A/N yet another AU, or this time a series of AUs. I like writing about natural disasters, especially since I've just spent the better part of a term studying them in school - so I'm sorry about how gloomy this is! If you have any prompts/disasters (natural or manmade) you'd like me to write, drop me a review/PM. Enjoy! Sorcha xox
Sumatra, Indonesia, 1883
There has been smoke around the island of Krakatoa for as long as she's lived there, well, all three months of it. Every morning she gets up out of the cold sheets and looks out of the window, down the rolling hills to the sea, wishing she could see his ship on the ever-shifting green-satin horizon, a faint dot of hope, but every morning there's nothing. She knows this is normal, honestly, he'd told her about it when he'd married her and the children seem calm enough but today there's a quiet, well-restrained fear thrumming in her bones.
They've started to celebrate on the beach again. She can see the people weaving across the pale sand like honey-bees drunk on nectar, the fires burning in homage to the great gods making the distant mountain bellow. Is it just her or does the sky look blacker this morning?
"Mother?" There's a faint rap at the door, and Maria turns to see Liesl there, clutching her silken robe around her and her braid falling across one smooth white shoulder.
"Yes, darling?"
"When will Father be home?"
"I don't know, Liesl," Maria says, sitting down on the bed and patting the space beside her. "Soon, I hope. The eruption is making me nervous."
"Me too," Liesl confides. "I had to tell the little ones that there was just a silly monster making a fuss inside it but I'm so scared Mother, Father and Rolf are on that ship and they have to sail right past the volcano to get back from Java…"
"Your father is a very sensible man and a very experienced captain," Maria reassures her. "He'll be fine."
"I'm just…"
"I know, I know. How about we go and practise our music, yes and see if Frau Schmidt will let all of you children help her to bake something?"
"Yes, Mother." Liesl doesn't sound convinced, but she gets up in a swishing of pink and long blonde hair. Maria goes back to watching the volcano out of her window.
Looking back, Maria wishes she'd had the seat at the head of the table. If she had, she would have been able to see it first, she would have been able to spare the boys and little Marta that sight. In the end she knows it wouldn't have made any difference.
They were sitting quietly and eating their luncheon when the first of the explosions shook the house, the island, the world, shattering their eardrums. Gretl, Marta and Louisa screamed, and Kurt dropped his knife and fork. Maria took a deep breath and turned to look out of the window. Another explosion, and then another, a trail of them darkening the day and sending shockwaves through her veins.
"Go into the sitting room with Frau Schmidt," she says, trying very desperately to hang on to the last vestiges of her calm. "I'll be there in a second."
They go, the littlest ones still crying, and Maria sinks to her knees, murmuring a pray over again. Hail Mary full of grace, hailMaryfullofgrace HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE and when she opens her eyes, the enormous wave is massing on the horizon and before she can do anything it curls back like a serpent and slams into the shore, metres and metres below. She hears the screams of her stepchildren from the sitting room and curses herself for sending them there, to a room with a view of the mountain, a view of the sea.
She kneels there in abject horror, staring down the hillside at where the town used to be, at the heaving, whirling brown water and all of her being is thanking God for letting Georg rent this house at the top of a hill. Georg. Georg, oh god, if he were anywhere near that mountain, he…no…no…
Dizzy whiteness spins at the edges of her vision, and the children are crashing through the door, her command to stay in the sitting room completely forgotten. They fall into her and that's where they stay, watching as their world sinks beneath the surface of the sea.
The next few days skip and drag by in her memories. As soon as the water recedes, their neighbours are descending on the house to help – the young woman alone with her husband's seven children – and discuss what on earth they do. The more adventurous souls head down into the ruins of the town to hunt for survivors, and before she thinks, Maria offers up their house as a makeshift hospital.
It fills within hours, people white and shaking, people clutching stumps where limbs used to be, people gibbering at the way the sea snatched their loved ones from between their very fingers…Maria doesn't know if this hell will ever end. She and Liesl and Louisa and Friedrich help as best they can and Frau Schmidt looks after the little ones upstairs. Maria desperately tries not to think of Georg but his face floods behind her eyes every second of every day. Is he alive? Oh God, if you have any mercy, say he's alive!
One day, possibly a week, possibly two after the waves, Maria is tending to one of the young women whom her neighbours found floating out at sea, clinging onto a piece of wreckage when she hears a scream from the hallway.
"Give me one moment," she tells the girl, and gathers up her skirts, dashing to the door. Liesl is on her knees, embracing a very, very blonde head of hair, and Maria's heart stops dead in her chest as she sees the person standing above his daughter and smiling that faint, grim smile.
"Georg," she whispers. He looks up and his face lights. She sees his mouth form her name. He looks exhausted, bruises gathering under his dirty skin and a cut on his cheek, but that doesn't stop him from catching her as she flings herself into his arms and holding her so tightly she can barely breathe. "Oh god, I thought you were dead, I thought you were…" her breath hitches on a sob. "I can't believe…oh thank God."
He rests his face in her hair, slumps into her arms. Behind her, she can hear Liesl whispering to Rolf, and the gazes of their straggling little band of rescuers and nurses. Reluctantly she pulls away and turns to face them.
"Back to work," she says, wiping the relieved tears from her cheeks and gripping Georg's hand. They disperse, and she turns back to smile at her husband, reaching up to cup one hand around his cheek. He turns his face to kiss it, and it hits her then; no matter what life chooses to throw at them, they'll always make it through.