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Legundo walked away from the train station as fast as he could without running, until he came to a dead stop at a corner. He was so focused on getting away from the station, that he didn't know where he was intending to go. He was still in his dress uniform, the collar feeling tight against his throat, a paper detailing his honorable discharge clenched tight in his fist.
There were two other former soldiers that had been on the same train as him, but he didn't bother to keep track of them. They were both excited to get home, Legundo was just desperate to get away.
Away to where?
Did his mother even still live in this town? Did he even remember her address?
He stood motionless as the bustle of people flowed around him, a stone in a river, none of them paying any mind to the shell shocked man in black and carmine. He forced himself to breath, inhale and exhale over and over, as he worried another soft spot into the paper he was holding.
It had been two years since the war had officially ended, leaving Legundo to finish his service in a time of relative peace. He traded dirty, rickety field cots t for hospital beds, traded missing limbs for routine checkups.
It didn't stop his hands shaking any time he saw a young soldier step into his ward, his mind replacing them with the same young faces over and over again, their eyes filled with pain and fear and false hope.
Am I gonna make it doc?
Legundo shook his head firmly, ignoring the strange looks it earned him from passerby, as he started walking once more. To an inn, perhaps, just somewhere to stay for the night.
What was he going to do?
"I need a bucket of water, and something to patch the wound with, now!" Legundo ordered, as blood soaked through the bandages that he had carried on his person. The young boy who had run to get the doctor in the first place didn't move. "What are you waiting for? Go!"
Legundo had been woken up early that morning, the boy at his door rambling frantically about his father and a wolf attack. Now, the man in question was laid out in the grass, scratches running along his body, and a torn, messy bite across his shoulder.
The boy flinched, but it was luckily the jolt that it took to get him moving, running back towards the house. Legundo turned his attention back to his patient, one hand holding fabric to the wound, while he clumsily cut a scrap from the hem of his doctor's robes.
Anything to stop the bleeding.
After too long, what could only have been a few minutes, the farmer's son returned, a wad of cloth tucked under his arm and a bucked splashing in his hands. He handed them over, before taking a step back, watching Legundo clean the wound with wide, terrified eyes.
"Is he gonna be okay?" he asked, voice quiet and shaky. Despite himself, Legundo scowled, his voice clipped.
"He won't be if you don't let me focus," he snapped. The boy remained silent after that, but he did not leave.
The sun was cresting the treetops when Legundo leaned back on his heels, taking slow, forced breaths. The farmer was still injured, and would be out of work for a good while, but Legundo felt satisfied enough to carry him back across the field to the house without aggravating the injuries. As he marched back, the little boy trotting nervously at his heels, he listened out to the sounds of the woods and the farm waking up, trying to push away the residual sounds of gunshots and mortar shells.
Legundo's life forced him to never forget that a large part of being a traveling doctor was the traveling part. He got used to long roads and sleeping under trees, praying the weather didn't turn, that no highway robbers saw a lone man as an easy target.
Most of the money he allowed himself to accept went back into his craft, paying for bandages and salves and to upkeep his surgical tools. he was thankful for the kindness of strangers, willing to cover the price of a night in an inn, when they heard the work he was in town to do. Still, those nights on the road often reminded him harshly of hunger's wrath, a lesson he tried to impart on his patients through words rather than experience.
Too often he saw families and children, surviving at the fringes of their town's society, farmers desolated by hard winters. There, he would patch skinned knees where he could, administer medication for wracking coughs. He taught people lessons learned from worse times, how to mill pine bark into flour, how to differentiate barberries from nightshade.
Sometimes it helped.
Sometimes it didn't.
He never overstayed his welcome. When people were healthier than they had been when he arrived, when he had successfully shared his knowledge of common cuts and illnesses, he would often be gone one sunrise, the coins he could spare left on the bar of the inn as the only sign there had been someone staying in his room at all.
On occasion, someone would ask, or he would ask himself, why he never stayed. He could help the people of whatever community for years on end, set up a permanent clinic, settle down and be happy. He paid the thoughts no mind.
There were more people that needed help, that didn't have access to doctors.
And Legundo didn't deserve to be happy.
How could he find a place in any town, when after enough time, the faces he passed became visages of familiar ones, haunted by hunger and poison and death? No, it was better to keep moving. A rot like Legundo shouldn't be allowed to fester.
As such he told himself, as he hefted his bag over his shoulder once again, looking over his shoulder to the lights of Barrowhill, and then back to the wilds once more.
Legundo sighed as he stepped outside, glaring up at the sun that seemed to forever permeate this town. He was stopped, however, by another person looking up at him with a mix of worry and apprehension in her eyes.
"Is he gonna be okay?" she asked. Her red curls gathered in a bob around her ears, and the copper rims of her glasses were flecked with green oxidation. "My cousin Oli, is he gonna be okay?"
Legundo looked back at the door. Sunnyside Cliffs thankfully had a local healer, but she was unfamiliar with surgical procedures, and was happy to employ Legundo for a short tenure. The boy being treated inside had injuries Legundo had seen many times before, scratches and bites, though thankfully, he had been brought to the clinic before he could bleed out by his cousin, chattering about werewolves.
"He's going to be fine, so long as he's allowed the rest and recovery time he needs. It's likely that he'll have scars though, for years if not the rest of his life," Legundo explained patiently. Oli's cousin, who's name Legundo never got, nodded seriously.
"Do you think it was a werewolf?" she asked seriously, and Legundo had to hold back another sigh. She was sixteen, two years younger than her cousin, but between her oversized sweater and imaginative fantasies, there was a wide eyed immaturity about her.
"I definitely believe it was a wolf attack. As for the supernatural, however, I myself am a man of science, unfortunately." The girl looked downcast, before plastering a cheerful smile across her face.
"Well, if it was a werewolf, hopefully Oli doesn't become one too! Maybe it would be cool if is he was, but then he would eat people, which isn't good," she muttered. Legundo tried not to grimace. The village healer had confided in him the family's tragedy, and it wasn't like the girl's coping mechanisms were hurting anybody.
The two of them fell into an uneasy silence, leaning against the side of the building, she with a book, and he with a stubborn stain on the glass of his monocle. Eventually, the healer called him inside, to assist with their patient once more.
Legundo's resentment for the army had long since settled into barely glowing embers. it was a fact that lingered in the back of his mind as he half watched the trio of soldiers chatting and laughing at the bar. Legundo himself nursed his rare indulgence of a whiskey, reminiscing.
On the counter in front of him, a shining medal lay. It lived in the bottom of his stuff, only taken out on rare occasion to receive a polish until the metal reflected a monster back at him.
"-got herself shipped off to Oakhurst for it," one of the soldiers said, causing the other two to wince. It made Legundo perk up, however, at the name. Anyone who payed any attention in the greater area had heard of Oakhurst, a dead end, a wrong turn, a haunted land. Over the past few weeks, however, Legundo had hears whispers like this of multiple people leaving surrounding towns, Oakhurst their intents for various reasons.
Legundo didn't have a destination he was wandering towards currently. But if people were traveling to Oakhurst, perhaps it was not as abandoned as people claimed it to be.
Maybe people needed help.