Somewhere in Berlin, 1932

Gilbert found them in January. It was bitterly cold in Berlin, and he was so newly eighteen that he still said he was seventeen when people asked. He found them when the brownshirts caught a man his Papa had known, and the blood spattered bright and gleaming across the street like the jewels Gilbert's mother had once had before she'd had to sell them. He could taste it, the metal in his throat like the bullet shells he dug up from his garden.

After the brownshirts were gone, people melted out of the shadows and hauled the man up. One of them looked up and stared right at Gilbert, grey eyes harder than steel.

'Are you going to tell?' he hissed, in a low, ruined voice. Papa always said that Gilbert should treat the people the brownshirts beat just like he treated the brownshirts themselves: pretend they didn't exist. That was how to keep yourself safe.

The man sobbed on the street and Gilbert knelt down beside him. He was new to being eighteen and newer to the idea that Papa was wrong about things, but he reached out, the cold biting his fingers like he'd gotten too close to a fire, and helped lift the man up onto his shoulders. The grey-eyed man looked away, his face contorting in something close to grief.

Nobody said anything else until the man was settled in a war-bruised house in the outskirts of Berlin, and Gilbert was shivering and his boots were soaked through. He could almost hear Papa's voice scolding him. The winter months were the worst, and they didn't have enough money to warm him or to feed him. Gilbert huddled back against the wall and gritted his teeth. Papa would shout, but Gilbert was used to that. What he wasn't used to was this strange, bright warmth that swelled in his chest when the bloodied man moaned and opened his mouth. Still alive.

The grey-eyed man thrust something at him, and Gilbert grabbed it without looking. It was half a cold sausage. His mouth watered, but he carefully tucked it into his pocket.

'It won't kill you,' the man said.

'I'm savin' it,' Gilbert said, startled by the hoarseness of his own voice. 'For my baby brother.'

The man didn't look at him, but after a few moments, he held out the other half, and Gilbert took it.

'How old are you?' the man asked, and Gilbert's tongue tripped over the syllables of seventeen before he caught himself for the first time.

'Eighteen.'

The man glanced sideways at him, and Gilbert drew himself up. He wasn't as tall or broad as he could have been, but he was strong, strong enough to carry a man the brownshirts hated and not regret it. He knew what these people were, and he threw himself into it.

'I can fight,' he said. The words felt like they had been building for months, for years, from the day he found that Papa had gone to be a soldier again, from the day he became his baby brother's only lifeline. 'I have to fight.'

On the table, the man cried out, low and wavering with pain. His arm lolled off the side, and tattooed in the soft pale hollow of his elbow were three arrows all in parallel. The man sighed, the noise surprisingly soft.

'If you want to join us,' he said quietly, 'come back here in a week, after dark.'

'I will if you give me more food,' Gilbert said quickly. The man held his gaze evenly, but Gilbert refused to relent.

'I will,' the man finally said. 'But if you betray us, I will kill you.'

'If you didn't, the brownshirts would.' Gilbert felt himself smile for the first time in months, dry lips and starved muscles making his jaw ache, and the man smiled the same way. In that ruined building with a ruined man, Gilbert found the most dangerous thing in the world: hope.

That night, he watched Ludwig eat and went to sleep without feeling hungry at all; full not from food but from hope.

Everything else seemed almost bearable for a week, even the brownshirts and the starving and the cold. When the time came, he settled Ludwig in front of the fire, wincing at how thin he still was and the hollowness of his cheeks. Their hands almost matched, all knuckle and harsh lines, hands already too used to holding onto hunger and guns and hopelessness. Gilbert forced his eyes away and held Ludwig's gaze.

'Stay. Stay right here until I come back, do you understand?' His hands shook as he wrapped a blanket around him.

'Where are you going?'

To hope. To something that would get them through this winter and through the hopelessness that killed just as surely as starving.

'To save us,' Gilbert said.

When he arrived at the house, the man was waiting, gazing up at the rafters. He held a gun.

'You think that scares me?' Gilbert asked as he got closer. Maybe he should have been afraid, but all he felt was the shining, burning way he'd felt the first time Papa brought him back to Berlin, like this was where and what and how he was always supposed to be.

'I expect it wouldn't,' the man said. 'Who are you?'

'Gilbert.'

'Full name.'

'Gilbert Friedrich Beilschmidt.'

'Beilschmidt?' The man's eyes narrowed. 'Do you have a grandfather?'

'Yes.' He lifted his chin.

Gilbert knew too much and too little of his grandfather's time in the Great War. What he did know was that it had eaten him alive and turned him into something like Berlin, sharp and hollow and starving. A nightjar called in the rafters above, and Gilbert realized, like ice water down his back, that he was that way too, and that he was here chasing the same desperate solutions his grandfather was.

'I sent a couple of my boys to trail you for a few days, make sure you weren't one of the Party,' the man said lightly. His gun reflected the faint moonlight, and so did three arrows sketched in charcoal on the inside of his coat. 'Gilbert Beilschmidt. You've got a bit of a reputation.'

Gilbert's hands tightened into fists, and every wild thing he'd ever done in his eighteen years seemed to fill this quiet room, all the things Papa had shouted at him for so many times. 'I'm no fucking Party member,' he said.

'I know.'

'Who are you?' Gilbert challenged. The three arrows drew his eye again. He'd seen them before, and they both knew it.

'You already know who we are,' the man said with the barest, harshest smile. 'Do you want to join the Iron Front, Gilbert?'

War was calling on the horizon like the nightjars, and they both knew it. This wouldn't stop the war, but it was better than anything else, and Gilbert needed the food for Ludwig and the hope for himself. He held out his hand.

'I need to,' he said, and he could see the same desperate need in the man's grey eyes even as he laughed and tucked away his gun and took his hand.

'Welcome to the Iron Front, Gilbert. My name is Ernst.'

Gilbert stumbled home in the late hours and almost collapsed as soon as he was inside. He'd nearly forgotten that he'd left Ludwig waiting until he spoke.

'Gilbert?'

He looked at him anew, and his decision dug its teeth into him. It was the right decision if it was for Ludwig. Anything was right if it was for him.

'Baby brother,' he said, 'I think I've saved us.'

Things got better after that. Gilbert met with the Iron Front at night, and sometimes he could bring food home, food Party members had ordered and shopkeepers had pretended to misplace, or food that delivery drivers could be bribed into handing over. The city fought, in the slow, smoldering way that a city could, and Gilbert gloried in it, and he gloried in how his baby brother finally looked alive again.

One night, out on a run, someone almost killed him. Not a brownshirt, but some woman who almost shoved him down to hide from one, catching his nose on the edge of a fuel tank.

'Watch it,' he snapped, wiping off the blood.

'Pardon me for saving you,' she spat back. 'Next time I'll let them catch you.'

'I can handle myself.'

She raised an eyebrow. 'Of course, darling. You've still got some blood on your lip, you know.'

Gilbert asked around enough to find her name, Erzsébet Hedervary, and ask Ernst never to put them on the same team again. If anything, they ended up together more often after that.

He told his best friends about all of it, during one of their wild nights, two and a half drinks deep in some neon-lit bar with men and women who danced. Francis was holding a flower, twirling it in his long fingers.

'I've got a secret,' he said, and after they staggered back to Francis' place, he told them. He trusted his best friends more than himself, more than the touch of the handgun he'd stolen off a brownshirt. Ernst had frowned at it, but Gilbert didn't care. Erzsébet had laughed, which made him sure he'd done the right thing. Steel and his best friends and his baby brother were the only things Gilbert knew that he trusted.

They fell into their favourite places in the living room. Francis liked the couch and Antonio had his armchair but Gilbert always laid himself down on the thin carpet in front of the fire. Francis' art supplies may have had no place in this Berlin, but at least they burned hot. Francis always laughed, may as well use them for something useful now.

'I'm with a group now,' he whispered. The fire threw phosphene sunsets into his eyes. He'd never say such things openly outside this room, and that made it all the sweeter. 'A resistance group.'

'Who are they?' Francis asked, and Gilbert knew that Ernst would be angry before he spoke, but he couldn't care. He trusted his friends more than anything.

'You know who they are,' he said with a grin, and sketched three arrows in the soot left at the base of the fire. It stuck and smoldered on his fingertips, but he didn't care. He looked up to his two best friends, two wild-hearted birds drawn into Berlin just as he was, and knew that they'd understand, even if they didn't agree.

'Gilbert,' Francis sighed, mouth twisting in what he wanted to look like disappointment, but Gilbert could read him and his artist's heart as easily as poetry. 'How long have you been with them?'

'Five months,' Gilbert said. Five months since he'd started feeling alive again.

'I don't want to have to haul your body out of the river,' Antonio said, and Gilbert laughed because he had to.

'You think that if the brownshirts catch me, they'll let me have that?'

His friends laughed too, because if you didn't laugh, you cried, and if you couldn't cry, you ran off to join a resistance group. Gilbert swept the arrows out of existence and they kept talking until the sun was almost up and Gilbert had another Iron Front errand to run.

'You could just stay here,' Francis offered when he had one foot out the door. Gilbert turned to him, golden hair and blue eyes, angelic with the wax-marker fire softening every curve. His artist's hands shook, and the petals dropped off his flower.

'Sorry, darling,' Gilbert said, and shut the door. He had a city to live for.

They'd come around.

0o0o0o

It was January when it happened. Gilbert was smoking when it happened, watching the city twist like his smoke beneath him. If you knew the city, it was easy to know the news just by watching how the people moved.

He was waiting for the news. In public, Ernst had scoffed at the whole thing, no way that fucking bastard gets the vote, but Gilbert had seen the way he'd looked in private. Hopeless. He'd seen the way the gullible people in the streets had looked as they'd lapped up that man's foul words. Like they had hope again. Must be easy, when those words didn't condemn everything you loved and everything you were.

He breathed out a curl of smoke and watched the people below rise in a roaring wave, twisting like feral dogs scrapping for a bit of meat, all dressed in their uniforms.

'Son of a bitch,' he said calmly. It didn't even surprise him. He'd done his grieving at the graves of everyone the brownshirts got. Still, he ached deep down in a liquid-trembling desperate way, and so he pulled out his cigarette and drove it into the underside of his forearm, near his elbow where Francis didn't check very often, hot and smoking and filthy. That curdled that ache into rage, bitter and gasoline-hot, what he needed to keep going for the next year, and the years after that. Gilbert didn't cry anymore. He was nineteen, so new to it that eighteen still sat better on his tongue, but that was more than old enough to stop crying. Ludwig hadn't cried in years.

He put away the snuffed-out half of his cigarette and went to see Ernst. They had work to do. They gathered like a flock of solemn birds, until Ernst raised his cigarette and his sleeve slipped just enough to show his burns. They all had them now, a better marker than their arrows.

'We keep fighting,' he said. 'Our war isn't over yet.'

They'd all prepared for this, even though they hadn't admitted it. Plans left ready to be sparked, things to fall back on. Hard not to, when they made their careers out of betting on losing dogs. Silently, they all moved to those now.

'Ernst,' Gilbert said when almost everyone was gone. The man grunted and waved him over. 'I've got good news.'

'Hard to have worse news today.'

'I've got a couple friends who'd be willing to join.'

Ernst scoffed. 'You trust them?'

'More than I trust you,' Gilbert said. Other people would have been angry, and rightfully, but Ernst just laughed.

'Good enough for me.'

Francis and Antonio would join him. Gilbert knew they would, after today. He only had to wait and let it happen. He told Erzsébet about that, because in this whole damn resistance, she was the only half-trustworthy one.

'They'll come around,' she agreed, stealing a cigarette out of his back pocket, long brown hair tangled around her shoulders. 'Mine did.'

'I didn't think you had any friends,' he'd snarked. She shook her head, ashing the cigarette out over the windowsill.

'I don't. Too dangerous.' A different smile flickered around her mouth for a moment. 'But I have my musician.'

'A musician?' Gilbert breathed out a long, twisting line of smoke. 'Don't you know people like that never survive in this city? The dogs will hunt them down soon enough.'

'There's more to life than war, Gilbert,' she said. Gilbert would believe it when he lived through it.

Francis was the first. He showed up at Gilbert's house in the dark, climbing up to the roof of his upstairs window like he'd done so often before. The front door was always noisy, and Francis hated waking Ludwig.

'Hey,' Gilbert said, grinning. 'You got a lighter? I've got the cigs for tonight.'

He'd been bumming cigarettes off Francis for years, ever since they first met on a rooftop almost like this. Gilbert crawled out through the little window, legs dangling over the edge. Only half the shingles remained.

'No lighter,' Francis said hoarsely. 'I've got a few matches-'

'Good enough for me.' Gilbert plucked one from his shaking hand, scraped it across the shingles that were left, and lit his cigarette.

'Gilbert,' Francis began.

'Let me,' Gilbert said, taking Francis' out of his hand and lighting it off his own. He took a deep breath of sweet harsh smoke. 'Let me guess. It's about my group.'

Francis didn't say anything for a long time, and then he laughed, sweet and harsh the same way.

'You already know,' he said. 'Today. The Chancellor…'

'I know.' Gilbert shifted closer to Francis on the little roof, breath catching in his throat. He'd always been the soldier, not the artist of their little trio, and he felt all their differences so much more. 'I know, Francis.'

Francis turned to him, eyes nearly luminescent with tears.

'Antonio wants to know where we should go,' he said. His voice didn't shake at all. Gilbert told him, and they finished their cigarettes together before Gilbert crawled back inside.

'Tell Ludwig I hope he's doing well,' Francis said.

'He will be,' Gilbert assured him. He would make sure of it, no matter what it cost. He loved his friends too much to leave them out of the hope of his resistance. He loved Ludwig too much to put him in that kind of danger.

0o0o0o

When someone came over to pick up some writing for a pamphlet, he heard Ludwig at the top of the stairs on the creaky step, clutching the banister in pyjamas and bare feet, and his blood ran cold.

'Go to bed, Ludwig. Now.'

The man had looked half a second too late. Gilbert dug his nails into his palms.

'Who's Ludwig?'

'Some kid Aldrich brought in to live with me,' Gilbert said curtly. The lie stung on the way out. Like Ludwig wasn't all he had left in the world, like he wasn't the golden boy their mother had given her life for. Ludwig was what he hoped and fought for. 'He doesn't matter. What else do you need?'

When the man was gone, he locked the door and staggered into the kitchen. He kept all his windows shuttered, but tonight he threw them open and smoked a cigarette down until the embers burnt his fingers, and then he went to talk to Ludwig. He hated it, hated himself and every unsteady step, terrified that all those months of planning and fighting and surviving would burn down because of this- one step at the top of the stairs, one moment of weakness in front of one person, his whole life like a flower crushed beneath a boot. He couldn't think like that, though, because if he was hopeless he'd already lost.

'You can never look again,' he said, and even though the nicotine blur, he was shocked at the raspiness of his voice. 'Do you understand?'

Ludwig only looked at him with those wide, blue eyes. Gilbert went to bed and dreamed of jackboots at the door, all night long. Wasn't it strange, that the things that gave him the hope to live felt like the things that would kill him? He felt like a snake eating its own tail, like a war machine grinding up its own people.

0o0o0o

Where have all the young men gone?

Gone to soldiers every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

-Where Have All The Flowers Gone

The Iron Front was a Weimar-era organization that fought against the fascist government.

:: The heat of staying up late at night and hoping the morning doesn't come