Nothing But Blue Skies

Marge tells herself that the catch in her chest and the sting in her eyes are just the work of the thin pale smoke drifting up from the wood she can’t light.

“I’d better get on home,” John says when Gale says nothing else. “I gotta, uh..” he trails off, glances around at the swathes of icy white drifted up around them. The silence seems louder like this, sitting heavy around whatever excuse he can’t bring himself to give. “Bye, Buck.” He turns to go, heel scraping on shoveled pavement. “Oh-” he tosses back over a hunched shoulder, “-happy new year, and to your missus, too. It’s gonna be a lucky one, I can feel it.”

Gale’s shoulders twitch, spine stiffening even straighter. John doesn’t look back again, and Gale just turns slowly on his heel to watch him trudge next door, watches him tromp through a week and a half’s worth of snow drift to his front door, stays standing there still and silent even after John’s door snaps shut again, loud in the snowed-in hush.

Marge watches him until the cold air whistling past her fingertips has turned them numb, and he still hasn’t moved. She raises the sash high enough to be able to duck down and stick her head out the window, pretends like she doesn’t see him startle before he turns with a scrape of his boots to face her, eyes wide and hunted. “Honey, I can’t get this fire to light no matter what I try. You mind comin’ in for a minute and giving it a shot for me?”

“Wood get wet, then?” he asks, and Marge pretends that she can’t hear the hollow chill in his voice from whatever it is he thinks he can’t let anyone else see. She nods instead, and steals back inside with a shiver when Gale just nods back and sets his shovel aside to tromp up the walk.

“Doin’ okay out there?” she asks once he’s kicked the snow off his boots, hovering a little too close to him kneeling at the fireplace and fiddling with the ratty nest of half-charred tinder looking more than a little sad under the damp logs.

“Uh-huh.” Gale holds a match to it until it kisses his fingertips, and he doesn’t flinch as he drops the end into a piece of balled up newspaper. “John’s back.”

“That’s good. How is he?”

Gale shrugs, coat rustling. “Said he’s fine.”

Marge bites the side of her tongue hard enough she winces and feels it swell almost instantly just to keep from snipping at him. He’s not fine, and Gale must know that. He must.

“He say where he’s been?”

“No. Didn’t ask.”

“Maybe he went to see some family,” Marge posits. It seems thoroughly unlikely and she waits for Gale to push her on it, but instead he just shrugs, lights another match, mutters a distracted, “Sure. Maybe.”

She sighs and sits on the arm of the armchair, crosses one leg over the other and props her chin in her hand, her elbow digging into the soft meat just above her knee. “Or maybe not family, maybe he went to see some of the fellas he flew with. ‘Member I told you he’d called one of them up last time I saw him?”

“Uh-huh. Could be.”

“Is that something you’d ever want to do?”

“Well,” Gale hums. The match burns down to his fingers, and he lights another. This fire’s not getting lit, they both know it, but Gale sticks the fresh match into the ashes of the tinder and for a handful of moments they can lie to themselves and think that this time it’ll flare to life.

“Well?”

“What?”

“A visit, honey. To anyone from your squadron?”

“Oh,” Gale breathes, and his coat rustles with a shrug. “Not really in a position for a visit with any of them, sweetheart. And not during the holidays.” He twists to look at her over a shoulder, and there’s some look in his eyes she doesn’t know how to read. “Guess this season’s been quiet, huh? You want to go somewhere for a visit?”

“No,” she hurries to reassure, “oh no, Gale, I just…well, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. John just seemed so happy that day before Christmas I saw him talking to his friend, that’s all.”

“Hm.”

Gale turns back to their useless wood and strikes another match.

“Why don’t we see if John’s got some firewood to spare? Just enough to get some of ours dry enough to light.”

“Okay.”

The match burns down, kisses Gale’s fingertips. He drops the spent stub with its fellows in the ash. He kneels in front of the cold hearth, and when Marge stands he doesn’t even stir.

“I’ll be right back,” she tells him, and at least he nods. Their front walk only gives her a little trouble, and Gale’s cleared their part of the sidewalk entirely, but the snow up to John’s porch is so deep it’s nearly level with it, the bottom two steps entirely buried. Marge sinks into it up to her calves and shivers under the coat she’d thrown on over her warmest winter clothes for the short trek, but she’s far too determined to turn back.

The drifts piled high on all sides seem to swallow the quiet rap of her knuckles on John’s front door, but just as she’s raising her fist to try again she hears a faint shuffling and John’s exhaustion somehow still comes through even muffled by the door when he says, “I’m comin’, hold on,” hardly louder than his usual volume.

“Hey, Bucky,” Marge offers when the door creaks open, and the smile she tries falls back off her face within a moment. “You feeling alright?”

“Oh sure,” he smiles, stiff and without teeth. “Just a little hungover, guess I rang the new year in a little too hard. Everything alright with you?”

“Oh yes, I’m fine,” she hurries to reassure, smiling softly mostly because she can’t help it when she thinks about the quiet she and Gale have enjoyed together. He’s slept peacefully almost every night between Christmas and now (save for last night, of course), even with the cold driving him closer and closer to the hearth, further and further into his head. Not to mention that he’s been extra sweet on her while they’ve been holed up together in their home, a little bubble of the peace they’ve been chasing so long.

“That’s good,” John nods, whole body moving with it like usual. His gaze slips aside a moment later, unfocused and glassy over her shoulder for a long moment before he blinks and focuses on her again with obvious effort. “Somethin’ I can do for you?”

“Oh-“ Marge starts a little, embarrassed to have already nearly forgotten her reason for coming over, “yes, well, I’m sorry to bother you when you’re only just now home from your trip-“ John twitches at the term but doesn’t correct her, “-but our extra firewood got wet somehow even under a couple of wax tarps. Do you have any to spare?”

John doesn’t even let her finish, doesn’t wait for her to explain that they’ll pay him back in kind once they get some of their own stash dried out again. Instead, he opens the door wider so quickly he stumbles a little with it and gestures for her to come in. “Jesus yeah, you must be freezing with no fire on, huh? And standing in the snow and all, Christ. Come in, quick. Sorry Marge, don’t know where my head’s at-”

Marge steps over the threshold with every intention of keeping her attention fixed politely on the entryway and no further, she’s not here to snoop. She glances around anyway, can’t help it, and abruptly realizes it doesn’t even matter — John’s house is entirely bare, there’s nothing to see (or not) anyway.

“I’ve got some nice dry stuff in the workshop, I’ll go get it,” he tells her, sitting on the bottom stair off to the side to yank his boots back on, “just give me two minutes and I’ll have you and your mister all sorted, alright? Sit tight for me, I’ll get it. I got it.”

He’s rambling, mumbling a little, and when he stands he braces himself with a hand planted firmly on the wall before he pushes himself off it to tramp through the house to his kitchen at the back. Marge trails after him much more slowly; she pokes her head into the sitting room to find the most utilitarian bare minimum filling the space - a couch, a coffee table, a radio on a side table just big enough for it; she runs her fingertips along the bare stretch of his hallway, and when she steps into the kitchen all there is of note is a crushed up pack of cigarettes and a few empty or mostly empty bottles of beer cluttering the Formica tabletop. She resists the urge to check his fridge for any food, doesn’t let herself check his cupboards either. He’s a grown man, a veteran and all. He doesn’t need her poking her nose into his business like that, likely wouldn’t welcome it and she wouldn’t even be able to blame him.

He’d returned the plate from the Thanksgiving leftovers late the next morning, the china scrubbed clean enough to gleam and his cheeks a little pink as he’d thanked Marge for sending Gale over with it. He hadn’t been home for Christmas or New Year’s Eve so Marge hadn’t fixed him a plate for either dinner, but now, strangely, she wishes she had and at least stuck them in the icebox, just in case.

“Okay, here we go,” John grunts, shouldering his way back into the kitchen with his arms full to spilling over with a generous stack of neatly cut logs. Marge hurries to help him with the back door, the cold billowing in around his wide shoulders before she lets the door fall shut again behind him. He readjusts his hold to one hand and uses the other to sweep the bottles aside with a clatter, and when he drops the bundle of wood on the tabletop Marge has to dart forward to stop one bottle from teetering right off the edge of it and shattering on the floor. “Hold on, I’ll get you some more,” he grunts, already on his way back out.

Marge steps in his path just enough to make him pause and raise his eyes from the floor to meet hers, questioning. “It’s alright Bucky, we just need enough to get the fire going so we can dry out our own. Gotta keep enough for yourself, don’t you?”

For a long moment, John doesn’t look like he understands. And maybe he doesn’t – his house is freezing, as to be expected with nobody in it for over a week in the dead of winter, but she’d noticed during her quick peek in at the sitting room that his fireplace is scrubbed perfectly clean too, like he’s only just moved in. He doesn’t use it, and Marge wonders as he mutters, “Don’t worry about it, hang on,” and ducks carefully around her to go outside again why she can hardly pull Gale more than a few inches away from their hearth these days while John seems to have entirely forgotten his own exists.

He comes back inside sniffling and stomping his boots on the linoleum, arms full of another round of perfectly split logs, and nods at the first pile on the table. “Think you can manage that, or you want me to make two trips with it?”

“Oh I’m sure I can-”

“Marge?” Gale barks it sharply enough that Marge jumps, but when she hurries to the open kitchen door she sees him standing in the snow on John’s porch with a wild, panicked look in his eye, rather than anger.

“There we go, problem solved. Come in here Gale, Bucky’s got some firewood for us — two armfuls.”

The panic fades the second he locks eyes with her, replaced by tired relief. He steps inside without knocking his boots clean and though Marge winces neither he nor John seems to notice much, or care.

“Sorry about the steps, I’ll get to ‘em in a bit,” John says as he carefully loads up Marge’s outstretched arms one log at a time with the second pile he’d brought in, a gentle stacking from his own arms into hers so as not to overburden her or knock anything off balance. “You need a hand getting back to the sidewalk?”

“Might be good,” Marge nods. Gale drags the first round of logs off the table with a horrible scraping and Marge winces again, bites the other side of her tongue to keep from spouting off a reminder to be careful with John’s things, even as few and cheaply made as they are.

“Alright, let’s get you back over there so you can warm up,” John tuts once her arms are full and she could swear she can feel the ghost of his hand at her back, no pressure but the promise of it, held carefully at bay. They step outside again and Bucky goes first, kicking and shoving at the snow on his steps like he might be able to clear a path for her with no proper shovel, and he’s big enough that it even works, a little. She steps carefully where he did with his hand at her elbow to steady her, and he keeps it there gently guiding until she crosses abruptly to the bare concrete Gale has already scraped clean.

“Thank you,” she turns to tell him, her chest aching at the sight of him standing there up to his shins in snow, shoulders hunched in his coat. “You want to come by later, maybe, for dinner? It’s New Years, and all.”

John’s eyes flick to their house over her shoulder and naked longing breaks through the hangdog misery clouding his eyes.

“I’ll take a rain check on that if it’s alright, Mrs Cleven. I should, uh…” he trails off, eyes flicking in every direction like it might help him find some excuse she couldn’t instantly poke holes in, but in the end he doesn’t even bother trying anything. “Come back if you need more wood, I’ve got plenty to spare,” he says by way of parting, and then he’s gone again, shoving his way through powdery drifts and stomping his boots on the porch and slipping inside, away, back into hiding.

Gale’s got the fire going pretty good already when she gets back inside. Marge stands a little closer to it than she normally would as Gale, kneeling at the hearth, takes the wood from her arms one log at a time, same way John put them there, to set them gently in their empty storage rack tucked away beside the hearth. Their own soaked logs are steaming already in the heat where Gale has laid them lengthwise along the hearth as close as he can get them without risking them catching as well as they dry. When Marge’s arms are empty again Gale gets to his feet with a hand on the mantle, knees creaking.

“I’m gonna go finish shoveling,” he tells her, eyes fixed on the flames, the steam.

“Alright. Thanks for gettin’ the fire lit, I’ll keep it going so it’ll be nice and cozy in here when you’re done outside.”

“Alright.”

It takes a few more long moments before Gale seems to gather himself together and heads back out, and as the steady scrape-thump-scrape starts back up again Marge tidies up the sitting room, mostly to have something to do. When she’s finished, she throws another log on the fire and goes to straighten Gale’s books in the den next, though naturally he keeps them more than neat enough already. It’s early yet but dusk is already falling when she steps into the kitchen next to get started on supper, and as she whips up an easy something mostly made of last night’s leftovers she keeps half an eye on the view of John’s kitchen across the way. It’s not snooping; he’s got the lights on and the curtains open, doesn’t seem much to know or care if she can see the lonesome tableau he makes sitting at his empty kitchen table in profile, his face turned towards his hallway and the front door beyond it.

Gale tromps back inside and heads upstairs when dinner’s almost done and the daylight’s almost gone. Marge is stuck at the stove stirring a pan of gravy to make sure it doesn’t burn so she can’t check on him, but she hears the shower squeak on and the pipes groan with it. She’s still standing there a few scant minutes later, gravy finally thickening, when the water shuts off again, as quick a shower as Gale always takes. Some habits are hard to break, she supposes, and though she’d like it if he spoiled himself a bit with some extra time under the hot water, there are more important discussions about his military and prison habits to have first before she bothers to broach something so minor as that one.

She sighs and clicks the burner off, steps to the side to check on the scrawny winter vegetables steaming on the next burner over. 

“Smells good, sweetheart,” Gale murmurs from right behind her, prefaced and punctuated by soft kisses to the curve of her neck, where he buries the praise as well.

“Think I might’ve made too much,” she says as nonchalantly as she can, a little half-lie. “Reckon I might take a plate next door, if that’s alright with you?”

“Sure,” Gale shrugs; he’s already leaving again, hand trailing along her waist, the small of her back. “Gonna sit by the fire for a bit, just ‘til supper’s ready.”

Marge finishes up, and as far as she can tell neither John nor Gale moves much at all while she does. John’s working his way through a pack of smokes and a bottle of something amber, occasionally thumbing at his nose and curling his shoulders a little more, his coat still wrapped around him. Gale, she’s sure, is sitting in the armchair, feet nearly in the fire he’ll be staring unseeing into the depths of unless and until she comes in to pull his attention away. 

She makes the first plate for John, and when she steps out to carry it next door there’s not a speck of snow to be seen on the stairs up to his porch.

“Y’didnt have to, Mrs Cleven,” John says when he opens the door. He says it in the very careful way of a man trying not to let on he’s been drinking all afternoon, and Marge will do him the courtesy of acting like she can’t tell, like she doesn’t know.

“I made too much,” she shrugs and pushes the plate a little closer to him, holds it steady while he fumbles to get a palm under it. “Before it was just me and Gale, I used to cook for my whole family, and for all my college roommates, too. Hard habit to break, I guess.”

“Well,” John starts. He looks down at the heaped up plate of food and takes a deep breath in, deep enough it moves his shoulders as well as his chest, though if it reaches all the way to his belly his sweater and coat are too loose on him to tell. “Thank you, Marge. I’ll bring the plate back when I’m done.”

“Take your time, Bucky, we got plenty. Have a good night, okay?”

“Yeah. You, too.” Marge offers him a smile before she turns smartly on her heel, but she hasn’t made it any farther than his stretch of the sidewalk before he adds, “Jesus, did Buck- I mean-the steps and-“

“Sure looks like it,” she tosses back over her shoulder with another smile. “We’re glad to see you back home, Bucky.”

She scoops John’s seed out with crooked fingers, washes it down the sink with a flush of cold water, shocking and bracing and entirely too good at clearing her head for her liking. She flicks excess water off her fingertips and reaches down again, her slip smooth and body-warm against the inside of her wrist as she works her way inside again, a soft breathless, “ah-“ escaping past her parted lips with a wince. “Oh god,” she whispers, trembling, as she rubs her fingers against her walls, a pale imitation of John’s cock or even Gale’s fingers inside her, but still. She moans softly, whimpers an exhale against her fist resting on the side of the sink, rinses her fingers again under cool water. She digs in again with a soft, pleased, “Mm,” from deep in her chest and fishes out more of John’s come.

It takes a few goes, her fingers cool and slim inside herself where John had been so hot and hard and thick. She cleans up down there as best as she can with a bit of tissue when she’s done, tosses it in the toilet bowl but doesn’t flush for fear of the noise. She nearly heads straight back to bed, but she only makes it one step over the threshold and spots the familiar shape of Gale sleeping neatly tucked up under a single thin sheet before she stops again, guilty and strangely pleased at the same time. She may have emptied herself of the worst of the evidence that she’s strayed, but she still smells like sex. She can smell John on herself everywhere he must’ve touched her, pressed against her; once she realizes that she finds she’s also sticky with the musky sweat from their combined exertion everywhere she could conceivably sweat and…well, she certainly can’t go back to Gale like this. She steps back into the bathroom, shuts the door again without even a click of the latch.

At the risk of waking Gale in spite of her best efforts, Marge strips and steps into the shower before the water can even warm up properly, shivering a little under the lukewarm spray as she hurries to scrub the most important bits. Armpits, between her legs, across her shoulders, the small of her back, the sides of her neck — anywhere sweat gathered, anywhere John’s mouth and hands had been, she scrubs brusquely with a rag and hopes it’ll be good enough.

The handle squeaks and the pipes gurgle when she shuts the water back off some minute or two later, and in the dripping silence she waits, half hunched over and shivering, to hear if Gale’s woken up. The silence stays thick, the calm before the storm that’ll surely break come morning, so she dries off, slides back into her slip (with a spare thought to be grateful John took it off her before they got going), and returns to the flicked up blankets on her side of the bed to slip back between them with her breath held and her movements deliberately unhurried.

Gale, still asleep by some divine miracle, mumbles something unintelligible and pulls her in close the moment she’s beside him, and though her mind’s racing with thoughts of how the hell she’s supposed to tell Gale what she’s done she still somehow manages to drift off again for a few hours without too much trouble, worn out by both the late hour and such a good orgasm.

Gale gets up with the watery gray dawn and gets ready for work, kisses her cheek lightly enough she barely stirs, waking just enough to lean into the sweet press of his mouth and hum a wordless acknowledgement of his usual, “Have a good day, sweetheart,” murmured so low it wouldn’t wake her if she were sleeping deeply.

Gale leaves, and Marge settles in to sleep a little longer with the feathersoft patter of rain on the sash to soothe her. A creak in the hallway just a minute or two later drags her eyes open, though, just in time to see Gale stick his head back in the room, brows knitted.

“Sorry to wake you, sweetheart, but…keep an eye on Bucky today, wouldja? Seems a little off.”

“‘Course,” she mumbles, still half-asleep for now, though her heart stumbles a little in her chest, maybe even skips a beat or two. “He ’cross the hall?”

“Downstairs,” Gale shakes his head, “sittin’ by the window. Seems pretty stuck in his head about somethin’.”

“Okay.” Marge is sure she’s never in her life felt a spike of adrenaline from pure guilt but, well, there have been a lot of firsts since John came into their lives - what’s one more? “I’ll look after him. Go on to work, don’t be late.”

Gale leaves again with an extra thanks Marge isn’t sure she deserves; she waits to hear the kitchen door shut, for the car to start up, before she slips out of bed and into her favorite towel robe to creep downstairs, hiding a yawn behind her wrist.

“John?” she calls from the foot of the stairs. It looks like he hasn’t even moved since she went upstairs last night, though he must have at some point considering he’s at least got his shorts and shirt back on. But he’s still staring out the front window, still rubbing his fingers back and forth and back and forth across his mouth, still curling his bare toes into the carpet over and over with a slow-motion restlessness. “Bucky — honey? You alright?”

Marge waits and waits for some kind of reply, but eventually she has to step away from the stairs and into the living room, gets close enough to put a hand on John’s shoulder before he even seems to notice she’s there. He jumps, shies away from the touch; Marge takes her hand back and just barely refrains from raising it in surrender to the wild glare he levels at her before he seems to remember himself and softens again, blank neutrality.

“You okay, Bucky?”

“Uh-huh. Fine.” Marge skitters back a step to get out of John’s way as he lurches to his feet, oddly unsteady. “The boys already out?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, which is fine considering Marge only has more questions she’s not sure he’s able to answer at the moment. He stumbles into the wall on his way out of the sitting room, Marge trailing along behind him like a lost duckling as he crosses the front entry to the den on the other side. She has to bite back the urge to tell him to be careful; Gale’s books are important to him, the sum total of everything he’s put his hands on and decided he wanted ever since he was a boy scrounging as many pennies as he could find to buy the cheapest novels available. John heads straight for them without a care and looks all set to yank one down off the shelf, but at the last moment he gentles, big hands cradling a slim volume he opens but doesn’t seem to see.

“Bucky?”

“Whaddya know,” John mumbles, chin to his chest. “Don’t think I know this one yet.”

Marge bites her tongue against the urge to press him, to ask again what’s wrong, if he’s alright. She has a feeling that she already knows what his answer would be - it’s John, he’s fine, always fine, no matter how obvious a lie it is. He stands there and Marge stands with him, little though he seems to realize she’s hovering in the doorway watching. He stands there and he stares at that book and he doesn’t turn any pages, doesn’t seem to be reading it at all. His breathing is slow and even, almost conspicuously so, and some slow minutes drip by in a rain-drenched hush before Marge finally has to say something.

“John, I’m gonna get started on breakfast, okay? Be ready real soon.”

John doesn’t even twitch. Gale has gotten like this exactly once, drifted so far away from her that nothing could get through to him, but the experience is burned so bright in her mind she can recognize the pattern in John now. Unfortunately there was nothing she could do last time but wait for Gale to find his way back out on his own, if there was anything better she could’ve done neither of them had known what it could be. So, much though she hates to do it, she leaves John there to stare blankly at the book in his hands, big shoulders hunched in on himself and his head ducked so low it’s bound to put a crick in his neck if he stays like that too long.

She goes upstairs, dresses for the day, and forces herself to step into the bathroom to take care of her morning ablutions. She could, of course, avoid the mirror entirely if she chose, but that seems cowardly in the light of morning, and Marge Spencer is no coward. She steps up to the counter and takes a deep breath in, hand pressed flat to her diaphragm to feel her muscles move with it, and with her lips pursed around the exhale she raises her head to meet her own eyes in the mirror.

She looks for some evidence of last night, some fundamental difference that couldn’t possibly be explained by anything other than John’s touch. She stares until her eyes burn with the need to blink, until her hand on her stomach is no longer shaking, until the next breath comes easier. 

There’s nothing to see. 

Logically it makes sense, the only change in Gale after he’d had John was in his demeanor, a weight off his shoulders and a light back in his eyes that’s been missing for so long. Marge doesn’t get to have the same sense of relief, in fact it’s the opposite, but she can bear that guilt invisibly. She will, at least until she finds the words to explain what’s happened and why she wanted it to. She has to find the answers herself first anyway, there’s no sense in bothering either Gale or John with her fears yet.

She fixes her hair with businesslike efficiency and returns downstairs to start on breakfast for two just in case John finds his way back soon enough to let her feed him. The silence is strange; a space with John in it should always feel just shy of too full, his presence too large to be entirely contained no matter how he’s feeling, but right now if Marge hadn’t seen him with her own two eyes she’d be utterly sure she was alone.

She gets breakfast plated up and goes to find John, standing exactly where she’d left him with his chin on his chest and the same slim volume cradled in his hands. He’s rubbing a thumb back and forth against the page, hypnotically regular. “John?” she calls gently without any hope of acknowledgement, and she gets exactly that — nothing.

She waits long enough to count a hundred and thirty-eight ticks of the clock in the kitchen, and when John still does nothing she steps out of the den as quietly as she can, practically tiptoes back down the hallway though she doesn’t quite know why; there’s a fragility to the silence, or maybe just her perception of it, and she isn’t sure she wants to know what’ll happen if she breaks it.

She eats, wraps John’s plate up in foil with a wince for the sharp crinkling of it, metal on metal squealing as she closes the foil around the bottom to secure it. She slides the plate into the icebox as quietly as she can, holds her breath as she shuts the door, listens so hard for any movement down the hall she nearly jumps out of her skin when John speaks up from right behind her.

“What was that?”

Marge whirls around, heart in her throat, and flinches back a step until her back hits the icebox with a little clatter of its contents; John’s right there, and how he got there silently in the time it took her to put the plate away she’s got no fucking idea.

“Your breakfast. Figured I’d save it for later for you-“

“Just gonna spoil,” John frowns, looking not quite at her but at a spot over her shoulder, but further out than the icebox, some middle distance only he can see. “Eat it, ‘m not hungry.”

“It’s not gonna be in there long enough to spoil, you sure you don’t want-?“

“Eat it,” he insists, eyes flashing to hers just long enough for him to glare. “Don’t ever let me catch you wasting a single goddamn thing like that again, you hear me?”

“Okay, Bucky,” Marge soothes, one hand half raised towards him and the other pressed flat against the icebox door, cool under her trembling, sweaty palm. “Okay, I’ll eat it, alright? It’s not gonna go to waste, I swear.”

John just grunts and turns his head to look out the window over the sink. The rain has picked up, a steady pattering downpour that turns the lines of his house across their side yards a little blurry and indistinct. Marge inches to the side, away from the sink and towards the hallway, and when John doesn’t seem to notice she does it again, and again, one inch at a time until she’s clear from his looming shadow, no longer cornered.

“You wanna go sit down for a bit?” Marge tries; she reaches for him, presses a hand to the small of his back to find him absolutely drenched in sweat, his undershirt sticky and cold with it. “C’mon Major,” she tries and that, finally, is what swings his attention back to her properly, eyes focusing. “Let’s go sit down for a bit, okay? Why don’t you read me what you found in the library?”

“What?” It crackles so rough in his throat Marge winces though he doesn’t seem to even notice it himself.

“I said let’s sit down for a bit, you can read to me,” she coaxes. “You got somewhere better to be?”

John stares through her for a long moment before he shakes himself a bit, pats his chest and then his hips like he’s looking for something in his pockets, though he’s still just dressed in his smalls without a pocket to be had.

“Lookin’ for something, Major?”

“My smokes,” he mumbles and frowns down at himself, plucks at his clammy t-shirt with pinched, trembling fingers. “What’m’I..?”

“Left your clothes by your bed,” Marge tells him, and when she puts gentle pressure on the small of his back he takes a stumbling step in the right direction, following along docile as anything in his confusion. “I’ll bet your cigarettes are in your trousers. I’ll go get them for you, okay? You just sit right here and wait for me.”

“…yeah. Alright,” John mutters and collapses, puppet strings cut, back into the armchair by the window when they reach it.

His clothes are laid neatly over the chair in the corner of the guest room and Marge lays them just as carefully over her forearm. She steps into the main bedroom to fetch a pair of Gale’s shorts and a stretched out old a-frame that hangs too loose on him even now and takes the whole bundle down to John, once again staring hard at the rain through the window with an expression so blank there’s not a hope of knowing what he’s thinking behind it.

“Alright, here we are,” Marge says as if nothing were the matter; it’s always the best thing to do for Gale in these moods. Acting normal brings him out of it faster than the few times she’s tried cosseting, maybe John needs the same. “Why don’t you get changed into something warm and dry, hm?”

John snorts at that, mutters a mutinous, “Right, sure,” before he turns his head and goes still, frowning. “Where’d you get those?”

“Told you, Bucky, just left ‘em by your bed is all. Come on, up you get. You’ll feel better when you’re dressed.”

He hauls himself to his feet and only stumbles a little when he gets there, easily steadied with a hand slapped on top of the radio console. He stops there though, makes no move to continue, so Marge just drops her armload on the radio case too and reaches out to tug his shorts down his legs where they pool at his ankles. His expression cracks enough for raised eyebrows; Marge ignores the look in favor of helping him wrestle out of the damp cling of his t-shirt, and once he’s naked she regrets not thinking to snag a towel to scrub him dry with but he’ll probably just keep sweating anyway, so oh well. She coaxes him a step forward with a hand on his hip so she can kick his shorts far enough away he won’t trip on them, and then she’s snagging the fresh pair and dropping to her knees to hold them out for him.

John blinks down at her, uncomprehending, and then all once the light snaps back into his eyes and his expression turns stormy.

“I’m not a fucking invalid, I can put my own damn clothes on,” he barks, sharp with anger or embarrassment or both. Marge stands again, hands him the offending garment, and turns to leave him to it without a word, acting for all the world like she’s got better things to do than see him dressed and made comfortable. She steps out into the hall but stops again just out of sight around the corner, so she’s more than close enough to hear when he raises his voice to call after her, “And if you’re gonna run around playing Nellie Nursemaid why don’t you go do something useful and check on Hollis, huh?” He snaps something straight, probably his trousers, and finishes under his breath, “Jesus fucking Christ you get one concussion-“

Marge presses her fingers flat against her lips, takes a deep breath in through her nose, holds it, releases it, and heads back to the kitchen to get some space. Where before the house was eerily silent, as John gets dressed he all of a sudden becomes conspicuously loud. He thumps around in the living room, the den. He mutters under his breath and he raps his knuckles on a window somewhere, a staccato rat-tatatat loud enough to make her jump even several rooms away.

Marge tells herself to breathe, to calm down. This is John, it’s just Bucky, he’s just having a rough day but he’s not going to hurt her. She’s got nothing to be afraid of, and he needs her, needs someone to keep him grounded in the present when it seems he’s so lost in his past he can’t figure out where or when he is, what’s going on.

“Get a grip, Marge,” she whispers to her waterlogged reflection in the window over the sink. “It’s just Bucky. Relax.”

She breathes slowly with conscious effort until she feels steadier, ready to try again and figure out what John needs. She turns resolutely and stops in her tracks in the next instant, her heart bounding along faster again in spite of her efforts. John’s looming in the doorway and he takes up nearly the whole thing with his broad shoulders. Marge steps back until the edge of the sink digs into the small of her back and she rests a hand on the cool enamel to steady herself.

John doesn’t even seem to realize she’s there; he’s staring blankly across the kitchen, at the window on the back wall that looks out over the yard. He sways a little in place, steadies himself with a jerk upright and a hand braced against the door frame.

“John?” she tries, without much hope for success. Sure enough, he barely twitches, so she tries again. “John, honey, did you need something?”

He turns his head like a broken marionette, jerky and stiff, muscles refusing to cooperate but he does eventually tear his gaze away from the back window to bore into her instead. He gestures with the half-crushed pack of cigarettes that lives perpetually in his pocket. 

“‘M gonna go see that doc the Brits’ve got, see’f’I can get some meds for Hollis with this.”

Hollis again — has to be one of his men, but he’s never mentioned him before so she’s not sure what happened with him. He’s sick, or he was when John knew him, on whatever day John thinks they’re living now. He doesn’t seem to think her presence is odd so he’s not completely stuck in the past, but he’s clearly confused, doing his best to piece together what he thinks he ought to do. Marge doesn’t know what breaking his illusions will do to him like this, if it’ll be better or worse, so she says, “Okay. That sounds good. Hopefully they’ve got some to spare.”

It still might not be the right choice to help him stay in his delusion for all she knows, but John nods, his whole body moving with it like usual, like he’s drunk even though Marge is sure he hasn’t had the opportunity to get there yet today, nor would he still be drunk this morning as she’s pretty sure he didn’t drink last night. He lingers a few beats too long, staring out the sink window this time at the chain link fence just barely visible through the curtain of rain.

“Keep ‘em off my back, wouldja? Just a friendly visit, nothin’ suspicious, but you know how the guards get about the damn fence.”

“Yeah,” Marge lies through her teeth, her heart skipping a little faster again as she begins to think, maybe, this is something more than what happens to Gale sometimes. That this is something she has no idea how to fix. “Of course, Major.”

John keeps staring at the fence through the window long enough Marge is just about to ask if he’s sure he doesn’t want to just sit down for a minute instead, ask if he’s alright. Before she can open her mouth he whips around and stalks back down the hall, yanks the door open with a bang off the wall and leaves it hanging open after him. Marge jumps and hurries after him, stops half-hidden behind the door jamb to keep out of the rain starting to fall sideways on the wind while she watches John stop halfway between their houses — the fence line — for a conversation with empty air.

He’s gesturing with one hand, pack of cigarettes tucked into the big palm he’s hiding behind his back, subtle as a kid trying to hide a stolen candy bar. She can’t hear him at first but he gets rapidly louder until he’s shouting loud enough to make the muscles in his neck stand out, “-ellin’ ya I just gotta get back a book I loaned!! Just there, that combine right there-“ he points at his own house standing silent vigil over whatever this is, “-in and out ‘fore you can even get to the office to ask!”

He stops talking then, looks down at his feet as he kicks one toe against the concrete and ruffles his empty hand through his hair, gives his limp, damp curls a good yank as he nods along like someone’s talking to him.

“Yeah alright fine, Jesus Christ,” he snaps, “that’s fine, don’t wanna eat this slop anyway. Keep your fuckin’ rations, I’ll be back in five minutes.”

When he starts walking again Marge slips out onto the porch to keep watch from just those few inches closer, certain that the jerking shudder of him is going to tumble down to the ground any second now. He doesn’t, he lurches up the steps to his porch and bangs his way inside his own house just as noisily as he’d left hers.

Gale has never been like this before. Gale goes quiet, and he shakes, and when he comes back to himself he’s a little dazed and it’ll take him a bit to get back into the swing of their life, but he’s never talked to empty air before. He’s never talked to her like she’s one of his men, he’s never been so…so furious, with no clear target to point at. This is new. She doesn’t want to even think it, hates herself for it the second the thought occurs, but if this isn’t the first time John’s been like this, it might go some way towards explaining why everybody in town is so afraid of him. 

Marge thinks she might be, just a little tiny bit. Or maybe just scared for him, yes that’s it, that’s all it is. She’s afraid of what this means for him, unsure what brought this on but knowing it must be confusing, and terrifying. It sounds like so far as he’s concerned he’s back in a prison camp, with all this talk of combines and rations and trading cigarettes for medicine some poor kid desperately needs, and if his experience was anything at all like Gale’s she knows at least enough to be sure it was bad enough to fuel all his nightmares for years.

Marge ducks inside just long enough to take off her slippers and put on her shoes. She marches resolutely down the stairs and the sidewalk with every intention of following John home to keep trying to talk to him and get him out of this…episode, but she stops short at the boundary line, John’s orders ringing in her ears. Distract the guards, keep him safe. There are no guards, of course, John’s in no danger, but he doesn’t know that. He thinks he needs someone he trusts at his back, and god damn her if Marge isn’t going to be that for him. So she stands at the fence, and she wraps her arms around her middle as the rain soaks her through, wind chilling her bare skin, and she longs for a wool sweater to wrap around herself but doesn’t dare go back inside for one, not without John on her heels.

She’s watching John’s dark house for any sign of life so hard she jumps about a foot in the air for a flurry of barking close enough to hurt her ears. She whips around to hunt for the source and spots Lloyd Turner’s rottweiler bounding down the street, running loose yet again and splashing through puddles like it’s the greatest day of her life. The dog barks again, leaps to bite at the fat raindrops as the wind chases them in a new direction. Marge hasn’t yet decided if she’s going to try to do the right thing and catch the stupid mutt before it can run further from home or stay right where she is for Bucky, idiot dogs and their bids for freedom be damned, when the choice is taken from her in a flash too fast to stop.

John comes barreling out his front door so fast he’s a blur, and in the same moment Marge registers the pistol clutched in his fist John’s raising it to aim at the dog running straight for her and firing.

–//–

“Cleven!”

Gale looks up from his work and shucks his gloves when it’s clear he’s needed elsewhere. The foreman jerks his head for Gale to follow him and he does, out the door and across the yard outside the factory doors to the little set of administrative offices.

“Sir.”

“Got a call from your wife,” the foreman tells him; Gale doesn’t care much about the man one way or the other but at least he’s not the type to beat around the bush, he’s got as little interest in making small talk as Gale does and it’s a point in his favor. “Said she slipped and fell in a muddy patch by your fence, needs you to bring the car and take her to the doctor.”

Gale absorbs the information and nods along, doing his best to look properly concerned. Marge isn’t in the habit of lying, but there’s not a single muddy patch to be seen in their yard, she tends it far too well for that, and John’s grass on the other side is tall enough to cover his knees. John’s got no muddy patches either.

“How much you got left to finish today?”

“Three ‘til quota.”

“Good man. I’ll have the others take it on, you get changed and head on home to look after your missus. Be back tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rain plasters his hair flat to his head and turns his shirt translucent despite how close he’d parked to the locker rooms this morning. He peels out too fast onto the main road and squints through the dim windblown curtains of it trying to shove his hair back into place and plucking chill, drenched linen away from his chest. In between bouts of soggy discomfort that make him want to crawl out of his skin, he tries to figure out what the hell is going on at home. 

Marge is hardly the type to call him home from work for something frivolous, he doubts she would call him home even if she did twist an ankle in the garden, so that had to have been a story to tell the foreman, something he would buy only because he doesn’t know Marge at all, doesn’t know she’s tough as old boots when it matters. Besides, if she really needs a car John is right there with his and he’s hardly going to go anywhere in this mess if he doesn’t have to, especially considering he’d hardly even seemed present this morning-

It strikes him suddenly, quick as lighting. It’s John. It’s not Marge, it’s John.

Gale pushes another five miles an hour past the speed limit and makes it home in record time, miraculously without hydroplaning or getting pulled over.

“Marge!” he shouts the second he’s out of the car, whipped haphazardly into the driveway in the name of expedience. She’s on John’s porch pounding on his front door with both fists and as he gets near with long, loping strides he can see she’s as drenched as he is and pale, too, save two spots of color high on her cheeks.

She’s hoarse, shouting for John in between beating her fists against the door, and Gale doesn’t know if it’s tears or rain running down her face to drip off her chin, but it hardly matters.

“Marge, stop-” Gale grabs her wrists in both hands and she goes limp instantly, panting hard. “Jesus, sweetheart, what the hell is going on?”

Marge is just about as steady as a rock, maybe more so. He doesn’t know what his life would look like without her and he doesn’t want to know, he’s not sure he would’ve survived half the things he did if he weren’t so determined to get back to her, if she wasn’t steady enough for the both of them even across the ocean and an entire world in chaos.

All that means right now is that he’s got a wintery cold pit of dread low in his gut, because whatever John has done has set her to practically hyperventilating, her eyes so wide the whites are visible all around, her entire body wracked with tremors too irregular and intense to just be from the chill. He shakes her – gently – to try to get her to focus and it works at least enough that she clutches at the front of his shirt, knuckles white as she huddles closer with an exhale that warms his neck where she buries her face.

“I can’t get to him,” she confesses. “I can’t- he’s gone somewhere I don’t- Gale he’s not here, I don’t know what to do!”

“Okay,” Gale soothes almost mindlessly. He pets the back of her head, huddles her closer, looks up at the blank face John’s house gives the world and quick as a single thought he has a plan.

“Let’s get you back inside, okay? I’ve got him, I’ll get to him, just go inside.” Marge, thankfully, follows when he steps back to coax her down to the sidewalk and back home, though she does it sniffling and looking back over her shoulder every couple of steps.

“Come upstairs, let’s get dried off and changed into something warm,” he says next, step two. She goes, tromping sodden upstairs with Gale just behind her. The loose floorboard at the threshold of their bedroom creaks softly once, twice. Gale has to help Marge out of her dress, drenched and clinging coldly to every inch of her. He helps her with her slip and underthings too, has to clench his teeth against the feeling of too-cold skin against his. She passes him a towel from the bathroom without comment and just as silently goes to take a shower, her hair wrapped up on top of her head but the rest of her tucked neatly under water hot enough to fog up the mirror in a few short moments.

Gale strips, towels himself off briskly enough the friction brings some heat back to his extremities. He leaves the towel flung over the bedpost and his wet things in a pile with Marge’s, redresses in dry trousers and a wool vest over his fresh shirt, in spite of it being July. The wool will at least keep him somewhat dry for long enough to do what needs doing.

Once assured of Marge’s comfort and dressed more comfortably himself, Gale stalks back downstairs to retrace his steps to John’s front porch for step three.

He does at least pound on the door some, though he refuses to stoop so low as to holler for John to come let him in. He pounds the door hard enough to rattle the hinges, and when there’s still no sign of John Gale sighs, steps down from the porch, tromps through wet grass up to his shins and across John’s back porch to shoulder his way in through the kitchen door. It takes a few tries but Gale’s solid enough these days to manage it with only a little ache left behind for a souvenir. 

John’s back door isn’t quite so lucky, the wood around the deadbolt splintered and shredded, a crack spidering through one of the little window panes. Gale shuts it again behind himself and finds it still latches and decides that’s fine for now, he’ll fix it some other day when there are less pressing matters to attend to.

John’s house is dead silent and as much like a mausoleum as ever. Gale stalks through it quietly enough to be drowned out by the pattering rain with a prickle of unease crawling up his spine and his hands held in loose fists, ready to snap up a defense at the first sign of trouble. It’s too familiar, walking on eggshells through a too-quiet house knowing there’s something — someone — dangerous waiting to be found, waiting to be given the smallest excuse to lash out. There’s another cold pit in his belly that has nothing to do with the chill rain that managed to slip under his collar, a twitching in his fists that hasn’t bothered him since he was much scrawnier and less assured of his ability to hold his own. The first stair creaks under his shoe and Gale backs off it to press his back flat to the opposite wall so fast even he’s not quite sure how he got there. 

There’s no sound but the rain and Gale’s racing heart. He breathes until the sound of his thundering pulse fades and he starts up the stairs again, skipping over that first creaking step straight to the second. The rest of the stairs are sturdy and don’t complain under his weight; Gale takes them slowly just in case, shoulder pressed to the wall and fists still at the ready. When he reaches the landing everything’s shut up tight but the bedroom, the last door open just a crack to spill wan grey light onto the landing and, when Gale pauses to listen, a faint, weak keening like an injured animal.

The door swings open silently at a gentle nudge of Gale’s knuckles. John doesn’t look up, if he even knows he’s not alone anymore. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed curled over, hands in his drenched hair, his face hidden behind white knuckles. In between wordless keening he’s muttering something, too low and fast to hear, and when Gale steps closer to try to catch it he finds it’s useless; it’s just gibberish, half-slurred words that don’t belong together the way he strings them one after another like they’re individual instead of a sentence, inflectionless and trembling.

Under the heavy wet scent of rain seeping into everything even with the window closed tight, there’s an acrid tang and when Gale looks for the source he finds a little puddle of bile between John’s feet, mercifully clear of anything but a bit of foam. The held-ready shiver of a fight seeps back out of Gale’s taut muscles, his hands uncurl. He steps closer and John still keeps muttering, doesn’t seem to realize he has an audience. Gale has seen his fair share of men sink away somewhere unreachable, gets there himself sometimes too, and though he knows it means John could just as likely lash out as not at a threat only he can see, Gale can’t drum up any fear of him. Like this he’s so…small, a child in a man’s body curled around all the things he’s seen that’ve left him afraid of something as gentle and common as rain. He’s tapping his fingers to the drumming beat of it in his hair, darting fearful glances at it out of the corner of his eye without raising his head. John doesn’t need to tell him outright for Gale to know that’s what’s done it. 

The blanket and his trousers rustle softly when Gale rounds the bed to crawl onto his knees behind John. When he’s close, he leans in but doesn’t touch, not yet. “Easy now,” he says like John’s a spooked horse, and he may as well be. John rocks back and forth just once, leans forward like he’s going to be sick again and then sinks his weight back into the curve of his spine pressing a ridge that’s all-too-defined through his shirt.

Gale leans in a little closer to hear what John’s muttering, hunting for a clue. It takes a few words before he realizes it’s names spilling from him, a list like a mantra.

“They’re okay,” Gale tries; the names are American, or at least not German, so he goes out on a limb and assumes they’re John’s men, the ones he couldn’t keep safe, the ones he can’t ever bring himself to talk about sober. “I already talked to ‘em.” Along with the lie, he risks a touch. John’s back is cold and clammy under his hand and Gale has no way of knowing how much of it is rain and how much is fear sweat, but this close he can at least smell the second on John so it has to at least be part of it. He rubs his palm flat up every single one of John’s vertebrae and back down, up and back down. John shudders and his mumbling gets a little stronger, if not any more intelligible.

Gale leans in close enough he’s an inch away from resting his chin on John’s shoulder and just keeps rubbing his back, a slower and steadier rhythm than the frantic tapping of John’s fingers or the rain on the sash. He can’t tell if it’s helping but at least it’s not hurting, and he thinks maybe he needs the contact just as much as John does. He still can’t tell what John’s saying but the timbre of it changes, dead inflection suddenly rising and falling as John’s hands tighten in his hair so much Gale worries he’s going to yank it straight out.

“Ya gotta weather it, Johnny. Just gotta get through it,” Gale tells him, low and warm in his ear. John shivers, loosens his fingers, stops his keening. In between more incomprehensible muttering he’s just breathing, sawing ragged things but Gale will take it. He leans over again, presses his back more firmly up into Gale’s palm, but before Gale can try to figure out a way to ask him what’s wrong and why he’s suddenly gasping there’s a bang downstairs almost immediately drowned out by furious barking and a man’s voice shouting close at hand.

Gale’s up and out of the bedroom like a shot, muscles once again locked and raring for a fight as he stumbles off the bottom step and finds himself face to face with the neighborhood rottweiler and Lloyd Turner just visible out the back door storming across John’s back yard like he owns the place.

“Get this fucking dog back to your own yard, Turner!” Gale shouts loud enough it hurts his throat, scrapes it raw. He aims a kick at the thing lunging for him teeth first and clips it on the chest but it doesn’t seem to care or even notice, straining to get past him.

“Got a right to let her run if I fuckin’ want to, Cleven!” Lloyd shouts back at him from John’s kitchen door knocked open again. Gale kicks the dog hard enough to make it pause long enough for him to reach down and haul it up by the collar and hold it in place, if not actually still. “Y’think I want this energy in my yard all damn day?! Tell Egan to get himself under control before he worries about my fucking dog, give me that-”

“Just GET OUT!” Gale barks and shoves the dog towards her owner.

Gale thinks very seriously, if briefly, about landing a right hook square on Lloyd’s nose as he leans in close enough to get his own hand around his dog’s collar, but he’s got John upstairs to worry about and Marge next door who has to be worried sick. He lets the dog go and contents himself with shoving Lloyd and his wriggling barking gnashing dog back down the hall, across the kitchen, and out the door. He slams the door shut behind them and throws the deadbolt again, for all that’ll do before he can fix the jamb, and stands there just long enough to make sure Turner is actually hauling the dog back across John’s yard and the yard adjoining it to head back to his own place before he hurries back up to check on John.

He’s got a hand hanging between his knees cupped like he’s thinking about holding something, index finger twitching like pulling a trigger. Gale gets behind him again, tells him the first thing that comes to mind, the first thing he thinks might help. “Wasn’t after any of yours, s’okay. Didn’t hurt anybody.” 

John bends further down between his knees, hands locked against the back of his neck tight enough his fingertips are white between his equally pale knuckles. Gale slides his hand up to the middle of his back and holds him in the stretch and ignores the ache in his own chest as he waits for John to relax.

He does, slowly and in stuttering stages like stumbling drunk up the stairs to bed. His breathing slows and deepens, eventually stops hitching. His tapping fingers still, knuckles turning pink again with a flush of blood as he releases his death grip on himself. The rain outside is slowing and John is slowing with it; when it gentles to silent rivulets down the glass rather than frantic pounding, Gale reaches around John’s slumped shoulders to press a palm to his forehead. He’s cold and by now Gale’s sure the damp under his hand is sweat. He shushes John gently and coaxes him into sitting up again and exhales slowly along with John when he’s able, finally, to tuck himself entirely up against John’s broad, clammy back.

“Take your time,” Gale murmurs in his ear around a roll of thunder rumbling somewhere off in the distance. “I’ve got ya, Bucky.”

It takes a few more long moments but finally, blessedly, John manages to rasp, “Buck?” It sounds like it hurts, he sounds confused, but Gale just keeps holding onto him, hand on his forehead and arm curling slowly around his waist and his mouth still pressed close to his ear.

“Hey sweetheart. You back with me?”

“Jesus-” is all the warning gets before John’s lurching forward again to vomit. Gale holds his head steady and waits it out, listens to him choke and gasp and cough and sob in between each. It’s horrible. Gale is grateful he’s here for it.

When it’s over, John is clearly exhausted. Gale takes his lax weight on his chest and holds him steady. He can wait. He presses his face to John’s hair and doesn’t care one bit about the fearful sourness of him, just holds him, holds him, breathes and waits.

Finally after some length of time, John comes back to himself with the faintest stirring and a hitch of an inhale. Gale rubs his chest, slow motion circles to keep him warm, and he tilts his head to let John get at his neck when he turns his head to breathe him in deep.

“You wanna get cleaned up?” Gale asks before he can think twice about it. John does, so Gale goes with him. He thinks, maybe strangely but he can’t help it, of John showering alone after Kate Walllace had her way with him, of him taking care of himself as much as he can be bothered to every single day with no one to help him, no one to hold him close and tell him he’s alright, not even after an episode.

With that thought, Gale climbs right into the too-small tub with him and leaves no room for argument that this time, at least, he’ll have another’s hands on him, that he won’t have to even hold his own head up, he can just lie there limp and let Gale tend to him.

John lets him without a fight. Gale’s gentle and slow, wary of startling him or dragging him out of the half-stupor he’s sinking back into. He could be perfunctory, he knows. He is when he bathes himself, doesn’t see much point to lingering over it when his body has been a stranger to him for so long. But John’s body he knows, and like this he has a reason to touch every inch of it so he does, rag and soap a flimsy enough barrier he can still get a sense for every bump and ridge of his bones, the stretch and bunch of his muscles, every bit of skin and hair and living inch of him. John submits to it all with the loose joints of a marionette and Gale takes full advantage, leaves no inch of him unloved.

He empties the tub most of the way, refills it, not ready yet to leave. John still has nothing to say so they lay there in the dripping quiet, flushed with heat and so tangled in each other with body-warm water filling all their gaps that Gale doesn’t know where their borders end – he doesn’t want to know. He wants John inside him, wants to be in him, in ways that have nothing at all to do with sex. This is as close as they can get so Gale will sit in it until the cold thing in the pit of his stomach is finally chased away and John can do more than lay limply in the cage of all four of Gale’s limbs.

Only it has to end eventually, of course. The water cools again and instead of refilling the tub this time Gale hauls John out of it, dries him, dresses him, takes him downstairs and fixes him a drink. He fixes the radio John out his fist through weeks ago. John watches him through red-rimmed eyes over the edge of his whiskey glass, tired but awake and aware, which is more than he’s been probably all day, considering how out of it he’d already been when Gale left for work this morning. Gale talks to him about the stalag and the boys he’d been in with while he works, not to throw him back into whatever he’d been stuck in all day but to remind him Gale was there too, knows at least something of the place John still can’t escape. They’re out of it now, together, and he wants John to remember that as he drowns his demons in his own living room, his tired bones half-swallowed by his couch and a thick sweater far too large on his wasted frame.

“I want you with me and Marge tonight, John. That gonna be okay?” Gale checks when he’s finished with the radio and his story both, standing there in John’s bare living room with the man himself staring up at him uncomprehending until the meaning finally dawns with an extra bit of shine to his eyes.

“Yeah, okay.”

Gale nods, matter settled to his satisfaction.

“Buck.”

“Uh-huh?” Gale prompts but John just shakes his head. He’d said his name (or at least the one John insists on using) like a sentence, all there was to it. Gale waits him out; with John there’s more, always more, he sometimes just needs to find his way around to it and decide it’s worth it to open his mouth and say what he wants. John leans forward over his knees again but not to get sick, just to curl up like he has to get small around whatever it is he’s trying to put words to.

“Want ya to tie my shoes,” he tells his knees, accent thicker with tears he’s not shedding. Gale goes to fetch them without a word, and realizes only on his return that he moved too quietly and John’s still hunched over waiting for an answer, shoulders up around his ears.

Gale gets on his knees and says, “Sorry sweetheart. I’m here.” John collapses blindly onto him, so trusting.

Gale ties his shoes. Of course he does.

The process of getting John up and shuffling next door is both too familiar and strange at the same time. It’s hardly the first time in his life Gale has helped a drunk, staggering man through the front door, but doing so in the middle of the afternoon is novel. Gale registers the smell of whiskey on him only vaguely and without any of the nauseous hatred the same smell on his father used to leave roiling in his belly. 

Gale crowds John into the house with his hands on him and a sort-of kiss pressed to the back of his neck, so unlike every time he hauled his father bodily up the sagging porch steps, dodging his flailing fist and rubbing at bruises around the back of his neck when he was finally able to duck out from under the crush of his arm looped tight enough to choke.

“Gale?”

“It’s us, Margie.”

Marge hurries out of the kitchen to meet them as soon as he calls, and so unlike Loretta Cleven’s stern, flat-mouthed resignation every time Leslie staggered home, all there is to see on Marge’s much softer face is open concern, perhaps tinged with relief.

“Oh, John,” she exhales and Gale delivers John easily into her hands with no fear that he’ll turn senseless anger on her, which is perhaps the strangest change of all from when this scene played out ad nauseum in his boyhood. He was always too small to protect his mother when it was needed, and by the time he was finally strong enough his father had long since abandoned them to their dusty little cabin, and Gale was nothing more than a mouth Loretta wished she didn’t have to feed rather than someone who could be of any use to her at all.

“Jesus, y’ scared the shit out of me,” Marge adds but as much as she clearly means it, still all she does is pull him down even closer to press her forehead to his with a feathery sigh. Gale still has no idea what happened to upset them both so much but there’ll be time for that some other day. There’s clearly some comfort to be found for both of them in being close to each other so whatever happened must have been external and, therefore, not Gale’s problem at the moment.

John tells her he’s sorry, crackling and hardly audible but they’re all huddled up close enough in the entry to hear him. Marge, when she pulls back, looks oddly guilty even before Gale adds, “Rough day,” which even he can acknowledge is clearly an understatement. Marge hardly glances at him though, just fusses over John for another long moment, back of her palm kissing his clammy forehead, before she turns to go get him a glass of water and leaves Gale to the task of coaxing John upstairs and into their bed.

The moment Gale nudges him past the guest room John balks, of course he balks, but Gale just tells him again, “Easy. You’re okay,” and tries to fill it to the brim with enough quiet surety to make John believe it. It’s unclear how successful he is when John marches to the main bedroom like he’s suddenly got two wooden legs, but the important bit is that he lets Gale do it at all, and the second important bit is that he takes a deep breath and relaxes just a little as soon as they cross the threshold.

The springs creak a little when John lands heavy on the edge of the bed and Gale once again wrestles with the strange double-layering of past and present, unpleasant and even a little dizzying, but he presses on as the rain resumes outside, tapping softly at the window sash.

When Gale was a boy helping Loretta tumble his father into bed, the best they could typically manage together was to rid him of his dusty boots, soles worn so thin his socks beneath were wearing down in the same pattern — a bare patch and a peek of tough callus on the balls on his feet, a little towards the insides. He was always scuffing and stomping and dragging, large presence made even larger by the unselfconscious noise of his arrival in any room. But being drunk suddenly made small again, curled up in patched up clothes and snoring off the last burst of the evening’s temper that carried him over the threshold and hardly any further.

Now, Gale’s a grown man, and he can do more. Wants to do more. He kneels down to untie John’s shoes and slip them back off him and, for reasons he can’t fathom how to articulate, he finds himself touching so much more than necessary. It’s novel, in a way — clean, undarned socks; John’s ankles surprisingly slender under the hems of his trousers when Gale wraps his hands around them and gives them a little squeeze. That, more than anything, seems to snag John’s wandering attention and he responds in kind, squeezing Gale’s shoulders between his knees.

Gale leans in, thoughtless, to press his mouth to the tender, bony curve of John’s knee hardly softened by his trousers.

John stirs again to look down at him and Gale, kneeling, looks up at him through his lashes and thinks how strange it is, to take thorough ownership of John’s body as he has in such servile ways — washing him, dressing him, on his knees on the floor for him — but John still has a sense of quiet devastation to him, no power to lord over Gale like this. All the tender feelings Gale never once felt for his father stumbling around confused and drunk seem to be rising all at once for John, and Gale finds he’s not entirely sure what to do with them as they land heavy like a shoulder rammed to his sternum, threatening to knock him flat on his back with their intensity.

“You still with me, Bucky?” Gale asks with another squeeze to bone and sinew and warm skin a little rough with wiry hair.

“Always.” Gale has to breathe around the new thing in his chest for how easily he answers, even now. He feels his mouth stretch faintly into a smile, watches John stare too hard at his mouth for it. “Buck?” 

“Uh-huh?”

Gale drags John’s socks off slowly, one at a time, savoring it in a way he never has before and doesn’t entirely understand why he wants to now, either. He waits for an answer but all John does is stare at him with a morose, wanting sort of twist to his mouth. John’s still only staring, silent and agonized for some reason, when Marge arrives, bringing with her a faint ghost of lavender and ozone.

As if immune to the tension of whatever it is John can’t bring himself to say, she sighs to the room at large, “Okay, here we go,” and then, to him, she says, “Gale, honey, Lloyd from up the street is lookin’ for you. Won’t tell me what for, just that he needs to talk to you.”

It seems obvious enough he shouldn’t have to say it at all, but, “Now’s not a good time.”

He punctuates it with a pointed glance from her to John and the way he’s suddenly staring hard at the opposite wall decorated with their wedding photos, smiling and dropping it again in eerie turns, and Marge just nods and rolls her eyes, long-suffering. She knows, of course she knows.

“I know, I told him that.” She nudges the glass of water in her hand against John’s limp fingers until he rouses himself enough to take it. “Said he’s not goin’ anywhere ‘til he sees you, though.”

The next smile John tries is more a baring of teeth, eyes glassy, and Gale ignores the shiver it puts down his back. He can’t figure out what the hell John’s doing but it doesn’t matter, apparently he’s got a different battle to fight and he just has to leave this one to Marge.

“Alright. Stay here with Bucky, will ya? I’ll go see what he wants.”

John comes to life when Gale creaks to his feet, desperate but weak hands reaching for his trousers like a child afraid to be left alone. Gale steels himself against it and leaves anyway, a muscle jumping in his jaw from tamping down his frustration far enough it hopefully won’t show on his face too badly by the time he reaches the door. He should be tending to John and Marge, not soothing Lloyd fucking Turner’s temper and bruised ego, but here he is.

“Have some water, baby,” Marge murmurs softly just before Gale steps out of range and that at least is reassuring; John’s in good hands, maybe even better ones than Gale’s right now. He reaches the front door and wrenches it wide open.

“The hell do you want, Turner?” So much for hiding his frustration, but it’s clear just looking at him and his twisted up sneer that Lloyd’s spoiling for a fight anyway, so what does it really matter?

“You hiding that no good sonofabitch in there behind your wife’s skirts, Cleven?”

“Hey!” Gale barks, well and truly at the end of his tether, apparently. “You watch your goddamn mouth - about both of them-”

“I got a right to call any of you what I damn well please! Your little woman even tell you what that cockeyed souse did this afternoon-?”

“Y’got five seconds to get off my property, Turner-”

“Your property?! Who gives a damn about your property when it’s mine that’s been damaged! Shot at my damn dog, he did, the poor bitch’s been cowering under the porch all day since-”

“Bucky’s done the whole block a damn good favor then!” Gale bites, savage with both teeth and fists clenched hard to keep himself from swinging but he can’t quite keep his voice from rising instead. “Go on home Turner, and from now on I don’t give a damn what you do on your own property but you keep that mutt on it! Fences, a chain, a goddamn leash, just keep the thing inside, doesn’t matter – I see that dog come down this far again, I’m takin’ it straight to the pound!”

Lloyd gapes at him like a fish drowning in air, eyes bulging and mouth working around nothing at all. Gale doesn’t know the finer details of course but he’ll get them from Marge as soon as John’s out for the night, but it hardly matters anyway. That dog drives John up the wall, he’s always muttering about Germans and bullets and infected bite wounds when the mutt’s on the loose, even on the days he doesn’t get too bad, and Gale knows for a fact everybody’s good and well sick of Lloyd letting the thing run wild. He wouldn’t take it to the pound, probably, but then he’d never expected John to actually take a shot at the dog (if he really did like Lloyd’s claiming), so who fucking knows. They both have an end to their respective ropes, and if Gale’s is feeling frayed he knows John’s has already snapped. Lloyd’s just too stupid to get out of the way of the fallout.

“You’re just as bad as he is, ain’t you?” Lloyd finally huffs. “My Bonnie, she says you and your little woman are good people, and I told her from the start she’s too weak in the head to be making that kind of decision and now I see I’m right! Like two peas in a damn pod you and that asshole of a swigger-

“Get the fuck outta my house. Just control your damn dog, Lloyd. Go on.”

Gale doesn’t know what exactly convinces Lloyd to listen – the look in his eyes, the cold fury he’s sure is radiating off him, finally realizing that he’s not going to get what he wants out of this, whatever – but he goes, and Gale slams the door shut behind him for good measure hard enough he hears the dishes in the kitchen cupboards clatter with it.

The blank expanse of the front door is surprisingly soothing. It’s a good, sturdy door, with a hefty lock on it he can thunk into place and a chain they rarely use but that rattles now as Gale slots it home, too. He locks the kitchen door they never usually bother with, locks every window and draws every curtain until the house feels like the inside of a coffin.

He closes them in every way he can, does what he can to shield them from everything beyond these four walls, and when he can breathe without it shaking in his chest he goes upstairs one slow, plodding step at a time. The only people in the entire world he wants to see are up there waiting for him, and he’s calm enough now to join them without scaring anybody (he thinks, he hopes).

John’s lying back on the bed, hands behind his head and eyes shut looking for all the world like he’s about to fall asleep if he hasn’t already, but Gale only gets a glimpse of him before Marge is standing and ordering him back out into the hallway with a look and a jerk of her chin. Gale goes, of course, and watches, curious, Marge fidgeting in front of him in the strange shadows cast at this end of the hallway by the wan overhead light back behind him at the landing.

“Margie?”

“I think this might be partly my fault.”

Guilt, and something else that sets her teeth on edge and her gaze darting everywhere but somewhere she might catch his. He doesn’t understand.

“How’s that?”

Marge purses her lips. She’s white knuckling the near-empty glass of water in one hand, absently petting the bodice of her dress with the other like it’s a cat in her lap, a nervous habit he hasn’t seen from her in a long time – years, before everything went to shit. A teenage habit he hadn’t even noticed she’d stopped until this very moment. It puts his teeth on edge, too.

“…Marge?”

In a guilty rush, Marge lifts her chin to meet his eyes and says too quick, “I just think maybe I’m too hard on him to eat.”

Gale can only blink for a long moment; that hardly seems relevant, and certainly not any cause for what he’s identified now as shame in her restless gaze, but if that’s what she wants to address then he can play along.

Marge continues, though, before he can reply. “Maybe I shouldn’t be pushing him so much, I know it’s not easy. Wasn’t for you, anyway, and it can’t be for him either.”

“Hm. Maybe go a little easy on him if you feel like that, but I don’t think that’s it, sweetheart.” Gale pulls a smile across his uncooperating mouth, sure that she won’t buy it but she’s hardly looking at him again anyway so it’s not like it matters much. She’s still tense and after a moment she takes a sip of the water in her hand, swallows it with that same nervous twist to her mouth. Gale tries again to soothe her, “Think this is the kinda thing that we can’t really point any fingers about. Think the only people to really blame for it are long gone or too far away to ever undo what they did, if it even could be undone at all.” 

Privately, Gale hopes that whoever is responsible for scrambling John up so bad died as painfully, as miserably, and as shamefully as so many of their prisoners and victims did. The likelihood isn’t great, but deep down in the most tattered, ugliest parts of himself he tries not to show Marge he hopes that it’s true. John, he knows, would feel the same.

“What should we do?”

“Just gotta help him weather it, that’s all.”

Marge nods; there’s truly nothing else for it, and they both know it. Some things just have to be borne with as much dignity as one can muster. 

Gale steps aside to let Marge down the stairs, and when he gets back to John’s side, finally, he finds him curled up on the bed entirely and seemingly asleep, face buried deep in the pillows and his back rising and falling easily, rhythmically. Gale crawls in beside him, lays down close to feel him warm and breathing steady, reassuring.

He’ll ask tomorrow, what happened. Marge will wake up with him when he gets up for work, he’ll ask her then, over coffee and with early morning misty light softening everything until it’s easier to hear. He’ll ask if John really shot the Turners’ dog, if he hurt anybody, if they’ll have to close ranks around him even more and keep the others from tearing him apart. He’ll ask himself if, should all of that be true, any of this is truly worth it.

Marge tells herself that the catch in her chest and the sting in her eyes are just the work of the thin pale smoke drifting up from the wood she can’t light.

“I’d better get on home,” John says when Gale says nothing else. “I gotta, uh..” he trails off, glances around at the swathes of icy white drifted up around them. The silence seems louder like this, sitting heavy around whatever excuse he can’t bring himself to give. “Bye, Buck.” He turns to go, heel scraping on shoveled pavement. “Oh-” he tosses back over a hunched shoulder, “-happy new year, and to your missus, too. It’s gonna be a lucky one, I can feel it.”

Gale’s shoulders twitch, spine stiffening even straighter. John doesn’t look back again, and Gale just turns slowly on his heel to watch him trudge next door, watches him tromp through a week and a half’s worth of snow drift to his front door, stays standing there still and silent even after John’s door snaps shut again, loud in the snowed-in hush.

Marge watches him until the cold air whistling past her fingertips has turned them numb, and he still hasn’t moved. She raises the sash high enough to be able to duck down and stick her head out the window, pretends like she doesn’t see him startle before he turns with a scrape of his boots to face her, eyes wide and hunted. “Honey, I can’t get this fire to light no matter what I try. You mind comin’ in for a minute and giving it a shot for me?”

“Wood get wet, then?” he asks, and Marge pretends that she can’t hear the hollow chill in his voice from whatever it is he thinks he can’t let anyone else see. She nods instead, and steals back inside with a shiver when Gale just nods back and sets his shovel aside to tromp up the walk.

“Doin’ okay out there?” she asks once he’s kicked the snow off his boots, hovering a little too close to him kneeling at the fireplace and fiddling with the ratty nest of half-charred tinder looking more than a little sad under the damp logs.

“Uh-huh.” Gale holds a match to it until it kisses his fingertips, and he doesn’t flinch as he drops the end into a piece of balled up newspaper. “John’s back.”

“That’s good. How is he?”

Gale shrugs, coat rustling. “Said he’s fine.”

Marge bites the side of her tongue hard enough she winces and feels it swell almost instantly just to keep from snipping at him. He’s not fine, and Gale must know that. He must.

“He say where he’s been?”

“No. Didn’t ask.”

“Maybe he went to see some family,” Marge posits. It seems thoroughly unlikely and she waits for Gale to push her on it, but instead he just shrugs, lights another match, mutters a distracted, “Sure. Maybe.”

She sighs and sits on the arm of the armchair, crosses one leg over the other and props her chin in her hand, her elbow digging into the soft meat just above her knee. “Or maybe not family, maybe he went to see some of the fellas he flew with. ‘Member I told you he’d called one of them up last time I saw him?”

“Uh-huh. Could be.”

“Is that something you’d ever want to do?”

“Well,” Gale hums. The match burns down to his fingers, and he lights another. This fire’s not getting lit, they both know it, but Gale sticks the fresh match into the ashes of the tinder and for a handful of moments they can lie to themselves and think that this time it’ll flare to life.

“Well?”

“What?”

“A visit, honey. To anyone from your squadron?”

“Oh,” Gale breathes, and his coat rustles with a shrug. “Not really in a position for a visit with any of them, sweetheart. And not during the holidays.” He twists to look at her over a shoulder, and there’s some look in his eyes she doesn’t know how to read. “Guess this season’s been quiet, huh? You want to go somewhere for a visit?”

“No,” she hurries to reassure, “oh no, Gale, I just…well, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. John just seemed so happy that day before Christmas I saw him talking to his friend, that’s all.”

“Hm.”

Gale turns back to their useless wood and strikes another match.

“Why don’t we see if John’s got some firewood to spare? Just enough to get some of ours dry enough to light.”

“Okay.”

The match burns down, kisses Gale’s fingertips. He drops the spent stub with its fellows in the ash. He kneels in front of the cold hearth, and when Marge stands he doesn’t even stir.

“I’ll be right back,” she tells him, and at least he nods. Their front walk only gives her a little trouble, and Gale’s cleared their part of the sidewalk entirely, but the snow up to John’s porch is so deep it’s nearly level with it, the bottom two steps entirely buried. Marge sinks into it up to her calves and shivers under the coat she’d thrown on over her warmest winter clothes for the short trek, but she’s far too determined to turn back.

The drifts piled high on all sides seem to swallow the quiet rap of her knuckles on John’s front door, but just as she’s raising her fist to try again she hears a faint shuffling and John’s exhaustion somehow still comes through even muffled by the door when he says, “I’m comin’, hold on,” hardly louder than his usual volume.

“Hey, Bucky,” Marge offers when the door creaks open, and the smile she tries falls back off her face within a moment. “You feeling alright?”

“Oh sure,” he smiles, stiff and without teeth. “Just a little hungover, guess I rang the new year in a little too hard. Everything alright with you?”

“Oh yes, I’m fine,” she hurries to reassure, smiling softly mostly because she can’t help it when she thinks about the quiet she and Gale have enjoyed together. He’s slept peacefully almost every night between Christmas and now (save for last night, of course), even with the cold driving him closer and closer to the hearth, further and further into his head. Not to mention that he’s been extra sweet on her while they’ve been holed up together in their home, a little bubble of the peace they’ve been chasing so long.

“That’s good,” John nods, whole body moving with it like usual. His gaze slips aside a moment later, unfocused and glassy over her shoulder for a long moment before he blinks and focuses on her again with obvious effort. “Somethin’ I can do for you?”

“Oh-“ Marge starts a little, embarrassed to have already nearly forgotten her reason for coming over, “yes, well, I’m sorry to bother you when you’re only just now home from your trip-“ John twitches at the term but doesn’t correct her, “-but our extra firewood got wet somehow even under a couple of wax tarps. Do you have any to spare?”

John doesn’t even let her finish, doesn’t wait for her to explain that they’ll pay him back in kind once they get some of their own stash dried out again. Instead, he opens the door wider so quickly he stumbles a little with it and gestures for her to come in. “Jesus yeah, you must be freezing with no fire on, huh? And standing in the snow and all, Christ. Come in, quick. Sorry Marge, don’t know where my head’s at-”

Marge steps over the threshold with every intention of keeping her attention fixed politely on the entryway and no further, she’s not here to snoop. She glances around anyway, can’t help it, and abruptly realizes it doesn’t even matter — John’s house is entirely bare, there’s nothing to see (or not) anyway.

“I’ve got some nice dry stuff in the workshop, I’ll go get it,” he tells her, sitting on the bottom stair off to the side to yank his boots back on, “just give me two minutes and I’ll have you and your mister all sorted, alright? Sit tight for me, I’ll get it. I got it.”

He’s rambling, mumbling a little, and when he stands he braces himself with a hand planted firmly on the wall before he pushes himself off it to tramp through the house to his kitchen at the back. Marge trails after him much more slowly; she pokes her head into the sitting room to find the most utilitarian bare minimum filling the space - a couch, a coffee table, a radio on a side table just big enough for it; she runs her fingertips along the bare stretch of his hallway, and when she steps into the kitchen all there is of note is a crushed up pack of cigarettes and a few empty or mostly empty bottles of beer cluttering the Formica tabletop. She resists the urge to check his fridge for any food, doesn’t let herself check his cupboards either. He’s a grown man, a veteran and all. He doesn’t need her poking her nose into his business like that, likely wouldn’t welcome it and she wouldn’t even be able to blame him.

He’d returned the plate from the Thanksgiving leftovers late the next morning, the china scrubbed clean enough to gleam and his cheeks a little pink as he’d thanked Marge for sending Gale over with it. He hadn’t been home for Christmas or New Year’s Eve so Marge hadn’t fixed him a plate for either dinner, but now, strangely, she wishes she had and at least stuck them in the icebox, just in case.

“Okay, here we go,” John grunts, shouldering his way back into the kitchen with his arms full to spilling over with a generous stack of neatly cut logs. Marge hurries to help him with the back door, the cold billowing in around his wide shoulders before she lets the door fall shut again behind him. He readjusts his hold to one hand and uses the other to sweep the bottles aside with a clatter, and when he drops the bundle of wood on the tabletop Marge has to dart forward to stop one bottle from teetering right off the edge of it and shattering on the floor. “Hold on, I’ll get you some more,” he grunts, already on his way back out.

Marge steps in his path just enough to make him pause and raise his eyes from the floor to meet hers, questioning. “It’s alright Bucky, we just need enough to get the fire going so we can dry out our own. Gotta keep enough for yourself, don’t you?”

For a long moment, John doesn’t look like he understands. And maybe he doesn’t – his house is freezing, as to be expected with nobody in it for over a week in the dead of winter, but she’d noticed during her quick peek in at the sitting room that his fireplace is scrubbed perfectly clean too, like he’s only just moved in. He doesn’t use it, and Marge wonders as he mutters, “Don’t worry about it, hang on,” and ducks carefully around her to go outside again why she can hardly pull Gale more than a few inches away from their hearth these days while John seems to have entirely forgotten his own exists.

He comes back inside sniffling and stomping his boots on the linoleum, arms full of another round of perfectly split logs, and nods at the first pile on the table. “Think you can manage that, or you want me to make two trips with it?”

“Oh I’m sure I can-”

“Marge?” Gale barks it sharply enough that Marge jumps, but when she hurries to the open kitchen door she sees him standing in the snow on John’s porch with a wild, panicked look in his eye, rather than anger.

“There we go, problem solved. Come in here Gale, Bucky’s got some firewood for us — two armfuls.”

The panic fades the second he locks eyes with her, replaced by tired relief. He steps inside without knocking his boots clean and though Marge winces neither he nor John seems to notice much, or care.

“Sorry about the steps, I’ll get to ‘em in a bit,” John says as he carefully loads up Marge’s outstretched arms one log at a time with the second pile he’d brought in, a gentle stacking from his own arms into hers so as not to overburden her or knock anything off balance. “You need a hand getting back to the sidewalk?”

“Might be good,” Marge nods. Gale drags the first round of logs off the table with a horrible scraping and Marge winces again, bites the other side of her tongue to keep from spouting off a reminder to be careful with John’s things, even as few and cheaply made as they are.

“Alright, let’s get you back over there so you can warm up,” John tuts once her arms are full and she could swear she can feel the ghost of his hand at her back, no pressure but the promise of it, held carefully at bay. They step outside again and Bucky goes first, kicking and shoving at the snow on his steps like he might be able to clear a path for her with no proper shovel, and he’s big enough that it even works, a little. She steps carefully where he did with his hand at her elbow to steady her, and he keeps it there gently guiding until she crosses abruptly to the bare concrete Gale has already scraped clean.

“Thank you,” she turns to tell him, her chest aching at the sight of him standing there up to his shins in snow, shoulders hunched in his coat. “You want to come by later, maybe, for dinner? It’s New Years, and all.”

John’s eyes flick to their house over her shoulder and naked longing breaks through the hangdog misery clouding his eyes.

“I’ll take a rain check on that if it’s alright, Mrs Cleven. I should, uh…” he trails off, eyes flicking in every direction like it might help him find some excuse she couldn’t instantly poke holes in, but in the end he doesn’t even bother trying anything. “Come back if you need more wood, I’ve got plenty to spare,” he says by way of parting, and then he’s gone again, shoving his way through powdery drifts and stomping his boots on the porch and slipping inside, away, back into hiding.

Gale’s got the fire going pretty good already when she gets back inside. Marge stands a little closer to it than she normally would as Gale, kneeling at the hearth, takes the wood from her arms one log at a time, same way John put them there, to set them gently in their empty storage rack tucked away beside the hearth. Their own soaked logs are steaming already in the heat where Gale has laid them lengthwise along the hearth as close as he can get them without risking them catching as well as they dry. When Marge’s arms are empty again Gale gets to his feet with a hand on the mantle, knees creaking.

“I’m gonna go finish shoveling,” he tells her, eyes fixed on the flames, the steam.

“Alright. Thanks for gettin’ the fire lit, I’ll keep it going so it’ll be nice and cozy in here when you’re done outside.”

“Alright.”

It takes a few more long moments before Gale seems to gather himself together and heads back out, and as the steady scrape-thump-scrape starts back up again Marge tidies up the sitting room, mostly to have something to do. When she’s finished, she throws another log on the fire and goes to straighten Gale’s books in the den next, though naturally he keeps them more than neat enough already. It’s early yet but dusk is already falling when she steps into the kitchen next to get started on supper, and as she whips up an easy something mostly made of last night’s leftovers she keeps half an eye on the view of John’s kitchen across the way. It’s not snooping; he’s got the lights on and the curtains open, doesn’t seem much to know or care if she can see the lonesome tableau he makes sitting at his empty kitchen table in profile, his face turned towards his hallway and the front door beyond it.

Gale tromps back inside and heads upstairs when dinner’s almost done and the daylight’s almost gone. Marge is stuck at the stove stirring a pan of gravy to make sure it doesn’t burn so she can’t check on him, but she hears the shower squeak on and the pipes groan with it. She’s still standing there a few scant minutes later, gravy finally thickening, when the water shuts off again, as quick a shower as Gale always takes. Some habits are hard to break, she supposes, and though she’d like it if he spoiled himself a bit with some extra time under the hot water, there are more important discussions about his military and prison habits to have first before she bothers to broach something so minor as that one.

She sighs and clicks the burner off, steps to the side to check on the scrawny winter vegetables steaming on the next burner over. 

“Smells good, sweetheart,” Gale murmurs from right behind her, prefaced and punctuated by soft kisses to the curve of her neck, where he buries the praise as well.

“Think I might’ve made too much,” she says as nonchalantly as she can, a little half-lie. “Reckon I might take a plate next door, if that’s alright with you?”

“Sure,” Gale shrugs; he’s already leaving again, hand trailing along her waist, the small of her back. “Gonna sit by the fire for a bit, just ‘til supper’s ready.”

Marge finishes up, and as far as she can tell neither John nor Gale moves much at all while she does. John’s working his way through a pack of smokes and a bottle of something amber, occasionally thumbing at his nose and curling his shoulders a little more, his coat still wrapped around him. Gale, she’s sure, is sitting in the armchair, feet nearly in the fire he’ll be staring unseeing into the depths of unless and until she comes in to pull his attention away. 

She makes the first plate for John, and when she steps out to carry it next door there’s not a speck of snow to be seen on the stairs up to his porch.

“Y’didnt have to, Mrs Cleven,” John says when he opens the door. He says it in the very careful way of a man trying not to let on he’s been drinking all afternoon, and Marge will do him the courtesy of acting like she can’t tell, like she doesn’t know.

“I made too much,” she shrugs and pushes the plate a little closer to him, holds it steady while he fumbles to get a palm under it. “Before it was just me and Gale, I used to cook for my whole family, and for all my college roommates, too. Hard habit to break, I guess.”

“Well,” John starts. He looks down at the heaped up plate of food and takes a deep breath in, deep enough it moves his shoulders as well as his chest, though if it reaches all the way to his belly his sweater and coat are too loose on him to tell. “Thank you, Marge. I’ll bring the plate back when I’m done.”

“Take your time, Bucky, we got plenty. Have a good night, okay?”

“Yeah. You, too.” Marge offers him a smile before she turns smartly on her heel, but she hasn’t made it any farther than his stretch of the sidewalk before he adds, “Jesus, did Buck- I mean-the steps and-“

“Sure looks like it,” she tosses back over her shoulder with another smile. “We’re glad to see you back home, Bucky.”

She’s always prided herself on her social skills in the past, even Gale’s natural reticence has never once phased her throughout their lives, but right now when she needs those skills the most Marge finds herself drawing nothing but blank after blank.

“You and your fella getting on okay?” John finally asks, startling her out of her frantic searching and she seizes the new topic gratefully.

“Oh! Yes, we’re settling in just fine, thank you. Gale likes his work at the plant, and I’ve heard about a relief group in town I think I’ll join.”

John nods slowly, shoulders curving and straightening in time with the bobbing of his head.

“And he’s good to you?”

There’s something buried in the question, some deeper meaning Marge can’t guess at the nature of. It doesn’t matter: even if she could, her answer would be the same.

“Always has been, and every day gets better and better.”

John finishes his cigarette, stubs it out on the porch and sinks even deeper into his chair and his coat, long legs sprawling and hands linking over his stomach.

“Nice promise, huh? The American dream.” John gestures clumsily, hands spread wide like framing a photograph. “Picket fence, comfortable house, wife and kids and neighborhood barbecues and all that. Real nice.” His hands fall into his lap again with a quiet thump. “Too good to be true, you know?”

“Sure. Maybe.” Marge can’t quite keep the hesitation out of her voice but John doesn’t seem to notice. She’s not sure what he’s getting at, but he’s talking and that’s important enough it doesn’t matter much what he’s really saying.

“Yeah. ‘Cept you really got it, didn’t you? You and Buck.”

“You’re still tryin’ to call him Buck, huh?”

John finally looks at her then, just a roll of his head on his neck, shoulders leaning a bit into the twist.

“Yeah. Suits him, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.” Marge smiles just a little, “He’s never been one for nicknames, just always been Gale.”

John sighs, cheeks puffing up with it as he looks back up at the sky, spine untwisting again. “Well I’ve always been Bucky. Stops feeling like a nickname at some point, if everybody says it enough. Y’get used to it, like no one ever called you somethin’ else.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Sure.”

John falls silent again, and still. Marge checks the mulch covering the bases of the rose bushes she’d inherited from the house’s previous owners; come spring she’s got plans to try for fertilizing them in hopes of fleshing out the spindly little branches and getting some good blooms to snip off and bring in the house for drying or arranging up on the mantle. The really hard frosts won’t hit until the new year, but for now the mulch is doing well enough to keep the roses insulated, and verifying that takes away any last excuse she’s got left to keep hanging around trying to coax John into talking.

“It’s getting cold, gonna be dark soon,” she says lamely, a last-ditch attempt. “You gonna head in?”

“I’ll be out here a little longer. Don’t let me keep you, though, Mrs Cleven.” John twists his head to look at her again and the smile on his mouth doesn’t quite reach his glassy eyes, it’s too tight at the corners to be convincing. “Don’t think your fella would forgive me if you caught cold standing out here trying to keep me company.”

She goes inside.

–//–

Christmas comes too quickly, as it always does, and this year Marge begs off the expected trip home to Wyoming with the excuse that she and Gale want to enjoy their first Christmas together in their own home. The day her mother gives in, the day Marge gets to tell Gale once he gets home that evening that it’ll be just the two of them for the holiday, she’s so relieved she can’t stop grinning all during her morning errands, and she’s sure she gets a few looks but she can’t be bothered to care.

She picks up the last few groceries they’ll need to hold them through the holiday, and tops up her knitting supplies that are running low after the latest round of socks and scarves and all she’s made to contribute to the relief group’s Christmas drive, and she’s just dropped them off at the car to head down to the dressmakers to see about getting some scrap fabric and trimmings to freshen up some old dresses with to make them feel new when she hears a familiar voice, too loud for the humble phone booth on the southern corner of the town square to contain.

“-ppreciate it, Rosie, good to hear from ya…yeah, y’know, always good, doing just fine. How’s New York, you still see Croz around at all?…Oh yeah? Sounds like you’ve been havin’ a good time... ‘Course you all know they would’a been missing something down there without my vocals-”

Marge starts, blushes a little pink in a way she can blame on the raw wind as she realizes she’s eavesdropping, but she’s also just realized in one fell swoop that she’s never heard John laugh before this exact second. It’s big and boisterous and when she catches a glimpse of him through the glass he’s grinning, wide and true and happy enough it nearly shuts his eyes, and she’s never seen that before, either.

Of course that has to be the moment John turns, looking around idly as he listens, and spots her just standing there, hands buried in her coat pockets and staring right at him. She waves, doesn’t know what else to do, and gets a wave back, a happy grin.

“Listen Rosie, thanks again for the card, I’ll call you for New Year’s too now that I know how to find ya, alright? Got a friend here I need to chat with, but you tell Croz I say hi, okay?..Uh-huh. Take care of yourself, alright? Bye.”

Marge has approximately half a heartbeat to brace herself for John’s unexpected presence that promises to be a bit bigger than she’s used to, and he doesn’t disappoint — he shoulders his way out of the booth that’s barely roomy enough to contain him and then he’s right there in front of her, all cold and windchapped six-plus feet of him, still grinning big enough his blue eyes are nearly gone in a nest of smile lines she’d never noticed before.

“Well then, Mrs Cleven,” he greets, reddened fingers tapping his forehead, imaginary cap tipped and a curl knocked loose in the process. “What are you up to, last minute shopping?”

“More or less,” she smiles, hands tucked firmly in her coat pockets and not at all itching to brush that errant curl back out of his face. “Good phone call?”

“Huh? Oh yeah.” John nods with his whole upper body, shoulders following the bobbing of his head as he turns to fall in beside her and they start walking towards the dressmaker, elbows knocking. “Stopped by the post office to send off a few things, had a postcard waiting so I figured I’d return it with a call.”

They split apart to let a woman pushing a baby stroller covered in swathes of lacy trim pass between them and come back together elbow to elbow in her wake.

“Her name’s Rosie?” Marge prods and for some reason it makes John laugh and scrub at the back of his neck, a little bashful.

“Rosie’s a ‘he’, buddy of mine from the hundredth — my bomber group, I mean. Robert Rosenthal, great pilot, really great guy. He’s in New York, catches up pretty regular with our old head navigator Crosby, so hearing from one is a good bet for news of the other.”

“Ah, I see. Well that’s nice, I’m glad you got to have a chat. They’re both doing well then?”

The John Egan who walks her to the dressmakers, and then to the milliner, and then back to her car, is a very different man from the John Egan who has every woman in the neighborhood looking at him sidelong while they whisper behind their gloves and every man steering a wide berth. This John Egan she can picture so clearly going by Bucky without anyone batting an eye; this John Egan is charming and gregarious and flirts harmlessly with all the shopgirls until they’re blushing and giving Marge a much better deal than she’s gotten in either shop yet; this John Egan seems like he’d easily be the life of any party, and Marge just knows without a doubt that as much as her Gale is made for quiet solitude and the comfort of only his most trusted friends (or, in other words, her), this John is made for large groups of friends to hold court with and the bustling fuss of a full social calendar.

He talks her ear off the whole hour or so they spend together and by the time he shuts the car door for her, all gentlemanly about it to the point of obviously poking fun at himself, she’s fairly sure he’s said five times as much in an hour as Gale has in the last few months. She sits there in the quiet, each exhale fogging in front of her as she watches him weave through other people shuffling down the sidewalk with ease — and head straight into the bar across the street.

“Hey! ‘S Bucky, t’you. Bucky, Buck.”

“I ain’t goin’ by Buck. What are you doing here, John? Fuck are you doin’, beating down the door in the middle of the goddamn night?”

Marge creeps down another few steps silently, just enough to peek around the corner. Gale’s blocking most of her view but he’s clicked on the front light and when she gets a glance over his shoulder she has to press her fingers to her mouth to keep from saying something, anything, that would draw attention.

“Jus’ tryin’ to get to bed, that’s all,” John slurs. “Don’ want any trouble, honest.” He raises his hands to his shoulders, swaying surrender.

“This ain’t your house.”

“What?” John squints through bruised lids already swelling almost shut, and when he tilts his head back to look up at the house he nearly goes sprawling on his back before he rights himself.

“Oh Jesus. Fuck. Sorry, Buck, ‘m sorry,” he sighs. His bottom lip is swollen around an ugly split, dried blood streaking down his chin. “‘M goin’, didn’t mean to keep y’up. Sorry. Christ.”

Marge takes the last couple of steps necessary to slip up behind Gale, her hand on his back, to stand with him as they watch John stumble back to the sidewalk and over to his own front door, muttering to himself the whole way. He fumbles his keys, metal jingling at his feet. Gale stalks past her, back into the house. Marge stands there in the doorway, heart slowing and her arms around her waist to hold her robe shut, and watches John squat down to pick up the keys only to just tip back, back, and fall the last few inches to thud down on his bottom right there on the porch, slumped like a puppet with its strings cut. He kicks at his door, just once, and then looks for all the world like he doesn’t plan to move again. 

She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just shut the door against the cold chilling her bare legs, go back to bed now that they know there’s nothing to be afraid of. They haven’t seen much of John lately, not even enough for the occasional hello, certainly not enough to be able to call each other friends, but she still can’t help but notice that he doesn’t seem to really…do anything. He doesn’t go anywhere on the weekends, he doesn’t see anyone during the week. He goes to work, he comes home, and no one even stops by to say hello. No one checks in, and with no little guilt she realizes that’s including her.

Marge steps out and crosses the pavement on bare feet, climbs the couple of steps up to John’s porch to step carefully over one leg splayed out wide. 

“Oh. Hey. Mrs Cleven,” John slurs, trying to sit up. “Hey, sorry, don’t be scared of me Marge, ‘kay? Please. Didn’t mean to, just..y’know? Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” she promises, reaching down to pluck his keys from his lax grip. His knuckles are split, already bruising by what she can see from the light off their porch next door. The house key is easy to pick out from amongst the others; she unlocks the front door and feels along the wall for a switch, wincing a little in guilty sympathy when John swears at the sudden flood of light, bloodied and bruised hands flying up to shield his eyes.

“Hey, you got in!” he crows, abruptly grinning, pain apparently forgotten. He lunges to his feet and Marge has to duck aside to keep from being bowled over as he barrels inside, catching himself with a little oof of displaced air on the post at the base of the stairs. “Jesus, real angel you are Marge, coulda just slept on the porch you know,” he tells her, big hands gesturing as he rambles. “Here, lemme have the keys, go on back home to your fella, don’t let him go to sleep alone okay? You take care of him, doncha? He takes care of you? ‘S the way should be, they promised.”

Marge passes John his keys, holding them out until his wide swings finally end with his palm wrapped hot and tight around them. “You okay, Bucky?” she can’t help but ask. This close he smells so much like a distillery she wants to sneeze just to clear her nose, and she can just barely make out a broken vessel in one of his swollen eyes, crimson bleeding across the white.

“I’m good, Marge, always good! Come on now, get goin’, your fella’s all alone over there, come on.”

Marge doesn’t have much of a choice but to let John chivvy her back out onto the porch, though she can’t help but notice that even drunk off his ass he doesn’t touch her to do it, just crowds close and gestures in the direction he thinks she should go. She goes, and he closes the door behind her with exaggerated care, as if being gentle with his own door should make up for nearly kicking theirs down.

Gale’s waiting for her in the front hallway when she steps back inside, her bare feet cold enough now to make her whole body shiver.

“You get him inside okay?”

“Yeah,” she breathes, rubbing her hands briskly over her arms. “Just didn’t want him sleepin’ outside in this weather, looked like he was planning to.”

Gale nods, reaches out for her to pull her into a hug that squeezes the breath out of her. Marge goes easily, happily, and stands there with him until she’s warmed back up and Gale’s yawning against her hair, finally ready to try sleeping. They go to bed. Gale holds her close, and Marge nods off again thinking of John falling asleep alone.

--//--

Gale relaxes in increments so slow she only sees them because she’s looking for them, but slow progress is still progress. He keeps filling out as he eats good meals, three times a day under her watchful eye. He goes to the doctor and gets a clean bill, and with that comes Marge’s promise that she won’t make him go again unless they’re both sure he’s dying. He gets along well at work, makes a few friends that Marge meets as well when they’re out in town together running errands of a weekend, or when they’re invited around a couple of houses for Friday evening dinners; Gale doesn’t care for the first dinner and doesn’t seem likely to change his mind after the second so they quickly quit accepting the invitations, but a few of the folks they meet at them are nice enough to keep in casual touch with Marge even after Gale makes them scarce. They’re surface-level acquaintances and are unlikely to ever become more, but Marge knows beggars can’t be choosers and she’ll choose fluff without substance over anything deeper she might develop with their catty neighbors any day.

The weather turns truly bitter towards the middle of the month and Gale starts spending practically all of his free time sitting so close to the fireplace Marge is worried a single stray spark will set him alight, but knowing what little she does of his time in the prison camps she doesn’t have the heart to ask him to move further back. He spends a lot of time reading and the rest of his time staring at (or maybe through) his pictures she’d insisted be put up on the mantle with the bits of his uniform they’d had framed, but he’s always quick to turn away and answer her when she comes in to talk, or to kiss, and these days every fresh greeting between them comes with a ghost of the smiles he used to give her when they were courting, before everything. Even those wan smiles are better than when he’d come home and couldn’t seem to smile for anything at all except on special occasions, and she loves him for every single one of them.

“Saw you out talkin’ to John this morning,” she tells him, perched on the arm of his chair in front of the fire, her elbow resting on the back cushion so she can play with his hair and he can hold her steady, his arm sturdy around her hips.

“Mhm.”

“He on break from school for the holiday?”

“Mhm. ‘Til Monday.”

Marge hums, plays with Gale’s hair some more. He relaxes into her, head tilting to rest on her ribs as he stretches his feet closer to the fire.

“Momma called, said her and daddy are gonna be here tomorrow afternoon, wanna beat the weather. Oughta check the guest linens are still fresh,” she muses. Gale hums, nuzzles her ribs, the side of her breast.

“Packed ‘em in lavender like always, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I’m sure they’re fine.”

Marge sighs and takes the roundabout admonishment to relax without argument. She leans heavier against the back of the chair and curls up smaller, with her feet in Gale’s lap to get comfortable. He keeps nuzzling into her and Marge smiles, strokes her fingers through his hair he still keeps cropped as close as the day he’d shipped out.

It’s not hard to guess where his mind’s going when he starts getting affectionate like this but she lets him get there in his own time, lets him savor her as much as he could ever want. He’s so careful with her, gentle stroking hands leaving heat trailing under her skin in their wake, steady breathing, deliberate kisses he seems to place just so, right where she likes them best. She knows better than to ask if they should go upstairs for this, knows better than to expect them to make love the normal way — the way all her girlfriends back in Florida and Wyoming told her she should. For that matter, she knows better even than to expect it to be like that one time she’d managed to talk him into making love to her before he’d shipped out. Things are different, Gale’s different, but then so is Marge, and she’s also pretty sure they’re happier together than a lot of those girls were with their fellas who pawed and groped and put their girls on their backs just to take their own pleasure hard and fast and give nothing back at the end. Doing things different seems pretty good from where Marge is sitting, all things considered.

When they finally get where he’s going, she winds up straddling Gale’s lap sitting on his hand, big and warm and moving just right in between her thighs to take her apart at the seams, and all thoughts of linens and rationed holiday menus and everything else that isn’t her husband’s touch flies right out of her head.

Gale spends the entire evening taking her apart until she’s begging him to let her breathe, let her recover. She laughs when she tries to stand only to find her knees have completely given up on her, and Gale smiles when he carries her upstairs to bed. He helps her clean up enough to sleep, tucks her under the covers, and goes back downstairs to bank the fire, turn off the lights. She’s nearly asleep when he comes back, and tonight’s apparently a good night because he lays down under the covers with her and falls asleep almost instantly once he’s got her in his arms the way he likes.

It makes it all the more heartbreaking when her parents arrive the next afternoon and he goes silent, and cold, and the look in his eyes is like he’s just stepped off that train again, fresh off his tour. Her mother needles them at every opportunity for any hint of children coming now that she doesn’t have to content herself with doing it in writing only to find those parts of the letters going ignored. Her father barely even looks at Gale except once to ask him about his work down at the plant, then again, though it’s more like half a glance from the corner of his eye, to tell him he needs to do better keeping up with raking up the leaves in the yard.

By the end of dinner Marge is so worn out trying to keep her parents’ attention off Gale so he can keep to himself that her knees and hands tremble with wrung out exhaustion of an entirely different kind to the night before, and if it were possible to sink right into bed in the next moment she would do it without a moment’s hesitation. Gale helps her wash up despite her father grumbling that that’s woman’s work, and she’s glad for the chance to lean against him just for a minute where they stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the sink.

It startles her when he clears his throat and speaks up, voice a little rusty with how little he’s been using it all day. “Think I oughta check on things next door for a minute.”

Marge blinks out of her thoughts and glances up at him, but his gaze is fixed on the window behind the sink. It takes a bit of squinting to find what he’s looking at, the kitchen lights at her back only making it harder to pick out whatever he’s spotted in the dim lamplight outside, but when she finally sees what he does her heart sinks right down to her nicest shoes pinching her toes too tight and rubbing little tender spots on the backs of her ankles.

“Name’s John Egan,” the guy introduces himself a week later when they’ve finished hauling everything in and they can finally settle enough to meet the neighbors properly, “but everybody calls me Bucky, and I like it better that way.”

“Gale Cleven, my wife Marjorie.”

“Just Marge though,” she smiles, sweet balance to Gale’s newly stern, unsmiling affect. “I like it better that way.”

John smiles at her then, so much more real than whatever he’d done last time, and when he shakes her hand his own is big and warm and calloused kind of like Gale’s are, a hand used to hard work.

“Pleasure to meet you properly, Marge. Gale.”

John shakes Gale’s hand too and seems about to say something else but Gale’s already pulling away to take the couple of steps down to the pavement so they can continue on their little meet-and-greet tour around the block. John offers a nod full of understanding to her apologetic little grimace, and he just watches with his hands in his pockets and one shoulder leaned up against the side of the doorframe his shoulders nearly fill as Marge joins Gale down on the sidewalk to tuck her hand into his elbow, and on they go.

—//—

“Oh lord no, I wouldn’t go anywhere near that man if we weren’t neighbors, and even at that I don’t talk to ‘im unless I’ve got Artie with me.”

Marge hides the urge to frown in the motion of crossing one ankle behind the other and taking a careful sip of her too-bitter coffee.

“Sad but true,” another of the ladies sighs, and maybe Marge is being unfair but she thinks the pout that goes with the sentiment looks more than a little put-on. “Just somethin’ off ‘bout him! You know, Cal and I think he’s gotta have someone he’s threatened or something up at the school what got him the job - don’t know how he’d get it otherwise, man’s not right in the head.”

“Ain’t that the truth. What’s he teaching again, Bonnie?”

Mousy little Bonnie Turner, sitting beside Marge, clears her throat and holds a hand in front of her mouth to finish chewing the minuscule bite of a ginger snap she’d just taken. “Woodshop, I think,” she says when her mouth’s clear. “Somethin’ handy, anyway.”

“They gave him sharp tools to brandish around those kids?“ Henrietta Smith scoffs from her throne at the top of the room. “First sign of trouble I’m going to write to principal Perry myself and let him know what’s what. They oughta know what they’re dealin’ with, hiring a man like that to teach. How’s he been to you and your fella so far, Marjorie?”

“Nothin’ but nice,” she says, and it’s the pure truth but it still earns her a couple of scoffs that put her back up. “I mean it! He’s been fine. Maybe a little quiet, but everything seems alright.”

“You’re still new,” Henrietta tuts, and the rest of the ladies she’s holding court with titter as well (except for Bonnie next to her, who just looks like she wishes they’d change the subject). “Just wait ‘til he gets it in his head that someone’s done him wrong, or ‘til he’s got nothing better to do but make trouble for everyone else, like he did this summer. A man always reveals his nature eventually, and Major John Egan’s nature is mean.”

Marge leaves not too long after that, excusing herself with the reason that she needs to get home and start dinner for Gale. She’d hoped for nicer neighbors here than the ones they’d left behind, but it seems folks are the same no matter where you go — nosy busybodies who sit around and do nothing but judge their neighbors and gossip, all mean-spirited and nasty. She shudders and has half a mind to do something silly like take a shower to see if she can scrub off the grimy feeling that little ‘afternoon tea’ left her with down in her soul. She pauses on the sidewalk outside John’s house with half a mind to march right up there and talk to him for a bit just to show those clucking hens what for; it’s quiet though, he must still be up at the school, so Marge goes on into her own home, still only half-unpacked.

Some hours later, dinner’s in the oven and she’s sitting at the table working on unwrapping all their photos from their cushions of newspaper scraps when a car passes by, turns into the driveway next door. She hardly feels better than one of those busybodies as she does it, but she stands up to creep over to the window, staying just out of sight with her stomach pressed to the edge of the sink.

John steps out of his car so he can haul up the door to his garage, gets back into the car, she presumes to drive it inside. He sits there, hands on the wheel and his chin on his chest, for a few long minutes marked only by Marge’s breathing and the clock she’d put above the kitchen door ticking away. She has half a mind to go check on him and make sure he’s alright, but before she can decide one way or the other John suddenly jerks upright and her heart lurches when his car does, a few inches forward in a harsh jerk. He slams the brakes, stalls it, starts it again with too harsh motions like he’s angry with it, but then he gets it into the garage without incident anyway.

He hauls the garage shut again behind himself but he doesn’t go in his house. He’s just standing there outside the garage with his hands on his hips, two fingers curved over his belt and the rest of them curled up entirely, tucked into his palms, breathing deep and looking down at his yard, at the grass getting a little long. When he finally gets moving he still doesn’t go inside, and Marge hurries to take a step or two back as he comes towards her — or, it turns out, just towards his side yard and then up and around to the front of his house for a stop at the mailbox. Marge leans forward again, cranes her neck until her forehead is nearly pressed to the glass to keep her eyes on him as he stands there on the sidewalk between their houses, flicking through a few envelopes. One of them he folds in half and tucks into his shirt pocket, but the other two he keeps hold of — and then he’s definitely walking towards her house.

Alice’s warning rings in Marge’s head the same moment a knock on the door cuts through the ticking silence and Marge tells herself she’s being ridiculous. She might need her husband Arthur around to feel safe, but Marge can hold her own just fine – and John hasn’t given her a reason to be afraid of him anyway! She marches to the door, opens it to find John standing on her stoop with two envelopes held carefully between his big hands. He’s got a light scatter of wood shavings in his hair and a layer of sawdust paling his sleeves, and the stern lines of his face soften ever so slightly when she smiles at him.

“Hi Bucky,” she greets, and he softens even further, gently surprised pleasure. “What can I do for ya?”

“Marge,” he replies and touches the front of his hair like he’s used to having a cap there to tip. Gale does it too sometimes and Marge finds it as charming on one as the other. “Seems the postman was in a rush, left me a couple’a letters that aren’t mine.”

John holds out the envelopes between them and Marge hurries to take them. A glance at the first proves it to be from her mother, and the second something more official-looking from-

“Oh!” she chirps, smiling wide.

“Good news?”

“Hope so! We’ve been having an awful time tryin’ to get my name changed since Gale and I tied the knot,” she explains, already ripping into the second envelope with one red lacquered nail, thin paper giving way easily. “Third time’s the charm though, right?”

The documents slide free and she catches the letter that’s come with them, unfolding it eagerly to skim through the apology it contains and then, yes, there it is:

Marjorie Ruth Cleven.

“Well?” John prompts, and when she looks up she finds him smiling, hands in his pockets and eyebrows raised. “Good news?”

“Good news,” she confirms, nodding.

“Well then congratulations, Mrs Cleven.”

And oh that’s lovely. Marge thanks him, cheeks aching with how wide she’s grinning, and John’s smile widens a little more like he doesn’t even notice it. He nods, takes a couple of steps back out of the shade of the porch and into the sunshine.

“I’d better get,” he says. He nods to the letters in her hands, “I’ll let you know if that happens again, might be some confusion down at the post office since you’ve just moved in.”

“Y’ don’t have to do that, John, it’s alright. You can just put anything that’s ours right in the mailbox, no need to trouble yourself.”

John’s smile fades just a little, creasing at the corners as he digs his hands deeper into his pockets.

“Ah yeah, of course. I’ll do that. Have a good evening, Mrs Cleven.”

He’s turned and gone again quicker than Marge can figure out what else to say, though she doesn’t step back inside until he’s unlocked his own front door and gone in.

Gale gets home around six, and the moment he’s kissed her hello Marge shows him the letter just to see one of his rare smiles creep slow as molasses across his face. It makes his hollow cheeks look a little rounder, puts a bit of his old light back in his eyes, sets her heart to aching in the best way just the same as ever.

“Well,” he drawls, tucking an arm around her waist to reel her in tight so he can kiss her forehead, “how ‘bout that. Mrs Marge Cleven.”