Chapter Text
He was locked in the attic again.
He couldn’t really parse out why. He knew he must have done something, but as he thought through all his steps up to then he didn’t know which one had landed him there. Eventually he pushed that aside and turned to other things. It had become easier to do that with each time Lutz had sent him up here. He hadn’t come to expect it, really, considering that it surprised him when it would happen, but he was getting better at accepting that it happened and putting that into a little box and setting it somewhere that kept it out of his immediate sight.
He used to like the quiet this would give him, near the beginning. The first time he was sent to the attic without supper, he was five, and he almost viewed it as a little game. He made up short melodies and hummed them to himself. He hopped around and pretended that some of the floorboards had disappeared to give him a challenge (that was, until Vilna Lutz tromped up the stairs, rapped on the door, and told him he was making too much noise). He eventually sat on his cot and waited for the door to open again, staring at the sloping ceiling. Morning came. The door stayed closed.
By the fourth time he had figured out that getting locked in the attic was not a good thing. He didn’t know how long it would take until he was let out, and if he was being honest he also didn’t know how easily Lutz might forget him. He took to sitting right in front of the window and staring out at the streets of Baltese. And he did it silently, too, because one too many times walking too loudly had given him a bruise on the cheek and several extra duties.
From the sixth time to the fifteenth, he liked how quiet it was. Without being given commands so often (and so forcefully), having the space to think was nice. He had time to come up with stories or just sit there and let his mind wander.
Then the twentieth time, his mind wandered too far for his liking. It took him places he didn’t want to visit. He was eight and he’d started learning more about the world, becoming curious about what existed past the lighter things that he’d been satisfied with when he was younger. Vilna Lutz told him about soldiers who deserted. Soldiers who were found dead in the morning and soldiers who were caught and shot for cowardice. There is nothing nobler than being a soldier, Lutz had said firmly, and he disapproved of those who tried to escape such a thing. Cowardice is right. Only a coward would desert his post.
During that twentieth time, he stuck his head out of the window and looked down at the cobblestones far below him. He thought about how his entire body ached, how his hands had red, raw marks on them from the stick. He thought about his empty stomach. He thought about how long these spells in the attic had gotten. He thought about his mother and his father and his sister, all together and waiting for him. And for a moment, he thought he wouldn’t mind being a coward.
He started trying to make the silences as short as possible after that.
He found that as long as he had something to do with his hands, he was mostly fine. He smuggled up a needle and thread and tried teaching himself how to sew, because Lutz was always saying soldiers worked with what they had and therefore any rips and tears in his clothes must be repaired. He made his bed and then remade it every hour or so. He took broken things with him when he could, and he took them apart and tried to put them back together. He measured his own height against the doorframe, though he didn’t grow much. He drew things that he saw from the window.
Whenever something started becoming second-nature—when his hands would move on their own and he’d begin to think of other things—he set that off to the side and picked up another task, one that he needed all of his attention for.
The task he always drifted to the most was staring at the attic door.
He looked at the door a lot, as the years passed. He sat on the edge of his cot (or sometimes right up at it, hugging his knees) and looked with intense focus at every single detail of it. He memorized where each scuff was. Where the wood had worn down the most. Where the handle was starting to tarnish. He stared so hard that there wasn’t a single thought in his head that wasn’t about that door. Sometimes, when he felt up to it, he made sketches of the door too, and he’d look at one, tilt it this way and that, declare it not good enough, and start over on another page.
The door opened once, when he was examining it like that. He jumped and scrambled to stand up, his chin lifting reflexively, and Lutz just looked at him for a while like he was trying to figure out what he’d been doing and why he’d been doing it.
After that he started doing the same thing with the window. With his cot. With the old dresser in the corner. With the ceiling. Just in case the door opened again, so he wouldn’t be caught sitting so close. He didn’t want to look desperate. Soldiers weren’t supposed to act desperate. And he deserved to be locked away like this, in any case. Right?
He looked in the mirror once, then never again. His reflection didn’t feel right. He chose to blame it on being in the same room with no one else around for just a little too long rather than the other option his mind conjured up.
He opened the window and hung nearly halfway out of it. He glanced back at the door and listened hard for footsteps. He looked down at the cobblestone, noted the bare and scrawny bushes he hadn’t seen before. They wouldn’t do anything to stop a fall.
He froze for a while, his eyes on the street. He took a deep breath. He ducked inside and shut the window so hard that Vilna Lutz gave two loud knocks against the door, code for keep it down.
He nodded and sat on his cot with his arms wrapped around himself. “Yes, Vilna Lutz,” he said, though he knew it was too soft to carry through the wall.