‹ Prequel: Flucht
Status: 2.0.
Tommy Guns
eins
“Scheisse!”
Ruedi’s curse echoed loudly around the empty confines of the medical tent, the cacophony of medical equipment falling to the floor the only accompaniment to his mournful lament. As the steel bowl spun on its axis, coming to rest underneath the nearest bed and sending instruments to all corners of the room, Ruedi silently thanked god that he was the only man left to clean up the mess that had been left by the nearby battle the evening previous. Even if somebody had been around, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – knocking the entire surgical tray off of the cart it was precariously perched on wasn’t his intention, and anybody with fingers as cold as his would understand the slip of an icy palm sending the entire thing crashing to the ground alongside the remains of Ruedi’s sanity.
It wasn’t as if Ruedi was insane anyway; quite the contrary. He – according to the Wehrmacht – was perfectly sane and deemed ready for the onslaught of war by the medical professionals who cleared him for work each year. So no, he wasn’t crazy, nor was he losing his sanity; he was simply sleep-deprived and malnourished, much like every other soldier that he had ever met. He even had an excuse for his ghostly complexion and bloodstained fingernails. Every night he watched as soldier after officer after unidentifiable corpse was shipped through the flaps of the medical tent, and he spent every single waking moment working in vain with the substandard supplies gifted to them by the government. He would work for hours without breaks, trying to save life after wretched life with hardly any glimpse at victory to break up the bloodshed. Every day, he would grow tired of watching the light fade from the eyes of men whom simply refused to hang on, men whom passed onto the other side after sobbing for their mothers, daughters, sons and wives in a startling contrast to the might they had showed whilst parading around the battlefield. Instead of leaving behind a legacy they could be proud of, they were reduced to nothing more than numbers, their war-torn bodies buried hastily in the fields just outside camp with nothing other than a roughly-made wooden cross as identification.
It was selfish, really, for men to die on his tables. With every day that passed, Ruedi’s mortality rates were growing higher, swelling in size alongside the desire of the German people to beat the Allies. They had been fighting well, pushing German forces back time and time again and leaving more bloodshed in their wake with every step they took towards Berlin, bloodshed that found its way back to Ruedi and his slapdash, poorly-equipped team of medics who could do nothing more than to make the lives of the injured as comfortable as possible within their final hours.
Cursing again, this time much more silently, Ruedi dropped to his knees and started to pick up the instruments. Some were spared damage, such as the dulled metal of the scalpel to his right, but much of the disposable equipment was ruined. A ball of gauze managed to roll its way into a pool of stagnant blood a few centimetres to his left. Muttering under his breath, Ruedi made a mental note to find out whatever inept newbie had supposedly cleaned up after the steady flow of injuries subsided earlier that evening as he dropped to his back and slowly worked his way under a gurney in an attempt to retrieve the bottle of saline solution that had miraculously survived the drop.
“It’s cold as balls out there.”
Were he anywhere else, he may have been happy to hear another person’s voice, but after dealing with dead bodies for hours, the shock of a human voice caused Ruedi to jump violently upwards. As his body jerked forward in an attempt to see the owner of the voice, his forehead connected with the metal underside of the gurney with a dull thwack and, for the third time in the space of five minutes, Ruedi found himself swearing aloud. As a sharp, spreading pain began to migrate across his forehead, Ruedi found himself noting grimly that it was nothing short of a minor miracle that his mother was not around to see the foul-mouthed vagrant her only son had become.
Ruedi glared at the hand that had appeared in front of his face. “Jesus, Felix, don’t you ever knock?”
Hand still outstretched and bemused grin on his face, Felix Müller looked wordlessly at the closed tent flaps behind him before looking back at Ruedi. The younger man rolled his eyes, accepting the help up from the ground. As he stood to his full height – a measly five-foot-nine-inches, something he inherited from his mother – he felt his head begin to spin. Groaning loudly, he worked his way backwards until the edge of the gurney hit his legs, sitting down and placing his head in his hands.
“Okay, knocking on a tent. Not my best moment.”
Ruedi winced as he sat upright again, silently making a note never to climb under anything shorter than him again. “Seriously, though, you can’t just go around unannounced like that. It’s shit like that that’ll get your brains blown across a wall one day.”
“I’ll survive, I’m sure,” Felix replied curtly, placing a finger under Ruedi’s chin and lifting his head up slightly. “Let me see, love. For once, I can play doctor.”
Reluctantly, Ruedi allowed Felix to inspect his forehead. As Felix’s fingertips pressed against the area where his forehead connected with the gurney, Ruedi hissed involuntarily. He could almost hear the teasing he would endure for however long the bruising decided to hang around. In fact, he knew that he would spend the next few days being the butt of every joke in the canteen; Ruedi Schmidt, the idiot doctor who managed to injure himself without even stepping foot on a battlefield. It was almost too good to be true.
Felix must have sensed his discontent, because he took a step back, placing his hands on his hips and sucking in a long breath. In any other situation, Ruedi would have assumed that Felix was bringing more bad news, but the smirk that tugged gently on the corners of his chapped lips was a dead giveaway.
“It doesn’t look good, Dr Schmidt,” he started, his voice as grave as he could muster. “We’ll have to amputate from the neck upwards. Don’t worry though, we’ll find a way to keep you talking. Maybe we could turn you into one of those floating heads from those movies we used to watch.”
As Felix dissolved into a fit of giggles, Ruedi couldn’t help but laugh along. Throwing a roll of gauze in his boyfriend’s direction, he almost marvelled at the way in which he effortlessly side-stepped his terrible aim with what he assumed was the same precision that he dodged bullets out on the battlefield. At the thought of Felix on the front lines, Ruedi felt a lump begin to form in his throat, but he swallowed quickly, forcing a smile back onto his face.
“Fuck off, dickhead,” he muttered lightly, shoving Felix playfully as the older man settled himself onto the bed beside Ruedi. Felix simply grinned in reply, sliding his hand into Ruedi’s and giving it a light squeeze. Ruedi couldn’t tell whose fingers were colder, his or Felix’s. The cold snap had hit everybody; three frostbite-related infections already crossed his path earlier that week, and they had anticipated quite a few more before winter began to thaw.
“Don’t you miss it?” Felix asks, his face falling a little as he talked. Ruedi felt the all-too-familiar sinking of his stomach. Guilt.
“Miss what?”
“Home.”
Ruedi coughed, a harsh bark that sent shooting pains up the sides of his throat. Winter hit them all hard, not least the people on the front lines. The Polish countryside was far bitterer than even the sharpest sting of Berlin winter. He thought back to the tiny spartan apartment that he and Felix called home where the fire crackled merrily in the corner in a vain attempt to combat the draught coming in from the window in the sitting room. He used to study from books with impossibly long words, curled up in the ancient armchair as Felix pottered around in the kitchen. As he threw impossible amounts of ingredients into the pan, he made anecdotal comments about the many things he would do for next winter: repair the latch on the window, secure the shutters so they didn’t make as much noise during the windier nights, finally repair the creaky floorboard near the front door.
He didn’t manage to complete the seemingly endless stream of tasks before they had left the city.
“Of course,” Ruedi murmured, pushing all thoughts of home to the back of his mind, “but we’re safe here. There’s no way we would be safe in the city. You know that.”
A murmur of voices passed by the tent entrance. Glancing quickly towards Felix, Ruedi fell silent, waiting only until the voices receded into the distance before expecting Felix’s reply.
“Sure, if safe means hiding everything about who you are and risking your life for a country you don’t really want to fight for,” Felix replied. His voice was hushed, his eyes alert for any sign of life coming their way. “This isn’t safe. It’s torture.”
Felix looked miserable as he hopped off of the bed. In the two years they spent fighting, he seemed to have aged exponentially. Where his eyes were once bright and inquisitive, they were dulled and lifeless, staring at an enemy that was never there. He still laughed occasionally, but it wasn’t a laugh that Ruedi recognised; it was forced and robotic. His hands shook when he stood at ease, and the dark circles around his eyes hinted at the lack of sleep Ruedi knew he was suffering from. Felix would simply brush it off when mentioned, making up a poor excuse to keep Ruedi at bay.
Ruedi could fix gaping bullet wounds and bring men back from the brink of death, but he didn’t know how to fix Felix.
The voices were back again, their proximity much closer than before. Felix stood a little taller, lifting his rifle a little higher on his shoulder. Almost as if prompted, Ruedi grabbed the nearest medical implement, wincing a little as the scalpel blade brushed against his finger. Even if there was more to be said, the conversation was over. They couldn’t ever risk being caught.
“Thank you, Stabsartz,” Felix said, raising his voice a little as he turned to leave.
“Any time, Oberst.”
Ruedi’s curse echoed loudly around the empty confines of the medical tent, the cacophony of medical equipment falling to the floor the only accompaniment to his mournful lament. As the steel bowl spun on its axis, coming to rest underneath the nearest bed and sending instruments to all corners of the room, Ruedi silently thanked god that he was the only man left to clean up the mess that had been left by the nearby battle the evening previous. Even if somebody had been around, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – knocking the entire surgical tray off of the cart it was precariously perched on wasn’t his intention, and anybody with fingers as cold as his would understand the slip of an icy palm sending the entire thing crashing to the ground alongside the remains of Ruedi’s sanity.
It wasn’t as if Ruedi was insane anyway; quite the contrary. He – according to the Wehrmacht – was perfectly sane and deemed ready for the onslaught of war by the medical professionals who cleared him for work each year. So no, he wasn’t crazy, nor was he losing his sanity; he was simply sleep-deprived and malnourished, much like every other soldier that he had ever met. He even had an excuse for his ghostly complexion and bloodstained fingernails. Every night he watched as soldier after officer after unidentifiable corpse was shipped through the flaps of the medical tent, and he spent every single waking moment working in vain with the substandard supplies gifted to them by the government. He would work for hours without breaks, trying to save life after wretched life with hardly any glimpse at victory to break up the bloodshed. Every day, he would grow tired of watching the light fade from the eyes of men whom simply refused to hang on, men whom passed onto the other side after sobbing for their mothers, daughters, sons and wives in a startling contrast to the might they had showed whilst parading around the battlefield. Instead of leaving behind a legacy they could be proud of, they were reduced to nothing more than numbers, their war-torn bodies buried hastily in the fields just outside camp with nothing other than a roughly-made wooden cross as identification.
It was selfish, really, for men to die on his tables. With every day that passed, Ruedi’s mortality rates were growing higher, swelling in size alongside the desire of the German people to beat the Allies. They had been fighting well, pushing German forces back time and time again and leaving more bloodshed in their wake with every step they took towards Berlin, bloodshed that found its way back to Ruedi and his slapdash, poorly-equipped team of medics who could do nothing more than to make the lives of the injured as comfortable as possible within their final hours.
Cursing again, this time much more silently, Ruedi dropped to his knees and started to pick up the instruments. Some were spared damage, such as the dulled metal of the scalpel to his right, but much of the disposable equipment was ruined. A ball of gauze managed to roll its way into a pool of stagnant blood a few centimetres to his left. Muttering under his breath, Ruedi made a mental note to find out whatever inept newbie had supposedly cleaned up after the steady flow of injuries subsided earlier that evening as he dropped to his back and slowly worked his way under a gurney in an attempt to retrieve the bottle of saline solution that had miraculously survived the drop.
“It’s cold as balls out there.”
Were he anywhere else, he may have been happy to hear another person’s voice, but after dealing with dead bodies for hours, the shock of a human voice caused Ruedi to jump violently upwards. As his body jerked forward in an attempt to see the owner of the voice, his forehead connected with the metal underside of the gurney with a dull thwack and, for the third time in the space of five minutes, Ruedi found himself swearing aloud. As a sharp, spreading pain began to migrate across his forehead, Ruedi found himself noting grimly that it was nothing short of a minor miracle that his mother was not around to see the foul-mouthed vagrant her only son had become.
Ruedi glared at the hand that had appeared in front of his face. “Jesus, Felix, don’t you ever knock?”
Hand still outstretched and bemused grin on his face, Felix Müller looked wordlessly at the closed tent flaps behind him before looking back at Ruedi. The younger man rolled his eyes, accepting the help up from the ground. As he stood to his full height – a measly five-foot-nine-inches, something he inherited from his mother – he felt his head begin to spin. Groaning loudly, he worked his way backwards until the edge of the gurney hit his legs, sitting down and placing his head in his hands.
“Okay, knocking on a tent. Not my best moment.”
Ruedi winced as he sat upright again, silently making a note never to climb under anything shorter than him again. “Seriously, though, you can’t just go around unannounced like that. It’s shit like that that’ll get your brains blown across a wall one day.”
“I’ll survive, I’m sure,” Felix replied curtly, placing a finger under Ruedi’s chin and lifting his head up slightly. “Let me see, love. For once, I can play doctor.”
Reluctantly, Ruedi allowed Felix to inspect his forehead. As Felix’s fingertips pressed against the area where his forehead connected with the gurney, Ruedi hissed involuntarily. He could almost hear the teasing he would endure for however long the bruising decided to hang around. In fact, he knew that he would spend the next few days being the butt of every joke in the canteen; Ruedi Schmidt, the idiot doctor who managed to injure himself without even stepping foot on a battlefield. It was almost too good to be true.
Felix must have sensed his discontent, because he took a step back, placing his hands on his hips and sucking in a long breath. In any other situation, Ruedi would have assumed that Felix was bringing more bad news, but the smirk that tugged gently on the corners of his chapped lips was a dead giveaway.
“It doesn’t look good, Dr Schmidt,” he started, his voice as grave as he could muster. “We’ll have to amputate from the neck upwards. Don’t worry though, we’ll find a way to keep you talking. Maybe we could turn you into one of those floating heads from those movies we used to watch.”
As Felix dissolved into a fit of giggles, Ruedi couldn’t help but laugh along. Throwing a roll of gauze in his boyfriend’s direction, he almost marvelled at the way in which he effortlessly side-stepped his terrible aim with what he assumed was the same precision that he dodged bullets out on the battlefield. At the thought of Felix on the front lines, Ruedi felt a lump begin to form in his throat, but he swallowed quickly, forcing a smile back onto his face.
“Fuck off, dickhead,” he muttered lightly, shoving Felix playfully as the older man settled himself onto the bed beside Ruedi. Felix simply grinned in reply, sliding his hand into Ruedi’s and giving it a light squeeze. Ruedi couldn’t tell whose fingers were colder, his or Felix’s. The cold snap had hit everybody; three frostbite-related infections already crossed his path earlier that week, and they had anticipated quite a few more before winter began to thaw.
“Don’t you miss it?” Felix asks, his face falling a little as he talked. Ruedi felt the all-too-familiar sinking of his stomach. Guilt.
“Miss what?”
“Home.”
Ruedi coughed, a harsh bark that sent shooting pains up the sides of his throat. Winter hit them all hard, not least the people on the front lines. The Polish countryside was far bitterer than even the sharpest sting of Berlin winter. He thought back to the tiny spartan apartment that he and Felix called home where the fire crackled merrily in the corner in a vain attempt to combat the draught coming in from the window in the sitting room. He used to study from books with impossibly long words, curled up in the ancient armchair as Felix pottered around in the kitchen. As he threw impossible amounts of ingredients into the pan, he made anecdotal comments about the many things he would do for next winter: repair the latch on the window, secure the shutters so they didn’t make as much noise during the windier nights, finally repair the creaky floorboard near the front door.
He didn’t manage to complete the seemingly endless stream of tasks before they had left the city.
“Of course,” Ruedi murmured, pushing all thoughts of home to the back of his mind, “but we’re safe here. There’s no way we would be safe in the city. You know that.”
A murmur of voices passed by the tent entrance. Glancing quickly towards Felix, Ruedi fell silent, waiting only until the voices receded into the distance before expecting Felix’s reply.
“Sure, if safe means hiding everything about who you are and risking your life for a country you don’t really want to fight for,” Felix replied. His voice was hushed, his eyes alert for any sign of life coming their way. “This isn’t safe. It’s torture.”
Felix looked miserable as he hopped off of the bed. In the two years they spent fighting, he seemed to have aged exponentially. Where his eyes were once bright and inquisitive, they were dulled and lifeless, staring at an enemy that was never there. He still laughed occasionally, but it wasn’t a laugh that Ruedi recognised; it was forced and robotic. His hands shook when he stood at ease, and the dark circles around his eyes hinted at the lack of sleep Ruedi knew he was suffering from. Felix would simply brush it off when mentioned, making up a poor excuse to keep Ruedi at bay.
Ruedi could fix gaping bullet wounds and bring men back from the brink of death, but he didn’t know how to fix Felix.
The voices were back again, their proximity much closer than before. Felix stood a little taller, lifting his rifle a little higher on his shoulder. Almost as if prompted, Ruedi grabbed the nearest medical implement, wincing a little as the scalpel blade brushed against his finger. Even if there was more to be said, the conversation was over. They couldn’t ever risk being caught.
“Thank you, Stabsartz,” Felix said, raising his voice a little as he turned to leave.
“Any time, Oberst.”
“Felix?”
“Mm?”
“Ich liebe dich.”
“Ich kenne.”
“Mm?”
“Ich liebe dich.”
“Ich kenne.”