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The Captain has always loved the rain. It washes away the pain and the ache and the dull monotony of life, leaving what seems for just a moment like a clean slate. It runs its fingers through his mind, breaking down his barriers and cleansing him down to his very soul. Lord knows he needs that sometimes.
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It's been a long, unseasonably dry autumn. The sun beats down unforgivingly, and the men spend every free minute they have complaining about the heat. The heavens finally open on the first day of November, all that pent-up energy flooding the world like a biblical storm. At Button House, the soldiers stay inside, playing drinking games with the small amounts of watered down alcohol that they smuggle in from the village.
The Captain pretends not to notice. After all, the men distrust him enough as it is, and he doesn't want to further isolate himself from them. He watches as Havers weaves his way through the tables, nodding to a few men along the way. His Lieutenant has no such troubles when it comes to people - Havers seems to be unusually gifted when it comes to social skills, even putting up with the Captain's deranged rambling.
He glances longingly towards the window. The rain is really coming down now, like fingers on the window, hammering the ground. He can see the silhouette of the woods through the mist, looming upwards like a fortress of old. The treeline calls to him. He wants to get lost in the foliage, to run and run until he leaves the world behind. He wants to fall, to lie in a clearing and listen to the rain on the canopy and know that for once, he is truly alone.
He grabs his coat.
The woods stand sentinel in front of him, and as he passes the first bushes he begins to feel a sense of peace that he can never get at the house wash over him. It smells wonderful out here. As the rain drenches the sun-baked land, it releases an aroma that reminds him of a word he learned in school. Petrichor. He relates to it somewhat. He often wonders when the drought of his life will give way to the final rain, that refreshing downpour that signifies the end.
He goes deeper into the woods, deeper and deeper still. He needs to lose himself, lose some of the weight that he carries on his shoulders every day. He's soaked through now, but he doesn't care. Finally, he collapses to his knees in a clearing. The trees make a roof above him, but it doesn't keep out the rain. Good. He wants to feel it on his skin, to feel the force of nature beating him ever back. He wants it to cleanse him of this cruel, impossible love that he drags with him everywhere he goes.
As he kneels there in that clearing, he sees those eyes, like warm treacle and autumn leaves. It feels so wrong and so goddamn right, this forsaken love, these ungodly feelings. The rain falls until he can't distinguish his tears from those of the sky. He doesn't hear the tread of army boots towards him until it's too late.
"Sir?"
He startles upright, wiping away the water on his face and ignoring the crack his knees make as he stands. Of course it would be him. The universe is a cruel master, after all. "I'm sorry to intrude, sir. It's just that I saw you leaving, and I thought I should follow you to see if you were alright." Havers's hair is glued to his head, his army uniform drenched. He isn't wearing a coat. The Captain is too shocked to speak, too surprised that anyone, let alone him, would care enough to want to check on him.
He doesn't say anything, but he meets his Lieutenant's eye, and all the pain and the sorrow and the love pours out. He knows that Havers sees it there, because in that instant he sees the reflection of his emotions in those amber eyes. "Oh, Captain." He expects the man to run, to leave and to escape the rain and the woods and the raw emotions, but Havers takes a step forward, and then another.
And then Havers's lips are on his, and it's beautiful and it's perfect and he's been waiting for this his whole damn life and didn't even realise. This is it, his first rain, washing away the drought. This can't be wrong, not when it feels so right. They break apart for just a moment, and he looks into Havers's treacle eyes and sees his past, his present and his future all reflected there before him.
--- Button House, 1946 ---
It's raining again. He can't feel the rain anymore. Never again will he be washed clean by its cool fingers, never again will he feel it streak down his face like tears from above. He stands in that clearing once more, but this time he's alone. Havers was his forever until he wasn't, and it's too late now, they're both bally dead anyway, but he still stands there, waiting for someone who will never come.
He stands there and he screams at the heavens, not caring who hears. He curses the universe for being so cruel as to give and then take so harshly, and he curses himself for being such a fool as to believe that he could ever be happy. He drops to his knees, and he breaks apart as the sky falls around his head.