#and george headbutted the boy in the face and when paul freaked out he said that paul was too good for that guy

[softschofield]

the convoy boys after the war, part one - rossi and cooke ♡

rossi:

i’ve talked about rossi after the war quite a bit, but essentially, he copes the best. or, rather, he’s the best at accepting that he is fundamentally ruined, that he’s been hollowed out and emptied, that he isn’t and never will be the same, that this trauma will last a life time. and because he’s able to accept that relatively easy and make peace with the sleepless nights and who he’s become and what has happened to him, he can move on. he can look the trauma in the eye and shake its hand and get on with his life in a way that is both terrible and enviable. he’s always been at peace in the quiet, always had a deadpan, irreverent gallows humour, always had to look out for his mother and his siblings and himself - and those three things form the basis of how he’s able to more or less put the war behind him. he was raised in a bleak, grey world of wild moors and black-brown bricks and factory smoke, and war is just another bad thing.

afterwards, he doesn’t go back to the factory. he’s reunited with his family - a joyous, deafening affair: he showed up completely unannounced and knocked on the front door during dinner, and then his siblings are all over him, from the youngest to the eldest, from the sister who had been in a crib when he left in his uniform to the brother who’s almost a man and who has taken a job in the mines, and he has children perched on his shoulders and in his arms and around his legs, and everyone is laughing, and he’s grinning that soft, sly crooked grin, and his mother is shouting at him for something with a gruff face and her apron round her waist, and when he opens his arms for a hug she swats him away like she’s cross, and then they’re finally hugging and she’s smiling and pretending there aren’t tears on her cheeks. he’s reunited with his family, and he stays in his old childhood bedroom for a few days, because they want him to and he isn’t settled yet. he tells his siblings the stories he can bear to tell, and ignores his mother when she insists he doesn’t help her make dinner, and it’s good, it’s nice, to be back in this warm, low-lit, loud home. 

a week or so later, he finds a second-story flat in the same row of grey houses he’d rented a flat in before the war, and he spends all his service pay - two and a half years’ worth - that he hasn’t given to his mother or put into the flat on a typewriter, and then all the money is gone. the flat is empty and cold and feelingless: low ceiling and water stained walls and grimy glass, and water in the bathroom that never runs hot. but it’ll do. his mother gives him an old desk she’s kept tucked away in the barn, and for a long while it’s his only piece of furniture - that and a fuzzy little lamp with a bulb he has to tap a few times to make it stop flickering. he puts the desk by the window, looking out over the brown, damp street, and every day he writes.

he’d always wanted to be a writer - a journalist, to be precise - but he’d lacked the courage to start before. rossi, afraid? no one at school would have believed it. anyway, the war hammered that out of him. there’s no nerves left now. there’s just a quiet, empty, dead-eyed fearlessness that was born in shellfire and turned to soft steel the first time he came out of it alive. friends died, but no one could touch him. stand up and wave his arms about in no man’s land and no one could have touched him.

so, every day, he writes. he starts to write down everything about the war, in chronological order, but it isn’t right and most of the time he’s just left staring down at the page with the echo of cooke telling some stupid story that everyone knew never happened and jondalar speaking softly about his little sister and the smell of flowers and the slums during the rainy season in india inside his head. they’ve written to him. quite frequently, really. he sends a few lines back when he feels like it, but soon enough that stops as well. what is there to say? if it weren’t for the war, they never would have met.

when the memoirs go nowhere, he hitches a ride into the biggest town near his own village (his own? his family’s), walks straight into the local newspaper’s office, puts a few pages of writing onto the editor’s table, and asks for a job. just like that. fearless, hooded eyes and all. he gets it. he stays for a few more months in his little flat, writing articles and posting them in. he has dinner with his family most nights. sometimes he stays over for breakfast, or to take his younger siblings to school, or to go out with them to the moors. the rest of the time he keeps to himself. he’s not interested in other people, in pubs, in friends. a few try to befriend him, boys he’d known at school before he’d dropped out and boys from the factory and men who had known his father. he’s polite, but terse, and the conversation never goes far. few try a second time. he’s nice to the old women, though. they don’t try to be sympathetic and submissive about the war. “fuckin’ disaster wasn’t it, hen?” they growl in those thick accents of theirs, and he sneer-smiles back at them and loves them fiercely for it, “the english ought to be shot for it.”

he stays for a few more months, and schofield wrings an address out of him in one of the few letters he answers, and it’s better than he thought it would be to see him. his mother tries to fatten schofield up. they travel around the country for a few months. walk the moors and the forests. it’s good. it’s nice. they talk about books. he’s fascinated by the newspaper job. he’s sad to see him go.

after that, he moves to dundee, then to glasgow. gets a job at a bigger and better newspaper. writes articles that earn him praise and recognition. malky sends him a letter - sweet malky, he keeps writing even when he doesn’t get anything in reply - with a clipping of one of his articles. he says he’s started ordering the paper from glasgow just so he can read what he’s written. 

and something about that snaps rossi out of it, out of this grey fog that he’d taken to be the rest of his life and that he’d merely accepted. he writes to all of them - to parry and jondalar and schofield and butler and malky and cooke - and finally they all get together and it’s wonderful. it’s perfect. it’s everything he’s ever needed. after that, life is warmer, brighter, sunnier, more open. he hears the birds singing for the first time in a year. they go down to london one time and jondalar introduces them all to his parents and sisters, and they all stay for dinner. another time they all come up to scotland to stay at rossi’s family home and go for picnics on the open moors. he and cooke finally get together. everything is good. rossi becomes a famous journalist and war writer, once he finally writes his memoirs and finds a publisher for them.

they heal. 

cooke:

after having found a place among people who wanted him with them and who he could honestly call his friends, after having belonged for a little while, going home is tough. the schoolboys who had made fun of him and played cruel games with his head and his heart had gone to war themselves, but that doesn’t mean they want anything to do with him. they stick with the ones who had made it back, and the few times cooke tries to go over to them, smiling and submissive and ‘hey, lads’, when he sees them in a pub or on the street, they glare at him so coldly that he stops mid-step and sticks his hands in his pockets and turns the other way. 

back home in london, he doesn’t have anyone. his father is as terrible as ever, cruel and violent and drunken and belittling. any confidence cooke had gained in the company of people who cared for him disintegrates the second he steps back into his childhood flat. his mother weeps when she sees him, and he hugs her back and smiles and breathes in the smell of her hair; she’s alive, and they’re back together, and he’s happy. but then his father appears in the doorway and cooke shrinks into himself and drops his eyes. over the next few weeks, over tense dinners where cooke sits silently and bows his head and doesn’t make eye contact because that will only make him angrier, his father insists he must have been a coward in the war, that he hadn’t done anything worth being proud of, that mrs baker’s boy down the street got himself two medals, that he’s useless and weak and stupid. 

once or twice he tries to argue, tries to stand up for himself - rossi and butler and jondalar and malky had taught him self-confidence and what it was like to be valued, so he tries to use those lessons. it doesn’t end well for him. it doesn’t end well for his mother either, and he isn’t sure whether he stops trying to defend himself for his own sake or for hers. soon enough, he’s back to being the quiet, flinching boy he’d been before the war. and he starts to believe that all the things his father says must be true. he was a coward. he is stupid. he’s always known he’s weak. rossi had only been tolerating him. they’d never been friends. he was just an unwanted tag-along lingering at the edge of the group. they’d been laughing at him. no one had ever really liked him. rossi had only kissed him because he felt sorry for him.

he wants to work at a little tailor shop on the corner - he lurks around outside, looking at the pretty suits and the men with tape measures and dreaming of something he doesn’t quite understand - but when he goes in to apply they shoo him out the door. something about his accent. something about not muddying up the floorboards. something about not trying to rise above his station. he shoves his hands into his pockets and walks aimlessly through the streets until the humiliated blush leaves his cheeks and ears.

eventually, he gets a job at a grocer’s. it’s better than the tailor’s, anyway. he gets to make silly faces at babies and teach swear words to the kids who hang around and get smiled at by nice ladies, and sometimes he nicks a sweet or two from the counter and chews on them on the walk home. he gets reprimanded for it eventually, called into the manager’s office and yelled at until his cheeks are red and that insolent glare he’d learned in the war is back on his face. at first, he just sits there and takes it, like his father has taught him to do. but finally, he gets sick of it, and he’s had enough, and he slips back into the private cooke he’d been, irreverent and loud and cocky and fearless. he shoots to his feet and shouts right back at the old man in his waistcoat, gets all up in his face and grins with the relish of it. he gets fired for it, of course. he howls with laughter on the sidewalk and earns looks from passersby and skips around the block. but once the adrenaline has worn off, once it stops feeling like freedom, he’s left cold and jobless and embarrassed on the street. 

somewhere along the way, he stops writing to rossi. he barely replies, anyway, and it just makes him more sure that he’d only ever been a burden. he stops writing to malky last. but he keeps all of their letters, tucks them away safe and secret behind a loose slat in his bedroom wall. he takes them out and reads them sometimes, to remember what it was like to have friends and smile thinly at the pages, when he’s sure his father is asleep and that he isn’t going to burst in and snatch them off him and laugh at him for being a pitiful little queer with a crush on every boy he ever served with. 

finally, it’s jondalar who seeks him out. cooke hugs him when he sees him, forgets all about the insecurities he’s been wallowing in for the last year and just launches himself at him. jondalar hugs him back and laughs. they spend a wonderful day together, just wandering round the parks and getting hot chips in greasy newspaper, and cooke feels more like himself, like the person he’d been and the person he’d almost grown to love. he’s loud, and tells jokes, and smiles a lot, and he catches jondalar smiling back at him when he thinks he can’t see, like he’s relieved, like he’s proud, and it makes cooke’s heart feel warm and hopeful.

jondalar brings him home, and introduces him to his parents and his sisters, and cooke stays for dinner and chatters on all evening. he gets on well with jondalar’s youngest sister, and his parents seem to like him. his father is nice and warm and patient. he likes that. after dinner they go for a walk and jondalar tells him he’s been trying to track everyone down. cooke is more relieved than he could ever say to hear that he isn’t the only one they’ve stopped writing to; according to jondalar, most everyone has gone quiet. cooke agrees to help him, and they set to work. for the first time in a long time, the smile on his face is real.

they manage to find them all - by sending letters to families, by scouring newspaper ads - and they’re just about to try and contact everyone when rossi’s letters arrives, one to jondalar and one to cooke. cooke goes running over to jondalar’s flat to show him the letter, all grins and wild eyes and joy. the old team gets back together. everything is good. everything is happy. he belongs again. he’s whole again. he’s him again. 

with his friends back in his life - even odd, quiet, old-fashioned schofield - he can start to truly heal, without feeling like he’s just stagnant and afraid and drifting. he gets a job as a milkman and he loves it - loves the route and the people leaving early in the morning for work and school. he hadn’t even really realised he’d been coping with trauma; the immediate threat of his father had pushed all that to the back of his mind. he’d still had to survive now. 

one day, when cooke confesses the truth of his home life to rossi, rossi and butler go round to cooke’s home with cooke trailing nervously behind like a child - and they give his father hell. butler just lurks ominously, but rossi goes at him - he tells him he’s scum and nothing and pathetic, and that if he ever tries to find cooke he’ll bash his skull in with a rock and no one will ever find the body. butler guards cooke’s bedroom door while he shuffles past his father and, with rossi’s quiet, gentle help, packs his things. “you, too,” rossi says to cooke’s mother. when she just stares back, wide-eyed and hunted, butler explains, “we’re not leaving you here, love.”

she glances fearfully at her husband, like she’s waiting for him to stop her, like she’s terrified of what he’ll do, like she’s afraid to dare to hope - but when he just stares back down at her with hot, hateful eyes, she skitters to their bedroom and throws a clothes and sentimental few things in a bag and rejoins butler in the corridor. once cooke is ready to go, rossi puts his arm gently around cooke’s mother and ushers her past her husband and out the door. butler slams the door behind them.

and for the first time in cooke’s whole life, and for the first time in years for his mother, they’re both free. they can both smile and laugh freely. they can both start to heal.