Chapter Text
War messes with your mind in a way that a civilian will never fully understand. It messes with your body, with your heart, and with your soul. It goes after love, even, grinding it down like another enemy, when all it is is collateral damage in the raging gunfire. People like to think of war as somehow romantic. Maybe some parts of it can be, in a way.
But war is not, never will be, kind to love. Especially not in a POW camp deep in the Reich, where if the guards don’t kill you, the cold or starvation just might.
And if none of that does you in, well… war sure does mess with your mind, doesn’t it?
–
Who knew the sound of bombs in the distance could carry so much hope. It’s a sick side effect of the human condition: one person’s suffering is another’s salvation. The world isn’t so black and white, though, and when you think about it, it could be said that a few bombs over Berlin isn’t nearly enough to make the Nazis pay for what they’ve done to this planet and its people. In a few years time, the human species will wonder how such violence can be natural, if this is just how people are meant to behave. How could this possibly be true? But then again, how could it not?
In a POW camp in 1944, the sounds of an air raid play like a symphony.
The gunshot outside, the man on the ground, the dog trying to tear him limb from limb, the shouting – those instead are the sounds of tyranny, of wielding power just because you can. Suffering for suffering. Death for death.
When the guards yell at the airmen to get back inside, Bucky tells Gale that the goddamn Nazi goons are gonna take them out one at a time. Gale says nothing. He can’t stand it here any more than anyone else, and he is well aware that a toe out of line could mean fade to black. But at least here, he knows that he and John are both alive. They’re alive. They have each other, and at least Gale isn’t alone. He clings desperately to these facts that he knows to be true. This could be worse.
Days pass, and hope is tangible in the barrack once again as the men gather around Gale, watching intently as he fiddles with the crystal radio that Bucky had spent days gathering the measly materials for. News from the front seems to be the only thing anyone really wants these days, short of being far, far away from here. It’s the only thing that carries any promise of an end. The only proof they can get that they aren’t stuck here for nothing, that their sacrifices are worth the pain they’ve endured.
When Gale slams the headphone down on the table, he can’t believe he’s failed. The bubble of hope pops like a sad balloon.
When Bucky asks him one day if, when the weather clears (will it ever?), they should make a move, Gale tells him all but no. Tells him to find a plan with better odds. Tells him “my plan is to get home in one piece.”
He remembers all too well the deadly state John was in when he stumbled into camp months ago. He remembers the sleepless nights spent trying to keep him alive. His own harrowing journey to the Stalag he barely lets himself think about. He has nightmares – about John dying on him, about hands and ropes around his own neck, about crashing through the sky in a tin can in flames, about being the only one left standing like a lost little kid in the street with no one to call home. Sometimes he feels like he’s holding on by a thread to the only sense of hope he has – the fact that they are both here and they are both still breathing. Beyond the fences of this camp, none of that would be guaranteed.
Bucky’s the opposite. Sure he has nightmares, just like everyone else in the sleepless night – about getting beaten to death in a burning town, about Buck’s plane going down, about hiding behind marsh grass with a gun just waiting to be killed, about everyone he loves getting taken out one by one until he’s alone with nowhere to go. This place, though, is not the answer. He’s damn sure of that. The Luftwaffe doesn’t care which of them lives and which of them dies, and Major John Egan is not about to stand by and let them use him – or, God forbid, Buck – as target practice. Why doesn’t Gale get it?
“You’ll die here in one piece,” Bucky tells him.
Gale stays quiet, and Bucky doesn’t even notice the way that he nervously grabs at the ring hanging on the chain around his neck. Gale clutches it for all it’s worth though. Why doesn’t Bucky get it? This could be worse.
They go on, living day to day but hardly living. They eat their rations and assemble for appel and try to sleep in rickety bunks and freezing cabins. Occasionally, Buck gets a letter from Marge: news from home, sending thoughts and prayers for him and Bucky, telling trivial stories to make him smile. She’s even started including baseball stats and scores for Bucky to follow. Gale tries to get Bucky to read them, to maintain a connection with the outside world and understand that someone beyond these fences is thinking about him. He refuses, won’t even touch them. Gale writes Marge that he’s concerned about Bucky. Her heart breaks for them.
None of the men can seem to find a balance between thinking of home and trying not to let the thinking drown them.
They find ways to entertain themselves. Books, music, sports, the occasional play. Gale has started holding classes for some of the other POWs, teaching them about physics, mathematics, and astronomy. It feels good to learn just to learn, to understand something about the world that isn’t shrouded by the war. It’s Gale’s escape, his offering to the men who offered up there lives. Bucky used to love listening to Gale go on about these things, would look at Gale like he’d hung the stars himself, smile and kiss his nose and make him blush before insisting he keep talking. He could listen to Gale talk for hours, and Gale had rarely felt so loved.
Now Bucky leaves the room when Gale starts teaching about the beauty of their universe. He doesn’t want to hear it anymore. Somewhere deep within himself, it hurts too much. It doesn’t line up with the situation in which he’s found himself. He can’t stand the way he feels alone in a crowded room. He can’t stand accepting that this is who they are now, where they’re meant to stay.
Sometimes, Gale will find him, will try to hold Bucky’s hand. He’s getting worried, doesn’t know what to do. Bucky tells him he’s fine, just needs some air, just needs some space. He’s just cold, just hungry, just tired, just angry at the fucking world. He’s fine. Gale tells him he loves him. Bucky doesn’t say it back.
He doesn’t feel right anymore. He hasn’t in a long time. He can’t say why. Words like depression aren’t commonplace yet.
Gale thinks it’s his fault.
After Gale manages to sand down the copper wire of the radio, he’s thrilled to hear actual transmissions coming through the headphone. The BBC, news from the front, their saving grace. Suddenly, the fact that they’re all stuck in this camp means something again. They went down swinging for something far bigger than themselves, and the allies had filled in the gaps. They hadn’t narrowly defeated death for nothing. The men scramble to start copying down and disseminating information, and the bubble of hope starts to grow.
Something like that is awfully fragile, though. It ebbs and flows and hesitantly tries to fill the cold and musty corners of the barrack, wrap itself around these men like a blanket. It’s enough to keep them going, but never quite enough to keep them warm. To keep them sane.
After dozens of men are executed for trying to escape the camp, that bubble bursts again. Things are about to get worse around here, not better, and Gale wonders if they should’ve taken a chance when they had it. Maybe they’d die trying, but maybe they’d die anyway.
But Bucky tells Gale that he might’ve been right, they shouldn’t be so hasty with an escape after all. Gale has about two seconds to feel like maybe they’re on the same page again, maybe Bucky is finally coming back into himself. About two seconds of that hope he’s been trying to cling to. Then Bucky declares that he has nothing worth rushing home for anyways.
Gale’s heart drops. The hope flies away, fading tendrils swirling in the air that he can’t quite keep a grip on. He wants to scream, aren’t I enough?
How many days and nights had they spent dreaming about a future? About a life after the war? It’s enough for Gale to hold onto, but his gut twists as he wonders if the private vows they’d made to each other before they shipped out, the rings they’d had engraved and carefully gifted to one another, had been nothing but words and hunks of metal. What the hell had happened to I made it home to you? Did it all mean so little to Bucky, now? Did Gale mean so little?
Sometimes the words you don’t say hurt the most. He tells Bucky that it’s just this place getting to him, but he doesn’t know how much he believes it. For the first time since Bucky made it back to him, Gale starts to feel alone.
–
Hope tends to be stronger than fear, but it’s a lot harder to build up, to maintain. As it’s dangerously close to fading from the barrack, bumping along and just trying to hold on, a nervous tension tries to shove it away. And the longer you let a tension linger, the more it comes to life. The less you do to overcome it, the stronger it bites you where it hurts.
In the winter cold of Stalag Luft III, Gale approaches Bucky where he stands in the open, mimicking a baseball announcer as he fakes a pitch to an imaginary batter. “You okay, Major?” Gale asks.
Game on pause, Bucky nods, squinting at Gale. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“Just asking.” Gale had been ‘just asking’ for days. Bucky can’t stand it anymore.
“Just asking?” he scoffs. “Well I’m great is the truth. I’ve been here for eight months now. Still trapped, still cold, still eating scraps. And we keep waiting for something to happen.”
“Could be worse,” Gale offers. Same old, same old. “We could be dead.”
“Maybe for you,” Bucky mutters, without even a thought. “At least that I could stand. I can’t stand this.”
They both feel it, the moment something between them shatters like glass struck by a bullet. Or maybe more like a tripwire that was hidden beneath the mud.
Gale isn’t enough. He gets it now, loud and clear.
Bucky knows he said something wrong – what else is new? – but he doesn’t know what it was. Which words exactly struck a chord in Gale that was better left alone. Which sentence from Bucky’s mouth tripped the wire and trapped them in this sudden, slow motion sensation of being ripped apart. The very air seems to shift, the ground beneath their feet. The expression on Gale’s face, for once, is raw, unfiltered, rather than being carefully schooled. And he looks so terribly hurt that part of Bucky wants nothing more than to reach out and hold him tight, give a hundred apologies and promise that whatever he said he didn’t really mean it. He doesn’t, though. He can’t.
Gale wishes he would. In this fragile moment, that would have been enough. He’d accept anything, any attempt at comfort or reassurance, to make this rising feeling of abandonment go away. This remnant of a childhood long gone and yet still hanging over his head. Don’t let me go. Don’t give up on me yet. Not now. But he can feel the cold air between them, slowly fraying the tether that had joined them at the hip for so long, and as the moment drifts and Bucky does nothing, they both know there’s no taking it back.
“We have to be patient,” Gale says instead, but the words feel empty, echoing through his head. There’s no feeling anymore. All he can feel is the cold lodged deep in his bones. And now, the heavy, strangling emptiness in his heart that first swells in his lungs as anger, and then settles through his whole body as sadness.
Bucky won’t look at him. Gale sets his jaw, and he walks away. Alone.
Sometimes words have meanings to others that you can never comprehend, and sometimes these words build on each other over time, spinning new meanings as they stack together, amplify each other. A weapon that you can never fully learn how to wield, that gives you the catastrophic power to build or to break. One careless strike can rearrange entire worldviews, break down the glass castle you painstakingly built, and you’ll never even know why or when.
–
Nothing is quite the same after that. The other POWs can feel it: “Mom and Dad are fighting,” they whisper, trying to pass it off as a joke when really the entire barrack has become filled with a thick and sticky uncertainty, an impenetrable tension that swallows them up, and no one even knows why or if it will get better. No one asks. If they did, Bucky would act oblivious and Buck would glare with the intensity of a hundred angry stars about to explode. They know better than to ask.
It’s been like this for days when Bucky waltzes out of the barracks to find Gale overseeing work on the stump remover, says it looks like a work camp, that they should take a break, play some ball. Gale doesn’t like the wild look in his eyes, the bitter sharpness in his voice. He’s egging Gale on with a manic air, a stumbling and angry set to his shoulders that reminds Gale of growing up at race tracks and sports bars. Then he about starts a fight, and that’s when Gale’s through with it.
He shoves Bucky away, sending him to the ground. “The hell is wrong with you?” He demands. “You ain’t gonna help, stay outta the way.”
Bucky’s just grinning at him though, this weird and twisted thing that Gale can’t stand seeing on the same face that used to look at him with undying love. “You’re the king of the camp and I’m just in the way,” Bucky muses, laying in the dirt with his hands behind his head and one leg crossed over the other like he’d chosen to be there. “King Cleven says no baseball, just work work work.”
Gale glares at him, hands on his hips, and then looks around at the crowd that had gathered on all sides to watch the show. Buck and Bucky, attached at the hip no more. They can’t decide if this rift feels unnatural or inevitable. Someday Gale will understand that love itself can become a weapon in the hands of war. Simultaneously unnatural and the most natural of all. He will understand the inevitability of pain that comes from dedicating yourself so deeply to someone else. But right now he understands none of these things. He clenches his jaw before looking back down at Bucky, trying to knit together the love and the hurt and the frustration and the confusion into something he can feel without crumbling. “I’m sorry,” he tries, reaching a hand down. “Come on.”
Bucky’s not really here with him anymore, though, is he? Hasn’t been for days. He’d drifted somewhere away from this place, away from Gale, and Gale hasn’t figured out how to bring him back. “No,” he says, kicking at Gale’s hand. “Work. You got a stump to pull.”
Gale keeps trying for a minute, insisting that Bucky stop this nonsense and get back up. When he won’t, just keeps kicking at Gale’s hand with more and more anger, Gale grabs his leg and pulls, falling back into the dirt. Everyone just watches as they struggle on the ground until the colonel storms out and tells them to break it up.
No one knows what’s happened between the two majors. They know better than to ask. But even if they did, neither one knows that they even have an answer.
–
Somewhere deep down, even a man at war is still the little boy they used to be. They’re still the teenager that had something to prove. They’re still the young man that joined up with fire in their heart. War messes with your mind, but that doesn’t mean you come out of it someone entirely new. War does its best to tear love apart, but that doesn’t mean love goes away. It just becomes something that can hurt you more.
Bucky’s not really a feelings kind of guy, and yet he feels too much. Alone in his bunk, with shaking fingers he moves to grab the ring that should be nestled behind his dog tags. He remembers, belatedly, that it isn’t there. It hasn’t been since he was captured months ago. Gale said he’d get him a new one, but Bucky wonders if that’s still true. Does Gale still love him, or had he managed to drive away the best thing in his life? He knows that he’s not the best partner, the best person, the best anything really. He knows he can be hard to put up with. He knows he’s not good enough for Gale. He knows.
Gale is not really a feelings kind of guy, so why can’t he shake himself out of this? He knows he can be too aloof, too hard to talk to, too unwilling to open up. He knows he’s not worth the trouble, that everyone who matters will eventually up and leave or hurt him if they stay, that he’s alone in this world and always has been. He knows he’s not good enough for John. He knows.
Bucky has been racking his mind for days, driving himself crazy, trying to remember what he said and where he went so wrong. He can’t think straight in this little dose of purgatory, trapped in a weird no-man’s-land of uncertainty. His brain won’t piece the thoughts together quite right. He needs to fucking eat something other than potatoes. He needs a drink.
Gale has been shutting himself down, distancing himself to the point that he feels like the strong facade he’d manufactured is all that’s left of him. A solid outer shell with nothing but smoke behind the screen. Deep inside, he wants nothing more than to feel Bucky’s strong arms around his waist. To hear his voice tell him they’ll make it through this. But he shoves the longing away. He still can’t figure out, or can’t admit, what had gone so wrong.
John Egan has always been Bucky, life of the party, class clown, never tied down. He drinks, he gambles, he sings too loudly and fights too quickly. He’s always craved attention, and he learned early on how to get it, how to keep it, good or bad. Even if it was a flimsy substitute for the genuine love and care he’d never managed to find. The idea scared him too much anyways, though he’d never admit it, and he pushed it away when it was offered to him. Low stakes, one night, fun times, roll the dice. Never anyone to say don’t forget to write. It was easier to keep afloat that way. People never saw through him, and he gave them what they wanted to see. Until he met Gale Cleven.
Gale Cleven, long before he’d been Buck, had just been little Gale Cleven. Grew up too fast, one foot on the gas and one dragging in the mud, just trying to keep himself moving when his father kept them stuck in a future he couldn’t create. Gale had to be strong then – don’t cry, cover the bruises, smile and nod and yes sir and no sir and never talk about how you feel – and he has to be strong now; people are counting on him. He didn’t come this far by any means other than his own grit and determination. He doesn’t let anyone get too close, and over the years he’s crafted his perfect persona: the strength and certainty he’d craved as a child, both feet finally on firm ground. Until he met John Egan.
Buck and Bucky saw right through each other from day one, played foil to one another. They were far too similar and far too different and no one would ever understand why exactly they worked but they did. No one questioned it. Gale slowed John down, payed attention in ways no one else ever had, loved him in ways he never imagined he’d deserve. He made John feel whole, gave him something worth living for, worth coming home to. John tore through Gale’s walls like a wrecking ball, made him feel, made him come back into himself when he spent too long being strong for everyone else. He took care of him, offered protection and shelter that Gale had never been given before. He showed Gale that he didn’t need to do everything alone, he didn’t need to be alone, and that he was worth something just as he was.
What happens to love when you don’t hold onto it tight enough? What happens when you can’t get back to the start?
Bucky nearly brains himself on the bunk above his – Gale’s bunk – when he tries to sit up too quickly, his head spinning with cascading thoughts that hit him like a truck in a moment of clarity. You’ll die here in one piece; what the hell am I rushing home for; at least dying I could stand. How did he not see it before?
Sometimes words make the most sense after they’ve already been said, when they wind around and around inside you with all the should’ves and would’ves and why’s and what-the-hell-was-I-thinking’s. A weapon of mass destruction whose aftermath is only visible when the smoke finally clears in the dawn.
Bucky wipes his face with one hand, groaning as he tries to remember the conversations he’d had with Gale in recent weeks. The things he’d said had been real and he meant them; he can’t stand this place and needs to find a way to get out, to get Gale out. He can feel himself going crazy here, wilting away with the cold and the lack of food, the constant subjugation and the uncertainty of Hitler breathing down his neck, the apathy rising until he’s just about numb. He’s been feeling too antsy, lashing out, desperate to feel something other than anger and emptiness and fear. But now his lungs feel empty, his heart squeezing too tight when he thinks about what his words might’ve meant to Gale Cleven, so poised and so tough and so, so afraid of never being enough, of being let down, of being alone.
Bucky doesn’t feel numb anymore.
When Gale comes back inside later, he finds a slip of paper tucked under his pillow. “I’m sorry” is scrawled in messy writing that he knows as well as his own. He presses it firmly against his chest, feeling the weight begin to fall from his shoulders.
–
A full day after Bucky left that note on Gale’s bunk, he’s starting to worry it wasn’t enough. Why would it have been? He’d been kind of an ass without even realizing it. He’d messed up, just as he was prone to do. But he doesn’t know what to do now. Gale still avoids him, won’t talk to him unbidden, won’t look at him, won’t occupy the same space as him. Bucky almost feels sick with it.
This is the state he’s in, sitting alone at the table in their barrack, tapping his fingers mindlessly on the wooden tabletop as he stares into the oblivion of his present and future, when the door swings open. He expects it to be Hambone or maybe Benny or Crank.
“John.” His fingers freeze mid-tap, hovering in the air above the table. He stops breathing, won’t blink, stares straight ahead at the wall. “John,” Gale says again. He sounds tired. Bucky doesn’t know if it's because of him or this place.
“Please look at me,” Gale sighs. It’s the first time he’s asked for Bucky’s attention in days. Bucky doesn’t even know how long it’s been. He’s about to turn around, but then Gale has walked around the table and is standing in front of him instead.
John flexes his jaw and looks up through tired eyes. Gale can’t help but think about the bruises that covered that pretty face just months ago. “Here to tell me off some more?” John asks. “Not getting enough work done for you?” The words fall flat and he regrets them the moment they slip off his tongue, but he can’t help it. He can’t stand it here anymore. He’d like nothing more than to be blackout drunk, and his mind is damn well trying to mimic that feeling as much as possible: block everything out, don’t think too hard, don’t think at all.
Maybe he can blink and it’ll all just go away.
“John,” Gale says again. He doesn’t seem to know what else to say. From his pocket he pulls out the crumpled piece of paper with John’s handwriting. He tosses it on the table. It’s been folded and refolded and balled up and smoothed out. It tells a whole story on its own.
John stares at it. “Yeah?”
Gale runs a hand through his messy hair. They both do nothing but look at the table for what feels like several minutes. Time has been fuzzy here, though. It could’ve been no longer than the blink of an eye and they’d never know. Gale makes a noise like he’s going to say something, but then doesn’t. John feels a strong hand grab his gently, hesitantly, like it’s not sure if it’s allowed to. When John lets his fingers curl around it, Gale squeezes tighter. And when John looks up again, Gale is on his knees in front of him.
A delicate copper ring is in his other hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger. A rustically beautiful thing, made out of strands of the copper wire that John had snagged for Gale’s radio. They’ve been carefully twisted and pressed flat around each other, sanded as smooth as could be managed with the resources Gale had.
John stares at it, his turn to not know what to say. His free hand reaches out to touch it but he pulls back. He looks at Gale, and he can’t for the life of him figure out what that facial expression is. Pain and hope, care and sadness, pleading and dejection. “Bucky,” he starts. “John. I-”
“I love you,” John blurts out.
Gale could cry. He won’t, but he could. The tired and relieved way that he smiles makes John want to cry, too. He missed Gale’s smile. His real smile, not the sure and confident way he made himself look for his men. The smile that was just for John.
“I… I know I said I’d buy you another one,” Gale says softly. “I still will. But, I thought maybe you’d like something to hold onto until then.” He takes John’s hand and slips the ring over his finger, even though they both know it can’t stay there. “I’m sorry. I just-”
“No,” John cuts him off. “No, it’s all on me. I was-”
“You were-”
“I just-”
“I know.”
“I didn’t even think about…” John sighs. “I didn’t realize how much I hurt you. I’ve felt so…” So what? So lost? So empty? So broken.
Gale nods. He knows. “I shouldn’t have taken it so personally,” he insists. He motions around them. “It’s this place.”
“I pushed you away.”
“I did, too.”
John whispers, “I thought I’d lost you.”
Gale shakes his head. “I love you too much.”
The universe knits itself back together, stitch by stitch.
John looks at the new ring on his finger, twists it around gently. It’s not the same, but it’s perfect anyways. “Can’t believe you made this.” He doesn’t say anything about how having this little piece of metal, a little piece of Gale, makes him feel whole again.
Gale squeezes his hand. “Couldn’t stand seeing you without it.” He doesn’t say anything about how terrified he’d been of John not wanting it anymore.
John reaches out and brushes Gale’s hair back out of his eyes. He feels overwhelmed with how beautiful Gale is, how perfect he is, how much love he has for this man. “I’m so sorry.”
Gale just nods, and then he leans forward and hugs John tight, pouring all of the hurt and the fear into one desperate motion that whisks it all away