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John Brady comes home from the war and picks his life up. He spends a few weeks in his childhood bedroom, letting his mother fuss over him. He sleeps in a silent building, all alone, and feels like he might float up off the mattress without the familiar grounding weight of Benny pressed against his chest. It’s not cold enough to need to share a bed. He should be perfectly fine to sleep alone.
He picks his life up. Puts his wheels down. Takes a job as a music tutor at one of the better boarding schools in the area and tries not to look up at the sky more than the next man. His hands twitch by his sides in a crowd, he finds himself reaching for someone a thousand times a day. There’s no one there.
When he takes the job at the school, he agrees to take a house master position too, just for the first year. It means he doesn’t have to find anywhere to live, not just yet, and gives him enough extra cash each month to build a decent buffer of savings, on top of all the pay he hasn’t spent from four years of war. He buys himself a new saxophone. Doesn’t play Blue Skies. Thinks about writing to Bucky. Decides he doesn’t think Bucky can read. Thinks about buying himself a new cross. Writes Solly a letter.
Once a week, on Friday nights, from the phone in the staff lounge, Brady calls Benny. He stands by the wall and forces himself to breathe and listens to Benny tell him about the things that have happened since the last time they spoke, what he and Meatball have been up to, how his classes are going now he’s finally finishing college. Sometimes Benny doesn't have anything to tell him, and Brady reads the silence as well as he ever did in Texas or England or Germany, and so he fills the static between them with mindless anecdotes about his students. Every single call, he wraps his right hand around his left wrist and holds so tight it leaves bruises.
**
He’s fine. He’s alright. He’s teaching music, which he loves, and the boys are smart and focused and they want to learn.
Brady looks at them, upturned faces over sheet music, and has the startling realisation that each and every one of them is a mothers' son and it just… Doesn't matter. They're just boys. Not hostages against his soul held ransom by the universe. They're just children. They'll never go to war. He doesn't have to keep them alive. He only has to teach them chord progressions. He excuses himself between classes and stands in a closet in the hall and holds his left wrist so hard he almost can't feel it, so hard it almost feels like it belongs to someone else.
He doesn’t sleep, and when he does he has nightmares, but they’re quiet. No one notices. He picks his life up, carries it around, all by himself.
**
Three months after he starts at the school, fourteen phonecalls, fourteen weeks of bruises on his left wrist later, a letter comes in the post. There’s two things in the envelope.
The first is a piece of thick card, scented with a perfume Brady is a little appalled to realise he recognises. It’s an invitation to the wedding of Marjorie Spencer and Gale Cleven, which is both a very predictable and very surprising thing to receive.
The second thing in the envelope is a little note. The chicken scratch handwriting is unfamiliar, but Brady knows who it’s from.
Little John, the note starts. Marge is finally making an honest woman out of Buck. Your presence is required three days in advance for bachelor party business, I’ve appointed you deputy-best-man. Everyone else is coming too, so no excuses. Bring those stolen shoes. And your saxophone. Bucky.
Brady calls Benny. It’s a Tuesday, they spoke just a few days ago, and when Benny hears Brady’s voice on the end of the line the panic is clear straight away.
“Johnny?” he says, crackly over hundred of miles. “Johnny? What’s happened? Are you OK?”
Brady’s heart seizes in his chest, just a little, and he wraps his hand around his wrist. “I’m OK, sorry, just got some very strange mail.”
The tension disappears from Benny’s voice immediately. “Ah. The wedding invitation?”
“Got it in one. Mine came with a note from Bucky declaring I’m deputy-best-man, which honestly feels like it’s your job, and not mine.”
Benny laughs. “If Buck gets to pick, then yeah, that would be my job. But I have a feeling Bucky might have made a snap hiring decision without consulting the groom. And obviously he’d pick you, Little John.”
The name in Benny’s voice is something Brady hopes he doesn’t hear again. He makes a disparaging noise into the phone, and Benny laughs again.
“I don’t think I want to know what being Buck Cleven’s deputy-best-man involves,” Brady tells him.
There’s a little pause. “I was a little surprised to get the invite,” Benny says.
“Why? Buck was always going to want you there.”
Benny pauses again. The line is full of static. “I suppose I just didn’t think they were still going to get married.”
Brady has been deliberately not thinking about it. About the thing that they have always known about Buck and Bucky, unmentioned and unmentionable as it might be. About the idea that something that had seemed so absolutely fucking vital to survival in every single way could be useless in the real world. It makes him feel a little sick. He presses his fingers against the bruises on his wrist.
“I suppose we’ll find out. You’re going, right?”
There’s a little note of worry in his voice that he hates. He’s a bomber pilot. He flew twenty missions, he spent eighteen months in a POW camp, he dragged every mothers’ son he had eyes on safely back to England. He’s not afraid of going to a wedding by himself. Of not seeing Benny.
“Yeah Johnny,” Benny says, “I’ll be there. We can split a room. Look,” and now his voice changes, all business. “I gotta go. Speak Friday?”
“Sure,” Brady tells him. “Say hi to Meatball for me.”
**
There was a number scrawled on the back of Egan's note. Brady manages to resist his curiosity for two days after his call with Benny, and then he gives in. He's curious. And he's concerned. John Egan said he doesn't have a mother, only Brady himself, and… Well. He dials the number.
“Hello?”
The voice at the end of the line is unfamiliar and shockingly female.
“Hello,” he says, “I'm calling for Major Egan?”
“Oh!” Says the voice, “Oh, of course. Just one moment, I - oh, who should I say is calling?”
For a moment he almost says Captain Brady . “Brady,” he goes for instead, “Ma’am.”
“John Brady?” She says, little lilt in her voice.
“Yes ma’am,” he says, completely nonplussed.
“How lovely,” she says, and sounds like she means it. “He's been hoping you'd call. Wait just one moment, I'll fetch him.”
Brady stands in the teachers’ lounge and forces himself to keep his free hand by his side.
“Little John!” Crows the voice at the end of the line.
He's almost forgotten that the name was ever a dig and not a term of endearment.
“Bucky,” he says, and tries to keep his voice as dry as he possibly can, because that's how they do this.
“You got my letter, then?”
“I have to tell you, I think deputy-best-man sounds like a made-up job,” Brady says. “And if it's not a made-up job, it sounds like the sort of job that, at a Cleven wedding, would go to Benny.”
“Ah,” Bucky laughs. “I see you're confused. Understandable. You're mixing up deputy-best-man with second-best-man. Second-best-man would be a DeMarco job. I'm the best man. I need a deputy. That's a Brady job.”
Both these roles sound like Biddick jobs. It's been a while since Brady's thought about Curt. Not a comfortable realisation.
“And what does being your deputy involve, on the day that Buck Cleven gets married?”
He's fishing and they know it. He does not know why he is fishing.
“You will not be required to hold my hand as I weep,” Bucky tells him. “Or sit on me to stop me objecting.”
“I'm planning on driving across,” Brady says, because he has no idea what to make of that. “Would you like me to stop in Wisconsin?”
“I'm not in Wisconsin,” Bucky says.
“Where are you?” Brady asks, all of a sudden a little afraid. Bucky is not in New York. It's fine.
There's a pause. “I'm in Casper, Wyoming,” Bucky says.
Everything clatters into place all of a sudden.
“Was that Marge, answering the phone?”
Bucky hums a few bars of Blue Skies. Brady tries to think of something to say before he loses control of the conversation. He's not fast enough.
“How are you, anyway, Little John?” Bucky asks. “Doing alright without DeMarco?”
Brady does not reach for his wrist. He doesn't. “Slowly but surely getting used to it,” he says, unsure if it's the truth or not. “Though the lack of dog hair is a blessing.”
Predictable as ever, Bucky howls down the phone line. Brady holds the earpiece away from his face, and does his best not to laugh. The man doesn't need the encouragement.
**
The headmaster grants him the days away he'll need for the Cleven wedding, and Brady marks it down on his calendar and then puts it out of his mind.
He’s fine. He’s alright. The job is fulfilling. He speaks to Benny on Fridays. He plays the saxophone and sleeps alone and writes letters to his mother and his boys and tells himself he’s picked his life back up.
**
Brady is alone all day. Every fucking day. Surrounded by children he doesn't need to worry about. It should be a relief. He can't fucking breathe.
Everyone on the staff knows he flew bombers in the war, knows he spent most of it in a POW camp, and for the first few weeks of term they watch him cautiously. There's one teacher, one of the English department, who was a paratrooper. They're introduced to each other on the first day as if the shared reality of their wars would be enough to make them friends. Brady takes one look at the man, who evidently at some point got blown to shit, and knows very clearly that neither of them are looking for soldier companions in peace time. He'd be a mothers' son to Brady by the end of the first game of cards and Brady can't take any more.
Thankfully, no one else on the staff seems inclined to push the matter. Everyone knows that the soldiers came back fucked up. Brady is not fucked up.
He speaks to Benny on Fridays. It's nearly Christmas. The wedding is in the Spring. It’s fine. He’s fine.
**
Christmas 1945 is… Well. It's not Christmas 1944, or Christmas 1943, and that's about all that can be said for it.
**
Brady's brothers take him out on New Year's Eve. He drinks when they drink and dances when they dance and he kisses James’ girlfriend's sister at midnight, because he can't see a reason not to. Her name is Peggy, she's sweet and slight and dark-haired. He loses her in the crowd for just a moment after the bells ring, her hand slips out of his, his fingers stretch out after a wrist that is not there and all of a sudden he's somewhere else entirely. He can't breathe. He can't hear a fucking thing. It is very, very cold, and he can’t see a single mothers’ son.
One of the boys out with his brothers was an Army Medic. He gets Brady out the back door of the bar and brings him a glass of water and stands with his back to him as Brady pulls his shit together with extreme force.
**
He calls Benny on New Year's Day, even though it's not a Friday.
The flocked wallpaper by his mother's telephone table is torn ever so slightly from some childish mishap none of them can remember anymore. Brady sits on the little stool by the phone table and runs his fingers over the tear. The bruises on his wrist are cut by little half-moon fingernail scratches.
“Hello?”
The voice on the end of the phone is enough to make him want to weep.
“Happy New Year, Benny,” he says, almost steady.
“Johnny,” Benny breathes his name out like he's been holding it in for hours. “Happy New Year.”
“You sound like shit,” Brady says, because he does. “Big night last night?”
There's a shaky little sound that could be the static or could be Benny trying to laugh. “No,” he says, and it sounds off, even from just one word. “Was gonna go out with some of the boys I grew up with, but-”
Brady waits. Doesn't ask. They don't ask questions, don't need to, never have.
“House two roads over was having a party and they set off fireworks,” Benny tells him. Brady knows for a fact he's got his eyes closed as he says the words, eyes closed and jaw set. “Put me off a bit.”
It's like a fist around his heart. He presses down on the bruises on his wrist, digs his fingers in, tries to think of what to say. If Benny was here in front of him he wouldn't need to say anything, he could just wrap a hand around his wrist and hold him there and that would be enough. But Benny isn't in front of him. He's so fucking far away.
“That'd do it,” he says, in lieu of anything useful. “How did Meatball like them?”
This time, Benny's laugh is a real one. “Not one fucking bit,” he says, and Brady laughs with him.
**
Without a great deal of prompting from James, James' girlfriend, and his own mother, Brady takes Peggy out a few times. She's sweet, sharp and funny and full of bright dancing life, exactly the sort of girl he's always liked. She reminds him a little bit of Lil, actually, who he'd had an eye on but known better than to go near. Peggy is easy to spend time with, they go for dinner, to the movies, for a drive, she calls him John and holds his hand and it's fine. He's fine. She's more than fine, obviously, she's probably close to perfect.
There is definitely something wrong. He kisses her goodbye on the evening of his day off, much more chastely than he gets the feeling she would like, and drives back to the school, lies on his bed with his boots still on and makes fists in the blanket to keep his hand off his wrist.
He doesn't take her out again after that. The guilt weighs him down for a handful of days, and then he speaks to Benny on the Friday, and doesn't mention a word of it.
**
It’s a cold winter, but there’s a fireplace in his room and Brady has as many blankets as he needs. It’s not that cold. Not as cold as in Germany. It’s warm enough to sleep alone. He can’t. He speaks to Benny on Fridays, gets the feeling Benny’s not getting any sleep either.
**
It’s a long drive from New York to Wyoming, even without going via Wisconsin. Brady speaks to Benny on Fridays, they agree to split the drive alongside the room. It’s not that far from Victor to Philadelphia, not in the grand scheme of things, close enough that Brady has not been able to explain why he hasn’t gone down there once since they got back to the States. He could have had a hand on Benny a hundred times.
On the drive down it occurs to him that every single time he’d got a hand on Benny since the beginning of the war, it’d got more and more painful to let him go. The last time it felt like he was dying.
He’s been holding out for this wedding for months. The years that will follow it feel impossible.
Brady pulls the car off the highway, sits by a shitty diner and spends an hour convincing himself that he’s not going to turn around. He sits there, holding tight to the steering wheel, because he knows Benny will ask if he turns up with bruises.
He’s a little later than expected when he gets to the DeMarco house, sun just starting to sink, and he’s greeted on the drive by what feels like a tonne of fur and slobber when Meatball launches himself into Brady’s arms. The weight of the dog forces him back against his car, knocks the air out of him, and Brady sneezes straight away because no matter what he’s told himself and everyone else, he’s definitely a little allergic to dogs. Just a little. Not enough to stop him being Meatball’s third best friend.
“Look at that,” comes a familiar voice. “He missed you!”
Brady hides his face in the dog despite the way it makes it hard to breathe, just for a moment, and then looks up at Benny. “Well, he knows a pilot when he sees one, that’s for sure.”
Benny shoos Meatball back into the house, and reaches for Brady. It should probably be a handshake but they lived in each other’s pockets for years and deep down Brady knows that if he could he would keep Benny under his fucking skin, so he doesn’t feel ashamed of the way he lets Benny fold him into his arms and hold him tight. It feels a little like coming through the gate at the Stalag, hearing his name in that voice and letting the hope eat him alive.
Behind them, Benny’s mother is coming out onto the porch. Brady shoves at Benny, just a little, just enough, and when the arms come down from his shoulders he takes him by the wrist, just for a second, just to practise letting go.
**
Gloria hugs him like he’s one of hers, and tears up just a little when she holds him at arms’ length to get a good look at him.
“Your mother told me you were too skinny,” she says, and then hugs him again. “Come on inside and wash up for dinner, you made perfect time.”
It's a lie, he’s late, but he doesn’t contradict her, lets her shuffle him into the house and seat him at the table next to Benny. They hold hands to say Grace, and Benny presses their knees together under his mother’s frilly lace tablecloth when they let go. Gloria serves them soup, to start, and Benny and Brady share a look bordering on hysteria, all of a sudden sitting at a splintery table in the freezing cold, starving to death, eating cat soup. Brady is struck by the realisation that here, years later in the warm with enough to eat and Benny safely home with his mother, it’s actually very funny.
“This soup is delicious,” he says to Gloria, with his very best manners. “What’s in it?”
Benny chokes, just like he did in the Stalag, and Brady tries and fails to keep it behind his teeth and then they’re both howling with laughter, sobbing with it, while Benny’s mother looks at them like they’re a pair of naughty school boys. She declares she doesn’t want to know, which is a relief because neither of them feel like she’d find it nearly as funny as they do.
Benny empties his bowl, and Brady looks at him and says, as quietly as he can, “Good job Benny, you need the protein,” in his very best bad impression of Cleven’s drawl.
Benny kicks him. Brady feels his age for the first time in years, if not much, much younger. All of a sudden, the fact that he’s only known Benny four years seems strangely shocking. They should have known each other their whole lives. They should have grown up together. They should have had decades of each other by now. It feels strangely unfair that Brady’s only had four years, and most of them in hell.
For a second, it’s like he’s not in the room. It comes up on him out of nowhere, the fucking freezing cold as he threw himself out of the bomb bay doors. It’s just a second, and then Benny’s got his hand tight around Brady’s wrist, pressing down into the bruises, and he’s right back there in Gloria’s dining room.
It’s so quick she doesn’t notice. Benny holds onto him as Gloria serves the roast and by the time he lets go Brady’s feeling stupid. This hasn’t happened to him for months, not since New Years, and it’s so quick it’s like it never happened by the time they’re eating dinner.
**
He sleeps in the spare room under blankets made for Benny and his siblings when they were little kids, warm and safe. If he has nightmares he doesn’t remember them, but he wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of footsteps going down the stairs at the end of the hall. It’s a house full of people but Brady knows exactly who it is. He lies in bed, staring at the ceiling, counting breaths and giving Benny the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he needs a glass of water. He gives him five minutes, and then sits up, pulls on his pants and shirt and jacket, and makes his way down the stairs.
Benny’s sitting on the porch, wrapped in his sheepskin, knees up to his chest like a little kid. Brady closes the door quietly and moves over next to him. Benny lets out a ragged breath and leans into him, like he’s been walking for days with no rest and no food, and Brady wraps an arm around his waist, curls his fingers around his wrist, and holds him tight.
It’s cold, out here in the dark, cold and dark and quiet and mercifully still. Benny’s breathing is still uneven, but he’s gone limp in Brady’s arms, like all the fear of the night has drained out of him into the dark. They sit there for an hour, until the cold has started to leech into their bones. It’s not til Benny starts to shake that Brady really realizes how cold it is, and how fucking stupid it is that they’re out here when they could be inside.
“Up, soldier,” he says, “C’mon Benny, before you freeze to death.”
It’s hard for Brady to get a proper look at him in the dark, but he can tell that Benny’s not quite all there, in this moment. There’s something vague in his face, something distant and disconnected. He’s a solid weight against Brady’s side as he hauls them both to their feet and drags them into the house. It’s alright. He doesn’t need Benny connected and present, he doesn’t need to have him all there. He just needs to have him in reach. All the rest of it? Not important. He can wait til Benny makes it back from Germany, or Algeria, or the middle of the sky, and he can hold him til he gets there.
**
They leave early the next morning, early enough that Gloria and the rest of the family are still in bed. It’s a long way to go. It’s still cold, but the sky is a bright, perfect blue, with all the promise of warmth coming later in the day.
Benny looks better in the light of day. The vague look is gone, he’s sitting in Brady’s passenger seat half-buried in maps with a furrowed brow.
“Fair warning,” Brady says to him. “If we end up in France, I’ll leave you there.”
Benny’s laugh is loud and bright in the stillness, ringing out in a way it barely has since they left Greenland.
“You promised Croz you’d never mention that again,” Benny reminds him. “He’d be hurt, Johnny, how could you.”
“What Harry Crosby doesn’t know, won’t hurt him,” Brady shoots back. “You wouldn’t hurt him, would you Benny?”
“Who me? Never.”
The drive is endless. They switch every few hours, stop for food, stop to stretch their legs, and in between they make their way across the country to a very suspicious wedding. Brady feels more like himself than he has since he got home. They stop for the night in a tiny motel and take the last room, settling down to grab a handful of hours of sleep on two skinny beds. It’s late and they’re exhausted, so Brady doesn’t let himself think about it, just kicks the left-hand bed closer to the right. He reaches across the gap between the shitty mattresses and wraps a hand around Benny’s wrist. He dreams of marching, of snow and freezing cold, and the shape of Benny’s skull in his shitty hand-knitted hat.
They’re on the road at dawn. Benny’s got bruises on his left wrist that match Brady’s, and neither of them say a word.
**
It takes an unholy number of hours, and two bizarre nights in bizarre rooms in bizarre motels, ignoring the fact that they're only able to sleep if they've got a hold of each other, but they make it to Casper. Under strict instructions, they dump their bags at the hotel, room not yet ready for them, and make their way out to the Cleven residence.
“Do you have any idea what we're about to walk into?” Benny asks him, as they pull up to the drive.
“Some, but nothing I'd call reasonable,” Brady replies, and puts on his very best inscrutable expression.
The door is thrown open before they even have a chance to knock and 6ft2ins of Bucky Egan barrels into them.
“Buck!” Bucky yells over his shoulder, “Get your ass downstairs, the second string is here!”
“Yeah, fuck you Egan, it was my damn fort!” Brady sees Marge in the hall behind Bucky a moment too late. “Oh, God, sorry ma’am.”
Bucky smirks. “Don't ma’am Mrs Cleven, she doesn't like it.”
Buck appears at his shoulder. “Don't Mrs Cleven Miss Spencer, Bucky, she's got three days left.”
“Call me Marge, please,” she says, elbowing both men out the way and giving them a bright, brilliant smile. “Hopefully you don't need to be told to ignore these two. Come on in.”
Benny gives Brady a look of wide-eyed incredulous amusement, and they do as they're told. On the other side of the door, they’re greeted by the usual societally-approved round of handshakes and back-pats. It comes hand in hand with what Brady’s started to think of as soldier-scrutiny. They’re light and breezy, all four of them, but each and every one of them is looking very closely at the others in an attempt to work out just how deep the mask goes, and what it’s hiding.
To Brady’s eye, Benny looks alright, if a little tired and a little thin, still. He’s noticeably better than he was when they left Germany, but he’s still easily recognisable as a man who had a hard war. Brady’s got no misconceptions, he knows he’s the same. Better than 1945. Not anywhere near who he was in 1942. The Bucks had looked worse, by the end of the war, but they’re looking a lot closer to 1942 right now than anyone else Brady’s seen. Buck’s scars have faded, so much so that they’re only really noticeable if you know where to look, and now that Bucky’s lost the gaunt, starved set to his face the unevenness left by the broken eye socket is hard to see. They look good, they look happy and healthy and safe, and Brady all of a sudden realises he and Benny are falling short in comparison.
He pulls his shirt cuff down over the bruises on his wrist.
**
It’s one of the weirdest evenings Brady’s ever sat through. He and Benny sit side by side at the table and watch a bizarre ballet taking place between the Bucks and Marge, watch the way they orbit each other. It’s oddly beautiful. And truly, truly strange.
When it starts to get dark, Buck gets up to take Marge back to her parents for the night. She says goodbye to Benny and Brady, shakes their hands, and then steps up to Bucky, going up on her tiptoes and putting a very careful, very precise kiss just an inch from the corner of his mouth. He rests a hand on her waist, just for a moment, and then steps back.
“Do you have the car tomorrow or do you need me to come and get you?” Bucky asks.
She smiles. “I’ve got the car, and I’ll be running errands with Dottie in the morning, but if someone wanted to swing by my parents’ anyway, there are a few more boxes ready to make the trip.”
It feels almost as intimate as if they were standing in the bedroom the three of them almost certainly share. Brady watches them and feels oddly hollow. He wraps his hand around his wrist, even though Benny is right there, because he doesn’t know how to admit to himself that he needs to reach for him.
They pull out of the driveway behind Buck and Marge, heading in the opposite direction, back to town and their hotel. Brady waits until the headlights of Buck’s car aren’t visible in the rearview mirror, and then he turns to look at Benny.
“Jesus Christ,” he says, and it comes out half a laugh.
“Is this what you thought we were walking into Johnny?” Benny asks him, all incredulous humour.
Brady shrugs. “Pretty much,” he tells him. “Though I didn’t know what it was going to look like.”
They’re silent for a long time, driving through the outskirts of town in the dark back to their hotel.
“It looked pretty good,” Benny says, quietly.
Brady agrees with him. It looked pretty good. He’s got no idea how on earth they’re making it work, but it looked pretty good.
“She makes them safer,” Brady says. “Being married, having Marge in the house… She makes them safer.”
It’s the truth. Cleven being married gives them plausible deniability. Gives them cover. Benny’s quiet again.
“She makes them happier, too,” Benny says eventually. “They looked happy.”
**
The lady at the hotel is apologetic, they’ve got a few rooms out of commission due to a burst pipe, so the double they were booked into has turned into a single. She trips over herself saying sorry to them, and neither of them have a heart to tell her that the bed they’ll have to share is about three times the size of the bunk they spent two winters curled together in. The pillows are soft, there are plenty of blankets, and he’s got Benny within arm’s reach.
They strip down for bed, unselfconscious after years and years and years of living in each other's pockets. In their shorts and undershirts, lights off and curtains drawn, they climb up onto the bed in silence. Benny rolls onto his side, like a hundred nights before, and like a hundred nights before Brady curls up next to him, wraps himself over his back, slings an arm around his waist and puts his face against Benny's hair. Sleep comes easy, and is deep.
**
He wakes in the middle of the night with Benny tucked under his chin. Safe, whole, peaceful.
**
For a made up position, there’s a surprising amount of work involved in being a deputy-best-man. Benny and Brady have breakfast at the hotel and then head back over to the Cleven house where they're presented with a list of tasks. First up is collecting various tables and chairs from houses all over the town and bringing them over to Marge's parents’ house to be put in the backyard for the reception. Once that's complete, and it takes most of the morning, they're handed a list of other petty errands that need to be completed, and Bucky declares that he's off to pick up the rings. There's something a little tight, a little sad, on his face as he looks at them, and while Brady and Benny get on with putting together the new furniture for Marge to move into the house with, there's one thought clattering around Brady's mind.
“Spit it out,” Benny says, kindly, after a good hour.
“What?”
“Whatever it is that's hurting you right now. Spit it out, Johnny.”
Brady breathes out, and sits back on his heels, hammer forgotten by the side of the table. “This isn't our job,” he says, quietly. “All of this? Deputy-best-man, putting their lives together? This should be Biddick. But he's been dead longer than we knew him.”
Benny scrubs a hand over his face. He takes a breath, as if he's about to speak, and then can't. Brady shuffles over to him, wraps an arm around his shoulders and a hand around his wrist.
“Ev Blakely is Croz’s kid's godfather,” Benny says, face pressed into Brady's shoulder. “Because Bubbles is dead. Ev came and got drunk with me about it.”
“Do you think it helped?” Brady asks. He's been careful not to drink beyond his limits since he got back. He's a little scared of what might happen.
“No,” Benny says. “Because they're all still dead.”
Later, when they've finished their chores and eaten dinner with the Bucks and their Marge and gone back to the hotel, later, when they're lying in bed together in the dark, curled like a matching set, Brady picks up the conversation.
“I thought you were dead,” he says into the silence. “I waited on the hardstand for Our Baby just like we waited for Escape Kit in Algeria, and I…” he has no idea what the rest of the sentence is.
“When we got to the Stalag, I realized that I was probably going to sit out the whole war,” Benny tells him. “And that any day could be the last day of your life, and I wouldn't know it. That your fort could go down any mission and you'd burn up over Germany and I'd be sitting there imagining you eating shitty powdered eggs at Thorpe Abbotts and you'd be dying and I wouldn't know.”
“How many days?”
“Six,” Benny says.
“Yeah,” Brady nods, and then presses his face into Benny's hair, clean and soft like it never was in Germany. “You were dead for about that long for me, too.”
“Lots of boys dead for lots longer,” Benny tells him, voice soft with sleep. “But those were the worst six days of my life, Johnny.”
“Me too,” he says, and holds him tight.
Benny's asleep in minutes, and Brady basks in the warmth and weight of him and thinks back to October 1943 and marvels at how well he walled up his grief in the face of the mission and Bucky's shattered self. Worst six days of his life and looking back he thinks he barely felt it.
**
They’ve been given strict instructions from Marge to come over to the house for breakfast, and so they’re treated to the truly bizarre sight of John Egan with a flowery apron over his shirt and slacks, making pancakes.
“These are, shockingly, not half bad,” Benny says, midway through his second plate.
Bucky laughs at him. “Well, it’s not cat soup,” he says. “But give me time and I’ll be nearly as good as Hambone.”
Marge makes a delicate face of disgust. “Is cat soup going to be one of those charming stories I wish you’d kept to yourself?” she asks, as if there are lots of those.
Buck smirks. “Culinary adventures at summer camp,” he tells her. “We got creative.”
We ate cat, Brady thinks. We ate cat, and we slept in beds together, and we held hands in the dark and I played the saxophone until it broke my heart and Benny read us poems until it broke our brains and we all broke a little bit, all over.
He feels slightly detached, he can hear the conversation going on around him and though the shape of the words are familiar he can’t quite work out what they’re saying. He looks up from his plate to see Buck looking at him, slight frown on his face, and then Buck’s eyes shift from Brady to his left. Benny keeps cutting his pancakes and making fun of Bucky’s cooking, and then he switches his fork to his left hand, reaches down and puts his right hand on the edge of Brady's chair. Brady wraps his hand around Benny's wrist, holds him tight.
“What’s on the list for today?” Benny asks, voice very normal.
“Divide and conquer,” Marge says, “I need Gale for the morning, we have to meet with the pastor. And John needs to write his best man speech,” she fixes the man in question with a firm look. “Which needs to be appropriate for an audience that includes my parents, and our pastor.”
Bucky rolls his eyes. “Yes, Mrs Cleven, ma’am,” he says, and gives her a smile that could light a night raid. And then he turns to the rest of them. “So, Little John, you’re with me, and DeMarco we need you on pick-up duty getting guests from the train.”
“There’s a list,” Buck says. “And we’ll pay you back for the gas.”
Brady holds on a little harder, and then lets go.
They finish breakfast, and Brady starts to clean up as the others head out. He stands at the kitchen sink and watches out the window as Benny pulls out of the driveway. He wraps his hand around his wrist in the hot water, holds it tight until the car is out of sight.
“Alright, Little John?” Bucky’s voice is oddly gentle.
“Yup,” Brady says, and turns around. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing a speech?”
Bucky makes a face, but takes the hint.
The rest of the morning passes in a semblance of peace. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done on the house before Marge moves in, and there’s only a day before that happens, and so Brady spends a few hours putting up shelves in the living room while Bucky sits cross legged on the floor and scribbles on a notepad like it’s personally offended him.
“You look like a kid doing homework,” Brady says, marking a level on the wall above the side table.
“Yeah fuck you very much, Little John,” Bucky says. “This is important.”
“Homework’s important,” Mr Brady, music teacher, says on autopilot.
“Not as important as this,” Bucky says, and goes back to it.
There’s something about the way he’s looking at what he’s written that makes Brady pause, and look at him again. This is his wedding too, Brady realizes, and all at once the fact that he is not Curtis Biddick sits so heavy on his soul that he can't breathe. He doesn't have a place here, he wasn't ever supposed to be John Egan's deputy, he's John Brady and he's in the wrong fucking shoes.
He really can't breathe. It's like having his mask ripped off in the middle of the horizon and he puts the level down, steps back from the shelves and wraps his hand around his left wrist so hard he can feel the bones grinding together under his fingers. It fucking hurts, and that's enough to override the panic that always accompanies these moments, the gut punch realisation that he's dying and Benny isn't within reach. Brady manages to get air into his lungs.
When he comes back to the room, Bucky is looking at him with all that soldier scrutiny.
“Are you alright, Little John?” he asks, and his voice is incredibly gentle.
“I’m putting your wife’s shelves up wonky,” Brady says, instead of saying no, or yes, or anything at all.
**
By the end of the day, the vast majority of the survivors of the original 100th bomb group are in Casper, Wyoming, and it’s sheer fucking chaos. Brady stands next to Benny at the bar that they’re all shoehorned into and watches the mayhem swirl around them.
Crank comes past them, shakes hands and pats shoulders, and then Johnny Hoerr, and Petros and Blum, and Glenn and Murph. They come in one by one, their Stalag boys, and Brady straightens his spine under the familiar unaccustomed weight of so many mothers' sons.
Ev Blakely comes through the door with Douglass and Hambone on his heels and Brady is struck by the memory of them rocking up late and miraculous after Bremen, all swagger and bravado covering up their grief and exhaustion.
It's a story he and Crank had told the others a thousand times in their shitty freezing bunkhouse. They'd done it over and over, sitting around their splintery table, recounting the misadventures and near misses. No engine Cleven. Wild Cargo making it to the Scottish coast on one engine. Paddlefoot's Proxy’s trip to the French coast. Dye buzzing the tower when he made his 25. Just-A-Snappin back from the dead. Brady watches Blakely make his way round the room and thinks he's a little bit in love with him still, with all of them, and the way they're somehow still here when so many other people aren't.
Tonight, it seems like everyone is dedicated to resurrecting 1942. It’s the same as it’s always been, very nearly. The radiomen remain mouthy, gregarious, bombastic. The navigators are still earnest, studious cartophiles. The bombardiers continue to be obsessive, chaotic gremlin people, because no amount of peace was ever going to help with that, and the gunners are lunatics, even if they’re no longer children. And, just like when they were killers, the pilots fall into two categories - reserved and considered, or feral and impulsive. And then, as always, there’s Buck Cleven.
He's holding court, sitting in a booth with Marge tucked up under his arm and Bucky lounging over the back of his seat. In this light, the three of them look silver and young, like the night Bucky had left for England, untouched and untouchable. Brady thinks he's far from alone in being a little bit in love with them.
Of course, because they're all a little bit in love with them, and because they're all well aware of who they are to each other, there's a lot of sideways glances being sent at the Bucks tonight. The men are careful, concerned, wearing their happiness for Cleven very lightly and watching Egan very closely, because for every letter Marge sent there was a month of nights where the Bucks span the room on its axis like a tiny wayward galaxy with two central stars.
No one says a word. No one has to.
They've booked out the bar, because they're not stupid, and the remains of the 100th is mingling with Marge's sorority sisters and book club girls and colleagues from the elementary school. The whole evening is hanging on a precipice - as much as Brady likes women, he knows from long, long nights of experience that adding them to a room with his men is always a recipe for chaos.
“Any bets?” Blakely says, passing them each a whiskey.
“Hambone is going to strike out hard the minute the one in the pink notices his wedding ring,” Benny says conversationally, “I think probably even odds she slaps his face.”
“Why is he even trying?” Brady asks, memory of the way Ham used to sleep with his wife's letters under his pillow coming straight back up.
“Douglass bet him he'd strike out,” Blakely says. “He's doing a lot better.”
“He's got skin in the game,” Benny reminds him. “If Hambone’s only playing for fun.”
Brady cannot believe they've made it to a point in their lives where they're drinking whiskey at a pre-wedding party and discussing girls. In a room of mothers' sons, it seems lightly insane that the thing he's most concerned about is whether or not his bombardier gets his nose broken by a second grade teacher called Millie.
“What about the two of you?” Blakely asks, raising an eyebrow lavisciously and gesturing to the wide variety of beauty on display.
Brady realizes all of a sudden that the thought has not even occurred to him.
Benny laughs. “Hey,” he says, and Brady thinks he's the only person who might hear how careful the words are. “We like these boys. Don't wanna ruin their night with unbeatable competition.”
Blakely flicks him the bird and sidles off to bother one of the bridesmaids. Benny puts his drink down on the bar, and lets his hand drop to his side, close enough so Brady could reach his wrist if he needed to. It feels a little bit like a fist around Brady's throat, and all of a sudden he knows he's lost.
“I had a girl,” he says quietly. “Or, a girl who could have been my girl, I suppose. Just after Christmas. Peggy. Took her out a bunch of times. Could have kept doing it, but…”
He runs out of words and Benny just watches him, doesn't ask, because they never do, and waits for the words to come.
“I couldn't find a way to make myself want to turn it into something,” Brady says, eventually.
Benny hums. “I've taken a few girls out since we got home,” he says, even though he's never mentioned it. “Took a girl to bed for the first time in years, when we got back, and it's been fine.”
They've never discussed taking girls to bed even though they're both well aware the other has done so. It's not something they've ever shared. This is the first time Brady's ever heard Benny talk about women, and he knows there's more he's not saying. He waits for it.
“I just can't imagine it anymore, Johnny,” Benny manages after a while. “The things I used to want. A girl in my bed, a wife, a life like that. I can't see how who I am now fits into that.”
It's everything Brady hasn't been able to admit to himself. There's the beginnings of him stepping out of his own body, but he's surrounded by his boys, he's safe. He brushes his fingers over the inside of Benny's wrist, because he thinks he can probably manage on just that much right now, and then picks up his whiskey.
“That's why I stopped seeing Peggy,” he says. “Didn't seem fair.”
“What was she like?” Benny asks, and there's something about the curiosity in his tone that's oddly warming.
Brady thinks back to her, the potential he deliberately walked away from, and realizes something that makes him feel a little off kilter. “Funnily enough Benny,” he says. “She looked a little bit like you.”
**
He drinks more than he usually would, partly because the boys keep buying him whiskey and partly because for the first time since getting home he feels like nothing dreadful is going to happen if he slips. Benny's right there, looking at him with that particular face that means that he thinks he's an idiot but that he doesn't really mind, and none of the men in this room are dead.
“Johnny, you've lost your edge,” Benny says, and elbows him.
“Yeah fuck you very much,” Brady responds lightly, and elbows him back.
Benny's no better off, and they're both somehow in much better shape than pretty much everyone else in the room, except predictably Cleven and shockingly Egan.
Bucky declares himself the best best man of all time and insists that to allow him to retain that title they all fuck off to bed. Brady escapes Blakely’s suggestive eyebrows and the bottle of whiskey he's holding, and follows Benny back to their room. It's dark and late and quiet, and Brady is drunk and happy for the first time in years. He gets changed and crawls into the bed, half asleep by the time Benny joins him. He wraps an arm around Benny's waist and pulls him back against his chest, face against his hair. Benny's hand wraps around his wrist. Brady breathes out.
**
He can't imagine how he ever slept without Benny right there.
He can't imagine how he's ever going to do it again.
It's fine. They have four more nights of this. It's fine.
**
For the first time since being back with Benny, sleep isn't deep and peaceful. Brady has strange, shifting dreams where he feels restless and unsettled, an itch under his skin that is familiar/unfamiliar, a need he can't place. It's not one of those dreams where he's lost something, it's not the dream he had in the Stalag all the time where he's running and Benny's on his heels and then he's not. It's something else, something hot and twisting, something that feels like it's got its teeth in him.
Either Benny's having the same sort of night or Brady's dreamed need is catching, because instead of Benny tucked under his chin like every other morning, Brady wakes on his back with Benny draped across his chest, thigh hitched over his hip and face pressed up against his neck. It's a position so reminiscent of nights with girls before the war that it takes Brady a second to orient himself and then he knows exactly what the need was in his dream.
Irritated, he blames Blakely and his suggestion of attempting to seduce one of Marge's many pretty friends, and rests his cheek against Benny's hair as he waits for the itch to fade and sleep to reclaim him.
The solid weight against his chest is more than he's used to, but it's Benny, and so the excess pressure comes with the perfect, perfect peace of knowing they lived through the night, again. The dream need bleeds away into the dark and Brady breathes steady and goes back to sleep.
**
The Cleven wedding is in the late morning, and there's still a short list of tasks for two men who should have been Curtis Biddick, so they wake just after dawn to the sharp knock of their wakeup call from the hotel concierge.
It's too early and they're too hungover for food, so they drink coffee in silence in the deserted hotel dining room, and then head off for the first item on the list, which is collecting the flowers from the florist and taking them to the church. They're quiet in the front seat of the car, easy in the knowledge that they don't need to say anything. The florist helps them stack the buckets of roses in the trunk and the back seat, and they're greeted at the church by a handful of Marge's friends who tell them to come in for a moment and have a cup of coffee.
Brady looks at Benny, who looks back, and thanks the girls and turns them down.
Their next task is to go and do one final taxi run to the station, and then to go back to the hotel and make sure all the boys are upright, dressed and prepared to behave like heroes, or nice young men, and not hooligans for Marge's family. They are Cleven's family.
Jack Kidd meets them out the front of the station, looking oddly young all rumpled from the overnight train. He went grey at the temples while they were in Germany, Brady realizes, but he's lost that horrible look of creeping despair that he wore after Bremen.
“Alright,” he says when he gets in the car. “How bad is it and is there any sort of plan in place?”
Benny snorts.
Brady wonders briefly how much he should give away, and decides on nothing. “Egan seems fine, happy for them, and when he appointed me deputy-best-man he promised I wouldn't have to hold his hand while he cried or sit on him to stop him objecting, and so far I believe him.”
Jack makes a deeply sceptical noise. “So there's no plan?”
“Well,” Benny says, “If there is, no one's run it by us.”
He makes the noise again. “Bad sign. And what the fuck is a deputy-best-man?”
“It's a Biddick job,” Brady tells him, because he's hungover and exhausted and sad and deputy-best-man could be a Kidd job, too, if you squint. “But I'm doing my best.”
**
The 100th outdo themselves, and are all milling around in the hotel lobby a good ten minutes before they need to leave for the church. Blakely looks like death, Hambone has the beginnings of a black eye and there's a conspicuous bite/bruise peeking out of Dougie's collar, but they're all there, dressed neatly and fully conscious. Small miracles. Mothers' sons. Brady adores them, it's unbearable.
Marge's side of the church is full of her family and friends. Buck's side is full of bomber crews. Brady and Benny take the front row, with Crank and Jack next to them, and it feels strangely right. Hambone sits down on Brady's other side, and elbows him in the ribs.
“Douglass is over there by the big drapes,” he says, very quietly. “You give me the nod and I'll give him the signal and he'll set them on fire.”
Brady turns to stare at him, for a moment completely lost for words.
“If you think we need to stop the wedding,” Ham says, deadly serious. “If you think we need to stop the wedding, or if Bucky starts to lose it, you give me the nod and Dougie will set the curtains on fire and we'll cut this whole thing off at the knees.”
There is so much going on in Brady's mind in that second that he can't decide what to say first. Benny seems to have no such problem, leaning over Brady and punching Hambone hard in the shoulder.
“I will cut you off at the knees,” he says, voice dripping with sincerity. “You leave this wedding the fuck alone, Hambone, or I will ruin your fucking life.”
It's the most vitriol Brady has heard from Benny since the last time they tangled with the RAF, and he's a little in love with him, just for a moment. Hambone looks sufficiently cowed. Brady turns in his seat, finds Douglass, and fixes him with a very sharp look. Dougie puts his lighter back in his pocket, and sits down. Brady resists the urge to put his head down on Benny's shoulder and weep. He used to be a pilot. Now he's a babysitter. Benny fixes Ham and Dougie with one last glare of his own, and then turns away from them both so that only Brady can see the way his shoulders shake with silent laughter.
Up in front, to the side of the altar, Bucky is fixing Buck's tie. They're looking at each other the way they always do, like no one else exists, and then there's a signal from someone, somewhere, and they snap to.
The first notes of the bridal march start, and everyone gets to their feet.
Marge floats down the aisle on her father’s arm in a cloud of white lace, and the look on her face is pure, triumphant joy. Brady looks over Benny’s shoulder at her, and feels something vicious curling in the pit of his stomach. He can’t get a handle on it, can’t work out what the fuck it is, can’t help himself reaching for Benny and wrapping his hand around his wrist. Up at the front of the church, the Bucks are watching their girl come down the aisle to them and their identical expressions give absolutely everything away. She gets to the top of the aisle, Buck steps forward, Bucky steps back, and everyone else takes their seats.
It’s much like any other wedding Brady’s ever been to, mostly, up until the pastor asks for the rings, and Bucky steps up. He’s got the box in his hand, but when the pastor reaches for it he sidesteps him, very subtly, and stands between the two of them. Buck goes first, taking Marge’s ring from the box. He puts his hand on Bucky’s arm as he does it, and there’s a moment where they’re looking only at each other and there’s no one else in the world.
Next to Brady, Hambone shifts in his seat. The whole 100th is tense in the pews. Brady holds his breath and doesn’t know what the fuck it is he’s waiting for.
Buck puts the ring on Marge’s finger, and then it’s her turn. She reaches for the box, exactly as Buck did, and rests her hand on Bucky's arm, looks up into his face with impossible, unbelievable devotion, and he looks back down at her.
“Holy shit,” Hambone breathes. Brady grinds the heel of his boot down onto Ham’s toes.
Marge gives Buck his ring, and Bucky steps back, sliding the box back into his pocket, and Brady holds on to Benny like a lifeline. The vicious thing in his stomach has teeth.
**
They make it through the wedding with no one setting anything on fire and then Buck and Marge are married and Bucky is smiling at the pair of them like this is what he’s always wanted, and the 100th are fucking baffled, but satisfied. They move across town to Marge’s parents’ house, and the reception starts.
Brady’s going through the motions, but the way that Benny is looking at him tells him he’s not doing a very good job. He doesn’t think anyone else has noticed.
“Johnny,” Benny says, voice pitched low as they stand at the makeshift garden bar. “Johnny, what do you need?”
Brady shakes his head. “I’ll be alright,” he says, and tries to believe it.
He’s looking around the garden, trying to work out what it is he needs, what it is he’s looking for. Benny puts a hand heavy and solid on Brady’s shoulder, and then there’s someone else on his other side.
“Little John,” Bucky says, and nudges him. “Hey, Little John, you with me?”
Brady looks up at him, eyes wide.
“Forty two,” Bucky says to him. “Counted the invites, counted them in the church, counted them just now. Forty two mothers’ sons, Little John.”
He breathes out. “Forty two mothers’ sons, and you and me.”
“And you and me,” Bucky repeats. “You good? DeMarco?”
“I’ve got him.”
Benny always has him. Brady breathes in, breathes out, takes a minute, leans into Benny by his side. Forty two mothers’ sons, all safe and whole and living. And Benny’s one of them. Benny’s right there. Benny has him.
**
He doesn’t remember going to bed that night, but wakes in the morning tangled up in Benny’s legs, curled together so tightly he thinks they might be bleeding into each other around the edges.
The thought is oddly comforting.
Three nights left. That one is less comforting.
**
Benny's quiet the next morning, quiet and jumpy and a little folded in on himself. Brady stands right by him in the elevator going downstairs and holds onto his wrist. The bruises on his own arm have faded. There aren't many people in the hotel dining room for breakfast, Johnny Hoerr drinking coffee with Crank in peaceful silence, and Brady and Benny sit down at their table and eat real eggs and drink real coffee and don't say much. Benny eats with just his fork, other hand on the edge of Brady's seat. Brady holds on.
They say goodbye to everyone who's awake, and Brady walks away from a building full of sleeping mothers' sons, back to his real life.
**
It felt like a long, long drive on the way across. The way back goes far too fast.
They stay in two crappy motels, crammed in tiny twin beds together, and Brady tells himself that he sleeps, that he doesn't lie there with Benny tucked against his chest and stare at the walls in the dark. He tries to think of something calm and peaceful, tries to think about the brilliant blue of the open sky, tries to think about nothing.
He has no idea what he actually thinks about.
**
They say goodbye on Benny's mother's porch and Brady drives one-handed with his fingers tight around his wrist all the way home.
“I'll speak to you on Friday,” he says as he leaves.
**
John Brady comes home and picks his life up. He teaches his classes and makes polite conversations with his colleagues and does the rounds of the boarding house in the night. He doesn't sleep.
**
He gets home on the Tuesday. He lies awake that night, and the next night, and on the Thursday night he gives up trying and sits in the chair in his little study, presses bruises into his wrist.
Vaguely, Brady remembers someone telling him the story of Crosby’s epic shift in the run-up to DDay, his 72 hours of no sleep, powered by coffee and amphetamines. Brady has coffee, but no uppers, and he wouldn’t take them if he did have them. By Thursday morning, he’s been awake for pushing 50 hours. The edges of his vision are blurred, he’s losing time, and he’s so tired he’s stopped feeling it. Quietly, leaning up against his piano in a break between lessons, he thinks it might be a miracle Croz lived to see the aftermath of DDay at all. His lessons pass by in a blur of earnest little faces and dissonant chords, and he remembers very little.
Halfway through Thursday, one of his students snitches on him, and the school nurse corners him at lunch.
“Mr Brady,” she says, all brisk concern, “I’ve got no doubt you’ll tell me that there’s nothing wrong, but I’ve had a great deal of practice with young men and you’re all terrible liars. So I’ll thank you if we can skip the prevarication, and instead you can just go straight to bed.”
There’s something about her face that reminds him of Buck Cleven in the Stalag insisting that Crank switches bunks with him, moving away from the drafty window so that his cough doesn’t get any worse, and so Brady doesn’t argue with her. He doesn’t go to bed, either, though. He knows he’s not going to sleep.
Instead he takes himself outside, into the quiet little courtyard garden reserved for staff. There’s a bench next to the roses, and he sits down, tips his head back, stares up at the sky. Not a single patch of blue. He presses his fingers into the bruises and can’t feel it at all.
**
Thursday night. Friday morning. For the first time in a long time, he thinks he might be about to die.
**
He speaks to Benny on Fridays. When the time comes for him to call, Brady’s passed Croz’s 72 hours by a fair handful, and he’s seeing things that aren’t there. It takes him three tries to get the number right, his fingers aren’t following direction. There’s the distant hum of a Mig in the back of his mind, he can see the trails out of the corner of his eye. He’s in the teachers’ lounge. He’s in America, he’s indoors, there aren’t any fighters. There aren’t any fighters. A whole wing’s worth of dead boys are sitting on the sofas with the maths department. The phone rings six times.
“Benny,” he says into the phone. His tongue feels thick and heavy, he can’t make his hands work well enough to put pressure on his bruises.
“Jesus, Johnny,” Benny says, “Are you alright? Are you drunk?”
He’s so tired he feels drunk. Feels wasted. Feels like he might die. “Just tired,” he says. “Haven’t slept since I got back.”
“At all?” Benny sounds horrified. “Jesus, Johnny, it’s been four days. You haven’t slept at all?”
He shakes his head, and then realizes Benny can’t see him. “Don’t think so. It’s alright. I’m alright.”
“You sound like you’re dying, Johnny.”
He feels like he’s dying. “I’m alright,” he says. “Are you?”
Benny makes a noise in the back of his throat that sounds a little like Meatball sneezing. “Christ. I’m fine! Not sleeping great, but I have slept. What the fuck are you doing?”
“Staring at the walls, mainly,” Brady tells him. He makes the executive decision to not tell Benny that he’s seeing things he knows aren’t there. He’s pretty sure Curtis Biddick is lounging by the coffee pot. “I think Biddick is here.”
“Jesus Johnny,” Benny says, yet again, and there’s a note of real panic in his voice. “OK. alright, listen to me, Johnny. Can you listen to me? Is there anyone in the room with you who you know for sure isn’t dead?”
Brady looks. “Yeah,” he says. “Pretty sure.”
Benny breathes out. “Alright. You got anyone there with you that you trust?”
“You’re not here,” Brady says.
“Fuck,” Benny breathes. “No, fuck, I’m not. Just… Just sit tight, Johnny. Find someone for me to talk to, give someone the phone.”
Brady does not want to go near the maths department. Tipper, the English teacher who was a paratrooper, is standing next to Biddick by the coffee pot, watching Brady with his one remaining eye, and he takes the phone as soon as Brady holds it out.
He leans against the wall and waits for whatever it is that Benny is going to do now. Eventually, Tipper gives him back the phone.
“You with me, Johnny?”
“Always,” he says.
Benny breathes out, a soft noise Brady usually hears in the dark. “Good man. Now, you do what Ed says, and get some fucking rest.”
“I’m sorry,” Brady tells him.
“Shut up Johnny,” Benny says, “Do what you’re told.”
Benny hangs up on him, and Tipper prods him with his cane until he gets up off the wall and makes his way to his room. He’s forced onto his bed, and handed the still unopened bottle of whiskey that Benny sent him for Christmas.
“DeMarco says you have to drink at least a quarter of that,” Tipper says. “And if that doesn’t work I get to physically knock you out.”
Brady stares at him.
“Which I was about an hour away from doing, anyway,” Tipper continues. “You look like you’re dying. Drink your whiskey, lie down, go the fuck to sleep.”
**
It works. Thank fuck.
**
He has no idea how long he sleeps for, but when Brady wakes up, Benny’s sitting in his study chair, reading the copy of Leaves of Grass they took with them when they left Stalag Luft III.
“Are you actually here?”
Benny looks up, startled, and then gets out of the chair. “Johnny, Jesus Christ.”
So he is actually here. “What are you doing here?”
There’s a moment where Benny just stares at him. “Johnny, you called me, sounding like you were dying, and you told me that you hadn’t slept in four days, and then you told me that you thought Biddick was there with you. Ed told me you’ve looked like shit for days.”
“I was just tired,” Brady tells him.
“You were hallucinating a dead man,” Benny says, very flat.
Brady decides against telling him it was dead men, plural. He feels like a naughty school boy, feels like he’s been caught doing something wrong, feels stupid and weak, and…
“I’m sorry,” Brady says.
“Don’t be sorry,” Benny says, and gets up and sits down on the bed next to him. Brady wraps a hand around his wrist. “Just never do it again.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Brady tells him.
“I know, Johnny. Just… Next time you go more than twenty four hours without sleep, will you call me, please?”
Benny looks worse than he did on their march. Brady decides not to tell him that he goes twenty four hours without sleep at least once a week.
“You didn’t need to come all this way,” Brady says.
Benny hits him, hard, right where he knows it’s going to hurt most, in the socket of the shoulder he dislocated bailing out of Mlle ZigZig. “Shut the fuck up,” he says. “I am more pissed at you than I have ever been, in my life. You’re a fucking idiot, and if you ever do that again I’m gonna tell your mom, and my mom, and Bucky Egan.”
It’s this last threat that lets Brady know he’s forgiven already. He still feels stupid. Deeply, deeply stupid. But Benny was scared, and not angry, and Biddick and the rest of the dead boys are gone, and he no longer feels like he’s dying.
“Thank you,” he says. “I’m an idiot, you’re a good man, and I’m sorry.”
“Alright,” Benny said. “You're forgiven. And I was going to ask if I could come down this weekend anyway,” he says, and now he looks hesitant.
“Really?” Brady asks him. “Why?”
“I've got a proposition for you.”
**
He knows he's going to say yes before he's even heard what it is. He's always going to say yes to Benny.
**
Benny lays it out for him very simply. A friend of his uncle is reopening a school a few towns over from where Benny grew up, and needs hands on deck to help get the buildings ready, and then to staff it. Benny's weeks away from getting his degree, his plan is to graduate, spend the summer getting the school set up, and then when they open teach English.
“I want you to come with me,” he says. “Finish out the semester and then hand in your notice and come with me. Come help me with the building work, come teach. There's housing on the grounds, we can pick a cabin and fix it up, live there and teach there. I…” Benny seems to have run out of steam. “I want you to come with me, Johnny.”
Brady stares at him. “Are you sure?”
“We're not alright, Johnny,” Benny tells him. “Neither of us are alright, at all. You're not sleeping and I'm severely fucked up and the only time I've felt anything like alright since we left England was last week, with you in arm’s reach. I'm putting my life back together. I need you to do it with me.”
**
Brady says yes. He was always going to say yes.
**
He survives the semester. He picks his life up. He puts his wheels down. He goes to Benny. Sometimes it feels like every journey he’s ever taken, his whole life, has been to Benny.
**
The school is on the outskirts of a small-ish town, about an hour from where Benny grew up. It’s been closed for a handful of years, since just before the war, and the buildings aren’t in dreadful shape. There’s a main school building with a hall and classrooms, a separate building for Brady’s music department, and two small boarding houses, plus a handful of cabins for staff. According to Benny, they’re anticipating mainly day students for the first term, but there will be a couple of boys boarding, and those numbers will increase after Christmas.
They’ve got almost three whole months, and the place to themselves. There’s work to be done, but it’s simple, nothing nearly as strenuous as pulling stumps or walking miles in the dark with no food while being shot at, nothing nearly as high stakes as dropping bombs from a tin can full of mothers’ sons at thirty thousand feet. They’re just sweeping out rooms, replacing floorboards, repainting walls, fixing windows. It’s easy, it’s peaceful.
And he’s got Benny.
**
Benny gives him a tour when he gets there, shows him the grounds and the buildings and runs him through the priorities list he’s drawn up. There’s a nervousness about him, like he’s trying to impress, like he’s concerned that Johnny will look at what’s in front of him and think he’s made a mistake.
“I picked us a cabin, it’s the furthest one out, because that puts us right on the woods, but if you don’t like it we can choose another one. Or you can get a place in town, there’re apartments available, you-”
The cabin next to the woods is perfect, a tiny cottage with two bedrooms and a tiny study. It hasn’t been lived in for years and has suffered a bit, so the first items on Benny’s priority list are getting it fit for them to live in. They focus on the bedrooms first, sleeping on bedrolls on the livingroom floor, tucked together like they always do, and Johnny sleeps, really sleeps, with Benny pressed against his chest, head under his chin, safe, where he belongs.
They finish the first bedroom, haul a bedframe and mattress from town in the flatbed of Benny’s truck, and they sleep in there, together. They finish the second bedroom, bring the second bedframe and mattress in, and Johnny stands in the doorway of what should be his room, and feels faintly sick.
“I don’t think I’ll sleep if I sleep in there,” he says, very quietly.
“I don’t want you to sleep in there,” Benny says.
Johnny wraps his hand around Benny’s wrist, and holds him tight.
**
They finish up their house, move on to the next one. They sleep curled together in Benny’s bed.
**
It all becomes very normal, very fast. They share the bed in Benny’s room, wake up in the morning and take it in turns to make coffee. They go for a run most days, chasing each other along the trails in the woods, making breakfast in the tiny kitchen of their house before they start work on whatever’s next on their list.
It’s cripplingly domestic. In his worse moments Johnny thinks it almost reminds him of the Stalag, the rhythm to it, the way every day follows the same patterns. In his better moments, he thinks it’s the happiest he’s ever been, in his life.
**
They’ve been there for a fortnight the first time Johnny has a nightmare. Foolishly, despite being someone who knows better, he’d thought maybe he was done with nightmares, but apparently not. It’s the same one he’s had a thousand times, the one he never really remembers, the one that’s just vague flashes of flak and people screaming and dead mothers’ sons by the time he wakes up. He’s quiet when it happens, he knows he is, because no one’s ever commented on it, but he wakes to Benny saying his name.
“You’re alright Johnny, it’s alright. You’re safe, we’re home, I’m here.”
He sits up, disoriented and a little lost still, and Benny wraps an arm around him. Johnny melts into him, because he is safe. He’s always safe with Benny. He never wants to be anywhere else.
“What was it?” Benny asks, when Johnny’s breathing properly again.
He shrugs. “It’s never anything specific. Bail-out bell, counting chutes, dying boys. Standard stuff.”
He’s shaking. Distantly, he realizes Benny’s stroking his back. It feels good, soothing, and when he turns his face into Benny’s shoulder, he can feel the press of lips against the top of his head. Benny holds him, smoothes soothing hands over his skin, kisses his hair and tells him over and over that he’s alright. Eventually, Benny shuffles them back down onto the bed, and pulls the covers up over them. They’re the inverse of how they usually sleep, Johnny tucked against Benny’s chest, arms tight around his waist, Benny’s cheek resting on the top of his head.
“Sleep, Johnny,” he says. “I’ve got you. Go to sleep.”
He wakes at dawn, still curled up in Benny’s arms, and lies there, staring at the ceiling he replastered, feeling a little bit like he got struck by lightning. Everything feels perfectly, perfectly right. Nothing makes sense.
“I can hear you thinking,” Benny says. “Spit it out.”
Johnny sighs. “I only ever feel right like this,” he admits.
It hangs in the air between them, all the things he means. He doesn’t have to say them, and Benny isn’t going to ask. It’s never been like that.
“I know,” Benny says. “Me too. Everything goes to shit without you. I don’t feel sane without you. Those months after we got back I was a fucking mess. I didn’t feel anything like myself until I was standing there with you on my mom’s porch. I’m only OK when you’re here.”
This isn’t news, not really. Johnny remembers the empty, cold feeling of waiting on the hardstand for Our Baby after Bremen, remembers the way the hope ate him alive as he walked through the gates to the Stalag. He looks down at his wrists, completely free of bruises for the past fortnight. And then he thinks about everyone else.
“It’s not like this for the others,” Johnny says. He knows it’s not.
Benny shifts in the bed until they’re lying nose to nose. Johnny can see every single one of his eyelashes. It’s overwhelming.
“It’s like this for the Bucks,” Benny says.
The words feel a little bit like coming out of clouds and seeing France.
“Do you think we’re like the Bucks?”
“Well, we don’t have a Marge,” Benny says, voice perfectly steady, as if they’re discussing who’s turn it is to go and get groceries. “And I don’t know how we’d go about finding one, or what we’d do with her once we had her.”
At this, Johnny laughs. “That’s a failure of your imagination, Benny.”
“Oh, shut up, like you’d have the first idea of how to make that work.”
Very briefly, he allows himself to contemplate the idea of sharing a girl with Benny. There’s something unsettling about it. The idea of sharing Benny with a girl.
“Apart from not having a Marge,” Johnny says. “Do you think we’re like the Bucks?”
Benny hums. “I don’t know. It’s not like we know anything about them for sure, do we? But we’re not like Ham and Dougie, or Crank and Murph. This is…”
“Yeah.”
“Did you know I caught them once?”
Johnny did not know that.
“In the Stalag. After their fight. Caught them kissing round the back of the combine.”
It’s strange to Johnny how easily he can imagine that, and at the same time have absolutely no idea how something like that could even happen. It’s not something he’s ever thought about. And now he can tell he’s going to have to think about it a lot more.
“So what are we supposed to do now?” Johnny asks, because he has no idea, and all of a sudden so many ideas.
There’s a flush creeping up over Benny’s cheeks, and Johnny can feel the smile building in the back of his mind. Everything about this is ridiculous. He has no idea if this is even something he can do. Except, this is Benny. There’s never been anything they can’t do.
Benny inches forwards. It’s not much of a kiss, really, in the grand scheme of kisses. It’s the lightest touch of lips, a simple first-date sort of kiss, even though they’ve been sharing a bed for weeks. It’s not quite like kissing a girl. But it’s not bad, either. It might actually be everything.
I could probably do that again, Johnny thinks. And so he does.
**