thisbluespirit (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2019-08-12 09:06 pm
thisbluespirit) wrote in rainbowfic2019-08-12 09:06 pm
Cloudy Grey #7, Snow White #14 [Divide & Rule]
Name: After the War
Story: Divide & Rule
Colors: Cloudy Grey (#7 accompany); Snow White # (sacrifice)
Supplies and Styles: Pastels (also forgenprompt_bingo square “Faced with overwhelming odds.”)
Word Count: 2468
Rating: Teen
Warnings: WWII; some mentions of bombing/injury/death.
Notes 1941-1945, September 1949; Edward Iveson/Julia Graves. (One day I will write something that’s not Edward and Julia again, but not today, sorry.)
Summary Edward and Julia’s war, mostly fought alone.
***
Spring 1941
Julia was just out of school, alone and doing secretarial work for a stationer’s, and had been glad to be conscripted into something more useful. She’d wound up joining the Women’s Voluntary Service and now, nearly a year later, she was helping to run a British Restaurant. She enjoyed it, even with the eternal fight to acquire sufficient supplies, between shortages and interruptions to deliveries due. She liked organising people and resources, she found, quite quickly. At any rate, she liked it much better than writing essays, or worrying about watermarks and paper thickness.
She’d been living with Margaret, her last remaining friend from school, in a flat in Bermondsey, and if it weren’t for the worry and shame of Mother, Christy and Rudy out of reach in Germany, she’d have been much happier than she had been since Father died. At least here, as long as she told no one else her family secret, she couldn’t be given the cold shoulder by the entire form. The last year had been one long nightmare. Sixth formers didn’t rag people and they didn’t send classmates to Coventry, but they still made their feelings plain, however much they stood on prefectly dignity. Surviving the Blitz was easy after that.
Of, course, Julia realised, as she counted up boxes full of tins of corned beef and bags of flour out the back, she should never have risked feeling happy. She was beginning to think she was cursed, and if only she’d left Margaret alone, if she’d kept herself to herself, this wouldn’t have happened.
It would, though, she knew. It was one of those things. Everybody had stories like it by now. Ironic little things – Margaret after coming through the endless months of bombardment had gone to her people in the West Country for a week, and the street had been hit by a stray cluster of incendiaries dropped by a lost bomber on his way home.
Now she numbered her remaining school friends down from one to nil.
Edward had started the war by being put in prison. He had been conscripted out of the Foreign Office and into the Intelligence Corps, and MI5, who had been immediately shunted out of Thames House to Wormwood Scrubs so swiftly that inmates had barely been moved out before his colleagues were moved in, and the first few weeks were spent trying to avoid locking themselves in their new ‘offices.’ Now they were in Blenheim Palace – from the ridiculous to the sublime.
He walked out into the grounds on a fine spring day and had to remind himself that he was engaged in war work, that it hadn’t been his decision as such to remain here, out of danger, save that shared by the rest of London and the South East and any other city that was seen as a target. That was true of an awful lot of other fellows, too, of course, but he still couldn’t feel comfortable with it. He made other people fight his war. He persuaded German agents into betraying their country, and others to serve their own.
He wasn’t visiting his mother and he wasn’t even thinking about Peggy Venn.
He was a damned coward.
Summer 1943
Julia wanted her desperate war romance, the way everyone else seemed to have. She made one for herself, falling for Michael Campbell, a corporal in the Royal Artillery, manning the Ack-Ack guns. He came into the restaurant on a regular basis and chatted up all the girls. He wasn’t going to argue with his role in her script.
It was always just pretend. Part of her knew that, buried deep down. It was never real, even before it crashed and burned like everything else.
There was a delay somewhere. There was always a delay, whether it was down to troop movements, bomb damage, air raid warnings, or staff shortages, or something else. The train had been due to leave hours before it even arrived and now, finally barely a mile from Charing Cross, it slowed and ground to a halt. Edward shifted himself further into his corner in the overcrowded compartment and gripped his book more tightly, not that any of his fellow travellers seemed inclined to talk to him. There were two girls in uniform, busy talking to each other, a soldier catching up on some sleep, and another frowning at a newspaper. All half off on leave, no doubt, and the other half going back again, like Edward.
Edward turned a page of Orley Farm, but he wasn’t reading it any more. He knew already that he’d had it with Peggy. One night to hang onto each other, that was all they’d had. Two nights, if you could count that one in the air raid shelter. There was nothing to say anyway. Now they were in separate branches of Intelligence, they probably shouldn’t even have been meeting today. He couldn’t tell her what he’d been doing and she was going back to France with a department that technically didn’t even exist. Even if she made it back again, what was there left between them but silence?
Autumn 1943
“After the war,” said a girl sitting nearby at a table as Julia cleared away the plates and mess that a couple of soldiers had just left behind them, “we’ll still have these places, don’t you think? And more.”
As things stood now, after the war didn’t exist any more. After the war was a fairy tale phrase that might as well mean never, like once upon a time or happily ever after.
“We know it works,” continued the girl, waving a fork at her friend sitting opposite her. “Feed everybody cheap – all even, in it together. The government won’t just take them away, will they? And we’ll have more things like this. Only with more cheerful paint.” She grinned. “No more brown.”
Julia bit back a laugh as she passed their table. She could sympathise with that much. Everything seemed beige these days – beige, brown, khaki. Uniforms, Utility dresses. Just trying to find something to wear that wasn’t falling apart and practically indecent was a battle. If half the girls slept with GIs for the nylons, who could blame them at this point? One got sick of mending and making do and stretching everything as far as it would go while one hoped for the end of the war that never came any closer.
She couldn’t share the girl’s vision of the future, couldn’t see what she was seeing. Maybe tomorrow, she thought. She was tired again, and weren’t they all? War’s first victim was sleep.
January 1945
It wasn’t Edward’s decision. The act of playing God belonged to his superiors. He merely had orders, but stopping for a cup of tea in a British Restaurant in Islington after visiting one of his assets, he felt the blame clinging to him. He was part of a chain of misinformation, feeding it back in the end to the Germans, getting them to believe that their VI and V2 rockets had hit places further west than they had, gradually shifting the targets away from the most densely populated areas, killing someone else instead. Less someone elses, that was the point, but it was an uncomfortable thing to be even part responsible for. At least with the V2s there was nothing anyone could do to stop them; it seemed more justified. With the V1s, they were switching out defended areas for undefended ones, and that came with its own costs.
Edward pushed aside his empty cup, and left the café, heading away down the street, wishing the war would get on and end, when there was a deafening bang, thunder and blue lightning across the sky, and he found himself next lying on the ground, robbed of breath, lying alongside the rubble of what had been the nearest wall. He risked lifting his head, coughing at the dust. There was a woman in uniform only a yard of so away, more debris between them, and glass splinters everywhere. The other end of the wall, still unsteadily standing, gave up and collapsed.
They must have been at the edge of the blast. Raising himself into a sitting position, he could see that the street stretching away from the restaurant had been flattened, and there was a cloud of dark smoke rising in the distance. He’d heard people talking about the rockets, and felt the echo of the impact of a hit before, but he hadn’t been so close before. The unreality of it was overwhelming, with an eerie silence cast over the whole area. He wasn’t sure for a minute if he’d been deafened by the blast, or if it was simply that still in the aftermath. He shook himself.
“You all right, love?” said the woman nearby, and though his ears were ringing, he heard her clearly enough. It was, it seemed, simply that still.
He looked up in surprise and gave a nod, only wondering afterwards if that was true. But he didn’t feel any pain and he didn’t seem to be bleeding. He coughed again. “You?” he added, meeting her gaze. She looked, under the covering of dust, to be about forty or so, and he registered that she was wearing the khaki uniform of the ATS, although she seemed to have lost her cap.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and then moved on, stepping over the remains of the wall out into what had been the street.
Edward got to his feet and followed a few steps behind, stopping again on seeing her crouch down beside an elderly man. He hurried over, kneeling beside her and helping to remove the bricks that had half buried the poor fellow.
Behind him, he could hear the delayed engines and sirens of the emergency services finally arriving. From the sound, he judged they were heading towards the blast’s centre, probably about a mile away from Edward’s position. Lucky for him, the ATS woman, and the injured old chap. Any nearer and none of them might be here.
“He’s still with us,” said the woman, brushing down her skirt as she rose. She paused, on the point of moving, and then looked upwards at the sky with a glare. “Dirty way to fight a war.”
Edward took hold of the man’s hand as he began to stir and only marvelled that she believed there was any clean way to fight one.
After the War (September 1949)
Julia woke out of a nightmare about Rudy and Yorckstrasse with a yell and flailed about, sending her glass flying from the bedside table. She struggled free of the bedclothes to sit up and reached out for the lamp before getting out to clear up her mess. The carpet had at least saved the glass from breaking, but the water had soaked into it. Julia heaved a sigh and stamped across to the bathroom and back with a cloth, not minding the lateness of the hour.
“Julia,” said Edward, poking his head out of his bedroom door, blinking in the dim light. He emerged fully, tying the cord of his dressing gown and frowning at her, dishevelled and thunderous in the way that he was when awoken suddenly at unwelcome hours of the morning. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t really; she didn’t want to be alone, thinking of Rudy and other awful things that had happened over the last ten years. Part of the point of this odd marriage of theirs was that she shouldn’t have to be. “It was a nightmare. About Rudy and things.”
His expression softened and he crossed over to her room, standing in the doorway as she knelt on the carpet inside, giving the damp patch a hasty scrub with the cloth before throwing it onto the chest of drawers and clambering back into bed. She looked up at Edward, who straightened himself, about to leave. “Don’t go.”
Edward gave a wary look, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s late,” he said, somewhere halfway between sympathetic and irritated. “Early.”
“I know.” She lay down, but stretched out a hand to him before he tried to slip away. What she and Edward had was a peculiar sort of arrangement, but one of the best things about him was that there was an awful lot she never needed to explain. He knew what she’d been doing in Paris; he was the one who’d informed her of Rudy’s death in Berlin; he knew the rest of her family, and they’d both been through the war here at home, in London. As he took her hand, closing his fingers around hers, she closed her eyes. “Stay for a bit. Please.”
Edward shifted his position further onto the bed, and then looked down at her. “I’m not going anywhere. Although, Julia, nothing funny at this hour.”
She had to turn her head into the pillow to stifle her giggles. He did so hate to be woken in the middle of the night, even aside from all his odd notions of what times it was and wasn’t proper to do things.
“Julia?” said Edward, shifting nearer, concern edging into his voice. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, turning back to smile at him. She squeezed his hand. “I don’t want to go back into that dream, that’s all.”
Edward leant back against the headboard and gave the tiniest quirk of a smile, stroking his thumb over her fingers. “You won’t,” he said, and he was right.
Edward slid down against the pillows with a yawn, watching Julia. She had gone straight off to sleep, despite her worries. He was the one left awake, as usual. He gave a soft laugh and stretched over cautiously to turn off the lamp without disturbing her.
Times like this gave him cause to hope again that she might share his feelings, but he hesitated to press further. She might run away again, or worse, give him an honest answer he’d rather not hear, not yet. What they had was strange, perhaps, but it was a good deal better than the loneliness that had gone before, even as it was. There was potentially everything to gain, but also the chance of losing this, and he couldn’t risk that. He always had been a coward.
Julia stirred beside him, only half-awake as she edged nearer and said, drowsily, “I’m sorry. I’m a horrid sort of person.”
“I know,” said Edward, keeping his voice low. “You woke me at half-past three in the morning. So, shh, and go to sleep.”
He wasn’t sure, in the murky grey darkness of the room, but he thought she was smiling.
***
Story: Divide & Rule
Colors: Cloudy Grey (#7 accompany); Snow White # (sacrifice)
Supplies and Styles: Pastels (also for
genprompt_bingo square “Faced with overwhelming odds.”)Word Count: 2468
Rating: Teen
Warnings: WWII; some mentions of bombing/injury/death.
Notes 1941-1945, September 1949; Edward Iveson/Julia Graves. (One day I will write something that’s not Edward and Julia again, but not today, sorry.)
Summary Edward and Julia’s war, mostly fought alone.
***
Spring 1941
Julia was just out of school, alone and doing secretarial work for a stationer’s, and had been glad to be conscripted into something more useful. She’d wound up joining the Women’s Voluntary Service and now, nearly a year later, she was helping to run a British Restaurant. She enjoyed it, even with the eternal fight to acquire sufficient supplies, between shortages and interruptions to deliveries due. She liked organising people and resources, she found, quite quickly. At any rate, she liked it much better than writing essays, or worrying about watermarks and paper thickness.
She’d been living with Margaret, her last remaining friend from school, in a flat in Bermondsey, and if it weren’t for the worry and shame of Mother, Christy and Rudy out of reach in Germany, she’d have been much happier than she had been since Father died. At least here, as long as she told no one else her family secret, she couldn’t be given the cold shoulder by the entire form. The last year had been one long nightmare. Sixth formers didn’t rag people and they didn’t send classmates to Coventry, but they still made their feelings plain, however much they stood on prefectly dignity. Surviving the Blitz was easy after that.
Of, course, Julia realised, as she counted up boxes full of tins of corned beef and bags of flour out the back, she should never have risked feeling happy. She was beginning to think she was cursed, and if only she’d left Margaret alone, if she’d kept herself to herself, this wouldn’t have happened.
It would, though, she knew. It was one of those things. Everybody had stories like it by now. Ironic little things – Margaret after coming through the endless months of bombardment had gone to her people in the West Country for a week, and the street had been hit by a stray cluster of incendiaries dropped by a lost bomber on his way home.
Now she numbered her remaining school friends down from one to nil.
Edward had started the war by being put in prison. He had been conscripted out of the Foreign Office and into the Intelligence Corps, and MI5, who had been immediately shunted out of Thames House to Wormwood Scrubs so swiftly that inmates had barely been moved out before his colleagues were moved in, and the first few weeks were spent trying to avoid locking themselves in their new ‘offices.’ Now they were in Blenheim Palace – from the ridiculous to the sublime.
He walked out into the grounds on a fine spring day and had to remind himself that he was engaged in war work, that it hadn’t been his decision as such to remain here, out of danger, save that shared by the rest of London and the South East and any other city that was seen as a target. That was true of an awful lot of other fellows, too, of course, but he still couldn’t feel comfortable with it. He made other people fight his war. He persuaded German agents into betraying their country, and others to serve their own.
He wasn’t visiting his mother and he wasn’t even thinking about Peggy Venn.
He was a damned coward.
Summer 1943
Julia wanted her desperate war romance, the way everyone else seemed to have. She made one for herself, falling for Michael Campbell, a corporal in the Royal Artillery, manning the Ack-Ack guns. He came into the restaurant on a regular basis and chatted up all the girls. He wasn’t going to argue with his role in her script.
It was always just pretend. Part of her knew that, buried deep down. It was never real, even before it crashed and burned like everything else.
There was a delay somewhere. There was always a delay, whether it was down to troop movements, bomb damage, air raid warnings, or staff shortages, or something else. The train had been due to leave hours before it even arrived and now, finally barely a mile from Charing Cross, it slowed and ground to a halt. Edward shifted himself further into his corner in the overcrowded compartment and gripped his book more tightly, not that any of his fellow travellers seemed inclined to talk to him. There were two girls in uniform, busy talking to each other, a soldier catching up on some sleep, and another frowning at a newspaper. All half off on leave, no doubt, and the other half going back again, like Edward.
Edward turned a page of Orley Farm, but he wasn’t reading it any more. He knew already that he’d had it with Peggy. One night to hang onto each other, that was all they’d had. Two nights, if you could count that one in the air raid shelter. There was nothing to say anyway. Now they were in separate branches of Intelligence, they probably shouldn’t even have been meeting today. He couldn’t tell her what he’d been doing and she was going back to France with a department that technically didn’t even exist. Even if she made it back again, what was there left between them but silence?
Autumn 1943
“After the war,” said a girl sitting nearby at a table as Julia cleared away the plates and mess that a couple of soldiers had just left behind them, “we’ll still have these places, don’t you think? And more.”
As things stood now, after the war didn’t exist any more. After the war was a fairy tale phrase that might as well mean never, like once upon a time or happily ever after.
“We know it works,” continued the girl, waving a fork at her friend sitting opposite her. “Feed everybody cheap – all even, in it together. The government won’t just take them away, will they? And we’ll have more things like this. Only with more cheerful paint.” She grinned. “No more brown.”
Julia bit back a laugh as she passed their table. She could sympathise with that much. Everything seemed beige these days – beige, brown, khaki. Uniforms, Utility dresses. Just trying to find something to wear that wasn’t falling apart and practically indecent was a battle. If half the girls slept with GIs for the nylons, who could blame them at this point? One got sick of mending and making do and stretching everything as far as it would go while one hoped for the end of the war that never came any closer.
She couldn’t share the girl’s vision of the future, couldn’t see what she was seeing. Maybe tomorrow, she thought. She was tired again, and weren’t they all? War’s first victim was sleep.
January 1945
It wasn’t Edward’s decision. The act of playing God belonged to his superiors. He merely had orders, but stopping for a cup of tea in a British Restaurant in Islington after visiting one of his assets, he felt the blame clinging to him. He was part of a chain of misinformation, feeding it back in the end to the Germans, getting them to believe that their VI and V2 rockets had hit places further west than they had, gradually shifting the targets away from the most densely populated areas, killing someone else instead. Less someone elses, that was the point, but it was an uncomfortable thing to be even part responsible for. At least with the V2s there was nothing anyone could do to stop them; it seemed more justified. With the V1s, they were switching out defended areas for undefended ones, and that came with its own costs.
Edward pushed aside his empty cup, and left the café, heading away down the street, wishing the war would get on and end, when there was a deafening bang, thunder and blue lightning across the sky, and he found himself next lying on the ground, robbed of breath, lying alongside the rubble of what had been the nearest wall. He risked lifting his head, coughing at the dust. There was a woman in uniform only a yard of so away, more debris between them, and glass splinters everywhere. The other end of the wall, still unsteadily standing, gave up and collapsed.
They must have been at the edge of the blast. Raising himself into a sitting position, he could see that the street stretching away from the restaurant had been flattened, and there was a cloud of dark smoke rising in the distance. He’d heard people talking about the rockets, and felt the echo of the impact of a hit before, but he hadn’t been so close before. The unreality of it was overwhelming, with an eerie silence cast over the whole area. He wasn’t sure for a minute if he’d been deafened by the blast, or if it was simply that still in the aftermath. He shook himself.
“You all right, love?” said the woman nearby, and though his ears were ringing, he heard her clearly enough. It was, it seemed, simply that still.
He looked up in surprise and gave a nod, only wondering afterwards if that was true. But he didn’t feel any pain and he didn’t seem to be bleeding. He coughed again. “You?” he added, meeting her gaze. She looked, under the covering of dust, to be about forty or so, and he registered that she was wearing the khaki uniform of the ATS, although she seemed to have lost her cap.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and then moved on, stepping over the remains of the wall out into what had been the street.
Edward got to his feet and followed a few steps behind, stopping again on seeing her crouch down beside an elderly man. He hurried over, kneeling beside her and helping to remove the bricks that had half buried the poor fellow.
Behind him, he could hear the delayed engines and sirens of the emergency services finally arriving. From the sound, he judged they were heading towards the blast’s centre, probably about a mile away from Edward’s position. Lucky for him, the ATS woman, and the injured old chap. Any nearer and none of them might be here.
“He’s still with us,” said the woman, brushing down her skirt as she rose. She paused, on the point of moving, and then looked upwards at the sky with a glare. “Dirty way to fight a war.”
Edward took hold of the man’s hand as he began to stir and only marvelled that she believed there was any clean way to fight one.
After the War (September 1949)
Julia woke out of a nightmare about Rudy and Yorckstrasse with a yell and flailed about, sending her glass flying from the bedside table. She struggled free of the bedclothes to sit up and reached out for the lamp before getting out to clear up her mess. The carpet had at least saved the glass from breaking, but the water had soaked into it. Julia heaved a sigh and stamped across to the bathroom and back with a cloth, not minding the lateness of the hour.
“Julia,” said Edward, poking his head out of his bedroom door, blinking in the dim light. He emerged fully, tying the cord of his dressing gown and frowning at her, dishevelled and thunderous in the way that he was when awoken suddenly at unwelcome hours of the morning. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t really; she didn’t want to be alone, thinking of Rudy and other awful things that had happened over the last ten years. Part of the point of this odd marriage of theirs was that she shouldn’t have to be. “It was a nightmare. About Rudy and things.”
His expression softened and he crossed over to her room, standing in the doorway as she knelt on the carpet inside, giving the damp patch a hasty scrub with the cloth before throwing it onto the chest of drawers and clambering back into bed. She looked up at Edward, who straightened himself, about to leave. “Don’t go.”
Edward gave a wary look, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. “It’s late,” he said, somewhere halfway between sympathetic and irritated. “Early.”
“I know.” She lay down, but stretched out a hand to him before he tried to slip away. What she and Edward had was a peculiar sort of arrangement, but one of the best things about him was that there was an awful lot she never needed to explain. He knew what she’d been doing in Paris; he was the one who’d informed her of Rudy’s death in Berlin; he knew the rest of her family, and they’d both been through the war here at home, in London. As he took her hand, closing his fingers around hers, she closed her eyes. “Stay for a bit. Please.”
Edward shifted his position further onto the bed, and then looked down at her. “I’m not going anywhere. Although, Julia, nothing funny at this hour.”
She had to turn her head into the pillow to stifle her giggles. He did so hate to be woken in the middle of the night, even aside from all his odd notions of what times it was and wasn’t proper to do things.
“Julia?” said Edward, shifting nearer, concern edging into his voice. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, turning back to smile at him. She squeezed his hand. “I don’t want to go back into that dream, that’s all.”
Edward leant back against the headboard and gave the tiniest quirk of a smile, stroking his thumb over her fingers. “You won’t,” he said, and he was right.
Edward slid down against the pillows with a yawn, watching Julia. She had gone straight off to sleep, despite her worries. He was the one left awake, as usual. He gave a soft laugh and stretched over cautiously to turn off the lamp without disturbing her.
Times like this gave him cause to hope again that she might share his feelings, but he hesitated to press further. She might run away again, or worse, give him an honest answer he’d rather not hear, not yet. What they had was strange, perhaps, but it was a good deal better than the loneliness that had gone before, even as it was. There was potentially everything to gain, but also the chance of losing this, and he couldn’t risk that. He always had been a coward.
Julia stirred beside him, only half-awake as she edged nearer and said, drowsily, “I’m sorry. I’m a horrid sort of person.”
“I know,” said Edward, keeping his voice low. “You woke me at half-past three in the morning. So, shh, and go to sleep.”
He wasn’t sure, in the murky grey darkness of the room, but he thought she was smiling.
***
no subject
no subject
no subject
This is really good. It's tired, sort of, and lonely, and definitely full of pain, but that moment of company at the end makes up for all of it.
no subject
I mean, I don't know why you'd ever stop writing about Edward and Julia tbh....
Ha, yes, well, the thing is I seem to have gone right off the rest of the canon, but I don't seem to be able to come up with a new one, or put Edward and Julia down. I was wondering if maybe I could make one of the AUs work as a solution, but I don't seem to be able to quite. So it's really awkward, and, I mean, there are other characters, too. I just need to find my way forward. In the meantime, all I got is Edward and Julia. Just as well somebody else likes them too!
no subject