Archive of Our Own

1911

It all comes down to the fact that Quentin knows the rules of baccarat. He isn’t especially good, even, but this puts him ahead of the attractive young lad with the Northern accent who has been roped in by one of the regulars, lectured over the noise of the band for thirty seconds, and shoved towards the tables. He is losing money rapidly and growing more surly with each hand; Quentin is bold on gin. He feigns a prior acquaintance to get close, then introduces himself and murmurs some advice in the lad’s ear. There are spots of red staining his cheeks, and for a moment it seems like he is going to ignore Quentin out of sheer stubbornness. But he relents, and grudgingly introduces himself when he’s won the hand. They manage to win back three-quarters of his losses before his luck turns again.

“I need a drink after that,” Barrow declares, and he looks at Quentin out of the corner of his eye. The gold glow of the kerosene lamps glimmers in his dark hair as his head tilts, and Quentin’s heart leaps. This isn’t an inverts’ club by any means—he doesn’t know how to find those—but it’s a place where people sometimes look the other way, and he’s been hoping and hoping. So he buys Barrow a drink.

Half an hour later they’re back at his flat—nothing to be proud of, a cosy little bachelor’s flat like a thousand others—and not long after that, they’re in bed together. It’s a little awkward, at first. Quentin has just turned thirty-one and this is the first encounter he’s had with a man that has taken place in a real bed, with all the opportunities that affords; Barrow is younger by eight or nine years at least, and full of bravado, but even as he murmurs will you fuck me? in Quentin’s ear his voice is brittle in a way that suggests he hasn’t gotten around to this either.

But they’re tipsy, and they’re having fun, so neither backs down. They start and stop and start again, and they find something together, like musicians meeting each other for the first time in the corner of a smoky pub, tuning their instruments privately and coalescing in a melody over time. It’s a warm June evening and sweat spots the sheets and the headboard slams against the wall. Barrow is urging him on with one arm flung around his neck and his fingers dug into the meat of Quentin’s arse and it’s perfect, in the end.

“I don’t even know your Christian name,” he laughs to himself a little, after, when they’re catching their breath.

“Are you so sure you know my surname?” Barrow asks, very serious, and Quentin flops his head to the side.

“No,” he says with mock gravity to match. “I suppose I don’t.”

“I hope I don’t know yours,” the lad adds with a mischievous grin, and they giggle like schoolboys for a moment until Quentin musters up the energy to cup the back of his head and kiss him. “Thomas,” he offers when Quentin draws back.

“Thomas,” Quentin repeats, as sweet as a sugar cube on his tongue. “Well, I’m sorry to say I can’t repay the favour.”

He’d offered up his full name at the club. Thomas shrugs.

“Ah well. I’ll live—seeing as you do. Have you got a cigarette?” he asks, changing tracks abruptly, and Quentin groans.

“You want me to get up and find them?”

“Better you than me.”

There is a beautiful deep flush in Thomas’s face, and Quentin reaches over and cups his cheek, feeling the heat against his palm.

“You are all right? I mean—”

“Better than all right,” Thomas teases. He rolls onto his side, and pulls Quentin closer with a hand on his thigh so they’re pressed together the whole length of their bodies. They kiss again, lazy and indulgent, and Thomas nips at his lower lip with his teeth. “Even better with a cigarette.”

He’s a demanding little minx. But Quentin gets up and comes back with the bottle of port and a pack of cigarettes that they had abandoned in the sitting room. They make themselves comfortable and make actual conversation for the first time, rather than flirtation and innuendo. Thomas works in service—he mentioned that at the club, but now Quentin learns he’s the footman to an earl, but it’s an aggravating place to work. The butler is a tyrant, and he declares himself quite jealous when Quentin reveals that, while he has a supervisor who sends him lists of clients to visit, he can go about his own business without anyone looking over his shoulder.

“I’d like to be a valet someday,” Thomas says. “The butler’s over a valet, but he doesn’t order the valet around the same way—nobody except the lord of the house, and you can’t really get away from that in service, can you?”

“No, I suppose you can’t,” Quentin smiles. He takes a sip straight from the bottle and passes it over. “I’m not sure what I want to do, longterm. My job’s nice enough, I suppose. It’s dull, working in wholesale, but—I like working around clothes well enough, more than any of the things I used to sell, and I’m too old to become an apprentice or work as a tailor or something. If only I had a convenient uncle to die and leave me a shop readymade.”

“My father has a clock shop. I don’t mind clocks, but we drive each other mad, so I left. If I knew he were going to die at a convenient time—”

“That’s horrible,” Quentin laughs.

“What, more horrible than you killing off your uncle?”

“Hypothetical uncle!”

“Ah well,” he says, grinning. “Didn’t really mean it, anyway. I’ve got ambitions. I want to travel—being a valet’s good for that. And it’s got opportunities, if I ever want to leave service. Lots of connections to powerful men. You never know.”

They chat for a little while longer, until Thomas checks his pocketwatch and declares it’s time for him to get back. Quentin walks him to the door and gives him a goodbye kiss that drags on like a lazy summer sunset.

“I’d like to see you again.” He kisses down from Thomas’s ear, and the lad makes a sceptical noise even as he turns and shifts closer. “Please?”

He backs Thomas against the door and slots a leg between his thighs. Thomas spreads his hands flat against the wood of the door and lets Quentin bring him off again, whispering yes and grinning like the cat that got the cream.

“All right,” he relents finally, with another kiss. “But I’ll have to sneak out and take the latch key—I don’t know when I’ll be.”

“That’s fine. Come straight here, and I’ll be waiting.”

Thomas comes back the next night, although he doesn’t stay long, and the one after that. The Crawleys are hosting a ball soon, so he can’t visit the following evening; the next one, he surprises Quentin at nearly two in the morning.

“Too late?” he asks with a raised eyebrow, taking in Quentin’s pyjamas.

“No,” he says hastily, fighting back a yawn. “No, I’m pleased to see you. And it doesn’t matter when I’m up tomorrow, as it’s the weekend…”

“What’s a weekend?” Thomas scoffs.

He sheds articles of clothing on the way to the bedroom. Quentin lingers by the door for a moment, smiling to himself, and fetches a bottle of wine before he follows. He isn’t sure how long Thomas will be staying, but he sounds like he badly needs a drink before he goes.

It’s a familiar song, by now, and they fall into an easy harmony without speaking. They reach for each other, dispose of what clothing they have left, and fall into bed. Thomas pushes—tearing himself away from kisses and yanking at Quentin’s limbs impatiently—until Quentin retaliates, pins him against the mattress and fucks him so hard and fast there is no room for anything else in his head. He thinks he can feel the reverberations of Thomas’s pleasure in his bones.

“Christ,” Thomas gasps explosively when Quentin finally rolls off him, and they pant in companionable silence.

Quentin passes Thomas the wine bottle and the corkscrew, which had been waiting on the bedside table along with a lighter and Thomas’s cigarettes. He takes those up, too, lights one for Thomas in his own mouth and a second for himself.

“I hate the lot of them,” Thomas says when he’s sucked down enough smoke to calm himself down. “Except maybe Lady Sybil, and that’s only because she’s young. I suppose once she comes out she’ll be fawning over dukes like the rest of them, and looking at footmen like they’re busy, disgusting little ants.”

“I take it you didn’t enjoy the ball, then?”

“Did I heck as like.”

He’s tired and a little giddy from being woken at this hour. He blames that for what he does next, which is to reach out to where Thomas’s dark hair feathers over his forehead and brush it away, and trail the backs of his knuckles over the curve of Thomas’s cheek and the slope of his graceful neck. Like a real lover. Thomas looks at him. Quentin picks up the wine from where it’s nestled between them and takes a swig.

“Tell me about it,” he suggests.

That’s all it takes—a little wine, a little provocation, and Thomas is happy to expound on the details. The particular gripes of a late-running ball and a house full of toffs who never learned any manners that counted, and the general foibles of a family whose attempts to be liberal only seemed to highlight their failings. Quentin met with a baronet, once, on business, and sometimes when he was a child his mother would drag him and his sister over to stand politely by her side when she greeted the local viscountess at the annual summer fete. That’s the closest he’s ever gotten to an earl’s household, and he listens with at least as much fascination as he feels watching Thomas’s beautiful lips shape the words.

“Now Lady Edith,” he says finally. “The problem with Lady Edith is that you want to feel sorry for her and you can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because for as much as Lady Mary bullies her, you can tell that Lady Edith tries to bully her back. She just isn’t any good at it. And it’s very sad that her parents don’t give her much attention, but as far as I can tell she doesn’t do anything worth paying attention to. It’s just—pathetic.”

“Poor Lady Edith. Don’t we all wish we were clever enough to smack down people we disliked, and interesting enough that everyone cared…”

“That’s the point.” Thomas’s second cigarette is burning down. He deposits it in the ash tray and props himself up on an elbow, his head cradled in his hand. “Of course that’s what we all want, but you look at Lady Edith all you think is ‘my God, I hope I don’t sound like that.’ I have a theory…” He walks his fingers up Quentin’s chest, trailing idly through the hair there. “…that people most hate the thing they recognise in themselves. The thing they are but wish they weren’t. That’s why the moralists have such a problem with our sort, because they’re that frightened by how much they want to be fucked in the arse.”

Quentin laughs, a deep belly laugh because they’ve reached that hour when everything is much funnier than it ought to be, and a genuine smile takes over Thomas’s face.

“What about the women?” Quentin says when he’s down to a giggle.

“Oh, women deserve a good arse-fucking more than anyone else and are less likely to get it. The poor dears.”

And that sends them off again.

“A very interesting life philosophy,” Quenin finally declares, when he can breathe, when he can take a sip of wine without choking on it. Thomas leans close and kisses his collarbone.

“What’s your life philosophy?”

“Me? Oh…” He considers the water-stained ceiling for a moment. “It’s a very old-fashioned one, I suppose. But I think I believe in predestination.”

“What’s that when it’s at home?” Thomas snorts.

“You know. The idea that it’s already been decided who’s going to hell and who’s going to heaven, and what you do in life won’t change your fate. I don’t believe in luck.”

“You don’t feel like you were lucky at the club?” Thomas says, his voice going silky. “When we met?” His hand trails down again, to caress Quentin’s bollocks and his soft cock.

“On the contrary,” he murmurs. “I feel very, very lucky. But feeling and being aren’t the same. Every gambler in that club that night lost, and every one of them won, even if only one hand, one toss of the dice. That’s chance. Simple mathematics, not luck. The question is, which of them can walk away in time and which one of them will stay until they’re ruined. That isn’t luck, it isn’t chance, it’s who they are. I— you’re trying to distract me.”

“Yes,” Thomas smiles. “But I’m listening.”

“I think people who are going to lose money will lose money, if they start out rich or poor. People who are going to be successful will be successful. People who are going to be taken advantage of will be taken advantage of, people who will be taken care of—” His breath catches. He twines his fingers in Thomas’s hair. “—will be taken care of. I have a friend who has a lover. And they met in— a cottage in Bristol. Oh—”

“Go on,” Thomas says, kissing the crease of his thigh. “I’m still listening. I’m very interested.”

“And I used to think about how lucky they were, because it was so utterly improbable that they had met. I thought I could never be so lucky. Then one day it occurred to me that I would have to be profoundly lucky to—to find someone in a cottage… if all I ever said was ‘good evening’ and ‘may I’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘good night.’”

“Mm.”

“So—predestination,” Quentin says. His voice wavers. “I had to confront the idea that if I was the sort of person who went to cottages alone and never spoke to anyone and always came home alone, then that was a good indication I would end up alone forever. If I was ever meant to find companionship, then I ought to get started. Not so much to have a chat there, but to try other places. To go to dodgy clubs and talk to handsome men. And if that was the sort I was, and if you were the sort who was always going to say yes, always going to—oh, you sweet boy—”

He does his level best to convince Thomas to stay the night. When that fails, he convinces him to take a cab, at least, and they stand under a street lamp for a long time, waiting. It’s early enough that the bakers and scullery maids are starting to wake. Thomas thinks he can manage a few hours’ sleep, and if he downs several cups of coffee—well, that won’t invite comment.

“You know,” he says after a while. The air has gone thin, the way it does when the grey dawn is lurking nearby. “I was talking to those footmen we borrowed, and they told me something interesting. Apparently there’s a hotel bar that’s poplar among our sort. Young working-class lads sit at the bar and toffs come over and invite them to sit, if they want. Champagne and oysters, Nathan said. And everything obscene happens out of sight, so people look the other way. Will you take me there?”

“Oh dear,” Quentin says dryly. “I’m afraid you might be labouring under a misapprehension. This flat is not a toff’s secret love nest, Thomas. It’s really all I’ve got.”

“I know that,” Thomas says, nudging him with his elbow. He yawns, and Quentin hears the click of his jaw. “Don’t much like oysters, anyway. But I’ve never been among a whole crowd of men like us before. And if you want to show me off a little… well, I won’t tell anyone you’re not a toff.”

His eyes flash from below his lashes, and Quentin feels it like a spark at his fingertips. To show something off, it has to be yours—even if only temporarily. That’s a change.

“I’d love to,” he says lightly, leaning against the lamppost. “But I’m afraid it will have to wait. I’m being sent to Ipswich on Monday to tour new vendors. I won’t be back for a week.”

“A whole week?” Thomas pouts. “Won’t you miss me?”

“Endlessly.” His hand lifts, intending to settle on Thomas’s cheek—the dark is just dark enough for this. The rattle of a shutter opening somewhere, and he loses his nerve. He tugs at his lapel instead. “Or you could come.”

“What?”

“Run away with me, Thomas. I’ll sell fabric to tailors and you’ll be my living model—how’s that for showing you off, hm? Or we could be very daring and leave you back at the pub, doing nothing at all. I’m not sure how long my income can support a kept man, but it’s worth a try.”

“In Ipswich?”

Thomas wrinkles his nose. Quentin wants to kiss it, but then the cab comes. He pays a preemptive fare and they say their goodbyes, and they forget about the whole thing. Mostly.

Quentin goes to Ipswich. He does rather well, and rewards himself with a new handkerchief, with scalloped edges in lavender embroidery. He’s wearing it in his pocket eight days later when he goes to the hotel to meet Thomas.

But Thomas isn’t waiting at the bar. He’s sitting down at one of the small tables, with a glass of wine in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, smiling at a man in pristine white tie that makes Quentin’s best suit look like rags. Quentin’s step doesn’t falter, at first—if Thomas has got some toff to buy him an expensive glass of wine while he waits, good for him—but then Thomas glances up. He freezes. He doesn’t wince or blush; he’s too practised for that. But his chin lifts and his smile tightens like a garrote. His companion sees him distracted and glances over his shoulder.

He’s handsome. Handsome in the way Thomas is handsome—a smooth, youthful face made for coy smiles. Not like Quentin, who sometimes feels like he went from awkward adolescence straight to middle age.

Still. It’s a spry middle age, and he’s not so self-conscious as to think he deserves this. He only thinks of leaving for half a step. Then he keeps walking. He stops at the table and puts a hand on the back of an empty chair.

“Well, it seems you’ve got your hands on a drink already. Lucky you.”

“Yes, I have.” Thomas taps ash and hesitates. His companion tilts his head, like drawing a screen between the two of them and the rest of the room. “This is my friend, Mr. Sidebotham,” he says, and waits.

“Villiers,” the young man says, turning to shake Quentin’s hand. “Charmed, I’m sure. I’m terribly sorry if I’ve intruded—Thomas and I met at the Crawleys’ ball a while back and I couldn’t resist the chance to get better acquainted when the opportunity presented itself.”

“I understand completely,” Quentin says, because he does. A week ago, in bed together, they had laughed over the idea of the Crawley sisters fawning over a duke. Frankly undignified, Thomas had called it, but of course things are different when you’re the one he’s plying with wine and attention, isn’t it? Dukes have money and estates. Dukes need valets. “Do you come here often, Villiers?”

“Oh, now and again. Do you?”

“No,” he says cheerfully. “Never in my life. Then again, it does seem more your place than mine.”

Villiers’ lips twist in a suppressed sneer, Thomas’s in a smile. His smoke-coloured eyes flicker to Quentin’s in a moment of acknowledgement. Quentin may not know nobility, but he’s met enough rich men to know what they’re like. They expect the lower classes, when in their presence, to put on their best clothes and best manners and pretend (badly) to be more sophisticated than they are. Mostly he does, because he’s a salesman and appearances matter, but refusing to play is its own vicious satisfaction, sometimes.

“What a pity.”

“Yes. But everyone enjoys a little variety now and again, don’t they?” Villiers says something pleasant—faux-pleasant—but Quentin doesn’t hear it. He’s watching Thomas as he lights a cigarette and fumbles with the catch of his lighter. “Well, I’ll leave you to your drinks. Enjoy your evening, Villiers. Thomas.”

He turns without waiting for a response and walks towards the bar to sit with the hustlers and buy himself a pity whisky, because he’ll be damned if he slinks away with his tail between his legs. There are two men leaning against the corner who watch the proceedings with interest, their heads bent close together. Quentin sits at an open stool nearby, where he can’t see the tables, and orders a drink.

“Supposed to meet that chicken, were you?” asks one of the men. He’s blond, and older than many of the others, old enough that he’s wearing a bit of powder to brighten his cheeks. A few freckles poke through.

“I was.”

“Shocking,” his friend says, clicking his tongue.

“No manners,” the blond sniffs.

“Mm.” The bartender sets a glass of whiskey in front of him, and Quentin swallows half of it in one gulp. He sets the glass down and sits forward, deliberate. “I’m Quentin. And you—?”

The two glance at each other, and something wordless passes between them. The blond leans back just far enough to refocus his attention. His friend leans closer, resting on his elbow, and bats his lashes. He has bright blue eyes, and chestnut hair slightly too long and artfully curled and tousled.

“Harry,” he says.

Quentin grasps his hand and tries not to wonder if Thomas is watching.

1916

The ringing in his ears is so loud, it ought to block out everything else. But it doesn’t. It’s a piercing, dizzying sound and he can’t focus on anything else, but beneath it he can still hear shouting and crashing and the rat-a-tat of gunfire, and he can still feel it, vibrating through his entire being. He squeezes his eyes shut like that will help; he’s confused when it doesn’t.

“You alive, sergeant?” someone asks, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder, and he squints up at a dark figure. He thinks at first, with a jolt of alarm, that the figure is standing at the lip of the trench, he’s so high up, but then Quentin realises that no, he’s the one lying on the ground. How odd. He doesn’t remember lying down.

“What?” he asks.

“Lucky bastard, looks like,” someone says.

“Wrap him up.”

“Will you get a move on?”

“Up you get.”

He can’t follow the conversation. It seems like it’s moving incredibly fast. The figure props him into a seated position and wraps bandages around his head—he’s bleeding, and it’s only then that he realises the pain is from a wound, too, not only that horrible sharp sound—and hoists him to his feet. They hobble together through the trench, following a stretcher, weaving through the men who surge towards the front of the line, and linger to tend their wounds, and lie dead in the mud. Quentin’s vision is blurry and he doesn’t recognise anyone except, eventually, the man in the stretcher before them. That’s the lieutenant. Got to be. He’s a slim young lad, hardly past his majority, but he’s got a hearty red moustache that doesn’t match the rest of him. Quentin hopes he’s okay.

The din fades, the further back they retreat.

“It’s stopped,” the medic carrying him says to one of the stretcher-bearers. Quentin is still hearing echoes of shells.

They retreat from the main line and reach an aid station, hastily constructed from metal siding and wood that has aged a hundred years in a few months. From the outside, Quentin expects it to collapse from the reverberations of the battle; when they go inside, it seems almost sophisticated. There are rows of beds, like any other hospital, and canvas strung up to delineate rooms and provide a modicum of privacy. Or to protect passersby from the most gruesome sights, he thinks as another stretcher-bearer takes in a man clutching a leg that is barely attached to the rest of him. Barely attached is worse than either fully attached or fully detached.

There are lots of RAMC men, tending to wounded soldiers and directing the flow of traffic. The rumble of ambulance engines is constant, but only the worst men are sent back outside for transport. There is a large empty space set aside for the less desperate, and a lieutenant points Quentin and the stretcher-bearers in that direction. They set Lieutenant Mallory down in a row of stretchers, and deposit Quentin on a crate.

Lieutenant Mallory’s moustache is grey on one side from ash or dust, and his right boot is hideously mangled, a twist of burned leather. Blood soaks the khaki wool of his trousers.

“Stop the bleeding,” he mumbles. A medic kneels beside the stretcher and touches the lieutenant’s neck. He is still for a long, long minute, just long enough for Quentin’s frustration to reach the breaking point, and then he stands. “You’ve got to stop the bleeding,” Quentin says, loudly. A medic ought to know that.

“He’s not bleeding. He’s already gone.”

It takes Quentin a puzzled minute to work out what he means. He fixes his eyes on the lieutenant’s face, and flinches when the medic comes up to him and prods at the edge of his bandage.

“This is filthy already. We’ll have to... I know you.”

Quentin looks up at him. Everyone looks the same here.

“Don’t I?” the medic says, hesitant. “From London?”

“Thomas.”

The name dredges itself from within him. Thomas smiles, a lopsided grin that looks more genuine than it could possibly be, here amidst all this.

“Mister—excuse me, Sergeant —Sidebotham, isn’t it?”

“Quentin.”

“Yes. I remember.” There is a pause. This isn’t a place for pauses. It’s busy, swarming with energy and need, and the awkwardness of civilian life is hard to sustain in a ramshackle place like this. Then Thomas hauls Quentin up by his arm. “Come on, up you get. We’ll get you a clean bandage. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so... my ears are ringing... not as badly anymore. I don’t think I’ve been shot. They would have told me if I were shot, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Thomas takes him behind one of the curtains and sits him down on a real cot, six inches off the dry ground. There is a bowl of lukewarm water, a pile of clean linens, scissors, and iodine. Thomas removes his bandage—it’s stuck in places, with the dried blood, but his touch is gentle—and washes his head and applies a fresh one.

“It’s good to see you again,” he says in a quiet voice. “Despite the circumstances.”

He’s as lovely as Quentin remembered. Even here, even dressed in khaki and smudged with grime as they all are, his hair is still that black and his lips are still that red and his eyes flash in the light and rumble like storm clouds. Quentin reaches out one clumsy hand and Thomas takes it, and squeezes it tight.

“All right now?” he says. His voice is different than Quentin remembered. Lower, sweeter, like spice cake soaked in honey.

“Yes. Yes, I’m all right. It’s good to see you, too.”

“Did you know him well? The lieutenant?”

“No, I...” He shakes his head, and his skull hums. “He was young.” It’s the best way he can think of to articulate why he’s sad, and Thomas nods slowly.

A lieutenant comes in then, and Thomas drops Quentin’s hand and jumps to his feet. He can’t exactly follow the conversation that follows—the lieutenant wants to send him somewhere, and Thomas comes up with an excuse for why he needs to be monitored where he is. They both go, and when Thomas comes back he wraps a blanket around Quentin’s shoulders and gives him a cup of tea made with condensed milk. It’s the best thing he has ever tasted, but he takes only two small sips.

“More where that came from,” Thomas says. “Don’t worry. I’ve got to go check on the new lads brought in, but I’ll be back on my rounds later. Don’t fall asleep while I’m gone.”

He doesn’t know how long Thomas is away. He checks his wristwatch, but it’s shattered and stopped. When Thomas comes back, he has a battered tin kettle and a second cup. He sits on a wobbly stool and refreshes Quentin’s tea.

“Right then,” he says. “Let’s have a game, shall we? Make sure your brain’s not too rattled in there.”

“A game?”

“Not baccarat,” Thomas grins. He shuffles a battered deck of cards on the mattress and deals them two each. “Pontoon alright? And I’ll deal first because my head hasn’t been smashed against a wall lately.”

He knows Pontoon; everyone here knows Pontoon. He puts the cards down according to instinct as much as intention. Thomas lights a cigarette.

“Shall we talk about the old days, then?” he asks lazily.

“How is your duke?”

The question he least wants to ask, the answer he most wants to know. Thomas’s eyebrows rise, and he shrugs.

“Not mine anymore. Not by a long chalk. He threw me over, and I tried to blackmail him.”

“Oh, Thomas...”

“I know. We deserved each other. Not like you and me. Should have snatched you up when I had the chance.”

“That’s mean,” Quentin frowns.

“Is it? It wasn’t meant to be.” Thomas seems genuinely contrite, and he nudges Quentin’s knee with his own.

They don’t talk about the war. They talk about the intervening years since they last saw each other as if only three have passed, not five. Do you still live in London? Are you still in service? They go up to 1914 and then they go back. Their last jobs, their first jobs, the ones in between. School and their families and their childhood homes. It’s funny, how much they have in common. They both lost a parent at a young age—Quentin his father at five, Thomas his mother at ten. They both have sisters, who both have new babies. They never had pets, but they used to run around after the neighbours’ dogs.

Somewhere along the way, they abandon Pontoon, and they’re just talking.

Quentin’s ears stop ringing, eventually. His head still aches, but he can focus better. He realises he was shaking only when he stops. It’s hard work, shaking—his muscles are sore. Thomas gets up every half hour or so to circle the room, but he always comes back. He keeps a hand on Quentin’s knee, when people aren’t looking, an achor to keep him floating away.

“All right,” Thomas says finally. “Time for you to get some sleep.”

“They’ll send me back in the morning,” Quentin says, already resigned to it, and Thomas shifts his weight.

“Probably,” he admits. “Yes.” His dark lashes flutter as his gaze drops to the floor. “I’ll probably be sent back soon, too,” he mumbles around his cigarette. “They send us out with stretchers. It’s a sort of rest, being back here, but it doesn’t last.”

The rest of the aid station is asleep. The rest of the world is asleep, the British and the French in their trenches and the Germans in theirs, and the civilians in their beds and the dead in their graves. Quentin is so very tired, and the war has stripped him of his peacetime pride. He had meant to forget about Thomas entirely—Harry had told him to. But then, when Harry went off, he left a much lighter impression than Thomas, even though he had stuck around for three months longer. Hardly more than a rumple in the sheets, ironed over a week later.

Thomas was his first, in a way, and that still means something, as much as the dark stranger in a dark cottage who had first sent bright flares crackling up his spine and behind his eyelids.

“You would run away with me this time, if I asked you to,” Quentin says. Thomas’s thumb brushes back and forth over his knee. His mouth tilts in a hint of smile.

“To Ipswich?”

“God, no.” He considers it. “Well, yes, you would. It’s not here.”

“That’s true. It’s not here.”

“But we wouldn’t go to Ipswich. We would go somewhere worthwhile.”

“Somewhere with a bit of sunshine,” Thomas suggests. “For a change.”

“And a beach. I miss the ocean.”

“But not on the beach. The sand would get everywhere. Drive us mad.”

“That’s the Caribbean out, then. Impossible to escape the beach. Italy?”

“I can’t speak Italian.”

“Nor Spanish, I suppose?”

“No.”

“And we’ll pass discreetly over France.”

“Yes, let’s.” They smile foolishly at each other for a moment. “You’ll be all right,” Thomas says. He squeezes Quentin’s knee and stands.

“You’re really going?”

“I’m due in my bunk, Sergeant Sidebotham. You deserve some shut-eye yourself, and eventually one of the real doctors will come along to confirm you’re fighting fit.”

“I don’t know how I’ll ever be well when you haven’t given me an answer about...”

A yawn overtakes him, and their plans remain ambiguous. Thomas’s lips touch his temple, just beneath the white bandage.

“Why don’t you figure out where you’re going, and then ask me again?”

“I will, you know.”

Thomas gives him a dubious smile and passes through the canvas. Quentin falls asleep staring at the makeshift door.

The next day, he returns to his unit. The time stretches on, the horrible monotony of the war and the trenches and the peculiar hell of the Somme. He gets shot—properly, in the shin, which introduces a level of pain he’s never before reached—and gets sent back to the aid station. He observes the orderlies through a haze of morphine, but doesn’t see Thomas. When the ambulance pulls around, he finally risks the question, in case this is his last chance to say goodbye.

“Corporal Barrow got shot,” a private says, lifting up the stretcher. “Days ago.”

For one wild moment, he thinks they’ve dropped him. He feels like he’s tumbling down, down, with no hope of a safe landing.

“Is he—badly?” he slurs. The thump of his heart feels strange, like the rhythm has been thrown out of whack. The corporal at the other end of the stretcher snorts.

“Don’t you worry about Corporal Barrow, sarge. It’s back to Blighty for him. He’s the sort who always manages to make the best out of a bad situation, sure enough.”

1919

He had intended to ask directions to Downton Abbey once he disembarked from the train, but he doesn’t bother; he honestly doesn’t think he could get through a conversation with a stranger at the moment. Not a village stranger, who would have no qualms about asking who he knows, what he wants, where he comes from. But he doesn’t have to, in the end. He drifts from the station to the village to the abbey, and the only difficulty he faces at all is a chink in the drive that catches his toe. It’s evening, fading fast, and the lush green country of York has all turned a deep heather-grey, as impenetrable as London fog.

He walks around to the side entrance—the kitchen courtyard entrance, the one for staff—and knocks, and tells the boy who answers the door that he is trying to get in touch with Thomas Barrow, if anyone in the house might know his address, perhaps a Miss O’Brien—

“Would you want to talk to Mr. Barrow himself, sir?” the lad asks.

Yes. Yes, he would.

It takes a few minutes for Thomas to come to the door. Quentin stares intently at a pair of pigeons convening together on a nearby roof, dark smudges in the twilight. He’s not interested in pigeons—not really—but he finds himself watching at them a lot lately, because they’re always there to be stared at. Always moving, finding something to do, and never taking offence.

“Quentin?”

He turns and takes off his hat. Thomas is puzzled to see him, but—he thinks—pleased. He’s wearing a striped suit and a red tie, both finer than what he had worn before the war and in colours that flatter him much better than the Army uniform. He’s lost that half-starved, ragged look that men get in the trenches, and the last bit of boyishness that had softened his strong jaw.

“You’re looking well,” Thomas says, clearly thinking along the same lines, although Quentin feels like an old, faded suit stretched out on the drying line. “Better than when I saw you last, at least.”

“Yes, well. I was patched up properly. And you—I was sent to the aid station again later, and they said you’d been shot.”

Thomas holds up his left hand. He’s wearing a glove that obscures his fingers, but they’re slightly curled in a way that indicates all five are still attached. Lucky bloke.

“It’s not pretty,” he says with a careless shrug. “But it still works.” He lowers his hand and tugs at the cuff self-consciously. “What brings you to Downton?”

You, of course you.

“We buried my mother yesterday,” Quentin says instead. His voice sounds flat. He clears his throat. “I— I buried her, that is. My sister, she and her husband are in Shanghai. I sent a telegram, of course, but they couldn’t... it was only me and a few old maiden aunts.”

Thomas pauses in his fiddling. He looks up, face blank and eyes sharp. Quentin has about had his fill of gentle sympathy the last few days. He doesn’t expect any from Thomas—he’s not the type. Part of him thinks he’s only here because Thomas won’t treat him like a little porcelain figure picked out of a pawnshop window. Like there’s a handwritten sign tied around his neck reading Orphan—handle with care.

“I’m sorry,” he says, just enough of a low note in his voice to be bearable. “Really, I am.”

Quentin nods without thinking much about it. Everyone’s sorry. Everyone’s sorry and no one is sorry, because so many people have died in the last five years that one old mother hardly counts. He spins his hat in his hands.

“I’ve decided to emigrate. There’s nothing much for me here—a few distant relatives. The maiden aunts and a cousin in Edinburgh I haven’t seen since God knows when. An awful lot of my friends have...” He clears his throat. “And my sister, she— she likes China a lot, her husband likes his job. They hope to stay there for quite some time, and obviously it’s difficult to get back to Britain often—”

“You’re never moving to China.”

“No,” he says, laughing. It’s a soft, broken laugh, hardly recognisable as what it is. But it’s the first time he’s laughed, since. “No, California. It’s closer. Not close, but closer. San Francisco or Los Angeles—it will be a week at sea at least, and then a few days by train, so I suppose I’ll decide by the time I get there.”

“Well, then. Good luck.” Thomas smiles and offers him a hand to shake. “If there’s still gold out there, I hope you’ll be the one to find it. You probably deserve it most.”

Quentin is still holding his hand. He stares at Thomas, trying to muster up— not so much the courage as the energy. Thomas looks back at him for a long moment and then down at their hands. He glances over his shoulder, lips parting to say that someone will see and that he has to go back.

“Come with me.”

“What?”

“Come with me,” Quentin repeats. “I know it’s mad, but—but the world’s mad, isn’t it? So maybe it can go mad in the right direction for once.”

Thomas is smiling, but not properly—smiling like someone is playing a joke on him, and he’s pretending to go along so he doesn’t look the fool at the end.

“There must be something in the air,” he says in a light voice. “Lady Sybil’s fit to run off with the chauffeur—”

“Good for them.” Quentin steps closer. He takes hold of Thomas’s other hand, the one in the glove, and holds them both to his chest like an actor in an especially tawdry play. “Run off with me.”

“I haven’t got any money.”

“Neither have I.”

“I mean it. I lost all my savings in a scheme that didn’t play out, and I haven’t worked for wages since I left the Army.”

“Well, I’ve got enough to pay your passage. After that, there will be something from the sale of my mother’s house… not a lot, but enough to tide us over until we found work. A clothing shop or—or I worked as a secretary for the Army for a while, when I got back, and I’m not all bad. And I happen to think you made a wonderful orderly, or doctor, or whatever it is you would call it, if you don’t want to go back to service.” He’s rambling. He’s trying to be reassuring, and with every word that comes out of his mouth, Thomas looks less convinced. Quentin sighs and lets their hands fall. Thomas doesn’t pull away, at least. “I don’t know what we’ll do, Thomas. Truly, I don’t. But I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I’d rather take a chance on starting again than keep on retreading the same old ground.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in luck,” Thomas says, the corner of his mouth slanting upwards. Hope flares in Quentin’s heart.

“I don’t believe in being lucky. The existence of chance itself—that’s simply a mathematical fact.”

“And… us?”

He swallows.

“Well… we’re not quite mathematical fact.”

“No, we’re not.”

We could be happy, Quentin wants to say, because—because he thinks they could. Because they can stay up talking for hours, into the early morning, with nothing but a bottle of port or a pot of tea and a few cigarettes between them, and they can pick up and drop threads of the conversation without getting tangled, and they can soften and soothe each other when things get prickly. There is something here. There must be. You don’t come back to a man that many times over that long a span if there isn’t something there.

Then again… five or six nights doesn’t make a lifetime. And Thomas has already walked away from this once.

“We could have a go,” Quentin says finally, a rough edge to his accent that hasn’t been there for years. “You and me. As much or as little as you want—we can have a go.”

Thomas’s hands slip out of his. He looks over his shoulder, at the door, and then up at the house looming above them. It’s proper night, now. There’s no moon.

“I can’t say for sure, especially not right this second,” he says. “There’s flu in the house—half the staff are laid up, and Lady Grantham and some other members of the family. I’ve promised to help out. When are you leaving?”

“Three days from now. The Baltic out of Liverpool.”

“All right. I’ll… I’ll make a decision by then. I don’t know if… if I decide to come but I can’t get away that quickly, would you book passage for me in advance? If I sent a telegram to the docks before you go? You haven’t got other candidates waiting in the wings, have you?” he asks with a sly grin, and Quentin tries for a smile.

“No. Only you. And yes, I would. Trustworthy fool that I am, I would.”

“There’s a lot of people in this world I’d cheat,” Thomas says seriously. “But you’re not one of them.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure, really. I think… I don’t know.”

He looks puzzled, but Quentin doesn’t press the issue. He clears his throat.

“All right, then. I’ll await your telegram, one way or the other. And if this is goodbye…”

He holds out a hand. Thomas takes it and then, quick as a swooping bird, kisses his cheek.

“Then good luck,” he says. “And I’m glad to have seen you again. I…” The knot in his throat bobs. “I’m glad,” he repeats.

He’s not coming to California.

For one wild moment, Quentin wants to invite Thomas back to his room. He doesn’t have a room, but he passed a few inns on his way—one of them will have space. He knows it’s a bad idea before he says it. Thomas will be missed at the house and recognised in the village. 

So he goes back to the village on his own, and catches his foot in the same hole in the path. In the morning he takes the train to Liverpool. The morning the Baltic is due to depart, he goes to the clerk’s office and finds a telegram waiting for him. Got my old job back, prospects good for a better one soon. Decided to stay. Fondest wishes.

Well. That’s that.

1928

The next time he comes to Downton Abbey, he doesn’t take the train and he doesn’t go around to the side entrance. He comes up the drive in a gorgeous Minerva roadster he leased in London, and parks by the front door. It’s bustling with both house staff and film crew, and he’s hardly stepped out before footmen are taking his luggage and an elderly chauffeur is commandeering the car. Lady Sybil must have run off with the last one in the end, he thinks with a smile, or else the poor lad had left with a broken heart. This man doesn’t seem the type to inspire romantic adventures.

Neither of the footmen is Thomas, but that’s as he expected. It’s been almost ten years, and it would be silly to presume that—

But Thomas is standing by the door at strict attention. He looks marvelous in black. Always has. There’s a bit of grey at his temples and his face is a rigid mask of politeness.

“Hello,” Guy manages. He clears his throat. “Guy Dexter. I hope you’re expecting me.”

“Of course, Mr. Dexter,” Thomas says in a voice as smooth as glass. “Right this way.”

He hadn’t realised he was hoping until that hope is dashed against the rocks. He follows Thomas into the house, wishing desperately that he had come up with some sort of strategy, but—no, if Thomas doesn’t recognise him then there’s nothing he can do. He can hardly say “by the way, we were lovers a while back, and I invited you to come to California with me and I got rich and famous there, don’t you remember?” without sounding like a cad, and part of him sours at the idea of having to remind Thomas that they’ve spent hours talking late into the night, in bed together on beautiful summer evenings, in wartime over battered cups of misappropriated tea.

It stings. It really does. But he’s shed a lot of himself in the last few years, and… well. Guy Dexter is like Hollywood itself: he has a past inasmuch as it makes for interesting tidbits in Photoplay. Nothing more.

So he plays the role he’s become accustomed to, and everything proceeds according to the script. The Crawleys behave like all English aristocrats—scrupulously polite, and startled to find that Guy is capable of getting through a meal without cursing or passing out on the table. Myrna, dear thing, veers between not knowing the rules and flaunting them with wild abandon. They appeared together in a film the last time he visited England, in 1925, and something has changed. Her nerves are frayed—not hard to guess why.

He smooths over rough tempers all night, and then finally he slips away, into a small section of the library where he can take a breath and observe his surroundings properly. Strange, to look around and see books and paintings the likes of which belong in a museum, and realise they belong here. He almost envies them their surety.

No one seems to notice his escape except Thomas, who follows after him with a glass of whiskey.

“Thank you,” Guy says, and Thomas inclines his head.

“I’m the butler, sir. Please let me know if there is anything you need.”

“Anything I need? That’s rather a tall order.” It slips out without thought. The sort of roguish thing Guy Dexter is known for, the sly joke that doubles as an entendre for men in the know. Thomas’s gaze drops and Guy’s heart with it. “I’m sorry—”

“I had worried,” Thomas interrupts in a low voice. His eyes flicker up and lock with Guy’s. “That perhaps fame might have gone to your head, Mister… Dexter.”

A smile grows across his face.

“And I had worried you didn’t recognise me,” he counters.

“I almost didn’t,” Thomas admits. “Not until you spoke—at least I wasn’t sure. It’s been ten years,” he adds defensively when Guy raises an eyebrow. “And you’ve grown a moustache.”

“Still, you didn’t say a word—”

“I couldn’t very well say something on the front doorstep with all those people about, could I?” He glances back at the main library. “Same here, for that matter.”

“Can you come to my room later?”

“It might have to be very late, with a house this full.”

“I’ll wait. I don’t mind.”

And he doesn’t. And he waits. And Thomas comes to his room and they don’t talk, not at first, because a friendly kiss on the cheek becomes a real kiss and then they’re laughing and stumbling back into bed. Guy hadn’t presumed this would happen, honestly, but while he was waiting he had undone his tie and replaced his dinner jacket with a smoking jacket, and he slips out of that easy enough. They have to stop kissing to free Thomas from his more close-fitting livery. He eases the coat off and presses his lips to the nape of Thomas’s neck.

“I didn’t tell you that you were my first, did I?” Thomas asks, stretching against him like a satisfied cat.

“No.” He kisses around Thomas’s neck and scrapes his teeth against the curve of his jaw. “I might have guessed.” He slips his arms to Thomas’s front and opens the buttons one by one, and nuzzles against the first bit of pale skin that emerges. “You were mine, too.”

“Really?”

“Well, the first with whom I shared that particular vice, yes. I was… shy. Before.”

“Difficult to imagine,” Thomas points out dryly, as Guy’s hands are roaming boldly beneath his vest, delighting in the feel of layers of fat and muscle that weren’t there before. Guy hums his concession and Thomas tips his head back for a kiss. “Not a vice,” he reproaches.

“No,” Guy agrees. He strips off his own shirt without bothering with half the buttons and tosses it somewhere, and tugs Thomas down so they’re lying partly on the bed and mostly on each other. “Not a vice,” he murmurs against Thomas’s mouth. “A delight. A pleasure. A—a game. One I trust we’ll be much better at this time around.”

“Weren’t that bad before.”

His hands are everywhere, his body hot between Guy’s legs.

“Of course not.”

“But practice does make perfect.” Thomas draws back from a kiss with Guy’s lower lip between his teeth and fingers curled sharp into his back. “Have you had very much practice, Mr. Dexter?”

“My fair share, I suppose. Although— more the other way around, if I’m honest.”

This sparks Thomas’s interest, whatever bit hasn’t been engaged already. It proves to be the missing link, this change of roles—that, or almost twenty years of experience, or the luxury of a large bed in a room with thick walls and no neighbours to worry about. They move together and laugh together and moan together and fall apart in a jumble of sounds and sweaty limbs and jumping muscles that can’t be teased apart.

They’re quiet for a while after. Thomas’s head is nestled against Guy’s shoulder. He barely has to turn his head and his lips brush Thomas’s temple as he asks, “Can you stay?”

“No.”

Guy pouts.

“Yes,” he counters, with another kiss.

“No,” Thomas laughs. “Do you have any idea how early I would have to wake to make sure no one saw me leaving your room?”

Guy doesn’t know. He isn’t listening. All the blood is rushing through his ears as his eyes suddenly fixate on Thomas’s forearm where it is draped casually over the sheets, palm up. A line of white scar tissue bolts like lightning down his wrist.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

Guy starts. Thomas draws away, a sour look on his face. He sits up and pulls up one knee, his back curved to hide most of body and his expression from Guy’s view.

“I-I’m sorry— I didn’t— I didn’t see—”

“But you’ve always known I was weak. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.”

There is a dressing gown draped over a chair. Thomas stands and shrugs into it, and fishes his cigarette case out of the inner pocket of his jacket.

“Not weak,” Guy manages, startled and upset and dizzy with relief over the fact that Thomas isn’t storming out. Thomas gives him a sardonic look, and he sits up straighter and pats the mattress behind him. “Come back to bed, darling.”

“No.” He sticks the cigarette in his mouth and lights it; then he throws open the sash of the window and sits against the sill, one leg pulled up again, the other dangling, like the cigarette dangling between his fingertips. “Mrs. Hughes doesn’t like the guest rooms smelling of smoke. It’ll take us that much longer to air it out if I do.”

He blows smoke out the window. Guy watches it dissipate, batted around on the summer breeze. How horrible it would have been, he thinks, for the world to go on spinning when Thomas was gone. How horrible to think that he himself would be completely unaware of the absence. Once or twice a year he would have thought of Thomas still in England, working his better job, finding love, turning heads—and never known that he had already faded away, less substantial than tobacco smoke caught in the weft of bed hangings.

“I almost did,” he says faintly. “Twice. The first time when I was about… twenty-five. Twenty-six. Coming to terms with— all this. And then again, coming back from the Army, when it seemed like… so many of my friends were dead. And all the men I met were scarred.”

“Lots of ugly bastards our age,” Thomas mutters. He tugs off his white glove and waves a scarred, wrinkled hand sardonically. “Lots of blokes have had to lower their standards, I expect.”

Guy pulls up his own leg so Thomas can get a good look at the knotty mess of deep pink scar tissue on his skin.

“Not just that. I mean—not just the look of it. But it was horrible, too, seeing them moving like old men, feeling ashamed of their bodies in a way they hadn’t before. Trusting less. It felt like the war had stolen all the beautiful things in the world, and I couldn’t imagine how we could ever get them back. The only thing that stopped me—both times—was that I knew it would be hell on my mother. There was no way to make it pleasant, no way to keep her from knowing. Then after she died… Nothing stopping me now, I thought. But I didn’t mean it then.”

Thomas looks troubled at that.

“Does it never go away?”

Guy swallows. He’s already babbling, leaping from thought to thought in a way that hardly makes sense, and now he’s run out of ways to explain this. How at first it was an all-or-nothing sensation, that either the urge to die was the only thing that occupied his mind, lurking in every corner and every shadow, or else he had locked it out, refused to grant it one inch of space, stuffed his brain so full of other thoughts that he couldn’t possibly entertain one more. And now it’s like… like a little bit of clockwork, or a strange piece of knotted driftwood that he can pick up and examine from every angle with faint curiosity, without much investment, and put away on a high shelf and not think about for a long time until it catches his eye again.

“It stops meaning anything,” he concludes. “That’s enough.”

“Right.”

Thomas shifts in the window. There’s a moon, a big blue moon that turns his hair into magpie feathers.

“Anyway. It was a while ago, and—I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve had much more exciting adventures in the last decade, I’ll have you know,” he says with a playful, disdainful sniff. “I took the great sea voyage to New York once. I alerted the household to a fire and became Lady Grantham’s hero on behalf of her daughter. And Master George and Miss Sybbie and I once investigated a monster in the kitchen gardens that turned out to be an escaped piglet.”

“How very thrilling,” Guy says, sounding sarcastic and meaning it with all his heart.

“Mm.” He exhales a mouthful of smoke. “What’s Hollywood like?”

“I know it gets some bad publicity, but… I live in a place called Hancock Park, and it’s pretty nice. Peaceful.”

“I can believe it,” Thomas says, mouth tilting in a smile. “Go on.”

He talks, drifting idly from topic to topic, describing the house and the weather and the city and the filmmaking business. Thomas is somewhere between envious and admiring when he describes his little circle of inverted friends, although he admits to not watching many films and doesn’t recognise any of their names—he’s only starstruck when Guy mentions tea and cricket with Charlie Chaplin. He comes back to bed, when he’s finished his smoke, and Guy lies back down and trails his fingers over bare skin as he talks. He raises goosebumps, but Thomas doesn’t tell him to stop, not until an enormous yawn takes over his face.

“I ought to go up,” he says.

“All right.” Grudgingly. He tilts his head for another long, slow kiss. “Am I forgiven?”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“Hazard of the profession.” They smile at each other foolishly for a moment. “Will you come back again tomorrow?”

“What’s the rush?” Thomas asks. He sits up and retrieves his vest. “We’ve got a whole month.”

Say you’ll come away with me this time, and there won’t be any rush at all. It’s on the tip of his tongue. Light, teasing, matching Thomas’s tone. He doesn’t say a word.

Thomas will be back tomorrow.

He doesn’t stay as long, after that first night, but that’s fine—they’re both busier now, with filming truly begun, and they need time to come to terms with the unexpected awkwardness. It’s odd during the day, when Guy is a guest and Thomas waits on him. It’s odd at nights, when they’ve finished making love and settle in to talk and have to confront the ways they’ve changed. Guy is more prone to be bold and outrageous the way all Americans are, and rich film stars even more so. The first time one of his quips makes Thomas drop his gaze and goes red, Guy thinks it’s his fault. It takes him a while to realise that not only is he willing to go further, but that Thomas is more apt to retreat. Those sharp edges that entertained them both in 1911 haven’t been ground down entirely—Thomas recollects himself quick enough, and makes a few sly remarks of his own—but they’ve dulled. For years Guy’s memories of Thomas have been preserved under glass, like butterflies on pins. It’s a strange feeling, to reconstruct a relationship with someone he doesn’t know anymore.

One night, a week into filming, Thomas comes to him in a mood Guy can’t grasp. It’s not joy, that much he can tell, but it’s not exactly sorrow, either.

“Dear thing,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Thomas lies, sitting on the edge of the bed. He adjusts the lapels of Guy’s smoking jacket and smiles up at him, somewhere between a lover’s coy moue and a servant’s blank. “I’m not feeling very chatty tonight, that’s all.”

Guy lets this pass, because he doesn’t want to pry, and because it occurs to him that this might be what Thomas needs—to get out of his head for a little while and lose himself in his body. Guy can understand that. He’s felt like that before.

But Thomas’s enthusiasm waxes and wanes as they kiss, like he can’t focus on anything at all, and Guy’s uneasiness grows. When he draws back to kiss his neck, Thomas tilts his head but doesn’t touch him in return. When he unfastens Thomas’s buttons, Thomas lets him but offers no assistance.

They used to strip corpses like this, in the trenches. No guilt—few enough good boots and warm coats out there, no point burying them with dead men.

“Thomas,” he pleads. “Do you want to forgo tonight? Have a rest? I promise I won’t be insulted.”

“No,” Thomas says straightaway, clutching at his arms. “No, I came because I wanted company.”

“And I am more than happy to give you company, dear one, but I don’t think I can give you this.”

His heart is pounding. He has never been very good at taking pleasure wherever it’s offered and ignoring the human messiness that comes with it; it reminds him too much of those early years when he treated desire like a hateful necessity. Slinking home from cottages and resolving not to go again. Ironically, he’s become worse at it after becoming a film star, when people began to expect amoral hedonism from him as a matter of course. The first time a pretty lad had rolled over and started to talk obliquely about his ambitions in film—well, he hadn’t cried, but it had been a near thing.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas mumbles. “I shouldn’t have bothered—”

“Thomas,” Guy says again, chastising him, drawing the word out like a scolding schoolmaster to try and keep things light. He squeezes Thomas’s hand. “You can tell me if there’s something on your mind. Aren’t we friends?”

“Are we?” Thomas asks with a bemused snort. Their eyes lock and they both collapse into relieved giggles.

“I’d like to be,” Guy smiles. “Come on, then. Is it trouble at work?”

“Well, things are very difficult at work these days. There’s a film crew constantly getting underfoot, and we’ve just had to shift the whole house’s schedule, which hasn’t been done, by the way, since the house was a hospital during the war—”

“Don’t bully Myrna. I know she’s difficult, but—well, it’s a difficult job. Especially for a woman like her.”

“It’s not trouble at work,” Thomas finishes simply. Guy examines the unhappy lines of his mouth.

“Trouble with a man,” he diagnoses, and he can tell by Thomas’s wince that he’s right. He squeezes Thomas’s hand. “No wonder you didn’t want to tell me. I promise I’ll only get jealous in the most flattering of ways.”

“That’s not why,” Thomas says, shaking his head. There’s still a smile playing on his lips, but it’s faint and fading fast. “It’s only that the whole thing feels… ridiculous. But… yes. It’s a man. We met last summer. He was—I did something foolish, and he rescued me. Afterwards, we talked. About normal things, or the things that would be normal for anyone else, that I’d never really talked to anyone about before. How it felt to be always pretending, how wonderful it was to stop, other foolish things we’d done for—for men, really. I think I told him about you, a little.”

“You’ve never done anything foolish for me.”

“I lied to my superior officer for you. And I think I told him about Philip—the duke. the whole thing surrounding that, and that involved you a little. But the point is, it was the first time I had ever really talked to someone like us, just as a friend. Not afraid to talk about other lovers, not trying to be enticing, not worrying over whether he wanted me or not. As it happened, he did—”

“Naturally.”

Thomas’s lips twitch.

“But I didn’t know that until the next day. He was only visiting Downton—well, he’s in service too, he was here working—and before he left, he kissed me and said he wanted to keep in touch. And we did, for a while. We’re still in touch, technically.”

“But not…?”

“No. Not as lovers. It was the distance. We only managed to meet up twice after, and it was nice when we did but it always faded away in between. Or maybe…” He trails off, shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got over it. But—but what’s happened now is I’ve just got word he’s getting married.”

“Ah.”

“And—” Thomas looks away, his eyelashes fluttering rapidly. “I’m very fond of him, but I’m not in love or anything. I didn’t have expectations. In a way I was happier to have him as a friend, because I’m horrible at romance. I’ve burned every bridge I’ve ever built, it feels like sometimes, and when that didn’t happen with Richard I was so pleased with myself, and I thought— I thought—”

A tear rolls down his cheek, and Guy puts a hand on his back.

“It’s all right, darling. I understand.”

“And d’you see how that makes it worse? Because for years I thought I was going to be alone,” Thomas manages in between gasping breaths. “When I finally got too old to be working. I thought I’ll never have children, no other family, no lover—and then for just a little while I thought it wouldn’t matter, because I had a friend. I thought two old blokes on their pension, nobody would care, and at least I’d have somewhere to go after— after giving my whole life to this bloody house where everyone else has got somewhere else to go. And now—now he’s got a wife and it doesn’t—I’ll never—”

“That’s enough, now, dear,” Guy hushes as Thomas breaks out into a full sob. He puts his arms around him and turns Thomas’s face into his chest, and Thomas clutches at his collar. “There, there. No need to get yourself worked up about that sort of thing, is there?”

“What sort of thing?” Thomas says in a muffled voice. “Silly little thing like dying alone—”

“Yes, a very silly little thing.” He runs his fingers through the short hair on the base of Thomas’s skull. “You’re not dying for a good long while, Thomas. Don’t let’s worry about forty years from now. You just have yourself a little cry, dearest, and everything will be all right. There, there…”

They rock together for a long time, until Thomas has cried himself out onto Guy’s chest. His breath is even but ragged, and his face has a dull, hollow cast to it. Guy has been murmuring nonsense, and he kisses Thomas’s temple in a soothing, congratulatory sort of way.

“It really will be alright, you know,” he says. “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that you’ll find someone.”

“I’ve only been looking for twenty-odd years,” Thomas mumbles. “And I don’t know how—” He sighs. His accent has slipped in the last half hour, the first time Guy has heard since 1911. “Best luck I can hope for is keeling over in the dining room and never knowing what I’ve missed. That’s how Mr. Carson used to wish he’d go, I’ll bet.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’re right. That would disrupt dinner—Mr. Carson would have hoped for the pantry.”

“I mean… don’t sell yourself short. You’re not a spinster because you haven’t found anyone yet, and you’re not a vassal locked in the Downton dungeons for life. It’s 1928, and things are changing every day. I only moved to California when I was your age—older, even—and I was older again when I started working in films. For all I know, my career may be upended again by the time I set foot in Los Angeles. And as for my personal life, I never touched another man with until I was twenty-six, and I still haven’t settled down. But that’s all right, because there are other things, things that I never expected, that fill my life and bring me joy.”

“Well, that’s settled that, then,” Thomas mutters. He draws back, forceful enough that it breaks Guy’s hold without waiting for his acquiescence. “I’ll wander around York until someone makes me famous or a busload of queers has a dropoff—”

“I won’t pretend it’s easy,” Guy says, raising his eyebrows. The tears have drained away, and there is a hard, dry edge to Thomas’s voice. “I just mean… if you keep hoping, keep looking, you’re more likely to find happiness that way than if you give up and decide that your whole life ended at thirty-five.”

“I don’t understand you,” Thomas says. He gets out of bed and digs through his jacket for his cigarettes. A familiar action, sure enough, but— not. His movements are quick and stuttering in a way that makes Guy still, makes the hair rise on the back of his neck.

“How do you mean?” he asks in a cautious tone.

“I mean—” It takes him three times to flick the lighter properly, and he snaps it closed. “I mean I don’t bloody understand you and I never have. What makes you so sure that just because something’s true for you, it’s going to be true for me? And why do you even care?”

“Thomas, we’ve known each over for almost twenty years—”

“No,” Thomas says firmly, jabbing two fingers in the air at him with the cigarette balanced carefully between them. “We’ve known each other for two weeks, spread over twenty years. Up until this week, about, what, thirty hours altogether, if that? You asked me to move to California with you, based on nothing, and now here you are coming all the way back to tell me to keep my chin up—”

“Believe it or not, I was signed on to be in this film before Barber settled on Downton Abbey,” Guy says dryly. “Even after I learned where we were filming, I wasn’t sure you were still here. I didn’t come here for you.”

“This time.”

This time. He nods. No point in trying to deny that. He watches the smoke curl around Thomas’s fingers and dust the stark black of his trousers. Follows the glowing tip of Thomas’s cigarette as it floats through the air, flares when he takes another long pull.

“Do you have a spare?” he asks.

Wordlessly, Thomas tosses the case and the lighter on the foot of the bed. Guy picks them up. Fumbles with the lighter, and takes a drag.

“Should I open the window?”

“Doesn’t matter, really.”

He does anyway. He sits in the window and crosses his legs at his ankles. Vaguely he’s aware that his heart is racing, but at the same time everything feels… faint. Far away. Like he’s been out walking through a very cold winter’s day, and every part of him is tingling with it, so badly that he can hardly distinguish one part of his body from the other. He just has to trust that everything is as it should be.

“For as long as I can remember,” he says slowly. “For as long as I knew there were men like us, I thought they must be a certain kind of horrible. Lecherous old men, or street boys and servants who went around for money, or—all the way back to Sodom, rioters leering over the angels because they couldn’t stand to allow some beautiful thing go undefiled.” A scoff comes out of Thomas’s mouth along with a puff of smoke, and Guy grimaces wryly. “I know. Stupid. Melodramatic. But it’s what I thought. It took me a long time to reconcile the fact that I was that sort of man. Longer to realise I couldn’t restrain myself through sheer force of will. And a bit longer after that to realise that there was room for something beautiful in amongst all the sordid mess. I was still somewhere in the process of that realisation when I met you. There were a lot of things I liked about you and still do. But if you had been… perfect… beautiful and peaceful and calm and kind without a hint of sharpness, I don’t think I would have trusted in you. I would have thought something was too good to be true, and I would have run away.”

“That’s it?” Thomas says, disbelief twisting his face. He’s standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed tight, looking lost. “I was mean and greedy and that was what you liked about me?”

“No,” Guy shakes his head. “I liked that you were real. Not— not greedy. Greedy is when someone has enough and still wants more. You were… hungry. Hungry for love and kindness and stability. Just like now.”

“You were a perfectly nice man and I ditched you for a duke the second I had a chance.”

“You were young,” Guy says. A sideways, indulgent smile. “Young people do stupid and cruel things sometimes. They’re allowed. And there was something admirable in that, even. Not at the time,” he amends, when Thomas’s eyebrows fly up disbelievingly. “I was very angry with you at the time. But…” He shrugs. “The world is never going to be kind to us. Never going to give us anything worth having. You said ‘I don’t care. I want it anyway. I want the best, and if the world won’t give it to me, I want to find a man who will.’ I couldn’t demand that for myself yet, but I wanted to be that man for you. You… straightened my spine.”

Thomas is staring at him, his eyes sharp and bright as steel. For a terrified moment, Guy is sure that the next words out of his mouth will be Were you in love with me? Are you still in love with me? and that he will have to answer. He is less sure what the words out of his own mouth will be in return.

“Predestination,” he says finally. “You were always looking for opportunities, so you found them. I’ve always been lonely and trying not to be, so eventually I won’t. That’s what’s been decided.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s shite philosophy.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Thomas’s gaze drops to the floor. He sighs, a long, deep sigh, and nudges at his temple with his knuckles.

“I don’t know about hungry,” he says. “But I am tired.”

“I know, pet.” Guy nibbles on the corner of his lip. “There really is no way I can convince you to stay, is there? I’ve got an alarm clock, you know. I can make up some excuse—I called you for something, I’m secretly a demanding bastard—”

Thomas doesn’t mean tired tonight, but is exhausted and done with this conversation, and he catches the line Guy has thrown.

“There are other staff downstairs before I’m up in the morning. Someone will want to know why I was down to hear the bell, and I’ll still have to invent a task that would have kept me here for hours.”

“All right,” Guy sighs. “Is the butler’s bed more comfortable than a footman’s, at least?”

“You could say that.” Thomas stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray on the desk. Guy reaches to do the same, and Thomas holds it out for him. “I’m sorry,” he says, eyeing the crumbled ash, the buckling white paper. “For being such an arse. You were… very patient, and I’m grateful. Even if I’m not very good at saying so.”

“Forget it. But—can I ask a favour?”

“Go on.”

“Don’t ever kiss me again unless you truly want to,” Guy says. There is a hollow ache in his stomach. “I—if you want something from me, I’d rather you just ask.”

Thomas sets the ashtray down. He steps closer, so they’re standing toe-to-toe.

“And… if what I want is a kiss?”

Guy is still leaning back on the windowsill. He has to look up at Thomas. His eyes are still red from crying, and he isn’t smiling, not properly. But his face is soft and warm, with little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. Guy takes his hands, brushes his thumbs over Thomas’s knuckles.

“Well, that’s all right, then.”

Thomas leans in, slow, deliberate, and presses his lips to Guy’s cheek. Guy’s eyes drift closed. He takes a deep breath, inhaling the smell of burnt tobacco and soap, feeling warmth against his skin in the familiar shape of Thomas’s lips. They’re quiet and still for what feels like an age, until Thomas draws away and clears his throat.

“Good night,” he says.

“Good night.”

He still doesn’t say it.

He makes his film. It becomes a talkie and for a while he’s convinced that this is the end of everything. Again. Perhaps his destiny is for his life to turn over every few years, never settling into just one thing. But the recording goes pretty well, all things considered, and Thomas thinks he’s being fatalistic.

He explores the house and the grounds as much as he’s allowed and strikes up a friendship with the children and the staff and Lady Mary—the Dowager Countess is a more terrifying figure, and he limits himself to politeness that she greets with suspicion. He tries to mediate between Barber and the other actors, and between Myrna and everyone, with varying degrees of success. He plays with the dog whenever he can (not often—she doesn’t seem to like the bustle of filming very much) and wishes, for the thousandth time, that his schedule was conducive to owning one himself.

And wherever he turns, there’s Thomas. Thomas on the gallery, with soothing words and sly grins. Thomas in the dining room, his face eerily blank always but his eyes sometimes finding Guy’s in a way that acknowledges there’s a joke to be said, and they’re in on it together. Thomas lurking at the edge of crowds, listening but not appearing to care. Thomas in his bed, fucking him, urging him deeper, pinning him against the door, writhing against silk sheets, leaning against the window ledge, carefully folding his clothes, smoking, complaining, gossipping, laughing.

“You know—” Thomas says one night. They’re lying in bed, Thomas by the headboard and Guy by the footboard, propped up on pillows, passing a single overfull glass of whiskey back and forth. “I’m having fun.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

“I meant…” He gestures for the glass again and takes a sip. He traces a finger around the rim and his head flops on his shoulder; Guy thinks he might be drunk. There’s a coy little pout on his lips that comes from long ago. “It’s strange. Being here, and having fun like this. You know Philip and I—the duke—it was in the room across the hall that we ended things. Catastrophically. And the one two doors down, that was where I made a move on a diplomat who threatened to have me arrested—and then I found him dead there the next morning. He had a stroke or something—”

“You what?”

“—actually, same sort of thing happened in the attics. Not the death bit, but… God, he was lovely. Absolutely gorgeous, and absolutely uninterested in a midnight kiss, more fool me. And then the basement, too.” He snickers. “Only then—well. Can’t help but wonder sometimes, if… when he asked if I only wanted to be friends, if I’d said as a matter of fact, yes, I’d prefer that— well, it probably wouldn’t have changed anything. Maybe it would have hurt less.”

There’s a pause as Thomas stares over Guy’s shoulder. His voice is meandering from topic to topic as he catalogues heartbreak in a way only he can follow properly. Then he shrugs and takes another sip. There’s hardly any whiskey left in the glass, just the finest thread of amber.

“All that, in this bloody bad-luck house,” he says brightly. “And yet I’m having fun.”

Come away with me, dear one, forget this fucking house and everyone in it—

“You’re drunk, Mr. Barrow,” Guy accuses. He lunges across the bed and Thomas is giggling even before he settles. He prises the glass from Thomas’s grasp and makes a big, silent-actor show of knocking back the last little bit before dropping the crystal on the thick carpet and setting his mouth to the corner of Thomas’s jaw.

“Stop it,” Thomas laughs, one hand carding through his hair and the other slipping over his waist. “That’s going to leave a mark—”

And that’s how they get on, until the night the rest of the Crawley family comes home. Guy and the rest of the film people have clearly overstayed their welcome, although Lord Grantham doesn’t seem to mind as much as he had before he left; the south of France has done him good, it seems. After dinner, they’re all milling about the library with drinks when Myrna says something to catch Guy’s attention, a morose prediction on the state of their future careers.

“Our business has always been one of chance,” he says, without thinking much about it, until the next time he catches Thomas’s eye and Thomas quirks one eyebrow. Chance but not luck, Mr. Dexter, is that right? he says in all but words.

It hits him all at once.

He’s wrong. He’s always been wrong, because he has been luckier than he could have dreamed, to have four chances with this fascinating, prickly, beautiful man. Lucky that he had gone to the club that night, that he had been wounded on the right day, that Thomas was lousy at baccarat, that he had joined the RAMC, that he had still been at Downton after the way, that he is still here now. Four chances, and Guy is about to blow the last one on what? Wounded pride at the idea that this invitation has been rejected thrice already? Fear that it might happen again? Who gives a damn about fear and pride, when the alternative is that interminable loneliness, no more pleasant in a Los Angeles villa than a cheap London flat?

Guy sets his glass down, without bothering to even check if it’s empty, and wanders away with his hands in his pockets, towards the small library. He looks up at the painting of the little boy in the dress and waits.

Five minutes later, Thomas approaches with a drink on a tray. A cocktail this time, an old-fashioned; he’s put effort in.

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

“Will you come to my room tonight?”

Thomas hesitates.

“I’m not sure… the first night back, there will be lots of coming and going—”

“I don’t care. I’ll wait as long as it takes—and I won’t keep you long.”

“Is that meant to be tempting?”

“Thomas…”

He says it wrong. Too sweet, too strong, burning on his lips like whiskey. Thomas goes still for a moment, looking at him with an appraising eye, and then he shrugs one shoulder.

“All right. I don’t know how long I’ll be. Don’t fall asleep.”

That night Guy waits, fully dressed and pacing, for as long as he can bear. And then he goes through the green baize door and down the stairs. He almost jumps when he’s caught, but with sheer force of will he remains casual and unashamed. He can hear movement in the servants’ hall as well as the kitchen, so he goes to Thomas’s office quickly and makes sure to shut the door behind him.

“So this is where you hide.”

Thomas sets his newspaper aside with alacrity and stands, reaching for his jacket in a prudish show of propriety that Guy finds endearing.

“Someone’s impatient,” he chides. “What would Mr. Carson say about me having an upstairs guess?”

“He’s not in charge anymore. You are.”

“And if someone comes in? What would they say?”

“I don’t care.”

He strides forward in one step and takes Thomas’s face in his hands and kisses him, hard, a kiss that could be a goodbye kiss, if it has to be—even though he hopes it isn’t. Thomas yields to him for just a moment, his breath released in a soft, pleased sigh, and then he runs his hands through Guy’s hair and tugs and nips at his bottom lip, just enough of a reprimand to sting. Guy touches their foreheads together.

“What’s all this then?” Thomas says, quiet, in the space between them.

“Run away with me.”

He straightens, tugs at Thomas’s twisted lapel, smoothes it to avoid meeting his eyes.

“Come back to California—or wherever. I travel a lot for my work, and if my career folds—”

“It won’t,” Thomas mumbles.

“—then we’ll think again. We’ll go wherever you want. You can work for me—that’s what we’ll tell people—run the house or something, or on set—”

“Trusted manservant is what the adverts in the papers say,” Thomas interrupts again, a lightness to his voice that isn’t promising. It turns this into a joke. It’s been a joke in the past, but that’s not what Guy wants, not now. “When they’re looking for someone to be a one-man band. Butler, valet—you don’t need a chauffeur, do you?”

“No,” Guy says distractedly. “No, I like driving. And I don’t mean that’s all you can do. If you want to work somewhere else, or nowhere at all, that’s fine. I mean this isn’t like last time, when I didn’t have the faintest clue what we were going to do. This time, I’ve got a plan, but my point is, hang the plan if it’s not what you want. I love you, Thomas. I have for a long time. And our lives can take any shape that pleases you, as long as we’re in bed together at the end of the day.”

And he means it. He is not an ambitious man and his own future—alone or with a lover as yet undecided—has always been a pleasant, murky haze, like a comfortable cottage seen through a morning’s fog. With Thomas, everything is clear and nothing is certain. Different futures flicker in his mind’s eye, a hundred films cut and spliced into one reel, each one clear and crisp and gone too quick to comprehend. But beautiful. Magical, in the way that films are when you finally get to see them finished, even if you know exactly how much hard work and tedium went into making them.

He knows that films aren’t real, and even so…

“Yes.”

“What?” 

Thomas laughs and wraps his arms around Guy’s neck.

“Did you think I’d need time to consider, when I’ve been thinking it over since 1911? I said yes, Quentin. I will.”