#frukweek2022

A man a few feet away grunted. England and France fell silent, watching him adjust his sleeping position and fall still and quiet once more.

France let go but did not step away. England didn’t move either, merely watched him with guarded, sunken eyes as if waiting to see what France would do.

‘How about we both sleep, hmm?’ France said after a moment of stalemate, ‘You’ll only be more irritated with me tomorrow if you’re tired.’

‘I’m always irritated with you.’

‘You are always tired.’

England snorted but quickly recovered, mouth a tight line once more. There was a rigidity to him, made only the more visible now that there was nothing left for him to do to hide it away. Without work or movement, England stood as if expectant of something, tense and awkward like a puppet without purpose. In the dark, all there was left to see of him were the absences.

France nudged his arm with the back of his hand and indicated further into the stables for England to follow. Wordlessly, England gave up the argument and did so, past their mixture of men to a stable box right at the back that they had both initially claimed upon arrival. As soon as he lay down, France’s body grew heavier, his limbs easing into the hay as the overwhelming need to sleep caught hold of him once more. He’d only awoken because he’d been cold alone and, without England there to remedy that fact and only serving to add more worry that France did not need, he’d reluctantly pulled himself up to go looking.

England came to sit beside him, his back against hay stacked along the wall.

‘You won’t sleep like that,’ France told him helpfully.

England made a low noise in the back of his throat and rested an arm loosely on a knee brought to his chest.

There was a small open window high on the wall behind them, split across their bay and the one next door. It gave enough light to outline them both in silver and France watched the way England’s fingers worried the material of his trousers and the controlled way that he breathed.

Too controlled. Too forced.

‘Arthur,’ France heaved himself up to sit level besides him, ‘What is it.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

France took hold of his free hand, running his thumb across the dry, calloused skin of his palm. The silence of the unsaid between them grew thicker, balanced on the knife’s edge of breaking.

England let out a held breath through his nose.

‘I am thinking about how strange this all is,’ he said, voice a barely more than a murmur, ‘how mixed and messy. Not only this battle but-‘

He waved his free hand outwards towards the world beyond, ‘Everything. Military knowledge of every century pressed together and then buried under something new. Guns and gas with swords and horses.’

France stayed silent.

‘We’re here. Right now, we’re here in the middle of it all but I can’t tell. The field outside and the farmhouse and the barns- it’s quiet, as though we’re not in a war at all. As though we’ve woken from a nightmare and realising that nothing has changed.’

There were more of their men outside, far too many to fit inside the stables and the barns or the farmhouse- the terrified owners only placated by France himself promising them no trouble. France imagined England walking through their men in the fields under moonlight, a weary soldier of old wars stepping silently amongst children of the new.

England lifted their joined hands and twisted them over, regarding his cracked and broken nails with a blank expression. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that. Guns, that is. The distance they give.’

‘You preferred to kill and be killed up close?’

‘Yes,’ England replied immediately, ‘Yes, I do. I prefer to see the life I am taking. It’s not real otherwise.’

‘Ever the sadist, hmm? To enjoy watching an end that you have caused.’

‘To know that I have done it. To make it real, otherwise we’re hardly any better than the Kings and generals who ordered the damn thing, sitting far away from it all in comfort and completely unaware of the reality they’re causing.’

‘This is hardly comfort.’

‘You know what I mean. There is no skill in this sort of warfare, no honour. Just hold the trigger down and watch children die in hundreds. You can no longer improve your chances of survival by training with a weapon. You cannot prepare for this, cannot defend against it. If you live then it is luck and if you die then that is expected but none of it feels real because you can’t even see what’s killing you.’

He took a deep breath, shaky on its way out and shook his head sadly, ‘Before, I could feel the physical toll. Now, I can almost pretend that I’ve not killed anyone at all.’

France said nothing, a hollow apathy preventing him from connecting to what England was saying. He agreed, logically. The sentiment was there, the understanding that he too felt what England was clumsily trying to say- that killing could be justified if it was equal somehow, could be pretended to be fair. To win because you are better skilled in a sword, to lose because you’re not as deft with handling a bow.

There was no pretending with this, there was no illusion of honour or greatness, or right. There was only death, mindless and nameless, and luck granted out blindly to not be stood in the path of a bullet meant for any man it caught. He knew this, but France did not feel it. He felt as though part of him were locked away, stored behind thick glass and forced to watch.

‘There has never been honour in war,’ he said eventually, listening to England breathing softly beside him, ‘Men kill and they die. The only ones who have honour are the fools who believe in it, and they rarely live long enough for it to matter.’

‘There was more honour than this.’ England closed his eyes, tipping his head back to expose the length of his neck, ‘And to think, this is all that our young ones will know. This to them is war.’

France ran the pad of his thumb over England’s thumbnail, his knuckle. Thought about all of the different things they both had done, how many more horrors they’d still do. He was long past being surprised by this war, that part of himself long lost and churned into the bloody fields of Loos and Verdun and Ardennes.

‘Speaking of young ones, I came across Mathieu a few months ago.’

England’s head did not move but his eyes opened to focus intently on the rafters above them.

‘He asked me how we can all do this so much. War, fighting, all of it, I suppose. I told him that this sort is new.’

‘He and Alfred at least know the ways that it used to be. It’s Jack and Alex and the rest I worry about…’ A squeeze of France’s hand, emotion slipping free, ‘But thinking about it does nothing.’

‘Thinking about it might be the only thing left to make it real.’

England shut his eyes again. He let go of France’s hand, ‘Don’t make this philosophical.’

France huffed without any real irritation, ‘You wouldn’t let me sleep. This is your punishment.’

‘Excuse me-‘

‘You’re excused.’

England wore fear like fatigue, sleepless nights and a racing mind that carved bags under his eyes. Something heavy and inconvenient that could be fixed if he only tried hard enough, if he only thought about all the ways to rub out the emotion with words and action.

England shook his head, his expression unreadable, and France knew that the moment- that brief and rare flicker of mortality and innocence between them- had passed. The feeling of something unsaid was still there between them, settled in the lines of England’s face and in the shaking of his hands.

France knew.

France knew, but he couldn’t bring himself to address it.

‘Stop talking,’ England lay on his side turned away from France, his arms tight across his chest, ‘And go to sleep.’

‘Stop making things so difficult then,’ France followed suit and came to lay pressed against him. He draped an arm over England’s waist, last there perhaps together in his comfortable Parisian flat, maybe England’s London townhouse, and pressed a kiss to the back of England’s neck.

England half lifted his head to look back at him. France knew that he wanted to say something and he waited for it, feeling Arthur searching his face for something perhaps Francis no longer had.

England said nothing. He lay his head down and that was that.

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