Work Text:
Click doesn’t mean to bring up the subject. It just so happens to slip through. And it’s such a large part of himself—most of his life, all of his death—that he hardly thinks anything of it when it first comes out.
It’s a calm day in the suitcase. The weather is pleasant and everyone, even Regulus, is enjoying the peace and quiet. Click decides to use this rare opportunity of nigh serenity to organize more of his collection (more, because there are always more. The photos just keep multiplying. Every time he thinks he’s gotten them all, another pops up in the corner of his room, in Theia VI’s case, in his pocket). An all-purpose room—the one with striped brown walls, plants in the corner, a great round table, and a single window overlooking an ever changing yard—happens to be cycling by his room. Lovely.
The large table spares plenty of room for him to spread his pictures, and he begins without a hitch. The time flies by - or maybe just trickles past - as he sorts portraits from landscapes from action from stills. Click is in the middle of filing scenery of the suitcase and scenery of the 1930s when the door opens. He looks up.
He sees the white sheet first, the metal wire second. “Ah,” Charon says, pausing halfway through the door, “Entschuldigung. Did I interrupt you?”
“Oh, no, it’s alright, sir,” Click says with a shake of his head. “I was just going through my work.”
“Then I did interrupt you.”
“Not really. I was just finishing putting these in their place. You can come in, if you’d like.”
Charon hovers in the doorway a moment longer before, as there seems to be nothing else to do, he steps fully inside. The door clicks shut behind him softly. “You’re the photographer, yes? I’ve heard much about you, but I don’t think we’ve met.”
Click nods, pulling a thick folder from his case as he says, “Likewise. I kept meaning to talk to you, but could never find the chance. I suppose it’s better we meet like this than on the battlefield, right?”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
Despite himself, Click smiles a little. Holding up the folder, he beams, “I’m going through pictures that I’ve taken. I like to keep the more recent ones sorted from earlier ones. Sorting them by era or subject, or both, it… helps pass the time.”
Charon drifts closer, folding his book beneath an arm, bending slightly over the table. Click catches a faint woody scent laced with something floral. One of Charon’s hands reaches out, hovering over a still of a street seen through a second-floor window. Pauses. The sheet shifts, just a little, as he looks at Click again. “May I?” Charon asks.
“Of course! Just, please be careful with them, sir. Some of these have undergone some aging, even in the suitcase.”
And for a while, it’s quiet again. Click continues pulling more photos from various containers, Charon continues his silent examinations of people, technology, skies, forests, everything that Theia VI has captured. They stand in a comfortable silence, with only the shifting of film and the flutter of folders as ambience.
Finally, Charon speaks again. He is holding a picture of what used to be a small city block, now a burning stack of rubble. “You have many of these pictures. These ruins.” The blackened tips of his fingers do not crinkle the picture - he is considerate of art, especially in front of the artist - but they seem to pinch a bit tighter. “Has Frau Vertin… taken you to such places often?”
Click hums, not looking up from the fan of portraits in his hands, saying, “Oh, no, you’ve seen where Ms Vertin’s missions usually are. When, I suppose. We tend to try and stop destruction from happening.”
“Then why do you have so many of… these?”
“Ah,” Click says, leafing through a thin album of plant stills, “well, most of my first pictures are from the Second World War.”
He finds the shot he was looking for - a natural corridor of trees with two cars on the road, one behind the other - and sets it on the table. Then he looks up.
Click can’t see Charon’s face. No one has, and no one will. But now the cloth is turned towards him, and there is a stillness, a coldness, uncommon even for Charon.
“Second.”
Something like a tremor goes through Click. It’s not fear of Charon, not really, but he suddenly remembers something. He had been passing through a town with a squad, and saw a woman staring at the latest paper. Though he couldn’t read the pages, he recognized the shape of one of his photos. The woman did not cry. She did not gawk or scream or clench the paper with white knuckles before tearing it to shreds, jaw clenched hard enough to break a tooth. She just stared at the paper.
“Mm,” Click breathes, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “It was… It was in Europe, mostly. I was mobile. There was…”
Silence.
Not the peaceful silence of before. Dead silence. Silence like ash on snow. Silence like the bottom of a lake, when you’ve run out of oxygen and strength, and all that’s left is the water above and the water below.
Charon returns the picture of the destroyed buildings to the table. Another long pause. “Second,” he says again. Softer, heavier. “Ein anderer.”
Click doesn’t know much German, but the tone says enough. There is nothing for him to say. There is nothing he could say that would mean half as much as any picture would. He just floats there, trapped.
When Charon moves again, it is calm and controlled. His free hand returns to the book under his arm, a gesture almost protective. “Why? For what reason?”
A hundred lines flash through Click’s head. Political tensions. Expanisionism. Fascism. Economics. Treaties that failed to bring peace. Appeasement. Humiliation.
Each one dies immediately under Charon’s faceless stare.
“We had one,” Charon says, even and stony. “Some say we had a reason: to end the old world. To make something new, something better, from the destruction. ‘Lass uns vergeben, aber niemals vergessen.’ It was not reason enough. To end the old world was not reason enough.”
Another shifting of the sheet. Dog tags clink against one another as Charon goes to touch another picture - this one of a crater that used to be a townhouse - his fingers stopping over it. “It did not end, did it.”
Click closes his eyes. Despite being a ghost, his throat goes dry. “No, sir,” he rasps.
“You said you were mobile. There was… another mobilization? Another draft?”
“Yes.”
“Another generation told it was necessary. That the suffering, the blood - they were necessary.”
“Yes.”
Click shuffles the rest of the stills in his hands, puts them in a file under the table. When he comes back up, Charon has picked up another picture. It’s the one with the soldiers in the landing craft, smeared with dust and dirt and sweat, their faces – their faces – he knows the picture from the signature on the back. Charon stares at their faces and says, “Vergib, aber vergiss nie. They almost look the same. They have… that same look. In their eyes.”
There is nothing for him to say.
“We were - they were told that it would never happen again. That something of such a scale would never be repeated.” He pauses. The shrapnel in his head - is it sharper, now? “What year.”
Click takes a moment to sort through information in his head, parse hundreds of dates from hundreds of papers, and says, “1939.”
Charon places the photograph down with an unbearable sort of care. His fingers curl over the image, and for a moment Click thinks he may see him shake. It’s the first visible emotion he’s shown this entire meeting. “Nicht einmal 50 Jahre. Sie hatten nicht einmal ihre Toten begraben.” He turns away from the table, towards the window.
The suitcase is still so quiet. The light outside is still so gentle.
“Did no one recognise the patterns?”
“Some did.” And they weren’t listened to, it goes unsaid. They weren’t listened to, or they weren’t loud enough, and history repeated itself.
Charon makes a sound akin to a sigh, akin to metal on fabric. “‘The war to end all wars,’ they said,” he murmurs. “And yet.”
More silence. Heavy and thick and rotting.
“In the second,” Charon says, composedly, “was it worse?”
Click considers. There is no point in lying. “Yes.”
If Charon had breath, it would have left him then. He does not turn back to the table. He does not ask for evidence. He asks, “How so?”
Click’s hands go to Theia VI. The shape of her brings him some comfort, some anchor. It’s not that he feels threatened, he feels - he’s not sure how he feels. “It wasn’t… trench warfare. It was in the sky. In the sea. Industrialized genocide,” he says in a soft voice, as though that will ease the burden. “Entire populations arrested, persecuted, sent to… labour camps. Death camps. Cities destroyed. Atomic weapons.”
Charon turns to him, and it’s worse than if he had slammed his hands on the table or raised his voice. “Atomic.”
The photographer, who had considered it both a loss and a blessing to not have captured the bombs, nods. “Two cities, sir, devastated. In seconds.”
“Seconds.”
“Yes.”
The lights hum. The air grows stale as something like shock calcifies into something more brittle, more sharp. The hands holding Charon’s book squeeze as though driven by rigor mortis.
“Wir haben absolut nichts gelernt,” he says, quietly. “Nothing. Nothing. We have learned absolutely nothing.”
Shakily, Click moves to hover his hands over the remaining photographs on the table. He almost feels the urge to sweep them away, gather them up like chicks, protect them from this silently hostile moment. “We… did learn a little,” he whispers, keeping his gaze on the pictures to keep them from dissolving into dust. “After.”
“Did we?”
“We…” Click blinks, rubs a thumb over the corner of a different photograph. This one is of a hospital, of a soldier emerging through the doors, guided by the gentle hands of his mother and brother. “We built international institutions. Created frameworks for human rights. Made alliances between countries to specifically prevent such a war from happening again. I’ve heard from some other residents that we’ve made monuments and museums to preserve the horrors, scare people into never causing another one.”
“And have we succeeded?”
Click pauses. “According to the Foundation’s records, there hasn’t been a third world war, sir. Not for over fifty years since the second ended.”
The tension in the air softens the smallest bit. Charon’s shoulders lower half an inch. “Good,” he murmurs, turning back to the window. He runs a finger over the edge of his book soundlessly, shaking his head. “I thought that we had reached the limits of human cruelty. That the war was the threshold of humanity’s evil.”
A tightness in Click’s chest pulls tighter. “I don’t know if there is a limit.”
The faint clicking of dog tags. “They were children, in my war. They believed their sacrifices meant something. They believed their deaths, their pain, would spare their families from feeling the same. Or perhaps worse.” The clinking stops abruptly as Charon pulls them into his chest. “And there was another.”
And suddenly, Charon laughs shortly. It’s a terrible sound. Click thinks he will hear it in his nightmares.
“Todeslager. They made death camps.” And then Charon asks, because he has to, “How many?”
Click remembers when he had first found the number. How he had gone, with Vertin’s help, looking through a select few archives from the future that detailed events from the second world war in retrospective detail. Now he holds Theia VI to his chest like a lifeline as he whispers, “Six. Six million, sir, in the camps.”
Charon flinches so hard he stumbles, though he is quick to catch himself with a soldier’s poise and reassert an upright position. “Sechs Millionen.” The small shake in his voice feels like an earthquake in Click’s ears. “Sechs Millionen. Allein in den Lagern. Sechs Millionen…”
He lifts a hand to the cloth on his face. Click is not sure if the gesture is to rub his face or clean sweat or claw at what remains. Finally, Charon shakes his head just a bit and turns fully to the table again, studying. “And you photographed it?”
“Yes.”
“That is… dangerous,” Charon says flatly. “To keep such images of mass destruction. Preserving the aftermath of weapons that could level entire cities. There are some that could look at it—will look at it—and make an idol of it. ‘Wir haben das getan,’ they will say, and find it powerful. Perhaps admirable, even. So many lives, reduced to a flat picture.”
The blood rushes to Click’s face—does he have blood anymore?—as he argues, “They are not flat, sir. They speak. Perhaps better than an article ever could. It’s not reduced, and it’s not glorified, it’s raw and real. With them, we never lose sight of the horrors that had been and should never happen again. They let us remember.”
Surprised at his own sudden bravery, Click quickly glances at Charon. The forgotten soldier does not appear angry or even sad. He seems awfully tired.
Something, or someone, rustles in the yard beyond the window. “That is true,” Charon finally says, softly. “They let us remember. We can only hope that they serve only as reminders that such a thing should never happen again. Never.”
Click nods solemnly. “That is my purpose and intent.”
The atmosphere has gotten lighter, somehow. Not completely clear, perhaps, but certainly not as suffocating. Click swallows. It’s the most he’s talked to anyone in the past few weeks. Of all the suitcase residents he’d expected to be dragged into conversation with, it certainly wasn’t Charon—and certainly not over something like this. Yet there is something about their conversation that is relaxing. Like a weight lifted from the shoulders, or the discovery of some near-fresh bread in the rations.
“You were very brave,” Charon says, “going into the midst of the horror to capture it with your camera.”
Though he’s heard the compliment a hundreds times, it’s different coming from someone like Charon. Click doesn’t smile, but he nods, saying, “People had to know. It was terrible, and people had to know that it was terrible.”
Charon has returned to the table, fingers resting atop a picture of boys laughing, one of them throwing a beret into the air, one of them waving at the camera. “Thank you for sharing this with me. Awful as it is.”
“Of course.” Click runs a thumb over Theia VI’s shutter button. “I hope, when this is over, I can take kinder pictures.”
A short, chafing sound from under the sheet. Then a sigh. Without another word, Charon carefully lifts his hand, turns, and exits.
Click watches him go. Something tight in his chest has loosened, if just a little. Kinder pictures. Pictures of people living life as it was meant to be lived, pictures of thriving flora, pictures of cities and towns whole and healthy. No more gunpowder, no more bombs, no more Storm. That’s his dream.
He returns to his pictures, rustling, waiting.