This story has not been leaving me alone the last week! I have the next three or four chapters outlined already, so I'm hoping to update this one once a week for a bit. :)


July 1919

The scent of frying meat worked its way into Erik Guérin's dream, drawing his attention away from the slaughter that usually played out while he slept. He'd spent much of the war in the trenches, where fresh food, not to mention fires to cook it upon, had been rare. They'd mostly subsisted on tinned meat and vegetables, things that Erik hoped to never eat again in his life.

His brain wavered uncertainly between slumber and awareness at the conflicting information, and he at last jolted awake.

Erik's chest heaved as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. It took him a moment when he first woke every morning to remember where he was, but he knew in an instant where he wasn't.

The trenches.

Those trenches had felt like one long mass grave, and Erik had spent hours wondering if he'd be buried in them dead or still alive.

But he rested in a proper bed now. He even possessed a pillow and a blanket that had tangled around his legs at some point during the night, and a mattress was beneath him.

What luxury.

Kicking his feet free from the quilt, Erik glanced about the room that grew more familiar with each passing second. He'd returned to his childhood home in Rouen after he'd been pronounced well enough to live on his own, hoping to find…what, exactly? Peace? Solace? Comfort in the past?

Well, whatever he'd been seeking, Erik hadn't found it yet.

Unless it was bitterness, he supposed. He had more than enough of that to last him for a hundred years, if not a thousand.

Erik flung his left arm over his face. His forearm slid over the hole where his nose had once been, across the cheeks that had been scarred beyond all recognition by a bullet and the damned Krauts' poison gas.

He remembered everything now.

Shoving himself into a sitting position, Erik groaned even as his stomach rumbled as the smell intensified. Sausage, he nearly growled to himself as his mouth began to water. Maybe eggs or potatoes. Toasted bread. And fruit. Always fruit.

He didn't know what was in season at this point, and Erik didn't care. A brush with scurvy in the trenches had given him a craving for fruit that still hadn't diminished years later. Strawberries, grapes, blueberries, pears, apples, cherries; it didn't matter to him. Given the chance, he'd eat every last one he could shove into his mouth, and then he'd probably stuff his pockets full for a later snack.

There was only one reason why Erik was having breakfast at all this morning: Petros Mnatsakanyan, his only friend, had returned to Rouen far sooner than either of them had expected.

And that meant his bid to reach London had failed.

Erik wobbled to his feet and reached for the primitive leather mask he kept on the nightstand. Slipping it over his head and tightening the strap at the back, Erik wondered how he'd managed to acquire a friend like Petros in the first place. That mystery was the one puzzle Erik's mind had never been able to solve.

Everyone who met Petros liked him. He was intelligent and funny and polite and obscenely wealthy, the furthest thing from Erik. Yet of everyone he could have befriended at university, Petros had chosen him. Even though life seemed to pull them constantly in opposite directions, Petros always remained.

And now that he'd been disappointed once again, Petros had chosen to come to Rouen while he shored up his strength and prepared another way to find his missing family.

Glancing down at his old shorts and wrinkled shirt, Erik shrugged. He had the decency to hide his ruined face from Petros; that was the only concession he was willing to make. This house belonged to him, and he'd be damned if he spent the next few weeks or months in discomfort in his own home.

"Erik!" Petros's head popped around the kitchen door as Erik tromped down the front stairs. He offered Erik a bright smile, but dark smudges shadowed the skin beneath Petros's eyes, making him look unwell. "Do you always sleep the days away?"

Erik grunted. "I regret giving you a key to my house."

"You'll forgive me once you open the present I bought you at the market this morning." Petros wandered back into the kitchen, and Erik had little choice but to follow him.

He dropped into one of the two chairs at the table and looked at the paper bag with a bit of suspicion. "What is it?"

Petros rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the sausage on the stove. "Open it and find out. You act like you've never received a present before."

His friend came a little too close to the truth, at least in his life before university, but Erik would never admit that. He reached for the bag and opened the top, unable to stop the grin from spreading across his features. At least the mask covered most of it. "Apricots and plums?" Erik could almost taste the apricots melting on his tongue.

"I told you that you'd forgive me." Petros smirked at him as he scooped a couple of sausages and a mound of eggs onto a plate. He slid it in front of Erik before picking up a newspaper and unfolding it to reveal the front page. "Do you know these people?"

Managing to tear his eyes away from the food for a moment, Erik studied the photograph in the bottom right corner of yesterday's Le Journal de Normandie. Two people stared back at him with solemn eyes, each holding something blurry in their hands. He lifted one shoulder before rubbing a plum against his shirt. "I don't recognize them."

"What about their names?" Petros cleared his throat and turned the paper back so that he could read the caption below the photograph. "Monsieur Desmarais, a coppersmith who lost three sons in the late war, and the Vicomtesse de Chagny, an artist whose husband died in a U-boat attack off the coast of Greece, have combined their talents to create masks for scarred veterans in Rouen and the world over."

"I don't know him, but I've heard of her. Or the de Chagnys, at least." Erik took a big bite from the plum as he considered Petros's questions. "They're one of the wealthiest families in this part of France. The Comte de Chagny could buy the entire city several times over and still be rich. Why?"

Petros flipped through the newspaper without answering, pausing about halfway through. "Vice Admiral Henry Michael van der Linde named Commander of the Mediterranean and British High Commissioner to the former Ottoman Empire," he read in a steady voice.

"It appears that I can't leave France right now after all, Erik. Something about how I'm a citizen of a formerly hostile power, even though that same country massacred my people." Petros's throat worked up and down as he struggled to keep his emotions in check. "But perhaps I don't need to reach London. Perhaps someone else can reach it for me."

"I can't do it." As much as it pained Erik to admit it to anyone, even himself, that was the truth. It was difficult enough for him venture outside his front door or to shop for necessities; he couldn't leave the country, not even for Petros and his family.

"I'm not asking that of you." Tossing the newspaper onto the table, his friend sank into the other chair and gestured towards Erik's plate. "Eat. You're wasting away to nothing."

Erik peered down at his shirt and shorts and for the first time realized how baggy they were on his lean frame. He'd always been thin, but after his injury and lengthy recovery, he'd grown almost skeletal. Erik popped the rest of the plum into his mouth and picked up his fork.

"Van der Linde had four daughters," Petros explained as Erik speared a sausage and brought it to his mouth. "Three of them married well. One even married some minor English lord. A baron, I believe." He rubbed his chin briefly. "And then there was the youngest daughter. A bit spoiled, or so the rumors go. She broke her father's heart and ran away to Paris with her art instructor. It was all very romantic I'm sure, at least until she died giving birth to a little girl."

Petros abruptly picked up the newspaper and turned to the front page once more, tapping at the photograph of the coppersmith and vicomtesse. "And now that little girl is grown and here in Rouen, making masks for men just like you."

Unease settled in Erik's belly. "And?"

"And I want you to ask them to make a mask for you." Petros held up both palms when Erik opened his mouth to object. "Erik, please. All I want is a chance to meet this woman and tell her my family's story. If I can win her over to my cause, I might be able to reach the ears of a man who can actually help me find them." His eyes dimmed as he drew in a deep breath. "And if they're all dead, I'd like to know that too."

Every cell in Erik's body wanted to protest, to tell Petros that he wasn't about to allow two more strangers to study him like he was a specimen beneath a microscope. But the words stuck in his throat as he gazed at his friend.

Petros had been the only person in his life to care if he lived or died. When Erik had been at the front, it had been Petros who had written him letters encouraging him to keep up his spirits. And when Erik had been wounded and returned to France a broken and bitter shell of his former self, it had been Petros who had taken him in and nursed him back to some semblance of health.

"Please. I need to know what happened to them." Petros's voice wobbled on the last few words. "I realize that my father was likely killed, my mother and brother too, but if any of my sisters survive…The reports coming out of my homeland haven't been promising, Erik. I know if any of them still live, they've been raped and probably sold into slavery or forced into marriage with men they don't know. I need to help them, Erik. I can't live with myself knowing that they might still be out there, hoping that I'll rescue them someday."

The raw pain in Petros's voice made Erik's stomach churn.

"Besides," Petros continued after he'd composed himself again, "you need a new mask. I don't know how you're able to wear the one you have now. It looks like it might smother you at any moment."

"I normally don't wear it. Only when I have to go into town or I have a guest over." He didn't tell Petros that he was the only guest to have ever graced his door.

"You're wearing a piece of leather that has two holes cut for your eyes and a slit for your nose, Erik. Why wear that when these people can make you something that makes you look like everyone else, or at least nearly so? Then you could go out more, perhaps meet other people." Petros gentled his tone, as he so often did when he prepared to say something that he thought Erik wouldn't like. "I worry about you here all by yourself, locked away with nothing but your music to keep you company. It isn't healthy, Erik."

Erik didn't respond to that; he knew it was all true. "Even if I do reach out to them, it might not work. What if she's estranged from her grandfather? Or what if she doesn't want to contact him or help you?"

"Then I'll try something else." Petros shrugged his shoulders. "I'll go mad if I do nothing. Do you understand?"

Yes, Erik wanted to say. He understood how razor-thin the line that divided sanity and madness truly was, how terrifying it was to stare into the abyss and wonder which way he might fall at any given moment. "I don't know that I can go to the coppersmith's shop, Petros. It has been very difficult for me to leave the house lately."

His friend appeared to brighten at his words, as if sensing that Erik was about to give in to his request with a little more convincing. "I'll go to them myself and ask that they come here to you. Surely they won't be able to turn down a local hero."

"Don't call me that. I'm not a hero." Of that, at least, Erik was certain. The whole war, at least in his mind, had been pointless, and his own injury even more so. He'd simply been unlucky, his long legs eating up the ground fast enough to make him one of the first soldiers over the trenches when the order to charge had come. And with his height, he'd been a good target.

"Thank you for doing this. You don't know how much I appreciate it, Erik."

Staring down at his cooling food, Erik said nothing. He'd lost his appetite, just as he'd lost so many other things in the past four years. His face. His health. His confidence. Even his will to live most days.

The only thing staying his hand was Petros, though the man didn't know it. But if Erik could help Petros find his family, perhaps even help reunite him with a surviving sister, then he would feel less guilt if it all became too much for him to bear one day.

"Think nothing of it," he replied, pushing his plate to the side.