Chapter Text
Dunkirk was small, terribly small for the tens of thousands of bedraggled troops that poured into it, dark-eyed with loss and black-tempered with exhaustion.
Terribly small to share with the likes of Geoffrey Appleyard.
The cricket pitch was the furthest thing one could imagine from the rubble that spread in every direction, and yet it was all Gus could think of when he saw him. Mud-stained whites, pride of his schooldays, and that bastard of a left-hand batter from Winchester, all knees and elbows and sardonic eyebrows.
And a broken nose, which, Gus was proud do see, age didn’t fix. Now that was a memory that had kept him warm on many a cold evening.
It was a memory Appleyard had kept, too, because his hand rose to rub at the crooked bridge of it when he locked eyes with Gus across a muddy street, glaring.
Gus offered him a mocking salute.
---
“Appleyard.”
“March-Phillipps, was it?” He dragged a long look up Gus’s figure, an expression of horrified intrigue on his face. “Truly fascinating what they let into the army these days.”
“It’s not often you say something sensible, old boy,” Gus agreed, donning his most annoyingly affable expression. “Say, who did you steal that uniform from?” He reached to flick the sloppily opened collar, dancing away as Appleyard’s hand shot up to snatch his wrist.
The uniform was tailored to perfection for him, the short battledress jacket accenting long legs and broad shoulders, but he wore it like a slob, with haphazard cuffs and an oil stain on one thigh.
Even his cricket jumpers used to have little holes in the knitting, Gus recalled.
Never mind the one that ended up with a sleeve ripped clean off after that one memorable match. They both got suspended for fighting, but Gus had judged the sound of Appleyard’s nose breaking under his fist, the sight of those superior, mocking eyes kindling with fury perfectly worth both the suspension and his own black eye.
With nothing to do in the besieged city, frustrated and cooped up, he was finding the memory sweeter than he had for a long time, especially face to face with the smug sod.
His palms itched.
---
It was raining.
That was, in fact, an understatement. A storm raged over Dunkirk, drenching the ruined city to the last; rivers of rainwater ran down the streets towards the choppy sea and flooded basements full of shivering, swearing soldiers.
Gus loved storms, had since he was a lad; something about all that power lifted a giddy sort of joy in him, made him feel invincible.
He could still admit it was bloody inconvenient right now, what with water squelching in his boots as he picked his way through muddy puddles.
The town lay almost completely dark. There was no risk of being bombed in the rain, but electricity has long been shut off to prevent fires, and men kept a watchful eye on their kerosene lamps. Only the jagged lightning lit the streets up in its phosphorus shine.
The silhouette of the last house in the lane stood a little apart from the others. The upper floors had completely collapsed under shelling, partially caving into the cellar and keeping most men with preservation instincts away.
Gus, who had made his hideout there, didn’t mind. He preferred the solitude. A universe, ultimately, of one – where he had only himself to rely on, but only himself to care for, too.
Which, he assumed, was precisely the reason someone had invaded his cellar.
“Ah,” said the disgustingly superior shadow sitting on his bedroll, “I should have guessed this utter tip was yours.”
A lighter flared in the darkness, the flame licking a cigarette stuck between Geoffrey bloody Appleyard’s lips. He lifted a ratty blanket that had cost Gus four cigarettes, and dropped it back down with an expression of slightly horrified curiosity.
Gus felt his temper kindle, bubbles rising to the top like fine champagne. “You are very, very welcome to get out.”
“I’d rather not,” his unwelcome visitor drawled in a bored voice. “The weather seems terrible.”
“See, there is just one problem with that,” Gus told him pleasantly. Appleyard made a mockingly polite, questioning sound in his throat. He even cocked his head, the bastard.
“I don’t bloody well care. Get out.”
Appleyard smiled, wide and inviting. Violence sang in Gus’s blood. “Or what?”
Gus lunged for him. Appleyard dropped the cigarette and swept his feet from under him.
They landed in the bedroll, brawling like schoolboys; Gus glimpsed the edge of Appleyard’s feral grin, felt an answering one tug on his own mouth, and did his best to wipe it off with his fist. A knee landed in his ribs, almost knocking the wind out of him. He jammed his elbow into Appleyard’s diaphragm in answer. The world narrowed into his beating heart and running blood; into strain and frenzy. He was heavier than his opponent, stronger, but Appleyard had a longer reach and he could twist like snared fox; for a while neither could come out on top.
He had spent days cooped up, and all of that ennui was now running out of him in a rush. He was no stranger to violence, and it sang in him, lifting his spirit.
Appleyard twisted away from him, took a step back. Blood ran from his mouth. They both stilled, panting in the night air, poised for a strike.
It was intoxicating. Gus lunged forward again, unwilling to let go yet, unwilling to go back to the stillness of the basement, unwilling to return to the mind-numbing boredom of the days and nights spent waiting among the ruins.
It couldn’t last forever.
A well-timed left hook threw him off-guard, teeth clicking. Appleyard slipped from his grasp, leaping up the stairs; Gus saw his insolent, bloodied grin blip in the darkness, two fingers raised in a rude salute, and then he was gone.
Gus stared after him, and then dropped into his bedroll. His ribs smarted. His knee twinged, and his whole face was on fire.
He grinned at the low ceiling, split lip stinging.
---
With most of the water lines into the city damaged or shut off, the few working pumps formed long, orderly queues. In fact, most of the day in the occupied city could be spent queueing, either for water or for food in front of the handful of functioning field kitchens.
Queues, orderly in that most British way, lined the streets close to the harbour where the shelling wasn’t as frequent as on the outskirts. An enemy plane would sometimes swoop over them, dropping bombs, and the soldiers would lie down next to each other, cigarettes still clamped between their teeth as mortar and fire rained around. Some of them wouldn’t get up when the danger was past, and then the mates of such an unfortunate bloke would grab him by the arms and legs and carry him off towards the beaches, and the queue would shuffle forward again.
Gus preferred to scrounge for his water in the leaking faucets of ruined houses, and win his food at cards, as it alleviated some of the boredom. His luck as of late has however been truly rotten, and so he had spent a long morning with three canteens slung over his shoulder, moving slowly towards one of the pumps. Men around him gossiped and ragged each other as they waited; someone started a game of football in the muddy street.
He filled his canteens and looked around. Gulls wheeled over the harbour. The pleasant, slow day around him contrasted sharply with the blackened ruins, the hordes of khaki-clad men and the distant thrum of the artillery, pounding the suburbs to the south.
A yard or two away, Geoffrey Appleyard sat on a low wall and stared out towards the sea. And he looked like he had spent the rainy night outside, too.
Good riddance.
Gus could leave him alone. He could pick up his canteens and go find some poor wanker to cheat a handful of cigarettes off of.
His socks needed darning. He could shore up the back corner of his cellar which had started to sag rather alarmingly.
He had things to do.
“Had a nice kip?” he called cheerfully, inordinately pleased when Appleyard twitched, shoulders coming up.
“Quite, thank you,” he was quick to pull the mask of polite superiority back over his face. “I’ve always been rather partial to wet sand.”
That startled a laugh out of Gus. “Have you, now.”
“Sorry about your mug,” Appleyard continued, high-handed.
This conversation was taking turns Gus hadn’t expected. “…are you?”
“Well,” Appleyard inclined his head, “now that I have to look at it.”
Gus snorted. “You are very welcome to come and get yours fixed again. The black eye is quite becoming, I must say.”
He stepped around the wall, turning for home. A sharp whistle cut the air; he was grabbed around the waist as a lunging body brought him unceremoniously to the ground behind the wall. The world around him shook on an explosion. He landed hard, bricks and shrapnel raining all around, smoke filling his eyes and throat.
Coughing, he felt the other man roll off him, and they lay dizzy in the settling dust.
He turned to see Appleyard, swearing rather inventively at the sky, face scraped up. A smoking crater yawned beyond the short wall, exactly where Gus would have stood if not for the rude interruption.
The football players lay around like scattered dolls.
He felt his stomach swoop.
“Thank you,” he said, smothering the unpleasantly genuine sentiment in generous layers of condescension.
Appleyard’s eyes, strikingly pale in his soot-covered face, subjected him to a long, disgusted look. “Choke on it,” he advised. “And watch where you’re bloody going.”
---
“Not you again,” Gus said when the annoyingly familiar silhouette appeared in the door to his cellar.
Appleyard glared at him, and fell down the stairs.
“Bloody-” Gus was on his feet and near him just as he started picking himself up, sluggish. “Miserable, woebegotten-”
The arm Appleyard was using to push himself up gave; Gus graciously saved him from mashing his face into the dirt for the second time.
“Get your hands off me,” the ungrateful sod wheezed. Gus turned him to his back, unwieldy and uncooperative and heavier than he had any right to be.
“Shut up,” he said, eyes glued to the wool of his battle dress, blackened by blood on the left shoulder. The small hole above the breast pocket gleamed wet and obscene right in the middle of it all.
“You fool,” he said. “You bloody, miserable fool.”
“You said that already. Not too eloquent, are we?”
“Wait how eloquent you are when I’m done with you-” his mouth was running almost of its own accord, the familiar annoyance warming blood that had started to run suspiciously cold.
Blood. He had yet to stop being surprised how much of that stuff was in a man.
“Do you have a dagger?” he asked when he was done with the buttons and the bloody shirt and undershirt underneath and all the mess of torn flesh and blood-stained, blue-turning skin lay in front of him in all its stomach-churning glory. It was a stupid question, but he wasn’t going to judge his conversational skills right now.
Appleyard flipped it out with his working hand. A wooden handle and a long, double-edged blade with German lettering, and if Gus had more sanity to spare, he would find it funny. As it were, he took it out of his hand, wrapped the handle in a handkerchief and offered it to him.
“Try not to leave your teeth in it, old boy.”
Appleyard glared at him, but Gus could see the short, wheezing puffs of breath jumping out of him, the sweat beading against his hairline in the cold basement. There was nothing else to give him, and he knew it, if the uncharacteristic docility he opened his mouth with was anything to go by.
The tip of the dagger scratched against the ground as he turned his head away, the hilt wedged between his bared teeth.
Gus took a deep breath. There was a lot to get wrong in a human shoulder. An artery ran somewhere there under the collarbone, and one nick would turn Appleyard into a number in a casualty report, if that. He could get a nerve, too; make sure the man never moved his fingers again. But if the bullet stayed in, he would be dead for certain. It would be a long, slow, fever-fuelled descent to a personal hell as infection sapped colour from his skin and strength from his bones, until he died a dog’s death, a half-mad shadow. And Gus would have to watch it.
The bloody bastard had to pick his hideout to fall into.
Gus slipped the tip of his dagger into the wound. Blood washed the edge, and suddenly his mouth was full of bile; his hand shook, iron biting flesh. Appleyard made a sound around the guard in his mouth, and Gus might have been telling himself he had nothing but distaste and loathing for him, but he never wished to hear a man wearing the same uniform as he himself did make a sound like that again.
He dropped the dagger as a dry heave shook him from the stomach up.
Appleyard reached up, the good hand visibly shaking as he loosened the guard between his teeth, flexing his jaw.
“Didn’t have you for a coward,” he said, hoarse.
He was white around the mouth, hairline darkened with sweat, and his breath came in rapid pants, like he couldn’t quite catch it despite not moving at all.
The steady grey of his eyes said he knew he was going to die. Even if Gus dug that bullet out of him, he would still be stuck in a filthy basement of a besieged city, with no clean water and no medication to speak of.
And he had chosen Gus’s hideout to fall into.
Gus had never asked for any of this. He had volunteered to fight, not to sit in a hole and die like a rat. Not to sit in a hole and watch Geoffrey Appleyard die like a rat.
“Shut up.” Gus wedged the hilt of the dagger back between his teeth, effectively ending the argument.
He wiped his own knife off best as he could and shuffled to his knees.
Only one way to go about this. He brought his right shin down on Appleyard’s arm, just under the joint, and his left knee onto his chest, using his weight to pin the injured man to the ground.
Appleyard closed his eyes. Gus plunged the dagger into the hole in his shoulder. The body under his tried to heave up, fingers of the outflung right hand clawing at the earth, heels digging down; Gus leaned forward, fighting him like a wild animal, straining in every muscle from thighs to neck. Tendons in Appleyard’s throat stood out, lips pulling around the guard in his mouth as he wrestled his own body where it struggled against the cold fire lancing his shoulder, clinging desperately to shreds of control.
“Let go,” Gus told him, and was rewarded by a furious glare and a bitten off sob. It opened his heart like a tin of corned beef, all jagged edges that would cut your hand, and the strange, pinkish mess of packed meat inside.
Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging. He watched the hand wrapped around the dagger as if it wasn’t his, the blade plunged two inches into the grotesque, overflowing pit of torn flesh. It nicked something hard in there, and Gus twisted it to get under the bullet, almost without a higher thought.
Appleyard went limp under him so abruptly he almost overbalanced, the added strain finally robbing him of consciousness.
Thirty seconds later the projectile was out. A fresh wash of blood followed it, and Gus threw himself aside as the cramps ran up his back, his stomach attempting to crawl out of his mouth.
He spat the burning saliva out, wiped his eyes, and turned back to the carnage of his work.
Appleyard lay in the blackened ruin of his uniform, edges of his shirt starkly red like petals of some demented rose. His bare chest shook in stuttering gasps and his eyes were opened to slits and wet, eyelashes clumped together. The dagger lay next to his head, hilt still wrapped in a handkerchief.
He was looking straight at Gus, and there was neither gratitude nor reproach in his eyes, just the same acceptance that Gus now felt in his cracked heart.
Damn him to hell.
---
Armies might march on their stomachs, Gus mused, but they certainly lived on their lungs, supplied by a steady stream of cigarettes.
Unless you were stuck in a besieged pile of rubble.
It was unsurprising they became currency; all of man’s needs weighed against the chance to forget, for the span of a few deep breaths, where he was.
Wasteful to smoke them. If you could help yourself.
Oh yes, cigarettes were for trading. But there was no rule against trading with yourself, Gus thought as he carefully drew his second mouthful.
Appleyard shifted where he lay about a yard away. He wasn’t looking at Gus, staring at a crumbling wall instead like it held all the secrets of the universe. The raw want he wouldn’t acknowledge was rolling off of him like fevered sweat.
Serves you right, Gus thought viciously, determined to either have the cigarette all for himself, or make him ask for it.
Cigarettes were for trading. What would he get out of sharing this one?
The other man shifted again, a low sound escaping him as the movement jarred his injury.
“Stop mucking about,” Gus snapped, sharper than he meant to. His mind was all too ready to conjure up the glassy-eyed absence Appleyard had spent the last three days in. The image wasn’t doing his empty stomach any favours, which soured his mood in turn. “You will ruin all that neat handiwork,” he tried to amend in a lighter tone.
Wouldn’t do to be caught out. Fully conscious, Appleyard was a canny sod, and Gus wasn’t going to forget it.
He was rewarded with a scoff. “You call this neat handiwork?” Appleyard indicated his shoulder with his jaw, careful not to move again so soon. “A tank could drive through that hole.”
Ungrateful wanker. Gus could feel the familiar annoyance warm his spirit.
“If you don’t like it, you are welcome to take it up with the Jerry who made it,” he gestured for the stairs that led out, “watch he won’t do us all a favour and make another in your head.”
Appleyard had a quick, secretive smile – unless he laughed at you. Then, he smiled wide and wicked, and laughed deep. Deep enough to jostle his shoulder and lose what little colour was in his face.
“Shut up,” Gus told him, and reached across the gap between them to stick his smouldering cigarette between Appleyard’s lips, still curved in a sickly grin.
Cigarettes were for trading. Half of this one could get him blessed silence. The shamelessly blissed-out expression on the other man’s face was just a bonus, and one he didn’t care for, anyway.
---
It was raining again. Appleyard dozed in the haphazard nest of half-rotten blankets and remnants of his uniform, the sound of water as it ran down the stairs into the cellar absurdly comforting, given it was turning the ground around him to mud. It was just enough noise for his pain-strung mind to catch onto, to offer a distraction from the fire that spread from his shoulder to his veins. It let him sink into that grey half-sleep where pain was a distant hum, not a roaring inferno.
Gus kept half an eye on him as he rooted through a few boxes the previous owners of the house had left in the back. If he was careful not to make too much noise, well, it was only because Appleyard was a miserable bastard when he was conscious, the pain and discomfort obliterating the feeble remnants of his manners, such as he ever had them.
Gus had very little mood to be taken to task for breathing too loud, especially if he couldn’t exactly wring the sod’s neck without undoing all of his good work. He was becoming unpleasantly fond of that bit of surgical effort. Too bad it was attached to Geoffrey Appleyard, of all people.
Most of the boxes were filled with what once might have been memories, but to a pair of soldiers constituted old junk. Toys and diaries and a baby dress, and Gus did his best to ignore what he was doing. He had neither time nor the luxury to pity someone else’s life.
His search produced a battered deck of cards, a chess set with three white rooks missing, and, the prize of prizes, a dusty bottle of brownish liquid that made Gus’s heart race.
If it was alcohol, and not a long-forgotten cruel prank, he was a rich man. Stiff drink was the only thing coveted more than cigarettes, save for the ever-elusive, mythical morphine. And if that wasn’t a thought that brought him back to Appleyard, shifting in restless sleep.
There had to be thousands of men in these godforsaken ruins whom pain robbed of sanity and dignity. Gus knew of a few dressing stations where doctors and a handful of sleep-deprived nurses did what they could with the worst of the damned, having ran out of most medication days ago, but most men suffered as Appleyard did, left to the mercy of their mates.
Each of those would give whatever Gus might ask for an ounce of alcohol.
---
“I’ll play you for it,” Appleyard said later that evening. He lay unmoving, sparing himself the pain, but his eyes burned, hanging on the bottle of alcohol Gus had forgotten to hide.
“Rummy,” Gus agreed. He had no intention of parting with it, but it felt too low to simply refuse. He had seen the tremors that ran through his companion’s right hand where it lay clenched in the ratty blankets.
Appleyard licked his lips. “Chess.”
Gus considered him. “You can have the white.”
He had never been burdened by much conscience. As far as he was concerned, men did whet they had to with what they had at their disposal. Still, something in him twitched weakly at the bargain he offered.
Appleyard’s mouth pulled into a tight line once the chessboard was set up and he realised he was three rooks short, but he didn’t say anything.
Gus understood his uncharacteristic restraint half an hour later, when a long, shaking finger tipped his king.
“Go easy on it,” he advised as he handed the bottle over, doing his best to keep his tone friendly. He had set Appleyard up and still was soundly trashed; he wasn’t going to pile being a sore loser on a top of that.
That would be entirely too much satisfaction for the bastard.
Appleyard wasn’t paying him any attention. He tipped his head backwards, drinking in quick gulps, throat jumping. That was Gus’s money and cigarettes disappearing into his gut, and yet Gus couldn’t bring himself to tear his eyes from him, from the desperate abandon and strange grace of it.
“Here,” Appleyard held the bottle out to him. A quarter of the contents was missing already. His pupils have dilated, red splotches standing high on his pale cheekbones. He shook the bottle at Gus again.
Gus took it, mostly by reflex, and it was as if Appleyard’s strings were cut. He dropped back into the blankets, eyes closing. He almost seemed to have lost his edges, blurred slightly in the semi-darkness as he brought his good arm up to wipe his mouth on his sleeve.
“For the cigarette,” he said. Even his voice was stronger, although it had slurred.
“You-” Gus stared at him, speechless.
“Don’t overthink it,” Appleyard advised him, lips quirking into a shadow of a smirk. Between the blood loss and the weak rations they existed on, the alcohol worked quickly. A blanket of numbness was settling over him, muting the pain and drawing away concerns, muddling his head.
Gus took a long gulp. Whatever it was, it was objectively foul, and still the best thing he’s had in his mouth for weeks, burning a trail down into his gut.
He sat the bottle carefully down, still more than half-full. Appleyard’s breathing had evened out and deepened; he was fast asleep. For the first time since he fell down the stairs into the cellar, the deep lines in his face partially cleared, giving him a deceptively peaceful expression. He had trashed Gus despite being set up, only to turn and offer the bottle to him and fall asleep as if he didn’t have a care in the world; it was sheer arrogance, arrogance to the last.
God help Gus, but he liked it.
He shook his head in wonder. Carefully stoppering the bottle, he wrapped it in a corner of a blanket so it wouldn’t break if Appleyard knocked it over in his sleep, and stood up.
Water to fetch, cigarettes to win – he had things to do. A man to care for.
---
It crept into Gus’s sleep by increments; a hand reaching for him, tugging on his clothes; a voice, raspy with urgency. He floated up and up through a dream thick with smoke and then woke at once, grasping the wrist at his collar and reaching for his knife.
“Oi,” the voice rasped again. Appleyard.
He must have reached over from where he lay, working hand scuttling over Gus’s face and clothes until he woke. Darkness lay thick around them, cloying and hot. Irritation sprang in Gus like wildfire.
“What?”
“Get out,” Appleyard told him, uncharacteristic urgency lacing his voice. Gus could see nothing of him in the darkness save for the sickly glint of his wide-open eyes. The night scratched in his throat.
“What?” he asked again, uncomprehending.
“Out,” Appleyard wheezed. Gus reached for him, found him clammy with sweat and over-warm. He sat up abruptly. The fever has been mostly gone for a day or two. There were no good reasons for its return. Had the alcohol done more harm than good?
“Easy,” he tried to soothe. “Lie down, there is a good man-”
Appleyard made a frustrated sound deep in his throat. He was putting up a fight, wrenching his wrist from Gus’s grip “I am not delirious, you fool,” he growled, “The bloody house is on fire.”
Gus stilled like a deer in the headlights. The thick darkness, the warmth of the air – now that they were silent, he could hear the merry crackling of flames somewhere overhead.
“Bugger.”
He clicked his lighter open. The flame tangled in thick billows of smoke drifting downward, slid off Appleyard’s ragged, sweat-drenched face.
No time to lose. Stowing the lighter, he reached for Appleyard in the darkness, grasping the edge of his half-donned uniform. “Up we go.”
Something cracked in the corner. They both stilled, turning after the noise, just to see the half-collapsed ceiling fall through in a shower of bright sparks. Fire whooshed above as the collapse opened a new stream of air to feed it.
Burning rubble tumbled into the cellar, heating up the space and throwing the walls into a maddened dance of red light.
Gus rolled to his knees and heaved on the uniform still in his grasp, dragging the other man up with him, staggering for the stairs.
Appleyard tried valiantly to keep up, breath harsh even over the whoosh of the fire that now spread over the back wall. The fever and the pain had sapped all his strength; they were a few steps from the stairs still when he tripped and brought them both down in a tangle of limbs, biting through a cry.
“Get the hell out,” he wheezed, trying in vain to catch his breath.
“Daft sod,” Gus panted at him. It was getting harder and harder to breathe, and sweat was running down his body like rainwater. A few moments more, and they would be stuck here. Nothing for it. Gus gathered all his strength, and, hands fisted in Appleyard’s uniform, dragged them both for the stairs as his struggling lungs allowed.
One step.
Two. His legs were lead; he was never going to move again.
Three. His foot slipped, the edge of the concrete stair biting into his knee as he fell.
Four. Appleyard made a strangled sound as his good hand grasped Gus’s belt and heaved up.
Five. If the bugger could try, so could Gus.
Six. They plunged out into the street.
Cold air hit Gus’s face as he stumbled forward. Appleyard’s knees buckled as the last burst of desperate strength left him, and they both tumbled into the mud and puddles in the street.
Gus lay on his back in the dirt, gulping the cold air. Appleyard curled next to him, trying to wrap himself around the injured shoulder. His breath came out in gasping sobs, and Gus’s heart heaved in his chest. He half turned and dragged him up, propping the other man’s head on his shoulder so he wouldn’t lie with his face in the mud. A hand fisted in his uniform.
“Thank you,” Appleyard wheezed.
“Choke on it,” Gus told him, suddenly giddy.
---
The sun was already rising when Gus found them a new spot on the beach, partially tucked under a low pier. Appleyard fell asleep the moment he was horizontal, exhaustion graving deep lines into his pale face.
A nurse had had a look at his shoulder in the aftermath of the fire. The wound had partially reopened in their struggle to escape the cellar, so she re-bound it in what looked like strips of an old shirt. She couldn’t say much more than what they both already knew – that it was on his grit and will to pull through.
That, Gus thought, was actually good news. There were few men as bloody-minded as Geoffrey Appleyard.
Wind whistled chilly over the beach. Appleyard radiated warmth at Gus’s side, slightly feverish. Gus mentally shrugged and pressed closer to him, aware of the small flame of thorny fondness that had replaced his long-cultivated dislike.
It was most inconvenient, but there wasn’t much to be done about it here and now. If they ever got off this beach, a return to London would put the likes of Geoffrey Appleyard out of his mind; if they didn’t, well, he was going to have other things to worry about.
Either way, it didn’t signify.
---
Men slept in piles all along the beaches. Nothing wrong with sharing a little body heat with a mate; its not like they had much else.
Nothing wrong with sharing a little body heat with a mate, but it was a trifle embarrassing to wake up snuggled to a bloke whose nose you’ve enthusiastically done your best to break a few days ago.
Especially when he was looking down said nose at you, grey eyes amused.
“Had a nice kip?” he rasped. It was disgusting how much Gus had gotten used to that sardonic tone over the last few days.
“I should have saved that bottle in your stead,” Gus told him, and didn’t move. The beach was cold. If Appleyard wanted, he could try and have a row about it, but until then, Gus was going to get all the body heat out of him he could.
It was the least the sod could do, serve as a pillow. A bony one, at that.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you. Blimey, I could use a drink.”
Gus decided not to question the logic of that.
“Shame you can’t cheat one out of some unsuspecting blighter, isn’t it.”
Appleyard huffed a laugh. “You can’t cheat at chess. If anything, it was me who was cheated.” He sounded perversely pleased about it.
Gus couldn’t resist the jab. “You just said you can’t cheat at chess, old boy.”
“You are a cad, Gus,” his pillow told him. He didn’t sound incensed about it. “A rotten sod.” What was more, he made no effort to move, not even to push Gus away from himself.
Gus snuggled even closer to him, just to see what would happen. “Careful, Apple. That sounded almost like a compliment.”
“Oh, I wonder why.” Appleyard tipped his head a bit, breath ghosting over Gus’s hair.
Was that how it was going to be? Gus’s heart picked up speed, just a little. “Your fever must have gotten worse.”
“No other explanation for it.”
---
The ships started arriving in that morning, looming out of the mist like spectres. Gus took a long walk up and down the beach, listening to gossip, and then returned to where Appleyard lay, helped him up, and together they shuffled for the pier.
A hospital ship stood there; the big red crosses painted on her hull stood out like lighthouse lights.
The soldier guarding the pier took one look at them and frowned.
“We don’t take walking wounded, sir,” he said.
Gus repressed a flare of temper. “Corporal,” he said pleasantly, “if I let go of the good lieutenant here, he won’t be a walking wounded.”
It wasn’t much of an exaggeration, even if Appleyard huffed an irritated “Cheers” into Gus’s ear. Despite his best attempts, he hung off Gus’s shoulder, ashen-pale, with his left arm tied to his half-naked chest with crusty bandages.
“Be that as it may,” the corporal flittered a quick look at him and away, “if he isn’t on a stretcher, I can’t admit him, sir.”
“You are not going to tip some poor blighter out of a stretcher,” Appleyard hissed at him as Gus tugged them aside to regroup. He sounded almost indulgent.
“For you, I could.” Gus lathered the statement in enough barbed irony to hide that he almost meant it. He had known he was growing unpleasantly fond of Appleyard, but last night had shifted something. His universe of one was expanding, and wasn’t that a bother.
---
They ended up in a queue again. Gus felt like his time in the army consisted mostly of queueing. Good thing this one was waist deep in water, enlivening the whole experience.
Wouldn’t do to get repetitive.
Appleyard kept lapsing in and out of threadbare consciousness, the only thing constant about him the white-knuckled grip he kept on Gus’s collar.
Exhaustion cramped Gus’s shoulders. He would have never thought it was possible to be this tired and remain standing. Water lapped at him, swayed him back and forth, one in a long line of men that littered the beaches.
Time stretched into interminable white buzz; once in a while a plane would swoop down, black and monstrous, and Gus would press closer to the unwitting body clutching at him and hope. Fire and water rained around them, and yet the men didn’t move.
There was nowhere to move, nothing to do but wait.
Nothing to do but wait, and then there was the rocking of a boat, men lowering Appleyard over the side to him, choppy sea, wet wool, and finally the iron bulk of a destroyer, solid like a mountain.
Appleyard’s mutilated shoulder got them both a place inside, away from the windy, wet deck. Cots filled every available space on the warship, and men fell into them as if they were graves, robbed of consciousness the moment hey were off their feet. Gus lowered his burden onto a scratchy blanket, and then stretched alongside him before he could think about it.
He was out the moment his head hit the mattress.
After, he would hear the grisly stories. Whole destroyers sinking to the bottom of the Channel, soldiers drowning and burning at the same time, grim-faced civilians pulling their army out of the seas one man at a time, planes dropping from the pale skies like falcons. But that would be later. For now, his luck held, and he knew of nothing until the ship horn welcomed the Dover coastline.
---
“Thanks, mate.”
Gus lowered him onto a stretcher. Rows upon rows of them lined the piers, nurses in neat uniforms flitting in between, dispensing medicine and feminine charm. He twitched the edge of a thick blanket and drew it over Appleyard’s chest, taking care not to jostle him.
“Thanks, mate? That’s all I get for saving your arse?”
Appleyard smirked. He was filthy, dressed in bloody rags and he still looked two steps from deaths door, but the spark in his eyes was bright. The hook that had been tugging at Gus’s ribs for days yanked, hard.
“What else would you want?” Appleyard asked. His smile was wide and wolfish in his thin face, lively. Gus was perfectly, clearly aware he meant to put the man out of his mind.
It was certainly the sane option.
Who in bloody hells was interested in sane options?
“Why,” Gus looked him in the eye, “I wouldn’t mind a piece of said arse, old boy.”
That startled a laugh out of the other man. “I bet you bloody wouldn’t, you sod.” For a man flat on his back and weak as a kitten, he was remarkably self-assured. His eyes were assessing on Gus’s face. “I will let you buy me supper,” he allowed, smirk still in place, “in about three weeks.”
For all the cockiness, he was clearly exhausted. For a mad moment Gus contemplated sitting next to him until stretcher-bearers came to take him away, and then dismissed the sentimental thought.
Appleyard’s eyes have slipped closed, chest rising in a regular, long rhythm.
Gus bent to him and gripped his good shoulder. “Alright,” he said, quiet. The thin lips quirked into a small smile in answer.
He rose from the cobblestones, glancing back at the dozing man, and walked off, towards the trains where throngs of men already waited. The British Army rolled in the port, bloody and defeated, and yet he could hear crass jokes, see steam rising out of tin mugs of tea. Civilians stood on streetcorners, patting the shoulders clad in filthy wool.
Britain lay unbowed under the setting sun. Gus could feel the war in his bones, and found he didn’t mind.