She survived two wars through a network of code words and code names.

(Keeping them safe, keeping them hidden.)

Mac Easmainn. Ruairí Ó Dálaigh. Saoirse ní Houlihan. Mac Diarmada.

(Philippe. Raoul. Sorelli. Erik.)

Gráinne.

(Herself, Christine.)

Dáithí. Frongoch. Northumberland. Ashbourne. Arbour Hill. Banna. Ninety-Eight. Fitzgerald. Malone. Connolly.

Passwords, invoking the dead, invoking sacrifice. Buying a way to safety.

It was 09 March 1920, the day she first met Raoul de Chagny. This boy of sixteen, and she had just turned seventeen, but there was something gentle in his hand, something soft in his voice as he gave the code, Mac Easmainn.

Code and name both, Mac Easmainn. She assumed that's who he was hoping to find, suspected him to be genuine, but you couldn't trust the Tans not to send a boy to lower someone's defences, so she held her place at the door. "And?"

He frowned, a furrow of his brow that made him look even younger. "And what?"

"Do you go around to people's doors randomly speaking Irish?" She put all of the disdain she could summon behind it, and felt a little sorry for him, but if he was genuine then he wouldn't break and she had to be sure.

He quirked a brow, and tilted his head. "Are you not Christine Daaé?"

Still best to be careful, best to check. "It would depend on who's asking."

"De Chagny, Raoul de Chagny."

She knew it was not Philippe because she had met Philippe and he insisted on paying her for letting him disguise himself in her father's old clothes. She knew, too, that there was another de Chagny, because Philippe had told her about his younger brother in school (and she had made him promise to be careful, for the sake of that brother, so he would not be left alone in the world as she had been). And this boy would look a bit like Philippe, a similar sort of jaw, his hair just as blond.

Still. Any number of people could know Philippe had a brother, could find a reasonably similar boy and set him up to catch her out.

"How can I be sure?"

He sighed, and swallowed. And it was the oddest thought that struck her, that he had a nice neck, something elegant about it. "If I said Erik told me to come here—"

She opened the door without another question, and let him in.

Erik had first come to her in March 1919, needing somewhere to hide. He was hobbling and had been running for three days and knew where to find her because he had written her a letter from Frongoch, to tell her of her father's death.

(Pneumonia. Thomas Daaé's lungs had never been strong.)

February 1917, and she had just turned fourteen, and had only Aunt Kitty for all her company in the world, the only thing between her and a convent or the workhouse. There had already been an official telegram with the news, and when she read the words she went straight to bed and refused to leave it. Then the letter came, a few days later, parts of it censored in heavy black ink, but the letter was addressed to her and the name was unfamiliar, until she saw written there in a spidery hand, your father Thomas.

(She still has the letter, tucked away safe with so many others.)

When Erik first came to her, that spring of 1919, it was only four months since her aunt had died, and it didn't matter to her that harbouring a fugitive could land her in prison, didn't matter to her a damn. Not when that fugitive was fighting the very power who arrested her father and caused his death in a foreign prison camp.

(She hated the English, hated them with every drop of blood within her, for taking her father from her.)

She fixed the gash in Erik's leg as well as she could, and made up the bed in her father's old room for him. He thanked her with a smile, and squeezed her hand.

Such a simple way, to become part of a war.

She heard the argument from the next room. The older de Chagny trying to persuade the younger one to go back to school, Raoul refusing. Around and around they went, and there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do. She had only just met Raoul, after all. And she had left school at thirteen, when her father was arrested. What could she possibly say?

"How can I go back after what they said about you?" and something cracked in her chest to hear Raoul say that, to realize that while his brother worried so much about protecting him — and she knew because Philippe had told her, one cool summer's evening with the smell of flowers heavy in the air while he waited for Sorelli to come — Raoul, too, was worrying about protecting his brother. This boy who could hardly be sixteen, ready to protect a man more than twice his age.

She was tempted to march right in there and tell Philippe to listen to his brother when the voices quietened, and she realized he had given in.

In another world, it would have struck her as horrifying, a boy of sixteen becoming a soldier like that.

In another world, there might not have been need for the war.

When the RIC came looking for Sorelli, the first time she stayed in April 1919, they didn't find her.

Instead they found a girl and her cousin baking bread. Not a gun in sight, no dusty clothes, no blood. They left without causing too much of a mess, and the dark-haired cousin promised that should they see anyone matching the description of Sorelli Harrison they would be sure to let them know.

It was all Christine could do to contain her laugh when she saw them walk down the road, to think they had spoken to Sorelli herself and never recognised her.

And that night Sorelli slipped back out, kissed her cheek before she left and gave her a sharp knife, should she need it.

"Another friend of ours will be passing through in a week. He'll be calling himself Mac Easmainn."

Christine promised to keep an eye out for him.

When Mac Easmainn did come through, he had burned his hand and there was soot on his face. She sat him down and tended to his injury and made him drink strong tea.

"You don't look much older than my brother," he whispered.

And so she first heard of Raoul.

(It was another two months before she knew Mac Easmainn was really Philippe de Chagny. And when she asked him about his choice of codename, his voice was strained as he murmured, "Casement was a good friend of mine.")

Erik told people for years that his face was disfigured from the South African war, when he fought on the side of the Boer farmers.

It was true that he was there, true that he fought though he was only seventeen. But it was not that an English gun disfigured him, because he made that bit up, to hide the fact that he had been born looking like that, as if half his face had been torn off, or almost.

She might have thought he was some sort of a wraith, that evening he first came to the door, if she'd thought that wraiths could bleed.

They arrested her father because he was in the Gaelic League and he played his accordion to the Volunteers and he had written poems that were published beside those of Plunkett and MacDonagh, so of course, of course this quiet man who never hurt a soul must secretly have been plotting a rebellion.

He never even owned a gun.

(It was Sorelli who got her a gun, August 1919, but only because she asked for one.)

It was Erik who sat with her, in the cool night air, after Raoul was shot.

He lay in the very bed she had first made up for Erik, his chest bandaged, eyelids hardly fluttering in his unconsciousness, Philippe holding his hand, gaunt and pale himself, soaked with blood, and she couldn't bear to be in the house a moment longer, couldn't bear the copper smell of blood in her nose, couldn't bear the walls closing in.

Sorelli was cleaning up, and she knew she should have been too, her house, her kitchen, her table where the surgery had taken place, but she couldn't stand it, not a moment longer.

So she was sitting out in the cold, breathing, slowly, trying to calm the pounding of her heart, when she felt someone beside her, and Erik handed her a cigarette.

"I find it helps at such times," he whispered, and she nodded.

The truce didn't come until July 1921, but to her own mind she counts it as the day they buried Philippe de Chagny three and a half months earlier, as if time stopped when they lay him in the ground in Glasnevin. (Raoul had swayed on his feet, as if he would collapse, and she held his arm to keep him steady.)

The police came that night, as Raoul lay half-insensible, and all that kept her from shooting them was the promise she had made to look after him, and how could she do that in prison? Or dead?

Her nails dug into the palm of her hand, and she was ready to fight, ready to argue, if she had to. To protect Raoul and Sorelli and Erik, and the house too. They would have destroyed the house, the house that had been Philippe's, that was newly-Raoul's, if not for the shots down the street that led them away.

(She never found out who was shooting that night, what side they were on, who was the target, but she thanks them every night in her prayers.)

(It was only afterwards she learned that Erik was stood just inside the door of Raoul's room, his revolver cocked and ready, if they got that far.)

Philippe de Chagny entrusted his brother's happiness to her just before he died.

It felt like a blessing for something not yet come.

After the police left, she crawled into bed beside Raoul, and took him in her arms, careful not to hurt him, careful not to jar his wound. And she held him there, as he shook with tears, as he shivered with fever, as he slept the sleep of the exhausted and woke gasping with Philippe's name on his tongue. Held him, and kept him safe, and ached that there was nothing she could do to ease the pain, nothing she could do to take the grief away, nothing she could do to bring Philippe back to him.

They were not a couple, only friends on the cusp of something more, but she kissed his forehead, and kissed his hand, and whispered to him as he whimpered, and when her tears came she closed her eyes and hid her face in his hair, and didn't try to stop them.

One of her sharpest memories of the days after is of Sorelli and Erik, embracing each other in the hallway. Framed there, half in shadows half in light, his face in her hair, both gasping quietly through the tears that wracked them, that they could finally release, when Philippe was in the ground.

Neither Erik nor Sorelli ever spoke of the time after the funeral, after Raoul's fever broke but before the truce. Neither of them could bear to stay still, and once they knew for sure that Raoul was going to be all right, they slipped away in the night, without a word of where they would go. And they never spoke of what they did, and Christine would never ask, but she knows they stole guns, knows they burned a barracks, knows they killed several men each, and made the Tans who were part of the ambush that killed Philippe pay for what they had done.

She does not need to know any more than that.

Looking back, she's not sure when she realised Erik and Sorelli and Philippe were three lovers. Maybe it was that first evening they came to her together, July, she thinks, 1919. She'd met each of them separately by then, and that evening they needed somewhere to lie low, just for a night, on the way back to Dublin.

"We're all right in the same room," Sorelli said, and smiled at her.

She thought it best not to ask questions.

She did ask Erik about it, that March, in the days between when Raoul was shot and when Philippe was killed. They were out having another smoke, and he was after telling her about Northumberland Road, when he had been shot during the Rising. He had heard them kill Michael Malone somewhere downstairs, and he had the door covered with his revolver, fighting against the rising blood in his chest, ready for them to come for him.

He was sure he was going to die, and he planned to take as many soldiers with him as he could.

The coughing started before they burst through the door, and as he choked on his own blood one of them stomped on his hand holding the revolver, and broke his fingers.

He laughed hollowly as he told her, "I've never been able to play the accordion since," and the silence that fell was heavy with the weight of all that had been done.

She took a second cigarette, and asked him about Philippe, and Sorelli, to save him from dwelling on what he had lost, and he told her with the softest smile, a true one, how they had been together for two and a half years.

"There is never a day when I am not grateful that they love me." And then he laughed, a low laugh in the cool night air, and she smiled to herself to hear him. "Philippe sent me a letter when I was in Frongoch that was half in Kikongo."

"Kikongo?" Such a thing for the man to write in!

"He learned it with Casement in Africa," Erik said, as if that was all of the explanation it needed, and she knows now that it was. "I copied it out and sent it back to him and asked for a translation." He took a drag of his cigarette, and breathed the smoke out. She watched it float grey against the night sky, curling up to the stars, and when he spoke again his voice was softer than a moment before. "It was another year and a half before we became involved, but that was the moment I knew."

It is a carved elegant box in his study, where Raoul keeps Casement's letters, and Philippe's.

She has never read them, and has no desire to poke in the business of dead men, but she is glad they can be a comfort to Raoul, glad that he can have these treasures of his brother's, and of the man he admired.

(She knows Philippe more than admired Casement, knows that he had loved him, and it is not her place to pry into that either. Enough that she knows. Enough that Philippe had been happy.)

The speculation over Casement's diaries disgusts her. What does it matter, who he did or did not love? She has been fortunate to count Philippe and Erik among her dearest friends, and that they loved each other does not make their efforts to free their country any less great, does not diminish them as men.

She does not care a damn what anyone might say, what anyone might think. The people who say those things could never understand.

There are some nights she can't sleep, because she remembers Philippe lying there so still, remembers Erik's head resting against his side, remembers Sorelli's face pressed close to his, remembers the feel of Raoul in her arms, remembers the slackness of Philippe's mouth, remembers watching him, willing him to breathe, to gasp, to cough, to do something. Even those ragged breaths were better than the silence that followed.

(She sees it so clearly, his head tilted back, the blood so dark staining his fingers, his clothes ragged, torn open, the wounds hidden by the towels Erik had pressed to them to stop the bleeding, soaked with blood, the webbing blue veins around his eyes, so stark, so clear against the white of his skin.)

(Some nights it is Raoul, instead, she sees, Raoul gasping in her arms, the blood spattered over his face, over his neck, welling between Philippe's fingers, his hand pressed to Raoul's chest, and she remembers thinking that this boy, this boy that she might love, maybe, was dying in her arms, and there was nothing she could do about it.)

1921-1923.

Raoul getting shot and Philippe's death to the ceasefire in the civil war.

She prefers not to remember the civil war. Prefers not to remember wondering if she would ever see Raoul again, prefers not to remember Erik sentenced to death, prefers not to remember the prison break that saved his life, and when she was captured herself.

Prefers not to remember Sorelli, and the fever that burned through her skin from the infected hole -in her side, and how she lay shivering and burning in Christine's arms, covered with two coats, while Raoul ran for a doctor.

More than forty years later she sleeps best when she doesn't let herself remember the details.

That they all survived it is a miracle.

(She only lets herself remember Raoul, and how when she kissed him for the first time, lying there in her father's old bed, his smile faint from the morphine and his wound, it felt like being reborn.)

("…didn't…get you flowers…" he breathed, and there were tears damp on his cheeks, and it was so hard not to cry, so she smiled for him instead. "You will," she whispered, "you will.")

Mostly she remembers the stillness.

The stillness of sitting outside with Erik, sharing a cigarette.

The stillness of Sorelli, sleeping in the armchair while she could.

The stillness of Philippe, asleep with his head on his brother's pillow.

The stillness of Raoul's hand in hers, as he slept, and as she listened to each soft breath, the tears were tight in her throat, to know he was alive, that he would live.

Such stillness. Such quiet. As if there were not a war, in the world outside around them. As if it was not a war that had brought them all here. As if this was perfectly normal, how things always would be. How they could be, someday, after.

Raoul sent her a gift of Broken Glory, Eva Gore-Booth's collection of poems for Christmas 1920. Alone in the house on a dark night, she read it by the light of the fire, and she was past crying, past collective grief over all that happened to bring them here, fighting the English in mountains and bogs and cramped narrow streets, but as she read the line, I dream of one who is dead, her throat caught tight, and she had to set the book down.

She did not, as a rule, drink alcohol, but she had a taste of whiskey that night, and as it burned in her chest she was made real.

(Raoul saw the book, sitting on her shelf, that March when they were waiting for Philippe and Erik to come back from meeting Lynch in the mountains, and when Sorelli was in the other room he traced his fingers over the spine of it and asked how she had liked it.)

("Well enough," she said, and well enough did not capture the half of it.)

(As he lay unconscious after the bullet that almost killed him, she wished she had said more.)

She still has that old copy of Broken Glory. It sits on the bookshelf beside the collected poems of Eva Gore-Booth and the collection of Countess Markievicz's prison letters. And beside them is the collection of Casement's poetry that his cousin put together and had published.

Philippe's poems are next to it. Raoul debated for months over publishing them. Philippe had only ever put a few into the world when he was alive, but there were hundreds and hundreds of them in his study, in notebooks and on the backs of envelopes and receipts. They sat down with them, she and Raoul, and Erik and Sorelli, long after everything was over, and chose the ones they thought he would have wanted the world to see.

The collection was well-received, in Dublin and America and England.

They have never regretted doing it, sharing with the world this part of the one they all miss.

The day Raoul proposed to her it was the eve of the fifth anniversary of Philippe's death. The next day they would visit his grave, and tell him the news, but that day they had gone for a walk in the Phoenix Park, and Christine knew there was something on Raoul's mind, but she thought it best not to ask. He often got quiet, when he was thinking of his brother, and it was better to let him be than to disturb him. So that day she just squeezed his hand as they walked, and when his lips twitched into a slight smile, her heart was light.

A warm afternoon in spring, the primroses blossoming delicate under the trees. They lay down on the blanket they'd brought, and she lay her head on his chest, his arm coming around her to keep her close. He still didn't speak, but she didn't mind because she knew his silences and the shape of them. She just curled her fingers with his, and contented herself watching a small round blackbird, bobbing through the grass.

She was almost asleep when she felt him shift, his thumb soft as it stroked the backs of her fingers. She pressed herself closer as he kissed her hair, and then she heard it, the soft whisper.

"Marry me."

Marry me.

Her breath caught, and she raised herself onto her elbow to look down into his face, this face she loved dearly (loves still, for all the ways it is different now, older), the scar on his chin, his deep blue eyes, his golden hair that bit too long curled to frame his face, and she had to make sure she had heard what she thought she did.

"Marry you?" Her voice fainter than she could ever remember it.

He nodded. "Only if you want to," and his eyes flickered looking into hers.

She smiled, and bowed her head, and pressed her lips lightly, lightly, to his.

And like that they were engaged.

The wedding was a quiet affair.

Herself and Raoul, of course. Sorelli as her bridesmaid and Erik as groomsman. The roles reversed from their wedding a couple of years earlier. They could have made it into a huge event, could have had photographs in all the papers. Raoul was infamous after the war, had built a name in speculation, and she had her own reputation. The two of them together would guarantee a media presence.

Instead they found a small church in Dublin, and with Erik and Sorelli as their only witnesses, they were married.

It was afterwards everybody else found out, and the letters came from all over the country. Christine still has them, tucked away safe.

After the ceasefire was called, she went back to her own house, to try to make it liveable. The table where Philippe had died had long been moved into her father's old room, because she could not stand to see it but it seemed wrong to burn it somehow, and it was a task to pull the house back from the mess it had fallen into. Erik and Sorelli had slipped away to Cork, and she had lost track of Raoul in the upheaval after Lynch's death in the Knockmealdown Mountains. The civil war was halfway to being over, and it began to feel like there could be a time afterwards.

The order to dump arms came on 24 May, and she tucked her revolver away safe, and her knife. Maybe she would never need them again, but better to have them and not need them than not have them and need them.

The next evening, as she swept the dust out from under the cupboard, a knock came to the door. Her hand went to her hip, but of course the revolver was not there anymore, and she flexed her fingers to get the reflex out of them, and swallowed.

(What a thing, to be little more than twenty, and tuned to the movements of war,)

Bracing herself, she opened the door.

There was no officer there, no soldiers. Only Raoul, a scabbed-over gash in his chin, his clothes ragged, his hands behind his back, the late evening sun making his hair glow.

Her heart caught, and he smiled at her, as he produced a bouquet of purple flowers from behind his back.

"You told me once, that if I brought you flowers I could kiss you."

The war is over, he meant, but could not say, and I want to love you right, and not in a hurry.

She nodded, and took the flowers. "Find me a jar for them," she said, "and I'll let you."

(There was an empty jar in the cupboard, and he filled it with water, and she took his hands in hers, and kissed him.)

They loved each other through the war. Held each other and kissed each other and loved each other in every way they could, though she worried and never told him that they might make a baby. It never happened, and they never stopped loving each other.

The war was the war, and she counts the start of their relationship from 25 May 1923. The first day afterwards.

(When they were together, during the war, she and Raoul pretended they were husband and wife. Ruairí and Gráinne Ó Dálaigh. Mostly they slept in sheds when they were on the run, or wrapped in their coats under the trees, but when they stayed in safe houses, or on the floors of trustworthy strangers, they were husband and wife to the eyes of the world, and slept in each other's arms.)

He has always been a very careful lover, and their first time, that summer of 1921, was awkward, the first for both of them, awkward, and uncomfortable, and a little painful, for both of them, the truce new and his wound still tender. But she enjoyed his kisses, enjoyed the brush of his hands on her sides, and when he gasped into her mouth and asked how it was, she swallowed a breath and whispered, "it's grand."

Grand.

"Grand," and he smiled against her.

(She asked Sorelli for advice after, on how to make it better. They were sitting by the fire, and Sorelli nodded, and told her things she could do, things Raoul could do for her and she for him. And when they tried it again, it was better for the both of them.)

(Sorelli cocked a brow the next morning to see her, and when Christine grinned, she smiled and made tea.)

After that evening when Raoul turned up at her door, she led him to her bed and there in the darkness they kissed and whispered and held each other, and slept better than either of them had slept in weeks. Years.

(He made her promise to keep the table Philippe had died on, that he couldn't bear the thought of it being destroyed, and sometimes the fact of still having it makes the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, but it is, in a way, a tribute to him and all he was, to have it and to have the photographs on it, to have the blood stains covered by the white sheet. When they are in season, she keeps a bouquet of greater periwinkles in the vase.)

Raoul helped her fix the house up, and at night they slept in each other's arms, his heartbeat beneath her ear reminding her that he was there, that he was real, that she need not be alone anymore.

When they could not put it off any longer, they went back to Dublin.

All Raoul had was what was left of the family wealth, most of it spent on guns, on two wars. There were two trusts for him, one from his father and one from Philippe, but he was only 19 and would not come into them until he was 21, and they decided it best that he find work. But he had no qualifications, had not even finished school. And the civil war had put a mark against his name with many possible employers.

Taking up a profession was out of the question without university. University was out of the question without completing the school exams.

They were in the parlour one afternoon, talking over apprenticeships, and how he might sit the exams, when a knock came to the door.

They went together to answer it, neither of them used, yet, to this post-war world, knowing that it would not be Erik or Sorelli because they would not knock. At the door they found a gentleman, dressed in a fine suit, who could not be much more than thirty. With an outstretched hand, he introduced himself as Millar Gordon, a stockbroker, and Raoul invited him in.

Into the parlour, and Gordon swallowed, turning to Raoul. "I briefly knew your brother," and his accent was distinctly Northern (Belfast, Christine later learned). "And I knew someone who I believe was a good friend of your brother."

Raoul quirked his brow. "Who might that have been?"

Something flickered in Gordon's face, that vanished as soon as it came, and he swallowed convulsively. "Roger Casement." The name was barely a whisper.

Christine excused herself to make some tea.

By the end of Gordon's visit, Raoul had a job.

(After he had left, Raoul swung her around, laughing. The first time he properly laughed, and they fell to the floor in each other's arms.)

The night she told him she was expecting a baby, she had already known for three days.

Three days of keeping it secret, of figuring out what words to use, of a way to do it. Should she tell him in a dramatic fashion? Tell him over dinner? Morning or afternoon? Casually or with gravitas?

In the end, it was simply that she could not keep it in any longer.

A cold night in late January, but it was warm in their bed, warm with his arm around her, his head tucked in against her neck, the way he sleeps best. They were only after turning in, so she knew he was not asleep, and she squeezed his hand, and kissed his forehead.

"We're going to have a baby." She breathed it softly into the darkness, and felt his breath hitch.

"What did you say?" His voice gravelly with tiredness, she always remembers it, how rough it was that night.

So she repeated it, a little louder, feeling the weight of the words.

"We're going to have a baby."

He shifted, rolled over and turned on the lamp, and in the soft glowing light his face was pale, his hair already mussed, his stubble shining as the light caught it. "When?"

"August. Mid-August."

He smiled, just slightly, as a tear slipped down his cheek, and kissed her.

It was Raoul who suggested Philippe, she who suggested Ruairí, and together they named their son.

(It would have been her right to suggest Thomas, after her father. But Philippe Thomas didn't ring right, and nor did Thomas Philippe, and Tom de Chagny felt like it was missing something. So she suggested Ruairí, and it was for Casement, a bit, for her son sharing his birthday, but it was for Raoul too.)

If she were a superstitious woman, she might have considered it bad luck to name her son after dead men.

Philippe, named after his dead uncle, brought to an early death.

Raoul, named after another dead uncle, almost brought to an early death before spending two years on the run.

Casement and how many Rogers were in his family tree? Many of them, as it turned out from Raoul's research. His own father one of them, and both of their lives spun short.

Philippe Ruairí, a combination of names, deaths. And maybe she would have been superstitious, but she had faith in those names to keep her boy safe.

He did not tell her that he was frightened she would die, but she already knew. After all, his mother had died when she had him, her own mother died when she was only a little girl, so little her only memories of the woman were of her long blonde hair, and her soft voice, whispering stories. So she knew he was frightened, but he would not speak of it.

He didn't want to worry her, she knew. And she didn't want him to dwell on it.

(He talked to Erik about it, and she was relieved that he could put it into words for someone. And she talked to Sorelli about it, so though it was too much for them to say to each other, they did not dwell on the thing that could happen, but which would be unlikely.)

She could never have asked for a more attentive husband.

It was her choice to have the baby at home. She could have gone into a nursing home, could have paid to stay in there for weeks and be sure of proper treatment. The very thought of it made her anxious. Not that something would go wrong, but being in a different environment, being surrounded by strangers.

Better to be at home, in her own room, in her normal surroundings, with Sorelli to hold her hand, and Raoul and Erik waiting just outside. And if something was going wrong, to go to the hospital then. But the odds of something going wrong were low, and she was happier to be comfortable.

(Sorelli had made the same decision, six years earlier, and nothing had gone wrong, and she had stayed with her through it while the midwife worked, and as Sorelli cursed everyone from Erik to Cosgrave to de Valera and even hurled a few words at the ghost of Philippe, Christine sat behind her letting her squeeze her hands half to death and agreeing with everything she said.)

(When little Connie came screaming into the world, all the cursing was forgotten.)

When she told Raoul she wanted to have the baby at home, he nodded and kissed her, and told her it was her choice.

The night Ruairí was born, Philippe came to her in her dreams.

"Thank you," he whispered, and kissed her hand. "Thank you."

(When she woke, after, to Raoul asleep beside her, to the soft snuffles of Ruairí sleeping in his basket beside the bed, his fingers so small under hers, there was an easiness in her heart that she had never known before.)

(She has never told Raoul about it, but she told Sorelli, and Sorelli's voice was soft when she whispered, "sometimes it feels like he's still here.")

Raoul wanted to sleep in the chair that night, after the baby was born. He would have gone to the other room, but he didn't want to be far from her, and she didn't want him to be far. When she woke from that first sleep, and found him in the chair beside the bed, tired and smiling to himself, she squeezed his hand and asked him to join her in the bed.

"I don't want to hurt you," he whispered, and she was sore, and stiff, but she wanted to be close to him, wanted to feel him close to her, so she smiled and told him he wouldn't. And it was a little bit of a lie, but he needn't know that.

He slipped in beside her, slowly, and carefully pressed close, and she closed her eyes, and sighed. "I always sleep better with you here."

(And she did sleep well, before and after that dream with Philippe, with Raoul close to her, and her hand in the cot with Ruairí's fingers curled around one of hers, and sometimes she looks at him even now, all grown up, and remembers that first night, when he was so small and new. She could never be prouder of him than she is, when she sees the fine young man he's become.)

Ruairí has taken after Raoul, tall and slim, that firm De Chagny jaw that had sometimes made Philippe look stern but adds an elegance to Raoul when he tilts his head. There is a little of her around his eyes, in his forehead and in his mouth, and something of her father in his hands, but he is a de Chagny in every way.

Sometimes, at some angles, he looks like Philippe back again. Or Philippe as he could have been as a younger man. She only knew him in those last two years before he died, and sometimes she wonders what it would have been like to know him sooner, earlier. In a time without war.

(Have they ever known a time without war? Even now it is in their memories, in their muscles and bones, in their fingertips.)

Erik's death, 10 June 1957, was sudden.

The best way, perhaps, that he didn't suffer. He had even been to see them the evening before, talking to Raoul about his latest manuscript. He had been in good spirits, himself in every way, and Sorelli was laughing as they went out the door to go home.

He had a headache the next morning, Sorelli told them after. Took aspirin for it and went out into the garden and just collapsed, dead. An aneurysm, the doctors said. Quick. He hardly would have felt a thing.

Seventy-four years old, and dead, just like that.

(Philippe would have been seventy-six, if he had lived.)

They buried him in the grave with Philippe. Raoul's suggestion, when he could find words to make it, that they would be together. Ruairí did the eulogy, his hair combed back so that he looked, almost, like how Raoul once had, and all day he kept his eye on Connie, not that there has ever been anything between them, and he said once that it would be like going out with his sister, if he got involved with Philomena Constance, and in an odd way Christine was relieved to know there was nothing but friendship between her son and her goddaughter, and it was an incongruous thing to think of, when they were just after burying Erik, but it came to her all the same, oddly, with how protective Ruairí was of his dearest friend.

Someday Sorelli will join her two men in the grave. Someday Raoul will be there too, and Christine herself. The five of them back together again, and to hell with what the world says.

Erik was like a brother to her, and she thinks Philippe would have been too. And it is an old grief deep in her heart, that she never got the chance to know.

It is fifty years, now, since the Rising. Fifty years, and it is necessary, it is right and good to mark it, to pay respect to the past and what started it all, but she cannot watch this Insurrection series that feels like an attempt to relive it, just a little differently.

What she remembers of the Rising is dim, because she was not there, was not part of it. She was far too young, but what she remembers best is her father being taken from the house by the soldiers, though he had no association, played no part. All because of who his friends were. All because of his poetry and his music. He died because of it, and she cannot bring herself to associate with anything that tries to make it real again.

She cannot watch these actors parade on a screen wearing the names of men long-dead, as if they could revive them by pretending to be them, just for a little while.

It is too false for her.

Raoul does not watch it either. Instead he sits down, and writes his own quiet tribute to all those who had died. To the ones who died for freedom, and the ones who died for peace, and the ones who died knowing they had to, and the ones who died long after, when it was all done, but who played their own part too.

There were many nights she lay awake, after she told Raoul about the baby. Many nights, thinking, wondering, learning the new shape of herself, feeling each kick, each tiny little shift, as the baby grew bigger within her.

There was one night she remembers best, in the darkness. It was late March, a few nights after Philippe's anniversary, and she was halfway along, or a little more, the softness of her belly still new, still a little strange to her. Raoul was asleep, a better sleep than he had had in recent nights, no nightmares this time, no memories in the darkness, and as she felt the flutter of his soft breaths against her neck, his arm warm around her, she thought of this baby within her, and how she had almost begun to think it would never happen. Raoul's baby. Her baby. Theirs.

Theirs.

And she thought of her mother, that woman only a memory. Did she, too, lie awake in the darkness, and think of all that had happened, that could happen, and feel this great overwhelming ache to keep her baby not yet born safe from the world and everything in it? Did she have faith that everything would go well? Or did she worry?

And she thought then of Raoul's mother. That woman who had died to have him, who had broken her husband's heart so that he died an early death and Philippe was the only one left, brother and father and mother all in one to look after Raoul and love him and keep him safe. If their mother had known what would happen, would she have done anything different? Could she have? Would she have been proud, of how her sons had turned out?

Christine could not imagine her not being proud. Torn with grief, yes, over Philippe, but proud.

And she sighed into the darkness, and stroked her thumb over the softness of her belly, and brushed Raoul's fingers, and knew they were lucky, to have lived, to have survived. Lucky to have each other, to love each other. Lucky, that their child would be born free in a way that they had not been, and so help her, but she would do anything to keep her child from having to know war as they had done. From having to know that grief, that fear.

More than just lucky. Fortunate. Blessed.

She is not sure that she believes in a god, after everything. Not sure that there is some higher power, benevolent or vengeful. But she believes that there must be something after death, must be more than just darkness forever. And she believes, she knows, knew then, that night, her hand on her belly and Raoul sleeping beside her, knew that their baby was a blessing, a gift, and one that she would love and protect to the end of her days.

(They will see Philippe again, she knows. Philippe, and Erik. And her father and mother and Aunt Kitty. And Raoul's parents, Sorelli's. See Lynch and Malley and Murray. And Casement. See them all. And maybe some would call her delusional, but she believes it, because she wants to, she needs to. She is no theologian, is far from being a religious woman, but if she did not let herself believe it then there would be hope, only endless darkness forever.)

On the anniversary of the Rising itself, they go to Glasnevin, she and Raoul and Ruairí, and visit Philippe and Erik in the grave where they lie together, and visit the grave that holds Casement's bones.

(That funeral last year, long-awaited, and she knew Raoul was thinking of Philippe, saw the tears that trickled down his cheeks as they lowered the coffin, and all she could do was squeeze his hand, and offer her silent strength.)

They do not speak, not at either grave, but it is enough to be there, enough to mark it, in their own silent way.

Best to let the dead rest. They suffered enough in life.

(She knows Raoul blames himself for Philippe's death. Knows that he thinks if he had not been shot then Philippe would have been faster, would have been more alert, more careful, that he would have survived the ambush. And maybe he would have but it is not right that Raoul blames himself, and maybe she's selfish but if a de Chagny brother had to die, she would choose to save Raoul any day.)

(She hates to admit it, even to herself, would never speak it aloud, but it's true.)

(In a better world, it would never have been a question.)

The first place they went after they were married was the graveyard.

Her in her dress, Raoul in his suit. Sorelli and Erik wandered quietly, gave them space, and with Raoul's hand in hers they went to Philippe's grave, and lay her bouquet at the stone bearing his name. And they did not speak, and there were tears in both of their eyes, but they knew he would be happy for them, knew he would be pleased.

They escaped alive, but the nightmares took a toll on them all. Some nights she woke gasping, some nights Raoul woke her screaming, writhing in the bed. It was the same for Erik and Sorelli. Memories twisting into nightmares, memories that were nightmares re-lived all over again (Philippe dying, Raoul shot, Sorelli shot, breaking Erik out of prison, getting thrown in prison), twisted and changed (Raoul dead, Sorelli dead, her dying, Erik dead, and the blood so much blood, world pressing in).

The nightmares have become less frequent with age, only a few times a year. But still they come, every now and then.

She has never forgotten Sorelli's cry that night, when the door burst open and Erik stumbled in, bloody and crying, Philippe half-unconscious on his back. Has never forgotten Philippe's groan of pain as they settled him on the table, hears Erik's half-hysterical "you don't need a priest!" in her dreams, sees the bottle of morphine Sorelli took that had been left for Raoul, and the glint of the needle as she drew up a dose for Philippe. And how the bile rose in her throat, when she realised his spine had been shattered, that he could not feel his legs. How pale Raoul was in the door, how he sank into her arms as she led him to a chair, the gasp of his voice as he whispered to Philippe and Philippe's faint smile, the brightness of his eyes. And how she held Raoul as he shook, as he lay his head down on Philippe's shoulder. Her own tears blurred her vision, and she will never forget the way Erik and Sorelli were whispering, telling Philippe they loved them, kissing his face, his hands, and all she could do was hold Raoul, hold him, as she watched the pulse flicker in Philippe's throat, and stop.

Erik's silent tears as the doctor stitched his forehead, his eyes never leaving Philippe.

Sorelli so gentle cleaning the blood from Philippe's face, from the corner of his mouth.

Raoul with eyes closed, as if he could make it not real.

She was the one who covered Philippe with Erik's big coat.

And the fear that gripped her heart, when she realised Raoul was bleeding again. She had thought the blood was Philippe's.

The quiet in the room, as the doctor attended to his wound , silent but for Raoul's ragged breath.

She steadied him on the walk back to bed, and never left his side all night, her head on the pillow next to his, her hand twined with his, her fingers stroking his hair. She didn't sleep, felt it each time he woke, and even as he slept the tears trickled down his face, and she watched Sorelli and how still she was, as if she was frozen there in the chair, the revolver in her lap, her jaw set and firm, eyes rimmed red in the dim light from the lamp and several times she saw the tears glisten on her cheeks, but she never made a sound.

Christine wanted to tell her to go into the kitchen, to sit with Philippe and be there with Erik, but she couldn't find a word to speak, and she knew Sorelli would never go.

The first light of morning broke watery and grey, and it felt as if the world would never be right again.

(Something rare and beautiful gone from it, broken.)

(I dream of one who is dead, above dreams that float and fall in the water…)

She does not regret being involved in the war, either war. She knew more than four years of war for the sake of Ireland, but she cannot regret them. It was her duty. It was necessary. And it was an incomplete freedom that resulted, but they have fixed it as best they can, and there is more to do, more to be done, but some day, somehow, the six counties of Northern Ireland will be brought back and united with the twenty-six of the Republic, and it will be a free and united Ireland at last. More violence will not solve it, but they will find a way.

(The war brought her Raoul, and she would never give him up for the world.)

She's loved him since that day in her kitchen, when he asked if he could kiss her, and she told him to bring her flowers.

If she had known he would be shot in the time it took to take a breath, she would have kissed him then and there.

Would have kissed him, and never stopped.