Certain Demolitions: Play a Fantasia
Summary: 8. The lost in pain and lonely for affection - that's where the Gavin brothers are.
Chapter 8: Time after Time
[Status: Cannon in the context of C.D.]
Munich, Germany
193X
I don't want the morphine.
I don't want the morphine.
Fourteen year old Kristoph Gavin kept telling himself that, and he intended to keep telling himself that until he believed it. He was lying in bed, he knee tightly wrapped. He'd aggravated his injured knee again. Am I ever going to get better? Is my knee ever going to heal? His left hand was pressed to his eyes; his glasses were on the nightstand on the right side of the bed.
He hated the way morphine clouded his mind, and while it would let him sleep and ease the pain in his knee, he wouldn't be able to think straight for very long after the injection.
The bottle on morphine and needles are in locked box in a drawer in the left nightstand, where he could reach them from the bed if he needed him. The locked box would keep Klavier out of them. The doctors who had come yesterday after his accident had advised him to rest his knee as much as possible. But that's what they've advised since the day of the explosion that gave him the injury in the first place: stay off his knee as much as he could. He'd graduated to using a cane, but the other day, he'd tripped over a sidewalk curb and landed hard on his bad knee. When the immediate shock of the injury – and the sudden, excruciating pain - had passed, he'd been unable to support any weight on his knee. For the moment, when he needed to get out of bed, he had crutches to help him get around and minimize the weight on his knee.
The pain itself was just on the edge of what he could tolerate without medication. He was wishing he had brought a book back to bed with him last time he was up, because he didn't feel like getting up to get one now, and now he was bored and nothing to focus on but the pain.
Outside, the rain was beating on the windowpane. Though he wouldn't realize it for a couple more years, it was probably not helping his knee.
Kristoph took his hand off his eyes, and then squinted at the door to his room. He couldn't tell without his glasses if it was closed all the way, though it should have been. But he couldn't remember if he'd closed it all the way or not early.
The door, as it turned out, was partially opened, as Kristoph discovered a moment later when Klavier clambered onto the bed, using the footboard as a handhold to pull himself up.
After Kristoph's injuries, some workers had been hired to switch the bed Kristoph used to have in his room with one of the other beds in the house. This bed he has now is taller, so it's easier for him to get in and out of it. He missed his four-poster bed, though. This one has a smaller headboard and footboard.
And it had more obvious baseboards that frame the bottom of the mattress and make convenient footholds for shorter, younger brothers.
Klavier is obviously upset when Kristoph sees him. "Mutti didn't want me." He said petulantly.
Kristoph sighed. Here is another problem. "Mutti wants you, Klavier. She just doesn't want you to be near her because she doesn't want you to get sick." He reached for his glasses and put them on.
"But she's been sick forever." Klavier complained. "Is she ever going to get better?"
"I hope so," Kristoph replied. But he doubted it. Their mother had refused to go to a sanitarium, claiming that her children needed her. But then things like this happen, and she can't help either of them.
Kristoph is more worried every day that his mother's health is sinking more than she's letting on.
Klavier crawled up the bed towards his brother. "Her door was locked."
That does not surprise Kristoph either. He didn't say anything, and Klavier went on. "She told me to go away through the door."
"She loves you, Klavier." Kristoph assured him.
"Does your knee hurt?" Klaver asked.
"It does." Kristoph acknowledged. There was no point in hiding it.
"Oh." Klavier got quiet, and started tugging on the bedspread.
"What's wrong?" Kristoph asked.
Klavier stopped and looked up at him. "I'm hungry."
Kristoph sighed again. This was probably what Klavier had been looking for in the first place - someone to take care of him. A break from life would be a nice change. Kristoph threw off the blankets and turned so that he was sitting with his feet on the floor. He reached over Klavier to grab his robe at the foot of the bed – it was navy blue, in comparison to the royal blue one he would use when he got older - and put it on over his sweater and pants. Then he reached for his crutches. "Well, let's see what we can do about that."
(-)
What they can do about that, Kristoph discovers about three minutes later, is get into a mess trying to go down the stairs.
The servant's staircase, past Klavier's room on the back of the house, comes out almost directly at the kitchen, but the main staircase has stairs that are a little wider and a little shorter, so Kristoph opts to use those instead. There's also a wide landing in the middle of the staircase, which he figures will only help.
But he's out of practice with crutches in general and especially on stairs, and he isn't leaning heavily enough on the one to keep it from falling out from under his arm, and then falling all the way down the stairs.
Kristoph should more appalled at this, but it fits the day he's been having. And for this minor disaster, anyway, he has Klavier.
He sits down at the top of the staircase, letting his feet rest a couple of steps below the landing, so that he can get back up later, while Klavier, looking very determined, marches down to the bottom of the stairs and hauls the other crutch back up with him.
It's a colder comfort, but at least they'll still have each other, should the worst happen to their mother.
Klavier returns the errant crutch and looks quite proud of himself as he does. Kristoph smiles, genuinely and in spite of himself, and ruffles his brother's hair as he takes the crutch. "Thank you."
Klavier looks even happier at this, but then races back down the stairs ahead of his big brother, who descends much more slowly.
Together, they make a simple dinner. Kristoph dispatched Klavier to take a tray upstairs and leave it outside their mother's door, warning him to be careful not to spill anything as he goes and to come back when he's done.
Then they sit down and have dinner.
(-)
Kristoph is relieved when he's finally back in his room, even if he does still have Klavier tagging along behind him. He's really out of practice on the crutches and that makes everything take much longer than it should, and he's wishing again that his knee would hurry up and heal so that he could go back to using his cane. He sank onto his bed with relief, set his crutches on the floor, and then realized that he'd forgotten his book. Again.
Klavier scrambled onto the bed a moment later, by the same baseboard- footboard route he'd used to get up before, and looked at Kristoph, who was still sitting on the edge of the bed, curiously.
"Klavier, can you bring me that book?" Kristoph asked after a moment pointing out a volume bound in red leather and sitting on the small desk in the corner of the room.
Klavier scrambled back down off the bed, and came back with the book. Kristoph took it from Klavier and then swung his legs up onto the bed, grimacing as he did. He was pulling his robe off when Klavier managed to get himself back up onto the bed. "Read to me?"
"It's in English, Klavier, and I'm not going to translate it for you." Kristoph warned him.
"I can understand it!" They both know he can. "Besides, this is the one you read to me last time." The book, A Tale of Two Cities, is rapidly becoming the book that Kristoph always reads to Klavier when Klavier is upset that their mother won't see him. Even though it is in English. They have a German copy somewhere in the library, but Kristoph hasn't bothered to look for it. He prefers to read books in their original language whenever he can.
Kristoph stacked his pillows behind him, against the headboard, and leaned back. Klavier crawled up towards him, and settled down next to him.
"Book the Second – the Golden Thread." Kristoph began. "Chapter 19. Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark night. He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had done so, whether he was not still asleep."
"That's not right!" Klavier interrupted, pulling excitedly on his brother's sleeve. "That's not where you left off last time!"
"Stop it." Kristoph ordered, looping his arm around Klavier to make the little boy stop moving. It was true, Kristoph realized after a moment, that this was not where they had left off last time he had read to Klavier. He started to flip back through the book, trying to remember where exactly he had stopped last time. "Where did we leave off?"
"You were reading about what the wine-keeper looked like."
Oh you dear heaven, Kristoph thought. How many chapters has that been? The chapter about the wine shop in the first book would be a good place to start. He started flipping through the chapter in question, looking for the description. "This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows…"
Klavier settled down and started to pay attention to the story. When he fell asleep, halfway into Chapter four of the second book, Kristoph flipped back to where he had left off and continued reading silently.
Outside, the rain continued to beat against the windowpane.
[A/N:] This was not how I planned to spend my Sunday night but here, have some brotherly fluff. I don't know where these ideas come from, but I try and write them down when I get them.
I kind of like seeing early!Kristoph. He doesn't have his office yet, so he's got a smaller desk in his room, and of course I mention in-story that later on he gets a different robe, if that matters. And it turns out I was wrong back in chapter 5 of this collection when I had little!Klavier and referred to him as a toddler. In the 2010s, he would be considered a preschooler, but I haven't figured out if back in the 1930s, that toddler age category would have extended later. Today it stops at age 3, but I don't know how the stages of child development were categorized back then - if they were. It might be a later theory.
I quoted Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" quite a bit in here, but the copyright is expired on that book and you can read it online.
Alright, I think that's all the notes. Please review.