With a sigh of frustration Terry threw the notebook aside, turning his head so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Another ten minutes wasted. He knew he was going too easy on himself.
The homework was simple, not a lot of work either – all he had to do was write down the worst of the memories that weren’t his own memories. Three thoughts, two situations, one person. Six lines of text and he’d be done, so why was this task taking him weeks?
He realised he was feeling sorry for himself, so he lifted his head from the pillow and took the notebook again. After he pulled himself up to sit cross-legged on his bunk and took the pencil into his hand, he re-read what he’d written the other night.
Hunter
support strength advice NCO. 50.
courageous, smart, honest?
He’d started with the last part of the exercise rather than doing it in the right order. Even that part had seemed impossible until Evelynn helped him get this much done. He didn’t want to rely on others to complete the rest of the exercise though, it was his responsibility after all.
Terry frowned, pulling himself together for the fifth time in a row. It’s not hard, just do it, he told himself. Write about two situations.
Before his mind’s eye he saw a friend lying on the ground, clutching a stuffed murloc doll as she watched him dig a grave for her. His spade had hit more rocks than soil as he’d laboured in the sun, knowing full well that no matter how hard he worked, the animals would be digging up her remains within a day of his departure. Then the vultures would use their pointy beaks to tear off what the other scavengers didn’t want or couldn’t get out from between the bones. Even with rocks stacked on top, he lacked the time needed to dig a deep enough grave. Burning her body wasn’t allowed. He had glanced at his dying friend, who’d met his gaze with feverish and sorrowful eyes.
Neither of them said anything.
What was there to say?
The memory only lasted a split second, but it caused such a tight squeezing sensation in his chest that he had to gasp for breath and stop before he could even move the pencil.
It wasn’t even his own memory; it hadn’t been him who did those things, but it was still Terry’s eyes that had shared the look, Terry’s hands that had dug the shallow grave and laid the friend to rest. Much like a dreamer, he had been no more than an observer. And he believed that people’s bodies remembered such events.
There had been many situations, way more than two. Most of the time he considered them nothing more than a nightmare, because it hadn’t been real. But any time he was made to dwell on memories of those events that didn’t really happen, his body got confused and thought it was real, that it was time to get tense, or angry, or afraid.
Bodies didn’t know the difference between real and not real, between then and now.
Unfortunate, but no reason not to do one’s homework.
To calm his rapid heartbeat, he started adding more circles to the ones already decorating the margins, filling in some of the circles with spirals, leaving others blank or adding fine straight spokes down the middle. The action soothed him into a more relaxed state. As he concentrated on making the little circles perfectly round, he considered how to go about his task.
Maybe he should ask Evelynn for help again. Not that the homework was too hard. It wasn’t hard at all, he reassured himself. Nothing was too difficult for him, there were simply some things that went better if you did them together. Like bandaging your own shoulder. Asking for help of any kind was something he felt uneasy about. When he’d asked Nith to apply a new dressing on his shoulder, she had commented on his scars; it embarrassed him. Longford had watched without a word so Terry had quietly resolved to ask him to change the bandage tonight, not Nith, though his first preference still went to Evelynn. Asking two things of a friend in one day might be too much though.
He would definitely finish the homework today, no matter what.
It had to be done before his next appointment with Summer. Not that she would show any disappointment, he was sure that she’d immediately forgive him even if he didn’t complete any of it; she’d give him something else to do instead. She would go too easy on him.
Summer hid her feelings well, but even the idea that someone might sympathise with him that way gave him an inner sense of contempt – and fear. And while he had been taught how to motivate himself without using a derisive or hateful inner voice, he still loathed those moments when he gave in to self-pity. Today wasn’t going to be one of them.
He’d ask for Longford’s help changing the bandages and Evelynn’s help with the memories.
Finishing his doodles Terry got up, slotting the notebook and pencil into their pouch. As he leaned down to tuck the pouch into his backpack, the stitches in his shoulder pulled uncomfortably tight.
So he walked into the storeroom, glancing over his shoulder to ensure nobody saw him.
With a quick sly motion he pulled a glass jar off a shelf and fished out a white pill which he tucked into his mouth. He was used to dealing with pain but in combination with the blood loss, he was at risk of passing out if he exerted himself. The herbal painkiller would keep him on his feet for the next four hours.
While he was there anyway he picked up the shooter’s sandwich he’d prepared yesterday, taking the paper bag out from under the pan with water he had used as a weight. It was a half loaf of bread, hollowed out and stuffed with layers of cooked mushrooms and steak slices. The pan had compressed the loaf overnight and as a result the meat juices had soaked into the bread, giving it flavour. He eagerly inhaled the salty scent as he bagged the sandwich, then washed his hands at the sink.
Next he went into the armory to pick up the recurve bow he’d been using for a couple of weeks. He grabbed a bow stringer off a shelf and strung the bow, then attached a hip quiver to his uniform.
To his relief, there was nobody else on the range.
Loads of bullet holes marked the middle of the practise tree; he wouldn’t need to put up a target. After stepping into a firing line and ensuring he was alone, he nocked the first arrow and smoothly drew it back, taking a moment to aim before releasing. The swooshing sound of the arrow in flight and the subsequent quiet thunk pleased him; he heard and saw the arrow land more or less where he’d aimed it.
Terry enjoyed the practise, the privilege. When he’d chosen to be a rifleman, he hadn’t been sure if he was allowed to keep training his other skills. Yesterday he’d used a crossbow, today was bow day. As a challenge he tried to shoot the second and third arrow fast, one after the other, with as little time in between as he could manage. Not as swift as Nith, of course, but then, he wasn’t an elven archer.
He stayed in the dead grounds for a while to empty the quiver, sometimes focusing on his technique, other times shooting several arrows in rapid succession. At the end he crossed the dead grounds to collect his arrows.
While eating his shooter’s sandwich on the hillock nearby, he took a closer look at the weapon he’d been using. It was a decently well-crafted recurve bow, plain and serviceable; it met his needs for practise but it wouldn’t be any good for Nith. Judging by how it hadn’t been adjusted since he’d last tuned it for himself, she hadn’t even tried this one since the captain had told her to get rid of the powerful sin’dorei bow she had looted. Not that he’d tell her, but he sympathised with her for losing her new weapon so soon.
As soon as he finished his meal he got up again and jogged to the river. It was the perfect time of day, cool but not yet dark out. He took off his clothes and equipment near the waterfall so he’d be able to keep an eye on his belongings, preparing clean clothes and laying his towel on top.
Then he clambered up the slippery rocks at the waterfall’s foot.
With a constant and deafening roar the falls crashed into the rocks below. Droplets spattered everywhere. As Terry perched under the stream he felt the water beat down hard on his shoulders and back, providing him with a pleasant, almost numbing sense of pressure that wiped conscious thought from his mind.
Instead, he let his imagination run free, picturing the river as it seethed further downstream; first passing between Elwynn and Westfall, then alongside Duskwood and through a mountainous gorge leading further south all the way up to Nesingwary’s camp after which the banks spread far apart. The previously wild stream had become a deep, slow river here, powerful but stately.
He didn’t know for sure what might lie beyond, he’d never travelled that far, but he vividly imagined a wide delta like the one at the Tol’vir city in Uldum – more lush though and with raptors and big cats stalking along the shores. Warm and bright and buggy and humid; as real as if he were there in person.
Slowly Terry pulled back the way he came, picturing himself as a small dot at the waterfall, no more significant than an ant. He resisted the urge to think thoughts of his own and instead kept his mental focus cast outward, going upstream and past the waterfall this time, imagining the pressure of the water against his legs if he were to climb and wade through.
Up there he would find the source eventually.
He wanted to explore and see the spring in person, or at least imagine it, but he couldn’t do that yet.
Instead he leapt into the cool river water, swimming a few strokes and then turning to drift on his back. As he floated southward and the distance to the waterfall increased, the roaring noise went down and he could hear his thoughts again.
Soon, Earthcaller Tsuyuri would be asking him why he couldn’t ‘go’ to the source. He wasn’t looking forward to explaining something he barely comprehended himself but he’d give it his best try. The last thing he wanted was for her to give up on him.
He would’ve liked to become a shaman himself, and the next best thing was to spend time with actual shaman, who could tell him stories and share information that’d help him make sense of the world and the elements. Tsuyuri was one such shaman. That process had started when he was thirteen when his companion Ingvild had indulged his curiosity, and now he hoped that Tsuyuri held the answers to Terry’s remaining questions. Questions that Ingvild hadn’t been willing or able to answer.
He liked the earthcaller’s stoic manner, her draenei heritage and the way she steered their conversations to the topics she wished to discuss. As he floated gently downstream, he briefly wondered what it was like to be a draenei. While he respected the draenei people a great deal for their spiritualism and the sacrifices they’d made, Terry revered orcish shaman even more.
If he could choose, he’d stop being a human and live as an orc instead.
He’d do it in a heartbeat. As an orc he wouldn’t have to hold back and downplay his enjoyment of all things related to warfare; it’d free him to be himself while learning to live honourably and bravely without any of the complicated unnecessary stuff that humans tended toward. He knew he couldn’t become an orc, but he’d been giving semi-serious thought to the worgen curse.
His friend from the brigade had told him about the curse; he’d talked about the rage, the suppressed memories and the visceral way of experiencing emotion and its effects on self-control. Blood lust in particular. So the downsides wouldn’t be that bad, Terry reasoned. And as a sort-of guerrilla soldier, the upsides appealed to him a great deal.
The fantasy came to an abrupt end when it occurred to him that even as an orc or a worgen, he’d still be making excuses for himself. The orcish blood-curse and the worgen curse would give him more strength, yes, and they’d mask some of the things people saw as issues in him, but neither would take away at the rage he already felt so often.
He reluctantly acknowledged that it was better to focus on control than to add another issue.
He’d confirmed to his worgen friend that the half forgotten memories of being a feral worgen weren’t merely imagination, it actually happened, but he hadn’t been himself. It wasn’t you, he’d told him over and over again. It wasn’t you who did those things. It wasn’t your fault. All you did, all you could do was observe.
He pondered on it as he slowly swam back toward the waterfall, to his clothes. Terry knew that if you observed too many things, you developed a condition called coping, which made you half forget all the bad memories, but which also made you forget the good ones from before any bad things started happening.
And he wanted to know about his own good memories, the ones he had lost. He’d do anything to recall those.
Fortunately, you could get rid of coping by doing something called ‘exposure’, he’d explained, which is re-doing the thing you couldn’t handle the first time. He would not outright recommend that his friend should go back to the woods of Gilneas to run around and kill strangers though. Nobody had told Terry how to do exposure either.
He would let his friend arrive at the only right conclusion himself.
![:hugs:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/hugs.png?v=6" ":hugs:")
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
