Jul. 25th, 2019 02:57 pm
FIC: Alive in Our Skins
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thrillingdetectivetalesALIVE IN OUR SKINS
Lew "Chuckler" Juergens/Robert "Lucky" Leckie
What made markedly less sense, Leckie considered, glancing down to his thigh, where his sleeping foxhole companion was steadily soaking his dungarees through with drool, was this fixation on Chuckler.
“But it’s [...] not just me being here again, old
needer, looking for someone to need,
but you, up from the clay yourself,
as luck would have it, and inching
over the same little segment of earth-
ball, in the same little eon, to
meet in a room, alive in our skins.”
....................
If it were going to be anyone, Leckie thought absently, watching a thin ribbon of smoke unfurl toward the darkened heavens, it really ought to have been Phillips. He came from that sly-featured, effete Southern stock—they of silk cravats and linen suits and mint juleps taken on the long, shaded porches wrapping their modest manors in the lazy midsummer afternoon. With his golden curls and soft eyes and genteel nature, trapped together on this hellish limbo of an island that was sorely lacking in feminine companionship of any stripe, it would have made sense that Phillips might eventually begin to appeal to certain of Leckie’s more intimate appetites, starved as they were for greater nourishment.
What made markedly less sense, Leckie considered, glancing down to his thigh, where his sleeping foxhole companion was steadily soaking his dungarees through with drool, was this fixation on Chuckler. He took a long, slow drag off his slowly diminishing cigarette and sighed up into the star-spattered night.
Chuckler was a man. A real man’s man, even, as Leckie’s father might say, which was a distinction that seemed to be measured by the fact that Chuckler was broad-shouldered and affable and could trace his family history back several generations on American soil—whatever that was worth when so much of the blood meant eventually to nourish that familiar homestead loam was spilling out onto the golden sands coating every inch of this tropical wasteland instead. Outdated metrics of worth notwithstanding, Chuckler was exactly the type of man that Leckie would have chosen to march into battle beside if he’d been granted personal influence over the decision rather than receiving an order to sally forth into hell with a virtual stranger at his shoulder upon the whim of the U.S. military.
I mean, Jesus, Leckie thought, considering the ten extra days Chuckler had spent in the brig back in Melbourne, busted down to private on account of Leckie’s own drunken insubordination and suffering the strange, routine shame of having his dark curls buzzed every day without so much as a breath of complaint. The stupid, loyal son of a bitch.
It had started as honest admiration, Leckie knew that much. Where Hoosier took time and patience to befriend and Runner was a late starter and something of an acquired taste, besides, he and Chuckler—so called because he was charming, friendly, and almost universally well-liked among a whole score of men with good reason to nurse their perpetually sore tempers—had hit it off right away. Chuckler was smart but not pedantic, capable but not domineering, and his mouth was sharp when he grinned in a way that always seemed to imply to whoever happened to catch his expression that they were in with him on the joke, whatever that may be.
He was a normal kind of good-looking, with blue eyes and straight teeth, trim of figure like all Marines were here on the ass end of the Allied advance, and roughly Leckie’s equal in height. There was nothing about him that was so spectacular as to suggest he ought to be the exception to the rule of preference that had governed all matters of Leckie’s heart since he first hit puberty. And yet, here they were—Chuckler slobbering the beginnings of another sore into the damp meat of Leckie’s thigh while Leckie smoked, and brooded, and fought the urge to reach down and soothe away the tension knotting Chuckler’s brow with a few tender passes of his fingers.
They were six days into the assault on Cape Gloucester, all of them filthy and exhausted, scruffy and unkempt. Leckie had been cultivating an itchy, perpetual five o’clock shadow since just twenty-fours after they made landfall and Chuckler was more than halfway to a full beard going on nearly a week without a shave. It suited his square jaw, handsomely maturing his boyish features, and Leckie couldn’t stop thinking about what it might feel like against his thighs. He was in no position to find out—even if Chuckler might have been amenable to the suggestion, which would be a greater miracle than the Japs deciding to surrender tomorrow—but Leckie couldn’t rattle the question loose from his mind.
The reality was that even if he were game to give it a go, Chuckler probably wouldn’t be any good. Leckie didn’t imagine he had much by way of experience on the performative end of a French bath and enthusiasm could only absolve so many sins when a man’s prick came into such close contact with a full set of teeth. Still, the thought of Chuckler peering coyly up along the plane of Leckie’s bare abdomen, sharp mouth stretched wide, was enough to ignite a bright cherry of desire in the molten pit of Leckie’s gut. He shifted a little, at the risk of rousing Chuckler from the uneasy slumber he’d finally settled into a few short hours before, trying without much success to adjust himself against the sudden flare of want without stooping to the indignity of rooting around in his dungarees to do so.
Chuckler had the fingers of his right hand fisted in the loose fabric over Leckie’s knee, the identification bracelet his parents had bought for him before he shipped out gleaming star-bright against the strong, tanned pillar of his wrist. He had nice hands, Chuckler—big and square with long, nimble fingers, well suited for a mortar, a rifle, a Ka-Bar, and any other number of tools crafted with the express purpose of ending a man’s life. Leckie wondered vaguely what Chuckler was liable to do with those hands if Leckie ever succumbed to the urge to take a finger into his mouth, drag his tongue pointedly along the callused pad. Nothing good, probably, but—on the off-chance the luck that had inspired Leckie’s nickname held fast—maybe something fun, even so.
Leckie ruminated on this for awhile, until the change of the hour was heralded by much scattered grumbling and rustling, all the men around them rousing to swap shifts on watch duty. He lowered a hand carefully to Chuckler’s shoulder, gently cupping the firm muscle and debating whether it wouldn’t be kinder just to let the other man sleep. After all, Chuckler ran himself ragged more often than not, herding their little squad of troublemaking machine gunners, and it wasn’t like Leckie was destined for sweet dreams, anyway; not with as many raw thoughts teeming through his brain as there were enemies out in the looming woods, waiting to crawl through the brush and catch them unawares.
He was spared the responsibility of deciding when Chuckler stirred against Leckie’s leg of his own accord. He rolled over onto his back, dislodging Leckie’s hand but leaving his head pillowed against Leckie’s thigh, and arched into a slow, sinuous stretch, cracking an eye up at Leckie.
“Lucky?” he slurred curiously.
“Yeah, Chuck,” Leckie confirmed. “Still me.” Chuckler blinked and scrubbed at his face for a second before unleashing a powerful yawn.
“Time’sit?” he asked, the half-open yaw of his mouth distorting the words to near unintelligibility. Leckie swallowed, skin prickling with heat.
“It’s, uh,” he started, and glanced down at his watch, the angle of the faintly glowing hands against its dark face. “0200.”
Chuckler grunted his acknowledgment of this fact and then dropped an arm heavily over his eyes.
“Just g’me a sec,” he mumbled from somewhere underneath his own elbow. Leckie tried very hard not to stare at the tantalizing arc of his throat, the sharp arrowhead of bare skin revealed by his partially unbuttoned shirt pointing past his collarbones to the spray of dark hair flocking his chest.
“Uh huh,” Leckie replied, vague and distracted. Before he could think better of it, he lifted the hand that had fallen aside into the dirt to skim his fingers through the couple of wild curls tufting up from Chuckler’s forehead.
Chuckler made a soft, curious noise and tensed up just a little, moving his arm cautiously down to lay, forgotten, across his chest while he blinked up at Leckie with thoughtful, narrow eyes.
“Luck?” he asked quietly.
Leckie swallowed against the sudden tightness in his throat, mouth gone gritty and dry, and croaked, “Take another ten, Chuckler.”
Summoning courage from some untapped vein that had managed to survive this far into the brutal excavation of internal fortitude demanded by participation in wartime combat, Leckie left his hand where it was, drawing his fingers in short, smooth strokes through Chuckler’s sleep-mussed fringe.
“Hell,” he added weakly a few seconds later, while Chuckler watched him with the heavy, calculating gaze of a man working his way through some daunting and unexpected equation, “take thirty. I’m not quite ready to settle in yet.”
Chuckler was quiet for a long time, peering consideringly up at Leckie through the dark. There was a weight pulling his brow low and serious over his eyes, a subtle tension yoking his shoulders and pinioning his arms in place where he had them folded casually across his chest. Leckie could feel the hammering throb of his own heartbeat in his throat. He wondered if Chuckler was near enough to hear it over the hundred thousand foreign insects blanketing the night with their eerie, trilling chorus.
“You sure, Lucky?” Chuckler finally asked, pressing his mouth into a thin, waiting line. It was a question made of quicksand—benign at first glance, it would swallow a man whole with just one misstep and no amount of struggle or thrashing about would save him. Leckie licked his dry lips and nodded; a swift, shallow duck of his chin.
“I’m sure.”
His voice was hoarse, but steady, and the answer seemed to soothe whatever parts of Chuckler had wound clock-spring tight under the surface of his dirt-streaked skin. He sighed through his nose and settled back down against Leckie’s thigh, tilting his face toward Leckie so that his cheek was pressed against the dusty fabric of Leckie’s dungarees and reaching down to tuck his far hand under Leckie’s ankle, fingers curling up under the muddy, bedraggled hem, pressing bright bars of heat against Leckie’s skin.
“Alright then,” Chuckler murmured quietly, and closed his eyes. He tilted his head a little, nudging against Leckie’s fingers, and added, just a little louder, “You’n keep doin’ that. Feels nice.”
Leckie huffed a laugh and ran his fingers through Chuckler’s hair again, dragging gently against his scalp and scratching absently on every other pass or so. Chuckler hummed low in his chest, deep and contented, and drifted slackly back into the shallow doze of the deployed Marine.
In a few weeks’ time they would all likely be too matted with sweat and fouler stuff to allow for such a tender touch. Right now, right here, tucked together in the mud while a distant mortar ripped violently through the night, Leckie endeavored with all his being to enjoy it while he could.
Lew "Chuckler" Juergens/Robert "Lucky" Leckie
What made markedly less sense, Leckie considered, glancing down to his thigh, where his sleeping foxhole companion was steadily soaking his dungarees through with drool, was this fixation on Chuckler.
Author's Note: This was written as a part of theeasycotroopers Rare Pair Meme for
This fill exists for exactly two reasons: 1) I felt kind of bad that the Rare Pair Meme was so saturated with BoB content and 2) I discovered that Chuckler's first name is also "Lewis" and I felt contractually obligated to write him. I will admit to knowing almost nothing about Leckie, Chuckler, or the particulars of their involvement in the various campaigns of the Pacific Theater. I've watched The Pacific twice now, but will happily own up to a pretty severe character bias which has driven me to fast forward through basically two-thirds of the narrative in the interest of watching baby Rami Malek swan about being a sly dickhead all over the place.
I think I did a pretty okay job, even so, but there may be some historical inaccuracies. I've also taken a few dramatic liberties—for example, there likely would have been pretty severe light discipline on Gloucester but I like the backdrop of a character brooding over a smoke, so Leckie's having one in this story and anyone who doesn't like it can cart their criticisms elsewhere.
Title is from a poem called 'Accidents of Birth,' by William Meredith, which is also quoted at the beginning of the fic. It seemed like the kind of thing Leckie might enjoy, though it was written by what is essentially a contemporary so the poem would have been published after he returned home from the war. This was not beta-read, because I wanted to get a fill out and posted in a reasonable amount of time since all my others have taken or are taking way longer than they probably should. All errors are mine. Enjoy here, or read on AO3 if you prefer.
Mols, I hope you like it!
needer, looking for someone to need,
but you, up from the clay yourself,
as luck would have it, and inching
over the same little segment of earth-
ball, in the same little eon, to
meet in a room, alive in our skins.”
If it were going to be anyone, Leckie thought absently, watching a thin ribbon of smoke unfurl toward the darkened heavens, it really ought to have been Phillips. He came from that sly-featured, effete Southern stock—they of silk cravats and linen suits and mint juleps taken on the long, shaded porches wrapping their modest manors in the lazy midsummer afternoon. With his golden curls and soft eyes and genteel nature, trapped together on this hellish limbo of an island that was sorely lacking in feminine companionship of any stripe, it would have made sense that Phillips might eventually begin to appeal to certain of Leckie’s more intimate appetites, starved as they were for greater nourishment.
What made markedly less sense, Leckie considered, glancing down to his thigh, where his sleeping foxhole companion was steadily soaking his dungarees through with drool, was this fixation on Chuckler. He took a long, slow drag off his slowly diminishing cigarette and sighed up into the star-spattered night.
Chuckler was a man. A real man’s man, even, as Leckie’s father might say, which was a distinction that seemed to be measured by the fact that Chuckler was broad-shouldered and affable and could trace his family history back several generations on American soil—whatever that was worth when so much of the blood meant eventually to nourish that familiar homestead loam was spilling out onto the golden sands coating every inch of this tropical wasteland instead. Outdated metrics of worth notwithstanding, Chuckler was exactly the type of man that Leckie would have chosen to march into battle beside if he’d been granted personal influence over the decision rather than receiving an order to sally forth into hell with a virtual stranger at his shoulder upon the whim of the U.S. military.
I mean, Jesus, Leckie thought, considering the ten extra days Chuckler had spent in the brig back in Melbourne, busted down to private on account of Leckie’s own drunken insubordination and suffering the strange, routine shame of having his dark curls buzzed every day without so much as a breath of complaint. The stupid, loyal son of a bitch.
It had started as honest admiration, Leckie knew that much. Where Hoosier took time and patience to befriend and Runner was a late starter and something of an acquired taste, besides, he and Chuckler—so called because he was charming, friendly, and almost universally well-liked among a whole score of men with good reason to nurse their perpetually sore tempers—had hit it off right away. Chuckler was smart but not pedantic, capable but not domineering, and his mouth was sharp when he grinned in a way that always seemed to imply to whoever happened to catch his expression that they were in with him on the joke, whatever that may be.
He was a normal kind of good-looking, with blue eyes and straight teeth, trim of figure like all Marines were here on the ass end of the Allied advance, and roughly Leckie’s equal in height. There was nothing about him that was so spectacular as to suggest he ought to be the exception to the rule of preference that had governed all matters of Leckie’s heart since he first hit puberty. And yet, here they were—Chuckler slobbering the beginnings of another sore into the damp meat of Leckie’s thigh while Leckie smoked, and brooded, and fought the urge to reach down and soothe away the tension knotting Chuckler’s brow with a few tender passes of his fingers.
They were six days into the assault on Cape Gloucester, all of them filthy and exhausted, scruffy and unkempt. Leckie had been cultivating an itchy, perpetual five o’clock shadow since just twenty-fours after they made landfall and Chuckler was more than halfway to a full beard going on nearly a week without a shave. It suited his square jaw, handsomely maturing his boyish features, and Leckie couldn’t stop thinking about what it might feel like against his thighs. He was in no position to find out—even if Chuckler might have been amenable to the suggestion, which would be a greater miracle than the Japs deciding to surrender tomorrow—but Leckie couldn’t rattle the question loose from his mind.
The reality was that even if he were game to give it a go, Chuckler probably wouldn’t be any good. Leckie didn’t imagine he had much by way of experience on the performative end of a French bath and enthusiasm could only absolve so many sins when a man’s prick came into such close contact with a full set of teeth. Still, the thought of Chuckler peering coyly up along the plane of Leckie’s bare abdomen, sharp mouth stretched wide, was enough to ignite a bright cherry of desire in the molten pit of Leckie’s gut. He shifted a little, at the risk of rousing Chuckler from the uneasy slumber he’d finally settled into a few short hours before, trying without much success to adjust himself against the sudden flare of want without stooping to the indignity of rooting around in his dungarees to do so.
Chuckler had the fingers of his right hand fisted in the loose fabric over Leckie’s knee, the identification bracelet his parents had bought for him before he shipped out gleaming star-bright against the strong, tanned pillar of his wrist. He had nice hands, Chuckler—big and square with long, nimble fingers, well suited for a mortar, a rifle, a Ka-Bar, and any other number of tools crafted with the express purpose of ending a man’s life. Leckie wondered vaguely what Chuckler was liable to do with those hands if Leckie ever succumbed to the urge to take a finger into his mouth, drag his tongue pointedly along the callused pad. Nothing good, probably, but—on the off-chance the luck that had inspired Leckie’s nickname held fast—maybe something fun, even so.
Leckie ruminated on this for awhile, until the change of the hour was heralded by much scattered grumbling and rustling, all the men around them rousing to swap shifts on watch duty. He lowered a hand carefully to Chuckler’s shoulder, gently cupping the firm muscle and debating whether it wouldn’t be kinder just to let the other man sleep. After all, Chuckler ran himself ragged more often than not, herding their little squad of troublemaking machine gunners, and it wasn’t like Leckie was destined for sweet dreams, anyway; not with as many raw thoughts teeming through his brain as there were enemies out in the looming woods, waiting to crawl through the brush and catch them unawares.
He was spared the responsibility of deciding when Chuckler stirred against Leckie’s leg of his own accord. He rolled over onto his back, dislodging Leckie’s hand but leaving his head pillowed against Leckie’s thigh, and arched into a slow, sinuous stretch, cracking an eye up at Leckie.
“Lucky?” he slurred curiously.
“Yeah, Chuck,” Leckie confirmed. “Still me.” Chuckler blinked and scrubbed at his face for a second before unleashing a powerful yawn.
“Time’sit?” he asked, the half-open yaw of his mouth distorting the words to near unintelligibility. Leckie swallowed, skin prickling with heat.
“It’s, uh,” he started, and glanced down at his watch, the angle of the faintly glowing hands against its dark face. “0200.”
Chuckler grunted his acknowledgment of this fact and then dropped an arm heavily over his eyes.
“Just g’me a sec,” he mumbled from somewhere underneath his own elbow. Leckie tried very hard not to stare at the tantalizing arc of his throat, the sharp arrowhead of bare skin revealed by his partially unbuttoned shirt pointing past his collarbones to the spray of dark hair flocking his chest.
“Uh huh,” Leckie replied, vague and distracted. Before he could think better of it, he lifted the hand that had fallen aside into the dirt to skim his fingers through the couple of wild curls tufting up from Chuckler’s forehead.
Chuckler made a soft, curious noise and tensed up just a little, moving his arm cautiously down to lay, forgotten, across his chest while he blinked up at Leckie with thoughtful, narrow eyes.
“Luck?” he asked quietly.
Leckie swallowed against the sudden tightness in his throat, mouth gone gritty and dry, and croaked, “Take another ten, Chuckler.”
Summoning courage from some untapped vein that had managed to survive this far into the brutal excavation of internal fortitude demanded by participation in wartime combat, Leckie left his hand where it was, drawing his fingers in short, smooth strokes through Chuckler’s sleep-mussed fringe.
“Hell,” he added weakly a few seconds later, while Chuckler watched him with the heavy, calculating gaze of a man working his way through some daunting and unexpected equation, “take thirty. I’m not quite ready to settle in yet.”
Chuckler was quiet for a long time, peering consideringly up at Leckie through the dark. There was a weight pulling his brow low and serious over his eyes, a subtle tension yoking his shoulders and pinioning his arms in place where he had them folded casually across his chest. Leckie could feel the hammering throb of his own heartbeat in his throat. He wondered if Chuckler was near enough to hear it over the hundred thousand foreign insects blanketing the night with their eerie, trilling chorus.
“You sure, Lucky?” Chuckler finally asked, pressing his mouth into a thin, waiting line. It was a question made of quicksand—benign at first glance, it would swallow a man whole with just one misstep and no amount of struggle or thrashing about would save him. Leckie licked his dry lips and nodded; a swift, shallow duck of his chin.
“I’m sure.”
His voice was hoarse, but steady, and the answer seemed to soothe whatever parts of Chuckler had wound clock-spring tight under the surface of his dirt-streaked skin. He sighed through his nose and settled back down against Leckie’s thigh, tilting his face toward Leckie so that his cheek was pressed against the dusty fabric of Leckie’s dungarees and reaching down to tuck his far hand under Leckie’s ankle, fingers curling up under the muddy, bedraggled hem, pressing bright bars of heat against Leckie’s skin.
“Alright then,” Chuckler murmured quietly, and closed his eyes. He tilted his head a little, nudging against Leckie’s fingers, and added, just a little louder, “You’n keep doin’ that. Feels nice.”
Leckie huffed a laugh and ran his fingers through Chuckler’s hair again, dragging gently against his scalp and scratching absently on every other pass or so. Chuckler hummed low in his chest, deep and contented, and drifted slackly back into the shallow doze of the deployed Marine.
In a few weeks’ time they would all likely be too matted with sweat and fouler stuff to allow for such a tender touch. Right now, right here, tucked together in the mud while a distant mortar ripped violently through the night, Leckie endeavored with all his being to enjoy it while he could.