Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Survivor's Guilt
Blood. Blood everywhere, on his hands, on the ground, in his mouth. He was kneeling on the ground but he couldn't feel it. No senses here but pain. Only scattered, irrelevant thought.
The dream's burning remembrance didn't leave when he awoke, and Hogan paced with a severe headache.
He remembered searching frantically for a pulse on his fallen subordinate, and finding none. He remembered looking up into the faces of his crewmembers--Kinch on the verge of tears, Carter in shock, Newkirk glaring his hatred at Hogan, and an aching hole where LeBeau should have been.
LeBeau: Always the weakest member of the team, the most-- expendable, no matter what they said about Carter. That only made it worse.
It had been a fairly simple mission, in, out, and back to camp. There was no-one but Hogan to blame for the way it turned out. Hadn't he sent LeBeau? Hadn't he given him no backup?
In short, LeBeau had been captured by Major Hochstetter.
Hogan himself had ordered his death. There was no way to rescue him, and the local Underground couldn't risk his death. Of course, the Stalag 13 operation was gone, another product of his bad commanding skills.
They'd poisoned Lebeau, and it had been fairly quick. That was no consolation. He was, after all was said and done, dead.
He could not remember leaving Gestapo HQ under his own power. Perhaps he'd fainted. But he remembered the desperate escape and the fear, and, most of all, the sorrow, that unending pain from a wound no one can see or heal.
God, his head hurt. It felt like his forehead was going to explode.
Hogan realized that his hand was resting on the handle of his gun, and in the cold steel there came an answer.
The private who came when he heard the gunshot stared at Hogan's prone body and wondered what had happened to the new arrivals to make them so bitter.
His companion was thinking along the same lines.
"Who could they have been? That's the third suicide in as many days!"
X-X-X
Years passed. The war ended.
Carter stared down at the gravestone as if his gaze could somehow bore through the stone to where the Colonel lay. Who would've thought I'd be the survivor? He couldn't get past the idea. Who would've thought, when this crazy idea came up, that they'd all die? Who would've dreamed the Colonel would kill himself? He never seemed the sort. So bright, always ready with a smart comment even under threat of torture. Why did he have to kill himself?
Carter knew, of course. But he'd never been able to stay depressed for long.
He dropped a bunch of flowers and then turned back to his pregnant wife, Mady.
"I'm done. We can go now," he said to her in the German he now spoke more than his native language.
Within a few months the child was born. And Andrew named him Robert.