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historia-vitae-magistras · 3 months ago

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The Dreadnoughts song "Brisbane Harbor" opens with "Prick your finger it is done, turn your face into the sun." i.e. the subject of the song has signed onto this journey for ill or good and regardless has to make the best of it and return with his humanity intact. This is one of those moments where that choice is made. This is one of the most experimental, darkest and nastiest things I've ever written. TW for several flavors of violence and trauma and several flavors of assault while I'm at it. This is also a take on a reversal of the myth of the crucified Canadian. I did my best to be as fleeting and undescriptive about things as I could but It's still fairly nasty. Please keep that in mind if you choose to read. Your own eyes are responsible for your own emotions from here on out as you have been warned.

March, 1916.

Zee?” Jack opened the length of tent canvas that served as a door and shoved his way inside. “Zee what happened?”

She sat on a cot, or maybe an officer’s folding chair. He doesn’t know. Just that the blanket around her shoulders is open and her shirt is torn and he’s never been so angry and afraid in his life in that moment, his grip going white on the beam holding up all this canvas. But she looks at him and he shoves it down, shoves it where it can come up for air later when he can scream to the heavens because he can’t right now. She’s looking at him the way she’s looked at him when she died of scarlet fever, terrified of nothing but the way she went quiet when she was in pain and how the world around her and the people in it could drown her out in a way they never could when she was well.

There were people around her. Father, their uncles, Matt, nurses and officers, buzzing around like fucking carrion birds. She was shaking and looked at him, and he could tell she’d been crying and she looked at the people around her, touching her and getting in her space and the strain was unbearable. She was an island, she liked the waters clear around her.

“Get out!” He bellowed. He shoved the nearest red tab and stuffed him out the tent flap and kicked another one on the arse to follow besides. “Get out! Get away from her!” Dad looked up, bewildered but didn’t need any explaination to start ordering the same, the old lion roaring that he’d kill them all if they didn’t move, didn’t get out, didn’t leave them be. He gives Jack a look as if to ask permission for something.

He’s not sure he loves his father, since Gallipoli but they love her. Jack practically throws people out of his way and Zee is arms out, sobbing, crushing the distance of the Tasman before he can even open his arms to hold her. Dad gives one last look and Jack knows he'll be outside with Matt, prowling and protecting them but the last glance he gives is sad and Jack is glad. Maybe he'll see what he's done, letting high spirits, including Jack's own, throw them into a war without a way out. Zee turns, trying to get more contact and he can see a bruise on her shoulder.

“What happened?” He demanded. “What did they do?”

“Ludwig— He—” She made a wretched sound and his heart hurt so much for her.

“Did he hurt you?” He rested his cheek on her head and held her tighter trying so much just to not melt down just hearing the fear in her. "If he touched you—"

“No!" Zee said. "No, not like that. It's Ludwig he's never even looked at a girl. He jumped me behind the lines to make sure I knew he could. I fought—"

"Course you did!" Jack agreed. "I'm sure you put the fear of God into him!"

"I took a chunk out of him." She said and he could still see a smudge of blood on her cheek to prove it. "And I could have thrown them all out just now too!"

She cried. And he almost laughs, because of course she could. She could howl down the roof of the world with those geysers of hers and the windpipe to match.

“I know.” He said. “But its not like Dads good for much these days. Good to let him feel useful. Proper kind of you.”

She barked out a laugh but a sob came so quickly on its heels he started up with her, blinking down tears.

"What do you need?" He said.

The crying started again and his shirt was getting damp.

"I won't be Aunt Brighid!" She blurted. "I won't spend my fucking life one step ahead of armies waiting for the sack."

"Not as long as I'm breathing!" He said. Because that's the easy part. It's the quiet part, the reassuring and God awful stillness of it that's harder.

He doesn’t have time to say before she's pulling away from him, not far enough she has to let go of his hand but far enough to look at him and look at him hard.

"Take Matt and hunt him down and make sure he knows there are consequences! You tell him if he touches any of us, he and the Prussian bastard will pay for it! I am not some fucking piece on the board to be terrified and played this way or that. Do you hear me? I won't! I won't be tossed around like that ever again. And then you come back in one piece because I'm going to need another hug."

"He won't dare." Jack said, and kissed her hair, meaning it more than anything. "If he's not already terrified of you he will be. And I'll be quick."

"Don't kill him." Zee said. "He doesn't deserve it."

_______

"Give me your bayonet and back off," Matt commands in that low tone of voice that reverberates through the trees, through the fog and the smoke and the night, driving deep into Jack's belly where fear should be. But there is little there since Gallipoli, and even less since Zee stumbled off the line with her collar torn and her eyes wild. He hands over the bayonet.

Matt has shucked his helmet. His hair is shorn, and his face is dark like a thunderstorm above the outback, the kind that threatens to shatter Jack's entire continent asunder. Ludwig is pinned to the fake tree that Matt himself had occupied only moments before, lying in wait like a wolf spider until the right German, Germany himself, had stumbled across the mud. Matt had sprung the trap, and Ludwig had fallen. He stands now, pinned to the tree with bayonets spiked through his wrists, Christlike.

"You don't deserve to be martyred," Matt snarls as he hammers the third bayonet into the thin slice of muscle and clothing just next to the groin. Jack clenches as he sees how near the crux of Ludwig's thighs it lands. Matt draws in close.

"If you ever touch them again, I will find you. And I won't miss. Are we understood?"

There's a sluggish nod as piss and blood mix and trail down the grey trousers. Jack can't really look at Ludwig's face. Their enemy—wire-thin, half-starved—stands there. Matt has no guilt, but Jack—wracking guilt is worse than the medieval torture rack, the way it floods, hot and bile-like through Jack's veins, replacing his blood and his brain and his sense and his sincerity. Matt's knife comes out, the long wicked thing he had carved Jack a tiny lopsided koala with when he'd been tiny and miserable in London that first Christmas more than a century before. Jack wants to vomit. The knife comes up, swinging horribly accurate in Matt's hands, blurring in the dark with a glint that shines like a sparking telegraph wire strung between his brother's hand and Germany's sternum. Jack's hand lifts and stays Matt's hand.

"Enough!" he says before he can stop himself. "That's enough! He gets the picture!"

"He hurt her. This was her idea."

"He scared her. It's war. And you've scared him and more. Fucking hell Matt, look at him. We're supposed to be the good side, and this—this isn't good!"

"I don't care," Matt snarls, turning the same tone on Jack that he had just used on Ludwig. "Crawl back and hide behind Zee's skirts if you want! I'm finishing this."

"Finishing what? The war? Does your entire country collapse when they kill you? No! Stop it! Walk away before you lose yourself, Matt!"

Matt's eyes flicker up. Even the rich blue of them has dissolved into the mud with the last of his decency, or maybe the gas since he healed from the chlorine, leaving pale irises to blend into the whites. Jack thinks it might be too late. Matt's humanity might be gone, dissolved into France the way it had come into being.

"This isn't what Zee wants," he says instead. "She doesn't want it to happen like this. She doesn't want this. And it's her who's hurt that matters here. Not yours. This is not about the gas, Matt. Do you hear me? You will be walking over her wants her as much as he did if you continue. This is not what she wants!"

Her shaking, Aunt Brighid's screams. He puts more pressure on Matt's knife hand and stares him down.

Matt's face doesn't change. Ludwig, who has been silent this long, looks at Jack like Jack gives a shit about what happens to him, and not the dozen times Zee has made the choice to be a human being. The dozens more he has for her sake and his own. Not this piece of shits. The knife draws up and Jack thinks for one horrendous moment Matt will slit another throat in front of him but he doesn't lose his grip on Matt's wrist, and after a long moment, Matt looks at him, really looks at him.

His face gives nothing, but he plucks up the bayonets, stepping back with a look of mild disgust when Ludwig's blood stains his sleeves. Not guilt, not even regret. Jack feels something horrendously like fear then.

"I will hunt you down and put you down like a rabid dog if you touch my family again. I don't care what agreement exists between your brother and my father. I will hang the pieces of your body where every German will see, where your brother will find you, part by part. Speak you understand or I'll do it right now. As long as I'm breathing they are as untouchable as Alfred. Do you understand?"

Jack looks away.

#my writing || cacoethes scribendi #jack || a land of summer skies #Ludwig || in deinem Herzchen klein #matthew || my country is winter

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