“I bet you’ve grown quite attached to such a beautiful colleague.”

Charles did not reply, only staring at him with all the visceral anger he knew he could not allow himself to release. Deep down, he felt smug that they all assumed his attachment to Lane extended past a professional capacity, because they could not have been more wrong to assume they were romantically involved.

“No?” The Englishman raised his eyebrows, visible above the mark that covered his nose and mouth. He seemed to put two and two together, as he suddenly withdrew something glinting from his pocket. There, hanging from his fingers, were both he and Lane’s rings. “My brother assumes this is ‘M’… But she isn’t, is she?”

Charles blinked hard, feeling whiplashed by the reminder of home. Lane’s screams had quietened somewhat as they had taken her a distance, but he could still hear them. He was suddenly struck with sympathy for all the English foxes that the families of his classmates made a hobby out of hunting when he was younger. He always remembered learning later that such canine descendants have a natural bodily reaction to being surrounded by flapping and chaos which made them lash out to kill until every last source of the flapping had stopped. To a human, of course, when the fox then only ate one of the livestock they killed and left the rest, this looked like senseless slaughter. But now, as he was surrounded by constant stimulation, noise, distress and panic with a stomach more empty than it had ever been, Charles understood.  In that moment, had it not been for his duty to protect those in his command first, he too may have lashed out to the point of slaughter, in a desperate, rabid desire for some peace and stillness.

LINKS:  [FF] and [AO3], as per your preference.

Writing these chapters has been hard because I feel as though there is a pretty fine line between writing this kind of evil and making sure the story is realistic and writing something that's too hard to read. It's very difficult to write such violence and abuse when you've never experienced it.

As a result, I have been doing a lot of research. Massive thanks to the Reddit community for all the really insightful, personal threads of soldier's war stories. I also heavily read real people's stories on sexual assault and bullying in the Army and I was shocked to find how common it is. I'm hoping that this story can therefore draw some light to this fact through Molly.

Cheese omelette w/ rosabaya