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Sometimes you wake up at night, sweating and screaming and reaching for your bow.
Your mom came in the first few times, talking softly and singing the same lullaby she sang when you were four years old and afraid of the thunder. But it doesn’t work and she eventually stops coming in, but it doesn’t matter to you - you’d rather face the nightmares than smell Walter all over her skin.
Home is a battlefield.
Sometimes, there’s a faraway look in Digg’s eyes that you recognize.
You see that look in the mirror just before you’re jerked back to the island, to the sand and the heat and ever-present taste of salt.
Back home, they’re all trying to get you…
You’re not exactly sure how it started between you. Maybe it’s because he was just always there, always silently watching.
Maybe it was that moment when you were standing outside and heard the gulls cawing and you looked over and saw them fighting over a fish. And for some reason, for some god-awful reason you can’t fathom, you felt the bile rush up in your throat and all you could see was the birds picking at your father and you fell to your knees and you were gasping for air and the birds were just so loud.
And then there were hands, warm and rough and they were pulling you up and out of your nightmare, and it was Digg’s voice, steady and demanding, that brought your eyes to focus.
He doesn’t say anything else, just your name over and over until he’s absolutely sure it’s him that you're seeing and not the island or the birds or your father’s rotting body.
And that night, when the liquor makes you both too brave and too lonely, you push him against the wall.
…get you to open up…
It’s not until the morning, when you not only realize that you haven’t slept this well in five years, but that the man next you has been just as ripped apart as you have.
You trace burns and bullet scars and an old tattoo, some wound that never fully healed and a spot on his side where a large chunk of flesh was just gone.
He watches your hands and the way your body moves as you straddle his hips once more, you feel his eyes on your scars and you know that he’ll never ask about them.
Just as he knows that you’ll never ask about his.
…be somebody you’re not sure you are anymore.
Sometimes you wake up at night, sweating and screaming and reaching for your bow.
Because no soldier ever returns home whole, but sometimes, just sometimes, they can find another who is just as broken and the pieces will fit together nicely.
So in the middle of your nightmares, when you reach for your bow and Digg reaches for his rifle, somehow the two of you meet in the middle and you find each other.
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End.