Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

California – January 1918

The house was too quiet again.

Not peaceful, it was never that. This was the kind of quiet that pressed against his ears, made his skin itch. A performance of stillness, always on the edge of snapping. Even the tick of the grandfather clock in the hall felt too measured, like it was pacing him.

Vincent sat hunched at the edge of his desk, shoulders tight, thumb flicking over the tuning dial of his battered receiver. He had the window cracked open just an inch, and the breeze stirred the lace curtains. The air tasted faintly of copper, dust, and blooming flowers from the garden outside.

Behind him, the clatter of plates drifted in from the dining room. The quiet symphony of expectation: silver tapping porcelain, cutlery aligned just so. His mother’s voice, careful and melodic, reciting the day’s schedule to someone who wasn’t listening. She hadn’t called for him yet. She was waiting for him to come of his own accord, to be polite and punctual and polished, as he had been taught.

His father had asked him something earlier, something about the telegram from his uncle, or the state of the market. Vincent hadn’t answered. That silence earned him a welt across the back of his hand, sharp and practiced. He couldn’t remember what the question was now. He didn’t think it mattered.

The newspaper on his desk still smelled like ink, the pages folded unevenly, smudged at the corners where he’d held it too tightly. WAR IN EUROPE – AMERICANS CALLED TO DUTY was stamped across the front in heavy type, bold enough to bleed through to the other side. He’d read the article three times. It hadn’t said anything new.

A recruitment poster had gone up near the town square. He’d passed it that morning on the way to the telegraph office. Join Up. Serve Your Country. Be a Man. Red, white, and sharp like a slap. The soldier in the image looked like a hero, chin high, eyes hard, clean lines like he’d never been touched by anything real.

Vincent couldn’t stop thinking about it. The way it looked like a film still. How everyone else in the square had glanced at it with curiosity, or pride, or white-hot urgency. Vincent had just stood there, staring, waiting for something in him to shift. Nothing did.

He just felt hollow. Like someone had scooped him out and left the shell behind.

The receiver on his desk hissed.

It had been making that sound all morning - faint, crackling, a restless sound in the wires. He kept it tuned low, one ear always half-turned toward it. The set wasn’t anything special; just a clumsy, stained contraption assembled from salvage and patience, perched beside the window like an old birdwatcher. He’d built it the year before, taught himself to listen. Not just to the signals, but to the spaces between them. The silences. The almosts.

It wasn’t enough.

He hadn’t told anyone, but he’d already filled out the forms. He’d gone down to the recruiter’s office in the next town over, alone, coat collar turned up, teeth clenched. Said he was eighteen. Wrote the date of birth twice and didn’t flinch. His signature was a little uneven. He hoped no one noticed.

It hadn’t felt brave or heroic; it had felt inevitable.

It wasn’t that he wanted to die. That would’ve been easier, somehow. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to live, either. He just couldn’t stand the idea of staying still, of staying like this. Of being quiet, unnoticed, unfelt. A ghost in pressed shirts and polished shoes. A boy praised for saying all the right things, while screaming silently between the lines.

Out there, where the noise was real, where men bled and shouted and became legends, maybe he’d be enough to register. Maybe he’d burn loud enough to be remembered.

There was a letter from Princeton on the hallway table. He hadn’t opened it. He didn’t need to. He already knew what it said, and worse, he already knew what it expected.

He adjusted the dial again, softer this time. A low hum bloomed in the static, throaty and strange. Not a word, not quite. But something. A breath. A signal. A sound that could almost have been laughter, if he were dreaming.

He closed his eyes and let it fill the room. Let it settle in his chest like a pulse.

Somewhere, someone else was listening too.

He was sure of it.

— Alastor —

New Orleans – January 1918

New Orleans never really slept; it just played dead when it got bored.

Alastor stood at the edge of the canal, arms folded, watching the water catch gold from the streetlamps. The city hummed behind him - jazz bleeding out of windows, the clatter of carts and cats and late-night teeth. Somewhere, a couple was arguing. Somewhere else, someone was dying. The sounds overlapped so neatly it might have been music.

He liked nights like this. The city was too loud to think in daylight. But here, just before midnight, everything made sense. The filth, the dark, the performance of it all.

He smiled, mostly for himself.

Earlier that afternoon, the paperboy on Canal Street had shouted headlines about war until his voice cracked. Uncle Sam Wants You! Enlist Now - Serve with Honour! Alastor had paused just long enough to glance at the poster behind him. A sharp-jawed soldier stared out over an imaginary battlefield, chin high, rifle gleaming.

The men gathered near the café took it seriously. They puffed their chests and used words like duty and honour with trembling mouths. Most of them had never held a weapon. He doubted they could even look someone in the eye and lie properly.

Alastor had already enlisted.

The office in the next district hadn’t asked too many questions. Not when you smiled right, spoke clean, wore clothes that didn’t give you away. The sergeant behind the desk was tired and bored; Alastor knew how to work with that. Said he was twenty. No one checked. They barely glanced at his forms.

The uniform they issued him didn’t fit. He planned to make it work.

It wasn’t patriotism, whatever that meant. That was a word for white boys with fathers and futures and college waiting on the other side. It wasn’t revenge, either - no one had wronged him badly enough to deserve the energy. There was no grand tragedy behind his decision. No aching wound, no flag draped over a coffin.

It was simpler than that.

He needed to get out.

And the war, for all its noise and blood and smoke, offered something precious: a way to disappear while being seen. A stage. A story he could write himself into, rather than be written out of.

Back home, they called him strange. Too quiet. Too sharp. A boy with no father, no fear, and too many teeth in his smile. The other boys avoided him unless they were trying to prove something. The men avoided him because they could feel the wrongness underneath the manners, the way he watched people too closely and never flinched when he should have.

They thought he was soft, or odd, or dangerous.

He liked that.

Alastor turned from the canal and began walking. His boots echoed against the wet cobblestones, each step measured. He moved like someone with nowhere to be and no interest in rushing.

He passed by closed storefronts, gas lamps still burning low, a sleeping cat curled in the window of a bakery. His neighbourhood was quiet, at least on the surface. That was the trick of New Orleans: you could live on top of ghosts without ever knowing their names. He pulled a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed it neatly. The burn in his throat was clean, almost sharp enough to count as a feeling. He exhaled slowly and watched his breath fog in the lamplight.

His bag was packed already. Not much to it. A pocketknife, his mother’s comb, a threadbare scarf, a book of old French poems he’d stolen from a man who never missed it. Everything else could be replaced, or wasn’t worth keeping.

He hadn’t told anyone he was leaving. There’d been no reason to. His mother passed barely three months prior, and no one else looked at him long enough to notice when something shifted. He thought someone might try to stop him - an auntie, maybe, or that one older boy from the club who used to flirt with him like it was a dare. But in the end, no one had really been watching.

Tomorrow, he’d leave. He’d wear the uniform, shoulders back, eyes forward. He’d get on the train with the others and let the roar of it all swallow him whole. War wouldn’t make him good. It wouldn’t make him honourable. But it might make him something - and that, at least, would be more than nothing.

The street curved, and he paused at the corner. A church bell rang once, low and tired. He tilted his head, listening. Far off, a radio crackled behind someone’s curtain. He caught a hint of it - just static, the kind that filled up empty spaces. The kind that felt like company when you didn’t want to be alone.

He smiled again, smaller this time.

Somewhere, the world was already burning.

And Alastor wanted to hear it scream.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Midwest United States – Military Training Camp – February 1918

The train ride had been long and colourless. Rows of hills and trees and nothing. Boys packed too close, all trying to sound older than they were. One had a harmonica and wouldn’t stop playing it. Another claimed he’d killed a man already. Vincent didn’t speak. He stared out the window and let the sound of steel and track fill his head until it was hollow again.

The platform was chaos when they arrived - too many boys crammed into too little space, all elbows and shouted names, uniforms being tossed like bread loaves from open crates. A sergeant with a voice like gravel barked something unintelligible over the din, and no one listened. Someone tripped over their own boots and went sprawling into the mud, laughing like it didn’t matter. Someone else vomited into the gravel beside the train wheels, pale and shaking. No one offered to help.

Vincent stepped down carefully and was nearly trampled by a pair of boys chasing after the same cap. One of them shoved past without looking. The other had blood on his chin and didn’t seem to notice. He clutched his pack tighter, adjusted his collar, and slid into the line without being told to. It felt like disappearing. That suited him just fine.

Camp was even louder than he expected.

Nothing moved quietly. The wind tore through the canvas tents like it was looking for something to punish. Men shouted names, orders, insults - sometimes all at once. Whistles screamed through the air like birds in pain. Boots slammed into dirt with mindless rhythm, and someone was always banging metal against metal like they thought it might fix something. Even the birds overhead seemed to scream rather than sing, ragged and shrill, like nature had been drafted too and was just as bitter about it.

The barracks reeked of damp wood, old sweat, wet socks, and something sourer underneath. Dust clung to the floorboards like skin. He was assigned a bunk at the back - top row, loose frame, thin blanket. Someone two beds down snored like a dying horse. Another boy talked in his sleep, muttering names Vincent didn’t recognise. He didn’t ask.

The first night, Vincent barely slept. His skin itched from the sheets. The bunk beneath him creaked with every breath of the boy below, and the latrine stank like something had died in it weeks ago and been poorly buried. He lay on his back with his arms folded tight across his chest and stared at the slatted ceiling until morning.

He wasn’t made for this. Not really. The clothes hung wrong on him, and the boots rubbed his heels raw. His hands blistered from drills and his shoulders ached from carrying gear made for broader men. The mess food tasted like ash and salt. The other recruits jostled each other with sweaty elbows and laughter that rang too loud in the mornings. He avoided them. Not carefully. Just naturally.

No one seemed to notice.

They thought he was cold, maybe. Or soft. He didn’t care. He spent most evenings on his back staring at the ceiling, tapping his fingers against his thigh in sequences, counting the beat between.

Dot-dash, dash-dot-dot-dot. Dash-dot-dash-dot. Over and over.

Morse felt like a secret somehow. A rhythm only he could hear. It made sense in a way nothing else did - clean, coded, exact. He picked it up fast, faster than anyone else in his unit. When the instructor asked for volunteers to learn wireless ops, he didn’t raise his hand. He just looked up, made eye contact, and nodded once.
They reassigned him the next day.

He was given a pair of gloves and sent to a quieter tent, one filled with wires and coils and tables bolted into mud. The smell was different there - less of man, more of machine. He liked it. There was order here. Buzzes and clicks and the steady, calm chaos of communication. Things made sense when you reduced them to signal and reception.

He excelled quickly. Too quickly, maybe. Someone muttered something about a pretty-boy lapdog, all brains and no blood, loud enough to earn a few laughs but quiet enough to avoid consequence. Vincent didn’t respond. He didn’t need to.

He didn’t explain what he liked about it. Not the soft knock of the code, like rain on a roof he could almost remember. Not the faint scent of ozone and dust that clung to the gear, settling into the fabric of his sleeves. Not even the feeling that somewhere out in the dark, across distance and fog and broken wires, someone might answer. Might already be listening.

He didn’t have to explain. No one asked.

During drills, they worked him hard. Just because he was clever didn’t mean he was spared the mud. He stumbled often - too lean, too pale, too unused to running with his breath caught behind his teeth. One day, in the rain, they marched for hours without pause, the ground turning to sludge beneath their boots. Vincent's legs gave out near the end, not all at once, but gradually, like a fuse burning down. He fell hard, knees sinking into soaked earth, the weight of his pack dragging at his spine.

For a moment he thought he might just stay there, sink into it, let the storm bury him.

But he crawled the last fifty metres, arms shaking, boots dragging behind him like dead limbs. The sergeant didn’t shout. Just looked down at him like he was a stain that hadn’t come out in the wash.

He didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

At home, he’d built his receiver from spare parts he wasn’t supposed to take - resistors from the workshop, an old brass dial he’d stolen from a junked wireless. It was the only thing he’d ever made that worked the way it was meant to. He kept it hidden beneath his bed, wrapped in cloth to muffle the hum. It didn’t pick up much - just static, the faintest trails of Morse from towers so far off they might’ve been imagined - but it helped him sleep. It had a pulse, that thing. A heartbeat in wood and wire.

He would curl around the signal like it might speak, fingers resting on the casing as if the warmth of it could settle into his bones.

He missed it now. Missed the sound. Missed the weight of it beneath his bed, the knowledge that something was there, even if it didn’t speak.

Now, he lay awake with his muscles screaming and wondered what would break first - his body, or his mind. The days blurred. His knees ached, his fingers blistered, and his thoughts came in fragments. Words clipped short. Names without faces. Code tapped out behind his eyes, even when he tried to sleep.

Two nights later, the signal room sent him to run a coded burst to the southern line. The regular operator had fallen sick, and they were short-staffed. Vincent said nothing - just stood when called, slipped on the gloves, and sat at the transmitter like he’d always belonged there.

It was the first time he’d handled the machine alone and the code came out clean. Sharp. Effortless. It was the first thing since arriving that had felt right.
The sergeant made no comment, but someone passed him a second pair of gloves. That was as good as praise, here.

One night in the mess hall, he sat alone at the edge of a long table, methodically eating a grey-brown heap that might’ve once been stew. A group of signal runners gathered near the middle - boys from the ridge station, louder than they needed to be.

He hadn’t been listening. Not really. But something in their voices changed, shifted from laughter to tension, like they were telling a ghost story without realising it.

“Half-feral, that one,” one of them said, leaning in. “Grins at you like a dog, never says much. Got a real rich boy accent, too. Shame he’s not exactly white, eh? So they sent him off with only half of his training. Kid didn't even flinch.”

Another chimed in, grinning around a mouthful of bread. “They liked him though. Higher-ups think he’s useful. Took out a private in one swing, didn’t even get a scratch. I heard even now the bastard sings while he runs, like it’s a game to him.”

They laughed. The table buzzed with it.

Vincent didn’t laugh. He didn’t move. Just kept his eyes on his tray, though his spoon had gone still in his hand.

He stored the name when it was mentioned.

Alastor.

He tapped it out later that night. Just once. Then again. The sequence felt strange on his fingertips - sharper than the others, like it didn’t want to be spoken, only signalled.

He told himself it didn’t matter. That boys like that came and went all the time in places like this. Boys with fists and charm and no care for wires or rhythm. Still, he tapped the name again.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot…

The code stayed with him as he drifted to sleep. Not the boy. Not the rumours.

Just the pattern.

He hadn’t met him. He hadn’t even seen him. But already, something in the signal had changed.

And Vincent had always known how to listen.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – February 1918

Mud sucked at his heels with every step, thick and angry, like it wanted to keep him.

Alastor didn’t stop. He ran.

The message was tucked safe in his chest pocket, the paper sealed, words bleeding through just enough to look official. He didn’t know what it said. Didn’t need to. His job was to get it from point A to point B without dying.

So far, he’d been very good at it.

The trench ahead yawned like a wound in the earth. Sandbags slumped against the rain, and everything smelled of iron and piss and rot. A shell had hit nearby the day before - half the front line was newer than it looked. The boys in it weren’t. They looked old. Tired in a way no one that young should be.

He vaulted the edge with a practiced roll and landed clean in the muck, knees bending to take the impact. Someone swore nearby.

“Christ, boy, warn a man next time,” a corporal muttered, dragging a cigarette from his lip and blinking like he wasn’t sure if Alastor was real.

“I’d have waved,” Alastor said lightly, “but I was running for my life. You understand.”

The corporal stared. Alastor smiled. Not warmly. Just enough.

He handed off the message to a waiting officer, saluted out of habit, and stepped back into the shadowed wall of the trench, where the water pooled and the rats ran.

The officer barely looked at him. Most of them didn’t. The ones who did tended not to twice.

He lingered a little longer than necessary, letting his breath even out, watching the men fold back into their patterns - reloading, murmuring, writing letters they might not finish. One boy was smoking with shaking hands. Another kept glancing at a photograph tucked into his breast pocket like it might crawl out and save him.

Alastor turned and walked the line for a bit before heading back out. A few men watched him pass - one narrowed his eyes, another muttered something under his breath. A younger boy flinched when Alastor’s boots splashed too close.

He kept walking.

In a strange way he liked the runs. The noise. The thrill. The way time stretched thin when bullets cracked somewhere too near. He sang as he ran, softly, under his breath. Not loud enough to draw attention - just enough to keep the beat in his head. Old melodies, mostly. Folk songs. Cabaret snippets. Lullabies he barely remembered learning.

It helped him pace his breath. Helped him forget the stench, the ache, the corpses that turned up like weeds when it rained too hard.

Sometimes, when the wind was just right, he imagined the trenches sang back. Not in music, just in tone. The scrape of metal, the rattle of boots, the hum of something still living beneath all this death. It made him feel more awake. More alive.

They’d started calling him something behind his back. He didn’t know what. Didn’t ask. He could hear the shape of it when they thought he wasn’t listening. The kind of word said too quickly. Too nervously.

He let it be.

Let them guess how he’d taken down that private three weeks ago, during training. The one who’d dragged a boy behind the mess tent and come out alone, smiling. No one had asked questions when the man’s body turned up in the latrine pit two days after that with his throat torn open like an animal had done it.

They asked fewer when Alastor returned from his next run with dried blood on his sleeves and nothing in his eyes.

He didn’t explain himself. Not to them. Not to anyone. He had a smile and a name and a role, and that was all he needed. Let them call it madness, or luck, or cruelty. It didn’t matter what they believed, as long as they didn’t stop him.

He was fast. That made him useful. And in war, useful things were rarely questioned.

Still, he could feel it - how the edges of him didn’t blur like everyone else’s. How the others folded into one another, traded smokes and cards and whispers about girls. Alastor stood apart. Not above. Not below. Just elsewhere. Watching.

Always watching.

He passed a cluster of men near the fire pit. They were eating quietly, until one of them muttered something he couldn’t hear. Another snorted. Someone else glanced over, then looked away too quickly. They didn’t laugh. Not properly. It was the kind of sound people made when they wanted to seem unbothered. He recognised it.

He didn’t slow. He just adjusted his sleeves, squared his shoulders, and kept walking like nothing in the world could touch him.

Back at camp, the air buzzed with the low thrum of radios being tested, pulses of signal drifting between tents like ghosts looking for homes. He passed a group of boys huddled over a deck of cards. One looked up as he passed. Flinched, then tried to laugh it off. The others didn’t laugh with him.

Alastor winked. Just once. Just enough.

He ducked into the supply tent, peeled off his coat, shook the worst of the wet from his boots. The world was still damp around the edges. His legs ached. His left wrist had started to swell from the last impact. He didn’t mind. It meant he was alive.

He sat on his cot and ran a hand through his hair, fingers catching on tangles. His skin was chapped, his shirt still damp at the collar. He could hear shouting somewhere outside, but it was distant now. Background noise. Unimportant.

The camp was quieter in the evenings. Still full of noise, but different. The kind that filled up empty space rather than trying to break it.

He tilted his head.

Somewhere across the camp, a transmitter clicked to life. Not loud. Just a faint rhythm, dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash.

Someone was testing code, probably one of the new ops boys that just arrived. The signal wavered, then steadied. Not a full message, then. Just practice.

Still, the pattern caught him.

He tapped his foot in time with it, not realising he was doing it until the signal stopped and the quiet filled in around it until the operator began again.

Alastor didn’t know the code. Not yet. But something about it stuck. Lingered in his bones like a hum you couldn’t shake.

He lay back on his cot and closed his eyes.

Didn’t sleep. Not yet.

Just listened.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early March 1918

He’d expected noise, the training camp had prepared them for that, but not like this.

It wasn’t the bombs; he hadn’t reached the front yet. Not properly. Those came as echoes, deep and distant, like someone striking the earth with the flat of their hand. It wasn’t the shouting either, though there was plenty of that, in English and French and some urgent language he didn’t recognise. It wasn’t even the screaming, thin and occasional, that came from the medical tents set too close to the mess line.

It was everything else.

Boots on wet stone. Shovels in ruined earth. The grind of wheels and the whine of pulleys and the ever-present breath of the wind through broken rafters. A man weeping behind the barracks where no one would see. Someone laughing too hard over something not funny. The sound of a priest tearing up a letter.

It didn’t stop. It didn’t even pause.

Vincent stepped off the transport with stiff legs and a pulsing headache. The ruins of the village loomed around him, brittle and grey. Once it had been a town - stone homes and narrow lanes, a chapel still standing in pieces on the hill. Now it was just bones. The only colours left were brown and blood. Some walls still bore the faded stencils of shop names. A few had bullet holes in them, small and round, like warnings.

He’d barely slept on the way over. The train was cold and the boat worse. One boy jumped the railing in the first hour at sea. No one even knew his name but some of the others snarled about him being a coward. Vincent had sat alone through the crossing, fingers resting against the wall of the cabin, counting the shiver of the hull as it split the water like code.

He knew he was close now. Not just to the front but to something else. Something unseen but waiting. It made the air burn behind his eyes, like recognition without memory.

The signal tent was at the edge of the camp, stitched up from canvas and iron poles. Inside, everything hummed.

He was assigned a corner table, a battered headset, and a receiver patched together with tape and prayer. The officer in charge didn’t even look up when he handed Vincent the code sheet.

“Test every frequency on this list. Twice. No guessing. Don’t improvise. We’ll know.”

Vincent didn’t answer. He took the list and nodded once, then sat down like he’d always been there. Like he belonged.

The air inside the tent was warmer than outside. Damp, electric. The kind of warm that made his fingertips twitch. He reached out and touched the dial like it might whisper something back.

Static. Sharp at first, then softer. A hiss, a crackle, a breath.

He closed his eyes and let the sound settle. Let it wrap around his skull like wire.

There were two other operators in the tent. One looked maybe thirty. The other had eyes that didn’t blink often enough. Neither spoke to him.

That was fine.

He tested the first frequency. Then the second. Most of them were dead or filled with overlapping chatter - snatches of code, orders, jokes not meant for him. But one channel buzzed in a strange rhythm. Interference. He logged the anomaly and moved on.

That night, he found the wireless in his cot’s footlocker. A gift, someone said. A spare. It looked like it had been built by six different men on different days. The casing was wood but the dial was brass, pitted and scratched. One corner had been scorched. He turned it over and found a name carved faintly into the underside. Not a real name. Just a set of initials and a date. Long enough ago that whoever had owned it probably wasn’t coming back for it.

Vincent loved it immediately.

He stayed up late reworking the tuning. Adjusting the wires. He used thread from his kit to bind a loose coil and scavenged a knob from an unused lamp in the corridor. By the time the lights went out, he had it humming. The static curled through the tent like breath in winter air.

He lay still for a long time, listening to the room settle around him. Boots dropped. Someone muttered in their sleep. The wind clawed at the canvas.

And when the tent was quiet, truly quiet, when even the insects seemed to have stilled, he reached under the blanket and tapped it out without thinking:

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

It wasn’t a message. Not yet.

Just a name.

He didn’t expect an answer.

The next morning, he passed a group of runners headed out along the eastern road. They were lean, soaked in mud. Laughing. One of them looked back as they passed - a flicker of teeth, a flash of red in the dark. Vincent didn’t catch the face. Only the feeling it left behind.

Unease. And something sharper.

In the mess, someone mentioned the name again.

“Kid’s half ghost, I swear. Came in grinning, shoes covered in blood. Asked for seconds.”

Another voice, lower. “They send him where they don’t think anyone’ll come back. But he does.”

The laughter that followed wasn’t kind. But it wasn’t mocking either.

It sounded like awe dressed up in fear.

Vincent didn’t speak. He didn’t look up. But his chest tightened, just slightly, like a wire had been pulled through him. Not panic. Not even fear. Something quieter. Stranger.

A name, repeated in rooms he’d never walked. A boy who didn’t cry, didn’t break, who ran messages through blood and trench smoke and came out the other side still singing and smiling. It sounded made up. Or like a character from one of the stories his uncle used to tell - heroes with no pasts, only forward motion.

But they were talking about someone real. Someone close.

And somehow, it felt like a signal meant for him.

He didn’t know what the boy looked like. Only the pieces people left behind - grins and blood and ghosts. He tried to picture him and couldn’t, not quite. Just impressions. Teeth in the dark. A voice cutting clean through gunfire. Red in the mud.

There was something about that. The sharpness. The wrongness. The fact that even here, in a place built on violence and hierarchy, this boy didn’t fit. Couldn’t be placed. Couldn’t be contained.

Vincent wasn’t used to wanting things. Not out loud. Not in a way that might be noticed. But the idea of someone else out there - someone his age, someone who might be more myth than man, who didn’t flinch when the world asked him to-

It twisted something inside him.

Something that buzzed too close to want. Or hunger.

That night, he returned to the cot early. The receiver was already humming when he touched it.

He tapped out the name again.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

Alastor.

Then, slowly, deliberately, he added his own.

Dot-dot-dot-dash. Dot-dot. Dash-dot. Dash-dot-dash-dot. Dot. Dash-dot. Dash.

Vincent.

He closed his eyes.

He imagined another boy in another tent, lying in his own cot and staring at the canvas. He imagined him hearing it. Smiling, maybe. Tilting his head. Not responding, but recognising something in the rhythm. Some secret pulse.

Or not. Maybe it didn’t matter.

Maybe the point was in the reaching. In being heard by someone, even if you never knew their face.

The response was silence, but it wasn’t empty.

Like the pause between chords. Like breath before speech. Like the crackle of vinyl before the first note. It held something there.

And for the first time since arriving - among strangers, across oceans, soaked in mud and static - he didn’t feel entirely alone.

He adjusted the dial and started again.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early March 1918

The rats were bolder tonight.

Alastor watched one dart beneath the cot across from his own, trailing a half-eaten biscuit like it had somewhere to be. No one else noticed. The boy who slept above it had long since stopped waking at the sound of scurrying.

He sat cross-legged on the floor, still in his undershirt and braces, sleeves rolled and collar loose. The tent smelled of old canvas and smoke. Outside, the night was soft with drizzle, soaking the world in silence. Not real silence, the kind with breath and crackle beneath it. The kind that hummed.

He liked the quiet like this. Not for peace – it never offered that – but for its clarity. It made everything sharper. Easier to hear. Easier to feel.

He was listening to the signals again. The sound had become familiar by now, and recently he could hear it coming not just from the signal tent but from one of the other sleeping areas as well.

Morse hadn’t been part of his training – not properly. After the incident with the private, they’d stopped bothering to teach him much at all. Just put him on the next ship over, handed him a fresh uniform, and decided whatever he already knew would be enough. He was fast, after all. Obedient, if you squinted. And nobody wanted to be alone in a room with him for long enough to ask questions.

But a few weeks ago, while digging through a supply crate that hadn’t been sealed right, he’d found a folded sheaf of papers – tattered, smudged, but legible. Letters, patterns, basic cipher structure. The Morse alphabet scribbled between code phrases and handwritten corrections. He read it once, twice, then burned the shapes into his skull. It was easy. Like learning a second voice.

So when it continued – those knocks in the static, just past midnight – he recognised it. Not the code, not at first. Just the rhythm. The precision. The feeling of someone reaching out, deliberate and unseen. Each night, the signal returned: steady, exact, too clean to be weather or error. Like a knock from underneath the world, asking to be let in.

At first, it came alone.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

Alastor.

He didn’t need to translate it. He felt it first, the weight of it, the attention tucked inside.

But later, he did decode it. He scratched it into the dirt behind the latrine, boots dragging each mark until the shape made sense. Until the name revealed itself plainly. Not a message. Not a warning. Just a name. His name.

And that made something shift.

Because this wasn’t random. Wasn’t a misfire or a drill. It wasn’t the wind playing tricks through wires or a ghost in the line. Someone was sending that. Someone close. Thirty yards away, maybe less. Tapping his name into the dark like a secret invitation.

He lay back on the floorboards once and just listened, arms folded behind his head, letting the name settle into his chest like smoke.

Alastor.

Alastor.

He didn’t know what it meant – not yet – but he knew it meant something. No one said names like that here. Not out loud. Not unless they were counting casualties. But someone had chosen his. Spoken it carefully, coded it cleanly, as if it mattered whether or not he heard.

He never answered. Just turned his head slightly toward the hum, foot tapping out the rhythm in the dark, as if his body knew something his mouth didn’t yet. He let it echo through him until it faded, until the tent fell quiet and the static dissolved like breath on glass.

It came again the next night. And the one after. The same name. The same rhythm. The same impossible clarity, as if the boy on the other end wasn’t asking anything at all, only waiting to be known.

Then, tonight, it changed.

There was a pause. A space, like a held breath.

Then another name. Shorter. Sharper.

Dot-dot-dot-dash. Dot-dot. Dash-dot. Dash-dot-dash-dot. Dot. Dash-dot. Dash.

Vincent.

Alastor startled. That addition to the signal wasn’t random. It wasn’t stray. It was a conversation now. A loop. A line drawn straight through the mire.

He whispered the name once. Vincent. Just to feel it in his mouth. It tasted like iron and winter and the echo of a gunshot over water. Something sharp. Something real.

He didn’t know who the boy was. Didn’t know his face, his voice, his rank. Only the code. Only the rhythm. Only the way the signal came clean through the static, night after night, steady as breath. Like someone speaking without words, trusting he would hear it anyway.

It made something twist in his chest. Not warmth. Not quite. Something stranger. A tension that felt like the moment before a song begins – when everything is holding still, waiting for the first note.

This wasn’t like the voices he heard in passing – officers barking, sergeants snapping, boys trying too hard to sound brave. Those were just noise.

This was intention.

This was signal.

And Alastor, for all his mess and madness, had always known how to listen.

Across the tent, a boy snored like he was dying. Another muttered nonsense in his sleep. Somewhere beyond the tents, someone was crying, muffled against their sleeve.

Alastor leaned back on his elbows and stared at the ceiling. The waxed fabric above sagged slightly, dripping at the seams.

He smiled. Not because he was happy. Just because he could.

Vincent.

He wondered what had made him choose the name. Whether it was his own or just a title. If he had dark eyes. If he had a voice like his name promised. If he knew what it meant to call something out into the dark and wait.

It wasn’t just the code. It was the precision of it. The clarity. Whoever he was, he tapped clean. Measured. Not like a soldier. Like someone used to being ignored. Like someone who’d learned to speak without raising their voice.

It was interesting.

He sat up slowly, dragged a hand through his tangled hair. His fingers came away damp. Not sweat. Just rain leaking in at the seams.

He hadn’t planned on taking an interest in anyone here.

But something about this boy - this signal - had cut through the weeks of monotony and violence and noise. Most people blurred together. Smiles without names. Faces without shapes. But not this one.

This one had come looking.

Alastor pulled his coat off the cot and shrugged it on, though he wasn’t cold. He stepped into his boots, laced them tight, and slipped out into the night without waking anyone.

The rain had softened to mist. Everything looked silver under it - the dirt, the trees, the broken teeth of the village skyline. He passed the latrines, the mess, the wreck of a church someone had half-demolished and never cleared. The signal tent stood apart, faintly glowing from within.

He didn’t go inside.

Instead, he sat against the ruined stone of a well a few metres away, one boot propped on a loose stone, elbows resting on his knees. From here, he could hear the faint buzz. Not the words. Not the meaning. Just the echo.

He imagined the boy sitting just inside, hunched over his own receiver, headphones clamped too tight, eyes sharp. He imagined fingers moving without hesitation.

He imagined him.

And for the first time in weeks, maybe longer, Alastor felt curious.

Not suspicious. Not wary. Just that soft prickling under his ribs that told him something unusual had stepped into his orbit. Something worth tracking.

He tilted his head.

Could’ve been a trick. A bored operator. A fluke. But he didn’t think so.

The name had been real.

He dragged a piece of charcoal from his coat pocket and scratched something into the stone beside him. Not a word. Just the code.

Dot-dot-dot-dash. Dot-dot. Dash-dot. Dash-dot-dash-dot. Dot. Dash-dot. Dash.

It looked better like that. Not written. Marked.

It would be easy to reply. To tap back a name, a shape, a signal of his own. But that wasn’t how he did things.

Let the boy keep guessing. Let him keep calling. Alastor wasn’t ready to answer yet - but he was listening. Closely.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid March 1918

The receiver suddenly crackled deafening static into his ear. Vincent didn’t flinch, barely reacted beyond a soft sigh as he felt his headache come roaring back.

He sat hunched over the transmitter table with his jaw locked and his spine curved like a question mark, eyes fixed on the dial though he’d already checked it twice. The morning light leaked pale through the canvas seam above his shoulder, catching the frayed edges of the code sheet pinned beside him. He didn’t need it anymore.

Outside, the world cracked and muttered as it woke. Boots scraped against gravel, harsh and aimless, as men shuffled through orders they hadn’t yet received. The soft wet slap of mud churned under cart wheels echoed like meat dropped from a height. Someone was smoking behind the tent - cheap, bitter tobacco rolled tight between shaking fingers, smoke curling against the canvas like it might claw its way inside.

He stayed where he was, headset clamped over his ears, breath held as if that might make the static speak. It fizzed like water on a fire, bright and uncertain, then dulled into something that refused to answer. Not tonight.

He exhaled. Not a sigh, exactly. Just breath, returning to his lungs now that hope had left.

Slowly, he stood. The ache ran from the base of his spine to the back of his neck, his limbs dragging behind him like dead weight. Joints popped in protest, loud in the quiet. He hadn’t been sleeping, not really. The bunk was too short and the nights too long.

As he stepped outside he watched the smoke coming from the cookfire trenches in thin grey whisps, curling low over the mud. It didn’t rise anymore. It sagged. Everything sagged.

The mess line crept forward in shuffling inches, boys silent and slack-jawed, heads down like cattle who’d seen the bolt too many times. One of them coughed wetly into his sleeve and kept walking. Two near the front were arguing over sugar rations - fists clenched but unraised. One had a swollen lip. The other stared through him like he wasn’t there. Neither looked like they remembered why they were angry.

Somewhere behind the latrines, a voice cracked out a verse of a song about a girl in Alabama. It trailed off before the punchline.

The trench behind the far ridge had collapsed again during the night. Another shelling. Not heavy enough to warrant panic, just enough to bury. They’d found someone’s arm an hour after dawn, half-pulled from the dirt with the sleeve still intact.

Someone - probably one of the new boys - had drawn tally marks onto the side of the latrine tent in soot and pisswater: four lines and a fifth slashed through. Three neat sets. Fifteen men. No names.

No one talked about it aloud.

But they counted. Always counted.

Vincent passed a group of engineers crouched over a splintered spool of wire. One was ankle-deep in muck, swearing softly with every tug, trying to coax the line through a knot of broken trench wall. His hands were bare. The skin at his knuckles had split from cold and grit, blood black at the edges. Another sat hunched beside him, singing low and off-key through cracked lips.

It was like this most mornings now. The war was a beast that groaned and bled and pressed its weight into the bones of the earth until even the trees leaned away from it.

How were a group of young men ever to survive it whole?

He drifted toward the edge of camp where the wire split off toward the south post. His boots stuck in the mud more than they used to. He was lighter than when he’d arrived, he hadn’t noticed until his belt began to hang loose around his hips.

“Signal corps,” someone barked nearby, tossing him a coil of copper. “Take this down to Ridge Two. Captain wants an extra line set before nightfall.”

He nodded without looking up. Took the wire. Moved.

The path twisted through cratered earth and broken fenceposts, past what might once have been a barn. Now it was a husk of wood and rot, with a bent horseshoe nailed into nothing.

He walked. His hands itched. The copper was cold against his palm.

The trenches and front lines were a mile from camp but eventually he could see them just ahead - temporary, shallow things, more ditches than defence. The men there were fresh, young, twitching like pulled threads. One boy jumped at the sound of a shovel hitting stone. Another scratched absently at a lice bite until the skin came away under his nails.

“Careful,” one of them said as Vincent passed. “There’s been movement east of the hedgerow. You see anything funny, run. Don’t play brave.”

He nodded again. Kept walking. Eyes forward. Breath tight.

At first, it was nothing. Just the wind, maybe, or the shift of shadow where the scrub thinned. A flicker at the edge of vision. A shape where there shouldn’t have been one.

Not a threat.

A runner.

Not close. A dozen metres off, maybe more, cresting the ridge with no warning, no herald. Just there, sudden and sharp, like the crack of glass underfoot. A blur of brown and red and something too fast to be proper. Not graceful - too fast for that. Just momentum in human form, teeth bared to the sky.

He was moving like the world couldn’t catch him. Like he’d already outrun it once and didn’t mind trying again.

Grinning.

Mouth wide, open, gasping, but not in pain. Like the air tasted good. Like every breath was its own triumph.

His coat was soaked through, dragging slightly at one side where the weight of rain and something darker pulled it low. Blood on his sleeve, fresh and tacky, slick against the curve of his elbow. One boot untied, laces flapping with every stride like they were trying to keep up.

Vincent stopped walking.

The coil of copper slipped from his hands and hit the ground with a dull metallic thump, the wire unspooling into the mud like entrails.

His breath caught.

It was him.

It had to be.

Even at a distance, even blurred by fog and motion and disbelief, there was no mistaking the shape of it. The feeling of it. The grin carved like a dare across his face, the impossible lightness of someone who didn’t fear falling because he’d already made peace with the landing.

Vincent's heart kicked hard against his ribs, not like fear but like recognition. Like a key sliding into place.

The runner crested the hill and was gone.

Just like that.

One last flash of red, a sharp peel of laughter trailing behind like smoke after gunpowder, and the figure disappeared over the ridge, swallowed by distance and war.

Vincent stood there, alone on the path, throat tight, pulse thudding in his ears.

Mud soaked into the seams of his socks, cold and slow, but he didn’t move.

Couldn’t.

Not until a voice rang out behind him - sharp, impatient. Real.

“Signal boy! You deaf?”

The shout cracked through him like a whip.

He blinked. Breathed. Swallowed.

Bent to gather the wire with hands that weren’t steady anymore.

The rest of the walk passed in silence.

That night, he sat at the receiver with his fingers curled against the dial, not tuning. Not transmitting. Just listening. As if the boy from the ridge might speak again, somehow. As if he already had.

He didn’t send the name.

Didn’t need to.

He closed his eyes and saw a smiling face in the fog.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid March 1918

Alastor didn’t remember the run ending.

One moment he’d been sprinting down the ridge with laughter in his throat and the sky pressed sharp against his teeth, and the next he was back at camp, boots squelching in the muck, fingers numb, coat soaked clean through.

He wasn't out of breath. Not really. His lungs burned a little, but that was from the gas flare two days ago.

He stepped into the camp like a man walking into his own home - casual, humming, head tilted just enough to avoid the low beam. Someone swore as he passed.

“You’re bleeding.”

He glanced down. The sleeve of his coat was torn, blood dark around the elbow. He flexed the arm. It moved. That was enough.

A medic stepped toward him, hand outstretched with a bandage.

Alastor took it without a word. Didn’t thank him. Didn’t offer the arm. Just sat on the edge of his cot and started to take off his coat.

The medic hovered for a moment, waiting to be useful.

Alastor didn’t look up. “I’ve got it.”

The medic left.

The tent stank of wet canvas, unwashed socks, old metal. Someone had pissed into a tin can and left it near the door.

He peeled back the fabric at his elbow, winced as the crusted sleeve tore away from the skin beneath. The cut wasn’t deep - just wide, ugly. Still bleeding. He didn’t bother cleaning it. Just wrapped the bandage tight, tied it off with his teeth, and sat back with his eyes on the ceiling.

Outside, the guns started again. Distant at first, then closer, a slow rhythm like the world cracking its knuckles.

He closed his eyes and counted between blasts. Three. Four. Six. A pause. Then one too close, deep enough to make the cot shudder beneath him and shake dust from the canvas roof.

“Bastards are trying the southern edge again,” someone muttered near the tent mouth, tone casual in the way only the half-broken managed. “Lost four last night. One was an ops kid. Didn’t even make it out of the trench. Just-” He made a gesture with his hand. Gone.

Alastor sat up, altering them to his presence. “Which four?”

The man blinked, caught off guard. “What?”

“The names,” Alastor repeated, more evenly this time.

A shrug. “Didn’t catch ‘em. Couple runners. Some new kid from signal, think they said?”

“Of course.” Alastor smiled, slow and brittle.

He stood. His legs ached in protest, wanting him to lie back down and not rise again. His right boot squeaked when he walked - water in the sole, trapped and persistent.

It made a high, stupid sound with every other step.

The trench had filled with rain again. Boards floated. One boy was waist-deep in the water, trying to fish out a corpse he thought was a pack. It wasn’t. He didn’t scream. Just sat back on his heels and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.

There wasn’t enough cloth to bury the dead anymore. They’d started stacking them in the old machine-gun nest.

“Use them for cover,” the sergeant had said. “If they’re not going to be useful alive, let them do their bit dead.”

Alastor had laughed then. He was the only one who had.

He passed a mess line that didn’t move. The cook handed out tins of something grey. The boy next to him had half an ear missing. He didn’t seem to notice.

Past that, charcoal outlines on the wall. Not art. Just names. Then crosses. Then nothing.

He paused by the wire post, the one half-swallowed by frost and rain-swollen earth. No new message. No fresh orders. Just the usual low hum of static leaking faint through the canvas seams of the signal tent nearby.

He tilted his head, listening.

It wasn’t the first time.

The others didn’t hear it, not like he did. To them, it was interference. Background. Nothing. But Alastor had always known how to tune his ears toward things that weren’t meant for most men.

He hadn’t reached out. Not once. Not to the boy who sent him names into the dark like they were secrets, or spells, or prayers meant to land somewhere that mattered.

Vincent.

The rhythm of it still sat heavy in his limbs. He felt it in the bruise on his thigh from yesterday’s fall, in the slow throb of his knees, in the rasp of his throat after too many hours breathing through cloth and smoke.

He caught himself tracing the pattern sometimes - without thought. Thumb brushing slow over the barrel of his pistol. Fingertips tapping the inside of his boot. The name wasn’t lodged in him exactly. It moved.

Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe cruelty. Maybe he liked the idea of being watched - known - without needing to answer. There was power in that. Silence was a weapon just like any other.

But today-

Today he’d seen… not a shape, not a man. A boy. A point of quiet carved into the movement of the world.

Pale. Black-haired. Staring up at him from the muck like he’d stepped into the wrong story and didn’t yet know how it ended.

Just a boy.

Standing alone with a wire coiled at his feet like a snake, eyes locked on Alastor as if he'd seen a ghost.

It shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have stuck.

He’d seen hundreds of faces since arriving in France. Watched most of them shatter. Some screamed. Some whimpered. Some just folded in on themselves and disappeared, even if their bodies kept walking.

But this one-

This boy hadn’t moved.

Not even when the guns started again. Not even when the sky cracked open.

Not until someone shouted behind him.

Alastor hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.

He told himself it was nothing. Just another look. Another face. But it felt different, like hearing a name before being introduced.

But even now, with the cold working under his fingernails and blood drying stiff beneath the fresh bandage, the image sat behind his eyes like a loaded question.

And then he’d bent to gather the wire like it was nothing. Like he was nothing.

Alastor licked a split in his lip, tasted blood and dirt.

Later, in the deep dusk, he sat with his back to the stone wall behind the latrines. The signal tent glowed faint in the distance.

Someone passed behind him, dragging a rifle by the strap.

“Quiet tonight.”

Alastor didn’t look up. “For now.”

He waited until the footsteps faded.

Then, with one boot braced against the mud, he tapped out a sequence against the heel with his finger.

Dot-dot-dot-dash. Dot-dot. Dash-dot. Dash-dot-dash-dot. Dot. Dash-dot. Dash.

He didn’t send it or write it down, just felt it. Let it echo in the marrow of his bones and smiled like a man who knew he was being watched.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late March, 1918

The wind had teeth today. It snapped at the edges of the signal tent, tore through the seams like it wanted to gut the place from the inside out.

Inside, Vincent hunched over the transmitter table with his jaw locked and shoulders tight, one hand pressed flat against a bundle of maps that refused to stay still. The other gripped a metal weight salvaged from a broken fuse, its edges sharp enough to dig into his palm.

Rain hadn’t started yet, but it was coming. He could smell it in the air – iron, salt, the brittle tang of ozone. Like the sky was winding itself up to strike.

“Oi, Vincent!” His lieutenant barked, sharp-voiced and sour. He didn’t look up from his paperwork. “We need more hold-downs. The canvas’ll tear clean off if this keeps up. Go scavenge something heavy – stones, sandbags, I don’t care what. Now.”

Vincent didn’t argue. Just stood, pressed the receiver’s dial down into rest with a practised thumb, and stepped into the wind.

It howled like something wounded.

Camp was already beginning to buckle under the weather. Spare tents flapped wild, corners snapping like whips. Two boys were wrestling with a sheet of corrugated iron that had taken off like a wing, teeth gritted, jackets soaked through. Someone’s laundry line had come loose and now danced like a ghost between the poles, twisting in long, slow spirals.

Vincent kept his head down, collar turned up, boots dragging more than they lifted. His thighs still ached from the last forced march, but it was a dull pain now, background noise. Something he’d learned to carry without comment.

The signal tent’s rear flank pressed into the rise just beyond camp, tucked against a curve of churned-up slope where the wind caught hard and the mud dried faster. He circled around it, boots slopping through the thick brown sludge, eyes scanning for anything with weight.

There – a heap of stones piled up near the back edge, half-forgotten, slick with moss and ash.

He moved toward it, bent at the waist, began to tug one free–

And stopped.

One of them wasn’t stacked like the others. It was resting flat, just under the edge of the canvas, tucked close to the ground where the rain hadn’t reached. It had been placed.

Vincent crouched. His fingers brushed the surface – mud, a film of cold grit – then something darker beneath. Charcoal.

Letters, no – shapes. Not written but marked.

...- .. -. -.-. . -. -

His name

His name.

Vincent froze. His whole body seemed to still around the moment, like the air had gone quiet just to make room for this.

The storm still snapped overhead, canvas slapping like it wanted to tear free, but he didn’t hear it now. Not properly. Just the static hush inside his own head, rising.

He ran his fingers over the marks, reverent without realising it.

Not fresh. But not faded either. It had lasted here – waited, somehow.

He didn’t smile. Didn’t breathe. Just stared at it and felt something uncoil behind his ribs, slow and awful.

Then–

Bootsteps.

Steady. Measured. Close.

He stood, the motion unthinking. Turned.

And there was the boy from the ridge. Emerging from the fogged air and gusting wind like he belonged to it with his coat half undone. Hair dark with rain. A sandbag slung over each shoulder, heavy and effortless.

Their eyes met across the distance. Not far now. Ten paces? Less.

No code. No rumour. No static. Just recognition.

Vincent stared. Everything in him went very still.

And now that he saw him – really saw him – he couldn’t look away.

Alastor was taller than he’d imagined. Lean, wiry, built like something carved sharp at the edges and left out in the elements. His coat hung crooked, one side heavier with rain and weight. His hair, soaked dark, curled where it clung to his forehead. His skin was tanned and dark despite the seemingly never-ending winter, and his eyes – dark, fixed, unreadable – held a brightness that wasn’t entirely sane.

This was him.

The boy from the runners’ gossip. The one who sang in smoke and didn’t die when he should. The one who grinned like he knew something no one else did.

And he was real. Solid. Breathing. Staring back.

Not a voice. Not a rhythm. Not some phantom stitched together from static and rumour.

Real.

Vincent's breath caught and didn’t return. Something unspoken dropped into place in his chest like a coin into a slot, and for one suspended second he swore he could feel the mechanism of himself turning over.

He took him in all at once. Not just the face, though it was striking, sharp-boned and a sun-kissed brown despite the never-ending rains, his eyes dark and unreadable, mouth parted like he might speak and simply chose not to. But the presence of him, the way he held still in the storm, like it didn’t deserve his flinch.

His uniform was wrong in half a dozen ways. Belt too low. Boots too battered. A sandbag on each shoulder like they weighed nothing. He looked like he belonged to the mud more than the men.

And now here he was, in flesh and filth and silence, looking at Vincent like he was the unexpected answer to a question he hadn’t meant to ask.

Alastor’s expression didn’t shift. He didn’t smirk, didn’t blink, didn’t soften. He simply looked. Like he was tracing something across Vincent's face, something only he could see. Measuring it. Marking it.

Not suspicion. Not even interest. Just a flicker – the one that said, I see you.

The moment stretched, delicate and taut, held between them like a wire drawn too tight.

Then–

“Alastor!”

The name cracked across the slope like a whip. A voice, harsh and ragged with weather, full of someone else’s orders. “Quit dallying and get your arse back here!”

Alastor didn’t flinch.

He kept his gaze fixed on Vincent a second longer, just long enough to say, this isn’t over.

Then he turned.

Boots deep in the mud. Shoulders square. Gone.

And Vincent was left standing beside the stone.

Breath caught in his throat. Name still drawn at his feet.

Something permanent had just happened, Vincent knew that.

He just didn’t know what to call it yet.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late March, 1918

Alastor dragged the last sandbag into place with a grunt, dropped it onto the pile, and straightened with a hiss as his shoulders pulled tight beneath his coat. No one said thank you. No one even looked. That was the way of things, now. Labour was just survival wearing different shoes.

The rain had changed while he was out. Colder now. Finer. Not heavy enough to soak, but sharp enough to cut. It slipped under his collar and crept along his spine like a blade laid flat. Everything stank – wet wool, rusted wire, breath gone sour from days of the same rations. And beneath it all, that old, iron stink. The one no one mentioned.

He flexed his fingers once, then again. The skin along his palm had split at the crease from lifting, and blood had started to well at the edges. He let it. The pain was distant. Just another signal, buried in the static of his bones.

He hadn’t meant to see him. Not really. He hadn’t planned it.

He’d rounded the corner, intent on delivering the bags and maybe swiping something edible from the quartermaster’s tent, when he’d caught the figure by the stones. Lean, dark-haired, hunched slightly like he’d stumbled across something important.

Vincent.

The boy stood with one hand brushing the edge of the rock like he might disappear if he stopped touching it. Alastor had seen boys freeze before, at bombs, at blood, at the sound of their own name in the wrong mouth. But this wasn’t that. He wasn’t afraid.

Just still.

Watching him back.

Alastor hadn’t expected to be looked at like that.

There’d been something in the boy’s eyes – something still and steady and cutting – that made him pause without understanding why. Like he’d been caught in the act of being himself.

The moment had passed, of course. The shout from the slope had torn through it like a knife. And he’d turned. Left. As he always did.

But now–

Now the image kept replaying behind his eyes. The curve of Vincent's jaw. The way he hadn’t moved. The name still drawn at his feet.

He made his way back through the trench, though ‘trench’ was generous. It was mostly water now, the kind that soaked through every layer until you were never warm again. Sandbags leaked. Wood warped. Someone had scratched the words “home sweet home” into the helmet of a corpse stacked near the edge of the line. The letters were too neat to be madness.

A rat walked between his feet, bold and fat. It didn’t run.

The man beside him had a hole through the centre of his hand, bandaged poorly, and was joking about it. “Looks like God finally tried to shake hands,” he said. No one laughed, but he said it again anyway.

Alastor walked through all of it like it was a dream. Everything muffled. Everything fogged.

But not that boy.

Not him.

He kept seeing the way his lips had parted, like he might speak but hadn’t. The lines beneath his eyes. The way he hadn’t blinked when Alastor had looked straight at him.

It wasn’t admiration. Not exactly. But it sat close to the same part of him. The part that remembered being small and full of teeth, and how everyone looked away from that eventually. Everyone but one, now.

He slipped away when the line settled – no orders, no eyes on him, no one bothering to wonder where the strange boy with the too-wide smile might have wandered off to. That was the thing about being useful: once you weren’t actively bleeding or burning, they stopped watching. They assumed you’d reappear when needed. Like a ghost. Or a gun.

He cut behind the mess, where the stoves were belching steam and the cook was shouting about spoilt tins, then ducked through the ragged break in the fence just past the wreck of the old cart. Beyond it, the land dipped into a hollow where the trees had given up growing, and the wind pulled hard enough to lift the corner of his coat with every step.

There, where the ground sloped high and then broke unevenly, he found a patch of collapsed stone, old ruins or just war-torn debris, hard to say now. The wall had fallen in on itself in such a way that the pieces formed a hollow – small, dry, ribbed with splinters and clay. A cave by accident.

He crawled in on hands and knees, boots scraping, the hem of his coat catching on a rusted nail. Inside, the space was barely wide enough for him to sit, but he didn’t need more than that. He settled in facing the entrance, knees pulled up, coat drawn tight across his chest like a second skin.

The earth here was firmer – less soaked, less violent. It didn’t squelch under him or try to take his weight as penance. The air smelled of moss and metal and the faint, burnt scent of old oil. Somewhere far off, the war continued: distant booms, a murmur of voices, something flapping loose in the wind like a banner that had forgotten its cause.

Alastor let his breathing slow. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Let the silence breathe back.

His fingers twitched against the dirt. Not pain, not yet. Just the ghost of urgency.

He found a stick near the entrance – snapped from an old fencepost or maybe a rifle stock, it was hard to tell – and brought it to his lap. Blunt, stained, chipped at the edge like it had once mattered to someone.

He began to draw. Not images. Not letters. Just lines. Crosses. Curves. Shapes that didn’t lead anywhere. Like tuning a frequency by hand. Like scratching at something just beneath the surface to see if it would bleed.

Vincent.

He mouthed it once. Just to feel it.

The name cut across his tongue like it had been waiting there.

It didn’t feel soft. Or sweet. It felt like iron – sharp at the edges, metallic and heavy. It lingered, too. Left something in its wake.

Something not entirely safe.

He let the stick fall to his side and rested his hand on the dirt instead. His fingers dragged slow patterns in the earth. He remembered how the stone had looked, half-hidden beneath the canvas, protected from the rain by accident or design. His own mark, scrawled in charcoal. Not as a message, not even as a signature. Just a pulse. A noise. A name.

Vincent had found it.

Alastor didn’t need confirmation to know. He’d seen it in the boy’s face, the way he’d stood like he’d stumbled into something sacred. Like something had looked back at him for the first time in weeks and seen.

He could reply.

He could trace the rhythm again, let it travel backward through the wire and into the tent, through the storm and into the boy’s chest. He knew the rhythm now. It wasn’t just a trick anymore. It lived in the soft tap of his boot heel against stone, in the pads of his fingers when they itched with stillness. He carried it the way soldiers carried old bruises – without thinking

It would take so little.

A tap. A knock. A breath.

But he didn’t.

Not yet.

He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe cruelty. Maybe the flicker of something more dangerous, something not entirely within his control.

He didn’t want to close the gap. Not like that. Not all at once. No, Alastor wanted to watch it narrow.

To see what the boy would do next. If he’d signal again. If he’d look.

That was the part he didn’t understand. Wanting. Not power. Not performance. Not the delicious silence that came when someone flinched the moment before they bled.

Just this quiet, careful curiosity that wouldn’t unhook from his ribs.

It wasn’t even about the name, not anymore. It was about the moment. The look. The pause between them that had stretched taut and refused to break.

The silence around him pressed close again – full of weight, of promise, of something becoming.

The rain had softened to mist now, fine enough to blur the edges of the sky. The storm wasn’t gone. Just holding its breath.

But the hum remained. That invisible thread.

Somewhere not far off, the boy was likely back in the signal tent, crouched over the dial with his hands tight around the coil, listening for something he couldn’t name.

Alastor leaned back, slow, spine scraping stone. He closed his eyes.

And with one fingertip, gentle and sure, tapped a single dot against the meat of his thigh.

Not a message.

Not yet.

Just the feeling of almost - not a conversation, not yet. But a door, half-open.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early April, 1918

Vincent had stopped pretending his mind wasn’t occupied by Alastor.

He still tapped other codes, sent messages, adjusted frequencies like the war demanded it. But always, eventually, his fingers drifted back to the same pattern. Alastor’s name, again and again, in the space between real work. Between meals. Between thoughts.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

He didn’t expect an answer, not really, but he kept sending it anyway, like muscle memory. Like breathing.

The signal tent was quiet that morning. Too early for the main frequencies to start buzzing, too late to call it night. The light was grey through the seams, thin and watery, and the canvas sagged in the corner where yesterday’s storm had clawed at the supports. Everything smelled of smoke and old rope. The heater had died again. He didn’t mind.

He adjusted the tuning dial without looking at it. His gloves were off. He wanted to feel the metal beneath his fingertips.

He’d seen Alastor’s face. That was the difference.

Before, it had been rumour. Signal. Possibility. Now it was a boy - grinning, bloodied, real. A face carved in motion, too alive to be fiction. Vincent had tried not to think about it, and failed.

He kept picturing him cresting the ridge like something half-wild. The sound of him laughing, not loud, but open. Like the war wasn’t a cage but a wind he’d learned to ride. And the way he’d looked at Vincent, just looked, like he wasn’t surprised to be seen.

That was what stuck.

Most boys flinched under attention. They played up or pulled away. But not Alastor. He’d met Vincent's eyes like it was nothing. Like he was measuring a doorframe to see if he’d fit.

Vincent was still replaying that moment.

He didn’t understand it. Not fully. But he’d never been the type to need full understanding before acting. He just… wanted.

Not in a way that made sense. Not yet. But in a way that pulled at him when the rest of the world dulled.

He found himself scanning the path from the tent more often now. Watching the runners. Looking for red in the coat, a crooked stride, the flash of a grin. Listening for a voice he didn’t know but was sure he’d recognise if he heard it.

Nothing came. But he kept looking.

Later that day, while changing a coil in the receiver, he caught himself mouthing the name. Just under his breath. Just once. It startled him enough to stop, to glance around the tent like someone might’ve heard.

No one had. Of course they hadn’t.

Still, he felt it settle under his ribs like a secret he wasn’t quite ready to call by name.

Late afternoon, when the sun was just beginning to burn weakly through the clouds, casting everything in a pale gold that made the ruins look almost gentle if you ignored the sound of gunfire. Vincent had been returning from the south line, mud caked to his shins, the wire coil half-unspooled over one shoulder, when he saw him.Not close. Not like last time. But not as far as the first time either, either.

Alastor was crouched near the edge of the trench wall, boots planted wide, a small hammer in hand. He was securing something - a corner of mesh, maybe, or the tattered edge of a tarp that refused to lie flat. One arm lifted, shirt pulled tight across his shoulders. The curve of his neck caught the light.

Vincent was frozen. His body stalled, breath caught like a record skip. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just watched.

Alastor didn’t look up. Not this time. He seemed focused, oddly so. His lips moved - murmuring something under his breath, but too softly to catch. He worked fast. Efficient. But there was no urgency in it. No fear. Just a calmness that didn’t belong here.

Vincent's mouth went dry. Not from nerves, not from fear - from focus. From the strange, aching clarity of seeing someone who didn’t look like he belonged to this world, and yet fit inside it perfectly.

He knew this wasn’t unusual. There were a hundred boys doing the same work across camp. Repairs. Sandbags. Maintenance. But none of them looked like this doing it. None of them held themselves like the war was a stage and they were simply playing a role they’d already mastered.

Alastor moved like he’d done this a hundred times in another life.

The hammer hit cloth. A single strike. Then another. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow now, revealing arms corded with muscle but lean - not sculpted, just used. Not soft. Not show.

Vincent watched the movement of his hands, the curve of his shoulders beneath fabric worn thin. The high melody of his voice. Even the silence around him seemed to bend a little.

A boy passed between them, carting a sack of tins, and the spell broke.

Vincent startled - not outwardly, not dramatically, just a tiny hitch in breath, a shift of weight like he’d forgotten he had one. His hands curled tighter around the coil slung at his side. The air around him felt wrong now, too loud, too bright. He turned back toward the tent without a word, every step suddenly mechanical.

He didn’t risk looking again. Not yet. He wasn’t ready for what might be there if Alastor did look back.

By the time he reached the edge of the signal tent, his thoughts had scattered into sharp, unhelpful fragments. He dropped the coil too hard onto the crate by the door, hissed softly under his breath when it bit his palm.

Inside, the tent was dim and humming, but it didn’t soothe him the way it usually did.

He sat down anyway, jaw tight, shoulders hunched like he could fold himself small enough to escape the shape of the moment.

His hands didn’t know what to do. They hovered over the receiver, hesitated, withdrew.

He hadn’t even turned the power on.

Instead, he laid his fingers flat against the table, the skin still stained with dried mud, and tapped.

Slow. Deliberate.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

Alastor, again and again.

The rhythm was sharper now. Not frantic, but uneven at the edges - like his pulse had caught in the pattern and couldn’t quite steady. He told himself it was just the surprise. Just the coincidence of it. Just a glimpse of someone who’d already been inside his mind for too long.

But he could still see him. Not fully. Just flashes. The line of his jaw. The turn of his wrist as he swung the hammer. The way the light had caught the back of his neck and made it look softer than it should have.

He dragged a hand down his face, exhaled hard through his nose.

This was ridiculous.

It was war. Boys ran messages and fixed tents and didn’t smile back. Not like that. Alastor was interesting, that was all this was.

His cheeks felt hot. He wiped his palms on his thighs, pressed them back to the table, and started tapping again.

Just the name.

Not to be heard.

Just to remember the shape of it. Just to hold the image in place a little longer.

Outside, the storm started to pick up again, wind pulling the canvas seams like it wanted in.

Vincent kept tapping.

And in his mind, the hammer struck cloth. A smile flickered. A voice rose and fell in some strange, tuneless hum that no one else heard quite right.

He didn’t try to shake the image this time.

He just let it stay.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early April, 1918

The day started grey. Not overcast, just grey. A colour that seeped into things, into skin and breath and memory, until it dulled the edges of everything it touched. Alastor laced his boots in silence, fingers stiff from the morning cold, then stood and shrugged into his coat like a man slipping back into a mask.

They sent him to walk the wire. No urgency to it. Just something to keep the lines intact while the storm threatened to buckle camp from the inside out. He wasn’t trusted with maps, or codes, or command. But they trusted him to follow the fence line, to notice what others missed. To return.

He didn’t argue.

The walk took him past the edge of the mess, past the crumpled latrines and the rust-choked drums meant for burning waste. The wind curled low today, sharp and biting at his ankles like a dog that hadn’t been fed. The rain hadn’t started again, but the air was wet with promise.

He walked the edge of things. He often did. The line between camp and mire, trench and collapse. It suited him. Fewer eyes. Fewer voices trying to make sense of the boy who didn’t blink at blood.

He passed a group of engineers hunched over a tangled coil of copper. One was muttering curses in Cajun French. Another had cut his hand and didn’t seem to notice. Alastor barely glanced at them.

It wasn’t the wire that held his attention.

It was the signal tent.

He passed by it often - not deliberately, not in ways that would be noticed, but enough that his feet knew the route without needing reason. A long way round. An invented errand. A detour through the excuse of stretch or habit. And always, just for a moment, a glance.

It had become part of his routine, if he could call it that. Little stolen moments. A flick of canvas, a blink through the seams, a pause with his back to the outer wall while he “retied” a boot that hadn’t come undone. Just long enough to see if the boy was there.

He usually was.

Inside, hunched over the table like a question without an answer, sleeves rolled back, collar open, eyes narrowed as if willing the static into words. Sometimes with gloves on. Sometimes without. Always quiet. Always listening. The rest of the world frayed at the edges, but Vincent looked like he belonged to the silence. To wire. To purpose.

He didn’t twitch or mutter or bluff like the other boys did. He didn’t spit or sing or slam things for the sake of being heard. He was deliberate. All the way through.
Even now, just visible through the flap - shoulders slightly turned, hair falling forward as he adjusted a tuning coil - he looked like he was halfway out of his own body. Or halfway deeper into something no one else could see.

And Alastor… watched.

Just a little. Just long enough to let the image settle.

Vincent wasn’t soft, not precisely. There was too much tension in the way he held himself for that. Like he was a thread pulled tight, never quite relaxed, never quite slack. But his features had a certain quiet to them, a stillness that Alastor couldn’t stop returning to. The line of his jaw. The slant of his shoulders. The almost-pretty frown that folded between his brows when he was concentrating, mouth just slightly parted like the effort cost something.

He didn’t move like a soldier. He moved like someone who had always been out of step with the world and had finally - finally - found something that listened back. Like he was tuned to a frequency most people didn’t bother searching for, and somehow, the machine had answered him. Not with words, but with purpose.

That intrigued Alastor more than he liked to admit.

Most boys here were noise. Bluster. Elbows. Survival writ loud. They needed to be seen to believe they existed. But Vincent was quiet. Not timid. Deliberate. Like he’d been made from stillness and static and narrow escapes, and now he was carving out a shape that didn’t rely on anyone else’s approval.

There was a sort of gravity to him.

Not the pull of charm or heat. But the quieter kind. The kind you didn’t feel until you were already tilted toward it.

Alastor didn’t understand it.

Not the urge. Not the watching. Not the boy.

But still, he lingered.

And even when he turned away, even when he forced himself back toward the path and the routine and the long tangle of trench and smoke and orders, he carried the image of Vincent with him. Like a note struck and left unresolved. Like a question that hadn’t been answered properly and might not ever be.

He could still feel the weight of Vincent's stare from the other day. That moment by the stone. The way he hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t looked away. Hadn’t acted like Alastor was a monster, or a story, or something to be ignored.

He’d looked like someone trying to memorise him.

Not catalogue. Not analyse. Memorise.

And for a boy who lived off instinct, who had long since learned that people only noticed him when they had something to fear or something to prove, the sensation of being understood - or worse, seen - without being dissected was something altogether foreign.

Alastor leaned against the trench wall, careful and slow, and tried to name the sensation curling under his ribs.

It wasn’t desire. He’d seen what desire looked like in men. In their eyes. In their mouths. In their hands. It was greedy. Clumsy. Always reaching. Always claiming.
That wasn’t what this was but it wasn’t innocent either. It wasn’t soft.

It was heatless. Hungerless. But sharp. Like recognition. Like some part of himself, long splintered, had leaned forward to say, There. That one.

A boy tuned to the same strange ache in the world.

Vincent shifted, leaned into the receiver, pressed his fingers down against something unseen - and Alastor’s stomach twisted.

Quick. Unexpected. Like someone had struck a tuning fork too close to bone.

He stepped back without realising it. Breath caught short.

Not fear.

Not quite.

Just… too much, all at once. A signal too loud in his chest.

He wasn’t used to being interested in anyone.

Later, after the wire was checked and the long loop through mud and rot was done, he found himself by the half-collapsed wall near the quartermaster’s tent. Not hidden. Not watched. Just out of sight. He crouched low, elbows on knees, the world quiet enough here that he could hear the slow drip of water from the edge of a splintered beam.

He should’ve gone back. They might be looking for him by now. But no one really looked for him. They just noticed when he reappeared.

In his coat pocket, his fingers closed around a stub of charcoal. The same one he’d used on the stone. The edge was dulled now, smudged black onto the lining. Useless for anything but scribble. He drew it out, turned it in his fingers like a coin he didn’t quite want to spend.

There was no paper. No wall. Just the dirt, and the inside of his palm. He pressed the charcoal there and marked a single line. Then a curve. Then another.

It didn’t spell anything. Not properly.

But he knew what it meant.

He exhaled slowly through his nose. His breath fogged, then vanished.

He wasn’t sure why he’d done it.

Maybe it was habit. Maybe it was something worse.

Somewhere out there, the boy was probably still at the table. Still listening. Still tapping.

Alastor curled his fingers into a fist, smudging the mark.

He’d never really believed in fate. The world was too messy, too cruel, too loud for that. But for a moment - just a moment - he wondered if signals really could call things into being. If tapping a name enough times could make it matter.

He smiled, not wide. Just a curl at the corner, private and toothless.

Then he stood.

The dirt clung to his boots. The day still smelled grey. But in his chest, something faint and unfamiliar thrummed like a wire just beginning to hum.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early April, 1918

The quiet wasn’t clean. It never was.

Even now, as dusk folded itself over the camp like damp cloth, soft and clinging, the air still buzzed faint with motion. Somewhere, boots scuffed against the frost-bitten boards near the mess. A shovel rang hollow where it struck stone. A low voice murmured something in the half-sleep lilt of fatigue, followed by another, shorter and sharper, like the tail of a scolding. Wind tangled with canvas. Always the wind. Not loud tonight, not screaming, just ever-present, rustling the seams like it meant to listen in.

Vincent sat in the signal tent with his chin resting in one palm, elbow propped high and crooked. The receiver was off. He hadn’t touched it in nearly an hour. His gloves hung from a nail behind him, damp at the fingertips from the storms.

He wasn’t listening to anything and that, perhaps, was the problem.

His other hand traced slow circles on the tabletop. Not real shapes. Just motion. It had been a long day, but the kind that didn’t justify its own exhaustion - no fire, no alert, just sandbags, drills, ration arguments, the slow erosion of morale that came with another day survived by accident.

Vincent's thumb tapped softly against the wood now, not thinking, not quite deliberate. A short pause. Then the rhythm began.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

He wasn’t sure why he kept doing it. Habit, maybe. Obsession, more likely. Every time he tapped the name it felt less like sending a message and more like carving a shape into the inside of his own skull.

The image came uninvited - a flash of red at the corner of the trench, the sharp motion of a hammer in an ungloved hand, sleeves rolled up and collar unbuttoned. Vincent dragged a hand over his mouth.

Ridiculous.

He could still feel the imprint of that moment pressed behind his ribs - the way Alastor had looked at him like something already known. Something that made him hover longer than they should and his breath catch short behind his teeth. He’d gone even quieter since then. Still tapped, but rarely spoke. Not anymore.

Tonight though, the air felt different. The silence wasn’t hollow. It pressed against the inside of the tent like a held breath.

Vincent shifted on the stool. Reached for the receiver, then paused.

Something tapped.

Soft. At first he thought it was the wind, or one of the boys stumbling past in the dark. But then it came again. More precise this time. Three sharp taps against the canvas wall. A pause. Then five.

Then another.

His blood ran cold. The sound wasn't Morse over wire or a signal but someone knocking. Physical and deliberate, just beside him.

The hairs rose along his arms as he turned, slow, staring at the canvas wall beside the transmitter desk, breath pulled tight into his throat. The canvas fluttered slightly where the knuckles must’ve landed, creased and dented with the echo of the touch. It looked so harmless, just a ripple in the fabric. Just a shape in the dark. But it landed like a rifle crack in Vincent's chest.

The stool scraped behind him as he stood, quiet and apologetic. The weight in his limbs was slow and tight, like wading through the static he used to imagine was alive. But this wasn’t the same. This wasn’t imagined.

He stepped toward the canvas. Each footfall sounded louder than it should’ve, though the mud deadened his boots. His pulse was louder. A static all its own, behind his teeth.

The canvas was cold and damp under his fingers, the seam stiff with dried rain. His hand hovered for a beat, two, then he pressed his palm flat against it.

Nothing.

No knock. No movement.

He blinked. Leaned closer.

“…Hello?” he said, too soft to carry.

And then, on the other side, he heard footsteps. Not retreating. Not pacing. Just a shift of weight. Then a shape. A shadow, barely perceptible, where someone stood just beyond the thin wall.

And the knock came again.

But this time, simpler.

Tap. Tap.

Vincent let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. He stepped back and crossed to the entrance, fingers trembling slightly as he reached for the flap, but he steadied them. Forced them still. Forced his shoulders square. His jaw locked.

Then he pulled the canvas aside.

The light from the tent spilled out into the dark like a gasp, soft and yellowed, catching on every raindrop still clinging to the wind.

And there he was.

Alastor stood barely a pace away, hands in his coat pockets, shoulders crooked like he’d just leaned against the wall and hadn’t expected to be caught. His hair was damp, curls twisting tighter on his face, and his collar sat open, as though he'd tugged it loose to breathe better and never bothered fixing it.

His expression didn’t change from a small, crooked grin.

Not smug. Not amused.

Just... present.

Like he had every right to be here, outside Vincent's tent, outside the thin wall where his name had been returned in rhythm. Like he’d meant to be heard. Vincent couldn’t speak. He wasn’t sure he remembered how.

The wind moved between them. Just once. Enough to lift the edge of Alastor’s coat and brush against Vincent’s sleeve.

He hadn’t imagined it. Not the knocks. Not the stare in the rain. Not the mark on the stone. Not any of it.

“Hi,” he said. Quiet. Ridiculous. All the words in the world, and that’s the one that made it out.

But Alastor nodded. Just once. Slow. Deliberate.

And replied, low and even:
“Hello, Vincent.”

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. Just two syllables, quiet, deliberate, dropped into the silence like a pin.

They had never spoken. Had never met properly. Had never stood still long enough for names to mean anything beyond codes to nowhere and scratches on stone. And yet, Alastor had said his name. Like he’d always known it. Like it belonged to him too.

Vincent's mouth went dry. His heart caught behind his ribs.

Alastor was watching him. Not smiling, not curious, not even expectant. Just... watching. Steady. Like he was listening for something only Vincent could say.

And suddenly the space between them felt narrower than it had any right to be.

“You know my name,” Vincent said. Not a question but also not a statement. His voice didn’t crack, not quite, but he hated how thin it came out, how sharp.

Alastor blinked once. “You told me,” he said.

Not I overheard. Not someone said it. Not a shrug or a smirk or a joke about marks made of charcoal.

Just, you told me.

Like his tapping codes in the dark mattered. Like it meant something.

Vincent stood there, caught between breath and silence, and for the first time in weeks, he felt real. Not signal. Not static. Not stray voltage humming in the dark. Just... him. Seen.

And Alastor hadn’t looked away.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early April, 1918

It hadn’t been planned. Not properly. Not in any way he’d admit.

Alastor hadn’t set out that evening with the intention of making contact, not exactly. He’d drifted - boots treading familiar paths, jaw stiff with the memory of cold metal pressed against his ribs not twelve hours earlier. A sniper who’d missed by less than a breath. A bullet grazing the flesh of his chest. A moment too close. He could still feel the impact of it in his skin, like static, like smoke.

They told him to walk it off.

He had.

Straight down the route that skirted the signal tent - the one he always chose when his limbs buzzed with too much leftover adrenaline and the barracks felt swollen with breath. A patrol route, if anyone asked. A habit, if no one did. Nothing strange about a boy walking the perimeter after yet another brush with death.

Except he never lingered at the other tents. And tonight, he didn’t keep walking.

He stopped at the back wall, hands buried deep in his coat pockets, and stared at the canvas like it might answer first. Inside, a chair creaked. Something shifted. Then nothing.

Silence, weighted and waiting.

Then - rhythm.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

His name.

Again.

Alastor tilted his head, slow.

It still caught something in him, not pleasure or softness, but recognition. Sharp and specific. Like the shape of that name had been branded behind his eyes and hearing it now was less surprise than inevitability. A call he hadn’t known he’d been answering until today, until the war tried and failed to swallow him whole.

He hadn’t planned to respond but he was here. Breathing. Beating. Flickering. And the war, for all its appetite, hadn’t taken that from him. Not yet.

So tonight, he was feeling impulsive. He raised a hand and tapped the rhythm back against the canvas.

He didn’t knock hard. Didn’t need to. Just a ghost of sound, barely a ripple in the fabric. But deliberate. Enough for someone inside to notice, if they were listening. And Alastor had a very strong suspicion Vincent always was.

There was a pause after he knocked. Then movement, slow and deliberate, like someone afraid they might break whatever they found.

The tent flap opened and there he was.

Up close and in this light, Vincent looked paler than he did from a distance. Not sickly, but cut from colder cloth. The angles of his face were delicate in the half-light, his eyes too large in their sockets, pale but clouded with something unreadable. The line of his mouth was sharp, like he’d been caught on the verge of asking a question and hadn’t decided which one.

He looked younger than Alastor had thought.

That startled him a little.

Not that he’d assumed Vincent was older - there weren’t many of those left - but something about the boy’s stillness had always read older. The way he moved like noise was a crime. The way he treated every silence like something sacred. That kind of discipline belonged to men who’d already been broken a few times.

But this wasn’t a man.

It was a boy who looked like he was one long night away from unravelling entirely.

Alastor’s stomach twisted again.

He wasn’t sure what he expected Vincent to say. A question, maybe. Or a name. Or - more likely - nothing at all. Just a startled blink and the closing of the flap like it had all been a mistake.

But instead,
"Hi."

So ordinary it made him smile for real. Alastor, not missing a beat, had returned his greeting.

“Hello, Vincent,” he said, soft and even.

The boy stopped like he’d been struck. Not visibly, not dramatically, but Alastor saw it all. The subtle halt of movement, the way breath hitched and stilled, the flicker of something sharp behind his eyes. Not fear. Not exactly. Something adjacent. Like recognition had bloomed too fast, and now his mind was scrambling to catch up.

Alastor watched him - steady and curious - and felt something curl, warm and low, behind his ribs. It was the look on Vincent’s face, maybe. The astonishment. As though hearing his own name spoken aloud had knocked something loose inside him. Like he hadn’t expected to be known.

They’d never spoken before. Not like this. Not with air between them instead of wire. But the name had lived in Alastor for some time now. Lodged there in rhythm and hum, in the tap-tap-tap he’d learned to feel rather than hear. Vincent had given it to him in pieces, deliberate or not, and he’d taken it without asking. Let it shape itself into something familiar, something his.

“You know my name,” Vincent said. It wasn’t a question. Not really. More like something he needed to name out loud, if only to believe it.

Alastor let the corner of his mouth twitch, not quite a smile. “You told me,” he replied.

And that was true. Vincent had told him in static and silence, in a rhythm he hadn’t stopped listening for since. No lies. No need for explanation. The boy had offered it, and Alastor had held it close. Just like now.

He kept watching. Vincent, still trying to steady himself. The weight of it all, settling between them. And that warmth didn’t leave. If anything, it deepened.

Vincent.

A name like an open frequency. A name that sounded like wanting.

He hadn’t expected to like saying it out loud but he did.

Vincent didn’t respond right away. His hands were tense at his sides, one curled slightly like he didn’t know if he meant to raise it or use it for defence. His eyes - pale, brittle, full with questions - flicked over Alastor’s face and then dropped to his coat, to the seams of his gloves, like the answers might be stitched into the fabric somewhere.

Alastor took a slow step forward. No sudden movement. No grin. No charm. Just a step.

The wind caught again, brushing between them. He let it.

"You’ve been listening to me," Vincent said suddenly, voice clipped. It wasn’t a question.

Alastor smiled then. Just faintly. "And you’ve been talking," he returned. Soft and simple. Like the truth had always been mutual, even if neither of them had said it aloud.

Alastor let the silence stretch, then shrugged one shoulder, not apologetic, just acknowledging the truth of it. They had been circling each other for weeks. One with signal. One with silence.

Neither of them innocent. And now the game had turned face up.

"I wanted to see who you were," Vincent said at last, voice low.

"And I wanted to know what kind of boy taps the same name every night like a hymn," Alastor answered. That was perhaps a step too far. Vincent's face flushed, his jaw clenched, but he didn’t look away. Didn’t retreat.

Alastor admired that. He watched him for another breath. Two. Then asked, softly, "Did you mean it to be a message? Or just a sound?"

Vincent’s eyes flicked up, sharp and cutting. “It wasn’t for you.”

"But it reached me anyway." Alastor didn’t say it unkindly. Just stated it. A truth. The kind that didn’t change just because one of them hadn’t planned for it.

Another beat.

"Are you going to tell anyone?" Vincent asked, the words almost a challenge.

Alastor tilted his head. "About what?"

“You know what.”

"That you tap my name into tables like confessions?"

He took another half-step, watched how Vincent's throat worked as he swallowed.

"No," he said, at last. "Who would there even be to tell?”

Vincent blinked. Alastor thought he saw something release in his shoulders, not completely, but enough to register.

"Then what do you want?" It wasn’t spoken rudely. Just tired. Honest.

Alastor considered.

"I don’t know yet," he said. "But I think I want to hear you tap it again."

Vincent didn’t smile. But he didn’t close the tent either.

He stood there, frozen in something that wasn’t fear and wasn’t fascination, and Alastor let himself look again, really look.

Vincent was beautiful. Not in a way that drew heat or ache like so many men talked about, but in form. In shape. In the way his pale eyes sharpened when he was cornered, and the way his breath curled like steam in the tent light, and how all of him held still like signal waiting to be tuned.

He didn’t understand how but he wanted Vincent.

He wanted to understand how that boy had managed to take root in his thoughts. Wanted to know why a name knocked into stone had started to feel like something sacred. Wanted to know what Vincent would do next.

But not tonight.

Alastor stepped back, the distance measured and clean.

"Goodnight, Vincent," he said.

And then he turned, and walked away into the dark.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid April, 1918

He didn’t sleep that night. Not really. His body remembered the bed, but his mind forgot how to rest. Every time his eyes drifted closed, something startled him - the scrape of a boot, the twitch of canvas in wind, the phantom echo of a knock that never came.

But it wasn’t fear, it was memory, replaying in loops.

The knock. The canvas. The voice.

“Hello, Vincent.” He heard it again now, soft and deliberate, curling round the syllables like they belonged to Alastor, like the name had only ever been waiting for his voice to find it.

The tent was dark. His fingers still tingled from where they’d tapped Alastor’s name out hours earlier, like the act had burned something into them. He hadn’t done it after Alastor left. He hadn’t trusted himself to.

Now, he lay still. The others around him breathed deep, heavy with sleep and ration wine, but Vincent stared at the tent ceiling, watching the shadows twitch.

He hadn’t expected the voice. The face, yes. The name, maybe. But not that calmness. That clarity. Like Alastor had always known he’d be there, just waiting to be found.

It scared him a little. Not in the way the war scared him, not blood or bullets or gas. This was different. It was the fear that came when something you only half believed in turns out to be real.

He rolled over. Pressed his hands under his pillow. Tried not to think.

But the knock still echoed, soft and certain.

He didn’t know what it meant.

Or rather, he didn’t know what it was meant to mean. For Alastor, anyway. For Vincent, it had been compulsion. Ritual. A confession too quiet for the rest of the world to notice. But Alastor had noticed. Had heard it. Had returned it.

And now Vincent was floundering in the wake of being heard.

At some point before dawn, he dozed off. Not sleep, exactly, just a kind of temporary unconsciousness that left him more frayed than he started.

He woke to the sound of boots and rain and the stench of half-burnt coffee. The tent canvas sagged under the weight of water; outside, someone cursed about soaked socks and blisters. Same as always. But Vincent’s body didn’t feel the same. He was loose at the edges, like his skin didn’t sit right. Like his heartbeat had changed key in the night and no one had told him the new melody.

He dressed in silence. Skipped breakfast. Didn’t want to see the others. Didn’t want to see him.

He almost made it through the whole day without doing either but luck, like signal, was fickle.

It was nearly dusk again when it happened. He was moving crates near the tent line, a pointless, busy-hands task one of the sergeants had barked at him half-heartedly. His gloves were wet again. The mud sucked at his boots. He hadn’t touched the receiver since midday.

Then a shadow passed to his left. Not close, but not far either. The kind of nearness that demanded attention without asking.

He looked up.

Alastor.

Casual, coat open, sleeves damp with rain and collar turned against the wind. His gait was easy, but not aimless. His hands were in his pockets. His eyes weren’t on Vincent - not directly - but they didn’t have to be. He was aware, in that animal way certain boys were. The ones who noticed everything without ever seeming to. The ones who didn’t need to look to know they were being looked at.

He moved like someone used to being watched and Vincent felt suddenly foolish for thinking he’d ever been subtle.

He forced his gaze down. Picked up another crate. Set it two inches to the right. Useless. Obvious. Ridiculous. His hands trembled slightly.

When he dared glance again, Alastor was gone. The space where he’d stood looked unchanged - just mud, canvas, the weight of routine - but Vincent felt it like a gap in pressure. Like something had shifted.

He turned back to the crates. Moved them without purpose. Let the seconds stretch thin and brittle.

He didn’t breathe properly for five whole minutes.

That night, he didn’t tap.

He sat with his hands resting on the table, the receiver silent, the air thick with the usual mix of oil and damp wool and breath too long held. His gloves hung where they always did. The storm whispered against the canvas.

He wanted to. God, he wanted to. His fingers itched for it. The muscle memory pulled toward the rhythm the way breath pulls toward a gasp.

But he didn’t.

He stared at the receiver instead. Let the storm rage. Let the boys around him smoke and argue and scrape through another rotation of this endless, absurd theatre.

The rain thickened, heavy now, slicing against the tent in sheets. Vincent pressed his palms flat against the tabletop. Closed his eyes.

If he tapped now, would Alastor hear it? Would he come again?

Did he want him to?

He wasn’t sure.

He didn’t know what came next. For weeks it had been abstract. Distant. Romantic in the way the idea of connection was romantic - not in the way people were.

But now it was real.

And he was real.

The voice. The knock. The eyes that hadn’t looked away. The fact that he’d known Vincent's name without asking, without mocking, without demanding to know anything back.

It should’ve felt intrusive. Should’ve made Vincent retreat. Build a wall. Pretend. But it didn’t.

It felt like something was being answered. Not a question, exactly. Just... a part of him he hadn’t named. So he tapped. Once. Twice. Not the full rhythm. Just a shape.

Then he leaned forward, mouth close to the cold metal lip of the transmitter.

“Are you listening?” he whispered, soft enough the storm might’ve swallowed it whole.

But somehow, he thought it wouldn’t.

Silence followed. Not empty. Not answerless. Just waiting.

Eventually, he stood. Let the wires hum alone.

He tried to avoid him the next morning. They’d gone months in the same camp without crossing paths - surely it wouldn’t be difficult to do it now, when he needed it most.

He skipped conversation at breakfast, kept his head down and eyes lower. Took the long way to the latrines, boots squelching through the edge of the waste trench just to stay out of view. Spent ten whole minutes pretending to reorganise the coal pile until his fingers burned with cold and the world smelled of ash.

It didn’t matter.

Alastor was by the supply trench when he finally surfaced, sleeves rolled again, mess kit balanced in one hand, the other sketching some story in the air. Smiling. Humming. Easy in his skin.

And then - without pause, without strain - his eyes cut sideways.

Vincent nearly tripped over a bucket.

He didn’t stay to find out if Alastor had noticed.

He just walked faster. Hands clenched at his sides. Jaw locked. Pathetic.

And worse, he didn’t know what he wanted. Did he want Alastor to follow? To stop him? To speak again, low and familiar, like they were sharing something other boys couldn’t touch?

Or did he want to be left alone? To scrub the memory clean and go back to the comfort of not knowing?

He wasn’t sure anymore, but the knock still echoed and in his fingers, the rhythm remained.

Dot-dash. Dot-dash-dot-dot. Dot-dash. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dash-dot.

A name. A confession. A tether. He tapped it once, against his thigh, and kept walking.

And behind his ribs, something answered.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid April, 1918

It was the first time he noticed the absence - not quiet, not calm, but the kind of stillness that made you realise what had been there the whole time.

No taps. No rhythm. No pulse of thought pressed into static. Just silence - thick, shapeless, oddly heavy. The sort of silence that filled your ears like cold water. That made you want to knock the receiver just to be sure it hadn’t died.

Alastor hadn’t realised how much he’d been listening until it stopped.

He lay awake most of the night, one arm folded beneath his head, the other resting useless across his ribs. No storm this night, no rain to curtain the tents or swallow the quiet. Just the low breath of sleeping men, and the soft scrape of boots as someone wandered out to piss, and the hollow stretch of nothing where a rhythm used to be.

He didn’t know what he expected. Not a conversation. Not a confession. Just… something. A name. A sound. An echo. The shape of attention across the wires.

But the air stayed still. Flat. Untouched.

He rose early, earlier than usual. Skipped his usual route to the latrines and instead walked by the signal tent. Pretending to stretch. Pretending not to glance. Pretending not to notice how undisturbed the canvas looked, no shadow moving behind it, no signal light blinking, no sign of life at all.

He told himself it didn’t mean anything.

That Vincent might be sleeping. Or busy. Or just tired of playing pretend with ghosts in the wires.

But something in his chest was sour. Not quite pain. Not quite loss. Just that creeping itch you got when you’d spoken a truth out loud and weren’t sure if the room had heard it or not.

The day passed slow and grey. He ran one dispatch, retrieved rations, washed mud from his sleeves in a broken barrel. When no one was looking, he tapped the inside of his wrist. Habit. Restless. He didn’t code it. Didn’t dare. Just kept the rhythm alive beneath the surface of his skin.

He saw him around midday.

Vincent, ducking out of the quartermaster’s tent with a mess tin in one hand and a scrap of bread in the other. Shoulders hunched, eyes low, mouth tight in a line that said do not speak to me. Alastor didn’t. He stood behind a stack of gear and watched as the boy passed without noticing.

But he felt the tension. The conscious turning-away.

He’s avoiding me, Alastor thought without malice. Without surprise. He just folded the observation away like a letter and tucked it behind the ribs.

Still, it smarted. A little.

They hadn’t touched. Barely a word had passed between them that hadn’t travelled through wire or weather. But something had landed. Something had shifted. And now it sat tilted. Uneven. Strange.

He let it lie for the afternoon. Lost himself in the rote movements of trench work - patching canvas, fetching boots, hauling broken crates from one point of camp to another like the effort might distract from the fact that he hadn’t heard his name all day.

Until evening, when luck - dumb, theatre-flick luck - handed him a proximity he hadn’t planned for.

“Take these over to the stores,” a sergeant barked. “You, runner boy - and you, signal. Get it done before dark.”

And just like that, he and Vincent were standing opposite one another, fingers beneath the same warped edge of a supply crate, lifting with a synchrony too seamless to feel like coincidence.

Vincent didn’t meet his eye. Not once. His jaw was set, mouth drawn, hair damp from sweat or rain or both. But his hands didn’t tremble when they touched the crate. Didn’t flinch when Alastor’s fingers brushed his.

Alastor watched him in periphery. Measured his breaths. Marked the slight twitch of his left shoulder when they set the first box down. The way he adjusted his grip after each lift, like it gave him something to do that wasn’t looking.

He didn’t speak, and Alastor didn’t push.

The second crate was lighter, easier. Vincent set his side down with a dull thunk, straightened, and finally - finally - glanced his way.

Alastor kept his expression light. Open, but not unguarded. He didn’t smile.

“They’ve got us shifting the same crates others moved yesterday,” he said, voice low, like it wasn’t meant to be commented on. “Guess it keeps us busy.”

It hung there. Not a joke. Not quite small talk either. Just a thread laid down between them, thin and loose.

Vincent’s gaze flicked sideways, brief and bright and unsure. His jaw worked, like he wanted to speak but didn’t know how to shape it. Then-

“I suppose that’s the point,” he said, quiet. “Keep the hands full. The mind... quiet.”

It was said gently. Earnest. Like an offering, not a conclusion.

He shifted his weight. Looked back at the crate pile. Then down at his gloves. Then at nothing.

“I didn’t mean to-” Vincent began, then stopped. Shook his head once, small and sharp. “Sorry.”

Alastor wasn’t sure what he was apologising for. The silence, maybe. The way he’d left yesterday without speaking. The tremble in his voice now. Alastor said nothing. Didn’t need to. Just tilted his head slightly, the air between them softening.

Vincent took a step back. Not retreating, not exactly - just giving the moment space to breathe. He touched the brim of his cap in a motion too stiff to be casual.

“I should... get back,” he murmured.

Then he turned, not hurried, but not slow either. The air felt different when he left. Lighter, maybe. Or simply less tense.

Alastor stood still a moment longer. Let the shape of those words settle in his bones.

He didn’t follow. Not yet. Just turned back to camp with a thoughtful quiet, boots slow in the muck.

Later, he lay on his cot staring at the tent roof, Morse playing against his skull. No words. No full phrases. Just fragments of rhythm, pressing through him like breath. The quiet tonight was thinner, lighter. Still no tap from the signal tent, but it didn’t feel like rejection anymore.

Just waiting.

So when the camp fell to its slow, sleeping hush, he rose.

Boots silent. Coat buttoned only halfway. Fingers twitching in his pocket around the last of his smokes - creased, bent at the filter, already half-flattened. He didn’t think much about where he was going; his feet already knew.

The signal tent was dark but not empty. He could feel the presence through the canvas. Someone inside. Awake.

He stood there a moment. Didn’t knock.

The last time he had, something had changed.

He didn’t want to change it again. Not yet.

Instead, he took the cigarette from his pocket. Turned it between his fingers. The paper was soft from too many days carried too close to skin. He’d scratched along the filter with a thumbnail once, tapping out nonsense. Rhythms he hadn’t understood then. Maybe he did now.

He crouched, slow. Careful. Then slid the cigarette beneath the edge of the canvas flap.

Not a note. Not a name. Just weight. Just tobacco and paper and trace warmth from the hand that left it there. Just the shape of a signal left behind in silence - something to find, something to keep.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid April, 1918

The tent had taken on a smell. Not quite rot, but close to it - like sour cloth and metal warmed too long by the generator heat. The stench clung to the canvas walls, steeped into the seams.

It was in the threadbare collar of his undershirt, in the crumpled sleeves of the uniform jacket he’d thrown over the back of the chair hours - or was it a day? - ago.

Everything smelt vaguely of grease and ash and stale tobacco. Like the air had gone solid and wouldn’t lift again, heavy and cloying as if the signals themselves were exhaling back on him.

He hadn’t left in nearly two days. Not properly.

Just scattered trips to piss behind the latrine trench, one half-hearted bite of something biscuit-shaped before the call-back whistle went again.

The southern line was screaming. Message after message spilled from the receiver like blood from a split vein, and Vincent - bent over the desk with ink-stained fingertips and a crick in his neck that never went away - did what he always did. Listened. Wrote. Rewrote. Transmitted. Slept only when the weight of his own head toppled forward onto the crook of his elbow.

It was only when he startled awake, fingers clenched around the stylus like a vice, that he noticed how silent it had gone. Then - inevitably - another burst of static, another flare of code, a fresh voice crackling through the din, distorted and too fast, repeating the call sign twice, thrice, as if begging for clarity.

He gave it.

He always gave it.

Outside, the weather had turned. He could hear the wind scraping along the guy ropes like claws against cloth, like something half-alive out in the mud.

He hadn’t been outside since dusk, and now it was dark again, so it must’ve been morning once in between. He missed it. Missed the faint blue-grey of light bleeding in through the flap at dawn, missed knowing what day it was.

That information had stopped being relevant. He was tethered only to the codes now.

Everything was shifting.

Whole battalions pushed forward or pulled back. Trenches caved in.

One outpost sent the same message four times in one hour, each with different coordinates. Someone had scratched the word “HELP” onto the margin of a field note, like it might be seen by someone who could do anything about it. Vincent had traced it with his thumb without thinking. The ink was still wet. No name attached.

He’d tried once, days ago, to sketch the movement out across a makeshift grid in the corner of his ledger - just to see if he could spot a rhythm, a pattern. Something that would make sense of the chaos. But there wasn’t one. It just bled outwards. The southern end of the front in particular had become so volatile it no longer resembled a line at all. More a loose sprawl of men and weapons and screaming, constantly rearranged by every new shell.

There were names in those messages. Not many. Not often. But sometimes he caught them. Sometimes he saw a rank and a surname that tugged at his memory, and he had to sit very still, breathing shallowly through his mouth, until it passed.

He hadn’t thought of Alastor.

Not in… it must have been days. That was the most frightening part, if he let himself feel anything about it at all. Not that Alastor might be gone, but that he could be dissolving. Not dead. Not absent. Just... fading. Slipping back into static. Unfixed. Vincent didn’t want to forget his name, but there hadn’t been space to think, not really. Every moment was full. Every moment demanded his hands, his eyes, his unbroken attention.

It had been easy, too easy, to surrender to it. There was no one here to notice when he stopped talking aloud. No one to comment on the way he hunched forward even when no signal was incoming, like he was trying to crawl inside the machine and live there. One of the other boys - a newer recruit from some inland station - had tried to start conversation yesterday. Or the day before. Vincent hadn’t looked up. He didn’t remember what the boy had said. Just that the quiet afterwards had felt like victory.

The wire didn’t ask anything of him beyond presence. And he could give that. He could sit at this desk, hunched in the yellow lamplight, fingers twitching with every new burst of transmission, and give his whole self to the process. The rest of him didn’t matter. Not the way his spine clicked now when he shifted wrong. Not the smear of blood he’d wiped from beneath his nose earlier. Not the dreams - or whatever they were - that flickered at the edge of sleep, filled with teeth and shadows and a signal that wouldn’t resolve into anything real.

He kept his head down. Obeyed the wire. That was what he was good at. That was all that was left.

When the message finally came - short, abrupt, cold - it didn’t register at first.

GAS DEPLOYED. RUNNERS LOST IN SOUTHERN TRENCHES. MASS CASUALTIES. NAMES INCOMING.

He heard it and his hand moved to transcribe it before his mind caught up.

GAS DEPLOYED-

That wasn’t unusual. Not anymore. The weather had turned, the wind made it more viable.

RUNNERS LOST-

He froze. That was worse. That wasn’t general. That wasn’t a broad sweep. That was specific. Runners?

SOUTHERN TRENCHES-

Surely not.

MASS CASUALTIES. NAMES UNKNOWN.

He stared at the words until the lines on the page swam. Then he placed the slip of paper under the receiver board with slow, deliberate care, like he could trap it there - make it less true if it couldn’t move. He tried not to feel the tightness building in his throat. Tried not to picture the southern trenches, or who might’ve been running between them.

He told himself it wouldn’t be him.

Of course not. A thousand men along that stretch. More. Alastor was fast, too fast to be caught. Wily. Bright. He clearly knew how to navigate the risk, knew when to cut a line or duck a barrage.

But gas didn’t care about clever. It didn’t care if you were already on your last legs or if you'd just crawled out of hell with a grin. It filled the air. It burned through masks. It made the earth cough up everything it had taken in.

Vincent sat back in his chair. Slowly. His eyes felt dry. His lungs ached.

The room tilted. Not physically, but in the way things did when you hadn’t eaten or slept or stopped long enough to remember you were more than a pair of hands. His pulse beat in his ears. He tried to look busy, to reach for the next sheet of code and ready it, but his fingers wouldn’t close properly around the pencil. His whole hand was trembling. Not with exhaustion this time. Not with cold.

It was the not-knowing. That was what did it.

He could live with silence. With distance. He could live with longing like a wound pressed deep into his ribs even if this curious, new-born connection had given him something to cling to. But this - this half-formed maybe, this fragile, staggering suggestion - was unbearable.

Because it could be true.

And if it was true, he would never know for sure. Not for days. Not until some poorly typed record crossed his desk, or the name fell out of someone else’s mouth in a mess hall rumour, like the first time. Like how it all started. He would hear it in passing. Casual. Offhand. And the world would tilt again, this time forever.

He shoved himself up from the chair. Too fast. The whole tent spun and stuttered, and he caught the desk edge hard with his hip. Something rattled and fell behind him. He didn’t stop to see what it was. The air inside had gone thick and sour again - burnt copper and sweat and something else now, something sickly, like ink turning inside itself.

Outside, the cold hit him like a slap.

He staggered out into it, boots half-laced, coat barely on. The sky was black and moonless, thick with cloud, and the camp around him buzzed low with the rustle of canvas and far-off voices. No shelling for once. No barrage. Just the stillness that came after something awful, like even the night was holding its breath.

He didn’t know where he was going. Just that he had to get away from the machine, from the desk, from the unspooling thought that maybe- maybe-

He reached the far edge of the camp, just past the signal lines where the brush thinned into ragged hedgerow and broken fence. It was darker here, and quieter. The wind lifted scraps of smoke and earth into the air. He fumbled in his breast pocket with numbed fingers, found the roll of cigarette rations, and struck a match.

It flared too bright at first. He blinked against it, shielding the glow with one hand. The paper caught. The tobacco burnt dry and fast.

He breathed in.

It didn’t help.

The smoke tasted like cardboard and ash and whatever they’d packed into it to keep them calm. It made his throat scratch. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Not until he lit the second, and even then, it was only because he was too cold now to feel them properly.

He crouched low against the fence post, one arm braced on his knee, the cigarette burning low between his fingers. The darkness closed in at the corners of his vision, and the only light came from the ember glow each time he inhaled. He tried not to think. He tried not to imagine-

A footstep.

Or maybe a shift in the wind.

He held still, eyes wide, cigarette frozen midway to his lips.

Then another.

Then the unmistakable rustle of movement, slow, quiet - down by the fence-line, where the shadows bent wrong and the mud went deep.

And then a shape. Not looming. Not abrupt. Just… there. Cut from the night like a wound stitched back into the earth. Moving slow, shoulders slightly hunched, arms swinging loose.

Vincent didn’t think, didn’t mean to speak, but the name cracked out of him like a sob split in half.

“…Alastor?”

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid April, 1918

The sky looked wrong, too quiet and starry for what had happened that day.

Alastor crouched low near the latrine trench, scrubbing his hands on the grass though there was nothing on them now - just the memory of blood. His knuckles stung. The scratches weren’t deep, but they felt jagged, uneven, like something had clawed at him from the inside out. The taste of salt and ash lingered in the back of his throat.

He hadn’t stopped moving all day. The phone lines to the southern trench collapsed just before dawn and every runner within reach had been deployed - east, south, back again. Alastor had sprinted near four kilometres by noon, boots sliding in the wet, mud slicked up his shins. Orders in, orders out. Not enough hands to carry it all. Not enough time between bursts of shellfire.

And then the gas.

He’d seen it begin. A slow rise at first, a green-yellow bloom wafting from the gully mouth near Sector 5. Didn’t even need to smell it. Just knew. Men started screaming before it reached them. Some clawed at their masks like they made things worse. Maybe it did, he hadn’t stuck around to check.

Another runner caught it before him. A boy. No name Alastor knew, though they’d crossed paths more than once. He’d been coming from the eastern ridge, shouting something about a change of position. And then he dropped. Just folded like paper - arms twitching, legs buckled. His helmet rolled one way, his body another.

Alastor had ducked behind the embankment, lungs tight, hands braced in the churned muck. He held his breath longer than he thought he could - long enough for the worst of it to pass. He didn’t cry. Not for the boy, at least. But the gas stung his eyes, and the tears came anyway, scalding hot and silent, tracking down his cheeks like something he'd refuse to name.

By nightfall the gas had cleared, but the silence didn’t lift. The trenches smelled like death, vomit, and blood.

He’d run two more messages. One to an officer up near the western rise who didn’t even look up from his map when Alastor arrived. The second to a field medic half-buried beneath triage tarpaulin. The man hadn’t said thank you. Just reached out with blood-crusted fingers and pulled the slip straight from his hands.

Now, finally still, Alastor couldn’t remember how he’d got back to camp. He must’ve walked. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been out here either - crouched by the fence-line, knees drawn up, palms braced hard against the earth like it might shift again if he let go.

He hadn’t meant to stay this long.

But going back in felt… too sharp. Too much. Too soon.

He was still dragging himself upright, limbs stiff with cold and memory, when the voice broke through the dark.

“…Alastor?”

He didn’t move. Not at first. The sound cracked at the edges, too human to be trusted. It could’ve been the tail-end of a dream, one of those deep ones that curled like wire through his chest, all trees and teeth and voices blooming from the static. He braced against the fence post, breath caught somewhere high in his throat.

Then again, louder this time.

“Alastor.”

Not a ghost then, nor a dream.

He turned, slow, as though the air itself might shatter with too sudden a shift. His fingers curled tight around the post, grounding him in the dark. And there - half-silhouetted past the hedgerow, cigarette flaring low in one unsteady hand - stood Vincent.

He looked wrong - not damaged, not broken, just too here. Like someone who hadn’t expected to survive this far and was still trying to make sense of it. As though someone had scraped the polish from him and left him raw and flickering. His coat hung open, shirt collar skewed, hair falling in loose strands that caught the match-glow like wire. He looked hollowed-out; like the light had given up trying to hold onto him. And his eyes looked as if they hadn’t properly shut in days.

Alastor felt something lurch behind his ribs. Not pity. Not quite. Just a terrible sense of recognition. Like a mirror had cracked in a place he hadn’t known to look.

“…Hello Vincent.” he said. It came out quieter than he meant. Rougher too.

Vincent didn’t speak at first. Just stood there, blinking like he wasn’t sure if Alastor was real.

Then, with a rasp barely audible over the wind: “I thought-” Vincent stopped. Tried again. “There was a message.”

Alastor nodded. “Yeah.”

He didn’t elaborate.

The air sat thick between them.

Vincent drew in a breath, slow. “They said some runners were down.”

“Down… That’s one way to put it.”

That hung there for a moment too long.

Alastor shifted. He wanted to move closer, only a little, just to lessen the gap. But something stopped him. He didn’t want to startle the boy. Didn’t want to cross a line he couldn’t uncross. So he stayed where he was, fingers tight on the fence rail, letting the quiet stretch and shape itself around the throb in his knees.

“Were you…” Vincent trailed off. “Near it?”

He gave a nod, sharper this time. “Close enough.”

There was something strange in the way Vincent was looking at him. Not relief exactly. Not fear either. Something bruised. Something frayed. Like he’d been holding himself together with string and had only just remembered it was tied to something real.

“I’m alright,” Alastor said, finally. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

Vincent let out a sound, half-laugh, half-scoff. “You’re not.”

Alastor tilted his head. “Neither are you.”

And that, oddly enough, seemed to settle something. Vincent looked down, a soft breath escaping through his teeth as he crouched back against the fencepost. The ember of his cigarette flared once, then dimmed.

Alastor stepped forward, careful. Slow.

Then sat.

Not too near, not too far. Just enough that the cold air no longer bit quite so sharply.

They didn’t speak for a while.

Somewhere in the dark, a nightjar called. The brush rustled low. Alastor could hear the slight hitch in Vincent's breath - uneven, but steadier than before. It didn’t have to mean anything. The silence. The proximity.

But it did. Something about the silence felt shared, not empty. Like a frequency only they could hear. He just didn’t know what it was saying yet.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front - Late April, 1918

It hadn’t meant anything. That’s what he told himself. Again. And again. And again. Just a coincidence. A moment of stillness when everything else had been noise.

But Vincent had replayed it more times than he could count - those few minutes huddled near the fence post, smoke curling from his fingers, breath fogging faintly in the cold. The way Alastor had appeared from the dark, steady and slow, like he wasn’t startled by the world still turning. Like he'd been expecting Vincent all along.

They hadn’t said much. Hardly anything, really. A name. A question. The barest exchange of words, each sentence flattened beneath exhaustion. But it had steadied something in Vincent that he hadn’t realised was shaking.

Three nights later, he’d found Alastor again.

Same spot, same hour - just past the signal lines where the mud ran shallow and the shadows pooled thick between the fence posts. Alastor was already there, crouched low on his haunches like a fox at rest, boots muddied, coat creased from wear. He didn’t speak when Vincent approached. Just looked up with that quiet, crooked grin and held out a cigarette.

There were two of them in his hand.

And Vincent, without thinking, had taken one.

They smoked in silence. That time, too.

Now it was another three nights on. Or maybe four. The days had blurred again. Messages streamed in constant, overlapping bursts. Two sets of coordinates had arrived coded wrong and one soldier’s full name had slipped through in a dying gasp of Morse - just a private, but it clung to him. Some poor boy’s final transmission and the only thing the wire had caught was his name.

Vincent had written it down. He didn’t know why. The page was already full, but he squeezed it between two other lines in handwriting barely legible.

He’d barely thought of Alastor those first few days after. Not because he didn’t want to. But because something in him was afraid to. Like if he held the memory too tightly, it might press through his fingers and vanish. He let it sit instead, like a heat low in his chest. A presence he didn’t need to name.

And now here he was, again.

He didn’t even pretend to make it casual. He’d gone through the motions - waited until his shift ended, made a half-hearted note about fresh requests from the northern ridge - but the second the tent thinned out and the sky darkened past dusk, his feet had taken him back. Same boots, same coat, same route past the twisted hedgerow and the rust-stained mess pans dangling from a clothesline someone had strung too low.

It was ridiculous, really. Childish. As if hope was worth anything in war. As if showing up mattered.

But he was here.

The night air was colder than he’d expected. Still and sharp. His breath smoked faintly. The signal tent, now far behind him, buzzed low like a hive. He could still hear it in the back of his mind - a constant electric itch. He tried to shake it off.

The spot wasn’t far now. Just past the bend in the wire.

He slowed.

Just in case.

Just to soften the disappointment if the space was empty.

But it wasn’t.

Alastor was already there.

Leaning against the same battered fence post, coat collar turned up against the cold. His face was half in shadow, but he straightened at the sound of boots, and Vincent caught the gleam of his eyes under the moonlight - calm, unreadable, unmistakably watching him.

He was wearing his usual crooked grin, eyes shining in the moonlight. With a flick of the wrist, he held out a matchbox, then the telltale shape of two cigarettes tucked between his fingers.

And just like that, the static in Vincent’s chest eased.

He didn’t speak, just crossed the final few steps, reached for the offered smoke, and crouched low beside him.

The match flared. He struck it for both of them.

The silence settled in quick, comfortable now, or something close to it.

Alastor exhaled first, the smoke curling out sharp and white.

Vincent followed, blinking at the burn in his throat. The ration cigarettes always made his tongue go dry, but he didn’t care. The ritual was what mattered. The act of it.

“Busy?” Alastor asked after a while, voice low.

Vincent made a noncommittal sound. “Always.”

They lapsed back into silence, but it felt different this time. Not brittle, not stretched too thin. Just worn in. Like boots at the heel or paper softened by the fold.

Alastor shifted a little, shoulders rolling as he leaned more comfortably into the fence post. His cigarette glowed faint in the dark, casting a quick flare across his jaw before dimming again.

“Still running messages?” Vincent asked, unsure of what else to say.

“Among other things.” Alastor’s mouth tugged upward. “They’ve taken to calling me the deer. I suppose it's because I’m always out running for my life.”

Vincent made a low, amused sound. “Fitting.”

Alastor tipped his head. “I’m not sure it’s a compliment. They're pitifully stupid animals.”

“Nicknames here never are,” Vincent said, voice dry. “I probably have a few but I’d have to actually speak to any of the others to find them out.”

A soft huff of laughter escaped Alastor, more breath than sound. “You don’t talk to them?”

“Why bother? You’d be surprised how fast people start to avoid you when you just ignore them.”

“Sounds efficient.”

“I thought so.” Vincent took another drag, letting the burn sit for a moment before breathing out. “Doesn’t matter. Everyone forgets eventually. We’re always moving. Always dying. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who still cares what day it is.”

“I only know thanks to a calendar in my superior’s room.” Alastor sighed, and turned to look at him sidelong. “Do you know the date?”

Vincent shrugged. “I mean, not really. Don’t have a clue what day it is. They come in as part of the code, but never clearly. ‘Prepare for dawn attack on the 28th.’ ‘Trench cleared as of the 24th.’ Everything’s in reference to something else. Not like a calendar. Just fragments.”

He paused, thumb tracing the edge of the matchbox still resting in his palm. It was scuffed and dented, an older make, British issue from the look of it. The striker strip was faded, and the branding half-worn, the kind issued with rations before the Americans arrived in force. He almost asked where Alastor had gotten it, he didn’t sound English, but the thought passed without landing.

He turned it over once more, then let it rest beside him in the dirt. “But I think - based on the last one - I think today might be the 26th.”

Alastor didn’t speak, but his grin widened a little.

Vincent tilted his head, glanced over. “It is, isn’t it?”

After a beat: “It is.”

“Hmm.” Vincent looked down. Let the cigarette rest between his lips for a second, eyes half-lidded. Then, more lightly than he felt: “Happy birthday to me, then.”

Alastor blinked. “Pardon?”

“My birthday. I think it’s today.”

There was a flicker of something in Alastor’s face, confusion, maybe. Or something quieter. “You think?”

“I mean, yes. Probably. Close enough.” Vincent gestured vaguely. “I’ve lost track properly, but... April 26th. That’s mine.”

Alastor considered him for a long moment. “How old?”

Vincent gave a small, crooked grin. “Eighteen, I suppose. Officially.”

Alastor didn’t say anything for a moment. The wind picked up, fluttering the edge of his coat.

“That’s young,” he said eventually.

Vincent snorted, low in his chest. “You don’t get to say that. You can’t be much older than me.”

Alastor arched a brow. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

There was another pause. This one easy. A shift in rhythm, not in tension.

“No cake,” Vincent said.

“No party either,” Alastor replied.

“Tragic.” Vincent drew from his cigarette, held the smoke for a beat, then exhaled. “Could’ve at least brought me a ribbon or something.”

“I brought you a cigarette.”

“True.”

Alastor looked at him again, this time properly. The moonlight caught in the hollows beneath his eyes, softening the angles of his face. “Do you want me to say something?” he asked. Not unkind. Just honest.

Vincent blinked. “What, like congratulations?”

“Or condolences.”

“Neither. I don’t think I care.” He paused. “I think I just wanted to say it out loud. To know it still means something.”

Alastor nodded. “Alright.”

And that was enough.

They finished their smokes. Let the night stretch long around them. No laughter this time, but no dread either. Just two bodies sitting close enough to feel the warmth between them but not close enough to need to name it.

Eventually, Alastor stood. Dusted the ash from his trouser leg. “Same time tomorrow?”

Vincent looked up. “You’re the one who waits out here.”

Alastor gave him the barest of shrugs. “Maybe I’m just hoping you’ll keep showing up.”

Vincent didn’t reply. Just smiled, small and strange and real.

Alastor turned, coat catching on the breeze, and Vincent watched him go until the dark folded over him again.

Then he tipped his head back against the post, the cigarette stubbed into the earth beside him, and let himself stay there just a little longer. Just until the hum behind his ribs finally settled.

It wasn’t until later, in the quiet dark of his bunk, that he realised he'd taken the matchbox.

He turned it over once in the dark. Thumb brushing the worn lettering. Still didn’t know where Alastor had gotten it. Still didn’t quite mean to keep it. But he didn’t give it back either.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late April, 1918

He’d been there a while. Long enough for the night to press close around his shoulders, sharp with spring cold - the kind that still bit, unlike winter’s weightless chill that sank deep and never left. The fence post pressed into his spine, warped and splintering, but he didn’t move. The moon hung low and clean above the camp, shadows sliding long across the ground. Behind him, the hedgerow rustled only when the wind pulled straight through.

Alastor stood still, coat collar turned up, one boot half-buried in the mud where the ground always softened past midnight. The box of matches felt light in his pocket, nearly spent, but he kept it close. Two cigarettes between his fingers - habit now, not chance.

He didn’t pace. He didn’t hum.

He waited.

He didn’t know exactly what had changed in him that night - when that boy had said his name like it meant something, like it hurt to hold in. But something had.

Alastor had stood in the cold for a long time after Vincent had gone, longer than made sense. Just thinking. Or maybe not even thinking - just feeling the shape of something new against the place in him that usually stayed untouched. Like someone had knocked loose a hinge inside him and he’d spent the days since waiting for it to swing open.

Three nights later, when Vincent had come again, he hadn’t been surprised.

He’d expected it. Had known, somehow, that the boy would find his way back through the dark, pulled not by duty but by something smaller and stranger. A thread. A sound. A pulse buried deep in the static. Alastor had already had the cigarettes ready. Hadn’t even needed to think about it.

Now, again, it had been three days. Three long nights full of movement and silence, of mess runners and dead radios, of commanding officers barking half-formed orders through grit teeth. But all of that blurred at the edges.

This was the centre. This moment, this edge of camp where the world held its breath.

A footstep, then another. Slow. Hesitant.

Alastor straightened.

He didn’t smile yet. Not quite. But the flicker of anticipation stirred in his chest like something waking.

The footsteps grew closer, then slowed. The silence shifted.

He turned his head, not abruptly, and caught the boy in the shadows.

Vincent. Again.

Same coat, same stride. He looked tired still - worse, maybe - but the kind of tired that settled like a bruise rather than a break. The kind you learned to live inside. His shoulders were stiff, the lines of his face too sharp in the moonlight. But his eyes still found Alastor’s - like they were already tuned to the same frequency, locating each other through instinct alone.

Alastor lifted his hand, two fingers crooked around the cigarettes. He flicked the matchbox out with a snap of his wrist.

Wordless, Vincent crossed the last few feet between them. He didn’t speak. Just took the offered cigarette, crouched low at the base of the post, and lit both with one flame.

The match flared, then went dark.

The silence settled again. Not awkward. Not even quiet. Just full. Like a breath held between them.

Alastor exhaled first, watching the smoke bleed into the air. His fingers were steady. The cigarette burned clean, straight down the line.

He didn’t look directly at Vincent for a while. Just let himself feel the boy’s presence next to him, low and solid and real. The way the smoke from both their cigarettes curled together before vanishing. The way the quiet held.

He wasn’t sure what this was. Just that it steadied something in him he hadn’t meant to let shake. It didn’t make him lighter. It didn’t soften the world. But it made it bearable. The hollow in his chest didn’t ache quite so much. The weight behind his eyes didn’t feel as heavy.

He wanted to say something. He didn’t know what.

Alastor drew from the cigarette again, slow and steady, watching the ember crawl down to the paper’s edge. The warmth sat in his lungs longer than it should’ve. Not comforting, not exactly. But anchoring. Tethering.

Vincent was still beside him, knees crooked, one elbow propped on the fence rail. He didn’t speak either, but Alastor could feel the attention humming just under his skin. The awareness. Not of being watched but of being met. It was different.

It was a strange thing - quiet, sharp, and whole. He hadn’t known that someone else’s nearness could settle inside him like a signal he wanted to keep answering; not when he’d cared for no one, truly, except his mother until now.

“Busy?” he asked, voice low.

Vincent made a soft sound, half-laugh, half-breath. “Always.”

They lapsed again, easy. Alastor let the smoke drift out from his nose, head tipped slightly back. He didn’t know what to say. Charm had always come easily - people were predictable, readable, disposable. But Vincent pulled in a way Alastor wasn’t prepared for. Not with expectation, not even with want, but with presence. With weight.

“Still running messages?” Vincent asked after a while.

He nodded, mouth twitching at the corner. “Among other things.” He let the words hang a second before adding, wryly: “They’ve taken to calling me the deer. I suppose it's because I’m always out running for my life.”

Vincent arched a brow without turning his head. “Fitting.”

“I’m not sure it’s a compliment,” Alastor replied. “They’re pitifully stupid animals.”

“Nicknames here never are,” Vincent said dryly. “I probably have a few but I’d have to actually speak to any of the others to find them out.”

That tugged a real sound from him - more exhale than laugh, but close enough. “You don’t talk to them?”

“Why bother?” Vincent's voice didn’t shift. “You’d be surprised how fast people start to avoid you when you just ignore them.”

Alastor let that sit for a beat. “Sounds efficient.”

“I thought so.”

Then silence again, this time longer but not uneasy. Just stretched, worn, familiar.

“Everyone forgets eventually,” Vincent said, voice quieter now. “We’re always moving. Always dying. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who still cares what day it is.”

“I only know thanks to a calendar in my superior’s room,” Alastor replied, sighing softly. He didn’t mention how often he glanced at it - not to track the war, but to avoid its worst turns. He turned toward Vincent, meeting his gaze sidelong. “Do you know the date?”

A shrug. “I mean, not really. Don’t have a clue what day it is. They come in as part of the code, but never clearly. ‘Prepare for dawn attack on the 28th.’ ‘Trench cleared as of the 24th.’ Everything’s in reference to something else. Not like a calendar. Just fragments.”

He fidgeted then, fingers ghosting over Alastor's matchbox in his hand. “But I think - based on the last one - I think today might be the 26th.”

Alastor didn’t answer straight away. He hadn’t been counting, not really, but… yes. That sounded right. Close enough.

“It is,” he said.

“Hmm.” Vincent looked down, cigarette between his lips, eyes half-lidded. Then, lighter than the weight behind it: “Happy birthday to me, then.”

Alastor blinked. “Pardon?”

“My birthday. I think it’s today.”

He studied him properly now. Pale, drawn, hair loose over his brow, mouth wry but tired. Something fragile but burning all the same. Not fragile like glass - fragile like a matchstick just struck, alight before the wind caught it.

“You think?”

“I mean, yes. Probably. Close enough.” Vincent gestured vaguely with his free hand. “I’ve lost track properly, but… April 26th. That’s mine.”

Alastor hesitated. “How old?”

“Eighteen,” Vincent said. “Officially.”

He didn’t reply at once. The number caught in his chest, unfamiliar and heavy. Eighteen. That made him just months younger than Alastor but there was something in Vincent that made him feel much younger than Alastor had ever been. Something sharpened early, worn too thin too soon.

“That’s young,” Alastor said at last - not with judgement, not even concern. Just quiet observation, offered without weight.

Vincent scoffed low. “You don’t get to say that. You can’t be much older than me.”

Alastor arched a brow. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

They both went quiet again, but the silence had warmed. No longer empty. Just resting.

“No cake,” Vincent muttered.

“No party either.”

“Tragic.” He took a long drag from his cigarette, then added with mock seriousness, “Could’ve at least brought me a ribbon or something.”

“I brought you a cigarette.”

“That you did.”

The moonlight shifted as vmoved, the smoke curling faint from his lips. Alastor watched without turning, just enough to keep him in sight.

“Do you want me to say something?” he asked, voice low, nearly a murmur. “About the birthday.”

Vincent blinked. “What, like congratulations?”

“Or condolences.”

“Neither.” A pause. “I don’t think I care. I think I just wanted to say it out loud. To know it still means something.”

Alastor nodded once. “Alright.”

And that was enough.

They smoked the rest in silence, side by side in the night. Eventually, he stood and dusted ash from his coat. “Same time tomorrow?”

Vincent looked up at him. “You’re the one who waits out here.”

“Maybe I’m just hoping you’ll keep showing up.”

Alastor blinked, surprised by the sound of his own voice, by the truth of it, spoken aloud before he’d quite meant to. He glanced away, adjusting his coat like it might cover the flicker of something too bare.

Vincent didn’t answer. But the smile he gave was small and strange and honest.

Alastor turned to go. Didn’t look back. But just before he vanished fully into the dark, he glanced once to the side - just enough to see the matchbox still in Vincent's hand, slipping quietly into his coat pocket as though he’d forgotten it wasn’t his.

Alastor’s smile lingered. He said nothing. He’d taken it from a dead man’s coat weeks ago. It meant nothing. But if Vincent wanted to keep it...

Well. He didn’t mind.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early May, 1918

He didn’t look at the sky anymore. He didn’t need to. The tent told him everything.

The signal tent had its own clock - not one that ticked or chimed, but one that pulsed. That cracked and whined and stuttered in code. Orders came in bursts. Names too, sometimes. Coordinates garbled at the edges. Requests for flare guns and aid kits and burial tags. Everything arrived with a weight behind it now; not the weight of consequence, but the weight of repetition.

And somewhere in the middle of it - right between a field request for barbed wire and a truncated message about reinforcements that never came - Vincent realised the hour had turned.

He didn’t look. Didn’t ask. He just knew.

He finished logging the signal, let his pencil trail off near the end, and pushed to his feet like it meant nothing. His coat was already on. Boots half-laced. He ducked past the flap with barely a nod to the corporal slumped in the corner, muttering something about shrapnel, and let the canvas close behind him like a breath let out slow.

The cold hit sharp. Not sudden, not startling. Just… known.

He tucked his hands into his sleeves as he walked, out past the mess line, past the laundry strung too low, past the twisted length of wire where someone had hung a tin plate to keep the rats off. The air smelled faintly of smoke and metal and damp, like it always did when the weather threatened rain but held back. He could hear a voice calling names from the entrance to the camp, sharp and angry, but it faded quickly as he passed the hedgerow.

He didn’t hurry. That would’ve been obvious. That would’ve made it something. But his pace was steady. Ground-learned. Familiar.

The kind of walk you didn’t think about until your body just did it.

He wasn’t even sure why he’d kept coming. There hadn’t been a decision. Just a rhythm. A current pulling him each night the same direction, back toward the fence post just beyond the wire where the ground stayed dry and the dark came quicker.

The first time had been chance.

The second had been hope.

Now it was just… the shape of the day.

He didn’t mark the nights anymore, but if pressed, he could’ve counted them by memory. Not by date. Not by hour. But by how it had felt, each night a slightly different weight in his chest, a slightly different stillness in the air. Some had been colder. Some had come with wind. One with distant shellfire. But the shape of it was the same. Always the same.

And he kept returning. Without question. Without plan.

Not for any reason he could name. Not for hope. Not for company. Just because something in him followed the current. And the current always led here.

The spot came into view slowly, framed between two split trees and the bent back of a rusted cart that hadn’t moved in weeks.

He slowed out of habit. Not fear, not doubt. Just something to soften the moment in case the space was empty.

It wasn’t.

Alastor was already there.

Leaning against the fence like he belonged there, one foot crossed over the other, head tipped toward the moon. He didn’t startle when Vincent approached. Didn’t speak either. Just turned his head slightly, enough for the light to catch the faint grin pulling at the corner of his mouth.

Two fingers crooked. Two cigarettes held between them.

And Vincent, without a word, reached to take one.

They didn’t need to speak. Not yet. The silence was the point. The match flared, the way it always did - bright, sharp, and quick - and then faded into the dark.

Vincent breathed in. The burn scratched at his throat. The wind tugged gently at his collar.

They stood there, side by side in the quiet. Smoke curling between them like breath made visible.

Nothing had changed but something in him settled all the same.

It was the same every time now and still, it never felt dull. Never rote. The ritual didn’t wear thin; it deepened. He could trace each motion in advance - the flick of the match, the curve of the smoke, the faint sound of Alastor’s breath as he exhaled - and somehow, that only made it sharper.

Vincent kept the old matchbox in his pocket now. Alastor had never asked for it back. Just showed up a few nights later with a new one and didn’t say a word. That silence said more than a thousand questions might have.

There was something holy about it. Not sacred, not quite. But precise. Intact.

He hadn’t spoken a word yet. Didn’t need to. Not tonight.

He let his gaze drift to the horizon, where the sky split into muddy blue and grey. The last light fading. He wondered if Alastor ever watched the sky like this when he was alone. If he ever saw patterns in the clouds or faces in the smoke trails. If he counted the seconds between shell bursts, the way Vincent sometimes did when sleep wouldn’t come.

It didn’t matter. Not really.

What mattered was that he was here. That they were.

Vincent shifted slightly, crouching lower against the post, the chill seeping through the hem of his coat. His cigarette burned low in his hand, ember blooming brighter whenever he drew in. The smoke no longer stung his lungs and throat. It just was another part of the night. Another part of them.

He glanced sideways, not fully, just enough to see the outline of Alastor’s face in profile.

There was something steadying about him. Not calming, exactly, but rooted. He didn’t fidget. Didn’t pace. He just… was. Present. Whole in a way that few people managed to be out here.

And Vincent kept showing up.

He didn’t know what that meant yet.

He didn’t want to know.

But if Alastor ever stopped coming, if one night the post stood empty, if the match didn’t strike, Vincent wasn’t sure what he’d do. Not because they were friends. That would’ve been too easy. Too soft.

But because the silence would break wrong without him in it because he’d grown used to the shape of them, side by side.

He smoked slower than usual tonight. Maybe deliberately. Maybe not. His fingers had warmed enough to move freely again, no longer stiff from the cold. A part of him wanted to say something. Ask about the day. Make a joke. Anything to stretch the moment out longer.

But he didn’t.

He finished the cigarette in silence, then stubbed the end against the fence post with a slow, deliberate drag.

Next to him, Alastor did the same - no rush, no sound.

It felt like they’d already spoken. Like the quiet had carried the conversation on its own.

Eventually, Vincent turned his head, voice low with something like fondness. “You’re always here first.”

Alastor’s grin tugged sideways, small and crooked. “Maybe I like the quiet before you show up.”

Vincent exhaled - not quite a laugh, more a breath edged in warmth - and looked back toward the trees. “Maybe I should talk more, just to spoil it.”

That drew a real laugh from Alastor - soft, brief, but unguarded. The kind that lingered in the air like smoke.

They didn’t speak again after that. Not until the cold crept too deep and the cigarettes had long since burned down. Alastor stood first, as he always did, brushing ash from his sleeve, leaving the silence intact.

He didn’t ask if Vincent would return, he didn’t need to.

And Vincent, once Alastor had gone, stayed just a little longer - long enough to watch the smoke fade. Long enough to feel the quiet return.

The hour would turn again tomorrow.

And when the hour turned again, he’d feel it. He always did.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early May, 1918

There was no clock for runners. No bell. No call to mark the hour. But Alastor always knew.

It wasn’t instinct, exactly – instinct was loud, red, the sort of thing that screamed when danger was near and kept him alive when he was sprinting over blood-wet dirt and through the cracks in gunfire. This was quieter. A pulse. A hush in the chest. A tug at the base of his spine that said now.

He never questioned it.

He was never questioned either. Never lingered long in camp, never made enough of himself to invite scrutiny. If anyone noticed him slipping away, they didn’t care enough to ask why. A runner could vanish and reappear like smoke if he kept the right posture, wore the right expression, stayed forgettable in the way that mattered.

And Alastor was very, very good at that.

The route didn’t change. It didn’t need to.

His boots found the rhythm easily – over familiar ground now, through low ditches and half-churned paths, under the bent arms of the hedgerow. He ducked beneath the same length of barbed wire, skirted the broken cart and its sagging axle, stepped over the rusted tin plate that someone had hung from the fence to scare off rats. He could’ve walked it blind by now, and maybe someday he would.

Everything smelled of smoke and churn and the kind of rot that settled in canvas left out too long. But he didn’t flinch from it. He barely noticed anymore. The scent had become a texture, a part of the air. Like the fog that never left. Like the silence that pressed in around everything after dusk.

His hands were already in his coat pockets when he reached the spot – fingers cold, but not numb. He didn’t shiver. The box of cigarettes had been tucked there all day. He hadn’t opened it. Not once.

He never smoked until he was here, hadn’t even smoked before the war. Not properly. He’d picked it up from someone already dead. Lit one just to keep his hands warm. Then again to keep them steady. Now it was something else entirely.

He came early now. Earlier than needed. Not from nervousness. He didn’t pace. He didn’t hum.

He simply stood still, like always, and let the silence settle around him.

There was a kind of peace in it. Not safety – nothing here was safe – but stillness. A held breath before the strike.

And then it came. The faint sound of boots through wet earth. Measured, even, deliberate.

He didn’t turn. Just straightened slightly, lifted his head.

The sound came closer. Slower now. Alastor adjusted his collar, let the moment breathe. Then, as always, Vincent stepped into view.

Same coat, same shape of weariness in his shoulders, that precise kind of tiredness only he seemed to carry - not collapse, not drag. Just friction. Like the world rubbed wrong against him and he hadn’t learned how to flinch.

Alastor let his mouth pull into its now-familiar grin, small and angled. Not a performance. Not quite. But something near it. A greeting without words.

He held out the matchbox, the two cigarettes already waiting between his fingers.

Vincent took one.

The silence didn’t fall. It returned – like breath into a hollow chest. Like something old resettling.

Alastor struck the match.

The flare lit the edge of Vincent’s face – cheekbone, brow, the part of him that always looked just slightly elsewhere. Then the flame died.

They smoked together.

Not in sync, not in tempo - but with a mirrored rhythm, like code tapped in separate rooms that still made sense. Muscle memory. Habit formed by proximity. The way the smoke curled upward. The way the breath lingered before leaving. The pause between exhales.

It never felt rehearsed.

The repetition didn’t dull it. It sanctified it.

Alastor leaned back against the post, let the wood press into his spine. Let the cigarette warm his fingers. He stared somewhere above the horizon – not searching, just holding space.

He didn’t count the nights between these moments anymore.

He didn’t need to.

Vincent always came.

Just like Alastor always waited.

He’d tried not to name what it was between them. Had tried not to think about it too hard. Had tried to let it exist untouched – unpoked, undisturbed – like the silence between lightning and thunder.

But there were words forming now.

Ones he hadn’t said aloud. Might never say aloud.

Ritual.

Need.

Name.

He drew from the cigarette slowly, let the smoke sit a little longer than usual before releasing it. The ember glowed bright at the tip, then dulled.

He could feel Vincent beside him – not just in sight, not just in sound, but as a hum under the skin. Not like danger. Not like threat. Just presence. Steady and low.

The boy didn’t shift much anymore. He used to fidget, used to sit stiff like he might bolt if the quiet held too long. But now he crouched low against the fence, elbows tucked in, coat wrapped close. Still sharp, yes – still vigilant. But something had eased.

Something between them had worn in over the weeks. Not softened; neither of them had dulled. But it had settled, become steady. Sure.

The silence felt different now. Not hollow, not waiting. It was weighted, brimming with all the things they hadn’t said and didn’t need to. Like the space itself remembered each time they’d sat like this - still, shoulder to shoulder, letting the dark speak first.

Alastor didn’t turn his head, not fully, but his eyes shifted just enough to catch the curve of Vincent’s shoulder, the angle of his wrist, thumb hovering near the end of a cigarette he hadn’t finished. Not quite ready to let it go.

Lingering.

There was something in that. Something quiet but sharp, like a wire drawn through the chest, pulling just enough to notice. Not painful. Not heavy. Just… there. Real.

He didn’t have the words for it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But it nested somewhere behind the ribs, where instinct lived. And if this boy - this strange, watchful boy - ever stopped coming, if one night passed and the boots never came and the match stayed unstruck...

He didn’t know what he’d do with the quiet then.

It would not be peace. Not absence. Just lack. And it would gnaw at him.

Eventually, Vincent spoke. His voice was low, careful, not hesitant, exactly, but tuned to the moment like a hand adjusting the dial on a receiver.

“You’re always here first.”

Alastor let his smile tilt, the corners tugging with a faint sincerity he didn’t quite mean to show. “Maybe I like the quiet before you show up.”

There was a beat of silence. Then, almost beneath his breath, Vincent said, “Maybe I should talk more, just to ruin it.”

That drew a real laugh from Alastor - soft, surprised, and entirely unpolished. It escaped before he could catch it, warm and strange in his chest. He didn’t remember the last time he’d laughed like that. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

After that, they didn’t speak. The silence resumed, but it wasn’t a reset. It held something more now, an echo of amusement, a trace of closeness in the stillness between them.

The cigarettes burned down. The spring chill crept into their seams, found the skin beneath cuffs and collars. Still, they didn’t move.

Eventually, Alastor flicked the end of his cigarette into the dark. He brushed a trace of ash from his lapel with idle fingers, not because it mattered, but because it was something to do before the moment ended.

He didn’t ask if Vincent would come again.

He didn’t need to.

The boy would return. He always did.

The world might keep burning. Orders might change. Trenches might shift.

But this - this strange tether between them - just might hold.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early May, 1918

It started with static.

Not the usual kind - not the steady, breathing pulse of the wireless, or the stutter of code whispered in from miles away. This was different. Harsher. A shriek that tore through the receiver like sinew being pulled taut and then flayed. It surged, spat, howled - a burst of white-noise agony that made every man in the tent flinch and Vincent’s fingers seize on instinct.

Then silence.

Not calm. Not quiet. Just absence.

A cold, unnatural hush that settled over the signal tent like breath held too long. The kind that followed a scream - or preceded one. The corporal nearest the switchboard stared at the receiver like it might start bleeding.

Something had burned out. Or ruptured. Or failed in a way they couldn’t see. Vincent didn’t know what, no one really did, but everyone had an answer anyway.

The corporal swore it was sabotage - kept muttering about loose earth, stolen wire, saboteurs crawling beneath the trench floor with blades in their teeth.

The captain, brusque and sweating through his collar, blamed the weather. “Humidity,” he grunted. “Moisture in the wires. Bloody things were never meant to last out here.”

Someone else said rats. Another blamed rot. Another simply shrugged.

None of it mattered.

The system was down.

And with it, so was he.

“Field work,” the lieutenant had said, voice like a boot heel grinding into muck. “Temporary. Just until it’s sorted. No point having a man sitting around when there’s a war to fight.”

Field support. The words landed with the same weight as a bullet that hadn’t hit him - yet.

Vincent had nodded. He didn’t argue. Didn’t ask. And when the quartermaster handed him the rifle - without ceremony, without even looking up - it felt wrong.

The weight of it wasn’t just physical. It landed in his arms like a punishment. Heavy. Mismatched. Unfamiliar in every angle.

His palms felt wrong against the worn grip. The shoulder strap was too short. The barrel dragged slightly to the left. It didn’t hum. Didn’t click. Didn’t pulse with quiet potential the way his signal key did. It didn’t respond to his hands at all.

His fingers itched for contact. For copper. For pressure. Something to press into, to translate through.

But there was no code in this. No rhythm. Just metal and recoil and silence.

The rifle sat in his arms like a mistake his body hadn’t agreed to make, and for the first time since he’d arrived in France, Vincent had no idea where to place his hands.

No idea how to carry this without shame.

The uniform fit the same, but everything felt off. Like the thread had been pulled too tight.

They marched him out that morning without ceremony. Just another boy with orders. He didn’t even know which line they were sending him to - just that it was wet, already shelled, and short-staffed.

The trenches stank.

He’d known that, in theory. Everyone did. But this was different. This was rot. Stale water and meat gone soft in the sun. Blood turned to syrup. Mud that swallowed shoes whole and left skin burning. The first body he stepped over wasn’t whole. The second had a name tag identical to one he’d copied into a log the week before.

He stopped reading the tags after that.

There was no rhythm here. No code. Orders came in yells, not signals. He was handed spare ammunition with no instruction, pointed toward a sector and told not to get in the way.

He barely knew how to hold the rifle. His hands kept slipping. His shoulder ached from the recoil even when he didn’t fire.

And all he could think - all he could feel, even through the damp and the rot and the endless, endless noise - was the fence post.

That cold length of wood out past the hedgerow. The soft strike of a match. The smoke rising quiet between them.

His body knew the hour even now. Tracked it like a prayer.

He didn’t ask to leave. He didn’t expect to be allowed. But that ache - that strange, low absence where something steady had been - grew louder than the mortars.

He kept his head down. Didn’t speak unless prompted. When someone asked his name, he gave it like it didn’t belong to him.

That night, buried somewhere in the wet black of the trench wall, he sat with his back against a crate of bandages and tried not to listen to the boy sobbing three feet away.

He didn’t sleep.

He thought about the way Alastor always tilted his head before offering the cigarette. How his fingers never trembled. How the quiet between them had come to feel like something he could lean on.

He remembered - suddenly, vividly - the soft sound Alastor had made two nights ago. A half-hum under his breath. Tuneless, but steady. Vincent had meant to ask what it was. He hadn’t. It looped now behind his eyes like a code fragment stuck in repeat.

The next morning passed in haze. More mud. More yelling. More blood.

By the time he was released a week later - not reassigned, not officially, just allowed to return for reassessment - the skin on his palms had cracked from gripping the rifle too tight.

He made his way back through camp without speaking. The signal tent had light again. The corporal was asleep in his chair.

Vincent didn’t go inside.

He walked instead. Past the mess line. Past the low-strung washing. Past the tin plate that had rusted just a little more in the days he’d been gone.

His feet carried him the rest of the way. He didn’t think about it. Didn’t question it. Just moved.

The fence post stood where it always had. Weather-worn. Splintered near the base. The earth beneath it was dry.

But Alastor wasn’t there. The hour was wrong.

The silence wasn’t right. Not like before. Not full. Not holy.

Just empty.

Vincent crouched low, breath fogging faint in the early dusk. The air smelled of old smoke and unwashed cloth. His hands shook faintly as he reached into his coat pocket.

The matchbox was still there. Not the one he used. The other one. British army issue, older make, scuffed and softened by wear.

Vincent had kept it. Still did. Not because he needed it. But because it was his now - in that quiet, deliberate way that things became yours when someone let them go without asking you to give them back.

He struck one now.

Lit the cigarette slowly.

The match flared.

There was no one to share it with.

The smoke burned worse than usual. He held it in longer than he meant to, then exhaled too fast. His eyes stung.

He didn’t cry. He wouldn’t.

He stayed until the sky turned grey-blue and the first stars tried to claw their way out behind the clouds.

The post never shifted. The trees didn’t move.

And Alastor didn’t come.

Vincent stayed anyway.

Because maybe next time, he would.

Maybe tomorrow, the silence would hold something again.

Maybe.

He crushed the end of the cigarette against the post, and didn’t look back as he left.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early May, 1918

He’d come early again.

It had stopped being about the time days ago. The rhythm was instinct now, stitched deep beneath his ribs like a compass buried in the bone. He didn’t wait for cues. He just moved - quiet, precise, careful through the hedgerow, boots light where others dragged. The post was already a silhouette by the time the light dropped low.

But Vincent didn’t come.

Alastor didn’t flinch. Didn’t let his face turn or his body fold. He just slowed - shifted one step, then another - and leaned against the fence like always. Let the night’s cold find his fingers and the silence settle the way it used to.

He waited.

The matchbox stayed closed in his coat pocket. The cigarettes untouched. It wasn’t the first time Vincent had run late. But it was the first time he hadn’t come at all.

When the hour passed and the chill crept up beneath his collar, Alastor straightened. He didn’t sigh. Didn’t mutter. Just turned, slow and smooth, and started walking. Not back to camp, not exactly. He passed the outer edge of the mess tents, eyes skimming the silhouettes that crowded near the fires. Nothing. Just shadows and chatter and the rattle of mess tins.

He didn’t know what he expected.

He didn’t expect the tent to be dark.

The signal tent - usually pulsing with that faint, electric breath, that undercurrent of Morse that buzzed through the night like wire-bound heartbeat - was still. Silent. There were two men outside, huddled over a box of uncoiled wire. One was swearing. The other smoked.

Alastor paused.

“Something happen?” he asked, casual, light. Voice tucked under the quiet.

The man with the cigarette looked up. Narrowed his eyes like he didn’t recognise him, then shrugged.

“Sabotage,” he said. Or weather. Or rats. Or rot. The words changed depending who you asked. “System’s down.”

Alastor’s stomach didn’t drop. It simply went still.

“And the operators?”

“Sent ‘em out. Field support. What else? Can’t sit on their arses while the lines are dead.”

That was all he said. That was all he needed to.

Alastor nodded once. Sharp. Then kept walking.

He didn’t go far. Not back to the fence. Not to barracks. Just far enough to lean against the shadowed side of the infirmary wall and let his thoughts curl around themselves like smoke trying to find a crack.

Field support.

He could picture it. Vincent with a rifle, hands not built for weight but for rhythm. Palms meant to press keys, not triggers. The thought scraped against something deep in his chest.

He didn’t sleep well.

The next morning, he was assigned a double run. New message system - manual relays until the wires could be fixed. Everyone was stretched thin. He didn’t argue. Took the packet, bit the strip between his teeth, and ran.

And kept running.

The days blurred.

He ran with messages tucked against his ribs like smuggled breath. In rain, in mud, through smoke. His legs ached. His lungs burned. He lost track of his own rotation.

But every trench he passed, every checkpoint he reached - he looked.

Not obviously. Not enough to draw notice. Just a pause. A breath to scan the faces in shadow.

He didn’t see Vincent.

The fence post remained empty.

Once, he slipped past the hedgerow between runs. Just to be sure. Just to see. The ground was undisturbed. No footprints but his. The silence was cold, brittle. He didn’t stay.

The next run was longer. A message to a lieutenant near the eastern ridge. Shellfire had started by the time he got there, and it didn’t stop for hours. He slept in a hole in the wall with one boot on and woke to a rat pressed against his knee.

Still no Vincent.

He stopped waiting, but he didn’t stop looking.

Even when his ribs ached from a fall and his foot split open on a rusted nail. Even when his coat soaked through and his knees gave out at the edge of the northern trench. Even then, he kept watching the faces.

Kept hoping one might turn and match the one he was searching for.

The one he needed.

He didn’t know what to call the feeling, something raw and fixed and wordless. The knowledge that something had changed, and if Vincent didn’t come back - if he’d been sent to the front, to the slaughter - it would undo whatever hinge had just begun to settle in Alastor’s chest.

The message runs slowed. The line flickered back to life three days later - faint at first, just a pulse. Then stronger. The tent lights burned again.

But Vincent wasn’t there.

Alastor didn’t ask.

He just returned to the fence post.

And waited.

Not because he believed in miracles - but because he knew what the silence sounded like when the match didn’t strike.

And he couldn’t bear the silence if it didn’t.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid May, 1918

The days blurred. Not from exhaustion - though that carved deep - but from sheer unrelenting sameness. Wet boots. Wet socks. Wet skin. The trench was never dry. The air never clean. Even when the sun was out, it came through grey and yellowed as though spring couldn’t bare to arrive on the battlefield. Light filtered through mist and smoke and a ceiling of rotted canvas. He’d stopped trying to wash his hands. There was no point. Dirt lived in the seams now.

He didn’t keep count. Not on paper, not in his head. But his body did. A rhythm. A thrum in his blood every time the moon reached the middle of the sky. That was when he used to walk. That was when the fence post would come into view, when the match would flare, when the quiet would mean something.

Now the silence had teeth. And it bit down hard.

They’d put him on patrols. Then trench repair. Then ammo runs. One day they handed him a spade and told him to dig. He didn’t ask what the hole was for. He didn’t need to. There was always something to bury. Rations. Wire. Limbs.

He was still dreaming in code. He tapped messages into his thigh while walking. While crouching. While trying to sleep. Sometimes he caught himself looking for the key, half-convinced he’d simply misplaced it. As if any of this was a mistake that could be reversed by finding the right frequency.

The only time he felt human was the half-hour after dusk. Not during it. After. When the orders had been barked and the reports dragged back and the sky had gone fully black. He would find the least wet spot in the trench and sit. Back to a wall. Chin to knees. One hand wrapped around the matchbox he still hadn’t used.

Alastor’s matchbox.

He hadn’t said why he’d kept it. He wasn’t sure there was a reason. It was warm from his coat now. Familiar. He ran his thumb over the edge sometimes, just for the friction. Just to feel something that didn’t sting.

He kept waiting to see him.

Not at the fence post - he hadn’t dared return, not since that first empty night - but in the lines. In the alleys between sections. On the runs. Alastor could be anywhere, really. He was fast. Untrackable. Vincent had overheard someone call him a ghost. Someone else called him a demon. Neither had known he was listening.

He’d looked, every day. Let his eyes scrape every silhouette. Scanned every crooked grin. Every narrow shadow. But never found him.

Until now.

Two weeks to the day since the outage, they called him back.

Vincent hadn’t been told why he was summoned. Only that he was wanted. “Reassignment,” they said, vague as always. “The last of you. Should’ve been back sooner. Blame the wire.”

He didn’t argue. He just followed.

The mud was thinner today. Or maybe he was too numb to feel it. He kept his eyes forward. Kept his mouth shut. His rifle had been left in the trench. He wouldn’t miss it.

The officer’s tent loomed too large for comfort despite being half buried into the side of a trench. He ducked the flap without thinking, eyes still adjusting.

And stopped.

He knew before he knew.

There, just to the side - half-shadowed, not even close to casual - stood Alastor.

His coat was muddied. His boots worse. His expression… unreadable. Still. Too still. Like a creature mid-track, half-sprung in motion but unwilling to commit. His eyes were locked on Vincent.

Not moving. Not blinking.

Not pretending.

The officer was saying something. His mouth moved. Words fell like clods of dirt against stone.

But Vincent didn’t hear.

He looked at Alastor. Just looked. Let his chest ache with it. Let his throat tighten around the sudden impossible relief of it. Two weeks of war, of rot, of ache - and here he was. Intact. Whole.

Watching him.

The officer’s voice cut through finally, low and rough.

“You’re back with ops. Systems functional. Full reallocation. This one,” he jerked a thumb in Alastor’s direction without looking, “brought the confirmation. Told you runners were good for something.”

Vincent didn’t move.

His mouth parted slightly, reflex, but no words came. He couldn’t have spoken if he’d tried.

Alastor still hadn’t looked away. Not once. Not even when the officer’s voice dragged the moment forward like a weight.

The man sighed. “Dismissed. Go wash. You look like hell.”

Vincent nodded. Barely.

He didn’t remember turning. Only the way his boots scraped against the ground as he stepped backward. One pace. Two. Then the canvas flap dropped shut behind him with a low, papery sigh.

The air outside hit sharp. Brighter somehow. Too bright, even with the cloud cover low and dirty above the camp. Everything looked brittle. Unreal. As if he’d stepped back into a dream too large for his skin.

He didn’t wait to see if Alastor followed. Didn’t turn. Didn’t pause. He just walked and walked, feet unwilling to stop until he had made it back.

The camp stretched wide around him, worn down at the edges. It had changed since he’d left. Not much. Not in ways that mattered. But the mess line was shorter. The laundry line was gone entirely. One of the tin plates had rusted straight through and hung limp, jagged and half-eaten by time.

His feet carried him without thought. Past the familiar bend in the path, past the dip in the fence where the mud thinned, toward the corner of camp where the shadows always fell first. His body knew the way back like it had never left. Like it had only paused.

He let his breath out slow. Felt it shake a little on the exhale. Not from cold. Just from the press of everything.

The ache in his chest had shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.

But it was still there.

Then- Footsteps.

Soft. Deliberate. Slower than his, but steady.

Vincent didn’t turn. He didn’t need to.

The sound threaded into the air like a familiar chord, a note returning to a song he hadn’t realised had gone quiet. The pace was light, almost careless. But not indifferent.

No one walked like that out here. No one else moved as though the world were something to be danced around, rather than survived through.

And then - fainter still - singing.

Not words. Just sound. Low. A lilt beneath the breath. A tune with no structure. Only shape. Only memory.

Vincent felt it in his spine before he registered it with his ears.

That voice. That hum.

He could’ve wept, if he hadn’t already gone dry days ago.

It was him, of course it was.

Alastor, behind him. Close enough to follow. Far enough not to press.

Vincent didn’t stop walking. But his shoulders loosened. His breath evened. And his hands - clenched useless at his sides for what felt like years - finally began to relax.

There were still no words. Not yet. But every step forward felt a little more like home.

And behind him, that soft, strange voice carried on, low and crooked and unmistakably alive.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid May, 1918

The post stood empty again.

Same hour. Same hush. Same tilt of moonlight over the fence line.

Alastor didn’t leave right away.

He hadn’t expected him, not this time. Not really. But he still came. Still stood there like it might undo something in the world if he didn’t. He let the matchbox sit untouched in his pocket, fingers resting on it like a talisman. It wasn’t about the cigarettes. It hadn’t ever been.

It was about being here. Just in case.

Eventually, he moved. Not out of disappointment; he’d stopped calling it that. It was more like a quiet ache now. A pressure that had settled into the bones without a name.

He made his way back through camp, boots ghosting their usual rhythm. The mess tent was shuttered. The signal tent dim. The man snoring nearest the cot line was the same as yesterday. Everything unchanged.

He slid down into his bunk without removing his boots, without undressing, and let his coat stay wrapped around him like a shell. The canvas above him sagged slightly. Someone had drawn a crude skull in charcoal across the ceiling, right above the cots. The eyes dripped where rain had run down.

Alastor watched it until sleep came.

It didn’t last.

The morning cracked sharp. Someone shouting. A whistle. A shuffle of boots near his head. He rolled without thinking, sat up with the matchbox still clenched in his fist. His coat itched at the collar, damp from where he hadn’t moved.

“Run,” someone said. “North trench. Second line. Take this.”

A paper pressed into his hand. He didn’t look at it. Didn’t need to. He was already moving.

The sky was gunmetal grey. The mud deeper than usual, slick and laced with something that smelled like copper and old wool. His legs moved fast, too fast, but he didn’t stop. Didn’t dare. Mortars had been intermittent all morning. Runners were more expendable than ever.

The trenches curved ahead like intestines, half-collapsed. Someone was screaming nearby, or laughing - sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Alastor ducked past a group dragging a body by the ankles, didn’t ask.

The paper crumpled slightly in his grip. He skimmed it in a glance as he vaulted a shell-split board.

Reallocation.
Final reassignment.
Private Vincent.

He stopped short. Only for a second. But his breath caught hard enough to punch the air from his lungs.

Vincent.

Alastor stared at the name like it might vanish if he blinked. The ink had run slightly. The paper smelled faintly of the signal tent.

He ran faster.

There was joy in it. Ridiculous, blasphemous joy. His coat snapped behind him like a second skin. The barbed wire caught at the cuff but didn’t tear. The heel of his boot skidded against packed earth.

Machine gun fire cracked somewhere ahead, distant enough not to matter yet. He ran anyway. Not just for himself. Not just for the message. But for the boy on the paper. The boy he hadn’t seen in weeks.

The boy he’d been watching for in every line, every trench, every fleeting glance.

The boy who’d felt, somehow, like the only part of this war that wasn’t trying to rot him from the inside out.

It was absurd, really - grinning so wide it hurt with boots caked in blood and a leg half-numb from cold. But he couldn’t help it. He felt alight. Alive.

The run wasn’t short. Nothing was. He clipped a knee on a brace and nearly went down. His side burned from effort. Someone shouted his name - or something close to it - but he didn’t stop.

Not until he reached the officer’s post.

He handed the message over without ceremony. Waited just long enough to confirm it was read. Then lingered. “Private Vincent,” the man muttered, checking something off. “Back to ops. Final reassignment.”

Alastor said nothing. He didn’t have to. The man gestured vaguely with a pen. “I don’t have anything to send back. You can wait if you want to try to get the kid back in one piece. Hell, I won’t stop you.”

So he waited.

He stood by the far corner of the tent, half in shadow, trying not to shift too much. He didn’t know how long it was - minutes, probably - but each second felt slow. Slow and full. Like the world had pressed pause just long enough for one thing to go right.

And then- The flap opened.

And Vincent stepped through.

He looked… God.

He looked wrecked.

Matted hair. Hollow eyes. Skin drawn tight from cold or hunger or just time spent too long in the wrong place.

But he was there.

Alastor’s gaze locked to him and didn’t move.

Vincent didn’t see him straight away, or maybe he did but couldn’t process it. His eyes were scanning, blinking slow. Then they found him.

And stopped.

They didn’t speak. Not yet.

But Alastor held that look like a hand to the chest. Like a breath he’d been holding since the night he didn’t show.

The officer’s voice cut through it. “You’re back with ops. Systems functional. Full reallocation. This one brought the confirmation.” He gestured with a half-eaten sentence in Alastor’s direction. “Told you runners were good for something.”

Alastor didn’t care what was said. Didn’t care how little anyone understood what it meant. All that mattered was this: Vincent was looking at him.

Alive.

Dismissal came. The moment broke.

Vincent turned. Stepped out.

Alastor waited just a beat - just long enough to remember how to breathe - then followed.

He ducked the flap. The air outside hit fresh. Cold. And clean in the way only war could fake.

Vincent was already walking. Not fast, not far. But forward.

Alastor didn’t call out. Didn’t ask. He just walked behind him.

Not directly. Just far enough to not press. Close enough to not lose him.

The sound of their steps fell into rhythm before he meant them to.

And then, without warning, he was singing.

Low. Crooked. Thoughtless.

A tune he didn’t know. Or maybe he did. Maybe it was one Vincent had caught before. Maybe it was one they’d shared without meaning to.

He watched the tension lift from the boy’s shoulders - not fully. Not entirely. But enough.

Enough to know he’d been heard.

And Alastor smiled. Quietly. The way you did when something impossible stopped being.

And simply became.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid May, 1918

The job felt lighter than it used to.

Not in strain, the war hadn’t changed, but the pressure behind each tap didn’t claw at his knuckles anymore; the rhythm came back smooth, steady, almost natural. The way it had been before the weeks of wet trenches and blood and silence so wide it had hollowed his bones.

He sat hunched at the signal board, elbows propped, sleeves pushed halfway to his forearms. His fingers moved without thought. The codes were dull tonight - routine, predictable, all coordinates and half-hearted reports from the northern ridge. Nothing urgent. Nothing screaming.

That should’ve helped. It didn’t. Not completely. Because even now, hours in, he still kept glancing up.

Alastor wasn’t on duty here. Never was. But Vincent’s eyes kept drifting toward the flap anyway, expecting him. Or maybe hoping for something stranger - some flicker, some shadow. Something to prove he wasn’t just a creature of dusk and woodsmoke and silence held too long.

The officer dozing in the corner gave a snore that cracked like a log splitting. Vincent startled faintly and dropped his hand.

The key gave a last, unfinished tap.

He stood, slow, careful not to disturb the coil of tension still wrapped round his spine. The tent was warm enough - too warm, almost - but the moment the air outside hit his chest, he breathed in like he’d been holding it all day.

The walk wasn’t long. It never had been. But something about it tonight felt different.

Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe the way the moonlight stretched thin through the clouds, drawing pale silver along the dirt paths like chalk lines. Maybe just the rhythm of it - his boots pacing out a memory he hadn’t said aloud.

Same turn. Same ditch. Same snag of wire, the tin plate still rusted halfway through.

He knew the shape of this path too well now. It lived under his skin like a second map.

And when the fence post came into view - when he saw the crouched figure already waiting, shoulders bowed against the night, cigarette cupped steady in his hand - something in him loosened.

Alastor didn’t move. Not right away. Just lifted his head slightly, eyes catching the dark with that same unreadable gleam.

Vincent didn’t speak. Didn’t try to. He just lowered himself slowly beside him, knees crackling in protest, and let the weight settle as their coats brushed.

Neither of them moved away.

Alastor held a cigarette out and Vincent reached to take it, their hands brushing knuckle to knuckle.

The contact was nothing. The contact was everything.

He struck the match and lit his cigarette, watched the flame blur the air between them. It caught in the hollows of Alastor’s face, then vanished.

Smoke curled and their shoulders pressed together.

They smoked in silence for a while. Not the same silence as before though. This one felt warmer, weighted. Like a blanket pulled just over the shoulders, not enough to smother - just enough to hold.

Vincent let the smoke drift out slow from his nose. “Did you hear about the rat in the mess tent?”

Alastor glanced sideways. His mouth curved. “Which one?”

“The one that dragged a whole loaf of bread down the corridor, the one with half a tail.”

A huff, almost a laugh. “That one again. I think he’s organising a little syndicate. Saw him in the mess with two others and a crust between them.”

“They’d treat him better if he did.”

Alastor’s cigarette was burning low now. So was Vincent’s. But neither moved to stub them out. Not yet.

It felt… right. To be here with Alastor. There’d been so few things that felt that way in his life.

He let his eyes drift to Alastor’s face. Not directly. Just the outline. The way the shadows curled under his cheekbones, the soft glint of moisture in his hair from the damp, the way his lips parted just faintly with each exhale.

Vincent didn’t realise he was staring until Alastor turned toward him and said, low, almost amused, “Something on your mind?”

Vincent looked away, not sharply. Just slow. “Not really.”

“Liar.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Alastor sat back slightly. Not to create space. Just to stretch - his shoulder rolled, coat tugging taut at the seams, one leg stretching out so the toe of his boot pressed lightly to the dirt near Vincent’s. Somehow, that single point of contact felt louder than the entire damn war.

Vincent swallowed.

“You’re chattier than usual,” Alastor murmured.

“So are you.”

They both smiled. Different kinds of smiles, but not far apart.

They stayed that way until the cigarettes were nothing but dust and the night folded down around them like a closing eye.

When they stood, it was slow, quiet. Vincent’s shoulder bumped Alastor’s as they straightened. Neither apologised.

No one said goodnight but when they turned to walk back, their steps fell in time.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid May, 1918

Alastor sat already settled against the fence post, coat collar drawn high, knees pulled in. The temperature had settled lately, late spring finally forcing the cold away, but the wind was still biting.

He heard Vincent’s footsteps before he saw him.

Even now, they stood out, quieter than most, but with a kind of rhythm that stuck in the gut. There was a weight behind each step that didn’t speak of fear or haste; just presence. Just choice.

Alastor’s chest tightened. He didn’t shift. Didn’t turn. Just let his head lift slightly as the boy arrived.

When Vincent crouched beside him, when their arms brushed, Alastor felt the contact like a wire pulled tight under skin. Not tense. Not painful. Just live.

Their fingers touched - knuckle to knuckle, just briefly - when he passed over a cigarette and the point of contact burned more than the match.

Alastor didn’t show it, but he felt it. A spark. An ache.

They smoked like always - slow, steady, breathing in time with the dark, but tonight, something had shifted.

The silence wasn’t the same. It wasn’t sharp. Wasn’t guarded.

It held. It allowed.

Vincent spoke first. Something absurd. Something about rats and stolen bread. Alastor huffed a laugh, genuine and unpolished. It settled in his chest like warmth. Familiar, if not yet safe.

He liked that Vincent was speaking more. Liked that his voice no longer carried that brittle edge, no longer sounded like it might crack if held too long.

They had been out here too long for politeness. Too long for walls. And Alastor was beginning to understand that closeness could be quiet. That not all company demanded something in return.

He stretched. Not to fill space or push it, but to ease into it. His shoulder rolled; one leg extended, boot brushing dirt near Vincent’s. It wasn’t meant as a signal, but the closeness it brought felt… right. A point of contact that hummed louder than any broadcast. A kind of tether.

When he turned slightly and caught Vincent watching him - just the edge of it, just enough - he let his expression tilt amused.

“Something on your mind?”

“Not really.”

“Liar.”

And there, there was that moment of give. Not surrender, not softness exactly, but a mutual leaning. They weren’t touching, not properly, but they didn’t move apart. Didn’t shift to end it.

“You’re chattier than usual,” he murmured.

“So are you.”

Their voices dropped like pebbles into still water. No ripple. Just quiet. And when they smiled, it felt like something earned.

Their cigarettes burned to nothing between them. Time edged past, unnoticed. Alastor didn’t mark the moment they stood, only that when they did, his shoulder brushed Vincent’s and Vincent didn’t flinch.

Neither apologised.

When they walked back, Alastor matched his stride. Let it slow. Let it fall into rhythm. Close enough for their coats to catch. Close enough to feel it when Vincent didn’t pull away.

He didn’t run, not this time.

He just walked with Vincent beside him.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late May, 1918

The weather had changed.

Not by much - not enough to call it kind - but the wind had stopped biting and the sky no longer wept through his collar. The cold still clung to the ground in the early hours, but the nights weren’t quite cruel anymore. Just long. Just wide. Just bearable.

He didn’t rush tonight.

Didn’t need to. He knew Alastor would be there. Knew it like his pulse, like muscle memory. Like code written into the marrow. Still, his steps quickened near the hedgerow, and he didn’t try to slow them. Not tonight. Not after the way things had felt last time.

He passed the tin plate. Passed the rust-wet fence rail. Smoke kissed the breeze. Familiar.

Alastor was already sitting - not standing, not waiting like always, but seated low against the post, knees drawn in, cigarette already lit. The glow caught his jawline like fire in silhouette.

Vincent crouched down beside him. No pause, no second thoughts. Their shoulders brushed as he settled. He didn’t move away. Neither did Alastor.

“Brought something,” Vincent said, voice low, the way all things felt in this place. He reached into his coat pocket and hand brushed the matchbox first - Alastor’s, the older one, still tucked in the same coat pocket like it belonged there. Familiar. Steady. Then, lower in the pocket, his fingers found the tin. “Tea. Kind of. If you don’t mind it lukewarm and terrible.”

Alastor turned his head just slightly, the corner of his mouth curling. “You had me at lukewarm.”

They drank in silence. It wasn’t good. Vincent didn’t care. The tin passed between them like something sacred.

When Alastor handed it back the second time, their fingers lingered. Not accidentally. Vincent’s knuckles slid slow over his. And Alastor didn’t flinch.

They smoked next.

Not the usual rhythm - not that ritual, familiar and distant. This one was closer. Heavier. Like their lungs had agreed to share the same air and not speak of it. Alastor’s knee brushed his as he shifted, and Vincent didn’t pull away. He let his own rest against it, slow and deliberate. No space left tonight. No reason for it.

The silence wasn’t hollow. It pressed, thick and low, like the earth before rain.

“Someone called me a ghost,” Alastor said, eventually - voice quiet, wry, like it barely wanted to disturb the dark. “Said I wasn’t real. Just some story passed around in the trenches.”

Vincent turned his head slightly, blew smoke sideways through his teeth. “You do walk like you’ve got secrets.”

Alastor huffed. It wasn’t quite a laugh. “I do. Though, I’ll take it over The Deer.”

That drew a faint breath of warmth from Vincent’s chest. “They’re still calling you that?”

“It’s stuck.” Alastor muttered. “I’m still too fast. Too thin. Too quiet. They thought I’d bolted from the underworld.” A pause. “They’re not wrong, necessarily.”

More quiet. Not empty. The kind that grew roots.

“You?” Alastor asked, eventually. “Finally talked enough to the others to find out your nickname?”

Vincent hesitated - long enough that it might’ve passed for avoidance. But then he said, dry and careful, “Little Shark.”

Alastor tilted his head. “That’s not terribly frightening.”

“No,” Vincent agreed. “Supposed to be ironic. ‘Dangerous in the right situation, but pathetic and flailing outside of it.’ Their words.”

Alastor exhaled through his nose. “A deer and a shark. How poetic. They’re real into animals lately.”

“Easier to name what we’re not.”

That landed harder than he meant it to. Alastor didn’t answer right away. Just smoked. The ember at the tip of his cigarette flared and faded, like a heartbeat in miniature.

Vincent leaned back slowly, letting his spine settle against the fence. It creaked under him, but held. Alastor’s shoulder followed - not fully, not with weight - but just enough to keep the connection between them unbroken.

They stayed like that.

Not talking. Not shifting. Just... present.

Eventually, Vincent’s head tipped. He didn’t mean to. The tilt was slow, instinctive, like a flower following light. His temple came to rest against Alastor’s shoulder. Lightly. Tentative. Testing.

Alastor didn’t move.

Didn’t stiffen. Didn’t lean in. Just let him stay.

And Vincent - he let his eyes close for a breath. Just one. Let the weight settle like dust over a place undisturbed.

“I used to hate quiet,” he murmured.

Alastor’s voice came soft. “Why?”

“Because it meant something had gone wrong.” He paused, swallowing. “Now I think I hate it less.”

He felt Alastor shift, not away, not even toward, just enough to acknowledge the words. Then, after a moment, the barest brush of fingers.

Not a grip. Not a claim. Just the back of Alastor’s hand against his. Light as thread.

Vincent didn’t look. Didn’t move. But the heat of it ran up his arm like fire bottled and buried under skin.

His fingers twitched once. Hesitated.

He could’ve taken it. Just wrapped their hands together, palm to palm, like a vow not spoken aloud.

But he didn’t.

And after a beat, Alastor’s hand slipped back into his lap, quiet as a secret returned to silence.

It was alright. It didn’t need to happen tonight.

But God, he wanted it to.

And next time... maybe.

They stood together, slow. Coats brushing. Boots aligned. When Vincent turned toward the path, he felt Alastor fall into step beside him. Not behind. Not beside-and-apart.

Together.

The fence post faded behind them, but the warmth of it didn’t. Not really. Not now.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late May, 1918

He had arrived before sunset.

Earlier than usual, though he hadn’t meant to. His boots had simply moved that way - like breath, like pull. He’d passed the same bent scrub tree and the same cart whose wheel had finally rotted fully through, and when the clearing opened up around the fence post, his body had already decided to stop.

He didn’t stand tonight. He sat.

The shift was small, but it meant something. He drew his knees in, rested his elbows lightly atop them, and lit the cigarette slow, the match held in a pause just long enough to catch his face in flare-orange before the dark returned. The air was warmer than last week, but it didn’t matter. His coat stayed on. His gloves stayed off. He liked the way the breeze carried now - how it nudged rather than clawed. There was softness in it. Something nearing mercy.

He didn’t count the seconds until he heard steps. But when he did, his shoulders eased. No need to look.

He could feel it - the weight of Vincent approaching, the quiet rhythm of boots worn thin by trench lines and long nights. It wasn’t like the others. Vincent didn’t stomp or drag or mutter as he walked. He just arrived.

And tonight, he didn’t pause.

Vincent crouched beside him without hesitation, shoulder brushing his in one smooth motion. The contact hit like warmth soaked through fabric, no startle, no jolt. Just heat.

Alastor didn’t move away. Of course he didn’t.

“Brought something,” Vincent said, voice low - almost reverent. Alastor turned his head, saw the glint of metal pass between hands. Ration tin. The shape of it familiar, the gesture strange. Personal. Shared. He didn’t reach at first. Just looked.

“Tea,” Vincent added. “Kind of. If you don’t mind it lukewarm and terrible.”

Alastor let the corner of his mouth turn upward. “You had me at lukewarm.”

It tasted awful. Metallic and stale, but he drank it like a gift. Because it was.

The tin was passed back and he let their fingers touch. Didn’t pretend otherwise. And when Vincent’s knuckles slid soft across his own, he held still - not cold, not inert, just open.

They smoked next. Not like usual. Not with distance and ritual and the practiced silence of two boys pretending they weren’t watching each other. This was something else. Closer. Grounded. The kind of quiet that didn’t ask for space anymore.

Alastor shifted and felt his knee press into Vincent’s, Vincent let it.

More than that - he leaned into it. Let the contact hold.

It did something to Alastor’s chest. Not pain, not pressure. Just a… tightness. A fullness. Like something was taking shape in a place he hadn’t realised was hollow.

They talked. Not much. Just enough.

He didn’t know why he told the ghost story. Maybe because he wanted Vincent to laugh. Maybe because he didn’t want him to forget that Alastor had always existed in the corner of things - in myth, in shadows. It didn’t scare him, being mistaken for a legend. It felt… right. Familiar. Easier than being a boy with bruised knuckles and too much quiet.

Vincent’s replies were warm. Dry. Real. His voice curled round the dark like smoke from the end of a match.

And then came the stillness. Real stillness.

The kind that settles in a place when both people stop pretending there’s a reason not to be close.

Vincent leaned back. Alastor followed - not all the way, just enough to mirror. His shoulder stayed aligned, their coats brushing down the seam. He didn’t shift.

And when Vincent’s head tilted - when it found its way slowly, gently, to Alastor’s shoulder - something ancient and unnamed stirred in him.

He didn’t move.

Didn’t dare.

Vincent’s weight was slight. Just enough to register. But it felt like everything. Like a small gravity placed into his frame. Like the world was finally tilting on an axis that made sense.

“I used to hate quiet,” Vincent murmured.

The words landed warm on Alastor’s collarbone, and he breathed them in like a secret.

“Why?”

“Because it meant something had gone wrong.” A pause. “Now I think I hate it less.”

Alastor didn’t know what to say. Not really. He wasn’t built for softness. But he shifted - just enough to let his arm brush against Vincent’s, skin to wool, sleeve to knuckle. And then, carefully, he moved his hand.

It wasn’t a reach. Wasn’t a request.

Just... closeness.

The back of his hand grazed Vincent’s, barely, softly, as if by accident. But it wasn’t. Not really. It was a question dressed as coincidence. A breath of skin that asked something without language, without risk. A silent do you feel it too?

He didn’t know why he wanted it. Not in the way he usually understood wanting. It wasn’t about desire. It wasn’t about hunger. It was something quieter, needier. The warmth of another’s skin. The press of fingers into the hollow between his own. A tether.

He’d never needed that before. Not like this. Not ever. And yet-

Now he did. Fiercely. Awfully. Completely.

He wanted to hold Vincent’s hand. Not to provoke. Not to possess. But because something in him shrank from the idea of not doing it. Of letting space exist where there could be none. Of leaving the hand unheld when it was so close, so painfully close.

He felt Vincent’s fingers twitch. Just once. A minute shift in the air between them. So small it could have been nothing. So small it could have meant everything.

Hope flared in his chest. Sudden. Sharp. A single clean note struck against the bone, hot and bright and gone too fast.

His breath caught.

And then, with a slowness that ached, he drew his hand back into his lap. Fingers folding inward like a secret, like a wound.

Because maybe it wasn’t time. Maybe Vincent hadn’t meant it. Maybe that twitch had been nothing at all. Or maybe - just maybe - Alastor didn’t know how to reach properly. Didn’t know the shape of wanting in a way that could be returned.

But God, he wanted to learn. He wanted to try.

When they stood, the brush of Vincent’s coat passed against his again. A ghost of contact, caught for a second longer than before. It lingered, like it, too, was unsure whether to stay or leave.

And when Vincent turned toward the path, Alastor didn’t hang back this time. Didn’t wait for space to rise up between them.

He stepped forward. Walked beside him.

Not offset. Not behind.

Their strides found a rhythm without effort. Boots falling in tandem. Shoulders level. And though their hands didn’t meet, they swung in a mirrored arc, close enough to feel the air stir between them. Close enough to imagine.

He didn’t reach out. Not yet.

But the want pulsed like a second heartbeat. Quiet. Steady. Pressing.

The ache of a hand not held, but nearly.

And maybe next time - when the night was softer, when the silence had thickened into something safer - maybe then it wouldn’t feel so impossible.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early June, 1918

He didn’t remember how it had felt before this.

Not the war, he remembered that. The rot, the crush, the cold. The choking stink of blood and rain and men too young to have died the way they did. He remembered sleepless hours hunched over wire that frayed under his fingers, code that stuttered when his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He remembered the wall of the trench rising up to claim him once, the moment he nearly didn’t clear it. He remembered the stink of old meat in the heat and the way ammonia clung to the collar of his coat like a punishment.

He remembered all of that.

What he couldn’t remember were the nights before this. Before Alastor.

Now there was rhythm in the world. Not order - nothing in war ever earned that word - but pattern. A shape that repeated. And it started, always, with the sound of boots in the grass.

Alastor didn’t come every night. Vincent never expected him to. There were days when the world demanded him elsewhere - orders, runs, storms, death.

Tonight, he heard the steps first.

Even before the silhouette. Even before the hush in the hedgerow.

He didn’t turn. Didn’t have to. He just breathed in slow and let the world recalibrate around the sound of Alastor coming back.

The earth was firm beneath him, spring returned in bones and bark and grass that held stubborn to green. The breeze was soft. The sky held. The leaves moved above the wire in patterns too gentle for battle.

And then Alastor sat beside him.

Not crouched. Not tentative. Just - there. Like the space had always been waiting.

Their thighs touched. Knees too. Neither moved.

It was just pressure. Just warmth. But it jolted something beneath his ribs, soft and real. He didn’t shift. Just breathed

They didn’t need to speak. The hush between them used to bite - now it folded soft, like cloth worn at the seams. No cigarettes tonight. No metal tin. No offering. Just the weight of presence. Just the soft press of body to body.

Alastor leaned forward eventually, slow, bracing one hand against the earth. He reached into his coat and withdrew a scrap of bread - rough-edged, burned on one side. He broke it in half and passed the larger piece to Vincent without a word.

Vincent took it. Ate it. Didn’t taste it. Didn’t need to. What mattered was the motion. The gesture. The unspoken kindness of it.

He watched Alastor’s hand where it rested on the ground between them. Fingers loose. Dirt catching beneath the nails. Knuckles raw. He imagined tracing code along the knuckles - soft taps, his own name spelled slow in skin instead of static.

His own hand twitched where it rested in his lap. He didn’t plan to move. But the longer he looked, the more something in him itched. Not for ownership. Not for comfort. Just... for closeness. For proof. He thought he might draw back. Thought the feeling would pass. It didn’t.

And he reached. Not sudden or clumsy. Just a slow movement like breath, like habit.

Just to cover.

His calloused hand over Alastor’s broader one. Not soft. Not hesitant. Just sure.

He didn’t look at him.

He didn’t have to.

And Alastor - bless him, damn him - turned his hand over.

No question. No invitation. Just their fingers woven together.

Vincent’s breath caught.

He hadn’t expected Alastor to answer. Not like this. Not with silence and certainty and that impossible ease. But he had. And Vincent was still here. Still holding on.

Vincent held on. Let it anchor him. Let the silence knit itself around them like a second skin. The ground breathed warm beneath his boots, the post leaned behind him, the air no longer felt like it needed a reason to be still.

He spoke, eventually. Not to break the moment, just to mark it.

“I think about it sometimes,” he murmured. “What it’ll be like after.”

Alastor’s thumb moved, a single pass against the top of his knuckle, a motion so careful it felt reverent.

“After?” he asked.

“After the noise. After the uniforms.” Vincent paused. “And I can’t… I can’t picture anything. Am I just supposed to go to university? To kiss my mother like I haven't shot people?”

It didn’t come out like grief. More like fact. Like saying the sky is blue or the wire is frayed. Something true, unchangeable.

Alastor didn’t answer.

He just tightened his hand around Vincent’s, just slightly.

Just enough.

He didn’t understand what this was - not fully. Not yet.

But it felt… whole.

It felt like something that didn’t have to be named to be real.

And for the first time, he let himself lean into it. Let the presence beside him be enough. Let his hand stay wrapped inside Alastor’s, the pressure steady, grounding. A knot tied not in rope or code or ritual - but touch.

He didn’t let go.

Not when the wind changed.

Not when the quiet shifted.

Not until Alastor rose, and even then, only when Vincent felt him pull gently, lifting both of them by that same shared hand.

They walked back slowly. Side by side. Boots brushing.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.

They didn’t let go.

Not until the flicker of others came into view, bodies near tents, voices in the distance.

Then, at last, fingers slipped apart. Not snatched away. Just… paused.

And that night, when Vincent lay still in his cot, breath deep in the canvas dark, he didn’t dream in code.

He dreamed in presence.

In warmth.

In hands.

In return.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early June, 1918

The warmth had returned, but it hadn’t brought calm.

The earth cracked now where once it drowned. Dust clung to his boots instead of mud, but it wasn’t an improvement - just a shift in terrain. The air tasted scorched and empty. The trees still held their branches wrong, leaves hung limp in colours that didn’t belong to spring. Not new green, not death. Something in between. Something stalled.

He had run two messages that day. One through a corridor he didn’t trust, the other over a hill that still smoked from yesterday’s shelling. He hadn’t looked too closely at the bodies. Couldn’t tell where the limbs came from. Didn’t want to.

The day dissolved around him by the time he reached the edge of camp. His legs knew where to go before his mind caught up.

He wasn’t carrying anything.

No packet. No letter. No reason.

Just the matchbox in his pocket.

Just a direction that had stopped needing explanation.

The route to the post was quiet now. Not peaceful. Not soft. Just steady. Something that stayed. And when he reached the old break in the hedge, when he saw the figure already sitting low at the fence, something in him unknotted.

Vincent didn’t turn.

That was how he knew he’d been expected.

Alastor moved slow. Not hesitant, just deliberate. Just aware of the air around them, the hush that filled the space like breath. He lowered himself beside the boy without speaking, without shifting, without needing to make a shape of anything.

Their legs pressed together at the side. Their shoulders followed. Neither of them moved.

It was the simplest thing. It was unbearable.

He hadn’t brought the cigarettes. Not tonight. Not because he’d forgotten, but because he hadn’t needed the ritual to start this. It was already here.

They sat in the warm hush. The kind that buzzed in the bones. Not quite silence. Not quite stillness. Just presence.

After a while, he reached forward.

The motion wasn’t planned. It had lived all day in the seam of him, waiting to be followed. His hand found the ground for balance. His other reached inside his coat.

A scrap of bread - blackened at the edge, uneven. Burnt ration, too dry to bother with unless you were starving like they all were.

He’d saved it.

He didn’t know why until now.

He broke it in half and held out the larger piece. Not ceremonially. Just… gently. Certain.

Vincent took it.

Alastor didn’t watch him eat. Didn’t need to. He stared down instead, at his own hand where it rested against the dirt. Fingers spread. Palm catching dust.

And then warmth.

Weight.

He felt it before he saw it.

Vincent’s hand. Settling over his. No ask. No pause.

Just contact.

His breath caught low in his throat, a sound too quiet to be startled.

He didn’t look at Vincent.

He didn’t pull away.

Instead, he turned his hand over.

Not a decision. Not a moment of bravery or surrender. Just something his body did before the rest of him could catch up.

Vincent’s fingers slid between his.

And there it was.

No spark. No ache. Just a hum. Just a warmth that filled his chest like signal caught clean at last.

His hand tightened, just slightly, and the feeling rose in him like heat.

He couldn't think of a word to fit the feeling, paltry things like romance or attraction would never fit. Even love itself felt like it would be too small if it continued to grow.

Vincent tilted forward then, quietly, like a hinge giving under weight. He lowered their joined hands until they rested against his own thigh, like something precious.

And Alastor let him.

He didn’t understand what was happening - didn’t know what to call this thing between them - but he knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t performance. It wasn’t something he’d fashioned out of control or charm.

It had been earned.

Hard-won, unexpected, and terrifying in the quiet way things are when they begin to matter too much. When they slip under the ribs without warning and settle there, weighty and uninvited, but no longer unwelcome.

When Vincent spoke, it was barely above a murmur. Not because he lacked the words, but because the night might steal them if he wasn’t careful.

“I think about it sometimes,” he said, voice roughened by air and ash. “What it’ll be like after.”

Alastor’s thumb moved before thought caught up. A small motion. A brush across the top of Vincent’s knuckle - feather-light, steady, and startling in its gentleness.

“After?” he asked. As if the word itself could be dangerous.

“After the noise. After the uniforms.” Vincent hesitated, his voice quiet. “And I can’t… I can’t picture anything. Am I just supposed to go to university? To kiss my mother like I haven't shot people?”

Alastor didn’t respond. Not aloud.

He couldn’t.

His throat closed around the shape of the ache he couldn’t name, and so instead he tightened his hand around Vincent’s just a little more, a silent promise, or maybe a plea, that this moment, at least, was real.

There was nothing else to offer. No certainty. No comfort. No plan for a world beyond this wire-strung one. Only presence. Only this: their hands, their silence, the press of shared breath and ground and weight.

And for the first time in his strange, sharp-edged life, Alastor let that be enough.

Vincent’s head dropped after a time, slow and quiet. Their joined hands settled deeper into his lap like something sacred. The weight of the moment sank in around them - not crushing, but deliberate. Heavy. Beautiful.

Around them, the world shifted. The hour turned, as it always did. A wind stirred the grass. Somewhere distant, a voice cracked high, laughter, maybe. Or grief.

Alastor didn’t move.

Not until Vincent shifted. And even then, only when the moment itself seemed to sigh and loosen its grip.

They rose together, not hurried, not awkward - just slow, like something fragile being unwrapped.

Their hands stayed joined.

Alastor hadn’t meant to keep holding on. Hadn’t realised, maybe, that he had no intention of letting go.

And still, he didn’t.

Not when they turned toward the camp.

Not when the night pulled back like a curtain and the outlines of tents and figures and firelight took shape again around them.

Only when the shadows of others began to stretch long across the canvas walkways, and the space between footsteps threatened to speak too loudly of what they held - only then did their hands part.

Not abruptly. Not with shame.

Just slowly. Gradually. A brush of fingers and a shared breath in place of goodbye.

Not an ending.

Just a pause.

Later, when Alastor lay alone beneath the sagging canvas roof, coat drawn high, boots still damp near the hem and the matchbox pressed warm beside his ribs, he didn’t sleep.

Instead, he traced the memory with care. Held it close.

The shape of Vincent’s hand in his. The quiet surety of it. The way it had fit not just against his palm, but into something deeper, something that had never held anyone before.

And for once, it didn’t feel like possession. Or control. Or danger dressed as desire.

It felt like return.

And he didn’t want to lose it.

Not now.

Not ever.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early June, 1918

He woke with the shape of a hand still in his palm. Not physically - there was no pressure, no weight - but the memory clung to his skin. He’d slept with his fists half-curled, and even now, in the early breath of morning, his fingers refused to uncurl entirely. Like they still remembered the other shape. Like they weren’t done.

He stayed still for a long time.

Not asleep. Not quite awake. Just hovering. Floating in that place where the body hasn’t caught up with the mind, and the mind is still pretending it didn’t ask for something so quietly it can’t bear to hear it spoken aloud.

Alastor’s hand had been warm. Steady. Dry in a way that surprised him. Not soft, but sure. Not demanding, but open. And when their fingers slid together - when the bones of it aligned - something in Vincent had stopped resisting.

It had just... stopped.

He sat up eventually, slowly, arms stiff from the position he’d curled into sometime before dawn. His bunk creaked. Someone groaned nearby. The tent still smelled of mould and wool and half-clean socks.

And yet-

Everything was different.

He moved through the day like a wire with current in it. Alert. Responsive. His hands tapped better than they had in weeks - fluid, clean, exact. The signal sang again. Even the mess line passed without him noticing the rot of the potatoes or the slosh of water over tin. It all blurred under a hum. Not a melody. Just a tone. A presence. Something settled under his ribs and ringing faint in the softest part of his mind.

He thought about Alastor all day.

Not obsessively. Not like hunger. But like direction. Like how you find yourself always facing home

He found himself glancing at the horizon. Wondering if the runners had gone out early. If Alastor had already passed him in the morning mist and he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t speak to anyone about it. Didn’t say his name aloud.

But the ache was there. Present. Bright as wire beneath skin.

That evening, before his shift, he sat in the corner of the tent with a pencil stub and a scrap of paper torn from the side of a signal form. He wasn’t sure what he meant to do. Write a message? A note?

Instead, he reached for his field needle and thread.

The same one he’d used to stitch up a torn cuff a month ago. The thread was black, fine, half-frayed.

He pulled the cloth from his pack - a handkerchief, worn at the corners but clean. It still held the faint scent of soap, a reminder of some week-old attempt at order. He laid it flat across his knee, smoothed it once with his palm.

Then he began to stitch.

Not neatly. Not quickly. Nothing like his mother’s fine embroidery but still each movement was careful, deliberate. The thread caught more than once; his fingers trembled slightly as he worked. Morse code - dot, dash, dot, drawn into fabric like breath pressed into frost.

“Alastor. Vincent.” And beneath it, small and crooked: “1918.”

The year that was still happening. The year they were both surviving.

The line ran uneven and long. It wasn’t elegant. It didn’t need to be. He wasn’t making it to impress. He was making it to remember. To mark something. To say without saying.

He folded it once. Then again.

Slipped it into his coat pocket, where it pressed warm against his chest.

He didn’t know if he’d give it to him. Didn’t know if Alastor would even want it.

Maybe that didn’t matter.

Something in him just needed it to exist - some proof they’d existed too. Together. In the most brutal of years.

That night, he walked slow.

Not cautious, just prepared. The way you were when you were heading toward something that mattered, and you didn’t want to arrive too soon in case you startled it.

The air was warm. Not soft, but warmer. The sky had begun to hold light longer. The scent of iron had faded from the wind. Somewhere, a bird had begun singing again.

Alastor sat there, back against the wood, legs stretched out like he’d been waiting an hour and hadn’t noticed. His eyes were half-lidded, not tired, just… settled. At ease in the dark like it was the only place left in the world that made. He looked like something carved out of the quiet, untouched by urgency, untouched by anything but the shape of this moment. Vincent almost stopped and stared.

He didn’t speak, didn’t need to. He just sat close to Alastor without calculation or ceremony. Shoulder to shoulder, shirt against shirt. The warmth between them sparked quick and then stayed, steady as pulse.

Alastor glanced at him. Just once. And in that glance was everything.

A small smile. No nod. Just presence. Recognition. Weight.

They didn’t reach for the cigarettes that often anymore. Didn’t need to.

Instead, Vincent let his shoulder lean heavier, a slow press of bone and wool. Let his thigh rest against Alastor’s with intention, not accident. They didn’t adjust. Didn’t apologise. The silence grew wider around them, but instead of swallowing, it settled - like breath cooling on skin, like night pressing low but not unkind.

Then, with a familiar motion, Alastor reached into his coat. Bread again. Rough. Uneven. Split by hand, not blade.

He broke it clean in half and passed one piece over without looking.

This time, Vincent took it differently. Didn’t wolf it down. Didn’t pretend it was nothing. He ate slow. Thoughtful. Left the final bite pinched light between thumb and forefinger.

And held it out.

Alastor didn’t blink. He turned his head and leaned, teeth parting to take the bite straight from Vincent’s hand. Not rushed. Not teasing.

He didn’t pull back right away. Just watched as Alastor chewed, a strange quiet rising in his throat. A kind of stunned tenderness and want.

Alastor chewed the bread slowly and looked at Vincent with a soft expression. Not his usual grin. Not the twist or the flare or the cut-glass charm. Just a smile. Honest. Quiet. Real.

No words passed between them, but something else did. Something heavier. Older. The kind of thing that didn’t need speaking because it had already been said, night after night, in silence and smoke and shared space.

Time bent strangely after that. They didn’t shift. Didn’t stand. Just let the dark fold around them, like a curtain drawing shut without threat. The breeze moved soft through the wire, and the stars - what few had dared show up - blurred into that muddy, luminous blue that only came before the true dark settled in.

At some point - he didn’t know when - Vincent reached into his coat and let his fingers brush the edge of the stitched cloth in his pocket. He touched it the way you touch something precious and familiar. Didn’t pull it out. Didn’t need to. Just felt the seams, the shape of the names.

Alastor. Vincent. 1918.

Proof, silent and sacred, that they were here. Still here. Still them.

And sitting beside him, shoulder warm and breath quiet, was the only other proof he needed.

He stayed.

Alastor stayed.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early June, 1918

He hadn’t meant to arrive early. He just kept walking.

The message run had ended hours ago, something short and dull about repositioning crates that would be stolen by morning. No real urgency. But Alastor didn’t stop moving. His legs carried him beyond the officer’s tent, past the wire stacks, past the sagging stretch of laundry line now half-devoured by moths.

By the time he reached the post, the sun hadn’t quite gone, but it was low enough to burn gold along the edge of the wood. He crouched, then sat. Back against the fence. Legs outstretched. Hands quiet in his lap.

The sky was beginning to pale at the edges with summer’s hush. The kind of air that didn’t bite or pull, just drifted through like it belonged here. Like it wasn’t haunted by gas and rot and things with teeth. It felt borrowed, like a moment stolen from somewhere softer and untouched. A peace the war hadn’t earned but hadn’t yet ruined.

He didn’t count the seconds. But he felt each one. A steady press beneath the skin.

Then - steps. Measured and familiar, a beat he knew better now than his own heart.

Vincent appeared between the trees, soft in silhouette, the light catching faint on the side of his coat. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

He sat beside him. Close. Closer than ever before. And something in Alastor, that tight thing curled quiet beneath his ribs, relaxed. Just slightly. Their shoulders touched, then their thighs, and Alastor didn’t move.

He glanced over once. Caught Vincent’s eyes with a small grin as something quiet and deep passed between them like an old current made new again.

The silence filled in the space after that, but not like silence used to. This wasn’t emptiness. This wasn’t weight. This was knowing. This was presence.

Eventually, he reached into his coat.

Bread. Cracked and rough, hoarded from breakfast and ignored all day. He hadn’t known what he was saving it for - only that the thought of not bringing something had made his chest ache.

He broke it. Passed half over without looking.

Vincent took it slowly, like it meant something. Ate slowly, like it was something. Then - held out the last bite between his fingers, asking nothing. Just being.

Alastor turned and leaned, teeth catching the bite straight from his hand. The warmth of Vincent’s fingers grazed his cheek as he leaned in - gentle, unhurried. The bite passed soft and sure from one to the other, and something in it felt deeply human in a way he wasn’t used to being.

Crumbs clung faint to his breath. He didn’t blink. Didn’t pull away. Just let the moment rest against him like a hand laid to the chest. Steady. Undemanding. And real in a way so little else was.

And he smiled. Not wide. Not sharp. Just honest - quiet and startled and real - and it settled something in him that had been rattling loose for longer than he cared to name.

He didn’t understand the feeling. Didn’t try to. But it stayed. Steady. Like the warmth of a hand you hadn’t realised you’d been waiting to hold.

They didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. There were no questions left worth asking.

Instead, he let the dark gather around them. Watched the way the horizon faded without protest. Let the stars come slow and strange above the wire, like they were trying to remember how to shine.

Vincent didn’t shift. Neither did he. They stayed where they were, joined not by gesture or claim but by something steadier.

And after a while - Alastor didn’t know when - he saw Vincent’s hand move. Slowly. Deliberately. Into his coat. A brush of fingers. The faint lift of fabric.

He didn’t pull anything out, didn’t speak, and Alastor didn’t ask.

He just wanted it to be.

They sat like that until the night had fully drawn in. Until even the wind held still. Until their shoulders no longer just touched, but leaned.

Alastor didn’t want to move.

He hadn’t thought he was capable of this. Not like this. Not without humour or edge or mask. But here he was, sitting still beside a boy who’d nearly vanished, who still bore the shape of war in his eyes, who had chosen this strange, unspoken thing.

Had chosen him.

And he wanted to stay just like this. At least for tonight.

He didn’t reach for Vincent’s hand. Not yet. But God, he thought about it. He thought about it more than he’d ever thought about wanting anything in his life.

The silence had deepened - shifted into something even quieter, if such a thing were possible. Not hollow. Not tense. Just... aware. As if the air itself knew this moment was balanced on a wire. That even the wind had chosen to hold its breath.

Vincent hadn’t moved in minutes. His shoulder still leaned against Alastor’s, warm through their shirts. His head tilted ever so slightly, like he was listening to something only he could hear. Maybe he was. Maybe it was the same sound Alastor heard sometimes in the quiet between codes in the signal tent.

Alastor let his fingers uncurl slowly, one knuckle at a time, until his hand settled open in the dirt between them. Not offered, not asking. Just there. Familiar. Waiting. He didn’t plan it. Didn’t think it through. Just knew he wanted to be reached. That he wouldn’t run if he was.

Vincent’s hand found his without pause or fanfare. Their fingers slid together like they already belonged there, and maybe they did.

Alastor’s chest eased. Not sharply, not like some great relief, but like a thread, fine and taut and strangely whole. The kind of peace that didn’t announce itself. Just was.

They didn’t grip tight. Didn’t fidget. Just held. Like this had always been the shape of their nights now - hands folded between them, silence pressed soft at the edges.

His thumb drifted over Vincent’s knuckle once. Familiar. Not testing. Just a mark of presence.

Vincent didn’t speak. Just leaned a little closer, his shirt brushing Alastor’s side as he held his hand tighter.

So Alastor did something he hadn’t before.

He tilted his head sideways - slow, thoughtful - and let it rest, gently, against Vincent’s.

Not heavily. Not demanding. Just a touch. A shared anchor.

Vincent didn’t flinch. Didn’t shift. His head stayed there, solid and warm beneath Alastor’s temple.

They stayed like that.

Not as a promise. Not as a moment made to be remembered. Just a choice. A rhythm. One more piece of quiet they’d carved for themselves inside the noise.

And when the hour turned, they didn’t move.

Not because they couldn’t. But because they didn’t want to.

Because this - this quiet, shared weight - was enough.

And maybe, if the world didn’t end by morning, it would be enough again.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid June, 1918

It had been at least a week. Seven days and nights. Maybe more. Time didn’t pass cleanly out here. One moment into the next, dusk into smoke, breath into nightfall. Daylight didn’t end so much as fade. Even the moon didn’t rise - only revealed itself, pale and washed-out behind whatever hung in the sky.

But Vincent remembered the first time he’d leaned his head against Alastor’s.

He remembered the soft give of it. The warmth. The way his temple met bone and wool and neither of them moved. No startle, no stiffening. No jokes. Just... presence. That had been a week ago. Or thereabouts. And they’d done it again since. Not formally, not ritually. Just as a natural continuation of the space between them. A shape they knew now.

Since then, the nights had changed.

Not outwardly. Not in ways anyone else would’ve noticed. But the quiet between them had thickened. Gained gravity. They didn’t always speak, but when they did, it was easier now. Quieter, but sure. Their hands found each other with less hesitation. Their shoulders met with intent. The stillness was no longer empty, it was theirs.

Tonight was the same. Or close enough.

The world hadn’t ended. Not yet. The sky stretched wide and pale above the trees, star-scored and thin. Alastor was already there, his silhouette familiar even before Vincent could see his face. He sat the way he always did, like he belonged there, like the night made more sense with him in it.

Vincent didn’t pause.

He sat beside him like he had every night since that first one. Close. Without calculation. Like the space had been waiting.

Their sleeves brushed. Then their elbows. Their hands, after a moment, slid together, fingers interlocking with no fanfare. It didn’t surprise him anymore. It just felt right. Like how he should be held. Like how they should be held.

He exhaled slowly and leaned in.

His head found the hollow of Alastor’s shoulder like it always did now. A quiet fit. A place to rest.

Alastor didn’t move.

They stayed like that for a long time - shoulder to shoulder, temple to temple, pulse to pulse. And even as Vincent melted into it - into the heat, the hush, the rhythm p something stirred low in his chest. Not fear. Not doubt. Just a quiet ache that warmed when Alastor was near and cooled when he wasn’t.

It wasn’t painful. Not quite.

What was this?

He didn’t mean it like a question in need of solving. It wasn’t panic, wasn’t demand. It was wonder. Curiosity that curved inward, blooming like radio static catching on a signal for the first time.

It wasn’t what the other boys talked about, all sly grins and rough laughter and bragging about hands beneath skirts or breathless kisses behind barns. That world had always felt like something he was meant to pretend. A story he’d been handed but never wanted to read.

But this... This felt different. This felt real.

And tonight, when his head leaned in and found the slope of Alastor’s cheek, when he felt the hush of breath and the brush of hair, something bloomed sharp and heated behind his ribs.

Slow. Familiar in ways he couldn’t name. He let the thought sit there, warm and heavy, and let it unspool.

He wanted to kiss him.

Not as a joke. Not to test a theory or prove a point. Not even to see if it meant something more.

Just to know.

To find out what Alastor’s mouth would feel like against his. The shape of it. The taste -not of cigarettes or loamy quiet, but of him. The truth of him. The realness that couldn’t be reached by voice or static or touch alone.

Something only a kiss could hold.

The thought had come fast, struck clean through him like a flare. And then it passed - but the warmth stayed. Not fire. Not ache. Just... presence.

He didn’t want Alastor the way the boys whispered about women back in the barracks. That comparison had never sat right in his mouth. But he did want him.

He wanted his voice in the dark. His hand close. His stillness. His nearness. His mouth, maybe. Once. Maybe more. Not out of heat or want of relief, but something gentler. Stranger. No less sharp.

It was the first kind of wanting that didn’t twist in him. It just was.

He didn’t have a word for it.

But it was his.

He shifted slightly, his thumb grazing the edge of Alastor’s hand - quiet, hesitant, but deliberate. He didn’t look to see if it was returned.

It was.

Alastor didn’t speak, but he answered, and Vincent let his body settle closer in response. Not leaning, not clutching. Just... easing into place, like muscle remembering warmth.

He hadn’t planned to bring anything tonight. But the cloth was still there, folded in his pocket. Unseen. Unspoken. He’d stitched it weeks ago, late one night when the wires were down and his hands couldn’t sit still. Not thinking, just... sewing. Slow. Tight. Small block letters: Alastor. Vincent. 1918.

At the time, it had felt like a comfort. Something to mark the hours. Something to do when the silence got too loud. But now-

Now it sat in his pocket like a truth. Not a symbol. Not a promise. Just proof.

That this had happened. That it mattered.

He hadn’t known, when he made it, what it was for. But he’d carried it every day since. Folded and hidden, pressed flat like a second heartbeat beneath the layers of uniform and smoke.

He brushed it lightly now, through the fabric of his coat. Just once. A small, grounding motion. And then he let it go.

His hand stayed in Alastor’s. His shoulder brushed Alastor’s coat. Neither of them spoke, and he didn’t need them to.

He thought back to the first night, the first message, tapped into the dark with nothing but hope and static to catch it. Alastor.

And somehow, impossibly, it had found its mark.

Led here.

To this moment. This weight. This warmth.

He didn’t need to give anything yet. Didn’t need to name it. Just needed to be here.

Next time, maybe. Or the night after. But the wanting to share it - that was new.

He let his hand settle fully in Alastor’s. Let their bodies rest against the night and the breath between them.

He didn’t know if Alastor felt the same, but he didn’t pull away.

And maybe that was its own kind of answer.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid June, 1918

He arrived early again.

He hadn’t meant to. There hadn’t been a plan. But his legs had carried him along the path before he’d had time to think otherwise - past the wire, past the broken fence rail, past the place where some half-forgotten sign once hung. It didn’t matter now. None of that did.

The air was warm, thicker than it had been even weeks before. He didn’t notice it much. Only that it didn’t hurt to breathe and the wind no longer bit.

He sat without hesitation. Not crouched or braced, but settled. Back to the post, arms on his knees, coat open just enough to let the night in. His body knew the shape of this spot now. The lean of the fence. The slant of the light when it fell. The space he left beside him.

Vincent would come.

That was certainty, now.

Soft steps. The hush of boots on dry grass. The slow, familiar exhale that always came just before he sat.

Alastor didn’t look. He didn’t need to.

Vincent sat close, closer than usual, as though the air between them had narrowed to something intimate and necessary. Their sleeves brushed. Then their thighs. Then, after a quiet beat, their hands. No tension. No hesitation. Just the clean slide of fingers finding their match.

Alastor didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

Vincent leaned into him a moment later, head finding its place just beneath his jaw. That, too, was familiar now. Expected. Not because they’d said anything aloud - not because they’d agreed - but because their bodies remembered each other. Knew the pattern. Followed it.

He breathed in, slow.

The weight of Vincent’s head against his shoulder was a strange kind of comfort. Not softness, exactly. Not safety. But recognition. A wordless knowing that rooted somewhere low in his chest.

They stayed like that for a long time.

He didn’t know how long. Time bent here. Folded. Stilled. Minutes bled. The war didn’t touch this place, not the way it touched everything else.

And still, something in him remained sharply awake.

He could feel the way Vincent’s body leaned, just a little heavier tonight. The way his breath slowed, but didn’t deepen. Something was stirring in the boy beside him. Something quiet. Sharp at the edges.

Alastor didn’t ask. He never asked. But he noticed.

He always noticed.

He’d begun to understand Vincent in gestures. The twitch of a hand. The silence that held too long. The way his thumb would circle, once, over the seam of a coat sleeve. Alastor had started to listen for things that had no sound.

Tonight, Vincent’s hand lingered slightly tighter in his. The way he leaned wasn’t just habit. It was want. Not heavy. Not urgent. Just… there.

Alastor sat with it. Didn’t shift. Didn’t breathe too deep. He didn’t want to change anything by accident.

He didn’t know what Vincent was feeling. Not fully.

He knew what he wasn’t feeling. Vincent didn’t preen like the boys who bragged. Didn’t laugh like the ones who lied about what they wanted in the dark. There was no greed in him. No push.

But there was longing. And what if Vincent ever wanted more? Alastor didn’t know what he’d do with that. Not yet.

He didn't understand - not Vincent’s mind, not whatever he might be wrestling with tonight. But he didn’t want to change it, or direct it, or turn it into something it wasn’t.

He just wanted Vincent to stay.

With him.

That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? Simple. Unadorned. And more frightening than any deeper craving might have been.

He wanted Vincent.

Not in the way others meant that word - there was no ache for skin, no frantic reach for heat or friction, no fantasy of mouths and sweat. That wasn’t what stirred in him when they touched. It wasn’t what pulsed through him when silence bloomed between their bodies and Vincent didn’t leave.

But he wanted. Fiercely. Quietly. Entirely.

He wanted Vincent’s presence. The weight of him - solid and real- pressing just lightly at his side. He wanted to be seen. To be chosen. Not once, not as a moment of kindness or mistake, but again and again, until it wasn’t a question anymore. Until it was just fact.

He wanted belonging.

This shared quiet. This rhythm they’d found without ever speaking of it. Something unspoken but certain. Something that didn’t ask to be named.

And more than anything, he didn’t want it to end.

The world could fall apart. Trenches could shift. Orders could scatter them. One wrong slip of paper, one call across the wire too late, and it would all vanish - but this- this quiet weight beside him, he wanted to hold on to. Even if he didn’t know how.

Even if he didn’t understand all of it.

There wasn’t a language for this kind of wanting. Not the kind he’d ever been taught. But he could only hope, hope in that sharp, silent way he’d always known best, that Vincent might understand him anyway. Might feel it in the spaces where words refused to form.

So he leaned. Slow. Careful. Let his head tip just slightly to the side until it came to rest against Vincent’s.

Their temples brushed. The contact was feather-light, just enough to feel, not enough to ask for anything. Vincent didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. Just breathed in and let the moment hold.

His Mama had said once - quiet, almost teasing - that everyone had a person. Not always a wife. Not always a sweetheart. Just... someone who felt like stillness when the world was all teeth.

He hadn’t believed her. Had laughed it off the way he laughed off most things that ached too close to hope. But now-

Now, with the press of Vincent beside him and the weight of silence that didn’t demand anything at all, maybe he understood.

Vincent’s thumb brushed against his hand. Deliberate. Gentle. It didn’t ask anything either.

And Alastor answered. Not with words. Just the smallest shift of fingers, flexing, leaning, pressing back. Not to hold. Not to keep. Just to stay.

Whatever this was, this not-quite romance, not-quite friendship, not-quite anything he could name - it was his. Theirs. And he didn’t want to let it slip between the cracks.

Most things didn’t last. He knew that. God, he knew that. But the thought of losing this - of watching Vincent fade into the mud and smoke like everything else - made something twist, sharp and sickening, behind his ribs.

He wanted this to last.

And maybe - if they both kept choosing it - if they met here again and again, shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, maybe it could.

Vincent leaned in. A little closer. A little more.

Alastor didn’t move.

He let him stay.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid June, 1918

It hadn’t rained in days. Maybe more than a week.

The trenches cracked now instead of drowning. The mud turned dry and flaked from boots like scales. Sweat pooled under his collar and stuck the shirt to his spine, but he wasn’t complaining. No one was. The silence of guns was louder than the heat. It held in the air like breath drawn too long, like everyone was waiting for the next command, the next order, the next shell that never came.

And somehow, impossibly, they were left alone.

Not fully. Not completely. But close enough.

The message traffic had slowed - too hot, too still, too many officers holding their breath. The code came slower now, hesitant. Like the wire didn’t trust itself to speak. Vincent could keep up easily, even with his gloves abandoned and a pencil tucked behind one ear. He stayed near the tent, as always, but the pressure had eased.

No one was watching as closely.

Not anymore. Not in this heat. Not when half the camp was sleeping upright in the shade and the other half barely had the strength to complain. Orders came slow and thin. Command was stretched across too many points and too little news. And in the silence that followed, he slipped away unnoticed - his coat slung over one arm, hair damp with sweat, boots lighter than they’d felt in weeks.

Alastor was waiting.

Not always in the same place. The fence post, yes, more often than not, but not only. Some afternoons they wandered. Slow, circuitous walks along the sun-bleached edge of camp, never far enough to raise eyebrows, but far enough to be alone. Sometimes behind the wash line, where canvas drooped low and smelled of soap and warm wool. Once behind the collapsed mess tent, where wildflowers had started to creep through the cracks in the broken boards.

They were slipping sideways through the seams of things. Claiming space where no one else thought to look.

They’d shared a canteen. Not because of thirst, but because Alastor had offered, wordless, and Vincent had taken it without thinking. They’d sat hip to hip under the low overhang of the quartermaster’s hut, sharing bites of a salvaged apple - mealy and half-rotten, but sweet in the centre - and when Alastor pressed the last piece into his mouth with two fingers, it felt like a gesture neither of them quite knew how to name.

Vincent showed him the spare receiver he had one afternoon, the one he’d first sent out Alastor's name on. "Not official,” he said, tapping it lightly against his thigh. “But it hums better than the ones they give us.”

Alastor had taken it carefully. Not dismissively, not like the others. He turned it in his hands and held it to his ear to listen to the faint hum of static. “It sings,” he’d said. “Have you ever thought about what this could do after? If we ever learnt to send more than just code?”

“After?” Vincent had asked.

“The war. The world.” A shrug. “This could entertain. Not just inform. A voice across a wire, one day. Stories, maybe. Songs.”

And Vincent-

Vincent had blinked, struck silent by the ease with which Alastor said it. The hope threaded into his voice. The way he spoke of after like it was something that might actually happen.

Later, Alastor had watched him work. Everyone else had happily left when Vincent said he'd take over, eager to get out of the sweltering tent, and Alastor had crept in mere minutes later. He crouched beside the signal table with his chin in his hand. Vincent had shown him how the receiver tuned by ear, how the pitch changed with angle and tension. Alastor’s eyes tracked every movement. When Vincent brushed his arm to adjust the dial, Alastor didn’t shift away. Just watched. Just listened. As though the whole machine mattered less than the boy who could make it breathe.

There were more moment than he could count. A piece of bread passed in silence. A cigarette struck and held until the other leaned in to light it. Once, Alastor had reached across to smooth the edge of Vincent’s sleeve where the seam had split, thumb grazing the curve of his wrist like it meant something.

It did.

Vincent knew it did.

And he knew, too, that it was becoming harder not to reach for him. That the distance between them shrank each time Alastor laughed under his breath or tipped his head to listen without needing to speak. That his body leaned by instinct now, like it had learned the shape of Alastor’s and wasn’t willing to unlearn it.

He didn’t say it aloud. Of course he didn’t. But he thought it sometimes. When Alastor’s hands lingered a moment too long. When his eyes caught Vincent’s across the tent and softened in that quiet, slow-burning way. When Vincent watched him eat or hum or press the bridge of his nose between two fingers like he always did when he was thinking hard and trying not to show it.

He thought: I think might love you. and it didn’t hurt. It didn’t even surprise him.

It just settled. Quiet and warm and real. A truth he hadn’t said out loud, but was slowly learning to live inside.

This afternoon, they sat by the half-broken cart. Alastor’s coat spread beneath them. His sleeves rolled high. Collar open. He looked almost languid like this, wrist draped over one knee, boot tapping absent against the wheel, hair loose from the heat and shadowing his brow. Vincent watched him through the corner of his eye and thought how strange, how unfair, how beautiful it was, to find something like this in the middle of a war. To find someone like this.

He didn’t speak.

He didn’t need to.

Alastor turned his head a little, met his gaze, and grinned.

And Vincent smiled back. Soft and certain.

And something in him said, Yes. This. This is mine.

Vincent hadn’t realised how long he’d been staring until Alastor tilted his head sideways, eyes half-lidded, and said, “You know, if you keep looking at me like that, someone’s going to think you're some charmed fool.”

Vincent’s heart kicked once, but he didn’t show it. “What if I am?”

Alastor blinked. And then - just the smallest tilt of his mouth, crooked and unreadable. “Then let them think it.”

Vincent looked away, not from embarrassment, but because the feeling rising in his chest wasn’t ready to be seen. He picked at a loose thread on his cuff. “You’ve never really told me what you did. Before the war.”

“There isn’t much else to tell.”

“Liar.”

Alastor didn’t answer right away. The sun shifted between the leaves, casting their shadows in tangled shapes across the dirt. His voice came softer when it returned. “My Mama used to sing when she cooked. Old songs, Creole ones, half in French. I didn’t always understand the words, but I liked the sound.”

Vincent didn’t interrupt.

“She taught me to sew. Thought I’d need it, being skinny and rough with fabric. She was right.”

“Where was your father?”

That brought a real silence. A slow one. But not tense.

“Gone,” Alastor said at last. “Before I could spell the word.”

Vincent nodded. Let the answer be.

They didn’t speak again for a while. The breeze stirred the edges of the coat beneath them. Somewhere, a bird called low and hoarse from a tree that didn’t look like it could bloom.

“I used to think I’d be a professor,” Vincent said eventually.

“Of what?”

“Language. Or maybe sound. Something that needed tuning.”

He felt Alastor shift beside him, and before he could overthink it, a hand brushed his own. No pressure. No claim. Just contact.

Vincent turned his palm upward, and Alastor’s fingers threaded through.

They sat like that until the sun dropped behind the mess tent, turning the sky the colour of worn copper. Their hands stayed joined. Their shoulders leaned.

That night, they met again by the post.

Vincent brought a scrap of chocolate he’d bartered from a boy who didn’t like sweets. It was half-melted, sealed in waxed paper and folded three times into his breast pocket. He offered it wordlessly.

Alastor’s smile was real. Tired. But real.

They broke it in half. Ate in silence.

And when Vincent shifted closer, Alastor didn’t move away. When their hands met again, it was without ceremony. Just fact. Just habit. Their shoulders fit now. Their breaths found rhythm without trying.

They didn’t talk about what they were. About what it meant. There was no room in this world for that kind of talk, not without danger.

But Vincent didn’t need to say it. He knew it already.

They were each other’s.

Not in name. Not in claim.

But in shape. In ritual. In return.

He wanted to ask, sometimes, what Alastor saw when he looked at him. If he felt the same steady pull, the same ache behind his ribs, the same strange joy at just being seen.

But he didn’t ask. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Instead, he whispered stories when the dark fell close - of radios built from broken parts and wires salvaged from his father’s attic, of tuning into distant broadcasts he wasn’t meant to hear. Of California heat and long hours locked in silence just to feel the click of something responding.

And Alastor listened.

He always did.

Sometimes he spoke back - words rare, but chosen. Sometimes he reached over to press their hands together again without looking. Once, he leaned close enough that Vincent felt his breath warm against his jaw. He didn’t kiss him. But he didn’t move away either.

It was enough.

The lull wouldn’t last. Vincent knew that. The stillness never did.

But for now... For now, there was no shelling. No movement. No code clattering urgent across the line.

Just summer heat and quiet. Just the slow hum of two boys becoming something more than alone.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid June, 1918

The heat didn’t bother him much.

It clung - heavy under the arms, behind the knees, where his collar wilted and stuck - but it didn’t bite. Not the way the cold had. Not the way loneliness had. Now, the sweat made the world feel more solid. More real. More alive. His coat stayed unfastened. His sleeves rolled high. He moved slower through camp, but not out of weariness. Just... because he could.

No one had barked orders in two days. The wire still buzzed faintly in the signal tent, but only half-heartedly - nothing urgent, nothing sharp. Officers slouched beneath canvas, muttering things that didn’t carry. The runners sprawled wherever they could, boots off, shirts undone, faces turned toward a sun no one had trusted since Verdun.

It was a strange kind of quiet. Not safety. But pause. Like the world had taken a breath it hadn’t meant to.

And in that breath - impossibly, blessedly - Alastor had found space.

He’d never had much of that. Not in camp. Not in life. But now, somehow, the air around him bent a little wider. Allowed more room to slip between things unnoticed. And he wasn’t alone in that space anymore.

Vincent met him in it. Night after night. And now, some days too.

They walked. Sometimes nowhere. Sometimes just out past the laundry line or around the half-sunken supply cart where grass had begun to take root. They didn’t walk fast. They didn’t need to. Alastor liked the way their shadows moved beside each other - not mirrored, but near. Like a code only he could read.

He’d waited by the fence post, at first. That had been enough. But Vincent had started arriving earlier, lingering longer, and Alastor hadn’t minded. He found himself lingering too.

There was a rhythm to it now. Not ritual. Not the way they met before. This was something different, slower, warmer, shaped by choice rather than compulsion.

And in that rhythm, they shared.

Not confessions. Nothing grand. Just small things. Bread broken in silence. A piece of chocolate passed back and forth until only the wax paper remained. Stories, sometimes - of families, of old static, of the places they’d been before their boots found France. Vincent told him about a radio he’d built when he was twelve. “It didn’t work well,” he’d said, “but it hummed.”

“You always liked the hum,” Alastor had murmured.

“I liked being the one who made it.”

He’d said it so simply. Like it wasn’t the most important thing Alastor had heard in weeks.

Another day, Vincent had shown him the spare receiver - the one he wasn’t supposed to have. Hidden in a battered canvas wrap, tucked behind a panel beneath the main table, it looked unremarkable at first. Smaller than the others. Dust-caught. One of the dials had a hairline crack running through the face.

But Vincent unwrapped it like something holy. Like something private. And Alastor, watching the careful way he handled it, felt something stir low in his chest. Not curiosity, not entirely. Something closer to reverence. Or longing. Or maybe both.

“It’s nothing official,” Vincent murmured, thumb brushing along the copper coil. “But it hums better than the ones they give us.”

He tapped it once against his thigh, then set it down between them. It wasn’t powered, not exactly - not rigged to the full system - but as Vincent flicked a switch and adjusted a twisted length of filament, a thin thread of sound rose from the coil. Soft. High. Barely more than a breath.

Alastor froze. The hair on his arms lifted. He couldn’t explain why. The pitch wasn’t pure. The signal fractured. But it felt… alive.

Vincent saw the way he leaned in. Said nothing. Just slid closer and took Alastor’s hand, guiding his fingers over the side dial. “It shifts by tension,” he said, quiet. “Pressure, angle, heat. It’s all touch.”

Alastor didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. His breath caught behind his teeth as the pitch changed under his fingers - a slide of tone so slight it felt like the air itself had turned toward him. The hum didn’t just exist; it responded. Like it had been waiting for him.

He turned the receiver slightly, then again. The tone shifted up. A little brighter. A little clearer. Then, with the flick of a switch Vincent adjusted by muscle memory, it dipped low. Round. Warm. It throbbed through the space between them like pulse.

Alastor touched the housing gently. His fingers itched. Not to understand. Not exactly. But to play. To pull sound from this machine like he could coax breath from a stage. The potential in it burned through him - not cold like his usual interest, but hot. Bright. Compelling.

“It sings,” he said aloud, and hadn’t meant to.

Vincent looked at him, properly, this time. His head tipped slightly, like he hadn’t expected to hear those words from Alastor of all people. Like something about the way he’d said them, unguarded and uncalculated, had struck a chord.

Alastor didn’t look away.

“Have you ever thought about what this could do after? If we ever learnt to send more than just code?”

Vincent blinked. Stilled. The sound wavered slightly under their shared hands, static tugging faint at the edges. And Alastor saw the shift in his face - something startled and quiet and wide-eyed, like he’d said something sacred without realising.

But he meant it.

Because it wasn’t just about the machine. It was the idea. The possibility. Alastor could see it - the theatre of it - not just signal and war reports, but sound. Showmanship. Voice spun out across the air like silk. Stories cast into rooms where no one else could go. A performance without stage or curtain. Just frequency and flame.

He imagined Vincent behind a board, coat half-buttoned, eyes sharp, voice low - not sending code, but spinning something new. News. Drama. Music. Maybe even laughter. Using the charm Alastor could see buried beneath the youth and war to influence masses.

Alastor wanted to be there. To stand just outside the frame, grinning sharp into a silence that wasn’t empty anymore. To make it entertain.

He didn’t know what shape the world would take after this, if it ever came. But in that moment, bent together over a machine humming low between their hands, he saw something that might belong to them. Not just survival. But stagecraft. Not just noise. But art.

Vincent was still staring. Alastor turned the dial again, let the pitch slide higher, until the air between them nearly shimmered.

“You’d be good at it,” he said softly. “You already know how to make the wire listen.”

Vincent’s lips parted. A breath. Not a reply.

For a moment, neither moved. The distance between their faces was barely a span, breath to breath. The air grew still, charged. Not expectant. Just possible.

Alastor didn’t lean in. Vincent didn’t either. But something hovered there, a gravity they didn’t follow, but didn’t pull away from.

Then Vincent blinked. Let his eyes drop. The moment passed.

But it stayed in the air, soft and unsaid.

They didn’t always talk. Sometimes it was touch instead. Not bold, never planned, just presence. A hand brushing a sleeve. A knee pressed to his beneath the cart. Fingers meeting once across the signal table and not retreating. Once, he’d reached up to tuck the edge of Vincent’s hair behind his ear and hadn’t said a word when Vincent let him.

Another night, Vincent had stared at him for so long Alastor almost laughed. “If you keep looking at me like that,” he’d said, voice dry, “someone’s going to think you’re some charmed fool.”

“What if I am?” Vincent had replied, and something in Alastor’s chest had gone too still to breathe.

He hadn’t answered. Not aloud. But he hadn’t looked away either.

He didn’t know what this was. Not fully. He didn’t need to.

But he knew it felt... right. That Vincent was no longer just the boy in the signal tent, the sound he’d waited for in static. He was real now. Whole. A shape Alastor had begun to build his own days around without even meaning to.

There were hours that passed now with the weight of him still warm at Alastor’s side, and when he closed his eyes, he could still feel it. Could still hear the sound of his voice - low, tired, real - as he recounted some absurd rumour or story from back home. Once, he’d talked about the California heat like it was a person. “She doesn’t let you forget her,” he’d said. “Even in winter.”

Alastor didn’t speak much about himself. He wasn’t sure he knew how. But once, by the cart, Vincent had asked and Alastor felt compelled to tell him, to be known.

He’d hesitated. Then said: “She used to sing while she worked. Kitchen songs. Old ones. I never learned the words, just the rhythm.”

Vincent hadn’t pressed. Just nodded. Just understood.

Then, he’d asked about Alastor’s father.

“Gone,” Alastor had said, simple. “Before I could spell the word.”

No sympathy followed. Just silence. Just company.

And Alastor had wanted to reach for him then. To take his hand without being asked. To press their palms together not for comfort but for proof.

Sometimes he did. Sometimes Vincent reached first.

Like now.

They sat under the weight of late afternoon, backs to the wheel of the old cart, the world slow around them. Alastor’s coat was beneath them. Vincent’s hand was in his. The sun turned the edges of his hair gold. His eyes were half-closed, not in sleep, but in something softer. Something near peace.

And Alastor let himself watch, just for a moment.

He didn’t understand everything he felt. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. But he knew that being near Vincent made the world bearable in ways it had never been. Made the quiet feel like something worth holding. Made the ache in his chest feel like something other than hunger.

He wanted this to last. Not forever, he didn’t believe in that, but longer. Long enough.

That night, they met again by the post.

Vincent brought more chocolate. The square was half-melted, folded carefully in wax paper like it meant something. He didn’t speak as he offered it, just held it out. Alastor took it. Broke it in half. Passed one back.

They ate it in silence.

And when Vincent leaned into him again, when their hands found each other without hesitation, Alastor didn’t shift. Didn’t brace. He just leaned back into the touch.

And for the first time, he didn’t wonder what this was, or how long they had. He just sat in it. Let it hold. Let it become.

A sharp bark of laughter echoed faintly across camp. Not theirs. Not near. But real. A reminder.

Alastor didn’t look up.

But he heard it. And he didn’t let go.

And when the silence eventually breaks - when orders come, shells fell, and Vincent is pulled away again - he would still have this. As a memory, as a truth.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late June, 1918

The path wasn’t quiet tonight.

Not loud either, not yet – no shellfire, no shrieking whistles – but something in the air had shifted. The silence didn’t hold the same. It was thinner. Brittle at the edges. The kind that cracked if you leaned on it too hard.

Vincent knew before he left the tent.

Before the corporal handed him a mess of half-corrupted signals. Before the officer muttered something low about fallback contingencies and western pressure. Before the word movement passed too casually between lips that never said more than they meant to.

Something was shifting. That much was clear.

They wouldn’t call it retreat. Not yet. But Vincent had been decoding messages long enough to read what wasn’t said.

He hadn’t finished the last transmission. It didn’t matter. They weren’t urgent – just chatter, posturing, small corrections laid over a map that was already wrong.

He didn’t ask to leave. Didn’t need to. Nobody questioned him anymore when he moved like that, deliberate, quiet, already halfway gone. Alastor's matchbox had stayed tucked against his ribs all day, unused, as if it too was bracing for bad news.

The air outside was thicker than it had been all week. Warm, sour, smoke-sweet with something that didn’t belong to their fires. The hedgerow didn’t sway. The wind had stilled. Every leaf held its breath.

In the distance, a whistle blew - sharp, thin, meaningless. But it cut through the stillness like a line drawn in sand. A reminder: they weren’t alone in this silence.

He walked faster than usual. Not because he was late – he wasn’t – but because the quiet had taken on a new shape, and he didn’t want to learn what it meant if the post was empty tonight.

He passed two men near the latrine trench, heads bowed in quiet conversation. One of them looked up just as Vincent passed. No recognition. Just the shape of caution behind the eyes.

“Careful,” the man said. “Movement east of the hedgerow. If you see anything strange, run. Don’t play brave.”

Vincent nodded and kept walking.

He wasn’t sure what he saw first – a flicker, maybe. The shape of presence where there shouldn’t have been one. And then the fence. The figure beside it.

Alastor.

Already there. Waiting, as if the night had summoned him first.

Vincent didn’t pause.

He slid down beside him in one motion, coat still half-buttoned despite the heat, fingers ink-stained from the day, hair sticking damp to his temple. Their shoulders met with a soft press, sleeves creased together at the seam.

Alastor didn’t shift. Just let him in. Let the closeness settle.

They didn’t speak. Not at first. But it wasn’t the old silence, the curious hush of early May. This one was different. Warmer. Tighter. Full. The kind of silence that knows.

Vincent didn’t bring anything tonight. No tea or chocolate. No stitched cloth to hide in his pocket. Just himself – his breath, his pulse, the ache that had been climbing his throat since the sun began to set. The cloth he’d embroidered still sat folded in his coat pocket, close against his ribs. He hadn't taken it out. Not yet. But the weight of it was there, a small, deliberate truth pressed into the seams of his uniform.

Alastor struck a match without a word. The flare lit the planes of his face for just a moment before he leaned in, offering the cigarette to Vincent. Their fingers brushed as he passed it over. Vincent took it, inhaled once, then handed it back. They shared it in turns, slow, unhurried, the smoke curling between them like a thread.

After a long moment, Vincent let his head fall, soft and slow, against Alastor’s shoulder.

Not habit. Not comfort.

Something heavier. A weight passed between them.

His breath brushed Alastor’s neck as he shifted closer, and for one suspended second, Vincent felt the strange pull of it – the question not asked, the closeness just shy of too much. He didn’t lift his head. Didn’t lean further. But the thought hung there, quiet and unanswered.

Alastor didn’t move.

So Vincent spoke.

“They’re shifting the lines.”

His voice didn’t waver, but it came quieter than he meant it to. Flat. Not from numbness, but from repetition. He’d thought it so many times it no longer sounded like something new.

Alastor turned slightly. Not a glance. Just a presence adjusting. A subtle lean. Their arms pressed more firmly together.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to.

“Nothing formal yet,” Vincent added. “But it’s coming. The way they’re talking, it’s already happened somewhere. And when it hits here, it won’t be slow.”

Alastor shifted again – not away. Just enough that Vincent could lean into him more if he wanted to. And he did. He didn’t mean to, but his body followed the gesture before he’d had time to think.

He didn’t say, We’ll lose this.

But the silence said it for him.

For weeks now, they’d built this thing – quietly, patiently, like hands cupped around a flame. And now the wind was coming. You could feel it. In every footstep. In every missing breath.

He thought of the chocolate. Of Alastor’s laugh behind the ration cart. Of the way they’d sat with their fingers interlaced while the sun burned low and the world held still. All of it already starting to feel like something the war had borrowed and wasn’t going to return.

Vincent turned his hand where it rested between them. Found Alastor’s, steady and open.

Their fingers laced like it was routine now.

And maybe it was.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else,” Vincent said, barely louder than the wind. “I know I will. I know we both will. But I don’t... I don’t want it.”

His thumb brushed the back of Alastor’s hand once. His head still rested on his shoulder.

They sat like that a while longer. Long enough for the quiet to change again, turn gentle. Less taut. Not because anything was solved. But because there was nothing else to say.

He didn’t cry. He hadn’t in months. But there was a stretch behind his ribs that pulled like something close.

When they rose, it was slower than usual. Their hands didn’t part until they had to. Not until the camp lights caught their silhouettes in a way that felt too visible, too vulnerable.

Even then, it wasn’t abrupt. Just a pause. Just the space between fingers. Just the memory left behind.

Vincent walked back without speaking. Alastor walked beside him, steps matching like a rhythm learned by heart.

And that, at least, felt like something they still had.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late June, 1918

He knew before he saw him.

The air was wrong tonight. Not loud, not violent – not yet – but sharp. Tight at the edges, like something bracing to snap. The sky had gone soft and colourless too early, and the birds hadn’t called from the hedgerow like they usually did at dusk. Even the wind had stilled. As if the world was holding its breath.

Alastor didn’t stand by the post. He didn’t pace. He sat, arms braced over his knees, cigarette already lit and burning slow between two fingers. He didn’t think. Not clearly. He just waited.

And then – footsteps.

He heard them first. Knew the cadence by now, the specific hush of boots that didn’t drag or stomp, the deliberate way Vincent moved even when he was tired. The sound settled into him before the boy had even come into view.

And then he was there. Sliding down beside him with the same tired grace, coat clinging damp to the curve of his back, breath still shallow from the walk. Their shoulders touched. Vincent didn’t speak. Didn’t apologise for the closeness. And Alastor didn’t flinch.

He didn’t have it in him to pretend anymore. Not tonight.

He struck the match slowly. Lit the cigarette again – it had gone cold in his hand. When he passed it over, their fingers brushed. He watched as Vincent drew a breath from it, then passed it back without a word.

They shared it. One breath, then another. Smoke curling in the warm night air, soft as thread.

Alastor felt the weight shift beside him before the head touched down – Vincent, leaning in, slow and certain, temple pressing against his shoulder.

Not habit. Not comfort. Something else. Something heavier.

His whole body registered the weight before his mind caught up. The closeness. The heat. The way it filled the hollow curve of his side like it had always been meant to.

He didn’t move. Wouldn’t have known how if he’d wanted to.

Vincent’s breath brushed his neck, soft. And for a moment – one long, held moment – Alastor felt the question rise in the space between them. It didn’t pass into action. Didn’t become anything more than what it was. But it was there, bright as a struck match. The kind of silence that asks, If I leaned closer, would you stop me?

He didn’t answer it. Not aloud. But he didn’t pull away.

And then Vincent spoke.

“They’re shifting the lines.”

The words fell like ash – light, but final. Not surprised. Not afraid. Just... expected. As though the quiet had been holding them in its teeth all day, waiting for the right moment to let them drop.

Alastor turned just slightly, enough that their arms pressed closer. Just enough to be felt. Not enough to break the moment.

He said nothing. He never did when Vincent needed the space to speak.

“Nothing formal yet,” Vincent continued. “But it’s coming.”

He didn’t explain further. Didn’t need to. Alastor understood. He always did. They’d both seen how quickly orders changed, how fast the ground could give beneath their feet. They’d lived in the margins long enough to know when the shape of a silence meant everything was about to break.

He shifted again. Just a little. Enough for Vincent to lean more fully if he wanted to.

And he did.

The weight against his shoulder deepened, and Alastor let it anchor him. Vincent’s presence had always felt like a frequency – low, constant, bone-deep. But tonight it hummed louder. As if this closeness might be the last of its kind.

He didn’t want to think about losing it. But the thought pressed anyway.

They’d built this thing between them carefully. Slowly. Night after night, word by word, silence by silence. A ritual born from breath and habit, not declaration. And now, already, he could feel it bracing to be broken.

Vincent’s hand shifted beside his. Their fingers touched. Alastor turned his palm without hesitation.

They laced. Automatically. Like it was something they’d been doing for years.

Alastor looked straight ahead. Into the dark beyond the trees. Into the place the next order would come from. He thought about the way Vincent had smiled that afternoon, biting down laughter as he handed over half-melted chocolate. The way their hands had stayed joined until the sun had vanished behind the mess tent. The way Vincent always tilted his head to listen – not to reply, but to understand.

It wasn’t supposed to last. Nothing did out here.

But God, he wanted it to.

He felt Vincent shift beside him. Heard the whisper of cloth as he spoke.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else.”

Alastor closed his eyes.

He didn’t say, I don’t either.

He didn’t have to.

The warmth of their hands said it for him.

The cigarette had long since burned out, forgotten. The only smoke left between them was memory.

They sat that way for a long time. Not speaking. Not needing to. The kind of silence that could hold anything – fear, ache, love, all folded into one long exhale.

Eventually, the hour turned. The wind shifted again. A voice called faintly from camp – someone swearing about rations, or mess. It didn’t matter. It was enough to remind them: this wasn’t theirs to keep.

When they stood, they did so slowly. Neither pulled away first. Their hands didn’t part until they were halfway to the path, until the camp lights caught them too clearly. Even then, it wasn’t a break. Just a breath.

They walked in silence. Shoulders brushing now and then. Not perfectly in step, but near enough.

Alastor didn’t look back.

He didn’t need to.

Everything he wanted was still beside him.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early July, 1918

They told him by accident.

Not because they knew. No one knew. No, this was just offhand. Said like it meant nothing when it meant everything. One of the signal officers had returned from mess with a mouth full of toast and a scrap of a grin, muttering something about runners being redistributed ahead of the next push.

“New lists went through this morning,” he said, chewing slow. “About time. Can’t keep sending the same lads back and expecting them to return with legs.” A shrug. “That one - the fast, quiet one - what’s his name?”

Vincent didn’t answer.

Didn’t have to.

The officer snapped his fingers, trying to catch it. “The deer boy. That one. He’s getting shipped east. Just a day or two forward, they said, but-” Another shrug. “We’ll see if the lines hold that long.”

The words landed like sand in Vincent’s mouth.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t show anything. Just nodded, tight, and returned to the board. He finished decoding the last message with mechanical precision, though he couldn’t have repeated what it said if someone held a knife to his throat.

When he stood, it was slow. Not dramatic. Not rushed.

Just final.

He didn’t ask permission to leave. He hadn’t needed to in weeks. By now, no one questioned the way he vanished when the air went still.

Outside, the sky had turned a dull, pale silver. Heat hung over the ground like a second skin, and somewhere behind the barracks, a pipe had burst, leaking thin steam into the still air. It felt like the whole world was sweating.

He checked the post first. Of course he did. But Alastor wasn’t there.

Then the wash line.

Then the cart.

Then - finally, thankfully - he found him. Not far from the perimeter fence, crouched beside a box of coiled line, sleeves pushed to his elbows, boots muddied to the ankle.

Vincent stopped just a few paces back.

For a moment, he didn’t speak.

He just watched.

Watched the way Alastor’s fingers moved, deft and certain, unwinding the copper like it meant something. Watched the crease in his brow. The little twist of his mouth when something didn’t curve into a grin. The arc of his spine as he leaned forward - present, real, here.

And then the weight in Vincent’s chest shifted, heavy as stone, because soon he wouldn’t be.

“Hey.”

Alastor looked up. Just that. Just lifted his head like he’d known Vincent would come. Like he’d been waiting.

No smile but not cold, either.

Just steady.

“You heard,” he said.

Vincent nodded once. He stepped closer, until their boots were nearly touching.

“I thought maybe I wouldn’t,” he said. “I thought they’d send you without saying.”

“They nearly did.”

His voice was calm, but Vincent could see it - packed light, coat already folded, boots tied too tight. He was ready. Ready to leave the moment they called.

Vincent hadn’t known if he’d find him. Hadn’t known if he’d already missed the last chance. The thought had sickened him since the moment he'd heard.

He looked around once, quick. No one was watching. The tents behind them were still, and the path ahead was empty for now.

Then he reached into his coat. Slowly. Fingers careful.

The cloth was still folded, stitched tight along the edge, thread puckered faintly where he’d pulled it too hard. It felt warm from being pressed against his ribs. Familiar. Private. More a part of him than anything else he carried.

He didn’t speak when he held it out.

Didn’t explain, just waited, hoping Alastor would understand everything unspoken.

Alastor took it.

Carefully. Gently. Like it was something breakable. His fingers didn’t tremble, but they hesitated for half a breath too long before unfolding it.

He read the stitching in silence.

When he looked up again, Vincent wasn’t sure what he’d see. Not a grin. Not a quip. But what was there - a kind of stillness behind the eyes - made something twist in Vincent’s throat.

“I didn’t know when...” Vincent said, voice rough. “I didn’t know if I should give it to you. But, if you’re going, I wanted you to have it.”

Alastor looked at him. Really looked. Like he was trying to take in every part of his face at once. Like he wanted to carry it with him.

“I’ll keep it close,” he said quietly. “Where they won’t think to look.”

Vincent nodded. Because that was all he could do.

They stood there like that, just standing. Breath shared. Heat rising off the dirt between them.

Then Alastor moved. Just slightly. Just enough to shift the space between them into something that asked to be filled.

Vincent stepped forward.

No hesitation. No flourish. Just instinct and need.

He lifted one hand and touched the side of Alastor’s face, fingers light against his jaw. Alastor’s eyes didn’t close, but they softened, lids lowering, lashes catching a beam of late sun like they’d been dusted in gold.

He bent slightly - just slightly - because Alastor was a little shorter, and this moment didn’t ask for symmetry. He pressed their foreheads together, holding Alastor's jaw in his hands, skin to skin and breath to breath.

He felt the rise and fall of Alastor’s chest, steady and unflinching, and the press of their hands as Alastor raised his to cradle Vincent's face in return. He could have stayed like that forever. Didn’t care if anyone saw. Not now.

Alastor let him stay. Tilted his head just a little more to meet the touch fully. Not a kiss, just the pressing of their faces together, but not far from one either.

It was the closest they’d ever come to saying it aloud.

Then-

The horn.

Sharp. Two bursts. Not urgent. Not yet. But final. Undeniable.

Alastor didn’t flinch.

Vincent did.

But he didn’t pull away. Not right away.

They breathed together for one last second. Forehead to forehead. Silence louder than anything they could have said.

Then, slowly, Alastor stepped back. Their hands slipped apart. The cloth was already in his breast pocket, folded neat behind the lapel.

He didn’t look back and Vincent didn’t call after him.

He just stood there, hands still half-open, wind tugging at his sleeve, the imprint of Alastor’s cheeks warm in his palm.

He stayed until the shape of Alastor vanished between the tents.

Then he turned back toward the signal tent.

And walked back, slower this time. As if he was already trying to remember how to walk without someone at his side.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early July, 1918

They told him just after dawn.

No ceremony. No warning. Just a folded slip and a half-awake corporal slurring orders between mouthfuls of biscuit.

“Pack light. East trench. Relay point. Stand ready by the quarter-hour bell.”

That was it.

No details. No map. No promise of return. Just movement. Forward. Closer.

Of course it was coming. He’d felt it for days - in the weight of silence, in the sudden calm. Orders don’t come down like that unless someone’s already decided where to bleed next.

Alastor didn’t speak. Just nodded once, sharp. Tucked the slip into his coat.

The moment the corporal moved on, he went still. Not from fear but from thought. How long did he have? Where was Vincent? Would he even know?

He should have written. Should have sent something. Should have done more than linger by the post last night, watching the sky and listening for footsteps that never came.

Instead, he was standing alone, lacing his boots too tight. Trying to remember how to breathe around the thought: I might not see him again.

The thought didn’t twist. It didn’t panic. It stilled him the way sharp things do. Like the moment before a knife presses in.

He’d known since morning.

Orders clipped to the back of a crate, scribbled in that hurried shorthand officers used when they didn’t want to linger. His name tucked into the margin like an afterthought. East line. Runners rotated. No return date listed.

He packed without ceremony. Water. Rations. A packet of field orders looped tight in oilcloth. His coat folded sharp over one arm. Boots laced with the kind of finality that made the knot feel like a death sentence.

He should have gone straight to the staging point.

That was what the orders had said. That was what the others had done. One short burst to prepare. Two to move. Clear. Clean.

But instead, Alastor drifted.

Not lost. Not hesitant. Just... deliberate.

He moved like someone threading a needle in low light. Not toward the ridge. Not toward the others already gathering near the carts. But sideways, into the space between what he was meant to do and what he needed.

Toward the signal tent.

Not inside. Just close enough. Just near.

He stood at the edge, hands tucked into his pockets, back straight, watching the tent flap ripple in the faint breeze. It didn’t lift much. The air was too still. Heavy with smoke, heat, the distant tang of something burned that hadn’t come from their own fires.

Nothing moved.

No shadows. No voices.

No sign of Vincent.

He almost turned then. Almost stepped back toward the ridge with the others, his pack already light on his shoulder, the wire coil looped neat in one hand. He was ready. The kind of ready that came from knowing there would be no second chance.

But his feet stayed.

He didn’t know why. Or maybe he did.

One more look. One more try.

He walked slow through the camp’s edge, past the flattened mess line, past the old ration cart where the flies buzzed thick around rusted tins. Past the gap in the fence where someone had tied old string between posts like it might keep something out. Or in.

And then, a flicker.

A shadow in the corner of his eye. A slope of shoulder. A silhouette too familiar to be anyone else. Moving quiet, like he didn’t want to be seen. Like he’d come looking for something he wasn’t sure he’d find.

Vincent.

Alastor didn’t call out. Didn’t smile.

He crouched again beside the coil of line. Kept his fingers moving. Unwinding copper like it meant something. Letting his breath settle in his chest where it had been braced too tight for too long.

Then footsteps. Light, careful. Close behind him.

He didn’t turn. Not immediately.

Just lifted his head. Calm. Certain.

Like he’d known Vincent would come.

Like he hadn't been praying to a God he barely believed in for just one more moment.

“You heard,” he said.

Vincent nodded. Slow. The heat had flushed high on his cheeks and his shoulders sloped like the sun had settled into his bones.

“I thought maybe I wouldn’t,” Vincent said. “I thought they’d send you without saying.”

“They nearly did.”

No bitterness in it. No fear. Just fact. A truth so old it didn’t sting anymore.

The air between them felt like glass. Clear. Sharp-edged.

He was due to leave the moment the horn called twice. That was all the margin they had left.

Vincent looked around once, quick. Checked the path, the tents, the distance. No one was watching. No one nearby.

Then his hand moved, slow and careful, into his coat and when he drew it out, Alastor saw a cloth. Folded along the seams like something precious. Edges slightly frayed. Not worn. Just... handled. Kept close.

Vincent held it out without a word and Alastor took it with both hands. Gently. As if it might disappear if he reached too fast.

He unfolded it without tearing. Without breathing.

The thread pulled tight in places. Crooked in others.

Alastor. Vincent. 1918.

Just that.

It wasn’t a message. It wasn’t a token.

It was proof.

He stared at it longer than he meant to.

Not because he didn’t understand.

Because he did.

And that kind of understanding didn’t come often. Not in this place.

When he looked up, Vincent was watching him. Still. Like the world might split beneath them if they didn’t get this moment right.

“I didn’t know when…” Vincent said. His voice caught, like it hadn’t been meant to be spoken aloud. “I didn’t know if I should give it to you. But if you’re going, I wanted you to have it.”

Alastor held his gaze.

Let the silence wrap around them again.

Not empty.

Full.

“I’ll keep it close,” he said. “Where they won’t think to look.”

It wasn’t a promise. It was a certainty.

Then he stepped closer and Vincent moved forward to meet him without hesitation.

Vincent’s hand rose, palm brushing along his jaw. Not urgent. Not demanding. Just… sure. The way the sun sometimes pressed through the clouds without asking.

Their foreheads met, slow and certain. Breath to breath. Skin to skin.

Alastor let his hands rise in return, one to Vincent’s face, the other at the nape of his neck, fingers curling into the soft damp curls behind his ear. Not to pull him in.

To hold him still. To make this real.

The cloth - already tucked into the inside breast of his coat - pulsed against his chest like it had always belonged there. Not heavy. Not fragile.

Just alive, like a second heartbeat alive and beating next to his own.

They stood like that for one long second. Maybe two.

Long enough to breathe together. To be together.

Then-

The horn.

Sharp. Two bursts.

Not a surprise. But final, all the same.

Alastor didn’t flinch but he felt Vincent’s breath catch against his cheek. Heard it. The stutter of it.

Still, neither of them moved. They stayed for one more heartbeat.

Finally, Alastor stepped back.

Not fast, but with the kind of care you gave to leaving something holy behind.

Their hands slipped apart and neither said goodbye.

He turned toward the ridge, toward the runners already forming a line, toward the smoke thinning over the trees, and walked. Boots steady. Spine straight.

The cloth pressed to his ribs. Warm.

He didn’t look down, didn’t touch it, but he knew it was there.

And that had to be enough.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid July, 1918

The silence had changed.

It wasn’t absence, not exactly. There were still voices in the tent, boots outside, static on the wire. But none of it settled where it should. None of it filled the space that had opened just behind his ribs the moment Alastor walked away.

He hadn’t gone far. Not in the scheme of things. A few miles forward. A new line. A different stretch of dirt pretending to be defence. But it might as well have been the moon.

They’d promised updates. Vague ones. Vincent hadn’t asked. He knew better than to take comfort from secondhand assurances. Until it was Alastor’s voice, he didn’t want to hear a damn thing.

He worked mostly in silence now. Took longer shifts than he needed. Didn’t speak unless spoken to. The boys around him didn’t ask why. Maybe they didn’t notice. Maybe they did.

It didn’t matter.

The static still lived in the receiver. Still hummed at night, low and familiar. But even the sound felt distant now. Like something trying to remember the shape of a voice.

He tried not to check the post. Not obsessively. Not like before. But some part of him still kept count. Still watched the hour. Still walked past the edge of the hedgerow, just in case.

No one was ever there.

He didn’t return to the fence. Not yet. That place wasn’t built for one person.

But some nights, he sat outside the tent instead. Let the wind carry the static from the signal coil, and listened. Not for words. Not for meaning. Just for the hum. The pulse. The sound of something reaching.

That was what it felt like now. All of it. Reaching.

He’d taken to tapping small messages when no one was watching. Just at the edge of shift change. Just when the tent emptied enough to hear himself think. Not full codes. Nothing reportable. Just fragments.

There. Here. Still.

Listen.

Come back.

He didn’t expect answers. Didn’t even know if Alastor had a receiver, or access, or time. He wasn’t a signal boy. He didn’t belong to that world. But Vincent tapped anyway. Because it was the only thing he still knew how to do.

Sometimes he tapped out his name. Sometimes Alastor’s. The rhythm was still carved into his hands – he couldn’t have forgotten it if he tried.

Other times, his hand drifted to the place where the cloth had once been – the inside pocket of his coat, now empty. It felt strange, walking without it. Like forgetting something vital. Like breathing lopsided.

He hadn’t made another.

Didn’t know if he would.

That one had said everything he didn’t know how to speak aloud. And he hoped – God, he hoped – that Alastor was still carrying it. Still listening.

Now there was nothing to do but wait. For news. For orders. For the next burst of movement that might pull him forward too.

And he hated it.

The waiting. The stillness. The cruel, gnawing quiet that came when there was nothing left to do but hope. He hated the way time stretched in his chest like wire pulled too tight, every hour heavier than the last. He hated that he didn’t know where Alastor had been sent exactly, or whether he was sleeping, or eating, or breathing.

He hated knowing that someone he loved was walking deeper into danger with every passing day – and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Yes – loved.

He didn’t fight the word anymore. Had probably known it the moment their foreheads touched and they stood there, suspended between breath and silence, saying everything without language. No theatre. No signal. Just skin and stillness and the unbearable weight of knowing.

He’d known it longer, if he was honest. Known it in the curve of Alastor’s grin. In the way he listened, really listened, like silence itself had a frequency he could hear. In the steadiness of his hand. The hush of his voice.

But he hadn’t had the breath for it. The space. The language. Not then.

He did now.

And it burned. Soft. Constant. A quiet ache in the hollow beneath his ribs, pulsing like static through his chest. A presence, even in absence.

One night, when the others were asleep and the tent had gone dark except for the flicker of the lamp over the transmitter, Vincent reached for the key and tapped it out.

I love you.

Three words. Eleven taps. Sent to no one, meant for one.

He didn’t repeat it. Didn’t send it again. Just once. Just to feel the shape of it in his bones. In the wire. In the night.

Then he cut the line for an hour.

Claimed interference when the corporal stirred. Said the air was thick with static. That the ground might’ve shifted the connections.

No one questioned him.

They never did anymore.

He sat there in the silence he’d made. The fake static humming faint in the wires. His hand over the desk. His breath shallow. And all he could see was the last time they stood together. The way Alastor’s hand had cradled his face. The weight of their foreheads pressed close. The warmth of the cloth in his palm – his name and Alastor’s, stitched into proof.

It hadn’t been a goodbye. Not really.

Just a vow he didn’t know how to say aloud.

And now, every night, when the codes stopped and the tent emptied and the world slipped sideways into quiet, Vincent sat back down at the signal desk and tapped out Alastor’s name again.

Not to ask.

Not to call.

Just to say:

I remember. I’m still here. I’m listening.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Near the Front – Early July, 1918

The forward line was too quiet.

Not in the way peace was quiet. Not in the way night settled sometimes over the post like breath held between two ribs. This was the other kind – the kind that came before the world cracked open again. No shelling for two days. No smoke. No screams. Just the eerie, echoing hush of ground that hadn’t yet decided which way to break.

They’d moved him with no fanfare. One order. One horn. A nod from a lieutenant who hadn’t learned his name. The new trench wasn’t far – just east of their last position, down a line dug too shallow and supported by timber that splintered under rain. But it might as well have been a different country. Everything was slower here. Brittle. Even the mud felt old. As if it had soaked too many boys and forgotten how to let go.

Alastor ran messages through it anyway.

Same as always. One pocket full of code, one of pencil stubs and bandages. His hands knew the routine. His feet knew the way. He moved between sectors like a shadow, breath held, boots silent. Fast, fast, always fast.

But something had changed.

Not around him – in him. He could feel it. The shift in his chest. The way the ground pressed harder beneath his boots now. He’d always moved like he didn’t care if he was seen. Now he moved like he hoped someone might be listening.

Vincent.

The name still pulsed under his skin like a held chord. He didn’t say it aloud, but it rang through him anyway. Especially now. Especially when he crouched in a new trench with unfamiliar boys who eyed him like something strange. Especially when the shelling started up again two trenches over and he found himself reaching inside his coat for the cloth, just to press it between his fingers.

It lived close to his chest, folded behind his lapel. Stitched with their names in a hand that wasn’t neat but was real. He didn’t look at it often. Didn’t need to. Just the weight of it was enough. Just knowing it was there.

He ran two full routes his first day. One through a collapsed sector, the other past a field riddled with gas shells that hadn’t gone off. The third was shorter – just a note passed down the line – but the boy who handed it to him flinched when he asked for it. Didn’t meet his eyes. Didn’t speak. Alastor didn’t ask why.

He was used to being a question people didn’t want answered.

That night, the trench filled with rain that hadn’t yet fallen. Sweat, mostly. Smoke. The kind of damp that came from fear and heat. Alastor sat near the far wall, coat drawn tight, the cloth pressed lightly in his palm. He didn’t sleep.

Instead, he listened.

The other runners often talked in their sleep. One cried out for his mother. Another said nothing, just whimpered every few minutes like a kettle left to boil dry. Alastor watched the sky. Listened for taps that wouldn’t come. The signal line here was dead. Supposedly temporary. Too much shelling had buried the wire last week and no one wanted to risk the trench again to retrieve it.

But Alastor still listened.

He didn’t know if Vincent could still reach him. Didn’t know if their signals would find their way. But sometimes, when he sat still enough, when the world went quiet enough, he thought he felt it – the faintest echo in the air. A rhythm in his ribs. A sound that didn’t come through his ears but through his memory.

I’m still here.

He’d never had that before. Not really.

There’d been his mama. A few aunties. Women who spoke sharp and moved sharper, who loved him in their own unspoken ways but watched him, too, like they weren’t sure what kind of boy he’d turn out to be.

But that was it. Everyone else kept their distance. Alastor smiled too easily. Spoke too clean. Asked questions he wasn’t supposed to ask. He’d grown up surrounded by silence and the weight of men who turned up dead once he got too close. Some folks called it misfortune. Others called it justice. Either way, he was left alone with the knowing of it.

No one wanted to hold his gaze for long. Not once they’d heard the stories. Not once they’d seen the way he watched people move, like he was waiting for something to shift.

So he kept to the edges. Learned to be quick, to be useful, to be gone before anyone could ask too much. Company wasn’t something he sought. Not really. And love – whatever that was – had never looked like something meant for him.

But this – this was different.

This wasn’t hunger. Wasn’t the flared heat he’d seen in other boys’ eyes, or the mockery hidden in laughter. It wasn’t flesh, or ache, or want twisted sharp and dangerous. He didn’t want Vincent like that.

But he wanted him.

Wanted the hush of him. The steadiness. The way he looked without flinching. The way he stayed. The way he listened like the answers mattered. Like Alastor mattered.

He didn’t know the name for that kind of wanting. He didn’t need one.

He just knew it felt like truth.

He wanted the sound of his breath in quiet. The way he said certain words slower than others. The weight of his hand – not pulling, just present. Wanted the knowing of him. The way their silences matched. The way Vincent looked at him like he wasn’t a riddle, but an answer someone had already worked out and chosen anyway.

He’d never had that. Not from anyone. Not once.

And it made something in him quiet. Not small. Just still.

He missed him.

More than he should. More than he’d ever admit aloud. Not because he was afraid, but because the shape of the missing was too wide to name.

He didn’t think it was quite love. He didn’t know if he believed in that kind – the kind with sex and rings and the words people stitched into songs. But he knew now what it felt like to want someone to live. To stay. To be known. And he knew, now, that Vincent was the shape that made everything else feel less hollow.

He didn’t need a word for it but he had the cloth.

He had the memory of that final moment – forehead to forehead, palms pressed together, the breath between them slow and shared. He had the weight of Vincent’s hand on his face, not claiming, just keeping. He’d left without a word and Vincent had let him. Because they’d already said everything without speaking.

Alastor had run again the next day. And again after that. His coat grew heavier with sweat and soot. The wire in his pocket stiffened at the edges. But he didn’t take it out. Not even when the boys muttered about superstition and lucky charms. He let them believe whatever they needed to. So long as it stayed safe. So long as it stayed his.

They asked him once, the new corporal. “You ever think about dying out here?”

Alastor had shrugged. “Only when I imagine the silence after.”

“The silence?”

He hadn’t answered.

Because he didn’t know.

Only that it wasn’t this.

Not yet.

And in the stillness after the run, when he lay against the trench wall, chest heaving, boots soaked, hands burned from climbing the wire mesh too fast – he reached into his coat and touched the cloth again.

Just once. Just to feel it.

And let himself believe – for that second – that somewhere, far enough to be safe but close enough to feel, Vincent was doing the same.

He didn’t dream that night.

But when he closed his eyes, he swore he heard it – three taps, then four. Then silence.

Just a memory.

Or maybe a message.

He didn’t know which.

He didn’t care.

Either way, it was him.

And that was enough.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Mid-to-Late July, 1918

He was unraveling. Quietly. Systematically. Like a wire pulled too tight, fraying strand by strand beneath the pressure. Not loud. Not messy. Just… thinning.

The days blurred. Orders still came, signals still flickered across the wire, but his hands had started to move without direction. His fingers tapped even when he wasn’t meant to be sending anything. Just shapes. Echoes. The rhythm of a name spelled out so many times it barely felt like language anymore.

Alastor. Alastor. Alastor.

Some nights he didn’t remember sleeping. Just the lamp flickering above his station and the low hum of the receiver curled tight around his spine like static hunger.

He still brought the cloth to his bunk. Not to wear. Not to look at. Just to know it was there. The second one he’d made – stitched with the same uneven lines, the same quiet names. It hadn’t been for Alastor. Not this time. It wasn’t a message. It was a promise: I won’t stop.

The first had gone with him. Folded into the lining of his coat, pressed against his chest like a second heartbeat. Vincent tried not to think about it too hard. Tried not to imagine that coat torn open. Blood. Mud. Fire. A hand reaching for a square of cloth that meant too much and said too little.

But he thought about it anyway.

He’d started working late. Earlier, too. Took double shifts when no one asked. Slept in odd hours, shoulder to the signal table, dreams splintered and short. When he spoke, it was only when he had to. The boys around him had stopped asking why.

They assumed he was tired. That he’d burned out. Maybe they were right. Maybe he had. But not for the reasons they thought.

He wasn’t burnt from war.

He was burnt from absence.

It clung to his skin worse than gas. The not-knowing. The hollow shape of Alastor beside him where there was no longer anyone to lean against. The way his own name sounded thinner now when tapped out loud, like the air didn’t want to carry it anymore.

Vincent used to imagine Alastor would die.

Not cruelly. Not obsessively. Just… statistically. He was a runner. A name on a list of bodies never recovered. A message gone missing. A ghost made of legs too fast for safety and smiles people didn’t trust. Vincent had always known the numbers.

But knowing and feeling weren’t the same.

Now he thought about it too much. Thought about what it would mean to never hear from him again. No warning. No goodbye. No body.

Just silence.

He hated it. Hated the not-knowing. Hated that the world had the power to make someone disappear and offer no proof of absence. No funeral. No sound. Just quiet.

He loved him.

It didn’t feel fragile anymore. Didn’t burn like it had in the beginning, sharp and aching behind his ribs. Now it just lived there – a steady, quiet ache like breath drawn too deep. Something constant. Something known.

One night, he wrote it out in full. Not on the wire, not for transmission. Just on a scrap of ration paper folded four times into the corner of his desk.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I don’t know how to stop.

Then he burned it in the signal ashtray and sat in the dark for an hour without moving.

The matchbox stayed in his breast pocket. He hadn’t touched it in days. The thought of striking it, of making flame, felt obscene in a world already burning. Better to leave it whole. Unused. A promise he wasn’t ready to break.

He tapped less now. Not because he didn’t want to. But because he didn’t want to feel the silence back. No reply. No echo. Just the sound of his own pulse in his hands and the terrible stillness of the wire.

Still, sometimes he did it anyway. Short bursts. Fragments. A name. A word.

Once, he tapped out please.

He didn’t even know what he was asking for.

He hadn’t told anyone. Not about the cloth. Not about the night they’d stood forehead to forehead and said everything without breathing a word. Not about the silence he filled with Alastor’s name each time the signal tent emptied. No one would have understood. Not the way he needed them to. And that kind of love – his kind – didn’t belong in the open.

It belonged here. In silence. In code. In static.

He didn’t want a future without him. He knew that now.

And God, that terrified him.

Because the war didn’t care what he wanted. The war didn’t keep promises. The war didn’t understand how one boy could become someone else’s whole life just by standing still long enough to be known.

It had taken nearly everything to let Alastor walk away. Not to cling. Not to beg. But to press their foreheads together and give him the cloth and say I’ll stay without saying it aloud. To let him go like a hand pulled back from flame.

But now? Now the absence was eating him.

He heard a voice raised outside one night and flinched so hard he spilled the inkpot. Saw a runner in the distance who looked too much like him and had to step behind the tent post until his hands stopped shaking.

He was in love with a boy who ran toward bullets for a living.

And every day he didn’t hear from him was one more step closer to never hearing from him again.

Vincent sat at the signal desk with his head down, tapping nothing, listening to the silence.

He whispered his name into it. Just once.

“Alastor.”

No reply.

But still – he stayed. Still he listened. Because if love meant anything at all, it was staying when the silence stretched long and cruel. It was tapping into the dark not for an answer, but for the truth that someone was still reaching.

And Vincent always would.

He would reach until his hands bled. Until the wire snapped. Until the war broke everything but the sound of that name in his chest.

Because that name meant something.

Because Alastor was worth waiting for.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Near the Front – Mid-to-Late July, 1918

The run back nearly tore the breath from his lungs.

Not from distance. Not exactly. He’d taken longer stretches, crossed more dangerous lines. But something in this one hit different. Something in the shape of the trenches – too quiet, too still – like the world was bracing. Like even the dirt knew they were due to lose something soon.

He moved fast. Always did. Mud caking his boots, breath fogging in the warm dusk. The code packet was secure in his breast pocket, stitched shut with twine, radio-slick in its waxed casing. But it wasn’t that weight he felt most. It was the cloth. Still folded. Still stitched. Tucked behind the lapel like a secret vow.

He didn’t take it out. Not on runs. Not with hands this dirty. But he felt it press with every step. Just there. Just enough.

Vincent.

The name sang in him now. Not like music, but like wire. Like tension pulled tight between two points and humming with every shift of air. He thought about him more than he meant to. Not constantly. But often enough to realise that silence didn’t feel like silence anymore unless it was shared. That every time he sat at the edge of the trench, looking out at a world preparing to burn again, it wasn’t death he feared, not really. It was absence.

He’d survived this long by not needing anyone. Not really. Not since Mama.

But Vincent… Vincent stayed. Even when he couldn’t.

That mattered.

It was late when they returned. The run had taken longer than expected – mud in the south line, a collapsed duckboard near sector five. He’d helped pull one of the younger runners free, boots caught fast, body trembling from more than just cold. The boy hadn’t thanked him. Just looked at him like a ghost and muttered something about lucky shadows.

Alastor didn’t mind.

He preferred it that way.

He cleaned his hands slow back at camp. Cloth scrubbed along his knuckles until the worst of the grit peeled away. His boots he left caked. There wasn’t time. The sergeant would call for another run by morning and they’d all go crawling back into the wire like it hadn’t tried to eat them just yesterday.

He sat down anyway. Back to the slope. Ground dry behind him.

And he waited.

He didn’t know why. Not exactly. The signal lines weren’t restored. No clicks. No tap of code from the other trenches. Not here. But something in his bones itched. Something in his chest whispered, Listen.

So he did.

He closed his eyes and let the memory rise – not sound, but shape. The rhythm of a message tapped out by steady hands. The slow, familiar beat of Vincent’s fingers against metal. Not asking for anything. Just... saying. Just being.

Alastor pressed his palm to his coat.

The cloth was warm again.

That was the strangest part. It shouldn’t have been. Not this late. Not with the sun barely hanging. But it was. Like a hand pressed between his ribs. Like an answer he didn’t know he’d been waiting for.

He didn’t smile. But his breath deepened. Softened.

And he let himself remember.

The shape of Vincent’s face in that last light. The way he’d stepped forward, hands careful. The pressure of their foreheads. No words. No lies. Just skin. Just stillness. The part of love no one ever wrote poems about – the part that didn’t need to be pretty.

He didn’t have a word for what they were. Still didn’t. But he knew it better now. Back in New Orleans, in a shadowed room where people touched with reverence but not want, he'd met a few others as uninterested in romance and sex but who were married to others. He hadn’t understood it then. Hadn’t had a name for the way his heart pulled without craving, for how he could want someone without needing to take.

But he understood now.

He didn’t want Vincent’s body. Not like the boys around him wanted. He didn’t want him in lust, or hunger, or even safety.

He wanted his presence. His steadiness. The quiet way he chose things.

He wanted to be chosen back.

And he had been. He knew it.

In every look. Every message. Every time Vincent tapped a name into the dark and never said it aloud.

Alastor.

He reached for the cloth again. Didn’t take it out. Just touched it. Let the seam catch beneath his nail.

They’d only been apart a week, maybe more. But it stretched. Days blurred. The smoke shifted colours, the sky greyed at the edges. He didn’t count by calendar anymore.

He counted by absence.

And it ached.

Some nights, he thought he felt it – three taps, then four. Then silence. Not real, not quite. But real enough for the bones.

One runner, a new one, had asked what the cloth was. Alastor didn’t answer. Just looked at him long enough for the boy to glance away.

He didn’t owe that answer to anyone but one.

Maybe, if the wires were ever restored, if the signal boards ever hummed this far east again, he’d send something. Not code. Not officially. But something.

He didn’t know what yet.

Just… something that said:

I felt it. Whatever you sent. I felt it in the dark. And I kept it close.

He didn’t sleep that night.

Didn’t need to.

He had the cloth. The weight of it. The hum of the air around him.

And for now, that was enough.

Because he knew Vincent was still out there.

Still tapping.

Still waiting.

Still listening.

And so was he.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Late July, 1918

It started with his hands.

Just a tremble, at first. Barely noticeable. He thought it was fatigue - too many late nights bent over the key, too many hours squinting through haze and static, waiting for a code that never came. His fingers fumbled once or twice, missed a dot, slurred a dash. But he caught it. Adjusted. Blamed the cold that hadn’t come, the damp that hadn’t lifted. It was nothing.

He didn’t stop working.

Didn’t sleep, either. Not really. He dozed in bursts between shifts, head pillowed on his arm, static still humming through his jaw. The signal tent smelled like old cloth and scorched wire, and the air buzzed in his ears even when no one was tapping.

Sometimes he tapped out Alastor’s name. Sometimes he just sat there with his hand poised over the key and didn’t move at all.

He was tired. That was all.

That was what he told himself when the chills set in - first in the joints, then in the spine. When his knees started aching in the mornings and he caught himself shivering in his bunk, shirt clinging to the sweat on his back. He curled tighter under the blankets. Worked anyway. Bit the inside of his cheek until the ringing in his ears dulled enough to focus.

No one said anything, not at first. One of the privates asked if he was eating. He lied. Said yes. That he was just run down. Everyone was run down. It was war.

But then the fever started.

Low, constant, like heat bottled under the skin. It made the world tilt slightly when he moved too fast. Made the words on the orders blur when he read too long. His pulse thudded in strange places - wrists, jaw, behind his eyes. He started losing his grip on the rhythm of the days.

Once, he woke at the signal desk. Didn’t remember sitting down. The lamp had gone cold. His fingers were still pressed to the key. Someone must’ve finished his shift for him. He didn’t ask who.

He told himself he’d go see the medic. Tomorrow. After the next shift. After the next message.

But the next day came, and the next, and the sickness didn’t ease. It pressed tighter into his chest now. Made his throat raw. Made his ribs ache when he coughed. It came in waves - sometimes light, sometimes crushing. Always present. Always worse at night.

He didn’t go to the post. Couldn’t.

He tried. Made it halfway there once, coat clutched to his chest, boots too loose, vision flickering. But his legs buckled near the wire pile and he had to crouch there, hunched and shaking, until the worst of it passed. When he returned, he told the others he’d been searching for a misplaced spool. He wasn't sure anyone believed him.

By then the medic had noticed. Dragged him in one morning when his voice cracked trying to answer roll. They took his temperature, listened to his chest, and didn’t bother to hide the frown. One whispered something about the camp down near Épernay – a dozen boys sick in a week. Two already dead. They said if his fever climbed any higher, he’d be moved west to isolation. Said the last one they’d seen like this had started coughing blood by day three and didn’t last the week. No ceremony. No time.

Vincent didn’t answer. Just nodded, tight, and bit down on the inside of his cheek until it bled.

He wasn’t supposed to be sick. He was supposed to be following Alastor. Transferred forward, reassigned to keep the line intact, to trace his steps until they met again. That had been the plan. That had been the only thing he could hold onto in the quiet.

Now? He couldn’t even stand long enough to shave.

He’d tried to make another stitched cloth.

In the days after the worst of the fever, when his hands had stopped shaking long enough to thread a needle, he’d pulled out what little scrap he had left. The stitches weren’t neat this time. His vision blurred too often. The thread tangled. But he’d tried anyway.

Not as a gift. Not really. He hadn’t even been sure who would carry it. Only that if he couldn’t go - if his body gave out before he made it to Alastor - he wanted something to follow instead. Something to say, I was trying. I was still listening.

But the names never made it in full. The thread snapped halfway through the second line. And he hadn’t had the strength to start again.

It still sat at the bottom of his pack now. Folded, unfinished. Not quite anything. But not nothing either.

He stopped tapping. Not because he didn’t want to, but because his hands didn’t always listen. Sometimes they jerked against the desk. Sometimes they shook too much to hit the key clean. When he tried, it came out like noise. Like interference. Like trying to scream through water.

He hated it.

He hated the weakness. The stillness. The helpless ache that came with lying still while Alastor moved forward, further into danger with each passing day. He hated the thought that he might miss him. That by the time he was well enough to follow, Alastor might be gone. Might be past the reach of signal. Past the reach of everything.

He whispered his name anyway. When no one was around. When the tent was dark and the coughing eased long enough for breath.

“Alastor.”

It didn’t fix anything.

But it was something.

That night, when the fever dipped just long enough to let him move, Vincent slipped out of the tent. Just for a moment. Just to breathe. He didn’t make it far. Walked to the edge of camp, sat beside the stacked crates.

He’d kept the matchbox in his pocket all week. Hadn’t touched it since the fever began. Tonight, he struck one - not for ritual. Just to see if the world still caught fire the way it used to.

The flame curled brief and sharp against the night. He lit the cigarette with hands that wouldn’t stop trembling.

He smoked it slow. Alone. Ignoring how it made the coughing worse and made his head pound.

Didn’t say anything. Didn’t tap. Just stared out toward the line Alastor had vanished into and let the smoke curl soft into the air like a prayer with no words.

It was all he had.

And if the war didn’t take him first, he swore, he’d find him again.

He had to.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Near the Front – Late July, 1918

There was smoke in the dirt now. Not just above it - in it. Caked into the grit that clung to his boots and under his nails. It coated the back of his throat like ash and made the trench smell like someone had buried fire beneath the boards.

He’d been running longer routes. Thinner ones. Riskier. The lines kept moving - never enough to matter, just enough to get boys killed. They’d lost three positions in four days, gained one back, and now the maps changed daily. The dirt didn’t care. Neither did the flies. But the dead did. And Alastor had started to recognise the weight of their silence in the soil.

He ran through it anyway. Didn’t ask where. Didn’t flinch when the names got harder to remember. The orders came in fast. Fewer runners meant more weight, and his legs burned with it. His chest did, too. Especially when the gas rolled in low, a pale mist clinging to the dugouts like it didn’t want to leave.

They’d stopped issuing masks for short runs. Said the timing wouldn’t matter. Said if you were caught in the middle, a mask wouldn’t save you. Said it like the air itself had turned against them.

Alastor still carried one, torn at the strap, tucked in his coat beside the cloth. It wouldn’t help. But it was something. Like the wire in his pocket. Like the name he whispered in the dark without meaning to-

Vincent.

He hadn’t come. Not yet. Alastor watched every new arrival like a boy watching the sea, hoping it would spit back the one thing it had stolen. A silhouette in the wrong coat. A voice too high. A flash of hair that didn’t shine the right way. None of them were him.

At night, Alastor crouched at the far edge of the trench and stared at the sky through a sliver of boards. He thought maybe he’d see something. A flare. A runner carrying news. A message in the dirt.

But the sky never gave anything back.

He started carrying the cloth tighter. Not in his lapel now, but right against his chest, wrapped once in linen and pressed under the lining of his coat. It helped. Not enough. But just enough.

Each time he ran, he left a bit more of himself in the mud. He could feel it. In the way his boots hit harder. In the way his throat scraped raw. In the tight wheeze behind his ribs when the shelling started and the smoke sank low over the line.

He was tired. But he didn’t stop.

He couldn’t. Not yet.

Because if Vincent had been sent forward - if he’d come through a different camp, a different rout - then Alastor had to be the one to see him first. Had to be the one to pull him out if the trench collapsed or the gas came too fast. Had to be there. Just in case.

That’s what this was, now. All of it. Just in case.

And every time the horn went, he went with it. Didn’t complain. Didn’t stall. He ran through smoke and mist and gunfire until the blur behind his eyes sharpened into stars. Until he could barely breathe for the effort. Until his legs felt like metal and his hands like smoke. Until he forgot to ask why he was still doing it.

The others thought he was reckless. Some said nothing. Some stared when they thought he couldn’t see. They didn’t understand. They didn’t know that he wasn’t trying to be brave. He wasn’t trying to be remembered.

He was trying to stay close to a promise no one else had seen him make.

By the sixth run that week, his throat was raw from shouting through the smoke. His chest felt like wire pulled too tight. The gas didn’t burn, not yet, but he could feel it settle. Behind the ribs. At the base of his spine. A coil. A warning.

Still, he ran. Still, he checked each trench. Still, he looked at each new face with the same quiet, desperate hope.

Still, no Vincent.

That night, he lit a cigarette with hands that shook more than they should’ve. Sat at the far edge of the post, alone, the trench wall warm behind him from the heat of day. The smoke steadied him. Didn’t taste like anything. Just ash and paper.

He exhaled once, slow. Looked up.

He remembered Vincent’s hands - how they moved when he worked the dial, quick and clean, and how different they were when he passed the chocolate, fingers slow, deliberate, brushing his. They’d trembled a little that night. Alastor hadn’t said anything. Just watched. Just felt the heat of that touch echo longer than it should’ve.

Alastor didn’t believe in prayer. Not really. But he let the smoke rise like one anyway. Let it curl toward the sky and vanish into something bigger. Something that might carry a name without needing to speak it aloud.

He didn’t dream that night. Didn’t sleep, either.

He just sat with the cloth in his coat and waited.

Waited for the horn.

Waited for the next run.

Waited for the face he hadn’t seen in weeks but still knew better than his own reflection.

He would keep running until then.

Because if Vincent was out there, running or silent or buried beneath the weight of orders-

Then Alastor had to be the one to find him, before the war did.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Western Front – Early August, 1918

He was back on his feet by the second of the month.

Not fully, not really, but upright. Breathing without burning. Able to walk the length of the tent without needing to brace himself. The fever had broken days earlier, but it had taken the better part of a week for his legs to stop shaking when he stood too fast.

The medics called it luck. Or resilience. Or youth. Vincent didn’t care what they called it, so long as they cleared him to return.

He didn’t ask about transfer. Not straight away. He waited until the shakes stopped and his fingers could hit the key cleanly again. Until the dark didn’t lurch when he leaned over the transmitter. Until his voice didn’t crack when he said his name during roll.

Then he asked.

The lieutenant narrowed his eyes, muttered something about protocol and rotation, and said he’d see what could be done.

Vincent knew better than to wait by the tent flap. So he worked. Slowly, at first. Then faster. Longer shifts. Double watches. Paperwork he wasn’t assigned. Anything to stay moving.

Because it had been nearly a month now.

Twenty-nine days, to be exact, since the last time he’d touched Alastor’s face.

He counted them. Silently. Like code. Like prayer.

Twenty-nine days since the horn. Since the cloth passed from one palm to the other and was pressed to a chest Vincent could no longer reach.

Twenty-nine days since he’d let himself be still.

He didn’t know where Alastor was. Not precisely. The lines had shifted again. More movement in the east. The runners had changed hands at least twice. The last message he’d received from that sector was three days late and half-burned at the edges.

Still, he looked. Every dispatch. Every hint of movement. Every passing name on a logsheet. He scanned them with the quiet hunger of someone trying to find a ghost that hadn’t died yet.

He wasn’t eating properly. Not because he didn’t want to. But because food had started to taste like paper. Like ink and dirt. His body was hungry, but his mouth didn’t believe it.

Instead, he sat at the edge of the tent each night, smoking slowly, letting the air bite his skin clean of fever. He didn’t tap out Alastor’s name as often anymore. Not because it didn’t ache. But because there was no answer. And the silence felt heavier with each repetition.

He still whispered it, though.

Sometimes in his bunk.

Sometimes over his cigarette.

Sometimes just in the back of his throat, like a song without sound.

Alastor.

Once more he'd become a rhythm more than a person. A pulse. A shape the world had left behind for Vincent to follow, one whisper at a time.

And now he was going to follow it.

He didn’t wait for orders. Not properly. He waited for the rotation list to be posted. Waited for the first morning his name wasn’t on the shift board. Then he gathered his coat, his pack, and the incomplete signal form he’d forged to include his own reassignment.

He wasn’t good at lying but he was good at writing things that looked like truth.

Vincent passed through the first checkpoint by noon.

No one stopped him.

And by dusk, he was already a mile east.

The march was slow. He didn’t hitch a ride, didn’t ask to. The trucks weren’t reliable anyway, and the walking helped. It grounded him. Reminded him that his body still worked. That he was capable of movement, even now.

He spent the second night in a half-destroyed outpost, curled under the remnants of a tarp with his coat wrapped around his knees. The stars above were thin and weak, but they reminded him of Alastor’s eyes – wide and waiting, even when the dark tried to swallow them.

He didn’t sleep.

But he didn’t break, either.

By the third day, his boots had split at the heel. He borrowed twine from a chaplain in the next post and wrapped them twice. The man asked if he was heading toward the new signal line. Vincent nodded. Didn’t say why.

He reached the frontlines by the end of the week.

The trenches were worse here. Narrower. Rotten in places. The smell hit before the rest – damp, ash, copper. And something else. Something he didn’t want to name.

He asked after the runners. Kept his voice low. His questions smaller.

Tall. Quiet. Southern. Might’ve smiled too much.

No one had seen him, or if they had, they didn’t say.

Still, Vincent kept walking.

Kept scanning the faces, the shoulders, the lines around the eyes.

One boy offered him bread. Another pointed him toward the eastern line, said a few of the runners had gone that way two nights back. Said the smoke was worse over there.

Vincent nodded and went.

He didn’t find Alastor that day. Or the next. But he walked through every trench. Every sector.

He tapped the name once – faint, beneath his breath, fingers brushing the edge of a transmitter that hadn’t worked since May.

He felt it more than he heard it.

The rhythm in his ribs, the ache in his hands.

Vincent would find him.

He had to.

Because nothing else mattered anymore.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Early August, 1918

He didn’t know what day it was anymore. The date slipped sometime between the fourth message run and the shell that took out the northern duckboards. The sun still rose, still set, but it did so behind curtains of smoke and sky too grey to tell one hour from the next.

Everything blurred. The days, the faces, the dirt. What he remembered now were pieces – the shape of a runner collapsed against a sandbag wall, boots sticking out where they shouldn’t have been. The way a sergeant shouted something urgent, voice cracking on a name Alastor had only just learned. The ache in his legs after a run that didn’t end where it should’ve, and the sick pull in his gut when the last trench he reached wasn’t there anymore.

He hadn’t spoken much in the last few days. The other runners were all new. Young. Wide-eyed and hollow-chested, looking at him like he was part ghost, part rumour. They didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer answers.

The only thing he carried now that felt real was the cloth. Still folded. Still tucked against his chest.

He didn’t take it out. Didn’t need to. Just knowing it was there was enough. Just touching the edge of it with his thumb when the gas got too close or the shrapnel landed too near. Just enough.

Alastor didn’t dream anymore, not properly. Sleep came in bursts. Collapsed hours on the floor of the dugout. Sometimes upright. Sometimes not at all. But in the few seconds before sleep – that strange, weightless drop – he saw a hand. Not reaching. Just offered. Still.

And sometimes he could feel it. A warm hand. The press of a forehead. Quiet breath. A name tapped into the dark.

Vincent.

He hadn’t stopped watching. Every new arrival. Every soldier moved up from the rear. He searched their eyes for something familiar, listened for a voice that matched the hum in his head. Nothing.

A few boys knew the name. Some shrugged. One said he thought there’d been a signal lad like that sent forward – sick as a dog, barely standing. Transferred through camp after camp. Kept trying to work. One corporal claimed he’d seen him near the wire stacks down at Mercel trench, but couldn’t be sure. “Too thin,” he said. “Looked half-dead. Might’ve been someone else.”

It was enough.

Alastor started leaving notes. Not official ones. Just markings. A signal scratched into the wall of a dugout, carved under a plank behind the mess kit crates. A rhythm tapped into the underside of a ration tin, hidden near the northern post. Things only someone like him would see. Someone like Vincent.

He didn’t know if they’d be found but he had to try.

The last message run had taken him through an abandoned line. Half-swallowed by collapse. The map had said to reroute – unstable, unsafe – but the lieutenant had pressed the packet into his hand anyway and told him to “figure it out.”

He did. He always did. But this time he’d barely made it through. His boots slipped on the broken timber, his leg caught on a nail that hadn’t belonged to anything. Blood soaked into his sock, not deep, but sharp. He didn’t slow. Just pressed forward.

Because something in him was starting to fray.

Not in the way he’d expected. Not the breakdown kind. Not the kind that made you cry in the mud or scream during bombardment.

Just hollowing. Quietly.

He missed Vincent.

God, he missed him.

Not just his voice or his hands.

He missed being seen. Missed knowing someone was out there thinking of him too. Missing him back.

He told himself Vincent was still there. That he was moving through the lines. That the war hadn’t taken him. That he hadn’t vanished into one of the medical stations and been buried under a name someone spelled wrong. But some nights, that lie got harder to hold.

So he started asking the wind.

Not aloud. Just in thought. Just in the way his eyes moved through the trenches. Are you out there? Are you close? Are you coming?

And then, one night, something shifted.

He’d finished a run late – later than he should’ve. The trench near B-line was waterlogged, and the return route had to be doubled back. He reached the post soaked, coughing, aching behind the ribs like he’d run through fire. The others were asleep or too far gone to notice.

He stood there, back to the wall, arms limp at his sides. The trench was mostly empty – only the wind at his collar and the hush of boots scuffing elsewhere, far off. His breath had started to slow. His hands hung open.

And then-

A hum.

Not in the wires. Not in the trench. Not in sound.

In him.

A thrum through the chest like static memory, like a signal caught somewhere in the ribs, deep enough that it couldn’t be traced to ears or sky or earth. Just… there. Like the echo of a message sent hours ago, still rattling in the bones, still waiting to be answered.

He looked up. Slowly.

The trench line curved ahead in quiet shadow, boards slick with the night’s breath. A lantern burned low near the junction, casting its gold spill over the duckboards in flickers.

And there – just beyond the light, half-silhouetted by smoke and mist and months of absence – was a figure.

Too tall, too thin. Moving carefully, like his body was remembering how to walk again.

Alastor’s lungs refused to work. His ribs held still. He didn’t blink.

Not even when the figure stopped at the bend, turned slightly, and braced a hand against the beam as though the weight of breath alone might fold him. There was something in the motion – a rhythm, a shape – that made Alastor’s whole body go still.

His mind didn’t catch up.

He just started moving forward. Quiet. Not because he meant to be, but because he couldn’t bear to break the air.

Boots soft. Steps careful.

If it wasn’t him-

If it was a ghost made from fever or grief or hope grown too loud-

The ache might break him.

But if it was-

If it was-

He moved closer. Closer. Past the crates stacked with wire. Past the half-rotted ladder that no one climbed anymore. The light swelled as he neared, catching on a sliver of cheekbone, the slope of a jaw that hadn’t forgotten how to set firm against silence.

Hair fell over the boy’s brow, longer than it should’ve been. Damp at the edges. Collar too loose. One hand still braced against the wall like it was holding up the sky.

Alastor didn’t call out.

Because then he turned.

Slow. Careful. Like he’d heard something. Like something inside him had said, look.

And their eyes met.

Not across a trench, nor across a battlefield, but across a silence that had lasted weeks. A silence that had worn them both thin and trembling and waiting.

Alastor felt it – felt the wire snap taut and hum again, felt the air around them sharpen like light through glass. Felt the part of him that had gone hollow begin to fill again, breath by breath.

It was him.

It was Vincent.

Alive.

Breathing.

There.

For one moment, the world didn’t move.

Not the smoke.

Not the sky.

Not even the weight inside his chest.

Vincent’s lips parted like he’d meant to speak, but no sound came, and Alastor was already moving again.

Not a run, not quite.

But faster. Closer. No hesitation now.

And then-

He stumbled to a stop in front of him.

Close enough to see the shadows clinging to Vincent’s eyes. The way his shoulders hunched slightly, like he hadn’t quite remembered how to be upright. The way his breath shook just a little at the edges.

But he was standing, he was here.

Alastor didn’t think, just stepped forward. He reached out with one hand – slow, deliberate – and cupped the side of Vincent’s face.

The warmth of him was real. Solid. Not a dream. And Vincent leaned in, eyes fluttering shut like breath finally let go.

Their foreheads touched. Pressed together. And it was like something fell back into place.

Not loudly. Not with fanfare.

Just… completely.

Vincent’s hands found his sides, trembling still, and pulled him in – gentle, desperate. And Alastor stepped into the space like it had always been waiting. Like they’d never stopped.

His arms wrapped around him, one behind the neck, the other across the back. And Vincent folded into him.

They didn’t say a word.

Didn’t have to.

Because this was the message.

The wire.

The signal.

This was what they had always been reaching toward.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Early August, 1918

He didn’t know how long they stood like that.

Long enough for the lantern flame to falter, recover, and falter again. Long enough that his legs started to tremble, not from illness, not from fear, but from the ache of stillness after too much motion.

But he didn’t move.

Not while Alastor’s hands stayed firm against his back. Not while the press of his forehead held steady, warm against his own. Not while breath passed between them in quiet, shared rhythm.

He let himself feel it, just for a moment. The weight of another body. The safety of it. The steady hum where Alastor’s pulse echoed through his chest like a faraway signal he’d finally reached. He hadn’t realised how badly he needed that sound until now. How much he’d come to crave it - somewhere beneath the fever, beneath the hunger, beneath the empty nights spent tapping out a name into silence.

Alastor’s thumb moved, barely, along the curve of his jaw. A small thing. A confirmation. Still here. Still real.

“You…” Vincent swallowed. His voice didn’t quite work. Tried again. “I thought-”

Alastor didn’t let him finish. Not with a word, but with a soundless exhale and a nearer press, like if he held Vincent tighter he could erase the ache of those missing weeks. Or maybe just the memory of them.

Vincent’s fingers curled into the back of Alastor’s coat. Not gripping. Just grounding. The fabric was damp, worn thin in places, haphazardly stitched up in places. It didn’t matter. He was warm beneath it.

Eventually, their bodies shifted. Not apart. Just enough to breathe properly. Enough that Vincent could tilt his head and look at him.

And for a moment, he couldn’t. Not really. His breath caught halfway. Because Alastor... He looked wrong. And right. And something else entirely.

His face was even thinner, angles made sharper by months of rationed meals and sleepless nights. A shallow cut ran from the corner of his temple down to the edge of his cheekbone, half-healed and pink in the low light. Mud clung stubbornly to the edges of his jaw, dried in lines where sweat had run through it. There was a split at his lip, and one brow had been nicked clean through by something that hadn’t missed by much.

But it wasn’t just the injuries. It was the wear. The war. The hollowing around his eyes, where something once quick and glinting now sat low and dim. His coat hung looser than it should. His curls had lost their shape, dark and matted where they stuck to his skin. Even the way he held himself was different - tighter through the shoulders, like the air was always a little too close.

And still, despite all of it, despite the grime and blood and weeks carved into every line of him, he was beautiful.

Beautiful in the way ruined things sometimes were. Earned. Real.

Vincent swallowed once, throat working around a knot that hadn’t been there before. His voice was quieter this time, barely a whisper.

“You look like hell.”

It wasn’t cruel. It was reverent. Disbelieving. Half-a-laugh curled behind his breath.

Alastor’s lips quirked at the corner. The smallest thing. Not a smile, not properly. Just the memory of one.

“Well, you always were a bit fond of monsters.”

It made something catch in Vincent’s throat. Not a laugh. Not a sob. Just breath, jagged at the edge. He didn’t smile. Not properly. But he let out a sound that almost became one.

He sank down first, knees giving out with a soft thud against the duckboards. Alastor followed, lowering beside him without question. They ended up shoulder to shoulder, backs against the mud-plastered wall, arms just barely brushing in the dark.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Vincent reached into his coat. Pulled free a small, battered tin. Opened it. Half a biscuit. Stale, crumbling at the edges. He held it out wordlessly.

Alastor took it. Broke it in half. Gave the larger piece back.

They ate in silence.

And in that silence, something held. Something that hadn’t before.

Not just presence. Not just survival. But something. Like the echo of a message repeated too often - until it wasn’t an echo at all. Until it was a truth, spoken plain.

He didn’t need to tap it out.

Didn’t need to whisper it anymore.

Because it was here. Close enough to touch. Close enough to hold. Vincent glanced sideways. Alastor was watching him - not with a smile, not with a joke, but with eyes so steady they hurt to look at.

“I’m not going back,” Vincent said quietly. No preamble. No explanation.

Alastor didn’t answer right away. His gaze lingered on Vincent’s face, like he could read the bruised hollows beneath his eyes, the sick-worn pallor still clinging faintly to his skin. Then, without a word, he reached out - slow, deliberate - and adjusted the edge of Vincent’s collar where the fabric had turned up. His fingers brushed against bare skin, lingered longer than necessary, as if grounding himself in proof. Warmth. Flesh. Real.

“I know,” he said. But his voice had changed, low and tight, like it caught on something he couldn’t name.

Vincent looked down. His fingers curled into the edge of his coat. “They would’ve kept me at camp,” he said, voice low. “I asked for transfer, but they never gave me an answer. So I didn’t wait for one. I just-”

He paused. Shook his head slightly. “I walked.”

That made Alastor shift. Slightly. Sharply. Not away, but closer. His hand dropped to Vincent’s knee, grounding him. Holding him still like the truth might unseat them both.

“Three posts,” Vincent continued, a little hoarse now. “Six trenches. I thought maybe if I got far enough, someone would point me the right way. I didn’t even know if-” He faltered. “But I had to try.”

He glanced up, and for a second his expression cracked, just a flicker, just enough. “I thought I might’ve been too late.”

Alastor’s hand tightened. Just briefly. And then he moved, closer still, until he was kneeling in front of him, mud and all, the lantern glow catching in his hair. He brought both hands up to Vincent’s face this time. Cradled it. Like he might still vanish if he didn’t hold steady.

“You weren't,” he said. Quiet. Firm. Unshakable. “You found me.”

Vincent made a sound - low, broken at the edge - and leaned forward until their foreheads met again. He didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Just moved like his body knew something he didn’t.

Alastor didn’t pull away. His hands only pressed in closer, palms warm against Vincent’s cheeks, thumbs brushing over bone like they were trying to map something back into place. Something lost. Something important.

“You idiot,” Alastor whispered, and the words brushed across Vincent’s skin like breath warmed at the edges. Not cruel. Not angry. Just soft. Raw. Real. “You wonderful, stupid, ridiculous boy.”

Then he leaned in, slowly and without ceremony, and kissed him.

Not a fleeting press to the temple or a reverent brush of lips to brow, but a kiss. A real one. Mouth to mouth, hesitant and deliberate. It didn’t carry heat or hunger. It wasn’t about that.

It was about knowing.

A touch born from everything unsaid and everything understood. It was the way Alastor held his breath just before their mouths met, like the moment was something fragile. The way his lips trembled slightly, unsure, like this - this closeness - was a language he was only just beginning to learn. And Vincent didn’t move at first. Didn’t dare. His whole body went still under the weight of it, caught in the soft shock of finally being chosen.

Then he leaned in - just a breath’s worth, just enough to say yes.

It wasn’t deep. There was no urgency. Only the press of shared breath and the echo of weeks spent reaching across silence. The kind of kiss that stitched instead of sparked. That stayed. That said, I heard you. I’m here.

And when it ended, they stayed there, foreheads brushing, breath mingling in the space between their mouths.

Vincent felt it everywhere. Not in his gut. Not in his lungs.

But in that strange, hollow place behind his ribs where he’d been hurting for weeks. The place that had gone still when Alastor vanished. The place that had braced for silence and found signal instead.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. The kiss had said enough.

So he breathed - quiet and uneven - and let it happen.

Let Alastor come back.

Let him stay.

Then Alastor shifted beside him, slow and sure, lowering himself down onto the duckboards until they lay side by side again, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. Not tangled. Not clinging.

Just there.

Just them.

Vincent turned his face slightly - just enough to feel the shape of Alastor’s shoulder against his cheek - and closed his eyes.

Everything still hurt. But not in the same way.

“So what now?” he asked after a moment, softer. “You can’t exactly rejoin a unit you abandoned. They'll send you back if they find out you forged orders.”

Vincent exhaled. “Then they don’t find out.”

“You planning to live under floorboards until the war ends?”

“No.” Vincent tilted his head back with a sigh. “I’m planning to stay useful. Same way I’ve always been.”

Alastor turned slightly, watched him again, really watched him. “That so?”

“If I can find a signal line to join, I will. If not… then I run. Like you do. I carry messages. I fix wires. I do what I have to.” A pause. “I’m not leaving again.”

There was no hesitation this time. Alastor reached for him. Pulled him in. Arms wrapped around shoulders and spine and everything in between. No caution. No apology. Just him.

“Vincent,” Alastor murmured, lips near his temple.

Vincent melted into the embrace. Let his cheek rest against Alastor’s shoulder. Let his arms wrap back around and hold. He didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.

Outside, the war still raged. The sky still burned.

But here. inside this hush, this hold, this borrowed moment, he was found.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Frontlines – August, 1918

Vincent was here and Alastor couldn't let go of him. Not when his own body had gone so still it barely felt like breathing. Not when everything sharp inside him had gone quiet under the press of a trembling chest against his own. Vincent was here. Warm. Anchored. Real. And for one impossible moment, the war didn’t matter. Nothing did but this-

Breath. Weight. Contact.

They shifted only when their bodies demanded it, when knees ached, when lungs reminded them they still needed air. They didn’t move apart. Just enough to lean against the trench wall together. Just enough for Vincent to tilt his head up and look at him properly for the first time in weeks.

He stared. Just stared. Then: “You look like hell.”

It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t even surprised. It was quiet. Half-laughing. Like Vincent had been expecting something worse and couldn’t believe what he’d actually found.

Alastor let his mouth curl into the smallest shape of something familiar. “You always were a bit fond of monsters.”

And that, somehow, landed. Something in Vincent’s throat hitched. He didn’t smile, not really, but the breath he let out sounded close to one.

They sank to the ground, slow and quiet, the way you lower a candle to shelter it from wind. Shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, not needing to speak just yet. The silence between them was too full for words. So Alastor listened instead. To the scrape of boots on duckboards. To the faint tremble in Vincent’s hands. To the sound of something - not relief, exactly, but something close - beginning to settle behind his ribs.

Vincent reached into his coat and offered half a ration. It was crumbling, stale at the edges. Alastor took it anyway, broke it in two, and gave back the larger half.

They ate in silence.

Alastor didn’t ask what had happened yet. Didn’t want to break the moment by chasing its cost.

Instead, he turned his head slightly. Watched the outline of Vincent’s face in the dim lantern spill. Took in the too-thin cheeks, the shadowed hollows under his eyes, the faint twitch in his fingers even now.

He wanted to say, I missed you. Wanted to say, You look awful and I’m so glad you're here. Wanted to lean in and bury his face against his shoulder and not let go for hours.

But instead, he reached for him again. Adjusted the collar at his throat where it had twisted loose. His fingers brushed bare skin, lingered for a second longer than they should have.

And then Vincent spoke.

“I’m not going back.”

Alastor didn’t respond straight away. He couldn’t, not with everything moving suddenly too fast beneath his ribs. But his hands kept steady. His voice, when it came, was quiet. “I know.”

“They would’ve kept me at camp,” Vincent said, voice low and even. “I asked for transfer, but they never gave me an answer. If I waited, I’d miss you again.”

Alastor looked at him - really looked. And now that the flood of relief had eased, the details started to register.

The state of his boots - mud-caked, cracked at the sole, bound with twine that frayed near the toes. One sleeve of his coat had been stitched through with what looked like signal thread, and the collar sagged half-detached. His shoulders twitched every time he shifted, like the movement hurt but he was trying not to show it. And when he breathed, it caught, enough to remember he hadn’t come through this clean.

Alastor felt something coil sharp behind his ribs. Not anger. Not yet. But something close.

He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. His hand still hovered just beneath Vincent’s scarf, fingers brushing wool turned sodden and cold. Unnaturally cold. Alastor hadn’t noticed it until now.

“So I didn’t wait for one,” Vincent said, as if it were nothing. As if it were logical. “I just… walked.”

Alastor’s stomach dropped, a hollow plunge that felt like falling through ice.

He didn’t let it show. His expression didn’t flicker. But somewhere deep in his chest, something snapped taut and vibrating - like wire strung between his ribs had been tripped and pulled. Danger. Idiocy. Love. Vincent didn’t notice. He kept talking, that same maddening calm in his voice he always used when he’d done something reckless and couldn’t quite grasp the scale of it.

“Three posts. Six trenches. I thought someone might point me the right way. I didn’t even know if-”

He faltered. Swallowed. “But I had to try.”

It hit Alastor then - what Vincent had actually done. Alone. Unarmed. On foot. Through No Man’s Land and God knew how many active lines. Mines. Shells. Patrols. Gas. A wrong step. A wrong uniform. A man like Vincent, recognisable in seconds, visible for miles.

He could’ve died.

And no one would have known.

That was when Alastor moved. No dramatics. Just a silent drop to the duckboards, one knee in the mud, both hands rising to Vincent’s face.

He held him.

Not roughly. Not gently either. Just entirely. Fingers firm on wind-chilled skin, like if he didn’t anchor him now, the images would overwhelm: boots torn open by wire, lungs filling with smoke, a rifle lifted too fast in the dark.

“You weren’t too late,” Alastor said. His voice didn’t crack, though something in him did. “You found me.”

Vincent made a sound - soft, almost a breath, cracking at the edge - and leaned forward until their foreheads touched, a point of contact so slight it felt like it might disappear if either of them exhaled too hard.

Alastor stayed still. Didn’t breathe at first.

Then he whispered, “You idiot. You wonderful, stupid, ridiculous boy.”

It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t gratitude. It was awe. It was terror. It was love sharpened by the knowledge that this boy - this infuriating, impossible boy - had risked everything to find him.

And might do it again.

Alastor didn’t think. Couldn’t. Not with the feeling clawing up his throat like static, not with that impossible boy holding still in front of him as if he were something worth finding.

He leaned in.

Not far. Not fast. Just enough.

Their lips met in a quiet, unfamiliar press. No movement. But contact. A confirmation. The soft, awkward weight of someone who didn’t know how to want like this but did - fiercely, wholly, in his own way.

He let it rest there. Just long enough to feel Vincent’s breath against his cheek. Just long enough to know.

Then he pulled back. Let their foreheads touch again, gentler this time. Grounding.

And then, finally, he lowered himself beside him again, slow and certain, until they lay shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh.

No rush. No noise.

Just warmth. Just gravity.

Just the hush of something tethered, held, and kept. him.

Then he lowered himself beside him again. Shoulder to shoulder. Knee to knee. He could feel the tension still in Vincent’s limbs, the way he sagged into the contact like it was the only thing holding him up.

“So what now?” he asked, after a silence stretched too long. His voice was steady. His hands were not.

“Then they don’t find out.”

Alastor blinked. “You planning to live under floorboards until the war ends?”

“No.” Vincent tilted his head back, his voice soft. “I’m planning to stay useful. Same way I’ve always been.”

Alastor narrowed his gaze slightly, but didn’t interrupt. Vincent glanced at him, then continued, voice soft but certain.

“If I can find a signal line to rejoin, I will. I can still work. I’ve done it before. And if not-” he shrugged one shoulder, “then I run.”

Alastor went still.

“Like you do,” Vincent added, like that explained everything. "I carry messages. I fix wires. I do what I have to.”

Alastor stared at him. Really stared. And for a moment, the trench around them blurred - lantern smoke, dirt, the smell of gunpowder and rotting rope - and all he could see was this boy. The way he said it. Like it was obvious. Like it was safe.

Runner.

Vincent was talking about being a runner.

Alastor had known boys who volunteered for it. Eager, usually. Or desperate. They never lasted. It wasn’t a matter of luck. It was the role. The risk. There was no cover. No mercy. You were either fast or dead. Invisible or gone.

And now Vincent - his Vincent - was sitting here, bones still shaking from fever, talking like he could just slot himself into the most dangerous job on the line and survive it on determination alone.

He wanted to shout. To curse. To demand how he could say that so calmly.

But Vincent beat him to it.

“I’m not leaving again.”

Alastor reached for him. Not slowly this time. Pulled him in with both arms, wrapped around spine and shoulders and the space just beneath the ribs, like maybe if he held him hard enough it would root him here. Vincent folded instantly, without hesitation, arms slipping around his waist like they belonged there.

“Vincent,” Alastor murmured into his temple, his mind racing.

He didn’t follow it with anything. Couldn’t. Every word that rose behind his teeth felt too big or too small. He didn’t want to scold him, not now. Didn’t want to call him reckless, even though he was. Didn’t want to tell him how close he’d come to losing this, to losing him.

So he just held on. Let his hands move slowly across Vincent’s back, fingertips brushing fabric stiff with travel and sweat and old smoke. He could feel the tremble still in his arms. Faint, but there. His breath hadn’t fully steadied either. It hitched now and then like his lungs were still trying to remember they could be used for more than just running.

“You should rest,” Alastor said softly, after a while. “You’re still half-dead on your feet.”

Vincent didn’t answer straight away. He just tightened his grip slightly, fingers fisting in the back of Alastor’s coat like he was afraid it might be gone if he let go. Then, finally, he nodded.

They stumbled toward a deeper but abandoned trench together, slow and clumsy. Alastor pulled off his outer coat and laid it over the duckboards to soften the ground. Sat down with his back to the trench wall and coaxed Vincent down beside him - not flat, but curled up into the line of his body, head tucked just beneath Alastor’s chin. One arm draped over his waist. One hand curled loosely near his chest.

It wasn’t warm. Not really. But it was better than the wind. And it was quiet. Not silent, but quiet enough to pass for peace.

Alastor stared out into the dark while Vincent’s breathing slowed. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t plan to. He just watched the edge of the trench for movement, listened for steps that didn’t belong, eyes never straying far from the path that had delivered Vincent back to him.

He still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do now. How to keep him safe. How to make sure this didn’t happen again. There were no clear paths here. No orders. No rules. Just a boy who had walked through fire for him and now lay sleeping in his arms like the war had never touched him at all.

Alastor pressed his lips to the top of his head once. Just once.

And he whispered, so quietly even the trench didn’t hear:

“I’ll keep you alive.”

Even if it meant burning the whole line behind them.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Mid-August, 1918

A week passed, but the shape of that night hadn’t left him.

Not the way Alastor looked at him. Not the way the silence held after. He’d stopped counting silence by taps and started counting time by the sound of Alastor’s boots ahead of him.

The rhythm was different now. Not cleaner. Not easier. But steadier. Vincent didn’t mark the days by meals anymore, he barely tasted food when they had it. Didn’t track them by sleep, either, sleep came when it could, and even then it was thin. But Alastor? Alastor was measurable. Alastor was a constant. The sound of him shifting just before dawn. The way he paced when he was thinking, five and a half steps and turn. The way he muttered numbers under his breath sometimes, when checking the slip against a changing route.

They hadn’t stayed in one place long enough to memorise it. Each dawn brought new orders - sometimes scribbled, sometimes shouted, always rushed. Positions changed. Maps blurred. No one seemed entirely sure where the line even was anymore. They moved constantly. Dug in by evening, gone by morning. Sometimes less.

And somehow, Vincent kept up.

He wasn’t official. No uniform reassignment, no proper clearance. But no one stopped him, either. Alastor walked like he belonged everywhere, and Vincent stayed just a half-step behind. He carried what needed carrying. Ran when there was running to be done. Kept his eyes open and his questions small. Most of the soldiers were too tired to care. A few gave him curious looks. None asked who he was. None told him to go.

He learnt fast. Learnt that if you kept a folded slip in your hand, most wouldn’t question what it said. That if you looked like you had somewhere to be, and looked too dirty and too tired for someone to want to deal with, you could move freely. He still listened for sound the way he used to in the tent - ears tuned to the rhythm of boots over duckboards, the snap of breath in a too-quiet space. Sometimes, it helped him guess which paths were safest. Sometimes, it just reminded him he used to speak in code.

He shared rations with Alastor. Shared blankets, too, when they had them. More often they didn’t. They made do. Back to back in shallow dugouts, shoulder to shoulder under collapsed tarps, sometimes pressed so close against the trench wall that Vincent could feel the slow lift of Alastor’s breath behind him as he drifted toward sleep.

They didn’t talk much. Not because they didn’t want to. Just because there wasn’t time. But it didn’t matter. A glance often did the work of a sentence. A touch, a shift of weight, a brief meeting of eyes across a bombed-out path. They had become a kind of unit. Not in title. Not in rank. Just… in function.

Vincent had learned the rhythm of it quickly. How to time a run between mortar fire. How to spot the patches of earth that looked too solid, too clean. How to breathe through the smell of corpses in summer heat. How to carry without cradling. How to step over bodies without looking like he noticed them at all.

His body was still catching up. Still too thin, still sore around the joints. But he moved faster now. Thought faster. Hurt, sometimes, but didn’t break.

He was good at it. That surprised him. Not the endurance, he’d always been stubborn, but the way it felt. Not good, not noble, but right. Like motion itself was a kind of language. Like all that time spent tapping names into silence had taught his feet how to find their way forward.

He watched Alastor closely. Not just to follow. To learn. To understand.

Alastor had changed, too. Not softened, he never would, but he didn’t hide his gaze now when Vincent looked back. Didn’t pull away when they touched, even in passing. He still didn’t speak much, but when he did, it landed low and deliberate, often at night, often when Vincent was on the edge of sleep.

“That was smart, earlier.”

“You didn’t get hit. Good.”

“You take the east side next time. I’ll take the harder way.”

They hadn’t held hands again. Not properly. But one night, when the shelling started too close and everything turned to smoke and shouting, Vincent stumbled. Alastor caught him - quick, firm - one hand around his arm, steadying. He held on a second longer than necessary. Just long enough to make sure Vincent was really there, upright, alive.

Even now, Vincent could still feel the ghost of that grip - firm and certain, right where the bruise had bloomed later. A shadow-touch. A reminder. Like his body hadn’t forgotten being steadied, even if his breath had.

His hand was warm, even through the grime. Solid. Sure. Then he let go, already moving, already vanishing into the forward dark like nothing had happened.

But Vincent felt it. Not as a question. Not as confusion.

He loved him. Fully. Quietly. In the marrow-deep way that didn’t require permission or reply.

So when he lay down that night - wet and exhausted, breath fogging against Alastor’s collarbone - he didn’t wonder what it meant. He just let himself feel it. The steady press of their shoulders. The rise and fall of Alastor’s breathing. The presence of him, not leaving.

That was enough.

There were other things. Smaller things. The kind that built slowly, that filled the spaces war left behind.

Alastor always passed Vincent the last sip of his canteen when it ran low. Vincent never let Alastor lie down with a soaked coat, he turned it dry-side out without ever saying a word. Once, while they waited for new orders, Vincent stitched a tear in Alastor’s cuff with thread from his own kit. Alastor never mentioned it. But he wore the coat every day after that, the cuff folded just so.

They didn’t talk about any of it. They didn’t need to. It was just what you did, when someone was yours.

He hadn’t struck a match in days. Not since they started moving daily. But he still kept the box close, tucked near the same ribs the cloth used to guard. Sometimes, when Alastor slept, Vincent would press his thumb against the edge of it, just to remember he could still make sparks if he needed to.

Vincent didn’t think about the end of it. He knew better than to imagine where this was going. He didn’t ask Alastor about the next month, or what came after. He just stayed close. Let the days pass. Let the war move around them while they ran through it together.

He didn’t know how long this would last. The front was changing shape again. The skies stayed louder for longer. Men they’d passed yesterday didn’t show up today. Routes they’d run three times were now charred into the earth.

It couldn’t stay like this. Nothing ever did.

But for now - for this week, for these days - Vincent had Alastor. Not in the abstract. Not in the distant way he had before, when names were something you tapped out in darkness.

He had him here. Breath and blood and voice. Presence. Pattern. Partnership.

And for the first time since the start of the war, he didn’t feel like he was trying to survive alone.

He didn’t say it. Didn’t dare. He used to think survival was the point. The goal. The victory.

Now, he couldn’t picture surviving if Alastor wasn’t there to survive with him. The thought of making it alone didn’t feel like living at all. Each time he reached for Alastor in the dark, or let his shoulder brush his side while passing messages down the line, or sat beside him while eating half-rations with fingers still blackened from smoke - he knew it was true.

He didn’t just want to stay alive anymore.

He wanted this.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Mid-August, 1918

By now, no one questioned the boy following him.

They barely registered him. Another figure in the mud, another pair of boots on the boards. The war moved too quickly for introductions. Men arrived, vanished, bled into the soil or walked out without warning. As long as a body was moving in the right direction with a satchel in hand and a certain look in their eye, no one cared where they’d come from. No one dared ask, either. Questions slowed things down. Slowing things down got you noticed. Getting noticed got you killed.

Alastor made sure of that.

He never said Vincent’s name aloud. Never claimed him. Never made a scene. But he did things. Quiet things. Shifted a crate here. Redirected a message there. Swapped a page on a half-read log, slipped one order sheet into another pile and watched as the wrong name disappeared from the roster entirely. One less question. One less trace.

He didn’t ask permission. He didn’t need to. There were too many officers, too many field promotions and rapid deaths and men being moved without warning. The trenchline changed like tidewater now, fast and disorienting. He just smiled. Suggested. Said things like “I’ll take it from here,” or “He’s already been cleared,” or, when necessary, said nothing at all and simply looked until the man in front of him faltered and turned away.

And Vincent stayed close.

Alastor hadn’t expected how much it would matter. Not just tactically. Not just for survival. But bodily. Viscerally. The knowledge of him just behind. The weight of a second pair of footsteps in the mud. The way his breath sounded in the half-dark when they pressed in under cover, close enough to feel it ghost against the side of Alastor’s neck.

He didn’t know what to do with that. That feeling. It lived under his ribs like something born there. A thrum. A quiet, constant pull. A need to keep him close. To hear him. To see the way he moved with more precision now, more confidence. The way he adapted. The way he listened to advice, and then did better the next time, without needing to be told twice.

He’d never had a partner before. Not a proper one. He’d always run alone - too fast, too strange, too sharp at the edges to match pace with anyone else. Most runners didn’t last long anyway. Even if he’d wanted someone at his side, it would’ve meant learning to grieve faster. But Vincent didn’t try to keep up. He just learned the rhythm. Matched it. Found his own route beside it, without needing to be led.

There was a night - just three days in - when they’d taken cover in the ruins of a dugout, half-collapsed on one side. The timber had buckled inward. The ground was soaked through, slick with mud and blood and shrapnel dust. But it held. And the artillery had faded far enough into the distance that the shaking had dulled to a murmur. Vincent had pressed against him, hands scraped raw from the fall, chest heaving too fast. He didn’t speak. Just leaned. Just stayed there.

Alastor let him. Let Vincent curl into him like it was the most natural thing in the world. And when Vincent finally slumped against his shoulder, no longer trembling as he settled into sleep, Alastor let his weight rest. Didn’t speak. Didn’t move.

He held him steady. Just long enough.

Until the war picked up again.

He didn’t pretend it didn’t mean something.

He just didn’t name it out loud. Because names made things real, and real things got taken.

Still, he started marking their paths differently after that. Not just by sound or distance or risk - but by line of sight. Where they could see each other if they had to split. Where Vincent could keep footing if he stumbled. Where Alastor could intercept, if something slipped - if a message got noticed, if an officer asked the wrong question, if someone realised the boy who hadn’t been on the roll last week was still here now, tucked close his shadow.

He held those routes in his mouth like secrets. Redrew them every time the lines changed. He never said why.

He didn’t pray. Not quite. But each morning he woke and found Vincent still there - still breathing, still close - something in him held fast. The tension of support. Of anchoring.

And every time that boy stood and readied himself to run again - eyes too sunken, ribs too sharp, still smiling like the end of the world was worth it - Alastor felt the strain deepen, like a wire pulled just one breath tighter.

Not because he doubted Vincent.

Because he didn’t know how long he could bear it.

He wasn’t thinking in fragments anymore. Not about the fingers or the voice or the scent of earth when their shoulders brushed. It was all one shape now. One presence. One impossible, vital thing.

Vincent.

Alastor - who had made a life of surviving alone, of loving only what couldn’t be taken - was starting to realise just how much he’d already given up.

And how much it would destroy him to lose it now.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Late August, 1918

The world had been loud all morning.

Not just the shelling - though that, too, had come in brief, brutal bursts - but the kind of loud that lived in the body. In the joints. In the blood. The kind that came from waking too early, walking too far, and carrying too many things that couldn’t be laid down. Orders. Questions. But by some mercy, the afternoon had quieted.

They’d delivered the last message just before midday - Vincent’s boots sliding slick through shallow water, Alastor two paces ahead, grinning like a ghost whenever the mud sucked too hard at their ankles. The officer had barely looked at the packet. Just waved them off with a grunt, already shouting for someone else.

No new assignments. No redirection. So they drifted.

Not aimlessly, that was a good way to get killed, but sideways, down a trench that hadn’t been walked since morning, through a collapsed passage marked off by caution chalk, and out toward a hollow neither of them had spoken about but both had remembered. A pocket of ruin and scorched stone on the sector’s far edge. Useless, officially. Overlooked. Forgotten.

Safe, in the way that forgotten places sometimes were.

They didn’t talk much as they walked. Didn’t need to. There was something in the way Alastor’s fingers tapped lightly against the strap of his pack, some quiet rhythm Vincent had learned to trust. It meant his shoulders weren’t tense. It meant they could afford the detour.

And so they took it.

The hollow wasn’t much. A broken lip of stone, a patch of dry earth, the remains of something once-built now only meaningful to them. But there was still sunlight in it. Still warmth where the rocks had held the day. Still enough quiet for breathing.

Vincent sat first. Let his legs fold underneath him, slow and careful. His knees ached. One ankle had started to turn stiff when the cold set in. He didn’t say anything.

Alastor dropped beside him a moment later. Close, but not too close. Just enough for their elbows to brush when one of them shifted. Just enough for the silence to feel shared.

It could have stayed like that. Should have. Another moment tucked between the cracks of the war - borrowed, wordless, safe.

But Vincent couldn’t stop thinking about the way Alastor’s hand had lingered that morning - just between his shoulder blades after a near-fall, firm and steady like he’d meant it. Couldn’t stop thinking about waking in the night to find Alastor turned toward him in sleep, closer than usual, like his body had given up keeping distance.

Couldn’t stop thinking about a future that kept knocking at the back of his mind like static he hadn’t tuned in properly. A signal just beyond reach.

Alastor was scribbling - pencil scratching lazily across a torn scrap of paper. The page was already cluttered: nonsense phrases, half-legible jottings, a grinning deer beside a crooked radio mast. He didn’t explain. Vincent didn’t ask.

But the words had been building in his throat for days now. Maybe longer.

He glanced sideways. Then said - softly, like it had just occurred to him, though it hadn’t, “When the war ends...”

Alastor looked up. Calmly. No flinch. Just meeting his gaze like he already knew where this was going and was bracing himself for it.

Vincent’s pulse jumped. “When it ends,” he tried again, voice low, “do you think- I mean, if I made it out. And you did-”

He stopped. A breath in. A breath out. His fingers dug lightly into the edge of his coat.

But Alastor waited.

So Vincent swallowed and said it.

“Would you stay with me?”

The words fell quiet between them, not uncertain, but not loud either. A truth laid down gently. Carefully. Like a wire he was trusting Alastor to pick up.

“I want to build something, maybe finally go to university.” he went on. “Not orders. Not war. Just- radio. Music. Story. Real voices. Like what you talked about once.”

He looked down. Ran a thumb across a fray in his sleeve. “I don’t want it to be like this forever. The mud. The silence. The guessing. I want to come out the other side and still have you. Still have this.”

Then the breath he’d been holding finally loosened.

“I love you, you know."

No fanfare. No tremble. Just steady, like it had always been true.

“I’ve known for a while. I didn’t know if you… if you feel it like I do. Or if that word even fits what we are. But I needed to say it. Just once. While I still can.”

He looked up.

Alastor didn’t answer. Not immediately. He looked at Vincent the way he always had when they spoke, like if he just listened close enough, he’d hear something no one else could.

He reached out. Pressed his palm gently to the back of Vincent’s hand, fingers curling around his.

Vincent huffed a laugh. Soft. Wrecked.

“You don’t have to say it back,” he said again. Quieter this time. “Just… just stay with me? Please.”

Alastor’s thumb moved once, slow, across the curve of his hand. Then he nodded. A beat passed. Then:

“Always.”

They didn’t speak of it again that night. Not directly. But later, they talked about radio towers and station names. About cities they might live in, if such things still existed by the time they got there. Vincent described the coast in winter. Alastor murmured something about river fog and magnolias and the hum of wet heat just before storm season. Their shoulders brushed and neither pulled away.

And for that one dusk, with the war quiet just long enough to pretend, it felt like a future might still be out there, waiting for them to find it.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Late August, 1918

The moment was too quiet not to mean something.

He’d known Vincent was thinking - he always could tell. There was a rhythm to it, a stillness that wasn’t still at all. Like a wire strung too tight. Like breath held on the cusp of something unsayable. That’s how it was now. Sitting side by side in a hollow of scorched stone, the light bruised and turning, the warmth bleeding out of the earth like a secret no one else would think to find.

Alastor didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just waited.

And then, Vincent did.

“When the war ends…”

It was quiet. Not unsure, just soft. A whisper across the line. A flicker he leaned toward before it fully formed.

Alastor looked up, slow.

Not startled. Not surprised. Just… ready. Braced, though he wouldn’t have said for what.

Vincent faltered. Tried again. His voice caught, reshaped. Like the words had lived too long in silence and weren’t quite sure how to land.

Then came the question.

“Would you stay with me?”

It shouldn’t have hit that hard.

But it did.

Not visibly. He kept still. He always kept still. But something inside him staggered - just once, just enough to leave a mark.

Stay. With me.

He’d thought about it. Of course he had. Not with any grand plan, not with domestic softness or declarations. But in the back of his mind, where the maps redrew themselves when Vincent walked too close to danger. Where the risk of loss had stopped being theoretical.

But not like this. Not now. Not from Vincent.

And not with such terrifying clarity.

He listened. He always listened. But now he felt every word, peeled clean of pretence. There was no performance in them. No plea. Just honesty - uncloaked and devastating.

“I want to build something.”

Of course he did. Vincent had always been more than Alastor let himself be. That hunger in him - quiet, stubborn - was the first thing Alastor had ever respected. The need to create. To reach.

“Not war. Just- radio. Music. Story.”

It stuck like a thorn in his chest. Because Vincent meant it. Not metaphor. Not metaphorical wire or poetic code. Him. He wanted him.

“I want to come out the other side and still have you.”

Alastor couldn’t breathe for a second. Couldn’t think around it. Because no one had ever said that to him before. Not past the moment. Not past use. Not as something that lived in the future.

And then-

“I love you.”

Just like that.

No ceremony. No breaking voice. Just a truth, given like a gift. Heavy. Whole.

Everything stopped.

Not just the war. Not just the world. Him.

He didn’t blink. Didn’t move. He just sat, suspended - like if he shifted at all, the moment would vanish, and take Vincent with it.

Vincent, who had crossed illness and firelines and carried bloodied orders between teeth just to get back to him. Vincent, who laughed too loudly and bit back fear and said his name like it meant something.

Vincent, who saw him.

He felt it - tight and sharp and unfamiliar. Not grief. Not exactly. But something close. Something hollow and radiant all at once.

Gratitude. Fear. Awe.

Hope, he realised, was the worst of them. The most painful. The most alive.

He’d known he loved Vincent. Of course he had. Known it in the things he didn’t say, in the way he watched him sleep. In the way he mapped safer paths not for himself, but to make sure Vincent would be safer. In the way silence between them never felt empty.

But he'd refused to name it.

Not because it wasn’t true. But because naming things gave them shape. Gave them weakness. Made them easier to destroy.

And now Vincent had offered it anyway. Had taken his heart and placed it - gently, terribly - into his hands.

You don’t have to say it back.

That made it worse.

Because he wanted to. God, he wanted to.

But not like this. Not yet. Not while the words still tasted like blood and dirt and goodbyes. If he labeled this, it could be taken, could be lost.

So he did what he could.

He reached out. Pressed his palm to the back of Vincent’s hand. Not a grip. Not a promise. Just - presence. A tether.

Vincent huffed a pleased sound. It cracked something open between them, something weightless and real. Alastor felt his chest ease just slightly, enough to breathe again.

They talked after that. Not about love. Not directly. But about after. About signal towers and rivers and the quiet hush of radios tuned just right. Vincent described the coast. Alastor murmured something about cypress trees and southern heat and the way the air thrummed in July.

Vincent leaned in.

Alastor let him.

Didn’t try to name what it meant. Didn’t try to cage it or run from it.

Just stayed. Let the warmth settle. Let the moment hold.

And when Vincent whispered “Just… stay with me? Please.”

He didn’t pause. Didn’t hedge.

“Always,” he said.

And meant it.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Late August, 1918

The light was soft and warm when he woke.

For a moment, he didn’t know where he was.

Not fully.

Just the weight of a coat across his chest, the feel of gravel beneath his shoulder, and something steady beside him. Breathing.

He didn’t move. Didn’t need to. The morning wasn’t pressing yet. No whistles. No boots overhead. Just a hush between hours, when the sky turned to blue and the trenchline hadn’t quite remembered what it was for.

Alastor sat close, legs drawn up and arms loose around his knees. He’d been awake for some time - Vincent could tell by the stillness. The kind that didn’t come from sleep.

His gaze wasn’t focused. Just resting somewhere in the middle distance, as if watching the air settle.

Vincent turned his face slightly, cheek against fabric. It was Alastor’s coat. He could tell by the faint scent of dried tobacco, damp wool, and the hint of magnolia that clung to him even now. Familiar now. Grounding.

He didn’t speak. Neither of them did. But the silence had changed. Not broken, never that - but thinner. Transparent in places. Like something had passed through it and left the shape of itself behind.

I love you.

The words hadn’t echoed. Hadn’t bounced off the walls or soured in the air. They’d just… stayed. Like signal caught clean.

Alastor hadn’t said it back, but Vincent hadn’t expected him to. Not really. And maybe that was why it hadn’t hurt. Not then.

Because for a night - just one - they’d let it be simple. Let it be true.

But this world wasn’t made to hold softness. Not for long.

He sat up slowly, careful not to jar the stillness. His spine creaked. His legs prickled with pins and needles. But he breathed through it and let the morning return to him.

Alastor passed him a tin cup without speaking. Cold tea. Bitter. A little metallic. Vincent drank anyway.

They packed in silence. A shared rhythm. No instructions. No questions. Alastor’s notebook disappeared into his coat. Vincent’s folded map slid back into his satchel. Their boots scuffed faint tracks into the dry soil of the hollow floor.

Still, the quiet held.

It almost felt like safety.

They didn’t talk as they returned to the main line. It wasn’t far. Just a narrow stretch through partially collapsed trench - roped off with chalk markings and a single rusted spade left sticking out of the dirt like someone had meant to return and never had.

The air felt different here.

Heavier.

Maybe it was the way footsteps echoed. Or the way the sky seemed duller, despite the sun finally cutting through the cloud. Vincent couldn't name it exactly. Just a sense that whatever had kept the world at bay the night before had begun to lift.

A shape appeared ahead, two men seated on a box of sandbags, sharing a cigarette. Runners, judging by the armbands and the state of their boots. Neither looked up as Vincent and Alastor passed.

But just as they reached the bend, one of them said something low. Not loud or urgent, but cold and quiet.

Vincent didn’t catch the words. Only the pause after.

A short silence. Followed by a laugh, dry and careless.

Then nothing.

He didn’t look back -but he felt Alastor slow by half a step. Not stop. Not tense. Just… shift. Like a wind change.

They kept walking.

Later, when they passed the outer edge of the signal tents, Vincent adjusted the strap across his chest. His insignia had slipped slightly under the fold of his coat. He hadn’t noticed until now.

Alastor noticed first. He didn’t say anything, just gave a faint gesture toward it. A flick of his fingers.

Vincent nodded. Straightened it.

Nothing else was said.

But something between them changed again. Subtle. Almost imperceptible. Alastor’s steps drifted slightly ahead. Not far. Not away. Just enough that they no longer moved in perfect rhythm.

Vincent didn’t question it. Didn’t ask. But the warmth in his chest dimmed slightly, like the air had cooled.

And for the first time since the night before, he wondered if he’d imagined it. If the quiet had only felt like safety because he’d wanted it to.

He reached into his coat and touched the matchbox still tucked deep inside. Thumb brushing the metal like it could translate something he couldn’t name.

Alastor turned his head just slightly, enough to catch his eye. His mouth was neutral, unreadable. But there was something in his gaze. Not distance. Not quite.

Vincent didn’t ask.

He wanted to. The words were there - half-formed, clumsy things - but something in Alastor’s face made them catch.

It wasn’t a rejection. Vincent knew what that looked like. And it wasn’t fear, not exactly - though it wore the same coat.

No, this was different. Older. Like Alastor was preparing for something. Like it had a name, and he’d already memorised the shape of it.

Vincent didn’t press.

He dropped his gaze instead. Focused on the matchbox in his coat. It was warm from his pocket, the metal dulled from months of being turned over. He flicked it open and shut once. Not to spark. Not to burn. Just to remember.

They moved on.

The comms post came into view - tents stretched in uneven rows, signal wires vanishing into earth and sky. Familiar again. The rhythm of the war returning. A place where things were meant to make sense.

They didn’t pause.

Alastor peeled away with a murmur about checking supplies. Vincent let him go. He didn’t follow. Didn’t offer to.

Instead, he ducked inside the edge of the haphazardly set up signal tent he wasn't part of and settled near a crate of spare batteries. No one noticed him. He was still in uniform. Still in place. Just another shadow in a corner.

He sat there for a while. Elbows on his knees. Fingers tangled loosely.

Something had changed.

Not shattered or broken. Just… slipped. Like a gear not catching properly. Like signal just out of reach.

He told himself not to overthink it. The war did this. The trenches bent time and space and sense. People came close, then drifted. It didn’t always mean something.

But still.

Nearby, someone laughed. Distant. Too sharp.

Vincent closed his eyes.

He didn’t know what had changed.

But he knew it wasn’t over yet.

— Alastor —

Northern France – The Frontlines – Late August, 1918

He hadn’t needed to check the supplies.

There was nothing he didn’t already know - what had run out, what had been stolen, what was rusting untouched at the bottom of a crate marked ‘urgent’ three rotations ago. The tent’s contents were a mess of mislabelled tins, half-used wire reels, and rain-softened inventory sheets. Predictable. Inconsequential.

That wasn’t why he’d left.

He needed space.

Not solitude - he’d had plenty of that - but distance. From Vincent’s eyes. From the quiet that had become too meaningful. From the weight behind a truth neither of them could afford to name aloud right now.

From the feeling still curled under his ribs, stubborn and bright and dangerous as a lit fuse.

Their walk back had turned strange in the way things do after intimacy, after softness. Not wrong. Not regretful. Just exposed. Like leaving warmth and stepping back into a cold room, already aching for what you’d only just held.

He ducked behind a row of supply crates, boots crunching faintly against gravel, and slipped between two sagging flaps of canvas. Narrow gap. No one looking. The kind of place you went when you needed to vanish for a breath or two.

He leaned against the support post and exhaled, slow.

He had heard worse.

Whispers weren’t new. Not about him. Not ever.

Since the first day of training. Since before. Wrong voice. Wrong name. Wrong skin. Too polite, too quiet, too clever. Didn’t drink. Didn’t joke. Smiled at all the wrong things. Didn’t belong.

He’d stopped listening long ago.

The trick was not letting it find purchase. If you flinched, it stuck. So he didn’t. He smiled. He filed the comments away beside weather reports and shell estimates. Noise. Predictable, mean-spirited, and ultimately useless.

But this time, when those two runners - who’d likely be dead in weeks - had whispered as they passed, it had been different.

Because this time, it wasn’t just about him.

“There he goes. Black bastard and his little whore.”

“Bet he’s got him bent over in the dugout, fucking faggots. Pretty boy don’t even flinch, follows him like a bitch on a leash.”

He didn’t know which one had said what. Didn’t need to.

Their voices had been low. Measured. Casual, in that way particular to cowards who like to be overheard but not held accountable.

Then they had laughed. Dry. Ugly. A sound with no humour in it.

Alastor hadn’t paused. He’d registered it the way he registered a shift in the wind, a change in pressure. Instinct. But inside, something had lanced deep. Not pain. Not fear. Just heat. Dense and silent and crawling behind his ribs.

Not because of the words. But because of what they meant.

Because they were watching Vincent now.

Not him.

Not just him.

Vincent.

Vincent, who’d woken under his coat like it was the most natural thing in the world. Vincent, who drank bad tea and traced his thumb across an old matchbox like it still mattered. Vincent, who’d said I love you like it was a fact - not a risk, not a request - just a truth he’d been waiting to share.

And they’d turned it into something filthy.

Made it small. Weak. Something targetable.

His hands twitched at the memory. He flexed his fingers once. Let them curl again.

He could bear being called a freak. A bastard. A mongrel. Slurs far worse than that. He was. He didn’t mind.

But this - this - was different.

They weren’t just mocking. They were testing. Watching for fault lines. And if he gave them one - if he so much as looked the wrong way - they’d pull the thread until it all unravelled.

And Vincent-

God.

Vincent didn’t know.

He’d looked at Alastor this morning like nothing had changed. Like something sacred had been placed between them, and he still believed the world would respect it. Like he hadn’t felt the shift in the air the moment the laughter followed them round the bend.

But Alastor had.

He’d felt it like a wire tightening round his throat.

And that was why he’d stepped just slightly ahead. Hadn’t reached back. Hadn’t spoken.

He’d learned long ago that sometimes the only way to protect something was to pretend you didn’t have it.

He closed his eyes. Let his head tip back against the post. Breathed shallow.

He’d seen it before. Too many times.

Men who hadn’t done anything wrong. Just laughed too loud. Sat too close. Cared a little too openly. It never ended cleanly.

Nothing ever did.

He pressed his knuckles to his mouth, just briefly. Just to keep them still.

Vincent wasn’t built for this. Not like him. His softness wasn’t weakness, but it made him visible. And people punished what they could see.

If this kept growing - if whispers turned into something worse - Alastor didn’t know what he’d do. But he knew what he wouldn’t let happen.

He wouldn’t let them hurt Vincent.

Not for this. Not for him.

Eventually, he stepped out again.

The light had changed. Sharper now. Less forgiving. The trenches had taken on the texture of midday - shouts, movement, the rising scent of cordite and heat-softened canvas. The machinery of war resuming.

He stopped just before the tent’s edge and watched.

Vincent sat near the battery crate, knees drawn, arms loose. Not tense. Not waiting. Just still.

There was something in his posture that made Alastor ache.

He hadn’t asked. Hadn’t followed. Hadn’t tried to fix anything.

He’d just let him go.

Trusted him to come back.

Alastor turned away before he had to decide whether he could.

He couldn’t sit beside him here. Couldn’t reach. Couldn’t touch. The quiet between them was too fragile now - too exposed to carry weight.

But he would stay nearby.

He always had.

And for now, in a world too cruel for softness, that would have to be enough.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Advancing Sector – Early September, 1918

The line moved again that morning.

No announcement. No whistle. Just a corporal with a cracked voice and a folded message, calling names into the half-light like they were already gone. The last of the morning dew hadn’t even lifted when they were told to pack - boots stiff, air raw, breath misting in the pause before sunrise. It didn’t feel like morning. It didn’t feel like anything at all.

Alastor was already up when Vincent stirred. Satchel slung. Coat half-buttoned. He hadn’t made a sound. Just stood with his back to the trench wall, gaze distant, caught in the haze of a lantern someone hadn’t turned off yet. Orange light clung to the curve of his jaw, the hollows beneath his eyes.

He didn’t speak.

Vincent didn’t either.

They just moved - automatically, wordlessly - falling into step like always.

Alastor ahead. Vincent behind.

A habit carved into the bones.

The trench they followed was shallow. New. The walls damp, scraped clean of anything human. Probably German a week ago. Probably marked a dozen different ways before that. Someone had scratched a direction arrow into the clay with the heel of a boot. It pointed nowhere useful.

They walked through the echo of it, boots slapping against warped boards that shifted underfoot. The ground sucked wet at their heels. The rhythm of the march was slow, stilted - made strange by the ground and the silence both.

Vincent’s calves burned. His shoulders too, sharp and sore from where the strap of his bag bit into one spot over and over. But that was the kind of ache you got used to. The kind that faded into the background when everything else hurt more.

It wasn’t the walking that bothered him.

It was the weight.

Not in the satchel.

Not in the gear.

Just… between them.

Space where there hadn’t been space before. Cold and careful and deliberate.

It hadn’t been like this a week ago. Not even two days.

Back then, there had been something shared in the quiet - breath passed between them, heat transferred in brush of shoulder or knuckles or coat. Alastor had stood close, even when he didn’t speak. Had waited for him to catch up. Had laughed - quiet, small - at nothing at all.

Now he moved like a man learning a new route. Every step just a little too careful. Every glance ahead, never behind.

They passed three platoons digging fresh lines into the clay - men hunched with shoulders turned inward, helmets askew, eating from tins without names. Their faces barely registered. Just shapes in the smoke. Part of the trench now.

The war had taken on that kind of blur again.

Nothing stayed familiar long enough to remember.

Vincent didn’t know when the change had happened. Not really. He could guess, if he wanted to - backtrack through the way Alastor had started letting him go first through narrow spaces, the way he’d stopped meeting his eyes when they spoke. But even that felt like trying to remember a dream backwards.

It wasn’t speed. It wasn’t the job.

It was something else.

Something unspoken.

Carried tight in Alastor’s shoulders like a message he’d refused to send.

And Vincent—

Vincent couldn’t ask.

He’d tried once. Two days ago. Not directly. Just a light remark, a quiet question. Something about the way the stars had looked the night before, or whether they’d stop at the next junction. It didn’t matter.

Alastor had answered with a nod and a glance that didn’t land.

Vincent hadn’t tried again.

The trench veered toward the east rise, then dipped through scorched brush and the blackened skeleton of what might’ve once been a stable. The ridge beyond it reeked of cordite and old blood and something else - something greasy, like burned meat and boiled rot.

Vincent breathed through his mouth and didn’t speak.

They paused for water when the line forked around a broken set of supply rails. Alastor crouched to adjust a strap. Vincent drank from his canteen, held it in his hand a second longer than necessary, then capped it and kept it to himself.

For the first time in weeks, he didn’t think Alastor would take it if he offered.

Not because he didn’t need it.

Because he wouldn’t.

Because something had shifted, and they were both pretending it hadn’t.

Midday came thin and grey. No sun. No shadow. Just the kind of dimness that made the world feel rubbed out, as if someone had dragged a wet cloth over the horizon and left everything blurry and pale.

Vincent reached into his coat, intending to find the tin of lozenges he sometimes kept in the inside pocket. Instead, his fingers closed on metal.

The matchbox.

He paused.

Pulled it out. Turned it once in his hand.

It was warm from being pressed to his body. Familiar in the way most things weren’t anymore. Scuffed, slightly dented at one corner, the striker half-worn. Still his. Still here.

He didn’t open it.

Didn’t need to.

He just held it, thumb rubbing a slow arc against the edge, and let his eyes drift forward, to Alastor’s back.

Something about the way he walked now felt unfamiliar.

Not in the motion. That part was the same, long strides, shoulders forward, the steady rhythm of someone who always mapped his footing two paces ahead.

But the posture had changed.

He still glanced back. Vincent knew he did - caught it once in the corner of his eye, a flicker of movement when he stopped to adjust his coat, or when the path narrowed and split. But it wasn’t the same as before. Not open. Not casual. Now it came careful. Masked. Like Alastor was checking for danger, not him.

Like the concern had become covert.

Like he was trying not to be seen caring.

Vincent didn’t know what to do with that.

He watched the line of Alastor’s spine, the swing of his coat hem, the careful tension in the set of his shoulders, and felt, with a slow chill settling beneath the ribs, that Alastor wasn’t just walking ahead.

He was walking like someone being watched.

And whatever closeness they’d carved into the seams of their days, Alastor was trying - deliberately, silently - not to let it show.

Vincent watched the curve of his spine, the swing of his coat hem. And felt, with a cold certainty he hadn’t let himself acknowledge before, that Alastor wasn’t just walking ahead.

He was walking away.

Vincent closed his fingers around the matchbox, gently.

Then tucked it back into his coat.

He didn’t know what he’d done. Didn’t know what he was doing. Only that whatever it was, it ached - and he didn’t know how to fix it.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Advancing Sector – Early September, 1918

They halted near a ridge just before dusk.

Not because it was safe - nothing was - but because the men ahead hadn’t finished laying down boards, and the slope had turned to slurry with the last shelling. A few of the others had already slipped down the incline and twisted something they didn’t have time to bandage properly. One of them, a boy from the next unit over, was still swearing into the mud when Alastor passed.

Vincent was somewhere behind him. Not far. Sitting with his back to a collapsed section of wall, elbows on his knees, head lowered like he was resting - or thinking. Probably both.

Alastor didn’t stop to speak. Didn’t sit beside him.

He kept walking. Just far enough that it didn’t look like hesitation. Just to the edge of the temporary hold line, where the trench wall rose high enough to block most of the wind and the stench wasn’t quite as thick. Close enough to keep Vincent in view. Far enough to look like it didn’t matter.

He waited until no one was looking.

Then reached into his coat and pulled the cloth free.

It was folded tight. Small. The edges softer now than they’d been, but the thread still held - pulled taut in places, crooked in others. Vincent’s stitching. Vincent’s hands. Vincent’s name, right there alongside his own.

Alastor. Vincent. 1918.

He ran a thumb along the seam. Let it catch, just slightly, on one uneven thread - the one that always made him pause.

Vincent had given it to him back in July. Not clumsily. Not shy. Just quiet. Sure.

He could see it even now, like it had only happened yesterday. Vincent glancing around once - quick and precise - checking the path, the tents, the silence between movements. Making sure no one would see. Then drawing the cloth from his coat with that same care he reserved for things that mattered.

He hadn’t spoken at first, just offered it to him, palm flat, eyes steady. And Alastor had taken it with both hands. Gently. Like it might vanish if he touched it too fast.

He’d unfolded it there because he had to see it. Had to know it. The words stitched in Morse weren’t a code. Weren’t a signal.

They were proof.

That someone saw him. Chose him. Knew what he was and offered something anyway.

When he’d looked up, Vincent had been watching him like the world would split open if they didn’t get it right.

“I didn’t know when…” Vincent had said, voice catching like it hadn’t meant to be spoken. “I didn’t know if I should give it to you. But if you’re going, I wanted you to have it.”

And Alastor had told him the truth.

“I’ll keep it close,” he’d said. “Where they won’t think to look.”

It hadn’t been a promise.

It had been a vow already made in silence, spoken aloud only because Vincent needed to hear it too.

Then they’d stepped in.

Forehead to forehead. Hands rising.

Holding each other still and real in a world that couldn't feel further from that.

The cloth had gone into the inside breast of his coat moments later, where it had stayed ever since, against his chest, like it had always belonged there. Not fragile. Not heavy.

Just alive.

A second heartbeat.

Now, with the trench cold around him and the silence between them deepening by the day, he held it again.

Pressed it into his palms.

Let it steady him.

Because he couldn’t reach for Vincent right now - not without risking what safety they still had. But he could reach for this. For the thing they’d made in the dark, between orders and fear and hope neither of them had said aloud yet.

And if that had to be enough for now… he would make it enough.

He closed his eyes and let the fabric rest against his lips.

He wanted to cross the distance between them now. To run to Vincent's side, in the dirt and dust, and say: This is how I keep you with me.

But the world wouldn’t let him. Not now. Not with eyes starting to watch, and whispers that curved sharp behind teeth.

So instead, he sat with the cloth cradled and let the war move around him.

And pretended - for a little longer - that this was enough.

Alastor knew there was a change. He felt it in every flicker of hesitation, every time Vincent didn’t offer his canteen, didn’t make a quiet joke about the shape of the mud or the sound Alastor made when he rolled his ankle on bad boards.

It was confusion. Hurt, maybe.

Alastor couldn’t blame him.

He hadn’t said what changed. Hadn’t even hinted. And Vincent, with all his careful listening, all his subtle watching, had respected that silence.

Which made it worse because Vincent deserved more.

More than silence. More than a ghost of a hand once offered and now gone. More than the kind of love that couldn’t be named without consequence.

He didn’t deserve to be seen as a risk.

And Alastor—Alastor couldn’t stand the idea of being the reason someone else turned on him.

So he stayed where he was. At the edge. Close enough to see. Not close enough to touch.

A man passed, muttering something about wire being redrawn at the north corner. No one responded. The sun dipped lower. A bird passed overhead, wings stiff, gliding without effort.

And still, Alastor didn’t move.

His hand crept toward his coat again. Stopped.

He didn’t need to touch the cloth again to remember what he was holding. He just needed to believe it hadn’t slipped away.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Advancing Sector – Mid-September, 1918

They’d moved twice in three days.

Not far - just east, then north again. Barely a kilometre each time. But it didn’t matter. It felt like trying to dig a trench with bare hands. The maps had stopped matching the ground. Coordinates came through scratched or reversed. Orders were relayed by men with glassy eyes and blood-stiffened cuffs. Everyone looked lost. No one said it aloud.

Vincent had stopped trying to remember the names of where they were. The mud didn’t care what it was called.

He adjusted the strap of his satchel again. It had started to pull harder on one shoulder, where the fabric had stiffened and cracked with dried sweat. A familiar ache. He counted the pain with each step - one, two, three, four - then let the rhythm carry him.

Alastor walked ahead. Not far. Never far.

But still not close.

The trench narrowed where they passed through the new forward position. Sandbags laid badly. Barbed wire curled too low. Someone had chalked a message on the boards: DON’T DIG TOO DEEP. THEY LISTEN.

Vincent didn’t look at it too long.

They were stopped by a runner on the ridge, who handed over a packet of names and new placements. Alastor took it without a word. He always did. Men handed him things the way they handed over their last matches - quickly, without looking.

It was getting colder. He could feel it in the way his fingers stopped moving the same way after midday. In how long it took his knees to forget they’d been wet overnight.

Vincent shifted his weight and blew warm breath into his cupped hands. His fingers ached.

He didn’t speak.

Later, they came to a break in the line where the boards were missing entirely. Just a stretch of churned dirt, water pooling underfoot, and a half-collapsed lip of trench wall waiting to slip.

Alastor stepped first.

Vincent followed, carefully, watching the way the ground gave under each footfall. He wasn’t looking for conversation anymore. Just signs. Tells.

Alastor’s posture was the same. Forward. Measured. Controlled.

But Vincent had learned to read around the edges.

The tension in his shoulders was heavier now - less like planning, more like bracing. And when they stopped on the other side of the collapse to catch breath, Alastor didn’t pass him the last sip of water like he used to.

He just drank.

Wiped the edge of the tin with his glove.

And moved on.

They reached the second post in the late afternoon. The light had turned to a dull grey smear, stretching long shadows over the ground. Someone had set up a crude heating station: a ration fire in an old shell casing, blackened and hissing. Two men sat beside it, eating from the same tin, muttering between bites.

Vincent caught a glance as they passed.

Not long. Not sharp.

Just one of those looks. Flat. Knowing. Unkind.

Alastor didn’t react.

Didn’t even slow.

Vincent followed him past the fire, past the next bend, and into the quieter stretch beyond. They were alone again for a few metres, the trench curling around a slope lined with what might’ve once been tree roots. The silence there felt heavier. More honest.

He wanted to say something.

The words had been pressing for hours - rising with the smoke, caught in the soft hum of his own thoughts. Something simple. Nothing sharp. Just enough to test the air between them.

He nearly said it then.

“Are we-”

But Alastor shifted forward, reaching out to steady himself on the edge of the trench wall as it dipped. The motion was too fast to interrupt.

Vincent bit the rest back.

Swallowed it.

Tasted bitterness for no reason.

Later, they paused again. Not a formal stop - just a moment to breathe. Alastor was checking the map. Vincent leaned against the wall and reached into his coat.

His fingers found the matchbox easily. He hadn’t realised he’d been reaching for it.

He turned it over once in his palm. The metal was cool. Familiar. A comfort by reflex now. He didn’t need to strike it. Just hold it. Just feel something real.

He looked at Alastor.

He hadn’t changed much. Not really. Still tall. Still sharp in profile, still frowning slightly even when he wasn’t thinking hard. Still his.

But something in the air between them had shifted so quietly it had become deafening.

Alastor looked up.

Caught his eye for a second.

And Vincent thought - just for that second - that something might give.

That he might say something. Or come closer. Or smile for real.

But the moment passed.

And Alastor looked away again.

Vincent turned the matchbox over once more. Then tucked it back into his coat.

The ache in his shoulder throbbed a little harder now.

He told himself it was the bag.

But it wasn’t.

He hadn’t asked what changed.

He still wasn’t sure he wanted the answer.

But today - more than before - he was beginning to believe it wasn’t something he’d done.

And that made it worse.

Because if it wasn’t his fault, there was nothing he could fix.

Nothing he could say.

Only a silence that stretched longer with each step, each breath, each touch that never landed.

And God, he missed him.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Advancing Sector – Mid-September, 1918

The slope had held longer than expected.

He’d thought the boards would give by midday - too shallow, too wet - but someone must’ve reinforced them when no one was looking. That was the way of this part of the line lately. Everything half-done. Half-fixed. Half-ready to collapse.

They hadn’t slept properly in over thirty hours. He could feel it in the way his knees locked when he paused too long, in the tremor in his fingers when he rolled the pencil stub between them to mark a direction on the map. It wasn’t enough to stop him. Just enough to remind him he wasn’t made of metal.

He was tired.

Not just tired, bone-deep worn.

And still, he kept Vincent within sight.

He hadn’t meant to hear the muttered remark by the fire. The two men had barely spoken above a murmur, forked spoons scraping against a shared tin. But Alastor always heard things he wasn’t meant to.

Not a slur this time. Not directly.

Just tone. Curled vowels. The shape of something that wanted to be cruel but hadn’t yet found a safe place to land.

One of them looked up. Not at him. At Vincent.

Then back down again, smirking.

Alastor hadn’t stopped walking. Hadn’t turned his head. Hadn’t let it show. But the ache behind his eyes sharpened all the same.

He felt Vincent fall into step behind him again. Quiet. Predictable.

And for a single, sick moment, he hated the world for making this necessary.

They reached the ridge around dusk. Light fading fast now, autumn leaning in without apology. Alastor stopped just before the crest and pretended to check the map again. The pencil stub slipped in his grip. His knuckles cracked as he adjusted.

He didn’t need to check the line.

He already knew where they were going.

He just needed a reason to pause.

He could feel Vincent behind him. Just a few metres back. Not close enough to touch. Not far enough to forget.

Alastor kept his head down. Traced the edge of the paper. The lines meant nothing. The ground shifted too fast to hold to them. Still, it gave him something to look at.

Something that wasn’t Vincent’s eyes.

Because he’d seen the look Vincent gave him earlier - brief, quiet, when they’d passed the fire. A look that asked nothing and still said everything.

And again, when he’d spoken. "Are we-"

It had been so close.

One breath away.

And Alastor had moved. Not out of cruelty. Not even out of fear.

Out of reflex.

Out of survival.

Because if Vincent finished that sentence, Alastor wouldn’t lie.

And the truth wasn’t safe.

Not here.

Not now.

He stood in the fading light and let the silence thicken.

Then, slowly, deliberately, he reached into his coat.

The cloth was exactly where it always was - tucked against the inside, pressed flat over his heart. It was warmer now, drawn close all day. He pulled it free like it might vanish if he moved too quickly.

He didn’t open it.

Didn’t need to.

The memory was etched clear - Vincent standing in that narrow space behind the tents, eyes too bright, hands too steady, offering it like it was nothing and everything all at once.

Alastor. Vincent. 1918.

It wasn’t a code.

It was a declaration. A quiet, unflinching one. The closest thing to I love you they’d had before either of them had found the words.

He held it now like it could answer the ache in his chest.

It didn’t.

But it helped him remember why he was doing this. Why he was keeping distance. Why he hadn’t spoken.

Because if anyone thought too hard about that cloth - if anyone so much as glimpsed it - they’d know.

And if they knew, they’d look at Vincent differently.

And Alastor couldn’t bear that. Not again.

Not with him.

He pressed the cloth between his palms.

Felt the thread. The ridges. The stitches that didn’t quite line up.

He imagined Vincent stitching it, tongue between his teeth, head bent, fingers too cold and too stubborn to stop. Working thread through fabric like he was building a message that didn’t need words.

Alastor hadn’t told him what it meant.

He didn’t think he could.

But he held it now like a vow.

Like a tether.

Like a promise he hadn’t broken, even if everything else was breaking around it.

Behind him, he heard a shift.

Vincent. Shuffling his satchel. Breathing heavier than usual.

Alastor didn’t turn.

He wanted to.

God, he wanted to.

He wanted to go to him - wanted to lean in, shoulder to shoulder, like they used to. Wanted to give him the cloth and say: You gave me this. It hasn’t left my chest since the day you did.

But the silence held.

And the world was still watching.

Eventually, he tucked the cloth back inside his coat. Pressed it flat.

Then let his hand fall away.

He looked out across the field ahead - wire strung low, a dip of broken trees, the outline of a church steeple gutted by months of shelling.

They’d be sleeping near that tonight.

If they slept at all.

He heard movement again - Vincent adjusting something, maybe shifting his weight against the trench wall.

Still so close.

Alastor closed his eyes.

Let the guilt bloom, slow and bitter behind his ribs.

Vincent hadn’t asked again. Not since that half-spoken question.

And Alastor hated himself for that.

Because it wasn’t mercy. It was obedience.

He was teaching Vincent to expect distance.

And it was killing him.

A shout echoed from the line ahead. Nothing urgent. Just a warning about loose boards.

Alastor opened his eyes.

Looked forward.

Then glanced back. Just once. Just enough to catch the edge of Vincent’s coat as he moved out of the light.

Still here.

Still following.

Still his.

For now.

And for one, dangerous second, Alastor let himself hope he could find a way back.

Not to safety.

But to them.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

They were on the move again. This time to a ridge north of a village no one could name.

The map called it sector twelve. The sign someone had chalked onto the trench wall called it Shitslide. Both felt accurate.

They’d been assigned to message rotation again. Forward line, then flank. Back again. Alastor took the packet from a sergeant with a rag wrapped around one eye and nodded once. No words exchanged. Just motion.

They walked.

This time, Alastor didn’t walk far ahead.

The path was narrow, overgrown in places where the trench had slumped in on itself. Roots hung down from the ridge like veins, some of them still clinging to shattered pieces of wooden slats. The kind of trench that wasn’t meant to hold for more than a day or two - just long enough to pass through, relay a message, fall back again if things went wrong.

Vincent didn’t mind it. There was no one else here. Just the two of them, boots splashing in shallow puddles, breath clouding in the crisp morning air.

And the silence.

But not the same silence.

Alastor still didn’t speak. But he didn’t move like he was avoiding him. When they came to the first break in the boards, Alastor offered a hand to help him across. Not dramatic. Not forced. Just… like before.

Vincent didn’t comment. He wasn’t sure he could.

His fingers closed around Alastor’s hand before he had time to think - rough gloves, warm palm. A real touch. Not necessity. Not habit.

Alastor flinched but his fingers curled around Vincent’s.

And Vincent held onto that a little too long before letting go.

They reached the outer forward post a little before noon. A dugout half-carved into the slope, reinforced with sandbags that sagged with damp. A corporal leaned out, took the message without looking, and gestured vaguely toward a crate of rations left by the wall.

“Rest a bit. You’ll be called when the next packet’s ready.”

It was the closest thing to permission they’d had all week.

Alastor sat first, dropping down onto the edge of the supply box with a soft sound - half-sigh, half-reluctant exhale. He didn’t look at Vincent, but he didn’t sit far.

Vincent sat beside him.

He didn’t know what made this moment different. Maybe nothing had changed at all. But Alastor didn’t shift away. Didn’t adjust his coat to make more space between them. Just unwrapped a strip of bread and passed half over without comment.

Vincent took it, and they ate in silence, shoulders close.

The fire wasn’t much - just a stub of flame in a dented steel canister - but it was enough to warm their hands from the autumn chill. Enough to feel like something human.

Once, Vincent glanced sideways. Alastor wasn’t looking at him, but his profile was softer, less braced - like whatever tension he’d been carrying had eased, if only slightly.

Footsteps approached: steady, unhurried. A runner. Not urgent. Just another message.

Alastor shifted to stand, coat rustling faintly. One hand moved toward the inside of his chest - not toward the satchel, not the outer pocket, but the place Vincent remembered.

Where he’d tucked the cloth that day in summer.

And for a moment, he held it there. Not long. Just enough.

Just enough for Vincent to realise - He still has it.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t ask. But something inside him steadied - like pressure releasing from the chest, like proof. Not seen. Not spoken. But felt.

His throat tightened with something he couldn’t quite name. Relief, maybe. Or grief. Or both tangled so closely they felt like the same thing.

Because no matter how much had gone unsaid these past few weeks, that had stayed. And that meant something.

They moved on not long after, following a new route toward the east bend. The orders were vague, something about confirming with the next signal post, making sure the line hadn’t buckled overnight.

It didn’t matter. They walked.

Together.

They passed through a stretch where the boards had been torn up entirely. Craters swallowed the path, the sky stretched wide and colourless above. Vincent stumbled once, catching his foot on a jagged edge of rusted metal. Alastor caught his arm before he hit the mud.

Their eyes met. Neither of them spoke.

Alastor let go gently.

At the far end of the trenchline, they reached another temporary post. A runner scribbled a note on the back of a torn message sheet and waved them on. No new instructions. Just wait.

They found a space beneath a collapsed ledge - mostly dry, shielded from view and out of earshot. A pocket of pause.

Vincent dropped his pack and stretched his legs. Alastor followed, settling beside him - not close enough to touch, but close enough that their shoulders brushed when either one shifted. Close enough for Vincent to feel his warmth through their sleeves.

The matchbox was still in his coat. Still warm from being pressed to his chest all day.

He pulled it out and held it in his palm. For a long moment, he said nothing.

Then, without looking, he turned it sideways, offered it toward Alastor.

Alastor glanced down. Then reached out, slowly, and took it. Not to light it. Not to use it. Just to hold it a while. Then he passed it back.

Vincent didn’t say thank you. He didn’t trust his voice.

Something in his throat caught - sharp and sudden. Like the silence had shifted before he was ready.

He tucked the matchbox away and looked down.

It was the closest they’d come to real in days.

The wind picked up a little after that. They stayed under the ledge, sharing the quiet between them like an old coat. No one asked questions. No one moved.

When the next message came, they stood together - side by side. Not touching. But not pulling away, either.

And just before they stepped back into the open trench, Vincent glanced over and caught the edge of a smile on Alastor’s face.

Small. Uncertain. But real.

And Vincent felt it land in his chest like a signal he hadn’t dared to tune in to.

He didn’t trust himself to answer it. Didn’t know how to hold something that tender without shaking.

So he looked away, and he followed.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

They were on the move again. Same mud. Same cold. Another broken stretch of land that wouldn’t remember their names once they passed through.

The map called it sector twelve. Some sharp bastard had chalked “Shitslide” onto the trench wall.

Alastor thought that was nearer the truth.

The packet sat heavy in his satchel, corners soft with damp. He took it without speaking, nodding once to the one-eyed sergeant - because words, here, felt like risk.

Then he walked.

But not far ahead this time.

Vincent moved beside him - sleeves brushing now and then, boots splashing through the shallows - and Alastor didn’t force the distance back into place. Didn’t lengthen his stride. Didn’t pretend the gap was necessary anymore.

It was, of course. In all the ways it had always been. Men talked. Men watched. And the trenches remembered things better forgotten.

But not here. Not today. Not in this stretch of wreckage, all mud and wire and the pale hush of a sky that bled light over the trench’s broken back.

Just them.

And Alastor couldn’t lie to himself anymore. The space he’d carved between them wasn’t protection. It was punishment. For Vincent. For himself.

It was killing them slowly.

When they reached the first break in the boards - where the ground dipped sharply and roots clawed down from the ridge overhead - Alastor offered his hand without thinking.

Not a grand gesture. Not a statement.

Just… a hand, held steady in the air between them.

For a moment, he thought Vincent wouldn’t take it. That he would see it for what it was - a reach, a selfish want after nothing but taking - and let it hang unanswered.

But then rough gloves closed over his. Warm. Solid. Certain.

Alastor held too long. A second. A breath. Just enough to feel it.

Then let go, before he could break what little permission he’d allowed himself.

They moved on. Boots dragging at the boards, breath misting in the air. No words. No need.

At the forward post - a dugout half-swallowed by the slope, sandbags slumped and weeping into the earth - a corporal waved them to a crate with barely a glance.

"Rest a bit. Packet’ll be ready soon."

Permission. Of a kind.

Alastor sat first, the crate groaning under his weight. He didn’t look at Vincent. Didn’t need to. The air shifted when he sat close - not touching, not claiming, but close enough that their coats brushed when they moved.

For a moment, he let his eyes close. Let the ache in his chest settle. Let himself believe - just for now - that this was allowed.

Then he broke the bread in half and passed the larger piece sideways, without a word.

Not because he should.

Because he couldn’t not.

Vincent took it without hesitation. Their gloves rasped together - a small, rough sound - and Alastor bit the inside of his cheek to keep from turning toward him. To keep from looking.

They ate in silence, shoulders close. The stub-fire in the old steel canister threw half-hearted warmth against their hands, and the scent of scorched tin filled the hollow space between them.

Alastor kept his eyes forward. Watched the smoke curl. Watched the puddles ripple. Anything but the angle of Vincent’s head in the light. Anything but the shape of him, steady and real and unbearably close.

Footsteps echoed down the line. Another runner. Unhurried. Routine.

Alastor shifted to stand. Habit moved his hand inward - not to the satchel, not to the outer pocket, but to that place beneath his coat, folded tight against his ribs.

His fingers found the cloth. Pressed against it. The stitch of a vow in the fabric, holding parts of him still too jagged to name.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vincent notice.

A glance. A flicker. No words.

Alastor let his hand fall. Let the cloth stay. Let the moment pass without claiming it.

Because he couldn’t risk words. Not here. Not yet.

They moved again, following the ridge east - ground torn by shells, sky cracked open above. The boards vanished entirely in places, and they picked their way through raw mud and twisted metal.

When Vincent stumbled - caught on rusted iron - Alastor’s hand snapped out before thought could stop it. Caught his arm. Steadied him.

For a second, their eyes met. Unguarded. Bare.

Alastor didn’t speak. Just let go gently, as if Vincent were made of the same fragile thing he’d been carrying since summer.

At the next post - a sagging ledge of sandbags and splintered boards - they were waved through again. No orders. Just wait.

They dropped their packs and sat beneath the ledge, side by side, breath fogging in the wind.

Vincent shifted first. Reached into his coat. Pulled something small from inside.

The matchbox.

Plain. Scarred. Alive, in a way most things no longer were.

He didn’t look at Alastor. Just held it out, sideways. A quiet offering. No weight behind it. No ask.

Alastor stared for half a breath too long.

Then took it.

Held it like it might sear through the glove. Like it might press the shape of Vincent’s hand into his own if he let it linger.

It was warm. Worn smooth at the edges. He turned it once in his palm, thumb brushing the striker, and let himself believe - just briefly - that the world hadn’t taken everything yet.

Then, slowly, he passed it back.

Vincent tucked it away. Their hands brushed. Brief. Burning.

The silence changed. Not the kind that gnawed. The other kind.

Shared. Worn. Woven between them like a threadbare coat, patched where speech would only tear.

When the call came for the next dispatch, they stood together. No words. No hesitation.

Before they stepped into the open trenchline, Vincent looked at him. Just once. Quick. Hopeful.

Alastor smiled.

And when Vincent looked away and followed without pause, Alastor let himself believe - for just this breath, just this hour - that some part of them might survive this.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

They were halfway to the east signal post when Alastor started to pull away again, and something in Vincent broke.

It wasn’t planned. Wasn’t smart. Just a sudden, crushing certainty that if he let this moment pass - if he let Alastor keep walking ahead like nothing was wrong - he might not get another chance. Might lose something he hadn’t even been allowed to keep.

His hand shot out. Caught Alastor’s sleeve in a sharp, graceless tug, and yanked him off the trench path without a word.

Alastor stumbled, boots slipping against wet stone. His body tensed by reflex, hand half-reaching toward his coat - but froze the moment he saw Vincent’s face.

Vincent didn’t speak. Didn’t explain. Just dragged him forward with both fists clenched in his coat like an order he couldn’t voice.

Alastor didn’t resist. Didn’t ask. Just let himself be pulled.

They moved beneath a collapsed beam, through a break in the trench wall, and into the hollowed skeleton of an abandoned storehouse. The roof was half-rotted, the walls slumped inward, the air thick with the stench of rust and old decay. A forgotten place, untouched by anyone who could overhear.

Vincent didn’t let go until they were hidden. Alone.

Alastor stood stiff against the wall, hands twitching by his sides like he couldn’t decide whether to defend himself or run. His eyes flicked to every exit. His weight braced like an animal expecting pain.

Vincent stared at him - chest heaving, vision blurring around the edges. His hands shook with the urge to do something. To shake him. To yell. To drag the truth out of him. But he kept still. Because he’d learned - too well - that if you pressed Alastor wrong, he vanished. Pulled inward. Shut down.

But this? This silence? This slow death of closeness? It was already killing them.

His voice cracked open before he could stop it.

“What happened?”

Alastor flinched like it landed in the bone. His mouth opened, then shut. An excuse gathered - half-formed, familiar - and died unspoken. His gaze darted past Vincent’s shoulder, to the beam, the shattered roof, anywhere but here. Anywhere but him.

Vincent stepped forward. Not fast. Not aggressive. Just enough to block the escape route he already saw Alastor building in his mind.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. His voice steadied, even as it burned. “Please.”

He saw the moment something inside Alastor gave way. Not a collapse. Not a dramatic fall. Just… a slow, exhausted yielding. Like something that had been holding too much for too long finally, quietly, sank.

Alastor closed his eyes. One hand lifted - trembling - and pressed flat to his chest. To the place Vincent already knew. The inner lining. The pocket where the cloth still lived.

The one stitched with both their names.

Vincent’s breath hitched, sharp and bright and awful. Because he still had it. Still held it like something sacred. Even after everything. Even after all the silence and the distance and the retreat.

That meant something. It had to.

So he didn’t speak. Didn’t reach. Just stayed there and let the weight of it hang between them.

Let the silence speak for both of them.

When Alastor finally spoke, his voice was rough. Frayed down to the wire.

“I thought…”

He swallowed. His hand curled tighter against his coat, as if trying to protect the cloth from the admission.

“I thought if I stayed away, they wouldn’t see.”

Vincent felt the words land like a stone dropped through his chest. Still, he forced the question out, even though he already knew the answer.

“See what?”

Alastor’s eyes opened. Bloodshot. Raw. The kind of raw that didn’t come from wind or exhaustion but from a wound so old it had learned to hide in daylight.

“Us,” he said, barely more than breath. “See you. What you are to me.”

Vincent staggered back half a step - not from fear. From relief so sharp it felt like pain. But Alastor wasn’t finished. The words came hard now, like something pried loose and spilling fast.

“It’s not just talk out here. One word. One rumour.”

He laughed then, ragged and hollow and furious. Shook his head like he could shake the memories off with it.

“Men vanish here, Vincent. They don’t even get buried. They trip in the wrong crater, and no one looks twice. Maybe they were too soft. Maybe they looked the wrong way. Maybe they didn’t belong.”

His hands curled into fists.

“If they think you’re weak - if they think I made you weak-”

He broke off. Jaw clenched so hard it shook in his throat.

“I couldn’t-”

He tried again, breath catching on the back of a sound that never fully formed.

“I couldn’t live with them hurting you because of me.”

The last word broke. Fully. Just for a moment.

And Vincent moved.

No hesitation now. No permission asked. Just closed the distance and cupped Alastor’s jaw with both hands like he could hold the truth still, like he could touch him hard enough to make the fear stop, like the act of holding might be enough to undo the ache beneath his skin.

Alastor flinched - not away. Never away. Just a raw, involuntary recoil, the kind that lived in the bone, like someone who’d spent a lifetime bracing for the blow and still didn’t know what to do when none came.

Then, slowly - achingly - he leaned in. His forehead bumped clumsily against Vincent’s. His breath hitched, sharp and wet between them.

Vincent closed his eyes. Felt the tremor pass through Alastor’s whole frame - the way he folded into the touch, not easily, not gracefully, but with the terrible weight of someone who had forgotten what it meant to be caught before the fall.

“You idiot,” Vincent whispered, voice breaking apart on the edges as he echoed Alastor’s words from weeks ago. “You wonderful, stupid man.”

Alastor let out a noise then - small, helpless - and Vincent pressed their mouths together, anchoring them both before the world could claw them back apart.

The kiss wasn’t clean. It wasn’t soft. It was desperate, unsteady - teeth knocking, breath stuttering - the kind of kiss you give when you don’t know if you’ll live through tomorrow and don’t care, as long as you get this one thing first.

Vincent kissed him like breathing. Like grounding. Like he’d waited too long to come home to this.

Alastor kissed him back like a man who had been starving for touch and only just realised it. His hands fisted in Vincent’s coat, yanking him closer, like he thought Vincent might vanish if he didn’t anchor him fast enough.

When they broke apart, it wasn’t clean either. Their foreheads stayed pressed together, coats rustling where they clung, both of them panting like they’d been holding their breath for weeks.

Vincent moved first - not pulling back, just shifting enough to wrap his arms around Alastor’s waist. Pulled him in tight, chest to chest, heart to heart. Grounding them both before the war could creep in again.

Alastor clung back like he’d never learned how to do anything else. Buried his face against Vincent’s shoulder. Breathed him in like it was the only thing still tethering him to the world.

Vincent didn’t speak. Didn’t push. Didn’t ask for anything more.

He just held him. Let the silence stretch, this time warm instead of raw - thick with meaning, but no longer with fear.

Minutes passed. Maybe more. Time bent in places like this. Folded in on itself until all that remained was breath and warmth and the weight of two people not letting go.

When Alastor finally pulled back, it wasn’t far. Just enough to look at him - face open in a way Vincent had never seen before. Raw. Unguarded. Present.

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Alastor rasped. His voice sounded like it had been dragged up from a pit. “I thought if they didn’t have reason to look-”

“You’re hurting me now,” Vincent said. Quiet. Certain. “By staying away.”

Alastor shut his eyes tight. A breath rattled out of him. His hands twitched at Vincent’s back, like he wanted to let go and couldn’t.

Vincent lifted one hand. Brushed a thumb along his cheek. Not pushing. Just… offering. Steady as he could make it.

Alastor opened his eyes. Met his gaze - really met it - for the first time in weeks.

Vincent held it. Didn’t flinch.

“We’re runners,” he said softly. “We’re always moving. There’s no one to whisper if they don’t see us twice.”

Alastor’s throat moved. A tight, painful swallow. But he didn’t argue.

“And even if they do…” Vincent’s voice cracked. He pushed through it anyway. “I don’t care. I’m tired of pretending I don’t miss you. I’m tired of pretending you’re not-”

He stopped. Chest tight. Breath catching. The words stuck somewhere behind his ribs, too sharp to name.

Alastor’s hands gripped the back of his coat. Pulled him in like the truth was already there between them and didn’t need to be said aloud.

He leaned in again - slower this time, cautious, like asking permission with every inch - and Vincent met him halfway. Pressed their foreheads together. Noses bumped. Breath mingled.

When he spoke, it was a whisper. Not a declaration. Not a promise. A fact.

“You’re mine.”

Alastor made a sound - quiet and broken - and nodded once against him, like he couldn’t have spoken even if he’d tried.

They stayed like that, pressed close while the storehouse groaned softly around them. The cold wind hissed through the broken walls but didn’t touch them - not here. Not where they held fast.

Eventually, they sank to the floor - coats tangled, boots nudging each other - and curled in together like animals in a den. Not hiding. Just surviving the only way they could.

Vincent drew Alastor in against his chest, cradling the back of his head, fingers threading gently through his hair. Felt the way his breathing finally began to settle, slow and steady, like something in him had stopped running.

He didn’t ask for words. Didn’t need them.

This was enough. This closeness. This being.

He pressed a kiss to Alastor’s temple and tightened his hold when he felt Alastor shudder in response, like the last of the tension was giving up at last.

Outside, the war muttered and stirred. But it didn’t reach them here.

Here, there was only this: breath and heartbeat. Silence and skin. The fragile, fierce tether they had nearly lost but hadn’t.

Not yet.

Not ever, if Vincent had anything to say about it.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

It broke him, how quickly he folded. How much he needed it. How much he needed him.

The kiss landed like a fall - sudden, graceless, inevitable. No heat. No careful shaping of mouths. Just the raw, staggering collision of two men who had run out of ways to survive apart.

Vincent’s hands twisted in his coat - not pulling him closer, just holding him there. Like he might be swept away by wind or memory if Vincent didn’t anchor him. Alastor clung back without thought, hands clutching blindly at damp wool and fraying seams, seeking nothing but the proof that they were still here. Still breathing. Still real.

When they broke apart, it wasn’t clean. Their foreheads bumped, breath stuttered. Coats rasped where they trembled with the aftershock.

He didn’t pull away.

He couldn’t.

Somewhere beneath the wreck of fear and instinct, he remembered how to flinch. How to be sharp-edged, small, uncatchable. But not here. Not with Vincent’s arms around him, a tether that didn’t tighten but refused to let go. Not with a heartbeat pressed against his ribs - steady, insistent, alive.

He froze at first, every muscle locked. Then - inch by inch, breath by breath - he let go. Sagged forward like a man finally collapsing after holding a line for too long.

His forehead dropped to the curve of Vincent’s shoulder. The coat scratched his cheek. The smell of dirt, oil, and that stubborn thread of cheap soap tangled in his breath.

It shouldn’t have mattered. None of it should have mattered.

But God, it did.

He gripped the back of Vincent’s coat like a drowning man gripping driftwood, breath hitching in short, broken bursts against his neck. Vincent’s heart thudded wild beneath his hands - solid and defiant - and it undid something deep in Alastor that had held out longer than it should’ve.

He didn’t know how long they stood there. Minutes. Hours. He could’ve missed a whole war and not noticed.

Eventually, Vincent moved - gentle, and grounding - and eased them both toward the floor.

Alastor followed without thought. Sank into the cold dirt beside him. Their coats tangled. Boots scraped stone. The world narrowed to warmth and weight and the closeness of another body that wasn’t trying to take anything away from him.

Vincent settled first, back to the wall, arms loose but open. Not demanding. Just there. A place to land.

Alastor didn’t remember deciding to move closer. He only knew that he did. That his body folded in without hesitation, tucking his knees close, burying himself in Vincent’s hold like something half-starved for warmth and too far gone to pretend otherwise.

He pressed his face to the curve of Vincent’s throat and let go. Let the tension bleed out of him in trembling waves.

It was unbearable.

It was terrifying.

It was the first thing that had felt real in weeks.

Vincent’s fingers found his hair, threading through it gently, reverently, like he was soothing a wounded animal. He didn’t speak. Didn’t ask for anything. He just stayed.

Alastor squeezed his eyes shut.

He didn’t deserve this. Not after the space he’d forced between them. Not after carving silence like a trench between their hearts. Not after making Vincent doubt himself - doubt them - just because Alastor hadn’t known how to say what mattered before it was too late.

And yet… here they were.

Still here. Still alive. Still reaching.

The cloth sat pressed against his chest, tucked inside his coat, right where he’d kept it. He could feel the shape of it even now. And when Vincent shifted, he felt the scrape of the matchbox from his pocket - a sound so familiar it could have been a name. A vow. Proof they had never really let go.

He swallowed against the weight of everything unsaid. Every truth he didn’t know how to give voice to. Then, slowly, he shifted his hand, searching until his fingers brushed Vincent’s, curled against his side. He laced them together without speaking.

Vincent squeezed back immediately. No hesitation. No demand.

Just being.

Alastor turned his face slightly, breathing in the warm, unmistakable scent of him, and realised that he would let the world burn to keep this moment safe.

That he already had.

That he would do it again.

Vincent shifted just enough to press a kiss to the crown of his head. Soft. Unspoken. Precious.

Alastor bit back a sound - half sob, half gasp - and pressed closer, as if he could disappear into Vincent’s warmth, as if he could outrun the enormity of what he felt by tucking it into skin.

Outside, the war rattled on. The grind of boots. The rumble of artillery. The machine chewing bone into mud.

But it didn’t find them here.

Not yet.

Not while they held each other like this.

Not while they remembered how to breathe together.

Alastor didn’t know how long they stayed there. Long enough for the cold to creep through the floor. Long enough for his back to ache from the strange weight of safety. Long enough to imagine, just barely, that maybe they had a future tucked somewhere inside this ruin.

Eventually, the words found him - rough, raw-edged, dragged up through grit and silence.

He didn’t lift his head. Didn’t loosen his hold. He just whispered it into the space between collarbone and breath, so soft the war couldn’t hear:

“I’m sorry.”

Vincent’s hand tightened in his hair. Not forgiveness. Not a demand for more. Just a grounding touch that said, you don’t have to say it.

But Alastor had to.

He needed him to know. That he’d been afraid. That he still was. But that he was here.

Still here.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

The cold woke him first.

It seeped in slow, worming through the cracks in the battered roof, settling into the earth under their bodies. His knees ached. His spine protested every shallow breath. His fingers, still curled in Alastor’s coat, had long since gone numb.

But he didn’t move.

Not yet.

Not while Alastor was still pressed so tightly against him, breath stirring the folds of his collar, one hand fisted stubbornly in the fabric of Vincent’s shirt like he might drift away if he let go.

Outside, the war muttered and groaned - the distant pop of rifle fire, the low, dragging shouts of a shift change somewhere further down the line - but none of it had touched them here. Not yet. Not while the world had forgotten them for a little while longer.

Vincent let his eyes close again, just for a moment. Breathed in the slow, uneven rise and fall of the body against his. Alastor smelled of earth and damp wool and something older - something stubborn and sharp and familiar in a way that made Vincent's chest ache.

For the first time in weeks, maybe longer, he didn’t feel like he had to brace himself for loss the moment he opened his eyes.

Alastor was here.

Still here.

Still holding on.

Vincent shifted minutely, his arm tightening around Alastor’s back. He felt a soft huff of breath against his neck - not quite a protest, not quite a waking - just a wordless acknowledgment of the movement. The grip on his shirt tightened briefly, then eased again.

He could have stayed like this forever, if the world would have allowed it. But even in this stolen space, reality pressed close around the edges. Orders. Duties. The knowledge that someone would notice if two runners didn’t show up where they were supposed to be by midday.

Gently, carefully, Vincent lifted one hand - the one not trapped under Alastor’s body - and brushed his knuckles lightly against the back of Alastor’s neck. A small, grounding touch. A reminder that they were still here. That he wasn’t asking for anything more than this.

Alastor stirred properly this time - a slow, reluctant shift - his fingers tightening once more in Vincent’s shirt before loosening, not pulling away but adjusting, as if he’d only just remembered his own body existed outside of the shelter they’d made together.

Vincent smiled against the cold fabric of his coat.

When he spoke, his voice was low. Rough with sleep and cold and everything they hadn’t said the night before.

“Morning.”

It wasn’t a question. Just an offering.

Alastor grunted something that might have been a greeting. Or a complaint. Or a word too tired to form properly. Vincent took it anyway.

He shifted again, easing them both up inch by careful inch, until they were sitting against the broken wall instead of lying crumpled in the dirt. Alastor allowed it - sluggish, blinking slowly like the sunlight filtering through the gaps above them was a physical thing he had to push through to move.

Vincent looked at him properly for the first time since waking. His hair was flattened awkwardly against one side of his head. His coat was streaked with mud. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with exhaustion.

And he was still, impossibly, breathtakingly here.

Vincent lifted a hand again - slower this time, careful to give space if it was needed - and brushed a few strands of hair back from Alastor’s forehead.

Alastor blinked at him - slow, dazed - but didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away.

For a moment, they just breathed together, matching each other’s shallow, uncertain rhythms. Then Alastor moved - tiny, almost invisible - tipping his head forward until it rested, heavy and trusting, against Vincent’s shoulder once more.

Vincent closed his eyes. Let it anchor him.

He knew it couldn’t last. Not forever. The war didn’t allow forever.

But maybe it could last long enough to get them through today. And tomorrow. And every battered, broken day after that until they were out of this place and into something new. Something better. Something they could build for themselves, one breath, one step, one stubborn heartbeat at a time.

He let himself believe it. Just for a moment.

When they finally rose - slow, stiff, reluctant - it was with a kind of unspoken coordination that hadn’t needed words in weeks. They gathered their scattered gear with numb fingers, adjusted their coats against the chill, checked the packet of orders crumpled in Vincent’s satchel to make sure it hadn’t been lost in the night.

Alastor didn’t speak as he slung his pack over his shoulder. But as he moved past, his hand brushed Vincent’s arm, a simple, silent acknowledgment of presence.

Vincent smiled - small and private - and adjusted his own pack with a grunt of effort, falling into step beside him.

The path back wound through the battered outskirts of the line, the ground soft and treacherous underfoot. The cold crept higher with every step. So did the sounds of the war - sharper now, more insistent, no longer muted by the shelter of the ruins.

By the time they reached the edge of the main trench, the world had hardened again around them.

Not physically. The boards still sagged underfoot, slick with last night’s rain. The wire still looped low and mean across the breaks in the line. The air still smelled of mud and metal and old fear.

But something had shifted all the same.

Vincent tightened his coat around himself and kept close to Alastor’s shoulder. Not touching - they couldn’t, not here - but close enough that if he stretched his hand out sideways, he could have brushed the back of Alastor’s sleeve.

He didn’t. But the knowledge sat there between them, steady and solid, like a bridge they both knew how to cross now if they had to.

They passed a cluster of men crouched around a heating brazier, smoke curling thin and blue into the frozen morning air. One of them looked up - not long, not sharp, just long enough to register something.

Vincent caught it. Felt the weight of it settle low in his gut.

He hadn’t thought about it before - not properly. He had spent so long keeping his head down in the ways he knew: good student then good soldier, the kind of son his mother could brag about to her friends without worrying what the neighbours might say.

Quiet. Unsocial. Safe.

He had trained himself to see the big dangers - the mortar shells, the machine guns, the cracked bones and shrapnel wounds. But he hadn’t seen this kind of threat coming - the smaller one, the quieter one, carried on glances and lowered voices and the easy cruelty of men looking for someone else to hurt.

He had been foolish.

Not for choosing Alastor, never for that. But for believing, even for a little while, that surviving the war would be the hardest part of this.

He knew better now.

He tucked the knowledge into the place where he carried all his other lessons - the ones he didn’t speak aloud, the ones stitched into the seams of his uniform and the backs of his hands.

Keep moving. Keep small. Keep careful.

But don’t let go.

Never that.

Vincent let his breathing settle. Let the tension bleed back into something he could carry.

At the next bend, the trench narrowed to single file. Alastor went ahead - not far, not fast - and Vincent followed close enough that if he needed to, if anything so much as twitched wrong, he could reach him again in half a breath.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Eastern Sector – Late September, 1918

The trench swallowed them again without ceremony.

One moment, they were moving side by side through open ground, boots scraping mud, breath fogging the pale morning air. The next, the walls closed in - wet boards pressing close, wire snagging low across corners, the stench of damp and rust and human fear settling back into his lungs like it had never left.

Alastor adjusted his satchel against his hip and kept walking, shoulders hunched slightly against the cold. Vincent matched his pace without needing a word - half a step back, always within reach, just like before.

Except it wasn’t like before. Not anymore.

Before had been distance. Silence carved sharp to protect what they couldn’t name. Before had been the ache of keeping Vincent alive by pretending he didn’t want him at all.

Now...

Now, Alastor could feel him. The steady, stubborn heat of him at his side. The way their steps fell into rhythm without thinking. The quiet gravity that pulled at him every time Vincent shifted closer on a narrow board or braced himself on a cracked support post.

Alastor didn’t need to look to know he was there.

He just knew.

A few men glanced up as they passed a junction where the wall had collapsed into a shallow pool of brackish water. Alastor caught the flick of a gaze - quick, assessing, sliding off them like a stone skipping water - and tucked the awareness into the back of his mind where he kept all the other useful things he didn’t allow to show on his face.

Keep moving. Keep your head down. Keep your hand steady.

But he didn’t widen the space between them.

He didn’t quicken his pace.

He didn’t pretend not to notice when Vincent’s coat brushed his at a narrow turn, or when their boots struck the same stretch of warped board in perfect, deliberate synchrony.

Let them look, he thought, heart ticking slow and sure behind the battered cloth pressed against his ribs. Let them wonder.

He had spent too long thinking he could outrun what he wanted. Thinking he could tuck it away under silence and duty and careful distance and survive that way.

He wasn’t sure if this - this fragile signal they had between them - would be enough to carry them through what was still coming.

But it was all he had left.

And he would hold to it - bleeding, breaking, burning - because there was no part of him left that could let go and still call itself alive.

Vincent shifted beside him, lifting a hand to steady a loose plank where it jutted dangerously across the path. His fingers brushed the wood - light, sure - and the simple, careless grace of the motion hit Alastor harder than any shellblast.

He adjusted his stride without thinking, letting his coat brush against Vincent’s sleeve just once - a silent echo of last night’s confessions, of the way their bodies had tangled together in the dirt like roots refusing to be torn free.

Vincent didn’t react outwardly. Just kept moving.

But Alastor saw the way his shoulders loosened. The way his fingers relaxed on the edge of his coat. The way he leaned in, fractionally, into the space between them instead of away from it.

And for the first time in too many months, Alastor felt something flicker inside him that wasn’t cold or anger or the dull ache of loneliness gnawed too deep to name.

It felt like hope.

He didn’t trust it. He wasn’t stupid.

Hope out here got men killed faster than bullets. Made them slow. Made them soft. Made them forget the world would sooner grind them down to mud than let them walk away clean.

But still -

Still, he found himself thinking - if they could just hold out a little longer, a few months more - if they could make it through the winter, if the line held, if the damned officers didn’t waste them in one more senseless push -

Maybe.

Maybe there could be something after this.

He caught himself imagining it: A train pulling into a cracked, sun-bleached station. The rattle of boots on dry boards. Vincent standing awkwardly on the platform, coat slung over one shoulder, squinting into the heavy southern heat.

And him - Alastor - leading the way down the overgrown path to a small, leaning grave on a hill just outside the parish fence. The stones half-sunk into the clay, the wild magnolia blooming thick in the ditches where no one bothered to pull it back anymore.

He pictured himself kneeling there, brushing the leaves from the name he hadn't spoken aloud in years. Pictured Vincent beside him - hat in his hands, solemn and quiet, because he would understand without being told that some things weren't for speaking over.

And maybe - maybe - he’d say it then. Soft. Careful. A benediction more than a confession.

Mama, this is him. This is the one I chose.

He didn’t know if he believed in ghosts. He didn’t know if there was anything left after the world was done chewing you up and spitting you out.

But if anyone ought to know Vincent - if anyone ought to see how fiercely, how stupidly, how entirely he loved Alastor - it should be her.

He bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood and forced his focus back to the boards underfoot.

Not yet.

They had to survive this first. They had to survive today.

But the thought stayed, stubborn and living, tucked away behind his ribs like a seed he didn’t dare crush just yet.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —

Northern France – Near Sector Twelve – Early October, 1918

The map didn’t match the ground anymore.

Too many craters. Too many shifts in the line. Too many places that were supposed to be supply paths or comms junctions and were now just long, splintered ditches filled with water and wire and broken boards.

But it didn’t matter.

Vincent could still find his way. As long as Alastor stayed close, he always could.

They were running messages again - long ones, stitched between listening posts and battered outposts that hadn’t seen a resupply in four days. The line was stretched thin and tired, more patchwork than strategy now. There was talk of another push soon - not from anyone official, but in the way men spoke when they didn’t want to believe they knew something.

Vincent didn’t ask. He didn’t need to.

He knew what it meant when runners were being sent deeper, not forward. He knew what it meant when the quartermaster was down to handing out rusted tins with no labels and saying “just heat it, you’ll know by the smell.”

But he also knew the sound of Alastor’s boots behind him - the exact way they fell on wet boards, quick and quiet and steady. He knew the way Alastor’s coat flared slightly when he walked, and how his fingers brushed the edge of Vincent’s sleeve when they passed through narrow turns - never enough to be noticed, always enough to be felt.

They hadn’t spoken much since leaving the signal tent that morning. There hadn’t been time. But they hadn’t needed it either.

Vincent handed over the packet at the second post just before noon, fingers cold through his gloves, breath fogging pale against the wind. The corporal barely glanced at them before shoving a new folded slip into his hand and waving them on with a grunt.

He didn’t look at Alastor at all.

Vincent didn’t decide whether that was good or bad. Just tucked the paper into the pouch on his chest and kept moving.

Alastor fell into step beside him - not ahead, not behind - and they walked together along the bend of the trench where the wall had slumped into itself and the mud came up past their ankles.

At the end of it, when the boards resumed and the slope dipped low, Alastor reached out without a word and caught Vincent’s arm - just for a moment, just enough to steady him as he climbed up.

His grip was warm even through the gloves. Firm. Real.

Vincent didn’t thank him. Didn’t need to. Just squeezed back once before letting go.

They moved quieter after that. Not because they were avoiding sound but because there was nothing that needed saying. The path ahead curved through a stretch of earth Vincent didn’t recognise. There were no trenches here, just the remains of old shellholes and a slumped communications tower half-swallowed by soil.

Alastor led the way now, boots careful on the stones. He didn’t ask Vincent to follow. He didn’t need to.

And Vincent - for the first time in a long time - let his eyes drift up, let them linger on Alastor’s coat, the twist of his shoulders, the way his breath curled white in the still morning air. Not calculating distance. Not watching for flinches or changes in pace.

Just watching.

Just letting himself look.

They stopped to rest when the wind picked up - huddled in a narrow ridge carved by rainfall and shell blasts, mostly sheltered from sight. Vincent eased down onto a broken beam, unstrapped the satchel from across his chest, and stretched his arms until his back popped.

Alastor crouched nearby. Passed him the last of the tea from his canteen without a word.

It tasted like rust and cold and something close to comfort.

Vincent handed it back with a quiet “thanks,” and Alastor nodded, just once, and leaned back against the slope beside him. Their shoulders didn’t quite touch. But they could have. Easily. And that was enough.

The world felt quieter here. Still dangerous, still fraying at the edges - but slower. Like they’d found a pause in the war that didn’t belong to anyone else.

Vincent let his eyes fall half-closed. Let his head tilt just a little toward Alastor’s warmth.

And when Alastor’s knee bumped his in passing - not hard, not intentional, just a shift of weight - he didn’t pull away.

He smiled.

He was tired. Everything still ached. The line might break again tomorrow. But for now, they had each other. They were still here. Still moving.

Still choosing.

— Alastor —

Northern France – Near Sector Twelve – Early October, 1918

They set off again when the wind changed - a sudden sharp gust that brought with it the stench of cordite and rot from somewhere east.

Alastor stood first, rolling his shoulders, stretching the stiffness from his arms. His legs ached in that dull, persistent way that no longer felt worth noting. Everything hurt these days. The trick was knowing which pain mattered.

Vincent rose beside him, slower, brushing mud from the hem of his coat with one gloved hand. He didn’t speak. Just adjusted the satchel across his chest and glanced at Alastor like a question that didn’t need asking.

Alastor answered with a nod. Then started walking.

The path narrowed where the hill dipped into a natural break in the terrain. Old barbed wire jutted from the earth like ribs. A dead signal pole leaned at a crooked angle, snapped clean midway up, its cables long since scavenged or swallowed by the ground.

They picked their way carefully through it, boots sinking into damp clay. The silence between them wasn’t heavy - not anymore. Just worn smooth by routine. Safe.

Alastor listened to the rhythm of their steps. To the brush of cloth. To the soft hitch in Vincent’s breath when the incline steepened.

It calmed him more than it should have.

He knew better than to trust any quiet that lasted too long. Still, he let his eyes drift over - just for a second - watching the way Vincent moved now: not stiff, not uncertain, but steady. Braced against the world, but no longer braced against him.

And God, that did something to him, something low and strange and warm in a way he didn’t have the language for.

He’d spent so long guarding his want - armouring it with sarcasm and silence and the sharp edge of a smile that meant nothing.

But this - this closeness, this trust, this everyday withness - it stripped something out of him he hadn’t meant to give.

He wasn’t sure he wanted it back.

They paused again by a downed supply cart, long since picked clean. The canvas still fluttered where the wind caught its tattered edges. Alastor crouched beside it, checked the tread marks leading off toward the eastern bluff - a familiar sign, something to orient by.

When he straightened, he caught Vincent watching him.

Nothing sharp in it. No demand. Just watching. Like the sight of him was something worth keeping track of.

Alastor didn’t look away.

Instead, he reached into his coat - slowly, deliberately - and pulled out a folded strip of cloth. Not the stitched one. Not that. That lived too close to his chest, too deep to be shown so easily.

This was something else.

Old. Frayed. Torn at the edge. It had once been a piece of his mother’s apron. The last one she wore before she got sick. He’d torn it up after she died because something about seeing it hanging there - sun-bleached and unchanged - had made him feel like the world hadn’t noticed she was gone.

He hadn’t looked at it in years.

But he’d carried it. Folded and folded again, hidden in the lining of his inside pocket. A superstition, maybe. Or a weight he didn’t know how to set down.

Now, he pressed it into Vincent’s hand without a word.

Vincent blinked, startled - not because he didn’t want it, but because Alastor had never offered him anything like this before. Not so plainly. Not without ceremony or deflection.

Alastor didn’t explain. Didn’t try to soften it. Just met his eyes and said, quietly, “For luck.”

Vincent looked down at the scrap of cloth in his hand - thin and stained with time - and then back up at Alastor, and something in his face went soft in a way that made Alastor’s heart stutter.

“Thank you,” Vincent said.

Simple. Sincere.

And then he tucked it into the inner seam of his coat, near where the matchbox lived, like it belonged there.

They didn’t speak again for a while.

They didn’t need to.

But Alastor walked just a little closer after that. Just close enough to feel the brush of Vincent’s coat when the wind shifted. Just close enough that if something broke again - if the world cracked, if the sky fell, if the line dissolved into blood and smoke - he could still reach him.

And maybe, just maybe, hold on.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —
Near Sector Twelve – Northern France – Late October, 1918

It started with pressure.

Not from the air, not from the ground, but from the kind of silence that meant something had shifted. Something vital. Something wrong.

The clouds hung low and heavy, wool-thick with rain, the trenchboards slick with frost and rot. October made everything slower. Heavier. Men moved like ghosts now, breath rising in pale clouds, eyes ringed dark with too many nights unslept.

Vincent knew this stretch. Had run it twice already this week. A relay post just beyond the ridge, then down to the munitions line near the collapsed tower. Easy work. Routine.

So why had his chest gone tight?

He glanced sideways.

Alastor was walking close - coat collar turned high, gloved hands in his pockets, eyes fixed ahead with that same quiet precision he always had when working. They hadn’t spoken much that morning. There hadn’t been a need. The cold made conversation stiff, and silence came naturally and comfortably. Lived-in and familiar.

Their boots scuffed against the boards, slow and careful. The path narrowed, dipping briefly before rising again toward the ridge. A snag of old wire dragged across the edge, and Vincent stepped just slightly too far left, catching the toe of his boot.

He stumbled.

Before he could find his balance, Alastor’s hand was there - low and steady - catching his elbow with that quiet, wordless ease he always had when it came to Vincent. Like he'd been waiting to do it.

Vincent straightened, breath fogging the air between them.

Alastor’s hand lingered for half a second longer than necessary. Then it slid away, fingers gently brushing the inside of Vincent’s wrist as it went. Not an accident.

Vincent didn’t say thank you. Didn’t smile.

He just reached out as they moved and let the backs of their gloves brush again. Light. Barely there. But there.

Alastor didn’t pull away.

That was the moment Vincent remembered, later.

That tiny touch, warm through the wool and the cold. Like a secret passed between them without words.

Suddenly, there was a sound like the sky tearing open. Loud and impossible to ignore.

Not just near. Too near.

The air cracked - split down the middle like bone under pressure - and the ground bucked like it wanted to turn inside out.

Vincent dropped instantly, muscle memory overriding thought. His hands hit first, skidding on frost-slick boards. His knee slammed against the edge with a crack that might’ve been bone, might’ve been the trench shifting beneath him.

Then came the blast.

The ridge ahead vanished.

Not just obscured - erased - in a wall of light and dirt and thunder. A sheet of noise that flattened the sky. Smoke surged up like a hand closing over the world.

Vincent shoved upright, disoriented, lungs seizing around a mouthful of cold ash and cordite. His ears were screaming - no sound but static - and his first breath was already a curse.

He barely saw the motion.

Just a blur. A coat. A shape.

Alastor, slamming into him.

Not out of panic. Not confusion. Deliberately.

A full-body shove - flat-palmed and brutal, aimed straight at his chest. A final, surgical move.

Vincent flew backwards from the force, his boots slipping out from under him as he hit the trench wall hard, the splintered wood and packed earth catching him like a trap. His ribs lit up in pain. Something twisted sharply in his shoulder. The wind was knocked from his lungs before he could scream.

The boards beneath him groaned.

He hit the ground in a collapse of limbs and air and noise, his back slammed flat against frozen boards, the wind knocked clean from his chest. For a second, everything vanished. No sky. No breath. Just the ringing - high, sharp, and endless - like someone had torn the frequency out of the world.

Through the haze, he saw Alastor.

Thrown from the ground by the shockwave like a paper figure. His coat flared once in the blast, then folded. His arms hung limp. His legs twisted mid-air. And then he disappeared behind the plume - smoke and soil and fire swallowing him whole.

Vincent made a sound - hoarse, broken - no language to it, just the sound grief made when it didn’t yet have a shape.

He clawed at the trench wall, nails biting wood, trying to rise.

Another blast came.

Not as close, but close enough. The boards beneath him shook like teeth in a jaw. Dust rained from the struts overhead. Mud sloughed off the trench walls, thick and wet and heavy, clinging to his legs and dragging him down. His gloves tore open on something jagged.

Still, he fought to stand.

The air was blinding now - grey smoke curling like hands, pulling at his lungs, choking the light from the morning. It stank of death. Of scorched blood and melted flesh and ruptured metal. The kind of stink that clung to skin and lived in your teeth.

“ALASTOR!”

He screamed it like it might part the smoke. Like the force of it could stitch the shattered world back together.

No answer.

No figure in the haze. No voice. Just the roar of the wind over cratered boards and the echo of his own desperation.

Vincent shoved forward - staggering, sliding - boots slipping in slurry, heart thudding like gunfire. His ribs ached. His vision stung. The trench narrowed around him. Every shadow was a body. Every scrap of coat a corpse.

“Al-” he gasped, lungs clawing for breath. “Alastor-!”

Nothing.

Just the silence between strikes. The place where sound went to die.

He caught sight of the wall - splintered where Alastor had stood. Blood smeared in a sharp red streak down the wood. Mud churned where boots had been. The ground was ruptured. Violated. Something holy torn up by iron.

Vincent stumbled forward, reckless now, arms out, shoulder slamming the trench side as he fought through the smoke. His eyes streamed. His throat burned.

And still he searched.

He can’t be gone.

He can’t be-

Then-

A shape.

Crushed against the wall. Legs twisted beneath him. One arm sprawled like a rag doll. His coat was soaked so dark with blood it looked almost black, plastered to his chest, smeared with ash.

Alastor.

Vincent let out a cry - a horrible, wet sound - and lurched forward, slipping to his knees in the mud. He crawled the last stretch, unthinking, just movement and noise and sheer force of will.

“Please-” his voice cracked as he reached out. “Please, come on-”

Then - arms caught him.

Two men, shouting, grabbing, dragging him back. Medics. Uniformed ghosts with blood already on their hands. One seized his shoulder. The other reached for his chest.

“Let go!” Vincent roared, thrashing, teeth bared. “Let me get to him-!”

But they didn’t listen.

They pulled. Forced him away. Alastor’s body was already being swallowed by the smoke again.

“He’s gone!” one barked. “You’ll get yourself killed-”

“No-NO-”

He kicked, shoved, twisted. His legs slipped in the blood-wet mud. But the arms held firm. He was dragged, screaming, away from the one thing in the world he couldn’t bear to lose.

And as the trench bent around the slope and the smoke closed in, the last thing he saw was a now pale hand, glove blown clean off, lying slack in the mud.

Unmoving.

Unheld.

Gone.

— Alastor —
Near Sector Twelve – Northern France – Late October, 1918

The boards beneath their boots groaned with every step, damp and swollen from frost, warped by rot and too many months of being walked on by men who didn’t come back. The trench dipped ahead, a shallow curve cut into the earth by rain and retreat, its shape familiar now. Muscle memory carried Alastor forward. Every step precise. Every glance measured. He didn’t stumble anymore. He’d trained himself out of it.

He heard Vincent falter before he saw it - just the slightest hitch in breath, a scuff of leather on warped wood.

Alastor reached out on instinct.

Elbow first. Then a firm catch at the wrist. Not grabbing. Not holding. Just enough to steady him.

Vincent righted himself with a quiet exhale, and for a moment, their faces turned toward one another, breath clouding faint between them.

Alastor smiled. Didn’t speak. He let his hand fall again, slower than necessary, his glove brushing the inside of Vincent’s wrist on the way down. A whisper of contact. A deliberate thing passed in silence.

Vincent answered.

Not boldly. Just a touch - knuckles grazing his coat, fingers brushing along the line of his glove before falling away.

Barely anything.

But there.

And it lit something in Alastor’s chest he didn’t have words for. Not yet. Maybe not ever. That kind of warmth had no place here. Not among boards slick with mud and the smell of rain-soured gunpowder. But he felt it. He always had.

Dangerous, that kind of warmth. Dangerous, because he’d never been good at letting himself want. Not really. But he wanted this, wanted him.

Even if he hadn’t said the words aloud, they beat behind his ribs every time he saw the curve of Vincent’s mouth in the cold, every time his hands shook after a close call and he hid it by lighting a cigarette too quickly. The words lived in him now. Quiet and clawing and unspoken.

He could say them later.

Later, when-

A noise split the sky.

Not a shell. Not mortars. Not grounded.

This came from above.

His head snapped up.

Shapes. Three of them. Distant but growing. Not birds. Not clouds.

Planes.

Low. Fast. Armed. Swooping down from the north with a sickening inevitability.

His mouth opened - to shout, to warn, to run - but the blast hit first.

Too late.

The ridge ahead erupted - dirt, fire, splinters - and Alastor didn’t hesitate.

He turned and shoved. Both hands flat against Vincent’s chest. All his weight behind it. No hesitation. No calculation. Just the one thing that mattered: Get him clear.

He felt the force of it ripple through his arms - the resistance of Vincent’s body, the wild surprise in his eyes as he was thrown backward. Saw the sudden flail of limbs, the helpless stagger as Vincent hit the slush behind him, hard. His coat snapped in the updraft like a torn banner.

Alastor moved - tried to follow, tried to throw himself down over him, shield what the war hadn’t yet claimed -

He was too slow.

The second blast hit.

Close - immediate - like the world itself had been ripped in half.

Not a thunderclap. Not a warning.

An ending.

Light tore through the sky like a blade. A burst of white and yellow and red so bright it swallowed everything. Heat followed, crushing and full-bodied, surging over him like a wave too wide to outrun. It filled his lungs. His eyes. His bones.

Then, weightlessness.

Alastor’s boots lost the ground. His spine arched mid-air as the blast lifted him like a scrap of paper. For a suspended moment, he floated, suspended against the smoke-thick sky, arms splayed, coat twisting around him like torn wings.

The sky above him wheeled, pale clouds slashing across soot and steam. Colours blurred. Angles fractured.

He didn’t scream. There was no breath to spare. The force had stolen it - ripped it from his lungs like the rest of him.

And then-

The world returned.

Too fast. Too hard.

The ground slammed into him like a freight train. Shoulder first. Then hip. Then skull.

Bone cracked. Something inside him gave - he felt it. A twisting, grinding snap deep in his chest that lit every nerve with fire. Pain roared through him, instant and total, white-hot and mindless.

The trench tilted sideways. Blurred at the edges. Nothing made sense.

Everything was sound and not-sound: the muted thunder of another blast somewhere distant, the groan of twisted wood above him, the sharp, high frequency of his own skull ringing like a bell cracked down the middle.

His body refused to move. Limbs loose and scattered. Chest tight. Ribs seizing. Each breath scraped like broken glass.

Through the roar, through the blood and smoke and too much silence, he could hear voice.

Rough. Frantic.

Calling his name.

Not a hallucination. Not a memory.

Vincent.

Alive.

Still fighting.

Still there.

Relief hit harder than any shell - fierce and violent and final. It flooded him like light after days in the dark, too sharp to hold. It made his eyes burn.

Vincent was alive.

He’d done it. He’d protected him. That was enough.

He didn’t have to move. Didn’t have to run. Didn’t have to survive the next shelling or scrape out another inch of borrowed time from this hell-spat earth.

But he wanted to see him. One last time.

That was all.

Just a glimpse.

He couldn’t lift his head. Could barely feel his fingers. But his neck shifted, just enough. Just far enough to turn his face toward the sound - toward the voice clawing his name from the smoke like it still mattered.

And there he was.

A shape against the ruin. Vincent, crawling forward, eyes wild, lips moving in something close to prayer, blood across his collar, mud on his sleeves, dragging himself hand-over-hand through the wreckage like it might still matter.

Like Alastor might still be saved.

Alastor tried to speak - just a whisper, just a syllable - but no sound came. His mouth opened around the name, dry and empty, like the air had vanished from the world.

Vincent, Vincent, Vincent-

It echoed through him like a heartbeat. The only thing left that felt real.

Pain surged again. A wave. Thick and suffocating. It buckled something inside him. His ribs clenched, and he knew he wouldn’t draw another full breath. Not here. Not now.

The edges of his vision darkened.

He could feel the cloth pressed tight to his chest, right where it had always been.

The one Vincent had stitched by hand. Their names sewn together. A scrap of something gentle in a place that knew nothing of softness.

Still there.

Still his.

And in that final, flickering moment - he held to that. Not certainty. Not peace.

But hope.

That he’d done enough. That Vincent would survive this war.

Then-

Darkness.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —
Northern France – Early November, 1918

There was no body.

Not on the day it happened. Not the day after. Not the days that followed.

Just smoke. Mud. The warped memory of a pale hand lying slack in the dirt, stripped of its glove. And silence. Too much silence.

Vincent searched anyway.

The medics had tried to pull him back to the aid station, citing his injuries - bruised ribs, torn muscles, a concussion they hadn’t quite diagnosed. He let them bind his shoulder, gave them enough limp compliance to keep their attention short. Then he slipped out before dawn the next morning, still mud-slick and half-dressed, teeth chattering from fever he didn’t feel.

He forged a note to explain his absence. Then another. Claimed the relay captain had sent him. That he’d been told to recover gear. That someone had mentioned a missing signal box. A jacket. A scrap of inventory. Anything to buy himself one more morning.

He faked confusion. Faked fever. Faked names. Anything that would keep him near Sector Twelve.

Anything that would keep him close to the last place he’d seen Alastor breathe.

The trench was quieter now. Not abandoned, but close. Some of the men had already rotated out. The boards were half-swallowed by landslip, and the frost had begun to set into the edges of the foxholes. It was colder here than he remembered. Or maybe it just felt colder, now that he was alone.

He returned each morning before the sun, ducking wire and debris, navigating by feel. The blast site had shifted things -displaced wood, cratered the slope. It took time to re-learn it. To find the exact slant where Alastor had stood. The exact wall where blood had streaked like someone had tried to hold him in place and failed.

Vincent crawled along the edges, his coat caked to the elbows, fingers torn raw beneath half-frozen gloves. He dug with his hands when he had to. Pulled up clumps of ash-thick earth and turned them over, as if the body might be waiting just below the surface, untouched by flame. As if war hadn’t been quite thorough enough.

He whispered Alastor’s name as he worked.

Softly. Always softly. Like saying it too loud would break something final.

Some days, the wind stole it straight from his lips. Other days, it echoed back in the silence - just enough to give him hope. Enough to try again.

He found a glove once. Burned nearly through, the edges blackened and stiff. Too big for him. Too long in the fingers.

Another day, he uncovered a pair of glasses - crushed flat into the earth, one lens gone, the other fractured through the middle. The arm was twisted. Bent like it had been stepped on.

Vincent held them in his hands for a long time. Didn’t cry. Didn’t move. Just stared. Until the frost on his gloves melted into the metal and his knuckles throbbed from clenching too tight.

But it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t him.

Not the coat. Not the cloth.

Not Alastor.

The days blurred. His shoulder stiffened, then went numb. He stopped reporting to the mess. Ate only what others offered out of pity or confusion. He stopped writing, too - not that there had ever been anyone to write to.

By the end of the week, the officers caught on.

The front was shifting - contracting, not advancing. Command was getting jittery. The Germans were failing fast, and the lines were being thinned for what might be the final push.

Runners were in short supply. Relay crews even shorter.

Vincent was called in. Not questioned. Just handed orders and told to be on the next transport out. Coastal route. Safer. Rear communications.

He didn’t argue. He just nodded once, eyes too flat to challenge, and walked back to his tent like a man who hadn’t yet remembered how to breathe.

That night, he returned to the trench one last time.

Kneeled in the churned, frozen mud where the last of the smoke had cleared. Ran one gloved hand along the collapsed slope, fingertips skimming the bloodstained wood, the warped metal, the stone that might’ve once been part of a rib.

He didn’t pray, but he stayed there long enough for the frost to cling to the hem of his coat and his breath to stop fogging.

The reassignment didn’t matter.

Nothing did.

Not anymore.

He ran messages in silence.

He didn’t linger at post stations. Didn’t ask who was winning. Didn’t laugh when someone made a joke to cut through the cold. He passed paper between hands like a machine, hands stiff in their gloves, mouth drawn tight.

He ate when forced. Only what others placed directly in front of him. Biscuits that tasted like dust. Broth that scalded his mouth and still didn’t warm him.

He slept in shallow bursts, when his body gave out - always on his side, shoulder screaming, head tucked to chest like it might protect the last fragile parts of him. Every noise startled him half-awake. Every dream ended in fire.

He barely spoke.

Didn’t drink. Refused the hand-rolled cigarettes offered by other runners, even when his fingers trembled to accept them - because Alastor had always rolled any they smoked, and Alastor was gone, and something inside him said it would be a betrayal to take one now.

He just worked.

Moved forward.

As if momentum might trick the world into returning what it had taken. As if if he kept moving fast enough, he’d find himself back in that trench. Just in time. Just before.

But Alastor’s name wasn’t on any list.

He checked.

At first, carefully. A question slipped into conversation. A glance over a manifest.

Then more openly. Desperately.

He hounded the field clerks. Cornered runners outside relay stations. Traded favours for incident logs and cipher sheets. Once, he scaled the steps of a chaplain’s tent and begged him - voice raw - to check the death rolls again. “He might’ve been misnamed,” he said. “Just- please. Check again.”

Nothing.

He chased down field reports. Harassed medics, shouting half-mad over hastily scribbled notes that mentioned an American runner too wounded to move. He found the medic. The man barely remembered. Said the body was likely lost with the rest of that flank.

Vincent screamed at a supply officer who flinched every time he said “missing.” Demanded search logs. Medical records. Letters from families that never came.

The answer was always the same:

No transfer. No capture. No burial.

Nothing.

“Shell must’ve taken him clean,” one corporal shrugged, jaw tight with the ease of someone used to saying it. “Happens more than you’d think. Move on.”

Vincent hit him.

He broke two knuckles. Couldn’t move his hand for days.

Didn’t regret it.

They pulled him off-duty after that. Forced rest, they said. Issued him a cot in a lowland station house and bandaged his fingers with more care than he deserved. Told him to write home.

He didn’t.

What would he say?

That he’d let him die?

That he’d felt the warmth of his hand less than a minute before and hadn’t held on hard enough?

I let him die.
I didn’t hold him long enough. I lost him.

The words ate him alive.

A week passed.

Then came the news.

The war was ending.

There were whispers at first. Rumours carried on wind and wire. But then came the confirmation: an armistice. November. Ceasefire set for the eleventh hour.

Troops would stand down. Communications posts would be dissolved or shifted to civilian efforts. The lines would clear.

The boys cheered. Someone lit a flare that left a green bloom against the pale grey sky. A few of the younger soldiers cried, openly and without shame.

Vincent didn’t move.

He sat on the edge of his cot, fingers wrapped in linen, eyes fixed on the floorboards like they might split open and swallow him whole.

He didn’t feel joy. Or anger. Or even relief.

Just hollow. A body moving without purpose.

Like the only part of him that might have known how to feel had been buried somewhere east of the ridge with no name, no marker, and no one left to mourn him but the boy he’d once pulled out of the mud and kissed like a secret.

The next morning, he packed what little he had.

A signal book. A dented field compass. A matchbox that didn’t belong to him.

Boarded a transport train south with the second wave. Didn’t say goodbye to anyone.

A week later, he stood on the dock in Calais, watching the last of France vanish behind cold morning fog.

The ship took him to London. A train across to Liverpool. Another ship - larger, louder - homebound.

He didn’t remember the crossing.

Didn’t remember customs, or meals, or where he slept.

Only the air when he stepped off the gangplank in New York - sharp and stinking of salt and coal - and the slow, horrible realisation that the ocean hadn’t washed any of it away.

That the war hadn’t ended. Not for him.

That he was still gone.

Somewhere beneath the dirt. Unnamed. Unfound. Unburied.

And Vincent - Vincent who had kissed him in the dark, who had whispered love when no one else dared - had nothing.

No grave.
No letter.
No final words.

Just a matchbox in his pocket. A single, soot-smudged keepsake.

The only proof left that Alastor had ever lived. That he had loved.

And that Vincent, somehow, had survived.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —
California – July 1919

By the time the jacarandas bloomed again, his parents had stopped asking if he was all right.

They asked about school instead. About the university. About the paper he was writing for his advanced transmission course, the lab hours he was clocking soldering feedback coils with burn-stung fingers, the afternoon lectures on modulation theory and electromagnetic harmonics. About the professors who called him promising, precise, exceptionally articulate for someone his age.

They didn’t ask if he slept. Or why he still jumped at thunder. Or why the smell of burning copper made him freeze with his hand halfway to the stove.

He smiled for them. Polished. Clean. The kind of smile that didn’t wrinkle the eyes. The kind that made people feel better without knowing why.

They loved that smile. Said it made him look older. Said they were proud of how he’d grown.

They didn’t realise it was someone else’s.

Vincent had built it from memory - deliberate, sculpted, meant to disarm and distract. A shadow of another man’s mouth. Another man’s ease.

He’d spent weeks after the war trying to remember it in perfect detail. The way Alastor would smile when lying through his teeth. When charming someone dangerous. When hiding something unthinkably precious and pretending it was nothing at all.

It had been careful. Elegant. Practiced. That rare, impossible thing: a kindness that made you feel like you were the one doing the seducing.

Vincent had loved it. Admired it. Wanted it.

So he made it his own.

He watched himself in mirrors now - bedroom, lavatory, shopfronts when no one was looking - learning how to hold tension behind his teeth the same way. How to part his lips just enough to seem unguarded, while his thoughts kept to themselves. How to blink at the right moment. How to raise an eyebrow. How to tilt his head like he was listening, even when he wasn’t.

How to make people laugh while he said nothing real at all.

He was good at it.

Too good.

Even his professors commented on his poise. His clarity. The way he could explain something complicated and make it sound inevitable. His hands never shook when he spoke in front of a room. His voice never faltered. His shirts were pressed. His shoes clean. His timing always perfect.

He didn’t tell them where he’d learned that.

He didn’t tell anyone much of anything.

Sometimes he went out. Never with women - only men. Brief things. Low-lit things. Encounters behind shuttered windows and narrow stairwells, in bars where the piano played too loud and no one looked too closely. Smiles traded like matchflames - quick, hot, bright for a moment, and gone before they left a mark.

Names didn’t matter. Half the time, they didn’t ask.

He let them touch him, sometimes. Let them kiss like they wanted to know him. Like they wanted to be the thing that unbuckled the tightness in his spine.

None of them ever were.

None of them said always like it meant something.

And that was good. Safe. Clean, in its own way.

Because he didn’t belong to anyone anymore.

Not since that final day - when the sky split open, and the only person who’d ever said his name like a promise disappeared into fire.

So he smiled.

And wrote his papers.

And kept the slowly rusting matchbox tucked in the drawer of his desk, just to the left of the voltmeter. Its corners were worn soft from handling. The striker strip had faded to a dull grey. He hadn't opened it in weeks, but the shape of it was carved into his palm from muscle memory.

He didn’t light it anymore.

Just opened it, sometimes. Ran his thumb along the strip. Closed it again. Sat with the silence until the ache passed.

Because the silence still knew him best.

Sometimes, he wrote things down.

Not letters. Not anymore. There was no one left to send them to.

But notes. Fragments. Half-sentences in the margins of lecture pages. Scrawled thoughts between circuit diagrams. He filled notebooks meant for electrical theory with lines that had nothing to do with modulation or frequency.

Static reminds me of your voice.
You’d hate this professor's metaphors. Yours were better
He said “resonance.” I thought of you.
Too much noise today. Can’t think.
Still carrying that matchbox, by the way.
I think we've figured it out, how to send Voices.

He never wrote Alastor’s name, but it was there.

Lurking in every margin. Hanging in every ellipsis. Ghosted into the graphite like his presence had stained the paper. Like the pulse of him still lived in the gaps between signals.

He sometimes found himself tuning to dead stations late at night.

Not for Morse, or the new snippets of voices and music. Just to listen to the static.

To the low, humming noise that filled the corners of the dormitory room when everything else was asleep. He’d lie on his back, one arm flung across his eyes, and let it fill his head. Let it soak down into the softest parts of his chest. Pretended, for a minute, that the frequency might shift. That a voice might bleed through. That Alastor might somehow reappear from the dead and say his name again.

He knew it wouldn’t happen, but he still listened.

He’d always been good with sound. Even before the war. But now? Now it was the only thing that made sense. Machines he could fix. Circuits he could control. When wires sparked and failed, they did it for reasons. Reasons he could chase down and correct with solder and heat and stubbornness.

People were harder.

Their failures were softer. Slower. More like rot than damage. He didn’t know how to fix a man who couldn’t laugh right anymore. Couldn’t correct for the way his parents went quiet when he entered a room too softly. Couldn’t patch over the moment his professor said, “You’ve a way with clarity, Mr Vincent - rare for boys from your side of the city,” and he’d simply smiled instead of correcting him.

He let people see what they wanted to.

Let them assume his life had gone on.

That his grief had been a quiet thing. Private. Dignified. Like the kind of loss polite people didn’t mention at dinner.

He even joined a society club for students in the engineering faculty. Not to socialise - he wasn’t that changed - but to sit in a room with noise. With laughter. With men who wore too much cologne and argued over turntables like it meant something. They made jokes about girls and circuits. Spoke about future postings. Naval commissions. Real salaries.

Vincent nodded at all the right times.

Smiled.

Laughed, sometimes.

But he never mentioned France.

Never mentioned Alastor.

He didn’t cry anymore.

Couldn't.

So he'd learned how to be a man people admired. A voice others trusted. A smile they remembered.

He’d learned how to make himself into something that couldn’t be lost.

Because once - just once - someone had said always and meant it.

And if Vincent couldn’t have the man back, he’d settle for becoming the memory of him.

— Alastor —
New Orleans – December 1919

The spiral didn’t stop, but it slowed.

Not cleanly. Not kindly. It dragged itself out like something dying with its claws still hooked in the soft meat of him, refusing to let go. Some days it eased back gently. Others, it sank its teeth into his ribs and held fast. He learned to breathe again before he learned to eat. Learned to sit still before he remembered how to speak without baring his teeth. There were stretches of days he didn’t leave the room at all. Others when he woke with his cheek in the mud, halfway down the riverbank, shivering and blood-slick and smelling of someone else’s liquor, someone else’s death.

But he stopped hitting people. Mostly.

Stopped drinking until his name evaporated. Not from shame. Not because he felt it was wrong. Simply because it was impossible to work when your hands trembled like wires strung too tight, when your thoughts shattered every time a bottle hit the table.

And eventually - he did work.

It began with sound.

Not with his voice - not yet. Just the guttural cough of radios long dead. Speakers blown out. Dial sets broken at the hinge. He haunted pawn shops and scrap yards with a grease rag tucked in his sleeve and desperation under his fingernails. He found an old cathedral model with its face half-caved in, left to die beneath a tarpaulin behind a thrift shop. It hissed when he moved it. Moaned when jostled. He loved it instantly.

Took it home in a flour sack. Laid it out on the floor like a body. Spent two weeks kneeling over it - bartering for parts, boiling wire in vinegar to strip the rust. He carved calluses into his palms twisting copper, burned through two shirts from solder sparks. When he flipped the switch and the first crackle of static breathed through the speaker like a ghost inhaling, he wept. Quietly. Hunched over, face in his hands, shoulders shuddering with the effort of holding it all in.

It didn’t fix him.

But it gave him something to hear that wasn’t memory.

From there, it built itself like fire rising from a spark. One repair job. Then another. A receiver tuned clean. A friend of a friend who needed something restored. He kept his head down. Wore gloves when he could. Smiled just enough. A polite young man with a damaged leg and a better ear than anyone else in the Quarter.

People started listening.

Not just to the radios. To him.

He didn’t offer much of himself. Never had. But when the technology caught up, he began to broadcast.

Late nights. Shortwave. Illegally, at first - just a ghost of sound at the edge of the dial, the breath before the voice. Then: words. Low. Measured. A smile behind each syllable, audible even when you couldn’t see it. He told stories. Not the safe kind. Not the kind with endings. They were strange, sharp things. All teeth and shadow. Laughter that cut. A voice from the underside of the world, wrapping velvet around something you’d rather not name.

He never gave one. A name, that is.

He didn’t have to.

People knew the voice. That was enough.

And on those nights - when the rain turned the Quarter to glass and the streetlamps buzzed like insects on the verge of dying - he’d lean into the mic like someone was listening. Like someone had always been listening.

He never said the name. Not even then.

But Vincent was there.

In the cadence. In the pause between sentences. In the way his fingers tapped the desk when he was thinking - left index, ring, then a soft thumb-tap. A rhythm stolen from another life, another room, another pair of hands.

Sometimes he tuned dead air on purpose. Let the hiss play through the speaker like breath in a sleeping body. Sat in silence, cigarette smoke winding up past the dial, pretending he might hear it again - that voice. Stubborn. Wicked. Laughing even while bleeding.

He never did.

But he kept the cloth still. Folded beneath his coat. Threadbare now. The stitching worn down to a ghost. He ran his thumb over the edge during broadcasts like it might anchor him. Pressed it to his chest when the stories got too close to the truth.

I love you, Vincent had said.

He had meant it.

Alastor believed him.

But the war hadn’t ended with peace. It ended in silence. In ash and unfinished sentences. And all it had left behind was this.

The edges had always been there - fine as wire, sharp as charm - but grief had refined them. Tempered them. What was once mischief had calcified into menace.

He hadn’t learnt restraint; he’d perfected it.

Not like a man learning to lie. Like a man re-learning his native tongue, one vowel at a time. He filed off the softness. Burnished the cruelty until it gleamed like a blade under moonlight.

He still laughed but now it was hollow, perfectly timed, cut to exact shape. He still teased but now the barbs were deliberate, humour dulled to a threat you didn’t realise until too late. He made jokes like other men lit fuses. Not to defuse them, just to watch them burn.

He’d always been clever but now - now he was exact.

Every word measured. Every smile choreographed. Every silence held just long enough to make someone lean in and wonder what they’d missed.

He held a room like a magician holds breath: tightly. Reluctantly. Always with the implication that something terrible might follow.

And still, in the quiet - beneath it all - he waited. For a voice. For a name. For a promise made under fire and never truly broken, just... unanswered.

Because if Vincent ever found the frequency, if he ever whispered back-

Alastor would hear it. No matter how faint.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —
New Orleans – April 1923

He told himself it wouldn’t matter.

Five years. A new job. A better suit. Shoes that clicked sharp against marble, microphones that warmed to his voice like old friends. He was a name now. A known quantity. Vincent. Clean-cut. Bright-eyed. Trusted on both coasts.

He had everything he was supposed to want.

But New Orleans sat on the itinerary like a fuse.

He’d never been. Not once. Everything he knew about it came from someone else's mouth - low and velvet, half-laughing. Alastor had described the city like it was full of sin and salt, brazen and unforgiving. Vincent used to listen with rapt attention, sharing his own tales of California beaches and slow sunsets. Somewhere far from the trenches, far from them.

But the moment he stepped off the train, he knew exactly where he was.

The heat hit first - wet, clinging. It curled into his collar and didn’t let go. The scent followed: sweet rot, citrus peel, metal, gumbo, smoke. The kind of thick sensory tapestry you could drown in if you weren’t careful.

He didn’t hate it.

But it scared him.

Because it was Alastor’s.

He kept expecting to hear him. To turn a corner and catch that lilt - rich with menace, ridiculous with charm - spinning something into poetry.

The streets were narrower than he’d imagined. The buildings older, hung with iron and dripping flowerboxes. Music oozed from the cracks between doorways: brass, piano, voices like liquor.

He tried to shake it off.

It was just another stop on the tour. One city among many. One more speech, one more handshake, one more chance to flash the smile he’d stolen from a dead man and make it feel like his own.

The network had put him up near Canal Street. Room with a balcony. Too new, too sterile. He didn’t unpack.

His schedule was clipped to a brown folder waiting in the lobby. “Mr Vincent,” the label read - no surname. No prefix. Just the brand. Just the voice.

He didn’t correct them.

He hadn’t corrected anyone in years.

The days passed like static. Morning inspections. Afternoon demonstrations. Dinners with too much brandy and not enough substance. He sat on too many velvet chairs, in too many lounges, listening to executives who liked his voice and didn’t ask where he got it.

Someone joked he ought to take up hosting. Said he had the timbre for it. The rhythm.

Vincent smiled.

The kind that didn’t reach his eyes.

By the third night, he stopped pretending.

The city wouldn’t let him.

He skipped the press dinner. Walked the length of Chartres instead, collar turned up, coat too crisp for the street. His shoes rang against the stone like teeth on a glass. He passed a man playing trumpet with no audience. A woman dancing barefoot in a doorway. A preacher shouting at shadows.

He thought of stories Alastor had told. A bar with no name, where someone got shot on Sundays just for fun. A stairwell that smelled of tobacco and holy water. The taste of gumbo on burnt bread. The laugh he made when talking about it. That laugh that said, Can you believe this place?

Vincent could.

It was loud. It was bright. It was everything Alastor had promised - and Vincent hated how much it felt like him. Like walking into someone else’s chest and finding your own heart in there.

He didn’t remember how far he walked.

But by midnight, he was near Rampart.

The butcher’s shop was gone. Replaced by something with a neon sign and too much polish. The air still buzzed - less smoke now, more perfume. He paused by a lamppost he didn’t recognise but stared at anyway.

This is where he stood, he thought.

He didn’t know if it was true, but he wanted it to be.

The next day was supposed to be the end of the tour. Final stop. A visit to the regional station. Check their modulation alignment. Meet the local tech team. Say something pleasant and forgettable about regional independence, maybe offer to fund a new transmitter if they played the cards right.

Vincent wasn’t expecting anything.

Not really.

He wore his best suit anyway.

Double-breasted, grey-blue, pinned neat at the cuffs. Subtle cufflinks. A tie in a colour someone once told him brought out his eyes. The producer met him in the lobby of the station, a squat little building tucked between a pharmacy and a wine shop, with wrought-iron gates that hadn’t been cleaned in years and ivy trying to devour the windows.

Inside, the air was cool. Dim. Smelled of coil dust and lemon oil.

He liked it.

“Mr Vincent,” the station owner greeted, extending a ring-heavy hand. “Pleasure’s all ours. We don’t often get the big names down this far. Usually it’s New York or Chicago that get all the fuss.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit of fuss,” Vincent said, and smiled like the compliment fit him just right. “Sometimes the best signals come from the smallest towers.”

It landed. The man beamed.

He was short and round and smoked like the war had never ended. The kind of voice that rasped through the teeth. But he had clever eyes, and clearly liked anyone who knew how to flatter without sounding like they were trying.

Vincent let himself glide.

He toured the tech room. Made a few observations. Wrote a note on his itinerary about rechecking their subcarrier bleed. Let himself be caught in soft conversation with a secretary on break, who liked his tie and told him her sister kept pictures of him clipped from the paper.

“Well,” Vincent murmured, brushing her fingers lightly when she passed him a cup of water, “let her know the print doesn’t do me justice.”

The girls giggled. The station owner chuckled. Someone muttered “shameless” with a grin.

It was easy. It was smooth. It was nothing.

But the pull started again.

Like copper under his skin. Like memory pressed too tight against the base of his skull.

“Evening’s host just finished covering a lunchtime slot,” the owner said as they crossed to a hallway lined with frosted glass. “Not one of ours originally. He’s... unique.”

“Is that so?” Vincent asked, lightly.

“Numbers are better than anything I’ve seen in five years. People hang on his every word, but we keep him for local late-night, mostly. He's a bit eccentric for the morning crowd.”

They stopped outside a recording booth.

A red light buzzed dimly overhead.

Inside, the silhouette of a man leaned toward a microphone, one elbow on the desk, his face mostly turned away. Just the edge of a smile. Just a hint of something familiar in the angle of his shoulders.

The red light flicked off with a quiet snap.

The mic cut a second later, the voice trailing out in a hum of static and breath. Vincent stood still, shoulders relaxed by habit, mouth curled in that easy half-smile he wore in places like this - half charm, half performance.

Inside the booth, the silhouette shifted. The man rose with languid precision, one elbow lingering on the desk, a hand trailing lightly over the dial. He moved like someone who knew people were watching. Like someone used to performing restraint.

The station owner opened the door and the man turned.

Not in slow motion - there was nothing cinematic about it - but still, everything else stopped. The hallway behind them, the voice of the station owner, the clatter of distant typewriter keys - gone. Vincent’s breath caught hard in his chest, like something inside him had been jerked backward through time.

It couldn’t be.

But it was.

Alastor looked the same - and completely different. Neater. Sharper. His hair combed with militaristic care. His face gaunter, maybe. Or just older. The smile on his lips was shallow, automatic, already fading as he turned. But his eyes-

Vincent would have known those eyes in the dark.

And for five years, he’d been certain he never would again.

Five years.

Five years of silence. Of loss that had become routine. He had built himself around the absence. Worn that pain like a second skin. He had touched that matchbox and told himself he was gone. Told himself a hundred times that bodies didn’t just disappear without reason unless there was nothing left to find.

He’d believed it.

Except now Alastor stood there in the doorway, still and perfect as a photo pulled from a drawer you swore you’d burned.

Their eyes met, and Vincent’s entire world - his voice, his poise, the persona he’d worn so well - shattered at the edges.

He couldn’t breathe.

His lungs stuttered, locked somewhere between panic and awe, and he didn’t know if the ringing in his ears was leftover feedback or blood rushing to his head.

Alastor hadn’t moved. Not an inch. His eyes held steady - unblinking, unreadable - but something behind them had cracked. Vincent could feel it. A subtle widening. A tremor he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t spent months memorising every micro-expression that face had once offered him in the dark.

Then-

“Oh! You two know each other?” The station owner’s voice barged into the silence like a marching band. He clapped a hand lightly against Vincent’s shoulder, oblivious.

Alastor blinked. A beat too slow. “We fought together.”

His voice didn’t break. Didn’t shake. But it was quiet.

Vincent nodded - too quickly. Too sharply.

“Yeah,” he said, forcing a smile that felt carved from stone. “Yeah, that’s right. We… go back.”

“Well, look at that. Small world, isn’t it?" The station owner beamed, oblivious to the way Vincent’s world had changed.

The air in the booth had gone stifling. Too hot. Too close. His collar was choking him.

Alastor cleared his throat and shifted forward. “Would you mind,” he asked the station owner, all smooth civility, “if we borrowed a moment? Just to… catch up.”

The man beamed. “Of course, of course. You two take all the time you need.” He turned, already rambling something about late-night rotation slots as he disappeared down the hall.

They didn’t speak.

Alastor nodded - once, curt - and Vincent followed him on instinct. Past the reel cabinets. Through a side hall that stank of varnish and stale coffee. A service door slammed behind them, and then-

Outside.

Air.

A back alley behind the station, narrow and half-shaded, flanked by a brick wall and bins that smelled faintly of rust and lemon polish.

Alastor leaned against the wall like his legs might give out, eyes locked onto Vincent.

Vincent stood with both hands braced on his hips, chest rising too fast, eyes still fixed on the man in front of him like blinking might erase him.

Neither of them said anything.

The silence roared.

And then-

“You're here,” Vincent breathed, his voice cracking. “You’re alive.”

— Alastor —
New Orleans – April 1923

Alastor stared at him.

Really stared.

The hair was neater now. The jaw sharper. A line of tension lived beneath the skin that hadn’t been there before, smoothed over with the kind of polish you only earned through grief and keeping too much quiet for too long. He wore a better coat -something tailored, expensive - but not flashy. The shoes gleamed. The voice hadn’t changed.

God, his voice.

Alastor felt it like a bruise pressed too suddenly. It opened something in him he hadn’t known was still soft.

You’re alive.

The words hit like a gunshot and a prayer all at once. Alastor’s breath caught high in his throat and wouldn’t come down. Then, too suddenly to stop, the laugh escaped - sharp, unhinged, scraped raw at the edges from a place just under the ribs.

The laughter died somewhere in his chest, lodged behind a thousand things he hadn’t said in five years.

And then he moved.

No warning. No control. Just motion -fierce and shattering, like something inside had burst its seam and the only way to stitch it back together was to get to him. To hold him.

He crossed the narrow alley in two steps and threw his arms around Vincent like he meant to break bone. His face pressed into the curve of his neck, breath ragged, eyes burning. His ribs flared with pain. His coat twisted under Vincent’s shoulder. One shoe nearly slipped on the slick concrete, but he didn’t care.

He clung like a drowning man to the thing he’d dreamt of and buried and mourned.

Like this moment wasn’t real unless he could feel it.

Vincent staggered from the weight of him - choked on a breath, hands splaying reflexively against Alastor’s back as if to brace himself, to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. There was a beat, maybe two, of hesitation. And then Vincent was holding him just as fiercely, arms curling around his waist like he might splinter without them.

He crushed him in close, foreheads nearly touching, no space left between them.

Neither of them said anything.

Couldn’t.

They just stood there in the half-shadow of the alley, wrapped in each other, pressed tight enough to hurt. Five years of silence echoed between their ribs, making itself known in every desperate inch of contact. The world kept moving - cars in the distance, someone laughing in the street, the low hum of a radio bleeding from a window above - but none of it mattered.

They didn’t part. Not even an inch.

Alastor clung tighter, face still buried in the crook of Vincent’s neck, the scent of him hitting like a gut-punch - salt and static and the faintest trace of whatever cologne he’d borrowed from the hotel. But underneath that was something unmistakable. Something that hadn’t changed. Skin and heat and something like ozone. Something that was only his.

He breathed it in like it might vanish. Like the air in his lungs had never been enough without it.

Vincent held still. Tense at first - like he didn’t trust the weight, like part of him still expected the figure in his arms to dissolve into smoke - but then the resistance bled out of him. He sank forward. Let his head fall against Alastor’s. Closed his eyes.

And they both cried.

Not loud. Not shaking. Just wet heat at the corner of the eyes, sliding down skin like rain off glass. Silent. Reluctant. Too exhausted to pretend they weren’t.

Alastor’s shoulders stuttered once. Just once. A full-body tremor, quick and terrible, like a sob with the sound chewed out of it. He gritted his teeth against it. Didn’t speak. Couldn’t. His throat was too raw, too tight. His hands curled into fists at the back of Vincent’s coat, holding so fiercely that his knuckles ached.

Vincent didn’t move.

Didn’t flinch.

Just stood there and let himself be held. Let himself hold. One hand slid gently up into Alastor’s hair, tentative at first, then firmer, cradling the back of his skull like something holy. His other hand remained locked at his waist, keeping him close, keeping him here.

Neither of them tried to make sense of it.

There was no logic left. No plan. No performance.

Just this impossible miracle in a narrow alleyway, where somehow, they had found one another again.

Still alive.

Still breathing.

Still theirs.

The moment cracked at the edges with the sound of a door creaking open behind them.

Alastor stiffened.

The warmth of Vincent still pressed to him. The scent, the heat, the impossible closeness. He didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to let go, not now, not yet - but the world was already bleeding in. Already asking questions.

He pulled back like it hurt him. And maybe it did. Just a breath of space. Enough to see Vincent’s face again.

God.

That face.

He couldn’t look at it too long. Not here. Not with ears on the other side of the door and a war’s worth of grief still sitting between his lungs.

“Come with me,” he said - quiet, hoarse, almost pleading.

Then he turned.

Didn’t wait for an answer. Didn’t care. Just walked. Fast. One hand catching Vincent’s sleeve on the way past, tugging gently, the same way he had once in shell-pocked trenches when silence had meant survival.

Vincent followed.

Of course he did.

Their steps matched without thought. They always had. Alastor didn’t look over his shoulder, didn’t explain, didn’t even speak. He just walked, long-legged and fast, down the narrow length of the alley, out into the Quarter. The noise swelled. Cars honked. Someone shouted across a street. A band played too loud three blocks away.

But all he could hear was the click of Vincent’s heels beside his own.

The same rhythm. The same weight. The same living proof that he was no longer alone.

He felt like he was eighteen again, striding back from a transmission tent with mud on his boots and something fragile and burning walking at his side. Only this time, it wasn’t a trick of memory. Vincent was here. Real. Close enough to touch.

Alastor didn’t take him to a café. Didn’t slow near the river. Didn’t bother with pleasantries or planning.

He brought him home.

Home, in this case, meant a crooked walk-up above a grocer that always smelled faintly of fish oil and boiled onions. The stairs creaked. The banister wobbled. The second-floor landing was too narrow for comfort, too loud for secrets.

He opened the door with a key worn almost flat. Didn’t look back until they were inside.

The lock clicked.

The apartment was small. One room and a closet pretending to be a kitchen. The wallpaper had started peeling. There was no proper table. Just a battered desk half-swallowed by radio guts and stripped wiring. A mattress in the corner with a blanket folded sharp. Two chairs. One lamp.

And silence.

Alastor looked at Vincent then.

Just looked.

Tried to drink in the changes - the lean of his shoulders, the sharpness of his jaw, the newness of him - and reconcile them with the ghost he’d carried for five years like a pressed flower between pages.

“You’re here,” Vincent whispered. Like he still didn’t quite believe it. Like it might vanish if said aloud. “You’re really here.”

Alastor didn’t answer. Not with words.

He stepped forward instead, slow but sure, until the space between them disappeared again. His hand reached - hesitated - then landed light at Vincent’s cheek, thumb brushing the skin beneath his eye like it might flake away if touched too hard.

Still warm.

Still real.

Still here.

“I didn’t think-” Alastor started, then stopped. Shook his head with a soft, bitter breath of a laugh. “I thought I was going mad, when I heard your voice.”

Vincent swallowed, the motion visible in his throat. His eyes didn’t leave Alastor’s. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was.”

A pause.

Then they both let out a laugh, too sharp to be amused.

Alastor let his hand drop, fingers trailing down to Vincent’s shoulder. He looked older up close. Thinner, maybe. Or just held tighter. Like a man wrapped in silk and wire, polished on the outside but always bracing for impact. His collar was pressed. His tie perfect. But Alastor could still see the ghost of exhaustion beneath his skin.

“You got taller,” Alastor said, like it mattered. Like the details could ground him. “Or maybe I shrank.”

“You still slouch,” Vincent said, softly.

“You still frown when you think too hard.”

“Do I?”

“Always did.”

Vincent smiled then. Small. Fragile. Like it might fall apart if they breathed too hard.

They didn’t touch this time. Not yet. But they stood close - closer than most people ever dared - with barely a whisper between them. The room buzzed with the silence they hadn’t been able to fill for five years.

“I thought I saw you die,” Vincent whispered. “I - I heard you scream.”

Alastor’s throat worked. “And I heard you call my name.”

Silence again.

Then Vincent stepped forward, just once, and Alastor met him in the middle.

Foreheads tilted in. Noses nearly brushing. Their breaths mingling in the space between old grief and something too sharp to name.

“I kept the cloth,” Alastor murmured. “The one with your name. I never let it go.”

“I kept your matchbox,” Vincent said. “I still have it.”

Alastor surged forward, hands rising to cup Vincent’s face with a kind of reverence that bordered on frantic. His thumbs swept along cheekbones, tracing the damp paths already left by tears neither of them had tried to hide and kissed him.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t clean.

It was desperate.

Like a prayer spat out in the middle of a storm. Like the kind of kiss that knew nothing could ever make up for five years lost but tried anyway - teeth, salt, breath, and all. Alastor clung to him, mouth trembling, jaw tight with the effort of keeping it all inside. His hands shook where they held Vincent’s face, sliding into his hair like he needed more. More contact. More proof. More real.

Vincent made a sound - low, hoarse, almost wounded - and wrapped his arms around Alastor again. Held him like gravity was a thing they could ignore together.

They kissed until the tears made it messy. Until it stopped being about desperation and became something gentler, quieter. Until Alastor pulled back just enough to press their foreheads together again, breathing hard.

He didn’t let go.

Couldn’t.

He kissed the corner of Vincent’s mouth next. Then the curve of his jaw. Then his cheek, just beside the tear-track.

Vincent laughed - wet, broken, incredulous. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re here,” Alastor whispered, voice cracking.

“You’re crying.”

“So are you.”

Vincent didn’t argue.

They stood like that for what felt like forever - arms locked around each other, breath stuttering between half-laughs and tiny, helpless sobs. Alastor’s fingers tangled in the back of Vincent’s collar. Vincent’s hand stayed over Alastor’s heart, like he couldn’t bear not to feel it beat.

“I missed you,” Alastor breathed. “God. I missed you so much.”

Vincent didn’t speak - just kissed him again.

Softer this time. Slower. Like trying to memorise him all over again, one press at a time. Alastor let it happen, melted into it. Let himself be held and kissed and touched like he hadn’t been gone - like he hadn’t been dead in every way that mattered.

Then he kissed back.

A brush to Vincent’s cheek. The corner of his mouth. The edge of his jaw where the stubble grew in coarse and real and undeniably him. Another to his temple. His nose. Each one steadier. Quieter.

“I thought I’d made you up,” Vincent whispered against his lips. “Some days. You felt too good to be real.”

Alastor shook his head and kissed him again.

He led Vincent by the wrist, hand trembling as he crossed the room, and dropped down onto his bed hard enough to jostle the springs.

They curled into each other without thinking. Without instruction.

Like they had in the trenches. Like they had when the rain was endless and the sky fell in around them and the only warmth they ever had was what they could steal from each other.

Vincent lay on his side, one arm tucked beneath Alastor’s, the other draped over his waist. Alastor pressed close - forehead to cheek, chest to chest, their legs tangled like wire. He kept his hand on the back of Vincent’s neck, thumb moving slow and aimless against skin.

No words.

Just breathing. Just presence. Just the unbearable, miraculous fact of it.

Outside, the city went on - cars in the street, someone yelling half a block away, a distant brass band stumbling through some half-remembered waltz.

But inside, in that tiny apartment, all the noise fell away.

They had each other again.

Chapter Text

— Vincent —
New Orleans – April 1923

The sunlight came in soft and streaked, slipping through the warped blinds in uneven lines. It lit the room in pale gold, catching on dust motes and worn wood, on the scattered copper guts of a half-repaired radio, on the edge of a blanket kicked halfway down the mattress.

Vincent didn’t open his eyes right away.

He didn’t need to.

Alastor was still there.

His body curved warm against his own, breath slow and steady. One arm slung across Vincent’s ribs, fingers curled loose against his side. The other tucked beneath his chest, like the instinct to hold had never left him. His forehead rested at Vincent’s temple, lips parted faintly, curls soft and unruly where they brushed against Vincent’s jaw.

Vincent had never slept like this. Not in five years. Not in California, with the windows shut and the fan buzzing overhead. Not in hotel rooms between business trips. Not even with warm hands and wanting mouths and fleeting company. This was different. This was weightless.

He’d fallen asleep curled around the body he’d once buried in his heart like a grave, and for the first time since France, he hadn’t dreamt of Alastor’s blood.

He let out a breath - slow and even - and only then opened his eyes.

The room was small. Alastor’s apartment. He remembered the click of the door. The way his voice had cracked. The kiss. The bed. The way they’d fallen into it and curled around one another like instinct.

Vincent shifted, just slightly, enough to look.

Alastor was still asleep. Or close enough. His face was slack with it - unguarded in a way Vincent had nearly forgotten existed. The lines had softened, the sharpness of his jaw dulled by sleep. His mouth twitched faintly, as if caught halfway through a dream. A good one, if the weight of him meant anything. He hadn’t moved all night.

Neither had Vincent.

He hadn’t needed to.

His hand drifted, brushing Alastor’s waist beneath the hem of the blanket. Skin. Warm and real. He let his fingertips settle there, circling a slow pattern. No destination. No urgency. Just proof.

They’d survived. Somehow.

Alastor made a soft sound and nuzzled deeper into the crook of his neck, breath hot and familiar, impossibly steady. Vincent smiled, the shape of it something raw and private. The kind of smile no one else ever saw. The kind that wasn’t borrowed from anyone at all.

He kissed Alastor’s hair. Once. Lightly. Then stayed there, lips pressed to the softest part of his scalp like a benediction.

“It wasn’t a dream,” he whispered.

Alastor didn’t stir. Not yet.

Vincent didn’t mind.

He was content to lie there a while longer, wrapped in breath and heartbeat and the impossible miracle of being able to hold him again.

The light had shifted. Warmer now. It caught on the curve of Alastor’s shoulder where the blanket had slipped, on the fine hairs along his forearm, on the arch of his neck just above the collarbone. Vincent watched it change colour across his skin like time made visible.

He didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to disturb the fragile peace wrapped around them like a second blanket. But his arm had begun to ache, pins and needles gathering under the elbow Alastor had pinned during the night, and he knew if he stayed too long like this, he’d lose feeling entirely.

So he shifted. Carefully. Slowly.

Alastor murmured something - a half-breath, no real words - and tightened his grip for a second before settling again, his leg sliding forward to hook loosely around Vincent’s knee. His face stayed hidden, pressed into Vincent’s shoulder like sunlight was too much to bear just yet.

Vincent huffed a quiet breath, amused and unbearably fond, and eased them both a few inches onto their backs so he could stretch one arm. Alastor didn’t stir further. His fingers twitched against Vincent’s ribs, then stilled, content.

The ceiling above them was stained in one corner. A water mark shaped like a violin. Vincent stared at it for a moment, tracking its uneven edges, and tried to imagine what this apartment had looked like before Alastor moved in. Before the copper, before the wires, before the city knew the voice behind its radios belonged to a ghost with a grin too sharp to be real.

He couldn’t picture it.

Because this - this cluttered, humming, half-repaired space - was Alastor. Every bit of it. The scattered notes on the desk. The fraying rug. The coat still hanging from a nail by the door. Even the smell of the place - dust and solder and something darker underneath, like scorched sugar and ozone. Like breath held too long.

Vincent’s gaze drifted to the workbench. The guts of a radio lay open there, wires twisted and sorted, valves aligned. The kind of methodical disarray only someone obsessive would understand. Someone who still needed to keep their hands busy or else start screaming.

It looked just like the sets he'd scavenged. Just like the ones dragged back into working order with nothing but spit, metal, and the promise of a code on the other end. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed it.

He sat up slowly, dragging the blanket with him. Alastor mumbled in protest, arm tightening, then relented when Vincent leaned down and kissed the bridge of his nose, soft as a promise.

“Just stretching,” he murmured. “I’m not going far.”

Alastor didn’t answer - just exhaled against his chest and went still again, his breath evening back out.

Vincent sat at the edge of the bed and looked around the room like he was seeing it for the first time. He could still feel the imprint of Alastor’s hand on his side. The weight of his thigh against his own. His voice, low and wrecked, still echoing somewhere behind his ribs.

He stood. The floor was cold, but he didn’t care. The room smelled faintly of static and smoke. Of night, and survival, and something sweeter brewing beneath it all. He crossed to the bench barefoot and ran his hand along the edge of the desk, not touching the components - just tracing the wood, grounding himself.

There, hanging out of a notebook, was their cloth. The one he’d stitched for Alastor in a rare moment of rest between bombardments - before he’d ever held his hand, or felt his lips against his own. The fabric was faded now, soft with age, the edges worn threadbare from fingers that had held it too often and too tightly. The embroidery was still intact - just. Their names, side by side. The year. A jagged stitch where the needle had pricked his thumb and bled into the thread. Vincent traced it gently, thumb brushing over the curve of the 'V'.

It had been loved. Not folded away in a drawer. Not tucked beside medals or ration tokens. But loved. Touched. Cared for. As if it had meant something.

Vincent swallowed around the ache in his throat and opened the notebook it had been tucked inside.

The first few pages were what he expected - wiring notes, dial corrections, alignment schematics. But beneath them, the margins shifted. The handwriting changed. Tightened. Lines of dots and dashes scrawled in fading pencil, slipped between frequency calculations like secrets.

Morse.

He read slowly, translating by reflex:

Testing. No call sign. Just reaching.

Weather: stormy. Interference high. Thought I heard your voice once, in static.

I wonder where you are.

If you’re still out there…

There was no signature. No name.

Just more code. Scattered across the pages. Wonderings. Memories. Tiny messages rendered in dots and dashes like prayers sent into dead air. Not meant for anyone. Not meant to be answered. Just left behind like echoes - like proof. Of a man still trying to listen, even when he believed there was no one left to call him home.

Vincent closed the notebook with both hands. Held it to his chest. Stared up at the ceiling until the silence stopped ringing.

Then he lowered it gently to the desk. Folded the cloth back into place. Let his fingers rest there - just for a moment - so he could feel the weight of it beneath his skin.

Then he turned. The bed creaked faintly as Alastor shifted, curling into the space where Vincent had been like his body had memorised it.

Vincent crossed the room. Sat back on the edge of the mattress. Let his hand drift into Alastor’s hair, combing it gently back from his brow.

“You can sleep a little longer,” he whispered. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

— Alastor —
New Orleans – April 1923

He woke to warmth.

Not the cloying heat of summer. Not the slick burn of fever, or the drunk weight of whiskey still clinging to his blood. But something gentler. Steady. The kind of warmth that stayed where it touched. That didn’t vanish when you opened your eyes.

Vincent had shifted at some point - he could feel the absence, faint and recent, in the mattress beside him. But the blanket still carried his weight. The pillow still smelled like the salt of his skin. His body had been there. Still was, judging by the faint sound of breath somewhere just across the room.

Alastor didn’t move. Not yet. His limbs were too heavy. His thoughts hadn’t quite caught up to the day. But he didn’t need to think to know this: something inside him that had been screaming for years had finally - finally - gone quiet.

He let that settle for a moment. Let it soak down into his chest, into the hollow spaces where the fear had lived too long. Vincent was here. Not just as memory or longing or hallucination. He was here. And Alastor had slept. All the way through the night No alcohol pulling him under. No tear tracks marring his face. No static pressed so tightly to his skull that it drowned out everything else. Just the rise and fall of another chest. The weight of Vincent's legs tangled with his own.

He hadn’t known what that would feel like again. Hadn’t dared imagine it.

When he opened his eyes, the world didn’t lurch. It simply existed - quiet and real and close.

Vincent was sitting on the edge of the bed, turned slightly toward him, one leg tucked beneath him, watching with a look that wasn’t guarded at all.

Alastor blinked, groggy and disbelieving. Then his mouth tugged into something slow and crooked. “You always watch people sleep?”

Vincent raised an eyebrow, but the smile betrayed him - broad, fond, entirely unrepentant. “Only the ones I adore.”

“Creep,” Alastor muttered, and shifted deeper into the pillow. “Did I snore?”

“No,” Vincent said, voice low. “You're a regular sleeping beauty.”

Alastor huffed out a laugh, and looked at each other for a long moment, caught in that stunned, impossible joy at waking up and having the other there.

“Well,” Alastor murmured, voice rough, “good morning."

Vincent leaned in slightly, brushing hair away from Alastor’s brow with maddening fondness. “Good morning.

Alastor laughed again. Real, this time. Not hollow. He let his eyes fall shut just for a second, feeling the hand still in his hair, the warmth at his side, the fact of it. The miracle of breath and not being alone.

For a while, they just sat like that - breathing in the same space, blinking slowly in the gold light like they’d only just remembered how to exist without flinching. Alastor stayed half-curled on his side, the blanket gathered lazily around his waist, hair a mess, sleep still heavy in his bones. Vincent sat beside him like he was afraid to move too far, like this closeness might vanish if disturbed.

Alastor reached up eventually. Let his fingers drift along Vincent’s forearm - just a touch, light and grounding. Vincent caught his hand and didn’t let go. Their fingers slotted together like they never should have been apart.

“You look like shit,” Alastor murmured after a beat. Fond. Drowsy. A little smug.

Vincent’s mouth curled. “You’re one to talk. You look like someone let a raccoon nest in your curls.”

“Mm. Dignity is overrated.”

Another quiet beat passed. Vincent’s thumb traced circles against the back of Alastor’s hand, soft as breath. Alastor tilted his head just enough to nudge his cheek against Vincent’s hip, the fabric of his trousers still faintly creased from yesterday. He could smell him - soap and dust and the faint trace of sleep still clinging to his skin. Real.

And then, quiet but sudden, barely more than a breath -

“I love you.”

Alastor’s eyes opened.

Vincent wasn’t looking at him anymore. His gaze had dropped to where their hands met. Like he hadn’t meant to say it. Like it had slipped out sideways, sudden and true, and now he didn’t know what to do with it.

But Alastor did.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, reached with his free hand, and cupped Vincent’s jaw gently. Tilted his face toward him. Held it there like something precious. Like he was trying to memorise it all over again. And maybe he was.

The line of his jaw had sharpened. His cheekbones were higher, more defined. His eyes - still bright, still clever - held something deeper now. Less youthful, more deliberate. There was tension at the corners, the kind that came from nights spent alone and too many cigarettes smoked under streetlights. He wasn’t eighteen anymore.

He was a man. And he’d found his way back.

Alastor’s thumb brushed across the stubble on his cheek. “Say it again,” he whispered.

Vincent met his gaze. Didn’t blink. “I love you.”

And this time, Alastor smiled. Slow. Soft. Undeniably real.

“Good,” he said.

Then he leaned in, pressed their foreheads together the way they always used to - breath to breath, no space between. He closed his eyes and let the words live where they’d always belonged.

“I love you.”

He felt Vincent’s breath catch. Felt the quiet exhale that followed. Felt his own heart beat against his ribs like it had finally found its rhythm again.

There was nothing else to say. Not yet.

They stayed like that for a long time, foreheads pressed, hands tangled, the morning stretching around them like something sacred.

They dressed slowly, comfortably - no rush, no hurry. Alastor pulled on yesterday’s trousers, still barefoot. Vincent rolled his sleeves up past the elbow, collar open, his tie forgotten somewhere in the sheets. They moved easily around each other now - like a rhythm re-learned. Like trust worn into habit.

Alastor reached for the door, hand hovering over the handle.

He hesitated.

Vincent turned back, watching him with a brow half-lifted. “What?”

Alastor looked at him. Took him in. The lean set of his shoulders. The new lines at the corners of his mouth. The quiet steel of him. And beneath all that - the boy who once coded Morse across trenches, hands shaking with cold, voice steady as the sky fell.

“You planning to head west again after this?” Alastor asked. Light. Careful. Too casual to be casual.

Vincent didn’t answer right away. He stepped closer, close enough their shoulders brushed. His voice was soft when he spoke.

“That depends.”

Alastor met his gaze. Something raw flickered in the space between them. They were close - too close for the street. Too close for this city, this time, this world. But neither stepped back.

“Stay?" Alastor murmured, low. Just that. A single word, offered like it cost something.

Vincent’s hand brushed his as he reached for the doorknob. A touch that lingered. That said more than it had to.

“Always,” he said. No flourish. No grin. Just the truth.

Then the door opened.

They stepped outside, shoulders just far enough apart. No eyes lingered. No one knew.

But in the way they walked - in step, in silence, hands brushing once like the tail end of a signal - everything was said.