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nemfrog

“Beams thrown from the Heligoland Lighthouse.” Lightships and lighthouses. 1913. Internet Archive

1st-1

How small we are.

If you had one thing you could say to the person you loved most, what would it be? Tick tock Equinox.

The young man looked dead ahead into the void where the whisper of a voice seemed to come from.

"Tick tock Equinox."

He paused for a moment before opening his mouth to finally speak. "Kimmie," he said. "I'd speak to Kimmie."

He thought about the faint smell of strawberries that filled his nose every time she walked by. He thought about how he put her hands in his back pockets while they walked, and he thought about her painted toenails and how her feet always seemed cute in comparison to his much bigger, flat ones.

She had a gentle way about her, kissing him tenderly, gingerly touching Poko on the top of her head and giving her scratches with the tips of Kimmie's dainty fingers. He missed that.

Tears welled up, for the first time in many years.

"I'd--" he cut himself off to sniffle, and quickly wipe his face.

"I'd tell her to be happy, and not wait."

He pictured back at the lab, most likely having moved on from his anomalous case. He pictured her brushing shoulders against some other young man and the whole chain of love slowly build between them.

Equinox's heart began to hurt, but he chose to smile.

"I'd tell her to be happy."

#ask #answered #lit rp #rp

dame-de-pique

Captain George Bankart - In Beresford Dale, 1888

#place

nemfrog

“Large stones, with voids filled with medium sized stones surrounded by smaller stones and sand.” A treatise on concrete. 1911.

Internet Archive

strawberrybutch

why why why

#musings

{ *cracks knuckles for the fifteenth time* alright. now we write. }

May 26th, 1940 - Dunkirk

It was only early in the morning when Equinox woke up. When he opened his eyes he was greeted with the farmhouse ceiling which had a sizable hole in it. The sun was beginning to peek through and lit up some of the sleeping faces by his feet.

Christopher, the young boy from Manchester shook beside him in his sleep. Equinox sat up and leaned over. The boy's eyes were closed tightly and beads of sweat covered his forehead. His fists were clenched to his chest and he was mumbling something in his sleep. Equinox's heart sank when he remembered this boy's harrowing story of how he'd lost men in his troupe. How his best friend received a bayonet to the head, and how Christopher has pulled the trigger on the soldier who stabbed his friend.

"He should have shot him," Christopher had said. "He should have shot my friend, but instead that bloody Nazi stabbed him in the head to prove a point, I'm sure of it."

Equinox placed his hand on the shaking boy's shoulder, and whispered something to him. The shaking died down a bit and the muscles seemed to relax.

Someone was snoring not too far from where they were, and someone else on the far side of the barn was already sitting up, awake. He looked over at Equinox and gave a slow nod of the head before staring back up at the ceiling. Murphy, everyone called him. He was the quiet type, probably out of fear of making close relationships. Like many of the boys and men out here, Murphy had turned to silence as a way of coping with the death.

Equinox slowly stood and his knees squeaked and cracked like the floors of an old wooden home. He traversed the sleeping bodies, careful not to accidentally step on any fingers, and squeezed through the half open barn door.

You could faintly smell the ocean from here, and the air felt slightly sticky with salt and humidity. He hadn't showered in easily a week and the grime was beginning to really bother him with the stickiness of the air. He didn't even want to know about what he must've smelt like after long days in the sun and night on beds of hay.

The woman who owned the farmhouse told the soldiers to call her "Lola".

"It's what my mother called me and it's what I call myself, so please, Lola, if you will," she'd told the commander. He thanked her profusely for the food and shelter and shared with his men.

Lola's husband was somewhere off on another front and she hadn't heard from him in weeks. The men all assumed the worst but she was convinced that the cross around his neck would keep him alive. None of them had the heart to tell her that crosses meant nothing in this war. Nothing meant anything anymore.

Today was the day. The men had gotten word that they'd be evacuating in the night. Operation Dynamo was in effect. The Luftwaffe had been mercilessly bombing the beaches despite the RAF's efforts to slow them down. Equinox wondered what it must've been like to be a pilot in the war.

Equinox had been in this timeline for only three weeks, but it felt like an eternity. He took the clothes off a dead soldier he'd found in the forest, but not without hurt in his heart. He knew that if he didn't blend in, he'd die. His accent was difficult to cover up, bringing plenty of questioning gazes every time he opened up his mouth, so like Murphy, he kept quiet unless spoken to. He remembered learning about the war in textbooks, which made it seem so far away. And It had been far away.

But now he was in the thick of it, and by some grace he was still alive. It was the first time he'd ever experienced death to this magnitude and it had clearly taken its toll by the way his shoulders slumped and sagged during most of the day.

He pulled out a cigarette and lit it with his second to last match. Little by little men were beginning to come out of the farmhouse and stretch in the daylight. It would be their last day here, and many of them were relieved, yet frightened. The Nazis had been pushing them further and further into a corner and to prevent hundreds of thousands of men from dying, generals had decided to evacuate.

Equinox worried about Lola and her son. What would happen to them once the Nazis arrived and caught wind of her harboring Allied troops?

The day passed by quickly, with the men packing up what they could before being shipped off on sailboats and fishing boats. The shallow beached didn't allow for bigger ships to land so the French offered their services to the allies.

Equinox wouldn't be around to see it though, as his time in the war had come to an end. He'd been packing up his things when he felt the sudden change of atmosphere in his bones and before he had the chance to cry out, he was gone.

#musings #multifandom rp #literature rp #an exercise for me