Relief is good, but this is bad. He rests the muzzle of his gun against the forehead of one of the corpses pulling him down. This is--
Is it that bad?
It reeks, drowning in the slop of this place won't be pleasant, but will it be all that bad, comparatively speaking? No worse than choking on vomit on an exam table.
Unfortunately for David and his little In Water moment, another gun goes off where his own did not, and the corpse's head bursts like a melon hitting the floor. It falls back, but more are floating up from the stinking water, and if the lake has a true bottom then it's now well below David's feet.
One of them turns to him. The end of a length of rope lands on its head. One could almost imagine a look of surprise on the wet green face.
"Grab it!" comes an order barked from somewhere beyond the rising sea of rotting bodies.
It's an order given with authority in the field from a voice he recognizes. Obedience is automatic. He's up to his chest, and he's fucking tired, and it's not Caleb, the body or the voice, and for fuck's sake can he just be done, but he grabs the rope.
Grabbing the rope is enough for now. Charlie can hypocritically examine David's lack of will to live later.
The dead soldiers haul at David and at the corpse that isn't Caleb. Charlie hauls at the rope. The water is thick with bodies and the sludge of even older bodies, and David has some fucking weight to him besides, but it's amazing what a little elbow grease and fear will do for your poundage. When David is close enough to get his footing on some actual non-corpse ground, Charlie takes his bayonet and smacks the butt into the skull of one of the corpses who came along for the ride. It cracks inwards.
"Up." Terse.
He doesn't appear to be looking clearly at the bodies, or at David, though he does look very sharply into no-man's-land, towards the unseen enemy lines. There's an overstrung slackness to him that David, as another soldier, is sure to recognise.
He recognizes it. The tension, the sharpness of the order, they're familiar.
He gets up.
Because that's what he does, it's what he's always done, it's what he's had no choice in doing. It's soothing in a way to let programming take over. He gets up, slicks the rot off his gun to make sure it will still fire, even if he has to do it at close range until it's dry and cleaned. Hopefully the fucker doesn't jam.
Tired blue eyes meet Charlie's. He's the established authority at this point: if he has a mission for them, then at least David doesn't have to think about next steps.
There's definitely a bad taste to ordering David around like his fucking commanding officer, given the specific cruelties heaped on him. But if they unpack that it won't be here in the middle of an enemy assault.
Hollow, focused eyes meet David's. If Charlie is surprised, or relieved, or concerned, it's buried too deep for either of them to see right now. Another shell screams through the air and bursts too soon, in the sky, like a fucked up firework, and the distant shrapnel crowns his head as he grins suddenly and violently.
"I'm sticking my neck out, kid, so prove me wrong and be fuckin' real. Follow me. Listening post."
He slips into the lee of a muddy rent in the ground, half-cover against being seen from the northeast, and hustles at a low crouch.
The be fucking real gets more of a response from David than anything else so far. A lift of his eyebrows, a briefly opened mouth, then he's back on task.
"I'm real."
Follow to the listening post, easy enough. David again obeys, falling in behind Charlie and keeping a faint eye on the path behind them as they hustle forward. This, strangely, feels much less like a nightmare. It's simple reality, albeit one that he didn't personally experience. He's been through close enough.
Wryly: "Custom-made." It sucks beyond description and he can't wait to get out! But the basic trench setup is at least not as bad as when--
--There are screams from the battlefield, faint and distant. This isn't new. What's new is the way they seem to shift in tone: between one moment and the next, while not being paid attention to, they've become screams of excitement. There's shouting, laughter. A rhythmic vibration that suggests music is being played just out of earshot.
Charlie stops dead for a moment, looking like his legs have stopped working. Then, as best he can when bent over, he starts to sprint. He glances back to make sure David is following. His eyes are very wide.
Something in Charlie's reaction engages what hasn't been present in David until now: survival instincts. Charlie is afraid. Charlie isn't a civilian, no, but he's afraid and that means there's something here to protect him from. Something he thinks he can't take on alone.
That probably shouldn't settle David's mind as much as it does. He checks his weapon again, spots a broken piece of something that could have been a cart and wrenches it out of the mud as they pass. Something to bludgeon and stab with, should he need it.
Charlie swivels again, this time with a finger over his lips. Barely audible, more mimed than whispered: "Wait."
The rows of barbed wire are still to their west, barring the way between them and the frontline trench. But closer and half-hidden by thistles is a long ditch set into the ground, walled with sandbags, deep enough for a man to crouch along and not be seen. It cuts back through the barbed wire at a right-angle to the front line. A dead sapper sits propped against some chickenwire at its end, his brains on his helmet. He looks startlingly familiar at a glance.
The singing voices rise in a joyous chant, punctuated whenever a singer is taken over by wild and raptured laughing. The sound is closer now. The whites of Charlie's eyes are very visible: he looks like a man with something breathing down his neck. He gestures for David to follow, the movement of his hand staccato, and then he drops into the shallow trench.
Wait, Charlie says, and David freezes into a silent crouch. He moves when Charlie gestures for him to do so, forces himself to keep his eyes away from that familiar-unfamiliar corpse.
Caleb isn't here. It's not him.
That noise though--small as it is, it's enough of an alert that David will try to put himself between Charlie and any obvious cause.
As soon as David follows over the edge, the cause will become very obvious indeed: they're falling. What was a shallow ditch stretches under his feet into darkness, and he tumbles past sandbags and wire and bones with the ruthless gravity of falling in a dream. The laughter is suddenly right in his ears, as if they're surrounded by invisible revellers. Their singing and chanting are loud and excited; they use a strange barbed language that hurts to listen to. It's catchy. Makes you want to sing and laugh along, even if forming the words yourself makes your mouth bleed.
A little way below him, Charlie is panting and twisting and reaching for the sides of the trench, grasping at anything that might arrest his fall.
He finds himself humming, finds the taste of copper on his tongue, grimaces and spits to one side as they fall.
Then he turns in the air, using his arms and legs to weight the way he's angled, and arrows down after Charlie.
As soon as Charlie is in reach, David braces himself--this is going to hurt--then loops an arm around Charlie's waist. David's gun gets carefully pointed away from the other man. Then he takes the spar of wood he pulled out of the ditch, hopes it holds up to the both of them, and drives it into the nearest trench wall. He lets momentum do the work of digging it in deep.
At best he's going to dislocate something. At worst the wood will break. It's worth a shot.
One moment Charlie is falling and in hell and falling. The next moment he's-- well, he's still in hell, but he's also making a squeezed-stress-ball noise as he jerks to a halt with David's arm around his waist like a motion picture damsel grabbed by an action hero. And like a motion picture damsel, he grabs back, hanging onto David's arm for dear life.
He breathes in a bit too fast, half-spits and half-coughs out a mouthful of blood, and wheezes "Jesus! Okay!" out of sheer surprise.
Then they hit the wall in a tangle, as 'up' fights briefly with itself before switching roles with 'sideways'.
Yep, that fucking hurts all right. The popping sound his arm makes as it abruptly takes both of their weight hopefully hides the soft grunt that pain squeezes out of him. Pain is irrelevant, the priority is survival.
He clears his throat and horks a mixed wad of spit and blood into the abyss--
Except it hits his leg instead as the world tilts aggressively around them and they land on the brand new ground formerly known as wall.
They're now in a vast underground space with no visible end, as if a huge empty car park had a ceiling and floor of dirt and wood and wire. Here and there, ceiling and floor meet each other in a rubbly pile, and here and there, those piles are hollowed into dugouts. In those holes, booted feet and the tops of heads are barely visible in the low light. It's impossible to tell whether the men they belong to are dead or sleeping.
Charlie, who is now covered in nearly as much slime as David, laughs a little hysterically as he untangles himself, and then says: "Fuck."
He chokes up another round of blood. Furtive: "You okay, kid?"
"All good," he confirms, even though getting to his feet is slightly more of a production with one shoulder dislocated. Without waiting for instruction, he goes to the closest pillar of earth, braces himself against it at an angle, closes his eyes--
Yeah that ugly crunchy popping sound was David shoving his arm back into its socket.
He winces as he gives it an experimental lift and rotation. That's all, though--after that he has steady blue eyes on Charlie again, waiting for an explanation or plan of action. Whichever is more relevant.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cw suicidal ideation
Relief is good, but this is bad. He rests the muzzle of his gun against the forehead of one of the corpses pulling him down. This is--
Is it that bad?
It reeks, drowning in the slop of this place won't be pleasant, but will it be all that bad, comparatively speaking? No worse than choking on vomit on an exam table.
His finger on the trigger goes slack.
no subject
One of them turns to him. The end of a length of rope lands on its head. One could almost imagine a look of surprise on the wet green face.
"Grab it!" comes an order barked from somewhere beyond the rising sea of rotting bodies.
ANNND MORE CW FOR SI
does he need a snack
The dead soldiers haul at David and at the corpse that isn't Caleb. Charlie hauls at the rope. The water is thick with bodies and the sludge of even older bodies, and David has some fucking weight to him besides, but it's amazing what a little elbow grease and fear will do for your poundage. When David is close enough to get his footing on some actual non-corpse ground, Charlie takes his bayonet and smacks the butt into the skull of one of the corpses who came along for the ride. It cracks inwards.
"Up." Terse.
He doesn't appear to be looking clearly at the bodies, or at David, though he does look very sharply into no-man's-land, towards the unseen enemy lines. There's an overstrung slackness to him that David, as another soldier, is sure to recognise.
chokesputter
He gets up.
Because that's what he does, it's what he's always done, it's what he's had no choice in doing. It's soothing in a way to let programming take over. He gets up, slicks the rot off his gun to make sure it will still fire, even if he has to do it at close range until it's dry and cleaned. Hopefully the fucker doesn't jam.
Tired blue eyes meet Charlie's. He's the established authority at this point: if he has a mission for them, then at least David doesn't have to think about next steps.
no subject
Hollow, focused eyes meet David's. If Charlie is surprised, or relieved, or concerned, it's buried too deep for either of them to see right now. Another shell screams through the air and bursts too soon, in the sky, like a fucked up firework, and the distant shrapnel crowns his head as he grins suddenly and violently.
"I'm sticking my neck out, kid, so prove me wrong and be fuckin' real. Follow me. Listening post."
He slips into the lee of a muddy rent in the ground, half-cover against being seen from the northeast, and hustles at a low crouch.
no subject
"I'm real."
Follow to the listening post, easy enough. David again obeys, falling in behind Charlie and keeping a faint eye on the path behind them as they hustle forward. This, strangely, feels much less like a nightmare. It's simple reality, albeit one that he didn't personally experience. He's been through close enough.
"Your little bit of nightmare?"
no subject
--There are screams from the battlefield, faint and distant. This isn't new. What's new is the way they seem to shift in tone: between one moment and the next, while not being paid attention to, they've become screams of excitement. There's shouting, laughter. A rhythmic vibration that suggests music is being played just out of earshot.
Charlie stops dead for a moment, looking like his legs have stopped working. Then, as best he can when bent over, he starts to sprint. He glances back to make sure David is following. His eyes are very wide.
no subject
That probably shouldn't settle David's mind as much as it does. He checks his weapon again, spots a broken piece of something that could have been a cart and wrenches it out of the mud as they pass. Something to bludgeon and stab with, should he need it.
"Who's on us, Charlie?"
He has the feeling it's not Germans.
no subject
The rows of barbed wire are still to their west, barring the way between them and the frontline trench. But closer and half-hidden by thistles is a long ditch set into the ground, walled with sandbags, deep enough for a man to crouch along and not be seen. It cuts back through the barbed wire at a right-angle to the front line. A dead sapper sits propped against some chickenwire at its end, his brains on his helmet. He looks startlingly familiar at a glance.
The singing voices rise in a joyous chant, punctuated whenever a singer is taken over by wild and raptured laughing. The sound is closer now. The whites of Charlie's eyes are very visible: he looks like a man with something breathing down his neck. He gestures for David to follow, the movement of his hand staccato, and then he drops into the shallow trench.
Before he lands, he makes a quiet noise of shock.
no subject
Caleb isn't here. It's not him.
That noise though--small as it is, it's enough of an alert that David will try to put himself between Charlie and any obvious cause.
no subject
A little way below him, Charlie is panting and twisting and reaching for the sides of the trench, grasping at anything that might arrest his fall.
no subject
He finds himself humming, finds the taste of copper on his tongue, grimaces and spits to one side as they fall.
Then he turns in the air, using his arms and legs to weight the way he's angled, and arrows down after Charlie.
As soon as Charlie is in reach, David braces himself--this is going to hurt--then loops an arm around Charlie's waist. David's gun gets carefully pointed away from the other man. Then he takes the spar of wood he pulled out of the ditch, hopes it holds up to the both of them, and drives it into the nearest trench wall. He lets momentum do the work of digging it in deep.
At best he's going to dislocate something. At worst the wood will break. It's worth a shot.
no subject
He breathes in a bit too fast, half-spits and half-coughs out a mouthful of blood, and wheezes "Jesus! Okay!" out of sheer surprise.
Then they hit the wall in a tangle, as 'up' fights briefly with itself before switching roles with 'sideways'.
no subject
He clears his throat and horks a mixed wad of spit and blood into the abyss--
Except it hits his leg instead as the world tilts aggressively around them and they land on the brand new ground formerly known as wall.
He makes another small irritated noise.
"Fuck's sake."
no subject
Charlie, who is now covered in nearly as much slime as David, laughs a little hysterically as he untangles himself, and then says: "Fuck."
He chokes up another round of blood. Furtive: "You okay, kid?"
no subject
Yeah that ugly crunchy popping sound was David shoving his arm back into its socket.
He winces as he gives it an experimental lift and rotation. That's all, though--after that he has steady blue eyes on Charlie again, waiting for an explanation or plan of action. Whichever is more relevant.