Happy belated New Year to any followers reading this. This story also moves into a new year: 1944. It’s been a blast to write and, if there’s anyone out there reading it, a blast to share it with you. Chapter 14 on AO3 or ff.net.
Excerpt below the incredible piece created for this story by @eclecticmuses​
The worse things get, the more benign his letters to Jemma are. He leaves out anything about assaults and artillery, but tells her about the Indian troops he’d patrolled with and the Christmas he’d shared eating cold rations with the Anzacs. His “death letter”, as Hunter calls it, remains unsent.Â
Fitz calculates that in the last one-hundred days of combat, they have had six real days rest. Even then nobody had a real rest. Just a couple of days when they knew straight away they were going back to the line. Fitz’s mind never registered it as a rest. They’re weary and fed up. The handful of veterans that had fought across North Africa joke morbidly about missing the sand to maintain their sanity. He rereads Jemma’s letters every day and spends most of his free time gazing at her photograph, trying to assure himself that she’ll still want him if he should somehow return from this. Â
They’re passing through another deserted mountain hamlet when he looks at himself in the mirror for the first time in, what feels like, months. He stares at his reflection in the broken piece of glass, wondering if she’d even recognize him. Aside from the patchy beard he’d told her about months ago, his face is gaunt with dark circles beneath his eyes. There’s a scar above his left eye where he’d caught a fragment of treeburst months ago and his wiry hair is as long and unkempt as it’s ever been. He holds his hands out next and tries to tell himself it’s the stress and lack of sleep that is making both hands shake. Four months of dirt and blood are trapped beneath his fingernails and the skin has been torn from the knuckles on three of his fingers from the bouldering they’d had to do on yesterday’s patrol. He thinks about what’s beneath his uniform then, the countless cuts and bruises, and curses himself for even daring to imagine a scenario where Jemma would see him without it on. He’d survived this long by living minute-to-minute, not getting lost in dreams about the future. He wouldn’t start now.
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