Summer in Germany. // TR x Reader

Chapter One.

A gentle pull on my hand. I resist, turning away, and smile when I feel the tiny fingers pushing aside my bangs, the weight of a body against mine.

"Hello" A huff of breath against my cheek. "Are you alive?"

"She's asleep," Someone whispers. "If we don't wake her up, we can eat all the chocolate ship waffles we want.."

I growl, and clamp a hand over his, which is sneaking under the edge of my sleepshirt. I open my eyes and look up into his face, those handsome features dusted by flour and a smear of chocolate. "Easy," I warn him, pulling on his wrist and dragging him onto the mattress, my movements quick as I wiggle out of the covers and atop his waist. "You know the monster is grouchy when she is awoken."

"Let me, let me!" Bethany scrambles before me, straddling his chest and gripping the front of his shirt, looking back at me with a smile.
"Ah..." I crow.

"My monster keeper and I have got you captured, my good sir!" I shift atop him and he gives me a look, the sort of look that–years ago. I smile at him and wrap my arms around him. "Alright, I have to get to writing."

I'm dying. It's a grim start to any story, but I think the news should be delivered in the same manner as a ripped band-aid. Short and blunt, a stab that burns for a moment, then is gone, the moment over.
My doctor tip-toed around the news, showing me test results and citing blood cell counts.
I should be sad. I should be emotional, my fingers shaking as they press cell phone buttons and make depressingly bleak phone calls to all of my friends and family. Only, I don't have friends. And my family ... I have no family. I have only this countdown, a dark ominous chant of days, sunrises and sunsets before my body gives up and my mind shuts down. It's not really a terrible diagnosis—not for me. I've been waiting four years for something like this to happen, a guillotine to fall, an escape door to appear. I'd be almost cheerful about it, if it weren't for the book.
The story. The truth, which I've avoided for the last eight years.

I step into my office and flip on the light. Moving forward, I reach out, my hand trailing over the corkboard wall, hovering over the tacked up drawings of Third Reich— the little red nazi as what I've called him, the pages of abandoned ideas, jotted notes of a hundred sleepless nights, sparks of inspiration—some that led nowhere, some that now sit on bookshelves on my digital platform.
My husband made me this board. His hands held the wood frame in place, cut the cork, and nailed the pieces into place. He kept me out of the office all day to do it, my insistence at entering thwarted by the lock, my knocks on the door ignored.
I remember sitting back in this same chair, my hands on my belly, and seeing the final product. I had stared up at the blank board and thought of all the stories I would build on it, the words already itching for their place. It had become everything I thought it would.

I stop at the page I've read countless times, its paper worn more than the others, the edges not obscured with clippings or neighboring photos. It's the synopsis for a novel. Right now, it's just one paragraph in length, the type of copy that might one day be embossed on the back cover of the book. I've written fifteen novels, but this one terrifies me. I fear that I won't have the right words, the right arc, that I will aim too high, hit too hard, and still not properly affect the reader. I fear that I'll tell everything, and still no one will understand. It's a book I had planned to write decades from now, once my skills had grown, my writing sharpened, talents perfected. It is a book I planned to spend years on, everything else pushed aside, my world closing in on the one thing that mattered, nothing else moving until it was finished, until it was perfect.

Now, I don't have decades. I don't have years. I don't have the level of skill. I don't have anything. It doesn't matter. I pull at the tack that holds it in place, and set the page carefully on the center of my clean desk. Three months.
The deadline is the tightest I've ever faced. There will be no frantic calls to my peers, no negotiation for more time. Three months to write a story that deserves years.

Weather an eternity or just a minute,
There he was at the junction with bullets flying past him in every direction. Instead of crossing the street, they saw him dancing, as if in a trance. He cursed the shooters. Like he wanted to stay there forever. As if he wanted to show off his waltz amid the gunfire, with the waving swastikas above his head.
And it's followers.
Preparing their big revenge just 300 yards away:
Die Throzemphtekh.

He'd seen him before, having had business in this once beautiful place several times, but he didn't have to pay him off- His leader would have taken
care of that.
Reich pasted a tiny smile on his face, feeling a bit more alert now that the coke had fully kicked in.
But his smile faded as he took the person more into
view, who was definitely not what he was
expecting.
His face, already flushed with content, dimmed at
the sight of the other.
"Who are you?," he said, breathless.

— Panzxr Chocolate, Nhozempthekh (2018)
ThirdUnion—

Writing the first chapter burns. Maybe it's the new approach, maybe it's the memories, but I feel hot with the effort, my shirt damp against the small of my back, my chest tight and achy by the time I finish the story of their meeting and their first interaction. It was a night where his fingers looped through his as they come from beneath the snow. He had kissed him against that tree, my mouth hesitant, his strong and sure, my nerves dissolving in the first confident dive of his tongue.
I had been such a young twelve year old—one that had never been on a date, never been pursued, never cared about boys and romance, outside of the pages of the novels she wrote.
Those long ThirdUnion oneshots, stories, and the nights she'd draw illustrations for them.

But everything had been different after that night. Simon swept into my life and turned it into something fiery and wild, my days beginning with an excited fervor, my nights ending with thoughts of love and of a book—one of travel and passion, of their eyes and his touch, of being desired for something other than his words.

At precisely 2: 24 on Wednesday afternoon, I stop typing. Moving the laptop aside, I clear off the top of my desk, moving my phone into the center of the space, a fresh notepad pulled from the drawer, a pen uncapped and placed on its white lined surface. In the next two minutes, I settle back against the chair and extend my arms over my head, closing my eyes and stretching my chest.