Hands. Hands touching him, laying him down. Fingers pressing into his wrist. The scratch of a pen on paper. Murmured voices. A slight pinch in the crook of his elbow. The uncomfortable feeling of something cold flowing into his blood, conjuring the image of a dissipating spurt of blood in water.

The hands disappear, voices silence, and there is only the sound of his own breathing, soft, and the echo of the pounding of his heart, so very far away.

He drifts, drifts a long time, as if he is lying in the bottom of a canoe floating downstream. The sky black as ink overhead, speckled with shining stars, the sides of the canoe a protection from the faint breeze, the night air balmy. And there is only he, and Antoine curled up beside him, tucked in as close as he can get, sighing softly in his sleep, his delicate fingers splayed protectively over Konstin's heart. Just the rippling water, and this, and them, alone and together, and infinitely slowly so as not to wake him, Konstin takes that hand, and raises it to his lips. "I love you," he breathes, "I love you."

Hands return, pulling sheets, and the canoe fades, Antoine's warm body fades, and there is only the distant brush of cotton against his chin. Why are there so many hands? And though his eyes protest they open, the light stinging them and he blinks, an unfamiliar colourful room swimming into view. Greens, blues, yellows, oranges, all adorning the wall, and his head aches with such brightness, forces him to close his eyes again but not before catching sight of a woman hovering at his side.

"Do you want anything, Commandant Daaé?" Her voice is soft, but still it is much too loud, grating on his ears, his head pounding and he groans. Her hand is chilled against his skin, and he shivers.

Antoine. He wants Antoine. Is he here? Where is he? He is supposed to be here.

But—the nurse will not know him as Antoine. How is he supposed to ask for him again?

His thoughts are too slow, like thick soup and not the watery broth sometimes served to the men. Antoine's name, his name…

"De Chagny." Speaking makes his throat ache, and he almost whimpers with the pain lancing through his head. Too many De Chagny's. It is always better to use his rank to be certain. "Where—Comman—dant De Chagny?"

"De Chagny?" The nurse's voice is farther away than it was before. "He is in the room next door, sleeping."

Next door? So far away, and Konstin feels a pang of hollowness in his chest as he nods. The next room? Why the next room? Is there not room in this one? Why can he not see him? All he wanted was to see him.

She walks slowly through each compartment, looking in on the wounded men in each berth. Most of them are sleeping, comfortable with the morphine in their blood, though one or two of them (and she feels a check at her heart when she notices) who are not long after coming down the line, are running low fevers. She resolves to monitor them, and do what little she can. There will be no taking them off the train until they reach Paris.

She finds, as she tightens a dressing that has come loose around a leg, the man it belongs to regarding her warily through fever-bright eyes, that she cannot think of them as soldiers, not anymore. They are simply men, wounded broken men, and nothing more than that. There is no pretending here, no lying, not to herself, not now.

She is so hollow, so tired. What she would not give to lie down and sleep for a hundred years, but she has never been able to sleep on trains. The constant chugging noise is enough to keep her thoughts churning, over and over and over again in time with the motion, and her thoughts do not need any help, not now. Every limb, every fibre of her, is heavy and aching, but if she lies down she will not be able to stop herself from thinking.

(If she sleeps she will think of Edouard, dream of him, long for him. Think of how he should be on this train, travelling to Paris to recuperate. How she should be spending her hours with him, kissing his hand, and his forehead, and holding him, and murmuring to him, and he would lean his head into her shoulder, and she would smooth back his hair and force a smile for him, pretend that she is not worried though the relief would be real, the happiness at him being well enough to travel. And they would exist only in each other's arms, and nothing else would matter, nothing else. But if she lets herself think of him she will crack, and she is barely held together as it is, and she must not crack now, not when she is on her way to Paris, not when these men need her, she must not.)

There is a compartment of gassed men, damp bandages around their burnt eyes, strips of gauze protecting their blistered raw skin. She cannot change their dressings, not here. She has not the space for it, everything too cramped and confined, but she murmurs to them, cradles their delicate hands in hers, careful not to hurt them, and tries to pretend that their breathing is not laboured, that she cannot hear the rattle of fluid in their lungs, has not wiped pink froth from their lips. These men need her perhaps more than any of the others, so they know they are not alone, to try to take their fear away when the morphine can do so little for their pain.

For a long time, long stretching hours when she is expected to be sleeping but cannot sleep, she moves between the berths of these gassed men, and holds their hands, and prays with them, for them, every prayer that she can conjure up, and with their covered eyes they do not see the tears trickling down her cheeks even as she fights to keep her voice steady (it would not do to upset them). And they cough, and she trickles water between blistered lips, and she does not think, does not feel, and it is as if she exists only for these men, as if the whole world has come down to this, this compartment in this train with these berths of the gassed, rolling on ever into the darkness.

The nurse told him that Konstin is in the next room. He asked her as she drew the blankets up to his chin, and it was at once a comfort to discover that he is so close by and an aching disappointment (tinged with worry that makes his heart twist) that Konstin will not be joining him in this room. The nurse smiled at him as she slipped out, and though he smiled back at her, it only masked the questions lingering in his mind. If Konstin is in the next room, is he on the other side of this wall that the head of Antoine's bed is against, or is he against the far wall? Or perhaps he is in the other room, sharing the wall furthest away from Antoine. How to know? How to find out?

It seems so important to know, important that he be able to check in on Konstin secretly, in his own way, the nurses and orderlies oblivious. They would not understand, would only become curious. And curiosity leads to investigation, leads to discovery. And discovery now would be nothing short of scandalous, possibly even treasonous.

A message. There must be some way to send him some sort of a message.

And then it comes to him, the faint memory of Saint-Cyr, of their time as officers-in-training, when they had tiny narrow adjoining rooms. In the small hours, long after lights out, when the rest of the dormitory was sleeping, they would softly tap messages on the wall in code. Not Morse Code, that would be too obvious, and everyone in the rooms around them would be able to deduce the meaning. No. They devised their own system of tapping, one that they wrote down before ever they reached Saint-Cyr, and learned, for the sake of being prepared.

What message to tap out? Something simple, innocuous.

His initial. That would do.

Antoine sighs, and dredges up the letter K. He always used Konstin, never his given name of Erik. It was almost an extra layer of security, and K was always two quick raps. He tries it now, tap-tap, as if knocking on a door, and waits for thirty seconds, measuring them slowly in his head, before tapping again. Tap-tap.

And back comes the reply. Tap-tap-tap. Three quick raps, the letter A, and a grin spreads slowly over Antoine's face. So it is the room behind him, and Konstin's bed is against this wall. The relief that washes over him would be dizzying, if he were not already lying down.

A soft sound comes from the other side of the wall. A tired chuckle, and Antoine sighs and murmurs, twisting so that his lips are as close to the wall as can be, "Good night, Konstin."

The morning. In the morning she will be able to see him at last, will be able to kiss his hand and press her cheek against his. Her bones ache for sleep, but she cannot sleep with the thought of seeing him, a fountain of questions tumbling in her mind. How pale will he be? (Very, she suspects.) Will he be full of morphine? (Enough to keep him comfortable, she hopes.) Will he be happy to see her? (He will, she knows he will.) Will he have many bandages? (Too many.) Does he know how close he came to death? (She prays not, oh how she prays. What a dreadful thing it would be to live with, having to know that.)

(Does he know his father was watching over him? Could he feel his presence? Did Erik appear to him the way he appeared to her to tell her that Konstin would be well? She has no answers for them, and she knows she will not ask him.)

And though part of her longs to know what happened to him, longs to hear it from him how he was wounded, another part of her cannot stomach the thought of hearing how her son was wounded. It will plague her, one way or the other. The worry, the wondering. The imagined visions of it, haunting her each night, how he must have lain there in such pain, such fear. How he must have bled, that blood so precious that a drop of it must never leave his body, should never have left him.

Is it better to know or not? She cannot tell.

She sent Raoul up to bed hours ago. He had started snoring in his armchair, and she gently shook him awake and supported him up the stairs and eased him into bed. And he stroked her hair, and reached up and kissed her, and whispered, he will be home soon enough, and then we will see, he will be fine, I know he will, and she held him in her arms as he slowly went back to sleep, listening to the softness of his breath. She eased him back down, and tucked him in, then slipped away, back down to her own chair, to her abandoned knitting and the carefully preserved photographs she has spent the evening looking at.

When Konstin was seven months old, Raoul arranged an appointment with a photographer. "Consider it a gift," he said, his eyes kind, "I know you have nothing—nothing like that of Erik, so I thought you might like to have some of Konstin. Something to keep, a reminder." And she remembers the tears welling in her eyes as she hugged him, and thanked him, and a fleeting flicker of something made her kiss his cheek. He blushed scarlet, and when the day of the appointment came, she had a photograph taken of him and her and Konstin together, as well as one of her holding Konstin, and Nadir and Darius with Konstin. She would have liked to have one of him with Sorelli, but she was shortly after having the twins and in no condition for it. But if Christine has to choose a favourite from that photography session that must have cost Raoul a small fortune, it must be the one of Konstin on his own, sitting up, his eyes wide with wonder, and face framed with blond curls, almost a halo. It took so much coaxing to get him to sit still, and he is almost angelic in the portrait, perfectly innocent and adorable, and looking at the photograph now Christine feels a pang of pain in her heart.

If he could be that size again, she would cradle him so close, would do everything she could to keep him safe and innocent, make certain that he would never have to suffer a single day. He has suffered so much, too much, and tears prickle her eyes thinking of it, and she sets the photographs down lest any droplet fall on them. They are too precious to risk them being damaged in such a way. Too precious, but not half as precious as the boy in them.

He is caught half between the worlds of waking and sleeping, limbs heavy with tiredness, the knuckles of his good hand still aching from tapping out messages to Antoine on the wall, when a soft voice calling his name pulls him fully back to consciousness. "Konstin?"

His eyes flicker open, and dimly he sees a figure, a woman, settling into the chair beside his bed. A woman, a woman he knows, who knows his name. He does not know many women, and fewer who would call him Konstin. Is it Mamma? No. No, she is too young, and something about her eyes is just slightly wrong.

Then who—

It is only when he feels the soft touch of fingertips on the back of his hand that he realises it is Anja. Anja, here. And before he can say anything, before he can even smile at her, there are tears welling in his eyes because she is here, and she is safe, and he is here and he is safe, and things can only get better now, only get better, and his throat is too tight to swallow, and she is wrapping her arms around him, careful and gentle and laying her head down on his shoulder.

She does not speak, only whimpers, and through hisshirt he can feel the twisting of her lips. His little sister, his little sister so grown up and here, and she is hugging him, hugging him. A part of him did not think he would ever see her again,thought she might only be an impression lingering in his thoughts where—wherever he would end up, but she is here, and real, and hugging him, and it is too much, too much and not enough to have her here, to have her arms around him. His tears run down into her hair, and her tears are damp and warm against his neck, and for a longtime they can only hold each other, just hold each other and cry.

A/N: Fun fact: While I was struggling to name this chapter, the Traveling Wilbury's song 'End of the Line' came on, and it just felt appropriate to name the chapter after it!

There are six chapters and the epilogue of this left to go, and I'm planning to post the epilogue on Christmas Eve, so expect a bunch of updates over the next few weeks!

I hope you all enjoyed this chapter despite the angst.

Up next: Marguerite still on the train, Antoine receives visitors, and Christine is anxious but relieved.