Chapter Text
Theo rocked back and forth in his waiting room chair, the discomfort of its wooden frame only serving to sharpen his nerves.
“Who are you here to visit?” Asked the young woman behind the desk.
“Fred- Frederick Du Chatelet.” Theo wrung his hands, grateful that they were out of her line of sight.
Nodding, she went over her clipboard, tracing the names down it with a pencil. She frowned.
“Not here, I’m afraid. Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
“I got a telegram just yesterday. It said he’d be here, I haven’t made a mistake.” He leaned in closer. “Are you sure he’s not there? Could you check again?”
She didn’t look best pleased at that.
“It’s not down here. Are you sure you have the name and everything right?”
“Yes, of course I-” Theo almost yelled, and had to restrain himself. He’d gain nothing from making the woman mad and he had everything to lose. “I’m looking for a pilot, only recently in. Frederick Du Chatelet, Flying Officer- it might be down as DC, the other pilots call him that?”
She made a show of flipping through her chart and looking disapproving. “I’m very sorry sir.” She said, not managing to not ooze annoyance. “You must be in the wrong place.”
A man barrelled through a door behind the desk at that point, stopping Theo from saying the really rather uncourteous thing he had intended to by light of being so unexpected.
“A word in private Miss Agata, if you please.” He said in a tone that didn’t brook refusal.
“Can it wait just a moment, doctor?” She asked.
It was clear that from the doctors stern demeanor it wasn’t, but just in case this didn’t come through, he said very clearly and quite loudly enough “Now, Miss Agata.”
Theo watched as she ducked into the next room with the man who didn’t quite look enough like a doctor for his liking. That wasn’t his business, he supposed. But he didn’t like the thought of Fred being treated somewhere with cut rate doctors. He wasn’t sure he trusted this place on the whole. He was here to check on Fred, and if the staff didn’t know where he was that wasn’t a point in their favour either. He ought to check to be sure. He wanted to see him, but he had a reason, too, a duty of care. He glanced around the little waiting room. Nobody was looking at much, and there weren’t many others in, an uncomfortable looking young woman and an antiquated man whose form receded more and more behind his newspaper the more you looked at him. Nonchalantly he took the door through to the ward.
The walls were painted a very sterile blue, beds partitioned away from each other with curtains of precious fabric. Things seemed wrong. Unhealthy here. The smell was enough to make Theo want to gag. Everything reeked, like bleach and scorched skin. Occasionally with a distinct undertone of urine too, an unwelcome change to the other deeply repugnant scents. He hated being here. Call it yellow if you wanted, but he did not have the stomach for it. But stomach it he would, if only for Fred.
Whatever it was, whatever it was, he hoped it was minor. It had to be. They could not have him. He hoped the curtains had more purpose than just to shield the patients from view.
Theo walked down the little aisle in the middle, which came to a junction leading three separate ways, left, right, or straight ahead. An older looking nurse with grizzled grey hair just slightly escaping from under her cap spotted him looking uncertain and before he could walk assertively in any sort of direction she was upon him.
“What are you doing?” She asked brusquely, almost running his feet over with the little trolley she was pushing.
“I’m a visitor. I’m here to see flying of-”
She pointed in the direction she had come from. “Pilots down that way. Remember to be out by six.” She then proceeded to steamroll past him, with such force he felt almost blown back in her wake. Efficient to a fault, he thought, as he set off in search of pilots. What if he had been a spy? She couldn’t just go around giving directions to anyone.
He stood to the side, as a team of several nurses wheeled a white shrouded figure out on a bed. Were it not for one twitching arm that lay on top of the covers Theo would have taken him for dead, his bandaged head and eyes some ancient rite of protection to save the poor soul in the next life in place of this one.
Poor sod. Theo wondered if he’d be better off if they just let him die.
Once they had passed, Theo slipped past into the next room and surely enough he recognised the familiar grey-blue of a pilots jacket hung over a chair. It was so close to being the same as one he’d just left, with a row of beds lining each wall, all facing in, yet the atmosphere hung differently. There was conversation in here, loud enough that he could hear it. Some of the patients watched him as he in turn scoured the room for a trace of Fred and he wished to himself that they were blindfolded like their fellow who had been wheeled past. He did not like their eyes running down his neck.
The last bed on the left was the only one sectioned off. It had a curtain round the outside of it, sectioning it away from the rest of the world. It scared him, thinking what he’d find, poking his head through that sheet.
The light on the bedside table was on, some compensation for how the screens kept the ‘room’ dark. Theo saw the body in the bed. He looked away again, very quickly. He wished he hadn’t, but the sight made his skin chill, hairs all standing on end. It was swathed in bandages, no holes for eyes but a gap for the mouth, red and raw and entirely unlike a mouth ought to look. Over the covers his arms were neatly lined up, revealing, again bandaged, hands that looked altogether wrong, the fingers misshapen, too thin and warped. Claws, that would be the right word for them. Just looking at them knocked the wind clear from his lungs.
But it was not his Fred.
He could tell just from looking at the poor fellow that it wasn’t him, even under the bandages. He wasn’t built like a Fred, and little wisps of blond hair poked out of the bandages at the side of his head here and there.
And that hunched little figure sat at his bedside looked rather more like his Freddie.
“Oh Freds. You really had me worried with this one.”
No response came from the little thing. His jacket and hat hung over the back of his chair untidily, and were surely crumpling as he leaned on them. Bless him, the lad had fallen asleep pressed up against the armrest. Funny, he had been so anxious about the thought of seeing Fred, had felt so strange right up til he had gotten the telegram. Concern had overtaken him then, like he’d been possessed by some powerful force. Seeing the body in the bed, and Fred like this, all he could feel was relief. He was deeply, selfishly glad that this was someone else’s tragedy.
Coaxing the jacket out from under Fred’s body, he laid it over Fred instead. Nothing short of a good ironing would get those wrinkles out but it might at least keep him warm.
On second thoughts, he pressed a little kiss to Fred’s forehead, smoothing his skewed hair out of the way. Freddie stirred, but did not wake. Good. He was sure the lad needed a good spot of sleep more than he needed to be fussed over, judging from the looks of him. He looked rough, honestly. Which Theo only said with the greatest of love, but it had to be said. He looked a bit grey about the face, and unless those bags under his eyes were lying, he hadn’t been sleeping. Theo’s eyes flickered down to the arm cradled in Freddie’s lap, encased in a sturdy cast. Oh, the poor thing. He supposed that’d be the reason Fred was allowed to stay down here, not off flying another sortie while his unfortunate friend languished in hospital, whoever he was.
Better to let him sleep, in this case. He was sure Fred wouldn’t mind someone else keeping up his little vigil. There was another chair available, on the other side of the bed, so he took it up and brought it close to Fred's.
Theo watched over the man for what felt like years and years. The jagged rasp of his breathing lulled him into a feeling of drowsiness, which was strange as it unsettled him so. It seemed so inhuman, almost repulsive, though he was sure that was nothing to utter out loud. The whole body seemed unsettling, as if something of the human had left it. With the appearance of the little bits Theo could see, it had little look of humanity. He- that was, he. Poor thing, Theo thought sternly to himself. Here, surely, was the body of a good man and a dutiful man so he had no business to treat it so ill. But it affected him so, it really did. He had never thought himself vain, though he was sure he possessed some little looks, but truly as he looked at this poor fellow he felt sure that in his position, he would rather have died than live on so changed, his body so wasted. He remembered, during the war and at the end of the war, men who had returned in such forms. Their numbers had dwindled since, sometimes healing, and many lived on as they were but surely he could recognise the attrition. There had been such a man down the road from him, who he used to watch from his lonely window as he made his slow procession down the street in the evenings- he never knew his occupation. He had borne his injuries well, and the prosthetic had gone a good way to conceal much of his face, but Theo had seen enough for it to make him queasy. Then, one day, his walks stopped. It might have been anything. He might not have died, maybe moved away suddenly or was taken back into hospital. But Theo had wondered- or he had believed, perhaps, that he had killed himself.
The grey nurse from earlier swept into the room, regarding the man in bed and consulting his chart. She noticed Theo and decided to look down her nose at him imperiously.
“Visitor hours are over.” She said in a tone that brooked no disagreement, even when levelled at a captain. “And you had better take him with you, too.”
Theo nodded. Leaning over, he ran a firm hand along Fred’s arm.
“Come on now.” He heard himself say. “Lets get you out of here.”
Gently he brought Fred to his feet and steered him from the room. It was a quiet trip through the hospital, and then out through the crisp night air. Theo would rent a room from the owner of a local pub- who gave Theo a key and a rueful look of understanding. He lived in a little town with a big hospital after all.
It felt like a relief to have the door locked. Even with the sound of the pub leeching up through the floorboards, it still felt better to have a barrier between them and the world. Fred was sat down on the bed already, struggling to remove his shirt over his cast. Theo tried to help him, holding open the end of Fred’s sleeve to better ease it through. Even so, Fred was somewhere else, not looking at him. Out, through the thick walls to somewhere Theo had not been, and hoped never to.
“That’s it, dear. That’s it.” He coaxed as the sleeve slipped off, and he helped Fred undress himself. He didn’t like Fred being this quiet. From other people he might well have longed for it, but in Fred it seemed unnatural, somehow. He found himself yearning for a word, unable to fill that void himself.
Unsatisfied, he pressed a kiss to the back of Fred’s hair.
“Let’s get you to bed then, eh?”
It wasn’t like a normal night with Fred, he reflected as he undressed himself, folding his and Fred’s clothes up neatly on the chair. There was none of that usual excitement, anticipation for what lay in wait. But he wouldn’t like to be anywhere else, all the same. Not with Fred like this. And beyond all human thought, the prospect of Fred’s skin against his soothed his soul in ways he could not possibly express. What brought him here was nearly out of mind, to him at least. He climbed into bed and could not help but to pull Fred close, pressing his face against the man’s neck, winding gentle limbs around him where he could.
“Will you be gone when I wake up, Ted?” Fred asked, voice reedy and thin.
Theo pulled him just that little bit closer.
“I’ve already paid for the room. You won’t have to worry about a thing.”
Freddie shivered even within his arms.
“I wish you would stay.” He said, almost sullenly.
“I do too, love.” Theo agreed, and nuzzled up closer to him.
“You won’t, though.”
That stirred up something in Theo that he didn’t find entirely welcome.
“Listen, I came out here for you. I wasn’t supposed to do that. Don’t make this hard for me.” He said impatiently, withdrawing his arms and rolling over, occupying an uncomfortable sliver of the mattress that the blankets didn’t fully cover.
Then he felt very silly, but it felt as if it should have made him sillier still if he just rolled back over. The dark room felt rather oppressive, cloyingly so, pressing down upon him. It felt lonely. It shouldn’t have, but he did. There was a shifting behind him, and then there was flesh pressing close against him. It seemed like it was not his place to be held tonight. Then again, perhaps it was all the same.
Something felt very damp on his neck. The sensation of it made his stomach bottom out, with a feeling of being so unhelpful and rather stupid.
“I- never thought life could be like this-” Freddie sniffled “I- I-”
“Oh dear, oh my dear…” Theo said, and pressed ever closer to him. And he could not think of a thing to say to make any of it alright.