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Hans wasn’t listening when they dragged him up from one cart and put him on another. He only remembers the transfer at all because they banged his knee as they did it, which jolted him into awareness, but only briefly.
“Careful,” Von Bergow had warned. “We need that one healthy.”
He sits in his tower now and pushes the bruise they left on him. He wants to remember. He needs to, but the whole morning is a smear across his memory, even before he was pulled out of the rubble, the sharpest thing from today just the aches and pains he still feels from a battle half-forgotten.
“Careful,” Von Bergow had said, and Hans didn’t really understand what he was talking about, and he hadn’t cared.
He should have listened. He should have forced himself.
The daylight had been hurting his eyes, eyes that weren’t focusing anyway, so he’d had them closed. His hands were bound, and Henry wasn’t fighting, which meant Hans didn’t have to fight, either. If they had had a chance, Henry would have been fighting, but he wasn’t, so Hans let them move him as docilely as a lamb.
Henry should have fought.
They must have been parted when he got the bruise on his knee. How hadn’t he noticed that Henry didn’t come with him? How long was it before he came to understand he was alone in that cart?
The day was clear, but Hans was in a fog. He does remember asking, “Where’s Henry?” as the cart rattled beneath him, and the only answer was a cackle from the driver, no different from the black birds in the trees above laughing at him. He’d wondered if they smelled death on him, if they were just waiting for their turn to tear into his flesh, the black fluttering above as they followed him.
But that was stupid, because Hans wasn’t dying. His head was just all jumbled up, and the fog slowly lifted itself. Hans was fine.
But Henry…
Somewhere on that journey, he did become aware that Henry was no longer with him. He twisted from side to side, forced his eyes open, but he wasn’t there, not in this cart, and not in any other. Maybe someone told him, or maybe it was just that his cart was the only cart making their journey to wherever, and Henry wasn’t on this. Hans was alone. He was being transported alone.
He felt cold then, even if his mind wouldn’t let him grasp more than the obvious. That next step, that next piece of knowledge—where exactly Henry was, what exactly he was doing, or rather what was being done to him—he couldn’t put words to it. But he felt it, a grave cold penetrating his aching bones and making him shiver. His head ached. He cried. The birds cackled above, and he wished he had his bow. He wished he could kill them.
“I have to go back,” he had said, but of course they didn’t listen to him. Nobody ever listened to him, and they weren’t about to start now when he was bound and imprisoned. “I didn’t say—I didn’t get to say…”
The sky above him looked the same as the sky on any day, and that felt like a personal betrayal. It should look different. The world should look different. And he thought, did it happen already? While he wasn’t paying attention? And he thought, it couldn’t have, because he would know. He would feel it, if it happened. He would know.
By the time he reached Maleshov, because that’s where they brought him, some fortress in the middle of nowhere, he couldn’t breathe. They half dragged him up the steps to his room, his prison, because he couldn’t make his feet work. He still can’t breathe, the ceiling of this tower bearing down on him. He sits at the window and gulps down the night air, and he knows exactly what happened—what he let happen, even if he doesn’t remember it.
Hans is a captive held for ransom in Von Bergow’s current residence, and Henry, if he is still alive—please, God, may he still be alive—is in a dungeon in Trosky, the same dungeon where Hans once volunteered to torture a prisoner.
Hans hadn’t thought his shame over the past weeks of his life could get any deeper, but there it was. He had volunteered to prove himself, and he had made Henry join in and do the dirty work. And if he had reluctantly agreed to torture for Von Bergow, Toth would have no such qualms about it. He could almost see his gleeful face.
He shoves his whole head out the window, so he can at least pretend he is out in the open sky and not in a prison. He tries to remind himself that at least he’s not in a dungeon, like Henry.
He’d rather be in the dungeon with Henry. Then it wouldn’t be his own guilt eating him alive. Then he’d have a chance to at least do something for him. Maybe.
Henry would be good at being tortured, he thinks, feeling a little insane. He’s tough, tougher than Hans. He’d take it and smile and insult them and piss them off. Hans can imagine it, how much stronger Henry would be than anyone in that room. He’d last a long time. Which is good, because once they were done with him, he’d be killed.
A pair of hands grabs him around the waist, and Hans yelps as he’s dragged back into his own prison. The Frenchman pulls him fully into the room, and Hans loses his footing, sprawling to the floor.
“There’s no need to jump, good man,” the Frenchman is saying. “It will all be fine, you’ll see.”
“I wasn’t—”
His voice is weak, and he realizes he has a hand around his own throat, fingers tracing the memory of a noose.
Henry can’t be dead already. He can’t be. Hans would know. He would have felt it.
“I wasn’t trying to jump,” he gets out. “I just…”
He doesn’t know how to finish that sentence. He doesn’t know how to breathe anymore.
“First time as a hostage?” the Frenchman asks companionably. He puts a heavy hand on Hans’s shoulder. “It’s not so bad, you know.” He steers him toward the table. “Good food. Comfortable beds. And now for you, great company! You were pretty dazed when they brought you in. A little disoriented, no? Come, sit here with me. Away from the window.”
The man babbles unimpeded about something or other, which Hans appreciates, because he has no interest in talking back. The words flood over him, accented and inane, and he keeps his eyes on the small patch of night sky he can see from his place at the table.
Was that clenching of his chest it? The pang of sadness that followed? The shuddering breath that caught in his throat? How would he know? How would he really know?
Or was Henry still alive? Was he making them work for it? That would be like him. Or was he feeling the way Hans did as he walked out to those gallows? Except Hans at least knew that Henry was trying to move mountains for him, whereas Hans didn’t do anything for Henry. He left him behind. Didn’t even argue his case as a potential hostage, the ransom Radzig might give.
He’s not dead, Hans decides long after Brabant has talked himself to sleep. He can’t be. Henry still feels real, Hans able to imagine him so perfectly he could be in this room with them, complaining about Brabant’s stories with that skeptical look of his and licking his fingers after eating the chicken Hans didn’t touch and giving him that half-grin and plotting their escape.
Hans can see him in this room, right now, and if he were dead, if his soul were gone from this world and departed for the next, he couldn’t do that, could he? He wouldn’t be able to summon him to mind so perfectly.
He wipes the tears from his face and brings his hands together, but when he whispers a shaky, “Forgive me,” it’s not God he’s praying to.
He should have kicked up a fuss. He should have demanded Henry come with him, he should have…
“Oh, god, forgive me,” he breathes.
He should have… he should have said goodbye.