It takes four months after the end of the war to wake up in his new body. Four months of what could have been the greatest summer of his life. Could have returned a jovial, gallant veteran, a hero of three islands, (four if you count Pavuvu, ten with the practice landings). Could have revelled in a parade, a brass band, a million speeches in his honour, solemn photographs amongst white washed cemeteries and floral wreathes.
Instead, he spends it sedated and silent, bundled between sterile doctors rooms and the warm safety of his room. Though his sister promises a party next February, or March, (if she can get her husband to actually watch those children of his) and coax her brother from the shelter of their parent’s house. By the time he relearnt to walk and talk without stuttering, more newborn fawn than human, snow was coming down in thick, heavy blankets, as if to postpone his arrival in civilisation.
It’s the thick of December, the land buried under ice. The gravel in the driveway frozen over into a single sheet. The balsams peer from under their snowcoats. Massachusetts shivers; the vast Pacific sweltered and laboured and dripped in the heat. Its nothing like it used to be. Feels nothing like it used to be. Feels all sideways, like falling down the stairs- you don’t land where you expect, but always further down.
Cold trickles down Andrew’s back like the realisation of a somnambulist when he wakes at his desk one day. He has been moving through it all, the visits and appointments and dinner and lunch with his mother, the walks to the park and trips to his father’s office and meetings, and now he truly sees. He takes a blink, hears his eyelashes brushing, and the beating of his heart, a shaky, unsteady feeling of tired muscle quivering with effort. Puts his hands to the desk. He’s alive.
His room is still. Grey snow-light seeps through the windows and the lengthy burgundy curtains that fold over themselves on the floor. Everything in the room is ill fitting, a size too large. Books on the shelf, slouching onto the rug with paper pads and a cascade of stationery; the bag of filthy football clothes spilling out, the upside down cleats thrown by the crooked wardrobe door, the haphazard slagheap of jackets, are untouched.
Even while half awake, he had not disturbed it as much as he thought he would, it’s a perfect picture of what the bedroom of a twenty four year old should look like. It has been kept and swept and time has not dirtied it. The sudden thought of his mother dusting and wiping but leaving the evidence of him perfectly intact in case he came back leaves a painful lump in his throat. The bed is neatly made, fresh and pressed- and he recognises the folded sheets as his own work, and the four dark tartan blankets as his- but there's a bag near civvy clothes at the end that doesn't fit (Civvy is not something he would say before all this. Civvy is a word someone else taught him).
He stands with some uncertainty, waiting for his legs to work, unsure if they will at first, but the sensation comes and he stands, and reaches for the bed. The bag is his, was his, from another time. He tips the dusty brown knapsack upside down without second thought to what may be inside, regretting instantly and flinching as the contents spill out; as if something from the islands may jump out at him, a spider hiding inside a shoe.
Nothing attacks him, not even a thought. He expects to remember, to maybe feel something, some spark of recognition. But the muddle on the sheet is just a collection of things, a soldier’s kit on display in a museum. He wants to lean forward to the glass and read the inscriptions; Item A, socks, self-explanatory, Item B, pocket bible, also self-explanatory, Item C, some kind of belt with a heavy steel clasp, Item D, loose change, Item E-
It’s Item H which catches his attention, peeking from the breast pocket of his shirt, a cream and red pocket-square. It’s silky and soft, despite everything, and unfurls with a flutter, a soft whisper of material. Its white and red and marked with bleeding lashes of thick black ink and it’s- (it’s this tightness in his stomach, the feeling of being dropped suddenly, but its not fear, or anger, or hate, it’s-)
It’s a gift. He remembers. Vaguely, like he is picking up a book from his shelf that he doesn’t remember buying but knows it must come from his mother on Christmas, he struggles to comprehend the silk. He tightens his hands to fists as the flag dangles in front of his body. A gift. A miracle it got back.
He sorts the rest of his things carefully, waiting for any sign of recollection. Nothing comes. The past remains a mystery.
Later, in the evening, with snow coming down and the sunset bleeding between the bare trees, his mother brewing tea in the kitchen, and his father knocking ice from his boots, he reads. They have kept all his letters, and there's some resistance in getting them back, from the way his mother distractingly taps a teaspoon against the porcelain cups that bear delicate blue thistle and rose. Her hesitance thick as molasses, but she yields, indulges his curiosity. He feels nothing but both the detached curiosity and intimacy of reading a book from another's point of view.
It’s not him, but its supposed to be him. He’s supposed to be able to imagine the scenes and relate to this character, Lieutenant, and then Captain Ack Ack, within. The man writing to his parents writing to himself in the future.
He gets a headache halfway through the letters- last addressed from the Coral Sea-, and goes to bed. He’ll feel better in a few days. He won’t worry about it. He has a hole in his head. The flag sits at the end, folded into the same crisp square that has left creases that will smooth out with time. It’s in the millisecond before he gives into sleep that he remembers who it’s from. He won’t remember when he wakes, but his hand is in the fold of it, clutching it while he sleeps.
///
From the beachfront the jungle swallows the sky, towers above them and eats them whole. Living and monstrous. Glowing with green-bronze sunlight, heated like an oven, tropic air thick with the sweet and oversweet smell of decay. Tangling, groping vines climbing up rain-slick boughs and snaring across the poorly defined jungle trails. Guadalcanal is where they make heroes, where he comes to define his duty, where he watches hundreds of boys bleed out in the rotting brown mash of leaflitter, and where he meets Eddie.
He gets his orders are given out under the shade of a blasted-open fig tree, surrounded by the bowed backs of officers busy in the act of twisting watch pointers while smoke clouds the sky. It's this- the civilian looking watch his father got him, counselling snugly on his dark suntanned wrist and the vulnerable white underside- he takes respite in. Only in the here and now. Nothing forward and nothing back. Here and now. He learns it there. He tells it to himself, to never think about what happened, to keep pushing forward; as long as he lands on his feet he'll keep moving; he’ll land on his feet if he keeps moving.
He also learns this. He owes his life, his sanity, his soul, to his company. The flock of peachfuzz-feathered chicks who follow him through the jungle and cut through the elephant grass behind him. He doesn’t let them scout for him, he wouldn’t make them do anything he wouldn’t do himself (thus goes the old saying, the wisdom passed through the ranks). They owe their lives and sanity and souls to him. One does not exist without the other. Neither do him and Hillbilly.
This is how they meet. (Scene, a hot, sweltering clearing, mud up to the shins; cast, the Captain, sweat-soaked and blustering, a scant gathering of second Lieutenants, and a First Sergeant. The Captain raises a hand for silence, call the show to a start. In the jungle it is never quiet. Andrew’s inquiry of how-the-f*ck he is supposed to find I Company is dismissed by the Captain; he is passed off to the First Sergeant)
His guide is two steps ahead of him as the crowd dissipates (the only time he will be). It’s the third Jones he’s met thus far, tall and slim. Besides the ammo pouches, holsters, and straps, a set of Japanese knives dangle from his waist.
“They call me Ack Ack,” he informs the lean back ahead of him, the undergrowth shivering in the parting wake. His guide shrugs, dark eyes from the dark shadow of his helmet as he glances back. His uniform is loose, baggy, and somehow shockingly, strikingly, clean; but not out of place, (he could never be described as out of place) he moved confidently, silently, the ease of a man used to uneven terrain, noise, chaos.
“Hillbilly,” he replies.
“Oh- You must be from New Jersey," he jokes, automatically, choking on his own laugh. His guide There is a beat of silence before the answer,
“Nevada, actually, sir,"
“Must be used to this heat,"
"'M'workin' on me tan," Behind the shadow, pale as a ghost, a smile twitches.
He doesn't remember much of the Canal- the details all become a blur. It's hard to place specifics in the pitch black of the undergrowth, scenes only glimpsed in the millisecond flash rifle fire.
(He remembers this though. With the same syrupy feeling of his mother recounting how she met his father. He does not put the two together)
///
His second day of new life feels like stepping onto pond ice.
He doesn’t know how to tell anyone that he does not remember the last few months, and everyone is still gracious enough with him to not comment if they notice a change in him. He is grateful to the man before- himself, really- who laid the foundation for this new life of his. Learning to use his fingers and flex his hands and lift his arms again, to hold a pencil and mug, walk without tripping over his own ankles, enter a dark room and be able to feel the space around him, get up without passing out. He does not remember any of it, but the him-before probably did.
His parents treat him with the same delicacy they’d treat the elderly, if either of their parents were still alive. There's always a cup of tea, ginger and honey, or elderflower, on a plate nearby him, one he never remembers appearing, and dinner arrives promptly every night, steaming home baked comfort.
It’s weird to consider being back. The future looms, darker than the tangled mass of hickory at the end of the garden in the fog. Just another task to be tackled.
“We’ll clip those in’t spring,” His father is saying at the table as he comes downstairs, cold winter light spilling in. Late afternoon, the clock chiming.
“Not with your back,” his mother is laying out the fine china again and Andrew panics briefly thinking some event is about to occur- but no, she’s always used it since he came back. Something about appreciating the good things while you have them and not just keeping them away. There’s shortbread and the last of the oatcakes she’d made yesterday, warmed over the fire. Plenty of jelly- or jam, his father calls it, and butter to spread.
“Ach, it’s my remit,” his father shakes the newspaper to its middle section, accepts the kiss to his forehead and pushes the rosethorn painted plate to the centre of the table. dSteam rolls from the teapot and the three pearly mugs. Sunlight winks. It's been a long, long time since a quiet moment like this. His body isn’t adjusted to the silence, the slowness, the luxury of peace. He needs something to do.
"I'll do it," he offers, and is countered with two quizzical stares, a soft murmur of disagreement, “I’ve hacked my way through jungle,” he says automatically, close to a plea, as he stares to the solid grey wall of fog, like a cliff, or a hull. “I’ll do it,”. His parents share another look out of sight, and Andrew remembers the boats. One of the corporals had been seasick. Eddie had held him over the side and then threatened to carry him over his shoulder if he didn’t sort himself out. He’d always been strong.
“Well,” his mother says, “we’ll see.”
//
He has a violent, painful headache when he wakes, violently dragged from slumber by dry heaving. It’s a fuzzy, miserable morning. A slog to get downstairs. Sunlight blooms in painful spots along the fence and dazzles through the needles of the wattle tree. Only the cool, damp breeze takes the edge from the pain, and the rich smell of coffee wafting up from in front of him.
Hillbilly’s head is on his forearms, a non-zero chance he is asleep or comatose. Martin is staggering back to the kitchen. The neighbourhood is quiet. Andrew is grateful. He holds his coffee between his hands but cannot bring himself to drink yet. He does not, he realises, remember a thing. He knows he is hungover, violently, from the last hour on the bathroom floor praying to God he doesn’t rip his throat throwing up and begging Him that he will never drink again if He frees him from the pain. He doesn’t know how. A considerable gap in his memory.
It is the first time in his life he remembers not remembering. The past ten hours have just gone; his brain pulled the shutters down and the stenographer went home and there’s no recording of proceedings. There’s a strange feeling to it. No recollection. No knowledge of anything that happened, who he was, what he said; just the knowledge that something that should be there isn’t.
“Did I do anything stupid?” He asks, tentatively, his voice feeling thick and dry in the back of his throat. Hillbilly speaks face down, that rich voice of his muffled,
“Apart from puke on me?”
“Did I?” Andrew is suddenly aghast, but he can’t help but laugh. He’s pretty sure he will still become Captain, and Hillbilly, pressed to the cool table, is still a Lieutenant (Thank God, or all that paperwork and needling went to waste). He watches, waiting, with a grin that’s half embarrassment and half amusem*nt as Hillbilly gingerly lifts his head, using a palm splayed flat against the metal lattice table to physically support himself.
“Looked like you would,” he rasps.
“You look like you will,” Andrew chuckles with relief. He feels good despite the regretful hedonism. He feels great despite the physical misery. It’s what he needed. Hillbilly barely manages a flimsy smile. Methodists are not known for drinking, and he is white and drawn, his rust coloured curls askew, his shirt unbuttoned to his collarbone. Faint shadows of stubble show on his jawline. There is no hope any of them will make it through the day in one piece.
He doesn’t remember Hillbilly being with them. It had been him, Martin, Chisick, Everett- no trace of him in the billet, he must have abandoned them for some woman midway through the night- and Stanley, who is upstairs with the hair of the dog and not a hope in Hell. Somewhere in the night Hillbilly joined them. Andrew’s glad he’s there, even if he doesn’t remember.
“Feel like I will,” Hillbilly grouses, his hands tangling in his hair. There’s a muffled shout behind the kitchen window, a silhouette holding up a mug and tipping its head, “I hear God callin’ me,”
“That’s just Martin,” Andrew raises his palm to the kitchen and shakes his head. It slinks away.
Hillbilly turns his miserable, wretched gaze upwards. His sleepless, bloodshot eyes watery, like a cup of the sea.
“He threw me outta bed,” he complains, “I said,” and he has to pause to swallow, and for a moment Andrew is truly worried, the knot of nerves in his chest tightening suddenly, “I said- I outrank you, but he said- I dunno what he said. He said somethin'. I woke up on the floor.”
“At least he didn’t throw up on you,” Andrew reminds.
“Don’t say that, or I will,” Hillbilly warns. He slowly stretches, and Andrew feels his shin brush against his own. He waits until he has finished testing the range of motion in his sore arms- the lines of the table still pressed into his skin- before he settles his foot against his anklebone. Warm skin to warm skin. Hillbilly jolts and reaches for a sugar packet he’s suddenly realised is laid on the table with the fine china from inside. Martin had brought his stash out to revive them all, and that it might save him.
Andrew’s coffee is still warm and has about sixty cubes of Domino in, coagulating at the bottom, but still tastes acidic in a way that only ration coffee can.
“How’re you feelin’?” Hillbilly asks, one long word out the side of his mouth while he swirls his coffee, “Other than stupid?” The sun must be blinding him as he lowers his eyes from where Andrew smiles at him.
“Like I’ve been shot in the head,” Andrew beams.
Hillbilly rips open another packet of Domino and puts it onto his tongue. Crunches to consider his words. He goes for another packet instead- fiend for all things sweet. On the Canal, Sergeant Jones showed Andrew to mix his coffee ration with cocoa powders and as much sugar as he could barter for. It’s things like that that got him his commission. Andrew would trade him his cigarette ration for more coffee: he would smoke them gratefully, one after the other. They leaned on each other. Hillbilly grins, a flash of teeth.
“You’ll get used t’it,”
///
His mother does not send him to the garden but upstairs, with strict instructions to not even think about following after his father, who is going to get on the roof and take the storm-beaten shingles off alone. The thought of it, of danger, physical work and the chill under the open sky, sends a thrill through him suddenly, but he obeys- one person he’d never begrudge taking an order from- and heads back upstairs.
There’s a doctor in Boston telling him the same, assigning mediocre goals; to walk to the cornerstore without feeling nauseous, carry unplanned conversations on new topics, organise and rebalance his life. Every day he has a new task, a new goal to achieve, when back then all he had to think about was wake up alive and deal with whatever was happening then. He has a calendar, a schedule, a future to wrangle.
There’s a folder with a number on it and a detailed after action report of the hole in his head; it’s going to a medical journal, anonymously. It feels like a violation, someone peering through the curtains. He can stand and walk and talk somewhat perfectly, and his name is not even being attached to the miracle. Where’s his due credit?
Even as he shakes a little at his desk, he feels fine. A little fuzzy, delicate, like he’s hungover and the faintest movement will make him dizzy, but it’s the feeling of something that will pass.
The scar is healing behind his ash blonde hair, and he believes the Dr’s line about internal bruising or concussion- he’d spent enough years getting thrown around on a football pitch to know the joys of head injuries intimately. He wants to be rid of it, like a cold that's lingered too long. He's back and he's alive, and once he's better he's not going to waste it.
There’s a letter for him from New Guinea on his desk, and another from China, in the same illegible handwriting. The man who never wrote letters home. The man who’s words he can effortlessly read in that laconic, grave drawl.
Ack Ack
Chance would be a fine thing if we end up in hospital together. I have coffee, but no cigarettes, trade?
E H Jones
And he huffs a laugh at that- is Eddie mocking him with his sign off, as he always did when peering over his shoulder to scowl at his reports? (“A A Haldane? There’s one Haldane this side of the date line, ain’t nobody confusin’ you for some other officer,”)
Eddie made it to a hospital, was able to write, and was looking for him. Maybe hoping they’d cross paths. Andrew sighed. He had no idea how to explain it. Even if he’d seen Eddie- had he?- he wouldn’t remember. What was he supposed to say? He knew what he would say in person- the same way Eddie would listen his desultory rambles and then, with endless patience, decipher whatever Andrew had said and lay it out in plain country words- they always had an answer for each other. Paper has no tone, no volume, no gesture. Even all their chemistry can’t translate plain words to the true meaning- explain all thoughts inside him now, the future at his doorstep, the void in his head.
The second from China makes his stomach turn with nerves. The date is smudged, but it’s past the end of the war, and partially censored,
Captain
I hear you made it back to the states with your head injury. I weren't lucky enough to be discharged and am now [and this is censored, up until his last line]. Stanley escaped Stateside, you may already have letters from him.
Write when you can.
Lt Jones.
In the long four months of recovery, Mr E ‘H’ Jones had gone from New Guinea, to a hospital ship somewhere in the Coral Sea, to Darwin, back north to Melanesia and through Micronesia, to China, surviving his fourth and fifth gunshot wound and giving another chunk of his life to the Corps, and changed the way he wrote. It feels more formal and stiff (so much for thinking he can’t convey tone through a letter) and the nerves double, an ache stirring in his chest. This is Eddie. There’s supposed to be no formality between them. Once he’d made Eddie his XO (after some arguing, reasoning, and near pleading, more than the promotion) he’d told him to call him Andrew, and been refused, but Eddie never called him Captain, and he never called himself Lieutenant.
It takes Andrew a good few minutes to find a piece of paper- before he gives up and tears a sheet from an old college composition book.
Dear E H Jones (no A?), he writes, and wonders if he can even begin to put to paper the sudden things he wants to say.
I’m sorry for missing your letters- no, he thinks. He knows Eddie; apologies only annoy him. Andrew stares at the paper again. He seems ruffled. Worried maybe, by the lack of reply. Is he worried because he thinks Andrew’s injured gravely, or dead, or because he’s ignoring him? Which is worse? He presses a hand to his forehead. He’s over thinking. Getting a headache, slow beat of his pulse behind his skull.
The bastards have censored your letter. I don’t know what you are doing in China but I hope it pays better than selling trophies to Seabees.
And then he pauses. Thinks a little. Eddie had always belonged to the Marines but what if the war had changed him as it had Andrew? He shakes the feeling, slow prickle of cold up his scalp. If anything had to stay the same, it would be Eddie. Unflinchable.
Are you staying with the Corps for now? Have Echo Company managed to steal you away? When are you coming back? I suppose I have a lot of questions without being able to shake answers out of you anymore. You know the format for reports, I don't know if we can manage my old tent on Pavuvu but I think we can find a pup tent and put it on a beach somewhere.
Yours,
A A Haldane
And folds it, not realising he is trembling all over. The slanted sentences, oddly bulging o's and consonants scribbled together, symptomatic reminders of his own brush with death. If it were anyone else he'd rewrite it to be perfect, not a hint of anything wrong, but it's Eddie, he's tired, and he knows he will know. He's okay with that.
Weeks later, watching his father back up on the other side of the house, carrying tools and a cup of tea from his mother, he gets a reply. Of everything that’s changed, he has one small thing to rely on- Eddie (even if its not the full picture, he knows that, he’s just clinging to this little comfort).
Ack Ack
It’s more interesting if I keep it a mystery what I’m doing in China, and stops the [censored, a single expletive adjective he assumes; a sense of humour from the censor] from ruining my letters. Maybe it's in the newspapers.
I may be back in the States on leave soon, I can tell you then, but Echo did not steal me. There's a lot of reorganising now the war is over. I’m not good at writing letters so you will have to shake the answers out of me. I hope you are keeping well.
Yours,
E A H Jones. (Happy now?)
////
He's daydreaming of a white-sand beach and a thousand clustered leaves again. Impenetrable wall of rustling darkness. A trail through the mangrove. Distant shouting artillery between the shivering sounds the leaves make, as frightened as they are. (They made him a Captain for that, remember?)
"-not a single word has registered has it?"
Andrew blinks. Sluggishly catching up, knee-deep in the ocean waves again. In the foam, a landing craft, a body. This is why he shouldn't give into it. This is why he needs to sleep, and not chase after Martin chasing after women, go pint-for-pint with Stanley, convinced he can drink Gunny under the table, or follow Hillbilly to whichever Aussie pub he's been invited to play in, on stage with the limelight in his curls and the adoring crowd.
"Sir, I-"
Chamberlain claps his hands to his thighs and stands with a suddenness that makes the rest of the world jump to attention. A group of schoolkids yowl outside.
"Captain of Marines, or the football team, you'd think there'd be a difference,"
"I like to think so," Andrew smiles weakly as Chamberlain prowls at the back of the desk. Rearranges the loose sheets of paper with his hand, the skin spotted with age and jungle rot. Chamberlain comes to a stop by the window, heels clicking together. His igneous stare crystallises into a pragmatic, dismissive look.
"Just remember, you're responsible for those boys out there," he pulls the chain for the blinds and they clatter shut, leaving thin slits of the southern sun streaming through, "I want this exercise to go off without a hitch, I want it to look good,
Shrieks outside, howls from the courtyard, and the distant crash of glass. Someone's sent the cricketball straight across through a window. An argument on who will bring it back. Face the homeowners wrath, return a hero.
"I'll do my best," he smiles, aiming for humour when he feels the General's eyes land on him- as grey as mercury, "but we're just kids,"
The old man says nothing. Andrew leaves, unsettled.
The sun set on his tram ride home; empty streets and empty roads. The night was timid and clear. Coffee splutters on the stove and his restless pacing worries the carpet, threatens to wear a hole in it. Papers and manuals and reports cover the blue diamonds and cypresses of the Persian rug beneath his wandering.
He's in charge, which feels good, if daunting. But the General's got it all wrong; the world's got it all wrong. All these notes, all this theory, as clinical as a surgeon's guide. It won't be perfect, it's a training exercise, for the uneducated and uncertain recruits, the Canal vets struggling to sober up and come back. He's got to temper Martin's mood swings, coach his new XO, condition the recruits in an environment only half as hot and dire as combat so they might have half a chance of surviving, and get them back for Sunday supper; that's the whole point of the exercise. Not to look good.
(He doesn't do it to look good, to brag about his rank and gold, he does it for them. The future. America. The Cause.)
He's exhausted, the clockhands pulling towards midnight. Lost himself thinking again, but wasn't he always prone to?. The Canal keeps tugging on his shirtsleeve, the sea keeps whispering in his ear. If he's to lead his company, and it will be his Company, he cannot ever think about it again.
There's a sudden knock as his door- like the crack of a rifle- it makes him jolt upright. Shoeless, untucked and dishevelled, he heads for the door. The shadow of a silverfern obscures the rippled glass, but Andrew would recognise that tall shadow on any crowded platform, on any street, any ship, in the world.
Hillbilly stands on the porch, crouched for his height, garrison cap in hand, and bathed in the deep, twilight haze of the wet southern night. Amber streetlight dances off the rainwashed blue roads, pooling in inky puddles of nightsky. The pearly bellies of eucalyptus leaves flashing under the moon.
"Hillbilly," he's smiling before he gets the door fully open. The lieutenant- not yet his- rocks up to the balls of his feet, then sinks back down with an exhale, before he speaks,
"D'you want t'go-" he starts, and then a passing car makes him clear his throat suddenly, "I- drink?"
It takes Andrew a moment to catch up. He shifts to lean against the doorframe and move his shadow from Hillbilly's face so he can see him. Freshly polished bars at his throat. Neatly pressed uniform molded to his shoulders. Those earnest blue eyes. What's the reason he's here- not just at the doorstep, but here? What's his cause?
"T- t' celebrate?" Hillbilly presses.
If anyone was to believe in anything, it'd be him, Andrew figures. Some motive there, and not just a paycheck. Dedicated to his regulations and rules, hands never in his pockets, immaculately clean shaven- a man who truly lives, breathes, believes in the Marines. But he doesn't know. They only met weeks ago, even when it feels like a lifetime since landing.
"There's a bar right down the park yonder through them trees," Hillbilly explains, that slow manner of his nervously gaining speed, gesturing vaguely behind himself at the windows opposite; warm slices in the twilight. Andrew realises he has been staring mutely when Hillbilly frowns.
“Not tonight,” he smiles weakly, and catches something faint- the briefest flash of something - “another night,” and then when he realises that’s a terrible reply,“We've got this exercise tomorrow," and Hillbilly stills, returning his arms to his side, "but after all of us will go drinking, Martin will want to anyway,"
"Right," Hillbilly says. Another car crawls past, slower, and Hillbilly turns his head to glare as it retreats into the shadows. He returns to stare blankly at the doorjam, "Sure, great,”
He slinks back to the street, making no noise down the gravel path. Gunny had commented on it once, how he had known some hillbilly who could move through the bush without a sound because of all the federals he ran from and the coon he hunted. Martin had said it was f*cking scary, ought to put some bells on him.
Andrew closes the door once the street is empty. Goes back to his preparations, the long list of reports for the brass. Thinks about the officers, the people he will need for whatever's to come, people with experience of the real thing and not the theory; and writes a note to ask the General for a transfer.
///
There’s this weird feeling inside him as the month drags on. A tide that pushes and pulls. He feels like a hypocrite, and doesn't know why. Like he's forgotten something- a coat on a park bench, his watch in the dresser drawer; or even worse, like he's betrayed someone, left part of himself by the wayside.
Dear Eddie
I still have a head and all four limbs so assume I’m okay. If you get the New England Medical Journal you should look for Patient A with the head wound and read about it there, or I can tell you when we meet again. I'll get a copy of the x-ray if you want the gory details.
Are you back from China yet? You must be soon. I assume peacetime will put you back on base somewhere. Keep your address updated with the Corps, don't make me have to chase you up for paperwork. I hope you are keeping safe and dry
Yours
A A Haldane (Yes, thank you)
The new year comes, all gold and glitter. His mother hosts a party in the lounge that spills to the yard and watches the fireworks over the Merrimack and the sky is nothing like the sky over the Pacific. His resolution is to never be shot at again. A reply comes a week later-
Ack Ack
Not out of China yet [and this part is scribbled out, self censorship, errors.] It's mostly busywork. Guarding. Seeing ruins. Getting wet. I got presents for all the kids but I've apparently a new niece so will have to find something for her, maybe a sword.
I may be on leave around Easter, the Lord willing. I'll let you know the day as soon as I can if you want to come down to Dixie and the good Dr allows. We'll hike the woods if you'd like and show the wildlife what the Corps taught us. The whitetails won't know what's hit them.
Yours,
Eddie
-and he smiles the entire time reading it.
He had imagined them meeting after the war, but in what context, well, he’d never given the specifics much thought; it was more of a distant fantasy, like seeing the Braves win a season, or Marlene Dietrich performing on their islands, than anything real and tangible. Common logic had told him not to jinx anything and even think about being home over there too much. Even if he had considered it once, and now, in the sanctuary of the continental states, can dream about it all he wants. Even if Eddie's still finishing up in the Corps they've both mentioned meeting- he can, and does, go back to his old letters for proof, and then fetches the map in his father's study.
He sets his sights on Virginia, or Pennsylvania, wherever, a day trip to prove he’s fit enough for his new life, whatever that may be. He can think about it once he’s done that. He can put his feet on the right path. It's a simple goal, something he's used to, when all his others were so gigantic. Capture an airfield, take a vacation in the Appalachians, he knows which one is easier. It's a warm feeling in his stomach, rising through his chest to his head and the vistas of sun-filled longleaf pine and flowering redbud, the peaceful kind of nature that didn't exist over there. And Eddie, alive and well. He can already feel the sun on his neck.
Dear Eddie
When you get back, send me a telegram and I’ll drive down, or get the train if my mother doesn't approve. I'm sure she will be fine letting me go if I tell her who I'm visiting. I think a trip will prove I'm not an invalid.
I'll be discharged properly soon and will be looking for a job- shame it's halfway through the schoolyear now otherwise I would try get an assistant job there.
And I don't think war trophies are appropriate for a young girl- there's a toymaker a few blocks from me that sells dolls, why don't you pick a sensible option like that and not a handful of teeth?
Yours,
Andrew
//
The sea meets them again, and they follow the curve of the equator on the wide blue road to Hell.
The ship is as festive as a morgue. Marines jostle in the open air to take in the tangy sea breeze, the only thing that cools in the clamour. In the next few latitudes they will all be below, in the heat and sweat.
Melbourne is a very, very, long way away. Andrew feels it sharper now, watching the generals and colonels plan, and the boys argue and bicker on deck. They are away from civilisation and in some macabre limbo, the waiting just before the landing. If his boys are nervous, they don’t show it. They push and shove through the crowd, voices climbing to shouts, to carols, a card game here and a boxing match there.
Chisick weaves between the platoons, agitated- from the set of his tense shoulders, the constant nodding, rhythmic as waves. Aft, Gunny prowls with a gunto sword held at his waist, the one that the mortarman carries, and demonstrates his finest moves to the wide eyed PFCs. The sun glints off the blade, winking.
"Saint Nick with a sword," Andrew remarks mildly, from the safe distance of the stern railing.
"We're all on his naughty list," Martin agrees, from the floor behind Andrew's feet. Sunbathing, shirtless, his arm slung over his eyes, as casual as a man taking his vacation poolside.
“End up with coal in your stocking,” Hillbilly adds from his spot in the shade. Andrew has already gifted each of his lieutenants cigarettes he carefully bargained for in Australia, and effectively given his company the morning off. He doesn’t feel very Christmassy.
"He'll want to hide that thing," Martin proclaims with authoritative firm, raises his head to warn them, “they make you give all the good stuff to the Majors."
"They?" Hillbilly tips his head, catches Andrew's puzzled glare for a second when their eyes meet. Andrew only shakes his head.
"The photographers." Martin scoffs, glances up at the both of them like he can't believe he has to explain himself, "so they can do their photo ops and make it all- you know- we're all in this together and I'm not just sat behind a desk, I've got a Jap sword too- routine." He chews on his cheek, a muscle in his jaw popping, "Happened to a guy in E Company, I heard.”
"Mmhh," Hillbilly hums, and this time when their eyes meet, his narrow gaze is crinkled with mirth, glittering like sun on the waves.
"It's true," Martin snaps defensively, "he'll come take your swords if you ain't careful,"
“All the more reason to be promoted, so you get the good stuff,” Andrew smiles. He doesn’t make a habit of looting bodies himself. He’s took ammo off his dead boys, sure, but that’s different; it doesn’t stop him thinking about the historic worth of it all, the pearl lacquered boxes and crafted metal handles. He wonders if they feel the same way about him.
Martin gives a low grunt of agreement, holds the silence while he stretches, and then tips his head back to peer up at Hillbilly with a mean squint, “How much you make from all them swords Hillbilly?”
“Ain’t polite to ask," he responds gruffly, pulling a cigarette from its carton. He has to pat his left, and then his right side pocket, before he finds his lighter.
“Could buy me a house with all you’ve sold-“ Martin tosses his hair back and ruffles it with his hand.
"Ain't buyin' you a damn thing-"
"You've got a whole Jap General stuffed in your seabag, and if you ain't f*ckin' it, you're selling it for parts," Martin's tone is heated, challenging Hillbilly's phlegmatic gaze, and his smile borders on unhinged.
Andrew turns his head to look at his Lieutenants, eyeing each other like dogs on different sides of a gate. Hillbilly; immovable, unafraid to scruff the company like unruly cats. Martin, his troublemaker; endlessly energetic, vibrant with life, possibly spoiling for a fight if Andrew lets go and releases him into nervous flocks of Marines. OCS never tamed him, Guadalcanal sharpened the blunt edge of his personality into a vicious point, and Andrew wonders who he will be when (if) he comes off New Britain.
He gives a good-natured warning sigh to disrupt them, the kind his father would give when his brother came to terrorise him and his sister, and it stops them dead in their tracks. Andrew suspects Hillbilly would turn him into garters anyway, but Martin's snipes unsettle him.
"Well, I quite fancy a flag,” he turns around, lets his elbows drop down and his spine rest against the metal. From behind, the drop below feels steeper, the spray sounds louder.
“Hm?” Martin asks, while Eddie only smoothly turns his head in question, Andrew can feel his eyes behind the shadow.
“One of those battle flags," he continues, rolling a hand through the air, "It’d look lovely in the dining room, or above the fireplace." It’s a silly desire, childish really, and half-a-joke, with some truth behind it, he does want one, has always wanted one. It's some kind of immense curiosity to want one. It's the kind of rarer trophy the Seabees, Majors, and photographers love, a bit of a status symbol maybe. It's also, as a much younger him would say, wicked.
“Oh yeah, next to the skull you use to decant wine,”
“See, you get the picture,” he smiles at Martin.
"Hm", he twitches restlessly, unsatisfied. He's gone looking for a spat, and found nothing. His grimace is uncomfortable, too wide for his tense jaw. They must have crossed the nothernmost latitude of the safe zone silently, a blanket of unease pulling over the ship. Martin pulls his shirt back on as the temperature drops. Clips his belt around his waist. Stands uneasily. A western wind smells of smoke, and Andrew isn't sure if he's hallucinating.
"See what's about then," Martin announces, then politely leaves with a sir, and that's when Andrew knows the battle is really coming. Just over the next few whitecaps. Just beyond that foaming border.
"Had a dead bobcat 'bove our stove,"
Andrew jumps at the sudden sound, looking back over his shoulder to see Hillbilly step from the shadow, over the place where Martin laid, and to the railing. "An' a deer I shot once. Skinned it myself,"
Andrew found himself relaxing at the smooth sound of his voice besides him, shedding the concern that had crept up on him; whenever he really spoke, his mouth barely moving, his voice was a voice to be listened to when he drew out his accent, a coal-miners drawl thick as honey,
"Back in Nevada?" Andrew asks, once he's caught onto the line he's thrown.
"Pennsylvania," Hillbilly replies, and then settles onto the railing, "we moved about a lot,"
"You'd ever move here?" he gestures to the tropical sea; greenish where the highest waves catch the sun.
"Lived on a boat my whole life anyway," Hillbilly settles, his cigarette burnt to a nub. Andrew hums vague agreement, and lets his gaze settle across the forward crowds. Lines seem to be forming, and he can hear Gunny still, the grunts and groans of the privates around him. Martin nowhere to be seen.
Hillbilly is looking at him, just from the corner of his vision. Andrew lifts his gaze, to the man he promoted and now can rely on for answers. In his company, there must be some fifty years of service between them- the ones he trusts anyway. It’s a small comfort, suddenly feeling as if there is no ground under his feet, and only a bottomless abyss, as they sail higher and higher.
Hillbilly says nothing though, just tips his head barely to the right. Andrew remembers he has to ask. He’s not a mind reader.
"Think he'll be okay?"
"He talks like he's borrowed someone else's teeth," Hillbilly shrugs, "don't have to worry 'bout them gettin' knocked out," and Andrew frowns. Hillbilly catches it, eyes softening briefly; he raises his arm like he’s going to lay a hand on his back comfortingly, the same way Andrew does- more of a force of habit than any decipherable action- but halfway through the thought he changes direction, reaches for the railing.
"He'll be alright," Hillbilly says after another moment of silence, another twitch of his bony shoulders, and Andrew quickly learnt his shrug meant nothing as he pats him on the arm, but his going for a cigarette betrays his nerves, "He'll be alright."
///
Snow melts, as it always does in spring, and he is reassured that the world is not completely upside down. 1946 is unheeded. His mother is content to let him shovel the driveway, frowns when he attempts the neighbour's, and he has to sneak back inside with a hand pressed to his temple and his body threatening to give out, because she'll never let him out if she catches him like this. It doesn't matter, it'll pass. The new world is coming.
There's justice in Nuremberg and a new government in Tokyo, Oppenheimer on every magazine, new jobs and new shops and new things, money pouring into Europe. Peace and prosperity, they said so on the news.
He keeps up his visits home. His nephew is obsessed with him, his niece shy at first, wondering who this stranger is and why she is alone at Grandma's, but soon eagerly joining her brother to clamber up his back and demand rides through the house. They both hang from his lifted arms, vying for his attention, demanding to know everything about him. His favourite movie (Casablanca). His favourite baseball team (Boston Braves). His favourite colour (he doesn't have one). They shadow him, like new NCOs.
He watches them fight with sticks in the backgarden- playing Marines and Japs where he played Cowboys and Indians- or Scots and Sassenach when his father joined in to chase them around the yard; he watches them tussle and roughhouse without a care and thinks it was all worth it, and if it doesn't feel like it was always worth it, it will do soon.
There’s a new confidence blooming somewhere under the scar tissue, fragile and young. He keeps moving, like he can outrace the feeling in his blood. The shadow in his dreamless nights that darkens the edge of his vision. The headache he wakes to every morning. The flashes of light in his eyes. Tracer fire.
He just thinks about the Virginia hills in the springtime, seeing Eddie again. That’s what he needs. A little peace and quiet maybe, not the adventure he previously thought of, but a vacation. Stretch out in a lush meadow, put his feet in a rushing clear-blue river, watch the fish dart between the rocks, the birds hop on the stepping stones. A little break from it all.
He keeps writing Eddie, and a few letters from his boys- one in college, one training as a mechanic, one back in the Marines, one tearfully thanking Andrew for everything. He keeps busy, a book and a newspaper and the classified ads for his job hunt. He doesn't want to press again, as the snow melts away for good and the magnolias die off and the tulips start to bloom, he wonders when Eddie's coming back. He hadn't said a word of it- wrote of the rain and harsh weather, performing on stage with courtesans and musicians, getting back to sea- but nothing about home.
The next letter comes weeks later, when it's hot enough to tease summer, and Andrew feels right enough to walk his niece and nephew for taffy by the river, takes some back for his mother, and the return address is horribly, conspicuously, not China or Virginia or Maryland or any other state he suspects Eddie to live in. It's the middle of the sea.
Ack Ack
I didn’t get leave [furious censorship marks, angry valleys left in the paper. Andrew can only translate his anger in his scratchings.
I’m unsure of when I’ll get leave again. They tried to transfer me but I refused and they might not want to ask again. I have reupped. There's another kid in the family, and apparently not much work. I don't want any of them joining the Navy or something stupid. I will try get leave as soon as I can.
Yours, Eddie
He holds the letter in his hands. Stares at the ink which bleeds into thin paper. What is he supposed to reply to that?
All spring he had waited for something, and now it's not happening. He sits and holds his letter for a little while before coming to the conclusion he should have come to back when he woke up. It’s 1946, it’s a new year and a new life. He shouldn’t mope about it, it’s only a letter, and it’s not like he won’t write a hundred more to Eddie and the boys in his company. It’s not like the world starts and ends with Virginia- it didn’t in 1861, and it won’t now. And yet it hurts. A little.
He stands up, holding to the porch railing. Cobbles together scraps of thoughts of what he should do with his life. One letter, one sentence, has thrown him so off course. This is why he never liked dwelling on the past, and now he's dwelling on the future. Let down by imagination, by something that didn't even happen.
It's not like he won't eventually see Eddie- he realises, that that's the wound that stings the most, not knowing when- there's a hundred more months just like this one to come. It's only natural to feel so disappointed, he had relied on Eddie for so long; it's like taking the crutches from an old man and expecting him to walk fine- not that Eddie was his crutch, he thinks hotly, just that- he'd looked forward to seeing him. That was it. He was looking forward to seeing his XO, his closest friend, they had both dodged death by millimetres and it only felt right they should be allowed to meet again. And Jesus, he missed him-
“Come inside laddie,” his father calls from the inside, when it starts to drizzle, and his voice sounds a million miles away, inside his head, like how he used to read his letters. “Catch cold out there,”
He gathers the frazzled sentences in his head and walks inside- consciously placing all his weight through his heels like the physiotherapist told him to do when he felt off kilter- and headed upstairs with a hand that didn't leave the banister until the last step.
His flag flaps a greeting when he opens his bedroom door and the rush of air disturbs it. It settles back against the wall with a whisper. Perfect white, still so clean after so long. Andrew sighs, and the flag sighs with him; breeze from the open window disturbing the room.
He’s had Eddie by his side for so long for everything that he hasn’t considered what it’d be like to be without. Especially now, with all this black cloud gathering over him as he stumbles through his new life.
His mother shakes him awake that night- or was he already awake?- and comes in through the shadowed doorway, perches on the edge of his bed. Her hand comes to his shoulder but not into his hair like it used to.
She carries a crystal glass, sweating cold in her hand, balanced on her thigh. The moisture stains her nightdress.
“Do you have a fever?” She asks. The shadow of her outline is barely visible, but he can feel the weight and shape of her in the dark; the worried pitch of her breathing. Years in the darkness in the jungle have given him the senses of a rabbit, or mouse, a prey animal sensitive to the faintest stimuli.
“What?" He rasps, and his mouth is sticky and dry and horribly familiar.
Her worried sigh sinks deeper into the mattress, and she fusses with the edge of the blankets to smooth them out around him.
“I thought you might be ill, you kept shouting about water.” Her voice is low, though he knows he's woken the whole house. He swallows uncomfortably. Nearly chokes on the ball of spit lodged in his throat.
“I’m sorry- did I wake you?”
“No, no,” she lays her palm on his arm, wet from where she held the glass, gooseflesh shivering (when he was younger, her hand could wrap all around his forearm, now her thumb and fingers don’t even come close, and he can feel the bones in her fragile hands). The blankets rustle as she shifts to face him better.
"All these blankets-" she lifts the first three layers, "no wonder you're hot,"
He makes no comment, he likes them close. She knows that as well as he does. They share the same colour eyes, and the same soft hair with the weightless curls, and sometimes, Andrew thinks, they share thoughts.
She leaves him with the glass and a troubled kiss on his forehead. He lies awake, blankets woven between his fingers. He doesn't know what happened to his greens. Perhaps it's for the best he never was reunited with some of his things. He'd like the smell of the blanket, sand, dust, sweat, gun oil; he'd like to leave it far in the past. Restlessly, he turns to his side and pulls the sheets over him. Heavy, they press him into the bed.
In the dark, he makes a plan to move out.
///
Another New Year's Eve slips by- it rains for two, three days. Prolegomenon to the monsoon. Each raindrop carves up the earth like a spray of machine-gun fire, waistdeep trenches in the mud. Chisick catches a bullet, and he makes Hillbilly his XO under a curtain of rain. The most natural decision in the world; though Hillbilly was unconvinced, balking like he had for his commission. Andrew chased him down through a rainstorm, borderline to begging.
They spend the night fighting off a flood, every molecule alive with fear, and plans are drawn to capture an airfield and shuttled down the line to him (Andrew feels like his whole life is going to revolve around airfields).
After, bloodied and limping, he hobbles through the line; dripping as much as the jungle around him. The wound on his neck will fester in the heat, but eventually close and heal. Not an inch of skin on his hands is clean. Gunny slinks inside the barbed wire and bamboo, slowly circling inwards, sheepdog herding the company into pens.
He sees Hillbilly in his peripherals while hears the same joke for the fifth time that night from his boys, has another bloodied PFC ask about the gash on his forearm. He's stood tightly, peering at Andrew sideways with the faintest tilt of his head. His sleeves are bloodied, damp and sticky. Andrew watches him, wired like a machine about to move. But he doesn’t. He only stalks off to nudge Martin with his foot, wordless demand for him to move.
Hesitant, Andrew thinks, (which is a word he would never, ever apply to him. The madman has already been shot twice, and he is usually so at ease, so effortless in anything he does). He wonders if he’s cracking. Who isn’t. He's trying his best not to crack here.
They cut through the jungle, leaving trenches in the mud. Taking encampments and waterlogged foxholes; defending a creek of rapid water in the pitch black monsoon night. He cannot see a hand in front of his face, but he can feel things all around him, make the shape of them in his head. He can hear the dripping of rain, frantic footsteps splashing in the puddles. Echolocates himself in the dark, the flash of muzzles on wet trees his only indication of his orientation-up.
In a dry spell, they hang hammocks and anything they can to dry. The air is so damp evaporation fails. The sun heats the cloistered trees like an oven. They traipse through the sagging, water-heavy, decaying undergrowth, though it feels more like a swim.
It's unnatural, how wild and untamed the jungle is. They gather in the airfield, the obtuse triangle of cleared land and open, slate grey sky, where a thin, dying breeze brings little relief from the sea.
All around the feral jungle stretches two hundred feet high, its crowded canopy an umbrella from sunlight; figs and flowers and vines and trees and bamboo and all manners of shrubs fighting to reach to the illusive beams of sunlight that filtered down. In the depths, in the dense and hot permatwilight, it is never silent. When they cut through the jungle, a line of sweating, nervous, exhausted, the birds and insects chatter and chirp and clatter, undisturbed. It covers their movements, and the shrieks cut Andrew to the bone.
They're not quiet like birds back home when they see people- they have never seen them before, see no threat in the snaking columns of heavily armed Marines and the Japanese that creep around them until the fighting starts and they flee. Every footstep feels like desecrating holy ground, bringing death and destruction with them to the vibrant, living, vivid jungle. The crack of smallarms fire, the echoes of artillery-
"And all this f*cking rain," Martin grouses, hunched under a poncho. It's constantly wet, wetter the further they go in. The sodden, spongy jungle, leaves and trees swollen with rain. The never-ending rain, the living drumbeat, pounding incessantly. They march to the rhythm of it, pressing outward from the airfield to clear the island. It leaves holes were it drips into them, ridges and marks were it cuts right through. When he lays a hand on Hillbilly’s forearm (for who’s stability he can’t tell) he swears he can feel the echo of hollow bone. Water erodes stone, the jungle erodes man. It's the cycle of life.
After the battles (which he doesn’t dwell on) and the death counts and the long, hot nights, comes plague. Andrew doesn’t die of malaria, though Gunny boldly attempts it- leaving Andrew so shocked that he almost shouts at the man for having the audacity to even try.
Hillbilly catches it bad, and there’s nothing the medics can do for either of them. (He suspects neither are taking their atabrine, sharing some backwoods phobia of modern medicine.) Andrew takes a shift of watching over a shivering Hillbilly, who yesterday was unconscious, and today asks Andrew to knock him out cold.
“A gin and tonic is what you need,” Andrew says, his voice feeling too loud. It’s humid in the tent, both down to their scivvy shirts. Swear and rain runs down Andrew’s arms, pools in his elbow and along his waistband. He shifts on the floor, legs numb. It’s worryingly easy to space out when he's finally had a chance to sit down; his mind keeps going back in time to when he was little, hot with fever and his father read him Kipling at his bedside.
“Please jus' kill me,” Hillbilly shakes, lifts himself somewhat vertical, and pulls out a cigarette. He pats for the ammo-box by the cot, missing every time, movements like jelly. It takes Andrew a moment to realise he can’t find his lighter (when can he?) and he reaches for the spare he keeps for moments like this. He curls his fingers around Eddie's forearm to hold him still while he sparks up. His skin is clammy and cold, damp with sweat and rain. Andrew wants suddenly to take him somewhere dry and towel him off, like Australia, or America.
“I’m serious, lieutenant,” he lets go and leans his head back where he sits, feeling his own kind of fever. Outside its pouring, the rain dense enough to be solid. He understands now, how they used to think disease just materialised in muck when he looks at soupy ether of filth outside. Its hard to imagine anything living, even microscopic, out there, just death and decay. He remembers his father reading to him about that too.
“Jus’ get my Bible,” Hillbilly flops back to the cot, draws himself inward, “I’ve got the prayer I want folded over,”
He's being theatrical, but Andrew can't help the stab of sympathy despite his smile. When the whole company caught something, Eddie had been going up and down the line with suspiciously gained coffee and sugar, and song (One of the corporals threatened to put him in a nurses uniform for his entertainment). Andrew doesn’t know if he has anything like that to give. He instead reaches an arm around Eddie where he lays, and his Lieutenant sighs fussily, tips his head towards Andrew’s shoulder. His palm rests on Eddie’s shirt sleeve, fingers just brushing the edge.
“The Brits in India used it to treat malaria,” he says, almost wistfully, smiling to himself, “Tonic has quinine in it. Tastes foul but so does most medicine.”
“Mh,”
“That’s why they drank so much of it. Not that they didn’t like gin of course- you know plenty about that- but it had legitimate reason.
“Mh,” He huffs, sounding a little more pained this time. Andrew goes quiet, tries to imagine his whole company, pissed for medicinal purposes.
“We could set up a bar, work something out. I bet someone back home could send us tonic. Martin can sort dinner, he says he can cook. You’ll be the band- we’ll make the mess tents into a dancehall. Borrow some nurses from Australia, or some Seabees, whatever you fancy. We'll use cans as lights, just put some wool in them and set that on fire. It'll be real high class, like the Plaza, or the Ritz."
He can picture it perfectly as he paints the picture, same as he does for all the boys. Only this one really tugs his mouth into a smile, he'd like to see Hillbilly back on stage, drunk and wild again. He'd like to see Martin not look so pale, Gunny not look so old.
He doesn’t realise he’s stroking Eddie’s arm as he thinks, and he trails into silence. His palm fits snuggly around his shoulder. The first tight curls on his neck brush his along his wrist and forearm.
“Keep talkin’,” Hillbilly mutters, and Andrew looks to his side to double check he actually spoke, because he was suddenly so, so, far away, staring into the flaps of the tent and the gummy drops of water leaking through, “was almost asleep,”
“Glad you find me so boring you can fall asleep,” Andrew says, and the reply he gets is another short exhale, one he feels against his nape when Hillbilly turns his head slightly, “I’ve already given you all my fun facts, I’d rehearsed them for things like this,”
“Then tell me why we’re here, dyin’ of Lord knows what,” he huffs, twisting his hips so his legs lie on top of each other, sinking into the cot. Andrew runs his hand back over him when he pulls the blanket back into place.
“You want an actual answer?” He teases, sure Hillbilly just wants to be deep in unconsciousness, unable to feel, hear, or think (At least Andrew knows he did when he went through his bout of it, half mad with fever. He has no reason to believe their thoughts would differ.)
“You got one?” Hillbilly doesn’t sound surprised. He makes an effort to roll and crack his shoulder blades, pyretic ache gnawing his bones.
“Because it beat joining the Boy Scouts," he lays his hand back on Hillbilly's clammy shoulder, rubs sympathetically, tenderly, "or the Navy, or the Air Force, or staying at college." He knows he has a real answer, simmering inside of him since he landed; since the first salty spray of seawater crashed into him, since the General looked at him with those narrow, doubting eyes, and told him to look good, and he understood. The starts of it are written in the margins of his books, the burned into edges of his mind. They'll leave behind a ruin here, bodies and wreckage, and the land - but it is for good. They'll make a new world from this, a better one. They have to.
"It’s our duty,” he says quietly, because he’s sure somehow that Hillbilly will already be asleep, and this limbo isn’t real. This place, this moment in time, is suspended. The rain is still, the outside isn’t there. They’re away from any trace of the civilised, good world he is fighting (and will die) for. He wants to believe in it. That one day there will be no fighting; that even if the history is full of wars, they have their fill. This is the crescendo of two thousand years of history. This will be worth it.
“Can hear y'thinkin,” comes the complaint, from Hillbilly who shuffles up his shoulder a bit more, tucks his head in closer, nose pressed to his skin.
"Keeping you awake?" The warmth draws him in, tips his head to the side, resting against him.
"Go write it down," Hillbilly yawns mutely through his shivers.
"I will," Andrew thinks, and the pieces of it are so far apart still but they will come into place; there's always time in the future. "I'll write you a paper on it, get it published in a journal, so I don't have to keep you awake with all my rambling,"
“Like y’are now,” though it comes out in one word, and he is dropping towards sleep.
“Like I am now,” he agrees.
When he looks back over, Hillbilly’s asleep.
///
Once he gets over the weirdly emotional episode he's found himself entrenched in, he'll be on the right path.
It's worrying, this gloom, but not too worrying, he’s been warned that the faithful shot-in-the-head has a long list of side effects. Emotional disturbance, balance issues, nightmares- none of which he remembers having (he jolts awake from a knock on the door and his heart pounding and body sweating and head aching so fiercely he wants to drag himself to the hospital and check they haven't left the bullet inside him, and he doesn’t remember a thing of what he saw). A nightmare with no record, just another symptom on his long list of potentials. Its just weird to actually experience it. It’s just another thing to recover from, to get over, to not linger on too long.
Maybe he can shake it to. The feeling racing through his bloodstream, jittery and vicious.
That must be what is it. A side effect from the head wound (he ought to name it at this rate, like it's not him but a separate entity, a parasite residing in his head. Something to kill).
He gets a letter back from the college library, who might be interested in hiring him, if he can make an interview next week. The professor of humanities, who knows him from before, says he isn't hiring right now, but will come fall. Things slowly fall onto the path, even if they aren't in the right place. He gets an invite for a wedding, for Gunny’s wedding, which shocks him so drastically his mother asks if someone has died and he excuses himself to write Eddie immediately, even though he just posted a reply to his last letter a week ago;
Lt Jones.
Crisis: Gunny to marry?
Seeking advice.
Cpt Haldane.
The thrill makes him spin; his mother comes upstairs with tea to check that someone hasn’t actually died, and it takes an hour to explain to her fully that Gunny- confirmed Asiatic, completely feral, would eat a Corporal for breakfast and spit out his buttons, and who Andrew may owe his life and company to- is engaged to be wed. She does not understand the enormity of this.
He gets suddenly giddy at the thought, and goes to organise his blues, because Gunny has requested them and he'll be damned if he ever denies Gunny a thing now. Gunny won't have invited the whole company, just the officers and a few NCOs who he could tolerate maybe; hopefully his fiancée has encouraged him to be more sociable and invite more than him and his officers. Warmth spreads through his chest when he thinks of Stanley and Martin, how they must be getting on, they can catch up in the peacetime.
He gets a letter, and then a reply to his memorandum days later.
Cpt Haldane
RE: Gunny to marry?
Lord above have mercy on us all.
Lt Jones.
He smiles at that, Eddie equally traumatised and confused by Gunny's sudden domestication- the wolf becoming the dog. Gunny had been the timeless figure in his company and the Corps; he can’t picture Gunny, with his own house, spouse, life, and no more corporals to bark at, without chuckling to himself. He’d wear his gaitors for a Sunday stroll. At least someone has settled; it means they all can.
He wonders if Eddie will do the same.
Andrew can’t sit on his hands when there’s work to be done: he visits apartments down by the river, the rented rooms around the green bend of the park, near mainstreet; replies to all his boys, and stops worrying about it. He gets a place down by the green, a narrow house on the corner, shaded by a pine tree and a wild laurel. His mother lingers in the porchway when he goes, shadowed by the sagging purple wisteria that droops over the porch.
“Well, I suppose you’re not too far away," she declares, as if the proximity will console her. Andrew immediately wants to say I'm not over there, as a joke, but stops himself. He really has been ten thousand million miles away, stood in the sunlight that glitters on the freshly washed windows. The red brick is only pockmarked on the eastern side of the house, where the rain comes in. There's ivy struggling to bridge the gap between the windows, and a cluster of twigs peeking from the rooftop. What had he felt then, five years ago, before he left for Quantico?
When he looks at his mother, he thinks of all the mothers who don't get to watch their sons leave a second time. She’s lost her son before. Even if this time he carries a suitcase not orders, he feels suddenly cruel, leaving so fast. Leaving her to an empty house, with his father on business, his brother God knows where, and his sister in that house with that husband she hates.
“I’ll come for lunch on weekends,” he promises, crossing back across the gravel to loop his arm around her in a halfhug, and then fully, tucking his head into the crook of her neck. He could stay there for a little while longer.
Placated, she smiles at him the same fond smile she gives his father before he leaves for works. Back when they were younger, when she used to let the three of them stay up late when he wasn't in, build a den from sheets in the dining room with a lamp and a pile of books and toys, and they'd end up staying all night, just them and some ghost stories and a plate of buttered bread and jelly and not a clue in the world for anything to come.
///
In the sunlight, Andrew remembers what it’s like to be dry again. This is how plants must feel in the spring, when the cloud cover of winter fades and the sun rises earlier each day, hotter and brighter and higher in the sky, and replenishes the hollow, barren earth. Liquid sunshine pouring down into the empty parts of him and refilling his soul.
He stretches his legs out, relishing the ache with a pleased noise, the painful feeling of tight scar tissue being pulled, dried mud tugging on hair. It’s just proof he’s still alive, blood and muscle knitting together after being ravaged by the jungle. They've survived another day, he can only be grateful.
He leans against Hillbilly next to him; uncomplaining, because he lets him sleep against him whenever he can. He doesn't need to constantly entertain or monitor Hillbilly like he does Martin; he can soak in the tranquillity of this moment. Hillbilly’s watchful eye on the company, smoking dutifully. Andrew would do the same for him, of course.
The day is so blue and bright he’s squinting through the golden blur of his eyelashes at the distant shimmer of the sea above white treetops; the fat shapes of ships in the bay. The company mills down below in the shade of sparse palms, while the officers rest on a rocky granite outcrop ringed with tufts of spiky grass; just sheltered enough to be vaguely comfortable. It vaguely reminds him of the brooks in Massachusetts, high banks of fragile reeds swept by the breeze.
Gunny roots between the scattered throngs of Marines, NCOs faithfully trailing after him with ammo. Their medics are slowly catching up, going from cluster to cluster. Doc crouched in his makeshift clinic, a sign shoved into the mud at the base of a palm tree. Martin is slouched in the shadows, surrounded by Stanley and conversation.
It’s- and he won’t even think the Q word, because it feels unlucky, but it is. It's calmer now. He sighs through his nose, settling against Hillbilly’s shoulder as he sinks down against a crick in his lower back. He feels Hillbilly’s hand go to his side, and he tugs one of the straps that cross his body away and down, muttering something, and Andrew can press his cheek to the bone. Warmth saturates him as he closes his eyes, shadows dancing in front of him, a red haze of warmth.
Just twenty minutes, then he'll go back down and check on his boys. Let them all catch some rest. Let himself rest too, in the dappled shade besides Hillbilly.
He hears Hillbilly's inhale, sharp hitch of breath like he’s about to run at something, feels it when the rise of his shoulders lifts him up too.
“Found this for ya’", he says. Slowly opening his eyes, Andrew raises his head to look up at Hillbilly, who fumbles with the clasp of his shirtpocket until he pulls out a crinkly package. Wrapped in wax paper, he hands it over without a word, and keeps his eyes narrowed and focused on the crowd below. Andrew sits up properly, holding the feather light parcel in his hands. It's been kept very clean and safe inside its wax paper. Inside is a very small, neatly folded, red and white piece of silk. It flutters open in his hands, impossibly soft against his hands, and Andrew's heart skips a beat, at how perfect it is, how legible, how-
“Jesus Christ,”- it’s specimen quality, damn near flawless. Museum piece.
“Said you wanted one,” Without moving his head or eyes, he lights another cigarette, as Andrew inspects the flag in his hands and grins. He can’t help but wonder, when he looks at the strong black ink strokes and delicate fabric, holds it between his fingers, how much it must cost.
“When we get to Melbourne I’m taking you for drinks,” he promises breathily, his stomach twisting with glee. He can't stop himself grinning. He could have leaned forward and kiss Eddie's cleanshaven cheek, if Eddie didn't already look so painfully flustered.
"Now-" he ducks his head with a huffed laugh and a smile he holds back with his teeth biting his lip, the most Andrew has ever seen him smile, "you know Methodist's ain't s'posed to drink,"
"They serve water," like he hasn't seen Hillbilly drink, like Hillbilly hasn't taken him drinking before. He holds the flag very gently, very cautiously. He doesn't want anyone else to see it. Priceless to them, and to him, in another way. "We can do something else then,"
Hillbilly flashes him a sideways glance, but only for a second; it's gone before Andrew can register and wonder what was in that bashful, amused look.
"How 'bout a dance?"
“You dance?”
“Like the devil,”
“Well, I’m not the best,” Andrew smiles again, folding the flag back up in his hands as crisply as he can, “you might have to show me.”
Hillbilly gives a whistle, long and low sound, and settles his hands on his thighs, his cigarette clasped between his fingers.
“Well, now," he says nothing further, and Andrew thinks he might be smiling, watching as he refolds his flag back into a tight square and back into its paper cocoon; and wonders how he's going to get it home safe.
///
The flag is the first thing to go up in his new house. Right above the fireplace, where he said it would always go.
His mother is appalled, his father tolerating, he's yet to ask the opinion of his siblings. Everett just winks and says its wicked, and then they get thoroughly drunk at the equally small bar down the road- housewarming present- and wake up on the couch.
He writes Eddie first thing once Ev is gone and he has to start organising himself in his new home. His mother will reroute any letters addressed to him though, so he doesn’t need to worry about any letters from his company going to an old address, he just needs to make sure Eddie's get to him first; it's only fair, it may take him a few days to go pick up from his mother's, and him and Eddie are basically having a direct conversation on paper. Eddie's letters are getting longer (delusions are nowhere on his long list of possible side effects, so he allows the thought to continue), as he reads about Eddie at sea, in Hawaii, bitching about the attempts to fold the Marines into the Navy- or God forbid the Army. They’ve started having separate conversations in the post script, and it all feels shockingly normal. His weird emotional hiccup subsides with the good weather, the summer coming on strong.
He attends Gunny’s wedding, and doesn’t have to give a speech. After the modest ceremony, after the new Mrs Gunny Haney pours affection onto him and thanks him endlessly, while he only smiles awkwardly (she doesn’t know what Gunny did for him, and Gunny will only kill him if he attempts to thank her for her new husband’s war effort). He buttons up his dress blues in a hotel room while Martin slouches on the floor in his and drinks Overholt from the bottle. Andrew takes a moment to look at the man in the mirror, the dark wool and medals sitting on his chest. It's not entirely admiration, a heavy pang of grief suddenly weighing him down when he looks past his reflection into the room behind him. It's just the two of them. Stanley and Eddie and the dead didn't come. He won't deny his disappoint at Eddie not being there. He had searched for him in the crowd and found nothing but strangers.
He looks down at Martin, uncertain if he is ready. He grins like a fault line, cheeks quivering; eyes cloudy as cataracts.
"Handsome bastard," Martin whistles lecherously, "don't go upstaging the groom," he hiccups, green as the carpet.
“I think that's a sign you've had enough," he says, trying to remain light as he stares into the glassy eyes of his former lieutenant. Watching Martin pull the stopper from the bottle with his teeth, his throat feels suddenly tight.
“‘M serious,” he laughs, “you know what Stanley used to say? He used to say he’d let his wife have a go at you,"
“Chrissakes-“ he sighs, kicking at Martin's feet, splayed on the ground. Hillbilly wouldn't have approved of talk like that, he probably would have swatted Stumpy over the head and glared. He means to ask, but Martin cuts him off, whiskey spilling over his fingers,
“God'shonestruth," Martin hiccups, slouches further, "Chisick as well." And Andrew flinches at the name of his former XO.
It's an obvious reaction, caught by both of them, magnified by the silence of the room. Martin swirls the bottle in a clumsy circle, sloshing the liquor, and throws it back. He doesn't say a word, collapsing further against the flowered wallpaper and into the sticky, worn carpet.
Martin, he thinks, are you alright? And before he can ask- some firm grip of uncertainty holding him back- Martin reanimates and takes a loud drag of his cigarette. Some of them must still be like this. Drifting along in their newly pressed clothes they never got to wear back then, pursued by the past.
“Wish that bastard was here,” he mutters.
"Wish Stanley's wife was here," Andrew says, and Martin laughs hard enough to break the spell and they're back downstairs to revel in the end of the war and the start of a new life.
The feeling fades, six glasses of champagne in, and Martin drags him to the floor to dance. Try to dance; Andrew, not knowing even where to put his feet, and Martin too drunk to even know where his are,
“Short blonde on the left, or the tall redhead with the bag?” He stumbles, ankle dragging over his shin, gripping Andrew's forearms to hold himself upright.
Andrew follows his eyes to the back of the church hall, laughs a little, as Martin leads clumsily. Andrew has never been a dancer.
“I think she’s twice your age," Andrew warns gently.
“The Canal gave me an extra ten alone Skipper, I’ve aged in dog years,” Martin stares to the back of the hall, lost.
The rest of the guests are townspeople, churchwomen, and men Gunny knew from other companies, way back when, all equally pleasant and happy to be there. It’s a frenetic affair, probably the first non-war related celebration in the town since the end of it, with Martin getting drunker and drunker and more chaotic as the night rolls on, smoothly. There's nothing to stop them having fun.
He leaves Martin to it, finds the dapper groom at the bar.
“Lieutenant Stanley’s got a baby,” Gunny snorts, “surprised he’s even allowed one.”
“He’ll do well,” Andrew comments mildly, having already received the exciting news of Stanley’s new son. He wonders if there’ll be a Christening, if he’ll be invited. He ought to visit anyway.
He looks to Gunny, the old man, wise beyond his centuries, who once tried to clip him over the head for asking a dumb question in a firefight. He doesn’t fidget with his drink, he just takes a measured sip, and has to ask,
“You heard from Hillbilly?” cautious, the same way he used to ask him for advice; a casual tone that doesn’t demand an answer.
“You got an address?” comes his gruff deadpan.
“Somewhere in the sea,” Andrew shakes his head automatically, a dull feeling of regret starting in his chest. How many of his boys are still in China, waiting to come home? When is Eddie coming home? Before he can slide further into worrying- the seed planted at the start of the evening, Martins’ blurry eyes- Gunny says,
“He ain’t written anyone.”
“Huh," Andrew replies, and that surprises him.
“Don't think he can write” Gunny directs the question, hidden behind his words, at him.
“Got one or two letters off him, well wishes, the usual,” is he lying to save Gunny's feelings, or the embarrassment he feels suddenly at Eddie writing him, and possibly only him? He didn’t know Eddie wrote no one else but him. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t tell anyone he is. It makes the back of his neck prickle, the way Gunny eyes him with that calculating, discerning stare.
"Well," Andrew smooths down the front of his blues, "we'll see," and he clears his throat, distracts himself. On the dancefloor, Martin has his jacket tied around his shoulders, some lady's corsage tied around his wrist. Andrew directs his attention back to the man of the hour, forgets about himself, and Eddie.
"Never thought I'd see you get married, pops," he smiles, raising his glass to toast Gunny's; a furious glare warns Andrew he may get clipped over the head, but it breaks and splits into an equally wild grin as their glasses clink.
"Never thought I'd see you alive,"
///
They don’t go back to Melbourne.
The disappointment runs through the ship, and Andrew knows he will have to deal with these soured Marines until they sweeten. For now, he doesn't care. He's off New Britain, he's alive. He paces around the deck of the ship, soaking in sunlight like he’ll never see it again. Breathing in the sea air, the feel of the wind on his skin. He's content, lulled by the faint sounds of Hillbilly’s guitar over the engines and the roar of the sea. Its mournful sounding, slow, but with feeling, and the crowd around him is slumped and sleeping at peace. Maybe it’s a lullaby.
He finds Gunny on the port side. As old as dirt in dog years, according to Hillbilly. From the way they speak about each other, and rarely talk to the other, anyone would think they don't get on. But there's a respect in their silences, and a favouritism in how Gunny keeps an eye on him.
“Evening,” he says in greeting, “changed our honeymoon location,” he splays his hands on the railing and leans back on the balls of his feet, nonchalant, “hope the kids don’t mind.”
Gunny snorts in response, which Andrew knows means no, they are still bitching, but he eventually straightens himself to speak, pulling the limp, unlit cigarette from his mouth.
“They’ll live, apart from Hillbilly,” and Andrew looks up, concerned, “actin’ f*ckin’ heartbroken since I told him. Think he’s got some girl back there. Sad f*ck."
Andrew's heart gives a painful jump. Hillbilly?
“Does he?” He tries not to sound so pitifully confused. It’s like the General side swiping him with a sudden patrol or change of plans; momentarily knocked off his feet.
“He’s all sappy, playin' Shady Grove," Gunny rummages in his pockets loudly, like a thief in a drawer, and pulls a lighter, "I'd say he'd cry into his rations if I didn't know him better,"
He hums, feeling a little unsteady about it. They'd been so close, second in command and best friend he ever had, and Hillbilly hadn't told him? He knows some of the boys have girlfriends back in the States and Australia even if they don't talk about it - he's the company skipper, he's not f*cking blind, he sees the mail. But Hillbilly? The man has never even given an indication of any ties to anything but the Marines. It would be like Gunny getting married suddenly, to discover he had a secret love.
When he looks towards the crowds, different companies milling together around Hillbilly, he feels a strange pull in his chest, the twang of an out of tune string. But it's gone before he can think about it, and he lets the sound of the music wash over him instead.
///
Dear Eddie
Gunny’s wife is the most shockingly normal woman- nay, person- I have ever met. I have written to the Church to ask her to be considered for sainthood. I’ll spare you the drunken anecdotes of the wedding, it’s never as funny hearing them from a third person, but just know there was a fountain and a lot of champagne (you’re smart enough to fill in the rest.) Martin might elope with this sixty year old widower he’s met. Apparently she can foxtrot.
Debauchery aside; how is the Marines? How's the weather? Or are you bored of me asking by now? How is the company getting on? I'm surprised you are still getting recruits and not just soaking in the sun. Try to actually keep my old company in good order.
Andrew
(P.S., not to sound like my mother, but you ought to write Gunny)
Ack Ack
I’ll happily listen to your drunk mishaps any day of the week, you can think of it as Confessional.
We’re in [censored, several heavy lines of ink. He knows Eddie must know that half his words are censored, and yet he writes them anyway. It adds to the illusion that this is just a normal back and forth conversation, folie-a-deux]
Yours, Eddie
(PS I will send him a postcard but I can only find those lewd ones and I don’t think Mrs Gunny would approve)
(PPS I'm glad the wedding was nice. Shame if I missed you in dress blues.)
When he writes back, he has to tell him,that entire letter was censored, so you must be back in China, and adds in the post script, yes I was in dress blues, a damn shame you missed it. I made sure I would have passed even your inspection.
His next order of business is the reshaping of himself into a scholarly man. Summer turns to fall, and the professor writes and offers the assistant's position he shakily spoke of earlier in the year. Andrew can't believe how quick the time has gone. They let him assist the football team for training, and there's a careful sort of hesitancy, like handling china bowls on a boat, when they discuss his place on the coaching staff.
"Whatever knocks I get on the field isn't going to be as bad as what I've already had," he says, and the temperature of the room plummets. Andrew is unbothered. The coach balks and concedes. He has strict instructions to drink plenty of water and to sit down if he feels the slightest bit dizzy in drills; no heroics on this field.
(Eddie finds it much funnier, agreeing, and wondering if a sharp hit to the head might suddenly regrow the part of brain he's missing, like smacking a broken radio to make it work again)
He still thinks people are still being nice to him, but then the semester hits and he has more work than the Corps ever gave him, and time slips away. Winter sneaks up without much fanfare. He doesn't know what he expected. Soon it'll be a year down, a year since the war. He still feels like a lifeboat at sea, lost in the fog.
He has a lot of thoughts, mostly just a strange hurt that he hasn't yet been reunited with Eddie- there's other boys in his company to write to, sure; he writes Martin and receives no reply, Stanley promises he's still alive and had sent him a nonsensical letter about the state of the Corps; Doc had finally re-emerged from his self-imposed exile in a Navy hospital and was re-exiling himself to work in a psychiatric unit in Pennsylvania- his true calling, he claimed, a born madman at home amongst other mad men; but still. Something lingers below the surface, a shadow circling his adrift raft; shark-fin tip between the sea foam. What else could he want? Maybe he just misses the Corps, the constant something, even standing by to stand by, there was something, an undercurrent of tension, nerves, or just crowds and crowds of people. He was never alone like he is now.
He stores his mail away on the kitchen table, stares across his dimly lit lounge. He's been thinking of redoing the kitchen, maybe the sitting room. A fresh coat of paint; it'll give him something to do when the weather turns. He has to organise the schoolwork for tomorrow. Maybe check in on his mother. See if Ev is free for drinks.
He takes a breath.
///
When they come ashore, nothing is built. The island lies as ruined as the cities of Europe. Rows and rows of coconut palm sway in the dusk, heavy shadows stripe the sand tracks. Figures mill in the twilight between the groves. Uncertainty gathers, a tension building like the air before a storm. It takes a few brief, strictly delivered conversations to organise something.
The first hammocks go up, fluttering like flags to salute the eastern stars. The clouds dissipate over the sea. The sky is clearer and cleaner than anything Andrew’s seen before. The Milky Way is a glittering pathway through the heavens.The only smoke threatening to spoil the view is from Hillbilly’s cigarette.
“A few days work,” Andrew starts, “and we’ll have this place looking like Rome,”
“Y’ain’t even got a tent,”
“Oh ye of little faith,” he chastises, putting a hand on Hillbilly’s knee briefly, almost chastising, to chase away the worried feeling in his chest. “Tonight, we’ll sleep under the stars, tomorrow, the Ritz.”
Hillbilly gives a low noise of vague agreement. Andrew just sighs and leans against him, the skin of his bare forearm touching his own. In the distance, gaslamps explodes into colourful flames, and a few tentpoles are tentatively raised into the air.
“We could share a tent if it all goes wrong,” he suggests to Hillbilly, casually putting together the logistics in his head. They might end up sharing a tent anyway, they were always in each other's pockets in Gloucester. Andrew needs to whip the company back into fighting condition; it just makes sense to keep him around.
“Could share a hammock,” Hillbilly exhales a mouthful of blue smoke when he speaks; casts a quick glance towards Andrew's hand through the cloud.
“I don’t think it’s that dire yet,” he chuckles, and lets his hand sweep down the side of Hillbilly's leg; the muscle twitching under his palm.
“Never underestimate the Corps,” he reminds him.
He is reminded. Every day they linger and fester on Pavuvu, he is reminded. That they, for all their belief and good will, serve an ancient, lumbering beast of a Corps. That it hates them, almost as much as they hate the Japanese.
He hangs his flag in the tent he calls home. Keeps the deck neat for all manner of visits and complaints and drop ins; Gunny and Hillbilly leaving cigarette ash wherever they sit. In between the sudden paperwork, that he has no excuse to avoid, the meetings, the proximity to the General again, he finds small comforts where he can; letters from home, good news and gifts.
Andrew throws the cigarettes from inside to Hillbilly, sprawled on his cot. He startles, barely catching them, from where he is lounging in the single line of sunset coming through the tent flaps.
“S’this?”
“My father asked what else he could do for the war effort,” Andrew has to hold out the creased letter in front of him to straighten out the words and read- last time he said something about the factory and his sister’s kids and some local group knitting for the Army in Europe (not the Marines though, God f*cking forbid they receive any help, and then he realises knitwear will do f*ck all, so he asked for cigarettes for his poor, dying Lieutenant who cannot cope without a pack). His father has written back cheerfully, endlessly jovial, and Andrew can almost hear his voice, dense, deep Scots and laughter that carried for miles.
“Y'want one?” Hillbilly asks, muffled as he tries to light up.
“All yours,” Andrew waves him off while he sorts through his letters. His sister, endlessly worried, and managing to sneak in around fifty complaints about her husband; friends from home busy with work and academics; his mother, with so many questions he’s surprised MPs haven’t shown up at her door.
“My mother wants to know how ‘that hillbilly friend of yours’ is doing,” he quotes, pitching his voice fondly. He can picture her asking, as if she’s potting about the kitchen while he sits at the kitchen with tablet and a coca cola and tells her about his brand new schoolfriend.
“Happy as a mule eatin’ briar,” He exhales smoke, and Andrew isn’t sure if that means good or bad, “‘hillbilly friend’,” he scoffs,” he lights another smoke up, stretching himself out and his shirt riding up, relaxing in the sudden lap of luxury.
“My ma'd call you a Yankee bastard, prolly,” he says after a moment, organising his new cigarettes into his pockets. The pale band of skin on his waist still exposed. He flicked the lighter, sparks flying.
“Your father?” Andrew inquires, putting down his mother’s letter.
“No clue,” he closed the zippo and put it back with the cigarettes, then straightened out his shirt. “She chased him off with a rifle one time like a porch thief.”
“Must be where you get it from,” he comments mildly.
“I come by it honestly,"
It’s a routine they fall into. Rotating positions between the cot and the desk. Andrew defending his company against Them, and Eddie doing whatever he can. Sometimes Andrew doesn't know what he does when he's not hunting down NCOs for reports or teaching the company the tricks of the trade. Sometimes he just exists, contently, at Andrew's side; or on the decking, any number of Springfields around him, or a radio in pieces, or a card game. Martin had set up a poker tournament once, when Andrew was listening to a Major drone on- some practice landing- and had returned to find his officers in no state to board transport in the morning.
He gets a note from Above; a sweaty runner and a headache blooming. He will not come to understand the Corps.
Cpt Haldane
RE: Company Morale?
Seeking advice.
Gen Chamberlain
“Who writes sh*t like this?” He throws the note at Hillbilly, who unwraps it and reads while Andrew fixes his appearance in the mirror.
“He can't make a sentence sound straight," Hillbilly deduces, then goes back to whatever he was doing.
"I don't even know what he's asking," he sighs, running a hand through his hair with a scowl. The few strands he's been trying to fix back into place flop forward again, and he tries again. And they loosely hang over his forehead again. He sighs loud enough for his breath to make them dance.
"Honestly," he gripes to no one, not expecting Hillbilly to reply. It feels like one small thing on top of the other, threatening to bring the whole structure down. He strokes his fingers back through his hair again, one more time to try to make it stay. It doesn't; defying him and springs back into place. He ought to cut it.
When he looks across his tent with a huff, Hillbilly is still holding the note, looking at him with a half smile that seems almost fond, his eyes misty.
“Well-" Hillbilly clears his throat and folds the note, straightening suddenly, "good luck w'it.”
Andrew has terrible luck. The Corps wants everything perfect, and they can only do their best- with their malaria and malaise, ancient supplies, a chain of command that never sticks to the direction it picks and can't understand why morale flounders in the heat. Andrew ignores it, tries to nurse his sickly, exhausted company back to health. The sea will do them good, the shady tents will have to do. He decides to be lenient at first, while some of his company sleep tentless on the beach and the roads are undug, and then he will make them look Good. He explains this plan to a very patient Hillbilly, trying not to rant. Under the desk, he wipes his sweaty, slick palms against his thighs and wonders how he won't crack.
He won't, because he has Hillbilly. And God Bless Hillbilly, the one good thing he picked up off the islands. He may glare at the NCOs, may frighten Andrew with his intense observing of Marine regulations, may walk as silent as a ghost and scare the Christ out of him sometimes, but he's as sweet as sweet tea when he wants to be, at Andrew's side for anything and everything, and Andrew has never been more glad to have someone as competent and dutiful as him for his XO. Hillbilly is as committed to the boys as he is. Understands they have to get as many of their boys through it as they can, and keep Them off their backs for now. Andrew might feel the first fraying strands of his sanity, but at least they can joke about it now.
Hillbilly leaves him sarcastic memoranda on his desk, in between all the bullsh*t paperwork and reports, the watersoaked maps and letters to be sent home, mocking the General's requests, and he is half heartbroken to turn him down- a meeting with his immediate superiors scheduled the same time.
Cpt Haldane
Movie tonight?
Seeking company (which has him laughing out loud)
Lt Jones
He laughs it off, waving Hillbilly away with a hand. Tired, beyond tired, he just wants to crawl into sleep. He doesn’t hear Hillbilly’s reply, doesn’t hear him at all; he slinks off into the red shadow of twilight before Andrew even notices. The company comes first. Everything else is left behind, and he never thinks about what’s behind him.
///
Forty seven sneaks up too fast. He'd sent Eddie a Christmas parcel, to an address in California, and didn't ask if he was on leave- a fear of jinxing it maybe. Eddie sends back a postcard and a paperback of The Good Earth, one more battered and ragged than Andrew has ever seen in his life, the back pages spill out if he doesn't hold the book closed, when he leafs through it one evening.
Ack Ack
I spent Christmas in a ditch and nearly woke up a second lieutenant. Grovelled plenty. Smoothed it over. Will be going shipboard again soon, at least Hawaii for a while. Might get myself a shack there and hunt wild pig on the weekend if I'm basically going to be living there. You'll have to keep me updated on the dealings in Congress of whether they are going to fund the Marines or not anymore if you're not too busy being a teacher now (congrats on that, as well). [Assistant, Andrew thinks, and then decides to not correct Eddie, let him think highly of him instead] Don't work too hard. You're probably not getting paid enough. You should start that paper of yours instead like you said you would.
Yours
Eddie
(Thank you for the cigarettes. I hope you enjoy the book)
He spends the snowy months grading papers for the professor, starts tentatively wandering the jewel coloured bookcases, no genre in mind just browsing; Malraux and West, Seneca and Gibbon, Lewis Allen and Comte. Slowly, he rediscovers a part of himself in the moth smelling corridors, the amber lanterns of the library's nooks, and the rowdy discussions in the halls.
It's not until the professor passes him a copy of one of Orwell's latest essays, and invites him to faculty dinner-and-drinks after New Year, that he wonders if Eddie is right (well, Eddie is always right, in a general sense), and he should start that paper. What was it even about again? He doesn't remember, three champagnes in, New Year just around the corner. Something about fighting the good fight. It's written down somewhere.
He weaves through the crowd to find one of his colleagues, wanting to listen in on the topic du jour; the anniversary of the United Nations, Truman and Greece, tensions with Russia. He catches words of conversation, laughter and jokes, and there's still that sense within him. Something missing; as he searches for a familiar face in the crowd and finds the backs of suit jackets staring back. Like the next stage of his life is just around the corner, waiting for him, and he just has to catch it.
"Why, Andrew,"
He spins around like he's heard a twig snap in the jungle and his shoulders are suddenly rigid with tension. Stares to the cadaverous, planetary face, grey skin and the sunken eyes.
"General," his smile makes his temples twitch painfully. His pulse is thumping under his skin. Taut neck; nails in his palms.
"No need for that here, I'm not with the Corps now," the General smiles widely, skin on his face bunching up in sagging wrinkles that try to escape his face, like a Han dynasty hound.
"Oh of course, I-"
"I hear you're in social studies," the General lets go of his handshake and Andrew witnesses him wipe his hand on his side, so he copies and does the same, forcing himself to smile, "They haven't got you locked up there have they?"
"I'm an assistant," he says, "for now,"
When the old General leers at him, his lips peel back to shows gums. His cheeks and forehead are mottled red, the colour of a fish rotting in the sun.
"Oh, wonderful- wonderful, well, let's not get too ambitious," he laughs suddenly, and Andrew's boat is swept into a racing torrent of confusion, rapidly heading for anger, "they don't just let anybody teach," he guffaws, paw slapping Andrew's shoulder, and excuses himself to lurch back into the crowd.
Andrew forces his hand to lay flat. Back to a fist, and squeezes.
First he has to write Eddie.
///
The Company keeps him busy and leaves him no time- no matter how many times Martin wants to drag him to the beach when some female nurses show up.
He organises a shooting contest inbetween the usual training, Gunny and his team versus Hillbilly and Stumpy. He wins, naturally, the trophy made of a coconut shell and sticks, and has to escape the celebrations to meet his superiors in case they notice he’s not there.
Morale, he thinks. Its all about morale, while the boot of the Brass presses on his neck harder each day. He gets more insane notes, and even Hillbilly’s mocking can’t smooth his feathers anymore when the Brass calls him for another meeting. Andrew wants to remind them it’s not his company getting into mischief and fights, or being sent off to Banika for psychiatric help, but everyone’s going mad on Pavuvu. It’s contagious. There's no semblance of purpose here, waiting on a baking hot island to go back into Hell, just madness, senseless heat, a limbo.
In the midst of this, Hillbilly plays guitar for everyone. The beachfront's an open stage, singing Cripple Creek and Lonesome Road Blues and twisting and moulding the words to fit their islands, their war. Spinning tales on the shoreline, plucky adventures and daring tales of drunken mishaps, conspicuously borrowed from some rumours Andrew’s heard floating about; but all the names are changed by a letter or two so there’s enough deniability when he tells the tale of Bohnny who fought the B Company clerk at chow, and one of the privates can only silently pout. The songs ring out through the nighttime, clear as a ship’s whistle.
He plays for anybody, K Company and beyond, anywhere; sometimes in Andrew’s tent, the sunset low and red. He asks him, one week, when its doing nothing but raining, dreich and dreary around sunset, if he knows any Scots songs in his repertoire of gospel, bluegrass, and showtunes. Hillbilly shakes his head with a disappointment Andrew thinks might be physical, from how distraught he seems.
The next day he strums the first shaky lines of Loch Lomond and something he says is called Wild Bill Jones, and it sends him right to sleep.
He gets his Old Company vets to appraise the newest NCOs and lieutenants, kitten-whiskered and puppy-eyed, some of them barely meeting his gaze when they meet for the first time in his tent; a grizzled audience of Hillbilly, Stumpy, and Gunny eyeing them like a cattle auction.
“Nervous as a long tail cat in room full of rocking chairs,” Hillbilly decides about the new Lt, who shares his tent (when he’s not camping in Andrew’s) and shivers in his shadow. Andrew doesn't need to ask if he will be alright, he just cants his head the slightest, and Eddie knows it's his cue to elaborate, shaking his head and muttering, "bless his heart.”
It starts raining in fits and starts one week and delays a practice landing, the sea too choppy to navigate. Mercurial weather, always catching him when he’s walking through camp with Hillbilly just two steps behind him. Not as heavy as New Britain, but enough for Gunny to decide to strip off in the middle of the street and shower.
“If I ever do somethin’ like that,” Hillbilly says, pale faced, having just witnessed a vision of himself in thirty years, “I want you to take me 'round back a'tent an' shoot me,”
When the good weather returns Andrew swims out to a wreck with Everett once his own company sets him free (Hillbilly balked and claimed a fear of sharks). They take turns diving down, the other holding up the makeshift raft they’d brought out, and then sun themselves on in, drinking in the ocean rays.
“Submariners must be crazy,” Everett says, splashing clumsily when he resurfaces (every Marine a swimmer) and hauls himself to the raft.
From the surface, its a glistening mirror of blue and muddied greys, but underneath the surface the splotches become yellowgreens and browns, and then every colour and colour combination imaginable as he swims further down, into a sprawling range of coral mountains and sandy hills sloping into bluegreen invisibility in the distance. Between the hills of coral lay rivers of sand, trenches where colourful fish swam, unheeded by the pull of the wind-swept waves above. He can just float down here, silent as a tomb, watching bubbles rise from his mouth and nose and fish glide along the seabed, rowing themselves with their fins like oars. A shark patrols the outer reef slowly, eyes rolling up to take him in. He resurfaces to take a breath, and swims down to the sand.
He paddles down to the wreckage and reaches a hand forward to brush the barnacles on the tailfin. He doesn’t know this planes- shame on him- but he knows its one of theirs, at least the Navy’s. There’s no one in the co*ckpit, no one on the sand. The wreck lays sunken in the rolling hills of sand, being slowly swallowed by sediment. One day it won't be there. He touches his hand back to the wing, barely visible, after only a few months under the sea, and heads back up while his lungs hurt.
Thousands of miles away, there are ancient Spanish galleons in the indigo lagoons of the Caribbean, the first temples baking in the hot Levant sun, castles and towns freezing along the Alps and Carpathians, now besieged for the hundredth time by a new enemy; there is history all around them, a trace of the past everywhere they go. But when he looks back down to the wreck, he can barely distinguish the dark blue of the plane from the dark blue of the coral and the shadows in the sand and the sting of salt in his eyes, he wonders, if in one hundred years, if there will still be a trace of any of them.
///
Dear Eddie
The year has gone too quickly, I'm sorry for my late reply. California sounds like it keeps you equally busy. I can't believe they passed you up for promotion- well I can, it's the Corps, it's f*cking illogical- but it's you for Chrissakes. To whom do I voice my immense displeasure to?
In better news, I've started redoing the house. My sister keeps dropping off my niece and nephew for some reason, I might need some 'keeping young children off the furniture' tips from you because I only know the basics- and please don't send any swords or weapons to keep them entertained though.
I keep bumping into Chamberlain is at my school though, apparently he lives up here.
Yours
Andrew
The year has gone by too fast. The summer has come and gone, and half the things he meant to do are unfinished. Downstairs, a new grey countertop, repainted windowsills and bushels of basil and mint, freshly laid terracotta in abstract patterns to separate the kitchen from the living room; repainted cream with a smart pine green trim- the flag moved to his bedroom for safer keeping, and never returned back downstairs- and somewhere in the future, new carpet. His desk is awry, tucked between a bookshelf missing a few shelves (he'd put them back in another day; for now the piles of books lay on the floor, winded up the stairs, and tracked down the hall to his bedroom.)
Between all this renovation, responsibilities in taking over the ageing professor's class, and evenings studying, it's a miracle he has time to write back. He feels a sickening guilt when he lets his last letter- arrived in Sacramento- sit on the mantelpiece for a good two, three, weeks before he finds time to reply; with a bottle of whisky from one of the class's mothers and a fire burning merrily away in the fireplace, sweet smell of applewood smoke and heat. He expects something, he isn’t sure what- some coldness, some distance, from Eddie, but he replies like no time in the world has passed, and they can pick up wherever they left off- left Sacramento, might be heading east for a spell.
He tears his carpet up one afternoon when it starts to look at him funny and he notices the splatters of paint along its edges. His mother is horrified to discover him floorless two days later, when he'd been too distracted by the world news to remember to lay down a new carpet. He ends up teaching a night class for law students, goes out to town till the bleary dawn and can barely stay awake invigilating exams. When Eddie warns him about working too hard, he can hear the sound of his voice when he reads it. The concept is foreign to him
He watches his sister's kids tussle on his new carpet, reads the latest updates from Europe- Communist Poland, the red scourge in a country that had so desperately tried to shake off occupation and reclaim its borders for itself, a violent, bloody Partition, war in Greece, China, Paraguay, Palestine, Kashmir. The slow, sluggish tension between the superpowers seeping across the world like ice freezing a pond; progress grinding to a halt. What was the point of all?
The thought, bitter and guilty, is familiar. He's wondered it before, angrily staring at Chamberlain across a tent. But he chokes it down, wakes up each morning for another day, skims the papers to see millions going across the ocean. The snow starts to fall. He's been here before, in this ennui.
That was it, he thinks on the tram, Pavuvu, where everything started to slide off the edge of the map.
///
In the midst of the war on boredom, the war on insanity, he sends Hillbilly to Banika, which may be proof the other side is winning and Andrew has truly begun to lose his mind. At the time the decision makes sense; when he is asked who he thinks is long-suffering enough to be rewarded with a farce of a guard job just across the strait, a chance to relax and unwind in relative civility, he thinks of Hillbilly.
It’s dangerously silent outside, only the hum of the camp winding down for the evening, long yellow slats of sunset coming through the tent flaps, the door rolled up to allow a scant breeze inside. Birds making dusty, vivid sounds out front. Heat rising. A sense of boredom; he's suddenly, wildly, almost restless to get back into it. This is the new enemy they fight.
He came to this war with a belief, and he strengthens it every night when he thinks of all of the good things back home; but with his tent as empty as it is, he starts to worry. They’re going back soon, and its hard not to feel the slow, creeping dread, like watching the floodwaters rise and being powerless to stop it crashing into the house. He doesn't know why he keeps feeling it, when he shouldn't even be thinking about it.
It's his company and his boys he's sending out there. His responsibility. His duty to keep them safe; all the boys he's learnt bits and pieces about, watched over and watched grow, through the worst of it, and the rare moments that could be described as better. He's not soft, all of the General's comments about fraternisation aside, but he feels this warm, lingering sadness sometimes, watching the faces of his boys jostling and bickering in the chow line, sunbathing in the grasses, training in the sand; and at night seeing the bloodied red and black faces of them burnt and hurting, sundrained and sick, driven mad. He knows they're all going back out there again. It's all for a Good- it has to be.
Pavuvu stays hot. Sultry, rancid heat settling over the island. Rich taste of the sweating sea on the wind. Its not Melbourne, it's nothing like Melbourne, where for six hours a night you could get drunk enough in the winding twilight blue streets, cool with misty rain, warmed by good beer, to forget you belonged to Uncle Sam.
Everett leaves for war again, without him, for the first time since they left Massachusetts together. The other officers are not friends, but they are friendly; walking a thin line of professional civility and hostility. When it's just them, Andrew realises how young they are. One-up-man-ship, the snide comments of men from High Society, clueless yet to the war, mistrusting and judgemental. He wonders why they are in it- glory? They drag him from his hammock, curled with Men at War, halfway through, basking in pinkish sunset, to a half-abandoned card game.
The new idiot-Captain-of-Echo is lamenting his NCOs, a Tennessee man pinched from C Company barely a week ago.
"That stupid f*cking NCO of mine- honestly, Robert," he pinches the thin bridge of his nose, laughing exasperatedly, airily, leans back so far Andrew hopes he tips over;
"Honestly-" and Andrew wonders if a man who has to repeat something is telling the truth, or just justifying it to himself, "It's like he's selectively deaf, he doesn't hear half of what I say,"
"Give better orders," Andrew says, automatically. His tone is ignored, swept away by the gesticulations of this drunk, enraged fool.
“See you're lucky, I need what you have, those NCOs that listen to you and that hillbilly of yours-"
“Lieutenant Jones,” Andrew corrects, sharper than he intends to, and then thinks, Eddie. Who has only been gone four days and it feels like a limb missing. He feels, for the first time in his life, horribly disjointed from this tent, this space, this whole damn earth.
When he comes back to his tent one afternoon, storms rumbling to the east, dark clouds swirling up over the sea, Hillbilly is collapsed on his cot. Andrew takes in the scene- an amused hitch in his breathing, a chuckle rumbling in his chest- before he does anything stupid.
With one shoe off and one shoe on, a foot on the ground, his pack slumped face down, and his shirt on the floor, Andrew had never seen him such a mess since Melbourne; the memory pulling a fond string in his chest. The blanket is crumpled across his shins, and his dungarees low on his waist, stretching across the sharp cut of his hipbones. His belt half undone. His arm hangs off the cot, wrist folded painfully against the floor, while the other lays across his stomach, fingers curling around his side. The chain of his dogtags looped around itself across his chest, the tag nestling at the dip of his sternum. He has tattoos inked into the side of his ribs.
It’s none of that that makes his heart kickstart, it’s just seeing him again; knowing some normalcy has returned, he's not alone to fight this war. He fights a smile with his teeth biting his lip, and then gives into it; laughing, bubbly like he's drunk on champagne, or relief.
Eddie stirs at the sound, confused, slower than Andrew expected. He crosses the tent, balances on the edge of the cot, hipbone pressed to hipbone, wraps his hand around Eddie's forearm just as he wakes.
“Mh?” His eyes are watery, coming meet Andrew’s drowsily. The fine, photographic blue of a harbour dawn.
“Thought you were dead,” Andrew's smile won't stop.
“Hello,” Eddie's breathing stutters as he comes to his senses, Andrew’s hand gently on the arm that sits on his ribs. He’s still drunk. He can see him trying to think, utterly unable to respond, just smiling tightly.
“I’m so glad Methodists don’t drink,” He reminds him, and strokes down Eddie’s lean torso and his chain without thinking, muscles shivering in the wake.
“Oh, I-“ his words escapes him in a sigh as he tries to prop himself up on his elbows, dogtags sliding off his chest, shaking out his wrist with a wince, bringing his other leg up to the cot, and Andrew shuffles to give him a bit of room to adjust.
“-had a good time?” Andrew finishes for him, when he doesn’t speak again.
“Have to ask someone else, I don’t remember,” his words finish on an exhale, eyes fluttering closed and his head tipping back.
Eddie’s skin is like suede under his hand. He reaches his fraying waistband and fingers a loose thread idly, curling the thread around his finger. Eddie's smile is drawn when he looks back up, the barest hint of teeth (which is the most Andrew has ever seen him smile, at least recently), eyes half lidded, a drunken flush across his cheeks.
Andrew reaches back up and taps two fingers on his chest, like he's knocking on a door, where the little fox dances atop his bones.
“When’d you get this?” He asks. He's not sure if he's seen it before, he's never really thought about staring at anyone in the showers or on the beach, but he admires Eddie's supple torso decorated with ageing tattoos that bleed into his skin and he suddenly regrets not doing it. The fox chasing it's own tail, the eagle, globe, and anchor back up on his arm, the tiny stars and compass directions down his sides
“Thirty seven, abouts,” he slurs a little, and watches Andrew’s hand. It carefully rests on his ribcage; the cool metal of his wristwatch brushing the last bumps of his ribs. When he speaks again, Andrew's whole hand is lifted. “Got it for my first company,"
Andrew gives a low mmhh of approval, taking a second to glance back at it, admire it- the history on Eddie's skin, the things he takes with him, and asks, with a hint of teasing,
“When are you getting one for King?”
Eddie holds the silence for a moment, steadying his breathing.
“When I get one for Item,” he answers plainly, the deadpan in his voice only a little bit shaky,
“When’s that gonna be?
“Whenever I get leave-“ his breath hiccups again, a tremor passing across his stomach as his breathing gives out, swallowing a cough. Andrew wonders if he's going to be sick. He glances up to look at Eddie to check if he's alright, and finds his pale blue eyes blown black, dark and wet as a starless sea.
“I’ll get a real nice one,” He promises, quieter, and trails his hand down his bones, resting his fingers just an inch away from the fox, and smoothing down the fine, pale vellus hair, “a fancy lil crown,”
“Oh, you better,” Andrew agrees, and lays his palm flat. His fingers curl around and rest on the curve his side, each one in its own soft valley between his ribs. Andrew looks up to the sharp point of his collarbone and counts down his bones slowly. The tiny nub of his first rib barely visible. The second and third hiding under muscle. He feels chest expands against his hand when he breathes and Andrew’s eyes trail down his fourth and fifth ribs, his sixth, to his seventh where his thumb lays.
There’s a stillness to this moment, like this is the sacred centre of his world. His palm resting flat on Eddie’s bare ribs. Neither of them moving. Just the shallow sounds of Eddie’s breathing, and the faint movements of his chest, as he lets himself be manhandled. Allows his Skipper to openly run a hand across his skin. Dusty, golden sunlight glows within the tent; he inhales the sweet smell of the tropical sunset to come and the cool night it will bring.
He's letting his hand linger, but he sees no reason to move. Seven days have been damn near torturous, when he considers it. No one to follow after him in camp, shadowing his every move, no one to laze about with, in the rare moments of quiet, no one- he realises, with his hand wrapped around Eddie's bones- to hold onto.
He feels a prickling on the back of his neck, and even with the tent flaps secured, it's like he's being watched. Eddie waits underneath him, for an order or signal, laid in his blueish shadow, held captive by a hand. He doesn't move at all, like the slightest movement will break the moment- but when Andrew lifts his hand, his eyes follow it quickly, hungrily, like whatever Andrew will do, he will take. Andrew feels the sweat that gathers at his hairline break and roll down his spine, the heartbeat wildly pulsing in his thigh from where it is pressed against Eddie's leg, hyperaware of every inch of uniform.
Eddie only smiles weakly. For all his drowsiness, relaxed in the cot, and his drunken flush, there's a tension in his body that Andrew can feel under his palm. Eddie doesn't- Eddie should not- unsettle him; but there's this tightness in his throat, the same nerves he feels before stepping into an exam hall, the General's tent, a landing craft, the weight of expectation, like he should do something.
He moves too fast for the scene, too fast to follow, and ruffles Eddie’s hair, tousling the curls with an open hand- and there's this look that look flashes across his face that has him second guessing. The briefest twitch and then it's gone. Utterly unreadable.
"Missed ya,"
///
Over the summer break, hurricane Catherine makes land. His wily and harried sister, doomed darling of the family, divorcing her husband and whisking the children back to Lawrence. It's he who lays in the storm path.
She won't tell their mother, so Andrew sleeps on the couch while the kids and their mother take his bed. He sleeps dreamlessly, as he always has, but wakes in the night to stare up at the blank, shadowed wall; missing the red and white flag above his head, the one that they keep asking about (he takes it back down to appease her, moves it back above his new couch-bed, and it's a comforting, familiar sight).
"Marriage is terrible," she declares miserably one hot evening, lifting her hand daintily to find her coffee mug. Lying on his battered couch like it was a chaise lounge,
"I wouldn’t know," Andrew reminds her, and feels a sudden pang watching her. Three years older, she was supposed to know everything back then.
"Honestly," she slumps into his pillows- spares from their mothers house-, pulls one out and fluffs it. Andrew turns the pages on his desk; he's halfway through an article on the blockade in Berlin, the plan to keep airlifting supplies in.
"Tell me whats going on in your life then, I haven't seen you in years. " His sister asks, tipping her head back to stare at the ceiling.
"You saw me when I came back, I've seen you and the kids loads." He responds mildly, unwilling to be subject to the same scrutiny he just applied to her.
"That wasn't the same Andrew." She replies, prim, a trace of her old fire coming back, "I haven't seen you."
Andrew knows she is not talking about the physical distance that once separated them. What once was filled by the ticking of a grandfather clock in their family home is now the silence of his new abode.
"No one expected you to move out so fast-"
"I wanted to."
"You've changed." She declares after another moment, peering at him with her dark grey eyes.
Andrew feels a flare of frustration as he puts his pages down; he hasn't been able to read a single word, even with a ruler held under each sentence to stabilise the letters. A headache worms up through his sinuses. He wants her out the house suddenly.
"I did get shot in the head,"
When they move out again, his house is empty, and he almost regrets being snappy with her in the last few days. He comes home to darkness, untouched furniture, and still, cold air. Without the children loafing on the couch, rummaging through his cupboards, there's a quiet that permeates the walls and floor. He buys a radio, points the aerial out the back window and catches the frazzled remains of hosts chattering.
He’s not lonely, he just hasn’t received a letter in a while. It's the Corps, the post is always late, and he was so used to having regular correspondence now, the lack of it unsettles him. The thought feels rational, sensible, until he starts wondering why it’s a lack of letters from Eddie that have him so downcast.
School keeps him busy once he's back in, avoiding the General and his associates keeps him busier; walking in wide arcs around the back of the school in case he shows up- completely irrational fear; the man is back in Boston anyway. The professor keeps handing him articles, asking his opinion, and Andrew answers back politely, more restrained than he'd like to be. He sits quietly throughout class, his head anything but.
They are rushing into the modern era; the floodgates of communication are open, everyone and everything is racing for the stage. Everything coming together finally, at least everything should be; all these grand ideas of liberty. He feels a chalky bitterness at the back of his throat when he reads of the UN, of the Cold War, the rising tension in Berlin and the plight to feed the Western half. Of the stories coming back from the old front lines; death marches and massacres. All of that, for this. This world they can't decide on yet. They teeter on an edge, pushing each other along, wobbling over the abyss on each side.
He doesn't have anything to say about it in particular. He did, once.
///
It’s strictly company business, why he’s drunk in Chamberlain’s tent in the middle of the week. It starts amicable, then the jungle hooch is doled out and it descends. He doesn’t really remember the discussion, even the reason for the meeting. He ends up arguing something. He doesn't know what, how it started, or where he was trying to go. He knows it's something to do with the right thing, that vague nebulous concept that nips at his heels.
"The war to end all wars," Chamberlain grins wanly, his teeth floating across the table and the spray of cards and half-cigarettes. Andrew can barely focus on his face. How strange- a campaign ago, he nearly adored this man, basked in the glow of his attention. Now, the feeling is something closer to hate. What the jungle does to a man.
"Exactly, peace," his hair flops childishly against his forehead, sweat clinging to his skin, trickling down his neck, and he's slurring hiss's. A few glasses too deep to be cobbling together pieces of this theory he's had since Gloucester, Melbourne, Massachusetts; that all this suffering will transcribe to something worthwhile. He can beat all this pain he carries if he can ascribe it to something with meaning.
"No war after this," Chamberlain's wiry brows arch upwards in shock- genuine- from the way he meets and fails to hold Andrew's dead glare (he's picked up the cold ability from someone else) and the silence around them would be frosty if not for the oppressive heat. But his stare holds no authority, the General simply diverts with a dismissive wave of his hand, "no place for you boys," and a chuckle diffuses through the tent.
"Join the trades," Andrew hiccups, his voice savage.
He knows there are past wars, there have always been wars, but (and this is where he will admit he has lost his mind) this is the modern age, and he is the modern man. They have no need for this savagery; this looting and burning and gunning and pillaging and raping and torturing and annexing and violence. This is the war to end all wars, or what is he fighting for? Why shouldn’t they just go home? Because they fight for America and democracy, the right of the people, the right to liberty, peace. It's for the good fight.
A hundred years ago, his grandfather probably shot at Eddie's, or any of the great uncles and distant dead cousins of the Southern boys in King, and now look at them, a close as nesting doves. Why not the rest of the world?
He storms out before the next game is dealt, suddenly wanting nothing to do with them, or this, or anything. He wants Pavuvu's darkened roads to swallow him up, wants to go back into the fray, right to the war; it's almost like where he, Captain Ack Ack, belongs. It's where all this can make sense.
Palm trees rustle, crabs hurry from the undergrowth. Cherry red dots of cigarettes and lanterns guide his path to the seafront. The strait ripples beneath the starry vault of the sky; the black masses of ships in the harbour bobbing in the waves, silhouettes like cutouts. He stands in the shelter of a young palm, the swaying fronds just above his head. From here, no one can see him, and he can see out to the ocean. He's not sure where he is on Pavuvu, or whether the ocean he stares at could take him home.
To his left, a stone is knocked across the pathway, a purposeful noise, and he turns towards the sound.
"Ain't like you to be hidin'," and Eddie steps from the shadows, veil of blue smoke parting around him, and the musical softness of his voice sends a prickling relief though him.
He sheds his anger, stepping towards the warmth of his body, bracing his hands on Eddie’s arms with a sigh. The fine, strong bones. The cut of his uniform; like it was made for him, or him for it.
His breathing hitches once, but before Andrew can ask why, he looks down at him with a slanted frown, his cigarette slanted upwards as he talks,
"He beat you in cards?"
Andrew scowls, and it makes Eddie's mouth flicker to a thin smile, how petulant he must look. He struggles to find the words to reply. This close, he can see his eyes are not entirely the same shade of blue throughout.
“I think, he-" Andrew begins, falters, woozy,
“-cheats like the devil,” Eddie says softly, finishing for him.
“You can't say that, he’s the General,” he pretends to push Eddie away in outrage, but nearly falls over himself and only ends up smiling against him again. His legs brush against Eddie's as he uses him to right himself, his anchor. Patiently, Eddie allows this with only a huff of protest. His arm slips around Andrew's back and his hand rests on the sharp angle of his waist, fingers tucked against his side. In the dark they cannot be seen. Andrew sighs against the sensation, drunk on feeling.
"Some General, getting' all his junior officers drunk as Cooter Brown," Eddie chides, his other arm just skimming down Andrew’s shoulder blade, gently testing whether he can rest his hand there or not. He could lean into it, let himself be pulled fully into Eddie's gravity; they have orbited each other for so long, it's a wonder they have not become a single person somehow.
"It's not like that-" he protests. In the midst of this embrace, warm and content as he is, Andrew remembers he has a duty to do, and should endeavour to find a defence for Chamberlain. He leans backwards, shakes his head, the motion heavy. The stars blurring. Eddie tenses, and then his arm is gone, leaving only a cold space of Pacific air. He looks like he might step back, Andrew fears. A seabird calls overhead. Apart from that, it is silent. Ash flakes from the remnants of Eddie's cigarette, burnt down to the very last bit.
“Walk you back then?" Eddie throws the end to the leaflitter, scuffs it with the toe of his boondocker.
“What’re you, my date?”
Eddie exhales into his collar, a sharp exhale. He doesn’t say anything, he turns to the path, his back almost to Andrew, if not for him looking over his shoulder and gesturing to the path with a nod.
“He’s an idiot,” Andrew complains, nosing back into Eddie's side as he is led from the dark esplanade back to his tent. It's a longer walk than he remembers.
“Ain’t they all,” Eddie coos. He looks straight ahead, but his hand lifts up, and Andrew permits himself to be guided with a hand that doesn't quite touch his shoulder; fingertips hovering just millimetres away. He wants to lean back into it, feel Eddie's palm flat against his back, holding him firm.
"He thinks I'm some kind of pacifist," he says, and it comes out slurred, shumkindofpacifish, when he stumbles over the decking and Eddie lifts the flap clear of his head so he doesn't stagger right into it.
"Or a Yankee,"
"Listen to me, it's serious," Andrew winces as the lantern is lit and Eddie flutters about the tent, setting things to rights; the lighting’s all wrong. He would much prefer the dark for this. "The man's a lunatic,"
Eddie doesn't laugh, but gives a small clucking tut that might be agreement. He’s facing away, inexplicably preoccupied on rearranging the cot than with Andrew pawing at his side, futilely trying to win his attention back; Eddie's usually so focused on him anyway. He shakes out the blanket, then holds the corner up; neither asking nor ordering.
"I'm not a child, lieutenant," Andrew sways against the spinning tent, unsteady as a ship in a cyclone. He grins dumbly. His answering scowl is unimpressed.
"Lay down an' hush," Eddie's palm on his shoulder compels him to sit. He peers upwards at his lieutenant. Thank God, he made him his XO in the rain.
"Every order I'm gonna have to double and triple check with you," Andrew says, picking the conversation back up. Eddie sighs.
"Well- that ain't so bad,"
"I'm serious-"
"Okay Ack Ack," Eddie huffs a quick noise, and Andrew shrugs; he attempts to get the blanket onto his body before he lays down, fully clothed, ready to pass out. Eddie gives another short, sharp exhale, more akin to a rough attempt at laughter and he steps forward to the edge of the cot.
Andrew looks up much too fast, the motion catching the fingers at his throat, catching his tie clumsily. Eddie's dry knuckles nudge his skin as he pulls his collar to stand upright, loosens his tie and pulls it out from around his neck. Andrew swallows, a reflex he can't fight, when Eddie undoes his top button, then the second. He reaches back up to smooth his collar down, as if uncertain what to do. How far to take it. He leaves the next few buttons, and Andrew expects him to back off and leave him to sleep; he hopes he doesn't. He leans into the tender ministrations, the press of long fingers against his collarbone. It's the kindest touch he's felt in years; not infantilising, or exasperated, but a genuine concern. He can't see Eddie's face- shadowed by the latern's amber glow behind him- but he can hear his shallow breathing, feel the closeness of his body.
Eddie hesitates only briefly, as he wraps Andrew's tie around his hands to fold it neatly, reaches to lay it on the desk. Then he gets to his knees at the edge of the cot, balancing his hands on either side of his thighs. Andrew can't get a read on his face.
His hands grip the cut of Andrew's waist, fingers down the small of his back and running over the bunched fabric to press in- then, as if he is remembering himself, he stops, grips the material instead, and swiftly untucks his shirt without any fanfare. He makes no move towards Andrew's belt- unwilling to go any further- but his hand cups the back of his leg, a sudden searing heat that jolts up Andrew's spine enough to almost sober him up.
Eddie's hand runs the length of his calf, middle finger down the seam of his service uniform. His hand curls around his ankle, enough pressure to be felt, lifts his foot onto Eddie's bent knee. Efficiently, swiftly, he tugs the knot out and pulls his ragged, peeling boot off. As Eddie tucks them under the cot- so he can't trip in the morning- Andrew realises he ought to get them replace. Eddie carefully changes leg, setting his foot back down instead of dropping it. There's a painfully tender ache squeezing at Andrew's heart as Eddie tends to him, patient as a saint.
"Lookin' after me," Andrew mumbles, anything to distract from how dry his mouth is. Eddie halts, and while his hands are still soft, Andrew can see the tension that runs through him when his eyes narrow just so- imperceptible to anyone but him, he thinks, who knows his lieutenant so well-that his half smile so plainly adoring it sends a shiver down his back.
Eddie does as he predicts, twitching his narrow shoulders in a shrug, rebuttons his expression. If he had a cigarette, he would light it.
"Part of the job," he mutters, his voice low.
Duty. Andrew gives an unconvincing mmhh of agreement, dissolving into a chuckle at the end. Andrew knows duty, and he knows he doesn't approach his duty with that much naked affection in his eyes. Eddie would pad after him to the ends of the earth, he thinks, drunk beyond reasoning.
Eddie retreats from him, his face dissolving to shadow, and pulls the blanket to envelope Andrew's shoulders as he lays down. He exchanges one embrace for another, Eddie and his lingering hands for the scratch of his blanket. Sighs into the cot, the night already a faded memory. Eddie turning back to the dark, the soft sound of the tent flaps rustling and the smell of cigarette smoke.
///
The next year he takes to reading in earnest. If he stands still for too long, he'll lose direction (what direction that is, he isn't sure, he's aiming for a vague, ill-defined idea of the future as the months bleed by.) His only rest nowadays is the deep, dreamless sleep he falls into every night. He wonders if the shrapnel took that part of his brain out; left his nights so empty.
The professor approaches him one morning, scouring the library for the next class's books, asks him if he would like to write a paper. They're shaking up the department next semester.
“Why not? You’re always reading along,” the old man sounds incredulous when Andrew hesitates to accept.
“Part of the job,” Andrew replies by rote. He never considered academia, beyond the predetermined route of going to college. But it makes sense, he should consider a career now he canhave one, no longer unburdened by the liberty of not knowing if he will be there tomorrow, the day after, the week after; Schrödinger's Marine. And he once joked- though how funny or how serious the joke was is debatable- about authoring one; to Eddie, no less, who had asked him about it years after. Someone had believed he would put all his beliefs to paper, concisely.
Even if he doesn't feel them as keenly as past-Andrew did- the old him that was younger, more naïve. If the professor asked old-him, on a Micronesia beach, he would have leaptat the opportunity. Now, in a dusty, well-trod library hallway, the only danger being the scant rainfall predicted that afternoon, threatening to ruin hair and picnic plans, he pauses to reconsider.
Why does he hesitate? Since when has he ever hesitated? In the Corps, everyone looked to him for direction, leadership. In the college, his peers see a war hero, endowed with secret knowledge- can he put that to paper? He tracks down the professor that evening, the rain sliding down the rooftiles, spiralling down the leaking gutters. Agrees. It could be good for him, letting everything out; like bleeding humours, letting the black bile out. That's what plagues him; melancholy. A chance to illuminate the gloom. Uncertainty over his decision follows him home- but it’s not like he has to rush. He knows at least one person will be able to help,
Dear Eddie,
///
There’s something gnawing at him he can’t explain. Scratching in the rafters. In his tent at night comes the wet sounds of a rat chewing bamboo and when he sits up and turns on the lamp there is nothing; the creature has fled and the tent is empty.
It starts to frustrate him, this feeling outside the realm of any feeling he has felt before.Glancing over his shoulder in the quiet parts to check if anything follows. If anything sneaks up. It's irritating, wet fabric rubbing against the same patch of skin.
He is called to the General's tent to explain his company lagging behind in a practice landing, an innocent mistake by some new clerk; missing equipment from another company when they all know they are robbing each other blind; a day of missed drill when the rain came so thick and fast it threatened to wash the roads away. Fault is pointed squarely at him. He knows they need someone to blame, but he'll be f*cked before they blame him.
He barges into his own tent, all fire and brimstone. Throws his garrison cap to the desk. The air is hot and close, and Eddie is innocently tuning his guitar, raising his head to follow the caps trajectory and then glance at him.
“That f*cker,” Andrew spits, takes a sharp breath, "-doesn't understands a damn thing-“ His shirt is soaked with sweat, and he fumbles to get the buttons undone. He shakes it off his arms angrily, puts his hands behind his shoulders and yanks his skivvy shirt off, a fluid, irate motion. He barely catches the sound of Eddie’s inhale, but he doesn’t start speaking as he assumed, so continues-
“Does he not think I’m actually trying to improve my company? To make sure my boys don’t go die out there next time? Or does he think I just do what he does and twiddle my f*cking thumbs and jerk off all day so when Nimitz starts breathing down his neck about landings and training and this and that he has to do the same to me? We have one little disagreement and suddenly everything's my fault? Suddenly King isn't good enough?"
He knows he's not making sense, but that word, good, catches him. The General's favourite. He balls his shirt up in frustration, throws it towards his cot. Eddie catches it in surprise.
“Right,” Eddie sounds a little strained, sitting up suddenly. Andrew's shirt clenched in his hands, the fabric woven between his long fingers. He blinks. Andrew realises he’s not giving him the full picture of the long meeting he's been subjected to- a full rundown of the scene can wait- his angers threatening to boil over into something vicious if he doesn’t just scream about it for a moment.
“I swear to God- he puts us through how many practice landings when he’s done what- one? He couldn’t land a, a-“ he fails to find words, because turns of phase is Eddie’s job, but he’s only sat still as the mountains, flushed from what could be sunshine or moonshine. His legs crossed and leaning forward to rest his head on his hands, observing. He doesn't give some charming southern metaphor, just blinks owlishly.
“Bastard,” Andrew grits his teeth, finding no words for his frustration. He can only stare at his scowl in his tin shaving mirror, his tiny, distant reflection. Maybe Eddie was right, all officers are bastards and all sergeants have a heart of gold.
“Gives me no warning about anythin’ and then comes saunterin’ down here throwin' these bullsh*t orders at me-" he catches himself, wondering how much he sounds like Eddie on some words, and cuts himself off to march across his tent to the ammo boxes where he keeps a spare shirt. "He's f*ckin' with me, or I'm goin' crazy."
It’s pointless anger, and a pointless accusation. It feels good to burn. The Corps is a frustratingly incompetent animal he cannot tame. And lately there's an anger inside him he doesn't know who to blame on; he has never raised his voice at his boys for any one of their monumental f*ck ups, but something has turned the tap on, and it all just pours out.
(This is so, unlike him.)
He throttles the shirt between his hands, wringing them like he could a neck.
(This is so, so, unlike him.)
He snaps from his righteous frustration when there's laughter outside, a sudden reminder of Pavuvu. This can't do. With a measured, careful exhale, he shakes out his shirt and pulls it on, turns to glance at his Lieutenant, uncharacteristically silent.
“You alright?” His voice feels dry.
Eddie smiles weakly, swallows. He shifts again under the weight of Andrew's concerned stare, slouching further down, pressing his weight where his ankle rests on his knee.
“You're fixin' for a helluva fight,” his eyes are a little glazed- it must be malaria or something coming back- his shoulders lifting up and down with every careful, measured inhale.
Andrew huffs a laugh, pulls his shirt on but doesn’t start buttoning yet.
“You wait- I'll drag him from here to Toyko,” he agrees mildly, the anger inside him cooling. It's not leaving (it won't leave) but it's dissipating.
Eddie nods a little, and Andrew watches him watch him. He must be agreeing with him, struggling to find some way to do the sensible thing and talk Andrew out of staging a coup or otherwise just giving the man hell, because his eyes dart down and flicker, restless. Following each methodical slotting of the button into place, the tucking, the smoothing down. He stands a little taller. A little meaner; scowling himself down in the tin mirror.
Screw the General. Screw the war. Screw everyone that doubts him.
//
The feeling deepens as the winter comes and he watches the world through foggy windows. Sterile fields of snow across Massachusetts. Streets overflowing with slush. He visits Boston for a weekend, watches icefloes in the Charles, grinding against the banks.
The newspapers start to worry him. Border clashes and insurgency. Civil war, again. All that for this. It's all kicking back up again, like a dust devil slowly forming on the sand. Maybe he ought to change his thesis to that; if the thought of it didn't make him so sick. He decided on what he promised on Gloucester, an odd loyalty to that moment. How the world gets better. How they all do. It’s harder to believe in now (but he can’t let it go).
He sees like he saw in the jungle, blind in the darkness, but every sense as sharp, he can see it. A long black shadow moving slowly across the grassy quadrant. Creeping up on him.
Dear Eddie
Have you re-upped? I haven't heard anything from you in a while. I was hoping you'd be back in the States soon, I know you haven't mentioned it. I've received some letters about a K Company (circa Guadalcanal-Okinawa) reunion but it's all very shaky. I think most people would like to move on and forget it happened. This new war will probably just create more of the same.
Let me know, it's been a while.
Yours
Andrew
He meets his newest colleague, a transfer from sunny California, another casualty of the new year shake-ups; Takashi Fujimoto, who declares call me Tak, and shakes his firm, hand.
“Dean tells me you’re writing a paper,” his deep black eyes crinkle at the edges, even if he doesn't smile, and Andrew likes him instantly.
“Attempting," he doesn’t make the usual joke about having already made the medical journals. Or mentions that the paper is on hiatus; untouched for weeks.
“Everything starts off there,” he says. They get lunch as colleagues, and then whiskeys as friends. Days later they are at a diner after school. It's nearly empty, having just survived the onslaught of schoolkids demanding malted milkshakes and ice cream.
"So," Tak settles into the booth, comfortably middle aged, in red knit and a heavy woollen jacket that sags over his shoulders and bunches at his elbows- Andrew suspects it was brought last minute when he arrived in New England and found out how cold it was- "a treaty on the modern age,"
"Something like that," he smiles, fiddles with the edge of the menu. Pacifist, someone he'd like to avoid called him once.
"I like the sound of it, optimistic,"
"Well," Andrew huffs, "that's what everyone says."
"Oh they say?"
"A little,"
Tak considers with a nod. He’s got a napkin tucked into his collar; the ruff of a clown. Andrew wonders if they are all like that. He can’t remember if any of his boys were from California.
"I hear you're a hero," Tak sips his drink, and Andrew uses the motion to allow for a pause; wincing internally. He hasn't thought that in a long time- if ever.
"I saved a cat from a tree once," he diverts. Tak slaps the table when he laughs, a sudden barking laugh that reminds him of a shout. A few patrons turn to glare.
"Okay okay, sure, hey I was Army for a while, so no bad blood between us, right devil dog?"
"No one says that," he laughs suddenly at the nickname, and even the waitress looks up, and hopes to God he never calls him that again. Actually, it's funny, it's the first time he's laughed in weeks.
"I read it in one of my son's books- he's big into those soldier stories. Can't get enough of them. I can't stand 'em."
"I know the feeling," Andrew agrees, sympathetic.
"Why, you read kids books?" Tak smiles. Andrew shooes him away with a laugh. His colleague gets another coffee, a slice of late season cranberry tart, tons of whipped cream. Andrew finds he has an appetite again and orders the same. Tak puts so much sugar in his coffee that Andrew's certain he wouldn't even have needed to mention his service.
"You read Kohn?" Tak asks again, once their supper is gone and it's finally dark out.
"A little."
"Orwell?"
"A bit pessimistic," Andrew settles his head onto his hands.
"And what do you think?"
"Hm?" he tilts his head, Tak just staring back at him, wildly curious. Steam hisses into the air, plates rattle, while he thinks; finally he says,
"About all this money in Europe, splitting our spoils of war, about Truman and his atom bombs, Stalin and his Union, the end of empires, " Tak leans over the table, holds his mug to his mouth and wiggles his brows when he speaks, "about our modern age,"
The well-worn face, barely falters, even if Andrew knows he is frowning. He has skirted close to it for months, years if he is going to be honest, but saying it out loud would be some kind of admission, some of surrender, some kind of waste. But the feeling is growing, and soon it's going to become a physical presence, it's hunting him down, through the empty library and the echoing halls. He won’t let it catch him yet.
"I'll let you know,"
Unsatisfied, Tak drops his smile, but he says nothing. On the way out, he leaves a handsome tip for the waitress.
//
It rains on Pavuvu like it rained on Gloucester. The air hangs with moisture like a wet sheet, clings to the body, even in sunlight. They’re shipping out next week; seven sleepless nights away. He has to go tell his lieutenants, Gunny, the NCOs who need to know. He has to make sure everyone is ready.
He clutches the last letter from his mother on his chest and stares at the ceiling of his tent. A scant sea breeze comes in and lifts the corner of his flag. It's a strange feeling, a hollowness that starts in his stomach and rises to his chest, his throat- fear? Any man would be afraid of going back out. Anyone would be afraid. Of course he's afraid, but it's his duty. This island and then the next, and then Japan, and the unconditional surrender of the Axis and then-
He doesn't want to jinx it. But in the end, it'll be worth it.
///
That sharp six sense of his has proven itself again, same way it kept him half-awake every night, listening to the rustling elephant grass and marimba notes of bamboo striking each other in the dark, trying to pluck the sounds of man from the rhythm of nature.
War rumbles on the horizon; over the mainland and across the sea. Truman has arranged his chess pieces against Il-sung and Mao and Stalin to the north. Maybe he was stupid for thinking the end of his war would be the start of something new; that it could ever change. He was the product of a war after the one to end all wars, what did he expect? He still worries about his boys, the ones that made it back, and Eddie, who could be anywhere, absolutely anywhere. The lines are active again, they were only at recess. They wear different colours; they are older, younger at the same time.
Dear Eddie,
I apologise if this letter is late again. I genuinely can't tell if I'd rather go back to the Canal than deal with the schoolwork this year. They are increasing the number of classes so I'm working overtime now, like I wasn't busy enough with them all wanting updates on this paper. I can't tell if they are interested in it or if the department's future rests on it, when I don't think it's going to get finished. You must be busy as well [he omits the new war entirely. Not just because he can't even begin how to word it, but because some part of him doesn't even want to imagine it]
However we've got new staff here- including this Japanese fellow who served in the Army (I know, I know) from California, he says he's going to help with the paper drafting business and see what we can. I've been covering his lessons and grading while he's caught the flu. Massachusetts winters are not for the faint of heart. I’ve also had to repair windows for a lady down the street- I don’t know why she asked me- [He keeps his letter light. Ancedotal. They are sat in a bar opposite each other, small talk that doesn’t dip below the surface. He doesn’t want to think about Eddie back out there]
Yours,
Andrew
True to his word, he is inundated with work; it keeps his head above water. Tutoring on the side gives him extra money to spoil his niece and nephew when they come on the weekends, their mother strung out and withdrawn on the couch. Tak likes to leave him articles in his pigeonhole, now he has one, and expects a review the next time they get drinks. The professor does as well; and once again he's faced with expectations. He hasn't made a single word of progress on anything. The corridor back home is halfway painted. The kids don't mind.
Eddie's reply takes longer than usual- and it’s not Korea, but it's not California either, or anywhere else safe. It's still too close to the frontline to unspool the tight knot of concern in his chest- and he rips open the envelope, his heart pounding uncomfortably loudly in his ears.
Skipper
Quit apologising. I'm just glad you still write me. Made it to Japan for a brief spell [and again, the censor. But he’s used to it now, he's just fantastically glad that Eddie is curled up on a tatami mat to sleep and not a foxhole]
I’ve done enough sightseeing to go crazy. Japanese music is weird. The geisha play nice but they sing kinda differently. And all the kabuki plays are f*cking tragic. The food is great though. They make all these fake models and drawings so you can see what you're getting. The Captain is more focused on getting f*cked up off sake though. I think [censored, long sentence, and Andrew frowns. But he notices, briefly, the Captain, and not my Captain.]
Weather is not so great either. Tell you what, this place would have been terrible to invade.
You should visit. Lot of old buildings and shrines and boring historical things you would like. We're all very friendly with each other, despite previous events.
That colleague of yours sounds nice for an Army fellow. [There's more censoring, but the scribbling is different, and it might be self-censoring, or a mistake.] I hope work isn't keeping you busy.
Yours,
Eddie
(PS I thought I’d get updated. Didn’t have money so just got the one, left side. Didn’t hurt- and I’m not bragging)
Andrew follows the arrow he’s drawn, where he’s left a scribble in the margin in pencil, sideways and smudged; a small ink black crown.
////
Its quiet (Shoot him for thinking it). It's as quiet as the night Jesus was born, the whole earth still and waiting for something. Sand devils twirl around the low, cropped dunes. Slow shushing of the waves against the shore, the restless sound of people moving in the dark. A claw-scratch of moon rises far to the west.
Pavuvu is hell. Soon they will be digging deeper to the next fiery ring, and then-? When does this war end? Is it even something he should allow himself to think about? When they're going back. With that ageing Corps and God knows what. This is one thought he cannot shake, but must.
It’s easy, somehow, to sometimes forget. In this moment, the war is a million, million miles away. This scene is set on an inexplicably warm Massachusetts beach- Nauset or Good Harbor- and Eddie is beside him, ankles splayed on the soft sand which is not mined or trapped or thick with barbed wire, but pristine. The image makes his chest clench, a sharp pain that has him looking over to Eddie, barely a hand-width of sand between them.
It’s the only time he can have with Eddie where they're not being shot at or ordered around; the quiet moments when they're tentatively off duty. He wants to ask, what will Eddie do after this?, because it's dark and it's quiet and if he's going to think it, he might as well ask.
But he doesn't find his voice, because he half-knows; Andrew back to Massachusetts, Eddie back to the peacetime Corps, or wherever he calls home on the continent. They have a definitive end, even if they don't catch a bullet. It sits uncomfortably in his ribs, emotional indigestion; along with something else, some simmering emotion he feels when Eddie sighs and knocks his boots against Andrew’s in response; and he never even asked the question, he doesn't need to speak. In this quiet between them, sat shoulder to shoulder, they can read the silence.
“I've eight years of sleep to catch up on,” he says, and Andrew recognises the motion- the twitching foot, and the gruff diversion to a joke- as avoidance, unwilling to press further. He can probably read the distress in Andrew's scowl. His eyes, full of concern, flitting to Andrew’s open shirt buttons with the barest nod, are his prompt to continue the thoughts that started in silence. He has gotten very, very good at reading this man.
“I’m gonna end up teaching football, I think,”
“All the way to the NFA," Eddie agrees, and there’s a sad pinch to his voice that has Andrew reaching out his hand to place it on top of Eddie’s wrist. There’s a cut on the side, a cat scratch he can feel under his thumb. He lets his forearm rest on top.
“NFL,” he corrects, his voice too gentle for the tut to be anything but fake.
“What ‘bout your paper?” Eddie asks. Over the sound of the waves, Andrew can barely hear him talk. He used to think he could pick Eddie’s voice out of a million people speaking at once; now he can hardly hear over the hushing of the sea, the buzzing in his head, his pulse, pounding steadily away in his ears.
“Hm?”
"Your- paper," he says, pausing, like he has said something he shouldn't have.
Oh. God, he didn’t remember saying. That was a whole lifetime ago, a whole different Andrew ago.
"Well, on the side maybe.” He shrugs, uncertain of his own answer. He didn’t expect Eddie to remember. He usually expects Eddie to know everything. It feels like he’s suddenly out of step.
“In between solvin’ world peace an’ all,” his exhale is hardly convincing as laughter.
Eddie fall silent again, the tendons in his hand and wrist flexing as he slowly moves his hand, and then twisting his arm around. Soft flesh to soft flesh. The tips of Andrew's fingers just barely press into the bottom of his palm. His fingers twitch; his nailbeds whitening as he applies enough pressure to drain the blood. There’s a question working it’s way down through his nervous system into Andrew’s; he can feel his tension, electric, passing through to him. Enough to make the hair on his arm raise.
“No wife and kids?”
“Hm?” Again, because somewhere, somehow they have become out of sync. A step out of each others dance.
“In your grand plan,” Eddie rolls his other hand through the air as nonchalantly as he can- a gesture he has picked up from him. “No- no white picket fence and… kids.” He isn’t sure how to respond again. He’s never considered it. He has had no reason too.
“Well I'll-,” he doesn't answer, “I’ve never thought about it. I have my family and friends and studies and…” he finds himself trailing off again, lost to the thought. It doesn’t fit into his grand plan. He has a scattered handful of nephews and nieces he’d like to teach football and read to and play with, but be able to return. He remembers to return the question, venturing gently, because the moment feels fragile, and Eddie’s arm is tense beneath his, “you?”
Eddie stiffens, a sharp hitch of his breath.
“What?”
“What about you?” He reiterates, clarifies. The look on Eddie’s face rapidly shifts into something akin to understanding, bashful.
“Oh- no. No.” He’s quickly shaking his head, but his eyes won’t lift from where he watches his wrist underneath Andrew’s, and he very carefully removes his arm and tucks it back to his ribs. The cold air rushes in. “No, no- I’ve the Corps.”
“I have the Corps,” Andrew says softly.
“Well you’re-“ Eddie pauses, and there’s something just there, on the tip of his tongue, “civilian.”
“You make it sound like a bad thing,” he attempts to joke, but his voice sounds a little drier than he wants.
“No not like that- you’re- Here, for the war. I was here before it, and, Lord willing, after it. There’ll always be another war for me after this, peacetime gets boring.”
“That's not true.”
"True as can be,"
"It's not-" and he's reaching for Eddie again, curling his hand back around his arm; skin contact completes the circuit and something finally switches on in his head, "No one wants to go through this again. Once this is over and we win and go back, we won't have to fight again. We screwed up with Versailles because we never- never put anything meaningful in place. We didn't understand then-"
"The first one was just a fluke?" Eddie's voice is teasing, but his eyes soft,
"Maybe, yes, god- I don't know," he breathes, "I know that all of this has to be for something."
Eddie's smile is so, so fond. He shakes his head a little, wheezes a breathy laugh.
"Okay, Skip," Andrew's heart gives a desperate squeeze as Eddie removes his arm again, “It’s true, hate it all you like, you’ll write your paper on it.”
“Maybe I will,” Andrew murmurs. He can taste cigarette smoke, from how close they sit. When his sister first met her husband, she always complained about the taste of his cigarettes.
"Just cause you wan' it," he flicks his ash, speaks a little too fast, "doesn't mean you get it," He exhales. The red arc of his cigarette falls to his side. The ember and ash dries up.
It’s quiet, and he hates himself for thinking it again. Q-word, risky word. Say it once and suddenly They jump from the shadows and get you. He’s thought it too many times in the weeks they’ve been here, and its coming back with teeth bared.
It’s his third landing. He doesn’t know if can see the same goal he once did. If this chain of islands will lead anywhere. He has to though, because an entire company depends on him. Because he depends on himself to still believe. It’s coming back to bite him now, grabbing his ankles and holding him down. It’s gonna eat him alive one day.
///
He gets an extra letter three days later; and his stomach flips, strangely giddy when he recognises the shape of Eddie's handwriting, the way he crams the address on the left side rather than in the middle of the envelope. It’s the little things like this that lift his mood from that dark, shadowed place it seems to reside nowadays. It’s a cheap, thin, envelope, with cherry blossom stamps and no return.
Andrew, in awful, slanted handwriting, the next few words completely unreadable until he can make out, I’m in [crossed out- a misspelling?] Imedo- and well, that explains it, drunk, on leave, and writing him a little letter; something he must have forgotten to say. It's a mess of smudged pencil, sentences obliterated by the censor, a thick black line like the kanji of his flag. Unreadable. He doesn’t know what it says, and he has to know what it says. It’s Eddie.
Inside the envelope is a white and red silk pouch. Feather light, he can barely feel it in his hands, but he can feel it throughout his body as he studies it; the delicate ferns embroidered on its face and around the back, interlinking and sprouting across fine, shiny silk, and the golden kanji which he trails a finger down, feeling each stitch.
There’s something inside it, he can feel the edges of a rectangle piece of thick paper, but the pouch is sewn shut in a manner that suggests it is meant to stay shut, so he leaves it be. He has no idea what it means or what it says, but it sits perfectly in the palm of his hand. He twirls a finger around the brocade string, a bit of weight to it.
It’s pretty. Well made. He has no idea what it is (It’s a gift).
He sets it on his desk, on his journal, then, suddenly hot under his collar, he puts it in his wallet, between an old tram ticket, a postcard from his mother, and a photograph of the two of them in Melbourne, another war ago.
////
“Ashes to ashes-“ Eddie throws the last end of his cigarette to the waves, “dust to dust,”
“Don’t ever quote the bible at me again,” Andrew warns, “what will the company think if you become some deranged hillbilly preacher?” The joke dries in this throat, and he will soon get used to this feeling of saliva so thick it threatens to choke him.
The island lies across the water. The sea turning choppy and restless, anticipatory. Ancient unseeing thing. It knows, its seen this before, when the Japanese came here first, and the Dutch, and the Portuguese maybe, the sea faring tribes before them, the first humans before that. It sends huge sprays of white foam up their ships, salty handshake to greet them, hello, again.
Smoke comes towards them on the breeze, thin clouds of soot. The artillery that comes in tune with his breathing, the boats sluicing through the waves. The sweaty tang of fear in the air. Ashes to ashes. He doesn’t dwell on it.
Below deck its dark. Crowds of men churning and tripping and fighting for space. Glowing red lights and the flickering of lighters. He nods to his boys, a hundred sets of eyes as they file past down the line.
Eddie appears unfazed as ever, insouciant, clean faced, as he strolls down the gangway two steps behind; unconsciously shifting his weight as the ocean dips and sways, and the sea of men parts for them. He checks the boys, yanks their riflestraps and belts back up, wipes sweat from green faces, buttons up blouses with a chastising word about Marine standards- all good humour, nervous laughter trailing him as he prowls. He has this instantly soothing effect to the expectant, scared K Company, a cool cloth to a burn.
Without looking away from the horizon, Hillbilly unclasps his breastpocket and pulls a cigarette from the carton within. He tucks it behind his ear, where it remains until Andrew meets him again on the beach, but he doesn’t like to think about it anymore.
"Hillbilly-" he says, and doesn't know where to go with it. Eddie just puts his cigarettes away.
“I’ll see you on the other side,”
///
Ack Ack
I don't know about Massachusetts, but Korea is f*cking cold. I'm going to go somewhere warm after this, maybe the Philippines or Vietnam.
There's new faces in the company, who give me trouble, mostly kids. Some vets of the last Asian excursion are still with us, but it's too cold for any of us to be useful. I think I remember how to start a fire, Lord knows I can't find a lighter, remember? Helluva lot of walking as well.
How is the paper? Maybe if it's not too big you can post me a draft once it gets going, give me something to think about on these rucks.
Yours, Eddie
It’s like getting a diagnosis for an illness you suspect yourself to have- Andrew was not entirely surprised when he was told he’d been shot in the head; he had the nausea and the pain and the blurred vision and the hole in his head to suggest that something was amiss- but the confirmation of it settles grievously in his chest.
Eddie’s in Korea. It’s the only place for him to be. You couldn’t take a fish from water and expect it to swim. This is what Andrew's rallying against- human nature. History is all war, war is politics by other means, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He's trying to teach rattlesnakes to walk, tell the starling not to fly; how fruitless this pursuit of is. How wretched and ambitious this goal at hand. Such is the feeling that overwhelms him, leaving him drained and longing for news all day. That Eddie has taken a wrong turn and will be delivered to his front door- Andrew coughs hotly in surprise and wrenches himself from the thought.
It’s an issue of adjusting, he thinks, the thoughts ravelling through the hole in his skull. It’ll pass. Don’t dwell on it. It’s the thought of the new decade looming, facing it. The thought that all the dead boys and that fateful shot didn't do much good.
Eddie
I can't say I'm happy about you being in Korea, but best of luck. How is the company holding up? What is Korea like? Nevermind, none of that will get past the censor. Some of our boys have written me with various updates, you must keep an eye out for Warren and Yates, well all of them. And yourself. I've been keeping busy with the school and continuing to be a free babysitter. Frankly, I don't think I will write the paper. I’m too busy with everything going on.
Praying for your safe return.
Andrew
///
Peleliu is a thirteen kilometre square island belonging to the nation of Palau; five nautical miles northeast of Angaur and twenty two nautical miles southwest of Koror. It is a coralline island covered in mangroves and casaurina forests. The highest elevation is two hundred and forty six feet but the mountains reach all the way to heaven.
He doesn’t like to think about Peleliu.
///
He comes home to post, tears it open while he shucks his coat, scarf, and pours a home-brewed Kentucky bourbon (proudly gifted by one of his boys). Drinks two fingers of it before reading. Warmth spreads down his throat and chest as he peers down as the open letter on the table.
Ack Ack
We’re up [censored, but Andrew surmises it’s Eddie describing where he is, and he’s knows they are up north, he had spent every hour of the last fortnight agonising over Inchon and every scrap of information he could get]
-freezing, so I’ve experienced every kind of weather God can throw at me.
And don't worry about me [a single word scribbled out] I've survived worse.
Yours
Eddie
Tak and he spend hours in the library, mulling over nothing, debating everything. Korea has captivated them both; though Andrew feels more weighed down by it than his colleagues, elated and buoyant with a new topic at hand, a new 20 page chapter in a future textbook. Andrew does little but fret over Eddie suddenly. He is supposed to represent the department in meeting to help brief Senator on Tuesday. He doesn’t know how to condense all the thoughts inside him into a single party-line, a comprehensive thought.
“Maybe you should put it on pause,” Tak advises him over the desk; long lines of amber streetlight falling over their poorly lit office space. The first draft hangs limply in a typewriter balance on top of a stack of 18th century textbooks, condemned to be forgotten. He hasn’t told his colleagues there’s a layer of dust settling on the ribbon.
“Never pick it up again,” he leafs through the essay he started to grade and suddenly lost his place. His head is beginning to hurt.
"Oh don't do that- everyone hates their first paper." Tak tuts sharply, unimpressed.
“I think I was too optimistic-“ he presses his hands to his eyes, until shapes dance.
“-about being able to write a paper?”
“About the world not going to sh*t again,” he fights the urge to rip at his hair, "it's always going to be like this. It employs people."
Tak laughs, which has Andrew chuckling bitterly, and then laughing out loud.
“I’ll bring you some journals some time, see if they give a different perspect-“
“No need,” Andrew shuts him off with a bitter sigh, "I’ll stick to history.”
Snow comes that week, bitingly cold. Frosty windows and icicles every morning. He runs for the tram each morning, late, headlights cutting through the fog. He buys a pack of cigarettes, and a thick burgundy and blue-green tartan scarf, and ships it to Korea.
Eddie, he'd wrote, after mindlessly answering all Eddie’s questions and adding his own scattered anecdotes, and then frantically puts pen to paper and writes, the paper is on hold. Maybe if I had someone as cynical as you with me I wouldn’t have gotten so far with it.
It sounds stupid, but- [he crosses it out.]
I worry for you every day- and your company [and this.]
Ifeel like a war widow waiting for each of your replies. [and this.]
Write me soon
Yours, Andrew.
Eddie’s reply comes late. Andrew’s started counting the days in between his letters. Mrs Gunny Haney has sent him a card wishing him well. Her husband has not signed it.
Eddie’s letter is the usual. Andrew is certain he can track him on a map of Korea. When he holds it, the date in the top right several weeks ago, he wonders if he is reading a dead man’s words. He gives no indication of anything amiss, just cold, and tired, and bored on the 38th Parallel. He signs off, but the lamplight glows though the thin paper and Andrew can see words, half visible, on the back.
You should still write that paper. Maybe what we need is someone to start believing in a better world and start a movement. It could work. And if you don’t write it someone else may come up with the idea and it won’t be as good. And if you don’t write something on it you’ll write something stupid on the Civil War and I’ll have to come argue the finer points with you.
Yours
Eddie.
He stares at his letter. The handwriting he knows, the voice he can hear when he reads. His sensible, steady presence. And it's the first time he ever disregards anything Eddie has ever said
///
No, seriously, he doesn’t want to think about Peleliu.
//
The lack of sunlight is doing something to him. Back there he got too much of the stuff, and now he begs for it. He wants a sun-bleached beach front and a million hot nights in the tropics. A steamy downpour and a hammock between the palms.
He wakes at his kitchen sink at midnight, the moon strong as a flashlight, a glass overflowing in his hand. Water dripping to the floor. When he turns it off and throws a teatowel down and goes back upstairs, his coat and boots are on the floor. A pack of cigarettes on his bedside. The bed unmade.
He wakes up angry for no reason, stays that way for days at a time. Can’t put a finger on it. It’s just there. Like a loose thread he cant find but can feel, brushing against his skin. When he goes to cut it off, he can’t find it.
Everett drags him drinking after a week of unwitting silence from him. Less than two glasses in he gets into a fantastic argument with some staffer from the science departments.
“Jesus,” Ev breathes, once he's dragged Andrew from the bar and into the cold street. Andrew feel like he can’t breathe correctly.
“They let people like him walk around,” He spits.
“No I-“ Everett exhales, “I’ve never seen you argue like that. I've never even seen you shout."
“Yeah?” Andrew challenges with a sudden wicked smirk.
“Yeah.” he echoes. He throws his cigarette end into the gutter. He smokes Chesterfields, and they don’t smell the same,
“They’ll report you if you get too- political,” Ev says carefully, after a long moment when the snow starts to fall. He takes the slightest step back, rocking on the soles of his feet, like Andrew’s madness and misery is contagious and he wants to be as far away from it as he can.
“Yeah.” Andrew agrees. He got shot in the head for the right to do that, didn't he?
He feels electric, tight as a drum. Paces his home in the night with the radio low and the papers and letters in his hand. There’s news from all his boys over there. Another one somehow in the Army in Germany. Another war across the sea. Martin reappearing, in someone else's letter, divorced and in the National Guard, and then vanishing again. Mrs Gunny doesn't write him anymore. Stanley has another kid.
He’s starting to feel things again. In this horrid sharp pangs that come like the prick of a needle in his chest. He feels heavier and heavier, and he doesn't know why. He doesn’t want to think about any of it, he just wants it to go.
The only thing that brings him some relief is his post; between the long, lonely nights sitting at his chair and staring out the icy window (God, does he feel like a war widow). He can pour out all his frustrated, sh*t feelings on a piece of paper, a one sided conversation with a man in his head who may only be an ideal but once stood at his side and walked through Hell with him.
Even if he doesn’t send those pages, he knows Eddie will understand if he ever finds out. Won't he? (he wonders if he just takes what he wants from them, hears what he wants to hear. He has to disregard the thought). Eddie knows him. He knows Eddie. There’s nothing Eddie wouldn’t understand.
(He’s holding onto this loyalty for some reason. Ignoring the stark reality in front of him. Six thousand eight hundred miles between them. He hasn't seen Eddie since.)
///
There is one thing he’ll say about Peleliu, the thing that’s haunted him since waking up.
It’s not the heat; the rocks; the endless walking back and forth from the line to the Airfield once they captured it, exchanging positions with the next sorry lot to go up and try break the long, slow stalemate; the bleeding; the f*cking mindnumbing heat and sweat dripping down his forehead and back and the flies buzzing in dense clouds along the roads; the thirst so strong he could feel his blood thickening and every part of him start to ache; or the way the island crawled night and day with the enemy, every rock hiding danger, every cave full of them; or the pointlessness of it all, really; or even both their attempts at dying. It’s none of that that bothers him.
It’s that one morning he left Eddie on the roadside and promised he’d come back, and Eddie had grinned at him and waved him off and watched over the company. The nights were clear and calm and cool. When he got back, he couldn’t even get a word out of him.
That’s what bothers him. What frightens him, and has frightened him, for years. What keeps him awake at night when he thinks of Eddie back across the ocean and his heart pounds in his chest- is he still over there? Will he ever come back, mind, body, and soul? Is it worth even worrying about?
Is the Eddie in his letters the one he left behind on the rocks six years ago, or the ghost he came back to?
And that’s it.
That’s all he’ll ever say about Peleliu
///
Andrew's mind is wandering. He has to anchor it to something, before the rest of him goes with it. He drowns himself in the newspaper and reports of Korea while his body walks him to work- the two are separate now, he is not himself any more, he is Obsessively dragged back to the same words that depress him. He has to know everything, maybe it’s a remnant of being Captain. He's long past the point of going grey, his temples a fine spun silver.
When this war ends, if it ends, he will go back to normal. Then he’ll just wait for the next one (This is nothing to worry about).
Every night he dreams of nothing and awakes thirsty, head pounding, knowing that something happened. He tunes the radio, checks the mailbox- sitting empty for days- and the news only puts fear into him; now he knows how bad it can be. What they don't talk about when they talk about war.
Snow lies like curdled milk on the roads. The dawns are weak, shrouded in fog. Night comes thick and fast. If anyone notices he is late for work, they say nothing. No one asks about his paper. The draft is ripped from the typewriter, stuffed in a drawer, and a fresh sheet is plugged in, the mechanism snapping into place- the same pinging note of an empty Garand. There is no new, modern world. There’s just this.
Tak decides his time is up, he’ll fly south for the winter, a little over a year since he came. The school hosts a modest party for him, Andrew helps him pack. In the evening the day after, he comes around to drop off the journals he promised to. Andrew can't not let him in; sleet pouring down outside.
“The next time I see snow, I better be skiing,” he sighs, hanging his shabby wet peacoat up and smiling at the blaze Andrew had nursed in his fireplace.
“Soon you’ll be back in sunny California,” Andrew smiles, not jealous at all. He likes the quiet of winter, even when its gloomy and wet. The summers don’t get hot enough in Massachusetts to remind him of the Pacific, they just remind him of good weather.
“My daughter’s turning five soon,” Tak grins back proudly, “I don’t want her growing up without me,”
They toast, exchange addresses, drink another, complain about the rest of the faculty. Andrew’s going to miss having a friend around, one he can discuss it with. One not so civilian.
“Don't bother with them now, no sense working on this over the exam period and Christmas,” Tak advises as he goes to leave, taking out a stack of loose sheets and stapled articles from his bag and placing them on his table. Every other sentence underlined or highlighted, notes scrawled sideways on the margin and where the footnotes should be.
“I’m assuming I’ll have to put you as co-author," Andrew comments. His chest stings at the thought of how much work Tak has put in, and how he will likely not use any of it.
“Well send me a draft when you think about finishing up, hm?” Tak says, and Andrew nods dumbly while he looks over his desk. The suburban mess of it. Sprawl of journals and papers. He leafs through Andrew’s hastily scrawled notes, deranged pencil markings, the trinkets on his desks, his wallet, keys, and pocketlint dumped there. His eyes narrow, scrutinising. Andrew turns for the kitchen to get the rest of the bottle, then Tak says,
“I didn’t know you had a girlfriend,” and Andrew looks up. His blood goes cold like he's been caught.
“I don’t,” he manages to say, watching Tak lift his hand. He carefully holding up a red silk envelope between his thumb and forefinger, and Andrew feels his heart painfully thump against his ribs.
“You-“ he squints his brow in that confused, amused way he does, teasing, “you know what this is?”
“What?” Andrew hasn't got a clue. He desperately awaits an answer as Tak studies the envelope in his deft fingers, eyeing each strand of thread sagely before he speaks again.
“It’s an omamori.”
The answer provides no clarity, and Andrew feels his pulse begin to slide as he stares blankly at Tak.
“You didn’t learn anything over there?” He laughs. Andrew is wildly out of step with the joke, or whatever Tak finds funny. All he knows is it’s a gift.
“I shot at them, I didn’t learn their culture,” he reminds him, a little coldly, a little defensively. Tak laughs good naturedly, the war being just another footnote in a long list of national tragedy.
“Thought you had some secret Japanese sweetheart and weren’t telling me,” he keeps laughing, no bite in his bark, and then mercifully takes a step closer so Andrew can see. He has to restrain himself to not lunge forward and grab it back from where it dangles; red silk catching the fire's glow.
“It’s a sort of charm, see, there’s a little prayer inside it,” Tak explains, his voice reverent, and he holds up the delicate silk pouch higher. A sudden stab of protectiveness almost forces Andrew to ask him to put it down- “en-musubi,” he says, peering at the lettering, and then winks obviously enough for Andrew's blood to heat. “you’d give it to someone who you wanted, you know? I gave my wife one.”
“Oh- no, it’s just,” he has forgotten every word in the English language, his thoughts a feverish swirl, “I thought it was- just good luck charm, I uh- got a lot of, things,” he stammers, awkwardly stumbling off trail; not because he could be potentially discussing war trophies with a man who eight years ago was this country’s mortal enemy, but because-
Tak laughs broadly, no hurt feelings, and either delighting in or utterly unaware of Andrew's emotional predicament.
"Shame," he sets the pouch down, smooths it out gently, fondly, then winks again, playing along, "it's real nice. Whoever got it must have really liked you- or whoever you took it off really liked someone else."
Andrew moves to shoo Tak out the door before he can throw anymore gasoline on this fire. He must be close to the same scarlet shade as the pouch. The omamori Eddie sent him.
His heart slamming in his throat, he can only try give his best smile while this hot feeling twists in his gut and Tak chuckles while he gathers his briefcase and coat.
“Well,” his smile only broadens as he twines his scarf around his neck; Andrew would call him cruel if he thought he had any inkling of what he'd just done, “I hope you find her,”
“It’s not like that,” he manages to say.
“Sure, sure. Hey, I’ll write once I’m back in California, send you some good weather,”
Andrew waves him off. Slams the door. Ignores the little red pouch, glowing, on his table. He’s holding the door handle closed for several minutes afterwards. He has no idea how he’s going to write now.
///
He dreams that night. The first dream he remembers in years.
It’s nothing strange to him, when there’s the weight of a man in his lap, straddling him by the fireplace, orange light licking across their skin and discarded clothes, drab jackets a pile on the floor. His one hand strokes down a tense, hard thigh, his other wrapped around his back. The weight across his legs settles comfortably, his knees brushing Andrew’s waist. He leans back, wondering who, but the other man comes with him, pushing him down to the cushions.
He brings a hand up from his hips, teasing over over a thin belt and a fraying waistband, stroking over his stomach. Rough fabric of a shirt hanging loosely over twitching, shivering skin.
When he pushes up the shirt- white, clean- he exposes a smooth tan and a million freckles. His hand settles on the warm, tacky skin of his ribcage, and he feels the breath fluttering in his mouth. He parts them briefly, a huff of protest against his upper lip when they separate, and looks down to where his hand strokes across lean, scarred muscles and his fingers come to rest on the soft part between his sixth and seventh rib, where the skin is inked with a small black crown tattoo.
And then Eddie shifts back into him, his words lost to breathy, frantic, whispers, but the thought of the sound of his voice, musical and slow, sends reverberations throughout him, like a bell being struck.
Skipper, Eddie’s exhale is lost to his whine, his mouth against Andrew’s neck, teeth just brushing his tendons. Eddie presses his weight down, arches his back against him, his hands frantic against Andrew’s collar as Andrew dumbly clutches his body. Scrabbling for buttons, zippers, pulling and yanking. Breathing hard, forehead against his collarbone, where Andrew can just kiss his hair and feel Eddie' whimper, rock harder into his lap, slip his hands around his back, gasping-
Skipper- Skip-, Andrew-
He awakes, cold.
///
Eddie.
Did you mean it?
He crumples the letter and tosses it to the fire and feels the hot sting of guilt across his skin when it ignites. Watches the flames consume the evidence. There are a few simple facts at play.
It’s a love token.
Eddie was likely- must have been- blind drunk when he sent it to him.
The letter was near unreadable.
The censor-self censor?- had f*cked it.
The war has f*cked them again, and there's nothing he can do.
His mouth is very dry when he reaches for his drawer and the careful stack of letters with shaking hands (Its not his injury, its his heart rate). The letter is in its envelope, not like the others he leaves roughly folded and stacked together.
Andrew, it reads, his name for the first time, and then the rest of the sentence mangled together under the scrawl. It might be an l or a b or a d, he was really not sure what he said then and he’s really not sure now. I'm in Imedo, and he assumed all the crossing out was just misspelling- but now-
He goes back downstairs for the omamori, the whiskey, and all his heartache. (His grief has taken a new, vicious form, now he can name it properly. Now he knows where it’s targeted). Why did Eddie send it? (Because you give it to someone you wanted.) Was he asking-?
Andrew faces the rest of the facts as they sit on his lap, much like a dream he'd rather forget (He won't dwell on it- he tells himself- but God it's so easy to remember).
Eddie didn’t write anyone else.
Eddie gave him a little red envelope meant for lovers.
Eddie gave him a flag worth hundreds because he'd made some joke about having one (And he did it privately, shyly, away from the others, and asked for a dance). Eddie had never left his side. And Andrew had never left his.
And it's so easy to think- reminisce- about every time he would go looking for Eddie and seek out his side, go sit in the shelter of his music and laughter, simply look his way and understand entire sentences in the set of his brow; or the time he lay his hands on his Lieutenant and his breathing went all funny; and the tattoos, and the crown he has on his ribs now, the one that Andrew dreams of; and all the little jokes and comments they’d shared, and-
He looks to the snowbound garden, where the deep snow might chase the heat from his face.
Hes not insane. (If he was, he’d take all those letters Eddie sent him and find an I and an l and an o and a v and an e and a few other letters and line them up to the censored sentence and give him a bit of room for how drunk and sloppy it is and hope, God, that the handwriting matched up. That the I of Imedo could be the l of love and if, if, if the slimmest chance lines up, and they ever meet again, and loves him back). He hasn’t fully lost his mind yet. He just has to know.
He keeps the letter to their usual, a brief recap of life and any stray anecdotes or comments he might find mildly amusing, prayers for the company in Korea, comments about whatever gossip he's heard, hand shaking the entire time, an empty stomach and his body nothing but alcohol and adrenaline; and then he throws it out. He can't do a normal letter. He can't pretend this isn't normal. This is probably half the reason he's been so abnormal.
Andrew debates leaving it for tomorrow, knowing that at night Eddie will come to him and gives him what he craves in his dreams. If he leaves it till morning, oneiric answer in hand, he'll never write it at all. But he knows this isn’t something he can just ignore and never think about again, and writes,
In Japan you sent me an embroidered charm, it was white and red and had a little prayer tucked inside. Eddie, if it was supposed to be a question, the answer is Yes.
It’s in the postbox before dawn, when he’s barely awake and walking down the icy streets. He’s cold, shivering, but burning with the thought of it; phantom hands on his waist. That the answer back could be yes, too.
And then days later he gets the morning paper. The Marines had been trapped in Chosin and were surrounded. And all the country can do is hope for a miracle.
///
He doesn’t get a reply.
He has come to accept a few things, a new set of facts at hand. He will never finish his paper in the state that he is in. He is never getting a reply from Eddie. The Marines and UN are stranded in a reservoir on the other side of the world and he can only wait to see what is allowed to be printed in the paper next morning.
Eddie’s in Chosin. And Eddie belongs to Uncle Sam, so what was the point?
He lets himself dwell on it, because now he's in the habit of grousing about his house. Kentucky's finest guides him, until he is sat on his porchstep burning a cigarette because it takes him back and he needs the warm hand of nostalgia. He dreams fitfully, of hot, rancid heat, and endless thirst, of the bone-soaking showers of the monsoon, of Eddie curled up with him in a hammock, sharing body heat and breath as the rain hammered down, whispers and slow, wandering hands, snowdrifts, and the long frozen road to Chosin.
And then he works himself back up into a state of frantic grief, thinking about Eddie and the war and every dead kid. He can shake it off in the daylight, the cold echoing halls of his college, conversation-steamed tram, windswept streets, and he can't deny it at home.
When midnight comes sneaking around again, he’s upstairs again with his despair. That sad lonely thing that sat with him since Peleliu, since Gloucester, since he was reborn on the shores of the Canal; since he saw Eddie carried off on a stretcher dripping blood. It came home with him and settled in his walls. Thrived on his neglect, the roots of it have burrowed inside him and knotted around his bones. He doesn’t know what to do with it, and if he takes it out, he doesn't know what's left. What it's eaten away.
He is completely, utterly unmoored. Unknowing. The other side of the world a mystery, the half that he is on as well. The great love of his life in Chosin. The snow piling outside. Winter howls it’s lonely song.
He receives no reply from Eddie.
///
It’s determined to keep snowing. His mailbox stays faithfully barren. There is no contact with the boys in Chosin, no word from Eddie. Dead, or ignoring him. Andrew knows which one is worse, and the other still hurts. In the space between sleep and work, the twilight zone of silence, he finds a million ways to dwell on it. Oh if he was wrong about its meaning, what has he thrown away? The chances are slim- he realises, if Eddie remembers enough about the letter to understand what Yesmeans, what would he do? If he didn’t understand, then why would he send it in the first place? A joke?
Every morning he gets the paper and races through the print, searching for hope between the snow-wet pages. The whole country is waiting for news from the shores of the Sea of Japan. They've gone too close (into the mountains) and got caught again. Andrew prays that if nothing else, Eddie makes it through again.
Every night he has terrors. Rarely has anything else. He watches himself die in the coral hills and then wonders if he is dying on his second sleepless night in Massachusetts. In an act of desperation he debates his mother's house, and then his kitchen, sleeping with a blanket over the lamp and the fire blazing; so the light diffuses and dances in shadows not unlike the moving darkness of the hills. When he wakes, the automaton kicks in.
He has nothing else to do, but the banality of life; the life he wanted so badly back then, bleeding out and begging to make it through. Sees the world from the perspective of his hebetude; a view behind fogged glass. It's easy to fall into this pessimism, much easier than carrying the weight of all your beliefs. Was all of it worth it? Was every dead corporal and friend he'll never see again, and each bloodsoaked yard of ground worth getting on the swaying, condensation-thick tram, the stuffy claustrophobic schoolrooms, the queues in the cold, the news from the East, the numb, cold shadow that swallows him when the sun goes down? The question nips him quietly; sick with guilt wondering how many millimeters to the left or right would have put him six feet under and not here.
He finds himself reading one night, sick of the taste of his own inertia; idly leafing through a paperback more than anything comprehensive. It’s the only thing he knows; the book sitting on an open box from when he moved here, and the thought to unpack escaped his mind. Hemingway’s beautiful nurse dies in childbirth, London’s dog returns to the wild. Time slips, the ice hardens. They march deeper into the snow.
There is no way to answer the question, you can ignore it all you like, or you can just keep believing that someday it will be worth it, it doesn't have to make sense. You just keep going.
Across the sea, the first ships dock.
They call it the Miracle of Christmas. There's bunting in the shop window, where the owner kept a candle burning for the Chosin few and the huddled masses yearning to be free on the shores of Hungnam. The church bells ring all morning.
And every day it stays lighter for a few minutes longer. 1951 is trying to claw itself into existence and prove itself to be real, living and breathing. The spring is fighting to come. The world's not ending, it's just winter.
The snow will melt.
///
He remembers nothing of the after Peleliu. Three centimetres of metal, and it took four months of memory and God knows how many years of his life. He can live with that.
Sometimes he thinks he remembers the shoreline of California. Maybe. Rocking hospital ship, cradled between the pale sky and bright blue ocean. The shoreline a paintstroke on the horizon, sunlight bright enough to make you squint. Peer behind the grey canvas of mountain to find the wild desert behind it, and after plains and plains and more mountains, home. Just the last few miles of ocean to go, after two thousand other miles of them. Between there and here is a wash of pure sapphire, soft and fuzzy in the blinding sun. Colour of the Earth, their Earth, the colour of home.
Ask anyone, his favourite colour is blue.
///
There’s a fog outside. Coming in from the sea. Clambers over the houses, swallowing streetlights, muffling sound. The mute evening draws on, lazily, contently.
He stokes the fire to where it blazes magnificently, keeps it fed with last year's timber. There's something primal and calming about fire, something so human about it. Sap popping, embers leaping to his carpet, where he crushes them satisfactorily, smearing the rug.
He sits in front of it with the poker in his right and a glass of whiskey in his left, ice melting, rainbows refracting in the carved sides. The rug soft beneath him. Sooty stain on the mantelpiece, last year's Christmas cards still lining the top. The living room is a state, the couch piled with coats and laundry and his briefcase, open wide, papers cascading. The draft is creeping under the doorframe to reach him where he rests at the fireplace. It's a cold, quiet night.
All down his street the lights glitter and he hears the snow starts to fall when the windchime next door sings. The last violet clouds of the sunset gave way to night hours ago and the town sits under the blanket of night. He pours another drink and debates a coffee. This feels like a night to stay up a little. He’s not doing so bad now, it’s raw but touchable, like a wound he can move and not rip open. He only woke up once in the middle of the night this week, at his desk, with a pen and paper in his hand, and wondering if that’s what he was trying to do when he first came to.
He finishes his drink, and really pauses to consider. His weekend is free, and he has no plans (he’d stopped making them a while ago), nothing to do till he's back at work. With nothing to do, he leans back against his couch, rolls his sleeves to let the fire's heat singe his arms. He could turn on the radio, or finish Shanghai or one of his other books, or stay here, unmoving, hypnotised by the flames.
Then there’s a knock at the door, echoing throughout his house. He sits upright, twists to face the window- nothing, the curtains block the porch. There's no further sound, and he stares as if the wall will reveal something. He didn't even hear a car approach.
The knock comes again, and he pulls himself to his feet, gripping the mantelpiece. He creeps towards the door- midnight only a few hours off, who knocks at this hour? Fear pinches him, but he brushes it off. The glazing is rippled glass, obscuring a silhouette he would still recognise anywhere in the world.
Eddie stands on his step in uniform, lit by streetlamps. Snow gathers on his shoulders and hair, his cap clutched in his hands. The street foggy, deep twilight all around. Just a foot of space between them.
“Eddie-“ He throws his arms around him without thinking, the breath knocked out of him, drawn forward by the same force that holds the moon to the earth. He has to stretch onto his tiptoes to reach, and Eddie steps up the porch step to meet him. He wraps his arms around Andrew’s back, and his forearms overlap and cross his body until his hands are on the side of his ribs; and his breath tickles against his nape, and all Andrew can do is sink into the soft drab-pine wool and try to stand.
He dizzily presses his face to his shoulder, his pulse flying. His collar catches his ear, and Andrew feels him sigh, a shiver down his spine as he exhales, melding into him. His heart is pounding so hard he's certain Eddie can feel it through their clothing. He can't stop grinning against his collar. Eddie alive and well in his arms, what more could he ask for? A button catches his cheek as he turns his head, and then wrenching himself back far enough just to look up and raise a hand to brush the snow that melts in Eddie's curls.
He huffs- and God its so shockingly familiar how he sounds- his chest rising underneath him as he runs his hand back across his hair, snow showering. His hand trails down, Eddie tightens the grip he has on his waist, and he lays both his hands on Eddie's shoulders, his forearms braced on his chest. He radiates warmth with the slow rise and fall of his ribs- his breathing ending in a hitch on each inhale. His blue eyes shining golden in the light from behind.
"Lettin' the heat out," Eddie murmurs, and that's all it needs; a moment of eye contact a full sentence. They've never been out of step; Eddie moving his right leg forward so Andrew can lift his left backwards and up over the threshold- mind the doorjam- into the cloistered warmth of the porch. Eddie kicks the door shut behind him, and Andrew has to lift his arms to fumble for the top latch so it doesn't blow open- which lets him lean in closer, arms sliding around Eddie's neck. A heavy bag slips down his side and thumps to the ground.
Andrew has to consciously lean backwards again to look at him and take it all in in the bright, golden light. He hasn't changed an ounce. A little more windswept and sunworn, creases around his eyes, freckles across his nose, and his hair a few shades darker, but just the same as yesterday. He's still trim and slender in his uniform, the lean form of his chest and narrow waist, long legs pressed against his own, perhaps a touch too boney; but it's Eddie, his Eddie, back from the war.
“When'd'you get back?" Andrew mumbles, feeling tongue tied for the first time in his life at how close he is, how close they are, closer than any firefight or foxhole. He had only meant for it to be a brief hug, now he's snared by arms he cannot escape, his heart thumping away. The proximity soothes a part of his soul, bruised and aching, and he fears he won't be able to let go unless Eddie physically shakes him off.
"Few days ago.” He answers, a touch too warm to be his usual deadpan. Andrew follows the long line of his throat as he swallows, exhaling with a measured breath, “Figured they wouldn’t ask a man in uniform for a ticket, 'specially if he has seabags." He shrugs, not strong enough to disentangle them, "An' if they did I could say the Corps screwed up my return papers,”
“Oh,”
“They didn’t ask. I just changed at Philly,” Eddie continues, his voice unwinding the knots of anxiety in Andrew's chest. Just the sound of his voice is enough to placate his frantic heartbeat, enough to let him gather his thoughts and believe this thread will lead him somewhere, to something he wants.
“So you came straight here?” He asks gently, trying to be open as he can, but he can't help the soft smile, sappy affection.
“Well-“ Eddie trails off nervously, and he presses on the small of his back, the faintest hint of pressure. (Andrew has never thought him hesitant).
“Well?” He pries, leans forward. Eddie catches his movement by sliding his hand up his spine, between his shoulders, cradled.
“-I got your letter," he breathes, and oh. Eddie came straight for him (isn't that answer enough?). He smiles, melting, Eddie’s hand holding him upright while he talks.
“Took a while t'find me, after the evacuation. Then the companies got mixed up and the weather was bad and- well it’s the Corps-" Eddie rambles away (If his hands were free, he would be lighting a cigarette) and keeps one hand on the faint ridge of his spine, his thumb starting to move “But I got it-“
He sets his palm along Eddie's neck, feels the soft skin and the arteries racing below, and Eddie shuts up. His smile falters, fluttering, closes his eyes and tugs at the same time as Andrew leans up further, pulling down on his lapels, tipping his head to the side to let him close the distance between them.
He barely has a moment to catch his breath, Eddie’s hands sliding up his back and into his hair. Andrew gasps against the feeling, his warm, wet mouth, his grip in his hair. Something within him- when Andrew has to pull back for air, tip his head the other way, just so, and kiss him again, murmuring gently- breaks, and Andrew loses his hold on Eddie’s lapels, forced backwards against the wall.
His hands grip Eddies waist for balance, slip under his belt to feel the shape of him better. Eddie grips the back of his neck tighter and lets his other hand go- the skin fo his scalp tingling- to slip his arm around his back, pressing- it's like he can't decide if he wants to push him against the wall or pull him forward, but either way he wants Andrew against him. His buckle presses so sharply into his skin it's going to leave a mark. Its got to come off. He'd love to get it off.
He doesn't need any words- he doesn't have any- smothered by kisses and roaming hands, he tangles his fingers into Eddie's belt and pulls him with him, across the wall and up the stairs. Clumsy as a newborn deer, blindly dragging Eddie up the stairs with him, Andrew has one hand on the wall to guide him. He thinks it's twelve steps. Thank God Eddie's tall enough to not break them apart when he's one step below, following.
He gets the door open, step by step pulls Eddie with him. Snow and moonlight shadows. A draft from the cracked window. Creaking floorboards. He doesn’t bother with the light.
The back of his knees give way to the mattress. He is suspended by Eddie's grip on his collar, his neck. It takes a moment of gentle pawing, a complaint muttered against his mouth, to convince Eddie to relent his tight hold, and clamber backwards over the bed. Eddie clings to him as he follows, straddling his thighs as Andrew comes to sit at the headboard. His hands grasp Eddie's thick jacket again, the material warm between his hands.
Even without lamplight, he can see the gleam in Eddie's eyes- a deep sea, sparkling moonwater dancing. He wants to drown himself in it. Eddie strains against his hands holding him back, tipping his head to the side to get the angle just right and leaning back in-
Only then does the rustle, the waving shadow, of the flag above him catch his attention. He sits back a tad, almost jumping, and Andrew can read the question knitting between them once the flash of panic dims.
"You gave it me," he explains, sincere and unwavering as he looks up, his hands gripping Eddie's tie like a rope as he pulls it from his jacket, "Of course I kept it."
"Surprised it came back," his hot breath coming again, embarrassed. Andrew lays his hand across his hollow, smooth, cheek, flushed with blood, and is rewarded with a distracting nip to his palm. He runs his fingers down Eddie's jawline, tilting his head as he sighs.
Eddie's weight spans his lap, a thousand times heavier than the dream, a thousand times more real. Not breaking the path, his fingertips trail across neck, the hills of his throat and press on the soft patch below his larynx. His answering smile is shockingly soft, his hands roaming from Andrew's waist up over his chest to his shoulders. Leans in to kiss again, gripping his nape. He sighs dreamily, hand cupping Andrew's skull. Fingers threading his hair, stroking silky strands again and again, then rocking his hips to the same rhythm.
Wriggling for as much space as he can- with Eddie determined to keep him pinned to the bed and the headboard equally unmoveable- Andrew manages to slip his hands between their bodies and find Eddie's buttons. A blind man reading braille, he trails upwards to find the start of them. Every nueron is shortcircuiting, Eddie kissing him senseless, he can barely feel his fingers trapped between them.
Eddie's breath catches once, a feathery gasp into Andrew's mouth, as the first button slides through. Andrew pushes his hands in to touch warm, tacky skin. The pulse that hammers underneath. He has to tear himself from the feeling of Eddie's hands slipping under his back, his breath travelling from the skin of his neck down his spine in a ghostly shiver, to focus on Eddie; flag, prayer charm or cigarettes, no gift greater than this.
The second button snags on its thread, then pops through. Then the third. The material sags and bunches as his jacket loosens, until Andrew has to nearly fight him off to get his belt undone. The fabric bunches awkwardly, tightly, and he can't pull it through. He tugs, and Eddie doesn't relent. He tightens his grip on Andrew's neck, arches his back further into him; and Andrew can feel his stomach muscles twitch through the fabric against his hands. He tries again, a spark of desperate frustration.
He has to shove Eddie off him with gasped curse, a needy whine through his teeth. He needs this uniform off. Needed it off months ago. Eddie whines at the loss, his legs sliding back, but concedes; craving simultaneously being able to give Andrew his body, and the need to wring every ounce of hot pleasure from this moment for himself, what he has so desperately, ardently, wanted.
He dips his head to Andrew's neck to create enough space for both his hands to tug the belt free. The next buttons fall easily, the undershirt untucked swifty. Small mercies.
Eddie swamps him again, in the brief pause of his movements, his mouth on Andrew's neck and the delicate, sensitive tendons, his own hands pulling at his workshirt, delirious when they get to the buttons. There's a frantic desperation at play, to get as close as they can to each other, and then closer than that. Skin to skin, cell to cell.
He has to keep fighting the arousal racing through his blood to recall what he was doing, where he wanted his hands to go exactly. This proximity had filled his senses with Eddie- the smell of his sweat, soap, and aftershave, canvas and smoke, snd the feeling of the small pocket of air between them that only exists when Eddie's hips recede, catch, and then roll back along his tense thigh, a wave of pleasure through his body.
Eddie seems to remember himself, his hand sliding around Andrew's neck to his collar, where he attempts to get the buttons undone, clumsy and shaking as his other hand grips Andrew's waist tight enough to bruise. He hopes it does. The first button pops through- Eddie exhales sharply, and then his breath comes in erratic gasps as he struggles with his sleeves. He yanks at his rolled cuffs, hissing frustratedly. The fabric is tight, Marine rolls, but slowly, inch by inch, unfolds.
Eddie's hips jerk upwards when Andrew pushes underneath his jacket to loop his arms around his waist for balance and shimmy his own shirt off his shoulders. It's flung to the floor without much care, the cold air prickling across his bare forearms. Even with his tee still on, he shivers. The fire barely heats the rest of the house. He tugs Eddie further up his lap for warmth, holds him still. His dazed flush creases into a frown, biting his wet lips as Andrew enforces the space between them. He just wants the jacket off, and a little peek.
"Come on," Andrew strokes his sides soothingly, "lemme see." Tight as stretched wire, Eddie complies. Barely. Andrew's hands roam his back- taught, coiled muscle and the stacked column of his spine that flexes under his hands. He brings his hands around, gliding over a million tiny scars, and Eddie's breathing gives out, his hand stalling across Andrew's chest and falling away. He lays his head at his creased collar, panting. His thighs tremble. He whimpers.
Andrew sneaks a hand down to his slacks- frayed edges and soft material- and lifts up his undershirt. His hand molds to his waist, velvet soft, shuddering violently as he gasps for breath again. Eddie shifts back, just enough, for Andrew to run his hand along his obliques, sleek stomach, fine hair on his navel. His hand goes up, and he tips his head as he moves, searching for rib number seven, and Eddie's black, dark eyes. Eddie keeps a closed mouth kiss pressed to his lips. Refuses to part, his breathing shallow. He can feel his restraint, like a dog straining at the leash.
Andrew's right index finds it first, a lump of hard bone under supple skin, while his left hand strokes a ridge of mangled scars, then settles on his waist to keep him still. He squeezes. Eddie exhales shakily, the kiss hitching when Andrew's hand ghosts the scar that nearly killed him. Then his fingers press firmly on the fleshy part between them, where it must be, and Eddie gives helpless noise.
"You said it didn't hurt," he teases.
"It didn't," his voice is hoarse.
Eddie shifts, barely enough, jacket falling open to expose his torso. Andrew lifts his undershirt slowly, his blood rushing with a hot thrill as Eddie's breathing quickens impatiently, tightly, with each slow inch of skin revealed. Dark-violet with shadow, glistening with sweat. Between his ribs sits a small black crown tattoo- the one he's been dreaming off. The one from a distant, sun-filled tent; the one he got, years and miles away from him.
He pushes himself upwards to press a chaste kiss to Eddie's lips- and whatever he planned afterwards is thrown out the window. A feather-light touch of dry lips is all it takes to break something within him.
Eddie grips his hair tightly with a groan, desperately pushes him backwards and presses him neatly flat to the mattress. The pause to admire his body has driven him wild; his breathing comes in shallow, desparate gasps. A quiet begging noise against Andrew's neck.
He manages to get Andrew's tshirt off- an awkward, ungraceful struggle- but he doesn’t give Andrew any time to undress him. It’s over before it starts, and Andrew can’t even protest. Eddie’s hands all over him, his mouth on his, the smell of smoke and wool in the dark. Andrew manages to slip his hands under Eddie’s skivvy shirt, the buttons of his jacket clinking as it bunches and folds against his chest; he strokes a hand down his warm, naked skin, and Eddie gasps helplessly
He falls slack against Andrew’s chest; his wool uniform scratchy on his stomach. One leg folded to by his hip, the other stretched and tangled with his. He feels a buzzing sensation though his chest, when Eddie mutters something he doesn’t quite hear burying his face against his chest, something that sounds apologetic, regretful. Andrew shushes him with a kiss to his temple, tasting the sweat, and slowly, almost so Eddie doens’t catch him, sneaks his hand back to Eddie’s collar and lifts.
Breathlessly, Eddie raises himself enough to allow his jacket to be removed. When Andrew pulls it free, he manages to sit back with a huff, and carefull
“Don’t wanna ruin it,” he mutters. His belt is still on. Andrew isn’t honestly even sure if he even got his shoes off. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t comment. He lets Eddie fuss with his greens and press him back into the bed.
He can feel Eddie’s body better without the jacket; murmuring appreciatively as Eddie allows him to run his hands up and down his back, muscles bunching and tightening. He hasn’t got his breath back, but enough of his senses, to pin Andrew’s left wrist on on the mattress with one hand and slip the other under his waistband. Eddie swallows every noise he makes, quick and clever and playing Andrew’s body like a guitar. Andrew wirthes underneath him, pushing against the hand that holds his wrist still until Eddie’s grip slackens when he whines in protest, and Andrew can slip his hand down to tangle his fingers against his; pull Eddie flush to him and kiss properly. The angle’s wrong, the room is too cold without blankets. Eddie definitely still has one shoe on. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters; Eddie came home to him first.
///
They awake sometime past midnight, a tangled mess of limbs. Slats of moonlight stripe Eddie's back, his thin shirt clinging to clammy skin. Andrew strokes his hair as he comes to, twirling his fingers in his curls, tugging out each whorl and letting it spring back into place.
"Nicest sleep I've'ad in years," Andrew feels his voice- vibrating through his chest- more than he hears it. He hums back an agreement. All his heavy quilts and blankets across the years don't compare to the solid weight of Eddie on his chest, his arms looped over his shoulders.
"Dinner?" He asks eventually, once he's passed every strand of hair, and Eddie's breathing evens out worryingly back towards slumber. Andrew wonders if he has fell back asleep, but then he nods, and struggles to pry himself away to sit upright.
"Starvin'," Eddie agrees. He accepts clean clothes without complaint, throws his uniform into the laundry basket, but keeps his own undershirt on, leaves his shoes by the door.
The fire is still going, diligently shimmering away in the pit of embers. Their shadows track across the lounge, tripping over each other, until Andrew has to step away. The meagre offerings of his kitchen seem to be coated in a layer of dust. Stale bread. Bottle of whisky. Coffee jar. He has neglected his living for too long.
"French toast?" He throws the question over his shoulder, and Eddie slides up behind him to nod and rest his chin on his shoulder. He's always liked that he was taller.
He hasn't cooked it since college, and he could never afford as good a whisky as this then- generous pouring of it into the batter, the syrup, the glasses. Eddie clears the kitchen table as best as he can, shoving books and papers into an errant, unbalanced, mess, a landslide waiting to swamp them. Eddie sits while the bread fries, his gaze following Andrew around the kitchen; when Andrew returns it with a smile, he busies himself with studying the academic paraphernalia, clearing his throat.
"All this your paper?"
"Some of it," Andrew returns smoothly, amused at how Eddie still ducks from his admiration, until he notices Eddie's hand grasping the threaded handle of the omamori, still delicately resting, his lucky charm, on his books.
"Hell," Eddie scoffs, and then doesn't continue. He doesn’t press. The answer is firmly yes. Andrew wonders how to word the question, even when he’s sure of the answer. Eddie will have to at least visit his family before he decides to stay. Andrew pours more whiskey, throws the empty plates in the sink, wonders if they will stay up the whole night. He stares into the ink black of the yard, a dark mass of shadows melting under the glowing moonlight that filters through the cloud.
“Come lay down a bit,” Eddie’s voice doesn’t startle him, but shakes him gently from reverie. Whatever had interested him about the garden is gone. He likes his house better with another in it.
Eddie reaches for him on the couch, tasting of whisky and maple. He lays against Andrew’s chest, comfortable, happily basking in the warmth of the fire. It’s quiet, and Andrew could just lay there a while, reaching for the Faulkner novel sprawled on the coffee table. There’s a thin layer of dust on it too.
He digs his elbows into the cushions so he can wriggle further down and stretch out. Eddie goes with him, settling against Andrew, melting a little as Andrew turns his book down, pages bending, so he can rest his hands on the dip of his spine and read.
"I've lost my page,"
"Which is it?" Eddie mumbles.
"As I Lay Dying," Andrew thumbs through the pages. Each sentences seems to bleed into the next, unrecognised, "I'll have to start again,"
Eddie huffs in lieu of a reply, but for him, it's a full answer. His hand strokes Andrew’s side; eyes closed, his breathing even. He’s just a touch too tall for the couch, his knees bending so he can lay flat against Andrew. Midway through a page, he shifts himself to turn his head.
“You sure you’re comfy?” Andrew asks.
“Any clime and place,” Eddie sighs dreamily, valiantly clinging to wakefulness so he can reply, “jus’ keep talkin’, that voice of yours sends me right to sleep.”
So Andrew does, kissing his hair and telling him he’ll just get a few pages in, just lay here a while. Andrew goes to turn another page, his hands resting on Eddie’s back. He shuffles a little, rubbing his cheek against Andrew's chest. He shifts again, clearing his throat weakly, and then drops back towards unconsciousness. Amused, Andrew can only smile. Eddie’s even, steady breathing lulls him into a state of tranquillity he hasn’t felt in years. The minutes grow heavy. The fire burns low; Andrew’s hands feel leaden and sluggish, slackening on the pages, eyes dropping, until he falls asleep as well.
When dawn comes, its slowly. Cars idling in the icy street in the morning twilight, headlamps flickering yellow through the gap in the curtains.
He wakes to the chill, no sheets over him just Eddie. Dead to the world. His hands are still in his book on Eddie's back, fingers slotted between his current page and the page he meant to turn to. He should fold the corner over and put his book on the coffeetable so he can pull the blankets over them and go back to sleep. He should drag both of them upstairs to bed. He should, but he doesn’t.
He just lays there a moment. Shadows passing by the wall. It's quiet, not a soul to bother them, not a care.
A bird starts up somewhere in the backgarden, chirruping melodiously to the slow sound of bells twinkling next door. The breeze playfully brushing loose snow off the branches. Water dripping from the icicles that hang from the roof.
The first sounds of the thaw.
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