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The scene transpired ever so abruptly. One minute my arm was still intact -- I had never broken it, never dislocated it or sprained it, never did anything to injure it besides acquiring a few cuts and bruises over the years -- and the next minute, my arm cradled a bullet within it, with the bullet hole acting as a skylight above its crib. I don't think I even noticed the bullet as it flew inside me. It was only after I experienced a concentration of heat in my upper limb contrasting with the chilly Russian weather that I looked down at my skin to find that it had been breached. The strange thing is that it didn't even hurt. I was completely calm when I saw it, despite the abnormal amount of blood filtering out of my body. After a too long period of staring at my wound and not thinking anything of it, I reminded myself that my parents would be furious if I were to be gravely injured or killed, and I fled the battlefield without looking back to glimpse another horror, damning the consequences of being labeled a coward or being discharged not so honorably or being known as the man who ran away from war because he couldn't handle it. My parents should only care if I'm dead, and I know that they would care a lot more if their reputation were ruined, but my life isn't about my parents anymore. I'm an adult with control over myself. When I return to Saint Petersburg like I promised, I can find Alexei, and we can move in together without my parents to hover around us disapproving of him. We can create a new life for ourselves, one without restraints. That's what I truly want, but that desire will not come to me if I risk my chances fighting in a battle whose outcome I am not very enthusiastic about.

I have walked several kilometers in a terrain with which I am not familiar at all, but anywhere from the fighting is perfect for me. About an hour into my trek through who knows where, a small cottage appears in my line of sight. Since it is the only trace of human life that I have seen in a while, I decide that it's my best hope for survival. I'm too tired to be wandering around in the wilderness any longer, so I draw closer and strike three times upon the wooden door by using the hand that isn't busy tending messily to my wound, and soon a sliver of her home is revealed from behind the door.

"Are you one of those soldiers from the battle in Borodino?" the woman asks before I can even say anything to greet her, and I nod, not wanting to ruin my opportunity to be ushered inside and welcomed. I assume that she has seen one of those aforementioned soldiers from Borodino, and that is why she is not fazed in the slightest by the mess of color spread across my face, nor the way I hold my arm to shove the blood back inside, as if that could work successfully.

The woman invites me inside, pulling the door further back and gesturing with her hand to the room that doubles as a kitchen and a living area -- her house is surprisingly spacious for a random cottage in the middle of nowhere. The woman occupies herself again with washing dishes with the water from a large bucket, chatting with me at the same time. "Another soldier knocked on my door a few hours ago, and I let him in, but he was Russian, not French," she tells me, having picked up on my slight accent. "Alexei is his name."

"Alexei," I repeat, savoring the name on my tongue, the taste bringing back pleasant memories of the boy I love, even if Alexei is a relatively common Russian name and could have been anyone. "I have a friend named Alexei."

"And what is your name?" the woman inquires.

"Olivier Renaud."

"You must be famished, Olivier Renaud. Let me get you some food before you starve to death." The woman opens her cabinets and stands there for a moment, selecting what she could make for me. She giggles a bit, then supplies me with the reason why. "How ironic would it be if you escaped the war to avoid a low chance of survival yet died elsewhere?"

"Sadly ironic," I reply, which earns a small smile from the woman as she turns her back and starts to prepare some food. I take the available opportunity to produce a wad of gauze from my bag and attempt to treat my wound. I have no proper medical supplies besides the gauze, seeing as my position is not that of an army medic, and I know that an infection of the wound is more than likely, but I assure myself that I will make it back to civilization in time to treat it, so I commence my attempt at bandaging myself, but I don't get very far before I am ratted out by the woman's vision.

"I should ask Alexei if he would like anything to eat. I totally forgot to do that when he came, and now he's sleeping in my room, because I figured he should take the comfier bed after sleeping on shabby structures in the military." Happily babbling to me about whatever she would like, the woman turns around with a bowl of fruit in her hands, which she almost drops upon seeing the chaos that is my arm. Her pupils expand to accommodate her growing fear, and with shaking arms, she places the bowl of fruit on the table. "Or maybe I should call Alexei right now to help me fix you up." The woman scurries out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, where the Russian soldier sleeps. It takes some time to wake him from his deep slumber, as he has probably not slept very well and for very long since joining the army and especially not after the battle, which he must have fled early like me.

The woman reappears in the living room, and so does an essential part of my soul. With her stands the fatigued figure of none other than Alexei Kozlov, still entranced by the beauty of sleep. He doesn't notice me until the woman tells him that they have a visitor, and then the sun breaks out from below the earth for the first time in three months.

Alexei sprints towards me and catches me in a firm embrace with his head nestled into my shoulder. "Oh how I've missed you, my love," I whisper into his ear, and he tightens his grip on me as a response, beckoning a stab of pain out of my arm that manifests in a sharp inhale of breath.

"Olivier, what's wrong?" Alexei asks, pulling away from me, eyebrows tightened in confusion and concern.

I can't even be bothered by my injury now that I am reunited with Alexei. I can only smile warmly. "My love..."

"Get him seated back at the table, Alexei," the woman instructs before I can explain as she washes her hands, pointing Alexei over towards her multipurpose bucket of water with a gesture when he has done what he was told first. The woman apparently has designated a whole cabinet to medical supplies, which she scans for the appropriate treatments to my bullet wound. Once she has found what she was looking for, she brings them over and sets them on the table.

"Conveniently for you, I used to be a nurse back in my day," the woman informs me with a wink while unscrewing the lid of the rubbing alcohol.

"So you know if he's going to be alright?" Alexei inquires, so panicked that his leg jitters under the table. It's cute to know that he cares a lot about me, but I don't want him to have a heart attack by being so distressed over my safety.

"He'll be just fine, sweetie."

Alexei nods, only a tiny bit consoled, so I grasp his hand to support him. I should technically be the one who needs their hand to be held, considering I'm the one who is about to be in a whole lot of pain in addition to the fear of dying, but I am surprisingly relaxed. That might change when my nerves are assailed by a procedure, though.

"I understand that we just met and that this may seem a bit forward, but you're going to need to take your shirt off so that I can clearly see the wound."

I silently unbutton my top coat, then my main covering, and finally my simple cloth undershirt after I untuck it from my pants and slide the suspenders off of my shoulders, and the woman starts on her work once all is done. The first step is to take a small cloth and wipe away the blood around the bullet hole, then to add some disinfecting alcohol for the actual wound and the supplies that she will be using for the procedure. The stinging rooted within my skin draws a wince out of me, to which Alexei responds by grabbing my hand again.

"I'm not going to amputate, but I am going to be retrieving the bullet from your arm, as there is no exit wound. This is going to hurt like hell, but it would hurt a lot more if I didn't have drinking alcohol for you." The woman pulls out a bottle of whiskey that she keeps only for medical purposes as implied by how little has been used of it. She pours me enough whiskey to act as a makeshift anaesthesia, and I reluctantly force it down my throat. The French are known for their obsession with wine, so I have never tasted hard alcohol like whiskey or vodka, and it comes as a shock to me to taste such a flavor. I only drink it so that I will be spared some torment down the road.

Positioning the tweezers in her hand, the woman explains, "You were hit from far enough away that the bullet is somewhat close to the surface of your skin, so fortunately for you, I can get it out easier." I prepare myself for agony as the tweezers float closer and closer, and eventually they touch my tender skin and dive inside. She has already located the bullet, but fitting it within the tweezers and pulling it out is the difficult part. In order to get ahold of the bullet, the woman has to make a bit of extra room in the bullet canal, entailing pressure against my inner workings. She works as quickly as she can so as to not stretch out my suffering for longer than it needs to be stretched out, but wincing and whimpering are still fit into the schedule. Alexei looks away from the sight, but little does he know that he is solving a percentage of my pain by maintaining contact with me. The woman soon extracts the bloody bullet and disposes of it on the table, where it clatters and leaves tiny footprints of my DNA. Once more, she cleans the wound with alcohol and includes water this time. Finally, that step is over and done with, but the woman introduces another.

"Next comes stitches to seal up the wound." The woman starts right away with threading the needle, and in a matter of seconds, it plunges into the skin surrounding where the bullet entered my body. Her hands are steady despite her old age, and it soothes me to know that she is familiar with what she is doing, even if she hasn't been actively working in her field recently. I need not expect a slip or any other type of mistake.

The procedure comes along relatively quickly, and by the time she's finished stitching up my injury, it looks as though a I experienced a wound of a lesser proportion. She wraps up my treatment by asking Alexei to hold a cotton strip to the affected area as she winds the sections of my gauze that are still intact around my arm, and just like that, I am repaired.

"I thank you very kindly for your services," I say to the woman who may have just led me to survival, and she smiles and nods once, forever a benevolent figure who has given all that she can to two soldiers that she just met a few hours ago.

"Since there are two of you now, you and Alexei can take my bed, as it's bigger, and I'm sure neither of you would enjoy sleeping with me over each other."

"Oh, are you sure that you're okay with this? You've already done so much, and I don't want to impose on your good night's sleep."

"I'm absolutely sure," the woman clarifies, shooing us towards her bedroom. "Go on now -- get some rest. After that traumatic experience, you need it." 

~~~~~

A/N: THE BOYS ARE BACK, THE BOYS ARE BACK

i hope y'all are happy ;)))

~Darkota 

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