Work Text:
“Mother, you really have to replace that old thing. If it’s about money, I can—”
“Fareeha, it still is working well enough. Save that money for that ring for Angela – I’m still waiting for grandbabies you know, and I am not getting any younger.”
Unable to stop herself, Fareeha let out an exasperated sigh from the other side of the call. “Don’t try to sidetrack me, mother. I know the weather hasn’t dipped any lower than 90 degrees in Gibraltar for three weeks.”
“Habibti, I spent most of my life in Cairo. This heatwave is not even close to the daily temperatures there.” Ana snorted, and then covered it up by clearing her throat.
Fareeha let out another exasperated sigh, but then the sounds of unfamiliar voices in the background muzzily filtered through a hastily covered phone speaker. After a moment of muffled talking, the young woman returned to the call. “I have to go now, mom, but I’ll call you back later in the evening. Please, just consider replacing the A.C.?”
“Alright, alright. Don’t stay out too late, habibti.” Ana couldn’t help the smile that tugged at her lips. Her daughter was old enough to be preparing to propose to her girlfriend and steadily rising through the ranks of her security company, but it seemed like only yesterday that she was only just a precious little girl dreaming of one day being able to navigate the skies.
“Love you too, talk to you later.” With that, the call cut, leaving Ana Amari alone in her otherwise quiet apartment. The old woman stared at the screen of her phone for a moment, taking in the all-too-familiar picture of her daughter’s face saved as her wallpaper, before slipping it back into the pockets of her pants. Getting up from her perch on the kitchen table, Ana moved over to the couch and settled down to resume watching one of the many soap operas currently playing on the television.
“¡Soldado, tu eres… el papá!”
“¿Cómo? ¡Tu eres un hombre! ”
“¡No lo sé! ¡Ayúdame, hijo de puta!”
The air conditioning unit attached to the window gave a mighty clunk before sputtering into stillness. Ana glared at the machine, hoping that it would spontaneously whirr back to life as it did the past three times, but after a moment it was clear that the air conditioner had finally died a slow and long-suffering death.
Within a few minutes, the temperature in the apartment had climbed to about 80 degrees. Ana sighed as she dragged herself over to the A.C. Prying open the outer case, the old woman gave the inner workings of the machine a good, hard look before running her hands over her face in defeat.
Despite having reached the grand old age of 60, Ana could still field strip a sniper rifle in five seconds while blindfolded and with one hand tied behind her back, but the internal mechanics of an air conditioner were simply beyond her.
“Perhaps Fareeha was right…” Muttering to herself, Ana replaced the cover and then meandered over to her bedroom to exchange her sweat-stained top for a clean shirt and a hair tie for the end of her braid. Grabbing her purse, which was hanging on the coat rack, the old woman gave the A.C. one last look before walking out of her apartment. “I wonder if the mall still has any fans left…”
The apartment door to Ana’s left opened just as the old woman was locking her door. A tall, tanned, and freckled young woman in a grease-stained tank top entered the hallway with a grilled cheese sandwich hanging out the side of her mouth. A plain backpack hung off from one of her shoulders – a university student, most likely.
The young woman hastily removed the sandwich from her mouth when she noticed Ana and grinned brilliantly. “Oh, hi there neighbor!”
Ana couldn’t help but smile at the young woman’s energy, which reminded her of her own daughter. “Hello, dear. You must be new, as I recall that 24C has been empty for some time.”
“Yes, my grandpa and I just moved here from Eichenwalde. Sorry for all the noise, moving everything inside has been a bit hectic – especially since someone didn’t pack up his music collection properly until the last minute!” The last part was aimed inside of the apartment.
The young woman received a steam of incomprehensible, guttural German in response, but then simply laughed out loud at whatever that had been said.
“Oh, I barely heard you two moving in, honestly. Between the noisy racket my good-for-nothing air conditioner makes and the daily shouting matches between Jack and Gabriel, you two are relatively silent.” As if almost by fate, there was a crash of noise and muffled shouting that started up in 24A. Ana shook her head in exasperation and aimed what she hoped was a reassuring smile at the young woman.
“Yeah, I was wondering about that. Are they alright?” The visible concern on the young woman’s face almost made Ana want to laugh.
“Don’t worry, those two are a bunch of crotchety grumps with decades of marriage between them; the arguing’s just basically foreplay by this point.” The young woman’s face twisted into a horrified expression that Ana was all-too-familiar with, and this time Ana couldn’t help but laugh. “Ah, you youngsters are too precious for this world! You make the same face my daughter does!”
The young woman ducked her head and grinned despite the slight flush of embarrassment on her cheeks. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t keep you any longer, ma’am. I’m sure you were off to do something important.”
“Please, call me Ana. None of that ‘ma’am’ nonsense.” Ana held her hand out for a handshake.
“Nice to meet you, Ana! I’m Brigitte.” The young woman took her hand and shook it with a firm grip. She turned to stick her head through the still-open door to her apartment and yelled through, “Opa! Come say hello to our neighbor!”
A bark of something affirmative in German, and then heavy footsteps stomped over to the door. The man that appeared behind Brigitte was simply… huge, for the lack of a better word. Dressed simply in a sweat-stained undershirt and patchy old blue jeans, he filled up the entire doorway with pure muscle – quite a feat for a man that looked to be in his sixties – and despite the intimidating scar slicing down a bushy brow and through his left eye, the look on his face was soft and unthreatening. His white hair seemed to have been combed back half-heartedly, although his bushy beard was lovingly maintained and handsomely sharp on his jawline.
Brigitte stepped to the side and fired off a few sentences in rapid fire German, of which Ana heard her name mentioned a few times, and then the old man’s mouth stretched into a wonderfully blinding smile that successfully captured all of Ana’s attention.
The man raised his hand out, presumably for a handshake, and Ana reached over with a smile. Surprisingly enough, the man instead took her hand in an incredibly gentle hold and bent over to press a chaste kiss to the back. When he straightened, still smiling, he spoke slowly in heavily accented English, “Reinhardt Wilhelm, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you, Reinhardt.” Ana couldn’t help the schoolgirl’s flush that bloomed at her cheeks and the giggle that escaped her. A gentleman, in this day and age?
“Opa!” Brigitte groaned in mock embarrassment, but the twinkle in her dark eyes betrayed her amusement. The young woman turned to Ana with her genuine smile still firmly in place. “Please excuse my grandpa, he’s been a drama queen ever since he learned just enough English from old movies to get by.”
“I don’t know, he’s certainly charming.” Ana slipped her hand out of the old man’s hold, albeit a little reluctantly.
Brigitte’s phone chimed and the young woman pulled it out of the pockets of her cargo pants. Her eyes nearly bugged out of her sockets when she realized the time. “Oh no, this is bad – I’ve gotta dash now before I’m really late for my presentation! Sorry about the rush Ana, but it’s been really nice to finally meet you!”
Ana waved away the apology. “Don’t worry about it! You better get going, young lady.”
Brigitte popped a quick kiss to her grandfather’s cheek before and gave Ana a parting wave before she sprinted over to the stairwell, her almost-forgotten grilled cheese sandwich stuffed back into her mouth.
Reinhardt’s smile didn’t drop when his granddaughter rounded the corner – in fact, it grew impossibly larger when he aimed it at Ana. “You are Kapitän Ana Amari, ja? Ӓgyptisch Scharfschütze? I know your face.”
“Perhaps.” Her lips twitching into a neutral line of suspicion, Ana’s hand fell to the side of her purse, which also doubled as a convenient hiding place for her legally-owned Desert Eagle.
Reinhardt definitely noticed the twitch, so he quickly continued on in a light tone, “Your skills are… legendär. Stadtkommandant Balderich von Adler spoke highly of you, many times. It is wunder… es ist eine Ehre to meet a person like you.”
Ana gave the still-grinning old man a calculating stare benefitting of a retired Captain of the Egyptian Special Operations Division. She passed through several questions in her mind before settling on a simple, “You are one of those Crusaders of the Deutsches Heer then, aren’t you?”
“Hauptmnan, under Stadtkommandant von Adler.” Reinhardt nodded once, clasping a fist over his broad chest. “Die Crusader stehen wache.”
A retired Crusader as her next-door neighbor? Her apartment complex was turning into quite the motley collection of interesting individuals. Ana saluted back in respect, though the line of her back was not as straight as she would’ve liked it to be. “What a small world it is, Captain Wilhelm.”
“Ach, no need for rank. I am simply Reinhardt, now.”
“Then, I am simply Ana.” Ana finally let the smile she had been holding back to return.
Still unabashedly smiling like a fool, Reinhardt hesitated for a scant moment before saying, “Dein Lächeln ist wunderschön.”
Ana raised an eyebrow, but then chuckled as she shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I do not speak German.”
“Of course.” Suddenly nervous, Reinhardt scratched at the back of his neck. “Ach, I have kept you for too long with talking. You must be busy, ja?”
“Oh, I was just going to the store. My air conditioner broke, so I need to fix it.” Ana glanced her watch, which indicated that she had spent a roughly half an hour talking to her lovely new neighbors.
“Ich weiß die Worte!” Reinhardt slowly mouthed the words broke and fix, and then pulled out a small notepad from the back pocket of his trousers that looked comically tiny in his overlarge hands. He carefully flipped through a few pages, squinted at a few scrawled lines of handwriting, and then looked up to beam at Ana. “I am Handwerker… repairman. I can fix die maschine!”
Ana blinked in surprise. “You can repair it?”
“Ja. I repair, frei.” Reinhardt pointed a thumb over his shoulder into his apartment. “I get tools for fix!”
“Only if it’s no trouble. I’m thinking of replacing it soon.” Ana briefly entertained the idea of that this charming old man could be up to no good, but the puppyish look of absolute delight just to be of help had her quickly discarding that thought.
“Kein Problem für eine schöne, Frau.” With that, Reinhardt disappeared back into his apartment. There was a noisy racket of cardboard boxes falling and plastic bins rattling, and then the old man lumbered back to the doorway with a well-worn toolbox.
Ana unlocked the door to her apartment and then ushered the German inside. Now that his figure wasn’t somewhat blocked by the doorframe, Ana realized she had to crane her neck a bit because Reinhardt really was that tall; her modest furniture, fastidiously chosen for her long-legged daughter to sprawl comfortably on, looked practically dollish next to him.
Reinhardt knelt down by the air conditioner and set down his toolbox. He pulled off the cover with a click of his tongue and then immediately got to work, plunging his hands into the guts of the air conditioner as if he was intimately familiar with every piece inside.
Ana settled down on the arm of her couch and watched the man work, her gaze slipping every so often down the slip of pale skin exposed in the gap between Reinhardt’s shirt and the waistband of his jeans before the before she caught herself and dragged her eyes back up to a more appropriate area… like his massive shoulders.
When Reinhardt had leaned back to wipe at the sweat collecting on his brow – it was, after all, still quite warm in the room – he caught Ana’s flustered staring and simply winked with a lopsided grin.
With a low chuckle slipping past her lips, Ana just knew she and Reinhardt were going to get along just fine.