Einherjar

pretty men, bad ideas

[maisix]

mostly here to write fic and be deeply normal about fictional men with problems.

ao3: [maisix] asks: open JP / EN / CN

usual suspects: Leon S. Kennedy, König, Simon “Ghost” Riley currently: mostly Ghost, because apparently I have no peace

occasionally writes fic. also prone to rambling, spiralling, and saying things that should probably have stayed in the drafts.

18+ only. expect war, sex, grief, moral mess, and the occasional unfortunate amount of research.

[maisix]

Occupied France, 1944. You work in the railway administration, translating reports for the German army. He is a British SAS soldier with a blackened face, a stolen file, and no intention of being taken alive.

Love survives the war, but it does not acquit anyone.

PREVIOUS / MASTERLIST

Chapter 3: Le lieu intact

The light at the end of the lane does not move closer. It sits at the distance where the hedgerow meets the road and stays there, a pale disc against the dark, and you watch it without stopping, without looking directly, counting your own steps to keep from turning around. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty.

He is beside you. He has not said anything since Kopf runter. His hand is at his side, the fingers loose but the wrist turned inward, the arm ready. His eyes have already been to the hedge, the wall, the ditch, the open field and back. You do not need to look at him to know this. You learned it through his forearm over the last hour.

Your arm is still linked through his. There is no one on the lane to perform for, but you have not let go and he has not shaken you off and so you walk like this, your body pressed to the side of his arm. The arm is thick enough that your fingers do not meet around it. Your shoulder fits into the hollow below his, your hip against the outside of his thigh, and the contact is warm through the fabric and solid, and the solidity is mass, plain and simple. You have never had a husband. You do not know what a husband's arm feels like. But you think it might feel like something you could lean your weight into and the weight would be taken without the arm adjusting. You do not lean. You hold on, because holding on is what you have been doing since the filing room, and letting go requires a decision you have not yet made.

The light does not follow. After thirty steps you allow yourself to look back and it is gone, switched off or turned away or never what you thought it was. The lane is dark. The insects are loud. Your own breathing sits above them, closer, more ragged than you want it to be. You let go of his arm. The air fills the space where his body was. You keep walking.

The mill is ahead, a shape against the sky where the lane turns and the trees begin. The wheel is gone, sold or stolen in some year you will never know, and the race that fed it has silted to a brown trickle you can hear but not see. Nettles grow out of the bank where the sluice was, thick, waist-high, pale in the thin light. The door is off its hinges and leaned against the outside wall with a plank braced under it to keep it from sliding. Inside, the mill is one room, stone floor, the remains of the hopper still bolted to a timber frame that has rotted at the base and sags left. A leather strap hangs from a nail above the hopper, cracked, dry, the kind of strap used to hold a grain sack open at the mouth. The roof is intact. The window on the south side has been boarded from the outside with planks that do not quite match the building, newer wood against old stone.

You step inside. Your shoe finds a piece of broken tile and the sound it makes on the stone floor is sharp and loud in the enclosed space and your body flinches at it and the flinching annoys you because you have been walking for an hour without flinching and a piece of tile should not be the thing that undoes it. He comes in behind you and stands near the door, not inside and not outside, his weight on the frame, his eyes adjusting. The scarf is still on his face. The cut above his eye has crusted dark.

You lean against the wall opposite the door. The stone is cold through the back of your blouse. Your legs have not stopped shaking. Your knees, your thighs, the muscles in your calves. You press your shoulders into the wall and let the stone take the weight and stand there and breathe and your breathing is loud to you and loud to the room and you would like to stop it being loud but your lungs are doing what they want and have stopped consulting you.

He watches from the doorway. He does not come closer. Between you the stone floor is bare, swept clean by whoever used this building last, or by wind, or by rats. A rusted bolt sits against the base of the wall near your right foot. A length of rope, grey with age, coiled under the hopper. The room smells of damp stone and old grain and something animal that has been here recently, a fox or a cat, something that uses the dark.

Outside, the trickle of the race. The insects. The breeze coming down the lane from the direction of the town, carrying warmth and the faint petrol smell of the vehicles that have been running in the streets all evening. A bat crosses the open doorway low and fast, close enough that you feel the air from it. His head does not turn. The bat does not concern him.

"You can go from here," you say.

He does not move.

You wait. The breeze comes through the doorway and touches your neck where the sweat has cooled and you shiver once, a short involuntary thing, and press harder into the wall. Your blouse has stuck to your back. You can feel the damp of it between your shoulder blades, the cotton pulling at the skin when you shift.

"Why," he says, the word coming out flat through the wool.

"Because you did not kill me."

He is quiet.

"Because if they found you there, they would not only kill you."

He is still quiet. You can hear his breathing now, or you think you can. You are beginning to resent the evenness.

"Because I did not want to hear it," you say.

"Hear what."

"What they would do to you."

The words come out before you have finished choosing them. They sit in the air between you and the air does nothing to soften them.

He steps into the mill. One step, then another. The stone floor gives a different sound under his weight, deeper, the grit shifting. He stops four paces from you.

"Who do you work for," he says.

"You know enough."

Something outside, distant, a vehicle on the Poitiers road, the engine note rising and falling as it passes behind the trees. It moves through the space and then it is gone and the insects fill back in. A dog barks somewhere, a single sound, then silence.

"What are you," you say.

He looks at you.

"Not a soldier. Or not only."

"Enough of one," he says.

"Enough of one." You look at the dark square of the doorway behind him. "For what?"

"For leaving."

You have heard him do this before. Wrong room.

The shaking in your legs has slowed. Your shoulders have stopped pressing into the wall. You are standing now the way you stand at your desk, upright, the weight on both feet, the body returned to a posture it knows.

"Do not come back," you say. "If I see you again, I will call."

He says nothing for a long time. Long enough that the bat comes back through the doorway, or another bat, low and angular, and he does not look at it. Long enough that you hear the trickle of the race change pitch as something passes through it, a leaf or a branch, and then it settles again.

"Then call sooner," he says.

The words land. You feel them in your sternum, a small flat impact.

You did not call.

You could have. In the filing room, before you touched his collar, before you pushed his hair back, before you said the word husband. You could have opened your mouth and said a name, any name, Drechsler, Pfeiffer, Wache, and the building would have done the rest. You did not.

"You should not have done that," he says.

"I know."

He turns toward the door. He stops at the frame and puts his hand on the wood and looks out at the lane and the dark and the hedgerow.

"Your collar," you say.

He looks back at you. The scarf is still on his face. The eyes above it find you across the four paces of stone floor and stay. Whatever he is looking at, it is not the wall behind you and it is not the doorway behind him. It is you, specifically, the shape of you against the stone in the dark, and the look lasts one second longer than any look he has given you tonight. Then it ends.

"I fixed it. Don't unfold it before you are clear."

The wool moves over his mouth. Not enough for a smile. Just a brief pull in the fabric, there and gone. He reaches up and touches the collar, two fingers on the fold, confirming. Then his hand drops.

He looks at you once more from the doorway. Then he steps through and into the lane and you hear his boots on the packed earth, three steps, five, seven, and then you do not hear them anymore because he has moved off the path and into the grass or the hedge or wherever men like him go when they stop being visible.

The mill is empty. You are in it.

You stand against the wall. Your arms are still folded. Your legs have stopped shaking. The square of moonlight on the floor has moved since you arrived, crawling toward the hopper, and in its edge you can see a smear of something dark on the stone that was not there when you came in. You look at it. Blood, probably. His. From the cut, or from the side of his jacket, the stain you covered with his collar. He stood here and bled onto the floor and neither of you noticed. The blood is already drying. By morning it will look like a watermark, like something the building has always had.

You uncross your arms. You button your coat. You run your hands through your hair and find it damp at the temples and push it back. You step outside. The lane is empty in both directions. The moon gives enough light to find the ruts and follow them back.

The walk takes forty minutes.

At the checkpoint, the new man looks at your Kennkarte, then at your face, then back at the card. His torch is dim. He waves you through.

No questions.

The town is quiet. The shops are shuttered. The tabac is dark, the poster still curling in the window. Your shoes sound too loud on the cobbles.

In your room, the water in the jug is warm and tastes of clay. You drink it anyway. The bed is where you left it. The clean paper is still stacked on the table. Your right shoe has a scrape across the toe.

The office will be there in the morning. The top drawer of your desk has your brother's letter in it. He is somewhere near Bonneuil-Matours. He asks again if you have been taking care of yourself, as though you were the one who had left home for the army and never looked back.

Nobody knows about tonight.

You are sitting on your bed on the Rue de la Gare with your shoes off and your feet sore. There is a scrape across the toe of your right shoe. The man is gone. The grip on your wrist is gone. The pulse under your thumb is gone.

You lie down. The ceiling is above you. The tracks are outside the window. No trains tonight. The yard is closed. The memorandum said so. You typed the translation yourself.

In the morning there will be the office. Filing. Typing. Drechsler’s coffee at four. The carbons. The third column.

*

The filing room is different in the morning. The blackout curtain has been pulled back and pinned, and the light comes through the south window at a low angle, catching the dust in the air and laying a warm stripe across the shelves where the June fuel allocation files are stacked. The room is narrow and clean and smells of paper and old wood and nothing else.

You stand where he stood. Left side, between the window and the door. The shelves are at your back. The distance to the door is four steps. The distance to the window is two. You can see the corridor through the doorframe, and the corridor is lit and empty and ordinary, and from here you can see both directions, which is why he chose this spot, or you think it is.

The files on the shelf behind you are in order. You check them because checking them is your job. Transport schedules, fuel allocation, bridge reports. Nothing is missing. Nothing has been moved. Nothing has been taken. The stack is as you left it, the edges aligned, the rubber band still perished on the June reports, the brown mark still on the cover sheet.

You look at the floor where he stood. The morning light shows the stone clearly, the cracks, the old mortar, the grain of it. There is no blood. If there was blood last night it has been scuffed away or was never enough to mark the stone. The floor looks the way it has always looked. Clean, grey, used.

You stand there a moment longer.

Then you go back to your desk and sit down and put your hands on the typewriter and begin.

[maisix]

currently writing the WWII AU and unfortunately I think I've just written the most beautiful sentence I'll ever write.

it involves a warehouse, a war, dirt under your shoes, rusted metal at your back, and a man with a blackened face kissing your hand like he has all the time in the world.

naturally, it's for Ghost.

I'm fine.

[maisix]

I've been listening to the Molière musical again and À quoi ça rime is so painfully Ghost-coded it's been rattling around my skull for days.

you know when a song gets in there and starts rearranging the furniture? yeah. that.

so now I'm writing again, because apparently I cannot leave this man alone.

anyway. London, 1666. what could possibly go wrong.

[maisix]

Occupied France, 1944. You work in the railway administration, translating reports for the German army. He is a British SAS soldier with a blackened face, a stolen file, and no intention of being taken alive.

Love survives the war, but it does not acquit anyone.

PREVIOUS

Chapter 2: Le mari sans papiers

The soldier in the doorway is young. That is the first thing you register, before the uniform, before the rifle slung across his chest, before the torch in his left hand that throws a disc of yellow light across the floor and catches the edge of your shoe. He is young and tired, his collar dark with sweat. He has been checking rooms too long. Doorway, floor, shelf at eye level, then on to the next. He misses corners. Men like him always miss corners when the day has gone on this long, so you do not look at yours.

He sees you first. Then his torch moves and finds the man beside you.

"Wer ist das?"

Your hand is on the man's arm. You put it there in the second before the door opened, when the handle turned and you moved without deciding, your fingers closing around his forearm above the wrist. The muscle under the sleeve is rigid, the entire length of the forearm locked. His wrist bones press into your palm, knuckles too large, the joint rough against the inside of your fingers. If you let go his hand will go back inside the jacket and the thing that is no longer in his hand will be back in it.

"Mein Mann," you say. "Er wartet auf mich."

The soldier looks at the man beside you. The torch moves up from the chest to the face and stops at the wool scarf covering the lower half. The sudden light catches his eyes and the pupils pull tight. He does not blink. He sits in the torchlight and gives nothing back.

"Warum trägt er das?" The soldier gestures at the scarf.

"Verletzung," you say. "Kiefer. Er kann nicht sprechen."

The soldier shifts his weight. He lowers the torch from the man’s face. The beam drops to the floor between you and slides toward the door he still has to check. He is a young man with a torch and a list of rooms to check and a uniform that fits him the way uniforms fit men who have not yet grown into the war, slightly too large at the collar. He looks at you. He looks at the man. He looks at your hand on the arm. He does not know your palm is wet against the sleeve.

"Papiere?"

You reach into your coat pocket with your free hand and produce your Kennkarte. The photograph is two years old. Your hair was different. The card identifies you by name, by nationality, by occupation: Dolmetscherin, Eisenbahnverwaltung, Châtellerault. Translator, railway administration. The soldier reads it, turns it over, reads the back. He holds it up and moves the torch between the photograph and your face. You let him look. The bulb is too bright and too close and you can feel the heat of it near your chin.

He hands it back.

"Und seiner?"

"In unserer Unterkunft. Er ist erst heute angekommen. Vom Zug."

"Von wo?"

"Poitiers."

The soldier considers this. Behind him, in the corridor, you can hear the second soldier opening the supply closet at the far end, the one that has not been used since the previous administration left a set of broken chairs inside. A chair leg drags across stone. Torchlight moves across the corridor wall and settles.

The young soldier looks at the man beside you once more. His torch goes to the scarf, to the jacket collar turned over on itself, to the boots. His gaze stays at the boots.

French work boots have hobnails set in a particular pattern. German military boots have a tread that any soldier would recognise from his own feet. The boots beside you are neither. Leather, re-soled, caked at the seams with something the torchlight turns to brown.

Your pulse sits in your fingertips where they press into the forearm.

"Er soll sich das nächste Mal ausweisen können," the soldier says. He steps back from the doorway.

You nod. You do not say thank you. You walk the man past the soldier and into the corridor, your hand on his arm, and you can feel the soldier watching from behind as you move toward the side door at the end of the hall. Your eye line reaches his shoulder and no higher. His chest is thicker than yours by several turns of the ribcage, and walking beside him the corridor draft does not reach you. His body is between you and everything else. Your heartbeat slows by degrees. You work to match his pace. His boots put weight into the floor at regular intervals, heavier than yours, easier to follow. The corridor is long and lit only by what comes through the glass panel above the front entrance, a grey square of evening light that falls on the stone floor ten metres ahead.

His stride is wrong. You feel it before you see it. He walks the way he stood in the filing room: weight forward, balanced, each step carrying through the shoulder before the next one lands. A husband would not walk like that.

You slow your own pace. You press your fingers into his forearm once, a quick compression, and lean toward his shoulder.

"Slower," you say. English, barely a sound.

He adjusts. His stride shortens. His weight settles back.

You push the bar on the side door and the evening air comes in warm, carrying the smell of engine oil from the vehicles parked along the courtyard wall, and beneath it the green smell of the plane trees on the road past the gate. The two soldiers who were leaning against the back gate earlier are gone. The gate stands closed. A single lamp burns on the wall above the courtyard entrance, throwing an orange circle on the stone below it. A fermented stink lifts out of the gutter. Your eyes go to it before you can stop them. The stones along the foot of the wall are bleached and worn. A moth works the edge of the light in tight circuits.

The courtyard is not what you expected. You have always used the front entrance. The front is swept, the steps washed, the brass plate polished by someone whose name you do not know. Back here the flower beds have gone to seed. Crates have been pushed over them. A wheelbarrow sits on a flat tyre beside the wall, and under a tarpaulin something gives off the old-metal smell of engine parts. The path to the gate has been squeezed to a single body's width between the debris. It looks less like an office and more like the aftermath of a move that was never finished. Your step catches on a loose stone and you pause. He does not pause. He is already through the gap between the wheelbarrow and the wall, one shoulder turned, no adjustment, no slowing.

You step out and he comes with you. Your hand on his arm, his body beside yours, the warmth of the evening settling on the back of your neck. You turn left toward the street. The street leads to the bridge and the bridge leads to the south bank and the south bank is where the town thins out. You do not know where you are taking him. You know it is not here.

The street is narrow. Stone facades on both sides, shuttered windows, iron balconies with paint cracking in long vertical strips. The cobbles are uneven underfoot and you match your feet to the ruts without thinking, the same ruts you have walked for five months, the same uneven stone at the corner where the drain cover sits crooked and has sat crooked since before you arrived. There is a paper straw on it now, one end bitten flat and darkened. The tabac door is still shut. The poster in the window, an advertisement for cigarettes that have not been available since February, has curled at the top corners from the heat.

You walk. He walks beside you. Your hand on his arm, his arm against your side. To anyone watching from a shuttered window, a wife walking her husband home in the long June evening, leaning into him because the cobbles are bad and because that is what wives do.

"Do not look at the door," you say, because his head has turned slightly toward the tabac.

His head comes back.

"Your hands."

He opens them. You feel the motion through his arm, the tendons releasing.

"You are not guarding me," you say. "You are walking with me."

He says nothing. But the fists stay open.

The street takes longer with him beside you. Your pace stays almost normal. His stride keeps changing the measure of it, pulling you half a step too fast before you can correct it.

A vehicle turns into the street ahead. Headlamps. The light sweeps across the building fronts and catches you both and you do not flinch. You tighten your grip on his arm and tilt your head toward his shoulder and keep walking. The vehicle passes. A Kübelwagen, two men in the front seat, the engine rattling on the cobbles. It does not slow. The lamplight runs across his jacket and across your face and is gone and the street is dark again and you keep walking.

At the corner of the Rue de la Poste, a checkpoint. You see it twenty metres before you reach it: the wooden barrier across the road, sandbags stacked on either side, the lamp on a pole that turns the checkpoint into a bright island in the darkening street. Two soldiers and an Unteroffizier. One of the soldiers is smoking. The smoke rises in a thin line and disperses at head height. The other is leaning against the sandbag wall with his hands in his pockets and his cap pushed back. The Unteroffizier is standing at the barrier with a clipboard. His pen is clipped to the board and the board is angled toward the lamp and he is writing something, the pen moving in short strokes.

You keep walking. Your pace does not change. Your hand on his arm does not tighten. A wife would not prepare herself to pass a checkpoint she had passed every day for five months.

The Unteroffizier looks up. He sees you. The clipboard comes down to his side.

"Papiere, bitte."

You produce the Kennkarte. He takes it, reads it, looks at you. His name is Brandt. He has a wife in Düsseldorf whose photograph he keeps inside his cap, pressed flat against the crown. You know this because Pfeiffer told you, and Pfeiffer tells you things because Pfeiffer has decided that telling you things is a form of friendship. The next day, you bought Pfeiffer a beer.

"Und der Herr?"

"Mein Mann. Er spricht nicht."

Brandt looks at the man beside you. He looks at the scarf. He looks at the shoulders under the jacket.

"Warum nicht?"

"Er kann nicht. Kieferverletzung."

"Kann er hören?"

"Wenn er will."

This comes out flat. Not entirely performance. Brandt's mouth moves once at the corner. The soldier leaning against the sandbags glances over. You have said the thing a wife says about a husband who has been difficult on the journey and who will be difficult when they get home and who is standing beside her like furniture she did not choose and cannot return.

Brandt hands the Kennkarte back. He does not move the barrier.

"Er muss sich das nächste Mal selbst ausweisen," he says. "Oder er bleibt hier, bis wir jemanden zum Überprüfen schicken."

The man beside you does not move. You can feel the stillness. It is not waiting. He has calculated the distance between his right hand and the Unteroffizier's sidearm. He has set the number aside. He has not discarded it.

"Herr Brandt," you say. "Ich bin seit fünf Monaten in diesem Büro. Sie sehen mich jeden Tag. Wenn Sie meinen Mann morgen mit Papieren sehen wollen, muss ich ihn erst ins Quartier bringen. Und dafür muss er durch Ihre Schranke."

Brandt looks at you. He looks at the man. The man beside you is looking at the barrier, not at Brandt. This is correct. A sullen husband with a jaw injury does not make eye contact with the man deciding whether to let him through. He endures. He waits for his wife to do the work.

Brandt lifts the barrier.

You walk through. You do not say thank you. You are a German woman with a German husband walking through a German checkpoint. The walking through is not a favour.

Fifteen metres past the barrier. Twenty. The lamp behind you puts your shadows ahead of you on the cobbles, long and joined at the feet.

The soldier who was leaning against the sandbags calls something. His voice carries in the warm evening air. The words are rough, idiomatic, barracks German, not addressed to you but to the man beside you, or to the air between you. Something about a wife who does all the talking. Something about what a man does at night if his mouth does not work. The other soldier laughs. A short sound, cut off. Brandt says nothing.

The arm under your hand turns to iron.

You feel the sequence: forearm rigid, shoulder locked, weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet.

You move your hand from his forearm to his wrist. Your thumb closes around the inside of his wrist. You press down, firm enough to hold him there. For a moment there is only the pressure of your hand on his skin. Then a beat comes up under your thumb, small and regular, and you realise you have his pulse.

You lean into him. Your mouth close to the side of his neck, above the collar. Anyone watching sees a wife steadying her husband, calming him, managing him. Your lips do not touch his skin.

"Do not," you say.

The arm does not relax. But the motion stops.

His pulse under your thumb, fast and hard and even. The street ahead is darker now, the lamps fewer, buildings giving way to lower walls and then to the edge of town where the houses stop and the road becomes a lane between hedgerows. The checkpoint lamp shrinks behind you. The soldier's laughter has stopped. The evening insects have started in the hedgerow to your left, a continuous sound that fills the space the town has left behind.

"If you look at another man like that," you say, "he will remember your face."

He says nothing for five steps. Six. Seven. The lane is unpaved here, packed earth, and your shoes find the ruts left by cart wheels.

"He already looked," he says. Low. The scarf dulls the consonants.

"Then make him forget."

He turns his head toward you. In the failing light you cannot read what is above the scarf, only the line of the brow and the cut that has stopped bleeding and the eyes. They are on you, and there is no gratitude in them and no trust. At least they have stopped looking for the way out.

You let go of his wrist.

The town is behind you. The lane runs between hedgerows into open ground where the fields begin, flat and dark, the last strip of light sitting along the western horizon. The air smells of cut grass and warm stone. Underneath it, the sour chemical trace of scorched rail.

Your legs are shaking. Your knees. Your thighs. The muscles along your calves. You keep walking because stopping would mean acknowledging the shaking and acknowledging the shaking would mean sitting down and sitting down on a dirt lane at the edge of Châtellerault with an Englishman who cannot speak and a pulse still beating fast under the skin of your wrist where his blood was a minute ago is not something you are prepared to do.

The hedgerow gives way to a stone wall, low, capped with moss. Beyond it the field stretches south toward a line of trees that mark the river. A barn sits at the edge of the field, its roof partly gone, the timbers visible against the sky. An owl calls from somewhere inside it, or near it, a single note that carries across the open ground and stops.

He walks beside you. His stride has settled into something closer to yours, to the husband's, though there is no one left to perform for. His hands are at his sides, open. His breathing has not changed since the filing room. Yours has.

The lane forks. Left toward the river crossing, right toward the mill that has not operated since the owner's sons went to the front in 1940 and did not come back. You go right. The mill has been empty for years. The miller left last year. Since then, animals have had the place more or less to themselves, and people keep away.

You are almost there when he says, behind you:

"Kopf runter."

German. Your German. Two words spoken with an English mouth that turns the vowels wrong and the consonants too hard, and for a moment your feet stop because no one has spoken German to you in that accent before and the sound of it, your language in his voice, lands somewhere you were not expecting.

You turn. He is looking past you, over your shoulder, toward the road you came from. His chin is lowered. His eyes are on a point of light that has appeared at the far end of the lane, a torch or a headlamp, moving slowly.

"Keep walking," you say.

This time, he obeys.

[maisix]

Occupied France, 1944. You work in the railway administration, translating reports for the German army. He is a British SAS soldier with a blackened face, a stolen file, and no intention of being taken alive.

Love survives the war, but it does not acquit anyone.

Chapter 1: L'homme mal classé

The office closes at six but the war does not. A wire can come in at any hour. You stay until someone tells you to leave, and then you stay after that, because the filing does not stop when the Feldwebel locks the front door, and the carbons do not collate themselves, and the transport requisition from this morning still has a wrong depot code in the third column that no one has corrected because no one reads the third column except you.

Châtellerault's railway administration occupies the south wing of what used to be a postal sorting office. The ceilings are high enough that the heat collects above head height and does nothing useful there. The walls are pale green, institutional, with a strip of darker green at waist level where the old wainscoting begins. Someone has hung a calendar from Poitiers on the wall behind the main desk. It is two months behind. No one has turned it. The typewriter is a Torpedo 18, manufactured in Frankfurt, requisitioned from a stationery supplier in Châtellerault whose name is still on the service tag bolted to the underside of the carriage. You found it there in your second week, when the ribbon jammed and you turned the machine over to clear it. The name was Garnier. You did not look for it. You have not forgotten it.

The files lean against the far wall in stacks, oldest at the bottom, held upright by the weight of everything that has come after. Transport schedules, fuel allocation, troop movement carbon copies, bridge inspection reports, requisition forms for rolling stock that has already moved south or been reassigned or no longer exists. Your job is to translate what needs translating, French municipal documents into German, German operational summaries into a format the local Kommandantur can file, and to type what needs typing, and to not ask what the typed things are for, because the typed things move down a corridor and into another office and after that they are not yours.

You are good at this. You are good at this because you are accurate and because you do not make mistakes in the third column and because you have learned the particular rhythm of this office: which signatures are needed before a fuel requisition can leave the building, which forms can be stamped by the duty clerk and which require Drechsler's hand, which documents go upstairs to the Kommandantur liaison and which go into the metal cabinet by the window where the lock has not worked since March and where the key sits on top of the cabinet itself, visible to anyone who cares to look. You know that Feldwebel Drechsler drinks his coffee at four and does not want to be spoken to until the cup is back on the saucer. You know that the duty clerk on the night rotation enters through the side door and leaves his bicycle in the courtyard against the wall where the drainpipe leaks, and that his name is Pfeiffer, and that he once brought you a bread roll from the canteen without being asked and never did it again. These things are like the e on the typewriter, the letter that sticks more often than the others. Only a dry ribbon. Nothing worth looking at too closely.

The air in the office is bad. By noon, the smell of railway oil has thickened in it, sharp and black and impossible to keep out of your throat. The food is not good either. You cannot remember what the potato cake at noon tasted like. French documents lie scattered across the desk, pages out of order, half-sentences caught between carbon copies and official stamps. After long enough, even the broken-off ends of French become part of the room.

Your brother writes that the mud is worse than last month. He does not say where. His letters arrive through the military postal system, stamped and refolded, sometimes with a line blacked out by a censor whose hand you have come to recognise by the thickness of the ink. In the last letter he complained about his boots, said the leather had split at the toe, said the quartermaster had promised replacements twice and delivered neither. He asked whether your mother had received the money he sent in April. He asked about the roses. He signs his name, then draws a careful line beneath it, then the unit number you read each time and each time move past without stopping. He does not ask where you are. He only says he is somewhere near Bonneuil-Matours, that the billets are close and stale, the weather damp, and the French countryside has very little to say for itself.

The envelope is in the top drawer of your desk at the office. You keep it there because the room you sleep in has no lock, and because letters from home are personal and this office, despite everything, has a door that closes.

Outside, the day's last light has gone flat. June evenings in the Vienne stretch past nine, the sky holding a thin brightness that makes the buildings look cut from paper against it. The air coming through the window above the filing cabinet carries the heat of a day that should be ending but is not. The station is two streets south. You can hear the shunting from here on windless nights, the couplings knocking against each other as they are pushed together or pulled apart, metal on metal in the yard. Tonight there is no shunting. The yard has been closed since midday. The reason arrived as a typed memorandum on Drechsler's desk at eleven: an incident on the line south, unspecified damage, area sealed, all civilian and non-essential military movement suspended until further notice. The memorandum was on standard Kommandantur paper, countersigned by an office you have not seen correspondence from before. You noted the signature block. You did not ask about it.

You typed the French translation of the suspension notice yourself, for the mairie. You checked the spelling twice. You put the carbon in the outgoing tray.

After the memorandum came the patrols. By early afternoon the street outside the office had emptied of everything except uniforms and vehicles. A motorcycle courier passed three times in one hour, the same machine, the same rider, the engine note the same each time, turning south toward the railway sidings and returning north and turning south again. You watched from the window above the filing cabinet while you replaced the fuel allocation files for the third week of June. The second time the motorcycle passed, two soldiers came up the street on foot and stopped outside the tabac across the road, which has been closed since the owner left in April. They tried the door. They looked through the glass. They moved on. A woman had been watching from the upper window of the house beside the tabac, and when the soldiers stopped she moved back from the glass, and when they left she did not return to it.

You were watching too. From a window, with the fuel allocation files open under your hands. You stayed where you were.

The lamp outside the station has lost its glass shade. Through the window you can see the bare bulb, unlit now in the long evening, mounted on its iron arm above the street. The glass must have broken recently. Last week it was there, or you think it was. The pieces would have fallen onto the pavement below, but there are no pieces. Someone has swept them. The bulb hangs exposed, waiting for dark to arrive and make it useful.

The office was closed at five. Drechsler left through the front. You stayed, because the transport requisition was still wrong in the third column and because there was nowhere to go that was better than here and because the sound of your own typing is a sound you understand.

The filing room is at the back of the building, past the corridor with the water-stained ceiling and the toilet that runs continuously, a thin sound inside the wall that you heard every day for three weeks before you stopped hearing it and that you hear again now as you pass because the building is empty and the building being empty makes everything in it louder. You go there to return the bridge inspection reports to the correct stack, because someone, the duty clerk probably, or Pfeiffer, has filed them with the fuel allocation records, and the fuel allocation records have a different numbering system, and it matters, or it does not, but you do it anyway because the doing it is what your hands know and your hands need to know what comes next.

The door is half-open. You push it with your shoulder because your hands are full, then lean back until it closes behind you. The room is narrow, shelved on both sides, one window at the far end that looks onto the courtyard. The blackout curtain has been pulled across but not pinned at the bottom corner, and a strip of grey evening light comes in at a low angle across the floor and climbs the base of the opposite shelf. Your eyes follow the light across the floor, past a broken tile near the wall.

He is standing against the shelves on the left side, between the window and the door.

Your feet stop. The bridge reports shift in your arms, the top one sliding forward, and you catch it against your chest with your chin and hold it and stand in the doorway with the documents pressed to your body and look at what is in the room with you.

He is tall. That is the first registration. Tall and wide enough across the shoulders that the shelving behind him, built for file boxes, frames him wrong. He is wearing civilian clothes, a dark jacket, a shirt that might have been white before today, but they fit him differently from the men in this town. The jacket is tight across the upper arms. The trousers are cuffed in a way that is not French. He is standing with his back to the shelves but not leaning. His weight is forward on both feet, distributed evenly, and his right hand is inside the jacket at the left side, and his left hand is flat against the shelf behind his hip where he can push off it to move. He is not looking at the window. He is not looking at the door. He is looking at you.

The wool scarf covers the lower half of his face. Only his eyes show. The light through the gap in the curtains is not enough to give you his expression. There is a cut above his left eye, shallow, several hours old, the blood dried to a dark line that follows the crease of the brow. His hair has been pushed back and is darker than it should be. Wet, or dirty, or both. Below the cut, he keeps his eyes on your face. They have not blinked since you came in.

His stare makes the back of your neck go cold. Dark eyes, no fact in them, no angle, nothing you can use. The look stays fixed on you, too close to the skin at your neck. The tendons in his left hand are standing. His breathing is even. You have seen fear in this building. The French clerk who delivers the water reports on Thursdays, his fingers pressing the paper hard enough to crease it as he hands it across Drechsler's desk. The families at the checkpoint on the Poitiers road.

You open your mouth and what comes out is French, because French is what you use in this building when you are not typing German, and because this is a French town and a person in it is assumed to be French until proven otherwise.

"Qui êtes-vous?"

He does not answer.

His thumb presses once against the inside of his jacket, then stops. The leather creaks under his hand and goes quiet. He is deciding something. You can see the decision being made in the small adjustments of his weight. His right hand stays where it is, inside the jacket. His left hand lifts a centimetre off the shelf and returns.

You lower the bridge reports. You set them on the nearest shelf with both hands, slowly, placing them flat, and you do this because your hands need a task that is not shaking. The paper makes a small sound against the wood. Outside the window, a vehicle passes in the street, headlamp light sweeping across the top of the blackout curtain and vanishing. The engine is heavy. A truck, not a car.

"Who are you," you say again. English this time. Because something in the cut above his eye and the way his hand rests inside his jacket is not French and is not German and the shoulders are wrong for this town and the silence is wrong for a man who has been caught somewhere he should not be.

His eyes change.

"Wrong room," he says.

The scarf dulls the words. The vowels sit flat and the consonants carry, and the rhythm is unmistakable. The accent comes from somewhere in the middle of the country, maybe the north. You cannot place it exactly. English, though.

Your hand is on the shelf. You can feel the grain under your fingertips, the rough edge where the wood has splintered at the corner. Your body has already done something without your instruction—shoulders drawn up, weight shifted onto the back foot, left heel finding the doorframe.

The corridor behind you is eight steps. The side door is at the end of the corridor. Drechsler is gone. Pfeiffer will not arrive until nine.

The man has not moved. He is watching you calculate.

"Don't speak," you say.

He looks at you. The cut above his eye has opened slightly at the outer edge. A thread of fresh blood sits in the crease of his brow.

"Not with that accent."

The sound from the front of the building reaches you through two closed doors and a corridor, and even so you can identify it: the main entrance, tried from outside. A hand on the latch, then a knock, then a voice in German. The voice is not shouting. It is asking a question in the tone of someone who expects the door to open and is mildly inconvenienced that it has not. A second voice answers from further back, and there is the scrape of something heavy being moved, the iron bolt, the one Drechsler slides into place when he leaves because the lock alone is not enough for him, and then the bolt gives and the door opens and the voices come inside the building.

Your fingers dig into the shelf. A splinter presses into the pad of your index finger.

"You're German," he says. The cadence of a grid reference.

"And you are very bad at being lost."

The voices in the front hall are speaking to each other. You can hear the words now: checking the building, orders, someone saw a light on the upper floor, standard sweep of the block. Two men, possibly three. Their boots on the stone floor of the entrance hall have the cadence of soldiers who are walking a route they have been told to walk and will walk it thoroughly.

Footsteps come closer. Your fingers stay dug into the shelf, caught there between holding on and letting go.

He stops looking at you. His eyes move to the window. The drop to the courtyard. The height of the wall. The distance across the yard to the back gate. Each part of it passes through his face in order, quick and practical, and then the answer is there.

"No," you say. "There are men in the yard."

You know this because you saw them from the corridor window twenty minutes ago. Two of them, leaning against the gate that leads to the lane behind the building, smoking, their rifles slung. You did not think about why they were there. Now you know.

His eyes come back to you. They stay.

"If they find you here," you say, "I was never alone. Do you understand?"

He understands. You see it in the way his right hand comes out of his jacket. It comes out slowly, the fingers opening, and it settles at his side. The hand is empty. Whatever it was holding is now somewhere inside the jacket where it cannot be seen, and the transfer happened in the space between one of your sentences and the next, and you did not see it move.

In the corridor, closer now: a door handle tried, a drawer opened and shut, the scrape of a filing cabinet pulled and pushed back on its rail.

You step fully into the filing room. You set the bridge reports on the shelf where they belong, fuel allocation on the left, bridge inspection on the right, and you straighten the stack because straightening stacks is what you do and because if you do not do it now your hands will do something worse. The paper is cool against your palms. The rubber band around the June reports has perished and left a brown mark on the cover sheet.

You look at him. The jacket, the stain below the left pocket that is not mud and not rain and not anything you want to name. The boots, which are leather but not the right leather, not French work boots and not German military issue, something else, something that has walked a long way and been re-soled. The hands at his sides, empty now, the knuckles scraped on the right, a small cut across the base of the left thumb. The face, with its dried blood and the eyes that have not looked away from you once.

You are a person who files bridge inspection reports in the correct order and types the third column without errors and translates suspension notices for the mairie and keeps your brother's letters in the top drawer because the top drawer is yours and the things in it are yours and nothing else in this office belongs to you and nothing else in this town belongs to you. Caution is how you survive here. You have to know what is yours to touch.

The man in the filing room is not yours.

A second door opens in the corridor. Closer. The toilet, from the sound of it, and closes again.

He did not hurt you. He is standing in the room with his hands empty and his back to the shelves and he has not moved toward you and he has not moved toward the door and the cut above his eye is bleeding again, a single line into the crease.

You cross the room. Three steps. You have translated field interrogation summaries. Verhör. Verschärftes Verhör. There is blood on the files that came in three months ago. You do your job. Old blood darkens with time until it looks like ink. You have typed the dates and the locations and the outcomes and filed the carbons. Your job is the third column. Your job is the depot codes. Your hands go first to the scarf, to straighten the edge of it over his mouth, then to his collar to fold it over the stain. His hand catches your wrist. The grip closes around the bone below your palm, fast, exact, the fingers finding the joint and locking. The speed of it goes through your arm and into your shoulder.

You do not pull back.

"Your collar," you say. "There is blood."

He looks down. His eyes go to the stain. He lets go of your wrist. The place where his fingers were keeps its shape for a moment, a band of pressure fading on your skin. You fold the collar of the jacket over the stain. You reach up and push his hair forward over the cut above his eye, and your fingertips touch his forehead, and the skin is colder than you expected, and the edge of the cut is rough under your thumb, and he does not move. He lets you do it. He stands with his hands at his sides and the blood on his brow hidden now under the hair you have moved, and he lets you arrange him.

"You are my husband," you say.

He stares at you.

"You cannot speak."

The door handle turns. The metal-on-metal sound takes every other sound out of the room. You hear quiet.

"Not if you want to live."

The door opens. Your hand tears a seam in the day.

[maisix]

He stays the rest of the day.

He does not ask permission for this and you do not give it and neither of you discusses how long he is staying. He sits at the table while you try to work, and you say try because the work is the same client documents you do every morning. They require the same amount of attention they always do. Very little. Today, very little is more than you have. He goes through his phone for long stretches, reading things, sending short messages with his thumbs, the screen angled away from you. At one point he steps into the hallway and makes a call with his voice low enough that you can hear the rhythm but not the words, and the call lasts maybe four or five minutes, and when he comes back you do not ask who it was and he does not tell you.

It is different from before. You never used to watch him from the corner of your eye, never used to check what his hands were doing when he moved around the room. Today you do it again and again, and your attention keeps breaking off from the work. Nothing gets done.

At noon, you go to make lunch because it is lunchtime. He says he can do it. You tell him you are not surrendering your kitchen to an Englishman. There are limits.

Bread, cheese, and half a tin of soup from Tuesday. You heat the soup, put the bread on the board and the cheese on a plate, and set everything on the table.

The soup is ordinary, familiar enough that you do not need to think about the taste. You take a mouthful and watch him finish the bread in a few bites before lifting the bowl to drink, while the sweetness of tomato stays at the back of your throat. He does not comment on the food. He never does.

"You should sleep," you say. "You drove all night."

"Later."

"When later."

"When you're asleep."

"That's not how sleep works."

"Works for me."

You eat your soup. The bread is slightly stale. Across from you, he drinks from the bowl. You know the sound of him swallowing well enough for it not to bother you, which does not explain why it is in your kitchen on a weekday in February. He was just here. One or two visits a year. That was the rule.

After lunch he goes through the flat again. You stand in the kitchen doorway and watch him.

There is too much of him for the flat, too much weight passing through the small spaces, and you do not stop him. Moving suits him better than sitting still. The checking is careful, room by room, corner by corner.

In the afternoon he moves your chair from beside the office window to the other wall.

"That's my reading chair," you say.

"Not tonight."

"I hate this."

He puts the chair against the wall where it cannot be seen from outside.

"I know," he says.

You stand in the doorway and look at the chair in its new position and the window with its exposed sightline and the room that was yours this morning and is something else now. Scratches show on the wall. The carpet holds the dents where the furniture has been. Sunlight comes in through the window, and all the shadows in the room are wrong now. There is too much empty space where there shouldn't be, and no one crosses it. A man has rearranged the room, and his only right to it is that someone worse got here first.

"I won't be watched in my own house," you say.

"You're already being watched," he says. "I'm just the one telling you."

You go back to the kitchen. You make tea. You stand at the counter and drink it and look at the wall. The cup hooks left by the previous tenant are still there, the ones you have never used and never removed, and you look at them now. The plastic hooks are faded. The adhesive behind them has bled onto the wall. You remember trying to take them down when you first moved in, but the glue was too much trouble. In the end, you let them stay.

He checks your phone before dinner. He does not go through your messages. He turns it over and takes the case off and looks at the SIM and the battery compartment, and puts it back together, and scrolls through the app list and the call log and checks the number from the card against your recent calls and your contacts.

"You didn't call it," he says.

"I told you I didn't."

He hands the phone back. You put it on the counter and do not pick it up again for the rest of the evening.

Dinner is pasta, because it is what you have, and because it does not require you to think about what you are doing, and because cooking for two when you have been cooking for one for three years involves a recalibration of quantities that you do not want to examine too closely. You put the plates on the table and he eats and you eat and outside the light drops from grey to dark and the streetlights come on along South Street and the town contracts into its nighttime shape.

When you finish dinner, he washes up. You do not argue about this. He dries the plates and puts them on the rack and folds the tea towel over the oven handle, which is not where you keep the tea towel, which is where he puts it every time, and which you will move back after he leaves. You have been moving it back for years. The repetition of this is not annoying.

At ten he checks the locks for the last time and sits on the sofa. The glass no longer takes the wind. The street has no cars in it at this hour. You are very tired. You have been awake for nearly forty hours, with the exception of the hour or two you managed before the fox knocked over the bin lid. Sleep went with the noise; the weight stayed behind your eyes.

"Get some sleep," he says.

"When are you leaving."

He looks at his phone. He puts it face down on the arm of the sofa.

"Early."

"How early."

"Five."

"Of course." You lean against the doorframe. "Where."

"Work."

"Work," you say. "Right."

The old discomfort comes back. It has been bearable because the visits were a choice.

He is watching you from the sofa. "I'll be back."

"That's what you always say."

"I always am."

"Aye." You push away from the doorframe. "Same bastard."

He does not smile. He looks at you the way he looked at you at two in the morning last time, across the orange bar of streetlight on the floor, when neither of you said anything and neither of you moved. The curtains are closed. The orange light is not on the floor tonight.

"Call me if it starts," he says.

"If what starts."

He does not answer this.

"That's comforting," you say.

"Not meant to be."

After you say goodnight, you go to the bedroom and lie in the dark, listening to the flat. There is another person breathing in it now, and that person is between you and the door. It should make you feel safer. It does. It also makes you feel something else, something you felt standing at the kitchen counter at two in the morning, reaching for a glass of water.

Your body remembers it. Countless swallows. The work of forcing it down, of keeping it down. You do not choose the remembering. It arrives before thought, before language, as ordinary as a heartbeat.

You close your eyes. You breathe. Tomorrow he will be gone and you will drive to Dundee and have blood drawn by someone you have not met in a building you have not been to and this will be fine. You have done harder things. You have done considerably harder things.

You do not sleep for a long time.

[maisix]

who’s the lucky dog whose friend drew them art today!!!!

it’s me. I’m the dog.

[maisix]

did everyone see the new trailer???

the ink. the fucking ink.

I’m not well.

[maisix]

btw, ghost’s shoulders are so stupidly broad. like do men actually come in that size in real life or is he just a load-bearing wall with eyes

my gaze needs a taxi to get from one shoulder to the other. I’m sick of him.

[maisix]

probably my best banter ever

"You look tired," he says.

"You look like you've been sleeping in a field."

"Hotel."

"Same thing, Manchester."

"Not from Manchester."

"Aye, worse." You drink your tea. Outside the bin lid settles. "Say 'route' again."

"No."

"Coward."

"Scottish women and vowels." He picks up his own mug. "Dangerous hobby."

"Englishmen and consonants. War crime."

"Not English," he says, into the mug.

"No. Just gives orders like one."

full chapter on ao3

[maisix]

L'Assasymphonie

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

[maisix]

accidentally learnt the SAS has been around since WWII and instead of being normal about that my brain immediately decided to picture simon in that era, in uniform, in a heavy military coat, looking like he was built to ruin lives in black and white.

and now I’m just meant to carry on with my day????

absolutely not. obscene. illegal. too hot. I need to lie down.

[maisix]

why’s he so hoooooooot. like what am i meant to do with that