A/N- Thank you so much for your reviews last chapter, and I'm so glad people are still reading :) Sorry it takes a while for me to update, but uni is killing me :(

Hope you enjoy, and please review :) xxx

These Arms

Chapter 7

Lucas stuffs the papers in after the shirt. That way, if it rains, or if the back gets wet, the papers will stay dry. The writing on Brooke’s letters won’t smudge then, nor the ink on the photograph. So he stuffs in another unfolded shirt after that, the pare pair of pants, a pair of hand-knitted woollen socks.

Now that the Spring has come, Lucas has managed to prise the boots off of his feet, let the swelling settle a little, change his socks. The old ones smelt so much that not even boiling them could have salvaged them, and so they went on the fire as Haley laughed, saying that there was nothing worse than a man with bad feet.

Lucas could thinks of lots worse than that.

His eyes flick to the sleeping men around him: Jake Jagelski who he’d watched cry on numerous occasions while staring at the photograph of his daughter, Tim Smith who had finally managed to score with Theresa, Fergie, who had been nursed back to health, joking that if he got that much attention from the nurses every time he took a bullet, he’d have to do it more often.

All of them, every man, was braver than he was. None had run away. He was the first.

It was the letter that had confirmed his decision. There’s a woman back home that he loves, that he needs, and that needs him, a little girl, a tiny, beautiful, precious baby girl that’s spending her first moments in the world without a father, and Lucas can’t stay a moment longer in the trenches he’d helped dig.

He’s past caring that running away back home makes him a coward. He’s past caring that he has no money, no map, no means of finding his way back to Tree hill, but he’s damned if he doesn’t try.

The fire went our long ago. He can still smell the smoke, means that it might still be faint for the eye to see, dangerous, yet he’s past caring now because he’s not part of this any more. The sky’s black, cloudy, the air thick and warm so it’s harder to breath now.

He hasn’t been able to breathe properly for since a shard of metal landed in his chest a couple weeks ago. He though he’d managed to pull it out after taking cover behind a tree.

He doesn’t want to wonder what might happen if that wasn’t the case.

“Where are you going?” Haley hisses as he places his backpack at the other side of the barbed wire. He can tell it’s her without having to look round, and suddenly he wishes he’d written a letter.

“I can’t so this any more.”

“You can’t do what any more?”

“This.” Lucas stresses. “I can’t fight out here. I’m not good enough.”

“So you’re going to run away?”

He can hear the disappointment in her voice. It only makes him more determined to make it back home to Brooke.

“If it makes me a coward, so what? I can’t do this anymore and I don’t want to pretend that I can.”

She looks at him for a while, not saying anything, just staring. And when she asks him to wait, he does, expecting her to thrust some food into his hand.

When she returns after a couple minutes with her own bag, Lucas wishes he’d never met her. Leaving would have been much easier.

“Haley, no.”

“No what?”

“You can’t come. It’s too dangerous, it’s…”

“I’m coming.” She shrugs. “You can’t go on your own.”

“What about Joe? I thought you wanted to do this for him. I thought…”

“He’d have told me to go with you.”

“But Haley…”

“I’m coming.” She says firmly. “Now hurry up because we’ve wasted time arguing here.”

And when she places her own bag at the other side of the wire, Lucas can’t bring himself to look back.

-

The fields are thick was grass, with corn, with poppies growing redder by the day. They pass hedgerows thick with berries, stop to rest against them when one or the other gets a little tired, picking a mushroom or two each from the clumps of them that grow in the shade beneath the leaves. Often, they find masses of wild strawberry plants growing near to where they figure the railway line runs, grabbing handfuls each, even though the fruits aren’t yet quite ripe enough to be sweet.

Lucas has never felt so alive.

They’d stopped at a tiny stream the other day, spent a whole afternoon with their feet in the water, simply talking about what they’d do when they got back home, where they’d go, who they’d see.

His beard’s getting longer again, scruffier, itchier. He knows he has to find a razor before going back to tree hill. Brooke would never jump into his arms if he looked like a monster.

Haley just tells him that he looks like a man.

They use Lucas’ compass to head north, trying to find the nearest town to at least figure out where they are. He’s sure they’re still in France, but he’s not 100 of anything anymore.

Haley tells him that as long as they’re not near Italy, they should be fine. Lucas guesses though, that nothing is fine anymore.

The sun is hot. Not Spring-time hot, but midst-of-Summer hot, and when Haley has to excuse herself, removing her stockings before rolling her skirt up so that the hemline rests above her knees, Lucas takes off his shirt, pressing it into the backpack he carries by his side.

Every day, he checks that the papers are still there, the photographs, the letters. And then he rolls them all back up again, tucking shirts in around them so that they’ll stay dry in event of rain.

“Do you think you should write to Brooke?” Haley asks as they rest beside the hedgerow in a field full of corn. “So she knows you’re coming.”

“We’ll be a long time yet.” He says evasively.

“But what if something happens? She won’t know…”

“It wont.” He answers quickly. “I promised her I’d marry her. And I intend to keep that promise.”

“But Luke…”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m going home.”

And they walk then in silence, legs heavy, breathing laboured, lips dry as the afternoon tumbles into evening, the insects playing in the air as the two of them squint at the lights of a small town far ahead.

It’s a long way to home.