Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

That I am separated from him for ever I will never, never believe [...] Nature is not so rich in perfection. Having formed him the best, & wisest, she will not idly throw away her work & shatter her image. She, in a fit of inspiration, planted this seed - a flower grew transcendent in loveliness & she hastily translated it to a more genial soil. - the journals of Mary Shelley.

It is the body which grieves, grieves for the body of the lost one. [...] I do think her soul survives, but my body grieves and grieves for hers. - the diary of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

*

At night when Paddy can't sleep, when there is no fight left in him and the rum is long gone and nothing in his books will soothe his frantic beast in his chest - then, and only then, does he let himself take out Eoin's cigarette case.

He's been kicking around with the McGonigals for long enough that he remembers Ambrose muttering darkly about his little shite of a brother, staying with him for Easter break and back for all of five minutes before he's already nicking his cigarettes straight out of Ambrose’s jacket pocket.

"I tell you, Blair, the fucking audacity!” Ambrose gestured a lot while he spoke, and Paddy reached across and shifted his pint lest it fall victim to his friend’s irate hands. “I asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing, and he just laughed, I swear to Jesus, Ma was always too soft on him and now he thinks he's got us all wrapped around his little finger.”

Paddy offered Ambrose one of his cigarettes instead, and didn't ask why, exactly, Ambrose hadn't let him have it, when he'd see Ambrose topple a man twice his size on the rugger pitch, no problem. Siblings were strange, he knew, and the McGonigals were stranger than most. He'd met all but the youngest boy, and they were alarmingly warm and chatty and very, very tall, constantly talking over one another and having little tiffs only to be unquestioningly kind in the next moment. He loved his own family, of course, but he lacked the openness with them that seemed to emanate from the McGonigals. For reasons that he hoped were obvious to nobody but him, his chronically disappointed father and fretting mother (well, Ambrose seemed to have his own polite suspicions) he felt perpetually on edge with them now as a grown man. He valued his privacy too much to invite his family to speculate on his life the way the McGonigals seemed to be constantly and with great glee looking over one another's shoulders. Paddy figured whatever it was that made Ambrose seemingly hand over every cigarette he owned with nothing but a grumble to his bairn of a brother must be a byproduct of how these odd, delightful, overgrown McGonigal children were raised.

It was some time before Paddy met Ambrose's little shite of a brother, who had been mostly sequestered away in his posh Catholic school for the time Paddy had been mates with Ambrose. Whenever he was released on break would mostly coincide with Ambrose disappearing into the family home for a whole calendar of events, to which Paddy would frequently be invited and always politely decline.

“Are you not close with your family, then?” Ambrose had asked him only once, tone casual but watching him with keen eyes. Paddy thought about the invites from his sisters he frequently left unanswered, and the cold, knowing gaze of his father.

He'd lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We’re fine.”

So it wasn't until the youngest McGonigal was spending the summer with Ambrose that Paddy was able to complete the set. Eoin was like the rest of the brood: supremely long-limbed, aggressively good-natured, charmingly antagonistic. The pub was noisy and crowded, the three of them wedged together into a corner booth. With two McGonigals at the table, Paddy had to rescue his glass from being knocked off the table half a dozen times. They were very similar, only there was something in the line of Eoin's smile that made Paddy feel like he had a knife to his throat, and he couldn't quite put his finger on why.

Paddy had stepped outside into the drizzle for a smoke, when Eoin found him not long after.

“Where's your brother got to?” Paddy had asked.

Eoin looked extremely put upon. “Having a very tedious argument with someone he knows from Queen’s.” He had pulled a face that Paddy couldn't help but laugh at. Eoin had smiled, clearly pleased to have gotten what he wanted. “Can I have one of those, then?”

“Oh, I see.” Paddy laughed again, shaking his head. “I've been warned about your inability to procure your own cigarettes, young McGonigal.”

“I'm procuring one right now,” Eoin said evenly, like butter wouldn't melt. A knot started to form in Paddy's chest. Oh, he thought, very faintly.

“Very well,” he said, and reached into his pocket, tossing his tobacco pouch to Eoin. “Papers are in there. Have at it, boy.”

He watched Eoin turn the pouch over in his broad hands, with long, lovely fingers, a curious expression on his face. “You do know how to roll, don't you?”

“Why don't you teach me,” Eoin said, easy as anything. Paddy was starting to understand his capacity to lead his older siblings around by the nose.

“What did they teach you at that poncy fucking school,” Paddy said, and Eoin laughed, his teeth flashing white in the dark. Stepping closer, he watched intently as Paddy took a pinch of tobacco, levered it into the paper and rubbed his fingers back and forth to make a cylinder. Eoin copied, an attentive student.

Paddy had said, “Then you just lick the edge and press the seam down,” and Eoin was nodding, brow furrowed a little in concentration as he said, “Right, yeah, okay.”

Eoin's tongue was very pink. The paper grew darker with his spit until it was almost translucent. Where he had clumsily caught his knuckles with the swipe of his tongue, a nearby street lamp illuminated a dash of saliva, glistening.

With a violence that took him by surprise, Paddy thought, with all the imagination, with all the magic alcohol, I needed to see your lips as well, needed your body near me, and then, fuck.

“Are you out here teaching my brother filthy fucking habits, Blair?” Paddy jumped out of his skin, heart pounding and ready to apologise, to swear to Ambrose he'd never act on it, that Eoin was innocent of any indiscretion. But Ambrose was talking about the cigarette, of course, and both he and Eoin were laughing. Slowly, Paddy relaxed. Instead of asking for a lighter, Eoin put his hand on Paddy's shoulder to lean close, holding his cigarette to Paddy's. As amber flame burst bright across Eoin's face, he glanced up and their eyes met. Not for the first time Paddy thought, these McGonigals will be the death of me.

Now, Paddy sits alone on his cot, and holds Eoin's cigarette case in his battered, undeserving hands. He touches the clasp of it, and thinks about all the times he saw Eoin unhinge the case with an easy flick of his thumb. There must have been a last time he saw Eoin do that, but he didn't remember it now. He presses his own thumb to the clasp, and remembers the whorls of Eoin’s fingertips, the callus he always had on the inside edge of his thumb where his pen grip was shite. Paddy thought often of taking his hand and pressing his lips to the stubborn, innocuous wound of the callus. He wishes he had done it.

Slowly, he opens the case. There are six cigarettes in here, he knows them by heart. One of them has the tobacco coming a little loose, tendrilling out one end, and so Paddy tries not to touch that one. He gently pries a whole one from its place, and holds the seam to his dry lips. Once, Eoin held his laughing pink mouth to this paper, giving it form. Each crawling day will pale a little your scarlet lips, Paddy thinks, words cored straight from the aching pit of him, each mile dull the dear pain of your remembered face. Now Eoin’s body lies somewhere in the desert, and this is the closest that Paddy will ever get. Meanwhile, Paddy slouches onwards, festering with grim life.

There's a steady rain beating down outside. When he finally slides into an uneasy sleep, the rain follows him there, dogging his step. For as far as he can see the desert stretches around him: endless, unyielding. The dream is fully-formed, visceral, he is soaked to the bone.

Ahead of him is Eoin, his back to him. “Eoin,” he calls, but his words are drowned out by the torrential rain. He struggles up a dune, trying to get to where Eoin is waiting, but the rain grows thicker and he can barely make him out. It doesn't matter, Paddy knows it is Eoin even through the heavy downpour that mists around them - can spot the telltale smudge of inky hair, his willowy limbs.

When Paddy finally reaches him, the rain is so dense they might as well be underwater. “Eoin,” he says again, his words rippling around them. Paddy reaches out to touch the familiar line of Eoin’s shoulder, and feels grasping, desperate hands catch against sand and brine, slick to touch. His fingers dip uncomfortably into the viscous mass of him, so unlike Eoin's study living body. In the next breath, Eoin’s body falls, folding in on itself, dissolving completely into the sand. Like he was never there. Paddy is alone.

He wakes with a jolt, a dull ache in his chest. Eoin's cigarette case is pressed beneath his cheek, where he curls on the edge of his cot. Layered beneath the roar of the rain is the distinct sound of people shuffling around the camp.

“You’d best get Paddy,” he hears from outside his tent, and he fumbles to slide the cigarette case beneath his pillow.

It's Reg who sticks his dripping head in unannounced. When he sees Paddy is awake, he smiles. It's a little unhinged.

“Good, you're awake. Get up,” Reg says, then laughs incredulously. “You are not going to believe who is here to see you.”

Standing in the mess, wet hair plastered to his head and laughing as he talks to a bewildered-looking Almonds, is Eoin.

Paddy’s ghost-heart ruptures in his chest. He stalls in the doorway, traitorous feet pinning him in place. Was he always that tall, he wonders, was his smile always bright just so?

“Eoin,” he says, like he does in his dreams. Eoin turns. Paddy has dreamed of him so recently that the shock of it is slow to break upon him. Eoin's smile turns softer, more private, and Paddy thinks, what a fine effigial figure he makes.

“Paddy,” Eoin says, and the lovely oaken richness of his voice sounds just the same. He is peaceable, watching Eoin cross the room to stand in front of him, breathing steadily until Eoin's sand encrusted hand reaches to cradle his jaw. At first touch, Paddy feels like he's been shot. For all his dreaming, he has never once been allowed to touch the solid warmth of him, his fingers only briefly dipping into Eoin's barely-there form when it is already mid-disintegration.

“Oh,” Paddy says weakly, and feels his knees buckle like he's watching it happen to someone else. His entire world has narrowed to the scrape of Eoin's sandy palm against his unshaven jaw.

Eoin catches him with an arm around his waist, and Paddy can feel that his arms are not shrunken and decaying from months as a corpse swallowed by the dunes. He is no desert ruin but thrumming with vitality, his arms as strong and capable as they ever were.

All words have left him. “Eoin,” he says again, struggling to look at him directly in his smiling face as after so long without it feels like trying to look at the sun. He looks instead as his throat, trying to see the beat of a pulse. “You died.” Paddy saw his body, how the sand enveloped his lifeless face like a vestal shroud. The image has haunted him for months.

Eoin takes Paddy's hand, and holds it to his own throat, so he might feel for himself the sparrowlike flutter of a pulse. The boy lives yet. This close, he notices his skin is a shade paler, the colour of the sand beneath his fingernails. There is fine lacework of scarring slicing across both cheek and forehead, though long healed. There are differences. But it is undoubtedly Eoin, his Eoin, come home to him with the rains.

“Aye,” says Eoin, “something like that.”

*

Paddy was so fucking grateful to have Eoin back that it anything amiss takes longer than it should to rear its head.

He has spent months in solitude with no easy presence falling into step with him by day or falling asleep with him at night. This miserable state of affairs proves troublesome when transitioning back to being one-of-two. Paddy's haggard body had learned grief all too quickly, and the shape of it struggled to fall from him now even when he could hear Eoin’s laugh across camp, or press his hand to the fluttering pulse at Eoin’s wrist. During the months Eoin was gone, Paddy dreamed of him so frequently that there are moments now that the fear he has conjured Eoin in a dream once more has him in a stranglehold. He is roused from sleep one day to Eoin bending over him, telling him gently that Stirling wants a word, and Paddy is momentarily paralysed by the fear that Eoin is no more than a spectre, ready to dissolve into nothing should he attempt to close the distance between them. It goes on in this way. Paddy’s grief had been a howling, palpable being in Eoin’s place. Now Eoin is back, his grief has nowhere in particular to be. It lingers.

If Paddy struggles to unlearn his grief, Eoin seems to have little trouble with relearning life. While strange things certainly happen during wartime, it is still unclear what exactly happened to Eoin during his prolonged absence. Stirling's expertly fudged paperwork says something about an escape from a POW camp and partial amnesia, which is the generally accepted theory. Someone must have stitched the wounds on Eoin's face, pried his body from the sand (where Paddy had left him, he often thinks, agonised) and delivered him to a place where he could be kept until he simply… walked into Jalo during a storm.

Eoin, cheerily, remembers not a whit after the jump. “Could've been anywhere,” he says merrily when questioned, which is a bit of a fucked thing to say, so everyone just agrees on the POW camp breakout even though the Red Cross has no records of him being anywhere in the vicinity, and he's too healthy to have walked all the way to Jalo. The only wound he bore with him out of the desert were his hands, his fingertips and nailbeds shredded with sand baked into the flayed flesh. The state of them appeared like he had been digging down into the sand, or perhaps up. Paddy thinks this for precisely one grim moment, then leans in against Eoin's side to feel the aliveness of him, warm and bright, and vows to put any thoughts of that nature out of his mind.

It takes weeks for the first change to show itself. Paddy is stirred from sleep to Eoin swearing quietly, words heavy with slumber. When Paddy rolls over to see what the problem is, Eoin is covered in blood.

Immediately Paddy is on his feet, reaching for Eoin as he looks furiously around them. Jalo is quiet, there is nobody in their tent but them. His ears are ringing as he touches Eoin's front, and his hand comes away slick.

“Paddy,” Eoin is saying, fond and exasperated, “peace, lad, it's fine.”

“Pray, tell me how, exactly, is this anything resembling fucking fine,” Paddy bites out, his hands red with vital parts of Eoin that should definitely be on the inside of him.

Eoin rolls his eyes, and touches his hand to Paddy's wrist. “I've been getting blood noses lately. This one's a bit more grisly as I seem to have slept through the worst of it.”

Paddy looks closer, and notices the blood crusting his nostrils. He feels a little foolish, but mostly just relief.

“Here, make yourself useful,” Eoin says kindly, “pass me your flask.” He strips off his soiled shirt, and when Paddy hands him the bottle, pours a little out onto a clean corner of it and starts to clean himself up.

“You're making a right mess of this,” Paddy tells him, after watching him simply move the blood around his face, “I'm not entirely convinced you have ever washed your face before.” Laughing, Eoin surrenders the task to Paddy. They don't speak any more, there's no need. Paddy is content to listen to Eoin's breathing while he works, the soft intake of breath as he drags the wet cloth along Eoin's throat to wash the blood from him. When he lies in bed afterwards, he holds his cheek to where Eoin had gripped his wrist with bloodied hand, still marked from his touch.

Other things are new. Where once they fairly evenly matched each other for pace, now Eoin was always ahead, his long legs stretching out beneath him like a gazelle. The sand rises like white mist behind him as he runs, and Paddy watches and feels vaguely sick at the thought of his dreams - Eoin always ahead, just out of sight and moments from dissolving. Afterwards, Paddy presses his hands to Eoin's chest, rising and falling rapidly from his recent exertion, to feel the breath enter and leave him and be reassured of his bodily presence. Eoin is gracious as ever, squeezing his arms with a heavy touch that lingers. Something else that strikes Paddy as curious is his grip has changed. He had not been dead so long that Paddy had forgotten the searing pressure of his hands, the strength of his grip and how much weight Eoin could bear. He has always been strong but now, more so, it seems. Curious, that months in the desert should return him in peak physical condition. But if the only price it extracted in exchange was the occasional blood nose (Eoin) and the paralysing fear that all of this could be whisked away at a moment's notice (Paddy) - well, then, they would pay it gladly.

During raids, Eoin is lethal. Silently, his feet pound along the sand to wherever Paddy found himself. On rugby pitch and battlefield alike Eoin had always been unswervingly capable and confident, but it seems his absence had brought him a new kind of ferocity. He takes more risks, apparently determined to give Paddy a heart attack. After so many months of enforced respite in some mysterious elsewhere Paddy does not begrudge him this - history shows he has consistently been inclined to indulge and celebrate Eoin's daredevil streak - but Eoin pushes it far beyond what even Paddy is comfortable with. He tries to talk to him about it, telling him to pull his head in, and Eoin laughs and calls him a hypocrite, and says “yes, yes, okay, I will,” and then does exactly as he likes. The boy is a nightmare, eyes bright in the darkness as he jogs to crouch by Paddy’s side, late again, another man’s blood on his knuckles and splattered across the cut glass of his jaw.

“It distresses me,” Paddy tells him after one such night, as the first light of day starts to bleed streaks of apricot across the night sky, “that I might have to bury you again, and that it might take this time. It distresses me to no end, Eoin.” His preemptive grief feels heavy in his limbs and in his gut, tongue bloated and indelicate. Shortly after returning to camp, Eoin had tipped what was left of his canteen over his sweatslick curls. The water had sluiced down his head and shoulders, and Paddy had watched as he'd shaken the drops from his hair, laughing. He's still damp now, looking so much how he did the night he came back. But instead of smiling, there's a line cleaving between his brows in concern.

Paddy is too stitched up with fear and self loathing to touch him, but Eoin has always been braver. He cups Paddy's jaw in his strong, living hands, and tilts their foreheads together. “I'm not going anywhere.” He swears it like a vow. It makes Paddy's breath catch in his chest. “I'm sorry I left you before, but I won't be making that mistake again.”

They're outside, but in a quiet corner of camp. Eoin doesn't seem particularly bothered either way. Paddy closes his eyes and leans into him, knowing he should care if someone sees but he's too desperately hungry. He can't bring himself to mind when only weeks ago Eoin was dead in the ground.

“I left you,” he says, a horrifying thickness to his voice that makes him squeeze his eyes more tightly closed lest he disgrace himself any further. He thinks of Eoin in the desert, bound up by the sand like Christ in his death shroud. “I left you there. Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.”

Eoin strokes at his face too intently to be graceful. It's lovely nevertheless. His thumbs catch at the miserable lines of grief that turn Paddy's lips downwards. “You didn't know,” he murmurs, “and it hardly matters now. I found you. I'll always find you.”

They stand under the rosy sky, tilted towards one another while Paddy grapples with where to put his unyielding grief which has long passed its expiry date. Eventually, the sun has risen, and they stagger back to their tent. Paddy falls to sleep staring at Eoin's occupied bed, wondering if Eoin is telling the whole truth about remembering nothing from his time buried in the desert.

*

A raid goes poorly. Paddy's lot are fine, back on time, and though he knows Stirling's bombs went to plan if the timely explosions are any indication, they are markedly absent. Paddy had let Stirling take Eoin. “Leave off, will you,” Eoin had said, laughing. His skin was still a hue too pale under the bright desert sun. “You can't watch me all the time, I'm not going to disappear.” He was being kind, giving Paddy a smile he knows is just between them. But now they're forty minutes late for the rendezvous and all Paddy can think is, Eoin was wrong, I could have watched him. I should have.

Cooper offers him a cigarette. “We've had raids go far worse than this,” he says, giving him a side-eye that is far too knowing. “They'll be back in a jiff.”

Paddy hauls him by the collar with his furious grasping fist, but the look Cooper fixes him with is so soaked in pity that he can't stand to look at him long enough to hit him. He gives him a shove instead, letting him ragdoll into the dirt. Cooper gets up, unperturbed, dusting sand from his palms, then lights a cigarette and passes it to Paddy. He takes it but does not look at him. He looks at nothing else but the horizon, until after long, silent moments, a Jeep crests over it and he feels he can breathe again. As it draws closer, he can make out Eoin's silhouette, but the stoop of his shoulders is all wrong.

“What the fuck do you call this,” Paddy spits when Stirling leaps from the Jeep before it's come to a stop.

“Sorry for the delay, chaps,” Stirling says loudly, irritatingly grandiose, and Paddy could wring the spine of him to dust until Stirling catches his eye and gives him a searing look. Around the far side of the Jeep, Almonds and Fraser are helping a fawn-legged Eoin down, but something is… not right. It's a moonless night, clouds lingering above them, but from a nearby torch Paddy can make out tracks of red down his face and chest. His blood runs cold.

“What have they done to him,” Paddy grinds out, Eoin's head pitching forward, low and unsteady, from where Almonds has propped him. He can stand, just. “What have you done to him?”

“Not. Here,” Stirling says sharply, under his breath, at the same time as Almonds says quickly, “He's unhurt, Paddy. Let's get him sitting down.”

Paddy's nerves are putrid ash in his mouth. He can't stop looking at the spectre of Eoin, bracketed by Stirling and Almonds as they ferry him to Paddy's tent, now Eoin's, too. He walks behind, feeling absolutely fucking useless, eyes trained on the caved-in slump of Eoin's back as his brain screams wrong, wrong, wrong.

As if this night had not punished him enough, Bill Fraser falls in step with him. “We were intercepted on the way out,” he says, low and quick, his eyes darting to Stirling and then back to Paddy. “We had to split up. I found him stood over five bodies, he seemed fine but not present - battle fatigued, maybe - and,” Fraser falters uncharacteristically, “He can't hear us, but his-- his eyes, Paddy--”

“Fraser,” Stirling says sharply from ahead, “not now,” and Paddy says, “yes, right fucking now, David.” But nobody else says anything. When they reach the tent, Fraser holds the canvas open for them silently. He looks very young. Paddy ducks inside, and Fraser doesn't follow them.

Eoin has been deposited on his cot against the far wall. He sits fine enough by himself, but slumped, all the wind taken out of him, his face turned down and away. He is very, very still.

There are too many people here. “Get out,” Paddy says hoarsely, and looks at nobody but Eoin. There's a pause, and he hears several bodies leave.

“Paddy?” Someone is asking, too close, too concerned for Paddy's tastes. He shifts closer to Eoin to block him from view, an exercise that would usually be fruitless as Eoin is a full head taller, but he's buckled forward over himself in such a disjointed and unnatural way that Paddy thinks he might have a shot. It doesn't matter that they've already seen him, they were with him when it happened. They've seen enough.

“Get the fuck out,” he snarls, hurled over his shoulder. It’s Almonds, he realises belatedly, and he is grateful because Almonds actually has a brain between his ears and so leaves sharpish. The noise outside fades to din, the usual post-raid rowdiness. Paddy doesn’t listen. There is something very wrong with Eoin.

“Eoin,” he says quietly. Eoin’s limbs, lovely and long, so frequently stretched out and very much in the way, are folded strangely, arms around his torso and legs tucked together. His head is turned down, angled away, doused in sand all over except for the shock of blood on his face, his neck, his hands.

Eoin doesn't turn. He can't hear us, Fraser had said, bleakly efficient but nervous in a way Paddy would not associate with him. Battle fatigue is not uncommon, but he has never seen it worn by Eoin. Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles comes unbidden to him, but he does not say it aloud. He will fix this, whether he must coax or rend it from Eoin’s darling unked frame.

The lamplight flickers. Paddy looks, and then looks again. Eoin’s left shoulder appears-- odd, wrenched askew. He swears it hadn’t looked like that before, when he'd been brought in. They'd have said. Paddy would have noticed.

“Here, what's this?” He keeps his voice low, tries for soothing but in his grief he'd gone so long without someone to speak sweetness to, it is a struggle to remember how to, sometimes. Eoin deserves only kindness and Paddy feels like he is scrabbling desperately to relearn a foreign tongue he'd half forgotten, blown clean from his brain.

In lieu of any convincing oratory softness, Paddy goes to him. Eoin does not appear to notice. It's his left shoulder, loose and disconcerting. He's no medic but he's seen his fair share of dislocated shoulders, and had his own wrenched back into place a few times. “Oh, lad,” Paddy murmurs, “let's deal with the shoulder first, and then with the rest.” Slowly but methodically he begins to unbutton his shirt to inspect the full extent of the damage.

Four buttons in and Eoin’s head rolls back. Paddy immediately catches it, cradles the skull in one hand like a baptism, and he would be more alarmed by this specific action if the sallow skin stretched across Eoin's collarbone didn't choose that moment to ripple beneath his hand.

Beneath the evidentiary touch of his hand, Eoin's body moves in a way it should not. Paddy has felt bones snap, crunch against his fist or beneath his foot both deliberately and accidentally, and yet this is not that even remotely. The bone is there, then it is not, and then it is back again, swelling back into existence like the flicker of a candle. Eoin gives no cry of pain. Eoin does nothing but let the dead weight of his head hang heavy in Paddy's desperate palm.

When he thinks to check Eoin's shoulder again, it's fine. He does not try to fool himself that it was a trick of the eyes. Eoin's body now is not as it was. Paddy must learn him anew.

“Eoin,” he says, both gentle and grave. His voice shakes, but he knows if Eoin can hear him, he will forgive him for it.

Eoin turns his head, and his eyes are black like starless skies. Though he tilts towards Paddy, he does not seem to see him. The whole of his eyes are polished onyx. The whites have been swallowed by blood-black, sclera and iris alike blown into one vast emptiness, unseeing, unblinking.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Paddy thinks. Again, he says, “Eoin.” His voice sounds strange to his own ears, hollow.

Eoin's head still rests in his palm, only it feels lighter. He knows the feel of Eoin's gritty curls, the warmth of his skull, but it feels like the smoke of the boy now, somehow dislocated from the real thing. With his other hand, he skims lightly along the line of Eoin's previously twisted shoulder, and something in the form of it warps, an impressionist McGonigal.

Real fear licks at his spine. “No you fucking don't,” he says, sharp, and bears down firmly on Eoin's shoulder. The meat of him holds, bones and sinew and all. Paddy lets out a breath he didn't realise he was holding, and once he's convinced Eoin isn't going to seep into the ether the moment he stops pressing at his shoulder, he removes his hand and quickly cups the side of Eoin's face, both hands cradling where the desert has ravaged him.

“This is a curious turn of events,” he tells Eoin, and strokes the glorious stretch of Eoin's eyebrow with his unworthy thumb. “Why don't you rejoin me here, amongst the living, and we can have a little talk about it.” He wonders if that is where Eoin is, wherever he was before that Eoin can't remember - hell, or heaven, or his Catholic purgatory. Or just nothing, deep in the dunes, waiting.

Eoin’s lips, split and caked in blood, part in the hint of a noise. It's almost a groan, more exaltation. Not ideal, but something. “Oh, a fine start,” Paddy tells him, and thumbs beneath where the elegant sweep of lower lashes frame the endless pits of his eyes. “Now the rest of it.”

Eoin blinks. The uncanny dark remains, but blinking is something people who are alive do. Paddy counts it as a win. “A faery’s child,” he says to him, because it's much nicer to think about than Eoin being dead in the ground, “her hair was long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild.”

Eoin blinks again, and Paddy, buoyed by small victories, continues similarly. He keeps his touch firm and steady, and with the hand not cradling Eoin’s head upright, traces the lines of his beautiful, haunted face. Paddy speaks all the while, with the hope of anchoring Eoin in the here and now across whatever senses he can grapple onto. From this angle, he can see where blood has crusted inside the delicate arches of his nostrils. A raid is an inopportune moment for a blood nose, but it settles something in him momentarily to know the crimson streaked down his chin and flecked across his hands is likely related to that than anything that could put Eoin actually at risk. A blood nose seems entirely corporeal, too, Paddy mulls, which is reassuring at the present as Eoin's form seems unconvinced by its own dimensions, although he still would much rather Eoin's blood stayed neatly inside its container, thanks. Where Eoin's crows feet crease in his smiles, the skin is slackened. Paddy wonders if this is how he always is in slumber and Paddy has just been painfully unobservant, or if this returned body has momentarily forgotten the shape of them between each tremulous moment. He presses his thumb there, a vigil, willing their return.

“And there I shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four,” Paddy says, thumbing further at the edge of Eoin's eyelid. Like clockwork springing into action, his eyes close, and experimentally, Paddy drags his thumb along his eyelid, teasing at his mink-soft sprawl of lashes. He does it again, and again, and when Eoin's eyes blink open, his boy is returned to him. Paddy makes sure to still his hand before his trembling gives him away.

“Am I without mercy, then?” Eoin croaks, as if his throat has forgotten the act of speaking. His speech is slow, jerked from him in unsteady ripples like the fickle clavicle that had bucked beneath Paddy's touch. Without thinking, Paddy cups his hand over Eoin's throat where it is stained in his own blood, as if trying to remind Eoin's body of the shape of him. Like this, he thinks desperately, and the column of Eoin's neck shivers in acquiescence with a punched out sigh.

Eoin's eyes in his head are dark, but they are his, watchful and half-lidded. The night has been so long. Whatever Eoin may be, god or devil or something in between, Paddy is a fallible man. He cannot help himself. He bends and touches his own forehead to Eoin's, and feeling the heat of him, is reminded that he is alive yet. “No, lad,” he says, wrung to his fetid wanting core with exhaustion, “you have shown me great mercy.”

Someone had thought to leave a basin with clean(ish) water and a cloth near the tent entrance, and Paddy extracts himself from Eoin long enough to grab it. Eoin's skin has been so dry since he returned, cracked across his knuckles and frequently rubbed raw and flaking at different points: his ankles, his elbows, the creased ridges of his knees. Paddy cleans the blood from him, then washes these places where his skin is dry, wishing the water was gentler for him, eased with oils to help the chafed skin heal. Paddy has no such oils to anoint him with, so must make do with an ancient tin of Vaseline, smearing it with clumsy, gentle hands over where Eoin's knuckles have split themselves raw, where the shell pink skin of his lips are torn and peeling. He does this quietly, focussed on his task, while Eoin sits and sways a little, one hand fisted in Paddy's shirt to keep himself steady.

“Paddy,” Eoin says, soft like a bruise, only half-there. Paddy abandons his task immediately, Vaseline tin falling to the sand below as he cups Eoin's face in his hands, searching his eyes for any sign they might go distant again.

“What is it?” His voice is too raw. Once, this would have embarrassed him, but he has been slowly unravelling since he saw the fallen line of Eoin's shoulder in the jeep, worse since he felt Eoin start to fray at the seams beneath his hands.

“Would you lie down with me a while? Feeling a bit like I might,” and he pauses, throat working the words over as Paddy watches, half-agony, half-hope. “Like I might scatter apart at any moment.” Eoin lets out a breath of a laugh. Paddy can't see a single funny thing about this.

They end up like this: Eoin, stretched out flat on his back, and Paddy half-lying on top of him. Similar to earlier, the pressure helps. So Paddy lies with his ear to Eoin's chest, his hand making slow, sweeping motions up Eoin's arm and down his chest and then back again, paying particular attention to making his movements constant and heavy. Eoin's mostly undressed from when Paddy washed him, but Paddy's got all but his boots on, still gritty from the raid. Eoin doesn't seem to mind, letting one hand comb idly through the greasy strands of Paddy's hair.

Paddy can't see Eoin's face to check his eyes, but he can hear his breath, and feel his beating heart beneath his chest. Eventually, it is coupled with the gentle give of Eoin's body relaxing into sleep. Paddy remains where he is. There's no way he could sleep as it is, still too wracked with fear that Eoin could disappear beneath him at any moment if Paddy stops grounding him, reminding him of the shape it takes to be amongst the living. He will not let the frame of him disjoint. A body is a beautiful thing, and Paddy intends for Eoin to keep hold of his. If Eoin is struggling with that task, well then, Paddy will hold it together for him.

Stirling chooses this moment to walk into the tent.

Paddy doesn't lift his head. Very quietly, so as not to wake Eoin, he says, “Fuck off.”

As per fucking usual, Stirling does what he likes and refuses to take Paddy's feedback on board. He watches them silently, eyes flickering over where Eoin sleeps on undisturbed, to where Paddy lies like a loyal hound across his master's chest.

“Is he back to normal, then,” Stirling says. He's non-specific, as if saying what he saw in Eoin could speak it back into existence.

“Aye,” Paddy says, voice pitched low. “That he is.”

“Right,” Stirling says, “good.” It's silent between them, Stirling's eyes tracking Eoin's sleeping form although his mind seems to be elsewhere.

“I want you to know that I don't intend to do anything about this,” Stirling says after a moment. Paddy bristles as much as a man is capable of who lies with his cheek to the reassuring drum of Eoin's heartbeat.

“What, exactly, are you referring to?” he asks, and Stirling looks exasperated.

“His bloody eyes, Paddy, and whatever else was happening to him out there,” Stirling hisses. Paddy is trying desperately to keep his own body soft and forgiving against Eoin's when what he really would like is to give Stirling a nice slug to the jaw. He hates that the others saw this before he did, that he couldn't protect Eoin from being observed while totally unmoored from his own body. It feels like Paddy has failed him once again.

“There were others there, too.” He thinks of Almonds hovering behind him in the tent, of Bill Fraser's pale, worried face.

“Nobody will say anything,” Stirling says firmly, “we are all very fond of McGonigal and are delighted he has… been returned to us, and not only because it makes you significantly more pleasant to have around. He's a bloody good soldier. Besides, this is the SAS. We all have our eccentricities." Eoin stirs, and Paddy instinctively shushes him, smoothing the flat of hand along his side in a sweeping, hypnotic motion.

“You've found a way to manage it, then?” Stirling asks, once Eoin seems to have been pulled back under into sleep. Paddy knows what Stirling is getting at, but ‘manage’ feels particularly unsuited to the task that is making sure Eoin's precious body remembers how to hold together.

“Yes,” he says, even though he himself is uncertain. “Consider it managed.”

Stirling gives a sharp, decisive nod that suggests centuries of butlers and grouse shoots and inbreeding. “Well then, I don't see why GHQ would need to know anything about this.”

Even speaking with Stirling about this feels disloyal to Eoin, somehow. “Okay,” he says, “I'll tell him.” And then, “Now, fuck off.”

“Gladly,” Stirling says, and promptly does so.

Paddy dozes. When he wakes properly, just after sunrise, it's to Eoin's bright, laughing eyes, crinkled at their corners from his smile. Paddy touches Eoin's wrist and feels the blood and muscle of him, skims the fine hair along his forearms and watches his answering shiver. Eoin’s body seems to have remembered after all. I would do anything, Paddy thinks, I would do the worst thing in the world to keep him like this.

Chapter Text

Then full of enthusiastic faith kneels & prays, & in holy frenzy covers the child with sand. [...]
Twas done
the infant died
the blessed Sand retired, each particle to itself, conglomerating, & shrinking from the profane sand
the sands shrank away from it, & left a pit
still hardening & hardening, at length shot up a fountain large & mighty
How wide its spray, the rain-bow plays upon the Stream and the Spray - but lo! another brighter, o far far more bright
it hangs over the head of a glorious Child like a floating veil [...]
the Soul arises they drink, & fill their Skins, & depart rejoicing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1807, unpublished fragment from notebooks. 

*

The French continue to be an irritation despite doing nothing especially offensive. Since Eoin reappeared Paddy has largely ignored them as best he can, and to be fair, it hasn't been particularly difficult. Most seemed mildly curious in their sanctimonious continental way at the appearance of a soldier out of the desert. But they are at war, and strange things happen at war. Even stranger things happen in the SAS. Everybody knows this, and so they mostly lose interest, other than the fact that Eoin is, of course, extremely fucking nice to them and tries to befriend them all with his truly woeful French.

From afar, Paddy watches Eoin try out some of said woeful French on Bergé, who waits him out and then answers him drily in English. Eoin appears undeterred if his widening grin is anything to go by.

After a moment, Paddy realises Augustin has come to stand by him. In truth, Paddy has avoided him of late, has had little reason to seek him out and Augustin seems to have given him a wide berth too. When he and Eoin sit by the fire in the evenings, or when he leans against Eoin's shoulder at the piano bench, he sometimes spies Augustin watching them both with a curious expression, like he is trying to puzzle something out. Paddy would rather he didn't figure anything out about Eoin, but whenever Eoin feels him bristle at his side, he does something entirely distracting like absently pressing his hand to Paddy's elbow, or knee, or once the back of his neck, and murmurs "Peace, Paddy," and Paddy grudgingly does as he is told. He will try to know peace, if Eoin commands it. It is still so new, Eoin's… condition, and he has vowed he will not be trigger to it, so he does try his best to curb his more violent impulses when not actively engaging in combat. It is for this reason that he does not tell Augustin to fuck off now, because Eoin would hear and get involved and Eoin seems to be having a nice time speaking terrible French not too far away.

It had been six days, since Eoin's sense of self had temporarily vanished and his body had done its best to follow suit. Since then, it has happened once more. It had been a quiet slippage into nothingness - Eoin there one moment, and the next, gone, shoulders slackened and eyes empty, glossed over. Quiet, so as not to draw attention, Paddy had led him gently by the hands to the solitude of their tent. There he had laid the boy down and climbed half atop him, so best to press the breadth of himself to the palpable traces of a body in flux. Knee to knee, Paddy waited, hands firm and willing his own body mellow and calm, as Eoin's left ear trembled in and out of existence. He could have wept with it. Instead, he hitched himself further along Eoin's willowy frame and caught the fickle lobe between thumb and forefinger, let his mouth press to the delicate ridge of his antihelix, and there told him what he remembered of The Eve of St. Agnes until Eoin unfurled back into himself all at once, blinking and yawning and fixing Paddy with a tired smile.

As far as Paddy can tell, there seemed to be no unifying trigger between the two instances. But he is loath to be the cause of any distress that could cause Eoin to tip over into that bleak quivering stretch of absence.

So Paddy says nothing to Augustin, and for a time, Augustin seems content with silence too.

When he had thought Eoin swallowed up by the desert for good and Paddy was waiting for his grief to do the same to him, Augustin had expressed an odd kind of aggressive patience with him that he had grown unused to in Eoin's absence. Paddy had recognised something in Augustin, briefly: suitably antagonistic, occasionally sympathetic. It repulsed and beckoned at once. But Eoin had returned, and with him, Paddy's attentions were drawn home to him. And Augustin has mostly kept his distance, until now.

There's the sound of Augustin shifting next to Paddy. "Don't," Paddy says, without looking at him.

Augustin sniffs. "I have not said anything. Your friend seems very nice."

Paddy keeps his tone low, so as not to reach where it sounds like Eoin is borrowing heavily and with a lack of success from his schoolboy Latin. "Perhaps you misheard me when I told you not to speak."

"I only wanted to ask if you had read something," Augustin says offhandedly.

Paddy clenches his jaw. "What."

"An essay," Augustin says mildly, "by Freud. L'Inquiétante Étrangeté. Are you familiar?"

Paddy is. He says nothing, merely stares straight ahead. The lovely line of Eoin's jaw, his freckles in the sunshine.

"I am very happy, for your sake, that your friend is back," Augustin continues, and Paddy knows he should stop him there but he is frozen in place. "I am interested to speak with him. It is difficult to look at him and not see… a kind of gothic collateral. The disruption of nature."

There's a beat, where Paddy watches Eoin's laugh, eyes squinting as he peers at Bergé who is backlit by the sun. The sound of his own thundering heart roars in his ears. Then the moment passes, and he draws back his fist and sinks it into Augustin's jaw.

The fight doesn't seem to trigger anything in Eoin except the faint irritation that Paddy won't tell him why he punched him first.

"I don't see why you won't just tell me." Eoin empties his flask over Paddy's bloodied knuckles, and tuts at him as Paddy lets out a hiss. "He seems nice enough. And don't think I haven't seen the way he looks at you." Eoin eyes him slyly, and suddenly Paddy's tongue feels too big for his mouth. He's looking at you, he wants to say, but that seems entirely beside the point.

It's too big, to share this with Eoin. Paddy is so rarely lost for words, but he can't seem to let Eoin in properly on the agonising stretch of time between Eoin falling and Eoin rising. How his grief had taken place of Eoin in his absence, how it was beyond belief that Paddy still lived by the time of Eoin's return. Even the slightest acknowledgement that something was off, that there was something that Paddy couldn't 'manage' about this returned Eoin, as Stirling had put it, led him to think that he could be gone as soon as he arrived. Augustin could fuck off. There could be nothing of the uncanny in this Eoin. He wasn't collateral, he was everything. The ways he was different now were the ways he was able to come back to Paddy. Wondrous strange.

Was that really him, Paddy thinks, in my dreams? Eoin still claims to remember nothing. Paddy believes him, does not wish to falter in his belief of him, and then he thinks of the briny smoke of dream-Eoin that Paddy reached for, reached through, so many times while he slept in his bed and Eoin slept in the dunes, and he— wonders.

He says none of that. Paddy shrugs, flexing his hand and staring down at it. "He got my goat," he mutters, and Eoin sighs, and grasps his shoulder, and they say no more about it.

Nonetheless, Augustin's line of questioning gnaws at him. Despite Paddy's close observational attentions, they know so little. Feeling desperate, Paddy writes to Ambrose: have you noticed him changed? Has he said anything to you? He feels dishonest about going behind Eoin's back, and also about potentially making Ambrose worry, when Paddy told Stirling he would handle it and he looks like he's buckling under pressure already. 

Ambrose is irritatingly clued in as ever and yet does not seem especially worried. This combination is a common McGonigal trait and annoys Paddy to no end. Yes, he has mentioned he feels changed, I wager being out of a POW camp would likely make him feel a changed man (is that still the theory for polite company? When we are in the same city again you are both going to take me to a bar and tell me what has really been happening out there). Anyway, he has written that he credits the change in himself to you and your presence, although being home, in a fashion, and alive (in a fashion?) would also feel grand I imagine. You appear to be doing something right as he seems excessively merry, even after having walked out of hell against all odds, or something to that effect at least. I don't need to tell you to be good to him, because we know you always are, but I will tell you to not handle him with such care that you do the both of you a disservice. If you catch my drift, Blair - I mean it. Don't waste his little resurrection stunt by being repressed or tediously noble.

Once he has recovered from the abject humiliation of having Ambrose instruct Paddy to make a move on his younger brother, he turns the rest of the letter over and over in his mind. Is it me, Paddy thinks, is this change in him wrought by mine own hands? Shaped in my grief? Try as he might he does not, cannot regret it. Stirling commanded him to bury his grief. Instead, it seems to have unburied Eoin McGonigal. 

*

The thing that seems to shake Eoin the most is that Withers appears to have a problem with him. While Withers has his favourites, he is a jolly little thing who will quite happily duck his snout under anyone's hands in the suggestion that they might consider scratching his ears. Although the human residents of Jalo had unanimously decided to ignore whatever the fuck was going on with Eoin and politely look the other way (after calling for Paddy) whenever he had one of his odd moments, it became clear that Withers had not received this memo. One morning, rounding the tents, Paddy encounters a borderline distraught Eoin facing down an extremely disgruntled terrier. 

"Withers, leave it," Paddy says over the barking, and raises an eyebrow at Eoin. "What have you done to offend him?" 

The much beloved Eoin McGonigal has made it his lifelong goal to be incessantly charming towards anyone who even vaguely dislikes him. He has won over significantly more challenging adversaries than Jalo's littlest stray, and yet if the barking is any indicator, Withers appears entirely resistant to his wiles. "I don't know, I just tried to give him a pat and he won't stop barking." Paddy, who has spent years becoming fluent in McGonigal, knows that Eoin is going for nonchalant but actually sounds extremely fucking bothered by this state of affairs. 

"Withers, enough, bad dog," Paddy snaps, and the dog stops barking but is still growling, his lips curled back to show his nasty little teeth in a manner that is oddly reminiscent of Bill Fraser. "Go on, get," Paddy says, making a shooing motion with his hands. 

"Don't make him leave, he was here first," Eoin says glumly, "poor thing, he was just trying to have a kip and I interrupted him." 

"Well, he can't go picking fights with whoever he likes." Paddy likes the dog well enough, but he wouldn't be as invested if Eoin wasn't looking so fucking dejected. 

"It's not whoever, though, is it," says Eoin, "it's me, he knows that I'm..." He trails off, rubbing the back of his neck. "You know." 

Paddy knows. It's the closest they've gotten to actually talking about it, outside of whenever Paddy's specific skill set is required to quite literally hold the beautifully cobbled pieces of Eoin together. Of course, with Eoin's bleeding heart, it's over a bloody dog. 

"Aye," he says, softer, "I know." Withers has grudgingly settled back down onto the hessian sack he had requisitioned as one of his many beds about the camp, and while he is still glaring at Eoin, he has stopped his growling. "It's just the dog," Paddy tells him. 

Eoin scrubs roughly at his face, looking forlorn. "It's not just the dog though," he says quietly, "is it." 

Paddy understands him as he has always made a study of understanding Eoin. The dog's unease has forced him to consider his own state, as it was, as one who was dead and now is alive. They know so little about what has happened, and yet Paddy is still terrified to try to understand the totality of it, in case he unpicks something key to the workings of whatever has bound Eoin here and the boy once again slips away beneath his grasping hands. The little notes he makes himself (often kicks in his sleep prior to a blood nose, or more responsive to shoulders and head being touched than hands when his self wanders) are the closest he gets to examining the situation they have found themselves in. Even then, it is entirely responsive: what does Eoin need? What might help Eoin in this very moment? Paddy is adaptable and reactive and as his days of scholarship are long behind him, he applies his paltry hands and scrapings of soft words and tries to think no more of the root. He is preoccupied with easing the symptoms, not the cause. Eoin is back and Paddy will keep him here or die trying. 

But Eoin seems to have been engaging in some ill-advised critical analysis of the topic. Paddy wants to slap his hands away and tell him to get out of it, like he would to the cranky terrier at their feet. Instead, he goes to him and fits the flats of his palms over his collarbones. Eoin deflates, his shoulders dropping as he lets out a sigh, and leans heavily into Paddy's touch. 

"Give him time," Paddy says, and Eoin nods, conceding temporary defeat. "He'll come around, he's just a bit slow on the uptake. I think you'll find that there's not a lot of room for brains in that runty little body of his." 

"Are we still talking about the dog, Blair," Eoin says blithely, and Paddy steps on his foot. 

Eoin is temporarily cheered, but he does pursue a friendship with Withers with single minded focus. It becomes a not uncommon sight to spy Eoin sitting cross legged in the sand, a little ways from where the dog is curled warily. "Exposure therapy," Eoin calls out when questioned on his approach. "He's just got to get used to me, that's all. I'll win him over in the end." 

"Seems like overkill, isn't one loyal hound dogging his every step enough for a man?" Stirling asks idly, slanting a sideways look at Paddy, who would have told him to fuck off if not for the delighted laugh it coaxed from Eoin. Apart from his tussle with Augustin, who fucking deserved it, he finds himself less prone to indiscriminate violence of late, his energy serving a better purpose. 

It is the work of weeks, but the unbridled joy that crosses Eoin's face the fateful day that Withers grudgingly snuffles a biscuit out of his hand makes Paddy's chest ache with joy for him. 

Eoin has been squirrelling an inordinate amount of food to tempt the dog with, and this does not escape Paddy's keen eye. Broadly speaking, Eoin has been entirely disinterested in meals since he came back. While the food at a wartime desert camp is by no means appetising, Eoin has never been precious about food before. Paddy has seen Eoin inhale far viler fare with gusto, but now he picks over his food like a reluctant child. 

After the first few times he notices, Paddy accosts him about it in their tent. "You aren't eating," he says bluntly, and Eoin flinches, looking vaguely guilty. They are changing for sleep, and Paddy runs his hands along Eoin's ribs, feeling the meat of him. He isn't quite sure how much there is a correlation between what Eoin eats and how he maintains a considerable weight, considering how Paddy has to coax his body back into being several times a month, but he would rather not chance it. 

"I know," Eoin says, and has the decency to look a little embarrassed. "I don't know what's wrong with me. It all just tastes like..." He falters, looking down at where Paddy's hands rest bracketed along his middle. 

"Like what?" Paddy prompts. Eoin looks up at him, eyes lidded. 

"Like sand," he says hoarsely. Paddy feels sick with the memory of Eoin's shredded fingers after he returned. How long was he in the desert, half-buried and waiting to rise? How long did he lie there, sand filling his eyes and ears and lovely pink mouth? 

"Okay," Paddy says gruffly, desperately grappling with mitigating the sound of his own sadness. Eoin, who is extremely wise to his fuckery by this point, lets his own hands rest at the small of Paddy's back and says nothing about the thickness to his voice. Gracious lad. "Let's see what we can do about that, then. In the meantime," he clears his throat, "please eat, Eoin." 

"I will," Eoin promises, and by God, the man does try. He white-knuckles through whatever horrid tinned meats and chalky biscuits they're given to appease Paddy's anxieties, although by the sounds of it, Eoin could be dining at the Ritz and still be having a rotten time of it. It isn't until they get a crate of oranges as a special delivery that Paddy finally sees Eoin eat with any kind of enthusiasm. The oranges break the culinary monotony but they're nothing special really, pale anaemic little globes barely bigger than one's palm. But Eoin is a man possessed as soon as he has one in hand, splitting it in two with his knife and working his way through each segment methodically. He sucks each half-moon from the rind and then, apparently unable to help himself, swallows down the rind with just as much single-minded reverence. 

Paddy watches him from behind his sunglasses, unbidden heat roiling in his gut. If Eoin is like this about fresh food, Paddy will spend the rest of his life on his knees, trowel in hand, tending to pumpkins and honeydew and whatever else Eoin fancies. He will install a pineapple pit himself only to grow and feed him one by hand, spikes and all, if it will have him happy and healthy and eating.

Eoin grins unashamedly. "Sorry, it just," he stops to lick a trail of juice from the webbing between his thumb and forefinger, and Christ alive, this boy will be the death of Paddy, "it tastes good." 

It is very nice to see Eoin enjoying his food. Paddy silently hands over his own orange to the custody of Eoin's sticky hands, and excuses himself. 

It is funny, except it's really not. Paddy has never been so familiar with another man's body, not even those he had exchanged furtive, meaningless intimacies with before the war. He has carried a pathetic candle for the youngest McGonigal for many years now, but his own desires feel entirely removed from how he has come to know the smallest details of Eoin's body. The salt-pillared husk of Paddy's own body wants, yes, but such base concerns are far from his thoughts when Eoin's eyes are as black and alien as unknown stones hauled from the deepest parts of the ocean, and all Paddy can do is try to cup the sea of him in his clumsy hands. 

So, it is the easiest thing in the world for him to put his wanting aside. Until it isn't. 

Chapter Text

And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay

*

Paddy is on his third night of not sleeping. The first night was a raid, then the day following proved too hot for him to settle. The night after he had spent gripped with fear. He had spent long, sluggish hours staring at Eoin's cot in trepidation, waiting for him to slither out of existence. All that day he had been in a vile mood, surly and argumentative. Even the ever-patient had Eoin had kicked him out of their tent, looking extremely, haughtily twenty-one while telling him to have a drink and calm down some until he was ready to play nice and, hopefully, pass out asleep. Paddy feels ancient to his bones, and is too proud to tell him that the only way he knows he could settle would be to lie with his head atop Eoin's chest. Instead, he sulks in the mess, rum-soaked and foul-tempered, listening to one of the lads committing a crime against music on the piano.  

In truth, he has held himself apart from the men as of late. Not as he had before, when he was nursing the wreckage of his grief, but Eoin had consumed much of his attentions. Too much, really, but the majority of the men are too discreet or oblivious or grateful that Paddy had pulled his fucking head in to draw attention to Paddy's single mindedness of late.

All except for one, that is. Augustin finds him stewing in the corner.

"You are here without McGonigal," Augustin says. He has a habit of making the most basic of statements sound existentially profound. Paddy likes to think that his students at university must have hated him, but really he knows they would have hung off his every inane turn of phrase like he was the second fucking coming.

"Ah, how astute of you professor," Paddy says icily, and downs the rest of his cup. "As you might have also noticed, we are not joined at the hip."

Augustin regards him with a sense of passive contemplation. "Perhaps not, you are more his shadow. Or perpetually in his orbit. I have been wanting to speak with one of you, but I thought you would consider it more agreeable that I approach you, rather than him."

Ire sours in Paddy's gut, mingling with keen, familiar humiliation at being clocked for his spaniel-eyed adoration. It's true, he had been caught in Eoin's orbit for years now, like a miserable fucking moon. He had liked to think he was better at masking it, until Eoin died and he stopped caring. But he's exhausted, and smarting a little from Eoin sending him away, and hearing these words in Augustin's patrician mouth is another blow. "Bold of you to assume that I would think it agreeable for you to speak with me in any context." He chooses his next words carefully, loath to give Augustin further ammunition. "Eoin is his own man. He can tell you to fuck off himself. As I am telling you now: fuck off."

"How aware of his own condition is he?" Augustin asks, and Paddy's lip curls in fury. Augustin's tone is classic detached professor, inquisitive and conversational in its idle flippancy.

"You are gnawing on my very last nerve, Jordan," he spits, low enough so they can't be overheard, "if you presume to think that you can talk about him, about his condition as you so conveniently put it. You speak of his being here in this camp like it's something you have any right to even consider, let alone philosophise about like he's a topic for your fucking study group. Like Eoin is a thing your filthy little undergraduates can mull over."

Augustin catches his wrist before Paddy can turn away. Brave, stupid man. Paddy wants to grind him into dust beneath the heel of his boot.

Augustin leans in, and his voice is quiet, but urgent. "His very existence points to a gap in the field of visible, some… historical residue, debris from something lost. Eoin is fundamentally incorrect, an absolute impossibility." Augustin's cheeks are flushed - partly from liquor, but also in part through excitement that Paddy finds repulsive. "Doesn't that interest you? He is impossible, Paddy."

Paddy has always known that Eoin is an impossible thing, heard him called such by siblings and teammates and soldiers alike for years now. He has always been too smart for his own good with an innate capacity for rule-bending, but what was more impossible was his loyalty, his keen sense of right and wrong, his unparalleled generosity. It felt the most correct thing in the world to have him back amongst the living. Why shouldn't he come back, thinks Paddy hotly, who, if not he?

Paddy is not quite aware he's doing it until he's already thrown Augustin back across a table, the bottle of rum smashing at their feet. He wants Augustin to hit him back but the insufferable man is only on the defense. It is profoundly unsatisfying.

Paddy lets Augustin's head crack against the table, and takes deep joy in the way the man flinches at impact. "You want to study him so fucking badly," Paddy sneers, barely cognisant of what he is saying, "but you won't even give me the decency of fighting back, you sanctimonious little prick."

Augustin looks at him dead on. There is a trickle of blood coming from his lip, where Paddy split it with his fist. "I don't want to study you, Paddy, fucking hell. You need help, both of you."

"From you?" Paddy asks, repulsed, and goes to punch him again, even when he can feel Riley's hands pulling at his shoulders, trying to pull him off.

Like the sound is on a string woven into the very fibre of him, Paddy hears the click of a gun, and freezes, dropping Augustin and wheeling around. 

In the doorway, stands Eoin, pistol in hand. It is dark, but Paddy does not need light to know the animal hunker of Eoin's limbs means the boy is not in himself, but secreted away elsewhere, beyond Paddy's grasp. He stands like his shoulders are hoisted by invisible hooks, like the ones bearing pig carcasses at the butchers back home. But this time it is different. Usually, Eoin turns still but gentle as a lamb: quiet, biddable. He stays put until someone leads him to Paddy, and Paddy can lead him somewhere away from prying eyes where he can bring him back to himself. In this state Eoin can, on occasion, move his head or make some soft, low noise, but never wander around unbidden. 

Eoin is alone in the doorway. He has put himself there, cocked the gun himself, and pointed it directly at Paddy's heaving chest. He looks wrong, like the gothic abhorrence Augustin wants him to be with such dispassionate emphasis. The terror of it makes him want to be sick. What have I done, he thinks, what have I made him into? 

The scene is a sick parody of one that lives keenly in Paddy's memory: Eoin's shrewd, resolute eyes, his laughing mouth turned serious as he held his gun aloft as a threat, as a promise. I'll shoot you, Blair. The lines were clear then. Paddy could rein himself in or Eoin would do it for him.

Now, the uncanny double of this changed Eoin replicates those same actions, only fundamentally wrong in execution. Will it end, as it did before, if Paddy comes to heel? Is this what some part of Eoin is trying to do now, or is this how it will be from now on? Will Eoin start to spend more and more time black-eyed and listless? Will he try to hurt Paddy? 

Eoin will hate himself for this, Paddy thinks. The thought is significantly more harrowing than the prospect of being shot.  

"Eoin," he says, too gentle, too raw for the mixed company they currently keep. Augustin is closer to the doorway, and Paddy sees him tear his studied gaze from Eoin to Paddy. Usually, the thought of someone who wasn't Eoin seeing the soft underbelly of him would incur his rage, but now he thinks, good. Let them all look at him, not at Eoin. 

Grimly, Paddy wonders if this progression of Eoin's condition is tethered to his own mistakes. If he truly had some role in Eoin coming back, then these complications with Eoin's state of being were surely the result of something defective in Paddy. He grieved too violently when Eoin was dead, or he wanted too much when he lived. He still wants now, despite his best efforts to stamp it down to ashes. If his love for Eoin had been more pure and fraternal, less tainted with his desire, then perhaps Eoin wouldn't be tormented like he is now.

But Paddy's hands are only suited for destruction. Though he had tried so, so hard with Eoin, perhaps it simply wasn't enough.

Now, he looks at Eoin's uneasy slouch and the pistol held in his trembling hand, and thinks of when he tried to shoot himself shortly after the French arrived. Maybe this Eoin is just this latest manifestation of the howling shape of his ceaseless grief, come back to Russian roulette him once more. Paddy thinks, wildly, about closing his eyes and waiting for Eoin to pull the trigger. Surely a finer end than anything else waiting for him in the desert. If Paddy has wrought this change in Eoin through his own fury and obstinance, through the yoke of grief that still fetters him despite Eoin's return, then he deserves to be put down like a rabid dog. Maybe then he could finally pay the price for his role in Eoin's death.

But Eoin wouldn't like that. 

Paddy knows if he allowed that to happen, and then Eoin returned to himself, he would be ruined by his grief. And Paddy wouldn't be there to know, unseeing, the crook of his elbow, and where his waist dips just so, and his exact height in the doorway, all to try to cobble him back together again.

"Eoin," he says again, and Eoin's lifeless expression turns his way. His eyes are black and show no recognition, but he holds the gun still. The uneasy slouch of this spectre is like one who struggles in his sleep because of the exceeding terribleness of some dream. 

Almonds is moving steadily towards them, and, after a moment of hesitation, stands by Eoin's side. "Here, lad," he says in that quietly reasonable tone he uses mainly for spooked animals and Paddy. His eyes dart between Eoin and Paddy, as if wondering why Paddy hasn't done his usual vanishing act with Eoin firmly in hand. But Paddy is sick with indecision, going on 65 hours without sleep and half in love with the idea of Eoin blowing his brains out. "Why don't we get you back to your tent?" 

The gun wavers, as if Eoin is being persuaded to drop it, only something is off about the movement. Paddy knows that Eoin can't be reasoned with when he's like this, only coaxed with the warmth and pressure of a living body, to remind Eoin that he, too, lives, despite evidence to the contrary.

The thing is, Eoin is always unnervingly still when he is like this. But the gun has been trembling in his hand almost the entire time Eoin's shape has towered in the doorway, not just since Almonds spoke.

In a single horrifying breath, Paddy realises that it is not Eoin's resolve with his weapon that is faltering, but his body. 

"Wait," Paddy says, loud and brash to his ears, and the gun pitches forward into the sand between them as Eoin's hand and forearm flinch out of existence. 

Almonds freezes up as Paddy unravels into rapid movement. It's dark in the mess, but not so dark that those closest wouldn't have seen it. Almonds, definitely. Fucking Augustin, no doubt, maybe Riley, where he'd posted up next to Paddy after hauling him away—

But it doesn't matter now. Paddy steps over the gun, ignoring it, and reaches up to cup his hand firmly over the scruff of Eoin's neck, the other taking the hand that dropped the gun. It's barely there, nothing at all - an artist's impression of Eoin McGonigal's hand. Paddy can feel the rippled echo of his fingers and knuckles but little else. The calluses at his fingertips, the creases cutting through his palms - all gone, swallowed by the desert.

"Don't you dare," Paddy tells him, and squeezes his hand, hard. The flesh goes a little wavy beneath his grip, but holds. "I will not have you parted from me in this fashion, nor any other." Eoin's head tilts to look down at him, his eyes like black holes in his head while his body struggles to devour itself in fluctuating temporal confusion. Close in the burning lamplight, the polished smoothness of Eoin's eyes reflect Paddy, an inept figure lost in this dark wilderness of mirrors.

Nobody follows when they leave. Behind them, the mess is quiet. Ahead, the endless, silent stretch of the desert where Eoin had been reborn. Paddy tries not to rush him, but he's agitated, sweating from nerves in a way he never does during a raid, or brawling, or idly facing down a hanging.

"Come," he says, when they are finally in the private dark of their tent, "Eoin, love, sit down, come on." He almost wishes Eoin would try to hurt him again, because then, at least, there would be some purpose to him. Anything but this tremulous haze of his beloved boy.

Eoin stumbles right before they reach his bed, and when Paddy looks down he sees his leg is wrenched askew, hanging ill at ease as if being attached to his hip was mere suggestion. "Easy, lad, there we go," Paddy murmurs. He gets him sitting, and blind with panic, pulls Eoin's shirt off and wrestles himself out of his own. Skin to skin, he thinks wildly, laying Eoin's blurred composition of a body down and pressing their chests together.

"Like two pigeons in one nest folded in each other's wings," he tells Eoin quietly, then, "Eoin," pulled ragged from him when Eoin's arm dips out of being again.

Paddy fumbles for where the hand ought to be until it flinches back into sight. Once it has safely returned, he raises Eoin's palm to his mouth and holds it there.

“You've already broken the silent sabbath of the grave, lad,” Paddy murmurs, feeling the humid drag of his lips over Eoin's cirrus-edged fingers, one by one. “Surely, that was the hardest push. Coming home to me. There's no going back now.”

It's the most intimate thing they have done, and Eoin isn't even properly there for it. But Paddy feels half-mad with dread, so deeply afraid that Eoin is going beyond Paddy's capacity to steer him back. There is an immediacy of his mouth to Eoin's hand that feels soothing. He's never quite sure how much Eoin can hear him in this state. To speak directly against Eoin's hand as it threatens to slip into a state of unbeing seems pragmatic, really. Eoin can be coaxed by touch, so why not let him feel Paddy's words as well as hear them.

It takes longer than it usually does. Perhaps Eoin had travelled further than normal, and Paddy wonders if one day he will go so far that he won't be able to lure him back to living. Slowly, like some tempestuous winged creature, Eoin's form settles, but Paddy does not let go of his hand. With the rest of his body Paddy fits it to serve Eoin's, which still lies prone, dark eyes sightless and inhuman. Paddy, who is feeling the brunt of three nights without sleep, shifts restlessly atop Eoin. He tries to make his body soft and steady but he's frantic with exhaustion, his free hand roaming Eoin's chest and shoulders and hair as he mumbles whatever he can salvage from the wrecked state of his psyche.

"It may well be that in a difficult hour," he says, half-slurred, smeared into the humid ditch of Eoin's neck, "pinned down by pain and moaning for release, or nagged by want past resolutions power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, or trade the memory of this night for food." His teeth catch, just scraping the marble column of Eoin's lovely throat, flushed pink from the heat of all the carrying on Paddy's been doing in such close proximity. He thinks with resentment of Augustin calling Eoin historical residue, like some crumbling ancient relic excavated from a tomb, when he was here only so recently, so radiant with life. He was just here.

"It well may be," says Paddy, brokenly, and leaves a single kiss, clumsy and open-mouthed, at Eoin's throat. "I do not think I would."

Beneath his lips, Eoin's throat works at a swallow. Paddy goes still.

"Eoin?" he murmurs, and waits. There's no response.

With aching slowness, Paddy presses his lips to Eoin's skin once more. There's a moment where his heart sinks at his own pathetic foolishness. Then he feels the vibration of Eoin's hoarse, "Paddy," where his mouth is still parted in a kiss.

Paddy pries himself up just far enough to witness the crinkle of Eoin's blessed smile across his weary face.

"Hello," Paddy croaks. Spellbound, he touches that smile with the tips of his fingers. He never thought he would see it again. Eoin makes a small, pleased noise, and kisses Paddy's fingertips as a lover might.

"Hello to you, too," says Eoin, and his voice is scratched to all hell. Paddy is close enough to see that there is sand where there wasn't before, crusted at the corners of Eoin's eyes and clinging to his lashes. He is quick to thumb it away before it can trouble Eoin any further.

His other hand is still occupied with the one of Eoin's that kept threatening a disappearing act, and Paddy chances a look at it, twisting Eoin's arm up to the light. Eoin lets him, watching patiently as Paddy looks to his fill. When he is satisfied, he presses his unworthy cheek to the hallowed ground of Eoin's palm, deep creases and all, and feels himself breathe easy for the first time in days.

"Alright there, lad?" Eoin asks him gently. Paddy is wrung out and doesn't want to ruin this by speaking, so wordlessly lets himself be reeled in to rest his head alongside Eoin's. It's quiet, except for the sound of them breathing. Paddy closes his eyes.

"Can't believe I almost had to die a second time to get you to finally kiss me," Eoin says, and although he can hear the smile in Eoin's voice it is so profoundly unfunny that Paddy could wring his beautiful neck. He noses in close, his forehead pressed to Eoin's temple, and tucks a brief kiss at the corner of his mouth.

"You're going to have to give me a bit more time before you can make jokes like that," Paddy says, and Eoin makes a noise that is half-laugher, half-apology, and rolls onto his side to kiss Paddy properly.

They must sleep for a time, or Paddy dozes, at least, because sometime after Eoin holds him close and kisses him with such slow, single-minded intensity that Paddy feels drunk with it, he opens his eyes and notices the tent is in that early dawn half-light state. Eoin is awake, and watching him with a slight frown, although he smiles to see Paddy blinking awake.

"Go back to sleep, it's early yet," he whispers, cupping Paddy's jaw in his hand. "Nobody will disturb us."

It would be so easy to do as he is told, but Paddy is a contrarian little shit. He fights against his own lethargy, trying to convince his traitorous, sleep-fogged brain that Eoin is here, that he isn't going anywhere. "Are you well?" he asks, unable to mask the slight panic edging his words.

That same frown slips down across Eoin's countenance once more. "Aye, darling, I'm well," he says, and leans closer to press his lips between Paddy's brows. He stays there a long while. Paddy moves his hand to the back of Eoin's ribs, feeling the rise and fall of his living breath, and matches it.

Paddy is almost asleep again when Eoin pulls back and asks, in haunted tones, "Blair, what happened? What did I do?"

Paddy opens his eyes. It should be criminal, how serious Eoin's face can get at the age of twenty-one. This beautiful silly boy should be skiving off lectures and sloshing through mud at rugby practice and making inadvisable choices at the pub, not hovering somewhere between life and death in a war none of them asked for.

He knows it will hurt, but Paddy tells him all the same. Eoin grows wet-eyed and remorseful. For the first time since he came back, he looks frightened. It feels like some sort of horrible breakthrough.

"I'm sorry," Eoin says, aghast. His words are thick with unshed tears, "Paddy, I'm so sorry."

Paddy will not stand for it. "Now, then, none of that," he murmurs, and leans their foreheads together. He waits for Eoin to cry, silent sobs that make his shoulders tremble, and then he waits for him to stop.

"Where do you go," Paddy whispers afterwards, when a tired kind of silence stretches between them. "When you wander from here, where do you go?"

Eoin's eyes are red but he doesn't shy away from answering. Brave boy. "I wasn't lying, when I said I don't remember," he says slowly, "it's more like, I'm remembering through my body."

He is quiet for so long that Paddy thinks that might be all he is going to get.

Then, "I sometimes think about when Keats was in Rome, right before he died, and he told— well, I can't remember his name, but he told his mate that he was so close to death that he could already feel the daisies growing over his grave. That's as close to it as I can explain, just," and he swallows. He looks hollowed out, and resigned in a way that sets Paddy's teeth on edge. "No daisies in the desert, are there. Just the sand and the wind up above, and I can feel it, sort of, only underneath it's only— me."

Paddy thinks of the hours Eoin has haemorrhaged to waiting, crosslegged and hopeful, for Withers to throw him a kind look or nose at his ankles. It feels especially cruel for Eoin to be caught in this endless loop. Not just in the senseless violence of his death, but to be pulled back unwittingly to the loneliness of his grave.

Meanwhile, Paddy's grief still dogs him relentlessly, even when the boy in question lies breathing in his arms. What a sorry pair they make.

"You are here with me now," Paddy tells him, "and I have a yen to keep you with me." Eoin's face cracks open in a beautiful smile, reddened eyes and all, and laughing, calls him soft.

Paddy nods, considering. "So be it," he says, and guides Eoin onto his back so he can lay prostrate across Eoin like a man at worship. He tongues at the quivering, laughing throat of him and tastes desert, desert, desert.

*

“I wake each morning like a boy — even now, even now! I swear to you, there’s something in me that could dare to love this world again! . . . Is the knowing all? To know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax and fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths. Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love — as to an idiot in the house — forgive it; again and again . . . forever?”

After the Fall, Arthur Miller.

Chapter Text

Now the final wall of propriety between them has crumbled, it is hard for either of them to exhibit any kind of restraint with each other. Paddy finds himself reaching for Eoin even before he is properly awake, his eyes blinking open to Eoin's thumbs stroking the line of his brow. They are discreet enough in public, though in the half-dark of their tent each night Paddy kisses the gritty, peeling skin of Eoin's elbows, his knuckles, his knees, all of which are still are dry and sand-wrecked from his rising. Afterwards, he anoints each peeled surface with vaseline, to keep the skin from cracking further in the unforgiving desert air. Eoin protests each time, insisting he can do it himself, but Paddy shrugs him off and applies the ointment with single-minded focus. Eoin watches, mouth parted and gaze heavy and dark, until the task is done and he can finally pull Paddy to him and kiss him, then again, and again. There is so much of Eoin in these bodily gestures - the scrape of his teeth behind Paddy's ear, his scorching hands cradling his hips steady - that for whole minutes, sometimes, he forgets that Eoin's body once was not there for him to touch and hinge himself over or lie beneath, and instead lay silent and uninhabited in a sandy grave.

Despite their new closeness, there is still the rift of Eoin's physical unpredictability lingering between them. He has only gone black-eyed once since the night he had pulled a gun on Paddy, though it had not felt so severe: Paddy had laid across him, one hand tangled in his curls, and alternated between speaking into the crook of his neck and leaving imploring kisses along the slackened swell of his lower lip until Eoin regained hold of his body. But Eoin has seemed more troubled by it than he had previously. While part of Paddy is glad that Eoin is finally understanding the magnitude of his own fear, instead of treating it with his prior flippancy, he does not rejoice to see Eoin in distress. The reality is that there is so much they do not know - and in the not-knowing, guilt eats away at him at the potential for his own selfish hand in Eoin's consternation over his complicated return.

The days pass, circumstances much the same. One late afternoon when returning to his tent, he hears voices coming from inside, and slows his step.

"It worries him," Eoin is saying, and Paddy's heart lurches to a stop. "I can see how the fear is eating at him, but I think there's a part of him that thinks if he speaks of his troubles, I'll disappear. And that he is somehow responsible for every bad thing in this, whatever this is, and none of it is my fault."

"I have gotten that impression, yes," comes Augustin's voice, and Paddy clenches his jaw. Of fucking course. He forgets the discretion of eavesdropping, and unceremoniously shoves through the tent flaps. Augustin has perched neatly on the edge of Eoin's cot, a notebook in his lap, and Eoin sits opposite on Paddy's cot, leaning back against the tent. Each of them is holding a cup of terrible army tea. They both look up at his entry.

"Sorry to interrupt the tea party taking place in my own tent," Paddy says tersely, "if I'd known, I'd have brought scones. Put the doilies out. Fetched a little ottoman for your feet, professor."

Augustin looks vaguely amused. Eoin rolls his eyes and sets his tea down on the floor, holding his hand out to Paddy.

"Peace, love," Eoin says to him, wiggling his fingers until Paddy takes his hand. Though Paddy bristles at being exposed to Augustin in such a way, he can't help but obey when he has been brutish and Eoin responds so kindly. He feels the fight drain from him in one fell swoop. "I invited him here. I thought it might be easier for you if you weren't around, but now you're here, you might as well take a seat."

Paddy lets himself be reeled in and sat next to Eoin, who leans in and presses an obliging kiss to his temple. "You don't have to stay," Eoin says softly. Paddy looks him in his earnest face, and knows why Ambrose could never deny his precocious little brother anything he asked.

"No, I'm grand, I'll stay," he murmurs. He glances across at Augustin suspiciously, but if Eoin has asked him here, then it's something Eoin needs. Paddy supposes that there are more irritating people he could ask for advice on this. Probably. He just can't think of any right now.

"Great," Eoin says, and claps his hands. "Well, Augustin and I got chatting and I never realised how fortunate we were, Paddy, to have our very own philosophy professor in our midst, and so I asked if he had any thoughts on some pertinent issues around suddenly being not-dead, and what do you know, he did!"

"Did he just," Paddy says evenly.

"I have, uh," Augustin has the decency to look a little embarrassed, which brings Paddy some sorely needed comfort, "well, I have been making some… notes, to try to distil my thoughts on this topic. I wanted to be prepared, should either of you feel open to talking about this with me. I understand it is sensitive, and perhaps I have not been as delicate as I should have been, in the past."

Paddy eyes where Augustin still bears the smudge of a bruise from their fight in the mess, and snorts.

"That's very nice of him, isn't it, Paddy," Eoin says performatively, but Paddy can tell he is genuinely interested. Eoin has always been a glutton for knowledge, lying back on his cot and demanding Paddy read to him. More than once Paddy had endured Ambrose's complaints about his little shite of a brother disassembling the family radio or longcase clock at inopportune times to "see how it worked". There is an innate curiosity to Eoin that Paddy has frequently found both incessantly charming and annoying, and both sensations arise in him now as he watches Eoin shift, eager for whatever philosophical tripe Augustin has been noodling away at while Paddy has been deeply preoccupied with bigger concerns, like keeping Eoin in one piece.

"If you start banging on about porous and buffered selves, I'm leaving," Paddy says, and Augustin laughs, light and musical. "Or Freud," he says, as an afterthought. Eoin elbows him in the ribs.

"Here, don't be such a philistine," Eoin chastises him, sounding so much like Ambrose. Paddy catches that sharp elbow and gives it a squeeze before letting it go. Eoin stays close, pressed along his side, and it does ease the tension from his bones just a smidge.

"Well," Augustin begins drily, "an intellectual who we shall not name in present company wrote extensively on this idea of the uncanny, which is not gospel but I believe is worth interrogating here. By uncanny he meant, broadly speaking, that which is most familiar to us - our loved ones, our homes, even our own bodies - suddenly seem strange to us, or possessed by a force that we do not recognise and cannot control."

"Sounds familiar," Eoin chirps, although there's a tension to his voice that wasn't there before.

Augustin nods. "Now, there is no exact science on this, and if there was, I would pay it no heed, anyway, as this is all conjecture. I would posture that the horrors of this war and what has happened here," he motions at Eoin, "has proven that there is no innate, reasonable order in nature to be parsed in totality. However, repression," Augustin's eyes flicker to Paddy's, "is raised frequently by theorists wrestling with the uncanny. Did you dream of him?" Augustin asks Paddy, offhandedly.

Paddy thinks of the unreachable dew-smudged rendition of Eoin's figure, pillared on some remote dune, that used to visit him each time he could stomach closing his eyes. He says nothing.

"Aye, he did," Eoin says, glancing at Paddy, who scowls. Traitor. Eoin gives him an apologetic shrug. "Does that mean anything?"

Augustin hums. "Maybe. Do you remember him, Eoin? In dreams, or in whatever… state you occupied in-between?"

"I didn't dream of him," Eoin says slowly. His voice is steady but his hands in his lap are fraught, picking at his thumbnail until Paddy can take it no more and reaches across to still them. Eoin grants him the flicker of a smile. "I wouldn't call it a dream, but I felt him with me, sometimes. His presence. But it's hard to think about, like it's slipping away from me. Or like it's less a memory, and more a feeling."

"Well," says Augustin, not unkindly. "You were dead."

Eoin lets out a low laugh. Paddy doesn't find it funny.

"Do you think the dreams mean anything, then?" Paddy asks hoarsely, thinking of Eoin dissolving beneath his grieving palms night after night.

"Maybe," Augustin says, "maybe not. Not in terms of some kind of foresight, or premonition. That they were recurring is interesting, as it syncs with the nature of Eoin now - his nosebleeds, his lapses in mind. It suggests a pattern, a cycle." He is silent a moment, making a note in his papers.

"Strange things happen in war time," he says after a moment, and Paddy snorts.

"Aye, though I'd wager that rising from the grave is strangest of all."

Augustin hums in that irritatingly opaque manner of his. "Maybe, maybe not. During periods of intense conflict, moral systems are relative, not unitary. Boundaries are drawn with new sharpness, and simultaneously erased with new ease. It can be impossible to establish precisely where they have been erased, or what is in flux at any moment."

Paddy swallows. "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold."

Augustin smiles, bittersweet. "Quite."

Eoin's hand tightens around Paddy's, though his face remains passive. "So, you're saying, the violence of the war has thrown everything off kilter?"

"Maybe," Augustin says, and Eoin huffs in annoyance.

"Were you expecting clear answers from a continental philosopher, lad?" Paddy asks wryly, but squeezes his hand in a conciliatory gesture. Augustin has the decency to look a little apologetic.

"My point is, we don't know what this widespread violence will yield. The negotiation of death as something from rational to irrational would hardly be the most confronting thing to happen in this desert. For all we know, it could have happened a dozen times over since Eoin walked into camp."

Eoin frowns. "We haven't heard of this happening to anyone else."

"Nobody outside of Jalo has heard of what happened to you, though, have they," Paddy says, thinking of Stirling's fudged paperwork and the resolute silence of their fellow men.

Eoin looks unconvinced.

"Regardless," Augustin says, "what all of this doesn't specifically address is why Eoin's body seems periodically uncertain of where to be." He lets his gaze dip down to where Paddy's hand is still caught in both of Eoin's. Paddy feels the familiar tang of indignant shame at the back of his throat, but Eoin remains steadfast and unmoving, so Paddy keeps still. "It is none of my business," Augustin says slowly, "the nature of your relationship to one another. I am not interested in passing judgement, but also, I cannot pretend I have not been observing you as a ways to hypothesise over what, exactly, has brought about this return."

"Delighted we have piqued your scholarly interest," Eoin says drily. Augustin clears his throat, looking a little embarrassed, but soldiers on.

"Eoin died. This we know to be true. But it could be," Augustin says delicately, "that Eoin as we know him now has been called back from memory, and this is what haunts him still."

"From my memory when I grieved him?" Paddy asks bitterly, feeling the guilt rotting in his gut. Eoin lifts Paddy's hand to his knuckles and brushes a kiss over them, but does not speak.

Augustin frowns, flipping a page in his notebook. "I think it's more complex than just that. I would consider your… reluctance to part with your grief now as having greater bearing on his fluctuating existence, than the mere memories that re-crafted him. But no, what I meant were the memories embedded in Eoin's exhumed body. His corporeal instability is tied to his body's inability to forget the violence wrought upon it in the moment of death. He is trapped in a cycle of— well, not exactly remembering, but not-forgetting."

Paddy was not there, when Eoin died, but has imagined one thousand times over the sound of his beautiful body cracking over the unforgiving earth as it hit the ground. Next to him, Eoin is still. Paddy turns to look, and sees that he is thin-lipped and pale.

"What about the gun?" Eoin asks, voice wavering.

Augustin shrugs. "Your body remembers violence, particularly under duress from one or both of you," he says, "that is my best guess. Really, we don't know any of this, only recognise patterns and try to make some sense of it."

"So, I'm being haunted by my own death," Eoin says, shoulders back, pushing on through the horrors with a brave face as he always does. "That doesn't explain why I have a body to be haunted in the first place."

Augustin nods, like he has been anticipating this question. He's loving this, Paddy knows, and though it's a little grim to consider it doesn't quite grate on him as it has previously. There isn't a single other person in this world that Paddy would want with them in this moment. Augustin might be smug and pretentious and painfully French, but he has been so kind to Eoin in this conversation, so clear with him in outlining his thoughts, so genuine in his efforts that Paddy can't help but be grudgingly appreciative. He feels that same spark of shared mindset between them that had initially piqued his interest back when the French had arrived. It is fortunate that Augustin is so remarkably self-absorbed that the amount that Paddy has punched him in the last few weeks hasn't seemed to deter him from whatever strange half-friendship had been brewing between them before Eoin returned.

"First, we mustn't forget the ferocity of Paddy's grief." Augustin says it with such mild interest that it takes Paddy a moment to realise he is being horrifically exposed. But Eoin is nodding along, and so Paddy bears it. "For argument's sake, let us assume that there is some sort of reciprocal tether, between the two of you, some harmony existing from one to the other in the ether. While grief could put a strain on this tether, or cause it to react in curious ways," Paddy's hand flinches in Eoin's as he thinks of the gun in his hand, his black, sightless eyes, but Augustin ploughs on, "grief is but one part of remembering - and I actually think the significantly smaller part, here. I would like, for a moment, to think on eucharistic transubstantiation."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Paddy says, rolling his eyes, and Eoin throws his head back in a delighted laugh.

"As we Catholics in the room know," Augustin says, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, "transubstantiation allows for the belief that one can recall the body in actuality from death, through devotional ritual. Doctrine states the bread we take during communion quite literally becomes the body of Christ. Considering an extension of this thought, the act of remembering is not merely a mental exercise, then, but in the right circumstances can serve as an act of bodily worship in the present, to bring the past back to life through remembrance. It is a literal, everyday resurrection, to call a body forth not in sadness, or grief, but through loving memory." Augustin pauses, and his expression softens, as one might when about to administer some healing balm. "Your body, Eoin."

Paddy doesn't know where to look. He stares down at his lap, cheeks aflame. All along, he has agonised in silent torment over his animal grief making Eoin into some monstrous other, pulling him unbidden from his place of rest and tethering him despite the sore attempts of Eoin's body to flee. But Augustin speaks of his grief as only one, smaller part of the situation - something that unbalances the state of things, but not its total sum. Instead, if what Augustin is suggesting is true— he used the word devotional, if he believes Paddy's role it all was born from love—

"Paddy," Eoin says, so gentle. A familiar hand grazes his hairline, and Paddy cannot deny him. He looks up. Eoin looks back: steady, loving, a helpless smile curled in the corners of his lovely mouth.

Paddy opens his mouth to speak, though his own words fail him. "To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates," he rasps, and Eoin watches him with dew-bright eyes.

"I am different, though," Eoin says haltingly, his gaze tearing from Paddy back to Augustin. "I am— faster, stronger."

Augustin had politely been examining his notes, but when addressed he glances up and fixes them both with a small smile. "Take it up with Paddy, maybe," he says, looking like he might laugh. "It seems you were that in his mind already, if it is he who brought you back. Perhaps his memory has rendered you in greater perfection, making you harder to tear from him again. But I would say, we have lingered too much on grief. Instead, let us think that it was loving memory that raised your healed body from its grave, not a broken one through grief."

*

Eoin asks for some space, after Augustin leaves them. "Nothing bad," he promises Paddy, and leans close to seal his oath with a kiss, "I just need to think a bit."

"Take all the time you need," Paddy tells him, and means it. The sun is low in the sky now, and he watches Eoin walk beyond the walls and post up on a dune, his long legs pulled up to his chest as he faces away from the settlement. It is so close to the vista Paddy was met with for months every time he dreamed. Once, this would have eaten at him. He would have felt compelled to go to Eoin, feel his pulse, touch the springing curl of his hair to reassure him of life. Or, simply hollowed out by the belief in his own complicity in Eoin's destruction: the thought that if he touched Eoin, he would fall into nothing, ceasing to exist.

But something in him has shifted. He looks at Eoin and hopes that his thoughts are peaceful and productive. He trusts that when he has taken the space he needs, Eoin will return to him. That they will curl in their narrow bed, and he will pillow his head on Eoin's sternum and fall asleep to the rise and fall of his chest.

Secure in this knowledge, he does not disturb Eoin's retreat. He helps with dinner, and then when it is time to eat, sets a plate aside for Eoin but does not trouble him with it.

Eventually, Eoin returns. His eyes are red but he smiles when Paddy hands him his meal, and eats it dutifully before he speaks.

"Will you come with me?" he asks, "back, to where I was buried."

Paddy would go to the ends of the earth if Eoin only asked. "Aye, of course," he says, and they go for an unsanctioned jolly out into the desert. It is quiet between them: Paddy at the wheel, Eoin occasionally directing him.

"Here, I think," Eoin says, the first they have spoken in hours. Paddy obediently kills the engine. They sit with the silence around them.

Eoin speaks first. "My body remembers," he says, "sometimes I wake with sand in my eyes, or even— the blood noses, I think that's where my head cracked forward when I…"

He looks at Paddy, desperate, like a wild animal. His freckles look dark in the moonlight against his pale skin.

Somewhere near here, Paddy sat and sung to Eoin's lost, buried corpse. You must bury him in your head, Stirling had told him, not long after. No one can bear undeclared grief. But if there was any truth in what Augustin had said, perhaps they had been thinking about it wrong. Something good in Paddy had helped to re-form Eoin into the living boy across from him. And perhaps then, it was his grief that had threatened to topple that which he loved most.

Trying to bury it had not worked, but he finally felt ready to accept the horrors of his grief, and move beyond it. To bear it forth and away from them both, before it could hurt either of them any more.

The howling in him has gone quiet. When he reaches for it, he finds little, only the breath of it. What sings louder is love for the boy who breathes across from him.

He is here with me now, Paddy thinks, and touches his thumb where the freckles scatter like stars across the rise of his cheekbone, tracing the knitwork of his scar. "When you died," he finishes for him quietly.

Eoin looks pained, and Paddy waits while the concept of his own death is wrenched from him. He strokes his thumb over the perfect, unbroken line of Eoin's nose, and catches the tears that fall from his eyes.

Eventually, Eoin gets down from the jeep. He walks about thirty feet away before falling to his knees like he's been shot. Paddy's heart stops in his chest, his hands clenching at his sides. Slowly, he gets out of the car, and leans against the bonnet to wait for him, feeling the residual engine warmth through his clothes. Eoin knuckles both hands into the sand, and Paddy wonders if his body remembers more keenly, here. Around them the dunes are smooth and unmarred, pearl-white under the light of the moon. Paddy thinks about Eoin, newly alive, flinging himself up through the heavy sand, one of his lovely hands grappling for purchase against the slippery sand, and shivers.

Paddy doesn't know how long he waits, but soon enough, Eoin calls his name.

"It's funny, isn't it," he says, once Paddy is at his side. Nothing about his tone is funny. "To think that I died here, and was buried. That I was mourned."

"Aye, all of that," Paddy says, and kneels in the sand in front of him. "And might I remind you, you live yet."

"I don't know if I can forget it," Eoin says wretchedly, "I fear that part of me will always go looking for it. That my body can't forget the moment of its death."

Privately, Paddy thinks that once the war is over, it will be easier. Once they are out of the desert, and not surrounded by death and dying and killing at every turn. The desert in its opaque uniformity haunts Eoin like he perpetually has one foot in the grave he had crawled out of at all times. Maybe, when they are home - once they breathe damp air and the sodden grass squelches beneath their muddied boots, once Paddy can pick fraughans and crabapples and press them to Eoin's laughing mouth - his body will be convinced by what it is to be completely alive. They just have to find their way through this war, first.

Paddy presses his hands to where Eoin's still are fisted in the sand.

"Sweetheart," Paddy says, and Eoin's shoulders quiver. "You don't need to forget, but let this be your last return. You have come back and seen it with your own living eyes, with your breathing body. There is nothing here for you." He holds his fingers to the steady thrum at Eoin's wrists, feeling that stubborn, vital spark of life. "The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body," Paddy says, and when he looks up from Eoin's wrists, the boy is watching him, expression cleaved open. "The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones."

Eoin sucks in a shuddered breath. "You skipped a bit," he says.

Paddy's lips quirk in a smile. "Poetic license," he says, and raises a wrist to kiss the pulse of it. Sand sticks to his mouth, and he licks it away. Eoin watches, eyes dark like molasses.

"No waxing lyrical on the beauty of my waist, then," Eoin says, and Paddy thinks how glorious it is that Eoin is alive to be clamorous for his attention and praise. This may have been where Eoin died once, but he is not dying now.

"It's fine, I suppose," Paddy tells him, and kisses his other wrist. He knows he will always carry the grief of those months with him, but that is past. Now, the taste of Eoin is alive on his tongue. The boy flourishes, and Paddy will live alongside. "Should you falter, I can remember the shape of you for the both of us," he says, turning his cheek into Eoin's palm. "But trust in your body to remember its life over its death, Eoin."

Eoin, his brave, valiant boy, looks at him wet-eyed and smiling. "Oh, alright then," he says, tilting his head down for a kiss. "Twist my arm, why don't you."

*

[…] The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric