Archive of Our Own

Thank you. The sun will never bless our heads.
Take my sad thanks for this: you do not
cause my sickness. And I don’t cause yours.

Marina Tsvetaeva, I'm glad your sickness
(trans. Elaine Feinstein).

In the beginning, he could almost notice a thread of obsceneness trailing through the slumped bodies, the wearied bodies, the bodies of those wounded and of those so long past wound they were hurling into those unnamable territories one shouldn’t have thought about on a good day, let alone on a day so cumbersome it was leaving greasy, opaque fingerprints over their eyelids.

Outside, the weather was ripe with the humid promise of a summer thunderstorm: the past weeks had festered a sweltering heat, and the birds were abuzz over the horizon with their frenzied flights. The clouds were an acrimonious shade of grey, Bucky shivered at their premonitions, felt it a bit like the apocalypse, like what was happening in the East. The night prior rocks had been cracking as evening fell and they had sounded like bullets. Bucky had folded his thin pillow over his head, but it had accomplished nothing.

The battering was inescapable and he hadn't slept a lick because one moment he'd been getting drowsy and the other a bang would startle him away from slumber; at dawn, already tired because of training, in front of scalding coffee, he made an offhand joke about his own ears to Buck's weary face and it was met with silence. It had been unusual, but not unexpected.

The worry had only started to settle when his good-day, cadet had been met with a singular sharp jerk. Buck could be a right bastard in the mornings, but he'd always been polite. From there, a winding trail of hopeless ideas had started to cascade out of his brain and towards his guts.

When Buck hadn’t even mustered a smile at his antics, Bucky had plunged himself into engineering a plan to tie his friend up, shove him in the back of a jeep and drive the both of them to the nearest civilian hospital. The decision was immediate, and uncomplicated; a little less than a year at Randolph, and by the second week he’d had gathered enough evidence to understand that some things were best kept outside of the brass’ eyes, ears and hands. He’d always suspected his friendship with Buck would be one of those, too.

In the end, no amount of intimidation or coercion (he was just about prepared to beg, as well) had been needed: after breakfast Buck had been plucking at his sleeve cuffs in calculated intervals that betrayed some sort of nervousness thrumming, jittery, underneath or within his bones.

“Alright, Buck?” he’d asked, once most of the other men had cleared out.

His mind had wandered towards the previous night and its dinner; at one point during those early acquaintance-days and sleepless-nights Buck had narrated a story on the gristly consistency of a hare's legs, which had made Bucky’s middle-child-catholic-school-stomach churn in disgust.

It couldn’t have then rationally been the poor excuse for beef gravy, or the mashed potatoes and their acid taste, that had battered Buck into silence, although Bucky hadn't doubted for a second about their prowess. Looking pale, Buck had nodded. Then he’d shaken his head.

“I need you to drive me to,” his throat had worked around nothing, in the graceful idleness he’d been getting used to seeing coming from his friend, “In town. I need to go. To a clinic.”

Bucky had blinked twice, trying to catch up with a conversation that seemed to have started without him. The quick glance, Buck’s expressive eyes lingering maybe a bit too much over his shoulders, hadn’t helped to clue him in.

There had been entire sprouting conversations Bucky had begun to pick up hidden underneath his narrowed eyes, the slant of his lips, that otherwise would’ve fallen to the ground and died in the arid, feverish drought of military stoicism. In the years that followed, there would be many more (both beautiful and terrible, angry and desperate), though Bucky couldn’t have known then: at the time they’d been young and inexperienced navigators of a language still in its infancy.

Warily, he’d tried to retrace his steps in the semantic jungle of their daily routine: it was something Buck hadn’t wanted to share with anyone; an embarrassing truth, or something so private it had turned shameful. Reaching his conclusion, he remembers he’d given an ecstatic giggle. Bucky, in good conscience and with no real remorse, could have weaved a tapestry of stories like that, but he hadn’t pegged Buck to be that sort of fella.

He’d slowly wriggled his brows, “Really?”

“I just need you to drive me there, Bucky,” he’d said in a tone that had meant he’d been getting exasperated.

At twenty-two, Bucky hadn’t quite internalized yet the distance from which the shining light of Buck’s good humor would give way to his more turbulent disposition; he'd been stepping onto rocky terrain, sure-footed the way only someone used to facing the histrionics of a younger sister could be. That day he’d only snickered. Probably he had calculated the odds and determined that Buck would’ve told him everything with time.

That had been it; he’d accepted the request with what he’d hoped would come across as an unconcerned shrug. He hadn’t wanted to make that novelty disappear because a few cards were shown too soon. Buck had nodded again, left the hall for morning lessons, and wouldn’t find him again for hours, when the mid-afternoon sun and its white heat were at their worst.

Bucky hadn’t had a problem finding a car; he was a sweet-talker, he liked making people feel good for being good to him, and so he’d presented Buck a bleached jeep and drove them to the clinic, which was at the edge of San Antonio, a generous forty-minute trip through a green, semi-deserted landscape that offered no respite from the rays cooking their skin.

It was July and the British were in Libya and Algeria fighting the Italians and sinking French submarines; there were talks amongst the pilots, everyone had almost unanimously agreed that F.D.R. would get them in (over there, it had always been said like that, an anonymous somewhere) as soon as the occasion would rise.

Bucky had silently disagreed, as had Buck, but for wholly different reasons Bucky hadn’t been privy to. It hadn’t mattered what the matter-of-fact resolution the upper echelons had been gearing towards.

What had mattered, in the way all ugly truths matter, was that the men were smelling the war. Its stench had reached them across the ocean. It had made them restless, which in turn had created some sort of concatenation of cause and effect that overthrew the careful balance of the civilized American society, allowing for the kind of mingling his Mama had been aware of but pointedly ignored. Daily passes had become a common occurrence, as shots, and pills and rubbers. But sometimes it just wasn’t enough.

“Hey, Buck,” he’d said evenly, jovially, as he parked the car. The address he’d been given had led him to an unfamiliar place, but he’d firstly guessed there were more than one of those kinds of establishments in a city like San Antonio, so full of red-bloodied soldiers.

Except, he'd never been too keen on ignoring the obvious.

“You’re not here to get more prophylactics, are you?”

“No, Bucky,” there had been a monumental sigh, a sound so tired Bucky had felt guilty of something he himself had not really understood at the moment, “I’m not.”

***

(But what about when you first met? - Well, that’s a much longer story, it won’t fit in an hour.)

***

In the beginning, other than noticing the obsceneness of the tumultuous crashing of bodies, all sitting and moaning, some on the ground, the unrelenting warmth oozing in swathes over the terracotta-orange tiles, the flood of desperation in his nostrils, he also had the singular, elucidating, almost striking thought that nothing would be lost, now that he knew. That he wasn’t crazy, or unfit or deficient; that those philosophers and doctors and scientists had, since time immemorial, found for him a legitimate explanation that could justify the sort of improper thinking growing out of the secret inner workings of his body which when embarked upon made him itch for confession before Sunday’s mass. It was good not to be found responsible for any wrongdoing.

Even when faced with the harsh reality of biological unfairness, he couldn’t help but feel an eagerness taking root in him, a knowledge that he could fix whatever had been upset before.

Buck, though, that first time didn’t have the face of someone who felt good or at all relaxed at the notion of a restored world order. Within the miasmic dry-rot of the clinic’s walls he turned paler, like the squalor and pain (surely, Bucky thought, there were better places than this?) surrounding them suddenly became too much for his sensibilities, which Bucky already knew were not sensible at all. His face appeared distorted with the sort of terrifying rending fear that made men lose their religion.

It was in this mood that Buck grabbed his elbow, turned and said: “I’m trusting you, Bucky.”

All along the perimeter, suffused by the shrilling voices of nurses and medics calling one or the other names, the septic funk of disease was whorling around them. Bucky nodded softly.

Buck’s eyes were galvanizing, with his grip tightening he got closer, and whispered: “You’re going to listen,” his voice was trembling, Bucky was unsure with what, “I’m going to tell you, and you’re going to listen.”

“You can trust me, Buck,” he replied. It was imperative that Buck knew: “I’m going to listen.”

“Good,” he said, back to the composed, kempt soldier, “We’re going to sit down and wait. I have an appointment scheduled in thirty minutes. Since I’m not married I need you to sign the waiver. It’s a formality, and it won’t appear on your records–

“Jesus, Buck, wait a second–

As he spoke, Buck made a violent forward movement, bringing them closer, “Use a fake name, if you want, Bucky, these people don’t care about me. Just listen. Once they call my name, you’re going to sign the waiver, and then you’re going back to the base. I have a four-days leave, on Monday you’re driving back here, you’ll pick me up, and we won’t talk about it. Because I trust you.”

Bucky felt right then that he would carry the heavy burden of his choice for a long, long time. And there would be no minimising it, not the realization of what Buck was, and not the joy he felt minutes ago, that was waning as the darkness grew closer and the voices louder.

All the pain, Bucky’s first instinctive judgment, the siren song of a natural predisposition, edged closer together on a too small surface he was struggling to keep balanced. In front of him, a bifurcation stood out, chromatic in shade, and unsure in the results.

It must have had something to do with the news everyone was hearing, worrying and rattling, too loud to be unavoidable. It must have also been the Army; Bucky hadn't known and he lived with the man. Buck had, not at all unlike those hares he’d been trapping as a child and that unfathomably freed themselves, found secret ways to hide and disguise.

For a minute he contemplated, miserable, what exactly he would be putting his name on, his complicity in an act that warranted such secrecy. Abruptly (except not at all), he wanted to give Buck something real, the sacrosanct proof of what he’d been building in those hours spent telling each other jokes and smiling covertly behind their instructors’ backs, and sitting in planes, and touching the enchanting tendrils of what Bucky could only guess was the physical manifestation of the Transcendent.

“OK, Buck,” he said, unable to stop himself from imagining the worst. There were certain things he just hadn’t been aware of, those years, growing up the way he did, but that Buck had evidently spent a lot of time considering, “But what– I mean, is it dangerous?”

“About as dangerous as a war,” replied Buck, forcing some levity in his voice.

He walked towards two free chairs and elegantly sat down, as if he were at the bar and was waiting for his stylish bottle of coke with a slice of lemon.

In Bucky’s head it just sounded like in the ensuing four days he would be getting some serious indigestion. He sat down, too, and looked at the other people in the room, cramped and inadequately bright. Some were irreparably gone, in the throes of the kind of bloody-gusts of pain that Bucky had never seen before, and he was sure they were going to die in their hemorrhagic efforts to stay alive.

In jolting swells he thought of his baby sister crying without wanting to be comforted, because the hurt had been impossible to communicate. Buck was sweating, his forehead was covered in a glossy sheen, and if he was feeling any sort of discomfort, he was also great at covering it up.

“Does this… God, Buck. Just what the hell are we doing here, actually?”

Buck turned, fixing him with a stare that made Bucky feel like a pinned insect.

“You’re a good man, John,” he said, “You’re a good, nice man, so you don’t think about other men that aren’t good or nice. You’re a bit of a lothario, but you’re a good man.”

“Now, Buck–

“It’s true. You know of their existence, and it upsets you something fierce, I see it. You see it, too. And we can’t ignore them. Now, we both want to do our part. I’m willing to lose a great deal to do my part, but I’m not willing to give them this,” he folded his hands on his lap. To the untrained eye it would have looked like dissimulation.

“You’re serious.”

Buck smiled, unlooking. When he did that, his cheeks grew round and his lips flat, and he was the handsomest man Bucky had ever seen, charming, with a harsh softness that contextually made little to no sense.

He found, or rather, imagined to find, the echo of spiritual recognition, distorted through time and by the always-fractured fears snagging on their selves. It was their past, too, and maybe too early, anticipating everything that would come. As if they had known each other for much longer, a circular time.

“I’m sorry,” Buck said, at last, “I know I’m asking a great deal out of you.”

“To be honest, I’m still not sure what you’re asking me at all.”

“I know,” but Bucky understood it wouldn’t be followed by any explanation, “I’m glad you’re here, nonetheless. And you can hate me later, but now I need you to do this thing for me.”

People kept slurring words, entering and exiting from the narrow door that said OFFICE in an inoffensive font and from there in various state of distress either leaving the building altogether or being ushered towards the other end of the room, where two more doors were closed and were subsuming all of Bucky’s unwitting assumptions.

“Gale,” he never called him anything but Buck, really, though the moment warranted the kind of honesty only given names could sustain, “I don’t think I could ever hate you for anything at all.”

“Thank you, John,” he put his hand over Bucky’s knee, holding, holding.

***

The papers presented to him weren’t brief and they weren’t short, but they possessed the sort of sterility that even flight manuals lacked, a kind of irony Bucky felt breathless for falling into. Sentences like should be otherwise considered permanent and irreversible, and neverending lists (bowel injury, vascular injury, method failure, infection, hemorrhage, visceral injuries, patient regret) were presented to him with an ascetic wash of medical superiority. He read them over with growing dread.

“It’s a lot, but we must be transparent,” said who Bucky assumed was the surgeon, “I assure you, since the last decade the procedures are safer and the recovery easier and faster for the patient, too.”

“Sure,” Bucky felt himself reply, his mind slipping on the nauseating sound of the clock ticking.

Buck was pouring his attention over his own set of papers, less bulky and not making any noise.

“It would be better to wait, but really, it’s all for the sake of formality if–

“We’re in the Army, sir,” interrupted Buck, like he’d been practicing the script of the conversation they were going to have and the doctor was improvising.

“Yes,” said the doctor, “yes, of course. Excruciating circumstances, you told me. And, truthfully, you’re not the first one that has reached out to us... It’s a brave thing, what you’re doing. As I was saying though,” he gave Bucky a slick, black pen, “if your mate thinks it’s best we can proceed.”

There was an ear-ringing warble; Bucky wished he could turn back, turn to Buck, and see him laughing (in the way he usually did, with some false starts and a reticence that was all for show), and see him say there you go, Bucky, you’ve been had– that in a moment all lights would turn on and the man in front of them would sit up and clap his hands at a joke well executed, that all the people outside of the door with OFFICE on it would burst into stomach-gripping giggles.

“If I think–

“Could you give us a moment, doctor?”

“Of course,” the leather chair creaked under the mass of the man, “Nurse Adrian will be just outside if you need anything.”

At his shoulder, Buck said thank you, sir. Bucky was poleaxed.

“Your mate,” he muttered, “is that who I’m supposed to be?”

He needed to leave the room, wander until he would meet the Texan desert, with its weathered rocks and unpeopled confines, surviving on water-oases until the mirages would drive him to madness, and only then return to the clinic and see whether or not Buck would still be there, asking this something of him, that Bucky had never once thought would be his to give.

He abandoned to what he thought would have comprised his natural life the momentaneous, ugly, ruthless evidence that Buck could think of him that way only as a deceit.

“I didn’t think he would be so talkative.”

Bucky looked at him, really looked at him. In the delicate sunset glare, his face had an unsettling intensity, almost ripping at the seams, catching the shadowed impressions of thunderclouds in the distance. In all likeliness, this was as bitterly close as Buck would ever get to admitting as to what he’d orchestrated. The worst thing, Bucky would probably forgive him for it.

“Is this,” he stopped, restarted, “Buck, I won’t pretend I’m not, I’m not glad you came to me–

Buck shifted in his chair, turning to him, the same steely gaze insinuating itself between them, he sounded ripe with anger when he said: “This isn’t about you.”

“Well, it damn feels like it is since I’m involved, doesn’t it!?” Besides, he wanted to add meanly, it was always going to be about me, “These waivers, too. What kind of procedure would even require–

“You don’t know,” Gale had his torso protruding, his hands clasped on the armrests, “and I have no intention of letting them know, either. You heard the BBC broadcasts, you heard Churchill. You hear how people talk, what this war is doing. In a year, maybe two, we’ll be over there, and I’m ready to die, as you are, but I don’t. I can’t–

“Hey, now, Buck, hey,” he moved, too, grasping Buck’s fingers in his, “wait a second, let’s just– There must be another way. Suppressants, or–

“And what when there won’t be any suppressants?” Buck pressed with cold rationality, “Any contraceptives? What then, Bucky?”

I’d still be there, he wanted to say, peering into his friend’s eyes, knowing how trivial and sappy he would have sounded. But the fact was that he did believe it, that his presence would somehow matter over much more unattainable things, that in a world created in His image miracles would still be permitted.

From the glacial stillness, he could tell Buck was waiting for a response and he wondered if he was thinking about Bucky dead on some German doorstep and if the notion of losing each other made him as uncomfortable as the hypothetical did to him. This felt altogether like a different beast to kill, and he didn’t like having been made aware of the sordid reality, but the opposite notion would have perhaps destroyed him like a cancer, slowly but surely.

“I. I don’t know, Buck. This is not–” he was going to say, this is just not done, “this is something you’ll have to live the rest of your life with.”

“Yes, Bucky,” he said, levelly, white-knuckling Bucky’s hand, “so is a child. So is remorse.”

***

(You told me this was not a tragedy, sir - It’s not, it’s not! Indulge me, we haven’t even really started.)

***

Any sense of quietness had long since faded during those fatidical four days spent in different rooms.

When he’d come back to base he forewent dinner and drank himself into a stupor and strolled until even the crickets fell silent, as the hot torrid tarmac had fumigated away the sweeping gusts blowing eastward, towards that damned place.

His mind had drilled itself in a coiling knot of gross fopperies that all felt like immanent realities: Buck would die, Buck would hate him for having let all of this happen, Buck would turn his back and relegate Bucky to the halcyon days of innocent youth when this thing had yet to insinuate itself between them.

Despite it all, scattered as he’d been, he couldn’t help but wanting to nurture the tumor residing in his belly, the thing he’d firstly assumed a deviancy and when exposed as the mundane linearity became truly impossible to ignore. Mostly, he hadn’t wanted to ignore it. Mostly, he had wanted to hope.

That crapulous night, Bucky had deduced with as much conviction as he’d ever believed in anything, thanks to the clarity that only a belly full of a good spirit could afford, that he would forever be wishing the same seductive, insoluble things he’d wished for before Buck did the things he felt like he’d had to do.

Since he’d been feeling forlorn, he had remembered that long ago, as a pugnacious child fighting sharks in a lake, he’d theorized what exactly had made him like this, some sort of genetic inescapability of bad blood ensnared within a failed marriage. The same reason his mother had three children and no husband, a contagion seeping out of their marrow. It was a difficult thesis to entertain, and he never much liked unsettling the sand at the bottom if the surface had been calm, but all that waiting in the Jeep for Buck had suddenly authorized a deluge of usurping emotions nesting in every hairline fracture of his cranium.

Deciding he’d been done with what he'd been calling the Four day Flood, stumbling, he had fallen into a fitful sleep whose nightmares he carried onto the waking hours, until Monday had come and he’d commandeered another car and vomited behind a bush, the order of events imprecise even to him.

During the drive away from the city’s boundaries he’d managed to make peace with the recollection of a Buck who hadn’t looked any different at all, exiting from the unassuming glass doors. Bucky had offered him his hand, he’d spotted him squaring his shoulders with every step, and acted like he didn’t feel fragmented at the sight. Buck had taken it, but following a quick squeeze he’d sat in the car waiting to be brought back to base. He’d looked pacific, at least not mourning anything, but there and then Bucky hadn’t had the sort of insight required to translate all of Buck’s expressions.

He should have asked for a photograph for comparison, a perverse memory haunting them.

The months following they’d both been promoted to second lieutenant and moved to MacDill, Florida and not a single person had suspected anything, though Buck had started to talk about this girl he’d known back home like they’d been writing to each other non-stop for years. Only he knew (hoped) that it had been mostly a pretense. Marjorie Spencer was real, and she’d graduated valedictorian the same year as Buck, and she was a beta unhappily waiting for a proposal from someone everyone but Bucky saw as something else.

Meanwhile, perhaps precisely because of this, he had also begun developing the absurd notion that after the ordeal, they had managed to breed some sort of conjoined connection that meant nothing would surprise him anymore. A real, tangible conviction that Buck somehow entertained in secret. And liked to disprove: by the time How Green Was My Valley had won Best Picture and the Navy was scuttling ships to avoid falling into Japanese hands, Buck came to him one evening with a chalky-green face cut in a deep frown.

“My menses came in early,” Buck said, as he closed the door to their room, walking across and slumping on his bed.

Bucky had been laying over the coarse covers, pretending to read China Sky (he’d borrowed it from Bill Veal and his saccharine collection of contraband books) and mostly not paying attention to it, wanting to be prepared when Buck would come back from the showers. In the end, he’d actually given the book a chance; he swallowed word after word, like a viscous figment taking root at the base of his neck, entrapped by the doomed love of those doctors. It meant, succinctly, that he hadn’t heard Buck coming in, and that his comment didn't make much sense, and his complexion even less. He let the book fall on his chest to look at him.

“What–

“My heat–

“I know what menses– Jesus, the mouth on you,” sitting up, under the abluted artificial light, Bucky ruminated on what he’d just heard.

“But, I thought. It was supposed to be permanent.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he paused, “It, uh, it upset my cycle. I thought it would be settled by now. But.”

“OK,” said Bucky, vaguely remembering some highschool detail or the other, “And you’re sure–

“Yes, Bucky, I’m pretty damn sure.”

Sitting on his mattress, Buck looked like a gutted fish. In the book Dr. Gray had just begun explaining to his wife about the indomitable resistance of the Chinese (God, how they can take suffering). Bucky didn’t know, truly, what to do.

Feebly, he asked: “How’d you manage it before?”

Buck didn’t blush, but he could perhaps taste the reticence in his tone of voice as he said, “Like you do, Bucky.”

The fuse in his gut, always lit, had flared, inflammatory and sizzling. Maybe it was the graphite-smudge of days spent studying the simple ligaments of Buck’s hands, or the humidity-drowned grass outside leaving stains over their knees as they ran and fell and ran again, or maybe it was the anonymity of the confession– they all made him realize Buck, despite his best efforts, was not a sexless being. He sat up, and before he could say anything Buck turned his back so that they were looking at the same wall. To Bucky’s surprise, he kept on talking.

“I started late,” his shoulderblades, dear and lithe, casting a solemn profile, were moving with his measured breaths, “we were already in Wyoming, by then. The oil and gas of the fields made scenting too difficult, everyone in them was smelling the same artificial smell. By the time I finished University and enlisted, not a single doctor had visited me once.”

Bucky couldn’t move, the words were like the flickering sensations of having drunk too much and wanting to walk in a straight line home, too much of a muchness.

“I got smart, maybe I just got lucky. There are shots and inhibitors, which I took for a while, but they show up on serologic tests, so I had to stop before joining,” he turned his head, chin over shoulder.

Bucky’s ganglia were reconstructing every information into a fortress where they could hide forever.

“There are a few of us, here,” Bucky didn’t know if he meant MacDill or the army, if he liked that fact at all, “we get by. We help each other get what we need. Only, I thought I had more time.”

He nodded; it made sense, although the pang of jealousy was as real as a wooden spike in his chest.

“Your secret little club,” he said, and got a small smile out of it.

“So, what do you need to do, now?”

In all honesty, Bucky had been unsuccessfully shoving down any sort of remaining want for the improbable chance of it (he couldn’t even name it) ever happening in good company and two fingers of whiskey; returning late in the small hours with the murdering belief of Buck’s sleepy reprobation. It was comforting, in the same way his mother’s slaps had been comforting.

He was also suspecting that Buck knew, with the same chemical understanding of his own organism– that he was waiting to be burned by their reciprocal scorching confession of need, something he’d relegated in a precious box stored at the back of his mind on the fifth day, almost two years prior. In their shared room, the thing they had promised not to touch and crossed deserts and planes and swamps to keep secret was slowly but surely revealing itself.

Buck turned back, staring at their wall,“There’s another clinic in Tampa.”

Bucky craned his neck, towards the ceiling, the sky beyond it.

***

The second, silent drive to the second, larger city, Bucky couldn’t help but ask. He was proposing a practical solution, that was how he sold it. He was doing it because he cared. Which in any case was true.

“I can’t do it with you, Bucky,” Buck said, over the roaring wind.

On their right, the green luscious bay, scarred by grey and red and white, plunged into ultramarine blue. The iodine was great for the lungs, awful for the houses, the cars, the lampposts, the letterboxes, the joints of every mechanical thing. Flying over it, recon missions to spot submarines, making sure one death didn’t equal the other, wouldn’t have prepared them for Groenlandia, for the North Sea and its stacking waves.

But it was not yet time for that, and in the car he only sunk into the certainty that it was never going to be the lake. It was never going to be as vast, as spiteful, as unforgiving. The ocean was too big to care. It was never going to be slapping you, catching you, throwing you back. It was beautiful, but it loved too much, it would be guzzled without chewing, just for the sake of shitting it out. Sometime soon, they’d both be over it.

As they passed house after house, he almost pushed further, he almost said why not? Why not when you trust me like this? When you showed me yourself while you had no real reason to? It was him, in the end, gripping the steering wheel. It must have been him.

“I can’t,” Buck repeated, words catching in his throat, “You know I can’t.”

If he wanted to say more, he didn’t, gaze lost on the skyline. The wind was catching on his eyelashes, brushing his hair, the wayward tufts escaping regulations; Bucky had guessed it was his own brand of rebellion.

“OK, Buck,” he said once the silence became too long to bear.

Then he smiled, he smiled so serenely it must have looked like he’d just won the lottery, just made the whole rotten business on the other side of the world stop with a single decision.

“You know you’re always going to be my ace, either way.”

“What could that possibly mean, Bucky Egan?”

“It means it's a good thing you don't gamble.”

Buck was still looking at the water, hands folded, face hidden. He snorted, “When have I ever?”

***

(But what happened in Tampa? - Well, that is his story to tell. I was just there to pick him up.)

***

In Algeria there had been no hints of shade, no soft landings, no third times.

After the bust over Regensburg, Bucky had wondered, hands on hips, how navigators and cartographers could find their sets of coordinates along a Cartesian plane that liked to shift on the daily. It had been immense, like the dissipation of everything real, sweat beading at the back of their necks and sliding down, swelling over their vertebrae.

The haze of the desert had expanded behind their shoulders and over their heads. He’d never seen true infinity before, not even flying over the ocean had compared. He could have tasted it, or maybe it had been just the heat, the primal abundance of it, making him chafe in the sunset of a summer that in that country had no finishing.

With the corner of his eye he’d spotted Buck, shirtless, imperturbably talking to his men about the shapes of the following days. They had been meant to wait, gather their scrambling limbs and enjoy the velvet varnish of a yellowed expanse. Buck had lost the shirt two hours after landing; it had been the only sign of struggling he’d given, and even then no one but Bucky had noticed.

The small incisions he’d told everyone were because as a child he’d developed appendicitis, the soft swell of his belly because he’d eaten too many eggs, drank too much coffee.

“And danced too little,” Bucky had said, throwing an amicable arm over his shoulders. He’d squeezed his bones.

“Careful, Major,” had said Crank, squinting against the African day glare.

“Yeah,” but Buck had been smiling, almost mischievous, “careful, Bucky.”

They’d been attached, still, and Bucky hadn't wanted to let him go without a good reason. He’d been propelled by a sickly, tearing desire to show the others how close he could get to Buck without being driven away, assembling as evidence the jetsam siphoned by the Mediterranean when it had been a boiling asymmetry of unconscious life that would, one August day, give substance for their sprawling bodies to lay on.

In the end, he’d given one last squeeze, following the damp satin of Buck’s skin, obscenely. He’d swore he had felt Buck shudder; remembers it, too, because it was nonsensical in the asphyxiating air of the desert. He’d wanted, unsure at the notion, to have a mirroring scar over his lower abdomen, too. To share the scraping, the cutting.

The doctor would have seen everything, of him, he’d thought, and he’d pinched Buck’s side for it, for the trespassing of a boundary no one had ever set, nor even imagined. It had resulted in a short-lived scrappy fight: no one had wanted to move much, and by nightfall they had lost the hope of seeing any more B-17s.

The next morning, they’d put everyone in the few salvageable birds and they’d flown over to Telergma, another barren strip of land, unmet by the expectations of every single pilot that by lunchtime had just only craved a beer and a shower, and hadn’t gotten either. Buck, so far removed from any sort of agony, had sat down with him on a bench overlooking the airfield as they had counted their losses.

“Can you see the end of this?” Bucky had asked.

A month prior the Allied forces had landed in Sicily. Italy appeared to him like a riddled, infested by history place. It was a country too old. All of those countries had been too tired, carrying in their arms the decaying corpses of ancestors they couldn't even recognize from enemy to ally, the past taking its hands and cauterizing their eyes.

“It’ll end,” Buck had said, taking a swing from his canteen, “It has to. No one fights forever.”

“Mh,” he had replied.

The night had been frigid, in a different way than those familiar Texan ones. The stars clearer, in the air the telluric fragrance of the arid land had permeated every once brightened corner. There had been no children in Telergma, no noises except the engines popping, the soldiers singing, the war some miles West.

RAFs pilots had bunkered down their forts with snooty superiority, but they'd been dying like flies, too, the bastards. And they’d never said it, either. The kite drivers were MIA, they got lost. The flyboys exploded, crashed, sunk.

In truth, Bucky had not been worried about the war ever ending, but about its logic of death, of what they had been doing in England, over Germany, in North Africa, all the way to Japan, Korea. He'd projected his mind to the finish line: he had seen Italy, France, Poland, even Germany– all liberated. He’d seen Stalingrad in the snow, spotless for once, the Pacific lulling to sleep its carcasses, a great overcumbering mantle over the world. What of them, then? What would have been of Buck and Bucky, after the funerals?

“There's always going to be another war,” Bucky had said, like a premonition, an ugly hope.

In the distance, a drunk body had hit the metallic sides of the hangar, it echoed, dull. Bucky had kept going: “What can you do? Even those fucking Krauts are fighting for what they think is right.”

“Don’t go there, Bucky,” Buck’s arms had brushed his own, “we need you here. You’re the best of us.”

“Feels like the best of us are either lying in a field or at the bottom of the sea,” he’d said, and he’d been ambushed by Buck’s hand nipping his earlobe, tugging it down slightly, towards himself.

Searching for Buck’s eyes in the darkness had been inevitable. He'd been spotting a sunburn across the bridge of his nose, though he’d turn silky and honeyed in a matter of days. Texas, Florida, Iowa, they'd all been like that, with Buck basking in their suns like a clean shaven lizard and then still lamenting the cold. Algeria would've suited him. He'd look like a king. Bucky grunted, averted his eyes.

“What have you been drinking, huh? You're in a mood.”

“Two whole bottles of champagne and a gin tonic,” as Buck's hand had scoped out his nape, in his fog-memory, he’d plucked at his curls in reprimand, “Just water. Lukewarm, too. Couldn’t even find coffee.”

“It’s this place,” after a hum, tender digits had been carding in between his sweaty hair, massaging away the tension. Bucky had never undergone a torture so inhuman, “mankind’s not meant to see it like this. We’re too greedy. It’s Ozymandias, what that Brit fella said.”

“Didn’t you study math in college, you loony? What the hell d’you even know about British poetry?”

The hand had made contact with his spinal divot, emanating the sort of unkind sultriness only the sand beneath their feet could have competed with. Every touch had been like a delicious venom, a fatality sour and painful, like the agony of frostbite, and at the same time like the suffocating ecstasy of his organs lifting and rearranging as altitude progressed.

Since Florida they had caught themselves orbiting the same windblown confluence of feelings. The way he figured, it'd been happening since Randolph, in subtler ways neither of them had been aware of.

Bucky had been certain that there wouldn’t be any healing from it, and that he hadn’t wanted to try it, either. Buck’s propensity to regale him with heartbreak hadn’t been the problem. The problem: that even then it had never sounded like repudiation. Bucky had been like a dog with a bone, and instead of burying it Buck only threw it farther, but always in reaching distance for him to hallucinate his teeth sinking into its calcined consistency.

At Thorpe Abbotts, carrying those missions alone, the prospect of showing Buck what real bombardments looked like, had petrified him and made him mean and cowardly. To compensate, he’d started feeding the molten-part he’d tried to castrate, and he’d danced and he’d fucked and he’d always, always, always touched his chest after, over the rosary, and thought of Gale, and inside the women he’d thought of Gale, and inside the very few men he’d thought of Gale, at the bottom of every Glass he’d thought of Gale. He’d sat on his bunk at dawn and he’d viciously encircled the gorged part of his cock, cutting off all the pleasure, and thought of Gale.

He’d thought him under strangers’ fingers, he’d dreamed of him open, heady and pulsing, a beast reaching for pleasure. Rueful, he’d also scrambled together some images of them in the same bed, sharing a house, a table, kissing goodnight, never leaving the other’s side.

On those same daydreams he’d grafted angrier ones: he would go into a rut, and Buck would help him, soothe him through, would say he’d regretted not doing it sooner, or that he’d been evil for never severing their circuitry and feeding Bucky an already moldy loaf of indulgence. He’d cried once, at his own cruelty. He’d just wanted his Buck, he’d wanted for the world to want Buck, for Buck to want the world.

Once they’d reunited, all of it somehow had stopped. He’d maybe been too glad to have Buck with him, and when he did come to him, tremulous, he’d nearly made himself glad at the fact that Buck had truly needed him. He had woven intricate sutures in the breach of their friendship. He had made declarations Buck never turned down or acknowledged, but his expressions would always be telling.

Those late, final hours in Algeria, Buck’s face had done something, as well, so close to Bucky’s own. Like he, too, had had the realization that they were real and they were there, and the War was all that it took for them to know each other.

His infrequent wet breaths, whose tendrils had been almost like a caress, had put him in a trance. They had reminded him of the dewy emerald gradients of the English countryside, of every crime he’d committed there. He couldn’t remember, he doesn’t even now, whether or not that had been the real first, for them. He does remember the unsaid: kiss me, kiss me and let’s get over with it, kiss me now so I can finally die for country and men, and I can free you from this me-burden.

Ignorant of his monologue, Buck had answered, genuinely, as he often did when he wanted to appease Bucky.

“I read a lot, as a child. Not much to do besides sitting still when winter came. My mama said I was too skinny to play outside, but our neighbor was an English teacher, went to university before the Great War and all. He had a lot of books. So I would sit in his living room reading all afternoon. It worked fine for my mother since she wouldn’t have me underfoot, and it worked well for me, because I didn’t mind the company one bit.”

“Mhm. You like poetry, don’t you?”

“I’ve been known to read it, yes. Why, you asking for recommendations?”

“Hah!” Bucky had almost shouted, Buck’s nails had dug over the collar of his shirt, “I don’t care for poetry.”

“Well, why not?”

“None of those sons o’ bitches ever got it right,” Bucky had said, whispering, he’d gotten conspiratorially closer, “why hide when you can just say what you mean? For example, your poet might, I don't know, wish to sail across the sea to meet his pilot,” at this, Buck’s lips had flattened, his cheeks rounded, his hand stilled, “but the truth. The truth is none of them are meeting anyone, or wishing to. They get torn, from limb to limb. Or they suffocate, or freeze, or they burn. From dust–

“Bucky–

“You don't believe, Buck, do you? Well, the saying goes from dust to dust, you might've heard it. And what of that? He’s not coming back. You know, I asked him to punch me. I could not– it just felt like this hole in me,” no children in Telergma, no civilians, but the war had already been called total. There was no point in separating anyone, “I don’t think I can stay here with you. 'm already there.”

On the verge of the witching hour, full of that brutal delight at the transgressive closeness, blood had rushed throughout his arms and legs when Buck had gotten both of his hands on his face, traced his under-eye, finding it dry. He’d pet him for a while, embarrassingly it felt nice, it had been cute. He can't recall the exact shade, or the angle of his downturned eyes, but he'd collected every ounce of gentleness and smothered himself in it.

“Let’s go to sleep, Bucky.”

There had been no other words, no further thoughts.

***

(You’re skipping all the way to Algeria! - Well, you already know what England looks like. Nothing fun about that.)

***

In the morning, after flying to Marrakech, Morocco, Bucky haggled the fare for the taxi that would get them to the hotel. It seemed cheap of the Army to leave them on their own devices once they had landed, but even that had felt like freedom.

The city was as fathomless as the Algerian desert that had tolerated them for a while: streets were lined with shops and businesses, cafes, libraries, busy people flitting to and fro, inside small red doors, and outside, again, from houses and behind iron gates. From the minarets, orphans and refugees held out their palms.

Most of the men were happy to mingle, once away from the planes and their defeat. The hotel was the unhappy incestuous result of tourists and soldiers, almost obsolete in its largeness and shine. Buck, of course, had been stolen away by some local girls hanging around the outskirts of the market square, their heads covered in dark fabrics, their necks hidden by elaborate jewels.

He was entertaining them, Bucky assumed, by showing them his leather satchel, his engraved dogtags. They all brought their shoulders together, their width stark in contrast: Buck with his linen shirt and the girls with their flowy dresses. None of them spoke English, and Buck knew German for some fortuitous reason, and he understood enough French to buy himself a scarf from the suq, but they were communicating thanks to something far more untouchable. At one point, he turned and raised his fingers towards Bucky, waving him closer.

He walked over, he heard him say “Bucky,” and the girls repeated buck-yi. They were wary, until Buck said mon ami, and then they seemingly decided he was worthy of interest, too.

Mainly, they were mocking his moustache, they were making fun of all of them, he’d guessed by their giggles, and they were comparing Buck’s blond hair to Bucky’s darker shade. Marrakech was virulent with soldiers, they couldn't have been the first ones they'd seen. Children were everywhere, too. Running amok the Medina, hiding in corners, unable to be truly ignored.

Everything here was simply just too close to something else.

“They scented me,” said Buck, as the girls bade them goodbyes. Some older woman had given them a wide berth and they all fell silent and in line behind her. Buck had said merci, adieu and they all whispered a bit chastised bye, au revoir, “that’s why they were curious. Never seen an American one.”

“How?” Then, to specify: “How did they scent you?”

“I don’t know.”

Bucky had always refrained from knowing him that way. It had only happened twice: when they first met, and he’d only picked up his aftershave, his pomade and his cologne, and after the clinic in San Antonio, when he'd been suckerpunched by the antibiotics, “In Tampa– he started to say, then stopped, two men walked close by.

“In Tampa?”

“Can you scent me?”

Bucky paused, stomach clenching and small intestines violently churning all the way to the left, kicking his pancreas into producing industrial quantities of bile.

Shocked, he began to ask: “Are you–

“I’m asking you, Bucky,” brusquely, “Don't act stupid.”

“Alright, damn, not here,” he searched for a secluded alcove, and the finding itself felt like a mercy.

In nudging intervals, walking as unassumingly as possible, they hid from the sun, shining on top of everything and not casting any shadows.

“Open your collar, c’mon.”

Buck was still working the first button out of its hole, when Bucky stuck his nose under his jawline, ignoring Buck’s tiny Jesus, Bucky, wait a moment. His mind flooded: there it was, he privately gasped with only a specter of satisfaction, there he is.

It was gunpowder, at first, which was the same as everyone in the 100th. Then the silvery smell of salt, rich and heavy, like a Sunday roast, a full meal; like burnt sugar on the bottom of a cookie. It was stronger at the juncture of bone and cartilage, where his beak fit in like a train breaching a mountain valley, even if Buck felt so small in comparison. He choked on his own saliva, a full body tremor starting in his thighs, a livewire zapping his muscles, collecting blood cells full of oxygens all the way from the meat of his heart and upwards to his brain, and then down again, carrying electric signals impossible to misinterpret.

Buck was fisting his hair as he gulped, gorged himself on his skin. God, he said, Gale, God.

It wasn’t meant to happen like this, disrupting the muezzins’ voice over the top of the flat roofs, inundating the streets as every devout scrambled across the squares, with goosebumps rising and him unable to stop whimpering like a beaten drunk suckling at the neck of an empty bottle.

Buck’s fingertips climbed down over his ribs, tipping his head back, murmuring something like c’mon, now, c’mon, but he couldn’t hear, aching, the delirious outline of his voice. Underneath the gravid smell, he spotted the acrid note of fear, pain, eye-watering grief.

“Bucky,” a whispered confession, “get off.”

“‘m sorry, Gale,” he said, cringing. His cheeks felt wet. It meant to him that Buck didn’t look at him with hate, and he was sure he'd just about made the biggest mistake of his life, “Oh, Jesus, ‘m sorry.”

“You’re OK, Major,” he replied, dignified, “I guess that’s my answer.”

Rigidly, Bucky fought between the want of putting more distance between the two of them, and the knowledge that his arousal would show if he did that. He was sure Buck would ignore it on account of them being friends. But it would maybe be too revealing, even if at that point he had already killed the suspicion and embraced the fact: that Buck knew, that of course he did. He was a smart guy. He wouldn’t have asked in the first place, hadn’t he known.

All of it gave way to more wobbling, meandering mental exercises, some more savage than others. In all of them, Buck had the temporary silhouette of a perennial joy that would always have the aftertaste of regret, which would be all Bucky’s.

But in Marrakech, unmistakably made of flesh, he did (contradictingly) visibly seem bothered by himself, his lips pursed and a stern curve of brows. It left his face wide open, which also had a startled quality to it. It didn’t make much sense, as the ebbing day got blood-stained by its snapping jaws clenching over their jugulars, to look that way.

He’d always played the game by its rules, Bucky reasoned, but he had never hidden his cards, and he’d made his stakes clear from the start. So he stared, and inquired, cautiously examined each pore. Attention made Buck twitch.

“John,” he said, snapping him out of whatever spiral he’d tried to retreat into, “Remember I’m trusting you.”

There must have been something in his tone, overwhelming to a boiling degree, that made Bucky pause, skirting on the seconds between prayers and ablutions.

“I remember, Gale.”

***

In his hotel room, Bucky undressed Buck (Gale) with simulated calmness. It was important that Buck (Gale) saw him, and didn’t spook. He can’t recall what force had moved them from point A to point B; only a lethal downpour urging him to acquiesce to the demands of his body, while Buck (Gale) bowed his head to hide the flush of his cheeks. Maybe it had been humiliation and Bucky had decided to ignore it, maybe it was just a natural response to outside stimuli, but it got them there, disrobing hastefully looking at the other with so many mercurial emotions he hadn’t thought the human body had the capacity to contain each of them, that inevitably they would capsize and poison the ground they would walk on for the rest of their lives.

In an attempt to compose himself, Buck’s (Gale’s) eyes traveled over his face, if not confused then displacementally neutral, as if he couldn’t decide what to do once they were alone and the curtains had fallen. Bucky came to the conclusion that he’d be prepared to walk on a bleak land, bleaker than what it already was, just to have this one moment, even doused with regret. He tucked a finger just below the jut of his chin, petting him with a heavy hand. He was all man, compact, skin peeling over his nose.

He touched, and then he dared to kiss. First, the cheeks and their scars, playfully biting them. Second, the temples, perspiring and tangy because of it. Then his top lip, where he could feel the wisps of his stubble. His bottom lip, wetted but cracked after the day.

It was different from the sex he had previously undertaken almost like a chore or a hobby one did because at one point the skills acquired had meant that one was good at it, and being good meant feeling good, and feeling good meant feeling something at all, which also meant that oftentimes he was feeling awful for relenting to bad habits. It didn’t matter, anyhow, not then. What mattered: their bodies, like magnets, stretching into the other, voracious mouths and young. He imagined them young, younger than they were, then older, and all the stages in between, just as Buck (Gale) pulled him in.

Bucky’s mind, spurred into action, formulated something on the value of right times and right places, though Buck’s (Gale’s) scent was overpowering most of his rationality. He was being sentimental, disregarding all the wrongness and the consequences neither of them could have foresaw, but it had every criterion to be considered lovemaking, in retrospect.

“You’ll be nice to me, won’t you?” Buck (Gale) murmured. His sentence was off in several different directions, like he didn’t want Bucky to be nice to him at all, “Hm?”

Bucky kissed him again, he remembers (he will always remember) the tactile brightness of Gale’s mouth, how it felt akin to the systemic geometrical solution for a problem that took place in multiple planes of existence, where three years spent with some unrecognizable creature simmering within their bones, groaning when their foreheads clashed, and Bucky’s teeth drawing the barest hint of blood from Gale’s lips, were all rounding up to a trembling release.

Bucky slotted his body against the door; everyone behind it was eating, or taking a bath, or fucking as well, and no one would have suspected anything if two majors weren’t there with their subordinates. Spurred by their banality, his hands moved, frantically, over Gale’s shoulderblades, tracing his moles and every freckle he could remember the exact location of. Gale kissed him with the crook of his elbows hung over his shoulders, hands interested in touching first and feeling second. Finally, Bucky drew back, nose pressed against Gale’s cheek.

“What do I smell like?” he chose not to answer, because he’d been unsure of what Gale had wanted to hear, “Baby,” he said, rutting madly over the slight give of Gale’s stomach, “tell me what I smell like.”

Hidden beneath his pants, Gale was hard, too, “You–,” there was a gasp, its origins unclear, “sweet. You smell really sweet, and soft. Like growing up close to a bakery.”

“Yeah?” lost in it, he was skirting around the awareness that this would have killed him, this fragile thing taking shape in a violent place, “You like it?”

“I do, John,” then he kissed him again, angle all wrong, trying to shed their uniforms without unsticking their hands from each other's faces, “You smell like a dream, J-Jesus. ‘M sorry.”

Were Bucky’s mind at all artistically inclined he would have perhaps said that the windows were enclosing them in a watercolor wash, its liquid echoes stilting their space in a lavish distortion, so unrealistic it was collapsing under the chafing weight of their cottons and linens and wools, like splotches of ink over an otherwise bare canvas.

He didn’t think any of those things; his eyes darted around the room only once, to gauge how many steps there were from the wall to the bed, and then all of his efforts were diverted to the man in front of him. It didn't matter what the light was doing, all that was important in the world was currently under his hands, alive and breathing, uninhibited.

He had not at all contemplated the strength it would take to flip Gale over, against the wallpapered surfaces glinting with their ivory and delicate rose, to fist his belt and pants and shorts and kneel, bringing everything down with him.

Gale naked was a punch to the gut, unreal and all golden skin, paler around his tights, under his belly-button and the smattering of hair covering his swollen cock he brushed fleetingly once he got to touch, yielding, wringing a moan out of the man.

He stuck his nose in the underside of Gale’s buttocks, where meat was more supple, both hands clutching his muscular thighs, squeezing and lugging him closer, too. Gale moved with him, fluid, kept on saying sorry and John and the occasional fuck.

Bucky was familiar with the easy nonsense people threw around: most of the time it meant nothing, but in that moment he didn’t want to risk it meaning something. Rising from the floor, following the smooth path of Gale’s vertebrae, as his fine hair caught on his calluses, he said to his neck: “Why’re you sorry, baby, huh?”

Gale’s jawline was clenching, brittle, his breaths quickening, “I couldn’t– I wish, but I–” whatever else he’d been meaning to say, he never finished.

With fascination, Bucky saw Gale suddenly rear himself to his full height, turn again, and kiss him on his cheek, smearing spit until he found Bucky’s lips, and then hide his nose where Bucky, too, smelled the most. Bucky was hairier, which seemed to spur something in Gale once he got to touch around his chest, the trail curlicueing from his nipples to his own belt, that was being dealt with fastidiously, in the usual efficiency Gale was always proud of.

Pushing him, he growled: “Get on the bed, Bucky,” in his gravelly voice.

Bucky, scrambling backwards, hit the plush covers. It wasn’t a big bed, if they were going to lay next to each other they would superimpose. He sat, legs widened enough that Gale could see everything, his most intimate, hidden parts. He didn’t feel any shame, he wanted Gale to observe, as he walked across the room to reach him, knees landing with a dulled thud on either side of his hips. Bucky’s hand immediately settled on his ass, fevered in every place they weren’t touching. Daring, he slipped a finger between Gale’s thighs, running his pads and touching through every spasm, doing it again feeding a possessive compulsion, until Gale sat more heavily on him and trapped his wrist.

“I’m going to–” Gale gasped, “I will give this to you, and you’ll take it,” he said.

Bucky nodded, of course he wanted it, of course he’d take it, even though deep within a rumble at his immobility was convulsing and twitching.

“Say you’ll take it, Bucky.”

“I’ll take it,” with his mouth half-opened, tongue lolling and too big, “yeah,” he kept saying yeah, as Gale licked into him, and spread his thighs once more.

“I’ll make you take it, right?” Bucky’s fingers were finally encircling the furling hole, one digit shallowly breaching its walls, unassumedly wet with the kind of anticipation Bucky had only felt once, before taking his first test fight, and Gale was moaning around them, “I’ll make you forget, about–

“Gale, Christ,” Bucky interrupted, as a gushing sound followed his second finger.

“The war, you’ll remember you’re here,” he said, body undulating over the bend of Bucky’s forearm, “You’re here with me.”

Bucky swore, furious, at the incongruous words spewing from Gale’s lips, that then fell over his brow, licking at its hairs. His tongue nudged itself over his eyelid, taking residence in the frail socket over the thin skin. His left hand was scratching his shoulders, his right hanging on Bucky’s own, moving him faster.

“I’m sorry, Bucky,” Gale was whispering, hard in his ears, “I’ll give you this. I can only give you this.”

“Fuck,” fuck, “Just, Gale, hold on. Let me,” he tried to move them, lay Gale on the bed, but Gale’s nails cut into his tendons and he whimpered.

“No,” he said, emphatically, “Like this, Bucky.”

In the frenzy, he hadn’t noticed Gale’s fingertips reaching his cock, obscenely hard, swollen. Fisting it, Bucky looked down, to see. He surged forward, shoved his tongue in Gale’s mouth, reaching his tonsils and making him gag. Two fingers became three, extending them, preparing him for the intrusion. Gale’s own cock was weeping, untouched, but when he tried to make a reach for it, Gale batted his hands away, slapping it with force.

“Inside, inside,” he was saying, just as Bucky had been thinking of adding his little finger to the collection currently within Gale, “Get inside me.”

“Baby,” he sobbed, frozen instincts blaring in his brain, “please,” what was he asking for?

Gale must have known because he’d put his thumb over Bucky’s cockhead, meanly squeezing and nicking the tender wet flesh, and fed it to his entrance, while Bucky hadn't even removed his own hand.

“Wait, Gale, not bare,” he wrestled against him. Gale laughed, insanely, like he didn’t care.

Struggling for air, Bucky dropped on the mattress, skin hitting cloth, bouncing with the elastic response of the bedsprings. Gale was still on him, cradling him inside. The moist slide was made more compelling by the humming sounds Gale was filling the diaphanous atmosphere of the room with, braced on Bucky’s chest. His nails had never once ceased marking their indents in his skin, which Bucky didn’t know if he liked or not, but Gale was giving them to him, his unquiet whining notching each scar deeper into his body.

Logically, Bucky knew it must have felt like that every time, once he’d breached a willing partner, every time, once he’d uncovered himself and spent in the rubber. Fucking, even if the word was vulgar and crude, was fucking, no matter what his mama would think, or the priest, or the Army.

It was sex, the meeting of two estuaries bursting, mingling once they'd reach their respective end. Yet, in the upside-down mating they were trying to make work, it seemed like something so wholly different, so vibratingly resonant, a melody changing with each note, that Bucky thought he’d just been born, and that Gale was feeding this life to him, in their umbilical connection.

Around the room, the squelch of Gale's wetness muffled the outside mid-day prayer. It was like floating in the mud. Unsatisfied, but unable to tell himself why, Bucky attempted to flip them over one more time before his protests were quelled by Gale's fingers over his collarbones.

“If you try that again,” bowing down, urgently, bared teeth and hair sticking to his forehead, he growled, “I'll get off and never come back, John Egan, I’m serious.”

“No,” he begged, eyes squeezed shut, “no, no, Gale. No, I'm sorry. Stay there, please.”

He couldn't even moan; all he managed were panicked huffs from his nostrils. Distractedly, he felt his mouth fill with the salt of his tears, as Gale kept on bouncing on his cock, no real rhythm, nor technique.

“You'll stay down,” Gale kissed his forehead, then never got up, slowing the quaking ripples of his body, “you'll stay down here.”

“Mhm,” he mumbled, the static stemming from his timpanums suffusing the frightened swarming of his senses, “I’m here, Gale.”

“John,” still kissing his head he pressed his ass down, catching on his cock’s end, still not ready yet to trap them together, “with me.”

“Yeah, baby,” he tried to pacify the wild thing Gale had become, “with you. Always with you.”

The percussive beat of the slaps made Bucky flinch. Gale kept at it, unsatisfied with every position, either sitting up or climbing back down, stomach to stomach, mewling in a high-pitched voice the memory of which Bucky was sure he’d need to bring to the grave.

“Say it again,” Gale gasped; Bucky was delving into his navel, across the ridge of his hips, the jut of his bones, the valley of his ribcage, following unraveling vibrations he could hear radiate through his whole body.

“I’m with you, Gale,” tugging him down again, he started moving his hips as well, he had forgotten he could do that.

One by one, Gale removed his nails from each of the holes they’d made for themselves in Bucky’s chest, and by the time Bucky could no longer slide smoothly all the way outside of Gale, they were hugging: Gale, in a perverted foetal position, over him, and Bucky, whose legs were numb and hanging from the edge of the bed, under Gale.

“Do it,” Gale said, tilting his pelvis.

Bucky could feel his pulse through the flimsy skin-barrier separating them from their true insides. I can hear your heart, he wanted to say, can you hear mine? Can you feel it beat because of you? Does it make you insane, as well?

He tried and barely succeeded to dislocate his arms from Gale’s vise, to reach their meeting-place, circling, fondling Gale’s genitals that were so drenched in fluids Bucky’s grip slipped once or twice, and his vision began to darken at the edges.

“Inside?” it was barely a gasp. Gale must have heard it, though, because he tightened arms and legs around Bucky.

“Inside,” he shook his head in approval, “I’ll kill you if you spill–

Bucky came, savagely, at the whispered shards of the idea. He closed his eyes and gathered his knees from under him, as their biology locked them together. Gale was silent, except for the gasping exhalations of breath hitting Bucky’s neck. Bucky didn’t know when he came, too, but he could feel its dampness spreading over his skin.

They stayed like that for a while, holding and being held, with the afternoon creeping over them and the disjointed shuffling of the other men, drunk on life, downstairs; everything leaning against something, like pieces of a broken compass insisting on facing the true north.

Then Gale got up, and switched off the light.

***

(He never tells anyone of the day in Marrakech. It’s theirs and theirs alone.)

***

There are a few different ways this story could unfold.

In one of them, John loses himself after Algeria, because Gale, for reasons otherwise unknown, never finds him that night in Telergma, never introduces him to those three curious young girls in Morocco. He doesn’t know what Gale smells like, and this innocent ignorance breeds exhaustion, breeds tension, breeds conflicts. Each grain of sand knows of the war; those old enough to have seen the First one, back at Thorpe Abbotts, all stand with their hands folded and tell quite keenly the usual trenchfoot stories over dirt water they all pretend is coffee. There isn’t much to do besides trying to assemble enough alcohol to get drunk and listening to them talk.

When the War imposes itself over the stories of its forefather, Buck and Bucky sit down in meetings and discuss potential strategies: at the end of September, 1943 everyone is regrouping, reshaping, reimagining the world. No one can see the end: the Italians are splitting, the Australians are moving, the Soviets are impossible to stop which makes the Americans more careless.

Less than a third of the pilots Bucky has spent the beginning of the year sleeping next to are still walking with them. It doesn't matter much to the Colonels and Generals, it needs to end and they need to win. They're lucky, Bucky thinks, that dying for something is pretty much a standard practice in every denomination he can remember the name of, that it can sell an easy ideal without mistaking it for knifepoint oppression.

In the end, it made little difference and all had amounted to nothing.

By the 14th of October, Buck has been shot down over Bremen for nearly five days, MIA but the chances are slim, and the Luftwaffe butchers so many bomber planes Bucky, ignoring Buck’s status, sees the end of the war, and disappears from the radars. He remembers his signature on some Texan papers, and his mother believes him dead. They will never find each other again.

In another one, you know this one (How would I know this one? - Because this is what always happens in tragedies! - But you said– - Yes, yes, now let me finish) with London bombed and a bed filled with a woman John’ll always remember, Gale still gets shot down, and John still believes in miracles, and gets shot down right after him. They see the worst of each other, but while they knew the good, they’d never come to understand the best; Gale doesn’t turn back, he asks Marjorie Spencer to become his wife. They never have children; to their neighbors it doesn’t matter why. Bucky will kiss him one last time before the wedding, before returning to the only thing he could lose himself to. He will never forgive him for this.

But this is how this one goes.

***

When the English September fogs came rolling in, the British and the Americans were closer to collaboration than they ever had been, although neither liked the other much. Eisenhower made it look like a few successes were bringing the tide in their favor (this, he remembers, was not entirely true. They didn’t see the end until maybe July of 1943, and even after that, those who weren’t hiding behind maps and telephone calls didn’t think about winning at all as much as they were thinking about getting out of it), and he and Gale were inhabiting the peculiar place where people who were less than lovers but more than friends usually gravitated towards. It was a dilapidated and a silent house, it looked like long-lasting glances from across powdered eggs and touches Bucky wasn't sure were accidental or purposefully meant to tease.

None of it mattered much, when outside of their extended fingers’ reach the world was transforming into a graveyard. At night, Bucky would search for him, trying to trap him with drinks and tunes, walks to the city. Gale at three in the morning indulged him more than Gale at six in the evening; the blearied moon cupping their voices. As a rule, in those small hours, they did not talk about the war. Bucky asked him about radio transmissions, why he decided to fly instead of putting that fat brain of his to better uses (there was nothing on the ground for me, he said). The threshold of dawn usually meant those talks were nearing an end, sometimes Bucky kissed Gale’s wrist.

As October brought its bare branches and even shorter days, he found himself doing more walking, alone, along the base, bike hidden behind a shed, lighting cigarette after cigarette heedless of the rationing. They were getting them, one way or the other, Bucky didn't care.

After those splintering hours spent flying from Africa to England, he’d pondered, fuzzily, whether or not doing something would shatter Buck and his self-imposed chastity. He’d never been given atropine, but the funk he got himself into he imagined must have been the same one induced by the drug, staring at the Atlantic, staring at Buck’s bird, knees locked and ventricles working overtime.

He never subscribed to the wisdom of contrition, but on that slow procession of a flight, clashing with his beliefs, he was perhaps entertaining the idea that it would have been better to never have known. In the evening, after interrogation, being so out of it, he wrote a soppy letter to his mother. He said: I’m sorry Mama, I know you hate this. I hope you can forgive me. And some other maudlin, customary nonsense. He wrote give my love to everyone, meaning his sisters.

Unable to stop the pen, he thought of writing also about Buck, who he’d already mentioned when she was still bothering with replying to his efforts. The Gale of his past hadn’t much changed, or he did but only in the sense that seasons do, so that one day the incipient transformation of summer boomed into the oranges and browns of fall, and that fall was an inchoated winter, and one day through a forever too-short spring, it would be summer again.

In the end, he hadn’t waxed any brand of cheap romanticism on paper. Not even because he couldn’t have found the words to explain what sort of situation he managed to get tangled into, but because the words were too many; he wouldn’t have had enough space to say all that he’d wanted. He couldn’t begin to find an explanation for Gale.

He sent the letter alongside some money he would’ve otherwise burned. God only knew when she would receive it, if she would open it at all. With a miserly temper he asked himself if a mother could stop loving her son, lighting a cigarette (it would’ve been his fourth or fifth), and he walked again across the base. Some of the mechanics offered him a ride, asking if he needed to get into town, which he refused with a honking laugh. Some days ago he’d had a mind that he could walk all the way to one of the beaches out East. It was a better pursuit than chasing Buck’s hidden wrists, at any rate.

Eventually, he sat down on a nondescript step. He was close to the infirmary where some of the men were all being sedated and nicely put out of commission. A few of them would not survive the night. Most of them were not surviving the war. Bucky truly questioned himself, on what he was doing and why he was doing it, in the first place.

His hand reached his rosary, and he slithered back to that first time Buck came to England, how funny he thought he’d been with the unicorn, (that was where part of his first paycheck had stupidly gone, too), how immobilized he felt after. He couldn’t let Buck go out there without him. What had unnerved him the most were the birds, the blood-and-feather ones, singing in the morning. And that Buck had looked at him the same way he’d looked at him that day at Randolph.

He gave another snorting laugh, closing his eyes at his melodramatics. The worst part, he berated himself, was that he wasn’t even drunk, hadn’t tried it one bit. It was– Bucky still thought of it as divine providence, otherwise he couldn’t have found any explanation for their destined tendency to be, in all possible iteration, a simultaneous thing. And when he opened his eyes, like a premonition, there was Buck.

He saw him walking towards the infirmary, hands in his sheepskin pockets, a face so carefully camouflaged Bucky was able to spot the first adhesive tentacles of pain.

“What’s going on?” he asked, still on the step.

Buck stopped right in front of him, it was then Bucky noticed that more than in pain he was angry. Unartfully, he got up, only for Buck to ignore him and enter the tent.

“Buck, what’s wrong?”

“Leave it, Bucky,” he said, navigating the narrow corridor between the beds.

Of course, he thought, now I have to leave it. Bucky trailed behind him, until he reached the small back door and found Smokey, sitting at his desk, writing whatever army doctors needed to write.

“Majors,” said the doctor, “is this urgent?”

“I don’t know, Buck, is this urgent?”

“I said leave it,” he turned towards Smokey, then whispered: “abdominal pain, I’ve been puking everything I ate for the last three days, don't got a fever and my chest hurts, too. I skipped my last menses, but now I’m bleeding.”

The doctor scanned their faces, he looked perplexed if a bit worried, “Does Major Egan–

“He knows. Doctor, tell me it’s not what I think it is.”

Bucky closed his mouth, raked. He’d been aware, broadly, that if no one asked, no one told. And he’d also understood, maybe more blurrily, that there were more than one Buck Cleven in the Army, something that all rationality led Bucky to connect the suppository help some of them had access to. At the center of the cold room, Gale was still as a statue, and Smokey struck him as surprised.

“I would need to do some exams before–

“Then do ‘em,” Buck said, “But is it possible?”

“Is what possible?” Bucky asked (he did ask, but he doesn’t tell anyone about his obtusiteness, later).

“It could be, in theory. Major Cleven, why don’t you sit down? It’d be–

“How?”

“Major, I’m not a gynecologist– “What?– “but it could very well be a displaced pregnancy.”

“What are you saying?”

“Major Egan, sir, with all due respect, it’d be better for all parties involved if you would stop shouting.”

“Buck, what the hell are you–

“I need you to strip and lay on the bed, Major.”

Bucky felt like a child, absurdly, he wanted to cry don’t ignore me! He wanted to ask mine? Or who else’s?

Buck, reluctantly, started to remove his jacket, then his shirt, his undershirt. From the outside, he didn’t look any different. Skinnier, possibly, redder in certain parts but that could have been the crisp weather. In the otherwise motionless room he regressed the numbers; a little more than a full month had passed since Marrakech; he thought: when his younger sister came, he was old enough to remember his mother crossing each date on the calendar and counting down the days.

In his arithmetical foretelling, Buck had sat down on the small cot, in a private corner, with the belt unfastened.

“When did you last have sexual relations?”

“It was in September,” Buck said, wincing as Smokey started palpating his stomach. Bucky felt a morbid pleasure at the admission.

“Known or unknown person?”

Before he could answer, Gale let out a scream, and made a grab for Bucky’s wrist, fingers constricting and crunching the bone. He heard himself grunt and then got closer, bringing his free hand to Buck’s sweaty forehead and saying shh, shh, what’s wrong, what’s wrong.

The air smelled rank, and Smokey looked at the pair of them. On a cold October day, when at the bounds of their consciousness the skin of the earth was cobbling over, he was the first person to look at them.

“Major,” the doctor said, mollifying, “is the bleeding dark?”

When Buck nodded, face twisted in discomfort, Smokey walked away from the cot and started to open and close several drawers of his desk.

Bucky didn’t want to leave his side, still clutching and being clutched, “What does that mean? Is he…”, although he couldn’t finish the sentence, the doctor understood.

“I can't be sure, but it's not good, knowing Major Cleven’s medical history. I’m afraid we’ll need to deal with this surgically.”

“But, why? You mean termination, is that it?”

“Bucky, leave. It.”

“How can I leave it, Gale? You’re… you’re–

“You can’t even say it!” Buck winced with the force of his own rage, fingers still tightened around Bucky's bones.

Pregnant, his mind supplied. An omega, my omega. My man.

This was not the first time Bucky had skirted the periphery he was skirting then. In the most recondite recesses of his mind, even after San Antonio, he let himself be poisoned by the preposterous and the improbable, at times even the impossible. But as the doctor came closer, under the fluorescent lighting, with a syringe he promptly injected in Gale’s veins and a nonplussed expression, Bucky let its glint die in their present. It was atrocious, he didn’t have a better word for it.

“Major Egan, I’m sure you know that what we’re doing is quite literally illegal,” he waited for the threat of further screaming to disappear before proceeding, “it’s most likely that Major Cleven here is just about four weeks pregnant. Close your mouth, sir, and let me finish before you speak. Thank you. The problem is that, as is my understanding, the Major cannot be pregnant,” he was talking smoothly, with a flat pitch, and Gale had his eyes shut, “In the worst case scenario, the fertilized egg has not reached his uterus, he won’t be able to carry it to term. He needs to be operated on, as soon as possible, preferably by specialists. Even if it’s just an infection, there's still a risk of internal bleeding. I can’t do anything for him here while also safeguarding his status. Not every army doctor is… sympathetic.”

A sudden movement from Gale made Bucky shift, he was shaking his head, teeth chattering. Bucky took off his own jacket, a bit awkwardly given Gale’s grip on his hand, and laid it over his uncovered chest. There you go he mumbled.

Smokey was still talking. Bucky registered the padded drone of his voice, as if they were in different rooms. He was saying it would have been better if they could go to Scotland, on account of the American brass being farther, and the possibilities of hiding themselves between civilians higher, but the situation could become dire in a matter of days, and without a good reason they would attract too much unwanted attention.

“What do I do?” Gale asked, “where do I go?”

“The 77th Station Hospital is a forty-minute drive from the base. A Sergeant friend of mine is a practicing surgeon. It’s not ideal, but I wouldn’t wait too long, it’s a lucky thing you’ve caught it in time.”

“They’re going to discharge me.”

“Major, I’m going to speak plainly: if you don’t get any surgery, you’re going to die.”

Too much, too fast, Bucky reasoned, which was the best way to make Gale balk and walk the other direction. He crouched over him, a little bit, just enough so that his torso was covering Buck’s chest. There must have been a reason, it seemed to him, and that the reason was there in between them. If there was a solution, even slight, and that solution was to do this, then of course he'd find a way to do it. It dawned on him, Gale's face brittle and contorted, that he'd been doing that for as long as they'd known each other, and that it didn't matter. That the war didn't matter, if this thing could destroy them.

“Gale, c’mon,” his palm on Buck’s cheek, what else could he have done? There was no comfort. It was a miserable thing, but of course Gale was more important, “it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, OK? Just you. I promised you, remember? Always with you. And I mean always, ya hear? If you go, I go, is that what you want?”

Gale was whispering this can’t be happening, this can’t be fucking happening and if John had been him, and Gale had been John he’d say something like well, but it is. What’re you going to do about it?

“It’s you and me,” he sniffed, “it’s just you and me. I won’t ever hate you, you already know that. What difference does it make, now or in San Antonio, huh? What difference? Whatever happens, it’d be me and you, Buck and Bucky, yeah?” He was speaking to the side of his head, lips brushing his hair, kissing him as much as the talking allowed, “Let’s just go, we’ll do this, and it’ll be just us. You’re telling me One Engine Cleven is afraid of a few lapeled bastards?”

“You’re crazy, John,” he struggled, paused, then struggled again, “OK, doc. Alright.”

“It’s for the best,” continued Smokey, next to them.

“I’ll drive him,” he turned to the doctor, “stay with him. I’ll find a way. Whatever- whatever.”

“Thank you for your cooperation, Major. I’ll wire Sergeant Dodson right away. That’ll be your surgeon, Major Cleven. I’m going to request a two-week pass for the both of you, on account of the Regensburg mission. In all likelihood,” looking at Gale, “you won’t be able to return to active duty for at least six months, but we’ll figure out the details later. We could spin this as a ruptured liver.”

“He doesn’t drink,” Bucky felt himself say.

“And I’m sure he doesn’t fraternize, either. I suggest you start finding a car,” Smokey’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, “That’ll be all, for now.”

It started to rain.

***

“Thank you, John. I haven't said it enough.”

He hummed, “How is it,” he had to clear his throat, “that whenever something like this happens, it's me who's got to drive you, huh?”

It drew a grimace out of him, short-lived, that almost looked like a smile. Bucky doesn't remember, even if he focuses and tries to guess, what had transpired between them, and what he'd been feeling. It's a vague coming back, their words and their meanings.

It was Buck, saying: “I'm real sorry it had to go like this. But, thank you, just. Thank you.”

Bucky studied him, unguarded. The rain had persisted, wearing into a gentler spray, and Buck's eyes turned grey with the weather, pooling in them their entire chromatic shift.

“No need to thank me, Buck.”

“I do,” he went quiet, it was clear to him that he was in pain, “I– I hope you won't think–

“I won't think.”

“You don't even know what I was about to say.”

What he can recall: the car, not fast enough, the chafing of his uniform, the brackish jade of the pines, the flat country battered by the winds and the men, working the fields, exhausted and holding their breaths. Gale’s smell, and the smell of the wet earth, the texture of the steering wheel under his palms, the texture of Gale's uniform under his palms, the tender weight of his thigh, Buck saying don't go there, Bucky.

“If I could–” he choked, “If I can make it easier for you, then I'll do whatever I can. And I won't think whatever damned thing you don't want me to think.”

“That's not a good life to live.”

“Buck, you can make your choices, I will make mine.”

And: Gale’s hand over his, still on Gale's thigh, the roar of the engine as he stepped on the gas, his stomach swallowing his heart, a tear cutting his cheek, the want for a stiff drink.

“I just can't give you–

Then, he was angry, “What?” he said, neck whipping, “what can't you give me? A child, is that it? Why would I want a child to be born in a world like this one?”

“Don't say that, you love children.”

“It doesn't matter,” their hands were still caught together, “Buck, it doesn't matter, I told you, none of that matters. D’you hear me?”

“I hear you, Bucky.”

“Do you understand me?”

The silence stretched, one last remaining tether to something that was destined to drift forever, “I understand you,” he said at last.

“Then it's settled,” though it wasn't, because they hadn't talked about any important thing, “You and me, Gale.”

“You and me.”

***

(The conversation, too, and its scrambled puzzling togetherness is edited. Words don't matter so much as their meaning does.)

***

It took three hours, one to acquire the Jeep and drive to the hospital; four in total if John also counted the ones Gale spent unblinking and feeling the Novocain.

Sergeant Dodson had greeted them with a booming voice. He was a tall, heavy man with encumbered shoulders and bushy, white eyebrows. The first thing he’d said to Gale was that he used to deliver babies in typhoid India when the only things he’d possessed were nine fingers (he lost one on a bayonet) and not an ounce of rum, which had been apparently meant to reassure the both of them. He’d squared John, then nodded, like a hunter spotting a boar and deciding at the last second to spare it.

He hadn’t got the permission to wait inside, for lack of spousal status; the nurses had ignored him, even when he’d sought some updates. He’d been sitting in a long corridor, in the actual building, unhearing the moans of the wounded. The air was carbolic, unlike anything he'd ever smelled. Just sitting, he came to learn, had been a privilege few could afford: most of the patients were stationed in tents, not unlike those at Thorpe, twirling their thumbs, if they’d had any. Bucky hadn’t felt lucky, but that was also because he didn’t know what shape their story could have got bent into.

There was nothing to do but wait; thirty minutes in, one of the orderlies had come to collect him, she’d given him a glass of malted milk and a ham sandwich and told him the Sergeant had done several laparoscopies and saved countless lives, not to fear too much, and that he could trust them, her, too, but not too speak too loudly. It was just taking a bit long because the Major wasn’t responding well to the local anesthetic, that it was normal. John, after having taken the glass and the sandwich, had tanked her.

“What’s your name?” Bucky had asked.

Those were the first words he’d said since the car ride, when he’d rehearsed in his mind what he really wanted to tell Gale, but in the end he’d just uttered you and me, and let him go.

“I’m Joan,” she’d said, “What about you, sir?”

“That’s funny,” he had felt his skin stretch in a genuine smile, “I’m John. But everyone calls me Bucky.”

“That’s funny, indeed,” she had a tight accent, with an upturned end, mousy hair, thin lips, not a day older than nineteen, “I’m just Joan. I can’t dawdle too much, I’ve got pans to clean, but I’ll come back to you once I know more about Major Cleven, sir.”

“That’s very kind of you, Joan, thank you.”

“Of course. Enjoy your meal, Major Bucky.”

Bucky had drunk his milk, eaten his sandwich and took at least five or six brisk walks across the front garden by the forty-minute mark.

The windows were tall, the grounds surrounded by a fence. Paths had been cut with precision, the grass was green, ripe with rain, and slippery. All he’d been doing was counting, listing, noticing things around him. He roamed the grounds with a dull ache behind his eyes, aware in theory, that it was due to the tension in his jaw. Most of his rationale had been siphoned into the puddles he’d watch his reflection in. He disregarded the seconds to focus on the years.

He’d walked, and he had thought; about Gale, of course, who would never carry his child, because he had wanted it so, about his child, who was never going to be held, because it couldn’t even grow. He had thought about all the landmarks of their history, about the songs he’d sung to make him smile, the pranks, the laughter. The fights, rare as they were, like bruises on a sugary fruit, too ripe to eat. He had thought: none of it matters, if Gale isn’t with me. And then he had realized that that possibility was real.

He’d had the dignity and the common sense not to cry, though it had been a near thing. All the reasoning brought him to the same solution. A hidden part of himself, still caged, had inflated in the darkest moment, and it had told him he was meant to ask for more, to do more. That it was his purpose.

It had feinted reason and validity. Many disparate days convoluting into an incoherent nonsensical mumble. He’d gone back to the way Gale had looked at him in that clinic, in San Antonio, saying you can hate me; Bucky, naively, had not realized what it meant for him to confess to something like that. But the truth was that really he could not have hated him less than what he did then, crazily wandering the hospital grounds, in all his humanness. He could not harbour a single hateful thought, enmeshed in all his others, never for Gale.

He remembers, once he takes himself out of the equation, that it was that moment, in reality, that made him understand what he had meant when he’d said he’d bet on them. It was just that– that in a world where so much was outside of their reach, he could choose to keep this precious thing alive, and that he’d promised Gale, who hadn’t understood the enormity of John’s vows, that he would try until his death.

The plain and simple truth: he’d loved Gale the moment he’d heard him talk (How’d’you do?), he’d loved him when he thought there would have been not one iteration for their togetherness, and he’d hated himself when he’d loved him more once nature had shown him it hadn’t been true. He loved him reckless, joyful and rebellious, he loved him dulled, sad, and pensive. He loved him afraid, pragmatic, annoying, and grandstanding. He loved him naked, independent. He would love him from far away, he would love him in silence, he pledged himself to love him alone, but that he would make it so that Gale, too, would see him.

He loves him now, three years into the war and in England, dreary England with its rains and thunderstorms, the hares that don't fear humans. He loves him in the hospital, snatching away what Bucky thought he was supposed to ask of him and giving instead what he really wants, which is Gale, always Gale.

It turns into a delirious soliloquy, all this standing still not doing anything, he's going insane.

He takes another walk to clear his head, and once not even the crisp country air has proven effective, he goes back inside and sits on the same stone bench he’d been sitting on when Joan had found him. He sits, legs outstretched, then one knee over the other, then outstretched again. He waits, he closes his eyes. It's just one thing after the other.

“There you are, Major,” Joan’s voice comes disembodied by his left. She reappears with a swoop of white cloth, her face professionally friendly, “Major Cleven is out of surgery, sir.”

Bucky sits, he waits, he sits. He thinks Lord, I know you're there, so you better answer. In the end, all he can manage is a chocked: “Is he…”, and he sits and waits and sits a bit more.

Joan looks at him placid like a mountain lake, unperturbed by his obvious nervousness, she says: “He’s alright, sir, only a bit disorientated because of the sedatives.”

“He had to be sedated?”

“Don’t worry, Major! It’s just for the pain. The doctor was very satisfied with the results.”

He wants to ask what else? To repeat it and explain it in smaller words, unmistakable. He grips the bench, nods.

“Right, well. Thank you, Joan,” a breath, “Do you know when I can see him?”

“The nurses are finding him a bed right now. I’d say about another hour, just to be sure no one notices anything’s afoot,” sensing his distress, she quickly adds, “But I can keep you company for a while.”

Her eyes are brown, wide, like the beaten paths John has walked up and down until he decided that sitting and waiting were better than walking and crying. She looks at him expectantly, representative of a patience John has abandoned and possibly never possessed. He decides he can sit and wait while they talk, he thinks thank you, Lord, he thinks she's witness enough, so he pats the bench, scooting his body on the left to give Joan more space.

“OK, Joan, sit down with me. I’ll tell you a story while we wait.”

—fin.