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Chapter Text

PADDY

In the end, Paddy doesn’t get to say goodbye, or doesn’t know it when he says it.

It is the eyelid flicker flash of a glance in the back of the plane, and then the roar of the wind and Eoin is gone. Paddy jumps first, without looking back, and he will always, for the rest of his life, wonder if things would have been different had he let Eoin jump first.

He couldn’t have. Couldn’t have watched the wind take him. 

Paddy’s chute had taken him far off course, but some of the others saw Eoin land – badly, limbs askew. Heard the sound of bone breaking, saw the desert take him. 

“He was bleeding something else,” says one of the men. 

And, “No one could’ve survived that landing.” 

And, “His body’ll be miles from here.”

Practical, pragmatic words, spoken carefully, but flaying Paddy’s skin from bone anyhow. 

Eoin is dead , they all say, as though this is a truth that Paddy can accept. 

He listens, and he is stoic, and he says nothing, but while the men rest, Paddy marches right back out into that desert to look for him. He is damned if he’ll let Eoin lie without a burial. 

But the desert is a vast and greedy creature, and it swallows Eoin without so much as a trace. For days after, he returns. Walks despairing loops. Shoots at the sky. Calls Eoin’s name. 

Searches for a trace of him. 

Impossible, intolerable, that Eoin could have vanished from his life without warning. Without even a body to bury. Without even a goodbye. 

Eventually, David Stirling is there, hand heavy on Paddy’s shoulder. “Paddy,” he says, and that is all. 

“Let me sleep here tonight,” says Paddy, heavy and final, gaze fixed on the sand. “Tomorrow I will play the good soldier. Just let me sleep here tonight.”

So he recites Brooke and he sleeps there in the desert and in the morning he walks back to the camp, and he does not find Eoin, body or soul. 

After that, Paddy sets about dying. 

There are missions – increasingly dangerous, reckless missions, which Paddy dives into with the unhinged vigour of the desperate. Night raids and more jumps, dangerous face-offs which they cannot possibly come out of alive, and yet, time and time again, he does. 

There are the French, and Eoin’s ghost is standing beside him, tall and slim and laughing, burnished golden in the desert heat, saying, “Lay off, Paddy,” and Paddy says, “You’re dead,” and shoots with more determination than before. 

Then Jock is killed and David is captured and somehow when the dust clears Paddy Mayne is the one left standing. 

And what for , he thinks, as they are shipped like so much cargo over to Europe. For what godforsaken purpose can I still be standing, when David is gone, and Jock is gone and Eoin — 

And Eoin. 

Eoin, lying somewhere still in that desert, the desert that Paddy has left behind him now, but whose sand he carries inside his bones like an hourglass. One day soon, his time will run out, and his path will tilt, and all of the sand will pour from his open mouth and bury him there, bury him with the ghost of Eoin McGonigal, who follows him still. 

“For all is dark where thou art not,” mutters Paddy, leaning his arms on the rail of the ship, and beside him, Eoin’s shadow hums and sighs. 

“You never liked Tennyson.”

“Perhaps not,” admits Paddy. “Would you have Whitman? I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you . Or Yeats: I left him to the indifferent stars above .”

“Lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows,” says the ghost of Eoin, to spite him. 

Paddy stares down into the ocean. It is too dark, too far down to show a reflection, and so too opaque to throw the illusion of Eoin into stark relief, or to ripple as he fades.  

In Europe, Paddy bleeds poetry and men – loses both, faster than he can countenance, and loses blood, too, though not enough for his liking. 

At night – for he does not sleep, anymore – he sits with a cigarette or a bottle, and battered books, and tries to fill in the blanks his exhausted mind’s begun to lose. He reads Auden and Frost; the war poets: Sassoon and Gurney and Owen. 

And you have fixed my Life – however short, writes Owen, spilled stark ink in letters to Sassoon. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

I sit alone at last, and therefore with you. 

Sometimes, Paddy thinks the mad dog that bays for blood and the ghost of Eoin McGonigal are the only parts of him left. 

He will follow one of them into oblivion, and only time will tell which. 

He leans back, staring at the stars of Europe – which are much like the stars of the desert, though lonelier, somehow. Closer, somehow. Almost fallible. 

“I shall swing out soon,” he mutters, and reaches for another drink. 

. . .

13 miles to the east, Eoin McGonigal lies on his back and stares at the starless ceiling of his cell. 

“Goodnight, Paddy,” he says, as he has said each night for two long years. 

And the empty cell echoes back.

Chapter Text

EOIN

The first few months after the jump are the worst. 

There is the terror of the mission itself— the moment in the air as Eoin realises it is all going wrong, the way he lands badly, a pain so white it knocks him out for minutes together; he comes to being dragged along the ground, stripped raw by sand and thorns, a terrible burning pain, and horrible fear: fumbling for his knife, hands unable to grip— And then, when he’s managed to cut himself free, the moment where he looks down at himself and sees his leg— the bloodied mess of it, splintered bone and so much blood. He knows, in that moment, that he is a dead man. Knows he won’t make it out of the desert. It is his last thought before he passes out.

The next few days are the white noise of pain and blood and the grimmer, bleaker understanding that this will be a slow death. He thinks of finishing it for good, but he has lost his pistol in the fall, the knife fell from his hands when he cut the ‘chute and anyway— he couldn’t have done it. Too afraid of damning himself, though in all likelihood he is damned already.

So he lies there as the desert sucks hungrily of his blood, and stares at the gleaming sky, and he prays: God, let it be quick— God, let Paddy be alright— God, Paddy— until the names becomes twisted and he scarcely knows which he is praying to.

And then, when he comes to again, expecting blue sky and grit, or perhaps the darkness of death, he finds instead a white hospital, and nurses, and he feels the briefest, confused moment of utter exaltation, until his brain catches up enough to hear the language they are speaking, and he realises he’s been delivered from death into purgatory. 

They have to operate. It is—

He doesn’t like to dwell on it, or on the days afterwards, when Eoin wakes for the first time, looks down at his leg, which is itching something awful, and— 

“Right,” he says, very quietly. “Okay.” 

They fashion a rough pair of crutches for him, and sew a pair of trousers short at knee, and discharge him into the PoW camp, unsteady and grim on the crutches, with the hands of the desert scored down his right cheek. He lost an ear, in the fall — far less momentous than a leg, but, as it turns out, utterly vital to his balance, and so one-legged and off-kilter, he lurches unevenly around the camp for weeks, falling time and time again, until the camp doctor tells him he’ll lose his other leg if he isn’t careful.

He slows down. He takes the camp in. 

He is still in Egypt. He is still nearby. He is battered and quartered and none too strong, but if he can get out— 

Somewhere in the desert, Paddy Mayne believes he is dead. And Eoin cannot live with this.

The first time he tries to escape, the guards are amused. He makes it no further than three paces from the fence, though it is night and he has been careful. But he can’t be stealthy, not like this, and the hopping, lurching, uneven gait doesn’t lend itself to a smooth escape attempt, and there are lights on him, and then hands on him, and foreign voices in his ear. 

“Where will you go?” asks a guard in heavily accented English. “Will you hop the whole desert?”

“If that is what it takes,” says Eoin, grimly, and the guards laugh, and haul him away, leaving his crutches behind there in the sand. 

He gets a week of solitary confinement, reduced rations – reduced from what , he wants to ask, of their already meagre meals – and the men make jokes about it, the one-legged soldier determined to hop his way home. 

The second time, Eoin plans carefully. The guards are right – he cannot hop his way to freedom. And so he watches, and he learns their routines. He chats with the guards, or those who have some English, anyway. Makes himself affable and non-threatening and amenable. And so they get sloppy, and they aren’t expecting it, when Eoin waits til dark and lurches between the vehicles like some hellish thing of the night, and no one is watching him closely enough to miss him. 

He knows how to hot-wire a car – something everyone in the SAS knows, quick and quiet and efficient. And he has it, too, or almost has it— the car is thrumming to life below his hands and he is scrabbling for the pedal with his one foot when hands are hauling him from the seat, throwing him to the ground. He lands badly, winces, and then curls up when heavy booted feet follow him from all sides. They leave him there, battered and bloodied, and someone spits on his cheek as they walk away. In the end, it’s not nearly as bad as leaping from a plane in a sandstorm. 

It is, he decides, an acceptable risk. 

They transfer him to Europe, and he starts again, smarter this time. He works with other prisoners – Algerians and French, Americans and a handful of Canadians who trade cigarettes and show him how to brew gin in an old barrel and let him help them dig a tunnel beneath the barracks, because, as he is quick to point out, he still has the use of both hands. 

Eoin escapes – or tries to escape – from three camps, before they send him to Colditz. 

By that point, he’s a bit of a story in his own right: the one-legged soldier with the scarred face, who won’t be stopped by fence or moat or bayonet. Ridiculous, really. It’s no more dangerous than a day in the SAS; no more dangerous than jumping into a sandstorm with a paper thin parachute and a few meagre hours of practice rolling from the back of a vehicle. But the other prisoners don’t see it like that, and the stories take on a life of their own.

Colditz, though. 

When he is moved there, at first he refuses to be galled by it. He waits six months, waits politely for his turn – for the prisoners who have been there longer have a whole roster of escapes, it turns out, a long-winded complicated thing which has to be managed and orchestrated – and then, when he sees his opportunity, he takes it. Sews himself into the side of an under-stuffed mattress which is for transport and gets himself loaded into a truck. Nearly suffocates below the weight of other junk tossed on top of him, and has to master himself to keep from crying out. They toss the mattress in a junkyard by the side of the road, and Eoin waits til night and cuts himself free.

He makes it almost twenty excruciating miles, travelling in small, exhausting bursts across farmland and forest, before he is caught by a patrol a few hours before dawn. He tries to run, but it is absurd. The soldiers – cruel young men barely out of their teens, thirsty for Empire and blood – laugh at him, and then beat him bloody. 

Eoin wakes in the hospital again, with two cracked ribs and a lung that flaps like parachute silk when he tries to breathe. 

The futility of it strikes him, then; all that effort, and he made it twenty miles. 

It is four hundred to the Swiss border.

They shrink his already meagre rations, leave him in solitary for so long he begins to fear they’ve forgotten him there, begins to dream in raw, claustrophobic bursts. For a long time, he keeps himself sane by writing long, winding letters in his head: to his mother, his brother, to Paddy. 

Dear Paddy, I am not dead—

Dear Paddy, Forgive me for leaving you—

Dear Paddy, I— 

And then, when that runs dry, by reciting snatches of the poems Paddy had spun for him: against the traffic lights that skim thy swift unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars— I should’ve been a pair of ragged claws— darkling I listen, and for many a time, I have been half in love—

But he doesn’t have Paddy’s memory for verse, never did, and he winds himself into circles trying to recall the next word, the next line, until he is near to tears. Keats goes, and Tennyson, even Yeats. Eventually, he begins to forget the sound of Paddy’s voice, the coarse wool and salt of it, the rasp of his vowels and the way he dips low when he tells the truth.

By the time they let him out, Eoin McGonigal is changed. 

“You’ve lost your bunk,” says one of the other men – a large Welshman with red hair and three failed escape attempts under his belt. He knows what it’s like, in solitary; knows to treat Eoin with a gentle hand. “New guy – only been here three months. Fancied a window.”

Eoin sighs, and makes his slow lurching way across the room. He is weak, after months – who knows how many, Eoin’s long lost track – in a darkened box, and he staggers on trembling arms, weak like a kitten and bitter with it. He means only to collect his meagre belongings, not to cause trouble, not to even speak to the troublesome newcomer, but fate and God and man have other ideas. 

“I’ll be damned,” says a voice, belonging to a life years and miles from here: a voice meant for commanding units and schmoozing with big wigs and flirting with Algerian spies. A voice that does not belong in this godforsaken prison. “Eoin McGonigal, returned from the bloody dead.”

David Stirling is sitting on Eoin’s bunk in slightly stained khakis and an undershirt. He has a beard, and none of the buttoned up precision he’d somehow managed to maintain hundreds of miles into the Egyptian desert, but there’s the same determined wildness to his features: madness, moulded by years of English boarding schools and sheer bloody-mindedness into tempered steel. 

“Stirling,” says Eoin, surprisingly pleased to see him. 

And then, immediately after comes a flash of desperate, white-hot fear. Because if Stirling is here—

“Don’t panic,” says Stirling, in his sardonic, chewing-the-cud tone. “Paddy’s fine.”

And all the air goes out of Eoin at once. He sits heavily on the bunk beside Stirling, protocol be damned. Stirling is eyeing him with something between curiosity and concern. 

“Which is more than can be said for you,” he observes. “What the devil happened to you anyway? Last I heard, you were dead. Though,” he adds, reflectively. “I suppose we never did find your body.” 

“Not even the leg?” asks Eoin. “I wouldn’t mind it back.”

Stirling barks a laugh. 

“How long have you been here?” he asks. 

“I dunno,” says Eoin. “Not yet a full year, I don't think. Spent the last few months—”

“In solitary, yes,” says Stirling. “I’d heard. Failed escape attempt.”

Eoin shakes his head. “Stupid,” he says, half under his breath. “Where would I even have—”

He cuts himself off. “I’ve got some hooch I was saving for in case I failed, and ended up back in this place,” he says, changing the topic. “Figured I’d need it. What d’you say we get blind drunk?”

“Now,” says Stirling. “You are speaking my language.”

. . .

It is much later that night, when Stirling and Eoin are dizzy and jam-happy from the hooch , which is almost exactly as bad as Eoin had remembered, that Stirling pats his pockets for a minute, and produces his cigarette case. 

Eoin, who hasn’t had a smoke in god-knows-how-many months, eyes it hungrily, but when Stirling opens it, he ignores the rolled cigarettes, and instead reaches for something small – a slightly yellowing piece of paper folded so flat it almost disappears into the case. When Stirling holds it out to Eoin, a little sand falls from its edge. Eoin is suddenly strangely breathless. 

“What is it?” he asks.

Stirling shrugs. “Open it.”

And then he does reach for a cigarette, but now Eoin has eyes only for the paper, which he opens with trembling fingertips, to see Paddy’s handwriting. 

It— it’s a poem. 

What else , he thinks, and then has to suck in a sudden sob that comes from nowhere and seizes him by the throat. Paddy . 

“He was getting rid of it,” says Stirling. “Tossed it for the fire. I felt that it was worth saving.”

Eoin can’t look at him. Still caught by Paddy’s words in Paddy’s hand, Eoin’s fingers where Paddy’s had been. Like Paddy had reached out through the years and touched him, right behind the ribcage, sent life thrumming through the thin blue veins in his wrist.  

“I’ll—” Stirling stands up, walks to a tactful distance, until Eoin can just see the shape of him in the dark, the red glow of his cigarette. With unsteady hands, he returns to the paper. 

Paddy never shows Eoin his poems— had never shown Eoin his poems. Said they weren’t ready for public consumption, and when Eoin had laughed and said “I’m not the public, Paddy,” Paddy had said cryptically, “No, you’re you ,” and would say no more. 

So it is a wonder, now, a revelation, to see these words, to hear them in Paddy’s salt-coarse wind-sharp voice, which comes back to him like he is sitting right beside Eoin, there in the night air of Colditz, and not a thousand miles away. The sand has found its way beneath Eoin’s blunt fingernails, and it sits there sharp like the point of a compass, connecting the years. 

The first few verses are about war, and death: bloody and grotesque as he would expect from Paddy, but tempered, too, restrained. Like all that poetry has bled into Paddy’s veins and channelled his anger out into this: the beating heart that Eoin always knew was there.

But when he reaches the last verses—

When he reaches the last verses, he has to stop, and take a breath, because his hands are shaking too hard for the words to be legible. He collects himself, wipes the stubborn glaze of tears from both eyes, and reads. 

Each time I close my swollen eyes I know
His body gritted down with callous sand – 
Discarded, reaching for me with the hand
Of ghost or spurnéd lover. I must go

And walk with him among the desert there:
He calls me like a call to Evensong
Or lover calls beloved. On his tongue
My summons; in his name my only prayer. 

Eoin reads it three times, and then Stirling’s cigarette is down to the butt, and he is wandering back over, eyes like molten flint in the dark. He sits back beside Eoin, observing him in that hunting-dog way of his. 

“Someone had to keep it,” says Stirling, an offhand British schoolboy drawl. “Didn’t seem like he could. So I kept it for him.” 

He tips his head, and now Eoin does look at him, and sees the unawaited softness in his face, the hint of something deeper in his strange dark eyes, when he says, “Only it seems I’ve been keeping it for you, haven't I?” 

Eoin holds his gaze for a long moment, but Stirling does not flinch. So, he knows what Paddy is to Eoin – understands what the poem means to him. Had seen the way Eoin looked at Paddy, before the jump; seen the way his eyes followed Paddy when his back was turned, the way his expression went unguarded suddenly, softened by heartache and yearning. Perhaps, he has known all along. 

And he has carried this piece of paper with him in his cigarette case, one man’s elegy for his dead friend, because he had known what it would’ve meant to Eoin. 

Who would’ve guessed that within the body of this tight-laced upper-crust madman, there lurked the soul of a romantic.

“Thank you,” says Eoin, with fervour. It is all he can say. He folds the paper up, very carefully, and slides it into his inside-breast pocket. It will go where he goes, this proof that Paddy Mayne – at least in one sense of the word – had loved him. 

“Right,” says Stirling, suddenly brisk again, embarrassed as all the English are by any overt show of emotion. “I think we’d better be making our way out of here, hadn’t we?” 

Eoin looks at him. 

“It’s not like other prisons,” he says. “Colditz. That’s why we’re here. It’s supposed to be inescapable.” 

“Well, that’s a load of tosh, isn’t it,” says Stirling. “You just tried.”

“I failed,” observes Eoin, though not humorously. He finds he cannot tell Stirling what those months of solitary have done to him. 

“Has no one escaped?” 

“Ye–es,” says Eoin, slowly. “They have, but—” he sighs. “Stirling—”

“I hear you’ve been quite the escape artist, in the past,” says Stirling. “The other men have told me about you. Why you’re here.”

“That’s different,” says Eoin. “Look, a moat and battlements and guards and barbed wire aside, we’re 400 miles from the Swiss border, and that’s across rough country. I’ll never make it.” 

He gestures helplessly at the pinned fold of his trouser, just above where his knee had been.

He cannot tell Stirling of those long gruelling hours, staggering from copse to hedge in the pitch black, telling himself Just to the next tree line, just to the next tree line , and knowing he could not – would not – make it. Those hours in the dark, when a slight misstep had sent him stumbling to his knees; the slamming pain that rocketed through him when he knocked the stump of his leg hard against a rock; the way he’d leaned over and vomited – not much coming up but bile and a few blackberries he’d torn from the hedge with greedy trembling fingers days before. He was sickening and feverish by then, undernourished and exhausted. The bruising blisters that live below his armpits now, cruel side-effect of the crutches, had burst and he was sweating blood from both, so that he must’ve looked grotesque in the shadows. It had been cold, too, and his prisoner’s clothes had done nothing to keep out the cold of an oncoming German winter. 

A shivering, pathetic thing – a million miles from the boy who’d stood by Paddy Mayne’s side in the sands of Egypt, and thrown himself with such easy confidence from the back of moving trucks. 

Ah, Paddy, he’d thought, as he panted there in the dark. What would you make of me now?

Stirling though – Stirling, who has been here only three months, who looks better fed than Eoin, and madder, too; Stirling, who has the use of both his legs – might pass as a farmer or a soldier; Stirling might manage the trek through rough terrain, across river and mountain; Stirling might be able to outrun his pursuers. Stirling, with sheer bloody luck and SAS levels of determination and madness, might even make it.  

But Eoin has no hope. 

For the first time in months, the knowledge is unbearable. 

He steels himself, determined to hide how much he hates this. “You’ll have to leave me behind.”  

“What utter bloody nonsense,” says Stirling, wafting away Eoin’s concerns with a disinterested hand. “Anyway, that’s the trick of it: they’ll be looking for us all the way to Switzerland. But we aren’t going to Switzerland, Eoin.”

“No?” says Eoin, politely; always the best way to deal with the madman that is David Stirling. 

“No,” says Stirling. “Because 13 miles west of these walls, a very small company of men is embedded behind enemy lines.”

Eoin looks up at him then, sharply. It is impossible. “Not—?”

“The S-A-fucking-S,” says Stirling, with his mad toff grin. “Led by no other than Paddy Mayne.” 

He knows he has caught Eoin with the only bait that would’ve snagged him, the one offering that would’ve brought spring to his wintering heart. The one man that Eoin would come back from the dead for, break out of Colditz for, only to double back further into enemy territory. The man he would crawl 13 miles on his stomach for, through mud and water and enemy fire, into the jaws of certain death. 

Eoin would walk into the mouth of hell to see Paddy again; 13 miles is a fucking gift. 

“So,” says Stirling, archly. “Are you in?” 

And Eoin smiles for what feels like that first time in two years. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Fuck it. I’m in.”

Chapter Text

Eoin

They should be miles and miles down the escape list, after Eoin’s failed attempt – especially given it was unauthorised in the first place, and hadn’t exactly placed him in favour with those In Charge. But David Stirling walks his public-school arse into the Escape Officer’s unofficial office (a cleared cell, far from the nearest guard post) with a wink at Eoin and a bottle of something which looks a little better than hooch, and when he walks out an hour later, they are at the top of the list.

“What did you say to him?” asks Eoin, in half-grudging admiration. 

Stirling waves an airy hand. “Oh, you know, the usual sort. ‘Vital to the war effort’. ‘Shorten the time before Armistice Day’. Threatened to get myself shot, all that.”

“Right,” says Eoin. “And that worked, did it?”

“Well,” says Stirling. “My mother was an Honorable. Would make things a tad awkward for him, when he got home.” 

Eoin huffs a half-laugh, eyes Stirling. 

“So, what’ll it be then?” he asks. “Tunnel under the moat? Knotted bedsheets?” He quirks a testing eyebrow. “Drag?” 

Stirling’s lips quirk. “As appealing as those options are,” he says. “I’ve been offered something a little better.” 

Of course he has. 

“Oh yes?” 

Stirling grins. 

“They have,” he says. “A plane.”

. . .

Stirling isn’t lying about the plane. 

It’s a glider, to be more specific – two wings, lightweight material, a cockpit with space for two pilots. No engine, nothing that will carry them the thirteen miles to the West, but enough to get them over the river and a little further; enough to carry them away into the night without – if the wind is favourable and they’re very lucky – the guards even realising they’ve gone. Stirling’s managed to arrange two other prisoners to stand in for them during morning roll call; by his reckoning, they’ll get clean away before anyone thinks to look for them. 

The glider is, unfortunately though logically, hidden away in the attic above the chapel, and so after a painful journey up many stairs and a narrow ladder, Eoin is winded and in pain, and he hoists himself into the attic half-expecting to find out that Stirling’s dreamt the whole thing up. 

Instead, he has to catch his breath for an entirely different reason. 

The plane is a genuinely remarkable thing: built from bed slats and floorboards that the men have purloined from all over the castle, with prison sleeping bags stitched expertly together for its skin. They have fashioned it together using an astounding collection of tools: an iron bar from a window; the bolt from a cupboard hinge; a gramophone needle. 

They have built a sixty foot runway through the vaulted space of the attic, fashioned together from tables and floorboards; at the end, there is a counterweight to assist in the glider’s launching: a tin bathtub filled with concrete. At the end of the attic, they have excavated a hole in the wall large enough to launch the glider through, chipping away at it with impossible slowness over the last year, covering the hole during the day with a mixture of concrete and brick and relying on the fact that – as it’s high up and overlooks nothing but a sharp drop – the guards aren’t looking too closely at it. 

All together, the whole thing is astounding. 

“How long have you been working on this?” asks Eoin, leaning heavily on his crutches. 

One of the engineers shrugs. 

“‘Bout 18 months,” he says, offhand. “Group effort, really.”

“How—?”

“We got a book out the library,” he says. And then, at Eoin’s look of incredulity. “Really. Aircraft Design. Guards even checked it out for me.”

Eoin barks a disbelieving laugh. 

“She’s near enough done,” the engineer continues. “We’ve just been waiting for a pilot mad enough to try her.” His gaze goes to Stirling, who is examining the glider. “You sure you can manage this thing, Stirling?” 

“Oh yes,” says Stirling, with the lazy arrogance of the English upper classes. “Don’t you worry about us. We’re SAS men.” 

“‘Scuse us a moment,” says Eoin politely to the engineer. 

He fists a decisive hand in Stirling’s shirt and drags him aside. 

“You told them you were a pilot?” he hisses. 

“I told them I have experience with planes.”

Eoin grits his teeth. “With all due respect,” he says. “I don’t think falling out of them is quite the same as flying them.” 

“How hard can it be?” says Stirling. 

Eoin has no answer to this. 

“The plan is simple,” Stirling continues, taking Eoin’s silence as assent. “We’ll wait for nightfall, then glide across the river and towards the forest to the west.”

“And what’ll we do,” says Eoin. “Once we’ve landed. If we land.” 

“We’ll ditch the glider and head towards camp. There’s a village a mile from the woods; we’ll steal a bicycle.” He glances at Eoin and then away again. “You’ll perch on the back, I’ve more than enough good legs for the both of us.” 

And at once, Eoin remembers that before his own jump, there had been Stirling. Stirling who had launched himself out of a plane with a parachute that didn’t open, and who’d lost the use of both legs. Sure, Stirling came alright in the end, through sheer bloodymindedness, the way Paddy had told it. But in the beginning, he hadn’t had a single working leg. 

Eoin, at least, has one. 

“Alright,” he says slowly, with an ease he doesn’t feel. 

“Good lad,” says Stirling, slapping Eoin on the shoulder and then frowning. “We’d better feed you up; can’t have you dropping from starvation halfway to the camp.”

In the end, it is two more excruciating days before they can try anything: weather, last minute adjustments, and then the almighty task of getting the glider onto its runway. It is maddening to both of them: the narrow window of time they have to get back to their unit dwindling away. Eoin knows Stirling must have considered leaving Eoin, and trying his luck another, quicker, way. To his credit, he never gives a single indication of it. 

Eventually, the preparations are done, and Stirling and Eoin slip up to the chapel attic in the depths of a still, silent night. Eoin brings nothing with him, just his crutches and Paddy’s poem, tucked safely away in his inner pocket. 

The glider is there on the runway, surrounded by the engineers who built her – they help Eoin and Stirling into the plane with a great deal of backslapping and hushed excitement and last minute instructions or well-wishes. 

And then they are stepping away, and it is just Eoin and Stirling in the tiny glider, which suddenly feels incredibly paper thin and flimsy. Ahead of them, the wall has been cleared away, and the sheer vertical drop gapes blackly below them. If the glider does not work, they will plummet to the rocks beneath with no chute to catch them. 

Eoin knows, intimately, what this death will be like. Stirling knows it too.

“Ready?” asks Stirling.

“Ready,” lies Eoin, and his hand – without his permission – goes to his breast pocket. 

I’m coming, Paddy. Wait for me.

Then Stirling holds up a hand, and the rope holding the bathtub is snipped. Eoin feels a terrific tug in the pit of his stomach, and the glider is roaring forward with a great surge, gathering impossible speed up there in the vaulted attic, and then it is through the gap and they are soaring out into the night. 

Paddy

Paddy is tired of Germany. 

He’s tired of the stinking mud, and the rain. He’s tired of not being able to light fires, and having to eat cold beans from a can, and hunching over his book at night unable to see it. Most of all, he’s tired of hiding – skulking around in forests and wild grassland, sneaking into towns or military bases and killing quick and silent, then clearing out before anyone even knows something’s wrong.  

They have one last mission here – a radio control station they need to take out – before they can pack up the camp and head for the coast: the distant promise of home leave, and then Italy. 

A few hours before they are due to move out, Paddy returns from patrol to discover a knot of excited men, clustered around something in the dark, whispering excitedly. 

“What’s this, then?” he asks, and the men part immediately to reveal the tall, entirely unexpected figure of— “Stirling,” says Paddy, thoroughly shocked. “What the fuck are you doing here?” 

“Hullo, Paddy,” says Stirling, with his wolf’s grin. 

He is grimy as anything – covered in filth and bearded, like a strange wildman, half mud-creature, half-man. Below the grin, he looks exhausted and a little worse for wear. But all the same, he has made it here, despite all the odds. And god only knows how he’d got the information that they were here, even while behind bars. Stirling bows to a higher power known only to himself. 

“You are supposed to be in a PoW camp,” says Paddy.

“Well, couldn’t let you have all the fun, could I?” There is something in his eyes – a strange glint, something Paddy can’t interpret.  “Brought you something,” he adds casually.

And then he gestures, and Paddy sees that there is another man in PoW civvies behind him, and that’s as far as he gets before his head becomes a roar of white noise and the ground slides sideways beneath his feet because—  

It is Eoin McGonigal. 

Most of Eoin, and here Paddy’s mind skips and stutters, because Eoin’s right ear is crushed and uneven, half destroyed, and there is a long vicious scar across the arc of his right cheek, and his right leg— The place where his right leg should be is horribly, explicitly empty. He leans against Reg Seekings, one arm gripping Reg’s shoulders. Paddy can see the faintest tremble around his left knee, where it struggles to take his slight weight. All of this, Paddy’s subconscious catalogues, while most of him, heart and nerves and soul and breath, is frozen, stuttering over the impossibility of it. 

Of Eoin, here. 

Alive. 

And then, Paddy bows to the inevitable and looks into Eoin’s face. And Eoin’s cheeks are hollow and his lips are white with pain and his curls are wild and too long, hanging uneven over his one good ear. But his eyes. His eyes are the same. 

For a long, suspended moment, Paddy stands his ground, gripped by the utter conviction that he has finally cracked down the middle, and his sanity has pooled out into the unforgiving Leipzig mud. 

And then Eoin, very very softly, in that damnable even voice of his, says, “Paddy.” 

Just that. Just his name. Like it's all he's waited two long years to say. 

And then everything breaks loose at once, and he is staggering forward, crossing the space between them too quickly. He is right there in front of Eoin, and his fist is gripping the frayed front of Eoin’s shirt, and he sets his forehead against his own fist, curled so tight that he can feel his own pulse racing there. And below it, steady and even below Paddy’s, Eoin’s. 

He feels Eoin’s arm come up, his hand press into the hinge where Paddy’s shoulder meets his neck, and Paddy feels his knees give, keeps himself upright only by the iron force of his will. 

“Right,” says Bill Fraser, from somewhere behind Paddy, surprisingly tactful. “I’d say this is worthy of the last of the rum. What d’you say, lads?”

And there is a low roar of approval, and everyone is moving off, moving away, leaving Paddy and Eoin and poor Reg, who stands there still, solid and enormous and just a little awkward. Johnny Cooper hovers, waiting for him. 

“Go on,” says Eoin, and Paddy feels him make a gesture. “I’ll be grand.”

Paddy masters himself. Forces himself to pull back, to step into the gap that Reg leaves, so that he is sliding under Eoin’s arm and wedging himself there. 

“Get some rest,” says Reg, and then he and Johnny are moving off with the others. 

Paddy fixes his gaze across the camp. 

“Can you walk?” he asks Eoin, without looking fully at him, stealing a glance under his eyelashes and then away again.

“I can,” says Eoin. “Lost my crutches, though. Will you—?”

“Yes,” says Paddy, roughly. Anything. 

He will be Eoin’s crutch for the rest of his goddamn life, if only Eoin will stay with him, if only Eoin will keep looking at him like that, keeping being warm and solid and alive beneath Paddy’s hands. 

And so they make their slow, shuffling way across the camp to Paddy’s tent. 

Once they are inside, Paddy deposits Eoin on his camp bed and lights one of the small candles they can hazard, then turns away, staring blankly at the canvas. He keeps looking at Eoin from the corner of his eye, sliding glances at him, like he’s afraid to look at him full on. Like the sight of him would blind Paddy. 

Eoin watches him for a long moment, waiting for him to get his head right.

“You died,” says Paddy eventually, helplessly, as though he cannot understand this not to be true; cannot move himself past that point in the desert where he had left Eoin McGonigal, and half of his own soul. “You’re—” He shakes his head, stupid. “You died.”

 Eoin huffs a laugh, humourless. “Part of me,” he says, and it is not clear whether he’s referring to the missing leg, or the other absence – a hollowness at the heart of him, the crack that will take longer to heal. 

“I should never have left that desert,” says Paddy, voice raw and wrecked. He turns to face Eoin. “I should have torn it apart til it cracked like a pomegranate and delivered you back to me.”

“Ah, Paddy,” says Eoin, eyes glittering in the dark. “Then it would have taken you. And where would I be then?” 

Paddy moves towards him like a man possessed, unable to hold himself back any longer. He sinks to his knees on the floor before Eoin, and then his thumb is on Eoin’s chin, tilting it so that he can get a look at Eoin’s split lip, the poppy bruise blooming across one high cheekbone. 

“Who did this to you?” demands Paddy. “I will have his life.”

Eoin’s expression is blown open, lips slack and eyes dark. He swallows. 

“It— we landed funny,” he says, an explanation which explains nothing at all. “It was just the impact, that’s all.” 

“All this time,” says Paddy. “All this time, you were—”

“They kept me in Egypt, at first,” says Eoin, skimming swiftly over those terrible early days – the pain and the infection, the fear that he might die after all, leg or no leg. The despair. “I nearly escaped, so they shipped me over here.” He shrugs. “I was in Colditz, when Stirling found me.” 

Paddy stands, paces, a tiger in a cage. 

“If I’d known,” Paddy bites the words out. “I would have taken that place apart with my bare hands. I would tear it apart still.” 

Eoin coughs a laugh, says, like it matters: “Paddy, it’s Colditz.”

Paddy stares at him. “I would have gone to Hell itself for you, Eoin McGonigal,” he says, and it is not a grand declaration or a sweeping metaphor. It is the truth of him, bone deep. His voice softens. “Had I been sure that you would follow me back out.” 

“I would’ve,” says Eoin, at once. “Paddy—” 

He stops. 

“I tried to get back to you,” he says quietly. “So many times, I tried—” He glances down, dark eyelashes brushing over his devastating cheeks, gaze on his pinned up trouser. “Paddy—” 

“You’re here now,” says Paddy, roughly. 

He sits heavily beside Eoin, so close that their thighs brush. His gaze is fixed on his knees when he says, “I have— we have a mission. I’ll have to leave,” he says, and tries not to react to the way that Eoin flinches. “But I will be back by tomorrow night.” 

“You’ll take me with you,” says Eoin, even, but the question is there in his eyes. 

Paddy shakes his head. “I will not have you in danger again. Not while there is breath in my body.”

Eoin’s lip tugs, just a little. “Don’t leave me behind, Paddy,” he says, very quietly. 

And in it is all the fear that he has carried into the camp, all the new uncertainty in the long slim line of his body. That he is no good to Paddy now. That Paddy will not want him like this.

Paddy stops. Turns. Looks him full in the eye for the first time. 

“If you think,” says Paddy, very clearly. “That I would willingly be parted from you again, Eoin McGonigal, when God himself has been overthrown and the universe has delivered you from the dead into my arms—” He stops, overcome. Eoin is trembling. So instead, he says, “Stirling’d have my head, if I took you on a mission now.”

“When has that stopped you?” asks Eoin. 

“Never once,” says Paddy. “And not now, only that I myself would have you safe.” 

Eoin’s lip twists. “You can say it,” he says. “I’m a liability, Paddy. I know it as well as anyone.” 

Paddy grips his shirt with both fists. “You are the blood that beats in my veins,” he says, nonsensically. “You are the only thing that makes sense in this whole godforsaken universe. And when I lost you you took the heart of me with you. God, Eoin.” He presses his forehead to Eoin’s, unable to put into words what it was to lose him. What it is to have him again here, in the middle of hell, so new and unbelievable that even now Paddy can barely bear to blink, for fear that Eoin will disappear from under his desperate hands. 

“Eoin,” he says again, because it’s closer to his meaning than any other word. 

Eoin’s hands come up to the back of Paddy’s head, his blunt fingernails in the short fine hairs at the back of Paddy’s neck. 

Paddy never told Eoin what he was to Paddy. Never dared act on any one of the myriad desires that trembled in his hands or crowded below his sharp tongue. So Eoin cannot know that Paddy would rather die now than be once parted from him. Would walk away from this camp and this war, gladly, if it meant that he could take Eoin McGonigal with him.

But he cannot. The universe has brought Eoin back to him, and Paddy owes it to his men to do the job he’s been given. One more mission, then— 

There will be time. 

Paddy pulls back to look into Eoin’s eyes. 

“But you have also just walked out of a prisoner of war camp,” he says. “Give it time. Give yourself time. I will be here.” 

Eoin’s eyes skate over his face, searching. He must find whatever he’s looking for, because after a moment, he nods, and his fingers loosen in Paddy’s hair. Before he can question it, Paddy lets himself lean in and press a hard, sudden kiss to the skin of Eoin’s forehead, both hands cupped reverently around his jaw. 

When he moves back, Eoin’s eyes are wet. Paddy stands and turns away, knowing he must go. The tent suddenly seems impossible to cross. 

“I find myself a coward,” he says, very quietly. “I am afraid to leave you. I am afraid for my life – though I have never once coveted it before.” 

There is a rustling behind him, and Eoin is on his feet. Paddy can feel the heat of him, swaying just behind him. He turns, helpless, and finds Eoin right there; has to tilt his head to meet Eoin’s dark gaze. It is a move that comes back to him like a familiar tune from childhood, or the final line of a poem he’d long ago known. 

Eoin looks down at him, and there is something of that old warmth, old familiarity in his ruined face. And something small and silver that flickers between them, which Paddy wants to call hope. 

“Then you’d better make sure you come back,” says Eoin.

Chapter Text

Eoin

During his stint in solitary, Eoin has spent a lot of his time in dreams. 

Some of them are dark and oily: grotesque creatures that lodge themselves at his temples, spill from his helpless lips; some, gauzy smears of heat or sound; some with the rough-ragged grain of desert sand, others the damp greenness of hometurf. They take him by the throat: throttle and gag him, toss him roughshod like something disposable; or they cradle and soothe him, press gentle, blissful, beautiful fingers to his eyelids. Some of them come with familiar calloused hands, familiar eyes, sage and seasalt and Irish peat.

All of them are a lie. 

Tonight, he dreams in strange, tangled snatches of impression: a madman in prison clothes, delivered from another life, swigging alcohol and conjuring absurdities from thin air; an attic room; a paperwheel plane, with origami wings and a sharp, lethal nose; a plummet to nothingness. A poem. 

Paddy.

And then he wakes, and opens his eyes, and it is black and close and so very cold, and he is back in his solitary cell in Colditz. Or not back. Still. 

Because he hadn’t ever left it. 

His sanity has finally tipped sideways and led him a beautiful, terrible dance of gliders and Stirling and Paddy—

And Paddy. 

Paddy, who in his dreams had reached for him, had spoken strange, beautiful words that the real Paddy would never say. Words like: you are the blood that beats in my veins, words like: I would have gone to Hell itself for you. 

Words like: Eoin. 

A foolish, fitful fantasy conjured by a feverish, desperate mind. An impossible, ridiculous fantasy: a plane and a one-legged man on the run; a Paddy who pressed a kiss— A kiss. 

Anguish sinks her hooks into him, tearing at the open fleshwounds of his despair, dragging at him with greasy, glass-shard hands. It is unbearable.

I wish I had died there, Eoin thinks, for the very first time. I wish I had died there in that desert and never known the years without him.

He turns on his side, moving with the slow, dragging heaviness that has permeated all of his movements for months, now. Like the air around him is treacle, or sand. 

I will die in here, he thinks. Knows. Why am I even fighting it?

Ma. Pa. Ambrose. 

Paddy.

Except that Eoin already is dead, isn’t he? Dead in name, dead in action. Dead in all but… in all but whatever ghost of him remains in this cell, here, now. A dead man walking, he thinks, with a twisted bitterness, thinking of his leg. 

Why not give into it? After all, it would be so easy. So easy, an exquisite death, that’s what he had heard… Who had told him that? Who had said—? An exquisite death. His number had been up a long time ago. He was just fulfilling the debt. 

Time’s up. 

Except that wasn’t quite—

Up—

That wasn’t quite the thought, was it. That wasn’t quite right—

Up, Eoin—

A dead man walking.

“Eoin!”

Eoin bursts into wakefulness with a great, desperate gasp, like a man reborn from the bottom of the sea. With blind, anguished hands, he reaches out, and his fingers grip stiff fabric and dirt and beneath it, warmth— 

“Paddy.” 

His eyes focus, adjust in the low light of the candle. 

Paddy is there, kneeling beside him on the ground, face lit from below like he is a child telling frightening tales after dark. His expression is strange and unfamiliar: careful and searching, something like fear caught at the edges of it, though Paddy Mayne has never once been afraid of anything. 

Someone is making a terrible noise: low guttural sobs, jerking shuddering breaths, a man guttering and drowning on dry land. 

“There you are,” Paddy is saying now, above the awful sounds, pulling Eoin towards him very gently, hands soothing Eoin’s upper arms like he is a distressed animal. Perhaps he is. “There you are, come on lad.” 

And then Eoin is pressed against Paddy’s shoulder, and he realises that the sounds are coming from his mouth, which is open and helpless as a fish’s, unable to pull oxygen from the black air. He shudders and gapes, and Paddy’s arms are on his back, pressing down, rubbing great lines down his spine. For a long, desperate moment, Eoin thinks he might die there, in Paddy’s arms. 

For a longer one, he thinks he will die happy. 

And then slowly, the blackness at the corners of his vision is fading, and the air in his lungs is less threadbare, and he can feel his own body again, shivering back into place like a shroud. 

“There,” says Paddy. He pulls back, just a little, and brings a hand up to Eoin’s face. 

Eoin watches him distantly, and is dimly shocked when Paddy’s calloused fingers brush over his own cheeks – as though he had not made the connection between his own flesh and himself. He is more shocked to realise that Paddy is wiping tears: a salty helpless streak down each side of his face that he does not remember crying. 

Roughly, he brings up the back of his palm to wipe the other away, but Paddy is there, pulling his hand back to take on the task, his hand so much gentler than Eoin’s would have been. So much gentler than Eoin could have dreamt from Paddy.

“You’re here,” Eoin says, as the thought of dreams tolls him back to the moment. “It’s not—”

“Not a dream,” Paddy confirms, anticipating him. “And after all, I’d hope that in dreams you could conjure better than this godforsaken forest, this godforsaken tent. This godforsaken man,” he adds, a little flash of sharp tooth showing in the gloom. 

“I have been dreaming myself here for two years,” says Eoin. He gestures around. “To whatever godforsaken tent you found yourself in.”

Paddy’s eyes are a dim glimmer in the darkness. For a moment, Eoin fears he has said too much, given himself away. Then Paddy puts a gentle hand on Eoin’s arm, before he moves back.  

“Then I can only hope the real thing lives up to the dreams.”

Eoin draws in a long breath, forcing himself to sit upright. He looks around, taking stock by what little, dancing light the candle throws. Paddy’s pack by the tent flap, a pistol, a pair of boots. The rough grain of the sleeping bag he is sitting in. Paddy. 

Paddy, who is turning with a cup in his hands, holding it out to Eoin. 

“Eat,” he says, pressing it into Eoin’s palms. His gaze flashes fever-quick over Eoin’s body. “You need it.”

Eoin looks at him narrowly. “Have you eaten, Paddy?”

Paddy holds up an empty mug. 

Eoin eyes it and then slowly raises the mug to his lips. 

The soup is cool, but that is good – Eoin isn’t sure his half-dead tongue could manage anything hot right now. While he drinks, Paddy watches him: glancing at him and then away again, with the same flickering half-frightened glance that Eoin remembers from the dream that was not a dream; from last night.

“You said my name,” Paddy blurts, when Eoin meets his gaze for the fourth or fifth time. “In your dream. You—”

Eoin flushes, distantly amazed that he has blood in him left for it. 

“I was dreaming,” he mutters, into the soup. “I dreamt— this was all...” He makes a jagged, helpless gesture. “I dreamt I was back there.”

“You spoke of death,” says Paddy, and his eyes are sharp on Eoin now. “With my hands on your cheeks. I could not reach you, and all the while you spoke of death—”

Eoin drops his head, jaw tightening. 

Paddy waits, and then when Eoin does not say anything, he continues: “You said—”

“I don’t want to know what I said,” snaps Eoin, uncharacteristically harsh. 

He sees the surprise in Paddy, the way it shocks him into abrupt silence. Thinks with a twisted mix of satisfaction and horror: I am not the same man you knew, Paddy Mayne. I am not the boy you left in the desert.

Perhaps you will not want me after all.

There is silence for a few minutes, while Eoin stares into the soup with no appetite, and Paddy stares at him. 

Eventually, Eoin says, “Will we need to move out?”

“We have time,” says Paddy, the same words he’d said last night. “It is only just dark – we will wait for the blackest part of the night.” 

Eoin feels his lip twist. “How many—”

“A day’s walk,” says Paddy. And then, seeing Eoin’s face. “We have the bicycle—”

Eoin is turning away, face hidden from Paddy.

He doesn’t want the bitter tar that sits on his tongue now, doesn’t want the twist at the corner of his mouth. But he cannot pull himself from it. 

“I’ll slow you down.”

Eoin can feel Paddy’s eyes on him.  “You’ll do no such thing.”

“A day’s march,” Eoin says. “It’s impossible, Paddy. I’ll never make it.”

“You’ll make it.” 

“You should leave me—”

“Eoin.”

It stops him. The third – fourth? – time Paddy has said his name tonight. Eoin remembers, with a distant, dredging dreamlike sense, that Paddy had never spoken it once in the desert: always my friend or lad or sometimes just a look. Suddenly, it falls from Paddy’s tongue as readily as poetry. 

“You must know I will not leave you,” says Paddy, slowly. “You must know I’d sooner leave my soul behind in this godforsaken forest, than you.”

“Think practically,” says Eoin, stubborn, despairing. “I’ll be a burden.”

“Then you are mine to shoulder, and I will bear you gladly,” Paddy told him. “As you would me.”

His eyes skip up, the faintest hint of uncertainty. As you would me? 

“I would,” says Eoin. 

“Then,” says Paddy. “We will go together.” He swallows, says the word very quietly, again, as though it tastes of something sweet and lingering. “Together.” 

Eoin closes his eyes. When he opens them again, Paddy’s are fixed on him. 

“Ah, Paddy,” says Eoin, quietly. 

The candle sends orange waves of light flickering across Paddy’s face, makes of his eyes something bottomless and unknowable. 

“I would not leave you,” Paddy says. “Not for anything in this world, or the next.” 

“The world is broad and wide,” says Eoin. “Do not speak so readily, Paddy, or make promises so rashly.” 

Paddy catches the reference, throws it back, doubled, tripled: “There is no world without these walls.”

Eoin swallows. A swallow’s dip surge of feeling fizzes in his stomach; the air between them grows thick and heavy. 

Almost as though without his consent, Paddy’s mouth shapes new words. Others’ words, coming to his lips like a prayer to a dying man. 

“There’s/ Nothing like this in the world, you say,” he says, eyes skating Eoin’s face. “Knowing I cannot touch your hand—”

Then he draws in a sharp, shuddering breath, and breaks off. 

Eoin’s undying heart stutters and skips. 

Paddy is staring at him in the low light, half wonder, half fear, all pressed down into sharp edges: the mirror-cracked shards that make up Paddy Mayne; his fierceness and his fury and his beautiful poet’s soul, reflected and refracted through the thousand broken slivers in his eyes. 

The red, wet thing that pants at the heart of him. 

And Eoin remembers, with a sudden startled clarity, the words he had thought at Colditz, the sandy shiver of Paddy’s poem in his palms: Paddy Mayne, at least by some definition of the word, loves me. 

Paddy Mayne loves me. 

Is it so impossible? 

Eoin knows the poem Paddy is drawing from now – they used to read to each other in that cottage in Scotland, shivering in threadbare jumpers against the cold of a northern winter, pressed together and thrilled by the excuse for it: Paddy’s too long glances; Paddy’s wild snarls; the way Paddy gentled at the touch of Eoin’s hand. 

…where death, if shed,   
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn   
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Desperate, and brave, Eoin meets Paddy’s gaze and speaks the next line aloud. 

“Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.”  

For one endless, suspended moment, Paddy does not move. 

Fuck, thinks Eoin, and then Paddy surges forward like a wave into his space.

Paddy’s fingers are tangled in Eoin’s collar, Paddy’s forehead against his, Paddy’s nose rough and unbearable against his cheek. Paddy’s trembling mouth against the tender skin at the corner of Eoin’s lips: almost, but not quite, there. 

In his name my only prayer, he thinks. Paddy. 

Then Eoin tilts his head and kisses him. 

Paddy tastes of soup and smoke and gun oil; he tastes of dank German mud and unwashed clothes and blood. He tastes of the desert and adrenaline and the woody hitch of rosary beads; of paper and sweat and piano keys. He tastes of Irish fog, and mud and the sea. 

When Eoin pulls back, they are both shaking with it. 

“Alright,” he says, gently, not sure which of them he’s saying it to. “Alright. You and me.” 

And Paddy huffs a noise into Eoin’s mouth, half laugh, half sob. 

“It was always you and me,” he says. “Though you did not know it.”

“I knew it,” says Eoin. “I was waiting for you to catch up.”

And now Paddy does laugh. A small private thing: a sound Eoin has never seen him make in public. A sound he saves for Eoin alone. 

“Blasphemy,” he says. “I will have you written up for that, Lieutenant.”

Eoin smiles up at him. “I fancy my chance with my commanding officer.”

“Shameless,” says Paddy, and kisses him again. 

For a while, it is the two of them and the soft, forgiving candlelight; the gentle darkness. 

“Will we make it, do you suppose?” Eoin asks him, as they lean against each other, something new and tangled; he is created again in each of Paddy’s breaths against his sternum. 

“To the rendezvous?” 

Eoin shakes his head. Will we make it, he means. Will we.  

“We will make it,” says Paddy, and presses the words into Eoin’s cheek. “We’re owed some time, you and me. And if God or whatever greater power there is up there doesn’t see fit to deliver it, I’ll see to it myself.”

“You know,” says Eoin. “I really believe you will.” 

“Believe it,” says Paddy, kisses the words into Eoin’s mouth.”Through the desert, and through death. Believe it.” 

He pulls Eoin against him, as though they can be closer somehow, in the darkness there, and Eoin knows that – from above – they must be a single creature; not two in the dark but one –  a single, thrumming pulse threaded between them, a single heartbeat, woven through each pulsing centre. One being, joined at lip and temple and wrist. Something new and strange and beautiful.

And he knows no deity nor power that could part the two of them now.