Still - h.s (au)

Chapter 26

No perspective

January 1942

Being away from Harry was harder than Grace had ever anticipated. Ever since she said goodbye to him that her heart was shattered in small pieces. She thought that the first days were going to be the hardest but quickly she found out she was wrong. The hardest were those days where she had no idea where Harry was.

Where could he be?

Had he already arrived in Burma?

Was he safe there?

Did he already start fighting?

So many questions which would remain unanswered for a long time, because a letter would sometimes take more than a month to reach its correspondent.

A month if they were lucky of course. Lost letters are very common during the war, either because a ship sunk, or a plane was put down.

Grace's journey to Tunisia was a long one, because they had problems on Tunes harbor due to an attack of the enemy forces. What was supposed to take a week ended up taking two full and painful weeks. She spent Christmas on the back of a truck with all her team under an excruciating sun that burned deeply. The new year arrived without any celebration. There were too many things to do, and that was nor the time or the place to celebrate.

And then the first month had passed without any news from her loved one, and each day she suffered more with the absence of news. The only thing that made the days go faster was the fact that she worked from dawn until after the sun had set. And then she was too exhausted to even think, drifting to a restless deep sleep until the following day, repeating this for over thirty days. Here she didn't have days off, or anywhere to go really. It was harder than she had ever anticipated, her body was craving some well deserved rest, but she knew she couldn't stop working. These soldiers needed her.

In only a month she had already seen so many atrocities, more than she could ever have imagined. Her first patient died in her arms a few hours after she began her first shift leaving Grace devastated, all she could think was patient over the following days.

Grace had thought that she was able to save all lost causes, as she did with Harry.

But she was quickly proven wrong.

And that was the first patient she saw dying, but in the following month, she witnessed many more deaths of soldiers who could very well be her brother or her Harry. She had stopped counting on the third day because she couldn't bear the fact that so many people had and would die in her arms. But it was the fact that she saw so many deaths that her heart feared even more for Harry, but there was nothing she could do but wait.

Wait days.

Wait weeks.

Wait months.

Harry had her address, but Grace didn't have his and she couldn't be the first to send him a letter, because if she could she would already have sent a million letters just to keep him company once he received them. But she needed his letter to come first, so she knew exactly where to send her letter.

She didn't quite understand how letters could travel so far, and she even feared that Harry's letter wouldn't be able to reach her in the middle of the desert, because there was literally nothing there.

Grace and the rest of the team had built an improvised hospital on the day they arrived because the previous one had been destroyed by the enemies. It was a shock for them when they arrived seeing that they had nowhere to help the wounded. But they managed to get the hospital done in just two days. It was nothing fancy, it was essentially just a big tent in the middle of nowhere, but for now, it had worked just fine.