Describe a chance encounter that changed your life/Theatrical Muse Challenge fic

I hadn't thought about the risks to myself when I decided to volunteer my time in Africa.  My life had been spiraling out of control for more months then I wanted to think about and all I knew was I needed to get away.  I didn't look at the dangers that my decision might offer, I'm not even sure I consciously thought about them. I only knew that there was something missing in my life and I wasn't going to discover what it was if I remained in Chicago.

I should have been shocked by the conditions in Kisangani and Matenda but I wasn't, maybe because I found myself making comparisons to how things were during the war back home.  It was impossible for me not to.

It was funny, but I found myself welcoming the exhaustion that came with the work in Africa.  After 18 hours or more on my feet I became numb, and in the twisted way that my mind was seeing it, I found comfort in that.  I found comfort too in the arms of Gillian, but not so much in the emotional sense as much as the physical.

If not for what happened in Matenda I believe I very likely would still be locked in that loop of self-destruction that led me to Africa, but fate has a way of intervening when you least expect it to.

I don't think any of us thought things at the Matenda clinic would progress to the level that they did, how could we have?  When I decided to stay it was my decision, I had patients who couldn't be moved, I was needed.  Patrique, I wish he had left when the others had, but his loyalty to what we were doing, maybe even to me was too strong to let him, and he stayed.  How could we know it would end the way it did?

The calm of the first few days was deceiving and I'm sure my battle with malaria clouded how I was seeing things, but I refused to recognize the growing threat despite Patrique's warnings.  And once I did it was too late, the wheels were in motion and what was coming was more horrific then any of us could imagine.

We fled into the abandoned fields surrounding the clinic to avoid the fighting, carrying those that were too weak to walk.  We took almost nothing with us, the bare minimum of medicines and nothing else.  By morning most of those who had escaped with us were gone, they understood that their own lives were in danger if they were found with us...why couldn't Patrique, Chance and her mother have gone with them?

I blame myself for everything that happened after that even as I know it was beyond my control.  If I hadn't been sick, if I hadn't been trapped in the cycle of abuse that had led me to Africa in the first place.

We couldn't have known the Mai Mai would still be at the Matenda clinic when we returned, but they were, and that mistake would cost Patrique his life.  Not at first of course, but that would be the final outcome.  It's hard to remember the details, the malaria was raging in me by then. 

When John found me in that stifling shack I was close to death.  But, by the time I was able to return to the States the healing had begun, and I couldn't help but see my life far differently then the way I had when I had arrived.  Chance and her mother... Patrique...the sacrifices each had made were not made in vain.  In the midst of all that death I somehow found what I'd thought I no longer had in Chicago, I only wish the cost had not been so great.

Is there ever a good reason to get blinding drunk?/ Theatrical Muse Challenge fic

I used to think there was...

I think of all of those months I wasted after Abby and I broke up the first time.  The first time, I don't even want to think that there might be a second, especially now with the baby, and the chance that we might stand a chance at becoming a family.

Drinking had become an escape for me then, a way to not have to justify the impersonal sex that I was engaging in, the mess that was my life.  I look back on it now and I realize how out of control I was, but at the time, all I saw it as was a means to feel something other then alone.

I suppose I should be grateful that I didn't lose my license. I hold myself responsible for so many mistakes, the least of which was the death of Rick Kendricks.  I think of how I was willing to put not just my own life at risk but those around me like Harkins, and I wonder why I shouldn't I have been held fully to blame? 

I wonder sometimes if I'm not too lucky, my family dies and I live, I make medical mistakes that cost people their lives and I glide on through unscathed, and then there are times like in Africa. 

I look back on what I was like when I first got there, the drinking, the recklessness, not just in how I handled my work, but in the sex.  I look at how I taunted death the first time the Mai Mai came into Matenda, the way I put not just my life but Patrique and the remaining patient's lives in danger by choosing to stay when we were ordered to leave.  And I can't not ask the question of what right did I have to make that decision for them?

I think finally facing my own death made me realize how valuable it was.  Not just in those final minutes, kneeling there in the dirt with Patrique dead beside me, but in the time after as the malaria raged in me unchecked.  I think of Chance and her mother putting their own lives at risk to save mine, I look back at all John did, of what he was willing to risk when he thought I was already dead, and I wonder what right I have to throw the gift that they gave me away with the life I had been living.

So now, I would say no...life is far too great a gift to diminish it's worth by throwing it away, even if only for a few hours.

Theatrical Muse Challenge fic

"Do you believe in love at first sight?" and "How did you lose your virginity?"

Danijela...
 
It's to her that both of these apply and so I combine the memories together for it seems the obvious thing to do.

I first saw her in a coffeeshop and I instantly knew that she was the one I wanted to spend my life with.  She was so young, just 16 the first time I saw her.  I didn't know that at the time of course, I only knew she had to be the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and when I saw her I felt things I had never felt in my life.

It took me almost a week to work up the courage to speak to her and it was then I learned both her name and her age.  I was older than she by two years and that alone would prove to be our greatest obstacle.  Over the next few months we took to meeting almost daily, first in the shop where I'd first seen her and later, as we grew more comfortable in each other's company elsewhere in the City.  The more I learned of her, the more convinced I was of what I'd felt that first day and it wasn't long before she expressed the same to me, all that remained was for us to be married.  If only it would have been that easy. 

Because of her age we were forced to delay our marriage and it wasn't until the day she turned 18 that we could finally see our dream become reality.  Danijela came from a very religious family, so it was left unspoken that we would never share more then a kiss or a simple touch before our vows were exchanged.  So it happened that the night of the day we became husband and wife was also to be the one in which we both lost our virginity.  She was my first, and for most of my life the only woman I would know intimately.

I'd never really thought about our decision to wait until we were married to take that next step, she was religious, that was her wish and I honored that as I honor her to this day.  The love I had for Danijela only grew from that point in time and within the year we would welcome our first child. And as impossible as it seems, her giving me that gift only served to increase the love I felt for her.

I'll never understand how something that provides so many wonderful memories can also be that which, to this day, still tears my heart to shreds, but such is the case with my life with Danijela.  I will never understand why God felt it necessary to take this woman and the children she gave me away, and for many years I hated him more than those who had taken their lives. 

Danijela and I had seven years together from the day we met to the day I lay her and my children in the still frozen ground of that Vukovar cemetery.  For another seven years I would swear I had buried my heart along with them.  I was wrong, but, that's a story for another day...

What is your most treasured possession and why?/Theatrical Muse Challenge

A photograph...

A creased and frayed wallet sized black and white photograph of my wife Danijela and our daughter Jasna. 

One photograph to tell the story of lives ripped too soon from this earth, and even in that it's incomplete.  What I wouldn't give for that photo to have one more life captured in it.  Marko, my little boy, my son...why was he denied something even as simple as this to remember him by?  Not a day goes by that I don't find myself pulling that photograph from my wallet and wondering why?

I can remember the taking of that photograph as if it had been taken yesterday instead of fifteen years ago.  The occasion was one of celebration, a birthday party for Jasna to mark her fourth birthday. Marko was barely six months old at the time so if seemed only natural that I held him as the photographer captured that image of Jasna and her mother.  If only I had known that it alone would survive to tell the story of those who were no longer here to speak for themselves.

A Theatrical Muse challenge fic

What does comfort mean to you?

I think sometimes you find comfort in small things.  Those things that under normal circumstances you might not notice but which somehow in times of tension, or fear, have a way of erasing everything else.

I remember laying in the darkness of our apartment in Vukovar during the war, the sounds of mortars and sniperfire keeping me from sleep.  In those hours when the chance for death was so near I found my comfort in the sounds of the quiet breathing of my wife and children. At other times, when it seemed there had been more death then life in my day (or night),or when I was questioning my choice of what I was doing with my life, the only comfort to be found was in the arms of my wife.

When those sounds, and even that touch were taken from me I wondered if I would ever know those kinds of comfort again, and it was then I turned to more destructive methods to find relief.

There was a time in my life when I wondered if those early means of comfort would ever return to me.  It's only in these past few months in fact that I can finally allow the hope of reclaiming them to surface.  I know that Danijela and my children are gone and the comfort they brought to me has been lost with their passing, as are the extremes in my life that made me so desperate for the comfort they brought to me.  Having that security doesn't make me want the comfort any less though and so I welcome my now being able to turn to Abby.  Perhaps the most welcoming comfort I look forward to is once more laying in the darkness and listening to the quiet rhythms of my wife and child as they sleep, and with that I know I will find true peace.

 

A Challenge fic for the Theatrical Muse group

When I awoke the next morning...

I was alone...

Even as I knew it to be true I didn't want to believe it.

In less than twenty four hours I had gone from being a husband and father to being alone.  Now, with the bite of coming snow in the air I was forced to turn my thoughts from the care of my family to laying them to rest.

How does one begin to accept that those very people that made you look forward to whatever the day might bring were no longer there?

I traveled through the next few days in a daze, entering the rubble that had been our home in search of the treasured doll and teddybear that would be laid to rest with their young owners.  I can't begin to describe what it was like as I stepped over the remnants of the crib that had held my young son prisoner knowing he had died under the debris.  To once more face the scene of my own failure, the blood of my wife and daughter still too fresh in it's presence.  All the while remaining aware that even as I saw it as such I had done all that I could despite my inability to accept that fact. 

There was nowhere in those days to find comfort, the Church my wife had loved seemed in my eye to have betrayed them and I wanted nothing they tried to offer.  Grief consumed me and I might have been a dead man myself as I existed in the fog of it, all the while wondering what I had done to deserve life while theirs were stripped from them.

When the time came to lay all three to their final rest it seemed only fitting that the snows came, the tears of rain as frozen as my heart now seemed.  I was alone, and all those who gave me reason to live were gone.

 

The Call

(I've starting writing Luka fics for a site called 100 Moods, here's the first of the new ones...for Ecstatic)

He was going to be a father again.

The shock of the news had begun to fade and with it Luka found himself being filled with a feeling he had never thought he would never know again.

He was going to be a father again.

It had never even entered his mind that Abby might be pregnant.  Granted they had slept together but, it wasn't the first time and they had used precautions, hadn't they?  He was finding it hard to get his mind to settle on anything specific with the exception of that one single fact.

He was going to be a father again.

When he had lost Jasna and Marko he had never thought he would know that joy again, a smile filled his face before he could stop it.  The sleepless nights, the dirty diapers, could he have ever believed he would look forward to that again?  But he was.

It was true that he and Abby would have to work through how they would handle the parenting, but he had to cling to the hope that she'd let him be part of the child's life, even if they weren't a couple.

He was going to be a father again.  He had to call his own father, the man deserved to know that he would once more have the chance to be a grandfather.  He reached for his cell phone even as the realization was made, only to find himself having to make three tries at dialing the number before he succeeded.  As he listened to the ringing on the other end he found himself unable to stop the smile that again filled his face, and then it was time.

"Tata...it's Luka, I have something I need to tell you."