Trigger Warning: Assault and mentions of killing. 

I have been trying to tag when new things crop up but please do note that this story is going some darker places and I want everyone to make sure they are guarding their mental health & safety. From this point on, it will be violent and possibly triggering. Casus Belli may not be the story for you. 

The faucet was leaky. A steady, drip, drip, drip was the painfully discernable sound in my housing. Even on the busiest street in London, it audibly kept time. It was a beat of a drum, the ticking of a clock, and the twitch of my eyelids as I stared up at the ceiling. Military-funded housing was lousy at best but better than the ground in Normandy. The leaky faucet could have been the beat of a battlefield, a gunshot steadily tapping out the rhythm of the war that was still waging across the channel. It was a beat that I had been removed from, confined to these four walls.

I wasn't paraded out of the company with fanfare and shame. I was removed, silently, quickly, with as much discretion as could be managed. I hadn't expected it. I had been ready to hold my head high as I was marched away in shackles of shame, avoiding the eyes of the men I had wanted to trust me but that had never come to pass. The swiftness to which I had been rejected was startling and stung like a wasp's blow to my heart.

the faucet dripped with the rhythm of a clock that I wished I could turn back. To do what? I didn't know. After two weeks in this room, waiting for new orders, waiting for new assignments, I still didn't know quite what I regretted. Not a word that I had spoken would I take back. Not a movement or shot I had fired. But I would have done anything to be back in the ranks of those I had left. But why?

I had been trained for solitary missions, an ally somewhere deep in enemy territory at most. Never a fleet of men to call allies or even friends. I had been left to my own devices for two years and for some reason, the second I had been placed in the company of others I had gone soft.

The faucet kept dripping and the world kept turning, leaving me standing in one firmly planted spot. Where was I to turn?

My mind found those two weeks a time for inward reflection, turning towards my thoughts. I hadn't been given much time to think. After months of waiting, waiting, waiting, and a few weeks of a flurried activity and fighting I was left a hastily packed kitbag overflowing onto the dingy carpet of the hotel and a cluttered mind.

Miriam had always said cluttered minds were wont to trip their owners. Her own silent ways left a lot of time to shelve and store her mind's wanderings but I had never inherited that skill, even after years of coaching. Two weeks of silence with only my reflection for company left me with ample time to perfect the art.

I had known silence, come to relish in it in those days and nights that blurred together. The sky beyond the windows was gray, indiscernible from sunrise to sunset. London had been a mistress of mystery since I had been ushered into the hotel in the dead of night with no understanding of my surroundings. I hadn't been to this city that my mother had once called home. It seemed only fitting to be trapped with only the memory of her creation.

My waking hours were spent pacing, wearing a track of my bare feet into the carpet while I prayed for any knock on the door. I knew only when to rise and fall by the watch, scrapped and cracked from my exploits with explosives. Round and round I went, my feet falling to the tempo of the leaky faucet, a drumbeat, or a ticking clock.

Over the rug, stepping through the pile of discarded clothes that were more suitable for a French girl than a waiting agent. I'd stop, my feet stalling at the mirror, mesmerized by the girl left behind. One of the first orders of business after the lock had clicked in the door and I had heard the engine of my escort pull away in the street below had been to shed my skin. I hung up the mantle of Irene La Blanc, shaking the grime off her persona, before folding it neatly and laying her to rest on the side table.

The girl I met on my path, staring back at me in the mirror was a sight to behold. Hair wild, skin flushed from the stuffy air and the exertion of her path. She wore only the loose shorts and tee-shirt that had been more suitable for physical training than lounging in a hotel. She had no past and no future, a shapeless creature ready to be molded and formed. A lump of clay that would be shaped into whatever weapon was required of her. There was something she carried, in all her formless mystery. Shoulders back, eyes wide. I hardly believed it was me. The more passes I made in my room, as the weeks became one and then a second, the harder it was to believe. Until I came to the conclusion that it wasn't me at all.

I had thought in Normandy and in Madrid that I was still me. Virginia Carroll in all her child naivety would return in between missions, in between assignments, and all would be as it should. It was impossible.

I had wanted to be Virginia Carroll around the men of Easy but they had needed someone between Irene and Virginia, trustworthy but not unhelpful. The recipe for the combination had yet to be perfected. While my days were caught in this dizzying spiral, meeting this mysterious girl in the mirror and hearing my mother's voice in my ear, the night brought old memories.

I lay in my bed, the one pillow flat beneath my head, and though the mattress could not be described as comfortable it was too soft compared to the foxholes and tree limbs I had grown used to. With the mattress beneath me and the silence all around, things found a way into my mind. Things that I hadn't thought of for years, men and bodies that had fallen in my first days in Europe came to keep me company. Things I would rather have forgotten.

It came as a dream at first, a soft whisper of breath on my neck that made my skin shiver and my blood curdle. The breath became a cry and then a scream, shrill and afraid. The scream was one that was familiar in fear of childhood nightmares and spiders in beds not in the fear of death or discovery.

The scream would echo in my mind and I'd thrash awake, only to find my scream joining Lydia's.

In the silence that followed, I could hear my mother's berating. My mother's shouts of disappointment.

Then I'd lay back down, listening to the streets below and waiting for the clock to tick toward 6 am, where I'd rise, wash my face from the sweat and tears that left my skin sticky and salty. The faucet would drip, my feet would find their path from the day before and I'd start all over again.

The longer I spent in that hotel, the more vivid the dream became. The breath became a gasp, the sweat became the memory of blood, and the shout was a gunshot. My gunshot. The first trigger I had pulled at another living, breathing thing. I had pulled it, not a doubt in my mind until the body hit the floor and it went from alive to dead. Because of me.

I woke, Lydia's scream of fear in my head, my mother's words of disappointment on my lips, and sweat dripping off my brow. Fear caught my chest in a whitened fist, and I stared at that girl in that mirror. Not me.

Blindly I reached for the journal stained and warped from rain and water. I kept it close, a pencil clipped to its cover. I flipped through the pages, not opening to a new, spotless page like I usually did but reaching for the first page, marred with its first tally. Taking the pencil in trembling fingers, I marked that tally again, pressing hard. It showed darker, reaffirming that it was over. That he was dead.

I hadn't thought of that inn and its long twisted hallway in months. I had packed it away and allowing clutter to form over it, never addressing the contents.

It had been the last time I had seen Lydia. My last memory of her, nothing like the rosy days spent in parks and childhood thrills. A gunshot, blood splattering on her cheek.

I pressed harder, the pencil tight in my palm. My knuckles were turning white but I kept marking the same line, over and over and over.

Felix had been nowhere to be found. A flash of light, a crackle of a record finishing. Before they could place another on the needle, I had pulled myself away from the German soldiers gathered in the parlor and their warbling record player. Lydia had disappeared not long before, Liseux our final days together before being placed in our separate assignments. I had wanted to say goodbye, my train leaving the following morning. Felix had told us to flirt with the enemy, one final practice run, while he had been ferried to and from Paris on some other mission that was too secret for my knowledge.

My skirt, long and green, that had whipped to and from while I allowed the German soldiers to swing me from partner to partner, caught on the corner of a side table, pulling me back. I turned, to free the fabric and found myself caught between the wall and a soldier.

"Let go of her,"

My back pressed to the wall, his breath on my neck. Her voice had shaken with fear. I felt him laugh against my neck. Hot against my neck.

"Let go of her,"

She had a gun drawn. It wavered.

A gunshot echoed in the halls, sending my teeth rattling in my skull. I felt his breath on my neck, finished. His hands went limp on my body. She had a gun drawn but no smoke plumed from her barrel.

I dropped the pistol though the metal was cool to the touch and pushed the body off of me.

Barely eighteen and I had pulled that trigger, done what Lydia could not.

The lead on the pencil snapped, tearing through the page. My breath had been rattling with the dancing and the adrenaline but here, in this London hotel, my breath was steady. I dropped the notebook, squeezing my eyes shut, tighter, tighter, as I tried to forget the feeling of his hands and his breath. It was just a body now, another tally in the book.

Miriam had told me not to be afraid and already I had failed that. She had known more than I had given her credit for. While the whispering and fighting had stung and I had wished for more, it was the only way I had made it out of Normandy in one piece. Her war had been different, that much I knew. But I didn't know what she had fought, what she had seen. She didn't speak of Germany. She didn't speak of London. I had no family in either then I knew of. I had no idea what she lost. Lawson had tried to tell me and I had tried to stop him but even he knew a fraction of the truth. She had saved lives, that all anyone was willing to tell me. All Miriam was willing to let them know. How did an informant learn to shoot the way my mother did? How did an informant come face to face with a weapon and walk away with only superficial scars?

Miriam told me not to be afraid. Miriam told me not to ask questions. So I didn't, out loud. But inwardly, while I cleared my cluttered mind, listened to the dripping of the faucet, and pushed that body off of me, I questioned. Who was to hear me, locked away in here anyway? 

Author's Note:

Fun story, I wrote this chapter while in quarantine at my college so I really understood Ginny's pain.
Song for the chapter: Control by Halsey.