[Fanfiction] Two and Six Turns, Sixty Degrees
Title: Two and Six Turns, Sixty Degrees
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): Drama/Angst/Steampunk/AU/Romance
Character(s)|Pairing(s): Austria/Hungary, Prussia/Hungary
Rating/Warning(s): PG-13, gruesome imagery, cursing
Word Count: 4,222
Summary: For dragon_gypsy , as part of the NCorp Secret Santa exchange. Steampunk AU, as told over several years and several hours. Some things change and some things endure like clockwork.
2 PM
Gilbert wasn’t too surprised when Eli never showed up again on the eve of his eleventh birthday. At least, he told himself that as he slogged through sleet, ankle deep in shit. But the old man would be grouchy for coming home this early so before he crossed the crumbling Bridge of Old Moons, he turned around to head back to the harbor and landing strips, the mudlarking territories and the old beats.
On the other hand, Gilbert was surprised that he even had a birthday. But it was all that he was going by to trust that he was eleven, not twelve or ten. Eleven.
He steered clear of the rock strewn shores by the filthy river; no one in their right mind would be mudlarking right now but it didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a snitch perched nearby, ready to go flying off to the gangs should an interloper attempt to scavenge on hard won territory.
No one was around when he got to one of the older airship hangars, ducking around to the back and scuttling up a rickety flight of rusting iron stairs. Still, he checked the traps and ducked in time to miss the beam that would start leaning just so… He surveyed the attic mutely, the sleet hammering on the filthy window in an erratic rhythm.
It didn’t seem right, without Eli here. Too damn quiet. He hated quiet.
Gilbert went to the wiggly floorboard and pried it up with the blade of his knife. Then he tugged out their “safe” (a battered tin painted black). It took some time for him to pry off the top; it had nearly rusted shut thanks to the damn sleet and the shitty building. He stared at the contents without really seeing them.
A small acid fuel cell carefully wrapped in waterproof silk. Loose coins or maybe just rusting disks of metal. A coil of copper wire. A rosary missing half its seed pearl beads. Several blue prints on thin, thin rice paper (kept in a cracked leather case to protect against moisture). He went through it idly, only to encounter something wrapped in a bit of discarded gold-colored foil. Brow furrowing, he picked it up; it was much heavier than it looked.
Undoing the wrapping carefully, he then stared at the heavy black Iron Cross in his hand. Or rather, the note on top of it.
It’s yours.
Nothing else. Nothing more.
He stared at it again and his cold fingers curled around the ancient metal. His left cheek began to ache in a distant memory (Damn if Eli had a hell of a right hook) and he could taste mud mingling with blood from a split lip. Eli’s smile had been irregular (having finally lost that tooth he’d been wiggling for weeks) but triumphant.
Gilbert traced his thumb over surface of the medal. Time had taken its toll and whoever this had belonged to, whoever had had this pinned to his chest, would never be known, name and date having been long excised from its surface. It was frankly a miracle that they’d ever found this in the muck by the harbor (If Gilbert ever believed in miracles). There was no question about selling it and no chance of wheedling a reward out of an owner. So they’d kept it. And bitched about it. And punched the ever loving shit out of each other in the way only street kids could.
“I found it first, you bastard!”
“I picked it up first, you twit.” Then Eli had paused and hadn’t quite smirked. His lips twisted slightly too much to be a regular smile. “And if I die, you can have it. Or if you get it out of my cold, dead fingers.” And he had taken off down the street, Gilbert hurling after him and screeching, even when they barreled into a wheelbarrow filled with rotting fish and earned several clouts to the ear apiece.
That’s when it hit him the hardest, harder than any sucker punch Eli could deliver. His fingers tightened around the medal and he closed his eyes tightly.
“I don’t need you,” he snarled to the stagnant air and the sounds of sleet. “I don’t fucking need you, you pain in the ass!”
Gilbert came home late as usual, going up to his attic room with a tin shoved under his coat and a heavy weight around his neck.
4 PM
There were multiple… incidents in their acquaintance but Roderich Edelstein would always remember two (to his profoundest irritation). The first time they had encountered each other, it could have been out of some trite novel.
At fifteen years old, Roderich Edelstein was considered almost more than ready to be accepted into the glittering and restrictive arms of the Haut Ton, which made him wonder why his carriage was lingering in a less than pleasant sector of the city. He closed his philosophy text and pulled the two curtains (one velvet for warmth, one gauze for insects) and mused upon the scene. The coachman was cursing very foully, something about a gear catching.
Lips tightening, the young aristocrat made to close the curtains again, only to find his body moving backwards instinctively as something hurtled right at the mechanical carriage and yanked open its door and hurled itself inside the velvet and suede upholstered interior all within a space of twenty seconds. Roderich reached for his pistol only to find a knife already pressed at his throat.
“I wouldn’t do that, pretty,” said a scratched tenor. In the dim darkness of the interior, the dark haired boy could see light glinting off a reddish iris.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked the young lord in his iciest voice.
“Just passing through, Herr,” said the intruder, flashing a lightning fast, lightning bright grin.
He could get glimpses of things, like looking at a scene through a keyhole (not that such subterfuge could ever be attributed to an Edelstein, especially so… coarse). A mismatched array of clothing under a far too new, far too clean military jacket. An infantry officer’s jacket. Wisps of hair that could have been pale blonde under all that grime escaped from a hat too big. Of course, curiously red eyes (who could possibly have eyes like that?). Roderich found himself facing a heavy Iron Cross hanging from the creature’s neck as a grubby paw reached up to the brass wire container overhead, seizing a bottle of wine.
He yelped in a most undignified manner as the paw then flattened over his chest. The creature grinned again, flashing astonishingly pale teeth for such a denizen of the streets. His canines were disturbingly pronounced. Then his expression turned… puzzled?
“You’re a boy?”
Roderich sputtered. “I most certainly am male, if that is what you mean! Get out!”
The creature muttered something under his breath about confusing genders and boys too pretty to be girls. He grinned anyways. “Thanks for the drink and the talk, Herr,” he said, somehow managing to pull the knife away, pat Roderich’s cheek and dive out the other door to the streets in a matter of moments, also somehow managing to disappear into the swirling crowds of the city like a ghost.
The next time he met the wild-eyed… brute, it was when both of them were one and twenty. Roderich Edelstein walked through the ranks of the infantry mutely with the rest of his classmates at the Academy. His eyes fell onto one Sergeant, a man too young to have such a rank but who wore a very old Iron Cross indeed.
The man kept his eyes ahead, but his side of his mouth slowly curled upwards. “Hello, pretty,” whispered the still scratchy, still high tenor.
And that bespoke much of Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt’s and Colonel Roderich Edelstein’s professional acquaintance with each other.
6 PM
They called her “Héderváry’s bastard daughter.” And that was the politest of the remarks, really, murmured behind painted fans and exchanged in the fashionable salons. Never mind her father attempted to allay rumors by having her be adopted formally, as though she were some foundling in truth, instead of his indiscretion with a maid.
She paused. She was being too hard on her father, admittedly. Even she couldn’t think of her mother with the most gracious of terms, with the term “scheming minx” being the most charitable that she could think of. But she was entitled to it; she had lived with the woman, hadn’t she? Elizabeta looked down at her gown and smoothed its many ruffles. Wearing skirts came uneasily to her still and the fashions seemed to only grow more absurd by the year.
She was sixteen and more than ready to be married.
Irritated, she got to her feet and went over to the townhouse’s window. If she looked just hard enough, she could make out the imposing battlements of the Academy. There were other institutions of higher learning in the city but everyone knew what you were talking about when you referred to the Academy. She stared at it in nothing more than the most worrying longing.
“We’re going there some day,” the green eyed boy said in conviction that made priests blanch.
“Sure we will. Where are you getting the sponsor, huh? Out of your ass?” jeered his companion, who was in the middle of dissembling one of the cheap mechanicals stolen from a holiday shop display. It was painted garishly yellow and had once sported curly brass plumes upon its head and tail, now long since pried off for the metal.
“They have tests, you moron,” snorted the first speaker, running a hand through tangled brown hair. “And watch it. That thing has a spring right in the-”
“Shut up, I know what I’m doing.” A tiny scream of tortured metal and then-
Elizabeta fingered a small scar along her temple, so small as to be nearly invisible. But she knew it was there. And that was enough, wasn’t it?
She turned away from the window, irritated with herself for mooning over things like half the debutantes she knew (the other half lacked the mental capacity of a flower pot). Instead, she went over to her desk and cleared away its half-finished water colors and pastel sketches. At least her artwork was more than acceptable, to the delight of her bohemian sketching instructor and to the morose irritation of her etiquette instructors (“Young ladies do not excel.”).
The only piece of jewelry the girl wore for the moment consisted of a silver chain so thin that it may as well have been a thread from which was hung a brass key. She pulled it off, using the seeming ornament to open a small drawer in her desk. From it, she pulled out a mostly dissembled box of leather, wood and assorted metallic bits. It looked frankly like a child’s attempt at one of those new “light picture machines,” being about a third of the size of those ponderous things. She sat at her chair and began to tinker with it, using a small lantern to examine for any cracks or leaks at the joins. It was a pity she could not get her hands on a welder’s torch. She made do with her metal hooks and lantern flame.
Elizabeta held up her newest efforts, the box fitting comfortably in her hand. The makeshift welding had left ugly weals on the patina brass edges but that could be fixed all too easily. Her lips pursed. Now, she had gotten good results with the addition of that acid…
-
She was sixteen and had undergone her presentation a month before and hadn’t had a single offer, whether serious or not. Her father had been pathetically- attentive? That seemed to be his general modus operandi with her, perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of desperation. It would have ill-fitted any real father and to see the still dignified military man at it was frankly rather embarrassing (for his sake, not hers).
So she slipped away from the glittering ballroom and away from the veranda (where those “courting” couples were up to things that would make the chaperones combust). Furtively glancing around, she lifted up her voluminous hoopskirt, took out her new “camera” (thanks to her Latin instructor), and began to hunt her marks.
Lady Etoile was at it again with a new paramour, though everyone knew that. Elizabeta kept a death grip on her camera though, even as the aperture slid open, right when her fingers were over it. Her head whirled as she spat out several interesting curses that she had learned from the mechanics and then she froze.
Roderich Edelstein, scion of House Edelstein, was staring down at her through his delicate spectacles.
Now if this were a story, she would have been helped up and their eyes would have met. She would have gone away from the ball in a happy daze. Sadly, this was not to be the case. Elizabeta settled for hiding her camera in the folds of her skirt (for once glad for its voluminous mass), got to her feet herself (not caring how unladylike that seemed), flashed him a brief, brittle smile after the shortest of curtseys, and bustled back to the ball.
And then she was promptly surprised to receive an invitation to a card party at the Edelsteins the next day.
8 PM
She was in the hangar, of course, examining the newest Tiercel. Needless to say, she was not terribly impressed.
Gilbert had been in a foul mood that day. He trudged back to the hangar with a limp and a growing temper and it just about snapped when he saw a figure dressed in pale green (which stuck out like spring grass against cobblestones) examining his airship. Then that figure had turned around. And stared right at him.
The girl was pretty enough. Big green eyes, red brown hair fastened into one of those fancy updo under a little black hat. And… his eyes went downward. But then his irritation flooded right back.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, never mind that this could result in his getting his ass handed to him should this chick be some higher up’s daughter.
The girl was still staring at him, her eyes going to his hair and eyes and then right to the Iron Cross he wore at his throat. She didn’t look horrified or guilty, merely rather thoughtful.
“What’s your name?” she asked and there was something- familiar about that voice. The tone, maybe.
“Sergeant Gilbert Beilschmidt. The awesome Sergeant, of course.” He gave her the tooth baring smile that made girls blush.
Her mouth split open into a wide smile and then she slowly approached him. He didn’t take a step back though some voice of self-preservation decided to ring alarm bells. She reached out, as if to trace his face, she leaned in- And punched him right across the face.
“What kind of shit work have you been doing, Gilbo you moron?”
“You know, you should propose to her.”
“The fuck, Francis?”
The gold-haired brothel master smiled that broken mirror smile of his (all glitter and angles and shards). He reached out to languidly pour another glass of wine for Gilbert.
“You’re head over heels for the woman, Gilbert. It’s sickeningly sweet watching you moon over her, my friend.”
Gilbert sputtered another curse and the languid-eyed foreigner on the other couch laughed and almost choked on his sherry.
“Francisco is correct,” said the dark clad man, grinning and tossing back his tangled black curls from his eyes. Light glinted eerily on one of them, which looked just a little too flat, a little too shining. “You are over the moon about her.”
“I am fucking not,” snapped Gilbert. “Antonio, you smoking what the damn frog is?”
“Or is it Edelstein again?” hummed Francis, adjusting his pale silk robe. He idly traced his fingers along the blue roses along the hems, as though they were real flowers. “You can always propose to him, you know.”
“You are one fucked up bastard,” pronounced Gilbert.
And it wasn’t anything that they didn’t know already. Because they were all fucked up bastards. That’s what kept them in this stupidly luxurious little room, with Antonio drinking sherry by the bottle (but his knives weren’t ever too far away, his sword leaning just by his hand), with Francis languidly smoking flower-scented stuff in a long gold pipe. By proximity, the other two would be just as lost in sweet dreams by the end of the night. But Gilbert didn’t mind too much- Much.
-
Elizabeta always changed behind a makeshift curtain and the few times he had tried to peek (on principle!), she had seized the frying pan that had somehow been there and had bashed him over the head with it. His head still rang from it.
She fastened up her hair tighter and wrapped an oil cloth around it as she approached the Tiercel. Gilbird twittered at her and she absentmindedly caught the yellow painted metal missile that hurled itself at her.
“Always did have a thing with animals,” she remarked with a grin as she cradled the mechanical bird in her hands. The machine chirped and sang a few bars of a cracked, off key tune. Gilbert snorted and went to get another spanner.
They never talked that much while working, except to hurl insults at each other about the quality of the work (never anything personal…mostly, except when Elizabeta would make crude remarks about Gilbert’s “five meters”). Somehow, they ended up under the craft, fixing the fuel lines yet again (“Dammit, Gilbert, learn to weld!”). That was when he caught her hand, stripped off her glove and shoved the ring onto it. The “ring” was nothing more than the rim of a spigot. But he’d done his best to polish it, even etch something on it that might have been a cross. She stared at him and at the makeshift ring on her finger.
“If this is some kind of joke, Gilbert,” she began.
“It’s not,” he snapped. “You keep bitching about the posh stuff, right? I have some… I have something saved up.”
He didn’t look at her. And his conscience yelled “Coward!” at him. Funny how that voice sounded like Eli’s voice (not Elizabeta’s).
“Gilbert. I was going to tell you. Roderich proposed.”
His blood ran cold. He slowly turned his head so that he could look at her. She swallowed and pulled out a thin, thin chain from under her work coveralls. On it was that odd key and a gold ring set with a single diamond. Its facets sent glittering points of light mockingly around the place.
“Fine,” he found himself saying. “Fine. Go do what you want.”
10 PM
There were objections to his marriage of course. He was the heir, after all. The Edelsteins were an ancient family and as it were, he stood twelfth in line to the throne, a proximity considered uncomfortable yet somehow prestigious (those who admired the trappings of power rarely had it). But he didn’t care. He argued calmly that House Héderváry was also of a noble line, was also old, despite their somewhat limited fortunes. That hadn’t stifled arguments but that hadn’t roused more. Only when he quite firmly said that he would step down from his position did the arguments stop at all.
And so, he’d married Elizabeta Héderváry in a quiet wedding unremarked by the society pages.
She was hardly the spitfire hellion or the ill-mannered dolt that rumors painted her as in those first days. Which puzzled him, as he found himself coming to a dutiful matron who kept out of his way and said nothing out of turn. One night, he touched her bare shoulder and found himself asking, “Are you happy?”
She looked at him with wide green eyes in the darkness. “Of course I am,” she replied. “Why else would have I said ‘yes’?”
He didn’t ask her that every day but sometimes, she would peer at him with those curious eyes of hers (eyes that seemed so innocent and yet so very old, old enough to make him feel like an infant in the privacy of his own mind). Sometimes, she would repeat that phrase. “Why else would have I said ‘yes’?” She would always say it gently but never mockingly, though it would always make him feel just a little foolish.
It was inappropriate for a man to pay a call on a married man’s wife but Roderich wasn’t about to lecture Beilschmidt on that. First, because it was rude to indicate another’s faux pas, and second, it was, as Elizabeta would put it, as fruitless as teaching a goat to sing (“It’s a waste of time and it only annoys the goat.”).
As it were, the Sergeant-Engineer sat in his armchair, feet propped on his desk. He grinned at Roderich but there was no mirth in his smile.
“Beilschmidt.”
“Edelstein.” The pale-haired man was holding that strange flying machine again, the one shaped like a brilliantly yellow canary.
“I put the state secrets into a different drawer,” Roderich said, deadpan.
“The one with the edelweiss key? Nothing I don’t know already.” The young man swung his legs off the desk. “By the way, someone tried to send your wife a late wedding present. Almond flavored.” The man tapped his gloved fingertips onto the smooth wood and glass top of the desk in an erratic tattoo, the broken rhythm irking Roderich to no end. “I thought you nobles knew subtlety.”
“Some more than others.”
Then with a surge, the other man had come up to him, sending the chair crashing to the ground, and Roderich could smell bitter cherry liquor on his breath. He knew that he would be finding an empty, cracked bottle in the rosewood bar to his left. But he was more occupied by a pair of red-violet eyes. The color had only deepened over the years but the touch of purple only made the Sergeant-Engineer’s gaze seem that much more disturbing.
“Are you quite finished?” asked Roderich, stiffly.
Leather gloved fingers suddenly gripped the nobleman’s chin, tilting his face roughly this way and that. Beilschmidt spat a curse and turned away, heading out the door.
“I’m going east, if that means anything to you,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t stay up too late worrying!”
“I never do.”
Roderich trusted his wife. He knew that she took promises seriously. Her relationship with Beilschmidt consisted of nothing more than two mechanically inclined individuals (and several less than ladylike exchanges of curses).
And yet… when the message came at the door, with a black covered box, he saw her turn white and began to shake. He forced the messenger in his stoic black uniform out and as soon as the bearer of the news had left, Elizabeta ghosted past Roderich, went to her private study, and locked the door behind her. She emerged hours later, red-eyed and tight-lipped, and her husband pretended that he had not passed by the door several times and had heard her sobs.
12 AM
It had been nearly a year. She rocked the cradle gently and gazed at the slumbering child without really looking at it. But her fingers reached in to gently touch the wisps of ash blonde hair and soft, pale skin.
Roderich hadn’t been happy about her choice in name. But she had insisted and he had given in, naturally. Perhaps Gilbert would laugh himself sick to think of Roderich’s child named after him (and this was Roderich’s child, despite the pale hair that led to arched eyebrows by the servants and those few visitors they had allowed).
It was a little sound but she was always alert. She slipped from the nursery on ghost feet, glad that being sequestered in the house allowed her to eschew corsets and hoops. Her hand reached into her pocket to reach for her gun.
Roderich never left her unguarded, not when some would prefer that Edelstein’s heir would be free to remarry even now (though the birth of the heir’s heir perhaps lent them a respite, not that Elizabeta ever allowed herself that complacency). But she never trusted the guards her husband had procured. The best guarding, as far as she was concerned, was in allowing her to do what was necessary and staying out of her way.
She slipped down the hall on stocking feet as there was a crash from the doorway. Outside, the wind howled with a bitter late winter storm. She glanced out the window and kept her grip tighter on the pistol.
Then she froze at the top of the stairs as a voice bellowed raucously, “Oi! Pretty boy! Eli! Where the hell are you?”
Wind and rain blew in through the door and drenched the filthy figure in the foyer. Water dripped from uneven shoulders and the crudely bandaged stump of a right arm. But the eyes were still the same, the mouth still twisted and full of eerily pristine teeth, which were bared into a terrifying grin.
Gilbert Beilschmidt met her eyes and grinned wider. “That’s twenty points for me, Eli. Where’s your fucking camera so I can remember this?”
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): Drama/Angst/Steampunk/AU/Romance
Character(s)|Pairing(s): Austria/Hungary, Prussia/Hungary
Rating/Warning(s): PG-13, gruesome imagery, cursing
Word Count: 4,222
Summary: For dragon_gypsy , as part of the NCorp Secret Santa exchange. Steampunk AU, as told over several years and several hours. Some things change and some things endure like clockwork.
2 PM
Gilbert wasn’t too surprised when Eli never showed up again on the eve of his eleventh birthday. At least, he told himself that as he slogged through sleet, ankle deep in shit. But the old man would be grouchy for coming home this early so before he crossed the crumbling Bridge of Old Moons, he turned around to head back to the harbor and landing strips, the mudlarking territories and the old beats.
On the other hand, Gilbert was surprised that he even had a birthday. But it was all that he was going by to trust that he was eleven, not twelve or ten. Eleven.
He steered clear of the rock strewn shores by the filthy river; no one in their right mind would be mudlarking right now but it didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a snitch perched nearby, ready to go flying off to the gangs should an interloper attempt to scavenge on hard won territory.
No one was around when he got to one of the older airship hangars, ducking around to the back and scuttling up a rickety flight of rusting iron stairs. Still, he checked the traps and ducked in time to miss the beam that would start leaning just so… He surveyed the attic mutely, the sleet hammering on the filthy window in an erratic rhythm.
It didn’t seem right, without Eli here. Too damn quiet. He hated quiet.
Gilbert went to the wiggly floorboard and pried it up with the blade of his knife. Then he tugged out their “safe” (a battered tin painted black). It took some time for him to pry off the top; it had nearly rusted shut thanks to the damn sleet and the shitty building. He stared at the contents without really seeing them.
A small acid fuel cell carefully wrapped in waterproof silk. Loose coins or maybe just rusting disks of metal. A coil of copper wire. A rosary missing half its seed pearl beads. Several blue prints on thin, thin rice paper (kept in a cracked leather case to protect against moisture). He went through it idly, only to encounter something wrapped in a bit of discarded gold-colored foil. Brow furrowing, he picked it up; it was much heavier than it looked.
Undoing the wrapping carefully, he then stared at the heavy black Iron Cross in his hand. Or rather, the note on top of it.
It’s yours.
Nothing else. Nothing more.
He stared at it again and his cold fingers curled around the ancient metal. His left cheek began to ache in a distant memory (Damn if Eli had a hell of a right hook) and he could taste mud mingling with blood from a split lip. Eli’s smile had been irregular (having finally lost that tooth he’d been wiggling for weeks) but triumphant.
Gilbert traced his thumb over surface of the medal. Time had taken its toll and whoever this had belonged to, whoever had had this pinned to his chest, would never be known, name and date having been long excised from its surface. It was frankly a miracle that they’d ever found this in the muck by the harbor (If Gilbert ever believed in miracles). There was no question about selling it and no chance of wheedling a reward out of an owner. So they’d kept it. And bitched about it. And punched the ever loving shit out of each other in the way only street kids could.
“I found it first, you bastard!”
“I picked it up first, you twit.” Then Eli had paused and hadn’t quite smirked. His lips twisted slightly too much to be a regular smile. “And if I die, you can have it. Or if you get it out of my cold, dead fingers.” And he had taken off down the street, Gilbert hurling after him and screeching, even when they barreled into a wheelbarrow filled with rotting fish and earned several clouts to the ear apiece.
That’s when it hit him the hardest, harder than any sucker punch Eli could deliver. His fingers tightened around the medal and he closed his eyes tightly.
“I don’t need you,” he snarled to the stagnant air and the sounds of sleet. “I don’t fucking need you, you pain in the ass!”
Gilbert came home late as usual, going up to his attic room with a tin shoved under his coat and a heavy weight around his neck.
4 PM
There were multiple… incidents in their acquaintance but Roderich Edelstein would always remember two (to his profoundest irritation). The first time they had encountered each other, it could have been out of some trite novel.
At fifteen years old, Roderich Edelstein was considered almost more than ready to be accepted into the glittering and restrictive arms of the Haut Ton, which made him wonder why his carriage was lingering in a less than pleasant sector of the city. He closed his philosophy text and pulled the two curtains (one velvet for warmth, one gauze for insects) and mused upon the scene. The coachman was cursing very foully, something about a gear catching.
Lips tightening, the young aristocrat made to close the curtains again, only to find his body moving backwards instinctively as something hurtled right at the mechanical carriage and yanked open its door and hurled itself inside the velvet and suede upholstered interior all within a space of twenty seconds. Roderich reached for his pistol only to find a knife already pressed at his throat.
“I wouldn’t do that, pretty,” said a scratched tenor. In the dim darkness of the interior, the dark haired boy could see light glinting off a reddish iris.
“What is the meaning of this?” asked the young lord in his iciest voice.
“Just passing through, Herr,” said the intruder, flashing a lightning fast, lightning bright grin.
He could get glimpses of things, like looking at a scene through a keyhole (not that such subterfuge could ever be attributed to an Edelstein, especially so… coarse). A mismatched array of clothing under a far too new, far too clean military jacket. An infantry officer’s jacket. Wisps of hair that could have been pale blonde under all that grime escaped from a hat too big. Of course, curiously red eyes (who could possibly have eyes like that?). Roderich found himself facing a heavy Iron Cross hanging from the creature’s neck as a grubby paw reached up to the brass wire container overhead, seizing a bottle of wine.
He yelped in a most undignified manner as the paw then flattened over his chest. The creature grinned again, flashing astonishingly pale teeth for such a denizen of the streets. His canines were disturbingly pronounced. Then his expression turned… puzzled?
“You’re a boy?”
Roderich sputtered. “I most certainly am male, if that is what you mean! Get out!”
The creature muttered something under his breath about confusing genders and boys too pretty to be girls. He grinned anyways. “Thanks for the drink and the talk, Herr,” he said, somehow managing to pull the knife away, pat Roderich’s cheek and dive out the other door to the streets in a matter of moments, also somehow managing to disappear into the swirling crowds of the city like a ghost.
The next time he met the wild-eyed… brute, it was when both of them were one and twenty. Roderich Edelstein walked through the ranks of the infantry mutely with the rest of his classmates at the Academy. His eyes fell onto one Sergeant, a man too young to have such a rank but who wore a very old Iron Cross indeed.
The man kept his eyes ahead, but his side of his mouth slowly curled upwards. “Hello, pretty,” whispered the still scratchy, still high tenor.
And that bespoke much of Sergeant-Engineer Gilbert Beilschmidt’s and Colonel Roderich Edelstein’s professional acquaintance with each other.
6 PM
They called her “Héderváry’s bastard daughter.” And that was the politest of the remarks, really, murmured behind painted fans and exchanged in the fashionable salons. Never mind her father attempted to allay rumors by having her be adopted formally, as though she were some foundling in truth, instead of his indiscretion with a maid.
She paused. She was being too hard on her father, admittedly. Even she couldn’t think of her mother with the most gracious of terms, with the term “scheming minx” being the most charitable that she could think of. But she was entitled to it; she had lived with the woman, hadn’t she? Elizabeta looked down at her gown and smoothed its many ruffles. Wearing skirts came uneasily to her still and the fashions seemed to only grow more absurd by the year.
She was sixteen and more than ready to be married.
Irritated, she got to her feet and went over to the townhouse’s window. If she looked just hard enough, she could make out the imposing battlements of the Academy. There were other institutions of higher learning in the city but everyone knew what you were talking about when you referred to the Academy. She stared at it in nothing more than the most worrying longing.
“We’re going there some day,” the green eyed boy said in conviction that made priests blanch.
“Sure we will. Where are you getting the sponsor, huh? Out of your ass?” jeered his companion, who was in the middle of dissembling one of the cheap mechanicals stolen from a holiday shop display. It was painted garishly yellow and had once sported curly brass plumes upon its head and tail, now long since pried off for the metal.
“They have tests, you moron,” snorted the first speaker, running a hand through tangled brown hair. “And watch it. That thing has a spring right in the-”
“Shut up, I know what I’m doing.” A tiny scream of tortured metal and then-
Elizabeta fingered a small scar along her temple, so small as to be nearly invisible. But she knew it was there. And that was enough, wasn’t it?
She turned away from the window, irritated with herself for mooning over things like half the debutantes she knew (the other half lacked the mental capacity of a flower pot). Instead, she went over to her desk and cleared away its half-finished water colors and pastel sketches. At least her artwork was more than acceptable, to the delight of her bohemian sketching instructor and to the morose irritation of her etiquette instructors (“Young ladies do not excel.”).
The only piece of jewelry the girl wore for the moment consisted of a silver chain so thin that it may as well have been a thread from which was hung a brass key. She pulled it off, using the seeming ornament to open a small drawer in her desk. From it, she pulled out a mostly dissembled box of leather, wood and assorted metallic bits. It looked frankly like a child’s attempt at one of those new “light picture machines,” being about a third of the size of those ponderous things. She sat at her chair and began to tinker with it, using a small lantern to examine for any cracks or leaks at the joins. It was a pity she could not get her hands on a welder’s torch. She made do with her metal hooks and lantern flame.
Elizabeta held up her newest efforts, the box fitting comfortably in her hand. The makeshift welding had left ugly weals on the patina brass edges but that could be fixed all too easily. Her lips pursed. Now, she had gotten good results with the addition of that acid…
-
She was sixteen and had undergone her presentation a month before and hadn’t had a single offer, whether serious or not. Her father had been pathetically- attentive? That seemed to be his general modus operandi with her, perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of desperation. It would have ill-fitted any real father and to see the still dignified military man at it was frankly rather embarrassing (for his sake, not hers).
So she slipped away from the glittering ballroom and away from the veranda (where those “courting” couples were up to things that would make the chaperones combust). Furtively glancing around, she lifted up her voluminous hoopskirt, took out her new “camera” (thanks to her Latin instructor), and began to hunt her marks.
Lady Etoile was at it again with a new paramour, though everyone knew that. Elizabeta kept a death grip on her camera though, even as the aperture slid open, right when her fingers were over it. Her head whirled as she spat out several interesting curses that she had learned from the mechanics and then she froze.
Roderich Edelstein, scion of House Edelstein, was staring down at her through his delicate spectacles.
Now if this were a story, she would have been helped up and their eyes would have met. She would have gone away from the ball in a happy daze. Sadly, this was not to be the case. Elizabeta settled for hiding her camera in the folds of her skirt (for once glad for its voluminous mass), got to her feet herself (not caring how unladylike that seemed), flashed him a brief, brittle smile after the shortest of curtseys, and bustled back to the ball.
And then she was promptly surprised to receive an invitation to a card party at the Edelsteins the next day.
8 PM
She was in the hangar, of course, examining the newest Tiercel. Needless to say, she was not terribly impressed.
Gilbert had been in a foul mood that day. He trudged back to the hangar with a limp and a growing temper and it just about snapped when he saw a figure dressed in pale green (which stuck out like spring grass against cobblestones) examining his airship. Then that figure had turned around. And stared right at him.
The girl was pretty enough. Big green eyes, red brown hair fastened into one of those fancy updo under a little black hat. And… his eyes went downward. But then his irritation flooded right back.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, never mind that this could result in his getting his ass handed to him should this chick be some higher up’s daughter.
The girl was still staring at him, her eyes going to his hair and eyes and then right to the Iron Cross he wore at his throat. She didn’t look horrified or guilty, merely rather thoughtful.
“What’s your name?” she asked and there was something- familiar about that voice. The tone, maybe.
“Sergeant Gilbert Beilschmidt. The awesome Sergeant, of course.” He gave her the tooth baring smile that made girls blush.
Her mouth split open into a wide smile and then she slowly approached him. He didn’t take a step back though some voice of self-preservation decided to ring alarm bells. She reached out, as if to trace his face, she leaned in- And punched him right across the face.
“What kind of shit work have you been doing, Gilbo you moron?”
“You know, you should propose to her.”
“The fuck, Francis?”
The gold-haired brothel master smiled that broken mirror smile of his (all glitter and angles and shards). He reached out to languidly pour another glass of wine for Gilbert.
“You’re head over heels for the woman, Gilbert. It’s sickeningly sweet watching you moon over her, my friend.”
Gilbert sputtered another curse and the languid-eyed foreigner on the other couch laughed and almost choked on his sherry.
“Francisco is correct,” said the dark clad man, grinning and tossing back his tangled black curls from his eyes. Light glinted eerily on one of them, which looked just a little too flat, a little too shining. “You are over the moon about her.”
“I am fucking not,” snapped Gilbert. “Antonio, you smoking what the damn frog is?”
“Or is it Edelstein again?” hummed Francis, adjusting his pale silk robe. He idly traced his fingers along the blue roses along the hems, as though they were real flowers. “You can always propose to him, you know.”
“You are one fucked up bastard,” pronounced Gilbert.
And it wasn’t anything that they didn’t know already. Because they were all fucked up bastards. That’s what kept them in this stupidly luxurious little room, with Antonio drinking sherry by the bottle (but his knives weren’t ever too far away, his sword leaning just by his hand), with Francis languidly smoking flower-scented stuff in a long gold pipe. By proximity, the other two would be just as lost in sweet dreams by the end of the night. But Gilbert didn’t mind too much- Much.
-
Elizabeta always changed behind a makeshift curtain and the few times he had tried to peek (on principle!), she had seized the frying pan that had somehow been there and had bashed him over the head with it. His head still rang from it.
She fastened up her hair tighter and wrapped an oil cloth around it as she approached the Tiercel. Gilbird twittered at her and she absentmindedly caught the yellow painted metal missile that hurled itself at her.
“Always did have a thing with animals,” she remarked with a grin as she cradled the mechanical bird in her hands. The machine chirped and sang a few bars of a cracked, off key tune. Gilbert snorted and went to get another spanner.
They never talked that much while working, except to hurl insults at each other about the quality of the work (never anything personal…mostly, except when Elizabeta would make crude remarks about Gilbert’s “five meters”). Somehow, they ended up under the craft, fixing the fuel lines yet again (“Dammit, Gilbert, learn to weld!”). That was when he caught her hand, stripped off her glove and shoved the ring onto it. The “ring” was nothing more than the rim of a spigot. But he’d done his best to polish it, even etch something on it that might have been a cross. She stared at him and at the makeshift ring on her finger.
“If this is some kind of joke, Gilbert,” she began.
“It’s not,” he snapped. “You keep bitching about the posh stuff, right? I have some… I have something saved up.”
He didn’t look at her. And his conscience yelled “Coward!” at him. Funny how that voice sounded like Eli’s voice (not Elizabeta’s).
“Gilbert. I was going to tell you. Roderich proposed.”
His blood ran cold. He slowly turned his head so that he could look at her. She swallowed and pulled out a thin, thin chain from under her work coveralls. On it was that odd key and a gold ring set with a single diamond. Its facets sent glittering points of light mockingly around the place.
“Fine,” he found himself saying. “Fine. Go do what you want.”
10 PM
There were objections to his marriage of course. He was the heir, after all. The Edelsteins were an ancient family and as it were, he stood twelfth in line to the throne, a proximity considered uncomfortable yet somehow prestigious (those who admired the trappings of power rarely had it). But he didn’t care. He argued calmly that House Héderváry was also of a noble line, was also old, despite their somewhat limited fortunes. That hadn’t stifled arguments but that hadn’t roused more. Only when he quite firmly said that he would step down from his position did the arguments stop at all.
And so, he’d married Elizabeta Héderváry in a quiet wedding unremarked by the society pages.
She was hardly the spitfire hellion or the ill-mannered dolt that rumors painted her as in those first days. Which puzzled him, as he found himself coming to a dutiful matron who kept out of his way and said nothing out of turn. One night, he touched her bare shoulder and found himself asking, “Are you happy?”
She looked at him with wide green eyes in the darkness. “Of course I am,” she replied. “Why else would have I said ‘yes’?”
He didn’t ask her that every day but sometimes, she would peer at him with those curious eyes of hers (eyes that seemed so innocent and yet so very old, old enough to make him feel like an infant in the privacy of his own mind). Sometimes, she would repeat that phrase. “Why else would have I said ‘yes’?” She would always say it gently but never mockingly, though it would always make him feel just a little foolish.
It was inappropriate for a man to pay a call on a married man’s wife but Roderich wasn’t about to lecture Beilschmidt on that. First, because it was rude to indicate another’s faux pas, and second, it was, as Elizabeta would put it, as fruitless as teaching a goat to sing (“It’s a waste of time and it only annoys the goat.”).
As it were, the Sergeant-Engineer sat in his armchair, feet propped on his desk. He grinned at Roderich but there was no mirth in his smile.
“Beilschmidt.”
“Edelstein.” The pale-haired man was holding that strange flying machine again, the one shaped like a brilliantly yellow canary.
“I put the state secrets into a different drawer,” Roderich said, deadpan.
“The one with the edelweiss key? Nothing I don’t know already.” The young man swung his legs off the desk. “By the way, someone tried to send your wife a late wedding present. Almond flavored.” The man tapped his gloved fingertips onto the smooth wood and glass top of the desk in an erratic tattoo, the broken rhythm irking Roderich to no end. “I thought you nobles knew subtlety.”
“Some more than others.”
Then with a surge, the other man had come up to him, sending the chair crashing to the ground, and Roderich could smell bitter cherry liquor on his breath. He knew that he would be finding an empty, cracked bottle in the rosewood bar to his left. But he was more occupied by a pair of red-violet eyes. The color had only deepened over the years but the touch of purple only made the Sergeant-Engineer’s gaze seem that much more disturbing.
“Are you quite finished?” asked Roderich, stiffly.
Leather gloved fingers suddenly gripped the nobleman’s chin, tilting his face roughly this way and that. Beilschmidt spat a curse and turned away, heading out the door.
“I’m going east, if that means anything to you,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t stay up too late worrying!”
“I never do.”
Roderich trusted his wife. He knew that she took promises seriously. Her relationship with Beilschmidt consisted of nothing more than two mechanically inclined individuals (and several less than ladylike exchanges of curses).
And yet… when the message came at the door, with a black covered box, he saw her turn white and began to shake. He forced the messenger in his stoic black uniform out and as soon as the bearer of the news had left, Elizabeta ghosted past Roderich, went to her private study, and locked the door behind her. She emerged hours later, red-eyed and tight-lipped, and her husband pretended that he had not passed by the door several times and had heard her sobs.
12 AM
It had been nearly a year. She rocked the cradle gently and gazed at the slumbering child without really looking at it. But her fingers reached in to gently touch the wisps of ash blonde hair and soft, pale skin.
Roderich hadn’t been happy about her choice in name. But she had insisted and he had given in, naturally. Perhaps Gilbert would laugh himself sick to think of Roderich’s child named after him (and this was Roderich’s child, despite the pale hair that led to arched eyebrows by the servants and those few visitors they had allowed).
It was a little sound but she was always alert. She slipped from the nursery on ghost feet, glad that being sequestered in the house allowed her to eschew corsets and hoops. Her hand reached into her pocket to reach for her gun.
Roderich never left her unguarded, not when some would prefer that Edelstein’s heir would be free to remarry even now (though the birth of the heir’s heir perhaps lent them a respite, not that Elizabeta ever allowed herself that complacency). But she never trusted the guards her husband had procured. The best guarding, as far as she was concerned, was in allowing her to do what was necessary and staying out of her way.
She slipped down the hall on stocking feet as there was a crash from the doorway. Outside, the wind howled with a bitter late winter storm. She glanced out the window and kept her grip tighter on the pistol.
Then she froze at the top of the stairs as a voice bellowed raucously, “Oi! Pretty boy! Eli! Where the hell are you?”
Wind and rain blew in through the door and drenched the filthy figure in the foyer. Water dripped from uneven shoulders and the crudely bandaged stump of a right arm. But the eyes were still the same, the mouth still twisted and full of eerily pristine teeth, which were bared into a terrifying grin.
Gilbert Beilschmidt met her eyes and grinned wider. “That’s twenty points for me, Eli. Where’s your fucking camera so I can remember this?”