History

As a baby, Étienne never wept, never screamed, never threw tantrums or called for nothing in the wee hours of the morning. For a family with five girls already and no son that managed to live longer than infancy, healthy, quiet Étienne was practically a gift from god. All they could ever want, all they could possibly need.

Until, slowly but surely, the Beaudroit family realised that Étienne was rather strange, as far as little French babies were concerned. Yes, he never screamed or whinged, but he didn’t seem to laugh much either, and where his sisters had begun to babble and blather, Étienne only met cooing and prompting with steady silences. He was, indubitably, a strange boy, but he was a boy and so he was cherished and guarded. It may have taken him more than long enough to start speaking, and even then, he could hardly be described as talkative, but he was healthy, he was easy to manage and he was a he. Sufficient in all the ways that mattered.

It seemed that Étienne was destined to be a man of action. Words did not come easily to him, as interested as he pretended to be in his studies or the stories his sisters would obsess over, there was something they had he was unable to replicate. While maths and geography seemed to fall into place in his mind like puzzle pieces, he was abysmal in his French classes, worse in his English and an absolute terror among the other students who decided to prod him into action.

He was far from social, a boy of few words who would grow into a man who spoke more with his fists than his tongue, His temper was obvious, though not ever-present. In his younger years, he responded quite viscerally to taunting and provoking, and when his cheeks rouged with indignance and his tongue lodged itself in his throat, he found a good beating worked better than an essay or a dissertation ever would.

It went like that for longer than Étienne would care to admit, now. He tried for his parents, to keep his anger subdued and his head down in his study material. His father was of the opinion that Étienne was intelligent enough. An architect, someone who preferred numbers over scripts, Étienne supposed they had that in common, though he found that he could never figure out how to express himself through using his words. A point of soreness that would no doubt fix itself into his life for until the end of time, but one that Étienne had eventually learned to live with. By the time he had received his CEP, (a feat dubbed remarkable by his peers, the ones that didn’t hate him started calling him Lucky in spite of his protests. Étienne surely hated them when it stuck.) Étienne had learned how to let his fury simmer into something more manageable, exchange it for passion as he advanced farther into his life.

Over a decade after Étienne was brought into the world, the Beaudroits welcomed little Edgar Beaudroit into the world. Sickly, giggly and everything Étienne was not. That meant nothing though, as becoming an older brother brought out a gentleness Étienne did not know he possessed as he spent as much time as was acceptable with his little brother, hoping and aching with his whole being that Edgar would live to walk, then run, then ride with him across the sprawling fields as Étienne had taken to doing when the world of men would become too much for him to manage.

At just past two decades of attempting to avoid disappointing his family anymore than he already had, he found himself being sent to The École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr, where, in spite of his shortcomings, Étienne would spend the next three years of his life dedicated to his country. His family finally had their efforts rewarded, as sickly little Edgar grew into a young man with intellect sharp enough to continue in the path of their father, and the commission purchased for Étienne resulted in him graduating Saint-Cyr as a lieutenant.

And so he joined the French Navy in their effort against the Chinese in the Tonkin war, where he found himself under the command of one Achille Quemper, a man who was unique in every sense of the word, the man who would eventually become Étienne’s brother in every way but blood.

He participated in the war for a long, grueling year, stationed in Quang Yen until he eventually followed Captain Quemper into battle aboard the Podarge. The battle of Fuzhou was one that even Étienne could label a victory, the battle of Tamsui that followed had him escaping to his countrymen by the skin of his teeth, without his captain and a majority of his crew. Hollow in ways that Étienne could not, cannot describe, he stayed East and attempted to continue his service to his country, though his falling head-over-heels for a Vietnamese local called Võ Tất Ahn was hardly patriotic.

It was a short, sweet love affair, exposing Étienne to the sort of warmth he wasn’t aware was within his capabilities to experience. Ahn’s french was elementary, mediocre at best, but Étienne was hardly the most outspoken, and perhaps he had confused passion with love, but it was definitely heartbreak he had felt when they were ripped away from each other permanently, as Ahn was killed by Étienne’s fellow frenchmen.

As the year of war drew to a head, Étienne found himself pushing all notions of love aside for the much easier to digest sentiment of national pride and, after losing his eye in the battle of shipu and regaining his captain, he returned home to where his family waited with open arms and baited breath for the broken version of him that they had received.

Most recently, after months of moping and mourning for someone he probably shouldn’t be missing and falling out of contact with most of his fellow soldiers and sailors, his father had arranged to sent Étienne to London with his passable English and his general gloom to man his brother-in-law’s bookshop, a change of scenery and a bit of a last-minute attempt to instill his eldest son with a sense of normalcy, so he does not haunt the halls of their home like the spirits of his dead comrades haunt his dreams.

Étienne does not want to tell his parents he is a lost cause, realistically he does not know.