Chapter Text
The hour was late. About four, Freddie assumed, from the level of light coming through their small window, the distant chirpings of birdsong beginning to wake the world. The usual reminder that he needed sleep; yet it was only half an hour since he had returned to earth. The fires had burnt brightly that night.
He had pulled off another of his lucky flukes tonight. A well placed shot in the engine, glancing by that Messerschmidt so close that the explosion had left marks on poor Beaut. He landed giddy and ebullient, congratulated by one of the more tenured pilots on his unpredictability. It was funny- well, not funny but ironic to find after all these years that it was a useful trait after all.
The adrenaline had all but worn off by now. Yet sleep would not take him, it seemed. Fatigue pulled at his eyelids, dragged his body down into the mattress, yet even so he remained conscious. Of all of it.
His mind was divided into two halves. One half to fire in the cockpit, and some chargrilled corpse entombed in the English Channel. The other to a very potent and profound sense of longing. He was thinking of some words, a line from a song, a very dreary song actually and he couldn’t remember the rest of the lyrics, or the tune (though some would say those had never been his forte) to save his life. But that bit still rang in his head, the dreary woman as she wailed out “Oh friend of times much better. Of times much better than these.”
He did not remember its origins. Indeed, it was a nothing of a phrase, but it plagued him still, and since he would not think of his victory, would not be consumed by heat, the air fell cold about his arms. Nights like this were odious.
He sat up. From below his pillow, he retrieved a nearly empty packet of cigarettes and a little matchbox. Since he was unlikely to sleep, he saw no harm in it, and he lit the match against a bedpost. He smoked alone, hunched alone in his cramped little bunk as the other occupants of the room slept on. The moment was just one of the little secrets he had started to covet.
He wouldn’t be sleeping after all. He never slept on nights like this, and there were more and more nights like this. It made him feel old, which was very sobering, because he had never enjoyed feeling old, and indeed rarely did. He would never have understood it before, being so secure and unquestioning in his heart as to be settled anywhere and never be troubled by thoughts of the world beyond. In a way perhaps he was more infantile now, restless as he was. Like a child away from home, unsettled without the soft familiarity of its mother nearby. And he knew as well that if Teddy were just here, that if he could hold him, or be held, or even just smell his warm, clean body, he would be rooted once again, and could sleep soundly.
If he closed his eyes now, if he lay back and imagined, perhaps he would lose himself to it completely, and drift away for the bare hour and a half before he was once again roused. Perhaps. Or perhaps, he acknowledged unhappily to himself as he closed his eyes as a little test and found himself as awake as he always was, perhaps Teddy could not quite save him from this one.