“Hey Cowboy.” Is he the only one feeling the heat here? A bead of sweat rolls down the back of his neck, he feels it trickle down his spine and it makes him shiver in spite of everything else. He’s the first one in their unit to forego the shirt. Maybe he’ll start a trend.
They’ve been stationed out here for what feels like days, sitting around nursing blistered feet and going permanently half-hungry on shitty rations. Snafu himself is sitting pretty with a small collection of cookies and peach jam that he swiped from an army supply drop a few hours ago. He dips a cookie in the jam, swirls it around. Crumbs fall off and speckle through it. He thought about spitting in it to mark it as his, but some of the fuckers around here would eat it regardless. Anyway. He has Cowboy’s attention. It takes him a second to remember why he wanted it in the first place.
   “Why you lookin so glum, boo? We in paradise. Blue skies. You see a cloud up there? We got hours of doin fuck-all but this. ’S just like vacation.”
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“You keep staring at me instead of watching the film. What’s up?” for snafu from sledge
soft sentence starters • not accepting unless we have a ship bc im lazy@bonnmot
Gene could ask to watch paint dry and Snafu would say yes. It’s not about movies – he doesn’t have the attention span for them, most of the time, finds his thoughts drifting loosely and not entirely by his own design far too easily. It’s about spending time with Gene. All of his clothes smell clean and fresh and they’re soft, somehow so much softer than anything Snafu has of his own, and sometimes when Snafu looks at him sidelong his profile is caught in the light from the kitchen if it’s still on, and it almost hurts, hot in his chest and the tips of his ears.
   “Nothin, sugar, you just keep catchin me at the wrong time.” That’s not true. He is smiling though, not entirely but just enough, biting down on the insides of his cheeks to stop Gene’s curiosity bubbling over. He gets self-conscious, he goes pink under his freckles, he fidgets, he gets bashful and scoffs and shakes his head.
On second thoughts. Snafu grins, almost impish, showing teeth. “Naw, you’re right. I’m starin at you. But I got a good excuse.” They’re close but he makes the effort to lean over so he’s talking right by Gene’s ear, chin on his shoulder. “I can watch a movie anytime. When do I get a hundred minutes to sit just lookin at you?”
“You’re not in bed. I came looking for you.” for snafu from sledge
soft sentence starters • not accepting unless we have a ship bc im lazy@bonnmot again
Gene finds him in the communal kitchen on their slightly threadbare sofa, head tipped back to look up at the ceiling with slow, calculated incomprehension. They must plaster it over every year. No way it stays that clean and white without intervention.
(He’s thinking too much about the wrong things.)
He’s been thinking about it, in a roundabout sort of way, being in bed with Gene. Whenever he stays here in Gene’s dorm they have to squeeze into a single bed, hot and stuffy and breathing on each other, limbs tangled together with the air con on through the night. He doesn’t mind it. Likes it, most nights. It’s taken a while, but it’s like his body knows now not to panic when Gene’s an inch away, even when he’s sleeping. He likes the sound of the air con unit and the every-ten-seconds flash of the oversensitive smoke alarm on his ceiling and Gene puffing out little breaths onto the side of his neck, tickling if he catches hairs. He’s a wrapper, a clinger, bony legs tangled with Snafu’s, holding him still.
And Snafu, he likes it, he wouldn’t say he doesn’t. He’s always done better in heat than cold, anyway, and sleeping alone feels pointless and chilly and sour and like a waste of time. There are plenty reasons he doesn’t like staying in Gene’s dorm – his roommates being A-number-one – but Gene’s bedroom doesn’t feature on the list. It’s just – this, here, now, for no reason, awake. He’d been dreaming, not really about anything in particular and he doesn’t remember it after waking himself up enough to get up and out of bed without waking up Gene too. So he got here, and his left hand side is cold because Gene isn’t holding onto it any more. He can see him, sort of, without lifting his head. The light in the hallway is on but the light in the kitchen is off, and Gene’s hair and parts of his arm and shoulder and neck are caught in it and blown out, outlined in bright white.
   “You’re not in bed,” Gene says, like Snafu mightn’t have known unless he told him. And maybe to clarify: “I came looking for you.”
Snafu watches him stand there and feels himself sit where he is, not moving and thinking only vaguely about the pale, almost invisible hairs on Gene’s legs or how he sniffles sometimes when he sleeps like the onset of a cold he’s probably going to catch. Gene moves, fidgety, just a little, while he waits.
Snafu lifts his head, less because he wants to and more because he wants Gene to know he hasn’t expired sitting here on this couch. First things first: “’m a’right.” Now that’s out of the way: “C’mere.”Â
He lifts a hand and lets it fall on the empty couch space beside him. Gene’s barely sat down before Snafu has an arm around him, nose buried in his hair, eyes shut. He feels hypersensitive to noise, the sound of Gene moving and settling, his own hand brushing the soft cotton of Gene’s shirt, Gene breathing out through his nose and starting to say something, an are or a Snafu or something else, but it doesn’t go anywhere, swallowed down again or filed away for later. Gene’s skin is warm, there’s a heat to him underneath the surface that Snafu doesn’t know what he’d do if he couldn’t feel any more. It’s not panic, it’s the opposite. It takes more than a minute like this to understand that calmness as something new, not just never with anyone else but never at all, before this second.
Snafu will, in all probability, never love anyone else. Not like this, not after this. There is Gene, and nobody else. The finality of thinking it is euphoric.
   “Let’s just stay here a while,” he says, or maybe just thinks it. Either way, Gene stays.
