-The Beginning-
Roderich
(We are All in the Gutter, but) Some of Us are Looking at the Stars
1945/1920s
Note: I know they usually refer to Hungary as Elizaveta/Elizabeta, but for the purposes of cultural authenticity, I'm using the actual Hungarian version, which would be Erzsébet (or Erzsa for short, although that is probably not the correct nickname. There are limits to my patience for research so….). I'm not quite committed enough to fanfiction to go research what being on speed feels like, so the /brief/ mentions of that in this chapter are entirely fictional and loosely based on times I've consumed upwards of 6 cups of coffee during finals week. Stay off drugs, kids!
"Do you think? Do you think-"
"Is he awake?"
"Will he live?"
"That Nazi fuck-"
"-think there's blood on my pumps."
Roderich wakes to the smell of gunpowder and gasoline, fragments of half-remembered conversation slipping through his blitzed-out brain like sand in an hourglass. His heart is still beating too fast- a frantic rhythm that makes his veins feel too tight and his chest hurt. Despite the heaviness of his exhaustion, he doubts he'll be able to force himself back to sleep, not like this with his mind flickering between diamond-sharpness and swirling oblivion. He's curled up on some sort of bench, and the cracked leather of it scrapes painfully against his bruised cheekbone as the surface below him rumbles and jolts along. When the …car? Roderich decides that he's in a car, because unsure of what else this could be, takes an especially rough turn, there's a feminine shout and someone else starts cursing rapidly in what he's certain is Polish, although his grasp of the language is shaky at best.
A rescue then? Roderich daren't hope- it does things to people. He tries to lift his chest off of the seat, but makes it scarcely an inch before the excruciating pain forces him back down. He manages to swallow a cry because he's good at dealing with pain- he's had to be, but he can't help the tears that prick at the edge of his eyes as his ribs meet the bench again- harder than he'd like; it hurts. He takes a breath and that hurts too.
"Shh, stop moving, you'll hurt yourself." The woman speaks again, shifts in the passenger seat and reaches back until her pale fingers are touching the edge of the back seat, and Roderich would know that voice anywhere- those green eyes, and that insane, untamable mass of hair.
" 'rsza?" Roderich tries to make himself speak, but his tongue feels heavy in his mouth- thick and dry and fuzzy, and the words won't form. He's so tired.
"Shhh…" Erzsa is crying now, and all Roderich can do is stare, because Erzsébet Hedervary does not cry, hasn't in all the years he's known her- in all the years she's been his wife. "You're safe now."
Safe.
Roderich closes his eyes and falls into a sea of stars; they surround him, close, and sparkling and warm, enveloping him in soft, golden light, bearing him gently back into the past.
In Roderich's oldest memories- the happy ones, before his life was destroyed in an explosion of shattered glass and black smoke- he is looking at the stars. He remembers being tiny, sitting on a balcony at his grandfather's house in Vienna, wrapped in a quilt that smells like old books and Chanel No. 5, curling his fingers around the intricately twisted iron bands of the railing while his grandfather runs his fingers through his hair and spins stories of gods and heroes and ancestors as numerous as the stars. Roderich giggles and stretches his hands to the sky, certain that if he reaches hard enough, he can touch them. On nights like this, he feels like he could live forever- high on music and starlight and the warmth of childhood. He doesn't hear his father's whispered admonishments that his son is too old for faerie tales.
When Roderich is in first grade, he learns that stars aren't dead people at all- they're giant balls of gas, and he didn't really believe that but hearing it announced so casually still feels like losing something and when one of his classmates- Gilbert starts sobbing, Roderich doesn't blame him at all. He wants to cry too.