Chương 41: Day Forty-One

Dear Diary, I've decided. I love having duBois as a teacher. I mean, at some point I want to kick his ass all over the Practice Yard. Not because I'm mad at him or anything, but it would definitely be one of those personal achievement bucket list things. I'm not sure if I'm gonna add him onto the people I want to sleep with yet, but signs point to yes. Not, like, any time soon. Ew. He's not a pedo and I might still be technically underage and one of his students.

But give it ten years or so, once I'm out of school and he's looking at retirement, I think I could beat a gold watch hands down. Yeah, I'm not real coherent today. I'm not super sober, possibly hung over, and I've gone more or less without sleep two nights this week, including last night, Friday night, the night before Saturday, the day I have Physical Training with Mister Friendly and Sadistic Marshall duBois. And now my brain has been taken over by Kronk. Right.

Today started pretty good, at least compared to the shitty night that preceded it. Saffron knocked on my door, and I crawled over and pulled it open far enough for her to see me. She looked down, saw me naked on hands and knees, and started with her customary, "what the fuck, Diaz?" before stopping herself mid-fuck. She slipped into my room, pushed the door most of the way closed, and lit my desk lamp until dim light suffused the room.

She reached down, lifted me more or less to my feet, and helped me back to my bed.

"What happened to you?"

"Nightmare." She just stared at me, one eyebrow raised, before sitting down next to me and putting an arm around me.

"I'm scared to ask exactly what you dreamed about." I shuddered, opened my mouth to explain, discarded half a dozen different ideas before they could form into words, and closed my mouth again without speaking. Saffron pulled back, pulled one leg up onto the bed so she could turn to face me squarely, then turned me so I had no choice but to look at her.

"Tabitha, while you have been reckless, rude, vulgar, and even on occasion profane, not once have I seen evidence of cowardice from you. If something scared you too much to sleep, it's something deeply upsetting." I shook my head, trying to figure out how to explain without, y'know, telling her about the whole 'died, isekaied, incarnation of Evil' thing. All I could force out?

"But... It's not. It shouldn't be!"

"Sometimes talking helps?" I nodded, sighed, and tried again.

"I'm back at the aquarium." She nodded in mistaken understanding, putting one arm around me and pulling our foreheads together, wiping tears I hadn't known I cried from my eyes. I blinked and forced myself to continue.

"I'm in the water. I'm in the water, and an octopus shoves me into a chest, and I'm dead, but I can still hear and see and feel everything that's happening. The octopus shuts the lid, and I'm falling further and further into darkness. Forever." She blinked, an idea obviously taking shape in her mind. I couldn't bring myself to distract her; I just leaned against her, quietly weeping away leftover terror. Quietly, as if afraid I'd bolt, she whispered, "I had nightmares about the aquarium too. I..."

She stopped, shaking her head without moving it from mine.

"I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed because you told me your nightmare while you're still shivering from it, and I can't bring myself to tell you details about mine, even though I haven't had one since that week." I smirked through my tears.

"You got over PTSD in a week, and you call me brave?" She mouthed 'ptsd' without speaking, so I filled in, "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Battle Fatigue. Shell Shock. Happens to soldiers and other folks in terrifying situations who can't run away, but can't give into terror during the thing, or they'll die, so they just... Repress it."

"So, they repress it. That's how you survive."

"Yeah, but all that repressed shit doesn't disappear. Once you're out of the survival situation, sometimes it all bursts out at once, sometimes it leaks out in dribs and drabs. Sometimes it feeds on itself and even gets worse as time goes by. Sometimes if the survival situation goes on long enough, it starts leaking out anyway. Random outbursts of inappropriate emotions, even violent ones." By this time Saffron nodded along, as if everything I said made sense to her, but she'd never put it all together.

"Where did you learn about this?"

"You mean, other than growing up in Camden?" That got a lopsided grin out of her.

"I recognize the symptoms from growing up there, yes, but I would never have thought to put the pieces together like that." I smiled back.

"I can't take credit, as much as I'd like to. One of my teachers, er, tutors. A military retiree. He told me about it and said that most of the kids from Camden he mentored showed signs of having it. Having it really bad." She nodded again, still never taking her head from mine, which felt really weird as her forehead rubbed across mine.

"Yeah. I'm not surprised." We sat there like that for a bit until I took a deep breath and said, "not saying I wasn't shivering from waking up with fear sweats, but right now I think I'm shivering because it's fuckin' cold in here." I glanced down at my own front, and Saffron's gaze instinctively followed mine to rest for a split second on my nips, which presently confirmed my statement about my room being, as noted, fuckin' cold. She rolled her eyes heavenward, pulling back as she did so, but laughing as well.

"You, Tabitha Diaz, are incorrigible." She paused, staring me straight in the eye while giving me the impression she'd like to be looking elsewhere and being anything but straight.

"And irrepressible. Never change." With that, she walked to the door, but before leaving turned to ask, "Will you be okay? Do you need me to walk you to the infirmary? Or tell duBois that you're not well enough for PT today?" I plastered on a look of mock horror.

"I may be brave, but I'm not brave enough to miss duBois' class!" She laughed as she turned to go, and I called out, "save me some spicy eggs!"

"No promises!" she called back, prompting me to move my ass and get dressed before she managed to eat or otherwise dispose of all the eggs just to fuck with me. So breakfast was breakfast. Nothing special, although Saffron did try to pig up all the spicy eggs, but I managed to out eat her. Kind of surprising that she even came close, but maybe whatever weird illness consequence thing she had going on made her crave protein or something.

Then again, she'd been pushing herself at PT, both building her Endurance and upper body Strength, which might explain it as well. When we got out to the Practice Yard, duBois had us break up into groups as usual, although after taking one look at me he had me wait next to him while he gave the rest of the class their marching orders. Once he had them all working without any direction from him, he put one hand on my shoulder and muttered, so low I almost couldn't hear it over the Cadets exercising, "play along."

Then he barked out, loud enough to hurt my ears, "you think just 'cause you scored top in Endurance you don't NEED to work your Endurance up? You've got another think coming, Cadet! Inner track, MOVE!" I moved. I full on sprinted, with duBois keeping pace the whole time, along the 'inner track' of the Practice Yard perimeter.

It basically consisted of the third and fourth rows of paving stones from the edge, and while it obviously had less distance, duBois sometimes used it to have Cadets do wind sprints as opposed to distance runs. He barked at me as we ran, shouting any time I slipped out of a flat out dash. The other Cadets cleared the inner track, since none of them had wind sprints this morning and he and I were both moving fast enough to seriously injure somebody if we ran into them.

I mean, I'd probably hurt myself, and might hurt somebody like Saffron or Bill, but if duBois ran into somebody he'd splatter them like Truck-kun on a bad day. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. So I got the shock of my new life when he literally body-checked me as we passed one set of doors, slamming me straight through them. I stared in confusion at the closed doors we'd just passed through, the same doors also standing conspicuously open.

When I heard him screaming at me from the track on the other side of the doors, I twigged to what was going on.

"How often do you use those illusions?" He chuckled.

"That's 'how often do you use those illusions, Sir', and the answer is 'I'll never tell!', possibly with an over the top laugh if I felt like hamming it up." I clapped one hand over my mouth to stifle my laugh, and used the other to gently and quietly swing the door shut. The moment he had the other door closed, he waved me toward the stairs, and we walked up to his office. When we got there he gestured for me to sit down, then closed the door behind him.

Sitting there in the half-light of his desk lamp, with stuffed bookshelves blocking the light from his office windows, he dropped into his chair, looked me square in the eye, and said, "what's wrong?" I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what I'd done since our last discussion, but nothing terribly damning came to mind. I mean, yeah, I kinda habitually teased Saffron with morning nudity, but she didn't strike me as the type to go snitching to duBois before asking me to stop.

Which, now that I thought of it, she'd never actually done. That aside, I couldn't think of anything. I plastered on my best confused innocence and said, "I'm not sure what you mean, Sir." He frowned at me a second, then sighed.

"You're not in trouble, Diaz. Not yet, at any rate. What you are is packing enough luggage to carry Lancaster's wardrobe in one go." He tapped my cheekbone and I got it.

"I'm sorry, Sir. I... didn't sleep well last night." He just snorted.

"Diaz, 'didn't sleep well' for one night isn't enough to put a spontaneous marathon runner as close to the edge as I can tell you are." He held up one hand to forestall my denials, not that I had any really ready to go yet.

"I've seen plenty of soldiers on the edge. You're showing some signs of that, and you've got eye bruising like somebody broke your nose. I know you're not dehydrated; I've watched you down gallons of water every time you're in the dining hall. That means you're Spell Shocked and losing sleep because of it." He leaned forward, made sure I was looking him straight in the eye and said, "out. With. It."

I'd done this with Saffron, who had no fuckin' reason to be all helpful with me after I'd been teasing her for weeks, I could do this with duBois. I drew in a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and said, "I didn't sleep last night." He leaned back, nodded, and after a moment said, "because..." Another deep breath.

"Nightmares. Nightmare. Woke me up, couldn't close my eyes afterward." He pursed his lips and nodded, "I've had nightmares too nasty to get back to sleep after a time or two..." I interrupted, suddenly needing him to understand.

"No, sir. Not 'I couldn't get to sleep', although that's not wrong. I could. Not. Close. My. Eyes." He sucked his teeth and let out a low whistle.

"Well. That's worse than anything I've ever gone through, but I can empathize." He paused for a bit, then asked, "do you want to talk about it?" I nodded, then shook my head, then nodded again. As I sat there trying to think of what I wanted to say, how much I should tell him, and above all how to phrase it so I didn't sound like a complete nutcase, duBois' voice screaming 'Don't you FUCKING slack on me, Diaz!' floated up from the Practice Yard, audible even through the window and the closed door.

I couldn't help it, I snorted, chuckled, then started crying. Not, like, sobbing uncontrollably, but water leaked from my eyes, my nose ran, and every couple seconds a hiccough-like sob made me twitch, forcing me to speak a word or two at a time.

"Sorry. Sorry, Sir. It's. It's fuckin' stupid." He held a hand up, palm outward.

"If it's affecting you this much, it doesn't matter if it's stupid or not, Diaz. If I may be permitted to borrow one of your favorite phrases, 'It's fucking with you'. Now, in your own time, out with it." I nodded, then sat there for a bit while listening to the sound of him screaming imprecations at me trickled in from the Practice Yard. He must have noticed, because he smiled and said, "keep this a secret or I'll end you, but I am indeed mortal, and fuck up now and then myself.

But it would spoil the illusion if I stopped it now." That got a genuine laugh out of me. Weak, but genuine. I thought about what I wanted to say, lining the words up in my head like soldiers stacking up to breach a doorway. I expected to blurt them out all in one big splurt, but they flowed out smoothly, even a bit monotone.

"I dreamt I was back at the aquarium. I fell into the water, already dead, but too stupid to just stop and let go. I felt the injuries that killed me, felt shit that ought to be inside leaking out as water rushed in. Then that octopus grabbed me and shoved me into..." I stuttered a second, trying to think of a more descriptive term, but in the end just let, "shoved me into a chest," come out.

"Then I fell into the chest, like it had no bottom. I fell, and fell, and fell, with the tiny slit of light above me getting smaller and smaller and smaller." My voice shrank as I repeated the word 'smaller', until I barely breathed, "I never stop falling, ever. Just falling into the dark and cold until I woke up with my voice too hoarse to scream." DuBois ruffled one hand through his hair.

"I get that some of our Cadets can get... Noisy, and everyone else still needs to get all the sleep they can, but this would be one of the big downsides to soundproofing the Cadet cells." Without really thinking about it, I asked, "Are the Cadet suites soundproofed too?" He chuckled at my question, "Not by the school.

Pretty much everyone who can afford a suite can also afford personal noise suppression, and in any case the only ones they can complain about are their fellow scions, which they won't do because politics."

"Why can't they complain about the Cadets in the cells?" He grinned at me, the expression there one instant and gone the next, so quickly I almost thought I'd imagined it.

"Because the soundproofing goes both ways. Kind of like some of the Cadets. Which is really why we put the soundproofing in place in the first place." I swear, if I'd been drinking something, I'd have done a picture perfect spit take at that. I spluttered my way through half a dozen comebacks before I realized the moment had mostly passed, and settled on, "Are you sure you ought to be telling that kind of joke to a student, sir?"

He looked me square in the eye and held eye contact while he said, "I know that Status and Inspect lump everyone into 'Juvenile', 'Young Adult', 'Adult', and a few other categories, but that's more or less exactly what they're doing. Lumping people into categories. I've known twelve-year-olds from... Bad places... Who have more emotional maturity than any forty-year-old I've met, and I've known grown assed adults who displayed more childish ignorant pettiness than any four-year-old I've ever seen.

We've got a lot of you Camden Yards kids this year who still technically rate as 'Juveniles', and all the Global Spells will slot you into categories because of that, but I swear most of you are downright pathologically mature for your ages."

"Uh..." I couldn't think of what to say to that. I blame it on lack of sleep. He smirked and said, "to make a long story short, I know, too late, but Phileo City Heroic Academy isn't a grade or prep school. In general we don't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic except in the broadest of senses. We're a military Academy, and historically less than three percent of any given class qualifies as 'Juvenile', and all of those scored well above what their supposed 'superiors' did on the entrance exams."

"What about this year, sir?"

"Way more than three percent. And as a group, you Camden Yards kids beat the shit out of the Old Guard kids on the exams. Not that I'll admit to telling you that, so keep your mouth shut about it. Got it?"

"Yes, Sir!"

"Good. Now, is this the first night this week you've gone without sleep?" I shook my head, not trusting myself to not fall apart if I started talking about it again.

"Okay then. That makes a little more sense. How many times previously?" I whispered, "one." He spoke quietly, surprisingly so.

"Okay then. The way I see it, you've got two options here. Either you head down and talk this over with Sister Siobhan right now," he paused, and without even thinking about it I shook my head the tiniest bit, "or you can employ some questionable self-medication to get enough rest to be functional for Combat Training tomorrow."

"Self-medication, sir?" He couldn't be suggesting what I thought he was suggesting. He proved me dead wrong when he reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a dusty old bottle.

"I usually save these for graduation, or as a reward to myself for not summarily executing pricks like Lancaster's father, but I'd say this one'll be dying for a good cause." He handed me the bottle and asked, "How old are you?" I took the bottle, grasping it without pulling it away from him as I answered, "old enough, Sir?" I thought he'd pull it back when I answered, but instead he nodded and said, "so this here soldier," he nodded to the bottle, "is twenty-one years old.

Treat him with the respect due to a senior soldier, take him back to your room, and give him an honorable death. Then get some sleep and be ready to fuckin' work your ass off tomorrow, hear me?" I pulled the bottle from him and tucked it under my shirt, nodding as I said, "sir, yes, sir!"

"And Diaz?"

"Sir?"

"If you have another nightmare, let me know. There's no shame in calling in reinforcements when you need them. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!" Twenty-one year old Scotch is smooth as a fuckin' newborn's ass, but it still packs a hell of a kick. I passed out sometime before lunch, and didn't wake up until the following morning.