"It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice." - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
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"If they've already tried to make them talk we're screwed, you know that, right?" Juliette asked Thomas. She was seated in the living room of the safe house in Bordeaux.
Tom sighed. "If they've already tried to make them talk we're more than screwed. We're fu-"
"They won't have tried to make them talk already. The ranking officers here don't have high enough security clearance," Alex swiftly interjected. "Their orders were to detain them and keep them alive and safe until they get to Paris. You'll be fine, Juliette," he promised, looking each of them in the eye sternly. "Just, don't think about it. Our Resistance contact will be here soon."
As if on cue, the coded knock at the door sounded, and Alex was on his feet in an instant. When he opened the door he asked the relevant question, and when he received the relevant answer he let the woman in; code words were standard procedure, even with a secret knock.
"You are the new Brits, no?" the woman asked with a thick French accent, removing her jacket before following Alexis into the living room. "Such a shame about the other ones."
Alex nodded, but was ever a man of few words.
"My name is Brigitte. I am the local Resistance contact, as I am sure you are already aware."
Juliette's eyes shot up to the woman at the sound of her name. She knew that name and she vaguely recognised that voice.
"Brigitte?" she whispered subconsciously under her breath, her eyebrows furrowing as recognition set in. It was definitely her.
When the woman looked in her direction she gasped; Juliette hadn't been sure she would recognise her after all these years but apparently she had. "Juliette? Little Juliette Chevalier? It cannot be!"
Juliette hopped to her feet more out of shock than anything else, her eyes wide and her hands fidgeting as she tried to work out how to navigate this unfamiliar territory. But surely it was a good thing the safe house owner knew her - at least they knew they had her loyalty.
"I can hardly believe you recognise me," Jules resolved to say. She smiled when Brigitte placed two gentle hands on her shoulders as she took her in. Juliette was a lot older now than she had been when Brigitte had last seen her, and certainly much changed, but Brigitte was looking at her like she hadn't aged a day. It was a sort of warm feeling that settled into Jules' stomach at being looked at like she was the old, sweet Juliette who believed unfalteringly in the good in the world. The old Juliette who role-played princesses and weddings everyday. It seemed to be a lifetime since then, but standing opposite Brigitte, it had only been five minutes.
The French woman pulled Juliette into a tight hug, all the while voicing her disbelief at their reunion, before pulling back and scanning her once more. Then her face changed, as she seemed to realise that the fact that Juliette was here meant that she was a spy. Suddenly, that warm feeling was gone; with the look of poorly veiled dread that passed across Brigitte's face she was no longer that innocent little girl and was once more the agent who took lives on almost every mission, and who lied and manipulated relentlessly.
"You are a spy now, I see," Brigitte began, almost warily, as though afraid to say the wrong thing. She paused and then uttered a small sigh. "You are very brave. I can imagine your parents are very worried - but, oh, how proud they must be!"
Juliette looked away. "My parents don't know. You understand, of course, that -"
"Oh! Yes, of course. That was silly of me." Then she placed a hand on Jules' arm. "But you are still very brave."
Juliette smiled sadly. "Thank you."
"How do you two know one another?" Martin asked, looking between the two women cautiously.
Suddenly, all of the enthusiasm was back in Brigitte's manner. "Oh, I used to babysit little Juliette and her brother very often when they were small! I was a close friend of her parents - I had grown up on the same street as her father, you see - and when they lived here in Bordeaux I used to be their first choice of babysitter."
Juliette smiled. "You were always my favourite, too."
"She used to make me read - uh, I do not know how you say it in English, it is 'Cendrillon'?"
"'Cinderella'," Jules supplied.
The woman clicked her fingers before continuing. "Yes, 'Cinderella'! She used to beg me to read 'Cinderella' to her over and over again before she would sleep. She used to love to play princesses, I remember that very clearly. I had always thought she would grow up to become one, for I had never seen a prettier princess in my life."
Juliette smiled and pulled Brigitte into another hug, suddenly overcome with nostalgia and the gratitude that here, right in front of her, was someone who remembered her as she was before the war. That meant everything to her, for it proved that that little girl was real and had existed once upon a time, before she had had to grow up and discover parts of herself that were better left uncovered.
After they pulled apart Alex got straight to work interrogating the woman on everything he needed to know about their safe house, its location, the activity of the Nazis, and any recurrent issues the Resistance had been facing recently. He was especially concerned about any information she had on how there had been such an extreme information leak so as to expose an entire team of spies.
Brigitte lamented that she had no information on that matter to share. "It is so terrible what happened to them. So terrible. I wish so much that I could have stopped it. But if I had tried the Nazis would have taken me too, and I could no longer help others like yourselves."
Alex reassured her that she had done the right thing in staying quiet, and that there was nothing she could do.
At this point it was still very dark out, the early hours of the morning meaning an almost eerie silence had fallen over the city. Still, Juliette dreaded the sunrise; they were to leave at first light.
Jules left soon after alongside Thomas and Alexis in order to get a visual on the building that was currently imprisoning the team of British spies they were come to rescue. The building was rather pretty, in the way that old French architecture generally was, and looked utterly mundane; one could never have guessed who it was holding hostage.
The trio took note of the guard detail: where they were posted, how long the intervals were between shift changes, and the routes they took in order to change shifts. Juliette knew she needn't bother herself with it, really, as she would be hiding in plain sight, but she wanted to know where Tom would be waiting to give her back up, especially since his timing was so crucial.
Alex briefed them both once more on their jobs, this time with the visual aid of the building through their binoculars, and Juliette and Tom both nodded along as they tried to get as familiar with the building as possible by merely observing it from the outside.
When they set back on their route to the safe house, Tom offered Juliette a smile. "It must be nice to see Brigitte again. She seemed awfully excited to see you."
Due to the early hours of the morning they had to keep quiet, and with the posting of Nazis everywhere to enforce curfew they had to stick to the shadows. However, Thomas and Juliette in particular had mastered the art of the inconspicuous whisper through all of their experience in the field.
Jules nodded. "Yeah, it is nice to see her. Strange, though. I never expected to see her again. I'd kind of indirectly erased her from my memory, if I'm honest, but it's nice to speak with someone who remembers the me from before the war, even if I was quite young when she knew me."
Tom smiled slightly, and she knew he could relate to that feeling of having lost part of yourself with the experiences you had had. "I can imagine."
They spent the rest of the journey in silence, making sure they kept safely out of the sight of the SS guards and that no one was following them. After Tom pushed open the door to the apartment building and held it open for Alex and Jules, Alex turned back to her all of a sudden. He offered her a faint, though sweet, smile and placed a hand on her shoulder as though sensing her growing nerves through the energy she was radiating. "It's going to be okay, Juliette. I'll make sure you're safe."
Jules smiled back at him and nodded, grateful for the reassurance even though there was no way that was a promise he could make with absolute certainty, before following him and Tom up the stairs.
After having knocked the required rhythm on the dark wood of their safe house's door, Alex sent Jules another reassuring smile. This smile, however, dropped immediately when he turned to face Martin in the doorway, who had a grave expression on his face. Martin appeared almost ashen, as though he had seen a ghost.
He ushered the trio in quickly before shutting the door behind them and leaning against it. When Juliette looked from him to Will, who looked similarly pale and spooked, an icy foreboding clawed its way up from her feet to her stomach, settling in on top of the anxiety she already felt about the mission.
She glanced at Alex, who was looking at Brigitte, and followed his gaze to find the woman cowering in a corner, her hands covering her face.
Jules looked back to Martin with alarm written clearly on her face. "What's wrong?"