“Do you remember me?” Billy asks one day.
It catches Frank by surprise, they’ve just been shipped out for their third tour, they haven’t even been here a day and Billy’s already morose, so he rolls over “What the hell are you talking about? You’re right here?”
Billy’s on his side, looking at him, one arm outstretched towards him “But if I wasn’t.” he says, earnest as he’s ever been, dark eyes searching Frank’s face, boring into his soul “Would you remember me?”
“I… yeah, of course I would.” Frank murmurs, his throat feeling dry all of a sudden “Billy, what’s going on?”
Billy shifts onto his back, staring at the roof of the tent, his lips lifting up a little “I’d remember you.” he says calmly.
It sounds like a promise, and Frank is afraid of what it entails.
***
Frank doesn’t ask, even though it tugs at his mind, every time they go separate ways, his eyes following Billy, wondering what he meant.
You never know out here, in the desert.
He just hopes he never has to find out.
***
After his family dies, Frank can’t think of anything but grief and revenge.
If he could, maybe he’d have listened to Billy’s pleading that he not go after Orange alone, that he let him help.
Frank doesn’t want to ruin Billy’s life too.
So he plans to go in at night, break into the CIA safehouse and kill Orange then and there.
Maybe he’d die in the process, maybe he’d live.
***
Billy sneaks along, because he knows Frank, and he’s not going to let him get himself killed.
The knife that was meant for Frank, sinks into Billy’s stomach, deep, in a place where too many vital things rest.
Frank roars and charges Orange.
The fight is over in under a minute, but it’s a minute too long.
Billy’s fallen against a wall, one hand pressed to the wound, blood is dripping down his chest, spilling ever faster, and it won’t stop, but when Frank kneels down next to him, he scrabbles at him “I-I remembered you-” his eyes are huge with fear “Do-do you-”
Frank’s got blood all over him, his own, Orange’s, now Billy’s “I remember you, Billy.” he rasps, pressing his forehead to Billy's for a moment, then pulling back to stare into his eyes “I promise, couldn’t forget you, wouldn’t, not for all the money in the world.”
Billy sobs, fingers clinging in his coat “I’m scared.” he admits, sniffling and terrified as he looks up at his best friend “Frank, I'm scar-scared.”
“I know.” Frank says, his throat closing up, desperately pressing down as he tries to reassure him “I know but I got you, it’s okay, I’m here, I won’t let anything happen.”
It’s a promise they both know he can’t keep.
“Glad it’s-it’s you.” Billy says, and his lips twitch up, even as he’s crying “Always wanted it to be you.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Bill, and neither are you, okay? We’re-” Frank’s fingers are slipping in the blood pouring from Billy “We’re gonna get through this, it’s gonna be okay-”
Billy’s eyes glaze, and his hand loosens.
“No, no, no, no-” Frank says, feeling for a pulse and finding nothing, his jeans are soaked through with the red “C’mon, Billy, come on, don’t do this to me…”
Billy doesn’t move, and his still body doesn’t pull in another breath, no matter how much Frank screams for him to do so.
The cops arrive twenty minutes later.
They take Billy’s body and they take Frank to a hospital.
All he can see is red spreading everywhere and those dark eyes, the fingers that gripped onto him.
Billy shouldn’t have gotten involved, it wasn’t his war.
But he did.
Because Billy is his best friend, and he wasn’t going to let Frank die alone.
***
Madani orchestrates Frank’s release, and his new identity.
Frank isn’t sure he wants or deserves it.
***
No one else, aside from Curtis, comes to the funeral.
No workers, no friends, no former lovers.
Frank stands there, and he thinks about what Billy said and he understands now.
He’d wept over Maria’s grave, over his children’s graves.
But Billy had never had anyone to remember him, no one to care what fate befell him, so he asked Frank too, in the only way he could think of.
Frank closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at the grave.
In the haunted hours of the morning, when mist still clings to the earth, and the sky is lightening, Frank thinks of dark eyes and a hand held out to him, he thinks of fire and brimstone and a hell that they both loved.
He thinks of his best friend.
“Do you remember me?” Billy’s voice echoes softly.
Always, Frank will think.
Always.