Fic: Shelter (Bertie/Lionel, PG)

[cruisedirector]

Title: Shelter
Authors: dementordelta and cruisedirector
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~2900
Summary: The war changes everything, except the things that will never change.
Note: This follows all the posted parts of "Crown and Country" (they're all in this comm as well as on AO3 but out of order). This is less sexy and much darker than those.

Comments

[oleander9999]

I come by and check every so often and was thrilled to find a new chapter of Crown and Country! I'm still asleep or I would have gotten the pun of the title (thanks, miss_morland!)

My heart was simultaneously broken and warmed by this story: broken because we know that, though this is fiction, they really did suffer the horrors of the Blitz and Bertie was losing his health, Lionel getting older, warmed because in your universe they have each other completely. I love that they have their memories of Balmoral, of their many levels of union, their dreams of what might have been and what will be in another life, another world.

I love imagining their being a haven for each other during that sad, terrible time and I truly believe that they did provide comfort and shelter for each other with their friendship.

I'm so impressed that you manage to make this so historically real along with dreaming a fictional world, it adds so much to the emotion of the story to be able to slip so easily into it because of its plausibility!

Thank you for sharing this and I hope you will post more -- if you say some is unpostable, I'll believe you (with regret!) but I don't believe the redundant bit! You may not fully know the comfort and sweetness your stories provide, maybe as much to readers as to the characters! Our times are not so dark as theirs, but they are gloomy, and faith and love shine brightly through your words.

[cruisedirector]

Thank you so much! There's one more chapter and I think that's really the last one (it's postwar, neither of them is young) but it's much happier than this one, though this one isn't nearly as bad as reality must have been. I think there is no question from the letters and diaries that they were a comfort to each other during the war and immediately afterward (no sooner had Lionel celebrated the fact that his sons had come through safely than he lost Myrtle).

Do believe me on the redundancy. I've been editing the last bit and it has some of the same lines nearly word for word over and over. The sorts of things people say before falling asleep etc. *g* There's almost nothing that moves a plot as such.