Title: Enigma 1/3
Fandom: Card Captor Sakura
Series: Faces of the Moon
Summary: Concerning the adventures of Keroberous and Yue before they met Sakura. WWII, Bletchley Park, there are more mysteries than just the codes.
Characters: J. Glasscastle, J. Glasscastle, Tommy Archer, Tessa Archer
Warnings: Original characters, poor historical research

Enigma (1/3)

The rule is, no character is ever itself.

They came in low through the tunnel, a sheaf of papers in a shallow wooden tray. Tommy Archer picked them out of the box, squared them by tapping them on his desk, and glowered at the top page.

Written in a careful round hand in black ink was:

St Jean le Peu?

J wants to know, "Sounds like some piano is escaping," 17 across.

Tommy scrubbed his short black hair furiously then scrawled an answer with his lead pencil:

Village near Tarrascon, pub Marie et Marthe. Barmaids Madeleine, Oceane, Susanne. Three roads, one close to big highway. More information?

Julian can answer his own bleeding crossword.

He put the sheet back in the box, and shoved it back through the tunnel with the broomstick that leaned against the wall. An answer came back in half an hour, in florid, curling script in vivid blue ink:

Barmaids did the trick.

Ta.

Decrypt to come from Bombe room.

"As the angel changes angles," 5 down.

J wants to know, can you take his place for tennis? Twisted ankle.

Tommy answered:

Sorry about Jacinth's ankle but DON'T DO TENNIS. Or crosswords. How about soccer? Working now.

and got back to the serious business of squinting over maps in Hut 6. Before he'd transferred from his regiment to Bletchley Park, he'd had some vague idea of academic boffins soberly poring over great tomes of abstruse cryptographic technique, when they weren't puffing briar pipes while wrapped in smoking jackets and slippers and listening to Mozart. He'd expected... gravitas (Oh G-d, the crosswords were rubbing off.) Instead, he got paper darts, terrible coffee, and a crowd of mild-mannered but definitely eccentric people who pestered him for cribs from his knowledge of the French countryside and played rounders at lunch break, every day, with more seriousness than they seemed to apply to the codes.

The box came back, with a single scrap of paper, in the careful round black script:

My ankles are in quite good health, thank you very much - J is a d-ed liar. Will work on the soccer side anyway. Darts?

He answered: At the Mary Red, half eight. I have dinner with a pretty girl first.

Then there were the Glasscastle twins, two tow-headed Welshman with public-school drawls, who seemed determined to drag him into one weird game after another, apparently because he could actually tell them apart. Darts made a good compromise.

*

It was stew, big savoury chunks of meat floating in a warm mess of beans, cabbage, dumplings, and gravy.

Tommy frowned at the pretty girl he was having dinner with. "We were out of meat ration for the month, you said."

She smiled at him from across the scrubbed table, showing a missing front tooth. Tessa had changed the ribbons on her braids for dinner, though the flower-print of her cotton dress showed some spatters from the cooking. "We did!" his eight-year-old sister said proudly, the glass of her horn-rimmed spectacles catching the light.

"Ah," he said, and lifted the spoon. "You've put oregano in it, nice. I can't quite recognise the taste, mind. Is it rabbit?"

"Something like that. Mrs Pushkin is helping with recipes and that." Tessa grinned her gap-toothed smile again. She was going to break hearts when she hit puberty. Tommy vowed to be there with a big stick, just in case.

*

Later that night...

"I take it," said the rangy Welshman, looking out into the dark, "that if through some miracle your image of perfection appeared before you, you'd tell it to bugger off and bring back the coal dust."

Tommy grinned. "I don't want an image. When I find my special one, I don't want her to be what I expect. What do I know, anyway? I'm just a dumb stoker's son from Bristol, a mud-footed soldier. When I find someone, I want her to be herself, as hard as she can. I want to spend a lifetime undressing her, and treasure each mystery."

The pub behind them roared with life. Through the window of the Mary Red, Tommy could see the other Glasscastle - Jacinth it had to be, from the frenetic brilliance in his eyes - landed his three darts in an irregular grouping on the dart-board and drank down a pint-glass of piss-yellow beer. Julian, cool-eyed, thoughtful, dragged again on his cigarette and released a cloud of smoke into the cool, dark air.

"I think," said Julian carefully, "I think this may have been an error of judgement."

"Eh?"

"Who do you love?"

"What are you asking me?"

But Julian only shook his head.

"Oi! Jay!" shouted his brother. "Your turn! Win the game for me, hey?"

Julian shrugged his bony shoulders and strolled inside. He kissed Kitty Price the barmaid for luck, landed three darts in the bulls-eye, and graciously accepted a round of beer from the losers.

He turned to grin at Tommy, who started shoving his way through the crowd - Jacinth had just dropped like a felled tree.

NOTES TO: BLETCHLEY PARK

They came in low through the tunnel... I couldn't find any close pictures of the tunnel leading between Hut 3 and 6 (they shared documents frequently, and shoved papers back and forth with broomsticks to keep from getting wet. Most of my Bletchley Park info came from www codesandciphers dot org dot uk. Very helpful, but not as complete as I'd like.

At the Mary Red... So, I really don't know that much about the environs of Bletchley Park, and research materials sometimes don't have little useful details like pub names. Please don't trust any details in here, because the odds are good I made them up.

Julian Glasscastle... In the Japanese version, Yukito's family name 'Tsukishiro' translates to 'moon castle', which isn't too far from 'Glasscastle', I guess. Incidentally (as A Scholar of Magics, by Carol Stevermeer also indicates), 'Glasscastle' is another way of saying Glastonbury, an island in a lake in Great Britain associated with Arthurian myth, specifically, it might be Avalon. The English dub has Sakura's family name as 'Avalon', and Yukito's personal name as 'Julian'. None of this information is needed to read the story, but I thought the byzantine routes I go through to pick names might be entertaining to the reader. Cheers.

Jacinth Glasscastle... It's very difficult finding a man's name (in the Western side, anyway) that relates to flowers. For some reason, I wanted it to start with J. Jacinth (or Hyacinth) is either a precious stone, a flower, or a pretty young man that the sun god Apollo was friends with. He died. Yes, I do think too much about names.