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"You haven't changed a bit, you know," Biggles said idly. "Still toddling along behind your elders, getting underfoot, making a mess and somehow still coming up roses through sheer dumb luck." At least the brat hadn't died. The last thing he wanted was to write to Aunt Sylvie. Biggles dropped unceremoniously onto an empty old oil drum and settled in. The whisky definitely helped.
Algernon Montgomery Lacey scowled, and slumped against the hangar wall. It gave a little, the sheet metal not quite secure in its footings. "You know, it's the oddest thing," he said, just as airily. "I don't remember a damn thing about you. I mean, Uncle James sent Mother the occasional photo, and Uncle Richard never stopped blathering on and on about you, his blue eyed boy."
Biggles squinted his hazel eyes at the kid, but waved peaceably.
"Mmm. Too young. Darling little chubby cheeked thing you were," he added, with an entirely spurious air of benevolent reminiscence, "all freckles and long curls and tantrums and the prettiest little black velvet frocks. Just about trundling around under your own steam and still getting to grips with perfecting your bathroom habits." He fished out and lit a cigarette, eyeing his baby-faced, and fulminating, cousin. "Recognised you at once."
"Oh, sure grandpa," his cousin said flatly. His eyes were flat and dark, his whole mien hollowed out from yesterday's laughing boy. He glanced down his RFC tunic, half undone and spattered with the inevitable machine oil and dirt. "A lucky mess in spanking new velvet."
Biggles shrugged. He tapped the cigarette ash away, ignoring the way his hands shook ever so faintly. "Don't knock it, pipsqueak. You made it home. Even took out a couple of the other fellows in the process. That's what you're here for." He slanted a chill little smile, "That and getting away from your darling Mama."
Algernon Montgomery looked at him, eyes sharp and just as cold. "You ain't a bit different to me," he said flatly. "You enlisted just to get away from Uncle James. Well. You think living with Mother was all milk and honey?"
Biggles blinked. "Never gave it much thought at all," he said easily. He didn't care to think about Father and Dickpa, nor about all those thundering tirades and angry letters. He certainly hadn't expected Aunt Sylvie to care, and had pre-emptively dropped her from his recollection almost as soon as he left school. He eyed the bottle of whisky at his feet and poured himself another finger. The stuff had grown on him.
"Sure you didn't," Algernon snapped back, and Biggles sighed. Lad was itching for a fight, well. He could have one, or he could have a drink, and he knew which was less likely to have the pair of them up in front of Major Mullen come morning, Aunt Sylvie be damned. He poured a second glass and gestured at the unoccupied chocks. There were always a few spare. He slid a look at his cousin. To come back into that disaster with his guns jammed! The lad had earned a drink.
"Pull up a pew, and don't be so rowdy." He held the glass out. For a long moment Algernon looked like he'd much rather throw it in Biggles' face. He took it though, and kept eye contact as he slugged it back.
He was coughing a moment later and Biggles snorted. "Go easy on the sauce, laddie," he said with all the wisdom of a septuagenarian, rather than the actual two years he had over him. "Terrible thing to be wasting whisky."
"Not the 'good' whisky?"
"Oh, any whisky at all. And this is the good whisky, I just can't stand the stuff. Obtained in consequence of a trifling exchange up by Duneville." He offered Algernon a crooked little grin and waved the bottle. Algernon sank onto the nearest chock and mutely held his glass out for a refill. "Officially, it's lemonade."
"Yessir, definitely lemonade, sir." He sipped more carefully this time.
"Good lad." Biggles took a good slug from the bottle and leaned into the sun-warm metal of the hangar wall. He closed his eyes and took another sip. The wind was coming from the west, and if he breathed deep he could almost overlook the reek of engines and forget the terrible stench of the Front. He breathed slowly, let the whisky take over. He didn't have to think about any number of things that he'd seen and really didn't want to remember - helpfully, his brain provided an image of Algernon with blank eyes and blood seeping from a bullet wound through his chest.
No. That way lay madness. He took another sip. Perhaps even a gulp. Too early for bed. Dinner had to be soon, but he hadn't heard the usual scrum, and everyone seemed to be loitering in a vaguely exhausted hope that it was coming soon.
He could check his watch of course.
He didn't.
Glass tinked against glass and he squinted one eye back open to see Algernon holding out his glass hopefully, having tapped it against the whisky bottle. "Be my guest," he muttered, and let the kid have the bottle. Aunt Sylvie wasn't going to be best pleased, but she never was. A gurgle and clink told him Algernon had taken him up on the offer, and, a quiet weight change told him, had topped off Biggles' glass too. Good lad.
"I suppose it's better than the trenches," Algernon said some time later, and Biggles emerged from something that wasn't quite sleep nor yet drunken unconsciousness.
"Thus the youth of today," he mumbled, waving a sarcastic hand. "Genius."
"Look, Captain, I'm sorry about Healy. I really am," Algernon blurted into the peaceful evening. His voice had a shake to it and Biggles flinched inwardly. The whisky was meant to sort this out, not make it worse. God. The brat better not be a weepy drunk.
"Not your fault, pipsqueak. Could be Jerry tomorrow. Most likely will be. And then it'll be one of us the day after that, and so on and so forth till there's no one left at all."
Biggles slid a glance at his cousin, and took in the grim look on his face. Aunt Sylvie hadn't done him any favours, but Biggles was starting to think that she knew Algernon just as little as he had.
"You did all right, kid," he said instead. "Got yourself home, twice. That's not nothing. You saved my neck. And dinner's in a minute, and I've got the best part of a case of those for later."
"And Healy died! Don't you care?"
Biggles sighed, and very carefully refused to meet his cousin's eyes. "First thing you have to learn here, laddie," he said, soft and not unkind. "That's war. Dirty, stupid, wasteful. Caring will break you, and the War won't stop for you, it'll just grind you up anyway. Live while you can, let the rest go."
"The king of moral philosophy," Algernon said in a tone so bone dry that Biggles actually straightened up and looked at him. He was slouched forward, elbows on knees, holding the glass loosely and staring at the dirt. "Dum spiro, spero, or some such tripe. Mors et persequitur--"
"Latin." Biggles blinked. "Schoolboy nonsense won't help either." Though there were some pretty gnarly ideas in that too. Not like the modern age had a monopoly on appalling ways to kill people. At least the planes kept a fellow above the gas.
Algernon's breath stuttered, his voice shaking. "So, what? Congratulations, you killed a man. Now go back out there and do it again?"
"Just so."
"And if you won't shoot him, we'll shoot you."
"Now you're getting it." He saluted with his now empty glass. "Carpe that diem."
Algernon snorted. "My digs are a tin hut next to a man-made swamp, surrounded by jolly fellows like yourself and the constant joy of death, despair and drunkards, but sure." He squeezed his eyes shut, and Biggles politely looked away.
"Chin up! You'll probably be going home soon enough in a cushy box or two."
Algernon laughed under his breath, seeming to surprise himself with it. "A nice quiet mausoleum does sound restful."
"*And* your Ma won't ever nag you about getting your clothes dirty again."
"Charles won't tell you to fetch his books."
"Dickpa won't --" he stopped. "Actually, I'd be sorry to grieve Dickpa." They sat in silence a long few minutes. "You think he'd miss us?"
"I think he'd miss you," Algernon said, easily. "He barely ever remembered I was even there except when Mother threw a strop at him."
"His velvet knickerbockers!" Biggles squeaked in a falsetto attempt at his Aunt's voice.
"She loved those damn things. Had a little portrait done up of me in them, and blow me if the blasted thing wasn't front and centre of every gathering of the coven. I don't think I wore them past three years old and they were still the bane of my existence."
"Ha!"
"She used to tell this story about how you dropped me in some mud puddle and ruined them."
"I *did*. You were an insufferable little swine." He considered that for a moment and added, "You're welcome."
Algy grinned, wide and wicked. "Yeah, but I bet I got you first. Made sure you'd destroy that outfit."
Biggles paused. Not even the best part of the bottle of whisky quite erased the implications of Algy's comments. "She really would miss you something rotten," he said, a little roughly. He hesitated. "She wrote me, you know. Told me to keep an eye out for you."
Algy groaned and dropped his face to his knees. "Oh god, no."
Biggles shook his head. "No -- she." He stopped. He felt profoundly unqualified to talk about mothers. His own had passed in childbirth, dying with a baby sister who lasted barely longer than their mother. His ayah and tutors had raised him, his father a distant, disapproving source of strict discipline and threats. He rather thought that if an absent father was disappointing and a too present mother, stifling, that between them they had barely a single decent parent at all. "Dickpa would definitely miss you."
She must have kicked up an almighty stink to get you assigned to my squadron, he didn't say. That irritating little brat, coddled and cosseted, rebelling at every juncture, didn't want to hear in the slightest how many bridges his Mama burned, how she must have wrestled with her disdain for Biggles and his father and written him anyway, couching a desperate favour as a familial order.
He took a deep breath and let it go. He'd miss the little blighter too, but no point being sentimental. No need tempting luck.
"Algy? Call me Biggles."