fic: the time allotted for disavowals (rpf AU)

[falseeeyelashes]

the time allotted for disavowals

rpf. in our bedroom after the war. felicity jones/eddie redmayne, damian lewis/rebecca hall. WWII!AU. 3755 words.

notes: damn, i gotta stop writing such long things for that comment ficathon. for goddesspharo! who requested "Damian Lewis and Eddie Redmayne as ginger brothers during WWII + Felicity Jones with bonus Rebecca Hall." SO THAT HAPPENED LOL. i have no idea what's in the water this month making me so bizarrely prolific (or prolific about the most bizarre things?) but I'm gonna let it ride.



“I’ll be headed out for the day.”

It does not matter which of the two says it -- they both plan to head out for the day.

At breakfast, Damian reads the paper while Felicity consults the early morning post. The paper Damian reads now is the New York Times, the society pages, a day delayed. His favorite subject as of late has been New York.

Her favorite subject has been the picture Spellbound. Each time she mentions it, Damian has forgotten the plot, a fact she finds ironic and tells him such, in the same breath that she says, “It’s about amnesia.”

He accuses her of having amnesia, too. He claims she has amnesia where New York is concerned. He says that she usefully manages to forget each conversation they have ever had about the possibility of leaving London for New York.

“That’s not amnesia,” she says, “That’s denial.”

This morning they do not discuss either New York nor Spellbound. Damian leaves Felicity at the dining room table with a small peck on the top of her head.

He forgets his hat but he keeps walking.

Felicity married Damian before the war, but she was still considered a war bride.

Their wedding was sparsely attended and just as sparsely decorated. She wore his mother’s wedding dress, refitted to suit Felicity’s diminutive frame and the current era, yet still too large in the shoulders, the train catching underfoot. She carried a small bouquet of roses and drank too much champagne and vomited in the church’s tiny lavatory just after the ceremony.

Only his mother attended from his immediate family, as well has his cousin Romola and his Uncle Colin. Romola had told Felicity she was beautiful, a beautiful bride, and that she was sure Eddie wished he could have been here.

“How very kind,” Felicity had lied.

She had one week with him as her husband before he left for France.

She married a stranger and he came back to her a different stranger.

“All husbands start as strange men,” her mother had said before the wedding, dragging a silver comb through Felicity’s hair, “and they’ll remain strange men but not so much strangers.”

Damian came back a hero. His younger brother came back broken.

The way Damian’s mother tells the story, Felicity was a nice girl from a nice family and Damian was an even nicer man from a nicer family, so he did her the favor of marrying her.

The way Damian’s brother tells the story, Damian had stood to inherit, so she married him instead.

Both are true, Felicity supposes, in their own right. The part neither considers in their retelling of her marriage is that Felicity was not brave. 1939 was a year when everyone was brave, or at least that’s what they told themselves. Everyone was strong, everyone was brave, everyone was going to defend London.

Felicity wasn’t brave, that’s what she thinks.

She caved. She was a nice girl from a nice family and her mother saw an opportunity. Her mother encouraged her to take it -- marriage as a capital investment. Damian stood to inherit. Damian was a nicer man from a nicer family.

So she married him.

Damian tells the story with himself at the center: Felicity needed him, so he took her on. As his wife.

Damian leaves their house that morning -- the same grimace to his face each time he crosses the threshold, be it arriving or departing, too aware that the ownership of the house is not his, but rather, his mother’s -- with no real purpose in his heart.

He has grown tired of London. The flurry of rebuilding and the constant reminders of the war do nothing for him. He is acknowledged as a hero, still, and he imagines it should pain him more to confess the pride, the pleasure, such recognition brings him.

“You shot some Germans and came back a bloody celebrity,” Felicity had said to him, her face pale and cold, and for a brief moment he saw in her his brother, his brother the night of the dinner, and he had hated her.

Damian stops at a pub. It is at this pub that he will meet Rebecca.

Rebecca is the Bolshevik daughter of Sir Peter Hall. Damian knows the Halls, or rather his mother knows the Halls, a family on par with his own. He also knows of Rebecca. He knows of how she went rebellious, and by extension, wrong.

In the pub she sits alone, dressed mannish and awkward, her dark hair unfashionably long and messy, a book open flat in front of her.

Without invitation or prelude, he takes a seat across from her at her table.

“Not yet disinherited?” he asks as greeting.

She does not glance up from her book.

“Their disappointment in me has yet to reach such an all-consuming inheritance-altering level,” she says, and then she smirks.

Felicity leaves the house. Their house. His mother’s house. His house -- not her house.

If anything, she decides as she walks, London has become her own private ghost town.

The city leaves her feeling as though she is caught between two points -- the before and the after. She supposes that what they are living is the after, but it doesn’t seem right to her. It doesn’t seem as though they are finished.

She feels she is still waiting.

A month previously, Damian’s mother held a dinner in her house (their house) for her two sons.

The dinner was the first and last time the two brothers sat in the same room since the war.

Damian took his seat at the head of the table, casually austere and well-groomed, wearing his heroism proudly, publicly, his gaze towards his wife and his brother appraising and cool.

Eddie was a wreck. Eddie was a disaster. Eddie was, she knew, not right. He drank rather than ate through the dinner, snapping at the valet that he had no desire for the French wine Damian insisted on serving, that he wanted whiskey. So he was brought whiskey and he drank his whiskey, but rather than the drink diluting him, rendering him sloppy and shapeless, it made him meaner. His gaze tightened to match that of his brother -- appraising and cool -- and each time he caught Felicity’s eye she felt a snap of dread.

It reached a head when the plates were cleared and Eddie slouched low in his seat and said: “I had to see it to believe it, I suppose, but it is true. War made a fucking peacock out of you, didn’t it.”

Damian had barely bristled, but Felicity caught the twitch to his mouth. She was sure Eddie had as well.

“We were all heroic in our own right,” Damian said.

She thought, for a beat (the longest beat of time she could remember experiencing, at least since the Blitz, and just as during the Blitz, she was sure the world was about to come crashing down upon her head), that Eddie might kill Damian. The freckles stood out starkly on his pale face, his jaw clenched and tight, his cheekbones too sharp, too harsh a reminder of the skull beneath the skin, and as that beat ended he looked to her.

“Your husband’s a fucking liar,” he said to her, and it was the first and only thing he had said to her all night. “A goddamn fucking fool.”

Eddie subsequently left. He went back to that grimy flat he had rented over a butcher shop against his mother’s protests.

Felicity had watched him leave, watched him ignore her when she reached for his arm and said, I am so sorry, Eddie.

I am so sorry.

Eddie was missing in action for almost a year.

They found him in Holland, just before the war ended, laid up in a church rendered as a hospital. He had been shot in his left shoulder, his right leg near cut in half above the knee from shrapnel. He survived the war with all limbs intact, but now he favors his good leg, the pain at times overwhelming.

Damian had returned home by then, but not when the first word came that Eddie was missing.

Felicity had been alone in London. Damian’s mother had left for the countryside even though the Blitz had ended. Even during the Blitz, Felicity had remained. They had been supposed to shut the London house for their own safety, but Felicity had remained.

At the time, she worked as a nurse in the city and she considered the proximity a benefit rather than a risk. But that always was her way -- for better, for worse -- to ignore a risk and only see the potential good in it. Eddie told her that once. He had said it like it was a good thing, a thing that made him care for her, and she had believed him.

Felicity had been the one to receive the telegram. She read it in the foyer, the late afternoon light waning towards sunset, and as she read the words MISSING IN ACTION she felt within her a wild, animal rush of panic. This was not supposed to happen. He was not supposed to leave her, not forever, not for good. He was meant to come back and he was meant to forgive her, and he would love her, and she would love him, and if they had to live with shame, then they would live with shame. This was not supposed to be the end.

She had clutched the telegram to her chest, slouched against the front door, and she had cried. She had cried noisily, like a child, unable to catch her breath, and all she could think of were his hands, his hands, his strong hands, his hands cupping her jaw, his hands holding hers, his hands buried in the ground.

The maids had ignored her.

Rebecca talks with her hands. All pronounced gestures and earnestness. She talks about the Soviets like she thinks she understands them and she talks about war as though she has been there.

It doesn’t bother him as much as he supposes it should.

The one thing Damian has truly gathered since his homecoming has been that the world he returned to is not the one he left. It’s that the war he experienced was diametrically different from what Eddie saw and felt. He knows this, but he will never admit it. War is hell for all involved, but he is positive Eddie occupied a different circle of it. He’s not sure why openly acknowledged it would be akin to admitting defeat, but he knows that it would be.

He also knows his wife will never be his, never fully. She is another thing Eddie experienced in sharper relief. Passionately, intimately, and to admit that, he is sure, would be an even greater loss.

So he looks to Rebecca. He does not mention the war and he lets her speak of it, lets her describe horrors that make her eyes go wide and excited, and he supposes he could hate her too if he did not want her so much.

He orders them both another round.

Felicity arrives at Eddie’s just when the rain begins in earnest.

His landlady shows her up to Eddie’s room, but not without a suspicious eye.

Eddie is drunk, or he is drinking at the very least. She remembers a very different Eddie when he’d drink: funny and bright, the life of the party. He looks at her meanly.

“My brother’s errands?” She doesn’t take her coat off.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Are you here,” he asks, each word deliberate and cold, “on my brother’s errands. Or Mummy’s?”

She stares at him as one might appraise a stranger. No, it’s more than that. She looks to him as one might attempt to recognize a face they thought they knew, a person they now fear they might have completely invented.

“Neither. I came of my own volition.”

“How grand of you,” he says. And then, “Make yourself at home.”

She paces his small flat (it feels generous to even call the space a flat; it’s all one room, the bed tucked in the corner, the kitchen table only a handful of steps from it), and he watches her. She can feel his eyes on her, following the lines of her body, the slope of her neck, and she wants to tell him that she misses him, even now. She misses him. She’s sorry, she misses him.

“Tell me about Damian.”

She lays her gloves on the table. “What would you like to know?”

Eddie shrugs but it comes across more as a tic. He’s thinned out, all muscle and bone, the chords of his neck visible when he swallows. “Surprise me.”

“He’s well,” she starts.

“Is he?” Eddie interrupts, angrily, like either he doesn’t believe her or the thought of Damian doing well offends him.

She unbuttons her coat and stands a little straighter, her hands limp at her sides. “I don’t walk to talk about Damian.”

“I do. He was, after all, mine first. But then, so were you.”

Felicity pushes her hair off of her neck, heavy and damp from the rain, and peels her coat off. His stare unnerves her, makes her swallow quickly. “People don’t belong to each other,” she snaps, and then turns, her back to Eddie, watching the rain for a moment. She looks to him over her shoulder. “Are you punishing me? Is that what this is.”

He purses his lips, noncommittal. “I never asked you to come here.”

Her eyes flit to the dirty window and then back to him -- also dirty. “And you? How are you getting on?”

He slams back the remaining whiskey in his glass. “I’m not,” he replies.

Evening approaches.

Damian is imagining the curve of Rebecca’s throat under his mouth. He’s imagining her just as wrong and filthy beneath him.

Rebecca looks at him with judgment as they talk, from Churchill to the Americans to Stalin’s vision for the East. She looks at him with respect too, buried there in all that green.

It’s refreshing, he supposes, to have a woman look at him as though she wants him.

Felicity looks at him with dark accusation in her eyes.

It’s not an attractive look on her, that heavy weight of resentment.

Their meeting ends precisely the way Felicity feared to imagine it would:

he fucks her.

He fucks her for the first time since he’s been back. He’s not shy about his body, not shy about the scars and the cruel leanness he now carries, the way his ribs show or the sharpness of his hips.

He’s not shy about the way he wants her, with his mouth snapping against her own, his teeth against her bottom lip, his tongue in her mouth, the way he makes her feel like he could eat her alive -- that he wants that.

That she wants that, too.

He is brutal and desperate with her, his hands gripping her too tight, bruising against the inside of her thighs, her hips, the curve of her ass. He holds her down beneath him, his hand pushing against her clavicle, the bone fitting against the palm of his hand, and the harder he pushes, the louder she gasps. The more she arches her neck back, baring herself to him, wanting, she thinks, for him to hurt her.

His hands, she can’t stop thinking of his hands. His hands on her body, his hands trying to reach inside of her, his hands inching for her throat.

She begs him when she comes, broken sounding sobs tucked under his jaw as his own body drops down to hers.

She begs: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

After, she rolls from him, her legs still shaking, her chest tight. He keeps kissing her bare back, open-mouthed and tender. She thinks she wants to cry.

She doesn’t.

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“You’re sorry,” he breathes against her neck. Their faces are close together.

“I’m no good at this,” she says.

I’m no good at loving you.

But I do, she does not say. I do love you.

During the Blitz, Felicity worked as a nurse. During the Blitz, Felicity would hide in the Underground with the rest of them.

She wrote Eddie a letter when she was down below. She wrote to him while the woman next to her sang hymns under her breath and the man next to her recited the same list of names over and over again. At first she believed the names to be saints then thought perhaps they were all the women he had loved.

She wrote Eddie a letter, sure in her heart that she was to die, and all she could think was that there were so many things he needed to know.

She never sent the letter. She didn’t die and she did not send the letter. She crumpled it in her hand when she emerged aboveground.

She did not send it, but she kept it.

By the time the Blitz had ended, by the time she felt her hope begin to ebb, Eddie was gone.

Missing, was the word, which she supposed, was a different thing than lost.

Damian fucks Rebecca at the boarding house where she resides.

When he is inside of her, he can hear the whine of the pipes through the wall, the hacking wet cough that belongs to her neighbor, and loud yelling in what he assumes to be Polish. Unlike the building around her, Rebecca is quiet while he fucks her, taking him inside her like a predetermined eventuality.

She closes her eyes against him and stretches her long body under his when he comes.

“Don’t look so troubled,” she says when she rises, reaching for a silk robe. “I hardly expect a sonnet or a declaration of love. Not from you.”

In the picture Spellbound, Ingrid Bergman says, The point is that people read about love as one thing and experience it as another. Well, they expect kisses to be like lyrical poems and embraces to be like Shakespearean dramas.

That’s not Felicity’s favorite part of the film, but she thinks of it often.

When Felicity leaves his flat, she leaves the letter with Eddie.

“This is yours,” she says, dropping the ruined letter on the table. She buttons her coat, and he watches her, naked, from his bed.

And then she leaves.

Outside, she finds the rain has stopped. She pulls her collar up against her neck and refuses to look back.

If she looks back, she thinks, she will not leave.

She walks briskly, already thinking of the house she will return to, her husband.

What she never says to Damian is that he left her, too. He left her, his brother left her, left her to a London on fire, and when he came back, he refused to talk about it. What she wants to say is that she’s not stronger than that. That she needs to talk about it, that she needs to feel it in his body too, that grief, that sense of lost, the knowledge that comes with the after, with feeling, deep down, in your bones and in your gut, that nothing can ever be the same again.

That she can’t forget the darkness underground. She can’t forget that telegram. She can’t forget Eddie, she can’t leave Eddie behind. There may be a place in New York for Damian and there may be the promise of a better future for the both of them, but there’s also a threat she cannot leave behind.

She will tell him tonight, she thinks, her pace quickening as the city darkens. She will tell him tonight, after their supper, after his mother has gone to bed.

She will say, No, Damian, I cannot go. She will say, No, Damian, I cannot stay.

She will say: No, Damian. I cannot love you.

She learned underground that there is a finite amount of space for anything in this world. There are only so many people who can crowd into one place. There are only so many bombs one can drop before the landscape is decimated beyond repair.

There’s only so much room in her heart.

Damian had been home when they received word that Eddie had been found.

Damian had been the one to tell her the news, and she had laughed, a bright, near hysterical sound, and he had stared at her, wary and unsure. It was the first time she had ever seen her husband caught off-balance and that only made her laugh harder, the words he’s alive! interspersed incredulously through her laughter.

“Stop that,” he had finally said, clipped, nervous. “Stop -- stop laughing.”

And she had. She stopped laughing suddenly, brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, and then looked up at Damian.

“He’s alive,” she said one final time, and then: “I love him.”

Damian’s face had gone shuttered. “You think I did not know?”

She arrives at the house just as Damian rounds the corner. Their eyes meet, but there is no surprise from either of them.

She waits at the gate for him and then smiles, small.

In the letter she had said, I ask you to forgive me. Not because I deserve it, but because I need it.

“How was your day?” she asks Damian. He opens the front door for her.

“Amusing enough,” he says.

I need you, Eddie, she had said. I need you to return, I need you to come back to me. I need for the hope to exist that despite everything, despite all the wrongs, you can still love me.

“I’m going to freshen up for dinner,” she tells him in the foyer, and he nods; she’s aware only when she departs up the stairs that neither of them offered a kiss in greeting.

She closes the door behind her and presses her back against it. She breathes deep.

I love you, she had written, I love you, I love you, should I die you must know this, I love you.

She stands in front of the mirror (I love you, he said in his bed to her) and she turns the tap and water rushes from the sink (I love you, she wrote).

She takes her wedding ring off. The water is cold.

fin.