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“…Worth living, and worth dying for.” Jack Reed concluded his speech to the booming of cheers, the black night sky sporadically popping with fireworks as he walked off the stage. Wading through the jubilant crowds of Chicago, he noticed the Black and Red flags adorning the skyline of the Second City, and he still couldn’t believe any of it. As the British Chairman Horner and French Premier Jouhaux emerged from the crowd to formally congratulate him, Jack’s mind whizzed into a blur of memory and ecstasy; thoughts of the Russian Revolution that would go on to fail, of the French and British ones that would go bring Europe breath of a new kind of freedom. Of…Of…
Of Moscow in 1920, of the long train from Baku. Of wading through the Muscovite station, desperate for her.
The train had been shelled by Cossacks. Its engine burnt black, with all its Soviet decorations – attached to convince the Azeri to the side of the Bolsheviki – burnt to hell and back. He was lucky to have survived the initial explosion, luckier to have not caught a bullet in the neck in that field.
Luckiest to see her face in the sea of others in Moscow.
As Chairman Horner spoke about the bountiful cooperation between the Union and the Combined Syndicates during the war, or some other such thing, Jack’s mind settled back into reality, as the distinctive sight of Louise Bryant’s distinctive black bonnet shone through the crowds of the white city.
A smile dawned onto his face, respectfully, if internally, dismissively, shaking the hands of the European Syndicalists, before pushing his way through the bustling crowd, as the two dragged themselves into a desperate hug. How long had it been? She’d stayed away for security purposes; Couldn’t be too careful with remnant FBI agents or some Longist lone gunman.
But that was all over, now. The American Union State, the Federalists, even the Pacific States, all gone. Against all odds, the Second Continental Army had won, and the future looked bright despite the gloom of the Depression and the war itself. History was being written, and Jack had become the kind of man he would have written about as a stary-eyed journalist 20 years prior.
As the two idealist Bohemians held themselves together, memories of their past flooded into their minds’ forefronts; Greenwich Village, Portland, Petrograd, Moscow.
The departees from the train was deafening, yet in spite of such, and his exhaustion, Jack rose his voice enough so her ears might hear him.
“Please don’t leave me.”
The crowds of Chicago started to disperse into their own cliques and bubbles; Jack’s admittedly light security slowly creating a perimeter just in case, with the man of the hour whispering into her ear as the night winds off Lake Michigan flushed against their trench coats.
Whatever Jack Reed whispered into Louise Bryant’s ear would be kept between them beneath the stars. The art deco skyline of Chicago lit up by firecrackers, its populace kept up by celebration, and its dreams steady as the breeze. The two pulled away for a moment, as red fireworks crackled and burst in the winter night. In the distance, some college students, drunk on joy, sang The Internationale, while some union workers, drunk drunk, haphazardly joined along.
He took a deep breath in, the frosty midnight air cleansing his lungs as he took in the moment, as the adoring couple slipped away into the night amidst the celebrations. Tomorrow he would resign his commission, for tonight he could come to terms with the fact that he pulled this off at all.