Passion Bearers

The return

While Tommy's body might have survived the war, his mind didn't. There would always be something in him that would be broken forever, broken from killing too many, seeing too many die. Good men, bad men, it didn't matter. They were all dead by the end of it, all buried in unknown graves, their bones buried far from home.

When he first arrived to France, Tommy was not the man that he was today. While he thought he had been tough, that he saw the dark side of life, he couldn't have been more wrong. There was still an innocence in him, a joy of life, attachments to the world.

The first year in France, he tried to hold onto to the fact that he had a family waiting for him back home. In those nights in the tunnels, when he thought he'd never see the sight of sun again, he imagined Tess and Charlie. He imagined Tess in that yellow bright dress that she wore to the countryside once, her hair let down, flowing down her back in waves. He saw her eyes, dark like the depth of night, but warm like the light of fire. He saw his son in her arms, his eyes looking up at him, his smile as wide as the world.

For a while, it had been what kept Tommy floating. He'd hold onto the picture of them fervently, to the point that the picture had been nearly rubbed out from the many times he stroked it with his finger. During those days and nights when he'd thought he'd die, when he thought he couldn't go any further, it had kept him sane.

But, around the time that his daughter was born, Tommy began to lose himself. He just kept imagining his daughter, agonizingly himself with the fact that maybe, he'd never see her again. That this war, just as it had taken away many things, would take away his chance of seeing his own daughter. It nearly drove him insane, thinking of how close he was to his family, but how far away they were. Reading letters from Tess made it worse, making him stop reading them and writing to her altogether.

Tommy realised that it was terrible of him but lines of what was terrible and what was not were slowly blurring to him. It was also around that time that John had gotten news of his wife dying, as he informed Tommy on one of those rare days that the brothers actually got to see each other. Something broke in John when he got the news and he became more broken than he already was due to the war. Tommy feared being that broken, he feared thinking of whatever could happen of his family while he was gone. Sometimes, he thought of Tess leaving him for another man, tired of waiting for him. Sometimes, he saw her injured, hurt by other men with him not there to ensure her protection. It was getting so maddening that Tommy erased the thought of his family completely from his mind while he was at war.

While Tommy was tunneling he lived in constant fear. There was always a risk of collapsing, poisoning from the carbon and worse, the unwarranted explosion of mines they'd already set in. Sometimes, there were times Tommy thought that they'd be buried alive by the enemy's tunnellers and he'd have nightmares about it for weeks, screaming through the night.

As years passed by, Tommy could deal less and less with his nightmares. Like many soldiers, he sought oblivion, an absolution of all the sins and memories that he gathered. Like his brothers, he visited brothels, all in a quest to escape the reality of war. The first time he visited, he kept seeing his wife in the woman, the guilt like a shadow over him. Tommy never thought he loved Tess but in that moment, when memories of the softest of her sighs, of the tickle of her hair on his chest, appeared in his head, he doubted himself for a moment. But, imagining her when she wasn't there just brought further pain to Tommy. So, he kept visiting he brothels until he was numb to guilt. Until he succumbed to the oblivion.

But, whores weren't enough to satisfy him. He began to rely on cigarettes, alcohol and soon enough, opium as well. In his opium induced state, he could see his children running through the field, Tess right by his side, blinding him with her huge smile. Even though he knew how dangerous it was, he kept chasing the feeling again and again, wanting to escape the war to just, for a moment, be back home again.