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John has never felt more like prey; he’s skittered through the shadows casted by his enemy, been hunted through the woods. Now, he’s in captivity, snarling at the cage of his cell like a still-feral zoo animal. The pervasive silence, the isolation, means John only has his own thoughts as company. But his mind is not a place he wants to occupy.
His only refuge is the sporadic trips back and forth to that prick Kraut’s office, where he’s sometimes granted a sip of alcohol, and can focus his mind on being impenetrable and defiant. Only the echo of two words threaten his composure, a name. I’d like to talk to you about Buck Cleven.
When he’s back in his cell, John curls up on the filthy mattress pushed far into the corner. He ignores the steadfast pain in his head, a thrum more resolute than his own beating heart. He uses a fingernail to chip a tally into the wall, then closes his eyes to imagine the jut of a jaw, soft, flaxen strands of hair, eyes like the sun-sparkling water of the English Channel. He wonders, fearfully, just how long he’ll be able to recall the angles of Gale’s face. John would purge every other memory he has if he could just hold onto that one.
——
Three days into his confinement, John hears the cell adjacent to him clank open and slam shut. Someone has been moved next to him.
Once the guard’s footsteps retreat, John begins to tap on the wall that divides the two cells. It’s a shoddy approximation of Morse code - one tap for a dot, two for a dash - but it’s his best bet. He's not sure he could raise his voice loud enough to carry through the wall, he’s not sure it would be safe to try. So, he hopes whoever is stuck next to him is intelligent enough to parse what he’s spelling out.
“Hello?”
Waiting the few moments it takes for the individual to decode his message is agonizing, John fills them by squirming impatiently. But soon enough, a response begins to come through.
“Name?”
It takes him some time, but John carefully and methodically spells out “Major John Egan, 100th.”
The taps come quickly after that, urgently, almost in excitement. John wonders if this could be someone he knows, one of his downed crew, or another one of the men from the 100th he thought lost. But he doesn’t dare let his hope take root. During a war, hope is the thing with teeth, and it takes a chunk from you each time it inevitably leaves.
The message finally begins to take form. “100th. Your Buck.”
John begins trembling like an aspen. He can’t. He can’t believe it. Won’t believe it. Because this would not be a disappointment he could survive. This is probably some fucked interrogation tactic, John reasons. Some Kraut pretending to be Gale in an attempt to get him pliable and cooperative. But he’d be remiss if he didn’t find out for certain.
“Prove it,” John taps back, fist shaking against the wall.
“We danced. Before I left. The Way You Look Tonight.”
The message is long, and it takes John’s addled mind a while to piece it all together, but the moment he does his neurons entirely misfire. He makes a few abortive sounds like a backfiring car engine, and his blood freezes in his veins, forming long stalagmites of ice. The Krauts know a lot about him; where he’s been, who he’s fucked, what he likes. But they couldn’t know that; a quiet moment shared between the two of them, under the watchful eyes of God, but nary another soul.
It’s Gale. His Gale. He begins to sob.
“You died,” John says to him.
As if Gale can sense his palpable distress through the vibrations in the wall, he says “never left you.”
John’s relief permeates the air of his cell like an aura of cologne, something strong and lingering, like Gale’s signature aftershave. This turn of events is almost enough to make him believe in the almighty. But part of him knows there’s a reason they’ve been put together, and the fear of finding that out sits in the silt of his gut like a leaden brick. Having Gale here is almost worse than not having him at all. Because now he has something to lose.
——
“You awake?” John knocks.
It’s the middle of the night now, but a ghostly sliver of moonlight cuts through the thin window of his cell. It breathes an ounce of life into the oppressive blackness.
John flicks at the flakes of blue paint, watches the pieces of it drift to the ground. He feels that someone must be doing the same to him, chipping away at his own desiccated exterior. The ground around his feet is similarly littered with pieces of himself.
“God, I need a cigarette,” John grouches at the wall. He knocks to Gale to say as much, even if he’s currently unreachable in sleep.
“Have couple. Match too,” Gale replies, a few moments later.
“You don’t smoke.”
“Found some. For bribes.”
“Doesn’t help me.”
John sighs to himself. Silence stretches out between them, long and elastic. John is about to ask Gale if he’s still there, but then he hears a gentle pattern of knocks form a single word.
“Idea.”
John watches in bewildered awe as a piece of straw - no doubt from the inside of Gale’s own mattress - is punctured through a miniscule, but deep, crack in the wall separating them; one John had watched delicate beams of sunlight dance through earlier. Before long, wisps of smoke begin filtering through the hollow length of it. The muffled sound of Gale’s coughs can be heard as his body protests each inhalation of the cigarette. But he remains undeterred, blowing each drag through the straw like John and his base needs are somehow worth the corruption, worth this unusual effort.
John’s entire body feels frayed. He’s a copper wire stripped bare; one raw, exposed nerve. He falls to his knees like a supplicant in prayer, sucking greedily at the air. The sweet plumes of tobacco are vacuumed easily into his lungs, John doesn’t dare waste a single molecule of it. It’s heady and intoxicating. The taste of it, the knowledge that it is also Gale he’s tasting, has him entirely drunk off it.
John can’t touch Gale. He can’t see him. But this, this, is something to hang onto, something that makes him real. It’s not a lot, but after having spent numerous days choking on the heft of Gale’s death like a gun in his throat, it’s everything. For one blissful moment, John is able to forget about it; Germany, the spectre of his death, the ache of his injuries. All he feels is the ache of his own hardness.
What else could Gale feed him? The thought has him unravelling. He imagines Gale’s mouth as a whiskey spring, all spiced peat and pepper. He’d lick the honeyed dregs of it off his tongue, or let it drip lazily into his open mouth. From now on, John swears he’ll only imbibe by way of Gale. He’ll take all his sins that way; sampling each one, like a smorgasbord of immorality, as long as they’re perfumed by the rose petal plump of Gale’s lips.
It’s over far too soon. Gale begins threading the straw back through the wall. John follows it until it disappears and his forehead is left flush against the eroded concrete. The cool of it soothes the bruised orbit of his eye. He adjusts himself in his uniform, suddenly embarrassed by his insatiable desire. Where Gale is concerned, it’s as Pavlovian as a dinner bell.
In the aftermath, the sobering reality of his confinement pierces through his haze like a guillotine's blade. But the nicotine has calmed the tremor in his hands, and John feels Gale’s presence like a crackling bonfire. So, he thanks the universe for small mercies. John soon feels a lazy sequence of knocks tease along the fractured edges of his skull, where it’s still pressed against the wall.
“Good?” Gale asks.
John lifts his fist to rap out a reply.
“Good.”