bakerstreet | Things We Lost in the Fire

Things We Lost in the Fire

Mutual Healing Shipping Meme

Healing doesn't come quickly, whether the need comes from physical or mental wounds. But you're trying regain your strength - and yourself.

People, as a general rule, are kind, or at least not outright inflammatory to you, it seems. Still, you just can't connect with them. No matter how nice, how caring, they don't understand. They've never experienced anything like what you've gone through, or they're not like you in a way that lets them see what you still go through; they have no frame of reference. Sure, they have sympathy, but it's not the same. So there's no real connection, despite any friendliness. It's so easy, then, to feel detached...

...until you meet them, in this place of both death and healing.

They may not have been through the exact same struggles, they may not be exactly the same as you, but they know what darkness is light. How they handle this fact may be better or worse than how you do, yet you can see yourself in their actions. And for once? There's connection; more than that, too. Slowly, you can feel yourself opening up towards them, and then, falling for them.

Is this something your used to? Will you fight your feelings, or will you jump at the opportunity to be with someone who can begin to get you? You may have little choice in the matter, as your instincts may just reach out to be with whatever compatible contact you can get. That's better, in the long run, though. Who else could have wounds like yours?

Essentially, it's what it says: a "romance," in the loose definition, or "shipping" meme for characters who have been through the wringer or have hangups.
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I am being safe. I am being careful. I am being strong. Don't worry, dear Tommy -- I am a little better every day, every minute, and by the time I see you again I will be well enough to jump on one of your horses and race it myself.

It's not true, not yet, but she is trying. In the early days -- and he doesn't need to know what it was, she doesn't need to talk about that -- she hadn't had his letters to hand, only memories, and she had healed mostly by virtue of the faint threads of hope those had left her with and her own grit-toothed stubbornness. The more she'd been able to remember, the more possible it had become. Now that she has the letters again, it feels almost easy, and each one buoys her spirits that much more.

What she doesn't tell him, for fear of scaring him further, is this: that she's come to believe in their shared dream so strongly because there has to be something at the end of all of this. That, too, gets easier to believe every day; the more the mood in the camp changes, the less it becomes a desperate wish and the closer it comes to being reality.

I think, ironically, your intel is better than mine now. Where shall I go? Give me a city and I will be at the station every day until I find you. I promise -- I swear it. If you have truly come to trust me again, please believe that.

Come to Strassbourg. Even if we can't return to England or Russia, it is a border town, and one way or another a should be able to reach it. I will wait too, I promise, I promise. I won't return home before I have seen you again.

The letter barely has time to arrive before it happens: suddenly the camps are thrown over, the liberators liberating, the captors becoming prisoners. For a week after they have no papers, no place to go- and Tommy, with his house arrest, takes the longest by far. He knows correspondence will be useless, now, and so he tries his best to make it to Strassbourg before too much time passes. Every night he spends dreaming of her, happily sometimes, but more often anxiously.

Strassbourg is in chaos, but one thing he can do: sit in the train station hallway and wait, and wait.

It turns out that chaos is what waits for Nina, too: when the gates of her camp are flung open, she discovers that her country is in the midst of its own revolution, the government still in disarray, everything in a state of confusion. Petrograd isn't even the capital anymore, and no one really knows quite what to do with the Russians for a while. It at least gives Nina time to think, to finish healing, but she worries about Tommy in Strasbourg. Tommy waiting for her. What if he loses faith while she's still sitting here like a piece of mislabeled cargo? She begs everyone who leaves before her to pass messages on if any of them are going to France, but she has no way of knowing if they get to him or not.

She no longer considers that he didn't go at all. She meant what she'd written: the war has ripped the faith right out of her, but what little remains, it all rests with him. Whenever she finds herself wavering, she remembers that day in the cell: the day he could have easily killed her himself, when still, he tried to think of ways he could save her.

She hasn't been saved, but by the time her papers finally come in, she's well enough to trade the ticket back to Russia for a ticket to France and make for Strasbourg as fast as she possibly can. After all the enforced isolation, the station is an overwhelming blur of activity, but she clutches her little bag close to her chest and dives into the crowd, searching, endlessly searching--

--until she spots a flash of blue eyes and the glint of dim station lighting off the curve of a familiar cheek. It's been months since she last saw him, but after all those nights spent mapping his face with her eyes and hands and lips, it doesn't take more than a glance, and then it doesn't even matter when her vision blurs. All she has to do is cut through the crowd, sit down next to him, and reach out with one trembling hand to slip something into his: a little wooden horse, rubbed smooth and shiny from months of being held, and stroked, and loved.

She might as well have punched him, for all that he's stopped being able to breath. Imagining this moment, day after day, sitting on the same bench in clear view of most of the entries, all possible scenarios had passed through his mind: that he would see her clear across the hall, and he would run towards her and wrap her in a tight embrace; that she would come up behind him, tears in her eyes, and he would kiss her until they both couldn't kiss any longer; that he would see her, first, and he would wrap his arms around her from behind and whisper guess who.

(Sometimes, at night, he would imagine himself sitting here, still, a year from now. Just an Englishman whose mind had been lost to the war, people would say, and he would cradle her letters to his chest as he tried not to lose her.)

Instead she's there, suddenly, and his hand wraps around an object that ought to be familiar, but that's been shaped by her hands as much as his, now. He looks at it, breathing fast, before he lifts his eyes to hers.

"You came," he rasps, eyes wide and almost disbelieving. They did it- they actually did it.

She's been shaped by the months apart, too, though neither smoothed nor softened: she looks thinner, sharper, harder, as if the camp had honed her at every edge. Her skin is no longer so smooth and clear as it once was, her cheeks now dusted with the spidery red of broken blood vessels; though her face is still otherwise mostly undamaged, there's a hint of a scar on her lip where a cut, maybe the same one he remembers, never healed quite properly.

What's most important right now, though, is her eyes, and his happy disbelief mirrored in them. Hers are already full of tears, and this time she doesn't try to hide them or stop them from spilling, doesn't so much as try to wipe them away when it would mean letting go of his hand.

"I'm here," she whispers, her voice breaking -- and on second thought, she does let go, but only to throw her arms around him and bury herself in the warm, solid comfort she's been without for much, much too long.

He hitches in one sharp breath, and then it's like the world around him stops existing. The hustle and bustle of a train station, the voices around them, all stop mattering. He draws her against him so close she could climb into his lap, so hard he might be in danger of hurting her. He doesn't like the way she looks but they're details, now: what matters is that she's here at all, with him, warm and alive and happy to see him.

For all his faults, for all that he is from where he is, Tommy isn't embarrassed, now, to cry. The years have been long and dark, and she's emerged as a bright point, the only thing keeping him sane. He's quiet about it, his tears soaking into the collar of her dress as he keeps her close against him.

"Welcome back, Nina," he whispers eventually, breath hitching, still not pulling away.

She wouldn't care if he did hurt her right now -- she wouldn't care if he outright cracked her ribs with the force of his embrace. It feels like a lifetime since she was held by somebody she wanted to be held by, and it's even different now than it was before. Now he knows her, the truth of her, and he's still here; now she no longer has to keep a part of herself separate, struggling and striving not to love him. She feels his arms around her waist and the damp of his tears through her clothes, the sheer depths of his feeling for her, and she does, in fact, crack under the weight of it. She clutches to him and sobs, softly but openly, her shoulders shaking against him.

Eventually, she hears him speak and tries to quiet herself with a shuddering breath of her own, though she doesn't yet move a muscle, either. "Were you waiting long?" she manages to get out, her voice coming out small and soft.

"Not too long." He raises a hand to her cheek and rubs a thumb over her cheekbone, gently wiping the trail of tears off of her skin.

"I have lodgings- are you hungry? Thirsty? I-"

He doesn't want to talk about this in public. He wants to get to relearn the shape of her, the way she fits into his arms, the way she looks when he makes her laugh. But they're still in the middle of a train station, and it feels like he has more right to see her than the rest of the world right now.

She shakes her head, then leans it into the touch of his hand, seeking the warmth of his palm against her cheek. It's actually not true, she realizes a moment later -- she is hungry, and if she keeps weeping like this, which feels likely, she'll be thirsty before long, too. She just wants him, though, first and foremost, just to enjoy the sheer reality of his presence. She doesn't want to stop touching him long enough to deal with all those other things.

She sniffles a little and swipes at her other cheek, then actually smiles when she pulls back and sees the identical glimmer on his. She cups her hands around his face to brush his tears away, too, then and draws him in to rest her head briefly against his. "Can we take care of that there?" Food, drink, she means.

God, what they must look like- something out of a story, he thinks, two lovers who have gone through hell and have emerged, together. He traces the line of her jaw and smiles, softly, then shifts to kiss her forehead.

"Yes. We'll take care of that 'ere, and then we'll go."

She might need to be the one to stand up first, though- somehow, it feels very hard to let go of her.

She trembles a little when he kisses her forehead, so tender that she very nearly breaks down all over again. She closes her eyes to ward the tears off, and though her lashes grow damp again, no more fall down her cheeks. She's as aware as he that they should get up, but it takes her a moment, too, to bring herself around enough to move so much as another inch away.

But eventually, the sounds of the station start to intrude, and even though she finally has the luxury of not caring what they look like or who sees them, she sniffles again and draws back with a watery smile, absently wiping at her face again. She picks up the horse from where it's fallen to rest on the bench between them, pressing it back into his hand, then closing hers over it. "Okay," she says softly, feeling her legs steady underneath her. She picks up her bag with her free hand, looping the strap over her shoulder. "Show me?"

It hits him, when he takes her hand (and he'd offer to take her bag, but those are her only possessions in the world right now besides Tommy himself and he knows he hadn't wanted to hand those things off to anyone) and starts guiding her to a little stall in the corner that's selling warm pretzels and coffee: this is the first time they don't have to worry about being locked up, or worse, just because they're holding hands in the open.

It makes him feel impossibly strong and certain, and he smiles brilliantly at her as he tugs her along. Buys her something with the money his family has been sending him (his family, who knows about Nina, who knows why he hasn't come home yet even if he really, really ought to have done), watches her eat and drink and warm up. People around them don't even look at them anymore, and he looks amazed at it.

Her strength, as always, is a quieter one. She lets him lead her by the hand, lets him buy her meal -- even leans into him a bit as she tears off pieces of pretzel and sips her coffee. She's more than happy to let him take care of her. Her strength is in her ability to adapt: the way she seems to already have just flowed into this new city, new life, without much of a second thought. She glances around at the crowd as they pass through it, but it doesn't seem to faze her. It's not because she's overwhelmed by them that she stays pressed up against him; it's because she needs to feel him there, and would even if they were standing comfortably in the middle of Vladivostok.

She meant what she'd written: she doesn't care anymore what happens next, if it happens with him.

She smiles at him over the rim of her cup, surer, happier now that the initial teary shock has passed. Now her eyes aren't just glassy, but shining. "It's good," she assures him, offering him a bit, like it's important that he know this about what is, technically, their first meal together.

"It is." Honestly, he's not noticing the food, or the coffee- he's just looking at her from up close, smiling at her like he's watching her eat the finest meal in Europe, not a pretzel from a cart. He presses a light kiss to her temple and throws back his coffee in one go.

"Your trip- how was it?"

"There isn't much to say about it," she admits, leaning into him again, reaching for his hand. "A blur. I slept most of the way." She had thought to try to stay awake, to watch the countryside go by -- but at this point, she really couldn't be more sick of the German countryside, and she wanted to be wide awake to look for him if it hadn't been so easy.

She hesitates, then tries to ask again: "How long?" He's been here long enough to have lodgings, to get money... How long has he been waiting here for her?

He threads his fingers through hers, rubbing his thumb against the inside of her wrist. He's still exhilarated at getting to hold her hand in public, at having her here at all- he's a total contrast to her, not natural at all.

"Four and a half weeks," he replies, squeezing her hand once. "My family's- sent me money to stay here."

Which means both that he had enough faith in her to wait here for over a month, and that surely, his family must know why. She feels, suddenly, like a leaky faucet, because she very nearly starts to get weepy all over again. "Tommy--"

She manages to fight off any further tears, but she drops his hand to wrap both her arms around the one of his nearest her, pressing her face briefly into his shoulder. Even when she looks up again, she keeps walking like that, clasping his arm tightly.

"I'm sorry," he says, weakly- unsure of why she's crying, what he's apologizing for. He pulls her into a little corner to wrap his arms around her anew. The mere fact that he gets to comfort her physically, instead of waiting weeks for a letter to arrive, makes him unashamed about doing this right now.

"You're here now, eh?"

She nods into his shirt, returning the embrace tightly, though she doesn't need to linger in it this time as she had before. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting so long," she murmurs, explaining as she draws back to look at him. She reaches up to clasp his cheek briefly. "But thank you." For waiting, for being here, for trusting her.

"Let's go--" She hesitates. Go home isn't right, when she knows this is just a stopover, but there's nothing she can think of in either language that feels more right. "Let's get away from all these people," she decides instead, linking her arm through his now. "Show me where you've been while you've been waiting?"

He nods, feeling new tears sting in his own eyes, but he's able to shake them off with a smile and a squeeze to her arm.

"Mostly here," he quips, weakly but with intent. "It's a small walk. Close to the station- convenient. It's small, but my landlady's nice. French."

Mostly here, he says, and she glances around and gives a little shiver, squeezing his arm in turn. She can't imagine how lonely it must have been--

No, she can imagine it exactly, because she had been just as lonely in the camp hospital, fighting her own ravaged body and trying to hold onto scraps of letters in her mind until she was well enough to write new ones. She had been lonelier still in the days before the letters, so sure then that she would never see or hear from him again, so sure that there was no one left for whom her life held any value at all.

"Show me," she says again, a little more adamantly, urging him to a faster walk. "You can teach me French when we get there," she tries to joke, though her voice doesn't quite carry the humor. In a crowd like this, they could both still be lonely; alone together, they can both be so much happier.

He laughs softly, curling her closer against him as he walks.

He's renting an attic room in a small house in an alley- it's small within small within small, and it's not the best part of the city. He holds his arm tightly around her, though, wants to protect her even as he usher her up the stairs.

It's just a room- a single bed pushed against the wall, a dresser, a bowl for water on top of that. He has his military-issued bag standing in one corner, still packed. It's bare, of course, but it's cozy enough for such a small space. He closes the door behind him, and then-

They're alone. They're finally alone, and they're not in the woods, they're not scared.

It's perfect. Not for forever, but for right now, it's all they need: a door, a lock, a roof over their heads, and a place to sleep. It's so quiet and calm here that it feels almost like a dream; like she might open her eyes and still find herself in her hard little cot in her old camp room, with nine other girls packed in around her like sardines. She stands in the doorway with him, though, looking all around, and the seconds pass, and nothing happens but dust motes floating through the air, illuminated by the pale light from the window.

She lets out a soft sound, not quite a laugh, but just as happy. She lets her bag drop to the floor, then slips the horse into her coat pocket and quickly unbuttons it, allowing for just the slightest nicety of hanging it from the doorknob. Underneath, she's wearing a dress he knows well: the same one that had gotten soaked that first night in his barracks. She smooths it down, then turns to him, smiling helplessly.

He's tempted, at first, to joke around a little more- ask her what she thinks of his little palace, whether it was what she expected. But the words dry up on his tongue when he seems that smile, and he softens immediately and takes a few steps back towards her.

His hands rest on her waist comfortably, so familiar. "I remember this dress," he whispers, smiling, and then another step closer: "I want to kiss you, now, very badly."

She shivers a little as his hands find her waist, as if not a day had passed since he'd last touched her. There are words forming on her lips, maybe something about the dress in turn, but they die in her throat when he whispers that. For a second, just a split second, something murky and worried flashes through her eyes.

He has to know, she thinks, what she's been doing in his absence. He must know how she's been literally making her living. She knows he must, but the thought still makes her hesitate, suddenly guilty, because she's never actually told him. Should she--?

She bites her lip, then goes up on her toes to kiss him once, very softly, very sweetly, her hands coming to rest on his chest. "Could we..." For once, she struggles with the words. "I'm not... like I was before." She glances up into his eyes, uncertain. "I need a little time."

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