in which bradford is home! and it kind of weirds him out.

It's still some time before they discharge him. But when he can finally leave, his father makes arrangements for follow-up appointments and any physical therapy Bradford might need, and then he is very carefully bundled into a taxi and driven home.

The house looks just as it did when he left for basic training so many months ago. The housekeeper is still there, although her daughter is making noises about going to work in one of the munitions factories, because the wages are better than what she gets in service. Bradford's mother goes not generally discuss the running of the household with him – or even with his father a lot of the time – but he can tell that she is not pleased by this turn of events.

His bedroom looks the same. His bed feels the same. But he has so gotten out of the habit of sleeping alone on a good mattress on a proper bed frame in a watertight, well-ventilated, properly-heated room that it takes much longer than he would have expected for him to fall asleep. He wants to blame the stiffness where his ribs are healing and his flesh is knitting together, but the fact is that he no longer knows what to do with feather pillows, clean sheets, and warm blankets.

( Despite that, he sleeps well, once he finally reaches unconsciousness )

words: 1965
total words: 40,811
note: i'm guessing it's about the middle of december now. i gave bradford a couple weeks to be in the hospital, altho i don't really know how long they would've kept him. we seem to have passed the obsessive-about-accurate-details part of the nanonovel. :D

bradford meets his friend pryce for dinner and realizes he can't talk to civilians any more

Bradford returns several salutes once inside Pryce's building, from people in uniform as well as from the occasional civilian. He even passes a couple of women in military uniforms, although what their function is he can't tell. He's really only familiar with nurses.

Pryce is working in a large studio with tables covered in giant sheets of paper, scattered notes, and half-empty cups of tea. There are several other men in the studio, some of them bent over drawing tables and some leaning against the work tables and some just standing around talking. Bradford isn't quite sure how to proceed, if he should go into the room and find Pryce himself, or if he should call his name, or if he should just collar someone walking past and ask for assistance. This is what he gets for dropping in unannounced. Part of him is surprised that everyone else in this department just let him walk right in. He wouldn't have thought his uniform and his captain's stars would get him such open access in a place crawling with military men of higher rank.

( Fortunately Pryce picks that time to look up. )

words: 1946
total words: 42,757
note: actual research for the irrelevant details - where exactly pryce lives, and whether or not he'd be wearing a uniform as an engineer working on fighter planes for the raf but not actually cleared to fight. the mental picture for his studio/working area comes from this photo of the drafting room at the ford motors bomber plant during ww2, showing men lying on top of an immense table drafting on huge sheets of paper.