Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

October 4, 1943 — The skies over Hanau, Germany

✦

The sickness overtakes John's body in increments, sinking its tendrils into every basic function of living like a tree driving its spreading network of roots deeper into the soil around it. Its form is nebulous in the beginning, a general unwellness easily enough ignored–who isn’t tired around here?—but, over time, the shadowy malaise begins to take a more concrete shape as it expands: intermittent vomiting with no rhyme or reason, headaches that slam at the front of his skull. The periodical fatigue becomes overwhelming with the passing of days; to his surprise, John finds himself retiring early from nights out at the pub, or avoiding them entirely, to get extra time to lie corpselike in his rack with growing frequency.

He sleeps deeply, without dreaming. On multiple occasions, the internal rhythm that has awoken him at the same time for years, wholly independent of the presence or absence of sunlight, fails, and he instead awakes to Harry or Hambone's hand shaking his shoulder; he rises feeling unrefreshed and sluggish on those days, reluctant to drag himself out of bed in a way he hasn't been since college, his mind so clouded that thinking feels like trudging through a thick mud. Invariably, he spends the rest of the day exhausted on these circumstances.

Bit by bit, sleep becomes John Brady's new keeper.

Some mornings he's ravenous when he shakes away its hold, untouched by the new symptoms; on others, he's put off food so entirely that the mere sight of it turns his stomach. On two separate occasions, the curdling smell of the vats of powdered eggs that drifts out to the officers’ mess from the assembly-line kitchen on the other side of the wall sends him rushing outside to spew nothing but his own stomach acid onto the grass beside the gravel path out front before he’s even lifted his fork.

The increasingly frequent headaches show themselves to be unlinked to the weather, to hydration, to whether or not he’s eaten or how much he’s slept. They come and go with no warning (as opposed to his more enduring, omnipresent nasal congestion, because in addition to this he has to be afflicted by allergies for the first time in his life, too), a hideous tension at his temples and bricklike heaviness behind his forehead, like his skull is squeezing the front half of his brain tighter and tighter until all he can do is lie on his rack and press his face into his pillows to block out the light around him lest the dull English rays further provoke it.

Food upsets his stomach in ways it didn't before. Heartburn. More nausea. Bloating that becomes an unwavering daily feature of his life. Random fits of intestinal cramps that never accomplish anything other than making him uncomfortable for a few hours.

It all goes unreported. 

Everyone’s aware that something's off, aware he’s unwell from time to time, but hopefully they haven't given it enough thought to pick up on the pattern that seems to be forming. Maybe he just likes quiet time in his bunk and has a sensitive stomach. And if he says that to himself enough times, he can continue to proceed as though that is the God’s honest truth, and he can continue flying without issue, as though whatever sickness sleeps within him can’t reach him when he’s that high above the ground.

If the medical crew, or command, knew about this at all, he knows they'd probably pull him—but it doesn't affect abilities as a pilot, for whatever reason that may be, even if it's just luck (God's mercy, he's more wont to say; Harry, who has never experienced such clemency in the throes of his airsickness, is the one who calls it luck most often), so there's no reason to tell them. 

And it continues to be relatively unobtrusive for another three months. Even as the headaches persist, and the purview of the nausea expands outwards to encompass lunch and dinner, too, none of it ever makes it into the fort. He forgets about his new ravenous hunger when he's behind the yoke; the cramps low in his abdomen have just happened to enter a period of remission, or at least have grown subdued, every time they've flown since this all began, for whatever meaning of this.

It's nothing John can't live with, in the grander scheme of things. Headaches. Some stomach upset from time to time—and are cramps and throwing up that unheard of around here, with all of their food coming out of giant dehydrated bags—? Feeling tired against a backdrop of being called upon to fly multiple missions per week. It's nothing shocking. And it's not getting worse if he chooses not to waste his time trying to connect dots or track any of this. It's not like anyone could prove any connection between the sporadic vomiting episodes and the slow onset of new unpleasant tightness to his waistband of late, which is just recurrent trapped gas or unrelated water retention from a heinously oversalted Army diet or both.

And it doesn't affect his flying, which is, as far as the Army is concerned, his raison d'être.

The thin cold skies of early October are cooling and the days are growing shorter by the time it at last makes its appearance in the air. It's been almost half a year since he and his crew flew over from Greenland in early April and began to acquaint themselves with their new environs; about four months since he and Crosby became, for lack of a better word, steadies in the wake of that heated incident between them and everything it awoke. The peeks of Germany's forests under the pinholes in the cloud layer below them are painted in foggy reds and yellows and oranges, and the hayfields neighboring the installation have been shaved down, the sway of seas of tall yellow grasses replaced by stripped ground dotted with tremendous boulders of rolled hay.

He makes it through the mission itself: a bombing of a town called Hanau surrounded by a parquet of yellow and brown fields lying fallow. The nausea, even in the face of his welling nervousness as they approach skies dotted with smoky black explosions of flak, stays in check over Germany. 

It's only about thirty minutes into the return flight, when they’re safe at cruising altitude in Allied airspace over the Channel, when it hits him, abrupt and urgent, his stomach churning under the layers of clothing and lead apron meant to protect him from flak and the atmosphere's cold. John swallows thickly, over and over, as his mouth floods with excess saliva. He tries to focus on the stationary clouds dotting the horizon above his instrument panel, like this time there is some strategy to be had that will keep the looming vomiting fit in check. Nothing works; his guts lurch. 

To Johnny, and Johnny alone, he speaks up, voice low, and utters a simple, matter of fact, "Gonna hurl." 

And then he does. It takes him a little too long to get his mask undone as the acid surges up his throat; he's still yanking it off of himself when the first hard, spastic retch comes. The morning's Last Supper spills over the edge of his oxygen mask's rubber seal and down the front of his flak apron across a series of heaves, none of which leave him feeling any less nauseous. Belaboring his body's point, his throat convulses with a last few unproductive retches after his stomach's emptied before the fit finally releases its hold.

John takes a shuddering gasp the moment his stomach returns control of his throat to his lungs, already dizzy with the lack of oxygen in the thin cold air of the atmosphere. He scrambles to wipe out the edges of his mask and get it back over his nose and mouth as quickly as he can, and it takes several ragged breaths once the damp seal is pressed to his face before he stops feeling like the air has been vacuumed out of his lungs. He closes his eyes for a brief moment as his body's oxygen levels start to equilibrate and lets out an annoyed sigh with air he can't really afford to be expending right now.

"Adrenaline," he breathes, voice hoarse with the burn of his own stomach acid, mouth sour. "Sorry."

It's a patent lie. He's sick again. The scant amount of breakfast he could manage to force down turned his stomach this morning, and his guts have been cramping since the moment he woke up without ever relenting for long, before he even ate anything. He just flew regardless, because what the fuck else was he supposed to do?

"It happens," Hoerr says. John watches him reach for his throat mic, presumably to ask for a towel or a paper bag or any of the things he wishes his own hubris hadn't kept him from having up here, and snatches his wrist with the hand that was resting over the throttle.

"Don't." The last thing the crew needs is to know that the guy responsible for operating the plane just puked all over himself—and that John Brady, after multiple years of flying, just puked all over himself. "I'll just—wipe it off. Shit."

At least it's mostly on his flak apron and not his clothes. He can take it off and fold it in on itself before disembarking to conceal the vomit splattered across it. Nobody needs to see this. It's bad enough that any of them know he's been unwell, but they don't need their confidence shaken by finding out he's carried it up into the air—or their esteem for him shaken by it, either. This is bad enough as it is.

✦

The cramps that started as little twinges low in his abdomen (as they usually do) steadily grow in their intensity through interrogation, and his empty stomach starts churning again, even though his unrinsed mouth is still sour with the products of the last episode. True to his word, Hoerr doesn't say anything, and he's deeply grateful for it.

John waits another three or four hours after he gets out of interrogation before he finally reports to sick call, enough time, hopefully, for any of the wounded men, of which there fortunately weren't that many this time, to have already been stabilized. Then he walks down the gravel path to the medical wing, even though he feels much better by now, aside from the way his pants feel too tight and his shirt and jacket sit awkwardly over the small but unquestionably present swell to his lower abdomen, a last residual trace of the morning's upset.

The Red Cross nurse at intake leads him to one of the only unoccupied beds lining either wall of the medical hut and hands him a metal basin 'in case it happens again', tells him the doctor will be with him when he can, and then leaves him sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the stainless steel surgical bowl and feeling rather overdramatic as he waits for the doctor to make time to see his unwounded body, upright and mobile in the sea of the day's carnage.

The first wait is quiet, just long enough to make him wish he'd brought a book without being too excruciatingly boring. Everyone else, fresh out of the more minor sorts of surgeries that don't require relocation to a larger medical unit, sleeps off the last dregs of anaesthesia around him as he waits for the doctor to show; the ones with more grave injuries have already been transported out to an offsite hospital better equipped to reassemble them. 

The bed they briefly occupied after the surgeons stabilized them for transport have already been made anew, the olive drab blankets held down at the ends of the mattresses with crisp hospital corners like folded paper, waiting for the next casualties to come in the long, unending procession of wounded that characterizes life here. Whatever's going on with him, it could be so much worse, and even in his discomfort he is grateful.

John does idly glance down at his watch a few times, though it's not like he has anywhere to be other than in bed. It ends up being about forty minutes before the flight surgeon is able to free himself to come take a look; the man who shows up looks exhausted, the roots of his hair damp with sweat, and if John didn't feel ridiculous before, he certainly does now.

Pleasant, but all business, Smokey, apparently already briefed by the nurse at intake, tells him to take off his shirt and undershirt and lie back, then unbutton his trousers and push them down, still within the realm of modesty, just enough for the full trail of dark hair under his navel to be visible until the point at which it meets the cradle of his pelvis. The air in the infirmary is colder against his skin than it should be on a day in England's temperate October, almost like he's still in the air.

He goes down the list of standard questions John assumes he asks everyone who comes in for GI issues as he lies there half-naked, filling in the blanks in the brief synopsis he gave the nurse who first saw him: Tell me what's going on—How long has this gone on?—Where is the pain?—Does anything set it off?—do you have a family history of any sort of digestive disease—?   

He answers each to the best of his ability, and then Smokey asks him why he didn't come in or report this sooner, and that's the point at which he averts eye contact, feeling a bit like a child at the dentist being asked if he's regularly flossing.

"It didn't seem like a big deal. Not like it was bothering me that much, and it wasn't affecting me up in the air," he mumbles. Beat. It occurs to him that as of today he needs to amend that previous statement. With a rueful grimace, he adds, "Until today."

Smokey frowns at him. "If this is an ulcer, which it very well could be, you could have had it rupture like Hughlin's by delaying treatment. Report these things when they happen, Brady. You're an officer. You need to set a better example for your men."

John makes a quiet noise in the back of his throat to acknowledge that he's heard, considering that there's not really anything he can say in his own defense, and there's no point in explaining to a doctor whose only concern is treating patients the myriad complicating circumstances that held him at bay. Fortunately, Smokey doesn't waste any time lecturing, just turns his attention back to the exam.

"Well, I can see what you mean about the abdominal distension. It's not terrible, but it's there. Any worse in the air?"

"No."

"And you said it's been pretty consistent?"

"Yeah. It's gotten a bit worse lately."

"Alright. Breathe normally. I'm going to take a listen." Smokey pushes back his long white ear hairs with the black rubber buds of his stethoscope and adjusts them until they're comfortably lodged in place, then presses the cold metal diaphragm firm to John's sternum without so much as breathing on it to warm it up. The hair on his arms raises; his nipples harden with the sudden chill between them. 

After a moment or two of listening over his heart, he moves the diaphragm to listen to different points over his lungs, then his abdomen. John watches as his eyes narrow ever-so-slightly at the edges, his frown deepening the corners of his mouth and the lines around when the diaphragm rests over his vaguely bloated midsection. He flips the end of the stethoscope over and uses the narrower top part, staring almost unblinkingly at a spot at the wall in his focus as he holds it lightly to his skin, head tilted to one side like a listening dog, then picks it up and places it on a few other points on his belly and repeats the process. 

John's heart beats faster as a sinking sort of dread settles over him, and he wonders if the doctor hears that, too—nobody wants to see their doctor make faces while examining them, he figures, no matter how controlled their face is, or how minute the changes may be. He's always been acutely aware of the little changes in the people around him, the little tells. Maybe somebody else wouldn't notice at all. He doesn't know.

It's hard to 'breathe normally' now that his attention is drawn to his own breathing and his conscious mind takes over the process, but John tries to approximate it even as nervousness begins to take hold, carefully balancing each breath in and out until Smokey finishes what he's doing and straightens up to address him, at which point he finally, finally looks him in the eye.

"Hold your breath for a moment and stay completely still."

What's so weird that he can't hear it unless I hold my breath? He's never had a doctor take so long to listen to any part of hum, even during the physical he took to get in. His heart beats still faster, which he's sure the doctor hears as he lightly sets the small part of the stethoscope directly over it and takes a few seconds to listen in silence.

"Okay, just breathe normally. Relax your belly, I'm going to take a feel."

John realizes with a stir of unexpected anxiety that he would rather he didn't —there's an animal part of him that can't override the instinct to protect the most vulnerable places on his body; he's not thrilled with the prospect of lying on his back without even the thin defensive barrier of a shirt as to allow someone else to poke and prod his internal organs, but it's a necessary evil. To that point, the line of his own mouth tightens as Smokey starts, first placing his hand flat over John's skin in various places and tapping the tops of his fingers, then pressing into him more deeply as though to deliberately antagonize already malfunctioning entrails.

John hisses with the abrupt stab of renewed pain one such touch drives into his side, under his navel and to the left. The entirety of his trunk goes rigid in self-defense before he can stop it. Smokey looks up at him.

"That hurt?"

"Yeah. Like being fucking—stabbed."

"Okay. Relax your abdomen. You're tensing up."

No shit I'm tensing, it fucking hurts. You don't have to stop and have a whole fucking conversation while you're over here bearing down on me, he thinks sourly, but John manages to keep his tongue in check, willfully relaxing despite the pain and letting out a sigh in time with the closing of his eyes and lowering of his brows.

The prodding continues, and it's fucking unpleasant the entire time. His eyes remain shut until it stops, at which point he folds his arms rather defensively across his bare chest. The doctor frowns at him.

"Don't get worked up yet, but there's reason to suspect that an upper bowel obstruction might be at play. We'll have to go take radiographs to confirm."

John's brows lower as he levels a critical stare at the man across from him. Who the fuck says that and then just doesn't elaborate? "What does that— I don't understand what that means." 

"It could be a lot of different things. It could be food that didn't properly digest, it could be something called a stricture. We won't know until we take the radiographs." Well, that's two of us who are annoyed, Doc. "Put on your shirt and follow me, please."

The Picker field-unit x-ray machine has its own designated room, albeit a stark, brutally empty one: the tremendous piece of equipment stands alone in the center of the room without even a single chair for decoration. John crouches down and awkwardly positions himself on the stretcher-like bed of the apparatus, only a few inches off of the floor, then lies back on its low flat surface, shimmying down on the table when instructed until his feet and ankles hang limp off of its end.

"Stay very still," the doctor tells him as he moves the massive camera apparatus into place on the double stainless steel tracks that run alongside the stretcher and adjusts the camera over his bare abdomen. Then he walks back to the control panel, holds the bulb of the shutter, snaps a few shots with his thumb, and they're done.

"You can sit up and put your clothes back on. I'm going to look at these in the darkroom and I'll be back in thirty minutes."

✦

The doctor is not back in thirty minutes. The doctor is not back in an hour. "Thirty minutes" comes and passes six times before the door to the bare-bones "radiology room" finally opens.

John tries not to stew once he's alone on the exam table, which is pretty-fucking-difficult, considering that they leave him in there for what he approximates to be three hours. By the time anyone shows up to tell him what's going on, he's hungry and thirsty and bored and tired and really has to piss. He's paced, he's prayed, he's more-or-less come to terms with the fact that they're probably going to cut him open and maybe take out a section of intestine or whatever they do for this in another few hours. 

One doctor left the room. Three come back, and three nurses behind them. He didn't even know they had three practicing doctors here, and he certainly doesn't recognize the two new ones Smokey's brought along with him this time. His heart picks up the quick pace of the earlier exam again. Cold fear surges, washing away the prior frustration in one fell swoop. Time seems to slow. There's no way this is good.

“John, this is Dr. Ames. He’s come from the hospital in Norwich to take a second look at you.”

Norwich? He has a general understanding of where, exactly, that is—at least an hour away and to the northeast—based on conversations he’s overheard, but that’s about the extent of his understanding of the area that surrounds the Thorpe Abbotts air installation—not like he goes very far off base, especially with how tired he’s been over the past few months. The thought, though, that a doctor had to be brought in to consult from an hour away, doesn't bring him much comfort.

“A second… A second look. Why? Do I have to be transported somewhere?”

“We don’t know much of anything for sure yet. Come with us, please.”

Not like he has much of a choice.

John follows the gaggle of medical personnel—the surgeon, the newly introduced Dr. Ames, the other stranger they didn’t even bother wasting the time to introduce him to, and three fucking nurses—back to the unit’s one private exam room (also not a good sign, as far as he’s concerned). 

“Alright, lie down and unbutton your shirt, please,” Dr. Ames instructs, stepping forward as he sits on the end of the exam table. He's old and fat and has deep laugh lines and looks like you'd expect a family doctor to look, not someone from a hospital apparently more sophisticated than the Thorpe Abbotts medical hut.

Smokey steps back to the periphery of the group, abandoning him, and John wishes he wouldn't. He can’t help but to feel like some kind of animal on display as they all watch him, a nonconsenting exhibit in a teaching hospital. They’re keeping something from him and he knows it.

They have him repeat the same song and dance he did several hours earlier: unbuttoning his shirt and pants, pushing the latter down a little on his hips as Dr. Ames sets the heavy black leather bag he brought with him on the side table and opens it up, withdrawing his own stethoscope and planting it in his ears.

“Breathe deep,” Ames says. He listens to his chest. Then, just like Smokey said: “Alright, hold your breath.”

John does. He watches as Dr. Ames first listens to his heart, then different points on his abdomen, trying to pick up even the tiniest indication of what he's thinking in the lines of his face. His lungs begin to ache as the doctor frowns just like Smokey did, and he’s pretty fucking sure the guy’s forgotten about the fact that he’s presently not breathing. His willpower gives out before the exam's finished; with a tremendous wash of relief John lets out a heavy breath followed by a fast, deep replenishing of his oxygen supply, heart beating faster as he recovers. The doctor seems unperturbed.

“Alright, again.”

Fuck. How long is this going to go on, exactly?

So he takes another long, deep breath and holds it. The doctor continues to listen, then flips the end of the stethoscope just like Smokey did hours earlier and listens with the smaller part—over his abdomen, over his heart, over the center of his chest.

“Okay, let it out.” John does. The doctor takes the stethoscope out of his ears and exchanges it for some device he’s never seen before—a narrow, hornlike black metal cone with a flat disc at its end, the approximate size and shape of a champagne glass without its stem. Nobody tells him what it is.

“Alright, I’m going to take a feel here,” he says, and does—John grimaces as he begins to palpate with the hand that isn't holding the horn thing he didn't bother to introduce, deeply, like he’s trying to shift his guts around within him. He sticks the horn under his arm for a moment and does the same tapping thing atop his flat fingers that Smokey did, too, but in the opposite order of operations. 

“Stay very still and try not to breathe too deeply,” he instructs, then holds the base of the horn off to the side of his navel and just below it, where the small curve to his belly is more pronounced, and presses deeply, planting his ear against the flat disc at the end. He listens for a few moments (or so John assumes), then pushes it against a few other spots, squinting as he listens there, too, then straightens up and puts the horn back in his bag. 

“When did the symptoms begin?”

“About… three months ago.” At least someone’s talking to him. 

“Your medical records say you came in for a lower GI bleed and abdominal pain back in May?”

“Well, yeah, but that was… I don’t think it’s related. Doc said it was gastroenteritis and it went away after a few days.”

“How much time passed between the last day you spent sick and the first time you started feeling unwell again? Do you remember?”

“...No, not really.” A lot was going on, on account of flying and getting shot at fairly routinely. The doctor looks disappointed. He doesn't say why he asked.

“Alright, let’s get some x-rays.”

What’s wrong with the ones we have? What finding is so serious that they have to double check? Or bring in a doctor from an hour away?

Finally, his patience runs out, or maybe the growing anxiety just wins, his brows lifting skywards, the sharpness he's held at bay for hours finally overtaking his tone.

“Will somebody please tell me what’s going on? Could you give me even the faintest idea as to what’s going on here, or what you think is going on?”

“That’s why we brought in an external consult, son. We’re not sure yet, but we’re hoping another round of x-rays will give us a better idea. Come with me, please.”

John lets out a sharp, frustrated exhalation through his nose, jaw tightening, but he follows them. At least the pain has slacked off. 

“Can I at least have something to eat? Drink? Or even just take a piss before you leave me in the room to wait for another three hours?”

Smokey looks over at one of the Red Cross girls beside him. “Nurse,” he says, and she nods and splits from the group, presumably—hopefully—to bring him something to fucking eat. He’s not sure he’s ever been so hungry. Then he turns back to Brady. “We’ll take the radiographs first, then we’ll get you something to eat and drink. We need a urine sample. Nurse Rogers will bring you a collection cup when she comes back.”

A urine sample? What the hell does that have to do with a bowel obstruction? Eligibility for surgery, maybe. Possibly. He doesn’t even bother asking, this time, because he’s sure he’ll just get some other cryptic answer, if he gets one at all.

✦

Smokey is, at least, true to his word when they're done. First, though, Dr. Ames retakes the radiographs himself, carefully positioning the camera on its pole—initially at the same distance Smokey used, then much closer to his abdomen, photographing at different angles, moving it left and right on its tracks to capture different parts of his belly. It’s decidedly more thorough than the first series.

This time, they at least lead him back to the exam room to wait instead of making him more-or-less sit on the damn floor of the radiology room for three hours. The nurse brings him a plate of crackers and a glass of water and an empty piss cup labelled BRADY, JOHN D., then knocks on the door to retrieve the plate and cup and piss fifteen minutes later.

They’re gone for another hour after that. Then all six of them come back: both doctors, the man they didn’t introduce, and the same three nurses he's getting really sick of seeing.

“John, we have some difficult news.”

His face falls. “Are you going to operate?”

“Well, yes, but not for a bowel obstruction. None of us have ever seen anything like this before. As far as I and the rest of my colleagues are aware, there are no records of this happening, but there are a few cases of your disorder in the medical texts, and it's not entirely unheard of in veterinary medicine. Dr. Ames has seen a few patients like you, but never in your condition." 

My condition. What disorder—what fucking disorder? What is "my condition"? Cut the fucking dramatics.

A pause. John hangs on every word, face drawn, feeling every individual heartbeat behind his sternum.

“You seem to have been born with some sort of… true hermaphroditism that went undetected until now. Your present state would imply the presence of an almost completely formed, functional female reproductive system that only developed internally. Usually when this happens, there are defects in the external genitals, ambiguity of the genitals, or they're only partially formed, and the patient has corrective surgery as an infant. Your particular case of hermaphroditism wasn't caught at birth because you fall into the minority of hermaphroditic cases in which there are no obvious genital defects."

What?

No. That's not possible. He is very visibly a man, as confirmed in the fucking physical he had to take to get into the army. It's right there in his paperwork. The family doctor told Alice and John Brady she'd delivered a perfectly healthy, normal baby boy. It's not possible. And what the hell does he mean, his present condition? Cancer? Reproductive cancer?

The numb disbelief does nothing to wipe away the fear—no, horror. He can only describe the feeling that's seized his entire body as ground-opening horror, and the doctor isn't even done talking. John's mouth opens, lips moving in a silent effort to make words for a few moments before he actually finds his voice. His face feels cold and numb.

"Present... present state. What does that mean? I don't understand. You're not making any sense. You're telling me—you're telling me I have cancer?"

Smokey's shoulders rise with a slow, stiff breath in. He sighs, and watches John with a sort of weary pity that makes his skin crawl. Spit it out. Spit it out. Stop fucking with me. He wants to scream but finds himself unable to make sound.

“When we took radiographs, we were expecting to see a mass around the upper half of your intestinal tract, which would be consistent with the symptoms you've been having. We did have a diagnostic finding, but it wasn’t that. We found a second spine."

"A second..."

"That gave us reason to believe the irregular heartbeat I picked up earlier could have been a fetal heartbeat. Doctor Ames is an obstetrician, John. He was able to confirm. Our best guesses place you at about four months pregnant. The urine sample we took should confirm in about two days.”

That's not possible.

John's hands, trembling, find their way to his mouth without his thinking to move them there. The floor gives out under him like the trapdoor beneath the gallows, leaving him adrift in a cold yawning void with no tether to what he's always understood to be reality. His body feels too cold and too hot all at once. Apparently he said his thoughts out loud without realizing he was speaking, because Dr. Ames answers him.

“Our best guess is that a fistula formed between your rectum and the vaginal canal. That sometimes happens in female patients.”

The vaginal canal. No. He doesn't have a vagina. There is no fucking—canal.

“No. This isn't real. None of this is real, and you're fucking with me, and you can—you can ask the doctor that did the exam, I'm—The doctors told my mom she delivered a boy. I'll take off my fucking pants right now if you don't believe me, because this is—this is ridiculous. This is bullshit. It's not possible, and you're fucking with me, and I don't know why, but— You made a mistake. You made one hell of a mistake.”

The nurses look sympathetic in a way that makes that harder to believe. His heart has never beat faster in his life. He's never felt this scared in his life, even when he landed in that open field with no gear. He wishes he was there again, making an emergency landing, or getting shot at, or flying through flak, or anywhere that's not sitting here listening to this.

It just can't be real.

“It’s a lot to process.” Smokey's big wrinkled hand reaches into the folder he's holding in the other one and withdraws the large black sheaf of a single radiograph. He turns on the bright lamp behind him and holds the film in front of it, illuminating its bright positive spaces to reveal the image taken. John stares slack-jawed at the translucent image, at the impossible way the light passes through it, until Smokey lowers it and holds it out, the darks and lights of the picture fainter, but still visible, without a proper backlight.

"This is one of the radiographs Dr. Ames took. That white line is the fetal spine, and the large white mass above it is its skull. That black space around it is the uterus."

John takes it, hand still trembling, and stares at exactly what they told him they saw, with BRADY, JOHN D., written in the top right corner of the quivering image. His name. Not some woman’s. That's his name.

As described, a tiny spine stands out against the black vacant space of his abdomen like the thin white sliver of a crescent moon as the image shivers in his hand. That’s—unquestionably, he’s looking at a second fucking spine. Inside of him. It’s impossible. His mind reels. This has to be some cruel joke.

“That’s not. That’s not inside of me, someone mixed up the pictures. This is someone else’s. They wrote the wrong name on it. I can’t be pregnant. Look at me. I don’t have—There’s no way that—” He lets out a shuddering, disbelieving laugh, desperately scanning the faces of the medical personnel standing before him. “There’s no way anything could get… could get in. They would have detected something when I was born. I was born a normal baby boy. This isn’t possible. This isn’t real. You made a mistake. Retake it. Retake the radiograph. This is someone else’s. Stop fucking with me!”

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry, retake it!" His voice breaks. His throat feels so tight it is as if an invisible hand is strangling him. His eyes burn with welling tears. "Retake it. Right now. This isn't—this isn't evidence. How the fuck did they even let you—let any of you graduate—"

Smokey ignores the ad hominem, and John's tears, entirely. It's like he doesn't even hear it. Dr. Ames answers for him. "We reviewed the case of suspected gastroenteritis in your records from earlier this year. Back in the second week of May, it says here that you came in complaining of abdominal pain and distension with headaches and minor low GI bleeding, but no fever. Based on the exam notes from that visit and the radiographs we took now, we have reason to believe that was likely very late menarche. Or implantation bleeding. The prior is more likely, and while twenty-five is a lot later than usual, there are a lot of other variables at play in your instance that obviously aren't considerations in young women. The timing would line up with the spinal development we're seeing on the radiographs."

John stares dumbly as the doctor stares back at him like he's supposed to understand what's being said to him. A larger, more sweeping sense of numbness descends over him as though his own body is turning to cold lead. “I don't... I don't know what that means."

Nobody's talked to him about this. About any of it. He has the vaguest sense of a synonym for the word, but that's not fucking possible, so for all intents and purposes he still doesn't know what it means. He also doesn't want to. He doesn't want to hear or know anything that's going on right now. He wants to smoke and have four or five beers and spend a day asleep and forget any of this happened.

But he remembers, of course—how the fuck couldn't he?—the agony of the unending waves of hard, burning abdominal pains that hit him like claps of thunder, radiating through him to his back and all the way down his legs, enough to confine him to his cot for two days, hardly even willing to get to his feet to eat anything, robbed of his appetite by the waves of pain and nausea. The night sweats, in which he went to bed at a comfortable temperature and awoke in sweat-drenched sheets, the pounding headaches at the front of his skull. The abdominal bloating that made it hard to button his trousers in the morning. A few spots of blood after days of this had been diagnosed as a "lower GI bleed" when he finally dragged himself to the flight surgeon, part of an amalgam of symptoms representing a severe case of gastritis to be managed with increased fluids, bland food, and rest. It went away after a few more days, just as the doctor said it would. And then two weeks later, he'd let Harry fuck him for the first fucking time. There hadn't been any need for a rubber; he'd prepared himself and it wasn't as though they were seeing other people.

Once. Harry has fucked him once. His first time letting anyone fuck him.

And now, four months later, these people are claiming that that got him pregnant. That Harry got him pregnant. On the first fucking try. Like some kind of joke from God, or—or punishment. Punishment for the obvious crime of adultery.

Harry.

How the fuck is he supposed to tell Harry?

A single tear spills over and trails down each cheek, joining over the soft flesh beneath the hard, unquestionably masculine line of his jaw, one more organic contradiction in terms.

What if he leaves? He has a wife. Who wants an illegitimate child in the middle of the war? Who wants a man who gets pregnant, who is only going to look worse and worse and become more of a liability and wash out of service in the middle of a war? Not that it's relevant, because this still can't be real. He shouldn't even humor it.

Smokey’s voice interrupts the accelerating train of thought.

"Do you know how this could have happened, son?" Smokey watches him like he already knows the answer. John knows one is supposed to forget propriety and be frank with doctors for their own benefit, but he doesn't have it in him—if anyone should be discharged for fraternization, it should be him. There's no need to send them on a witch hunt for the other culpable party. This is all his fault. He could have just said to wear a rubber. There were other reasons to do that, anyways.

John opens his mouth but doesn't say anything, trying to form an answer that will be satisfactory enough to inhibit further questioning without revealing too much. Finally, he settles on an untruth: "I was... very, very drunk. I wasn't myself, or making decisions that I... ever would have made sober. We both were."

Smokey sighs. "Well, I won't ask you who the father is. I don't think that matters much right now."

He says it with a degree of sympathy that would normally make him bristle. Instead, John just returns it with a quiet "okay", acutely aware of the coldness of the side of the exam table against his bare calves. Dr. Ames takes over.

"I'm sure I don't have to explain to you the precariousness of your situation, Captain. This is very, very unnatural, and aside from the presence of a functioning womb, your body isn't built to host a child. It's a wonder that it hasn't been rejected yet, but when it does, the likelihood is high that it would be fatal with treatment. We caught this early. Had it progressed further, you likely would have seen further tendon and organ damage and eventual hemorrhage, which we may not have been able to get under control once it started." 

When. A sickness begins to grow in the pit of his stomach, entirely unrelated to the unwelcome passenger dwelling just below it. He knows where this is going, and every word closer to the eventual truth adds to the enormity the sense of dread looming over him. "Because the lack of any true birth canal, we'll have to perform the procedure surgically under general anaesthesia.”

The procedure.

Dr. Ames' thin lips tighten in a hard line, the corners of his mouth momentarily deepening as he regards his patient. “This is a highly atypical situation. Normally, this would never be performed. Were you a woman, this would be illegal. But you’re very lucky, Captain Brady.”—it’s hard to feel that way in the slightest—“The law specifies women. It says nothing about hermaphrodites."

Beat. John is still turning the phrase hermaphrodites this way and that in his mind, trying to absorb that a doctor has just used it to refer to him, a man, when Dr. Ames continues.

“And I, personally, would never perform a termination this late in a pregnancy. But in your case… It's lifesaving treatment. The child won’t live, and it’s remarkable that it’s survived this long, no doubt with defects. Were it to survive another five months, it would die after being delivered. The male body, even a hermaphroditic one, cannot guide a baby through developing the organs it needs. This is unnatural, and if we don’t intervene, it’ll kill both of you. The Army needs every pilot it has."

John stares, jaw slack and mouth barely open, shellshocked. Dizziness washes over him, only furthering the surrealness of the moment.  

He's only been informed of this, of the fact that he's apparently not even wholly male, within the past hour, and now they're discussing killing it like they're talking about the weather and not a human life.

"But it... right now, it's healthy? Normal?" he croaks out.

Dr. Ames' thick black brows furrow over eyes that show the first traces of pity he's seen from the man since they were introduced,  or maybe it's just displeasure. "Its skeleton and heartbeat are normal. If it’s developing the organs a fetus should have at this stage, it won't be for much longer.” His voice grows firmer. “It won't live, Captain. If we wait for your body to reject it, it'll most likely kill you too. You’ll bleed to death, and we won’t be able to help you. I've seen it before, and it is a terrible way to die. Even were that not the case, even if we could by some miracle get the bleeding under control, the organ damage would be irreparable. A male body cannot supply a growing fetus with the nutrients it needs. It simply cannot. Your blood volume won’t increase. Your kidneys won’t handle that much waste. Your organs will shut down. Now is not the time to let emotion and sentimentality take over."

Smokey speaks up behind him, his voice gentle. “I’m telling you, son. I know it’s not an appealing choice. But there is no other choice if you want to live. Once it's been taken care of, we can get everything in there fixed up and it'll be like this never happened."

Taken care of.

"Okay," he whispers yet again, his dry lips barely moving around the word.

Smokey squeezes his shoulder. "It'll be okay, son. You'll be okay." 

Okay. That's the word that keeps getting thrown around back-and-forth. Not once, at any point since his arrival, has anything been okay.

It's all John can do to keep himself from falling apart in front of the nurses. The moment they leave the exam room, telling him to take as much time as he needs, he silently prays—to God, to the Virgin Mother, to every saint he can think of. There is no answer but the baby's impossible heartbeat within him. 

✦

John stands outside in the cool twilight and stares at the asphalt under his boots, counting pebbles, barely able to think, to breathe, like his brain can't choose a singular point of fixation to begin with and has instead chosen to focus on nothing at all in a dire situation in which it must focus on everything.

He's not sure why he's not crying. Shock, maybe. Inwardly, he feels like he has every other time he's wept, tension and ache building in his chest until it rivals the now-explained abdominal pain that's persisted through the entirety of the five-hour "check". His throat feels tight. But his eyes don't produce the tears themselves, like his body is frozen in time. The evening air is cold on his skin. He's hungry, but he was ordered not to drink or eat anything from the moment he stepped out of the medical wing. Maybe this is why he's been hungrier, too. It makes too much sense for him to dismiss it as a cruel joke, except maybe one from God. He feels hollow far beyond the emptiness of his stomach, despite the unwelcome thing growing inside of him. He wants to lie down, to sleep until this is all so distant it feels like the few remembered traces of a bad dream. Instead, he doesn't sleep at all.

His hunger and the weight of the news keep him lying awake long after the sound of turning pages and cots creaking under bodies adjusting themselves gives way to quiet. He wants so desperately to grab a knife right now, to reach into himself and scrape it out until he's clean again, uninhabited, unviolated. He'd be free from all of this then. He could cut out everything that shouldn't be there and get rid of it and live a normal life and never think about it again. That's more-or-less what they're promising him tomorrow, isn't it? To completely erase everything about this situation without a word to anyone, without destroying his body or taking him off of the front line for a prolonged period of time or forcing him to carry that thing. It should be a relief.

Instead he feels vaguely sick the longer he turns it over in his mind, retracing every detail he'd been offered. A long vertical incision slicing into his abdomen and opening him up from his navel down to the pubic bone, so that they can get in and... it's hard to think about. He despises the thing, and it's hard to think about so much as being complicit in disposing of it to save his own life. 

But that's the reality. It will die outside of his body, and quickly. To get this thing out of him and remove any trace of any of this having happened, they will have to bring a dead halt to the development of a human being. Kill it. 

It had a tiny but visibly human spine and skull on the radiograph. Bones, and a little body and brain for them to protect. It's the size of an apple, about. Just... in him, every second of every minute of every day, regardless of what he wants. Painfully, he finds he wants— needs— to know how they'll dispatch it. Will they let it take a first breath first? Can it breathe yet? Will it hurt when it's killed? 

Will it cry? What if it doesn't die quietly?

John bends over the edge of his cot just in time for his stomach to eject its minimal contents onto the floor.

Chapter Text

October 5, 1943 — Thorpe Abbotts Air Installation, East Anglia, England
21 weeks.

✦

John, despite his overwhelming fatigue of late, does not sleep in the receding window of time he has left to spend alone with the fetus before the scheduled hour in which it is to be separated from the body which presently keeps it alive. He lies awake on his back in the darkness and stares at the ceiling of the hut, turning every word the doctors said to him back and forth in his mind, trying to absorb them, trying to comprehend a world in which it is possible that John D. Brady is not a man, let alone one in which he is carrying a child. Moments pass in which he's sure that he has to be misremembering, that he misinterpreted the whole thing, and with them, a fleeting sort of delusional hope that this is all some sort of misunderstanding—and then, invariably, it all crashes back down in a span of minutes. This repeats a number of times.

A hermaphrodite. The doctors called him a hermaphrodite. Worse—the insidious, incongruously female parts of his body work, horribly so. A human being dwells within him without his permission, and has done so without his knowledge, without his permission, every minute of every day for the past four months. Every memory now appears in a new, grim light—all of the missions he flew pregnant, all of his chances to recognize that something was wrong much earlier. (Would it have mattered?)

They're going to open up his entire abdomen like a cadaver's in a few hours, and he could die, in a way that feels like much more of an immediate threat than incoming flak around a B-17. These could very well be his last few hours on earth, too.

(And would he deserve it, he wonders, for letting them kill an innocent life, guilty of no crime other than existing where he and Crosby planted it?)

John gets up to piss three times during the long stretch of time he spends awake in the darkness, each time with sudden urgency that interrupts his stream of consciousness, walking alone but not alone in the light of the streetlamps on his way to the latrines. It's a deeply unnerving feeling.

He's pregnant. He's not a man, and he's also pregnant. Four months so. The facts circulate in his brain with his blood, coming over and over with no clear end like waves crashing against the shore.

More than once, he lies completely motionless on his cot and holds his breath, chest growing still, and tries to see if he can feel anything moving within him, as though a single kick, a confirmation of existence, is the final piece that will make this real. Maybe it's not ready to move yet, or maybe the fetus, unaware that it is soon to die, sleeps peacefully like Christ in the manager, nestled safely within his body with no understanding of the idea that someone might wish it harm.

They told him there are undoubtedly things wrong with it, things that make killing it like a rabid animal the only option, but it doesn't feel that way right now. Wouldn't it have died already if that were the case?

And, at last, John cries.

In the absence of any listeners, or witnesses, or a single comforting hand, John cries, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs as he squints up at the dark ceiling. The sobbing overtakes his entire body until he can hardly surface to catch his breath; he presses his hand to his nose and mouth hard and sinks his fingernails into the cold soft flesh of his face to keep his sobs from waking any of the men around him. 

He cries until his lashes stick together, until the skin of his face is wet and cold, until his eyes sting and burn like they've been splashed with soap. He's out of breath and completely unable to draw in a breath through his newly congested nose to replace the air he's lost by the time his soundless sobs slack off and his breathing from parted lips starts to deepen, as his shoulders grow still. The grief isn't any weaker. His body is just tired. The child, listless within him, still sleeps, unaware of his agony, his grief.

Did the Virgin Mary feel anything like this, pregnant with a child that should have been impossible, faced with the specter of nine months of pregnancy whether she was ready or not? Did she feel as hopelessly alone as he does now?

Has anyone, ever?

John sniffs harshly and wipes the wet trails under his nose on the back of his wrist, shakily moving his legs over the side of his rack until his bare feet touch the cold cement floor.

In the darkness, he slowly lowers himself at the edge of his bed to kneel uncomfortably on the hard floor, perhaps moving a little more gingerly than he has over the past four months, before he knew of the thing's presence—before he knew he was piloting a pregnant body, before he knew of his own precarious state. John clasps shaking hands in front of his cold wet face and whispers so faintly it's inaudible from the racks that bracket his own on either side, unscripted in a way so few prayers have been throughout his life:

Please, Father, please help me. I'm so sorry. I'm repenting with all of my soul, Father. Please forgive me my sins. I come to you begging for your mercy and forgiveness. I slept with a married man. I knew it was wrong. I was selfish. I've killed. I'm an an adulterer, but the... the baby didn't... Please, don't have this happen. Please forgive me. Please have mercy on me. 

Tears stream down his cheeks anew. John draws in a wavering breath around another long soundless sob he suppresses by pressing his mouth to his forearm until he can get it under control. 

I need you to tell me what to do. Please. Please help me. I don't know how to be pregnant, or have a baby, or what I'm supposed to do, or why this is happening to me, or what I'm supposed to tell Harry. I just... I just don't understand why this is happening to me, Father. I'm not the only guy to ever... 

He shuts his eyes tightly, the only sound his shaky, erratic inhalations as he tries to catch his breath around his own muted weeping. He carries on.

I don't want to be pregnant. I don't want to have a baby. I don't want to die, Father. And I don't want the baby to die, because it didn't do anything to me or to anyone, it's just—

John sniffles and wipes at his face with both hands.

It's just a baby. It's just an innocent baby, and I don't understand why you let it— Why did you put it here? In me? Why not someone else? Why not a woman? Why not someone who wants it?

There's no answer. The half-finished life still rests motionless within him. John presses his aching forehead into the edge of his mattress and allows his tears to seep into the sheets as his hands slowly unfold.

✦

0500 comes too early. Brady has only just returned to bed, lying still as his body, and the child's with it, slowly warms again beneath the sheets after too long exposed to the October night chill. His knees freshly ache from the press of the ground, and he can still feel the impressions the hard cold floor left on them; his ankles haven't even shed the passing soreness that came with how long they were bent in genuflection. His eyes are raw at their edges; the space under his nose and just above his upper lip is wet and cold and chapped from crying. 

John glances at his watch in the darkness, and there it is, illuminated in what of the diffuse glow of the streetlamps outside manages to seep into the hut: 04:38, looming over him like a grim specter. His heart sinks. They're expecting him to report for surgery to execute the thing and scrape its remains from him, and to purge his body of its unwelcome femininity afterwards, to exonerate him of the defects that weren't caught at birth, in 22 minutes. 22 minutes until they fix him—22 minutes until they kill it to do so. His child has 22 minutes left in its existence on earth.

His heart beats faster. He feels sick again, but with adrenaline, not the shadowy illness of pregnancy. John shakily raises himself to his feet, like a new foal standing for the first time, and starts to go about getting dressed as silently as he can, grateful that it's still dark, so that he doesn't have to look at his own midsection, the faint puffiness to it, and think about the reason for the change, the thing now dwelling within him: the second beating heart, the spine, the tiny skull shoehorned among his innermost organs, carried with him everywhere he goes until they carve it out of him, even in skies full of flak—little to his knowledge at the time.

It's strange. He simultaneously dresses himself for the abortion like he would any other day, as though he's just going down to the mess hall, and with the careful precision of an embalmer dressing a body for a wake. He's aware of how thirsty he is, and hungry, but he isn't tired like he knows he should be after a full night spent awake—he's more alert now than he has been in months, hands shaking with the excess of adrenaline in his blood as he starts attempting to do up the button at his throat.

He starts buttoning his shirt from the top button this time, not the bottom as usual, pausing for a moment at the fifth one down, just under his sternum, before he slides it into its hole and proceeds to the rest of them, clumsily closing those that remain over the small swell of the child's presence as though pulling a shroud over the coffin his body is to become.

John still puts on a tie and tucks in his shirt and fastens his shirtstays like he does every other day, even though that pulls his shirt down against the faint thickness to his waist and makes it that much more evident for the last time before he is to be emptied of all the unwelcome things within him. He sucks in a little to close the button at the front of his pants and wonders as he relaxes his abdomen if the child can feel it—the pressure as his abdominal muscles push inward against it, the unyielding stiffness of the waistband when they relax. The environment outside that has no intention of changing for it, adapting for it, welcoming it, the way it's crammed himself into this new place, into clothes for someone never meant to be pregnant, into the life of someone who doesn't want a child, who can't have a child right now, in the middle of the war. He wonders why God chose now.

John realizes he's been dressed, and standing still, for several minutes. He slicks back his long bangs like he does every morning and takes too long doing it—why he's styling his hair for surgery, he doesn't know and has no interest in examining. He inspects the front of his uniform shirt for lint. He rearranges his hair. There is nothing else he can do to occupy his time. It's time to go. He has to leave now.

John swallows. Why does he feel like he's the one walking to the gallows?

This will make it all better, he reminds himself in a feeble attempt to shore up his own resolve. You heard them. You have to. You have to. This is to save your life. You'll be a real man after this. A whole man. They'll fix you. You'll be a man again. And nobody will be able to question it. They'll let you keep flying. You'll keep fighting in this war.

John reaches for the doorknob only to pauses before his hand touches the cold metal, fingers hovering over it. He turns his head to look one last time in the direction of Harry's cot, where the father of the baby sleeps soundly, unaware—surely if the doctors had found anything urgent the previous day, after all, John would have told him posthaste, right? 

Instead he will have had a child and lost a child without ever knowing it.

Unconsciously, his other hand comes to rest over his midsection, as though to shield it—and a moment later John suddenly becomes aware of its presence and jerks it back as though burned—as though he's touched the hot burner of a stove and not the body he inhabits. His throat feels tight. There's a fleeting urge to wake him as he stands there, contemplating. To say goodbye, before they... 

Will they bury it? It's four months old. Surely that's old enough, complex enough, to warrant a funeral, right?

Will he get to see it before they put it in the ground? Will he get to see what he—they—made after they kill it? Before he can stop it, the vision appears in his mind's eye with terrible clarity: him beholding its lifeless body, tiny and still, only to find that nothing was wrong with it—the doctors handing him their dead four-month-old unborn child, and him returning to flying days later, expected by everyone around him to act as though nothing has happened from the moment he is released from the hospital, and then facing the rest of his life with the weight of a pointless killing, the destruction of a child, on his shoulders.

How could he possibly answer for that at the end of his life, when it comes time to explain to God? How could he live, day in and day out, until that point?

He knows with sobering certainty that he would be incapable of forgiving himself. The half-finished pregnancy and half-finished child he brutally ended will undoubtedly follow him for the rest of his life. And what right would he have, to have children later, having killed the first one? —not that he can, being (apparently) a hermaphrodite. If he correctly understood the flurry of information the doctors sent crashing down on him without stopping to explain much of anything yesterday, has the equipment, non-functional. 

He's sterile, both infertile and fertile at the same time, his body a contradiction in its own terms. He can bear a child. He cannot create one like any other red-blooded man.

It occurs to John, for the first time, that the small creature within him is his first and only child. There will be no more offspring from the Bradys' eldest child.

—and against all odds, right now, its heart beats within him, keeping the rhythm God decided the bodies he crafted in His divine image should. It could be defective in the future, or it could kill him. But the doctors don't know that, do they? They're confident, bordering on arrogant. But do they have any information other than proof that the baby is fine? They could kill the only child he will ever be able to have based on theory and projection and hand him a perfect little body cut down before it could finish growing.

Not that he wants a baby, or can raise one. He doesn't and unequivocally can't. He has to go back to serving. To flying. There's a war on, and his country needs him. There is no space in John Brady's life for a baby, and the idea of fatherhood is unthinkable. But—a tiny desperate voice in the back of his head insists—maybe he could—maybe he could see it before the war ends. He could give it to some Catholic orphanage, turn it over to the care of nuns, and they could place it, in a real family with a mother and father who have desperately yearned for a child to love. He could see it at least once before he crosses the Atlantic for the last time, just to confirm that it's okay, that it's going to be okay. Then he'd know, and he could rest easy for the rest of his life, knowing he did what was difficult but right. 

John realizes his eyes are welling with tears again. He's still staring at the dark space where he knows Harry Crosby's sleeping body is. 

He glances down at his watch. 

04:56. 

He has to go now, or he'll be late, if he isn't, already. He probably is, and he doesn't doubt they won't be happy with him. John swallows hard and turns away from the baby's father, opening the door at last and slipping out into the dark foggy English morning.

There's dew on the grass bordering the edges of the path leading to the medical unit on the walk over, not the frost he expected to see as his hair stood on end in the cold air that surrounded him in his genuflection, and when he enters the medical hut, the unit is quiet but unmistakably alive even at such an early hour. A couple of nurses stand up front chatting to each other as they wait for him, and Smokey stands there waiting too, a nonparticipant in the conversation, wearing an unreadable expression. Dr. Ames is nowhere to be seen—already back in the operating room?

"Morning, Captain," Smokey drawls. "Florence will take you back into preop and we'll prep you. You're a bit late so we're running on a tight timeline." He presses his lips together, watching him with something like grim sympathy. Nervousness flares in the pit of John's empty stomach.

"I..." Best not to have the conversation out here in the open. "Okay."

Smokey parts from the nurses. It suddenly occurs to John as he watches the back of his white coat that we'll means the nurses. Smokey is walking in the direction of the OR. His next chance to speak to him, if not now, will be when he's lying supine on the operating table, shaved down and ready for surgery, in the few moments before the anaesthesia kicks in. And then it will undoubtedly be too late, and there's a part of him that isn't so sure they wouldn't just... knock him out if he started arguing if they already had him in that position, based on how yesterday's conversation went. Shit.

"Wait, Doc—wait. I need to talk to you now. Before..." John cants his head toward the closed door of the preoperative suite. His heart pounds. He swallows dryly. "Alone."

✦

John's heart continues to beat so fast and hard under his uniform shirt once he sits on the edge of the exam table in the private room with his shoes still on that it makes him nauseous. Smokey watches him expectantly, brows raised, standing in front of the closed door connecting the medical hut's single exam room to the hallway on the other side of the wall like he expects to leave a moment later, not like he plans on having the full conversation John knows he's about to bring down upon them.

"I... I..." When he finally manages to verbalize the amorphous tangle of feelings that's been festering within him since the news was first delivered, his voice is quieter than he thought it would be, almost a whisper. He finds, despite all of the times he's gone up into the sky to get shot at, that he lacks the courage to disagree with the doctor any louder. "I can't do it, Doctor. I'm sorry. I just... I can't abort it. I'm not going to."

A few seconds pass in silence, Smokey's face perfectly frozen, like he's not comprehending. And why would he? Who would want to go through this, or carry it to term, or bring an unwanted child into the world, or be what must be the world's only pregnant man in full sight of the world? Who wouldn't want a single surgery to make everything go back to how it was? John certainly wants to. What hermaphrodite would decline a free surgery to fix that, to be like everyone else?

It is, in every proverbial sense of the word, a freefall. What will happen to him? What happens to a man who manages to get pregnant in the service? Discharge, undoubtedly. Jail? An insane asylum? It's a bad idea. A terrible idea, and one that might kill him—but so, after all, might the war.

But he knows what will happen if he kills it. And that is enough.

"John..." Smokey starts. "You need to think about this rationally. This is a surgery to save your life. This fetus isn't viable. It won't live. We would just perform the same operation in five months to remove its body if you risked your life and got yourself discharged to try and carry it. Now, Dr. Ames stayed here overnight to be ready for surgery at 0500 on the dot. He's a busy man with a lot of patients back in Norwich. We need to start now. "

John clenches his jaw to keep his lower lip from trembling. It does anyway when he opens his mouth a moment later. "I said no. If I— If I die, I die, Doctor. I could die every time I go up there, too."

The flight surgeon's patience fails him. His voice raises in its harshness, but not in volume, the conversation remaining firmly within the four walls they've ensconced it in. "You're being—insane. This is madness. Captain Brady, you are proposing an experiment that will cost you your life at a time when your country needs every pilot it has, and it is an incredibly selfish decision. You are only thinking of yourself. What of your parents? Your siblings? Are you going to force them to bury you when you spontaneously abort and bleed to death? We've lost so many pilots to things that weren't preventable. This is."

"I'll... I'll..."

"You just stay there," Smokey says with uncharacteristic sharpness to his normally genteel drawl. John swallows against the lump in his throat. "I'm going to go get Dr. Ames to talk some sense into you, seeing as I seem to have failed."

Smokey turns on his heel. The door shuts. John lets out a tense exhalation at last in the very small window of time he has to do so.

✦

Dr. Ames' bare forearms are still damp and flushed beneath his rolled-up sleeves with the agitation of a now-undone surgical scrub when he strides into the exam room with a disapproving look that seems to furrow every line on his face at once.

"Captain Brady. Smokey tells me you came in this morning saying you 'can't' have surgery today, is that correct?"

"I won't."

"Then allow me to tell you you are making the choices of a madman. It is completely out of the question. This is a lifesaving operation. You're telling us you'd rather choose to die. Captain, can't isn't a luxury you have right now. You're not understanding the precariousness of your situation." 

"It's a four-month-old—"

"Fetus. Captain Brady, it is a fetus, and then it will be another drain on the state," he snaps. "You are in no position to carry it to term, and there is absolutely no reason to. It will kill you. God will forgive you in however many prayers around the rosary it takes for you to continue to fight in a just war instead of adding another mouth for Britain to feed."

John gapes. The sudden vitriol to the Oxbridge accent as the stiff upper lip falls away stings like the lash of a whip, momentarily leaving him wordless.

"It's... You can't just make me... You can't force me to do this. This is against the law," he stammers. "You said it yourself. Termination is against the law. You'll get your, your license revoked for killing a baby, and—"

"Now you just calm down, John," Smokey intones at Dr. Ames' side. "You're not thinking rationally."

"I'm being perfectly rational!" The harshness of his own cry startles him. "I'm not being irrational! You don't have any proof that anything's wrong with it. You only have proof that it's fine. I'm halfway through the pregnancy, and it has a... a normal heartbeat, and a normal skeleton, and it's growing like it should, and you want me to just— kill it based on a hunch. Do you hear yourselves?"

"Captain, it will not stay fine. It will not stay fine." Ames scoffs, watching him with narrowed eyes, every syllable making it clear that he finds the very idea he enumerates laughable. "Surely you don't think you'll just... carry it to term and deliver a normal, ordinary child like a woman would. At best, Brady, you will deliver a dead, deformed child. Why spend another five months like this just to bury it? Or, worse yet, meet it, watch it suffer horribly, and bury it a day later. Even if it lived, the child would undoubtedly be an invalid. Is that worth your life? You really want to die to add one more crippled, mentally deficient child born out of wedlock to the system?"

John stares, stunned, scanning the man's true face as the veneer of the plump, benevolent family GP is pulled back all at once like a horrible mask. "It would... I'm an American citizen. The baby would be American. It would be sent to America," he stammers out.

Dr. Ames' bushy black brows raise until his forehead creases thrice between them and his hairline. "And you think the American system will have a more benevolent view of this fictional child? A hermaphrodite's bastard child, no doubt some sort of... imbecile? Probably horribly deformed? You need to be realistic right now, man. You're living in a fantasy, Captain Brady, and the time for that is over. We're already running behind schedule because of this—silly, sentimental outburst of yours. It's time to operate and get this unnatural affair done with."

"So I kill it? Just because it's a—a—some kind of freak, or an imbecile, I kill it?" He feels like he's frantically pedaling to keep his head above water.

"Who exactly would want to adopt that child in your pretend scenario, Captain? What parent is going to look past all of the healthy, ordinary babies left without parents by this war, by no fault of their own, and choose to raise somebody's bastard when the child will just end up locked away in a lunatic asylum anyway? And if you dump the baby here, do you have any idea of how many fatherless little Bradys and Murphys and O'Briens these Catholic orphanages you're speaking of already have to feed? How many England has to feed?"

John watches, wide-eyed, uncomprehending. His body feels too cold. Smokey seems less than thrilled with that last comment, turning his eyes away from Dr. Ames to look at his charge in the wake of the unanticipated, and seemingly unplanned, cap to the outburst.

"John," he says, softly, tone shifting in sudden contrast to Dr. Ames' harshness. Perhaps turning the conversation over to his colleague has given him a chance to calm down. "I know this is a terrible choice to have to make. But you need to choose the humane option. For yourself, and for the baby. I wouldn't have said it like that, but Dr. Ames raises some good points and I think you know that. It's pointless to discuss whether or not the baby will live, because it won't. You won't. But if it did live, it would have severe, profound defects. It would never live a normal life."

Smokey frowns at him.

"I know you're picturing an ordinary child, the kind every mother wants to have, and that just isn't what we're discussing here. It never was. At the very least, malnourishment would leave it mentally deficient. Its body won't form correctly. The male body lacks the... evolutionary blueprint needed to guide it through forming the limbs it needs. The organs it needs. ...Listen, John. We're all God-fearing men here. I would never attend such a thing if it wasn't to save a man's life. But I know God would want you to have mercy on that child, John. You need to think of more than your own feelings right now. —Now, the operating room is ready, and Dr. Ames stayed overnight to start prepping at 0400 this morning. We can't wait any longer. This surgery will save your life. Everything will be just like it was before as soon as you've recovered."

His eyes burn with welling tears. It's like he's speaking to them through soundproof glass.

"It won't be," John chokes out. "It won't be. That's what you don't understand. I'll have—I'll have killed it because it might be different. And you'll have killed a baby. A perfectly normal four-month-old baby—"

"Fetus, John. We are running in circles," Smokey says, his voice finally losing the last of its sympathy as a much firmer tone of impatience takes over again. "There are other procedures scheduled today, and Dr. Ames is a busy man. There are women having their babies without him attending the delivery right now because he has taken the time to come perform this operation on you when most physicians would let you die. It's time, son. Whether you like it or not, no matter your feelings, this has to be done."

John's heart races as he curls his hands into damp fists beside his thighs on the exam table. The tears spill over. "I won't let you do it. I'm not going to do it. I won't let you kill it. It's—legally, it's my child until I give it away. Not yours. It's not yours to kill. You can't operate on me without permission. It's my body!"

"You're property of the United States Army, Brady! You gave that up!"

"Not if I'm discharged!"

Dr. Ames' voice cuts in; he stares him in the eye and John turns his head away from Smokey to stare right back, heart pounding in his ears, tears trailing unattended down his cheeks.

"Captain Brady, you are making a profoundly selfish, silly decision in the middle of a war. So be it. I can only hope that it won't cost you your life."

✦

Medical discharge.

His medical discharge.

Such was the worst case scenario two days ago, and for the duration of his illness up until it became clear that wasn't what it was, something he didn't even allow himself to consider—it was mild, he told himself. Intermittent. It wasn't affecting him in the air. There's a part of him that wants to insist that it still doesn't—throwing up was an isolated incident, and he still piloted the plane just fine.

Eventually, he's sure, he'll be too big to fly. Too pregnant. Might not even be able to cram his deformed body into the fucking pilot's seat without his belly pushing into the yoke—a thought that sends a visible shudder through him the moment it occurs—but right now he fits into his uniform. Nobody is able to tell. It's not—encumbering him in any way. And there are fat pilots. He hasn't personally known any, but he's sure there have to be. There are a couple of men who are just big guys around here. He could pass off as one of them for a few more months. Wear baggy clothing. Hide the child, and his condition, under the leather shroud of a larger A2 than the one he's been wearing since he joined up. People would have no reason to think it was anything other than letting himself go. He has been eating a lot more than usual, on the days he's not unable to eat at all.

But maybe it's not about that, a small, unwelcome voice in the back of his head reminds him. Women aren't permitted to serve. And, as of yesterday, he has learned that the body he thought he knew, that he thought to be unequivocally a male one at the peak of its virility, instead occupies some freak gray area that straddles woman and man. Who knows what that means, legally speaking? The law hasn't exactly had to account for many people like him. And hermaphroditism is a genetic disorder, a deformity. Plenty of people have been ruled out of service for defects much milder than a second reproductive system. Maybe they wouldn't let him serve without surgery to remove it all even if he weren't pregnant.

John blinks back tears as he sits alone across from Chick's empty desk and continues to wait.

At least it's not a blue discharge, there and by the grace of God.

But it is a discharge. After years of training, the war unended, it is a discharge.

His drying eyes trace the rhythmic twitches of the second hand on the clock mounted behind Chick's empty chair as the rest of him burns with pre-emptive shame. The doctors are no doubt explaining it to Colonel Harding right now, this very moment. Telling him all of it, all of the private things he would rather take with him to the grave, dissecting his mind and life and body with clinical detachment as his commanding officer stands and watches like a medical student at an autopsy: he got drunk, he let another man fuck him up the ass. He's a freak of nature, with a fully functioning uterus (a hard thought to even bear), less than a man, an undesirable who slipped through the cracks during the entrance physical. He's pregnant, out of wedlock no less.

John D. Brady is such a deviant that he somehow found a way to wash out of his military service by being the first man in human history to get pregnant, and then, utterly irrational, he has declined a chance at normalcy, his chance to continue serving his country and performing his duties, because he wants to carry out the pregnancy that forms a defective baby nobody will want and stay a hermaphrodite, as a consequence of. Will they even let him into the showers after this meeting? Is he male enough to share the showers with these real men, whose company he thought he shared until yesterday? He still feels like one of them. Is it indecent if none of the female parts of him are externally visible?

John packs his pipe again with trembling hands. Little bits of loose tobacco flutter down onto the floor at his feet, sprinkling over the leather of his shoes like some sort of ground spice. The pipe has seldom left his mouth for more than a few minutes since the appointment ended; it's not enough, but it's better than nothing.

Though he's finally had a chance to get some tobacco into his system, he still hasn't eaten breakfast, or seen Harry—once the doctors gave up on him, it was immediately from the medical wing to Chick's office; Chick, who has other things to do. It felt like the situation was missing a couple of armed M.P.s to escort him here, lest he run.

John smokes for a few more minutes, just long enough for the soothing rush of the nicotine to begin creeping over him anew, before the ever-familiar nausea suddenly and violently overtakes it. For what isn't the first time today, he finds himself unsure of whether it's nerves or the baby or both.

Either way, by the time he hears the door to Chick's office open behind him, he's on his knees on the hard floor, bent over the little wastebin beside Chick's desk and vomiting nothing but small dredges of stomach acid onto the crumpled up papers inside.

Of course.

"Captain Brady," Chick says over the sound of his dry heaving.

Not for much longer, Brady thinks from the floor.

He immediately rises to stand at attention in the gap between heaves, an unconscious bodily reflex at this point—only to quickly learn that it is one that no longer suits his body in its current state. John only makes it about halfway to a standing position before he folds over the wastebin again and hurls another pitiful mouthful of foamy chyme into the existing mess instead.

"At ease, please. Jesus." 

"Sorry," he coughs out, sniffing between words. The nausea hasn't receded at all. "I haven't been..." Feeling well. No shit.

Chick sits down with a soft creak of the chair; John can feel his eyes on him even as he remains bent over and staring at the mess that his stomach just expelled atop the wastepaper. After a few more seconds without another retch, he shakily wipes wet acid from corners of his mouth with the back of his wrist and straightens up, cheeks and ears burning as he sits down in the chair at the center of his commander's skeptical stare.

He can smell the vomit he just left in the wastebin from where he sits, and he's sure Chick can, too. They're going to have this conversation in a room that reeks of his own vomit. It is the most humiliating, degrading moment in John Brady's life, and they've barely said anything to each other yet.

Chick, who has put a fragrant cigar in his mouth since John was last able to stand upright and look at him (thank God) but has not yet lit it, leans back in his chair with another creak and interlaces his fingers, regarding him critically in a silent moment that seems to stretch on forever.

"Quite a situation you've managed to get yourself into here, Brady," he says at last. John's cheeks grow hotter. His mouth is still sour. "Can't say this is something my military career prepared me for. Now, the doctors tell me they offered you a nice, clean way out of this whole entire mess—a way out of a blue ticket, a way to keep flying and do your duty, a chance to be a real man and nothing but a man. And you said no, even though they warned you you'd be discharged."

Chick opens the top drawer of his desk and withdraws a matchbook, pausing to split one from the row of matches inside and strike it on the strip on the back of the cardboard. He holds it to the end of the bulky cigar in his mouth until the end begins to glow, then shakes it out. 

"Can you explain that to me? You know how urgent our situation is right now. How we need every pilot we can get. And as I'm told, you're washing out to have a baby that you, as the doctors have told me, don't want."

"I." John coughs as another swallow brings some of the residual acid in his mouth to sting the back of his throat. "I just..." Nothing he says will be adequate, so he settles on the truth. "It's four months old, Sir. As far as they know, it's healthy. It has a heartbeat. I can't kill it. With all due respect, Sir, I... I don't think I'd be able to go the rest of my life knowing that I killed an innocent child. I wouldn't be able to live with myself."

"'Healthy.' The doctors told me they explained to you in no uncertain terms that that's not likely to stay the case. That it won't survive, and if it did, it'd be an invalid. Mentally deficient, probably crippled. And you argued with them and wouldn't listen. That's no life for a child, John. They also said they told you that this would cost you your life and you still had the idea to say no."

John pauses. "Permission to speak freely, Sir?"

"Granted." Chick seems to say it because he's morbidly curious to see what he might say next more than anything else. It's not the first time John's felt like a zoo animal since his life came to a crashing halt yesterday.

"They've never... dealt with somebody like me before. I don't think anyone has. They're making guesses. They want me to kill it based on their best guess."

"Educated guesses. They have more of a frame of reference than you do. They're doctors. You're a pilot." Harding watches him in silence for a moment, then sighs gray smoke, straightening up. "Well. As I'm sure you're aware, this will be your discharge. The end of your time in the Army Air Force. And there's nothing I can do to protect you from getting a blue slip if you're walking around pregnant, considering that there's no two ways about how that happened."

"It was..." John mumbles. "I was drunk. Really drunk. I never would have..." He silently braces himself, closing his eyes for a moment to steel his conscience against the coming blow. "He... forced himself on me."

Chick raises his brows. "And are you willing to... put forth the name of the man who did this for a discharge board? Or do they just take your word for it?"

"I um... I don't remember. I was really wasted." It's an obvious lie, one he knows Chick won't believe before it even comes out of his mouth.

The entire situation is hopeless.

"Well, then, that won't help you, will it? At best, you might be able to escape a courts martial. We'll try." Beat. "I wouldn't even do that normally, Brady. It's an officer's responsibility to act like one. But you're a damn good pilot, and damn good pilots, if you haven't noticed, are dying left and right. I look the other way because we need every man we can get, and I frankly don't care about a man's sexual proclivities. But when queers like you are allowed in the Army, it's with the goddamn understanding that they'll be discreet about it."

John swallows, briefly averting eye contact. There's a knee-jerk instinct to deny when he hears that word, queer—he's not a homosexual. It's just Harry Crosby, and nobody else. But arguing won't help him in the slightest. Except—

If there was ever a chance to make his case, it would be now, in this exact moment, when Chick has just praised his abilities as a pilot and acknowledged the operational need squeezing them tighter and tighter with every mission. But is it worth the risks, when the answer is almost certainly no?, the lack of confidence that's already firmly taken root in his mind over the past twenty-four hours demands. Humiliating himself further, starting an argument?

John draws in another steeling breath. He tries anyway, voice low.

"I'm sorry, Sir. I don't want this. I don't want to be pregnant. I'm a man. Something's wrong with me, something happened when my mother was pregnant, but—I'm a man. And I—" He presses his lips together, wets the bottom one with a flick of his tongue. His voice softens as he attempts to make his case in earnest. "With all due respect, Sir, I've flown almost this entire time in—in my condition. I was a damn good pilot like this. I can still fly for a month or two. People will just—think I gained weight. It hasn't affected me in the air. It hasn't limited my ability to pilot, or perform my duties. I'm not... infirm, yet." He swallows dryly. "Please, Sir. Let me fly. Just for a few more months. Nobody would ever guess that I'm..." It's hard to will the word out. "...Pregnant."

Chick just stares at him, frowning around his cigar, eyes narrowing into an incredulous squint. A sinking dread overtakes him, or maybe it's just reality finally setting in. He already wishes he could recant everything he just said—he wishes he could hide now that Harding's response looms. This was a bad idea.

"Captain Brady, are you out of your mind?"

"No, Sir." He presses his lips together, eyes flitting down to momentarily fixate on the sharp lines of his knees where they draw the olive fabric of his trousers tight. "...I'm sorry, Sir."

Chick puffs on his cigar, an edge of annoyance, and perhaps indignance, at last creeping into his tone. "Then why come into my office, pregnant, and ask that?"

John wills himself not to cry, but everything makes him cry now, it would seem, and it is a strong urge to overcome. His throat tightens. His eyes well with unshed tears, and, to his further humiliation, their presence makes it to his voice. 

"I don't... I don't know, Sir."

I'm only further reinforcing the notion that having... all of this... must make me more emotional than a man with nothing but what he should have. Only showing him why I shouldn't be allowed to fly. Just proving his point.

"Then shut it, will you? This is enough of a problem as it is. I've already agreed to help you out of a courts martial, and that's a hell of a lot more than most of the men around here would have done."

John nods numbly, careful not to tip his head too far downwards lest the tears he's managed thus far to tenuously hold at bay spill over in front of his CO. "Thank you."

What's going to happen to me? he thinks but knows better than to ask.

Chick regards him, frowning in thought, this time, as opposed to obvious displeasure. His tone is gentler now that John has shut up as requested. "We'll see what the doctor Smokey brought in says about flying in your condition until your discharge is finalized—this week and next only. We'll get the paperwork in process today and start assembling the discharge board."

His heart shatters in his chest like a thin sheet of ice under the full weight of someone's boot.

"Right," he breathes. Two weeks is better than nothing. It comes as something of a shock considering how Chick reacted when he suggested flying on his own terms. He should be grateful, not overcome with grief, but as of yesterday, should be means nothing in the grander scheme of how John Brady's life is to pan out.

Two weeks. That's multiple missions. Maybe one of the times I go up there the flak will kill me. I wouldn't have to worry about this, then, he thinks impulsively, only to bring an overwhelming surge of guilt for even humoring such a thing down on himself a second later.

Chick presses his lips together and gives him one last look that falls somewhere between annoyed and disbelieving and sympathetic. 

"Good luck, Captain. The board will be in touch. Bucky will tell you more when they're ready. One hell of a situation you're in here."

"Thank you, Sir," John whispers, feeling more hollow than he ever has in his life.

✦

Harry is walking down the path that connects the mess hall to the road that runs through the center of the installation when John finds him. Every stride on his approach plunges him into a deeper awareness that everything he felt in the exam room, in his rack last night, in preop, in Chick's office, doesn't hold a candle to the tsunami of feeling that overtakes him now, when he's faced with actually telling the baby's father, the one person on God's green earth he's more afraid to lose than anyone else. It would just figure, losing him from this and not flak. Losing him not because of death but because Harry no longer wants him. It's a cruel end, but maybe it was inevitable anyways, Crosby already being married at the time they met.

Principal among his present storm of emotion: fear. Fear of losing someone he loves more, and differently, than he has loved any of the handful of girls that had preceded Harry Crosby in the cast of characters populating John Brady's heretofore perfectly ordinary life.

Fear of losing his best friend. One of his only friends.

Please, God, he thinks as he walks, every bit as desperate as he was last night. Please don't take him from me. Not now. I know he's married, but please, please don't take him from me. I can't do this without him. I can't do any of this without him. You made us meet. You put us in the same unit, on the same plane, pilot and navigator. Please don't take him away from me now. If you want me to carry this baby, please don't take him away.

John prepares himself, willing his voice to sound like a casual greeting. "Harry!"

Crosby turns his head the moment he hears his name, grinning wide and toothy just at the sight of him. Instead of any of the usual warmth his wonderful, perfectly white smile and the accompanying twinkle to his big brown eyes usually brings on, John's chest feels cold. His stomach turns. Is this the last time he smiles at me like that, before he goes back to Jean? Before this all comes crashing down?

He doesn't return the smile. He keeps his voice quiet. "Harry, we need to... talk about something. Off-base."

Crosby's face falls. His thick dark brows furrow in concern that makes it all the way to his eyes, which suddenly look much older than his years, as they sometimes do. His voice, too, softens.

"John, is everything okay?"

Nothing will ever be okay again.

"I... no. Not really. But we have to talk about it alone."

"Okay. Alright."

✦

It's a five-minute walk in silence to the front gates of the installation, which the two of them step around on foot. From there, the English road is more imperfect, the asphalt they walk on crumbling at its edges to bleed into the narrow dirt shoulder on either side. Occasionally Harry glances over at him, obviously worried, but he doesn't say anything until they round a blind turn and John at last stops, a few trees and an empty hayfield at his back behind the separator of the impossibly old, mossy stone wall running alongside the road.

They are as alone as they could possibly be, nary a single automotive passing by, not even cows present to hear them, and it still doesn't feel alone enough. John still doesn't feel ready to tell him, but he has to.

He takes in a wavering breath, heart beating as fast as a rabbit's. There's no way he'll even believe this. We won't even be able to have the conversation because he won't believe me. No sane person would believe this. I still can't believe this.

He wants to turn tail and run. He wants to run from this situation like he's never wanted to get out of anything in his life, skies full of flak included.

"Harry—" he starts. "Know that I would... never, ever joke about something like this. And I'm not crazy. My brain's all here. You know that." John swallows. Harry watches his face, clearly not comprehending where he's going with this yet, brows lowered in deep concern. John takes in another deep breath, his chest achingly tight. "When we... flew Hanau, I threw up again. In the cockpit this time. And I've been bloated lately. Constantly. And you know I've been... sick. For a few months. So once all of the surgeries were done, I... went to the flight doc. They did some x-rays because they thought I had a bowel obstruction, and then... they went and got a specialist from Norwich. An hour away."

Norwich, John watches Harry's full, shapely lips silently imitate, still not understanding. Why would he? Who in their right mind would ever come to such a painful, impossible conclusion as a pregnant man?

"They retook the x-rays and brought in better tools to listen to my stomach." His heart beats so hard and so fast he feels sick all over again. "And they... They told me I'm a... a..." John shuts his eyes tightly for a few seconds. It's still so painful, so difficult to say, a fresh hemorrhaging wound discordant with everything he ever thought he knew about himself. Part of him still insists, every time he hears the word, 'That can't apply to me.' But it does. That's what he is. It is the truth, and the medical term, and he has no choice but to self-refer with it to communicate the situation. "...hermaphrodite. A real one. I have..." He gestures, very vaguely, in the cool air in front of his torso. "All of it, except... Everything was inside, so when I was born nobody ever noticed or fixed—..." 

Tears well in his eyes, overtaking him with a sudden, sweeping resurgence of the strong emotion that preceded this conversation. His throat grows tight. His voice breaks as soon as he speaks again, thick with the effort of holding his sobs at bay. He's so tired of crying.

Harry looks horrified, but he has to continue now. All of his carefully planned lead-in, every way he'd thought he would introduce the situation as plausibly and as gently as possible, collapses like a house of cards in a strong wind.

"Harry, the doctor said I've been sick because I'm pregnant. I've been pregnant for four months. There was a, a connection between—there was enough of a gap for stuff to get through, and I was bleeding back when I got here for female reasons the entire time, not gastroenteritis, and now I have to have this baby, and—" Again, he loses his composure. With it—what little control hasn't already been yanked from his hands. Not even his emotions, now, can be kept in check. John lets out a choked sob as Harry watches him, speechless, mouth ajar. The remaining beats of the situation come out in a rushed, jumbled pile Harry is left to make sense of. "I'm going to be blue ticketed, and sent home, and there's nothing I can do, and it doesn't even sound real—who does this even fucking happen to? What are the chances I'd be the one fucking guy to get—knocked up—but it's real, and I can't—"

John lets out another pitiful sob. Harry speaks up at last, slowly and quietly, like he is individually picking each word in order.

"What do you... What do you mean? They have to have taken some kind of diagnostics, did they actually confirm that it's... That that's the... John, men can't... The doctor would have noticed something when you were born. This isn't possible."

"X-rays. They took x-rays two times and listened and told me they could hear its heartbeat. They showed me. I'm not insane, I'm not imagining anything. You know I've been sick. You know. It had a spine, Croz. It already had a spine and a skull and—..."

Harry cautiously lifts a hand and gently rests it on his upper arm. "Okay. It... if they're right... It's... It's four months? You're—they're sure it's only four months? They have to be able to do something about— There has to be someone who can help you.  We're so close to Norwich. To London."

"What do you mean?" John stills, sniffing. His voice lowers with the creeping dread that washes over him in degrees as Crosby's meaning sinks in. "Croz... what do you mean?"

Harry's eyes widen. His brows furrow again.

"John... what do you mean, what do I mean? You're not thinking of... If these people are right about this you can't possibly be thinking of—keeping it. This has to be—ludicrously dangerous to you, and there's a war on, and we're two men. They wouldn't let us keep it. We wouldn't be able to raise it. If you even lived. John, this has to be dangerous. I mean, what did the doctors say, didn't they—I can't imagine they didn't tell you the same thing, right? Right?"

They did.

John hesitates, mouth ajar, debating whether to share the full extent of what he was told, straddling the line between giving Harry apparent ammunition and giving him a full picture of the situation, of the truth —it is his baby, as well. He has a certain right to know. And... he loves Harry. Harry loves him. This affects him, deeply.

He's sure his moment of silence already says everything Harry needs to know, anyway, but he still puts words to it.

"They... They wanted me to kill it this morning," he starts, mouth dry, silently bracing himself against what he can only imagine to be a sudden explosion of Harry's disapproval—of his anger. The death of the relationship, if he hasn't already killed it. "They had the doctor who made the diagnosis stay to perform the procedure. They said it was legal because I'm not a woman." Just not a man, either.

Harry's brows raise skyward. "And you turned it down? They were willing to do a—a clean, safe abortion here, in an operating room, and get you and the kid out of this situation and save your life and you said no? John, do you have any idea how many women—" Harry lets out a quiet, disbelieving laugh, lifting a hand to run it through the thick dark hair atop his head, breaking it out of its crisp styling without a second thought. He doesn't even seem to realize that he's doing it. "People die, John. Women have that done in somebody's house with a—with coathangers, or crochet hooks, and they offered to do it under anaesthesia in a clean hospital room to save your life and you said no— I can't believe this. I can't believe you right now. This can't be real. Jesus Christ, this can't be real. I don't even know why we're having this argument, because this can't be... They have to have made some kind of mistake."

But as he says this, Harry's eyes are welling with tears to match the ones trailing down John's cheeks.

John just stands there. He stands there and watches him, leaving space for his reaction, and it occurs to him that he has never been so profoundly alone as he is in this moment.

Even Harry.

Even Harry.

"If this is real you're going to die, John! You're going to die! The doctors— I don't understand. They said it's going to die anyways, no doubt horribly, and you're not even that religious— Why are you suddenly the model Catholic now? I'm married! I'm married and that was fine, and, and premarital sex was fine, and—"

"It's four months old!" John shouts back, the sudden outburst surprising even himself. His voice lowers to something close to a plea. "Harry, it's four months old, and don't you think it means— something that against all those odds, not only was I—I made like this, but you were able to get me pregnant—"

Crosby stares at him, dumbfounded. "What does it matter? John, what does it matter? You don't even want to keep it! It won't even have a family!"

"We can find—"

"No, John, you won't! You won't. This isn't going to be some—cute-as-a-button blond-haired, blue-eyed kid, and I don't think you understand that. It's going to be— If by some miracle it doesn't kill you, it's going to be deformed! A man can't have a normal baby. That's not how it happens. It's going to die before it ever gets delivered, but if it didn't, so many things would be wrong with it that— Who would adopt a baby like that? It would be sick, and it would have no family, and it would spend its whole life as an outcast. It would suffer!" Crosby swallows. His tears spill over when he blinks. "You're not carrying a normal baby, John. It's just not possible. I know you want it to be, John. I know. But every day you postpone this you're risking your life, and you're going to lose everything. I'm going to lose everything. You have to go back. You have to let them do this. We can—we can bury it. We can have a proper grave, a nice grave, and a funeral, and you can visit it, and we can do anything that you want. But we just can't keep it. You can't. Your body can't. You'll die, John. You heard the doctors. You'll die."

John shakes his head, shoulders jerking with a muted sob. He sniffs and wipes fruitlessly at the wet skin under his eyes.

"I'm so sorry, Harry," he whines out. "I love you. I love you so much. You have to try to understand. I'm so sorry. I can't kill it. I just can't. I'd spend the rest of my life—"

"You have to! It isn't a choice!"

Another wave of tears.

"You want me to just—kill it like a bug. Like it's nothing to you."

Harry's voice drops to something more severe at the accusation—which John knows, deep down, even as he says it, is unfair—that stabs into John's core like a knife. "You know that's not true. You know it's not nothing to me. This isn't nothing to me. But it's not about what we want, John! It's about how things are. "

"It's your child! Harry, it's your child! How can you say that? Right now it's healthy, and alive, and nobody can prove any of those things—"

"How can you even think that? Science can prove them, John! Plenty of babies have horrible things wrong with them, and plenty of women die giving birth, and those are normal pregnancies. They're not a fucking—man! Why can't you see? Why won't you listen to me, or the doctors, or anyone who wants you alive?"

"I can't. I'm so sorry. I can't."

"Please." Harry swallows, tears streaking his cheeks, voice wavering. His approach changes all at once, his frustrated, uncomprehending insistences turning to a plea that hurts much worse. "Please don't do this to me. Please don't leave me here alone. I can't lose you too, John, it'll—it'll break me. I wish I could go back. I would erase all of this if it meant you could live. "

John blinks. Tears stream down his cheeks as he watches Crosby, and he realizes that the little flecks of moisture beginning to dot his skin are coming from the overcast sky above them, not his eyes, just spitting, hardly able to hold a candle to the rivers he's cried.

"John, please. " Harry's voice breaks. "You are going to die if you do this. God doesn't want you to die. It's not God's plan for you to die horribly. I don't understand why you're suddenly so religious now. Suicide is a sin, too. And that's what this is. Suicide. You're killing yourself. You're choosing to kill yourself over a fantasy and leaving me and your parents and your brothers and sisters behind."

Harry takes a solitary step, then all but falls forward into his arms at once; gingerly, John raises them to encircle his back as Harry presses his face into the side of his neck, hot wet tears burning into his cool skin like drops of boiling water from the edge of a kettle.

"Don't. Don't do this," he whines through his tears, voice muffled against the body holding his child. "I love you so much. I love you. I'm begging you. Don't do this, Johnny."

Harry has never called him Johnny before.

Chapter Text

So I run to the Lord
Please hide me, Lord
Don't you see me prayin'?
Don't you see me down here prayin'?
But the Lord said
Go to the Devil, the Lord said
Go to the Devil
He said go to the Devil
All on that day
So I ran to the Devil
He was waitin', I ran to the Devil ...

Don't you know I need you Lord?
Don't you know that I need you?
Don't you know that I need you?

Oh, Lord
Wait
Oh, Lord
Oh, Lord, Lord

Nina Simone, "Sinnerman"

October 5, 1943 — Thorpe Abbotts Air Installation, East Anglia, England  — evening
21 weeks.

✦

He needs to shower.

For the first time since early boyhood, since the day he'd bathed all by himself for the first time, John finds that the idea of simply washing himself clean—or, more accurately, everything involved with it—overwhelms him, a looming trepidation that yawns out before him like a tremendous gulch cut through the earth to separate him from action on the other side.

It had been an awkward adjustment period when he first enlisted, being naked around so many other men, some of them certainly better endowed than himself, but the bonds made in basic training and the rushed nature of their shower drills hadn’t left much time or space for insecurity—they were all too busy trying to get washed and rinsed before time was up to focus on their buddies’ cocks. Now, however, they have all the time they want, and the anxiety he feels is entirely alien in its nature, nothing like the insecurity the complicated rituals of the military had been built to ward off.

He hadn't been concerned with people looking at him in the showers after the first night in basic training, but now, suddenly, despite only the faintest physical change to his own naked body, John wonders if the innate human drive to mind one's own business while naked will be enough to keep eyes off of him. Should he even be here at all, his body changed as it is, chest ever-so-slightly swollen for underlying reasons he doesn't care to examine? Does he have a right to be in the men's showers, to slip in among unquestionably, one-hunded-percent male bodies in their vulnerable nakedness? Is this inappropriate? Is this the correct set of showers for someone like him to be using?

The thoughts that first surfaced in Chick’s office only build, all the more overwhelming now that he actually stands fully clothed and booted up in the dressing room, surrounded by mostly-empty lockers, his wood-and-cotton web shower shoes dangling unworn from one hand as every layer of uniform he walked in with shrouds the damning lines of his aberrant body. He'll have to peel away every stratum of his armor to reveal the true self if he wants to shower.

They would never, ever let a woman into the men’s shower block. It would be a disaster, although he’s sure the men wouldn’t see it that way. It would be utterly indecent, a fucking orgy. They’d all leer. And the reason for that would be the presence of her tits and lady parts, which they lack, and, well, apparently he doesn't, at least not to the degree of unambiguous masculinity of form that participation in this space requires. What does that mean? Does the faint puffiness his chest has taken on push it into the realm of tits that need to be covered? 

His body isn't a bat, isn't a bird. It feels like a wrongness, one he’ll be caught for, if he takes off his clothes and trespasses through the threshold to the shower area that takes up the length of the Nissen hut they use as an officers’ shower block, even if it’s empty. If he undresses, will scrutinizing eyes find some small physical difference between his naked body and the true mens’ that he was too busy minding his own business to notice in the showers before now? His chest isn't as flat as it used to be, and while logic tells him that it still falls well within the range of normal morphological variation among males, that it just looks like he's built up a little muscle or gained a small amount of weight—probably the latter, considering the new curve to his belly, where he's changed the most—there's a small, paranoid voice in the back of his mind that insists that someone will come in and see him and see right through him and know.

Is there really any difference in composition from a woman's breasts? 

They're certainly much smaller, and nothing similar in terms of shape, but he doesn't manage to hold the thought and its pain at bay. Should he be wearing a shirt in the showers? Will these men, hungry for any real female imagery in the flesh, leer at him , so desperate they'll settle for anything, like dogs picking at scraps?

Are breasts to be covered because of their size or who they're attached to or what they are? He doesn't know, and unfortunately, that's where the answer to his indecision lies.

All at the same time at he wonders this, John feels every bit the voyeur as he stands in the empty changing area, buttons untouched, shower shoes still hooked over two fingers of his bare hand—the only naked part of him, other than his face. His heart races. He wishes there was some kind of a mirror he could really study himself in for the first time since receiving the news, so that he could take in all the changes at once, and see them as another person would instead of from the limited point-of-view of someone looking down at his own body.

Do his nipples look like a man’s nipples? He’d never really compared his to Harry’s on the two occasions they were actually able to properly undress around each other. He’s never had much chest hair, pretty much nothing on his back, only a trail of dark hairs under his navel. Would he have more hair if he wasn’t like this? Is that unusual? Does all of this provide enough for someone with a keen eye to piece together the fact that there’s an imposter among their naked male bodies, a voyeur, a hunter parading around hidden under the tanned carcass of a deer?

Even once he’d started fucking Harry, and had had to contend to the fact that he perhaps wasn’t as purely red-blooded as he’d thought he was, he hadn’t felt half this much trepidation stepping into the showers. He’s flown up into skies full of flak and crash landed a plane twice and kept his shit together. He can’t even will himself to undo the first button of his shirt while standing alone in an empty changing room. 

But he has to shower, and he has to clean himself. He’s thrown up multiple times since he found out. His hair is getting greasy at the roots. He feels profoundly unclean: he wants to simply scrub this entire experience from his skin, and then turn his body inside out and keep scrubbing, until he washes out all of the impurities, the unwelcome organs and their unwelcome guest as though purging his body of parasites. It pushes him into a corner.

John takes a shaky breath and tries to re-moor himself in reality, the factual details of the situation. He’s the only one here. It’s 3 P.M. Nobody showers at 3 P.M.; they either shower first thing in the morning or in the evening before bed. That’s by design. Nobody, not a soul, is present to see him. If he let out a single word in the massive empty ribcage of the shower area, it would echo on the wall tiles and wet cement floor—though it’s not like he has any words left in him after arguing with the doctors, and Chick, and at last, Harry. He just wants to not speak for a while. 

He wants to be alone, despite already being more alone than he ever has in his life. He wants to sleep, even though the sleep debt he accrued last night still looms over him like a tsunami that hasn’t yet crashed ashore. He’s not fatigued; he’s still alert, awake. His nerves haven’t had a chance to be anything other than electrified than this began, and he wants so desperately to rest, to simply turn off his brain for a merciful few hours. He wants to be clean. He wants to sleep.

He has to shower to do that.

John lets out a shaky breath and sets his shower shoes down on the bench behind him with a soft clat of their thin wooden soles, then raises a trembling hand to the button at his throat.

He slips it free, then undoes his tie stepwise and methodical as though disassembling a piece of elaborate origami. One by one, with increasing trepidation, he undoes each shirt button, pausing, just as he did when he put it on, when he reaches the end of his sternum, where the flat plane of his upper body gives way to the outward curve of his soft vulnerable core and the creature lying at rest within it.

He takes a slow deep breath. Still trembling, John quickly undoes the remaining buttons and opens the veil over everything that sets him apart from these men like he’s opening the carcass of a deer. How he wishes he could gut himself like one, just… carve it all out and go to bed and sleep this off like a bad dream. He can’t. There is no escape from this situation, and he has been discharged. He hasn’t even thought of what he’ll write his no doubt disappointed parents yet.

John slips his shirt off of his shoulders and lets it fall into a heap of pale olive fabric beside his shower shoes. He peels off his undershirt, tighter around the midsection than it was when it was first issued to him. Now he knows why.

And then, his upper half naked, he stares down at his chest, the small insidious swell to his abdomen, where the intruder wedged among the organs that should be there pushes it out. Maybe this is more pronounced than bloating would realistically be. People have probably already noticed and simply haven’t said anything. His cheeks burn with humiliation, a heat that climbs all the way to the tips of his ears at the reflection.

He’s so fucking stupid. 'Bloating'. Four months pregnant and he writes it off as bloating that just never went away.

Maybe, if he’s really, really lucky, they’ve all just thought of it as weight gain. He doesn't feel tightly enough bound to reality to really gauge how likely it is, how realistic, that anyone would have guessed the true nature of his condition, or even had the passing thought that this would seem like pregnancy if only he were a woman—reality isn’t very real right now, and every time he tries to think rationally, he feels like he reaches out and grasps nothing but thin air. This isn’t a rational situation, and he is alone, with no anchor to the real world. Just him and the thing savagely and unapologetically bending and molding his body to fit it to its needs.

How far will this go? Will he grow breasts, real breasts like a woman's, not just the faint puffiness his chest has taken on at present, as this progresses? Will they go away after the baby? How big is he going to end up before the surgery to remove it?

The hair on his arms, more than a woman would have, stands on end in the chill of the dressing room he’s been loitering in. His hands fall to the buckle of his belt, but he doesn’t undo it for another several moments, even though he knows the longer he just stands here, the more likely it is that a man — 'another' man?, or a man?— will come in and behold the naked, unhidden form of his shifting, nebulous body when all he wants is to ensconce it in a fabric coffin of his own making.

Finally, John undoes his belt. He slips off his pants, his shoes, his socks. He slides his feet into the woven cotton straps of his Klaks shower shoes. And he stands there, shirtless, the swell of his middle fully exposed, his possibly abnormal nipples uncomfortably tender and hard in the cold, arm hair still standing on end and leg hair now joining it, still wearing his boxers like a new recruit who can’t will himself to overcome the modesty he inherited from Adam in the garden of Eden.

He has to shower. It's a basic reality that thrums in his veins with every heartbeat. He needs to be clean, more than he ever has in his entire life. He has to shower.

John steps out of his boxers. He scoops his discarded clothes on the bench into a heap, sets his shoes atop it, and carries it all to the first open locker he sees in both arms. He crams them all in without his usual care and closes the little metal door, then turns and walks to the showers, the only naked body in the massive emptiness of a hut meant to accommodate twenty men, toiletry bag in hand.

He turns on one of the twenty faucets and his chosen showerhead on the network of pipes branching out overhead coughs warm water, dips, then picks up a steady stream. John finally closes his eyes as the warm rain soaks his greasy hair and trails down his face, flowing over his distorted body, tracing every new curve and deformation on its way down to the drain at his feet. The only sound is his heartbeat, not the child's, and the splattering of manmade rain on a hard floor, the hiss and thrum water running through pipes.

October 7, 1943 — Thorpe Abbotts Air Installation, East Anglia, England
21 weeks.

✦

The dust is slow to settle after Harry first learns of his condition, and his unwillingness—or, more aptly, inability—to change it. On the sixth of the month, he's called to Smokey's office; having forgotten the outstanding urine sample as a minor detail against the larger backdrop of his life being thrown into chaos, John knows not why he's been called, and feels a bit as though he's reporting for his execution when the message is passed to him. A wild, fearful voice in the back of his mind wonders if what he was told about being United States Army Property means that they've spoken to Chick and all decided to do it anyway, but it's not like he can simply refuse, so he marches across base, opening and closing his hands in nervous fists at his sides the entire way over.

It's nothing that dramatic, and the visit doesn't exonerate him of his situation in the way that a forced abortion, which God would maybe forgive, would have. Instead, Smokey just matter-of-factly calls him into an exam room once the nurse up front alerts him to John's presence and informs him that the pregnancy test performed at the closest hospital with a maternity ward confirmed that he's pissing out all of the same hormones as a pregnant woman would. 

It's confirmation he didn't need, just one more nail in the coffin.

Crosby's grief and fear and rage is omnipresent as the days pass between them, seeping in through the very cracks in the walls every time he directs the deep brown lakes of his eyes John's way, always tinged with new sorrow. Sometimes now he looks like he's about to say something and doesn't, a new fault line opening in the earth between them, one John finds himself helpless to bridge. A few times, Crosby does try to approach him, to rekindle the argument, like he hasn't quite given up hope— a painful thought. John remains unmoving.

Gradually, the insistent pleas become less and less frequent. John's not sure why that feels like a betrayal, or an abandonment, when he should want the father of the baby to agree with him on the matter of killing it, when he should want Harry, if nobody else, to have faith in his ability to self-determine. Reality has apparently sunken in—or, perhaps, Crosby has simply shifted his tactics to hoping that they'll be able to stem the bleeding in time when the baby, as he and the doctors seem to think, inevitably dies. Damage control. John wonders periodically in his darker moments if that's what he's hoping will happen. It wouldn't have to live with being unwanted or deformed, and he wouldn't spend the rest of his life wondering what happened to the child he abandoned, his first and only.

Through all of this, Harry never lashes out at him. He tries to argue with him again, but the focus is always his choices, not him, John Brady; the whole matter is treated as some deviation utterly inconsistent with everything Harry has known about him up until this point, and everything John is. But is it, he wonders, or is it part of him that Harry doesn't want to accept? Is it really out of character? Did Harry know all of him, the real him, prior to this decision being made? It's painful, so John tries not to think about it.

But mercifully, by the grace of God, Harry doesn't seem to... resent him for his decision, as John had so desperately feared before breaking the news to him. Nonetheless, John quickly reaches the conclusion that the sadness and desperation every time Harry looks at him is so much worse than any loathing could ever be, reminding him every time that he, John, is the one responsible for his grief—that he must harm the person he loves more than he's ever loved anyone in order to spare the life of an unwelcome thing he's rapidly coming to despise. 

Harry, in his heart of hearts, still thinks that it's a choice, that he's choosing to risk his own life for this thing at the cost of potentially leaving Harry behind, alone, to mourn him, and there's nothing John can do to make him see that he's chosen the only option truly available to him. He aches with the knowledge. He cannot explain to him, in any way, that were there a choice to be made, he loves him deeply enough to make the one that favors Harry.

It's not fair.

In the face of profound unfairness, and his own fear, John prays, multiple times a day. There's still no answer, as per the usual state of affairs. And why should he expect an answer, John wonders in his more bleak moments. He's an adulterer, and he's suffering about as direct a consequence of that sin as one could conjure up.

He just can't imagine stopping his frequent appeals to God and the Virgin Mary without going insane. They have to listen to him, even if they never answer. So he talks to them more than he ever has in his life.

He and Harry still eat breakfast together in the mornings, as they did almost every morning before they learned of everything brewing within him, even despite the thawing chill between them, and he's not sure why Harry's weakening resolve is a disappointment. Maybe he wants Harry to push harder, to keep arguing until he reveals some new truth, some point in favor of aborting it after all that's impossible to deny. A way out of this.

Don't give up on me, he wants to say in one breath, and listen to me in another.

✦

“John, you need to eat more than that.”

Brady looks up from the congealed mass of pre-scrambled scrambled eggs he’s been pushing around with the tines of his fork as though that will somehow make them any less galling to meet Harry’s eyes across the shared table on this particular morning. Crosby watches him with obvious concern, a frown deepening the corners of his mouth, his thick dark brows—one of his handsomest features, to John's eye—furrowed, as they often have been when Harry's looked at him over these past few days.

“I feel sick.”

“John, it doesn’t—“ Harry cuts himself off, then continues at a lower tone, keeping his voice quiet and leaning forward across the table as not to be heard by any of the others presently occupying the officers’ mess. “John, if you really want to keep this thing, and you want to live, you need to eat. It’s going to take from your body if you don’t get enough food. You’ve already—you’ve already gone four months without eating for your… condition, and you won’t survive five more. You’re too thin.”

John glowers at him, or perhaps more accurately glowers at his lack of understanding. “Harry, it’s not a matter of if I want to or not. I can’t. I’m going to throw it back up if I eat it right now.”

“Then what can you eat? I’ll find a way to get it.”

“What?”

“Tell me what you can eat. If you can’t eat what they have here without throwing up, tell me what it is you can eat, and I’ll bring it to you if you promise to actually eat it. I’m not going to just sit here and watch you starve while you’re—allegedly carrying my child.”

“’Allegedly’? Harry, the test came back, it—”

“Dammit, John, you know what I—" Harry lets out a short, frustrated sigh. "Just tell me what you need, okay? I’m not a mindreader. I can’t just guess. I only know about this what you tell me about this. And if you're really not going to take the way out that you've by some miracle been given, and instead you really want to lay down your life to have this kid neither of us want, I want you to have the best possible chance of living through this, because I kind of have some skin in the game here. Got it?"

John watches him in silence, appraising. He still doesn't say anything when Harry stops talking, busy weighing out his options. Finally, he answers.

"Okay. I..." God, this feels ridiculous, and he can't help but to feel like he's being precious, demanding, making such a request in the middle of a war, with rationing fully underway. It's his fault he ended up like this, anyways. He watches the edge of his plate as opposed to meeting his partner's questioning, painfully critical eyes. "Only if you can find it, but... I, uh. Bread. sweet things. Baked goods. Apples might be nice. I... When I do feel hungry, I feel really hungry, but it's not..." John looks up and gestures vaguely with one hand. "It doesn't always make the most sense. Or it's things that we can't get." He tries to smile, thinly. The most he manages is a wavering upwards twitch of both corners of his mouth. "I'd eat my mom's strawberry rhubarb pie all day for every meal if I could right now, but that's not exactly practical."

"I'll try. You just... tell me what you want, what you're willing to eat, and I'll find a way. If this is what it takes, this is what it takes. Okay?"

He's serious. John shifts a little under his gaze, feeling ridiculous, needy in ways he has no right to be. "Don't... spend all of your time just trying to find—"

"I said I'd do it. You need to start... putting butter on your food, drinking milk, finding ways to get the extra calories. You were as thin as a rail when you got... when this started, and I'm sure you've lost weight with all the puking. That's bad. Really bad—and did the doctor say anything about if that'll let up? Anything you can do?"

"No. Harry, like I said, they didn’t really… I didn’t really get any advice or instructions or anything like that to not die. They just… told me I would, and tried to get me to… change my mind about…” He gestures with his fork, like his mother always told him not to. Termination. A topic he'd really rather avoid, lest he launch them into another argument, but this time it's unavoidable. At least Harry doesn't seem to be rising to the potential provocation. “And then when it was clear that I wasn’t going to agree with them, they sent me to Chick.”

“So they left you to die.”

“Well, that’s… That’s a harsh way of putting it. I don’t know that they even really knew what to tell me.”

Sharp vitriol flashes through Harry's normally placid eyes. “That Dr. Ames did. He was an obstetrician, John. I’m sure there was plenty he could have told you if he actually wanted you to live. But that’d mean proving him wrong. Threatening his dignity.”

Harry’s getting himself worked up. John is just tired.

“I suppose,” he concedes, quietly.

“We’ll have to—find you someone. There has to at least be a midwife here. In the village. These women don’t just all have their babies unattended.”

No, John thinks, but they certainly aren’t having them in hospitals, either. The average woman here seems one step away from having the baby in a barn—but there’s an even greater concern inherent to Harry's well-meaning idea than a simple lack of knowledge and experience.

“Old women talk. You know they’d gab, and the next thing you know, people would be coming down all the way from London to see the pregnant man. Word would get back to Chick and everyone else. It would be a disgrace. I’d be a sideshow.”

Harry sighs and concedes. “Maybe. There’s got to be someone in London.”

“London? Harry, I’m… going back to the states in a week. It’s probably best to just hedge my bets until then. My family doesn’t live that far from the city, and that’s where the best doctors are. They have… connections, they’ll be able to find someone. And the family doctor’s the one who delivered me and all of my siblings. He’s loyal. He wouldn’t tell anyone, even though he won’t approve.”

Harry looks at him like he's insane.

“And what happens if something happens before then, John? That’s an entire week of this thing growing inside of you, and then a whole plane trip with no doctor onboard. Anything could happen. We barely even know what’s going on.”

“Harry, I can’t just… go all the way to London at a drop of the hat. I’m still on duty.”

“Then at least go back to Smokey. Go to him, and ask him in earnest for advice. He was angry with you, John, but he wants what’s best for his patients. There’s got to be something he can tell you.”

John gapes, head ducking forward, brows raising. He lowers his voice to an urgent hiss.

“Are you insane? Go back to him? After he yelled at me and called me an idiot? You think he even wants to see my face again?”

Harry's voice takes on an uncharacteristic harshness. “John, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what you have to do if you want to live. You want to live, don’t you? You want the baby to live? This is the choice you made. And this is what comes with that choice. You can’t just go through this without any advice from a doctor. It’ll kill you. There has to be something he knows that he just isn’t telling you. You— For me, John, I need you to do this, okay? I need you to talk to him. Neither of us know what we’re doing here. And that could kill—that could kill both of you.”

'Both of you' . It still sticks out like a sore thumb, like something that shouldn’t be said in reference to himself, but there are two of them in his body right now, sitting in the same chair, sharing the same blood, aren’t there? He's feeding the baby just eating breakfast right now, isn't he?

John tightens his jaw until his molars squeak against each other, silent for a long conflicted moment as anxiety steadily rises in his chest. He's lost this argument and he knows it. “What would he even tell me, Harry?” he asks at last, voice pathetically quiet. 

“That’s exactly it. We don’t know. Only he knows. But more information can only help us.”

Harry sighs, then quickly looks around them, cataloguing their periphery like a deer about to walk out into an open meadow with a fawn behind it. There aren’t many people eating at this hour, and those that are are occupied by their own conversations.

Briefly, he reaches across the table and takes John’s hand in his, giving it a gentle, steeling squeeze. “I know you don’t want to do this. I know. I know how he treated you. But you have to. Right now, he’s the only doctor you have access to, and that’s what we need in this situation. A doctor. Not our own guesses. A real doctor.”

✦

Smokey's standing at the bedside of an airman whose condition presumably isn't self-inflicted with the back of his long white coat turned to the front door when John enters the increasingly familiar Nissen hut that makes up the triage and entry area of the installation's medical complex. His momentary lack of attention presents him with a brief, unexpected chance to steel himself against the disapproval he knows is to come, and it’s not unwelcome.

It's one of the nurses who first greets him instead of the flight surgeon, and in a further stroke of good luck, she wasn't among the three Red Cross girls who were privy to the debacle the other day. As far as she knows, he's a normal man like any of her other patients, just here to discuss private matters with the doctor, probably just some form of venereal disease contracted as a consequence of his own red-bloodedness as opposed to... all of this .

Brady shoves both hands into the pockets of his fully zipped A2 with renewed self-consciousness, pushing the front of the garment forward and away from his body as much as he can to draw the leather into a tight flat plane that further (he hopes) hides the small omnipresent swell of the thing in his belly. He finds he's a little more comfortable without the heavy leather resting over his chest and nipples, too; for whatever reason (some complication of pregnancy, undoubtedly) his chest hasn't just swollen a little over the past few weeks, it's become sore. Sensitive to the touch, even if it's just the brush of his own leather jacket.

The nurse smiles at him with situationally inappropriate cheeriness for someone who doesn't know why her patient is here. “Hi, Captain. What’s your name and what are you here for?”

“Brady. I need to speak to the doctor. Ongoing affair. Private matters. He'll know what I'm here for. Thank you." If she didn't think so before, he has no doubt that her mind has now been made up on the matter of his having VD now; she'll undoubtedly tell all of her girlfriends to watch out, John Brady has VD. It occurs to John as he stands under the arched ceiling of the mostly vacant hut that he’d rather be perceived as being lousy with venereal disease than with child.

“I’ll let him know.”

“Thank you.”

The acoustics of the still air amplify the receding clicks of the heels of the nurse's black pumps on the cement floor between the two rows of empty beds as she leaves him to get Smokey. John watches their backs, steeling himself, as she stops beside the doctor and leans in to say something inaudible in his ear.

Smokey immediately excuses himself from the wounded man's bedside to go see to him, John Brady, with a serious look and a long brisk stride that says he's expecting an emergency. He probably thinks that this is the crisis he’d projected, John reasons as he watches his long legs swing forward—that he’s just somehow upright and remarkably calm about hemorrhaging to death. He wouldn’t be the first soldier to conduct himself in a way utterly inverse to the degree of damage to his body, after all.

He's already frowning. John, though he didn’t see the face he was making before he turns, is fairly sure that he wasn’t before he laid eyes on him. He's had that that effect on doctors lately.

Now that the doctor is facing him, it occurs to John with deep unease that Smokey knows what's going on inside of his body, no matter how many layers of clothing he wears to hide his situation from everyone else, or how he tries to alter the drape of the front of his A2 over a growing belly. His gaze penetrates through the artfully manipulated jacket and uniform and flesh like the Picker x-ray machine that first brought the situation to light; John knows his eyes, pale blue like water under a layer of ice, see his bones and unnatural organs and the sleeping creature within, lit up like a radiograph against a backlight. He has no secrets; there is no hiding. John feels a little sick, but he stands fast.

“John. Everything alright?—Gladys, you can go. Thank you.”

John waits until the nurse is out of sight to speak, and even then he keeps his voice low. He feels decidedly ridiculous for even proposing such a thing before he even utters a single word from the pile accumulating at the edge of his tongue. “I… was hoping to consult with you. About bettering my chances of, uh. Survival.”

Smokey raises his brows. John burns with embarrassment. He tries to anchor his thoughts on Harry, the one he's doing this for, drifting away from the moment to ground himself in something more welcoming.

His skin crawls in the face of the flight surgeon's unambiguous disbelief and distaste anyway. He really wishes they could take this into an exam room already—anyone could walk in here at any moment, and he feels like a child receiving a scolding. Smokey's eyes narrow a little at their edges when he speaks.

“Let me be sure I'm understanding. You reject all efforts to save your life, all medical advice given to you by not one but two doctors, one of whom was a specialist, and now you come back to me days later to then ask for that medical advice all over again.”

John looks down at the laces on his oxfords, momentarily pressing his lips together before he all but mutters his answer. “Yes, Doc. I was hoping that… That there would be some sort of advice that you could give, pertaining to… making my chances as good as possible, and…” He looks up and takes a quick glance around their surroundings, checking for listeners. The one patient in recovery is too far away to hear what they’re saying, and the nurse has left. “…increasing the probability that… it… will survive.”

Smokey lets out a quiet huff through his nose. The loose fabric of his white coatsleeves twists as he folds his arms across his chest, frowning.

“You already know what my advice is, Captain Brady.”

“I do. But I’m hoping that…” He meets Smokey’s eyes at last, unwavering, even though it makes his heart climb up into his throat. “I’m hoping that as a doctor, even though I made the wrong choice, you’ll still… help me. Because of your oath. Because I need you to help me.”

It’s Smokey’s turn to look conflicted, which is something, John supposes. Finally, he sighs audibly, some of the tension leaving his shoulders, and gestures toward the space behind himself with the swing of one newly unfolded arm. He seems exasperated, but agreeing. “Alright. Follow me back.”

✦

The exam room appears as perfectly untouched as it did the first time John stepped into it. It's dreamlike, as though he never occupied it at all, as if everything that transpired the other day was simply a vivid nightmare that left behind no evidence in the corporeal world—except for the thing inside of him, of course. A visceral feeling of unease settles over him as he sits down on the end of the exam table just as he did shortly before both physicians came swooping down on him with all of the wrath of a pair of harpies; it's a sort of anticipation, as though his body itself expects that the same thing might happen again. John wrings his hands in his lap without realizing he’s doing it, and hopes that to someone observing from the third person (such as, say, a nurse unexpectedly coming in to grab him for an emergency) that his zipped jacket veils the small swell of the child as well as it seems to when he looks down—not that Smokey doesn’t know it’s there, anyway; not like he hasn’t laid his hands on it, seen inside of it, even.

Smokey’s already putting the buds of his stethoscope in his ears, which is a level of involvement John hadn’t anticipated. “Well, what is it, exactly, that you want to know? I’m not an obstetrician. The person to ask would have been Dr. Ames, while he was still here.”

John doesn’t bother speaking his thoughts in regard to that proposition, namely, that there would have been no way in hell he would have gotten an answer, other than a reiteration of how stupid and emotional he was being for even wondering such a thing. He just lets it go and takes the indirect scolding, because what matters here is information. Survival. He must survive this.

“Mostly, how to, um… What I should be eating, or… if there’s things I shouldn’t be doing—… That kind of thing.”

Smokey pauses, still holding the bell of the stethoscope in one hand, dark brows raised.

“Well, Captain, you shouldn’t be flying, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped you.”

What? He just told Chick I could. They both did. Why didn't anyone tell me they changed their minds?

“I—I thought Colonel Harding said that you—”

Smokey immediately counters with the kind of defiance of authority only a medical officer can get away with. "Well, he shouldn’t have. He was wrong, and this is dangerous to you and to your crew and to the baby that against all advice you seem hellbent to keep. I told him and so did Dr. Ames.”

Wait.

He did?

What Smokey says, and the emphatic tone with which he says it, stands in stark juxtaposition to what he was told: that both doctors had given their seal of approval for another two weeks of flight until his discharge is processed. Now he's being told neither of them did, which would imply that Chick's ruling was in opposition to medical advice.

John doesn’t have long to parse the revelation before Smokey carries on.

“Anyway, aside from that, which is the most likely way you could get killed by your current condition, you should avoid heavy activity and lifting. That could cause placental abruption and hemorrhage.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t. Know what that means.”

Smokey sighs, seemingly annoyed at having to backtrack during an appointment John suspects he wishes to keep brief.

“The placenta is what feeds the baby, son. It ties it to the inside of the womb. If you move too hard or strain, it can tear off and start bleeding uncontrollably. It’s probably already a precarious attachment in a body like yours. That’s why flying is such a terrible idea. If you have to bail, Brady, the impact will kill it immediately or cause a rupture, and the subsequent bleeding will kill you long before you’re able to get any kind of medical attention for it. Even if you could, like I said before, it would be in vain to begin with by the time things were set in motion. Women die in nice clean hospitals when that happens.”

It’s a sobering thought, one that perhaps sinks in more deeply now than it did in their earlier conversations, laid out in greater detail and without the distraction of arguing for the child’s life, or for his own right to stay off of the operating table. John is quiet for a moment, because he doesn't know what the correct answer is, other than agreeing not to fly, which he cannot and will not offer. Finally, he settles for just moving on to the next item on the mental list he's prepared.

“Okay. How do I… What am I supposed to eat?”

“Not these rations. Where you’d find what you do need, I don’t know. You need more food than a soldier does, more fats, more fruit. Milk, butter, that sort of thing. Meats.”

“Okay.” Finally, finally, he's been given some grain of advice he can work with, even if what the doctor's advised is all but unobtainable in the middle of the war. At least he knows, now. Another concern comes to mind. “Is there… Is there a way to stop all of the… the vomiting? To stop losing so much food?”

Now there's a long pause. Smokey presses his lips together with obvious displeasure, the corners of his mouth deepening on both sides, and sighs a long sigh through his nose. Whatever's going to come out of his mouth, John can already tell it's coming as a result of him feeling like his arm is being twisted.

“You’re only here for another week. I can give you a box of motion sickness tablets, but just one and that’s it. It should really be going to boys up in planes, not someone who went and got pregnant.”

Whatever he expected, it wasn't the sudden heel turn involved in such an abrupt and uncharacteristic display of mercy, but what he's describing sounds like such a godsend, assuming it works, it could have been directly sent down from heaven.

“I understand. Thank you.” 

"Okay. That's that, then. I might as well take a listen while we're here, make sure it hasn’t died yet. Then we’ll have Gladys grab those from the stockroom for you. One a day and only one a day. Take them in the morning as soon as you wake up. Take off your shirt and jacket for me.”

With the same displeasure as last time, John does.

And as he did last time, and in the same order, Smokey does his part, listening over his chest, then several points on his abdomen, the look on his face indecipherable beyond intense concentration.   The exam goes much quicker than it did when he was apparently trying to discern exactly what he thought he was hearing for the first time, but like last time, he still has to tell John to hold his breath at the end, when it comes time to listen to his belly in the same collection of spots before he straightens up and spreads the metal ear tubes of the stethoscope to remove the rubber buds from his ears.

“Well, it’s lived another week. Its heartbeat is fine in there, by the grace of God.”

✦

Bremen.

The mission command has just announced follows the same general trend as so many before it—the crew of Just A'Snappin, and 23 other forts, will be dropping bombs over key industrial sites to kneecap the German war machine tomorrow morning.

They've all flown countless missions before this one, save for a few replacements, but Crosby finds when the mission light glows red and they're all called down for the briefing that evening that he's never felt quite as intense and immediate of an urge to get his affairs in order as he does now—assuming it lives, there’s a child in the picture now. There's a pregnant partner to leave behind, not just a wife. John plans on putting the child in an orphanage, but surely it isn't right to shuck off all responsibility after leaving it to be raised by someone else, right? Surely they owe the child they created something, some little way to give it a leg up in a sea of unwanted orphans. Maybe money.

…Even if that means adjusting his NSLI. Taking from Jean. And he’ll have to write her a letter to explain why, so that at the time of his death she’s not just left wondering why she was left to live on a sum other than the $10,000 he told her about when he enlisted, so that she doesn’t spend the rest of her days wondering who the other woman was, comparing herself to the nebulous image of some buxom European blonde who never existed—

When it was another serviceman instead. John Brady. John Brady, and their child.

Can one designate an unborn, unnamed child, one that exists in secret, as a beneficiary? Harry decides, chewing on the inside of his cheek, that it’s a stupid question and one that’s bound to get him looks. Of course you can’t. People would question why the money wasn’t just left to the mother.

He could leave it to John, or to the orphanage, but it’s only been a week, and John hasn’t yet mentioned any specific orphanages by name—and what if, somehow, he has a change of heart and wants to keep it? It seems extremely unlikely, and Harry doesn’t even know where he’d begin with that, but… what if he sends the baby to one of his sisters or sisters-in-law, or to his parents back in the states? Secretly, he thinks he might prefer that option. John’s family is well-off. The baby would be well taken-care-of in a way they can't guarantee if it's left here at an orphanage. It wouldn’t even have to know it was adopted, and if it went to one of his many siblings, the physical resemblance would be there to corroborate its faux origin story. 

Mentioning the thought to John, of course, is out of the question—he no doubt hopes for all of this to pass without his family ever knowing, so unless Harry says something, and argues with him, it will remain little more than a pipe dream.

He presses his thumb to his bottom lip, brows furrowed, his other arm wrapped around his own chest as he stands outside of the payroll clerk's office, deep in thought. If he leaves money to John, he’ll have to have a reason why, one that won’t raise suspicion when eyes are already on John—and while the party who got him pregnant, who made him unfit for duty and took another ablebodied man out of the service for needless reason, remains unidentified.

He could leave the money to John’s mother, maybe, but he doesn’t know her address. Shit, does he even know John’s address back in the states, beyond knowing the town he's coming from?

—Maybe he’ll say something about gratitude for saving his life in those crash landings as the reason. That would work. Even though others would still surely see it only as John doing his job, and a bizarre reason to list someone as a beneficiary after their death.

Harry also finds himself more religious than he usually does—no atheists in a foxhole, and all of that. He doesn’t say anything to John on the matter, but he visits Father Teska after he decides to put a pin in the matter of life insurance for the time being, walking away from the payroll office without ever having entered it to make his way down to the on-base chapel. He talks about the people he’ll be leaving behind, plural. He asks about the Catholic orphanage system in England, to which Father Teska apologizes and tells him that he doesn’t have much information to give at all.

✦

While the guys fuck off to drink—and eat, and be merry, for tomorrow they may well die—the two of them rejoin in the installation's oft-vacant water treatment plant, a big brick building partly concealed by trees at the edge of the installation's perimeter. John locks the door behind them and steps up to him in the semidarkness, the sharp high lines of his cheekbones illuminated only by the dim glow of the wall lamps and the brighter orange light from the streetlamps lining the paths outside, holding eye contact, their faces so close he can feel the soft flow of air from John's nose against his face as he exhales. Harry breaks the silence, lifting a hand to gently wrap his fingers around his bicep, voice low and a little unsteady.

“John, listen. I need you to be… very honest with me, and with yourself.” John watches, not comprehending. He pushes through, walking on eggshells, knowing fully well how what he says is about to be received. There’s a reason he’s chosen a very private area to have this conversation, and it's not just his plans to say what may be their final goodbyes, in a way that feels very different from the nights they've shared prior to missions they'll both be flying. “Is there… Is there any chance, any at all, that you might… Drop out. Keep the baby. Or even just… send it to someone in your family, instead of leaving it with nuns here. I need to know. Because I’ve been thinking, and I… I don’t think it’s right for me to not… leave it with anything. If that’s the case.” Harry presses his lips together and swallows nervously, followed by a compulsive lick of his lips. “Even if we don’t keep it, I helped make it. It’s my child. I can’t just… leave my child to fend for itself with no help because of a mistake we made.”

John opens and closes his mouth without producing sound; his reaction is immediate, face screwing up, brows lowering, the corners of his mouth deepening. His eyes flash with indignance; his voice immediately comes out as a sharp low hiss when he does speak—even in their apparent solitude, he's mindful of his volume.

“What kind of question is that? Obviously I’m not going to keep it. I don’t want it and I’m not going to—tell my whole family how badly I fucked up, and how bad I am fucked up, when it could have a perfectly good life in England. I’m not going to burden them with the consequences of my mistakes. I’m 25.” A pause. John wets his lips. “And I don’t want to burden you with the consequences, either. You wanted me to abort it. Pretend I did. Leave the money to Jean. Not a kid who will get all the help it needs from the state.”

“But John—what if it doesn’t?” He lowers his voice, more gentle. “You’ve… you’ve seen the kids around here. The orphans. Do they seem like they’re living good lives? As good as they could be?”

“In a war? Yes. They do. And so will this one.”

“John." He watches him for a moment, quiet, studying the hard lines of his face before he goes out on a limb, keeping his voice soft. It's obvious, at least to him, what's happening here, though whether John's consciously aware of his own resentment of the unborn child remains a question. "It’s not the baby’s fault. How would you feel if this were… your sister’s kid out of wedlock or something?”

“That's irrelevant. Neither of them are pregnant and they’re not the kind of girls who get pregnant out of wedlock. —Can we change the subject already? Harry, I don’t want to waste our last night before the mission fighting. Talking about this when we should just be enjoying the time we have.”

“Hey.” He reaches out and lightly rests his other hand on John's forearm, steadying. “I don’t want to fight, either. I love you. I just don’t want to go up there feeling like I’m unprepared. This is something I need to do, okay?” He wets his lips. “John, my life insurance, I… $2,500 of that is written to go to you. Even if you don’t keep it. Jean’s going to be told it went to one of the orphanages around here.”

John gapes, uncomprehending.

“Harry, I make… I’m an officer. I make as much as you do. And my family… I don’t… I don’t need that.” Harry gets the sense that his distress is less about the money and more about the sudden discussion of Harry’s own mortality, a topic the two of them have always danced around, as everyone does in a war. It’s a constant hum in the background, the knowledge that either of them could die; maybe this relationship never would have come to be without death’s looming shadow pushing them closer, making them bolder in expressing their affections than they might normally be. At least such was the case for Harry. But they rarely ever talk about it.

“Who knows what will happen with your state, John?” Harry searches his face for some modicum of understanding. “Once you’re discharged, your medical expenses will be yours, not the Army’s. And I’m the one who caused this. I’m responsible.”

“We both are,” John mumbles, breaking eye contact. “You don’t owe me anything. I provide for myself. I'm not some English girl you got in the motherly way after a one night stand.”

“I know that. I know you do. That’s not why I’m leaving it to you, okay? I’m leaving it to you because I love you, and because if you were my wife you’d be getting all ten thousand even if you had a job back in the states, even if you were a Rockefeller. And nobody would question it.” He pauses for a moment, pressing his lips together. “It’s your right.”

Delicately, he lifts the hand on John's bicep to gently caress the hard line of his cheekbone with the backs of his curled fingers. John doesn't push him away. He also doesn’t seem to know what to say to that; he’s quiet, his dark blue eyes, seeming more a deep brown in the low light, flit across Harry’s face, scanning, just as Harry did while looking up at him a moment prior. Finally, he speaks.

“If you do that, I… I’ll adjust mine. That way it’s both of us. It’s what’s fair. If I… if we were married, or if you were… even my girlfriend back home, you’d get all ten thousand, right? The same principle should apply. If this isn't about me... If this is just about what's right, it goes both ways.”

“Okay.” If that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. Maybe there’s a little flutter of warmth there—even if John is just doing this to make the idea of receiving what he no doubt considers charity, just as he would were the payout to come from a stranger as opposed to his partner and the father of his child, an easier pill to swallow, it means something. They’ve never breathed a word about marriage, other than in their very rare discussions of Harry’s. It feels incredibly intimate for a conversation about life insurance.

Maybe because it’s also a conversation about his life. Mortality. The possibility that God could pull them apart, could strike one of them down and leave the other to live the rest of the days as the lonely half to a destroyed whole. John doesn’t even necessarily believe that they’ll both go to Heaven, given that Harry’s protestant. He hopes he does, that he at least manages to find that small measure of peace here. He can't imagine how bleak the situation would feel every time one of them went up in the air if he didn't believe whatever separation might come was only temporary, as Harry Crosby himself is so sure of.

There’s a quiet that settles between them for a few moments, just the sound of their breathing, the closeness of their bodies. It’s not the first time Harry’s gone into the air without him—but it’s the first time that he’s done so knowing that he was leaving two people, not one, behind. It’s the first time he’s left John behind in such a fragile state, when any moment could, in theory, be his last—and the stress, Harry suddenly realizes, won’t help.

He cups John's cheek with the hand that only lightly brushed it a few moments earlier; his partner allows it, canting his head slightly to press into the touch.

“Promise me you won’t stress. That you’ll stay as calm as you possibly can. I’ll… I’ll do everything I can to keep us safe up there, and come back to you, John. I’ll pray. I know you’ll pray. I’ll see Father Teska before we go up there tomorrow morning. But you can’t stress. You can’t panic. In your condition, that could… It could make something happen in there. You might abort, or start bleeding. I’ve heard of that happening with women, when they get a shock. Promise me you won’t.”

John swallows. “Harry, I can’t… You know I can’t promise that. You’re going up there to get shot at. I love you. And I can’t do this without you. I know I’m not going to sleep tonight. And I won’t be able to think straight until I know you’re on the ground and safe again. I know you feel the same way when I go up there.” His eyes are starting to well with unshed moisture again, the low dull wall lights glinting off of them like reflections on a pane of glass.

Harry supposes that’s fair.

“…Okay. But please at least… Try to eat. Try to rest. Breathe deeply, try to calm yourself when you can. Don’t go on a… on a hunger strike while I’m not here, okay? You have to eat to live through this, John. And I know how you get when you’re tense. You can at least do that. For me. Please.”

“Okay.” John nods. He blinks rapidly in an apparent attempt to fan away his tears before they fall after that, and Harry wishes he would let them come instead—this should be the safest space in the world to cry, the small warm distance between them, nobody but them around.

He raises himself onto the balls of his feet to bring himself to eye level and presses a kiss to his lips, slow at first, chaste. John’s eyes immediately flutter shut like a doll’s; in the instant before his own close, he watches the tears he was trying to hold back spill over. Brady cants his head to better lock in with Harry’s, the tip of his long nose pressing into Harry’s cheek as his mouth opens to allow his tongue passage, and they stay like that for several minutes, locked together as they share the warmth of a deep, unrushed kiss. Crosby drops the hand on his cheek and brings both arms to embrace him tightly, one hand curling around the side of his neck until his fingers sink into the soft naked flesh, the fingers of the other one splaying out across his shoulderblade, pressing into the muscles of John’s back with his fingertips until the knuckles just north of them blanch. John sighs.

He’d hold him closer, were that a possibility, wants to hold him so close that their two beings overlap and merge into one: one person, one body, one soul. This is the closest they can come without making love, and with the grim spectre of the coming morning looming over them, it goes unspoken that tonight there will be no intimacy of that nature, only frantic caresses, grabbing, kissing, taking in every detail of the other’s bodies as best they can, cataloging in enough vivid detail to hopefully last them the next sixty years if the need comes to pass.

October 8, 1943 — Thorpe Abbotts Air Installation, East Anglia, England
21 weeks.

✦

The crew of M’lle Zig-Zig are told they will be on stand-down for the mission over Bremen. They're flaky after Hanau, or so Smokey diagnosed them. John’s noticed the growing tension in the hut and in the fort's cabin behind him with the passing of days, of course; he's seen his crew wearing thinner and thinner—yet he still can’t help but to wonder if somehow the occupation of his body is what really motivated the call. It's a war, and they've been flying almost every day now. Surely they aren't the only crew this worn down. 

Even if Chick has approved him for flight for these next two weeks, Smokey could always refuse to allow it based on his own mores, subtly exercising his power in other ways to bar them all from flying as a punitive measure for what he has made abundantly clear he regards as a ridiculous, selfish decision. John would hope he's not capable of that—but he's not sure, and so it eats at him.

He's never been more upset to be grounded than he is now, when Harry is going up there and he isn't, when he is to be left behind, left in the dark for hours. He should be there too; he aches to be, the frustration building and building until it overflows as the burn of private tears welling in his eyes. All he can do is wait and pray as his only chance of surviving this goes up in the air to get shot at—and possibly comes back down as a body and not a man.

He tries not to think about the specifics of what this will look like if Harry isn’t at his side, or how it will be possible for him to go on, truly alone, for five more months. When his resolve gives out and some masochistic part of his mind tries to anyways, fleeing an instinctive fear of the unknown even despite the only other option being more pain, he finds he can’t picture it, no matter how hard he tries, no matter what angle he attempts to approach the hypothetical from. There simply is no future without Harry Crosby.

He doesn’t sleep much in the night that precedes what might be Harry’s last breakfast. He lies on his back and stares at the rafters of the Nissen hut that’s been his home for the past several months and tries to keep his mind blank, to not play out in vivid detail all of the horrible ways flak can disassemble a B-17 or a human body. He tries not to think about Curt, and the inferno he died in, or about failing oxygen tanks, or all of the Germans below who want Harry dead. He isn’t wholly successful. There are flashes through his thoughts, little blips of frozen, horrible images thrown by the light of a projector against the flat wall of his mind before he can chase them away, in the moments when his tiredness overtakes him and his conscious willpower fades as he edges closer to sleep he never actually finds for longer than an hour at most, no matter how badly his body needs it.

Flames billowing from behind an engine's motionless propeller, framed by black smoke. Harry bleeding to death in the cabin as crewmen's sticky overlapping hands struggle to stop the endless flow of his hot wet blood from slipping through their fingers, a botched emergency landing. Harry successfully bailing from a ruined craft only to hit the ground wrong and break his neck, or his spine, or hit his head too hard to come back from. Harry wasting away in one of the German stalags. 

It doesn’t help the resurgence of his nausea, or the newfound insomnia.

Fears of sleeping through Harry's departure occupy his intervals of unwelcome wakefulness, but John's eyes open in the darkness at the appointed hour even in the face of his sleep deprivation. He can hear the footsteps and rattling gear and passing conversations of the called-upon airmen outside through the hut's thin corrugated metal walls as the crews make their way down the path outside of the huts, and he pauses for a moment, listening for Harry's voice, a glimpse into the inner thoughts shared only with his crewmates and not himself, things Harry wouldn't tell him for a lack of desire to cause undue worry, even though all worry is due when one cares so deeply about someone about to fly directly into the sights of an enemy who wishes him dead.

John hears nothing. He doesn't encounter Crosby at all until he catches sight of his short frame walking along the asphalt path on his way to the officers’ mess. He picks up his pace and lengthens his strides to catch up with him, but he doesn't run—running is an idea he's met with a sudden new reticence over the past few days, given that common sense would indicate that being jolted around probably isn't good for the thing inside of him.

“Harry.” 

Crosby stops and steps onto the wet grass at the edge of the pavement. They hold eye contact. John swallows.

What else is there to say that they didn't exchange last night, after Harry had been pulled into the briefing room and John and his crew hadn't? ' Please live'?

Crosby reaches out and discreetly squeezes John’s forearm. “I know. I know. Come eat with us. I’m not leaving yet. We’ll do something together when I come back in a few hours, yeah?”

You can’t promise that, John thinks bitterly, as though he hasn’t said the same in the past, but he nods anyway.

✦

Harry doesn’t pray much. He believes in God, of course. He believes that God is behind their just cause, and attended church on most Sunday mornings growing up, but his conversations with the fellow have historically been few and far between. He speaks out of desperation today, and, notably, in front of people, one last plea to follow up his visit with Father Teska for good measure.

He’s discreet about it, almost shy as he rests his elbows on the navigator’s table and intertwines his fingers, bowing his head and closing his eyes. His lips move in the shapes of words he gives no sound to, but he figures God, if He is as omniscient as he has always been told, knows what is being said to him.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.

He swallows. Takes a long, deep breath and slowly exhales through his nose. The table starts vibrating under his elbows with the textured asphalt under the plane’s wheels as the plane lurches into motion and Ev begins taking her down the taxiway.

Please protect me, Lord. Please protect John, and have this pregnancy progress normally, and keep him from worrying over me. Please protect the child. Please keep us alive through this mission. I have to come back to him. And if I don’t… If I die, Lord, please send us to the same heaven. Don’t let this be our last meeting. If I die, don’t let his grief hurt the baby. Please let him live a long, happy life without me.

Amen.

Harry opens his eyes and slowly lets his hands fall. He only realizes after a few moments that Dougie is watching him with interest.

“Didn’t think you prayed, Croz.”

“Yeah, well, usually I don’t. I just have a bad feeling today, and I figure we could use all the help we can get.”

✦

The pre-flight checks and taxiing and final clearances drag on mercilessly, spanning out longer and longer between himself and a conclusion to the question of whether or not the person most precious to him will live or die today.

John's not sure how many hours have actually passed by the time he watches the last of the flock of planes accelerate down the runway while the human figures in his peripheral vision fuck off one by one to go back to their huts or the mundane tasks that still await them around the installation, but finally, the small dot of the last plane vanishes, leaving himself and the baby standing alone at the edge of the hardstand with his heart in his throat, lost by distance alone in the cloudless gray sky.

✦

There isn’t much of anything to do to truly occupy himself in Harry's absence. His appetite has awoken for the day, but John has no desire to eat; truth be told, he’s not even sure if the foods he so desperately craves at the moment would actually be appealing enough in person to will him to overcome the looming barrier of his own faint nausea and less-than-faint anxiety right now.

But he remembers what Harry—hopefully still alive; glancing at his watch, John figures that he can rest knowing he almost certainly still is as of this moment, given that enough time hasn’t passed for them to have yet entered enemy airspace—said to him, when they’d argued at the table.

He has to live. That involves doing everything he can to stack the deck in his favor, namely, feeding this thing. There can't ever come a day when Harry comes back alive and John isn't there to heave a sigh of relief and greet him.

At the officers’ mess, he asks for a plate of the assorted items he feels he’s most likely to be able to stomach and quietly thanks the rather perplexed cook when he hands it to him. Pancakes, with butter. Two slices of toast, with butter and jam. (The jam is iffy, but he hopes it’ll go down okay; there’s sugar and fruit in it and that is probably good for the baby.) Hash browns. A little oatmeal.

He spends the next two hours picking at the bland array, long after the pancakes and hash browns have chilled and the oatmeal has turned to a cold sludge. It's an active effort to stay in his seat and finish the meal—his building restlessness makes the idea of simply getting up and pacing infinitely more appealing than sitting still to graze on cold Army food he doesn't even want, but that kind of vigorous activity sounds like exactly the sort of thing Smokey told him in no uncertain terms not to do, so here he sits.

An hour in, he glances down at his watch as he takes another bite of cold toast. Are they over Germany yet?

He turns his attention to the pancakes, watching the teeth on the end of his butterknife trace little lines into the butter as he smears a gratuitous amount, more than he’d normally feel compelled to ask for, across both of them, paying too much attention to doing so in a perfectly even fashion. Are they taking anti-aircraft fire yet?

John sips his milk; orange juice is now too acidic for him to handle. Is Harry still alive by now? Is he wounded? 

Is his mind running in circles over a man who is already dead on the other side of the English Channel?

Eventually, the food runs out, and with it, he loses the only thing he had to occupy himself. He racks his brain for something to do that isn’t overly physical—none of the reading material he has could possibly hold his attention well enough to distract him from the dire life-or-death peril the other half of his soul is enmeshed in at this very minute.

So his attention moves from the intellectual to the practical. His pants are fucking uncomfortable as it is, so tight by now that they sink red marks into his skin and bear against his growing midsection rather painfully, and he has to suck in just to weasel his way into them. He has another week and change before his discharge, and this thing is growing fast.

He’s growing fast. His body is growing, continuously changing against his will even as he sleeps, distorting itself.

He can’t imagine how much worse his uniform trousers will be after another week of this, so he finally wills up the inner fortitude needed to humiliate himself by asking their quartermaster for bigger clothing. The good thing about being so harrowed with worry, John decides as he starts the long walk across the installation, is that lesser indignities, such as the humiliation of knowing everyone just thinks John Brady’s letting himself get fat in the middle of a war, fall to the wayside in the face of much greater concerns (Harry dying) to such a degree that he simply isn't able to feel all of the emotion they are owed.

So he gets his new pants. There’s less judgment than he thought there would be - this is just another day to quartermasters, and they quite simply aren’t that interested in his life, or him. It’s how he prefers it. And then he’s alone again, waiting, standing outside of the quartermaster's hut with the addition of a new pair of pants slung over one forearm and nothing left to do.

He goes back to his hut and changes into them because he might as well, but the tension in his core only coils tighter and tighter like a spring despite his efforts at distracting himself. They should be wrapping it up by now. They should be on the return trip. Harry should be on the return trip, and close to coming home. He has to be. He cannot conceptualize a reality in which Crosby isn’t flying back with the rest of them.

John lowers himself onto his rack and stares at the ceiling again, now in better-fitting clothes—a new pastime for someone who is about to have nothing but time—for all of ten minutes before the urge to roam overtakes him again. There's nobody else in the hut, just him, and the aloneness feels like it'll be enough to drive him to madness if he stays so much as another minute.

So he flees his living space like a rat from the hold of a sinking ship, thrashing, clawing out in the desperate hope of finding companionship's solid land—the trouble being, of course, that the idea of sharing this moment with anyone else is an unbearable prospect. 

He needs to be alone; he can't stand to be alone. 

Unable to stay under the rafters he's spent so much time staring at over the past few days for even one more minute, John abruptly rises, grabbing the coat he draped over the foot of his rack and shrugging it on as he hurries to the nearly identical hut the powers that be designated as their place of worship.

The newly fabricated church within the perimeter of Thorpe Abbotts looks nothing like the stone and brick Catholic chapels that loomed over his childhood, or All Saint's, further away in the neighboring village. The ceiling feels suffocatingly, claustrophobically low for a place of worship despite being the very same height as that of every other identical prefab hut on base, bearing down on John from above from the moment he steps inside like a tremendous heavy hand. There is no steeple; there are no stained glass panels to get blown to pieces during an air raid, only the iconoclasm of plain corrugated metal walls. The pew he carefully lowers himself onto is as plain and soulless as the flat white walls that enclose the space; its ends and back caps are angular, without the ornamentation he's used to. The woodworking looks new; the bible on the small shelf built into the back of the pew in front of him, similarly, appears recently printed. He wonders how many hands belonging to men who have since died handled it.

Father Teska is in his office, presumably, and John's glad for it. He would be sure to inquire, well-meaning as he is, and ask if he's here to seek pastoral counsel, and John's not sure he's able to hold up a conversation with anyone, even a chaplain, at the moment. Even God.

He makes his prayer of intercession anyway, brief as it is. There isn't much to say, and he won't have to reckon with any answer in words. His mouth moves along with the thoughts he directs the Lord's way, but he doesn't speak.

Please, God. Mother Mary. Please keep him safe. Let him live. I need him. Please keep him safe. Amen.

The rest goes unsaid between them—for lack of words to capture the feeling, he simply sits there, and thinks, deeply, about how much he loves the man, how wholly their souls are intertwined, the devastating void his absence would leave, and hopes that God, in his omniscience, sees that, too.

He remains in place after that, staring into the vacant space behind the pulpit where he's used to seeing sculptural beauty and stained glass. He doesn't look at his watch; he's not sure how much time has passed when in the place of the low, comforting clang of church bells the one-room chapel fills with the high-pitched wails of ambulances and shrill ring of alarms outside heralding the sight of the first returning craft limping back among the clouds.

✦

John walks briskly, as briskly as he can, but he does not run, even as his heart races and everything in him screams Faster! It's frustrating, moving so slowly, being unable to dash like everyone else does as they flock to the hardstand, but he wills himself to keep himself planted on the ground. 

His heart races and his breath remains to be caught when he comes to a stop at the tarmac's grassy edge and squints up at the pale gray sky, surrounded by children and ground crew and Red Cross girls doing the very same.

Black smoke billows in a long trail behind the engines of the first fort as it descends toward the runway, carried on wings with new holes punched through them. It’s not the first mission Harry has gone on without him since being transferred to Ev’s plane, but a new sinking, shadowy dread overwhelms him as he watches the first plane touch down this time.

It’s different now. He doesn’t even plan to keep the child; it won’t have a father, either way. But he can’t do this without Harry. His life hangs in the balance as he waits for the next fort to break from the generous cloud layer while the first slows to a crawl at the end of the runway and the surgeons start dragging out wounded, not just Harry Crosby’s life, as had every time before.

The second craft appears, a stark hunter green juxtaposed against its brilliant cyan-and-white backdrop. It is not Just A’Snappin.

The third appears. Not Harry’s.

The seventh appears. Not Harry’s. John stomach churns. He feels lightheaded.

The eighth appears. Not Harry’s.

He waits. Crews are disembarking by now. The ambulances are filling. The next planes in the succession appear, dizzying: nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. And then they stop. 

That's it. Thirteen planes.

There is no Everett Blakely. 

There is no Harry.

Only empty sky and the ground giving out under him as the wounded continue pouring out of every open window and door of the returning aircraft like ants spilling from a disturbed mound.

✦

Now he runs, desperate to catch up with someone, anyone, before they disappear behind the doors of the interrogation room, ignoring the familiar shouts entirely— “Nobody say a word until interrogation! Keep your mouths shut until interrogation! Save it! Keep it moving!” —it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. All that matters is whether or not Harry is dead or alive.

He reaches blindly into the mass of bodies pouring off of the planes, grabbing arms and shoulders, asking the same frantic question over and over: “Chutes? Were there any chutes? Did you see any chutes from Just A’Snappin’? Any chutes from Blakely’s bird?”

“Look, buddy, I don’t know”—“Don’t know, the flak was so heavy we didn’t get a chance to see”—“we lost sight of them”—“they took heavy fire”—“couldn’t tell ya”— and that’s the most that he hears. He's begging by the time crew number thirteen disembarks, and still there's no answer.

The stream of intact bodies coming from the cabins and cockpits comes to a trickle, then a halt. The doors to the interrogation hut close behind the last man. The ambulances drive away. The mechanics start hooking up planes, wasting no time in dragging them off of the crisscrossing taxiways into areas where they can be worked on in earnest, having by now extinguished all of the fires onboard and on wings and engines.

The air smells like smoke and the faintest twinge of human blood. John feels terribly cold, the only person left loitering on the hardstand with no clear sense of direction or purpose for being there, and nauseous. 

He bends over and vomits in the grass. And then he straightens back up, wipes his mouth, and resumes waiting for someone, anyone, to emerge.

✦

It takes an hour and a half for the news to crash down upon him: an obliterated fuselage, four chutes deploying from a plane that carried more than four crewmen, an equation that freezes everything inside of him. Harry is dead, or maybe he was one of the four, and maybe he survived the drop and the landing, and maybe whatever frightened, resentful German civilian who finds him won’t kill him on sight, and maybe he’ll make it all the way to the stalag system and survive until the end of the war. It’s a lot of maybes, more than his heart can bear, and the outcome will be the same regardless of the details in how it is reached: he will be spending the rest of the war without Harry. Unless there is some miracle and he gets out of it like Quinn and Bailey did, which is unlikely considering that he went down over the German heartland, John will be enduring this alone. Entirely alone. 

After the baby is born and he goes home, he may then spend the rest of his life without Harry Crosby, and because he cannot simply will himself to love someone else instead, he will eventually die alone, his one chance at loving and being loved spent by age twenty-five.

Tears well in John's eyes, burning, and he knows he’s helpless to stop them. They’ve all lost friends before, but this is different. This isn't a death. It is the end of his world, of their world. He doesn’t want to believe it’s true. He wants to believe that it’s something like Curt’s landing in some family’s cabbage patch, that he’s safe somewhere and just wasn’t seen or found. But he can't.

And faced with eternity, John crumbles.

He lies in his rack, blanket pulled up to his neck, and shoves his face into his pillow as though trying to smother himself, silencing his wails, clenching his hands into fists so tight his nails threaten to break the skin of his palms at his sides. He’s lost friends before. They all have. He’d only shed a few tears then, and then he’d tucked the grief away for later processing at a more opportune time. He’d kept moving. But there won’t be a war to focus on for much longer, no grand reason to keep on keeping on, just the emptiness of an ended career and solitude and a life without Harry in it, permanently tainted by the knowledge of what it is to be loved by him.

And now, here he is, the one left behind: all while a part of Harry’s being remains enmeshed in his body, still alive. He'll eternally part with that, too, and grieve what remains of him anew, when he willingly gives away the last living traces of Harry Crosby left on this earth in five months. He's not entirely dead, not while the child is alive—but the thing isn't for him to keep. He’s unmarried. He’s 25. He has no wife to raise it, and he knows nothing at all about children or parenting or how to be responsible for an entire human life, let alone one that might have things terribly wrong with it. He doesn't want a child, only closeness to his lover's ghost.

So he will mourn Harry, and then he will mourn the small flicker of him that remains in the soul of their newborn child. It is an anguish unlike anything John Brady has ever felt in his life.

Chapter Text

John isn’t sure exactly how long he spends lying face-down in bed, or exactly how much time it takes for his body’s seemingly endless well of tears to finally run dry. But eventually, the crying stops, leaving him to lie listless and quiet under the weight of his blankets, too exhausted to make sound, silently exhaling ragged breaths into the same wet pillow he's pressed to his stinging eyes, held down under the cold heavy hand of his own grief.

At some point—he's not sure how many hours have passed since he got the news—the door to the hut audibly opens behind him, though he doesn't lift his head to confirm what he's heard with his no doubt blurred eyesight. Hopefully, whoever it is will assume he’s sleeping and leave him be, or have the decency to realize he's not sleeping and leave him alone with his grief anyway, but he knows from the moment the door's unoiled hinges creak on the other side of the room that’s not likely. Everyone knew he and Harry were friends, even if nobody but the medical personnel and Harding (and probably now Bucky) know the full extent of their attachment to each other—and how a significant remnant of that attachment lingers on in his body even now that half of their union is dead. Someone is liable to check on him, as he would were any of the guys to lose their own close friends—as he has in the past, when buddies of his crewmen have died. It's only now, as he experiences it himself, that he wonders if his gentle probes into the well-being of the mourners were welcome ones.

The door shuts softly behind whoever it is, deliberately and gently closed instead of simply released to swing shut with its usual bang. John appreciates the absence of its loudness, throbbing as his temples now are. Boot soles scrape on the wooden floor behind him, a sound that gains volume and clarity as the interloper nears, then stop at the edge of his bed.

From the first syllable, the voice is identifiable as Johnny Hoerr's deep, familiar Baltimore accent.

“John…” His copilot starts, then falters before he gets any further. Abruptly, John finds every molecule of his being seized by the irrational urge to scream Fuck off loudly enough to lose what remains of his voice after the strain of the hysterical sobbing that came earlier, but he lacks the energy for that level of harshness. Instead, Brady says nothing, and gives no acknowledgement that he's listening, his focus moving to the slow rise and fall of his chest each time it pushes down into the thin mattress. “We’re going to go drink. You coming?”

What do you think? he thinks in sharp, immediate response, surly for what he knows is no good reason. Johnny is being kind; the problem is simply that John Brady is in no condition to receive kindness right now. His damp eyes narrow against the rough wet fabric of his cotton pillowcase, but in the seconds before giving his answer he sits with the actual idea of staying behind while everyone else drinks—no doubt long into the night, long after the empty hut has first grown dark and quiet and cool with the night air around him—and concludes with absolute clarity that it would be too much to bear. He doesn't have a choice, not really, when any grief or distress surpassing the black void of anguish that now consumes him is beyond his ability to imagine. 

And maybe—maybe alcohol will prove to be some kind of anaesthetic, however mild, however temporary. Anything to lessen his agony in this moment. 

John sniffs. He must seem everything the grieving widow, and that will only further be the case once he lifts his head and meets Johnny's eyes with his own bloodshot ones, the skin around them pink and raw with the chafe of unstopping tearshed, an impression cemented as soon as he allows his copilot to see the flush he knows his nose and face will have taken on from the crying. He’s seen plenty of guys cry over their friends here, but it’s never something that’s remarked upon—never—and while he hasn’t judged them for it, he hasn’t ever wanted to be in their shoes, either. He doesn’t want to be seen as someone who cries, at least not in front of others, and the state of him makes him clear that this has extended beyond the shed of a few masculine tears, acceptable in the alternate dimension of a war, for a fallen brother. He has been sobbing, hysterical, like a woman, only further evidence, perhaps, that he was never really wholly male to begin with. He wonders if Harry would have cried like this, were the situations reversed, or if he would have been reserved and contained in his grief like both of them were raised to be and only one of them managed.

Johnny will know he's been crying off-and-on for hours, and he's not stupid, so he'll probably connect the dots as to why. But it's not like John has much to lose anyway at this point, considering that he'll be dropping out of the Army Air Force at the end of the week. And even if he did—even if he doesn't want to talk to anyone, he can't be alone, either.

John’s head hammers when he finally lifts it from the pillow, his inflamed sinuses a pounding ache at the front of his face. He gracelessly wipes at his eyes and then the wetness under his swollen nose with the sleeve of his uniform shirt after he pushes himself up, his feet still in the socks he hadn’t taken the time to pull off before crashing into bed hours earlier as they come to rest on the cold smooth floor. He doesn’t make direct eye contact, even though that probably only adds to the pathetic image he’s casting here.

“Alright," he croaks. "Give me five. Yeah?”

“Alright, John. That sounds good.” Johnny reaches out and squeezes his shoulder. John doesn’t bother to shake his hand away, or to even acknowledge it. “We’ll be waiting for you, okay?”

He'll be expected: accountability. That's on purpose. Johnny's not stupid.

Hoerr pauses for a moment, like he's thinking about saying something and ultimately chooses not to, then turns and leaves, shutting the door behind himself just as gently as he did on the way in. After a few moments sitting upright, staring blankly at the edge of the nearest rack, John eventually slides his feet back into his brown leather oxfords and bends forward to lace them up, his fingers cold and clumsy with disuse.

He immediately regrets it. Bending forward only serves to make him acutely aware of the small swell to his midsection, which, for the first time in his life, gently presses into to the tops of his thighs, though not (yet) entirely inhibiting.The reminder of what he now has to live with alone comes as a sudden, acute stab of pain added atop the overwhelming expanse of his own grief.

How long until I can't even do up my laces? I'm grotesque. And this is only four months. Not even the halfway point. Maybe it's better that he never lived long enough to see what I'd end up looking like. Assuming I live.  

John abandons the thoughts there. He can't even begin to humor any abstract concept of the future right now, not when it feels like something that has wholly ceased to exist with Harry Crosby's death.

Maybe there really is no future. Is there really anything ahead for him now, other than more pain? The rest of his life has never seemed as bleak as it does now, and in all the times remotely approaching this level of despair, he had known at the time, on some level, that emotions were influencing his perception of reality. This, for the first time in John's life, feels to be a cold, rational analysis of his prospects: Harry is dead; if the pregnancy doesn't kill him, he'll live another sixty years without loving or being loved, having burnt the one chance at love God allotted him down to the wick in under a year. God designs one person, only one, for each of His children, made like interlocking parts to spend a lifetime together. But what happens when one of them dies at 24? 

There's nothing left but to endure the mutilation of his body as an unwilling passenger, and the damage the child—whom he'll have to live with abandoning if it doesn't die—deals to him will be presumably be something he suffers with for the rest of his life, for all of the sixty or seventy someodd years he will now spend simply waiting to pass into heaven and rejoin Harry, assuming this is punishment enough for the adultery and he doesn't have a layover in Purgatory.

Harry, who may have moved on. He doesn't doubt that their love was mutual, but—sixty years or more is a long, long time. There will be other good people in Heaven, maybe better than him, and they weren't with each other for that long in the grander scheme of things, were they? He knows, with every atom of his being, that Harry was the one he was supposed to spend his life with—but what are a few months compared to eternity?

John feels a rising wave of sickness for what isn't the first time today, though it takes on a different character than the usual manifestation of his nausea. Any joy he could feel, any rhetorical, far-away source of happiness his mind can conjure up in abstract, all of the things he thought about in connection to the often-parroted phrase 'when this is all over'—buying a home, teaching music—would only be poisoned by the pain of Harry’s absence, overshadowed entirely by the empty space where he was always supposed to be. There's nothing. Harry is gone, and there's just nothing—nothing but opportunities for more pain, more physical suffering.

Already he wants to simply get back into bed and lie there like a corpse until he can escape the feeling in sleep. It's a small victory, remaining sitting upright on the edge of his rack with his shoes laced, even if he can't bring himself to stand up and leave—the closest he comes is staring at the crack where the long edge of the door meets its wooden frame, periodically interrupted by rusting hinges—but it doesn't feel that way. 

A thought occurs to him, insidious, too quick to snuff out as something a person shouldn't think: Maybe, if he's lucky, he'll only live a few more months. Or maybe God will end his suffering and reunite them when he goes up sometime next week. 

And it occurs to him with terrible clarity that, for the first time in his life, he wants to die. 

It's a strange thought, after the endless flow of blood-freezing terror that's marked the past week, the instinct-driven fear he's had to fight through to climb into the cockpit on every mission. After so long desperately clinging to any chance to improve his odds of survival, John Brady feels finished at twenty-five. There's nothing left.

He's ready to let go, and he can't. 

His time is God's decision and God's decision alone; taking matters into his own hands would land him in Hell, and then he'd never see Harry. Reflexive guilt floods every burnt-out synapse at the very idea of wanting to die at all, in any fashion, a terrible, laughable thing to want when so many people have died around him, have died horribly, and would give anything for another minute on this earth. It's something nobody should want. His parents and siblings would grieve him, and he has to fight the war for another week, because the Nazis go on regardless of how individual men are feeling.

And he must keep his body alive, his heart beating and lungs moving, to keep this thing within him alive. All other complicating factors aside, if he were to extinguish the wavering flame of his own existence now, he would kill an innocent child that did nothing but exist as a consequence of his own idiocy. God would never forgive him for that. He would never forgive himself for that.

A renewed understanding that there truly is to be no escape from his suffering sinks over him like the heavy layers of a fire blanket snuffing out flames. John Brady must remain alive, and keep his body alive, no matter the state of the soul inhabiting it, even if that soul is all but lifeless, a dried-out husk inside of a living body. He must, as a ruling from God, as a moral imperative. He wants to cry again. His throat feels tight all over again, but no tears come. Maybe he's run out.

The welts his fingernails left in the beds of his palms when he first fell into bed and began to weep hours ago sting now, but he ignores it. It's an inconsequential pain, in the grander scheme of things; he's hardly aware of it, only the faintest brush at the edges of his senses alongside the discomfort of his inflamed sinuses and aching temples and the raw, sensitive skin around his eyes. He doesn’t feel like drinking, or doing anything, or living. But they’re waiting for him, and Johnny has undoubtedly told them by now that he’ll be coming, so he can’t not show up.

Maybe he knew that when he agreed. Maybe this is by his own unconscious design.

John finally breaks his motionless stare to turn toward his nightstand and check his face in the small shaving mirror set atop it: his skin is as damp and pale and blotchy as he expected it to be, and his nose is flushed almost scarlet. His lashes stick together, wet and several shades darker, over irritated pink skin. He looks like shit, and about as awful as he feels.

Hopefully the growing dimness of evening and the shitty lighting in the officers’ club, as well as everyone else’s new losses to grieve, will mask it. At the very least, he can trust the other guys will have the basic decency not to mention it, to not make the gaping wound ripped open across his chest for all to see a topic of conversation.

John stares at his reflection for a last long moment, glad he can't see the rest of his body, then rises at last, standing still for a moment as he weathers the unpleasant headrush that accompanies bringing himself to his feet before following Johnny's cold trail out onto the web of interconnected asphalt paths that link together every building on the massive compound.

✦

The air is cold on the damp skin of his face, and he can hardly breathe for the weight of his chest as he leaves the hut and starts the walk toward the officers’ club. Congested as he now is, he can barely take in any of the cold air through his nose, so the chill of it instead bites at his hoarse throat with every breath through his mouth. He’s sure that that, too, will make it to the sound of his voice when he talks to them. 

The bar is too loud when he steps into it after the only briefly interrupted silence of his own empty hut, but at least the dim, shitty lighting doesn't add any strain to his sore eyes; if anything, it's darker in here than it was out there. He doesn’t learn until he’s re-integrated himself into the herd of men at the bar to get his first drink—a whiskey double—that Buck Cleven’s plane went down, too, and he thinks, bitterly, that the gaggle he has to push through to get the barkeep's attention seems far more upset about Buck Cleven than Harry Crosby.  

Some rational part of him understands that Buck is their leader, and he, too, always sort of figured Buck would be the last man standing; it's maybe more of a shock than the loss of humble, ordinary Harry Crosby—yet still he finds himself unable to bear one more word about the guy, his grasp on his glass tightening and tightening through the conversation until he's sure it's close to shattering like a hollow eggshell in his grip, his jaw so tense it aches.

He doesn’t give a shit about Buck Cleven. Who fucking cares about Buck Cleven? Harry Crosby is dead, and the world has ended because of it, and he’s a footnote, an afterthought, in the wake of the disappearance of the star of the show. Like his life, the one that mattered more than any other here, matters less. He can barely stomach it, but at least Cleven's absence is less pronounced when he fucks off to the small table Johnny and the rest of M’lle’s crew have settled at with his newly acquired, already half-finished drink; Johnny, about as extroverted as he is, has chosen a table away from the bar, against the wall beside the hut's side entrance and the bathrooms. He would have chosen a similar place himself, and he's glad for it.

They all look up and their low conversations pause when he comes to the edge of the table, the only one standing while they all sit, late and looking like shit and acutely aware of it. He feels seen, more uncomfortably seen than he maybe ever has in his life, like they're all inspecting his entrails as though looking through him like the Picker X-Ray Machine that first delivered the life-ruining news of the pregnancy. 

Johnny breaks the silence as Hambone scoots his chair over some to leave room to pull out the empty one beside it. "John! Glad you could make it. Here, we saved you a seat."

Hambone pushes a full glass of whiskey toward him, the bottom of the glass grinding on the wooden tabletop as the two mostly-molten icecubes still floating in the amber waters clink against each other, as soon as he sits down in the seat they saved for him. "See you got your own drink. We grabbed you one already, top it up, you're almost dry."

He does, trying to configure his lips into something like an appreciative smile as he refills his glass to the top edge without question and mostly failing. It's more painfully apparent now that he's seated with the whole crew, not just Johnny checking in at the bedside, that this ongoing outburst, this feminine storm of overwhelming, hysterical emotion, is a failure on his part—as their pilot and as a man. They flew with Croz too, just as long as he did, and none of them are crying. He shouldn’t be seen like this, in shambles, clearly having spent a substantial amount of time weeping and weeping hard; it's different than the more acceptable sober air that hangs over the table where Crosby’s former crewmates have gathered to have their drinks, a little bit more pronounced than it is everywhere else.

Dead. Harry’s dead.

“Thanks, Ham.” John throws back three deep successive swallows, each one a little too much, making his throat ache with the stretch of the liquid at the same time the whiskey burns its way down. He barely feels any of it; he can only hope that the cold on the walk outside has at least worked a little to constrict the dilated blood vessels giving his otherwise pale face its blotchy flush, because the alcohol won't help bring it down. Not that any of them don’t already know him well enough to assume he has cried or will cry over this, probably. They all knew how close they were.

To that effect, he can tell, just by the delicate way they look at him, that they’re walking on eggshells, treating him with care. They feel sorry for him. He’s sunken to such pathetic levels since finding out the bad news, apparently, that he can’t even find the energy to object with this handling, to argue with them. He just hovers at the edges of their conversations, included without being pressured to speak, for an indeterminate amount of time, the passing of minutes and hours just as much of a blur as it was in his hut.

He’s on his third whiskey, immersed in a more dull sort of grief, when the time the cherry of a lit cigarette appears in the doorway beside them with Ev Blakely, scraped up but alive and breathing, following behind it. John's heart stops in his chest. He watches with wide eyes as the rest of the Just A’Snappin’ crew parade in behind him, pouring in through the narrow entryway, still in their sheepskins and flightsuits, his mouth half-ajar.

Croz is there, with a shaky smile that makes him feel like his heart is going to burst in his chest before Harry's even noticed he's there. Harry Crosby, whom he thought he’d never seen again, is alive, breathing, talking, real. Everything in him soars as he pulls his pipe from his mouth and shoves his chair back with a loud, abrupt scrape, muscles newly energized, the alcohol's effect abruptly shaken off.

“Holy shit, it’s Blakely’s crew!” Crank whips around where he stands at the bar, beaming as John briskly strides toward the newly returned airmen and squeezes between bodies to whirl around and face them.

“Jesus, we thought you bought it!”

For some reason, even in his joy, John can feel that his face lacks the exuberance in the expressions of those around him—and maybe there's an irrational cautiousness, as though this might be some sort of a dream. Can he know that it wasn't? 

“They reported four chutes outta your ship,” he says, searching their faces, uncomprehending. His heart races. He’d wept, he’d started to mourn, he’d thought Harry was dead. He’d thought he was alone, and he’d thought Harry was dead, and here he is. Alive. Meeting his eyes, holding them. He feels like a hallucination, some kind of mirage drawn up by a desperate, grieving mind. It’s a struggle not to cry again as Ev answers. His throat feels tight.

“Guess someone can’t count, no one bailed.” There’s a pause, like he’s teetering on the precipice of delivering hard news, but John hardly cares. All that matters, no matter how selfish it might be to think this way, is that Harry is here and in one piece. God and the Virgin Mary answered his prayers. Ev sighs. “Via and Yevich are in the hospital, and we lost Saunders.”

John meets his eyes, nodding as he’s supposed to do: that could have been Harry. But it wasn’t, and that’s the only thing that he can possibly care about in this moment. He looks at him again, cataloguing his face. Harry comes to stand beside him, in his immediate space, discreetly pressing into his side as John again faces Ev: I’m here.

“Where’d you land?”

Dougie answers for him, similarly decorated in a colorful array of cuts and scrapes. “Some RAF airfield outside of Loddon. It was a hell of a hairy belly landing.”

Harry’s voice cuts in beside him. John immediately turns to look at him. “Two engines shot, whole fuselage full of holes.”

And any of them could have killed him. Bullets that punched through a cold metal fuselage could have easily cut through his body, soft and organic and human. A frantic urge to pull Harry away from the crowd, to go somewhere private, where it’s just them, and check his whole body for damage, confirm that he’s okay and alive, rises within him until it's almost impossible to bear. Miraculously, John manages to keep his facial expression schooled as they continue detailing the plane’s gore, his heart sinking deeper and deeper, his blood chilling, as the picture of how close Harry came to the permanent sleep takes on growing, horrible clarity. He knows already that their words are painting the images that will haunt his nightmares for the next coming months, if not the rest of his life.

“Yeah, some Brit mechanic counted em all, how much was it, twelve hundred?”

Harry presses his lips together, brows raising, and nods emphatically. “Twelve hundred.”

And none of them hit Harry. Thank you, God. Thank you, Mother Mary, for answering my prayers. Thank you for keeping him safe. 

They keep going. John wishes they wouldn't.

“Stabilizer was totally shredded. Couldn’t get the wheels down.”

Stop. Stop. That's enough. Don't tell us any more. I don’t want to think about this.

Ev cants his head to the side. “Don’t worry, the brakes still worked—” he gestures with his cigarette, popping his jaw to one side. “‘Til we hit the runway.”

Everyone chuckles. John doesn’t. There’s nothing funny about the fact that they just came close to death, even if he knows that’s not why a single soul in the room is laughing right now. He doesn't know if he'll ever laugh again—he's felt the world end and be reborn anew in the span of less than twenty-four hours, and he's still reeling through the first aftershocks.

Dougie throws an arm over Blakely’s taller shoulders and gives him a shake, leaning into his side, beaming as he turns to give him his undivided attention. “It was a goddamn miracle that this man, Everett Blakely, landed her at all.”

Blakely, flattered, gestures with his cigarette held between index and middle. “The miracle was Croz’s bearing. One degree off, and we’re in the drink.”

“Pure luck,” Harry says, eternally humble.

Something strange happens.

With no warning, their discordant buoyancy becomes contagious. All at once, John's feelings of dread and horror and the emotional—and adrenal—exhaustion of the day's events fall to the wayside as it sweeps over him, too, a strange, detached giddiness that seizes everything in him and refuses to let go. Harry’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive. They’re going to be okay. It really sinks in, now, leaving all of the ghoulish details around the event irrelevant: He made it out. He’s alive. God answered John Brady's prayers this time. Harry is alive. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life alone.

He whips around to face Harry again with a grin he can feel taking over his whole face, overcome with adoration and warmth. His cheeks and the corners of his mouth ache with the sustained intensity of it as he reaches out and breaks the touch barrier between himself and his partner at last, gripping the warm solidity of his shoulder under its leather jacket, proving to himself that Harry’s real, and he’s here, alive and in living flesh.

“Yeah, you do it too often for it to be luck!”

“Then he managed to navigate us smack into the only tree for miles, so…”

Ev cuts in again. “A natural. The only tree in East Anglia.” Dougie starts laughing. So does Croz, his face losing some of its pensive sadness. It passes between them like a contagion, until John starts laughing too, too loud and too bright for the space, his hand still moored to Harry’s shoulder, long thin fingers gripping for dear life even in the burst of joy.

Ev points with the hand holding his cigarette. “Harry Crosby! Greatest Navigator in the Eighth Air Force!”

He wants to kiss him, so badly, more than he ever has before. He needs to get him alone. There’s a surefire way to do that.

“Alright, who’s drinking, I’m buying! Crank is too!”

Crank raises his brows amid the herd of bodies already bustling towards the bar. “I am?”

John slaps his shoulder. “Yeah you are! Whatever they want!”

Crank lets out a little laugh before going to join them. “Well, alright then.”

And then, finally, he’s able to lock eyes with Harry, who’s stayed exactly where he first planted himself beside him when they first came in, searching his face, his smile falling into something more disbelieving than rowdy. He realizes a second later that his hand is still anchored to Harry’s shoulder. The lump is returning to his throat, his emotions only held at bay as long as they strictly needed to be and not a moment longer. John's eyes begin to well as the euphoria fades to something more grounded, more serious.

“You lived. You’re alive,” he whispers, just barely audible over the bar's din, addressing him alone for the first time. “Oh, God, you’re alive.”

“Not here—John, not here, hold on—" Harry says, grabbing his arm, pulling him toward the narrow painted cinderblock side hall Ev just emerged from like Christ from the cave, lengthening his strides to accommodate for the damper his small stature puts on speed. 

“The water treatment plant,” he says, quiet and urgent and just loud enough for the two of them to hear, his voice more gentle than it usually is when he's the one beckoning John in that direction. “Same as always. Come on.”

John doesn’t have to be told twice. His hand trembles as it finally releases its hold and falls from Harry’s shoulder in the interests of following after him more quickly than he can do attached.

But it’s a long walk to the plant, a long time keeping their hands to themselves, longer than John thinks he can manage. It’s longer than it would be fair for anyone to expect him to manage.

What he does when the double doors to the officers' club close behind them on their way out is stupid and impulsive, ludicrously risky—and John knows it. He knows it well enough to at least pull Harry to the side of the hut, away from the twin windows at the tops of the closed doors beside them, which someone on their way to the bathroom could see through—but he can't contain the overwhelming tide of his affection, his joy, any longer in the interest of common sense. In the split second before John takes a quick frantic scan of what can be seen of their dark, desolate surroundings in the streetlamps dotting the paths, Harry looks bewildered and a little alarmed, but before he has a chance to ask what's happening, John, confident they aren't being watched and won't be for the few seconds he needs, snatches up the front of his shirt in a tight fist and pulls him in with the other arm to press a hard, rushed kiss to his lips, using his back to block the exact nature of the moment’s closeness from any unnoticed passersby behind them as Harry's shoulders and the back of his hand gently press into the wall. He feels like his own body is being torn in two when he forces himself to pull away a second or two later, breathless just from that brief instant of renewed closeness.

“If I were a girl I would have done that as soon as you came in the door.”

“And I would have let you. I would have jumped into your arms. But we can't do this here, John, come on, Sweetheart. I missed you. Let’s go. Let’s go, I don’t want to have to sneak around.” Harry’s hand finds his, squeezing it tight for a moment before pulling him back towards the path. The glow from the dim cage light over the double doors glints off his toothy smile. “Let’s take our time.”

✦

The brick building that houses the Thorpe Abbotts water treatment plant is set amongst a thicket of young trees at the furthest edge of the base, connected to the installation's greater attractions by a narrow, poorly lit asphalt path bordered by unraked branches and fallen leaves on either side. It feels like an eternity comes to pass before their long, brisk strides take them to the outpost's recognizably less dense outskirts, walking alongside each other in mutually understood silence, their souls trembling in anticipation of the coming chance to speak to each other, to see each other out of the prying gazes of men who wouldn't understand.

As expected, and as it always has been on their previous evening visits, the plant is quiet and dark and empty: there aren’t many people running maintenance on a water treatment plant at 7 P.M. the day of a mission. Just enough light manages to enter the stale air through the small high windows in the brick for them to properly see each other’s faces, and the building smells earthy, almost like a rootcellar, with faint traces of mildew and chlorine, but it's as perfect a place as he could dream up to get away together on a military installation. The smell has come to be a comforting one, a familiar balm, a signal that the reprieve of human closeness is soon to come over the past few months.

Harry shuts the door behind them and latches the primitive hook above the doorknob into the eye screw on the doorframe to lock it, at least as long as nobody kicks or pushes the door too awfully hard. As soon as he does, John whirls around, the tears spilling over after being held at bay far too long, grabbing his face with both hands so roughly that his fingertips dig into Harry’s cheeks. Harry lifts his chin at the same time as John presses his forehead to his own and closes his eyes.

“Harry. Oh, God, Harry. I thought I was going to—that— I thought I was going to be alone, without you, and—"

“Shh. Shhh. Never, John. Never. I love you so much.” Harry raises himself onto the balls of his feet and presses a frenetic kiss to his lips, one that lasts several seconds, wrapping his arms around him and splaying his fingers over John’s shoulderblades. It feels good to be held. He realizes only now that he's needed to be held since he first got the news. "I’ve got you. I’ve got you, John."

I've got you. It's exactly what he needed to hear, after today, and it's so easy to believe now that Harry's here again. In the face of his tenderness, he falls apart, drowning a single soft sob in their kiss, feeling the wetness collect on the soft flesh under his jaw. When Crosby surfaces for air, he keeps his face just as close, his voice soft; John feels the warmth of his breath against his own lips. “Let’s just… have a nice night together. Forget about everything that just happened for a little while. I could use that, too. One hell of a flight.”

John sniffs. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

✦

“Good. God, I missed you.” Harry drops his one arm to squeeze John’s bicep, the other sliding down his side to grasp at the top of his hip—and maybe it’s just in his head, but it feels a little softer than it used to—not by much and certainly not to the degree that a woman’s would, but his hand doesn’t immediately find the crest of John’s pelvis like it used to, either.

“Want you,” he murmurs, going out on a limb—whether or not John will requite his desperate, pressing desire for further intimacy in the wake of everything that's just threatened to separate them is entirely up in the air, a big blank uncertain space in the interaction ahead, but he wants so badly that the risk of offense feels negligible when regarded in the shadow of potential intimacy with this man. He could die tomorrow. John could die tomorrow—or an hour from now, even without ever going up in the sky in his current state—and he only has a week left on base before he goes back to America, the last time they’ll conceivably see each other again until the end of the war. And that's provided that Harry Crosby lives to come home to him, and that John is alive to meet him.

He intends upon treasuring every moment with him this week, remembering every part of him, creating as many memories, vivid ones, as he possibly can. It feels like the only way to keep himself from going mad in the wake of their shared mortality. More than anything, he'd like to remember this, what it feels like to be as close to him as two people in their circumstances can be, moving as one, sharing mutual joy and intimacy. If John will allow it.

“I—” John falters for a moment, his hands relaxing a little on Harry’s cheeks, seemingly without his realizing it. Harry's heart sinks as his mistake immediately becomes apparent. Of course. 

John draws back a little, so that Harry can see all of his face in the low light, uncertainty written all across it. His stomach churns a little. The air is cold between them. “Harry, you know I want you too, I just—”

✦

What is there even to say? Surely Harry knows.

His body has changed, gradually distorting more and more with every passing day; a bomb rests within him like unexploded ordnance slowly growing moss in an English field. What might provoke the insidious thing inside of him? What might be too much for his body to take?

What is too much for him, John Brady, to take? How much can he be seen before it simply becomes too much?

Harry and everyone else can tell that he’s grown, John's sure. He had to switch out his pants this morning, for fuck’s sake. Now that the veil of denial shrouding his own body has been forcibly pulled back, he sees the faint swell to his own midsection with new clarity, the ‘bloating’ that’s far too severe to actually be bloating, or anything other than gained weight or a growing, unwelcome fetus or a combination of the two.

How could Harry, or anyone, authentically desire him like this, while his body is warped, hovering in ambiguity between man and woman?

Harry's telling him he wants him while his A2 is still on. It obscures the small swell that pushes out over his waistband and presses into the front of the button-down shirt he probably also should have requested a larger substitute for; he hasn't seen that part of him yet. He's not offering what he's offering knowing what the body he wishes to be intimate with truly looks like.

Pregnant. Visibly pregnant, if one knows what they’re looking at, and getting fat if they don’t. It’s the least desirable he’s ever felt in his life; even the bright pink acne outbreaks marring the smooth skin of teenage years don’t hold a candle to this.

Does Harry expect him to remove his jacket—to unveil his body—if he agrees? He’ll surely be disappointed with what he finds, should he do so, and John finds himself struck with a sudden fear that Harry will pretend he isn’t, that he’ll soldier through sex that he doesn’t actually want to have simply for fear of hurting his feelings, or making him feel any worse, any more grotesque than he already does. He might feel obligated, given that it's his child malforming his body in this way. He probably feels responsible. It would be so totally like Harry Crosby to do so that the vision momentarily feels like it's already playing out.

—But he wants him. God, he wants him. Even the prospect of sex is impossibly alluring right now, leaving him frozen at an impasse, completely torn. John opens his mouth and tries to form words—even though he doesn’t know what it actually is that he plans on saying—and fails entirely, other than a little wordless sound, his lips twitching in silence.

Harry's eyes widen with a single, obvious sentiment: Shit. He backpedals, loosening his grasp on John’s arm a little. “It’s okay if you don’t want to. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t… I shouldn’t pressure you like this, I don’t know if the doctor even said it was okay, or if you want to when you’re… feeling this awful, or… I kind of let my dick take control for a moment there, I…”

John watches him. His throat feels tight all over again. “Harry, I don’t think you really… I don’t think you realize how much I’ve changed. I’ve been hiding it. I’m not like I was, I’m…” John doesn’t actually say the word pregnant. He's not sure if he can. To say it would be to make this all terribly real.

✦

John's barely uttered the word pregnant since this all began, so it shouldn’t come as any particular surprise that he doesn't do so now, but Harry still feels the silence when he trails off just in time to avoid it.

“I’ve changed.”

“John. No. You’ve barely changed, you’re barely even showing at all. Nobody can tell. I wouldn’t know if you hadn’t told me. I wouldn’t have even noticed.” Shit. That sure makes him sound like an attentive lover. Great going, Crosby. “And I still want you.” He squeezes his bicep. “Badly. If you’ll have me.”

“It’s not about whether or not I’ll have you, Harry. You know how badly I want you. Especially after today. I’m just…” John glances to the side, breaking eye contact. “I just don’t know if you’ll still want me. I’ve been hiding it. You don’t know the extent of this.”

“Then show me. Give me a chance. John, you could never be unattractive to me. And it’s—even if we don’t keep it, it’s my damn baby. That counts for something, right?”

“Does it?” He’s not sure he’s ever seen John look so uncertain. He’s always been so confident, aloof, unflappable, up until now.

“Yes, John. It does. And you’re the bravest man I know. That counts for something, too.”

John presses his lips together in a firm line, torn, and swallows before speaking a moment later. “I just… I don’t want you to feel obligated, okay?”

“I’m not. Sweetheart, I promise I’m not. Can I…” Harry's eyes fall to the fully done-up zipper of the A2 John's always worn hanging open up until a week ago. Cautiously, he reaches out, resting the pad of his index finger on the cool metal without actually taking hold of it, and looks up to meet the slate blue eyes that bore into his own. “May I open this? Please?”

✦

John’s heart races, and it has nothing to do with lust, or even the joy of Harry's aliveness.

He's scared shitless. He realizes the nervous energy buzzing inside of him feels eerily similar to fastening into the cockpit and heading down the taxiway to wait for their turn to take off and fly directly into a sea of flak—and yet all he's doing is standing before the man half-responsible for his current state, in no great danger of anything other than humiliation. Harry, familiar, beloved Harry—whose unshielded gaze has suddenly become one more thing to fear.

But he wants. God, he wants; his body aches for it, even as repulsive and unhuman as he currently feels right now. 

And maybe—maybe he wants emotionally, too, to be as close to him as two people can be after the horror and fear of today, after coming so close to losing him, with their goodbye looming. Harry could get killed while he’s in the States, and he probably wouldn’t even know until weeks after the fact.

They deserve this, as a couple. This might be the last chance they get to be this close each other’s bodies. He could die. And he should leave Harry with a memory, even if it’s not as perfect as the sort of memory he’s wanted to leave.

“You can tell,” he finally warns, softly. He can't bring himself to meet Harry's eyes as he pries each word out of himself. "You can tell that I’m. I’m pregnant. The baby’s grown. I went and got bigger pants this morning, because I can barely even… fit into my old ones.”

“That’s okay.” Hand still on the zipper, Harry raises himself onto the balls of his feet again and presses a slow, gentle kiss to John’s unexpecting lips. He meets his eyes then, reflexively, and Harry gently holds his gaze for a few moments after lowering himself back onto his soles, his big, dark eyes warm and fond. “I promise it’s okay. I’ll still want you when we’re all… old and wrinkled, John. Now—please, may I…”

There’s one last pause. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Just—be very gentle. I think it can… I think it can feel everything. And I don’t know what might be enough to make me start… bleeding. And not stop.”

Harry kisses him again. “I would never, ever be anything other than gentle with you. Unless you asked for it."

At last, he wraps his fingers around the zipper, which has since warmed to the temperature of his skin, slowly dragging it down its track until the sides of John’s bomber part and hang to either side, revealing his shirt and tie and the small swell of his midsection—of their child within it.

✦

Harry can see what John means without the oversized shroud of his jacket, the very real source of his apprehension, though he's careful not to let that on—his belly isn’t bulging by any means (yet?), not like an alcoholic’s or an old man’s, nor does he look fat per se, just within the range of average now as opposed to the tight, rail-thin physique that had emergency landed their plane in the empty meadow on the other side of the installment shortly before this whole affair between them began—but there’s no missing it, a small, visible press of his midsection against the front buttons of his shirt, perching over the newly loosened waistband he acquired this morning. With the barrier of his jacket removed, his sides do look a little softer, too; his trunk, on the whole, is maybe a little thicker.

But probably more troubling to John, or any man, than the new protrusion of his previously flat, almost concave midsection is the faint swelling of his chest—not much, passable enough as strong pectorals or a little bit of extra weight, but it’s there, and both sides rise a little against the fabric at the top of his shirt, though they’re largely put in proportion by his belly, which pushes out a bit further. Maybe that works to his advantage, painting an overarching picture of weight gain as opposed to something more insidious or unnatural as pregnancy—and, to be fair, Harry decides with a small feeling of comfort that it does look like he’s gained a little outside of the weight of just the baby and whatever fluids it's suspended in, so gradually that he hasn’t really noticed until John's pointed it out to him—even despite all of the food he’s thrown back up and the new reticence he directs at almost everything set down in front of him in the officers’ mess.

With a small rush of confusion, and guilt, and alarm, he realizes that his stare, which still hasn’t left the changes to John’s body to return to his face, is a hungry one. John looks good like this, maybe better than he does usually, and there’s a little flutter of excitement, unmistakably sexual excitement, low in his own belly as he catalogues the changes he’s responsible for—which is a horrible thing to feel when they’ve caused the man he loves such tremendous distress, and sickness. He shouldn’t be aroused by this.

He tells himself that he’s just turned on by the sheer sight of him on the whole, because John'sa handsome man and if he gets too in his head over this he won't be able to get it up. He misses their intimacy—and that's true. He does. But there are still little traces of guilty pleasure he can't talk himself out of, though they don't stop him from slowly lifting his hand from John’s hip, and the other one leaving his bicep, pausing in the chill empty air over the small curve of his middle. Harry looks up at him, meeting his eyes. John looks anxious, still.

“John, may I—”

“I—” His obvious surprise and lack of comprehension, and the deeper loss of self-esteem it alludes to, stings. After a moment of visible internal conflict, John picks the sentence back up again. “If you want to. …Gently. You have to be very gentle. And, uh.” Harry starts to reach out only to freeze at once when John opens his mouth to add another condition, then pauses as though trying to figure out how to word it. “My chest, don’t… Don’t touch me there, or anything, it hurts. Like I’ve been punched or something. Even a little pressure is fucking unbearable.”

“I won’t.” Harry raises himself up again and pecks him on the lips before smoothing a hand over the curve of his middle at last. It's an electric feeling, surging through his hand and his body like lightning, pooling as warmth and increasing tightness in the front of his pants. I did that. Fuck, where the hell did that thought come from? “Only what you want. Promise. And I’ll stop the moment you want me to.”

“Okay.” John reaches up and cups his cheek with both hands, gently stroking one cheekbone with his thumb for a few moments, then runs both hands down the corners of his jaws, trailing down the sides of his neck on their way down, and rests them squarely on his shoulders, feeling, squeezing. He lowers his head and presses a warm, lingering kiss into the skin between Harry’s ear and the corner of his jaw, just under his sideburns, sending a pleasant,  involuntary shiver through his whole body at once. His hands rove his sides as his tongue slips into his mouth, slow and savoring; at last, John seems to relax, even as both of Harry’s hands now smooth across him, cataloguing the new changes, admiring. 

John looks really, really good like this, carrying his child, and he’ll have to decide what to do with that realization later. He impregnated him, and for the first time it occurs to Harry Crosby that that is an incredibly erotic thing to say. He’s also too out of his mind with lust and residual adrenaline and relief at seeing him again to even begin to assess the meaning of it all. He simply doesn’t care to, so he shelves it, at least for the duration of this encounter. He’ll have plenty of time to think about it later.

One of John’s hand finally slides to the front of his trousers, palming at the increasingly pronounced bulge against the fabric, grinding his boxers against his bare cock beneath them, which feels fucking fantastic already. Harry sighs through his nose in a soft puff of warm air against John’s face, a nonverbal mark of approval as the kiss continues: Keep going. Please.

John understands him well enough; he does, dragging his hand upwards and joining it with the other one to work at his belt buckle, then the button of his trousers; when he finally shoves a warm bare hand down his pants and wraps it around his cock, offering a single rough, dry stroke, Harry groans into his mouth and arches up into the touch, hands momentarily stilling on his belly before they slide to his hips, squeezing, testing the small degree of new softness pregnancy seems to have put on him despite every self-destructive effort his body has otherwise made to keep that from happening.

Harry slides his lips away, breaking contact to speak into the side of his mouth in a sigh: “Feels fucking great. Missed this. Missed you.”

“Yeah?” John drags the pad of his thumb over Harry’s slit, sending a jolt of electrifying pleasure through him. “Missed you too. God, Harry, I thought—I’m so glad that you’re safe.”

“I am. I'm here.” His left hand continues to absently knead at John’s side as the right moves to clumsily and one-handedly undo his belt and slide it open, then get the button at the front of his brand new trousers and push the zipper down when it’s undone. He slides his hand between the waistband of John’s boxers and his skin as the pleasantly firm strokes and caresses of his partner’s hand continue, traveling south until he finds what he’s after, and—without looking, he’d assumed that John would be fairly worked up by now, like he would usually be at this point in this sort of clothes-on, mutual-touching rendezvous. 

But he isn’t, at all. He’s completely limp, heavy in his hand, without even a twitch of life against his palm as Harry begins to touch him. It’s got to be the loss of confidence, he figures; stroking across the length of his shaft anyway, gently, caressing the foreskin that hasn’t yet been naturally pushed back with engorgement. They have all the time they could ask for tonight.

It's the first time he's ever seemed to need a little physical encouragement to get hard, unlike himself, almost at full-mast just from a kiss, just from seeing under the recently omnipresent closed jacket exactly what pregnancy’s done to John Brady's familiar, beloved body. Harry tries not to think too much into it, just continues his ministrations, kisses him, lets his hand leave John’s side to cup his cheek instead.

“You look so good like this, John. You don’t see it, but you—” His breath catches as John traces a finger along the throbbing vein that runs the length of the underside of his cock—“You look so good like this. I like you like this.”

Even in the low light, he can tell that that’s enough to make Brady blush.

“It’s true. You pull it off well. Not many people who could say that. I wouldn’t mind a little weight on you when this is all over.”

“Don’t have to say that,” he finally says, a little coy. “My hand’s already on your dick. I’d still jack you off even if you didn’t.”

Harry chuckles warmly. “I mean it.”

John still isn’t hard, but there’s a little awakening, maybe; he feels warmer. Harry persists, keeping his touches gentle, teasing him awake as opposed to forcing.

“Don’t know if I’ve ever been this attracted to you.”

John grins into the kiss he presses to Harry’s mouth. “Full of shit, Crosby.”

“I swear I’m not.” His hand leaves John’s cheek to slide down his own boxers, resting over John’s as it works. “You ever feel me get this hard this fast?”

“Inconclusive.” A beat. John's prominent Adam's apple bobs with an awkward swallow as his hand momentarily slows on Harry's cock. “I don’t know why I’m not… Responding. You know I love to feel you, right?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s okay if you don’t. Really." His voice softens. "You’ve had such a day, Johnny.” He pecks him on the lips. “Such a day. If you just want to stay here and hold each other we can.”

“That sounds good for after.”

“Yeah? Then we’ll do that.”

Fuck, John's not even hard yet and he’s already close to the edge, starting to leak onto John’s hand, its path quickly becoming slicked with new moisture, gliding as opposed to dragging. John’s finally starting to come around, twitching awake as blood begins to flow south, thrumming against Harry’s palm as his cock takes a firmer, more concrete shape in response to his persistent caresses at last, his breathing coming a little softer and quicker. 

“Enjoying that? It’s the least you deserve. Doing all of this. Nobody else I know could, John. And you look so, so good doing it.” Brady whimpers in response to the praise, a soft, keening sound low in his throat, pressing further into his hand; fuck, that alone brings him, Harry, so much nearer to finishing. “Fuck, John, I’m so close. Just seeing you like this. Doing the things you’re doing. Never been so attracted to someone. Never been—ah—so attracted to you—”

John’s hand pumps faster, more vigorously, now aided by his body's addition of lubrication. Harry’s heart picks up its tempo in kind as the pleasure builds, quickly racing toward its peak, and all at once the climax hits him, bursting forth like brilliant white light from a collapsing star. He has the good sense to bury his face in John’s collarbone just in time to muffle the moan that comes out of him in the throes of orgasm, fingers tightening around the top of John’s hand as it holds him through the eruption and a few moments after; the hand on John’s cock momentarily stills as he forgets himself, and where he is, and everything. 

Slowly, he begins to come back down to earth, his heart still pounding.

Harry swallows, panting, and gives John another stroke as he lifts his head. “Let me finish you,” he murmurs. “On my knees. Let me thank you for being so brave. For doing this.”

“Please.” John slides his hand free of Harry’s boxers and grasps at the side of one baggy leg to dry it. “Please. I need it. I need you so bad.”

Harry, needing no further invitation, grins and lowers himself to his knees on the cold cement floor, taking his time, dragging his nose down the center of John’s body on his way down, following the curve of his pregnant belly with nose and lips. He pushes his waistband down a little further on his hips and reaches into his boxers, freeing his erection and its accessories to sit above the waistband of his boxers.

He takes John in his mouth slowly and deeply, savoring the soft, breathless moan that involuntarily leaves his lungs as he does. John’s long, not disproportionately so, but enough that he has to be careful of his own gag reflex, and has to avoid moving too sharply as his head begins to bob forward and back, lips dragging wetly along his shaft.

John’s hands find his hair like they always do when they do this, weaving into the thick strands, grasping handfuls as though to steel himself in the face of the mounting pleasure. He's clearly trying to avoid grasping too hard, but a few roots are still drawn tight enough by his grasp to prickle at his scalp, and Harry finds that he doesn't mind: it’s a pleasant, tingling sensation, one that grounds him in his own body even as he focuses on John’s and makes this moment between them all the more real.

He lets his eyes flutter shut as he drags the roughness of his tastebuds along the vein running the underside of John’s cock; it throbs against the pad of his tongue as John grows closer and closer, beginning to leak thin salty fluid just as he had into John’s hand a few moments earlier.

It feels good, knowing that he’s bringing him to such heights, and so quickly. He’d like to do so over and over for the rest of their lives. With any luck, he will, once this is all over.

“Harry,” John pants. “Harry, I’m so—so close.”

I know.

In mind of that, Harry slows his ministrations just a little, taking his time as he drags his mouth off of him and sinks John’s cock past his lips again, hands finding the tops of his thighs and absently squeezing, caressing. He'd like to make this wonderful respite last for him as long as possible—John's been in so much discomfort lately, so much pain, and there isn't a trace of that apparent now. 

He draws back again and drags his tastebuds over John’s leaking slit, and just like that, with a harsh, pitiful whimper, John’s hips buck forward; his legs tense under Harry’s hand; he takes him fully in mouth just as the evidence of his pleasure surges out of him, hot and wet, and swallows all of it.

For a moment they just stay like that: John’s cock softening in his mouth; John, visibly pregnant with his child, panting as he catches his breath; Harry still on his knees, which have begun to ache with the hardness of the uncushioned ground beneath them.

Harry pulls away slowly when their bodies at last separate, wiping the corners of his mouth on his wrist and shakily rising to his feet as his bent knees remember in real time how to straighten out again. John’s cheeks are flushed; he looks deeply content, more than he’s seen him since this began. Harry reaches for the hand that was knotted into his hair a moment ago and takes it, intertwining their fingers and giving it a warm, firm squeeze. He leans into John’s side, their joined hands between them.

“I love you,” he says, softly. “I love you. I’ll always come back to you. And we’ll get through this, John. You can get through this. I can’t see it panning out every other way. I know you'll live. If you listen to the doctor, and you do everything you're supposed to do, you'll live. And we'll have a life together.”

"I'd like that. I'd like that more than you could ever know. I love you."

✦

John takes care in rearranging his clothes and his hair and his general demeanor before the two of them return to the bar. He didn't even think to note the time in the flurry of emotion that followed the revelation that Harry was still alive, but hopefully, the two of them haven't been gone a suspiciously long amount of time, and if they were, hopefully everyone's too drunk by now to have paid notice to it. And if they did notice it—John finds it hard to care through the persistence of his sheer joy at the fact that Harry Crosby is alive and in one piece.

He re-enters the bar first, seamlessly weaving himself back into the group like he never left in the five-someodd minutes before Harry, who has hung back outside, makes his carefully timed reappearance through the same door he came in from the first time.

And then Bucky comes in after him. 

John's heartbeat seems to slow in his chest.

The bar quiets as the others make the same observation John did, one-by-one: Bucky, who was supposed to be on a weekend pass in London, with his jaw popped to one side like he's got something to say. John’s heart sinks. Bucky lays a big, heavy hand on Harry’s shoulder as he passes on his way to the bar.

“Croz. Harding wants to see you. Guess you got that promotion.”

Bucky cuts a direct line to the bar before he acknowledges any of them, handing his flask over the countertop with an unnervingly nonchalant fill ‘er up, Mike?. Only then, once the most urgent matters have been attended to, does he turn his attention back toward the rest of them, arms braced wide on the bartop. He sniffs.

“No use wondering, Gentlemen. You can all do the math as to why I came back early.”

“Jesus,” John hears himself say. “Another mission.”

He wants Bucky to say he’s wrong. He doesn’t.

I just lost him. I can’t do this again. God, let me fly this time. Don't let Harry be on this one. I can't just keep doing this. It's going to kill me.

“We’re flying every day now?” 

Dougie goes unanswered in the short few moments before the red mission light mounted to the painted cinderblock wall clicks on above the door, glowing like a crimson specter in the low light of the club.

✦

Another mission. John’s words are a constant hum in the back of his head, over and over, preventing him from fully absorbing the entirety of the seismic change in his own circumstances. That doesn’t matter. He’s just been promoted to the ground, and John hasn’t been.

Jack leads him into the command room, where the same red light from the bar hasn't stopped glowing beside the floor-to-ceiling chart that announces the men’s fates, assigning the planes they’ll survive or die in. He catches chatter from the men on ladders in front of the chalkboard, all of it filtered out except for a single phrase that stands out with sudden, terrible clarity.

“230-830, Brady. 307-25, give it to Cruikshank.”

No.

John can't fly. He can't be flying. He's leaving in a week. He wants to scream at the top of his lungs, to the whole room, that John is pregnant, that he’s carrying a child, that he doesn’t have any chance of living if he has to bail like all of the other names on the board do. It chills his blood, seeping into his very bones as the sound and faces around him turn to a blur. Jack is still talking to him, but he barely hears him, nodding like an idiot when the man's facial expression makes it clear he's waiting for affirmation.

God, don’t let John die. Scratch him. Do something, Smokey, Harding, someone. I can’t be the only one who sees how insane this is. I can’t be. Why haven't any of them said anything? Do they not know?

He feels like he's drowning, throwing his arms out in a desperate attempt at finding anything solid to hold on to, any isolated island of rhyme or reason to save him from the reality of the situation: John, pregnant with his child, is being sent up in the air to get shot at tomorrow.

Jack abruptly halts as yet another unfamiliar face, presumably one of his reports, stops in front of him. Harry almost runs into his back and walks up his heels, but he comes to a grinding halt just in time to avoid the collision. Jack and the stranger start talking. Harry turns his head to stare across the massive, paper-covered plateau of the planning table and reread the board on the other side of the room.

BRADY . . . 230-830.

“I’m sorry, Sir, but uh, engineering aren’t going to be able to get those two ships you asked about ready by wheels-up.”

Jack starts walking again without warning, abandoning him at the table as he walks astride the newcomer. Harry pauses for a split second before it occurs to him that he needs to catch up, and then awkwardly lengthens his stride to quickly close the gap between them like a young, clumsy animal trailing after its mother.

“We’ll uh… Did you get the bomb load details to ordinance yet?”

“It’s all squared away. They have everything they need.”

Harry continues to trail awkwardly behind them as they carry on their conversation, sure that he looks as lost as he currently feels. When the guy finally splits off to go do whatever he needs to do, Kidd's attention, and gaze, returns to him, picking up where they left off without pause in a way that seems pretty indicative of the chaos of the environment he's adapted to. “Hey, Croz. So we start with the duty officer.” He casts his glance to the glass-walled office up front. “Homer! Crosby’s just been promoted to group navigator.”

Homer, sturdy under his dress uniform with round shoulders and short dark hair already dramatically receding at the temples, pops out of the small bank teller's window in his fortress, ducking his head and resting his weight on his elbows to fit his stocky frame into the small space carved out of the glass shield as he gives Harry the ghost of a smile, wry, like there’s some joke he’s missing out on. “Welcome to the monkey house, Captain.”

Even with his mind is torn in a million directions at once like an impenetrable tangle of string, a botched cat’s cradle, some reflexive part of him knows to smile and mumble his thanks.

“Spence will have navigation field orders for you,” Homer says, and then the underling stationed at the desk below his window cuts in.

“Captain. You take it down to S-2. Tell the clerk what you need.”

A mug clinks behind him. “God dammit!” Harry's head reflexively whips around just in time for him to watch a dark brown lake of spilled coffee spread across the maps on the table they walked around when they first came in.

“Sorry! Sorry.”

Red gives the aerial negative in his hands a shake, sending beads of coffee dripping down onto the cement floor. “Get a cloth, will ya?”

Jack’s voice from another room reclaims his attention a moment later. “Keep up, Croz!”

Harry scurries after him again, lengthening his stride to make up for the lapse in his attention, and quickly joins him in the small cluttered space. 

There’s paper everywhere: a blanket so thoroughly covering the desk in the center of the room that not even a sliver of wood can be seen underneath, pinned all over the walls, hanging off of the ends of cabinets and side tables. A single household lamp on one wall and an emerald green banker's light on a little table pushed against the other wall are the room's only sources of illumination, dim and yellow. A few forgotten coffee mugs, the same plain white ceramic the officers are served in in the officers’ mess, dot the chaos of the papery landscape here and there.

“Alright, so this is your office. You get your own jeep. It’s a perk of the job. Anything else you need, you ask Tripp.” Jack takes a breath. “Good luck, Croz.”

That’s it? They tell me that and then just leave me? No further instruction?

His uncertainty wins out, and he's embarrassed to note the way it overtakes his voice before he can stop it. “Uh, Major— You sure I’m the right man for this?

Jack watches him for a long moment.

“No.”

Harry lets out a little breath, but his shoulders only lose some of their previous rigidity. Great . 

Jack turns and leaves.

At last his eyes abandon their myopic focus on the sea of papers he’s just inherited and lift to the dusty window above the desk, taking in the chaos that stretches out before him on the main floor — the beeps of telegraphs, overlapping voices, the scratch of chalk on the big board and plotting tools on the map-covered table. This is a big one. He knows it in his bones. This is a big one, and they’re sending John, and, unknowingly, the unborn child within him out into the thick of it.

Brady, 230-830.