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Sammy’s hands shook. They did that now. They shook when he was warm, they shook when he was cold, they shook when he was on duty, they shook when he was on reserve. He sometimes spent hours sitting in the trenches of Flanders — waiting for the whistle to blow or waiting for his shift to be over or waiting for the shelling to let up, waiting, waiting, waiting — and just watched his fingers tremble like aspen leaves.
The fortunate thing was that they shook badly enough that Sammy’s home leave, which he’d requested the moment he’d finished reading Martin’s last letter, was granted without hesitation, on account of him being temporarily unfit for service due to shell-shock. And due to the unknowable ways of Army logistics, he had even arrived home in England two days before Martin, whose ship, according to his telegram, had only docked last night.
Sammy’s cottage — or rather, the cottage he’d been renting from the Nichollses for the past ten years — was located at the outskirts of the small town. People rarely came here. Other than the insects buzzing and the birds chirping, no sound was to be heard. It hadn’t rained for days. Not even the wind stirred. It was the perfect picture of a peaceful summer day. There was a planter box in front of Sammy’s window, full of phlox the colour of Martin’s eyes, and butterflies and bees came and went in a busy, bustling frenzy of activity.
Still Sammy remained painfully aware that just across a narrow stretch of sea, the war raged on, all-consuming, ever-ravenous, gobbling up land and people alike.
He was sitting at his desk, working on the project he’d been encouraged to pick up: he was practice-embroidering a small white square of fabric with his name, regiment, and identification number in sunflower-yellow floss, with some free-hand embellishments added as a frame in the colour of forget-me-nots.
Suddenly, Sammy heard brakes squeak and, startled, he looked up. He put the embroidery down and leaned out the window. Down in the front yard, a soldier was struggling with a bicycle’s rusty kickstand. He was wearing a massive trench coat, the hem dusty from the road, and his head was hidden by an enormous hat. A heavy woollen scarf snaked down his shoulder, and his hands were covered with tan leather gloves.
For a few moments, Sammy was confused, not about who this man was, but why he was dressed for the deep of winter at the height of summer.
And then Sammy remembered all at once.
He bolted downstairs in only his shirtsleeves. He fumbled for the door handle, finally took hold of it, and yanked the door open. “Will you get out of the sun, you absolute mug!”
Startled, Martin turned. Sammy flinched. Martin had gone so very pale already. He’d always had a light complexion, but now, his skin seemed transparent.
Mentally shaking himself by the scruff of the neck, Sammy took a step to unblock the doorway. “Come inside.”
With hesitating steps, Martin came in. Sammy closed the door behind him and turned around.
They stood in front of one another, as speechless as they had been on that day over ten years ago, in a different house, in a different town, in a different life.
At last, Martin took his hat off and smoothed his hair down. Sweat was beading along his forehead, clearly from the thick clothes. “Where’s your housekeeper?”
“Quit,” Sammy replied, taking Martin’s hat and waiting for his scarf, coat, and gloves. “Can’t get servants at all anymore. The factories pay better, apparently.”
“Yes, my mother mentioned that, too,” Martin murmured while unwinding his scarf. His voice sounded odd, but Sammy couldn’t put his finger on why.
They fell silent again. Neither of them knew what to say; what did you say when facing your lover after the closest brush with death imaginable?
Wordlessly, Martin handed over his scarf, coat, and gloves, and watched apathetically as Sammy hung them up. He was wearing his uniform, the mud not very thoroughly brushed out of the hated khaki. He cleared his throat. “I, er.” He fell silent again.
Sammy looked at him. Martin glanced back, but averted his gaze. He bit his lower lip, and Sammy caught a glimpse of the long, sharp fang.
Gently, feeling almost entranced, Sammy put his hands on Martin’s hips and pulled him closer. He wanted to say something, anything, acknowledge in some kind of way that he understood that Martin had changed, irrevocably and permanently, but that it didn’t matter to Sammy, didn’t matter one bit, because the blue eyes looking up at him were the same eyes he’d fallen in love with all those years ago.
But Sammy had never been good at using his words. So instead, he put his index finger on Martin’s chin, tilted his head up, and kissed him.
Martin kissed him back with fervent relief. His fingers tightened around Sammy’s shirt. He took his lips off Sammy’s for just a moment, and when he kissed him again, Sammy felt a sharp, sudden pain in his lower lip. Involuntarily, he flinched. “What in —”
“Oh, my God!” Martin was staring at Sammy with wide, panicked eyes. “Sammy — I’m so sorry!”
“What even —” Sammy wiped at his mouth, and stared at the bright red blood on his fingers uncomprehendingly.
“I’m sorry,” Martin repeated. “I’m so sorry!” He fumbled in his pockets and handed Sammy a handkerchief. It trembled slightly in his grasp. “It’s — it’s these infernal fangs, I keep cutting myself on them, and now I’ve hurt you, and… Oh, God!”
Sammy, still pressing the handkerchief to his lips with one hand, grabbed Martin with the other and pulled him into another hug, this one tight and comforting. “Calm down,” he mumbled against the fabric of the handkerchief. “It doesn’t even hurt that badly.”
“I still hurt you,” Martin mumbled against the fabric of Sammy’s shirt. His voice shook.
“Not on purpose, though.” Sammy let him go, but only so he could look at him. “It was an accident. Please stop worrying yourself.”
Martin nodded, but he looked decidedly unhappy about it. Apparently unaware he was doing so, he poked at his left fang with his tongue.
Thinking of something Martin had said earlier, Sammy gently took Martin’s chin in his hand and took a closer look at him. His lips, especially the lower ones, were red and raw and covered in half-healed cuts. One had reopened and was oozing a bead of dark blood. Automatically, Sammy wiped it away with the handkerchief.
He leaned forwards again, but Martin flinched back.
Sammy stilled. “You’re not going to hurt me, Martin.”
“You don’t know that.”
“We’ll just need to learn our way around them.” Sammy waited a moment. And then Martin looked up and met Sammy’s lips halfway.
Nobody was hurt this time.
When they broke off, Sammy asked quietly, “Are you hungry?” Then he frowned. “Do you… you do still eat normal food, don’t you?”
Martin tried to smile, but it didn’t really work. “I do. But no, thank you. I’m not hungry right now.”
“Good,” Sammy replied. “Because all I could offer you would have been stale bread and cold potatoes.”
Martin chuckled. And then, suddenly and hugely, he yawned. Involuntarily, Sammy’s eyes widened at the sight of Martin’s long, sharp fangs. How on earth did those fit into his mouth? No wonder Martin kept slicing his lips open.
With a sigh, Martin pressed his forehead into Sammy’s shoulder. Sammy put his arms around him. They stayed like that for quite a while.
“Do you want to lie down?” Sammy asked Martin quietly.
Not lifting his head off Sammy’s shoulder, Martin replied, “I don’t want to sleep through our time together. We have so little of it as it is.”
Sammy paused. “You have leave for the whole month, and I for the next two weeks at the least,” he murmured. “Just rest, my love.”
Being unable to fight down another yawn, Martin acquiesced.
Sammy went ahead so he could shut the blinds in the bedroom against the bright midday sun. He had only the vaguest knowledge about vampirism, but that much he knew. Then, he helped Martin, who looked deader on his feet by the minute, peel off his uniform. Martin crawled into Sammy’s bed in just his underthings, and was asleep before Sammy had pulled the duvet over his shoulders.
Sammy went down into the kitchen to properly brush the mud out of the uniform. The holes on the left sides of the jacket and greyback shirt had not been mended yet. Sammy swallowed against a sudden gale of bile and nausea. How close it had been… Any of the spindly thin pieces in that fragile construction of fate might have snapped at any moment, and the love of Sammy’s life would have been gone, gone, gone.
Sammy took a deep breath and let it out slowly, like they’d taught him to do at hospital. When he went back upstairs, he left the uniform on the kitchen table, folded so that the holes couldn’t be seen.
Martin slept, and Sammy sat on the bed next to him, working on his embroidery — he was practising knot stitches; tricky bastards, those — even though it felt a little silly, having to turn on the bedside lamp in the middle of the day. Every now and then, he glanced down at Martin — his breathing was steady, but so soft and low.
By the time he woke — an hour or so later, though Sammy had lost track of time —, Sammy had added a row of French knots along the bottom of the fabric. “What’ve you got there?” Martin asked, his voice still sleep-slurred.
“They say it helps with shell-shock,” Sammy said with a small, slightly self-conscious laugh. “A comforteer noticed my hands shaking and suggested I try embroidery.” Sammy showed him his project. He’d finished his name, but neither the regiment nor the identification number, and had instead focussed on the decorative swirls. The row of French knots along the bottom had started out lumpy and uneven, but got noticeably neater the longer he’d kept at it. He was quite proud to see it.
“Needlepoint with shaky hands?” Martin asked, sitting up. “Isn’t that a little counterproductive?” It was so odd to listen to him speak — and finally, Sammy could pinpoint why. Martin’s voice was familiar in its pitch and timbre, but the enunciation was so painstaking and so sharp Sammy felt he could cut himself on it.
“I thought the same,” Sammy replied, “but now I honestly think it does help. After the first few stitches, I calm right down.”
“Maybe I should try that,” Martin muttered, fishing for the pillow in his back. “Would give me — Oh, bloody hell.”
“What?”
With a frustrated sigh, Martin showed Sammy the pillow. It had blood on it. “It’s been near two weeks and I still wake up every time with my mouth all sliced up.”
“You’ll just need some time to get used to them, I’m sure,” Sammy said.
Martin’s face was still sour. “A lot of things I need to get used to.”
For a moment, they were both silent. Then, Sammy asked, “How are your parents taking it?”
Martin just sighed, his head on Sammy’s shoulder. “How do you think?”
Sammy paused. “I hope,” he said carefully, “that they are happy their son is alive. Especially since they already lost one.”
“Yes, you’d hope that were the case, wouldn’t you,” Martin murmured.
Sammy ran his hand through Martin’s soldier-short hair. He knew it was a shallow comfort, but it was all he could think of doing. “What did they say?”
Instead of replying at once, Martin fussed with picking a feather out of the pillow for a little while. Then, his gaze intently fixed on the feather, he said, “My mother cannot look me in the eye and my father called me a coward. So.”
“God almighty,” Sammy muttered.
“Hm-hm.” Martin began shredding the feather, bit by tiny bit. “Now, John wouldn’t even think of letting himself be turned, apparently. John gave his life for king and country. John was courageous and dutiful to the last.”
“Stop,” Sammy told him, as gently as he could. “You’re not your brother. He was not you.”
“Which is the whole problem, isn’t it,” Martin replied gloomily. “I’ll never live up to him, ever. I’m just a perennial disappointment. I can’t even die properly.” He looked up, eyed Sammy. “I don’t even want to imagine how they’d react if they found out about us.”
Despite himself, Sammy’s heart beat faster in a panic. “Are they — do you think they’re suspecting something?”
“No.” Martin nudged at Sammy’s foot with his own. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s all right.” Sammy still waited a moment before he went on to make sure his voice would hold. “And what about Victoria?”
“Well, she doesn’t like being summoned down here, for a start,” Martin muttered. “Which was on Mater’s insistence but of course I bear the brunt of Vicky’s wrath.”
Sammy suppressed a smile. He could picture exactly what the wrath of Martin’s sister looked like. He wouldn’t want to bear the brunt of that, either.
Still plucking the barbs off the feather one by one, Martin went on, “But when she isn’t having my ear off about how they need her in London — as if the hospital can’t spare one VAD for one week —, she’s talking about France, Malta, Italy, you name it.”
That sobered Sammy up immediately. “She wants to go abroad?”
Martin nodded. “Treats it like a Grand Tour or something.”
Sammy could only shake his head. How, after seeing one brother dead and the other nearly so, would the sister want to put herself in danger by going to the front? If Sammy got his way, he’d never leave England ever again, and if he had to hack his right hand off to do so.
But then again, Victoria was Victoria. Headstrong, outspoken, and a little bit egocentric. Sammy had liked her from the day he first met her.
The feather was completely disintegrating in Martin’s restless fingers. Sammy put one hand above both of Martin’s to still them. In a voice almost a whisper, he asked the question that he should have asked right away. “And how are you, my love?”
Martin didn’t reply at first. Sammy felt his hands twitch under his own. But he made no move to take them away.
“It’s all so… exhausting,” Martin said. He sounded like he wanted to go right back to sleep.
“What, exactly?”
“Existing, at the moment.”
Wordlessly, because what was there to say, Sammy put one arm around him. “I’ve got you,” he said. He dropped a kiss on Martin’s temple. “I love you, Martin. I’ve got you.”
“I love you, too.” Martin’s voice shook. He swallowed and fixed his gaze somewhere right in front of him with the determination of somebody not wanting to cry. He cleared his throat. Then cleared it again.
Sammy just let him be, running his hand up and down Martin’s shoulder.
The embroidery had somehow ended up on Martin’s lap, and he now picked it up, examining it closely. “When you’re finished with this,” he said, tracing the curve of the S in ‘Samuel,’ “can I have it?”
“Of course,” Sammy replied. Hesitatingly, and feeling himself blush, he suggested, “I could teach you, too. It really helps. And you could make me a memento, as well.”
“Huh.” Martin tilted his head, regarding the uneven stitches thoughtfully. Then he looked at Sammy, and he smiled, and for the first time that day, it was genuine and free. “Yes. Yes, I think I’d like that.”