Chapter Text

"I've spent so long in the darkness I'd almost forgotten how beautiful the moonlight is."

― Corpse Bride

Memory comes to Gale syrup-slow as the weight of his father’s spirit slips away from him. Mud and ice and the ache in his hips from walking. Warm bars filled with cigarette smoke and loud voices. The taste of ginger beer and whiskey on his tongue. Reflexively, Gale tries to swallow but his throat remains still, the muscles and tendons atrophied to the point of uselessness. There’s a ringing in his ears, like a voice shouting his name, deep and rough and with an accent all pomp and fakeness. 

John called it hope.

Stale air of the ether drifts around Gale, tugging at the Mare’s spidersilk mane so the strands wave and shimmer like the fog around them. 

John called it hope.

There are blue eyes and blue sky in Gale’s mind, both battling for most vivid, most bright. And Gale thinks of bikes and luck and a waterfall of small moments– a hand on his chin, an arm around his shoulders. Warm and human and altogether so alive it had always scared Gale a bit, even before the war.

John, to Gale, had always seemed too tempting of a prize for death. 

John called it hope.

Beneath him, the Mare makes to turn, head swinging towards where Gale, too, feels the tug of the next soul, the next task, the next mission. She takes a step or two, cloven feet silent against the fog and stars below them. Her head bobs, horn curved and pale as porcelain.

Gale tightens his knees, digging in behind her shoulders, and gives her mane a tug. She tosses her head, and takes another step. The horn’s point swings dangerously close– so close it would have gored him if Gale hadn’t dodged out of the way

“No,” Gale says. “I won’t.” 

The Mare snorts, tail swishing angrily, the lions bob at the end lashing Gale’s legs like he’s a child, in trouble again. He digs his knees in harder. 

“I won’t,” he repeats, his voice barely more than a rasp. 

The body beneath him starts to spin and he rights her again with his knees. She sidesteps, lashes her tail harder, fights him harder. Gale can see the glint of her teeth in the moonlight, sharp as ever as she tries to wheel around and bite him. He tugs her head straight. A stomp of her hoof, sending inky, iridescent water up shimmering around them, smelling like electricity before a storm. The jolt jars Gale’s molars. Fangs snap for his thigh again, Sink deep this time and tearing through fabric and flesh all in one go. 

Gale is almost shocked to see the ragged hole left behind. That there was meat at all on him to be taken. He had almost forgotten there was anything beneath the coat at all, less so a body filling it out and more just the entity of him, whatever was still left. But the proof is there– bright red streaks down the Mare’s ribs, smearing along the white coat like paint as a dull throb echoes up Gale’s leg. He can see wasted muscle, yellow fat, the faint shimmer of bone. A body beneath the robe that was real and human. Maybe not quite alive, not quite working and healthy, but there in a way that he’d forgotten. 

Gale reaches down into the open wound and drags two fingers through the mess. The blood that comes away is dark with deoxygenization– thick and jammy like it’s half clotted. It clings to his white fingers, shaking slightly as his body trembles against its will. 

He slips them between his lips. Tastes iron and copper and a faint spark of electricity that might have been life.

The Mare’s nostrils flare and she tosses her head again, like an argument done, and turns towards that tug of a soul waiting. Gale yanks her head back around and she squeals in anger, trying for his leg a second time. He lays across the heavy expanse of her neck, hand gripping the base of her horn so he can speak right into one elegant, flattened ear. 

His leg throbs, spilling blood down her neck and shoulder, clumping her mane to red, stringy ropes. “John Egan,” he says in her ear, chest tight and giddy. “John Egan– you can’t make me forget him again.” 

One huge, milky eye rolls at him, the oblong pupil only barely darker than the iris around it. 

“John Egan,” Gale repeats. “He named me. He called me Buck.” 

The Mare tries to throw him, heels kicking out, head going down between her front legs. Gale clings with one thigh that trembles and shakes, muscle and tendon lost down the Unicorn’s gullet, and hands that dig nails deep into her flesh. Silver leaks out in its wake, staining his palms and making them shimmer. She bucks again, spinning around, and then goes up onto her hind feet, body twisting like a snake. 

It feels like his head coming above water, remembering John. Like his father cracked open a door that allowed the flood in. 

John’s voice over the radio and his forehead dotted with sweat as he bent over a microphone and the sight of him kissing a girl across the bar, ice pressing cool to Gale’s lips as he took another sip of his ginger beer. John’s shoulders sunburnt from playing baseball with their boys on a rare day off and the way his face got serious when they started talking strategy. The ache of his lunacy in the Stalag, his dirty, vacant face and the way his eyes clicked back to life, just a little bit, when Gale offered him attention. 

Beneath him, the horse screams again, echoing around the transitional space they occupy, and Gale remembers a tasteless porcelain statue, rearing and furious, extended as a peace offering. She jumps and spins through the air beneath him like any ordinary rodeo bronc from back home, head going down beneath her front legs and hooves kicking out behind him, bruising his body, throwing him around like a dead weight. 

He holds on through the rest of her fight. 

By the time her hooves touch down again, her sides are heaving with breaths. Gale gives her a quiet pat, settling back into to his seat atop her back. More flesh has been torn from his body– a bite taken out of his forearm, his ankle hanging by barely a thread. Blood and skin flecks the Mare’s mouth, frothy from her exertion.

Gale laughs. 

The sound is horrible, dry bone and burning paper. It hardly sounds like him at all, but he laughs all the same, patting the Mare’s heaving, bloody neck, and nods. Nods again, to himself and then up towards the sky and the stars. They shimmer and twinkle above him, winking in and out like a thousand fireflies instead of static, giant beasts of burning gas and chemicals. Like living things– eyes winking at them from the darkness. 

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Gale says to their cold silence. “Do you hear me? I’m done.” 

A shimmer in response.

“I won’t leave him once I find him again. I’ll find him and I’ll follow him and the bodies can pile up and the souls and the spirits can fade away and I won’t touch a single one of them, not for the rest of his life. They can fade away or burst through to the living world and I won’t do a single thing.” 

Beneath him, the Mare has gone quiet and still. Docile as a lamb with her head hanging low and nostrils swirling the fog with every muted exhale. 

Gale tries to swallow again, bones clicking. “Do you hear me?”

On and on the stars shine. 

Then the Mare’s ears prick forward. Gale feels it, too, at the same moment– something or someone beckoning them forward, neither John or spirit, but some other sort of thing. Old and intelligent and heavy like a weight on Gale’s chest. If he still needed to breathe, he might have felt the urge now. 

A step forward. The Mare flicks her ear back, as if she’s pointedly waiting for Gale to object. When no such disagreement comes, she takes another step forward, sending shimmering droplets echoing through the fog– 

–and then they step out onto a concrete floor.

The cured stone clicks underneath bone hooves, shockingly light and musical for the heft of her body. Only seconds are needed for Gale to recognize where they are, the space so familiar it might as well be home. Was home, for all intents and purposes, the cots and their nightstands lining the walls of the Thorpe Abbotts Officer’s barracks as familiar as his own bed back in Wyoming, stained now with the remnants of his father’s suicide. 

It’s entirely deserted as Gale slips off the Mare’s back, his boots making no sound on the concrete, body once again whole from the wounds inflicted on it. All the beds are unmarked, neatly turned down and pillows freshly fluffed. Each one is empty, void of all personality and belongings– like every man had died or been sent home. Light streams through the windows, dappling the floor as Gale walks down the center aisle and finds his cot. Muscle memory makes it easy, counting how many steps to take in the dark with a heavy, drunken body draped over his shoulder. Here is John’s bed, waiting as for the limp form that he frequently deposited into it. Here is his own, directly to the left.

There’s a trunk under his bed, inscribed with his initials and covered in dust. It’s familiar, too, the dent in the corner from John tripping over it, the frayed edges from Gale picking at the threads on nights he couldn’t sleep. Gale swipes his hand over the top, dragging furrows in the heavy snowfall of grime, and reaches for the latch. 

The door to the barracks open, the squeal of metal hinges echoing around the hangar. Gale stands upright, spinning on his heel, and finds that the Mare has vanished. 

In the doorway stand John. 

Or who Gale recognizes as John for all of a moment, before the figure starts to move and Gale realizes it’s nothing like John at all. The gait’s all wrong, too smooth and light for the large body Gale is used to being swung around like it deserves to take up as much space as possible, the face too calm, void of a single whisper of a smile. Its eyes, when it sits on John’s bed, might be the same shadow of blue, but contain none of the shine. There is no light to them at all, color flat like paint. The thing wearing John’s skin smiles– all wrong, close-mouthed and thin-lipped. 

It sits in the same way John does, knees spread and feet close, hands clasped between, elbows digging into the faint give of his thighs. 

Gare stares at it and fights a feeling of sick revulsion. “Is this a trick?” 

That thin smile fades, John’s face relaxing back into something more neutral. The emptiness suits it more, affectations of humanity dropped so the ancientness of it slips out, spooling from a body it wasn’t supposed to own. 

“I thought you’d like it,” the thing that isn’t John says.

“Didn’t expect you to have a sense of humor.” 

It tilts its head. “And what did you think I would be?” 

Gale stares at it.

“What do you think I am?” 

The tone is friendly, rather than a threat– genuine, neutral curiosity. The thing wants to know, but doesn’t seem like it would be particularly concerned if it received no real answer. 

“I think you’re like me,” Gale says quietly. “I think you got on that Mare and lost every bit of yourself to it. Do you even remember who you were?”

Blue eyes flicker flatly. “No,” it says, “but I don’t mind it. My life was short, and rather painful, and ended quite violently.” 

“Mine didn’t. Mine didn’t end at all.” Gale’s voice shakes slightly. “I wasn’t dead.” 

“You got on the horse.” 

“I didn’t know,” Gale barks.

“You knew,” Not-John says calmly. 

“When I signed my life away to the Army, at least they had the decency to give me a goddamn contract,” Gale spits. 

The thing looks up at him unblinkingly. “This isn’t the Army, Gale.” 

Gale sits down on his cot, pushing shaking hands through his hair. “I can’t do this if it means losing John.” 

The thing that once sat on the Mare instead of Gale looks at him with some semblance of sympathy– though there is confusion to it, too. So long spent as it is, it has entirely forgotten what it means to feel. 

“You’ll lose him either way.” 

Once again, Gale offers only a look. A stubborn, firm look that used to get him in trouble as a boy and delighted John, who had always loved a less-than-perfect Gale above all else. John relished in his annoyance and his laughter and anything that made him more human than Gale would have preferred to be. Gale wonders what John would make of him now.

“It doesn’t matter,” the old Reaper says, mustache twisting with forlorn sympathy. “Not if he dies today, tomorrow, or right when he’s meant to. You understand that.” 

More silence from Gale. Sat across from each other in mirror poses, the Reaper wears John’s skin near perfectly– except he isn’t John, can’t possibly replicate what makes John exactly the sort of man that had first drawn Gale in. The outline of him, surely, and a bit of color here and there– the smell of whiskey and wool and pomade, the way one curl always ran free from its careful styling, the way his knees turned out and the divot between his thumb and wrist went hollow when he spread his fingers.

“You felt it, Gale,” Not-John says. “You felt it, his heart, and the tear there where it got too big. You can see all the threads and where they stop, once you learn how to look.” 

Rage wells inside Gale. Cold and icy and tasting how he imagined the stars might– like electricity and ozone and snow. So chilled he fears it might crack his teeth for a second, only that might just be from the way he grits them tight. He tilts his head right back to the thing in front of him, looking it right in those empty blue eyes, the pupils slightly cloudy as if it wasonly there where Death could not hide its true identity. 

“Did my thread end at that road?” he asks.

Now it is the other’s turn to be silent.

“Did mine end there?” Gale demands sharply. “Or did I change the outcome?”

“Gale–” 

“I did,” Gale says, voice low and feverish. “I changed it. I wasn’t supposed to die there– tell me I’m wrong.” 

“You still retain free will– your father understood that.”

Gale ignores the low blow.

“I changed things by stepping out onto that road. I felt it.” He gestures a hand, voice rising. “If I can change mine, why not his? Who says his heart kills him, who says I lose him?” 

“If not his heart, then something else. He will die and you will go on and forget him.” 

“I told you,” Gale raises a finger, shoved nearly into the beaky point of John’s nose, “never again.”

“You won’t be able to help it,” the old Reaper goes on, maddeningly unaffected by Gale’s display of emotion. For the first time, Gale understands John’s own frustrations. “It is not in Death’s nature to be partial.”

“Am I dead?”

“You are not alive.” 

“That’s not the same as being dead. I feel pain, still. I bleed, still. I can go back.”

“Nobody gets to go back, Gale.”

The tension of the rage inside him bursts, slipping over Gale like an oily rainslick. He nearly inhales, mustering the volume to speak like he’s shouting over the coms for men to hit the deck. He slashes a hand through the air, standing up off his cot and stepping up to Death and forcing it to look up. Closer now, Gale can smell the sickly sweet beneath the put-upon bouquet of John. Crushed funeral flowers and meat gone off and the strange scent of the ether, tickling like spice in Gale’s nostrils. If Gale could still vomit, he might have. If he could still feel fear, he might have shivered

“I gentled that horse! I made it kind, changed it. I’m carrying goddamn souls through the goddamn stars for some mimic pretending to be my–” He cuts himself off. Not-John’s eyebrows rise slowly. 

Gale swallows thickly, fighting the ache and disuse of his body. “You look me in the eye and tell me I can’t.”

“The Mare needs a rider. She cannot exist as an entity on her own.”

A derisive noise forces its way from Gale’s throat, tasting of copper and torn meat as he forces his body to move and act more alert than it has in a very long time. 

“She needs humanity, Gale,” the Reaper insists. “She is the bite and you are the temper, and the fulcrum is your steady seat on her back.” 

“And I’m sick of death!” Gale shouts. “I’ve been sick of it for years now, I’ve been sick for months! Didn’t I already give enough people for you to feed on?” 

“It is why you were the perfect candidate,” the Reaper says. “You’d already long dealt in death.” 

Bombs bursting like jewelweed, bright clouds and orange flashes peppering a view below that felt more like a painting than real lives and buildings Gale was laying waste to. He never pulled the trigger, only handed the control over to his bomber, someone else to push the button by their whim on his orders. They never much discussed the casualties, though estimated reports would come in, the privilege of Officerhood affording Gale a chance to look at the lists. Gale never looked, unwilling to compromise his mission with empathy. John was the one who looked every time, the one to go make it right with God– for the both of them, he promised. 

“So I was cursed?”

The old Reaper’s brows draw together, its John façade eerie and sickening. “Is death not natural? Is it not the only constant humans have?”

“I want to live!” Gale’s voice echoes around the room.

The cot is still there, the trunk with his last name stamped on it still waiting with hand marks through the dust. On impulse, Gale kneels and flips it open, the latch loose from before. Inside, everything is as he left it, books and journals and half-written letters. A photo of Marge and a bible his mother gave him, spine unbroken. His thin book of poetry, Marge’s photo resting on top of it. A crumpled two dollar bill, two corners bitten off and stained where blood had smeared over Gale when he helped carry his men out of the fort after their first mission.

“Can’t you take it back?” Gale asks, setting John’s lucky charm down. “If you become her rider again–” 

“Death doesn’t work backwards, you know that. Why bargain when you know the futility?”

“Because I am not every other soul,” Gale snarls. “I’ve got something to go back for, I’ve got something to keep going for. My heart still beats and my body still bleeds and I have a place to return to. There is a way.” 

He sees it now, as he had before– a faint flicker to the old Reaper’s face. A twitch of his brow, a shift to his body. As faint as the shape of a wing through clouds, but Gale is a good pilot because he notices the minute details, knows how to navigate through soup-thick fog without hesitation, how to listen to every rumble and shake of a fort as he brings her down easy in less than stellar conditions. Gale has been negotiating with Death for a long, long time. 

“All of this is already impossible,” Gale says, reining some of his composure back in. “All of this is ridiculous, and now you expect me to accept that there are other rules and impossibilites beyond what this already is? I fly tin cans for a living.”

“You sound like him sometimes,” the Reaper says with John’s lips. 

“How do I go back?” 

Silence. A breeze rustles through the room, impossible for how the windows are shut. It smells like dust and sweet grass and ruffles the hair on the old Reaper’s head. There’s a look on its face, something closer to human than not. An interest and an empathy and a furrow between its brows, like it’s suddenly deep in consideration. 

“You are not alive,” it says slowly. “Neither are you dead. Somewhere half-alive– nothing can survive the Mare. But you are correct, you did not die when you took over the mantle.” 

Gale knows that if his heart still beat, then it would be racing as he settles back onto his cot, the sheets ruffled and out of place from his previous anger.

“But you’ve been her rider for too long,” the old Reaper continues. “You cannot simply walk out that door and step back into life, there’s not enough left in you.” Something more ancient and contemplative comes over its face. Thought and old knowledge that, perhaps, is not quite entirely its own. The whole room seems to shiver. “There’s a deal that could be made,” it says, slowly. “A promise. Something saved from when you all believed in different powers and different rules. You can go back to him, if you tie yourself to him. You can’t be parted, and whenever it is his time it will be yours, too. No second negotiations, no other chances.” 

“Deal,” Gale says quickly. 

“Even if it’s a decade? Five years? A single day?” 

“I’m used to battling against stacked odds.”

Another faint flicker of a smile. “You sound like him,” it repeats. 

Gale lifts one shoulder in dismissal. “How do I do it?”

The thing wearing John’s face tilts its head. “The Mare needs a rider. They have to be close to death– and they have to be willing.”

Gale shifts, clasps his pale, thin hands together and feels something close to hope shake through him. “Done.”

“It is going to hurt,” it warns him. “It will feel like dying. It might kill you anyway, trying to come back.”

“It’s been done before?”

“Before my time,” the old Reaper says, almost amused. 

“Then it’s doable,” Gale says while standing, reaching with automatic instinct for the Officer’s cap and shades that normally sit on his nightstand. Comes up blank and empty, the trunk by his feet similarly bare now save for a single sprig of lavender, soft-smelling and sweet. 

Gale bends to retrieve it and straightens to find the Mare has returned, head turned towards him and tail swishing. She is impatient, as always, head bobbing as she looks at him reproachfully. Clearly still sore from their argument. He steps toward her, one palm rising to see if she will lash out. When she simply rolls one large eye at him and turns her head away, he rests a palm on the slope of her neck. The neutral temperature, the dry, bone-scratch of her hide, the way he feels the thrum of energy beneath is all welcome and familiar. He strokes down her shoulder, feeling the flex and shiver of muscles, and offers her a scratch about the mane that she begrudgingly leans into. She holds still as he braces his palms across the slope of her back, readying himself to push up.

“One last question for you?”

Gale pauses. Turns back. 

The visage of John has melted away from the thing on the other cot. It’s left behind a youth with ginger hair and sharp, raw-boned features. Handsome, with pockmarked cheeks and thin lips. It twists around at Gale’s scrutiny, eyes as milky and dead as the Mare’s, expression curious, neutral. 

“Wouldn’t it be better?” the thing that had been Death asks. “Isn’t it nice, to just fade and forget and be nothing it all? Surely it’s the kinder option.”

They regard each other for a long, silent minute, Gale waiting to see if anything beyond mild curiosity pass over that strange, timeless face. It doesn’t change, doesn’t twitch. Doesn’t breathe or blink. Gale knows because he didn’t blink either. 

“Was I close to death?” Gale asks.

The old Reaper tilts its head slightly, smiling, faint and secret. “Your friend's blood was still on your hands.”

Stepping sideways out of that room leads them back to that snow-blanketed mountaintop, the air fresh and crisp, icing over Gale’s skin in seconds until it glimmers and shines. He sits atop the Mare, feeling the shift and contract of her body as she waits patiently, quietly, for Gale to decide where to go next. 

“Won’t be mad at me, will you?” he asks her softly as he trails nails down her skin again in a gentle scratch.

She switches her tail at him, ears flicking.

“I forgive you for all the bits you’ve taken out of me,” he offers. “Don’t think you truly mean to hurt, do you? Just happens like that, sometimes.” 

Another flick of her tail. She bends her head to lip at the snow, the powder so fine it sends minuscule crystals drifting into the air and out toward the open space between peaks. Ice glitters on them both, merging their figures into a singular winking form. Whether on earth or somewhere else, this mountaintop is too cold for any living thing to survive. 

The Mare shakes her head out, horn swishing through the air with a soft whistle. Gale pats her neck again, bends to press his lips to the cool shape of her shoulder. “Gotta be nicer to the next one,” Gale says into her skin, “or you’ll have me in a hell of a lot of trouble.” 

She twists one pale ear at him.

Somewhere in New York City, a woman is dying.

Rain drips from tin roofs and off iron railings, clinking like heavy pennies with a strange, rhythmic music. It’s timed near perfectly with the breaths of the figure in the bed, a second woman folded up in an armchair beside her, fast asleep. He enters the room the same way he has every other time, the Mare stepping them sideways out through the veil and almost, almost, into the living world. The smell is familiar to Gale now, sweet like perfume– burnt sugar and rotting, saccharine flowers and talcum power. It fills the room like a heavy weight, a window cracked to allow it seep out into the wider city, where a cat yowls in the alley and two men converse quietly on the fire escape. Faded rug fibers squish beneath his heavy boots when he dismounts, muffling his already silent footsteps as he comes around to the unoccupied side of the bed, taking to one knee and then both. Paper fragile skin scratches against his own as he picks up the woman’s hand between his own, thin enough he can see the bone and sinew and blue blood beneath. 

Though sickly and aged, the woman’s nose is round and upturned, hair dark and curling. Pretty, in a warm sort of way, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to the woman in the chair beside them, who shifts and murmurs but does not wake. 

The reek of death spills from the woman in the bed, leaking from her mouth and nostrils with every shallow breath.

She opens her eyes at Gale’s touch, tired and blue and seemingly not at all shaken to find a strange man in a dark coat kneeling by her bed. 

“You’re early,” she says. Her voice is thick with a brogue, familiar now for the last few years of Gale’s life.

“I know,” Gale tells her, squeezing her hand gently. “I’m sorry, Anna.” 

“Nobody told me you were going to be handsome.” 

Gale nearly smiles. “Am I?” 

“Knows it too,” she comments to the air. Her words rasp the same as his, both of them fighting bodies that do not seem quite willing to work anymore. She shifts, wincing, and they both pause as the woman in the chair stirs again. 

Gale can feel the flutter of her pulse under his thumb, strokes over it again and again in a marvel that someone living, breathing, existing, can see and speak to him– her closeness a tragic sort of gift. “Are you in pain?” he asks, once the woman in the chair settles again.

Anna grimaces, waving a weak hand, halfway through the gesture before she gives up and flops it back onto the knit blanket covering her lap. 

“It won’t hurt,” Gale promises her. “I haven’t felt pain in a long while, now.” 

“It’ll be soon?”

Her voice is whispery, heart an unsteady beat. Back resting against the pillows now, they fold around her body like the petals of a flower, multi-colored and hand-stitched with the names of her children. One she keeps in her lap, thumb brushing over and over soft blue thread, stroking the name like she’s dragging her thumb over rosary beads.

“I was only a little bit early,” Gale admits. 

Anna smiles, the expression vicious and familiar. Then it sobers as she looks down to the pillow, thumb slowing. “If I ask a question, will you answer me truthfully?”  

A tightness in Gale’s throat. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” 

“Is he dead? Really? They said– but that the bodies were so,” she chokes, takes a breath and steadies herself, voice wobbling and faint. Gale can hear the way her heart is stopping and starting, her breathing coming strange and gurgling. Minutes left, if that. “They said those boys were all so twisted up together they couldn’t be separated.”

“Curt was a friend of mine,” Gale says softly. “He asked me to come see you, to make sure you were okay.” 

He sees the news hit her, snuffing out one final bit of hope that somehow the US Army, in its vast and wonderful wisdom, had somehow made an error of identification.

“Oh,” Anne says, voice crackling and tearful. “Oh, I’m alright. Old women are meant to die.” 

“He was safe, calm for it. He argued with me.”

She laughs, more of a choke or a gag, but the humor there nevertheless. “Of course he argued.” 

Gale smiles, too, squeezing Anna Biddick’s hand. 

At the foot of the bed, tired of being ignored now, the Mare lips at Anna’s feet, her horn curving over both their heads. Her ears are pricked forward and curious, and she pushes up against Gale’s shoulder when Anna beckons her closer. Sniffs at her hair and the line of her shoulder and the hand that Anna raises to rub over her velvety nose. Gale watches very, very closely to make sure those sharp teeth stay behind soft lips.

Anna smiles, taking another shuddering, ragged breath, rasping and choking from her chest like she’s being strangled from the inside out. For a moment, terror flickers across her face, body convulsing, but Gale just squeezes her hand again, allows the Mare to nudge gently at her cheek until she settles, accepting the slow shutdown of her lungs. Reclined in the pillows, held up by their large numbers, skin draining of color before their eyes. The rich scent of death grows more cloying.

The Mare’s nostrils flare.

“I have something selfish to ask you, Anna,” Gale says softly.

A dry hand cups Gale’s cheek, thumb rubbing under his eye with gentle affection, the touch motherly and warm. He can’t help but close his eyes for a moment, leaning into the touch with a tremble to his bones. All sensation to him is muted and barely there, but he can feel the warmth of her, feel the minute hints of electric energy thrumming through. The last sparks of her life taste like the final bit of champagne at the bottom of a glass, sweet and popping and meant to be savored. They tingle in his mouth. 

Her palm squeezes slightly, work-roughened from years of washing laundry and caring for children and keeping a home. His question understood.

“I don’t know what happens after souls cross over, “ Gale admits, “but the ride is smooth, and there’s more stars than you could ever imagine. The Mare’s good company, even if she talks back some.” 

“A lot of stars?”

“More than I could count, more than I could name,” Gale says, pulling away from her touch and sitting on an empty spot by Anna’s hip. The bed creaks slightly and a breeze flutters through the room. There is sweat on Anna’s face, and her chest heaves like the constant incoming waves of the ocean, but her face is calm. “It’s not so bad, I’ve just got– I’ve got something to go back to.” 

“You young men always do.” Anna’s eyes twinkle. Her gaze was glassy. The curtains around the open window sway outward as if in anticipation. “Leavin’ the hard work to us women.”

“Apologies, Ma’am.” 

“I bet he’s out there,” Anna nods to herself, throat bobbing in a swallow that will never come. “My son, I bet he’s out in those stars somewhere, waiting for me.”

Gale leans over and presses cold lips to her forehead, feels her final breath against his throat. 

When he pulls away after a moment of lingering, Anna’s eyes are half open and glassy. She’s slumped against the pillows, smaller suddenly, like all the air has gone from her. It’s just him, now, and the corpse, and the woman asleep in the chair beginning to stir as if she, too, senses that there is suddenly one less heartbeat in the room. He can feel the spirit still in Anna, curled and slumbering as if the changing of the guard cant happen until Gale is fully gone. 

Hoofsteps on the floor, bone clicking against wood, light and musical. Gale stands as the Mare comes around to his side of the bed. 

She has always been massive, her head easily able to loop over Gale’s shoulder with some distance still between his head and her jaw, her body powerful and elegant. He strokes a hand up her cheek as she comes close, feeling the unnatural tickle of her not-quite-right hair, watching big cataract-clouded eyes blink at him slowly. She snorts, bumping into his pets for a moment, before retreating a few steps and lowering her head. The tip of her horn comes to rest against the center of his sternum, brushing aside the wings of his coat and to the filthy shirt beneath. Still in his prisoner clothes, greyed and overwashed and fraying, he watches as she nudges aside the broken buttons to the flesh beneath, little more than skin laid over bone, pale from lack of sun and ill-health. He feels the pinprick of her lining up, like a surgeon prepping the entry of a needle, a spot of red blood welling up.

If Gale could, he would take a steadying breath. 

Beside them, the woman is rousing. “Ma?” 

Gale makes the first move, stepping forward so the horn slips into him like a hot knife through butter, piercing through ligaments and cartilage and the fleshy protections around his torso. Starts with a pop, and then a wet slide, the Mare doing the rest as Gale’s entire body seizes in something close to agony, though not entirely so awful. He feels it sliding through him, grinding against bone and popping fragile, disused organs like overfilled balloons. More blood sluices down the horn, the ridges catching the streams perfectly and guiding them right to the center of the Mare’s forehead. It stains her skin like dark wine, flowing over her unblinking eyes and down to her nose, a spot that would be pink on a real beast instead of dead, fleshy pale. He leaves a bloody handprint on the base of the horn when he grabs it, and on her cheek where he braces himself against it as her forehead goes flush with his chest. 

They’re very nearly eye to eye. There’s copper in the back of Gale’s throat, gathering in the hollows of his teeth as he opens his mouth.

“No biting,” he tells her, thick and choked. He doesn’t sound pained or scared, but he doesn’t sound like himself, either. Or rather, he sounds more like himself than he has in a long, long while. 

She blinks at him. 

Then she steps back, pulling the horn from his body with none of the slow, graceful finesse with which she pressed it into him. Frees herself from his half-dead corpse with a wet, sucking sound, her eyes flashing and ancient, and for a moment instead of a horse Gale sees a glowing white figure, made of skulls and bones and funeral dirt. Ancient and incomprehensible, with cloven hooves and a lion’s tail and eyes that are milky white and familiar. 

Then he’s falling. 

Sideways instead of downwards, into the veil and through it, tearing it apart like sheets of paper treated too roughly. He hears it, the rip, and then Gale’s back hits something hard and firm. The smell of wet grass and dirt and fog fills his nose, and his mouth opens to take a breath of shock.

It’s like a million little fires are suddenly lit all over him, scalding his body. Gale arches with a scream.

His body had forgotten how to feel.

His hands hover over his chest, where he’s struck dumb with the sickening sensation of his heart pumping. It’s like coming back to life and then dying again, the oxygen setting his cells on fire, the cramp of his lungs remembering how to move, his chest remembering how to expand. Every breath cutting up his insides, panted through gritted teeth, spittle flecking across his lips like tiny drops of acid. Pure sensory overload.

His chest, when he presses one oversensitive hand to it– screaming through gritted teeth, assaulted by the worst pain he’s ever felt; worse than being strung up in a farmhouse, worse than watching Bucky suffer– is whole and unblemished.

Gale lays there in the field for hours, trying to remember how to block out the feeling of the breeze clawing at his skin, until night steals over the world and his instincts tell him he will die if he doesn’t get moving. 

The dirt feels like glass scraping his palms as he pushes himself up. 

Slowly, painfully, he places one foot in front of the other, walking steadily towards the lights of the airfield. They see him long before he sees them, but he can hear their heartbeats as the soldiers approach. Not as strong as he used to, fading as the world grows less painful, less overwhelming– a curtain pulled over his senses. Gale holds his hands up as they surround him, weapons pointed at his head, his chest.

He doesn’t recognize any of the soldiers and MPs. Fresh, baby-faced, maybe not new but new enough for Gale to have been gone well before they arrived. 

“Identify yourself,” one of them barks, acne still red and angry on his cheeks. 

Gale opens his mouth. Coughs. Gags for a moment as he tries to remember how his salivary glands work, twisting his jaw a few times before he’s able to gather enough saliva to speak. 

“Major Gale Cleven,” he says, his voice a ruin. “Oh–three–nine–nine–seven–eight–two. Reporting.”

“Holy fuck,” someone else says. 

To the soldiers, Gale is a hero, a legend come back from the dead. They stare at him with wide eyes as they walk him back to the base, or at least to the truck at the edge of the tarmac that Gale is so grateful for he might be sick. Is sick anyway, thick black bile in chunks that he thinks is likely blood slipping over his teeth as he braces himself against the front wheel and gives himself over to whatever his body is trying to expel. Waves off the hand offered to help him into the truck, though his arms tremble and shake and he has to sit with his eyes closed for long minutes before he has the energy to reopen them. 

To the doctors he’s a marvel, and the most exciting thing they’ve seen in months. His body, when they strip him of his filthy prisoner’s clothes, is shockingly pale and wasted– far more than it ever had been in the Stalag. His hipbones jut in stark relief and his ribcage ripples like reaching fingers every time he breaths. His broad shoulders are still just as wide, but now sharp instead of rounded. The hollowness of his cheeks makes the scars on them more pronounced, his eyes sunken and unnaturally bright. He’s so pale he’s closer to Doc Stover’s white coat than any of their skin. They want to get some fluids in him, get him set up on a slow process of refeeding, putting the meat back on his body that he’d long since lost. 

Gale hardly listens, he’s so occupied with staring at himself in the mirror on the wall, desperately searching his own face as if it will suddenly become unfamiliar to him.

Blue eyes and blonde hair in need of a trim. A few days’ worth of stubble and chapped, soft lips. A soft strong jaw and high cheekbones that used to be slightly rounded in a way he’d never quite thought was manly enough. 

“We’ll get the meat back on you,” one of the nurses says gently, handing him soft, clean pajamas to wear. Gale nearly drops them, the texture shocking to his senses. He rubs a thumb on a sleeve over and over, trying to train his body to accept feeling again. “Plenty of fellas came back lookin’ worse’n you, just give it a few weeks.” 

Her country accent is familiar and soothing. Gale closes his eyes and lets it wash over him. Can’t help his flinch at her touch, bare palm on bare shoulder nearly enough to make him scream. Keeps it inside through sheer force of will. 

“Thank you, Ma’am,” he says quietly, using the brace of her arm to dress himself and trying to maintain his pride about it. 

The pity and concern in her eyes is echoed around the room, and sets his teeth on edge even as he requires their help to do his buttons. He tells them that his hands are too shaky to perform the intricate task himself, but really it’s that the hard smoothness of the buttons makes his stomach churn and rebel, and he has no interest in letting them see what his guts want to bring back up.

“Does Major Egan know yet?” he asks quietly as they help him into a hospital bed, promising a meal and a warm drink momentarily. 

“Major Egan is flying a mission right now– a relief– a relief mission,” his nurse adds hurriedly as Gale stumbles halfway through climbing into bed, the newly acquainted oxygen rushing out of him.

“I see,” Gale rasps shakily, hoping they chalk the wobble up to exertion rather than emotion as he settles against the pillows. 

“Most of the flight missions are dropping food and medicine to the Dutch citizens nowadays,” the nurse explains as she fluffs his pillows, tucks the blankets up around Gale’s chest. He’d protest the treatment, only his body feels fragile as glass, his energy reserves tapped just from walking out of that field, let alone everything that followed. “The boys draw straws some days to see who gets to go up.”

“Imagine that,” Gale rasps. 

“They’ll call him in soon as those wheels touch ground,” his nurse assures him with a friendly pat to his arm. She looks young, no more than Gale’s age, with cheeks round and chin soft, but there are lines around her face that speak of a long, long war. “It’s good to have you back, Major.”

“Pleasure to be here.” 

Gale’s scraping his fork through a cup of oats and vegetables, chasing the last few bits of the bland meal. Shockingly small, not entirely appetizing, but Gale is able to feed himself and more was promised to come soon, so long as he goes slow and easy and is able to keep this down. He’s forking the last bite between his lips when the doors to the hospital wing open. 

He’s not the only occupant. There are a few other occupied beds, but Gale’s is the only one with curtains drawn all the way around it. He looks up only when one panel twitches aside and a larger-than-life figure steps into the small space. 

John smells like crisp air and engine oil and the celebratory cigarette he smokes after every successful wheels-down landing. 

There are lines on his face that are familiar and some that are unfamiliar, scars either fresh pink or fading to silver. A sprig of grey rests in his hair, here and there, less so visible and more just catching the light above them extra well. He’s filled out some, dwarfing the small space, one hand holding his cap and the other down by his side as he regards Gale with heavy eyes that run over him so many times that, for a moment, Gale fears John no longer recognizes him. 

His heart thumps uncomfortably in his chest, the feeling still foreign and unwelcome after how used to stillness Gale had become. He’s dizzy until he remembers to breathe. 

John’s nostrils flare slightly with every breath.

The filmy memory of draping himself over John’s back, unseen and unheard, pressed to filthy, stinking cloth and shivering shoulders and feeling the great bellows of his lungs and the beat of his heart and the chatter of his teeth echoes through Gale. He aches to touch him again, to drape over the wide frame of him, press fingers to his throat to feel that pulse as close to the source as possible. 

“You seem surprised to see me, Major,” Gale finally says. 

John’s face flickers through a series of emotions; disbelief, anger, relief. He settles on stern. “Would have been polite to give a guy some warning.” 

“I’ll send a telegram next time.”

John breaks, a smile spreading across his face like sunlight slipping out from behind clouds. It turns his face younger, gentler, healthier. He reaches out a broad hand that Gale clasps, pulling him upright and John down so they meet somewhere in the middle. One large palm rests on Gale’s shoulder. Mostly to brace himself, but Gale can also feel John squeeze his shoulder a few times, assessing and exploring just how far gone he’d become. 

He can feel John’s pulse hammering away against his cheek. Loud. Vibrant. Alove. Like he’d run the entire length of the Air Base to make it to the infirmary. For the first time in longer than he thinks he might be able to contemplate, Gale can feel it. Skin against skin, warmth against warmth.

He closes his eyes to savor it. 

It takes several weeks for the doctors to stop hovering, to clear Gale for short excursions and allow him to eat meals that more closely resemble something for an adult man instead of a child. Still bland, still not too rich– John tried to sneak Gale a cupcake one day and had been scolded so harshly by the nurse that his ears and neck had gone bright red. 

As soon as he’s released to go back to his own bunk– with the requirement that he still reports to the hospital wing every day or two for check-ups– John whisks them away. Meets him at the door to the Officer’s bunkhouse with two leave passes and two duffles slung over his shoulder, solid for all that it, too, is still not quite as meaty as it had once been. 

It was nowhere near Gale’s loss of mass, but he can see it still, the extra hollowness to his cheeks when John smiles.

The train to London is long and mostly unoccupied, and Gale dozes against the window as John flips through a newspaper absently. Sleep is another marvel, something so long denied to him that his body craves it. He’s perfected the art of the cat-nap the last few weeks, dozing half the day away and sleeping through the night with more peace than he has since his first mission up back in ‘43. The sun has the glass pleasantly warm, dust motes drifting between him and John, lighting up the fresh shine on his shoes. 

It’s late evening by the time they make it to the boarding house, John carrying the duffel bags and pausing halfway up to pretend to tie his shoe when he notices that Gale is taking his time with his ascent. Both the duffel bags and Gale take up residence on one of the two beds in the room, furthest from the door and any listening ears. He doesn’t mean to sit heavily, but he’s tired in a way he’s still getting used to, body better but not fixed. 

John loosens his tie the moment his hands are free, smoothing his hair in the mirror. He licks two fingers and smooths down his mustache, the beaky tip of his nose inches from the reflective surface, breath fogging the glass.

Gale almost smiles. “John.”

Like he was waiting for it, John turns. His expression is calm, expectant, twin spots under the arms on his uniform and at the center of his chest where he’s sweated through the green khaki. His collar is buttoned too high to see the beat of his pulse, but Gale zeros in on it anyway as John approaches wordlessly and drops to his knees between the spread of Gale’s thighs. 

A warm palm wraps around Gale’s outer leg, and again they meet in the middle, Gale folding at the waist and John tilting his head up. 

Their kiss is slow and lingering, echoing in Gale’s ears when they part. 

John’s mouth tastes like spit and morning coffee and old cigarettes and Gale savors it like a three-course dinner. Leans in again for another kiss and John obliges him, both of them going slow despite the energy thrumming between them, a quiet, silent desperation that has Gale wanting to sink his teeth into John and rip and tear and never let go. 

It’s the first moment they’ve had alone since Gale came back. 

Sensation is still heightened for Gale. He strokes over John’s face, feeling the catch of stubble and rough skin and the soft, fleshy curve of his earlobes, goosebumps rising on Gale’s skin in a slow wave as John presses inward and up. Their kisses remain gentle as Gale allows himself to be pushed up the bed, onto his back, John covering Gale with his own body as they kiss like first time lovers– slow and savoring, with one of John’s thumbs stroking over the arch of Gale’s cheekbone and Gale’s arms looped around John’s neck. 

They’re two big men in a small bed, with not much space for them to be anything but close, and Gale spreads his thighs open for John to fall between them, the two of them inhaling at the same time as John’s weight settles. 

His kisses turn inquisitive, questioning. Gale answers with a tilt of his head, a gape of his mouth inviting John in. 

Still, John pulls away, one hand tracing down the railroad of Gale’s ribs over his shirt. “You up for it? Didn’t come here just to seduce you, Buck.” 

“I want it,” Gale says, reaching for John’s belt. He keeps having to remind himself to breathe, to blink. John’s skin is thrumming with the electricity of life, and once he gets the pesky buttons open, Gale presses his palms against the flat of John’s belly like he might sink right inside. John’s hot, a little damp from sweat, the wire of his stomach hair scraping against Gale’s skin a sensory experience so intense he feels a little dizzy with it. He leans up to tempt his lips across John’s again, the other man unable to resist giving chase. “I want it,” Gale repeats. 

John exhales shakily through his nose, then pulls away to shrug out of his uniform, hands going for his belt to free his white undershirt from its clutches. Gale watches him undress with heavy eyes, watching the glisten of sweat at the hair-speckled center of his chest, the blotchy, uneven flush around his nipples. The pulse at the base of his throat, at the thick, blue veins on each wrist, on the insides of his thighs, up near his pelvis. 

Hunger still hovers around him, tightening his sides where there’d once been a subtle softness, hollowing his stomach and the center of his chest. His thighs don’t take up the same width between Gale’s knees as they once had. 

But he’s big and beautiful and staring at Gale expectantly. Slow, fingers still hyperaware of the shiny buttons, Gale strips himself down, lifting his hips so John can help him with his pants and then settling back against the pillows, breathing shakier than he’d prefer. 

John looks at him again.

“It might just have to be like this,” Gale says quietly, ears burning. 

Easygoing as he always is, John grins at him wide, and leans in for another kiss. “Need me to take care of you, doll?” 

“Don’t make me beg, John.”

Shaking his head, John presses another kiss to Gale’s lips, then pulls away and reaches above them for a pillow. Tucks it under Gale’s back, propping him up better, and then one under his hips, shooting Gale a wink as he does, as if what he’s doing is nothing. 

Gale has to remind himself to breathe again, though this time the forgetting feels entirely human.

They both fit together a little differently, though not imperfectly, and John’s hard cock brushes against Gale’s hipbone as he settles back on top of Gale. It’s heady, having every inch of John available to him, and Gale reaches for everything he can think of– from the broad curve of John’s shoulders, speckled with moles, and moving down over his ribs, where Gale takes a handful and squeezes, urging John to rock harder against him. Down as far as he can reach, to the back of John’s thighs, where he grasps meat and sinew. 

He rocks himself back up until John presses a hand to his hip, holding him still and then setting a slower, stickier pace that has Gale gasping at the slip and scrape of skin on skin.

Time slows, sun sliping down the walls, John rocking his hips into the open cradle of Gale’s body, leaning in for soft, sticky kisses to Gale’s mouth, the hinge of his jaw, the side of his neck. Eventually he pulls away, brow furrowing, and looks down. 

Gale, cheeks flushing, shakes his head. “They said it might happen– might take awhile for everything to work right after you go hungry like that.” 

They’d sat Gale down a dozen or more times, asking him to walk through what he remembers after vaulting over that wall, after being separated from Bill. Gale’d had no time to hesitate, and he wasted time only by putting a toothpick between his lips. The shake of his hands hadn’t been put upon as he answered in the most honest way he could; I don’t know. 

What do you mean you don’t know, Major?

I-I blacked it out. I don’t know. 

Even though he expects it, he still frowns at the way John balks, his brow furrowing and mouth pursing. John has never liked to partake in one-sided pleasure, even when Gale desired it, once or twice. Has never let Gale leave the bed unsatisfied. It’s a point of importance for him.

Sometimes, Gale thinks there might have been something in the past. Someone who might have laughed, or made fun of a John unable to perform.

“Don’t make me sit up and ruin these nice pillows you set up.”

John grins, crooked and bright and only a little irritated. “You sound like me, Gale.” 

Gale swallows. “Get back over here.” 

John kisses him. Rocks their hips back together a few more hopeful times, pulling pleased hums from Gale but no reaction from his cock. Through no fault of his own, every slip and press of hard flesh against his own is electrifying, and on the corner of perfectly too much and altogether too much. It’s like holding onto a live wire, standing outside in a lightning storm. Gale feels like he might split apart at times.

But he remains soft. 

Eventually, John exhales through his lips, pulling away and bumping their noses together a few times before reaching for the tin of vaseline he left by the bed. Slicks his fingers glistening and spreads one of Gale’s hips up and out. Preps him quick but easy, fingers slow and mouth wet over Gale’s skin, over the head of his cock in a slow suckle, tongueing along the scar below the head. 

Gale cringes and twitches and lets every feeling roll through him. Grunts when John slips in a third finger, along with the wiggle of his tongue and gentle teeth to the back of Gale’s thigh. John’s fingers feel thick, huge, scraping along the inside of him like it’s the first time all over again. Making himself at home again, settling into all the spots he knows well. He knows how to make Gale twitch and shiver, how to make him lose control of his silence and let out a quiet gasp, a broken keen, as he brushes up against Gale’s prostate.

“John,” Gale says, eyes shut to the ceiling, arm draped across them for extra measure. 

A pause, and then John’s fingers withdraw, leaving him shocked and empty, the loss of feeling so sudden he nearly begs for them back as lips press to the hollow at the center of his chest, right over the strange silver scar that serves as his only reminder that any of the last half a year was real. It tingles, strange and cold, a spot of ice in the otherwise building heat of his body as Gale listens to the sound of John slicking himself up. 

The first push of John’s cock up inside him has Gale groaning into his arm, body arching into it. Above him he hears John gasp quietly, feels the shake of one arm braced by his shoulder, as if the penetration hit him just as hard. 

“Good?” John asks him, dragging the tip of his nose against Gale’s, nuzzling his way under his arm until Gale is forced to drop it, forced to open his eyes and blink away the light and see the way John is looking at him, eyes tracking over his face and taking in every scar and pore. 

Gale swallows a few times, thumb brushing over the thick vein on John’s neck, feeling the rapid staccato beat of it, the fine tremble all over his large body from holding still, holding back, waiting for Gale as he always has. “Good,” he murmurs. 

He reaches up and grasps the nape of John’s neck, right where the hair had been shorn back short to military regulation, feeling the slide of skin over muscle and bone, alive and moving and perfect. Uses it to guide John’s hips forward until he’s fully seated inside. They both groan again, John’s knuckles rubbing along the center of Gale’s sternum.

“Breathe, Buck,” he reminds him gently. 

Gale gulps a breath, reviving his cells from their atrophy. 

“Missed this,” he gasps quietly, as John pulls nearly all the way out, leaving him empty and bereft and needing except where he stretches tight around the head of John’s cock. “Didn’t even know–”

Mute, wordless, brow furrowed and mouth a wet, open gape as he slides back inside, John nods in agreement. 

Gale can feel the shake of his shoulders, the shivers along his thighs as he tries to keep the pace slow and steady, gentle on Gale’s body. Tucks Gale’s knees up by the top of his ribs until Gale is an open cradle for his body to roll into, the vaseline smearing shiny and greasy between them, liquid from the heat of their bodies. Gale doesn’t kiss John, because that would mean not seeing his face, because it would mean John wouldn’t be looking at him. They hover against each other, breathing and brushing against in the roll of their bodies, John’s heart hammering like a drum that Gale can almost hear. 

He’s still soft between his legs, every scrape against John’s pubic hair sending sparks shooting through him. 

Then John shifts, pushing Gale a bit heavier down onto the pillows, and the angle changes. His fingers turn to claws at the center of John’s back for a moment. “There,” he urges.

“Yeah?” John asks, a little breathlessly, and Gale remembers him sick and starving and shivering and beaten into the mud. Gale remembers him locked in a train and covered in rags and fighting with shadows on a sunny day. He remembers following him as a silent shadow, two figures reflected on a prison bunk wall and the sound of his sickly breaths in a sleeping room. 

Gale muffles his next noise in the hollow of John’s neck, right up against his pulse, thundering like horse hooves, and nods. 

There’s less of John to cover him now, as he lays across Gale’s body and sets a slow pace that has him groaning with every direct pass over his prostate, but there’s less of Gale to be covered now, too, and the equilibrium of them is somehow still the same. The angle and the pressure has stars showing behind Gale’s eyes, and for a moment he tastes the strange chemical taste of the veil on his tongue, all spacedust and fog. He laves his tongue over John’s skin, letting the taste of the other man’s sweat and cologne overwhelm his mouth with flavor instead. Tries to ride the sensory overwhelm with soft gasps and quiet noises, a word or two of encouragement, just to feel up close how his voice makes John’s pulse skip a beat. 

His ears are soft under Gale’s mouth, the lobes sensitive when he sucks on them lightly, and John whimpers softly, a quick, bitten-off noise that he never likes to make and Gale always craves. Gale scrapes his teeth over the peach fuzz skin and feels alive, alive, alive. He’s doing nothing more than laying there and taking it, taking the pleasure John has to offer him, but he feels lit up like a live wire. The slide of sweaty skin on sweaty skin is shiver-inducing, John’s mouth the softest thing he’s ever felt, his hands a sandpaper scratch down his ribs as John grasps a hip, pulls them more securely together so he can grind down, breathing heavy and ragged. 

Gale can feel the way John loses himself to the pleasure, the slow pace he was trying to keep staggering into something more intense and needful. The bed is a sturdy one, it hardly creaks at all, the headboard bolted to the wall without any risk of knocking and giving them away. Gale revels in the sound of skin on skin, the way every press of John’s cock inside him is a pleasurable gut punch, pulling Gale apart and shoving the last lingering bits of him back inside his body. Making and unmaking and making and Gale’s been alive for weeks now but it hasn’t quite felt like it until this moment, masks off and uniform off and heart trying to match John’s regular, steady beat. He wants to climb inside, he wants to feel tucked up against the pulse of John’s heart like an animal in its cocoon. 

He wants to sink his teeth in. 

John’s mouth traces along the slope of his shoulder, up towards his neck where Gale can feel his own veins hammering away, each beat like a punch to the throat. 

“Bite me,” he orders, voice wrecked and rough and desperate. “Bite me, John, please–”

Hard teeth find the tendon on his throat, kiss and suck and then sink in with a sharp pinch that has Gale arching, has his hands knotting in John’s curls and pressing him down harder, encouraging.

“Bite me,” he tells him, as if John’s teeth aren’t already sunk deep and bruising, the skin blooming purple and the pores filling with little dots of blood. Gale is a quiet man in bed and John is only particularly loud when he’s drunk, but the both of them are vocal now– Gale panting and biting off moans with each gasp and John’s groans coming from his chest more than his throat. 

It’s clear, the moment John switches over from trying to make Gale feel good to trying to come. 

He tucks his face against Gale’s shoulder, mouth pulling back from Gale’s neck, hips taking on a new force, a new rhythm. Gale places a hand to the bite so he can feel the throb of it and nearly squirms away when John wraps a hand around his soft cock. 

The size discrepancy between them has never been huge, but without blood plumping it up it’s an easy handful for John, thumb rubbing under the head, fist moving slick and easy over skin. Gale lets his legs fall open, wraps his arms around John’s ribs and shoulders and holds him close through the gasps and the shivers. John rides his body like it’s all he can do, a soft noise in the back of his throat that Gale can only hear because his ear is pressed right up against it. 

He feels John’s body lock tight, cock pressing right up against Gale’s prostate. Grinding over and over as he comes in a warm flood.

Then Gale is coming, too, moving through his body in slow rolls that shake his limbs and tightens his throat. Come dribbles lazily from the tip of his soft cock, dripping over John’s knuckles and onto Gale’s belly. All he can hear is the ringing in his ears and the beat of his heart, but he knows he’s making some sort of weak, awful noise. 

Knows it must be too loud because John’s kissing him, shushing him softly, working his limp cock through the orgasm even as he’s shaking just as bad, cheeks flushed and eyes dazed. 

Gale’s whole body is staticky and tingling, his skin hyper-sensitive, and he flinches when John lets go of his cock. 

“You okay?” John asks him quietly, gold sunlight slipping from the walls to the floor behind him. 

The room smells like sex. Gale can taste it, yeasty and human on his tongue, the sheets shoved half to the floor and their crisp, respectable uniforms piled in a corner. John’s body is big and awkward and Gale tugs it back over him like a blanket, not caring where his cum glues them together, where it leaks free of his body and is surely ruining the sheets beneath them. John goes as easy and willing as he always has for Gale’s hand, their sweaty hair bunching together, skin against skin. Gale pets the back of John’s neck– strokes suntanned, sun-roughened skin over and over, again and again, as he nods. 

The ladder to the command tower seems to span miles as Gale looks up at it, John’s body crowding a respectable distance behind. He’s never been scared of heights but he’s worn down and wrung out, and he’s already tired just looking at how far he has to scale.

He doesn’t hesitate to reach for the first rung of the ladder, hauling himself up with John’s hand bracing at the small of his back. Pushes himself off the ground with one shiny boot and climbs to the light of fireworks and sparklers and oil barrels burning bright in celebration with men gathered around them singing, talking, laughing. A radio is playing, somewhere close by, and the air smells like gasoline and wet grass. 

The war is over, and Gale doesn’t have to see another man die ever again. 

John’s patient with Gale’s pace, waiting below whenever Gale pauses to adjust his grip, pauses to swallow down the irritation at the way his body hasn’t entirely bounced back from where it had once been. 

He can hear John’s heartbeat below him, steady and sure– taste the life on him in a way that hasn’t seemed to fade. He hasn’t seen the Mare or her new rider since, but he’d passed a funeral procession on their way back to base and felt a tug, a whisper, a hand on the back of his neck or a soft nose nuzzling his palm, only when he turned to look there’d only been John, hat down by his side and fingers crossing over his torso in respect. 

“Listen, Gale,” John says quietly, halfway up, “I gotta tell you something. About your old man–”

“I already know,” Gale interrupts, stomach flipping as he thinks of purple fingers and bloated tongues and the reek of piss soaking into hardwood floors. 

He mostly remembers to breathe now, and how to swallow the spit pooling on his tongue, and that people get unnerved if he doesn’t blink quite enough. He’s begun to have regular meals and gotten used to the fact that people can see him again, that they take notice when he enters a room. 

“Someone told you already?” 

Gale uses the excuse of his panting not to answer, ascending the rest of the way up the ladder without pause and refusing to let himself catch his breath at the top. He settles in one of the two chairs left out up there, leaving the left-hand one to John and resting his head back against the smooth glass window of the control room. 

The sky is clear tonight, the only clouds that of smoke from fireworks drifting past the stars. 

Looking up at them, Gale knows he sees far more spots of light than he should. 

He inhales deep, and then exhales. Accepts the flask from John and tilts the warm whiskey into his mouth, savoring the crisp burn. Holds it there for a few minutes, savoring the way it tastes like John’s kisses, and then hands it back to him. 

“John,” he says quietly.

“Hmm?”

“I got a story about a unicorn for you.”

Is everything signed? Is everything done?

I'm sorry about the blood

...the devil and his stones

It was every man for himself, every child alone

Please tell your mother I'm sorry for the strife

tell your brother I loved him

...the same to his wife

and if you have a heart to take my life away

give me something

give me anger to remember you today