Albert felt almost guilty about it. He had promised Jeff that he would help him, help to find out what happened to his family, but he really was next to useless. He hems and haws over that, worries about it to the point that it stacked up on his classes and his work and left Walter watching him with a keen eye.

“You smell like alcohol,” says Jeff’s accusing voice behind him.

Albert sighs, rubs at the hair standing up on the back of his neck, and doesn’t turn to look. He sits in the library brightly-lit with white light, almost empty at this time of night. He was studying for a class- he had long forgotten which one, almost cross-eyed from exhaustion- and he was sure he looked a fright, but at least there was no one around to see him

No one alive, anyway.

“You can smell?” he asks idly.

Jeff scoffs and Albert can hear him move, the rustle of his clothing and the quiet clatter of his canteen against his haversack. He glances up when the toes of Jeff’s worn, dirty boots stop just on the edge of his vision, a stark contrast to the library’s waxed tile floor.

“I can smell,” Jeff says, and there’s a frown on his face, as if he were disappointed, “and you smell like alcohol. Thought you were s’posed to be helpin’ me, not havin’ a bit’ve a drink.”

“I work at a bar. Everything smells like alcohol.” Albert rolls his eyes; why should he have to explain himself to a man that’s been dead for a century and a half? “Did you know that you have a really common last name?”

Something twitches about Jeff’s mouth as he settles in the chair on the other side of the table, one left pulled out by its previous occupant, and he shucks off his rifle and his haversack before he really looks at Albert, and once again Albert is struck by just how horrifically young Jeff was, twenty-something forever.

He tries to think of what it was like, separated from everyone and everything you knew, moving through a world you couldn’t even interact with. He feels sick.

“Jeffrey,” Albert asks suddenly, and he doesn’t know if he’s ever actually used the ghost’s name before now. He pauses for a moment, rolling it around on his tongue. “Jeffrey, how old were you?”

“Huh?”

“When you died,” Albert says, “how old were you?”

“Well,” Jeff says, considering, leaning back in his chair. The wood doesn’t creak like it should have, had someone with a flesh and bone body been sitting in it. “I was born in 1842. I turned twenty-two in May of ’65. So I would’ve been thereabouts.”

And suddenly, all at once, Albert pities him terribly.

“Tell me about your family,” he says, changing tracks entirely, only in part to try to escape that sad, sinking feeling.

He really did want to know about Jeff’s family, know who they were outside of the people he had seen in dreams.

Jeff manages a smile, then, but it’s not like any smile he’s favored Albert with; it’s soft and warm, affectionate, a faint flash of teeth. “I’m the oldest’ve five,” he says, sounding almost bashful. “Well, six. There’s me, then there was Laurie- he died young, though, was a few years after me- and Charlie, Annie, Fanny, and Nate. My parents, too.”

He seemed happy, talking about them, and something in Albert’s gut tightens with mingled sympathy and jealousy. A happy home life, a family that loved him- these were things that Albert didn’t have. He’d never thought much about it, had never let himself think much about it; he’d gone home with Walter on holidays and had contented himself with that.

He says, “What were they like?”

“Oh, they’re a handful, every one’ve ‘em.” Jeff laughs a little here, indulgent, and he scratches vaguely at his cheek as he thinks. “Charlie was as bold as you please; she had her own way’ve things and she’d do what she liked no matter what our ma said. Annie was quieter, shy, but sweet as sugar; she liked her books, more’n anything. Fanny was the youngest girl, loud and bright and cheerful. Nate was barely more’n a babe in arms when I enlisted, he was so young.”

He pauses here, then repeats quietly, “They were all so young.”

Albert reaches across the table the lay his hand on Jeff’s arm in some effort at comfort, but his hand passes straight through with little more than a nip of cold. Jeff smiles at him, smaller and more tumultuous than before, but genuine regardless.

He didn’t know how to mourn people. He’d never had anyone to mourn; all of his losses had been his own choice. He wasn’t sad that Jeff was dead because he’d never known him when he was alive, not really, but Jeff’s grief was open and painful as a wound. He’d had a whole family that he’d left behind, a life of love that he’d promised to come back to,and then he just… hadn’t. Albert wasn’t even sure if his family ever learned what had happened to him, dying alone on that field, choking on his own blood.