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Biarritz, 1918
The streets of Biarritz, France, were for the first time in years filled with life, music and laughter. All citizens, old and young, were out in the streets celebrating, as they had been for the past two days. Drinking, dancing and singing their days away, waiting for their soldiers to return home.
The great war was finally over, the Allies had won and peace was finally here. While Biarritz had not been particularly affected by the war, the people were still French. They still had families and friends who were lost. They had still lost their homes when they fled to Biarritz. But they were finally at peace.
Isabella and Nicholas had been in the town for the past two weeks. After they had traveled through both Scotland and Wales for a couple of months, they decided to sneak onto a ship to Spain, where they visited multiple coastal towns and cities, until they ended up in the French town Biarritz.
The plan was never to end up anywhere that close to the war, but they had made friends with some brothers who were also traveling through Spain. The brothers, Sylvere and Sylvin Bellangé, were on their way back to their hometown, Biarritz, and invited the two friends to come with.
The group of four were amongst the people partying in the streets. Nicholas was the only one not entirely drunk, ever since that one day a year ago, he made sure to never get drunk whenever he was with Isabella. He made sure to always stay vigilant so nothing would ever happen to her again.
Isabella on the other hand was drunk out of her mind. As opposed to Nicholas, Isabella had spent the year drinking and fucking her memories away. She knew it wasn't a particularly healthy coping mechanism, but she'd never been one for healthy coping.
Where alcohol had always helped her mind keep her damned memories away, sex helped replace multiple sexual assaults with good pleasurable memories, for a small amount of time both methods helped. None of them were helping her in the long run but for a couple of hours they did, for a couple of hours she was at peace.
Isabella also found great pleasure in having sex, especially with women. Of course, because sex was a pleasurable act with both men and women alike, but also because it was her own way of rebelling against Arthur Sr. He had tried to 'fix' her whoring and homosexual ways, when she had done nothing of the sort. Sleeping with both men and women whenever she felt like it was a big 'fuck you' to him.
He had tried to break her and was unable to. Well that's not entirely true, but she wouldn't let anyone other than Nicholas know that he had succeeded. She would never let anyone else know just how broken she was, especially not Arthur Sr. He would never get to know how much he had fucked her up.
