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It’s quiet but not eerily so in the barracks – the breathing and snoring and beds creaking make it comforting if anything. Bucky stares at the bottom of the bunk over his and considers it against the many different silences of the past few weeks.
He should be asleep, by all possible accounts. His head is aching like an avalanche drumming down on a cottage as his body is screaming for long-needed rest now when his psyche feels safer than in ages, but his mind is wide awake and refuses to calm.
There’s a creak of wood over him, but Gale is so silent in his movements that he momentarily thinks he imagines a shadow in the dark before a weight of another person settles onto his bunk. Bucky opens his arm to create more space between himself and the edge of the bed on instinct. Buck slides into it with practiced ease, the distance of the weeks passed disappearing without a hitch, filling the empty space in Bucky too when he fits the two pieces of puzzle they are together.
“Buck.” Bucky can hear the exhaustion in his own voice as loud as the wonder. They’ve hugged and Gale has cleaned his cuts and they’ve been unable to stop staring at each other through all activities of the day as Bucky has been introduced to the camp and gotten more reunions with crews that he can count, but it still feels unreal when he wraps the arm now under Gale’s neck around his back and squeezes him closer.
Gale only humms in response. He’s pressed as close as physically possible, cold nose seeking Bucky’s neck and inhaling deeply, like breathing the air in the nooks of Bucky would bring them even closer together. A slender arm sneaks underneath Bucky’s torso and he finds himself in a tight embrace.
“Bucky,” Gale whispers to his neck and presses a chaste kiss on his jugular. Bucky shivers, and his heart aches in the best way. “John,” Gale continues, moving his lips to the other side of his neck. His hands move up and down John’s back like he was a new kind of fabric he was trying to make sense of. “Darlin’,” he breathes wetly to his collarbone, ducking to press his face against the general area of his heart this time and settles there. Bucky can feel how hard he’s fighting the sobs threatening to escape him, and it makes his throat close up too.
He closes his eyes, the waves of emotions making him feel alive and dead at the same time, and brings his right hand to Gale’s hair, tangling his fingers in it and petting it back as he presses his own lips to Gale’s forehead and keeps them there as his breathing slows.
They are not ready for words yet. The feelings are too overwhelming, the stories too gruesome; the relief and fear in a relentless tango that helds back their tongues from asking or telling. In the dark Gale can’t see John’s black eye and John can pretend like the cuts on Gale’s cheeks and bruises on his neck were the doings of a mind delirious with worst-case scenarios. Pressed together like this only the instant joy of being pressed close to a lover exists, nothing outside of the outlines of them has real importance.
“Buck.” He says it again, and it feels like the air flows to and from his lungs more than in weeks, as if the four letters were someone’s hands forcing him back to life in a way that makes him thankful despite the pain it brings. Gale exhales and lifts his face from his chest back against his chin and Bucky gets honest to god butterflies when familiar hands, gentle hands cup his cheeks and pull his face down enough for them to stare at each other in their small cocoon.
Gale caresses his freshly shaved cheeks with his fingers like he’s relearning his outlines. Bucky stares at him and feels his chest fill with so much emotion it threatens to crack him open. He focuses on willing his mind to believe that this is real; this is what he prayed for nights on end, that even if they were both shot like dogs in the yard tomorrow he still got to see Gale one more time, to lie with him one more time, to feel loved by him one more time, and there’s entire lifetimes in that alone he vows to be eternally thankful for.
They are sharing the same air, lips almost touching. Desire and desperation are so tightly intertwined in them that Bucky crazily thinks about throwing Gale to the table in the middle of the room and having him loudly and violently, everyone else in the room be damned. He knows he has to shift his mind from thinking about everything as if it was his last day on earth like he has for the past weeks; not let it go completely, they have stay realistic, but enough so that he can have a taste of the hope Gale represents – that even if he doesn’t survive the war, he can have the little life of having his other half close like this.
Gale seems to be fighting the same good fight behind his eyes as well, but despite popular beliefs, he’s the one who’s more immediate to fall to temptation when they’re like this. The hitch of need in his breath before he crosses the barely-there distance between them is maddening. First brush of lips, first reminder of how heavenly Gale manages to make brief moments of existence, and Bucky is a goner. He surrenders all other functions, thoughts, aspirations; he surrenders to the pain of prolonged fight, he surrenders to the pain to keep trying. Just a kiss upon his lips and he knows he’d crawl through the past two weeks a thousand more times if it kept bringing him here.
The kiss is tender and aflame and wet and uncoordinated and so utterly perfect Bucky has to bite Gale’s lips to keep from groaning deep in his chest. Their lips make addicting sounds as they connect, clicking and smacking and sliding, Gale’s arms are now around his neck as he climbs the length of his body with shivers along his back, and they’re both trying to be careful but unable to not be greedy now when the fountain of reasons for another breath is there for the taking. Bucky’s hands are wrapped around his lover’s middle and pulls him closer, closer, closer, palms creeping deeper and deeper under his shirt and feeling his muscles and lungs work and be alive under his skin.
It’s impossible to tell how long they indulge in each other – Bucky is concussed and exhausted and traumatized and so filled with simple joy in the same moment that he feels completely removed from the concept of time. Eventually the desperate kisses turn back to breathing together to catching their breath together to pressing closer together again, Buck pressing his face to the crook of his neck as their pulses come down little by little. Bucky’s hand runs absentmindedly up and down his back under his shirt in a soothing motion, and finally it feels like his mind and body are synching up, the weight of Gale half on top of him grounding him back to time and place, to his self . The last thing he remembers before going under is love, just love, in and around him, as Gale murmurs a happy little “ Bucky ” into his neck one more time.