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He’s six fingers of whiskey deep in Marjorie Spencer-Cleven’s kitchen when John starts to itch.
It’s nothing new, this, and Bucky knows it as well as he knows flying and baseball and the back of his hands. Ever since he was a kid, Johnny Egan’s had a tendency towards this– a long-scraping itch right across the walls of his busted-up brain when things get too good, too right, begging him to start chewing it all up into pulp.
Things were right when he’d gotten the invitation in the mail, pale stationary with words carrying the promise he already knew. Save the date. Gale Cleven & Marjorie Spencer would like to formally invite you–
Bucky’d traced the indent of Gale’s name on that pretty cardstock and felt his cheek dent, folding over the G of Gale where a B for Buck might’ve gone instead.
Things were right enough.
See, the war ended and Bucky Egan met a girl– no, really– with dark hair and sweet rosy cheeks, who laughed at his jokes through her cute chipped front teeth. He fell in love with her under a splatter of stars outside a bar in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a fever-dream of dancing a night away through sweat and liquor. It’s a typical story with an atypical ending: she stayed, and he let her. They went flying. She never asked for more than he gave, never bothered asking where he went too late at night or came back smelling like cologne and sweat.
Buck, he managed to write, weeks before. I think I finally got it right.
Josie. Josephine. Sweet as candy with a mouth filthy enough to knock a sailor on his ass. She’d pinned the invitation to the front of their fridge with a tacky gas station magnet, like it was something to show off. After, she’d practically pushed him out the door. Go, she’d said, knocking Bucky’s hands out from underneath her skirt. Get whatever this is out of your system, you hear? I want you decent by the time you’re home.
Decent.
Bucky used to wonder if he didn’t start with faulty foundations, if the biological car crash of his mama’s drinking and his daddy’s generational bible-thumping didn’t spit him out wrong, broken. He used to wonder back in school when he’d stare at the O-ring lips of laughing boys, how the hunger in his gut would turn his grins light to dark and sweet to sour in an instant, numbness spreading in his chest like a yawning, wide-open pool.
It’s what gets him now, anyway, this ugly itch and Gale’s pretty mouth shaped around a grin, one arm around the back of Marge’s slim shoulders as she speaks. They’re talking about– dresses, Marge and her ma, the whole cobbled-together picturesque mess of the bridal party crowded in the kitchen, Bucky here reeking of booze and thinking maybe he’d never gotten anything right in his goddamn life.
It’d be easy to pretend this whole thing started with the chute, inspired as it was, half relic of a hell they survived and half something else, not harder to name but harder to speak. Bucky’d shown up to the house a few days before the rest and swept a grinning Marge up in one arm while Gale watched from the porch, cheek dented on how he was sucking in a smile. Marge’s eyes had gone soft and serious when she’d opened the package and her gaze fell on the folded up close-enough-to-white beige of a parachute.
Didn’t think I’d come empty handed, did you?
Oh, John, she’d said, nothing else for it, her ma in the back with a gasp to paint the scene. It’s perfect.
Perfect. Perfect, perfect.
John’s glass hits the table too hard, startling chatter into a weighted silence. Gale’s eyes find him like a beacon in a dark room.
“Gotta take a leak,” he says, grin too wide to be anything but uncomfortable.
-
He’d heard a guy spin it like a joke, once. How the closer you get to death the more you want to fuck. It was just out of pocket enough to earn a laugh from the crew he’d been with, but Bucky hadn’t thought too much of it.
Besides, Bucky could tell a better joke in his sleep with the way things turned out.
Take two guys who have spent years living in each other’s shadow while ignoring the elephant in the room, all the things unsaid– take them and strand them in a prisoner of war camp, where death and starvation and desperation all rot and roil around every corner, a mean, old lingering bitch of a promise.
Gale broke first. That’s the kicker. Gale Cleven, holy patron saint of the staunch non-believers, broke first, cornered Bucky in the washroom, the whole of him stinking like mud and death, and kissed him hard enough that Bucky felt the bones in his nose creak. It’d been after the fight, King Cleven, after Bucky had bruised up Gale’s ribs and come away feeling heavier than whatever cloud of gunk in his brain thought it’d be a good idea to start it. Gale broke his nose in the yard and touched him with that same bloody fist, shoved it down Bucky’s pants and jerked him hot and fast while they panted into each other’s mouths, wordless.
And then again. Again. Again. Days, weeks, months of it, of clawing for any moment they could get their hands on each other. Pandora’s box spilled open, elephant in the room cut straight through the gut, all of it justified thinly on a bar-crawling drunk’s joke of a pretense as long as Bucky never said what really mattered aloud.
Gale’s dutiful hands were always there to catch it, any damning sentiment, fingers stuffed into Bucky’s mouth before the words could hit the air.
You gotta know, don’t you? That I love you?
They’d done the courting– years of it, flight school and the before, hey, you look like a guy I know– and so this was it, huh? Their marriage bed.
And then it ended. The camp, the war, the sex, all of it. Gone in a sweep.
Nothing but blue skies, no more death do I see, and Bucky’s the sucker who walked his way into breaking his own heart.
Get it? Funny fucking joke.
-
Bucky hadn’t planned to stay at the house. Marge had just taken one look at him and insisted upon it. Her folks and their folks besides are at the motel down the road, each bedroom fit to bursting, and she’d hate to bother those poor motel owners any more than she already has. They’re a sweet couple. So she says. More fixtures in this life of Gale’s that Bucky doesn’t recognize.
John retches into the upstairs toilet, all bile. Cool water from the sink to his face does nothing to clear the miasma in his head, the way his hands itch. Bucky’s not drunk enough that he sways when he walks, not yet, but he’s drunk enough that he passes by the guest room he’s staying in and winds up staring at the closed-up door to the master bedroom instead.
Inside, after a gust of breath, nothing is all that special. A bedroom’s a bedroom, even if Bucky can count the ways Marge and Gale have lived in this one. There’s perfume on the dresser, and the sheets that cover the bed are military-neat.
At the center of the room, his gift, the parachute, is still half-boxed. Way he heard it, Marge’s ma is gonna craft a wedding dress out of the thing.
Marjorie Spencer. What a girl.
Bucky can still hear the chatter from downstairs when he settles down against the mattress, running a hand over the comforter. He imagines the way Gale might fuck Marge in this bed, how he’d sound when he did it. If he’d make any noise at all.
He presses a palm to the front of his jeans, just feeling.
It’s how Gale finds him, familiar footsteps not enough to get Bucky off the ledge, not enough to stop him from holding his hand closer to the flame.
“Took you long enough,” Bucky sighs.
Gale’s silence is a loaded gun, heavy.
Bucky squeezes at the soft handful of his cock.
Gale turns away.
“Quit that. You’re drunk. You’re confused.”
“Not enough, Buck.” Bucky scrubs his free hand over his face. “Shit, I’m all out of practice with this pretending.”
Gale’s quiet for a minute, face hardening.
“What is this?” His voice is as shuttered as his expression. “What are you doing, John?”
“You ever miss it?” Bucky makes a noise, half-slurred into the end of his words. “Not the– not all of it, not even most, just.” He kisses his teeth. “C’mon, Buck. You ever miss when I could touch you? Out in the open? Before?”
“Miss when you weren’t giving me grief in front of Marge’s folks,” Gale says, like Bucky’s talking out of his ass.
“Marge’s folks, right,” Bucky echoes. “Marge, too. Hey, you tell Marge much about your time out there?”
“Not now, Bucky.” Gale grabs his arm. Bucky shrugs him off. “Get up, come on.”
“Look, I’ll let you go. That’s what I’m doing, huh? I’m letting you go. I’m giving it up, Buck. Just not here, okay? Not now. It’s just us two, here. Don’t ask me for that, too.”
“What you’re doing is talking like a loon,” Gale grinds his teeth. “Acting crazy in my house, my life–”
“What life? I gave you a life. Damn good one, too. Buck fuckin’ Cleven!”
Gale grabs him by the collar, one big fistful of Bucky’s shirt. Something in Bucky’s blood sings for the contact.
“Keep your damn voice down.”
“Or what?” Bucky knocks their foreheads together. Gale’s breath is hot on his face. “Hm? Or what, darlin’? You want me to go back to pretending that bad?”
“Be quiet–”
“You want me to tell you that I don’t wish it was me up there putting that ring on your finger? That I wouldn’t have gotten down on one knee the day I met you? I’d’ve crawled in here after to suck your cock in my wedding dress, Buck.” Bucky can’t stop himself, words sharp as barbs and truer than anything. “I’d marry you again. Right here on this bed.”
Gale slams Bucky up against the nearest wall, his head connecting hard. Spit flies from his mouth with a groan, stars spritzing across his vision. It’s everything and nothing like what he wants. It’s the speed limit when he wants to feel the gas pedal hit the floor. It’s a choked-off noise when he wants to scream. You feel that, Buck? I don’t feel a thing.
Bucky sinks to his knees like someone cut his strings and Gale flinches, but sure as anything he’s half-hard in his slacks, the bulge straining fabric. Bucky’s mouth waters, bile and spit across his lips when he licks them, eyes wide for Gale’s frantic, prey-animal gaze. He’s still holding his fist half-formed where it’d been in Bucky’s shirt like he’s not sure what to do with himself in the wake of the violence.
“Buck,” Bucky sighs. “Buck. Could’ve had a real nice go of it, you and me.”
Gale’s hand falls to Bucky’s hair. Gentle, at first, fingers carding through to the knuckle. Harder, then, when Bucky leans forward, keeping him in place.
“Tell me to stop,” Bucky says, in the dark. “You tell me to stop– that you don’t want this, god damn it, and I will. I’ll walk.”
“You don’t know what I want, John.”
Bucky grabs ahold of the bulge in Gale’s pants, grips it tight.
“I know this.” A breath. “Yeah, I know you, Buck. You’re a coward, but you’re not a liar.”
For a minute, the fear bounces wild in Gale’s eyes, his mouth twisting up like he’s really gonna take a swing.
Instead, his hand crushes Bucky forward, Bucky’s mouth already open for the heat of Gale’s cock through his slacks. Bucky’s groan is animal-wild, the first taste of something you’ve been craving for years. Gale gasps, and Bucky– needs to see, needs to watch himself do this to Gale, needs to watch Gale react. He sits back, tongue rolling free, another too-eager, too-human noise drooling out of his mouth when he sees how Gale’s flush is lighting him up, one hand pressed against his mouth to muffle his own noise.
“Lemme hear, doll,” Bucky pleads, muffled, lips still half-splayed against Gale’s cock. “Just the once, lemme hear you.”
Gale’s moan is half animal, nearly a growl as he tugs himself from his pants.
His cock is sweet, thick and red, and Bucky has never wanted anything more than he wants it down his throat. He’d never gotten to see much in the stalag, too concerned with the shock of it, the desperate affirmations, the you’re alive, we’re alive, I’ve got you. He wants to lay Gale out, get him slick and wet enough that Bucky can just sink down on him, easy, easy, easy. Let me show you how good it could be. Let me be good, for you.
Like Marge. Like a wife.
Gale’s hand wraps around the base, jerking himself messily all the way to where Bucky’s lips spread around him. Bucky hums, threading their fingers together to guide the pace. Let me. Let me, let me. He’s getting hard so fast he’s dizzy, cock flushing and twitching within the confines of his pants. Gale’s ring is pretty against the pale of his skin, prettier peeking out from between Bucky’s bigger fingers as they slide together.
Gale sighs and Bucky moans, too loud for the quiet of the bedroom. Gale’s fingers dig tighter in his hair.
“Christ,” Gale breathes, while Bucky’s throat flutters around the width of him.
Bucky lets himself be gagged in exchange for another gasp, throatier this time, more animal. It’s like a test to see who will flinch first. Chicken.
Gale lets Bucky go when his vision starts to darken, when stars start to loom heavy and dreamy around the edges. Christ, Gale sighs again, and Bucky could laugh. Christ, sure. Instead, he chokes on a violent inhale, spittle flying.
He’s gone back down before Gale can check if he’s alright, licking up between their combined fingers, feeling with his mouth for that touch of metal band.
Gale’s hips are rocking forward, almost like he doesn’t know he’s doing it. Bucky wants him to know, wants it like a brand in his throat. Wants to give Gale away sounding like a death rattle.
He pulls off until he can just kiss the tip, throat aching, drool and precome drenching his mustache, dripping down his chin. “Come on,” he rasps, tightening his grip on Gale’s cock. “C’mere, honey, paint me up. Give me something pretty to wear to the altar. Let ‘em know I’m yours.”
Bucky watches the orgasm as it hits Gale, watches it shudder through him like a rippling wave. Gale watches, too, even when his lids go hazy and heavy, gripping at Bucky’s fingers, the both of them aiming his cock for the split of Bucky’s candy-apple-red mouth. Come hits across his nose and cheeks, tangles in stripes across his tongue.
Bucky’s quick to follow, bucking into his hand once, twice over his jeans before spilling into his underwear.
Gale sinks to his knees, breathing hard, flushed and beautiful. The adrenaline is making things sparkly-bright, paving way for the inevitable nausea, for the shame and shock Bucky should feel. Right now, he feels light as anything.
Bucky brings one of Gale’s hands to his mouth, kissing right over his palm.
“John,” Gale says, parting the silence. Bucky doesn’t turn to meet his gaze, selfish, smothering the moment between his hands like if he kills it Gale won’t be able to take it away. Gale guides his chin up with his hand, uncharacteristically tender.
“I would’ve,” Gale says– tells him. “Would’ve taken your ring the same as your name, Bucky. You oughta know that.”
It feels like what it is. A gift. Something to bandage over the still-gaping wound. Bucky’s grin is as empty as a prepared coffin.
“I know, Buck.”
“I need you out there. Need you to be my best man.”
“Know that, too.”
Gale drops his hand.
“Get yourself cleaned up. Nobody’ll expect you until dinner.”
There goes the nausea.
Bucky hardly hears Gale leave. His knees ache when he stands, coming to hover over the boxed-up parachute. Marge’s wedding dress. He’s grabbing a fistfull of the material before he knows it, swiping across the cooling come on his face.
When he drops it back in the box, there’s a stain, no bigger than two of his fingers pressed together.
Sure to fade come morning.