Hello anon... Me too, me too 🚬 and because I somehow care too much about it I've started doing something I never do which is Plotting and I've just about filled four pages of blunt ideas I'm not sure where to put ! But here's a sneak peak of a sneak peak for you & you don't get any context for it, though you can imagine what's going to happen...

A pair of skinny legs swing out as Gale settles on the windowsill just out of reach. They look everywhere but at each other—the taller flat-roofed hotel across the empty street, the strip of one- or two-storied buildings flanking it, all of them covered in gloom by a cloudy sky overhead.

John knocks the back of his head on the wall behind him and focuses on the staticky scrape of hair meeting brick. In the quiet, it's easy to pretend that the two of them made it out together; that they're here by choice, living out the ending they were supposed to get. It's a fresh wound every time, being close enough to see an outcome but never quite making it happen, or otherwise fucking it up so bad that it was better left to fester and rot into nothing. He wonders if he'll ever get used to it. 

When he passes the bottle over, Gale takes it, likely only to slow down his pace of drinking. Having disarmed himself, John's got nothing to do with his hands so he buries them in his hair and looks at the hotel again, at the marquee blinking at nothing.

"Dog that bites its owner oughta be put down," he says vaguely.

For a few seconds, Gale doesn't respond, and then he huffs in a rueful kind of amusement. Years later and evidently he hasn't lost the skill for parsing John's words into what he actually means.

"You didn't bite me. I was always telling you to get away from the posts," Gale says, studying the bottle before taking a quick swig. "Should've listened to my own goddamn self."

John works past the growing thickness in his throat. "It was my fault."

Another huff. "Cut it out now. That's the drink talkin'."

"I'm not drunk," John counters.

"Then you got no excuse. How many times are we gonna do this?"

"They sent you home because of me."

"Wasn't 'cause of you," Gale says, rote.

"They sent you home. You couldn't fly anymore," John presses. "That didn't get to you?"

Gale picks at the label. He's smiling, sort of. Like it's all some big joke, absent and detached, the one he puts on when he wants to float above what's actually happening. "At the rate we were going, I would've gotten shot down, too. Hell, we might've even ended up in the same stalag."

It's John's turn to laugh hollowly. He can't picture it in the least. Gale would've made it to twenty-five, safe and sound, and sat with his feet kicked up at Thorpe Abbotts just waiting for John to scrape his way back to him. 

"Yeah," he says. "Sure."

Bit by bit, the label peels away under Gale's graceful fingers, his silence hitting the brakes on the conversation yet again. Last time they'd been in a Jeep, and he had been fiddling with the buttons on his uniform; before that, in the barracks as he packed up his trunk, and before that, in the infirmary where he kept scratching at the tufts of gauze wrapping around his skull; and at the very beginning, crumpled small on the canvas, blinking up at John with an eye that was already filled through with red like a ruby hammered into the socket.

Gale breathes out. It's what resignation sounds like on him, spare and controlled. To John, it's hope for what could finally be his long-awaited comeuppance, except Gale just keeps fiddling with the label, and then he wipes at his mouth and says, quietly, "I'm sorry I wasn't there with you, Bucky," as if that—that is what's been killing him this entire time. 

John snaps his gaze over, thrown off, something adjacent to furious that Gale is refusing to give what he's so plainly been begging for. 

"You're sorry," he states. "What the fuck for?"

"Bucky—"

"Jesus Christ. You haven't even—you told me to come here, to apologize, and you haven't even let me do that, so just what the hell are we doing? Why did you even write me that goddamned letter, huh?" he spits, possibly the first direct question he's posed since being here. 

The letter. The fucking letter that Crank had handed it over a few months prior in the middle of winter, before the march but after John had made a break for the fence. Crank hadn't been speaking to him much then, even though John had sworn not to try it again, because he had also sworn not to try it in the first place and gone and done it anyway. The letter that's still sitting at the bottom of his duffel, unredacted only due to the fact there was hardly anything written at all: Crank tells me you're trying your damndest to become a martyr out there. Well, quit it. You owe me an apology—and that's face to face, not in writing, unsigned and sounding so wholly unlike Gale that John had stayed up nights just to try to picture him saying the words out loud. 

At length, Gale says, "I couldn't think of anything else that would stop you from doing something stupid."

John bristles. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means I know you," Gale snaps back. "You choose guilt, every single time. Gotta be alive to feel that properly, don't you?"—like an accusation, wielded in that one-of-a-kind way only a best friend can. The way only someone who loves someone else can. 

John straightens. "So here I am, Major. What now?" he goads. "What do you want from me?"

"What do you want? An eye for an eye? You think that’ll make you feel any better? You think that'd solve anything for me?" Gale asks, and without thinking, John says, "It would."

"It would," Gale repeats with a snort. 

"I mean it."

The only audible sound is a faint buzzing of electricity feeding through the street. John can almost feel it running right through him. He can almost see the fence bobbing in his vision, the expanse of freedom on the other side. 

"Take it," he says.

Gale stares back at him, one blue eye and one a milky white, the scar as shiny as a silver dollar under the moon—then he's dropping the bottle and climbing back through the window with jerky movements. Reflexively, John follows, grabbing his arm to yank him around once inside, and Gale pushes him hard enough to offset his balance but not enough to disturb his grip, because John's bigger. He's always been bigger.

"Take it," he urges again, hooking his free arm around Gale's nape, "get it out of me, fucking take it, Buck—" and the name gets cut off when Gale smacks him, square on the temple and open-handed as if to reset his brain. Of course Gale doesn't know that's been attempted before, with metal instead of the flat of a warm palm, and it hadn't worked then, either. 

John laughs again. He shakes his head like a dog drying its coat, jaw loose and pliant, then rears forward, pushing their foreheads together because he's got nowhere further to go. "You don't know what it feels like," he pants, heart squeezing with adrenaline as Gale gives him a dead stare from centimeters away, even as John pushes them another few steps, bone on bone. 

"Quit it," Gale grits out.

"You don't have a single goddamn clue, you don't—you're not supposed to forgive me, you bastard. That's not what I want."

Another smack on his bad ear, a flash of vertigo with it. Their contact breaks as John reels to the side and Gale shoves at him wildly. "Since when have you ever gotten what you want?"

The cut of moon over his face is a brutal spotlight. John pays no heed to how the insult gouges itself into his ribs and takes that sharp chin in hand instead, just like he used to.

"That's right, Buck. I'm the biggest idiot on earth, wanting someone—" he squeezes, hooking his fingertips in harder when Gale tries to wrench away because this is as good a time as any to say it, half-buried under their heaving breaths "—wanting someone who's this soft, this weak, this cowardly—" and then there's a bright supernova of pain that flips the room upside down. 

Time slows. He remembers, hazily, that vicious right hook, slashing in with a funny angle at the last minute, elbow and shoulder compensating to prevent any injury. Gale had been a beautiful fighter. John basks in the memory of it, even as his cheekbone pops and he ends up sprawled on the floor, arms spread wide and willing, giving Gale room to land atop him where he grabs a fistful of his shirt and yanks upward. At the exact instant another punch connects, Gale lets go and John's head turns into a falling stone, meeting hardwood in a sickening crack. 

John spins. Floats. For a moment he's somewhere else—a trundling wagon stacked with waxy limbs—on the canvas, watching Gale look up at him—a bombed-out city as smoke burns in his lungs—pushed up against the side of their combine, fighting off the rifle choked over his throat—staring at Jack driving away with Gale in the passenger seat, head bobbing, looking perfectly unchanged from the back— 

He comes to in the dark, his own liquored breaths damp and echoing against the crook of his elbow.

"Bucky," Gale is saying from far away, "Jesus, Bucky," and John wants to tell him he's okay, he's fine, he can take it, but all that comes out are thin gasps. He reaches out blindly; drags Gale closer and pushes his wet face to Gale's shirtfront, against that bounding heart. "Bucky," Gale says again, closer now. "John. You with me, John?"