#BUT GOD CROISSANTS OTHER VAS WERE NAMED!!! WHY NOT ENGLISH???

[chartreuxcatz]

It weighs on me. The fact that Croissants English VA was never confirmed.

[lumosinlove]

Well, this got longer than I thought it would, so I’ll have to publish in a few parts as I write...

But Happy Birthday, Finn, my favorite :)

Find it here on Ao3

~

Of Silence And Slow Time

part i of iii

~

New York City, 1920

~

Everyone told Finn that the statue looked like him, that he simply must go and see it.

“Really, Finn,” his older brother Alex said. “It’s the eyes, the face, it’s the mouth. It’s uncanny.”

Finn had just looked over Alex and the man and woman he seemed to always have at his side ever since the war ended. Natalie, a nurse whom he’d met in France, and Kasey a Canadian from another unit—they’d ended up in the hospital together.

“It’s in France,” Finn said flatly. “I know you’re forgetting about it all, but I’m not exactly keen on going back there. It took me ages to get home.”

It had taken everything for him to get home.

Alex, to Finn’s relief, nodded at Natalie and Kasey to go get themselves a drink at the bar down the street, told them that he’d meet them there. Finn stared down at the book open and unseeing in his lap. He wasn’t even sure what he was reading, on that he wanted to. His mind didn’t seem to follow him just right these days. Cars became bombs sometimes. Sleep was all dreams.

Alex sat beside him on their parents’ old sofa.

“Fish,” Alex said softly, and moved his hand slow, where Finn could see it, before resting it gently around his shoulders. “You can’t sit here all day. That’s not going to help you, and I know you don’t like it. You’ve never sat still like this.”

“I’m not going back to France.”

“It’s Paris,” Alex said, and gently flipped Finn’s wrist over to reveal the tiny globe his friend Jackson had dotted there with a needle and ink. “You’ve always wanted…don’t let this war stop you any longer.”

Finn stared down at the reminder he’d asked his friend for, ink permanent black. He’d never been farther than New England before the war. Paris, he’d always thought, gazing at his collection of books. Rome. Athens, Barcelona—

Finn swallowed hard. “Looks just like me, huh?”

Alex’s grin was enough to pull one out of Finn, just slightly. “It was bizarre.” Alex squeezed his shoulders. “I’ll even meet you there later if you want, once we’re through with Canada.”

Finn sent a wary glance towards where Natalie and Kasey had left.

Alex raised an eyebrow. “You’d like them. And, who knows who you’ll meet over there. We ran into all sorts of people, people like you’ve never seen. It’s why—” Alex broke off slightly, and looked after the nurse and soldier, too. Finn blinked at the nervous bob of his throat, and then his smile. “There are all sorts of love and art in this world of ours. I know it feels like it’s all war, I felt that too, but it’s not. Please let me help you see that.”

Finn rubbed a thumb over his tattoo, and closed his book.

Everything felt like war. He was so tired of it he thought he’d be crushed.

He looked up at his brother. “I don’t have much money.”

Alex just grinned and slapped him on the back, then pulled him into a tight embrace.

~

Finn arrived in Paris with a lump in his throat. He stumbled through half-French greetings and requests to his taxi, who looked at him sourly and turned out to have dropped him off four streets away from his hotel—maybe on purpose. Maybe because it was barely six in the morning.

Finn was annoyed at first, and then he began to walk.

Paris’ cobblestones were like those in the West Village, only they weren’t. There were glimpses of his home in the uneven tread of his feet, but these stones were darker, as if soaked with more time and more place. It calmed him, while the brief glance towards France’s rolling hills had sent him back to his cabin on the rocky ship, shaking and gasping for air. He’d barely eaten during the entire journey besides forcing down the occasional breakfast sludge, and his legs had wobbled so fiercely upon stepping back onto land, he’d had to sit down.

Finn paused now, closing his eyes and leaning against the nearest building. He’d been so stupid the first time, decked out in his new uniform, eyes on the war like it was some prize to be won. The comfort waned with his scattering mind and Finn tried to draw a steady breath in. The lump in his throat only grew tighter and he squeezed the handle of his small suitcase.

“Monsieur?” came a voice, spilled over with concern.

Finn’s eyes flashed open and he pushed himself straight, blinking through the pale morning light. There was a boy standing there, around his age, with bright blond hair and worried blue eyes. He was tall, with a neat white apron tied around his hips.

“Ça va?” the boy took a hesitant step forward. His eyes glanced towards Finn’s suitcase, and he nodded in realization, then spoke in accented English. “Are you all right?”

Finn looked behind the boy to see the cafe, slowly opening, from which he must have come. There was an abandoned stack of chairs he was putting out for the day, and his apron had an embroidered name at one corner, Finn realized, that matched the sign above.

Le Lion.

“Yes,” Finn breathed, but found himself unable to speak louder. “I’m fine.”

The boy just shook his head, and gestured behind him. “Non. You must sit down. S’il vous plaît. Please.”

Finn didn’t know how to refuse him.

A few minutes later, he found himself stationed at one of the cafe’s tables with a steaming pot of coffee in front of him, a croissant, and a plate of softly scrambled eggs.

“You look like you need more than butter and bread,” the boy had said, wiping strong looking hands on his apron. “You are from America?”

Finn nodded. He had been worried he would be able to stomach the food after the boy went through so much trouble, but upon his first bite of eggs, he felt ravenous.

“Yes,” Finn nodded, brushing his hands off from croissant crumbs. “Sorry, yes,” he held out his hand. “Finn.”

“Leo,” the boy smiled, and took his hand. “It is a pleasure.”

Finn found himself returning that smile with one that, for the first time in a long time, felt like his own. He tried to put coins into Leo’s hand when it was all over, but Leo simply waved him off and said he hoped to see Finn again.

~

The Louvre was more than Finn could have imagined. It was like walking across the ocean floor, new rarities at every corner. And, of course, there was the matter of the statue. Alex had said it would be with all the other works from ancient Greece. He didn’t have trouble following the signs to the correct gallery, walking through the white marble hallways. When he did reach the Greek galleries, his first thought was that the perfectly white statues nearly blended in with everything else, at least until he found a plaque that said it had all been painted once. Finn smiled to himself. Maybe his apparent stony doppelgänger had had red hair, too.

Imagining Alex and his long stride in these halls was easy. And it was quiet here, and distracting, which let Finn close his eyes for a moment, inhaling the scent of old stone, like a church, or a river’s bank.

When he opened them, he had found it. He was staring into his own face. His eyes were blank. He reached up to feel the shape of his own jaw as he looked at the statue’s, on display in the way the head was slightly turned, jaw set, brow low, as if in focus. Finn blinked, pulled out of the daze of seeing it, and his eyes landed on the museum card beside it. There was a word in ancient Greek, said to have been carved more visibly into the bust’s base. Future, it translated to. Thought to be made in the name of a God, though he may be lost now. There is no other surviving work by this artist.

Finn looked back at the eyes, so much like his own he could have seen brown there in the blank irises, and thought about when this strange statue had been carved. He’d always loved the way ancient Greece was sometimes described in poetry. It had gotten him through many long nights in the trenches. Serene, warm, and with nothing to do but lounge in the olive groves. Working the land and coming home at sundown to wine and honey and spiced meat. He’d longed for it. He longed for it still, this simple-seeming past.

The next thing he felt was warm wind. He smelled salt water.

The museum melted around him and his shoes slipped into sand before disappearing entirely.

~

Finn turned around to the sound of someone shouting, worried it was at him, only to find a brunette boy storming towards him—then past him—a foreign language continuing to fly off of his tongue. But more importantly, the boy was dressed in a simple garment of white cloth that left his strong, tanned legs and arms completely bare, and his feet were sandaled. Finn reached down to smooth his suit, only to find it gone, as well, replaced with a similar getup. He stared down at his bare skin, so pale in the bright sunlight.

And then the foreign language morphed, like a scratched record, and became English to his ears.

“—I’m telling you, Leo, I won’t go. Not without you.”

Leo?

And there the blond boy was, sitting in the shade of low trees at the edge of the beach. He was holding some sort of musical instrument, plucking at its strings almost sadly, head bowed.

“You have to,” Leo replied. “The oath says—“

He stopped mid-sentence, having looked up and spotted Finn. It made the brunette turn, and then Finn’s back was in the sand and there was a thin, rough blade at his throat.

Green eyes bore down into his own, a growl ripping from the boy’s throat. “Spartan.”

Finn choked out a breath, his hand going around the boy’s wrist. “No—no.”

“Logan,” came Leo’s voice, and then the knife’s pressure was released, pulled back by Leo, but the boy—Logan—was still sitting firmly on Finn’s hips. Finn felt his entire body flush with the sheer lack of fabric between them, but Logan didn’t seem to either mind or notice.

“I’m not a—Spartan,” Finn managed. “What the hell, I…” He looked to his left, at the sparkling waves lapping there, and then to the two boys looming above him. “Where am I?”

That made both of them freeze, the knife twitching in Logan’s hand.

“Ithaca,” Leo offered timidly, then glanced out at sea, as if that was where Finn had come from. Finn just stared at him.

He was the boy from the cafe. He was sure of it. His blue eyes filled with the same concern as they had on that early morning cobblestone street.

“Are you all right?” Leo asked.

“He is a spy,” Logan said, and went for him again.

Finn was ready this time. He knocked a leg around Logan’s waist, putting him on his back, and then rolled away from him and to his feet, knife in hand. He raised it for the two of them to see and then tossed it a little ways down the beach. “I’m not a spy. I…I’m just lost.”

It was true. In more ways than he’d even thought before.

“Please,” he managed more quietly.

He watched Leo and Logan exchange a look, unsure of what it meant, until Logan turned on his heel and Leo gestured for Finn to follow.

~

“Are you at war?” Finn asked he was led through the city streets. It had been a hot walk up a long road built into a steep hill, all the way up to what Finn assumed was the inner city and acropolis. Water ran along the side of the street—no doubt with sewage—and they crossed via stepping stones, pressing themselves against the walls whenever carts rattled by—carts filled with men with shields and swords or spears.

Logan, who brought up the rear behind him, having retrieved his knife, scoffed. “Aren’t we always?”

“And where are you taking me?”

“Where we take any question we can’t answer,” Leo said from in front of him, golden hair gleaming. “Pascal.”