Guess So!

He does read as a taciturn-loner character, though to me he's also someone who values solitude not because he doesn't like other people – he's fun, entertaining, a bit of a show off, he deeply cares about his men, and he has a sense of Duty – but because he fundamentally doesn't like himself. Or at least certain parts of his Self (his vulnerability, speculatively his queerness, too).

The Army isn't a place where one can be Alone, but transporting him into a scenario in which he is a lighthouse keeper is a great way to explore these exacerbated traits of his!

I also like lighthouses as haunting places of service. You're alone & you're tasked with the life of other people; you're alone & the Sea is right there with you. It's not being In It & it's not being Next to It. You're being subsumed by your duty, you're a beacon and not a man & your house is your place of work, your residence and your cage.

They're also the ideal Location to be working on Radios, which is something about Gale's character that I find so endearing : ) & so fascinating as well: you're broadcasting signals into the atmosphere & the atmosphere carries them for you; I think he'd like radio-dramas, I think maybe he'd sit down with a cup of coffee & socks that need mending & HIS PIPE! (his oral fixation...) & he'd listen to his Mysteries and Comedies #smiling. There could be many Signs & Symbols about Hearing a Disembodied Voice from Far Away & said Voice keeping Gale company. I find it deeply romantic, and I believe Gale wouldn't mind being alone because he can entertain himself endlessly but the problem is that he's stagnating & shriveling, a tree trying to grow into its own roots.

Cue, of course, John Egan... I like the prospect of him coming not from the sea, but from the air – crash landing, maybe. John - well. He's a fun guy, he's a cuckoo clock, he's an indolent drunk with a liver the size of his head and a heart three times bigger. And Maybe the plane crashed willingly, but as he finds him the only thing Gale knows is that he's a heavy bastard who's almost bled through his mattress (Gale has spent the night in watchful silence sitting in his armchair).

Once John wakes up, at first there is the You tried to kill yourself but you failed shameful recognition, then John sees Gale, who's lost his battle to sleep. He sees his gaunt cheeks and his long eyelashes, his round mouth, the width of his shoulders; is this the sign he was searching for? Even if it isn't, he's going to grab it with both hands and not let go. Gale wakes up, too, and a lightning strikes outside. This is a story about the weather!

After dutiful presentations, they're left to their own devices. Gale knows how to take care of himself because he has to, but he's not a doctor. The recovery takes time. It's frankly a miracle John's survived – he's got broken ribs & Gale has to help him to and from the bathroom, which in any case would have been an undignified experience even if he were to be able to do it himself (the bathroom is outside). At one point, Gale offers his radio, to contact someone, anyone, but John refuses. He says there's no one who'd want to hear from him (he hasn't set it up right!!). Gale is secretly glad; he'd forgotten how beautiful an annoyance could be.

And it's not like John is idling away, though he really should be laying still. He knows how to knit (the middle brother of two sisters), he knows how to cook, he knows so many stories – fun, sad, stories about planes and love and the meeting place of Sky and Sea –, he provokes Gale, he makes fun of him, he mends all his socks and sweaters, he breaks one of his radios by accident and they argue and scream and Gale says I'm not going to hurt you because you can't do it yourself. John laughs, he gets closer and even beaten and broken he's all-encompassing. He says: You think you're better than me? You think I don't feel you at night, shivering next to me?

Because this is a story about the weather, a window shuts closed and a thunder makes the glass shudder, and they have terrible sex: the lighthouse offers lamp oil but John refuses to use it as lubrication, so they only get spit & prayers & John's ribs are still tender & he's probably got a broken leg, too, so Gale has to ride him. It hurts too much & he doesn't know how to make it good; John is hurting too because Gale keeps putting his weight on his ribcage & biting his collarbones to suffuse his groans. It's fast and they cum but only God knows why or how.

Gale doesn't say anything. He gets up, gets dressed, and leaves John in his bed (it's theirs, at this point), half-naked, breathing hard, crying a little bit at his own cruelty. He feels he forced Gale into a corner, like he's keeping a fish out of the water just to see how big their lungs are.

Outside, Gale is walking too close to the cliff's edge, trying to make sense of what's happening, what's been happening. John gets up, too, he hops and wobbles. Of course, as this is a story about the weather, it's raining. A gentle drizzle promising bigger waves, but it's enough to make the grass path over the cliff treacherous. John slips and falls down and Gale sees his slow descent & runs down to him, almost breaks his neck, he falls down too and skins his knees in the rush to reach him, to get him off the ground & to bring him back inside, where they each catalogue their tiny hurts and their huge wounds, this time careful and slow, this time kissing, whispering connections of lips and tongue.

In the end, they sit down at the small table of the kitchenette, over two mugs of coffee, hair still damp, and don't say anything. They understand that what they did cannot be erased from their memories, maybe they don't want to.

John tells Gale he's going to have to turn up the light soon (it's a story about weather!) & Gale says Don't tell me how to do my job, John. And shave your damned mustache, it gave me a rash. And it's ugly to boot.

John laughs, their feet are touching.

“Christ almighty, this again,” the woman next to her mutters. Marge hasn’t seen her around much, only every now and again when she herself is so new to the group too, but Kate Wallace seems to be a fellow bastion of levelheadedness, and hasn’t spread one bit of gossip in the small handful of times their attendance at the meetings has overlapped — in Marge’s eyes, that makes her the cream of this particular crop. “I don’t even know the poor bastard they’re squawking about but if he’s half as bad as they say he definitely wouldn’t be walking around free and teaching kids, so it’s all gotta be a load of shit, doesn’t it?”

Marge smiles down at the knitting in her lap and nods, relieved. “Sure seems like it. I live next door to him, no complaints.”

“Well see, and there you go,” Miss Wallace shrugs like that settles it once and for all. She’s a quick knitter, needles clicking furiously even as she scans the assembled ladies with a little scowl Marge catches when she glances up at her. “No better than kiddies afraid of the monster under their bed, are they?” she snorts and Marge coughs delicately to hide her own laugh.

(“Oh, and remember this summer when he up and-!”)

“Good god!” Miss Wallace suddenly interrupts at top volume, sounding delighted, and the general clucking and fretting stops cold. “I just remembered I promised myself an ice cream sundae after this!” The rest of the group waits to see if anything more relevant is going to follow this pronouncement, but Miss Wallace just gets back to her knitting humming a jazzy sort of tune under her breath and Marge has to actually get up for a cup of water to keep from cracking up at the scandalized dismay on every other face in the room.

The interruption does, at least, turn the tide of conversation away from John to another piece of gossip that sounds a little less well-trod. Marge stays at the refreshments to stretch her legs and work out some stiffness in her fingers from clenching her needles a little too hard. She’s nibbling on a truly horrendous cookie (in name only) to kill some time when Miss Wallace joins her, picking over the offerings with a wrinkle in her nose and a disdainful sniff at a dubious looking gelatin concoction one of the wealthy ladies from the north side of town had produced with a flair that begged for a fuss to be made over her, no matter how little she’d done to deserve it.

“I’m Kate, by the way. Don’t think we’ve actually been introduced.”

Marge smiles when Kate flicks a glance up at her, eyebrows raised. “Marge Cleven, and it’s nice to meet you.”

“Well I’d hope so, compared to the competition,” Kate snickers with a jerk of her thumb back towards the circle of chairs set up in the middle of the floor. “I really am going to get a sundae after this, you want to join me?”

“It’s February,” Marge points out, on the verge of laughing again.

“Oh don’t worry, they make ice cream in February too. Might say it’s even easier to do it now, and you’ve got your pick of flavors since nobody else in town wants it. Gotta be better than whatever all this rationed misery is, right?”

Marge does laugh at that, finally, just a small one but it feels like more with how much tension it takes out of her shoulders. It’s been a while since she laughed, a long while, so when the meeting’s over, she goes.

“My husband used to take me out for ice cream,” Marge tells Kate when they’re settled in a booth at the end of the soda counter on main street, a couple of modest sundaes sitting in little glass bowls between them and already missing a few bites each.

“Used to?”

“Well, we were just kids then,” Marge tempers, feeling protective for no good reason. “He’d scrimp and save every penny he could find or make for ages, and as soon as he had just enough we’d go. He did it our whole lives, even before we started going steady.”

Kate hums, sucks her spoon clean of precious whipped cream and chocolate sauce that’s not as sweet as it used to be and goes in for another big bite. “Sounds like a sweet guy.”

“He is.”

“So why doesn’t he take you out for ice cream anymore?”

Marge shrugs delicately in a way she feels encapsulates everything there is to say about most young men these days, men their age at least. Kate just sucks her spoon again and raises her brows, silent goading to go on.

“Things change, I guess,” Marge says. “Life happens.”

“Sure does,” Kate shrugs, “but there are still pretty girls to take on dates and ice cream sundaes to be eaten, so things don’t change that much. Maybe it’s time you took him out for one instead, remind him of that.”

“Maybe so,” Marge smiles around another bite and decides she likes Kate Wallace a great deal.

—//—

“Gale!” Marge gasps, her head falling back and her hands clutching tighter in his hair. He’s trying, and trying hard, to please her with every trick in his book and it’s working, oh god is it working. Outside their bedroom window there’s fresh snow coming down and a chill winter wind rattling the glass but Marge is sweating in their sheets, under the press of Gale’s increasingly-healthy weight on top of her, both of them stark naked and rubbing against each other from shoulder to ankles in a delicious luxuriant of skin on skin.

They haven’t really been having sex much these days, even less than before winter set in. Between Gale being too far away and worn out by whatever demons winter brings him and Marge happy enough to wait him out without pressuring him, it’s been probably a couple months at least, maybe more. It’s fine, just means she’s more sensitive now. Gale has learned that firsthand and is now using that fact to reduce her to a whimpering, trembling puddle of pure pleasure, so as far as Marge is concerned everything is more than fine.

He’s got two fingers working in her and his mouth latched greedily on her breast and his free hand tucked underneath her to dig his fingertips into the curve of her bottom with enough pressure to bruise, and Marge for her part can only hold onto him with every limb and let him know exactly how good he’s making her feel as she draws up tight around his fingers and gets even wetter with a strained moan she’s helpless to stop, another orgasm washing through her strongly enough to curl her toes. Her whole body tenses with it as Gale works her through it, and as the last of it passes through her she falls limp and exhausted to the sweat damp sheets again. When she does, Gale gentles his touches without stopping them entirely, rubbing and kissing her through the smaller waves of pleasure that always follow after the biggest, and she moans gently low in her chest for the easy pleasure of it.

He’s still soft where he’s pressed up against her thigh but Marge knows by now that it’s not her, it’s just the way his body is now, and that it bothers him a hell of a lot more than it does her these days. After all, she still gets all the benefits of sex and Gale gets nothing but guilt and frustration, though he’s sworn to her — once, haltingly and blushing crimson — that he likes making her feel like this enough to easily offset any irritation he works up to with himself. She’s decided to take him at his word, especially considering he’s always the one starting it whenever they do this.

“Y’want another one?” he asks, mouth smearing hot and wet against her nipple all puckered up and sensitive from the attention he’s already paid it.

Marge tries to catch her breath but she’s still panting when she shakes her head a little, mussed hair rustling against the pillow, and says, “Dunno if I can. Can I?”

“One way to find out,” Gale shrugs and he gets back to it without any further discussion. By the time he wrings another orgasm out of her Marge is practically sobbing, her whole body flooded with sensation she can’t parse through. She’s twisted up in an uncoordinated mix of clutching Gale close and hiding her face in the pillow underneath her while her hips work restlessly to match his thrusting fingers, and as she comes down from the trembling high of it she discovers she’s got some aching muscles, particularly in her hips and her shoulders, to contend with after contorting herself so tightly with pleasure.

Gale tends to her carefully through that orgasm and its aftershocks, rubs her cunt with his slim, careful fingers and kisses her everywhere he can reach, just soft pecks of dry lips, until she drifts off to sleep right there just like that, legs still spread and everything. She used to try to stay awake after an orgasm, tried to figure out what Gale needed from her for her to be able to return the favor. It’s hard for her for some reason, she needs to sleep the exertion off for at least a few minutes after pretty much every time, but that hardly seemed fair to Gale, no matter that his cock never works like it should when she touches it, not even when he does. Eventually, of course, Gale told her to just forget about him and do what she needs, promised that he’d rather see her resting knowing he’s done right by her, and though Marge still feels a bit guilty she can’t deny it’s working better for them so far than any amount of careful fumbling with his limp, unresponsive cock ever did.

So Marge drifts a little, stays aware enough to feel Gale curling up tight with her and touching her gently but can’t muster up any real coherent thoughts about it, lets anything that does cross her mind slip gently away the moment it’s done. Gale kisses her parted lips, the tip of her nose, both of her closed eyes, tucks his mouth up tight against her forehead. Marge soaks up his attention like a garden sips a gentle spring rain — passive and quiet, adding the fresh bounty to the store of things to sustain it through the ups and downs of the growing season. There’s still plenty of growing she and Gale need to do, things they need to learn to settle into, but there’s never a doubt there that he loves her more than his own life.

Marge wakes again with that thought drifting somewhere nearly coherent — Gale loves her, and he may struggle to say it in so many words but she’s never once doubted it, not even for a minute.

“Good?” he murmurs against the warm apple of her cheek.

“Perfect,” she whispers back, smiling, and he tugs her favorite quilt over the both of them with a contented sigh.

They spend the whole day tangled up, and most of the evening too. Gale sleeps well that night after only a bit of reading to her to wind down, and come morning the whole world is buried yet again under shapeless humped up drifts of pure white snow.

Marge wakes to a regular thumping coming from somewhere beyond the window; the wind has stopped, the snow too, and even with the muffling of the fresh blanket on everything the air is still and thin enough for sound to travel perfectly fine. Marge turns over to find Gale already gone, of course. She can smell coffee and she lays in bed enjoying the warmth under their covers for another lazy few minutes before she crawls out of bed in search of her husband and the fresh cup of coffee he’s no doubt made for her.

The thumping is louder downstairs, closer. Marge shuffles into the kitchen with a shiver for the chill on her legs to find Gale standing at the back window with a mug in one hand, already properly dressed despite it being Sunday morning with nowhere to be and his free hand tucked in his trouser pocket with a forced sort of casualness.

“What’s going on out there, hon?” Marge yawns.

“John’s putting up a fence.”

For a moment Marge is sure she heard wrong. She’s not properly awake yet and Gale’s very handsome there silhouetted against the white and gray landscape beyond the window, surely she’s just distracted. But no-

“He’s what?” she asks and Gale shrugs, sips at his coffee all unhurried and lazy. 

“Puttin’ up a fence.”

“It’s February.”

“Mhmm.” Gale’s hum reveals nothing of his thoughts. Marge pours herself a cup of coffee, thoroughly bemused, and joins her husband at the window to watch John stomp through the snow at the back of his yard, one arm tucked over and around several wood posts and the other stuck out a little from his side for balance. When he gets where he’s going he drops the posts in the churned up snow and bends to pick up a shovel, which he stabs into the frozen dirt with a savage heave that, for all its strength, doesn’t seem to make much of a dent, if any.

They watch him hack away at frozen, unyielding earth until he’s red in the face and he shrugs out of his coat, and when he turns to throw the coat over the chainlink already up between their yards Marge’s heart squeezes in her chest for the look on his face.

“Gale,” she murmurs and he sighs, long and slow.

“Mhmm.” He buries the end of the hum in the dregs of his coffee, passes her the empty mug and dusts his hands off on each other, shakes them once like he’s got something on them only he can see. “Okay.”

Marge shivers in the gust of cold that races to fill the kitchen when Gale slips out the back door. Despite the chill and how little her nightgown and robe can do against it, she nudges the window open just a hair to eavesdrop, sips at her coffee while Gale crunches through fresh snow, his tracks perfect and deep.

“Mornin’, John.” In the snowed-in hush Gale’s voice carries through the window easily enough despite how low he keeps it.

“Buck,” John grunts between one heave of his shovel and the next.

“Need a hand?”

John is clearly as surprised as Marge is by the offer. He turns on his heel and doesn’t seem to care that it means Gale will see what they already saw from the window – tear tracks glinting in frosty trails down his cheeks like he didn’t notice them in time to wipe them away, and gaunt circles under his eyes the grey-purple of a day-old bruise.

“Ground’s frozen solid.”

“Uh-huh.”

John just looks at Gale for some long moments, but he must see what Marge already knows – Gale wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it, and he’s not going to budge until he gets an answer. John sniffs hard, runs his wrist under the end of his nose, gestures at their garage with a nod. “You got a decent shovel in there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well fish it out and come help if you want, I guess.”

Gale nods and does, tromping back and forth across the yard to the garage and back. When he reaches the fence he just drops the shovel over and vaults it with a rattle of the chainlink, loud in the hush. John doesn’t say a word, just gets back to hacking and stabbing and scraping ineffectually at the ground. They work in silence; Marge gets breakfast going with the occasional glance to check on them working away at a fool’s errand.

When she’s got it all fixed, Marge leans out the back door to tell Gale as much with her robe pulled tight around her waist to ward off the worst of the chill. “Breakfast’s on the table, come inside and warm up a bit.” Gale raises a hand to show he’s heard. “Bucky?” John starts a little and stops his digging to look back over his shoulder. “You want some breakfast?”

For a long moment it seems he’s not going to answer, or maybe that he hadn’t even heard her properly. But then, halting and a little ragged around the edges, he calls back, “That’s alright, Mrs Cleven, already had some. But thank you.”

Privately, Marge finds that hard to believe, but what is there to do about it? Gale’s vaulting the fence to come back in and John’s gone back to his impossible task, so she slips back inside with Gale and as they eat they both pretend like they’re not sitting there listening to John work hard to accomplish nothing much at all.

“You goin’ back out there?” Marge asks from the sink when they’re finished eating. She’s up to her elbows in hot soapy water watching John tromp over to his little stack of fresh-cut fence posts, the back of his shirt damp with sweat despite the cold.

“Yep.”

“There’s no point to it, Gale, ground’s frozen solid.”

“Think that’s the point, sweetheart.” Gale gives her a quick kiss to the top of her head, which isn’t at all the explanation she wants but she keeps her mouth shut. She sighs to herself in the empty kitchen and listens to the faint crunch of Gale’s retreat, the rattling chainlink when he vaults it.

“Christ’s sake, Buck,” John huffs – Marge reads his lips as much as she hears him through the back window. “Y’got a warm house and a wife inside, what the hell are you out here for?”

“Your house ain’t warm?”

No, Marge thinks, it’s probably not. She’s watched for it since that day with the wood, but no matter when she looks there’s never once been smoke coming out of John’s chimney.

John turns his back again, hefts a fence post in his arms. “Go back inside, Buck. Don’t want Mrs Cleven to think I’m stealing you away from her.” Gale, of course, doesn’t budge an inch. When John turns around again he scoffs and heads back to one of the spots he’s churned up, turned the snow grey and dirty. “Fine, suit your damn self. Be cold, see if I fucking care.”

John lines the post up and starts hammering away at it, regular thuds that carry along the snow without quite echoing back. Gale doesn’t help this time, just watches with his hands in his pockets, shoulders held tense like he’s trying not to shiver. For all that hammering, the post doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast, but John keeps at it with dogged determination.

Marge finishes the dishes, returns to the back window to watch. Gale’s gotten even stiffer, his shivering no longer held in check, but he holds his peace for another few minutes Marge spends wringing her hands before he speaks up, and when he does it’s gently.

“C’mon John, that’s enough.”

John pounds the top of the post twice more and stops; he takes his hands away and the post stands for a long moment before it falls in slow motion with a soft thump into the churned snow.

“Gotta get this fence up, Buck.”

“Why?”

John sniffles hard, scrubs the back of his wrist under his nose, and he doesn’t answer.

“Marge tells me you flew with the 100th.”

John sniffs again and nods.

“Tough break. Worst luck in the whole damn force.”

John barks a laugh but there’s no joy or real amusement in it, only bitterness and black humor.

“Didn’t call us Bloody for nothing.”

“Uh-huh. Where’d you end up — in Germany, I mean?”

Oh.

Marge stares a little harder like she might see fresh evidence of John’s time as a prisoner, but then she supposes the evidence has been there and plain to see since day one, and it’s on her for not having put the pieces together.

“Luft three.” John squints a little at Gale, looks him up and down in a slow drag. “You?”

“One. Went down firing on a train carrying munitions.”

John whistles long and slow. “Blaze of glory, huh?”

“Something like that. You want to come in for a bit, John? Marge’ll make you coffee, get you warmed up.”

Marge steps back from the window the moment before John looks over; he probably wouldn’t mind but for some reason she doesn’t want to get caught eavesdropping. It feels fragile, what’s happening out there, and she doesn’t want to spoil it.

“No, you go on,” John huffs, “I’m fine.”

“Alright,” Gale agrees easy enough but he doesn’t move.

“What?”

“Go inside, John. I’m not going home until you do.”

“What kind of idiot logic is that?” John snaps. “Go back inside, Buck-”

“Name’s Gale, John.”

“Well mine’s Bucky and I don’t hear you bothering to use it! Go back inside Gale, quit lookin’ at me like that-”

“Alright. That’s enough, Bucky.”

John stops short. He looks upset, still, but he just presses his mouth into a tight line and glares at Gale standing there shivering, shin-deep in show. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters and gathers up his discarded coat from the fence to take with him. “Go home, Buck!” he shouts from his porch once he’s stomped up it. The slam of his kitchen door is loud and sharp in the hush.

Gale finally turns to come back home and he must be even colder than he looks because he doesn’t complain once about Marge’s fussing when he gets in. She sits him down in the living room and builds up the fire for him, strips off his stiff leather shoes and cold, wet socks to hold his feet – pale blocks of ice – in her lap to chafe her hands against them for extra friction. It works well enough but she can do better; she leaves him there in front of the fire to put the kettle on the stove though she doesn’t wait for it to boil. At the first hint of steam she empties every drop into the biggest mixing bowl they’ve got and takes it back to Gale, still quiet and uncomplaining despite her fussing. He dunks his feet obediently and waits until she comes back with the blanket from the back of the couch to hold his arm out so she can perch on the armrest of his chair and throw the blanket around both of them.

“What was that all about?” Marge finally asks. Gale leans into her fingers combing through his hair with a long sigh pulled from deep in his chest and deliberates on his answer, humming once to reassure her that the answer will be coming, just might take a while in transit.

“…We had some guys,” he starts, rasping, some long minutes later with his wet trousers steaming dry and his feet turning a healthy pink in the hot water, “couldn’t much take it, come winter. Came up with ways to keep moving, keep themselves busy.” Gale clears his throat and continues a little clearer, “Harder to do nothing but sit and shiver than to come up with something stupid to do, if only to do it.”

Marge thinks on that as she tucks the blanket a little more firmly around Gale’s shoulders, still faintly trembling.

“But he doesn’t have to sit around shivering anymore,” she can’t help but point out.

“Doesn’t change that he does. Y’ever smell smoke from his house, or see it?”

“No.” So it’s not just her, and Gale’s been keeping an eye out, too. It’s a small comfort.