Chapter Text
For as long as Will could remember, he’d had the same dreams. He knew he should have called them nightmares, the smell of mud and fire and iron heavy, the ringing in his ears, the bodies, he knew all of that added up to nightmares, even as a child. But they felt too real, too visceral for that.
It reminded him of watching movies at the cinema, the screen so big that it filled his eyes and pulled him in so he forgot himself for a while. Only, instead of forgetting, he felt almost like he was remembering something—or at least trying to.
Some nights, it was the names of the two little girls who chased each other around the table, his eyes blank and filled with visions from some far, lonely place. Other nights, it was the lights trailing in huge arches over his head as he ran, trying to remember the way. But most nights? Most nights were spent desperately trying to piece together the same face: soft, flashes of blue eyes, dark hair, laughter ringing out.
Will knew that everything would finally make sense if he could just remember.
Laughter, blue eyes, then cries of pain, his hands warm and sticky, heart filled with panic, something deeper than that.
Why couldn’t he just remember?
It had been an abnormally hot August the year he turned seventeen, and Will had done his best to waste every damn second of it. He knew his parents were a bit worried about how much time he spent holed up in his room, nose in his books, searching, always searching, but it was too hot for even them to care about whatever he was getting up to. Will much preferred it this way, instead of being chased out to pretend like the other neighbourhood boys interested him at all—or, honestly, that they gave two shits about him in return.
Will had his books and his histories, and that was fine.
But nothing good lasted forever, he thought ruefully as his shoulder bumped against the bus window.
“Your granddad could use some company,” his mother had said, pretending rather horribly to sound casual, like she was only making a suggestion. “It’ll be cooler out in the country; some fresh air would do you some good.”
Slumping in his seat, Will scowled at the buildings passing by, wishing that there was ever a simple answer like his mother thought there was. When Will had told them of his dreams as a child, she had assumed that the therapy would make him normal again. When Will hid away from the world, she made it out as if he simply needed to smile more for the people his own age. It was bollocks, but Will was always a little too tired to care anymore. Years of carrying so many ghosts on his shoulders did that, he guessed.
But, as much as he hated leaving his safe corner of the world, he didn’t hate his granddad.
He’d always liked the smell of the cherry trees that bloomed in the garden out back, liked the little trinkets around the house from his life, liked the history etched into his granddad’s face. If he closed his eyes, Will could almost believe that life was simpler there, sitting in the parlour watching the light chase the shadows across the framed photos on the walls.
It was honestly just dealing with the rest of the world to get there that bothered Will. He hated buses, trains, planes, all of it. The crush of bodies around him, the press of so many faceless people, it made his throat close up with some unnamed feeling that tasted like so many dreams he’d had. Dreams that left him panting and kicking off his blankets, ready to run, ready to fight.
Will was lucky today, though, the bus mostly empty around him. There were a few people seated in front of him, yet his eyes hovered over the young boy, maybe thirteen, sat a few rows ahead of him. His hair was dark, but Will knew instinctively that it was the wrong colour.
As much as he hated crowds, he could never quite stop himself from scanning the faces around him. Searching, always searching.
His granddad lived just outside the city, but it was fast encroaching, the borders pushing further and further out as people tried to carve out the land. Still, it felt like the country in his mind, so maybe that was good enough. Will’s footsteps were slow, sluggish under the humid sun. He held his book with only his fingertips, hoping not to crease the pages with his sweat.
When he reached the house, his granddad was sat out back, watching the trees and flowers waving in what little breeze there was. “I was wondering when you’d arrive,” he said as Will set down his book on the little table next to his abandoned tea cup.
“Did mum ring?” Will asked, tucking his hands into his pockets and watching the now leafy green cherry trees. There was always something to remember.
“No, I just had a feeling,” his granddad replied. He stood slowly, popping his back into place before shuffling into the house, not bothering to beckon Will to follow. The curtains were drawn over the open windows, making the house slightly cooler and dark. There was a silence that Will felt here that was hard to explain, like something inside him that was constantly circling like a hare in a trap could rest here. This house had been in his family for so long that it felt like maybe a part of him lived here, too.
Will followed his granddad to the kitchen where he was pulling a bowl of cherries from the refrigerator, and setting them carefully next to a box on the table. There was something about it, something about the shape or the smell or something that made Will freeze in the doorway. Eyes wide, heart thumping loudly in his ears.
“What is that?” he said, his voice almost a whisper.
“Something that I’ve been meaning to show you.”
His granddad pulled out a chair for Will and sat down next to it before gently lifting the top of the box. Will approached slowly, knowing that his fear was irrational, but still unable to fight it back.
“This was my father’s,” his granddad explained, pulling out a small velveteen box. “From the war,” he added, a bit uselessly in Will’s opinion. Where else did old men get their medals from than ‘the war?’ “My father was a bit of stoic man, a bit sombre, so I heard very little of what he went through. But he gave all of this to me, trusted me with it, and I’d like to trust it to you now.”
Will now stood at his granddad’s shoulder, finally able to see the few contents inside the box. Besides the velveteen case, there were a few trinkets—old ID tags, a faded blue box in pretty stamped metal, a stack of letters tied with twine, an old uniform folded neatly, and precious little else.
“There isn’t much here,” Will commented faintly as he reached out to trail his fingertips along the dusty uniform.
His granddad chuckled as he pulled out the blue box. “No, but he said that there was very little worth remembering of those times.” Gesturing to the chair again, silently asking Will to sit, he continued, “I wasn’t around before the war, as you know, but my eldest sister did tell me once that he was a different person before he was sent to France. That he would laugh and play with them, that nothing got him down. By the time I was a child, I knew a very different person. Very kind, very gentle, but also like he was…” He pressed a hand over his mouth as he thought, eyes focused on some middle point Will couldn’t see.
“Like he was missing something,” Will finished for him, a feeling of unnatural calm settling over him.
“Yes, yes, just like that. I used to assume that was something that happened to everyone who survived. The guilt. They didn’t know how to handle that kind of pain back then, so they didn’t. But my father, I believe that he might have simply lost too much.” As he spoke, his granddad opened the blue tin, and pulled out a small stack of photos. “Sometimes losing one person too many will do that.”
On the top of the stack was a portrait of two girls. Will could feel his breath growing shaky.
He’d seen them, giggling as they ran through his dreams, heedless of his pain.
“My sisters,” his granddad explained, tapping their faces one by one with obvious care. “My mother,” he continued as he flipped the photo to reveal a woman who looked so familiar that Will had to bite his lip hard to keep from calling out. “Ah, here’s what I was looking for.”
Will couldn’t keep in the tiny gasp, the ache in his throat choking his breath at the photo before him. It was a portrait, a grainy photograph of a man wearing a matching uniform to the one inside the box. He stared out of the photo, eyes set ahead, looking for all the world to be Will. Same nose, same set to his jaw, same look in his eyes. Serious, but always watching, curious, yet anxious.
It was himself.
“My father,” his granddad said, pointing to the man. Laughing, careless as the little girls in his dreams, his granddad joked, “Strong genes from that one, clearly. I always knew you’d grow up to look like him, although it’s a shame you never got to meet the man. He passed just before you were born. Lived a good, long life, he did.”
“It’s not possible,” Will mumbled, taking the photo from his granddad with shaking fingers. He squinted down at it, hoping that it would shift, that a veil would fall from his eyes to reveal some difference between them. His great-grandfather looked just the same as before.
“I’ve felt for a long time that he lives on in you somehow. It’s the eyes.”
“How—?” Will began to say, glancing up from the photo towards the rest of the stack in his granddad’s hands.
Colour flashed before Will’s eyes, the photograph no longer sepia toned and flat. He could see the exact colour of the mud under the men’s feet, could picture the mottled colour of the grass after being trampled by so many men and horses. But it was the flash of blue that made him stutter out, “Granddad, who’s that man?”
Under his finger was a man, the glow of youth still clinging to his face. Soft cheeks, dark hair, bit of a laugh in the quirk of his lips. He was shorter than his great-grandfather standing beside and just a little behind him.
“It’s funny that you noticed him first,” his granddad said. He gently pulled a thin chain from the box as he spoke, “He’s the man I’m named after. A dear friend of my father’s, died far too soon. I wish I could tell you more, but that’s all he would tell me.” Hanging from the chain was a small golden ring, a signet engraved into the round, flat top.
“What’s his name?” Will asked as he took the chain into his hands, gently, so gently. Some distant part of him knew what his granddad would say, could feel the name burning on his tongue with so many unspoken words.
“Blake. His name was Thomas Blake.”
As the years passed, Will could feel that name stitching itself tighter and tighter into his veins, a constant presence in the life he tried to carve out in the present. It wormed its way through his brain, even as he did his best to put it out of his mind.
The tube was abnormally crowded, and Will could feel the beginning of a migraine forming behind his eyes. He breathed very deliberately from his nose, forcing himself to focus on looking out the smudged windows at the walls flying by. No scanning the crowds, no watching, no searching.
His old therapist liked to tell him that letting go of his hyperfixations, rejecting them outright, would help him feel more connected with the world, but honestly, he just felt tired. Very, extremely tired.
“Dreams can’t hurt you unless you let them,” every therapist he’s ever had told him, time and again, like that would make it real for Will. He wished that life was that simple, that easy to split into neat little categories the way they did with the books and the photographs and the ephemera at the university library. Because, ever since seeing his great-grandfather’s possessions years ago, since he packed them up and carried them home through the heat, his dreams only seemed to hurt him more.
It was like knowing the faces made the images, the sensations all the more intense in his dreams, all the more real when he opened his eyes. Yet, everything was still so vague. Around what little he knew were flashes of colour and fleeting smells and the hint of texture under his fingers, but maybe that made it worse, too. How could he fight what he didn’t know?
All he wanted was to find the face in the crowd, but he chose to stare straight ahead as he walked through the throng of fellow commuters, navigating his way back aboveground. He’d learned to put up with it all by now, learned how to blink away the flashes of pain, to press down the need to watch for dark hair, soft cheeks, wry smile. He’d learned how to live with one foot in some other place, some past that could be completely made up from the delusional fantasies his parents were convinced he’d outgrown.
Every day, Will tried to hold it all in a little better than the day before. Some days, he even succeeded.
But every night was a minefield, laying in the dark, desperate for sleep, desperate for peaceful darkness in the space behind his eyes.
He didn’t dream of the blood, of the mud, of the bullets every night, but the fear was always there. The fear was almost worse than the dreams by now, the clinging anxiety of knowing it could arrive at any time, invading his dreams of the little girls dancing through the halls, of the sounds of singing and chatter and laughter.
Of Blake.
Those nights were the worst, dissolving from innocuous, rather pleasant dreams of cherry trees and soft grass and the vague sounds of his voice to blood. Blood under his nails as he pressed his hand over Blake’s, his fingers weak and cold under Will’s.
The entire world faded with Blake.
He had woken to that two mornings before, and it clung to him—the hopelessness, the desperation, the fear. It was a stain across his soul at this point. Will tried to keep living his life, but it never stopped Blake from dying in his arms.
The campus was filled with that particular type of energy that September always brought, the freshness that came despite the autumn. But it was lost on Will, still trapped in the fog that dreams of Blake slipping away always left hovering over him. He cut through a mildly circuitous route to avoid the worst of the roving bands of students, the masses of people milling about the university. Tucked in amongst the old trees and university buildings was the library, a sprawling, ancient building with countless new wings branching out in all directions.
Will slipped into the back of a crowd of students that filed into the building, but he quickly cut away from them. He turned from the general collections, the study areas, and crowded computers and aimed towards the quietest corner of the building: special collections.
At this time of day and year, the reading rooms looked abandoned, as if no one was even here at all. But behind a set of double doors, the beehive of the collection spread out across countless storage and repair rooms, a massive maze of cubicles tucked into the main hall. The entire wing smelled like dust and paper, and Will felt himself relax a little from the press of his commute. He beelined for the break room like usual.
“So, I take it that mum’s home remedy didn’t work for you?” Purnima asked as Will shoved his bag into his little work locker. She sat at the staff table, peeling an orange like she had nowhere to be, feet propped up on a chair. Her voice had been sarcastic, the way she gestured to his face trying for a laugh, but her eyes were serious.
“No, still just as shitty at sleeping as I was before,” Will shrugged, laying his jacket over his bag and swinging the metal door closed. “My flat smells like an old lady’s now, so I guess I have that.”
“Oh, god, I even told her to ease up on the lavender oil,” she groaned.
Will had always been a solitary person, the child happiest to be left on the side-lines while the other children played, but Purnima had decided to chuck that out the window. They had arrived for their first days of work at the same time, newly minted librarians fresh from graduation just days before, and she decided that fact was more than enough for them to be instant friends. He didn’t mind it, more amused at the image they cut.
He was tall and thin, rather morose and always a little too serious, with a sense of humour that was lost on most people. She was chatty, a little too loud, passionate about almost everything—negative or positive, she had an opinion on everything. Purnima should have been grating, honestly, but there was something endlessly charming about her, her need to connect with everything around her. Sometimes he wondered if the only reason why she hung around him was simply to have some other outsider to roll her eyes with.
It didn’t really matter, though, because she was an actually good friend, and Will wasn’t going to question that too much.
“Don’t worry about it, give it a few days, and mum’ll send some new yoga cure,” Purnima laughed, tossing her orange rinds into the bin. “Imagine how handsome you’ll look if you actually slept once every month or so.” She patted Will’s cheek almost mockingly when he rolled his eyes.
“I sleep every night. Just not consistently.”
“Sure,” she sniggered. They filed down the hallway towards the storage rooms, the scent of citrus following them. “So, you all set for that history lecture this afternoon? There’s nothing like droning at some bored undergrads about primary sources.”
“God, don’t remind me. Why the hell do they keep sending me to these things? You’re the one everyone likes,” Will sighed as he pulled open the door to the equipment room.
Purnima shrugged as she ducked inside to grab the box they had packed the day before with all of the items they would need. “Hey, maybe the curator keeps hoping that you’ll actually get some sleep, charm everyone through the door. Besides, you’re really the subject matter expert on this one, so I don’t know why you’re surprised.”
“Yes, but no one gives a damn about physical preservation, especially not undergrads.”
“I was meaning the World War parts, but you do make a fair point,” Purnima said, handing Will the box heedless of the stillness he carefully painted across his expression. Will had been trying, really doing his best to live in the present, but it was like the world kept dragging him into the past.
His master’s thesis was what got him this position, he knew that, a sweeping study on the current state of preservation techniques used for ephemera of the early 20th century—an emphasis on the Great War happening so naturally when he couldn’t stop himself from getting lost in the artefacts he kept finding. The photos, the silent film reels, the personal effects, all spread wide across the county in all states of upkeep and repair. And he told himself that going east to look for more artefacts to use wasn’t motivated by anything other than scholarly curiosity.
But, when he found a single photo of Thomas Blake in a local historian’s attic somewhere in Essex, he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. So, he published his thesis and did his best to bury the thing.
Bury the past.
It seemed, though, that maybe the past wasn’t done with him yet.
They were scheduled to speak in one of the larger auditoriums today, more like a proper presentation. That often made it easier for Will, the distance and the lighting making all of the faces in the audience blur together, disappear as he talked. Then, he could sit back and let Purnima handle the rest, her natural charm and modern slant within the field making her the usual target of most of the questions they received.
Today proved no different. Will talked the crowded undergrad history course through the content of the university’s special collections, through their reading room policies, through their preservation efforts—things he cared about immensely, but knew from the various stifled yawns was about as dry and boring for the students as their regular history lecture. It was always a relief to hand off the presentation to Purnima. For the most part, he simply tuned her speech out, following the cadence of her voice without registering any of her words. He could probably give her presentation by memory at this point, anyways.
He perked up slightly when she glanced back, finally paying attention as she said, “Alright, well, we’ve bored you lot long enough. Does anyone have any questions about special collections?”
The questions were usual: why their food and beverage policies were so strict, how to set up one-on-one time with a librarian, where to find their digital repositories, all rather rote. But it was an equally innocuous question, one about how to get involved with volunteering, that caught at his attention.
The voice.
Will had no idea who had asked, unsure of which face in the crowd to look towards. He could feel his heart racing even as he forced his face and voice to remain calm as he chimed in on Purnima’s response.
But the world seemed so distant. Even just the hint of his dreams threw him back, pain and anguish clawing up his throat, desperate for some kind of release. He barely registered the rest of the questions, distracted as he was taking long and slow breaths, forcing his eyes to remain still. There was no face in the crowd to find, he told himself, there was no one there. Just ghosts.
By the time that the professor released the class, Will almost felt like himself again, more controlled at least. He’d done a good enough job covering it that Purnima didn’t even ask, a feat that Will decided was a victory for the day.
“We actually got some good questions today, yeah?” Purnima commented as she tucked their few visual aids back into their box.
“Well, these were history students today,” Will replied, voice faint but level. “They might actually need to use our collection at some point in their studies, so it’s not exactly surprising that they would pay slightly more attention.”
Purnima laughed easily, “God, if that was only ‘slightly,’ I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to have people actually give a shit.” She turned slightly as Will held up her jacket, slipping her arms into the sleeves. In all of their meaningless chatter, Will hadn’t even noticed him approach until he stepped into their lines of sight.
Round cheeks, average height, average build, blue eyes, dark hair. Boyish, handsome. For all the world, he would have been just another face, but, for Will, time had crashed to a full stop.
Blake.
“Hey, I was the one asking about volunteering? I wanted to pass on my name,” he said, like he wasn’t burning down Will’s entire existence, like he’d never called out for Schofield to follow him, like Will never saw the blood on their hands, entwined as his face turned ashen. No, he just held out a slip of paper, torn and folded, to Will, smiling over the images engraved into the hollow places behind Will’s eyes.
“Thank you,” Purnima responded for them as Will slowly took the paper from his hand, careful not to touch him. He could see her shooting him a confused glance, but he couldn’t.
“Okay, cool. I’ll see you ‘round, then? Cheers,” he said, and then he was gone.
“Will?” Purnima asked after a long beat of silence, touching his arm.
“I going to be sick,” Will muttered. He stumbled off the stage, aiming for the wc in the hallway beyond. Closing the door behind him, he leaned back against it as the first heaving sob left him. This couldn’t be real, his mind was constructing his dreams over his real life, that had to be it. It couldn’t—he couldn’t.
Distantly, Will realized that he still had the paper he had given him, crumpled in his hand. With shaking fingers, Will smoothed out the wrinkles in the paper before carefully opening it.
Printed in a slightly untidy scrawl was his email and student ID, neat and very real.
Tom Blake.
“Oh, god,” Will mumbled, pressing his hands over his eyes. The face in the crowd, the one he’d convinced himself wasn’t real, had been dead for over a century now, he’d found Will.
Will had bowed out of work early, desperate for the comfort of home but dreading it in equal measure. The crowds seemed to part for him, his face so pale that he might as well be sick at this point. His commute home, already a fairly short one, was made even shorter by the lessened crowds at midday.
He barely stumbled out of his shoes as he barrelled through the door. His flat was tiny, a long and narrow shape that played tricks with the light. Rushing past the bookcases and curios, he staggered for his bedroom, flung open the wardrobe door, and pulled down the box that he’d carried home from his granddad’s so long ago. Underneath the faded uniform, he pulled out the folders he’d promised himself that he would get rid of after his thesis had been approved.
One labelled “William G. Schofield,” the other “Thomas Blake.”
Ignoring the former, he sunk to ground to flip through what precious little he had found on Blake’s life. The photo his granddad had kept, a matching record to one in the Schofield file listing their regiment, a photocopy of a report permitting a Lt. Joseph Blake home leave following his brother’s death. But he flipped to the photo in the back, the one he’d found in Essex.
Blake hadn’t even been shipped out yet in the photo, him among the reinforcements being sent to France following the Somme. He stood to the far right of three men, all framed well and in focus. Will traced his fingertips over the curve of Blake’s eyebrow, trying to keep the shards of himself together.
It was like the man he’d seen today had stepped out of this photo in full colour, glowing with youthful confidence. It was him.
This had to be a dream. It had to be, the Blake he’d met today hadn’t been scared, hadn’t frozen with confusion. He couldn’t possibly have any links to Blake like Will had to Schofield, not when Blake died in 1917 in Schofield’s arms and his elder brother died of Spanish Influenza only two years later. No, it was just Will dreaming up another fantasy.
But he couldn’t decide whether this was the worst or the best of them.