Chapter Text
The sound of mud sliding beneath shoes is akin to the sound of a wound. It is wet. Not damp, nor moist, but wet. Wet as blood. The sound it makes starts at the base of your foot and ends up clinging to every inch of your shoes as you slip through it. It sounds like pressing your bare fingers into a gash and splitting it open until the edges tear.
The man’s footsteps are heavy. He carries himself sullenly, hands attached to the straps of his pack and head half-hung. His helmet is slightly too big for him, as is his uniform. He is not an unfamiliar sight. Reluctant victims of the draft die every day.
It isn’t that Arthur Lester is against the fight. But his hands are long and delicate, tethered to a piano’s keys, not the curvature of a gun nor the thick handle of a knife. His body is thin and his eyes are tired. He was a musician, once, long before even the draft came for him. A good one. The world might’ve even known his name, once, had it not been for the war. That, and several other things.
But regardless of his own cowardice, he knew not how to escape the draft, and he hasn’t wanted to be alive for a long time, anyways. So his feet slick through the mud like it’s a wound and carve a foul path over the trenches, and he carries on.
There hasn’t been much fighting in the past few days. Every man is thankful for this. Their army is stretched thin even with the compulsory draft. The year is nineteen-forty-four, and Arthur Lester has been fighting for a year.
Beside him stands another man. Both of them are tall, but the second man is taller by some inches. He’s broader, more muscular, though malnutrition haunts every man in their procession. He turns to the shorter man with a grin. He seems to know how to tread through the mud more carefully than Arthur Lester, though that same sickly wounded sound of gore emanates up from every one of the men’s treads.
“Looks like rain,” murmurs the other man. His voice is gruff and unimpressed. He’s stating the obvious – the sky above is dark and damp and the air smells like petrichor just as much as it does gunpowder.
“Ah.” Arthur’s voice is distracted. He clears his throat and looks up at the sky, before letting out a snort and shaking his head. “I don’t think I need to be a private investigator to know that, Parker.”
The other man – Parker – laughs heartily. It is too nice a laugh to belong in a place like this, but it comes from him regardless, and he slaps his hand on Arthur’s back, laughing harder when the smaller man scowls. “Just wanted you to get your eyes off the dirt, my friend. You can’t be finding anything interesting down there, can you?”
In contrast when Arthur laughs it is exactly the bitter sort of thing you’d expect from a battleground. “More interesting than gored-out corpses and burning buildings? No, Parker, I suppose not.” His head tips upward, right as the first droplets of rain begin to fall.
It quickly becomes a downpour, and rather than mud, they find themselves slipping around in water. There’s no way they can continue uphill through the forest from here but turning back would be just as treacherous. The ground high above them has enough rocks and trees to prevent a mudslide, and so the men set about making camp. There are about twelve of them, each one of them with dark eyes and skin made shades paler by the war.
A tarp is fashioned above them between the branches of several trees. They don their coats and lay their bedrolls out beneath them, uncaring for the way the mud immediately soaks them. The rain is foul, but the wind is stagnant, and a fire is soon lit beneath the tarp. A few of them have cigarettes or tobacco, and one of them has a flask of foul-smelling liquor from the last time they’d entered a town. It had been rubble, but an old general store had remained. Arthur and Parker had gone in together, but left soon after the first body was discovered.
The two of them lean together and pile both of their coats onto their shoulders. They look ridiculous, and were it not wartime the gesture would be received oddly by the others. But it’s cold, and so many of the other men do the same, bodies pressed together in front of the fire as they try to chase the dryer heat. It’s a hard fire to keep lit, what with the mud beneath them, but they manage well enough on desperation alone.
The rain does not let up in the following hours. It doesn’t let up when morning comes, either, and so their sergeant orders them to take their chances and continue upwards. The mud sounds different now. It suckles at the bottom of their shoes like something hungry. The rain is so thick and the runoff is so intense that it is impossible to prevent it from seeping between their laces and over the leather tongues of their boots. Each man’s feet are repetitively soaked.
Arthur’s hair is dark. It clings to his face, stringy and thinning with stress, starting to go gray at the temples despite his young age. It was auburn-brown once, but has turned to a color as dark as the mud in such a damp, dirty place. He reaches up as overgrown bangs slide over his eyes again, pushing them back under his helmet with a scowl. Water runs over his lips and into his mouth.
Their destination is in sight. Just over this patch of forest lies the Western front. Every step a wound in the earth, they march.
“Identify yourself!”
It’s half past sunrise. The corporal sees him first from his position at the front of the lines. Arthur and Parker both snap to attention at the sound of shouting, and the rest of the men, paranoid and exhausted, do as well. Several guns are raised. Those that do not raise their weapons still recoil from this new presence, distrust immediate in their eyes.
The man that emerges from the treeline looks like a wolf. His hair is long and tangled and black, sheets of it pouring in waves down his naked trunk. He is nude from the waist up, wearing little more than a pair of torn, bloody trousers on his legs. He has an animal look to him that has nothing to do with his features. A face that would’ve once appeared almost regal now looks warped and broken, with a crooked nose and scarred lips. His skin is a brown that would’ve been rich and brown – not unlike that of the Natives of America, or the inhabitants of Mexico – if it wasn’t turned pale by stress. He is tall and muscular despite his emaciation, and his arms are raised in surrender.
“Wait!” Parker pushes forward past Arthur, ever a curious soul, and attempts to mediate the threat of immediate obliteration. “Hold your fire, dammit. Where are you from, stranger?”
The man seems grateful to have not been shot on sight. His eyes are wild and frantic. Again the comparison to a wolf returns to Arthur – eyes bloodshot and wild with fear, cheeks sunken with hunger, beard scraggly where it clings to his jaw – and he peers anxiously out at him. Their eyes never meet, though Arthur can tell the other’s color. A bright, almost preternatural brown, nearly yellow in the light of their corporal’s torch.
“America. I’m-” the answer seems to be the first thing he can think of. His voice is deep and rough, like he’s been coughing fitfully. Sure enough, a moment later he doubles over, muffling a nasty sounding hack into his elbow. “I’m American, I’m- I’m friendly. We were ambushed. They had- they had gas, I- fuck. Fuck!” Each man takes a step backwards, save for the Sergeant, whose grip on his gun tightens and eyes flash wildly. The man seems to settle at the threat, shrinking backwards like a beaten animal. “They- they killed most of us, took- took prisoners of the rest of us, I’ve been there- I don’t- I don’t know how long. Please. Please. What day is it?”
“Do you have a name?” Asks the corporal, torch flashing through the rain to center directly on the man’s face. He really does look sickly, sclera feverishly red and lips pale as they tremble.
It takes him a long moment to respond. The wind is dead but the rain hasn’t ceased, and the sound of it pouring is enough to drown out all of their panting breaths. There’s the rattle of gunfire, far off in the distance, and the spell of silence is broken.
“I don’t-” he glances around at all of them, one by one, as if one of them might have the answer. His eyes land on Arthur’s, though only for a moment. “I don’t know.”
They give the man a shirt and a coat. He has shoes and trousers, and for now that will have to be enough. They tie his legs together enough that he can still walk but cannot run. They bind his wrists, though his hands remain in front of them. He is captive, but he isn’t treated monstrously. No one knows him. No one can confirm his story – some sort of injury stealing away his name, his identity, any way for any of them to know him. That makes him dangerous.
They carry on through the day with the stranger near the middle of the line so he can be watched. Arthur is a few steps ahead of him. Parker, too, though his usual curiosity seems dampened by the exhaustion of carrying on. It’s Arthur’s turn to be curious, shaking his head when Parker questions his slowing pace, coming to walk beside their captive instead.
“You said… Something about a gas. What gas?” The man looks hesitant to answer, though be it because he’s caught in a lie or because the answer is monstrous, Arthur isn’t sure. Gaseous attacks had been far more common in the Great War, and Arthur counts them lucky for that. Fighting against an ephemeral, unfightable force, something that you cannot shoot or contain… It sounds deeply unpleasant.
Rain drips off the man’s crooked nose. He sniffs, and it slides up his nostrils, forcing him to cough. “Nerve, I- I think. It was…” He swallows, pain evident in his eyes. Arthur finds himself sympathetic, though not enough to abandon all caution. “I only remember bits of it. We were… There were maybe five of us. I have a head wound, and I think that may be part of why there are gaps in my memory.” He raises his hands, parting his hair near the back of his head to show a gash, scabbed over with time but clearly painful.
Arthur grimaces sympathetically. “That looks…”
When the wolfish man chuckles, it’s like Arthur’s skin has been dragged across gravel. His hair stands on end at the dark sound, though he can easily blame it on the chill. “It’s painful, yes. But the gas…” He tips his head up, brow creased in painful introspection. “It was thick. We thought it was ash at first, but there hadn’t been any fire, or any heat to indicate something burning anywhere near. The gas was like smoke. It moved in thick, coiling strands, and clung to our skin like the rain. Only- it didn’t slide off, didn’t wash away. It burned.”
He whispers that last word, shivering. Arthur can see remnants of where the man’s skin has blistered along his left arm, though much of it has healed over enough where he isn’t sure if it’ll even scar. “I was faster than the rest of them. Grabbed a rag and doused it. Breathing in water like that… It was deeply unpleasant, though I doubt the gas would’ve been more enjoyable. Everywhere I stepped, no matter who I approached, they were all burning. Thick swaths of skin, sloughing from muscle, from bone, until there was no intervention that would’ve saved them.”
The story is sickening. Several of the other men have paused their chatter to listen. Arthur hears Parker utter a curse under his breath, and when he looks over, the man looks sickened by the revelations. “I…” Arthur turns back to their captive, brow drawn upwards. “I’m sorry. That sounds… Truly awful.”
“It was,” replies the man after a moment, nodding. Then- another beat of silence, as rain drenches his face, giving him the appearance of a man crying. “But I’m alive, friend. And hopefully I’ll know who I am soon.”
Arthur’s lips twitch into a slight smile. He hasn’t smiled properly in a very long time, let alone since he was drafted, but the expression remains until the stranger sees it, until he studies his face and nods. “That’s the spirit. Won’t be a John Doe for too much longer, if the weather clears up.”
They’ve made good headway by nightfall. And indeed, the weather does start to calm. But the men are exhausted, and setting up a proper camp and resting before they head out again is more important than spending the night trudging through the bloody mud. A fire is erected between a clearing of trees, using what little kindle they can find that isn’t completely drenched. Each of the men offers to share a portion of their rations, what little they have, with their mysterious captive. There is no bedroll to spare for him, but the corporal offers his coat for him to lie down on.
They sit by the fire, all thirteen of them. Arthur can’t suffocate his curiosity, and finds himself looking up at their captive several times. Each time he’s staring into the fire, eyes a molten gold that doesn’t seem to match his horribly bedraggled appearance. His cheeks are freckled. His hands are thick with scar tissue, and he appears to be missing several fingernails. Beneath the few that still exist there’s a dark mixture of mud and blood, darker than his skin and certainly darker than the lighter color of his palms.
When Arthur looks back up, he realizes he’s been caught. The man stares at him, an eyebrow raised as if to ask if he needs something, clearly unimpressed. Arthur looks away, sufficiently scolded, but-
“Don’t mind him. He’s just curious.” Parker comes to his rescue with the sound of his spoon scraping his bowl and words muted through the last of his food. “I think we all are, friend, though Arthur here could probably do with keeping his eyes to himself.”
Arthur scoffs, cheeks burning. Never one to let Parker win without a fight, he immediately sets off with a retort. “You’re one to talk, you bastard. Parker’s a ‘private eye,’ and he’ll never let you forget it once he’s told you. Once he’s told everyone.”
Several of the men snicker at Arthur’s ribbing. Parker scowls, but even he isn’t immune to the lightness of the banter, sticking his elbow into the other man’s side until Arthur laughs and shoves him away. “A private investigator, huh?” They turn back to the stranger, whose worn eyes spark with slight interest. “Maybe you can help me find my name, friend. I seem to have misplaced it.”
“Have any leads for me other than ‘tall, dark, and dirty?’” The men around them begin to laugh anew, and even the stranger manages a low chuckle, a little less miserable than before. If there’s one thing that Arthur knows about Parker, though, is that he is the patron saint of lost causes. The look in his eye seems to indicate real curiosity. “I’m only half kidding. Do you remember anything else of note? How many men were with you, your title, how long its been?”
The John Doe hums, turning back to the fire with a little wrinkle on his brow. He looks young. His crow’s feet aren’t sunken and his lips aren’t lined with frowns yet, even though the war certainly ages them all. “I remember… They called me private, the men who took me. They- they mostly spoke German, but one or two them knew some English. The things they called me…” He purses his lips. “Well. Let’s just say they were more about the color of my skin than anything else.”
“Fuckin’ Nazis,” someone grumbles, and words of assent are shared. The man chuckles wryly, before his frown deepens, eyes narrowed as he tries to suss out any information of importance.
“There was… one thing, that they kept calling me. King, I think. Over and over again in their rough English, and maybe in German, too. Koo… Koo-neeth, I- I think.”
“I know that word. They use it to mock the British quite often, I think- something about… Es lebe der König. Long live the king.” Arthur clears his throat as he tilts his head back up, shrugging at the strange glances the other men give him. “I’ve seen it written somewhere, though I don’t remember where.“
For a moment Parker seems more concerned with thinking than anything else. The other men continue to converse around them, mostly making fun of the language and the people who speak it in crass, crude words. Arthur and their captive are more concerned with Parker, though, and the expression of intense scrutiny on his face.
“It almost sounds like… Like a call name. The sort of thing someone would call another soldier, if they were known for something. Sounds like you might’ve had a reputation, friend. Is that what we should call you?” His voice is teasing, but not unkind. Parker’s always like that. He ribs and he pushes and he jokes but he never pushes too far. He’s too kind for that, despite the fact that Arthur knows for a fact he can be dangerous, too. “King?”
The man snorts, shaking his head. “No, no… That sounds rather conceited, I think.”
“Not feeling particularly aristocratic, then?” Arthur posits, a grin spreading across his face. Parker snorts, and the man rolls those handsome golden eyes, but he has a good natured look to him regardless.
Despite the humor, Arthur can tell that Parker’s curiosity has yet to be sated. He leans back and looks up to the sky in thought, chewing on a wad of tobacco that sits at the back of his mouth. He gnaws at it as Arthur watches, waiting to hear whatever conclusion he comes to.
“How many men were with you? Did you say?” When the man answers – six – Parker nods, as if starting to understand. “That’s not many. No squadron I can think of would be that small. Traveling like that is dangerous, and an ambush is bound to happen.”
“I don’t appreciate what you’re insinuating-”
“I’m not insulting you, friend.” Parker knows how to twist words around like a weapon. He knows how to rouse someone’s anger and how to deescalate a situation just as delicately. “On the contrary, I might just be paying you a compliment. The confidence to travel in such a small group, the code name, the fact that enemy soldiers knew what you were called… You might’ve been part of some sort of special forces group. I’d take a guess and say you might’ve even been rather important.”
The man sits in silence for some time, considering the idea. Something flashes in his eyes, and it isn’t only from the fire. Perhaps acknowledgment, or awareness, the knowledge of a memory making itself known. Or perhaps Arthur has been staring too long, and the whites of the man’s eyes are blending in with the gold.
“I still don’t remember. And King or Kon-ich or whatever else it is doesn’t sound like my name, so…” He waves a flippant hand, then seems to recede into himself, tucking the jacket closer around his broad shoulders. It hardly fits. Arthur can recall seeing a myriad of strange scars across his bare chest before he had been offered proper clothes.
Both Parker and Arthur are quiet too, for a bit. Arthur sighs and scratches at his stubbled chin. “Well. I suppose John Doe will have to do for now, won’t it?”
The trenches are foul and bloody. The mud from the forest doesn’t hold a candle to it. Where stepping in that had been like opening a wound, walking in the trenches is like living inside of one. The ground beneath and on either side of you, the makeshift ladders up into no-man’s land, the sky above you, the very air you breathe. It’s all a festering wound, an orchestra of dying men’s moans to harmonize with the howling wind and whizzing gunfire.
John grunts as he slides down beside Arthur. “Anything?” Asks the smaller man, peeking his head up from where he’s busy reloading his rifle, careful not to stick anyone passing with the bayonet. His lips pursed in a firm line, John shakes his head no and sighs. Parker wilts where he sits on the other side of Arthur, and then curses colorfully, pulling his helmet off in his frustration.
In the days since John Doe’s arrival he has provided too strong an asset to remain bound. They’d made it to the front and immediately given him a gun and uniform, regardless of the fact that no one around seems to know him. He is a ghost, lost in a sea of other ghosts, all of them waiting around to die. He hasn’t gained back any of his weight, and he remains gaunt and haunted, but he’s started to look more like the rest of them.
“Twenty minutes. I gave him twenty minutes,” Parker seethes. His voice is angry, but his eyes are tense with grief. Anthony Cliff, a man a few years their senior, had insisted upon running up into no-man’s land in an attempt to see how much further the other side has moved. He’d been given twenty minutes before he needed to be back. It’s been forty.
“I’m sorry, Parker.” Apologies mean very little when men drop dead every day. But Arthur still tries, with genuine sympathy in his voice. He squeezes his friend’s forearm and tries not to look him in the eyes, well aware that he’ll see a dead-eyed, angry look there that always makes his stomach turn.
John sighs, just as weary and resigned as the rest of them, but a determined man nonetheless. “There’s a chance he’ll still be back. He might not have remembered to carry his watch on him.”
There’s gunfire in the distance. Any number of men could be dead to that sound. None of them hold out hope.
Arthur places his hand on the mud behind him and makes to stand. He slips in the damp earth, and curses, but is quickly steadied by John’s hand on his lower back. He shivers, then thanks the man curtly, before walking the short distance to where their sergeant sits.
The trenches deviate in size in certain places, wider to accommodate places to plan. Their sergeant, a sour-faced older man by the name of Mickey Davidson, purses his lips as Arthur approaches. “Any news?” he asks, in the hopeless sort of voice that suggests he expects nothing at all.
Arthur shakes his head, watching the man visibly deflate. “John went up to search for him but saw nothing. There were… isolated gunshots, sir. I don’t expect us to see him back.” His voice is sincere and apologetic, but it is lacking in much grief. There isn’t room for grief in a place like this. Grief is something experienced by poets and artists, not the men fighting the wars. Grief might be felt years later in the embrace of your wife or kneeling in a confessional with God as your only witness, but to feel grief for every dead man here would kill them all.
Davidson dismisses him with a wave of his hand and continues discussing the next steps with their corporal by the light of the lantern shared between them. Arthur returns to Parker and John and finds them in quiet discussion. Parker looks up at him with a weary smile. John is expressionless, as he so often is. It can be off putting at times, but Arthur has been told his own expressions are often less than friendly, and so he has no room to judge.
“Tell him about it, Arthur. Blood and sand.”
He raises an eyebrow and allows a chuckle to pass through his weary lips. He rejoins the two men, sitting on the opposite side of the wall so he can face them both. “Ah. The infamous ‘blood and sand.’ Parker insists it’s a wonderful drink, but I’ve never had it.”
“And you… Have a lot of experience drinking?”
Arthur laughs at John’s question. It’s blunt, and would likely be seen as disrespectful if he hadn’t realized by now that John often doesn’t think before he speaks. Nodding good naturedly, he stretches his long legs out, knocking his foot against Parker’s in greeting. “Oh, I’m practically the world champion at it, my friend. If I wasn’t drafted I’d likely still be home in Arkham, pickling my liver.”
Despite the war all around them and the sloshing mud all below, Parker manages a laugh, too. Arthur continues, looking at Parker with a warm smile on his lips, eyes glazed over as if he’s lost in a memory. John studies him as he stares, eyes focusing on each individual feature on his face. “Blood and sand,” he continues, “is a drink. A scotch based drink with lots of fancy ingredients that I haven’t committed to memory-”
“Scotch, vermouth, cherry, blood orange-”
“Yes, thank you, Parker,” Arthur retorts, haughtily shaking his head. “It is a drink that Parker insists upon ordering for me, someday. When the war is over, at least, because I think we have left our vermouth and blood orange behind in Arkham.”
All three of them share a bit of laughter, then. When it stops, John is the first to speak. His features are a little softer now as he relaxes into the story and the banter. “So you two knew each other? Before the war?”
They both shake their heads, but Parker is the one to respond. “No, just both came from the same sort of place. Probably ran into each other while… Pickling our livers, isn’t it, Arthur?” A wide grin spreads across his face, and he kicks at the toe of Arthur’s boot. “But it’ll certainly make it easier once we’re shipped back, eh? I can imagine it now. What was the bar, Arthur?”
“Jack’s. Jack’s bar, I- I think.”
“Jack’s bar. We’ll walk in, two young, handsome soldiers, arm in arm and drunk already. We’ll walk up to the bartender-”
“Jack.”
“Yes, yes, Jack the bartender, and I’ll order us two blood and sands.” Parker’s huge grin begins to fade a little. It’s melancholic in the aftermath of his daydream, before he reaches out and taps John’s shoulder. “Could make that three, you know.”
What an odd thing to imagine. They’ve known each other for a long while now. John has only just entered their life, crash-landed through the tree line, a nameless amnesiac with nothing to call his own but his boots and his pants. But Arthur feels himself begin to smile at the idea. “Yes. I think that would be nice, wouldn’t it be? Much easier to shell out for a tip with all three of us.”
“A… A tip?”
“Yes, John. It’s a- a bit of extra money, something you give to your bartender for good service. Or, if you’re especially drunk, to apologize for throwing up on their bathroom floor later,” Arthur explains, tacking on that last part when Parker raises his eyebrow at him. “Well, how about it? I can’t say that old Jack’s is fit for a king, but…”
John growls good naturedly and shakes his head. He’s shaved and trimmed his hair since joining them, getting it closer to military regulations. His jaw is like a brick protruding from his head, thick and sturdy, with a slight cleft at the chin. His stubble grows fast, leaving him with an almost permanent 5 o’clock shadow.
“Sure, Arthur. Why not. If it gets you off my back, then…”
All three of them begin to laugh again, at that. For a moment the brown sky above them doesn’t feel so oppressively dark.
Arthur dreams.
He’s had strange dreams all his life. He used to awaken to night terrors in the orphanage, which led to quite a bit of contention between the nuns about whether or not he was predisposed to sin. The majority of them believed he was, especially with the strange demeanor he presented. Glassy eyed, barely verbal, far too curious for his own good.
The dreams have persisted into adulthood. Some sort of latent reaction to trauma, he supposes a doctor might say, but Arthur has never seen one about this. They are after all only dreams, and he doesn’t fancy being locked in an asylum for a few odd nightmares.
Arthur.
Tonight the dreams are strange. He stands in front of a place that is so dry in contrast to the trenches that he immediately recognizes it as a dream. The sand is kicked up by the wind, and when it is, it is hot. Arthur hisses, stumbling back and clutching his cheek where a sudden burning sensation crops up. He lifts his hand, then, and stares in wonder as the flesh begins to blister.
Arthur-
He takes a stumbling step forward. If stepping in mud is like opening a wound, this is like wading through ash. Like a crematorium has been upended at his feet, granules of hot sand sinking into his boots, burning. He hears a voice calling to him. It echoes through his head, sounding an awful lot like-
The sand whips around him once again. It forms thin tendrils and caresses his body, sharp and sinuous all at once. It latches onto him like tentacles, like it has a mind of its own, tugging at his flesh until it feels like it might tear. It crawls up his face, and he cries out as it begins to fill his nose. As a thin arm of sand reaches forward and presses into his eyes-
Arthur!
“Arthur!”
He snaps to wakefulness with a howl of agony. His face feels like its been set on fire. He instinctively reaches up to scratch at it, but finds his wrists restrained by strong hands. “Stop. Stop! Don’t- don’t touch it! Arthur! We need to run!”
It’s John. His voice is frantic, and for the first time since meeting him he sounds afraid. Arthur feels the man yank him up to his feet, and he tries to sort his memories. He’s a light sleeper, so he’d taken up the spot of lookout and fallen asleep, anticipating hearing anything approaching in the night. He’s above the trenches, where the air is a little less thick with death. He cannot see. John is yanking him up.
“Jo- John- hh- I-” he’s tugged up and away, and John lets out a groan of pain. He can feel his skin burning as he is urged to run, blobs of color and light eclipsing anything useful that his eyes could see. Milky tears drip down his face, and he chokes on a panicked sob, holding back nausea. “John! Wh- where- I- Parker-”
John stumbles and turns to him. There’s the sound of ragged breathing, of someone’s panicked breaths being muffled by smoke, or something else in the air. Gas. This must be what it feels like, Arthur begins to realize. “John? I- where is-”
“Gone.”
He’s yanked forward again. Arthur stumbles after him, instinctively following along. He can barely see, and the air is thick. John tugs at his wrist again, begins to say something, and Arthur digs his feet into the mud, going pale with fright.
“Gone. Wh- what- what do you- what do you mean, gone?” he inquires shakily, before thick gas begins to lick at his heels again, and he cries out, stumbling forward. He pitches towards the ground, but John gathers him up by the arms and yanks him into the air. He thinks of Parker. He thinks of kind brown eyes and floppy black hair and crooked teeth, two of them missing from a bar fight a decade ago. He thinks of blood and sand, and their promise, and all three of them pooling in for a tip. “We- no. John. No, we need to go- to go back.”
For a moment the only sound is both of their breathing. Arthur pulls his arm away from John’s grasp. He starts to turn, and John grabs him by a fistful of his shirt, yanking him back. “No,” he says, and his voice is cold.
“No?” Arthur gapes in confusion. His expression quickly turns to one of rage, and he digs his heels into the mud, yanking himself away again. John curses, and Arthur turns on him, furious. “What do you mean no! Parker is- Parker’s my friend, John, your- your friend!” He feels like he’s choking. Why is there no gunfire? Why is there no screaming? Why is no one responding as John and him bicker? Why is it all so silent, and why can he not see? John reaches for him again, but the moment his fingers brush against his arm, Arthur slaps it away. “Fuck you- fuck- fuck this,” he heaves, spinning on his heel.
Only to realize he has no idea where the trenches are.
It’s dark and he can barely see. His eyes are in agony, and no matter how much he blinks, his vision won’t clear. Arthur chokes on a quiet, fearful whimper. He hears John’s heavy footsteps approach, and an arm wraps around his front. For a moment he wonders if the man is going to embrace him.
The arm tightens around his throat. Arthur gasps, then writhes, air suddenly stolen from him. “J- Jo- hhng!” His legs kick, and he scratches violently at John’s wrists. If he had his wits about him, perhaps he’d understand. Perhaps he’d know that John could snap his neck and kill him in an instant, but is only cutting off his air instead. All he feels now, though, is the white-hot pain of betrayal before it all goes dark.