AN: I am so sorry about this fic. From the bottom of my heart I apologise. I was reading WWI poetry and then this happened. The title is taken from line 30 of "Dead Man's Dump" by Isaac Rosenberg. (I wrote this very quickly by my standards, so there may be a few mistakes.) Reading my other fic "Eating Paper" first might be helpful because I mention an OC from that fic.
Quiet dripped like syrup into his ears. It was not the variety of quiet that buzzed in the absence or anticipation of life, and it had no hopes of being solely a placeholder for momentarily mute voices. This silence had expanded and devoured the words of men, and now it sat satiated, dripping its ugliness into Jimmy's wanting ears.
Boots squelched into his view and fed his famished hearing; but even then, the crunch and suck that they brought was of the same quality as the resented quiet. Jimmy watched the man pass, and noticed that his grey coloured hands clutched a bayonet and pressed its dagger into his mud spattered chin. Jimmy knew this long lost man, and he tried to speak, but salutations were expelled in a burst of liquid that slicked his face and tantalized his tongue with the taste of bullet. When no speech came, he tried to rise to his feet but was pinned to the swallowing mud by bodies with stiff grey limbs that hung over him in revolting angles. From his place amongst the fallen, Jimmy could only see the shoulders of his friend now as he made his slow promenade down the trench. It was paramount that he not lose sight of him; not again.
With a last burst of energy, Jimmy heaved himself from the men who were each other's burial, and, staggering on the uneven ground toward the bayonet bearing man, he overwhelmed the honey silence with a desperate shriek.
The man turned and shook overgrown brown curls from his distant blue eyes. Grey hands slackened, and the bayonet sliced his chin as it thudded to the ground. It spiraled on its end, silver glinting in the sun, before settling to the mud in a hush like that of bird feathers. Jimmy fell to his knees and paid the penance for defying the enforced quietude. Scarlet speckled his white gloved hands. He stared, uncomprehending. The man was rushing towards him and still the coughing wracked his body and wrecked his livery. His nice, clean livery.
Arms swept him into the air, and they staggered backwards into the rotting slats of their terrible home. Jimmy breathed the words that were unutterable into the man's cheek. Words of wonder that Denis was still alive when he knew him to be dead. Dead and grey like Denis's hands that held Jimmy tightly. But his face remained pink with exhilaration, and the blood that spread across it burst new and bright from slit skin.
"Jimmy-Jimmy. You mustn't panic. Remember what I taught you." Denis's voice didn't mar the silent sky but rather dripped with its tranquility.
"I-I haven't got them!" Jimmy panicked, scrabbling for purchase on Denis's sludge soaked uniform. "I gave them to you, and now I haven't got them!"
"I know. I took care of them," Denis held Jimmy's face in grey hands that felt warm to frigid cheeks. Pulling him forward, Denis's lips brushed Jimmy's eye lids, and then his cheeks.
A small, pristine box was retrieved from his breast pocket. Bringing both of their hands between them, he pressed the little package into Jimmy's trembling hands.
"Take care you remember what I gave you those cards for," Denis rested his forehead against Jimmy's and beamed.
For a moment Jimmy's world was all smiles and familiar breath before the buzz of savagery carried its jarring crunch through Denis's neck and coated the air with tang of iron.
They slid down the water logged wood, and Jimmy's distraught hands covered the entry point in an unsuccessful effort to stop the wet scarlet spilling from Denis. As if the bullet had pierced both throats, Jimmy couldn't make a sound. His mouth gaped over and over in a silent sob that stemmed his breath and sent his head reeling. He crawled from beneath Denis's grey body and hauled himself to standing by the walls of dirt and sagging wood. Jimmy looked down at Denis's face, which now held the countenance of the dead; the blood impossibly old and black, and his lips colourless and cold.
Pushing from the wall, Jimmy began the traipse down the trench. The packet of cards had decayed with Denis, and now the case crumbled and the cards slipped from his fingers, fluttering to carpet Jimmy's succeeding path. "That's a'right, Jimmy, you can go."
His journey went uninterrupted until he met the bayonet that lay across the path. His livery had changed to match the uniforms of those who surrounded him. It was his turn to carry the bayonet. The blade was clean and sparkled invitingly in the cloudless sunlight. As he stooped to wrap greying hands around it, a voice shred his precious quiet, "Kent! You're alive!"
Turning to make the voice's body apparent, his boot caught on a man's loathsome limbs and he fell; the trench tilted to reveal the expansive sky, sending his eyes into convulsions against the onslaught of sunlight. His head slammed into the ground, and the disconcerting rattle of his skull dispersed the sweet silence.
The man beside him was still alive, and his contented sigh at Jimmy's appearance was perfection in the hush. Jimmy turned his head to see whose companion he was now and was met with eyes of multitudinous blues and greens. The man's hands were settled over his chest, and his face was pleased, "Show us a card trick, Jimmy."
"I can't," Jimmy choked out, "I've lost 'em. I've lost me cards." Thomas' fingers tapped limply against his chest. They moved slowly and with an inquisitive probing, like earth worms protruding from soil to wave blindly in intriguing, and yet abhorrent, sunlight. Instead of soil, Thomas' fingers extended from a bloody mass that continued to pour rampant liquid the colour of Lord Grantham's best port.
"You're hurt! You need to go home!" Jimmy exclaimed, shaking Thomas' shoulder.
"What do you think I did it for?" said Thomas.
"No, wait-that isn't how it went! Thomas?" Jimmy pressed as close to Thomas as he could get and felt his own heart beat against Thomas' arm. "Don't leave me here-please." He crushed his face against the itchy patches of Thomas' uniform.
"You'll need your own," said Thomas, nodding down at his still wiggling fingers.
"I don't want to be like you," Jimmy cried into his sodden uniform.
"Then I can't do you any good. Go, Jimmy. Shhhh, Someones calling you."
"James! James! Get up! You're meant to be polishing silver, not lazing about," Carson's voice stoppered the last drop of silence.
Jimmy jerked away from the terrifying nightmare. "Yes, sir!" He brought a hand to rub at the indent a piece of silver had made in his cheek.
Carson turned to leave the room, shaking his head in disgust at the standards of footmen these days. "Wait, sir. Where's Thomas?"
"Thomas? Who told you about Thomas?" Carson asked gruffly.
"What!" Jimmy sprang from his chair, "He works here!"
"I'll thank you not to take that tone with me, James. And no, Thomas does not work here anymore, and I've no idea how you know about him."
"What do you mean; where's he gone?" said Jimmy, more than a little panicked.
"He hasn't gone anywhere. Thomas Barrow died over four years ago in the Great War."