Alfred and Aurora celebrate the liberation of Paris in the middle of crowds of strangers in the streets. After two years in the field and eleven days of fighting for the city, the euphoria is unimaginable. They stay up all night, drunk on wine carefully hidden all through the long occupation and now freely shared. Aurora doesn't let go of Alfred the whole night, her fingers twined in his, or her two hands hooked into his elbow as they jostle through the crowds. It feels as though they haven't laughed in years, and tonight they can't seem to stop.
Alfred pulls Aurora to a stop and kisses her, out in the open, in the middle of the crowd, because he can, because for the first time in two years he doesn't need to be on alert in the streets, and because tonight there is no guilt in feeling joyous.
It's not the end of the war, but it's the end of their war. Sinclair allows them the night, but the next morning the orders come through summoning them home.
Aurora cries herself to sleep against Alfred's shoulder on the long plane ride across the Atlantic. Alfred isn't sure even she herself knows whether they're tears of frustration or relief.
Alfred's debrief with Sinclair lasts for days. Aurora tries to insist she be allowed to sit in, but is firmly rebuffed. Her own debrief complete, she spends her days alone on the shore, staring out over the waters of Lake Ontario, trying to remember how to be still without listening for signs of an ambush.
Every afternoon she meets Alfred as he emerges from Sinclair's office, pale and wrung out from his day of forced remembering.
In the evening, they share the lounge with Krystina, and sometimes Sinclair, trading happier memories and filling in a few blanks for each other. This is possibly the last chance they will ever have to speak freely among friends.
When Camp X discharges them, Alfred follows Aurora to Quebec. He hasn't had family of his own since he was twelve, and 'home' for him has meant 'Aurora', almost since he met her.
Aurora spends the train journey pressed up against the window. Canada is beautiful in September. And unscarred, at least on the surface.
"It doesn't feel real," she says. "I can't tell if that was the nightmare or this is the dream."
Aurora's parents are waiting for them on the train platform when they arrive, and their faces are just as kind as Alfred expected they would be. Alfred hangs back during the reunion, wanting Aurora to have the room to be just a woman greeting her parents, to not have to be reminded of the sergeant. And he wants to remember the moment, both for her and for himself. He wants the memory of what a happy family looks like.
But that moment doesn't last nearly long enough. Aurora's mother blinks at Aurora in surprise when Aurora is finally able to talk. They're speaking French, but Aurora's words now hold the cadence of another continent. Aurora masks her flinch at her mother's shock, and switches back to her childhood accent, but Alfred can feel the effort it takes her to maintain it.
Aurora hasn't lived at home with her parents in years, but she gave up her old apartment when she first moved to Paris before the war, so she accepts her parents' invitation to stay with them. She's returning to Québec to be near them, after all, so it seems to be the ideal solution while she and Alfred work out what comes next.
Aurora will sleep in her childhood room, Mrs. Luft tells them, and offers Alfred a guest room at the far end of the hall. Alfred agrees to the separation because Aurora's eyes ask him to. Their 'irregular status,' as Sinclair termed it, makes the situation awkward enough as it is.
At night, after the lights are out and her parents have gone to sleep, Aurora pads down the hall on silent feet to join him. When the door to his room eases open, Alfred lifts the blanket for her in invitation the way he used to do back at the beginning, and the memory buried in the gesture is both comforting and unsettling.
Aurora takes Alfred on a tour of the city. She smiles more in that afternoon, he thinks, than she has in the last year. They walk the main streets and stop to take in all the sights. But the best part comes later, as they wander home through her neighbourhood. She laughs as she tells stories of childhood upsets outside her old school, and tows him down the street to show him the park where her grandmother brought her to play when she was little.
It is another perfect day, another memory to hold onto for the hard times.
Aurora and René had adopted Parisian French accents when they joined the resistance. Their natural Québécois accents marked them as different, and different was memorable, so they learned to blend. It had been a matter of life and death at the time and worth the effort of policing every syllable out of their mouths, every expression, every curse word.
The process of unlearning it now is more challenging than Aurora expected. Memories of René ambush her in the middle of sentences, triggered by a word or an inflection. Memories of laughing together in bed late at night, at the absurdity of practicing the new sounds, or of waiting, tense, after a slip of the tongue from one or the other of them, to see if anyone noticed, if anyone commented.
She'd been a different person back when she spoke Québécois, and Aurora finds herself wishing that changing the accent back could mean changing the person back as well.
Conversation with Aurora's parents is stilted. Alfred and Aurora can't speak about their war, and that war has stripped them of anything else to talk about.
Sinclair provided them with harmless cover stories of work in anonymous Canadian Army offices overseas, and they built the rest between them during quiet moments before they left Camp X. Lies designed to bore, to change the subject, to divert attention.
Aurora's parents want to know everything. How did you meet? Do we hear wedding bells? But, darling, what happened to René?
Aurora rattles off the dullest story of office romance imaginable, and Alfred nods along. Before long even Mrs. Luft's smile begins to fade, and eventually she stops asking.
Aurora wants to want to be home. She dreamed of these streets, these people, this bed, all through the five long years she was away. She should be overjoyed.
But after four years of careful suppression, the sounds she grew up with feel foreign in her mouth. And her old friends greet her with strangers' eyes.
Even her old clothes don't fit, hanging loose on a body worn down to nothing but sinew and wiry muscle.
And when passing acquaintances ask her where's she's been, polite smiles dismiss any mention of her war work. It's not like she fought on the front lines with the men, after all.
Still, she tries to find a rhythm, to step back into old patterns. She's skilled at pretending now and maybe, eventually, this new life will start to feel normal in the way that field work came to feel normal.
She always intends to talk to Alfred about looking for an apartment, about finding new jobs, about settling down, but can never quite bring herself to speak the words.
Aurora wants to tell her father. That she knew, before the world did. That she learned the truth in the damp and the dark, surrounded by long-dead bones. That they did everything they could think of to help stop it. He's the only person in her world who shares this particular grief.
His parents, his sisters, his niece.
She wants to tell him. But she is bound to silence about this, too.
The enforced silence spreads, begins to infect the time Alfred and Aurora spend alone. Afraid of being overheard, afraid of falling into habits that might spill over when they're in company, they maintain their new fiction, and lose the ability to speak even to each other.
"I'll go back to Toronto," Alfred offers. The hardest words he has ever spoken, but he thinks it might be the only way that Aurora will be able to stitch herself back together.
But the look she gives him at the words is stricken. Hurt. "Alfred, no."
"You should have time with your family. I shouldn't have come."
"No. I don't..." She trails off, and he can taste the conflict in her voice. "Please, no. Please don't leave."
And that is that. But Aurora hasn't joined him in the guest room in days.
Alfred wakes to the sound of a door banging open in the middle of the night, footsteps running in the hall. He's on his feet, moving without thinking, fingers aching for a gun that isn't there. He yanks his door open and nearly collides with Aurora, running towards him. Her hair is mussed from sleep, her eyes wild and unseeing, streaming tears. She knocks him sideways into the wall, trying to get past, trying to get into his room.
"Aurora." He knows better than to try to take hold of her until she's fully awake. He puts his hands up between them instead, calming and unthreatening. "Aurora, it's me."
Her name in his voice is usually enough to reach her. He watches as her eyes come into focus, dares to take a step closer. "I'm right here."
"Alfred."
She grabs him then, rough and panicked, checking him for injuries. He lets her do it. "I'm here, I'm not hurt."
But she's not calming. Her breath comes in panting gasps, an awful acid green, and her eyes show white all the way around. Alfred recognizes the signals, understands the panic that's gripping her.
Another door opens, and Aurora's parents stumble into the hall, drawn by the noise. He uses his body to edge Aurora further into his room. "We're fine," he tells them, with no room for argument. "You can go back to bed." And he closes the guest room door on their worry.
"I shot you," Aurora manages between gasps. "They... made me, I... couldn't..."
"You didn't shoot me, I'm right here."
He takes hold of her arms just as her knees buckle, and he guides her down, bracing her back against the wall.
"Aurora, look at me." His voice is firm, unyielding. "Look at me." It takes a long moment, but her eyes finally focus on his face. "I'm not hurt. Do you understand?"
Still panting, she manages a nod.
"Good. Now take a deep breath for me." She does. Or, she tries to. Her body is still shaking too badly for it to be steady. He is crouched in front of her, close enough that his knees press against her bent legs. He takes hold of her hands, his thumbs sweeping a soothing rhythm across her knuckles. "Deep breaths. That's good. Do you know where you are?"
She nods again. "Québec. My... parents' house." Not 'home,' he notes.
"You had a nightmare."
Aurora closes her eyes, blows out a long, shuddering breath. "I woke up, and you weren't there. And I couldn't remember..." Tears drip from under her closed lids. "It was just like... after René... and I..." She can't finish, trails off, leaning forward to bury her face in her knees.
Alfred's throat closes around his own tears, and he shifts position to sit beside her against the wall. She turns into him, winds her arms around his chest, pulls herself close until she's clinging to him almost in his lap.
"I'm here, I'm not hurt." He murmurs the words over and over, his one hand rubbing soothing circles on her back, the other tangled in her hair, cradling her head.
When the tension finally runs out of her, he pulls the blanket, one-armed, from the bed and guides them both down until they're lying on the floor. More familiar now than a mattress. He wrestles the blanket over them both and curls around Aurora with a protectiveness he hasn't felt since the night after Tom died.
In the morning, he wires a message to Sinclair.
"We're leaving," he tells her simply, and she nods.
He sits with her in that room while she packs her bag, to help stave off the clinging nightmare. By late afternoon they're on a train back to Ontario.