Chapter Text
Nothing Is Ever Peaceful With Them
There is a version of this story where the man and the woman at the corner table are just a man and a woman.
He has good posture and a worse temper, the kind of face that looks carved rather than grown. She has dirt permanently under two fingernails no matter how often she scrubs, and a laugh that arrives late, like it has to clear customs first. They are drinking white wine they don't particularly like because the restaurant doesn't carry red worth the bottle. They are, by every visible measure, in love.
That version is true. It is also the smallest possible fraction of the truth, the way a photograph of a forest fire is true.
The restaurant sat at the end of a wooden pier on a island that had built its whole personality around the ocean and then spent decades pretending the ocean owed it something in return. Striped umbrellas. A chalkboard specials menu that hadn't changed the chalk in a week. A radio behind the bar playing something with too much brass in it. Outside the windows, the water did what water does, which is look calm right up until it doesn't.
"You're not listening," the woman said.
"I am listening," the man said. "You said something about soil."
"I said something about colonies of soil bacteria, Erik, which is not the same as soil, the way you saying 'Argentina' is not the same as saying you want to spend our anniversary murdering geriatric war criminals."
"They're not all geriatric."
"They're seventy. They're eighty. You're going to track down an eighty-year-old man hiding in a chicken farm and call that a vacation."
"It's restorative."
"For who?"
"For history," Erik said, and refilled her glass before she could ask him not to. "Someone has to keep the ledger honest. The world forgets so quickly. Give it forty years and people start writing books that use the word complicated."
"The world is complicated."
"Not about this."
She let that sit. She had learned, over the time they'd had together, which arguments were worth finishing and which were worth setting down gently and walking away from, the way you'd set down something with a temper of its own. This was the second kind.
"Fine," she said. "Argentina. But I want two weeks in the Amazon after. Not killing anyone. Just looking at it."
"You always want to just look at it."
"It's how you fall in love with something. You look at it before you decide it needs you."
Erik smiled in a way that he reserved almost entirely for her, the kind of smile that didn't know it was being watched by history and wouldn't have cared if it did. "And the planet needs you."
"The planet doesn't need anyone. That's the whole problem. It got along fine for four billion years before a single one of you showed up with a fork."
"I notice you're eating the fish."
"The fish made its own choices."
He laughed at that, short and real, and for a moment they were exactly what they looked like: two people who had found each other in a century that hadn't asked either of them what they wanted, and had decided, against every available piece of evidence, to build something out of it anyway.
It would not last. Histories of them, when histories of them were finally permitted to exist, would agree on that much. But it was real while it lasted, and realness is not the same as permanence, no matter how badly people want it to be.
"I talked to the man about the boat slip," Erik said. "He thinks we're newlyweds from Boston."
"Are we newlyweds from Boston this week?"
"You wanted Connecticut last week."
"Connecticut was for the dentist."
"We don't have a dentist."
"We have a cover dentist, Erik, that's the whole point of having a cover dentist, you can't keep forgetting our biography."
He spread his hands, an old gesture, the universal shrug of a man who had once moved continents and now couldn't keep a fake last name straight. "I'm better with metal than with paperwork."
"You're better with metal than with anything that isn't on fire."
"I kept the boat from sinking."
"You kept the anchor from sinking. The boat would have been fine."
"Small distinctions."
"Small distinctions are the only thing standing between us and a federal file with our actual faces in it."
The waiter came and went. The sun did the thing it does at that hour on a beach town, turning everything gold and a little dishonest. Down on the sand, someone was building a castle that would not survive the tide, and did not appear to know it yet, which Erik found, privately, to be the most human thing he'd seen all week.
"I want children," Ivy said.
She said it the way she said most true things, without warning, like she'd been carrying it in her coat pocket and finally just set it on the table between the bread basket and the butter.
Erik did not laugh. He considered it the way he considered everything that mattered, with his whole attention, which was the rarest thing he owned and the thing she valued most.
"Ours, or the kind you grow," he said.
"Does it matter?"
"To the children, probably."
She smiled at that, small and real. "I don't know which kind. I think about it and I picture green things. I think about it and I picture a kitchen. I don't know how to want both at once without it sounding insane."
"You spend your days turning men into fertilizer. I don't think insane is the bar you need to clear."
"You're one to talk. You collect Nazis like other men collect stamps."
"It's a smaller hobby than it sounds."
"It's not a hobby, it's a purpose, and you know the difference matters to you even if you pretend it doesn't."
He reached across the table and took her hand, the one with the dirt under the nails, and didn't say anything for a moment, which was its own kind of answer.
"We could try," he said. "Somewhere quiet. Somewhere that doesn't know either of our names."
"Nowhere knows our names. That's the problem with running."
"Then somewhere that doesn't know what our names mean."
"Is there anywhere like that?"
"There's an island," he said, and gestured at the window, at the gold water and the postcard light, "for instance."
She looked out at it. The castle on the sand was losing its third tower to a wave that hadn't even tried very hard.
"It's pretty here," she admitted.
"It's quiet."
"For now."
It was, in fact, very nearly perfect, in the specific and temporary way that things are perfect right before the universe remembers whose company they're keeping. Nothing about Erik Lehnsherr or Pamela Isley had ever stayed quiet for long. It was not malice, exactly. It was closer to gravity. Wherever they tried to set down roots, something in the ground objected.
That was when the screaming started.
It came from the beach first, a single voice, high and ragged, the specific pitch of a person who has just understood something their brain refuses to file under normal. Then a second voice. Then several, overlapping, the particular chaos of an entire stretch of sand standing up at once.
"Shark!"
Erik was on his feet before Ivy was, old instinct outrunning thought, his hand already at the edge of the table as if there were something there worth bending. Ivy rose more slowly, one hand still loose around her wineglass, watching the beach the way she watched everything, like she expected the world to eventually explain itself if she just paid enough attention.
Down on the sand, the crowd had pulled back from the waterline in a ragged crescent, the way water pulls back from a drain. A man was being dragged up out of the surf by two others, and the water around him had gone the wrong color, a red that did not belong in that particular shade of gold afternoon. He was missing a leg below the knee. He was screaming in a way that didn't sound like it belonged to a person anymore, just a body remembering it was supposed to make noise.
A heavyset man in a tan uniform had come pounding down the beach steps, a rifle in his hands he clearly hadn't fired in years, and was wading into the shallows firing into the water again and again, at nothing visible, at the idea of a thing more than the thing itself, shouting words that didn't carry over the noise of everyone else shouting too.
Erik watched the water.
Something moved beneath it, gray and unhurried, already gone before the chief's third shot hit anything but ocean.
Ivy set her wineglass down on the railing, very carefully, the way she did everything she meant to come back to.
"Well," she said. "So much for quiet."