these hurts of ours

Snafu doesn't sleep, if he can help it. Coffee and endless cigarettes dull the need, keeps him spinning in loops of silver daylight and gaslit nights. He's memorized the plaster cracks in his apartment, numbered the stains on every wall, charted the nocturnal courses of the cockroaches that come through them.

Eugene sleeps. Eugene sleeps with his eyes screwed tight against the dark, tangled bare-limbed in bedsheets older than the both of them. His spine presses in a curve against Snafu's thigh. Snafu smokes and keeps time in inhales and exhales of sour breath, feels Eugene's nightmares shudder through him, and regrets, obscurely, having only this to give him: a bare mattress and infested walls, when Eugene comes all this way, drags himself across state lines, just to sleep here next to him.

It doesn't help. Either of them. Snafu can't help either of them, neither the need that itches through his fingers with his pulse, nor the dreams that vibrate through Eugene's mind.

Eugene twitches and kicks, mutters and pleads and curses and yells. Snafu peers at him over the tip of his cigarette. Eugene's face twists and untwists itself. His knees pull into his chest.

The gaslamps outside lick the stripes down Eugene's cheeks golden. Snafu draws out his fingers from his fist as if he might wet his fingertips with them. He lingers. He could. He's allowed to. He doesn't. Smokes instead, unfurls out each breath until he chokes on it, watches his fingers float, stroking shadows.

Snafu wonders, idly, without much attachment to the fiction, at the surely spacious comfort Eugene must be afforded in his own home. Feather pillows, night breezes, the touch of clean sheets. The gentle quiet of it, and how many miles, how many years it must take to travel from that to the dark, the wet, the fear of Peleliu. How much shorter that journey must be, here, with the reminder of it next to him, fouling the room like a tasteless souvenir.

Eugene settles eventually; his face resolves like a natural progression. Snafu's smoked through his pack, and he hasn't got another, emptied it all in a dirty mug of ashy water next to the mattress. In his struggle, Eugene's turned his face towards him, hidden his face in Snafu's hip, and Snafu doesn't like that. Wants to see his face, wants the reminder of old pains he finds there, to remember why he keeps awake at night, guarding against demons far uglier and more damned than Eugene's bad dreams.

He moves down in shuffles of movement until they're nose to nose, Eugene's sleep-bruised eyelids still fluttering beneath his troubled brow. Snafu stares up at him under his lashes. It's a condition, this. They have words for these sicknesses he can't pronounce. It's unhealthful.

He pushes their heads together anyway, Eugene's clammy forehead against his hot, dry skin, and Eugene sighs, as if eased somehow. Snafu feels nothing but the lazy contempt for everything he always feels, but when Eugene's hand fumbles out of its knot of fingers and grips his, its a grip that asks him to stay. And that's something.

When exhaustion does collapse upon him, Snafu falls straight through into eternity. It helps that he has nothing, comes from nothing, wants nothing. Home is an alien fantasy as much as it is a blanket, a warm night, a stiff drink. He has no people in his past that he sees in his future. He has no places he wants to return to, and nowhere he wants to go.

And he misses the war. He misses the war with every passing day. Not the violence, though he was good at it; not the death, though it came easy for him, but the certainty, the easy sense of right. The purpose.

Four years he spent in that place, living and killing, learning, and he accumulated a set of skills that defined his person, that replaced his nature. But four years, that's nothing, not against the prospect of a lifetime, and now he has all this, and it's nothing, has no application, no relevance.

He's not like Eugene. Eugene's lived two lives, one before, one after. He's got ghosts in his past and phantoms in his future. He sees them at night. Shouts at them through his dreams, screams at death to stay the hell back.

Snafu's doesn't know what that's like. There were many ways of getting through the war, but the only one he figured out in time was to give himself over to it, so he did. He gave over everything: his faith, his past, his humanity. He abandoned who he was, who he'd ever hoped to be. He let the war have him and the war took him. Took him apart and used his parts locked in with others', crafted them all into the gears and wheels of something greater, something without flesh or pain or fear. Something made for the certainty of violence.

But then the Japs died and the war died and all its suddenly useless mechanisms were left to pull themselves apart, gather themselves back together. To find the hands that fit their pair, to let go of the ones that had fit into them. Cleaned and cut and armored in neat cotton, they emerged, man-shaped but forgetting what it means to be a man, to walk streets without fighting with shadows, to hear voices without waiting for screams, to be in darkness without thinking of silence. To eat with a fork, to sleep through the night, to bathe, to dress, to say please.

Eugene does these things still, a second nature, an easy instinct.

But Snafu was not made for living. He knows this with the certainty of a truth. He eats and breathes and sleeps and shits and this is something many others - countless others - can't say for themselves.

Living, though, is a deed for other people, better people, cleaner people, people fall into bed expecting to wake up the next day. He was made for other things: scavenging, surviving, scraping by death on the edge of a knife. He was made for war, and had he spent the rest of his life in war, he would have died young, but he would have died right.

But the war has survived him. He'd lived through it, but it wasn't he who had made it out in the end. His hands feel empty without their rifle, his calves bare without their spats, his head light and empty without its helmet. He misses the war every day, misses it in the bloodless gutters and birdsong daybreaks, misses it in each breath of clean air and each mouthful of clear water.

Being near to others helps. Being near Eugene helps the most. Eugene's hand on his shoulder feels almost like war, the press of his side almost like home, his cock in his ass almost like violence. They spent so long fit together, side by side: one working, ticking, killing thing. It fits to be with him. It fits to survive with him.

And he'll take for as long as he's allowed. That's been how he's lived, and he's never had thoughts of fairness before now, has never been on the painless side of harm: been capable of good, been the one to withhold it. It doesn't suit his instincts to be given choices. It doesn't suit his indifference to be given care. It eats at desire, scratches doubt into his mind, seeing the evidence of it, helping Eugene break: his imperfect choices, his insufficient care.

Eugene speaks only in barbs and knives during the day, saves his eloquence for the dreams at night, dreams that push at the lines of his sanity, blurring them with all the fear and pain and hate he can't feel awake.

How far that journey must be, without the reminder. How much harder it must be to hate, without the weight of his past next to him.

Snafu wakes without having dreamt. It might have been two minutes; it might have been two hours. The sky's still dark and Eugene's still asleep, still dreaming. Snafu watches.

He thinks maybe Eugene misses it too, the war, finds it lacking in every aspect of this ever-after neither of them expected to have. He thinks maybe Eugene was made for living once - made for lights and clear water and birdsong, not like him - but that maybe the war took that out of him and forgot to give it back.

Maybe Eugene was a man once, instead of a gearpiece. He must have been. He still has people who look at him, waiting, as if he's someone they know.

(They don't know him. No one knows any of them. The pieces of them that the war burned for fuel were the parts that they knew, these people, the folks at home. No one got that back, not even the good ones.)

Snafu was never going to make it, was always going to die an early death, by disease or by opiates or a knife in the dark. Appending stray mortars and a Jap bullet to that list didn't make a difference. He'll carry it with him the rest of his life and live on stolen time. He'll forever be a part of the war, the part that killed and waited to die. He was never made for living, but maybe Eugene was.

"You're awake," Eugene says. Eugene's eyes, the color of bruises, meet his on the pillow.

Snafu licks at the inside of his own mouth. "So are you, Sledgehammer," he accuses.

"Hm." Eugene's smile spreads shallowly. His eyelids dip shut and he slides forward til their mouths meet. It's a meager kiss, as far as their kisses go, which Snafu allows for a scant moment before he meets it with tongue, then teeth.

Eugene asks, "Do you have an answer for me?" The base of his thumb is pressed behind Snafu's ear, the rest of his fingers touching into his hair.

Pleasantly, he keeps Snafu from turning away, and he knows it. So Snafu avoids with other methods. "I think your mama would have quite a lot to say to me taking you away to be my pretty bride." He lets his inflection muffle the loathing in his voice, stretch it out long and slow until it sounds like a jocularity.

Eugene rolls his eyes. "I'm not asking you to marry me, man, just-"

"What, go steady?"

Eugene's hand moves absently along the side of Snafu's neck. Thumbs the boyishly smooth underside of Snafu's jaw, follows with his eyes. "Will you come with me?" he asks again and chases it with new reasons: "Florida's far enough away. No one will know either of us there. We can be anyone we want."

Snafu snorts disagreeably. "I don't run from no one, you know that."

"Not running," Eugene says. His eyes are sincere enough to hurt. "Starting over."

Eugene touches the dip of Snafu's throat with his fingertips. Tries to kiss him. Snafu stops him with his forehead. "You ain't need me around for that," he says.

"No," Eugene admits. The places where his skin touches Snafu's seem to burn. "But I do want you."

Snafu rages against a hope so miserable he feels it heating behind his eyes, so he closes them - once, twice, in slow blinks - so Eugene doesn't have to see. Wants to crawl inside Eugene's skin and never look at him again. Wants to hide, wants to run, hasn't anywhere to go. Tells Eugene lowly, "You don't have to, you know."

Eugene meets his eyes. Frowns. "What do you mean?"

"You can still turn around, you can get out," Snafu tells him, the quietest of the truths he has to offer. Snafu pulls away and moves so that his arms are braced on either side of Eugene's head, and now he's the one who can't look away, now he's the one who has to see. "Find a girl, forget, move on."

"I don't want a girl. Do you?" Eugene is confused; he thinks he's being selfish, rejecting his family, living in sin. Eugene thinks that they are the same, two soldiers leaned together to keep each other up. He thinks this is fair. He thinks this is harmless. He hasn't had to hear himself scream at night.

Eugene doesn't know selfishness. Snafu knows selfishness, knows it like a comfort, a third parent, would have kept holding its hand but that Eugene's fit better. He needs to let go. He's known this, known it so long but buried it so deep it's grown roots, not just true anymore, but real: "I'm fucked up, Gene. But you're not."

His words are long on his voice but stuttering, halting, because he never wanted to say this. Never thought he'd have to, never thought he had a better nature to prevail upon, much less do battle with. He would have kept Eugene until this ugly limbo claimed them both. If it had been up to him, neither of them would have lived to see this moment.

The last of the truths, then, the one he believes so heavily it cracks his voice: "You deserve better than this."

Eugene blinks. His hand comes up, lays across the back of Snafu's elbow. Beautifully misunderstanding: "I deserve better than you?"

Snafu laughs because he's out of words. Crumples with the violence of it. Eugene thinks this is it. That he's at the end of a long road, that Snafu's the gold at the foot of a rainbow.

He thinks he's happy. He doesn't know. He doesn't know the gold is poison - that Snafu's poison, a rotted corpse at the bottom of a well, dead for so long he's had time to get used to it.

Eugene doesn't smile. Maybe it's the tears, maybe it's the way Snafu's shaken himself apart, pieces again, collapsed against Eugene's chest like an unbound sack of bones.

Eugene doesn't know. Thinks Snafu's a cure, thinks the war made him sick and Snafu's getting him better. Doesn't know Snafu's no good, a cure for an ill that's only another sickness in the shape of a man. Eugene touches the back of his head, scratches light fingers into the scalp, presses with his palm as Snafu laughs against his neck.

Snafu bites - teach Eugene to keep a monster in the sheets. It's not a hard bite - barely any blood - but Eugene hollers just the same, shoves Snafu from his chest and flips him, pulls his wrists back along his shoulderblades, pushing. Snafu squirms, mostly for breath, keeps laughing - it's easier than breathing now, just keeps coming up, like vomit, like blood.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Eugene hisses, shoves a hand up along the underside of Snafu's jaw, fingers slipping on the bone, prying into Snafu's mouth, pressing down on Snafu's tongue. Snafu gags, bucks up harder, wails like a moan because that's Eugene's cock nudging against his balls, because Eugene thinks this is some game, some demented part of Snafu's personality breaking to the surface like a breech birth.

He wants to close his teeth over Eugene's fingers, make him bleed again, make him understand through pain what he won't understand through reason, wants to suck those fingers down, swallow Eugene whole, make him a part of him that will never leave, never hurt, never scream at horrors in the middle of the night.

"Fuck me," he slurs, giggling, gagged still, but then Eugene moves his hand, wraps wet fingers around Snafu's throat.

"Say that again, Shelton? Didn't quite catch it."

Snafu pushes against the hand so hard his breath stops, and in one sightless moment, he repeats, "Fuck me."

"Jesus Christ, man," Eugene mutters. Snafu pulls his knees up under him and rocks back, punishingly. "Okay, okay," Eugene says, when it's clearly not, it's anything but.

His ass is still slick from before, and Eugene's the one who made it so, so he tucks right in, easy. Eugene's let go of his wrists to better grab at his hips, pulls him back onto his dick with a snap of flesh that sounds in the stagnant air. Snafu helps it all along, squeezing down on Eugene's cock in time with his own, making himself tight, making it a hurt more than a pleasure.

"Fucking loosen up, Snafu," Eugene growls, fucks him in shallow shoves. Finds Snafu's supporting hand, laces it into his own, and that's the stupid thing that does it for him, one last giggle seizing into a whine while Eugene pumps it out, goes on long enough that Snafu does go slack on him, lets him gather his body up into his lap for the last few, feeling the shape of him change as he spills and then goes still.

Eugene breathes out hard against the back of Snafu's shoulder. "Christ," he says. "You're so fucking - Christ." Bites. Snafu flinches more from surprise than pain, but he knows he'll have broken skin.

"Ow," he says as Eugene sets him back down, a fistful of sheet already in his hand, wiping at his sticky stomach.

Eugene snorts. "Serves you right," he drawls. Kisses the mark. Turns Snafu around, pushes him back. Looming, then pressing down. "Now we match." Kisses him.

Snafu opens his mouth and takes, never was much good at gentle, so it's just a smash of mouths and teeth. He keeps his eyes open until they burn. Eugene's meet him. Doesn't look away until sleep steals him off.

Snafu considers that, head on the crook of an elbow, as he watches Eugene drift. Eugene thinks they match. He thinks Snafu is the same to him, just a bit broken, just as easily patched. That there's a place for him, in Eugene's gentle vision of the future. He doesn't know, Snafu thinks. He doesn't know how bad it gets. How bad Snafu would let it get, if it meant he could keep Eugene with him.

Eugene jerks. The first of the nightmares, easy as clockwork. Kicks Snafu in the shin, mumbling, "No, no stop," as if they ever would, here, with Snafu around, a sore Eugene's mistaken for a salve, a reminder of the bad things, a weight that drags him from safety.

Snafu touches the bitemark on Eugene's neck. It's already scabbed over. Eugene moans like he's being strangled, and Snafu knows the hurt his hands do, but he keeps it there because he wants to. Because he'll take until he can't justify it anymore. And the dream passes, and Eugene seems to calm, his face smoothing out, looking more like a young man again instead of a prisoner of war.

Takes his hand away.

But at least there are no hurts that he can give to Eugene that time will not cure.

He's only got two shirts, and he's got to wear one. The other fits into his seabag, along with his other pair of socks and his cash and his letters. He picks up his dogtags. Sets them down, picks them up again, holds them in his palm for a long, cowardly moment, closes his fingers over them. Puts them over his head, but tucks them under his shirt so that they make less sound. They'll always say who he is. They'll jangle like plague bells, so others will know too.

Doesn't look at Eugene again. Turn into salt if he does.

It's before dawn when he leaves. Dark on the edge of light.