The breeze was bitter. If you could even call it a breeze. It howled off the Channel, comprised of the cries and desperation of the boys trapped across it. It was cold. Back in northern France it had started to feel like summer, the evening breeze light as it danced through the warmth left behind by the setting sun. They weren't in France anymore though. They had pulled out weeks ago, fleeing back over the Channel as the Germans advanced through Belgium. And the reality of the imminent defeat whipped through the air demanding to be felt by every soldier who had allowed it to happen. Gone were the quite twilights perched on the low stone wall that surround the makeshift airfield north of Paris where their growing losses easily drifted away over the gentle hills and the small village on the wisp of the tobacco smoke. It had been easy then to trick himself into thinking this was a repeat of the Great War. Germany acting as the aggressor. Britain standing by France, her colonies in close succession. Troops of their nations amassed on eastern French boarder, waiting. And at last, the advance through Belgium. Everyone had waited and watched then for the great dig in, where the infamous trenches of this war would be formed. What field would be fought over for the following four years. But the tanks had rolled closer and closer. There was no time to dig. And soon, as the British Air Force evacuated ahead on the ground troops, the winds had shifted.

"Sir." A young man appeared before him, boots together, back stiff, chin up, right hand raised against his brow in salute.

"Yes corporal."

"Command wishes to see you."

He dismissed the boy. "Just had to interrupt my smoke, didn't they," he said, holding a limp, un-lit cigarette between his teeth. Collins looked at him with an amused grin. The wind had snuffed it out each time he lit it. He had given up, hunched his shoulders in a pout and stuffed his hands under his armpits to shield them from the wind. Collins had suggested they go back in. He had agreed. And then they had both remained sitting right where they were.

"You going to leave me all alone to freeze out here."

"Write your girl a letter. Keep your mind occupied." He winked and walked off back towards the airfield where a mission was waiting for him. He was glad of that at least. It wasn't any sort of foolish heroism where he was itching to single handily turn the war around and send Hitler cowering into exile on the heels of Kaiser Bill. It was more about keeping busy, keeping his thoughts at bay, thoughts about all the boys that had already died, about all the boys pouring onto the beaches, hundreds by the hour, with no where else to go, about the looming day when King George would board a carrier and flee across the Atlantic just as Queen Wilhelmina had fled across the Channel. He had never fancied himself a 'for King and Country' kind of guy. The growing storm was changing that though. It was changing a lot of things.

"We're going back. Dunkirk," he said walking into the barracks. Collins looked up at him where he sat in his bunk. "Cover for the evacuation."

"How many of us?"

The thoughts swooped back in as the canvas roof rattled above them. Not enough. That was the answer. They were saving them, the pilots, the planes, the ammunition, the boats, what remained of the British war arsenal, to defend the island, the last great stronghold. And in some twisted bout of irony, that decision left those they were willing to gamble with worse odds, practically guaranteeing they would be sacrificed. He was a pilot though. They made their own fighting chance, commanders of their own war.

Collins nodded absently. His mind in some similar death spiral. He sat down across from him, on his own bunk, gave his shin a light kick. "O-five hundred."

"Here," Collins said, his eyes refocusing again and reaching for an envelope on the small table between their bunks. "I took your advice," he shrugged, eyes a little rounder, a little bluer than Farrier remembered.

"I'll make sure it gets there," he answered. He watched Collins watch him take it and carefully place it in the breast pocket of his jacket. He looked so young again. In France he had aged. In good way, grown confident and skilled, and into a pilot Farrier wanted on his wing. But now it looked like they had never left Dover, like he was back running classes and drills for the new recruits and Collins was among them, looking eager and oddly alone amongst his peers. He wanted to reach out and pull Collins into him, to hold him. Instead, he folded his jacket back over the end of his bunk and lay down. He watched the canvas roof ripple in the wind and tried to find comfort in the rhythm of the storm set on a course of destruction.

He couldn't stop the shake in his hand or the way his eyes darted back and forth over the grey stone walls unable to relax, desperate for stimuli. He could feel the blood pulsing through his veins, up his legs, up his arms, in the tips of his fingers and toes. They tingled and twitched and refused to give him peace, even in the dead of night. It left him exhausted and yet his mind raced turning closer and closer to delirium.

It was weird that way. The stutter of his engine, followed by its silence, hadn't unhinged him like this. His eyes had moved instinctively to the propeller spinning rapidly in front of him, the three blades blurred into one translucent grey whirl. And he had watched as the grey grew deeper, the individual blades forming out of mid air, like he was looking through the lens of a camera, stepping closer, bringing them into focus. He watched them slow, each blade taking seconds longer to pass in front of him than the previous. His breathing fell into their rhythm, slowing, as did his heart beat until the final blade remained in his sight. Still. Only wavering in the wind. He was no longer flying then. He was gliding. Down was the only direction he could go.

But there were others flying. Enemy planes in the sky poised to pelt defenceless soldiers below with bullets that would tear flesh from bone, children from parents, souls from this earth. Sinking further into his seat, he had banked, losing more altitude, steering directly into the line of fire. He had had one shot, one pass at the German Wulf and then he would have been too low and yet he had never been calmer. He lined up the shot, fired, watched the Wulf spin out of the sky, and realigned himself with beach, blackened by the uniforms of the thousands of waiting troops. At first that was all he could see, the sea of black stretched up to meet the blue sky. And he looked up then, away from the boys he could no longer save, up into cyan abyss that reminded him so much of the eyes of another. Another he had failed to.

It could have been both relief and horror when the mass of troops finally gave way to sand. He felt neither though. He remained centered. It was like he was back in Dover teaching the new recruits: find a runway, keep the plane level, check the hatch, lower the landing gear, hold firm, don't think about anything but grounding yourself. And then set it all up in flames.

That's the image that haunts him now, the orange glow of the of the fire burning through his plane. The German soldiers had emerged over the dunes, out of the night cast in black, the fire snatching up all the light and turning it to smoke. They yelled commands that he could not hear over the roar of the flames. He couldn't hear anything over fire. The waves crashing just beyond his feet, reaching for him, beckoning home, could have been on the other side of a desert. That was it. The new front had been drawn on the sands of Dunkirk and he had landed on the wrong side of it. He had followed orders, followed protocol, followed his instinct and conscious and he came through it in tact, body and mind, ready to accept his fate.

That fate refused to come though and now, now that he was captured, and locked in a cell with no hope of escape, now was when his mind began its tailspin to oblivion.

There was chatter down the cell block. "Letters," he heard, "The Red Cross." The shuffle of feet soon followed as men in other cells moved to their bar doors. Farrier's eyes blinked and widened. His hand raised to his chest, slowly, as if waiting for the second memory, the one where he had moved the letter to his pack, left it in his bunk, or Collins had taken it back. He patted the front of his jacket. The edges of the envelope pushed back against his fingers. He slipped his fingers into reached into the pocket and pulled it out. One of the corners was bent. He worked his thumb and forefinger over the crumpled point to flatten it, an attempt to repair what was broken. There was a chance of course, a chance Collins was still alive. The landing had been smooth and there had been hundreds of boats in the Channel. War was not the time to bet on chances though.

A guard walked past holding open a burlap sack. Farrier remained seated. The envelope wasn't addressed to anyone, not even a name. He smiled faintly to himself, part of him grateful for the error. It gave him the excuse to open it, read it. See his handwriting again. Maybe even hear his voice again. Maybe find some light in love Collins had expressed for the intended reader.

He slipped his forefinger under the seal and slowly pealed up he flap, carefully so that it could be resealed. He pulled out the piece of paper and unfolded it. The first word made him pause.

Farrier,

He blinked his sore, tired eyes over his name again and again in disbelief. The letters blurred in and out of focus but always returned to the same form. Farrier. His thumb reached up to touch the long-dried, ink. The letter was meant for him. He took a breath before reading on.

I know I'm doing this wrong. I guess I'm doing a lot of things wrong. I've gone and got myself killed for one. Or maybe that's what a soldier is supposed to do. It's hard to tell sometimes what they actually expect from us. To be heroes or bullet fodder. You would say it was both. That they use us like pawns for a greater reason but that any feat, no matter how small, could be heroic. That's why you're going to make it through this. It was always grey to you and you've long found a way to navigate it. A true Londoner, I suppose, used to the smog. I'm already beginning to feel lost in it. Sometimes I feel so lost that I think you are all I have left. Is that a second? Probably. I don't think you would think so though. Don't suppose it matters at this point. In a way though it should matter more than anything else. Why does this terrify me more than flying into enemy fire. Maybe because I know you'll be at my side in the air but may not once we're back on the ground. And that, Farrier, would be a fate worse than anything I could have possibly suffered. Maybe this is number three. Maybe I've gotten it all wrong. Maybe those nights in France, staring out over the little village, your eyes weren't scanning the cottages for the one perfect for us to grow old in. The answer to that by the way was the one by the creek with the apple tree and the blue door. Where the postman's wife lived. Do you think he'll make it back to her? Do you think she'll recognize him if he does? If he was like you, she would. You'll make it back, you'll make it home and you'll guide the way for all those around you. Because you never did anything wrong. Even living in all that grey. And that was always a comfort weather I was in the air with you or sharing a cigarette with you outside the airfield in France, watching your gaze settle on the house by the creek. Because if it was you I loved, how lost could I really have been?

Be with you is the skies
Always
Collins

The walls of the cell disappeared as he read. The unintelligible shouts of German guards were silenced. His eyes and mind focused solely on the messy scrawl. He could picture the shake in Collins' hand as he wrote it and that seemed to stop his own. When he finished, he read it again, and again, his thumb moving from tracing the letters of his name, to ones in loved and always, and finally to Collins' own, getting lost in the curl of the C and the loop of the Ls. He fell into a trance of sorts. The first peace his mind had known since his boots had stepped back onto the continent.

In another circumstance the letter may have tortured him, a profession of love too late. A young man gone from the world, his mind lost and in turmoil. And he was the answer, the answer to all of it. If only lined up quicker, shot quicker. If he had only dug a little further within himself he could have assured him that he wasn't wrong and he wasn't lost, he was right where he was meant to be. Those thoughts had the potential to drive a person mad.

Instead of suffocating him though, Farrier found it easier to breathe. Collins may have died in uncertainty but he no longer had to live with it. What they had shared, however fleeting and however subtle had been real. There was something grounding about that. Something hopeful. Something peaceful. Something that made him both want to survive and make it home but also made him okay with whatever fate the dark, damp cell had for him. His dog tags still hung from his neck but with his plane in ash it was okay to leave the fight to others. It was okay to look beyond his duty as a soldier. And now there was something to reach out to in the dark, a civilian life that had existed in brief moments between shared cigarettes and could one day, maybe, be found again. It was okay to look beyond the war. It was okay to look home.

It was okay to look towards the hundreds of boats that had been in the Channel that day.

The orange flames that burned his eyes subsided that night and gave way to a soothing blue, the blue of the cottage door, the blue of the clear, open sky, the blue of his eyes. And he slept then. The first night in weeks.