A low whimper slips from Konstin's throat as Marguerite takes his hand, and a frown creases his brow. "You're all right," she murmurs, keeping her voice soft as she squeezes his fingers again, "you're all right, Konstin, I promise. You're all right now." He makes another noise, halfway between a whimper and a sigh, and she casts her mind back to what she read in his chart. Is he entitled to more morphine? No, he got some an hour ago. And it was a stronger dose, but it does not seem to have helped him very much if he is still whimpering.

His fingers twitch in her palm, the movement small, and his eyelids flutter but do not open.

She looks up, over at Antoine, to see if Konstin's disturbance has woken him, and finds him regarding her tiredly with one eye. A faint smile catches his lips when he sees her watching him, and he whispers, his voice thick with sleep, "I think he's settled now."

She looks back down at Konstin, and his breathing is, indeed, a little easier than it was a moment ago, the creases smoothed from his brow. Gently, infinitely gently so as not to jar the bandages on his arm, she sets his hand back down. A soft sigh comes from Antoine's bed, and she knows that he has fallen back to sleep. Good. It is better that they sleep now.

(She does not want Antoine looking at her with those eyes that feel as if they can see all of her secrets. Konstin's gaze can strip her soul bare, but Antoine's goes right to her heart, to the deepest hidden things, would go to—to Edouard, and if he knows about Edouard she will crack. Even now she feels tenuous, as if one strong gust of wind will make her dissipate.)

She needs to keep her hands busy. Needs to not have to think. And it is a matter of either sleep or work. But in sleep she will see Edouard (and she longs to see Edouard, longs to), but on the ward she will not have to think.

If she sleeps she might never be able to get up again. (It might be a blessing.) But Edouard would want her to work, would want her to help.

And it is as easy as that, really, to make up her mind. And she turns her back and leaves Antoine and Konstin sleeping behind her.

The damp seeps into her bones, and she draws her cloak tighter around herself. It has always been damp down here. It is natural that it would be, being so far underground and with the lake in such close proximity, though part of her wonders if it was this damp when Erik was still living. She does not remember it being so damp. It seems to have worsened with the years, but has it worsened, or is it simply that she is getting old?

Possibly it is both. She is not so terribly old, after all, only fifty-six. Philippe is twenty years older and still sometimes seems like a young man.

Christine sighs, and tightens her fist in the material of her cloak. Time just, seems to be going by so very fast. Sometimes it feels as if it was only yesterday when she first cradled Konstin in her arms, and now he is a grown man of thirty-five and lying wounded in a hospital so many miles away from here. And Anja, her precious tiny little girl, is a young lady, with a suitor who wishes to take her to the opera (Capitaine De Courcy stopped by, and asked her permission, and though Christine could not help feeling a little taken aback, she agreed, on the provision that it not be for a few more weeks. I think it would be more appropriate to wait until her brother is further out of danger, and the Capitaine agreed), and has seen so many terrible things that she should never have to see in her work at the hospital. And Émile, though he is still a boy in so many ways, age being only one, is sixteen and almost a man. When did time start going so fast? Why can she not keep her children as children forever, keep them safe from the world and all it can be?

She was only a year older than Anja when she married Erik. Only a year. And the thought of Anja ever being so close to marriage makes her blood chill.

Tears prickle her eyes and she sighs, tilts her head back and tries to will them away. It is not so very long since Konstin, as a little boy of three, would sit here beside her, and babble on, telling Erik as if he could hear him, as if he might be able to answer, of all the things he had seen, had learnt, chatting about nothing, and she would swallow a ball of tears in her throat and wish Erik could be here, could see his son and talk to him, as if she could conjure him before her simply by wishing hard enough.

But he never appeared. And she knew he could not, knew such things were impossible, but how she longed for him, ached for him, needed him so badly. And she would smile for Konstin, and pretend that there were not tears in her eyes, and tell him that "Papa is very happy that you are telling him your stories," and he would grin at her, a gap-toothed grin, his golden eyes shining, and she would pretend that it was not killing her to see those eyes.

"Oh, Erik," she whispers, feeling as if time itself is slipping through her fingers, is bringing him further and further away from her, "oh, Erik."

His father was here, but he is gone now. That much is obvious even to his heavy eyes. His father, gentle and sad, and if he tries he can almost feel the impression of a hand wrapped around his own, fingertips lightly tracing his cheeks. His father. His father.

Pain, old pain, twists deep in Konstin's heart, and he has to stifle a whimper. He has spent so long, so long, wishing he could meet his father, wishing he could sit down with him, and talk to him, just once. Such a small thing really, wishing he could meet his father just one time, and he was here, was actually here, but Konstin could not speak.

He casts his mind back, the memories coming slow. A finger pressed to his lips. A whisper of a terrible battle. …save your strength, my boy. It is a long fight…

My boy. My boy. Tears prickle his eyes. How long, how long has he ached to hear those words? And there were others, too, in that voice, and even now he can hear the tendrils of it. Dear boy, my son. Konstantin.

No one ever calls him Konstantin, and it is only people who do not know him well who call him Erik, though it is his proper given name. Mamma once told him that she simply found it too painful to refer to him as Erik, which was why she took Konstin from his middle name. To be called anything else is—is strange.

The pain will not trouble you long, I promise.

But the pain never goes away, simply eases to a duller throb but it is always there, in his leg worst of all, and his stomach, as if his skin is screaming down there. Why can it not just go away?

I'll stay as long as you want me to.

But Papa is not here now, has gone somewhere else, back to wherever he came from, and Konstin still wants him here, has always wanted him here. His fingers beg to curl around that cool hand, to cling to it and keep it here always.

I was never what I should have been to her…she made me very happy…you made her so happy

The three of them, bound together, and that was how it always should have been. Three of them, he and Mamma and Papa, but there was only ever two, and Papa was someone in stories, a memory who was not his that he tried to chase across Europe but he could only ever find whispers of him, and blood-soaked Persian stories older than he was himself, older even than Mamma, as if his father were some phantom wielding a sword (though it was catgut and Nadir was very specific on that point.)

Only ever two instead of three, and it is that thought that makes the pain lance deeper in his chest, and he does not try to stop the tears trickling from the corner of his eye.

The shell exploded behind him, and peppered his back with small pieces of shrapnel. Lefevre examined him before charging Marguerite with removing the shrapnel, and confirmed that the soldier's spine (and spinal cord) seem to have escaped unscathed. She nodded to hear him, but where once there would have been relief there was only numbness.

She widens each shrapnel-hole with the scalpel, to give herself more room to work, and fishes each small piece out with the tweezers. Blood oozes from the enlarged gaps, but she dare not stitch them in case of infection so she disinfects them with the carbolic solution (and her nose has become so accustomed to the smell that it does not even smart now) and pads the wounds, and bandages them. The padding will soak the blood, the pressure will stop the bleeding, and later, when all of the shrapnel has been removed and he has had time to rest, they will change his dressings, and see what needs to be done before sending him away.

So many little shrapnel-holes… She tries to count them, to work out how many pieces, scraps of metal and wood, are in his body, but she keeps losing track, her thoughts wandering. There are at least fifty, in his back alone, never mind the few that have sliced opened the backs of his legs, his arms, his buttocks (and she has seen so many that she is not embarrassed by having to dig shards of metal out from there, though once upon a time she might have been.)

He will live. Barring some catastrophic infection or the discovery of some previously-unknown internal injury he will live, and will return to the trenches to fight again. There is no doubt of that.

Why could Edouard not have been peppered with shrapnel?

Her hand trembles the moment she thinks of Edouard, and she has to set the scalpel down for fear of doing the soldier beneath her hands some unnecessary injury. Why could Edouard not have had some simple wound, enough to put him out of action for a time, enough for them to meet, but not enough to—not enough to—to kill him?

A painful spasm catches her heart and she whimpers, squeezing her eyes shut, willing away the tears that prickle uncomfortably. And she sees it again, Edouard's pale face and the slight flicker of his eyelids as she squeezed his hand, and she snaps her eyes back open because she cannot see him now, she cannot, she has work to attend to, she cannot think of Edouard but she can feel his fingertips ghosting over her cheek and she presses her hand to her face as if she could catch his hand again, could keep him here, but feels only her own warm skin, and a sob threatens to tear itself from her throat, but she swallows hard against it, lets her hand fall from her cheek and balls it into a fist.

The soldier is oblivious, dozing with heavy-lidded slightly open eyes thanks to the morphine, and though he is oblivious she whispers a hoarse, "I'll be back in a minute" as she rises from her chair. She cannot stay here, not now. The room is too small, too cramped, too warm. She'll faint if she stays here, she will, she knows it, will weep or faint and she needs air, and she has slipped from the room in a moment, past the rows of other wounded men, and finds herself in the hallway.

There is a window to her left, and with trembling hands she undoes the latch, lets it spring open and sticks her head out. The shock of the cool air makes her dizzy, and she sinks back down, her knees buckling beneath her, but before she can fall she feels hands wrapping around her arms, steadying her.

"Marguerite? Marguerite, are you all right?"

She looks up into Amélie's anxious eyes. All right? How can she be all right? How will she ever be all right again, when her heart aches with every beat and her hands tremble and if she takes one misstep she will fall and fall forever, down into nothing?

None of those words will come to her lips, all feel woefully inadequate. How can Amélie understand? Amélie, with her fiancé and her letters and her wisps of poetry? She does not have this aching emptiness inside of her, does not feel as if one strong wind will blow her away. How could she ever begin to understand?

But every thought catches in her throat, and she merely nods. If Amélie wants her to be all right, then she will be all right.

Amélie bites her lip, and her eyes lose none of their anxiety. "There is a Lieutenant who wishes to speak to you, in Matron's office. I'll take care of—of who you were looking after."

A Lieutenant? She does not know any Lieutenant. Why would anyone want to talk to her?

The tightness in her throat loosens, a very slight bit, and she nods, and steadies herself, and Amélie lets go of her arms. "Thank you." And her voice is faint, though what Marguerite is thanking her for, she cannot tell.

He pretends to be sleeping, and tries not to listen as the surgeon, a tall man with dark hair, slightly grey, tests the vision in Konstin's eye. There is a nurse with him, a silent stoic girl, and Antoine smooths his fingers over the sheets of his bed, trying to distract himself from what the surgeon is saying.

There is some sight, that is the good news. The better news is that more might return, but the specific use of might, the fact that it is not certain that more sight will return, makes Antoine's stomach churn. How can it be that Konstin's sight is damaged? How it happened is clear enough but why? Why did that happen?

The logical answer is that a shell burst, but the logical answer is not the answer he needs. What he needs to know is why? Why did it have to be Konstin? Why did it have to be his eye? Is he not wounded enough without that?

He swallows the questions down. It does not do Konstin any good for him to dwell on such things.

Konstin's voice is weak answering the surgeons, simple yes or no answers. The surgeon decides to leave the bandage off the eye, and that means he can also leave off the bandage still wrapped around Konstin's head, and the thought of his being free of some of the bandages is a comfort but not enough of one.

Two sets of footsteps, and the surgeon and the nurse leave, and it is then, and only then, and Antoine opens his eyes, and looks over to the other bed. Konstin does not acknowledge him, only stares ahead at the ceiling, and when Antoine's vision clears he can see that his hand is clenched in the sheets so that his knuckles are white. His own knuckles ache in sympathy, and he flexes them, but Konstin only sighs, and in the dim light Antoine can see a tear trickle down his cheek. His heart twists painfully but he knows, knows that there is nothing he can say to take the pain away, and watching Konstin's tears he has never felt so helpless.

The one good thing is that the surgeon, whose name Konstin cannot for the life of him remember, has granted him a stronger dose of morphine. The pain still gnaws at him, deep in his leg, but it has eased from its earlier biting.

His eye is more troubling. Now that Antoine is asleep, he tests it with a knot on the ceiling. He looks at it with both eyes open, and it feels as if the world is unsteady. Then he closes his left eye, the injured eye, and the knot comes into clearer focus. But when he switches eyes, closes his good one and opens the bad one, the knot blurs, the room a mess of jumbled colour, shapes unidentifiable and even Antoine's face, which he knows better than his own, is distorted. He sighs and closes both eyes, and tries not to think about it.

But he cannot help thinking about it. Fear claws at his heart, in spite of the morphine, in spite of what the surgeon said were "promising signs". What if the eye just stays that way? If he lost it he could live with it, or learn to live with it. If it came back that would be a blessing. But for it to stay blurry? For him to be constantly off-balance? How could he ever read music?

(Music has never felt so far away.)

He feels faintly nauseous, and takes a breath to try to settle the writhing in his stomach.

Footsteps, clacking on a hardwood floor, and his eyes flicker open again, the bad one and the good, and he sees the shimmering face of a nurse. She smiles at him, and reaching over him takes his right hand, and presses her fingers into his wrist.

"How are you feeling today, Commandant?"

Today. Today. What day is it? How long as she been checking on him? How long has he been lying here, with Antoine in the neighbouring bed? Konstin wracks his brain, but comes up with only fleeting impressions of faces, of pain and probing hands and voices. How long?

"What," his voice is hoarse, throat scratching and he swallows, and even with his blurred vision sees a frown crease the nurse's face, "what day—is it?"

Her frown smooths away and she nods, setting his hand down and patting the back of it. "It's Tuesday. The twenty-fifth of September."

The twenty-fifth of September? That makes no sense. Surely it is only two days since he and Dupuis and the others were crossing through the fog. How can it be the twenty-fifth?

"How—" He closes his bad eye for to see the nurse better, and her face is sad.

"You've been very ill. It is about a week, I think, since you came in with Commandant De Chagny."

A week? How could he lose a whole week? Time has gotten away from him terribly.

But if it is really the twenty-fifth of September, and it must be because why would the nurse lie, then that means tomorrow—

—tomorrow is Antoine's birthday.

Does he know? Is he aware of the date? Has he kept track of the days passing?

It will be Antoine's birthday.

Antoine's birthday, and they are both in hospital.

He meets the nurse's eyes with his good one, his heart hollow, and nods. "Thank you, Mademoiselle."

She smiles gently at him again, and turns to Antoine, and Konstin turns his gaze back up to the knot on the ceiling.

It could be worse, he thinks, and finally, finally the morphine seems to be helping, the pain duller than before and heaviness tugging at his eyelids, at least we will be together for his birthday.

And in the space between one thought and the next, he slips away.

The chapel is the one place where she can feel any sort of relief now, as if there is not a noose tightening around her throat. It is the one place where she can think, the one place where they will not disturb her because they know that she needs this, she needs this time here away from everyone and everything else. Out there is full of reminders, and each one is an icy hand squeezing her heart tight, so that it is so hard to breathe, so hard. But in here there are no reminders. There is only her.

She found the Lieutenant in the Matron's office, as Amélie had promised. He was tall, and he looked at once very old and very young, his face pale and eyes rimmed in red. He stood to greet her, and the very way that he stood made her think he was in a great deal of pain, and he held his hat with trembling hands.

Capitaine Laurent. He came looking for Capitaine Laurent, and she did not know the name. "He was shot in the shoulder," the Lieutenant said, his voice rough and hoarse, "while trying to save our CO. The—the Matron said he did not survive."

And something about that combination of words, shot in the shoulder and did not survive, made Marguerite's heart lurch. Was it the Capitaine? The one with the internal bleeding who reminded her so much of Edouard (and tears prickled her eyes but she fought them back, because this Lieutenant did not need to know about Edouard and would not understand even if he did know)?

"Did he have dark hair?" she asked, her voice faint. "Dark hair and grey eyes? Capitaine Laurent? And was he close to a woman named Isabelle?" And part of her heart said yes, let it be him, and another part said no, let it be somebody else, some nameless man that you never knew, but that part of her heart silenced the moment the Lieutenant nodded, his lips twisting, and she balled her hand into a fist, the nails digging so deep into her palm she was certain it would draw blood, that the blood would trickle from her skin to the floor and the Lieutenant would notice, would see that she is not fit to talk to him.

"Yes." And his voice trembled with the single word. "He was."

And Marguerite had never had to do this before, had never had to talk to someone who came looking specifically for one man and her own voice trembled as she whispered, "I'm sorry. He—he lasted only a short time. The bullet tore down into his chest. There was nothing to be done."

Tears welled up in the Lieutenant's eyes, and trickled down his cheeks, and he didn't try to wipe them away, simply let them fall as he sunk back down into his chair. "Tell me about it. Anything you can. She—she will want to know. Did he say anything? Was he in much pain?"

So Marguerite told him, told him about how she had held the Capitaine, and whispered to him, how he had wanted to tell Isabelle that he was sorry, and she tried to soothe him and told him that he could tell her himself, but he knew that he was dying. And she lied and said that he was not in any pain thanks to the morphine, and left out the part where he had asked her to kiss him, and she complied, for fear that it might trouble the Lieutenant to hear it, and said only that she was sorry for him.

And the Lieutenant thanked her for being there, and for telling him, and told her that Isabelle had been the Capitaine's fiancée. That he was soon due to go on leave and they were planning to marry. And it was those words, those words more than any other, that made Marguerite's façade crack, and she could fight her own tears no longer, every part of her heart aching for this Isabelle and her Capitaine, and aching for Edouard, and the Lieutenant reached over, his hand gentle as it took hers and he whispered, "I'm sorry for your own loss," and all she could think was, is it that obvious? Do I wear it so clearly for even strangers to see?

The Lieutenant took his leave shortly afterthat, and apologised for drawing up painful memories for her, and though she now knows the Capitaine's name she does not know the Lieutenant's, and it feels as if he might be a ghost, pulled out of some netherworld to come here and torment her. And the tears keep coming and coming, the flood of tears that have felt like a river writhing inside of her, begging to be let out, and she cannot stopthem, and does not wish to. And they strangle her breath but they are Edouard's due, only Edouard's due.

A/N: In some news, the remaining nine chapters of this and the epilogue have been written, and I hope to be posting by Christmas so stay tuned for many updates in the near future!

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Up next: A nightmare, a birthday, the promise of leave.