Chapter Text
At first Mittermeyer submits to the ministrations of Brunhild’s medical team, letting them hook him up the sensors and dress the electric burns on his back. Seeing his back fully exposed, the ugly edges of scored skin and weeping plasma, makes Reuenthal burn with cold, impotent rage, like a shard of ice driven into his chest.
Reuenthal will extract a price for this. He’ll fold it away along with the memories of his father’s hands and the taste of blood in his mouth, the snickering of the other boys and the whispers of bastard, the damned licentiousness of his mother and the vices that burn in his blood. Things to be meditated on, when he’s lying in the dark and waiting for sleep.
Worse than the wound is Mittermeyer’s blanched face, and the way he goes blank under the doctor’s hands; not merely the practiced boredom of a soldier, but something worse.
When the doctor says something about further imaging, Mittermeyer comes to life again. “No,” he snaps. “That’s enough. Dress the injury, and let me go.”
At the admiral’s table on Brunhild, under the scrutiny of Admiral Müsel, Mittermeyer’s imprisonment seems to have hardly phased him. Dosed with painkillers and dressed in a borrowed uniform, Mittermeyer trades wit with Kircheis and chats pleasantly through the meal while Müsel looks on approvingly.
Cloaked in the security of his flagship, the lion cub lays out his plans in plain terms. Reuenthal watches Mittermeyer’s wariness give way to a sharp-toothed smile, and knows he gambled well.
Out from under that scrutiny, absent whatever relentless momentum had sustained him this long, Mittermeyer seems — listless. He had burned up all of his strength putting on a devil-may-care attitude to his captors, and then to Müsel. A magnificent show, but by the time they return to their borrowed quarters Mittermeyer is pale and shivering even in the climate-controlled environment.
The rest of the way back to Odin, he sleeps; waking only to drink water and eat a little, half of which he can’t seem to keep down. He jokes quietly about Lohengramm’s personal stores after military prison rations, but it’s the fact Reuenthal has to goad him into eating in the first place that unsettles him.
The third time, he’d made sure the food was bland, nothing more than fruit preserves and bread, but eating still has Mittermeyer bent over a basin, coughing it back up in minutes.
“-- see, I’ll make a good husband of you yet —” Mittermeyer jokes weakly, when Reuenthal leans forward to yank back his hair.
Under other circumstances, it’s a remark that would merit a sharper response. “A man in your position should spend less energy on pointless remarks,” Reuenthal admonishes him.
“I have —“ Mittermeyer says, and coughs. “Weeks of smart remarks saved for you.” He closes his eyes and sits back, letting his head rest against Reuenthal’s outstretched arm. “It was a compliment, anyway."
“A married man couldn't have pried you from Braunschweg’s grip,” Reuenthal says.
Mittermeyer doesn’t have a smart remark for that; he’s busy being sick again, painful, convulsive dry-heaving. By the time he’s done, he’s shaking.
Reuenthal frowns. “Mittermeyer — “
“It’s nothing,” Mittermeyer says. “You’ll stay, won’t you? I will make myself better company.”
Reuenthal hasn’t left him yet.
As is natural for a man raised under his circumstances, Reuenthal has a keen sense for weakness. The knowledge of Mittermeyer’s gnaws at the back of his mind; something is drawn taut, and he won’t be able to rest until it is mended.
The warm weight of Mittermeyer beside him is a constant reminder that he’s safe, at least in body. In sleep, Reuenthal can too easily see the marks of strain under his eyes and around his mouth.
Best that they stay out of the way of Brunhild’s crew; there’s no sense in lending any further to gossip. The Gale Wolf will emerge from this escapade unscathed, and everything will return to what it had been before, but for their new purpose. All to the good then that Mittermeyer refuses further ministrations of Brunhild’s doctor, aside from letting them dress the weeping electrical wound on his back.
“Anything he finds will be on my Fleet medical records,” Mittermeyer says with a grimace, and Reuenthal can see the logic in that. A disabling wound can be used to discredit a man’s ability to command. But that implies there are other wounds he’s not speaking of. Mittermeyer has plaibly not been eating, and probably not been sleeping either; and he refuses tank sleep point blank. But even if he hadn’t, there’s only so much tank sleep can do in such a short period of time.
In some respects, this is all unimportant compared with the magnitude of the task they have agreed to shoulder for Musel. But Reuenthal still finds it hard to turn his thoughts to larger plans. He’s grown remarkably used to having Mittermeyer as a sounding board.
The hours disappear nonetheless, heedless of Reuenthal’s ambivalence, and soon enough Brunhild is beginning her descent back to roost on Odin.
By the time they land, rest has restored a little of Mittermeyer's color and focus, but he’s still remarkably quiet. Mittermeyer had spent the landing at the viewport, looking down into the familiar rolling greens of the countryside and polished blues of the city with uncharacteristic solemnity. They bid their farewells to Admiral Musel and Captain Kircheis, agreeing to meet a view days hence for further discussion.
“Reuenthal,” Mittermeyer says, when they step from the military port. “I want to stop by your house before I go to Eva.”
Reuenthal blinks, surprised; he had expected Mittermeyer to be wild to return to Eva; he’d been braced for him to go off like a shot as soon as Brunhild broke atmosphere.
“I want to — I need to — clean up, before she sees me,” Mittermeyer says, running a hand over his eyes. “I have given her new fears, a whole host of them. It’s my duty to lessen them, at least.” He’s talking too fast, one word running into the next.
The breeze cuts into Reuenthal’s senses, carrying away the ozone-and-adrenaline stink that pervades combat ships. The cool air of Odin envelops them. It’s perversely destabilizing. Reuenthal always feels like a duller creature, away from the razor’s edge of war. He turns his face from the fear in Mittermeyer’s eyes.
“Of course,” Reuenthal says, and clasps his shoulder. He tries not to see how the touch makes Mittermeyer wince. “I’ll bring the car around.”
Reuenthal’s arrival wakes the ramshackle Reuenthal estate, and like a beast being woken from napping, it is full of complaints.
“Lord Oskar,” his ancient butler’s greeting has the tone of an admonition. “We did not know you were returning to us so soon —“
Reuenthal waves a hand in dismissal of this. “Must I always inform you of my comings and goings?” He’d be Lord Oskar to the old bastard until the day they put one of them in the ground, regardless of how decorated his military career became.
“— or that you were bringing a guest —“ his butler says, peering at Mittermeyer. “Good afternoon, Admiral Mittermeyer.”
Mittermeyer, who generally has an irritating propensity to chat with the help, for once confines himself to a nod. This does nothing to dispel the curious crowd that has gathered, a maid and two serving boys.
“Regardless, we are home,” Reuenthal says. “Make up the guest room for Admiral Mittermeyer, and bring the medical supplies we have there.” That provokes bright-eyed interest from one of the boys, which Reuenthal tries to quell with a fierce look.
Reuenthal directs his household with crisp efficiency; linens and bandages and everything the medicine chest had to offer and more besides, and food — something appropriate for an invalid, which at least elicits a soft laugh from Mittermeyer — and then they were to leave them alone.
“You are wanting to call me a tyrant,” Reuenthal says, when the serving boy at last withdraws, Reuenthal’s instructions plainly spinning through his mind.
But Mittermeyer doesn’t take the opportunity for a jab, or anything else; he sits looking drawn and pensive, so entirely not himself.
Reuenthal gestures to the adjoining bathroom. “You can get cleaned up while they prepare your room.”
“Right.” Mittermeyer begins to peel off his borrowed uniform. His movements are wobbly and hesitant, pain-drunk. It’s plain from the gray under his eyes that he’s lost the dulling edge of the painkillers.
Reuenthal leans forward and undoes the clasps of his uniform, and lifts the rank collar carefully from around his neck. Mittermeyer’s breath catches; something in the movement is hurting him.
Mittermeyer emerges from the bathroom with his hair water-dark, and sits at the edge of the bed, wobbly-legged as a colt. Reuenthal reviews the damage.
Lack of food has stripped some of his firm frame, and leant a bluish-gray tinge to the skin around his eyes. His lips are split, and still cracked. He holds himself with shoulders slightly hunched, braced against pain. His hair has gotten longer than he usually allows it.
His back is swathed in water-resistant bandages, but now they’re sodden and bubbled with water at the edges where the adhesive started to give.
“Your bandages,” Reuenthal says.
Mittermeyer grimaces. “Right. Better to get it over with. Could you —”
Reuenthal peels the bandages from his back, and tries not to feel how Mittermeyer trembles beneath his touch, as if the whole of his skin is painful.
The injury; and beneath it, the fading, half-healed marks of two or three others, where he’d been struck before.
“How bad does it look?” Mittermeyer asks.
“It’ll make a handsome scar,” Reuenthal says, though the wound is ugly and makes him feel sick to look on; not for its ugliness but for the fact someone had done this to Mittermeyer. No fight, no boasts to be had; just an ugly static image of torture. It’s like a crack in the world. No one should be able to make Mittermeyer the subject of their hands. He’s a man of doing.
When Reuenthal's hand brushes Mittermeyer’s shoulder, Mittermeyer flinches and draws in a sharp breath. Reuenthal looks at the skin beneath his touch; Mittermeyer’s shoulder, dappled with moles and freckles, but whole. But Mittermeyer has gone white, his teeth clenched.
“What’s wrong?” Reuenthal asks.
Mittermeyer shakes his head. “It’s nothing,” he says.
“Mittermeyer, what did they do to you?” The works escape him with low urgency; he doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to know. If that truth stays between Mittermeyer and the shadowy figures of his torturers, it can’t touch what lies between him and Reuenthal.
But Reuenthal needs to know.
Mittermeyer shuts his eyes. “It was nothing so dramatic as you’re thinking,” he says. “I think they were worried at first, in case they were ordered to release me. They started with sleep deprivation — the lights were always on, and I started to lose track of time. And then they would take me to another room, and bind me, and leave me in painful positions until — well —“ He flashes Reuenthal a grin, but it seems a fragile thing. “They wanted to make me beg, but I didn’t give them that pleasure.”
“Dogs,” Reuenthal curses.
“I passed out a few times. I’d wake up, locked back away. Once I woke up still there, and I couldn’t breath — that was a bad moment. I was sick for a little while after that, with a fever, and they even had a doctor look at me.” He laughs. “I guess they couldn’t have me dying before they gave the order.” He stretches his arms gingerly, bending the fingers as if to test their function. “Everything hurts, but I think it should mend. I’ll — need to see a doctor. But I didn’t want — I didn’t think Müsel needed to know more.”
In case he found me a bad investment. The meaning is implicit.
He’s not that kind of man, Reuenthal wants to say, without fully knowing why. Something in the understanding in Musel’s face, the knowing look he’d shared with Kircheis. But that would lay bare that shameful vein of feeling.
“You’ll mend,” Reuenthal says instead. He winds new bandages over the wound, swathing it once more in soft cloth, and then helps Mittermeyer shrug on a fresh undershirt. When he fumbles with the buttons, Reuenthal leans forward to do them up, and their foreheads brush.
Mittermeyer sags forward, leaning into Reuenthal’s shoulder.
Reuenthal freezes. He doesn’t know where to touch him; it seems impossible to touch him without hurting him. But Mittermeyer is shivering, and finally he lifts his hands and embraces him, like he would a lover, like Mittermeyer embraces him when they’re drunk and happy and everything in the world is well.
A wracking sob goes through Mittermeyer; and then another.
Reuenthal stills.
Mittermeyer has always been easy with his emotions; he’s easily pleased and quick to anger, and just as quick to forgive.
He’s heard Mittermeyer injured; Mittermeyer swearing and cursing and biting back a scream, the bones of two fingers laid bare by incendiary blast; Mittermeyer pale, bleeding from a terrible wound on his neck; quiet, as if he hadn’t felt it at all. He’s heard other wounded men cry; he’s heard dying men cry for their mothers, for their lovers, heard them simply wail like damned things for someone, anyone.
He’s only heard Mittermeyer cry like this once before.
He doesn’t have the strength to cry long.
“A drink?” Reuenthal suggests at last.
Mittermeyer nods, exhausted and bleary with pain. Reuenthal takes him under the arm, and they go to Reuenthal’s sitting room, conspicuously freshly-dusted. There, his servants have already laid out food; he catches a glimpse of the serving boy disappearing down the corridor, eyes goggling at Mittermeyer.
If Reuenthal had a wife, there wouldn’t be a need for any of this.
No, if Reuenthal had a wife, she would be an aristocrat and would add twice the complication; there were no simple, honest women like Frau Mittermeyer among the ranks of the aristocracy.
(If Reuenthal had a wife, he would have had to hand Mittermeyer off to her; this was women’s work, after all —)
He cuts this line of thought at the root.
Mittermeyer accepts a little food, and then begins to drink with mechanical efficiency and the expression of a man condemned. Reuenthal watches, nursing his glass slowly for once.
“I don’t know what I’ll tell Eva. I don’t know what to say to her,” Mittermeyer admits, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “This isn’t her world. It shouldn’t be her burden. I burden her enough.”
“You’re looking to the wrong person for marriage advice,” Reuenthal says, leaning forward to refill his glass.
“I know,” Mittermeyer says. “I’m sorry to —“
“There don’t have to be apologies between us,” Reuenthal says.
“I suppose you don’t confide in your women.”
“If I do, I don’t remember it. It’s better that way,” Reuenthal says.
That brings a gleam of reproach to Mittermeyer’s eyes; and Reuenthal is glad to see it. “Those evil ways will catch up to you.”
“I look forward to it.”
Mittermeyer leans forward, resting his head in his hands. “One night,” he says. “I just need a night. To put my thoughts in order. I would be a poor husband, coming to her like this.”
Reuenthal looks at him. He’s not acting like Mittermeyer.
“Stay, then,” he says. “We’ll drink until you feel yourself again.”
The soft, dreadful tick of the old grandfather clock marks the moments, the same clock by which Reuenthal had once measured his father’s drunken ranting. Around them, the house sighs as timbers settle, a creature succumbing once more to stillness.
“Do you think I’m a coward, Oskar?”
Reuenthal blinks. “No,” he says. “It’s not in your nature to be a coward.”
The tick of the wretched clock and the creak of timbers is the only answer. Wolf slumps in the chair, staring towards the fire.
“There was no world in which I didn’t come for you,” Reuenthal says, taking a stab at the silence. He hates the pleading tone that trembles in the words.
“I know,” Mittermeyer says. “Fool I am, for worrying.” He runs a hand over his face. “Forgive me, Reuenthal, I am just — tired.”
In the pause, Reuenthal can taste all the uncertainty; time measured only in pain, with only unknown reprieve. He wouldn’t go so far as to call Mittermeyer an impatient man — but he has never been one who took enforced stillness well. “There’s nothing to forgive,” he says.
He can’t bear to look at Mittermeyer; he stares into the fire, waiting for a response. When he glances back, Mittermeyer is leaning back in the chair, fast asleep.
The glass starts to slip from Mittermeyer’s hand; Reuenthal lunges forward to catch it.
He lifts a hand to Mittermeyer’s face. His skin is warm from the fire, but there’s no fever burning beneath his hand; perhaps he is just well and truly exhausted.
All this while, something alien has been gnawing at him. A thread of awareness, perhaps one that Mittermeyer has dropped in his exhaustion; awareness that Evangeline must be running mad without word from them, that every moment is a kind of cruelty.
It seems Reuenthal’s duty to fall on that particular sword.
Reuenthal leaves Mittermeyer in the parlor, and returns to video comm console in his study. Mittermeyer had sent her an electronic communication, before they left atmosphere on the prison planet; she knows he is alive, and free, and that is the hardest part.
So why does he hesitate to punch in the number?
He had thought he was done with this duty; he’s more than fulfilled it. But Wolf is right; there are things a woman cannot understand. He would know better, after all.
Eva’s anxious face fills the screen. The strain is showing in the gray beneath her eyes. “Admiral Reuenthal!” she exclaims, her eyes searching the frame. “Where is Wolf? Is something —“ A breath catches in her throat.
“Mittermeyer is fine,” Reuenthal says. “Merely — overtaxed, by the trip.” He’s never seen Mittermeyer overtaxed in his life. He’d not been sure until now that he was truly capable of it.
Alarm fills Eva’s eyes. “Where are you?” she says. “I’ll come to him.”
He wants that even less. “You don’t need to concern yourself,” Reuenthal says. “I have things in hand. I’ll bring him to you tomorrow.”
He fixes his eyes on the spot between her brows, lets the emotions on her face slide through his perception; there is no way he can please her, in this exchange.
A barrage of emotions flash over her face; it reminds him with drear familiarity of the sorts of conversations that always ends his dalliances.
But Evangeline doesn’t cry.
“Admiral.” Her voice is small and tight, but her gaze is relentless. “What does he need?”
Here, perhaps that desperate panic can find answer. “Rest,” Reuenthal says, honestly. “Food, anything he’ll eat.” Eva, who hangs the stars on her Wolf. The love of a woman is different, they tell him; perhaps he’s simply never felt it. Perhaps he’s incapable of this honest feeling. He’s certainly ill-suited to it. “The things that you already have on hand.” He considers. “A doctor, eventually —“
“Is he —“
“He’s not in any danger,” Reuenthal says.
Evangeline blinks. Nods.
The rain is picking up outside, pouring down on the eaves of the Reuenthal estate.
“Get some sleep, Frau Mittermeyer,” Reuenthal says, and cuts the call.
Later that night, after he's seen Mittermeyer to sleep in one of the guest bedrooms, Reuenthal paces the halls aimlessly.
A soft sound catches his attention. “Reuenthal?”
“Mittermeyer?” Reuenthal says, stopping by the door. It opens with a touch, spilling light over the bed. Mittermeyer is sitting up, half-tangled in the bedsheets; his hair sticks out in a disarray, and under other circumstances teasing him would have been irresistible. But he's drawn taut, ready for a fight. "What's wrong?"
At the question, Mittermeyer relaxes. "Reuenthal." He laughs, but there’s a thread of fear in his voice. “I thought I might have dreamed it. That I was back —“
In the dim light of the hallway, Mittermeyer’s face is appallingly pale, and he’s slick with sweat. Something curdles sour in Reuenthal’s chest; he’s not suited to this; this is too much, too close, too perilously close to all the obscenities to which his mind bends.
He cannot change the fact that Mittermeyer is here, nor that he is the person at hand. Those are circumstances of his own making.
He lays his head down on the bed, and drifts into an exhausted doze, until Mittermeyer’s hand on his shoulder wakes him.
“Oskar,” Mittermeyer says. “Why are you down there?”
Reuenthal shoots upright, shame burning like a brand through him. “I —“
Mittermeyer’s hand withdraws in a second, and he looks bemused. “This bed is big enough for the both of us.”
The servants will talk.
Reuenthal is weary. He’s already spent half the night here; and Mittermeyer’s wounds will give the servants enough to talk about regardless. Excuses, but they serve.
Not daring to say anything, he crawls up into the bed.
The rain can’t quite drown out the steady sound of Mittermeyer’s heartbeat.
What little sleep Eva gets is fretful.
When she finds that Wolf isn’t coming tonight, she can’t bring herself to go back to their bedroom, where she had anticipated finally having him in her arms again. She catnaps on the couch, and wakes every hour, to stare at the hateful hands of the clock.
What should she expect? What does it mean that Wolf hadn’t come straight home?
There are things he doesn’t want me to know. The idea is a dull knife between her ribs, and Reuenthal stands between her and her Wolf.
Oh, she could hate him.
She feels like a mad thing. She’s cleaned the whole house as if the Kaiser himself is coming to visit.
There are things she could be doing; she’s forced herself into a state of perpetual motion during Wolf’s imprisonment, filling every moment she can with something, because when all fell quiet her thoughts would immediately conjure the things that could be happening to him.
The moments creep by, as the sun climbs into the sky and the birds begin to sing. She makes herself rise, and wash, and dress in a bleary rush, as if he might sneak up the drive when she is in the shower.
In the loose threads of time, she dabs perfume on her wrists. Puts in another tiny load of laundry. Finally just comes to sit on the couch, and twists her wedding ring around her finger, and listen to the rain.
Finally, the sound of a car on the drive cuts through her fugue.
Wolf steps from the car, and for a moment all her worries cease.
He’s smiling, and his eyes go soft and warm when he sees her.
Heedless of the rain, heedless of the wind whipping at her hair, she flies down the stairs, and to him. “Wolf!”
When she steps into his arms, their bodies fit together as they always have. He leans into her, and she feels the breath whoosh from his ribcage in one long exhale. “Eva. My Eva.”
When he comes home to her, he always smells like space, ozone and a metallic sharpness that she can feel in her teeth. The smell is pervasive enough to cling to his uniform through a handful of washes. She’s come to love it a little, because it means she’s holding him again, and they can exist as body and body instead of all the parcelled longing of distance.
But now he smells like dust and Reuenthal’s cologne and the vaguely floral rot that clings to the Reuenthal estate in what she sometimes thinks of as the ghost of Reuenthal’s lady mother. And beneath that, the hospital tang of antiseptic and sickness. He’s braced against her touch, even as he buries his face in the crook of her neck.
She’s so caught up in the realization, she doesn’t notice that the rain has stopped falling on her until Reuenthal steps into her field of view, angling his umbrella to better cover the both of them.
“Frau Mittermeyer,” he greets her with a courtly nod. In the chill, his breath fogs around his face.
“Admiral Reuenthal —” she says, and then trails off, at a loss. “Thank you.” The words are paltry, half-swallowed by the storm and the tumult in her chest. By what means had he freed her husband? Wolf had said something about an Admiral Musel, the brother of the Kaiser’s mistress. What had such a favor cost him?
She tries to catch his gaze over Wolf’s shoulder, but those eyes are flat planes of colored glass, lending no clue to the thoughts beneath.
She untangles herself slowly from Wolf, not able to pull herself from his warmth, from the tactile proof that he’s alive — so she grabs Reuenthal’s sleeve, and pulls him into a clumsy half-embrace with one arm, while still holding Wolf with the other. For a moment, she can feel the hammer of his heart through his uniform, and the whoosh of breath as he exhales raggedly.
Before he can pull away, she leans up to press a kiss to his cheek.
“Thank you,” she says. The words ache with unshed tears.
“Just what have you been doing in my absence?” Wolf teases.
Reuenthal stills and looks away; but Eva just laughs.
“Adultery. You’ll have to work to win me back,” she teases gently, and Wolf laughs, pulling her back into his arms.
“I’m equal to the task.” But then he sways, and she has to catch his arm. In a moment, Reuenthal is at his other side, steadying him; and Wolf laughs, abashed.
“I’m sorry, I’m — tired,” he says.
“Darling,” Eva chirps, touching his cheek. His skin is hot under her touch; the rings under his eyes are the same bruised color as the clouds overhead. His eyes have the dull sheen he always gets when he’s on painkillers. There’s so much to catalogue, and yet nothing. “You’ve been away too long.”
He laughs, a choked sound, and pulls her back into his arms. His arms tremble around her, and it feels as if the whole world is shaking.
Never expect a man to know what he needs.
“Come inside, and I’ll make us something warm.” She curls her hands together at the small of his back.
Wolf comes up the stairs on his own power, his steps careful and determined, but Reuenthal is only a step behind, his entire attention bound up in her husband. He pauses at the doorway; but at Wolf’s questioning look, follows them inside.
With Reuenthal present, etiquette dictates they go to the sitting room. Part of her longs to bring Wolf to bed and not let him leave until there was color in his face again, but Wolf doesn’t like a fuss being made over him. The more wrong things are with him, the more true this becomes.
Instead, she brings blankets to the sitting room and helps Wolf untangle from the half-drenched uniform. He sets his teeth as soon as she starts touching him, but he can’t quite keep himself from flinching under her touch, as if he’s expecting pain. It makes her fumble with the buttons and snaps as if she’s never touched him before. Every moment the process stretches longer is excruciating; her heart hammers in her chest like a trapped thing, and Reuenthal’s eyes bore into her back.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
He shakes his head irritably. “Nothing.”
Beneath the linen of his shirt, she can feel the familiar weight of bandages.
She retreats back into the rhythm of hosting; focusing on the curl of the steam around her fingertips as she pours tea from the delicate china Wolf had given her for their fifth wedding anniversary.
Reuenthal accepts the tea, and then holds it as if it’s an object he’s never encountered before. He doesn’t seem to see her pleading look.
Tell me something, anything.
Wolf’s hands are frighteningly clumsy on the china.
“I should scold you,” she says at last. “For being gone so long without my leave.”
Wolf chokes on his tea for a moment, and she has to rescue the cup before he drops it. “It was not with my volition,” he says, and then — “I sent Reuenthal. I thought you could make some use of him, at least.”
“Admiral Reuenthal is a poor substitute for you,” she says sweetly.
Reuenthal scoffs, and begins to drink his tea.
After that, the words come easier. As Wolf begins to talk again, she sees him becoming more himself; gathering that presence around himself once more that armor. He only picks at the food she lays out; but painkillers always make him nauseous, so she doesn’t worry immediately. She’ll get him to eat later, when there’s less distractions.
In the way he tells the story, she can feel the shape of things not said. This has been curated for her.
She tucks a curl behind her ear and tries to swallow that sting, but it rests in the back of her throat, burning like a hot coal. What an ungrateful creature she is.
Of course, she could try; once they’re alone, she could cajole, she could weep and cry and Wolf might give in, because he loves her, because he’ll go to great lengths to make her happy. But the plain truth of the matter is, there are things he trusts his comrade with, and a neat line dividing her from that world. Men’s matters.
It’s the order of the world, Frau Mittermeyer would have told her, adjusting her hands on the much-polished silver serving tray.
“ — And Admiral Musel took the matter in hand. In the manner of the old heroes,” Wolf says, smiling at Reuenthal.
“He’s driven,” Reuenthal says. A significant look passes between them.
“Admiral Musel —” he begins, but then grimaces as a little spasm runs through his hands. The cup slips from his hands, spilling tea down his shirt and rolls off his lap to shatter on the floor.
“Oh!” Eva exclaims.
Wolf curses.
In a way, it is something of a relief; it strips the situation down to necessity. She undoes the buttons of Wolf’s shirt to pull the sodden fabric away from his skin, before it can burn him more. In another moment, she might have blushed to be tearing off her husband’s shirt in view of Admiral Reuenthal, but that really was the least of her worries. “Here, stay there. Don’t step on the porcelain,” she says, helping him from the shirt. The bandages underneath are soaked too; they’re wound around his chest, discolored in the back with a little blood. The analytical part of her notes these details without emotion.
Eva hops to her feet, to grab towels and another shirt for Wolf; and then she remembers the bandages, and loops back to the water closet for her first aid kit too.
When she steps back into the sitting room, Wolf and Reuenthal’s heads are bent together, schoolboy close. Wolf is leaning over, a hand pressed to his head as if to hold it together, the other clasped tightly, still trembling. Reuenthal’s hand rests on the back of Mittermeyer’s neck.
Out of her view, Wolf is no longer pretending that he isn’t in pain. And from where she stands, Eva can see the cost imprisonment took on his body.
“It will pass,” Reuenthal says, quietly. Something in his tone brings her to a halt, standing in the hallway with her arms full of linens, her heart hammering in her chest.
She’s never heard Reuenthal sound so gentle.
Oh, she thinks, something sliding into place in the back of her mind.
Then: surely not.
But there was the way Reuenthal had claimed center stage at their wedding day, clasping her hand and kissing it, like he was swearing himself. His constant presence since; the loyalty to Wolf, above all else.
The way the look in Reuenthal’s eyes in this moment mirrors the ache in her chest.
Does Wolf know?
Claustrophobic doubt crowds in on the heels of her revelation; it starts as a whisper, until it is rattling around the cavity of her skull, in time with her pulse.
“I hope,” Wolf says, quietly.
The weariness in his voice drowns out her other thoughts. She’s incapable of not answering it. She steps back into the room.
“Wolf,” she says, softly, holding out the spare shirt. The way his eyes light when he sees her warms her.
“Eva,” he says. “I’m sorry about the —”
“It’s nothing. How do you think I could worry about that, now?” she says, touching his face.
He leans against her, burying his face in her shoulder with a soft little sound, but when she reaches up thoughtlessly to run a hand down his back, he flinches from her.
Reuenthal’s look of reproof burns her to the bone. She feels like a fraud, with the weight of that stare on her; it’s like she’s nineteen again, newly married and desperately hoping. “Wolf — these bandages, we should replace them.”
Under her touch, she feels his ribs heave as he draws in a long breath. “Alright.”
“We can go to —”
“It’s fine,” Wolf says, shutting his eyes. “He’s seen it already.”
Eva blinks. Of course. She tamps down the bitterness of that thought, and opens her first aid kit, looking for bandages. Reuenthal keeps giving her glances halfway between nervous and appraising; as if worried she might develop some ladylike squeamishness any moment, or worse. Her sometimes-ally is nowhere to be found.
I’ve seen him hurt before. Why would this be any different?
She peels back the bandages carefully, drawing a little hiss from Wolf. They come away yellowed and sticky with plasma, and the skin beneath is layered in a deep, ridges burn, beginning to scab over at the edges. It has the unmistakable precision of an injury inflicted with intent.
The sight of it crushes the breath from Eva’s chest. For a moment, she can only sit, frozen.
“They did this,” she says. “With a…”
“Don’t think of it,” Wolf says, his voice thick with pain. “Please.”
She worries at her lip for a moment. When she had been pregnant, those pains had been one thing to endure — when her body had betrayed her, it had felt like a betrayal of her very purpose, so badly she had wished herself dead to escape from the shame of it.
If Wolf’s commanding officers had been before her, she could have killed them. Let’s leave, she wants to say.
“Please, Eva,” Mittermeyer says.
“I won’t think of it,” she lies.
Instead, she cuts away the rest of the bandages with the little scissors from the kit. “Tell me about Admiral Musel,” she says. “He’s Countess Grunewald’s younger brother, isn’t he?” There isn’t a woman in the Empire who doesn’t know of Countess Grunewald and her beauty. She’s only a few years older than Eva, but she’s been the Kaiser’s mistress since Eva was a child.
“Eva…” Wolf begins. “Admiral Müsel is — there’s something I need to tell you."
Reuenthal sits up straighter, a breath hissing through his teeth. “Mittermeyer.”
“It’s not a secret I will keep from my wife, Reuenthal,” Wolf says. “It’s her life you’ve gambled as much as mine.” His tone is strangely gentle.
For a breath, Reuenthal looks stricken. His mismatched eyes flicker to Eva, and then away, as if just looking at her might burn him.
Eva glanced between them, bewildered. “Wolf…?” Her hands still on the bandages for a moment. "What's going on?"
"Reuenthal made a bargain with Admiral Musel," Wolf begins. "In exchange for -" He pales, and shuts his eyes for a moment. "Reuenthal, can you --"
In a corpselike tone, Reuenthal lays out the deal he made with Admiral Musel.
It is not so shocking as Wolf probably expected it to be; but Wolf doesn't know the state Reuenthal had been in, or the hare-brained ideas Eva had come up with, for that matter. In light of that, this is almost easy to swallow.
Less easy is the way Reuenthal tells the story, as if she is a child who can't be counted on to understand the importance of secrecy.
Suddenly, she’s seen enough of this man. His presence is suffocating; she can’t figure out up from down with him staring at her like this. “Admiral, I think Wolf is tired,” she says, brushing her hands off and standing up. “We should retire for the afternoon.”
Etiquette requires Reuenthal to do the same. “Frau Mittermeyer, if I can be of any further assistance —”
“I am perfectly capable of caring for my husband,” Eva says, all haughty dignity. “Thank you for the offer, but we don’t require your help, Admiral Reuenthal.”
She draws herself up to her full height, and meets his gaze. Here is an argument he can hardly argue with; she watches that realization flicker through his eyes, and all that strange softness disappears once more beneath a mask of neutrality.
A beat. Another man might have apologized.
“As you say,” Reuenthal says.
“What’s wrong?” Wolf asks, when she comes back to the sitting room from seeing Reuenthal off.
She opens her mouth. Do you know that Reuenthal is —
She closes her mouth. He sounds so tired. It doesn’t matter. He’s here, and that’s enough. She sinks down onto the carpet, feeling child-like and foolish, and rests her head on the edge of the couch, to look up into his face.
He’s quiet, waiting.
“Reuenthal is — a strange man,” she says at last.
Wolf shuts his eyes. “The strangest.” His voice sounds faraway. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay him. He’ll never take anything I offer him. How am I expected to live with that?”
The peevishness in his voice makes her laugh. He doesn’t know. How strange, for her to notice something in Wolf’s friend that he has missed. “Do you think he’s counting?”
“Reuenthal counts everything.”
“You’re a clever man,” she says, running a hand through his hair. “We’ll find a way.”
“Eva…” Wolf says.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she says.
“It was the only way.”
“I know,” she breathes.
“Eva, this is — this is treason,” he says. “Müsel is not playing idle games.” He takes a breath. “If you would — prefer not to be tied to me —”
“No!” Eva cries, grabbing his arm.
“This puts your life at risk,” Wolf says.
She shivers. “I don’t care. I care for you, that’s all. I would leave all of this, if that’s what we needed to do.”