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The two of them had been inseparable since they met. Bertie had moved to London from the north of England, and for a while after they first met Tim could hardly understand a word the boy said. They got along incredibly well, despite this. It wasn’t long before the two were spending a frankly inordinate amount of time together, and Bertie practically lived at Tim’s house.
When the Moon War started, they were both only 16, Tim barely so, and not yet old enough to enlist. When Tim asked Bertie if he would join up when he was able, his friend had laughed at him. “The war won’t even last long enough for us to,” he said. “I mean, two more years? Come on.”
And Tim laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Bertie grinned at him, all dimples and warm brown eyes. “Aren’t I always?”
“Shut up,” he shot back, but he was smiling. Even as they had peers just a few years older who were being sent off to fight, Bertie made it terribly easy to laugh it off, to feel like this war was never going to touch them.
In retrospect, it probably should not have taken Tim a war to realize that he was in love with Bertie. It wasn’t that he didn’t realize before then that he liked men; he had been well aware of that fact for years. But for most of their teenage years, Tim managed to dismiss the feelings he had toward Bertie as something entirely typical between best friends. If, sometimes, Tim would entertain in his mind the possibility of kissing Bertie, well, it wasn’t because he was attracted to him, he was simply curious what it would be like. And maybe Tim couldn’t help it that he had poor impulse control.
They were seventeen by then. The war was still on, but Bertie didn’t seem too worried and so neither was Tim. When Bertie came over to Tim’s house, as he did more often than not, kissing his best friend wasn’t exactly in Tim’s plans for the evening, and yet -
“Can I kiss you?” He’d just blurted it out, and he didn’t really know why. Immediately, he rushed to explain himself. “I mean, I’m just...curious. Just-”
Bertie cut him off. “Yeah. Sure.” Tim blinked, and his friend grinned at him. “I said sure. I mean, why not?”
“You’re sure?” When Bertie nodded, he leaned in and pressed his lips to his. It was a bit awkward initially, but they both relaxed into it. It wasn’t Tim’s first kiss, nor Bertie’s, but something about it was considerably more pleasant than any of Tim’s prior ones. He wasn’t, at the time, entirely sure why. It made perfect sense in retrospect. How did he not realize sooner?
The two didn’t exactly make a habit of kissing each other after that, but it also was not the last time it happened. When they kissed again, they were either both a bit drunk, or one of them had insisted upon it as “practice.” Tim recalled one incident of both at once. Still, it was never romantic , and Tim thought he was fine with that. They simply remained as they were: best friends; two young men (or occasional not-men, in Tim’s case) who would entirely platonically follow each other to the ends of the Earth and beyond.
Soon enough Tim was eighteen and the war on the moon was still being waged. He and Bertie had been seriously discussing enlisting - and it had finally become serious for them now - the day that Bertie, the older of the two, turned eighteen. Bertie told him he planned to enlist; at Tim’s insistence, he waited a few months to do so. They decided they’d both join up when Tim was also old enough so that they could go to war as they had done practically everything else - together.
Tim wasn’t entirely sure what he had expected. He knew they were going to war , after all. But hearing about it from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away and actually being there were, as it turned out, two very different things. It was, quite frankly, miserable, and Tim knew he should have expected that. Aside from the constant threat of death - from gas, radiation, or heavy artillery - it was muddy and filthy in the trenches, and freezing cold. It also didn’t help that Tim found himself sharing a trench with an absolute bastard - something or other d’Ville, his name was - and a strange wooden fellow. Had it not been for Bertie, he thought, he absolutely would have lost his mind (funny how that worked out).
Somehow Bertie managed to make light of even such situations as this. His humor was comforting, something familiar amidst all the unknown variables of the war. He would crack jokes even under machine gun fire. It wasn’t that he didn’t take the war seriously. He knew as well as they all did that he could easily get himself killed if he wasn’t careful, and unlike d’Ville, actively tried to avoid such a turn of events. All he wanted was to make the hellish experience as bearable as he could.
At some point, he started singing. It passed the time when they weren’t in combat, and it lightened the mood. He’d enjoyed singing before the war, too, often while Tim accompanied him on his guitar. Of course, Tim had no guitar in the trenches, but before too long started singing alongside him. The wooden soldier evidently loved to sing and quickly joined in. Tim was rather surprised it was a soprano. D’Ville acted annoyed by it, but accompanied them anyway more often than not. It seemed little more than entertainment for him or the soldier, but it became something of a coping mechanism for Tim and Bertie.
They passed maybe three years like this. The war itself seemed rather pointless. Gains were hardly made, and even when they were Tim couldn’t help but feel like the whole thing was pointless anyway. They were simultaneously always on edge, constantly afraid to hear the alarms go off, and feeling defeated. Sometimes Tim would think back to a conversation with Bertie that felt like a lifetime ago, when his friend had thought the war wouldn’t last long enough for them to be in it, and he would laugh. They had been on the goddamn moon for three years, fighting this merciless war and just trying desperately not to die in those wretched, muddy tunnels. That he didn’t have to suffer through it alone, that Bertie was there alongside him and they still managed to make each other smile in spite of where they were, was perhaps Tim’s main comfort. Somehow, with all that the three dealt with together (the wooden soldier routinely disappeared), d’Ville even slowly became tolerable. Maybe.
Somewhere along the line, something changed for Tim when he looked at Bertie, and he never was sure when it happened or why. Maybe it was when they sang together in the pitch dark, or when Tim looked at Bertie and his brown eyes shone despite the blood and moon dirt caked on his face. Maybe it was one of the many times they found themselves huddled under a lead sheet, practically clinging to one another and desperately trying to avoid being cooked alive. Maybe it was all of those and more.
He didn’t know if he was going to tell him. How could he? All he could think was that it would ruin their friendship and make things weird, and he certainly didn’t want to make things weird now of all times, when they were stuck in this war with only each other. He was also, franky, scared. Rejection, somehow, became even more frightening than being suffocated to death on mustard gas. So he didn’t say anything.
Apparently, though, he wasn’t subtle. At least, not subtle enough for his pining to go unnoticed by d’Ville.
“Are you going to tell him?” Jonny - that was the bastard’s first name - asked him one day, entirely out of the blue.
Tim played dumb. “Tell who what?” It came out entirely too quickly, and d’Ville rolled his eyes.
“That friend of yours. Bertie or whatever his name was.”
Tim would have thought that Jonny would be more confident about the name of a man he had known for three years, but he didn’t question it. “I don’t know what you’re-”
“Oh, don’t fucking give me that,” he interrupted. “You’re fucking… pining. It’s annoying.”
“I am not pining. I don’t pine.” Was he pining a little bit? Maybe.
“You absolutely do. Look, either tell him and have your happy little gay Moon War love story or whatever, or don’t tell him and move on. ”
Tim wanted to argue, even if perhaps just for the sake of arguing with d’Ville, which he always enjoyed, but he somehow couldn’t. “I want to tell him, but-”
“Then tell him.”
He considered. “I… will eventually.”
“Might want to do it sooner rather than later,” Jonny pointed out. “Being in a war and all. You never know.”
And so Tim began trying to psych himself up to tell Bertie, and trying to work out exactly how to say it. Every time he began rehearsing the words in his head, they felt wrong, and when he tried to recite them out loud he stumbled and felt like a fool. It didn’t help that Jonny overheard and mocked him for it, but he tried to ignore that. He kept running his mind through possible scenarios and what to say.
I hope this isn’t weird, but-
Being in this fucking war with you has made me realize-
I don’t expect you to reciprocate and it’s fine if you don’t, but I still needed to get this off my chest anyway. Bertie, I-
You’re my best friend. You know that.
I love you. I’m in love with you.
He was going to tell him. He was ready; he was going to do it, and maybe it would go well or maybe it wouldn’t but he’d waited long enough, god damn it. He had to do it.
And then Bertie died.
He fucking died. And that wasn’t what was supposed to happen at all, and it wasn’t supposed to be like this, and Tim fucking loved him and he was furious.
After what happened to him, there was hardly even a body for Tim to grieve over. He’d been nearly blown apart by the Kaiser’s heavy artillery and now Tim had nothing.
He couldn’t remember, later, if he had cried. Surely he must have, but he didn’t remember any tears, only a hot white rage boiling over from inside him. And laughter. That fucking bastard d’Ville and his twisted laugh, just standing there as Tim knelt over the corpse of the man he loved.
Bertie was long gone, that much was quite obvious by the sheer volume of blood and gore and the disfigurement of his corpse. He was dead and Tim knew that, but for some reason he still tried to speak to him anyway - a desperate, last ditch attempt. And he told him that he loved him, and he was sorry, and that those bastards would pay for what they had done. Tim’s trembling, bloodied hands found their way to the dog tags still intact around Bertie’s throat, and slipped them off with a care and gingerness he had not treated anything since. It was hardly compensation for the loss of his best friend, of someone he loved, but he was going to keep these, at least. And as his grief fomented into rage, he rose shakily to his feet, and tried to wipe the blood of the man he loved off of his hands, soon to be replaced with the blood of countless others.