Febuwhump day 4: Obedience

[sholio]

Master list here.

Day 4: Obedience
Brief Sakhalin-era snippet, 150 wds


Erich von Stalhein had spent most of his life taking orders - often from men he despised. Refusing an order at last - to execute James Bigglesworth - was perhaps his final act in this life, and the first one that made him feel like himself in a very long time.

"Get across the bridge. I haven't come all this way to cart home a corpse."

He resented it. But he did it. Those feelings weren't new. But it was the first order he had actually wanted to follow in a long time. He was willing to accept that the man giving the order made a difference - and it did.

But it was a while later before it occurred to him that Bigglesworth was, perhaps, the first person in a very long time, and maybe the only person, who had ever ordered him to do anything for his own good and not for someone else's.

Comments

[sheron]

Awwwwww! That's an interesting insight that von Stalhein now chooses to follow that order when he knows very well where his own red lines that he won't cross are. He's spent a good long while searching for them.

Also that scene in canon always slays me. Biggles putting himself between him and danger is just. Nggght.

[sholio]

Yeah, I was thinking about how he's not following orders here because he feels like he has to. He can technically say no (and in fact for him at this point, duty would probably be staying and dying on Sakhalin). He chooses to take Biggles's order, and I was thinking about that and also how - though Erich definitely isn't thinking in these terms at these points, I think - that all of Biggles's orders to him in B:FL and in this book are aimed at keeping him safe, which is the polar opposite of almost everything he's been ordered to do up to this point.

In conclusion: them.

[philomytha]

Oh, this makes so much sense for him, choosing to follow Biggles’s orders, because he’s learned that it matters to him who’s giving the order, and why <3

[sholio]

It was really interesting thinking about what's different here for him, how he'd explain it to himself, and so forth. I hadn't really thought of it as a watershed moment for him before, but really, it kind of is!