A/N: World War I, I feel, is always very saddening. Sure, everyone will go on about World War II and how destructive it was and they'll be right. World War II was indeed very destructive. But I will always feel like World War I will always be the sadder, just because of the sheer uselessness of the trench warfare and the stalemate on the Western Front and Eastern Front—hell, it toppled Russia's autocratic tsarist government and installed Communism in its place. (/history geek)
But … you know what, I really don't know. World War I somehow speaks to me more than its antecedant, and so with that, I present you "Soldier's Poem," inspired by the Muse song of the same name.
Soldier's Poem – Muse
She remembered very clearly the day they wheeled him in the stretcher.
The year was 1916. It had been over two years since the Great War had started. She was working as a nurse in the war hospitals.
And then they brought him in.
He was nested in a bed of white sheets, his uniform splattered in dark splotches of red.
Red blood.
Blood staining his sheets and whatever bandages were wrapped around him, blood staining his dark uniform, blood staining his skin in ugly brownish crusts.
But the rest of him was very pale like the sheets in which he lay, from his thin, bony face to his cropped short hair so pale that it didn't seem natural. It was like mercury, The soldier's uniform he wore clung to him like mere skin on a frame, and the delicate curve of his lashes rested over his cheeks.
Even then, to her, a simple girl from Hungary who liberated herself from the confines of her simple village to see the world, he was beautiful. She had not seen something—someone—as he was in her short month and a half at the German war hospital. Working here as a nurse, she had seen too many things that she ought not to. The spoils of war were not something proper women were allowed to dwell upon.
But here… the pale broken form of his body reminded her vaguely of a corpse, of a beautiful prince doomed to die in a fairy tale, exquisite in the white, deathly slumber. He was beyond human.
And she?
She was just a girl.
xx
She had to work up her courage to talk to him.
It shouldn't have been hard. She only had to force her legs to move to his bed, and then open her mouth and say Guten Tag.
Easy. On paper.
But when she tried, she would see his violet eyes, tinted red like he was some kind of vampire or a supernatural creature. He was untouchable to her, divine, even. Her heartbeat grew faster whenever she even walked by his bed to check on him, and then she would have to place her stethoscope on his chest to check his heartbeat, and rebandage the wound in his stomach and feel his face for any fever… it wasn't supposed to be sexual in any way, but her palms always grew hot and slippery when her fingers brushed his pale skin. She fumbled with her equpiment too many times when she was near him. It was ridiculous. She knew it.
That was the first thing he said to her.
"You know," his low voice murmured. "You're quite ridiculous."
She blinked, surprised, at him and couldn't speak for a moment. She didn't know what to say.
"I-I'm sorry," she managed, feeling very flustered.
The smile she got in response most beautiful, most heartwrenching smile she had ever seen.
xx
She often went back to talk to him after that day. They spoke German, but often he would use words that she didn't know, and he would have to go to long-winded explanations of what he was trying to say. Some days he would quote German literature that they both knew, and other days he would quote the Roman classics of Vergil and Horace and others that she knew not the names of. He talked of history and science and life and philosophy and everything that she could possibly imagine.
She learned that he was from Berlin, growing up in the city streets as a simple school boy with a little brother named Ludwig. He was proud to be Prussian, proud to be fighting for his country, proud to be a soldier. But above all, he was proud to be an older brother.
He talked about Ludwig constantly—how he wore lederhosen and didn't drink beer until he was older and how he was much too serious and how he never loosened up. He told stories of how they grew up in the streets of Berlin to a happy, if not too poor, family. They would rise every day with the sun and play soccer with the boys in the streets—Ludwig was always the goalie, he would add—and go to school and go to the country and swim in the creek and care for his pet chick that he found wounded in the streets one day as a boy.
Even when he wasn't talking, she learned much about him. She learned how he murmured the names of his mother and father and brother in his sleep, how he softened when he dreamed of his childhood, how he looked off into the window of the hospital with a thoughtful look on his face, how when he smiled one corner of his mouth would rise up a little higher than the other. She found himself lost in him, throwing all her other cares away in his violet eyes…
"There's no one to blame for this anymore," he whispered one day. "I would lay my life down for you."
She didn't know where it came from. She didn't care.
That was the first day she held his hand, his long fingers wrapped in her palms.
She would have held it forever.
xx
She was in love with him.
She had set out from Hungary, looking for freedom, looking to help with the war effort.
She hadn't found it. The life of a war nurse was tiring, tedious, and she didn't want this life.
Only he made it better, the wounded, platinum-haired soldier from Prussia with a soul of stories.
Only he brightened this war.
xx
"All of it, the guns, the machines, the gas, it's wrong," he said one day, eyes on the ceiling. "It's all wrong."
She only sat there, holding his thin fragile hand in hers. It was so pale and lifeless that she wanted to cry. He didn't seem to notice it, resting on the white sheets and pillows, but he was growing weaker every day, and his voice seemed to get softer every time she talked to him, like his vocal cords were slowly giving out.
"Tell me," he continued. "What justice is in this? The killing, the destruction. What is this for?"
"I… don't know," she faltered.
"Then," he said, turning his eyes onto hers, "what are you doing here?"
"To be free," she said, and immediately regretted it; she had never admitted that thought to anyone, let alone someone she hardly knew—but she loved him.
"Do you think you deserve it?" he asked her. "Your freedom, that is?"
She was taken aback. She didn't know.
He sighed slightly, and turned his gaze back on the ceiling. "It's a shame, really… we're all dying anyway…"
"No!" she insisted. "No, you're not, you'll—you'll get better and then you'll be fine—"
"The world doesn't work like that, Prinzessin," he said, and she blinked at him in surprise. Had he just called her a princess?
"I won't be around for much longer. We both know that," he said.
It was true. The life seemed to be leaving him with every breath he took, escaping with the air in his lungs. She clung to his hand a mere fraction tighter, for fear that his hand would crack under her grip and that he would be gone…
"No," she whispered thickly. "Don't leave me, please, I need you…"
"There's no justice in the world," he said softly, with an edge of sadness, lifting his other hand to cover hers. "There never was."
xx
The next morning he was not there.
His bed was empty.
Her feet took her quickly to where the other nurses stood, preparing bandages and other odd medical things like that. She almost didn't care what they were doing anymore.
"Where is he?" she begged the other nurses. Her voice broke slightly, and she willed herself not to cry; she nearly knew the answer, but she didn't want to hear it, she didn't ever want to hear it…
"He's passed away, love," said one of them. "Gone."
It sounded so simple, put like that. Passed away. Like he had to go on to another place, like heaven with eternal sun and eternal games of soccer and feast. Like he'd just gotten out of bed and walked there, in his atrocious condition.
She would never reach that place. Not without him. All that she knew in that moment was that the sun was gone, the only things that covered the sky were grief and despair and love and pain. Dear God, she loved him. She loved him so much but he was gone and he wasn't coming back.
He was gone. He was dead.
The man with hair like silver and eyes like garnets and smile like the sun would never talk to her in that raspy voice, never laugh obnoxiously again, never allow her to hold his hand, never look at her again with those eyes. He would never get better and they would never have run away to Switzerland, like they'd wanted to and they would never have gotten married and had kids and died together. God, how she wanted him back so badly. She wanted to reach out and take his hand and pull him back to her like she was taking candy from off a store shelf to make it hers… She wanted it back so much. Her chest throbbed at the idea.
She hadn't known that she'd started crying until someone gave her a handkerchief, which she covered her face with.
"There, there," they murmured soothingly, rubbing her shaking shoulders.
"He's… gone," she said. "Gone."
"No, wait," said one of them—the one who had said he was gone. The simple girl from Hungary looked up, tears streaming from her green eyes down her face.
"He left something in his hand," said the first nurse. "A piece of paper with your name on it."
"What… what did it say?" she asked, trembling with anticipation.
"Ich liebe dich."
Her heart expanded with the words, loaded with a meaning that none of the nurses understood. The pain was gone and yet at the same time all the more intense, but her heart beat with new resolve. She closed her eyes and bit her lip, the words echoing in his familiar scratchy voice again and again in her mind, cherishing them, holding them near forever.
Ich liebe dich.
Ich liebe dich auch.
Prinzessin = princess
Ich liebe dich = I love you
Ich liebe dich auch = I love you too
Extra A/N: Btw, I am always happy to take song requests, so if you guys are tired of reading depressing PruHun angst/drama/whatever, then feel free to review and give me a song :) It'll be in the chapter after next, since I really want to do a Franz Ferdinand song next—asdf I am OBSESSED with them.
But yeah. SONG REQUESTS, PLEASE! :D FOR SAKE OF KEEPING THIS THING UP!
