Chapter Text
8. you are very bad at rehabilitation. this is one addiction you’d fail to give up. he’s going to ruin you for all other kisses and all other boys and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to forget his name.
9. you still aren’t sure he isn’t a dream.
10. if you kiss him, you might wake up.
–Natalie Wee, yes & no (2015)
_______________________________
My dearest Gale:
There is nothing in the world I would like to do more than marry you.
Gale stares at the letter, postmarked ten weeks ago, and realizes that he never wrote a response. He never even started to draft a response.
He gets a piece of paper off of Alex and sits somewhere and puts his pencil down. And puts it down again. He must’ve been sitting there for twenty minutes by the time he writes:
Marge,
Then his brow furrows, and he crosses that out and writes underneath it:
Darling,
Your last letter arrived
The pencil rests again.
Darling, Gale thinks, intently, Sweetheart. Doll? He’d never called her Doll. That was something John used to say to drunk girls in bars.
He tries,
Darling, I can’t stop thinking about you and your last letter. I can’t believe I get to
When I come back I’ll
I must be the luckiest guy in the world to be marrying you, Marge. I asked John if he’d be best man and he said
Marge, did you know
I talked to him about
I told John
All of a sudden Gale feels sick, deeply, irreversibly sick, churning somewhere higher than his stomach but lower than his throat. He can’t look at the paper anymore. He folds it into a neat square and slides it into his chest pocket, and after a second he slides the pencil in too.
He closes his eyes and breathes.
He thinks about the letter. He thinks about Marge’s perfume, that too-sweet persimmony thing he used to like, in the same way he liked ginger beer because it was the only thing he could drink. He tries to think about the wedding, what it might look like, what he might wear. He tries to imagine Marge in her wedding dress – he can’t quite remember what style she said she’d wanted to wear in her last letter. He could pull it out and check, but the idea makes him even sicker. He can’t remember much of what she wrote past the first few lines.
The insides of Gale’s eyelids are trembling red, like John’s blood on his hands. He feels like an animal in a den waiting for its mother to come back with food and answers: small and dumb.
He’s struck like a stone by the thought that the sickness in his chest might be fear; or else it might be love. He’s never been able to tell the two apart.
To his credit, he swallows the vomit down before it can make it to his mouth.
____________
John stops wearing his sleeves down.
It’s summer, and it’s hotter, and his jacket gets ditched like everyone else's. Gale sees the men looking at him, staring at the ugly pink flecks on his arms, trying to remember if they’d been there before, from flak or freezing metal or whatever the Krauts had done to him between his bail and the Stalag. He doesn’t talk about the marks, and nobody really wants to ask – they have bigger fish to fry.
But Gale knows.
Gale sees the scars start to fade. Gale wants to look at him, in the showers, try to catch the rest of his exposed body, if he’d done anything else, if he’d started to hide it better. But he can’t. John would notice. And if John noticed him looking – And if John looked back –
Gale thinks, maybe I scared him out of it. Maybe he’ll never do it again. I can’t look and he can’t ask. It’s a stalemate.
Gale thinks, Good.
He doesn’t feel it.
______________
They start pulling up stumps. John doesn’t like that so much.
Gale knows it maybe before he does, why he’s doing it, what he’s asking. He knows it when John gets on the floor and stays there. He knows it when John drags him down and clutches his leg until the thing in Gale’s chest rears up in a punch.
He stands up while John stays on the ground, all spread out, rolling back from the strike. Gale’s mouth floods with saliva. He spits it to the side, wipes his mouth off, and turns around at the barking of German over the loudspeaker.
They made it, he thinks slowly. They started the Allied invasion of Europe.
A knot drills into his gut. It might be excitement, or apprehension, or a shameful kind of disappointment. He realizes very intently, while standing there, that the war is going to end at some point. The war is going to end and he might even be alive for it. He might see the States again in more than a faded photograph, lurid and colorful and real.
He might get married.
The news of the invasion puts the men in good spirits – even John slowly recovers from his fugue to join in with the festivities, though there’s a lingering sharpness about him, a splintering, like a tree caught down the middle. But he doesn’t come to Gale, not after the fight. Gale thinks, somewhat queasily, that it might have cured him of the itch for a while.
Gale thinks he should probably start trying to write his letter to Marge again.
Then he starts thinking about a winter march. He forgets the letter.
In fact, Gale spends so much time considering winter that he almost forgets about fall. It slithers around the corner like a snake in a henhouse: it’s suddenly October again. He looks at the battered little wall calendar and realizes that it’s the eleventh – three days since the anniversary of slamming into that farmhouse outside Bremen and he hadn’t even noticed. John’s birthday was a month ago.
A year he’s been here. A year. Huh.
He goes back to re-tuning the radio.
With the fall comes the cold, and with the cold comes layers. Those who had noticed John’s mottled arms forget about it when they disappear behind his sleeves again. Gale doesn’t forget, but he starts to think about other things when he sees John, like how their supplies are and where the Red Army is and how cold it’s going to get when the Germans make them walk. It starts to seem like maybe, in their world, John had never so much as given himself a sliver, and Gale didn’t know what cigarettes tasted like. It starts to seem like maybe it can be forgiven, and Gale will tuck the memory away in the same place he’d tucked away the copilots he’d lost, the feeling of freefall, the fuel on the cockpit wall he’d thought was blood, and the secondhand flavor of John’s mouth.
October rolls by. November comes around. New reports roll in over the radio every day, bombing and invasion, towns taken and towns lost. The men stop being relieved and start to get antsy. They all start to know that they’re going to have to walk. The question becomes, when.
Gale can’t answer it for them.
That Tuesday they all huddle around the crystal radio and listen to Roosevelt get reelected. In the scheme of the war it means little to Gale and apparently even less to John, who starts up interrupting the broadcast to find out who wants to play cards, or ball –
“ – Or something, c’mon, guys, I’m getting cabin fever just lookin’ at this – ”
“Shut up,” says Gale, straining to listen.
“ – President could be a goddamn circus bear, we’d still be – “
“Shut up, John.”
Gale makes it through about five seconds of actual silence before he looks over at him. That had been too easy.
John is just looking at him, eyes dark, mouth shut – his arms are crossed, leaning against the corner of their bunks. Gale looks away reluctantly, focusing on the radio again.
He doesn’t hear the rest of the broadcast.
When the radio finally quiets down, Clark sends a runner with a scrawled sheet of paper around to the other cabins. Dusk crawls over the camp inch by inch. The water outside starts to freeze.
It’s maybe twenty minutes from true dark by the time John says, lightly, “Well, I’m goin’ for a smoke. Gale, you want one?”
He holds something up, but it’s not the pack of cigarettes – it’s the lighter.
Gale’s ribs ratchet down on his heart. He hears himself say, “Yeah.”
He’s never wanted a smoke less in his life. Still he feels himself get up from the chair, shrug on his overcoat, clunk down the steps into the cold. John is already disappearing around the corner. Gale’s mouth is so dry he can barely swallow.
His heart jumps when John brushes past his usual smoking spot to duck into a wide crevice between two buildings, almost reminiscent of a British pub’s back-alley. The association stops Gale in his tracks at the entrance. There’s a dirtiness about it, a sliminess: going into an alley with another man to carry something out in secret, something made of flesh and heat.
Gale’s feet glue down at the mouth of the alley, stuck staring at his own long, looming shadow. He remains frozen there until John says, leaning against the wall, “I don’t have all day, Buck,” and the sound of his voice lets the world start to make sense again.
“Yeah,” Gale says again, stupidly. He walks up to John and stands beside him, shoulder to shoulder, like they really are just there to smoke.
John doesn’t even offer him one. He tucks the pack away and flicks the lighter – his face becomes an orange specter in the firelight, his cheeks hollow like he’s been starving for weeks, his lips bruise-gray, his eyes all black. Gale blinks away the afterimage when he snaps it shut again.
John tilts his head back, exposing the white column of his throat. He hands the cigarette to Gale as he exhales, who takes it out of reflex rather than desire.
It’s thirty degrees out. His palms are itching with sweat.
Gale watches John watch him take a drag. The smoke pours in and out of his lungs like cyanide, like oil, like air. Bitter and shining and smooth. It comes to him naturally as anything. He brings it to his lips a second time instead of giving it back.
John’s eyes are black poison. An engine engulfed, spitting fire, consuming itself. Angry. Needing. They could be fifty thousand feet up and Gale wouldn’t notice.
He takes a step closer to the edge. Another, until he’s squared with John, in front of him. Until he could press him up to the wall if he wanted to. John’s chest is barely moving. The way he’s slouched back, he’s shorter than Gale. Neither of them speak – maybe they can’t. Maybe they’ve said all there’s left to say without touching each other.
“Wait,” breathes John, just before the ember can meet his collarbone.
Gale stops. A cold trickle of shame pours down his back, suddenly, to have presumed, to have really thought that John wanted him to –
“Don’t do it like that,” John says. “Here.”
He reaches into his jacket and brings out a flashing splinter of metal. His straight razor.
Gale’s mouth fills. He’s struck by the kind of dizziness he hasn’t felt since jumping out of his burning Fort. “John,” he says, then closes his mouth, swallows – what then? Do you want this? Are you sure? He gave John an order. John is following it, like all good soldiers do.
Gale drops his burning stub to the ground and takes the razor. It’s fancy, if rusty, and inscribed with a set of cursive initials. Gale doesn’t know who they belong to and he guesses John doesn’t either – some poor unlucky bastard who either lost it in a bet or didn’t need it anymore besides. He unfolds it and brushes his thumb over the blade: sharp.
“Okay,” Gale says quietly. He sinks to one knee.
John’s breath finally makes an appearance, sharp and ragged, almost shocked – It drives a red-hot coil into Gale’s belly. He’s possessed bodily by a need to speak before John does. He says: “Roll your sleeve up. Show me your arm.”
Haltingly, John obeys. It’s been so long since the burning that Gale can hardly see the pink spots in the twilight, stretched and shiny. He grasps John’s wrist firmly in his left hand, over his fluttering pulse. He lines the knife up and John gasps when it brushes the tender skin inside of his elbow.
“Look at me,” Gale tells him, barely above a whisper. His voice bleeds danger into the air. His head is singing with a buzz that puts nicotine to shame.
The pillar of John’s throat tips down, down, down, rolling in a swallow, until his head is bowed into a shadow, a flushed mask of night-blue. The darkness floods his eyes ink-black from sclera to pupil. His arm twitches involuntarily in Gale’s grasp. His jaw is locked, flexing; he almost looks angry. Almost looks wasted.
Gale watches his face while he draws the knife in a slow, straight, neat line from elbow to wrist. It takes control to not go in too deep, to stop before the arteries. The knife runs through his skin like butter. When Gale’s father was sober more often, early on, he took Gale hunting once or twice, birds, small game. Sometimes venison. The sound of the skinning knife separating hide from fat had never really left him.
Gale is powerful, unstoppable, like a tornado over Oklahoma, ripping and taking what it likes from the town and the farmlands. He’s some terrible bowed thing, a pedestal for unholy desire to dance upon. He is sick. The sickness feels good.
John’s shuddering exhale breaks when Gale lifts the knife off his wrist, into a pathetic, pained noise; “Buck,” he begs the second it’s gone. “Do it again.”
Gale tightens his grip until John adds, “Please,” and then he can’t stop anymore either. He drags another mark into John’s flesh, smeared with beads of fresh blood, angry pink around the edges of the first cut.
They’re both trembling, by then, almost panting, John sunk back against the wall. Gale’s hand shakes around the blade so much that a droplet of red flicks off of it; the movement draws his gaze to the blade and he blinks and sees, again, the dark bands of rust, and he looks at John’s weeping arm, and the quivering heat in his stomach is replaced by chilly visions of rot and fever.
“John,” he whispers, horrified, barely gets out: “If this gets infected – They’ll – “
He raises his sleeve but his sleeve is dirty too. Gale is so far gone at that point that there’s little left to control his hindbrain. Instead he thinks, clean, he thinks, gotta get it out, thinks about pushpins and stray hounds, and then almost compulsively he puts his open mouth to the deepest red, where the thickest cuts lie inside of John’s forearm.
John whines and bucks at the contact; his leg jumps, almost catching Gale in the ribs. His other hand grasps at the back of Gale’s head and twists in his hair. Gale can’t tell if the noises he’s making are out of pain or pleasure. His blood is hot and thick in Gale’s mouth, rising behind his teeth, flooding his tongue. He tastes like a gun barrel. Like pain.
A deep noise wells from the back of Gale’s throat, beyond his control, embarrassing him. The preface of infection slips from his grasp like oil in water, refusing to mesh – he swallows, wet, heavy – he slides his tongue down John’s arm to his throbbing pulse point, smearing blood with his mouth and chin, like he’s pulling disease out; putting himself in.
John lets him, for all he’s worth. John pulls and pushes at Gale’s head in turns like he doesn’t know if he wants it to stop – John moans around his biting grasp until his legs shake and buckle and he slides haltingly to the dirty ground, so far down that Gale has to hold his arm up to kiss his wrist, or else sink to his own hands and knees, bowed over in service. He saves himself the choice by disentangling himself when the blood begins to clot, gasping, and only then does John cease his thrashing and his painful grip relaxes out of Gale’s hair, instead trembling by the side of his neck, underneath his ear.
John looks like hell in the half-light: black pupils blown wide, flushed to the neck, sweat glistening at his hairline. His chest shakes with every inhale and he exhales like a rope is clenching his lungs. Gale knows he must not look much better – blood and saliva drips from his chin, stringy, obscene – a hot flush of exertion thrums behind his cheeks and eyes – but Christ, Christ, he wants to do it again, he thinks, open John up on a blade and lick the gushing tenderness right out of him, from his mouth to his heart to his cock. A molten core of tingling heat swells low in Gale’s stomach, strong and dark enough to block out all thoughts of God.
“This is what you wanted?” He says. It curves up at the end like a question, though he hadn’t meant it like that; almost a crack. He doesn’t quite have it in him to be embarrassed.
“I had no idea,” breathes John, amazed, which manages to answer nothing and everything. “I had no idea.”
For a second, he almost looks like he might laugh. Then his face becomes serious again, and his hand becomes a vice at Gale’s collar, and he leans in and kisses him deeply on the mouth.
Gale moans with an abruptness that shocks himself. John’s mouth is everything the gash of his arm had been, with less sour sharpness but a thousand times more movement – his tongue slides against Gale’s own almost overwhelmingly, almost too much, before he even remembers opening his mouth enough to allow it – he burns like a brand, bitter and sweet, and Gale breathes into him as he laps his own blood from Gale’s lips.
John kisses mean. He kisses like a dog taught to bite for its food. His hands clutch at Gale’s neck, his ribs under his jacket – he whimpers like a dog too, when Gale digs blunted nails into the ridges of his swollen exhumed arm. It’s disgusting and enthralling. Gale rocks forward on his knees until he’s pressing John into the wall again, containing him there, one hand on his wrist, the other brushing the ground to steady himself – his finger flinches against something sharp and cold: the razor, forgotten in the dirt. He flirts with the idea of picking it back up –
– But John twists to force one of his legs between the both of Gale’s, rutting up against him, and he’s hard, he’s rock hard. Gale shouldn’t be surprised – not with the state he’s in himself – but it floods his mind with starving, hunting pleasure and he forgets the knife entirely to let John drag his hand down to the hard line of his erection, trapped between their feverish bodies.
Gale’s head is an inferno. He palms John through the fabric while they kiss, clumsily, maybe, too hard, but John doesn’t care – he whines and bucks up into it, and the way he’s moving Gale might as well be riding his thigh, like a woman, and he’s white hot, he’s trembling on the edge of a tailspin that he can never make himself come back from.
By the time Gale gets around to fumbling with John’s belt and grasping him, stroking him in earnest, John is so far gone he can barely kiss back – he makes a sound that forces Gale to put his hand over his mouth to keep him from attracting attention – it seems to only spur him on, his breath flooding through Gale’s fingers in long thick pants, twitching, spilling. His fingernails dig red flares into Gale’s back, under his jacket, under his shirt. The skin on skin, hot and rough, makes Gale jerk and shudder, losing his rhythm, shameful uncontrollable noises tumbling from his mouth.
Gale doesn’t realize that he’s coming until he almost chokes on copper and understands that he’s bitten a deep mark into John’s neck, just below where the collar lies; he shivers, tonguing over the blooming bruise while he twists his hand through the sticky mess that John’s peak had made of him, pulling out, trailing it up over his stomach. His own hips rock slowly to a halt in the aftermath; black spots dissolve from his vision, fading into the late dusk.
In wake of his ecstasy a cloying humiliation creeps up on Gale, infecting him through the cold stinging trails that John’s hands had left on his skin. He doesn’t know what to say. Can’t fathom what to say. He feels as though he’s woken up into an alternate world, torn away the peeling dressing to reveal a place he’s never seen. The shadows seem sharper, the lights brighter. Maybe it’s just the chemicals talking. He tastes blood far back on his palate and a new wave of shame sweeps him. His tongue darts over his lips and he suddenly can’t imagine kissing John with them, the same mouth he’d drank him with. Can’t imagine tasting any part of him.
“Hey,” John says. “Gale.”
Gale’s eyes are glued to the lazy drop of blood creeping down from the bite on John’s neck. He tears them away to meet John’s gaze, below him somehow, looking up.
There is no word for how John looks at him. Maybe, something that eclipses love and rises up into fear – something so afraid that it loses step and falls down love’s chimney into its hearth. Mostly behind the veneer he just looks lost, like a pilot without a navigator.
Gale thinks, at least, they can be lost together. He thinks that he wants it; more than he wants to be found alone. He thinks he wants to come down to Earth, if only John is there on the ground, sightless, red-throated, if only he can lie with him for a minute. He thinks he could be John’s medic and his pilot and his torturer and his wife too, if he wanted. He thinks it with a delirious, vicious certainty, like he’s giving up his whole life, signing the enlistment papers all over again.
While he’s thinking this, John has done his belt back up, taken out his pack of cigarettes and dug the lighter from Gale’s coat, though Gale knows full well he has his own. He blows smoke into Gale’s face with a strange satisfied dignity, a cat who got the cream, licking it off his paws.
Gale takes the cigarette from him without asking. He’s still in John’s lap.
John blows out a whistling breath. “Well, Buck, if I had known this was all I had to do to get you on me, I would’ve started choppin’ myself up back at Randolph.”
Gale looks up, startled. He has to find his voice to ask, “Since Randolph?”
Some of the satisfaction slides off John’s face. He takes the cigarette back. “Sure,” he says. “Sick like a dog.”
A sliver pierces Gale’s heart; still new, somehow, after all the battering it’s taken. He takes the cigarette from John’s mouth and instead of taking a drag, he kisses him – shallow, almost closed-mouthed, before he can think better of it at all.
“I’m sorry, John,” is all he says when he pulls back. He doesn’t know what he means. Sorry I took so long. Sorry I’m getting married. Sorry we’re here, together. His chest hurts so badly he can barely breathe.
The blue-black of John’s eyes coalesces into an unfriendly shard. “Yeah,” he mutters.
He pushes Gale back suddenly, extracts himself from the wall. Gale lets him go, watches him stand up and brush himself off, adjusting his dirtied clothes with a wince of self-pitying humor.
Gale’s still on the floor, holding the cigarette, swallowing. John looks down at him. They can barely see each other in the dark.
John seems for a devastating moment like he’s going to say something. Then he turns around, shakes his head slightly, and trudges out of the alley.
On the wall they’d been tangled against a single drying drop of blood trickles down, black in the moonlight, like a deep crack running through the stricken planks.
Gale puts the cigarette out in the dirt.
______________
John doesn’t kiss him again. John doesn’t hurt himself again. He doesn’t ask and he doesn’t tell.
Three months later, they march.
Just before, when they’re grabbing as much as they can carry, Gale lifts the pillow of his bunks and out falls the scrawled attempt at a letter he’d been meaning to send to Marge.
He can’t bear the thought of it burning with the cabins – he picks the scrap up and shoves it in his chest pocket.
It isn’t until they’re on the road that he remembers he hadn't found the other letters, the ones she’d sent. Her proposal.
His stomach curdles with guilt. His throat burns up.
The winter howls around him like a wounded dog.
______________
There comes a day in February when John Egan’s future shutters around him.
It starts when Buck says, I’m with you, John. I’m with you. It ends with the blunt end of a bayonet and crackshots over a wall that John prays all miss his head. It’s dark. He can’t see. When they were moving down the road at one point they’d stayed in the abandoned shell of a slave labor camp, and the straw mattresses were so ripe with maggots and grubs they’d had to burn them, and later, sleeping on the cold metal bedsprings John had thought to ask, Buck, can I lie up there with you to stay warm? And Buck had already been asleep, or maybe he just didn’t want to answer. That was the closest John had ever come to asking again, to saying Buck, fuck you, come here, split me open, heat me up. More than the march, or the gunfire – it was the being so close to him and knowing he couldn’t have it.
I’m sorry, John.
What an absolute load of bullshit.
But the next morning comes cold and gray, after Buck breaks for it, and they move again.
John’s chest is a black sinkhole for a while, rotting in its misery, like it does. At one point he thumbs over the long pale scar down his arm, twin lines running side by side, imperfect, permanent. He’d rubbed ashes into it to keep it from healing clean. It had burned in ugly shades of orange and purple. And Gale had done that; Gale had loved him there, though maybe he didn’t know the meaning of the word, and maybe never would, maybe maybe never can do it again.
But Gale had loved him.
For once, John thinks, I don’t die like this.
The morning keeps coming. He keeps walking.