Chapter Text
—
1896
It was a chilly dawn in April 5th, 1896, but none of it registered to Henry Schofield, who was pacing up and down the hallway just outside the closed door, or to Elizabeth Schofield, who was squeezing the bedpost and crying on top of her lungs as she pushed for the baby for safe delivery.
It might have sprinkled a bit in the morning, when the sun was barely peeking from the far end of the horizon, but none of it mattered. Because none of it could eclipse the bright smile etched on William Schofield’s face as he stared into his mother’s eyes, his cheeks rosy and his smile toothless.
Of course, it would be very natural for the young couple to be blinded by the simple smile of the little one—Henry and Elizabeth Schofield, very much in love, was barely of age themselves when they married, eyes glistening as they stared into each other on the aisle, vowing to be one—but the midwife noticed it.
The other girls from the village who had been helping her delivering the baby had gone downstairs to fetch some water and clean clothes to clean the mess, but for a second, the old woman could’ve sworn she saw the boy's eyes flashed. It wasn’t a blinding flash, although the parents would beg to differ, but under the shadow of April shower that morning, there was no mistaking that there was a glow emanating from the baby's eyes.
When she blinked, however, it was gone, so the midwife paid no mind to it.
—
1906
William—or Will, as how he usually went with these times—grew into a very sweet boy of ten years old.
He was quiet and a bit reserved, always steered clear from conflicts, and was gentle and caring and awfully protective of her two younger sisters, Mary and Elsie. He worked hard for school and during the weekends he could always find the time to help Elizabeth in the bakery even though the young woman always ushered him to go outside and play with his friends. He was relatively clear of any history of troubles, compared to the other boys in his school, except of a handful of times when he punched some boys for trying to kiss Mary as a part of a dare. He was an honest boy and he had relatively no trouble admitting to his mother that he hated being a thin and gangly boy who was too tall for his age the first time he went home with a bruise on his cheek.
But Elizabeth just wished she could get to know her first and only son better.
Of course she knew him, Will was never the kind of child who would hide things from her—she knew he was aware of the fact that she would always love him, all of her three children, whatever happened—but there were times when Will seemed troubled, Elizabeth wished he could only tell what was wrong when she asked him instead of flashing her one of his beautiful smiles, dodging the question away.
It didn’t help that he stopped lying to her, telling her that he was fine, the following months after they discovered that Henry Schofield wasn’t going to be home from the Second Boer War. Forever.
So she would usually just gather him into a hug and kissed the top of his head until he wriggled out, groaning playfully as he insisted that he was alright.
Because unbeknownst to the young mother, the boy himself couldn’t describe it.
—
1910
Will couldn’t place a finger on when he really started hearing those voices.
It was some time ago that he finally accepted the fact that he probably had started hearing the voices in his dreams from a very young age, forgetting them as soon as he woke up, before it finally permeated into his waking moments. He never really knew who it was, but it wasn't until he was fourteen that he realized what the voice had been saying.
He needs water!
Will blinked, the sight of his friend pushing back into focus as he snapped out of his reverie. “Will! He needs water! Get me your bottle!”
Will complied, although he retrieved his bottle from his school backpack a little too slowly, his mind trying not to short-circuit at the revelation. The boy in front of him, Matthew, was helping another boy, Richard, who had a cut on his chin from where he landed on the pavement, flesh raking into the ground and collecting dirt. He was on his way back home from school with his friends and there had been a fight about some nonsense about a girl that Will didn’t really understand, but the quick instinct that jumped into action as he pulled Richard away from the fight quickly dulled as he heard the words.
He needs water!
Matthew barked something at him, probably because he was moving too slowly, before snatching the bottle himself, pouring the contents on Richard’s chin. “For god’s sake, stay still Richard, you can’t have mud on a cut as big as that!”
Every was dull and silent and roaring and loud at the same time in Will’s head. He didn’t register his surroundings until he closed the door to his room, his back sliding against the cool wood and his mother’s questions from the kitchen went unheard.
—
1914
Will stood in front of a simple desk, a group of boys and young men bustling behind him.
He hated doing this. Not a lot of his friends had a family member swallowed by the horrors of war, as how it was evident from the way the lot of them was too eager to sign up to fight for the King and country even though they were barely sixteen years old, but Will knew. More than that, he understood—the impact that it would do to his mother and his two younger sisters. But to say he could easily dodge the pressure from his friends and neighbors, and the tiny voice pushing him to do his part to defend the country, with his views would be lying.
So here he was, standing in the queue, finally his turn to face the officer on the desk. The older man asked how old he was, and he lied through his teeth.
“Nineteen, sir.”
The man looked up, and Will widened his eyes in pure shock as he saw the man’s eyes flashed golden for less than a second, his breath knocked out from his lungs as he staggered backward.
“Oi, you alright mate?” a young man, who was next in the queue and was standing quite close behind him, asked, holding him steady. Will looked at him and was scared to see that the man didn’t even seem to register the unnatural event that he just witnessed. He slowly regained his composure as scanned the crowd around him, each man looking absorbed in their own business— how could nobody see that?
“You’re eighteen, boy, it’s not your time yet. Next!”
Will walked out of the building, feeling a wave of relief that was too confusing. As he stood there for a moment, calming his beating heart, he noticed a few more boys walking out of the building, looking pissed that they didn’t get the chance to fight.
The officer knew he wasn’t nineteen yet, even though the physical difference wouldn’t be recognizable for a gap as small as one year, and he knew all those boys were too young too. His words rang in his ears. It’s not your time yet.
—
1915
It was the same officer that accepted him the following year.
Will hadn’t been sure about it, a lot of his friends and neighbors were now dead and his family had insisted on him not to sign up, but as his eyes connected with the officer’s, a silent understanding passed between them. When the man’s eyes flashed golden once again, he found himself not feeling scared, but certain.
He received the message. This was what he was meant to do.
—
1917
It was the only feeling that he kept close to his heart.
Through the shells, through the deafening bombs, through the piss-soaked handkerchief he clamped tightly against his nose as the trench was flooded by chlorine gas, through the artillery attack and the shrapnel pieces raining down on him, through rain-soaked earth, through blood, through bullets that narrowly missed his helmet from snipers from the other side of no man’s land. But also through hunger, through bites of lice and invasion of rats, through the rain that froze him to near death and infection when the trenches were drained, through the boredom of waiting on the backline with no mail and nothing to eat, through the latrines and the sound of dying soldiers that he helped carry on the stretchers, begging him not to let them die.
To say that war was a cesspool of insanity, a whirlwind of unending terror and boredom and the guilt for alternating between both, was truly an understatement.
A little under two years since he signed up, Will was really ready to give up, until he heard it.
“Sho—Schofield? Did I get it right? Lance Corporal Schofield?”
Will looked up not so much at the mention of his name as much at the voice that wormed itself into his head. That voice—
The soldier before him suddenly turned back, looking at the sky behind him as though he expected to see a German aircraft in the sky rain bullets on them, legs already adopting the pose to enable him to jump. Will rose to his feet just as quickly, his hand already on his rifle and his feet ready to jump for the nearest cover.
“What is it, what is it?” Will asked, his voice rasping from dry throat. There were only the two of them in this corner of the line, and Will was ready to sprint to tell his commander of the threat.
But then the soldier before him them relaxed before turning back to him. “God, sorry, I thought there was something in the sky. Must be the trick of the light, though, saw something flashed in your eyes.”
This was the first time his brain nearly short-circuited since the day Richard Kent cut his chin on the pavement.
Everything about the soldier standing before him screamed new recruit —his build, his rosy cheeks, his demeanor and the fact he couldn’t stop talking, his youthfulness, the uniform on his person that Will would bet hadn’t seen the horrors that he’d seen, the lack of callous on his hands, the fact that he didn’t look like the war had cut some ten years from his lifespan, the generally clean and prim state of his person and belongings—and yet there was something about his voice Will couldn’t put a finger on. Something familiar about his voice—
“They told me you’d be here, so there you go. Got yourself a mail.”
There was something about his voice—
But that couldn’t be. There was nothing about this boy that didn’t betray the fact that he was a nineteen years old, if not younger, new recruit. There was no doubt he hadn’t met this chap before—so how could any of it be familiar?
“Blake, the name’s Blake.”
—
Blake turned out to be a very nice company.
True, sometimes he talked too much and was a bit insensitive, asking about the Somme and Ypres when all the men in the regiment would rather erase the words from their heads, and sometimes they could all do with a bit of silence to rest during the afternoons, but he was funny, never short of hilarious stories to tell, and quite frankly, he was the epitome of what it meant to be human. A reminder for him to stay sane in the middle of the war.
One couldn’t really choose one’s companies in wars—everyone was each other’s brother—but there was something comforting in working with Blake. Carrying the rations with him, helping the wounded with him, digging the bloody earth with him, even though the task used to bore and tire him to death.
One day, as they sat on the slightly damp earth in the backline, playing chess with rocks as makeshift chess pieces to kill time, he correctly deduced that Blake had an older brother.
“How did you know?” the young man asked in the middle of a chess game, astonished. Will only looked up and offered a small smile before he moved his rook, cornering Blake’s knight.
—
And so Will found himself leaning against a tree and drifted off to sleep in one of the rare afternoons where Blake was too tired to tell him the stories about how Evans woke half the trench up upon finding a rat in his pants or how Davies broke the latrine pole and sent his five of his comrades into the muck.
But then he heard Sanders woke Blake up, telling him to take a man and follow him.
It felt almost natural that Blake would offer his hand to him, would choose him to go with the young man, but then something happened as their palms touched.
A weak current seemed to flow from Will’s fingertips, tingling the base of his arms, but he ignored it. He’d been having some of these inexplicable and strange occurrences around Blake for a while now that he was able to brush it off as nothing in the face of the real absurdity of the Great War.
They walked down the trench to follow the Sergeant, Blake getting chatty as usual at the news of Myrtle having puppies, and Will wisely refusing to participate in a bet with him with enough healthy common sense, being the more sensible of the two.
—
The first time he realized it, he put his hand on Blake’s arm immediately, almost instinctively. Something just dawned on him—a feeling he couldn’t quite describe, something foreign and familiar at the same time, a tingling sensation in his bones that told him it was his job to look out for the younger man beside him, more than any other times. Something akin to the understanding—or dare he say it, the accepting of fate—that he felt as he finally signed up to do his part in the Great War, bravely leveling his gaze on the recruiting officer in front of him. Blake stopped climbing the ladder, retrieving his arm from where he was about to grab hold of the parapet to heave himself upwards.
This was it, this was what he was meant to do.
“Age before beauty,” Will said in a low voice, before climbing up the parapet himself.
—
“No, NO!”
And then a deafening explosion.
It happened in less than a fraction of a second that Will was not able to register anything.
But there was something. Someone. A voice, a familiar voice, a voice he had been hearing ever since he was a child. A tug. A faint feeling of his own body being pulled upwards, dull enough that he thought he was dreaming, that he was not inside his own person. A voice, a shout, a tug on his soul —
“WAKE UP! UP!”
His lungs convulsed and he retched, coughing out an awful amount of dust. He was alive.
—
The fact was Will could listen to Blake talk for eternity.
He might have never admitted it—and he really would never admit it, come to think of it, for the sake of other men who really needed the rest, Blake really didn’t need the encouragement—and he often dodged the prospect by saying he was not in the mood to listen, but the fact held true. He might have dozed off a few times during Blake’s endless stock of recounts, too tired to keep listening, but he loved listening to his voice. It was sweet, melodious, full of excitement and rich in hope, shining like a beacon with lights bright enough to pierce through the clouds in Will’s war-addled mind, reminding him of what was pure and what was human.
Gently caressing his soul like a lullaby, because, now he realized, he had been listening to it since he was a child .
And so Will found himself relaxing to Blake’s recount of how Wilko had lost his ear to a rat, of all things.
He had refused to listen to it at first, insisting that they kept their eyes fixed on the ridges for the oncoming Germans and kept their guards, but of course, Blake wouldn’t listen. And Will finally accepted it. They had set one bloody explosive just then, barely escaping the collapsing dugout in the process and nearly getting buried alive themselves, and had stood on open space for a long time. The fact that they hadn’t been shot then could only account for the fact that there was no one to shoot them—that was, if the Germans didn’t have more tricks up their sleeves.
And Will knew Blake was trying to make up for when they had a bit of an argument back then, so he let him.
And he laughed. First reluctantly, then appreciatively, and then genuinely.
The two aircraft they had seen earlier returned from the enemy lines, silencing them both.
—
There was a dull throb in his bones as soon as he set foot on the little house. He didn’t like the place.
He couldn’t decide what inflicted the particular thought—among the dead cows he spotted lying on the far end of the horizon, the cherry trees chopped down to rot, the dead dog he saw lying on the other side of the farmhouse, or the fact that the Germans just gave them miles and miles of land that Will couldn’t quite grasp his mind around—but there was something about it that didn’t feel right. As though there was some evil written on the walls.
“Anything?” Blake called out from the backyard.
Will concluded there was nothing in the area, and said as much to Blake, but he didn’t know if it was true.
—
He knew he was wrong when he heard it. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew something big was about to unfold.
This was the only time he hated hearing Blake’s voice, even though his voice and these particular words were something he had been listening to since he was a child.
“No, get him some water, he needs water! ”
Will couldn’t take his eyes off Blake, his breathing stopping and his heartbeat stuttering. There was something, something —
He didn’t want to look away from him, he didn’t want to let him out of his sight— how could he had heard this since he was a child —the gravity of the situation was pulling him into the earth, swallowing him whole, snatching his consciousness years into the past before throwing him back into the present in less than a second—something was wrong and he didn’t know what and he didn’t want to lose sight of Blake—
But he complied, and never had tearing his eyes from Blake felt so painful.
Because that was what he embodied. That was what Blake was the epitome of in the midst of this war—humanity. In the most important moment and revelation of his life, Will would not betray what Blake represented in his life.
Blake, Blake, Blake —
Before he regretted it.
“Stop, STOP!”
Will’s neck snapped to Blake so quickly it was a miracle he didn’t sprain it. Before he knew it, he sent two bullets down the German’s body, killing him outright.
Both of them stood looking at each other, Blake’s hands working around the buttons of his uniform, and Will standing there stupefied, both knowing what just happened.
Blake fell on his knees first, looking more like it was at the sight of the blood and the realization of the wound more than the actual pain itself, and Will followed suit, kneeling beside him. His voice shook. God, god —he pressed the dressing onto Blake’s wound, hoping to stop the bleeding although the latter writhed in pain and threw him curses. He couldn’t lose him now, he was supposed to look out for him —he couldn’t lose him, he couldn’t lose him, he couldn’t lose him.
Blake was losing blood impossibly fast, the color draining from his person too quickly. Will was desperate—he’d do anything, anything , he’d lift him, he’d pull him up for as often as he needed to, he’d even carry his whole body himself in his own arms if he needed to, he just couldn’t lose Blake —
“Your brother! We have to find your brother!” Will cried, pleaded, begged . Warm blood was flowing out of the spaces between his fingers in a sickly rhythm with Blake’s beating heart that was slowly losing strength, and Will hated it— he hated it .
He couldn’t lose him, not now, not ever, not—
“You’ll recognize him,” Blake breathed, sending Will’s heart to the bottom of his abdomen.
Will shut his eyes, not trusting his voice to even debate it— no.
“He looks like me,” Blake said, panting, “and, he’s a bit older.”
And then his head lolled to his side, resting against Will’s chest. His breathing slowed, he stopped panting, finally giving in to the death sentence, and Will hated himself for not knowing how to instill the fight back into Blake’s heart. He was still frantically looking around for help—Aid Posts, nearest cover, anything —he couldn’t lose him, he couldn’t lose him for god’s sake—
The roof of the fallen barn behind them collapsed, eaten by the fire roaring from the burning aircraft, sending embers into the air. He noticed how Blake was eyeing them curiously. Will knew what it was—blood was no longer feeding his brain and he slowly forgot what just happened.
“Are we being shelled?”
Will looked at him. He’d seen countless of other soldiers dying, he knew what it meant. “They’re embers, the barn is on fire.”
It was painful to watch as Blake’s eyes travel to the wound on his abdomen, realizing that the pool of blood seeping through to his pants was his own, but it was yet more painful when he put his cold palm on Will’s own. So gentle and weak and childlike and pale and feeble.
When Blake asked if he was dying, it was as painful and agonizing for Will to admit that he was, indeed, dying.
Tears pooled on Blake’s eyes. He was crying.
So there was nothing else he could do except to offer him promises—a letter to Blake’s mother, the safe delivery of the message, finding his brother.
—
“Come with me, Corporal. That’s an order.”
Will had seen countless other men dying, a lot of them cradled in his arms, a lot of them clutching onto his person, a lot of them too young, a lot of them losing the heat of their body on his lap, and a lot of them holding his hand, but Blake’s death felt like something was robbed from his soul.
—
It was the only thing that filled his mind and burned through his being as he left the abandoned barn, on the truck to Ecoust, on the mud that trapped the wheels.
“We all need to push! COME ON!”
It burned. It scorched his being, it burned in his eyes that were threatening to spill angry tears, it torched his throat as he roared in his attempt to move the truck, and it glowed bright—
When they finally got the wheel out of the mud, half of the men filed back into the back of the truck immediately, looking quite pleased that they could continue their journey, while the other half looked slightly annoyed that the driver had opted to veer out of the road and got them trapped in the first place. No one paid any attention to him except one Sikh soldier who offered him a hand to help him stand.
“Back in. Get back in. Go.”
There was nothing he wanted more in the world than to just continue his journey, reaching Ecoust as fast as he could. He knew his emotions were probably written all over his face, but he couldn’t care less.
But unbeknownst to Will, it was not what caught the Sikh’s attention.
It was the literal flash in Will’s eyes, there for a second and gone the next.
—
When he hit the back of his head on the staircase landing, his last thought was his promise to Blake.
—
And it was the first thought that passed through his mind upon waking up.
And so he pushed his way through the city, with only flares to see and ruined walls for cover and luck to pray to.
He pushed his way through the city, through the painful throb on the back on his head, through the aching hole bleeding open on his chest because the lost baby girl in Ecoust reminded him of his little sisters and the young maiden reminded him of his own mother, through the weight of his webbing pulling him under the water as he vaulted down into the river, through the white freezing water roiling all around him and choking his lungs, through the fatigue that was slowly claiming his person as he sat listening to the eerily lonesome ballad—
Blake. Blake. Sixteen hundred men. Joe Blake, Colonel Mackenzie.
Letter.
Devons.
Blake. Blake...
“We’re the Devons.”
There was a dull ebbing in the liquid of his brain. He had trouble understanding it, accepting it. He was there .
The fire had burned too long. His flesh were singed and his sinews exhausted, but the revelation splashed fuel onto his being and cleared his mind. Will rose to his feet.
—
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of his heart beating as he made the decision.
Something dawned on him. There would be no time. These men had prepared to attack in a moment’s notice with lieutenants counting down the seconds to the attack and Mackenzie was still nowhere to be seen, the next man he asked always telling him he was further and further up the line. He had no choice, no time to deal with the bustling soldiers lining up the front line and knocking over him as he tried to push his way through, no time —
And so he climbed up the sloping ground that was the only protection for the front line.
He’d walk through the line of fire for these sixteen hundred men. For Blake.
—
Something tugged on his soul. He heard something behind him.
He realized it now. All the gentle tugging on his soul and all the strange occurrences he’d had throughout his life, all the voices and all the glows, all the gentle tingling in his bones and the inexplicable instinct in his gut. It took his stupid self so long, so bloody long, but he realized it now.
It all pointed to Blake.
But this, this was a different tug. Something similar but not quite the same—
Will knew what it was before he finished his train of thought. He knew who he would see as he turned around.
Lieutenant Joseph Blake.
—
1918
Funny how he went back to the insane and deranged cycle of alternating between terror and boredom as he went to his next battles without Blake on his side.
Will heard the deafening sound of the explosion for a split second, and then all was black.
And then—and then all was white.
—
1919
On the other side of England, a nurse gasped.
The head nurse barked an order to her, telling her to clean the baby and to immediately fetch her more clean clothes for the young mother. She complied, but she could’ve sworn she saw the baby’s eyes flashed for a second.
—