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When they move into their first real house together, Luke stands in the front doorway and cries.
And Ashton understands, because it’s home. It’s the first real home either of them has had since childhood. It’s empty from wall to wall, just a big old farmhouse with nothing in it but two fifty year old men. The paint on the walls is chipping, the roof is leaking, and the floorboards are falling through in some places, but Ashton knows that it can all be fixed. It’s home.
“Beautiful,” Luke whispers, looking around and trailing from room to room, a step ahead of Ashton. “Here, and here—” He pauses in the biggest room, what Ashton assumes will become the living room. The light pours through the broken window slats. Luke sniffles and wipes a tear from his face with the back of his hand. “Perfect,” he says, choked and in awe.
Ashton comes to stand by his side, arms wrapping easily around Luke’s waist. He lays his head down on Luke’s shoulder, and they stand there for a long time, the sunlight bathing them in warmth.
The house takes a few weeks to fix up. Ashton gets down on his hands and knees and replaces the floorboards, grabs a rickety ladder from the shed and climbs up to fix the roof, repaints the walls. Luke, whose French is better than his own, takes their rusty car into the nearest town and buys secondhand furniture, which he carts back piece by piece. It takes a month, but they have the next thirty or so years to spend together. A month lost is a small sacrifice to make.
They lie together in bed the night they finish decorating the house, sprawled out with limbs entangled. Luke’s head is on his shoulder, greying hair tickling Ashton’s cheek. For the first time, they don’t have to worry about anyone seeing. The laws are different in France, and Ashton just wants to press himself against Luke and give him the love he’s had to hold back all these years.
Luke’s hand strokes Ashton’s wavy curls back, tucking them behind his ear. Even though Ashton has seen Luke in this way so many times before, he’s always just as awe-struck. Sometimes when he looks at Luke, he still sees that terrified 17-year-old boy, muddy and tired. There must have been something about him that night that has made a permanent home in Ashton’s heart, because the image never fades. Ashton loves him more than he’s ever loved him with each passing day, thinks he’s more beautiful than when he was just a boy with pure blue eyes and golden hair.
Tonight is the night they do the one thing they’ve always forbidden themselves to do, alone and safe in a sun-yellow house on the French countryside. They make love after ten years of waiting, and they fall asleep with tears in their eyes and fingers intertwined. Now is the time for living.
Those first years are perfect.
Luke grows bored. His English is almost perfect, even with his harsh accent and odd inflections. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets him by. His French is good, too, after a few years settled in the countryside. Ashton busies himself with oil paints. But Luke takes to sitting by windows and sighing, yearning for something he can’t have.
“We should visit Germany,” Ashton says softly as they lie on the couch together, carding his hands through Luke’s hair. The pale blond is almost completely grey by now, and Ashton loves to touch it. He’s toyed around with the idea of visiting Germany with Luke before, wondering if Luke needs closure or if the end he got was good enough. “Don’t you want to see it one last time, at least?”
Luke tilts his head, humming under his breath. “The wall,” he says without much more thought. “Which side would we visit?”
“Whichever side you lived on.”
Luke laughs quietly, for no apparent reason. It’s humorless, surprised. “Germany is in ruins. I have nothing left to visit.”
Ashton bites his lip. “What about,” he starts, and then backs down. They don’t talk often about their pasts. Luke, by nature, is reserved and keeps his secrets to himself. Ashton treasures the memories Luke shared of Jack, the times they spent as children in Ludwigshafen. Luke has never lost the admiring tone or the shine in his eyes when he talks about Jack. Nothing, not even the label of
traitor
and the memory of watching Jack die in dishonor.
“What about what?” Luke presses, shifting against Ashton and twisting to look at him.
“Nothing,” Ashton murmurs, pressing a kiss to his hair. “Lost my train of thought.”
“Are you sure?”
Ashton considers the consequences of his words. He makes sure to hold Luke very tightly before he says, “I thought we could see if your family survived. The camps, they were all—”
“Released,” Luke finishes for him, pushing him away and sitting up abruptly. He looks soberly down at his hands. They saw the pictures in the newspaper at the end of the war of men and women who looked more like skeletons than real living beings walking out of the iron gates. The whole world was brought to its knees, shattered by the realization of how low humanity had sunken.
“There’s a chance,” Ashton whispers, afraid to get Luke’s hopes up.
“My parents would be,” Luke says, and waves a hand, looking away. He doesn’t have to finish. “They were already old.”
“But—Ben?” Ashton says, touching Luke’s knee.
Luke squints at the floorboards, visibly conflicted. Ashton is almost sorry he raised the subject. He and Luke both know the chances are slim. But they’re not nothing. Still, if Luke pins his hopes on Ben still being out there somewhere and he isn’t, Luke will really have lost everything he once had. Ashton isn’t sure whether either of them is prepared to accept the fallout.
“It’s not possible,” Luke dismisses. “I do not think going to Germany would be a good idea.”
Ashton drops the subject. He makes sandwiches for them both for lunch, and they sit in the kitchen and talk about the flowers blooming outside and the smile lines on their faces, and Ashton pushes it to the back of his mind.
They visit Lauren and Christopher for Christmas in 1951. It’s the first time they’ve left France since they arrived, and Ashton is eager to be back in Britain. Luke falls asleep on his shoulder on the boat over, but Ashton can’t sleep. He’s afraid his country will have changed in the time he was away. But he hasn’t seen Lauren or her kids in six years, and his correspondence with the three of them through mail and even the occasional telephone call aren’t enough. All he has are the pictures they’ve sent.
They step off the boat in Folkestone Harbor in the pouring rain, and Ashton laughs. Britain is the same as when he left. Rainy, cold, and dismal.
When they arrive in London, Ashton realizes the city’s been rebuilt. There’s no trace of the crumbling, smoking ruins he saw when he left the city in 1940. Lauren and Christopher have moved since the war, and Ashton feels a touch of anxiety as he steps out of the car with Luke in tow and their bags on the sidewalk.
“It will be good,” Luke murmurs, touching his arm as he realizes Ashton’s hesitation. “Come. We should go in.”
They step out of the rain and walk up the driveway to the porch. Ashton knocks on the door, Luke rubbing his shoulder soothingly. Bless Luke for being his anchor to the solid ground. When Lauren opens the door, Ashton’s already enveloping her in a hug, trying to ease the ache of being away for so long. She’s as warm and soft as he remembers her, wisps of mousy brown hair falling around her face. It hasn’t gone grey yet. Ashton is glad.
“It’s been so long,” he says, smiling. “The girls, are they—?”
“They’re inside,” she says, smiling right back and touching his face. “Goodness. Your hair, you—”
“I know,” he says with a laugh. “I’m proper old now.”
Lauren finally tears her gaze from him and reaches out to give Luke a hug. Luke beams and accepts it, squeezing her tight. Ashton steps past, eyes searching for those he’s still missing. They’re there, in the living room, young women with wavy brown hair like his, waiting. And they look everything like Ashton remembers them.
The reunion is a haze of tears and Ashton doesn’t realize until Marie stands up that she has a child on the way. He didn’t know it was possible to be overwhelmed by happiness, but with Luke by his side and his family around him and a grand niece or nephew to come, he realizes that he got everything he wanted.
It’s a girl. Ashton gets the letter months later with her picture folded into the paper. She’s got barely-there peach fuzz and her eyes are shut tight. She looks just like Marie and Lauren, and maybe a little bit like him. They name her Annette. She’s the most perfect thing Ashton has ever seen in his entire life.
Luke comes to Ashton one day and says he wants to start growing strawberries. The question comes out of nowhere, but Ashton says yes. In a couple of months, Luke plants the whole backyard full of strawberry plants. Every inch of their land is covered. Ashton watches from the window each day as Luke digs the holes and uses an old hoe to create rows. In time, the ground sprouts with red berries.
They don’t know what to do with them all. They start eating them, but there are too many. Luke starts selling some of them at a local farmer’s market. The extra income helps.
Emma’s got a job as a flight attendant, and she sends them a packet of money every now and then even though Ashton thinks he still has enough savings to last him and Luke a while, given that they’re frugal. They don’t have electricity, just gas lamps, and they use water from the well, so utilities don’t cost a cent. The strawberries keep growing, and Luke sells some of the strawberries and makes others into tarts. He sells them all. It gives him something to do, and he’s happy.
The strawberries are sweet, and Ashton loves to kiss the taste off Luke’s lips in the warm afternoons.
Annette turns one in the spring. Marie and her husband, Andrew, come to France by boat and stay at the house for two weeks. Annette is an eager crawler, and Ashton finds himself scooping her up whenever she gets to close to something she shouldn’t. She’s beautiful and has the brightest green eyes.
Now that Marie is an adult, Ashton talks to her about things he couldn’t when she was a child. He talks to her about the first world war, meeting Luke, falling in love with him.
They sit by the fireplace together, just the two of them. Luke, who picked Annette up this afternoon and hasn’t let go since, shows Andrew around the rest of the house.
“You and Luke,” Marie says quietly, “I remember.”
“Me and Luke,” Ashton repeats. “It was always me and Luke.”
Ashton says a lot more, but that’s all that really needs to be said.
Each morning, Luke takes Annette on his hip and goes for walks with her, taking her around the garden and letting her eat the strawberries right out of his hand. They both come back with dark red mouths, and Ashton wishes fleetingly that he’d been allowed to have children with Luke. But somethings can’t be, of course. He soon forgets about it. Marie tells Annette to call him Grandfather and Luke Opa. All in all, it’s a good year.
Ashton decides on his own to invest in a private detective. It’s 1953, and he doesn’t tell Luke in case the results come back negatively. They’re both getting older, and if Luke won’t take the plunge, he’ll do it behind the scenes.
He waits a year. In the meantime, life continues.
He sends gifts for Annette’s second birthday. He and Luke sign the card together. Luke puts a jar of strawberry jam in the box, too. They send it off. In a month or so, Marie and Andrew send back a letter with new pictures of Annette. A couple months after, Ashton gets another letter. Marie is pregnant again. Ashton doesn’t cry this time, but he sends baby gifts.
Luke gets lonely from time to time. He confesses that he thinks more and more about his family these days—about his parents, and Ben, but mostly Jack. He teaches Ashton some German, especially the cuss words, and they both whisper them back and forth at night and giggle when Ashton makes a mistake. In 1954, Ashton nails two pieces of wood together in a cross shape and ties a ribbon around it before driving it into the ground in the backyard. Luke sinks to his knees in front of it that night and lets loose a stream of German. Ashton goes inside to give him privacy. Luke sits next to the cross sometimes and talks, telling Jack all the things that have happened since they parted and the things he missed.
The investigator finally sends a letter to Ashton, confirming that Elizabeth and Andrew Hemmings died during the war along with Ben’s address. Ben’s address, which means he lived.
Ashton toys with the letter for a day, wondering how to tell Luke. Eventually, he tells Luke at breakfast.
“What is this?” Luke says, brow furrowing as he drinks his tea. He holds the letter and squints down at it, reading slowly. “You—you had someone look for my family?” He looks up, doesn’t go any further. “I can’t read,” he says, and Ashton notices his hands are starting to shake. He hands the letter back to Ashton. “You tell me.”
Ashton doesn’t want to be the one to break it, but Luke asked, and so he clears his throat. “Good news or bad news?” he asks, scooting around the table to hold Luke’s hand. His thumb strokes over the soft lines.
“Bad,” Luke says decisively.
“Your parents,” Ashton says simply, and shakes his head. Luke watches him and doesn’t say anything for a moment, then nods.
“I know.”
Ashton can see his eyes drop, and knows that even if Luke knew in his gut they were gone, knowing for sure forces him to face the truth.
“But Ben,” he adds, afraid if he waits too long Luke might be too sad to hear the rest of the news.
“Ben?” Luke’s eyes widen, and his fingers squeeze tightly around Ashton. “You are saying Ben?”
“Ben is still in Ludwigshafen,” Ashton says, smiling weakly. “He went back home, I guess. His address is here. You could write to him. You could visit him, if you wanted.”
Luke grabs the letter from Ashton’s hand and scans it himself, body alert and rigid. He mouths the words under his breath and looks back at Ashton with tears in his eyes. He leans forward and hugs Ashton wordlessly, knotting the fabric of Ashton’s jumper in his hands.
Luke writes a letter to Ben that day, and Ashton hasn’t seen him so excited about anything since Annette was here.
Ben comes to France the next month, and when he arrives outside the house, Luke sprints down the drive like a younger man and straight into his brother’s arms. Ashton watches from a distance, giving Luke the space he needs.
“Du lebst,” Luke says over and over, crying and touching Ben’s face. Ben is much quieter, and only says a few words Ashton doesn’t catch in between. “Ich dachte du seist gegangen.”
Luke says a lot of things, and Ashton understands very little. At last, the two break apart, and Luke leads Ben up to the house, toward Ashton. Ben looks only a little like Luke, with grey hair Ashton pictures as having once been blond, and the same piercing blue eyes. He is frail-looking, with few of the same facial features.
“Das ist mein—” Luke starts to say, and then shakes his head. “Das ist mein Ashton.”
“Sie Ashton?” Ben responds with a short laugh, surprised. “Was meinen Sie?”
“Es ist nicht wichtig,” Luke replies, waving him off with a hand. He smiles radiantly up at Ashton. Ashton reaches out to shake Ben’s hand, nervous. Ben shakes with a hard grip. “Ben, er spricht nur Englisch. Ja?”
“Mein Englisch ist schlecht. Du übersetzt.”
“He says is English is bad,” Luke relays to Ashton. “Ashton, this is my brother. Ben.”
“Hello,” Ashton says quietly. Luke reaches up and rubs his shoulder, a subtle show of affection. He wonders what they will tell Ben.
“Ja, hallo,” Ben says, smiling warmly.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ben.”
“Er sagt: Ich freue mich, Sie kennen zu lernen,” Luke whispers to Ben.
Ashton is more or less ignored, but he’s glad. He can’t talk to Ben, and Ben can’t talk to him. Ben and Luke have years of catching up to do, and he watches them talk animatedly, too quickly to understand. He tries to imagine what Jack would look like, some blend of them perhaps.
They talk for hours on the couch in the living room. The night grows dark, and still they talk. They laugh a lot, and they cry a lot. Ashton doesn’t know what they talk about, but he watches the way Luke’s face lights up, and he’s content to leave Luke to it.
Ben finally asks about Ashton. “Wer ist Ashton für Sie?” he asks softly, touching Luke’s arm. Luke looks at Ashton.
“Meine Geliebte,” Luke answers with little hesitation. Ben’s face contorts into one of utter confusion.
“Was meinen Sie?” he asks.
It takes Ben a long time. He listens for a long time as Luke explains, and Ashton doesn’t know how Luke explains it, but it must get through. Eventually, Ben nods soberly and says, “Ich verstehe.”
“He understands,” Luke says, looking up at Ashton.
And that’s it.
In the morning, Luke shows Ben the strawberry fields. Ben reaches down and picks a strawberry and says, tearing up again, “Jack.”
“Für ihn,” Luke confirms, smiling tremulously.
They walk through the field together and then sit at the cross side by side. They stay out there the whole day. When Ben leaves the next day, Luke cries and cries. Ashton doesn’t know how to console him. Instead, he just stays by Luke’s side. That’s enough.
The years pass. Marie has a son, Kenneth, and then another girl, Janie. Emma settles down with a man named Henry after she leaves her job as a flight attendant and has two children, Bobbie and Ella. Marie and Emma visit with their children every summer to eat the strawberries straight from the patch and play in the countryside.
It’s 1961, and the kids are all here. Lauren couldn’t make the trip, but everyone else did. Annette is nine, and insists she’s an adult and that Ashton should treat her as such. Kenny is six and Bobbie is five. They’re impossible to contain. The two of them run wild in the fields and invariably come back a mess of dirt and grass stains, more best friends than cousins. Janie, who’s four, clings to her mother. Ashton coaxes her out from Marie’s legs and sits her on his lap, telling her stories and slowly winning her over.
Ella is just one, and Luke carries her on his hip like he did with Annette the first time they visited. He feeds her spoons of jam and lets her get her hands sticky with strawberry anything. There are a dozen strawberry tarts in the oven waiting to be pulled out, and jars full of strawberry jam in the cupboards. There’s a whole field of strawberries ready to be picked and eaten by the children.
And this is everything, Ashton thinks, watching from the living room in his armchair with a fond smile as his lover and his nieces and his grand nieces and nephews roam about, shrieking and giggling and talking. His whole family is around him.
It’s everything he could have wanted, warmth like being under the sun or eating strawberry tarts or being curled up in bed with his lover. It’s all of that, and more.