His head turned so fast it made him dizzy. He heard the words spoken to him but it took too long to process them. He was tired, so damn tired he swayed like a boat on the waves. These terrible waves, he heard them crashing, saw them whenever he turned around. There had been a time when Tristan enjoyed being at the beach, a time in which his uncle taught him how to swim, how to never be afraid of the water. But what treacherous thing this water had become, being so wide he could not cross over and being so small he knew the same waves were crushing at his own country’s shore. On the other side. Home. And the memories came and went, just like these dammned waves.
He stopped, feet sinking into the wet sand of this French beach, hair twisted and clotted by salt and sea foam. They had no time for goodbyes, for such words. They needed to hurry if Tristan was to escape, to live. To survive.
He had never agreed to do this. He had never wanted to allow this stranger, this man, to help him and risk his own life in the process. But Wilhelm had dragged him out here, late in the day, forced him to witness how the sun drowned herself in watery death, all fire exctinguished. Quite fitting, Tristan thought to himself as the fatigue lifted enough for him to think at all, to string more than a few words together in this almost unconscious state of desperation and desolation.
Why was he so tired? He could not remember, he begged God would allow him to forget.
“Then tell me, who was meant for a time like this? Who deserves something like this, Onkel?”, it felt so strange, this single word, on lips that were used to its taste but not to its sound. He had used it throughout his entire childhood, had called out for Bain so often and at so many occassions uncle had become something more than father, something bigger and more true. But now, in this different language that was supposed to feel like home but felt like hell, it sounded so different. Different but close enough.
For he knew on the other side of the canal Bain would do just the same. He would try to help, try to be a hero, he would sacrifice his own life for Tristan. Just like Wilhelm was attempting in this very moment. And Tristan hated them both for it. He hated that he had almost died in his burning spitfire. He hated that he was shot from the sky and his precious plane was nothing but smoke and ruins. He hated how he had spend days - or had it been weeks? - beaten bloody by his enemies. He hated how this war destroyed them all and that sleep could never come because the pain was too much. He hated how tired he was.
He hated so much and so strongly, in those few heartbeats where it was just the two of them, alone on a desolated beach in France, that it felt as if he was too burst open with it all. Maybe he would have exploded, like a grenade, leaving Wilhelm shell-shocked like the rest of them if only he had not been so tired.
Tristan had to focus so he would not collapse on the sand, his vision was blurry and it seemed as if the entire beach was now swaying. He could not remember the last time he had been on his feet for this long and his stomach turned with hunger. He fed it more anger.
“You should not have stolen that boat. You should not have gotten me out of there”, his words were a whisper and he was not sure if he gave them to Wilhelm or to the waves. Maybe the wind would carry them home, to his mother. For Tristan himself was sure he would not survive the journey. “There might be a storm coming. I shall drown and it will be all for nothing”, he turned his head to finally look the other soldier in the eye, “They will find out that it was you. And you will be shot. For nothing”
There was no survival. And that knowledge was the burden that had crushed Tristan a long, long time ago.
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