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tenaciousbouquetearthquake · 1 month

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Shall I tell you how many Nazis I killed today?, pt2

Read it on ao3 / Check out the story’s masterlist

Anders *may* have been faking injuries to come and see you in the infirmary, but this time he's actually been shot. In the leg. By Freddy.

Humor, angst, mentions of violence, and Anders Lassen backstory. Also, Anders has a dirty mind and is a bit of a lovable asshole.

Anders Lassen is bored . Bored, bored, bored , bored , bored .

Anders is so bored that he's been silently writing a novel in his head for the last two days. A thriller, of course, about a man and a bear fighting to the death in the wilderness in Denmark. It's a psychological thriller, a great story about man against nature, about the animal within the man, and about a man facing down his demons.

There's also a woman.

A beautiful woman. Strong, smart, kind, intelligent, and way too good for the hero of the story, but like all great love stories, she’ll decide to settle down with him in the end because he can fight off a bear with his bare hands, and also because Anders is writing the story and the woman in this tale of his looks remarkably like you. Although she's much happier to see her hero than you are to see him as you scowl down at him from his bedside.

Your arms are crossed over your chest in a delightful move that pushes your breasts out just enough to catch his eye and Anders grins at the sight at it, mentally returning to the last time he had you—and, by extension, them —all to himself. Now that , he thinks, was a damn good night, and a far better story than the novel he’s been writing in his head.

“What the hell are you doing here?” You're scowling, your mouth pinched in that particular way that always gives Anders a little thrill when he sees it. He loves it when you're angry, loves it when you're scowling, loves it when you're damn near ready to murder him for glaring at the other patients in the room who are eyeing the pretty medic like the last time he showed up here. You could make that look at him all day long and Anders would still love it.

Of course, he'd also be making a mental list of all the ways he could wipe that scowl from your face and replace it with something a little more inviting. An endeavor, he mentally adds, that would also be far more entertaining during this visit than his half-written novel that currently sees his alter ego about to be mauled by a great mama bear.

“Who, me?” Anders asks, gesturing toward himself as he looks up at you, thoroughly amused by the look of annoyance on your face. “I just came to visit my favorite medic. It's been a while since we’ve seen each other, you know, and I can't stop thinking about that time you threatened to cut my balls off with my own knife.” He watches your face go a little red, cheeks warning with embarrassment at the memory. “You remember the time, don't yo–”

“ Yes ,” you hiss, and Anders grins widely again, propping his hands behind his head to lean against them in a relaxed pose. You were a nurse then, too, he remembers. Right after he came to England. Right after Eric was killed. When Anders didn't know what he was going to do and didn't have any other direction or purpose than killing as many Nazis as possible. Not that that detail has changed, of course, but somewhere along the way, that plan came to involve you, and then you were removed from the team on a temporary assignment, and ever since Anders just keeps ending up in the infirmary. One injury after another.

What an awful string of bad luck.

“You know,” Anders drawls, making a show out of eyeing you up and down and even wiggling his eyebrows at the sight of you. “I like this outfit, but I don't think it suits you.”

You give him a look that says exactly how unimpressed you are with that statement, but for Anders, every look you give him just makes you more enticing. More exciting. More irresistible. Really, the sight of you angry or annoyed with him is just a big turn on for him and he can’t help wanting more. Needing more. To numb the pain of existence with the heady balm of your body and soul. “I don’t believe I asked for your opinion on my uniform, Lassen .”

His grin doesn’t falter for even a second, although he does have a small internal debate about whether the sound of you saying his last name with such frustration is more arousing than when you were moaning it that first night you were together. “Ja, you look much better wearing my shirt and coat,” he says, watching your cheeks turn bright red as you glance around the infirmary quickly, wondering how many people can hear him. It’s not many—or there aren’t many who would dare to acknowledge it, anyway. Anders has all the men in this tent thoroughly terrified. That happens when a six foot plus tall bear of a man with a reputation for blood lust glares at you from across the room. Somehow, people decide to find other things to be interested in. “But I like you best wearing nothing at all.” The way you look at him with such absolute fury then, the color in your face and creeping down your neck, the narrowing of your eyes.

Has any woman ever looked as sexy as you are, glaring at him like that?

That’s when you decide that you’ve had enough of this and Anders, well, Anders can’t help but stare at you as you close the distance between yourself and his bed, picking up his chart to look at it. “So,” you start primly, apparently having decided that you’re not going to let him bother you anymore—something Anders won’t stand for at all. “What the fuck is wrong with you today?”

Anders pulls his hands from behind his head and affects his most sullen, pained look. “Gunshot wound, Nurse. It hurts terribly. Perhaps,” he drawls, looking up at you through his eyelashes, “you can do something for the pain?”

He watches you swallow, the subtle movement of muscles in your throat and neck, the way you’re trying hard not to show that he’s bothering you. He thinks that he’d like to kiss you there next time, to pay special attention to that particular spot and to hear you moan his name when he leaves small, sucking kisses there. He’d like to see how your neck looks all marked up by him, to see you physically claimed by him.

He thinks about that a lot.

“You shot yourself in the leg?” You ask dryly, letting your hand with the clipboard fall against your leg with a quiet thud as you look at him with complete exasperation, and strangely, Anders is quite in love with that look, too.

“Ja,” Anders says, feigning embarrassment—as if he were capable of such a feeling. “Ja, it was terrible. We were fighting Nazis. There was blood. My finger slipped on the trigger.” He deliberately leaves out any more details, looking down at his wounded leg and shaking his head. He finds that people tend to believe this story more if he seems as though he’s too embarrassed to tell them everything . “And now, I’m stuck in the infirmary until I’m well enough to murder people again.”

There’s a moment when you’re silent and just gazing down at Anders, and he’s close, so very close, to looking up at you again. Just to see your face. Whether you believe him (you probably won’t). Whether you care (he hopes you do). Whether you’re worried about him (god, please let you be concerned for his well-being). Whether you’re overanalyzing this situation and he needs to run damage control (he’ll probably have to do this anyway, but it’s more fun when he gets to do it with you). Whether you’re anywhere close to figuring out what actually happened (Freddy did it—it really was an accident…probably…but maybe Anders should stop coming onto him and otherwise fucking with his head for a while?).

“Oh, come on,” you practically snap, gesturing toward his leg with your free hand. “You can’t seriously expect me to believe that? What, you couldn’t come up with a better story this time? You weren’t fighting off a bear in the wilderness somewhere and he took a bite out of you?”

Anders perks up like nothing else now, literally shoving himself up in the bed, purposely putting enough extra weight on his arms to make his muscles bulge and—he notes with satisfaction—draw your eyes there. “You want me to fight off a bear?” There’s real interest in his voice, real excitement. He’ll fight a bear for you. He’ll fight a hundred bears for you. He’ll fight an entire bear army as they march through Denmark in the dead of winter with no shoes on his feet because that’s the only handicap that will make it a fair fight for the bears, if it impresses you. God, you’re even more attractive now than you’ve ever been before. “I can do this for you. Do they have any bears here in England?”

Your eyes only faintly pull away from his arms, from the sheer bulk of them, to his face, and he can see the second the annoyance with him slips back into place. Or, at least, the second you try to be annoyed with him again. It doesn’t quite take this time, not completely. “That’s not the point,” you respond, and Anders notes that you don’t really answer the question about whether he should fight a bear for you. He wonders briefly how he can arrange your next meeting so it involves bears. Maybe he can find one and let it loose in the infirmary? “Last time you were here, you said you broke your foot and could barely walk on it, and it needed immediate medical attention or you wouldn’t be able to keep working with Gus.”

“Ja,” Anders says, sighing as he remembers. He’d stubbed his toe on a rock while he was helping to train some new recruits for Gus. The pain had been excruciating. It had clearly required medical attention. From you. “The mission, it was a dangerous one. I was lucky to come back alive.”

Your eyes narrow at him, but Anders can see that hint of a smile near your eyes, the way they crinkle and sparkle at him. “And the time before that, you said you’d taken a hit to the side and had been gravely injured and needed to be examined.”

“ Oof ,” Anders makes a dramatic noise of pain. They’d helped liberate a community of people on the Nazi controlled Channel Islands. A child ran up to him in excitement and hugged him too hard in thanks. He’d barely been able to breathe the whole trip home. Obviously, he needed to be examined. He could’ve died. “The pain,” he says, clutching a hand to his side. “It was unbearable. If you hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would have survived.”

Your mouth is still pinched in that delightful way Anders likes, your gaze just as sharp. But your lips are twitching. He can see it—he’s getting to you. “And the time before that,” you say, tucking the clipboard back into its customary spot at the end of his bed. Anders watches you, sensing that you’re about to do something from the way you’re moving. “You had a terrible pain in your chest and thought you were having a heart attack and needed emergency medical attention.”

Anders’s meaty palm immediately goes to his chest, splayed over his head, as he gives you a pained look. “My heart,” he says, closing his eyes in a dramatic expression. “It was so frightening. I didn’t know if I would survive.” He looks up at you through those glasses he wears. “Luckily, you were there to make it better or I might not be here today.” He ate one too many bowls of a really spicy Greek dish at dinner. It felt like his chest was going to explode. The only remedy he could think of was to come and see you.

You’re trying to be subtle, to be stealthy in how you move. Anders can see it. Anders has a pretty good idea of what you’re about to do. He’s a hunter, after all—half of his job is to know how animals and people think—and as much as he adores you, he can read you like a book. He can see the way you inch forward, the way you lean in just a little over his leg. He knows exactly what you’re about to do.

He also knows the pay off afterward is going to be worth a little pain. Or a lot of pain. Mentally, he prepares himself.

“Of course, I was,” you say sweetly, enjoying Anders’s game as much as you try to pretend otherwise. Anders can tell this, too. “I am a trained nurse and a medic, after all. My job is to be here for everyone who comes in with an injury.” Anders is scowling at the implication in your words that he's not special when you come down hard on his injured leg, the weight of your body pressing down straight on the wound that he knows you were expecting to be fake. At this point, most of the intake people don't really ask him too many questions—he just grumbles at them in that big, bearish way of his, and they give him a bed and track you down to figure out what the hell is wrong with him. So, it really shouldn't be so satisfying when his body jumps in the bed at the pain that shoots up his leg or he growls and lets off a string of words in Danish that his mother most certainly would not have approved of.

But then you're yelling, too, and you’re moving back and forth between his leg and his face with a look of absolute horror and concern, and it is satisfying. It's so fucking satisfying that Anders thinks it's worth every second of pain. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I'm sorry,” you’re saying frantically, uncertain what to do or where to start because you're not usually the person who causes pain. You're usually the person who makes it better. This must be so unsettling for you.

Anders obviously has to take advantage of it.

When the screaming calms down and you’re still distraught enough to not look too closely at him, he leans back in the bed and looks pained. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he says in a faux attempt to soothe you, even as he appears to be in agony. “It’s only a little pain. Just the whole leg. It’s not on purpose.”

“It’s not okay,” you argue, looking between Anders’s face and his leg. You gently readjust the bed around it, then the blankets, looking like you’re nearly in tears as you glance back up at him. “You’re actually hurt and I just made it worse. I’m supposed to be a nurse, not a torturer. Your poor leg. Are you okay? What can I do?”

“Ja, ja. It’s fine. I’m fine,” Anders says, pretending to be fighting back a groan of pain as you shuffle to try and make him feel better. You’re leaning forward to help him adjust himself comfortably at the head of the bed, moving his pillows for him, moving the blankets. Anything you can think of. Leaning over just enough that Anders, blessed, innocent soul that he is, can just peek down the top of your dress to those breasts that he’s oh so fond of.

It takes an awful lot of effort not to grin as he ogles them.

“No, it’s not fine. It’s not fine at all,” you insist, although Anders is actually only half listening at this point. “I’ve been so stressed with everything happening here, and we’re constantly busy, and I just assumed that you were being a pain in the a— what are you doing ?”

The question takes a few seconds to register, Anders is so caught up in the sight of your cleavage and all the other wonderful parts of your body nearby. When it finally does, he’s equally as slow to respond, his eyes only gradually moving upward, dragging casually over the other parts of you he can see—the perfection of your collarbone, the curves of your neck, that place just near your ear where he kissed you one time and discovered that you’re extremely sensitive and ticklish there. When he finally meets your eyes, he can’t even affect a look of anything approaching innocence, instead giving you a shameless grin. “Have I ever told you, min elskede,” he says, lowering his voice to something husky and clearly meant for seduction, “what a lovely figure you have?”

Your jaw drops open and you just stare at him for a long, long moment, as if your brain can’t quite compute what’s actually happening. That Anders Lassen is not only wounded ( actually fucking wounded , for once), but that he’s here and apparently determined to be a pain in your ass. Which, to be fair, is not an area that Anders is particularly interested in.

Unless you’re into that sort of thing, of course. Or you’d like to be in pain.

Anders is really quite flexible when it comes to the interests of his sexual partners, if he’s completely honest. And his choice in partners, in general. He’s not coming onto Freddy just to fuck with his head.

Well…not completely, anyway.

Long enough time passes that Anders is actually wondering if you’re okay. He’s about to say something when your mouth closes abruptly and you pull back, leveling one more glare at him before you turn to leave.

“Oi, min elskede,” Anders calls out to you. “We were just having a lovely moment. Where are you going?”

You pause midstep, stand there long enough to get control of your temper, and turn back to glare at him with the most beautiful, most delectable look of absolute irritation that he’s ever seen in his entire life. “ To get your knife and make good on my threat from before .”

Anders’s grin is so wide as you leave that his face actually hurts, but it’s a good pain.

The problem is that you don’t come back for the rest of the day or, more importantly, after dark. It’s not that Anders is afraid of the dark. He left behind those kinds of childhood fears a long time ago. There wasn’t really room for them in the space of his childhood, filled as it was with both the luxuries of extreme wealth and the hardships of choosing a life as a hunter. As a boy, he often spent his days attempting to appease his mother by acting like a gentleman and attending his school lessons, only to sneak out after dark and venture far enough from the family estate that he could get away with all sorts of trouble. Usually, he’d find somewhere quiet enough and with enough natural light to be able to practice his archery for a few extra hours. Sometimes, he’d run into a wild animal and nearly get eaten or mauled but manage to escape with his skin intact and his parents never the wiser. In the years that existed somewhere between boyhood and manhood, before Anders eventually wandered away from the fineries of the estate to a harder, more rugged life, his nightly adventures began to involve the opposite sex—or the occasional boyhood friend who shared a curiosity and attraction that they were willing to explore with him.

Anders Lassen is not the type of man to be afraid of the dark. Not then and not now.

But he is afraid of his dreams, as much as he doesn’t want to admit it, even to himself. In his dreams, he goes back to that place . To the dark room, where shadows dominate every corner. To the scent of vomit that’s been sitting, the air acrid and sour. Anders might have vomited, too, except that he didn’t have anything left in his stomach to throw up—not after he’d killed the guards outside this place, taken his first human lives. His throat still burned from when he’d doubled over and emptied his stomach right afterward, his hands thick with their blood as it dripped from the blade of his knife.

It’s always somehow too big and too small a room in his dreams. It feels cramped and claustrophobic, but the path to the center of the room is endless, stretched before him in a distorted vision of violence and its aftermath. When he gets here, Eric is still somehow alive, even though his heart is missing. He’s strung up by his hands, his face battered and bloody, his body broken and bruised, his heart cut out, but he’s still alive.

Eric looks up from where he’s hanging and sees Anders, his beloved older brother who always protected him as a body, standing there. He looks at Anders in accusation.

“ You’re too late . See what they did to me? ”

Anders wakes with a start. His heart is pounding, palms sweaty, hands clenched so tightly that his nails are cutting skin. It’s a few breaths before he even realizes that he’s not in that room anymore, that this place is bright and sunny and sterile, and that it reeks of rubbing alcohol and scrambled eggs. His eyes are wide open before his brain has time to process that the sudden light is too much for them and he winces and clenches them closed again, blinking them open slowly to adjust to the morning light that filters in through the window. It gives him time for his heart to stop pounding, to catch his breath and bring himself under control before you come into view.

“You’re running a fever.” You frown as you gaze down at him, your hair framing your face in that way that catches the highlights of the sun and lets rays fall gently over your face. It's almost angelic, and in the nightmare rattled mind of Anders Lassen, the effect is even more powerful. In that moment, you're the ray of light, the angel of mercy and goodness, the ultimate salvation. “How do you feel?”

Anders take a deep breath, then another. One more. He quietly tells himself to push past it, to leave the dark behind and walk into the light, into you. Somehow, though, he never takes that final step. A part of Anders Lassen remains in the dark, in the shadows and nightmares. A part of Anders Lassen really doesn't believe he can ever come back, if he was ever fully there at all. “Like I could fight a bear,” Anders replies, but he can feel that something is off.

Like looking at a painting that's been hung on a wall and you know that it's not straight, but it looks perfect from where you're standing.

Anders tries to pick up a detail to focus in on, something to draw his mind back to the present and away from the things he doesn't want to think about. The feeling of your hand on his forehead, a subtle weight he didn't notice at first but that now feels like it's always been there and like it should always be there. The flecks of green and gray in your eyes when the light catches them as you lean forward, odd strands of hair catching in your eyelashes when you move to examine him from a new angle.

Your hair is longer now than it usually is. He wonders if it's still as soft. His fingers flex on instinct at the thought, muscle memory taking over, and if he didn't feel so tired, and if you didn't look too perfect to touch, he'd indulge his senses in the feel of your hair. And your skin. He wants to touch your lips, tinted lightly with whatever balm you’ve managed to find. He wishes he had a pencil and some paper so he could sketch you while he’s here, cataloging all the details of you that he doesn't want to forget as he recognizes them.

Instead, Anders lets you examine him with the grace of someone who’s examined far too many soldiers. “You're burning up,” you say, moving methodically as you take his temperature from his forehead with the back of your hand, then feel his chest. It's a testament to how not good Anders is feeling that he doesn't make some smartass about it. He doesn't even try to grab your hand and steal a kiss on the inside of your wrist, right over the delicate veins there. “How's your leg?” He feels you lift the blanket to examine it, the bandage being unwrapped as he hums and only half follows your movements with his eyes.

“Still there.” Anders snorts. It’s not his best line, but it’s the best he can come up with, given the circumstances. Besides, he can’t think past how sticky he feels in the bed and the droplets of sweat on his forehead and the feeling of cool air against his burning leg. It’s almost too much until he feels your fingers gently above the gunshot wound, the same featherlight touch that always seems to bring him back from whatever dark hole he finds himself in. He almost thinks he imagined it when he sees you move to look at him, both of your hands in view, but Anders doesn’t waste any time on self-doubt. He’d know your touch anywhere.

“The infection is getting worse.” You’re trying not to sound worried. Anders can hear it. “I need to get a doctor. I’m going to be right back.”

He tries to protest—he really does. But your hand feels cool against his forehead and his cheek when you caress him there briefly before you disappear from his view, and he’s too lost in the sensation to argue. It feels like an age before you come back, but as he smacks his lips and notices how dry his mouth is, Anders realizes he’s losing track of time. It’s disorienting, this lack of control, the feeling of drifting in and out, as if he’s back on the Maid Honor, that night you spent above deck, and he’s feeling the boat rocking back and forth, but he wants to reach out for you and can’t quite make it.

“Min kærlighed.” The words are a whisper, a sigh into empty air. “Min kærlighed.” He remembers an old saying in Danish, something he heard his uncle say once when he was a young boy. The memory is disjointed, the words seeming to come out of nowhere, drifting through his mind the same way the Maid Honor was drifting in the sea. He’d repeated them, some of the very first words he spoke, tasting the sk sound of some of the words on his tongue, testing his grasp for a new form of communication.

His father and his uncle had laughed when they heard him. A very young Anders had laughed, as well, delighted to have caused such good humor.

His mother, however, had not been pleased—gentlemen didn’t say such things.

“Min kærlighed.” He taught the phrase to Eric once. Anders was twelve and Eric was—how old was he? Anders had only recently discovered the full meaning of the saying, something bawdy and irreverent. He couldn’t wait to teach it to his younger brother, his fellow conspirator in whatever trouble Anders was able to get into. True to form, his mother had not been impressed…but his father and uncle had laughed themselves into tears.

Anders can still remember the look his mother had given his father when she’d caught them laughing. It reminds him of the way you look at him when he manages to really piss you off.

“Min kærlighed.”

“ Shhhhh .” The feeling of your hand on his forehead is heaven. The cool, wet cloth you place there afterward is even better. “I’m right here.” You’re holding his hand. You’re touching his face. You caress his cheek gently with your knuckles, smooth back his short bangs from his face, trace a line from his forehead down the bridge of his nose.

He used to do that with Pippin, his childhood dog. A small, ratty thing. He wasn’t supposed to keep her. She wasn’t exactly hunting dog material, more like a ratter, and the Lassens didn’t really keep dogs as pets, anyway. They were there to help with the hunt. But Anders didn’t care—he snuck the dog into his room and by the time his parents and the servants in the house realized he’d taken her in, he was too attached to the little ball of fur. His parents didn’t have the heart to take her away from him.

“Min kærlighed.”

The comparison amuses him. Is that what it’s come to—Anders Lassen, a dog? A mere animal of a man? He supposes it’s an appropriate description. The Nazis and even most of the men he’s met would agree with it.

“Min kærlighed.”

You scowled at him the first time he called you that. It was just after you met, back when you didn’t really trust him or anyone else. You were newly qualified as a medic. Anders was newly arrived in England and had volunteered to help rid the world of Nazis. “ I don’t speak Danish ,” you’d snapped. “ But I’d appreciate it if you’d call me by my actual fucking name , thank you. ”

No one respected a female medic—no one wanted you in the field or trusted you to have their backs. It was actually the nicest thing any of the men had called you, although you didn’t trust that when he told you so.

“ Min kærlighed .”

Pippin died. It was Anders’s fault. He’d taken her with him on one of his late night adventures. They ran into a wolf. Anders froze, the only time it’s ever happened in his entire life. Pippin stepped in, charged the wolf, tried to protect him.

Is this how he dies? But who looks after his family, if he does? Who looks after you?

“ It’s okay .” You sound so far away. “ I’m right here. ”

Eventually, you asked him what all the things he called you meant.

Min kærlighed. Min Skat. Elskede. Min blomst. Smukke. Yndling.

You were both in bed. It was a rare occasion when you’d been able to get away, disappearing into a hotel room and not coming out for an entire weekend. He was stroking his fingers up and down your arm, your lips pressed to his chest in a kiss—something soft, reverent. Chaste. He could have told you the truth, but somehow giving you the words in English simultaneously made it too real and too unreal. It would mean admitting an emotion that he was determined not to experience. It would lose some of its magic in the translation.

“Ugly fish,” he’d declared after a long moment of silence. He felt you freeze against his side, felt the weight of your glare on him.

“Ugly. Fish.” You bit out the words.

He hummed the affirmative.

“All this time,” you started, placing an emphasis on every syllable, “all those names, and they all translate to ‘ugly fish’?”

“Ja,” he’d said on a heavy sigh, as if the subject were a burden to have to explain to you. “Ugly salmon. Ugly trout. Ugly tuna.”

“ Ugly tuna? ”

You’d scowled at him for days. Anders had loved every second of it, knowing without needing to ask that you weren’t really mad at him. You knew he was lying.

He knew that you knew he was lying.

It was a game and Anders Lassen so loves to play.

“ You can’t just stay by his bedside the whole time. You have other patients. ”

“ And you have other nurses. ”

“ May I remind you that you’re only here because you have a job to do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near his hospital. ”

“ You can remind me all you like. It won’t make a difference . I’m not moving from this bedside. ”

Who are you arguing with?

Anders dreams about Appleyard. It’s the day of the mission to rescue him from the German garrison. Anders is fighting his way up the stairs, down the corridor. He charges into the room where they’re keeping him, killing one of the Nazis through sheer, brute force. But it’s all in vain. They got here too late. Appleyard is already dead. There’s no battery attached to his nipples, just Appleyard hanging from the chains around his wrists, his chest carved open, his heart cut out.

Just like Eric.

In a fury, Anders attacks the remaining Nazis. He kills them. He cuts out a heart. He tries to put in Appleyard’s chest, hands frantic and slippery with blood as he tries to replace the life that they stole, to save Appleyard from his brother’s fate.

It doesn’t work.

“ You have to hold on, Anders.”

“ I won’t forgive you if you leave me like this .”

“ I can’t lose anyone else. Please. ”

He dreams again, but this time, it’s you. He’s running through the corridor. He can hear you in that room, that place that’s somehow where Eric died and where Appleyard was kept, dark and light at the same time, waiting for him at the end of that hallway that seems to stretch on forever. You’re screaming—dear god, you’re screaming, your lungs emptying of air as the sound claws its way through the hall toward him. You’re screaming his name.

Anders…Anders, help me!

He can’t reach the door. Why is the door so far away? Why aren’t his legs working right? He’s faster than this. You’re screaming and he can’t reach you.

“ Anders, please .”

Anders, please!

He’s nearly there—he’s nearly there. He can make it. He can make it.

“ Anders… ”

Anders!

Anders doesn’t reach the door in time. He never reaches the door in time. Not in any of his dreams. He never saves anyone, especially the people he cares about most. Anders fails in the only task that matters. He was built to protect.

But all he does is kill.

Death will be a blessing, a sweet release. He’ll see Eric again. He can apologize for not getting to him in time. He’ll apologize for not saving Appleyard. He’ll apologize for not protecting you. He can sleep. God, he can sleep without any more nightmares or seeing the eyes of the men he’s killed staring up at him, their blood on his hands, the weight of their murders pressing down on him. He wants to die.

He wants to die.

…he wants to die…

“ I need you .”

The world comes back into focus in minute details, one after the other. The ticking of a clock, the sound steady and constant like the metronome his music teacher used to use. The warmth of sunlight on his face. The feeling of linen scratching against his bare arms, sheets threadbare from too many washes. The sound of someone breathing near him, the quiet exhales like the air against his face in the seconds after releasing an arrow, the string of his bow reverberating near his cheek. The scent of something feminine—not soft or gentle, but crisp like the morning chill that bites against the skin of his face in the autumn back in Denmark. A weight against his arm, heavy like a body, the way his own body feels heavy in the bed as he slowly becomes aware of each separate extremity.

His toes wiggling, the one that was broken a few weeks ago still popping at the joint. The throbbing in his leg, the wound deep and fleshy where Freddy accidentally shot him. The base of his spine, stiff from staying too still for too long in a bed that’s too hard on his back. His heart beating a steady rhythm, as calm now as when he’s hunting elk, a quiet beat beat beat in his ears. The shoulder that’s been sore the last week after using it as a battering ram against a Gestapo agent. The twitching of his fingers, first one, then another, curving incrementally without Anders consciously thinking about the movement.

You. You, like an extension of his body, the beating of your heart against him from where you’ve positioned yourself over him to sleep like a blanket. Your hair against his neck, one arm draped over him in possession, your lips as they move in sleep and form soundless words that Anders will think about later and wish desperately that he had some way to know what you were saying. The tension in your arm, even in your sleep, holding onto his body like a lifeline, as if you could drag him back from whatever darkness was drawing him in, as if you could protect him— you could protect him , the Danish Hammer, a motherfucking Viking, a force of nature, who’s wrestled down bears with his bare hands.

His head feels fuzzy, too tired to concentrate and too stubborn not to try, turning slowly to look down at you and letting the weight of his head gradually droop in his pillow so that it settles naturally into a position where he can see you without effort.

Your eyes move behind closed eyelids as you dream.

What are you dreaming about?

Anders wants to touch you, to pull you closer against him and cradle your body against his, but he can’t bring himself to disturb you. Not when you’re holding onto him like that. He just stares at you and watches you sleep until you begin to wake up, as if you can sense that he’s awake and his attention is entirely on you. Everything about you is light and silken—the color in your face from sleep, the light catching in the highlights of your hair, the curves of your lips, your expression relaxed. Everything about you is alive.

Everything about you makes him want to be alive. Everything about you makes him wish that the world was a very different place and that he was a better man.

“Hello,” you say, breaking the silence, your voice barely audible. It sounds like the lightest note on the violin his sister plays, the one she refused to give up when his family left for England, the first hints of sound when bow meets string.

“Du er så smuk.” His mother would be amused if she could see this. She’d be sizing you up and planning a wedding and picking out names for her grandchildren.

You blink away sleep and practically climb your way up his body, not satisfied with how close you already were to him. A hand settles on his shoulder, your arm on his chest, your face next to his, your body claiming him completely, and distantly Anders thinks that he can’t remember the last time he was claimed by a lover. “You know I still don’t speak Danish.”

“Ja.” A large part of Anders is selfish and hopes that you never do. That these truths he can’t say any other way will never ever be revealed. “Ord kan ikke beskrive min kærlighed til dig. ”

You swallow, your throat bobbing. You’re not going to ask what he’s saying. Whatever’s transpired since the last time he spoke to you consciously, neither of you is ready to deal with it. “Maybe you’ll teach me one day,” you whisper. “Once we get back.”

Anders couldn’t make himself look away now if he tried. “Get back?”

You nod, careful about putting too much pressure against his body. “I’ve been reassigned back to Gus’s team as the medic. Once you’re ready to leave, we’ll be going back together.”

Anders smiles as the two of you settle back into a comfortable silence.

Fucking finally, he thinks. He was running out of ways to pretend to hurt himself.

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