Chapter Text
Like everyone else around here Vidal looked tough and world-beaten, stubbornly resistant to it but affected by it nonetheless. Neither his dark hair nor his dark, glowering expression stood out in an angry Spain, but there was something else to him that grabbed Pine's attention immediately, though it took him a while to put it into words. 'Paradoxical,' that was it, and the idea came to Pine in English for once. Vidal raged calmly from his place beside the brigade commander, held himself upright with an unrefined grace, held complete control over the nervous energy that made his fingers twitch while his face remained carefully impassive.
Which was an impressive sort of impression for a man to give when he hadn't yet said a word to the group gathered around him.
Everyone in this room was a killer and there was no reason to assume that Vidal was the rare exception to that rule, but Pine imagined that Vidal could murder someone very gently if he wanted to. He might hold someone down with firm and tender touches, stroke their hair until they gave up every secret and then slipped away from the world entirely.
This was an absurdly romantic view of anyone, let alone a soldier, but it seemed to fit and Pine could reshape the description to fit the man better should the need ever arise. He was, however, generally confident of his first impressions: he was rarely wrong about people, except when he was and in those cases the misjudgment was often catastrophic.
Still, it would do for now.
Pine waited at parade rest, the stance habitual by now, listening to the brigade commander's explanation of what needed to be done until it ended with the inevitable call for volunteers, at which point he raised his hand, which was another habit of his.
A weary voice a few feet behind him - Ogilvey's, on this occasion - muttered, "Jesus, Pine, you volunteer for everything.”
"Someone has to," he answered, putting no real thought into the response because by now the answer had become automatic. He did offer himself up for extra duties more often than anyone else but he didn't know how not to. It had been beaten into him by a long chain of orphanages and when he tried to resist the impulse he always found himself with too much time on his hands, which was something he didn't really know what to do with. It was better to be busy, always, than to have nothing to do and too much to think about while not doing it.
Colonel Álvarez was no more impressed than Ogilvey: “Let’s give someone else a chance to risk their life this time, Pine. You won’t win the war on your own.” He laughed at this, good-natured for the most part but it made Pine blush, blood heating his sunburnt skin well past comfort.
Álvarez looked around, hopeful of another raised hand, but Eduardo Vidal, interloper, took this moment to say his first words of the meeting.
“I’ll take him,” he said. “The man we're looking for is English too, maybe this tree of yours will think like he does.”
“We have plenty of Englishmen here,” said Álvarez, still not keen.
But Vidal shook his head. “I like this one,” he said, and he smiled at Pine for the first time, whose own mouth twitched in response, just a little.
The perpetual volunteer did not ask for much (another orphanage habit) but he liked to be liked, the same as anyone else did. To this end he had become something of a social chameleon, adapting and accommodating to whoever was around, an instinctive camouflage of targeted amiability. So far all he had done for this latest potential ally was to make himself useful but Pine knew then that he would continue to be useful, however much effort it took to achieve that. This was his way and this was his way in; he might not even have to lie much to win over Eduardo Vidal.
“Can you read a map?” asked Vidal, unfolding Catalonia and spreading the land across a wooden mess table.
“Yes.”
“Good.” Vidal drew an imaginary line with a fingertip. “Everything past here is held by the Fascists, and here” - he pointed to a forested area well past that line - “is where my best sources tell me Roper can be found.”
Pine frowned down at the map. “Has the front line really moved that much since last month?”
“You didn't know about this?” Vidal seemed surprised by his new recruit's lack of knowledge, looking up from the map to study him with curious eyes. Searching for something, it seemed, though what that was would remain a mystery for now.
“I didn't know things had gotten this bad,” admitted Pine. He overheard a great deal of the gossip that passed between the men of the unit but beyond unreliable rumour he remained deliberately uninformed – there was nothing he could do to change the result of battles he wasn’t part of. He preferred to follow orders as he was given them and to let the course of the war flow as it would, carrying him along with it.
“Don't worry,” said Vidal with drawled sarcasm, “the spirit of international socialist cooperation will have all of this fixed by the end of the week.”
The insult failed to land, having been aimed at a much more naive target. Dryly, Pine replied, “I should certainly hope so, if I’m not home in time for the cricket season I'll be putting in a complaint.”
“You might not get home at all,” said Vidal, eyes still fixed on him, “we’ll be on our own for this. Nobody’s going to come and rescue us if something goes wrong on this mission. Solidarity only goes as far as the front line.”
“I volunteered.”
“But what do you think you volunteered for?”
“Cutting off a source of weapons that kill people whether they volunteer for it or not.” He felt that Vidal was grading his responses like a schoolmaster testing to see if a student was ready for an exam. “I won’t let you down,” he promised. “This needs to be done, so I’ll do it.”
“I’ve been disappointed by the English before.”
“So have I.”
Apparently this was the right answer to the test, or at least right enough to get a passing grade.
“Your Spanish is very good for an Englishman.”
“I try to pay attention when people are talking to each other.” As far as Pine knew this was true: what others considered a talent for languages he viewed as a natural consequence of an inclination towards quiet observation. He was patient, he liked to listen, and as he saw it there wasn’t much more to gaining any skill than that.
“Like a spy?” teased Vidal, a slight smile assuring Pine that the question was not an accusation.
“Just a humble infantryman. You're not a local boy either,” he noted. “No lisp.”
“I’m Mexican.”
He must be here for the war as well then; it seemed to have summoned people from everywhere, drawing them together as if Spain were a shepherd rounding up a lost flock. Not that Pine himself was lost, but he had found himself here among them nonetheless.
“We’ll leave first thing tomorrow,” said Vidal. “Say goodbye to your friends before we go, just in case.”
Just in case. Pine would be the optimist on this mission, it seemed.
An early morning visit to the under-stocked and over-stretched quartermaster provided most of the supplies they were likely to need on the journey - estimated by Vidal to be a few days at most on the way in and the same again on the return leg of the trip, should they be lucky enough to need one - and for anything else they would have to scavenge or pray.
After that, now laden with purpose, they climbed onto the back of a truck with Ogilvey for a driver and drove away from the barracks with no farewell but the fluttering of the red and black flags waving against the walls in the mid-morning breeze – their departure was neither novel nor important enough to earn the attention of anyone else.
“You’ll have to walk from here, chaps,” said Ogilvey, who liked to pepper his Spanish with English to maintain what he thought of as the proper way of speaking. He stopped the flatbed truck in the middle of the dirt-paved road and turned around to look at the pair balanced on the wooden benches at the back. “I’m not getting any closer than this: I’ve got a girl waiting for me in Brighton who’d murder me if I got myself killed in Spain.”
“We’ll be back in a few days,” said Pine optimistically, picking up his bag from the floor of the truck. “We’re going through a forest, I’m very hard to spot in one of those.”
“Ha,” Ogilvey responded mirthlessly, “ha. Very funny. Get your lazy arses out of my truck so I can get back to the unit.”
Pine followed Vidal’s jump down to the ground, slinging his bag over his shoulder. As he walked around to the front of the vehicle he hung his rifle alongside the bag, hand gripping the strap. He banged his fist on the roof of the driver’s cab. “Piss off, old chum. Pip-pip, toodle-oo.”
“Fucking English,” muttered Vidal, starting down the road ahead of them.
“I don’t think he likes me,” said Ogilvey.
“Nobody does.” Pine gave the man a mock salute before turning to the road. He had to hurry a few steps to catch up with Vidal, the truck’s engine starting up as they left it behind.
He had not said goodbye to anyone before they set out, friend or otherwise. Not really, not with the weight of a last farewell. Planning for death was too close to planning to die. He would see the rest of the unit in a few days, and if he didn’t then he wouldn’t be alive to regret the decision anyway.