the heebie jeebies

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Pacific (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: R. V. Burgin/Merriell "Snafu" Shelton, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge Characters: R. V. Burgin, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton, Eugene Sledge Additional Tags: Angst Summary:

Shelton is somewhere out there. He’s alone. And so is Burgie. There’s a solution to the equation.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Pacific (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge Characters: Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton Additional Tags: Paranormal Summary:

“Come eat with me,” Eugene pleads, “Come eat with me, then come to bed with me, it’s cold sometimes in this apartment.”

Snafu doesn’t answer him, and Eugene eats alone on the sofa, staring blankly at the black-and-white tv his parents bought him for Christmas last year, thinking: heaven help me, he’s going to be the end of me. Heaven help me, I loved him. 

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Pacific (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge Characters: Eugene Sledge, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton Additional Tags: Letters Summary:

The first letter Eugene writes him is careful. No allusions made to the sand and the heat. Shelton would laugh his ass off if he did.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Eugene tastes of sorrow when Snafu kisses him in the hot rain of Peking, his teeth sharp and the memory of blood still caught in his skin, in his shadow, in the places where he ought to be clean but isn’t. Ain’t nobody clean anymore, not a single damn one of them. They been dirtied, sinned in the eyes of god and heaven and laid their arms down and wept in the mud, only they didn’t, they didn’t, they went on marching and killing and none of them ever repented, Snafu least of all, because maybe god never existed in the first place and it was all a lie, every last word of it, there wasn’t ever anything greater than man, and ain’t it all a big fucking joke, Sledgehammer? Ain’t that all it’s ever been?

No, says Eugene, no, you’re wrong, and there are tears in his voice because he still believes in god despite everything, still believes there was a reason for all that death, for the children who cried in the night over their mommas’ dead bodies, blood trickling down their tiny throats.  There is a heaven and there is a hell and we did what we were meant to do, Snaf, he insists, and Snafu kisses him harder, until he tastes blood of a different kind than in the war, and Eugene falls into him, his limbs useless, his breathing soft.

“You ought to come home with me,” He says, “Ought to get a place out by the river and we’ll buy a dog and sleep together at night, just you and I, and no one else in all the word, and we’ll forget the war -” “It don’t work that way."

But Eugene does not stop, his face frantic in the rain, like he’s running out of time for something he’s got to do, like he’s fixing to die, only Snafu wants to tell him it’s over, we lived we lived, we weren’t meant to live but goddamnit all we did. But Eugene's hands are desperate, his eyes are bright, he’s saying we’ll go away somewhere nobody’ll ever see us again and we’ll have the stars and the summer heat and each other and we’ll swim every morning and you’ll throw your Jap teeth in a ravine and I’ll stop writin’ in my bible and the blood will fall from our skin like water oh god Snafu can’t you see, why can’t you see.

“Hush, hush,  ain’t no use in dreamin’,” Snafu says, but it’s as if Eugene don’t hear him, the way he goes on in that breathless, dying way. So he sinks his teeth into Eugene’s lips and pulls him down with him onto wet ground, their knees brushing together as they fall, and Snafu buries his face in the sweep of Eugene’s neck and closes his eyes, the image of that wild, youthful face burnt into him - the rain pouring down the bridge of Eugene’s nose, eyes near delirious, his words all blurring together into one until Snafu couldn’t hardly tell one from the other, until in the end they didn’t mean a thing, nothing at all, except: I love you. That’s all Eugene had been trying to say, he realizes, all that had to be said before they parted maybe forever, maybe for the last time. Nothing more than that, nothing greater, just a confession in the end. 

“Oh, Hammer, didn’t your mama teach you sodomy is a sin?” “So is killing. So is everythin’ we’ve done.”

He mutters a muffled curse into Eugene’s rain-soaked shoulder, because Eugene’s right, what’s one more blasphemy, one more sin, after all they’ve done? They’re all goin’ to hell, every man on earth, except maybe for the saints and the children, so they ought to love while they’re still alive, ought not to try to be cautious and try to be good and try to be clean. And suddenly he feels he’s never been less sure about anything than he is now, doesn’t know what he wants or what is right, if there ever was such thing as right and wrong or if he and Eugene ought to stay like this forever, their bodies pressed close in an alleyway in China where no one will see the way two men hold one another like lovers, time moving neither forwards or backward, only caught forever in a tropical storm where Eugene is close and warm. 

“I hate you, Eugene,” He whispers, something raw and open in his throat, like the pulsing wound of war. “Wish I’d never known you.”

Eugene scrapes a stray hair back from his face with a shaking hand, “You don’t mean that.”

And Snafu says nothing, his heart on his tongue, an old grief filling him to the edges of what he is and where he ends. He can’t give Eugene what he wants, the softness Eugene imagines still lingers somewhere inside of him, can’t tell him: it’s gone, Gene. I lost it to the wet, cold mouth of Okinawa, to Peleliu in the sun, to Gloucester, Japan, America, the war, hatred. I haven’t got anything left to give you. You want so much but it isn’t there anymore.

He pulls away, his head bowed against the wind, rubs his thumb over Eugene’s knuckles once more, for good luck, for love, and says very quietly: “It don’t matter. Ain’t to be, boo, none of it.”

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Merriell's daddy dies on a Sunday, in a white hospital bed that smells of sickness and disinfectant. His last words are something bitter, something tired and old; he tells Merriell to go to hell, one last time, and Merriell smiles, his lips curling into the black of his eye, “I’ll see you there, daddy.”

And they stand at the back of the funeral, Eugene’s sweaty palm im his, and Merriell wants to cry but doesn't because there’s nothing left, something hollow in the place where the heart ought to be, and maybe it’s been gone for so long he's been mourning it all his life and didn’t even know it till now. Repent. Repent. We will all meet again in heaven. His soul begins to unravel within him and he imagines calling his daddy’s name out into the church, daddy, daddy, like a child. His father's face is lonely and ancient in the casket. He used to sing to Merriell when he was a boy, tuneless and low. Father, his father, our father who art in heaven. Merriell imagines raising his arms and tracing a finger along the bridge of his nose, his rough, ruined skin, the places where he remembers the light hitting him in old photographs.

"Gonna be me someday," he mutters in Eugene’s ear as they step out into the hot August sun. "We always been one and the same man, my daddy and I."

And as he says it, he feels the dread and the hate he's always had for himself coiling tighter and tighter inside, and again, he wants to cry, his face pressed into his daddy’s chest, his father's hands stroking his hair. He wants to cry for his daddy and his battered, broken body the day he died. He wants to cry for himself at seventeen, small and shaking and afraid as he stood over him with a belt, calling you fuck-up, calling you faggot, saying ain’t no boy of his was gonna go around with other boys, that weren’t the way God made him.

"Shouldn’t say things like that," Eugene whispers back. His cheeks are very pink in the sunlight. "It ain’t a cycle unless you make it that way."

Merriell bites back a laugh and remembers his grandmother, her molasses voice and velvety eyes, her eyes like a sky full of too many stars, how she’d sit him on his lap at twilight and tell him: it all ends up in the same place, baby. Fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and innocents and the men who kill them. They’ll all be gone one day, and he’ll judge ‘em all the same, and we never had any say in nothing at all. He remembers clutching his heart in his right fist, the rotting smell of the swamps all around him, asking her well, then what’s the point of it all. 

And he repeats these words back to Eugene, tells him: we ain’t ever been truly free, Gene. Not one of us. And his daddy had a dark smile and he used to kiss Merriell's head smelling of whiskey and cigarettes when he was a boy, his hands rough, unkind, and Merriell was made in his image and this is why he was never innocent, never a child like other children, always twisted and old before he was even born. 

"You're tryin' to find a way out," Eugene says, his smile strange, unknowable, "Tryin' to make it so you don't ever have to be a good man, blaming it on God."

"Bullshit."

"You're a coward, Snafu."

But he kisses Merriell in the shadows behind the church after in apology, his long fingers caught in his hair, his skin so soft Merriell could mistake it for a girl's if he were a different man, it's a sin, it's a sin. His daddy hit him with a belt for this when he was a boy. Merriell kisses him back, kisses him harder and kisses him meaner and he tastes the bloodstained taste of his soul on his tongue, a soldier's soul, and weren't it all a sin, every last second of it?

"What's the point of anythin', Eugene," He asks him miserably as the sun sets into twilight, only dimly aware that this is the echo of the question he asked his grandmother a long time ago, before war and love and the sorrow of knowing they were never truly free.

And Eugene doesn't answer, doesn't know the answer, only pulls away and looks into his eyes with his own and Merriell doesn't dare ask what he sees because every time he imagines doing so, he thinks of his daddy's gray corpse in the noonday sun and becomes afraid of what he might say. I am my father's son, calls his heart, a lonely old echo - I am he, I am he, I am he. 

They sleep pressed up against each other that night, soiled skin to soiled skin, the windows thrown wide open to let in a breeze that does not come. The summer rains come instead, hot and thundering, pelting against the windowsill like the ringing of drums. It’s Okinawa all over again, Merriell mutters, and Eugene doesn’t answer him. He stumbles into the kitchen feeling sick and ugly and sinful. He smokes a cigarette and drinks alone in the dark and outside the rain has faded to a light drizzle, almost too hot to breathe, to think, to feel. There are no more tears left for his papa or for himself. Oh, we’ll all be reunited in heaven. 

Eugene leaves the next morning, drives back to Mobile where his wife is surely standing in his dark doorway waiting for him. And when Merriell's grandmother comes that afternoon in her black mourning clothes, her dark, sorrowful eyes, he's sitting on the porch and he's weary with grief. 

She kisses him on the cheek, her lipstick leaving what looks like red bruises under your eyes: “He loved you, Merriell. You’ve got to know that.”

Merriell laughs then, and it’s bitter, and sick, and angry, and he scrubs the red stain from his cheek, bends his neck away from his grandmother’s hair, because: “Like hell he did.”

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

“I worry about you boys,” Burgie says, voice heavy like he’s holding smoke beneath his tongue. “Always.”

It’s late at night, so many stars in this strange Chinese sky that Snafu can’t hardly see - not the too-bright blue of Burgie’s eyes, his sweat-slick throat or sunburned shoulders. He ain’t pale, not like Hammer; no long-fingered hands of too many fine, slender bones, bones that could break easy as flower stems - not Burgie. He never knew such softness.

“Whaddya worry about us for?” Snafu asks him lazily, talking round cotton balls ‘cause it’s late at night and he’s tired, so damn tired. He’s been tired ever since the war’s end. 

The light changes, the moon shifting on her axis, and he can see Burgie’s eyes now - that damn electric blue, the color of lightning - and he’s close, close enough Snafu can smell the heat of the day still lingering in the pores of his skin, smoke and dirt and little Chinese girls who go squeak in the night. He wants to raise his finger and trace it along the fine, sinewed muscles of his arms. He wants to feel his blood pumping beneath his fingertips. Tell me that you love me, huh, he wants to whisper, voice low and only for Burgie to hear, no one else in all the world because no one else need hear this save Burgie and he. Tell me you love me, Burgie, only me.

“Hell, I don't know.” Burgie smiles at him, lopsided and a little wrenched at the corners. “Just seems to me like the war took a toll on all of us in one way or another. Can’t rightfully leave you alone with that kind of an echo. Besides, somebody’s got to worry about you, don’t they?”

“Sure they do.” Snafu grabs loosely at Burgie’s wrist because it’s lying there beside him and it's something rough and tangible, something that's been stained with the same red-black blood as his own. He grins dopily at him, means every word he says: “You’re a good man, Burgie.” 

Burgie laughs, his breath smelling of rice wine, doesn’t move his wrist away. And Snafu feels loose and young for the first time in a long time, feels something other than that strange, blank grief that’s followed him since Victory Day, since he tipped his head back and looked at the stars, surely the same stars he knew back home, and asked what do we do now without an answer, because maybe there wasn’t an answer, maybe there was never supposed to be a return home. God fucked up royal.

“Not only me,” Burgie says softly, tripping over the words, his eyes seeming to blur at the edges. “You’re a good man too, Shelton. Better than you’ll ever know.”

“Mm. Say what you want, don’t make it true.”

Snagu runs his thumb over the knotted scar on Burgie’s palm. He remembers that day. The smoking debris of a shell, burning in Burgie’s skin, not enough time for a bandage, then later: pink, damaged flesh that would never heal the same again. Burgie had displayed it to him proudly, cheeks pink with sunburn on Pavuvu, and said: it’s my own personal medal of honor. If I get through this damn war, I’ll show it to every man I meet.

Ain’t nobody gettin’ through this war, Snafu had answered, because he’d been empty then, ready to die, to leave behind war and all the hollow-eyed men who’d once been baby boots, faces still fresh from when their mamas had washed them last. 

“Y’remember what I said?” He asks Burgie quietly. Burgie’s eyes are half-shut and fixed on some vague point on the horizon; maybe west, maybe America, wherever home is for him. “When you showed me your scar that day on Pavuvu?”

“Sure I do.” He smiles at Snafu without looking at him. “I knew you were wrong, y’know, even when you said it. We weren’t never gonna die, not one of us. Always knew we were gonna make it home.”

“Only ‘cause of you. Hadn’t been for you, I would’ve been rotting somewhere in the Pacific right now with six bullet holes where my heart used to be.”

“A good thing you ain’t,” Burgie murmurs. “Would’ve broken my heart, Snafu.”

There’s something naked and honest in his voice when he says that, like a child confessing to something done wrong. Snafu’s only heard it once before, a long time ago on Gloucester when he’d said to Burgie on some black, rain-drenched night: You’re gonna save the world someday, Burg. Gonna save every single last one of us. He’d reached up and touched his hair, a colorless blob in the dark, except he’d known, he’d known it was copper in the daylight. Me too, even. We’re all gonna be alright because of you, gonna go on. And Burgie had laughed, the sound low and close to his ear, and he’d smelled like sweat and mud, like war, and whispered back: I don’t care about the world, Snaf. I just want to save you.

Snafu closes his eyes and wishes for the bravery of that night to tell Burgie that loves him. Wishes that Burgie loved him back. Wishes a thousand, a hundred thousand things and none of them make any sense because he isn’t even meant to be alive in this moment, Burgie’s warm skin against his own, drunk on rice wine and life, on the knowledge that he’s twenty-two years old and can do whatever he wants with the time that’s been given to him by accident.

“You’re a good man, Burgie,” He mumbles one more time, sick with regret for things that haven’t happened yet, for the things he’ll never say but should have said. “Don’t you forget that, you hear?”

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Burgie meets him in a motel somewhere on the long stretch of road between their two states. There’s a smudge of dirt still on his lips when he arrives and he smells like he just came from the fields, his smell a man’s smell, and Snafu breathes it in, the stench of him mingled with whiskey, with sweat. 

“Fuck, Burg,” He says. “Thought you swore up and down on your mama’s grave that you wouldn’t do this once you and Flo settled down proper.”

“Shut it.”

And Burgie holds him down on the stained bed, something virulent and feral and ashamed in his eyes, snarls in Snafu’s ear that he loves her, goddamn you, he loves her and only her, never anyone else.

“I never loved men, Snafu,” He says, panting between words, “You’ve gotta know that. I’m not a… I’m not a goddamn…”

“Fairy?” Snafu asks him, digs his finger into the hollow of Burgie’s collarbone where his own sweat has mixed with Burgie’s until the two are indiscernible, until he cannot tell where Burgie ends and he begins. “I know it, sugar. Don’t gotta tell me.”

“Good. You’ve gotta know that.”

Burgie collapses on top of him then, fingers still curled around Snafu's shoulders, and buries his face in the tangled mass of Snafu’s hair. Snafu can’t see him now, those electric eyes, that hard, sturdy face of an honest man, a good man, a better man than he. So instead he digs his nails into the flesh of Burgie's back, almost hard enough to draw blood, not quite, wishes he had the strength to tell him this is the last time, no more, for fuck’s sake, Burgie, only he can’t ‘cause he’s fucked up inside, something dirty in his ribs where the heart oughta be. 

“Chrissake, Burgie,” He murmurs, no real heat to his words, “When are we ever gonna stop this shit?”

It’s been like this for years: they fight and they fuck and they lay tangled together in the shitty motel rooms that lie between Louisiana and Texas with sweat pooled at their throats and cigarette ashes on the floor, Burgie telling Snafu he doesn’t love him, Snafu whispering back I know, Burg, I know. And tomorrow, when the sun rises over the highway, Burgie will stir awake beside him, dress without speaking, then, when he thinks Snafu ain’t woke up yet, he’ll bend over the bed and push the hair back from his face, let his hand rest against his cheek. He will stand there for too long, hardly breathing, only looking down on him for reasons Snafu will never know, then turn and drive back to Texas in his beat-up Chevy just in time to kiss Flo on the cheek and make breakfast for their little daughter who’s only three years old and loves her father more than anything in the world. 

He rubs his thumb along Burgie’s neck, imagines pushing into the skin and watching red blood bead along his nail just to hear Burgie curse, when:

“Did you love him,” Burgie asks abruptly, the words muffled by Snafu’s hair, too foggy and unclear. Snafu can feel his hot breath creeping down his scalp as he speaks.

“Who,” He answers, because he’s never loved anyone, always been hollow except for him. Only you, Burgie, he thinks, twisting a coil of copper hair around his thumb, only you, if I could tell you. Goddamn you. He was a fool to go and fall in love with a straight man whose dick moved faster than his heart, maybe if he’d had a soul he could’ve done it right, loved the right man, Eugene with his gentle eyes and his brain that was going to save the world. He had loved Snafu. He had loved Snafu and Snafu had run.

“Sledge.”

Snafu bites back a laugh, remembers Eugene’s face that day on the train, his still-untouched skin and shadowy lashes, how he’d never looked a thing like Burgie.

“Fuck no, never,” He says, and means it. Burgie sighs.

“He loved you, you know.”

“Don’t I.”

And Snafu thinks of Eugene with honeysuckle still clinging to the edges of his flesh, his trepidation and youth that first day in the tent before war claimed him, when Snafu had only looked at him with empty eyes and felt nothing because he’d been already dead by then, already desperate to prove that war belonged to him and he belonged to it. He thinks of all this and a thousand other things that feel more like scenes from another man’s life than his own - tenderness and planes of soft skin, the smell of a pipe, eyes too old for their owner’s face - and wonders why he’s here. Wonders why he chose this over all that. Wonders, again, why it forever feels as if he chose right.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand you,” Burgie whispers suddenly, his voice uncharacteristically soft, like a man speaking to his lover instead of to another man who fights and fucks and sweats just the same as he. He squeezes Snafu’s waist for a minute, rough enough to bruise, then releases. “Hell, nobody ever has, me least of all. Wish I could. Wish I could ask you what you’re thinkin’ right now and have you answer me honest-like for just once in your life and tell me what’s goin’ on in that fucked-up head of yours.”

“Would ruin the mystery, boo,” Snafu drawls, doesn’t tell him: I’ll never know either. Doesn’t tell him: maybe you know me better than I do. But Burgie doesn’t say anything more, doesn’t even raise his head to show Snafu what’s happening behind his eyes. (Coward, he wants to hiss. Coward, look me in the eye like a man and tell me you love me, tell me you hate me, tell me anything, just stop fuckin’ hiding.)

They fall asleep like that, Burgie splayed across Snafu’s chest, Snafu’s fingers still tangled in his hair. And something inside of Snafu aches but he does not know what for, except that maybe something inside of him has always ached, has always been raw and open and angry, and he did not know it until now, and Burgie’s voice, full of strange, unknown wonder, follows him into his sleep and curls around that gaping hole in his chest where he has always been half-finished, abandoned before he could ever be whole. He dreams of him that night. Of waking and finding Burgie still beside him, a cigarette hanging out his mouth and his eyes oddly gentle in the early morning light, a promise on his lips to stay. 

It’s only ever been him, Snafu realizes in that moment, with more finality than ever before. It could never have been Eugene, not in a hundred thousand different versions of their war.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

After the war, when the south becomes too silent and fragile for the both of them, they drive to California together in Eugene’s father’s truck because there’s nothing left to do. Snafu is silent for two hundred miles, blowing cigarette smoke out the window and his thigh nearly brushing Eugene’s, until at last, somewhere in the Owens Valley, he opens his mouth and says:

“The war didn’t change nothin’, huh, Sledge?”

Eugene flinches. He can see Snafu out of the corner of his eye - a dark smear in the shadowy light, and his eyes too bright, too pale, too old, hunched over a cigarette. He wonders briefly (often) if he would taste cigarette ash on Snafu’s tongue if he kissed him now, gunfire and fear, or if he would taste of peace; of the warm wind outside and the vodka they’d drunk sitting in the bed of the truck some three hundred miles ago in Nevada. He wonders if Snafu has ever thought of kissing him too, has ever imagined Eugene’s lips like a girl’s beneath his own, or if only faggots do that.

“What the hell are you talking about?” He asks him. “Of course the war changed things, dumbass. Wouldn’t be here now if it didn’t.”

Without answering, Snafu reaches and curls his fingers around Eugene’s, nut-brown on lily-white, and Eugene doesn’t tell him to fuck off. He tells himself it’s because this California road stretches for miles and miles without end and it doesn’t matter if they crash because there’s nothing to hit, hot sand and dried-up hollows of water. But Snafu’s skin is warm. They haven’t been this close since the war. He tells himself it’s because there’s nothing to hit that he lets Snafu stay holding his hand.

“I meant your face, Eugene.” (And Eugene’s breath catches in his throat when he hears his name said in Snafu’s voice like that - long and lonely and strange as the plains outside - because he was only ever Sledge to him, never anything other than that.) “You still got the face of a kid. The war didn’t change that. Didn’t change nothin’.”

As he says it, Snafu’s gaze is glazed and drowsy, unreadable, and Eugene wonders (but does not ask) what it is that Snafu sees when he looks at him. And christ, sweat glistens at the hollow of Snafu’s throat, bright like glass, his skin still soft as if it never saw war, and Eugene wishes for the first time that he was a braver man. He wishes he knew how to make people love him, how to ask them to kiss him. And he forgets to ask forgiveness from God for thoughts like these; forgets why it ever mattered at all. His heart is swelling too large for his chest, might burst if he remains silent, so he swallows the shards of the bullet that never hit him and asks, tongue almost too heavy to move:

“Are you a faggot, Snafu?”

Snafu laughs. It’s an odd sound, too loud for the space between them.

“Only sometimes.”

“The hell does that mean?”

Snafu’s silent for a long minute, his silhouette against the window not moving, not breathing, as if caught in a photograph, and Eugene isn’t sure what this moment means, if he ought to remember it for the rest of his life or never speak of it again, if he has a choice or doesn’t, if he is too small and the world too large for him to have ever had a choice in anything at all. 

Then, his voice thick with smoke and spite, Snafu says: “It means you oughta kiss me, right now, Sledge, before I stop bein’ a faggot, yeah?”

And without thinking, because he hasn’t had a single clear thought since the war’s end, Eugene turns to him and he kisses him. It’s hard and it’s messy, and it’s bitter with the taste of vodka, but not with the taste of war, no death on Snafu’s lips, no grief on his tongue. He’s Eugene’s first kiss. He’s his first kiss. Snafu’s lips are soft like a girl’s, he’s his first kiss and he does not taste of the war. Eugene slides his hand down Snafu’s narrow waist and along the sharp razor-edge of his hip bones, and whispers, maybe too quiet for him to hear, I love you, because it’s true, it’s been true for so long now that maybe it’s always been true -

“Don’t,” Snafu snarls, his fingers wrapping around Eugene’s wrist before it can slip any lower, to the bony circumference of his thigh. “Don’t say dumb shit you can’t take back.”

“I’m not gonna take anything back, idiot,” Eugene says. And Snafu sneers and presses closer until Eugene can no longer see his face, wild against the eerie light, can only taste him beneath his tongue and know that he is alive, that the war is finished, that the trucks came for them and so did the train. And when he pulls away at last, Snafu is no longer looking at him, he’s no longer here, but someplace far away. God knows where. Eugene wants to call out to him but isn’t sure how, until Snafu turns to him once more, his eyes too-bright and blue, like a child’s eyes, and opens his mouth to speak, lips trembling:

“You mean it? Ain’t gonna take it back?”

Eugene runs his tongue over the caps of his teeth, remembers wishing he were a braver man.

“Shit, Snafu. You should know I never say anything I don’t mean.”

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

if youre ok with the trigger warning and writing it etc, are you interested in writing about a scene where perhaps Eugene discovers that Snafu has a history of self harm? if not though please; feel free to completely ignore this and delete it 💓

Sorry, but I didn’t really feel comfortable writing about that subject, so I wrote something else for you instead! I’m sorry it’s not what you asked for.

Years later, after the war, after marriages, children, divorces, Snafu calls from a phone booth in Louisiana. Hello, he says, it’s me. And he doesn’t say his name, for there is no need, for his voice is as before. The same lonely drawl, the same words that catch in the roof of his mouth and come out mangled, come out sharp from the edges of his yellowed teeth. It’s me, he says, and Eugene hears again the voice of the Pacific; I’ve been thinking about you, all these years, he says.

Hello, Merriell, Eugene says, and then he doesn’t know what else to say. And he knows what he wants to say, what he wants to tell him: that he loves him still, that it is as before, that he still dreams in black and white of a night in China when two young men were afraid of a war already over. He wants to tell him that the war never ended, that he is still there, sitting on a hill and watching those haunted dead, that he never left, though he thought he did. But instead he says: I wrote you a letter, twenty years ago. Did you ever get it?

Snafu laughs, and the sound brings back a memory Eugene had thought he’d forgotten , one of a lazy morning on the edge of youth, when the sunlight blurred all colors and the only thing he knew was the sound  of Snafu’s laughter as if from someplace far away, and he had felt a sadness that he knew had only ever come from himself. A sadness that had always been with him.

Sure I got your letter, Snafu says, and every one after. I read ‘em, Eugene. All of them.

Eugene had written everything into those letters; at first, there had been anger. Hatred unbound, for Snafu, for the war, for his parents, for anything Eugene had once known or now knows. Then there had been regret. Pleads for forgiveness, promises that he hadn’t meant what he said, that he’d never meant any of it. And finally, the letters had stopped coming, as Eugene had grown old, as his fingers had begun to shake and his wife had left him with nothing but a handwritten note on his bed, sprayed with a perfume he’d bought her once.

They say nothing of those things now, of the youthful secrets Eugene had shared with him, the declarations of love he’d hidden in the double meaning of his every word. For love, like all things, is immortal until it ends. That is the thing they don’t tell you about immortality; it’s only while it’s being lived that it’s immortal, that the sun seems to hang in the sky forever and the voices never fade.

That’s good, Eugene says, and that is all he knows how to say to this man who once he knew so well, whose face he once loved better than his own, I’m glad you called. I’m glad you didn’t run from me forever.

They talk of little things, after that. Of children who’ve grown and men who’ve died, of places they’ve been and places they’ve never been but wish they had, and at the end of it, Eugene says, Goodbye, Merriell, you should come visit me in Alabama soon, and Snafu breathes, long and heavy, so that for a moment, it sounds as if he’s going to say something more, something he’s always meant but never said. But then the breath is released, and nothing is really said except for a goodbye and a joke Eugene’s already forgotten, then Snafu hangs up and is gone again.

A thought comes to Eugene in the long silence after; of another world, in which he and Merriell are raised side by side, on two farms in the open, yellow fields of Alabama. They are boys together first, then later young men. The war comes but they pay it no mind; they plow their fields together by the hot summer sun, and at night, they sit on the porch and drink iced tea, their mothers laughing behind them. In Eugene’s mind, the draft does not come for them, because they are two young men and they do not deserve to be soiled by such horrors. They build a clapboard house and they sleep in a little bed together, under a window through which the starlight glows, and through which they can hear their dog barking outside.

Eugene’s chest aches with want, for this quiet, desperate fantasy. He is sure they would never then have been sundered by life or by war.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

hello stop hurting me maybe (but its ok all of ur fics are amazing)

Sorry!

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

everytime you post is a blessing

This is so sweet :) thank you

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

By the time Eugene wakes, Snafu is gone, melted into the foggy streets of New Orleans. Eugene thinks of him walking away, holding his limbs too close to himself, his mouth curled into a bitter sneer, and he buries his face in his hands, but he doesn’t cry, because the gentle boy who cried when he was alone is gone, he died on the sands of Peleliu, Snafu watching with his red-rimmed eyes. He looks for those eyes now, those wild blue eyes, haunted by war and by youth, but Snafu is swallowed by the sticky-sweet heat of Louisiana, and everything is finished now.

Alabama is softer and sweeter than he remembers. Everywhere is flowers, dirt, the swish of girlish skirts, and Eugene tries to imagine Snafu here, hunched and scowling in his mother’s sitting room, Snafu who watched him with lonely eyes when he thought Eugene wasn’t looking, Snafu who whispered things in Eugene’s ear when he pretended to be sleep. He hopes it’s nice where Snafu is, that it’s somewhere where Snafu can be happy at last. But there was a sadness in Snafu even before the marines, something that the war did nothing to change; Eugene is sure of it. He can feel it now too.

“Eugene, dear,” His mother says over breakfast, with her red lipstick, with her white gloves, with her old-world elegance, “The Haywoods are holding a dinner this weekend, and told me to invite you. They have the loveliest daughter, you know. I believe she was a year above you in school. Her father tells me she’s been just dying to see you now that you’re back.” “I don’t want to go to any dinners, mother,” Eugene tells her, lowering his eyes to the table, because he cannot look her in the face, “Or meet any lovely girls, or attend any fascinating parties. I’m not sure - I’m not sure I know how to anymore.”

That night, Eugene dreams of Snafu, dreams of him as he knew him. Dirt gathered at the hollow of his throat, his grin lazy and reckless as he reaches for Eugene with his broken fingers, the light of his cigarette bathing him in gold. In this dream, he is a godsend.

By the time Eugene wakes, Snafu is gone again. His room is gray and quiet in the light of early morning, a storm brewing on the horizon. Everything smells bitter, of metal and rain and hot summer ground. Eugene sits on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, his bare toes curled into the floorboards, and tries to remember the sound of Snafu’s voice, so that not everything is lost. It’s no use. He can no longer picture the curl of Snafu’s smile, the hollows beneath his eyes. Soon that too will be gone.

“You oughta find yourself a girl, Eugene,” Sid tells him when they’re out walking one day, with that easy, disarming smile he’s always had, “Find a good job, settle down. Like Mary and I. Don’t ya want to start a family, Gene?”

“Sure I do,” Eugene shrugs, an excuse at the tip of his tongue, a reason to put it off just a little longer. Somehow, it never comes.

“Attaboy, Gene,” Sid says with a wink, throwing his arm around Eugene’s shoulders, “You’ll be hearing wedding bells before you know it.”

Eugene smiles weakly.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Do you have an AO3 account with your Snafu/ Sledge story pieces?

I don’t, sorry! Everything I’ve written is here on my tumblr.

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Hey! I recently introduced a friend of mine to your blog - I really, really love your writing! - and she’s a mix of emotional and psyched about your blog, lol. -Eli

Lol, that’s awesome. Thanks!

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

Eugene kept looking at him, waiting for his eyes to flutter open, for his mouth to curl into a lazy grin and say, “Scared ya, didn’t I?” But Snafu remained still and bloodied in his arms, all the life, all the love, gone from his face, leaving nothing of Eugene’s blue-eyed boy but death and empty anger.

“He’s gone,” Burgie said, voice vacant of any feeling and barely loud enough to hear over the whiz of passing bullets, “He’s dead, Sledge.”

“I know,” Eugene mumbled, “Just - give me a moment, will ya?”

Slowly, Eugene lowered Snafu’s blood-soaked body to the ground. He had been so light in Eugene’s arms, like a child, only a boy who didn’t deserve to die for causes he knew nothing about. There was a fleck of blood beneath Snafu’s eye, and Eugene bent down to rub it away, so that his face would be clean when he entered heaven. Snafu deserved that, at least; there was no sin left in his muddied hands, he had died as innocent as a newborn child.

It had happened so fast. One moment, Snafu had been pressed up against him like always, rain pouring down his helmet, the next he was jerking backwards, clutching at a blooming red stain on his uniform and groaning. Eugene had dropped down beside him, had eased Snafu’s hands aside, and Snafu had smiled, a bloody, dopey grin, and said, “Don’t ya worry bout me, Hammer - I’ll be jus’ fine,” even as his eyes began to grow dim and blood bubbled over his lips like a death sentence.

Now he was dead, lying limp and cold in the wet mud, his eyes staring unseeing at the gray clouds overhead. He had died like a fool, fighting in another man’s war like it was his own, and it broke Eugene’s heart.

“Sledge, we’ve gotta move,” Burgie murmured, crouching beside him, “I get it, it hurts - he was my friend too. But the war ain’t over just ‘cause he died, and I can’t lose you too because you were too busy grievin’ to avoid a goddamned Jap bullet.”

“He was too young, Burgie,” Eugene said, very softly. Burgie tugged at Eugene’s arm, pulling him too his feet, “I know. They all are. Now c’mon, let’s keep moving.”

[gettingthatyellowjaundice]

America drifts by in a haze of endless plains and yellowed fields, Snafu quiet and introspective in the window, like Eugene’s never known him to be. Eugene squints at him, his sallow mouth and hollowed eyes, his face as distant, as unreadable as the sky, and Eugene wishes he could ask him, just this once, “What are you thinking?” and have Snafu answer as honest as though he were a child. But he cannot think of any answer that Snafu would give him, cannot think of any world in which Snafu would find the words to explain himself; so he remains silent. There will be time for questions later - they have a lifetime after all.

He falls asleep somewhere between Arkansas and Mississippi, in the syrupy glare of sunset, while Snafu watches him over the shadow of a half-formed smirk. He thinks he dreams of Snafu standing over him as he sleeps, his eyes impossibly gentle, a finality in the curve of his smile as he turns to leave. Eugene is powerless to stop him, and the smile fades from Snafu’s face like a ripple in the water before he disappears down the walkway, his seabag slung over his shoulders.

When he wakes up, Snafu is gone, having melted into the foggy streets and lamplit alleys of New Orleans. Eugene doesn’t look for him, he doesn’t wait for him to come back; he knows Snafu has left him, sleeping in the night against the still-sunwarmed window, that there’s nothing left now, no more tears, no more forgiveness, only Eugene alone on a train. He slumps deep into the seat and this thing inside of him flutters, this thing he didn’t know he had, this thing he never wanted, flutters and threatens to break. It feels wet and red and angry, like something from those long, weary nights in Okinawa, and it tears at his chest until he’s untangled and wild in the pale light of early dawn.

He will go home. He will go home to wander through his soft Alabama fields and drift from cool, quiet room to cool, quiet room, to pluck flowers from the garden for his mother’s parlor and nap in the evenings. Life will go on like it always has, like it always will. He will forget, in time, about a pair of blue eyes that watched him once in the shadows of war, about a swollen mouth that once made a promise it couldn’t keep. Everything is finished now. Everything, everything, everything, save for the last goodbye that Eugene never had; it hangs suspended, as airy and delicate as spider silk, between himself and Snafu, wherever he is, lost to Eugene somewhere in Louisiana and kept young and bright forever in Eugene’s memory.