Alderney - Treeton Camp - He looked for the good bit. Searched for it like a man returning to his home following a decimating cyclone - desperate to find the one thing lost there he cannot live without. Frantically picking through rubble, pawing through debris - growing hysterical in his fruitless hunt.

He was long ago out of ideas, plans, solutions for how to handle the pain of die Sinnesschmerzmaschine. He wanted to break. He longed to give in. Could he do it? Please, could he? Just...offer up a small thing? Something insignificant, but seemingly important? A thing that might buy him a brief peace? Please?

En route to Treeton - Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had left his Guernsey estate at a strange hour the night before. It had not yet been quite two a.m. when he demanded one of his guards take him by car to St. Peter Port and a boat to Alderney apportioned to his use at the docks.

While on the pier, waiting for the boat to readied for launch, he had been unpleasantly surprised out of his black, singular frame of mind by the peculiar appearance of the island's Bailiff, Jodderick, who in short order explained that being out past the curfew was of the sole purpose to speak to him, that he had bribed a particular landser to let him know exactly when Herr Geis arrived to catch his boat back to his work on Alderney.

It was then Geis noted that with the exception of his overcoat, the Bailiff was head-to-toe in his pajamas.

"What is it?" Geis asked, even his curiosity unable to be piqued, despite the Bailiff's obvious distress.

"It is the reprisals, the Nightwatch killings." Jodderick spoke so quickly his words all but tumbled out one upon the other. He was clearly frightened at being out in the open past the strictly enforced curfew, even though he was clearly in Geis' company.

Geis' one eyebrow raised at mention of the Nightwatch, though his mind was still far more on the soon-departing boat than on Jodderick's troubles.

"My office is receiving threatening messages regarding them." He held out the paper doll chain, showed the writing that had accompanied it. 'Whichman watches you.'

Geis only half looked it over. "Not a very intelligent threat, Jodderick," he pointed out, dryly. "Your stalker is not even able to correctly spell 'Watchman'."

"No," the Bailiff shook his head, one hand fiddling with his coat's line of buttons closed against the night's chill. "There is an island story here, a sort of legend...of the Witchman."

Bogeymen. Geis gave a cockeyed smirk. "And what sort of story is it?"

The Bailiff's eyes grew round in the telling. "The sort you would not wish to have visited upon you - or your staff."

"So the threat then comes," Geis was bored, "not surprisingly, from an Islander. Were I you I should start with looking at the dead women's families."

"No!" said Jodderick, some of his old stentorian tones of command returning to him. "This is not my fault. I had nothing to do with - no hand in these deaths. You must speak with the Kommandant and advocate for me - for my staff. They are scared half out of their wits to open packages of any kind. Scared that this man - Whichman - will strike again," he waved the paper doll chain, "and less innocuously the next time!"

"You wish me to speak with the Kommandant?" The smirk appeared again.

"It was his doing. If he will only claim it as his decision, I feel certain these threats will stop." Here Jodderick's diplomacy (however misguided) kicked in. "Perhaps Herr Vaiser might even issue an apology for the misstep."

Geis let an air of danger descend on their conversation, and coat his tone. His eyes narrowed. Jodderick now had his full attention. The pitch of his voice fell appreciably. "You believe Herr Kommandant has mis-stepped?"

Jodderick's own demeanor backed down somewhat. "Well, he did not, after all, catch her."

Geis thought he had mis-heard. "Catch her?"

"The Nightwatch. I am told she is at it again, as though nothing has changed."

Gisbonnhoffer's eyes shot like 9mm bullets to his wristwatch. He pulled back the wide cuff of his leather glove to consult it. Two-fifty-five. It was not enough time. Not enough time. There was no visible wireless about, the boat's radio pre-set to Reich-only frequencies. "She is back?" he demanded. A tingle of amazement began to grow at the base of his spine.

Jodderick nodded briskly in the affirmative. "There are some," he told the clearly rattled Lieutenant, "who say she has risen." His eyes searched Geis' for any sympathy to his current predicament. "So you see," Jodderick continued, bringing the discussion back on topic, "if you will only - " but he got no further, as a supremely distracted Gisbonnhoffer threw one long booted leg over the boat's prow and was onboard and directing the soldier at the wheel to dispatch them with all haste to Alderney, no further thought to Guernsey's Bailiff in his growing ever-more crowded mind.

Looking out the window of the military supply truck he had commandeered now, the dawn not yet upon the Alderney landscape, he knew himself to be caught between Marion and the Nightwatch. His mind circled over and around the two females like an impatient vulture waiting for its prey to die.

It was an endless track of thought. Marion: he refused to believe himself without hope. He would initiate divorce proceedings immediately. He would (with all dispatch) acquire the necessary legal documentation to show to her to prove that he had removed all impediment to their future union. And he would set about, in the meantime, to winning her back.

The Nightwatch: she had returned. It was still up to him to find her, to be there the moment she tripped up, the glory of unmasking her to be his alone. It felt like she had evaded death just for him. No ham-fisted strategy like the Kommandant's unconsidered killings would smoke her out. She was a worthy adversary. Clever and shrewd to have evaded capture for so long. The trapping of her would need to involve an elegant lure.

He recalled the complaint of Jodderick the Bailiff (a man he had once thought of as a friend) only tangentially to his mind's main focus.

As the truck pulled through the barbed wire gates and to the camp headquarters and offices, Gisbonnhoffer's eyes strayed for a moment to the nearby blockhouse, which housed prisoners undergoing torture or being otherwise detained.

Strangely, he sighted a figure slinking away into the still-predominant shadows of the early morning. Specialist Joseph. Instantly he was curious to know what the man - expressly forbidden by him to be about that building - had been up to.

The door burst open. Mitch had been passed out. The rush of early morning air (he thought it must be of early morning, though no windows existed in this room to alert him of the passing of the days, the rising of the sun) roused him, and when his swollen eyes agreed to slit themselves open, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer in front of him, and not the recently departed Specialist Joseph.

"Let us have a chat," the tall officer invited, casually dragging a chair over to sit across from him.

It was the first time anyone had spoken to him in days. He had no ability to track how long he had been present here, how many sessions he had undergone at the hands of die maschine. Perhaps this was Gisbonnhoffer's appointed role in his torture: to be the man who, after the pain and anguish had been inflicted, asked the questions. The ones whose answers might cease further torment.

Still, he searched for the good bit. Was there a way he could be seen to both break and yet, do so helpfully for the unit? In favor of his fellows?

An inch of truth, he thought. Wasn't Allen always on about that? The best cons, the best grifts all began with an inch of truth at point of sale? Very well. He had lived his life truthfully for the most part - well, for the entire part. But if on one day, at the right moment, he might ransom himself from further torture, and in doing so might also find a way to benefit the gang, he would follow Allen's advice. An inch of truth it would be.

Planning to respond to whatever was asked, he tried to send his tongue out of his mouth to wet his flaking, papery lips. To no avail, his tongue was swelling to the point that it would not quite leave his mouth. The last food he had seen was that long-ago breakfast at La Salle's friendly table. He willed himself not to think of that. Not to grow sentimental over the faces surrounding him there.

"I thought we might speak of Lady Marion," Gisbonnhoffer said, assessing the rather egregious damage done to the fisherman by Specialist Joseph, whom he would see punished for disobeying a direct order. "I am only just returned from having visited her."

He looked at the man across from him, in far worse shape than when he had last left him. He wondered at how die Sinnesschmerzmaschine had so affected him, why it had not broken Flight Commander Thomas Carter down so. That man never looking so broken, his body never so polluted by the tool's perverted function. Thomas Carter had never appeared so beaten by it. Rather he had persisted in looking tenderized as a six-rounds-in bare-knuckle boxer, sometimes down for the count - but always ready with that last minute grab for the ropes to raise himself. Always something more held back, reserved in a place neither Gisbonnhoffer nor even Joseph had ever found a way to touch.

The difference, Gisbonnhoffer believed, between a simple (perhaps very simple, as so many of these locals seemed to be) Island fisherman, and a trained, crack British soldier.

"She has asked after you, after your welfare," Geis told him. "It is very satisfying, actually, to know that I will have the honor of marrying such a compassionate woman. Don't you think?"

Mitch heard the lieutenant speaking to him, grasped that it was, again, something about Marion, without fully comprehending what it was the man said. He thought of Marion entering into vows with such a man, a man that could order the things that had been done to him - that could sit there, even now, and pretend to be civilized in front of him. His piss and sweat and salt tears pooled on the floor beneath the chair to which he was chained.

Marion wed to this less-than-a-beast. Robin having to live with it. Marion having to bed it. There was nothing in Mitch's stomach to turn, to nauseate him, but he found himself so, nonetheless.

Kill two birds with one stone, his clouded mind suggested: a secret shared with Gisbonnhoffer, at which he might allow the pain to abate; a way to keep this man well and clear of Robin's Marion. Half a plan. It only lacked the inch of truth.

The intake of breath he took before speaking nearly did him in, his lungs sore to the point of the muscles within him burning at the rote task.

"You cannot marry Lady Marion!" he shouted, navigating his clumsy tongue in an effort to enunciate. "Her heart belongs to another! She is wed, some years ago now, to an Islander." The slits that were his eyes shut with the effort to get it all out. "She was no more than twenty ere it was done. And him now gone for a soldier. But wed, all the same! On my very life," he swore for effect.

Once it was done, the inch of truth sandwiched among it, the effort needed in the saying of it passed, his eyes did re-open into the swollen-over slits they had been, not enough of the irises visible for the other man to even name their true color.

What he was then able to witness caused his blood to run colder than anything that had yet been done to him in this hellish place.

The face of Geis Gisbonnhoffer became fluid. His features began to morph and twist into something that no longer tracked as quite human. His eyes took on a sharp, yet bore-ing quality. If his gaze could have melted all in its view, it would have. Like a cocked pistol, it became obvious he was sprung - in reaction to Mitch's 'confession' - ready for violent, explosive release.

Mitch did not know why, but his plan had failed. It had accomplished nothing of what he had hoped it might. And it had clearly awakened something doubly dangerous in this man that he would have done best to let sleep. Even in his murky, in-pain mind, he knew his error in an instant.

Geis spoke, his words sharp as diamond point - and as cutting. His tone chillingly fathomless. "Tell. Me. More."

"Ad kalendas Graecas," Mitch whispered like a memorized prayer, all strength in his vocal chords spent. "Ad kalendas Graecas," he repeated with conviction, his face wanting to contort into one of horror and despair, but the muscles and skin there too injured to comply.

"WH-AT?" the Lieutenant demanded, standing with such force that the steel chair he had been seated in thrust itself into the nearby wall, clattering heavily onto the floor.

The air in the room prickled and grew weighty, portentous as a coming storm.

A light scraping sound was heard as someone picked the capsized chair up and set it to right. "Come now, Herr Geis," came the Kommandant's voice, where he stood by the now uprighted chair. "'Ad kalendas Graecas' of course, 'at the Greek calends'." His voice was calm, light even, as though explaining rain to a child. "Calends: the first day of the Roman month from which days were counted backward toward the ides. The Greeks, of course, had no calends. So, you see," he was almost jolly in his delivery, "'Never'. Therefore this man defies you - however intellectually." He tutted. "Rather curious, don't you think? A simple Islander? Spouting Latin...under torture?"

At this he moved toward Mitch, using his own hands to part Bonchurch's (known as Miller here) shirt. "Interesting scars, wouldn't you say?" he asked the Lieutenant. "Even to your untrained eye, Gisbonnhoffer?" His eyebrows flicked up. "Myself I have never been one of a medical bent, and yet...a curious cocktail to find, this particular islander, wouldn't you say?" He turned and looked directly at Mitch, "quantum mutates ab illo?"

Gisbonnhoffer struggled to prevent himself from growling his query. "May I ask why you are here, Kommandant?"

"Specialist Joseph has been doing a bit of work for me. I knew you wouldn't mind...May I ask what you are doing? Detaining fishermen? Diefortner tells me our Latin scholar, here, had something to do with the return of your one true love, Lady Marion?"

"Sir," Geis reluctantly agreed.

"You need worry about him no further, Herr Lieutenant. I am taking him off your hands. You may consider yourself dismissed from the project. Though, you may be thankful I am doing so without having Diefortner draft a written reprimand for your permanent file."

Gisbonnhoffer protested. He could not afford to let this man go so easily...not after what he had just shared. "I need to speak with him further."

"No." Vaiser's word was final, though his voice the essence of calm in the lightly rendered denial. "The last thing this man needs is to speak to you. Go away now, he is mine. Go," he waved his hand dismissively, "see about the business of your job you have been neglecting, chasing after that Islander pet of yours. You are no longer wanted here."

Able to see no other action acceptable to his superior, no way 'round him, Geis left.

"Hello?" Vaiser asked. "Hello little fisherman? Are you still in there?" He tried to rouse Mitch.

Mitch grunted from where he had again swooned. Again, his eyes opened by slits.

"I will not overtax you, my fine fellow," Vaiser began chipperly, "with details. Suffice it to say the Reich is trying out a new plan for select prisoners, certain they'll win hearts and minds with it." He began as though he might poke Mitch, and then settled for a mere air pat nearby his shoulder, "You are to be billeted with a German family. Once you are...repaired...to your usual level of health, you will work for them, as their servant - hired man - whatever you would like to call it. Prisoner laborer. To ensure that you do not escape, nor try to run back home, you have been placed with a family deep into the mainland. So!" he clapped his hands together. "Let us hope your French is as good as your Latin, my boy." He gestured to two landsers standing at the ready just outside the door, who entered the cell and began to undo Mitch's bindings and fetters. It took both of them to manipulate his broken self out of the small room, and by the time they passed the doorframe, it was necessary for him to be carried to the waiting boat. By the time he arrived at the boat he was unconscious, and remained so throughout the journey over the water.

Geis stalked back toward the camp offices, his mind a-tilt. He could not even focus on the maddening interference of the Kommandant in the wake of the fisherman's wild (but passionately given) assertion that Marion, his Marion, had been - was still, possibly - married to an Islander.

He could not bring himself to believe it, to credit it at all. Setting aside Marion herself - hardly a woman suited to wedding a simple, provincial laborer - he could not imagine her noble family allowing such an ill-advised and in-equal match.

But then, perhaps they had not. Perhaps it had been a youthful indiscretion. Of course they would have wished to keep such quiet, even were they able to annul it or have it otherwise dissolved. But then, the fisherman had not said 'had been wed' or 'was once wed', but spoke of the matter entirely in present tense.

This Islander, so the fisherman declared, now gone for a soldier - so, officially his enemy. A man to be shot on sight. But, a man no longer present on these islands.

He thought of how he had so recently all but prostrated himself in front of Marion in the wake of her anger with him over news of his own long-forgotten family. He thought of the cast of her eyes, the hurt he perceived there, and, the disgust. Her treatment of him had been...belittling. Severe. If this were true - that she had a similar secret - could she have...would she have..?

The idea proved all but inconceivable. It would make her...his eyes closed against the thought, so repellent, so beyond present belief.

But he could not banish it, could not make it go away, sharing a corner with Jodderick the Bailiff's request and the return of the Nightwatch. Instead it stood, the barest of facts. (No, gossip, he tried to tell himself.) The barest of testaments, of a broken, half-witless simpleton fisherman. But who, truly, had nothing visible to gain in that moment by lying about such a subject.

There was something that he did not wish to acknowledge. Something about it he would rather turn away from: the fact that something of it had an undeniable ring of truth.

Marion had always told him she had returned to the islands in those dangerous days before the impending Occupation to tend to her father. But who truly would take such a risk? And taking it, stay on? At such a hazardous time? Simply, a dutiful daughter? Or a woman keen on a lovers' rendezvous? Perhaps a last chance to see a secret husband before he received orders to ship out?

Married at twenty (he almost gasped) would have made her three years a wife to this man when Jodderick had first introduced them.

He threw open the door to his office, not caring as the knob smashed into the reciprocal wall at the force of his opening it.

His eyes spied his file cabinet.

Records. Yes. Had this truly happened it would be certain that somewhere there must be a record of it. Somewhere on these islands.

The woman Grigorovna rushed into the room upon his arrival, almost colliding with him in her hurry to take his coat before he called for her.

He let her have the coat to hang, and walked toward his filing cabinet to lean one elbow upon it. Catching her eye he jerked his head to indicate that she was to shut the door.

As she knew he expected it, she did so, and walked toward him.

Anya Grigorovna did as she was bid and beckoned, as she might have any other day in the office block of the Treeton Camp. She had said she would stay. That she would attempt to find out what she could about Mr. Allen's fisherman. But nobody was talking. No one seemed to know anything about him; not why he was being held, nor for how long. Only that he had been brought here, and was, it seemed, still here. A comfortless piece of circular information.

She thought of the Gypsy char girl, how she might have proven useful in the situation. How, even as little as they had had time and vocabulary for communicating to each other, she missed her. Another loss.

Losses that mounted in front of her like a child's wooden blocks stacked precariously in play.

Lieutenant Gisbonnhoffer had positioned himself near the corner of the office, his legs somewhat apart, one arm on the filing cabinet. It was clear what he wished. What he required of her.

She walked like a sleeper toward him, stopping when her eyes were close, on level with his closely shaven Adam's apple.

"On your knees," he demanded, as though she needed prompting. His voice was poisonous. She imagined the spittle from such a mouth would be bilious, and freakishly black.

She looked at the corner edge of the filing cabinet. The same one she had broken in to, that had irrefutably given her the news of her family's total annihilation. How simple it would have been for him to tell her. He consulted files within it numerous times a day.

And yet he had not.

"Down. On your knees," he repeated the command like a curse. She saw his chin tremble with the force of whatever it was that had him in its grip.

"No," she told him, the sound of her refusal not at all harsh. Her head tucked down as her knee drove itself with the force of seven of her into his unprotected groin. "Standing is better."

With the pain of the unexpected, damaging impact he began to double over, but she brought the back of her bent skull up into the point of his chin as it came down, clocking him soundly with a well-landed second blow.

His head snapped back and he fell to the unvarnished wooden floor.

Anya's triumph was short-lived. Knowing there was nowhere to run, she did not even attempt it.

"Guard!" Gisbonnhoffer screeched once he again found breath, purple already blooming along his jawline, both his fists set about his crotch, the knuckles of them clenched white with physical anguish.

"You could have told me," she said to him, her voice controlled, so unlike his in this moment.

"Told you what?" he gasped out, nearly retching.

The guard arrived, speedily comprehending the situation and training his weapon on her.

"That you murdered my family, you motherless whoreson! You Devil's bastard!" She did not know the words for the curse in German, so she rendered it in Russian.

As another guard arrived and they were taking her away to - she did not know where - she heard the Lieutenant shout after her, "your mother died of illness, you crazy..." but the exterior door to the office block swung closed behind them and she was unable to hear what filthy German moniker he chose to tag her with.

Not too long after, the Kommandant arrived.

Geis was now gingerly seated at his desk, still concentrating on babying certain injured parts of his anatomy. Without preamble, he started in on the situation of the Sarkese fisherman. "Why did you do that?"

"Send him away?" Vaiser asked, "Release him? No. I sent him to Eva. She is good for such things, I suspect." The Kommandant paused. "Well, rather, she is good for many things. And good at many others." His eyes bugged lecherously at this. "He believes I have banished him to France." He shared some of his insight (gained through Specialist Joseph's diligent notes) into the fisherman's psyche. "He is not the sort of man to run. Not if he believes doing so endangers those around him."

Geis held back a groan at the Kommandant's, as usual, high level of confidence in his own schemes. "And what purpose do you possibly hope to serve?"

"Purpose?" Vaiser smiled, tapping a finger on the inkwell atop Geis' desk. "Would you ask a magician to prematurely show his hand? Spoil his trick?" He shook his head. "All in good time, Herr Geis." He teased with his tongue at the corner of his mouth. "Like your divorce." Vaiser knowingly grinned, savoring it. "All in good time. What has happened to your face?"

Geis cradled his chin for a moment in his cupped hand. Grimly he replied, "The woman you gave me - "

"What? Your secretary?" Vaiser laughed with glee. "Ho ho! I think I rather like this. Where is she now?" He looked about the room, peeked his head out the office doorway into the hall. "Not back among the camp proper already?"

"No. She has been taken to the blockhouse, on my order."

"Well, get her back!" the Kommandant happily demanded. "Get her back! This, I think could be fun. Have her sent 'round to my villa directly." His eyes sparked. A challenge. How he did like a new challenge.

And how he did enjoy - he could see Gisbonnhoffer was in pain, though the man had not said, though of course three separate guards, including the waiting-outside Diefortner had already related something of the just-occurred events to him before he had left the blockhouse. How he did enjoy the thought of his lieutenant expecting something rather calming...and receiving something rather...not instead.

'Teach him better than to lose focus mooning over Lady Moron.

Tasty, tasty, tasty, Vaiser chanted to himself as he turned to leave Geis alone with his bodily trauma and as-per-usual gloomy mood. A new toy to play with when he got home tonight. Better than Christmas, wot.

...TBC...

A/N: 'quantum mutatus ab illo' = Latin for 'how changed from what he once was'
I am now accepting reviews/wreaths of laurel/thrown popcorn/death threats/impassioned protestations about this chapter. You will find my direct e-mail on my Author's Profile page, or you may leave your feelings for all to read by posting a review through the link below. ;) Thank you.