outblazing | fic • II

II.

Would you look at that, the girl's the smart one.

Much too often when teaching General Höfer's four children, Fox finds himself thinking this, because between a pair of hyperactive twins and an older brother who's more interested in the girl next door than in geography, eight year old Hedwig Höfer is truly the intellectual hope of the family. She loves to read, is very good at it, too, always picking the difficult books rather than the one's she wouldn't have to spell her way through, because she's eager to learn and she's willing and she's a bright little star, isn't she? Crouching down next to her desk, supporting his chin on the palm of his hand, elbow on the table, while they have a brief discussion about the phonology of the word Fräulein, he feels this fondness in his chest that he never lingers on anymore.

It used to carry him through a school day, teaching kids like her, that feeling of affection. These days it's mostly an inconvenience. Like a reminder of times that were, times that will never return.

Not that he doesn't feel some tenderness for the boys, but in very different contexts, most of the time. In the classroom, they're little disasters waiting to happen and he's seen enough misbehaved kids in his life to know they're a special case of awful, these three. Still, playing football with Hans, the oldest, fourteen going on fifteen, in the garden, watching him make an absolute show of it every time he gets a goal in, Fox always smiles and lets him have it, that victory. Because some day, his side's going to lose and he'll be the one to pay the price for decades to come.

No one deserves that, especially not if they haven't experienced just a little bit of success before it all went to Hell. Yes, Fox looks at Otto's children and he prays to the God he doesn't believe in that they'll be resilient when Germany eventually burns to the ground. Hedwig will be all right, because Hedwig's like Fox were at her age. She'll find a way through the ashes and the embers. She'll learn to cook over that fire. Read by it, but her brothers... He didn't become a teacher to blame his students for their place in a war that they never asked for. War is adult business, Hans and Hedwig and Klaus and Karl are only in it because their father couldn't keep it in his pants, that is to say both his cock and his gun.

Good old case of original sin, supposedly.

Klaus calls for him by throwing his rubber across the room and Fox gets to his feet slowly, patting Hedwig on the hair before moving around the arrangement of chairs. He doesn't hold their nationality against them, the flag hoisted in their garden or the language they speak to him, thinking him someone he's not. None of that has anything to do with them, and neither does their father's involvement in the most dangerous bomb development project the war's yet seen, all one hundred years of it. You can't blame children for the chaos of the world, the mess handed down to them by their parents. It would be unfair.

All the same, when the horns sound and it's Fox's turn to perform his duty, he'll leave them behind in the dust of it. Hoping, naturally, that they'll be okay.

And knowing, logically, that they won't.