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The war followed them. It was a miracle they made it home. It was a pipe dream to get there unscathed. Boyce considered himself lucky that the monsters they escaped followed him in his dreams. Jacob wasn’t so lucky. They could find him in broad daylight in between laughs, in the middle of a sentence.
The window over the kitchen sink looked out over the three acres of land he inherited along with his grandmother’s house when she passed. It felt like waiting to get shouted down when he screwed up at boot camp after he asked Jacob to come to Louisiana and move in with him when the war was over. Profound relief hit him when Jacob burst into surprised laughter and bear-hugged him with a yes that came before he had to worry that it might not. Boyce told himself that his relief came from not being ready to say goodbye to a buddy that understood what fighting over there meant, even the stuff that happened in secret blown-up labs. He wasn’t ready to be stripped of the comfort of being understood yet. It could have been Tibbet or Ford or Chloe that he needed with him if any of them would have said yes or they were all still alive.
That was what he told himself.
He washed his dishes after lunch and was wiping his hands on a towel when he caught sight of Jacob far out in the back field. Boyce dropped the towel on the counter and leaned forward for a better look. Jacob was down on his knees cowering on the side of the shed with his arms up over his head.
“Shit,” Boyce murmured and shot outside.
The screen door banged shut with a creak of the old spring as he sprinted past the clothesline they set up with sheets blowing in the light breeze and ran for the shed they’d stuffed with yard tools to clean up the place. The trowel that Jacob had gotten out to use was on the ground in front of him. Boyce moved it out of the way as he knelt down.
“Jacob?”
His eyes were lowered, and he sat stiff and unmoving. He knew better than to touch him right away, but his hands reached and hovered. It was with trained restraint that he held back.
“Private Rosenfeld!” That did it.
Jacob’s head snapped to attention. The tension didn’t leave his body, but he lowered his arms a little. Just enough to let Boyce know he could dig him out of the hole he fell into with a little patience and care. He’d been doing that since basic. Back then, they took turns lifting each other’s spirits after falling short of the others’ times and ability. They didn’t have the same endurance or marksmanship—and it took monsters, both human and engineered, for Boyce to match the others’ nerve—but they always rallied. It didn’t take much. Just a glance or a joke, a hand on the shoulder or a line of comfort, a question about home or family to get the other to remember that they still had that and would get back there someday.
“Ed?” Jacob breathed, ragged and uneven through parted lips. “There was a bomb.”
“No. We’re home.”
They’d made it out somehow. It took three months for him to get the news that he was drafted and find himself in the worst place on Earth, in over his head and fighting for his life and the whole world. He and Jacob had finished unpacking in his grandmother’s old home almost three months ago now. Apparently, it was going to take longer for them to come back home completely than it had for them to be thrown completely out of it. He wasn’t going to let Jacob fly back to that place in a plane or in his memories.
“I heard it,” Jacob insisted, but his eyes were more uncertain, clearer. He was coming back around under the persistent pull of Boyce’s gaze on him.
He didn’t know what he heard. It could have been anything: a car, a neighbor shooting, some phantom in his own mind yanking him backward. It didn’t matter. Boyce wrapped Jacob’s arm around his shoulders and half-carried him out of that lab when he was an inch from death. He could sure as hell carry him out of the past.
“No, Jacob. We’re good now. We’re home. We’re not going back.”
His eyes sharpened with something like suspicion but probably closer to fear. “Neither one of us?”
He was only asking because he was shaken. He knew the answer.
Boyce told him anyway, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Jacob’s smile was a weak imitation of itself but still there, still proof that they were coming home even if they hadn’t made it all the way back yet. “Good. Because I’ve got a tree to plant back here.” He picked up his fallen trowel. “In ten years, this baby will be twenty feet. We can have a whole picnic area in the yard.”
“Sounds good to me.” Boyce helped him up, and they walked back towards the house talking about all the changes they could make to the place over time. Neither of them mentioned that Jacob was talking about them both still living there together in ten years or that Boyce had leaned into the idea. They got down on their hands and knees and planted the tree side by side. Jacob had big ideas for his grandma’s land. Boyce smiled at the ground as he got his hands dirty and listened.
It was a nice fantasy to help push back the awful ghosts they left behind. That was all.
****
Boyce woke up in a sweat, sitting straight up in bed, with the sheet down by his waist and his head light from the nightmare he’d escaped. It was six months since they’d moved in, and the monsters were still there, some in uniform, others unnatural and deformed. They only came in his sleep. He didn’t panic in public like Jacob sometimes did, only to end up embarrassed or quiet as Boyce helped him get home. They only found him when his head hit the pillow at night, but they were always there.
War taught him how to survive, but he wasn’t sure how to kill something that lived inside his mind.
His bedroom door opened, and he jumped. Jacob peeked in, silhouetted by the lamplight in the living room. Jacob always slept in the living room. Boyce hadn’t asked him why.
“Ed?”
“Yeah?”
Jacob let himself in and began to close the door after him but hesitated with a glance his way and left it open instead before coming closer.
“Are you alright? You were… loud.”
Damn. Most nights, he jerked awake and reminded himself that he wasn’t a little boy that needed his mother to check the closet for monsters anymore, but he could do it quietly. He didn’t want Jacob to worry about him, all too aware that he was the anchor that kept him steady when his own storms rolled in. Anchors were useless if they didn’t stay where they were needed, and it wasn’t his intention to let Jacob down.
“I’m good. Bad dream, that’s all.”
“I’ll say.” It was dark, but the window was open and Jacob must have seen him clearly enough in the moonlight because he wasn’t convinced that ‘good’ was the word for what he was. “You look like you just ran an obstacle course. Twice. Then got yelled at by Sergeant Rensin to do it five more times.”
That was a day better left forgotten. “He only made me run it three times.”
“I remember it as a hundred.”
Boyce’s shoulders eased out of their stiff posture as he answered Jacob’s smile with his own. That was definitely how it felt at the time. He’d collapsed on his bunk when he finally made it back to the barracks and Jacob had collapsed onto his own beside him like he’d been the one to run it. He’d congratulated him on not dying, and at the time, Boyce had sincerely thanked him.
Jacob sat down on the side of the bed, and Boyce pushed himself back against the headboard.
“Your nightmares…” He stared at the mattress between them, at the quilt his grandmother made with her own two hands just like she’d made this place for him to be with her signature on a piece of paper. For them both to be. “Do you see… you know?”
They hadn’t talked much about what really happened out there as the war carried them away from it and into other horrors. It was secret and imperative that they kept it that way, but sometimes they did. When they were alone. When not talking about it was unbearable. This loose from a nightmare that felt more like a room he’d walked out of in the real world, it didn’t feel too bearable.
“Yeah.”
Jacob’s hand moved along the quilt, stilled—came up and found Boyce’s hand resting on top of it, grasped maybe tighter than he’d intended since he’d had to work himself up to doing it at all. Now he did meet his eyes, and he swallowed.
“I see them too,” he said.
It was comfort and a promise in one. Neither one of them was alone with those things that haunted Boyce’s dreams and followed Jacob’s waking steps. They had each other. It had always been enough. Boyce didn’t let his own hand hesitate as he reached out and pat the one on top of his. He squeezed. It still was.
“We made it out,” he said, and despite the tremor in his nerves from the things he saw that he remembered and the things he still ran from in his own mind’s creation, his voice was firm with sincerity as heartfelt as the day Jacob had laid across from him on his bunk and let him know he’d made it through that crummy day in basic. They’d both made it through so much worse since then. “And we’re not going back.”
The lack of light made it okay that their gazes lingered too long and their hands were too clinging and too much a sign of their own need. For normalcy and steady ground. For each other.
Jacob gave him a small smile through a hurried exhale and withdrew his hand as he stood up.
“Dream better dreams, Ed,” he said as he walked to the door. “Angels. All-you-can-eat buffets. Tibbet singing in the shower.”
“That’s a nightmare worse than the one I had,” Boyce teased at the memory.
Jacob laughed and lingered in the doorway.
“See you in the morning.”
“And every morning,” Jacob joked with half a smile, but his eyes were serious. Boyce would take every morning if he was offering. He could use the routine. He wanted something he could count on while his mind caught up to the fact that he was home, safe. That Jacob was too.
He laid back down as the door eased closed and didn’t let his mind fall back to what he’d escaped. Instead, he focused on what was there in their home that he was trying to build. There were home repairs and yard work. He had a job with the potential to move up.
But mostly he thought about Jacob and the palm that hummed from the feel of his hand under his. And he slept easy until dawn.
****
Jacob lost it in a diner where they were having lunch when a waitress dropped a stack of dirty plates she was carrying back to the kitchen and they shattered in a ceramic explosion at his back. He was down from the booth and under the table before Boyce wrapped his mind around what was happening. He’d flinched like most of the other patrons, but Jacob was hiding from the blast and rocking, bowed over and gone. Lost somewhere Boyce couldn’t see.
He held his hand up to a concerned waitress that approached to keep her back and slowly lowered himself down under the table across from him. Jacob met his eyes, and he was already back. He understood what happened, and humiliation flooded through him at his reaction. He didn’t want to be made fun of or be seen as scared as he was. One was unavoidable. People noticed. But the other hadn’t happened yet. Boyce wasn’t sure what he’d do if someone did laugh or try to start something. Probably nothing. The people who’d laugh were the kind that couldn’t be taught what happened out there. Their ignorance wasn’t worth Jacob’s embarrassment.
He didn’t have a chance to coax him out before Jacob was shaking his head.
“You should go. You shouldn’t—You shouldn’t stay. I’m not the same. I’m all messed up, Ed,” Jacob whispered, and it took a second for him to realize that he wasn’t talking about the diner. He meant staying around him at all. In their house, in this town, in his life. “You’ve got to ditch out on me.”
Of all the silly questions or ideas he had since they met, that had to be the dumbest.
“I’m not going.” When Jacob tried to protest, he broke over him and insisted, “Jacob, I’m not going anywhere. I didn’t ditch you in that lab when our lives were on the line and you could barely walk. I’m sure as hell not going to leave you when we’re safe at home and you’re the only thing keeping me steady. You’re going to have to be the one to leave if that’s how you want it to be.”
That startled Jacob enough to clear his eyes a little of the frantic, shell shock clouding them. “Me leave you? I couldn’t. If I keep you steady, you keep me on the ground. I’d be up in the sky without you, Ed. It can’t be me.”
Easy does it. Boyce settled Jacob like he would put out a stick of dynamite with the spark dancing down the fuse, careful and smart but with no room for it to go off. He wasn’t placating him with lies. He needed him. And it was okay to be needed by him. It was okay.
“If it can’t be you and it can’t be me, I guess you and me, we’re stuck with each other. Like in basic.”
“I wasn’t stuck with you in basic,” he argued. Their friendship was quick and born from companionship and empathy. It grew from things much more than all that. “I chose you, and you let me.”
“Well, I’m choosing you now.” Their home. Their life. This fragile, shared safety they were building—together. He met his eyes, crowded with him under the cover of the table in the middle of a busy lunch hour, reducing the world down to just the two of them, the way they got through everything. “Let me.”
It was slow to come and tired, but Boyce got the nod he was after. They crawled out from cover and rejoined the world again. They’d be doing that for a while yet.
****
Jacob didn’t even pretend to try to sleep in his room that night. They wrapped up the game of cards that carried them through the evening after dinner, their plates moved to the sink but left forgotten while they swapped childhood stories and laughs at the kitchen table. They talked about anything that happened before the war, the experiments, the days when day-to-day survival was a luxury: Boyce’s childhood dog, Jacob’s childhood cat, the idea that maybe they could get one of each and a pig too, just to name it Tibbet and piss him off in the next letter they sent him.
Boyce stood up and stretched when they decided to call it a night, Jacob winning more games than he lost, only partially because Boyce didn’t have the heart to play his best when Jacob’s victory smiles were worth the losses. After the day he had, he wanted him to have those smiles. He’d excavate as many as he could from beneath the afternoon’s rubble.
Jacob went straight to the living room and laid down on the couch, pulling the afghan off the back and over himself. Instead of ignoring it like he usually did, Boyce followed him and watched him settle in for the night from the doorway. It took a while for him to be noticed, but Jacob twisted around to see him.
“What?”
“Why do you sleep in here?” He didn’t mind. There was no reason to. Hell, if Jacob wanted to camp out in the yard in a tent every night, the only thing he’d have to say about it would be making sure that he had a warm enough sleeping bag. And maybe he’d bring out one for himself once in a while. If that was okay. He thought it might have been.
“Can’t sleep in my room,” he answered. “Green walls.”
That wasn’t what he expected. He thought the couch was more comfortable than his mattress or the ceiling fan in his bedroom had a creak. It hadn’t crossed his mind that his objection would have anything to do with the color.
“What’s wrong with green walls?”
Jacob turned back around so he wouldn’t have to look at him when he said, “There were these green tiles in the lab. You know, when… before you got me. When I lay on my bed in there, that’s all I can think about. Sleeping in here, it keeps me from having dreams like yours.”
Boyce frowned. He should have asked sooner. They fell behind the rest of the group and struggled to keep up in basic training, jumped out of planes together, and dragged each other out of bad dreams and worse memories. Neither one of them was very good with space. It wasn’t what Boyce wanted. It wasn’t what Jacob needed. The damn walls were green. He should have asked sooner.
“Sorry, man.”
“It’s alright.” Jacob did turn to look at him then and gave him a crooked smile, one that Boyce hadn’t had to work to find under careful brush strokes and happy stories. “I blame your grandma.”
Boyce shook his head and raised an eyebrow in teasing warning. “She was a wonderful woman.”
He wouldn’t have changed a thing about her. But maybe he could make a few changes to her house.
****
Jacob came home that weekend to the few pieces of furniture in his bedroom dragged out into the living room. Boyce listened to his footsteps come to an abrupt stop after the front door closed and imagined the stumped confusion on his face that pulled him up short. He smiled down at the tray at his feet and got back to what he was doing.
It wasn’t long before the footsteps resumed and Jacob appeared in the doorway to his own bedroom, pulled up short again by the sight of his bed covered in plastic sheets and Boyce in a splattered t-shirt standing inside.
“What’s going on?”
Boyce gave him the same vague response he’d gotten from him the other night. “Green walls.”
A dawning understanding lit him up from the inside out, and Jacob stepped inside with a glance to the roller he held. “You got one for me?”
Boyce nodded to the tray on the other side of him on the floor, and Jacob came over to roll it up and down in white paint before coming over to stand next to him. He shook his head at the wall as he started to make new strokes over the green that he wouldn’t have to look at anymore before he went to sleep.
“You’re always looking out for me, Ed,” he murmured, and Boyce was surprised into stopping his own strokes to look over at the serious look on his face that sat firmly in gratitude but tilted too close to guilt for his comfort.
“We look out for each other,” he corrected.
“Yeah, but…” Jacob wouldn’t look at him, and Boyce hated the way the uncertainty in his avoidance strayed towards self-loathing, even if it landed closer to shame. “Maybe I take more than I offer.”
Boyce tried to imagine being there in that house without him, what that would look like, what he would do with all that empty space and silence he couldn’t fill. He tried to picture his life if he hadn’t asked him to come home with him, to make a home with him, if Jacob was someone he wrote letters to sometimes like Tibbet or Chloe. He cared about them, was always glad to hear from them. He missed them. He tried to imagine what his life would be like if he had to spend it missing Jacob.
“Hey.”
Jacob’s head was lowered, the roller at his side, but he raised his gaze to meet his own. Boyce stepped closer, heart hammering like he’d found a landmine with his left foot and a second one with his right. His fist was tight around the grip of the roller, but he defeated Nazis and fought monsters in his sleep. He could take one more step towards his best friend. He could meet his eyes and lean in, just a little, could recognize the sharp surprise and quick understanding that flickered in the gaze he locked inside his own. He could do that and not waver, because this was their home and he could paint over what hurt Jacob and protect them both from the green behind the white.
Boyce raised his free hand and let his eyes stray to Jacob’s jaw as he ran the back of his fingers down the length of it, gently took his chin and tilted it up. When he met his eyes again, they were questioning. There was a helpless moment when he thought he’d read it all wrong, that it wasn’t fear that stilled their hands from reaching when they sat pressed up against each other on the couch or bumped shoulders as they did dishes once they’d piled up too high or planted trees that they planned to picnic under a decade or two down the line. Because they would both still be there, and they would reach. Eventually.
He was reaching now.
It occurred to him that Jacob might not reach back.
Only, when Jacob did find his voice, it wasn’t to pull back or shoot down Boyce’s hope with disappointment. It was only doubt that made him hesitate. “I’m not… allowed.”
They weren’t following orders or completing a mission out there in their countryside home with the baby trees in the lawn and the walls that were the wrong color, but he understood. Boyce had to convince himself some days that he was allowed to be alive after so much death. It was hard to believe that they could be allowed to be happy too.
He lowered his hand and left the reaching to Jacob. “I’m saying you are.”
The thing about Private Rosenfeld was that pretty much everybody underestimated him. Not Boyce. So it was with relief but not surprise that he felt the curl of Jacob’s fist in his paint-dotted t-shirt and with a slow, ready smile when Jacob tightened his hold, pulled him closer, and reached back. His eyes sparked with silenced laughter and hope as the gap between them closed. Boyce wondered what Jacob saw in his own face beyond affection. He wasn’t sure there was room for anything beyond it. The first press of their lips was chaste. It was bridging the space between their hesitation and the truth. It was confession.
The second kiss had the rollers bouncing to the floor, and Boyce’s paint-stained hands on Jacob’s face, in his hair, and down his side. Jacob’s hands fisted the back of his t-shirt as his arms went around him. They kissed like they were back on that plane, falling out of the sky and rushing towards something that would either break their fall or break them, period. Boyce kissed him to ward off the letters he’d have to write if Jacob left him, and Jacob held him like a promise not to go.
He nudged his forehead with his gently as they shared a quiet laugh in the shaky breath between them. His hands traced Jacob’s sides and committed him to memory with lines and strokes to paint over the past that chased them.
“Okay?” he whispered.
Jacob opened his eyes and pressed his smile to Boyce’s lips. “Okay.”
Boyce felt the warm answer and kissed him harder to seal it. It was okay. They were okay.
They would be.