jesus christ, they got me!

John can evidently feel the surrender for what it is; he wastes no time falling to his knees and before Gale can protest the loss of his thigh firm and wide and warm between his John’s fingers are scrabbling insistent at his belt, then his fly, and then he’s pulling Gale free of his shorts through the unbuttoned slit and opening his mouth. Gale realizes what he’s doing far too late to stop him, and the wet heat on him feels far too good to even consider shoving him off once he’s started. But this is not what men do when they just need relief. A firm hand would do, unfamiliar grip and the sound of skin on skin to arouse, more than enough under such limiting conditions as they’ve been in since joining up. That would be enough.

But this? This…tonguing and suckling and fondling dotted with quiet moans and the slick pops of him pulling off before diving back down? That’s nothing Gale should allow, nothing he would allow were he not so weak to whatever John wants of him. So John sucks his cock uncontested and Gale bites the side of his hand to keep quiet as he shudders and spills so fast there’s no chance John can even pretend at having a sore jaw for his efforts.

John pops off him again and catches his cock in his fist to give it some easy strokes, Gale’s concave belly jumping with the shocks of too much pleasure for it. “That’s it,” John breathes against his shaft, knuckles bumping his own face when he nuzzles in. “There y’go Buck, easy. Easy.”

Gale wants to protest being soothed, he’s not a goddamn child, but he’s slumped back against the wall trying to catch his breath and John is rubbing all over and exhaling unsteadily against his cock, nuzzling him greedy and sweet in equal parts, so what the hell is he supposed to do? John needs him. John needs this. It’s taken entirely too long and too much uncertainty over each other’s fates for Gale to finally admit he’ll do anything John needs him to, but here they are.

“Just stay like that,” John tells him in between heavy exhales; Gale nods though John’s not looking, eyes shut in concentration as he shifts closer, knees on either side of Gale’s foot, and before Gale can think to offer something in return, a hand at least if not his hungry mouth, John’s rubbing up against his leg and choking on a moan like he’s sinking into a warm, soft body instead of rucking up against hard bone.

“Bucky,” Gale protests, rasping and throaty but perfectly audible. John ignores him, just presses his cheek to Gale’s hip, nuzzles at his balls still in his shorts and the root of his cock still held in John’s calloused fist. He jerks and shudders and drools a warm damp spot on thin standard-issue cotton as he ruts the hard length of his cock against Gale’s shin, their trousers rustling with it and someone’s belt clinking softly with every grind.

It’s horrible. Gale watches – witnesses – John’s desperation and dissolution into a needy animal humping his leg for release like it’s all he could expect to get, and through the guilt and faint disgust at seeing John so reduced Gale is relieved. Relieved that he just has to stand there, relieved that John is doing it all for both of them, relieved to metaphorically put his hands up and let John take whatever he needs without having to be the one to give it. Gale slumps against the wall and he watches John drool and rut and whine in the back of his throat until it’s over, until John buries his face in Gale’s hip to sob an exhale and he grinds against his shin hard enough to ache, until with a few aborted bucks of his hips he’s done.

John’s hair is damp with sweat, styling grease long since melted out of it. Somewhere beyond the shed wall at Gale’s back the ground crew are still firing off flares and cheering, liquor flowing so freely there’s probably as much of it mixed with oil on the stand as there is filling bellies and rushing to heads that’ll be sore come morning. Gale’s hip warms with each damp exhale against it and all he can do is stare up into the flashing shadows of the rafters and pet the top of John’s head like a dog brought to heel.

–//–

“Last time, Buck,” John warns for both their sakes. Gale nods because he’s right, this has to be the last, just as the previous four times should’ve been the last, too.

Gale’s on his knees for this one and they don’t have any time to waste in the bustle of packing everything up to pull out of England, so Gale just unzips the trousers John unbuttons for him and as soon as he can he gets the flushed head of John’s half-hard cock tucked into the slick meat of his cheek.

“Last time,” John says again later that night, fingers tucked up inside Gale somewhere he never thought fingers should go. He’s had a change of heart, needless to say, so long as it’s John’s fingers in there and John’s mouth on his ear and John’s thigh curled over his to keep his legs spread enough to get in there as every muscle in Gale’s body seizes up, protests too much sensation even though it’s a good one.

Gale’s neck aches at breakfast the next morning, muscles knotted from straining against the pillow and twisting in a way he shouldn’t to bite the corner and keep quiet as John wrung him out. He and John steal away to an office already cleared out save for a lone desk and its chair for John to rub the soreness away with his big, warm hands, and Gale has to thank him for that, doesn’t he? Of course he does.

“Last time,” Gale says to John as he lays him out on the polished wood, the chair kicked away to give him room to bend over John laid flat. He takes John’s cock in hand, slicks it with a mouthful of spit and John almost comes just from getting spit on, Gale can see it in the jump of his belly and the way his balls twitch higher before he relaxes with a long exhale past pursed lips. Makes for short work at least, a few feverish minutes of rubbing and John’s hand too tight in his hair and then he’s catching John’s release on his tongue. He swallows it easier than anything in the Officer’s mess has been going down since he got back from Germany.

Of course it’s never the last time when they say it. Gale knows that, John knows that. What business of anybody else’s is it anyway? Who cares? (Gale should, he does, but it’s hard to remember as much with John all over him even more than he’d been their first time around Thorpe Abbotts, filling up every empty space and reminding his body how to feel more than just cold and pain and hunger.) Gale fits himself into every crevice of John’s he can and John gives him the same. He thinks idly one night, laying in his bunk with John snoring in his neck, of cutting open his chest right over that damn bum rib and just ripping the thing out to let John slide his hand inside and fuck him that way, stroke his pulsing lung and tell him he feels good in there, wet and hot, just like he does when he’s got his fingers in his ass.

He doesn’t crack open his ribcage in the end but it hardly matters, John’s all tangled up in all the messy visceral parts of him anyway. The threat of home looms heavy on the sunsoaked western horizon, stormclouds building to the east to chase them that way. The morning forecast promises to be relatively clear, for England, and this time when John says, “Last time, Buck,” he has to mean it.

“I know.”

“You gonna let me go all the way, then?”

It’s not something Gale’s ever forbidden, but until tonight it was something John didn’t dare ask him for either. They’re packed up save their toothbrushes and the clothes folded in tidy, pressed packets on John’s untouched bed, the both of them ruining Gale’s clean sheets one more time.

“Sure, Bucky.”

John doesn’t take his time; they don’t have it to waste on a slow build and neither of them want to waste it anyway. Gale doesn’t ask where he scrounged up a packet of slick or what lie he told to get it, he just slides his shorts down far enough to kick them off one foot and hooks his knee over John’s elbow in the same moment John puts his arm in position for it. John’s fingers are known by now, a familiar intrusion that doesn’t feel thick anymore, just…normal. His body made itself a home for them just the same as his mouth only feels like it should when John’s tongue is in it, or his cock. Of course right now it’s his tongue, and Gale sucks on it dutifully while John satisfies himself with how loose he’s made Gale’s hole, loose enough to try something bigger in him.

Gale slides a hand in his hair to tug when John spends too long slicking himself up, Gale’s body empty and aching for him. John just huffs a little laugh and licks the back of Gale’s teeth for an insincere apology. Gale hitches his leg higher up John’s arm and relaxes into the stretch in his hip as John lines himself up, tip pressed to the soft opening he’s made for himself, and when he slides in Gale puts a fresh crick in his neck turning his head to bite the corner of his pillow again, like John always makes him.

He slips in thick and heavy and hot and he keeps going, keeps going, keeps going, until Gale is whining for the too-muchness of it and desperately hoping John never stops tunneling deeper into him. He’s unbearably full now and that’s fine, John’ll hollow him out eventually and make himself fit, like he has in every other conceivable way.

Except this is the last time, it has to be, so what’s the point of being hollowed out if John’s never going to fill him again?

“Goddamn it, Buck,” John grunts and bites Gale’s lip, his jaw, stops at his ear. Each tight exhale through his teeth tickles and Gale has half a mind to ask him to stick his tongue in there too, that’s a hole they haven’t done yet somehow. But talking would mean taking a deep breath and he can’t do that with John in him, it’s not really his fist groping his lung like he wants but it might just be close enough to almost count once John starts moving.

John fucks him in a way he’s sure he’s never done a woman. Women shouldn’t be done like this at least, hard and sharp with feral grunting and sweat working up quick between them. Gale’s leaking all over their bellies and John’s balls are slapping his ass, Gale’s own pinched under the heavy press of John’s hips. It’s messy and it hurts and John’s in him all the way up to the back of his teeth like his stomach’s trying to escape the onslaught and finally, finally, finally he’s full again. John fixed what the Krauts broke just in time for Gale to face Marge again.

John cries when he comes, hot tears that Gale licks off his face until he has to throw his head back for the way John’s yanking on his cock, rough and mean until Gale spills between them. It’s ugly and it’s animal, and in the morning when he hits the showers Gale scrubs every dried flake of evidence off himself until he’s a uniformly raw pink.

Last time.

“You ready to see Marge?” Gale doesn’t answer. Can’t. He’s still got John behind his teeth and a rib that hurts when he twists to look at him in the right hand seat of the last B-17 they’ll fly. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” he says to Gale’s silence.

They don’t talk much the whole way back; what’s there to say? There’s no privacy on a shared radio line and they only stop in Greenland long enough to refuel and switch seats, no chance to break away for one final ‘last time’, a true one, truer than all the others. John’s eyes are full of things Gale can’t look at head-on when he drops into the left seat still warm with Gale’s body heat, so he doesn’t. The view through the windscreen turns from windswept sere fjord to sky and sea and he can’t look to his left, not even to watch their hands overlap on the thrust, more than they should, two whole fingers each overlapped on the handles. It’s all they can do.

In a brief bout of what can only be insanity, Gale imagines they put the plane in the water hard enough to die together, the others in the plane with them just faceless collateral. They don’t know these boys, they were gone too long and became legends, untouchable but for each other. The boys they’re carting home don’t matter, only John does, but they keep the plane level and flying true until, at last, land.

Home.

The airfield is bustling, as they always are no matter the location in the world. They drop into the midst of the familiar old landscape of shouting and Jeeps trundling and men toting packs over their shoulders all moving in the same direction, heading to where they belong. John walks close enough to knock elbows every step, his bag over his right shoulder and Gale’s over his left to leave room between them to walk too close. Gloves tap gloves, leather on leather a poor substitute for skin on skin. John will of course keep pace with him until they’re forced to part; there’ll be no time to linger, both of them are heading on in the wrong directions. Away. But they’ll walk together until that final moment.

They’re processed, spat out in front of the office with new instructions, John to the transport truck at the front end of the line and Gale to the train station an easy walk down the road in the opposite direction, from there to catch a civilian flight home.

“Bucky,” Gale starts and finds he can’t finish - what’s there to say?

“I’ll see you around, Buck,” John says with a confidence he’s got no goddamn right to feel, not after what they’ve done. He pinches the tip of a finger between his teeth to tug his glove off with a jerk of his chin, and Gale does the same just to have something to bite on and hold back the bile climbing up his throat when he slots his bare palm against John’s.

“Yep. See ya,” Gale says, muffled around leather between his teeth.

John leaves, and he doesn’t look back. Gale watches him go, watches him hop onto the truck, watches him make fast friends with the other guys already waiting, watches the truck trundle away some long minutes later in which John doesn’t even glance his way, not once.

Gale turns his back on the motorcade as engines rumble to life and he makes it as far as the little alley between the main office and the supply shed next to it, just enough space between the two to tuck himself between them before he hits his knees and leans over to choke on John coming up from somewhere deep and bruised inside him.

It’s horrible. Gale watches – witnesses – his own desperation and dissolution into a creature kicked and gutted. He chokes on bile and spits trembling strings that drip from his lips as his entire body clenches, a rejection of the loss of half his mass, of all the bits of John that wound their way into him because he was weak and needed it to shore himself up. His gut spasms and he yanks his crusher off his head to shield his face from passing soldiers headed the same way he’s supposed to be, digs the knuckles of his other hand into the wall until they scrape, punches just once hard enough to bruise, each ridge throbbing blood hot in an instant. Footsteps on gravel crunch to a stop and Gale turns his head just enough to glare between the gap of his shoulder and the edge of his cap.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” he barks, meaner than he’s been since they set that dog loose on an innocent man in Luft III, since he held a gun to a kid’s head in the forest and told him to go. He wants a fight, a reason to curl up small around his hurts and nurse bruises that aren’t just a figment of his imagination. He wants John to come back and break his rib for real and claw at him and eat him alive. The man who isn’t John, and so doesn’t matter, just moves on with a shrug and leaves Gale there, dirt and grass stains on the knees of his pinks and bile still dripping off his trembling chin.