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David Katz was a soldier. A soldier whose enlistment had been… a little more dramatic than most. The events that led to it and the strange man from the paint shop who turned out to be some sort of self-proclaimed prophet were things he had never quite been able to fully erase from his mind. That was years ago now, he had long since completed his training and later been shipped off to Vietnam. Not just anywhere in Vietnam either, but the A Shau Valley, the exact place the ‘prophet’ had warned him he would die in. It was stupid, a small tiny thought niggling at the back of his mind, because there was no way anyone could have known the future, known his future, not really.
He got up and fought every time the calls came, sleeping and eating only when he could, just like the rest of them. They made the best of what they had and watched their friends fall almost daily. Dave wasn’t sure if he wished he had never enlisted, like the prophet had told him he would, but he was starting to struggle to imagine what life had been like before he was here, before everyday could be his, or the person next to him’s, last. Exhaustion and quick moving days left very little time to do anything other than go to move from one task to the next, as his time in the valley went on, the thoughts of that man with the long hair who warned him of his future faded, never quite gone, but not at the forefront of his mind.
Until one night. When a flash of blue light and a thud from inside the tent, followed by a series of loud bangs raining closer from outside woke him up. In those seconds, between the flash and their commanding officer yelling at them to get up and go, he woke to see a rather shocked-looking man lying on the floor beside his bed. The man seemed to register him at the same moment he did, and gave him a confused look like he had absolutely no idea where he was, and Dave felt his heart stop when their eyes met. There was blood and dirt streaked across his face and torso, staining the towel wrapped around his waist, his hair was short and dark and scruffy, there was dark eyeliner smudged around his eyes, and somehow… he looked… younger… than Dave remembered but there was no mistaking that it was him. The man from the paint shop, the man he’d hit in the diner, the man that had given him his own dog tags and told him when and where he was going to die. What was he doing here? What did it mean that he was?
His train of thought was broken by the sounds of war closing in on them and as he scrambled with the rest of them to get up and get ready, for the first time in years he could see the man’s face in his memory so clearly, looking at him with emotions Dave had never understood, never been able to place. Except now he felt that he could understand, the way he had looked at him back then had been almost like this man already knew him. But that was impossible. There was even a moment when the man appeared in front of him where he thought maybe the man had come to warn him, to save him, to stop whatever fate might be coming for him. He really must have been going crazy.
He didn’t get the chance to learn anything more about the man until they had all piled onto the truck later in the day, he was sat diagonally across from him, alone, looking lost and anxious. Dave had been keeping an eye on him throughout the day, but the man had shown no sign he had recognised him, made no effort to explain why or how he was there at all, to anyone. So Dave did the only thing he could think to do, and introduced himself.
The moment he had turned around, shaken his hand and spoken to him, any sliver of doubt that the man in front of him was somehow the same one from his memories, disappeared. His name was Klaus, and Klaus’ voice was the same as the prophets, the eyeliner he wore made his eyes stand out, it felt like he was seeing straight through him. Dave got the feeling he had absolutely no idea what he had just gotten himself into.
As time went on, he became more and more certain that somehow, this Klaus was seemingly a younger version of the one he had met in 1963, which made absolutely no sense, but was apparently the only explanation. He had fewer tattoos, there was less pain in his eyes, he smiled more, when they had leave and went to the bar, he danced and drank freely in a carefree way that didn’t quite line up with the version he’d met. There were no warnings about the future, no dog tags around his neck, none of the pained desperation in his face that Dave could now recognise had been there the last time.
How any of it was possible he didn’t know, and he couldn’t ask without explaining why, he had no idea how this Klaus would react to any of it. With every passing day February 21st came closer and closer, and the more he got to know the man in front of him, the more he couldn’t help the spike of guilt that crept up on him. He tried, he really tried, to not let himself feel what he felt, like he always had. To push it all away, dance with the girls and keep a friendly distance between himself and Klaus. He had just never expected it to be so hard. Klaus was unlike anyone he had ever known, he was carefree and confident and loud, so unbelievably comfortable in his own skin with his crop-tops and eyeliner and knowing smiles. Almost every single person Dave had ever known tried to fit in with whatever environment they found themselves in, but Klaus made little to no effort too. He was kind and sympathetic, he spoke his mind and sometimes got into stupid fights and drank too much but he was always Klaus, even in the midst of war.
Dave wasn’t sure at what point he decided to push away the fears living like shadows in the back of his mind, about his death, about the chance that it had something to do with the pain he’d seen in Older Klaus’ eyes. This Klaus was no prophet, this Klaus was here now, real and free and the only thing that made him feel alive in the midst of the war they were caught in. If Dave had to die, he didn’t want to spend it counting down every last second until that final gunshot took him, he wanted to make the most of every one of those seconds he had left, and if Older Klaus’ warning had been right, he had weeks, months before that day caught up with him. Any final reservations he may have had were gone the moment they had bumped into each other on that dance floor in the middle of a bar and their eyes had met and everything else around them had fallen away.
Klaus stood there in his almost-too-short shirt and his striped trousers looking at him like he’d hung the stars in the sky and Dave couldn’t have looked away if he had tried. They’d found themselves alone in the back of the bar and before he could second guess himself he’d reached for him and Klaus had reached back and then they were kissing and Dave knew there was absolutely no going back. Because he never wanted to stop kissing this man. How anyone had ever thought anything as beautiful and as powerful as what he felt for this man could be wrong, impure, a sin, he had no idea. He loved him, they loved each other, and it was perfect even if it made his heart ache, even if it made him pray and beg that the prophet’s words were wrong. That somehow that man hadn’t been Klaus, that he had really just been a con artist who knew what his favourite book would be before it came out. A book he had put off reading for months when it came out because he was afraid of what it meant if he did love it.
Maybe Dave was starting to wish he had never enlisted in this war, maybe it was worth it if it meant he got to meet Klaus. No matter how short their time might be, he wasn’t sure there was anything that would make him give it up now he knew what he could have, what was there for him in Texas anyway? From that moment on they were even more inseparable than they had been before. If anyone in their unit noticed anything, they kept it to themselves, and slowly the few that had issues with Klaus when he had arrived got over them the more he proved himself. Wherever Klaus went, Dave was there.
He was there when Klaus got homesick, there to listen to him talk about his siblings. He was there when he woke up from nightmares shaking and muttering about ghosts, calling out for his dad to let him out. He was there when Klaus got his tattoos, including a temple on his stomach with Thai script he refused to explain. Like if he never told him he’d never figure out it read ‘Klaus loves Dave’. He was there when they were told their next orders were to go to Hill 689 as reinforcements.
He had been so close to losing track of the days, to forgetting the fate that hung over him, to living only in the happy moments he carved out of the war with Klaus by his side, but the moment he heard that order, it all came back. It was February now, Hill 689 was the exact place the prophet had told him he would die with barely concealed tears in his eyes. There was no way out now, he couldn’t leave Klaus behind, and even if they managed to run away where would they go? There was no escaping, no excuse that would get him out of going up that hill. Dave looked at Klaus and felt his heart ache at the thought of telling him, warning him, maybe he should have, maybe he should have pushed him away, left him alone, maybe he had been selfish this whole time, or maybe this time it would be different, time had to have changed for this man to be in front of him now, because he was pretty damn sure he wasn’t from the sixties. It had to have changed for him to have been in front of him before. Maybe it would change again, maybe it already had, maybe they could leave this place together one day, have their own happy ending.
If Klaus noticed that he held him tighter that day, that his whispered ‘I love yous’ were maybe a little too insistent, he didn’t bring it up. He just said it back every single time like he had since the first time Dave had uttered those words to him.
On February 21st 1968, David Katz and Klaus Hargreeves’ regiment went up Hill 689 and came under heavy fire attempting to hold it. On February 21st 1968 as night fell, Dave had almost let himself relax where he lay next to Klaus in the mud, when he felt a sharp pain cut through his chest, and the world disappeared out of focus. He heard Klaus’ voice in the distance, felt himself be turned over, heard the tone of his lover’s voice change to shock and terror.
He tried to get words out, tried to say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I love you’ but he couldn’t. He saw the tears in Klaus’ eyes out the corner of his own, saw his heart break, heard his voice crack as he yelled out for help. Klaus was holding him, trying to stop the bleeding, do something, anything to make this not be happening, not be the end, but Dave knew it was too late.
In that moment, Dave knew that no bullet could ever hurt him more than the break in Klaus’ voice as he heard him call out desperately for a medic.
He understood now, the desperation and the sadness in Older Klaus’ eyes when he’d begged him not to enlist, when he had given him his own dog tags and said it was all he had left of him. To think that Klaus had tried to save him, to stop this and all he had done was hit him when his Uncle told him to, and then walk away again after he had gone to apologise. Could he forgive himself for that even if Klaus had known it wasn’t what he wanted to do? Why couldn't they have just had more time? If he had warned him, could they have avoided this? Would he have even believed him?
In the end, as his eyes slid shut and everything faded to nothing, the only thing he could hope was that somewhere, in another time, they would get the chance to share a happy life, that they would get their happy ending one day.