[Cardiff, Wales - 7:42 AM 28/02/1919]
The church was colder than I expected.
Not in the way of wind or weather, but the sort of still, heavy cold that settled into stone and never quite left. The air smelt faintly of wax and damp, with something older beneath it. Polish, incense and time itself worn into the walls.
I hadn't planned to come here.
My feet had simply brought me, the same way they had carried me across worse places without asking permission. Being someone who was both a devout Catholic and an ardent atheist left me slightly conflicted.
I sat halfway down the pews, cane resting against my leg, hands folded more out of habit than thought. The silence was different from the kind I'd known in the camp.
There, silence had always meant something waiting.
Here, it just… was.
For a while I did nothing but breathe.
In. Out.
Slow enough that the ache in my chest began to loosen its grip, if only a little.
I wasn't sure how long I'd been there when I heard the soft step behind me.
Not loud. Not sudden.
Just enough to let me know I wasn't alone.
"You look like a man carrying something heavy," a voice said gently.
I didn't turn straight away.
"Most are nowadays," I replied.
There was the faint creak of wood as someone lowered themselves into the pew behind me, not crowding, not pressing.
"That's true enough," the man said.
His voice was older. Calm. The sort that didn't need to raise itself to be heard.
I let out a breath through my nose.
"I've been trying to think something through," I said after a moment. "Can't seem to settle it."
"Thinking rarely settles things on its own," he said. "But it's a place to start."
I gave a faint, humourless smile at that.
"It's… hypothetical," I said. "Or near enough."
"Those are often the most honest kinds of questions."
I nodded, though he couldn't see it.
"If a man loved someone," I began slowly, choosing each word as if it might shift under me, "and promised he always would… does he do wrong by finding he cares for someone else after they're gone?"
The question hung there, quiet in the cold air.
For a few seconds, there was no answer.
Only the faint echo of something moving in the far reaches of the church.
When the man spoke again, it was softer.
"Gone how?"
I swallowed.
"Gone enough."
He seemed to consider that.
"Dead?" he asked.
"As far as I'm aware, yes," I said. "But… gone all the same."
Another pause.
"Ah," he said gently. "That kind of loss."
I stared ahead at the altar, at the dull glow of candlelight against stone.
"It feels like a betrayal," I admitted. "Even thinking it."
"Of her?" he asked.
"Of what I said. Of what I meant when I said it, of how it is impossible for me to keep that promise now."
The man shifted slightly behind me, the sound of cloth against wood.
"Do you still love her?"
The question caught me off guard.
"Yes," I said, without hesitation.
"Then nothing has been broken."
I frowned faintly.
"That's not how it feels."
"No," he agreed. "It rarely is."
He let that sit a moment before continuing.
"Love isn't a single space a person fills and leaves empty behind them. It isn't a cup that, once poured out, can only ever hold the same thing again."
I let out a slow breath.
"But how can I do that to them? They will swear to be with me until death, and yet I will always feel slightly guilty for letting them."
"You are not replacing anyone," he said firmly, though still calm. "You are continuing to live."
The words settled somewhere deeper than I expected.
"I told her…" I trailed off. "I meant it. At the time."
"I don't doubt that you did."
The man leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the back of the pew.
"But tell me this, when you made that promise, did you believe your life would end the moment she was gone?"
"No."
"Then the promise was never meant to bind you to emptiness."
I closed my eyes briefly.
The logic of it was simple.
Too simple, almost.
"It still feels like I'm leaving her behind."
"Grief often feels that way," he said. "As though moving forward is a kind of abandonment."
I let my fingers tighten together.
"And it isn't?"
"No." A pause. "It is a kind of faith."
I glanced back at him then, properly for the first time.
He was older, grey at the temples, face lined but not unkind. The sort of man who had heard many things and judged a few of them too quickly.
"Faith in what?" I asked.
"That what you had was real enough for God to change you," he said. "And that what you become because of it does not dishonour her."
The church seemed quieter after that.
Or perhaps it was just me.
I looked back toward the altar, toward the small steady flames of the candles.
"I don't know what she'd think; in fact, I fear that if anyone saw what I thought, they'd be terrified," I said.
The man gave the faintest hint of a smile.
"I suspect she would want you to be loved in return. Besides, God loves all his children, and I'm sure that whatever you may think, as long as you listen to what Christ told us to do, he will even cherish you."
I let that sit with me.
It wasn't like anything he'd said had given me a profound revelation or anything, but I did feel better just talking to someone who cared but had no stake in it.
"Thank you… Father."
He inclined his head slightly.
"You're welcome."
I sat there a little longer after he rose and left, listening to the quiet, feeling something shift, and for now, that was enough. I then got up; there was something I might as well get done sooner rather than later.
Her house sat exactly where memory said it would.
Second from the corner.
Cleaner than ours. Straighter lines. The kind of place where things were kept in order because someone had the time and expectation to keep them that way.
I stopped across the road from it.
Didn't mean to. My leg simply refused the next step, as though it had more sense than the rest of me.
The cane rested against the pavement, steadying me while I stared.
A light burnt in the front room.
Warm. Yellow. Alive.
For a moment I let myself imagine it was as I'd left it, her sat by the window with a book she wasn't really reading, listening for footsteps that never came. The thought twisted something sharp in my chest.
That wasn't fair.
Not to her.
Not after everything.
I shifted my weight, the prosthetic pressing uncomfortably against the stump. The leather had begun to chafe again from the walk, but I barely noticed it.
This was worse.
This was standing on the edge of something I could not undo.
I had faced artillery without thinking. Crossed open ground under machine gun fire because someone had told me to go. Jumped out of an aircraft because someone had said it would be fun. I had almost blown myself up trying to make rocket fuel.
And yet this… This had me rooted to the spot like a coward.
I tightened my grip on the cane.
What was I expecting?
That she'd be waiting?
That she hadn't listened to her father, the foreman for that mill over on Roath Dock with a reputation to keep, a daughter to place well, a future to secure?
Men like him didn't leave things to chance. They planned. They arranged. They made sure their daughters married someone with prospects, not a dockworker's son who went off to war and never wrote back. Especially one who had even worse prospects due to being a cripple.
I let out a slow breath.
Never wrote back.
The words sat bitter on the tongue.
Three letters.
Three chances that vanished somewhere between here and Germany like they'd never existed at all. Of course we had written dozens of times before I was captured, but obviously, like my family, she probably assumed I was dead.
Silence long enough to mean something.
Silence long enough to be taken as an answer.
A figure passed behind the curtain.
I went still.
Just a shadow at first, then the faint outline of movement as someone crossed the room. My heart gave a sudden, traitorous lurch before I could stop it.
It might not even be her.
Time had passed. Lives had moved on. There were a hundred reasons for that light to belong to someone else now.
I told myself that.
Didn't quite believe it.
The evening air carried the distant hum of the city, the clatter of a tram, voices somewhere further down the street, and the dull rhythm of industry that never quite slept.
Normal life.
The sort I had once assumed would be waiting for me unchanged.
I shifted again, the cane tapping softly against the stone.
Tap.
The sound felt too loud.
Too final.
If I crossed the street, there would be no taking it back.
No returning to the version of her that existed only in memory.
No pretending the silence had meant something simple.
I could still walk away, pretending everything was for the best.
Go back to Louisa Street. Back to Mam and Margaret, to the smell of supper and the small, solid certainty of what remained.
Leave this untouched.
Unbroken.
My hand tightened around the handle of the cane until the wood pressed hard into my palm.
Across the road, the light burnt steadily on.
I stood there a moment longer, caught between the life I had lost and the one I had yet to face, and wondered, not for the first time, whether surviving had been the easier part.
Kitty and I had first met after a sermon. Of course it wasn't one of those love-at-first-sight stories; they're dumb, and people who actually base relationships off of butterflies are idiots. But after seemingly running into each other multiple times, we had become more acquaintances.
Of course that wasn't necessarily appropriate since while the class disparity between us wasn't huge, it was there. But the old teddy who volunteered to fight hadn't cared; he would have insisted we loved each other, hence him proposing the night before he left for basic training.
She had accepted.
But the new me, the one who had actually been married for over a decade in the future, knew we had both been kids who didn't really know each other. Not to say that those feelings I had weren't real, but this combined with my general hesitation about what exactly had happened to my future self meant I was incredibly conflicted.
I had firmed my resolve. This needed to be done.