31 May 2020
Prompt: Hiding an Injury
Character/Pairing: Théo Barbot
Rating: T / PG-13 / Teen
Notes: DLM AU. Tried to cover how most of Mendeleiev's group died. I think Fred was the only one I missed? That'll have to be its own thing, maybe a little Reaper History with each chapter as the team's full backstory. AFTER OTHER THINGS ARE DONE.
Théo Barbot was twenty years old when the archduke was shot and the world went to hell. Three months past his birthday he left his small flat behind, what would have been the greatest sculpture of his life left half-finished under a sheet, and was shipped out to the front line. He had done surprisingly well in the war, at least at first. For someone who had always abhorred violence and fighting. He was an artist, after all. His soul was tortured enough without the bloodshed.
The law ordered he serve three years, which the option to reenlist at the end. They called it an option, at least, but times were getting desperate and France needed men. He'd heard tell of plenty of men who hadn't been gifted a choice in the matter at the end of those three years.
He was twenty-three with two months to freedom when the sickness struck. The trenches were riddled with their fair share of diseases, but this was something new. Something worse. Something that started taking down man after man, his comrades, his friends, then the nurses that cared for them. Word spread like wildfire: one hundred and fifty thousand men sent back from the front lines, all sick and dying. Rumors of consumption, every cough echoing in the night and making him jump.
But somehow…he stuck it out. Somehow he dodged the bullet – at least that one. Ironic that it was an actual bullet that sent him home. Ironic that he ended up catching the consumption from an old buddy who sought him out when news of his return hit town. He had been so glad to be home, so glad to be alive, so glad to see an old friend…he never thought anything about grabbing that drink when Marc asked him out. Was too drunk to think anything when Mark coughed into a handkerchief at the end of the night, ferreting the blood-stained cloth away before Théo's glassy eyes could notice.
It set in quick enough. By the time he learned of Marc's death, he was close enough to it himself.
And still his masterpiece was unfinished. His hands were too weak to hold his tools. The coughing kept him up late into the night, the disease tapping what little remained of his strength during the day.
"It's a shame you can't finish her," his old teacher commented the day he came to view the piece. "She would have been beautiful."
"She still will be," Théo said stubbornly, pursing his lips and swallowing back the cough. His head was swimming, and he sat down on a stool until the dizzy spell passed. "I…I will recover. I am young and hale. I will beat this."
"Many better off than you haven't," his teacher said, laying a hand on his shoulder. Théo shivered as his hand brushed down his arm, a chill like death stealing over him.
"I must finish her," he said stubbornly. "She is…she can't…I…"
And then the coughing hit, and then he was toppling from the stool, and then his head was hitting the table with his tools, and then he was hitting the ground, and the tools were falling, and then…
He could breathe easier than he had in months as he stood to the side of the statue, staring at his still body. His teacher was gone, but the dark-haired woman he had come with had returned from his balcony, where she'd been enjoying a cigarette. She frowned at the statue, the cigarette still in her mouth. He had asked her to step outside, afraid the burning would spark with some of the open chemicals he used. It seemed that no longer mattered.
"I don't see it," she said, shrugging as she looked at the statue. "But I was never one for artists."
Théo Barbot was twenty-three when he died in 1917, and he was never sure if it was the consumption or the point chisel through the eye that got him in the end.