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He knows that song, he has heard it before. When was it? He found himself thinking, and it takes him away to a quiet place, a far place.
And the memories push him back away. It jabs daggers into his arm, a bullet hole gaping through his flesh. The artificial screams ringing inside his head – make them stop – they burn, and he turns to ash inside the fire.
He’s about to die.
An abrupt and sudden death. He was plummeting below to the barren hearth, desolate earth. Shh. The voice coos, and the man gazes up with wide eyes like he would up to the next world. It smells like, burnt grape vines, gunpowder, cinder, and wet soggy rain seeping through the cracks.
He knows that song. He has heard it before. It’s Camille Saint-Saëns, and the voice hums it like a lullaby. He lay, on the cold dirty floor, bleeding and dying inside the pale arms that smelt of a burning orchid.
Bruce isn’t dead.
He wakes up to find his stinging wounds dressed up neatly in bandages. It’s not perfect, but the handiwork keeps him alive and breathing to smell the fresh rain in the morning.
There is little else he can do, his rickety body is damning him to stay here, coddled in the makeshift bed, poorly constructed with dirty curtains, a mattress, and a military blanket.
The house has already suffered canon fire, or an air raid. It might have also been a bombing, Bruce isn’t too sure. But the roof is falling apart just enough to show a blurred grey sky. Bruce wonders about the prospect of dying, and lets out a pathetic cough. His lids are heavy, and the last thing his blinding vision allows him to remember is a man sleeping in the corner, deathly pale.
It reminds him of a corpse, and he dreams about a pair of stark green eyes that night.
The fever makes him delirious, the fuzziness threatening to kill him with vengeance. The man’s hands are cold, and it melts ice into his flaming feverish hell. They smother at his cheeks, his face. His fingers are rough and jerky. They’re edgy, but very subtle.
There is a tug, and Bruce feels his head being cradled. The shadows are too big in his eyes to look clearly, but he knows those green eyes are looking down at him. His ears miss the frantic scrambling noises near his head, glass things being dropped onto the floor.
Bruce doesn’t miss the heat engulfing his dried sore lips.
The warmth is mesmerizing. Something hot explodes in his chest, and it shoots all the way up to his throat. He feels the blood reddened mouth on his lips, a demanding tongue slipping past his teeth. It trickles and pushes something sour and cold down his throat, Bruce squirms at the taste and sensation.
They clash teeth, his incisors scathing the delicate red muscle tangled in his dry hot strands of breath. The man pulls back, tearing away from him and leaving Bruce dazed. The leftovers leaving an oozing thread between their tongues, the man wipes it away with the back of his pale hand.
Bruce remembers how to breathe, caving into his body’s need to reconstruct. It was like breathing for the first time, and the air is sweeter than it should have been. He swallows the vile tasting liquid remaining under his tongue, and whatever it was the man fed him makes his head feel better.
His breathing is short and broken, but the pain numbs in seconds. The fever is cooling, and the feeling of being alive is ecstatic. The oxygen is doing strange things to his brain. Bruce readily accepts the second dose of medicine, opening his mouth and sucking greedily at the thin cold lips. If his desperation to suck the life out of the stranger’s lips startled the other, he didn’t show even a blink of acknowledgement.
Perhaps he was aware of the pain, showing clear on Bruce’s face. The cool hand supporting his head as they wrap their tongues, the idle arm pushing against his chest to stop them from toppling onto each other, a pale neck, craned like he was praying while they shared gums, fangs, and fear.
It felt more like an orgasmed death than trying to stay alive.
Whatever drug was stinging sour tastes into his mouth was, they help him feel alive next morning. It’s still raining, Bruce hears the other man mutter, through his half dazed eyes closing as soon as they are opened.
Between his half delirious state, Bruce loses his sense of time. How much time has passed? He keeps asking himself, never getting around to the answer. His voice is too hoarse to ask anything, and most of the other time he finds the man near the window, crouching low and peering outside with a strangely wide grin on his face.
“There is a dead woman outside.” Is the first sentence Bruce hears him say, poking his head between the broken windowsill to peer down at the shambling streets.
His smile is toxic, and there is an uneasy feeling of something dark and sinister to it. It must be something that had to do with those emerald eyes. They were uncanny, Bruce cannot recall the last time he saw someone with such vibrant green eyes.
“I think the lassie got shot about ten minutes ago, which means we can’t light any fire tonight.” The man continues to muse, his hand scratching at the wounds adorning the buck of his neck.
Bruce notices his hair isn’t the same colour as his roots. They’re dirty and a smudged shade of ebony, but he can see strands of unlikely green near his scalp. He looks surreal. Pale white, bloodied thin lips, a long rifle propped against his shoulders. Bruce stops looking at the man when his eyes linger too long on the mumbling lips, his tongue flashing between the jagged teeth.
“Hope you’re into cuddling beefcakes, because we’ve got a cold night ahead.”
Bruce resigns back into his slumber, knowing that he won’t die tonight.
It is morning again when he wakes, and the rain is still monstrous. It incinerates on the ground, letting the soil and flooding mud everywhere. A few times he hears the gunshots, and the rumbling of moving panzers through the streets of old town. The air is stale, and nothing is moving outside when the hours pass in silence.
Bruce fears the worst when the pale man fails to appear even after the murky sun freezes half way through the sky, his heart skips a beat when the floors creak downstairs. A soldier by default, the well-built man is cautious to every single thing that vibrates his senses.
His arms are already reaching for his empty gun plopped on the side, head peering below the floor boards to catch a glimpse of the intrusion. He relaxes when the pale man walks in, and it surprises Bruce how his smile seems to force his alerted guards down so easily. He has an edgy step to his walk, a grunge filled rhythm in the way he moves. He smells like blood today, he’s got some on his hands.
The rifle looks too heavy for his arms. It doesn’t look like an infantry rifle, and the man was carrying a scope. US Battalions don’t have a sniper division, but he heard the man talk in a distinct American accent – he assumes the other as one of the designated marksman dispatched into the armoured infantry flanking at the rendezvous.
“Well, well. Look what I found handsome. Treats! Not good ones, mind you, it tastes a little off, but it’ll be good enough to make you forget you got stabbed in the chest and shot in the arms.”
Bruce peers down at his bandages, and then at the slab of chocolate in the pale hands.
“Bruce Wayne.” He admits, the can growing cool between his fingers. “It’s my name.”
The man frowns, only slightly before pushing another spoonful of soup into his mouth. His face brightens at the next second, like a Christmas light.
“Your mother is Martha Kane, no wait, she got married didn’t she? She obviously has, seeing you popping out of the oven.” He giggles, a sly little smile playing in his voice. “Martha Wayne, the golden lady.”
Kane’s heiress, one and only, Bruce hears the headlines in his head. It’s not strange, people knowing his mother, but the fact is strange when the place they were in was miles and miles away from home.
“You’re from Gotham.” Bruce concludes after his analysis, and the man laughs.
It’s a sound he hasn’t heard for a while. The grim atmosphere was used to looming around him ever since they landed between the crossfire.
“I knew there was a reason you seemed so familiar.” Says the man, his laughter sounding like bells chiming in the air, “Everyone in Gotham knows the Wayne’s; you’re our urban dessert, ready to be served in dinner tables at the gossip club.”
Bruce can’t help but crack a smile at that.
“Can I call you Bruce? Bruce.”
“What do I call you?”
It was a sudden realization, the fact that he still had no idea what the other’s name was when he clearly knew his, it bugged him. There is a curious flash between the green eyes before they fold into pretty little crescents. The man quietly puts down his can, slinking away back into the darkness before Bruce hears the little noises of him pulling out his dog tag. He reads it with curiosity; Bruce notices that it’s a half tag.
“Yes, they had to give me a name at the drafting, John Doe seemed a hard name to track me back when I’m dead.” He mutters, scowling at the nameplate.
“You don’t have a name?”
“I’m sure I do. Everyone has names Brucie.”
“Don’t remember yours?”
The nameless man smirks, flashing the dog tag between his lithe fingers.
“Well, I told the conscription I wouldn’t mind leaving my body unidentified, but apparently their strong need to tag me with a prim and proper burial name didn’t think fondly of it.” Doe mused, the music in his voice only a little cynical. “Now I don’t know what is worse, leaving some poor chum to figure out where my unidentified corpse needs to go, or being tagged with a name that appears second most often in elementary schools.”
“It doesn’t sound too bad.” Bruce chuckles. “So what is it?”
“Jack.”
“Jack.”
The name sounds peculiar on his lips. Like they aren’t his, but it’s new at the same time and Bruce is too busy feeling content at knowing what to call the other. Jack smiles at him, copy calling his name as if a baby coos after his mother. He feels warmer, knowing the name, knowing what name to say, when they-
“Thank you.”
When they perhaps end up lost.
Jack is a flimsy sleeper.
Although Bruce sees him hunched over in the corner hugging his rifle, he realizes the man wasn’t sleeping at all. It makes him question if he sleeps at all, if he has slept at all. When the midnight clears of the fog, Jack is reduced to a shivering mess.
“Come here.” Bruce commands, shifting up from his mattress. There is enough room under the blanket for the two of them, if they stay very close. There is a spark in the green eyes that looks at him from the darkness in the corner, calculating his answer.
“No need.” Jack responds.
“You’re going to freeze.”
“I am, freezing. It’s too cold for you. Your fever is going to get worse with me there.”
“You need sleep. It doesn’t look like you’re going to get any when you’re shivering that much.”
“Brucie,” Jack breathes, softly enough to show a tiny hint of emotion in his words. “I’ve killed far too many, too easily, to admit I’m still human enough to ‘need sleep’.”
They pause, letting the silence linger through the air between them, a ringing truth slicing through their minds. Bruce still remembers how the man laughed so easily, the spark that many had in their eyes back at home, before the war. He saw men break in the trenches, on the beach, on the bloody sand, on the field. After everything, they lose that spark, slowly hardening into something else, something more dead than alive.
And yet, here he sees now, why his stark green eyes show so much. It was something too pure, and too ignorant of the important things that kill off that spark.
It seemed to ask him. Are you still human enough?
“Come here.”
Bruce wasn’t going to say it the third time, he sits up with his arms reaching out. It makes Jack look at him with an expression too blurry. It feels like an eternity before he scrambles his way into his side, letting Bruce strip off his heavy jacket with a tug.
The man drapes the blanket over them, clutching tight around the lanky flesh and bones. With his leaner arms lost on direction, Jack warps his arms around the bigger body, stringing under the broad shoulders. Below the cover of their jackets and blanket, their skins on another, their chests against the other, their heart beats into each other like they would pump blood.
The warmth is contagious, and even though Bruce can’t see, Jack’s eyes are wide open at the growing heat circulating his bare frozen bones. He can’t breathe. He’s pleasantly suffocating. The heat is stifling, and they lay there for a long time in the fire before passing out into a much needed sleep.
The rain clears in the morning Bruce wakes up, Jack’s hair tickling his chin.
It’s all pale blue outside, and the colourless house looks deader than the corpse lying outside on the streets. They are the bones of long rainy days, what remains after the sky washes away the filth.
Bruce stares down at the pale lump sleeping in his arms, not even the soft ups and downs of his breathing diaphragm can convince him that he’s alive.
He holds onto him, almost like a lover.
They know when it is time to say goodbye.
Without words, they just know, when and how. It’s different from all the other goodbyes that they are used to saying, to friends, to family, to lover.
They know now is the time, because the rain clears and they can see the sky again.
“I’m regrouping with the next infantry division. We’re advancing north.”
It’s an obvious fact. The advancing battalions are catching up with the rendezvous, and by the next evening, a set of infantry troops enter the streets with the new supply line. The camp decides to sit for the night because the mud makes it difficult for the equipment to be carried, and by the time Bruce finishes cleaning his wounds up in the medical tent, he is met with Jack on board the supply truck headed west.
“Air strikers are headed back to the front. The ships are ashore with planes, Uncle Sam needs all the pilot trained chaps back where they can fly.”
“Never told me you could pilot.”
“I can surprise you with many things Brucie,” Jack grins. “I used to pilot, before the command decided to repost me because I have a tendency to laugh whenever something blows up beside me. They decided I might die due to lack of oxygen before I even reach the zone.”
Bruce frowned. “Better stay on land.”
“Oh well, I’ll just remind myself of your humourless face whenever I’m in the air then.”
Jack laughs away, already climbing his way into the back of the vehicle along with the others transporting to air base. There is a way of sick confidence Jack talks with, and Bruce isn’t too sure if it was a form of hardening or adapting. But his smile is too uncanny, too strange, and too weird, the man can’t stop himself tugging his lips along and smile along with him.
Bruce reaches out, his hand open and naked. It’s his first time, and Jack grabs it, wrapping his fingers tight around his.
They say nothing else, before the truck engine growls. Bruce opens his mouth, frantic to find the right thing to say, afraid that this could be the last. But Jack pushes first, his smile assuring him of a promise.
“Find me Bruce.”
The truck sets off, and their hands slowly untangle. Bruce feels the burn where their skins touched, his eyes blinking away the blur.
“I will find you.” He answers.
He lets him disappear, almost like a lover.