AN: Tiny tag for "Carentan".
Spoilers: Carentan, Normandy
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Rating: Teen
Characters: Will Zimmerman, Helen Magnus
Summary: There's a rug on the floor that Helen never looks at. More than that, she never steps on it either. It takes him a hundred days to notice. He has a few other things on his mind.
Ghosts
There's a rug on the floor that Helen never looks at. More than that, she never steps on it either. It takes him a hundred days to notice. He has a few other things on his mind.
Something happened in this bunker. He can feel it in the air, the way you're not supposed to feel anything when you're a normal human being, but the way the Sanctuary teaches you to look for anyway.
So he rolls up the rug.
There's a dark stain there, and when Josie comes in, she apologizes for it. That's why they put down the rug. They scrubbed and scrubbed, but they couldn't get it out. It's been there since the war, since the day the beaches were stormed. It's almost like there's something in the stone that keeps it from leaving the room.
He's sitting in a chair, fiddling with some tubes and wires and a dial he thinks might have come from the same toaster she cannibalized earlier, and she's sitting across from him, a table strewn with the detritus of a hundred small gadgets between them. She looks up, and he catches her eye and smiles, because he's starting to think she doesn't smile enough anymore.
She freezes, and there's something in her face he recognizes even if he still can't name it. Deliberately, she slides her chair across the cold cement floor, legs scraping under the weight, until she's not across from him anymore.
There are always invisible people in here with them.
The next day, all the furniture has been moved. She tells him it's about light and something about energy conservation, but he can't help noticing that the chair he sat in yesterday isn't across from anything anymore, and the tubes and dials have all be separated neatly into separate boxes. He doesn't ask. He's not sure he wants the answer.
"It was more than just a fire elemental, wasn't it?"
"There's always more, Will."
"What happened in that bunker?"
"I don't know, not all of it. There was a lot James wouldn't tell me."
That's a lie, he knows. James not telling her something was probably as good as shouting it from the rooftops, but he's not going to press.
"My grandfather was here that day, you know," he says instead. "He died near the coast. I wonder if he saw you."
"It's a small world, Will," she says, and he can feel it humming all around him. "Anything's possible."
That's probably true.
finis
Gravity_Not_Included, June 7, 2011