｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ ( 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚 ) chapter four — NANCY FROM THE 'NAM
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─ 🧳🕸📺📀🦟🌪🎞⌛️ PLATOON. 1966 ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆
STELLA WATCHES WHILST MOTHER NATURE MURDERS ASIA'S LOCAL WILDLIFE. A cigarette drooping from her mouth, Stella watches tiny fruit flies drown in the puddles just outside the unit's tent. They flounder for a moment on the water's surface before growing still. All sorts of bugs crawl out into the rain to die. She wishes she could. She hasn't had an ounce since yesterday morning. It's been raining for hours on end, and that's when she usually needs it most, but she's trying to hold off on using too much too soon. She's shaking. It'll only be so long before the withdrawl hallucinations start. 1st Platoon has just been sent out on a chopper for some jungle mission, with the mudslides and cesspits of filth and Lieutenant Blight leading them blindly into the battlefield. Base Camp for the 8076th MASH is in a similar state.
Paddy pokes his head out of the GP Medium tent, sliding his broken glasses up the bridge of his nose with his middle finger. "You need anything, Stella? Coffee? You've been out here a while. Are you cold?" he disappears back inside the tarpaulin for a moment as she taps her cigarette, and then reappears with one of those issue woolen blankets that the soldiers carry in their packs. He wraps it over her shoulders, and the wool is warm but itchy.
Of all the men and all their conquests, Paddy has the privilege of knowing Stella on the friendship basis that so few people can recognise her on. She likens that Orange County boy to her saviour. She says sometimes, if there is a God, it was him who sent Paddy O'Leary down into his Irish Catholic mother those twenty-four years ago. There was something angelic about the way his six foot stature made the sun shine behind his head like a halo when he looked down at her. Their one-year friendship was unmatched by any other in the unit, a strange siblinghood that came hand-in-hand with being presumed as some combat couple. The Man despises his nurses dating one another, but there is nothing he can do about Paddy and Stella because they're not breaking any codes of conduct, aside from the emotional involvement rule of not fraternising with any colleagues, even on a friendship basis (besides, nobody sticks to that — it's 'Nam, and it's 1966 — anything goes.)
Whenever she hallucinates, it's always of him. Be it from lack of sleep or the heroin she so often finds herself crawling back to on rainy days, he somehow always worms his way into her head. Whether his spectacles become two technicolour whirlpools or his tongue is a snake, it's always Paddy, no matter if he's actually there or not. He's always on the back burner in he mind, like their two souls swim together in a fish bowl for all eternity. So much so, that when he brings out that blanket for her, she's unsure whether he's actually real until she feels his breath on the back of her neck.
"Oh Stella," he mumbles, tucking a lock of dark hair behind her ear for her. "How do you survive?"
He receives no response, merely a the tiniest crackle as she inhales and the ashes of her cigarette pulsate. She watches men on latrine duty through the torrential rain with a faraway look, eyes half-closed, unblinking. For a girl who's only just grazed the surface of combat so brutal CNN refuse to document it, it's hard to believe that her thousand-yard stare is real. But there's something so haunting about her glazed eyes, and the way her fingers twitch as her arms hang limply by her sides. She's thinking about The Grey Man, and the blade to her neck. She feels phantom pain, and traces the area with her finger.
