Send me back, Matthew wanted to beg, to scream at the stars, to race to the false innocence of the nearest military post and demand to be sent back to a city full of teeth and bloody paint. Alfred was the brave one. Alfred was the one who charged in with lightning and laughter and burned his place into history. Matthew didn't have his electric loud love, but he had his own. Softer and quieter and ready to burn all the same. He'd claw his way back across the Atlantic if he had to.
Part of him insisted it couldn't be true. Francis couldn't be in the East, with the same familiar certainty that said the sun would rise and chase away the night. But here the goodbye was, in cheap black ink when they should have been in sunset red and softest orange paint. When they should have been in whispers against Matthew's skin, in the quiet warm morning. It couldn't be happening, but it was.
Francis. The resistance. The East. The fragments whirled in his head as he paced, hands and mind raw and sore, and no matter how many times he tried to fit them together they came up like this: Francis was going to die.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong in a way that pounded on the inside of his head. Matthew was helpless here, while Francis went to live and die as a hero. It was selfish to want him to be here instead, faraway and safe, but Matthew didn't care about being selfish or wrong at all anymore. He prayed, a desperate supplication to a God he barely knew. He'd never prayed before and the words and thoughts tumbled together. Keep him safe. Please, someone, anyone. Keep him safe.
Francis, gentle as the dawn, surrounded by the guns of the Stasi. Francis' smile and his hair streaked with blood, painted in some hellish parody of his sunset-coloured maple leaf poem.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Matthew bought a measure of vodka that night. It tasted like Berlin, the sharp sting, the hurting fire. He sat in front of his fire and tried to think himself back to that war city. I wish I was there, he raged silently to the impassive fire.
The new letter arrived a few days later, after Matthew had stumbled back from the military office yet again. He was broken, he was damaged goods, that's what his record said. Shell shocked from a war city. Damaged goods didn't fly.
The post office called him in when they saw him walking back to his house, and the man at the desk smiled at him and handed him a bundle of paper. Matthew accepted it without really thinking. A fog had settled over his brain.
He realized what it was at home, and a ray of sunlight scattered the fog. It was from Alfred. Alfred, the hero, the Americans' ace. He could keep Francis safe in Berlin, and he would. Matthew knew him. He was good, truly good that way.
He tore open the package eagerly, and under the sunshine of Alfred F. Jones, the dread didn't set in until long after it should. It came in pieces. The letter was dated the same time as Francis'. Military mail always arrived slowly.
There were tear stains in the blue ink that made up his address.
Matthew felt himself sit down slowly at his table, as if the fragile mirror lake of his life had split and he'd fallen through the cracking spring ice and into deep water. Numb and chilled to the bones and heart. All that existed was the meaningless pressure of the letter on his fingertips and the solid table.
He kep opening the package, carefully now, because it was all he could do. There were three letters. Two enclosed for Arthur. One for him.
Send this one to Arthur immediately, was written in desperate dark strokes across the second envelope. It was smudged and frantic, slanting as if the words had been written with the paper held against the side of a building. The other one was featureless, save for a single line written more evenly, carefully. All it said, in soft blue ink, was strange, nonsensical words. IOU 1 Bourbon.
Matthew turned them both face down- hands shaking, the cool polished wood against his wrists, against his ribs- and unfolded his letter.
Mattie, I'm so sorry, it said in messy scrawling letters, sliding down the page in smudged red ink. By the time this letter reaches you, I'll be in the East.
'Alfred,' he whispered, feeling himself start to break entirely. He couldn't. He couldn't lose them both.
Francis will be with me. He'll have told you he's going, I know he will, but I know he wouldn't be able to tell you what's happening.
I will. We're raiding the prison. We're going to save people. I can save people, Mattie. I can save Ludwig. And I swear to you as Alfred Foster Jones that I will save Francis, too. We'll be safe. I promise.
I miss you so much. I keep thinking it's you when I see my reflection, and I hate to say it but I wish it was. I wish you were here. You're brave. You're good.
I think what I mean to say is this: I wish that some time in the future all this will be better, and we can go back to Berlin. You with Francis and me with Arthur. And we'll be happy, Mattie. I promise.
I'm going to save a little part of the world. It's what I need to do.
Through his tears, Matthew turned the paper over to read the final words scribbled and cramped at the bottom of the page, spilling onto the back.
If you never get another letter from me, give Arthur the second letter. It's my goodbye to him. Tell him I'm sorry. I hope you never have to do it.
You're the best friend I could have ever asked for. I'm sorry. I wish things were different. I'm trying to make them better.
Yours always
Alfred F Jones
Alfred. Achilles, hopeful Alfred, blinded by his belief that the world will be okay, charging into a war that would eat him alive. Selfish, selfless Alfred, who laughed at the sun and believed he could save the world.
He fumbled for a pen and grabbed Arthur's letter, holding all Alfred's words. His not-yet-final goodbyes. Someday soon, this could be the only piece left of him in the world. These three letters laying on Matthew's oak table. His final words. It was all unfair and wrong, and he hurt with it.
The trembling in his hands slowed. Call me about Alfred, he wrote on a scrap of paper, and underlined the number three times. He carefully peeled the envelope apart and slipped it in.
The wind must have been cold on his face, but he couldn't feel anything. Fear and sick anticipation took up all the room inside of him. Matthew mailed the letter to England. After that, the night was dirty-snow grey with vodka and howling snowstorm pain.
0o0o0o
All Francis had to do was wait. It felt like such a simple operation when he thought of it that way. If he looked at the great engine of Kalmar's final plan from a dozen different tiny angles, it was so deceptively small, an easy mission, a simple task. Wait. Ready the gun. Kill the guards if he saw them.
He turned the gun over and over in his hands. His mind was full of a buzzing blankness. Nothing existed except the street he was watching. Turn left. Watch for movement. Turn right. He knew the fading morning light on these crooked cobblestones like it was written on his skin.
Kill Gilbert, once he came back with too much blood on his hands and in his teeth. Stand there while Antonio took this gun with the notches for years of friendship carved in the handle and pressed it to the scar on Gilbert's forehead and finally downed the eagle.
What would the world be like when Gilbert was dead? Would Berlin collapse in on itself entirely, once this burning keystone of its very being was gone? Would Francis do the same? Would he and Berlin both go on with an integral part of their snarling, weary engines missing?
Watch left. Watch right. The gun in his hands. The cold of the brick wall soaking into his bones. Antonio and Gilbert like twisted threads around his heart, winding into and around the prison. Matthew was like a shining gold thread, leading to safety away from here. He'd follow it after tonight.
There was the suggestion of a noise, nothing more, so quiet and faraway that Francis almost could have believed it wasn't there. He stood, holding up a hand in the signal for wait, and saw the other watches freeze.
Quiet. Francis closed his eyes and listened, trying to unravel the pace, the speed. His eyes snapped open, a gasp caught in his throat. Stasi, he signaled. The front guard had held them off as long as they could, but now they'd have to fight for their lives.
It wasn't his job to kill the Red soldiers or the Stasi guards. Kalmar trusted easier than most, but even he didn't trust Francis to pull the trigger when he should. They had Gilbert for that.
When the group rounded the corner, Francis remembered why. They were the cannon fodder boys. They were the young, the frightened, the hopeless putting on ill-fitting uniforms to pay for supper. They'd still kill Francis if they saw him.
He raised his gun towards the advancing soldiers. His hands shook. Just boys. Just boys falling into love and fear, just boys thrown out of home and into war cities where they became artists and soldiers.
He turned and fired at the prison, towards a dark shape in the windows, stupid stupid stupid- he didn't care, couldn't care, because there was the smell of gunpowder in his throat and fire racing up his spine. He wasn't born for a fight, but he would fight how he knew best. For a better cause than himself.
His shots hit the boys' shoulders and limbs. Francis kept his hands steady, steady and away from death. The world flashed, the world burned. Stasi soldiers, guards, filled the streets, and Francis shot for the head. Only when the ammunition was out did he stand up. There was smoke. Someone was screaming. Everything was so far away. He'd dropped a man with one shot; he'd seen the life leave his body. His head was light, floating away, and so Francis ran. He ran and kept running, breath tearing at his throat. He ran to the place where he knew Antonio and Gilbert would come. They would come find him, they always would, because their red threads of fate were tangled and knotted up in each other.
He sat down on the dock with the gun beside him, buried his head in his hands, and screamed until everything else was gone. An easy mission, a simple task.
Gilbert came to find him once the screaming was done. Everything was echoing quiet, and he came to sit down by the dock and smoke. Just like they used to. Like nothing was wrong.
The flame danced around Gilbert's fingertips as he lit the cigarette. His hands were collections of burn scars and unhealed wounds. Francis had watched them build engines and felt them in his hair a thousand times. Hands to break the world.
Gilbert smiled up at him, broken and wild, alien like white bone from a wound. The raw inner parts of them, laid out to this harsh city. Francis recognized none of the boy he loved in it. He didn't even know if the Gilbert he loved, the one who climbed on his roof to drag him into the Spanish sunlight, had ever really existed, or if Gilbert was sharklike the whole way down since he was born.
'So?' he asked.
'I wish you were dead,' Francis heard himself say, in a horrible ruined voice. Gilbert's smile glittered, and he leaned closer to speak, lips barely brushing Francis' jaw.
'Anything for you, darling.'
0o0o0o
:: The prickle of skin when you sit close to the fire after bitter cold nights