Disclaimer: 'Allo 'Allo and all characters belong to David Croft, Jeremy Lloyd, and the BBC.
Author's Notes: I know some people were disappointed that David and Jeremy had their only unambiguously gay character still end up in a straight relationship, but I have to admit I didn't think it came out of nowhere, and they were potentially a good match. Gruber and Helga started off very anti and bitchy with each other, but they got considerably friendlier as the series went on, and there was more than one hint that she could be attracted to him under certain circumstances. Some of his comments about the female species also sounded like they stemmed from bitter experience rather than lifelong disinterest ("Women, René, are all deceivers."), so it's not all that far-fetched to suggest that he was in fact bi, but had had heterosexual relationships go so badly that he swore off women.
It was raining in Nouvion.
More accurately, it was pouring. The countryside had been huddled under a bank of grey cloud all day, and it had finally broken just after sunset, bursting like a punctured barrage balloon and dropping everything at once: cats and dogs, as the British apparently called it. That had always struck Gruber as a very strange saying, but then the British were strange people, which was why, according to General von Klinkerhoffen, they were going to lose the war.
"They did win in the Great War," Gruber had mentioned.
"That was beginners' luck!" the General snapped. He was in a foul temper that week, not in the least because of the Resistance's latest sabotage brainwave, which consisted of dropping packets of scrap metal shards on the wires at the switching station and shorting out the entire area at regular intervals. Gruber would have thought that it would cause considerably more inconvenience to the locals than it did to the German army, as they never had a lot of terribly important operations going on, but then the Resistance worked in such mysterious, subtle and frankly confusing ways. General von Klinkerhoffen had turned a colour that was usually only described in books when he was given the news, marched around a lot, and issued orders to shoot a few dozen peasants to maintain face, but the Colonel had eventually managed to persuade him to turn the problem over to Herr Flick of the Gestapo. Which meant that nothing whatsoever would be found out, and the whole unpleasant business would blow over in a few weeks.
In the meantime, the flicker-glow of candles through the windows did make the town square look very pretty, even through the chilly raindrops bouncing off Gruber's hat and diving down his collar. Like dozens of fires in homely hearths. He was suddenly aware of feeling most dreadfully left out; the sense never stronger of always being on the outside here and looking in. Nouvion was a pretty place with its fields and woods that weren't so unlike the hills cradling Baden-Baden, and he caught himself, on occasions, wishing that he could have come here under different circumstances, just as a traveller, with paints and easel under his arm to spend long sunny afternoons capturing cream-coloured walls and vine-wrapped balconies. He had once managed to entice a reluctant René into posing for a portrait, standing in front of his café with a bottle of the house special in his hand, but Clarence had arrived early to pick him up and accidentally squashed several tables, chairs and parked bicycles with the little tank, and the sitting had ended quite awkwardly.
Overall, he suspected that he would have met with a more friendly reception from Nouvion without the tank.
And without a uniform.
If the Führer had made a different career move, Gruber's prospects in France could have been a lot rosier by now.
Still, René was always gracious, above and beyond the call of host, and Gruber loved the man for that much, even if he was too aware at times of the game they always played, the waltz they all seemed to be doing where each of them was trying to be a nice partner while keeping it a secret which direction they were going to dance in next. Sometimes he liked to pretend that he was ignorant of it, and that René didn't know the Resistance, and they were going to live happily ever after if they could just sit the war out cosily and not get one another shot or sent to the Russian Front. It was one of those evenings, when he wanted to say hang it, and be happy for a while, and he brightened as he neared the café door, with its friendly sign, block-printed in both French and German, turned to open. He had to show a front for it to work properly. No seam; a perfect mask. Gruber smiled, his warmest and most winning.
And, in the dark, walked into the deepest and muddiest puddle from there to Avignon.
!~~***~~!
As soon as he stepped through the café door, he was grabbed. Not necessarily how he would like to have been grabbed, or even where, but Gruber wasn't about to start being choosy about the preferences of the person doing it.
"René! Is there anything... pressing that you need my assistance with..?"
"Ah, Lieutenant Gruber, thank heavens someone is here at last..!"
Despite Gruber's continuing seductive efforts, René was seldom quite this eager to see him, and when he was, it usually meant that their necks were on the line because another failsafe plan had completely and spectacularly failed. Gruber felt some of the evening's enthusiasm dissipate as he made a quick, worried scan of the café. Everything appeared to be reasonably normal at first glance, whatever 'normal' was calling itself these days. The cheese dishes, he noticed, were empty; evidently even the risk of Madame Edith's singing had already passed earlier in the evening.
"Is something wrong?" he enquired. "You know that I do not want to see you in any trouble..."
René, upon closer examination, was wearing an expression that smacked more of weary desperation than blind panic. "It is Helga," he said, with a very small sigh.
"Helga?"
René gestured towards said private's table. "Herr Flick stood her up again to go and interrogate some suspects, she has been drinking all evening, and if I ask her to leave with the mood she is in, she may shoot me." He lowered his voice, his tone becoming pleading. "Lieutenant, could you take her back to the château? I cannot have people drinking too much in my café, the local police do not like it and neither do my bills."
Gruber felt himself soften. "I will do what I can," he murmured, hesitantly. He could never say no to René, about anything, which wasn't really the best approach for one of the conquering victors to take, but he was also now somewhat taken aback; a sort of shocked, morbid curiosity. Not because Helga was well on her way to being drunk - he knew she drank regularly, enough that it had to happen on at least the odd occasion - but because nobody ever saw her drunk. Gruber had never seen her himself; it was only the liquorice or peppermint on her breath to hide the fact that had given her away to him a while ago, the smell that wasn't noticeable except to somebody else who utilized it for exactly the same thing. No matter what had gone on the night before, she would be there at her desk in the morning, groomed, polished, and oh-so sanctimonious.
Helga was everything that Gruber disliked most about women, but, as he looked across at her sitting at the caf table on her own, staring into the candle in front of her with one hand morosely pillowing her cheek, something moved within him. Not quite pity, more like... empathy. She looked so completely and utterly dejected.
The chair made a squeaking sound on the damp floor, and she lifted her eyes, watching him as he removed his hat and sat down with the resigned antipathy of a tigress too tired to pounce. Eventually, she asked, dully, "Why are you so wet?"
"It's raining," Gruber explained. The feeling of being rather unnecessarily rude to his hosts always itched at him when he used German in the café, but he suspected that most of Helga's French had disappeared into a bottle a long time ago that evening. He waited for the eyeroll and the accompanying retort, but neither ever came. Instead, she stared at him a moment longer before reaching for her glass again. There were several more of them on the table, all empty.
"Is it? I hadn't noticed."
"René tells me that you have been here for a long time."
"And what if I have?"
"Only that I would not have taken you for somebody who drinks alone."
Her voice was sharp. "Nor I you, Lieutenant. Apparently we are two of a kind!"
"Touché," Gruber said, reluctantly, and in French. The liquorice, he'd forgotten, worked both ways.
Now Helga did roll her eyes. "Oh, do shut up! Why should I care about when you drink, or how much you smoke, or..." Casting about, she finally gave up with something resembling an exasperated growl, and twisted around so violently in her chair that Gruber had a vision of her ultimately falling off it and forcing him to carry her all the way to the château. The idea worried him so much that his hand involuntarily shot out, stopping barely short of making contact with hers. Helga looked at it as if it were a rodent of some type.
"Leave me alone," she said. "I want to be drunk. I shall be drunk. I want to forget that any of this ever happened."
She lifted the glass to drain it, and the pungent-fruit scent of brandy hit Gruber like a rather too happy memory. Pointedly, he turned the one nearest to him upside down on the tablecloth. "We must all find our own ways to get through the war. And to ensure that we are... provided for, afterwards, isn't that right?"
There was ice in her stare. "I want to forget tonight that I ever heard the name Herr Otto Flick." The words were enunciated one by one, as carefully as she was able, almost bitten off.
"Personally, as a safeguard, I have always had a preference for money over marriage," Gruber commented. It wasn't a conscious decision to put the warp on the last word, as if to imply exactly what her courtship entailed, but there was a small part of him that was almost enjoying this. There was a mild satisfaction in trying to best her, and a sort of... something else.
"As far as I had heard, your current preference was for knocking off your driver."
Gruber choked a little. "... that is a casual arrangement between Clarence and myself, and I am starting to see why the Colonel chose you to spy for him."
"It pays to keep your ear to the ground around here." Helga's gaze drifted back to the brandy glasses. She seemed suddenly confused, her forehead creasing. "I don't remember drinking all of that," she said.
"Nobody ever does."
"I need some fresh air." She rose to her feet, and a look of vague nausea immediately washed across her face. This time, she reached out to him as he stood, and he didn't try to avoid her grasp as she used his arm to maintain her balance. "I am ordering you to escort me home."
Gruber steeled himself. "Helga, may I remind you that I am a lieutenant and you are a private?"
"I am an angry private who is a good shot even when she has been drinking."
The water was overspilling the gutters outside, running in rivulets down the windowpane. René appeared at their side as they lingered at the door.
"Here, Lieutenant, take Edith's umbrella with you. She will not need to bother with it unless she has her hair done, and I have hidden the key to the till."
!~~***~~!
Walking arm in arm with a woman was peculiar, to say the least. It had been a long time since Gruber had done it, and he would rather not have had to confront the issue tonight, but with how unsteady Helga was on her feet, he didn't dare to let go of her. Nouvion was not well-lit at the best of times - they had twice taken a wrong turn and once wandered up the undertaker's back passage - and the road leading up to the château, which the last winter had left with more holes in it than the Führer's British invasion plan, was even worse. The damp breeze buffeting through the hedge tugged at their sleeves and hems, like a child impatient to go faster. At least, he thought, they had the umbrella.
"Perhaps we should wait and try to cadge a lift from one of the transport trucks?" he suggested.
"Don't be stupid." Her voice floated eerily out of the darkness. She was starting to sound drunk now: her anger ebbing with cold and tiredness and the brandy draining into the space it left. The plop and patter of the rain hitting the water on the floor and the canvas above their heads deadened the uneven approach of her heels, and he started as she stumbled into him. "They would never see us out here. I can hardly see you."
Juggling the umbrella, Gruber managed to reach inside his coat and locate the flashlight hanging from his tunic button by its flap. He fumbled the switch, and the beam angled across them, reassuringly bright. "Is that better?" he enquired, attempting to be jovial about it.
"Yes," Helga said, before lapsing into a very uncharacteristic silence against him. It was so uncharacteristic, in fact, that he began to wonder if she was passing out. He pushed at her shoulder.
"Helga, you cannot go to sleep now!"
"Why not?" As he tried to surreptitiously wriggle the arm she had slung around him closer to the vicinity of his waist and further away from that of his backside, his overcoat brushed her cheek. "You smell of wet wool and cologne," she said, absently, and then, before he could respond, "You smell nice. You don't smell of leather."
Gruber's instinct was to decide whether he should try to make a run for it now, or later, but he held off, his curiosity winning out over both options.
"What is it about this man that makes you wish to marry him?"
"Why do I wish to marry him," Helga repeated. It sounded as if she were asking herself the question. "Sometimes I wonder what it is that I do want. Herr Flick has not turned out to be all that I had hoped."
"I assume that you are referring to his prospects in Berlin and not to his warm heart and fun-loving personality?"
Her features were half in shadow, but she was glaring at him, albeit without very much venom in it any more. "I do have concerns about my future. And as a woman, I have certain commodities aside from paintings, that I must trade carefully."
"... I was under the impression that there had been a run on the exchange some time ago."
He fully expected her to slap him for that while there was nobody to order her not to, but, instead, her mouth, with its glossy lipstick still unsmudged, curled into a grimace of something between regret and bitter triumph. "Things are not always as they appear, Lieutenant," she said.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that - " He saw her jaw set. Helga Geerhart was - subtly - gritting her teeth. " - Herr Flick is saving himself for matrimony."
Gruber choked for the second time that evening. "You will forgive me if I find this a little hard to take in," he managed to say, when he had recovered sufficiently.
"It is not by my choice, believe me. This is what comes of being brought up by nuns. It rubs off."
"That is what I had assumed was -" Gruber began, but something in her face made him decide against continuing. "I did not expect Herr Flick to have such self-control," he finished, lamely.
"Should I accept that as a compliment?"
He sighed, unsure whether she were genuinely fishing for one or leading him into a trap, and unwilling to take the toss and probably lose. "Helga - "
"Herr Flick has devised many ingenious ways to avoid compromising his principleswhich still prove extremely satisfying to him."
"Are they to you?"
Helga turned away again, looking out into the dark. In the wobble of the flashlight, Gruber saw something glisten that he thought was water, and hoped he was right. He couldn't bear women crying. He'd never yet had to watch another man cry; not in the same way.
"It seems that of the two of us, you have the better love life after all," she said.
"Perhaps."
Helga tilted her head. "Perhaps not?"
"Clarence is a very sweet boy," Gruber said, defensively.
"But he is not René. And it is René you care about. And to René you will always be the enemy, no matter how he says he is on our side."
He winced, but, on reflection, he realized that it hadn't come coupled with any feeling that she had set out to deliberately hurt him. Rather, cocooned here behind the curtain of the rain, he had an odd sense of comradeship with her in their mutual dissatisfaction with life.
"I'm sorry," she added.
Gruber hesitated. "I am too," he said. Her expression was a mirror of his own.
A low sound in the distance made both of them jump. As they stood still in the road, it came again; a low, irregular rumble. If the Resistance were blowing something up, Gruber thought, they could certainly have chosen better weather to do it in. They spent a lot of time blowing things up. Perhaps they were taking a scorched earth approach to the occupation of Nouvion. In this rain, they would be lucky to scorch anything.
"Was that thunder?" Helga asked, doubtfully.
Gruber listened, and, finally, he heard it: the sound of anti-aircraft fire between what had to be the dull thudding impact of bombs. "It's an air raid," he said, nervously.
Her eyes went wide in the half-light. "We are out in an air raid? But there was no warning siren!"
"It's further away - there is a munitions factory at Crécy that the RAF have tried to bomb before."
"Can they even hit anything with this cloud cover?"
"No, but they seem to enjoy themselves, I do not think that the RAF get out very much."
Helga sounded queasy again, and her grip tightened. "I hate air raids."
"We are nearly there." Gruber tried to sound reassuring, although said reassurance was decidedly strained. There was a question in her face that he couldn't be the answer to, so he patted her arm instead, hoping that that would be enough. To his surprise, it felt as comforting to him as he had meant it to be to her.
The emergency generator had been started at the château while there was still some light, and the cobblestones shone slippery underfoot at the gate. The soldier on sentry duty peered out at them as they approached, his square features screwed up like a myopic bull terrier.
"Lieutenant Gruber, is that you? We have been receiving advance warnings of air raids. The General has ordered that all officers should return to the château."
"Well, we are all home now," Gruber said, lightly. He was not quite sure when he had begun thinking of it as 'home', but it was the best that they were going to manage. Their own commandeered castle, all locked up against the weather and the world. He was as relieved to return as he was ever going to be to anywhere here.
In the end, even Madame Edith's umbrella had held out.
!~~***~~!
Helga was almost asleep by the time that they climbed the stairs to the landing where the officers were billeted. General von Klinkerhoffen had decided that it would be a good idea to have the Colonel's secretary on hand for anything urgent that came up, and so one of the smaller rooms had recently been allocated as quarters for her, which was a step up from the attic above the baker. Herr Flick had been caused a severe inconvenience by this scheme, but General von Klinkerhoffen was not scared of Herr Flick. Gruber busied himself with lighting lights and drawing curtains while she waited, leaning against the door as he bustled around. When he attempted to help her take off her coat, she simply sagged, going limp against him. The smells of brandy and cigarettes clinging to her could almost have been masculine - although he had developed a predilection for brie in recent years - but that of her hair disconcerted him in some way. Hurriedly, he navigated her over to the bed and sat her down on the edge, resuming the task there and picking up her left hand, trying to feed it back through her sleeve. She watched his struggles in an unfocused way for a minute or two, then raised her eyes.
"Thank you," she said.
He shook his head, bemused. "For what?"
"Listening."
"A friendly ear is always welcome." Gruber shrugged, mildly. "Ah -" he finished, as he finally succeeded in removing the coat. He folded it once and hung it over the end of the bed, and, when she made no further move to help herself, started over again on her jacket, trying not to focus too hard on what he was doing.
"There are not many of those at Gestapo headquarters," Helga said, in a monotone.
His fingers worked at her buttons. They kept bumping into softness beneath the cloth, and the immense urgency to get past it and back to more neutral territory started to make him feel vaguely maddish. "Then why do you keep agreeing to go back to him?"
"Why do you keep torturing yourself around René?"
Gruber popped the last button. "The water in the bathtub is not very warm, but it is still warmer than it is outside."
He hung the jacket next to the coat, and she moved of her own accord, leaning down to her side slowly, almost carefully, until she was far enough down that her head touched the pillow. Gruber assumed that she didn't sleep with hair pins in, but he balked inwardly at the idea of trying to remove those as well. As he leaned over her, Helga lifted her hand, reaching towards the Iron Cross pinned to his breast pocket.
"What is that for?"
"Spending three days in a foxhole with a dozen stormtroopers." Gruber saw her eyebrows twitch. "We were hemmed in by the enemy," he added, by way of explanation.
"I wish that I had been trapped there."
"Helga," he said, with mild reproach.
A wry half-smile drifted across her face. "What is good for the gander should be good for the goose, should it not?"
"You have a point." Gruber straightened, hastily. It disturbed him that there was something about the situation that was making him react, a growing awareness of a need in her that the similar ache present in himself was responding to. With a shock, he realized what it was: loneliness. It was the last thing that he had ever thought that the two of them would have in common.
He wanted to not be lonely with somebody who knew what it was like.
Would that have felt so very wrong?
Just this once?
The sudden awkwardness was palatable. He would have rather she had just started to strip off, because that would have been what he expected. This odd parity wasn't setting his alarm bells off properly, and that was what scared him all the more.
"Don't go," she said.
Gruber inhaled, deeply. "Helga," he said, "I have not been with a woman for ten years."
He hoped that she didn't take it as a challenge. Whether it was because she was too intoxicated, or too tired, he didn't know, but the lack of immediate accusation came as a distinct relief. The window was as far away as the door, and, besides, he didn't feel that his chances of successfully making it down the ivy were terribly high.
"I am not about to change that," he added.
They regarded each other.
"May I ask why you are so certain?"
"Because I have always been open to both options, and men have been by far the most consistent and least troublesome one."
The question hung in Helga's face for a moment or two. Then the spark seemed to go out of her eyes, and she turned her head, the picture of a disappointed treasure hunter who had prised stones instead of rubies out of every last box. "I wish that I could say the same."
Gruber reached for one of the blankets heaped on the bed, and tugged it up around her. She probably wouldn't remember a lot of this tomorrow, and, with any luck, neither would he. It had been a most unsettling evening. He would have preferred, he thought, distantly, being on manoeuvres.
Helga watched his hands move with drowsy, thoughtful eyes. After a minute or two, she said, "Hubert?"
He started at the use of his first name. "Yes?"
"If I was a man, would you fancy me?"
Gruber sighed a little, smoothing the blanket. "Goodnight, Helga," he said.
Obediently, she rested her head against the pillow, closing her eyes. Gruber watched her for a while until her breathing evened out into the slow, steady rhythm of sleep, and then he picked up his hat from the bedside table where he had left it and switched off the lamp for her. The heavy oak doors of the château tended to creak and groan and were not easy to be quiet with, as most of them had had the misfortune to discover, but he did his best with Helga's as he stepped onto the landing and closed it behind him. As he headed back to the sanctuary of his own room, he tried not to think too much more about her. Instead, he thought about René. For the first time, it seemed safer.