The first time I went to the recruiting station, I was fifteen and they laughed me right out, leaving me to puff out my chest in compensation for my smarting pride on the long walk home. When I was sixteen, I had a beard, and those same men barely gave me a second glance as they handed me a clipboard and had me write down my medical history. Back then, I didn't notice how tired the faces around me were, how desperation could sink into the skin through your pores until you could choose to ignore even the most obvious of things. At the time, all I thought about was being a hot shot, off to the mainland, off to prove myself a man.

How different, how much sharper, how much shorter a walk home can be when you've won where it counted. I smiled at a group of girls I knew, boasting as I passed, "you lassies are all in safe hands now, you're welcome, and you're welcome again."

"What are you on about now DeGroot?" Alice MacAra said, but she wasn't mean about it none. I liked Alice. I flashed my grin wider for her.

" Sapper DeGroot, reporting," I said, giving a lazy salute.

A little crease sprung up between her eyes, but Leslie Burns said, "well look at you all a bluster! They cannae have believed you were eighteen. They would have turned you right out."

"They did last time," I admitted, but it was with a puffed humility, one where you know exactly what soil you're standing on. "But a man's got to do what a man's got to do."

Leslie scoffed, but didn't contradict me, her eyes running me up and down in a whole new light of sunspot glory. It affirmed. Everything I'd already known of course, in the way only the young can know that they're so much more deserving of everything they've gotten. Deserving of respect, deserving of girlies' attention, deserving of renown.

Lo that I'd looked at Maysie Cunningham, the third girl they had with them, staring off into space while Leslie asked me if I was going to be a pilot since any Scotsman worth his salt wanted to be a pilot when it all came down to it. If I were different, less cocksure, drunk on my own boyish confidence, I could have noticed how Maysie thumbed the white flower she kept pinned to the front of her shirt at all times. Her eyes drifting far off the conversation didn't matter at the time, it wasn't relevant the flower was for Gus Brown, who'd been doting on her before he'd been shipped out last month. I'd known Gus even. If I'd just looked at Maysie I could have seen what an idiot I was being, my future laid out like a tablecloth.

But that'd be a different story than this, wouldn't it?

Instead I boasted, wished a bunch of fine looking girls farewell, and went home. Home, a little cottage away from things. Home, tucked far enough into the hills that the family profession wouldn't disturb the neighbors.

It's the family profession that'd left Da's face the way it was, shrapnel long removed and one eye a deadened white. Not so long though that the other had started to catch up, though, that he still didn't give it his best shot at things. He evenings at the kitchen table fiddling with wires and carefully measuring compounds as he squinted through the film, even as it all got away from him. He denied this with an unspoken yet unshakeable determination.

Home, where I witnessed that familiar picture as I passed through the kitchen door and flinched nonetheless. I hadn't thought he saw me, so I spoke. "I signed up."

"I know," he replied, not looking up. At my surprise, he said, "you went this same time last year."

"Ah."

I stood. He sat, and tinkered, and didn't grow frustrated when the things under his hands didn't move the way he wanted anymore. The way they used to.

"I'm…going," I said eventually. Amazing how everything a young man dreams up about himself evaporates when faced with silence from his father.

Eventually, he said, "she'll be home in an hour."

Ah. The and I'm not going to be the one to tell her as clear as a bell.

I nodded. I went out to the vast swath of meadow behind the house, where the hill was a gentle embrace of grass and wildflowers, inclined so mellowly that I wouldn't breath heavy when I made the journey back up. The sides made a bowl like that, a perfect little scoop, as though Fachan had reached down and taken a handful of earth and thrown it aside. To the west, and meandering a bit more, there was a place I could think of as mine. Maybe there had been other youngins who had found it once upon a time, maybe in its long history it'd belonged to lovers and heartbreaks and the imagination of poets, but for me the carpet of bluebonnets on the sun-facing side would always belong to me and me alone. I sat, the inline greeting my back, dots of azure surrounding me in the cacophony of the wind. I waited.


When it comes to that first night spent crammed in the barest cover while the enemy rained hell's own fires down upon you, no man preserves his boyish idolization of war.

Well, one man maybe, but this story isn't about him. It is about me, and my months, years, centuries, I spent with a rifle clutched to my chest and my back soaked with mud. We were given orders. We followed. We marched. We shot men and had our own lads shot in return and each of us clung to a bit of normalcy like sitting around at night talking about back home wherever that was. I liked them well enough. It made things manageable. I spent so long scanning their faces, wondering which—if any—of them had made the same choices I had to get here, had taken those risks. Which of these were just boys, too small in their Das' coats? I was truly alone when I decided none, not any of this lot.

By the end, when terrible nights made each of the faces staring across from me look infinitely young and infinitely terrified, I would decide it was all of them.

I wasn't good with the rifle. I was passable, we all had to be passable, but I wasn't one of the lads who could disassemble and assemble in under a minute. There was a comfort to mediocrity. Perfectly average. The only surprise I had in me was picking up a grenade that had rolled under our feet one day and chucking it back to hell and high heaven. They'd clapped me on the back, told me good job, because that's what you do after your mate just killed a bunch of people as long as they're people on the other side of the hill. I didn't get what they were so impressed about. I supposed they'd never trained with dummy grenades when they were kids.

They were the good sort. I thought so. I couldn't tell one commander from the next other than there was always someone saying go here shoot this , because it was always fine except when it wasn't.

"Oi. Dylan, c'mon, we got to move."

Dylan did not, in fact, move. I knew that, knew he wouldn't be again, but that knowing part was buried deep within all the numb of my outsides that shielded against grime and flecks of blood. The left half of Dylan's head wasn't doing a good job of being an outside. I shook his shoulder a second time, because he was the only one I could see, the only one I hadn't lost in the tumult.

It had been a joint effort, American and French forces converging with the royal army in an attack that had sounded vaguely like a good idea when it'd been explained to us. Now though. Now I couldn't tell if it'd been a trap or something had gone…or what. May this was just what it was like to lose.

" Move ," I said again. The body jostled, slid sideways, and was still.

The sound of bombs dropping, then screeching, then tearing the landscape. It deafened me briefly, and it was enough to finally make me follow my own advice and move . I grabbed my rifle and ran, not sure where, not sure whose commands I should be following, desperately searching for anything that looked like a remaining chunk of army in the fields of grey brown grey. On hand held my helmet in place as I clumsily stumbled over mounds and into death traps, every trench threatening to break a leg and leave me there to die when the next strike came. The whirring of planes came again. I half tripped, half threw myself into what would only be called cover to a desperate man, and put my hands over my ears.

The boom faded. Panic wouldn't describe me in that moment, more frayed nerves sparking like wires cut with a shoddy pair of scissors. Was I even running the right way? There was another body in this hole with me, and I shook it just like I'd shook Dylan.

"Please, please …"

I'd turned to begging, understanding I was the last man alive on the whole blighted plot of damnation, going through the motions even as I felt myself shutting. Which is why it scared me shitless when this body gasped and its eyes shot wide open.

"Christ," I yelped, falling backwards.

The not-quite-dead man jolted to his feet, even as bullets were whizzing mere inches over our trench. The collapsible shovel that had been forgotten in his unconscious grip now flipped open, shaping his stance to that of violence as he whirled on his surroundings.

He noticed me, flat on my arse, looking up in partial horror as the man in a dilapidated American military uniform stood silhouetted against an orange-and-charcoal sky. He pointed his shovel at me. "You. Private! Report!"

Even shouting, his voice barely made it through the ringing in my ears. "Everyone is- W-we need to get out of here," I managed to stammer. And go where? that statement begged, but my mind was still only half on and I sputtered, "fucking hell I thought you were dead ."

"I was not! I was. Resting my eyes."

A line of blood ran out of his ear down his neck.

Still, he only took half a second to assess the surrounding carnage before flipping his head to the west. "A total and complete disaster of an assault. Hm. Well, not time to waste. Let's march, private."

It wasn't the way I had been going, but. Fuck it.

I was terrified. I was lost, had lost, had familiar faces around me one second and the next I didn't. I was shaky hands on a rifle I barely knew how to use, and I was the sound of silence right before something terrible was about to happen. But, most of all, I was still a boy, and in that moment the one thing I needed most was a path to follow.

He screamed, "charge!" as he flung himself over the side of the trench.

And like that, I was sucked into his gravitation.


"Down!" I yelled, grabbing Jane by the front of the uniform and bringing us both to the safety of mother earth.

It'd been days since I'd found this one man in a sea of madness. Or maybe weeks. Sometimes it was like he'd always been there, or maybe he wasn't there at all, even now. Jane…Jane didn't feel entirely real. From the way he spoke to the way death and consequences simply shaped themselves around him, he was more like a hallucinogenic amalgamation of hyperbolized ideals of soldier-hood than an actual person. Some days I wondered if I'd made him up, just to cope with being stranded so many miles into enemy territory. Other days I thought well why not? and went to sleep uncaring.

Jane heeded my advice only briefly. Timing was a thing that had been drilled into me by necessity, along with her sisters caution and reverence. You forget any one of the three when handling The Bomb and you don't live to make that mistake again, so years of honed instincts told me to brace in the dried dirt for a possible secondary wave of shrapnel. Jane cared for none of that. As soon as my grenade had detonated, he popped his head over our cover, slipping his binoculars over his eyes.

"Oorah! Nothing but a crater. Well done, son."

Jane—with his young man's voice and still broadening shoulder—was barely older than me, and certainly not by enough to be calling me son. I never pressed it, though. In that voice was something else, something you don't mistake for a lad's false confidence. Something I rarely even heard from men three times his age; conviction . Conviction that made you believe things would be right as long as you kept marching on.

I slumped against our cover, pulling my pack protectively over myself. Here DeGroot, you're the expert at 'em, you hold onto the 'nades. How long ago had they said that? Shoved off the weight, but also the expectation that I was somehow more equipped than they were, that I'd get them the supplies when needed? I'd been carrying around the bomb bag ever since that day at the field. It weighed on more than just my spinal column.

"We…we should set up a few more," I mumbled. "As traps. If we're staying here for the night. I could rig up something like a tripwire that'll pull all the pins at once…"

My exhausted mind was fizzling with possibilities, falling back into old habits as I mulled over the most efficient way to blow a man up. It was all explosive radiuses and walking speeds and whether that patrol had seen us the other day-

Jane hesitated, then sat down beside me. A hand found itself on my shoulder. "I mean it, private. Good work. You've done enough for today."

"Enough," I scoffed. Like anything would ever be enough.

As unreal as Jane already was, he still found ways to surprise me sometimes. His name, for one, but I was half sure that wasn't even his real one with the way his gaze had shifted when I'd finally pried it out of him. I'd told him mine too, but he seemed to have forgotten soon after. He did a lot of forgetting. That might have been concerning if I wasn't so bloody tired.

Other than his name, the man was a mystery. Affection and bouts of clarity were scarce. The hand on my shoulder could have made me follow his advice of slipp just with the comfort of its rarity.

"How much further?" I asked.

"Few days," Jane said noncommittally.

"And then? You still haven't told me where we're going. Are we going to find your company? And I still need to get back to…" Somewhere. Assuming we weren't the last allied forces in the world, isolated from communications and orders.

Jane glanced away. "I can't tell you where we're going."

"Why the bloody hell not?"

"Because it's a…secret."

For the first time in a long while, I perked up, the fog lifting slightly. "A secret?"

"I am…on a covert mission." Jane gained more confidence as he spoke. "To. Kill Hitler."

"Really?"

The haze of exhaustion that had been following me since I'd met Jane—hell, even before that—lifted ever so slightly. I found myself getting excited. Every boy dreams about daring missions and heroic single acts that save the day; you wouldn't admit it to your mates, but you dreamed it all the same.

Jane nodded, as though confirming it for himself. "Yes. That is why I can't tell you about what I am doing or where I am going, and why no one else knows where I am, and also why I am out here alone. Secret and very legitimate mission."

"You're not out here all alone anymore," I said, knocking my boot against his.

He opened his mouth. I didn't know what I was expecting—not that he'd invite me to his Special Forces operation or anything, or that I could do anymore than what I was already doing following him around like a lost puppy. But it was enough to just be a part of it. To be more than another pair of boots on the ground. And Jane…there was something to his presence. It was a force so strong I'd forget I was taller than him sometimes, to turn to the side and see he'd been looming in my mind when I wasn't looking. His features were strong and jagged, and his eyes were the sort of clear-water blue you saw only in paintings. The few times he'd taken off the helmet, the sight of them had pinned me by my throat and taken my soul right there.

Jane closed his mouth. He said, "rest up. We'll move in a few hours."

More plans, more worries about who might be creeping up on us, but I forced myself to put those back on the top shelf. Instead, I said, "you need sleep too, mate."

"Me? I just took a nap three days ago! It was very refreshing."

I sighed, found my head dropping against his shoulder in exhaustion, and didn't bother to move it.


It'd seemed so close.

Those days, those horrid, final days held no clue to their innards. It was more trudging, a bit more killing—

(Jane was good at killing. It'd be minimizing to say I didn't enjoy the mechanics of the family trade, but the killing itself…there were things I learned from Jane that I couldn't have learned anywhere else. I came to love his art, and the way he loved his art too.)

—and then the impossible. A collection of friendly forces, camped, entrenched, safe. Jane scanned them through his binoculars over and over again at my insistence, not daring to believe they were real after the horror we had found ourselves in. But there they were. Within reach.

"Fuck," I said, slumping over my knees. "Don't think I've ever been happy to see the union jack."

We were just picking each other's brains on how to approach without them thinking we were charging enemies, when the bombs started to drop.

Like cirein-croin stalking an innocent sea-maid, the attackers were drawn in by the bountiful target, the once empty plain screaming with engines in a matter of seconds. We were nothing in it all. A drop. But suddenly we were back in that hell from months again, and I found I couldn't hear myself screaming. Jane dug us a trench. Maybe. The prey part of my brain shouted hide hide hide so loud I could barely hear myself think let alone what my companion was doing. Within minutes Jane had excavated one of the old holes that had once been this battleground's pride and joy, tossing aside the dirt that had fallen in with the seasons as he kept one eye on the sky. He grabbed my arm and dragged us both under. An impact shook the earth so close I swore it had struck right where we'd been standing a moment ago.

We crammed ourselves in the shadow of an earth-wound made by tearing metal fingers, and plugged our ears.

"Hey, keep it together son."

I hadn't realized I was addled until Jane put a hand on my shoulder and kept me from rocking back and forth on the muddy excuse for a floor. My breaths came out in gasps, and it was so much worse than that attack when I had first met him, because then I hadn't been trapped, hadn't been boxed in just waiting waiting for the one strike that would eventually find us.

"We do not give in!" he kept saying. "America needs you strong; to give in is to hand the enemy their first step to victory, and we are not in the business of handing out steps! What are we, some sort of ladder company?"

I didn't correct for what would have been the dozenth time. Instead the panic took hold of me entirely and I said, "I can't, I can't, I can't keep going I-"

"That is deserter talk private! Just remember the respect your country will honor you with when you go out in a fiery blaze, taking every man in a thirty mile radius with you! Think only of our noble, gruesome demise, and how it will inspire a generation to-!"

"I don't want to be an inspiration!" I all but screamed over the noise. "Fuck, fuck, I don't want to bloody die ."

I thought of blue flowers and Mum at her knitting and Da quietly fixing something in his workshop and a small seaside town where nothing ever happened but also nothing ever happened . To give that all up because of something so stupid as thinking lassies would love a man in uniform, that I'd somehow be a man when I got home. I'd be nothing when I went back. I wouldn't come back at all, and if I did I'd be shrunken, broken. All because I didn't want to be someone who sat it out while the older boys went off to war.

Older boys. Because that's all we were, boys. That's all I was at that moment. I grabbed the front of Jane's uniform, forcing him to look me in the eyes. "You think it's going to matter?" I demanded of him. "If we die? Here? No one's going to write a bloody song about us, we'll just be another casualty report, another empty coffin gone home."

First that I'd ever seen, for the first time in his life maybe, Jane flinched. Flinched in the face of it all. He turned his head but I kept holding him, to meet those eyes that could cut like ice.

"If we die there's no mission, it means nothing we-"

The air exploded overhead. My fists curled tighter reflexively, pulling us together, and we stayed there as the heat and the bombs rained down. A scalding, burning sort of heat, that could no more describe temperature than the way my face found warmth in the skin of his neck. Cracks forming in an ancient gas vent, he broke, and his hands gripped the back of my uniform. There was he, and I, and our skin meeting skin as we tried to make the most of our last moments of wasted life.


"We need to go," Jane said in the first gap in the bombs.

I didn't want to. I didn't want him to be right, that this was our one sole shot to make it across the wasteland. Just wanted to curl into the dirt and let myself calcify until the sun swallowed the world.

"Now."

The silence was deafening. He put a hand on my shoulder. I urged myself to stand.

We were halfway across when hell came home again. The distance left was meaningless, as there was no way back now, only forward, and I wrapped shock around my mind like a protective blanket. Just keep moving. Just keep staring at Jane's back.

A story ends when a bomb drops too close.

To the left of me, the ground was liquefied, and as I went flying in more pain than I'd ever felt, all I could wonder was if Da had gone through this exact thing. To have it all turn on you at the worst possible moment. I laid in the mud and decided he must have, and every DeGroot before, in a third law of physics sort of way. Like Wayland at his smithy. Arachne at her loom.

"Tavish!"

Jane's voice was hoarse, choked by the smoke that surrounded us. It came closer, but even when his arms slipped under mine and he began to drag me out of the pit, it wasn't close enough. A layer of warbling fog between use as he demanded I keep moving, a tall order as anything.

My whole body screamed in pain. I tried to lift myself, speak as another bomb came down so close, but even moving my jaw sent fire up the side of my face. My vision was red blood and endless black.

"We need to go," he shouted, as though underwater. Might as well ask a mountain to nicely step aside. When I replied he cursed, then swung my upper body over his shoulders. I screamed as weight pressed against my wounded side. "No, you're coming with."

I didn't know why he said that. I still don't. I never asked him about that day, as he carried my barely-living body across that last half kilometer to sanctuary while the very air tried to kill us. Maybe I'd been screaming for him to just let me die.

If so, I never properly thanked him.


Waking isn't like they make it sound in the stories, with a gasp and a head laid back on a clean pillowcase. It is fighting. Fighting so hard you lose track of time, waking, then sleeping, then waking again and wondering if that first 'awake' was real or if you just dreamed it. Life came back to me in parts, finding out that it'd been months since my 'insane friend' dragged me back here.

And the war was over too. That was a real kicker. I wondered, vaguely as I laid back and tried to fight off unconsciousness, if Jane regretted spending the last moments of the World War hauling my sorry arse out of a hole.

The first time I could move my arms, I did something I'd been dreading ever since I'd first pulled myself from the reaching darkness into the blinding light of the field hospital. My hand cautiously felt up the side of my face, touching the bandages there. I didn't have to ask a nurse to know that my eye was gone—not just whited-over, but removed entirely. The side of my being that'd been facing the impact was lacerated, barely functional, and to rub salt in the non-proverbial would I slid a hand down my leg to feel it end abruptly at the calf.

I groaned. If I could fall further backward against the bed I would, but sitting took too much effort. Instead, I marinated in shock, listening to the sounds of the hospital shutting down, the reports discussed loudly in halls, the arguments about how to get us all home.

"Oi, s-sir," I said one time when an officer came close enough that I could grab at his sleeve. "The one who brought me in…the American sergeant…where is he?"

He snorted. "Right. Him. First of all lad, he's not a sergeant. We've been on the wire with the Americans and they don't know who the fuck he is either."

My guts, barely kept in place as they were, writhed in knots. " What? "

"Whole bloody mess," the officer sighed, blowing air enough to move one of the sweat-stiffened locks on his forehead. "If he's a spy he's a strange one, as no one has any record of him in their ledgers, or proof he's a citizen let alone served. We're trying to arrange some way to send him back so they can try him for…whatever law he's broken, I don't know."

"But he's." My mouth was dry, from days of water and prune juice in tiny cups. "He's special operations. That's why they wouldn't have a record of him."

The officer gave me a look of such unimaginable pity, that it finally hit me. I swallowed, sitting back, the horror of my idiocy crowding out the pain that always hung at the edges of my periphery. And so when the passing man left, the world's biggest fool lay in bed and closed his eye.


I practiced long, moving about on the crutches. It was almost easier than re-learning how to see with no depth perception, though several times the issues did compound and left me clattering into walls. Easier, since they kept saying I could get a fake leg eventually, that right now I just needed to rest and heal.

But the eye though. There was nothing to be done for it. This was as good as it was going to get.

I wrote letters to Mum and Da. I cried a lot reading the ones they sent back. It wasn't so bad. Lot of the lads in the beds next to me cried a lot too.

The months stretched, and the hospital was almost completely decommissioned now, only a few stragglers who they hadn't arranged to send home. I found that same officer, the one who knew the most about Jane.

"I want to see him," I explained for the tenth time.

Lieutenant Hill, having been worn down by a DeGroot's stalwart determination in doses of acid-tinged weeks, took off his cap and rubbed at his thinning hairline. "You're the worst thing that's ever happened to me, you know that lad?"

"Aye, I've been told that a lot."

Hill slapped his cap back on and gave a look like his fillings were trying to bore out of his head. "Fine, but none of this comes back on me."

"Of course not, sir."

For as long as we'd been there, Jane had never tried to leave. Only with the padded layer of retrospect could I see that was odd; for of course I'd never felt the need to leave that hospital, abandon those I'd fought to get back to. But Jane had been, technically, a prisoner. If I'd wondered at the time, I would have assumed that with the fighting stopped his journey could never end the way mine had: returning where I was supposed to be. But now. I wonder if that wasn't all it was.

When I stood with him for the first time since death had greeted us both on that plain, it truly seemed like there was nothing to keep him from leaving. A prisoner was a poor descriptor. (As Hill had lamented: simply no one knew what to do with him.)

Jane wouldn't meet my eyes eye.

"You weren't on a secret mission." It didn't need to be said, not with how he frowned, let the still-present helmet wobble over his features as he turned away. They'd tried to take it from him. It hadn't gone well. "What were you doing? Really?"

"Earning my stripes," he growled.

I sat. Standing with one leg grows tiring, crutches or no, and they'd provided him a few chairs he'd never bothered to use.

I scowled until his defensiveness turned to shame and he faced his hands. "I didn't mean to…"

"I honestly believed it," I said. "That it was special somehow, something bigger than us. Lord how much I wanted things to matter -"

He reached, like he was going to touch my shoulder. I wanted him to, badly in that moment, this man I had followed through hell on a delusion because I'd been that desperate to believe in something. He stopped after barely a second.

"I am. Sorry. Tavish."

I'd thought I'd hallucinated that, when he'd called my name after the bomb came down. Convinced myself I'd never been fully real to him. It was my turn to glance away. "…Thank you. For saving my life."

Then. Reaching again. Stopping near my chair as he looked me over with something much deeper than regret, a profound hesitance, fear of me maybe. I lifted my good hand and put it on the jut of wrist bone beneath his skin, lean from the years on rations. He lunged forward and hugged me.

"I am sorry," he said again, so close as I seized in surprise. "It was meant to be just me who had to go through it. You…you were not part of the plan."

I never am , but didn't say. Instead, "you're coming back with me."

"...What?" He pushed himself off my shoulders.

"To Ullapool," I said. "Everyone around here is dying for someone to take you off their hands, and if they do find some way to send you home the big wigs are just going to lock you up for stolen valor or something."

"My valor was earned , maggot-"

"Jane."

He stopped, just short of me losing him again. Unbeknownst to me, it'd already happened dozens of times in those months, when he'd considered slipping out the window and disappearing into the wilderness again. But he'd made a choice not to leave. To not leave me.

And so he said, "fine. But only until this all blows over"


"I think Mum likes you," I said.

We were in the grasses outside of home, the bluebonnets had come back again, just like they had for every season. Generation upon generation, fading and growing once more.

"She threw one of your fancy, wall-mounted cartoon bombs at me," Jane complained.

"Aye, but she missed , didn't she?"

"She's blind."

"She can still hit a pillock on his oversized helmet if she's truly radge with him."

We lapsed into silence, our back against warm grass, the sun on our shoulders, lifted just so by the incline. My crutches were by me, bending down stalks like the softest of beds, but I wouldn't be needing them for much longer hopefully. Da knew somebody who knew somebody. The tradition of losing body parts encouraged one to accrue a backlog of unspent favors with those sorts of professionals.

"Mr. Ross down at the food market says he needs someone to sweep up every now and again," I informed Jane when the thought came to me. "Though, if he's gone so far as to admit that, it probably means the old place is actually one melted ice cream short of falling apart."

"I don't need anyone's charity," Jane grumbled.

I shrugged. "Then actually do the sweeping instead of just pretending to. Doesn't count as charity then."

A few minutes. The wind sprung so wildly that if the bluebells were real bells we would have been in the epicenter of the most beautiful choir known to god or man. I rolled until my face was pressed into his shoulder.

"Alright," he said.

We'd never spoken of what had happened in that foxhole. When the world was ending and all we'd wanted in our last moments was a flicker of comfort, a brief sharing of misery that can only truly be known between two people who have resolved to die together. A time when wandering hands had gone further, pushed past the limits of what either of us had ever fathomed. Had become more, and then more than that. We'd never spoken of it, no, but when I reached over and turned his mouth towards mine, it proved that it'd never truly left our minds.