Let Slip the Dogs of War - Part 4
Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Authors: waffleguppies and marshwiggledyke
Fandom: Hot Fuzz
Rating: R for war and language, 1940's attitudes, mild PTSD
Characters/Pairings: Eventual Nicholas/Danny, epic bromancey Andes, Turner Twins, Tony, Doris, Auntie Jackie.
Author's Notes: Finally, I start contributing to this story! With another writer in tow, the tone changes to a more lazy, dialogue-driven pace, which I think fits Sandford to a T.
Apologies in taking so long with getting this up- after the fourth time LJ ate my notes and formatting, and then with the Blitz of DDoS hiccups, it's taken me a while to reorganize everything and have the energy to post.
There really was a bridge in Jesteburg, and it really was blown all to buggery by the Wehrmacht to prevent British troops from using the rails to transport supplies and further advance on Berlin. (Not that this really helped; British occupation of Berlin might have been better for its occupants than the undiluted Soviet rage it actually experienced.)
Less than three weeks later, Germany surrendered.
The East End (historically a heterogenous mix of immigrants, backgrounds and society, and thus a prime target for the Luftwaffe) was worst hit by the London Blitz- the homeless took to living in the London Underground. Children collected bits of bomb in the street (which adults did their best to confiscate). When Buckingham Palace was hit during a raid, the Queen remarked, “I'm glad we've been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”
The first VE day was reportedly quiet in the UK, outside of London (which reacted to the news in much the same way as New York City to Obama's election, whooping and partying and flooding the streets, hugging strangers, etc.) There were still rationing restrictions on luxury items, and most people were so exhausted that celebrations were a little on the half-hearted side. Many of the soldiers, doctors, airmen and civil defense forces weren't on leave yet. Having held the wolf at their door for five and a half years, (and for several of those, completely alone) the shock of German surrender, of it all being over and done, made for a muted, stunned entry into personal journals and letters.
A year later, people actually had the enthusiasm and energy and economy to celebrate. And that's where our story starts in this chapter.
*
Part 3
May 8th, 1946
Danny slept. Inside his head, bright, blazing images bobbed and leapt like flames in a fireplace, hungry, refusing to die away.
Bombs falling on Jesteburg. The heat on his face as he watched, silent and disbelieving, from the hills. The townspeople running over the fields towards the flames, down from the slope, the frantic search for buckets and water to save buildings already starting to collapse into their own foundations.
It had felt like a dream to begin with. The terrible vibrations in the ground, quivering underfoot, shaking and unstable like solid earth should never feel. The noise. The droning of plane engines, the roar of the flames.
He turned over, mumbling to himself, already trying to wake up. Fighting his way out of the dream.
The others, around him, their faces lit hellish red by the fires. Tony, somehow more together than he'd been for days, helping a fleeing family with their baggage. Andy, pale and sharp-tempered, not knowing if the hospital had been evacuated in time (it had, but they wouldn't find that out for two long days) or even if his friend had survived the twelve or so hours since they'd parted, raid or no raid (he had, although not without a fierce battle with the nurses over the confiscation of his hip flask) Everyone wondering, unspoken, the same thing.
They'd waited for orders. The bridge was a melting wreck over guttering, blazing water, oil floating into the burning river from the dockyards and the trainyard. The station was an inferno. The barracks, the hospital, gone as if they'd never existed.
And everyone was safe.
Eventually, Danny hadn't been able to stand it any longer. He'd cadged a bit of paper off Owen and scribbled with a piece of pencil lead he found in his pocket, a rough approximation of the word that had been printing itself over and over in his head, written there in slightly smudged type on muddy, many-times-folded dispatches paper, and he'd wandered through the milling crowds of troops and civillians until he'd found a Sergeant.
'Scuse me, sir, c'n you read German?
Some, Corporal, why?
What's this mean?
There was no silence up on the hill above Jesteburg that night. Too much fire, too many frightened, yelling people, too much chaos. For Danny, though, the world had gone a little bit quieter, watching the Sergeant's face study his bit of paper.
Brucke? Bridge. Means bridge. Where'd you get that from?
Just saw it on a sign, he'd lied, glibly, and then he'd gone back to his friends, because then he'd known.
No coincidence, the sudden, bewildering awakening, the grim, yelling coordination of the officers, the midnight order to evacuate. No stroke of luck, the panicked race through the barracks, the desperate ringing of the church bells, the flushing out and dragging of bewildered, terrified townsfolk from their homes. There was no chance involved. Bombs which were meant to fall on a sleeping town fell on an empty one. The bridge had been their target, the bridge and the railway station and maybe the barracks, too, but the people-
A cigar tin. Paws, racing through the long heathland grass. An advance warning.
Going to have to move fast.
Danny opened his eyes.
It was a bright morning, and a long slice of sunlight fell through the carelessly-drawn curtains. The tulips on them were fire-engine red in the warm light. Danny had moved into this flat a few weeks after returning to Sandford, and he wasn't exactly what you'd call a highly motivated redecorator. As a result, the previous owner's feminine touches were still pretty prevalent. Flowers on the rug. Peach Revo cooker in the kitchen. Danny didn't mind the cooker, actually. It was a girly colour, but it seemed remarkably resistant to burning things. It was also hopeless at keeping its heat to itself, and kept the kitchen nice and cosy.
He wandered blearily downstairs, checked the clock in the hall. Almost nine. In about an hour he was due at St. Vincent's to help his aunt put up bunting in the churchyard. Danny could think of several other more inventive uses for several miles of red, white, and blue bunting, but most of them were dangerously unpatriotic and best kept to himself. His aunt meant well but sometimes he didn't think it had fully sunk in to her that the war was over. She still grew terrifyingly enthusiastic at the very thought of organising anything for our boys, and the fact that her nephew was one of our boys as well just made her worse. She wouldn't stop knitting him socks.
His dad was quietly sympathetic, but had been reluctant to object that much to her plans. Danny thought that he was probably afraid that she'd start knitting socks for him, as well, not that anyone in their right mind would really want to take on Jackie and the rest of Sandford's W.I if they could possibly avoid it.
The 8th of May. Only a week ago everyone had been kitting their little daughters (and, in some cases, protesting sons) out in white smocks and bonnets and you hadn't been able to step outside your front door without falling over a maypole. Now, it was bunting all the way. Danny supposed it made sense. Last year, by all accounts, everyone had been a bit too scared that all this Victory and Peace stuff was a false alarm to celebrate much. This year, however, everybody could just about believe that it might actually last. This year, the celebration was going to be serious.
Which was brilliant, of course it was. It was just that, with one thing and another... Danny just didn't feel much like celebrating.
Generally speaking, the world that he and his friends had come back to did not fully understand what cause a young, returning soldier might have not to be entirely jubilant about the whole thing. He was alive and in one piece, and so were most of the people he'd left with. On top of which, they'd beaten Jerry, and he'd even got a few medals out of the whole thing. Everyone knew what he'd done, or had supposedly done. He was, on some small scale, a hero. Heroes, as he had quickly realised, were not really allowed to be mopey.
The village he'd returned to had come through the war mostly unscathed. Rationing wasn't as severe out here in the country as in the cities, and Sandfordians responded to the pinch of scarcity with a cheerfully flourishing market that wasn't so much black as sort of patchy grey. Everyone had heard about the devastation wreaked on the cities, the Bristol Blitz, the bombs and the terrifying shadow of the V2s, but hardly anyone had experienced these things firsthand. A German bomber returning light on fuel from Bristol had dumped its single remaining bomb blindly over the village in a desperate attempt to gain height, and the resulting explosion had turned a field of sheep into several hundredweight of lightly singed mutton (an amount which, by the time anyone in authority arrived at the scene, had quietly become a lot smaller.) By some unknown and highly unlikely process of inland flotation, a single, solitary sea mine had somehow made its way up the Tor and into the Castle moat, where it floated in a little buoyant cordon while everyone involved argued urgently about what on earth to do with the bloody thing.
Dressed and as awake as he was reasonably going to get, Danny pulled a knitted jersey over his shirt and worried at his hair with a comb and some Murrays. He restored his neat parting in the tiny hall mirror, trying to make the general effect as tidy as possible- anything to avoid his aunt's dreaded spit-and-hanky combo- and left the flat.
*
You'd think, from the amount of food out on tables, that Sandford had never heard of such a thing as rationing. Cakes, pies and jellies competed for space against plates of fairy cakes and lemonade. The letters 'VE' were on everything, up to and including small children. Most of the older folk looked utterly exhausted from the last time Danny had seen them, but by God this was Sandford, and there'd be a bloody VE Day if it killed them.
Some American soldiers, on leave from Cirencester and probably hoping for less competition among the girls out in the middle of nowhere, swiped a few jellies for themselves and leaned against their regulation motorbikes, watching the proceedings with some interest, but pointedly not helping with the decorations.
Across the church proper, children in paper hats clustered around a variety of tins, impatiently waiting for a scoop of Walls in their bowls. The Crown had rolled out a few of their untouched barrels, and glared at any adult who looked like they were going to get blitzed before midday. After all, there was the bonfire to come that night. You couldn't miss something as awe-inspiring as a 20-foot wicker Hitler going up in flames.
Danny was in difficulties. He'd really tried to stay out of sight, but Jackie had spotted him lurking behind the refreshments tent and hoiked him out to join the other press-ganged volunteers, most of whom were occupied with adding even more decorations and flags to a scene which already looked like the aftermath of a direct hit on a Union Jack factory.
“Now then, Danny, we all have to pitch in. There's some of my nice cream sponge in it for you.” Something about the cheerful glint in her eye suggested that the alternative was death.
If only they let women in the army, Danny thought. She'd've been running the whole bloody thing. Down there in the War Rooms telling Churchill and Allan Brooke to get their boots off the tables. “Yes, Auntie Jackie.”
“Good lad.”
Then she'd shoved what appeared to be several miles of bunting into his arms and bustled off to tell off some kids who were daring each other to pick glazy red cherries off an untouched trifle, leaving him halfway up a stepladder next to an oak tree with the feeling that he'd just been caught up by a very patriotic whirlwind and dropped there.
Resigned to his fate, he spent the next ten minutes tying lengths of bunting to various branches of the tree with a series of finicky and rather impossible knots. Having buntified everything in reach, he then moved up towards the top of the ladder, reaching for the higher branches.
At that moment, a small contingent of running, squawking children, trailing streamers and imitating an air-raid siren, dashed past the tree. Away in a knot-tying reverie of his own, the first Danny knew about it was when the small body of Tony's youngest bounced off the base of his ladder. The impact did little damage to the kid, who was made out of the same elastic-string-and-knees formula as his father, and pelted unheedingly away between the graves with his friends, but the lurch nearly knocked the rickety A-frame over. As his footing wobbled crazily, Danny grabbed at a tree branch and wished fervently that he hadn't draped so many tangly strings around his neck for safe-keeping.
The ladder rocked, badly, as if it were trying to walk out from under him, and for a terrible moment his feet actually left the ladder's top step. And then, just as suddenly, it crashed back into his knees, and settled, rock-solid.
In the sudden stillness, Danny clung to the top of the ladder and fought off the bits of string that had been threatening to garotte him.
“Thanks, mate,” he said, squinting down through branches and string at the person who'd grabbed the ladder at the bottom. “Could've been nasty, that.”
“You live round here?” asked the someone, in a rather different sort of accent than the one Danny'd been expecting. It was quick, businesslike.
“Yeah,” said Danny, concentrating on clambering down safely.
“You-” Pause, as if the speaker were having to work at this casual, indifferent sort of tone. “You know a Butterman, then? A Daniel Butterman?”
Feet on solid ground at last, Danny looked up, sharply, getting a good look at his rescuer for the first time. A slow, utterly delighted grin spread across his face.
“Reckon I might do.”
“Wonderful. If, uh, if you could just tell me his address, I could pop by later.” Angel was cleanpressed, wearing slacks and a white button-up shirt with a loosened tie around his throat. His hair had grown a little longer. He, Mr. Sergeant Angel, with the backbone of marble, was actually managing to look a bit nervous, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and having difficulty looking in any particular direction for more than ten seconds. He made up for it with a bit of a scowl.
“So what's 'is name, then? This bloke you keep going on about.”
“Angel. Well, Sergeant Angel, I-”
“Yeah- I know that, dummox. His first name.”
Danny had no idea. Angel had never said. Suddenly, it seemed more important than it had over the last year, not knowing if the friend he'd made in the most unlikeliest place in the world was all right or not. Names weren't amazingly vital, when all you hoped was that someone was alive.
He felt a bright, savage flood of joy. Angel looked a little thinner than he remembered- smaller, almost- but so rigid and uncomfortable, oblivious to who Danny even was, that a gleeful desire to tease crept over him. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“Not from round here, are you?”
“That obvious, is it?” said Angel, scratching at the back of his neck. “You lot sound a bit the same to me, too.”
“Yeah, an' you London lot all sound the same an' all,” said Danny, slyly, or at least as slyly as he could manage, which wasn't really all that sly. “How'd you get up here anyhow? Hijack a truck?”
The hard little frown tightened further. “Got a ride in one of the empty supply lorries heading out from the city, and walked the rest of the way in. Look, if you could just give me his whereabouts, thanks?”
Danny felt the urge to laugh. Angel not only remembered their meeting, he had actively come looking for him, and that made it very hard for him to mind that the Sergeant hadn't, as yet, recognised him. After all, they'd met shortly during a hard, frantic time, and Danny, unlike Angel, was not a very memorable person.
He was still searching for something to say when a slender hand came down on his shoulder with a hearty thump, and he found himself briefly and enthusiastically encircled by Doris, who was wearing a very smart blue blouse and skirt and completing the look with a startlingly red hat that nearly had his eye out as she hugged him gleefully from behind.
Doris Thatcher, as well as being the other half of that particular conversation about Angel's name, was Danny's cousin. She was a little older than him, single, endlessly forthright, and owner of the filthiest mouth in Sandford. As far as the tricky, tangled thickets of the Butterman and Thatcher family trees went, they were distant cousins, yes, but she was really more like a big sister, teasing and protective, knowing him inside out. She was vivacious and infuriating, and during the war he'd missed her badly.
“There you are! Thought I saw you fiddlin' with your bunting. Who's your friend, Danny?”
“Sergeant Angel, ma'am.” Then Angel's face went a funny shade of grey, and his face snapped back to Danny, guilt openly warring with a touch of anger at the trick. 'Danny'?”
Course, you nimno, who'd you think I was, Anthony Eden? Danny beamed and gripped Angel's hand, the ferocity of the handshake betraying in some measure how very glad he was to see Angel all in one piece.
“Yeh,” he managed, and then, suddenly, it wasn't hard to talk at all. “Sorry, Sarge. S'cause I've not got the helmet on, en't it?”
“You're so... clean,” said Angel, and just like that, the annoyance was gone, replaced with sheer wonder. His free hand wavered at his side, then grabbed Danny's shoulder. “Did you- Did everyone-”
“Everyone's fine,” said Danny, grinning. “Well, Evan lost an eye but 'e didn't seem to mind that much, really. Everyone got out fine.”
Thanks to you. It didn't really need saying. Instead, Danny pulled him into a brief hug, then slapped him on the shoulder. “I was worried you'd got caught by the Nazis on some special secret missioning somewhere an' I'd not see you again.”
This time, Angel was the one to nearly put out his eye on Doris's hat. “Yes, well, it was a near thing. A few of their special forces caught my trail on the outskirts of Bamburg.” He brought himself up short, clearly eying Doris with some wariness. “Anyway, well-done, Corporal. Not a man lost? That's a thing to take pride in. Especially riding in a German jeep through your own territory.”
And, what was clearly meant to be grumpy for the sake of grumpiness; “And how did you know I'd come find you, nixing Jerry from the equation?”
“You said you would,” said Danny, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.
Angel blinked, that slow, unprocessed look he'd gotten in the minefield. “And you believed me?”
“Um, 'course,” said Danny, tilting his head back. “I knew after Jesteburg got blown to buggery that you wouldn't bother goin' there, an' we got moved out straight away anyway, but after VJ-Day I knew you'd come back 'round sooner or later.”
Doris's eyes flicked back and forth between them like a game of ping-pong.
“My war service went on a good deal longer than most,” said Angel, watching Doris back just as carefully. If he could have figured out how to shoo her off Danny's elbow politely, it was obvious, he would have.
Danny noticed. “Me an' Sergeant Angel are goin' down the Crown, Doris,” he said. “Think you c'n hold Auntie Jackie off for a bit?”
Doris pouted a little, straightening her deadly hat. “You en't even introduced me yet. Call yourself a gentleman.”
Danny whined, nervously. Any minute now, he was certain, Jackie was going to hove into view and demand to know why he wasn't up a ladder in the name of King and Country, and if that happened it might be hours before he could escape and get away to talk to Angel properly. “Bloody hell. Er, Sergeant, this is Doris Thatcher, she's a... er...”
“Sister in the QAs. So technic'ly I outrank you, Sergeant,” she said, shaking Angel's hand and smiling winningly up at him, all big eyes and minor indecency. “Don't worry, I won't hold it against you. 'Less you want me to, o'course.”
Angel actually took a step backwards into the shade of the oak under the onslaught of that grin, with his hand still trapped in hers. In the comparative darkness against the bright and cheerful summer sun, those eyes glinted that pale colour under the flicker of his ordinary green, just like they had during Danny's first glimpse of him through the trees. “If you feel you must.”
The beginnings of an intrigued sort of frown started atop Doris's nose; she looked hard into his face and opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Danny did something sudden and she squawked and dropped the Sergeant's captured hand.
“Aunt at seven o'clock,” he hissed. Sure enough, the sound of Auntie Jackie booming at some hapless volunteer could be heard through the material of the nearest tent. Danny shot Doris a pleading look.
“Oh, all right,” Doris huffed. “Keep yer knickers on.” She gave Angel another brilliant smirk and tripped off to place herself directly in the line of fire, possibly by doing conspicuous violence to a flower arrangement in search of a rose for her hat.
“C'mon,” said Danny, urgently, and tugged Angel past the heaps of bunting, towards the churchyard gate.
Angel kept pace with Danny easily, grinning up at him as they jogged out onto the street and kept on down the kerb. “Shirking your duties, Corporal?”
Angel did not know the wrath of Aunt Jackie, so this was probably excusable.
“'Ey, unless you want to be hangin' flags 'til the cows come home as well,” Danny huffed. He was just a little bit more out of shape compared to when he'd first made it back to Sandford, just enough for it to be noticeable. “I been tyin' strings to things since half nine this mornin'. Here, it's just up the hill.”
“As long as it's not any more of that Sandford applejack,” said Angel, cruising easily up High Street's cobbles, looking around him at the buildings and their windows and the guttering along the roofs and the shrubbery and little black fences in wide-eyed wonder.
Danny stopped him right outside the pub, in the long cobbled square where flags hung from the long stone horse trough and bright printed posters were pasted on the flat wall of the Post Office, encouraging all and sundry to Dig for Britain and help end rationing. He caught Angel's arm as they neared the solid oak doorway, because it seemed to him that the Sergeant was looking so hard at everything they passed- for some reason- that he might have lost track of minor details, like the fact that Danny was there.
“Look, Sergeant,” he said, seriously, searching his face for any sign of an irritated reaction. “What's your name?”
“I never said?” said Angel, blinking away from the bunting strung from house-to-house.
Danny shook his head. “We was a bit busy.”
“Nicholas. Nicholas Angel.”
“Nicholas.” Danny tried it out, thoughtfully, then grinned and thumped Nicholas happily on the shoulder, drawing him into the cool interior of the pub.
“All right then, Sergeant Nicholas Angel, what're you havin'?”
“A fresh milk'll do me,” said Nicholas, squinting in the sudden shade.
Danny's face fell a bit. “Milk? You sure?”
“Shandy?” said Nicholas, beginning to look a little anxious.
Danny, who wasn't about to make an issue of it- this time- planted his elbows on the bar. “Pint of lager an' a shandy please, Frannie.”
Frannie winked at him from underneath an eye-catching spotted headscarf, which kept her hair from falling into her eyes as she pulled pints. She was the Crown's regular junior barmaid, and her recent stint as a land girl had given her a tan like a sailor. “Right you are, love.”
Danny turned his attention back to Nicholas.
“D'jou only just get here?”
“Walked in from Buford Abbey, like I said,” said Nicholas. “Only stopped long enough to drop a portmanteau off at the check-in around the corner from here, I think. I figured you'd be right in the middle of things.” The slightly smug smile told the world a little more than Nicholas probably wanted it to, that he took pride in the fact that his hunch had been right.
Danny collected his pint from Frannie and slid a pint of shandy over the blackwood until the lumpy, freezing glass bumped gently against Nicholas's elbow. “I knew you'd sniff me out,” he said, more than a little admiringly. “So, what d'you think of the place so far?”
Nicholas took a long, thirsty few gulps from his glass before answering. “It's so... intact.”
“Yeah,” said Danny, putting his glass down after a reflective pause. Nicholas had acquired a moustache, probably due to the unanticipated difference in frothiness between London and Sandford shandy bitters, but he felt that this wasn't quite the right moment to mention it. “The stuff we saw in Europe, I was scared t'death it wouldn't be. Thing is, we just weren't important 'nuff to bomb, really. An' lucky. We were bloody lucky. Was...” He hesitated. “Was your place all right?”
Nicholas looked up at him, the little moustache going very tight. “I lived in East London, Danny.”
Danny looked into his pint. “Yeh. You said.”
“There sort of isn't an East End anymore.”
“Yeah, I- shit, was she all right?” stumbled Danny. “Your girlfriend? Only, you din't say if she was stationed anywhere. She sounded like a great lass.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, she's fine,” said Nicholas, staring into his shandy with a slightly suspicious look. “We weren't living together yet. Was sort of supposed to happen after the wedding.”
“Eyy!” went Danny, a bit desperately. “When's that, then?”
“Thursday past never. She met up with some Canadian bloke after I got back. Pilot, I think.”
“What a tart,” said Danny, poker-faced, and drank most of his pint.
Nicholas shrugged. “She made a few valid points.”
Danny nodded. “In munitions, was she?”
Nicholas sucked in a breath. “When... women find out that the phase 'she'll have kittens' could apply to them, in a very literal way, they tend to not take it very well. They're even less impressed if you explain that that sort of thing happens after you're good and married.”
Danny, accordingly, huffed through his nose in sympathy. “Y'should see what happens if you pretend t'stab yourself in front of their mums. Never mind, though, 'ey. Plenty more fish in the sea.”
Nicholas set down his shandy, and stared at him. “You really think that that's a viable option for me?”
“Stabbin' yourself? No, I'm sayin' it's not a clever idea. You never know if they're gonna get all girly on you or have a heart condition or summat. Plus,” Danny said, thoughtfully, finishing his pint, “f'r some reason, sometimes they think you're a bit short upstairs. Must be a women thing.”
“Women at all,” clarified Nicholas. “It's buggery enough having to hide it from them in the first place, but who's going to actually look twice at you if you're upfront about it?”
“I dunno- I mean, you are amazin',” Danny pointed out, cautiously. “S'not everyone's a war hero, brains comin' out of their ears an' lookin' like you, and who c'n tell what their favourite perfume is just by lookin' at 'em, right? They got jumpy round you over there 'cause there were all them stories goin' round- you must've heard 'em- is it really that bad over here, now it's all over? And, you're a decent bloke. There aren't that many around, 'cording to Doris anyway. You just got to work a bit on not always lookin' like you're all on duty an' shit, that's all. Now it's all over.”
He pointed, judiciously. “I tell you somethin'. My Auntie Jackie would call you a Catch.”
There it was again, the tiniest flick of an ear. But Nicholas's face still looked a little doubtful, under the surprised, pleased raised eyebrows, as if he couldn't credit a few of these points, despite the enthusiasm and single-minded pick-me-up praise. “I'm not a war hero, Danny.”
“Why not? You got us over the heath. You saved a town, f'r fuck's sake.”
“I was never officially recognized.”
Danny, who was on the verge of getting up and asking if Nicholas wanted another drink, stopped dead.
“...You what?”
Nicholas shrugged, and poked about the bits of ice in his glass with a finger. “It's not done.”
“But...” Danny looked lost. “You got, like, a service medal or somethin', right?”
Nicholas shook his head. “It doesn't matter.”
“Yeah, it does!” Now, people were looking. Danny's voice was not often raised in anger, and when it was, people tended to notice. “'Course it bloody matters! You saved our lives an' you're tellin' me nobody said thank-you!”
Nicholas shifted back against the wood grain of the booth uncomfortably, not happy in the immediate vicinity of that attention, out-of-uniform and not actively directing it himself. “They don't have to thank me. Any soldier would have done it, could have done it.”
“Any soldier din't do it, though,” protested Danny. “You did it. I mean fuckin' hell, all I did was drive a truck a few miles an' I got mentioned in bloody Dispatch.”
“It was only a three-day leg,” said Nicholas, nearly muttering to counteract Danny's loud, angry voice. “And I broke regulations about taking off the uniform. That sort of thing can get you shot by your own side.”
“So c'n parkin' a German truck outside a 75th Scots Batallion checkpoint,” Danny pointed out. He cheered up a bit, quietening down accordingly. “I still got your uniform, though.”
“Y- ...You actually kept it?”
“Well, you said you'd want it back. I dunno how it was f'r you but Stores got royally ticked off if we lost our helmet, fuck knows what they'd do to you if you lost the whole shootin' match.”
“They'd give us a helmet and a pair of socks, and claim the rest would come in in two days,” said Nicholas, scratching at his collar, absently. Good lord, it probably smelled godawful.”
“No worse'n mine. Blood's hell to shift, but I think it brushed up all right.” Maybe not up to your standards, though, Danny thought. Nicholas was smarter than a new pin.
Nicholas went quiet, smiling down at his coaster and nosing it back and forth between his fingertips. When he looked up again, however, it had gone, and a bit of worry had crept into his face. “Danny, this... this wasn't entirely meant to be a pleasure trip.”
Danny looked up expectantly, openly hopeful. Nicholas's tone was serious and a bit uncertain, and he did his best to adopt a suitable expression in response, but he only achieved partial success. Since Nicholas had arrived, everything had sort of had a tinge of unreality to it. He still found it hard to believe that he was sitting here, back on home ground, having a pint with the same Nicholas Angel he'd last met in a muddy field about seven hundred miles away. It was good, of course, it was amazing, but it felt frighteningly transient, too. Too good to be true, even. He hoped that whatever Nicholas said next would dispel some of that unreality, maybe. Make it a bit more, well, real.
“Yeah?”
He couldn't have been more wrong. Nicholas's next words didn't do anything but thicken the unreality of his presence, like a fog of chicken soup and hippos. “I'm thinking of staying here. Permanently.”
For a second, Danny just looked outright dumbfounded.
“In Sandford?”
“If you think there's enough housing about,” said Nicholas, quickly. A room to let, or something? I've got a bit saved up, but a hotel would eat into that faster than I could make up the difference.
“You don't want to do that anyway,” said Danny, authoritatively, to disguise the fact that his heart was doing a violent Charleston in his chest. “The Swan's the only hotel in Sandford an' it's not much cop. You sneeze, someone three rooms down the hall sez bless you. Come an' stay with me. It's only a flat but there's a spare room an'...” He racked his brains. “...a cooker... an' I'm thinking of maybe gettin' a television if they extend reception from Cirencester. 'Cause at the moment you've sort of got to hold wires out the window to get a decent picture around here...”
Danny realised that he was starting to babble. “Ur. Yunno... if you want.”
“How much are you offering for it?” asked Nicholas, brightening considerably, for all his super-senses totally deaf to Danny's pounding heartbeat.
Danny blinked at him for a bit. “Er, well, I got an offer running this week, actual'y. Hundred per cent off for people who saved my arse from gettin' blown up last year. I mean, we could go halves on food an' the 'lectricity an' that, but I'm not havin' anything else off you.”
He looked up. “'Ey, you're not any good at plants an' stuff, are you, Nic'las? Only the old bat next door says my front garden's a disgrace t'the street, an' anything I put in buys it in about a week.”
From the flattened expression on Nicholas's face, his hesitation, it was obvious he didn't know whether to jump on the chance of a lifetime- free room and board in this day and age?- tempered only by a modicum of city suspicion over a deal too good to be true, and his own morals. He looked thinner than he had in Germany, which meant such offers had been few and far between, making them all the more tempting. He managed to resist. “Then I'll have to wait the week out in the Crown, because that isn't exactly fair to you, Danny. I'd owe you at least three pounds a month.”
Danny, who had been trying to get Frannie's attention by way of a series of not-very-subtle gestures in her direction- hand movements which to an outsider somewhat resembled a one-sided Masonic handshake- choked. “Three-?! Blimey, Nick, I en't even payin' that f'r two months!”
It occurred to him slightly too late, as things usually did, that Nicholas might find his offer as a bit insulting. Also, there was the problem of feeling like a guest, as opposed to feeling like you actually had a right to be somewhere. This was something Danny had experienced first-hand when he'd first come home, before he'd sorted out a place of his own. As a guest, you always felt obliged to walk around carefully and not touch things, always uneasy about outstaying your welcome. Above everything, Danny wanted Nicholas to feel comfortable, so he said, “Ten bob. F'r that, I could put a west wing on the Anderson.”
Or get us that telly, someday.
Nicholas considered, instantly looking more comfortable now that fair terms were being met. “Eighteen?”
The absurdity of the reversed situation started to dawn on Danny, and he started to grin. “Fourteen.”
“Sixteen, and don't make me shove it down your throat.”
“Done,” said Danny, happily, having finally managed to catch Frannie's eye. “An' I'm getting' you a proper drink t'settle it.”
“It's only mid-day,” said Nicholas, a bit doubtfully, but he didn't object too much. Probably because he was so shocked at having this element of his business trip already fulfilled.
“Sun's over the yardarm, en't it?” Frannie was quick on the uptake, delivering two pints to their table in short order. Danny raised his glass, completely elated and not particularly caring who knew it. He wanted to say something clever, a proper toast of some kind, but after a second he gave up and just jumped on the moment before it could pass.
“Cheers!”
Nicholas emptied a good fourth of his glass in reply, coughed, thumped his own chest, looking a bit embarrassed.
The first time he'd met Danny, he recalled, the man had been more caked mud than person. Stranded in the middle of a minefield with the rest of his battalion, Danny had approached his own situation- and Nicholas- as if it were no more serious than a pub, as if he had been in a pub, this pub, perhaps. The attitude had annoyed Nicholas at first- who wanted to have some clumsy and talkative oaf trailing you through a minefield? and the things he'd said; anyone who claimed they wanted to be able to sniff out mines was clearly mad- but he'd been the first to follow, and he'd kept on saying those illogical, strange things that caught Nicholas off-guard in the warmest ways.
And he was no different here, which was a kind of relief Nicholas hadn't expected, even if he couldn't recall the face without the mud.
Danny thumped him helpfully on the back, pulling the thump at the last moment. Nicholas was a bit too thin- he'd noticed that almost immediately- and might not be that resistant to full-strength back-thumps. He seemed fine, right enough, but even on short acquaintance Danny had got the impression that Nicholas was the kind of person who seemed fine and kept motoring on right up until their foot dropped off or they developed a sudden case of severe deadness. He was going to have to take good care of him.
Danny was shaky on the concept of altruism, up to and including how to spell it. Nicholas appeared to be a bit lost, somehow, and that had been the last thing he'd been back in Germany. Besides, that relieved sort of smile of Nicholas's... he remembered that, too, and it was well worth the effort.
“'Ve you had lunch? They do a decent ploughmans, or if you don't want to hang around here, I got a good bit of game pie at home.”
“If it's not out of a rusty issue tin,” said Nicholas, who was actually starving from the dusty march from Buford Abbey and what had really been three different lorry-hitching connections. Better to keep the conversation going, and keep the favour-asking from piling up for now. “I'd eat anything.”
A bit of a lie, this, but this was England under rationing, and one couldn't really be so picky in London nowadays. “Would you rather I come over your flat right now? You probably weren't expecting a flatmate when you left it.”
“Nah. It's alright,” said Danny, expansively, then paused. “Could always have another drink, though.”
“You can't be serious.”
Part 5