Chapter Text
France, Normandy, 1944. A week after the beaches turned red.
The village no longer had a name, only the echo of one. It had been shelled off the map, burned out of memory, and hastily reclaimed by Allied forces just days before. A strip of scorched earth between front lines. Its church bell tower leaned at an angle now, like it had bowed in defeat.
The field hospital had been wedged into what remained of a schoolhouse. Children’s chalk drawings still marked the walls in ghostly pastels — stick-figures and flowers behind drying blood and canvas partitions. The classroom’s old slate board was now a list of the dying.
Joan Ashford worked quietly. Efficiently. Her apron clung to her like a second skin, stiff with dried blood. Her boots stuck slightly to the floor as she moved — gluey with mud, disinfectant, and worse. The smell was the same as it had been since the landings: iodine, gunmetal, lavender from the fields outside, and the cloying sweetness of death.
She didn’t look at the soldiers’ faces anymore. Just wounds. Blood types. Signs of infection. The ones who cried out in English were easiest. The ones who didn’t — French villagers, German stragglers, the unconscious — those stayed with her longer.
“New one,” barked Corporal Ellis from the hall. “German. Barely hanging on.”
Joan’s pulse quickened, but her hands stayed steady as she finished changing a dressing. She didn’t respond until the corporal spoke again, closer this time.
“You’re the only one with space. Sorry, love.”
She stood, wiped her palms on her apron, and turned toward the entry.
Two medics came in dragging a stretcher. The man on it wasn’t much older than twenty — though war aged some and preserved others. This one looked preserved. As if his body hadn’t yet caught up with what his uniform said he was.
The tag on his tunic read Krüger, Wilhelm.
He was beautiful — in a cold, too-perfect way. Blond hair, caked with dust and sweat. High cheekbones. Pale lashes. Cheeks hollowed by fever, not hunger. His lips were cracked. His breathing shallow. Even unconscious, his jaw was clenched like he had no intention of surrendering to anything — not pain, not death, not her.
The wound in his thigh was still seeping, wrapped hastily in a dirty bandage that did more harm than good.
“Dropped from a half-wrecked truck trying to escape south,” one of the medics said. “Didn’t even have a weapon. Guess someone wanted him alive. Lucky bastard.”
Lucky, Joan thought, even as her fingers unwrapped the cloth from his leg. She pressed down gently to examine the wound. He flinched violently.
A hoarse sound tore from his throat. Not quite a word. It might have been “Halt.” Might have been a plea.
One eye opened, unfocused and storm-grey. It met hers — just for a second.
Then it rolled back, and he collapsed into the cot.
Joan stared at him for a long time.
Krüger. Wilhelm. Another uniform that once stood in the ruins of London. Another cog in the machine that crushed her brother beneath falling stone.
And now he lay here, trembling like a fevered child, lips moving with sounds she couldn’t understand.
She should hate him.
She would.
Later.