#scofra

This France, like an old star, was often too still, too prone to staring off into the distance with glassy eyes; saying little, eating less than that. Some of his vigour returned with the distant ringing of shots being fired and the echoes of thrown mortars bursting against the struggling green of the French countryside, anachronistic glee in his voice as he rallied his tired men with a mad gleam in his eyes that flickered through battle and dulled to banked embers by nightfall.

At a venture, when things seemed particularly hopeless, Scotland looked askance at France, wild-eyed and hair shorn close, efficiently (but viciously) pulling a tourniquet around his arm tighter with his teeth before shouldering his gun once again with a tight-lipped expression.

“What say you then,” Scotland began, grinning helplessly and running his fingers over the last of his rounds, counting them and recounting them and thinking that he had, at some point, been up against worse odds, “that we give them back a bit of the hell they gave us?”

France was silent for a long moment and Scotland was beginning to think he’d been ignored until a slim, long-fingered (familiar) hand settled heavily on his broad shoulder in the darkness, sliding down his arm in idle exploration, settling briefly in the crook of his elbow, lighting for a moment on his mud-flecked wrist, before seizing his much larger hand in a bone-creaking vice grip that shocked the breath out of him in one gusty exhale.

“Why not,” France returned in a murmur, his smile half-lost in the fading light. “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”

Scotland wanted to say–many things, probably. More than their tattered dignity would allow, more than what they didn’t already know. So, with the same single-bloody-mindedness that had gotten him this far, he steadily crushed the tiny voice whispering nonsense in the back of his head until it went silent.

He wanted to say–something, but he wasn’t the poetic one out of his brothers and all his beauty was written into the bones of the land and not laden heavy on his tongue.

He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t; so he didn’t.

And in that spare moment between one break in the bullet fire and the next hail of it, he listened to France inhale deeply, impatiently, and watched him jam the dented helmet onto his head, knocking it into place with a practiced fist, calloused fingers tightening straps, adjusting grips, straightening arms in their holsters.

Quick as a thought, he threw himself up the sides of their trench with a sardonic laugh, and the glance he threw over his shoulder back to Scotland felt like a benediction of the most bittersweet sort. He found himself laughing as well as he levered himself up and tore after France, lungs heaving like bellows.

He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t.