Rene doesn't get out of the car.
This is the first thing she thinks when they arrive back at the base. She turns around, waiting for him to step out, to slide an arm around her shoulders, make a joke about how the germans are in trouble if their damn nazis can't catch five agents hiding in a belltower. Kiss her just below her ear.
He doesn't.
She doesn't cry for him. She gives the report. She washes her hands. And then she drinks; until the crumbling of the earth around her feels normal. Until she can't think straight enough to hate herself for the pulse beating in her chest. Until she breaks, but doesn't care.
She thinks she knows what hell is then. She is wrong.
She keeps moving, training, running. If she doesn't stop, she doesn't have to think. If she waits until she's past exhaustion every night, she doesn't have to lie awake remembering. She tries drinking herself to sleep a few times the first week, but there's only so much alcohol she can trade favors for until it's gone, and it makes the nightmares worse. More vivid, more real. Leo. Marie. Annie. Frank. Rene. Rene. Rene.
Alfred makes her stop.
She breathes better when she's around him. Her pulse is slower. Her hands don't shake.
"Why don't you sleep?" He asks her, late one night when they're playing rummy in the common room. It's too late, nearly morning; everyone else has long since retired to their quarters, and it's just the two of them, trapped in their cycle of butterfly lies and half-thought maybes.
"Why don't you?" Aurora replies with a half-smile. He doesn't reply for a minute, just looks at her past the cards in his hand. She waits for his play, but he doesn't make it.
"I've had nightmares for fourteen years." He responds simply. "Sometimes they don't stop when I wake up."
He plays his hand. He waits; for her to respond, to react at all. She doesn't move. She can't. Even her body has never truly left Villemarie.
"Rene wasn't your fault," he says quietly, like he knows it's exactly the thing she needed to hear most. He shifts to his feet, and she sees the weight hanging over his lanky frame, the heaviness of his very bones. She wishes he didn't see her pain. She wishes he could be spared from this war's insatiable appetite for destruction.
He leaves with a soft "goodnight", and for a fleeting instant Aurora thinks of him sitting next to her as she falls asleep at night. She thinks that maybe, for once, it would be peaceful. No nightmares, no painful thoughts. Just sleep, and him.
It hurts, how much she wants it. Wants to ask him to stay.
She ignores him for two days instead.
As the missions go on, it gets worse. She tries to avoid him. Tries to avoid the wanting. She tries with her whole being, because her soul is tired and bent and torn. She tries not to love him because she knows what she's capable of.
She's used to holding lives in her hands, until it's his. Until it's Rene's, again.
She knows what hell is on a bright afternoon, in a warehouse with a gun that she doesn't use. On a night lit only by streetlamps, with a knife she does.