TFOA Chapter 23

Between the former military painter and farmer who had behaved abnormally, and the civilians who understood but whose wounds hadn't healed enough to simply pass it off as nothing more than a joke.

In their awkward silence with one another, the gathering broke up vaguely.

Niksi and Benjamin ended up returning home together since their direction was the same, following the field path back up to the hill road.

"Raul's treatment skills are excellent. His bandaging technique was absolutely perfect. I'd want to put him in front of military medic students to give lectures."

"......"

Niksi and Benjamin both had thin bandages wrapped around their right hands. It was a wound of dishonor.

Far in the distance, the pitch-black sky around them rippled as dawn was about to break. A lamb's long cry awakened the dawn.

Even in all that chaos, new life was still being born.

"...Hey, painter. Wasn't that ridiculous earlier?"

The painter, who had returned to silence mode like when they first met, only turned his eyes to look at Niksi.

"Anyone could tell we're not soldiers - only the two of us thinking there were enemies and making all that commotion."

"......"

"It's already been months since the war ended. But I suppose what's become habit in the body can't be helped."

She clenched and released her hand that still held a trace of pain.

Light in the darkness was the very first target of bombardment.

Long ago, on a night when one round of air raids had ended. Niksi lit a match to treat a wound and got slapped by a lieutenant colonel.

From the sky above, even the light of a match shows as clearly as a star in the heavens.

'You're telling the enemy 'the target is here,' don't you understand that!'

Standing before the shouting lieutenant colonel, she pondered whether his bellowing voice wasn't more of an 'I'm here' announcement.

Eventually, it became a habit to block out light first whenever air raids sounded. That's why she had grabbed the candle.

"You did too, right? You immediately took a defensive stance. Seems like you didn't slack off during your military service."

"...If I had slacked off, I'd already be dead."

That was true.

From his palm, where a thin, deep scar had been drawn by the broken glass mug, a delayed stinging sensation washed over him.

His broken hand that always tensed up only in situations like this. His useless hand that trembled like an aspen leaf whenever he held a brush.

Benjamin smiled bitterly. He had gripped it so hard that despite first aid, the bandage was already stained red.

The two stayed in petty silence for a while.

"Hey, Painter. When do you think we'll stop being soldiers?"

Whoosh, the sound of dry waves rolled in from the wheat field.

"Who knows."

Would such a time really come.

"I hope it happens quickly."

"Why."

"You don't know why I'm asking? I don't want to keep getting startled awake by thunder sounds. And the medicine is so harsh too... Ah!"

'I completely forgot! Painter's medicine!'

A few weeks ago. She remembered going to his house to treat the painter who was struggling between life and death due to side effects of sleeping pills, and disposing of all his sleeping medication. She had thought she'd make a replacement later, then completely forgot about it.

"Um, painter... are you sleeping well these days...?"

Benjamin raised one eyebrow.

"Actually, you know those military chemical sleeping pills at your house. I threw all of them away."

"...That was you too."

Benjamin let out a deep sigh that seemed to cave in the ground. He looked speechless with disbelief.

This is bad. He really looks angry. Niksi felt a bead of sweat run down her back as she hurriedly made excuses.

"Who uses that stuff even after the war ended! It wasn't made to be healthy in the first place, it's just a chemical lump. You got a fever from taking it last time! That stuff has severe side effects, you know? It even causes hair loss!"

"Sleep, I gave up on that long ago, from the time I enlisted and first shot someone to death."

"Uh..."

"Even with medicine, I probably can't sleep properly. If there's no medicine, then I'm giving up on sleep from the beginning."

Far away, beyond the horizon line visible behind Benjamin's house. A golden thread had been drawn.

A morning sun unsuited to their despairing conversation was brightening.

"That's all it is."

"I was like that too."

"It's common. For people like us."

He waved his bandaged hand.

"...I'll make sleeping medicine for you."

Niksi said.

She always carries a palm-sized medicine case in her chest. It contains various types of medication, but there are three types she never fails to keep stocked.

First, the narcotic painkiller Noel Hugger had given her at the end.

Second, the unauthorized sleeping pills she had made during wartime.

Third, the antidepressants prescribed after her final neuropsychiatric diagnosis showed abnormal results in every category.

"I can sleep well now without taking sleeping pills. It's that effective. So I'll make some for you."

"......It won't be dangerous to eat, will it?"

"What do you take a genius chemist for. I was the test subject."

"The cost."

"Forget it."

Niksi held up her injured hand in a fist toward Benjamin.

"What's between people in the same situation."

She smiled.

However, the painter, pretending to be oblivious and wanting to ignore it, never returned her fist bump greeting.

Unable to stand it, Niksi forcibly lifted his arm and made it bump against her fist.

"...How did you endure when you couldn't sleep?"

"When I couldn't sleep?"

Hmm, she thought for a moment.

"I just didn't sleep. If you try to force yourself to sleep, you just get more thoughts. And when you get more thoughts, it feels like your head will explode. So I just... did other things I could do during that time. Read academic books, or do experiments. If not that, then count the stars."

He had been expecting some decent advice from a senior insomniac. But her prescription was far too ordinary.

Something everyone knows, but knowing doesn't make it easy.

"You're not someone who can't sleep, but someone who gets sleepy but can't sleep."

"......"

"Anyway, human mental and physical strength has limits, so you just wait for that."

His insomnia. The painter actually knew the cause well.

Simply a mental problem. He never let go of his guilt.

Because he thought he shouldn't let it go.

At the crossroads.

The painter, who couldn't live with debt to the end, was bothered by Niksi's words about not charging for the cost.

Eventually, he called out to the farmer who was about to leave.

"...Hey, stop by my house. Take the ingredients you left behind."

At his house were scattered the ingredients Niksi had received in exchange for distributing beans to the village people.

Niksi, who belatedly caught on to what he was saying, acted like she knew.

"Can't have the pharmacist starving to death before prescribing medicine."

"Hehe, you figured out I'm a beggar?"

Niksi followed behind him without hesitation.

Dawn was beginning to break in the distance.

The sun was smaller than a fingernail, yet it instantly chased away the pitch-black darkness.

Even the deep, blue sea took on a whiter hue than light at this moment.

"...I always feel at ease when I welcome the morning sun like this."

The remaining dawn air. Breath mixed with alcohol and the sound of grass being softly stepped on.

The lamb that had quieted down after nursing, and the cooking smoke from some house's chimney preparing breakfast a bit early.

Every peaceful moment. Niksi squinted her eyes against the dazzling light.

"Looking at the morning sun makes you think, 'I lived through today,' doesn't it? You felt that way too?"

"......"

Morning.

The sunlight warmly softened fingers that had grown rooted to their guns, regardless of the season.

Even when at some point the comrade next to him no longer moved, he wouldn't turn his eyes away, but mornings were different.

When he looked at the sun, his eyes stung with an aching pain. Tears came from staring too intently at that light. There was an indescribable churning sensation.

After enduring nights that seemed like they would never end, the moment morning arrived. He would feel the reality of 'I made it through today.'

"Perhaps if we too endure through what feels like endless time, someday there will come a moment when we become ordinary people?"

Could that be possible.

Nights when he wouldn't have to cling to unhealed wounds and groan. Mornings when he wouldn't wake up startled from dreams searching for his gun. Days when he could play catch on green grass under sunlight without any worries.

Would such days come?

"So until then, we need to forgive our nights."

She said.

With her golden hair receiving the morning sun and shining brilliantly, she held what seemed like a rather refreshed smile.

The smile was somehow mischievous and fragile, and like the loosely relaxed fingers from that time, it made a small gap somewhere in the depths of him that had been firmly rooted.

A gap as small as a crescent moon.

The uninvited guest who had loudly opened the door and barged into someone else's home rummaged through her leftover ingredients in the pantry several times, then plopped down flat on his floor.

Saying the liquor was taking effect now, Niksi wriggled her way to the sunniest spot and soon fell asleep with steady breathing.

Someone who falls asleep the moment her head hits the ground, yet had claimed to suffer from insomnia.

Benjamin watched this spectacle with bewilderment while sipping warm lemon tea.

'If I wake her up, she'll be noisy. Well, she only just fell asleep, so she won't wake up anyway.'

Dawn air always had something that made a person's feelings hazy. It was a sensation that both the ordinary Benjamin from before the war and the present him after the war felt equally.

Between his body still racing through the night and the world beyond his sight that had somehow greeted morning.

A mind drifting back and forth indecisively between morning and night.

Flutter.

Benjamin brought a blanket and covered Niksi with it.

Sleep still would not come.

He had the thought that he should sleep, but well, what of it. What could he do when it wouldn't come.

He still could not forgive, either.

The guilt that had grown dull and dim since he couldn't remember when, whose original cause had become vague, still pressed down heavily on his hands for reasons unknown.

But what could be done about it. He was alive, at any rate.

So then.

He mounted a canvas on his easel.

He gathered brushes, a painting knife, and paints, and sprayed alcohol on the dried paint on his palette.

He decided to begin doing what he was able to do.