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Reg isn’t entirely sure how long he’s been trapped in this cellar below this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere French village. Can’t be too long because the Gestapo haven’t arrived yet, and he’s still got all his teeth and fingers. And his life.
Idiotic plan - Bill had called it from the off - but they needed the medicine, needed it faster than it would take to go through their usual roundabout channels to get it. And Reg was desperate.
They had known, when they’d made the drop out here, that there would be no coming back. Not for personal tragedy or medical care, not for fear or famine or flood. They were trapped out here until the bitter end. Until either they ended this angle of the war or it ended them.
They’d all accepted it, Reg had accepted it, brash in his belief in his own indestructibility. He had failed, however, to leave room in his reckoning that the one to die out here might not be himself.
Johnny had cracked a rib during an abseil down a cliff face to a stretch of cargo track they’d been ordered to take care of. The sort of easy, textbook injury to go along with this easy, textbook mission. He’d laughed about it afterwards, wincing, but taking it all in stride as he does everything: good-natured and wry.
“Really,” he’d said, chuckling in their tent after as Reg had busied himself with cataloguing every piece of him to make sure nothing else was broken, “Of all the injuries one can get from abseiling, I had to get the most boring”
And Reg had said “I love you” because he tries to say it as often as he possibly can these days. You never know when it’ll be the last time.
It had started as a cough, easily written off as the same cough they all have from smoking too much, the cold and breathing in all the dust and the gunsmoke. Only it had progressed, grown deeper, more resonant, like Johnny’s lungs were bass drums, skin stretched tight over hollowness.
Pneumonia.
They all know the sounds of it by now, and Reg has spent the past week listening to Johnny wheeze in his sleep, waking up to find his lips pale and his eyes unmoving beneath the lids. Every morning that same fear, that same litany of no! inside his head, and every morning leaning close and seeking out the barest whistle of breath, the warm-beating of his pulse beneath golden skin and Johnny blinking awake (awake!) and saying I’m alright, on a breath that sounds like the gasp a tire makes after a bullet hits it - all the air going out and not back in again.
There would be no flying Johnny back to England or to a friendly doctor in Italy, no hospitals to care for him. It is them and the forest and what they can gather and hold with their bare fucking hands. So when they’d gotten word that there would be penicillin in the next supply convoy on its way to Hamburg, Reg knew they wouldn’t have another chance.
And so here he is, trapped in a farmhouse cellar with a broken ankle, a leather case full of delicate glass vials of penicillin strapped to his back beneath his coat, and no conceivable way out.
Guillaume’s body is going cold there in the corner. Brain, it turns out, stinks something awful when left in the open air for too long.
His last act had been to convince the villagers that Reg was his idiot brother - sourd-muet he’d called him, pointing - before one of the village kids had gotten frightened and shot him through the forehead. Twitchy trigger finger. A real shame, Guillaume had been nice. For a Frenchman.
In the dimness, his body looks like any other body, and Reg is momentarily disgusted with himself for the lack of grief he feels.
At this point, the villagers think Reg is too stupid to know anything, but they’d shut him down here anyway; a flicker of doubt, maybe. The Huns won’t be so gullible. Reg still looks like a soldier even if he isn’t currently dressed like one.
They will want the location of Houndsworth HQ from him, and they will torture him to get it. In the meantime, Johnny will die, drowning from the inside.
Alright, alright, alright.
He tries to resign himself to the end of everything and finds something animal in him rejects it.
Reg isn’t sure how long he’s stuck there in the dark with Guillaume’s cold corpse for company as he tries to formulate a plan. There is only one way out of the cellar - the main door - and it’s barred and guarded. The door of the cellar opens out to a wide field with woods beyond: he remembers a brief glimpse of it before he and Guillaume had been thrown down the stairs. If he can just make it to the woods, he’ll be able to disappear.
He could, if he tried, probably break through it and subdue the country bumpkin with his father’s hunting rifle who stands outside but he won’t make it far on his bum ankle, will likely get shot.
Unfortunately, those odds are better than if he stays.
Cat-quiet Reg sidles up the stairs so he can press himself up against the door, ear against splintery wood, leaning awkwardly to keep the weight off his ankle. His breath plumes white in the cold, and he covers his mouth with his hand to keep it from drifting too far and giving him away. He can hear the shifting of feet above his head, powdery squeak of snow beneath boots, his guard bored and trying to stay warm. There’s only one, small mercy.
He listens to the cadence of the pacing - to and fro and to and fro - timing the rotation of it, until there is a pause at the furthest point, the snick of a lighter, a distant exhale, before he slides down to the cellar floor again.
With his ankle being what it is it’s difficult to get the momentum going, but luckily the wood of the cellar door is old and dry, as is the bar across. He runs at it from across the room, head protected, shoulder down, flinging the whole of his weight against the resistance of the door. Paddy would be proud, he thinks, it was a perfect Rugby move.
With a crack, the wood beam splinters, the doors fly open, and he finds himself standing at ground level for the first time in several hours with the winter sun in his eyes.
The guard, little more than a teenager in an overlarge greatcoat, startles so badly he drops the cigarette from between his lips and has to spend a moment patting sparks from his clothes before he even thinks about lifting the rifle, and that is more than enough time for Reg to get his hands around the boy’s throat and snap his neck.
“Sorry, lad” he says, dropping the corpse to the snow. His eyes are still open, terrified blue, neck at that odd unnatural angle, with the skin going all limp and bruised. Reg can feel the jolt of his spine snapping in echo up into his own teeth, more of a sensation than a sound and perhaps all the more horrible for it… but he can not think of that now. Already, there is shouting from the nearby houses, the thunder of footsteps. Gunfire.
Reg grabs the dead boy’s rifle and bolts across the field.
The open space is not ideal. He’s like a rabbit in front of the hounds, hyper-visible against the white landscape, hampered by the snow. Ahead of him, the forest is a black line of bare branches, promising safety; behind him, there is shouting, the pop of a rifle shot echoing clear in the cold as a bullet whizzes past his ear in a hot whir of displaced air.
He tries to weave, to make himself slightly less of an easy target, but with his broken ankle he only stumbles, nearly goes down. Each step is agony, the bones clicking in and out of place in a rhythmic grind in time with every pounding footfall.
He grits his teeth and tries to run faster, putting every ounce of desperation into forward movement. He thinks only of Johnny, of getting back to him. The case of penicillin strapped to the small of his back becomes a holy duty, a whip driving him onward. If he can just make it into the cover of the trees…
Pain explodes in his shoulder, a bright flash of agony, cold sweat breaking out across his skin, soaking. His vision whites out momentarily, bright sparks.
“Fuck,” he snarls, breath white in the cold like his ghost going out of him, and falls down hard into the snow.
They’re waiting for him when he comes to; he can tell without opening his eyes by the sound of other lungs breathing in the room.
He’s back in the cellar - down below ground with that same sweet-sickness of Guillaume’s brain, of damp, and rotten fruit - albeit tied to a chair this time. He tests the bonds as much as his shot shoulder will allow and finds no budge to them at all.
Fuck.
His shoulder is a white-hot core of agony, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. No one has bothered to dress the wound, and he can still feel it bleeding sluggishly, the gore half frozen to slush against his skin, binding his shirt and coat to him. He can smell it even though he can’t see it, iron tang, hot, animal reek. His hand feels numb and far away, some sort of integral nerve or tendon severed, maybe.
The case of penicillin and needles is still strapped to his back, however, he can feel it when he shifts his hips. He gets the feeling the villagers who recaptured him were not particularly thorough in their searching of his person, which under other circumstances would have been a miracle, but in this one just feels like a taunt. He had been so close. So fucking close.
With nothing left to lose, he opens his eyes.
There are four of them. One officer in his long black coat and the others of a more minor rank. The three are playing cards on the steps of the cellar. The door, broken from Reg’s escape, lets enough wan daylight in to see by. The officer, on the other hand, is standing, staring at Reg with some horrible approximation of the look Withers used to get when he was seeking someone to throw a stick for him, the same slobbering intentness; an animal with teeth looking for a game, looking for something to tear to shreds.
“For a deaf-mute, you’re certainly causing a great deal of trouble,” the officer says, in English, right off the bat, and Reg knows he’s fucked.
He grits his teeth, goes silent.
They already know, clearly, who he is or, more to the point, what he is, and the fact that he hasn’t been executed already means they are fixing to get information from him. They’ll want the location of the camp.
Reg will not give it to them.
“Nothing to say for yourself?” the officer asks, and when Reg doesn’t reply, backhands him across the face.
It’s a lovetap all things considered, barely even felt over the agony of his shoulder and his ankle, but he can feel the skin smart beneath the blow, the start of a flush blooming beneath the skin. The warmth is welcome.
“I know there is a whole crew of you” the officer says as though expecting Reg to be shocked by his knowledge “Little rats, little weasels, hiding out in holes in the ground in the woods, causing trouble”
Another slap, opposite side this time, sending Reg’s head rocking the other way. He lets himself go easy with it, muscles loose.
“You will tell me where they’re hiding”
Reg squares his shoulders and says nothing.
“We can do this easy or we can do it hard,” the officer says.
Reg says nothing.
The punch surprises him for how fast it comes, viper-quick lash out of a black-gloved fist. It hits him square, and he feels a tooth crack, bone splinter stuck into his cheek. He spits out a gob of blood - chewy-thick - that lands on the flagged floor with the sound of a small animal’s body hitting the ground.
“Just a taste,” the officer says as though it’s some kind of threat; more where that came from is implied.
Reg, who has been a boxer his whole life, finds the whole thing rather ridiculous.
The officer leaves him alone for a while after that, or rather as alone as he can be with the three junior soldiers, and Guillaume still slumped in the corner with his skull sloughed off like the top of a soft-boiled egg and his yolk-brain on display. Clever of them to have positioned his chair so he has nowhere else to look, but Reg has seen worse, sees it all over again every time he drops off to sleep. This is nothing.
He hums snatches of songs to himself as he waits - Blue Skies, Stormy Weather - and then skews dirtier to keep himself awake - Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major, then Come on Chaps which leads to a memory of Johnny, red-cheeked and three sheets to the wind, whirling round the mess tent with a mortified Greville-Bell, bellowing the lyrics with the pomp and gravitas of a proper opera. The memory of how, when he’d finished, he’d looked up, laughing hysterically, and his gaze had found Reg without trying; a promise that he would always know where Reg was and would always find him, no matter how crowded the room.
He has to swallow several times to keep the grief from overwhelming him.
There is no point in apologizing. They all knew that it might very well end like this at any moment, both of them dead and buried in unmarked holes and no closure to their war, but facing down the reality of it is different. He’d always thought that when they went, they would go together, side by side in the same firefight, guns in their hands and blood in their teeth, not like this; lonely and ignoble and separated from one another.
He stares, unblinking, at the Rorschach test Guillaume’s brainspatter had made on the cellar wall and does not cry.
He does not sleep either.
The officer does not bother with formalities when he returns what Reg guesses is the following day. They all know what he wants, and they know that Reg is not going to give it to him without a fight.
They start with fists but quickly move on to clubs, working him over with the precision of men used to doling out pain. They bloody his mouth, crack a few more teeth, beat him until his face is so swollen the skin splits open like an overripe plum over the flesh and he begins weeping blood. He feels a few ribs crack, and then they move lower, hitting his stomach and his groin until he’s coughing blood and bile out over himself, choking on it, acid burn up into his sinuses.
It’s never enough to knock him out, but just enough to keep him riding that edge of unconsciousness where things get hazy. If he were less used to pain it would be a very good place to have him, his mouth likely to run away with him but as it is they leave him be after a few hours, bored, needing to change tactics.
He does not sing to pass the time now, just watches his eyes swell shut from the inside like he’s being sealed inside a tomb and thinks of Johnny.
The next time they’re back, the cellar door opens to bright daylight, and Reg finds himself momentarily blinded by it, blinking spots out of his vision that are only half to do with the headache that’s been building for what feels like a lifetime. He’s concussed, clearly, not altogether inside himself. He can not see out of his left eye, and he isn’t sure if it is from swelling or if something had knocked loose inside his brain, and the issue is to be more permanent. His guts feel like a slurry up inside him, something probably ruptured, and his hands and feet are numb, which is, actually, preferable to how the pain in his shoulder and ankle had been before. One less thing to think about.
“Hmm” the officer mumbles, head tilted bird-like, eyes slitted “I think I know, now, who you are”
Reg doesn’t say anything, chewing on the rancid sludge of yesterday’s blood in his mouth.
“Seekings” The officer says, and Reg jolts at the sound of his name in that unfamiliar accent.
“I heard” The officer goes on “that they buried Lieutenant John Cooper in a field last night.”
Reg’s ribcage constricts in on itself, bones fit to pierce his heart.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news” he goes on, sounding genuinely apologetic “You were close, weren’t you?”
“Fuck you” Reg says, the first thing he’s said in he doesn’t know how many days.
The reprisal is swift and brutal; steel-toed boot right beneath the cap of his left knee. Reg feels the bone shatter with a crack like ice over a frozen pond, screams with the pain, doubling over as far as his bound hands allow. He isn’t sure if the tears in his eyes are from grief or from pain or if there’s any difference; it’s all physical, now.
“I really am sorry” the officer says, kneeling so they’re at eye level, one hand resting, paternal, over Reg’s shattered knee “Won’t you tell me where they buried him? Don’t you want to pay your respects?”
Reg snarls, some big push out of emotion like the grief is too much to be held between his teeth. It feels like his heart is rebelling, shattering to pieces inside his chest, thorns pushing out between his ribs and tearing his lungs open as they go.
The hand on his knee goes vicious, suddenly, and the snarl becomes a howl as the bone fragments grind, sharp edges catching on flesh as the officer massages the broken pieces of him beneath the skin like a baker kneading dough.
"You'll tell me, won't you?"
And Reg would - anything, anything to make it fucking stop.
And then the touch is gone.
Reg pants, animal wheeze, gone limp in his bindings. There are tears on his cheek and he's bitten through his tongue, the taste of blood familiar now and comforting for it.
“Shhhh” the officer says, kindly, even as he reaches up and wipes the tears from Reg’s cheek. The leather is cool against the overheated bruising, and Reg leans into it despite himself, breath a keening wheeze.
“It is alright to grieve” the officer says, two fingers tracing the tear tracks across Reg’s cheek “Wouldn’t you rather see him?”
Reg is about to reply - another curse, another biting jab - when the officer takes the two fingers from Reg’s cheek and plunges them into the bullet hole in Reg’s shoulder.
Reg screams, can’t help himself, mouth ratcheting wider and wider and wider as though he’s going to dislocate his own jaw. And still the fingers keep up, pressing and stretching and tearing him open wider; wet squelch of blood and meat between fingers and around knuckles.
It’s like molten lead poured directly into his skin, burning him from the inside, a violation more total than fucking, the very meat of him open to the air, to the exploratory touch where no touch should ever be.
The officer is methodical with it, feeling out torn meat, ripped tendon, shattered collarbone with a surgeon’s detachment; practiced in all the ways he can cause pain.
“Just tell me where the field is, and I’ll take you to him.” The officer says, reasonable like they’re discussing the weather, withdrawing his fingers. The pull out hurts almost worse than the plunge in, and Reg keens at the feeling - flesh-tear, agony. The fingers of those black gloves are mirror-slick with blood, dripping with the insides of Reg. “We are kind, you know, humane when it comes to the homosexuals. Just tell me where they buried him, and you can go and see him one more time before you die”
Reg’s mouth is still open, panting as though to exhale his own lungs, drool and tears streaking his face, making everything wet. He knows it’s a lie, a trap, but he thinks of Johnny - as feral and bloodthirsty as a fairy prince, as bright as the sun in the desert - felled by illness alone and left rotting in a hole in the fucking ground alone and he tells them.
God fucking smite him dead, but he tells them.
“Alright” the officer says, kind like Reg’s father had never been but like he should have been, smiling now even as he wipes his gore-slick fingers against Reg’s bruise-swollen cheek to clean them. The tenderness in the touch makes him shiver “We’ll take you to the grave. You can be buried with him.”
He is taken from the chair, his arms are bound behind his back with steel cuffs, and he’s lifted, groaning, onto his feet. They barely hold his weight, buckling beneath him, and they are forced to drag his deadweight up the cellar stairs, his injured leg catching on every step and sending a fresh jolt of pain up into his gums that he tries and fails to swallow down.
He’s surprised that they leave him with his eyes uncovered when they move him to the jeep but he supposes they need him to navigate. It’s not as though he’s in any fit state to make a run for it at this point, crippled literally and by grief. They let him keep the penicillin in its case, a taunt, a reminder of how close he had been and how badly he had failed.
The squad they’ve assembled is small but still too large for the Houndsworth camp to contend with head-on; armed as they are, well rested as they are. They’ve an advance guard of two motorcycles, followed by the lead jeep with Reg bound to the back seat with a gun to his head. The jeep is followed by an array of other soldiers on foot, about thirty of them, some just folks from the village, others in recognizable uniforms. All of them assembled with the singular purpose of massacring all that remains of the Houndsworth camp. Bill, Dave, Greville-Bell, Padre Mac - all his friends and brothers in arms will die. And it will be his fault. And then he thinks of Johnny, buried in an unmarked hole in the ground, and finds he wants, more than anything, to burn it all down.
The woods are a lesson in monochrome: white snow, white sky, white plume of their breathing and the exhaust of the engines and then the black trees, black uniforms, black metal of the guns, black tire tracks left behind. Reg spits a glob of red blood onto the snow just to leave a mark on something, proof that for a moment he was here.
After about an hour they come to a place where the road runs through a shallow gorge, trees on either side bending overhead like the beams of a cathedral ceiling. Reg is barely conscious, watching the sky flash past between the iron lattice of branches. The officer, seated beside him, is smoking but he doesn’t offer a cigarette to Reg, which is alright, he thinks. He is beyond pain, here, and it’s peaceful, almost.
And then the two motorcyclists hit the wire.
They’re lifted into the air for a brief and wild second, bikes and bodies continuing, even as the wire slices through windpipe, spinal column, and out the other side; arterial blood a perfect arc of red against the greyscale of the winter woods.
The decapitated bodies of their advance guard go flopping to the mud, their motorcycles sent careening into the underbrush with the engines still running. The heads roll along the road, back towards the jeeps for several horrible rotations before going still. One still has its eyes open.
There is barely time for the convoy to pull up, for the shouting to start, the unholstering of weapons, before another motorcyclist appears at the top of the ridge.
Reg would recognize that towhead anywhere; he’s kissed the vicious snarl at the edge of that soft mouth more times than he can count. His heart leaps as the motorcycle does, watching as Johnny lands the jump easy, back wheel spinning, throwing mud and slush even as he braces himself on his back leg, pulls the owen gun from the holster on his back and opens fucking hellfire.
Reg drops to the floor as soon as the arms around his go lax, pressing his face against the corrugated aluminium floorboards, groaning as all of his injuries jostle, but Johnny is here now, archangel eyes flashing holy judgment, with a gun in his hands. Reg will never be safer than when it is Johnny’s finger on the trigger of the weapon pointed at his head.
From around them comes the sound of other weapons opening fire, bullets pinging off of metal, thudding into the earth. Men shouting, blood spatter, death rattle.
It’s over in a moment. Reg’s captors barely even have time to fire a single shot before they’re all dead, pinned down from all sides and picked off expertly by the soldiers in the woods.
In the ensuing silence, he rests his swollen cheek against the chilly floorpan and bites his tongue lest he laugh aloud, giddy from the joy and from the pain.
Scattered gunshots, shouting, as the men wander through the bodies and pick off anyone who might be left. Voices Reg recognizes, here!, and then someone is undoing the cuffs at his wrists and flipping him over - gently, gently - and Reg sees Johnny like a dream come back to life.
His eyes are wide like they only are on Benzedrine, deep pools of black pupil superceeding beautiful blue, something crazed to him. He’s clearly on enough stimulants that he can’t even remember he’s ill.
“Johnny” Reg says, or tries to say, most of it coming up as a choke as the splits in his lips reopen and he ends up choking on his own blood.
“God” Johnny says, almost crying with it, tears along his bottom lashes - and Johnny should never fucking cry. He’s the most beautiful person in the world - “Oh God, Reg. Stay with me. Please, love. Fuck”
He wipes at Reg’s mouth, his face, flutters his hands over all of the broken parts of Reg as though not entirely sure what to do.
“Medic!” Johnny shouts over his shoulder, “Oh fuck. Medic!”
Reg catches one of Johnny’s fluttering hands, brings it to his face so he can feel the warmth of it, rub his thumb over the place where the pulse of him beats beneath the thin skin.
“You’re not dead,” he says.
Johnny fixes him with a glare, “Of course I’m not dead, you oaf,” and then he disolves again, muttering "oh god oh god oh god” as tears stream down his face for reasons Reg can not comprehend.
“I’m sorry,” Reg says, mush-mouthed “I told them, I’m sorry”
“Shhh” Johnny says, urgent chastisement, brushing his hair away from his face “shhh”
The medic arrives then and Reg loses time to the fussing.
He knows he’s lifted at one point and put on a stretcher, knows that Johnny collapses into the snow not long afterwards and that he screams himself hoarse - delirious and terrified - until the medic finds the penicillin and unstraps it from his back.
“We’ve gotta move the whole damn thing” Bill is saying when he comes back to himself “Dave, I’m giving you radios for now. Let Paddy know we’re abandoning ship. We need to move further in and quickly. Schnell, lads! Let’s…”
When he comes to the next time it’s to drab canvas above his head and the vague sensation of movement. Someone has stitched him up at some point, braced his ankle and his knee: he can feel the tightness of his skin and the bite of wood and the bulk of bandages around the joints.
There is something in his hand, warm and weighty, and with his gaze, he traces the line of his own arm from shoulder to elbow to wrist to his hand and then to Johnny’s hand loosely entwined with it.
Johnny, beside him, is pale and drawn, shivering from fever and the comedown from the amphetamines, wrapped in what looks like the camp’s entire supply of blankets. The circles beneath his eyes are dark as thunderclouds, his chin abstractly prickly with several days of translucent stubble, and his hair is sticking up in all directions, reminiscent of a dandelion puff. He’s the most beautiful thing Reg thinks he’s ever seen.
“Johnny” he says “love”
Johnny opens his eyes, supernaturally bright in the sickly pale of his face, and blinks.
“You got the penicillin?” Reg asks. He doesn’t know how many vials had broken, if there had been any left to be salvaged.
“Yes,” Johnny says, so very fond, hand gripping weakly at Reg’s “Doc shot me up proper with the stuff. Should be right as rain soon”
Good.
Reg closes his eyes, washed clean by the relief.
“I think,” Johnny wheezes “That next time one of us is ill, we should just pop down to the chemists instead of… whatever all that nonsense was”
Reg laughs, can’t help it, the absurdity of the whole thing. It hurts, twinges every broken bone and strained muscle in his body, but it feels good too; reminds him he has a body left to hurt, lungs left to laugh, a hand to curl around Johnny’s and pull him closer so they’re pressed together in the bed of the truck. They’re alone here, shielded by canvas walls, and so he risks pressing a kiss to Johnny’s fever-hot lips, just one, no intent to it, just for the pleasure of feeling Johnny’s breath against his face.
Johnny kisses back, a moment’s pleasure against his split and bloody mouth, and then he sighs and drops his forehead to Reg’s chest, too tired to hold his head upright.
“Reginald Seekings” Johnny says, then, in his officer voice - and even muffled by Reg’s chest and hoarse as it is there is still weight behind it, clarity - “When we are home - when we are home in England - if you ever ever again do anything that makes me get out of bed before I am damn well good and ready to get out of bed I will have your guts for fucking garters”
He curls up, coughing, clinging to Reg even as he wheezes through it.
“Understood,” Reg says, clinging back, breathing in the wonderfully alive smell of Johnny’s hair: cordite and sweat and smoke and sweet-sick pang.
He imagines it for a moment - a small stone house somewhere in Yorkshire near Johnny’s family, where the light would come in lemon yellow through lace curtains and dapple over a big bed with a feather duvet that they could nap in all day long - before it becomes too much and he promptly gives up and passes out.