Roméo and Yulia

While there were always some faint sounds in the background as they were getting ready to air, they seemed much louder on that day, to the point where Hugo had to interrupt his reading.

The music came on. Hugo looked at Sophie, who was organising the papers in front of her. They usually shared some kind of banter, but not this morning. As her hands started trembling, she put the papers back down. Hugo had not seen her in such a state since they had been sent together to Afghanistan. He wanted to say something reassuring to her, but there was no time.

Hugo turned his eyes back to the camera. Michal was screaming numbers, his fingers counting down. ‘10, 9, 8…’

Then Michal showed the one sign and Hugo started.

‘Bonjour et bienvenu dans ce treize heure.’

While he spoke about the growing conflicts with Russia, he was almost sure that he heard something. A BOOM, far away. It happened sometimes that planes flew above. That must have been it. Then one time, a military aircraft had broken the barrier of sound. Right there, right above Paris, the nerve of some people… As the BOOMs intensified, getting closer, Hugo became convinced that this was the case. A brigade of military aircraft flying overhead. The news was usually warned before such events, but increasingly, the military did as they wished without consulting anyone.

He looked up a moment to his assistant, but she gave him no signal. He was not going to stop presenting the news unless someone told him to. Besides, they had seen much worse. Terrorist threats, actual terrorists, fans far too passionate about their work. They weren’t about to- 

'Everybody out! Now!’ Screamed someone who had barged into the studio.

Without another word, everyone scuttled away. There was a moment of uncertainty once in the stairs. Waiting. If this was a terrorist threat, they were to barricade themselves inside; a fire, they had to run out as fast as possible. When the alarm came on, it was no surprise to anyone. Bombs.

Bomb drills had only been active in France for the past few months, with the growing tensions and all. 

Hearing it, Sophie started crying. Her eyes were probably blurry, blinding her. Hugo grabbed her wrist, knowing that her husband would never forgive him if anything happened to her. Besides, they had survived too many wars together to fall now. The only difference was that the wars had always been on different continents, in other countries, in which they had been forced to speak foreign languages. Never in their own country, in their own city. Who would ever attack Paris?

Sophie let Hugo pull her, between the crying and falling and pushing bodies all around them. Once they were in the basement, she let her legs crumble. How many people were there? A hundred? A thousand? Inhabitants of this building, members of their own team, along with people from any and every way of life, all compressed there together. Heads against heads and cries of children and adults alike, becoming increasingly undistinguishable. The lights turned off. Before this, people felt like their bodies were too close, this sudden darkness made all of them want to stick to one another like gum. 

Hugo thought about the catacombs which were less than a kilometre away from this basement. If they didn’t make it out, that’s how they would end up. Like a video game extension. Catacombs, 2025 edition.

That’s when Hugo felt something. In the middle of all the sweat, a perfume that he had never smelt before, honey-like. His hand made their way to soft hair, flowing through his fingers. The incessant screams vanished in the distance, replaced by the gentle whimpers of an angel. Not knowing if he would make it out of there, he followed some strange instinct, which told him to play with the hair.

The other person, probably following some strange dynamic too, let their head rest on his chest. The words that should have been said or thought, the feelings escaped comprehension. In the darkness, he uttered: ‘It’s okay, we’re all going to be okay.’ Of course he didn’t know that, no one knew. Whoever was pressed against his chest heard the words and held onto him tightly. In this moment, Hugo knew that if he was to die, then he would die in some kind of peace.

His life did not end there. The lights came back on, the shaking stopped, the cries calmed down. Slowly, with an excessive silence, people left. Hugo laid eyes on his stranger at last. A brown haired woman, with ocean eyes making their way into his mind, from which they would never leave. Sophie, like many others, was crying her eyes out. One could almost believe that her soul really had ended up leaving her body. But not his stranger. She looked at him, her mouth partially opened, as if meeting him was the strangest, most out of this world event of that day.

‘What’s your name?’ Asked Hugo, acting like a 5th grade student under the strange power that girls could hold over boys.

‘I’m…’ He could tell that she was holding back her words, as if her name in itself held a dark, unspeakable secret.

‘What happened?’ She asked, as if gauging how much information she could give away. She had some kind of accent, but the words were too few to tell where from.

Hearing the question, Sophie made her way into the conversation: ‘The Russians, they probably wanted to send a message after what we did last week. That’s what we were going to address today: the imminent war. Who are you? Are you part of the team?’

She finally asked, after realising that she had given up too much information to a total stranger.

‘I’m… No, I live in this building.’

‘Lived!’ Added Sophie, ‘You lived in this building. Not sure there’s anything left.’

When they left the underground, Sophie’s words were proven true: There was nothing above. Debris, pieces of where their lives had been for the past couple of years crumbled up.

‘It’s always the Russians anyway! Always!’ Screamed someone.

That’s when Hugo understood the obvious, where his stranger came from.

‘So who are you?’ Asked Sophie again.

‘This is my friend Charlotte. She was just visiting the studio when this happened.’ He answered.

Him and Charlotte exchanged a look, she would have spoken, but there was no time. They had to evacuate.

‘Come with me.’ He told her.

She looked around. What else could she do?

They dropped Sophie home, then once they were alone, she spoke.

‘Anya.’

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Thank you, for… Thank you.’

A million ideas of what Hugo could say crossed his mind, about the current political climate, about her torn up home, about that odd moment they shared together. None of these ideas made it up to his lips. He gave her a discreet look. Her hair was really long. In this light, it was clearly blond and not brown. Looking at her, he wondered if he had ever seen anyone this beautiful in his entire life. More than her thin features and perfect skin, it was her gaze. It faced everything with some kind of determination. Seeing so many countries, meeting so many people, Hugo had seen grown men broken by similar circumstances. There she was, clearly ready to build her life back up.

The whole way back, they avoided looking around them at the bleeding town that had been theirs.

'Paris,' he finally said, 'it's not France, it's something else, isn't it?'

Anya did not answer with a word or even a sound, but she did give a faint smile which told Hugo that she knew exactly what he spoke about. The I don't have time and I don't care about you mentality of this city, which made the whole world envious.

They arrived at Hugo’s house about half an hour later. He lived in Issy-les-Moulineaux, south of Paris, where nothing seemed to have been moved by the events of the previous hour. Had he lived east of Paris, it would have been a different story. Once they entered the house, Anya looked around. She was hoping to discover a child, a wife or even a dog, but the gigantesque building was completely empty, except for a long table, a couple of chairs and a few objects here and there that she could have found in any European home.

As the days passed by, war was officially declared by France against Russia. While Hugo had never explicitly offered for Anya to stay - due to some misplaced pride - he had not asked her to leave either. His new office was in Châtillon, which he would have been thrilled about, had the circumstances leading to this change not been what they were. He quickly got back to the news, for which he brought up the question of whether NATO would intervene or if they weren’t going to because France instigated. The answer did not come, no matter how much they begged for help.

Anya was busy painting. Hugo saw the progress of it every day when he got home. The house was always warm, a fire constantly burning in the chimney. 

He could not remember the last time he had bothered making a fire before that. It was too much effort, too much time to spend on something that had practically the same effect to him as a heater, which only took a button to switch on.

He could see the added value of a fire, now that it was there. The reassuring sound, the faint smell of wood, the childhood memories, the fighting flames. That’s what Anya seemed to be focused on. Every time he got home, she was looking at the fire, then reporting pieces of it on to her canvas.

She must have been a very good, somewhat famous painter, he thought, to be able to afford a place in the heart of Paris. There she was, with nothing but a cheap canvas and terrible brushes that had to be found in one of the few shops still open. When he showed up in Leclerc or Carrefour asking the staff if they still had art supplies available, people looked at him as if he was losing his mind.

In the fourth shop he visited, the manager recognised him from the news. She thought he was doing a news report on the progression of art, or something along those lines. She asked him why he would ever do a program like this at such a time. After some thought, he invented an excuse, that art was never as needed as in times such as this, when the country was broken. What could unite the world better than art, representation and… Before he could say more, the lady had gone to get what he needed. She sold him the few supplies they had left. There was not much.

He had thought about it on his way back from the shop. They had not bombed a small city, they had gone for the Louvre and Saint-Sulpice and Notre Dame. If France was a family, then Paris was the mother, keeping every child sufficiently well taken care of.

'Paris, je t'aime!' He wish he had screamed in front of the Eiffel tower while it was still time, but then again, had he done this, he would have been laughed out of there, justifiably so.

He had retuned with a canvas and only a couple of brushes. Like during every time of war or panic, most supplies were gone. People wanted to own everything that their eyes laid on. In 2020, there had been a shortage of toilet paper. 2025 was the year of art, apparently. Maybe if they owned enough, they could survive, protected by the objects swallowing their fears. Idiots. Still, it was worth it, to see her painting.

When he offered Anya the meagre materials, she showed herself to be more than grateful. She kissed him on the cheek. He blushed. She noticed.

Of course, he had worked on too many refugee stories to ask her out. Where would they go? What would she do, if she did not feel the same way? She'd run to the streets, too afraid of what he might do to her? Never in a million years would he let that happen.

Nevertheless, hope grew inside of him like a tumour. The hope, that the months and years he had sacrificed - in offices and facing cameras - no longer mattered. The wife he never got from high school or university, she was there now. He asked her where she had studied and obviously, the answer was the Sorbonne, just like him. Her with the history of art and him with the sciences of communication and information. They could have met and loved a shared life, if only he had not spent all his time locked in his room, studying to have the highest grades.

But what did it matter, she was there now. Then the hope grew even more, that someday, he could tell his children about how their mother and him met. Romeo and Juliette, not divided between two different families, but two different countries at war. The epic story of a love that would have made it. Surviving time and war and work and bombs. Roméo and Yulia.

Of course that’s not how Romeo and Juliet’s story ended, but he was too blinded by his hope to think of that.

Whenever he had an ounce of doubt, he looked at her and it went away. Sometimes, while she was watching TV or eating, he saw her taking glimpses of him.

On the last morning, it happened. She helped him put on a jacket before work and her hand caressed his.

She blushed, there was not doubt about it.

‘You should go.’ She murmured.

He nodded, wished her a good day. His hope turned from fiction to something plausible. Perhaps it would come true.

When he arrived at the studio, the only person there was Michal, desperately trying to handle the camera and lighting at the same time.

‘What’s going on?’ Asked Hugo.

‘It’s happening.’ Muttered Michal.

‘What’s happening?’

‘The bomb. The nuclear bomb, they’re dropping it on us. It’s not France that they’re in war with apparently. It’s Paris and everything around it. They’re attacking us non-stop. What other city got a hit? None. It’s just Paris against mighty Russia, apparently.’

Hugo barely heard a word, his mind had left.

‘I called Sophie and all the others to tell them not to come.’

‘And why didn’t you do the same for me?’ Asked Hugo, his voice shaky.

‘I know you, I knew you’d want to do this. You're like me, You just have your work. If you and I die, it’ll be with the honour of addressing the biggest story that has ever hit our country. We’ll die heroes and… What are you doing?’

Hugo grabbed his coat and ran out. He had to get back to her. He had to escape with her. He had to live with her. Back to his car, back on the road to Issy-les-Moulineaux, soon he would be back to Anya.

'Anya,' he mumbled the name to himself, like a mantra, a miracle of the alphabet that made his heart beat, that his ears had to hear one last time.

A couple of minutes after he left, Michal must have gotten on air and delivered the news, because both sides of the road were taken by thousands of cars trying to leave Paris. Hugo tried to drive as best he could with everyone else honking at him, but a few minutes before getting home, a car crashed into his.

He tried to make it work again, but there was nothing to be done. His Peugeot was wrecked. There was no way to leave the imminent Paris explosion anymore, not without a car. He ran to his home, where Anya was waiting patiently, she saw him panting, his glazed eyes. She had heard the screams and alarms outside. Had the end of the world been made into a sound, then she was convinced that this would have been it. Paris being deserted. But none of this mattered to Hugo. Nothing else mattered, not anymore. She was there.

‘What’s going on?’

Hugo could not answer. How could they escape? Running as fast as they could, hitchhiking… But their legs were too short and the people were too unhinged to take them along. So he did the only thing which came to his mind.

‘Will you dance with me?’ He asked.

Anya’s look of determination left her face. What was there to be determined about? Even without it, he still found her beautiful. She nodded. On his phone, he put a song. ‘Recette de l’amour fou’ by Serge Gainsbourg. She laughed at the lyrics, he took her hands in his.

Behind them, he saw the painting. It was finished. With a background of a fiery explosion, the front was two shadows, a man and a woman’s faces looking at each other, as if nothing else mattered. This masterpiece would burn, like everything else. They danced fast and slow. He made her turn and swing.

‘It’s okay, we’re all going to be okay.’ He lied, playing with her hair.

Hand in hand, he whispered in her ear words which he had never said to anyone before. She held him tighter when she heard them.

The yelling people and the honking were too far away, the drill in the street blended in with the music and in this odd harmonie, Hugo and Anya’s lips met.  First kiss. Last kiss. That was it. The last day, the last moment.

Had Hugo been given the choice to have any other ending, he would have chosen this one.