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When Bucky’s in a room the whole room knows it. Gale knows it too, though he thinks he knows it different. Bucky makes his way through the bar to Gale’s side and things click back into place. As predictable as gravity he slings a heavy arm over Gale’s shoulders. Damp heat rises through their uniforms to muddle the space between them.
“Miss me?” he asks. Gale gives him a flat look that Bucky delights in. He cackles like he expected it.
Little unquestioning things. Their routine and their roles. One of them careening and the other fixed always in place: Bucky dances, Gale watches.
It’s so easy that Gale thinks if he had to think about it it’d just as soon fall apart.
A shadow crosses their table, attached to a blonde Bucky’d been making eyes at earlier in the night, when the room was a set of prospects instead of a smear of color and noise. Gale heard her called Dorothy. Her nose crinkles sweetly when she smiles but she’s walked herself over here: direct enough to ask for what she wants. Exactly the girl Gale would’ve figured Bucky for, if he was a betting man.
It takes Bucky a second to swing his attention around from his boozy chatter with Crank and Benny. Gale nudges him in the ribs.
“Hi, there.” Bucky turns in his chair to offer her a grin. “Here to take me up on that dance?”
That sweet wrinkle again. “If you’re not preoccupied?”
“Too preoccupied for you? Never,” Bucky says, a touch of theatrics to it. “Let me just—“ He raises his glass to her before throwing it back. In his periphery, held in the hot angle of John’s underarm, Gale watches his Adam’s apple bob.
Dorothy waits with a face like humoring him is a joke Bucky’s in on. She laughs an encouraging little laugh, and touches up her lipstick in a small gold mirror.
“Treat the lady good,” Gale says.
“Cross my heart,” Bucky pledges, and when he stands, he squeezes the back of Gale’s neck. A quick, proprietary pawing, a move so classically Bucky no one thinks anything of it.
Gale could map the position of every one of Bucky’s fingers, like a brand laid to his neck.
Bucky takes Dorothy by the hand and spins her by way of greeting. She laughs but has to catch herself on the edge of the table for balance. Gale narrows his eyes; Bucky catches the look, plays contrite. He dips his head to whisper something to Dorothy. Probably an apology. To Gale it looks like something else entirely.
Gale sets a toothpick between his teeth. For the rest of the night, he only catches sight of Bucky in flashes. Lined up, he figures he could take those pictures and make them move, get the full magnetic effect of Bucky chasing something he wants.
One picture, a frame cut out from the rest. Bucky with his hand low on Dorothy’s back, just short of a scandal. His mouth is on her neck, but his gaze is latched to Gale. Something itches inside Gale’s spine. He takes a sip of his ginger beer and meets Bucky’s eye. It’d feel too much like backing down not to.
Bucky stumbles back an hour or so later, his curls prevailing, undone by sweat. Gale’s already standing. He doesn’t want an argument about another drink or another hour. Crank and DeMarco legged it thirty minutes ago. Bucky can make his choice.
“She said she had to meet up with a girlfriend,” Bucky offers with a loose shrug. “I was a perfect gentleman, swear. She must’ve only wanted a dance.”
“Sound a little defensive there, Bucky.” He never has to inflect for it to be taken as a joke. Sweeping the table for anything he might’ve left, an out-of-place gleam catches his eye. A tube of lipstick, the same gold as Dorothy’s mirror.
“Didn’t want you thinking I ran her off with unmannerly conduct,” Bucky says. “You saw me, I was good.”
Gale keeps careful tension on the toothpick in his mouth. “I’m no chaperone of yours.”
“Sure,” Bucky says easily, his eyes bright, “but you still kept an eye out, didn’t you?”
Gale shakes his head, huffing mildly like this is garden variety exasperation. Any more feeling than that would be unthinkable. Bucky grins and leans past him; Gale gets a lungful of musk and ladies’ perfume. When Bucky straightens up it’s with the last of Gale’s coke in hand. He tips it back, his damp throat catching the light, and drains the bottle with a little gasp, satisfied by Gale’s dregs.
They duck out into the cool air, Bucky whistling too loudly for the hour and Gale trailing a half step behind. Bucky’s uniform is dark with sweat, beneath his arms and at the small of his back. A thought punches its way into Gale head: what it would feel like, to put his hand there. To steer with a touch. Bucky, led the way Dorothy had been led. His pulse gives one hard thump in answer, like hitting a pothole, or an animal gone under a tire.
+
There’s the usual debrief the next night at dinner. The guys saw what Gale saw, or some version of it: Bucky with a beautiful blonde wrapped around him.
“She was sweet, that’s all.” Bucky shrugs. “Not like she’s not my girl.”
“They’re all your girls, Bucky, you greedy bastard,” Crank says, shaking his head, the whole thing rote.
Bucky grins. A little wolfish. He’s not boastful, but he’s got pride to him. Gale’s seen his mean, jealous streak rear its head a time or two. Maybe this is the inverse of that—nonchalance, lest he be disappointed. It seems fragile to Gale. A simple lever. Secure and insecure. Satisfied and needful.
“I just make myself available,” Bucky says. “If they want a fun time, then with me they’ve got it. That’s all.”
Gale takes a sip of his sweating coke and says, “You know, Bucky, if you were a dame they’d call you a floozy.”
Bucky’s face breezes through a few expressions: surprise, challenge, and an almost animal satisfaction, Gale thinks. Something rich and dark.
“Me?” Bucky says. “I’m pure as the driven snow. So are the girls I spend time with, as far as I’m concerned. What’s history to a guy like me?”
“Bucky the bachelor,” Croz says. “You’ll get sick of it one day, believe me.”
Bucky plucks an apple from the center of the table and cracks off an arrogant bite. He smiles around it, plucky, almost irritatingly charming. “I’m sure someone’ll come along to straighten me out,” he says.
“Take a hell of a woman to nail you down,” Crank says, with a look like he doesn’t relish the thought.
“What? To hear Buck tell it, I’m easy.” Bucky tosses a wink at Gale across the table.
Gale only shakes his head. He trades his knife and fork for a toothpick. It’s routine, he thinks. The ribbing they all expect, alongside Gale’s tolerance.
“Easy for Buck, maybe,” Jack says dryly. “Not like the rest of us can put a leash on you.”
Bucky smiles. “We’re talking rings, not leashes.”
“Same thing,” someone says, and sets the table laughing, but Gale’s got a nauseous feeling simmering in his throat. He thinks he feels Bucky’s eyes on him. He makes a point of not checking.
+
The day after finds them in a slog of personnel meetings: the brass calling up fresh faces and rotating out a few cases of shell shock.
Usually, Gale can count on solidarity from Bucky’s corner. He ignores every game of tic-tac-toe Bucky nudges his way, but they can trade a glance over Red’s speech-making and have all the language they need in it.
Today, though—maybe Gale woke up wrong. Maybe Bucky did. Little gestures scrape Gale’s nerves, and Bucky seems mulish and unreachable. Something’s misaligned between them. When Gale thinks on it, he finds with some dread that it feels somehow inevitable.
Bucky spends the meeting chewing the end of his pen, either in thought or a flagrant display of boredom. At one point Gale looks over and Bucky’s got it poised in his mouth like a cigar, brow furrowed in a solid imitation of Harding’s swaggering incredulity.
Gale kicks at Bucky beneath the table, but Bucky pounces on a new game: his foot finds Gale’s and he rubs up against Gale’s ankle, dragging at his pant-leg. Furious and obscurely humiliated, Gale turns to look him in the face. And in a conference with the highest-ranking officials of Thorpe Abbott’s air base, Bucky removes the pen from his mouth, bats his lashes, and blows Gale a set of little kisses.
By the end of the meeting Gale’s jaw is sore from clenching his teeth.
At lunch, Bucky and Curt make a production of their reunion after a morning apart. They waltz joyfully around the mess while Gale pushes peas around on his plate, entertaining tepid conversation with Jack.
It’s not the display that discomfits Gale. This, far from other things Bucky has done of late, doesn’t feel pointed. Bucky’s heart is in it when he spins Curt around. He means it when he laughs. Gale doesn’t resent him these things. It just appears to Gale as joy that he himself has no way into, as impenetrable as Bucky’s mood that morning had been.
Bucky slips into Jack’s seat when he vacates it, tossing an orange from one hand to the other and leaning into Gale’s space. He asks blithely, “I do something to bother you?”
Gale turns his gaze on him slowly. He fits a toothpick between his lips. “A little decorum wouldn’t go amiss.”
“I’ve got decorum in spades, Buck. Discretion, too. Anything specific you want me to change?”
“Anything specific,” Gale repeats, drawn out like Bucky needs it said slow. “I’m not your mother. Not your girl. I’m not gonna tell you to sit up straight, or when to keep your mouth shut.”
Bucky leans his cheek into his palm. “You gotta be my girl to do those things?” His smile is wide, a little dark, a little conspiratorial. “No, I think you push me around just fine as is. And without so much as a promise ring.”
The toothpick in his mouth reminds Gale not to bite down. “Watch yourself, Bucky.”
“Or what, you’ll tattle to Marge?” Bucky peels his orange, his posture lax and easy. “Careful, or she’ll start to wonder where her ring is.”
“Go fuck yourself, Bucky,” Gale says, low, and stands to leave.
Bucky frowns and holds up his orange. “Aw, I was gonna give you half.” He looks over his shoulder. “Curt! Hey, Curt. Want half?”
Behind him, Gale hears Curt come up to take his place. “He coming out with us tonight?”
Bucky makes a contemplative noise. “Don’t think so,” he says.
+
Gale reads in bed and falls asleep early. No one comes around asking if he’s headed down to the pub. It feels like dead-middle of the night when he gets up for the bathroom; the glint of his watch face corrects that to half past one.
It’s quiet on base as he makes his way back to the hut. Mist lays over the grounds, thickening the air enough to feel it in each breath. Gale takes in a lungful, holds, exhales. There’re no stars that he can see. Just densities of grey marking the underbelly of clouds. No moon, either. The dimness of his surroundings is barely thwarted by lamps dotting the base at intervals. Then, from the dark, comes the sound of someone whistling.
Gale has a choice, then. He lags. Slows his steps so his waiting isn’t obvious. Bucky’s there a second later, turning a corner to pick his way along the path between outbuildings. His hands are in his pockets.
He smiles when he spots Gale. “Hi, honey. I’m home.” Bucky squints at him. “Aw, don’t be like that. I missed you tonight.”
It was stupid to’ve dawdled. Gale shakes his head but Bucky’s hand, suddenly on his arm, stops him leaving. The sudden anger that claws through Gale surprises him in its totality. He stalks forward, crowds Bucky up against the back of some storage shed or other, till there’s nowhere for him to go.
Up close, Bucky smells of beer and liquor and sweat. Gale’s jaw flexes. Sense memory of his father taps on his skull.
“Gale,” Bucky says softly. Gale’s hands flex in a grip on Bucky’s lapels. Bucky casts a glance down at them, then at Gale’s face. “Does it feel good? Handling me?”
Gale shakes him. “Who else will? Who else—“ He stops himself. Who else looks at you, and knows you. Knows what it is you’re asking for.
Bucky swallows. He tosses his head back, and it thuds against the steel of the outbuilding. His neck is long and dotted with hickeys, each one a place somebody had their mouth.
Gale puts the pad of his thumb over one of those hickeys and digs in.
Bucky hisses in a sharp breath. He looks Gale in the eye, his gaze half-lidded. Gale presses harder. Bucky’s breathing is thick. A low whine crawls out of his throat and down into Gale’s belly where it gathers hotly. A man, he thinks. Sounding like that.
“Buck,” Bucky says, in his rasping, airless voice.
“You’re a tramp, John. Taking whatever’s offered. Begging for it.”
Bucky’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Not begging just anybody,” he says, and the words sound horribly undressed.
Gale lets up on his pressing. He takes his hands off Bucky entirely. Bucky’s face, when Gale lets himself look at it, is a tangle of pain, want and plea.
“Bucky. You’re drunk.”
Bucky sighs. “Not drunk enough,” he says. “You oughta try it. See if you can’t put yourself in my position.”
“What position is that? Chasing any skirt that’ll give you the time of day?”
Bucky smiles a tipsy, rakish smile, abashed at its edges. “Hell, Buck. If you’re me then I wanna be the one in the skirt.”
Gale startles into looking Bucky in the eye.
“What?” Bucky says, his voice soft and a little goading. “You worried it’ll remind you too much of Marge?”
Gale could hit him. He feels the urge clench itself in his fists. Quietly, warningly, he says, “John.”
Bucky puts his hands up, palms out. Hardly any mockery to it. Gale steps back and looks at him, pinned obligingly to the wall. There’s the man he knows there, the one he’d put his life on the line for, and then there’s the terrible enormity of what he’s offering.
The problem, Gale thinks, isn’t that Bucky reminds him of Marge. It’s that when he has his hands on Bucky, he doesn’t think of her at all.
Gale grinds his jaw. He wants to make this Bucky’s problem. Curse and spit. A man’s sense of responsibility won’t allow him. The tension strung between them shudders and gives way as Gale shakes his head again, as if that stood a chance of clearing it.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he grits out.
Bucky regards him with dark eyes. “Pretty sure you do.”
Another breath spent watching Bucky‘s chest rise and fall, and suddenly Gale’s so exhausted he can’t stand it anymore. “I’m done. I’m going to bed,” he says, and when he doesn’t hear any footsteps but his own, he figures Bucky’s still right where Gale put him.
+
Bucky’s an expert at hangovers, Gale knows. So whatever dogs his posture and undercuts his smiles the next day isn’t the pall of too much liquor the night before.
On top of that, there are whispers of a briefing tomorrow, more men up in the air the day after that. The mess hall is a mix of jittery, over-compensatory laughter and steely, considering silence.
He and Bucky trade a nod over breakfast. Bucky, for the first time since Gale’s known him, seems reluctant to meet his eye. They take up separate conversations a few seats down from one another. If anyone thinks anything of it, they know better than to say so. When Bucky stands to leave, the urge to push him back down in his seat radiates in Gale’s palms; he thinks of Bucky’s hand on his arm, the night before. Everything caught by, or on, something.
There’s mail on Gale’s desk when he stops by his room. Marge’s lovely handwriting, small and precise. Some smell of her on the envelope; that, or he’s imagining it. He’ll go on imagining. He puts his nose to it and doesn’t open it.
Day after next he could be up in the air. Day after that he could be just a name in a column. If he’s going to ask for her hand, he ought to do it now.
He sits for a long time with his pen in hand and Marge’s letter to one side of his desk.
Late that afternoon he drops in at the officer’s club, where Bucky sits with his back to the bar, elbow on the bar top, smoking and watching the room.
Gale takes the seat beside him, also facing out. There’s a tame-looking card game at one the tables, but it’s early still and the hall’s half-empty.
Bucky looks surprised to see Gale, or surprised to be seen by him. The hickeys on his neck are fading already to thumbprints of rust brown and sickly yellows. He nods hello at Gale. Behind the casual set of his face, Gale’s inclined to say he looks wary, pinched by shame and worry.
“Looks like you could use some air,” Gale says, eyes forward.
“Maybe so,” Bucky says, exhaling a stream of smoke. He stubs out his cigarette. “Got something in mind?”
“Air,” Gale says, flat, and Bucky laughs through his nose. His grin is small, his chin dipped to his chest, like he’s keeping it private.
They walk awhile in silence, Bucky following Gale’s lead, till they’re some ways down the airfield. Bucky asks, “Hey. You mad at me?”
The sun nestles low against the tree line and douses everything in heavy gold. Them, the hardstands, the great immobile birds.
“Not sure it’s fair to be,” Gale says.
“Not sure fairness factors into it,” Bucky says, mussing a hand through his curls. “Unless you were raised real different from me, I figure you see it the same.”
Gale wonders then just how much he’s shown Bucky of himself. Telling Bucky about his father under the cover of darkness, keeping it small—bombs in the distance, surely everything was less meaningful by comparison. He’d fooled himself into thinking he knew what he was doing. Even now, especially now, headed where he’s headed, ambiguity looms ahead of him like a sheer cliff face.
Bucky peers at his expression and laughs a bit at what he finds. Good laugh, kind and genuine, commiseration without the pity. “Yeah, similar enough, I bet,” he says, and leaves it at that.
Bucky follows him down the long lines of concrete, past the more industrious hangars and their staff, and onto the shelter for the hard cases. No mechanics here, not now; with a mission imminent they’ll have their hands full prepping the planes that stand a chance of being useful this go-round. Gale’s plane—the one he first went up in, then landed with whole chunks chewed out of her—needs longer.
They stand in her shadow, not talking. Bucky’s slanting a look at Gale from the corner of his eye. It’s an underrated quality of his, the waiting. Gale swings himself up into the belly and watches Bucky clamber in after.
They cleared the bullets casings out, is the first thought Gale has. Errant. Bucky stands near to him, because there’s hardly any choice. Light from the high hangar windows slants in through the bullet holes in the waist. Dust gives the light weight and borders. They stripe Bucky’s chest.
“Something you want from me, Buck?” His voice, light, nothing too serious happening here, waiting for Gale to say otherwise.
“Maybe,” Gale says. “Depends.” He reaches into his pocket. “Your girl forgot this, the other night.”
Bucky stares hard at his hand, the tube of lipstick there. His gaze comes slowly up to Gale’s face.
“What do you want me to do about it?” Bucky asks.
“Come here, John.”
Bucky closes the gap between them. It’s three steps, no more. Gale can feel his pulse in his wrists and throat.
“What do you think you should do?” Gale asks quietly.
“Think I ought to wear it,” Bucky says, very simply. “Think you should put it on me.”
“Yeah,” Gale says. “That’s what I thought too. Get down for me.”
There’s no need for it—Bucky’s not that much taller—but the height and the bulk of him fold down in front of Gale, slowly, one knee hitting the floor then the other. He looks up into Gale’s face with steady acceptance. Open, like he’d take anything.
His mouth drops open, just a little, as Gale swipes pigment over it. The color is startling on Bucky’s lips. A deep gash of red beneath his mustache. The wet shine of Bucky’s teeth, the shudder of his breath on Gale’s fingertips feel horribly undoing, too vulnerable by half. Nothing in Gale’s life has ever felt so dire.
“How do I look?” Bucky asks.
Gale caps the lipstick carefully. Should feel more wrong than it does: Bucky, on his knees with his wet red lips and heavy lidded eyes. Gale drags his thumb under the line of Bucky’s bottom lip to neaten it. Bucky’s mouth opens a little more.
“You’re a picture,” Gale says.
Bucky grins. Devastating, that grin on that painted mouth.
“Does this mean you’ll let me be your girl?” Bucky asks. The rasp of his voice seems tailor-made for Gale’s ears. Only just loud enough to reach him.
“That what you want?” Gale asks. “What you’ve been wanting?”
John looks up at him, dark-eyed, focused. Says, “I thought you’d been watching. Thought you knew.”
Gale crushes a grip of John’s curls in his fist. Thinks to kiss him. Thinks of the mark. He looks down at Bucky like this is his first time seeing him.
“Lemme put my mouth on you,” Bucky says. His breathing and voice are thick. “You can mess up my pretty face.”
“That any way to treat a lady?” Gale hears himself murmur.
“Making one beg isn’t much better,” Bucky says, but Gale’s released his grip on Bucky’s hair, and Bucky busies himself at Gale’s belt, the metallic clink of it seeming loud and obscene.
Gale feels unbearably hot, shaky with it. Bucky makes a big show of acquainting himself with Gale’s cock. Licking a stripe up it, rubbing it against his cheek. He sets the crown on his bottom lip and lets Gale leak there against the red of it while Bucky looks up at him through his lashes. No woman’s ever looked at Gale like that. Obscenity beyond obscenity. Gale can’t believe it, himself, how badly he wants. Seems like everything with Bucky is impossible, right up until he does it.
Gale nearly doubles over when Bucky takes him properly in his mouth. One shallow pass, then another, his eyes on Gale’s for that first swallow with him nestled at the back of Bucky’s throat. Gale thinks, in the dim way he has available to him, that it doesn’t seem like the playbook of a virgin cocksucker. The thought is like hard blow to his sternum.
“Not your first time, is it?” he grits out.
Challenge flashes darkly in Bucky’s eyes. He pulls off the spit-slick length of him, jerking him in one hand and the other cupping his sack. He flutters his lashes at Gale. “Guys say they like my mouth,” he says, “but you don’t mind that, do you Major Cleven?”
He swallows Gale back down before Gale can answer. Gale sucks in a breath through his teeth, fists a hand in Bucky’s hair for all the control it’ll give him. Bucky’s moaning while he bobs on Gale’s cock, high, desperate noises fucked out of his throat. It grates at Gale even as it makes him feel recklessly hot and undone. He’s got some sense of Bucky playing a game, or rubbing Gale’s nose in it, the wrongness of it all. Not enough to get your cock sucked by your best friend, who’s sucked off who knows how many men before you—he has to whine like a girl while doing it.
But Gale put the lipstick on him. He’d known what sort of man Bucky was, near enough. If Gale wanted this the normal way he could’ve had it. God knows Marge had offered. He eyes the stretch of Bucky’s mouth, red lips suctioned around him, and he feels as good and as awful as he’s ever felt.
Bucky puts a hand over the one Gale has in his hair. Gale takes the hint, firms his grip. Feels like he’s being taken for a ride. No place to go. His balls aching and tight, body riddled with guilty, strangling heat. And Bucky, glutting himself, smearing lipstick over Gale’s cock and his own mouth. He watches Bucky free up a hand to reach down between his own legs. Doesn’t even undo his trousers, just palms himself through the fabric, bucking against his own palm. Debased, lost in it. It strikes Gale like a brick to the head. Oh, Christ, he thinks.
“John,” he says, warning.
Bucky flicks a look up at him. Gaze bleary. His eyelashes dark and wet. Drooling on Gale’s cock with his lipstick smudged hallways across his cheek. Just a mess, the most erotic thing Gale can imagine. He slides off and jerks Gale in firm, quick strokes, humping his own hand outright.
“C’mon, fuck, c’mon Buck,” he pants. He opens his mouth.
“What’re you doing— John, goddamnit—“
Bucky’s so desperate. Gale’s fucked. He unspools under Bucky’s grip. He hears himself make one hoarse, pathetic sound. When his eyes slip shut, the image of Bucky catching Gale’s spend across his face burns behind his eyelids.
“Bucky,” he says, when he touches back down a moment later, and finds Bucky with his head tipped back, mouth slack, shuddering with his hand on the outline of his cock.
Bucky blinks up at him, dazed. Recognition seems to hit and a lazy, happy grin spreads over his mouth. He starts to say something; in that same moment, they hear voices from outside. Friendly chatter and footsteps put ice in Gale’s limbs. He rushes to tuck himself away then stands perfectly still with his belt undone, staring a warning down into Bucky. Bucky looks back, calm but alert, wearing Gale’s spunk on his chin and cheekbone. He unbuttons his uniform at the collar.
No way to ask what the hell Bucky’s doing. Gale’s heart pounds in his ears. Bucky uses the neck of his undershirt to wipe at his face. Lipstick first, like that’s the most incriminating part. There’s movement in the hangar down below them. Mechanics, voices Gale is horrified to recognize. He spends a purgatorial stretch of minutes waiting to either be spared or discovered. Nothing to do but watch his handiwork disappear from Bucky’s face.
At length the voices die down. Footsteps grow distant and then inaudible. After a bout of listening hard to the total, ringing silence, Bucky finally sighs. He eases himself from his haunches to the floor.
“Aw, Christ,” he hisses, rubbing at his calves. “Plain bad luck is what that is.”
Gale thinks briefly that he’s gonna be sick. The hollow belly of the plane feels unreal, warped and insubstantial. Bucky wraps a hand around Gale’s shin.
“Hey, you with me?” His face is scrubbed pink. He’s buttoned his shirt up again, the mess hidden away beneath.
“I’m fine,” Gale says. Bucky only gives him a searching look. He reaches up to fasten Gale’s belt buckle for him, but Gale knocks his hands out of the way and gets it himself.
“You do that a lot?” It wasn’t anything Gale planned on saying. He watches something in Bucky’s face twitch and go still.
“That, specifically? No.” Bucky stands, dusts himself off. Some of the coolness sloughs off his tone when he adds, shrugging, “There were guys before I enlisted. It was riskier, after.”
Gale nods, slowly. Bucky’s gaze on him is wary.
“Doesn’t have to happen again,” Bucky says quietly. “Guys mess around. It’s fine.”
“I don’t know, Bucky,” Gale says, desperate suddenly to get him to stop talking. “It’s— I don’t know about it. Any of it.”
No playbook for this. They’ve seen and done too much, and for the moment they’ve forgotten how to do something as simple as stand still beside each other. The chasm of what Gale feels he ought to say yawns wide and uncrossable. Bucky’s not much better off. He seems antsy, watchful like an animal.
“Sure thing, Buck,” Bucky says softly. “I’ll leave first. If you’re worried about it.”
“Sure,” Gale says. “You’ve got—“
Bucky freezes when Gale reaches for him. A smudge of red clings to the shadow beneath his lower lip and Gale scrubs at it with a thumb. Bucky lets him, then catches Gale’s hand as he pulls away to lay a kiss on the center of his palm.
“Was nice,” he says, muffled against Gale’s skin, “being your girl.”
Gale can’t think of an answer, and Bucky doesn’t wait for one. He steps carefully through the fort to the hatch, lowers himself down and is gone. Gale wraps his fingers into a fist. It’s dim now in the plane; sun crawling down out of sight of the hangar windows. Before he leaves he waits first for the light to go.
+
Gale watches Bucky slouch deep in his chair for the mission briefing. Eyes forward, smiling humorlessly to hear they’re sending more guys up. Odds are what they always are. Throwing bodies at the otherwise unsolvable problem.
It’s not the briefing that’s made Bucky unhappy. He showed up two minutes late, last one in the room. No one had touched the seat beside Gale. His face was already distant, then. Gale caught his eye and Bucky gave him a curt little nod that rankled Gale’s nerves.
Gale half expected to see Bucky again the night before, after the hangar. But he didn’t go looking, and he supposes Bucky didn’t either. Gale laid down in the dark a long time before he finally fell asleep, half hard and ignoring it.
Bucky wasn’t there when Gale turned out his light, and he was a no-show at breakfast. Didn’t turn up to chatter before the meeting. Agitation pulls Gale’s skin tight and tighter the longer Bucky goes without so much as glancing in his direction. Communication’s never been this hard before, largely, Gale recognizes, because Bucky always handled it.
He snags Bucky by the arm just as the briefing breaks up, when they’re both on their feet and everyone’s filing out. Already he’d turned bodily away from Gale.
“Hey,” Gale says, voice low. “You got something going on?”
Bucky’s gaze skitters past Gale’s face. “Not much. Get a drink or two, maybe. Why, you wanna come with?”
“Not what I meant.”
Bucky blows out a breath, glances around. “You wanna talk about that now? Here?”
Gale doesn’t rise to the bait. “Something’s off with you.”
“You wouldn’t be the first to say so,” Bucky says breezily. “Though maybe you know it the best.”
“Bucky.”
“Listen,” Bucky says suddenly. “I’m trying to make this easy, okay?”
How is this easy, Gale means to ask, but Bucky turns and flags down Benny. Then Gale’s faced with Bucky’s broad back while he tries to twist Benny’s arm into the promise of a drink later. Never know when it’s gonna be your last, goes Bucky’s pitch. All three of them are going up tomorrow. Can’t say Bucky doesn’t live what he preaches.
It’d be simple, direct and satisfying, to spin Bucky back around and make him face Gale like a man. Gale’s held onto that impulse from the time that he was a boy who stood no chance of making his father turn and see him. It’s the sudden lashing violence of the urge that makes Gale walk away.
He doesn’t catch sight of Bucky for the rest of the day. Doesn’t try to. Gale goes for a run, snags a sandwich for dinner, and sits up reading till half the men in the officer’s quarters have switched off their lamps. He’s still awake when Bucky comes in. Quiet, not so late, and moving carefully. Probably not entirely sloshed, not with a mission in the morning.
Bucky sinks heavily onto his bed when he reaches it. For a time he just sits there, his elbows on his knees, his posture weighted with something invisible. He seems tired, and older than he really is. At length, he looks up, and finds Gale looking back at him from his pool of lamplight.
It’s the strangest, most unthinking thing in the world, how much Gale wants to go to him then. Would run his whole professional life through with a pike, if Gale did as he wanted and carried him and his rotten heart barehanded to Bucky’s bed.
As it is he just holds Bucky’s gaze over the top of his book. Wonders if his wanting is as plain as it feels. Bucky stares back, unreadable, until he exhales a long breath and runs a hand down his face, weary beyond measure. Gale does them both a favor and switches off his lamp.
+
It costs Gale something to ask, “You seen Bucky?” that morning at breakfast. Everyone already assumes he’s Bucky’s keeper; this is Gale admitting to himself that he likes the job. Wants to hold onto it.
Turns out Bucky had been in the mess early, and left early too. Unheard of. Gale shovels down a portion of scrambled eggs and shoulders his way out against the stream of men filing in.
A circuit of the officer’s quarters and the line of trucks ready to bear the men away turns up nothing. Gale doesn’t know what compels him, then. Maybe just the magnitude of the black-painting building. It’s funny for a chapel. No qualms about being halfway to a funeral home. Maybe it’s the thought of Bucky’s crucifix, and how the chain glinted when he wiped Gale’s semen off his face with the collar of his shirt.
Bucky’s not inside, but Gale thinks twice and circles around back of the building. Made some kind of sense: Bucky wasn’t contained by his faith, but partner to it.
He hears Gale coming. No way not to. Gale’s in full flight-gear, clanking and feeling foolish. Bucky’s decked out the same but he carries it different. With Gale in spitting distance, Bucky straightens up a little, bracing like he expects a fight. The early morning air is damp and heavy; the cloud of Bucky’s breath almost reaches Gale when he exhales.
“How long were you planning to hide out?” Gale asks.
Bucky shrugs. A little petulant. “Thought if I waited long enough maybe the Krauts would make the whole thing moot anyway.”
“Goddamnit, John,” Gale spits. “You don’t get to talk like that.”
“It’s a clean solution,” Bucky says, scuffing the ground with his boot. “Me MIA, you married. Simple. Everything’s tied up, everyone’s happy.”
“I oughta throttle you,” Gale says before he can stop himself.
Bucky’s gaze is level. “Why don’t you?”
“I don’t want that from you,” Gale spits. “A blood price, or you shot down, or any of this twisted-up nonsense.”
“There’s a whole lot you don’t want from me,” Bucky says. “You think I don’t know that?”
Gale recognizes the trouble of it, pinned under Bucky’s gaze, all the humor gone out of it. The trouble is Gale can’t say what he does want. Doesn’t know what that version of his life looks like. The space beyond the carved path is blank and vast and horrifying. What he feels for Bucky has no name and even fewer boundaries. It eats him up raw. It makes him desperate, and stupid, and satisfies him with its teeth. Wanting Bucky feels good like nothing else does.
“I don’t regret it,” Gale says plainly. “If that’s what’s got you talking this way, you should know I don’t regret it.”
Bucky smiles. In a low voice, he says, “I’m glad it was good for you. You can take it with you, when this whole thing’s over and you’re picking out a wedding cake and a good school for the kids—you can rub one out in the shower, remembering the time you got blown by your best friend.”
Gale steps close, not sure when he decided to move. “You think you’re saving me from something right now? You wanna die just to prove a point? Those aren’t just your decisions you’re making, John. I chose. You don’t get to undo that. I get to keep choosing. I don’t know what my life is gonna look like, now, and that’s because of you. So you don’t get to just leave me in it.”
The plume of his breathing rolls across John’s mouth. The call goes up when they’re standing there like that, watching each other, trying drowningly to read something off each others’ faces. All crews to their forts.
“Goddamn you, Buck.” Something sags in Bucky’s posture. He laughs, an edge of disbelief to it. “What God made you? Why’d He put you in my way? I never had a chance.”
“You could take a little more credit,” Gale says. “Or give me some.”
John shakes his head. “Gotta go,” he says, and there’s a plea in it.
Gale exhales through his teeth. Reaches into his pocket and digs out the tube of lipstick. He presses it into Bucky’s palm. Bucky looks from it to Gale, then closes his fingers around it.
“Feels like a goodbye, huh?” Bucky says.
“No. You bring it back to me.”
“Thought you didn’t go in for this sorta thing,” Bucky says. “Good luck charms.”
“You’re a better bet than luck.”
“And still you’re not a gambler, huh?” John asks.
Gale puts a hand on his shoulder. His thumb skims Bucky’s neck. “Not if you don’t make me into one,” he says.