Re: The Lieutenant/The Daughter
He didn't think he was the gentlemanly hero from anywhere. That he was potentially mysterious was something he would find laughable. He was a straightforward guy. He'd ended up here because he'd fucked up, and now he was trying to make amends, but reacting to guilt didn't make him heroic. A hero just did the right thing because it was right. He was here for the money, because the only way he had left to fix what he'd done a little was to earn a lot of money before the baby came.
The soldier looked down at her skirt when she mentioned it; he was only a guy. A single guy who wasn't exactly getting around lately. Him not getting any was laughable for reasons we won't go into, but he did look at her skirt. "It wasn't your sherry, so you stole it and stashed it. Are you too young to get your own, or are you too broke?" He looked at the skirt again, but this time for a totally different reason.
"It's not blood." The substance in the cylinder wasn't blood. It was a highly flammable, highly combustible substance that had taken the military a very long time to get their hands on. A lot of soldiers had given their lives for this particular component, which was purported to be produced for militarized warfare by hostile foreign factions. It was imperative to get it back to base, and from there to find a way to make their front-liners immune to its effect. But that meant that having it in a baggage car of a stalled train where people were going missing was really bad news.
But there was that thing again, the sense that he'd already done this. That he'd delivered the cylinder, but it was there in his hand. "It's nothing," he told her, snapping himself out of it and zipping the bag closed.