A/N: This is a strange story that was written for one of Gates McFadden's 'Gates Plays' challenges in 2014. I can't actually remember the full challenge now, but I think the idea was to re-imagine the origins of the Crusher character we know in TNG in our present day. I've always loved the idea that Guinan had been on Earth centuries before meeting Picard (as per Time's Arrow) and the rest of this story is influenced by journalist Janine di Giovanni's book 'Madness Visible: A Memoir of War').

Acorns

The water is full of bodies and her eyes are full of tears.

They bump against each other: the dead, the tears on her cheeks. The meaning of her thoughts is blurred, as blurred as the morality of this war. She should get out her dictaphone, she should be recording her thoughts, if not for direct broadcast then at least as notes for the package she will have to send by satellite, later. As if anyone could forget this, she thinks, but she knows too well that however sharp the image now, however piercing, the memory will run with time, blending like the blood in the water. Not fading, not vanishing, but diluted. This is why there will always be wars, just as there will always be children. Blood and pain are mutable, impermanent. The memory of them cheats.

Howard cannot bring herself to move. Her cameraman is somewhere else, though as she continues to stare at the river, at the lumps of flesh bumping against its banks, she is aware of him floating at the periphery of her vision. Sometimes whole days go past where he does not remove his equipment from his shoulder. When he does his face bears lines that were not there a year ago, perhaps even a month ago, and she wonders if he ever cries. Howard wonders whether the camera lens provides a protection that journalists such as she do not have; whether the portable fourth wall they carry on their shoulders ever breaks. There are times she envies him that filter, but others that she pities him. To shoot or not to shoot? The choice, she knows, can drive you mad.

Howard has been here before. Or rather, she has been here for a long time. Two years ago, in Sarajevo, she watched from the window of the hotel on Sniper's Alley and knew that her profession was turning a corner into worse times. He was wearing a helmet, a flak jacket. He was wearing large white letters proclaiming his profession. He walked out, hands high, heading for the little girl that had frozen beside the twisted wreckage of a car, overtaken by fear as she tried to make the crossing. As Howard watched, the bullet felled her friend like an axe from behind. There was a sharp report, the smallest spray of blood. He crumpled, already gone. They shot him, though he was wearing the word 'journalist' tattooed across his body. Then they shot the girl. Two years ago; yesterday. The memory cheats.

The landscape here in Kosovo is flatter than she would have expected. There are trees, there are pastures. Remove the bodies, and it looks as so many other places do. She wonders if she manages to convey this in her nightly packages: she wonders whether the people at home can understand the normality of this place. It could be Iowa. Do they see that? These people, the ones fighting, the ones dying. They're not a different race, somehow inured to pain and death. They're not endowed with a gene that makes them immune to this horror that has become so every day. They are you, she thinks, but cannot say. They are me.

There is a farm. It stands within a square of green not yet withered by the coming winter. The white walls are tattered with uneven holes, the ungodly lace that is the tell-tale sign of warfare. She remembers Liberia, a turquoise camper van, peppered with so many bullet holes that it was more air than vehicle. Yet it was beautiful, still. The boy-child soldier with ebony skin and fairy wings, hauntingly pretty in their rank incongruity beside the weapon of murder in his hands. The memory, oh, the memory cheats.

She watches as the door of the farmhouse opens and an old woman, bent double, shuffles out leading a cow. The cow is bony and old, as decrepit as its owner. Perhaps it is the last of its herd. Perhaps all the others have been eaten or succumbed to the shelling. Perhaps they, too, are mingling in the river with the other dead.

Howard stares at the cow for a while. Somewhere, across the shallow valley, a new volley of shelling begins.

Two days later, she stands in a half-destroyed barn that lets in more sky than it keeps out. It has been turned into a hospital, of sorts, although there is no equipment, no supplies and no staff. By 'no', of course, she means 'nowhere near enough' and wonders, almost idly, which is worse.

Her cameraman is somewhere else again. Howard feels increasingly alone these days, though that may just be the exhaustion. They are on the front line, there is no way in or out except by walking. That goes for the dead, too, who lay where they fall, unless that happens to be into a river.

She is standing over the ravaged body of a girl who looks no older than 16, and probably far younger. Her camouflage shirt, grubby to begin with, has been saturated with her blood. Who are you? she asks, in the girl's language. Where do you come from? Why are you here?

There is a moment's silence as the girl stares up at her, and Howard can almost tell the story herself. There will be rape. There will be death. There will be separation. There will be horrors beyond anything any person should have to bear, let alone a child. It will end in, What else is there for me to do but fight?

Howard moves on, her limbs heavy, her mind numb. Her brain has been permafrost for years. There is one doctor seeing to the patients, a black woman with a wide, open face. She is broad, stocky, moving between the crumbs of life that lay strewn about the dirty floor with grace and alacrity. Howard watches her for a while. She doesn't want to interrupt, really. There is so much to be done, and none but this woman to do it. Yet there are questions that must be asked. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?

As she is watching, the woman looks up. Her face is composed, calm. Howard wonders whether this is a mask, or a sub-conscious defence mechanism. Out here, on the front line, these are the only two options that occur to her. Howard herself has both used the former and inevitably succumbed to the latter. The former, years ago, around male colleagues. The latter, so her friends at home would have it, ever since and for far too long.

She and the doctor walk towards each other, weaving between the hurt of many. They stand, face to face, Howard a head above the other woman and yet feeling, somehow, at least a foot shorter. In the woman's eyes is the knowledge of years: how many, Howard senses she would be unable to count. Perhaps the number would be inconceivable to her; a science fiction figure that would rival the stars in the sky.

She is about to ask her questions – Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here? – when the woman says:

"I know you. We've met before."

Howard frowns. For a second she struggles to articulate words, which are usually the only certainty she has. "I'm sorry – I don't think so."

The woman regards her, and later Howard will remember that she was smiling, although her mouth did not curve. Something about her eyes, the journalist supposes, something in those countless years, beyond the countless stars.

"Yes," says the doctor. "It was a very long time ago, and you were older then."

The latter, then, Howard thinks. Not a mask, but a defence mechanism. The mind has hidden itself in waking dreams. It is tragic that she is neither surprised nor dismayed by this. War produces a new normal that is anything but. Yet we accept it anyway.

The doctor does smile then, apparently reading her mind but too polite to call her on it. "Sorry," she says. "I'm pretty tired."

Howard nods. "I can imagine. There's just you?"

The doctor looks around, at the bodies scattered at their feet. "No. There's plenty of us. I'm just the one trying to keep the others alive."

"How long have you been here?" Howard asks. She does not take out her dictaphone. The memory will not cheat with this one, she thinks, and besides, later, when he returns, she'll get the cameraman to set up for a proper interview.

The woman smiles again. "The days all blend into one, to be honest."

"Can you expect any relief any time soon? Any help?"

Those eyes look up at her, almost amused. "Well, you're here now, aren't you?"

Howard takes a step back. Just for second, she thought she felt the ground move, but the one thing this place does not have is earthquakes. "Sorry?"

"You're here. You can help."

Howard shakes her head. "We have a few medical supplies. I'm happy to give those to you. But I'm a journalist, not a doctor."

"Oh," says the woman. "OK."

"I'm sorry," Howard says.

The woman has already moved away, casting a look back over her shoulder, an indication that she should follow. They move between the injured, and the Howard crouches down here and there, murmuring to the patients. Whoareyou?Wheredoyoucomefrom?Whatareyoudoinghere? The stories are all the same. No, that's not right: they are not all the same. They must not be all the same, not to her. They never have been. Yet they all blend into a smudge of hurt and violation that make her questions seem increasingly futile.

Howard is kneeling beside a man who tells her an age that matches her own, yet he looks as old as her grandfather. His face is lined with dirt and sun, exaggerated crow's feet tugging at the corners of his eyes. He is a farmer, he mutters, between moans. He wants to go home, but he knows there will be no home to return to. His wife and children are dead, or at least gone: in this context the distinction is negligible. His arm is bleeding, torn from wrist to inner elbow. These are fresh wounds over old ones and how wonderful the body is, Howard thinks, to heal and heal and heal again with so little help. There is a tap at her shoulder and she half turns to see dark fingers holding out a roll of bandage. She takes the proffered article without thinking, and a moment later is wrapping his arm. Once done, she takes a bottle of Codeine from her bag – inadequate, but all she has - and pushes one and then another through his lips, holding up her own water bottle to help him wash them down.

When she stands, there is still half a roll of gauze in her hand, so she moves to the next patient, a pregnant woman with a wound on the verge of festering in her shoulder. Howard has antiseptic in her bag, too – she always carries it, just in case.

Some time later, she crosses paths with the doctor. "Do you have any more bandages anywhere?" she asks. "I've run out."

The doctor says nothing, but pulls another roll from a pocket. Howard thanks her and moves on. She crouches down beside an old man who has no discernible injuries at all but whose face is laced with profound pain. She touches his shoulder, smiles for what feels like the first time in a decade.

"Where does it hurt?" she asks.

[END]