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jaws-and-canines · 1 year

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Sign Your Name Away

A Verschlimmbessern story. Contains mentions of death, suicide, chronic pain and past violence.

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Fennec feels like death. He thinks, perhaps, it has been several days- or only hours, and he would never know which. There are no windows, and the entire building seems to be made from temporary materials, to be disassembled or removed at short notice. There’s a lot of thoroughfare, but the curtains around his bed are drawn, and he knows he can’t stand up to open them even if he wanted to. So he sits, eyes shut, glasses hooked over the lapel of the rough linen nightshirt he has on beneath the covers. Imagining the owners of the footsteps that walk past.

But, God, he thinks, it hurts. He puts his head in his hands and leans back into the pillows, trying not to burst into tears. The sheer gravity of the pain that seems to radiate from his knee, all the way to the very core of his being, the burning heat, the way the stitches can be felt tugging and pulling at his skin all stack up. Fennec thinks he might snap, he might lose his mind should he be left in this state. The little voice in the back of his head points out that the damage is permanent. The damage is permanent and the pain most likely is as well. He can only hope he’ll be able to walk again, but he doesn’t dare hope much.

The curtains squeak as a man steps in, and throws them shut behind him. Black shirt, built like a house, short hair and a previously broken nose, the bent angle which seems to dominate his heavyset face. “Anton Fennec, is it not?” says the man. Fennec is at first surprised that the man speaks German without a particularly bad accent, as many of the others do- but then the coldness of the realisation washes over him. Not many positions in the armed forces would call for a bilingual person to that degree- radio operator, perhaps, translator, perhaps- but someone like that, working alone? No, thinks Fennec, wallowing in his realisation that the man is an interrogator.

If he wasn’t miserable to begin with, the realisation alone would kill any good mood in him.

He sighs. “Yes, but I wish it were not.” He fumbles to put his glasses back on, and then fixes the interrogator with a clouded gaze. “What are you here for?”

“I want to have a conversation with you.”

“Hm.” Fennec crosses his arms and shrugs, a gesture of ‘go ahead’. Conversation, anyhow, is better than what the previous string of interrogators did to him, even as he was begging and pleading and telling them everything he knew. He doesn’t mind conversation.

The man sits down on the chair beside Fennec’s bed. “If it’s any consolation, the war is well and truly over for you,” he says. “But I don’t think it will be much consolation given your…” The interrogator gestures broadly.

“My position,” finishes Fennec. The man’s eyes are not on his leg, not the surgical drain dripping bloodied amber fluid into a clear bag at the foot of the bed, nor on the crutches leant up by the side of the bed. They are on his face. The man’s sympathies are not for his injury, Fennec knows. They’re for his crimes and for how he’ll have to pay for them. In the traditional manner of the State, probably through a bullet to the skull at the bitter crack of dawn. “My position, which is precarious. I know well that it is.”

The man exhales through his nose, nodding slowly. “The War Crimes Commission has been assembled. The trial is due to start on Wednesday, which means that you will be expected to attend the preliminary hearing, and expected to co-operate with the ensuing investigation.”

Fennec groans, putting a hand over his face. He knew it was coming, but hoped it wouldn’t be so immediate.

“Does that surprise you?” The interrogator leans in. “Were you expecting to just be allowed to walk free, Anton?”

Fennec laughs awkwardly, and raises an eyebrow. He stares at the interrogator for a moment, trying to put together a sentence that won’t overtly provoke the man. “No. I was shot in the knee and then dragged several miles in handcuffs. That’s not a friendly introduction and it has not been friendly since. I was not under the impression I was not going to be tried.”

The statement is not hyperbole, although he had been barely conscious, shivering and bleeding profusely on the stretcher for the majority of the time, they handcuffed him all the same, and the points where the stretcher could not fit, or became inconvenient, they simply dragged him. Fennec licks his lips, shrugs, and sighs. “Though I was hoping for… more time.” He just shrugs again, open-handed, and pushes his glasses up his nose. “I… do not know. I tried my best, I tried my damn best, and that is all a man can do.”

“We know,” says the interrogator. “We know you tried to do what was right.”

“Oh, like fuck you did,” snaps Fennec, then shakes his head, a little taken aback by his own short-temperdness, something quite unlike him. “Pardon me,” he apologises.

The interrogator just carries on calmly. “I trust that you’ll do the right thing and co-operate with the investigation.”

Fennec sees right through the simple plea to his morals. It’s not particularly hard to do, he thinks. “And yet…” Fennec looks between the interrogator and the crutches he has not yet found enough energy to even try to use. “You people still shot me. And then, inexplicably, even after I told you everything I had to say, you tortured me. If that is how you treat people who try to do right, I would hate to see how you treat those who do wrong.”

The calmly spoken sentence hangs in the air for a few moments, the interrogator visibly chewing it over in his mind. Eventually, he speaks again. “If you don’t want to hear what I have to offer then I can just leave, Anton, I don’t need to be here.”

He sighs, waving a hand at the interrogator. “No, no, I will listen,” he says, almost exasperated.

“The punishment for a violation of the laws of war by a belligerent party, generally, is death. I’m sure you know that,” he says. “But someone in your position has one option available to him.” The interrogator puts the two pieces of paper on the bed, gesturing to them with an open palm. “Here is an agreement to testify for the prosecution. Here is an agreement from us that is contingent on the first, for you to countersign, that we will allow you to formally defect.”

Fennec looks at the pieces of paper, feeling tears welling up in his eyes. He sniffs, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. He feels the familiar shakiness of anxiety creep back in. “What will this do?”

“You will lose your German citizenship. You will be issued a State identity number, passport and National Insurance number and you will be tried as a State National- not a belligerent party. This means the death penalty can be taken off the table if you are found guilty with anything less than high culpability, which it seems like you will be.” He pauses, fingers still brushing against the two forms. “I might add, if you sign this, you will be held as a State National- that is, away from your peers, which is probably for the best.”

“Mmm,” muses Fennec by way of agreement. An understatement.

“How is the…” the interrogator trails off, gesturing to his neck.

Fennec tugs down his shirt collar, revealing the bruised ghost of a handprint there, two hands pressed to his neck. “Johan has always been very strong,” he says.

Fennec doesn’t like to work from conjecture, but the pieces all fall together- as the rumour went, Johan, Captain Rasch, always a little neurotic, had cut his own throat rather than face capture by the State soldiers, and had failed to die. The fact that he remained alive, thinks Fennec, is a very good thing. Not so much of a good thing was him suddenly appearing at the foot end of Fennec’s bed in the early hours of the morning, wearing only a green hospital gown and dripping with sweat, and going straight for Fennec’s throat with a grip only frenzy can pull from a man.

“I am sorry about that,” says the interrogator. “The orderlies should have been with him.”

“It is no harm, so it is no foul,” Fennec says simply.

In truth, he was scared half-to-death. Startled from sleep, he had grabbed for the only thing in reach and beaten Johan over the head with his crutches, screaming for someone to help. The orderlies heard the commotion, and dragged Johan away from him, kicking and screaming.

The only thing Fennec could think to say to Johan, at that moment, was that he was sorry for what he’d done to him- to all of them. He was hoarse for days- and yet he felt he was the one who needed to apologise.

He wipes his nose on his hand, pushes his glasses back up his nose, and goes back to the issue at hand.

Fennec looks at the papers, and realises, in the most tangible sense, that he is signing his life away. He is signing his wife and his daughter away. But it is this, he knows, or it is resigning himself to death. He doesn’t really feel like the choice is a choice at all. An utter non-choice, it is, with the hole that somehow he has managed to dig himself into.

“I want to keep my name,” he says. It’s a weak attempt at staking his claim over his own life.

It falls totally flat. “Then you can. Are you going to sign it or not?”

Fennec tries to stall again. “It could not wait, could it? You want it done,” says Fennec, looking at the man over the frame of his glasses.

“It needs to be done before the preliminary hearing.” The interrogator seems to have no concept of just how monumental the forms are, just how destructive. He’s handed Fennec what is essentially a loaded gun, and is asking if he can be done with it as quickly as possible.

Fennec pushes his glasses up his nose. No, if he goes home now, he ruins not only himself, but Alais and Rosalie as well, and he refuses to drag his whole family down with himself. They can live comfortably off his pension, claimed whilst he is presumed dead. A war criminal gets no pension- and most likely, gets tried in the Hague.

There’s no going home for him now, he realises.

“Give them to me,” he says, and gestures for the interrogator to put them on his table. “Pen,” he says, tapping the table again. “I need a pen.”

The interrogator presses the biro into his hand. Fennec scrawls his signature, with the tremor of hidden pain distorting the letters ever so slightly.

#count the days #Verschlimmbessern #suicide mentions #brief but still #whump #whump writing #original writing

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