#ab tag

His blood also gets all over Arthur, who spends the last half of their mission trying to hold his insides together. It doesn't work. Hatch is dead before Blue Moon lowers her landing gear.

They have to peel him out of Arthur’s arms.

He doesn't move after, just stays staring at the spot where he was, the holes in the side of the fort where the killing blow entered. Morse has to come back in and bodily drag him out by his harness. He slides out like a newborn foal, gets a face full of tarmac when his knees don't work, and feels himself get scruffed into the truck waiting to take them to interrogation like a disobedient dog.

Their co-pilot is being taken away in an ambulance with a fucked up leg, along with their waist gunner and radioman. None of the others can look at him. Arthur can’t blame them. He’s stained red from chin to knee. His nose had crunched when he’d fallen out of the fort, and now he can feel the blood from that slowly trickling down his face to join Hatch’s.

The Clubmobile girls, usually so unflappable, blanche when they see him. Doc Stover grabs for him, but Arthur waves him off, wiping at his nose with his sleeve despite the blinding pain it brings.

“S not mine. ‘S not mine. ‘S Georgie’s.”

Stover lets him go, but Tatty pulls him aside by the elbow, forces a glass of whiskey into his hands, and doesn’t let go until he’s knocked it back. It mixes poorly with the metallic taste in the back of his mouth, but the burn is comforting.

“Thanks,” he murmurs to her, and hopes she knows how much he means it.

Hatch's logs are, understandably, incomplete. Arthur reads out what he can of them. Stutters, and stumbles, and the pity in Red's face as he listens is worse than any frustration at his incompetence. He wants somebody to yell at him, shake him, tell him to get a grip on himself. He needs somebody to come rip him out of the hazy, distant, place he's been sunk into since Hatch had wheezed his last into his neck.

Jimmy Douglass would have done it. Would have rattled him by the shoulders until some sense had been knocked back into his fellow bombardier, and then dragged him along to the O Club to take his mind off of things. Would have cracked a shitty joke and nudged him to dance with a Red Cross girl until the pain was back to its usual dull ache.

Douglass isn’t here though, like the rest of the crew of Just-a-Snappin’, like the crew of Our Baby, like the six other forts that went down. Eighty men. Eighty one including Lieutenant George Edgar Hatch, navigator and son and husband and father.

He’d never even held Abigail. She’d been born after they shipped to England, six pounds and seven ounces and with a head full of hair, and they had drunk Norfolk dry toasting her.

Arthur doesn’t hear the dismissal, but Morse’s hand is more gentle this time when she guides him by his collar.

“C’mon,” she says. “Let's get you cleaned up.”

She leads him out of the hut, and he’s barely cognizant of his surroundings until he hears a hissed ‘Jesus Christ!’ from the group of men huddled by one of the doors. Veal and Bubbles are staring at him with open horror, Crank’s crew not looking much happier even though they’d already seen him in interrogation.

“‘S not mine,” Arthur mutters again, sniffing and swallowing a blood clot he really should have spit onto the grass.

“You feeling alright?” Crank asks cautiously.

“Peachy.” This time when he sniffs he does spit, turning away and shooting the vivid red glob between his teeth. “Fuckin’ aces, Charlie.”

“I got him, he’s fine,” Morse says firmly, taking him by the elbow and marching them away.

He needs a shower. Some more whiskey. A nap. His father to rise from the dead and be in England so he can pet his hair and tell him how to live through a man dying in his arms.

The irony of that last one isn’t lost on Arthur. Thomas Foster didn’t live through that either, it just took him a while to die.

Getting a shower at least is feasible. One bonus of walking around the base looking like something out of a nightmare is that when he steps into their block it very quickly empties out, and Morse stands a vicious guard at the door whilst he scrubs off the now dried blood and changes into his uniform. It helps him feel a little more human, even with the blossoming bruise on his nose and the black eyes that will rise any time soon.

His flight gear is pretty much ruined, especially the sheepskin, which has gone a muddy pink and looks distressingly like rotting meat. Smells it, too, and Arthur abandons it all after emptying the pockets. There’s blood on his pack of smokes, and he considers tossing them out of spite, but the craving wins out so he lights one as he waits outside for Morse to clean herself up. With his face tilted up towards the sky the last dregs of blood and mucus slip down his throat. He chainsmokes away the taste until Morse emerges, hair still damp but neatly combed. Unflappable as ever, his pilot.

“I’m gonna go to the hospital, check on the boys. You comin’?” She asks.

Normally Arthur would say yes without hesitation, but this time he actually thinks about it. Then he shakes his head.

“Naw. Give ‘em my love, though. Think I’m gonna sack out for a while.”

Morse gives him a long, searching, look, then nods.

“Course. Get some rest. I’ll swing by our racks later, make sure you get some dinner.”

Arthur isn’t sure he can stomach anything, but thanks her anyway. She splits off to medical, and Arthur makes his way back to the barracks. There's a mostly full flask slid down the side of his locker he should be able to get away with drinking until he knocks out. Maybe that way he'll be too out of it when she comes around.

Marta's already sitting on his bunk when he gets there. Not a hair out of place as usual, except for how her jacket is off and her sleeves are rolled above her elbows, even in the chill of an English October. There’s a sketchpad and pencil in her lap, with a figure Arthur can’t make out yet.

For a brief, fierce, moment he hates her. Hates her for being here, for seeing him, knowing him. Hates her even temper and pragmatism and the sad way she looks at him from behind her glasses.

“Not sure you're meant to be here,” he tells her dryly, staying by the door like that will save him from whatever conversation she might want to have.

“Not sure you're the person to make that argument,” Marta shoots back, just as flatly. Then her mouth twists uncomfortably. “Saw you get back. Heard about your navigator. Wanted to see how you are.”

“I'm fine. You can tell Esther that, too.”

“Tell her yourself. I ain't got the time to talk about you in my letters.”

That makes Arthur snort. Some of the tension he hadn't known he was carrying leaches from his shoulders.

“I ain't been good at keeping up with her recently,” he admits. Not since before Regensburg, at least. He’s found it harder and harder to carry a conversation with her, to share jokes and stories and pretend that it’s all still just a game. Frowning, he adds, “I need to write Georgie's family.”

“Thought that was Kidd's job?”

“Yeah, but…” Arthur shakes his head. “I was with him, Marta. I was… I held him. When he went. That’s… I owe him that.”

Marta doesn’t say anything, but she shuffles up his bunk a little, and he gives into the aches in his body that tell him to sit down beside her. Hatch’s rack is the one beside his, and he stares long and hard at the blanket. His footlocker is gone already, swept away to the orderly hut to be shipped back to his folks in Queens. Arthur doesn’t know everything in it, but there aren’t enough trinkets and letters in the world to make a whole picture of George Hatch, to replace him at his mother’s table and in his wife’s bed and in his little girl’s life.

They sit. Arthur smokes. Marta carries on with her sketch. Outside, the sun fades. 

Eventually, Marta breaks the silence.

“They're talking about sending you to the Flak House.”

“What? Who?”

“Major Bowman was talking to Smokey about it. Said you didn't look good in interrogation.”

Yeah, no shit. I still had my friend’s blood on my hands.

Maybe a trip to the Flak House wouldn’t be the worst thing. It was treasonous to admit it outloud, but he had been able to feel himself fraying at the edges since Algeria, since it became abundantly clear that Escape Kit wasn’t making its way over the horizon or back to base. Some time not sitting behind a bombsight might be good for him.

Then he remembers how many forts they just lost, how many crews. Their names and faces overwhelm him momentarily, one above the rest despite the way Arthur’s been steadfastly refusing to think about him between Hatch dying in his arms and hearing that Just-a-Snappin’ had bailed.

He’s not dead. Can’t be. Arthur doesn’t have that same roiling dread in the pit of his stomach that he did over Curt’s absence, and he’s willing to trust that superstition just to keep himself level. His name will appear on the next list of POWs, or he’ll vanish for weeks and then reappear after finding his way through France. Those are the only options Arthur can contemplate without clawing his own face off.

The thought of being trapped with those two scenarios (and their unspeakable third) for an unspecified time at Coombe House, where he is certain to have far too much time to dwell on them - and every other terrible thing to happen in his cursed fucking life - is completely unbearable. He’d rather shake apart here, in private, and keep himself up in the air in the meantime. They were going to have to drag him out of that fort feet first, just like Hatch.

“They won’t,” Arthur tells Marta. “Too few crews as it is, nobody will be going anywhere until the next batch of replacements make it in.”

“Yeah, well, once they do I’d say you're high on the list for sending out. Just thought I’d let you know.”

His earlier flash of hatred for her smolders shamefully in his guts. Sweet, perfect, Marta, who knows him too well. Knows his ways of running and hiding like a sick animal and lets him get away with it, like she lets him get away with so much else. He nudges her knee with his own in thanks, and she kicks him in the calf in return. For a brief moment he feels like a child again, and the bittersweetness of the sensation makes his eyes burn.

Some time later he is being shaken awake. He rolls over to knock Morse's hand off of his shoulder and buries his face more in the pillow with a groan. Marta had left him to his letter writing with a quick press of her head to his, and he had swiftly started on emptying his flask, a task only left unfinished by his falling asleep.

“C'mon, sleepyhead, I don't get a welcome back?”

It takes a moment for the voice to penetrate. Then Arthur is springing up, nearly tripping over the mattress and his own legs in his haste to get upright. Wild eyed, he fixes on Blakely, standing smiling by his rack like he hasn't just materialized from the ether.

Gagged by sleep and whiskey and confusion, Arthur surges forward to wrap his arms around him. Real. Warm. Holding him back. Arthur barely checks there's nobody around before pulling back to land a desperate, smacking, kiss against his mouth.

“Fuck, oh fuck,” he breathes. “Jesus, Ev, what the fuck-”

“Easy, there,” Ev is laughing, gentling him with a hand down his side. “I'm alright. We made it back.”

“Fuck,” Arthur spits one last time. Then he turns them and pushes him onto his bed by his shoulders. “Sit down, sit down, Jesus, are you insane? Have you been to medical?”

Without letting him answer, he kneels in front of him, starts really checking him over. Miraculously it seems like Ev’s in one piece, aside from the usual scratches and bruises they all come back with. Arthur runs his thumb over the largest graze visible, the one that has smeared a thick line of red over his nose.

Having sat patiently through the hurried examination, Ev reaches out to brush at Arthur's own face. It’s an effort to not flinch away, the puffy soreness of the skin around his eyes having settled in properly by now.

“What happened here?” Asks Ev.

“Fell outta my fort when we landed,” Arthur admits sheepishly. “Broke my nose on the runway.”

Ev tries valiantly not to laugh, but fails, and Arthur can't help but join him, dropping his forehead onto his knees. He's still in his flight suit. It smells of smoke, and sweat, and comfort. Arthur breathes deep, tries to calm his racing heart and spinning mind, tries to bottle up the screaming cocktail of feelings that wants him to pin Ev down and tell him in great, emotive, detail how deeply fucked he thought he was going to be without him. They clog his throat, jostle for dominance, pinwheel him between joy and fury and grief until a kind of numbness wins.

“Hatch is dead,” Arthur says hollowly, not raising his head.

The laughter above him stops, and a hand touches the back of his head.

“So's Saunders.”

Neither says anything for a long moment.

“I'm glad you're not,” Arthur finally adds. If he says anything else it’ll all come spilling out, and that can’t happen, not ever. For both of their sakes.

The fingers in his hair curl, then release.