Never Coming Home

It felt like the end of the world.

As far back as he could remember it had been Gerard and his younger brother against the world. Gee and Mikey, Mikey and Gee. They were a team and they did everything together. They were as close as brother could be, more like best friends than siblings. To their parents’ delight, the two had rarely argued and had grown up looking to each other for support. When Mikey had found himself the butt of the classroom jokes at school thanks to his glasses, Gerard had been the one to sort the bullies out. When Gerard had been trying to justify his musical career to sceptical parents, Mikey had stood up for him. They did everything for each other and without Mikey sitting beside Gerard, the elder felt entirely out of place.

It hadn’t made sense to him when they had talked about a military funeral. Mikey wasn’t a soldier, nor would he ever have been. Sure, that’s what they would say during the service, along with the fact that he had died valiantly fighting for a country he loved, but it wasn’t real. No one knew the real Mikey better than Gerard. The real Mikey had wanted nothing more than to live out his life as quietly as possible, sliding under the radar whilst doing what he loved. The Mikey that the war had shaped was a cold, hardened shell of a man. The Mikey that had been taken from him prematurely had been a ghost, a mere projection of what had come beforehand.

In all honesty, Gerard was pretty sure that Mikey had been dead since the very first time they were all forced into combat.

The war was still raging on around their ears. Storming the beach at Normandy had been a great success according to the government, despite losing literally tens of thousands of men. The fighting was dying down, and the Axis powers were pushing further back, retreating into their own countries like abandoned strays. The news told of victory in the near future, of a world where the country would be jubilant and the Allied forces would reign supreme, preventing a mass genocide. They told of hopeful days in the future where everything would be back to the way it had been before Germany had even considered invading Poland.

But none of that mattered to Gerard, because his life was never going to go back to normal, not ever.

They had tried to keep him in the battles for a week, citing that getting revenge on the bastards that had killed his younger brother would be a therapeutic way of him living out his grief, but that hadn’t lasted long. Military doctors, the shoddy kind with little training in psychology or how to treat a human being, had been forced to refer him to a specialist, a psychologist who also had little knowledge in how to speak to normal people, but had more education than almost every other military doctor Gerard had ever seen. He used several eloquent and long-winded phrases, but the simple fact was that Gerard wasn’t fit for battle. Hell, he wasn’t fit to clean his own boots, never mind hold a gun. They dismissed him on medical leave, citing family trauma as the main cause of his inability to fight for his country.

Wearing his dress uniform hadn’t been Gerard’s idea. His father had suggested it in a passing comment, a homage to how brave Mikey was. He would have wanted to see Gerard proud, his parents had said in one of the rare moments that they conversed with him. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but feel like they blamed him for what had happened. Gerard had promised his mother — out of earshot of Mikey, of course — that he would bring his brother home safely. He hadn’t kept that promise, and the guilt was eating Gerard from the inside out.

Gerard couldn’t sit at the front. He couldn’t concentrate on the words coming from the mouth of the official overseeing the service. Not even the sweat trickling down the back of his neck, created by the warm July sunshine pouring in through the window, could distract him from his own thoughts. He could barely feel the starched collar of his shirt dampen more and more with every passing second. It didn’t even register in his mind that he was crying for what seemed like the millionth time that week, or that his hands were balled into fists at his side.

All that he could think about was the fact that Mikey was never coming home.