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"Doesn't look too bad today. You're healing up quick."
Three fingertips alight around the socket of his right eye. John barely feels it past the layers of crusted blood that must be flaking off.
"What about the other one?" he says.
Gale slips his touch over, still impossibly gentle. John should've done more of that, probably, when he had the chance. Foregone any playful punches to the shoulder for calculated contact instead; maybe the flat of his hand pressed between Gale's shoulderblades, or to pinch at the chunk of hair that always bounced free around the cowlick on the crown of his head. Should've taken any opportunity for softness while it was sharp and within reach.
"Looks good, Bucky," says Gale. He pats at John's chest. "Get some sleep."
The mattress sags further down by the foot of the bunk as Gale shifts, then settles. There's a small crack of an opening book spine, the rasp of turning pages until he locates his spot and it goes quiet again. John keeps his ankle against Gale's lower back. Even lying fully horizontal, he's dizzy, likely still concussed. He goes to sleep.
-
The compound's makeshift doctor arrives to take a look. His pace is brisk, as if he's coming from one place and has another place to be afterward.
"Who's got a lighter?" he asks.
He sounds young, but there's immediate movement from around the table. John wonders if something about him commands respect. If he's older than that reedy tone would suggest. He wants to ask how many of them are in the room, watching this happen. Metal clicks open and a flint sparks.
"You see this, Major?"
A pause.
"Major, I need you to talk to me. Do you see this?"
Another pause.
"John," says Gale.
"Maybe," John says. He sways. His equilibrium is shot. "I don't know. Maybe. Kinda looks like there's Vaseline smeared all over my eyes. Everything's dark."
"It's pretty goddamn dark in here," someone says to his right. At his ten o'clock, someone else says, "It's nighttime, Bucky. Seems normal to me."
The lighter clicks shut. "Were you exposed to some kind of close-up explosion?"
"Tough to say. I might've been. I, uh, can't really remember much. Took a bad hit to the face, though."
"I can see that. There could be a fracture under there, but we can't do anything now."
No one asks any further questions. A chair skitters back. He feels Doc lean into his space purely by the displaced air, the warmth of another human body hovering.
"If it gets better or worse, have someone come fetch me."
"Will do, Doc," Gale says, since John doesn't respond. "Thank you."
-
He tries looking into a mirror in the latrines. Presumably that's what it is, nailed secure above a lone sink in the corner behind the trough, cold and smooth. He can't see shit. Not even a reflection of light.
"It's just a sheet of alloy," from behind him. Crank. "Makes everyone look warped, like they're in a carnival funhouse."
"Oh," says John.
He grips the edges of the sink again. The rest of the layout is a mystery. It'd taken him an unknown number of minutes to navigate his way here by himself. Every other time, they'd frogmarched him in on weak legs and directed him to wherever he needed to go.
"Benny looks like Charlie Chaplin in it. There's a bump here," Crank says, knocking, "that gives him a little mustache and everything."
John snorts. "Suppose I'll have to finish up my beauty routine somewhere else."
"Yeah. Come on, let's go back. It's freezing."
He still has to piss. "Alright," he says.
-
"You go in and walk straight, it's five steps to the trough. Six spouts on either side, so you can usually have your pick. There's a step right past the doorway, you'll watch out for that."
There are dogs barking outside. John rubs his skull against the pillow.
"You listening?"
"Yeah."
"To the right of the troughs are five urinals. It's another five steps there. Five steps left of the troughs are five toilets."
His ankle is shoved against Gale's back again. He hasn't taken his shoes off since he's gotten here. "Krauts really love the number five, huh?"
"At the other end is a row of showers. Cold water only and they don't work most of the time, but they're there. Faucet handles will probably be in line with your stomach." Gale taps at the spot.
"Okay."
"You need help, you tell me."
"Sure."
-
When everyone else is out, he walks around the barracks touching everything he can and gets a few splinters in the process. He rubs the curtains and grips at the doorknob. Tries to identify who's sleeping where by smell alone, but everything has the same musty, cold scent. He almost kicks over the piss bucket by accident. Then he sweeps the table into the wall and heaves the chairs across the room on purpose.
The door opens. John is panting, already gassed from that flash and fade of energy.
"You done?"
"Fuck you," says John.
He pants some more, slumping back and letting the wall take his weight. After a few seconds, he turns around to throw a fist into it, but he's too close and the impact hits sooner than expected, sending an electric zip up his arm and all the way into his shoulder. A one-man fucking show.
The door clicks shut. Gale walks toward him.
"Yeah," he says. "Fuck you too, Bucky."
John grinds his forehead into the wood. A knot bites into his skin. He presses harder so that he can see the pain of it, a trickle of red raining in slow motion. Gale turns him back around with a tug on the back of his sleeve and John goes willingly.
"Come a little closer, huh? Let me see you," he says, then laughs at how he sounds like a character out of a fairy tale. The wolf in disguise, the witch luring a maiden into the woods. He laughs and laughs until tears warm his eyes and he has to wipe at them with his knuckles.
Gale pries them away. "Your hands are filthy," he says. "You're gonna get an infection if you don't cut it out."
He's holding John's wrists down against the collar of his own coat. John scratches at the damp wool just because. "Not much of a threat at this point, Buck."
Two footsteps bow the floorboards. John's elbows crook into a tighter angle.
"Better?"
His voice is closer now, enough to gust up on the tip of John's nose. Gale must be standing only inches from him. He can sort of see the outline of his head, a blurry shape on top of a blurrier background. Everything else comes from memory alone -- the washed-out blue of his eyes, his sharp little chin. How his mouth was always upturned like he was skeptical, or asking for something without saying anything at all.
"No," John says.
Gale resets his grip around John's palms, firm enough to fold them inward a bit. He brings them up to his own face. "Better now?" he asks, breathing shallowly, warming John's nails. John dances his fingers around, ghosting over the sharp bristles on either side.
"You need a shave."
"So it is better," Gale says against his fingertips.
John's eyes are warm again. He looks up to blink it away. His hand is throbbing. He can look all he wants; try to peer through from the inside, but reality remains a fogged up window.
-
"Three rows of Dannert wire are caging us in. Guard towers every hundred yards or so. We've got some open space, though, in front of the compound."
"What about the gates?"
"Only one main gate. They bring trucks in and out through there."
-
"It's cloudy today, but it's bright," Gale says.
John can tell as much. Silhouettes float across his vision and dot the periphery with inky smears, like he's squinting at pond water through an unfocused microscope. He stumbles on the last step when his toes land square on a rock. Gale kicks it away swiftly.
"Got some of the boys playing soccer to your nine o'clock."
He turns to listen. The ball thunks, too dull to be a solid foot strike. People are yelling and jeering.
"Who is that?"
"Murph. He's trying to kick it up to his chest. Keeps missing, though. He's covered up to his knees with dust."
They take a walk around the barracks with their shoulders magnetized together. John counts the steps and skates his hand along the building to try to map out its dimensions, but the size keeps readjusting without a frame of reference.
"This side is about the distance from home base to first," says Gale.
John's hand drops. "Now how the hell do you know that?"
"Brady told me."
"Who knew this is what it would've taken to get you interested in sports," John says as they round a corner. Here, there's digging going on, the crunch of shovels and feet pounding them into packed dirt. Gale doesn't speak again until after they round another corner. The tinny noises of loosened pebbles being redistributed dwindles away behind them.
"We're prepping for a garden back there," he says.
"Gee, I hope that means more potatoes."
They keep walking.
-
"What's it look like?" he asks that night.
Everyone else is sleeping. John had laid there, awake, opening and closing his eyes for hours. The sounds eventually became too much to bear, each set of sleep-heavy breaths out of sync with grating irregularity, and he felt his way out of the room and into the drafty hallway. When someone followed to sit beside him, he didn't protest.
"What do you mean?"
John faces Gale's direction. "What's it look like?" he asks again. He can feel Gale studying him. Swallows when Gale takes his chin to fix the angle of his gaze.
"They're still blue. The whites are white, the blues are blue. They're lighter, though," Gale says, before John can rib him for being vague. "Kind of like, uh."
He trails off. "I don't think I'm very good at this. But you know, your grandparents, how it would look when they got cataracts?"
"No, I know," John says. "Milky."
"Milky," Gale repeats. "The pupils are bigger, too. And they're gray."
"Hm."
"When Doc was holding up that lighter, they were orange. Whole flame just filling them up with orange. Like lanterns."
They sit in silence. Gale starts lolling his head side to side, floating driftwood in a sea of black. His hair rubs on the wall behind him with a staticky kind of crinkling and brushes against John's ear in repetitive tickles. John claps his hand over it.
"Your hair," he says.
The crinkling stops. "Sorry. It's been growing out."
John removes his hand. Uses it to comb through Gale's hair instead. The pieces by his temple are indeed growing out. He pinches down the length of them, extending toward the corner of Gale's jaw before letting go.
"Might have to write you up for this, Cleven," he says.
It takes a few attempts, but he manages to reach up and grasp at the lock by Gale's cowlick, the one he knows is there, curling upward like a struggling seedling. Gale stays silent, so he holds his hand closed and rests his fist right there on Gale's head.
"Can you see that?" Gale finally asks, strained.
"Blind as a dumb bat. But you always have it. You've never noticed?"
"No."
"Guess it's on the back and all," John muses. "Guess you can't really see it."
"John," Gale says softly.
His face is hot. There's a thump and his fist moves with Gale's head as he rests it on the wall again at a new tilt. Gale is looking at him. He squeezes his eyelids shut.
"Hey. Look at me."
"Still can't see shit, Buck," he says, but he obeys. Blinks them open as ordered. He can hear Gale breathing. He can hear everything, all the fucking time.
"I can see you, though," says Gale.
-
"Alright, so Hambone just flipped a diamond ace. Diamond ace, clover four, diamond eight, spade three, heart three."
"Let's go all in."
"Roger. We're all in, boys."
Brady grumbles. Crank grouses, "Aw, shit. Full house, I know it."
"Don't come crying to us for cigarettes later," Benny says, clapping a palm on John's shoulder.
"You're only getting thirty percent of the pot!"
"It's more than you're gonna end up with, isn't it?"
-
Most days the anger floats high above him. He stays low, scraping his boots along the ground as if to keep himself glued there. Living becomes familiar in increments. He learns to pour his own water, listening for the change in timbre to know when to stop. Scrubs his own laundry and hands them off to Hambone to find a place to hang it. Sometimes he helps with the garden, stabbing down with the shovel where Crank leaves sticks as markers, letting his body work like it's supposed to, wringing out every muscle. In the evenings, Gale or Benny read aloud in the library. Benny is better at inflection but tends to go too slowly for John's liking. He pisses alone and shits alone and showers alone and dresses alone and still has to feel for the bunk slats as he gets into bed.
One afternoon he drags a shovel into the latrines. Takes a careful step past the doorway, walks toward the back by the sink, and slams it against that alloy mirror until the handle breaks and the shovelhead rebounds off porcelain before clattering onto the tiles. His grip is raw. He drops the splintered handle and examines the mirror. There are a bunch of dents in it. Not much other damage. It's quiet outside, most of the noise transferred into the barracks as people get ready for lunch.
He's kneeling, searching around for the handle again when he hears a phantom noise by the entrance, neck prickling with the sense that someone is standing there, watching him.
"Not a good time," he says loudly.
The words bounce around in a hollow echo. No answer comes.
-
"'You also had a brother called Achille, did you not? Poirot's mind raced back over the details of Achille Poirot's career. Had all that really happened?'"
John spreads his hand on Gale's leg. Gale stops.
"What?"
"How's it look."
"The same," Gale says after a beat. He goes back to reading: "'Only for a short space of time, he replied'," and John squeezes Gale's leg again.
"The same?"
Thing is, John's always had the habit of picking at scabs before they were ready to come off. Except a scab would imply some kind of healing, a symbol of time taking care of an injury. But time doesn't exist in this place. Time doesn't exist within himself. What he's doing is more like digging into a wound every single day and gouging it fresh.
Gale closes the book. "Scoot over some," he says, butting his hips up against John's. John hitches over until he sees a hazy glare. The sun, warming them through a window. Gale cradles the underside of John's chin with a cupped hand.
"It looks the same," he confirms.
"Whites are white and blues are blue?"
"Mostly. Still kind of gray. A nice gray. Like rocks by a lake."
John thinks he knows what Gale means. Those big rocks glittering on the shore, worn smooth by centuries of tides going in and out.
"What else," he says.
"You've got a scar here." Gale strokes John's right eyebrow with his other hand. "It's still pink. Fading, though. Cheeks are covered with muck, right worse than left. Looks like you came out of a damn coal mine. And your mustache is growing out."
"Gotta hire Benny again," John mumbles.
"He's won enough off assisting with your poker games, he'll do it for free."
"What about you? What do you -- how's it look?"
Gale drops his hands away. "Me? I look like hell."
"Nice try."
"Even grimier than you. And I've got these long scars on both sides of my face."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Long."
John tries to paste that into his memory. It keeps peeling off, refusing to stick to how he remembers Gale, smooth-cheeked and radiant. There was always a ringed glow around him in these mental images, as far back as Texas. How stupid. How incredibly mind-numbingly stupid. He should've known way before he actually did. Just a minute ago he was soaking in Gale's flat voice reading about Hercule Poirot posing as a made-up twin, and suddenly he's boiling in anger, the cavernous, impotent kind that burns inward with an almost paralyzing intensity.
"I'm fucking sick of this," he announces. He's shaking. "I'm so goddamn," he fumbles around behind him to snatch a book off the shelf. Throws it. "Fucking." Grabs another. Throws it. "Sick of this."
He scrabbles at Gale's lap. Gale hands him the book. He rips the covers off and tosses the rest of it in the same direction, then grabs the hair above his ears and shoves down between his knees as far as he can go.
"Jesus fucking Christ," he says into his chest, at that raging fire eating away at it, liable to consume him whole until he immolates right there in a stalag library.
Gale strokes at his back, slow enough to catch his thumb on each vertebrae through the thick material of John's sweater. On the third pass, he goes lower to meet the waistband of his trousers; nudges underneath the sweater hem without hesitation before moving up again, skin on skin now. John wants to cry. He would, if he could.
"I ruined the book," he says, muffled.
"There's plenty more to choose from."
John grunts. "You've got a nice voice, but you're a terrible reader."
"I know," Gale says.
-
"A bezoar? What the fuck is that?"
"That's what Doc said. Something about too much indigestible material leading to a blockage. You can get septicemia from that."
"From paper."
"I'm tellin' ya, that's what he said. So either stop passing notes, or burn 'em and bury the ashes."
"Now he tells us. I've probably eaten a novel by now."
"A few of those Brits have been eating weeds, I'm sure that doesn't help."
-
The corner by the window has become Gale's usual spot, at least when John is stretched out in his bunk, toes notched over the edge like he's sleeping in on a lazy weekend at home. He puts a pillow down and sits on the floor in John's line of sight, existing mostly as an abstract presence with the curtains drawn. Today he's nitpicking about the way the library is organized. Apparently a large section is books that have fallen apart along their bindings, teetering stacks of missing third acts and inadvertent cliffhangers. John's eyes close somewhere along the way, sapped from a midnight inspection that kept them shivering and tense for nearly two hours per Hambone's watch.
"Am I boring you that bad?" Gale asks.
"No," John says, mouth partly buried into the pillow. "I just like listening to you talk. Me falling asleep is a compliment."
"Alright. Go to sleep and I'll keep talking," Gale says. John feels him lean in. "As I was saying. The library."
"Oh, the library again. It's like you're singing me a lullaby."
He grins. It comes easily. Encouraged, Gale crowds in further, rising onto his knees to do so, elbows dipping into the bed for support.
"How's this for a lullaby -- do you know about the bezoars?" he says, low, right into John's ear. Gale's whispers still carry a thick bass undertone, perking up the fine hairs on John's face.
"Yeah," John says roughly. "You could probably open your own publishing house with whatever's in your stomach by now."
Gale laughs, and John does too. Close, they're so close. They dissolve into laughter again, the slightly crazed kind that leapfrogs too quickly, in danger of spiraling into a very different place altogether.
"Bezoars. Jesus," Gale rasps.
"Septicemia," John says. "Guards. Dogs. "
"And the weather is starting to turn."
This time Gale's lips actually touch John's ear on an elongated vowel, grazing the vertex of cartilage. There's barely any nerve endings there but John feels it more viscerally than anything else in his entire life.
"We're gonna die in here," he says.
He's said it before. Everyone has. They take turns voicing the thought out loud while the rest rush in with reassurances like some call-and-response playground chant, even though they all think it. We're gonna die in here. No we're not. Trying to smother a lit explosive by piling unlit ones on top.
"We might," Gale agrees with a snagged breath, a secret he hadn't known he was holding. He must be tired, too.
He presses his lips to John's ear again. John pictures that upturned mouth, the crest of it kissing deliberately onto his skin. He crooks his knee up to the image and pushes his hips down for a millisecond.
"Buck," he says on an exhale.
-
"Socks?"
"Brand new."
"I can just wash the ones I'm wearing."
"Those things need to be salvoed into hell, Bucky. I can't sleep with them hanging above me. Here."
A washcloth is placed into his hands. John drapes it on his head and leans over to untie his boots and strip his socks off. He balls those up and chucks them into the corner where the bucket should be. Works the washcloth between his toes.
Boots clomp in, followed by an exaggerated sniff. "What the hell died?"
"Bucky's socks."
"Finally. Rest in goddamn peace. I'll send out the funeral invites."
-
Benny is sick. So is Murph. Crank is recovering from a different iteration of sick, or maybe catching on to whatever the other two have. The room is abound with snoring mixed in with chesty rattling and intermittent coughs. John wiggles his toes, picking idly at the slats above him. Every now and then, he flicks off splinters and runs his fingers along the pits he's made in the wood. Gale might be sleeping too, if his complaints about John's socks were real.
He shimmies down a little and points his foot. It makes contact. Gale scratches at his instep.
John swings up to sitting, hunching forward so as not to hit his head, then pads to Gale's bunk. Sheets rustle, punctuated by the squeak of a compressing spring. A thunk of a body pressing into the wall.
"You alright?"
"Wanted to show off my new socks," John says.
He gets into the bed, half on his side, half on his stomach. They'd shared for a couple months after his arrival, though in swapped positions, with John using both Gale and the wall as anchors. Gale is lumpy against him, hugging his own chest, seemingly wearing every piece of clothing he has available.
"Let's see them, then."
John presses both feet up on Gale's shin, then crosses his right foot over to rub at Gale's other leg.
"Feels nice. And it doesn't smell like an old swamp anymore."
"So you should be able to sleep."
"Should be," Gale echoes.
John shoves his hand underneath the pillow. "How's it look."
"It's too dark in here to see."
"I meant you."
Gale doesn't answer. Cataloguing, maybe, or deciding whether or not to lie. John would be able to tell, before all this.
"I've lost weight," he admits.
"Yeah? How much?"
"Don't rightly know." It's one of those lies that could be the truth, depending on if John chooses to believe it. "We've all lost weight, you know that."
John says, "I could check for you."
The cacophony of snores goes on around them, but John hears Gale’s throat working, clear as day. The implicit permission is harder to make out, only becoming evident when he lays his arms at his sides. John blows into his fist. Dips underneath the blanket to Gale's waist. Multiple layers of fabric are swathing him. John creeps through the open shutters of his coat, rifles past a sweater, two shirts, and an undershirt to finally find skin, warm and thrumming. He lays his hand in that valley between two jutting ridges, just soaking up the heat there.
"Gale," he says. The shape reminds him of an empty serving plate.
Gale doesn't acknowledge him. John moves his hand, trailing it to the yawning arch of a ribcage where all the most important parts are. Bare bones, a half-built structure with nothing to plug up the spaces, nothing to protect the heart that's pounding under the heel of his palm.
"Gale," he says again. "Shit."
He heaves himself up onto his forearm, knees catching his weight between Gale's. Uses his free hand to run up the other side until his grip is spanning high over Gale's torso in a symmetric spread.
"It doesn't look that bad. No one's said anything," Gale says.
"Well it feels bad," John snaps. "Probably doesn't look bad because you're wearing half your weight."
"Not like I can fix it," Gale says sharply.
John squeezes on instinct. His strength is long gone, in a yellow range on good days, but he manages to depress a choked gasp from Gale's lungs, thumbs forcing into his sternum like a button. He does it once more to savor the noise; how it transforms into a breathier whimper that unlatches a lock inside him, letting loose the dormant thrill of having power over Gale without even looking. Understanding what he needs before a question can be posed.
"You feel that?" he says hoarsely. He stares into the emptiness, a strange contrast to the solidity of Gale under him, in his hands. He's hard between his thighs now, bent back over his knees in a twisted position of supplication. "I could crush you."
"I feel it," Gale says, labored, with that same jagged baritone.
John hovers there in a suspended curl, losing sense of time to Gale's heart going a million miles an hour. Then a cold hand slides around his nape. Pulls with such force that John, unprepared, is yanked with it, landing face-first somewhere along Gale's scratchy beard. His cheekbone flares, but he's moving automatically, hunting out Gale's lips with ease. It seems Gale had been waiting for it, mouth already open for John to kiss him wild and hungry.
He shifts his arms up to cage around Gale's head. When he lowers his hips, it feels so goddamn good that he has to pull away and suck his lips inward to bite down on the groan. It puffs out through his nose instead, a weak, desperate sound that breaks free uncontained when he lifts back up and rolls down, cock dragging heavy against Gale's. Gale, who is a livewire, a lit fuse writhing by its own flame. He claws through John's hair with all ten fingers. They kiss again, messy with spit, John's tongue occasionally lapping at Gale's chin and cheeks, tasting a thin layer of salt. He doesn't care. This is how he would've done it as any version of himself.
"Quiet," he shushes, even as he thrusts against Gale, over and over. "Quiet, be quiet. Shut up."
"Fuck you, John," Gale whispers.
His voice is stripped of any deepness, unfamiliarly thin. Every grunt he makes causes ripples over John's vision in a synesthetic trigger. John chases them until there's a steady flickering of white and black. He moves faster. The flickering eventually builds into a stream, like tracking static of a film reel. He's wet, almost there. Gale trembles beneath him, then stiffens, just before John's world explodes into a lightning bolt, sucking out the air and shattering away whatever had been possessing him in the first place. He stays there afterward, panting into the expanse of Gale's neck, a matching thunder in his ears.
Gale is clinging to his shoulders. John loosens atop him, barely finding the wherewithal to snake his hands underneath his armpits and wrap him in a tight hold. The lightning fades back into the stream, which fades into the flickering, which fades into the soft prickles of nighttime, leaving them once again just two small bodies clutching at each other.
"Yeah," he says. He sniffs. Gale embraces him harder. "Yeah, fuck you too."
-
"It's snowing."
"Is it sticking?"
"Not yet. It could, if it keeps on." The curtain flaps shut with a whump. "Remember Moore? From school?"
"Uh huh."
A huffed smile. "The ground looks like his pillow after that field exercise we had."
John laughs. The field exercise had come at the end of their training. Cadets were dropped into the nearby woods and tasked with finding their way out in teams. Three days of K-rations, multiple creek crossings, and thirty miles later, only half of them had managed a shower after arriving back at base after midnight. Moore had had a particularly bad case of dandruff, likely worsened by the humidity and sleeping on moist leaves.
"Jesus, Buck." John laughs again. Lets his face fold into the natural pull of it. "I'd forgotten about that."
"But you know what I mean."
He does. He knows what Gale means. He can almost see it.