Since his return from German airspace, Marinette had made numerous attempts to see Private Agreste, all of which had ended in failure. The base was by no means small, nor was it simple to navigate. In fact, Marinette had taken to tapping landmark objects as she passed them as a way of mentally bread-crumbing her way back to the hospital.
She'd seen many soldiers in her travels, but none of them she recognized. After the first awkward conversation with a rowdy bunch who spoke English with an accent so unfamiliar she wasn't entirely sure it wasn't Gaelic or Welsh, Marinette determined that talking to people was unlikely to be anything other than a hindrance. Her fear of English-speaking men only increased after she stumbled across a drill sergeant leading a platoon or two through a marching exercise and had, perhaps, stared a bit too brazenly as she scanned the faces of the boys before her. The tyrant in charge had yelled at her so loudly, and with such indignant fury that she got herself thoroughly lost while trying to run from his plosive obscenities.
By the time she finally found a landmark she recognized, and made it back to her quarters, she had all but given up on the idea that she might meet up with her intended upon pure happenstance. She decided, therefore, that the meeting with Private Lahiffe had been an Act of Fate, and that if she was ever meant to see Private Agreste again, Fate would need to step in.
Alix had been the one to suggest—quite bluntly, as though she was stupid for not having thought of it herself—that Marinette simply send Adrien a letter with a time and place to convene. Unfortunately, when the letter finally reached his hands, the time had already passed, and the place had been completely redacted by some overzealous mailroom attendant who had apparently decided that even internal locations mentioned in letters that would never even leave the base might constitute talk of "troop movements," and were therefore disallowed.
Though one more humble, or else self-aware, might have apologized for her part in the disastrous outcome, Alix laughed heartily at the image of Marinette waiting behind a crate of dirty towels for hours on end, only to learn that her love hadn't yet received the invitation, and wouldn't for another week.
"But what about you?" Marinette asked, turning the conversation on its head. "You're nearly healed. If you had a place to go, I might have already recommended they discharge you."
Despite her initial insistence upon leaving, Alix soon realized that discharge meant sleeping on the wet, disgusting streets of England—or else in some over-crowded poor house where her lack of wallet, identification, and manners wouldn't pose a problem.
"I dunno," she said with the uneasy nonchalance of someone who would really prefer to know.
"Don't you have any contacts you could reach out to?"
"Sure, in Occupied France, maybe. I'll call up my dad and see if he's seen my wanted poster up anywhere. I mean, assuming they haven't killed 'im for being associated with me, that is. Hell. Jesus. What if they have? I don't want to know."
Marinette could see the slightest twinge of stress in her less-than-furrowed brows, and knew that in her toughest patient, that meant fear.
"Part of Jalil's company is still here, if that's any help," she suggested.
"Maybe…" she mused, "Bastard hasn't responded to any of my letters though." She wrinkled her nose. "Probably dead."
"You've only just sent them," Marinette corrected. If letters inside the base took over a week to arrive, something traveling all the way to Narvik would be lucky to beat a snail's pace. A thought struck her. "Who were you intending to deliver your information to when you arrived here?"
"Top brass, I guess," she shrugged.
"And you were going to…"
"Just walk up to them, huh. 'Spose I din't think it all the way through. I figured runnin' around screamin' 'the sky's falling! The sky's falling!' might get me enough looks that I could get pointed the right way. Course, you say 'the sky's on fire' nowadays and everyone says 'Yeah, what of it?' like this is the kinda garbage you get used to." Her eyes unfocused with a thought that tasted just a little bit like a solution. "Hey, what did you say the name of that General you came over with was?"
"Bourgeois," Marinette offered.
"You don't think…" Alix mused, "You ever seen him hanging 'round a dorky, colored kid with glasses?"
Her mind flashed first to Private Lahiffe, but she'd certainly never seen him hanging around the general, and the descriptor "dorky" was anything but apt. Still, black soldiers weren't exactly common in her regiment. If there had been someone fitting that description in close proximity to the General…
"OH," Marinette cried, "with a clipboard? Always carries a clipboard?"
"BWAHAHAHAHA," Alix laughed, "That's him! Christ-almighty, he really did it. I thought fer sure he was full of fluff, but I guess he's got more brains in his head than any'ne has a right to ignore."
In truth, Marinette had never before considered the improbability—no, the achievement—of his position. She'd always viewed him as the sort of strait-laced strategist who only appeared for brief moments to back the General when he spoke, before disappearing once more into war rooms filled with math and geography, and the terrifying reality of bloodshed condensed into the comforting simplicity of statistics and charts. Pencil-pusher though he may be, there was something truly extraordinary about a young man of African descent in the cabinet of France's most successful General—especially in a war where enthusiastic pilots were declared 'medically unfit' to fly because of the color of their skin.
"If I write a letter for 'im, can you get it sent?" Alix asked.
"I can certainly try!" Marinette agreed, though she supposed that properly addressing the letter was a different matter entirely. She made a mental note to ask the mail-room attendants what exactly was required to post. Perhaps a name would be enough to track down someone with a high enough rank. Perhaps it would be another dead-end. Either way, she brought Alix the requested pen and paper, and was quickly greeted with a note that simply read:
"Max, it's Alix. Call the RAF hospital. – A"
Still, she did her due diligence and folded it neatly inside one of her own envelopes, stamped and addressed it as far as she could, and headed straight to the mailroom in search of help.
Through a great deal of pantomiming, and a very slow, and frankly demeaning demonstration of what happens to improperly addressed mail, Marinette was able to determine from the clerk that no, a name would not be enough to get the letter sent anywhere but the garbage pile. Still, she hadn't walked all the way to the main mailroom just to give the letter back to Alix. She located, instead, the box for Private Agreste, and then thought better of it and instead scribbled a quick note before placing it in Private Lahiffe's slot. Between the two of them, she'd discovered pretty quickly that Nino was the one with connections. Nino was the type to recall that your bunkmate's neighbor's former-drinking-buddy's fiancée had gone to school with his mother's childhood-friend's ex-husband's gardener's son. He saw the invisible threads that wove every person on earth into one great social web. If he wanted to make a connection, he knew exactly which strings to pull.
She hoped that by placing the note in its intended end-location herself she might avoid the wrath of whatever mailroom attendant seemed quite intent to delay even the most minor of interactions by at least a week, but she wasn't perfectly confident that the woman pretending not to watch her wouldn't immediately remove the two and throw them in the garbage pile for unaddressed letters as some sort of sick joke. She offered up only the tiniest of prayers that whatever cosmic force helped assure the timely delivery of mail was watching out for her just this once.
Fate responded with a brief visit from Private Lahiffe himself with a plan so obviously unobvious that Marinette didn't quite know whether or not to feel poorly for not having thought of it herself.
"Chloé still has a box here," he explained with the nonchalance of someone who was absolutely not where he was supposed to be, but didn't much care about that. "The boys from our unit still send her letters sometimes, and they get sent on to wherever she is now."
"And she…" Marinette thought it over. "She'll know where her father is."
"More likely that they're in the same place. Chloé wasn't exactly invited across the channel for her skills."
They shared a quick laugh. Chloé's medical missteps would have probably been far less humorous if she'd still been practicing, but with the knowledge that she was most certainly holed up in some hotel room somewhere, they were willing to crack a joke at the expense of all those she'd managed to maim during her brief stint as a field nurse.
"And Private Agreste," Marinette asked, turning shy. "How is he?
"Aces! Well, he's an ace at least. Flying ace, you know? But to tell the truth, I think all this is starting to get to him."
"All this?"
"He…" Private Lahiffe began and then bit his lip before starting over. "Adrien's a sensitive kid. I think he feels a lot more guilt than most guys up there. I think it's eating at him."
Since the start of the Blitz, the RAF had only gotten busier. Rounds of bombings in Germany were met with retaliatory rounds of bombing on the Queen's shores, as though the two countries were having a conversation that could only be carried out through bloodshed. Sometimes Marinette wondered if perhaps this was a new kind of diplomacy. When words failed, weapons spoke. How does one reason with unreasonable men except with force?
"Can… can you arrange for him to meet me some time soon?" Marinette asked. "I tried to set things up myself but the mail isn't exactly reliable here."
"Oh, haha!" Private Lahiffe laughed. "Adrien told me about the laundry room debacle. Said he spent four nights in a row just hopin' you'd show up late."
Marinette blushed scarlet. She'd given herself such grief for waiting just one night, and here her intended had spent four. Why hadn't she at least tried again? Still, she refused to chide herself too greatly. It was not as though the two of them were a couple, after all. What were they exactly? Friends? Dance partners? A nurse and her former patient? What did she want to be?
"Speakin' of Adrien," Nino interrupted her thoughts, "why don't you give me the letter and we'll sign like it's from him. Chloé's sure to deliver it that way."
"You're right," Marinette laughed. She doubted Chloé would lift a finger to help a fellow nurse—no less one of her least favorites—but for a pretty boy from a rich family… mountains stood little chance.
"You're lucky my schedule's pretty light today," Nino joked. "How'sabout if I save me one trip and just say Adrien'll meet you tonight? Same time, same place. If he can't make it, I'll tell ya myself, but I don't want to play secretary between you two if I can save my legs some walkin'."
"Tonight?" she asked, suddenly flustered at the looming prospect of seeing someone who had hardly existed outside of paper and ink in the last few months.
"Tonight," he winked. "Don't worry about it."
Of course, worrying was just about the only thing Marinette could do. What should she wear? How should she do her hair? The answer was "her uniform," obviously, and it was unlikely that she'd have any luck styling her hair into anything other than her usual sloppy bun, but if absence makes the heart grow fonder, looming reunion creates only tachycardia therein.
As she stood in the dark, moonlit laundry room, she almost wished there were some emergency afoot so that she could feel calm once more. It was so simple to speak of wounds and injuries and solutions and tinctures and disinfectants and cures. What had they spoken of otherwise? That night in the dance hall, with only a sip of weak alcohol and the adrenaline of a dozen dances done, how had he suddenly become so easy to talk to? Why wouldn't that be the case now? No, why shouldn't that be the case now? Why was she so distraught about the possibility of running out of words with someone she longed more than anything just to glimpse in passing?
Marinette steeled herself against the looming anxiety. If she was to be disappointed by his absence, she would bare it just as she had before. If she was to be gifted by his presence, she would allow her jubilation to guide her actions. There was no reason to worry before the moment came. The thought did not quiet the rhythmic pounding of her heart, but the world felt as though it were spinning less than it had a moment ago.
"Marinette?" a soft voice called.