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We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
Mr. Knightley, Jane Austen’s Emma
1.
The soldier has tired eyes.
This is the first thing Tom notices—other than the dust on his uniform, and the pack still laced tight to his back, and the way he’s sitting alone, slumped in a corner outside the mess tent. Tom could’ve stayed inside with his friends from training but he came out here to sit in the sun, and here’s this soldier: the only man in the whole company, as far as Tom can tell, eating alone.
Tom plops down next to the soldier, balancing his bowl of stew carefully, and looks sideways at him.
The soldier has tired eyes: blue, but a hazy kind of blue, like the sky before rain, just before the clouds open and soak you through to the bone. The soldier looks soaked through. He looks like he’s seen the war, all of it, has heard the shells and stepped over the bodies, and now he’s moving through France like a restless ghost, wandering from camp to camp until somebody prays for him.
Tom will pray for this soldier. It’s an easy decision, easy and irrevocable as joining the army or sitting down here in the dirt. He will learn this man’s burden, the shape and weight of it, and he will hoist it on his shoulders.
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
The soldier’s voice is quiet but intent, like he could make the question an order but can’t quite be bothered. Tom’s gaze is pulled back to his bowl. The stew is of... questionable consistency. It pales in comparison to his mother’s, like all the other food out here. But it smells enough like beef and potatoes to make his stomach rumble.
Tom holds the bowl up in the other soldier’s direction, as though they’re sitting across from each other in a London pub, not crouched out here in the fields of France.
“Cheers.”
And he digs in. The stew is rather bland, he thinks, but it’ll do. Still warm, at any rate.
“I’m Tom Blake,” he says between bites. “Just got in from training last Tuesday. You?”
“Lance Corporal Schofield,” the soldier says. He watches Tom as he eats, his eyes unreadable under the helmet. The cloudy sky cut through with a hint of sun.
“What’re you thinking about?” Tom asks.
Schofield doesn’t answer—just shakes his head slightly, as though issuing a challenge. That’s alright: Tom performs well under pressure. He wonders how long Schofield has been out here, issuing challenges. What he’s seen, who he’s lost.
And then suddenly, like a church bell sounding the hour, he realizes—that name is familiar.
“Schofield!” Tom says. “You fought at the Somme, right? What did you do? Can I see your medal?”
Schofield stares, his eyes narrowing. “Why?”
“Well—it’s a great honor, right? You’re a hero.” Tom scoots in closer, tries to get a closer look at Schofield’s jacket to see if there’s a medal pinned anywhere.
Schofield looks at Tom, and his mouth quirks upward slightly—almost approaching a smile.
“When you figure out what heroism looks like out here, Tom Blake,” he says, “you let me know.”
Tom is about to attempt a definition when one of the captains starts shouting something about afternoon training. He brings his bowl up to his lips and gulps down the remainder of the stew, then jumps to his feet.
Schofield is watching him. Eyes blue as a cloudy sky, almost otherworldly, the eyes of a ghost stuck in the body of a man. And Tom wants to pull him closer, to listen to his stories, to bring him back to life.
But for now, he settles for this: his own hand extended to Schofield, palm up.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”
2.
“Hey, Sco,” Tom says.
Schofield doesn’t respond. He’s slumped on a bench in the corner of the bar, his head tipped back against the top. His arms are splayed out at his sides and his eyes are closed, his features smoothed out, like he’s deep in contemplation or maybe just falling asleep. It’s strange to see him like this—open. No weapons in sight.
“Sco,” Tom repeats. He comes closer, rests their two whiskeys carefully on the wooden table and crouches down to look.
This close, he can see how the soft torchlight paints Schofield’s face: all patterns of gold and gray, the bags under his eyes hidden and the lines on his forehead unwrinkled. He looks like a character in the background of a painting, hidden in shadow in a corner while the hero stands bravely in the front, and Tom wants—he wants to pull Schofield to the foreground, crown him and give him a sword, or maybe he wants to push Schofield deeper into the shadows, let him sit like this, quiet, until the end of the war. Maybe both.
“Schofield,” Tom says. He reaches one hand up and flicks Schofield’s forehead, just sharp enough to hurt. Like Joe used to do to Tom when he fell asleep in the fields as a kid.
Schofield’s eyes flutter open—and Tom stops for a second, his lungs and his heart and everything, just looking at that blue.
“Blake, what’re you doing?” Schofield’s voice is the same quiet as always but less careful. Heavier, maybe, as though he’s leaning into each syllable.
“I think it’s time for us to go back to the barracks,” Tom says.
Schofield’s eyes widen and he shifts on the bench, trying to sit up straight. But his head betrays him: it slumps, ever so slightly, lolling in the direction of his right shoulder.
“Come on.” Tom stands back up and extends a hand to Schofield. “You’re drunk, let’s go.”
“I’m not,” Schofield protests. But he takes the hand—his fingers slip into Tom’s easily, his grip warm and strong.
Tom has pulled Schofield up before. He is always pulling: Tom gets up first, springs to his feet at the first mention of a drill or an errand or the next meal and tugs Schofield along with him, hoists Schofield like he is an anchor and the boat is set to sail. But there’s something different about this, more private. Maybe it’s the soft light, or the shadows cloaking their corner, or the faint sounds of laughter echoing from the other end of the bar. Maybe it’s the way Schofield moves: slowly, one muscle at a time, then rocking unsteadily on his feet for a moment before he settles. Maybe it’s something else—something like fluid motion, the full weight of Schofield’s body resting in Tom’s careful grip.
It’s times like these when Tom wished he knew poetry. Schofield can recite verse, a few lines at a time anyway, and he has three little leather-bound books in his pack that he’s always pulling out in a free moment, letters tucked in between the pages. Tom tries to ask about them, or tries to grab one and rifle through, but Schofield always holds it out of reach.
He’s like that, Schofield is: out of reach. There’s always some story he’s not telling, lingering behind the clouds in his eyes. The more Tom learns—Schofield is from Cookham, he used to climb trees as a kid, he learned a Queen Elizabeth speech in the third grade and can still recite it all—the more he wants to know. Even now, just pulling him up, Tom wants to know what Schofield’s thinking, wants to know how he’d describe the lights and the faint laughter and the feeling of whiskey burning in his throat and Tom, standing before him.
Tom arranges Schofield’s arm around his shoulders, then reaches out to the table and grabs both of their whiskeys.
“Cheers,” he tells Sco. And he downs the drinks, one at a time.
“Blake, you don’t—”
“Yes, I do,” Blake replies. “We paid for ‘em. And it’ll make the walk back warmer.”
And it’ll make it easier to look at you, he doesn’t say. Schofield stays close the whole walk back, one hand gripping the side of Tom’s jacket, and Tom is warm, warm, warm.
3.
The sun is warm on Tom’s face.
He’s got his helmet over his eyes to block out the light, but even there, the metal conducts heat and he feels like he’s swimming in it, drifting somewhere between the rays. The grass is soft beneath him, his pack is steady enough to lean on, and he’s dozing, his mind spinning between an aimless dream and blank sleep, when someone kicks at his side.
“Blake,” Sanders says.
Tom pulls his helmet down, squints up into the light. It’s a beautiful afternoon, the blue sky and the soft clouds rolling past. Might make a nice landscape if Sergeant Sanders weren’t standing there in the foreground.
“Sorry, Sarge,” Tom says, wiping at his eyes.
“Pick a man, bring your kit.” Sanders starts walking, clearly expecting Tom to follow.
Tom pulls himself up and looks at Schofield. Schofield is leaning back against an oak tree, face tilted up. He’s asleep, or at least pretending to be, this soft expression on his face like he could be dreaming. He’s close, maybe a foot away, but Tom is stuck there for a moment—just looking.
Schofield, asleep is a different person from Schofield, awake, Tom thinks. Not a soldier but his shadow, the ghost of who he’d been before the war. He’s close and he’s distant, he’s the sun stretching out over the fields, he’s an ancient forgotten language that Tom is desperate to learn.
And Tom wants to shift gravity: wants to pull the sun down closer in the sky, wants to pull the buds into flowers and the saplings into trees, wants to pull the war to a close. He wants to pull his dreams into the waking world, wants to keep them tight between his knuckles and shape them like mud from the riverbank, he wants—and Schofield is there, always, in his dreams and in the waking world, too. Hovering with those blue eyes or a slight smile, just out of reach, and Tom wants to pull the world around him quiet like a blanket, wants to say to the birds and the wind and the distant gunfire shhh, shhh, let him sleep.
But Tom is only a soldier, after all. He must stand on two feet and do as he’s told. Pick a man, bring your kit.
He pushes himself up off the ground with one hand, then extends it to Schofield.
Schofield’s eyes open, and he looks up at Tom—his eyes wide and expression soft—as though to ask, are you certain?
The task could be anything: a supply run, a scouting mission, an order to help the mess officers forage the countryside. Whatever it is, Tom picks Schofield. It’s easy: he will always pick Schofield. He keeps his hand steady. Palm open.
Schofield takes it. His expression softens, halfway to a smile, as Tom hauls him up. And this, too, is easy: Tom knows Schofield’s weight, could carry Schofield as readily as he carries his pack and gun. Could march with him across France, if he had to, though Tom would rather they walked side by side.
The sun is shining, the day is warm. Whatever this task may be, Tom is ready.
4.
The ceiling falls in.
It happens like a shell going off: the world upends in an instant. The dirt floor of the trench is covered in chunks of earth and stone, the wood beams creak and the air fills with chalk dust and the very earth groans and someone is screaming—
Someone is screaming. Tom moves toward the sound, his muscles pushing forward on instinct even has his lungs beg him to get out. The screaming is muffled by dust and stone—and still, Tom has never heard Schofield this loud.
Schofield. Fuck, Schofield—he’s buried under the rubble and he’s screaming and it’s Tom’s fault, it is, he should’ve shot that rat when he had the chance, he should’ve been more careful. Fuck, he picked Schofield for this, he said it’s my brother and barreled along with Schofield following for no good reason, just orders or loyalty—and it’s Schofield lying buried now, it’s Schofield who might never see the sun again.
“Schofield!” Tom shouts. “Sco! SCO!”
He pulls up stone and earth, his hands growing pale with chalk dust. Schofield can’t just be buried here. He can’t. He can’t. Tom can’t finish the mission without Schofield watching, telling him when he’s being stupid and then going along anyway.
Tom keeps pulling, keeps clearing the dirt and the rock, his breathing drowning out the rumbling of the ceiling and the creaking of the timbers. He keeps shouting, then when his breath runs out keeps whispering, Sco, Sco, Sco, as though if he wants hard enough he can summon—
Schofield. Tom sees his lips first, no longer screaming, then clears and clears until he can see all of Schofield’s face, so very pale in the torchlight. Coated in dust, his eyes closed. But he’s still breathing. He has to be.
Tom yanks Schofield up by the collar—he’s heavier now, with the pack on his back and the earth pulling him down, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to lift him, like Tom is just giving in to gravity. Tom Blake is standing, and so Will Schofield has to stand, too.
“Wake up,” Tom says, and Schofield opens his eyes.
There is so much Tom wants to tell him—wants to ask if Schofield’s head is pounding or if his mouth is dry, wants to ask if his lungs ache from screaming or if he can still hold a gun—wants to apologize for picking him and wants to insist he couldn’t have chosen anyone else—wants to say, your scream was the worst sound I’d ever heard and I’m gonna keep you safe from now on, I am, I am, I swear—but the ceiling is falling, and anyway, they have a mission to complete. Joe to save, and sixteen hundred other men besides.
Tom hauls Schofield up by the collar, pulls him close and looks at him, tired and shaking but alive.
“You keep hold of me,” Tom says. And Schofield keeps hold.
5.
Blossoms float on the water.
They come into focus slowly, spots of white expanding and resolving into soft shapes. Ripples flow out from the white droplets and Tom wants to touch them, wants to feel the cool water or the silky-smooth petals on his fingertips but he is reaching slowly, so slowly, as though he is moving through molasses or in a dream, or maybe he is drifting with the blossoms, maybe he is the water itself, the current humming quietly, the ripples reaching out. If he stretches out carefully, yes, he can feel the rocks at the bottom, and the fish flitting through hidden burrows, and the weeds sprouting from submerged earth.
Time moves slowly, one ripple at a time. And then a sound breaks through—somebody is breathing.
A body, heavy and shivering, laden with boots and webbing and a tin in his pocket. Tom knows—knows that tin because he watched Will Schofield fold the letter carefully in half and lock it inside, promised—
Will Schofield is in the water, waterlogged but still breathing. There’s blood on his jacket, Tom can feel it, and he wants to wash it clean, wants—he tries to cry out, some word of encouragement or maybe Will’s name, but he is only the current and the blossoms floating, he is reaching through water and through dreams.
Tom thinks, sometimes, the war would end if they all simply talked to one another. The Brits, yes, the French, the Russians, and also the Germans, the Austrians, all of them, every man in the world who can’t sleep safely without a gun. How different are his stories, anyway, from the stories of someone like him in an enemy trench—how many German farm boys hoisted up their packs once they turned eighteen, kissed their mothers and hugged their dogs, swore to glory only to find it bleeding?
If Tom could make the world a river, ending the war would be easy. Look how the morning sunlight reflects on the water. Look how the blue of the sky pulls in the white and brown and green of the forest. Look at how the trees stretch, ancient and kind, on the bank. Look how the blossoms float, quietly, one after another. If you picked them up and scattered them far enough, you could plant a forest everywhere on earth.
Will Schofield has tired eyes. Always has. Weary of the world, but not yet finished with it. Tom watches as Will notices the petals: lets them slip through his fingers. His eyes widen, the blue of his irises reflecting the lightening sky.
Come on, Tom tells him. Get up, come on. Don’t give up now. There’s sixteen hundred men out there, and who knows how many Germans. Their lives are still worth something. So is yours. Get up. Go.
Will watches the cherry blossoms, lets the petals slip through his fingers. He breathes. He begins to swim.
6.
Tom wakes slowly, resurfacing from dreams that slip away as soon as he blinks his eyes open. Strange: he feels like he’s been underwater.
He can’t breathe for a second, caught in water or fire or chalk dust. He has to cough and gasp to return to his tiny cot in the corner of the medical tent back at the 8th, near the tent flap facing out. The movement hurts his chest, and he has to put a hand there just to steady himself. The bandages are still tight around his skin. It aches—everything aches—but he can deal with that. Tom performs well under pressure.
He looks around, takes in the moonlight filtering in through the canvas, the sound of an owl hooting in the distance, the soft chorus of the other injured men breathing deeply in their sleep. Only there’s one sound—there’s someone right next to him, sitting on the ground at the side of Tom’s cot. That’s strange, Tom doesn’t remember this space being occupied before.
He looks—pushes up on one side and peers around as far as he can, makes out slumped shoulders and a bowed head and a pile of supplies in a heap and those shapes, the long face, the cheeks, the nose—it can’t be—but it has to.
Will Schofield sits at the side of Tom’s cot. Will is a dream, a mirage, the reflection of sunlight on water. Tom has to take a minute just to catalogue all that he can make out in the shadows—the shapes of Will’s eyes and nose and mouth, his jacket hanging open, his arms splayed out at his sides—and tell himself no, ghosts don’t sit like this, mirages don’t shake, dreams don’t smell of dirt and blood.
Will is sleeping. He must be—Tom can tell by the way he’s slumped, his head bowed. And because he hasn’t looked up yet—hasn’t looked at Tom.
And suddenly Tom needs Will to look: needs Will’s eyes and his voice, the soft vowels and careful consonants, needs it like he needs air or water or warmth. Needs Will to say his name.
“Hey, Schofield!” Tom says. “Schofield! Sco! Will!”
Will shudders, his shoulders shaking and going stiff. Tom wants to reach out a hand and pull him up onto the bed, to look at him better, but he’s pretty sure moving right now would send his chest into agony, so he settles for waving—like Will’s on a ship slowly docking, and he’s biding the time before Will can come back to shore.
Will’s eyes open, finally, cast around the tent and settle on Tom. Even in the shadows, Tom can feel the intensity of his gaze, like Will would rather look at him than at all the stars in the sky.
“Hey,” Tom says. “Fuck, it’s annoying I can’t shake you awake from up here. Thought you’d come all the way back just to die on me.”
Will keeps staring, and then he reaches out and touches Tom’s palm, lying open on the cot. Will’s hand is warm, caked in dirt as though he hasn’t washed since they left camp together—and for a moment everything Tom knows narrows to that point of contact, that place where their skin touches.
“Hey,” Tom says. Tries to collect himself, remember what normal, human speech should sound like. “You alright?”
Will looks at Tom for another moment, as though Tom just asked if the sky brightens at dawn, and then says, “Tired. I’ve never been so tired in my whole goddamned life.”
God, of course he’s tired. Will is always tired—tired of the war or the weather or Tom, or at least he pretends to be—but especially now, when Tom picked him for a suicide mission and then left him to run half the way there and all the way back by himself. What a ridiculous question.
Tom feels a laugh bubbling up—at himself, for asking something so stupid, and at the lightness he feels at seeing Will—at the pain in his chest, at the way the moonlight paints Will’s face in deep blue, at the enormity of being alive. The laugh pushes into a cough, but that’s alright. He can take it.
They talk for a minute, convey all the essentials. Will delivered the message. Will talked to Joe, Joe does look just like Tom. It’s funny: even as Will relays his successes, Tom feels as though he knew everything already. As though Will was carrying Tom with him, through Ecoust and the forest and the 2nd’s trenches and all the way home. Tom feels—something indescribable at the thought. Something immense, like he’s holding the whole world in his hands, like the world is Will’s eyes and the space behind them, everything he’s thinking and the way he’s looking at Tom.
Tom asks Will if he thinks Joe is more handsome, just to distract himself, and Will considers the question carefully. Looks at Tom with those immense eyes, as though he’s taking in Tom’s cheeks and eyes and the shape of his smile and his heart beneath, and—
“No,” Will says. “I don’t think so.”
Somehow this, more than anything else Will has said in the past two days, is what makes Tom’s chest go tight. Tom needs Will closer, needs Will next to him, needs Will solid and warm on the bed. Tom has Will’s gaze already: he needs everything else.
“Look,” Tom says. “Look, don’t sleep on the ground, alright? Or against a tree, or in one of the tents. I’ve got space here, right. I’ve got space.”
Will doesn’t argue: just follows Tom’s order, more readily than he’d follow any officer’s. Will stands, loosens his webbing and unlaces his boots, then lies down next to Tom. And it’s as though Tom has pulled him without even lifting his arm—as though they’re a pair of magnets or maybe a willow tree bending down to the river. Tom curls around Will’s back and presses close, close, breathes in until he can smell the familiar musk of Will beneath the dirt and blood matted in Will’s hair.
Will is asleep again in seconds, but Tom takes longer. He listens to Will’s breathing even out, and he thinks of what they might do after this. How they might sit together in the sunlight, how Tom might listen to Will read or Will might listen to Tom tell stories, how Tom might tell Will, finally, how he feels about him.
You came back, he thinks. Whispers it into Will’s hair, to make it real. “You came back. I brought you back. You’re here.”
+1.
Tom wakes slowly.
It’s morning, the kind of soft, peaceful morning where the sunlight stretches over the bed like a second blanket, casting the wood frame and the linens and the street outside in a hazy gold. Like a second blanket, or, really, like a third one, because Will has one arm stretched out around the back of Tom’s shoulders. He’s sitting up on the other side of the bed, a leather-bound volume smushed beneath him, like he started to read but got distracted. He’s watching Tom, hair shining gold in the sunlight.
Will’s gaze is like that, like morning light. It comes in softly, slowly, one color at a time, and Tom often doesn’t even realize it’s coming on until he’s bathed in it, every inch of his body kindling. Ready to catch fire.
“’Morning,” Tom says. He shifts: turns onto his side and moves closer, so that his cheek is almost up against Will’s shoulder. He takes in Will’s nose, his chin, the red marks on his collarbone from last night. Will’s eyes, still quiet, still watching.
“What’re you thinking about?” Tom asks.
Will tips his head back, just for a second, and when he looks at Tom again there’s a new tinge to his features. It’s hard to tell in this light, from this angle, but Tom thinks he might be blushing.
“It’s silly,” Will says. “You don’t want to know.”
“I do. Will—” And here, Tom looks at Will. Here’s the thing about sunlight: it’s heat, right. It’s energy. And energy can be transformed, pulled from one source and given to another. Conducted.
“Will,” Tom says, “I always want to know.”
“Okay.” Will looks at Tom, his blue eyes heavy with contemplation, then he stashes his little leather-bound book on the nightstand and shifts so that he’s echoing Tom’s position, lying on his side with his head resting on his palm.
“There’s this novel,” Will says, “by Jane Austen. Emma. I don’t know if you’ve—there’s no way you’ve read it, right?”
Tom shakes his head. The only novels he knows are books Will has read to him.
“Right.” Will moves in closer, reaches out his unoccupied hand to brush a curl away from Tom’s eyes. “Well—it’s a silly book, mostly, all these rich aristocrats who think the world will end if they’re accidentally rude to someone. But it has a brilliant love story. And there’s this scene, near the end, where the bloke finally confesses to the heroine, and he says—he says, if I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
The words wash over the bed like sunlight, like slow-burning fire. Tom has never been big on books, but Will reads to him. Will has this voice like it was meant for reading, low and precise, always measuring syllables against the beat of his heart. Tom wants Will to say the line again. He wants Will to read the whole novel aloud, if it means he’ll build up to this—if I loved you less.
“It made me think of—seeing you, after I got back to the 8th,” Will says. He leans in again, as though he’s going to brush another curl, but this time his touch lingers. His hand rests against Tom’s cheek. “I had so much—I wanted to tell you everything, but I didn’t know how. It was all bottled up inside me like a dam was about to flood. And you broke it—you did, you reached in there and broke the dam. You—you always do that. You make me feel like I have so much inside me, I could never express it all, but I should try anyway.”
Will is a poet in the sunlight. He talks about Shakespeare sometimes, Owen, Apollinaire, all these names that flow off his tongue like water down the river, and he reads verse to Tom or he recites it, he traces letters into Tom’s back when they lie together quiet after one of them has had nightmares, he tells Tom this is for you, I planted this verse and watered it and helped it grow. He says he does not have enough words, but he is the words, he is the sun and the river and the trees growing on the bank, he is the trees and Tom is the blossoms floating on the water, content just to be near enough to touch.
“Will,” Tom says. He closes his eyes for a moment, leans into Will’s palm at his cheek. “Tell me you love me.”
Will’s breath catches, but his gaze does not falter.
“I love you.”
And Tom moves up onto his elbows, turns on the mattress, and pushes Will down. Closer, closer, close.