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"C'mon, son," Price urged, pulling at him with an inexorable hand. "Un-ass that stool, there you go".
Groaning, Gaz let himself be lifted away from the bar, the flat palm of his hand unsticking from the sticky surface.
Gaz had a memory of sitting at home one evening when he was a boy, watching something on the TV about a group of adventurers bungee jumping over a crocodile-infested river.
Later, he would wonder if it hadn't all been an exaggeration, carefuly edited to trick the gullible audience. But at the time, Gaz had watched the aereal images of those dark, writhing bodies, packed close together in the murky waters like a fistful of worms, spinning and snapping in some sort of feeding frenzy, with something close to awe.
His sister had been perplexed; why would anyone do something so stupid? Gaz couldn’t have explained it even to himself. He still couldn't explain it years later, when he left their home to join the army with such an urgency you'd think he'd been running from a house on fire.
Gaz hadn't found the words for it even as he spent the following years jumping head first into danger at every opportunity his hands could grasp. The urge to jump, to sprint, to swim, to fucking crawl if he had to, towards guaranteed destruction as if it were his only option, even as safety slouched, calm and lazy, right behind him the whole time.
Now, in that ill-lit pub and far from war, Gaz was fully out of his seat and shrugging into his jacket, thanks mostly to his Captain. Gaz let Price wrestle the empty whisky glass from his hand, while the other arm was thrown around Price’s shoulders. What a pair they must've made.
"Lean on me, I've got you," Price was murmuring quietly right by his ear. Gaz would've followed such an order, even if he wasn't physically forced to by virtue of being too drunk to feel his limbs.
They began to move forward, and Gaz would've surely planted on his face, if not for the arm Price wrapped around him, rock-solid like one of those giant, prehistoric, tropical snakes that could squeeze around a bull like it was a little can of coke. Gaz felt his eyelids droop a little, and let the even breathing of his Captain dictate the rhythm of their march.
Perhaps the closest Gaz had been to understanding himself was when he was spat clean out of that helicopter, like an old coin rejected by a vending machine. When the certainty of death, as he plummeted towards the ground, limbs thrashing like a flightless bird, had been knocked arse over tit, much like Gaz himself, leaving only the exhilaration of being alive and whole in an impossible place.
Maybe in that indescribable moment, if she had been there to ask again, Gaz could have explained to his sister what exactly drove someone to do something so stupid. You needed to be a particular kind of fool to look at that violent mass of hungry mouths snapping up at you and think, 'wait for me, I'm coming'.
And Gaz was, at the end of the day, as particular as he was a fool.
"One step at a time, there's a good lad." Price was guiding him with the aptitude of a man who had never found an unfavourable situation he couldn't fight his way out of. Gaz could only groan and lean further into his Captain – it was very cold outside.
Soon, they made it to the car. Price lowered Gaz into the passenger seat and clicked his seat belt into place, despite Gaz’s hands getting in the way as he tried to help.
Gaz had read somewhere that crocodiles were like modern dinosaurs. Their anatomy and behaviour were both so robust and frugal, they hadn't had the reason to revise them, even as everything else perished or compromised around them across the ages.
Their targets changed names. The environment and the weather, the rules of engagement, it all changed, and yet they stuck to the bottom of the rivers, giant and rigid as old ruins, confident with the knowledge that their foolish prey was bound to wander over to them, time after time after time.
Price fussed over him for a bit. He went to take the bottle Gaz still held loosely under his arm, but Gaz pulled it closer to his chest with drunken petulance. Price showed him his hands in good-natured surrender, before going around to start the car.
The cabin light dimmed off and Gaz let his cloudy gaze linger on the profile faintly outlined by London's street lights. He thought he saw a smile there, a pleased curve of the moustache, a lazy dance of a shadow. Gaz longed for familiar eyes to turn to him, to illuminate him once again with their fixed blue light.
He drifted into sleep, picturing the dark of those pupils shrinking and expanding with the intermittent passage of headlights — there and gone, there and gone — inviting the daring and the unsuspecting to wander closer and take that last, fatal plunge.