Tomorrow
"We did not fight a conventional war; we fought a dirty war, one without uniforms, POW camps or rules laid down by the Geneva Convention. We slept under a starry sky at night…we lived in fear of being discovered by the enemy, of Nazi reprisals among our population and close family, and of betrayal within our own ranks." - unidentified Italian partisan soldier, WWII
As far back as he could remember, Amitore had thought of life as a wheel.
You were born into a cold, crowded world, growing up fighting for your land, your life, your sanity. Somewhere in the middle you married, gave birth to children, toiled at the land, scraped and saved. And eventually, old and tired, you died, body lowered into the earth you'd wept and bled for, as your children took their turn at the wheel. Nothing interrupted the cycle.
The war changed that concept. War had no respect for the young, the fragile, the weak. Hardened battle veterans and young recruits alike, it killed indiscriminately, leaving a bloody trail in it's wake. It stole all that was left of his home and family, leaving him with only one thing, Elena. She was all he had, and he could be content with nothing else. And then the wheel gave one final turn, handing him the short straw, the fall of the lot, sending him to murder a man and die himself.
He'd accepted it without protest, as he had everything he'd gone through. There was some resentment toward the American, he supposed, some flicker of anger that stirred within him when he saw Elena tenderly caring for him, attempting to patch his wounds with their meager supplies. Killing him seemed simple, another mission in the midst of a war in which he'd killed so many without even thinking twice about it. And dying...he'd forgotten how to live long ago.
But those hours within the cell, with the man lying there, half out of his mind with fever yet still trying to help him, believing him a prisoner as well, had shaken him to the core, left him questioning everything he'd believed in.
For the first time he questioned the senseless waste of lives, the slaughter that they commit every day. The Germans he can attempt to rationalize. They have no way of keeping prisoners, of feeding or holding them. A bullet is easier, one less enemy who will later slit your throat.
But to throw away their own lives, to kill an American, a man fighting for the same cause, is wrong. He can't justify what he almost did, the guilt pressing down on him like a giant weight suspended over his shoulders, threatening to crush him to death.
The American - D'Angelo, he amended -had been badly wounded after all. He'd seen the shrapnel fragments embedded in his back, arm, and leg, observed the agony etched into the man's face. Even as the German doctor prodded the wounds and threatened him with amputation as the infection spread, he had said nothing, not given anything away. And in the throes of his delirium, as he begged for morphine, he had never once cried out to the Germans. Always, his eyes were on Amitore, as if the partisan could pull the drug out of thin air.
There was an open decency in D'Angelo that he'd begun to doubt the existence of in his fellow human beings. Even suffering as he was, the soldier had dragged himself to Amitore, managing to get water down him before falling limply beside him, too weak to continue.
Amitore had had the moments between the explosion and when the soldiers and the partisans broke down the cell door to think, to consider as he knelt beside the wounded man, watching the faint rising and falling of his chest, the only movement marking the man as alive. He'd watched it, as if looking could urge it to continue, to keep up it's ragged rhythm until his rescuers came. For the first time Amitore felt a stirring of compassion within him, a desire to help instead of harm, to repair some of the hurt in his country instead of killing more people. He wanted this man to live.
And then the door had opened and Elena had been there, throwing arms around him, and he was alive, feeling her in his arms, feeling death walk away from him.
They had left that cell together, he running with Elena beside him, D'Angelo carried on a soldier's back, limp and seemingly lifeless. He'd held out little hope for the man's chances at first, but the medic's cautiously confident expression and the worry on the soldiers' faces infused him with a trace of belief that the private would recover. If a man had friends willing to risk so much for the possiblity of rescuing one man, surely the man couldn't simply die so shortly afterwards, without knowing that they'd not abandoned him, that they'd been willing to die to get him out. Whatever strength of will that had kept him alive that night in the darkness before they found him, whatever had carried him this far, could not fail him now.
His stomach had twisted as he watched them lift and load the man into the jeep. D'Angelo was still unconscious, fragile threads of his mind breaking under the weight of the agony, head falling painfully forward. They paused to tuck the blankets around him to cushion the wounded limbs, before driving toward the field hospital.
All the time they traveled and even as the medics carried the stretcher into the tent that served as an operating room, D'Angelo made no sound, lost somewhere within the suffering. Amitore followed behind the squad, watching silently with them as the doctor cut away the private's clothes and the medics lifted him onto the operating table.
He waited outside the tent while the doctor worked, digging out the shrapnel, and attempting to halt the spreading infection. Finally they carried him out and the squad came quietly inside, heads bowed as they waited for the verdict, the sentence of death or the whisper of life to come from the doctor's lips.
It's later when Captain Benedict comes out to light a cigarette and pauses to tell him that the soldier is alive, that he'll keep the arm and leg, and he'll heal in time. He'll bear scars to his dying day, but he'll be whole.
Amitore enters the hospital tent, sharp eyes quickly finding the cot to his right. The soldier looks strangely smaller beneath the blanket, arm and leg wrapped in bandages, more dressings wrapped around his chest to protect the wounds in his back. He notes the man's color has improved, eyes following the IVs trailing to his arm, one feeding plasma, the other morphine that has finally taken the lines of pain from the soldier's face.
Amitore steps closer and the man opens his eyes slowly, the black flickering across him for a long second before recognition dawns and he gives a weak and somewhat drugged smile.
He reaches into his pocket and withdraws the noose, laying it wordlessly on the cot, fingers outstretched, resting on the cold wire, feeling the apathy of it, the makeshift weapon that he nearly stole this man's life with. He lifts his head, waiting for the anger to fill the eyes watching him.
It takes a moment for D'Angelo to realize the significance of the object beside him.
"That close?" His voice is just above a hoarse whisper, tone unreadable.
"I heard the explosion. It stopped me." He won't say he was inches from the man's throat, scant seconds away from choking the life out of him, a mere movement from effortlessly ripping away the weak hand that reached up to stop him.
There's silence between them and finally D'Angelo brings his good hand over and fingers the wire.
"I remember the water." He says quietly. "During the pain."
"You gave me water when they first brought me in." Amitore drops his eyes back to the noose. "It was the first kindness I had been shown since the war began. I but repaid it." His head lifts, chin firm. "I would not have taken pleasure in the killing."
He finds no bitterness in the dark eyes, no hatred, only a strange understanding, a knowing that when the Germans returned they would have found not one but two bodies, the wounded man strangled, the other having calmly and quietly hung the noose from the ceiling, wrapped it around his own neck, and stepped off the edge of the cot.
"Its over, then. Forgotten."
He extends his hand, fingers faintly trembling. Amitore studies the offered hand before accepting it, nod stiff and firm. They will never meet again but he feels that he has somehow found a lifelong friend in this stranger, this American soldier. With a forgiving look D'Angelo has taken away all the pain within him, set him free, and given him a new life.
He watches as the man's eyes close, his body slipping into peaceful and healing sleep. He stares down at the noose for only a moment before dropping it to the ground and crushing it beneath his boots. The wire snaps.
He shoulders his gun and starts out of the hospital.
He stops at the flap of the tent and looks back at the man, alive, resting now, and the noose lying broken on the floor beside his cot. He looks down at his hands, strong and firm, stained with the blood of past killings, and finds them clean, as if a single forgiveness has washed away all the rest. His step is lighter, shoulders unburdened for the first time since the war began, since everyone and everything but Elena was taken away from him.
She's waiting outside the tent, waiting for him, hand outstretched, reaching. He places his hand around her's, fingers fitting together, entwining, strong, unbreakable. Elena smiles at him, a promise, a vow written in her eyes. No matter what happens and where they are tomorrow she'll stand by him.
He doesn't know how the war will end, whether the soldier inside will survive it, whether he or Elena will be alive to see it end. But for the first time it no longer haunts him. He feels alive and free, with the forgiveness draped across his shoulders, lifting up some of the weight of the weapon, and her love curled around his arm. For the first time he will face tomorrow without fear.
The first rays of dawn creep over the horizon, an Italian sunrise brushing the land, washing away the day before as it bathes the hills in gold. It's a fresh day, promising hope, and he sees it with new and open eyes.
They walk into the morning together.