There are things he remembers all of his life.

The impression of Philippe, tall and brave beside him, telling him it's all right to walk into the sea. The water cool against his knees. The sun glinting gold on the waves, grains of sand between his toes. The screams of gulls overhead. How he slipped and fell, but before the water could pull him under, Philippe scooped him into his arms and out of harm's way and he laughed, laughed as his brother swung him up high because it felt like flying, felt like he was one of the birds and he could grab them if he was only quick enough.

There are things Raoul de Chagny remembers all of his life. That day when he was two is one of the best of all.

If he had been older when his parents died, maybe it would have cut him worse. But his mother died when he was a baby, hardly a week old, and his father died when he was three. He has no clear memory of the man, except height, and distance, and a white beard, like something in a painting. All there is of him are shadows, and an echo that might be a voice, the glint of a ring on a finger.

It is as if his parents belonged to somebody else, as if they never existed outside of stories, were never any part of him.

It is Philippe he remembers best. Philippe, who tucked him in at night, and lay down beside him to tell him stories. Philippe, who he would press himself to when he was tiny and scared, and didn't want to be alone. Philippe who promised him that he would never need to be frightened.

Philippe, who taught him to read, and to write, and decided he should learn how to play the piano, that it was only right and proper.

Philippe, who took him out on a boat every weekend every summer, from when he was five, who taught him ropes and knots and how to count the stars, and find his way in the dark.

He remembers everything about Philippe, and how he smiled, and how his voice was soft whispering in the darkness, and how the bad dreams never came, when his brother was at his side. How his hair looked like gold under the sun, and his eyes were as blue as the sky.

(He remembers, too, how he missed him when he was old enough to go to school. And it was never so easy to sleep, in a dormitory of other boys, without Philippe just down the hall, without the tinkling of soft music from the parlour, but it was part of growing up, part of becoming a man, and that was all he wanted to do, to grow up and become a man, and be like Philippe.)

He doesn't remember the day they told him Philippe was dead.

Heaven knows he's tried to remember. Oh how he's tried. It must be in his head somewhere, buried behind everything else. He was sixteen, and he might not have been a man, but he was far from a child either, and logic dictates that he should have some memory of it.

He tries to reach it, has tried to reach it so many times, but it's just this space where a memory used to be.

He's never been able to remember it.

He has been fortunate, in his life, to be friends with psychiatrists who have made a whole study of traumatic events and the influence of childhood in forming the man. (There's a whole study there, to be done on some of the men he's known, but psychiatry has never been his field and he is far from equipped to carry it out.) The idea of something so terrible happening that it becomes locked in the brain and is never fully experienced, though everything else is experienced through it.

(Anger, and grief.)

But he can't find the memory of the day Philippe died.

He remembers afterwards. Remembers seeing his brother's face, and it didn't much seem like his brother's face, so pale and waxy. There was a cut above his eye that had been stitched closed, and they covered it in make-up when they laid him out but they couldn't quite hide it, and it was still a blemish that he could put his fingers to, a ridge like a scar, if there had been time for a scar to form.

(Across more than seventy years, he remembers the feel of it beneath his fingertips.)

He's often wondered, if he should have had them pull the sheet down past Philippe's shoulders, had them show him the terrible wounds that must have been there on his chest, the ones that killed him, the shrapnel from the bomb and the splintered ribs, but he didn't ask, didn't think that he could, and there was no breath in his lungs.

He remembers telling Sorelli.

It was only the fourth time he'd met her, his brother's fiancée, as she was then. (And he still has the letter Philippe wrote him when he was in Clongowes, to say he'd proposed and she'd said yes, and they'd agreed to marry when she was out of the hospital, whenever that would be.)

She'd always been polite to him, always had a smile for him, but he'd never readily spoken to her before, beyond formalities, beyond her breathy laugh.

(He remembers the way Philippe cried, to tell him of the TB in her bones, how he sipped brandy, and couldn't speak, the tears trickling down his face, and there was nothing he could say, but how he ached to say something, so he hugged him in place of words, and Philippe wept into his shoulder, and it seemed wrong that he should be comforting his brother, his brother who was more like a father, but there were tears in his eyes, too.)

That it fell to him to tell her— but there was no one else.

He can still see, behind his eyes, how she looked that way. Sitting in her bed beside the window, the light glinting on her dark hair, her leg in a cage. He knew there were twenty other girls on the ward, but he couldn't see any of them, could only see the book open on her lap that she wasn't reading, , the tilt of her head as she looked out the window at the rain. Every detail sharp in his mind, down to the pallor of her skin.

That she would have been his sister-in-law—

Nothing in the world felt real, his legs not even his own, none of the words felt right, but he didn't have to speak them, because when she looked at him she knew, and it was all he could do to keep breathing, as he whispered about the bomb.

She closed her eyes, and released a slow breath, and that was the moment that choked him.

He doesn't remember much of the funeral. Mostly the people, pressing close to shake his hand, the coffin before him and the glowing lights, shining off the dark stain of the wood.

The disbelief, that his brother was in there.

How was Philippe in there?

He sat beside the coffin all night, unable to speak a word, unable to think of very much of anything at all. Just looking at it, feeling half-tethered, the prayers cycling back through his head, the Latin circling and circling. Salve Regina…mater misericordiae…

All these people he didn't know, coming to tell him how sorry they were. Why would they be sorry? They weren't the ones who set the bomb. They didn't kill his brother. Why would they be sorry?

Who were they? All these strange faces, unknown to him. Why did they come?

And the girl, the girl with the golden hair. Wrapped in a coat too big for her, her face as white as he felt, the redness of her eyes, and her fingers were slim in his, something about her that struck his heart., that knocked the air from his lungs. Her hair golden in the candlelight, and those eyes, bloodshot blue like a mirror, her fingers slipping from his, and he tried to grasp them, but they were gone.

The fingers and the girl, lost back in the crowd.

A new hollowness, spreading beneath his ribs.

He choked on the breath in his throat.