Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

As the horizon swallows the daylight earlier with each passing evening, the days feel less like a linear progression and more like a closing net. It reminds Gale of the time he spent at Kearney Field—listening to the radio delivering news of an expanding front, falling asleep with the dread of a deployment date he knew was coming but couldn't yet place. He knows no better now, only that his time is running out, regardless of his plans. 

He still hasn't told John. Confession has shifted from a matter of willingness to one of sheer capability, and the stakes of breaking silence only climbed higher by the day. Gale finds himself unable to brace for the reaction of John, who’s been settled into this provisional life they’ve built. To John, it could be a disappointment or an ambush just as it was to Gale. Or, perhaps more unnervingly, the opposite. Either thought makes it all but impossible for Gale to keep down anything he consumes. 

By practice, he has learned to cover his tracks, rendering his inner turmoil invisible. John, accustomed to Gale’s inclination toward keeping his own counsel, mistakes it for his old reticence. Gale watches the erosion of the calendar with a growing numbness. It holds until one morning, John looks up at the ceiling while finishing breakfast, and mentions the leak in the roof. 

“Noticed it last night when it rained,” he says, gulping down his coffee before standing. “Probably just some loose shingles. We should get to it this weekend, but if it rains again before then—”

“I'll take care of it,” Gale says without really thinking.

John grimaces. “I only told you because I knew you’d try to climb up there yourself, you dodo.” He carries his dishes to the sink, speaking over his shoulder. “It’s a two-man job, Buck. Let it wait.”

“Sure,” Gale offers, providing the answer he knows will satisfy him. John grins, apparently convinced. “Good. I’m runnin’ late.”

His parting touch lingers. His hand cupping the nape of Gale's neck, his thumb brushing over the spot where the claiming bite has long since faded into a scar. Gale swallows, just to test the phantom of collar tightening around his throat, forged as much by his own surrender as by John’s affection.

By midday, it rains.

Small puddles start to bloom near the fireplace. Gale stays curled in the armchair; lunch is a chore he doesn’t have to perform while John is gone, and it’s easier to simply endure the hunger. He listens to the rhythmic tapping and expects it to lull him into a nap, but the rain is too cold and insistent. It carries the sharp, loam scent of rotting leaves, a smell that drags the ghost of his father’s house into the room. His old man would’ve been barking orders by now, hungover and agitated by the slightest sound, even the plink of raindrops. Gale wonders what the man would say in a few months, when it becomes impossible to look at Gale and overlook his designation. He wonders about his mother, too, though he can’t recall much of her. Strangely, what he remembers most is the low tune she used to sing while she bathed him. Lately, he drifts back to those childhood fragments more often than he cares to. The irony isn't lost on him; he finally found kinship in a memory, only for it to reemerge as a prophecy. 

The rain downgrades to a persistent drizzle after a couple hours. Gale gathers the tools and drags the ladder from the side of the house to the front. The roofline cuts the blue sky like a dagger. It feels like the high ground he used to command—a time of clear missions and an unshakable sense of self. He steps onto the ladder, testing his grip on the rung. It’s wet, treacherous, but manageable. Or it should be. The task turns into an ordeal the moment dizziness factors in, making the ground below tilt and swim. His palms are slick with sweat despite the bite of the cool air, his pulse drumming in his ears.

He keeps climbing. Rung by rung, he forces his limbs upward. The light’s not entirely gone when he reaches the top, hauling himself over the edge onto the sloped roof. The wind hits him immediately, cutting through his thin shirt. It clears the fog of nausea, shocking his system into clarity. 

Catching his breath, he looks down at the property spread out below. The yard is no longer the dilapidation he’d found in the summer. He’d cleared the deadwood and the choking vines; the sumac along the fence line has bled into a deep sienna, and the marigolds he’d put in by the porch are shocks of ochre against the darkening soil. He’d never had so much time for himself, so he’d put it to good use. It had felt right, bringing something back to life instead of dropping hell onto a landscape he could never see clearly from the clouds. He’d thought he didn’t miss the latter a bit, but when he leans forward to reach for the loose shingles, he feels heavy in a familiar way, akin to the sluggish pull of a fort lifting off. What's taken root in him shouldn’t weigh enough to shift his center of gravity, yet he feels unbalanced, loaded, as if carrying a live bomb in the bay, and he sees the scorched earth waiting for the moment he has to salvo it.

He stills on the roof, caught between decisions while feeling as though he has none left to make. 

Never in his life has he been this indecisive. Not during the chaos of the war, not even when he walked away from Marge to come here. The only moment that came close was the night before they left Kelly Field, when John had asked for his permission to court him. It feels like a lifetime ago, John being nervous, hopeful, yet simmering with a restless energy, as if he were ready to give an argument and braced for a fight. As if he believed he had to convince Gale to desire him. But it was never a matter of Gale not wanting him. He had wanted John enough to look into those eyes and see the rest of his life laid out like a flight plan. They were both newly promoted officers, and Gale had never felt bigger, more capable, than he did in that uniform. Yet even then, he knew if he allowed John to take his hand, he would eventually lose everything else just to be the one thing that belonged to him. He couldn’t give it a chance.

All the effort had been for nothing. The distance he’d maintained to preserve his own sovereignty is forfeited. Standing on the precipice of a future he didn’t choose, he’s trapped on a path he carved himself. 

Except there are other ways. He could speak to John, frankly and bravely, and declare that this was never the deal. He could pack a bag and vanish into the treeline, slipping away like his mother. He could reclaim the autonomy he’d possessed before John ever laid eyes on him. But even as these thoughts flicker to life, he knows he won’t follow through. He has already ceded too much ground, allowing John to carve a home into the marrow of his existence. To leave now wouldn't just be an escape—it would be an amputation. To excise the life they’ve built would be to leave himself hollowed out, bleeding into the wild.

And Gale is no stranger to the wild. A few months of domestication haven't stripped that from him. The real consequence, he’s aware, would be the wreckage he’d leave behind for John—and he isn't certain he could live with it.

He gives himself a moment, one hand grounding against the wet shingles, before reaching for the sodden cedar that’s stuck on the roof. He pries it up with the same violence he used to pull stumps in the prison camp. Another project to keep his body hard and ready in case a march is called. The thought brings a grim, dry amusement as he hammers the new nails home. It takes longer than it should, his fingers stiff with cold, but he has always been good at tethering his hands to labor when his mind is occupied elsewhere. 

By the time he lowers himself back to the ladder, the drizzle has tapered to almost nothing and the light has gone flat and grey. He is nearly at the bottom—close enough to feel foolish for his caution—when he looks down to gauge the distance to the ground.

It’s a mistake. A brownout leaves his head ringing, sending the world into a tailspin. The yard sways into a muddy blur. He reaches for the side rails, but his fingers find only empty air as the rung vanishes from beneath his shoes. There is a half-second of weightless lucidity where the sky and the ground swap places, a mid-air stall.

Then the impact comes, fast and absolute.

Gale lands hard on his back in the wet grass, the ladder clattering down beside him. The dusky sky hangs above, indifferent. He tries to draw a breath, but his lungs won’t answer. The grey bleeds inward from the edges, narrowing to a single dim point, and the yard, the house, and the weight beneath his ribs all go quiet.

When Gale comes to, he touches his stomach before he remembers why he has to. Before he remembers the roof, or any of that resolves itself into sequence, his hand is already there, palm flat against his abdomen, pressing. Searching.

Nothing tells him anything. It's too small for that; too new, too quiet, barely a fact yet. He doesn't know what he's feeling for, having avoided feeling it the whole time. His body offers him no signs but the dull throb of his own pulse beneath his hand.

Slowly, he becomes aware of other things. The faded paint of the ceiling in the bedroom. The familiar weight of their mattress beneath him. His clothes, changed, replaced with something dry and detergent smelling. He reaches down, brushing the inside of his thigh through the fabric. Feels clean texture against his fingers that are warm, limber again. It doesn’t count as sufficient evidence. But he knows that it’s still in him. With him.

Detecting no significant pain, he tries to sit up, only for the sting hiding in his back immediately wrests a noise out of his throat.

“Hey—hey. Take it easy.”

John materializes in the doorway. He’s holding the telephone receiver, the cord stretched taut from the hallway, and his face is pallid. His shirt clings to him in dark patches at the armpits. His hair is rain-slickened, mud and grass dried on the fabric over both his knees. Gale wonders distantly how long he was outside. How long he lay there before John found him.

“How are you feeling?” John asks solicitously, then adds when Gale fails to manage a reply. “It’s alright. Gimme a second. I'm getting the doctor on the line—”

“No,” Gale says shortly. His own voice sounds strange to him. He manages to scoot up until his back finds the headboard. “No doctor.”

John’s brow knits. “Why?”

“‘M fine.”

“I just found you passed out there, Buck.”

John says it in an even, measured voice. He sounds the way he does when he's working not to sound like what he actually is.

“Not injured.”

John just looks at him. The same look that, over the months in prison camp, suggests he thinks Gale’s buried his head in the sand and is unfit to assess the situation or make decisions in his own best interest. Before that, it used to be the way he’d interpret weather from a cockpit, not trusting what the instruments read, going by what the air pressure does against the skin of his face. 

Something in Gale's features must be showing clearly, a transmission he's not trying to send. John's jaw tightens. His eyes go hard, locked down. He disappears from the doorway. Gale hears the faint mumble of an apology to whoever was on the line and then a harsh click of the receiver. John comes back into the room. Moves to the window, then back, like he’s trying to find the higher ground. He stops in the middle of the floor, feet away from the bed.

“What’s the matter here?”

Gale starts, too quickly, “I’m—”

“Stop saying you're fine,” John says. “For Christ's sake, Buck. Do you have any idea—” He stops. Drags a hand back through his hair, still damp at the temples. “I came home and you were just—you were on the ground. You weren’t moving. Weren’t responding for shit. I thought you were—” 

He grabs at his mouth briefly, fingers digging into the sides of his face, like he's physically catching the rest of the sentence before it can get out. Gale waits with a twisted expectation that John might lash out at him, crush him with fury, sparing him from being the sole prisoner of guilt. But when John lowers his hand, his face has moved into something Gale recognizes as its own kind of hurt. 

“I know you're unwell,” John continues, his voice dropping an octave as the anger bleeds out into a raw, tired resignation. “I can see that much. If you can't tell me what's wrong yourself, then let someone who knows what they're looking at come take a look. That's all I'm asking.”

His shoulders are set in a surrendering hunch. Yet his claim on Gale’s vulnerability is bruising—the way he holds his own heart out in the light, expecting Gale to do the same. Gale feels a sudden, sharp impulse to sink his teeth into that openness, to mar it or tear it.

“I know what’s wrong with me,” he says.

“What do you mean?” John asks, bewildered.

Thing is, Gale had rehearsed this. For weeks, he had circled the suspicion in his mind like a splinter he wasn't ready to pull. But beneath the hesitation is an older instinct. A feeling that the telling should have been unnecessary. He feels as though John should simply know, the same way John seems to intuit most unspoken things about Gale.

This line of conversation was once easy, when they were curled up against the sub-zero chill, back-to-front in a cramped bunk with hanging towels for a pathetic shred of privacy. John’s hands would spread flat across Gale's stomach, his nose nudging Gale’s nape, rambling about how he’d set it right when he got out. There had been an access to freedom at John’s fingertips even when reality became too bleak for him. He’d picture an unnamed omega and the prosperous life they were going to build while Gale lay silent, acquiescing to his flagrant scenting. Gale had catalogued John’s fantasy more carefully than John ever had. John, who was usually half-gone by the time the words came out, drunk on exhaustion or whatever rot-gut they’d managed to scrounge that week.

There was mercy in that. In the unworded agreement that what happened between lights-out and reveille required no accounting in the daylight. That as long as neither held the other to a particular version of the future, they could both keep living inside the same one.

Gale looks at John across the room and finds, at the end of all his rehearsed sentences, he has nothing. No words feel equal to imparting the fundamental shift in their reality. 

So he stops trying to find them. He simply bares his face, drops the tension held in the muscles around his eyes and mouth, opening himself up, and lets John read into him.

John reads into him.

It takes only seconds for the realization to click into place. John has always been fast at this—faster than he’s probably aware of, faster than Gale has ever allowed him to be.

“Gale,” he says then.

His voice is rough, jagged at the edges. It’s not delivered in doubt. A flash of pure, solar wonder crosses his face, followed immediately by a crashing wave of confusion.

“How—” He stops, blinking away half-formed thoughts. “How long have you known?”

“A month or so,” Gale says.

The number lands. John squints, his mind visibly racing through the arithmetic, their shared table and shared bed. Searching for the moments where Gale had held this secret alone while he was inches away.

“A month,” he huffs. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

It's a fair question, one that anyone would ask. And still something in Gale recoils from the directness of it. The slight hardening in John's voice lives near enough to an accusation to trigger that old animal instinct to go flat and unreadable—to offer nothing that can be used against him. He breathes through the constriction in his chest.

“I wasn't sure,” Gale manages. “Still ain’t. Didn't see the point in saying something before I knew.”

John falls quiet, seemingly grappling with the idea that Gale wasn't withholding out of distrust, but was waiting until he could present a fact rather than a fear. It isn’t good enough, though; Gale can tell by the rigidity of John’s expression. He should’ve known that John is prone to claiming anything Gale had to give, in whatever condition it arrives, even the skeleton of a truth.

“Before you knew what?” John asks, his voice tight. “Before you decide what to do with it?”

“Bucky—”

“Jesus,” John snaps. He spins away so suddenly that Gale flinches, half-expecting him to bolt out the door and leave Gale swaddled in the sheets. But John just paces the small radius of the room like he’s on a short leash. “Should've known. You wouldn't even look at that damn pie.” His voice drops, the fury guttering into raw anguish. “And your scent. You smell so fucking—” He stops mid-stride as if he’s hit a wall at full speed. “Were you ever gonna tell me? If you’d fallen higher, or harder, and—”

Gale cuts him off before the spiral can take hold. “Don’t go there, Bucky.” 

John lets out a harsh, scraping laugh, exasperated. He laces his fingers behind his head and tips his face toward the ceiling. “Well, God, Gale. Where the hell am I supposed to go?”

Come here, Gale thinks. Says it aloud before his pride can veto the impulse.

John’s face twists in a scoff, a mask of hurt wearing the costume of irritation. He stays where he is for a moment, and Gale thinks of a dog standing in the rain outside a door, dignified in its misery. But he moves at length. Comes to the bedside first and works through his own resistance, and then the resistance loses, and John drops heavily onto the corner of the mattress. He sits with his back arched, elbows to his knees, turning his head to watch Gale. The lines on his neck are deep in the low light. It's the angle of his gaze that catches Gale somewhere undefended, the same way it catches him in a car whenever John glances sideways at a red light to check on him. Gale almost misses it when John speaks.

“Do I still remind you of your dad?”

The question seems to arrive from nowhere, yet Gale's mind connects the logic of it without his full registration. He doesn't have to go far to find it. John conjures his father most reliably when he drinks out on the porch. It sends Gale back to the years before his father stopped bothering hiding the bottles from his kids. There are other things, too. Things Gale has never quite held up to the light long enough to examine clearly. 

“Sometimes,” he concedes.

John bows his head, his knuckles pressing into the mattress.

“That what's kept you doubting?” 

It’s been a long time since Gale first told him that he's like Gale’s father, and John had received it the way he received most hard things that came from Gale—wearing the comparison like an insignia, another propeller pinned to his collar. It had spared Gale the imperative of giving shape to the parts he can’t bring himself to say: that John reminds him of the good things, too. The worldly, shrewd intelligence. The open, unabashed passion. The latter in spite of the former. Gale adores those parts of him—how he knows exactly how the world works and chooses to be loud and feeling anyway. He wants John to keep them. It had never been the reason Gale withheld things from or against him.

“It’s not what this’s ‘bout,” Gale says. “’S not about you. I just…” 

He pauses. And in the pause something clarifies—a runway emerging from morning fog, slow and then all at once. “I have to make the decision by myself.”

John is quiet for a moment. He rubs his nose hard against the fabric of his shoulder. “Yeah. I know,” he mutters. “I’m sorry, Buck. I—I didn’t mean to push you.”

“You didn’t.” Gale reaches up, touching John’s cheek. The skin is ruddy and wind-rough. He turns John’s face toward his. “You’re not.”

It feels like a gravity—the force that finally pulls John all the way onto the bed. Gale hadn't realized how cold he was until the heat of John’s body huddled alongside him, his head dropping into the curve of Gale’s shoulder, his arms sliding beneath Gale’s ribs to hold him tight. Even months ago, neither of them would have folded so easily. It astounds Gale how long it took to dismantle the walls between them; the demolition now looks like nothing so much as rebuilding.

“And have you decided?” John asks, his voice tenuous.

“I don't know yet,” Gale says, his fingers combing through John’s sweaty hair. Which is true, or was true, before he woke up. It seems his body is beginning to answer the question ahead of him. He's less unsure now than he was a month ago. He isn’t ready to say that, though. “Do you want it?”

Under his arms, the muscled span of John’s back goes tensely still.

“Do I—” he rears back, staring at Gale in disbelief. “C’mon. You can’t just ask me that.”

“I want to know what you want.”

John laughs, a helpless, grimacing sound. “Jesus. You’re a menace, Buck.”

Gale doesn’t relent. He holds John’s eyes and waits. John holds out for exactly as long as he’s able—which isn't long at all. The need to tell Gale everything mostly outruns his pride.

“I want it,” he says eventually, low and certain.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah?” John repeats it back, incredulous. “Of course I’d want it, Buck.”

Gale isn’t sure what his face is showing. Surprise. Bafflement. John is already taking his hand, the one cradling John’s head. His voice is immensely fond despite the hurting look in his eyes. “I love you. I'd want everything from you—anything from you. Don't you know that?”

And this, Gale realizes, is something John feels Gale should simply know. Gale supposes he does, in the idea of knowing a constellation is there even when the clouds move in. He’s been oriented by it, even if it’s never occurred to him to name it. He has never felt about anything the way he feels about John. Didn't realize there could be an epitome of a feeling this enormous. 

He blinks against the heat building behind his eyes. John shifts, cupping Gale’s face, his thumbs moving beneath Gale’s eyes with a gentleness that seems impossible for such large hands. Slow, deliberate. Like he's trying to reach something just beneath the surface. Like proximity alone isn't ample and he needs some other way in.

“I’ve loved you for so long I don’t remember a time I wasn’t,” John whispers. He presses their foreheads together, the side of his nose brushing Gale’s, and Gale feels himself coming apart when John asks, barely above a breath: “Don’t you see it, babe? Don’t you see it by now?” 

At this distance, only the close details of him come into focus. The blue of his eyes, the faint lines at their corners. Gale answers, with more faith than he knew he possessed.

“I do,” he says. “I see it now.”

Gale agrees to the house call in the end. John needs something concrete to work with. Something that can be accomplished. So Gale says yes, mostly for that.

They don't have a family doctor, but John has managed to produce one through a series of phone calls while Gale was still sleeping. One with a reputation for both his skills and tight lips. The doctor is a gray-templed beta carrying a black bag worn soft at the hinges. He has a steady handshake and the practiced neutrality of a man who has seen enough not to be surprised by the configurations people find themselves in. He doesn't comment on the house, or on John, or on any of the situations. Gale finds he doesn’t mind the stranger as much as he assumed he would.

“I can wait outside,” John says once the doctor settles into the room and begins opening his bag. “Give you some room.”

He lingers by the door, fidgeting with his fingers. Gale finds the thought of John being uncomfortable about leaving him with a stranger oddly intimate rather than possessive or controlling.

“Stay if you want,” Gale says.

John stays. Watches everything the doctor does with vigilant attention, arms folded against the window. He’s a large animal trying to take up less space, barely containing the need to be useful.

The examination is gentle and unhurried nonetheless, and the particulars of it—the cool press of gloved hands, the routine taking of pulse, the inventory of symptoms—are ordinary enough to feel strange against the enormity of what they're cataloguing. After Gale has answered enough questions for the doctor to triangulate his assumption, he produces a Pinard horn and attempts, briefly, to find what is not yet there to be found. He sets the horn aside without disappointment. The absence of a heartbeat at this stage means nothing except that it’s early, he explains. Ten weeks, give or take. It is the most probable figure. The news feels like something heard through a wall—the number reaching Gale without the weight. In front of the doc, Gale tries not to go back and dig up what they did ten weeks ago, which night that has to be the one.

Everything Gale presents tells nothing wrong, and the doc says so plainly, which is the thing Gale most needed to hear and didn't know how to ask for. He gives his orders before closing his bag: real rest, inarguably no roofs nor ladders. Iron-rich food. Milk. A few things to watch for. Gale should contact him again in a month, or go to a clinic, given he’d spent half his life on strict suppressants. He addresses this to Gale instead of the alpha. Gale thinks he might begin to trust this man.

John walks him to the door. Gale hears their voices in the hallway but can't make out the words. The front door opens and closes. Then John's footsteps returning. He comes back into the room and doesn't immediately speak. Just sits at the edge of the bed with his hands in his pockets.

“There's also—” He pauses to swallow. Taps his foot before he notices and stops it. “I asked him about the other options, too.” He holds Gale's eyes, steady. “There are ways to do it. I've got names. It'd be handled right, somewhere clean. I want you to know it's there. If that's what you want.”

He says it succinctly. Practically. As if he's briefing someone on available routes, on extraction options, on contingencies mapped out in advance. Since the first day they met, it’s been John’s most loyal trait. To have won him a bike, to have scrounged the radio parts, to have thrown himself in front of a gun, to have—waited for him, so that Gale’s choices are genuine, not just theoretical.

And when those choices are laid out plainly like that, the one path forward is suddenly unequivocal.

“Okay,” he tells John. “But I don't want that.”

Something in his chest settles, sealed shut, yet he feels lighter as the words leave his mouth. It won't be easy—it’ll be damn hard—but the alternative is impossible for Gale to even imagine taking on. He could attribute his decision to biology, to a nature that demands he nurture something he didn’t ask for. But deeper down, Gale knows he’s never going to not keep it—the only tangible evidence that proves, just by existing, that their ephemeral lives once converged.

John nods at the floor. He twists his lips into what Gale supposes is a grin, but the attempt collapses when Gale touches him on his arm. He doesn't make much sound. His face simply crumbles before he turns away, his shoulders racked with the sheer force of staying silent. The sight strikes Gale with a wave of unexpected, fierce tenderness, his hand moving in slow, steady circles across the wide, trembling span of John’s hunched back.

After a moment John clears his throat and wipes the back of his hand across his face and turns around. His eyes are red at the rims, but he smiles. “Alright,” he says. 

“Alright,” Gale agrees.

Changes in daily life announce themselves through trivialities Gale never anticipated. He should have, in hindsight; and he might have had second thoughts if he’d comprehensively known what he was signing up for.

With the overhaul season starting and the planes mostly grounded, John comes home earlier from the airfield. He seems to have brought that maintenance mindset back with him. At first, he behaves reasonably; Gale accepts the extra pillows and the mysterious disappearance of the hallway rug. He allows John to carry the laundry basket to the basement and hand Gale things from shelves he could reach himself. Tries to cede ground without it feeling too much like capitulation. It’s at least new for him, to be pampered outside of the infirmary. But by week two, the novelty wears thin when he tries to open the lid of a pickle jar and John snatches it from him. Gale has been pregnant for the last two months, during which time he repaired the porch and re-hung a door. His body hasn’t fundamentally changed its nature just because they’ve given the occupant a name.

All of Gale’s protests are overruled by John’s self-appointed role as medic. It’s irritating, and would almost be ridiculous, if it weren't for the other problem.

He knows the practical literature on wartime omega management—the way pregnancy amplifies the biological signaling between a pair. He understood it as a theory; he didn't expect it to be disruptive to his daily functioning. John passes behind him in the kitchen, one hand finding Gale's hip as he moves through the narrow space, and Gale's entire train of thought stops—like a watch dropped in water. Something has recalibrated his baseline to register John’s scent, turned up a dial he didn't know had settings beyond its default. The smell John leaves in their room makes somewhere deep in Gale’s hindbrain want to prostrate itself, desire strung through him, drawn taut. He catches himself, more than once, waking up from an afternoon nap, face down with John’s pillow between his legs, his hips humping and his cunt clenching in wasted effort, his head hazy, thoughts burned off to nothing. 

It becomes untenable, and Gale has never been one to approach a problem from the side. But the passes he makes don't meet with the usual enthusiasm. John explains, with an air of calm certainty that makes Gale want to tip a chair over, that he doesn't think it would be good for the baby. Gale stares.

“That something the doctor told you?”

“I know enough.”

“You know enough,” Gale repeats. “About my body.”

John has the decency to look uncertain and apologetic, but not enough to move off his position. The matter has been settled in whatever internal tribunal John has already ruled in, and he won't be compromised. So this is what Gale gets—John's mouth and fingers, offered with infuriating tenderness, which is nearly worse than nothing at all.

“You’re killin’ me,” John says, kneeling between Gale’s spreading legs that hang off the foot of the bed, his voice low and garbled as his mouth finds its work. His tongue flattens, pressing slow, and then focusing, pushing in just so. Gale’s thighs jerk and cinch around John's head hard without meaning to. “So hot for it. Like you've never been touched—” the words slur together and Gale realizes with mortification it’s because he’s unwilling to let John pull back enough to form a full sentence, his breath grazing Gale's pelvis. “—all while you're carrying my pup. Jesus Christ.”

It drives Gale crazy when John talks like that. Gale’s barely started to show and John’s already become insufferable about it. He refuses to notice it without remarking on it, enamored and reverent in a way that makes Gale's neck warm, sweat gathering behind his knees. And it feels deeply wrong, looking down the sweat-damp line of his body and seeing John’s dark hair between his legs, moving, and the new roundness of his stomach obscuring the lower part of the sight. Gale’s guts quiver from trying hard not to come at the shameless nature of it. But John hooks two fingers in alongside his mouth, opening him, gives him several quick shallow thrusts while his lips close around the peak and suck, and Gale's hand finds the bedsheet and twists and the orgasm arrives without further negotiation—his hips lifting clean off the mattress, the pleasure so dense and total it whites out his vision at the edges.

As the year wanes, shadows in the garden grow long and permanent, the cold settling into the floorboards overnight and staying. The house begins to smell like frost and woodsmoke. And pine, as one morning Gale comes downstairs to find John standing in the living room with his coat still on and needles on his shoulders, looking at a six-foot spruce he has apparently erected in the corner by the window while Gale was sleeping.

“It was on the curb,” John says.

It had not been on the curb; it’s far too lush for that. Gale doesn't say so. What he says is: “Do we have ornaments?”

As it turns out, they do. A basket from the five-and-dime was left in the basement by the house’s former owner, neglected by John since the day he moved in. They spend the better part of the afternoon remedying the naked tree. John insists on managing the upper branches, which Gale accepts without argument—partly because it's not worth the debate, and partly because the way John stretches to reach the high ones provides a view Gale isn't complaining about.

“You're staring,” John says, not looking down. Pleased with himself.

“’M supervising,” Gale says without missing a beat.

He hasn't asked John about the holiday—whether they have a joint plan, or whether John has his own one that Gale is adjacent to. He thinks about going home with John, if that’s what John wants, but then there would be no disguising their relationship. At three months along, the swell of him is low and definite beneath his clothes, unmistakable to the eyes of another omega. He doesn't sit well with the idea of being a lumpy imposition in someone else's home, with no ground of his own to stand on, even though nothing in this house is really in his name either.

The call that settles the question comes a week before Christmas while they are having breakfast.

John gets to the phone. He always does—it's his number, his reflex. Good thing that it seldom rings; Gale wouldn't even know how to address himself if he picked it up while John wasn't home.

Across the way, John’s silhouette goes still in the hallway. Gale hears him say, quietly, hi, ma.

Gale knows John hasn't spoken to his mother, at least not since the summer. It’s a mutual distance that Gale has only begun to understand. Back in the Stalag, when John told him his mother hadn't forgiven him for enlisting, Gale remembers thinking that he would have. That he’d have written every day if all he could do was wait at home. But waiting, he’s come to realize, is truly another way of being at war, a series of still frames and redacted letters, frozen and jagged.

He takes his coffee to the bedroom. Pulls the door shut and sits on the bed. Outside the window, the garden is a uniform gray, and the bare branches of the elm spread a fine network of twigs against the sky. The call runs long. His coffee goes cold on the nightstand and eventually the murmur of John's voice stops. Gale waits another minute. 

John is in the armchair when Gale returns to the living room, staring into the middle distance. He doesn't register Gale until a hand is placed on his shoulder. John’s hand comes up automatically, closing over Gale's; his thumb finds Gale's knuckles and moves across them in a slow, rhythmic stroke.

“Told my ma we’re not coming home for Christmas.”

“Oh,” Gale says. The relief arrives before he can intercept it—immediate and guilty. The warmth of it is followed closely by the recognition of the subject in the sentence. “Oh,” he says again.

“Yeah. I—” John's thumb is still moving. “I told her I'm with someone.” He glances up at him. “That okay?”

Something in Gale's chest makes a careful, preparatory adjustment.

“Sure,” he says. “It’s good you guys are talking.”

John is quiet for a moment. “She asked if it was serious.” He pauses. “Said she'd be happy for me. If it was.”

The end of the sentence is a hypothesis, a question left open, waiting. Gale sees where this path leads and his feet slow.

“It’s good,” he says, the words pointless. “That’s good.”

He lets his hand fall from John’s shoulder and retreats to the kitchen, needing to be upright and occupied. John’s footsteps track him, his presence immovable at Gale’s back.

“Hey.” John's fingers encircle his wrist as Gale reaches for the coffee pot. “Buck? What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’.” He shakes his hand free and pours a cup, knowing the coffee will be lukewarm and bitter. Sets the pot down. “Was there anything else?”

John is motionless beside him. Even without looking, Gale can hear him thinking. Percolating.

“Yeah,” John says. “Well.”

What follows is a span of silence, a blankness vast enough that Gale turns. He’s caught in the crosshairs of John’s gaze just as the question lands: “Do you want to bond with me?”

Gale’s heart gives a rabbit-quick kick and freezes. Beneath it, something warm and hungry and saccharine-sweet surges up. He’s purposely postponed the possibility, but this is the reality he’s been inhabiting without ever fully acknowledging it. Of course John would want to mate him. Even the old claiming bite John left on him pulses as John watches him with anticipation. But Gale’s animalistic want wars with a desperate, sensible clarity as his eyes flicker to the side of John’s neck, the same place where a permanent mark would sit. They were never the same. That was the problem. To Gale, the bite would be the physical monument to a surrender that happened long ago, long before he had ever allowed it. To John, it would be putting a lock on the door of a house he already owns.

His lack of response reflects gradually on John’s face. John’s mouth pulls to one side, the light in his eyes fracturing into something smaller.

“That was terrible,” he says. “Forget I said it like that. Let me—”

“Bucky.”

“I mean it though. I know the timing is—” He stops. Runs a hand over the back of his neck. “There's no version of this where I've done the courting right. I know that. But practically speaking—”

“John,” Gale says. “I don’t know if I want to do it.”

Something moves through John’s expression as he absorbs the hit. Disappointment, brief and honest, before he gets it under control. “Okay,” he says. “That's—okay. I get it.”

But he doesn't. He can't. How could he, when Gale has kept the facts of his own deficiency tucked neatly out of the way so he couldn't be tripped over? John steps closer, signaling his proximity as if trying to soothe Gale’s distress. His scent is rain and earth, but it’s also pomade and leather and old smoke. And Gale is back at the kitchen of his childhood, all spotless and shipshape, where his mother would stand and watch the tap flow for hours, his father’s presence etched into the very bone of the place.

Gale thought he had buried those ghosts deep; they had opened a chasm in him instead.

“No,” he says. “No, you don’t get it.”

John looks at him, nonplussed. Compunction sickens Gale. He works to find his voice. “I’m not cut out to be someone like my mother. I can’t.”

“What are you—”

“She left us when I was eight,” Gale says, and John falls silent. 

He’d never told John that—not in any meaningful way. He’d never wanted the look. That softening people get when they think Gale had it worse than the rest of them, like it’s something for them to decide. “She wasn't ill,” he continues, because he's started and stopping now would be its own kind of damage. “There wasn't an accident. She left because she wanted to. She made a choice.” The old feeling returns, something more structural than grief, something that lives in the bones of how he understands himself. “My father never came back from it. Not that he’d been any hope before that, but—” He stops around a thin, broken-string resonance in his voice, a weakness trying to take root in his throat. He swallows. “It obliterated him, John. What kind of omega does that? Her whole nature is supposed to be—”

“Buck,” John says. His eyes dim, his face softening, but it’s a tectonic rearrangement, like he’s trying to absorb these new pieces of Gale he just learned. Gale doesn’t want to know what he thinks.

“I've spent twenty years not thinking about what that says about her. About whether I've got it in me to do the same thing.”

John crosses the room in three steps. Gale looks off to the side, but then John’s hands are at his face, leaving him no choice but to let his gaze be lifted.

“Listen to me.” 

“Bucky—”

“No, listen,” John says, louder. “If I ever—if I make you feel like you have to leave. If I become someone you need to leave.” He holds Gale's eyes. “Then I want you to go.”

Gale shakes his head, but John’s hands are warm and firm, cradling Gale's face with unassailable faith in his own words.

“I mean it,” John tells him. “I want you to have anything you want. I want you to be able to do whatever you need to do. You’ll never hear it different from me.” His thumbs move against Gale's cheeks. “But I'm gonna spend the rest of my life making sure you want to stay. And I'll wait however long it takes for you to believe that.” His voice is quiet, plain, and precise. Like a vow. “As long as it takes.”

“That's not fair to you.”

John smiles, his eyes poignant. “There was a lot I didn't think was fair,” he says. “Things I couldn’t help. Things I sat on because I was cowardly and selfish. Not this one, though.” His fingers close at the scruff of Gale’s neck, shaking him slightly. “So don't go thinking I ain’t getting anything out of this deal. I’m happy where we’re at.”

“You don’t mind the waiting?”

Still smiling, John reaches for Gale’s hand and kisses the skin, right at the indentations Gale’s fingernails left from digging too hard. “Waited my whole life just to tell you that I love you, Buck,” he says into Gale’s palm. “I don’t care if it takes another lifetime for you to feel the same. It’d be worth it.”

Gale looks at him. At this man who has, in one form or another, always been waiting—on the other side of the ocean, at the end of a nonexistent runway in Algeria, in a prison camp counting days with marks on a wall, in a dilapidated house withering away. He shouldn't have had to. Gale has made him wait, at every stage, and John has done so without making Gale feel the debt of it. He can’t parse what he did to deserve this worn-in patience. He's not sure everything they’ve gone through had anything to do with deserving, when it comes to it. The hopeful radiance in John’s eyes makes it hard for Gale to remember why he had to walk away in the first place, but the instinct to flee is still there, humming in his blood.

The need for air clutching his throat, he pulls away, turns and walks out of the kitchen. “Can’t just bond over love, Bucky,” he says, thick-voiced.

John is on his heels immediately, following him into the grey natural light of the living room where the spruce stands commandingly in the corner.

“Why not?”

“Because bonding promises sacrifice. And compromise.” Gale whips around, his voice rising, frustrated by John’s either genuine bafflement or optimistic ignorance. “If it was solely about love I would've—” he struggles to find the language. “I would’ve said yes in the very beginning.”

John stops a few feet away, his face raw and open, crumpling.

“I really would, John,” Gale says. “I was already in love with you.”

The realization arrives without soft spots, without any give to it. No uncertainty in it.

“You think I didn’t know there’s no running away from you? I love you,” he says again, just to feel the weight of it leave his mouth. Just because it fits, because it's true, because he's wasted enough time binding it up like a wound. “I love you.”

John looks like he’s just pulled out of a blind dive and into the sun, dazed and blinking. Then he crosses the remaining distance and kisses Gale—a firm, closed-mouth press with both hands cupping Gale’s head. Gale makes a sound low in his chest as John pulls back to look at him, though not far enough for his eyes to be anything but two blue pits, deep and clear.

“Should’ve said it a long time—”

“You have no idea—” John punctuates his words with another press of dry lips to the corner of Gale’s mouth. “Jesus. Haven’t felt this way since the first time I took a plane up.”

Gale lets out a breath, a shaky smile touching his face. “You mean the time you forgot to let the flaps down when you landed.”

“Made it out in one piece, didn’t I?” 

“Barely.”

“Barely’s all it takes.” John’s grin is lopsided for a second before it turns quiet and serious. “God, Buck. Am I glad I made it out.”

There’s the same remorse, Gale recognizes; they are already bound by the same guilt that’s been chasing them in circles. Survival has felt like a litany of ill-gotten gains—a stolen breath, a peace they had plucked from the wreckage while others were left behind. The two of them, accomplices for life. But the light in John’s eyes is softer now, focused on Gale, stripped of the blaze it once was. It had torn Gale apart when he thought he would never see it again, leaving a dark cavity in his chest where John had always lived, stubbornly, without permission. He thinks he might be ready to endure a hundred lifetimes of penance, if only it means keeping that light from ever going out. 

Gale surges forward and kisses him, deeper this time, needing the slide of John’s tongue against his and the weight of his closeness, the desire that runs incandescent and scorching—the kind he’s never known outside of knowing John. John kisses him back in earnest until Gale has to break when the air runs out and his lungs feel like they might collapse.

“Hey, it’s okay,” John says, cupping Gale’s jaw with both hands, panting the words into his mouth. “It’s okay, Buck. I’ll wait. You know I’m all yours either way.”

“I know,” Gale says, not trying to gloss over the cruelty of it for honesty’s sake.

It’s a mixture of pain, relief, and hunger on John’s face. Stricken by the look, all the thoughts leave Gale’s head as if someone had drilled it hollow. He simply wants, and is exhausted by the effort of denying it. 

He pushes John down into the armchair and straddles him, knees bracketing John's thighs, his mouth on John again, letting the urge take him anywhere it needs to go. The tendon beneath the jaw. The beat of his pulse. The hollow of the throat. Muscles and bones Gale has mapped before, found again now like landmarks. He yanks John's sweater and undershirt over his head; John is cooperative in that artless, full-bodied way he always is when he's with Gale.

The pale expanse of John's chest is a scene Gale is never prepared for. He remembers how it was once discolored and sunken and blood-stained; remembers not letting himself stare at it, for fear of what the looking might cost him. It looks like a plain in snow now. Looks like home. His palms press flat against the warmth of John's ribs, feeling the rhythmic rise and fall. It slows him down; right there, with more tenderness than he thought he had left in him.

John breathes out something between a laugh and a groan, his hands coming up to hold Gale's head with a carefulness that is somehow more unbearable than urgency would have been. It ignites the heat in his groin, coils it tighter, causing something in his chest to split along an old fault line. He reaches up and takes one of John's hands, guiding it beneath his waistband. John wraps his hand around Gale’s cock without waiting for more instruction, already knowing, and squeezes the breath out of him. Gale lifts his hips to give him more room, rolls into it. Those fingers move lower, with finesse, to where he is aching and throbbing and clenching.

“God,” John says, voice gone rough, almost reverent. “You’re so wet already.”

It feels like the first edge of heat, like Gale could come apart if they stay on only this maddening tease, his mind gone to hot white static and the single, consuming awareness of John—John's hands, John's scent. Every nerve ending Gale has is demanding the only thing that can undo this thirst.

“If you don’t fuck me, John Egan—” he grits out.

“Don’t gotta ask me twice, baby,” John says, one hand working his belt buckle and then the zipper, the sound of it sharp and loud against the quiet pop and hiss of the fireplace. He's already big beneath Gale's palm when Gale reaches down, already filling, and Gale strokes him, feeling him go fully hard. The small, helpless sound it draws out of John's chest provides a satisfaction that goes bone-deep.

“C’mon.” John nips the line of Gale's jaw. Sucks at his Adam's apple when he throws his head back, giving him more access, a sensation Gale feels all the way down his spine. “Take them all off.”

What remains of their patience is only enough to tug Gale's shirt over his head and strip one leg bare, pants and underwear hanging off the other ankle, and then they're aligning—Gale rolls his hips down, John's hands gripping the creases of his thigh, guiding him, steadying him as he sinks fully seated. It feels almost too much at first, like it does every time, before it feels like a missing part of Gale's body finally rejoins. A key returning to its lock. He lets out a sound that is half sigh and half moan, rejoicing and relief all together, in time with John's low, guttural groan beneath him. 

Neither of them moves. Just breathing. Then John's palms are warm on his waist and his back, tracing the ridge of his spine with a touch that has traded desperation for reverence. Gale is warm everywhere—his legs cramped in the narrow space between John's thighs and the armrests, his cock leaking against the soft skin of John's belly, the low swell of his stomach flush against John's chest, the contact full and grounding. He can feel John's heartbeat from the inside.

“Missed this,” he mumbles into the crown of John's head. “Missed you.”

John makes an animalistic sound low in his throat, and Gale feels it in every place they're connected. He lifts his hips and clenches down, angling his pelvis just so, and John's head tips back against the chair, his skin flushed red and burning where it meets Gale's, his breath punching out of him. So responsive. Like Gale knows every button, holding that knowledge close, and John's body is more at the behest of Gale than of himself. Gale drags his lips across John’s scent gland, and the thrusts John pushes up into him become graceless, the movement of his hips bypassing the decision of his mind. Gale takes him and meets him with the same wanton eagerness, rocking down to match him, until John's hands come up to hold him firm below his ribs, halting him.

“Wait, wait. You sure you’re feelin’ alright?” he asks, his hands feather-light on Gale's stomach, stroking, and he sounds so ridiculous that fondness rises in Gale like a tide, hot and helpless, impossible to push back down. He thinks of the first time they ever did this, and how it felt nothing like this. He’d never imagined they could become this. 

“Yeah,” he chokes out. “Never better.”

John beams at him. In the slanting morning light, silver threads shine in his hairline when he tips his face to a certain angle, where his cheeks sharpen and the years are written honestly in the lines beside his eyes. He is just as strikingly handsome as Gale remembers from the very beginning—a lifetime ago, shaking his hand by the hangar under the flat Texas sun, thinking trouble and being drawn to him in the same breath. Despite having seen him inside out, despite having been given every dark room and every cracked foundation, John Egan remains the most unknowable existence Gale has ever encountered. Ineffable and fathomless, the person most worth knowing Gale’s ever met, a lifetime is barely enough to begin.

He moves again. Fucks himself down onto the hard, heavy length of his alpha, over and over, knees shaking, feeling John suckling at his nipples, excessively sensitive and pebble-hard, feeling impossibly open, spread wide and offered up. John smells like a contented, blissed-out animal, like safety and like want, and Gale breathes it in, lets it settle into his marrow.

“Fuck, you ride me so good.” John rolls his hips upward, helping Gale ride him more. “What do you need, sweetheart? Tell me what you need.”

“John,” he says, unable to vocalize even one in a thousand things he wants John to know. 

John understands. He always has. He cups Gale's face in both hands and kisses his temple, each side of his nose, the corner of his eye, slow as a liturgy.

“I love you. I’ll wait for you,” he says. “The only one I’ve ever wanted, Buck.” A pause, breathed into Gale’s hairline. “I love you.”

His scent surges, loud and decisive, flooding Gale's senses, and Gale locks up around him as John moves inside him, headlong and inexorable. John reaches between them and rubs him, grinding the pulsing peak between two thick fingers, and Gale cries out, everything arriving in a single, overwhelming spark. Orgasm spreads through him like ignition—groin to fingertips, a runway lighting up all at once, every nerve end alight and singing. John's groan rolls deep in his chest, resonant against Gale's skin. The base of his cock swells, nudging in firm and hard, and then he's pumping, emptying himself into Gale even though there is nowhere left to go. Gale’s already full, lodged and claimed by the testament to surrender that belongs to both of them, written as plainly as anything he has ever seen.

John walks in almost the same second Gale sets the receiver down, as if he’d been poised outside the door waiting for the click of the hook. He’s bright at the corners, his mouth working against a grin, the particular look he gets when he tries to mask an ill-advised request with nonchalance.

“Well?” he asks. “How’s Marge?”  

Gale had gotten back in touch with Marge after the New Year. When she called, she hadn’t seemed at all surprised to reach Gale at John’s number. The primary purpose of the call was to let him know she was moving out of his old house and had arranged for a neighbor to look after the mail, but before hanging up, she had whispered, I really missed talking to you. Don’t be a stranger, Gale. He hadn’t disclosed the full scope of the changes in his life over the wire, but he doubted Marge—who had known him long before either of them knew their designations—would ever see him in a different light. And he truly had missed her, too.

“She’s doin’ great. Got a job in Minneapolis. Said she’d like to visit, now that we’re closer,” Gale says. “If that’s okay with you.”

“It’s your call, Buck,” John says easily. “Just lemme know a couple of days before she gets here. Gotta make sure the house is presentable.”

He winks, and Gale feels a prickle of warmth in his cheeks. The nesting instinct taking over his body isn't subtle, and it definitely isn't confined to the bedroom anymore. Piles of laundered clothes, cushions and pillows migrate into every corner of the living space; the entire house has begun to smell like a heavy, protective wool blanket woven from their blended scents. John doesn’t mind the clutter—in fact, he practically thrives on it—but he knows Gale well enough to presume that he’d prefer to keep these instinctual shifts private. Sometimes it still astonishes Gale, the extent of his understanding.

“Alright. Now that that's settled,” John’s voice coaxes Gale’s attention back to him. “I want to take you somewhere.”

Gale had actually planned for a quiet morning. He's been working his way through the first part of Stellar Structure; the pace is dictated by his body, which doesn’t always cooperate, but he finds the intellectual friction more motivating than discouraging. The textbook belonged to a fellow pilot of John's whose older sister had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin. John had driven Gale there once, to the Washburn Observatory, and had acted the whole time like it was a perfectly ordinary thing to arrange, gaining them access after hours. He had simply said, there you go, before positioning Gale in front of a refractor larger than anything he'd trained his eye on, like it wasn’t one of the most spectacular things Gale’d ever seen. Gale had not said much on the drive home. Or later. He hadn't had the words for it.

“C’mon, Buck,” John says, and he's pouting, an expression that has no business looking the way it does on a man his size. He's put on a couple of pounds since the worst months of winter, weight that sits well on him, mostly muscle from the chopping wood and shoveling snow. He's been eating more too, mostly the leftovers that Gale's body has decided it wants no part of. It’s not that John is consciously doing anything. Gale suspects there's a biological explanation. It doesn't make the image any less endearing, his alpha quietly storing energy against the coming arrival of their pup.

“It's the best weather we've had in two weeks,” John adds, as if the sun itself constitutes a closing argument.

Gale looks at the window. The Wisconsin sky is a rare, piercing blue, the light coming in flat and bright off the snow. His body is getting heavier each day, and he knows the cram season is coming, soon John will be swallowed by dawn-to-dusk debriefs and flight hours. The comfortable surplus of mornings like this one is diminishing.

“Fine.” Gale acquiesces. “Give me a minute.”

John’s expression opens, morphed into a barely reserved excitement.

Gale gets changed, then goes to the old guestroom. It’s his study now. When he mentioned that he was considering going back to school, John had not made a production of it. By the weekend, he had emptied the room, told Gale to stay out, that he was not allowed to look before he’d fixed it.

The result is orderly and well-lit and set up with thoughtful logic. Everything was within arm’s reach, as if it were a cockpit designed for a different kind of navigation. A broad oak desk and a chair positioned to catch the best of the afternoon light. Reinforced shelves that anticipate the weight of hardcovers and bound volumes of journals. The bulky, stained guest mattress is replaced with something lower and more supportive, a place to keep reading when sitting upright becomes a chore. There were times, though, when John suggested sleeping there when he knew he wouldn't sleep tight and would disturb Gale. They tried it once or twice before Gale decided sleeping without John’s scent was far more disturbing than some toss and turn.

Gale makes sure he’s marked his reading progress and returns the others to the tabletop rack. Beside it, the K&E slide rule is sitting where it first was presented, polished and ivory-colored. 

“A gift,” John had said. “Figured it'd come in handy when you start school.”

Not if. When. And he had refurbished the room in one week. Like it doesn’t matter that it might take a year or two for Gale to even apply for a program after the baby is born.

Gale still isn't sure John knows how much it means to him.

In the truck, John keeps one hand draped over the wheel and the other slung over the passenger headrest, his thumb moving in slow, absent circles against Gale's shoulder. He’s quieter than usual, though there’s no dark cloud hanging over his silence, so Gale doesn’t ask where they’re going. The narrow roads near their house eventually give way to the broader county trunk, then to the state highway heading south, where vast unbroken sheets of snow cover the dormant fields on their right and shelf ice along the frozen shoreline of Lake Michigan on their left. As they approach the city, the rural tranquility is broken by the sight of power lines and the distant, low-slung silhouettes of warehouses. They exit the highway and turn into a corridor flanked by wooden barns that look like gingerbread houses; at the end of the road sits a private property, the signboard on the front gate as they pass it pulls a questioning look from Gale.

John just smiles wide, eyes staying forward.

Kept clear by plow trucks, the tarmac is a dark blade that cleaves the white in two. On one side, a fleet of crop dusters are lined up—sturdy, yellow-winged biplanes and low-wing monoplanes designed for low-altitude precision rather than speed. Even through the closed windows of the truck, the air changes; sharp, metallic tang of aviation fuel and the acrid aroma of engine grease thickening the air as the hangar emerges. It reaches Gale properly when John cuts the engine and opens the door, waiting for him to follow.

The ground crew waves to the truck like they've been expecting it. Even if Gale’s half guessed the purpose of this trip by now, he still finds himself without words when they stop in front of a Cessna AT-17 Bobcat. It doesn’t look like what he’d flown in basic training; stripped of its military radio gear, it’s repainted in bright yellow with a black lightning stripe down the fuselage, the fabric skin flawless, unscuffed and taut. A quiet bird, patient to be awakened.

“You gonna take me up there, Bucky?”

John puts his hands on his hips, then lets them fall. He pulls his lower lip inward.

“I was. But then I came up with somethin’ better,” he says. “Why don’t you take me up instead?”

The ease in his features stays, but his eyes are serious. He’s really asking Gale to be his pilot, for this trip with an unknown destination.

“John,” Gale utters, not sure how to react.

John breathes out, like something heavy he's been carrying around is now setting down, right where they can both see it.

“Look, I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he says. “‘Bout the bonding. What it means to you.”

Gale swallows. Apprehension stirs in him.

“So I got to thinking about what it means to me. The thing is…” John's gaze slides off Gale's face, moves out across the tarmac. His jaw works before he finds the words. “You saw me when you got here last year. I was a wreck, Gale. Sore, bitter, just letting myself rot because I didn't think I'd earned the right to anything resembling a normal life after the war. Didn't think I was worth the trouble.”

The twisting in Gale’s chest moves up and seizes his throat. There are a lot of things Gale wouldn’t waste trouble on. John was never one of them. Not for a single day of knowing him.

“I tried to imagine what my life would look like if everything went south and you had to walk out that door tomorrow. I realized—I won't go back to that dark place again. What we’ve got here—what we’ve built is already stronger than any mark on a neck. Even if I end up on my own, I'll still have known you loved me. That alone changes a guy permanently. You can't unknow a thing like that.”

Gale understands what John is doing. Building him a door and propping it open. Handing him a safety he's never once been handed—not by his father, who'd never bothered to sugarcoat what he wanted Gale to be and demanded compliance in return; and certainly not by the military, which had asked him to kill and offered nothing but medals and rhetoric of patriotism. John is trying to give Gale his conscience back clean, his autonomy spotless and free. It is more than anyone has ever given him. 

“You made it damn hard not to love you, Bucky,” Gale says.

John grins, his eyes creased into two small triangles, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth.

“Guess that makes two of us,” he says, before the levity dwindles and he goes serious again. “I meant what I said, though. I want you to have whatever you want, wherever that is. Doesn’t have to happen here. This job is nice and all, but I can do plenty of other things. We can go wherever you want to go. I'll live anywhere on earth, Buck. Long as it's with you. Long as you'll have me.”

He steps closer, within arm's reach. Some of the crew are looking their way, Gale is aware of them in the periphery, distant enough that their expressions are unreadable—whatever they make of the two of them standing here, whatever they think they see. And Gale finds that he doesn’t care. It’s the two of them. Always has been.

“And this’s supposed to be our ride?” Gale asks, holding John’s gaze as he puts his hand on the fuselage.

“You won’t believe the deal I can bargain for us, baby.” John smiles, sly and overconfident. “Just name a place.”

Gale can't suppress his own smile—doesn't try very hard. The fabric is solid under his hand, the smell of fuel and cold air in his lungs, the sky above the airfield pale and wide and, for the first time in longer than he can easily reckon, genuinely open.

“Can’t remember the last time I flew one of these,” he says quietly.

“Wanna give it a try?”

No cheap reassurance in the question, no empty promise, and Gale trusts him more for that than if John had offered blind faith. 

He exhales. Sounds more like a laugh than he intended. “Well.” He pulls his hand back and gives the fuselage a solid double tap. “Guess it’s all just stick and rudder, when it comes down to it.”

Moving with circumspection, Gale climbs into the cockpit with John on his heels. The side-by-side seating feels intimate, familiar. He slides into the left seat and stares at the instrument panel. The configuration is slightly different from what he trained on, but the logic of it is the same, which seems to bypass his conscious mind and connect directly to something lower, something in the spine. His hands are already moving before he's finished reading the panel. Cracks the throttles. Sets the mixtures. Engages the starter for the right engine first. The radial groans, turns over, spits a billow of blue smoke and catches with a seismic growl. When the left engine wakes to match it, the combined vibration rattles Gale’s teeth. A heartbeat outside and beneath his own.

He releases the parking brake and taxis out from the hangar onto the snow-cleared strip. Holding her at the threshold for the run-up, each engine answers cleanly when he cycles the props to test the pitch.

“She handles well.”

“See?” John replies, the sun coming through the canopy, catching the brightness in his eyes. “You still got it.”

Gale snorts. “Don’t count on it.”

John pats his thigh, and Gale has to swat that hand away with an incredulous huff when its touch traverses upward and turns into a smooth, playful stroke. 

“John.”

“I'm just sittin’ here.”

“Make yourself useful.”

His co-pilot goes and does exactly that, reaching for the clipboard that had come dispatched from the ground office. He studies it with an expression of performative diligence. 

“Looks like we've got a bit of a crosswind today, Buck,” John relays the information dutifully. “Blowing out of the northwest at about fifteen, with gusts pushing twenty-five.”

High, but not something unmanageable, compared to the worst conditions Gale had landed in with multiple engines feathered or half a tail missing. He thinks of Algeria, the flight over Greenland, the night before John’s departure, where they'd looked at each other and neither of them had said the thing they were really thinking because the war was still something that would happen around them rather than to them. They were prepared and terrified and lit up with something that felt, in the lying way that youth has, like invincibility. He feels that part of him is still here. Perhaps it always will be.

“It’s a little breezy,” Gale supplies.

As if he's been waiting for it, John smiles. “You tell me,” he says. Then, “ready to go?”

Resting his hand on the levers feels like a given. Gale had wanted this before he knew he could have it—one of the only two magnificent exceptions that defied the gravity of his terrestrial life. Both came together to form the wings that lifted him beyond what he'd thought possible; a place where he had long known, past all ambition and desperation, he belonged. He only realizes now that it’s also where his love resides. 

“I’m ready.”

He pushes the throttles forward. The Bobcat lurches, the engines surging from idle into full-throated power, and then the tail lifts, the aircraft eager to shed the earth.

In front of them, the sky goes forever.