Chapter Text
Tears o’er a tin box
Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn’t to know
Like a chicken with a fox
He couldn’t win the war with ego
Army Dreamers, Kate Bush (Never for Ever, 1980)
Gale had always loved the time of year when the summer ripened, vibrant greens melting into the deep, crisp hues of a promised autumn. He had always been sensitive, as a child, to the slight changes in the air that accompanied the liminal days of the end of August, when it seemed that suddenly the sun shifted by a few degrees in the sky. When he had tried to describe that change in the light, the rich, plummy hue of the air to his father, Cleven Sr. had looked at him like he was mad. Asked him where he got notions like that. Told him to stop reading poetry books and start preparing for a man’s life in the oilfields.
Many years later, Gale had learned that there was a reason for this. That, as the days grew shorter and richer, the sun drifted ever closer to the southward equinox, where it would appear to cross the celestial equator, heading southward. Shifting its light, just as Gale felt on his skin, by degrees towards the Southern hemisphere of the Earth. Moving to warm the other side of the globe, the one that had been shrouded in relative darkness during the months the other boys on Gale’s street laid out on the grass, water glistening on their skin, farmer’s tans cutting sharp lines across their biceps and where the collars of their shirts should have been. Gale never joined them. They never invited him, and besides, he didn’t enjoy the surety of summer so much as he did the steady herald of change brought on by the fall. It always seemed more hopeful, the idea that change, like the equinox, happened in degrees. Noticeable only to those who paid mind to its shift, until one day nothing was the same as it had been.
Today, though, he was sure that nothing was the same as it had been, but that everything was as it should be. For the first time in his life, perhaps – feet kicked up on the white railing of their veranda, sinking back into a high-backed wicker chair that John had scrounged up from the dump and ratcheted down onto the roof of his car (Gale had been using the truck) to carry home just so “my sweetheart can enjoy the sun without getting burnt.”
Gale hadn’t bothered to tell him that, by this time in the year, the ultraviolet radiation was so low that even his pale skin wasn’t really at risk. He’d just felt the flush rising in his cheeks, a burn of an entirely different kind. John had settled back in the wicker chair (after wiping it down – knowing Gale’s penchant for cleanliness), and pulled the smaller man into his lap as easily as if he was a child. There was no fear of anyone seeing here – their neighbours were over an acre away, and probably had seen worse, anyways.
The white gabled house on Estabrook Road had been home before the wicker chair or the repainting they’d done to get the railings creamy and bright again. The first truly joint decision they had made (though, for safety reasons, it was only John’s name on the deed) – ten minutes’ drive from Hanscom AFB, where John had taken up a teaching post instructing rookie pilots, and only a bit further to Cambridge, where Gale had been accepted with a generous scholarship to study applied physics and astronomy, working towards his PhD. Gale loved the quiet elegance of Concord, and the vibrant, yet sedate student life at Harvard. Though he had yet to speak the dream aloud, he hoped against hope that he would be allowed to stay, to tenure at Harvard after he graduated while John took youngsters over the low hills of Massachusetts and taught them to love the skies the way he did.
In that way, Gale thought as he pressed his feet into the railing, not wanting to leave his post and get ready for the day just yet, everything had changed. But, like the sun now shifting towards its southern equinox as August seeped gently over into September, it had happened by degrees. So slowly that Gale hadn’t even noticed until he was propped up against the porch of his own home, sipping a coffee made for him by the man he loved, about to leave for a seminar on a subject that consumed his mind both waking and asleep. And yet, it had been as inevitable as the equinox, as sure to happen as any predictable celestial event. Everything in its place, Gale thought to himself. The world was as it should be.
Sighing, he stood, swigged the last of his coffee. John had left early that morning to make it to a briefing session that started at 8am, before scheduling his events for the day and briefing his young pilots. They were a fresh-faced bunch, Gale knew. John was fond of them, even though his face darkened when he mentioned how many of them quizzed him about the war, about what it was like up there, taking flak, and down on the earth, feet planted in the muddy snow and soil of Poland. Gently, Gale had reminded him that they hadn’t been so different once. Fresh faced, excited for their first taste of battle. Those boys couldn’t possibly know – and both Gale and John, in the silent cocoon of their own bed, had whispered how they hoped they never would.
Inside, the house was resplendent in the last of the early morning glow, sunrise filtering through white linen curtains that Gale had chosen out and stitched himself. He’d learned how to sew mending his father’s clothes, as well as his own. But he was glad he had, when he’d found an opportunity to put even his rudimentary skills to work to brighten up their home a bit. Especially when John had wrapped his arms around him from behind, called him the “sweetest little embroideress,” and Gale hadn’t had the heart to tell him he couldn’t have embroidered with a gun to his head.
Coffee mug in the sink, brown paper bag with a ham sandwich and an apple collected from the fridge, Gale gave Clem, their small tabby cat, a quick scratch. She’d appeared on their porch one day, and John hadn’t batted an eye when she’d immediately been welcomed inside, weaving in and around their legs, purring sweetly.
“You be good,” Gale teased softly, catching her green eyes with his own by tipping up her little chin, “None of that ‘knocking the mugs off the shelves’ nonsense, or John ain’t gonna be pleased when he gets home. And if he isn’t pleased, he sure as hell isn’t gonna scratch you or give you extra dinner.”
John would absolutely do both those things anyways – the man was a bleeding heart, and Clem had wound her way in with the same deceptive ease she wove between their legs. But it wouldn’t do to tell her that. Someone had to keep some sense of order here.
She made a soft mrrp sound in the back of her throat, and Gale indulged her with a few more scratches between her ears before jogging down the front steps, not bothering to lock the flimsy screen door behind him. This was a good area, no crime, certainly no break-ins. He settled in the driver’s side of his car (usually John took the truck to work – he was more likely than Gale to haul odds and ends home to work with, usually with the goal of adding something on to their house), and put it in gear. It purred gently, a cloud of dust rising in the gravel behind him as he set off. As the autumn approached, they needed to start thinking of winterizing the yard, and he had promised John he’d pick up the tulip and daffodil bulbs he wanted to plant for the spring on his way to class today – with the hopes they could get them all planted this weekend, and John could start spreading mulch and leaves over the beds. Gale had protested he could help, but John had smiled, flicked him on the nose, told him he wanted to take care of “the sweetest damn thing in the world.” Which was, somehow, Gale himself.
With his list of bulbs and other gardening supplies he needed to buy rolling over in his mind, Gale tapped his hands idly on the wheel as he pulled past the gate. The sun was shining. He could hear cicadas singing their last few tunes, before the frost overtook them and their lifeless bodies began piling in the streets. Lifeless bodies – just cicadas, not dead boys, not lying in the snow.
There were still things (a lot of things – not that he liked to admit it) that made Gale flinch. As he turned on the radio and swivelled the dial, trying to tune into the news, he felt that familiar shudder creeping up his spine, like someone had let a thin trickle of ice water wind its way down his back. His hands went a bit cold and clumsy on the dials, reminiscent of when he’d barely been able to move them, frozen and weak as they were. The sound of static, his increasing frustration bleeding into panic as they had gone days, weeks, months without news of what was happening in the outside world. Months of careful building, preparation, planning smashed under Kraut boots when they’d finally found his radio. The terror of knowing he’d take the blame for it, the burning feeling of hunger from too many denied rations, the guilt at being forced to take the boys’ food just to keep himself alive. His stomach curled in on itself, hands clenching on the steering wheel, static pressing deeper and deeper into his eardrums until a bump in the road dislodged him from his spiral, and he discovered, to his terror, that he’d been driving blind down the blessedly empty street in front of their house.
Wrenching the radio dial away from the static and towards the one spot where it stuck from familiar use, Gale tuned himself into the news. Used a shaky hand to wipe the sweat away from his brow, shook his head like that could somehow dislodge the cottony feeling of static, starvation, failure pressing up against his ears.
Today was Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, he thought, trying to calm himself against the more comforting drone of the news, keeping an eye on the green countryside flashing by outside his window. Taught by his supervisor, Dr. Fleming, who was probably one of the best professors he’d ever had. If anyone could get him away from that staticky feeling besides John, it would be Dr. Fleming, who appeared to be able to see through him, infrared waves piercing through the clouds of dust and debris that Gale relied on to obscure the most private parts of himself. It was both disconcerting and comforting, but it also let Dr. Fleming ask him questions that made his brain work in new ways. It distracted him from the left cycles he fell into – minutes, sometimes hours and even days that he lost to the sound of static, the feeling of his fort jerking beneath him. The cries of his men as they’d bailed out into No-Man’s-Land. The feeling of a noose around his neck.
Once again, Gale jerked his attention back to the road. Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics. Navier-Stokes equations. The formation of accretion discs as they rotated, swirling ever inwards, around black holes, planets, and stars.
With each repeat of these things – things he knew so well, they were as second nature as driving his car or pressing his lips against John’s, his breath softened. The colours became more vivid as they rolled by, farmland turning to suburbia turning to the red bricks of Cambridge, the towers of Harvard looming in the distance. He breathed, tried not to heave a sigh, hedged the briefest glance up through the sunroof and imagined John flying somewhere high above him, curls flying in the wind and breathing in the air that always tasted just a little sweeter than it did on the ground.
John stopped himself a second away from banging the screen door open the way he usually did when he arrived home. It was a second nature response, taking up as much space as possible, as loudly as possible, probably from having grown up with too many siblings in a too-small home. But when he’d noticed the way the sound of the door impacting with the wall made both Gale and Clem jump a few weeks ago, he’d resolved to announce himself more quietly. Gale liked the quiet, appreciated the simple acts of love of others noticing when he was uncomfortable or out of his depth. He’d gazed up at John warmly yesterday, when the door had creaked open with a hesitant push instead of its usual bang.
“Hey sweetheart,” John called softly, setting his bag down and shrugging out of his jacket, letting it dangle from his pinky finger momentarily before slinging it over his assigned wooden hook next to the door.
There was some rustling from the kitchen, which opened down a narrow hallway directly ahead of the front entrance. John felt something warm seep into his chest at the domesticity of the scene as he wandered forwards, not bothering to remove his boots. Gale was standing at the stove, brow wrinkled in the way it did when he was focussed on perfecting something, sprinkling breadcrumbs over a casserole that was sitting on top of the warming oven. He looked up only when John entered – he’d obviously known that John would come to him, that he didn’t need to step away from his work.
“Hey sweetheart,” John repeated, more softly this time, slowly moving behind Gale and wrapping his arms around the other man’s slim waist, “You have a good day?”
Gale leaned back into John’s embrace until nearly all his weight was pressed against his chest, hands still working slowly to sprinkle the breadcrumbs, though they were now landing equally on the stovetop and the actual casserole. He didn’t seem to care, nuzzling into John’s neck, hot breath leaving a steamy little patch on the skin there. He nodded, gave a muffled little mhmm that vibrated into John’s skin more than it made an audible sound. John tightened his hands on Gale’s hips, rubbing over the slightly-too-prominent juts of his hipbones. He shook off a shudder. Starvation hadn’t been kind to Gale. He was trying.
“Yeah?” He murmured into Gale’s hair, soft and falling loose from its waxy pomade, though it still smelled a bit of pine needles and musk, “Your classes go good? You aren’t usually home this early, I wasn’t expecting to see your car in the driveway.”
Gale twisted in his arms and gave him a little smile, dusting off his hands on his front.
“My second class was cancelled. Dr. Walsh wasn’t feeling well, I guess. Pinned a note up on his office door telling us all to pack it in early for the day, so I figured I’d come home and cook some dinner for my fella.”
John felt his cheeks colour a bit, and squeezed Gale even tighter to him, pressing the shorter man’s head into his chest.
“Your fella, huh? Gee, and here I thought I was just some guy you were shacking up with for the free rent.”
Gale smiled a bit bigger and let himself be pulled away from the oven, let John’s hands wander a little lower than his hips, before finally batting him away.
“Well, I sure as hell ain’t paying you rent, so how about you let me repay you by not burning your dinner, huh? You can tell me about your day while I finish up, this just has to bake for about twenty, and I want to do us up some carrots and parsnips too.”
Gale dug around for the brown sugar in the under-counter cabinets while he spoke. His carrots and parsnips with brown sugar and butter were divine, and John found his mouth was watering. Even in the Stalag, when they’d been relegated to eating meat from dubious sources, Gale had been surprisingly skilled in dressing it up. John was hopeless in the kitchen – he’d take Gale’s culinary skills over his own any day.
Toeing off his boots and quickly returning to the mudroom to set them on the mat, John returned to their dining room, which was adjacent to the kitchen and let him sit and talk to Gale while not getting underfoot. He leaned back in one of the wooden chairs he’d handmade not long after they’d bought the place, stretching his socked feet out in front of him and letting Clem sniff at them briefly before she walked away, nose in the air. John chuckled, and Gale’s lips quirked up from the kitchen as well, though there was no way he could’ve seen what was making John laugh.
“So,” Gale continued, back still turned, measuring sugar and butter into a saucepan, “Get up to anything interesting up there today?”
John noticed the slightest bit of guardedness in Gale’s tone, the way his shoulders hunched inwards a bit. They’d talked about it before – Gale missed the skies, but he didn’t. Missed the clear blue, the clouds, the sun in his face, but not the flak that haunted his waking and sleeping hours. For him, thinking of the sky meant thinking of everything he loved, and everything that frightened him.
“Just the usual,” John stretched back even more, so only his shoulders and the upper part of his ass were actually in contact with the chair, “Kids being kids. We’re training ‘em on the new F-80s, which is a hell of a difference coming from the forts. They got real jet engines on ‘em Gale, no more propellers to feather. But they’re a hell of a time to maneuver, and you know dogfight maneuvering like that was never really my strong suit anyways – you were always the best one for that. Sometimes feel like you should be teaching them, not me.”
Still with his back turned, Gale snorted, dumping the chopped carrots and parsnips into the saucepan and letting them sizzle for a moment.
“Don’t think they’d want me, John. Nobody wants to be up there with a guy who might space out and run his jet into the side of a mountain.”
It was meant to be humorous, John could tell, but there was an undertone of bitterness to Gale’s voice. He’d never been any danger in the cockpit – he’d gone back to school before his flashbacks had leeched from his nightmares into his waking hours. But they both knew that now, if Gale was honest, no Army shrink would ever let him fly. If he was honest with himself, John wasn’t all too comfortable letting Gale drive on some of his worse days.
“You’d be okay, Gale, if you had to.” John knew it was better to confront the problem face on – Gale just got frustrated if he denied its existence, “Our strong, stoic Major all through the war. If you had to teach them, you’d do a damn fine job. They’d be lucky to have you. But Harvard’s even more lucky to have that brilliant mind of yours.”
That made him smile, as he dusted off his hands and gave their dinner a perfunctory stir with a wooden ladle before meandering over to join John at the table.
“Guess so. Wouldn’t know it, y’know. Everyone I work with is goddamned brilliant. In fluid dynamics today, we were talking about predicting how dust clouds form, and what causes them to move in the way they do, and this guy Harry, he’s able to accurately predict how they’ll shift before Dr. Fleming’s even got the progression photos from the telescopes up on the projector. It’s like his brain works in hydraulic engineering.”
John really didn’t have the faintest idea what fluid dynamics was, beyond what Gale had tried to explain – that it was a way of using hydraulic models to predict the movement of objects in space. He could listen to Gale talk for hours about his studies, though, without understanding a single word. He loved to watch his face light up, his eyes get bright with interest, gears turning and shifting in his head often while he was speaking out loud, working his way through a problem to a solution. John also knew, though, that Gale’s preferred subject was not fluid dynamics. He didn’t have an engineering background, he was always insisting. John had stopped trying to point out that he’d been almost as handy as Ken Lemmons with their forts – he was pretty sure Gale wasn’t talking about that type of engineering.
“It’s incredible,” Gale continued, catching John’s eye with an easy smile, “God, I wish I could think like that about physics – it’s such a practical way to model the behaviour of the universe. But I suppose guys like Harry’d be lost without me being able to keep up with them on the equations front.”
“Exactly. Jesus, Gale, the stuff I’ve seen you do with numbers. Someday you’ll be in the White House, modelling the behaviour of the universe for the president. I swear to God.”
John reached out on the last word and poked Gale’s bare foot with his own socked toe. Gale grinned and poked him back easily.
“Ya think, Bucky? I dunno what the president cares about dust clouds or nebulae.”
To the stars we’ll return.
It was something Gale had said to him once on the march, when they were close to dead, past shivering from the cold, stomachs past growling and groaning from hunger. Gale had told him that someday, when they sun became a red giant and swallowed up the earth, they’d crystalize and drift out into open space. John remembered imagining that, hoping whatever form he’d crystalize into would merge with Gale, so they could drift side by side forever.
He nudged Gale’s foot again.
“You’re always saying that what’s up there,” John motioned vaguely to the heavens, and Gale laughed, “Is the beginning and the end of everything down here. Don’t see how that’s something the president, or anyone else, could ignore. Seems just about like the most damn important thing in the world.”
When he looked up, Gale was staring at him with almost frightening intensity, though it was an intensity John had learned only Gale could conjure up – one that was underlaid with gentleness rather than force. Then he leaned forwards and took John’s face in both his hands, thumbs rubbing up and down his cheeks, and John realized that part of the intensity in his eyes was coming from a light glaze of what appeared to be tears.
“What gave you the right to be so damn sweet?” Gale rasped, thumbs still rubbing up and down, “Saying things like that, Jesus, John.”
John leaned forwards and pressed his lips softly against Gale’s own, bringing up his hands to wipe away an errant tear that tracked down his cheek.
“Only repeating what you’ve told me, sweetheart. We come from the stars, and to them we’ll return. Can’t get more important than that.”
“Stars are what we gravitate towards,” Gale said with a soft smile, gaze distant now, like he was reciting something he’d rehearsed in his own mind, “They’re what we came from before we were created, and what we return to when we’re destroyed. Our whole lives are bracketed around them, overseen by them, spent searching for them.”
The faint scent of brown sugar and butter drifted in from the kitchen, but John couldn’t find it in himself to warn Gale that their dinner was potentially in the process of burning. He’d get up when he was ready, thumbs still brushing aimlessly across John’s cheeks.
They ate dinner companionably, and John did the washing up after, the way they always split their tasks. John was a no-good cook, although Gale was convinced he could teach him, and Gale hated doing the dishes.
When they were through, John sat back on the porch with a glass of whiskey, Gale beside him, reviewing his notes and readings for the following day. There were fireflies flitting to and fro: little constellations of dots and dashes clustering in the grass of the front lawn. They were in their final days, the crisp, clear autumn and the shift of the equinox coming for them as surely as it came for everything. The end of John’s cigarette mirrored their glow as he took a drag, the end lighting up before crumbling and blowing away on the soft breeze.
“Gettin’ colder,” John remarked in that mindless way of his that Gale so loved, because it allowed him to hum along without focusing on the interaction, “Gotta start turnin’ the garden over for the winter. You got those bulbs you wanted to get planted?”
Gale shook his head. Of course, he’d meant to pick them up on his drive into town today. But, his head had been foggy and he’d forgotten. Suddenly, he ached all over, a prickly ache where each one was independent, yet they all meshed themselves together until he felt lit up with tingling pain like a macabre, trembly Christmas tree.
There was a heavy weight on his shoulder.
“Hey, Gale, you with me?” John’s voice broke through the prickling pain. Gale’s mind, momentarily dislodged, teetered like a precarious pile of stones, luggage unsecured on a rack.
“Mhmm. Sorry, don’t know where I went. Didn’t manage to pick up those bulbs today, I guess.”
John understood. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten, or hadn’t wanted to, it was that sometimes, now that they’d come home from the bucolic rolling fields of England and the flak-torn skies of Germany and the endless snow and corpses of Poland, they just couldn’t some days. John always said, they’d dust themselves off, and try again tomorrow. It made Gale breathe a little easier when he said that.
“So you didn’t go to the garden centre, we know that much,” John joked, smoke blowing from his mouth in a puff of good-natured laughter, trying to lighten the mood and set Gale’s teetering mind firmly back in place, “Luckily, I think we got a few more days before we really need to get on that. Want to go together on the weekend? I’ll drive the truck, and we can pick up some tarps and canvas to wrap the trees. Don’t want the rabbits getting at ‘em.”
Gale wrinkled his nose and fanned some of John’s cigarette smoke out of his face.
“Rabbits?”
“Y’know, when they bark the trees in the winter? Pain in the ass.”
Gale didn’t, in fact, know. They hadn’t worried much about the trees, or their bark, in Wyoming. Ranch was big enough without keeping inventory of every bush and shrub on it. He just shook his head, and John laughed, slinging his arm around Gale’s shoulders.
“Well, cowboy, we’re gonna make sure you never have to find out. We’ll get those bulbs of yours planted, and all the trees good and protected from the rabbits ‘fore winter comes. And we’ll get started this weekend. How’s that sound?”
The stones of Gale’s mind felt stable, or at the very least, less likely to topple into the unarranged chaos he’d been in this morning. He nodded, suppressed a little shiver as another light breeze wafted over the two of them. John’s cigarette flared red, creeping dangerously close to his moustache.
“Better put that out.” Gale suggested, reaching over to pluck it from between his lips. John let him, returning the favour by shucking his heavy flannel jacket and wrapping it around Gale’s shoulders. It held his warmth, smelt like Lucky Strikes and engine grease and something sweet, like hay. His cheeks coloured, and he looked up at John through his lashes, feeling the way the other man’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
“You were shivering,” John said gently, hand circling now, “Can’t have you runnin’ too cold now, sweetheart. You’ll catch your death.”
Gale used his feet to scoot the wicker chair sideways across the porch until it was flush against John’s own wooden rocker (another find from the local dump, meticulously repainted forest green). He placed his book spine-up on his knee, and leaned heavily against John’s broad shoulder. The arm around him squeezed him close as he did so, warmth seeping through the heavy flannel. Gale snuggled infinitely closer, shutting his eyes, letting out a content sigh.
“That nice for ya, sweetheart?” John chuckled, fingers dragging through Gale’s hair, “Don’t you gotta finish up your reading yet tonight?”
“Nah,” Gale responded, slightly muffled in John’s shoulder, “Just getting ahead. I can do it tomorrow in the library. Seminar’ll probably be cancelled as well, it’s the same professor.”
“Good. Then why don’t you get all cozy and warm here with me and we can sit and watch the fireflies ‘til you fall asleep? And then I’ll carry ya inside and get all snug and warm in bed and you’ll be all rested and ready to get that reading done tomorrow.”
Gale flushed, though he knew John couldn’t see it. The other man didn’t have that much height on him, but he did have a significant amount of muscle and weight, particularly since they’d got back. It wouldn’t be the first time John had hefted him up, bridal style, hushing him back to sleep as he edged his way up the narrow stairway to their bedroom. There was a part of Gale that loved waking up in bed, John teasing his hair softly, telling to go back to sleep. No one had ever done that for him before – not since he could remember, anyhow.
“Mkay,” Gale sighed, pressing his face into John and breathing in his scent of cigarette smoke and the sweet, oaky notes of whiskey on his breath.
“There you go. I gotcha, Buck.”
Gale hummed happily again, feeling John’s heartbeat thrumming in his chest. The fireflies were coming closer now that the light from John’s cigarette had gone out, and he watched them, fascinated. They blinked in some sort of indecipherable Morse code, known only to the other fireflies. And they seemed to orbit a central spot of light, one insect that was a bit brighter than the rest, that held them all together. Like stars, they were drawn to the heaviest, brightest object, falling slowly on the fabric of the universe towards a predetermined conclusion.
The fireflies spiraled about for a while longer, drifting to and fro in their groups across the lawn. Gale’s eyes drifted shut, and he could feel John growing loose and heavy above him as well. John was always tired after a day in the air. But he always found it within himself to hold Gale close, end their evenings off like this, even if he was falling asleep himself.
Like the fireflies, Gale found himself falling over and over towards John. Had done since they’d first met, and had been ever since.
During the autumn equinox, the days and nights are roughly equal, shifting by degrees towards a longer night, so slowly that the change is difficult to perceive until it has already occurred. During this time, when the sun begins its slow journey Southward, a change also occurs in the constellations visible in the night sky. Prominent in the summer, the Milky Way begins to fade, allowing the viewer a deeper view into the universe. The equinox is also associated with a higher likelihood of visible aurora borealis, as solar winds interact with the Earth’s magnetic field.
The equinox is a time of change. But it is also a reminder that what cannot always be seen has not necessarily vanished. The constellations past the Milky Way, the aurora borealis bringing visibility to the omnipresent solar winds. These things are constant, if not visible. And in moments of flux, they make themselves know. A comforting presence in a time when, before we know it, the sun has shifted past our hemisphere and the nights are long.