Chapter Text
Once Vilna Lutz goes out without telling Peter where he’s going, and he doesn’t come back. Peter is alright with the arrangement for a while, until the sky starts to get dark and he hears Leo Matienne returning from work and begins to realize that Lutz is well and truly missing.
Lutz told him to stay. He told him to hold down the fort and watch over the house, defend it like a soldier would. And Peter does not want to be a soldier—he doesn’t want to defend this house with its leaking roof and soot-covered fireplace and tiny kitchen—but he listens, because it’s always better to listen to a man like Vilna Lutz.
Peter wanders around the house. He stands by the door for a while, peeks outside here and there just in case Lutz might be coming back. He goes up the stairs, then down, then up again; habit makes him do so exactly seven times, which uses up a few minutes. He watches the streets through the window. He attempts to clean the fireplace, though it never gets clean no matter how much he scrubs. Brushing soot and ash out of his hair, he glances in the pantry to see what they have.
He forgot the bread that day. Or, he didn’t forget the bread, but the bread he brought back was only one day old instead of two days (better yet, three days), and so it was thrown out. Good soldiers follow instructions to the letter, Vilna Lutz had said, maybe regretfully, maybe chidingly; Peter hadn’t been able to parse out which past the shame making his face burn. If you don’t listen to instructions on the battlefield, you’re dead. You’d do well to remember that, Private Duchene.
Yes, Vilna Lutz, Peter had said just as he always did, tilting his chin down so Lutz knew he was truly sorry and was taking his reprimand to heart. There were still scars on the backs of his hands from a time he didn’t prove to Vilna Lutz that he was listening.
So, no bread. He glances at the front door before he can stop himself, imagining the patch of stone beside the steps where the loaf had been tossed. It’s gone by now—someone else picking up the scraps they thought no one wanted. Peter had checked for it as soon as Vilna Lutz left, but it had taken no time for the loaf to be snatched up. With a mix of humiliation, sadness, and resentment throbbing in his chest, Peter turns away from the front door and takes stock of what he does have.
He has the fish. No seasonings past salt, for Vilna Lutz frowns on making things more complicated than they ought to be. He might have an old potato or two, if they’re still on the bottom left shelf from the last time he studied the pantry. They won’t be very good, more eyes than anything else, but that’s alright. He’s eaten worse. He’s eaten nothing at all, before. If all goes well, at least he won’t go hungry tonight.
He knows how to turn on the stove. He knows where the pan is. He knows how to prepare the fish to cook them; he had to teach himself a while ago, when he started to realize he couldn’t rely on Lutz to make consistent meals, so his handiwork probably isn’t the best, but that doesn’t matter very much to him. He learned the hard way that he’d rather have cooked fish with its outer skin still partially on than eat them raw.
He pulls Vilna Lutz’s wooden chair from the living room to the kitchen, setting it up in front of the counter next to the sink. He retrieves the huge silver pot from the cupboard for the potatoes, pulls a knife from where it’s hidden inside one of the top cabinets. He goes to work skinning the fish.
That part goes by smoothly. He doesn’t have to worry about his hands slipping. He has enough half-formed habit and quiet, intent focus to do this one thing right. Then again, he’s also hungry, so the process goes slightly too fast to ensure the fish are prepared as well as they can be. He settles for what he has and decides if his stomach disagrees with him later, that will be fine. It isn’t something he hasn’t dealt with.
Things go wrong when the fish go in the pan. Peter isn’t sure if he touches the pan for too long, or does so in the wrong place. Maybe he brushed against the wrong surface when he was moving the fish over. It singes his hands, and even with his alarmingly high tolerance of pain, that makes him pull away and nearly knock the pan off of the stove. He manages to save it, but his eyes sting. He examines his hands. Sees two mirrored wounds on them, prods at the skin a little, bites his tongue, tastes blood, moves on.
The potatoes are peeled with the same knife that he used for the fish, because he can’t be bothered to get another one from the collection. He’s not supposed to know about where one of Lutz’s knives is, let alone all of them. It’s easier to hide if he only dirties one.
Things are fine. If he forgets the pain in his hands, forces it to fade from stubbornness alone, things are fine.
And then the pot, full of boiling water and messily-peeled, tiny potatoes, knocks over. Spilling its contents all over Peter’s hands and forearms as he tries to stop the pot from tipping.
He must have knocked it over. Somewhere in the motion of picking up the chair, transferring it back and forth, climbing up and down, he had to have hit the pot. Stupid.
You know how to do this, he thinks in the split-second before he registers the feeling of boiling water on his skin. You should be able to do it right. What’s wrong with you?
He doesn’t have the presence of mind to answer that question, rhetorical or not. All he really knows to do is crumple completely, falling out of the chair as he curls around the sharp, burning pain in his hands.
Even though he’s alone, he tries to swallow down the whimper in his throat. He fights to keep from crying aloud. He’s practiced, but not that practiced. He cradles his shaking hands to his chest, doubled over on the ground.
He isn’t thinking clearly. His vision is going hazy. He strains to make out the tiles beneath him, bends in half.
“Mama,” he sobs.
He stiffens as soon as the word leaves him. Well, stiffens as much as he can. He’s still trembling, his chest heaving. He straightens up a little, maneuvers himself onto his knees. He takes a deep breath and opens his hands so he can get a closer look at them. He feels the blood drain from his face.
His hands are redder than anything he’s ever seen, and the red rises halfway to his elbows. The stifling pain doesn’t let up, nor does the lump in his throat or the black spots at the edges of his vision.
You’ve burned yourself before, he tells himself, shutting his eyes and taking a deep breath.
Not like this, the child in him whispers.
We’ll be alright. We were alright before.
But it wasn’t like this, the child protests, frightened and sharp.
Peter works hard to make his hands stop shaking. He doesn’t succeed, so he just gets to his feet and stumbles to the pantry. Bandages are on the middle shelf, the one that both he and Vilna Lutz can reach with ease. Lutz always says that bandaging up is something both of them should be able to handle without the help of another person. Peter doesn’t know how to properly treat burns, but he thinks it’s probably the same as treating any other wound. Disinfect it, wrap it tightly and neatly, leave it to rest.
Except he tries to disinfect it, and it hurts. He drops the bottle of disinfectant on the ground and stumbles on his feet, crying out and bringing his hands to his chest again. He stands there for a long moment, staring at the overturned disinfectant as it spills onto the floor.
Okay, he thinks. Okay, that doesn’t work. Wrap them, then. Move to the next step.
It’s painful to hold the bandages, and it takes far too much effort to apply them the way he was taught, but Peter manages it. The result is medically precise and a little too tight for comfort, which is the way it always is. He breathes a little easier, trying to convince himself that this is right. He can at least do one thing.
It’s fully dark outside, which he notices with a start. He stares out the window, brow furrowed, listening. The only sounds he hears are of late-night stragglers heading home, fabric on clotheslines swaying in the wind. No voices, because most in Baltese go to bed early, and those that don’t remain out so long just to drown their sorrows, not to make conversation. Peter doesn’t see nor hear the familiar sound of Vilna Lutz limping over the cobbled street.
What he does hear is a faint sizzling-hissing. Accompanied by an odd, smoky smell.
His brain takes a moment to catch on. Then he’s practically running back into the kitchen, almost crashing into the stove from his misjudge of the distance between it and the doorway. He fumbles with the knobs and turns the stove off as quickly as he can. He has some trouble; his hands are still throbbing, and they scream through the bandages when he touches anything.
But his biggest problem right now isn’t the burns; it’s the trouble he’ll be in if Lutz happens to return before he’s cleaned this mess. So he decides to ignore the way his body protests and turns to the more immediate problem, which is the pot that he still hasn’t picked up.
It’s a slow process, but he washes out the pot, scrapes the blackened fish off of the pan, and puts everything up exactly where he found it. The fish aren’t salvageable, though he tries his best to get through them. The potatoes are still raw. Those, he most definitely can’t fix. He doesn’t have the time.
It looks like he will go to bed hungry tonight, after all.