A/N: I hadn't intended on posting this chapter for another few days, but I needed a bit of a lift tonight, so I decided I would.

His eyes flicker open to an empty room, the thin morning light illuminating the somehow colourful sterility of the place, blurred as if he is looking at it through water. Anja is gone, and pain pangs in his heart at the sight of her empty chair. She kept the nightmares at bay, and for the first time, when he knew he could open his eyes to her soft face, there were no visions of blood-stained uniforms or echoes of shells through the mist, but the memory of them lingers now on his skin. They are not so very far away, are creeping back, circling to get him, to take him, to punish him for what he has done, for the trail of dead he has left behind him.

His men. Where are his men? He wondered about them, so long ago, as he lay heavy and the fog pressed down on him and there was not a soul to be seen, the world muffled silent. No men. No bodies. No distant voices. Did they get away and leave him there? It would be desertion, abandonment, and he knows he should be angry, but he cannot be angry, not now. Better desertion than—than the alternative.

Let them be alive, he thinks, let them be alive.

His eyes fall to Anja's empty chair, and his fingers are warm with her remembered touch. But she is not here, and the pale faces of the battlefield are brushing up against him already.

He must not close his eyes. He must not.

What will Maman think, when she sees her? Will she know? Will she able to sense what has happened? Or will she be too happy, too relieved, to have her family all back together in Paris for however brief a time, to even notice?

No. She will notice. If there is one thing that Maman is it is perceptive. She is bound to notice, and it is impossible to keep secrets from her. Possibly, she even knows about Antoine and Konstin, in her own intuitive way, though they will hardly have told her. She was a prima ballerina, after all, and such things happen between the boys in the ballet. Doubtless she thinks it is something normal, or at least not unusual, not overly scandalous.

But even if she knows about Antoine and Konstin, Edouard is so very different, falls into a completely different realm. And if she senses, realises, otherwise divines, the feelings that live in Marguerite's heart for him, the aching hollowness at his—at his being gone (how is she still breathing? how is her own heart still beating?), what will she think? What will she say?

How can Marguerite ever begin to tell her about him? She chokes up just thinking about him. How could she ever speak about him? About the way she fell in love with him without ever intending to? About how she tried to fight it but simply was not able to? About the way he kissed her back as if she were the most precious thing in the world? About the way he asked for Konstin, and said that he hoped Antoine would be well? About the way he traced her face and leaned into her and held her hand? How could she ever tell her mother about any of those things?

(About the way it feels as if her heart has been ripped out without him?)

How could she tell Maman about him without any of those things? They had only a scattering of days, without time to speak, to learn. And he was so very ill for most of it, and that last day worst of all, after she had kissed him. But every time he drifted towards consciousness he would smile for her, and he called her beautiful though surely she was far from anyone's conception of beauty, too washed-out and worn. And she never doubted him, never doubted that he did think her beautiful. The sincerity of his words lay in his eyes, those beautiful green eyes.

They are far enough away from the lines that the land outside is green, has grass and trees, a multitude of shades of green as if there is not a war being waged just within earshot, and each fresh ray of morning sunlight illuminates the lushness of it, makes her heart stir. But for all of the shades of green, rich emerald and light chartreuse and hundreds in between, none of them are the same shade as Edouard's eyes. And it is a terrible, awful, wonderful, relief.

She does not think she could ever bear to see that shade again.

Anja kneels on the floor next to the couch, the dawn light filtering in the window casting her face pale, and she hugs Christine, leans into her as if she were only a little girl again. "Oh, Mamma," she whispers, her voice hoarse, "he's so frail. And he looks so tired, but I think—I think he was happy to see me. I hope he was but he's so ill, Mamma, and…"

Christine's thoughts come sluggish. She was dozing when Anja came in, and it takes her a moment to realise that Anja must have visited Konstin. Anxiety twists in her stomach as she clears her throat, those words replaying in her mind. He's so frail…he's so ill… The thought of his being frail, weak, makes her feel faintly light-headed and she is grateful that she is already sitting down. "Did you stay with him long?" she whispers, trying to contain the twisting anxiety in her chest.

Anja nods against her. "Most of the night. When—when they didn't want me elsewhere. He's in a room on his own and I couldn't bear to see him alone. So I sat beside him, and talked to him, and he slept a bit. He was sleeping when I left him." Slept a bit. Good. It is good that he is sleeping. He never sleeps enough.

But he is alone. That's not right. He's not supposed to be alone, and Christine's fingers tremble as she smooths back Anja's hair. Konstin never does well alone, needs company, attention, things to draw him out of his own mind. "And Antoine? Where is he?" If Antoine were with him he would be able to comfort Konstin, to set him at ease.

"In the room next to his."

Christine nods and pulls Anja closer to her, and nuzzles into her hair, and tries to hide the tears prickling her eyes.

It is quieter here than in the other hospital. There is no distant crash of shells, no rumbling of ambulance engines and shouts of men at all hours of the night. There are only the noises of the city that he has always known, the hum of automobile engines, rattle of carriages, whinny of the odd rare horse that has not been requisitioned and voices muffled by distance and walls, punctuated by the soft footsteps and hushed murmurs of the nurses and orderlies and doctors.

Antoine sighs, and lets his mind wander in the darkness of the room. Surely the war cannot drag on more than another few months. He knows he has been saying that for three years, but perhaps this time it will be true, though if Konstin were to hear him say that he would twist his lips and grumble, "if three years of killing and stalemate have not been enough to end it, what will persuade them to stop?" He has a point, but to give in to that point would be to relinquish all hope of the war ending at any time.

(Sometimes it feels as if they have been fighting over the same square of land for each one of those three years, an endless tug-of-war, each side getting pushed back and advancing forward like some sort of macabre dance.)

It is futile to think of the end of the war, to wonder when it will be. But surely it will need to end sometime. It cannot keep going on and on forever until the end of days.

(There are not enough men in the world, not enough babies being born, to ensure an endless supply of soldiers for the trenches, and the more men killed the less babies will be born, and perhaps this is the end of days, or how it will start. Perhaps they have brought it on themselves.)

When the war ends, because it has to end, it has to and he will not permit himself to consider any other ridiculous possibility, he will take Konstin, and hide him in Erik's old house beneath the Garnier, and they will live out their days together hidden from the eyes of the world, from its whispers and its glares and its wars and be safe and happy and content in each other's arms. And no one need ever know. It is none of their affair. They are the ones who got them into this mess!

The older Antoine gets, the longer the war drags on, the more he thinks Erik was right to hide himself away from the affairs of men.

Nightfall. The train is scheduled to arrive in Paris shortly before nightfall, only a handful of short hours away.

She never realised before how short hours can be, how soon they can pass. Then again, there was never a time before when every hour was precious, not before Edouard.

Tears prickle her eyes, and leans her cheek against the window. The glass is cool against her burning skin, and she curls her fingers tight around her Saint Anthony, as if it can bring her closer to him, as if some part of his spirit has lingered within it, continues to linger, pressed against her forever. And when the tears come, and trickle against the glass, she does not try to fight them.

It is two months since they've laid eyes on each other, two months of trenches and drills and letters, and simply being able to breathe the same air is…is almost overwhelming.

Antoine's hands are warm, soft as they run over Konstin's back, and Konstin cannot help but sigh. How long has it been since they have been together, truly together? A year, anyway, slightly more. (Fourteen months, since they came across each other in Rouen and had two nights together, two blessed nights.) And they only have one night tonight, just one night before Antoine needs to return to his unit, but one night…

An awful lot can be done in one night.

Antoine's lips have the sting of cognac when Konstin's meet them, and he whimpers, leaning closer and closer. He could lose himself like this, could lose himself in Antoine's mouth, Antoine's hands, and he would not care, could not care because it would be Antoine, Antoine, Antoine, and no one else matters half as much as Antoine does, no one.

And tomorrow he will be gone, on his way back, and then he will be up the lines again and who can tell when they will even be able to write again? Able to see each other? When—if—

He pulls back, tears prickling his eyes, and Antoine smiles softly at him, his own eyes shining. "I know, Konstin," he whispers, his fingers twining tighter with Konstin's own, "I know. But for tonight—for tonight let's pretend that none of that exists, all right?"

And he nods, unable to swallow the lump in his throat. "All right." Antoine fingers are light tracing his cheek, and he closes his eyes, and sighs. "All right."

The slight creaking of the door forces Antoine to open his eyes, and as if in a vision he sees Maman framed in the doorway, her dress a dark blue and hair neatly pinned back. She steps inside, and his father is close behind, grey-haired and leaning on his cane. He tries not to think that his father looks frail, thinner than he remembers, tries not to think that his mother looks tired, and his heart aches, aches with all that he is resolutely not thinking, aches at seeing them. It is more than a year since he has been on proper leave, been able to come home, more than a year, and it is as if, as if he has dreamed them here, conjured them from the depths of his imagination out of sheer desperation.

"It's good to see you, Antoine," Maman smiles, her voice soft as she crosses the room to his side, and her lips are soft as she kisses him on the forehead. His throat tightens, and he musters a smile for her, a smile that he only partly feels, and she kisses him again.

His father takes his hand, and squeezes it. "Does it hurt very much, son?"

Hurt? No, not the way it did. It is not very long since a nurse gave him another dose of morphine, and it has dulled the pain into something he only notices when he concentrates on it. He shakes his head. "No. The morphine is—is helping." Helping me, though not helping Konstin, he thinks but does not say, and prays that they will not ask him what happened out there, will not ask him how he was wounded.

Has Marguerite told them? Included it in a letter? About how he found Konstin and brought him back to the trench? She never said whether she wrote it to them or not, and a small, selfish part of him hopes that she did, so that they will not press him now. Someday, likely, they will ask him about it, and he will have to tell them. But please, God, do not let it be now.

He does not think he has the strength to recount it.

(And they will probably blame the morphine if he includes the ghost of Erik leading him back.)

He shakes his head to drive the thoughts away, and it is only then that he realises that it is only his parents visiting him. There is no sign of Guillaume, and if Guillaume were here he would buffer the silent worry of their mother, who is looking at him even now with concern in her dark eyes. Has he had to return to the ship? Or is he still home?

"Is Guillaume still on leave?" he asks softly, and prays the answer is yes. Heaven knows he needs to see his brother, now more than ever.

Maman nods. "Yes. He applied for an extension to his leave, for "extenuating family circumstances", and they gave it to him. He said he would come see you later, or tomorrow."

"He did not want to wear you out," Papa says, and Antoine nods, and silently wishes that Guillaume had not been so considerate, and come.

Slowly her eyes rove over Konstin, lying in front of her in the bed. The linen sheets are pulled up to his chin, hiding what must surely be a mass of bandages from view, and they cover even his left arm, his right lying exposed beside him. His face is pale, as Anja said, as she expected, ash-pale and pasty after all he has gone through, and there is a half-healed gash over his left eye, and another under the eye along the cheekbone, and a small one just at the edge of his mouth. Her fingers hover over those gashes, those wounds, aching to rub them away, to hide them, to pretend as if they have never marred his face, but she cannot bring herself to trace them lest she hurt him.

Oh, but he looks so frail, so ill. Anja did not do justice to the full extent of it. His cheekbones are hollower than she remembers, his face thinner. Surely he cannot have grown so gaunt just in the time since he was wounded. He must have stopped taking care of himself. He always was so prone to self-neglect, especially when stressed or upset. There is every chance he was neglecting himself again.

(What she would not give to be able to go back and shake him and make him promise to take care of himself, promise to be careful. But she has extracted those promises from him so many times, and this is where they have gotten him, lying here.)

The war has aged him, aged him terribly. How did she not notice before? She's his mother! She's supposed to know these things! But he is so thin, and she is certain that if the sheets were not covering him she would be able to count all of his ribs, and his dark hair is peppered with grey, that dark hair that he has always been so vain about. Pain twists sharply in her heart, aching pain to be able to wipe away the trace of all that he has gone through, to be able to restore her sweet boy from this man who looks as if he is almost too weak to be breathing, though he is breathing, he is, each breath soft and gentle, his lips slightly parted.

In an odd way, he has always looked like Erik. He has the same ears, the same angles in his face though his features are fuller, though he has a nose and his mouth is not distorted. Something of Erik has always lingered in the form of him, in the height and the leanness, even discounting the eyes, but now, lying here before her now, as if restored from the dead, he looks more like his father than ever.

She lowers herself, slowly, into the chair beside his bed, the one that Anja must have occupied through the night, and leans in, and ever so gently presses a kiss to his cheek. His skin is cool, slightly rough, likely from enduring the elements while he was out there, its boyhood softness long lost, and slowly she wraps her hand around his, careful not to wake him, not to hurt him. A faint whimper comes from his throat, as if he senses that she is here, and it goes straight to her heart.

"Ssshhh, darling," she murmurs, bowing her head and gently kissing the back of his hand. "Just rest, darling, just rest." And she cups her hand around the top of his head, and cards her fingers through his hair, her heart aching at the way they snag in the snarls and tangles. It is longer than the last time he was home on leave, almost long enough to start curling, and he has not worn it so long since he came home from Persia, when it had grown down to brush his shoulders. One of his first acts on arriving home was to cut it off, and she pretended her heart was not aching when he returned from the barber with short hair, all of his waves gone.

It is much more civilised like this, Mamma, he said, as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her, and it was the first time he called her Mamma since he was a boy. All through his teens she was Maman, but after Persia he reverted back, and she tried not to think about the things he must have heard about Erik, the whispers that must have reached his ears.

She has never asked him what he learned about Erik out there. Sometimes she wished to, sometimes she almost thought she would, but if he had wanted to talk about it he would have told her, and Erik himself told her enough, once upon a time, and later Nadir, to more than satisfy her curiosity on the point.

(Konstin confided it all in Nadir, she knows. They had several long night-time conversations in the weeks after Konstin returned, and he always sent separate letter to Nadir while he was away. Nadir alone knew the full extent of all that Konstin had learned, and more, even, perhaps, and he brought it with him to his grave. Sometimes he would look at her with a pleading sadness in his eyes, as if he was begging her to understand why Konstin was telling this things to him and not to her, and she did understand, she did, and she never held it against him but how she has always wished that she would be the one that Konstin could confide the things he learned about Erik in.)

Raoul comes to stand beside her, distracting her from that train of thought. She feels him more than sees him, the soft brush of his coat against her, and he wraps an arm around her shoulders, and kisses her hair, and she leans into him, her throat too tight to speak.

How long they stay like that, she cannot tell. She simply sits, holding Konstin's hand, stroking his hair, Raoul standing beside her, a warm presence, a reassurance that the worst is over, that everything will be all right. And when, at last, Konstin grimaces, and his eyes flicker open, blinking rapidly against the light, she sees that the left eye is bloodshot, the blood darkening the gold of his iris, and she swallows down the tightening in her throat at the sight of it. It would not do to let him see her cry.

Slowly, he turns his head, and when his eyes meet hers he gasps. For one long moment there are only his eyes, staring into hers, and then she sees a tear trickle over the bridge of his nose, and gently she reaches out and wipes it away.

His lips twist and he whispers, his voice hoarse, hoarser than she has ever heard it, "Oh, Mamma." And those two simple words break all of her resolve, and her own tears well up, trickle from her eyes as she leans in and kisses his forehead.

"I'm here now," she whispers, squeezing his fingers. "I'm here."

A/N: This time there really will be a couple of days between updates!

I don't think I have anything in particular to comment on this time, though I hope you did all enjoy the chapter.

stormaurora: ...next chapter ;)

Up Next: Marguerite arrives in Paris, another nightmare, and two brothers reunited.