June 2, 1944 (Four days before D-Day)

Staring out into the black night ahead of him, Jason was seriously beginning to wonder why he was running a reconnaissance mission at just after three o’clock in the morning. His surroundings weren’t just pitch black; the sky was a physical, liquid force that he was flying through. It was pure, obsidian velvet, smooth and cool to the touch with obvious signs of weariness. And, after nearly five years of war, Jason couldn’t blame the clouds for looking as thing as they did, barely reflecting any of the lights of the tiny French villages below them.

Truth be told, Jason didn’t miss Corsica all that much. The tiny, sheltered air base on that island some three hours south was not home, nor was it the front lines. Jason was supposed to be a leader, for Christ’s sake. An ace with more Nazi planes under his belt than square meals. But no. His overprotective father had sent him to a glorified spy school where he learned how to shoot things with a high-powered camera rather than high-explosive rounds.

It wasn’t that he hated his position, it was just that he felt that he had been sheltered from a duty to his country; from a sacrifice he should’ve been able to make for the people he loved, a debt he was itching to pay. He didn’t understand how taking photos of the French countryside in the middle of long, boring nights, over and over again would help him satisfy that hunger.

But this morning, something had changed. He could feel it in the air as it passed through his propellers. He could feel it in the pedals beneath his feet. Something was wrong.

His spotter, who had been lying still, looking through an observation port in the floor of the fuselage for the past ninety minutes or so, broke the silence with a sharp cuss.

Jason’s eyes caught on a streak of bright blonde hair slightly behind him and he turned, almost holding his breath as Will reported.

“Jay, I’ve got something. Charles, exactly where are we right now?”

Will addressed the last comment over his shoulder, and the deep, gruff voice of their engineer and navigator, Charles Beckendorf, answered with a string of coordinates.

“We’re ten miles south of Caen, Will. What do you have?”

Will’s brows were scrunched in a mixture of excitement, fear and quasi-anger. He handed Jason a slip of hastily developed photo paper with multiple bright shapes circled in black.

“Panzer division. The same one we saw two days ago. They’ve split off into two groups, and I count twenty-five of them heading North. They’re stationary right now but they’ll hit Caen tomorrow and reinforce the entire northern coast of the channel.”

Jason swallowed hard. All three of them knew of the last-ditch operation that was scheduled for the coming Tuesday. It had been thrown around in reverent whispers and excited eyes and none of it seemed real. Now, Jason thought, it was too real. Much too real.

Will turned expectantly between Charles and Jason. “You know what this means, right? We have to get to base as fast as possible--”

Crrrrack!

The plane jerked and shuddered, yawing left and pitching nose-down. Jason kicked himself mentally for being too caught up in the first piece of action they had had in months, and didn’t see the two anti-aircraft positions just in front of them.

Jason’s hands flew over the controls, but there was nothing he could do. He scanned the growing bouquet of flashing warning lights and his heart sank. He could almost see his father’s angry, disappointed glare in the neon red glow.

“Parachutes!” Will screamed. “We’re still high enough!”

Jason shot one hand under his seat and removed his parachute but left it in his lap, still fighting for control. Charles had opened the rear hatch and Jason could hear the wind howling behind him, choking his ears. Using all his remaining focus, he shouted, “Go!” as loud as he could.

Two seconds later, another ear-splitting bang! came from the back of the plane, and Jason looked behind him just in time to see Charles’ unconscious body fly out of the plane, engulfed in the explosion of a second round hitting the tail. He couldn’t see Will, but he still bellowed his name, and all the blood rushed out of his face. Quicker than ever before, he slipped one arm through the parachute and made his way to the door in the rear of the plane and jumped, slipping his other arm through the pack just before the black night air completely discombobulated him.

---

Jason didn’t feel any less sick to his stomach when he landed on solid ground. He had his pistol with him, and he checked that it was working, but he might as well been running around naked, screaming out his position.

He could see the burning wreckage of the plane as two bright orange dots in the azure moonlight. He had landed in between them in the middle of a plot of wheat on the edge of town, and was crouched behind a hay bale. He couldn’t see anything but the blackness of the night and the agile flames that had ruined his life in thirty seconds.

Suddenly, he heard a crunching sound to his right. He whipped around and saw Will’s unmistakable blonde hair.

“Damn, I thought you were a Jerry.” Jason exhaled as Will crouched behind Jason’s hay bale. Even in the dim light, Will’s crystal blue eyes looked shattered, and Jason suddenly remembered Charles’ limp body flying out the exit hatch.

“Is he--” Jason started.

“Jay, I couldn’t find him. I don’t think he made it, Jay. Jay, I don’t think he made it. I don’t think--”

“Hey!” Jason gripped Will’s shoulder hard. It was almost impossible for Jason to listen to Will when he was talking like that. He was fighting to keep the tears back himself as Will’s eyes started dripping. “You’re not hit, I’m not hit. Charles is a steady lad. We can find him.”

“In this light?” Will squealed.

“Shh!” Jason hushed. Both of them were silent for one full second. Two seconds. Three seconds. Four seconds--

The first bullet snapped through the hay just over Will’s head.

“Bollocks!” Jason groaned. He drew his pistol and so did Will, crouching even lower.

“What do we do?” Will asked. Jason had always been the leader of the three of them.

“We can either wait it out and hope they don’t find us, or we can sneak through the woods and head for Caen; hide in plain sight.”

They made a quick, stern eye contact and both of them realized it would be futile to try to outlast the enemy on their grounds. Jason braced his shoulder against the hay bale, and to his surprise, it moved forward.

“Use the hay bale for cover!” Jason grunted. “We can push it until it’s safe to move!”

On Jason’s signal, they leaned into the roll of wheat and heaved, moving it down the slope of the farm field at a pace quick enough to surprise the German soldier firing at them. Jason heard orders being shouted and the pace of the fire coming at the two of them increased.

Jason and Will kept pushing forward until they hit the edge of a street. The Germans were firing at them from inside a building, with the lights on behind the windows. Will whipped around the edge of their mobile cover and shot a few rounds into the building, stopping the fire. Jason sprinted for the edge of the house and heard two screams. He saw Will still firing and knew he had hit his mark.

For a few moments, it was eerily silent. The rustle of Will’s uniform almost echoed through the dark street, and Will tapped Jason on the shoulder. They moved in sync across an intersection, where they spotted the last of the patrol men they had alerted, his eyes scanning the dimly lit road for Jason and Will.

Will crossed the street back alone, positioning himself for a better shot. Jason crouched behind the wall of an abandoned tavern as he heard the crack! of Will’s pistol. The soldier’s body slumped heavily onto the curb.

It had been so long since Jason had been in a firefight, and he was almost high off of the adrenaline. He felt like he was made of liquid electricity. Just as he was about to congratulate Will, the silence was broken by the the unmistakable sound of a rolling tank.

Jason heard the metal tracks creaking against the road. His breath hitched; this was all happening so fast, he barely had time to react. He knew that with a tank, several soldiers would be trailing behind. He wanted to signal Will to hide with him, so they weren’t split up, but it was too late. The tank was rolling right for them. He decided to throw caution to the wind, and as he was about to hiss to Will to run, the tank abruptly stopped. The soldiers behind the tank rushed forward.

Jason could hear the scuffle of arms and punches being thrown.

“Jay!” Will called. He sounded like a lost child at a park. Jason leapt up, running to help Will, but he realized after trying a few steps that he wasn’t moving forward. He was being held back by strong arms behind him.

The next thing he knew, something heavy and hard had hit him in the back of his head, and he was being dragged back into the abandoned house he had taken cover behind.

---

“Next time, do you think you could manage to hit him a little harder? I want to see if you could knock his head clean off his shoulders.”

Jason would have found that sentence disturbing if it hadn’t come from such a light and airy accent, like a cross between a circus master and a leprechaun.

“Michael.” A female voice sighed. This voice had an accent Jason would have considered ‘confused,’ because it was somewhere between American and French. Or maybe he expected a French accent to sound as thick as cigarette smoke.

“What?” The leprechaun Michael retorted. “Sure, his shoulders are broad but I’d bet a few quid if you tried again it’d fly off like you were hitting a four in cricket!”

“Michael!” This time two distinct voices reprimanded the leprechaun, and Jason couldn’t get a fix on the second.

“I think he’s cute.” The unknown voice noticed, amused. Jason thought this voice was a lot more French, drifting and dragging over him like a fold of silk in one of his dad’s old suits.

Jason wanted to open his eyes to see who the third speaker was, but when they tried to flutter open, every nerve ending on his entire face blew up like he had fallen flat on top of a bowl of acid. He wanted to shout for help but all that came out was:

“Uhhhhhhh.”

The unknown speaker giggled, and Jason felt a cold cloth pass over his eyelids. Then he heard something in French that reminded him of when his mother would tell him to go to sleep, just before she would start drinking. It would be the only calm thing she would say before drowning a maelstrom of booze and her own emotions. Jason could feel the cold water from the cloth running over his eyelids like tears and he finally exhaled a breath he didn’t know he had been holding.

---

When he awoke again, his eyes opened without as much pain. He could see around the room he had been dragged into. It looked like a room that had been made to look as presentable as possible after a grenade had been tossed through the window. There was a brown leather chair with obvious shrapnel marks and the base of each wall was lined with glass dust that had been swept into the corners. There was a defunct bar with no seats against one of the walls and when he looked at himself, it appeared that he was resting on a couch with more than a dozen of bullet holes in it.

How long ago had that been? How long had he been out?

How long had he been dozing peacefully while Will had been taken captive? How long had he taken a nap while Charles had lain bruised and broken and most likely dead in a field somewhere outside Caen?

How long did he have to transfer the photographs in his pocket to London?

Jason sat bolt upright. It was a good thing that the leprechaun had been agile or else they would have had a smashing of heads as strong as any pair of rams.

“Whoa there, fly-boy!” The Irish accent rolled off his tongue with such poise that Jason was tempted to smile. It was the only familiar thing he knew in a sea of so much pain. He didn’t know vertebrae could hurt this much, now that they were bearing a little bit of his weight.

“Sorry.” Jason murmured.

“You better be, you almost knocked me out, you crazy English—”

“Michael!” One of the girls called.

“Is that the only word they ever say to you?” Jason asked. Michael turned his intense tawny eyes back on Jason’s and fixed a murderous glare.

Even though he stood barely four and a half feet off the ground, Michael was by far the scariest person Jason had ever seen. His brown hair was spiky as if it stood on end out of pure ire, and his eyes were light enough to be more muddled orange than brown, and Jason thought if Michael got any angrier his eyes would turn red.

Jason heard footsteps approaching, but didn’t dare move his eyes from Michael’s for fear of the leprechaun’s stare boring holes into his cheek. When the footsteps fell silent, he couldn’t help but turn and look at who’d walked into the room.

Jason quickly revised his ‘scariest person he’d ever seen’ statement. The girl standing at the foot of the couch seeped power and determination. Her piercing steel eyes gave Jason goosebumps and her straw-blonde hair, tucked neatly into a dark blue beret, seemed like it deserved to be flecked with the blood spots of dead soldiers; either German or Allied. Jason could feel an air of death about this girl, and he guessed it was because she had killed more than a few men in her day. But that wasn’t what scared him the most; what scared him even more than her confident air was how quickly her eyes scanned him up and down. It seemed like a million thoughts were pinging around that head of hers like wasps in an organized hive.

“You are British, by your uniform. Myself and my colleague,” the blonde gestured behind her towards the other room, which looked like a dining hall. “are Resistance fighters. Michael here,” she pointed to the leprechaun, “is Irish. We keep him around for amusement and he makes sure that none of our team gets killed.”

Jason almost smiled. He could, maybe, come to like this girl.

“Hey! I'm Northern Irish, madamoiselle. All the beauty of the Emerald Isle, but none of the freedom.” Michael retorted. Jason ghosted a smug grin at Michael before turning back towards the girl. All pretense of playfulness had left her eyes.

“You and however many co-pilots you….had on the other hand,” the girl murmured, an intimidating leisure to her tone. “Are not part of that group. And the way you went about waving your pistols like madmen attracting every German and the Wolf to this part of the city, you won’t be in our company for long.”

Jason clenched his teeth, feeling the blood rush to his face. This was a test, and he knew it. He took a breath to regain his temper. This wasn’t the right fight.

“Why did you crash in Caen, and what were you doing so far into France? Most planes don’t go within a mile of the coast. Did you come from England, or from the South? How many others, besides your friend that was captured by the patrol, flew with you? And why, in the name of everything logical, did you decide to go about waving your pistols like madmen attracting every German and the Wolf to this part of the city?”

She clipped the words off like a machine-gun and the last question with an intense level of exasperation, her strange mixed accent punching him in the chest. He had questions of his own he still hadn’t asked yet, but the amount of power in this girl’s voice made him think that they could wait. There was something about this girl that reminded Jason of every commanding officer he had ever had: sharp, quick, and demanding.

“There were three of us. We flew up from Corsica to take surveillance of the Panzer divisions in this area and took a few photos before an anti-air position shot us down. I need to tell my headquarters about the fact that an entire division is reinforcing the Northern coast or the entire fate of the war could be at stake.”

Jason could hear the desperation rising in his own voice as he kept talking. The blonde girl locked eyes with his, and seemed to be asking herself whether she could trust Jason’s answer or not. Michael was staring at the two of them with one part disbelief, one part amusement, and one part curiosity.

The intensity in the girl’s stare and the silence in the room was becoming deafening, until it was all broken by a raucous peal of laughter emanating from the next room.

“The entire fate of the war?” The second girl’s voice asked playfully. Jason still couldn’t see her, but her voice was as rich as any pudding he’d ever had; her voice had layers like a harmonious chord, all weaving together into a beautifully thick French accent. He wondered who could possibly own a voice this interesting. Then he saw her.

Jason would say she looked like any girl from the South of France, he had seen girls from Marseille, and they’d never been this stunning. Her skin was pure caramel, and her hair was a dark chestnut. Her eyes were kaleidoscopes and Jason had been staring for too long.
He feigned a sudden spasm of pain in his head, tearing his eyes away from the mesmerizing girl’s and shutting them tight. He heard a soft chuckle.

“Unfortunately, my liege, it appears that you’re unfit to ride into battle.”

Jason blushed again, this time out of embarrassment. When he looked up again, the girl was holding out her hand. Jason shook it.

“My name’s Piper, and this is Annabeth.” She gestured to the blonde.

“I’m Jason, pleasure to meet you.” Jason nodded at Michael and Annabeth.

“We have been fighting underground since the Nazis took Paris in 1940.” Piper continued. “We found Michael in forty-two in a Church outside Calais a year later. We kill patrols, blow up tanks, sabotage bridges.”

Jason heard a quiet pride in her words, and he found that admirable coming from a person who had been so beat down and hunted.

“Unfortunately, our actions attracted the special attention of Bryce Lawrence, a nasty SS colonel who goes by the name of ‘the Wolf.’”

“Meaning he hunts the weak and leaves no scraps for the buzzards.” Michael interjected, spitting against the wall.

“Yes.” Piper’s voice trailed off for a moment. “But he’s found a new target: us. We’ve been running ever since, wounding his forces but never getting close to killing him. But now, with your co-pilot captured, he knows we won’t be far behind. He’s tracked us this far. You just happened to crash into kindling while it’s just started burning.”

“Bryce Lawrence?” Jason asked. “He doesn’t sound like a Kraut.”

“South African.” Annabeth’s sharp voice startled Jason. “Hitler has friends in strange places, apparently. Although I wouldn’t put it past a Dutch South African to fit in with that sort of crowd.”

“All I know is,” Piper commented. “He must have found this guy in a hellhole. I’ve never seen someone so reckless with human life. He’s more malevolent spirit than human being.”

“So,” Piper began. “I believe you were talking about the entire fate of the war. Got any thing to back that statement up?”

“Oh, uh, um, yeah.” Eloquent, Jay. He thought. He reached for his pack and Michael handed it to him. Annabeth had taken a few respectful steps back, her gaze still locked on Jason.

Slowly, Jason produced the photo Will had handed him moments before the first shell had hit. He remembered how excited Will and Charlie had been to finally have some action. He could feel a cold wind rising in his lungs and behind his forehead. He felt his breath hitch.

“This--this is the photo my spotter produced.”

Jason paused. He could hear a voice, something like his father’s, saying:

They’re both either dead or captured, Jason. You failed them, you so-called ‘leader.’ You’ve killed them.

“Circled…circled are the tanks breaking off from the rest of the Western Army Group to head up to the coast. That’s a huge problem for…for the invasion plan.”

Jason’s voice trailed off. He could see Charles’ wild eyes as the plane was hit a second time. He heard the words of the secret invasion plan spill out of his mouth, but all he could see were Will’s tears, clear as nobody’s conscience as they rolled down his cheeks and onto the hay bale.

“…do with that information?” Michael asked.

“What?” Jason replied, shaking himself.

“I said, what do you intend to do with that information, Airman?”

Suddenly Jason realized how alone he was. “M-Me? Well, aren’t you all going to help me?”

“Why should we?” Annabeth asked, her face stony. “Why should we become another set of casualties in your war? We do not intend to die for your long-shot chance at recapturing France.”

“What about Will?” Jason found himself whimpering. “What about Charles? Don’t you want to help them? They could both be dead by now!”

“Will’s probably on his way to Dachau or Auschwitz. He’ll just have to be lucky enough to survive, I guess.” Michael mused apathetically.

Jason threw off the blanket the girls had draped over him and shoved Michael as hard as he could. He didn’t move Michael far because Jason was sitting, but Michael immediately blocked Jason’s next attempted strike, grabbing Jason’s arms and holding him still. Michael’s eyes seethed with rage.

“Oi, Englishman! You think I don’t want to go out there and slit German throats all day? You think I don’t lose sleep every night thinking about pumping Nazis full of hot lead?”

“Michael, calm yourself.” Annabeth’s voice was surprisingly soothing and even, causing the Irishman to loosen his grip. “Jason, this war has taken so much from us that can never be given back: cities, homes, people, family members, but most importantly, time. This war has taken time to get to where it is now and it will take even more time to get back to where it began. This war will not be won with one swift stroke by the mighty British fleet. It’s high time you start realizing that idea is an anachronism.”

“So you’re saying you’re not going to help me.” Jason muttered.

Piper’s eyebrows scrunched together in what could only be described as afterthought sympathy. “Jason, your war is not our war. Your war is something filled with heroic actions and headstrong decisions. Our war is attempting to regain some semblance of our idea of home.”

“Is it not your duty to regain your home land as quickly as possible?”

“Do not lecture us about duty!” Annabeth snarled. All four of them fell silent. Annabeth’s steel eyes looked cracked, and Jason began to notice little things about her assumedly perfect image that weren’t as perfect as he had originally thought: he could see subtle bags under her eyes and a slight slump in her shoulders. Jason knew these were not coincidences; almost everyone in Europe looked like that. Tired. Scared. All wrapped under a thin mask of bravery.
Annabeth slowly exhaled and reached up to grab her beret off her head. She ran her fingers over the dark blue fabric in what must have been a nervous tick. Jason noticed that at the front there was a small hole, as if something had been ripped off of the front of the hat. He had never known a Resistance fighter to wear a military beret before.

Annabeth must have noticed his gaze. “This beret is not official Resistance uniform, no. I took it from an old friend of mine. He…he is dead. He used to be a part of the Millice, who fought against the Resistance. I use it as a disguise so the German soldiers think I’m on their side.”

Jason looked at the floor to avoid making eye contact with Annabeth. He thought about how much they had had to do. How much he still had to do. He knew he had to get his information to headquarters, which was all the way in London. He knew that somewhere along that line, he would have to find and rescue both Will and Charles (if they were still alive). How he was going to do that alone, he had no idea. But at this point, anything was better than laying on a couch.

Jason looked up at Annabeth. “Where’s the nearest safe transmitting place I can find to send a telegram or call London without being listened in on or intercepted?”

Annabeth’s eyes went through a quick phase of incredulity before she replied. “There’s a Resistance-run phone in Ranville, about twelve kilometers northeast of here. It will be safe, if you tell them I sent you.”

Jason shifted up and winced in pain. He took a deep breath to gather himself and stood, taking a few moments to gather his balance. His insides felt jumbled and his head felt like the day after New Year’s, but he wouldn’t let himself sit again.

“My pistol?” Jason asked.

Piper walked over to the decrepit bar and brought the gun out of the drawer. She handed it to Jason carefully, her eyes still asking if he was sure about this.

“Thank you. For everything.” Jason addressed all three of them. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch sooner or later.”

Five minutes later, he was walking back onto the road he had been so anxious to get off of only a day before. That’s when he heard the scream.

Notes

Beta. Let me know if you liked/any plot holes or details I need to edit. I'm slowly but surely starting to come back to writing, and I wrote this chapter months and months ago, but I'm looking to restart it.