~ Part V ~
~ The Heart of the Beast ~

~ Fall 1915 ~

1.
~ Eames tried to keep warm as the cold rain fell on him. It was another exhaustive day in the trenches. A day that reminded him how slight, the grip on life could be. How easily it could slip through your fingers. He had no idea that the war would be like this.
As a boy, he dreamed of battlefields and hand to hand combat. Vanquishing an enemy who was in the wrong, and he would be in the right.
The reality was a world of cold rain, mud, hunger, infection and death. All this, and what ever gas the enemy could throw at them.
It was the gas that scared him the most. Great yellow clouds of mustered gas would encroach on them without prejudice or regret. It knew no borders, and attacked as silently as the wind that brought it to it's prey. In it's wake, it left men blind, burned and unfit for combat.
There weren't enough gas masks to go around and sometimes the masks would leak and trap the insidious gas close to the eyes anyway. Making the attack much worse.
Then, there was the issues of living in trenches. There was not even the dignity of proper hygiene here. The rat like tunnels reeked of human waste and other foulness.
All this might have been livable if the dead could have been evacuated, if there was a dry place to sleep and the bombs weren't always dropping on them. In the past year, Eames had lost track of how many had died.
At first, it was a great shock to him. Youth snuffed out so quickly, he could scarcely believe the thing had happened.
Young men, healthy men, couldn't just die. It was a thing that was not allowed. They were blown to pieces, their bodies left in the mud to rot. The gas crept in like a spider, and strangled the life out of those the bullets and grandees didn't kill. It was an unfair waste of life.
~ Eames let out a sigh and wished for the hundredth time he was home. Blue Rivers, with its safety, dry beds and beautiful lands called to him. Even in his sleep, dreams would come to him of the grand house, the conservatory, Ariadne... always, there was Ariadne to torment him.
He sat on a metal amo box and watched his fellow fighting men argue over the last tin of food. He hadn't eaten in two days, but he had stopped caring about that a long time ago. He longed for death now.
His first month in the trenches, he had been shot in the neck. The bullet passing dangerously close to an artery and the surgeon simply stitched him up. In camp, he had contracted some kind of sickness that he shook off after a few days of rest. The doctors called it Spanish Flu and he was soon enough back in the war.
He had food poisoning, jungle rot an some kind of eye infection. Nothing ever serious enough to kill him.
Ariadne had told him to go to war and die there, he was failing at it.
He watched the men fighting over the ration of food and wishing for a way out, when he pulled out his water proof envelope.
In it, were all the pictures he and Phillipa had taken together.
He had shown her how to develop them. They were his only link to Blue Rivers. His only proof that that life was real and waiting for him.
Not all of it, however. Somethings, would never come back to him.
Ariadne didn't love him. She had married Fredrick and gone to London to be with him. He hadn't bothered to go to the wedding. Hadn't bothered to see her after what had transpired that night. After their last night in the conservatory, he couldn't face her.
He had become a beast that night. He couldn't be counted as apart of the human race any longer. He had hurt the only woman he had ever loved, and he deserved to waste away and die in this hell.
What if she hadn't have fought back so well? What if, in his drunken rage, he had struck her or raped her? What if he had hurt her? He could never live with that.
So, that was why Eames found himself volunteering for reckless missions to string barbed wire across the lines. To act as a lookout, to string telephone lines in the mud, to ride across the gas ridden fields to allied command.
He deserved this hell.
With careful hands, he looked over the pictures of home. Phillipa had done an excellent job of capturing the conservatory. He wanted to step into the picture and be home right now.
He came to the candid group picture of Ariadne, Olivia, Lady Percy, Mal and Cobb at their breakfast table. It was a happy memory. Ariadne looked smaller than normal compared to everyone else.
Her eyes looked large and defiant.
"Like a doe, who has never seen a winter." Eames muttered.
He laughed at himself and ran his hands over her face.
He hoped she could forgive him one day. Forgive a man who loved her. Forgive a man who loved her so much his soul was in hell so that he might die and be absolved.

~ Ariadne was glad to escape London. With the war, Fredrick's departure just two days after their wedding, it was very lonely with only the young children and Maura for company.
No one was more shocked than she was to find herself back at Blue Rivers a month after Fredrick and Eames left for the fighting. It hadn't been a hard decision to make at all. Lady Percy had asked her to come back. The great house had become a sort of boarding home for the war workers that had come in. The village, thanks to Arthur's phone hub foresight, had become instrumental in the allied fight. Everyday there was radio transmissions and things to be decoded, transcribed and sent out.
Blue Rivers, drafted to do it's part, gave shelter to the women who worked in the telegraph office. Ariadne among them.
She had volunteered to join in this tedious, mind numbing work. Everyone was busy with some kind of war related task. Even Lady percy and Juniper found their jobs of running Blue Rivers much more then they bargained for, now that it was a boarding house.
Ariadne came home to her sad, broken little family each day, and the family ate dinner in the conservatory. The dinning room, reserved for the phone hub employees.
The staff, once at the beck and call of the family, now in the service of fifty girls from the country.
"I could never see what was so wonderful about this conservatory." Juniper sighed as they ate their simple meal.
Rationing had come into their lives and there was no more sugar, not even honey for tea.
"It's so drafty in here." she added.
Ariadne said nothing. She was getting to the point where she was forgetting how to talk. Her work at the phone hub didn't require her to speak, when she was at home, Olivia babbled enough for the both of them.
Harold was a quite boy who knew he was a guest in the grand home. He seemed a little intimidated by the house and the relatives he didn't know. He clung to Ariadne when she was available, and when she wasn't, tried to play with James and Phillipa as best he could.
He told his new step mother every night that he wanted to go home. He wanted daddy back.
"When the war is over, darling." Ariadne would whisper to him. "When the war is over, daddy will come home and everything will be better."
It had been a lie. Harold was too young to understand that Fredrick might never come home. He went missing the first month of the war and was suspected to be dead. the army wasn't anxious to declare him lost yet, and Ariadne could get no more information.
She knew, however, she was a widow again. Married and widowed twice in three years.
It would have been laughable if it wasn't so insulting.
On her wedding night in London, after the lovely ceremony and reception, her handsome new husband carried her to their new bedroom, he shyly told her he would be sleeping in the guest room.
"Because of the war, dearest." he said as she stared back at him in shock. "I can't have you fall pregnant. If I were to die, where would you be? No, it's best to wait until I'm safely at home and we are free of the burden of war."
It was a tragic joke Fredrick married her and refused to enjoy her. Another slap in the face by that cruel tauntress of love. He only wanted her as a full time caregiver to his son. He knew Ariadne had a soft spot for all children and would never place the boy in an orphanage. It wasn't Harold's fault his father had used her.
She refused to blame anyone but herself.
"Have we had any letters?" Aunt Percy asked.
Ariadne let out a sigh. Everyday at dinner, the same question. The family's way of asking for news of Eames or Fredrick.
"None." Airande said stiffly.
"You would tell us if there was. Good or bad, we need to know." Lady Percy said.
"Of course she would tell us. She and Charles were always close. Why, the first few months of the war, Charles wrote strictly to her." Juniper scolded.
Ariadne didn't respond. Her voice failing her again.
Eames had written to her at least once a week. Each letter expressing his guilt and remorse over what had happened between them that night. She had burned each one. Her anger at him still sharp and painful.
Mostly, she was still mad at herself. She had told him to go to war and die. They hadn't heard from Eames in over six months. With the growing lists of the dead, she feared that dying, was precisely what he had done.