Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list.
Agatha’s second story! I’m honestly really proud of this one. Agatha is my OC for krakaheimr‘s Chicago Spirit setting. But honestly this story has very little to do with that. This is historical fiction about an NB person dealing with their baggage.
CW for passing reference to past underage sex work. Agatha is from the early 1900s and she’s had it rough.
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The soil of Flanders Fields seems to seethe beneath Agatha’s feet as she walks through the poppies and graves of Ypres.
She had thought she would never come back here again. Never wanted to. The earth of the continent where she was born is a mass grave, and one of the things buried here is the person she should have been.
But then that’s why she had to come back, isn’t it? She couldn’t run forever; she’s not that kind of coward. No, cowardice has little to do with it. You spend years running from the pain and then one day, you look into the mirror and you understand it’s either time to turn and fight or to allow the past to take control of you.
And that is exactly why she left the first time. She is her own. She has paid far too much to achieve that. She will allow no one else to control her; not even her own memories.
She’s worn a funeral suit to this place, as befits a man visiting his own grave. Her trousered legs brush and hiss through the poppies and with each step those memories well up from the blood-soaked earth that bore witness: of how she slowly shed her humanity like the soldiers here shed their lives. Drip by drip. When she stopped being a girl, and became a woman. A man. A spy. A prostitute. A liar. A killer. A traitor. A disembodied knife in the dark. A monster.
And there, finally, she finds peace. She’s proud of her monstrosity. It feels like the truth. She wouldn’t choose to go back.
The men who ran the German war effort, who used her as a tool in her tender adolescence and turned her into a whore and spy and assassin for the Fatherland…they’ve walked on this soil. These very poppy fields contain, somewhere, the imprints of their squalid feet. Perhaps if she finds them, she can drive some iron nails through them. It’s a long shot, but she pocketed some before she came here, just on the off chance.
She has her knives too, on the chance she should meet any of them in person.
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