Chapter Text
For so long, he had just been the Captain. 82 years, to be exact. His men had no reason to know who he was, and his family, those who came After, after everything, they never asked. He never let them. It was best they knew nothing, for a Captain has no need to be a person, to reveal secrets, lies, loves, losses. He was better a silhouette, the brief outline of a man, less the truth strip him of everything once more.
Once, he had been Theodore Higgins, born to a housewife and a blacksmith. Humble beginnings, as was the case for most in 1898.
He spent his younger days sitting beside the fire with his mother, watching her darn his father's socks, the radio playing aimlessly in the background. He would draw, and oh how his father hated that. Theodore had always been a strange child, often talking for hours about graphite and paints, about firearms, and the workings of a car. He was fascinated by the world, naïve in a way that bore way to fury. His father would slam closed the book he was reading, after whatever hour he finally became sick of it. Often it was after 3, but sometimes, if he got lucky, his mother would distract his father with the gardening, a mischievous wink sent his way as she guided him from the room. That let him read for another hour or two. Those days were always his favourites.
His father would hate the ways in which he would fail to understand, be that when to speak in conversation, what to say, how not to stammer if he was nervous. He never knew the correct move, like a wonky chess piece in a royal game of belonging. He was bound not to fit in. He knew he would misspeak, but never could quite realise in time. His mother would clean up many cuts and scrapes due to his blundering mistakes, the others at school even less forgiving than his father. They seemed to be in agreement that Theodore was nothing but uniquely, and distastefully, strange.
He knew that he was different, down to his soul, and they could all see it. Most of all his father. He was hated for it, stupid, naïve Theodore, with his disjointed speech, his useless facts, his clumsy ways. His body never worked quite how he asked it to, running often ended in scraped skin and holes in the knees of his trousers, his hands only deft when holding a pencil. He took up too much space, said things he wasn't meant to, asked questions out of turn, gave too much or too little detail in everything he said. He could never quite get it right, could never really figure out what people wanted from him.
Ever since he was born, he was destined to be altogether different. As such, ever since he was born, his father had hated him.
*-*-*-*-*
By the time the Great War came knocking on their door, he had found a way to turn his little love for the arts into something that allowed him to make some much needed money. He would draw for their neighbours, and the customers at the store he worked at part time whilst his father was stationed at the nearby barracks, training for a war nobody saw coming. Theodore himself worked in the kitchens of the mess halls, too young yet to fight, but old enough to clean and cook, another such hobby that earned him a week's worth of silence from his father upon the discovery that he was rather decent at it after all.
War. It was something he never thought he would live to see. Though he knew what was coming, knew this wouldn't be over quickly. He knew that his art, and his jobs, would only do so much. Soon, he would have to take over his father's shop, becoming the true man of the house. His older brother, Charles, he'd left home before Theodore was even born, rarely visiting, too busy with his own life. With a wife and a child of his own, he had no need to bother with a brother so much younger than himself. Especially, as his father would love to remind him, a brother as soft as him. Real men, they would claim, did not cook, and they most definitely didn't spend hours outside amongst the bugs and the birds, drawing flowers and trees and the wonders of the world. Those were a woman's work, a woman's past time. Men were meant to build, with timber or steel, and they would leave before sunrise, come home after sunset, hands black from grease and clothes stained beyond repair. That was what good working class men would do.
Eventually, a good working class man is what he would have to become. It was against his very nature, but somehow, he found a way. He was treated kindly by his father's regulars, fishermen and butchers alike, men too old to fight, with sons overseas. Little Ted Higgins, they'd call him. Oh how he hated the name Ted, a name often used in mocking, spat from the mouths of peers and his brother alike. It made him think of teddy bears, such soft and delicate things. All of those things he knew well, by now, that he must never be, both as a man, and as his father's son. Not in this life, and not in this world.
1918, and the return of his father, saw the reality of war become inescapable. Where his father had been short tempered before, now, he was a ship out to sea. It was never certain which way the tides would flow, which man they would wake up to that morning. He had always been cold, to Theodore at least, but now it was as though even his bones were made of ice.
He was glad his father had made it, of course he was. But deep in his soul, settled at the bottom of his stomach on the night he found his mother cowering beside her nightstand, gown stained red with the blood dripping from her lower lip, he had wished his father had never returned at all. When he looked at his mother that night, watching as purple and black bloomed across her left eye, marring the porcelain of her skin with a thousand deadly promises, he wished for nothing more than the telegram to have arrived on their doorstep. The thought that he had wished his own father dead had made him feel sick to his stomach, but the sickening crunch of his mother's ankle as he helped her to her unsteady feet, well, that had made him even more so.
His father had turned to whiskey to heal the wounds of the war. He never spoke of it, but anyone could see that the light from his eyes had been lost somewhere on the battlefield. He was a shell of a man, and yet, somehow, he still pushed for Theodore to take up the offer he'd received to train. They'd had a busy week, and the mess hall had become understaffed, as had the training grounds. It became Theodore's job to run the kitchen, and accompany the COs in their drills, moving targets and training rifles for each session. He'd complied with the resilience they sought after. They felt he would make a good soldier, a fact which made him feel all the more like a fraud. He had learned, by now, to stamp down as much of himself as possible, but to have done so well enough already to seem fit to be a soldier was a cause for equal parts pride and shame. He longed for who he used to be, though in a way he felt as though it may not be too bad, after all, if he gives in, if he enlists. After all, enough men had died in that wretched war already, what was the soul of one more?
His father knew better, could sense his hesitation, his fear, hence his pushing. Hence his rage when Theodore tried to argue, to back out, to avoid the inevitable fate of becoming yet another hollow man, staring into the bottom of a whiskey bottle as though it could answer his prayers to a God he had never even believed in. It was this, his determination not to end up like his father, that led to his mother's agony. The blame was eating him alive, feasting on the scraps of his soul that he had tried so desperately to cling to. His mother had, as it turns out, been protecting him from the worst of it for months. His father would drink all day, and come home late into the night with a storm in his eyes and steel in his fists. The cause of his rage, nobody would admit aloud, but they knew it was him, knew it was Theodore. His softness, his kindness, his gentleness, his privilege in getting to keep his innocence when his father had suffered so dearly. He felt it unfair, that he should have to witness the deaths of those he called his friends, whilst his disappointment of a son could come home to paint cars, landscapes, and birds. In a world so hideous, how dare he be so weak.
Despite how hard he tried, Theodore knew no matter how much of his soul he buried, no matter how much of it withered away and died, he would never be the man his father wished him to be. He would always, in his heart, be the soft boy he had always been. He would always be too weak for his father to look him in the eye, too gentle to receive the pats on his back that Charles would receive, those brief moments he did turn up during Christmas, and birthdays. He would always be soft enough for his father to hate, to be his motivation for drinking himself into a stupor, night after night, to lay his hands on his wife, the way that he had done so that night. He had tried, so incredibly hard, to avoid this. To become a man so unlike the one he knew himself to be. It was never, and would never, be enough. They could see straight through him.
He was 20, almost 21, the night that he realised his father knew exactly who he was. What he was. It was a secret he had kept even from himself, the best that he could. Nothing more than passing glances, he would swear to himself, no more than brief, nonchalant looks towards the men lounging beside the public pool in the summer heat. He would only look long enough to notice how the sun caught their soft skin, the ways in which it would light up their eyes. It was never long enough to be mistaken as anything other than the uninterested wandering of eyes one did as they sat amongst friends. He was so incredibly careful not to let it be. He would have girlfriends, kind women who he would take on chaste dates, as was proper. As was expected. Some, he would court for a month or two, before they would part ways. Often because she found someone else, a soldier who took her fancy, a cricket player she had become enamoured with. He would pretend that it hurt.
It was another of those dreaded nights, because of course it was. His mother, battered and bruised though she was, had held him close, as though he was the one who had felt the crushing weight of his father's fury. She told him, then, that she didn't care what he was, who he was. She loved him the same, and had known he was different ever since he was born. Though she had made it no secret that she felt he should hide it. She knew the ways of the world, she knew the danger he would be in were anyone else to find out. She pushed him, too, in a way that had made up his mind to take that opportunity with the army.
"My boy, my Ted. I love you, I love you and I fear for you more than I feared even for the damnation of the men in those wretched fields. You must never let them know, promise me that you will do all that you can to avoid it. I wish you could be happy, but happiness is something you cannot pay for with your life."
And so it was decided, at that very moment. The day after, he signed himself up. He would be a soldier, for his mother, so as not to break her heart any further. He would try, as hard as he was able, to become another man. To become a man who wished for a wife, and children, and a red brick home with a wooden door and a garden of flowers, picked by his mother as a wedding gift. Even though he truly wished for anything else.
His father calmed, once Theodore came home in his uniform, name banished to the night. Higgins, they called him now, for it was improper for a soldier to be referred to by his first name, whether training or not. It felt fitting, in a way, to lose his name and to gain another. It was as though he was saying goodbye to the person that he once was, the person he was no longer allowed to be.
His fathers rage was still there, of course, always there beyond that thousand yard stare, but with more tales of the women he had met at the bases, girls there to tend to the kitchens, to stitch wounds from drills gone wrong, it had begun to lessen some. His father believed them, either because they were convincing enough, spoken from the mouth of an unrecognisable man, one which had replaced the son he so wished had never been born, or simply because to believe them was easier than to stomach the truth.
Soon enough, all was forgotten, and tides began to change. His father never laid hands upon his mother again, and slowly, they began to clap him on the back. He had always wished for this, but knowing it was at the cost of everything he knew himself to be, it was as though those hands were weights, dragging him further beneath the surface of his lies. He was drowning in the façade of a man he knew he had to be, but had always dreamt of never needing to become.