Chapter Text
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Thick smoke lifts across the battlefields of Flanders, revealing what might have been a beautiful morning under different circumstances. Days of heavy rainfall have flooded the trenches knee-deep and swelled up No Man's Land into a swampy kind of hell, postponing any offensives to a future with fairer weather. But today, the skies are clear.
A brittle kind of stillness lies in the air, disturbed only occasionally by sputtering rifles, like some twisted imitation of birdsong, when the first rays of sunlight warm the disfigured ground. Beads of dew glitter, still clinging to the barbed wire snaking across the open field and in-between the skeletal remains of a forest, now dismembered and blackened, jutting out of the mud like spears.
Lying face-down in a shell hole between the front lines, Hans Capon reckons that there are worse days to die.
At the beginning of the war, when the first notices of fallen alumni had reached him in his sheltered little bubble back at school, a plaque had been installed in the entrance hall, catching students’ fleeting glances every now and then. It quickly filled up with names, new ones carved into the pale marble after each memorial service.
By the end of the year, they would need a second one—but in autumn of 1914, they didn’t know that yet.
‘When I die, I want it to happen in a blaze of glory,’ Hans announced one particular day, brimming with youthful naivety, to the nodding heads of his classmates spilling out of the chapel. He had read about a valiant officer’s death in the papers the other week, holding position against the enemy forces all by himself to help his men retreat, and liked to imagine that he would act just as bravely, should the situation call for it.
On that morning, the sun shone brightly onto the schoolyard, war nothing more than a vague concept, a playbook for heroes. The names they’d just heard during the requiem were half-forgotten by the time smells of fried eggs and bacon hit their noses, thoughts already returning to more pressing matters, such as today’s breakfast.
Everyone’s but Henry’s, it seemed, who had chuckled briefly at Hans’ proclamation, yet remained with a faraway look in his eyes awhile later.
‘I think I’d rather just have a boring death, fall asleep peacefully,’ he said, eventually, and looked straight at Hans. ‘Or die protecting someone I love. That’d be nice, too.’
Over the course of his life, Hans has thought a few times more about the circumstances of his eventual demise. Quite often lately, if he’s honest, and in an increasing level of detail, the past months instilling the notion that it might happen rather sooner than later.
And while he has hoped for a little more heroic grandeur, he has seen enough to know that it could also be a lot worse. The open sky stretches above him, he’s not been bombed to shreds, nor buried alive in a clammy tunnel—maybe Fortuna is indeed smiling down upon him.
Still…
With a groan, Hans rolls onto his back, blinking cracks into the grime caked on his face. Mud, soot, and something gooey he refuses to think about. There’s the ghost of a name on his lips that is quickly swallowed by a fit of gurgling, rattling coughs. He can taste blood, faintly at first, an evasive tingle on the tip of his tongue that grows sharper, pooling at the back of his throat, thick and warm and acrid.
Carefully, he tries to sit up, just a little, so that he’s still hidden from the enemy snipers’ line of sight. His head is throbbing violently, and a diffuse burst of white, hot pain seizes his body at the sudden movement, sprinkling stars in front of his eyes for a second. The soil is too slippery to find any footing and his right arm hangs limply off his side, sleeve soaked in blood that might or might not be his.
Fuck, he thinks and lies back down again.
There had been an attack just before the break of dawn. Not that he remembers much of it. The rush of adrenaline from leading his men over the top had masked the first bullet to his shoulder, but he’d felt the second. Frantic commands tumbled from his lips, deaf to his own ears, pattered out by the clamour of shells dropping around them. Then, an explosion—the brunt of it taken by a young man from his platoon who he’s had no time to learn the name of—and his world went black in a spray of viscera and mud.
Some time must have passed since then. How much, he can only guess at by the way the shadows fall into the crater. An hour maybe, two at most. Enough for the sounds of fighting to have calmed down, not enough for anyone to come to look for him. Which means—
His eyes shut at the sudden twinge in his chest.
With stiff fingers, he fumbles at the front of his coat, tearing at the collar, before finally coming to rest at the touch of warmed metal. It’s a piece of shrapnel, cut and polished into a ring that he keeps on a chain along with his identity disc. Hidden from view, yet closest to his heart.
He promised, he thinks and at once feels stupid for it.
His mind is grappling for straws by now, latching on to the familiar memory of a lopsided smile and blue eyes dimmed by a sadness that never really went away. He remembers the flutters in his stomach in spite of so much horror around them.
“This might not be up to your noble standards,” Henry soft-pedals, trying for a joke to hide the twinkle of nerves that doesn’t quite suit him anymore. He’s grown a lot from the lonely boy Hans first met all those years ago, into the commissioned officer now in charge of men’s lives. Steadfast, reliable, seemingly unscathed by whatever life might throw at him. Nevertheless, still his Henry.
“You’ll have to close your eyes. And give me your hand.”
Hans complies without question. There’s some movement, a rustle of clothes, before Henry takes hold of his outstretched hand. Gently, carefully, as if it was a maiden’s hand he was clasping. As if Hans didn’t have the same rough patches on his skin, soldier’s calluses.
Something lightweight settles into his palm.
“You can look now,” Henry says. “It’s a bit makeshift, I know, but I can get you a proper one once we’re home again. I’ve made one for myself, too. I’m not sure if yours will fit, but… we’d best not wear them on our fingers anyway. Not here. Maybe on a chain?”
It’s a ring. Simple in its design, smooth and shiny, with a yellowish gleam that could almost be mistaken for gold, but Hans recognises it as the shell casings’ brass. A single letter H is engraved on the inside.
Thoughts tumbling at the gesture’s implications, he barely notices Henry’s ramblings coming to an end.
“Are you proposing?” Hans hears himself asking, half-incredulous and half-joking, not knowing which of the two he wants to go for, voice tripping over the last word in a way he doesn’t like.
When he looks up, he is met by Henry’s sheepish smile.
“It’s a promise. That I’ll stay by your side, for as long as you’ll have me.”
He should’ve kissed him, then. Fear of discovery had rooted him to his spot, perhaps rightly so, considering how things went down later, and left him fumbling for words that were going to fall short anyway.
He’s always thought—a bit naively, perhaps—that Henry would forever be only a short step away from him, catch his fall like he had done so often in the past. But lying out here in his shell hole, hurting and bleeding and alone, it doesn’t look like he will. Somehow, this stings more than the thought of dying.
Over time, his mind is growing fuzzier around the edges. Maybe it’s the blood loss, but it could also be the steadily strengthening summer sun that has him at its mercy. He’s not sure if he will be able to crawl back after nightfall, or even still be alive at that point. The impulse to pray flares up every now and then, rearing its ugly, hopeful head, but he stomps it down with bitter violence. If there is a god, he has turned his back on him long ago.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, the world slowly grows quiet around him. The rifles are no longer singing, the whistle of grenades has stopped. With the taste of blood still heavy in his mouth, mind stumbling and reaching for something to hold onto, it is his penultimate year in school that Hans Capon thinks of.