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Mophead—that is what he’d started to think of himself as—calling himself Eriche felt wrong, and he knew Munroe wouldn’t like it, which made his borrowed intestines feel like water when he considered it—had settled once again into the rote, perpetual cycle of war he’d forgotten. It was marching one-two-three-four, one-two-shit a mortar shell-run run hide, one-two-three-you-died-quickly-this-time…
And so on, and so forth. Always so forth.
This time around, Mophead awoke feeling distinctly different.
Waking, for him, was always different. Perhaps because of his memories, or lack of—but he always seemed to roll himself off of his slab far after everyone else had already gone. Sometimes, he sighed awake as if coming out of a deep, restful sleep; sometimes his eyes simply snapped open. Sometimes he was dizzy; sometimes he was sick.
He’d never bolted straight up, loaned heart already pumping enough blood to pool and bruise his forehead as it collided with another hard thing. That thing recoiled, all lank and choppy hair and swearing, as Mophead scrambled backwards off of the impassionate metal table and crouched behind it, pale eyes wild.
“What the fuck,” Munroe hissed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. It hadn’t quite started to bleed yet, but—there. As Mophead watched, muted red began to dribble from one of his nostrils, splattering a broad chest that narrowed to thinner hips. It looked like he had only half-donned his fatigues before coming over and—and what?
Panic surged through Mophead, centered around his staccato-pounding heart, as he recalled just why Munroe was here in the first place, here to see him revive so unceremoniously. It had been a shell—it had geysered up between them—and in the endless moment where Mophead’s nerves, fighting to process and send the rush of pain, raced his heart, throbbing slower each time, to the finish line of this unremarkable life—
He had heard Munroe succumb to his baser instincts. He had heard Munroe shriek Eriche’s name.
He had died before he could answer.
“What are you doing?” Mophead asked, voice high and thready. Usually, the apathy settled in soon after he awoke—until the battlefield, of course. This time, he couldn’t seem to find it in himself.
“Nothing,” Munroe replied defensively, smearing the blood from his nose onto the leg of his pants. First blood, and they had only just awoken. “Come on.”
Mophead struggled into his own clothes, his dizziness not helped by the perpetual, flashing screen they all had to pass on their way back from oblivion:
YOU ARE A SOLDIER OF THE CROWN ARMY
YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED ETERNAL LIFE
IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR SERVICE
TO PROTECT OUR GREAT NATION
The walk back to the bunker passed by in a blur, to Mophead. Although Munroe never looked back, he didn’t stray far, either, and Mophead followed him by the sounds of his snapped curses as he trod on the backs of his boots. Distantly, he knew he was acting…differently, than last time. But weren’t they all a little different, every time? He couldn’t put his finger on it.
They hadn’t been called to the front yet. But they were close—Warwick and Carrie, immersed in a debate that looked seconds from coming to blows, dominated one half of the small room they occupied. Its low ceiling and bare, cracked-concrete walls seemed to press upon Mophead’s lungs, and the dust that showered down whenever heavy artillery hit the ground made them all sniffle and sneeze. Mophead, sitting on a bench, pressed the sharp knots of his spine against the hard wall, trying to use the pinpricks of pain to ground himself but only succeeding in making himself ache. Munroe sat nearby, but kept space between them that was almost exactly the distance between Eriche and who parts of him had become. It was closing, little by little; every time their bunker shook with impact, Mophead twitched a little closer to the taller man.
“There’s something—”
“Are you okay?”
Mophead and Munroe spoke at the same time, when the pale man had moved so close to the other that their arms were nearly brushing. The brunette looked down, his mismatched eyes wary and—but no, maybe Mophead was imagining it—worried. It was the same line, the same cadence he’d spoken it on that first day, really not the first day at all, merely the one that felt like the first. After all of Mophead’s—maybe Eriche’s, at that point—sense of self had been eradicated from him by some fluke in the machine, some hiccup in the eternities-long system that had led to his first new memory being the shadow of disappointment that flashed across Munroe’s face as he asked, “You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know,” He breathed, pulling his legs up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. He hated the way his uniform scraped against itself, always too hard and stiff while never feeling like a protective barrier. “Something is wrong. S-something’s been wrong, since I woke up.” He meant to go on, stopped, breath strangling in his throat, but at this point in eternity, Munroe could guess what had choked him.
Maybe I’m getting sick again. However I was sick last time. Maybe I’ll forget again.
A sound rasped in his ears, grating like Warwick’s voice, but it wasn’t until he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder that lifted and lowered in time with those noises that he realized they were coming from his own lips. Somewhere far away, Carrie snickered—Munroe snapped—echoed by Warwick’s rough timbre.
Whatever he did, Mophead couldn’t catch his breath. It had run away with the beating of his heart, the both of them firing like pistons primed to create an explosion, only instead of a mortar shell, the explosion would be him, his eyes, or his head, judging by the pressure behind it, or, or his heart, flung like a grenade from a ribcage that felt seconds from splintering open. He hoped Munroe wouldn’t cut his hands on the bone shards as they flew, he didn’t want to hurt him again, he had this morning and every day before that, every time he didn’t remember, and
Mophead keened as he found himself tucked against a broad, uniformed chest that tapered to a narrower waist. The material wasn’t any more comfortable than his own, and his cheek pressed painfully against a rough metal button, but he didn’t care. His eyes were closed, and with his hair hanging in his face, it was almost dark, and the sounds of artillery roaring overhead were muffled in roped-muscle arms that could only have been Munroe’s. He’d never been here before, but Munroe had been the closest when the world had caved in. He couldn’t imagine Carrie, or Warwick grabbing him with any intention but to hurt.
And deep down, even if it was a lie, he told himself that he remembered this feeling. Somewhere, in some atom of himself that was still Eriche, maybe one single strand of his ropy hair, he remembered.
“The fuck’s wrong with him?” Carrie asked through the ringing in Mophead’s ears. He squeezed his eyes shut again, and Munroe’s arm covered his head more completely.
“Think it’s shell-shock,” he said, and the humming of his voice through his chest kicked Mophead’s heart down into a lower gear. It became slightly easier to gasp—although it still couldn’t be called breathing. “Not in his head, though. Whatever they did to his body…”
Carrie leaned closer—Mophead could smell him. “Still looks human enough.” He spoke without urgency, and the trace of amusement in his voice made the pale man want to vomit. He was close to it—his stomach flipped threateningly, receiving the panic from his heart and lungs and threatening to rebel, but he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t. Not in Munroe’s arms, not on his uniform that still fit his human form, even after so many deaths and resurrections. He swallowed hard.
“That’s probably why,” Warwick interjected. Heavy boots that had been closer than Mophead realized began to tread away, back towards his previous spot at the opposite end of the bunker. Carrie followed, and above his resumed chattering, Mophead could just make out: “The mind forgets, but the body remembers.”
He didn’t want to remember this. On the battlefield, bloody and dying, panic washed over him like an old friend. It pushed away the adrenaline he had learned to let spike, chased the survival instinct into oblivion, and for one second—or a few, if the shell hadn’t been close enough, the gunshot hadn’t been bad enough—made him feel human again. This, this nonstop paranoia, like every vein had been plugged into a generator and turned to its highest voltage, like lights were too bright and colors were too loud and he was dying without a scratch on him, wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.
A sob left his lips, muffled behind Munroe’s large hand as if he’d anticipated it. Willfully oblivious, Warwick and Carrie continued talking.
“Please, help me.” Mophead opened his eyes, squinting up at Munroe, into mismatched-flat-white corneas that seemed to glow in the dim light. “I can’t be like this. I don’t want to be like this.”
Munroe let go of him; he was always going to let go. But the important thing, was that before he did, he tightened his grasp. In the compression, Mophead could fill his straining lungs with enough air to keep him grounded for a little while longer.
“Got you.”
☽ ☼ ☾
The battle raged on in perpetuity.
Even at his best, which was his most apathetic, Mophead would have been hard-pressed to find any difference. And maybe there wasn’t; a war that required eternal soldiers was always going to be a war without end, wasn’t it?
He clung to his rifle like he had wanted to cling to Munroe’s arm as they marched towards the trenches, donning his gas mask early so no one could see the distress on his face. It seemed to suffocate him, and so he thought of Munroe’s arms suffocating him, and it wasn’t so bad.
“You sure about this? Don’t even want to try?” Falling into step beside him, Munroe muttered low enough that only they could hear. He was only wearing his helmet, as usual—Mophead had never asked, and didn’t know if he ever would, why Munroe seemed to hate the things. He only nodded, staring straight ahead, the only thing forcing his feet forward Munroe’s long strides that at times seemed to span two of his own.
There was never any preamble to the battle. In its eternity, it remained a constant—something that simply was, an immutable fact that solders entered and exited with a will that was eminently not their own.
Most of the time.
Mophead had thought his heart couldn’t possibly beat any faster than it had in the bunker, but whoever was part of this new, temporary version of himself remembered the deceptively innocuous feeling of combat boots tamping down damp dirt, and was terrified. The tidal wave of horror made his joints turn to jelly, but Munroe was there, uncharacteristically there, and the hand that wasn’t white-knuckled on his rifle was curled around Mophead’s thin upper arm just as tightly. He steadied—Munroe’s guidance had reminded him that this torment, dealt to him by a traitorous coward’s heart—he had a coward’s heart, too, but at least he guarded it well—would soon be over.
They filed into the trenches, meaningless fodder for the unseen enemy keeping them in constant stalemate. They readied their rifles, and Mophead remembered not to peer over the top of the sandbags. Beneath the gas mask, sight and sound were muffled, but not enough. Never enough.
He was tired. These ersatz atoms had robbed him of those short moments of peace before the firefight, and he was eager for it to be over. To have another chance at a millisecond of peace, to be allowed a few strong, steady beats of his heart.
Even to get another chance to fight, without his trigger finger trembling. Next time would be better than this. His own optimism, if there was such a thing inside him anymore, surprised him.
On Warwick’s mark, Munroe and Mophead clambered over the embankment, only carrying their guns far enough that the smoke obscured them from their superior officer. Once there, they dropped them.
Bullets flew around them, shells shook the ground, but all they needed was a few moments.
Mophead turned to face Munroe, his back to the enemy. Did it really matter if your back was to them, if you never saw them at all? If they rained down destruction from every angle with impunity? Which way could you turn, to face them head-on?
Munroe tapped the rim of the gasmask eye socket. “Take this off. You’ll end up like Warwick if it gets fused to your face.” His lips made a shape that was almost a smile, watching Mophead’s arms jerk, disconnected, like a ventriloquist’s victim as he pulled the mask from his visage. He was crying, and this, too, made the almost-smile on the taller man’s face widen.
Mophead had never felt more mortal. He let this strange heart and all its infirmities overwhelm him, shivering so hard his teeth chattered, sobbing pitifully and marveling at the feeling of his eyes stinging from tears not brought forth by poison gas. He blinked, vision clear for just a moment, and
Munroe was smiling. It was impossible to call it anything else. He was standing there and drinking in Mophead’s fear like it was the sunlight, and he was smiling, and crying, too. His tears turned black as they mixed with the ash raining down from the brutal sky, and his hands were free of weapons, so there was nothing stopping him from reaching for Mophead, brusquely tugging him back in against his sweat-smelling uniform. Mophead hugged him back, as tightly as he could, lodging himself firmly in the memory he believed he had of the shape of Munroe’s body, letting it widen, letting this embrace fill in the gaps his amnesia had left in its description.
He thought he heard, somewhere above him where Munroe’s lips met his bare head, “Got you, Eriche.”
A drumroll of gunfire exploded from their side.
Or the enemy’s side.
It was impossible to tell, and meaningless to try.
It peppered through them both, the spray so complete that for once, neither of them felt a thing when each of their hearts stopped beating on the other’s breast. They fell, in the embrace they hoped rigor mortis would keep them in, and hoped upon their last breaths that they would come back with one, single cell in their bodies that would remember this.
☽ ☼ ☾
"You sure that's what you want?"
"Yes, but I—I don't want to go alone."
"We always go alone. That's how it works."
"But—but we could at least wake up at the same time..."
"How? That shell between us last time—it was a fucking fluke."
And Mophead told Munroe how. And the silence yawned between them, broken only by gunfire and mortar shells.
"Why would you want that? To go that way?"
"Because maybe...maybe when we come back, I'll have a piece of you. And you'll have a piece of—of me."