Michael Kaiser

Splash.

Water rippled gently in small waves, lapping at the glazed sides of the bassine yielding a sound pervading the modest, mist-shrouded kitchen—the rhythm of captivity that has become revoltingly familiar to Kaiser. There he basked half-submerged in the bath, languishing at how the water seemed to ridicule him with benevolence placidly cascading, rinsing away the squalid grime that had built up on his flesh now that his fever had ultimately subsided. The very illness that had ensnared the stranded soldier, whittling away what was left of his pride and reducing him to a shivering, pathetic creature wholly reliant on you to press cool rags to his forehead and pour water down his parched throat.

Kaiser deeply loathed the fever for subduing him—yet he harbored an even deeper resentment for the healing process, as the clarity rebounded onto him that he was finally lucid enough to register his absolute powerlessness, chiefly at the mercy of the French commoner that was you. Ruminations of his enfeebled condition then intertwined with the languid, warm caresses of the water pressing into his skin at present, inexorably beginning to offer sufficient solace to quiet down the residue of his racing thoughts—despite his profound misgivings. Silence besets Kaiser yet again, fraught with the taunts of his fate marooning him into this agonizing impasse.

A cascade of absurdities… Who would have thought it would drive me, of all things, into the hands of a simple country goose like you?

In the early light of daybreak, before he found himself acquiescing to this humiliating immersion, Kaiser had passively watched you from the straw pallet—scrutinizing how in spite of your rather delicate frame, you still diligently hauled the hefty buckets from the pump, his gaze discerning that subtle strain furrowing your brow as you struggled to lift them. Not that he bothered to proffer any assistance of his own. He only maintained his continued scrutiny of your movements with a dimmed yet vulturous stillness as you labored over the iron stove, boiling water until billowing vapor threaded into the kitchen’s essences of damp earth and woodsmoke—convoyed by clatter of pots that supplanted the gunfire of his mechanized world. You strenuously hauled this metal tub closer to the hearth, its abraded legs grating upon the floorboards, all for him.

An enemy. A Deutscher.

A wolf you had persisted in restoring to health like a wounded bird.

At present, inundated by the harvest of your hard work, Kaiser’s narrowed blue eyes were magnetized to your every move in assessing stasis. He’d ponder bitterly, Who were you anyway to stir this ache in the Kaiser, the ruthless young Leutnant of the Imperial German Army? You were nothing but a mere, pitiful village girl... one with a knack for misplaced kindness. And that’s all you should’ve been... beneath him. Yet the sheer, unadulterated stupidity of your compassion borders on the profound, anchoring an unwilling awe in his chest that he seeks to grind down under the heel of his will—pulverizing it into ashes until only disdain remains.

Before being relegated into some sort of stray hound you had taken a fancy to feeding, Kaiser had his uniform and stripes to speak of his formidable legion of campaigns across the territory and beyond—what lives he took and terrorized to earn his title, his wicked recognition. He was to be feared, as he relished in the malicious gratification of it.

Yet it was an unanticipated skirmish that whisked him away from his men—an abrupt attack from the enemy gendarmerie the moment they gleaned word of his platoon’s discreet base in the vicinity of the village. It was unprecedented against Kaiser and the Zug he commandeered, but he held the line and endured the brutal, grinding trench warfare. His platoon—his Zug—out there, or perhaps lying in the front-line grave, while their Leutnant is now reduced to a helpless invalid in a rustic, forgotten cottage tucked away in the French countryside. The shame of it is still ever scalding, burning even hotter than the grip of his delirium ever did.

Kaiser had grappled by the skin of his teeth with his survival after. And as the days bled together, he fought desperately to stay alive even with his fatal wounds coaxing him ghoulishly to succumb to them, simultaneously hiding himself away in the cobwebbed gloom of the commune.

---

Kaiser was on the precipice of death. Of that, he was certain.

Huddled in the filth of a bygone alleyway ensconced in a quaint, picturesque French village, the stench of his own blood and fear shrouded his battered body in a dense veil of inevitable ruin. The world, at one time, was truly Kaiser’s to subjugate in his system of havoc. But now.. it had narrowed to the searing pain in his side—a carcass of a bygone stab wound, and the frigid, damp dread of imminent twilight. His weight was pressed upon the timeworn, stone walls of the pathway with an enfeebled pressure—catching wind of the distant, cheerful sounds of village life that he could hear even in the thresholds of the shadows. Children laughing, a woman singing... it had all seemed like a cruel joke played on him by a universe that sought to show its enmity towards him.

Hissing quietly, Kaiser pressed a hand to his wound—trying to stem the flow despite his vision tunneling, and it felt like his current broken state had truly branded itself onto his skin as an undoubted mark of his failure... an ineluctable conclusion. In this retributive ending, Kaiser would die a king without a kingdom, a god without worshippers, left to rot in the gutter like the trash his father always said he was.

But then.. you appeared.

You stood there, a stark silhouette against the dying radiance of the setting sun—a small, slight figure that should have posed an immediate threat, an enemy his dulled senses barely managed to register. You curiously regarded the crimson stains, the tattered gray uniform, and the unmistakable insignia of the very army you were bound to despise. He witnessed, then, the sudden flicker of recognition igniting your eyes, the momentary tightening of your jaw, the defensive stiffening of your stance. Kaiser braced himself. For a shrill scream, a frantic shout. For the sharp, echoing crack of a rifle as you summoned the nearby gendarmes. In those fleeting moments where he resigned himself to this grim, karmic fate, Kaiser even managed a weak, defiant smirk—his final, pathetic act of rebellion.

But you had done none of those things.

Rather, you simply lingered there for a suspended beat, as though your feet had been ruthlessly rooted onto the cobbled ground beneath, your expression entirely unreadable. And then.. you had spoken, your voice emerged gentle and hesitant. The exact French words had escaped his comprehension, yet the underlying gravity of the question remained completely unmistakable.

"Ça va…?"

...What? It was undoubtedly the most preposterous notion Kaiser had ever had the displeasure of enduring; so much so that his bewildered mind, already heavily encumbered by his looming fate, utterly failed to comprehend such sheer absurdity. He, an enemy soldier trespassing within your territory, bleeding out upon the fractured pavement of a forgotten alleyway—and you were inquiring if he were… alright? He strained to counter in the wake of it, desperate to spit some vitriolic German riposte that might restore the fractured balance of power between them.

Yet, all that escaped his desertic throat was a choked, wet cough. A tense moment bled into the next as you made your advance, taking a singular step closer—your movements entirely deliberate, innocuous, as though gingerly approaching a wounded, wild animal. It was a sentiment that did not seem too far from the truth. Subsequently, he tracked you with a narrowed, guarded observation, his hand instinctively darting toward the holster of the Luger he no longer possessed, silently cursing the bitter vacancy of that once-familiar steel. You sank to your knees, your skirts brushing the encroaching filth as you gently made contact with his forehead. Your touch radiated a soothing cool against his scalding skin, and in that fleeting instant, something profound within him shattered.

"Nein..!" he had managed to rasp, the single utterance emerging as a pathetic, strangled croak. He strained to inch backward onto the fractured pavement, desperately seeking to widen the proximity that had so suddenly closed with your unbidden nearness to him. Kaiser gritted his teeth, his brow furrowing in sharp, bitter irritation as he silently cursed his own pathetic vulnerability. "Lass mich in Ruhe."

But in spite of that.. A shake of your head accompanied that determined, furrowed brow he now witnessed every day. Eventually, you had remarked upon a different matter in resolute yet unbidden purpose, still lost beyond his clutches to perceive its pure intent—that is, leading up to you springing back onto your feet and walking off, to his astonishment.

Ugh... finally. Kaiser was overcome with a surging sentiment of relief, anticipating that would be the last he’d see of that strange village girl and be left placidly to embrace his impending demise. Alas.. it was rather short-lived.

You had returned shortly thereafter, a bucket of water and a clean cloth in hand. With a gentleness that had been infuriating yet still with a clinical imbue, you cleansed his seeping wound. He had lain there, a cocktail of impotent rage and a horrifying, creeping sense of gratitude weighing down on him to concede in your goodwill. You even made do with strips torn from your own petticoats somehow, bandaging him with its ever soft fabric pervading the scent of lavender into his skin.

After that, in an instant of such sheer, baffling insanity, the sheer absurdity of it had frozen him into a breathless hush..

"Chut… viens, vite. Il faut se dépêcher… avant qu'ils ne nous trouvent..!"

You’d addressed him in a hushed whisper as you helped him to his feet, draping his arm over your small shoulders—managing to hold his tonnage against your diminutive stature despite it eclipsing your near collapse—and strained to lead him away not to the village square to be executed, but to your small, humble cottage, tucked away at the distant edge of the woods.

You had.. hidden him.

You, a mere village girl, had chosen to shelter a broken enemy soldier. It was a notion of such unfathomable madness. The logic was so fundamentally broken that it completely bypassed his intellect, striking him directly in the soul. Kaiser had spent his entire life believing in the brutal law of power, where the strong preyed upon the weak. Yet here you were, a small creature of kindness, defying the very rules of nature he held sacred.

Pathetic... damn it all.

---

The old specter of their initial encounter at last waned, leaving behind the bitter taste of dependence. Kaiser’s weary gaze refocused upon you in the immediate present, perched beside him while you worked in gentle earnest to wash his body with a rough cloth lathered in soap, gliding it over his chest in slow, deliberate strokes, then his shoulders, down his arms. He watched you through half-lidded eyes, his mind wandering to the accumulated small kindnesses—the bandages changed, bread left within reach, your faint melodic hum while working.

He reflected then on three nights prior, when fever had still ravaged him at its most severe and his wound had festered with matching vigor. You knelt beside the straw pallet, your hands steady as you unwrapped the soiled linen from his thigh with a determined expression that the lantern sprawled long shadows onto. He had hissed through his teeth, his body rigid with pain, and you had paused—your eyes meeting his with something unreadable.

"Je sais que ça fait mal," you had whispered, your voice barely audible above the crackle of the hearth. You continued your work with painstaking care, your fingers cool against his burning skin as you cleansed the pus and blood with a deliberate touch that was clinical yet unbearably tender. When you applied the fresh bandages not long after, your hands had trembled slightly—not from fear, he realized now, but from the weight of what you were doing. Sheltering him. Saving him.

You should have let me die. The notion had been his aegis—a sanctuary in defiance of the gratitude that threatened to rupture his walled defenses. Yet even as he mulled over it, something in his chest had stirred—a hairline fracture in the armor he wore, brought about by the sight of your brow furrowed in concentration, your lower lip caught between your teeth as you worked. You had forfeited much of your possessions and even your own life for him. Knowing that and heaping onto it the silence of that moment, with your hands on his wounded flesh—Kaiser had felt something perilously close to.. awe.

There was also yesterday morning. Pride had kept his lips sealed despite the throb of hunger gnawing at his gut. You crept toward him with a bowl of broth for his routine meal, planting yourself perched on the lip of the pallet with that infuriating patience. Kaiser turned his head away, jaw set, refusing to acknowledge his need. In spite of it, you chose to simply wait. Steam rose between you from the warm meal that awaited him to heartily consume it, until at last his body double-crossed him with a subversive growl from his stomach that made his face burn with humiliation. Nothing had left your lips at that, though a small, amused smile curved it while you extended the spoon near his lips. Begrudgingly, he finally accepted it—hearing you hum that wonted French lullaby under your breath that you crooned habitually as you worked, which, across the vast stretch of days spent in your steady presence, has taken on a familiar and inescapable quality.

He had wished, with every fiber, to despise your existence—for bearing witness to his Achilles’ heel. Still, the memory now emerged with a warmth that appalled him substantially. Truly… you make me weak. Kaiser reflected then, his eyes gravitating towards the wall, withstanding ever colliding with your gaze even as he swallowed the nourishment you offered. But you had simply lingered in your melody, your presence a balm he dared not crave.

He remembered, vividly, the night before last—when sleep had eluded him and pain had kept him rigid in the darkness, confined by the solitary sensation of his suffering mounting once more. That was until Kaiser had sensed your presence before his gaze even lingered onto you—materialized as a soft shadow settled into the chair that lay by the hearth, the clicking of your knitting needles resonating faintly amidst the silence. You had resolved to stay there regardless of the late hour, choosing to keep watch over him until fatigue inexorably claimed him. Although when he stirred, the corner where you had been was bereft of your presence—albeit the quilt’s heavy wool heaped higher around his shoulders, and the embers had been stoked against the chill. Kaiser had lingered upon the mattress, peering a glance anchored to the vacant chair, where the utter hollow of your absence thumped hammering his chest like a physical wound. ..Damn. The faint imprecation he leveled against himself was a solitary thing, born of a bitter realization: Such details should have passed him by unheeded. He ought to have been indifferent. Yet Kaiser had kept a meticulous tally of the hours until your return, straining for the distant click of the latch. When at last you crossed the threshold, bearing the warmth of fresh bread and that small, tentative smile, an unbidden relief unfurled within his chest before his pride could bar the way.

And the baths—rites of humiliation perversely ingrained into routine since you first hauled him into your rustic haven and his battered, worn-down boots scraped against where the cool terracotta lay underfoot. He dwells on the first time, when you had washed his hair assiduously, your nails scratching gently into his scalp in a manner that stole from him a fractured breath. How you had murmured soft French apologies when the water scalded, testing the temperature with your elbow with the practiced tenderness of a mother with her child. How your hands had trembled upon that first contact—out of fear, perhaps, or something far more unnerving. This was yet another of your unmerited kindnesses, subduedly dismantling the fortress he had built against you. Always dragging my fragile heart out into the open… I cannot escape your suffocating mercy.

Beyond that, a grander obstacle loomed; it was a barrier Kaiser had yet to reckon with, born of their disparate tongues. This manifested in a moment two suns past, when the language barrier became a palpable thing, arising a sharp vexation of the stark divide in tongue as it stranded both of you in silence. He had been parched, his throat an arid chasm gripped by the lingering fire of his fever, and you had been attempting to tender him something from a clay pitcher. He had shaken his head, the foreign words slipping past him unheeded, forcing you to try anew—gesturing, miming the lift of a cup, your cheeks flushing with the sheer exertion of bridging the silence. Exasperation mounted steadily in his chest, a sharp pressure building right behind his eyes until his restraint finally snapped. Lunging forward, Kaiser seized the pitcher himself, swallowing greedily despite the violent tremor in his hands, sending a reckless cascade of water down his bare chest. He tasted a brief, petty victory in the way his sudden venom brought you to a complete standstill, shattering your calm—though only fleeting. When your palm inevitably extended to steady his swaying weight, the sheer audacity of your pity made him recoil. He flinched away, his jaw tight as he spat a low, guttural cascade of German curses at your feet, weaponizing a language he knew you couldn't comprehend just to build a bulwark between you again. The silence that rushed back into the cottage was immediate and suffocating, thick with the sudden, agonizing heat of his own shame.

Time and again, as Kaiser had come to learn, you failed to leave him anything short of completely struck dumb.

You, quite simply, only nodded. Reaching for the dry linen nearby, you set to work gently dappling away the moisture that splashed across his collarbones in his sudden, volatile eruption. Consequently, your face relented, smoothed over by a gentle, unspoken understanding that needed no translation. You gestured toward the pitcher before dropping your gaze meaningfully to him, the silence stretching between you like a wound awaiting suture—your patience a blade whetted against the stone of his resistance until he could no longer bear its edge. A heavy stare followed, the realization taking root in his mind by agonizing degrees that you would not relent, that you demanded this small surrender of him. "Eau," he muttered at last, forcing the syllable out like a bitter pill, his thick tongue wrapping mockingly around the vowels. His accent utterly butchered the French pronunciation, a physical manifestation of how deeply Kaiser reviled speaking the language of his captors, even with the basic vocabulary he possessed.

He had extended a trembling finger toward the pitcher; then, with a deliberation that cost him dearly, gestured toward his own mouth—finally, with a jerk of his chin that spoke of command rather than request, toward you. "Viens." The word had emerged harsh, guttural, yet unmistakably French, a concession that tasted of ash upon his tongue. You had understood. You approached, the pitcher cradled in your hands like an offering to some broken deity, and he had drunk from it while you held it steady against the violent tremor of his grasp—your eyes meeting his over the clay rim in a collision of gazes that spoke where tongues failed. Kaiser had not thanked you.. in truth, he could not. The syllables would have lodged like barbs in his throat, tearing at the fragile architecture of his pride. But something had passed between them in that suspended moment—a fragile truce brokered in silence, an ineluctable recognition of their mutual dependence that neither could afford to acknowledge aloud.

He had learned then, by agonizing degrees, that he could say arrête, could say danger, could say nourriture and eau in your tongue, and you would understand. The knowledge had been a weapon he did not want to need, yet he had hoarded those foreign syllables like ammunition in the dark arsenal of his mind, practicing them in the witching hours when you slept—when you could not hear the bitter cadence of his voice wrapping itself around the language of his captors, preparing for the next inevitable skirmish in this war of attrition.

The treacherous tenderness that has taken root within his chest cavity feels indistinguishable from high treason—an abject betrayal of the field-gray uniform he once wore with such lethal pride, of the Fatherland’s iron standard, of the very architecture of self he had spent twenty-six years fortifying against precisely this manner of siege. He is Leutnant Michael Kaiser of the Imperial German Army—a predator bred for war, not some wretched cur groveling for scraps of compassion from a village girl’s palm.

Yet here he remains, ensconced in this abominable tin basin like a child—permitting your hands upon his fevered skin, indeed starving for the continuation of that contact, and the recognition sends his gut roiling with a self-loathing so profound it borders on the physical.

Kaiser ought to despise you with the same virulence he reserves for his enemies. He attempts to conjure that hatred now, calling forth the specter of his father’s contemptuous sneer, the memory of the Oberfeldwebel’s riding crop cracking against his shoulders during training, every brutal homily he ever absorbed regarding the strong and the weak.

But the incantation failed.

Then you shifted, your skirt whispering against the metal rim, your hair cascaded forward in a veil that eclipsed the guttering firelight—and the entire architecture of his enmity collapsed beneath the weight of a single, devastating instant. He cannot recall, in that suspended breath, why hatred should bear your name at all.

A shudder wracked him, his reverie shattered violently when your cloth descended, gliding over the planes of his abdomen in languid, devastating circles that map the terrain of his scarred flesh with clinical innocence.

The linen dragged tauntingly against his skin with a friction that ignited awareness like flint striking tinder across his nerve endings, and he fathomed with sudden, terrible clarity that his flesh had committed treason against him yet again. Lower still the fabric ventured, to that treacherous expanse of skin just above the waterline where his hips disappear beneath the surface.. and he finds himself caught utterly unawares, his safeguard in ruins.

Weeks of sublimated tension crystallized in an instant of perfect, agonizing clarity: every furtive glance Kaiser has directed toward the pale column of your throat, every instance he has watched your hands laboring over some domestic task, each wretched hour he has spent awake in the straw-pallet darkness listening to the rhythm of your breathing from the adjacent room—all of it surged forth in a hot, ineluctable rush that brooks no denial. Arousal pooled heavy and traitorous in his groin, his manhood stirring against the tepid water despite the iron clamp of his will. Now, Kaiser was suddenly, violently aware at present of every fraction of warmth your body cast into the space surrounding him.. of the manner in which your breath ghosts against the wet plane of his shoulder, of the soap-slick friction of your palm against his submerged hip.

The atmosphere within the cramped cottage thickened, charged with an electricity that owed nothing to the rising vapor and everything to the catastrophic proximity of your regard. He could scent you. Lavender and woodsmoke, a particular essence that belonged to you alone, a fragrance that had long become maddeningly familiar across these weeks of enforced intimacy until it had woven itself into the very fabric of his consciousness. His heart hammered a brutal cadence against his ribs—a percussion of panic and wanting—and he knew with sudden, terrible certainty that he could no longer endure another moment of this passive submission, this emasculation masquerading as convalescence.

Irritation, directed at her, at himself, at this catastrophic weakness—flared white-hot, consuming the last vestiges of Kaiser’s restraint like parchment in a furnace. How dare she lay her hands upon him with such casual innocence? How dare she reduce him—Kaiser, the ruthless Leutnant—to this trembling state of unmanning need? He witnessed the slight widening of your eyes as you perceived the shift, the way your hand stilled against his submerged flesh as though singed, and the knowledge that you have noticed.. that you have borne witness to his arousal, his utter vulnerability.. unleashed something feral and vengeful in the cage of his chest.

Kaiser lunged with visceral speed that belied his convalescence—his hand shooting forth to manacle your wrist in a grip that is bruising, desperate, restrained. Water sloshed violently over the rim of the tub, soaking the floorboards and your skirts in equal measure in a baptism of chaos. He hauled you closer with a strength that defied his weakened state, his narrowed blue eyes burning with volatile accusation and naked, undisguised want. His thumb unearthed your pulse point, pressing with sufficient force to register the rabbit-quick hammer of your heart beneath his touch, and he holds your gaze with a ferocity that dares…no, commands you to look away.

Kaiser’s voice emerged as a low, dangerous growl dense with his Teutonic accent. The words rumbled from his chest like distant thunder—even so, as he speaks in his native tongue, the French syllables Kaiser has hoarded like ammunition rise unbidden to his lips, brutalized by his accent, spat forth like grapeshot. "Machst du das mit Absicht?" he demanded, his grip tightening to the threshold of pain whilst his perforating gaze raked over your features with curbed intensity. "Willst du mich provozieren, Mädchen?"