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“Responsible” wasn’t a word most used to describe you. Before the Halmeggia operation, it’d be easy to criticize you of alcoholism getting in the way of officerial duties, but ever since you’d been largely sober. So you had that going for you. You were just being lazy, rather than a drunk, though you’d always thought of yourself as a functional one.
Frau Falkenstein had wanted you to use your ration card to nab up the dwindling stocks of certain rationed goods, to make the Langenachtfest feast special, but you were having trouble securing cinnamon and sugar, much of the spare sweetening having been scrounged up already.
“Psh,” you grumbled to yourself as you exited a store in search of another, hoping for better fortune this time, “I don’t recall the sugarcane going through a blight…” Who knew. With the lack of grain, breweries had lacked for stuff to brew with. Maybe all the sugar was being made into spirits.
The next place at least had butter, but you were starting to give up hope on the foodstuffs, unless you ventured to another country. Get the Luftwaffe High Command to invade somewhere for their Langenachtfest feast. You pondered your bad luck on a bench in the space called Reserve’s Square, a park where reservists once trained for the Emrean War, now long since disused and made into a public plaza, military operations moved out of the city. What to get as gifts, you wondered…a set of new knives for Frau Falkenstein, perhaps. A goblet for her father, to match with the commemoration he had from the Luftwaffe. For Linda…usually she only added testing statements as sleight of hand to what you’d actually get her, but this year, she seemed insistent. Perfume, maybe?
Like that scent you caught, just a hint of it from afar, that seemed so…familiar.
Wait.
It couldn’t be.
Yet you were already on your feet and walking towards something you glimpsed at in the corner of your eye, before you even thought about why. There were no obstructions between you. There was no city, no people, nothing. A normal man might have called out, but you wanted to close, in case she slipped away again. Even as you came closer, you didn’t shout- your jaw was set, with an emotion you weren’t sure of. The closest thing you knew was hunger, despair, despondent need.
You didn’t even see her face yet, but you knew. The black, wavy hair. The way she walked, her slender figure, her elegant legs, her taut behind. That subtle scent she had on those nights, even that same jacket you’d given her, the same sort you wore now.
Her. The mother of your son. The woman who haunted your dreams ever since, who’d told you to never expect to see her again, that you hoped desperately and in vain might appear again. Yet here she was, and you didn’t know what to do next…
…Maybe, you shouldn’t do <span class="mu-i">anything…</span>
>?
You are forbidden from using your vocal cords. Speak with action.
