Whumptober 2025 Day 2: Taking Accountability

[rosanicus]

No 2: "You’ve got a lot of nerve to dredge up all my fears.”

Prophecy | Sewer | Taking Accountability

This is a loose accountability-taking but I was once again staring at the prompts for most of my free time today in despair. So hooray for writing things at all!

It was some weeks after his return from Sakhalin that Fritz saw his mother again.

Raymond had made arrangements for them to legally emigrate from East Berlin to the West, although they would not be able to stay in Berlin. In all that time, Fritz had not spoken to his mama. It was the longest he had gone without seeing her in his entire life, and the longer the time stretched the harder it felt to close the distance he had created.

The new flat was in a quiet, leafy suburb outside of Köln, easily reached by tram. Fritz held his suitcase in one hand - a new purchase, since he had been unable to bring one when he left Berlin, and one now filled with handed-down clothes, knick-knacks and secondhand books - and knocked, sharply, with the other.

"Mama," he said, when the door opened just a crack. "It's Fritz."

Mama opened the door just wide enough to beckon him inside. Fritz checked over his shoulder, a new instinct, before slipping through the gap.

He was expecting the hug, when it came, but he still felt cracked down the middle when his mother started to cry.

It was something she had always hidden from him, ever since he was very small and the war was just ended, his papa dead somewhere far away and all the houses across the street flattened by bombs.

He smoothed his palm over her back, rubbing tight circles, as she sobbed. Eventually she pulled away, her hands cupped at his elbows. She was a tall woman, but still had to tilt her head back to look him in the face.

"Liebchen," she said sternly. "If you ever disappear like that again, I will find you and drag you back by the ear."

"Understood," he replied. He set down his suitcase with a slight thunk. "Uncle Erich sends his love, of course."

"Oh, of course," muttered Mama. She scrubbed at her face with a clean handkerchief. "Your uncle likes to send all sorts of things." The flat in Berlin had been littered with little knick-knacks from across the world, the sort of thing which would be produced as if by magic from his uncle's pocket during his visits, or sent bundled in newspaper in a language Fritz couldn't even identify. "You took a great risk, going along with those men to rescue him."

"I know, and I am sorry for causing you so much worry," said Fritz, contrite. He knew that his mother knew the names of Biggles and his friends; it would have been impossible to avoid learning them, growing up, even if he hadn't begged for stories of them at bedtime for years. "But it was already a risk to cross the curtain. I didn't want to come back with regrets."

Fritz hated to worry his mother. It was simply that, in this case, he had felt that mama's worry was worth the potential reward.

Comments

[philomytha]

Ah, well done Fritz, at seventeen it isn't easy to remember that other people worry about you. This is an excellent missing scene, poor both of them <333

[tweague]

SO GLAD FOR FRITZ AND HIS MOTHER TO GET HUGS <3 <3 <3 And I love his mother's attitude towards her brother. That's a woman who has had to put up with The Walking Disaster That Is Erich von Stalhein for entirely too long.

[sholio]

Awwww, this is lovely; I love seeing their reunion, and of course she would have been terribly worried! Also, the flat full of little gifts from Erich from around the world. ;-; Because of course he would do that.