amberdreams (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
amberdreams) wrote2014-05-28 09:27 pm
amberdreams) wrote2014-05-28 09:27 pm
Entry tags:
King of Hearts - spn_cinema fic and art Part 1/2
Title: King of Hearts
Author: amber1960
Artist: amber1960
Movie prompt: King of Hearts
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Jared/Jensen
Warnings: Mental illnesses portrayed in an unrealistic manner and talked about in Victorian terms. War-like levels of violence, also portrayed in an unrealistic manner. Though the fic has French, German and English characters, inexplicably, everyone speaks English. Jared has unhistorical long hair without lice because – ew! Way to kill any romance…
Summary: Private Padalecki is happy (or as happy as a man can be in the middle of the war to end all wars) looking after his carrier pigeons. When his commander sends him on a dangerous mission to defuse a German arms dump in an abandonned French town, the last thing he is expecting to find is love with just a soupçon of craziness.
Read on AO3
Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to my two awesome betas
matchboximpala and 
keep_waking_up. They have saved you from my run-on sentences and many other bad habits. Any remaining idiocies are all down to me.
Disclaimer: The Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles is totally fictional and bears no resemblance to any British regiment, past or present. Neither do any of the characters portrayed resemble any real person, alive or dead – even though I’ve appropriated the names and physical attributes of certain CW actors, they are playing parts here, just as they do on screen. None of it is real, folks…
Belleville was aptly named, because she was both beautiful and a town. She liked that about her name, as she was a straightforward sort of place. Founded in the ninth century by Finbar, an itinerant Irish saint, Belleville had nurtured and protected her townsfolk as best she could for centuries. She had seen many of her men ride off to war, she had been besieged three times, been sacked twice, and had her heart singed once by accident, when Madame Pereaux forgot about the bread and set their house on fire, the resulting conflagration burning down Belleville’s fine Romanesque church of St Finbar and her council’s chambers. Of course, her citizens rebuilt her church in the new gothic style, even bigger and better than before, and the replacement Town Hall gained a tall tower topped with a wonderful mechanical clock that had a life-size knight in armour that emerged once every twenty-four hours from his portal to strike a bell with his mace.
So when the Germans invaded France in 1914, Belleville, with her stout, stone walls and sturdy citizens, thought she was as prepared as she could be for any kind of conflict.
She was wrong.
It was Belleville’s misfortune to be situated right in the middle of one of the lesser-known but strategically important Salients called Les Cinglés. Four years into the fighting and Belleville was a battered beauty now, her walls and buildings full of holes. She had been on the Front, behind the Front and was currently occupied by German troops. Troops who were now busy packing up and leaving, as the Allied forces’ latest big push had actually been successful in moving the Front northwards by a couple of miles, and Belleville was once again going to swap sides. This time she wasn’t sure she would survive.
One army or another - Belleville had quite lost track of which - had built a large concrete blockhouse in Belleville’s town square, and crammed it full of munitions. Now the Germans had been given orders that set her foundations trembling.
“Are the fuses set?”
“Yes, Oberst Scholz!” Hauptmann Bobo Bieber clicked his shiny black-booted heels together as he saluted. “Heinrich has wired the trigger to the town clock so the whole lot will blow at midnight when the knight strikes that stupid bell.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Oberst Scholz rubbed his hands together. “With a bit of luck the enemy troops will be in the town by then, and will be blown sky high along with this miserable heap of stone.”
From his darkened window overlooking the square, Henri Bresson, town barber and resistance leader, had been listening in to the Boches’ conversation and now recoiled in horror. Mon Dieu! Less than twenty-four hours and the whole town was going to be an inferno. He woke his wife and left her with instructions to warn as many townsfolk as she could, pack a bag and leave quickly.
“But what about you, Henri?” Madame Bresson’s voice trailed after Henri as he ran downstairs to the radio hidden behind the washbasins in his barber’s shop.
“Never fear, ma cherie, I’ll follow once I’ve warned the Allies.”
Unfortunately for both the Allies and Monsieur Bresson, the German patrol was not stupid enough to think it was normal for a respectable matron like Madame Bresson to be running around the town at one in the morning, clutching a large valise. They decided to investigate.
As a result, it was a somewhat garbled, trunkated message that reached the Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles regiment encamped in the trenches a mile to the south of Belleville. A message that was cut off when Henri was dragged from his shop floor into the street with a gun to his head. Henri bled out onto Belleville’s cobbles while Madame Bresson wailed and the good citizens of the town packed and fled.
Private Jared Padalecki (ornithological specialist) loved his pigeons. Ruby and Meg were beautiful birds, his girls, and he talked to them incessantly when he thought no one was listening, but sometimes he’d forget and do it when people were around. As a result his comrades treated Jared like the regimental equivalent of an amiable village idiot.
“Fetch me Padalecki!” Brigadier Henry Algernon Storm yelled at Captain Hamilton after he’d read the transcript of the Belleville barber spy’s message. Hamilton wasn’t worried by this apparent choler. The Brigadier wasn’t angry, yelling had been his default tone of voice since a shell had exploded too close last winter and burst his eardrum. Killed his damned horse, too, dash it.
“I don’t know what they want with Pigeon Paddy,” Private Hamish McGregor whispered to the rat peeking out from his inside pocket. His booted feet clumped loudly on the wooden boardwalk as he walked down the trench to fetch Private Padalecki. “That boy’s a few farthings short of a shilling, if you ask me.” The rat’s whiskers quivered in agreement.
Jared Padalecki had been fifteen when England declared war on Germany. His big brother Jeffrey had taken the King’s shilling on a summer’s day almost as hot as this one, and joined up to train as an ordinance specialist. Three years later, Jeff was dead in the mud of Flanders, Mrs Padalecki had wasted away with grief, and Jared had taken Jeff’s place in the Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles. One Padalecki for another. The British Army thought it was a fair exchange.
Jared had grown tall as a tree (perhaps that was one reason the birds liked him so much) but was no more warlike at eighteen than he’d been as a child making bridges out of blades of grass to help ants to cross puddles. But the War didn’t care about how bloodthirsty its soldiers were; the gentle exploded, were scythed by machine gun fire, or choked on the yellow gas just as prettily as the fierce. Jared had been at the Front for a mere four months and had already seen enough death to fill his dreams with blood forever.
He was puzzled by Captain Hamilton’s summons; there hadn’t been much call (thankfully) for his pigeons lately, as HQ was relying more and more on the radios. His mystification only deepened when he was escorted into the presence of the Brigadier, whose brash ginger moustache and sideburns always intimidated Jared. It was the way they continually clashed with the Brigadier’s ruddy complexion, as if they had a life of their own.
“Ah, Padalecki! Good of you to volunteer, boy.”
Volunteer? Jared opened his mouth to ask what the Brigadier meant but as usual he was too tongue-tied when faced with all that bristling ginger.
“We need an ordinance expert to defuse a blockhouse full of explosives in Belleville, and I hear you are just the man for the job. Now take what supplies you need and get going, come along, there’s no time to lose, chop chop!”
Captain Hamilton ushered Jared away before his stammered protests about being an ornithological expert not an ordinance expert, and you’ve got the wrong Padalecki could annoy the Brigadier.
“Let’s face it, Private, we need every competent soldier we’ve got for the next big push in a few days’ time. Do you want us to send one of your comrades to face what is probably certain death in that poxy town, when they could be killing Fritz on the Front Line, while you sit around sending messages, worrying about your birds dying? No? I thought not…”
Jared had no argument with that. He knew what horrors his regiment faced every time they had to go over the top, and just how lucky he was that the Colonel needed Jared’s birds ready to go during an offensive. Tending his birds kept Jared out of the worst of the fighting, and he was grateful for that.
So he kept his misgivings to himself, and kitted up with rifle and ammunition, his sgian dubh down his sock, and a pair of wire cutters he didn’t know what to do with. He tucked Ruby and Meg’s cage under his arm and took a deep breath. He stared up at the clear arc of midnight blue sky and silently hoped Jeff would be there in spirit to help him through this, before setting off at a jog along the rutted road to Belleville, kilt flapping in the night breeze.
Jensen had been sixteen and bearer of another, more prestigious name when the circus came to Belleville, and he fell in love twice over. Firstly with the travelling life and secondly with Emile. Emile was the Circus d’Etoile’s equivalent of the late great Jules Léotard, with the added advantage of being very much alive and prettier than Ganymede. Emile was not only beautiful, but also athletic and lithe and could fly through the air with the greatest of ease, so it was hardly surprising that the young, aristocratic but provincial boy was overwhelmed. The circus camped outside Belleville’s walls for a week, in the big square field where the Romans had once dug their ditches and marched to fight the Gauls. Jensen made a point of visiting every single night.
Even so, it had surprised everyone, even Jensen, that when the circus de-camped at the end of that week Jensen was sitting next to Emile at the head of the caravan. It was his seventeenth birthday and he should have been celebrating in the chateau, but he happily left Belleville and his ancestral home and his aristocratic name behind him, and never looked back. The circus embraced him like his family never had, accepting his nature with a carefree vive la difference!, Emile taught him how to love and how to fly.
After a year, when the circus found its circuitous way back to the area of Les Cinglés and set up camp in the town neighbouring Belleville, Jensen had been away from his family long enough to have forgotten how vindictive his father could be when crossed, and how much power and influence the d’Aubussons held in the region. The Vicomte d’Aubusson sent three men to the final evening’s performance. They enjoyed the show enormously, but that didn’t stop them fulfilling the Vicomte’s orders afterwards, by bundling Jensen into an old flour sack and carrying him away afterwards.
Coughing and spluttering from inhaling the coarse flour dust, Jensen blinked incredulously at his father.
“What have you to say for yourself?” The Vicomte demanded, that fierce gaze raking over Jensen’s inappropriately form-fitting costume and smudged stage make-up, blazing with disgust. The coating of chaff dimmed Jensen’s spangles, but Jensen knew his father’s problem with all this went much deeper than his son wearing too much sparkle.
“You kidnapped me!” Jensen said, still unable to believe his father’s audacity. Then he caught sight of the fine Louis XIV clock that had presided on that ornate marble fireplace since both were made, and he felt the colour drain from his cheeks. It was already four hours since the performance had ended. Emile would be frantic looking for him, while the circus would be packing up, ready to embrace the freedom of the road again. They would leave at dawn – it was inevitable. He knew they wouldn’t wait for him, it wasn’t their way. Circus people came and went as they pleased, they didn’t like to feel tied down, and assumed every member of the troupe felt the same.
Jensen fiercely regretted the stupid argument he’d had with Emile earlier that day… merde. Emile might even think Jensen had left deliberately, had grown tired of the travelling life.
“I don’t have time for this. I have to leave, immediately.”
“Back to your sodomite lover? I think not,” his father said, nodding to someone behind Jensen, and before Jensen could turn, a swift blow to the head laid him out cold.
Belleville was deserted; save for a patrol of German soldiers commanded by Hauptman Bieber, left behind to make sure none of the fleeing townsfolk tried anything heroically stupid, like the poor dead barber, whose body had been left lying in the street outside his shop. No one did. Folk gathered up a few valuable possessions and fled without a thought about trying to defuse the German booby trap that was set to blow their ancient town to smithereens.
The townsfolk didn’t even try and tend to Henri Bresson’s body, they were too fearful for their own lives. The baker’s wife put an arm around the weeping Madame Bresson and dragged her away, leaving Henri’s broken body sprawled on the street like a bloody bundle of rags.
Belleville was disappointed to find her people so weak and spineless. She didn’t like this empty feeling within her walls with everyone gone; she had never in her history been abandoned so thoroughly. Even during the worst excesses of the Black Death, her streets had still hummed with the clatter of wheels on cobbles as they piled the dead onto wagons, and though her houses had been filled with weeping, that was still a sign of life within her walls. So it was with hope as well as curiosity she observed the stranger slipping surreptitiously through her gates a few hours before dawn.
Belleville’s interest was piqued. The young soldier’s jacket and weapons appeared modern and dull, his uniform made of khaki-coloured wool with brass buttons and embellished with tan webbed belt, packs and pouches, all of which she recognised from her last occupation as being British. His lower half however, was at once more interesting and familiar to a town that had seen several centuries of men in tunics – a knee length, dark green, red and blue kilt that showed off the stranger’s long, well-muscled legs in a most satisfactory manner. Inexplicably, under his arm he appeared to be carrying a birdcage containing two pigeons.
Sadly, it seemed likely Belleville would learn little more about this intriguing new arrival, as his route was about to converge at the street corner near St Finbar’s church, where the German patrol was also headed.
Quelle domage…
The town was eerily silent, with the unmistakable feeling of emptiness that came from being deserted rather than merely sleeping. Jared hadn’t been at the Front that long, but it was a quality he had come to recognise within minutes of entering a village or town.
Ruby and Meg were restless in their cage, not used to being jostled around in the middle of the night. Jared was somewhat distracted by their distress, so had forgotten the need to be quiet and cautious as he approached the town square. Captain Hamilton would have torn me off a strip for being so stupid he thought, when he practically bumped into a very surprised German soldier. There was an instant of frozen shock on both their parts, then Fritz opened his mouth wider than Jared thought was possible and screamed “Alarm!”
Jared turned tail and ran, kilt flapping round his legs.
The nailed soles of his boots clattered on the cobbles, too loud in the emptiness, and as he ran Jared peered frantically into the darkness for that darker patch of shadow that might indicate somewhere to hide. Shouts and then a single shot rang out from behind him indicating the Germans were still hot on his trail though it was hard to hear them over his own noisy breathing and clattering footsteps.
He took a sharp left, one shoulder careening off the crumbling plaster coated wall. He only realised when it was too late that it was a dead end. His way was barred, literally, by a pair of huge iron gates set in a stone archway with lettering above it that he had neither time nor light enough to read. He grasped the ironwork in desperation only to feel a surge of hope when the gates parted under the pressure. They were unlocked.
Thanking his lucky stars, Jared shoved his way into a courtyard garden that led up to some steps. Inside the building, which loomed imposingly in the night, he could see a warm yellow light shining. Not stopping to think, Jared dashed up the stairway and through the metal studded outer door that thankfully stood ajar.
The hallway he found himself in wasn’t lit, so he had to chase the yellow glow up another flight of stone stairs. At the top was another iron barred gate, standing open, leading into a large high ceilinged room. Several people looked up as Jared entered. For a few seconds he wondered why these were the only townsfolk left in Belleville, then realisation dawned. All the people in the room were dressed in similar, ill-fitting grey linen jackets and matching caps, and several were engaged in behaviour that was, on a second glance, somewhat eccentric. These were not townsfolk at all, but lunatics, abandoned by the good citizens of Belleville.
One of the men, who’d been busy building the most magnificently constructed house of cards Jared had ever seen, rose to his feet, beaming in delight.
“Welcome, my friend, welcome!” The man doffed his grey linen cap revealing a mop of dark hair almost as unruly as Jared’s, and bowed with a flourish. “I am Misha, the Duke of Clubs, and this,” he gestured to a solemn, thin-faced older man who didn’t look away from the careful placement of the next card atop the construction on the table, “this is Monsieur Marguerite.”
Jared looked around a little frantically as he heard shouting in German echoing up from the bottom of the stairs.
“Um, right, pleased to meet you. Mind if I join you?”
He didn’t wait for a reply, but quickly moved round the table so the house of cards concealed his kilt. Shoving the birdcage underneath the table, he snatched a discarded, somewhat crumpled jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on over his khaki uniform. The Duke generously offered his own linen cap to replace Jared’s Glangarry hat to top off his disguise, and not a moment to soon, as the entire troop of Germans burst through the gates.
Only to stop dead at the strange sight that greeted them.
Jared grinned openly as the Duke went through the same welcome ritual for the Germans, introducing himself and Mister Daisy, but Jared’s smile faded when the Duke went on to wave at Jared. Hell’s bells, he should have seen that one coming.
“And this is…?” The Duke trailed off expectantly and Jared found himself momentarily stumped. Then his nervous gaze caught on the playing card in his hand. Improvisation, Jared, he thought. He waved a hand imperiously.
“Of course, I am the King of Hearts.”
Jared wasn’t anticipating the furore his choice of identity would cause. The Duke’s face lit up like Christmas morning, and even M. Marguerite was suddenly animated.
“My lord King, you have returned!” To Jared’s dismay, the Duke knelt down and began enthusiastically kissing his hand, then working his way up Jared’s arm. Several of the other inmates dropped their various activities to similarly fall to their knees, with a loud chorus of joyful cries. Thankfully the Duke was the only person so enamoured with the kissing part. So much for going unnoticed. When Jared glanced across the room at the German patrol, however, he saw that this overexcited display of affection from his ‘subjects’ was actually working in Jared’s favour.
The young German captain was staring at the chaos with a look of horror that was matched by the rank and file behind him, some of whom were already edging nervously backwards. The captain raised his hand and said something that Jared’s rudimentary knowledge of German (his French was much, much better) translated as shit, they are all crazy, let’s skedaddle. Jared watched incredulously as the whole troop turned tail and actually ran down the stairs as if their uniforms were on fire.
Grinning, Jared looked down at the Duke, who returned his gaze with a knowing look in his piercing blue eyes, and actually winked. The moment of sanity was brief, over so quickly Jared was left wondering if he’d imagined it. The Duke rose to his feet and announced to the room that celebrations were in order to honour the return of the King. This seemed to entail everybody in the room dashing about aimlessly and ignoring Jared.
Which was all fine and dandy, but Jared didn’t have time for a party. He had to find the barber/spy who could tell him what the cryptic phrase ‘the knight strikes at midnight’ meant, and where the blockhouse full of explosives was so he could attempt to defuse it. Despite the fact that the deadliest thing Jared had experience in defusing was an argument.
He tried asking the question of one or two of the inmates, but unsurprisingly got nowhere. Even if any of them had known about the town barber, or the German blockhouse, they were much too excited about Jared’s royal comeback to make much sense. And besides, one of them told him, the Barber was not dead or a spy at all, pointing to a hirsute chap that the Duke then introduced as Figaro, the Barber of Seville. There was nothing for it. Jared would have to venture out into the hopefully empty town to carry on his search, and pray that he wouldn’t bump into the Boche again. He looked at his birdcage and pondered for a second.
“So, I’ll leave my girls here where it’s safe, if that’s alright,” Jared announced to no one in particular. He placed the cage on top of a cabinet near a barred window, where his birds would see the sun when it rose, and turned to go; only to find his path blocked by a solid body. It stopped him in his tracks and he looked down an inch or so into a pair of huge and startled eyes.
Jared couldn’t help but scan the rest of this creature, who was so close he was virtually standing on Jared’s feet. Feeling strangely breathless, Jared took in the smooth brow, the almost but not quite perfect Grecian nose scattered with freckles, the definitely perfect bow of soft pink lips. As he looked lower, there was a spread of broad shoulders and a narrow tapered waist that the tatty linen uniform couldn’t disguise. The man was a Phidias statue brought to life, a paragon of manly beauty, an Adonis. Jared wondered vaguely who the lucky man had been who had breathed life into marble, and what the touch of those lips had felt like…. Jared’s gaze wandered of its own volition back up to those shockingly intelligent, mostly-green eyes, where it stopped, caught.
The shock of meeting that unblinking stare was unexpected and visceral. Jared was momentarily frozen to the spot. The slate of his brain, that had been covered in frantic chalk instructions about blockhouses and defusings, inadequacies and worries, each of which seemed to be terminated in scribbled explosions - all of it was completely wiped clean by the sweep of that look.
Then Adonis’s blink broke the spell, and Jared was free to move again. He was just sad that he now had no excuse to stay.
“I’ll just…um,” he said, inwardly berating himself for his apparent inability to sound even vaguely intelligent in the face of such perfection. Blushing, Jared fled the asylum almost as quickly as the Germans had done before him, with a different kind of fear nipping at his heels.
Jensen felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but with fewer rats. Well, no rats at all, to be honest, unless you counted the one they’d disturbed when they’d lit a lamp outside the storeroom at the back of the washhouse. Jensen had wandered through every room and corridor inside and outside the Maison des Autres and found not a single nun, nor burly orderly. Every door was unbarred, every lock was sprung, and everywhere Jensen went, he found confused but largely happy folk, most of whom decided to join him exploring the house that had been both home and prison to him for the last four years. By the time he found his way down the stairs to the large common room, virtually the entire population of des Autres was following behind him, chattering to each other and to themselves indiscriminately. At their rear was a blaze of light, where every lamp in the place had been lit in their wake. Many of the residents of des Autres didn’t like the dark, with good reason.
He had just turned eighteen when he’d woken to find that his father had committed him to the care of the Order of L’eclaire Lune, having declared his son both mentally incompetent and depraved. The Abbess had accepted both the Vicomte’s money, and his judgement of his son’s state of mind and morality, telling herself that one had no influence on the other.
So Jean d’Aubusson had found himself confined in a straightjacket, locked inside a dingy room whose padded walls were stained with sadness and anger. Rage was all that Jean had felt, and for a long time, it consumed him. At first he had yelled and sworn and cried for Emile, but as time had passed and the silence and the solitude wore him down, Jean had grown quiet and Jensen had emerged from the wreckage of the past, like a phoenix. When Jean had run away he had adopted a circus name, stolen from a book he’d loved as a child, about a Scandinavian sailor called Jens Jensen. He just liked the ring of it, and now, locked away from the world, this was the name he went back to. From then on he refused to answer to anything but Jensen. Jensen had an inner calm that Jean had only craved for – a calm that came, not from acceptance of his fate, but from an active rejection of his father, and of his family who never defended him or attempted to free him. So it was only natural for this to be the identity he assumed in Les Autres.
Time passed, and the institution’s regime changed, and Jensen’s origins were completely forgotten when the mercenary Abbess who’d pocketed Vicomte d’Aubusson’s money died. With her demise the only person who knew Jensen’s origins was gone. Mother Marie Claire took her place. The quiet and reserved Jensen had gained a position of trust working as secretary for the Sacrist, Sister Vincent, so he was able to discretely ‘lose’ all records pertaining to his arrival, and thus Jean d’Aubusson was finally laid to rest. Only Jensen remained. If Jean’s remaining family missed him, Jensen neither knew nor cared. Not one of them had ever bothered to visit, or even sent him a letter.
His family was here now.
Misha Krushnic - aka the Duke of Clubs, Monsieur Marguerite, the Duchess Victoria, Angelique the Madame, little Papillon the dancer, the General, Figaro the Barber of Seville, the Bishop. These were the people he cared about, his friends, his comrades.
Jensen didn’t think of himself as sane or insane. Not any more. Not since two years ago, when news of the German invasion had reached even the depths of the Asylum, and when he’d persuaded the resident doctor to allow him to leave des Autres to fight for France. The Duke, or rather his sometimes rational alter ego, Misha, had insisted on accompanying him, and it was Misha who had brought him back to the Maison when Jensen had been severely injured. Jensen hadn’t thought about leaving again since the moment he’d been carried (for the second time) inside the crumbling grandeur of the old mansion.
This was his home; it was where he belonged.
Jensen and his motley crew eventually arrived in the main hall, having ascertained that the Maison was definitely deserted apart from the inmates. Jensen was feeling decidedly unsettled by this, only to be further disturbed by discovering a stranger in their midst, standing out like a tree in a desert in his soldier’s uniform. This reminder of the war still raging outside was doubly unsettling. The man was young and very tall, towering over everyone; a skinny, shaggy-haired equivalent of the clock tower looming above all the other buildings in Belleville’s town square. He was taller even than Jensen, who was used to being the one everyone had to look up to.
For some obscure reason, the stranger’s uniform included a skirt.
Jensen, without even realising, drew closer and closer, as if the stranger was a fire on a freezing cold day. So when the stranger turned around, clearly about to leave, Jensen found himself unintentionally blocking the way. Toe to toe, Jensen looked up into a pair of curious, slanted, multi-coloured eyes and lost himself entirely for the second time in his life.
Jensen had a smile on his face as he watched the stranger leave, and didn’t even mind Misha making a quip about him having stars in his eyes.
For the first time in a long time, Jensen wanted to fly.
Belleville was fighting a shockingly hollow feeling, having watched the last patrol of les Allemandes exiting through her gates with an alacrity that had her examining her streets for pursuers. There were none. The irritating buzz of the German armored cars faded away – she much preferred the clop of horses’ hooves – and her streets fell uncomfortably silent. It was a silence that lasted only for a moment, but it was a moment that felt much too long, even to one as ancient as she.
Consequently it made her happy a little while later to spy the young mysterious stranger emerging from the enclosure that surrounded the Asylum’s grounds. She recognized him, in spite of the lack of pigeons, from his shaggy hair and shapely calves. His subsequent erratic behaviour was puzzling. She observed his apparently aimless wandering of her streets with some curiosity, as he entered and exited buildings seemingly at random, until she was distracted from this mystery by the welcome sight and sound of more people tumbling forth from the Asylum. It was comforting to know she was still occupied; it renewed her sense of purpose.
The people scattered across the vacant lots, disappearing into houses only to reemerge newly decked out in the clothing abandoned along with Belleville herself by her more craven former citizens. Colours flashed bright in the rising sunlight as the former inmates shed the dull greys of insanity and donned the silks and satins of normality.
As the sun kissed Belleville’s walls, her mortar expanded in the pleasant warmth that promised a more sultry summer heat as the sun ascended.
Perhaps today would be a good day to die after all.
Jared was distraught. Not only could he not find this blessed blockhouse full of explosives (which he still didn’t know how to defuse when he found it, but that was beside the point), but now he had found he was responsible for an asylum full of people who would be incinerated by his failure… one of whom was the most beautiful specimen of manhood Jared had ever seen outside museums of classical sculpture. Thoughts of the heady sculptural pleasures that might lie underneath Adonis’ less-than-flattering clothing were no help whatsoever, as they served only as a distraction from the task in hand.
Memories of those startlingly green eyes, and those groin-stirringly perfect lips were very diverting. Jared could at least console himself with the thought that when he was blown to smithereens he’d have something more pleasant to on his mind than concrete and wire cutters.
Jared entered yet another empty building without knocking. He’d long since decided his deeply ingrained politeness was just wasting precious time, and besides, there was no one left in Belleville to appreciate it.
At least that was what he’d thought, until he emerged from the last house he’d searched into a street full of perambulating people. Suddenly Belleville was looking like a rustic version of Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a sunny day, only less dreek and with more timber-framing. A finely dressed gentleman with his elegant wife’s gloved hand draped over his right arm strolled by. He gave Jared a jaunty wave with his left hand, and the lady tipped her parasol at him with a smile. Jared nodded in automatic reply before recognition struck. It was the Duke of Clubs. Jared looked more closely at the faces of the other passers by and sure enough, there the General (now attired in appropriately pseudo-military fashion in what looked like the brass helmet of a fire chief), and there, tripping along dressed all in jaunty yellow, was Monsieur Marguerite, looking fresh as the daisy he was named after. Sadly, there was no sign of Adonis.
Jared felt a bead of sweat trickle down his back. The day was going to be a scorcher, and he found himself wishing he could strip off all his gear and his heavy woollen jacket and join the lunatics strolling the streets and forget all about the bloody war.
But of course Jared couldn’t do that, he had a job to do, a town to save.
He grabbed the arm of one of the passing lunatics to whom he hadn’t yet been introduced, and tried asking about the blockhouse again, but the man just stared at Jared as if he was the crazy one.
“Sorry, must rush, must dash - for the sake of my smashing moustache - the Barber awaits!”
Jared had to acknowledge that the man did have a magnificent moustache, one that must require a lot of maintenance, but that didn’t help him one little bit. As he watched the man skip away down the street, twirling said moustache with gay abandon, Jared was no closer to finding the German munitions and preventing the explosion. It was as if Hope was skipping alongs personified by the diminishing figure of Moustache Man, and Jared could only watch as it vanished round a corner with one last flourish of its heel along with the man.
“Merde!” he swore with feeling, too caught up in his thoughts to hear the approaching footsteps behind him. He nearly jumped a mile when a warm hand landed on his shoulder.
The world was full of colour and the morning air already warm when Jensen stepped out of the Asylum gates for the first time in nearly two years. He was the last inmate to leave, not because he was reluctant, but because he’d taken the opportunity to rummage around in the storeroom to find his circus costume. He had no desire to analyse why he hadn’t wanted to leave the Maison des Autres without changing into what was essentially a relic of another life, but once he’d squeezed himself into the now slightly-too-small spangled suit he felt happier, and that was reason enough.
Once in the town proper, Jensen’s first task was to apply the finishing touches to his stage persona. Leaving Misha rummaging through the kitchen cupboards downstairs, Jensen sat down at the dressing table of some unknown wife or mother or daughter. He carefully applied abandoned cosmetics; eye-liner, a touch of rouge, shockingly red lipstick that he then blotted off, leaving his lips looking bee stung and full. Jensen stared at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, his mind still and quiet. It wasn’t his own face he saw, staring back at him, but Jensen hadn’t recognised the person he saw in the mirror for a long time now, makeup or no. Even Emile’s image was not as clear in his head as it had been. Blurred by time, and by other things. Dreadful things.
Jensen blinked once, twice. He wasn’t seeing the mirror at all any more, and his mind was no longer quiet. Instead he was back in that trench at Verdun, waiting for the shelling to stop and the whistle to blow. Misha was by his side, but in those moments before flinging themselves over the top into the flesh shredding hail of machine gun bullets, every man was alone with his private terror.
Now as back then, it was Misha who pulled him out of the muddy shell hole he had ended up in.
Misha burst into the bedroom and draped himself over Jensen’s back, resting his chin on Jensen’s shoulder. Misha’s blue eyes were Jensen’s wake-up call, bringing him back into the present.
“You were brooding again, mon ami. You know that is bad for your soul.”
Jensen had lifted his head and latched onto Misha’s wry gaze, needing the other man to be his anchor to reality. Jensen knew that Misha understood the need for something outside of oneself to cling onto when everything got too much.
And that was why Jensen had nothing but sympathy for the tall British soldier with the strange uniform looking lost when Jensen came across him in the street. Jensen could feel how knotted up and tense Jared’s shoulder muscles were under his casually placed hand. The boy was practically vibrating with nerves.
Jensen couldn’t have that.
They probably only had a day at most, and maybe only a few hours of freedom before the world inevitably came crashing back down onto their little town, as it always did, and took the sunshine away, and Jensen couldn’t bear to think that anyone should waste even a moment of that precious time. He decided then and there to make it his mission to ensure that Jared relaxed and found some pleasure, just as all Jensen’s friends were doing.
Onto Part 2
Author: amber1960
Artist: amber1960
Movie prompt: King of Hearts
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Jared/Jensen
Warnings: Mental illnesses portrayed in an unrealistic manner and talked about in Victorian terms. War-like levels of violence, also portrayed in an unrealistic manner. Though the fic has French, German and English characters, inexplicably, everyone speaks English. Jared has unhistorical long hair without lice because – ew! Way to kill any romance…
Summary: Private Padalecki is happy (or as happy as a man can be in the middle of the war to end all wars) looking after his carrier pigeons. When his commander sends him on a dangerous mission to defuse a German arms dump in an abandonned French town, the last thing he is expecting to find is love with just a soupçon of craziness.
Read on AO3
Acknowledgements: A huge thank you to my two awesome betas
matchboximpala and Disclaimer: The Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles is totally fictional and bears no resemblance to any British regiment, past or present. Neither do any of the characters portrayed resemble any real person, alive or dead – even though I’ve appropriated the names and physical attributes of certain CW actors, they are playing parts here, just as they do on screen. None of it is real, folks…
King of Hearts
~0~0~
~0~0~
Belleville was aptly named, because she was both beautiful and a town. She liked that about her name, as she was a straightforward sort of place. Founded in the ninth century by Finbar, an itinerant Irish saint, Belleville had nurtured and protected her townsfolk as best she could for centuries. She had seen many of her men ride off to war, she had been besieged three times, been sacked twice, and had her heart singed once by accident, when Madame Pereaux forgot about the bread and set their house on fire, the resulting conflagration burning down Belleville’s fine Romanesque church of St Finbar and her council’s chambers. Of course, her citizens rebuilt her church in the new gothic style, even bigger and better than before, and the replacement Town Hall gained a tall tower topped with a wonderful mechanical clock that had a life-size knight in armour that emerged once every twenty-four hours from his portal to strike a bell with his mace.
So when the Germans invaded France in 1914, Belleville, with her stout, stone walls and sturdy citizens, thought she was as prepared as she could be for any kind of conflict.
She was wrong.
It was Belleville’s misfortune to be situated right in the middle of one of the lesser-known but strategically important Salients called Les Cinglés. Four years into the fighting and Belleville was a battered beauty now, her walls and buildings full of holes. She had been on the Front, behind the Front and was currently occupied by German troops. Troops who were now busy packing up and leaving, as the Allied forces’ latest big push had actually been successful in moving the Front northwards by a couple of miles, and Belleville was once again going to swap sides. This time she wasn’t sure she would survive.
One army or another - Belleville had quite lost track of which - had built a large concrete blockhouse in Belleville’s town square, and crammed it full of munitions. Now the Germans had been given orders that set her foundations trembling.
“Are the fuses set?”
“Yes, Oberst Scholz!” Hauptmann Bobo Bieber clicked his shiny black-booted heels together as he saluted. “Heinrich has wired the trigger to the town clock so the whole lot will blow at midnight when the knight strikes that stupid bell.”
“Excellent, excellent,” Oberst Scholz rubbed his hands together. “With a bit of luck the enemy troops will be in the town by then, and will be blown sky high along with this miserable heap of stone.”
From his darkened window overlooking the square, Henri Bresson, town barber and resistance leader, had been listening in to the Boches’ conversation and now recoiled in horror. Mon Dieu! Less than twenty-four hours and the whole town was going to be an inferno. He woke his wife and left her with instructions to warn as many townsfolk as she could, pack a bag and leave quickly.
“But what about you, Henri?” Madame Bresson’s voice trailed after Henri as he ran downstairs to the radio hidden behind the washbasins in his barber’s shop.
“Never fear, ma cherie, I’ll follow once I’ve warned the Allies.”
Unfortunately for both the Allies and Monsieur Bresson, the German patrol was not stupid enough to think it was normal for a respectable matron like Madame Bresson to be running around the town at one in the morning, clutching a large valise. They decided to investigate.
As a result, it was a somewhat garbled, trunkated message that reached the Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles regiment encamped in the trenches a mile to the south of Belleville. A message that was cut off when Henri was dragged from his shop floor into the street with a gun to his head. Henri bled out onto Belleville’s cobbles while Madame Bresson wailed and the good citizens of the town packed and fled.
0x0x0x0
Private Jared Padalecki (ornithological specialist) loved his pigeons. Ruby and Meg were beautiful birds, his girls, and he talked to them incessantly when he thought no one was listening, but sometimes he’d forget and do it when people were around. As a result his comrades treated Jared like the regimental equivalent of an amiable village idiot.
“Fetch me Padalecki!” Brigadier Henry Algernon Storm yelled at Captain Hamilton after he’d read the transcript of the Belleville barber spy’s message. Hamilton wasn’t worried by this apparent choler. The Brigadier wasn’t angry, yelling had been his default tone of voice since a shell had exploded too close last winter and burst his eardrum. Killed his damned horse, too, dash it.
“I don’t know what they want with Pigeon Paddy,” Private Hamish McGregor whispered to the rat peeking out from his inside pocket. His booted feet clumped loudly on the wooden boardwalk as he walked down the trench to fetch Private Padalecki. “That boy’s a few farthings short of a shilling, if you ask me.” The rat’s whiskers quivered in agreement.
Jared Padalecki had been fifteen when England declared war on Germany. His big brother Jeffrey had taken the King’s shilling on a summer’s day almost as hot as this one, and joined up to train as an ordinance specialist. Three years later, Jeff was dead in the mud of Flanders, Mrs Padalecki had wasted away with grief, and Jared had taken Jeff’s place in the Argyle and Butte Scottish Rifles. One Padalecki for another. The British Army thought it was a fair exchange.
Jared had grown tall as a tree (perhaps that was one reason the birds liked him so much) but was no more warlike at eighteen than he’d been as a child making bridges out of blades of grass to help ants to cross puddles. But the War didn’t care about how bloodthirsty its soldiers were; the gentle exploded, were scythed by machine gun fire, or choked on the yellow gas just as prettily as the fierce. Jared had been at the Front for a mere four months and had already seen enough death to fill his dreams with blood forever.
He was puzzled by Captain Hamilton’s summons; there hadn’t been much call (thankfully) for his pigeons lately, as HQ was relying more and more on the radios. His mystification only deepened when he was escorted into the presence of the Brigadier, whose brash ginger moustache and sideburns always intimidated Jared. It was the way they continually clashed with the Brigadier’s ruddy complexion, as if they had a life of their own.
“Ah, Padalecki! Good of you to volunteer, boy.”
Volunteer? Jared opened his mouth to ask what the Brigadier meant but as usual he was too tongue-tied when faced with all that bristling ginger.
“We need an ordinance expert to defuse a blockhouse full of explosives in Belleville, and I hear you are just the man for the job. Now take what supplies you need and get going, come along, there’s no time to lose, chop chop!”
Captain Hamilton ushered Jared away before his stammered protests about being an ornithological expert not an ordinance expert, and you’ve got the wrong Padalecki could annoy the Brigadier.
“Let’s face it, Private, we need every competent soldier we’ve got for the next big push in a few days’ time. Do you want us to send one of your comrades to face what is probably certain death in that poxy town, when they could be killing Fritz on the Front Line, while you sit around sending messages, worrying about your birds dying? No? I thought not…”
Jared had no argument with that. He knew what horrors his regiment faced every time they had to go over the top, and just how lucky he was that the Colonel needed Jared’s birds ready to go during an offensive. Tending his birds kept Jared out of the worst of the fighting, and he was grateful for that.
So he kept his misgivings to himself, and kitted up with rifle and ammunition, his sgian dubh down his sock, and a pair of wire cutters he didn’t know what to do with. He tucked Ruby and Meg’s cage under his arm and took a deep breath. He stared up at the clear arc of midnight blue sky and silently hoped Jeff would be there in spirit to help him through this, before setting off at a jog along the rutted road to Belleville, kilt flapping in the night breeze.
0x0x0x0
Jensen had been sixteen and bearer of another, more prestigious name when the circus came to Belleville, and he fell in love twice over. Firstly with the travelling life and secondly with Emile. Emile was the Circus d’Etoile’s equivalent of the late great Jules Léotard, with the added advantage of being very much alive and prettier than Ganymede. Emile was not only beautiful, but also athletic and lithe and could fly through the air with the greatest of ease, so it was hardly surprising that the young, aristocratic but provincial boy was overwhelmed. The circus camped outside Belleville’s walls for a week, in the big square field where the Romans had once dug their ditches and marched to fight the Gauls. Jensen made a point of visiting every single night.
Even so, it had surprised everyone, even Jensen, that when the circus de-camped at the end of that week Jensen was sitting next to Emile at the head of the caravan. It was his seventeenth birthday and he should have been celebrating in the chateau, but he happily left Belleville and his ancestral home and his aristocratic name behind him, and never looked back. The circus embraced him like his family never had, accepting his nature with a carefree vive la difference!, Emile taught him how to love and how to fly.
After a year, when the circus found its circuitous way back to the area of Les Cinglés and set up camp in the town neighbouring Belleville, Jensen had been away from his family long enough to have forgotten how vindictive his father could be when crossed, and how much power and influence the d’Aubussons held in the region. The Vicomte d’Aubusson sent three men to the final evening’s performance. They enjoyed the show enormously, but that didn’t stop them fulfilling the Vicomte’s orders afterwards, by bundling Jensen into an old flour sack and carrying him away afterwards.
Coughing and spluttering from inhaling the coarse flour dust, Jensen blinked incredulously at his father.
“What have you to say for yourself?” The Vicomte demanded, that fierce gaze raking over Jensen’s inappropriately form-fitting costume and smudged stage make-up, blazing with disgust. The coating of chaff dimmed Jensen’s spangles, but Jensen knew his father’s problem with all this went much deeper than his son wearing too much sparkle.
“You kidnapped me!” Jensen said, still unable to believe his father’s audacity. Then he caught sight of the fine Louis XIV clock that had presided on that ornate marble fireplace since both were made, and he felt the colour drain from his cheeks. It was already four hours since the performance had ended. Emile would be frantic looking for him, while the circus would be packing up, ready to embrace the freedom of the road again. They would leave at dawn – it was inevitable. He knew they wouldn’t wait for him, it wasn’t their way. Circus people came and went as they pleased, they didn’t like to feel tied down, and assumed every member of the troupe felt the same.
Jensen fiercely regretted the stupid argument he’d had with Emile earlier that day… merde. Emile might even think Jensen had left deliberately, had grown tired of the travelling life.
“I don’t have time for this. I have to leave, immediately.”
“Back to your sodomite lover? I think not,” his father said, nodding to someone behind Jensen, and before Jensen could turn, a swift blow to the head laid him out cold.
0x0x0x0
Belleville was deserted; save for a patrol of German soldiers commanded by Hauptman Bieber, left behind to make sure none of the fleeing townsfolk tried anything heroically stupid, like the poor dead barber, whose body had been left lying in the street outside his shop. No one did. Folk gathered up a few valuable possessions and fled without a thought about trying to defuse the German booby trap that was set to blow their ancient town to smithereens.
The townsfolk didn’t even try and tend to Henri Bresson’s body, they were too fearful for their own lives. The baker’s wife put an arm around the weeping Madame Bresson and dragged her away, leaving Henri’s broken body sprawled on the street like a bloody bundle of rags.
Belleville was disappointed to find her people so weak and spineless. She didn’t like this empty feeling within her walls with everyone gone; she had never in her history been abandoned so thoroughly. Even during the worst excesses of the Black Death, her streets had still hummed with the clatter of wheels on cobbles as they piled the dead onto wagons, and though her houses had been filled with weeping, that was still a sign of life within her walls. So it was with hope as well as curiosity she observed the stranger slipping surreptitiously through her gates a few hours before dawn.
Belleville’s interest was piqued. The young soldier’s jacket and weapons appeared modern and dull, his uniform made of khaki-coloured wool with brass buttons and embellished with tan webbed belt, packs and pouches, all of which she recognised from her last occupation as being British. His lower half however, was at once more interesting and familiar to a town that had seen several centuries of men in tunics – a knee length, dark green, red and blue kilt that showed off the stranger’s long, well-muscled legs in a most satisfactory manner. Inexplicably, under his arm he appeared to be carrying a birdcage containing two pigeons.
Sadly, it seemed likely Belleville would learn little more about this intriguing new arrival, as his route was about to converge at the street corner near St Finbar’s church, where the German patrol was also headed.
Quelle domage…
0x0x0x0
The town was eerily silent, with the unmistakable feeling of emptiness that came from being deserted rather than merely sleeping. Jared hadn’t been at the Front that long, but it was a quality he had come to recognise within minutes of entering a village or town.
Ruby and Meg were restless in their cage, not used to being jostled around in the middle of the night. Jared was somewhat distracted by their distress, so had forgotten the need to be quiet and cautious as he approached the town square. Captain Hamilton would have torn me off a strip for being so stupid he thought, when he practically bumped into a very surprised German soldier. There was an instant of frozen shock on both their parts, then Fritz opened his mouth wider than Jared thought was possible and screamed “Alarm!”
Jared turned tail and ran, kilt flapping round his legs.
The nailed soles of his boots clattered on the cobbles, too loud in the emptiness, and as he ran Jared peered frantically into the darkness for that darker patch of shadow that might indicate somewhere to hide. Shouts and then a single shot rang out from behind him indicating the Germans were still hot on his trail though it was hard to hear them over his own noisy breathing and clattering footsteps.
He took a sharp left, one shoulder careening off the crumbling plaster coated wall. He only realised when it was too late that it was a dead end. His way was barred, literally, by a pair of huge iron gates set in a stone archway with lettering above it that he had neither time nor light enough to read. He grasped the ironwork in desperation only to feel a surge of hope when the gates parted under the pressure. They were unlocked.
Thanking his lucky stars, Jared shoved his way into a courtyard garden that led up to some steps. Inside the building, which loomed imposingly in the night, he could see a warm yellow light shining. Not stopping to think, Jared dashed up the stairway and through the metal studded outer door that thankfully stood ajar.
The hallway he found himself in wasn’t lit, so he had to chase the yellow glow up another flight of stone stairs. At the top was another iron barred gate, standing open, leading into a large high ceilinged room. Several people looked up as Jared entered. For a few seconds he wondered why these were the only townsfolk left in Belleville, then realisation dawned. All the people in the room were dressed in similar, ill-fitting grey linen jackets and matching caps, and several were engaged in behaviour that was, on a second glance, somewhat eccentric. These were not townsfolk at all, but lunatics, abandoned by the good citizens of Belleville.
One of the men, who’d been busy building the most magnificently constructed house of cards Jared had ever seen, rose to his feet, beaming in delight.
“Welcome, my friend, welcome!” The man doffed his grey linen cap revealing a mop of dark hair almost as unruly as Jared’s, and bowed with a flourish. “I am Misha, the Duke of Clubs, and this,” he gestured to a solemn, thin-faced older man who didn’t look away from the careful placement of the next card atop the construction on the table, “this is Monsieur Marguerite.”
Jared looked around a little frantically as he heard shouting in German echoing up from the bottom of the stairs.
“Um, right, pleased to meet you. Mind if I join you?”
He didn’t wait for a reply, but quickly moved round the table so the house of cards concealed his kilt. Shoving the birdcage underneath the table, he snatched a discarded, somewhat crumpled jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on over his khaki uniform. The Duke generously offered his own linen cap to replace Jared’s Glangarry hat to top off his disguise, and not a moment to soon, as the entire troop of Germans burst through the gates.
Only to stop dead at the strange sight that greeted them.
Jared grinned openly as the Duke went through the same welcome ritual for the Germans, introducing himself and Mister Daisy, but Jared’s smile faded when the Duke went on to wave at Jared. Hell’s bells, he should have seen that one coming.
“And this is…?” The Duke trailed off expectantly and Jared found himself momentarily stumped. Then his nervous gaze caught on the playing card in his hand. Improvisation, Jared, he thought. He waved a hand imperiously.
“Of course, I am the King of Hearts.”
Jared wasn’t anticipating the furore his choice of identity would cause. The Duke’s face lit up like Christmas morning, and even M. Marguerite was suddenly animated.
“My lord King, you have returned!” To Jared’s dismay, the Duke knelt down and began enthusiastically kissing his hand, then working his way up Jared’s arm. Several of the other inmates dropped their various activities to similarly fall to their knees, with a loud chorus of joyful cries. Thankfully the Duke was the only person so enamoured with the kissing part. So much for going unnoticed. When Jared glanced across the room at the German patrol, however, he saw that this overexcited display of affection from his ‘subjects’ was actually working in Jared’s favour.
The young German captain was staring at the chaos with a look of horror that was matched by the rank and file behind him, some of whom were already edging nervously backwards. The captain raised his hand and said something that Jared’s rudimentary knowledge of German (his French was much, much better) translated as shit, they are all crazy, let’s skedaddle. Jared watched incredulously as the whole troop turned tail and actually ran down the stairs as if their uniforms were on fire.
Grinning, Jared looked down at the Duke, who returned his gaze with a knowing look in his piercing blue eyes, and actually winked. The moment of sanity was brief, over so quickly Jared was left wondering if he’d imagined it. The Duke rose to his feet and announced to the room that celebrations were in order to honour the return of the King. This seemed to entail everybody in the room dashing about aimlessly and ignoring Jared.
Which was all fine and dandy, but Jared didn’t have time for a party. He had to find the barber/spy who could tell him what the cryptic phrase ‘the knight strikes at midnight’ meant, and where the blockhouse full of explosives was so he could attempt to defuse it. Despite the fact that the deadliest thing Jared had experience in defusing was an argument.
He tried asking the question of one or two of the inmates, but unsurprisingly got nowhere. Even if any of them had known about the town barber, or the German blockhouse, they were much too excited about Jared’s royal comeback to make much sense. And besides, one of them told him, the Barber was not dead or a spy at all, pointing to a hirsute chap that the Duke then introduced as Figaro, the Barber of Seville. There was nothing for it. Jared would have to venture out into the hopefully empty town to carry on his search, and pray that he wouldn’t bump into the Boche again. He looked at his birdcage and pondered for a second.
“So, I’ll leave my girls here where it’s safe, if that’s alright,” Jared announced to no one in particular. He placed the cage on top of a cabinet near a barred window, where his birds would see the sun when it rose, and turned to go; only to find his path blocked by a solid body. It stopped him in his tracks and he looked down an inch or so into a pair of huge and startled eyes.
Jared couldn’t help but scan the rest of this creature, who was so close he was virtually standing on Jared’s feet. Feeling strangely breathless, Jared took in the smooth brow, the almost but not quite perfect Grecian nose scattered with freckles, the definitely perfect bow of soft pink lips. As he looked lower, there was a spread of broad shoulders and a narrow tapered waist that the tatty linen uniform couldn’t disguise. The man was a Phidias statue brought to life, a paragon of manly beauty, an Adonis. Jared wondered vaguely who the lucky man had been who had breathed life into marble, and what the touch of those lips had felt like…. Jared’s gaze wandered of its own volition back up to those shockingly intelligent, mostly-green eyes, where it stopped, caught.
The shock of meeting that unblinking stare was unexpected and visceral. Jared was momentarily frozen to the spot. The slate of his brain, that had been covered in frantic chalk instructions about blockhouses and defusings, inadequacies and worries, each of which seemed to be terminated in scribbled explosions - all of it was completely wiped clean by the sweep of that look.
Then Adonis’s blink broke the spell, and Jared was free to move again. He was just sad that he now had no excuse to stay.
“I’ll just…um,” he said, inwardly berating himself for his apparent inability to sound even vaguely intelligent in the face of such perfection. Blushing, Jared fled the asylum almost as quickly as the Germans had done before him, with a different kind of fear nipping at his heels.
0x0x0x0
Jensen felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but with fewer rats. Well, no rats at all, to be honest, unless you counted the one they’d disturbed when they’d lit a lamp outside the storeroom at the back of the washhouse. Jensen had wandered through every room and corridor inside and outside the Maison des Autres and found not a single nun, nor burly orderly. Every door was unbarred, every lock was sprung, and everywhere Jensen went, he found confused but largely happy folk, most of whom decided to join him exploring the house that had been both home and prison to him for the last four years. By the time he found his way down the stairs to the large common room, virtually the entire population of des Autres was following behind him, chattering to each other and to themselves indiscriminately. At their rear was a blaze of light, where every lamp in the place had been lit in their wake. Many of the residents of des Autres didn’t like the dark, with good reason.
~0~0~
He had just turned eighteen when he’d woken to find that his father had committed him to the care of the Order of L’eclaire Lune, having declared his son both mentally incompetent and depraved. The Abbess had accepted both the Vicomte’s money, and his judgement of his son’s state of mind and morality, telling herself that one had no influence on the other.
So Jean d’Aubusson had found himself confined in a straightjacket, locked inside a dingy room whose padded walls were stained with sadness and anger. Rage was all that Jean had felt, and for a long time, it consumed him. At first he had yelled and sworn and cried for Emile, but as time had passed and the silence and the solitude wore him down, Jean had grown quiet and Jensen had emerged from the wreckage of the past, like a phoenix. When Jean had run away he had adopted a circus name, stolen from a book he’d loved as a child, about a Scandinavian sailor called Jens Jensen. He just liked the ring of it, and now, locked away from the world, this was the name he went back to. From then on he refused to answer to anything but Jensen. Jensen had an inner calm that Jean had only craved for – a calm that came, not from acceptance of his fate, but from an active rejection of his father, and of his family who never defended him or attempted to free him. So it was only natural for this to be the identity he assumed in Les Autres.
Time passed, and the institution’s regime changed, and Jensen’s origins were completely forgotten when the mercenary Abbess who’d pocketed Vicomte d’Aubusson’s money died. With her demise the only person who knew Jensen’s origins was gone. Mother Marie Claire took her place. The quiet and reserved Jensen had gained a position of trust working as secretary for the Sacrist, Sister Vincent, so he was able to discretely ‘lose’ all records pertaining to his arrival, and thus Jean d’Aubusson was finally laid to rest. Only Jensen remained. If Jean’s remaining family missed him, Jensen neither knew nor cared. Not one of them had ever bothered to visit, or even sent him a letter.
His family was here now.
Misha Krushnic - aka the Duke of Clubs, Monsieur Marguerite, the Duchess Victoria, Angelique the Madame, little Papillon the dancer, the General, Figaro the Barber of Seville, the Bishop. These were the people he cared about, his friends, his comrades.
Jensen didn’t think of himself as sane or insane. Not any more. Not since two years ago, when news of the German invasion had reached even the depths of the Asylum, and when he’d persuaded the resident doctor to allow him to leave des Autres to fight for France. The Duke, or rather his sometimes rational alter ego, Misha, had insisted on accompanying him, and it was Misha who had brought him back to the Maison when Jensen had been severely injured. Jensen hadn’t thought about leaving again since the moment he’d been carried (for the second time) inside the crumbling grandeur of the old mansion.
This was his home; it was where he belonged.
~0~0~
Jensen and his motley crew eventually arrived in the main hall, having ascertained that the Maison was definitely deserted apart from the inmates. Jensen was feeling decidedly unsettled by this, only to be further disturbed by discovering a stranger in their midst, standing out like a tree in a desert in his soldier’s uniform. This reminder of the war still raging outside was doubly unsettling. The man was young and very tall, towering over everyone; a skinny, shaggy-haired equivalent of the clock tower looming above all the other buildings in Belleville’s town square. He was taller even than Jensen, who was used to being the one everyone had to look up to.
For some obscure reason, the stranger’s uniform included a skirt.
Jensen, without even realising, drew closer and closer, as if the stranger was a fire on a freezing cold day. So when the stranger turned around, clearly about to leave, Jensen found himself unintentionally blocking the way. Toe to toe, Jensen looked up into a pair of curious, slanted, multi-coloured eyes and lost himself entirely for the second time in his life.
Jensen had a smile on his face as he watched the stranger leave, and didn’t even mind Misha making a quip about him having stars in his eyes.
For the first time in a long time, Jensen wanted to fly.
0x0x0x0
Belleville was fighting a shockingly hollow feeling, having watched the last patrol of les Allemandes exiting through her gates with an alacrity that had her examining her streets for pursuers. There were none. The irritating buzz of the German armored cars faded away – she much preferred the clop of horses’ hooves – and her streets fell uncomfortably silent. It was a silence that lasted only for a moment, but it was a moment that felt much too long, even to one as ancient as she.
Consequently it made her happy a little while later to spy the young mysterious stranger emerging from the enclosure that surrounded the Asylum’s grounds. She recognized him, in spite of the lack of pigeons, from his shaggy hair and shapely calves. His subsequent erratic behaviour was puzzling. She observed his apparently aimless wandering of her streets with some curiosity, as he entered and exited buildings seemingly at random, until she was distracted from this mystery by the welcome sight and sound of more people tumbling forth from the Asylum. It was comforting to know she was still occupied; it renewed her sense of purpose.
The people scattered across the vacant lots, disappearing into houses only to reemerge newly decked out in the clothing abandoned along with Belleville herself by her more craven former citizens. Colours flashed bright in the rising sunlight as the former inmates shed the dull greys of insanity and donned the silks and satins of normality.
As the sun kissed Belleville’s walls, her mortar expanded in the pleasant warmth that promised a more sultry summer heat as the sun ascended.
Perhaps today would be a good day to die after all.
0x0x0x0
Jared was distraught. Not only could he not find this blessed blockhouse full of explosives (which he still didn’t know how to defuse when he found it, but that was beside the point), but now he had found he was responsible for an asylum full of people who would be incinerated by his failure… one of whom was the most beautiful specimen of manhood Jared had ever seen outside museums of classical sculpture. Thoughts of the heady sculptural pleasures that might lie underneath Adonis’ less-than-flattering clothing were no help whatsoever, as they served only as a distraction from the task in hand.
Memories of those startlingly green eyes, and those groin-stirringly perfect lips were very diverting. Jared could at least console himself with the thought that when he was blown to smithereens he’d have something more pleasant to on his mind than concrete and wire cutters.
Jared entered yet another empty building without knocking. He’d long since decided his deeply ingrained politeness was just wasting precious time, and besides, there was no one left in Belleville to appreciate it.
At least that was what he’d thought, until he emerged from the last house he’d searched into a street full of perambulating people. Suddenly Belleville was looking like a rustic version of Edinburgh’s Princes Street on a sunny day, only less dreek and with more timber-framing. A finely dressed gentleman with his elegant wife’s gloved hand draped over his right arm strolled by. He gave Jared a jaunty wave with his left hand, and the lady tipped her parasol at him with a smile. Jared nodded in automatic reply before recognition struck. It was the Duke of Clubs. Jared looked more closely at the faces of the other passers by and sure enough, there the General (now attired in appropriately pseudo-military fashion in what looked like the brass helmet of a fire chief), and there, tripping along dressed all in jaunty yellow, was Monsieur Marguerite, looking fresh as the daisy he was named after. Sadly, there was no sign of Adonis.
Jared felt a bead of sweat trickle down his back. The day was going to be a scorcher, and he found himself wishing he could strip off all his gear and his heavy woollen jacket and join the lunatics strolling the streets and forget all about the bloody war.
But of course Jared couldn’t do that, he had a job to do, a town to save.
He grabbed the arm of one of the passing lunatics to whom he hadn’t yet been introduced, and tried asking about the blockhouse again, but the man just stared at Jared as if he was the crazy one.
“Sorry, must rush, must dash - for the sake of my smashing moustache - the Barber awaits!”
Jared had to acknowledge that the man did have a magnificent moustache, one that must require a lot of maintenance, but that didn’t help him one little bit. As he watched the man skip away down the street, twirling said moustache with gay abandon, Jared was no closer to finding the German munitions and preventing the explosion. It was as if Hope was skipping alongs personified by the diminishing figure of Moustache Man, and Jared could only watch as it vanished round a corner with one last flourish of its heel along with the man.
“Merde!” he swore with feeling, too caught up in his thoughts to hear the approaching footsteps behind him. He nearly jumped a mile when a warm hand landed on his shoulder.
0x0x0x0
The world was full of colour and the morning air already warm when Jensen stepped out of the Asylum gates for the first time in nearly two years. He was the last inmate to leave, not because he was reluctant, but because he’d taken the opportunity to rummage around in the storeroom to find his circus costume. He had no desire to analyse why he hadn’t wanted to leave the Maison des Autres without changing into what was essentially a relic of another life, but once he’d squeezed himself into the now slightly-too-small spangled suit he felt happier, and that was reason enough.
Once in the town proper, Jensen’s first task was to apply the finishing touches to his stage persona. Leaving Misha rummaging through the kitchen cupboards downstairs, Jensen sat down at the dressing table of some unknown wife or mother or daughter. He carefully applied abandoned cosmetics; eye-liner, a touch of rouge, shockingly red lipstick that he then blotted off, leaving his lips looking bee stung and full. Jensen stared at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, his mind still and quiet. It wasn’t his own face he saw, staring back at him, but Jensen hadn’t recognised the person he saw in the mirror for a long time now, makeup or no. Even Emile’s image was not as clear in his head as it had been. Blurred by time, and by other things. Dreadful things.
Jensen blinked once, twice. He wasn’t seeing the mirror at all any more, and his mind was no longer quiet. Instead he was back in that trench at Verdun, waiting for the shelling to stop and the whistle to blow. Misha was by his side, but in those moments before flinging themselves over the top into the flesh shredding hail of machine gun bullets, every man was alone with his private terror.
Now as back then, it was Misha who pulled him out of the muddy shell hole he had ended up in.
Misha burst into the bedroom and draped himself over Jensen’s back, resting his chin on Jensen’s shoulder. Misha’s blue eyes were Jensen’s wake-up call, bringing him back into the present.
“You were brooding again, mon ami. You know that is bad for your soul.”
Jensen had lifted his head and latched onto Misha’s wry gaze, needing the other man to be his anchor to reality. Jensen knew that Misha understood the need for something outside of oneself to cling onto when everything got too much.
And that was why Jensen had nothing but sympathy for the tall British soldier with the strange uniform looking lost when Jensen came across him in the street. Jensen could feel how knotted up and tense Jared’s shoulder muscles were under his casually placed hand. The boy was practically vibrating with nerves.
Jensen couldn’t have that.
They probably only had a day at most, and maybe only a few hours of freedom before the world inevitably came crashing back down onto their little town, as it always did, and took the sunshine away, and Jensen couldn’t bear to think that anyone should waste even a moment of that precious time. He decided then and there to make it his mission to ensure that Jared relaxed and found some pleasure, just as all Jensen’s friends were doing.
Onto Part 2
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Onward..ho!
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