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There’s a particular quality to arriving back in Pavuvu that always throws Eugene off. Maybe it’s because he expects the place to be even a little different after being away for so long. Maybe because the places they go in between their long stints on the island are so fraught, so full of death and mud and misery, that he feels he should be more grateful about setting foot back on Pavuvu’s stinking, but known, ground.
He never is.
Nauseous from the choppy cross, nauseous from the smell of the island in his nose, Eugene stumbles his way through tents and men until he finds the tent that he considers his, now. Mercifully empty. Jay is hot on his heels, Leyden behind him, but Eugene barely spares them any attention as he lets his pack drop to the ground, and then his body to his bunk. When he wakes, he’ll regret falling asleep in all the residual filth that lingers from the campaign. His hair is stiff with sweat, his clothes marred with salty white tidemarks of it. But for now he’s lying down on something that could almost be mistaken for soft, and his eyelids are so heavy he thinks they may never prise themselves open again.
The sea, a gentle undulation of noise under the chatter of thirty dozen bored men.
He sleeps. And when he wakes, he finds his muddy boots have been pulled from his feet while he slept, and lined up neatly under his bunk. The sun is low and orange in the sky, the light hazy through the mosquito nets that make up the walls of their tent, and Eugene lies there for a while, feeling the warmth of it. Jay is snoring to his left, stuttering, heavy-sleep snores. Eugene flexes his socked feet against the bunk, feeling all his aches and pains come alive once again. He groans.
Outside, a movement catches his eye. A figure, indistinct through the gauzy nets. Dark hair, bony shoulders, dip of his head towards another figure, blond. The smell of cigarette smoke almost masking that rotting coconut smell of the place. Eyes still heavy, Eugene blinks slowly, and turns onto his side, the bunk creaking under his weight. Sleep is black and curling at the edges of his mind again, but hunger is an insistent gnaw in his stomach that’s impossible to ignore.
A voice drifts in. “ — Fuck knows, I hope so.” Dragging, drawling accent, punctuated by the sound of someone spitting. Eugene sits up with a groan, rolling his neck on his shoulders as his body decides it’s time to protest all the aches he’d left to go stiff while he slept. He stretches his arms above his head, chin ducked close to his chest as he yawns, presses his palms to his nape to crack his spine. From outside, he hears, “Oh, he’s awake.”
Sleeping so well out here is near-disconcerting in its rareness. Eugene shuffles his swollen feet back into his boots but leaves the laces loose, pulls his shirt from over his head because he’s already working up a sweat and can’t stand the feel of fabric close to his skin. Jay is still asleep, face smashed into the bedroll, mouth open as he snores again. Eugene leaves him to it, pushing the screen aside to step out into the humid evening air.
“Mornin’,” Burgie greets him with, the hazy blond head through the netting. He’s working hard at a can of rations on his lap, and judging by the bright bead of blood at the crease of his thumb, has already come a cropper to the can opener once. Eugene nods sleepily to him, brain still drifting and pleasantly disconnected. Snafu, the dark head to Burgie’s blond, is sat to his left, arms and legs all gathered into an awkward cluster at his chest. Chin to his knees, pale eyes like headlights on Eugene, who isn’t awake enough just yet to deal with the man.
“Snaf,” he mumbles, in greeting. The man doesn’t respond, just brings his cigarette to his mouth, eyes following Eugene as he wanders closer to take a seat on the ground. Normally, Eugene knows he’d feel flushed and over-aware under Snafu’s hawklike scrutiny, but as of right now half of him is still laid out on the mattress under the bloody eye of the late afternoon sun, and the rest of him is too much of a fragment to react to much of anything.
He accepts a cigarette from Burgie, then watches him conquer the C-ration. Beyond them, the heat shimmers above the horizon of sea, and Eugene watches the pale heads of swimmers bob in the blue water for a while. The nicotine is waking him up, and when Jay rises he brings with him instant coffee, and that livens Eugene up further. Snafu unfurls from his ball of limbs, and takes to a sprawl, bare chested with his dog tags winking the sun’s light back gold between his nipples. He’s drunk; taking nips from a dented little metal flask every few minutes, and his eyes are heavy with it. If Eugene were to touch his skin, he knows it’d be warm, flushed from the sun and from the alcohol.
Eugene thinks of mud, of rain, of harsh sunlight and the smell of the dead baking beneath it. Every time he looks at Snafu, the man is looking right back at him, like he can read his thoughts, like he knows Eugene is trying parse the last month and failing to.
Stop looking at me, Eugene wants to say. Snafu blinks at him from the other side of the little stove Burgie has set up and warming his food. Jay drifts away, comes back smelling clean with mail in his hands; gifts from his mother, who never scrimps on the candy. Melted chocolate bars, sticks of sun-softened gum. They pass around a Hersheys bar and dip their dirty fingers into the melted mess stuck to the foil, and the taste is so rich and so sweet to Eugene after months of rations that it upsets his stomach.
“Jesus, I dunno how you manage it,” he groans, watching Snafu picking at the sweets still.
He blinks his big grey eyes at Eugene, heavy-lidded above the long curl of a smirk. “Sweet tooth,” he drawls, all the bones of his sternum and his collarbone jutting through his sun-browned skin as he leans back on his hands. “Raised up on condensed milk.” Leyden snorts, because him and Snafu are cut from the same weirdo cloth, but Eugene just stares at him, unable to work out if he’s kidding or not. Then his eyes cut away, and Eugene is left staring at his profile, at his skinny arms and chest, at the huge curling mass of his hair that makes the rest of him look even smaller.
The words are leaving Eugene’s mouth faster than he can register them. “You need a haircut.”
Snafu’s gaze slides back to him. “Me?” He scratches at the birds nest on top of head, half of it tied back from his face in a knot. “What, you gonna find me a barber out here?” Then he grins, and Leyden laughs, like he hadn’t cut Eugene’s hair himself not three weeks ago. Sometimes Eugene really wonders at the kick Snafu seems to get out of being completely obtuse.
Now he’s said it, Eugene knows he has to offer. “I’ll get it for you.”
Snafu kisses his teeth, takes another little mouthful of whatever hooch is corroding the inside of his flask away. “It’s fine like this.”
Leyden laughs, eyes on the book of matches he’s shredding trying to get one lit. “Gonna put the lice outta house and home, Snaf.”
Burgie groans at that, as does Eugene, who is feeling too filthy himself to even entertain the thought. He’s still got Peleliu dirtying up his hair, his skin. Still hasn’t gotten the wash he’d so sorely needed, and now needs even more after his deep sleep in that close, humid tent.
“Have it your way,” he mutters, as Snafu takes another drink from his flask. He gets looser with every one; Eugene is sure he’s gonna be on his back before long, he’s slouched so far back on his elbows. “I’m gonna take a shower. The offer still stands.”
Snafu shrugs languidly, bottom lip caught between his teeth as he watches Eugene rise from his seat on the ground. There’s something in his gaze that makes Eugene feel hot around his ears, his chest, something vaguely knowing and far sharper than Snafu likes to make out to be. His eyes jump from the soft, dark tangle of Snafu’s hair; oddly girlish, with the way it curls over his ears, to the shiny hollow of his throat, to the dark hair of his belly. Some kind of lesson in androgyny. The soft, full pout of his mouth versus the shit that comes out of it. The sweet, capital-R romantic curl of his hair versus the hard, bony lines of his small body. His fingers twitch in his lap.
“You going?” His voice is dry, a little snide. Eugene rolls his eyes and ducks back into the tent for his wash bag, brandishes his toothbrush at Snafu as he leaves.
“You look stupid,” he says, lamely, the effort to be cutting always a losing battle with Snafu staring so disinterestedly at him anyway. “Jesus, you try and do somethin’ nice for a guy.”
“I always aim to please!” Snafu calls after him, and Eugene stews his way through a cold shower for far longer than he needs to, washing the dirt from his hair and his skin. His anger feels misplaced; like it’s not even anger, really, just something close enough to it that it’s easier to just call it anger and leave it at that. Eugene isn’t sure he has the language for what it really is.
The way Snafu flips constantly hot and cold on him makes him angry. The way he can’t for the life of him work out how to make Snafu react the same way twice makes him angry. If Eugene had offered the haircut two weeks ago, five days ago, even just a few minutes before he did, Snafu could’ve had a completely different reaction. It’s the unpredictability. Eugene doesn’t know how to parse it. Dislike? Disinterest? Or does Snafu really like him but just loves to wind him up, like he does Jay? The answer is elusive, so elusive that Eugene’s sure this war’ll be over before he gets even close to it.
Whatever it is, the emotion has waned by the time he trudges back to their tent, hair wet and steaming in the late afternoon sun. Hard to hold a grudge when the brain is so exhausted. Despite his nap, Eugene feels like he could sleep for a hundred days more; even then he thinks he’d wake tired. He can’t remember the last time he felt rested, can’t remember the last time his body hadn’t tried to cling to whatever surface he was sleeping on as he tried to rise.
“Feel better?” Burgie asks, eyes shrewd and following Eugene as he ducks inside to toss his wash bag onto his bunk. Hazy once more through the mosquito net.
“Yes,” Eugene answers, and means it. “Yeah, Burg.” He steps outside, digs a cigarette from his pockets and lights up, inhaling deeply as his eyes swing over the camp. “Where’s everyone?”
“Food, I guess.” He shrugs. “Snaf’s drunk, Leyden’s encouraging him.”
Burgie’s propped up in a camp seat with a paperback that looks like it’s been through more campaigns than the two of them. Front cover torn; Eugene can’t make out what the title is. Even though Burgie should be the picture of relaxation right now, somehow he isn’t. Something about him still thrums with an alert energy, something highly strung and seemingly inherent to him. Eugene takes a seat on the ground, settling back against one of the wooden beams of their tent as he takes the man in.
“You ever feel like you’re rested?” he asks. Burgie snorts, eyes on his book, and shakes his head.
“Wakin’ up rested is for children.” His eyes flick to Eugene, very blue in his sun-browned face. “Children and people who got no worries.”
“Snafu sleeps good,” Eugene murmurs, thoughtful, and that’s enough to make Burgie laugh.
“He’s a law to himself. Normal rules don’t apply.” His eyes drop back to the page he’s reading, but Eugene can tell his attention has been tugged away from it now. His jaw works, and Eugene waits, smoking his cigarette and letting his eyes grow heavy in the warm evening that’s draping itself over the camp. Finally, he adds, “I really think Snafu ain’t got no worries.”
“I dunno.”
Eugene is curious, leaving space for Burgie to weigh in, but Snafu and Leyden choose that moment to reappear, bumping close together as they weave in through the throngs of men and tents. Leyden’s pink in the cheeks; alcohol and food, and Eugene’s sure Snafu’d be too if his skin didn’t hide it so well. A quiet spark of jealousy goes through him as Leyden nudges at Snafu’s side. The little dip of his waist. The way his dungarees hang from his bony frame. Eugene looks back to the tip of his cigarette, the dull orange glow to it. Stop looking at me, he thinks again, as he feels the weight of Snafu’s eyes settle down at their place on his shoulder.
“Gene,” he calls, as they approach. “Hey, Gene.”
There he goes again. Hot and cold. He only calls Eugene that when he’s feeling friendly; it’s one of the many ways Eugene knows how to keep track of his moods. Is he Eugene, Gene, or just nothing? Each has their own set of pitfalls.
Eugene can’t meet his eye. “What?” He thinks of the emotion he’d felt under the briskly cold water of the shower, scrubbing Peleliu from every pore of his body. Anger-but-not-quite. Almost-frustration. Pale-annoyance. It rises in him when Snafu teases him. It rises in him when Snafu pillows his cheek to his shoulder and fixes Eugene with those big doe eyes, creepy and sweet all in the same breath.
He smells like sweat when he sits heavily down at Eugene’s side, and Leyden keeps going, tossing a seeya! over his shoulder that no one reacts to. Burgie’s nose is back in his book. Jay is snoring away inside once more. Snafu’s skin smells sweet and musky, and Eugene shocks himself all the way down to his toes with the way it wakes up an urge-he-cannot-name inside him. When he glances to the side, Snafu is grinning at him like he knows about that unnameable urge, the unfixable emotion; toothy and huge, eyes unerring.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he drawls, and nudges his shoulder to Eugene’s. Bare skin to bare skin. His collarbone makes a bony jut at his shoulder, like he’s got a clothes-hanger holding himself together in there. “I need a tidy up.”
“That’s one word for it,” Eugene mutters, heart so high in his throat he can taste it. Slickly metallic. He nudges his cheek to his shoulder, and Snafu does the same. The two of them sat close and intent, sharing the same hot air.
Snafu speaks first.
“Now, or didja change your mind?”
Eugene looks away, and the air between them is free once more. “I should.”
The breeze brings with it the smell of the sea for a second, drowning out the scent of unwashed men and worse. Eugene tips his face towards it, just as Burgie snorts from behind his book and says, “Cut his hair, Sledge. Could’ve smuggled the enemy back from Peleliu in all that.”
Eugene feels himself colour as he realises he’d forgotten about Burgie’s quiet, watchful presence. He clears his throat and shifts a little further from Snafu, who is watching him with something vaguely wolfish in his expression. It’s blurred by the alcohol; softened by his clear drunkenness. He’s sweet like this. Hot and cold.
“Gonna wash?”
Snafu shakes his head. “Au naturale.” Rolls his accent right over the words. Eugene breathes a sigh out through his nose.
“Of course.”
They commandeer Burgie’s camp chair, which he doesn’t give up without a fight, but a determined and drunk Snafu is little match for anybody so Burgie takes himself off to ‘read in peace’ after a brief grapple for it.
“Hard thing to find in war!” Snafu calls after him, to which Eugene allows himself a smirk at. Snafu catches him, and nudges his side with his elbow, conspiratorial. “Gene, I know you ain’t laughin’ at me back-chattin’ a commanding officer.”
“’S just Burgie,” he mutters, and then, “Go on, sit before I change my mind.” Or you do, he thinks, as Snafu settles himself down in front of the scissors that Eugene had stolen from a med kit, and that now look pathetically small next to his birds nest of hair. “Snaf,” he mumbles, pulling the hair tie loose. “This shit grows like a weed.”
Snafu’s head dips. The flick of a lighter, over and over, flint rolling until it finally catches. Then he leans back with a sigh. “Good genes,” is all he has to offer. Eugene hums noncommittally.
Hair so dark it seems to have stolen the heat from the day; hot all of its own accord when Eugene sinks his fingers into it. Snafu makes a pleased noise and settles down further into his seat, the low orange light of the evening transforming him into smudges of purple and violet, as indistinct as he is unreadable. Eugene concentrates hard on pulling his curls taut, snipping at his head in chunks as the man smokes and lets himself be manipulated this way and that. It’s hard to disconnect the hair from the scalp, the scalp from the man wearing it. Not when it smells like him; stiff and hard to finger-comb through because of the sweat, the dirt, and Eugene knows it should be disgusting but he can’t find it in himself to feel that. Maybe war really has changed him. Or maybe that’s all Snafu.
“I better look handsome,” he warns, knees spread and posture easy. Eugene swallows against a lump in his throat.
Worse, Eugene knows if he lifted his hands to his face they too would smell like Snafu. Inescapable, consuming. He feels like he’s inching closer to a name for that feeling with every little snip of the woefully underpowered scissors in his hand. He pushes his fingers through Snafu’s curls, and Snafu hums. Dark hair litters his shoulders. Something inside of Eugene is beating its fists against his ribcage in an attempt to break free.
“Did you take my shoes off when I was sleepin’?” he murmurs, snipping the hair close at Snafu’s nape, bringing it down to nothing but a black velvet. Then he brushes at the skin, brushes the stray hairs loose, and watches as goose pimples rise on Snafu’s skin.
“Why’d you think it was me?” His voice is steady, soft. Dragging just slightly with a slur, with that heavy accent like honey.
Eugene shrugs, even though Snafu can’t see it. “Just felt like somethin’ you’d do.”
His big hands shift in his lap; dirty, callused, ungraceful things. Cigarette burning low between his knuckles. “You were sleepin’ so good I thought you’d sleep the whole night through.”
“Weren’t it you who snapped at me for takin’ my boots off?” He pushes Snafu’s head forward to snip that black velvet even closer. The knobs of his spine push through with the motion, and Eugene lets the urge to put his mouth to one slip through him, inner eyes firmly diverted as he pretends he never even felt it.
He can’t see the smile on Snafu’s face but can hear it in his voice when he replies, “You took your damn boots off on a battlefield, you idiot.”
“Whole damn country’s a battlefield,” Eugene murmurs, absently. He presses his fingertips to the side of Snafu’s neck, urging him to tilt his head. He goes easy. When Eugene shifts to his side to get at that girlish curl of his hair over his ears, he sees that Snafu’s eyes are closed, the line of his mouth soft and inviting. Difficult to believe that the teeth behind those lips can bite so hard.
He thinks of his and Burgie’s talk, the way that Snafu looks so relaxed he could slip into sleep any second, and asks, “You ever worry?”
Snafu’s eyes blink open. “Worry? Worry about what?”
“Dunno.” Eugene steps back to survey his handiwork; a little rough, still a little overlong, but far improved. “About anythin’.” He moves to go back in, scissors aloft, but Snafu turns, quick as anything, and catches his wrist.
His palm is hot to the drumbeat of Eugene’s pulse. Pale eyes ringed by those dark lashes. Ridiculous eyes, eyes that peer so deep that Eugene can almost feel like probing through into his head. “You think I don’t worry?” he asks, and Eugene sees the tightness around Snafu’s eyes, he sees the shudder of his hands. He shrugs, helplessly.
“That’s why I’m askin’.”
Snafu snorts, and then releases him, slumps back into the chair and sinks his hands into his hair. Leans his head over his lap to watch the loose hairs shake free as he scratches through it. “I worry,” he says, shortly. “Ain’t I human?”
Are you? Eugene thinks.
“What do you worry about?”
Snafu shoots him a look which is vague venom. Hot and cold. “Worry about you givin’ me a bad haircut,” he says. “How’s it lookin’?”
Eugene strays closer, unable to really tell with the sun sinking so readily into the waves now. The world is all brought up in smudges of purple, like one big ripe bruise. He feels the same. Aches down to the very core of himself. His hands slide home into Snafu’s hair, still warmed from the sun, and doesn’t miss how the man goes limp at his touch. Hot and cold. Is it exhausting, to swing between the extremes so much?
“Looks good,” he murmurs, to Snafu’s question. He isn’t sure he’s still listening; eyes closed again, head pliant in Eugene’s control as he cuts it shorter, and then shorter again. Something so close to regulation their CO might not even look twice. When he’s done Snafu spends a few tense minutes glancing this way and that at himself in that sliver of mirror he has propped up amongst his things, while Eugene watches nervously.
“Good?” he asks, when Snafu puts the mirror back, and stands.
“I ain’t a vain man,” is all he says, with a grin thrown over his shoulder that makes Eugene flush. He blames it on the heat, despite the fact that the cool night is now setting in, and the tent they’re standing close together in still holds the true heat of the day. Snafu sinks his fingers into his hair, curls sweet and short and springy now the weight has been taken off them. “Gonna shower,” he adds, but lingers a moment more. The two of them stood in the middle of the tent like fools, and Eugene knows there’s something sticking in his throat but now he wonders if there’s something fighting its way out in Snafu too. The duck of his head, the nervous twitch of his fingers in his dog tags.
But then, nothing. Snafu grabs his bar of soap and his towel that once upon a time might have been white, and he leaves, and the atmosphere in the tent deflates. Eugene takes himself for dinner, then for a walk down the beach with a cigarette, just to feel his bare feet in the still-warm sand. He thinks of the sun in Snafu’s black hair. He thinks of the way his throat had bobbed earlier, like he was swallowing something down against itself. That warm tent, the orange setting sun and the world beyond reduced to static through the mosquito netting.
Eugene raises his hands to his face. Smells hair, smells sunlight, smells that warm human scent. The waves whisper at his feet, and on the other side of it lies home, lies uncertainty, lies safety.
That night he doesn’t sleep well, some sort of penance for his long, solid nap earlier in the day. Tossing, turning, sweating, Eugene lies awake and wonders at the peaceful, still shape of Snafu in the bunk on the other side of the tent. Too far away in the darkness to see his face, but Eugene knows how it looks in sleep, so he doesn’t need to remind himself. Knows it by the glare of a star shell, by the light of the moon, knows it folded up in midnight black and cradled in grey dawn light. He thinks he could go home and forget about every single bit of war, but would still somehow hold onto how Snafu looks when asleep. Young, and hurt. The wrinkle of his brow. The softness of his mouth. Eugene’s never known a person to frown even when asleep. Maybe it means Snafu has more worries than he can even know.
He puts his nose to palm, to the fragile little thread of scent still there, and thinks of hot hair under his hands, and worries so big they exhaust you into sleep.