A/N: The promised family tree is at the following link, minus the spaces: littlelonghairedoutlaw . tumblr post / 165187221391 / the-promised-wraiths-family-tree-which-i-meant-to
"I thought him dead." Antoine's voice is faint even to his own ears, and though Konstin is sleeping (he seems to be sleeping a lot), it is best that he not hear. It would only trouble him to know that—to know.
Marguerite does not interrupt, simply nods for him to go on, and he can see, even though tiredness pulls at his eyelids, the worry creasing her mouth. Marguerite's worry always shows in her mouth, and the way she purses her lips. She's been like that since she was a little girl, when she would crawl in beside him after having nightmares, her eyes wide and her mouth creased. She is far from a little girl now, but if he narrows his eyes, lets them slip slightly out of focus, she could be all of seven years old again.
(Strange tappings at the window are the least of their worries now.)
The image fades away again, leaving Marguerite as the grown woman she has become, and Antoine sighs, shifts slightly in the bed. He has the distinct impression that he has been lying down too long, but he is too tired to move, his body too heavy and somewhere, in the back of his mind, lingers the fear that if he did try to stand, then his legs would simply buckle beneath him.
He shakes the thought away, mind drifting back to Konstin, back to his story.
"He was in a shell crater," he whispers, his lips stiff but he needs to speak the words, needs to—needs to know that it was real. (It was real. Oh, it was.) And he can still see him, can still see the blood smeared down his face, his head lolling limp, can feel the ground shake beneath him as the shells crashed and Konstin's breath was warm on his throat. "And I—I looked for a pulse, but I couldn't find one, and his skin was so cold that I was certain—certain—but then I felt the barest throb, and realised he was still breathing." He draws a breath, a lump in his throat that makes his voice hoarse. "That was when the strafe started."
He sees her swallow, but he cannot pay much attention, not when he can still feel the world shaking, can still feel the pounding of his heart in his ears, can still feel Konstin's body beneath him. "I lay over him, to keep him safe."
She sucks in a breath, her fingers tightening around his own.
"After the strafe passed I—I tried to see what wounds he had but there was so much blood," and his throat tightens, lips tingling with the memory of Konstin's skin as he kissed his forehead but he cannot tell her that bit, "and he woke but he was in so much—so much pain and when—when I tried to lift him," his lips are dry, and Marguerite dampens them with a little water, and vaguely he remembers something about his not being allowed to drink anything yet, "he—he passed out again." Tears burn his eyes, slip from the corners, and Marguerite is shushing him now, the tips of her fingers gentle as they wipe the tears away.
"It's all right, Antoine. It's all right. He's safe now, he's safe." Her voice is soft, and her arms wrap around him, draw him to her, and all Antoine can think is I just want him to wake up why won't he wake up? Why? I don't want him to die don't let him die but all that comes out is a whimper, and she is shushing him and stroking his hair the way Mother used to when he was small but all he wants is Konstin, Konstin to hold him and Konstin to kiss him and Konstin to tell him he's all right and Konstin to quirk that weary smile and call him a fool for worrying so when he is perfectly well, thank you very much, but Konstin is lying there, just lying there lost to the world, and Antoine turns his head, away from Marguerite, to look at him, just to look.
His face is almost as pale as the bandage around his head, mouth slack, and it is only the good side of his face that Antoine can see, the side that was not bloodied. The dim light casts shadows under his eye, along his cheekbone, make him look even more ill, his fingers limp where they lie on the linen sheet beside him. But Antoine's eyes do not linger on the still face, instead wander to Konstin's chest, the soft rise and fall of the sheets as he breathes. In, and out. And in, and out. So gentle, those breaths, so gentle…
And slowly, slowly Antoine feels himself coming back, feels his heart settling and the tightness of his throat easing, the chasm inside of his chest not quite so vast. Konstin is sleeping, just sleeping. He needs to sleep if he is going to get well. Sleep is good.
Pain aches beneath his ribs as Marguerite gently loosens her grip on him, but it is not so very bad, reminds him that this is real, that Konstin is alive. Konstin is alive.
And somehow, with that thought, what happened out there does not seem so terrible. He is alive. He is alive, and that is all that matters.
Marguerite dries his tears with her handkerchief and asks, her voice low, "How did you bring him back?"
Bring him back. Golden eyes and the face of a skull pass before him again. And looking at Konstin now, at the visible planes of his face, Antoine can see the similarity to that skull, though Konstin's features are not quite so sharp, and the angle of his nose is—is very lovely. "I—I got him onto my back, and I followed…I followed his—his father back to the trench."
"His father?" Even without seeing her, Antoine knows that her brow is furrowed, and he swallows.
"It must have been. It—He had—he had Konstin's eyes."
"Antoine—" Tired as he is, he can still detect the edge of disbelief in her voice.
"The battlefields are…they are full of ghosts, Marguerite. Ghosts and wraiths, and they kind of, they kind of coalesce out of the mist and the smoke and it—it was Erik. I know it was. It could be no one else."
And, he thinks, his eyes slipping closed, I do not want it to be anyone else.
How many times has she made this journey? How many times has she walked along this path? How many times has she stood or knelt or sat before this grave?
So many times. Thousands of times. Alone, or with Nadir, or Konstin, or even Raoul on a few exceptional occasions though it always feels odd to be here with him, as if she is betraying someone.
Betraying Raoul, by still loving Erik. And betraying Erik by loving Raoul.
In the earliest days, before she allowed Raoul to court her again, she tried to reconcile herself to the notion by telling herself that Erik wanted her to marry Raoul. Erik sent her off with Raoul, once, and it was her choice to return. And he asked Raoul to take care of her. After it all, he did not object to the thought of her being with him. He wanted her to be.
There was a time, back then, when she felt certain that a day would come that she would cease to ache for Erik. Certain that there would be a day where time and distance healed most of the wound his death inflicted, where she could think of him without paired stabs of pain and longing. Where she would forget the cadence of his voice, and the shine of his eyes, and the way his fingers were hesitantly gentle brushing against her skin. Certain that if she did not cease to love him then she would undoubtedly cease to be in love with him, that her love for Raoul would eclipse that for Erik.
And she feared that such a day could come. Especially with how short their time together was, a handful of months and nothing more.
But it never did. And across thirty-six years (thirty-five, to be accurate, thirty-five years and ten months, all adding up to thousands of days that she still feels in her soul) she cannot help but love him still, cannot help but feel tears burning her eyes at the thought of what they could have had, what they never got to have, cannot help the sudden memories of him as she is going about her day, as if she could, if she wished, brush up against him across all of those years.
Even now (especially now, with—with the news of Konstin) she aches to thread her fingers through his, and kiss his cheek, and hold him, just hold him. Just to feel him against her once more.
But she is not here, today, out of longing for Erik. She is not laying down roses at his secret grave because she wishes to be close to him again.
(Though she does. Oh, how she does. And she has never told Raoul the depth of that longing, but part of her suspects he knows.)
No. She is here today for the sake of their son.
Their son. That baby that lived beneath her heart even as Erik died, the hidden life unknown to her until months later. And she wondered, at the time, if some part of him knew, even inside of her womb, that his father was dead. And as she held him she feared that the whole thing had scarred him somehow, as if part of his soul was tainted by it. She was little more than child herself, hardly older than Anja is now, and sometimes it feels as if it were a world away, in another lifetime, and sometimes it feels as if it were only yesterday.
(Everything from before the war feels as if it belongs to another lifetime. Not just her time with Erik.)
(She still struggles to wrap her head around the fact that she is already older than Erik was when he died.)
That baby, who grew into a boy and then a man. And now he is off lying wounded (gravely, though she tries not to think the word, tries to maintain some sort of composure standing at Erik's resting place), wounded thanks to this war that feels as if it has been going on for a hundred years, as if there has never been anything but shellfire lighting the night sky and the rattle of guns, and broken bodies living and dead coming home.
She swallows, and curls her fingers around the rosary beads in her pocket. "You have to protect him," she whispers, as if Erik were standing here beside her, as if he were able to hear her wherever he is now (she has always talked to him as if he can hear her), and if she tries, if she lets the dark lake shore fade away, she can almost see him in his black dress suit, his eyes heavy and sad. "I know—I know he's already wounded. I know it's already happened, but you cannot let him die, Erik. I can—I can't lose him too. You have to keep him alive, and Antoine too. You have to."
And tears trickle from the corners of her eyes, and roll down her cheeks to fall to the dirt. But the trickle does not turn into a flood, not like it would have even hours ago. She is too hollow inside, worry twisting black in her stomach, to many tears left to cry. And she sighs, and lets her eyes slip closed, and stands. Just stands, her mind drifting blank, the rosary beads wrapped around her fingers an anchor.
It used to be a parlour, or a small secluded meeting room. Marguerite did not see it then. By the time she arrived here, late in 1914, it had already been converted, the château as it stood into a clearing station, then a hospital, and sometimes a clearing station again, depending on how the Front shifts. Half-hospital, half-station. Such a far cry from the opulence that once filled these halls.
The ballroom itself is the operating theatre, and sometimes as she sits monitoring the pulse of some broken soldier, she looks at the bodies laid out, four or five all being worked on at the same time, at the blood dripping to the floor, and wonders how there ever could have been a time before this.
But this room, this little room is so far from that, too. This little room still maintain a little of its splendour, in gilt-lined walls and frescoes. Too pretty, really, to be used as anything but the chapel. The first curé claimed it for himself after arriving, declared it only fitting that such a beautiful room be given over to the Lord.
They transferred him to the lines a year later. Last she heard, there was nothing left of him to be found.
The current curé, Dumas, holds a small service here every morning that she has never attended. More often it is used for the funerals, several bodies sometimes lying ready all at once, covered under a single service then taken out and buried.
She attends as many of the funeral services as she can. It seems only fitting.
The builders of this château, the family who designed this room, the woman of the house who, like her, may have been the daughter of a Comte, likely never envisaged its being used as a hospital. Doubtless they never expected such a war as this, for the world to come tumbling down in such a way. At another time, at any other time, Marguerite might wonder who they were. Titled people, presumably. Did they have many sons? Did twins run in the family? Was it tradition for the boys to go to the sea? So many questions she might ask, but all the wondering feels like ash at the back of her throat now.
What does it matter who they were? There is only this.
Likely only a handful of funerals ever took place here. Less than a hundred, maybe, depending on how long this place has stood. Two hundred years, or more, and a smattering of funerals across that time. And yet, yet in the two and a half years since she has been here, there have been more funerals than she could ever hope to count.
The chapel is quiet, today. Only her, kneeling in a pew that the orderlies put together early on. Not even Dumas is to be seen, and at another time she might be relieved but not now, not today. Is he off giving Extreme Unction to other soldiers, more men brought in on the brink of death like he did with Konstin? One last sacrament forgiving them their sins so they may rest in peace in the hereafter?
How can there be a hereafter after this?
Perhaps there is none. Perhaps all these dead are condemned to wander as ghosts, eternally bound to the earth and unable to move on. Antoine said that the battlefields are full of ghosts, and try as she may to pin such words on the morphine in his blood, his eyes were altogether too lucid. Could he, really, have seen the Erik who has only ever inhabited stories for her? And if he did, if Erik were really there, does Konstin know that his father is the reason he is alive right now? Her heart twists painfully at the very thought.
Dumas may be sitting with Dupuis, even now. Making the sign of the cross on his forehead and murmuring Latin and laying the Eucharist on his tongue. Her stomach churns to think it.
She should have been with him through his surgery. She was there for the first one, after all, and she's been with him since and held his hand and soothed him. She should have been there again, and she told that to Matron but Matron insisted that the best place for her is away from surgery of any kind, at least until tomorrow, and when Marguerite said that she is capable of monitoring his pulse, Matron stood firm and said no, saying it would be too much strain on her after donating blood to Antoine, and on top of the mental strain of Antoine and Konstin, brother and cousin both wounded, both here. And even as Marguerite said it is worse strain to stay outside of surgery and wonder, Matron remained steadfast so that all that Marguerite could do was stand there fighting the tightness in her throat as they carried Dupuis away, his fingers hanging limply off the side of the stretcher.
He is out of his surgery, now. Still alive (thank God). Amélie, Amélie knew that she badly wanted to know how things had gone, and so went and asked Sophie who had been there, to spare Marguerite the trouble of doing it. And Sophie said that they found the bleeding and stopped it, and everything went as it should, but went as it should with internal bleeding is almost like Minette saying any surgery was close. And Marguerite knows, oh how she knows, that went well does not always mean is well or will be well, and often simply means well, for now, the coda at the end a dark reminder of the multitudinous things that can go wrong, even after surgery, and her fingers tremble.
She should be there, when he wakes. To soothe him and hold his hand. Perhaps he will ask for her, his eyes still dull from the gas. But she cannot go to see him, not now. She cannot bear to see him like that, unconscious and pale, skin ashen and lips faintly blue in spite of the transfused blood in his veins. Just as she cannot bear to see Antoine like that, cannot face, again, the sight of Konstin like that so soon after last sitting with him, the thought of seeing Dupuis in such a state makes her stomach churn.
She reaches into her pocket, withdraws the two chains she unclasped from around Konstin's neck before he went into surgery. The Saint Anthony, and the wedding band, and she curls her fingers tighter around them, and squeezes them as if that will help him to get well, will help all of those terrible wounds to heal. The thought of him—the thought of him slipping away—
How could she ever tell Antoine? How could he ever bear it? She can still hear him, can still hear the pain and fear in his voice as he told her about finding Konstin out there, can see the terror in his eyes at the thought of losing Konstin, and the gentleness and relief each time he looks over to find Konstin asleep in the next bed. They have always been close, so very close, closer even than Antoine and Guillaume, and losing Konstin (her heart clenches painfully tight) losing Konstin would break him.
Even to tell Dupuis—but she might not even need to tell Dupuis. He could so easily slip away, too. That bleeding—her lungs tighten and it is so hard to breathe, so hard, and her fingers squeeze the Saint Anthony, the wedding band, but there is no magic that either of them can work now. There is only waiting. Only the endless waiting.
And her fingers ache to curl around Dupuis' own, to raise them to her lips and kiss his knuckles, but the pain throbs deep in her chest at the thought of seeing him like that now, and she gasps, tears burning her eyes, but there is nothing she can do, nothing, except kneel here as if her prayers could ever hope to be enough.
With trembling fingers Konstin wipes the blood from Antoine's lips, and gently, gently, closes his mouth. His eyes are half-open slits reflecting the grey of the fog, but Konstin cannot bear to close them, to seal them away from the world forever. Antoine can't be gone. Surely he is only pretending, acting! He has always been such a good actor, could have taken to the stage if he wished to, if his name had not dictated his future.
A distant keening noise reaches Konstin's ears, and it takes him a moment to realise it is coming from him, his aching jaw clenched tight. Every fibre of him insists that this is wrong, this is unnatural. People like Antoine are not supposed to die like this, are supposed to live forever. But here he is, lying in Konstin's arms, and he does not even blink as Konstin's tears fall on his face.
A choked-off whimper in Konstin's throat, and he drops Antoine, stumbles away retching. It's not real it's not real it's not real. It's an act, it's a dream it's—it's opium. Yes! An opium hallucination. Nadir always did warn him away from it, and the fog is not fog but smoke.
At the revelation the fog clears, and he is standing in a dimly-lit red room, the stem of an opium pipe between his fingers. Antoine smiles up at him from the floor, eyes drooping drowsily, already in the land of dreams and Konstin sways as his knees buckle.
"I'ssss very ssssstrong," Antoine slurs, slumping back on the floor, propped only by his elbow, and Konstin finds himself smiling without ever intending to smile, leaning in to press their lips together. "Not here, Konsssstin. Too many people."
The room is empty aside from them, but the hairs stir on the back of Konstin's neck. They do that so often, tuned to the things he cannot see. Ghosts, sprites, demons. His mother is full of ghost stories, said her Papa used to tell her them.
Would Konstin's Papa have told him the same, if he had been here?
Konstin's heart twists, tears falling from his eyes, and they are not in an opium den anymore but in a carriage on a train, a private carriage, and Antoine's arms are wrapped around him, holding him safe from the world and its terrible whispers.
"It's all right," he whispers softly, kissing Konstin's hair. "It's all right. It doesn't matter what they say what he was. What matters is what your mother says, and Nadir. They knew him best. And I know there were bad things, terrible things, but there were wonderful things too, right? About music, and art, and animals and so much more and that's who he was, darling, not what those people who never knew him say."
And Konstin whimpers and nods against him, and Antoine strokes his hair and holds himclose, until the rocking of the train slowly lulls him to sleep.
A/N: As ever, please leave a review and let me know what you think!
Up next: Antoine thinks, and remembers. Marguerite is rushed off her feet. Christine takes tea with Sorelli.