The Three Armies

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Mikey? Do you have any idea what you’re signing yourself up for?”

Mikey winces, his gaze fixed on the floor as if by staring at it hard enough, he can block out the sound of his older brother losing it right next to him.

Gerard isn’t angry with him – that isn’t the right word. Gerard was angry with him when he forgot to turn up to band practice the other week. Gerard was angry with him the last time he got so drunk he couldn’t remember his own name. Gerard was angry with him when he stole his pencils to draw Frank a birthday card last year, complete with wonky pumpkins and stick witches on brooms.

Gerard isn’t angry. His eyes are slits and his jaw is clenched and there’s a tight pulse thrumming in his temple and he looks like he’d quite like to kill someone. Maybe Mikey. Maybe whoever convinced him this was a good idea in the first place. Maybe himself.

No, Gerard isn’t angry.

Gerard is enraged.

“I’m sorry, Gee,” Mikey mumbles, when it becomes obvious that his brother expects a coherent response to his nonsensical ramblings. “I just- I have to do this. I have to.” And he can’t explain why, exactly, but his eyes are fierce and his jaw is set and he knows that Gerard understands. He doesn’t want to, of course he doesn’t, but he understands.

“Goddammit, Mikey. You know what this means, right?” Gerard sighs, rubs a hand over his face, glares at his idiot of a younger brother. “I’m gonna have to come with you, you know that?”

And Mikey just nods. He knows that it’d be futile to even try and talk Gerard out of it because never mind that Gerard is a pacifist and doesn’t believe in war, never mind that he has his art and he has his music and he doesn’t need this, not like Mikey does, Mikey is his brother and he’ll be damned if he lets him go off to fight in some war that has fuck all to do with them without Gerard around to keep an eye on him. That’s just the way things are, the way things always have been, the way things always will be.

---

And because Gerard’s going, so are Frank and Bob and pretty much everyone else they know. Of course.

“Fucking hell, guys,” Mikey mutters, as he watches his brother and his best friends sign their lives away under his name. “I don’t need all of you babysitting me, jeez.” But there’s a smile poking out from underneath the frown, taking the sting out of his words.

“Sure you do,” Frank says cheerfully, bouncing up and down on his heels. “You both do. You don’t seriously think we’re going to let you and Gerard go off to some foreign country by yourselves, do you? You wouldn’t last five minutes without us. They’re going to give you guns. They’re going to expect you to use them and not shoot yourselves in the foot. You do know that, right?”

Mikey shoots a half-hearted glare in his direction, which Frank reciprocates with a grin.

“You’re not dying on our watch, Mikey,” Bob adds, clapping him briefly on the shoulder.

---

None of them have ever fired a gun before in their lives, but they learn how to pretty quickly. Training is intensive and brutal and involves a lot of running and a lot more shooting.

It turns out Frank’s a crack shot with a rifle. This surprises no one. It also turns out, however, that Gerard is too. This is surprising, and no one’s more surprised than Gerard himself.

Bob’s not bad with a gun, though he’s better with explosives and grenades and, as he likes to put it, “blowing shit up”. And Mikey... well, Mikey’s just getting by, managing enough to stay under the radar. Most of the time.

This is not one of the those times.

Mikey’s running laps, rifle held high above his head, blinking hard to stop the tears streaming out of his eyes. He’s not sure what it was he did wrong; he’s been careful to do everything he’s been told the way he’s been told, never cheeks the General like Frank does – though the General thinks the sun shines out of Frank’s ass, so he can get away with bloody murder – and he’s even managing to shoot near enough the centre of the target one time out of every, um, fifty.

He thinks he might have looked at one of the officers wrong. That’s about all he could make out from the strident bellows of the man as he pulled Mikey away from the others and ordered him to do laps.

Mikey could hear Gerard protesting as he was dragged off - “But he’s got asthma, he can’t do laps, he could die!” - and thinks that this may be the first time in his life that he appreciates Gerard’s flair for the dramatics. It doesn’t help him any, but he appreciates it.

When the officer releases Mikey, he looks up at him as docilely as he can, knowing instinctively that this is not the time for insubordination. But when he sees who it is, he gives a start, dread settling in the pit of his stomach. This officer has had it out for him since the day they arrived here for reasons Mikey can’t even begin to fathom, and he takes any and every opportunity to make Mikey’s life a living hell. He’s been only vaguely successful so far; Mikey’s got friends, scary friends, who can play an M1941 Johnson rifle like a musical instrument. But his friends are nowhere to be seen, now, and that makes Mikey’s chest constrict.

“Start running, Way,” the officer sneers, glaring at him through narrowed, piggy eyes. “Your brother ain’t gonna save your skinny ass this time.”

Mikey gulps, nodding, and obeys.

---

His legs are pumping like pistons and his arms are aching from the sheer weight they’re holding above his head and his lungs feel like they’re on fire. He can barely breathe but he forces himself to, in through his nose and out through his mouth like he’s always been taught, and miraculously he doesn’t keel over and die halfway through. He wishes Gerard or Frank or Bob were at his side, running with him so he wouldn’t feel so alone in the empty expanse of the field, and he instantly hates himself for being so selfish.

Mikey’s not sure how long he runs for – maybe an hour, maybe more, he hasn’t got a watch so he can’t keep track – but when the officer finally calls out that that’s it, he can stop now, Mikey crashes to a halt right then and there and collapses on the ground, gasping and wheezing for breath, blackness hovering at the edges of his vision.

The officer crouches to Mikey’s level, pokes him in the side, smiles a cruel, crooked smile. “Pathetic. You’re pathetic, Way, just like your faggot of a brother.”

Oh. That’s why. Anger flares in Mikey’s chest and he starts coughing, chest spasming as he struggles in vain to breathe. Laughing, the officer gets to his feet, aiming a kick to Mikey’s side to roll him onto his back before he strolls away, whistling cheerfully.

Mikey thinks he might die here, gazing up at the sky, lying in a pile of mud and shit and God knows what else, and somehow he can’t muster up the energy to care.

But then someone’s at his side, massaging his back, murmuring into his ear, helping him to his feet. Gerard, Mikey thinks, burying his face in his brother’s neck, and the familiar smell helps him breathe, once, twice, before he succumbs to the darkness.

---

When Mikey wakes, he’s lying in a bed in the infirmary. There’s a familiar-looking medic, with a friendly face and hair that looks like it might be curly if it weren’t less than an inch long, adjusting the oxygen tank he’s hooked up to. The medic turns around, smiles when he sees Mikey’s awake, and leans over to poke Gerard, who’s snoring in the chair next to Mikey’s bed.

“Gee,” the medic says, poking him again, “your brother’s up.”

Gerard startles awake almost instantly, eyes wild, and blurts out, “What? Where? Who?” and Mikey bursts into a fit of giggles, which soon dissolve into violent coughs. The medic smacks him on the back helpfully.

“Thanks Ray,” Gerard mumbles, and Mikey starts because of course, this is Ray, Gerard’s best friend from high school who he hasn’t seen since they graduated two years ago.

Small world, Mikey thinks, and smiles.

“I’ll just be over there if you need me,” Ray says, nodding at another bed on the other side of his room.

Gerard nods back, stifling a yawn behind his hand, and Mikey thinks that he’s never seen him look so tired. It worries him. He wonders, fleetingly, how long he’s been unconscious and then, perhaps more importantly, why the hell he’s even in the infirmary in the first place.

Gerard just looks at him when Mikey voices his concerns. “You keeled over and passed out after running for four hours straight, Mikey,” Gerard informs him, worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. “You’ve been unconscious for nearly twenty four hours. You could have died.”

“Oh,” Mikey says, wincing because he remembers now, remembers everything. “Right.”

Gerard sighs, rubs a hand over his face like he’s rubbing the sleep from his eyes, but Mikey knows him better than that. “You could have died, Mikey,” he repeats, his voice tiny and cracking in the middle and so scared it makes something in Mikey’s chest squirm with guilt.

“I’m sorry,” Mikey mumbles, drawing his blanket closer around him.

“You don’t get to die,” Gerard says, looking up at him with eyes wild and crazy with something that looks strangely like grief. “Not here, not now, not ever, you understand me?” Mikey nods, thinking it’s probably not the right time to remind his brother that he’ll have to die, one day. “Promise me, Mikey.”

“I promise,” Mikey says, after a moment’s hesitation, and that seems to satisfy Gerard because he slumps back in his chair, eyes closed against the harsh white light, and nods. “Where are Frank and Bob?”

“Bob’s making sure Frank doesn’t do something stupid, like beat the shit out of the officer that did this to you,” Gerard replies, but the tone of his voice suggests he doesn’t think it would be stupid at all. “He’s being moved to a different squadron. He’ll never be able to hurt you again.”

Mikey tries to smile, but it feels strange stretched over his lips. “I’m fine,” he says, not sure who he’s trying to convince, but Gerard just gives a weary nod and squeezes into the bed next to him, folding Mikey into his side.

---

They're deployed mere weeks later, shipped from their training ground somewhere in south-east England to the mouth of the battle in the north of France. Mikey's not sure what they're trying to achieve here, but he thinks he probably ought to know. Something to do with reclaiming land, he thinks, taking power from the Germans. Something necessary, he thinks. Something right.

The boat is cramped and smelly and there are too many men crammed onto it, shoulders squeezed up against each other. Ray’s crossing himself; another man’s kissing a crucifix hanging at his neck. Mikey wonders briefly if he should do something like that, but he stopped believing in a higher power a long, long time ago. He’s not sure he believes in anything any more.

What seems like hours later but is probably mere minutes, they’re on the beach and the soldiers swarm off the boat like a colony of ants, splashing through the water onto dry land. Mikey’s pulled along with the current, separated from his brother and his friends, and he clutches his rifle like somehow it’ll protect him from the bullets whizzing over his head.

He forces himself to think, forces himself to remember what he has to do – run and shoot, run and shoot, by God almighty, Way, run and shoot. He can see Gerard some way up the beach with Frank and Bob, yelling and gesturing like a madman and ordering the men to move their asses already. Mikey smiles, with something that might be pride, and then ducks for cover when a bullet whistles past his ear. His throat seizes up and he starts gasping and panicking for breath that won’t come.

Breathe, Mikey, breathe, in and out, breathe, breathe, you’ve got to get out of here, breathe, breathe, and then Mikey runs and runs and his ears are filled with Gerard screaming his name and the discordant hail of bullets and he keeps running because he has to get away, he can’t die here, he promised, and that’s when a bullet rips into his chest and knocks him to the ground.

Gerard’s screaming swells to a crescendo above the machine guns and shells and the bassline of the ocean thrumming underneath, and Mikey’s singing back up like in the songs they used to play because the pain, the pain is almost unbearable as it bleeds out of the hole in his chest.

Ray’s at his side almost instantly, unrolling a bandage to press to the bullet hole to stem the flow of blood. He’s saying something Mikey can’t hear, can’t make out over the chorus of gunfire and Gerard’s screams and the blood roaring in his ears, but Mikey can tell from his face that it’s nothing good.

I’m going to die, he thinks with sudden, astonishing clarity. And then: oh, fuck, partly because of the pain, partly because of the pervading guilt. Gee, Gee, I’m so sorry.

And then it’s like everything just stops – the chorus ends, the pain diminishes and all Mikey can see is the sand, blood-soaked and tear-stained and covered in lifeless bodies, before everything fades to black.