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The most important thing is this: never forget the clocks.
.
It’s nine o’clock when they first meet, although no one’s keeping track. The clocks are only on churches, then.
It’s nothing. Erzsébet forgets if the next day. Gilbert forgets it in the next three seconds.
But they’re in the market, and Erzsébet lifts her head from where she’s being dragged along by a chain and sharp words in a foreign language (pretending to be a girl in the army, death, and trial by fire, all that) and Gilbert is out, slashing his sword, threatening all with a proud cross on his chest.
She meets his eyes- bright, brilliant red- and thinks this is an omen, I’ve seen a demon. She thinks, Tomorrow is the day I die.
He meets her eyes- dark, burning green- and is struck with the sudden desire to strike his newly sharpened sword at the bonds around her wrists. He thinks, I’ll see you again, and promptly never does.
That night, she dreams of Hell, and she wakes up with the ropes on her wrist cut and an escape route just visible, if she plays her cards right.
That night, he dreams of Heaven, and doesn’t wake up.
.
Seven-thirty sharp when a boy with silver hair crashes through the wall and puts an arrow through the king’s head. Erzsébet has her sword drawn. The king has filled coffers, and Erzsébet will do just about anything for money. Money means freedom.
She tilts her blade so it hits the edge of the attacker’s jugular, hitting metal. The visor flies off, clanks against the walls somewhere in the distance.
The boy has red eyes, and Erzsébet has the most quicksilver thought of, demons, Hellfire, never had a cage again.
And then he trains his blade to her heart, and they’re even.
He fights like no one she’s ever met before. When a word falls from her mouth- she doesn’t, can’t, know why- it turns out to be, “Who are you?”
It’s in Hungarian, which she knows no one speaks. And this boy does not look Hungarian. (He has too much of the devil in his eyes).
But the boy tilts his head and responds, and her tongue on his lips is flawless.
“We’ll see.” Is what he says, grinning over a streak of blood.
His words give her just enough time to slit his throat.
.
He didn’t mean to end up in Anatolia. It’s just one of those things that happens ; his feet carry him to places his mind knows not, and he’s always inclined to follow, see what comes next (when he was small, his mother would tell him stories, and he was always impatient, tell me what comes next. Then his mother died, and he stopped looking for other people’s stories, and decided to make his own.)
But the mosque is dark and blue and gleaming as he steps foot into it, shivering with the morning light. (If he had a watch, he would know it was six o’clock) He wears no armour, for the army he serves is not welcome here. A man drops to his knees in prayer. Gilbert knows to look like a foreigner would lead to a series of events that could lead to his death, so he too drops to his knees. He says nothing. He thinks nothing. Correction; he thinks I am insane, and not for the first time, he grins.
“Kopj le!” He hears, and he snaps to attention alongside all the other attendants of the mosque.
A pale girl in a dress is speaking very rapidly, and very vulgarly to an older Arab man. Her hands are curled like they’re used to knives, and he thinks, That’s right.
Gilbert has always known Hungarian. No one spoke it to him when he was young. He knew no Hungarians. But the language fell off his tongue as easy as that of his mother.
The girl is saying, how dare you take me for a trophy, I am warrior, my people will curse yours until that wretched God of yours falls from the sky to bring about the reckoning, I will make you bleed- and her eyes flash to him and he thinks, ephemeral.
His feet move before his thoughts do; within a second he’s on his feet, fake humility left behind like a corpse.
Trying to calm his nerves, he walks over to where the girl and the man stand. He reaches into his pocket, thinks of all the Turkish he can summon, and looks the man in the eye.
“This girl is not worth your while, fair sultan,” he says. “Let me be of aid.” He presses some gold into the man’s hand and grabs the girl by the wrist. Her eyes flash to his, dangerous, but she must recognize something in them, because her wrist goes limp under his vice-like grip.
The man only recognizes what’s occurred by the time they’re exiting. “Curse you, blood-eyed demon!” He says, and Gilbert shivers, because he knows the power of curses.
The girl looks at him, and he thinks she’s about to thank him (he doesn’t want her to; he doesn’t even know why he did it), but she doesn’t.
She just gives him a feral grin and turns on her heel.
When the sultan’s gods come through on their curse, they are not kind to him.
.
The boy mans a printing press. He has words in his hands and papers piled near his feet, and sometimes he forgets his knives.
The girl spins thread during the day but at night she cuts with a sword.
When Gilbert ventures out into one of the border towns, he yells “News!” with a high pitched voice and is met with dead silence.
That’s because the girl slit his throat.
They don’t take kindly to outsiders here.
She picks through his belongings, and finds a journal.
Page 27, a poem.
To the girl with the green eyes, it reads, in German, and Erzsébet can’t read Hungarian but she can read that language like second nature. Though I haven’t met her yet.
She shivers, and later that night she burns the book.
It’s dusk, and the night forgives nothing.
.
He tells the Hungarians to get in order, but they never do.
It’s nine in the evening and Gilbert is done. How are they supposed to win a war if they’re killing half their own population and their allies are as cooperative as feral wolves?
“In line!” He commands, but they’re not really in line, it’s more a vague imitation of a line than anything else.
His nerves boil. His brother’s on the Western front; he’s not sure if he’s even alive. His mother hasn’t sent him a letter in a month. Rations on cigarettes got cut down.
He decides they need an example.
“You!” he points a finger at a soldier at random, but his hand feels a pull that seems slightly magnetic. He frowns a bit, twitching as a boy with short brown hair and a short stature step up in front of him.
The boy’s eyes are green. Hauntingly so.
“Yes, sir?” he says, all chipped politeness that Gilbert knows very well as cheaply disguised defiance.
Gilbert’s mouth has gone very, very dry. Feeling like he’s lost control, he switches to Hungarian.
“Do you want a bullet in your head.” He says, and doesn’t know if the muffled gasps that come from the soldiers are a result of his threat or the fact that he speaks Hungarian, and he speaks it well.
“No, sir.” The boy’s tone is smooth but his words say make me. And Gilbert wants to, desperately, but his fingers go still on his gun.
“Alright then,” he says with an internal exhale. “Then do as I fucking say. ”
He doesn’t.
Of course, of course he doesn't. That fucking idiot, she's always like this, never backs down-
The bullet hits Gibert in the chest. He knows it’ll be fatal.
“Fucking Commies.” He swears, and hey, if those are his last words, it’s not a bad way to go out.
Tears fall on his cheek.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you dumbass-”
He smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Liebling. Mädchen.”
Her eyes go wide.
“-You too.” is what she says. He smiles.
“What’s your name,” He says.
“Erzsébet,” She replies, like a prayer.
“Erzsébet,” He says, tracing his syllables with his tongue, blood running down his side. “I’ll remember that.”
Not a bad way to go.
.
Erzsébet puts out her cigarette, ash staining the ripped folds of her skirt. She snorts. No one ever said this vocation made money, after all.
She smiled leeringly at a man who passed her by. He averted his eyes.
She doesn’t have many customers that night. But she peers across the grungy river that is East Berlin at night, and he sees a flash of silver in the streetlight. She smiles, but it’s not her usual leer. It’s odd, like someone pulled out a part of her soul she was never meant to use. For a second, she feels very, very old.
She sees those eyes again, and again, and again.
“Hey,” he says one night, crossing over to her side of the bridge, leaning against the blue of the railing, and she jolts, because his Hungarian is perfect.
“Not many Germans who speak Hungarian.” She says.
“How do you know I’m German?” He raises an eyebrow, almost impressed. Fuck you, she thinks. You damn well should be.
She shrug. “Just do.” Truth is she has no clue. “How’d you know I was Hungarian?”
He says, “Just do.” And smirks, and she thinks, what happens if I move closer.
She sees him again. And again. The fifth time, he kisses her, gasping her name into her lips. “Erszébet,” He says, although she’s never told him. But it doesn’t feel off. It’s easy- easy like nothing in her life has ever been.
He’s always grinning when they kiss. His eyes light up like Christmas lights when he kneels, pressing a kiss to her bare hip and whispering “Can I?”, as if it’s something important, something that matters. And Erzsébet goes all wide-eyed, because no one’s ever asked before.
She never asks about what he does when it’s not three in the morning. He never asks her. Instead they talk about other things; history, military strategy, fighting tactics (they spar once, and she has him pinned to the ground, about to say you win when he presses a kiss to her wrist. It goes on a bit after that.)
But it’s alright. It’s night, and she can forget.
She never asks, at least, until one night he doesn’t come.
She finds his corpse in the shadows of an alley, his blood on the KGB’s hands.
.
There’s a boy who moved in last year and he almost never leaves the house and his window is just adjacent to hers.
Sometimes she’ll look through it, and she’ll see his eyes, bright, burning red, and think, I miss you. She has no idea why.
She opens the window one day, says “Hey, Gilbert,” completely on instinct. He looks at her like she’s holding the entirety of the world in her hand.
“Erzsébet.” He says, and laughs.
She doesn't wonder when he became her best friend until it’s Valentine’s day and a bouquet of roses show up on her windowsill.
She pulls a maneuver they’ve been working on for months, balancing over a thin beam of wood until she can sneak into his room. She kisses him smiling, and he smiles back.
Three months later, the flowers are dead and she sees the letter.
To Erzsébet, it reads, and she’s an idiot for never asking why he always stayed in his house.
Ha. Cancer doesn't leave much time for socializing.
It’s midnight.
.
She remembers the time when they met. Every time.
She remembers the part where they fall in love. She doesn’t remember the details.
But this part, oh, this part. This part she remembers.
.
He doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers this.
He always dies before her.
.
He wakes up.
.
She wakes up.
.
She sees his eyes across the aisle, and she smiles, leans in. It ends in tragedy-it always does-but standing here, eye to eye, maybe it doesn't have to. Maybe this time it'll be worth it.
.
It's dawn.