[FICATHON] Slovenly Unhandsome, for lite_bright
Title: Slovenly Unhandsome
Author: gileonnen
Play: Richard II and 1 Henry IV
Recipient: lite_bright
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Hotspur, Kate, Hal
Warnings: Historical AU
Rating: PG-13
Notes: lite_bright's prompt was enticingly nonspecific, so I took a few ideas from it (student AU, unpleasant Hal, Percy Sr.) and ran away laughing. Hope that works for the recipient!
Summary: War is Hell; reconstruction is purgatory. Hotspur recuperates from World War II.
After the war, Hotspur doesn't trot off to school like what mates he had could afford it--smacks to him of middle-class pretensions, and he's one to call a spade a spade. While everybody's lucky charm Prince Harry is nancing about in Cambridge or Oxford or wherever the fuck he went, Hotspur's helping to rebuild fucking Germany. Keeping the Ivans out of the English zone, because as the old sarge used to say, "Even if he's not a commie your typical Russian is a damn mean blighter, pertic'larly if he's got vodka in him." That was how he always said it: pertic'lar. There'd been a few green blokes who'd had their sarge impressions down to a science, back before they'd shipped out and got blown to hell.
That's the way it had been, even at the beginning. It was either crouch unarmed in the cellar and say your prayers, or crouch with your gun and your mates and say your prayers; there were thousands of men who shouldn't have been there, and Harry Percy had met hundreds of them. Could've listed off their names if he'd wanted to, because they'd been matey back in basic training, but he has never made a point of dwelling on the dead. When he dreams about them, they're never Tommy who'd never cleaned his teeth before, never Ned the fop with his hat cocked at the regulation angle. Easier if the fragments have no names.
Not like it would've been better sitting pretty on the old Percy family estate in Northumberland, watching the kids from the city come streaming in with tags on them and pale, soot-touched faces. A man couldn't breathe behind blackout cloth, with a dozen kiddies having the run of the place, and there was the prince coming by with his friends and his photographers to show the babes back in London what they were missing. Made Hotspur damned sick.
"Let him be, you goose," Kate had said, before he'd gone to war. "He brings up people's spirits."
"And drinks their whisky," he'd grumbled in reply. "What should I do, Kate? Let him loll on my mum's furniture and have his picture taken with the kiddies? Answer him nicely when he tries to talk about sport? The bastard thinks that he can just waltz in here with his pack of cronies and his eau de cologne--and the worst of it is, my dad's hospitable to him, all because he wants what he got promised after the run on London--!"
"We've all got to do our bit," she'd said, laughing. He'd thought of it later, freezing half to death in the Oflag--all got to do our bit. "Your bit must be putting up with the Prince of England."
He hadn't put up with it any longer when he heard how the prince'd raided an army convoy to get a load of 24-hour ration packs for the kiddies of England. Yessir, Prince Harry, everybody's lucky charm, regular Puck, him.
Didn't matter if it'd been a "raid" only in name, pictures taken in Robin Hood kit. Didn't matter that the army had handed over the damn rations; Hotspur had seen the propaganda posters. We are not so POOR, says the smug-looking sergeant as he hands Robin Hal a bag of gold, that we cannot help our POOREST. Damn poster had made him retch, and he'd joined up inside a week.
By now, Hotspur figures he has a better handle on how sergeants operate than the poncy-arse poster artists. He likes imagining the whole thing as grudging, grumbling, respectful and obedient only because that's what the sarge was trained to be. The head of the convoy was probably trained to cavil over hairs, and he'd have surrendered every ration pack dearly--he should have. Hotspur's seen the way the countryside got blown to hell in the Blitz; he's heard the stories about London. How everyone turned looter as soon as a fancy house got blown to hell. That does mean everyone, he's seen little kids sneaking out of the ruins of bedrooms with diamond rings in their fists--and the propaganda artists are going to try to foist off a little pale-cheeked waif as a savvy Whitechapel lad? It makes him laugh. London Endures!--but underground, on the misfortunes of others. Every kid with a bit of raisin chocolate from a ration pack means that there's a soldier who didn't get to eat.
Even during that week in London, the goddamn rogue prince was grinning at him from every poster and newspaper, just as though he'd decided to follow Hotspur south from Northumberland. If Hotspur had been the kind of man who stepped into cafes, he couldn't have stepped into one without seeing Hal's bloody smug face--the recruitment posters all had Hal kitted out with a gun and helmet, encouraging soldiers to Save England! even if Hal had said himself he'd never fired a gun in his entire life. "Not for me, hunting and soldiering," he'd said with a languid shrug. "Never even fired in that run on London." It had been a perfect day. The prince had been neatly dressed, grey jumper and pressed trousers, dark hair in that stupid bowl cut that made him look girlish and young. Damned stupid look for a hike, but the hike hadn't been either one's idea.
"You think much of the run on London?" Hotspur had asked, standing with his back to the sluggish water at the base of the valley. "Not much," Hal had answered flippantly, and Hotspur had wanted to grab him by his collar and shove him in the water--hold him there until he'd killed the bastard.
Seeing that smirk on the recruitment poster, Hotspur remembered the way they'd walked in lonely silence along the streambank. He still wishes he'd strangled Prince Hal in the water on that brilliantly sunny day.
London endured, a damn lot of soldiers starved, and the artists declared the war over. Treaties got drawn up by the kings and presidents and what-the-hell-ever Stalin was calling himself. People still get shot on the streets of Berlin, and if you're English you don't go into the Soviet zone in uniform even if you're having a bit of a parade. Kate writes every week, the way she did when he was trying to keep things from going to shit in Calais, only now he gets her letters. The superstitious types keep their wife's letters bundled up in the front pockets of their uniform, but Hotspur calls a spade a spade, and a bundle of letters isn't going to stop a bullet but might turn a chest wound septic. He's seen enough infected wounds for one lifetime, in the prison infirmary stained like a butcher's--bullet to the lungs would be better. Better drowning in blood than seeing your own flesh eat itself alive.
The word from England, Kate writes, is that old Henry's sick--like to die, which is pretty poor compensation for the fine job he did getting them through the war. Old Richard the appeaser would've bollocksed it up, handed Hitler England on a platter and then asked if he wanted Wales and Scotland for dessert. When Brienne, Valois, and Anjou had been sacrificed and Holland had fallen, no one had been surprised when Bolingbroke had called for revolution; a man had to stand for his old family holdings, and he wasn't the only lord with ties on the continent. Northumberland had followed him, old Henry Percy and young Henry Percy sending their family guard all the way to London by jeep. Felt damned medieval, deposing a king, but Hotspur could still remember the taste of fear in his mouth--his mates said it was like blood, or like metal, but it wasn't like anything else. Bolingbroke had said he wanted this bloodless, but when the king's guard had opened fire Hotspur hadn't even thought. Just like shooting grouse in August.
Even after that business, the army loved King Henry IV. He worked with Parliament; he got them money; he got things done. And all the while there was Prince Hal down with the common people, cheering them and feeding them and looting with them and seducing their women (and not just their women, if you can believe what people are saying). Forgetting about the run on London, or claiming to, comb in his pocket and trousers neatly pressed.
It would be too easy for Hotspur to be like him. Go back to England, make the right connections to prepare him for a career in the House of Lords. Learn to hobnob. Do what's expected. Or he could do like his mates and get a good education, maybe go into business for a lark. Not as though he needs the money, but Kate says that England's having a damned rough time of it, getting their industry back on the ground. Henry Percy, pillar of the community. Would be nice to give a few dozen poor saps a job.
He could take the prince of England walking in that quiet valley, by the still water, and ask him whether he thinks about the things they did in London.
Truth be told, though, he likes it here in Berlin. He's just Hotspur to the soldiers, mule-headed when he's got an idea in his head and hot-tempered when anyone tries to stop him. They make fun of his Northumberland accent--"Thought you lords were s'posed to sound posh!" they used to laugh--and his ginger hair. Everyone knows not to ask him about that time when the Germans held him, or to ask what they did to him in that camp that smelled of death and piss.
It's not that Berlin is better. It's that he never has to explain why it's bad.
Author: gileonnen
Play: Richard II and 1 Henry IV
Recipient: lite_bright
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Hotspur, Kate, Hal
Warnings: Historical AU
Rating: PG-13
Notes: lite_bright's prompt was enticingly nonspecific, so I took a few ideas from it (student AU, unpleasant Hal, Percy Sr.) and ran away laughing. Hope that works for the recipient!
Summary: War is Hell; reconstruction is purgatory. Hotspur recuperates from World War II.
After the war, Hotspur doesn't trot off to school like what mates he had could afford it--smacks to him of middle-class pretensions, and he's one to call a spade a spade. While everybody's lucky charm Prince Harry is nancing about in Cambridge or Oxford or wherever the fuck he went, Hotspur's helping to rebuild fucking Germany. Keeping the Ivans out of the English zone, because as the old sarge used to say, "Even if he's not a commie your typical Russian is a damn mean blighter, pertic'larly if he's got vodka in him." That was how he always said it: pertic'lar. There'd been a few green blokes who'd had their sarge impressions down to a science, back before they'd shipped out and got blown to hell.
That's the way it had been, even at the beginning. It was either crouch unarmed in the cellar and say your prayers, or crouch with your gun and your mates and say your prayers; there were thousands of men who shouldn't have been there, and Harry Percy had met hundreds of them. Could've listed off their names if he'd wanted to, because they'd been matey back in basic training, but he has never made a point of dwelling on the dead. When he dreams about them, they're never Tommy who'd never cleaned his teeth before, never Ned the fop with his hat cocked at the regulation angle. Easier if the fragments have no names.
Not like it would've been better sitting pretty on the old Percy family estate in Northumberland, watching the kids from the city come streaming in with tags on them and pale, soot-touched faces. A man couldn't breathe behind blackout cloth, with a dozen kiddies having the run of the place, and there was the prince coming by with his friends and his photographers to show the babes back in London what they were missing. Made Hotspur damned sick.
"Let him be, you goose," Kate had said, before he'd gone to war. "He brings up people's spirits."
"And drinks their whisky," he'd grumbled in reply. "What should I do, Kate? Let him loll on my mum's furniture and have his picture taken with the kiddies? Answer him nicely when he tries to talk about sport? The bastard thinks that he can just waltz in here with his pack of cronies and his eau de cologne--and the worst of it is, my dad's hospitable to him, all because he wants what he got promised after the run on London--!"
"We've all got to do our bit," she'd said, laughing. He'd thought of it later, freezing half to death in the Oflag--all got to do our bit. "Your bit must be putting up with the Prince of England."
He hadn't put up with it any longer when he heard how the prince'd raided an army convoy to get a load of 24-hour ration packs for the kiddies of England. Yessir, Prince Harry, everybody's lucky charm, regular Puck, him.
Didn't matter if it'd been a "raid" only in name, pictures taken in Robin Hood kit. Didn't matter that the army had handed over the damn rations; Hotspur had seen the propaganda posters. We are not so POOR, says the smug-looking sergeant as he hands Robin Hal a bag of gold, that we cannot help our POOREST. Damn poster had made him retch, and he'd joined up inside a week.
By now, Hotspur figures he has a better handle on how sergeants operate than the poncy-arse poster artists. He likes imagining the whole thing as grudging, grumbling, respectful and obedient only because that's what the sarge was trained to be. The head of the convoy was probably trained to cavil over hairs, and he'd have surrendered every ration pack dearly--he should have. Hotspur's seen the way the countryside got blown to hell in the Blitz; he's heard the stories about London. How everyone turned looter as soon as a fancy house got blown to hell. That does mean everyone, he's seen little kids sneaking out of the ruins of bedrooms with diamond rings in their fists--and the propaganda artists are going to try to foist off a little pale-cheeked waif as a savvy Whitechapel lad? It makes him laugh. London Endures!--but underground, on the misfortunes of others. Every kid with a bit of raisin chocolate from a ration pack means that there's a soldier who didn't get to eat.
Even during that week in London, the goddamn rogue prince was grinning at him from every poster and newspaper, just as though he'd decided to follow Hotspur south from Northumberland. If Hotspur had been the kind of man who stepped into cafes, he couldn't have stepped into one without seeing Hal's bloody smug face--the recruitment posters all had Hal kitted out with a gun and helmet, encouraging soldiers to Save England! even if Hal had said himself he'd never fired a gun in his entire life. "Not for me, hunting and soldiering," he'd said with a languid shrug. "Never even fired in that run on London." It had been a perfect day. The prince had been neatly dressed, grey jumper and pressed trousers, dark hair in that stupid bowl cut that made him look girlish and young. Damned stupid look for a hike, but the hike hadn't been either one's idea.
"You think much of the run on London?" Hotspur had asked, standing with his back to the sluggish water at the base of the valley. "Not much," Hal had answered flippantly, and Hotspur had wanted to grab him by his collar and shove him in the water--hold him there until he'd killed the bastard.
Seeing that smirk on the recruitment poster, Hotspur remembered the way they'd walked in lonely silence along the streambank. He still wishes he'd strangled Prince Hal in the water on that brilliantly sunny day.
London endured, a damn lot of soldiers starved, and the artists declared the war over. Treaties got drawn up by the kings and presidents and what-the-hell-ever Stalin was calling himself. People still get shot on the streets of Berlin, and if you're English you don't go into the Soviet zone in uniform even if you're having a bit of a parade. Kate writes every week, the way she did when he was trying to keep things from going to shit in Calais, only now he gets her letters. The superstitious types keep their wife's letters bundled up in the front pockets of their uniform, but Hotspur calls a spade a spade, and a bundle of letters isn't going to stop a bullet but might turn a chest wound septic. He's seen enough infected wounds for one lifetime, in the prison infirmary stained like a butcher's--bullet to the lungs would be better. Better drowning in blood than seeing your own flesh eat itself alive.
The word from England, Kate writes, is that old Henry's sick--like to die, which is pretty poor compensation for the fine job he did getting them through the war. Old Richard the appeaser would've bollocksed it up, handed Hitler England on a platter and then asked if he wanted Wales and Scotland for dessert. When Brienne, Valois, and Anjou had been sacrificed and Holland had fallen, no one had been surprised when Bolingbroke had called for revolution; a man had to stand for his old family holdings, and he wasn't the only lord with ties on the continent. Northumberland had followed him, old Henry Percy and young Henry Percy sending their family guard all the way to London by jeep. Felt damned medieval, deposing a king, but Hotspur could still remember the taste of fear in his mouth--his mates said it was like blood, or like metal, but it wasn't like anything else. Bolingbroke had said he wanted this bloodless, but when the king's guard had opened fire Hotspur hadn't even thought. Just like shooting grouse in August.
Even after that business, the army loved King Henry IV. He worked with Parliament; he got them money; he got things done. And all the while there was Prince Hal down with the common people, cheering them and feeding them and looting with them and seducing their women (and not just their women, if you can believe what people are saying). Forgetting about the run on London, or claiming to, comb in his pocket and trousers neatly pressed.
It would be too easy for Hotspur to be like him. Go back to England, make the right connections to prepare him for a career in the House of Lords. Learn to hobnob. Do what's expected. Or he could do like his mates and get a good education, maybe go into business for a lark. Not as though he needs the money, but Kate says that England's having a damned rough time of it, getting their industry back on the ground. Henry Percy, pillar of the community. Would be nice to give a few dozen poor saps a job.
He could take the prince of England walking in that quiet valley, by the still water, and ask him whether he thinks about the things they did in London.
Truth be told, though, he likes it here in Berlin. He's just Hotspur to the soldiers, mule-headed when he's got an idea in his head and hot-tempered when anyone tries to stop him. They make fun of his Northumberland accent--"Thought you lords were s'posed to sound posh!" they used to laugh--and his ginger hair. Everyone knows not to ask him about that time when the Germans held him, or to ask what they did to him in that camp that smelled of death and piss.
It's not that Berlin is better. It's that he never has to explain why it's bad.