![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Six Times Face Cried - Time Five
Sep. 16th, 2011 03:47 pm..5..
When I awoke the next morning with a pounding head, I was in my own bed, dressed only in my boxers, the cuts on my hands and legs washed and neatly dressed. I looked at the clock and groaned, 10.30 already, no doubt the rest of the team would already be up, no doubt Hannibal would be furious with me again.
However, as I scrabbled about on the bedside table to pick up my watch, I saw the note, written in Hannibal’s bold script: Sick day, kid. Back on duty 0800 Wednesday. I let myself fall back into the pillows and opt out of life for a few hours.
______________
I was first one up on Wednesday. I hadn’t seen a soul yesterday, the house had been deserted when I had ventured down in search of food mid afternoon, and then I‘d gone back to bed, falling asleep again until after midnight. I‘d seen the light on in Hannibal’s room as I moved around downstairs fixing myself a sandwich, but he hadn’t made a sound or come out of the room to talk to me so I left him to it.
So now I was up early, cooking bacon and eggs, wondering what everyone knew about the events of the last couple of days, wondering which of my team mates would still see me as a drug dealer, if I would be forced off the unit eventually anyway.
But it seemed that I didn’t really have to worry. Everyone was friendly when they came into the kitchen, I suppose the pile of fried food and buttered bread didn't do any harm, and there were plenty of queries after my concussion, lots of comments about the bad luck of being mugged on an army base. Hannibal wandered into all of the food and chaos and comments, clapping me on the back and squeezing my shoulder firmly before telling everyone else to lay off me and that they’d better eat quickly as we were having a preliminary briefing at 0800 sharp. He left his hand on my shoulder the whole time he was speaking, that warmth there, creeping through the thin material of my t-shirt.
We crowded into a briefing room, with lots of good natured pushing and ribbing, but when Hannibal called us all to order, silence fell instantly. I was just starting to relax, feeling the excitement of a new job beginning to bubble through my veins when the day took a decided shift for the worse.
“Okay, gents,” Hannibal’s voice was calm and assured, “briefing notes. Read and digest, you’ve got ten minutes and then you’ll need to let me know that you know your brief. Okay?”
All around me people nodded and started leafing through their notes, but all I could feel was the start of the panic welling up from deep inside. I looked at my notes, five sides of A4, single spaced, no diagrams, black print on white, my ultimate worst nightmare. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read them because I could, easily. I knew damn well that I would have no problem at all in standing up in the middle of that room and reading every one of those five sheets out loud to the whole unit. My issue was that once I’d read it, I would have absolutely no idea what it said. To go through pages and pages of info like that would take me ages. I would have to work through it a paragraph at a time, actually cutting the text into chunks with scissors, making notes or diagrams as I went; coloured paper would help as well. I’d have to break it all down, make sure I understood each point, could see it all clearly in my head, before I moved on. To get anything from five typed pages of A4 in ten minutes would require nothing short of a miracle.
I felt the sweat building up across my brow and I wiped it away, noticing with horror that my hands were shaking really badly. I dropped the pages onto the desk in front of me wrapping my arms tightly around my chest, trying so hard to keep them still but the cold clammy fear was persisting, creeping up the back of my neck, taunting me.
“Two minutes...” I heard Hannibal say, eight minutes gone already? And his voice seemed a long way off, almost as if he were at the end of a long metal tunnel. I glanced around frantically, seeing that some people had already finished and were nonchalantly flicking backwards and forwards through their sheets, the very picture of relaxed indifference. I quickly picked up my papers again, realising that I’d never even turned onto pages two to five and began leafing through them as well, trying to look as if I too was simply checking some last minute facts.
My heart was pounding, the shaking in my hands had spread to my legs and I was starting to feel nauseous. I was a dead man, there was no way that I was going to be able to con Hannibal into thinking that I’d read his words, no way at all, and the second he realised that I hadn’t done as he had asked, well, what then? I’d never been in this situation before, never had to reply so totally on the written word, there’d always been enough of a visual or even aural nature for me to join the dots together well enough, I was smart enough to make a whole from a few slices of facts. But today, nothing. It may as well have been written in Ancient Greek for all I understood of it.
“Okay...” Hannibal rose to his feet once more and went to the front of the room, his feet sounding like a tolling death bell. I fixed my eyes on my sheets, trying to sink into the table top but my heart literally stopped dead in my chest as I heard him say, “I think the honour of recapping these preliminary notes should go to our newest team member...”
I couldn’t stop the panic from flaring through me as I shuffled the sheets awkwardly, making sure my eyes stayed right away from anyone else’s.
“Face?” Hannibal was waiting, I could tell that he was waiting, could feel his eyes and the eyes of every other person in the room burning into the top of my bent head, but I couldn’t look up, I couldn’t speak, shit, I could hardly damn well move.
“Face!” and there it was, that tone with the bite to it, that tone that says clear as day, ‘What the fuck you playing at here, kid?’ and I still couldn’t answer.
“Lieutenant!” That got my eyes up; I knew it would and so I made sure that my face was carefully blank, neutral and empty, the fear hidden way, way down away from these people. “I am asking you to recap the briefing notes!” There was so much in that voice, the anger, the disappointment, but it was the downright incredulity that got me the most; that he was just so amazed, after everything we’d been through in the last few weeks, that I would still do this to him. “Did you hear me?” the room was deadly silent and I winced as I heard the direct question in that last sentence, I had to answer a direction question, no way round it.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, amazed how steady my voice sounded when my entire insides were writhing like snakes.
He stared at me steadily. “But still you don’t comply. Why not lieutenant? Have you read the notes?”
There wasn’t a sound from my team mates; I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, but how the fuck could I answer that? “No sir,” I mumbled, knowing that I had nothing but the truth to fall back on.
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed dangerously, “I don't like listening to rumours, Lieutenant Peck,” he told me, his voice low and hard, “I always prefer to make up my own mind about a soldier. But when those rumours I hear about you talk of insolence, laziness and insubordination, and then you behave like this in front of the rest of the team, what on earth am I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know, sir,” I whispered, knowing I’d lost my shot at this mission, possibly even this whole damn unit.
Suddenly Hannibal let out a long, harsh breath, “You are wasting my time here, son,” he was already turning away from me, picking up his own damn hell-spawned notes and moving on, pushing me out of his mind, “Get the fuck out of here. Go back to your room, wait for me there. Now move.”
I didn’t move, I couldn’t. I was held in place by every pair of eyes in the whole room apart from his, the one set of eyes I actually wanted on me, wanted to see what I was really like, why I was the way I was.
“MOVE!” his voice literally shocked me to my feet and I was out of the door even as the first tears spilt over onto my cheeks.
_______________________
Like a stupid, damn baby I ran through the busy base, tears streaking down my face and blurring my vision. I kept my head down as much as I could and ran fucking fast; hoping people were too busy to pay me much attention.
I could hardly get the key in the lock I was shaking so hard and then I was up the stairs and in my poky little box room, throwing myself onto the bed like a teenage girl and sobbing into my pillow.
What on earth was I doing in this job? Who the hell was I trying to fool into thinking I could do it? I’d wanted to be the best of the best? A ‘real man’? I was a fool. This life wasn’t for the likes of me, an unwanted, unlovable orphan whose brain didn’t even work right. I was damaged goods, always had been. Maybe that’s why my parents had got rid of me; maybe it was obvious from the very start that I was faulty. In fact, what am I thinking? Of course it was obvious, why else would my own parents leave me on the steps of a church at five years old? Why else would countless streams of foster parents pass me by? Why else would commanding officers by the dozen despair of me?
I’d thought Hannibal Smith was going to be different, thought he’d maybe be the one who would be able to see through all the crap that clings to me, see the real me underneath. He hadn’t of course, but that was hardly Hannibal’s fault, that was down to the fact that the crap was actually all there was, there was nothing underneath.
For too many long, silent minutes I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling pondering my future before I came to a decision. I didn't belong in the army, I wasn’t a real man, never would be. I needed to set my sights a little lower, find something that I could do, decide where my talents really lay and follow a course that way. I thought really hard about the things I was really good at, the areas I excelled in, physical things, things I could do with my body rather than my mind. A cold, desperate chill settled in my bones as I realised the inevitable; the only thing I was actually damn good at, the thing that everyone agreed was a real, definite strength was sex. Was that where I had always been heading? Was my destiny in life to become a whore?
I closed my eyes against the pain that thought burnt through my heart and felt the heat of fresh tears leaking from beneath my eyelids.
_________________________
Half an hour later I had packed my meagre possessions into my kit bag and turned for one last look at the tiny room that I had hoped beyond hope would eventually become my home. It was stark and empty once more, the crumpled and tear stained briefing notes the only thing left to prove I’d ever even been here.
My fingers traced the handles of my bag as I looked at the five damn sheets of paper as they taunted my failings from the shabby old desk. Now the pressure of the team’s presence had gone and the terrifying ten minute window of reading time was long, long past, the words didn't evade me quite as much as they had. Without thinking, I picked the sheets up and read the title, ‘Operation Nightshade’ and shook my head. It was crazy, before, in that briefing room, I hadn’t even been able to get my stupid brain to take in that much. I knew, if I just sat down now and gave it a bit of effort, I could have the entire document creamed in half an hour.
Mind made up, I dropped my kit bag onto the bed and pulled out some stationary supplies before sliding into the wooden desk chair and picking up the briefing notes. At least this way I would be able to leave with maybe a crumb of self respect in place.
_______________________________
It took longer than I had imagined it would. Hannibal’s notes were detailed and fascinating, but very involved, and the way his mind worked was incredible. I started out by cutting the sheets into paragraphs, my mind tended not to freak out quite so easily if it only had a small chunk of information to work through at any one time. Then I spread out two pieces of A3 paper and taped them together so I had plenty of space to sketch out the whole of the mission. I used different colours for different phases, blue for preparation, green for execution, red for extraction, jotting notes and timings down on the huge sheet, taking my time to clarify every tiny point of the mission as I considered it.
Then I cut out markers for each of the team, quick cartoon icons, a cigar for the boss, a hamburger for Dave, Sonic the Hedgehog for Spike and so on. I was a stick man, always was, somehow it just seemed wrong to assign myself to something with more character than that.
Then, finally, I was done. I stepped back and admired the intricacies of Hannibal’s plan; the simple elegance and the damn obvious subtleties that the enemy would never, ever predict. I shook my head in wonder, the man was a genius. For maybe five minutes I stood there and looked, noticing a couple of minor adjustments I would make, maybe a few timings I would adjust, a few positions I would alter, but then the beeping of my watch pulled me back to the present and I realised it was midday and I needed to be going. I packed up my things, leaving Hannibal’s plan spread out like a shrine to his brilliance and wandered along to the bathroom to take a quick leak before I left.
I’d been gone longer than I expected, finding my shower gel and other assorted toiletries spread all over the washroom from where I had forgotten to retrieve them, and when I eventually got back to my room almost ten minutes later I froze as I saw a familiar figure standing in there waiting for me.
For just a second I considered bolting for it, but carrying a wash bag and leaving all my other worldly possessions behind wouldn’t be the best way to start out on a new life, so I swallowed my pride and walked quietly up to the door frame.
Hannibal was standing at the desk, his keen blue eyes flicking over and over my representation of his plan, fingers reaching out to touch the markers as he followed their routes through the mission. I watched as he moved from blue to green to red, picking up on my code instantly and as soon as he was finished with the run through, he turned and pinned me with his shrewd eyes. “What’s all this, kid?” he asked, just enough bite in his voice to make my heart start up again.
I took a step in. “It’s.... err.... it’s the mission, sir.” I found myself running my hand nervously through my hair and tried to stop, Father David had always told me it made me look insecure; I’d always thought that was probably because I was.
Hannibal turned back to my schematic and gently touched the little stick man figure. It was crazy but as I watched the very tip of that finger tracing the stick man’s limbs, it was almost as if I could feel the touch on my own skin. “Did you read the notes in the briefing?” he asked, not looking up from his hand.
“No, sir...” I mumbled, shame flushing my cheeks red.
He turned and looked at me and I forced myself to look back, even though I could feel the usual humiliation building up inside me. “Are you dyslexic?” he suddenly asked and I jumped, genuinely shocked, surprised that something like that would even occur to him.
For a second I considered lying, thinking how simple that would be, that one tiny lie, how it would excuse everything I was in his eyes, but of course I couldn’t. “No, sir,” I whispered, hating myself for actually wishing I was.
He frowned and glanced back at the plan whispering, “But there is something,” almost to himself before returning his piercing eyes to me and speaking louder. “Words don’t work so well for you, eh, kid?” I shook my head, incapable of speech as my heart was pounding so hard in my chest. “You work better with pictures?” and this time I nodded as Hannibal turned his eyes back to my desk. “Well, Lieutenant,” that sharp tone was back and I felt the tiny bubble of hope burst inside me, “you never consider that that might be something I would need to know? How am I supposed to plan for a team if I don’t know all their individual facets?”
I’d cringed in preparation of the word ‘weaknesses’ or ‘failings’ and was shocked when it hadn’t come. “I don’t know, sir,” I’d mumbled instead, staring morosely at my socked feet.
A long sigh came from my CO and I waited for the start of the usual, ‘you are such a disappointment to me’ speech that I’d had from so many priests, teachers, nuns, neighbourhood police officers, tutors, COs, drill sergeants etc. etc. over the years that I could probably recite it myself by now, but it didn’t come. Instead he just turned and strode past me out of the door, pausing in the hallway to toss over his shoulder, “Put your gear away, Lieutenant, you are going nowhere. And I expect to see you back in that briefing room at 0800 tomorrow morning. We have a mission to run, and I need to know that you understand your role.” And then he was gone and I was left confused, but not at all stressed about the morning. I knew damn well I knew the plan inside out and back to front.
Next
When I awoke the next morning with a pounding head, I was in my own bed, dressed only in my boxers, the cuts on my hands and legs washed and neatly dressed. I looked at the clock and groaned, 10.30 already, no doubt the rest of the team would already be up, no doubt Hannibal would be furious with me again.
However, as I scrabbled about on the bedside table to pick up my watch, I saw the note, written in Hannibal’s bold script: Sick day, kid. Back on duty 0800 Wednesday. I let myself fall back into the pillows and opt out of life for a few hours.
______________
I was first one up on Wednesday. I hadn’t seen a soul yesterday, the house had been deserted when I had ventured down in search of food mid afternoon, and then I‘d gone back to bed, falling asleep again until after midnight. I‘d seen the light on in Hannibal’s room as I moved around downstairs fixing myself a sandwich, but he hadn’t made a sound or come out of the room to talk to me so I left him to it.
So now I was up early, cooking bacon and eggs, wondering what everyone knew about the events of the last couple of days, wondering which of my team mates would still see me as a drug dealer, if I would be forced off the unit eventually anyway.
But it seemed that I didn’t really have to worry. Everyone was friendly when they came into the kitchen, I suppose the pile of fried food and buttered bread didn't do any harm, and there were plenty of queries after my concussion, lots of comments about the bad luck of being mugged on an army base. Hannibal wandered into all of the food and chaos and comments, clapping me on the back and squeezing my shoulder firmly before telling everyone else to lay off me and that they’d better eat quickly as we were having a preliminary briefing at 0800 sharp. He left his hand on my shoulder the whole time he was speaking, that warmth there, creeping through the thin material of my t-shirt.
We crowded into a briefing room, with lots of good natured pushing and ribbing, but when Hannibal called us all to order, silence fell instantly. I was just starting to relax, feeling the excitement of a new job beginning to bubble through my veins when the day took a decided shift for the worse.
“Okay, gents,” Hannibal’s voice was calm and assured, “briefing notes. Read and digest, you’ve got ten minutes and then you’ll need to let me know that you know your brief. Okay?”
All around me people nodded and started leafing through their notes, but all I could feel was the start of the panic welling up from deep inside. I looked at my notes, five sides of A4, single spaced, no diagrams, black print on white, my ultimate worst nightmare. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read them because I could, easily. I knew damn well that I would have no problem at all in standing up in the middle of that room and reading every one of those five sheets out loud to the whole unit. My issue was that once I’d read it, I would have absolutely no idea what it said. To go through pages and pages of info like that would take me ages. I would have to work through it a paragraph at a time, actually cutting the text into chunks with scissors, making notes or diagrams as I went; coloured paper would help as well. I’d have to break it all down, make sure I understood each point, could see it all clearly in my head, before I moved on. To get anything from five typed pages of A4 in ten minutes would require nothing short of a miracle.
I felt the sweat building up across my brow and I wiped it away, noticing with horror that my hands were shaking really badly. I dropped the pages onto the desk in front of me wrapping my arms tightly around my chest, trying so hard to keep them still but the cold clammy fear was persisting, creeping up the back of my neck, taunting me.
“Two minutes...” I heard Hannibal say, eight minutes gone already? And his voice seemed a long way off, almost as if he were at the end of a long metal tunnel. I glanced around frantically, seeing that some people had already finished and were nonchalantly flicking backwards and forwards through their sheets, the very picture of relaxed indifference. I quickly picked up my papers again, realising that I’d never even turned onto pages two to five and began leafing through them as well, trying to look as if I too was simply checking some last minute facts.
My heart was pounding, the shaking in my hands had spread to my legs and I was starting to feel nauseous. I was a dead man, there was no way that I was going to be able to con Hannibal into thinking that I’d read his words, no way at all, and the second he realised that I hadn’t done as he had asked, well, what then? I’d never been in this situation before, never had to reply so totally on the written word, there’d always been enough of a visual or even aural nature for me to join the dots together well enough, I was smart enough to make a whole from a few slices of facts. But today, nothing. It may as well have been written in Ancient Greek for all I understood of it.
“Okay...” Hannibal rose to his feet once more and went to the front of the room, his feet sounding like a tolling death bell. I fixed my eyes on my sheets, trying to sink into the table top but my heart literally stopped dead in my chest as I heard him say, “I think the honour of recapping these preliminary notes should go to our newest team member...”
I couldn’t stop the panic from flaring through me as I shuffled the sheets awkwardly, making sure my eyes stayed right away from anyone else’s.
“Face?” Hannibal was waiting, I could tell that he was waiting, could feel his eyes and the eyes of every other person in the room burning into the top of my bent head, but I couldn’t look up, I couldn’t speak, shit, I could hardly damn well move.
“Face!” and there it was, that tone with the bite to it, that tone that says clear as day, ‘What the fuck you playing at here, kid?’ and I still couldn’t answer.
“Lieutenant!” That got my eyes up; I knew it would and so I made sure that my face was carefully blank, neutral and empty, the fear hidden way, way down away from these people. “I am asking you to recap the briefing notes!” There was so much in that voice, the anger, the disappointment, but it was the downright incredulity that got me the most; that he was just so amazed, after everything we’d been through in the last few weeks, that I would still do this to him. “Did you hear me?” the room was deadly silent and I winced as I heard the direct question in that last sentence, I had to answer a direction question, no way round it.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, amazed how steady my voice sounded when my entire insides were writhing like snakes.
He stared at me steadily. “But still you don’t comply. Why not lieutenant? Have you read the notes?”
There wasn’t a sound from my team mates; I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, but how the fuck could I answer that? “No sir,” I mumbled, knowing that I had nothing but the truth to fall back on.
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed dangerously, “I don't like listening to rumours, Lieutenant Peck,” he told me, his voice low and hard, “I always prefer to make up my own mind about a soldier. But when those rumours I hear about you talk of insolence, laziness and insubordination, and then you behave like this in front of the rest of the team, what on earth am I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know, sir,” I whispered, knowing I’d lost my shot at this mission, possibly even this whole damn unit.
Suddenly Hannibal let out a long, harsh breath, “You are wasting my time here, son,” he was already turning away from me, picking up his own damn hell-spawned notes and moving on, pushing me out of his mind, “Get the fuck out of here. Go back to your room, wait for me there. Now move.”
I didn’t move, I couldn’t. I was held in place by every pair of eyes in the whole room apart from his, the one set of eyes I actually wanted on me, wanted to see what I was really like, why I was the way I was.
“MOVE!” his voice literally shocked me to my feet and I was out of the door even as the first tears spilt over onto my cheeks.
_______________________
Like a stupid, damn baby I ran through the busy base, tears streaking down my face and blurring my vision. I kept my head down as much as I could and ran fucking fast; hoping people were too busy to pay me much attention.
I could hardly get the key in the lock I was shaking so hard and then I was up the stairs and in my poky little box room, throwing myself onto the bed like a teenage girl and sobbing into my pillow.
What on earth was I doing in this job? Who the hell was I trying to fool into thinking I could do it? I’d wanted to be the best of the best? A ‘real man’? I was a fool. This life wasn’t for the likes of me, an unwanted, unlovable orphan whose brain didn’t even work right. I was damaged goods, always had been. Maybe that’s why my parents had got rid of me; maybe it was obvious from the very start that I was faulty. In fact, what am I thinking? Of course it was obvious, why else would my own parents leave me on the steps of a church at five years old? Why else would countless streams of foster parents pass me by? Why else would commanding officers by the dozen despair of me?
I’d thought Hannibal Smith was going to be different, thought he’d maybe be the one who would be able to see through all the crap that clings to me, see the real me underneath. He hadn’t of course, but that was hardly Hannibal’s fault, that was down to the fact that the crap was actually all there was, there was nothing underneath.
For too many long, silent minutes I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling pondering my future before I came to a decision. I didn't belong in the army, I wasn’t a real man, never would be. I needed to set my sights a little lower, find something that I could do, decide where my talents really lay and follow a course that way. I thought really hard about the things I was really good at, the areas I excelled in, physical things, things I could do with my body rather than my mind. A cold, desperate chill settled in my bones as I realised the inevitable; the only thing I was actually damn good at, the thing that everyone agreed was a real, definite strength was sex. Was that where I had always been heading? Was my destiny in life to become a whore?
I closed my eyes against the pain that thought burnt through my heart and felt the heat of fresh tears leaking from beneath my eyelids.
_________________________
Half an hour later I had packed my meagre possessions into my kit bag and turned for one last look at the tiny room that I had hoped beyond hope would eventually become my home. It was stark and empty once more, the crumpled and tear stained briefing notes the only thing left to prove I’d ever even been here.
My fingers traced the handles of my bag as I looked at the five damn sheets of paper as they taunted my failings from the shabby old desk. Now the pressure of the team’s presence had gone and the terrifying ten minute window of reading time was long, long past, the words didn't evade me quite as much as they had. Without thinking, I picked the sheets up and read the title, ‘Operation Nightshade’ and shook my head. It was crazy, before, in that briefing room, I hadn’t even been able to get my stupid brain to take in that much. I knew, if I just sat down now and gave it a bit of effort, I could have the entire document creamed in half an hour.
Mind made up, I dropped my kit bag onto the bed and pulled out some stationary supplies before sliding into the wooden desk chair and picking up the briefing notes. At least this way I would be able to leave with maybe a crumb of self respect in place.
_______________________________
It took longer than I had imagined it would. Hannibal’s notes were detailed and fascinating, but very involved, and the way his mind worked was incredible. I started out by cutting the sheets into paragraphs, my mind tended not to freak out quite so easily if it only had a small chunk of information to work through at any one time. Then I spread out two pieces of A3 paper and taped them together so I had plenty of space to sketch out the whole of the mission. I used different colours for different phases, blue for preparation, green for execution, red for extraction, jotting notes and timings down on the huge sheet, taking my time to clarify every tiny point of the mission as I considered it.
Then I cut out markers for each of the team, quick cartoon icons, a cigar for the boss, a hamburger for Dave, Sonic the Hedgehog for Spike and so on. I was a stick man, always was, somehow it just seemed wrong to assign myself to something with more character than that.
Then, finally, I was done. I stepped back and admired the intricacies of Hannibal’s plan; the simple elegance and the damn obvious subtleties that the enemy would never, ever predict. I shook my head in wonder, the man was a genius. For maybe five minutes I stood there and looked, noticing a couple of minor adjustments I would make, maybe a few timings I would adjust, a few positions I would alter, but then the beeping of my watch pulled me back to the present and I realised it was midday and I needed to be going. I packed up my things, leaving Hannibal’s plan spread out like a shrine to his brilliance and wandered along to the bathroom to take a quick leak before I left.
I’d been gone longer than I expected, finding my shower gel and other assorted toiletries spread all over the washroom from where I had forgotten to retrieve them, and when I eventually got back to my room almost ten minutes later I froze as I saw a familiar figure standing in there waiting for me.
For just a second I considered bolting for it, but carrying a wash bag and leaving all my other worldly possessions behind wouldn’t be the best way to start out on a new life, so I swallowed my pride and walked quietly up to the door frame.
Hannibal was standing at the desk, his keen blue eyes flicking over and over my representation of his plan, fingers reaching out to touch the markers as he followed their routes through the mission. I watched as he moved from blue to green to red, picking up on my code instantly and as soon as he was finished with the run through, he turned and pinned me with his shrewd eyes. “What’s all this, kid?” he asked, just enough bite in his voice to make my heart start up again.
I took a step in. “It’s.... err.... it’s the mission, sir.” I found myself running my hand nervously through my hair and tried to stop, Father David had always told me it made me look insecure; I’d always thought that was probably because I was.
Hannibal turned back to my schematic and gently touched the little stick man figure. It was crazy but as I watched the very tip of that finger tracing the stick man’s limbs, it was almost as if I could feel the touch on my own skin. “Did you read the notes in the briefing?” he asked, not looking up from his hand.
“No, sir...” I mumbled, shame flushing my cheeks red.
He turned and looked at me and I forced myself to look back, even though I could feel the usual humiliation building up inside me. “Are you dyslexic?” he suddenly asked and I jumped, genuinely shocked, surprised that something like that would even occur to him.
For a second I considered lying, thinking how simple that would be, that one tiny lie, how it would excuse everything I was in his eyes, but of course I couldn’t. “No, sir,” I whispered, hating myself for actually wishing I was.
He frowned and glanced back at the plan whispering, “But there is something,” almost to himself before returning his piercing eyes to me and speaking louder. “Words don’t work so well for you, eh, kid?” I shook my head, incapable of speech as my heart was pounding so hard in my chest. “You work better with pictures?” and this time I nodded as Hannibal turned his eyes back to my desk. “Well, Lieutenant,” that sharp tone was back and I felt the tiny bubble of hope burst inside me, “you never consider that that might be something I would need to know? How am I supposed to plan for a team if I don’t know all their individual facets?”
I’d cringed in preparation of the word ‘weaknesses’ or ‘failings’ and was shocked when it hadn’t come. “I don’t know, sir,” I’d mumbled instead, staring morosely at my socked feet.
A long sigh came from my CO and I waited for the start of the usual, ‘you are such a disappointment to me’ speech that I’d had from so many priests, teachers, nuns, neighbourhood police officers, tutors, COs, drill sergeants etc. etc. over the years that I could probably recite it myself by now, but it didn’t come. Instead he just turned and strode past me out of the door, pausing in the hallway to toss over his shoulder, “Put your gear away, Lieutenant, you are going nowhere. And I expect to see you back in that briefing room at 0800 tomorrow morning. We have a mission to run, and I need to know that you understand your role.” And then he was gone and I was left confused, but not at all stressed about the morning. I knew damn well I knew the plan inside out and back to front.
Next
