but only if you run.
I started writing this fic on the 18th of August. That is exactly 115 days ago. I don't think that I've ever struggled this hard with a fic before. It's kind of ridiculous. So, about two weeks ago, I decided I was going to finish it before the year ended... and here we are. Though, I don't know, I'm not very happy with it. It's really not my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but, yeah, I needed it off my harddrive at this point. And now that it's done, I just couldn't stand to look at it anymore. BLARGH. I think I'm going to go and hide in the corner now.
But Only If You Run
Cook/Archie. ~6200 word. PG-13
Beta-ed by sundayschild , who I love and adore. One day, I hope to be even half as talented as she is.
David Cook was 26 years old when he signed up to fight for his country.
He bought into the ideals. The stories of a bright, shining glory; stories of victory and triumph. Romantic imaginings of charging into battle, sunlight glinting off medals, and keeping their homes safe from harm.
Now - now David knows that there’s nothing glorious about it. There’s nothing majestic in watching your brother fall forwards after a bullet rips through his throat, his body hitting the ground with a sickening thud. There’s nothing to be celebrated in watching as Andrew drowns in his own blood, bleeding out onto the already blood-soaked sand while Michael holds him back by his shoulders, his ears ringing with the gargling noises coming from his best friend in the world, while the salty sea water stings against his skin.
They’ve only been out there three months when a new medic is brought in after Josiah takes a bullet to his right foot. His name is David Archuleta.
“You do know the last medic got blown up, right?”Johns says to him, his grin giving everything away, “Seriously, mate, it wasn’t pretty. Body parts were everywhere.”
Archie stares hard at the ground, hands shoved deep into his pockets. David can see his ears turning pink while the rest of him pales. He can’t help but feel for him under the amusement, “C’mon, leave the kid alone Mike.”
Michael just laughs, patting Archie on the back hard before walking off, the grin never leaving his face.
David doesn’t say a word. He just watches; eyes fixed on Archie, biting down on his bottom lip and trying not to laugh too.
The next time he sees Archie, he’s bent over almost double next a tree; his right hand pushing back against the bullet-torn bark for support, a hard line of tension coursing through his entire body, the sound of his retching punctuating the almost-silence, tearing into it.
He doesn’t expect the rush of affection that he feels without warning, sneaking up on him without even as much as a whisper or an echo of a footstep. He remembers this, remembers when everything was new and frightening. (Stretching back through his cracked memory, broken fingers reaching out across the chasm; foggy recollections of times when the destruction hadn’t quite destroyed him yet.)
David places his hand in the centre of Archie back, right between his shoulder blades, the ridge of his spine, and holds out his canteen for him.
“Here, take this. You’ll feel better.” He shakes it from side to side a little, listening to the metallic sound the water inside makes as it hits the sides, before placing it firmly in Archie’s open palm, catching the skin of Archie’s wrist with his fingers as he does.
David turns his hand and places a knuckle in one of the gaps between his vertebrae, and presses down for a second before taking his hand away. It’s shaking; just a little, tiny tremors running under his skin.
“Thank you.” His voice sounds so small and uncertain, like he’s watching the ground underneath his feet crumble, but underneath it all there’s a warmth; something soft and safe. David can’t put his finger on it.
“Don’t mention it.” He flashes a smile at Archie as he puts the canteen back in his pocket, scraping his fingernails lightly over the metal as his does and tries not to think about the way that, for a second, his hand had lingered for too long.
He watches as Archie curls his own hands into fists at his sides, pressing them against his thighs, almost as if to keep them steady. David tries not to think about that either, just smiles again when he nods awkwardly at him, keeping his eyes on the ground, and walks away, back to the rest of the company.
Archie turns back and flashes a quick smile at him before walking away, his eyes crinkling at the edges and the hint of dimples just starting on his cheeks. It was real, and open, and David doesn’t quite remember the last time he’d seen something that wholly good since the war began.
Something sharp twists hard inside his ribcage. (It doesn’t hurt.)
It’s something him and Michael do, late at night when everything’s gone still, the violence receding to the edge until the morning. They sit, slumped against the walls of their trench, sharing a cigarette, and just-just talking. Ordinary conversations between ordinary men. (If they close their eyes, they can even make themselves believe it’s true.)
They smoke the same way they all smoke out here: for something to do, something to keep their hands busy when they’re not poised on triggers, to keep their minds from skidding out. It keeps them focused; calm.
Michael’s part-way into a story about his childhood in Perth when he gets a far-away look in his eyes as he reaches for the cigarette, pressing the knuckles of his left hand hard onto the frozen soil.
“You think you’ll ever go back there?” David looks upwards at the night sky as he asks the question, not wanting to see what emotions play out on Michael’s face.
“Sure. One day. We’ve just gotta win this war and get back home first.” Home. He can’t remember the last time he heard that word spoken aloud out here. It rolls around his chest, rattling at the bars of caged emotions, as the smoke burns in his lungs.
“Do you ever think about it?” David rolls the cigarette between his fingers, passing it over to Michael, keeping his eyes on the trail of smoke it leaves behind.
“To tell you the truth, mate, I try my best not to.”
He understands perfectly. Out here, you keep precious memories locked away, treat them like photographs; taking them out when you need them, running your fingers lightly around the edges, before putting them down.
David remembers running barefoot through his back garden with his brothers, the sun behind them, fresh soil between their toes. Remembers late nights, hiding under the bedcovers, whispering stories to each other, lying close so nobody else could hear. (Memories faded like old letters, worn thin and smudged beyond legibility.)
“Yeah, it’s probably best you don’t think about how much of a good time they’re having now you’re out of their faces.” Divert the tension with a joke, never let them see you cry or show weakness; the soldiers’ best defence.
Michael’s laugh sounds empty and hollowed out, jagged around edges that should be smooth. David hardly even remembers what it sounded like before. He reaches out his hand to Michael’s shoulder and tugs forward until he turns to face him.
“Yeah, I know.” He twists his mouth to the side and drops the tiny cigarette butt on the ground between them. Neither goes to stamp it out right away, just taking a moment to watch the smoke curl upwards into the cold air, before Michael coughs and crushes it between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. (He passes the next one he lights straight to David.)
When David shifts slightly, digging his left boot into the frosted soil, stretching the cramped muscles in his legs. The fog thickens around them, curling under their uniforms, settling in against their bones. He shivers and rests his head back against the walls of the trench behind him, breathing the smoke out slowly.
A gunshot goes off in the field behind them. (Neither of them even flinches, they just let the sound roll over them. And so the greys and reds of the war dig a little deeper into their veins.)
Archie always seemed to strike perfectly, devastatingly, between the gaps in David’s armour, grown rusty with exhaustion and pain. David didn’t fully comprehend how he was able to do that - just crash into the chaos, and create beauty there; become the still point in a world that was spiralling out of control as they all watched. (Helpless as bystanders, the guns in their dirty hands no use. They didn’t solve anything. David knew that now.)
There was something that was more about him, his ability to grasp at tiny snatches of serenity and tease them with his splayed out fingers, making them last, turning them into a lifeline-a rope in the hands of a drowning soldier. That David didn’t think Archie even knew he was doing it, only made it all the more remarkable.
He found him like that, cross-legged, absentmindedly playing the piano on the ground in front of him, his lips moving, just barely, in time with the swift movements of his fingers, singing under his breath.
And he’s only singing quietly, his voice barely making vibrations in the air, but David can hear him clearer than he’s heard anything since D-Day. (Since the first time he heard a gun fire with the intention to kill and his brother’s desperate gasps for air.) He knows he should walk away, give Archie this precious moment alone, but he can’t.
He doesn’t want to.
Archie looks more alive now, sitting in on the ground with his helmet falling forwards over his eyes and the right knee of his pants torn, fingertips catching on the rough bark below them, than David has ever seen him before. David thinks that he looks more alive than he’s ever seen anybody look before.
It’s-it’s beautiful. He doesn’t even try to hide his staring.
Archie’s hands still as he lifts his head to see David looking at him. David doesn’t look away, there’s no point in that. Instead, he steps forwards; moves behind Archie. He sees the blush spread like wildfire across Archie’s cheeks as he stares hard at the ground, his fingers now tangled in his lap.
David laughs and reaches out to lay a hand against the back on Archie’s neck, his thumb pressing lightly over the knob at the top of his spine. (Archie doesn’t flinch even a little, but leans back into the touch. It’s only slight, but it’s there. David notices and presses down harder for a moment.)
“Don’t stop.”
Archie blushes harder, the red-gold of it spreading under the collar of his uniform - David’s fingertips ache with the urge to reach out and chase it - and carries on singing, his voice sounds something like David imagines salvation would; a lot like home.
Something warm (something bright and golden and wonderful) unravels inside David’s chest. (He closes his eyes for the briefest of moments and tries to hold onto the feeling.)
Michael dies in slow motion, and David is there to see every slow second of it.
He sees Michael’s quick smile the second before the bullet hits; sees the terrifyingly blank look on his face as he falls backwards to the ground; sees red spreading too-fast on the khaki of his uniform.
“Michael. Michael. Michael. Listen to me.”
He swallows hard and presses down as much as he can; feels blood (too hot, too hot) spill out from in-between his fingers, Michael shivering hard under his hands. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. This is nothing. Okay? Just--” He struggles to catch his breath, “Just hang on, okay?”
He doesn’t feel Archie gently pulling his fingers away, trying to get to the wound; doesn’t hear Archie talking in that calm, smooth voice of his. All he can see is the bright red - redredred - of Michel’s blood on his hands, on Archie’s hands, everywhere.
David feels like the entire world is whirling around them, the blood rushing around his skull fading into the static of white noise; deafeningly loud and silent all at the same time. The echoing thoughts of don’t you dare leave me here Mikey, don’t you fucking dare are the only fixed thing. (The still point in the chaos.)
Michael’s face twists into something that might be the ghost of a smile, but it’s too ugly, too harsh to be that; the pain showing through the cracks in the mask that he always seems to wear. The facade is crumbling and all David can do is watch.
He doesn’t look away from Michael’s face, not once. The entire world is spinning out around him and he can’t tear his eyes away, and he watches as Michael’s mouth opens and closes, like he wants to speak but can’t find the words. Every nerve in his body feels like its burning and freezing all at once, and he can feel everything. He can feel Michael’s blood soaking into his skin through the material of his pants and it makes him feel sick. Something settles in the pit of his stomach as he watches Michael’s eyes go glassy and vacant.
He doesn’t let go until he’s pulled away by Jason and Archie. His fingernails have Michael’s blood under them.
It’s still warm.
He doesn’t talk for a while after that, but it gets a lot easier to fire his rifle. (His aim gets better, his only coherent thought cold - die. It might scare him.)
“What do you do? Back home, I mean. What’s your job?”
David can’t fight his smile as Archie trips over the words falling from his mouth; doesn’t want to. He looks down at his boots, caked with dirt and rainwater, before answering.
“I was an English teacher.” His own use of the past tense makes something sharp and hot twist in the bottom of his stomach. He tries to ignore it as the word echoes around the walls of his skull, “High school.” (Was, was, was.)
He hears the rasp of Archie’s uniform, rubbing against itself, as he shifts his weight onto his other foot and tilts his head to one side. He’s looking at David like he’s the only thing in his world.
“Yeah?”
David nods and smiles again, just a little, as he lets himself remember the kids he teaches, their bright youth, and he hopes with a startling intensity that they’re all okay. “Yeah.” He waits for a beat before speaking again. “What about you?”
“Oh, I’m still in college. I’m training to be a vet.” David doesn’t miss the edge in Archie’s voice, yearning and hurt. “I mean, I always loved animals since I was really small and my parents wanted me to be a doctor, but -”
He stops mid-ramble when he hears David’s laugh, self-consciousness creeping into his voice. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just-it suits you.” David can hear the warmth in his own voice as a still quiet fades in around them. He toes the tiny pebble on the ground next to his boot; rolls it under his foot, back and forth.
When he looks up, Archie’s eyes have a too-bright and almost brittle edge to them as he tries to force a smile out. It looks nothing like a smile; it’s too twisted and laced with hurt to be a smile. It looks so wrong. David’s hand hovers in the freezing air above Archie’s arm, unsure of what to do. He just wants to take that look off Archie’s face.
“I just-I just really miss them sometimes, is all. You know?” He hears the sticky, dry sound of Archie’s swallow, sees the hard line of his clenched jaw. (It looks wrong on him somehow, too harsh and angry.)
David nods and puts his hand down to rest on Archie’s forearm, squeezing lightly. He keeps it there, fingers curled into the scratchy material of his jacket. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Archie presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and turns his head to the side, staring off into the night.
“You ever wonder why we’re here?” The word “here” means so much in that sentence, and David can feel the weight of it as it falls from his mouth. Here, on this continent, in this war. Here, in this trench at night with the rain pouring down around them both.
A second stretches too long between them, and David sees something flash in Archie’s eyes that he’s never seen before. It almost scares him. Almost. He can hear the metallic noise of the raindrops bouncing of their helmets.
“We’re here because.” Archie pauses, exhales, and turns to look straight ahead, his fingers curling together around his med kit. “Because it’s our job.” There’s a quiet strength in his voice, hidden under layers of exhaustion and pain, and means more than it should. David thinks about maybe kissing him. He doesn’t.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” He tips back his head back to catches the rain on his tongue. It tastes like blood and gunpowder as it slides down his throat. (When he shivers, it’s not from the cold.)
(It doesn’t stop raining for the next two days, each one of them drenched to their bones, skin got ghostly-white and wrinkled. Even after that, the puddles don’t drain away, the ground too water-logged to soak it in.
David splashes along the edge of one with his boot. Archie is standing just over his shoulder, his breathing deep and even as he watches, “You know, they say you can drown in an inch of water.”
He laughs until he cries; bent over double and biting down on his fist. He doesn’t know why.)
For a moment, David doesn’t really trust what he’s seeing.
It was earlier that day when the company had captured four Nazi soldiers as prisoners, earlier that day when David had taken pleasure in slamming the end of his rifle into one of their faces. (Thinking of Michael and Andrew as Chikezie yanked him backwards, stopping him from doing more.)
And now Archie’s just-he’s acting like he’s taking care of any of them, like this is the same. His fingers working over the gash on his forehead, muttering clumsy, broken-up German under his breath, even though the man isn’t saying anything back. It looks wrong; doesn’t make sense.
David curls his fingers around Archie’s wrist, feeling the bones move under the thin layer of skin there, and pulls him away. Archie doesn’t argue, just lets himself be pulled along, following David, just like he always does.
When they stop, Archie looks up at him, confusion stamped all over his face, his voice coming out soft and steady. “Cook? Are you okay?”
“No.” And David-he didn’t mean to say it as abruptly as he did, but once it’s out he can’t stop it. He looks away from the raw hurt in Archie’s eyes. “He’s the enemy, Arch. The bad guy. Why are you wasting time on him? Do you really think they’d look after you like that? I mean, Archie, those people, those things, they--”
He doesn’t understand. (Andrew and Michael.)
“He’s still a human, Cook. Oh my gosh.” His voice sounds stronger and more self-assured than David thinks he’s ever heard it sound before. He nods once and walks away, pushing half-finished thoughts of warm skin and interlacing fingers to the back of his mind.
David learned early on that war wasn’t about glory. It wasn’t about defending your country, or standing up for what was right; it was about breaking things.
Everywhere he looked, all he could see was death and destruction. Broken buildings, abandoned and barely standing; churches and homes, dragged down into the dust. Broken bodies, cold and bloodstained on the ground; left behind. Broken spirits; the look in the men’s eyes, the emptiness that was growing day by day. When he closes his eyes, all he can ever see are men that used to be his friends, their waxy, grey faces contorted in pain.
When he opens them-
When he opens them, all he sees is Archie. Archie’s face illuminated, just for a second, by a flare from another round of gunfire and he thinks-he thinks that maybe if Archie is okay, then he might be too.
When Archie takes a bullet to the shoulder, David can’t remember being more scared.
It’s all he can do to hold on - hold on to him - and press down as hard as he can, watching the dark red spread out onto the khaki coloured material of Archie’s jacket, onto his fingers. His mind feels like it’s strung too tight, too high, reeling backwards like a train that’s come off its tracks. Not again.
David can’t feel his hands; can’t feel anything past the icy cold panic skittering down the spine. (Not him, not him, not him. Not now. Not when they haven’t even--) He barely even registers Jason rushing towards them, his knees making a dull sound as they hit the ground. The world narrows down to Archie; Archie’s eyes screwed shut, his jaw clenched tight, fingers digging into David’s forearm.
“I’m okay. I’m--” And he’s shaking his head, grinding his teeth together, pushing Jason’s morphine away, “I don’t need it. I’m fine. Bandages are all-save it. I’m all right.”
He’s okay.
David feels too dizzy; he doesn’t quite know which way is up, and for one second, it feels a lot like his head might spin straight off his shoulders. He can hardly see his fingers as they grip numbly onto Archie’s own, and for one frightening and wondrous moment, everything fades into grey-black around him.
When everything swings violently back into sharp focus, Archie’s eyes are the only thing that he can see; twin points of perfect clarity swimming in his field of vision. The world doesn’t look so bad, for once. (He’s still holding onto Archie hand, he realises.)
Their first kiss, when it happens, is almost a mistake; both of them dangling somewhere in the silver smoke between awake and dreaming, bodies pressed together for warmth in their shared foxhole. The air around them is almost ice, but the inside of Archie’s mouth is so warm as he falls into it.
It’s easy.
And as Archie’s hand works upwards and curls into the collar of his uniform, fingers hitting the top button, and tugs, it feels like this - all of this - was inevitable. Like maybe they’ve been heading towards this the entire time. Two trains rushing towards each other on the same track, just waiting for the moment of impact. (The moment of the--)
Their boots make a heavy sound as they knock together and they break away on something that might be the beginning of a breathy laugh, the sound caught in the shared space between their lips. David can feel Archie’s smile, and it feels something like a miracle.
(Crash.)
“Hey, hey,” He can hear the smile in his own voice; it feels unfamiliar and warm against his tongue. Archie tucks his head in against David’s shoulder, face pressed into his neck, and it’s all David can do just to hold on; he can feel Archie’s heartbeat through the layers of their clothes. It’s racing.
A grenade goes off somewhere in the distance. (He holds on tighter.)
There’s a shift.
A slight difference between the shades, the lines blurred together so much that it’s hardly noticeable. But it’s there, hidden, buried under the dirt and fatigue that blankets them all. They draw together slowly, knotted fingers and eyelashes against cheekbones, one hushed breath at a time.
Archie smiles wide against David’s collar bone and the sky goes lighter behind them. (Grey to milky pinks and purples as David’s fingers twist into Archie’s hair, knees bumping through layers of cloth.)
He runs his fingertips over the skin of Archie’s wrist; presses down and thinks that he can feel the blood rushing through the veins hidden underneath the fragile layer of skin there, his pulse beating out a syncopated rhythm, tattooing David’s fingerprints with its beat. (He always seeks out the pulse points, counting out the syncopated beats in his mind, one two three four. They let him know that they’re still alive.)
He bends his head to lick at the small patch of skin behind Archie’s ear (dirt, salt, sweat, and Archie underneath it all) and presses a smile there; he breathes in Archie and breathes out hope. (Fragments of a million different thoughts lie scattered around the edges of his consciousness, each a different shade of pain and fear. None of them mattered, not right now.) Archie’s breath stutters on the end of a something that might have been a laugh and David tightens his hold on his wrist; feels his pulse quickening, just a little, under his grip. He pulls him closer, tangling their legs together. They fit.
(Outside, people are killing and being killed. Anger and fear run wild in the air, like bayonets against your skin, but in here, in this tiny hole in the ground with Archie, he can’t ever remember feeling more calm. They are caught in the eye of the storm. Caught together.)
He doesn’t see it coming. He should, but he doesn’t.
Handwriting that was once as familiar to him as his own, splashed all over the page. He knows who it’s from without even looking. It’s strange; it’s been so long since David has thought about her. It feels like she’s in another life altogether; that she’s writing to another man, not him.
He has never felt so far away from home.
David looks up to see Archie watching him with a strange look on his face, a look that David doesn’t want to place.
“Arch...” (Fingers that mean to reach out and touch clench at his side, nails digging into his own palm.)
When Archie turns away, David feels his throat clench painfully. He almost wants to laugh. He open s his hand, and lets the letter drift to the ground. (Of course, of course. He never did see it before. Why would it be different now? Of course.)
(In war, the violence gets everywhere. It works its way under your skin, into the crevices at the back of your mind. It wraps itself around your throat, squeezing tighter and tighter until it chokes you. It seeps through into your dreams.)
He can see Michael and Andrew, both of them stretched spread-eagle on the ground at his feet, their bodies broken open. He can feel the blood in his hair, falling into his eyes, into his mouth, against his teeth and tongue. He can taste it; hot, liquid copper, the rest of the world fading in and out, black and greys.
Archie’s voice calling out his name feels like a hymn to his ears, and he turns around to face him; reaches out. David watches as his brains paint the air behind him, his skull flying apart in slow motion. His arms and legs are numb, rooting him to the spot, forcing him to keep on looking as Archie’s body hits the ground with a sickening thud. He tries to scream and the sound curdles in his throat.
When he wakes up, his mouth aches and his eyes are burning. Without even thinking, he scrambles out into the open, the air too-thick, blocking his throat, his nose, his ears. He can still feel the blood all over him, sticky on his eyelashes, gluing them shut. It’s all he can smell.
He turns around and throws up into the snow; the alarm bell ringing in his ears drowning out all other sound.
When David slides back into the foxhole, Archie’s awake and looking at him with big worried eyes. He just shakes his head and clutches Archie’s hand, feeling the bones shift under his fragile skin, and tries to catch his breath again. (Inside his chest, he thinks he feels something splinter and fly apart. It scares him.)
“I just think that maybe this - this thing, isn’t the best for us right now. It can’t work.” The words taste like ash in mouth, feel a lot like fire rushing in his veins. He clenches his jaw against the betrayal lying under his tongue, the part of him that wants to beg him to stay (stay, stay).
Archie doesn’t say anything, just sits there, digging his fingers down hard into his kneecaps and nodding slowly. He doesn’t even look at him.
When he stands up to walk away, David doesn’t think he can remember the world feeling ever quite so big before; quite so empty.
The sleeves of Archie’s uniform have always been just that little bit too long. He rolls up the ends but they always fall down (David remembers moments of quiet, shared whispers in the middle of the night, reaching out at tugging at the material there, pulling Archie into him), leaving just his fingers poking around from under the dark fabric as he runs them over his rosary beads, or works on a casualty. It makes David’s entire body ache with the need to touch. (He knows he can’t. He knows, he knows, he knows.)
He hoards every stolen glance, keeps them locked away like a secret in his chest; pushes them down, keeps them safe - shelters them from the bullets and blood, unmarked and innocent. He keeps them whole and clings to them, his last foothold in humanity. (He wonders if Archie does the same thing.)
In the end, they had never really nothing more than the smudged out words on burnt pages of letters home; letters that would never be sent. They had lived in-between the lines of what the world expected and now - now there was nothing left to show. Nothing except for the dull, empty ache in his chest, and the itch at the back of his mind.
A drop of rain slides down his neck and under the collar of his shirt, pooling in the dip of his collar bone. He clenches his jaw and grips his rifle tighter, trigger finger holding steady, resisting the urge to squeeze, to fire at the empty sky.
He finds Archie the night after their final real advance.
David hadn’t been looking for him, but then, that’s how these thing work, isn’t it? He’s sitting at the edge of the lake near the building they’d been stationed in, legs crossed under him, his helmet left upside down on the ground. He’s sitting almost perfectly still, the movement of his chest as he inhales and exhales the only sign of life.
He can see Archie’s breath on the air, lingering just past his lips.
David sits down next to him, close; he imagines that he can almost feel Archie’s body heat through the layers of clothing. (Imagines.) Neither of them says a word, just letting the silence settle in. He thinks about taking Archie’s hand, knotting their fingers together so tight that they’ll never come apart again. He thinks about burying his face into his hair, where it curls at the back of his neck and behind his ears, and breathing in deep. He sits still and bites down on the inside of his cheek.
The dusk light reflects off the ripples on the surface of the water.
“I’m not sorry, you know,” Archie says, still looking straight ahead at the water. “Whatever it was that we had, I’m not sorry it happened. I can’t be.”
(God, David has missed him. He still does.)
Archie sounds a lot older now. The boy that he met all those months ago is not the man sitting next to him now, not quite. He’s grown; more self-assured and stronger, better equipped to deal with the world around him. Underneath it all though, he’s still Archie; still tumbles over his own words, and laughs too sincerely, still sings under his breath in the night. David pushes back a smile at the thought.
“Yeah, I get it.” His throat feels too tight; closing in on all the words he wants to say, the words he needs to say, but he does - he gets it.
When he turns his head, he feels his heart stutter-stop inside his ribcage; Archie’s eyes look almost impossibly bright, his face heart-breakingly young. He won’t ever be sorry. He isn’t capable of it, not for that.
David looks down at the water in front of them. Their reflection, broken apart by the ripples across the surface of the water, stares back at him.
Cowell brings them all together in a field (torn apart by bullets and bombs, patched together awkwardly in places) somewhere in Germany. There’s a too-serious look on his face, but his eyes are telling an entirely different tale. David can feel the shift in the air; tiny points of electricity just under the thin surface of his skin.
The war is over.
This moment-he’s imagined this moment a million times before, in a million different ways. They all have. He remembers restless midnights, sitting with Michael in secluded corners, passing their last cigarette back and forth between them, ash falling like charred snow into the cuffs of their sleeves. He remembers they’d always imagined fireworks, gold and green painting across the sky, high above their heads; always imagined screaming to the heavens with a joy they’d never felt before. Now though, it was more like a quiet relief, like simply falling asleep after being awake for too long for their bodies to stand it anymore.
He misses Michael, he thinks, with a clarity that aches somewhere buried under the rubble of the past year, under dead bodies and bombs, decimated homes and fields torn to shreds. (He misses Michael.)
He looks over at Archie and watches the slow, easy smile spread across his face as he hugs Jason; somewhere deep down in his chest, it still aches.
It takes David three months to work up the courage to look at the stack of pictures hidden in a shoebox underneath his bed. His hands don’t tremble when he lifts the lid, but it feels like they are anyway.
The picture on the top of the pile, tied together with frayed brown string-he doesn’t remember ever seeing it before, doesn’t remember it being taken. It’s of all of them, the entire company.
David’s right arm is slung around Michael’s shoulders, pulling him in close, smiling wide and open and almost real. He clenches his jaw tight, and forces his eyes away. The entire photograph is filled with the faces of the best men that David thinks that he will ever meet, each one of them a hero, braver than anybody could ever imagine.
Archie’s in the photograph too, hidden almost entirely corner. But he isn’t and-and what David sees there when he looks closer makes him ache in a way that he’d thought he’d stopped being able to do. Archie’s looking right at him, head turned to one side, with an expression that’s intense and impossibly serene all at once, the beginnings of smile sketched out across his face. He’s looking at David like he’s the only other person there.
His hands stay steady as he slides the picture into the back pocket of his jeans.
He’s out of his front door and in his car before he even stops to think about it. (His fingers are numb and shaking as he turns the ignition key.)
Seeing Archie again, it’s-- David thought he was prepared for it, he’d thought that he was ready. (He was wrong, as he so often is.)
He’s always been good with words, always been able to piece the right ones around each other to create the perfect pictures, the perfect colours, for what he wanted to say. David had spent his life enamoured with language and the way that it worked. That was why he became an English teacher; to try and pass that love on to the kids he worked with, to make a difference.
He’d always been good with words, until now.
Now, the syllables too big and clumsy in his mouth, a weight on his tongue, a square trying to force itself into a circle. And David thinks that maybe, just maybe, words don’t always work. He thinks that there isn’t always a word for what you’re feeling. It’s the first time that he’s ever thought that.
This-- it feels a lot like coming out of his skin, a lot like trying to catch your breath after running for your life. It feels like stepping off a battlefield. He digs his nails into the palms of his hands (just for a moment, just to keep him grounded) and reaches out for Archie, pulls him in. (They still fit.)
“I love you.” It comes out in one breath, his voice lifting upwards at the end, almost like it could be a question. They both know that it never was. (He thinks it never will be, and something shakes loose from deep inside his chest.) He says it again and against, whispering the words against Archie’s skin, where his neck meets his shoulder.
The war is over.
But Only If You Run
Cook/Archie. ~6200 word. PG-13
Beta-ed by sundayschild , who I love and adore. One day, I hope to be even half as talented as she is.
David Cook was 26 years old when he signed up to fight for his country.
He bought into the ideals. The stories of a bright, shining glory; stories of victory and triumph. Romantic imaginings of charging into battle, sunlight glinting off medals, and keeping their homes safe from harm.
Now - now David knows that there’s nothing glorious about it. There’s nothing majestic in watching your brother fall forwards after a bullet rips through his throat, his body hitting the ground with a sickening thud. There’s nothing to be celebrated in watching as Andrew drowns in his own blood, bleeding out onto the already blood-soaked sand while Michael holds him back by his shoulders, his ears ringing with the gargling noises coming from his best friend in the world, while the salty sea water stings against his skin.
They’ve only been out there three months when a new medic is brought in after Josiah takes a bullet to his right foot. His name is David Archuleta.
“You do know the last medic got blown up, right?”Johns says to him, his grin giving everything away, “Seriously, mate, it wasn’t pretty. Body parts were everywhere.”
Archie stares hard at the ground, hands shoved deep into his pockets. David can see his ears turning pink while the rest of him pales. He can’t help but feel for him under the amusement, “C’mon, leave the kid alone Mike.”
Michael just laughs, patting Archie on the back hard before walking off, the grin never leaving his face.
David doesn’t say a word. He just watches; eyes fixed on Archie, biting down on his bottom lip and trying not to laugh too.
The next time he sees Archie, he’s bent over almost double next a tree; his right hand pushing back against the bullet-torn bark for support, a hard line of tension coursing through his entire body, the sound of his retching punctuating the almost-silence, tearing into it.
He doesn’t expect the rush of affection that he feels without warning, sneaking up on him without even as much as a whisper or an echo of a footstep. He remembers this, remembers when everything was new and frightening. (Stretching back through his cracked memory, broken fingers reaching out across the chasm; foggy recollections of times when the destruction hadn’t quite destroyed him yet.)
David places his hand in the centre of Archie back, right between his shoulder blades, the ridge of his spine, and holds out his canteen for him.
“Here, take this. You’ll feel better.” He shakes it from side to side a little, listening to the metallic sound the water inside makes as it hits the sides, before placing it firmly in Archie’s open palm, catching the skin of Archie’s wrist with his fingers as he does.
David turns his hand and places a knuckle in one of the gaps between his vertebrae, and presses down for a second before taking his hand away. It’s shaking; just a little, tiny tremors running under his skin.
“Thank you.” His voice sounds so small and uncertain, like he’s watching the ground underneath his feet crumble, but underneath it all there’s a warmth; something soft and safe. David can’t put his finger on it.
“Don’t mention it.” He flashes a smile at Archie as he puts the canteen back in his pocket, scraping his fingernails lightly over the metal as his does and tries not to think about the way that, for a second, his hand had lingered for too long.
He watches as Archie curls his own hands into fists at his sides, pressing them against his thighs, almost as if to keep them steady. David tries not to think about that either, just smiles again when he nods awkwardly at him, keeping his eyes on the ground, and walks away, back to the rest of the company.
Archie turns back and flashes a quick smile at him before walking away, his eyes crinkling at the edges and the hint of dimples just starting on his cheeks. It was real, and open, and David doesn’t quite remember the last time he’d seen something that wholly good since the war began.
Something sharp twists hard inside his ribcage. (It doesn’t hurt.)
It’s something him and Michael do, late at night when everything’s gone still, the violence receding to the edge until the morning. They sit, slumped against the walls of their trench, sharing a cigarette, and just-just talking. Ordinary conversations between ordinary men. (If they close their eyes, they can even make themselves believe it’s true.)
They smoke the same way they all smoke out here: for something to do, something to keep their hands busy when they’re not poised on triggers, to keep their minds from skidding out. It keeps them focused; calm.
Michael’s part-way into a story about his childhood in Perth when he gets a far-away look in his eyes as he reaches for the cigarette, pressing the knuckles of his left hand hard onto the frozen soil.
“You think you’ll ever go back there?” David looks upwards at the night sky as he asks the question, not wanting to see what emotions play out on Michael’s face.
“Sure. One day. We’ve just gotta win this war and get back home first.” Home. He can’t remember the last time he heard that word spoken aloud out here. It rolls around his chest, rattling at the bars of caged emotions, as the smoke burns in his lungs.
“Do you ever think about it?” David rolls the cigarette between his fingers, passing it over to Michael, keeping his eyes on the trail of smoke it leaves behind.
“To tell you the truth, mate, I try my best not to.”
He understands perfectly. Out here, you keep precious memories locked away, treat them like photographs; taking them out when you need them, running your fingers lightly around the edges, before putting them down.
David remembers running barefoot through his back garden with his brothers, the sun behind them, fresh soil between their toes. Remembers late nights, hiding under the bedcovers, whispering stories to each other, lying close so nobody else could hear. (Memories faded like old letters, worn thin and smudged beyond legibility.)
“Yeah, it’s probably best you don’t think about how much of a good time they’re having now you’re out of their faces.” Divert the tension with a joke, never let them see you cry or show weakness; the soldiers’ best defence.
Michael’s laugh sounds empty and hollowed out, jagged around edges that should be smooth. David hardly even remembers what it sounded like before. He reaches out his hand to Michael’s shoulder and tugs forward until he turns to face him.
“Yeah, I know.” He twists his mouth to the side and drops the tiny cigarette butt on the ground between them. Neither goes to stamp it out right away, just taking a moment to watch the smoke curl upwards into the cold air, before Michael coughs and crushes it between the tips of his thumb and forefinger. (He passes the next one he lights straight to David.)
When David shifts slightly, digging his left boot into the frosted soil, stretching the cramped muscles in his legs. The fog thickens around them, curling under their uniforms, settling in against their bones. He shivers and rests his head back against the walls of the trench behind him, breathing the smoke out slowly.
A gunshot goes off in the field behind them. (Neither of them even flinches, they just let the sound roll over them. And so the greys and reds of the war dig a little deeper into their veins.)
Archie always seemed to strike perfectly, devastatingly, between the gaps in David’s armour, grown rusty with exhaustion and pain. David didn’t fully comprehend how he was able to do that - just crash into the chaos, and create beauty there; become the still point in a world that was spiralling out of control as they all watched. (Helpless as bystanders, the guns in their dirty hands no use. They didn’t solve anything. David knew that now.)
There was something that was more about him, his ability to grasp at tiny snatches of serenity and tease them with his splayed out fingers, making them last, turning them into a lifeline-a rope in the hands of a drowning soldier. That David didn’t think Archie even knew he was doing it, only made it all the more remarkable.
He found him like that, cross-legged, absentmindedly playing the piano on the ground in front of him, his lips moving, just barely, in time with the swift movements of his fingers, singing under his breath.
And he’s only singing quietly, his voice barely making vibrations in the air, but David can hear him clearer than he’s heard anything since D-Day. (Since the first time he heard a gun fire with the intention to kill and his brother’s desperate gasps for air.) He knows he should walk away, give Archie this precious moment alone, but he can’t.
He doesn’t want to.
Archie looks more alive now, sitting in on the ground with his helmet falling forwards over his eyes and the right knee of his pants torn, fingertips catching on the rough bark below them, than David has ever seen him before. David thinks that he looks more alive than he’s ever seen anybody look before.
It’s-it’s beautiful. He doesn’t even try to hide his staring.
Archie’s hands still as he lifts his head to see David looking at him. David doesn’t look away, there’s no point in that. Instead, he steps forwards; moves behind Archie. He sees the blush spread like wildfire across Archie’s cheeks as he stares hard at the ground, his fingers now tangled in his lap.
David laughs and reaches out to lay a hand against the back on Archie’s neck, his thumb pressing lightly over the knob at the top of his spine. (Archie doesn’t flinch even a little, but leans back into the touch. It’s only slight, but it’s there. David notices and presses down harder for a moment.)
“Don’t stop.”
Archie blushes harder, the red-gold of it spreading under the collar of his uniform - David’s fingertips ache with the urge to reach out and chase it - and carries on singing, his voice sounds something like David imagines salvation would; a lot like home.
Something warm (something bright and golden and wonderful) unravels inside David’s chest. (He closes his eyes for the briefest of moments and tries to hold onto the feeling.)
Michael dies in slow motion, and David is there to see every slow second of it.
He sees Michael’s quick smile the second before the bullet hits; sees the terrifyingly blank look on his face as he falls backwards to the ground; sees red spreading too-fast on the khaki of his uniform.
“Michael. Michael. Michael. Listen to me.”
He swallows hard and presses down as much as he can; feels blood (too hot, too hot) spill out from in-between his fingers, Michael shivering hard under his hands. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay. This is nothing. Okay? Just--” He struggles to catch his breath, “Just hang on, okay?”
He doesn’t feel Archie gently pulling his fingers away, trying to get to the wound; doesn’t hear Archie talking in that calm, smooth voice of his. All he can see is the bright red - redredred - of Michel’s blood on his hands, on Archie’s hands, everywhere.
David feels like the entire world is whirling around them, the blood rushing around his skull fading into the static of white noise; deafeningly loud and silent all at the same time. The echoing thoughts of don’t you dare leave me here Mikey, don’t you fucking dare are the only fixed thing. (The still point in the chaos.)
Michael’s face twists into something that might be the ghost of a smile, but it’s too ugly, too harsh to be that; the pain showing through the cracks in the mask that he always seems to wear. The facade is crumbling and all David can do is watch.
He doesn’t look away from Michael’s face, not once. The entire world is spinning out around him and he can’t tear his eyes away, and he watches as Michael’s mouth opens and closes, like he wants to speak but can’t find the words. Every nerve in his body feels like its burning and freezing all at once, and he can feel everything. He can feel Michael’s blood soaking into his skin through the material of his pants and it makes him feel sick. Something settles in the pit of his stomach as he watches Michael’s eyes go glassy and vacant.
He doesn’t let go until he’s pulled away by Jason and Archie. His fingernails have Michael’s blood under them.
It’s still warm.
He doesn’t talk for a while after that, but it gets a lot easier to fire his rifle. (His aim gets better, his only coherent thought cold - die. It might scare him.)
“What do you do? Back home, I mean. What’s your job?”
David can’t fight his smile as Archie trips over the words falling from his mouth; doesn’t want to. He looks down at his boots, caked with dirt and rainwater, before answering.
“I was an English teacher.” His own use of the past tense makes something sharp and hot twist in the bottom of his stomach. He tries to ignore it as the word echoes around the walls of his skull, “High school.” (Was, was, was.)
He hears the rasp of Archie’s uniform, rubbing against itself, as he shifts his weight onto his other foot and tilts his head to one side. He’s looking at David like he’s the only thing in his world.
“Yeah?”
David nods and smiles again, just a little, as he lets himself remember the kids he teaches, their bright youth, and he hopes with a startling intensity that they’re all okay. “Yeah.” He waits for a beat before speaking again. “What about you?”
“Oh, I’m still in college. I’m training to be a vet.” David doesn’t miss the edge in Archie’s voice, yearning and hurt. “I mean, I always loved animals since I was really small and my parents wanted me to be a doctor, but -”
He stops mid-ramble when he hears David’s laugh, self-consciousness creeping into his voice. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just-it suits you.” David can hear the warmth in his own voice as a still quiet fades in around them. He toes the tiny pebble on the ground next to his boot; rolls it under his foot, back and forth.
When he looks up, Archie’s eyes have a too-bright and almost brittle edge to them as he tries to force a smile out. It looks nothing like a smile; it’s too twisted and laced with hurt to be a smile. It looks so wrong. David’s hand hovers in the freezing air above Archie’s arm, unsure of what to do. He just wants to take that look off Archie’s face.
“I just-I just really miss them sometimes, is all. You know?” He hears the sticky, dry sound of Archie’s swallow, sees the hard line of his clenched jaw. (It looks wrong on him somehow, too harsh and angry.)
David nods and puts his hand down to rest on Archie’s forearm, squeezing lightly. He keeps it there, fingers curled into the scratchy material of his jacket. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Archie presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and turns his head to the side, staring off into the night.
“You ever wonder why we’re here?” The word “here” means so much in that sentence, and David can feel the weight of it as it falls from his mouth. Here, on this continent, in this war. Here, in this trench at night with the rain pouring down around them both.
A second stretches too long between them, and David sees something flash in Archie’s eyes that he’s never seen before. It almost scares him. Almost. He can hear the metallic noise of the raindrops bouncing of their helmets.
“We’re here because.” Archie pauses, exhales, and turns to look straight ahead, his fingers curling together around his med kit. “Because it’s our job.” There’s a quiet strength in his voice, hidden under layers of exhaustion and pain, and means more than it should. David thinks about maybe kissing him. He doesn’t.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” He tips back his head back to catches the rain on his tongue. It tastes like blood and gunpowder as it slides down his throat. (When he shivers, it’s not from the cold.)
(It doesn’t stop raining for the next two days, each one of them drenched to their bones, skin got ghostly-white and wrinkled. Even after that, the puddles don’t drain away, the ground too water-logged to soak it in.
David splashes along the edge of one with his boot. Archie is standing just over his shoulder, his breathing deep and even as he watches, “You know, they say you can drown in an inch of water.”
He laughs until he cries; bent over double and biting down on his fist. He doesn’t know why.)
For a moment, David doesn’t really trust what he’s seeing.
It was earlier that day when the company had captured four Nazi soldiers as prisoners, earlier that day when David had taken pleasure in slamming the end of his rifle into one of their faces. (Thinking of Michael and Andrew as Chikezie yanked him backwards, stopping him from doing more.)
And now Archie’s just-he’s acting like he’s taking care of any of them, like this is the same. His fingers working over the gash on his forehead, muttering clumsy, broken-up German under his breath, even though the man isn’t saying anything back. It looks wrong; doesn’t make sense.
David curls his fingers around Archie’s wrist, feeling the bones move under the thin layer of skin there, and pulls him away. Archie doesn’t argue, just lets himself be pulled along, following David, just like he always does.
When they stop, Archie looks up at him, confusion stamped all over his face, his voice coming out soft and steady. “Cook? Are you okay?”
“No.” And David-he didn’t mean to say it as abruptly as he did, but once it’s out he can’t stop it. He looks away from the raw hurt in Archie’s eyes. “He’s the enemy, Arch. The bad guy. Why are you wasting time on him? Do you really think they’d look after you like that? I mean, Archie, those people, those things, they--”
He doesn’t understand. (Andrew and Michael.)
“He’s still a human, Cook. Oh my gosh.” His voice sounds stronger and more self-assured than David thinks he’s ever heard it sound before. He nods once and walks away, pushing half-finished thoughts of warm skin and interlacing fingers to the back of his mind.
David learned early on that war wasn’t about glory. It wasn’t about defending your country, or standing up for what was right; it was about breaking things.
Everywhere he looked, all he could see was death and destruction. Broken buildings, abandoned and barely standing; churches and homes, dragged down into the dust. Broken bodies, cold and bloodstained on the ground; left behind. Broken spirits; the look in the men’s eyes, the emptiness that was growing day by day. When he closes his eyes, all he can ever see are men that used to be his friends, their waxy, grey faces contorted in pain.
When he opens them-
When he opens them, all he sees is Archie. Archie’s face illuminated, just for a second, by a flare from another round of gunfire and he thinks-he thinks that maybe if Archie is okay, then he might be too.
When Archie takes a bullet to the shoulder, David can’t remember being more scared.
It’s all he can do to hold on - hold on to him - and press down as hard as he can, watching the dark red spread out onto the khaki coloured material of Archie’s jacket, onto his fingers. His mind feels like it’s strung too tight, too high, reeling backwards like a train that’s come off its tracks. Not again.
David can’t feel his hands; can’t feel anything past the icy cold panic skittering down the spine. (Not him, not him, not him. Not now. Not when they haven’t even--) He barely even registers Jason rushing towards them, his knees making a dull sound as they hit the ground. The world narrows down to Archie; Archie’s eyes screwed shut, his jaw clenched tight, fingers digging into David’s forearm.
“I’m okay. I’m--” And he’s shaking his head, grinding his teeth together, pushing Jason’s morphine away, “I don’t need it. I’m fine. Bandages are all-save it. I’m all right.”
He’s okay.
David feels too dizzy; he doesn’t quite know which way is up, and for one second, it feels a lot like his head might spin straight off his shoulders. He can hardly see his fingers as they grip numbly onto Archie’s own, and for one frightening and wondrous moment, everything fades into grey-black around him.
When everything swings violently back into sharp focus, Archie’s eyes are the only thing that he can see; twin points of perfect clarity swimming in his field of vision. The world doesn’t look so bad, for once. (He’s still holding onto Archie hand, he realises.)
Their first kiss, when it happens, is almost a mistake; both of them dangling somewhere in the silver smoke between awake and dreaming, bodies pressed together for warmth in their shared foxhole. The air around them is almost ice, but the inside of Archie’s mouth is so warm as he falls into it.
It’s easy.
And as Archie’s hand works upwards and curls into the collar of his uniform, fingers hitting the top button, and tugs, it feels like this - all of this - was inevitable. Like maybe they’ve been heading towards this the entire time. Two trains rushing towards each other on the same track, just waiting for the moment of impact. (The moment of the--)
Their boots make a heavy sound as they knock together and they break away on something that might be the beginning of a breathy laugh, the sound caught in the shared space between their lips. David can feel Archie’s smile, and it feels something like a miracle.
(Crash.)
“Hey, hey,” He can hear the smile in his own voice; it feels unfamiliar and warm against his tongue. Archie tucks his head in against David’s shoulder, face pressed into his neck, and it’s all David can do just to hold on; he can feel Archie’s heartbeat through the layers of their clothes. It’s racing.
A grenade goes off somewhere in the distance. (He holds on tighter.)
There’s a shift.
A slight difference between the shades, the lines blurred together so much that it’s hardly noticeable. But it’s there, hidden, buried under the dirt and fatigue that blankets them all. They draw together slowly, knotted fingers and eyelashes against cheekbones, one hushed breath at a time.
Archie smiles wide against David’s collar bone and the sky goes lighter behind them. (Grey to milky pinks and purples as David’s fingers twist into Archie’s hair, knees bumping through layers of cloth.)
He runs his fingertips over the skin of Archie’s wrist; presses down and thinks that he can feel the blood rushing through the veins hidden underneath the fragile layer of skin there, his pulse beating out a syncopated rhythm, tattooing David’s fingerprints with its beat. (He always seeks out the pulse points, counting out the syncopated beats in his mind, one two three four. They let him know that they’re still alive.)
He bends his head to lick at the small patch of skin behind Archie’s ear (dirt, salt, sweat, and Archie underneath it all) and presses a smile there; he breathes in Archie and breathes out hope. (Fragments of a million different thoughts lie scattered around the edges of his consciousness, each a different shade of pain and fear. None of them mattered, not right now.) Archie’s breath stutters on the end of a something that might have been a laugh and David tightens his hold on his wrist; feels his pulse quickening, just a little, under his grip. He pulls him closer, tangling their legs together. They fit.
(Outside, people are killing and being killed. Anger and fear run wild in the air, like bayonets against your skin, but in here, in this tiny hole in the ground with Archie, he can’t ever remember feeling more calm. They are caught in the eye of the storm. Caught together.)
He doesn’t see it coming. He should, but he doesn’t.
Handwriting that was once as familiar to him as his own, splashed all over the page. He knows who it’s from without even looking. It’s strange; it’s been so long since David has thought about her. It feels like she’s in another life altogether; that she’s writing to another man, not him.
He has never felt so far away from home.
David looks up to see Archie watching him with a strange look on his face, a look that David doesn’t want to place.
“Arch...” (Fingers that mean to reach out and touch clench at his side, nails digging into his own palm.)
When Archie turns away, David feels his throat clench painfully. He almost wants to laugh. He open s his hand, and lets the letter drift to the ground. (Of course, of course. He never did see it before. Why would it be different now? Of course.)
(In war, the violence gets everywhere. It works its way under your skin, into the crevices at the back of your mind. It wraps itself around your throat, squeezing tighter and tighter until it chokes you. It seeps through into your dreams.)
He can see Michael and Andrew, both of them stretched spread-eagle on the ground at his feet, their bodies broken open. He can feel the blood in his hair, falling into his eyes, into his mouth, against his teeth and tongue. He can taste it; hot, liquid copper, the rest of the world fading in and out, black and greys.
Archie’s voice calling out his name feels like a hymn to his ears, and he turns around to face him; reaches out. David watches as his brains paint the air behind him, his skull flying apart in slow motion. His arms and legs are numb, rooting him to the spot, forcing him to keep on looking as Archie’s body hits the ground with a sickening thud. He tries to scream and the sound curdles in his throat.
When he wakes up, his mouth aches and his eyes are burning. Without even thinking, he scrambles out into the open, the air too-thick, blocking his throat, his nose, his ears. He can still feel the blood all over him, sticky on his eyelashes, gluing them shut. It’s all he can smell.
He turns around and throws up into the snow; the alarm bell ringing in his ears drowning out all other sound.
When David slides back into the foxhole, Archie’s awake and looking at him with big worried eyes. He just shakes his head and clutches Archie’s hand, feeling the bones shift under his fragile skin, and tries to catch his breath again. (Inside his chest, he thinks he feels something splinter and fly apart. It scares him.)
“I just think that maybe this - this thing, isn’t the best for us right now. It can’t work.” The words taste like ash in mouth, feel a lot like fire rushing in his veins. He clenches his jaw against the betrayal lying under his tongue, the part of him that wants to beg him to stay (stay, stay).
Archie doesn’t say anything, just sits there, digging his fingers down hard into his kneecaps and nodding slowly. He doesn’t even look at him.
When he stands up to walk away, David doesn’t think he can remember the world feeling ever quite so big before; quite so empty.
The sleeves of Archie’s uniform have always been just that little bit too long. He rolls up the ends but they always fall down (David remembers moments of quiet, shared whispers in the middle of the night, reaching out at tugging at the material there, pulling Archie into him), leaving just his fingers poking around from under the dark fabric as he runs them over his rosary beads, or works on a casualty. It makes David’s entire body ache with the need to touch. (He knows he can’t. He knows, he knows, he knows.)
He hoards every stolen glance, keeps them locked away like a secret in his chest; pushes them down, keeps them safe - shelters them from the bullets and blood, unmarked and innocent. He keeps them whole and clings to them, his last foothold in humanity. (He wonders if Archie does the same thing.)
In the end, they had never really nothing more than the smudged out words on burnt pages of letters home; letters that would never be sent. They had lived in-between the lines of what the world expected and now - now there was nothing left to show. Nothing except for the dull, empty ache in his chest, and the itch at the back of his mind.
A drop of rain slides down his neck and under the collar of his shirt, pooling in the dip of his collar bone. He clenches his jaw and grips his rifle tighter, trigger finger holding steady, resisting the urge to squeeze, to fire at the empty sky.
He finds Archie the night after their final real advance.
David hadn’t been looking for him, but then, that’s how these thing work, isn’t it? He’s sitting at the edge of the lake near the building they’d been stationed in, legs crossed under him, his helmet left upside down on the ground. He’s sitting almost perfectly still, the movement of his chest as he inhales and exhales the only sign of life.
He can see Archie’s breath on the air, lingering just past his lips.
David sits down next to him, close; he imagines that he can almost feel Archie’s body heat through the layers of clothing. (Imagines.) Neither of them says a word, just letting the silence settle in. He thinks about taking Archie’s hand, knotting their fingers together so tight that they’ll never come apart again. He thinks about burying his face into his hair, where it curls at the back of his neck and behind his ears, and breathing in deep. He sits still and bites down on the inside of his cheek.
The dusk light reflects off the ripples on the surface of the water.
“I’m not sorry, you know,” Archie says, still looking straight ahead at the water. “Whatever it was that we had, I’m not sorry it happened. I can’t be.”
(God, David has missed him. He still does.)
Archie sounds a lot older now. The boy that he met all those months ago is not the man sitting next to him now, not quite. He’s grown; more self-assured and stronger, better equipped to deal with the world around him. Underneath it all though, he’s still Archie; still tumbles over his own words, and laughs too sincerely, still sings under his breath in the night. David pushes back a smile at the thought.
“Yeah, I get it.” His throat feels too tight; closing in on all the words he wants to say, the words he needs to say, but he does - he gets it.
When he turns his head, he feels his heart stutter-stop inside his ribcage; Archie’s eyes look almost impossibly bright, his face heart-breakingly young. He won’t ever be sorry. He isn’t capable of it, not for that.
David looks down at the water in front of them. Their reflection, broken apart by the ripples across the surface of the water, stares back at him.
Cowell brings them all together in a field (torn apart by bullets and bombs, patched together awkwardly in places) somewhere in Germany. There’s a too-serious look on his face, but his eyes are telling an entirely different tale. David can feel the shift in the air; tiny points of electricity just under the thin surface of his skin.
The war is over.
This moment-he’s imagined this moment a million times before, in a million different ways. They all have. He remembers restless midnights, sitting with Michael in secluded corners, passing their last cigarette back and forth between them, ash falling like charred snow into the cuffs of their sleeves. He remembers they’d always imagined fireworks, gold and green painting across the sky, high above their heads; always imagined screaming to the heavens with a joy they’d never felt before. Now though, it was more like a quiet relief, like simply falling asleep after being awake for too long for their bodies to stand it anymore.
He misses Michael, he thinks, with a clarity that aches somewhere buried under the rubble of the past year, under dead bodies and bombs, decimated homes and fields torn to shreds. (He misses Michael.)
He looks over at Archie and watches the slow, easy smile spread across his face as he hugs Jason; somewhere deep down in his chest, it still aches.
It takes David three months to work up the courage to look at the stack of pictures hidden in a shoebox underneath his bed. His hands don’t tremble when he lifts the lid, but it feels like they are anyway.
The picture on the top of the pile, tied together with frayed brown string-he doesn’t remember ever seeing it before, doesn’t remember it being taken. It’s of all of them, the entire company.
David’s right arm is slung around Michael’s shoulders, pulling him in close, smiling wide and open and almost real. He clenches his jaw tight, and forces his eyes away. The entire photograph is filled with the faces of the best men that David thinks that he will ever meet, each one of them a hero, braver than anybody could ever imagine.
Archie’s in the photograph too, hidden almost entirely corner. But he isn’t and-and what David sees there when he looks closer makes him ache in a way that he’d thought he’d stopped being able to do. Archie’s looking right at him, head turned to one side, with an expression that’s intense and impossibly serene all at once, the beginnings of smile sketched out across his face. He’s looking at David like he’s the only other person there.
His hands stay steady as he slides the picture into the back pocket of his jeans.
He’s out of his front door and in his car before he even stops to think about it. (His fingers are numb and shaking as he turns the ignition key.)
Seeing Archie again, it’s-- David thought he was prepared for it, he’d thought that he was ready. (He was wrong, as he so often is.)
He’s always been good with words, always been able to piece the right ones around each other to create the perfect pictures, the perfect colours, for what he wanted to say. David had spent his life enamoured with language and the way that it worked. That was why he became an English teacher; to try and pass that love on to the kids he worked with, to make a difference.
He’d always been good with words, until now.
Now, the syllables too big and clumsy in his mouth, a weight on his tongue, a square trying to force itself into a circle. And David thinks that maybe, just maybe, words don’t always work. He thinks that there isn’t always a word for what you’re feeling. It’s the first time that he’s ever thought that.
This-- it feels a lot like coming out of his skin, a lot like trying to catch your breath after running for your life. It feels like stepping off a battlefield. He digs his nails into the palms of his hands (just for a moment, just to keep him grounded) and reaches out for Archie, pulls him in. (They still fit.)
“I love you.” It comes out in one breath, his voice lifting upwards at the end, almost like it could be a question. They both know that it never was. (He thinks it never will be, and something shakes loose from deep inside his chest.) He says it again and against, whispering the words against Archie’s skin, where his neck meets his shoulder.
The war is over.