Alderney - Treeton Camp - Gisbonnhoffer was in a particularly foul mood, well beyond what the men under his command had come to understand as his usual, familiar sulkiness. He had not wanted (nor expected, in the wake of recovering Marion from the flier and seeing her battered condition) to be immediately returned to his duty, though he had not fought the order, knowing it was better to be condemned to long hours at the camp, at his job, than reprimanded by the Kommandant, or, worse, to lose his position over occurrences of the last few days easily attributed to his incompetence (even if that blame was debatable).

He had just been setting down to work on the report of the flier's escape when a landser was at his open door, standing somewhat expectantly just outside the doorframe.

"Ja?" Geis growled at him.

"Herr Lieutenant, Sir," the young landser all but shook in his boots, "the prisoner is ready for you."

"Prisoner? What pris-" Geis let out with a heavy sigh and a collapse of his shoulders. The fisherman. Marion's Sarkese fisherman. His chair screeched back from its place as he pushed it from the desk with his weight still in the seat, his demeanor reverting quickly from frustration to the detachment of all-business. "What have you done to him?" He strode purposefully out of the main office hut, and toward the blockhouse of holding cells, expecting the landser to follow in his wake.

"Only the usual, Sir. Though, Specialist Joseph is with him now, and he's brought in die Sinnesschmerzmaschine." The landser slightly cringed at the thought of the dread device.

"And you perpetrated this under whose orders?"

"Um, standard...procedure, Sir. Specialist Joseph knew that you prefer to have prisoners loosened up before you speak to them."

"Yes?" Gisbonnhoffer half-shouted over his shoulder. "Well, this one was not meant for harsh treatment."

The landser could not conceal his surprise at this news. "Well, I, uh, suppose we could clean him up..."

"Don't be ridiculous," Gisbonnhoffer came to an abrupt stop, and spat out, "for us to enact our techniques on a prisoner, even one merely meant to be detained, and then not to even attempt an interrogation, but rather clean him up, shake his hand and send him on his way? We would be a laughing stock to anyone he mentioned his experience to! What's done is done. I shall question him. You may leave die Sinnesschmerzmaschine set up in the room. Specialist Joseph, however, in this instance, is dismissed. Go in and tell him so."

"Sir." The landser quickly did as he was told, opening the door to the small room that had been set up for such activities.

The smell of die maschine wafted toward Geis on the air as the door shut behind the landser. Nothing he had ever encountered quite smelled the same, the tincture in the air a combination of fear, sweat, damp porcelain, and unbridled electricity. Usually, the scent gave him a special charge, a feeling of purpose and near-triumph. It often signaled victory as close at hand.

Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine was not a 'technique' many men withstood for long. The flier had spent more than a fair share of time with it. So much so they had once run low on kerosene, and had to send for more. But then, Flight Commander Thomas Carter had not been just any torturee. He had well-proven that in more ways than simply being able to evade the machine, and his inquisitors.

Specialist Joseph exited the room, a clear look of confusion and disappointment on his face at being sent away. Gisbonnhoffer chose to roll his eyes rather than make eye contact with the underling whose only possible recommendation for himself was that he was a master at hurting others.

Geis pushed open the door into the interrogation chamber. Before him sat, behind a smallish table (just for what might be needed in the use of some of the hand-operated implements for various 'techniques'), the fisherman. He looked to be of his late twenties, early thirties, with hair somewhere between dirty blonde and light ash. His face was bearded, as, at this time of year many Islanders' (especially fishermen's) were. His build was unassuming. Geis noted he sat considerably well in the chair for someone already subjected to the 'loosening up' process.

Here came the Lieutenant, Geis Gisbonnhoffer, opening the door to the room. Mitch could not tell much about him, his vision was still quite blurry about the edges, and he knew he'd have burst blood vessels in his eyes (and possibly face) come tomorrow morning. Now there, he almost laughed in his head. He and Robin had seen plenty of those, but the acquiring of them had never been painful, only had nursing same the next morning.

"Mr. Miller," the Lieutenant said, queerly offering him a nearly formal address, "my superiors have some questions about your time with the escaped prisoner's hostage." He cleared his throat. "I mention my superiors so that you know it is best to keep this between you and I, at the lowest level possible, so that I will not have to call on anyone...more skilled at asking such questions. Do you understand?"

Mitch nodded, his injured tongue, he thought in working order, but no need to take the chance and find it was not yet ready to move, only to slaver and slur.

He was in an absolute devil of a situation, between Scylla and Charybdis if he had ever been so. Unit 1192's training had never been for long-term undercover work, they had trained for swift in (via parachute) and swift out (plane to England, or boat to surfaced submarine pick-ups). And that, in Occupied Mainland Europe.

The torture training scenarios they had been put through were ones in which they had been taken by the enemy, and known to be military. So; name, rank, serial number. Supposed eventual trip to a designated POW camp, and new mission: escape.

Or (as they were often apprised), unmasking as spies and firing squad, if that nice of a treatment. They owned and wore no uniforms, had no military identifying pins (as Mr. Carter had his RAF wings, his Flight Commander insignia) or ribbons, no papers attesting to such. No version of accurate identification at all, as they were...dead to the Empire. They were the ghosts of the war. The enemy was lucky to catch one, luckier still to be able to keep such a spectre once caught (assuming Jerry knew, even, what he had pinched).

But here, on Alderney, Mitch was a mere fisherman, with an incomplete cover story. After all, he had been meant to be the fisherman for but a handful of hours this morning. No longer. He would have to try, unrehearsed, to smoothly marry his Sark cover to this new wrinkle of owning a fishing boat as best he could, staying true to the impeccably forged identification papers and permits that he had been carrying at the time he was taken.

And it had been damn rotten hard to think and plan for such when these godforsaken Jerries had been sticking him with things and hurting him to distraction.

He had decided it would appear very suspect if a common fisherman with nothing to hide refused to speak, or refused to answer their questions, particularly under such duress. And so he purposed to answer them as normally and consistently as possible in the hopes of maintaining plausibility.

"You are from Sark?" the Lieutenant asked, his black-gloved hands folded on the tabletop. "Born there?"

"I was born a Guernseyman. I came to Sark to supplement it with essential workers in the raising of crops and livestock for the Reich." He thought referring to Germany as 'the Reich' offered a nice touch of respect.

"A Guernseyman!" Geis seemed positively chuffed. "I did not know this! You have family there?"

"I am a single man, my parents have passed."

"Passed? Passed as what?" The English idiom was lost on Geis. He took it to mean something along the lines of Jews hiding their identity, 'passing' as Gentile.

Mitch attempted to clarify. "They have passed...into Eternity. They are deceased."

"Ah. You have other family?"

And so things went for awhile. They might have been at getting to know one another over tea, had their surroundings been different. And had Gisbonnhoffer offered similar information about himself in turn.

"Might I have a glass of water?"

"Certainly," Gisbonnhoffer consented, shouting through the door to have a pitcher and glass brought.

As he took it to drink, Mitch (in the character of the concerned, Good Samaritan fisherman) speculated aloud, "bet the Lady Marion was glad to get herself one of these. She was looking worse for wear, wasn't she?"

"The Lady Marion?" Geis' until-then open face constricted with immediate interest at Mitch's wholly proper use of Marion's title. "Looking worse for wear? You two are acquainted? You know what Lady Marion usually looks like?"

He scrambled for conversational veracity like a cat seeking traction on ice. "Well, that is, we, erm, being a Guernseyman...one knows of the Nighten family and Barnsdale, surely."

"Does one?" Gisbonnhoffer queried, not entirely convinced. "And what might you tell me of her? That I don't know?" For the first time he became aggressively an intimidator, leaning across the table to increase his nearness to Mitch's face. "Let us reminisce. I am her fiance. Surely you are aware of this, Mr. Miller, as you are unmasked as so intimately familiar with her ladyship."

Sark - Farm of Blind La Salle - "Never made a coffin before," Wills Reddy announced as he stood in the front sitting room looking at where they had laid out Dick's body in it. He did not mention that yet turning in his mind was knowledge of the larger islands, the severe shortage of wood there as civilian coal rations were meager, if any at all, and in the coming winter Islanders would soon be back to burning books and furniture and anything to keep warm and cook what food there was, taking in bracken, gorse and seaweed for fuel, no doubt, as the early settlers on Sark had when the small island was found originally to be lacking in trees.

"It is of sturdy, strong work, and respectfully done. A fine box, Wills," Stephen assured him as his questing fingers examined Wills' handiwork.

His ears were less obstructed by John's gauze swathing of the night before, as Abby Rufford had sent one of her young sons to fetch the island's doctor over to have a look. The doctor had done what he might (the gang hidden from sight in the barn at the time), and re-bandaged them, making allowances for Stephen being able to hear.

Moments after completing his ministrations toward his living patient, he set to completing the necessary clerical work to declare Dick dead, and make way for the afternoon funeral to come.

"Would that you could attend, Dr. Battley," Stephen had told him, by way of invitation.

"Would that I could, also. Dick was a good boy, if sometimes not the sharpest of lads." He smiled wistfully for the boy he had known from birth. "But you must keep it a small, supremely quiet gathering, La Salle," he counseled, his voice low but insistent. "I cannot come and risk being punished for taking part, for the Germans might well have me sent away, or detained, and then who would nurse the island in my absence? But I know, also, the island needs you, needs this tenement and what it stands for. After what you have told me (and what gossip is circulating the island) of yesterday, you have caught the eye of this Lieutenant, and in your refusal of him you have perhaps foolishly made an enemy where a friend would have proven far more beneficial. He knows you now. You have raised his ire. It is not the wisest of moves to allow illegal meetings on your property just twenty-four hours later."

"It may not be smart," Stephen easily agreed, "But there is wisdom in it, I assure you, as it is the right thing to do."

"And what do you tell the Germans when they come, finally (as you have tweaked their noses one time too many), to ask if you are harboring Jews, escaped prisoners, or stranded RAF pilots?"

"I do not lie, Battley. That is the answer you are looking for."

"And that, La Salle, is where we differ entirely. I will never reconcile my scientific mind fully to your faith-filled one, for all that you can debate science with me as well as any man I know. For when the day comes the Germans ask me about Jews and prisoners and stranded RAF pilots, I will lie. And lie and lie, and I will keep on lying until St. Peter meets with me at the Pearly Gates and settles the question one final time as to which answer to this situation is most-acceptable to our God: mendacity in favor of saving lives, or truth (and faith in Heaven's intervention) at any cost." He closed his doctor's bag at this, his work done. "Now, if you simply leave them alone and packed as I have done for you, I shall return in a day or two-I will give plenty of notice of my approach before reaching the house, on account of your...dogs-" (he indicated his understanding that unexpected visitors were complicated to accommodate on the farm at present) "and I shall re-examine them." On went his hat, with a farewell nod. "Good day."

Stephen came out of the memory, and continued his praise of Wills. "Dick's parents will be proud to have him in something more than a simple shroud."

"I, for one," Robin offered from the horsehair armchair, where he stood from sitting, "trust we will find more hopeful work for your craftsman's hands in days to come." His lips stretched in approximation of a grim smile. He had not shared the news of Mitch's uncertain fate with the gang entire, yet. He had hoped to wait for the funeral, for which some few of them, at least, might risk being present. Johnson and Royston had gone ahead to scout among what was left of the mines' entrances on Little Sark, their physical presences rather too memorable for gatherings of any size.

As for the present conundrum of Mitch? What could be done, really, until Allen returned with word, any word? One could not assault Alderney entire, certainly. It was a veritable bastion of Jerry strength and firepower. The population depleted down to only six civilians following the pre-Occupation evacuations. Without a populace, among whom could one hide? Among only the military, which had infused their stronghold with all their impressive might.

Without a specific idea on where to look for Mitch, or where he had been taken and for what, anyone without permission caught on the island would meet a fate likely worse than that which Mitch (thought to be but an inconsequential fisherman) currently endured. It was mere hours since Bonchurch had been taken. The time for last-ditch wild-hair plans was not yet.

For the moment Robin played the game of wait-and-see, though nothing about such a tactic, at present, struck him as sporting.

The noise of a man approaching the entryway to the room prompted the two sighted, and one blind to turn in that direction.

Thomas Carter, hair not yet dry from Stephen's homemade lice-cure, had seemingly wandered down the short stub of a hall in search of who-knew-what, but certainly not the sight that met his eyes.

He had a towel thrown about his shoulders, and had been taking the corner end of it to dry out one of his ears. He had momentarily shucked off his RAF coat, leaving only the white undershirt below. Even so, he had assiduously affixed his wings and other crucial insignia to the ringed collar of the t-shirt, ensuring that he would be properly identified as standard military if he were captured, even in this brief moment, even from this place that seemed to him so far from camps or Nazis of any kind. Yet, even here, his wary, ever-vigilant mind saw to it he could not (unlike the others, perpetually out-of-uniform, unidentified as British SIS, about him) be taken for a spy.

The shirt he wore no longer clung to him, as it had the night he bailed out into the sea. The fit muscles it had once showcased were no longer ridged to impressive effect within it. Instead, it fell slack across his shoulders, looking what seemed like stretched-out across his chest. Weeks of Nazi privation and cruelty had shrunk not only his chest, but his waistline, and his trousers barely hung upon him, their belt taken immediately by his captors, not to be returned lest he fashion himself a weapon of it and its buckle...or a noose.

His face, clean-shaven for the entirety of his adult life, bristled with blonde whiskers longing to grow wild, within an inch of his eyesockets, across the swell of his Adam's apple, and down to his collarbone where it wished to marry with the hair on his chest. He desperately longed to have it gone, to find his face again, and felt thankful for the German's small allotment of food to him in this one thing: had they fed him better, doubtless it would be a far bushier thatch of which he sought to rid himself as soon as a razor could be located.

Had he been offered a razor earlier, he would gladly have used it on his head, removing the need for any lice-killer remedy, curious to see if the sensation of baldness would have been as fascinating and freeing as Babushka had read the Grand Duchesses had once claimed it was following their joint illness from measles in a letter smuggled out from their captivity to family members who had hand-copied its contents and sent it to Babushka.

That thought, so unreal, having so little to do with the present moment, came like an unexpected hiccup, his eyes widening in reaction to it having slipped out from behind the locked-gate of his past, and his turning over of it was what had propelled him to the archway and caused him to forget what he knew was beyond.

His hand froze for a moment with the towel to his ear, his eyes glommed on to the side of the coffin. From where he stood, gorgonized, only just inside the arch, he could not yet see into it.

It surprised no one that Robin, highest ranking officer present, spoke first. His tone was cooler than it had been to the flier previously, but cutting, a dagger's edge painted with poison. "You are not wanted here."

Carter did not retreat, nor did he advance. And, in fact, he averted his eyes from Robin's gaze, as a dog might in an effort to sidestep an apparent challenge. As Oxley was the undisputed ranking officer, it was understood by both rivals that it was Carter's job to take (and never rebel against) whatever was dished out. In another world, another lifetime, one in which American Thomas Carter would need never have been invented, he would have been Prince Komonoff, commander of men, of entire armies. Here, he was ever under another's authority. He had long ago accepted this.

Wills had gotten enough out of Carter the night before of the flier's first brawling encounter with an unintroduced Robin near La Seigneurie to fear what might occur next. With an intake of breath he made to move himself between the two men, separated now by just more than half the length of the modest sitting room. But before he could take a step, the back of Stephen's warm hand was to his chest, in a mild gesture to hold him off.

"Robin, if you will indulge me," the blind rector said in a voice that could not have been mellower, yet no less deliberate, "I think you will find that it is for me, and me alone, to decide who is not wanted in my own home, and where."

In the face of the unexpected assertion of local authority by Stephen, Robin ceded the point. But he did not do so meekly. "Very well," his voice was all challenge. "Let him have his look." He took a threatening step toward Carter, whose eyes remained floorward. "What?" Robin again taunted him, looking seconds away from a headbutt, or intimidating chest bumping. "Don't want it now? Changed your mind, Flyboy?" The emotion visible in Oxley was no longer one of singular rage and anger with the flier; his eyes took on a deeply pained quality, as of one tormented by personal culpability, by guilt. "Look at him!" he half-shouted, his hand grasping Carter's shirt as though he would pull him by force to the open casket. His other arm stretched out into a hand pointed at Dick's body. "He gave all for you! Know his face! Honor him at least in that, that you do not look away."

But Carter's upper body was slack, without the taut, scrapping emotion Robin seemed desirous of bringing out in him. He was without further fight. He did not say that had this been any other house, any other day, he would never have been able to recognize the boatman he shot through the heart, even had his own life depended upon such an identification. Such was the utter lack of attention he had paid to him, the lack of connection that the being in the way of him and that boat-of escape-was a life. Was a person. He had been, rather, a target, an obstacle. A removable hindrance.

Boom. One shot. One kill. My boat.

"He is Dick Giddons," Stephen offered, his tone compassionate where Robin's was accusatory. He spoke on conversationally, as though Robin's outburst had not occurred. "Within the hour his parents, and others who knew him, will be here to celebrate his life, and honor his passing." He turned his face to Oxley, "Robin, would you be so good as to help Wills find the remedy I prepared, so that he may dose himself and the boy? Thank you." He made the appeal sound as inconsequential as any slight favor he had ever requested. He also made it firmly apparent that, for the moment (as his earlier words had illustrated), Blind La Salle was taking charge in his own home, and Robin, and his at-present tumultuous behavior, was no longer welcome inside the archway of his front sitting room.

With a look from Stephen to Carter, and then one back to Dick, which he significantly brought back to Carter, Robin left the room for the rest of the house, Wills following after.

In the wake of their departure, Stephen smelled something in the room's air, not as pungent as the lice-cure's potent ingredients, but far more familiar. It would have been difficult for him to describe to a sighted person. It was a smell of colors, of some way in which he could sense another person's desires, their needs.

Were Louise here to ask him to define it, he would have told her it smelled something, perhaps, of hyssop; it sounded of cracked-with-age desperation, and felt of the texture of a tree branch no longer green enough with life to bend, that had broken cleanly away from its source: the tree.

Therefore, he was not at all astonished when the flier spoke without being in any way further prompted.

"I have committed crimes," Carter declared, his voice low, but easily audible. "Heinous crimes."

Stephen could not see Carter, but when the RAF flier's uneasy eyes flicked over to the former rector's unseeing ones, searching for some signal that he had been heard, that his admission would not be taken lightly, or worse, cause him to be rejected, Stephen spoke to assure him, answering his announcement with a statement of insight. "And so, you do not wish to look back. Because you don't like to see what you've done."

Carter found that it was easy...far easier than he would have imagined, to let his guard fall away in the presence of this other man, this man who could not watch him struggle to contain his emotions, who would not see any tears ready to, or already, falling.

Something in Stephen La Salle, he could not have said what, (his dooshcha raskaz, his 'soul story' Babushka would have said) told him, had this man sighted eyes, still, these things would have been easy to risk in front of him.

"I..." Carter began again, uncertain, truly, of where to begin. "...have not looked back-I have not wished to see what I have done, in so long...I, I have not been Confessed in nine, nearly ten, years." He tried for a small scoff there, but it sounded more of a slight sob. "Reddy claims you for a holy man, a minister of some sort?"

Stephen smiled encouragingly at the other man. "I was a rector, now retired. I will willingly hear any you have to say, but you must know that I am of the Methodist faith. You referenced confession as a proper noun." He slowly shook his head. "I am not of a denomination, nor a personal persuasion, that would hear such a Confession as you reference and believe myself empowered to offer an Absolution. Nor would I be willing to pretend at prescribing such."

"No," Carter said, in understanding, his voice gentle as a whisper.

Stephen returned himself to the horsehair chair Robin had vacated, pulling a simpler straight-backed wooden one directly across from it, so that it faced him. Nothing in the air that he could discern between he and Carter had changed with his explanation of not being able to preside over a capital-C Confession. He pulled his pipe out of his shirt pocket and brought its stem close to his mouth. "Will you sit?" he asked. "Perhaps, you would like to start with what has altered, Thomas, with what has set your path so that now you find yourself wishing to account for your actions over this past decade?"

"Please," Carter removed the towel from his shoulders, hanging it across the back of the straight-back chair to dry, and he took a knee next to Stephen. "Can I ask a favor, first?"

"Ask," he encouraged, his expression warm and willing.

"Here," Carter's breath caught with the knowledge of what he was about to break with-such a longstanding practice of enforced forgetting, "within this room, just now, can you call me Alexsei?" He felt his eyes swimming in water and struggled not to blink until it had equalized. "Just for the time we are speaking together like this, as a man of God and...whatever it is I've become?"

Stephen could not see the blonde hair of the man before him, the facial features, but he well-recalled that the boy Djak understood only limited Russian, and that this was the only man present who knew how to speak it to him. Perhaps he should not have, perhaps it was a gesture too familiar, but he nonetheless placed his hand on the flier's head, inadvertently echoing the action of one invoking a holy blessing. "Very well, Alexsei," he encouraged him to go on, "what has changed?" He felt Carter's-Alexsei's-head dip down under the palm of his hand, not in an effort to avoid his touch, but as though under a psychological weight that only Alexsei might see, might feel.

"The night I was shot down...I fly Spitfires. You know them?"

Stephen agreed he did. "The fast little RAF fighter planes. I am told by Mitch they saved much at Dunkirk."

"They seat one man: a pilot. A man who never has to look back. He has no crew," he shook his head. "No responsibility as such. If things go badly, if he errs in judgment, he is answerable only to himself, and he alone will suffer for it. A perfect match, the Spitfire and I."

The kitchen clock chimed the quarter hour. The house seemed empty of any but themselves, Wills and Djak not able to be heard about. Robin, if he was about, off to himself, well out of earshot.

"The night I became the Jerries' prisoner, when they pulled me from the sea, was not a normal mission. For reasons I am not at liberty to share, I was flying a bomber. The kind Eagle Squadron's Spitfires generally escorted. The bomber had a complete crew of ten. Many of them were men I knew. Some I had reason to admire. And when we took ack-ack, and I knew us for lost, though I tried my best first to keep us going and make a rough landing near St. Malo, and then attempted to allow us and our chutes to aim for the dry patch of Burhou, still, more than half the crew perished in the sea before the Jerries arrived. The rest they shot where we stood on the deck of their vessel, the blood in their veins still cold from the sea." His voice had unintentionally taken on a shivering quality, as though he still stood on that deck, drenched, breathless, longing for warmth. "Myself, I had stopped some years ago counting my personal number of kills, but suddenly I was seeing deaths because of me, because of what I had done. Where I had failed. Like Pedersen," he stopped, surprising himself by letting the name slip out. That name from what seemed so long ago, on the Finnish Front.

They talked on. Rather, he spoke at length for some time, as the blind rector attentively listened.

The kitchen clock struck the half.

"There was a girl-a woman," he said. He could not recall ever having spoken about her before, never in all the bars, locker rooms or war rooms he had ever occupied when such conversations might arise. "In America. Her name was Tasha. From before the war."

"Russian?" Stephen asked, inferring it from the name.

"No," he replied, "her family were third generation, Polish immigrants."

"So it is really like that, there, as they say? Everyone living all together?"

Carter thought for a moment. "Some places," he agreed.

"And this woman, Tasha?"

"She loved me," he said, his eyes nearly taking on a shine, an unseen inner light he had yet to display for longer than even Stephen could have imagined. "I...accepted things from her, certain gifts, certain," his voice nearly broke and he stopped speaking to recompose himself so that he might continue. "I was not honorable in my actions toward her. What she chose to give, I took. But ours was not a reciprocal relationship. I did not love her. I tried-I thought, I hoped beyond hope that her love of me would eventually inspire, give birth to," he rolled his eyes ceiling-ward without explanation over the expression he found himself using, "that I would, in being loved, find myself loving her in return." He was standing behind the empty straight-back chair, his hands fists over the drying towel, knotting it about the chair back's two spindle knobs in a gesture of agitation. "But I think, that is, I have come to believe, I am...broken in that way. That there is something defective in my make-up where love is concerned. Do you believe that is possible? That one may be so?"

La Salle did not immediately answer the question. He let it steep into the air a moment, as he would the leaves for a good tea. "I think that many people who do not know what it is to be loved, find it everywhere, and with many people, and frequently discover all too late that they have settled for a mere shadow of love at its truest. I think that some other people who do not know what it is to be loved find themselves frustrated as time goes past them, as they search and search, wishing to find only that purest, essence of love as a reality, refusing to settle for the artifice the world so often offers in place of the true." He re-pocketed his pipe, never having lit it. "Hearts have their own timetables. When I am one-hundred will I know all there is to know of the many loves possible? No. And yet, do you now know more of love than you did when last you saw Tasha? If you have a better understanding of yourself, Alexsei, then I say, yes." Stephen paused. "And I think, rather, I know, that if you are, as you claim, in someway broken in that respect, you may be repaired. You may be healed."

"I think," Carter told him, though he did not share Zara's existence with the rector, nor mention her name, "despite all these years at war, at some point, some tendril of...what I can only call love (as I have said, I know so little of it) crept near my heart. I don't know how, in all this, in such a black and empty spot it could even find sustenance to grow, but somehow, I know it is there." He exhaled through his nose. "And instead of that tendril being choked out by what I've filled that space with..." he could not go on, he could no longer prevent himself from laughing on the wrong side of his face.

Stephen finished it for him. "You find instead that you can less and less abide the darkness."

Again, Carter took a knee at the side of the rector. "For the first time in so long, I feel as though I have been attempting to nourish myself on poison. And for the first time, it is more than I can bear." He used the heel of one hand to scrape away the water of his tears. He looked to Dick Giddons' casket. "Do you not hate me for what I have done? For the killing of your friend? It was done, as I'm sure you know, in cold blood, and without a thought for him, or his soul. The commanding officer here, Oxley, he is right, no doubt, to treat me as he does: with repugnance, without respect."

Stephen tensed in his seat, the clogged-with-tears voice of the man to his side calling out to his heart, with its desire to offer comfort and reassurance wherever possible, but the question was a fresh one, and one that still yet stung. He said a small inner prayer for guidance as he spoke to answer it. "I would be a poor example of a minister were I to choose consciously to hate, and to wish to feed that hate with wicked actions and thoughts. I am grieved," his voice dropped to a low register it seldom used, its tone there, shaky, "that Dick is dead. Grieved, more, that you were the one to end his life. I would that I might have you rescued to safety, and him alive as well. But that is not to be so. To kick against what is injures only the kicker, and changes not a thing." He cleared his throat of its oncoming tears, "Perhaps, having become blind after a mostly-sighted life, I have learned this lesson better than others." He swallowed, regaining his emotional balance. "Perhaps it is only my pride that thinks so." He smiled. "Robin," he took a breath, referencing his friend, "struggles with your being here just as much (if not more) for your violence toward the Lady Marion. Perhaps you might express your contrition to him. (As I am assuming you already have to the lady, herself.) It may do some small good, but you must remember, earthly consequences still exist for God-forgiven actions."

Carter squeezed closed his eyes at the kitchen clock chiming quarter 'til. He felt exhausted beyond further exertion.

"We will, I hope," Stephen stood from his chair, knowing his guests would soon enough arrive for the funeral, "speak again like this, Alexsei. As for Robin, though I have not known Lady Marion and he together, I do have the distinct feeling that being without her at the moment has him set off-balance. Certainly he is feeling the separation most keenly." He chuckled as he said, "When Mitch returns he will inform you all about it, and their life before the war. He is a veritable Homer when it comes to the tales of his fellows! As for you, and your future here (as long as you might stay), it has been discussed and planned. You are to become my cousin, arriving to help in the wake of the loss of Dick's. The islands are crawling with La Salles. No one will be able to keep straight from which branch of which La Salles you are come." Without invitation, he held his left hand out to find Carter's face.

Carter, who had also stood to depart the room in light of the soon-to-arrive mourners, reached hesitantly for the rector's fingers and guided them to his features.

"Yes, good, a nice scruff coming on!" he praised Carter's bristles. "Don't cut it. We will decide later on a robust mustache, I think, and Robin says you're light of hair and brows. True?"

"True enough," Carter agreed.

"I will mix you a dye, then, one Louise's mother, my belle-mere, liked best to cover her aging tresses. We shall christen you a dark-haired La Salle before sunrise tomorrow." He half-grinned at this notion. "And then, the hardest part."

"Something dangerous?"

"Yes," La Salle nodded. "Before dawn you must sneak down to the docks and walk the road back here with Wills (who I will send down to the docks so that it will seem he is to fetch you), so that all the island may agree that you arrived the day after Dick's funeral, as you had been sent for, and that you may be known." He stopped for a moment and considered. "Mitch will be best to guide you there. We will speak more about it later today, when he returns."

Alderney - It was quite late in the day when Gisbonnhoffer exited the interrogation chamber. He was determined to make for the Harbormaster's Office and Marion, whom he had left waiting there, before nightfall. He would brook little that got in his way of such.

The sight of Specialist Joseph, as distasteful as always, proved more dismaying than usual, as it appeared the other man had been hanging about, waiting to speak with him.

"Ask 'im," he declared, darkly, and without preamble. "Ask 'im how he got the marks on his torso."

Geis all but forcibly shouldered his way in disgust past the man. "Sorry?"

"Well," the Specialist sneered on, "I weren't gonna to tell you, on account of you sent me away during the good bit, but ask him. When I was at my work I seen marks; scars and stitchings on his chest and back." He raised his unkempt eyebrows significantly. "Marks that don't make any sense for a fisherman's body to wear. Ask him how he come by 'em, that trauma." Here his overt curiosity turned to suspicious and insecure jealousy as he demanded, "Was it someone else's work? Whose? I'd like to meet 'em, I would. Like to take some notes on how they does it."

Gisbonnhoffer had only half-listened to the repellent soldier speak. "Really, Joseph," he smirked his reply, speaking at all only to conclude their non-conversation as quickly as possible, and see himself on his way, "I'm not of your ilk, panting to see a man shirtless. But as you have expressed such interest, I warn you: he is fully mine now, to do with as I please. You may keep yourself away from him and your pet, Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine. You will be summoned if I find I should need you. Until such time, find a hole, Man, and trouble me no longer with your...appetites." He nearly spat the last word.

...TBC...

*Die Sinnesschmerzmaschine - babelfish German for 'the Mind Pain Machine'

Author's Note: Very close (and repeat) readers [I'm talking to you, Marjatta] will, perhaps, note some slight inconsistencies with Carter's capture story between this recounting and as it is priorly given in "Don't Go Walkin' Down Lover's Lane". They are unintentional (and insignificant to plot), and are merely the pitfalls of writing-as-you-go and researching-better-as-you-go-along. [A Spitfire, you see, has no crew. Earlier it was stated more than once that Carter was flying a Spitfire that night, but it also references his crew. Whoops.]
This story is a living, breathing entity. In future, when the series of four stories is completed, I will take time out to fully-harmonize the two. As it is, take the capture story given here as gospel on a go-forward basis.

Additionally, all military ranks stated; British, American, German, etc. have been dressed up to sound good, rather than for full accuracy. And yes, I am choosing to use the organizations of MI-6 and the British SIS interchangeably, despite the fact the former was not technically created (at least it claims not to have been) in WWII.

Finally (because once I start writing author's notes I have trouble stopping), I will say that 'Geis' is meant to rhyme with ICE, not geese, and Alexsei is "ALEK-say" as opposed to "uh-LEXI". And that is where I will stop. For now...