[Rose] Per Ardua
Title: The Rose Garden - Per Ardua
Characters/Parings: England, America, France, Prussia, assorted others
Warnings: none
Summary: Twentieth century America through the eyes of a handful of mental patients and those around them.
Per Ardua: Sometimes, Alfred talks in his sleep.
One - Two - Three
Can I please strangle Canada?
Quote this chapter is from Next to Normal.
I’m dancing with death, I suppose
But really, who knows?
Sometimes he wakes up and goes downstairs and pours a cup of coffee. Fries up enough bacon to feed a family of four, Eggs, scrambled. A tall glass of milk, but leaves the carton out for a refill. Smiles. Turns. Sits at the kitchen table. Smiles again.
Sees Matthew staring at him across the table, eyes wide and bleeding palms and open mouth, dirt and tears and blood and tears and blood and blood and he screams -
and falls asleep.
~*~
One of the orderlies on D is French, or maybe just French-American - at any rate, he speaks the language.
Alfred says things to him in French, on occasion. Usually, it’s just simple things - a nom de Dieu when he’s feeling down, viens, vite during a fight, or even a little mon vieux! now and then when something particularly amazing happens. Occasionally, he spews sentences that come out like lines from a play - Pourquoi? Nom de Dieu! Qu'est-ce que je vous ai dit? Jamais faire comme ça! Jamais monter avec le vent en arriere! Jamais! Jamais! or Ecrivez le plus tot possible! or Je voudrais bien un filleul americain, tres gentil, comme vous.
Francis cracks a wide grin that Arthur would call shit-eating and laughs like he’s in on the joke. The accent’s too good - has Alfred ever been to France, he’ll ask unfailingly.
Every time, Alfred will say the same thing in response.
“I’ve been all over.”
~*~
Sometimes he’s in France, just a year and a half before the armistice. Matthew next to him, hunched in the dusty brown-white chalk dust that makes up their tunnel. Down the line the other members of the 50th battalion are hunched the same way, shivering in the cold and light snow. Matthew is saying something but the Jerry mines are going off all down the line and he can only just make out the motions of his lips - over the top.
Bells sound and as they scramble up and over. Matthew is running and the bullets are whizzing past his ears and as Matthew falls Alfred thinks I have never been to Vimy Ridge.
~*~
Actually, come to think of it, Disturbed Ward is so demographically American it’s as funny as anything else on the top floor.
There’s the big, silent Russian who hasn’t been known to speak since the day he arrived. (Not that anyone asks about him much - quite frankly, his ever-present, distant smile is downright intimidating.) There is Feliciano, who is instantly recognizable as Italian by his gesturing and rapid speech - though how much of it is the sickness and how much is his roots is anybody’s guess. Several of the doctors are expatriates, international brains who have somehow found themselves exchanging one sort of hell in their war-torn homeland for another entirely different sort in America: one Austrian, who left his post in Germany shortly after the new regime closed his hospital, and his wife, a gentle-dispositioned, foul-mouthed Hungarian whose marriage was her ticket to a new world; one quiet Japanese man who also fled the war.
(Alfred can hardly bear to see him in the halls. On good days he tries to hide in the shadows if caught waiting in the public petition line, ashamed. On bad days he can hardly contain himself with rage, and he usually ends up losing more priveleges instead of asking for new ones.)
~*~
Other times, he’s in England.
“You ready for this, Thomas?”
Alfred is grinning like a cat and quite possibly for the first time since the godawful war began, so is Arthur. They each have a beer in one hand, facing one another squarely and poised to spring at any moment.
“Bring it on, Jones - or are you scared you’ll lose?”
“Like hell, you limey.” Alfred only turns his head towards the barman slightly, nodding once. “Count of three - one, two -“
The man behind the counter eyes them warily, thumps once on the counter exactly at ‘three’ and watches each man closely as they rush to finish their glass first. They’re loud and nearly fight when they’re finished with the first - but most certainly not the last - glasses, but he knows these, the few, may be here today and gone tomorrow, and lets them have their one night’s rest.
The bar will be gone in the morning, anyways.
~*~
Alfred, of course, is always talking about his pride in his homeland. Irish, he boasts, claiming his mother’s grandmother crossed the ocean during the Great Potato Famine - although the others don’t understand how someone who has never seen Ireland, who is so many generations removed can say he is an Irishman. They ask if he’s Irish, why is his name Jones? What about his father’s people?
He sputters and says his dad’s people are British or from someplace-in-the-middle-of-Europe (the green one, he says, and they don’t get why). But those don’t count because one’s too far back or small or something and he can’t even remember the other one so it must not be important.
No one corrects this last piece of logic. They might be off their rockers, but they aren’t hypocrites.
(No one ever bothers to ask about America.)
~*~
He likes it best when he has his wings.
He likes the English well enough, does not interfere much with the locals. There is, of course, the occasional party when enough alcohol is accumulated, but as a general rule he sticks to his hangar and aeroplane and it’s just enough. It’s better up in the air - barring the damn Boches. Of course, that is the point - he finds a sick sort of calm when he flies across the Channel in the nose of a Spitfire.
He never fears the water below him, knows somehow that he will return to match wits with the other pilots and pester his mechanics and one day even return home to the States, knows this even as the bullets from the Messerschmitt above slice through his plane. Knows this even as it spirals, bleeding black smoke and coughing and smashing into the water with enough force to knock him out of his seat.
(He is afraid of the fires that will consume his engine, engulf the cockpit and lick at his uniform, steaming his goggles but not blocking his ears from the cries of the bomber crew. He is afraid of Matthew, bailing out the side of the bomber as his parachute burns -)
~*~
And Gilbert.
Alfred doesn’t talk about that in front of Gilbert, never comments on his obviously-German accent (he knows it well, an East German twinge that sends chills down his spine). He doesn’t say anything about his brother’s unusual name - if it were another patient, he’d laugh and ask what mother in their right mind would name a kid Ludwig. He will never say a word regarding the small German phrases Gilbert sometimes lets slip. It’s easier to pretend these things don’t happen.
In return, of course - nothing without a price, especially not here where goodwill runs lower than the thermostat in winter - Gilbert doesn’t bring up certain things either. He’s never asked about Alfred’s precious jacket, or why there is a silver badge sown into the inside right lapel. He doesn’t ask if Alfred has ever been to Kaliningrad even though he knows - he knows Alfred’s come damn close, at the least. (Königsberg, Kaliningrad, Königsberg. New names take time to remember.) He knows that it’s possible - and he doesn’t say that he knows this.
Usually, it’s easier to pretend.
~*~
“I never told anyone this,” Alfred says, blanket drawn around himself tightly, “but I think if this don’t work out - engineering, or law school, or whatever - I’d like to fly planes for a living. Maybe go to England, fight in the war.”
Matthew stays silent, shivering on the other side of their dorm room.
Sometimes Alfred talks in his sleep.
- Jerry is German. Also, Boche, Heinie, Kraut, etc.
- Tommy Atkins.
- To go over the top is to climb out of one’s trench and into No Man’s Land. Also means ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire.’
- Vimy Ridge is in the north of France, site of a battle during the first World War having peculiar importance to Canadians. The 50th Battalion of the Canadian 4th Division has particular importance.
- Supermarine Spitfires were the iconic British fighter planes of the Battle of Britain (though outnumbered by Hurricanes 3 to 1.) Messerschmitts were the German fighters who escorted the bombers.
- Why is Alfred part-Irish? Because America was. Why are Americans so proud of their great-great-great-great-great-great-whatsit’s homeland? Beats me.
- High Adventure is an excellent book by Jimmy Hall. By the way, the French bits are grammatically sound but they've got nothing to do with anything Alfred would be talking about. (why hallo thar, foreshadowing.)
- P-51 Mustangs really were beautiful ships.
- Ad Astra is supposed to be an epic game. Never played it myself, but its name is quite famous for being somebody's motto or something.
- There’s at least one inconsistency in each of the imaginary fragments. The falling-asleep bit in the opener is actually quite logical, if you take into account Alfred’s schizophrenia. (Exactly two of the memory-location bits are factual.)
- Why is this chapter so short? Because I had to cut all the Canada-plot bits out for the next chapter. Sorry, but that means the next one’s already nearly done! (It’s the beginning of an arc, hoorah.)