Somewhere in Berlin, 1932

War ate men alive. That's what Papa had said before he'd picked up his gun and left again, with his sunken cheeks and scarred hands and solemn, knowing eyes. Ludwig hadn't known what he'd meant, then, but he thought he knew now. It meant the people slowly filing past outside their window with their heads down, or the marching men in the streets, or the slow gnawing hollowness of hunger that slowly filled every waking moment.

'Stay,' Gilbert said one night, guiding Ludwig down in front of their guttering fire and wrapping a blanket around him. His bones practically glowed through his translucent skin in the firelight. 'Stay right here until I come back, do you understand?'

His mouth was dry. 'Where are you going?'

Gilbert looked up. His eyes burned from beneath his brow, dark and bright and as coppery as blood. His brother always shone bright, even when everything else in Berlin had burned out. 'To save us.'

Ludwig sat there all night. If he squinted into the fire, he could still see the denominations on some of the bills before the fire ate them up. It was cold, and alone with nothing else to do, the hollowness of hunger became the only thing that existed. He shuffled closer to the fire and smudged a finger into the ashes. His hands shook, but he traced a passage out of one of the few books they still had, a poetry book Papa had bought back when they still thought they had money, back when hunger was only a pang and not a second person beside the fire whose heavy breath filled the room. Gilbert threatened to burn it a dozen times since, but he never did.

Ludwig's eleven-year-old fingers traced the lines on the floor in charcoal.

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy…

The fire guttered out some time in the early morning, and Ludwig had finished three poems. He swept his hand over the soot, suddenly aware that Gilbert wouldn't like the mess. He glanced down at the warped floorboards one last time just before the last lines disappeared.

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

The soot had worked its way beneath his nails and into the lines of his palms. He pulled the blanket around him and waited until the sun was nearly up, when Gilbert stumbled in, paler than pale in the grey morning, and rested his head against the wall. He looked like Papa.

'Gilbert?' Ludwig ventured. He stood, clutching the blanket. Soot settled on his tongue, bitter and cloying.

Those blazing eyes snapped open again. His eyes fluttered.

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

For the months after that, Gilbert disappeared somewhere late at night, leaving Ludwig with his books in front of the fire. Slowly, things got better. Papa's money started stretching further, and even Gilbert started eating more again. Something had changed, though, sharpened Gilbert beyond recognition, something even worse than hunger.

Some days, people would slip into their house late at night and Gilbert would rush down to meet them. Ludwig held his breath in his bed and listened to the murmur of voices downstairs. He only peeked once, in bare feet at the top of the stairs, and Gilbert had looked right at him and said, very quietly, 'Go to bed, Ludwig. Now.'

He'd come up an hour later and sat at the edge of his bed, and told him never to look again. He'd sounded like a soldier, as alien and deadly as the screeches of the hawks Papa had once kept. Ludwig had said nothing, but they both knew he wouldn't look again.

One day, Gilbert woke him up and thrust his clothes at him, hissing that they had to go, that he couldn't leave Ludwig behind this time, and dragged him outside. They ducked through alleyways and side streets, feet crunching in the morning frost, and Ludwig noticed they were on the better side of Berlin now, where the houses had soot stains but not scorched bricks. Gilbert led him inside, and sat him down in front of another fire. Ludwig blinked into the flames. Even here, they still burned bills rather than firewood.

'Stay,' he said. 'I'll come get you once we're done.'

Ludwig tucked his legs up and wished he'd brought his books. Gilbert was gone, and the few people who came in walked quietly, burning with the same hidden energy.

Slowly, a haunting music began to drift through the rooms. Ludwig hadn't heard music in what felt like forever. Sometimes military chants floated through their windows, but never something like this, haunting and wistful. He shouldn't look. Gilbert would be furious. But the music drew him like a fish on a hook.

The floors groaned in sympathy as he crept closer. His pants had been too short around the ankles for years now, and the cold air nipped at his skin. Ludwig held his breath as he peered through the crack in the door. Inside, a man sat at a piano, a bright figure dressed all in violet, and from him the melody poured with desperation. His eyes were closed, but his face was anything but serene.

Ludwig backed away from the door, something sick rising in his throat. The room was heavy, impossibly so. The wood creaked again, twining with the elaborate melody. All the halls looked the same, and he could still hear the lamentation of the piano. He turned a corner to find his brother standing in the middle of a circle of people who burned almost as bright as he did. Ludwig's gaze was drawn to a crude hand-drawn symbol on a man's sleeve: three arrows all in parallel.

'Gilbert?' The word simply slipped out.

Gilbert's eyes locked with his.

Ludwig didn't remember exactly what happened next, only that Gilbert shoved him out of view of the people and snarled in a harsh, horrible voice, about fault and danger and stupidity and carelessness, about death, like a screaming eagle, and Ludwig could still hear the piano. His chest hurt where Gilbert had shoved him, a deep, burning ache.

Gilbert didn't talk to him for days after that. Ludwig itched to draw the symbol he'd seen, but he knew he never should. Sometimes, in his nightmares, he remembered that house and the desperate man at the piano and Gilbert's copper-red eyes and his fault, his fault.

Months later, the marching men in the streets shot someone. Gilbert hurried him past, but Ludwig looked at the last second and saw that the man had been carrying the hooked cross- but with those three arrows slashed through it, in a blue so dark it was black against the red of the flag, bleeding and bright. His eyes were still open.

War ate people alive, that's what Papa had said. Gilbert locked himself inside his room and didn't come out until dinner. When he emerged, his knife-sharp features caught the golden sunlight, and for a second Ludwig thought he was looking at the dead man.

0o0o0o

Somewhere in Berlin, August 1937

Gilbert used to be taller than him, once. Ludwig remembered that in the same hazy, faraway way that he remembered that Gilbert had been someone else once. He used to laugh easily and could coax birds from the trees and take Ludwig to air shows on weekends, in some hazy summer-coloured time when he was too young to think about the future. Ludwig never thought about those memories anymore, because Gilbert was different now and so was he.

He'd been taller than Gilbert since he turned fifteen. He remembered that as Gilbert reached up to adjust the collar on his shirt.

'You're gonna make us all so proud, baby brother,' he said with a glint in his eyes. Ludwig looked away, down at the scarred back of Gilbert's hand. It was almost invisible in anything but moonlight, but he could still find the arrow-shaped scar glimmering silver. He remembered when Francis and Antonio had come in with him, the backs of their hands bandaged, all of them laughing and proud and glowing like the sun.

'I will,' he said.

'Damn right you are. My baby brother's gonna be the best fighter pilot in the world.' His grin widened, the grin of hunger and having nothing left to lose, like the stray dogs Ludwig had once seen in the streets. 'If those bastards in the government want a flying force, they'll get it. And their ace will be someone from the fucking Iron Front.'

The echo of the words was bright on Ludwig's tongue. The Iron Front. Gilbert loved the movement with a fierceness. Gilbert loved it for the fire and the resistance and the danger, a wild machine ticking away in Berlin right beneath the nose of the Nazis. Gilbert was the kind of person who would die for something. Ludwig had always known that. A line from a poem drifted through his head, one he'd copied onto the paper hidden in his desk drawers…

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs
for their religion–

'The best fucking fighter pilot in the world,' Gilbert said again, thumping Ludwig's chest with the heel of his hand. Ludwig could see it in his eyes, a testament truer than the blue of his uniform or the roar of his Stuka's engine. Gilbert loved flight more than life, and so did Ludwig. He loved flight and the rare poems he knew, more than anything, because they were all he knew. He loved the Iron Front because they held the keys to a world where flight and poetry still existed. Where anything existed beyond the men marching down the streets and the flags hung from the windows and the weight of the world.

I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.

He let Gilbert lead the way to the airfield. He was nearly as tall as the officer there. He had hawk eyes, cold eyes, but Ludwig knew about wild birds and the cold, and he knew how to fly. It was all he knew.

You fly like an eagle, baby brother, Gilbert had said the first time he'd gone up in one of the old gliders. Ludwig had never heard anyone else call someone baby brother, but the way Gilbert said it, it felt like he had the world in his hands.

0o0o0o

Somewhere in Berlin, August 1939

War burned people alive, and war was coming. Ludwig knew it like he knew Gilbert, like he'd once known hunger.

For some people, war stoked them alive, awake, sharpened them into something pressured and bright as diamonds, going up in flames like a solar flare of magnesium fire. Some days, Ludwig felt like that, when Gilbert spoke at Iron Front meetings or when he saw someone smile with that starving-dog look, the look that said they were still fighting. They had to fight, or they would die. They would die faster than they died now.

Some days, war was all Ludwig could taste, and it tasted like rot. Those days, he read poetry. Those days, the only things that made sense weren't his uniform or his medals or the hiss of war to come, sure as hunger, but poetry. Poetry that whispered about things that he didn't know and yet understood, of love and the history of men who knew it.

Gilbert had burned the book two winters ago, when it got too cold to bear, but he'd winced when he'd done it and Ludwig had already copied his favourite poems. He traced fingertips over his own writing and then the stitching of his Luftwaffe uniform. For Germany, his officers said. For the Iron Front, Gilbert said. Ludwig listened to his own heart and heard only the spinning of a compass needle knocked off-key, with no true north left.

He'd be an officer himself by the end of the year, that was what one of the higher-ups had said, one of the youngest officers in the force. He'd be fledged just in time for war. Gilbert repeated that with a glitter in his eye. The rest of the Iron Front repeated it like a lament.

Ludwig thought again of the man dressed in violet at his piano, his music in the darkness of war. He thought, as always, of asking Gilbert what had happened at that Iron Front meeting so long ago.

Such thoughts weren't fitting for a soldier. Not this close to war. Thoughts were the sparks that started wars. Ludwig smoothed out a piece of paper and wrote his thoughts down, and when he was finished, he threw the paper in the fire and watched his words burn. If he wanted to survive, he would be the Luftwaffe's weapon. That was what Gilbert had taught him. He would be an officer, he would be a pilot, and some time on the other side of the war, maybe he would forgive himself for it.

0o0o0o

I could say bella, bella, even sehr wunderbar
Each language only helps me tell you how grand you are

I've tried to explain, bei mir bist du schön
So kiss me and say you understand

-Bei Mir Bist Du Schön

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

:: The rattle of train cars that sounds like singing just before you fall asleep