[future] always the first star that i find
Jack catches himself staring sometimes. It's a bad habit, always has been. When he was at the academy he'd spend all period with his eye hooked on the curve of Isaac Mattan's neck in the glass-bent sun, letting the grand sum of a thousand years of philosophy pour in one ear and out the other without a care.
As he got older he learned subtlety, silent hungry gazes that flickered like firelight over his men. He covered them in women and wine, drawing smiles from their lips like poison from a wound, and in those brief moments when they shone carnelian red in the dimly lit club, he almost felt whole.
When he watches David, there is no 'almost.'
It's spring outside their cave, and inside it too, dripping soft remnants of the first thaw from the ceiling, the same quietly persistent stream that carved these channels they call home from rock and earth. David has found a place just beyond the shadow of the cave, his war-sculpted form and kind eyes bathed in light, where he can clean his rifle in peace and pretend he hasn't been staring at the half dog tag on the rock beside him for what feels like hours. David had the tags made months ago, a small gesture to bring his men together under a common symbol when whole uniforms were impossible to procure, but kind intent doesn't change the fact that their purpose is to identify the dead.
Jack can't always draw a smile from his friend. On this crisp morning he knows he won't, but he crosses the space between them anyway, coming to sit beside the slighter man. And if something aches in his chest to see the season's first monarch coming to rest on David's knee, he'll hide his flinch in a smile and wrap a coat around the man's shoulders with only the barest brotherly squeeze, saying nothing except, "You'll catch your death out here, and then who will they follow?" because there are things David needs him to be, and things he does not.
As he got older he learned subtlety, silent hungry gazes that flickered like firelight over his men. He covered them in women and wine, drawing smiles from their lips like poison from a wound, and in those brief moments when they shone carnelian red in the dimly lit club, he almost felt whole.
When he watches David, there is no 'almost.'
It's spring outside their cave, and inside it too, dripping soft remnants of the first thaw from the ceiling, the same quietly persistent stream that carved these channels they call home from rock and earth. David has found a place just beyond the shadow of the cave, his war-sculpted form and kind eyes bathed in light, where he can clean his rifle in peace and pretend he hasn't been staring at the half dog tag on the rock beside him for what feels like hours. David had the tags made months ago, a small gesture to bring his men together under a common symbol when whole uniforms were impossible to procure, but kind intent doesn't change the fact that their purpose is to identify the dead.
Jack can't always draw a smile from his friend. On this crisp morning he knows he won't, but he crosses the space between them anyway, coming to sit beside the slighter man. And if something aches in his chest to see the season's first monarch coming to rest on David's knee, he'll hide his flinch in a smile and wrap a coat around the man's shoulders with only the barest brotherly squeeze, saying nothing except, "You'll catch your death out here, and then who will they follow?" because there are things David needs him to be, and things he does not.