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Chapter Text

Somewhere east of Smolensk, December 1812

Snow gnawed at bone like wolves at flesh. White had never seemed so violent until now, falling not as grace, but as punishment, stinging the eyes, blinding the way home. The Grand Armée, what remained of it, stumbled west in broken columns. Men once adorned in gold lace and polished brass now looked like moving corpses. Their faces were hollow, uniforms shredded, fingers blackened by frostbite.

He had no name then. Or perhaps he had one, but it had frozen off somewhere in the snows of Polotsk or been buried in a ditch with the rest of his battery. He’d been a gunner, Canonniers Gardes-côtes, reassigned inland, absurdly, to march on Moscow. He had manned artillery with pride, until the horses died, until the wheels shattered, until the cannons were left to rust in fields of white silence. Now he was a straggler, muttering to himself in Breton under his breath, clutching a rusted bayonet as if it still had purpose.

He would have died there, half-frozen, had it not been for the column of line infantry marching under a green pompon, 1er Régiment d'Infanterie de Ligne.

“Fusilier! Why’s that man dragging his death behind us?” The voice was curt, imperious, but not unkind. Its owner dismounted from a frost-bitten mare, boots crunching down into the crusted snow. A sous-officier by the stripes and the sword: Jean, as he would later be known to the gunner.

“He’s no longer a threat,” replied the young fusilier, glancing back.

“Then he’s a burden,” Jean answered, stepping forward, eyes locked on the half-conscious gunner curled beside a tree.

“Unless he can walk,” Jean added after a pause, kneeling. “Can you stand, soldier?”

The gunner stared through him at first, lips cracked, eyes glassy. But when Jean reached out, he recoiled, not from the man, but from the question. He forced himself upright.

“Good,” Jean said, almost pleased. “Then you’ll march with us. No room for statues in the snow.”

They did not speak on the first day.

Jean had assigned him no duties, only a place at the rear of the column, behind the fusiliers and the drummer boy who no longer had a drum, only frostbitten hands. The gunner limped in silence. The bayonet he carried was no longer useful, but he kept it anyway.

The march was not a march so much as a slow unspooling of human will, threadbare, fraying, barely holding. Boots sloshed through snow that reached their calves, then their thighs, depending on the whim of the wind and the uneven, frozen earth beneath. Each step offered something new, siding stones, broken muskets, even the curled shapes of men who had simply sat down and never risen again. Breath hung in the air like smoke, each soldier a fumbling chimney emitting faint signs of life. Their greatcoats were soaked through, then frozen stiff. The cloth cracked like old parchment with each motion. Snow clung to their lashes, their mustaches, their epaulettes. The sky above them was a dull sheet of pewter, heavy and low, as if pressing down on the column, urging them into the snow-covered ground.

At the front, Jean rode no longer. The mare had collapsed somewhere near Smolensk, and he had slit her throat himself to spare her from freezing to death upright. Now he walked alongside his men, saber still strapped to his side, though he had not drawn it in days.

Behind him, the fusiliers trudged in near silence, broken only by the squeal of leather straps and the occasional cough. Their muskets were slung over their shoulders, useless in the cold unless one had the strength, and powder dry enough to reload. 

Most did not.

The gunner walked with the rest. His gait had evened slightly, the limp now less a wound and more a habit. He did not speak, but he listened. 

To the crunch of footfalls, to the rustle of canvas, to the soft thud when someone fell behind and no one stopped.

The boy without a drum stumbled often, and the gunner began to walk closer to him. Once, when the boy dropped the wooden stick he still carried, the gunner picked it up and handed it back. The boy did not thank him, only nodded. Gratitude took more strength than anyone had left to give.

Evening came slowly, not with sunset, but with a deepening gray and the sudden drop in temperature that signaled the approach of another deadly night. 

Jean called for a halt.

Not that there was anywhere to stop, only a shallow dip in the earth where wind died slightly and the trees thinned just enough to remind them they were still in Europe, not Hell. The soldiers collapsed more than sat, forming huddled clusters around the miserable flicker of fire pits coaxed to life with strips of uniform and splinters of supply wagons long abandoned.

Jean moved among them like a shepherd, checking limbs for frostbite, pulling scarves up over exposed skin, and kicking the ones who lingered too long without tending to their feet. He passed the gunner once without speaking, then again, doubling back as if some instinct had tugged his coat.

“You’ve lasted longer than I thought,” Jean said, kneeling beside him.

The gunner didn’t look up. His hands were wrapped around the bayonet, tip planted in the snow like a marker stone. He gave a faint shrug.

“I didn’t pick you up to watch you rot on your knees.”

The gunner turned slightly, his cracked lips parting just enough to speak. “Then why?”

Jean didn’t answer immediately. He pulled a scrap of paper from his coat, a page torn from a ledger, smudged with ash. On it, a list of names. Some crossed out. Others faded beyond reading.

“I keep a record,” Jean said. “Of those I lose. It’s easier if I remember the ones I keep.”

He handed the paper to the gunner without explanation. At the bottom, a name newly written in tight, careful script:

1. Le Goff? — Unconfirmed.

The gunner stared. He hadn’t heard a name spoken aloud in weeks. Maybe longer.

“You Breton?” Jean asked, casually.

The gunner nodded.

“My mother was from Saint-Malo,” Jean added. “I understood your cursing.”

A beat. Then, from the gunner, hoarse and dry: “That was for the wind.”

Jean chuckled softly and briefly. Then stood.

“Keep walking, keep cursing. That’s an order.” He tossed a thin wool blanket down beside him. “I don’t have another, but I won’t need it tonight. Take it.”

The gunner blinked.

“I said take it, not thank me,” Jean said, already turning.

Later, when the fire died and only the sound of breathing and the distant groan of the forest remained, the gunner sat awake beneath the thin wool, staring at the bayonet in his lap. The edges were dull now, the blade pitted. It would never be a soldier’s weapon again.

But he kept it clean. Because Jean had told him to. Because hands must remember they’re still hands.

And for the first time in weeks, the gunner did not dream of snow. He dreamed of a voice, firm and unyielding, calling him by a name he had almost forgotten was his.

The blanket did little. Cold still curled through his bones like smoke through cracked stone. But it was something. And so, when dawn bled pale into the sky, just a lighter shade of gray, barely enough to count, he stood.

He always stood now. First among the silent. He didn't wait for orders.

Jean noticed.

“You walk better,” he said one morning, tightening the wrap around his wrist where a bandage had frozen stiff.

The gunner gave a nod, slow and stiff.

“You eat like a rat and sleep like the dead,” Jean went on. “That’s a compliment, for what it’s worth.”

“Not much,” the gunner rasped.

Jean smirked.

Another day continued, and when a man in the column collapsed mid-step and did not rise, Jean didn’t say anything. Just turned and walked on.

The gunner bent, took the man’s scarf, then jogged a few steps to catch up.

He handed it over without a word.

Jean stared, then took it.

They walked together more after that. Not side by side, never that close, but near enough that silence began to hold shape between them. Jean would speak, sometimes, and the gunner would answer if the words deserved answering. Other times, they would just march, step after step, in rhythm with the dying continent around them.

Once, Jean handed him a crust of black bread and asked, “You ever fire on your own countrymen?”

The gunner chewed slowly. His teeth hurt. Everything hurt. But he nodded.

Jean said nothing for a long while. The only sound was snow crushed under boots and the wet cough of the man three places behind them.

Then, finally, “Same.”

He didn’t elaborate, not at first. But that night, when they huddled beneath the same collapsed wagon for a windbreak, when their breath plumed white into shared dark, Jean spoke again.

“It was in Spain,” he said quietly. “Tarragona. 1811.”

The gunner didn’t respond. Didn’t need to.

“There was a squad. Corsicans. Boys who spoke half-French, half-Latin. They'd gone missing from the line. Took food from civilians. Looted a church. Said they were hunting partisans.”

Jean stared into the dark.

“They were hungry. We were all hungry.”

His hand moved unconsciously to the hilt of his saber. It stayed sheathed.

“My captain ordered us to make an example. Not just arrest them. Punish them. Publicly.”

Jean’s voice was low. But not emotionless.

“I called two of them out myself. Watched them dig their own trench. Shot the third when he ran.”

He didn't look at the gunner. “They didn’t cry. They just looked confused. Like they’d forgotten which side we were on.”

Silence.

The wind howled through broken timber, rattled canvas. A snowflake landed on Jean’s cheek and melted instantly.

“And you?” he asked.

The gunner hesitated, then shifted. His voice, when it came, was like gravel dragged across stone.

“Quiberon. Years ago. Before the Emperor.”

A pause.

“Chouan holdout. I was on the coast. Guarding batteries. They came out of the woods in the morning fog. Muskets, pikes, farming tools. I think… I think I knew one of them. Might’ve been my uncle. Hard to tell with the smoke.”

Jean didn’t interrupt.

“They rushed the battery. We fired. I kept loading. They burned when the powder blew. One screamed in Breton. I recognized the voice, but… I didn’t stop. I just kept loading.”

His breath shook, visible in the cold.

“After, I found a ring in the ash. Looked like my father’s. I never asked.”

They sat with that for a long while. The wind moaned through the trees. Somewhere, a horse whinnied, then fell quiet.

Jean reached into his coat. Pulled out the same scrap of paper, the ledger page, names written in soot.

He tore a new corner from it. Handed it to the gunner.

“For the ones we don’t name,” he said. “You don’t have to write it down. Just hold it.”

The gunner did.

He didn't look at it. Just held it between two frostbitten fingers until the fire died and the sky turned pale with another cruel dawn.

When they crossed the Niemen, when France was a week’s march away and death finally stopped chasing quite so close, Jean passed him a flask, what little brandy remained.

He took a swig, hissed, and passed it back.

“You’re a hard bastard,” Jean said.

The gunner wiped his mouth. “Still here.”

Jean nodded.

“That’s all that counts.”

He tucked the flask away, then paused. The night was quiet. Too quiet. Even the wolves had stopped howling, as if the land itself was catching breath. The stars above were thin and sharp like bayonets, cold and indifferent. For a while, neither spoke. The wind had died down. The fire cracked in quiet rhythm, throwing flickers of orange across wool and frostbitten skin. Snow drifted in tired flakes, soft now, as if the land had wept itself empty.

Jean pulled the scarf tighter around his neck, the one the gunner had handed him, from the man who’d collapsed and not gotten up. He exhaled through his nose, slow, like the thought had been building for hours.

“You hear about Charles?” he said, voice rougher than the cold.

The gunner looked over. Didn’t nod, but his silence said yes.

“Bérézina got to him,” Jean muttered. “Not the cold. Not even the water.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“I always had a feeling he’d do it, you know?” Jean’s mouth twitched, not a smile. “He’s attempted before. Pierre, a good man, bless his heart, tried to help him.”

The gunner watched the fire, eyes unreadable.

“But he still sat down by the embankment. Laid out his coat neatly. Took off his glasses. And blew his brains out.”

Jean went quiet. Then added, “Pierre found him. Screamed. First time I heard Pierre make a sound louder than a prayer.”

The gunner shifted, leaned over, picked up a half-burnt stick, and stirred the fire.

“Didn’t say a word for two days after,” Jean said softly. “Just walked. Carried Charles’ pack for a while. Then buried it.”

“He liked him?” the gunner said finally, not quite a question.

Jean stared at the flames. “Yeah. He did.”

A silence settled, heavier than snow. 

“You know,” Jean went on, “I almost ordered Charles to stay behind in Minsk. Said we didn’t need a doctor anymore. Too few left to save.”

He looked up, eyes meeting the gunner’s.

“I wonder if that would’ve helped. Or made it worse.”

The gunner didn’t answer.

Didn’t need to.

Instead, he pulled a small scrap of cloth from his coat, something torn from a sash, maybe, and laid it by the edge of the fire.

Jean didn’t ask. Just nodded once slowly.

They didn’t speak again that night, but the flask was passed between them once more, and when the fire guttered low, Jean made sure to heap more wood on before turning in.

It burned well into morning.

Chapter Text

They marched.

Not from hope but from the absence of alternatives. To stop was to die; to pause for too long meant limbs would not move again. So they marched through snow that no longer fell but settled thick as ash after the burning of some vast and invisible world.

The wind never relented. It was less a gust than a presence, omnipresent and sharp-edged, slicing through threadbare wool and peeling away layers of warmth. It howled down gullies and across white-plastered fields like a banshee, howling for the dying who would not admit it yet. Snow drifted sideways, up, in spirals, never simply down, and sometimes it was difficult to tell whether they moved forward or only circled endlessly in place, each tree and frozen cart husk echoing the last.

The ground was a liar. What looked like smooth terrain often hid the jagged teeth of frozen ruts, broken bones, and buried corpses. A man could fall mid-stride, caught in ice up to the knee, and not rise again, not without help, and help was rationed more tightly than food. No one spoke much, but from time to time a song would rise, drunken, broken, with half the words slurred or replaced by curses. The rhythm of marching boots turned it into something almost like a ritual. Men would sing for the first mile, then fall silent again, as if remembering how much breath it cost.

Some nights, they didn’t even bother with fires. No wood, or not enough strength to strike a spark. They huddled together in long ovals, body against body, breath mingling with frost. Sometimes a man would not rise in the morning. No one blamed him. They just took what he had, boots if they fit, gloves if they weren’t frozen solid, and moved on.

Time ceased to mean anything. Day bled into day with no beginning or end. Sleep came in snatches, not cycles. Hunger became a companion, not an enemy, constant, familiar, dull. And always, always the cold, not just around them but inside them. 

Cold in the lungs. 

Cold in the marrow. 

Cold even in the thoughts that flitted through their skulls like half-formed prayers.

The trees grew thinner the further west they pushed. Pines skeletal, blackened by frost and fire. Branches held no birds, only snow, and sometimes, if one stared long enough, the crooked limbs took on the shapes of people they’d left behind. A hallucination? Perhaps. But none dared ask aloud.

The sun, when it showed, offered no heat. It was a dull, indifferent smear in the sky, a ghost of fire watching them from behind a veil of ice. It cast no shadows, and so the world had no depth, no scale, just infinite whiteness, a blank page smeared with boot tracks and blood.

Jean said little, but he never let the line falter. He walked it like a tethered thread, drawing them forward, always forward, as if the act of walking might redeem them.

The gunner’s limp had become instinctual now, something he did not think about. His legs were numb. His fingers were numb. The frost crept upward from the soles like poison ink. He kept his hands balled tightly in his sleeves, only unwrapping them when absolutely necessary. When he did, the pain was explosive, like firecrackers going off beneath his skin, nerves remembering they were alive only to scream.

They passed more signs of war. A wheel from a caisson. The corner of a carriage poking from the snow like a coffin half-buried. A cuirassier’s breastplate, abandoned, rimmed in ice. Dead horses frozen stiff, mouths open as if still whinnying.

​​​​Frostbite bloomed like bruises. Fingers blackened. Noses bled. Lips cracked into raw strips. Men no longer wept for the pain; tears froze too quickly to make it worth the effort. A few had taken to muttering prayers.

Jean noticed it all. He said nothing of it.

He could not afford to.

A commander was not permitted to despair. He had watched enough generals crumble under the weight of defeat, their hopelessness spreading through the ranks like a plague. And so he kept his face stern, his posture upright, even as his own toes began to blacken inside his boots. Even as his left hand refused to uncurl without pain.

He was no fool. These were not soldiers anymore, not truly. Not in the old sense. Not in the way they'd been drilled back in the green fields of Saxony or the camps along the Niemen. They were men stripped down to hunger, nerve, and order. Rank was the only thing left holding them together.

The army had been vast once. Hundreds of thousands. A tide of blue and gold and red banners sweeping east like destiny itself.

Now there was hardly a hundred left, Jean doubted even Napoleon knew what remained of it. The marshals had gone silent. Command had splintered. Rumors flew like crows, Davout was holding the line in Poland, Murat had fled, the Emperor himself was somewhere west, already abandoning them.

Jean had chosen not to believe any of it.

Belief was a luxury. He could only afford action.

They passed a small copse of trees, brittle things clawing at the sky. Jean called for a brief halt. Just long enough to check the wounded and redistribute what little food remained. Half-rations, as always. Less than that, really.

He stepped away from the group to piss and stood there a moment after, staring west.

Brittany is still far. Too far.

He didn’t know how many would make it.

He didn’t know if he would make it.

A flake of snow landed on his glove. He watched it melt, sluggish and dull. Then he turned back.

Two men had collapsed during the stop. One was already dead. The other was blinking slowly, eyes glassy, lips mumbling something in a dialect Jean didn’t recognize.

He crouched beside him, took his hand, tried to warm it between his own.

“Stay with me. Don’t go to sleep.”

The man blinked again. “ Commander …”

Jean gave him a thin smile. “That’s right. Good man. Sit up. Come on.”

The soldier tried. Failed. Blood had frozen at the corners of his mouth.

Jean stood. “Carry him,” he ordered. No hesitation.

Two others moved, silent, lifting their comrade like a bundle of sticks.

As they moved, the wind picked up again, a long, keening wail that wormed through coat seams and helmet straps. Jean pulled his scarf, the one given to him by the gunner from a dead man, tighter.

Eventually, he dropped back, letting his pace slow until he walked beside the gunner.

The man had fallen a bit behind, his limp more pronounced today. His face was sunken, colorless. Ice had clotted in his beard. But his eyes were still sharp. That was why Jean hadn’t reassigned him, hadn’t let him collapse with the others.

“Your leg,” Jean said, voice dropping low.

The gunner shrugged. “It’s still there.”

Jean gave a quiet snort. “That’s not what I asked.”

The gunner didn’t answer for a moment. Just walked. Left. Drag. Right. Step. The rhythm of pain.

Then: “Feels like walking on splinters wrapped in fire.”

Jean nodded, slowly. “If it turns black, you tell me.”

The gunner shot him a look. “So you can cut it off?”

“So I can make sure you don’t slow down enough to die.”

Another silence. The wind carried the ghost of a scream from somewhere behind them. Neither looked back.

Finally, the gunner spoke again, “They’re talking again. About Russia. About God. About the blight.”

Jean didn’t respond right away. His jaw tightened. He scanned the white horizon.

“They think the Cannibals are punishments,” the gunner went on. “For Moscow. For the looting. For the churches we…” He paused. “For the churches they burned.”

Jean’s eyes flicked toward him. “You don’t believe that?”

The gunner shook his head. “I believe in frostbite. I believe in hunger. I believe if I sit down, I’ll never get back up.” He exhaled, watching the mist vanish in seconds. “I’ll believe in curses when it shoots me in the face.”

Jean looked ahead again. The line was thin now. Too thin. Shadows of what had once been a regiment.

“There’s no curse,” Jean said. “No wrath. Just winter. Just the dead who didn’t stay down.”

“You really think they were dead?”

Jean hesitated.

“…I think they should have been.”

The gunner gave a dry laugh. It turned into a cough. “Well. You’re not wrong.”

They walked in silence again for a few paces. Snow squeaked underfoot.

Jean spoke without turning his head. “When we make it out… if we make it out… I’ll need a man who remembers this.”

The gunner raised an eyebrow. “You offering me a promotion?”

“I’m offering you a reason to keep walking.”

The gunner was quiet, then nodded once.

“That’ll do, mon commandant .”

The wind picked up again, curling around their legs like smoke. The gunner hunched his shoulders, burying his mouth in his scarf.

Ahead, a man stumbled, just a half-step, a sag in the knees, but it was enough. Jean’s eyes snapped to him. He quickened his pace, caught up, put a gloved hand on the man’s back. “Up. Now.”

The soldier muttered something through cracked lips, yes, sir maybe, or just a noise, but he straightened. Jean didn’t move his hand until the man had found the strength to walk again.

The gunner caught up. “That’s the third one today.”

Jean’s voice was flat. “Fourth. One never got up this morning.”

They passed him earlier, what was left of him. Just a mound of snow and a man-shaped dent in the frost where someone had taken his boots.

Jean let his gaze drift upward. The sky was an opaque gray dome, pressing down like the lid on a coffin.

“The Emperor promised glory,” Jean muttered.

The gunner grunted. “He didn’t say it’d be cold.”

Jean gave a thin, bitter smile. “We were never meant to be here this long. This far. These are fighting men, not saints or beasts. They weren’t made for this kind of dying.”

They reached a rise in the road. From here, the forest broke in brief places, charred stumps like shattered teeth, a scattering of bones caught in the ice. Jean raised his hand. The column slowed.

“Camp here,” he called. “Short stop. Half an hour. Not more.”

A few weary cheers went up, hollow and strange. Men collapsed where they stood. Some sank to their knees and started fumbling for rations, others simply curled in the snow to rest.

Jean turned to the gunner. “Check the perimeter. If anything moves, we know first.”

The gunner nodded and limped off, already calling for two others to follow.

Jean remained still, watching them work. A boy not old enough to shave tried striking flint against a damp cloth and failed. A veteran soldier knelt beside him and lit it on the first try without a word. 

Jean rubbed his face. His beard was stiff with frost. His fingers felt wooden.

He looked east, toward the dark smear of forest where the Cannibals had come from.

‘If this is God’s punishment,’ Jean thought quietly, ‘then God is worse than war.’

Because war, at least, was a thing men made. War had reasons, cruel ones, but reasons nonetheless. A general’s ambition. A map drawn too greedily. Borders imagined into violence. Orders shouted by men with warm hands and full bellies. 

War wore a uniform. It spoke in strategy and casualties, in medals and mourning. War was ugly, but it was man’s ugliness. A cruelty they chose. A fire they lit themselves, even when it consumed them.

But this?

What name did this go by?

The frozen dead who walked like blasphemies. The open throats that still moaned. The things that used to wear the coats of friends. Of his men.

This wasn’t war. This was rot given shape. Hunger given purpose. Punishment without justice, without cause, without end.

If it came from God, then what kind of god was that?

Not the one they’d prayed to before the march into Russia. Not the one who blessed their banners or hovered over chapel tents on warm summer fields. Not the one Jean’s mother had knelt before, candle in hand, whispering for her son to return in one piece.

No.

This god had ice for eyes.

This god wept frost and spoke in the screams of the dying.

This god ruled over snow and silence and the slow cracking of bones in the night.

Jean stared at the treeline until his eyes stung. Nothing moved out there now. But he could still feel it, the memory of them, the ones who came lurching out of the dark, dressed in familiarity and reeking of sin.

He forced himself to look away.

If this was judgment, then it was a coward’s kind of justice. Cruelty without purpose. Suffering without any eye to see it. No wrath. Just rot.

Jean looked back at the fire.

The boy had finally coaxed a flicker from the tinder. It guttered, caught, and rose into a low flame. The veteran who’d helped him was already asleep, slumped against a pack with his musket still across his knees. The boy sat close to the flame, shoulders hunched, eyes locked on the fire like it was the only honest thing left in the world.

Jean pulled his coat tighter and walked the perimeter again.

If this was God’s punishment, then it meant only one thing.

God wasn’t watching anymore.

And Jean would not beg mercy from a god who had abandoned them. He would not kneel. He would not pray.

He would lead.

Until his boots split, until his sword dulled, until the sea took them or France received them.

Chapter Text

The clearing was hardly more than a shallow bowl between two low ridges, ringed with spindly birches that clutched at the sky like skeletal fingers. The snow lay thick and undisturbed except where the column had broken it, dozens of boot-prints, a few collapsed drifts where men had dropped their gear and sat down with the dead-eyed finality of exhaustion.

Someone had already dragged a dead branch from the tree line and tossed it onto the struggling fire at the center. Smoke curled upward in a weak, unsure column, gray and heavy with damp. It stung the eyes more than it gave warmth. The men crowded around it anyway, crouching shoulder to shoulder, too tired to talk. They didn’t even bother brushing the snow off themselves anymore; it was just another layer now, like the dirt on their skin or the frost in their beards.

The drumless boy sat cross-legged with his coat wrapped around his knees, gnawing slowly at a frozen scrap of biscuit. His eyes were red, but he wasn’t crying. Next to him, two men huddled beneath the same blanket, trading sips from a cracked flask, breath misting the air in rhythm.

Others stretched out where they could, backs propped against packs, heads resting on each other’s shoulders. Sleep didn’t come easily, but it came in flashes: heads drooping forward, eyes sliding shut, breath catching in that brief space between awareness and the deep, cold dark.

A few still worked. The gunner had made a slow circuit of the tree line and returned now, limping, nodding once at Jean to show it was done. He took a place near the fire, easing down with a grimace, arms folded over his chest to trap what little heat he could.

Jean remained standing. He always did, in moments like this. Not because he wasn’t tired, he was bone-tired, marrow-deep, but because someone had to stay vertical. Someone had to remain a figure, not a shadow.

The light from the fire flickered over their faces. Hollow cheeks. Cracked lips. Eyes that held the shape of death behind them.

It was quiet, except for the pop of damp wood and the occasional cough, or the rustle of wool shifting. The snow around the edges of the clearing seemed to lean inward, silent and watching, waiting for the fire to die.

So when a  cry went up, it was sharp enough to slice through the fog of silence and pull every head around.

Jean stopped mid-stride. The gunner followed his gaze, squinting through the swirling white.

At first, there was nothing.

Then, there was movement.

Off the path, just beyond the treeline. A figure. Then another. Shadows shifting in the snow’s dull glare, half-swallowed by mist.

Not horses. Not men. Or maybe men, but wrong somehow. Wrong in the way they moved. Lurching. Halting. Like marionettes with cut strings. 

Someone gasped.

One of the soldiers started backing away. “Cannibals,” his eyes widened. “They followed us.”

“Hold,” Jean barked. His voice came out cracked. He didn’t recognize it as his own. “Hold the line.”

But there was no line. Just hunger and frost and men held together by desperation, not discipline.

Another figure emerged from the trees.

This one was clearer.

The remnants of a French uniform. A shako torn open at the crown. Skin like parchment pulled too tight over ice. One arm ended at the elbow in a splintered twist of bone. The other dragged a rusted saber behind it, scraping snow in a lazy arc.

It didn’t make a sound.

None of them did.

Six. Seven. Maybe more. Spilling out of the woods like a wound opened wide. Their mouths moved, but no breath fogged the air. Their eyes were empty.

Someone fired.

The shot went wide, the crack echoing too loud, like thunder in a church.

Then the creatures moved.

Faster now. Not stumbling. Sprinting.

The air fractured.

Screams. The wet slap of bodies colliding. The bite of metal meeting bone.

Jean saw one man fall, throat torn open before he even had time to shout. Another tried to swing a musket like a club but got pulled under before it landed. Snow exploded up around them like smoke from a cannon.

Jean drew his blade, but his hands were stiff. Clumsy. His strike glanced off a creature’s shoulder. Another rushed him, teeth gnashing. He caught it with a boot to the chest, sent it sprawling, but more were coming. 

Always more.

Flashes of red. Ice underfoot. A roar in his ears that might’ve been wind or fear or the scream of something dying wrong.

Jean stumbled backward, the world a chaos of noise and blur and heatless motion. The thing he'd kicked was already scrambling back to its feet, limbs jerking in angles that no man’s joints should bend. Another lunged from the side, he didn’t see it in time.

A weight slammed into him, a body. Not the creature’s, someone else.

Jean hit the ground hard, snow driving into the back of his skull, his sword slipping from fingers that no longer obeyed. His ears rang, breath stolen from his lungs. He blinked up at the sky, gray, formless, infinite, and for a moment, he thought he might just lie there. Let it end. Let the cold and teeth and silence take him.

But a voice snapped him back.

“Get up!”

The gunner. Above him, rifle in hand, using it like a staff, jabbing the iron butt into the mouth of a shrieking thing that had come too close. The crack of splintered teeth. A spray of dark fluid. The creature staggered.

The gunner pivoted and shot another in the face at near point-blank. It dropped without a sound.

He hauled Jean upright by the collar. “You’re not dying here, mon commandant .”

Jean coughed. His lungs burned. “Appreciate the sentiment.”

“Save it.” The gunner shoved a pistol into Jean’s hands, his own, probably. Jean barely registered it. His fingers wrapped around the grip like he was holding it through gloves made of lead.

The clearing was chaos.

Men screaming. Snow churning red. Someone had managed to set another fire burning wildly, casting lurching shadows across the birches like hell had opened its throat. A private backed into it without noticing, flames catching his coat, and didn’t even scream, just kept shooting, the fire eating up his silhouette like paper.

The cannibals were everywhere now. Not just corpses animated by whatever cold hell had birthed them, clever , too. Coordinated. They moved like a hunt, flanking, isolating, breaking the men into smaller, more vulnerable pieces.

Jean fired.

The recoil tore through his shoulder, but the shot caught one of the things through the skull. It pitched forward, collapsing onto the half-buried body of a soldier it had been gnawing.

The gunner cursed beside him, swinging the butt of his now-empty rifle again and again, cracking bone, splintering ice, until it broke apart in his hands. He dropped it, pulled a bayonet from his belt, and stabbed with wild precision, like a man who had done this before, too many times.

They fought back to back now.

Jean found his sword again, his arms remembering their training in defiance of exhaustion. A creature lunged, he turned it aside with a shoulder, slashed low, opened its belly, though nothing spilled out. Another grabbed for the gunner’s throat, Jean took its head.

Then a voice, one of the men, the surgeon perhaps. “ The fire! ”

And it was like thunder struck twice.

They had fire.

The gunner shoved past Jean, flint already out, digging into a pouch with fumbling, bleeding fingers. Another man tossed dry cloth, torn rags, gunpowder from a cartridge bit open with teeth that cracked on the grains.

Flames rose.

Low at first. Then, hungrier, the flicks of red-hot flame licked his skin. For a moment, Jean’s mind wandered, the unfamiliar warmth sprawled through the commander’s body, and for that brief moment, he wondered once again what would happen if he walked into the flame, embraced the warmth like how Charles embraced that bullet through his head.

But that thought only lasted for less than a second; the cries of his men immediately pulled him back to reality.

One caught fire. It didn’t scream. Just thrashed like a puppet on a spit, arms flailing, legs kicking up clouds of ash and snow. The smell was unbearable: burnt meat, rot, and hell.

But they hesitated. The Cannibals didn’t like the fire.

That was enough.

Jean rallied what was left of them. “Keep it burning!” he shouted. “Circle tight! Burn them out!”

And they did. With torches made from rags and rifle butts, from splintered crates and frozen canvas. The fire leapt up into the twilight, throwing wild shadows onto the white, and the Cannibals began to falter.

Some fell. Some burned.

Some fled.

The silence afterward was full of breath and sobs and the crackle of flame.

And snow. Always snow.

Jean looked around at what remained. Four men down. Two dying. One of the wounded was humming again, off-key like a lullaby remembered wrong.

The gunner sat beside the fire, clutching his side. Blood seeped between his fingers.

Jean knelt beside him.

“You hit?”

“No,” the gunner muttered. “Just old wounds coming loose.”

Jean didn’t respond right away. He just stared at the gunner’s blood-slicked hand and the way the skin around it had gone blue at the edges. Cold or infection, either could kill, and both would, given time.

But not yet, at-least not tonight.

Not if Jean could help it.

“Pressure,” he ordered. “Keep your hand there. I’ll have someone look at it when we halt.”

The gunner gave a breathless nod. He obeyed without question.

He looked up. Around the fire, what was left of the column had gone quiet. Some were kneeling in prayer. Others just stared into the flames like they were trying to remember what warmth felt like, or what it meant. The wind keened through the trees, lower now, almost a moan. The kind that made a man think of cathedrals and funeral bells.

“They were cursed,” said a man. “That’s what it is. God saw what we did in Moscow, and He sent them.”

“Not just Moscow,” another murmured. “Vilna. Smolensk. That town with the horses, remember that?”

A man stood suddenly, voice rough with frostbite and fear. “We should’ve never come here . We’re being punished by god.”

God, punishment, judgement, Jean furrowed his eyebrows and stood up. They didn’t need talks of such things. 

“They are not God’s judgment,” Jean simply said. The speaker shut his mouth. A few heads turned, wary. “They are nothing but carrion. What the land spat out when war soured the ground.”

He let his words settle. The men didn’t believe him. He could see it in their eyes. Belief was a luxury they couldn’t afford.

“What matters is we’re not dead yet,” he continued. “And that means we keep moving. If you wish to repent, do so when we are safe. For now, I am your shepherd, and you will move when I say so. ”

“Bastien,” Jean pointed to a tall man near the edge of the firelight. “Inventory. I want a count of all cartridges and powder before we break camp.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lamont and the surgeon, you’ll check the wounded. Bind what you can. Take from the dead, they won’t be needing them anymore, prioritize the living.”

“Dig shallow trenches,” Jean went on. “South side. We burn anything that doesn’t rise.”

Someone shuddered. Another crossed himself. But no one questioned it.

“You,” he gestured to a pale soldier still clutching a bent musket. “You’ll take first watch. When the moon hits the top of that tree, switch with the quartermaster.”

A few men glanced at the tree. They knew he meant it. They’d watch it like a clock.

Jean’s eyes swept them one last time. “No talking of curses. Not while I command you. Fear is allowed. Cowardice is not.”

And that was the end of it.

The wind gusted harder, bending the fire sideways, but it did not go out.

They moved. Slowly, but with purpose. The wounded were tended. The dead, two of their own, and what remained of the Cannibals, were dragged to the trench and lit without ceremony. Flame and smoke spiraled up into the night, sweet with ash and rot. The smell turned a few stomachs, but no one fled.

Jean sat near the gunner again, his blade across his knees.

“You believe in curses?” Jean asked, not really expecting an answer.

The gunner smiled faintly. “I believe in fire,” he murmured. “And the men who keep it lit.”

Jean nodded once. He stood again and turned his face into the wind. Somewhere ahead, west of here, were the salt-sick winds of Brittany, the dull blue of the Channel, the possibility of warmth.

Behind them, the forest groaned.

Something cried out in the distance. Not a man. Not an animal.

But for now, the fire held.

And so they marched.

Chapter Text

Near the Coast of Brittany, spring 1813

The coast smelled like salt and wet stone and, for the first time in months, not death.

Someone cried when they saw the sea, might’ve been that drummer boy, might’ve been Jean himself. No one asked. No one mocked. They were too busy standing in stunned silence, watching gulls wheel over gray waves. It was real. It was France .

“We made it,” someone whispered, and the murmur rippled through the ranks like warmth through frostbite. “We made it.”

The gunner didn’t say anything, but he stood a little straighter. His boots, still caked in frozen Russian mud, sank into the thawing shoreline. The others grinned, slapped backs, some even laughed. Laughed like men again, not ghosts. The wind off the sea made their tattered greatcoats flap like battle standards. For a moment, it felt like victory.

Jean stood on a dune, hands behind his back. He looked different in the sunlight, less carved from ice. He surveyed the coastline, nodding to himself, jaw set, but there was a glint in his eye. Relief, maybe. Or disbelief.

“We’ll find a fishing boat,” he said. “Anything with sails. We can follow the coast south to Brest. We’ll be home before winter ends.”

Someone said they’d find a vineyard and drink it dry. Another promised to kiss the dirt in his mother’s garden. They joked about soft beds, real bread, and warm soup. It was foolish, maybe, but they let themselves believe it.

They built a fire that night, not out of necessity, though the cold still crept into their bones, but because they could. Driftwood and broken crates scavenged from the shoreline snapped and hissed in the flames. Sparks danced upward into the dusk like souls ascending. 

For the first time in months, they didn't have to hide the light.

Someone passed around a flask, nearly empty, but no one minded. They drank to each other, to France, to stubbornness and sheer dumb luck. The gunner took a swig and winced. It burned going down, raw and sharp, and he handed it back without a word. 

Jean sat beside the fire with his gloves off, palms extended toward the heat. The flames threw light across his face, softening the sharp lines drawn there by command and cold. He looked younger in the firelight. Or perhaps just more human.

As the stars began to blink through the coastal haze, the laughter softened. Men leaned against one another, eyes drifting shut. The boy with no drum curled up beside the gunner, his breath shallow and even, his hands tucked beneath his coat.

It was Jean who spoke first, low and hoarse.

“Dufresne should be here,” he said. “He always said he’d swim the Channel if he had to.”

A few heads nodded. One of the older fusiliers murmured, “Picard too. Broke his leg at Krasny, told me to leave him. Said the crows deserved a proper meal.”

“I left Marchand in a ditch,” someone else said. “Didn’t even say goodbye.”

And then the fire circle became a litany, soft and sacred. Names fell into the flames like offerings: Sergeants, cooks, horse-handlers, friends, brothers. Some were remembered with laughter, others with tears, but all with reverence. They mourned them not just as dead but as missing parts of themselves, pieces of the march that had been carved away and left behind in the snow.

The gunner listened, hands resting on his knees. When Jean’s gaze met his, he hesitated, then spoke.

“Name one,” Jean said gently, “if you remember.”

The gunner’s lips moved, slow, deliberate. His voice was rusty from disuse.

“Charles,” he said. Just that. Just the name.

And that was enough.

They sat long into the night, keeping the fire alive with both wood and memory. Grief didn’t vanish, but it softened, shared among men who had survived the impossible. The crackle of the flames, the murmur of the sea, the steady rhythm of breath and heartbeat, it all stitched them back together, thread by thread.

And that was enough.

They sat long into the night, keeping the fire alive with both wood and memory. Grief didn’t vanish, but it softened, shared among men who had survived the impossible. The crackle of the flames, the murmur of the sea, the steady rhythm of breath and heartbeat, it all stitched them back together, thread by thread.

The wind changed sometime after midnight, shifting from sharp and northern to something gentler, salt-heavy, laced with the memory of warmer shores. 

They sang, eventually. Not in chorus, not all at once, but one by one, half-remembered verses drifting up like smoke into the salt-wet dark. Someone began it low, maybe a lullaby, maybe a drinking song. Another picked it up, humming the parts he'd forgotten. It spread like the fire’s warmth, quiet at first, then louder. 

Clumsier. 

Freer.

They sang with hoarse voices and broken rhythms, cracked with laughter and laced with something aching and raw. No one had a good voice left, not after the wind and the hunger and the screaming in the snow, but they sang anyway, and it was beautiful in the way only survivors can be. 

Off-key and shameless and alive.

The boy without a drum tapped time on a piece of driftwood with his knuckles, smiling like he didn’t remember how not to. Even the oldest among them clapped along, their hands stiff with cold, their eyes shining. Someone tried to dance, boots squelching in the sand, arms flailing like a scarecrow in a storm, and someone else whooped with laughter and joined him. For the first time in months, their joy didn’t feel borrowed.

Jean watched them from where he sat by the fire, arms wrapped around his knees. The flames lit up his face, touched the corners of his mouth with something like peace. 

The gunner didn’t sing. He sat just outside the ring of light, watching. But he didn’t feel outside anymore. The ache in his chest wasn’t sharp tonight. Just deep.

Jean rose eventually, stepped through the flicker of flame and shadow, and crouched beside him. He didn’t say anything at first. Just sat.

“They’re terrible,” The gunner said finally, gesturing at the singing. “I mean, truly. It’s offensive.”

Jean huffed something that might’ve been a laugh. He handed the gunner the flask, empty now, but it passed like a ritual. 

“I used to sing,” he said. “Back home. My sister played the flute. We’d sit by the oven and try to drown each other out.”

The gunner looked at him sideways. “You sing?”

“I didn’t say I was good,” Jean said, smiling.

A long pause stretched between them. The waves rolled in and out like breathing.

“I miss bread,” the gunner said, voice rough with disuse and salt air.

Jean laughed. “God, yes. Warm bread. With real butter. And soup that doesn’t taste like boot leather.”

The gunner nodded. “And apples, a whole one. Not half-rotten.”

Silence again, companionable now. The songs behind them turned softer, winding down into murmurs and snores. Firelight danced on driftwood and tattered coats.

Jean tilted his head back, raising the flask to the sky. “To Charles, and the brothers we lost”

The gunner hesitated, then reached over and tapped the base of the flask with two fingers. 

“To the brothers we lost,” he said.

Behind them, someone let out a snore like a cannon report, and a few half-hearted laughs stirred in the embers of the camp. One of the younger men muttered something about pigs in wine sauce. Another replied, slurred, that he’d settle for pigs without the wine. Or the sauce.

The gunner smiled, just barely. “They’re dreaming already.”

Jean leaned back on his hands, watching the stars flicker through sea mist. “Let them,” he said. “They’ve earned it.”

The gunner glanced at him, firelight catching in his tired eyes. “You think we all make it? To Brest?”

Jean didn’t answer right away. The waves came in, sighed against the shore, and rolled back out again.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “But tonight, we’ve got a fire, a sky, and no Russians trying to shoot us. That’s more than we had yesterday.”

The gunner nodded. He picked up a bit of driftwood and tossed it into the fire. The flames leapt up, casting the shadows of men across the sand, tall and flickering.

Jean pulled his coat tighter. “We’ll find a boat. We’ll follow the coast. And if the gods are still watching... maybe we’ll even find breakfast.”

The gunner laughed, soft and startled, like he hadn’t heard the sound in a long time.

Jean looked over. “There it is.”

“What?”

“That laugh. Took long enough.”

The gunner shook his head. “Don’t get used to it.”

They slept in shifts, curled around the fire like old dogs. The boy without a drum snored into the gunner’s sleeve, unconsciously gravitating toward the warmth. Jean eventually lay down too, head pillowed on his knapsack, one hand still resting near his saber, just in case.

Morning came slowly and silver, mist rolling in off the water like a second sea. The gulls returned, their cries ragged and hungry. Someone groaned about salt in his boots. Someone else asked, half-joking, if there were any croissants hidden under the sand.

They broke camp with aching limbs and soot-smudged faces, wrapping scarves tighter, shouldering worn packs, and following the coastline south.

They talked, now. Not all the time, some silences still had to be weathered like storms, but the hush had lost its edge. Jean traded stories with the grenadiers about Normandy winters. The fusiliers argued over the best cheeses in the Loire. Even the gunner spoke, every so often, just short, blunt remarks, like stepping stones across a stream. Enough to not feel apart.

They mourned while they marched, but gently, without sinking.

“I still think about him,” the gunner said once, as they walked side by side, boots leaving deep tracks in damp sand. “Charles.”

Jean nodded. “Pierre does too. He wrote me. Said he has nightmares.”

The gunner’s mouth twitched. “I believe it. That man loved too hard for war.”

Jean didn’t respond, just looked out over the sea. “He made it home. That’s something.”

The gunner grunted. “Yeah. That’s something.”

By the third day, they found the ruined village tucked into a cliffside, roofs half-collapsed, nets rotting on their frames, but a few boats still intact under tarps of fish-skin and canvas. The men whooped and cheered. Someone kissed the deck of the first vessel they uncovered, whispering something that sounded suspiciously like a prayer.

They spent the day hauling out the boats, checking lines, and patching sails with scraps of their own uniforms. The youngest among them stood at the prow, arms spread, yelling that he was king of the sea.

But it didn’t last.

The sun was low when the gulls fell silent again.

Chapter Text

The gulls scattered first.

It was subtle, so subtle no one noticed. One moment, they wheeled and cried over the breakers, the next they were gone, vanished inland like smoke on wind. The sea kept lapping the shore, indifferent. The men didn’t stop working. They were laughing, still. Joking about wine, women, warm kitchens. Jean had just stepped into the boat to check the rudder.

No one expected it.

The scream came second. High, sharp, inhuman, until it twisted at the end into something unmistakably was . A voice. A man’s voice. Dying.

Jean turned in time to see Rousseau drop, red spilling across the sand in a fan. Behind him, lurching, grey-skinned, jaw slack, fingers torn and raw, was a thing . 

It moved like it didn’t remember how. Limbs jerky. Eyes blind. But it tore into Rousseau with terrifying purpose.

For a second, no one moved.

Then the gunner raised his musket, no powder, just steel, and charged.

Everything shattered.

More came out of the mist. From the cliff path. From the sea. Their skin hung in folds. Some wore pieces of uniform. A shako here. A tattered tricolor there. One still had a drum strapped to his chest, strings snapping as he moved.

Jean was shouting orders before he realized it.

Circle up, protect the boats, keep low!  

But most of the men were already moving, driven not by training but by instinct, by something worse than survival.

They were driven by rage.

They had come so far. Too far.

A cannonier smashed a monster’s skull in with an oar. One of the young ones, Martin, maybe, fell trying to grab a knife from the boat’s hull. His scream was short. His silence lasted longer.

Jean slipped in the wet sand, caught himself, and slashed at a face too close. The blade stuck in the bone.

Beside him, the gunner fought like a machine. No elegance. No fear. Just brutal, mechanical swings. He tore one creature’s jaw clean off with the butt of a musket. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t slow.

Someone shouted his name, Jean couldn’t tell who, and then the world was red.

Blood, sea spray, smoke from a half-burned fire, the bite of salt in his mouth, and iron in his nose. The monsters didn’t scream. They didn’t breathe. They just came, again and again, shambling, crawling, dragging ruined limbs across the sand like puppets on tangled strings.

Jean wrenched his blade free, lost his footing, and stumbled back into the shallows. The cold hit him like a slap, soaked straight through to the bone. A dead man, what was left of one, reached for his ankle. He kicked it away, boot connecting with brittle ribs that crunched like driftwood.

Behind him, the gunner let out a roar and brought down a blade scavenged from the wreckage. The steel was red, then black, then red again.

They were off guard. Exhausted. Half-starved. Half-mad. Their boots stuck and slipped in the sucking, treacherous sand, and the tide dragged at their legs like some other enemy, unseen but just as vicious. Their formations, what was left of them, shattered under the pressure. There were no clean ranks now, no orderly firing lines, no barked volleys or cold discipline. Only chaos. Only survival.

Jean shouted, but the roar of the surf stole his voice. He slashed again, blade heavy in his hand, and this time it caught on frozen leather, deflecting instead of biting. The thing lunged closer, rotting breath, glassy eyes, and he drove his shoulder into it, knocking it backward into the frothing surf. It didn't rise.

Another took its place.

It was endless.

They couldn't hold here. He knew it. God help him, he knew it. But there was nowhere else to go. Inland was worse, trees like grasping fingers, dark shapes between the trunks. At least here, by the sea, there was space to swing a blade. At least here, the water might slow them. Might give them a chance.

The gunner fought like a man possessed. He broke a thing’s spine with the haft of his weapon, spun, caught another across the jaw with a vicious snap of bone. His coat was torn open at the sleeve, blood running freely, but he didn’t seem to feel it. Every motion was a raw necessity, stripped of anything human.

Jean saw another figure stumble, young Fournier, barely sixteen, dragged down by two creatures clinging to his legs like drowning men. He opened his mouth to call out, but it was too late. Fournier vanished beneath a mass of rotting flesh and thrashing limbs. His cry was cut off with a wet, bubbling choke.

Jean looked away.

A musket barked nearby, one of the few shots left, and one of the creatures spun and collapsed, but more poured forward in its place. Like the tide. Like rot itself had gained a pulse.

The men gave ground slowly, step by step, boots churning muddy sand into a slurry of blood and foam. They fought in pockets now, no longer a line but a scatter of desperate, violent resistance. Cries of pain, of rage, of prayer, some in French, some in Breton, some just wordless howls, rose and mingled with the crash of the sea and the grating clatter of bones on steel.

Jean caught the gunner’s eye through the blur of salt and smoke. A brief nod passed between them. No words left. No orders left.

Only the simple agreement: We hold. We fight. We die if we must.

More fell. Rousseau. Martin. Lefèvre, screaming for his mother. They went down in twos and threes, torn from the world before their names could be shouted in warning. But the others closed ranks. Shoulder to shoulder, boots sinking into churned sand and blood-wet kelp, they fought like men with nothing left to lose.

Because they didn’t. Not really.

Not after Moscow. Not after the marches. Not after watching brothers freeze to death in snowbanks with names on their lips and no one left to hear them.

Jean’s voice broke screaming orders, but they followed anyway. Or maybe they didn’t need to anymore. They moved as one, clumsy, desperate, bloody.

Somewhere in the chaos, the boy without a drum picked up a rock and brought it down over and over until nothing was left but pulp. His hands bled. He didn’t stop.

The sea grew darker. Not with night, but with blood.

The last monster fell with a wet, cracking sound. Its head split against the prow of the half-built boat, jaw still working even after it hit the sand. It didn’t scream. It never had.

Silence settled, sharp and sudden, broken only by the wheezing breaths of the living and the hiss of the sea.

Jean stayed where he was, knee-deep in the surf, blade hanging limp in his hand. His coat dragged in the tide, heavy with salt and blood. He stared at the thing they'd just killed. Its uniform was French. What's left of it.

The gunner limped to him. His sleeve was torn, skin beneath scored with fresh red. He didn’t seem to notice. “We won,” he said.

Jean didn’t answer. He looked at the horizon. Then down at the sand. Then, finally, at the gunner. “We did.”

The gunner spat into the sand. “They weren’t supposed to follow us,” he said.

Jean’s mouth tasted of salt and bile. “No,” he rasped. “They weren’t.”

The gunner followed his gaze to the bodies. What was left of them. Rousseau, his chest opened like a broken barrel. Martin, arms curled around his ribs like he’d tried to hold his insides in. The others had already begun dragging the dead together, friends and monsters both. They didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

“We burn them,” Jean said at last. His voice cracked on the last word. “All of them.”

The gunner nodded.

The fire was built with the same wood they’d gathered for the boats. It was big. Bright. Furious. No one sang tonight. No one passed the flask. They watched in silence as the flames took what was left of their brothers.

The boy with no drum sat with his head on his knees. His hands were cut from fighting. He hadn’t spoken since the attack.

Jean stood over the fire until the sun began to rise, pale and cold and useless. The bodies were ash by then. Most of them.

He turned toward the others. What remained. Faces caked in soot. Eyes ringed in red. Twelve men. Out of forty-two.

Twelve.

“We leave at noon,” he said, voice raw from smoke and screaming. “I won’t risk the tide.”

No one argued.

They buried what they couldn’t burn.

Shallow graves in the thawing sand, marked with stones or bits of uniform. Jean knelt beside each one, muttering names when he knew them, silence when he didn’t. No prayers. No rites. Just breath and memory.

By the time the sun cleared the cliffs, the tide had crept closer. Foam licked at the edges of their fire pit. The sea didn’t care what it washed away.

The gunner stood watch while the others worked. He hadn’t cleaned his hands. Blood had dried in the creases of his knuckles, beneath his fingernails. He kept glancing inland, toward the path carved into the cliffs. Nothing stirred. No gulls. No ghosts.

The boy with no drum finally spoke.

“They weren’t Russian,” he said, voice like broken glass. “Were they?”

Jean looked over. The boy’s eyes were wide and raw. Not afraid, not anymore, they were just empty.

“No,” Jean said. “They weren’t.”

Jean’s gaze drifted past the boy, across the scattered corpses half-sunk in the tide. Some were little more than shreds of cloth and gristle now, but others, others were clearer. Faces, slack and ruined, but still carrying just enough to be recognized if you let yourself look too long. A drooping eyelid. A broken nose. A mouth you’d shared bread with not two weeks ago.

And the uniforms. God help them, the uniforms were French.

The blue coats, tattered and fouled with rot, still bore the faded brass buttons and the remnants of regimental colors. Some still clutched shattered muskets in hands curled like claws. One wore the blackened ruins of an artilleryman’s sash. Another still had a scrap of tricolor cockade pinned stubbornly to his cap, like a joke no one was laughing at anymore.

Jean swallowed hard against the bile rising in his throat.

He hadn't wanted to believe it at first, had thought, had hoped , that maybe these things were Russian deserters, or mad peasants twisted by cold and war. But no. The cut of the cloth, the familiar slant of the gait as they lurched forward, even the half-choked curses he'd heard in mangled French from a few of them as they fought, it was all too clear.

These had been their men. 

Frenchmen.

Brothers in arms.

Somewhere between the retreat and the sea, something had happened to them. Something worse than hunger, worse than cold, worse than defeat. Something that stripped away the soul and left only hunger.

The boy with no drum said nothing more. He simply stared at the bodies, one hand resting on the cracked drumhead he still carried strapped across his back, out of habit more than hope.

Jean forced himself to move, to put a hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder.

“Remember them as they were,” he said, voice low, nearly lost beneath the crash of distant waves. “Not as they are.”

Someone had mended the sail. It was patchwork now, stitched with scraps of greatcoat and tent canvas, but it would catch the wind. The boat rocked gently in the tide, already tugging at its anchor.

When noon came, they didn’t hesitate. Supplies were minimal, what little they hadn’t lost in the fight, but it didn’t matter. They had the sea now, and twelve men who still breathed. That would be enough.

They pushed off in silence.

The boat creaked as it drifted free, then turned south with the current, its patchwork sail swelling under a sluggish wind. Jean took the tiller, steady hands despite the red around his fingernails. The gunner sat near the bow, musket across his knees, eyes scanning the horizon. The others huddled close, speaking only when necessary. The boy curled near the mast, arms around his knees.

Hours passed. The cliffs fell away behind them, swallowed by haze and distance. Only the sea remained. Vast. Gray. Endless.

Then Jean said, softly, “Count.”

The gunner turned. “What?”

Jean didn’t take his eyes off the sea. “Count us. Aloud.”

The gunner looked back. One by one, he named them. Eleven names. Jean made twelve.

He exhaled.

“I had to be sure,” he said.

The gunner didn’t answer. He just nodded once and stared ahead, the sea wind tugging at the edges of his coat.

The sea took the boat like it was always meant to, lifting them from blood-soaked sand into cold, uncertain blue.

They sailed on. Toward Brest. Toward home. Toward whatever might still be left waiting for them beyond the edge of the map. 

Behind them, far behind, the tide rolled in over bloodstained sand and the bones of monsters, erasing every trace.

No gulls followed.

The sea was quieter than the land had ever been.

It breathed in slow heaves, gray and endless, rocking the boat like a cradle that didn’t care who it held. The sail flapped lazily overhead, patched with colors of every dead man’s coat. Salt hung in the air, thick and cold. It coated lips and lashes, crusted at the corners of their eyes.

The gunner sat near the bow, his musket still across his knees, though he hadn’t touched it in hours. His fingers were wrapped in strips of linen someone had found, and he flexed them occasionally, as if testing whether they still belonged to him.

Jean sat opposite, one hand on the tiller, the other cradling a tin cup half-full of brackish water. Neither had spoken in a while. Words didn’t come easily anymore.

Eventually, the gunner broke the silence. “The sea doesn’t stink.”

Jean looked at him. “No.”

“I keep expecting it to. Rot, blood. Something.”

Jean shrugged. “Maybe we’re just used to it.”

“Maybe.”

The boat creaked, shifting with the wind. The boy with no drum was asleep beneath the mast, curled like a cat, twitching now and then as if fighting something in his dreams. The others were scattered, silent, watching the horizon or their hands. One hummed, low and tuneless, not a song, just sound to fill the space.

“I used to hate boats,” Jean said suddenly.

The gunner arched a brow.

Jean smiled faintly. “Seasick. The first time I tried one, I vomited over a colonel’s boots. Thought he’d toss me overboard.”

“Did he?”

“No. Just laughed. Called me ‘Captain Churn’ for three months.”

The gunner made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Fitting.”

Jean took a sip from the cup and grimaced. “Tastes like rust.”

The gunner gestured vaguely toward the sea. “Everything does now.”

A gust caught the sail, and the boat groaned, tilting slightly. Jean adjusted the tiller with practiced ease.

“We should reach the estuary by tomorrow,” he said.

“If the wind holds.”

“If,” Jean echoed. The word felt heavy.

The gunner watched the water slide past the hull. “What if it doesn’t?”

Jean didn’t answer right away. The wind tugged at his collar. The boy twitched again in his sleep, muttering something unintelligible.

“We row,” Jean said finally.

The gunner nodded once. That was enough.

Another silence stretched between them, not hostile, just tired. The kind that came from running too far on too little, for too long.

Then: “Do you ever think about what you’ll do when you’re home?”

Jean didn’t look at him. “Do you?”

The gunner hesitated. Then: “Sometimes. In pieces. Like remembering a dream you didn’t know you had.”

Jean’s fingers tightened on the tiller.

“Sometimes I think I’ll just walk into the sea,” the gunner added, quiet. “Keep going.”

Jean looked at him sharply, but the gunner wasn’t smiling. Just watching the waves.

“And then?” Jean asked.

The gunner shrugged. “I don’t. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

Jean was quiet. Then he reached into his coat and pulled something out, a folded scrap of paper, brittle and worn. He passed it over without a word.

The gunner opened it carefully. Inside, a drawing. Charcoal. Smudged, faint. A little farmhouse. A tree. Two windows with curtains. The perspective was clumsy, the lines uneven, but it was… warm.

“Yours?” the gunner asked.

“My sister’s,” Jean said. “She drew it for me. Said I could hang it in my tent, remind me where to go when everything else got too loud.”

The gunner stared at it a while longer, then folded it back up and handed it back.

“She still there?”

Jean didn’t answer. Just tucked the paper back into his coat.

They watched the horizon after that, saying nothing. The wind shifted again, turning slightly southward. The sail snapped, caught it, and pulled them forward.

Toward land.

Toward answers.

Toward that small house drawn in charcoal.

Chapter Text

The sea groaned under them, heavy and slow. The sail rattled above, patchwork and tired, and the boat creaked with every shift of weight. Around Jean and the gunner, the other men stirred like ghosts.

There was one man, cross-legged near the stern, hands forever working at the same knot of rope, untangling, retying, undoing again. 

Another sat against the gunwale, eyes fixed on the horizon, lips moving silently as he mouthed names. A list of the dead, maybe. Or prayers. He didn’t blink much anymore.

The boy with no drum twitched in his sleep, moaning softly. More than once, one of the older men reached out to settle him when the nightmares gripped too tightly, usually the quartermaster, who’d taken to brushing the boy’s hair back like a father would. No one commented. No one questioned it.

The man with blond curls had started carving again. Bits of driftwood, bone, whatever he could salvage. The shapes weren’t clear yet, just vague hints of animals or men. His knife made a soft shick-shick that blended with the sea’s rhythm. He’d lost two fingers on his left hand but held the carvings like they were gold.

“Think we’ll see gulls again?” someone asked. Jean didn’t look to see who. The voice was hoarse, cracked from thirst and smoke.

Jean didn’t turn. The voice had come from somewhere near the bow, rough with salt and smoke, and barely louder than the wind.

“Depends,” said the gunner beside him. “On what’s left to scavenge.”

Silence again. Even the sea sounded tired.

One of the men snorted, rope still running through his fingers. “Those birds were always smarter than us,” he muttered. “Knew when to leave.”

No one laughed.

Another man stirred, sitting against the gunwale, eyes locked on the endless line of water. His lips moved without sound. A prayer. A name. A city. Jean didn’t know. But the cadence was familiar. French.

Not the language of war, but of kitchens, of mothers, of streets still paved with sunlight.

“We should be seeing land soon,” said the gunner, half to himself. “If the winds hold.”

“If God holds,” someone muttered.

“If France holds,” another added.

Jean’s throat tightened. He didn’t look up.

The boy whimpered. The quartermaster soothed him again, murmuring low words no one else could hear. It didn’t matter. No one needed to.

“We should never have left the woods,” someone said from the back. His voice trembled, not from fear, but from the weariness that came after it. “The fires scared them off.”

“They came back,” said the man at the gunwale.

“They always come back.”

The carving knife kept its slow rhythm. Shick-shick. Shick-shick. A limb took shape. A torso. A hint of ribs, maybe. Or wings. Or teeth.

“They weren’t men,” said the rope-worker. “Didn’t move like it. Didn’t die like it either.”

“They died,” the gunner said.

Jean’s hands curled tighter on the tiller. “Not fast enough.”

He hadn’t meant to speak. The words fell out, sharp as broken glass, and no one answered for a long time.

But they didn’t look away.

“You think they were ours?” asked the quiet voice near the mast. “From the column? The ones who didn’t make it?”

Jean didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. Some part of him had recognized the shako, the drum, the way one of them had limped like Durand used to, back before-

He shook the thought loose.

“They’re not ours anymore,” said the man watching the water. “Doesn’t matter what they were.”

Jean’s gaze drifted to the boy. His hair had been hacked short in Moscow. Lice. Cold. Discipline. But it still curled when it dried.

He couldn’t be older than seventeen.

He didn’t remember his name.

The quartermaster looked up and caught Jean’s eye, just for a moment. Then looked away again.

“There were forty-two of us,” someone murmured. “Before.”

No one corrected him. The number was right. And wrong. A ghost-count, heavy on the tongue.

“Maybe the gulls’ll be waiting,” the knot-worker said again. He’d untied and retied the same loop a hundred times now. His fingers bled.

The gunner let out a breath like a laugh. “You think they’ll care?”

Jean looked ahead. No land yet. Only the heave of the sea and the stink of blood still soaked into their clothes.

“They don’t have to care,” he said. “They just have to be there.”

No one answered, but the air shifted slightly, as if the boat itself had exhaled. As if the whole sea were listening.

Behind them, the boy with no drum twitched in his sleep. The quartermaster eased him back down with careful hands. The gesture had become ritual. Familiar. Like laying a child down in a crib. He hummed something tuneless and old under his breath. A lullaby, maybe. A soldier’s song softened by memory.

“Where you from?” the rope-worker asked suddenly, not looking up from his endless knot.

No one answered at first.

Then: “Avignon.”

“Le Havre.”

“South of Lyon. Vineyard.”

The man carving driftwood paused. “There’s a bakery across from my street. You can smell the butter a block away. Used to wake up to it.”

“Is it still there?” someone asked.

No one answered. No one could.

Jean closed his eyes. For a second, just a second, he could smell it too. Stone warmed by summer sun. Bread breaking under the hand. Children laughing. Someone calling his name from an open window.

Then the sea groaned and the spell broke.

The man at the gunwale blinked slowly. “I don’t even remember what the church bells sound like.”

“They’ll still be ringing,” said the quartermaster, soft but sure. “Even if no one’s left to ring them.”

The rope-worker sniffed. “I’ll kiss the dirt when we land.”

“You’ll drink it,” the carver said. “Like wine.”

Someone near the mast chuckled, dry as old paper. “I’ll marry the first woman I see.”

“Not if I get there first,” came another voice. “I’ve got enough back pay to buy a ring.”

“That’s if the paymaster didn’t freeze to death in Vilnius,” the carver said.

More chuckles now. Not loud, but real. Rusted-through and crooked, like laughter had forgotten how to fit their mouths. Still, it warmed the space between them.

The boy with no drum stirred again, eyes fluttering open. He didn’t speak. Just sat up, small and pale and shaking, and leaned into the quartermaster without shame. The older man wrapped an arm around his shoulders and didn’t let go.

“I had a garden once,” Jean said quietly.

The others looked up, just barely. His voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the lull like a blade through cloth.

“Not mine, exactly,” he went on. “Belonged to my neighbor’s mother. She let me sit there sometimes. After drills. Said it was a shame to let good sun go to waste on soldiers.”

He paused, thumb brushing the tiller absently.

“There were peas climbing up the wall. Lavender. Bees everywhere. You couldn’t sit without getting buzzed half to death.”

A few of the men smiled. One leaned back against the hull and closed his eyes, like he could see it. Smell it.

Jean blinked slowly. “I never told her I was leaving. When the orders came, I just packed up. Left the lavender blooming.”

“That’s what I miss most,” murmured the man carving, his blade paused mid-stroke. “Things that didn’t need you to stay alive.”

Jean nodded, but didn’t speak again. The memory ached, sweet and stupid, something fragile that had somehow survived snow, rot, and teeth.

“I had a cousin in Marseille,” the rope-worker said next, more to the sea than to anyone. “Taught me to fish. Hated the ocean, though. Said it was greedy.”

He looked out at the horizon. “She was right.”

Someone else muttered, “I want to feel dirt under my nails again. Not mud. Dirt. Warm. Dry.”

Another: “I want to hear wind in the trees. Not screaming.”

The boat drifted on, pulled forward by the breath of every word.

The gunner finally spoke. “I had a dog.”

They all turned.

“Little bastard,” he said, almost smiling. “Stole half my food every time I turned around. Would’ve followed me to Moscow if I’d let him.”

“What happened?” asked the boy, voice small.

The gunner looked down. “Left him with my neighbor. She sent word, after… after the border. Said he waits at the gate every morning.”

Silence again.

Then, softly, the quartermaster said, “Then we’ll get you back to him.”

The gunner didn’t answer, but his jaw clenched.

Above them, the sail cracked weakly.
The sea heaved.
The world spun on, cold and careless.

Jean shifted his grip on the tiller. His palms stung where old blisters had split, but he welcomed the pain. It was proof he was still here, still fighting, even if the war around them had dissolved into something fouler than any campaign map could chart.

Ahead, the sky bruised darker where the sun should have been.
Land, maybe. Or just another trick of light on water.
It didn’t matter. They would go forward anyway.

The rope-worker finally dropped his bleeding hands to his lap, the endless knot falling forgotten at his feet. He leaned back, eyes closed, mouth moving silently — a prayer, maybe, or a curse. They were the same thing now.

The man carving driftwood set his knife down carefully, almost reverently, and tucked the shapeless figure into his coat. His hands were shaking.

Jean glanced at the gunner.
The man’s jaw was clenched, his gaze locked stubbornly on the horizon, like he could drag the land into view by will alone.

“We’ll make it,” Jean said, quietly. Not loud. Not commanding. Just… steady.
A stone in a river that refused to be worn away.

The men didn’t answer in words.
But slowly, one by one, they sat straighter.
Adjusted their grips on the oars.
Checked the pitiful sail.
Wiped dried blood from their hands and faces.

The quartermaster hummed again, an old tavern song, cracked and nearly tuneless, but familiar.
The boy mouthed along, his lips forming the words even if no sound came.

The sea groaned under them.
The boat creaked.
And the little band of ghosts, stitched together by memory and misery and sheer refusal to die, sailed on toward whatever waited at the edge of the world.

Jean kept his eyes ahead, hands steady on the tiller, feeling the faintest lift in the wind.
He thought again of lavender, and bees, and warm dirt under bare feet.
And he vowed, silently, fiercely, that he would see such things again.

Even if he had to carve them out of the bones of the earth himself.

The first gull appeared just before dawn.

The carving knife hadn’t stopped, the shick-shick of it now soothing, like rain on a roof.

After a while, someone hummed again. A lullaby, slow and low. Others picked it up, not singing, just breathing along, their voices barely above the wind.

And the sea, vast and endless, bore them forward.

Toward France.

Or the memory of it.

Either would do.

Chapter Text

Night fell hard and cold.

Clouds smothered the stars, turning the sky into a heavy ceiling of unlit lead. The sea hissed against the hull, sloshing black and restless, licking at the sides of the boat like it was tasting the wood for weakness. The wind whined through the rocks like something mourning.

The men had slumped where they sat, drawn tight into themselves, each cradling their wounds—of body, of mind, of soul. No one sang now. No one spoke of vineyards or kitchens. The world had gone still and afraid.

Jean fought to stay awake.

He sat upright at first, head bowed, hands clasped over the sword in his lap like a penitent man at prayer with his eyes open, lips pressed tight. But the exhaustion was too deep. It came not just from the body but from someplace underneath, bone-deep weariness laced with guilt and dread. His chin dipped. His breathing slowed. The rocking of the boat lulled him down, down, down—

—into the snow again.

It came without warning. The woods rose around him, trees clawing the sky like dead men reaching from graves. Snow sifted from the bare branches, thick as ash. It was silent, but not peaceful.

Something was moving.

Shapes, barely more than silhouettes, limped between the trunks. At first, he thought they were men. Wounded. Frozen. Lost. He tried to call out. The wind tore the sound from his mouth.

Then he saw their eyes.

Black pits, gaping and endless. Teeth are too white, too many. They wore tattered greatcoats, French and Russian alike, soaked in ice and blood. Their fingers twitched like they were still remembering how to be human.

“Jean.”

He turned, heart jumping. A man stood in the snow. Rousseau.

Except half of Rousseau’s face was gone, peeled back to yellowed bone, one eye dangling, frozen solid. Frost clung to his beard like spun glass.

“You left us,” Rousseau said.

Jean staggered back a step. “We were outnumbered. I tried to hold the line—”

“You left us,” Rousseau said again, voice dull and certain as a bell.

Others emerged behind him. Lefèvre, with his chest caved in, red foam frozen on his lips. Martin, his arm gone at the shoulder, empty sleeve stiff with blood. The drummer boy stood behind them, smaller than the rest, hair stiff with frozen gore. No drum. Just that crown of thorns, made not of gold or glory, but blood turned brittle in the cold.

Their mouths opened, one after another.

Their mouths opened, one after another.

“Help us.”

“Help us.”

“Help us.”

The voices were layered, cracked, and wet, echoing against bark and bone. They rose and rose and rose, not in a plea but in a demand.

Jean turned to run. His foot plunged into something soft. He looked down.

Bodies. Piled in heaps. Limbs tangled. French and Russian uniforms were layered like mulch. Faces turned upward, eyeless and still, mouths open in silent screams.

He tried to draw his saber. His hands were empty.

The dead surged forward.

Hands gripped his coat, his sleeves, his throat, cold fingers like iron bands, nails like broken glass. Rousseau came closest, his ruined face inches away, and when he spoke, Jean could smell it: rot and powder and the sour tang of meat gone wrong.

“You’re not even our commander,” Rousseau breathed. “Just an infantry boy taking up a role too big.”

The trees twisted upward, no longer trees at all but black pillars, columns of smoke and ash rising to a ceiling of fire. The snow beneath him turned dark and soft and hot—ash, not ice. He sank, knees buckling. The weight of the hands dragged him down.

Something beat in the distance.

Thump.

A drum?

Thump.

No. The boy had no drum.

Thump.

Then what was it?

He was on his knees now, dragged into the ash. Shapes circled him. Shadows in cassocks, their faces veiled, whispering Latin that bled into Russian, into Breton, into things older than language. Smoke curled like incense. Ash rained like communion.

He saw a cross, but the Christ nailed to it had no eyes. No face. Just a screaming mouth that opened and opened and opened, until it was the only thing left.

Jean screamed.

He screamed for help. For God. For mercy. But no one came.

Because in his heart, he wasn’t sure he believed anymore.

God had watched him in Russia. Watched Lefèvre freeze. Watched Martin bleed. Watched Rousseau scream, and had done nothing.

Jean had held the line. Jean had prayed.

And still, the dead had followed.

Still, they came.

They did not care for prayers. They did not stop for crosses or creeds. They answered no trumpet but the sound of rot cracking through silence, no command but the old hunger beneath the snow.

Jean’s voice tore itself raw in the firelit dark of the dream. He clutched at nothing, his saber gone, his coat in tatters, his breath ripped away by hands that remembered only death.

And now the cassocked shadows were singing. A low, rising chant, thick with tongues Jean did not know.

He wept.

Not because he was afraid, not because he was dying, but because they were right.

He had stepped into command because no one else had. He had told men to hold lines that couldn’t be held. Had whispered prayers over their heads because it was expected. Had led them into fire and frost and silence, and called it duty.

He had pretended to believe so they could die believing.

He had lied.

He had sinned

The mouth on the faceless Christ opened wider. It filled the sky. The chanting rose to a fever pitch, roaring like cannon fire, drowning the thump-thump-thump that still beat without origin.

Jean’s arms spread without meaning to, like the cross. Like surrender. His head tilted back. Ash filled his throat.

The voice came again, quieter than all the rest.

“You should’ve been the one dead,” said his own voice.

Jean jerked awake, gasping like a fish fresh out of water, sweat slick on his skin though the air was freezing. His breath puffed in sharp, ragged clouds that quickly vanished into the dark.

The boat rocked gently beneath him. Each slow sway set the timbers creaking, an ancient groan that rose and fell with the hush of black water against the hull. Above, the moon broke through tattered clouds like pale knives, scattering silver across the restless sea.

Jean blinked, trying to banish the memory of snow and screaming. His vision blurred and cleared again, the real world pulling him back inch by inch.

The gunner was awake, staring at him. He said nothing, just held Jean’s gaze across the dark. His eyes were sharp, shadowed hollows beneath his brow, and there was a question in them—but he didn’t ask it.

From the stern, the quartermaster’s voice drifted over the water, low and soft as he hummed the same lullaby. A tune worn thin with repetition, almost tuneless, but gentle as a hand smoothing down hair.

The boy lay curled against him, trembling even in sleep. His fingers clutched a fold of the quartermaster’s coat, knuckles white.

Jean wiped his face with a shaking hand, feeling the sweat cooling into ice on his temples. He tasted salt on his lips, sea spray, blood, or tears, he couldn’t tell.

He forced himself to breathe. Slow. Steady.

He found his eyes lingering on the quartermaster, the steady movements of his hand as it rubbed circles between the boy’s shoulders.

Jean tried to remember the quartermaster’s name. Not the one from the roster, but the one spoken in letters home. A girl’s name.

Éloïse. That was it.

The quartermaster had a daughter. Jean remembered the way the man used to talk about her on the march, how she loved chasing pigeons through the square, how she’d scream laughing when the birds scattered. How she liked licorice twists and buttered bread. How she’d be taller than her mother soon, God help him.

Jean could still see the man’s face when he’d shown them a scrap of paper from his pocket, folded and unfolded so many times it was thin as onion skin. A clumsy drawing in a child’s hand, two stick figures holding hands, one big, one small, a sun blazing overhead.

He wondered if the quartermaster thought of her now, with every note of that lullaby. Or if he was too afraid to remember.

Jean didn’t look inland. He didn’t look back. The wind pressed cold fingers into the hollow of his throat. “Thanks for keeping watch”

“It’s just duty” the gunner murmured, voice like gravel. 

Jean swallowed. His mouth tasted of salt and ash. His hand trembled as he brought it down from his face, resting it on his thigh like an anchor. He nodded once, not trusting his voice.

The gunner didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Just watched him from across the narrow space of the boat, the moonlight carving silver lines across his scarred cheek. His bayonet lay sheathed beside him, but his hands were empty now, open, resting on his knees.

“You dreamed of something. What was it?” he asked after a moment.

Jean swallowed. His mouth tasted of salt and ash. His hand trembled as he brought it down from his face, resting it on his thigh like an anchor.

Jean let out a breath, shaky, uneven. “The dead,” he said.

The edge of the gunner’s mouth flicked upwards, “I didn’t take you to be someone who mourns.”

Jean’s lips twitched at that, something between a grimace and a bitter smile. “I don’t mourn,” he said.

The gunner tilted his head. “Then what are you doing?”

Jean looked away. The moonlight cut a jagged path across the waves, broken by the hull of their little boat, still and creaking in the tide. Somewhere inland, the trees whispered in a language older than French. Older than war.

“I see their faces,” Jean said, his voice low. “Every time I close my eyes. Not like they were, laughing, shouting, drinking.” He swallowed, jaw tight. “I see them dying. I see them dead.”

Across the boat, the gunner shifted. His expression didn’t change, not much, but the flicker of amusement faded. He looked at Jean, then away, then back again. Like he was trying to decide whether to say something honest or something useful, and realizing he wasn’t sure which was which.

Jean huffed. Not quite a laugh, but it wasn’t a threat either. “Then what do you do? Just forget?”

The gunner scratched the side of his neck, eyes flicking toward the sea. “I try. Doesn’t work.” His voice was even, but his posture gave him away, tense, not in a soldier’s readiness but something smaller, more uncertain. “You carry them. I… pretend I don’t remember the names.”

“That better?”

“Not really.” He paused, rubbing a thumb over the edge of his boot. “There's nothing else we can do.”

A long silence stretched between them. The kind of silence that wasn’t comfortable, but wasn’t painful either. Just there, almost like a spiderweb in the attic.

Jean shifted, his hand twitching like he might reach out. He didn’t. Instead, he let it rest near the gunner’s on the wood, close, but not touching.

The gunner noticed. Of course he did. He looked down at the space between them, then looked away. Said nothing.

Jean looked out at the horizon. “I thought it would feel better,” he muttered. “Getting here. France. Seeing the sea again.”

“Doesn’t, does it?” the gunner said.

Jean shook his head.

“Me neither.”

The wind picked up, tugging at their coats, lifting bits of hair and loose threads. A gull called from somewhere inland. The sound was lonely. Wrong.

The gunner moved again. A shuffle of cloth and leather. This time, he crossed the small gap between them, slowly, like he wasn’t sure if he’d be welcome. His knee bumped lightly against Jean’s.

Jean blinked. He turned his head, surprise flickering in his expression.

“You look like you need some warmth,” the gunner said, already regretting it, rubbing the back of his neck, something Jean noticed that he does when nervous. “We’re out at sea after all.”

Jean stared at him. Then laughed. Once, soft and tired. “Thanks.”

They didn’t move again for a long time. They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, knees just barely pressed together. The sea rolled beneath them. The sky turned.

It wasn’t warmth. Not really. But it was something.

Chapter Text

The gull’s cry thinned into the hush of the waves, vanishing like breath in winter. The only sounds that remained were the gentle slap of water against the hull and the soft creaking of old timbers settling beneath them. Somewhere near the stern, the quartermaster’s lullaby lingered, half-hummed, half-mumbled, like a prayer meant only for the sea to hear.

Jean tilted his head back, staring at the clouds swirling overhead like gunpowder smoke. He felt the warmth of the gunner’s knee against his own, slight but unmistakable, like a spark he didn’t dare acknowledge.

“You ever think about going back?” the gunner said suddenly. His voice was rough, but softer than before.

Jean blinked. “Back where?”

“Home,” the gunner said, still watching the waves. His fingers traced the grain of the wood, slow and idle, as though feeling for something he couldn’t name. “To whatever you left behind.”

Jean didn’t answer right away. He rubbed a palm against his thigh, fingers catching in the torn seam of his breeches. “Sometimes.”

The gunner huffed, one short breath through his nose. It might’ve been a laugh in a different man. “Only sometimes?”

Jean shifted, uncomfortable. “It’s…dangerous. Thinking like that. Makes you soft.”

“Soft’ll keep you human,” the gunner said.

Jean glanced at him, sharply. “Human doesn’t win wars,” he said, and his voice was edged now, clipped. “Not against whatever those things were.”

The gunner didn’t flinch, didn’t raise his voice. He just looked back at Jean and held his stare. “Would you rather be undead?”

Silence stretched between them, taut and uneasy. The lullaby faded, replaced by the sound of the oars gently shifting against the sides of the boat, and the wind worrying the sails above.

Jean was the first to speak. His voice was quieter now, as if the fight had gone out of it. “I used to think I’d be a cooper,” he said. He ran his thumb along the inside of his palm, tracing a callus. “Like my father. Barrels. Casks. Wine, salt herring, gunpowder. Honest work.”

He looked down at his hands, scarred knuckles, dirt under his nails, skin weathered to leather. “Instead…”

“Instead you’re a soldier,” the gunner finished for him.

Jean nodded. “A soldier who gives orders men don’t come back from.”

The gunner shifted, bumping his knee again, just slightly. “Could’ve been worse. You might’ve ended up a tailor. Or a priest.”

Jean let out a faint, genuine laugh. “A priest? God save me. I’ve enough sins as it is.”

The gunner’s grin twitched wider. “Could’ve heard your confession.”

Jean rolled his eyes. “You’d be the worst confessor alive.”

The grin twitched wider across the gunner’s face, though he still didn’t quite look Jean in the eye. “Could’ve heard your confession myself.”

Jean rolled his eyes and leaned back, shaking his head. “You’d be the worst confessor alive.”

“True,” the gunner agreed without hesitation. “Never had the patience for listening to people talk about their lives.”

Jean gave him a sidelong glance, eyebrow raised. “Yet you make an exception for me?” His tone was lighter now, brushing the edge of teasing, but only just. He wasn’t quite sure what this was. Not comfort, not really. But the ache behind his ribs had loosened.

The gunner turned slightly, his shoulders curving in, gaze angled toward the sea as though it held something he didn’t want to admit. “Think of it as repayment,” he muttered, “For the times you listened to mine.”

His hands fidgeted in his lap, fingers curling and uncurling slightly, brushing against the fabric of his coat like they weren’t sure what else to do.

Jean looked at him for a long moment. The scars. The dark hollows under his eyes. The dirt at his collar. A smear of dried blood he hadn’t bothered to wash away. He looked like hell.

But then again, so did Jean.

Without thinking, Jean’s knee leaned back into his again. Just enough to steady something that didn’t need to be named.

“Fine,” Jean said, low. “But I’m not confessing to anything tonight. You’d fall asleep halfway through.”

The gunner let out a rough breath that might’ve been a laugh.

Jean couldn’t help himself; the side of his mouth found its way up. Then the humor ebbed away, leaving only exhaustion in its place. “You think He’s listening?”

The gunner was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, it was soft. “Used to. Now I think He’s busy. Or far away.”

Jean traced a splinter in the gunwale with his thumb. “Maybe He’s afraid to look at us.”

“That’d make Him smarter than any general I ever served,” the gunner said.

Jean let out a breath that might’ve been a laugh, soft and short. It died quickly, swallowed by the hush of the sea.

They fell silent once more, listening to the sigh of the wind.

After a moment, the gunner cleared his throat. “Earlier. In your dream. You called out someone’s name. Rousseau?”

Jean’s body tensed. A line drew tight between his brows. He didn’t look over.

“He was… one of mine. At Borodino.” He ran a hand through his hair, fingers snagging in tangles. “Good man. Better than me.”

The gunner turned his head, studying him with a quiet sort of care. “You blame yourself?”

Jean kept his gaze on the dark horizon. “Don’t you?”

The gunner didn’t answer — not out loud. But the way his hand stilled, hovering inches from Jean’s arm, fingers twitching like they didn’t know what to do — he didn’t need to.

Jean dragged both hands down his face, as if trying to wipe the memory clean.  “Anyway. It’s done. He’s gone.”

“Doesn’t mean he stops following you,” the gunner said.

Jean let out a shaky breath. “No. It doesn’t.”

They sat there, close enough to share breath. Jean found himself acutely aware of how the gunner’s shoulder felt, solid and warm beside his own. He wondered, fleetingly, if the other man could feel his pulse beating like a snare drum.

“You know,” the gunner said after a long time, almost casually, “my mother used to say you shouldn’t try to carry everything alone. She said even a mule knows when to kneel and let someone else take the weight.”

Jean barked a dry laugh. “And what, you offering to carry my sins?”

The gunner shrugged one shoulder. “I’ll carry what I can, soldier’s duty, mon commandant .”

Jean turned toward him slowly. His face was unreadable in the moonlight, but his eyes caught the fractured silver like the sea itself. “That’s a dangerous thing to promise.”

“I’ve done more dangerous things,” the gunner said, voice a little lower now.

Their eyes held for a moment too long. Jean’s chest felt tight. He dropped his gaze, fumbled for something else to say.

“Suppose it’s warmer like this,” he muttered, half embarrassed.

The gunner cleared his throat. “It is.” His hand shifted, as though he meant to clasp Jean’s, but he pulled back at the last second, fingers drumming on the wood instead.

Jean noticed. Of course he did. Watched the aborted gesture with something like longing, though he’d never admit it aloud. For a foolish second, he wondered what it would feel like to have the other man’s hand, warm and living, steadying him. The thought sprang up so fast and vivid it startled him. He blinked hard, throat tight, as though he could pray the notion out of existence.

Instead, he cleared his own throat. “You’ll wear a hole through the plank, drumming like that.”

The gunner stopped tapping, but didn’t look at him. “Can’t help it. The quiet makes my skin crawl.”

“I know,” Jean said. His voice came out gentler than he meant.

The silence that followed was heavier now, but no less familiar. The gunner shifted, his shoulder brushing Jean’s for a moment as he leaned in just slightly.

“You know what’d help?” he murmured, as if confessing.

Jean narrowed his eyes. “I can guess. Starts with a bottle, ends with someone vomiting over the side.”

“Worth it,” the gunner said, already reaching inside his coat. With a flourish more sheepish than dramatic, he produced a battered tin flask. “Didn’t think we’d live long enough to bother.”

Jean stared. “You’ve been hiding that from your commander?”

The gunner looked away, mouth crooked in a half-grin. “Didn’t want to share if I was dying. Figured I’d keep it for myself. Selfish, I know.”

Jean tried to glare at him, but his mouth betrayed him, curving up, reluctantly. “You’re a bastard.”

“Sure. So, drink with me anyway?”

Jean hesitated. He shouldn’t. He was cold, exhausted, half-mad, and drinking would only make all the thoughts he shouldn’t be having slip closer to the surface. Drinking would only make it worse. Or maybe it would make it easier. But the flask smelled sharp and hot, like life

He reached for the flask. “One sip.”

The gunner handed it over. “Two.”

Jean shot him a look, but unscrewed the cap. The fumes alone stung his eyes. He took a cautious swallow… and nearly choked. “My god. That’s not brandy, that’s paint thinner.”

The gunner laughed softly. “Beats nothing, eh?”

Jean wiped his mouth. “Jesus. You’ll kill us faster with this than the monsters will.”

“Then drink up. We’ll die happy.”

Grumbling, Jean took another sip to prove a point. The heat burned a path down his throat, spread into his chest like kindling catching flame. He handed the flask back with a shudder.

“When this is over, if it’s ever over, we’re getting real brandy. Proper stuff. In glass bottles.”

“You buying?” the gunner teased, already bringing the flask up again.

Jean scoffed lightly. “If I’m still breathing, I’ll find the coin.”

The gunner didn’t laugh this time. His smile faded into something quieter. “All right. It’s a deal. Try to stay alive until then.”

Jean found himself looking at him again, too long, too openly. His gaze snagged for a heartbeat on the curve of the other man’s mouth before he caught himself and turned away sharply, throat dry. He muttered a prayer beneath his breath. For clarity. For strength. For distance.

The gunner nudged him with an elbow. “Don’t go getting pious on me now.”

“I’m not,” Jean lied quickly. “Just… thinking.”

“About what?”

Jean drew in a slow breath. “About how I’d like to be anywhere else but here.”

The gunner offered him the flask again. “Drink makes it feel like somewhere else. Even for five minutes.”

Jean hesitated. He wanted another swallow, even knowing it was a terrible idea. He wanted a lot of things he shouldn’t want. Instead, he shook his head firmly. “Wouldn’t want to get drunk right now.”

The gunner shrugged, “I wouldn’t mind getting drunk.”

With that said, he tipped the flask back with practiced ease. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, face pulling tight for just a moment as the burn hit. Then he exhaled, lips parting in a soft breath, the kind that curled warm in the cold night air. He passed a thumb along the rim of the flask, then rested it against his knee, letting it dangle loose in one hand.

Jean watched all of it.

The way the gunner’s jaw tensed, the way his fingers tightened just slightly around the tin. The glint of moonlight on the curve of his cheek. It wasn’t deliberate, none of it, he wasn’t performing. That made it worse. Or better. Jean couldn’t decide.

He didn’t mean to stare. Truly, he didn’t. But the quiet was thick, and the world had shrunk to the narrow breadth of this boat, to the breath between them, to the way the gunner tilted his head back and closed his eyes for just a second, like the drink had brought him somewhere else, somewhere warmer, quieter, kinder.

Jean’s mouth felt dry. The prayer he’d muttered minutes ago, clarity, strength, distance, sounded absurd now. Weak.

The gunner opened his eyes again. Their gazes met.

Jean looked away, fast.

The gunner wiped the flask against his sleeve, out of some old reflex for manners, and offered it back again. Jean could feel the heat of the gunner’s palm, even without touching it. And the ridiculous, dangerous thought rose again, how easy it would be to close that last inch. How quiet it would make his mind, even if only for a moment.

But instead, Jean only said, “You’ll regret drinking that when you try to sleep.”

The gunner snorted. “I regret most things. That doesn’t stop me.”

Jean huffed, trying to force the heat out of his face, to stamp it down beneath the cold and the dark and the ache in his bones. “You’re talkative tonight,” he said, aiming for dry, and nearly managing it. “Must be the rotgut loosening your tongue.”

The gunner leaned back, resting the flask on his thigh, smirking just slightly. “And you’re unusually observant. Must be all that praying sharpening your senses.”

Jean narrowed his eyes. “I wasn’t—”

The gunner raised a brow, clearly unconvinced. “Weren’t you? Could’ve sworn I heard a saint’s name in there somewhere. Or was that just you cursing me under your breath?”

“Is that how you talk to your commander?”

The gunner grinned, all teeth in the dim light. “Only the ones I like.”

Jean’s stomach did a slow, traitorous flip. He swallowed it down, forced his voice flat. “Careful. I’ll have you on report for insubordination.”

The gunner tilted his head, eyes half-lidded, voice lowering a fraction. “Go on then. Write me up. Might be the first time anyone’s ever written my name down proper.”

Jean tried to scoff, but it came out weaker than he intended. “And what would I even write? ‘Private under fire, drunk and running his mouth.’”

The gunner gave a small, rough laugh. “Better than ‘Private shot to bits in the mud.’”

Jean opened his mouth, then shut it again. He couldn’t argue with that.

The gunner took another careful sip, then tucked the flask away inside his coat. “Anyway. You’d probably leave out the bit about me being handsome. Wouldn’t want anyone to think you’re playing favorites.”

Jean’s breath caught. “You’re drunk.”

“Not yet. But working on it.”

“Good God.”

The gunner leaned closer, close enough that Jean could smell the raw bite of alcohol on his breath, layered with salt and damp wool. His voice softened. “It’s the truth, though. You’d leave that bit out.”

Jean managed a brittle laugh. “Because it isn’t relevant.”

Jean held very still. The silence stretched long between them, heavy with the sound of water lapping the hull. He was suddenly, painfully aware of how narrow the boat was. How close the gunner’s knee was to brushing his own.

He cleared his throat. “You need sleep. You’ll be useless tomorrow.”

“So will you.”

“I’m not the one drinking paint thinner.”

The gunner leaned back finally, resting his head against the side of the boat with a quiet thud. “You’re right. You’re the one praying away things you want.”

Jean felt like he’d been punched. “That’s enough.”

“Sure.” The gunner closed his eyes, voice gone almost gentle. “Just… don’t pray so hard you forget how to live. All right?”

Jean’s jaw worked silently. He couldn’t answer that. Not honestly.

The gunner cracked one eye open. “Wake me if we’re about to die.”

Jean forced a dry chuckle. “Of course. I’d never let you miss the end of the world.”

The gunner smiled faintly. “That’s my commander.”

Then he settled back, shoulders sagging as exhaustion finally took him. His breathing evened out, soft and steady, leaving Jean alone with the hush of the river and the distant creak of wood.

Jean turned his face away, hands clenching tight around the gunwale. He stared into the dark, trying not to think about the warmth lingering beside him, or how fiercely he wanted things he could never let himself have.

So instead, he prayed. For clarity. For strength. For distance.

And for the morning to come quickly.

Chapter Text

The sun rose slowly and red over the edge of the world.

Jean watched it from the prow of the boat, wrapped tight in his coat, breath silvering in the chill air. The sea lay iron-grey and trembling, touched here and there with molten streaks of dawn. Every swell caught the newborn light and shattered it into shards of gold and blood.

He was alone. The others lay slumped or curled beneath scraps of canvas, lost in uneasy sleep. The quartermaster’s quiet lullaby had faded with the darkest hour. Even the gunner, restless as he was, slept on now, mouth slightly open, a faint line creasing his brow like he still dreamed of gunfire.

Jean kept silent watch.

The rising sun hurt his eyes, raw from weeping and sleeplessness. It painted the salt crust along his lashes, stung the cuts on his face. But he welcomed the burn. It felt honest, somehow, a pain that belonged only to him, and not to any ghost clawing from the past.

The dark before dawn always seemed the worst. In that silence, there was too much room for memory.

He thought of Russia. Of snow black with soot and blood. Of men screaming as the frost bit through wool and skin. Of Rousseau’s voice, low and condemning. You left us.

He thought of the weight of command, how it settled like a stone between his ribs. Of the men who’d followed him because someone had to lead. Because someone had to pretend there was hope. He thought of the boy curled beside the quartermaster. How small he’d looked, clutching that coat. How Jean had felt something sharp twist inside him at the sight, something he wasn’t sure was pity alone.

Then he thought, unwillingly, of the gunner.

The memory of heat lingered beside him. A knee pressed lightly to his. A voice murmuring in the dark: Don’t pray so hard you forget how to live.

Jean closed his eyes, exhaling a shaky breath.

He wasn’t supposed to want comfort like that. Not from another man. Not from anyone, really. He was a commander, if only by necessity. He had to stay sharp, above need, above softness. And yet…

In moments like this, with the dawn bleeding into the sea, he could admit it, to himself, if to no one else.

He was so tired of pretending.

He gripped the rail until his knuckles ached, trying to anchor himself in the gentle slap of waves.

The sun climbed higher. Orange turned gold, turned white. Birds wheeled overhead, crying thin and high. The air smelled less of rot now, more of salt, and beneath that, the faint resin scent of pine drifting from the shore.

Jean kept staring into the light until his eyes watered.

He tried not to think of the gunner. But his mind betrayed him, slipping back to that day in the snow.

He’d found him half-buried beside a frozen cart, face chalk-pale, blood crusted black in his hair. Jean had assumed he was dead, like so many others scattered along that road. But when he leaned closer, he’d heard the softest rasp of breath. A stubborn pulse beating against his fingers.

Jean had shouted for help he wasn’t sure would come. He remembered the weight of the gunner’s limp body as he heaved him upright, the harsh steam of his own breath bursting in the cold. Remembered the gunner’s eyes fluttering open, unfocused, and fixing on him like he was the first warm thing he’d seen in weeks.

He hadn’t thought anything of it then. A man was dying, and Jean was a commander. Saving his men was his duty. That was all.

Except it hadn’t stayed just duty.

The memory played over and over, bright as frost-shine under a winter sun. The way the gunner had clutched his sleeve with numb fingers, as though terrified Jean would vanish if he let go. The low, hoarse voice whispering, Don’t leave me.

Jean had told himself it meant nothing. The man was half-delirious, trembling on the edge of death. But something in him had flinched at that touch. Softened.

He hadn’t expected to get… attached.

Now, with the dawn spilling warmth across the sea, Jean closed his eyes against the glow. He could still feel the ghost of the gunner’s weight leaning into him on those long marches after, still hear the crack of his laughter around campfires that burned too low, see the way his eyes creased at the corners when he grinned.

He’d tried to keep a distance. He’d tried to be only a commander. But the distance had shrunk day by day, eroded by cold, by blood, by the simple fact of survival. The gunner was still here, when so many others weren’t. And somehow, that mattered more than Jean wanted to admit.

He gripped the rail tighter, shoulders hunched as if to fend off the memory.

He shouldn’t want this closeness. Shouldn’t want the warmth of another man’s voice easing the terror from the dark. Shouldn’t want those fleeting seconds when it felt like the gunner saw past the uniform, past the walls Jean kept up, and didn’t turn away. 

But he did. God help him, he did.

He remembered the other man’s face when the gunner had grabbed him by the arms, shaking him hard enough to rattle his teeth, shouting at him to keep fighting. The way the firelight had shone across his features, catching in his hair, sparking off the damp sweat on his skin. Lighting his eyes up like the brightest emeralds Jean had ever seen.

It had been chaos all around them, men screaming, the thunder of footsteps echoing off the trees, smoke curling thick and acrid through the air. Jean had felt himself slipping under the weight of it all, drowning in the certainty that they were finished, that there was nothing left to salvage.

And then the gunner’s hands were on him, searingly hot through the layers of his coat. His voice cutting through the din like a blade: You’re not dying here, mon commandant .

Those eyes, wide, furious, terrified, had pinned Jean in place. A green so bright it seemed impossible, glowing like something alive in the shadows. For a second, Jean hadn’t seen the blood streaked across the gunner’s cheek, or the tear in his sleeve, or the ragged way he was breathing.

All he saw was that fire. That impossible, relentless spark.

It had terrified him.

Because he’d felt something answering deep in his own chest, something he’d thought long buried under duty and caution and the hard necessity of command. A spark wanting to burn with the same ferocity.

And he couldn’t afford that. Not here. Not now.

Not ever.

He closed his eyes, pressing his lips together as if he could hold the memory inside his mouth, keep it from spilling out and giving him away. His pulse was too fast, thudding under his skin like a drum.

He bowed his head, pressing his forehead against the chill of the rail, willing himself to breathe.

It shouldn’t matter this much. It shouldn’t feel like something sacred, the way the gunner looked at him sometimes, as if Jean was more than just a man, more than just another tired, battered soldier staggering across a field of corpses.

It shouldn’t, but it did.

And it terrified him.

He caught himself on the thought, the gunner. That was all he had to call him. No name. No family. No past beyond the snow and the mud and the gunpowder smoke.

They’d fought side by side for months now, shared water, rations, silence, fear. They’d huddled under the same tarp against sleet. They’d pulled each other out of rivers, out of half-frozen ditches, out of skirmishes that should have left them both dead.

And yet they’d never spoken their names.

It was safer that way, Jean supposed. Safer to be a rank, a uniform, a duty. Safer not to admit that beneath the mud and frostbite and orders, they were just two men, breakable and mortal and longing for warmth.

But God help him, sometimes he wanted to know.

He wanted to know what the gunner had been before all this, if he’d ever laughed until he couldn’t breathe, or danced drunk in a summer street. If he’d left anyone waiting behind. If he liked the taste of sweet wine better than bitter. If there was a name someone used for him in the dark, softer than the bark of a sergeant’s command.

And sometimes, though it shamed him, Jean wanted to hear that name from his own mouth. Wanted to speak it like a secret.

A wave slapped the hull below, jolting him back into his body. He realized his fingers were trembling where they gripped the rail.

He scraped a hand across his face, trying to drive out the ache pressing behind his eyes.

Names are dangerous, he told himself. Names mean closeness. Names mean remembering the dead.

But it was already too late, wasn’t it?

He was remembering. The green of those eyes in firelight. The rough rasp of a voice yelling at him not to die. The ghost of a knee pressed against his beneath a blanket.

Jean stared into the rising sun until his vision blurred white.

A sharp cough cut through the hush of dawn.

Jean flinched, shoulders snapping straight. He turned, scanning the deck, blinking spots of sunlight from his eyes.

Another cough answered, rougher this time, wet at the edges. A figure hunched near the mast, clutching the rail as if it might keep him upright.

Jean’s stomach dropped.

He pushed away from the railing, crossing the deck in quick strides. The boards creaked under his boots, the salt wind tugging at his coat.

“Soldier.” His voice came out harsher than he meant. “What’s the matter?”

The man looked up, eyes glassy, sweat beading at his hairline despite the chill. He tried to straighten, swaying a little.

“Nothing, Commander.” His voice rasped like gravel. “Just… the sea. Doesn’t sit right with me.”

Jean frowned, studying the pale, waxy cast to the man’s skin, the way his breath whistled in and out too shallow and quick.

“It’s more than the sea,” Jean said. “How long have you been coughing like that?”

The man hesitated, then broke into another fit, bending double, hand pressed to his chest. When he lifted his head again, there was a smear of red glistening on his palm.

Jean felt the world tilt under his feet, far more violently than any wave.

He seized the man’s wrist, pulling it closer to see. A bright thread of blood painted the creases of the soldier’s skin.

“Merde.” Jean let go like he’d been burned. He cast a frantic look around the deck, searching for any of the others who might help. “Sit down. Don’t move. Don’t talk. I’ll fetch water. And keep that hand covered, do you hear me?”

The soldier blinked at him, dazed, lips parted as though to protest.

Jean didn’t wait for the reply. He turned on his heel and strode across the deck, heart hammering too hard, too loud in his chest. Each step felt sluggish, like he was moving through water. Blood. God , not now. Not another one.

The others were beginning to stir. A groan from beneath the quartermaster’s tarp. A muttered curse. Boots scraping on damp wood. The brittle quiet of the dawn cracked open under the weight of waking bodies.

Jean passed the gunner as he knelt beside a pack. He hadn’t even realized the man was awake, eyes sharp now, jaw set, already watching him.

Jean didn’t speak, but he didn’t need to.

The gunner rose instantly, boots hitting the deck with a thud. “Who is it?”

“Near the mast,” Jean said, hoarse. “Coughing blood.”

The gunner was already moving, snatching up his coat, his satchel. Jean veered toward the barrel near the stern and ladled a tin cup full of water, splashing cold drops over his fingers in his hurry.

By the time he returned, the soldier was on the ground, propped against the mast, head tilted back like it was too heavy to hold up. The gunner crouched beside him, checking his pulse, his breath. The other man’s lips had gone pale, too pale, tinged with blue.

Jean knelt, pressing the cup into the soldier’s hand, steadying it when it trembled. “Drink. Slowly.”

The soldier obeyed, or tried to. He coughed again between swallows, a thin line of red running down his chin.

The gunner muttered something under his breath, too low for Jean to catch, and opened his satchel, drawing out a small tin of salve, some rags. His hands moved efficiently, but Jean could see the tension in them, tight in the fingers, sharp around the knuckles.

“Do you think it’s—?” The gunner started.

“Don’t say it,” Jean snapped, not looking at him. “Not yet.”

The gunner’s mouth closed with a click.

He shifted back on his heels, watching as the gunner wiped the blood from the soldier’s mouth, tucked a folded cloth beneath his head. The tenderness of the act surprised Jean more than it should have.

The soldier’s eyes had begun to roll back, fluttering beneath lids that barely stayed open.

Jean leaned in. “Stay with me. What’s your name, soldier?”

The man coughed, then whispered something. It was barely audible, more breath than sound.

Jean leaned closer. “Say that again.”

“Étienne,” the soldier rasped. “Étienne Dufort.”

Jean nodded once, firmly, and squeezed his shoulder. “All right, Étienne. You stay with us, do you hear?”

The gunner glanced at him briefly, then looked away again, jaw flexing. Jean stood slowly, rising back to his full height, watching the horizon where the sky bled from rose into gold. The wind cut harder now, sharper, and the warmth of dawn did nothing to push it back.

“Is it the fever?” he asked at last, voice low.

The gunner didn’t look up. “Could be. Or the lung-rot. Either one kills if it gets deep enough.”

Jean felt something cold settle beneath his ribs. “We’ll have to isolate him.”

The gunner winced, just slightly, as if the sound of Jean’s voice had scraped the inside of his skull. He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled through his teeth. “You can try telling the others that. See how they take it.”

Jean didn’t blink. “They’ll listen.”

The gunner glanced up at him, face drawn. “You sure about that?”

Jean didn’t answer. He didn’t need to be sure. He just needed to act like he was.

“Move him to the stern,” Jean said. “Away from the water barrel. We’ll rig something around him, canvas, rope, anything we have.”

“And then what?” The gunner’s voice was quiet. Tired. His fingers had stilled against the tin of salve, but he didn’t put it away.

Jean looked down at Étienne, now slumped against the mast like a discarded doll, his chest rattling faintly with each breath. His lips had gone a deeper shade of blue.

“Then we wait,” Jean said.

“For him to die?”

“For him to live, ” Jean snapped. He couldn’t help the anger boiling in his chest. “Christ. You think I don’t know the odds?”

The gunner grimaced, pressing the heel of his hand to his temple. “Gods, don’t shout.”

“I’m not shouting.”

“You are ,” he muttered. “To me, anyway.”

Jean exhaled sharply, tamping it down. The urge to shout, to pace, to punch something. “How much did you drink last night?”

The gunner didn’t answer right away. He wiped his hands on his coat and finally pushed to his feet with a grunt. “Enough to get hungover”

“Next time, drink water,” Jean said. “You’ll be more use in the morning.”

The gunner barked out a soft laugh. “Are you giving me health advice now, Captain?”

“Commander,” Jean corrected coldly. “And if you keel over next, I’m not dragging your corpse.”

The gunner narrowed his eyes and bent to gather his satchel again, slower this time. “If I keel over, I won’t care who drags me.”

Jean turned away from him, already scanning the deck. The other men had gathered in loose knots, watching, murmuring, waiting for instruction. Fear smelled like sweat and salt in the air.

He squared his shoulders. Stepped forward.

“You,” he said, pointing to two of them, the rope worker and the man who was carving out of a driftwood. “Take Dufort to the stern. Go with them.”

Jean kept speaking. “Rig up canvas to divide the space. He needs warmth and distance. No sharing cups, no sharing cloaks. If anyone else starts coughing, report to me. Immediately.”

A few of them exchanged looks, wary. One made the sign of the cross.

Jean didn’t flinch. “We’ve survived worse. We’ll survive this. But only if we keep our heads. Understood?”

A rough chorus of nods, “yes, sir”s, and mumbled agreements followed. Good enough.

As they moved into motion, Jean turned back toward the stern. The gunner was already helping to tuck a blanket around Étienne, his posture stiff. His face was unreadable, except for the slight crease between his brows and the way one hand lingered at his temple, as if the pain there was something living and sharp.

“You’ll need to sleep later,” Jean said as he approached, quieter now. “A clear head is more use than a bleeding heart.”

The gunner didn’t look at him. “You think I’ve got either, do you?”

Jean didn’t reply. Just looked at him for a long moment, then knelt beside Étienne once more.

The gunner spoke again, softer this time, a dry rasp of sound. “He’s just a kid.”

Jean didn’t disagree.

They sat there in silence a moment, side by side, not quite touching. The ship creaked around them. The sea whispered against the hull.

Jean said, at last, “There’s still a chance.”

The gunner didn’t answer right away. His hand hovered briefly over Étienne’s blanket before drawing back, fingers curling into a loose fist on his knee. “You don’t have to say that,” he muttered.

Jean kept his gaze on the boy. “I’m not saying it for you.”

“Then who, exactly?”

Jean didn’t respond. His jaw ticked once, then stilled. The wind stirred the hem of his coat, and he focused on the rise and fall of Étienne’s chest, shallow as it was, like it might disappear if he dared to look away.

The gunner shifted slightly beside him, elbow brushing against Jean’s for the briefest second. They both stilled. Neither moved again.

“I’ve seen lungs like this before,” the gunner said eventually, quieter now, like he was talking to the planks of the deck instead of to Jean. “Back in Algiers. A kid in our camp got caught in the rain for too long. Thought it was nothing. Two days later, he was pissing black and breathing like a fish on a dock.”

Jean swallowed. “Did he make it?”

The gunner’s mouth twisted. “No.”

Another long silence. Étienne stirred faintly, eyes fluttering open just a sliver before sliding shut again. The blanket rustled. The sun had begun to claw over the edge of the world, painting the mist in pale golds and cruel pinks.

Jean finally spoke, low. “You care too much.”

“Don’t start,” the gunner said flatly.

Jean exhaled slowly, eyes closing just for a moment. “We don’t have the luxury of softness out here.”

“And yet,” the gunner said dryly, “you’re the one who brought him fresh water. Precious resources”

Jean opened his eyes again. His mouth twitched, like he might’ve smiled in another life, under different rules. “Don’t mistake discipline for cruelty.”

The gunner looked at him then, finally. “Yes, commander.”

Their eyes locked. Too long. Too close. Those emeralds were blinking back at him again. Jean felt his pulse spike, a stupid, involuntary thing, and dropped his gaze instantly, heat prickling unwanted at the back of his neck. God. What was he doing?

He stood abruptly, brushing off his hands even though there was nothing on them.

“I need to speak with the quartermaster,” he muttered, already turning away. “See if we can spare broth.”

The gunner said nothing.

As Jean walked back across the deck, the wind cut across his face, sharp and cold. He welcomed it. It gave him something to blame the burn in his cheeks on. Something clean. Something safe.

Behind him, the gunner watched him go, headache forgotten for a beat, something quiet and painful lodged in his chest like a splinter.

Neither of them said what they wanted to.

Neither of them knew how.

Chapter Text

Near the Shores of France, spring 1813

It’s been nearly three days, and the boy’s fever hasn't broken.

Jean sat with him anyway, kneeling in the narrow space at the stern where the canvas made a poor excuse for a sick berth. Étienne’s breath rattled faintly, shallow pulls that came and went like waves breaking too far out at sea. His lips were cracked, his skin damp and grey. Jean wrung out the cloth in the basin, folded it, and laid it across the boy’s brow. He smoothed it once, with more care than he intended.

“Easy now,” he murmured, though Étienne was hardly awake enough to hear.

The ship’s timbers groaned. The sea outside was deceptively calm, lapping softly against the hull. Inside, it smelled of damp canvas and sour sweat. Jean forced himself to breathe shallowly, to keep his stomach steady. He’d seen death before, God knew he had, but never could he seem to strip the youth from it. Never could he stop thinking of the years it stole before its teeth even sank in.

The boy stirred. His cracked voice rasped: “Captain…”

Jean leaned close. “I’m here.”

Étienne’s eyes fluttered open a fraction, glazed and unfocused. “My mother… tell her I—” He coughed, the sound tearing through his chest like something splitting apart. Jean steadied him with a hand at his shoulder, waiting until the fit eased.

“You’ll tell her yourself,” Jean said, though the words tasted like ash.

When he looked up, he found the gunner standing in the doorway of canvas, watching. He hadn’t made a sound, but his hand was braced white-knuckled against the frame, his face taut. Jean didn’t acknowledge him, couldn’t, not now. He only dipped the cloth into the basin again, wrung it out, and laid it across the boy’s chest this time, as though that thin layer could anchor him to the earth.

“Rest,” Jean said, voice low. “That’s an order.”

Étienne’s lips moved as though he might have smiled. Then his eyes closed again. His breathing was uneven, slow, frighteningly shallow.

Jean stayed crouched beside him long after, cloth cooling in his hand, until the boy slipped back into that fever-dream state between waking and gone.

At last, the gunner spoke, his voice rough. “He won’t last the day.”

Jean didn’t look at him. He smoothed the blanket over Étienne’s shoulder instead, tucking it as though he might be chilled.

“Then he won’t spend it alone.”

Jean rose stiffly, knees protesting after too long crouch on the boards. He smoothed his coat, though the gesture was pointless, damp with sweat and seawater as it was. For a moment, he stood there, hand braced against the canvas partition, looking down at Étienne’s face, eyes closed, lips parted in a shallow rattle of breath.

“Stay with him,” Jean said, his voice low, steady but frayed at the edges.

The gunner gave a short, rough laugh, the sound without humor. “Where else would I go?”

Jean’s gaze flicked toward him, but the gunner didn’t meet it. His head was bowed, one hand resting on the back of the boy’s blanket as though to anchor him to the world by touch alone. There was a strange tenderness in the gesture, unguarded and uncharacteristic, and Jean looked away before it could root too deep.

Jean hesitated. For a moment, he wanted to say something more, some word of thanks, or reassurance, or warning, but the words caught in his throat. He only gave a curt nod and ducked out into the pale light.

He ducked through the canvas and strode out onto the deck.

The early morning struck him, cold, briny, sharp enough to sting his lungs. He drew it in anyway, as if it could scour clean the heaviness that clung to his chest. The air outside was sharp with salt, the horizon paling from black to bruised blue. The sea was calm, lapping against the hull in slow, patient strokes. Lanterns swung low across the deck, casting uneasy shadows across the lines and rigging. 

One of the men at the oars glanced up as Jean approached. “Land soon, sir. Less than an hour, if the current holds.”

Jean followed his gaze. In the distance, faint against the lifting fog, a line of darker shadow pressed against the horizon. Shore.

He let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. “Keep steady,” he said. “No rushing. No mistakes now.”

The man nodded, bent back to his oar.

Jean lingered there, watching the thin promise of land sharpen against the dawn, before turning back. He ducked once more beneath the canvas. The gunner hadn’t moved. Étienne lay curled beneath the blanket, lips parted, breath shallow. The gunner sat close, shoulders hunched, eyes fixed on the boy’s face as though sheer force of will could drag him through the next hour.

Jean eased back down onto the boards, the stiffness in his body second to the weight in his chest. The air beneath the canvas smelled of salt, damp wool, and sickness. Étienne shifted faintly under the blanket, breath rattling in and out like a leaky bellows.

The gunner didn’t look up when Jean sat beside him. His hand still rested against the boy’s shoulder, the gesture at once protective and helpless.

Jean said, low, “We’ll be on land within the hour.”

The gunner’s mouth twisted. “You keep saying we. ” His thumb moved once, distractedly, over the rough wool. “But he won’t see it.”

Jean’s gaze lingered on the boy’s drawn face. He swallowed. “We don’t know that.”

“Yes, we do.” The gunner’s voice wasn’t harsh, instead, it was flat, emptied out. “You’ve seen enough of them go. Same as I have.”

Jean pressed his lips together and said nothing.

The silence stretched. Étienne coughed once, a weak, wet sound that made both men glance down at him. The gunner’s jaw tightened.

Finally, Jean murmured, “He has a name. Étienne.”

The gunner’s eyes flicked to him, sharp for a moment, then softened, though his mouth stayed bitter. “Course he does. They all do. But after a while…” he broke off, rubbing at his temple with his free hand, “...after a while it’s easier not to say them out loud.”

Jean shook his head. “That’s a sin, to forget them like that.”

“Forget?” The gunner gave a short, dry laugh. “I don’t forget. I remember every last one. Faces, voices, how they cursed or prayed at the end. Sometimes I wish I could forget.” He leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. “But you know as well as I do, there’s no such thing as a nameless dead. Not for men like us.”

Jean studied him in the dim light, the set of his shoulders, the way his hand stayed near the boy as though touch alone could ward death away. For a strange, guilty instant Jean realized he had no name to put to that face. Not really. They’d fought beside each other, saved each other’s lives, crossed half an ocean together, bled on the same dirt, and yet, nothing. Just the gunner.

It struck him like a blow: how easily the man could vanish, how quickly he could become another nameless figure in Jean’s memory, folded into the blur of battles and storms and losses. Perhaps it was better that way. A mercy, no name meant no ghost to follow him after.

Still, his own voice betrayed him before he could stop it. “Do you even know mine?”

The gunner blinked, as if pulled out of a fog. “Your, what?”

“My name,” Jean said, quieter now, the words tasting strange on his tongue. “Do you know it?”

The gunner’s brow furrowed. He opened his mouth, closed it again. For a long moment, the only sound was Étienne’s labored breath, the faint slap of water against the hull. Finally, he admitted, “No. I don’t.”

Jean let out a breath, short and sharp, almost a laugh, though there was no humor in it. “Then we’re even.”

The gunner’s gaze didn’t waver. He sat back a little, the leather of his coat creaking. “Should I?”

Jean glanced at him, startled. “Should you what?”

“Know it.” The gunner’s tone was level, but there was something beneath it, something rough-edged. “Would it make a difference, commander?”

Jean wanted to say no. That it was better to keep the lines drawn, the sea between them wide. But the boy beside them moaned in his fever-dream, whispering half-words neither of them could make out, and the sound seemed to strip away the distance.

“It might,” Jean murmured.

The gunner studied him for a long moment, then gave a low grunt, like the subject wasn’t worth pursuing. He turned his head back toward Étienne, adjusting the blanket higher over his chest, careful, almost tender.

Jean stared at the two of them, and the words pressed against the back of his teeth, aching to be spoken. His name, so simple, so small a thing. Yet in this cramped boat, in this thin hour of dawn, it felt heavier than any rank or order.

But he kept it to himself.

Instead, he said, “Stay with him. I’ll keep watch for land.”

The gunner gave a short nod without looking up, his hand resting near the boy’s arm. The boy coughed again, weak as a newborn, and the gunner hushed him without thinking, palm hovering over his shoulder like one might calm a restless horse. Jean watched for a moment longer, then turned his eyes outward.

The horizon was brighter now. A line of pale gold crept over the waves, catching on the spray and turning the water into fractured glass. He narrowed his gaze, searching. There, faint, but certain: the dark smudge of coastline.

“Land,” Jean said.

The gunner looked up at once. His hand stilled on Étienne’s blanket, his face unreadable. “How far?”

“Not far.” Jean kept his voice steady, though relief slid through him like water over parched stone. “We’ll reach it within the hour, if the wind holds.”

The gunner gave a short nod. He did not smile. His attention drifted back down to the boy, whose breath rattled with each rise and fall of his chest.

Neither man spoke for a long time. The sea slapped the hull, the sails snapped and groaned, tand he gulls began their thin, circling cries overhead. The smell of salt was sharper now, mixed with the faint promise of earth.

Jean shifted his stance, straightening against the railing. “Once we’re ashore, we’ll find a physician.”

The gunner didn’t look up. “If he lasts that long.”

Jean clenched his jaw. “He will.”

As the morning wore on, the outline of trees sharpened, cliffs rising stark against the pale sky. Smoke from distant hearths curled faint and thin. Civilization, safety, or something close to it.

The men gathered what little they had, checked knots, shifted weight. Jean barked quiet instructions, the habit of command keeping his voice steady. The gunner stayed where he was until the last possible moment, his broad back bent protectively over Étienne.

When the keel scraped shingle, a shudder went through the boat. Men leapt out to drag her further ashore, boots sinking into wet sand.

The keel struck gravel with a jolt, the groan of wood against stone echoing sharp over the surf. A cheer broke from the men, thin, ragged, but jubilant all the same. Boots splashed into the shallows as they leapt down, dragging the vessel higher onto the strand. Laughter mingled with curses, some men dropping to their knees to kiss wet sand, others craning for the sight of trees and smoke beyond the dunes.

Jean stayed at the prow, breathing in the scent of earth, of pine carried on the morning wind. Home or not, it was land, and land meant hope. He turned back, voice steady with command even as relief loosened his chest.

The gunner shifted, bracing his arms around Étienne’s frail body. For a moment Jean watched, the way the man moved with such practiced gentleness, as though carrying something fragile and breakable. But when he went to lift, his motion faltered. His brow furrowed. He pressed two fingers to the boy’s throat, then bent lower, ear near his mouth.

Nothing.

Jean felt the air in his lungs turn to stone. “What is it?”

The gunner didn’t answer at once. His shoulders were rigid, his jaw locked. Slowly, he drew back, still holding Étienne close but not rising. At last, he said it, voice flat as iron:

“He’s gone.”

The shouts of the others carried over them, bright with relief, deafening in their distance. Jean heard none of it. He only saw the gunner’s hands, steady now, cradling the boy as if weight alone could summon him back, as if refusal were enough to keep him here.

For a long moment neither of them moved. The others were still shouting, stamping the earth like men reborn, but here at the stern it was quiet. Too quiet.

Jean knelt, his hand hovering uselessly above the boy’s chest, as though willing it to rise. “No,” he said, the word almost soundless. He shook his head once, sharply, like he could deny it into untruth. “No, not when we’re here. Not now.”

The gunner’s mouth twisted. “You think it matters where? He was dying yesterday, same as today.”

Jean’s gaze snapped up, hard. “You heartless bastard, he held on this long. He could have-”

“He couldn’t.” The gunner’s voice cut low and raw, the kind that scraped on the way out. “Don’t you put that on him. Don’t you dare pretend it was a matter of one more hour.” He pulled Étienne closer against his chest, as if to shield him from Jean’s words. “He fought as long as he could. That’s more than any of us have a right to ask.”

Jean rose halfway, his fists clenching. “And what do we tell the men? That he slipped away while we were too busy dreaming of sand under our boots? That’s the first taste of land we give them?”

The gunner glared up at him, eyes dark and blazing. “We tell them the truth. That he died like a man, not a child left behind, and if they can’t stomach it, that’s their weakness, not his.”

Jean drew in a breath, sharp as glass, and let it out in a shudder. His anger wavered, fractured into something heavier, something harder to carry. He looked down at the boy, at Étienne, who was no longer breathing, whose face was strangely peaceful in the morning light.

“He should have made it,” Jean whispered, and the words sounded broken even to his own ears.

The gunner shifted Étienne’s weight in his arms, too carefully for a man who claimed it didn’t matter. His knuckles had gone white. For the first time, Jean noticed the tremor in his hand.

Jean pressed his lips together. “If the men see him like this, their spirits will break. They’ve clung to him, clung to the thought he’d pull through. If that hope’s torn away now…” He trailed off, but the meaning hung there, heavy.

“You want me to lie,” the gunner said flatly.

“I want you to think,” Jean snapped, sharper than he intended. “We’ve come too far for despair to rot them now. They’ll follow me into hell itself if they believe it’s worth it. But if they look at him and see futility-”

The gunner cut him off, “And what if they look at him and see themselves? You think I don’t? You think I haven’t been wondering which of us is next?” His breath hitched, too quick, too shallow. He clutched Étienne tighter, as though holding him could anchor him against the thought. “He was young. Stronger than me, maybe. And still…” His jaw snapped shut.

Jean’s anger cooled at the edges, replaced with something colder, quieter. He knelt again, not for Étienne this time, but for the man still breathing in front of him. He studied the gunner’s face, the cracks running through the mask he always wore.

“You’re afraid,” Jean murmured. 

The gunner’s eyes flicked up, sharp, then away. His mouth worked soundlessly for a moment before he ground out, “Aren’t you?”

Jean didn’t answer at once. He looked toward the line of trees again, so close he could almost taste the air of them, the promise of solid ground. Then back to Étienne, and to the gunner’s shaking hands.

“I don’t get to be,” Jean said finally. “Not while they’re watching.”

The gunner let out a rough breath through his teeth, half a laugh, half a curse. “Then God help you, commander. Because they’re always watching.”

His grip on Étienne loosened just enough to ease the boy down, laying him across the planks with care so deliberate it seemed at odds with the callousness in his voice. He smoothed the blanket once over the still form, then drew his hands back, staring at them as though the tremor there belonged to another man entirely.

Jean watched him in silence, the weight of the moment pressing as heavy as the sky before a storm. His throat was dry, he swallowed against it.

“Cover him,” Jean said at last. “The men need to see land first, not loss. I’ll tell them… later.”

The gunner’s mouth twisted, a flash of bitterness, but he reached for another scrap of canvas all the same. Together, without speaking, they drew it up over Étienne’s face.

A shout rose from the beach, men calling, waving, the sound of oars dragging free of the shallows. The world beyond the canvas was alive with relief, almost jubilant. Inside the narrow stern, there was only the hush of waves against the hull and the sound of the gunner’s uneven breathing.

Jean straightened slowly, his knees stiff. He looked down at the canvas-covered shape, then at the man beside it, shoulders hunched, jaw set like iron against something heavier than grief.

“Come,” Jean said, forcing steadiness into his voice. “They’ll need us on the strand.”

The gunner didn’t rise at once. He sat there another heartbeat, broad hand still resting on the blanket where Étienne’s chest should have lifted. Then he pushed himself upright with a rough motion, not meeting Jean’s gaze.

“Go on,” he muttered. “I’m not part of your regiment, commander. You’ve fulfilled your promise of bringing me home.”

Jean hesitated. He wanted to argue, to insist the gunner has long been part of this team, that they need to stand together, before the men. But the sight of the gunner’s hand curling into a fist at his side, white-knuckled, trembling, stilled him.

The shouts of the others carried up the strand, rolling back on the salt wind like echoes from another world. Jean stood for a long moment at the edge of the surf, boots sinking into wet sand, watching them scatter toward the line of trees and smoke. They moved like men reborn, laughing, stumbling, falling to their knees to press their hands into the earth.

He should have gone with his men. Should have lifted his voice, raised his hand, led them onward. But his gaze kept sliding back to the boat drawn up on the shingle, to the strip of canvas in the stern, and to the man still sitting guard beside it.

The gunner hadn’t moved. He sat half in shadow, shoulders bowed, a silhouette against the pale wash of dawn. His head was bent low, not in prayer, not quite, but with a weight that pressed him into the boards. He looked like a figure carved from the wreckage itself, grim and immovable.

Jean’s feet carried him back before he’d even thought it through. He crossed the strand, ducked beneath the low canvas flap again, and crouched down in the dimness. The air inside was heavy still, salt and damp wool and the faint, sour tang of fever that lingered even now.

For a long moment Jean said nothing. He studied him, the hard line of his shoulders, the way grief hollowed the air around him without ever showing plain on his face. Then he reached inside his coat, pulled something from an inner pocket, a strip of oilcloth wrapped tight. He pressed it down against the boards between them.

The gunner’s eyes flicked to it, sharp, wary.

“My name’s Jean Louis Dubiore,” Jean said. “If you ever need it. If you ever care to use it.”

The words seemed to hang heavy in the air, heavier even than the boy’s stillness. The gunner’s brow furrowed, his jaw tightening, but he didn’t reach for the oilcloth, not yet.

Jean straightened, hand lingering on the gunner’s shoulder for a single, grounding moment. “You’re right, you’re not under my command anymore. You’re home, same as the rest. Whatever you choose to carry from here, that’s yours alone.”

The gunner’s gaze lifted at last, dark and unsettled. “And you?”

Jean’s lips thinned. He glanced once toward the canvas covering Étienne, then toward the bright strip of horizon beyond. “Me?” He let out a breath that came rough, ragged. “I’m still their commander, I need to behave my part.”

The gunner studied him for a long moment, eyes searching as though he might strip past the name, the rank, the stiff line of Jean’s shoulders, to whatever truth still beat beneath. Then his mouth twisted, not quite a smile, not quite a sneer.

“Then go behave it,” he said, voice rough. His hand shifted on the blanket, fingers brushing once more over the canvas that covered Étienne. “I’ll see to him.”

Jean turned to leave, ducking back into the light. The air outside struck him clean and raw, sharp with pine and woodsmoke, filled with the ringing cries of men who had already begun to scatter up the strand. They beckoned him, voices bright, waiting for him to lift them into order again, to shape their joy into something steadier than relief.

Jean squared his shoulders, forcing command into the line of his back. He strode forward, boots crunching on shingle, until the cries of “Commander!” rose sharp and sure above the surf.

Behind him, in the shadowed stern, the gunner sat alone with the boy and the strip of oilcloth between them. His fingers hovered, hesitated, then closed around it at last. The cloth was warm from Jean’s hand, heavier than it should have been.

He tucked it away without looking, then leaned forward, resting his brow against the boards beside Étienne’s still form.

Outside, bells were ringing from the village beyond the trees, faint and welcoming. Home.

Inside, the gunner stayed with the dead.

Chapter Text

The barracks smelled of powder and damp wool, no different from a hundred others scattered across the country. Boots clattered on stone, men shouted over one another, a chorus of familiar noise that filled the long hall and spilled into the yard. The gunner sat at the edge of it all, whetstone rasping slow and steady along the barrel of his musket. The rhythm as if the iron in his hands were the only thing anchoring him.

He had been back in uniform for nearly two years now. Long enough for the coat to lose its stiffness, long enough for the calluses to thicken again across his palms. He had fought in small skirmishes, stood in parades, and carried the weight of a gun crew through drill after drill.

The others had accepted him in the way soldiers did, by seeing that his work was done, his powder dry, his arm steady when the time came.

But he had not crossed paths with Jean.

He knew the commander was still out there. Rumor carried his name often enough, half in respect, half in awe. A man who had led them back from the edge of ruin, who had kept his promise to the living and the dead alike. The kind of man soldiers remembered, whether they wished to or not.

Sometimes, when the nights were long and the watchfire burned low, the gunner thought of the strand. Of salt wind and dawn light, of a strip of oilcloth pressed to the boards. Of a name offered, quiet and steady: Jean Louis Dubiore.

He never spoke it aloud.

The musket barrel gleamed as he turned it in his hands, light catching along its edge. Around him, the barracks roared with laughter, arguments, and the thud of dice on a tabletop. He remained apart, as he always had, shoulders bowed, a silhouette against the noise.

The wars were not the same wars they had marched into years ago.

The blight had seen to that.

It had begun in Russia, that much every soldier knew, whether they’d been there firsthand or only heard whispers in the taverns. They said the sickness had first taken root in the wastes beyond the Berezina, men staggering from the frozen river with blackened mouths and eyes gone hollow, biting their own comrades in the snow. The French had burned what they could, buried what they couldn’t. It hadn’t been enough.

From there, the stories scattered like shot: the infection crawling north to Vardøhus, festering in stone keeps, flaring up again in the smoke and rubble of San Sebastián. At Leipzig, whole companies had broken ranks at the sight of their dead standing again among the living.

And always, always, it traveled westward.

The gunner had seen it himself when a battery of the line had turned its guns on their own. He had heard it in the cries from Tyrolean villages, where the churchyards were chained shut against scratching from below. He had smelled it at Saint Petersburg, a rot like no graveyard ever held, carrying over the ice.

He thought of Jean more often than he cared to admit.

Not in words, never in anything so soft as remembrance. It came instead in the shape of silences, in the pauses between drills, in the moments when his hand closed around the oilcloth at the bottom of his kit as if to steady himself.

He had not seen him since the shores of France. That morning lingered like salt on the tongue, sharp and unshakable: the surf dragging at their boots, the men stumbling toward smoke and trees, Jean’s back turned at last, squared and unbending. A commander walking toward his duty, while the gunner had remained in shadow, crouched beside the boy who would not rise again.

Years had passed, campaigns fought, blood spilled across villages and fortresses, but Jean had never crossed his path. Not on the long marches, not in the barracks, not even among the rumors that swirled like smoke over every bivouac fire. He was always elsewhere, always a name carried in half-respect, half-awe.

The gunner told himself it was better that way. That he owed Jean nothing, that commanders and soldiers part ways every day and think no more of it.

For what would they say to one another, if they met again? Jean had offered him a name, an opening, a place at his side. The gunner had not taken it.

Yet when the blight rose in his memory, when he felt the old ache in his forearm from a bite barely survived, when he saw the dead stand again in the torchlight, he could not help but wonder how Jean would have faced it. Whether he still bore that same quiet resolve, that same iron steadiness that had carried them all off the strand.

The gunner would never speak it aloud. But in the long hours before dawn, with the barracks sleeping and the watchfire guttering low, he sometimes let the thought rise:

That somewhere out there, Jean Louis Dubiore still walked the earth.

And that perhaps, whether by chance or fate, they were not finished with one another yet.

“Come on, old bear,” a voice called over the racket of the hall.

The gunner looked up from his musket, the whetstone stilled in his hand. One of the younger lads from his crew stood there, grinning, a jug already in hand and the reek of wine rising off him. Behind him, a knot of soldiers clapped each other on the shoulders, their laughter loud enough to drown even the clatter of boots on stone.

“Stop looking so grim! We’re off-duty till morning,” the lad said, jerking his chin toward the rowdy table. “No drills, no marches. The quartermaster dug out a barrel he swore was lost. You coming?”

The gunner’s first instinct was to shake his head, to settle back into the silence that kept him steady. But the hall was different tonight. They were in a safe zone, close enough to the coast that no whispers of the blight touched them. The walls were thick, the garrison secure, and for the first time in months, the men let themselves laugh like there was no tomorrow.

The gunner slid the musket aside, setting the stone down with care. He rose, shoulders creaking, and followed.

The table roared to greet him, mugs shoved into his hands before he could protest. They made room at the bench, pounding their fists as he sat. Dice tumbled, songs rose off-key, and wine sloshed across the boards as though spilling it meant nothing, as though the world beyond the safe walls had not rotted.

He lifted the cup because it was easier than refusing. The wine was cheap and sharp, burning down his throat. The others cheered, one of them clapping him on the back so hard the drink nearly spilled again.

The taste hit him harder than he expected. Sour, thin, barely fit for a toast, yet it dragged something up out of him all the same.

Salt wind. The creak of the hull beneath them. The sting of cheap brandy passed hand to hand as the boat rocked in the black water. The faint brush of flask against palm, the meeting of eyes in the dark, the knowledge that neither of them had any illusions left about what might come by morning.

The laughter around him seemed to grow distant, blurred at the edges. He raised the cup again, forcing the burn down until his throat ached.

But the taste lingered, stubborn as the man who had shared it with him.

Someone was already singing, off-key but with such force that the others roared their approval. The musicians clapped with rhythm, grinning at each other’s mistakes as if they were part of the joke, laughter bouncing off the walls in waves. Even the worst notes drew hoots and slaps on the back; the more discordant, the funnier it seemed.

The gunner stayed for a moment, letting the chaos wash over him, but the warmth in his chest itched too sharply to ignore. He set his cup down and muttered something about needing air, or the privy (mostly the latter), and slipped out of the hall.

The stone corridor was quiet, the sound of the party fading behind him. Damp smelled of the night outside mixed with the lingering tang of spilled wine. As he rounded a corner, a voice stopped him cold.

“Sir?”

He turned, hand going to the hilt of his belt out of habit. A young face looked up at him, wide-eyed but familiar. 

Recognition struck quick as a musket ball: the drumless boy who had walked beside him from Smolensk, stumbling through the snow with blue lips and raw hands. The boy who had carried no weapon, no drum, only the will to keep his boots moving one step further when the others fell silent in the snow.

The gunner’s gaze dropped, almost against his will. The boy’s hands were bare in the lamplight, the fingers marked with pale ridges and mottled scars where frostbite had chewed at him.

And he had changed. Taller now, shoulders squared where once they had sloped forward beneath too-heavy packs. His jaw was sharper, voice steadier, eyes harder than he remembered. Still young, but no longer the half-frozen scrap of a child staggering through Russian snow.

The gunner felt something twist in his chest, pride, perhaps, or sorrow, or the uncomfortable recognition that time had moved for them both.

“You,” he said, the word low and rough.

The boy, no, the young man, smiled faintly. “It’s been a while.”

He shifted his weight, the faint smile lingering, though it was thinner now.

“I’ve just been transferred here,” he said, glancing toward the muffled roar of laughter and song spilling from the hall. 

“New orders, I uh… didn’t expect to find a familiar face.”

“I never thanked you,” The young man went on, voice quieter now, less sure. 

The gunner raised a brow, as if asking what there was to thank for. The young man must've caught this, as he smiled awkwardly and plucked a stray strand of hair from his uniform.

“Back then. On the march. You didn’t have to look out for me, but you did. I remember.” He flexed his hands as if the memory still lived in them, the pain of the frost clinging even now. “I don’t think I’d have made it otherwise.”

The gunner’s jaw worked. He had no easy words for that. he never had. He shrugged once, heavy-shouldered, as if to say it had been nothing, though they both knew better.

“How’ve you been?” he asked at last, the words dragging themselves out in a rasp.

The young man’s eyes flickered, shadowed by the lamplight. He looked older still in that moment, far older than his years. 

“Alive,” he said simply. Then, after a pause, with a wry twist of his mouth: “And that's gotta count for something these days.”

The boy let his hands fall, tucking them into his coat as though to hide the scars. His shoulders eased a little, and for the first time since their eyes had met, the guarded edge in his stance softened.

“My family…” He drew in a breath, steadying it before he spoke again. “They thought I was dead. Letters never reached them. When I finally made it back, after Russia, it was months later. My mother wept until her throat was raw. My father…” his mouth twitched into something like a smile, rueful but proud

“he put me straight to work before I’d even had a hot meal. Said if I was alive enough to walk through the door, I was alive enough to earn my bread.” 

The gunner’s lips pressed into a thin line, but he didn’t interrupt.

“They wanted me to stay,” the young man went on, his voice quieter now. “Wanted me to leave soldiering behind, marry, take the fields like my brothers. I tried, for a time. But every night, I heard the cadence of march, the crack of muskets, the drum in my own chest. Couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t stay.” His gaze drifted, and then returned, steadier this time. “So I enlisted again. And here I am.”

A flicker of relief ghosted across his face, almost boyish, almost the same expression the gunner remembered from that long, brutal march. “And to find you here, someone I know.” He let out a breathy laugh, shaking his head. “It feels less strange. Less like I’m a stranger among my own kind.”

The gunner didn’t answer at once. He studied him instead, seeing not the half-frozen child stumbling through snow but a man forged harder by survival. Taller, sharper, with a voice that carried weight where once it had only trembled. The boy was gone, but in his place stood someone who had walked through fire and chosen to walk back into it again.

“You still play?”

The young man blinked, as if the question tugged him somewhere distant. His hands twitched at his sides, the fingers curling and uncurling before he gave a small, almost sheepish laugh.

“Not like I used to,” he admitted. “Hands don’t move as well anymore. Frostbite took that from me.” He held them up, palms out, the scars catching the light. “But I drum when I can. On the mess tables, on the barrels. Some of the lads don’t mind the noise. Others…well, they throw boots.”

The gunner’s mouth twitched, the faintest shadow of a smile. “You keep the boots?”

The young man laughed softly at that, a sound with more steel in it than the boy’s laughter ever had. “I wish. I could do with a new pair.“

The gunner watched him, silent, weighing the words. The hall beyond the door still roared with drinking songs and laughter, but here in the corridor, the air was quieter, heavy with the silence that lay between them. He shifted his weight, glancing toward the dim passage at the far end of the barracks. The pressure in his gut had grown too insistent to ignore.

“Well then, go on,” he muttered, jerking his chin toward the hall where the shouts and music still thundered. “I’m sure they could do with a drummer tonight.”

The young man hesitated, as if reluctant to break the moment, but then nodded. His shoulders squared again, not the slouching weariness of a child, but the carriage of a soldier who knew his place among the ranks.

“Yeah, thank you, sir.” 

The gunner gave a grunt that might have been agreement, already turning toward the latrine.

The young man started to step away, then stopped. 

“Wait,” he said quickly. When the gunner turned back, the boy stood straighter, chin lifted, as if a soldier giving a report

“My name’s René.”

The gunner’s eyes lingered on him a long moment, studying the name as if it were another scar, another mark of survival. He gave a small nod, rough but certain.

“René,” he repeated, tasting the name like iron on his tongue.

The drummer held his gaze, steady now, braver than he’d ever been in the snow. “And you, sir? What should I call you?”

The gunner’s jaw worked, the words rising but catching in his throat. For a heartbeat, he almost gave it, nearly let the name spill the way Jean had once pressed his into his hands like a kept promise. But something in his slightly drunken 

He gave a short shake of his head, a flick of his hand as if brushing the question aside. “Doesn’t matter, you can keep calling me sir, I like that.”

René looked as if he might press, but something in the set of the gunner’s shoulders, hard, immovable as stone, stopped him. He nodded once instead, crisp and respectful, before turning to join the roar of voices down the hall.

The gunner watched him go until the door swallowed him whole, then turned back toward the shadows of the corridor.

Man, he needs to use the lavatory badly.