Authors Note/Disclaimer: I only own these imaginings of the characters and hold no rights to the canon or the way you see them. Reviews are massively appreciated but not pressured out of you, reader. Thanks for taking the time to read!
Pale puny soldiers of the pen,
Absorbed in this your inky strife,
Act as of old, when men were men,
England herself and life yet life. – Charles Sorley (1912).
Jean Prouvaire is nineteen. He doesn't even need to provide evidence, they just call him up. England's gone to war they say, crackling over the phone wire as though they're already across the sea dodging bullets. He shrugs, even though they can't see him, almost muttering that it's none of his business and can't they tell by his surname that he's French before he remembers. France is fighting too. France is the one being invaded, so he squares skinny shoulders and tells them that he'll be at the base at zero six hundred hours the next morning. Then he sits, covers his drawn face with a thin hand, and wonders how the fuck he's supposed to fight an entire country when he's never even been in a fist fight. Grandmother, of course, takes it badly. All tears and telling him he's too young, why didn't he lie? He just runs a hand through unfashionably long hair, blinking at his knees, clad in expensive white linen trousers.
"I'll need Grandpa's shaving set. There's a regulation for our hair." And then, pulling his hand from her grip, he makes his way slowly up the rickety cottage stairs to flop boneless and terrified into bed. All his life he's lived here, remnants of the boy he was stuck to the walls. A broken pottery vase sitting on the windowsill with half a dozen paper flowers sticking at odd angles from it, a pile of books next to that which looks like it might either fall off or blow away if he opens the sash pane. A water stain on the wall from when a five year old him got frustrated with trying to paint the sprawling valley view and threw the jam jars holding his brushes, still tinged green at the edges. As he rolls he catches sight of the handmade dream catcher his grandmother had given him at Christmas the previous year, and has to close his eyes to preserve the memory. Sometime soon there won't be any of this, because even then he knows he's not coming home. Not for a while, at least, certainly not for Christmas. He doesn't allow himself to dwell on what Grandmother will do by herself, Grandpa dead for years, doesn't like to think of her bent over her stitching or a book, her eyesight poor in the half light with no one to read to her. She'll prick her fingers, and with that realisation he feels tears start to well in his eyes. He doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to go at all. But he has to, to protect the country they both call home now, and the country his ancestors called home. He's never been to France himself, Grandmother having run away to marry a gypsy when she was a teenager, but lapped up the stories of Paris and the villages around it, imagined himself in a tiny apartment in Montmartre, surrounded by books and artists such as himself. He supposes that'll never happen now. Instead of an apartment it's a tent, a dugout, and rather than artists quoting poetry it's a dozen bloodstained soldiers swearing and spitting. So instead of crying, of wailing like an infant, he sets his jaw and grinds his teeth together, sitting back up when he hears the elderly lady in the bathroom.
It takes ten minutes for her to snip his hair back into a shorter cut, easily styled up into a soft peak with the help of a fingerful of beeswax. A pile of hair is gathered at his feet, and staring at his face in the mirror he hardly recognises himself. Has he always had freckles? Are his cheekbones honestly that high and feline? When did his ears start to stick out? The reflection swims in front of him as he ducks his head, the back of his neck freezing, and buries his face in his hands. After all the denial of tears, here they are. The scissors make the lightest of clattering noises in the sink as his grandmother drops them, one hand on the back of his head and the other tucking under his chin to draw him close against the softness of her chest. Neither of them say a word, not even when the gas lamp starts to flicker, Jeans arms coming up to loop around her shuddering torso. The silence says everything, he knows that by the time she wakes in the morning he'll be long gone.
"Do you have your boots?"
"Yes, Granny." She hovers over him, liver spotted hands fluttering over thick woollen jumpers and thin vests he's had since he turned sixteen, tears still drying on her cheeks as she does the last thing she can do for the boy who's lived with her his whole life. He can see it in her face – she too thinks that it will end far away from her, far away from home, but-. "You do know I'll be coming home every chance I get? It'll be over by New Years." Said quietly, cheerfully, for both their benefit. It's not fooling either of them but it draws a smile from her.
"That had best be a promise, my lad."
"Of course."
The sun's not even up when he shoulders his pack, already in a uniform picked up from the village the previous day, a kiss pressed to his hand and sent into the air towards her bedroom window and body swinging upwards into the army truck as it trundles past. The cottage disappears over the hill before the chill of fear settles in his stomach.