She is awake when he comes back in.

Or — halfway. The eyes are open but they have that quality again — the not-quite-there quality, the eyes of someone whose mind is still catching up to consciousness. She tracks him when the tent flap moves. He watches her register: the uniform first, always the uniform, then the face above it, then the space around her — canvas walls, camp cot, the distant sound of men and horses and the Front doing what the Front does.

He watches her decide whether to be more afraid.

She decides yes.

He stops moving.

He learned this in the first hour — that stillness is the only language currently available to him that she seems able to read. Movement toward her produces a specific tension in her body that he does not want to produce. So he has become, in the space of an afternoon, a man who announces himself at the tent entrance and moves slowly and keeps his hands visible and has not once crossed to her side of the tent.

He pulls the camp stool from beside the table.

He sits.

Not close. Halfway across the tent. Far enough that the distance is a statement.

She has pulled the blanket — his spare, wool, from his kit — around her shoulders without appearing to notice she has done it. Her eyes have not left him. They are dark and exhausted and afraid and underneath the afraid there is something watchful and assessing, and he finds himself thinking that whatever she was before this — before whatever happened to her in that field — she was not someone who frightened easily.

She is frightened now.

He does not let himself finish the thought about what it took.

The marks on her wrists.

He looks at the camp stool.

He reaches into his breast pocket. Lights a cigarette one-handed. Takes one draw and then — without crossing the distance — holds it out.

Not an offering exactly.

A language.

I am not moving toward you. There is no immediate threat. I have given you my cot and my blanket and I have no framework for what you are or how you came to be in that field but you are here and I brought you here and I am trying to tell you, with the only vocabulary available to either of us, that you are not in danger from me.

She doesn't take it.

He doesn't move.

He smokes.

Outside: Metz in the middle distance, horses shifting, someone laughing briefly, the low percussion of the Front four kilometers east that has long since stopped registering as sound and simply registers as the world.

Inside: him, her, the length of a tent between them. No shared language. No shared context. Nothing except this specific canvas-walled moment in the middle of a war neither of them chose.

She says something.

He doesn't understand a word of it.

The tone he understands — the sound of someone waking in an unrecognized place, reaching for: where am I, what is this, what are you.

He holds her gaze with the steadiness of a man who has learned that steadiness is its own form of information. He is not agitated. Not threatening. He is sitting on a camp stool looking at her like she is something he intends to understand eventually and is patient enough to wait for.

She says something shorter.

He thinks it might be an attempt at his name — something she heard Metz say when she was supposed to be sleeping. It doesn't sound like his name. It sounds like someone reaching for a word in the dark.

Something in his chest performs a function he doesn't have vocabulary for.

He says it.

"Erich."

Not Hauptmann. Not Brandt. Just the name, offered the way you offer something small across a distance — without pressure, with the understanding that it can be declined.

She looks at him.

The cigarette burns down.

He has followed every order this war has given him for three years.

She is not an order.

He is going to sit on this camp stool for as long as it takes.

He has nowhere else to be.

That is not entirely true.

He is here anyway.