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“Sledgehammer,” sinking into Eugene’s dreams like a stone. He opens his eyes to unfamiliar stars and he’s in a foxhole, of course, like always. It’s not raining, at least, but everything is still muddy and sucking at his arms when he raises them.
Snafu’s there, crouching close by, bending over to whisper at him. His knees are up, his rifle set across them out of the mud. His eyes seem five times their usual size, the way they’re picking up the moonlight.
Eugene pushes himself a little more upright, checks that his helmet’s on and his boots are still tied. He hasn’t seen his own ankles in weeks, but then, there’s nothing to do about that. Now he’s awake and he nods at Snafu to show him he can take his turn to get some rest.
Snafu keeps looking at him, motionless like a statue, keeps watching as he sometimes will if he’s not tired enough to sleep. It lasts a little while, staring at each other in the dark, listening for Japs like that’ll ward them off. Eugene doesn’t mind nights like this, where he doesn’t stand watch alone. He doesn’t mind having Snafu there to shake his head when he knows it’s a trick of light on some leaves, not the enemy.
But eventually, Snafu pushes himself down into the mud, almost horizontal, helmet tipped over his eyes, rifle still in that white-knuckle grip. He sleeps, and Eugene turns his eyes on the darkness, daring it to disgorge his worst nightmares, waiting for a battle-cry or a body dropping in on them.
His life has turned into a ghost story you’d tell a kid to keep them awake in bed, he reflects, thoughts turning over taffy-slow as the time stretches.
Hours later, long enough for Eugene to have forgotten what blinking is, there’s a flare. Its red-white light casts shadows everywhere, and gunfire starts up, too far away to be K Company. It falls to earth and the light disappears.
Eugene feels Snafu move, his arm nudging against Eugene’s side. He won’t break the silence by asking what Snafu’s doing, or wake him up if he’s not doing anything in particular. Then he can distinguish individual fingers in where Snafu’s touching him, at his hip, right over the bone that’s getting too prominent.
And then they pinch.
Eugene doesn’t make a sound, because the sudden pressure knocks the air out of his lungs. It hurts, it fucking hurts. It feels like he’s caught in a vice, even through his dungarees, even though he’s used to things hurting by now. He can’t track how time passes, because he’s suddenly focused on that one square inch of his skin between Snafu’s fingers and how it’s on fire.
He breathes in, the smallest hiss between his teeth. Snafu releases him, all that pressure gone, and it’s a relief but the ache is just setting in.
Eugene opens his eyes – when did he close them? – and gets his breathing evened out. His hip is throbbing, he can feel the bruise forming up. It’s still night and no Japs have descended on their hole during the time Eugene wasn’t paying attention. His fingers are stiff where they’re clutched around his rifle.
He lifts his head off the muddy side of the hole to look at Snafu. He’s twisted his neck to meet Eugene’s eyes, and his mouth opens in what might be a smile. “Thought it might wake you. In case you been dreamin’ this whole war up, Sledgehammer.”
Eugene drops his head back to look up at the stars. He wishes he were.
--
There’s no way to distinguish the time while they’re here. Either they’re being shot at or they aren’t. When they aren’t, they’re eating or they’re sleeping or they’re walking or they’re digging. It all feels arbitrary, like the Japs are waiting until they become just distracted enough before setting their guns off again, so there’s never any schedule or time to finish what you start.
The Japs aim for groups. Just as they start to bunch up together, just as they start to breathe or get their thoughts in order - a mortar drops and everything scatters like cottonwood fluff, insubstantial and useless. Start all over again, Sisyphus with his boulder.
Eugene can remember whole days during summer where he didn’t do anything. He remembers being outside and being happy about that, falling asleep slowly in the shade of a willow tree and never ever keeping an eye out for snipers. That feels like a dream, now.
He hopes that if he makes it back to that place, this will feel like a dream. Like one long, long nightmare, where he never looked forward to his twenty-first birthday because he thought it would come and go on Peleliu and please god just let them get off that fucking island before his fucking birthday, please.
But that was six months ago, and he still tracks the days passing, because if another birthday comes around out here he might go Asiatic.
Eugene shoots his rifle and he keeps it clean, he eats what he’s given and sleeps when Snafu’s looking out for them both. It’s terrible, but the best luxury he’s had in a while is getting to leave everyone’s line of sight to shit in a cave that’s been cleared of Japs. He comes back still pulling up his dungarees. His belt buckle is undone, knocking around, and it hits his hip.
That bruise, that goddamn pinched-in bruise. Eugene pulls the corners of his clothes aside, to see the pale wedge of his hipbone and the purple-red smear on it.
“Jesus, boy, look what you done to yourself,” Burgie whistles. “How’d you get that one, fell right on a rock?”
Eugene turns his head until he finds Snafu – looking right back, like he always is. “Yeah,” he answers, voice thick. “A sharp one. Hurt like a bitch.”
Snafu’s eyes go from Eugene’s, down to his hip, back up, back down. He stares at that spot even after Eugene’s fixed up his uniform and fastened his belt. He must know it’s from last night, or else he must be working that out right now.
When Eugene walks past him, Snafu’s arm flies out like a snake striking. His first two fingers dig into Eugene’s hip, that bruise, so hard and sudden that Eugene doubles over.
After a few deep breaths, Eugene can stand up straight again. Burgie’s laughing in that horrified way he has when Snafu does something new that’s awful. Snafu’s leaning back, wary, eyeing Eugene like he knows he might get hit in the teeth for doing that.
Eugene shakes his head, completely unable to deal with whatever is happening in Snafu’s mind today, and keeps walking.
--
That night, Snafu whispers, “Sledgehammer,” and when Eugene opens his eyes, there are dark fingers wrapped around his wrist, easily closing around his hunger-skinny bones.
The touch is light enough that Eugene almost thinks he’s still dreaming. That gets harder to tell, out here, in the mud and the blood and the dark. Is he dreaming that Snafu’s holding onto him so carefully like this? He can't tell, doesn't have the frame of reference.
The fingers follow his movements as he sits up, gets his rifle ready, waits for Japs. Snafu sits with him and watches, like he’s done any other night, not sleeping but letting Eugene be the more alert of them. Eugene can feel Snafu’s heat coming through where their skin touches.
After what seems a long while, when Eugene still hasn’t shaken them off his wrist, those fingers begin to tighten.
Eugene doesn’t react. It doesn’t hurt, at first, it just feels like a too-tight watch. Like if he turned his arm, the bones would grind together. He keeps his fingers steady on his rifle, and his eyes fixed on the horizon, and his thoughts spiraling around the hand squeezing his wrist. He’s not sure at all what’s going on.
Gradually, Snafu grips him harder, his eyes pinned wide open and unblinking on Eugene’s face. More and more pressure, fingertips making valleys, one of them pressing on a bone. It starts feeling like his wrist will dislocate somehow, like all the little pieces from his father’s medical illustrations will come unstuck and grind to dust. Then his whole hand flushes warm and goes numb, feels too swollen or far away somehow, and Eugene’s gritting his teeth not to make a noise.
One of Snafu’s fingers pushes so hard that something gives, a tendon rolling out from underneath, and it hurts so much more that Eugene gasps. His fingers pop open and his rifle drops into his lap, too loud in the night.
Snafu’s hand disappears instantly, and sensation floods back in, and that abused arm is so clumsy that Eugene wouldn’t be able to grip a mortar round if his life depended on it again.
But he made that small noise, and Snafu let go. Snafu gets down in the mud at the bottom of their hole and seems to go to sleep in the blink of an eye.
Eugene rolls his wrist against his knee all night, the new bruise coming up and keeping him wide awake.
--
He tugs at his sleeves in the morning, self-conscious in daylight. In their shared foxhole, rules didn’t seem to apply. Eugene couldn’t remember that Snafu putting bruises on his skin was wrong, or that he’d have to explain it away somehow. That pinch on his hip was one thing – and it rubs against his belt sometimes, when he has to lean forward, and then he remembers…
His hip was one thing, his wrist is another. Snafu held on so hard that you might see his fingerprints in the marks. What could explain that? ‘A Jap got ahold of me and you didn’t notice’?
So Eugene fiddles with his sleeve and keeps his left hand down as much as he can. He knocks it against his knee when he’s sitting, rolls it a little to feel the tenderness under the skin. He knows Snafu’s attention is on him, can practically taste what that’s like, now.
“Gene,” Snafu says, offering his canteen and wiping the water from his mouth.
Eugene casts a skeptical eye over the distance between them. Snafu’s to his left, positioned just far enough that Eugene will have to reach to take the canteen, and it’ll make his sleeve ride up. Eugene meets Snafu’s eyes and tries to get it out of him – how much of it was calculated so Snafu could see the dark bands around Eugene’s wrist.
Snafu doesn’t show him anything, of course. Like always.
Eugene reaches, Snafu hands it off. His eyes track the progress of that sleeve as it inches up, revealing. He doesn’t do anything, like grab Eugene’s wrist and make the marks flare up, the way he did to Eugene’s hip. But he knows they’re there, alright.
Eugene has to give the canteen back and show his wrist again, but then he drops it to his side and feels his face getting hot under Snafu’s gaze.
When they all stand up to get moving, Snafu swings his rifle over his shoulder, and the butt collides with Eugene’s hip. The pain knocks the breath out of him but he manages to walk without a limp.
Snafu’s doing it on purpose. It’s on purpose, it must be for a reason, but fuck if Eugene has any idea where to start on that.
--
That night, it’s his knee. Eugene’s in their hole right after the smoking lamp’s out, miserably huddled under his poncho, and Snafu jumps in. He catches Eugene’s knee with the toe of his boot, probably genuinely by accident, and pauses when Eugene lets out a reflexive curse.
“Shelton, you bastard,” Eugene says, speaking through the rain on his lips, drawing his knee up to his chest. It’s numb first, but then it starts heating up, blood flushing in. It’s tender at the inner joint, up over the curve of his kneecap, the whole space where his knees knock together in this shithole. Goddamn it, he has to walk on this tomorrow, when it’ll be ripe and thick-swollen.
Snafu kneels with him. Sits down, his back against the walls of the hole, his eyes unblinking and stuck on Eugene’s hand over the wound. His poncho starts shifting, rearranging the way they’re pressed together. He sneaks his hand between them slow, slow enough for Eugene to take his own away from the knee before Snafu’s gets there.
Snafu spreads his cold, clammy palm out over Eugene’s knee under the tent keeping out the downpour. Runs it back and forth, once, soothing a little. Almost petting, almost reassuring. Then his fingers dig in, right where it hurts, like Eugene’s skin will part for them and let Snafu sink down to his bones.
Eugene puts his head back, opens his mouth, swallows rainwater and any sound he might make. Sharp glass shards of pain race to the small of his back, his tailbone, like they’re ganging up on him. His entire leg is shaking, shuddering, flexing away and then into the touch. He can’t think in words, but the hand closer to Snafu claws out under the ponchos, grabs the collar of his uniform, hauls him closer.
Snafu lets Eugene breathe fast and wet into his shoulder and rough canvas and brings his other hand up to Eugene’s wrist, the wrist that’s pulling at his uniform. The bruise on that wrist.
He squeezes, fingers notched into their matching places.
Pain layered over pain, and it’s distracting, Eugene’s mind trying to run in two directions at once. It almost doesn’t even hurt properly. Eugene thinks this is what pain feels like in a dream – you’re aware of it, but it’s far away.
Then he snaps back and it’s all too close, smothering, choking him. It’s too much. Eugene keeps finding his limits with the Marines, and this is too much, pressing on the injured and raw parts of him just goes over a line somewhere. He puts his whole face against Snafu’s neck and he makes this keening noise, ripping out of his throat.
Snafu lets him go. His knee is swollen with the remains of its injury, his wrist remembers the touch. But Snafu lets go and starts trying to shuffle back and away, disturbing their little tent of ponchos and letting the rain in, making things slippery and spreading the mud everywhere.
Eugene curls both his hands in Snafu’s clothes, keeps his face hidden in the bend between Snafu’s neck and shoulder. He knows his face will be too warm-wet if he lifts it up and he can’t bear that.
He hears Burgie nearby: “What the fuck’s goin’ on over there?”
Snafu’s voice vibrates right into Eugene’s skin. “It’s fine. I’m takin’ first watch, everythin’s fine.” His hand comes up to the back of Eugene’s neck, and honestly, if he pinches or tears out some of Eugene’s hair, there is a KA-BAR that will deal with all this. Eugene’s not above knifing someone, he’s learned that much about himself over here.
But Snafu’s fingers hesitate before sliding into Eugene’s dripping hair and holding him, letting him keep hidden against Snafu’s skin.
“It’s fine, Sledge.” Hot words, breathed into his ear. “Everythin’s fine, Eugene, you can sleep. I’ll wake you.”
He doesn’t want to sleep. His knee hurts, his wrist, his goddamn hip. He doesn’t want Snafu’s hands on him but it’s helping, it’s lulling him to sleep against a buddy’s shoulder. It’s putting off the war until he has to open his eyes again.
Eugene sleeps.
--
Snafu must feel like he has permission, or Eugene must have given it somehow. After that, Snafu just puts marks on him sometimes when they’re alone.
His hands reach out and deal pain to Eugene’s softer parts, the underside of his arms or the giving tension of his stomach. A fan of fingerprints around the ball of his shoulder. Knuckles at the small of his back. A bootprint over his ribcage, when he thought his bones would crack before he called mercy.
Eugene marches all over Okinawa with aches and pains like he’s sixty years old, flinching when Burgie takes his arm and Snafu has to take it again, so the last deep lance of hurt through Eugene’s bruises is from him.
Snafu stays within about two arm's lengths these days. He sits down close enough that one hand sneaks to map out the tender points, hidden where their bodies turn inward. He can’t see these new marks, not through Eugene’s dungarees, but he never forgets where he put them.
He pickpockets Eugene’s gun oil and rag from out of his pack without a second thought, needing to clean his rifle, smoking and watching Eugene try to adjust his dungarees so nothing abrades the bruises speckled across him like leopard spots. Usually he gives the supplies back, even, or else he leaves them somewhere that Eugene can take back what’s his. In the scale of Snafu’s behavior, Eugene would almost feel coddled, if he didn’t have to suppress a wince every time the man was close enough to pinch him.
Still, none of it makes sense. It’s just a thing that happens, just a new thing to deal with in this messy, muddy, blood-soaked war. Eugene stopped thinking ‘I hate this’ or ‘I like this’ a long time ago; now something just is, whether he has an opinion or not.
And this is Snafu, who just does things sometimes, just puts bruises on Eugene like he has any right to do it.
--
They stop for a while, one day out of any number of days. They have time for chow and digging their graves for the night, maybe.
They don’t allow the men to know the date, but Eugene has a tally mark in his Bible, he at least thinks he knows the date, and that’s the closest they get to knowing the state of things outside this theater. It doesn’t matter because then it’s announced: Germany surrendered. His brother’s going to get shipped back to Mobile, victorious in battle, and he’ll still be on this fucking island.
Snafu passes by, cuffs his ear. “C’mere for a second, Eugene,” he drawls, the way he drawls everything. Knowing Eugene will follow him, because what the fuck else has he got to do.
Eugene follows him.
They go not very far away – when anyone asks, Snafu shows his teeth in his threatening not-smile and says they’re finding a place to shit. But they get out of sight and they’ll hear if anyone comes close, sheltered some by the rocky outcroppings that seem all over on this island, barely muddy at all.
Snafu puts a hand on Eugene’s shoulder, pushes him to the ground. Stretches him out so he’s laying flat and says, “Jus’ don’t move. And don’t cry out.” Then his hands are on Eugene’s belt. Before, he’s stayed above clothing, never unfastening a single stitch but getting to Eugene’s weak points anyway.
Eugene doesn’t know what to think. He hasn’t been thinking much for the whole time they’ve been here, never had time to slow down and turn his brain over, and that’s exactly how his superior officers like it. Everything has rolled over him like the tide coming in, until it swept him under.
Eugene doesn’t know what to think about his best friend out here getting his belt buckle open and tugging the side of his dungarees out of the way. Like it’s some kind of riddle, like there’s anything to think about. He’s drawing a blank.
Snafu puts his mouth on his dirt-streaked skin, and that’s new, that’s a surprise. His touch lands on Eugene’s hip, just where the first bruise was, just over the bone. It’s hard to tell, but maybe his lips are warm and dry, chapped in the heat. Then they part and Snafu bites down.
Eugene knows, by now, not to make a peep, but his hand falls to the back of Snafu’s neck, the bristles of his short-cropped hair. Not pushing him away, not doing anything at all. Snafu works his teeth into the skin, he seals his lips down and sucks, and Jesus Christ it feels like there will be signs of it there till the day Eugene dies.
It has just occurred to him, for the very first time, that letting Snafu mark him all over and never saying a word about it is – intimate. The whole situation is insane, the kind of insane that you can’t fight against in this place. But Eugene’s had Snafu’s fingers nearly everywhere, the small of his back, the insides of his thighs. He’s let Snafu touch places through his clothes that Eugene’s surely never been close to on a girl.
He is, in a breathless rush of coherent thought, only now becoming aware of how close Snafu’s mouth is to his dick.
Snafu keeps biting, chewing on him like he might take a piece out. Breath fanning hot over Eugene’s skin, tongue pressing down on the new deep mark.
Eugene’s fingers are suddenly clammy and stupid, slipping through Snafu’s hair, over his neck. Then they grip solidly, hard, and Eugene pulls Snafu’s head away from him. He is desperate, absolutely blindly desperate, to get Snafu’s hands off him and keep them off. He can’t get it out of his head; this island, trying to mark the time, his skin mottled with red and yellow under his uniform. It’s V-E day and what have any of them been thinking.
How many people had to make bad decisions for Eugene Sledge to get here, in the mud, hiding from the Japs and the Marines both, with Snafu Shelton’s mouth on his hip?
Snafu’s kneeling over him, wiping his red, spit-sticky mouth, waiting for Eugene to say why he stopped him. But really, why did Eugene let him start, that’s the important question here.
“Just stop,” Eugene says. It’s not loud enough to get them any attention, it’s just for the two of them. “Just – all of it. Stop.”
He expects a protest. Or maybe for Snafu to get insistent like a Marine trying to a talk a girl into too much in a bar. Or maybe even Snafu going ahead anyway, taking what he wants like he always has.
Snafu wipes his mouth again and gets to his feet. His eyes stay on Eugene – on the new mark, already flushed a dark, dark purple. Then they flicker away and he turns and he’s gone.
Eugene’s head rests right on a rock, and he puts his weight on his shoulders to haul at his dungarees and fix up his belt. The sun is setting – he’ll probably have missed chow, he’ll get there just in time to dig in with Snafu and spend the night waiting for another bruise on top of his collection. Snafu’s collection, maybe.
He touches his hip, flinches away from his own fingers.
--
Snafu wakes him: “Sledgehammer,” soft and low in his ear, like always. Eugene sits up and shifts a little farther from him, puts some room in between their bodies, like that will stop Snafu from reaching out and holding on.
But Snafu sits there. Silent, alert, fingers slowly checking that his rifle is clean and loaded. Lips pinched together and all his attention on Eugene, it seems like. Eugene lifts his knee to prop his elbow against, and Snafu’s head moves, following the movement.
Eugene gets hot under his collar, frustrated with waiting. He’s thinking: if you’re going to do it, just do it, just put another mark somewhere and get it over with.
Neither of them moves for such a long time that Eugene might be turning to coral, absorbing right into the rough terrain of this godforsaken island. His eyes track the world outside their hole, and he relaxes a little in the silence. Time always stretches out this late at night, waiting to die, waiting for a spark of pain. Waiting for Snafu to reach out.
With a suddenness that pulls Eugene out of his thoughts, Snafu squelches down into the mud and sleeps, not touching him anywhere. His jaw starts grinding a little later, a sure sign that he’s not faking.
Eugene studies that blank, motionless face in the ghostly light of a flare, but that’s awful. With his eyes shut and mouth slack, it seems like Snafu’s dead, like there’s no one home.
The sun rises. They’ve been on this island thirty-eight days.
--
The bruises fade and heal into clean pale skin, one by one. There still isn’t any time to take his clothes off, no excuse like bathing or checking a wound. But Eugene finds himself feeling for them, his hands roaming across his shoulders, locating this one and remembering how it got there. Snafu used to do this – poking at the marks he left, knowing exactly where to press to get it to hurt.
But Eugene told him to stop. And apparently it worked, because he’s finding fewer tender points. Nothing more responsive than the usual elasticity of his body, except for the last and worst – his hip, the huge blotch discoloring slowly into yellow and brown, the teeth marks blurring and indistinct.
It’s self-defeating and pointless to want things in a war. Things just happen to you, and you accept them. You keep walking forward and listening to orders and caring about seeing another sunrise. Or you try to care, anyway.
But Snafu’s like a ghost, these days. He doesn’t meet Eugene’s eyes, even when he catches Snafu staring like always. He doesn’t share smokes or borrow Eugene’s things, and he only touches him lightly in the middle of the night, waking him for watch.
It’s insane to want things out here.
--
Eugene opens his eyes and it’s dark but eerily silent – no sound of wind in the trees, no firefights happening a mile away. He thinks he hears Snafu – Sledgehammer – and he can taste the echo of that wake-up call in the back of his mouth. He reaches for his rifle.
He doesn’t find his rifle.
Eugene gets up out of the mess at the bottom of their hole. He puts his hands down into it, sinking them to the wrist and swirling up the mud, feeling for his rifle, because he needs it. It’s his watch, Snafu woke him up. He has to keep the Japs away. What’s he going to do with no rifle?
He turns to Snafu, trying to see properly in the dark. He has half an idea of borrowing Snafu’s rifle, because he’ll be asleep – he won’t need it, and Eugene will. He’ll just borrow it.
Snafu doesn’t have his rifle, either. He has his KA-BAR out, the huge knife he uses to pry out Jap teeth. He taunts, “How you gonna keep the Japs away?” and flashes the blade in the moonlight.
Eugene’s throat is frozen. Because he can’t find his rifle, because neither of them is keeping watch. Because the instant he makes any noise, Snafu will stop.
The knife moves. It fills up Eugene’s vision. He startles when Snafu’s other hand lands on him, working the tattered buttons free, opening his jacket. Rucking up his undershirt to expose his stomach, his sternum.
Snafu presses his hand flat. A little to the left, right over the heart. Then he brings the point of his knife down, making short little nicks between the webs of his fingers. Raising blood in the shape of his palm, moving his hand to smear red across Eugene’s pale-skinny chest.
It hurts, it bites. He’s the son of a doctor, and far off he’s thinking about how he’s never seen Snafu wash his hands, let alone sterilize that knife. But right now he can feel it, and he wants more.
“Sledgehammer,” he hears. He opens his eyes. His rifle is in his hands. Snafu is crouched over him.
He drags himself out of the sucking mud, out of the dream.
--
Somehow, the fighting seems less intense.
In the moment, when Eugene can feel the wind of a bullet passing too close, that is more real and immediate than his entire life leading up to the Peleliu beach landing. Sitting in the mud, ducking out of the rain; that’s real. That’s intense like Eugene’s drowning in it.
But the little skirmishes, the smaller pockets of resistance – those are easing up. The Japs still don’t surrender, but they also don’t have the strength to press back like they have before. It stops feeling like every step forward costs a Marine’s life, and instead turns into a tally of the dead bodies they pass.
It’s not an instantaneous shift; in fact, it doesn’t become clear between one sunrise and the next. But after six straight hours of marching forward, with only one challenge to their progress – a sniper concealed in a cave no better than a fox den – the men start looking around at each other, furtive and hopeful.
Eugene can see the exact moment the idea dawns on Burgie’s face: the man lights up, straight teeth showing on his dirty face. “D’you suppose we might,” he hesitates, lowers his voice. Cautious with the very concept. “We might be winning?”
“Shit, boo,” Snafu says, marching on Burgie’s other side, his arms full of the mortar. He throws a lazy glance their way, settling more on Eugene. Then he smiles, in his strangely stretched way. “Did you ever doubt our fearless leaders?”
Eugene glares at Snafu, because – well, just because. He can’t say what he thought. It’s what every man here has thought.
But Burgie, oh, he doesn’t let their staring past him stop his saying it. “I thought I was gonna die here,” he confesses, tone wondering and hopeful. “I thought for sure they’d have to bury me under the coral and I’d never get home. You think we’ll actually get off this island, boys?”
“No,” Eugene states, calm but final. Maybe he’ll go back to Mobile, maybe all this will fade into a nightmare that he only half-remembers waking from. But he won’t ever leave this place. It’s gotten into his pores, into the marrow of his bones.
He drops his hand. Pushes the heel of his palm into his hip, drawing the last twinges out of healing tissue there. The mark’s nearly gone.
Snafu’s still staring when Eugene looks up, and Eugene’s the one that turns away.
--
It mostly feels like cleanup-duty during the day. Sweep an area, hunt out all the hiding places where a Jap could be waiting. They still get shot at, but it’s different. They don’t take it so personally; it’s not the whole of Imperial Japan they’re fighting, now, just isolated pockets of soldiers who aren’t allowed to surrender and won’t die easy.
But at night, in their foxholes…
Some Marines think it’ll be different, somehow. Like the softening defenses of the daylight have any bearing on a single-man infiltration. They think just because an area is cleared that makes it safe, and K Company loses a few more good men that way.
Snafu and Eugene are practically wild animals by now, the way they keep on guard for any threat. They’ve never let a Jap into their foxhole and goddamn if they’ll start now, when it’s almost over.
--
Trees, thick old oaks, planted right after the Civil War and never disturbed since. Their bark against Eugene’s back, coarse through his shirt. Their shade and the sound of their leaves. Warm sun, long grass. Bird song.
“Sledgehammer.”
Eugene wakes up sharp, never disoriented. He knows he’s in the mud, on this island, and he knows who his enemy is. He sits up, gets his eyes on the ground outside their hole.
Snafu stays there, stays close. Watches him and doesn’t go to sleep. It’s too dark tonight to even catch in his eyes, so he’s simply a presence in the hole with Eugene.
“Shelton,” Eugene starts, whispering through a tight throat. Because he dreamt of home and V-E day feels like years ago. Because he never thought he’d live through this, and the idea of getting off this island – of going to a place where he can sleep through the night – is terrifying. Let alone going home.
He puts his hand down. His hip has healed up, there’s nothing there but the resistance of flesh against the pressure. He’s sorry for that pain to go, that last evidence of how turned-around and murky his thinking got about Snafu out here. Now the little instances, the short experiences – Snafu’s hand on his wrist, his knee, his thighs, his mouth on his hip – that’s all receding, too. Getting indistinct and dreamlike, melting down to fine details.
Snafu’s listening. Waiting for Eugene to put words to any of this.
Eugene reaches blindly toward Snafu. The collar of his jacket, it turns out to be. His knobbled collarbone underneath Eugene’s fingertips. “You ever think you’re really dreaming all this?” Eugene asks, hushed and almost praying that Snafu won’t hear him. After everything else, this seems like revealing too much.
“Thought you might be,” Snafu tells him. And – right. He’d tried to wake Eugene, that’s what started all this.
Eugene didn’t actually need to hear an answer. Not that kind of answer. There’s a sudden restlessness in him, a thick surging want that he’s been putting aside.
They’re winning. They’ve won. Maybe he’s allowed to want things again.
He moves his hand across, following the wing of Snafu’s collarbone, then over his shoulder. It finds the bare skin at the back of his neck, the small curling hairs there. “Shelton,” Eugene repeats. “Why did you put your hands on me?” They’re too near, this way, barely breathing words to each other.
“That’s a stupid question,” Snafu tells him.
“Why did you stop?” Eugene asks next.
Snafu huffs a laugh, breath going across Eugene’s cheek. “Shit, that’s a stupid question, too.”
Eugene kisses him. Snafu’s lips smooth across his, and his tongue presses in to open Eugene up. It’s gritty with mud from their faces, tastes exactly like they ran out of toothpaste a long time ago. It’s real like bullets passing too close, and something in Eugene starts to unravel.
Snafu gets Eugene’s lip between his teeth and bites. The flesh splits, a sharp and surprising tear, and Eugene rears back. He’s too well-trained to even gasp, but he tastes blood. His hand comes off Snafu to cover his mouth, touching at it carefully.
“The fuck you doin’?” Snafu asks. Not angry at all, not like when he catches Eugene doing something he shouldn’t. “Watch the line, Sledgehammer,” he says, and Eugene knows just the sly grin he’s wearing, just the teasing look.
Eugene sucks his lip into his mouth, getting more of that copper taste, more mud. He stares outside the foxhole like it’s any brighter out there, but he’s still focused on Snafu, on his breathing and the warmth of being near to him. He can’t stop fiddling at his swollen lip with his tongue.
Eventually, Snafu droops a little, leans into him. Falls asleep with their helmets knocking together.
--
When the smoking lamp’s lit, Snafu studies Eugene in the past-dawn glow and lights two cigarettes. He brings one directly to Eugene’s mouth, stays until his lips close properly, and then Snafu’s fingers press in harder.
It reopens the split lip, of course, a sliver of pain that wakes him up better than coffee. Eugene shakes his head and mutters, “So, we’re back to this, are we?” and pulls his pack onto his shoulders. When he takes the cigarette out of his mouth, the paper is stained a dull brown-red. He likes his pipe better.
An hour later, when they’re marching up some new hill and kicking over anything that could be enemy cover, Burgie asks, “Hey, Sledge, what happened to your lip?”
Eugene still can’t help the way he keeps fussing with it. It’s swollen and probably bruised, ready to bleed at the slightest provocation. He runs his tongue over the split again and catches Snafu, a few yards away, standing stock-still and distracted with staring at him.
Eugene smiles as much as he can. He tells Burgie, “Snafu happened.”
Burgie laughs – his regular what’s-he-done-now kind of amusement. “What, he punch you, or did you full-on fight? ‘Cause Snafu fights dirty. That boy’s got some claws.”
“Don’t I know it,” Eugene answers. He keeps looking at Snafu and tongues at his lip, and he makes sure it’s Snafu that turns away first.
--
The day they hear they’re shipping off this hell-riddled island, Eugene drags Snafu as far away as they can get before he starts tearing at their dungarees.
Eugene climbs on the ship out with bite-marks and bruises barely hidden under his clothes, aching deep in his heart whenever he starts thinking he’s dreaming.