A/N: That I've had a hard day is just a contributing factor to the angst in this truth is, I've just read a lot about the Spanish Civil War by this point.

Day 4: Historical (Human AU)

Warnings: mentioned character death of minor characters.

Rain was seldom an alternative to gunfire. In Antonio's experience, it was usually just a blanket; one sound over another. Night had been swallowed up by the massive black clouds. They thundered, Antonio shivered. Just another evening in the theatre of war. He wondered why they called it that. A theatre. As though it was some grand performance for an audience's entertainment.

He and a comrade had set out on his company's orders to find a structure, any structure, in this case, an abandoned shed made from stone and wood. These were often good for food, shelter, or even make-shift infirmaries, but usually one could find supplies like nails and iron or once even grain*. Antonio and his comrade had been discovered by a Fascist sentry before they could get close to the shed. In the crossfire, the comrade was killed and Antonio had escaped to the woods.

He'd returned after dark, when the rain made him hard to spot, and broke into the shed, which was empty and mercifully dry. If he could wait the night here, he'd probably survive. Unless the cold or the hunger killed him first. Antonio had no food and no way to find any in this weather. He was soaked and shivering, sitting on the floor with his chin to his knees. On the bright side, at least, he felt a lot cleaner than he had in the last month.

The shed door opened with a loud creak. Antonio felt a scream brewing at the back of his throat, but the soldier in him told him to shut up. He went for his rifle instead. It wasn't the best: a German Mauser 1869. A little over forty years old. The Republicans had few supplies, and those they had were antiquated. But he could still fire a close-range shot.

The man who entered was swaying on his feet, which made Antonio pause. Mercy. It was a habit he was trying to lose. The intruder seemed not to have noticed Antonio, sitting in the dark, because he staggered deeper into the shed and slumped against a wall. Antonio could smell mud, and blood.

Was he–was the comrade alive? He couldn't be! He'd been shot through the chest. But was there a possibility that this man was on Antonio's side? Perhaps the company had sent someone to look for them.

Antonio heard shuffling, and a moment later, the man had lit a cigarette. The small flame illuminated his face. Antonio did not recognise it. The light, unfortunately, blew his cover.

"Cazzo!" The man jumped for his rifle, dropping the cigarette in the process, but Antonio reacted first, on his feet and pointing his Mauser in the intruder's face.

"Drop the weapon," Antonio ordered in Spanish. "Do you understand me? Fascist bastard, drop your weapon."

The intruder, who was obviously Italian, obviously a Nationalist, and obviously an enemy, was also obviously injured. His movements were sluggish and clumsy. Still sitting, he set his rifle down carelessly, and pushed it aside.

"You understand Spanish."

"Of course I fucking do," the Italian retorted. "Living in this shithole country for god knows how long now! How could I not?"

"You're fluent," Antonio mused again. "Are you a translator?"

The man was silent.

"So you are."

"I dropped my last cigarette because of you." They were only silhouettes to each other. The night was too dark, too rainy. Antonio's eyes had adjusted to the lack of light, and his hearing had sharpened over the course of the war.

Why was he doing this? Why wasn't he just making the kill? Antonio lowered his rifle and pulled out from his coat pocket a tinder-lighter.* It had a small candle fixed to it. From the tiny flame, he could see the Italian's features. A sharp jaw, slating nose, intense, angry eyes. And youth. The Fascist was just a boy. "How…how old are you?" Antonio moved the candle so he could see the rest of his body. Something dark and sticky oozed out of his shirt. Someone had shot him.

"None of your fucking business." The Italian watched his tinder-lighter with a kind of fury mixed with envy. "Find my cigarette, asshole."

"No need to get abusive," Antonio said curtly. For emphasis, he held the barrel of his rifle tighter. He understood, though. Cigarettes were rare and valuable. A luxury. There was always a demand for them.

He found the cigarette on the floor by his feet. Antonio ignited it with the tinder-lighter and took a long, slow, greedy drag. Watching this, the Italian moved to get up, swearing loudly in his own language. "Che palle! Stronzo! Give it here!"

"If you move so much, you'll aggravate your injury."

"FUCK you."

Antonio picked up the Fascist's rifle, just to be safe, and walked off with it, leaving it on the other end of the shed. The Italian screamed obscenities the whole time, but didn't seem capable of actually doing anything.

"Shut up!" Antonio turned and barked. "Do you want to make a deal with me, or should I just kill you now?"

The Italian spat. "I don't make deals with Republicans."

"You don't really have much of a choice here." Antonio was looking at the boy's injury. "I'm not a doctor but I know a few tricks to stop the bleeding. I have some first-aid with me, too. I can stitch it."

The candle was melting fast. Antonio dearly wanted to preserve it. Candles were hard to come by these days. The Italian was watching him, hard eyes giving away nothing. "And what do you want in return?"

"I don't know. What do you have?"

"Food."

Antonio lowered the tinder-lighter.

"I-I have food." The Italian shifted and cringed from the pain. "It's not much…some biscuits I scrounged around for. I can share it with you."

"Fine." Antonio went back over to him and gave him the tinder-lighter. He kept the cigarette, though. "Hold this and hold still." Patting his coat pockets for needle and thread, he asked, "What's your name?"

"Why should I tell you?"

"We'll be stuck here a while, judging from this rain."

The boy took almost a minute to answer. "Lovino." He spoke the word out like he was admitting a deep vulnerability. "Lovino Vargas."

"My name is Antonio Fernandez Carriedo. I'm twenty-one." He was looking at Lovino with almost eager curiosity.

"I'm eighteen." Lovino looked away.

"Oh. Older than I expected."

"What did you expect, bastard?"

"Sixteen. Fifteen. You have young eyes." Antonio unbuttoned the man's shirt and handed him a rolled-up kerchief. "Bite on this."

It was always excruciating to stitch someone up. The patient was trying not to scream and run, and Antonio was trying not to burst into tears. He worked very hard to be tough in the face of a problem, but war was scary, and pain was evil, and he didn't want to cause anyone pain.

Lovino held still like a rock, making not a sound. He would wince and flinch, but at least he didn't thrash.

"Lucky it was just a graze," Antonio said after it was all over, just to lighten the mood. He wiped his brow and sat back on his legs, waiting for Lovino to collect his wits. "Who shot you?"

"T-there's a," Lovino replied breathlessly after taking the kerchief out of his mouth, "a battle going on outside. Or there was."

"Are you a deserter, then?"

"I'm not a coward," Lovino snarled once more. "We were ordered to retreat because of the rain. I was separated from my company."

Antonio put his palm out. "You said you would share food."

With a hand trembling from the pain and shock, Lovino pulled out a packet of biscuits from his coat pocket. There were only six. He split them evenly between the two. Antonio blew out the candle, which had fallen to half its height, and put the tinder lighter back in his pocket.

Both ate slowly because food lasted longer that way, and the stomach could be tricked into thinking it wasn't really hungry. Antonio, wanting to glean as much as he could from this unlikely encounter, ventured, "So…you said you're a translator?"

"You assumed," Lovino replied in a clipped tone.

"You speak Spanish beautifully." Antonio urged him on with an added, "Me? I'm just a simple soldier."

"Oh, bullshit. You're not a medic but you fixed me up just fine."

"I just have battlefield experience."

"No kidding. You're a doctor."

Antonio was silent, only taking drags from the stolen cigarette. Before the war…"I was a medical student. Before the war." His tone gained an edge. "A war that you started."

"Yes, I personally came to Spain with the singleminded goal of plunging the whole country into civil war." Lovino scoffed. "Bastard. Don't you think I have better things to do? It's not my business if the men on top want to fight. I'm just a soldier here. No-one will even remember me when I die in Spain." Words came tumbling out of him now, his tone rather bland, matter-of-fact, but stemming from a place of real anger and despair. "My grandfather died alone while my brother Feliciano and I were at war. Did we get to bury him? Shit no. Feliciano took a bullet to the back of the head in Barcelona. Did I mourn? Shit no. You think this is all about you, and your tragedies? Get out of here. It's bigger than you, it's bigger than me, it's bigger than any of us."

"You fight for Fascists who sent you and your brother off to die in a strange land."

"The Fascists didn't kill my brother," Lovino sneered. "Republicans did."

"The Fascists killed mine."

"Then we're square."

They lapsed into uneasy silence, until Lovino broke it once more. "I don't think us minor players have much choice in the events that happen around us."

Antonio sat back against the wall with Lovino, to get more comfortable. He had a point. They were born and raised in different narratives. Those narratives were larger than them. They could gripe and complain all they wanted, but the overarching story that was history never did change.

Could small players affect change, though? In small ways? After all, Antonio could have killed Lovino on sight. He didn't. Didn't that somehow…defy the narrative?

Lovino pulled out a water bottle from where it dangled on his belt. Antonio wanted to gasp. Fascist water bottles were a prized commodity, far better than their Republican counterparts.

"Sip?" to Antonio's surprise, Lovino was offering him first.

Antonio took the cigarette out of his mouth and gave it back to Lovino. A truce, of sorts.

They didn't talk much. Antonio had a feeling that if they did–if he actually got to know the other man, he wouldn't be able to return to the violence tomorrow. On the other side were a bunch of boys dying for madmen they had no choice but to fight for. He knew how party memberships worked in places like Italy and Germany. He knew that membership kept families safe from the state. It wasn't much different here, where the group you belonged to outlined your loyalty and your humanity for all the world to see. These were the rules of the story, after all.

Antonio didn't know what came first: sleep or sunshine. But suddenly it was morning, the sky was clear, and there was a cough in his throat from sitting in soaking clothes. The moment of peace gave way to instant panic: he'd dropped his guard around the enemy, now surely Lovino Vargas had gone to get reinforcements, he was going to be killed–

But Lovino was sitting across the room. He'd moved during the course of the night, his eyes vacant. He stared at the floor. By morning Antonio noticed how the mud on his boots was the same colour of his hair, how scratched up and banged up and war-worn he was. Antonio knew he looked no different.

"Thanks for yesterday," Lovino muttered in a monotone, not meeting Antonio's eyes. "For the stitches, I mean."

"Uh…it really was no problem."

"Though fuck you, because I wasted my last match on that cigarette, which you finished most of."

Impulse was stupid, and Antonio was stupider. He dug into his coat and pulled out the tinder-lighter. "You can keep this, if you want."

They watched each other from across the floor. "Why didn't you just shoot me?"

Antonio swallowed. "I don't know."

Lovino got to his feet, slowly, frowning in pain. He walked over to Antonio and took the tinder-lighter. In return, he placed the Fascist water bottle in Antonio's hands. "You should have just killed me."

"Why?"

Lovino moved next to the rifles that were just out of Antonio's reach.

Antonio widened his eyes, a part of him shocked, hurt at the betrayal. Enemies did what enemies had to do.

But Lovino only picked up his rifle and swung it on his shoulder. "Because now we might meet on the battlefield again, and I'll have to kill you." He blinked at Antonio. "And I don't want to kill you."

With that he was gone, out of the shed and into the sunshine, returning both of them to their own stories, to the narratives that would kill them before the war was over.

A/N: Yeah, they both die eventually, because this is war, and war is cruel. Thanks for reading!

*I don't remember where I read it (I think it was in Homage to Catalonia) but I know for a fact that structures and buildings were valuable for shelter and resources.

*tinder-lighters are sort of old-fashioned lighters. They're a little complicated, actually, but there are YouTube videos on how to use them. According to Homage to Catalonia, most, if not all, Republican soldiers had them.