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Tommy nearly laughed when Polly had told him that Ada had taken up work in a library.
Ada, who never had the patience to read a book without skipping to the ending first, who hated staying quiet, who got kicked out of school assemblies, church services and town hall meetings for chatting too loudly and disturbing the procedures in any way imaginable.
No, a library was not the place he would have expected to find his sister in.
And yet, she had chosen this as a place of work, less for the money and more against the boredom.
And her choice had decided his.
The expansion into London had gone quicker and more efficient than Tommy would ever have guessed, even hoped, but in the absence of a proper office, he had to make do.
First, he had tried to work at Ada’s house, but she lacked not only a typewriter (which he had bought her the following week) but a proper desk, proper light and proper quiet.
He couldn’t blame Karl for making noise, he was only a boy and children had every right (and maybe even a duty) to be loud, but it didn’t help when he had to go over numbers or comb through contracts.
So he came here, to this age old building with high arches and classic pillars, with a forest of bookshelves - filled with more books than any human being could hope to read in a lifetime, or maybe even in ten. Old books and new books, newspaper collections and archives that held letters and publications that preceded the United Kingdom itself, all joined forces to create an air of timelessness - as if these halls themselves transcended these numerical, linear bounds, and seemed to float somewhere between the past and the future, just not fitting into the present.
Screens at the windows prevented the sunlight to blind during the day while reading lamps spread their pale glow during the later hours.
It was quiet, though not silent, which was a distinction he never would have made if it weren’t for France. The sounds there haunted him every night, the gunshots, the explosions, the distant murmur of German behind ever thinning walls of dirt, the sound of shovels - but it was the silence that terrified him.
The silence after a blow to the head, not knowing how badly he was wounded, if maybe this was it.
The silence after an explosion when his ears had not regained their ability to process sound, when he did not know who was alive, who was hurt and who was dead or dying.
The silence after the tunnels had caved in around them, as the panic had paralysed them.
In his Birmingham office, the silence was drowned out by the constant buzz of the factories by the banging of metal, the hissing of smoke, the roar of engines in their restless beast of a city.
There was never any silence in Watery Lane either, for that the walls were too thin and the people too loud.
No, silence was something Tommy Shelby never wanted to experience again. It was nothing but waiting, merely stalling a possibly catastrophic truth.
Here, it was always quiet but never silent.
He could hear the faint squeak of the wheels on the book wagon as library workers pushed it through the corridors, while the lamps at the countless reading desks buzzed like fireflies.
He could hear the whisper of pages being turned and the scratchings pens or pencil made on paper.
And he could even hear the movement of the other visitors, the sound their chairs made when they moved them, the rustle of the fabric of their clothes, even their sighs and occasional, slightly more irritating coughs.
Sometimes, when his eyes felt strained or his hands got too tired (Ada had forbidden him to use a typewriter in here), he would lean back in one of the chairs of brown leather with upholstery thinned by year- maybe decade long use.
Then, when his thoughts outran his bodily limitations, he’d let his eyes drift over the library and its patrons.
Sometimes, he’d try to guess which type of books they were here for and for what - a book about botany for the old man with the white beard and green suit jacket, history for the stern woman with the white high collared blouse and dark purple jacket and suit that must have predated the war. The young man with the slightly ruffled hair looked as if he was here for his studies, and the ink stains on his cuff somehow made Tommy think he would be the type to write page long poems in his dorm room in the light of candles, filled with love and sorrow in equal measure.
It was only a game, of course, but something that stretched his mind the way he’d stretch his fingers after some more extensive writing.
The only person he couldn’t place, not even in his game, was the woman who always sat at the very same spot between the very same shelves every single time Tommy Shelby was at the library, no matter if it was morning or night.
From his place, he could watch her just fine, as she was seated across from the gap at the centre of the library space, from where one could look down at the lower stories all the way to the black and white tiles of the entrance hall.
The woman was dressed ordinary, almost boringly, in dark skirts, white blouses and a cardigan that time and wear had pulled slightly out of shape.
And she read, but she didn’t only read, she wrote as well, yet not always. Sometimes she would look like she was writing but she couldn’t be. For that, the movements of her hand were to elaborate, too large and almost too erratic, taking up too much space, switching between left and right, top to bottom.
Sometimes she’d just take a sheet out of that greyish blue folder of hers and stare at it for a while, sometimes minutes, before she resumed her writing or her scribbling or whatever she was doing.
So she wasn’t just reading and she wasn’t just writing, but no matter what she did, she did with purpose, control and a deep rooted sense of calmness, as if there was nothing in the world that could rush her.
It was almost as if her body and mind had assimilated to the strange way time moved in a place like this, not quite forward, not back, as if the timelessness of the library had found its way under her skin.
And that irritated him, well, not exactly.
It irritated him that he couldn’t place her, that he couldn’t just slap a label on her, independent of whether that would be right or wrong, and that made his eyes return to her time and time again, but they never lingered as long as his mind did.
And that he was wasting so much of his precious and limited time watching her, who apparently possessed an abundance of.
“Ada,”, he asked, the next time his sister passed him.
Making rounds, she called it, but he knew she was simply too curious to stay away, eager for any glance at his writing. About ‘their’ company.
“Ada, what section is that?”
He pointed at the shelves across from the gap, where she was sitting, reading this time, not just one book, but two at the same time, one lying in front of her, the other in her hand.
Ada’s eyes followed his hand and she scoffed.
“Don’t even try, Tommy.”, she warned him.
“I’m not trying anything.”, he hissed, glaring at his younger sister and her assumptions.
“Does she work at the library?”
Ada pursed her lips and crossed her arms over her chest. When she did that, she looked exactly like Polly, having perfected the look of annoyed disbelief and frustration.
But in the end, she relented.
“She works here but she doesn’t work here.”, Ada said, which told him absolutely nothing.
He raised his eyebrow and she sighed.
“She’s a classicist.”
“A what now?”, he asked, tilting his head in the direction of his sister as if the closing of distance would somehow make the word less coherent.
“A classicist.”, Ada repeated, making him wait for the explanation. “A specialist in the classic cultures.”
He stared at his sister in confusion. If this was supposed to mean something to him, he was at a loss.
“The Greeks and Romans.”, Ada said impatiently. “You know? Statues and vases and all that.”
She nodded vaguely towards her.
“She’s specialised in Ancient Greek poetry…or balladry or something.”
Tommy’s eyes moved from the woman to his own paperwork and back again.
“And that’s her hobby or…”, he asked slowly, barely believing he had to ask.
“It’s her job, Tommy.”, Ada said. “She’s here for some translation or other."
He snorted as he leaned back in his chair.
“People pay for that?”
“Apparently.”, Ada said with a shrug.
~
Ancient. Greek. Balladry.
Tommy didn't even know what to make of that, nor did he see a point in it really.
Antiquity was well and good in a museum, in artefacts, if people wanted to look at them.
Greece wasn't exactly his country of preference, but some claimed it was nice enough, although then one ought to focus on the here and now and not whatever happened not even centuries but millennia ago and balladry?
He liked ballads. Ever since he had been a boy, he had loved to hear the rough voices mix in the air with the smoke and sparks of the fire as they sang of long dead heroes and age old tales, whenever they went on the road.
But ballads were something to be listened to, not to be read, and he had the nagging suspicion that an analysis, the way a doctor would analyse a patient, would ruin it, would remove all traces of mystery, of muse and magic.
So why anyone would waste their time, let alone their money, on a pursuit as futile as that, was beyond him.
And yet, the next time he arrived at the bottom floor of the library, he took the left stairs instead of the right ones.
He reached the floor Ada worked on just fine, only this time he had to pass the length of both sides.
That path took him right by her desk.
He could see a collection of papers all spread out, some printed, some written in hand.
It was soon evident which one was the fair copy, but even that was written in pencil. He could only tell it apart by the fact that the writing on the other pages was more slanted, in less than straight lines, more like explosions of words like fireworks going off in different corners of the page than a coherent, linear descriptions of her ideas.
He also spotted a thin blue notebook like the ones school children used for their writings, and a dark red leather bound book which lacked the marker that indicated library property, and several others that possessed it.
But between the books, the notebooks, the sheets of printed and handwritten papers, he spotted something he really had not expected.
The greyish blue folder from which she had pulled forth sheets to stare at, was open, and in it, he saw a sketch.
It was a rough sketch, admittedly, but done well enough to not only show that there were men, but to see their differences.
Both were muscular, wearing the dress-like cloth of the ancient Greeks, with broad shoulders and strong arms.
One of them was leaning back, his legs stretched out and a cup of wine in his hand.
The other was sitting across to him, leaned forward just slightly as he held an instrument in his hand. It was too small for a harp, but it had a couple of strings, which his fingers caressed with skill and tenderness.
As he played, a few strands of long hair fell into his strangely beautiful, almost feminine face, but the eyes focussed on nothing but the other man, as if eagerly awaiting his reaction.
Each man had his name written on the side of their arms, in small, but neat writing.
There were also other sentences to the side, a few select lines of text, but before Tommy could read them, his head snapped up.
"Can I help you?", She asked.
Her voice was lowered to abide by the laws of the library as not to disturb the other patrons, nor to infringe on the integrity of the place, and yet her words were clear.
Tommy had not heard her approach, and now he felt caught, somehow, like an intruder who had no right to survey her work.
Quickly, he stepped back.
But she didn't seem to mind. There was no anger in her eyes, no mistrust in her voice, and instead of a frown, she wore a slight smile.
"Ah no.", Tommy said, clearing his throat.
The escape route he chose was to stride with purpose towards the shelf closest and build himself up in front of it.
Taking two side steps for good measure, he found himself staring at a shelf containing Sophocles and Aristophanes, Aeschylus and Agathon as well as something called Euripides which sounded suspiciously like an illness.
"Are you looking for something in particular?", She asked, apparently keen to ruin a possible dignified exit. "Or are you a general lover of theatre?"
Tommy turned slowly.
"Theatre?"
She nodded towards the shelf he had been studying for the last minute, still sitting at her place, surrounded by her papers and drawings.
"No- not really.", He stammered.
She smiled again.
"What interests you? History?", She suggested. "Poetry? Philosophy? Politics?"
As she spoke, she put down a pencil he hadn't heard her write with, and got up slowly, brushing down the wrinkles of her skirt.
"The politics section is over there.", He told her, waving across the gap to the part where Ada worked.
She nodded, but the smile never faded.
"That's true, but this part has the original text transcriptions and their translations."
Tommy did not know what to reply so he just shifted on his feet.
"You're Mrs. Thorne's brother.", The woman said, studying him with interest, but it wasn’t the kind of interest he was used to facing.
Her eyes did were filled with curiosity, but lacked any trace of hunger - for him, his money, his influence. She studied him the way he had seen her gaze at the works in front of her, and in the absence of any desire apart from knowledge, Tommy didn’t know what to do.
"She told me about you."
With that she stepped closer to him.
She smelled of old books, of tea leaves and a little bit of ginger, yet her perfume had a faint note of oranges.
Between the collar of her blouse he could spy a necklace with a single small pendant, showing the imperfect shape of a freshwater pearl, not round, nor a drop, something in between, something unique.
"According to what she told me, you'd be more inclined to Thukydides than Aristotle's definition of man."
Tommy huffed at that. He had heard the name Aristotle before but whatever he thought of man or of anything really, was not something he had concerned himself with.
The woman only smiled.
"Anyway, I'm sure you'll be just fine. If not, you seem to know where I am."
Tommy turned away before she could see the heat rise in his cheeks.
~
At first he thought his little encounter with her would be enough to satiate his curiosity, but the opposite happened.
Instead of becoming a passtime during his breaks, watching her had become a distraction, something that actively drew his gaze and not just caught his eye on occasion.
Why, he could not tell.
She wasn’t a stunning beauty like the dancers in his newly seized nightclubs, didn’t dress in flashy dresses and shining jewels made to capture his eye like their guests, nor did she try to enrapture him in any way - and yet Tommy couldn’t tear himself away, even if he wanted to.
Sometimes he caught himself having stared at her for the better part of God knows how long, without even remembering when his eyes had strayed from his own work.
He watched her read, then write, then read again, scribble, cross out, and then draw, or stare at an already finished work for several minutes. Soon he grew familiar with the way she'd chew on her bottom lip when lost in thought or how she'd occasionally mouth the words to herself again and again, to a rhythm he couldn't understand while reading.
It wasn't intentional, but soon he could read her emotions just as well as he could read the writing in front of him. He saw her furrowed brows when in doubt, and how her eyes would brighten in joy. Once, he had looked up and seen her shoulders quake as she wrote, her lips trembling.
With the hand that wasn’t holding that shortened pencil, she clutched a handkerchief, occasionally dabbing it under her glassy eyes.
The sight of her tears made his chest tighten.
It irritated him, especially since he hardly knew the girl, having only exchanged a few words with her of which he had understood very little.
Besides, she had no cause to be upset- over what? A few lines of a text written millenniums ago about people that probably never existed experiencing hardships that never took place. That was nothing to cry over.
And yet her tears seemed to burn right through him.
~
Tommy was just finishing up a proposition for new trade routs between Birmingham and the Liverpool docks (something he could have well done from his Digbeth office), when he heard a woman clear her throat.
He glanced up, surprised to see her standing in front of him.
She was wearing a brown skirt, a white blouse and above it a short sleeved woollen jumper making her look like a school girl, especially with her gray folder, her notebook and another book clutched to her chest.
“I’m ever so sorry for disturbing you.”, she said, offering him an apologetic smile. “Mrs. Thorne said I better ask you.”
Out of instinct, Tommy snapped his folder shut, hiding his writing.
“Ask me what?”, he wanted to know, leaning back in his chair.
She smiled another embarrassed smile and shifted on her feet.
“Well, I had a question, you see, and I asked Mrs. Thorne to help me find a book on it, but it’s a very peculiar question and it would take a very long time to find an answer in the biology section, especially since it’s not my forte, but she said you’d know…if anyone did.”
Those were a lot of words to tell him nothing.
Usually this waste of breath, time and energy annoyed but he almost smiled at how she tried to present her proposition, her curiosity clearly overriding her uncertainty.
“And what question would that be, eh?”, he asked.
She bit the inside of her lip before answering.
“Mr. Shelby, you wouldn’t happen to know if horses cried?”
He blinked twice, leaning closer to make sure he had heard correctly.
“If horses what?”, he asked, leaning forward over the old oak wood table.
“If they cry.”, she repeated before approaching his side of the table and setting down her books and files.
“Well, there is this one part - “, she said, flicking through the papers.
“The original is not quite clear. Some translate it as cry as in cry out, he says cry as in weep. This one says mourned.”
As she spoke, she pointed at different phrases from different words.
“It’s all rather upsetting.”, she admitted with a deep, dramatic sigh.
Seriously?, Tommy thought.
When he got upset it was because Arthur was off of his mind on snow, or if John blocked his company moves, if Sabini or Solomons plotted something to bring him down or if Polly was on his back again - and she, apparently, was frustrated because someone wrote something down thousands of years ago and she couldn’t figure out the exact meaning of his words.
Those are problems I’d like to have.
It was such a benign, unimportant detail and yet she was getting all worked up about it.
Enough to look for books, to ask Ada and now to cross the gap come to him.
And he did not want to repel her.
“Horses only cry when they get something in their eye, or if it’s too dry.”, he explained.
She glanced up at him and hummed softly but he could see her mind racing.
Then she returned her gaze to her drawing, which showed the necks and heads of two large stallions.
Her horses were not nearly as well shaped as her humans had been, and still better than any Arthur had ever drawn, maybe in spite or even because of her rough edges.
It’s not your problem, he told himself. It’s not even a fucking problem. It’s people making unnecessary work for themselves.
And yet his hands reached for her drawing.
“They don’t have eyebrows,”, he said, taking the file from her hands and placing it in front of him, covering his own paper work up.
With the other hand he took the pencil from her grip, feeling the fleeting warmth of her touch.
“But if they’re sad or frightened, the inner corners of their eye raise up. Like this.”
The addition was but a few, soft strokes, but even he could see that it changed the expression of the whole creature.
“Huh!”, she gasped, looking from the drawing to him and back again.
In her eyes he could see awe mixed in with a realisation he could not place.
Tommy would have paid a fortune for her thoughts in that moment, and an equal sum never to hear them.
They'd only distract him further.
~
A few days later, Tommy found himself leaving the library at exactly the same time as she did.
It wasn’t a complete accident. In fact it wasn’t an accident at all.
He had finished his own work nearly an hour ago but since he didn’t have anything to rush to, he decided to linger a little, and when the sun began to set, he considered it irresponsible to go without making sure she got to wherever she had to go safely.
So he made sure to bump into her on the stairs on the way down.
She had two bags, a brown leather one that reminded him of the one his school teachers used and another one made of fabric which she wore under her shoulder.
Both looked packed to bursting, poor thing.
“Need a hand?”, he asked.
“Oh that would be very kind, thank you!”, she insisted.
And so Tommy held her leather bag while she rearranged the other bag’s contents, finishing by slipping in her pencil etui in a gap between several books.
“Why do you always use pencil?”, he wanted to know.
“To correct mistakes, of course.”, she said, giving him yet another smile, as she put the bag over her shoulder.
When she reached out to take her other bag, he waved it off and fell in step with her.
Maybe his expression gave it away, or perhaps his silence, but as they continued on their way down, she chose to elaborate.
“Translating isn’t as easy as opening a dictionary, especially with poetry or verse.”, she told him. “You always have to weigh the tone against the literal translation, the lyrical style and of course the context.”
“That sounds very vague.”
She tried to hide her giggle behind her hand, because even if they were on their way out, and two of the last souls in this place, it was still a library.
It was a sweet, careless sound and one Tommy was surprised she offered so willingly.
“If you want certainty, Mr. Shelby, I’d suggest you turn to mathematics. There’s no such thing in languages.”
That made sense, in a way, but he still couldn’t understand why someone would voluntarily take it on if it was so complex.
“So why the drawings?”, he wanted to know.
She lowered her eyes, trying to hide her embarrassment from him, but then she grinned slightly.
“Most times it’s easier to translate words into pictures than into a different language, easier to capture the tone of the whole thing.”
He raised his eyebrow in confusion.
“It helps me get a better grip on the scene.”
To Tommy it just sounded like an infinite pool of unnecessary work.
“Why the Greeks?”, he asked, the sound of her heels echoing in the entrance hall, as they passed the front desk.
He chose to ignore Ada’s questioning glare.
“Why not?”, she asked, before answering her own questions.
“In their writings you can find the birth of our culture. Democratic ideals go back to the Athenians, our medicinal principles to Hippocrates, war strategy to Thukydides and well, literature to Homer.”
She sighed a dreamy sigh as if these long dead dusty old men were a youthful fantasy of hers.
“In a way, this language is the mother tongue of our civilization, well, one of them at least.”
Even though she was providing him a very pretty and passionate proposition, Tommy didn’t buy it.
“Maybe once.”, he argued as they stepped out into the cool evening air, and into the noise of the city. “But it’s not accurate now. Not anymore.”
She looked almost shocked, so much so that Tommy’s mouth went dry.
“But now more than ever, Mr. Shelby!”, she insisted. “Especially the Iliad.”
The fire in her tone betrayed her, and offered him a way out.
“That what you’re working on?”
She nodded.
“What’s it about?”, he asked.
“The last year of the war between the Greeks and Trojans.”
“The one with the horse? And that woman they all wanted?”, Tommy asked.
He had heard about it in France, with some cavalry officers referring to the tunnelers as their own Trojan Horse.
“Well,”, she said, taking a deep breath as if bracing herself.
“That’s the war but that’s not what the Iliad is about.”
“But people have already translated it.”, Tommy remembered. “Why are you doing it all over again? What's the point?
Both her face and her tone softened, making him realise he was on safe ground once more.
“There’s a lot of power in translation, a lot of trust, and because it’s not an exact science, there is no right way of doing it.”
When Tommy only blinked, she licked her lips as she searched for a different way of explaining it.
“There is a theory,”, she began, “that we only recognise what we know, or what we were taught to know. That every person’s view of the world depends on their standing in it, on how they learned to see it. You and I could look at the very same thing and see something quite different, perhaps even contrary.”
She said it lightly, almost carelessly, and yet Tommy felt these words would stay with him for a long time, even if he needed more time to think of them.
“Then of course, it’s the type of story that is often distorted to fit a narrative.”, she added with a shrug.
“And what would that be?”, Tommy wondered.
She took her bag from his hands, holding it in front of her as she looked up to him.
“They tell tales of the soldier and not the man, not the son, brother, father or lover.”
Tommy felt his jaw muscles clench as he stared at her, her young, innocent face, and the kind of eyes that had never had to see hardship except in her stories and novels and long dead poets.
He pitied her for her folly, and at the same time envied her naivety.
“Trust me love,”, he said, his voice dangerously low, “There’s no difference.”
All that melted away to give way to the soldier, a mindless, unfeeling being whose sole purpose was to obey and live, if possible.
A line of thought appeared between her brows as she tilted her head.
“What a curious thing to say.”, she said softly.
~
When he watched her walk away that evening, Tommy Shelby decided he was done with the library and the scholars in it.
There were on a different fucking planet, with enough time to waste on useless pursuits, chasing details of shadows that had never mattered in the first place, least of all now, in the modern age, where war wasn’t a fucking fire place story anymore.
And yet he had been standing in a book shop, flicking through a copy of the work she was working on, only to find a passage where some soldier was saved from a spear by a cloud of perfume or some nonsense - proof, as if he needed any more, that there was no point to any of it.
He bought the summary of several ancient myths, in normal English, all the same, and read the part about her story through that very night.
~
He was done with it, with her - and he was only in the library because he had to talk to Ada. It had nothing to do with her, nothing at all. Otherwise he wouldn’t have come.
It was only on the way back where he passed the desk in the section she had chosen at her workplace.
And something was different, one glance told him that, because she did not have one drawing in front of her, but several.
One showed the general scene but there were smaller ones, like the sketches a painter made before a larger creation.
The first showed the old man’s face, with fallen cheeks and deep furrows of worry on his brow. Large bags grazed his swollen eyes, tears shining between the wrinkles, and his lips seemed to glistened.
But there was a fire in his eyes, that made Tommy turn away, the hair on the back of his head standing.
The second more detailed picture was of a younger man, with hair with strands of different lengths as if someone had hacked at it carelessly.
He was young, and beautiful, with a square jaw, but delicate features - petal lips and large eyes, long lashes and shapely brows.
His features, apart from the strong, and muscly neck, were so delicate, they were almost feminine. His face was stoic, but he could see the tears running down his cheeks, and recognised the pain in his eyes more than he would have liked.
In one picture, he could see the old man and the young man both, huddled together, kneeling in front of a corpse, their hands clasping each others as if they were the last thing they had to hold onto in their grief, the last thing in the world.
She had been so immersed in her writing, she had not reacted to him stepping closer, not even when he came up to stand right behind her, his shadow falling over her papers, but Tommy had been so immersed in the emotion the men in their drawings showed, he had not realised she had begun to watch him.
When he did, he felt his cheeks burn.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”, she said, her voice uncommonly tender. “And I’m relieved. After all, it’s the most important part of the entire epic. Achilles and Príamos crying together.”
The second name would have been entirely foreign to Tommy a week ago, but since he had read the summary, he knew what it meant.
The old man, he could understand, but the young one couldn’t possibly be Achilles.
He looked tired, with slumped shoulders and strained muscles, gaunt, with a haunted look in his eyes which Tommy had seen back in France, in the trenches, a look they had brought home with them.
“Achilles?”, he asked, remembering the description he had read. “But wasn’t he the most ruthless of Greek warriors? Their best soldier?"
She nodded.
“Aristos Achaiōn.”, she confirmed, telling Tommy that he had not made a mistake.
“Does that mean that the corpse is Hector?”
She nodded once more, sighing deeply, her eyes returning to the image.
“The man who killed his comrade in arms? Whom he hunted down for revenge?”
Hunted, killed, and dragged around the city walls in an attempt to mutilate the man in an act of vengeance.
“That’s a very loose translation.”, she said. “I would chose something like 'most beloved' to describe his relation to Patroclus.”
Tommy swallowed hard as he sat down next to her.
Never mind what word she used, the fact stood. That man had killed someone close to him, and he had been out for revenge, which he had gotten, and yet…
“Why is he crying?”, he asked, staring at the fallen enemy. “With him?”
Achilles had no business crying over the man who had killed his closest companion, especially not while holding onto the dead man’s father.
They were enemies. They were meant to fight together, not cry and hold hands.
“Why wouldn’t he?”, she wanted to know, her voice barely above a whisper as she turned to look at him.
Her voice was thick emotion and her own eyes shone. It would have been a lie if Tommy claimed a different reaction. But still…it didn’t make sense. Soldiers didn’t cry, shouldn’t cry, especially not ancient heroes like these, who had weapons, whole strategies named after them, and least of all with their enemies and their fathers.
“Can’t you see?”, she asked gently. “They are the same…Hector and Achilles, Peleus and Príamos. A father weeping because he can never hold his son again, cursed to outlive him and others, a son weeping because he will never again feel his father’s embrace, mourning the price he will pay for his participation in war- and the price he has already paid."
He didn’t want to hear it, not any of it, and he didn’t want to see it either.
She knew nothing of war.
And it wasn’t like it was in the stories. One didn’t weep in front of one’s enemies.
If he had encountered Kaiser Wilhelm in the trenches, he’d have ripped the bastard’s head off with his bare hands if that could end the war, not cry with him over the fallen.
“Warriors don’t cry.”, he hissed through clenched teeth. Under the table, his hand had clenched into a fist, his nails digging so far into his palm he feared they would soon draw blood.
“Why not?”, she asked, tilting her head. Despite everything she had not lost the tenderness in her voice.
“Aren’t soldiers men? Laughing, hoping, praying, crying, fearing like the rest of us? The opposite would be rather worrying.”
Tommy tried to take calming breaths, to focus on something, anything in front of him, but her eyes were too piercing and the image to vivid to allow him any form of distraction, to block out the emotions bubbling up inside him, emotions a soldier should not feel.
Emotions, he had taught himself not to feel because they made him vulnerable and vulnerability, on the battlefield, meant death.
His hand shook as he reached for her blueish-grayish folder, flicking back a few pages to be rid of the image. The papers settled on a peculiar scene.
He knew of Achilles, he had known of him even before he had read that summary.
He was the namesake of battleplans, of strategies, of weapons and ploys, his murderous rage, his hot blooded anger, the havoc he rained down on the Trojans was famous - the highest of soldiers, the ultimate warrior.
She had chosen to give him a broad back and a tall frame, but in the image he saw now, it had crumbled.
It did not show a soldier, not a warrior, not the type of man to butcher dozens, to slay a man out of vengeance and then attempt to mutilate his corpse out of grief born rage.
On that page, Tommy saw nothing but a broken man, with his pain having brought him to his knees at the shores of the raging sea.
But he wasn’t alone. In the middle of the breaking waves, a woman had emerged from the water, standing right in front of him. She was beautiful, in a timeless, otherworldly way, with waist-long dark hair that was as wavy as the sea itself.
He was clutching her thighs, his head buried in her stomach as burning hot tears ran down his cheeks, his face- his whole body, contorted in anger.
There he was, the greatest of warriors, the fiercest of soldiers, on his knees like a frightened child, clinging to his mother's skirts.
He was looking up at her with utter desperation, meeting her eyes, which mirrored his pain, her hands cupping his face, worry, concern, agony all in her face. Tommy could practically feel her hands trembling, but he could also almost feel their warmth.
She had written the words next to the drawing of the two, barely three small lines of texts that blurred in front of Tommy’s eyes as they began to water.
“My child,”, the mother asked her son, “why weepest thou? What sorrow hath come upon thy heart? Speak out; hide it not.”
Tommy took a shuddering breath, trying to blink the tears away. When his hand came up to wipe under his nose, he could feel her eyes, her wide, seeing, knowing eyes.
"So you see now,", she said softly, her hand reaching out to take his arm, "why it's more important than ever."
His other hand covered hers, as he gave a single nod.
End.