Page 19 of The Words Beneath the Noise

“Why are you here?” I asked. “At this pub, I mean. Instead of wherever soldiers go to unwind.”

“Soldiers go wherever has alcohol and doesn't ask questions.” He glanced around the dim room. “This place is quiet. Doesn't remind me of anything I'm trying to forget.”

“What are you trying to forget?”

The question came out before I could stop it, too personal, too probing. I waited for him to shut down, to deflect with something gruff and dismissive. For the walls to come back up between us.

“The faces,” he said after a long pause. “The ones I put down. The ones I couldn't save. Sometimes they blur together and I can't tell which is which anymore.”

The honesty of it hit me. Here was this man who'd accused me of distance, of abstraction, and he was showing me his wounds because I'd asked.

“I know that feeling,” I said quietly. “Not faces, for me. Numbers. Coordinates that turn into casualty reports. Sometimes I see the figures in my sleep, scrolling past like ticker tape, and I know each one is a person but I can't make myself feel it properly.”

“Maybe that's a mercy. The not feeling.”

“Or maybe it's the worst part. Being so far removed that death becomes arithmetic.”

He studied me across the table, and something in his gaze had changed. Not softer, exactly. But less sharp. As if he was seeing me for the first time as something other than a soft academic who didn't understand real war.

“We're both in it, then,” he said. “The muck of it. Just different kinds of muck.”

“Different kinds,” I agreed. “Same war.”

He raised his glass, a small gesture that might have been a toast or might have been nothing at all.

“Same war,” he repeated.

I raised mine in return, and we drank in silence while the fire crackled and the night pressed against the windows.

“You're not what I expected, Sergeant Hale.”

“Tom,” he said. “If we're going to sit in a pub philosophising about the futility of existence, you might as well call me Tom.”

“Arthur. Though most people call me Art.” I hesitated. “I'm not sure anyone has actually asked what I prefer in years.”

“Which do you prefer?”

No one had asked that either. I turned the question over in my mind, examining it from angles I'd never considered. “Art, I think. Arthur always felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone more... proper.”

“Art it is, then.” He lifted his glass. “To walking without arriving and doing the work anyway.”

I lifted mine to meet it. “To telling doubt to sod off.”

We drank, and the silence that followed felt different than before. Companionable rather than awkward. Two people who'd somehow stumbled into understanding without meaning to.

“Finch really got under your skin,” Tom said eventually. Not a question.

“He looks at me like I'm already guilty of something. Like existing wrong is a crime.” The bitterness surprised me, how easily it spilled out. “Naff omi,” I muttered into my glass, the words slipping out before I could stop them.

Tom went still.

I realised what I'd done a heartbeat too late. The Polari had come out automatically, the way it always did when I was tired and angry and forgot to guard my tongue. Words that marked me as clearly as a brand if you knew what to listen for. Words that could destroy me if spoken to the wrong person.

My throat tightened. I waited for the question. For the careful probe, the narrowed eyes, the moment where everythingbetween us would curdle into suspicion or worse. Waited for him to ask where I'd learned foreign phrases, why I was speaking in code, what exactly I was hiding.

But Tom just took a drink and said, “What's that mean, then?”

No accusation. No suspicion. Just a straightforward question, like I'd used an unfamiliar word and he wanted to understand.