Archive of Our Own ^beta

And everything will happen if he only gives the word,
The lovers will rise up and the mountains will touch the earth.

Leonard Cohen, Last Year’s Man

Tell me, Tom says.  Tell me you know the way.

Will does know the way.  Or, at least, he knows the steps of it: Écoust, the river, the woods.  He knows how to put one foot in front of the other, to swing his arms, to breathe in and out.  To dive to the ground when the cannons fire.  To keep the letter tucked in a tin, safe beside his heart.

Steps are easy.  But what comes after—when the letter is delivered and the men have resolved to die another day?  Will is a body, floating on the current.  So is Tom.  So is his brother.  So are the hundreds, thousands, millions in the trenches and on the plains, the men sinking in ditches and the men buried without markers or flowers, the men rotting with the dead grass.  Decomposing, like so much cold earth.

You can stop a battle easily enough.  It takes a letter, maybe some running.  It takes one body by the farmhouse and another leaning against a tree.  But a war—how does that end?  How does a war shift, how does a world shift?

Will sits against a tree outside the 2 ^nd Devons.  The bark is cool, wet, rough at his back.  History sinks between the layers of wood.

Will closes his eyes.

1917.

Lance Corporal Schofield spends the rest of the war angry.

He returns to the 8^th three days later in the same clothes he was wearing when he left.  His boots still squelch when he walks through swampland, his wool underwear still sticks to his skin.  And his jacket—he’s washed it, twice at the river near the 2^nd then a third time in Écoust on the way home—but it still stinks of blood.

Or maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe it’s only his mind that stinks.  Every time he closes his eyes, he sees a body going cold.  There’s a special way the skin changes, the heat fades and the lips go blue and—

“Lance Corporal Schofield, sir,” he says to Sergeant Sanders, cloaked in shadow at the 8^th command tent.  His salute is sloppy: the angle of his palm is wrong, and he doesn’t hold it nearly long enough.  Nobody seems to notice.

“Schofield,” the sergeant repeats.

“Yes, sir.  Will Schofield.  I was sent to—”

“Yes, yes, we know.”  The sergeant turns to the officer at his right, as though to dispatch some other orders, then turns back to Schofield, almost absentminded.

“We thought you were dead, you and that other kid,” the sergeant says.  “What was his name?”

“Blake, sir.”

“Yes, right.  So you’re not dead, then.”

“I’m not.”

The sergeant is looking at Will, he can make contact with the man’s dark eyes, but there’s also a way in which the sergeant is not looking at him, or is looking through him, or is looking at a host of men before and behind him.  A host of men: all of them quietly staring, all of them wearing Will’s face.

“Right,” the sergeant says.  If there is a new softness to his voice, or a sadness—Will doesn’t hear it.  “So you delivered your message, then?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Saved your brother?”

“No, sir.  I mean, yes, but—it wasn’t my brother.”

“I see.”

The sergeant looks at Will, or through him.  His face is hard, beneath the helmet.  Laughter lines deepened and sharpened, as though sculpted in salt.  Will wonders how old the man is—thirty, fifty, seventy.  In the shadows of the trenches, it’s impossible to tell.

“Well,” the sergeant says.  “What’re you waiting for?”

“I—I thought—a medal, perhaps, or—”

The sergeant smiles—benevolent, like a teacher correcting an ignorant pupil.  “We don’t have the supplies for medals anymore, lad.  Live through the end of the war, maybe, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Live through the end of the war, maybe.  It echoes in Will’s head, that line.  Bounces to and fro across the walls of his skull when he lies awake unable to sleep.  Harmonizes with tell me, tell me you know the way and my brother, you must know my brother.

The end of the war.  Like that means anything.  Like that’s a real time, a marker on a map and not some phrase out of a fantasy universe where gods wield lightning and death is honored with tears and a processional.  Will can’t sleep.

Will can’t sleep, so he starts volunteering.  They need someone to repair the trench, right on the front line.  Sure, Will’s alright with his hands.  They need someone to run to the nearest town and buy bread.  Sure, Will likes bread.  They need someone to go out into No Man’s Land and collect bullets from the bodies left in yesterday’s failed attack.  Sure.  How else are they gonna get more bullets?

Will goes out there, crawls through the mud on his hands and knees until he reaches a body, then stares at the man’s face for thirty seconds before rifling through his kit.  Thirty seconds, even.  He counts: one Mississippi two Mississippi three, like counting the gap between lightning and thunder in an encroaching storm.  He closes their eyes, when he can.  If he recognizes the faces, he doesn’t acknowledge it, doesn’t say their names.

Will begins phasing out names, after that.  They promote him to Corporal for some godforsaken reason, and he calls the other soldiers you, or hey you, or boy.  He closes his eyes on the front lines, so he doesn’t see where the shells hit.  He eats far from the mess.  He doesn’t visit the medical tents.

Come back to us, Sarah says in her letters, with increasing fervor now that his responses are growing shorter.  Come back, come home.

He’s not sure how to explain that home is a fiction, a painting captured in a tobacco tin, a faraway star.  Home is a fiction, and he can no more return to it than he can stop running.

And he’s not—he can’t explain, he can’t put into words how he died out there in Croisilles Wood.  Or he drowned in the river, or he was shot back in Écoust, or he bled out by an abandoned farmhouse riddled with cherry trees.  His ghost is back there at the farmhouse, and his body is only running to catch up.

Corporal William Schofield died at the Battle of Passchendaele in October 1917, running toward the enemy line despite oncoming fire.  He was awarded a medal for his perseverance in delivering a message to the 2 ^nd Devons, across No Man’s Land.  He never saw that medal; it was sent to his wife, Sarah, after the war.  She pawned it to buy her daughters a Christmas roast.

1943.

It is cold in the camp.

That’s the first thing Sergeant Thomas Blake notices.  The cold, then the smell, like something rotting.  Tom comes from a family of farmers, and his mother used to take him out into the countryside each spring to help with her brother’s harvest, rows and rows of potatoes and sugar beets and cabbages all sprouting up towards the sun.  The cherry trees were his favorite—when his mother timed the trip right, they’d see groves of cherry trees in bloom like a toy forest dressed up in white, petals blanketing the ground in a snowy carpet.

The POW camp near Colle Compito smells like a cherry orchard that’s been left out in the sun for too long, sweetness turned sour.  Tom wonders what’s rotting, and then the soldier at his back pushes him forward into a makeshift cell and he places it: men, after god knows how long without showers.

The floor is packed earth, cool and somehow damp even though it hasn’t rained in this part of Italy for days.  Tom stays there on his hands and knees for a moment, thankful to be horizontal, then picks himself up and shuffles to a bench at the back of the compound, barely illuminated by torchlight coming in through a flap in the tent some several hundred feet out.

A cough comes from his left.  It’s a terrible sound—hoarse and violent, like a cannonball has been melted down and recast and fired out the lungs of this one man—and it goes on for a long time.

“I’d stay out of that corner, if I were you,” comes a voice from Tom’s right.  “That guy hasn’t stopped coughing since he got here two weeks ago.”

The voice has an American accent, and when Tom peers into the darkness he finds it attached to a body, vaguely soldier-shaped, a bit taller and broader than Tom is but otherwise undistinguishable.

“How long have you been here?” Tom asks.

“Could be a month,” the American replies.  “Could be two.  What’s it to you?”

“Sergeant Blake,” Tom says, moving towards the American with his hand outstretched.  “But you can call me Tom.”

The other man stays determinedly put.  “Right.  And I’m gonna just tell you my name.  Like I really believe you’re Allied and not some kinda spy.”

Tom wonders how many months in a German POW camp it takes to get that paranoid.  Is two months enough?  Three, four?  Will it be that long for him?

Another cough comes from his left, startling Tom out of his thoughts.  This one goes on longer and sounds nastier, like that soldier’s lungs are trying to escape up through his throat.

“God,” the American mutters.  “Can he just shut up already?”

That settles it.  Tom gets up, kicks the bench aside, and takes three steps toward the cough.  There’s a soldier leaning against the dirt wall at the back of the cell, his arms pulled up around his face in a vague attempt to muffle the sound.  He’s wearing a uniform Tom recognizes: green tunic and trousers, brodie helmet, stripes on his chest.  And there’s something else about him—something in his posture, maybe, the way he’s curled into himself, the way he’s trying to stay quiet despite all odds.

“Hey,” Tom says.  He gets closer, close enough that when he crouches down and reaches out a hand, he can touch the other man on the shoulder.  “You alright?”

“Got a fever,” the other man replies, voice muffled slightly by his arms.  “Best keep away, or you’ll catch it, too.”

His voice is familiar.  It’s something in his sharp consonants, the way they fall like commands even as the man’s shoulders shake.  Best keep away, you’ll catch it too.  The words echo in Tom’s mind, back and forth, back and forth.  You’ll catch it too.  You’ll—I wish you’d picked some other bloody idiot—let’s talk—we need to think about it—we should wait till it’s dark—dark—that won’t bother me.

Tom falls to his knees.  His hands drop to the floor beside him, nails digging into the dirt.  It’s cold, it’s damp—is it damper than before?  Is that water, beneath his palms?  If it’s water, why does it smell so sweet, why does it smell like something’s rotting?

“I’m not—I’m not keeping away,” Tom says.  He stares at the soldier—at his shaking shoulders, at his bowed head, at his hands gripping his elbows to keep them locked in place.  And his hands, Tom knows these hands.  Tom has felt these hands—they grip too tight, they press a tiny roll of bandages to a gaping chest wound like a single dam pushing desperately to stop a flood.

Tom knows these hands—they grip a corpse like they grip a rifle.

He moves closer—shifts on one side and then the other until his knees are touching the other soldier’s splayed-out feet.  Tom leans forward and places both of his hands on the other man’s shoulders—and, god, he’s warm, he’s too warm, he’s shaking—Tom needs to see his face.

“Please,” Tom says.  His voice is not quite his own.  It’s coming from somewhere deep inside of him, the space between his lungs or the chambers of his heart.

The soldier drops his arms.  Tom can only see shapes in the dark—sharp cheekbones, a long nose, eyes widening as the soldier stares at him—but even this is—he’s seen this face before.  In dreams, he thinks.  Bathed in sunlight, or in the smoke of a battlefield.  Shadowed by the trench wall—and Tom’s never been in a trench, he’s a pilot, except that he has been in a trench, he knows the way the dirt sinks beneath your uniform and scratches against your skin.  He knows it just as he knows the shape of these eyes looking up at him.

“Don’t,” the soldier says, desperate.  “I don’t know who you are, why you’re doing this—but don’t, please don’t, I can’t give this to someone else—”

“Don’t you remember?”  Tom presses his palms into the other man’s shoulders, tries to imprint some echo of the thoughts he can’t voice—I know your voice I know your touch I know your face I know I know I know—

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Tom sinks back onto his heels.  His mother is not a superstitious woman, but she saw a ghost, once, in an alley down near the wharf, a cold night in December before the war.  She saw a fisherman floating half a meter above the pier, whistling an old Irish tune, and for two years on she couldn’t get it out of her head.

I saw him, she said, when Tom prodded her to tell the story, looking to overcome some lull in the conversation with his friends.  I looked at him and I saw him.  Plain as that.

I look at him and I see him.  But this is no ghost—this is a man, flesh and blood and bones all sewn together here on this cold floor.  He’s dying, if not within the day then within the week, and Tom is filled with a burning anger at the thought—his teeth chatter and his hands shake.  He’s dying, and it’s unfair, it’s so bloody unfair, Tom has to do something.

Tom sits up and pushes forward.  He goes up to the wall, next to the other soldier, and sits down in parallel—the ground is still cold, it must be, but he barely registers the chill.  He gets one arm around the other man’s shoulders and pulls him—the solder tries to push back but he’s shaking, every part of him vibrating like a tripwire waiting for an errant step, and it’s easy enough for Tom to pull him sideways into his lap.  Tom brings one hand up slowly, carefully, and begins to stroke the soldier’s hair.  It’s damp, matted with sweat, but still soft somehow—this, even this is familiar.

“Keep hold—keep holding on,” Tom says, and he can feel his voice shaking, shaking to match the other man’s shoulders.  Tom can feel the vibration deep in his lungs.

“Oh—okay,” the soldier says.  “You’re insane, but okay.”

Tom is insane, probably.  Because sitting here, pressed up against this stranger, spinning soft circles in the other man’s hair, he feels like he’s in a dream, like he’s back in his mother’s apartment watching the rain spill into the London gutters, like he’s back in the countryside running through the harvest.  Like he’s home.

The soldier is dead by sunrise.  His body is cold, heavy in Tom’s arms.

“If you start coughing too, I’m gonna scream until they give me a new cell,” the American says.  His voice is sharp, but there’s something beneath it—heavy, resigned, like he’s seen this before.

He hasn’t seen this before, though.  Nobody’s seen this—not this man, not this moment.

Tom whirls and says—nearly shouts it, like a command or a battle cry: “His name was Will Schofield, and you will give him some fucking respect.”

The American stares.  “How did you know his name?”

Tom stares back for a long minute, then slumps back against the wall.  “Fuck.  I don’t know.”

After eight months in captivity, Lieutenant Thomas Blake was freed in an Allied raid of the Colle Compito prison camp in February 1944.  He served with the Royal Air Force for three more months, and was shot down during a bomber mission in the lead-up to the Battle of Normandy.  A gold star was sent home to his mother, Martha, who displayed it proudly in the window of her London apartment.

1968.

Constable William Schofield didn’t want to work this shift.

He tried calling in sick for it, even—told his supervisor he was coming down with some kind of stomach bug.  But of course that asshole Tony didn’t believe him, said they needed every man on board to handle what might be the “biggest group of pansies this nation has ever seen.”  Will’s not sure anti-war protestors qualify as “pansies,” but he’d still rather be slumped on his couch watching Doctor Who reruns than chasing after them.  Protests are so exhausting—all the yelling, and the pushing, and the complete lack of respect for law enforcement.

And this one is particularly so.  North Audley Street is packed with protestors: a wave of crude paper signs and masked faces all gaining on Grosvenor Square, trying to storm the American embassy.  Will can barely even see the cobblestones beneath the bodies.  And even though it’s March, barely five degrees C and cloudy, the place stinks with proximity and sweat.  Will’s wearing his riot gear, which is approximately ten thousand layers, regular uniform plus stab vest jacket plus baton and incapacitant spray, and he feels like he could keel over at any moment, just swaying on his feet at the edge of the square near the embassy, just trying to keep his part of the line clear.

He’s been waiting for nearly an hour.  The protestors are marching slowly, some calling out barely-audible chants and some waving banners with PEACE FOR VIETNAM or WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE embroidered on.  Someone near him has a drum—their thunks echo across the square even when there’s no regular chant going, and Will is going to have a headache for the next week, he can just tell.  The closer they get, the less prepared Will feels to hold them off: these kids are fighting for something, they care about the lives of innocent people they’ve never met in a country half a world way, and who the fuck is he to stand here and tell them they’re wrong?

Will’s about to lean over and ask the officer next to him when he thinks this mess will be over when he sees the kid.

The kid: a protestor at the head of a particularly tenacious group pushing toward the embassy, yelling something about THE REAL ENEMY IN THE WHITE HOUSE.  He’s in all black with no mask on, must’ve lost it in the crowd or pulled it off as some kind of statement.  And without the mask, it’s easy to tell that he’s young—can’t be more than eighteen, all wide eyes and ruddy cheeks, one hand on a sign reading NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR and the other raised in a fist.

He’s got wild, curly hair—runs a hand through it between fist-pumps and turns—turns just enough to make eye contact with Will.

Will freezes.  A chill runs down his spine and he takes a step backwards—he feels like he’s falling, suddenly, or floating.  Like he’s on his back in a cold river and he’s about to go over a waterfall.  But how would he know what that feels like—how—

The kid is still looking at him.  As Will watches, he grins—a sharp grin, a wild grin, and the shape of it is so familiar somehow that Will’s chest aches—and moves closer.

Will watches.  He should be straightening his posture, he knows, should be locking arms with the officers on either side of him, should be holding the line, but all those orders come to him from somewhere outside himself, like he went to the police academy in a dream and the real world is this, now, the kid’s bright blue eyes and the way his curls shift in the breeze.

The kid pushes closer, and closer, and then finally Will’s the only thing standing between him and the embassy, that cardboard sign pushed up into Will’s face.

“Hey, you!” the kid shouts.  “Pig!  What’re you looking at?”

And fuck, his voice is familiar too—the way it carries.  The consonants and vowels, hastily delivered and yet precise, like drawing lines on a map.  Will would follow that voice into battle, he would—he has, he’s followed it through No Man’s Land and out of the German trench and—why is he standing against it here, now?  What went wrong?

“I’m looking,” he says, helpless.  “I’m looking at you.”

The kid laughs at that, like Will has told some kind of joke, and of course the laugh is familiar, of course it echoes in Will’s mind like church bells ringing—it knocks down the walls in Will’s memory, knocks them as clean as a shell going off—

“Like what you see?” the kid asks.

“I just,” Will says.  The kid waits, still grinning, and Will wants to ask if he feels this too, if he feels like he might float off the face of the earth at any moment—but all he can get out is, “Why?”

“Why am I here?” the kid replies.

Will opens his mouth but there are no words, or no sane words, anyway.  The crowd keeps moving, pressing the kid closer, but Will feels like they’re locked in space—there’s something about the kid, the way he braces his shoulders and stares, the stupid way he keeps pushing.

“I’m here because—war is cruel,” the kid goes on.  “It’s ugly.  It just fucking—takes people, it takes people’s fathers and brothers and friends, and it sends them out to die, just to preserve some kinda—some fucking capitalist hegemony, right, and—”

“Capitalist hegemony,” Will echoes.  He still feels like gravity might fail him at any moment but this is bravado, this is stupid, and countering it is instinctual somehow in a way that raising his baton is not.  “Do you even know what that means?”

“It means England has enough of a destructive colonial empire of its own without supporting America’s,” the kid says.

And—okay, that’s something, that’s interesting, that aligns, maybe, with a book Will half-read in college—but before he has a chance to reply, the officer to his right moves.

The other officer is a burly guy, six feet tall and Will can’t remember his name but knows he’s fond of the incapacitant spray and Will wants to get in the way—can’t break rank—has to break rank—has to protect—

“Watch your mouth, commie scum,” the officer growls, and he reaches out one massive arm to grab the kid by the collar of his black T-shirt.

Will wants to reach, pull the kid out of the way, punch the other officer—shoot him before it’s too late—what?—but something funny’s going on with his memory and he can only watch—

The kid spits in the officer’s face and says, “Fuck the Queen and everything she stands for.”

And there’s a roar behind them, like oncoming thunder.  There’s—oh shit what did Tony say about getting mounted officers for this one—or is there a plane coming, one of ours, no, one of theirs—or is there a cough rising in his lungs sweat rising on his back—is there—

Will knows this.  He’s pressed against damp earth outside a farmhouse and blood is staining the grass, he’s pressed against damp earth in a dark compound and he can’t stop coughing.  There’s a body above him, there’s a body beneath him, there are twenty bodies in the river and every body is this body, is—

“Blake—"

He yells and dives towards the kid—Blake—Tom—but it’s too late.  The horse charges right into him and Tom goes down, his head knocks against the cobblestones with a terrible clunk.

Will needs to go—should go—should be going—should be gone—but he has to grab Tom, has to drag him to a clear patch of grass a few hundred feet away and hold him until a medic comes.  Tom is heavy, Will’s hands keep slipping from his shoulders, and yet this, even this is familiar, even this is muscle memory, even this leaves Will seeing double: the protest, still raging, and the farmhouse, too quiet.  I missed it again, I let him down again, I let him down.

Will tries to go to the hospital the next day to check on Tom.  But he’s no relative, not even a friend, just some stranger that can’t explain why he’s crying, and all he can get is pieces of conversation from across the waiting room as Tom’s brother—how does he know that this is Tom’s brother—yells at a nurse to do all she possibly can.

He waits.  Hides his face behind a newspaper, keeps his badge tucked in his pocket.  Around nightfall, finally, Joseph Blake goes past the waiting room into a brightly lit corridor and returns, twenty-seven minutes later, his hat in hand.  Joseph Blake makes a call on the waiting room’s payphone, and gets as far as the word “Ma—” before he starts to sob.

Will takes the long way home, after that.  He’s been up for nearly forty-eight hours and every muscle in his body aches, but he can’t shake the feeling that he should be running.

Constable William Schofield quit the Force after the embassy protest.  He took up a position at the East London Tate & Lyle factory and began attending anti-war meetings.  He regularly, albeit silently, attended meetings of the Socialist Party of Great Britain until a factory accident took his life in 1969.

1990.

“Hey,” Private Thomas Blake says.

He plops down next to the new guy at breakfast, sits almost close enough to touch, and swings his legs in so that his feet kick up against the other soldier’s boots.  The guy is reading, a battered copy of Catch-22 no less, and Tom loves a challenge.

“If you’re going to lecture me on the importance of social comradery for maintaining morale, I don’t want to hear it,” the new guy replies, without looking up.

Something about his voice is familiar: something about how sharp it is, like a knife whittled down to a point.  Tom stares at the guy’s profile—light hair, closely cropped, and sharp cheekbones, and a few freckles just at the side of his cheek, and—he needs to see his face.

“I just wanted to know,” Tom says, and his voice doesn’t sound quite familiar, as though he’s hearing it through a memory, “if you think there’s really something going on between the Chaplain and Yossarian, or if you think it’s all a joke.”

The other man looks up.

“You’ve read it,” he says.  And he’s looking at Tom—sharp eyes in a sharp face—Tom looks at him, Tom looks at him like looking through a window, like looking up at the stars just after twilight sinks in and making a wish.

“Yeah,” Tom says.  “I have.”

They sit together at breakfast, and again at lunch, and again at dinner, and at every meal after that.  The new guy’s name is Will Schofield, and pronouncing it—the soft will, the hard sco—is familiar, like going back to Tom’s grandmother’s cherry orchard in the summer is familiar, like reaching up for a fruit just when he knows it’s ripe and pulling it off the branch with a pop.

The new guy’s name is Will Schofield.  He likes reading, he likes red wine in the summer and hot cocoa in the winter, he doesn’t like talking about his family but Tom learns through slow prodding that he’s from Bedford and he has a younger sister, she’s studying to be a doctor and he enlisted to help pay for her school.  He likes to stay quiet at strategy meetings but when he says something the whole squad listens, and he likes to go outside on long afternoons and nap in the sand, and one sweltering night in June when Tom can’t take it anymore he goes to Will’s bunk after lights-out and pulls him outside beneath the stars and says— 

“I know you.  I know—this is mad, okay, I know it sounds mad, but—I think I’ve dreamed about you.  It sounds mad, okay, but please—”

It lingers, that last please.  It hangs in the hazy summer air, and Tom wants to reach out and take it—wants to pull the whole damn sentence back into his mouth and go back to the barracks and push this under his mattress and—

And Schofield is looking at him.  Schofield—Will—is looking, staring really, like Tom is the horizon beyond the desert, the beginning and end of the world.  It stops Tom in his tracks, that look, and pulls him into some tiny private gravity: the two of them, orbiting each other.

“Oh, thank God it’s not just me,” Will says, and he presses Tom up against the wall for a kiss.

It’s all familiar—Will up close, the shadows of his cheekbones in the moonlight, the smell of him like a forest after a storm, his hands—his long fingers, his calloused palms, less caked in dirt in this world perhaps but gripping tight, gripping Tom like he’s a flare gun or a branch hanging over the river—it’s all familiar, except for his lips—his lips are new.  Tom brings his hands up to grip Will’s hair, pulls him closer, opens his mouth and licks—and he is determined to remember this, all of this.  To imprint this onto their bodies until they wear matching bruises.

It escalates, from there.  Will joined to help his sister, Tom joined because he was flunking uni and it seemed like a good way to learn new stories.  They have missions: gathering supplies, running recon for the Americans, training the local forces.  They have schedules, they have duties.  But it all slips away so easily when you spend every second counting.  Counting shifts, counting names on the patrol list, counting minutes on the barracks clock until lights-out.  It’s simple enough to sneak out for a late-night picnic, if you get all your work done first.

Will keeps careful watch, glancing back between Tom and the light emanating from the door back inside, or at least he does until Tom can distract him—but the closest they come to getting caught is a rat that scuttles across the sand, casts too big a shadow and nearly gives Will a heart attack.

It’s easy, too, to notice the cracks in the operation.  They’re already watching carefully, and the more they watch, the more they see: drills don’t quite line up with missions.  The officers call all the civilians “insurgents,” land switches teams easily as flicking a torch on and off.  Questions are never answered, never precisely, never with the same words in which they were asked.

“They’re great at telling stories,” Tom says one night out behind the barracks, Will’s head pillowed in his lap.  They of course meaning the officers, or the Americans, or the whole damn Western capitalist project.  Whoever’s telling the stories.  Whoever’s demarcating us and them with no clear definition of who is us, and who is them, and what are they doing that threatens us, and what’s going to happen once the war ends.  It’ll be a short war, everyone says so, six months at most, but—what’s going to happen to the real people?  Will tells Tom not to talk like that, but Tom knows from the shape of his silence that he agrees.

And then, there’s the mission.

It’s simple, the officers say.  There’s an enemy base in a town with major communication infrastructure, and the Americans want control.  But Tom looks at the map, looks closely, and realizes it’s not a base, really—just a few hundred Iraqi soldiers, clustered around a town of civilians.  And their orders are to scorch the place: take no prisoners.

“Why do we keep finding each other like this?” Tom asks, that night behind the barracks.  “What’s the point—I die at the farmhouse, you die at the camp, I die at the protest—and this, what, is it your turn?  Or—or is it something bigger we’re meant to be doing—”

Will puts his hand over Tom’s mouth at that.  It’s meant to be stern, Tom knows, but the weight of it is so familiar that he’s quieted for a moment, just taking in the warmth.

“Shut up,” Will hisses, looking around frantically as though for a plane to roar out of the sky.  “Shut up.  Don’t talk like that.  We don’t know that any of it’s real.  We don’t know that it’s not—weird dreams, or hallucinations, or—”

Tom bites him.

Will pulls his hands back—he’s scowling, or trying to.  Tom can see his cheeks going faintly pink in the moonlight.

“We have our memories,” Tom says.  “They’re as real to me as the barracks back there, or the sand beneath us, or—or you sitting here.”  He puts a hand to Will’s cheek for emphasis and gets stuck there, watching the way Will closes his eyes and leans into it.  His face is warm.  His cheek is rough, faint stubble there at the base of Tom’s pal.  He’s here, long eyelashes and rough cheeks, freckles forming faintly along the bridge of his nose from too much sun.

He’s here.  Not in a river, not on the floor of a POW camp, not across the square at a rally, and Tom would do anything—Tom would run across No Man’s Land for a thousand years, if only Will would run beside him.

But that’s not the answer, is it?  Tom reaches back, remembers: hands clasped over his chest, blood blooming beneath his jacket.  Voices of the other protestors rising behind him as he charged.  And his mother, this mother, Martha Blake from south London who liked to watch reality television while she knit her boys sweaters, her face when he said he was going to enlist.  She asked him if he was certain.  He wasn’t certain then, not really.  He’s certain now.

“Here’s what’s real,” Tom says, tilting his palm up so that his index finger catches the tears forming beneath Will’s eyelids.  “Here’s what I know.  I know that we’re fighting for pretty stories that don’t make any sense.  I know that this next mission is gonna kill hundreds of people for no fucking reason.  And I know—I know I can’t watch you die.  Not again.”

“Okay,” Will says.  He opens his eyes—his eyes are stars, stars captured and pulled down to earth but left wide and shivering—and he’s looking at Tom.  “Okay.  I can’t watch you die again, either.”

Tom leans in, kisses Will gently, gently, like this is the first time and the last time, like this is the end of the world.

“I have a plan,” Tom says.

And Will says, “I’ll follow you.”

Privates Thomas Blake and William Schofield were killed in a training accident in December 1990.  A unit of British soldiers was en route to a “scouting mission” when one of the trucks unexpectedly exploded, triggering a chain reaction which killed the entire group.  The source of the blast is still unknown.  Neither man was awarded a medal.

2011.

All arrests are the same.

Will Schofield is used to it by now: it’s muscle memory, almost, to let his limbs go limp when the cops grab him around the waist, to brace for the impact when his back hits the pavement.  He recites his name when he’s asked, and when he’s not, he recites his sister’s phone number under his breath, switching to the Liberty HQ hotline number every minute or so for good measure, just in case the digits on his arm get smudged.  The cops take his phone, ID, and keys, yell at him once or twice to stop the mumbling, then finally give up and chuck him into a holding cell.

It’s not bad, as holding cells go.  Just one man in there already, concrete floor, brick at the back, only a little bit of piss in the corner—

Wait.  One man in there already.  There’s only a thin shaft of light emanating into the cell from a thin window three meters up, but it’s enough to make out details of the other man’s silhouette.  He’s young, around Will’s age maybe, with his face still rounded, wild curls twisting over his ears.

He needs a haircut, Will thinks.  He’s let it get too long.  And then he thinks, what?  And then he thinks, okay.

Will moves closer.  Close enough to see blue eyes shining, a hand-printed black T-shirt with an anti-war slogan.  The man is sitting quietly, absentmindedly twisting a gold ring on his middle finger back and forth.  Will is close enough now to smell—cherry blossoms?  How does Will know what cherry blossoms smell like?

“Was this your first protest?” Will asks, just as the other man says, “Hey, do I know you?”

Will goes over to the wall, turns, and sits down.  He lines up his shoulders in parallel to the other man.  It’s impossible, isn’t it, but Will knows him—knows this face in profile, knows it in sunlight and in shadow, knows these shoulders squared ahead of him in the trench, across No Man’s Land.  Knows this voice—has followed it blind, and exhausted, and near-dead.

“It’s my third,” the man says, and it takes Will a moment to remember that he asked a question.  “I’m fine, but it’s been hours—or feels like it, anyway—and I want to call my brother before he freaks out and starts banging on every precinct just to find the one I’m at.”

“Yeah,” Will says.  “My sister’s the same.  She thinks I’m gonna take the fall for the whole anti-Afghanistan movement by myself.”

“Tell me about it.”

The other man turns to smile at Will—what a smile, Jesus, like the bloody sun coming up—and then stops, transfixed.  Like he’s seen a ghost.

“I’m sorry, you just seem—do I know you?”

Will looks at him.  He takes in lips and brow and everything in between, voice and scent and shadow on the wall, memorizes it all just in case—then tells himself no, stop, this is it, this has to be it.

“Your name is Thomas Blake,” he says—slowly, carefully, pronouncing every syllable like crossing a river, like crossing to a new world.  “And mine is—”

“William Schofield,” Tom says.  “Will.”

They sit there just looking at each other—Will watches the sunlight shift across Tom’s face as though painting him all in gold and wonders, if, perhaps, he could learn to paint, too.  If he could keep this moment, etched, like a promise in his chest.  Or if he could just stay here—stay close—until the earth stops turning, or starts over again.

An hour into their confinement, Tom reaches over and takes Will’s hand.

The sunlight outside the police station is blinding.  If Tom was painted in gold in the holding cell, out here he’s awash with it, he’s a shower of sparks, he’s a renaissance statue that escaped the British Museum and came to life.

Except that no statue could move like this: charging down the stairs, arms outstretched.  Letting out a FUCK YOU, COPS yell loud enough to send the whole neighborhood’s ears ringing, raising his arms, then turning and charging back up to Will, grabbing his hand and pulling him into a sprint.

What do you want to do? Tom says.  We’re free, we’re here, we could do anything.

I want to go for coffee, Will replies.  I’m starving.

Tom nods, turns to Will with a grin—and he’s so close, so brilliant, like a star under a microscope, like Tom fucking Blake, inhabiting himself finally—Will wants to touch him, so he does.  His arm around Tom’s shoulder: gravity brought back into tune.  The world made real.

Do you know that place with the great sandwiches, what’s it called, Tom says, the one by Paddington Station.

And Will says, Yes, yes, I know it.  I know the way.