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thrillingdetectivetalesCOME TAKE ME HOME AGAIN
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Author's Note: This fill was written for the Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme, which, if y'all aren't already participating, you really should because it's super fun. The prompt was:
Thanks tomuccamukk and scandalinbohemia for looking it over in early draft form and convincing me that it wasn't total garbage. The version posted below hasn't been officially beta-read so any mistakes are mine.
You can also read it on AO3.
“Just, how it is, I guess?” Eugene shrugged. “I ain’t ever been.”
Merriell considered this for a long moment.
“‘bout the same as anywhere else, I expect,” he offered. “Prob’ly ain’t a whole lot different than it is in Mobile. Tighter quarters, maybe. More folks around.” He glanced out the window for a second, and then back at Eugene with a smirk. “Better music, too, I’ll bet.”
Eugene snorted, flicking his gaze away. “I don’t know,” he hedged, teasing. “Our bandstand really gets to swingin’ at the Christmas party the church puts on. Old Tommy Pellkenny is a dab hand on the horn.”
Merriell sucked his teeth, shaking his head lazily as he drawled, “Can’t dance in front of your mama and the preacher and Tommy whoever the way you can dance in the halls in New Orleans, cher.”
Eugene laughed outright at that, good humor etching deep dimples into his pink-flushed cheeks. A few of the other passengers glanced over to see what the hullabaloo was about but their attention didn’t linger long—the novel sheen of a couple of Marines returning from war had tarnished in the forum of public goodwill months before Company K hit home soil, and Merriell’s handful of forcibly rejected attempts to flatter the feminine clientele in this particular train car certainly hadn’t done that reputation any further favor. Not that he much minded. All that dog and pony had largely been to lift Eugene’s floundering spirits, anyway.
“Well,” Eugene said once he’d settled down again, picking at a loose thread sticking off his sea bag, “I guess you’ll have to show me someday.”
His voice was unusually subdued, almost shy in a way that stoked the banked heat of affection in Merriell’s chest, sent it running sticky all through his ribs. The pink stain in Eugene’s cheeks had flooded all the way out to his ears and he was watching Merriell cautiously from beneath the russet fan of his lashes.
Merriell nudged their boots together. “Someday,” he agreed. It felt like a promise in the still air between them. “Sure.”
Eugene’s answering smile was small and soft and sweet. It didn’t even show his teeth, but it wrung Merriell’s heart out like a dishrag. He swallowed around the tender knot in his throat and continued with forced levity, “You welcome ‘round my place anytime, Sledgehammer. Don’t even gotta be Christmas or nothin’, there’s no end of a party in the French Quarter. We’ll have you dancin’ the Louisiana two-step ‘fore you can blink.”
“Whatever you say, Snaf.” Eugene sat up and rolled his eyes, mouth curling at the corners. He stretched his arms up over his head, a contented hum rumbling through his chest. “How long we got ‘til your stop?”
Merriell shrugged, guessing by the angle of the sun, “‘nother coupla hours?”
Eugene made a quiet noise of frustration and leaned over until his forehead was pressed against the window, dark eyes trained blearily on the shifting horizon.
“What’sa matter Sledgehammer?” Merriell knocked their knees together. “Thought you musta been enjoyin’ my company, keen as you are to come visit me at home.”
“It ain’t that,” Eugene snorted. A little burst of fog sprang along the windowpane from the general vicinity of his nose, dispersing just as quickly as it had appeared in the muggy afternoon. “‘m just tired.” He shook his head clumsily against the glass, staring dimly into the middle distance as he sighed. It was a heavy thing, hanging leaden in the air. “It feels like I’ve been tired for a hundred years.”
He was pale under the lingering flush of pleasure, shadows dusted like bruises below his eyes.
“Go on and sleep, then,” Merriell said.
“Can’t,” Eugene intoned with good-natured gravity, glancing over with a grin. “Gotta see you off, yet.”
The heat suffusing Merriell’s chest spilled all the way out to his fingers, bubbling furiously like a pot of water left abandoned on the stovetop.
“Sleep,” he ordered sternly, knocking their boots together once more. “I’ll wake you up before I go.”
Eugene pressed his mouth into a flat, suspicious line. He was swaying gently in time with the train as it rocked underneath them. “You promise?”
Merriell watched him for a long moment, each of Eugene’s features picked out along the edges in a wash of buttery summer sunlight, and then extended his arm across the aisle.
“Pinky swear,” he said, curling all but his littlest finger into a loose fist. Eugene arched a highly skeptical eyebrow but the stain in his cheeks glowed even brighter when Merriell winked at him.
“Fine,” he muttered, whipping a hand out to wrap their pinkies together for a brief, lovely moment before sinking back into his seat and folding his arms over his chest. He shifted around for a second, settling himself against his sea bag with his head tipped back toward the ceiling and his eyes closed.
Merriell took the unexpected opportunity to study Eugene with unabashed openness, gaze trailing up the elegant column of his throat, along the aquiline slope of his nose, across the wide cushion of his mouth. His hair had been freshly cut—shorn short and neat around the ears and neck, with a crisp part combed slightly to one side and set with pomade. He had abandoned his cap as soon as was respectable, as even the jauntiest of tilts did little to offset the unfortunate angle of his ears, and the gaps at the cuffs of his sleeves highlighted his sender wrists.
“Quit it,” Eugene muttered out of nowhere.
Merriell blinked, caught out, but replied breezily, “Quit what?”
Eugene cracked his eyes, narrow and glittering with amusement. “I can feel you watchin’ me.”
“You didn’t complain about it nearly so much on Peleliu,” Merriell replied. Eugene snorted, his whole chest lifting, and let his eyes droop shut once more.
“Ain’t nobody tryin’ to shoot us here.”
“Not yet,” Merriell allowed. “Give me time.”
Eugene snorted again, a tiny huff through his nose. “You go botherin’ that pretty brunette again, you’re on your own and you deserve anything she gives you.”
Merriell bit down on a grin and shook his head. “Shut up, Sledgehammer.” Eugene smiled, smug and content with his eyes still closed as Merriell murmured, “Get you some sleep ‘fore I change my mind.”
By the time the train rolled into Terminal Station, Eugene was well and truly lost to the depths of a serene doze. He was slumped over onto his sea bag, chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm, breath wheezing softly out of his slackened mouth on every exhale.
He had drifted toward wakefulness at a few previous stops, when disembarking passengers or fresh boardees shuffled past with their luggage, but sank easily back into sleep at a murmured word of assurance from Merriell. This time, he just snuffled a little and shifted to press his face into the canvas under his cheek.
Merriell pushed himself to his feet as the car rocked to a stop, smirking fondly and shaking his head. He hoisted his own sea bag off the overhead luggage rack and slung it over his shoulder, straightening the lapels of his jacket as he turned back around to peer down at his slumbering companion.
The whole scene resembled nothing so much as an oil painting—all the colors of Eugene’s uniformed punched jewel-dark by the dim gold beams of the overhead lights, with deep, charcoal shadows smudged at the hollow of his throat and over the soft planes of his face. Merriell’s breath stuck in his chest, brittle and thin, as Eugene dreamt peacefully on, the inky ribbon of the Mississippi refracting silvery sparks of moonlight through the window behind him.
What good would it really do to wake him, Merriell wondered. They would salute each other, maybe shake hands or embrace for a second if they were feeling especially affectionate, and then wander off in their own separate directions, back to their own separate lives. Eugene had good intentions, wanting to wave Merriell safely off and making idle and likely fruitless plans to visit in the future, but the road to damnation was paved with greater kindnesses than these and Merriell had seen enough of hell for one lifetime.
He tore his gaze down toward the well-scuffed floorboards of the train car and turned away, shuffling forward with a step that dragged as though his boots were filled with sand and iron.
It was better this way, he insisted to himself. Better to pinch this hope off the vine before it saw a chance to blossom and spare them both the pain of the thorns that came after. Better that Eugene should wake up peacefully back in Mobile—with his parents and his brother and that cherub-faced friend of his from How Company merrily awaiting his return—and forget all about Snafu Shelton with his blood-stained Ka-Bar and his horde of gold teeth.
Merriell froze in his stride on the threshold of the car, the narrow doorway just ahead hanging open to the sticky Louisiana night, stars winking like distant tracers against the velvet dark.
Don’t look back, he warned himself, and grasped at vague memories of Lot and his wife, turned to a pillar of salt for his selfishness. He wasn’t going to ruin Eugene the same way.
He took a slow, shuddering breath and one jerky step, and then another, and another, until he was perched at the top rung of the car’s short flight of stairs, half his body hanging out into the molasses-thick night with the familiar bustle of the sleepless city all around him. He glanced over his shoulder, to the other end of the platform where the snaking silhouette of the train disappeared back into the dark, and climbed down. There were a handful of sailors in crisp white uniforms bobbing among the crowd of citizens in their traveling finery and Merriell picked his way through without much effort. A couple of well-dressed men gave him somber nods and some of the women smiled prettily from beneath their dainty hats but on the whole nobody spared him a second glance.
The hum of conversation suffusing the area buzzed like a great swarm at the forefront of his attention, so it took him a moment to recognize his own nickname cutting through the din.
“ -af! Snafu, I said stop, damn it all!”
Merriell wheeled around to discover none other than Eugene Sledge shouldering his way gracelessly through the throng, many of whom were staring askance at the vaguely wild-eyed Marine bowling ruthlessly past unsuspecting civilians and swearing aloud as he went. He had a faint mark on one cheek—the reddened texture of his sea bag imprinted on his skin—and a few locks of his hair had broken free of their careful coif to flop raggedly over his forehead.
“Sledgehammer?” Merriell said dumbly as Eugene stalked forward.
“Who the hell else would it be?” Eugene snapped. As soon as he was close enough, he reached out to shove hard at Merriell’s chest with both hands. “Whad’ja think, I was gonna let you just get away with it?”
“The hell’s gotten into you?” Merriell asked, staggering back with the force of the blow and dropping his sea bag off his shoulder with a heavy thump.
“What’s gotten into me?” Eugene hissed. He stepped in close with his shoulders hunched up toward his ears. His skin was peppered with angry red blotches, jaw set and teeth clenched the same way they’d been on the ridges of Okinawa just before he bawled that shavetail lieutenant out for fussing over what type of weapon his Marines used to kill Japs so long as they got the job done. “You left me alone up there, Snaf! What happened to wakin’ me up, sayin’ goodbye, huh? You too good to keep your promises now we ain’t sharin’ a foxhole anymore?”
Merriell had known that Eugene wouldn’t be best pleased when he woke up in Mobile to find Merriell conspicuously absent, but the fervor of his vitriol was a bit of a surprise. While Eugene was possessed of a highly combustible temper—not altogether unlike Merriell himself—his fuse was usually markedly longer than this. It was true that Merriell had been relying on a considerable distance from the immediate blast radius of Eugene’s temper to preserve his own comfort in the immediate aftermath of his minor betrayal, but he hadn’t expected a reaction of quite this magnitude, even so.
“I decided to let you get some rest,” he drawled, falling back on nonchalance to mask how nearly the radiating waves of Eugene’s fury had taken his knees out from under him. “So what? You fixin’ to fight about it?” He flicked a quick, pointed glance over the whole of Eugene’s person. “Clear as hell you need it. Look at you, barely a hundred miles from home and still halfway Asiatic.”
Eugene narrowed his eyes. His gaze was sharp and blood-black in the watery moonlight. Merriell’s stomach clenched, hot, as it pierced straight through him. He was vaguely aware that people were staring, openly captivated by the tawdry little scene they were putting on. Eugene didn’t seem to notice at all; or, if he did notice, he had decided that he simply didn’t care. Eugene was funny like that.
“I always knew you were a bastard but I didn’t figure you for yella.”
“That’s ‘cause I ain’t and you damn well know it.” Merriell grabbed Eugene’s lapel, yanking at it to pull him off-balance. Eugene stumbled a little but went right on glaring mutinously at Merriell from a spare few inches away.
“You got a better name for it?” he demanded. “‘Cause where I’m standing it’s plain, pitiful cowardice all the way through.”
“Jesus Christ, Gene.” Merriell rolled his eyes, temper broiling molten in his gut. It was a unique talent of Eugene’s, this ability to summon Merriell’s poorest nature with such immediate and unerring success. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake you, alright? Happy?” He pushed Eugene back with a half-hearted shove, releasing his grip on Eugene’s jacket, and sneered, “Now go on, get your fool ass back on the train ‘fore it leaves you here.”
As though roused by the reminder, the engine car rumbled and lurched, low whistle wheezing loud across the platform. Eugene didn’t even blink, just thrust his chin mulishly forward and reached up to wrap his fingers white-knuckle tight around the strap across his chest that Merriell only now realized connected to the sea bag full of personal effects and worldly treasures that Eugene had slung over one shoulder.
Merriell stared at him for a long, uncomprehending moment, red-faced and defiant in the gauzy light off the streetlamps, and then huffed a bitter gust of laughter. “Oh, goddamnit,” he breathed, shaking his head and wrestling against the grin tugging viciously at his mouth. “You asshole.”
“You said anytime,” Eugene accused, steadfast and stubborn. “Right now seems just as good to me as six months on, or was that all bullshit, too?”
Merriell shook his head again. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch, Sledgehammer. Gonna give your mama a nasty shock when her baby boy don’t climb off that train in Mobile.”
“I’ll send her a wire,” Eugene assured him briskly.
Merriell tapped his foot in an irritated staccato against the platform. “Maybe I got nowhere to go, huh?” he suggested, crossing his arms over his chest. “You stop and think about that before you came runnin’ out here?”
“If you ain’t got nowhere, then we’ll find someplace together,” Eugene retorted, insistent and aggravated. “That’s what we do, Snaf.” He frowned and gave his head a little shake, suddenly seeming to realize that they were drawing a crowd. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and twisted the strap of his sea bag in both hands, muttering darkly, “I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult.”
Merriell stared at him askance. Eugene’s tender complexion was splotched unattractively with the evidence of his anger, broad shoulders sloped inward under the weight of his wounded pride. His edges had gone fuzzy in the silken haze of smoke and steam ebbing through the air and the low light of the streetlamps carved deep, ghastly caverns around his hooded eyes.
Merriell had figured out pretty early on that the war was going to haunt him one way or another. He just hadn’t expected it to manifest quite like this—the privileged son of some prominent Alabama doctor baying like a stray at Merriell’s heels for permission to follow him home.
“‘Course you don’t,” he sighed, bending to hoist his bag up off the ground. He turned toward the nearest of the station house’s high, arched doorways and waved a hand over his shoulder, beckoning, “C’mon then. If we’re gonna air our dirty laundry, let’s get outta the damn street, at least.”
Eugene fell into step without complaint, silent and somber at Merriell’s shoulder as he forged ahead, weaving through the milling travelers and curious rubberneckers to lead Eugene to the relative privacy of a cramped public bathroom at the station’s northernmost end. There was a lone sailor loitering inside who looked up with interest when the two of them walked in, but he hustled along after barely a glance at whatever he saw in Merriell’s face.
Once they were alone, Merriell dropped his bag in the corner and wheeled on Eugene, herding him until he was pressed awkwardly back against one of the sinks, boxed in between Merriell’s arms with his sea bag abandoned carelessly to one side. With half his breath knocked out of him, Eugene only got as far as a thin, “Snaf, what - ” before Merriell caught his mouth viciously against his own.
Their teeth clicked and Eugene yelped, bracing himself with one hand curled over the lip of the sink at his back and reaching up to fist the other furiously in the fabric of Merriell’s uniform jacket. He opened to the kiss without hesitation, mouth hot and wet and welcoming, tilting his head in search of a better angle and moaning gently when he found it. Merriell swallowed the sweet little sound and rolled his hips up against Eugene’s. Neither of them was anywhere approaching hard, not yet, but Eugene keened low in the back of his throat and matched the motion anyway.
“The hell was that for?” he murmured breathlessly against Merriell’s mouth as soon as he had room to speak. His words were a warm rumble ghosting over Merriell’s cheek while their lips brushed and noses bumped.
“Awful lotta work, strandin’ yourself in New Orleans just for a lay, Sledgehammer,” Merriell teased, ignoring the question in favor of nosing along the blade of Eugene’s jaw. He sucked a lazy kiss at the hinge just below his ear and savored the way Eugene shuddered under his mouth. “Ought’ve said somethin’ sooner. Those train stalls are tight but we’d’ve managed.”
“What?” Eugene sounded dazed and distracted, likely by the hand Merriell had moved to cup him through the placket of his trousers, stirring his soft cock to attention.
“S’what you wanted, right?” Merriell asked as Eugene rocked into the curve of his palm. “A farewell fuck? Last good time to remember me by?”
Eugene froze. He flattened his hand against Merriell’s chest and pushed him back just far enough to catch his gaze. When Merriell looked up into his face Eugene’s brow was furrowed low over his dark eyes, swollen pink mouth pulled down into a frown.
“Is that what you think?”
Merriell’s stomach lurched but he licked his dry lips and replied with all the aloof detachment he could muster, “Ain’t it?”
Eugene studied him for a long, still moment, features darkening like a steely thunderhead rolling in over the sun, and said shortly, “Right.”
He surged forward, tightening his grip on Merriell’s jacket and bringing his other hand up to hook over Merriell’s belt. The force of his momentum carried them clumsily back into one of the stalls, halfway tripping over Eugene’s sea bag as they went. Merriell hissed as he knocked his elbow against the doorframe but Eugene didn’t so much as glance over, black eyes pinned dangerously to Merriell’s own.
As soon as the door had swung halfway shut at his back, Eugene was working Merriell’s buckle off with shaking fingers and slipping his belt loose.
“Lock that,” he ordered briskly, dropping to his knees right there on the filthy tile and stripping Merriell’s trousers down his thighs as he went.
Merriell reached absently for the stall door, fumbling the lock into place just as Eugene got his shorts yanked down, wrapped one hand around his still mostly-soft cock, and guided it into his mouth. He sucked hard at the head, tongue pressing a point of wet heat just under the ridge, and Merriell slammed his palm flat against the door with a bang that echoed percussively through the empty room.
“Fuck, Gene,” he sighed, threading the fingers of his other hand loosely through Eugene’s dark hair. He rocked shallowly forward into Eugene’s mouth and Eugene made an encouraging noise that hummed deliciously through Merriell’s rapidly stiffening prick. He gripped at Eugene’s hair a little tighter and pushed more forcefully. The hot, slick slide pulled a raw groan up from his belly, punctuated by the soft, wanton sounds leaking out from the corners of Eugene’s mouth.
Eugene curled his palms slackly over Merriell’s thighs, sighing through his nose and letting his eyes flutter shut as Merriell took his face in both hands. He was a vision, kneeling there—russet hair and pale skin all wrapped up in Marine service greens with that lush, berry-stained mouth stretched wide around Merriell’s cock.
“Missed seein’ you like this,” Merriell murmured, thrusting his hips forward. They’d been spoiled for privacy back in Peiping and having Eugene this way had quickly become one of Merriell’s most favored pastimes. It was second only to spreading Eugene out underneath him and watching him pant and shiver and plead while Merriell took him at his leisure, but that was hardly feasible in a public bathroom stall.
The reminder of precisely where they were, separated from the general masses by a short walk and a thin wall, ignited a pinwheel of bright sparks in Merriell’s belly. He rocked into Eugene’s mouth in long, smooth strokes and shuddered at the desperate way Eugene groaned around him.
“Yeah, Genie, that’s it,” he babbled, dragging his thumbs gently along the soft hollows of Eugene’s cheeks where his jaw was stretched open. “Fuck, you feel good. Want your mouth on me all the time. What if I keep you on your knees like this forever, huh? Keep that pretty mouth open for me. Never let you close it up again.”
The words were largely nonsense though the sentiment was true enough. It lit Eugene up like a firecracker and he gasped through his nose, tongue fluttering as he fought to swallow around Merriell’s prick. Merriell moaned. Eugene gripped at his thighs so hard there would likely be a smudged array of plum-dark bruises scattered there in the morning and pushed his face forward at the same time that Merriell rocked his hips, so his cock drove even deeper into Eugene’s throat.
Merriell chased his pleasure in the heat of Eugene’s mouth for a few long, hazy moments. He cradled Eugene’s face in his hands and rutted as deep into the slick pressure as he could without risking damage. He was spilling lust-soaked snatches of praise in a nonsensical torrent of adulation that had Eugene’s fair complexion glowing pink like a lit-up strawberry even though his eyes were closed, russet lashes fanning down his cheeks, soft and spiked wet at the outside edges.
“Fuck, cher,” Merriell moaned. His belly twisted white hot, clenching tighter and burning brighter with every sloppy drag of his prick through the wet circle of Eugene’s lips. There was a tender knot tangled behind his sternum that had throbbed into existence the second he turned his back on Eugene where he slept in the train car. It ruptured and split open without any warning, bleeding out to all of Merriell’s rawest edges, and he was overcome with a sudden, aching need to meet Eugene’s gaze, to pin this moment in his memory forever.
“Open your eyes,” he breathed, voice low and pleading as he stroked his thumbs along the high ridges of Eugene’s cheeks. “C’mon, Genie, look at me.”
Eugene’s brow pinched for a second and he made a soft, wounded noise in the back of his throat. When he looked up, his eyes were big and glossy and dark and Merriell felt the heat in them catch along the length of his spine like a match-head against striking paper.
“Gene,” he gasped, fixing the visual in his mind with a half-crazed desperation. “Gene, you’re so - fuck.” In a few shallow thrusts he was coming against the flat, wet warmth of Eugene’s tongue, groping blindly for the wall of the stall to try and hold himself up against the undertow of the sparkling white wave that crashed over him.
Eugene swallowed everything down without complaint, wrapping his arms around Merriell’s thighs for extra support. It was an old habit—Eugene was well familiar with the way Merriell’s bones tended to go liquid when he came, having caught a resultant knee to certain fragile parts of his anatomy a time or two in the past.
When Merriell finally floated back down from the heights of his orgasm it was to find Eugene with one arm still curled possessively around Merriell’s leg and his other hand tucked past the waistband of his trousers. He was stripping his dick in quick, almost pained strokes, hadn’t even bothered pulling it out of his shorts first. He had his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead pressed against Merriell’s hip and he was spitting little shards of noise past his clenched teeth with every pass of his hand, mouth swollen and jaw still glistening wet.
“C’mere, cher,” Merriell murmured, reaching down with trembling hands to tug at the collar of Eugene’s jacket and urge him to his feet. He didn’t want to let Eugene come like this, kneeling as a beggar ignored in supplication. Merriell wanted to get his hands on him, stoke that fire in his belly until it immolated, burn himself into Eugene’s memory as surely as Eugene was burned into his own. If this was all they had, Merriell was damn well going to make it count.
Eugene made a quiet, broken noise and turned his face into Merriell’s thigh. He shifted under Merriell’s hand but made no move to rise, so Merriell yanked a little harder, goading, “C’mon, Genie, get on up here. Let me get a look at you.”
Eugene hissed a slow, shuddering breath and swore miserably in a hot gust against the bared skin of Merriell’s thigh.
Merriell snorted and carded his fingers through Eugene’s sweat-damp fringe, watching as he gingerly withdrew his hand from the depths of his trousers, blinking blearily and wiping his palm absently over his knee. Eugene braced himself against the wall to push shakily off the floor and Merriell hooked an arm under his elbow and towed him the rest of the way up.
“There you go,” Merriell soothed, nose nudging Eugene’s cheek as Eugene half-collapsed against him. “That’s it.”
He licked his way into Eugene’s mouth, chasing the taste of himself and marveling at the way Eugene keened, loud and high and tingling against Merriell’s teeth. There was a tremor skittering sweetly under his skin and he clutched at Merriell’s shoulders with a wanton abandon they hadn’t had the opportunity to risk since before they’d trooped onto the sardine-packed transport ship back in the Port of Tianjin.
“Snaf,” Eugene gasped, pulling back just far enough to breathe. “Please.”
“I got you, cher,” Merriell assured him, clumsily kissing Eugene’s jaw.
He pushed Eugene’s drawers out of the way, palming over the blood-dark head of his cock, and was rewarded with a groan.
“That’s it, Sledgehammer,” he crooned, wrapping his fingers around the silken heat of Eugene’s prick and fisting it in loose, lazy strokes. Eugene was leaking like a faucet, hard as an iron girder, and slick with precome all the way down his length. He pushed greedily up into the circle of Merriell’s hand and whimpered at the drag, cock flushed so ruddy it shone like an artillery flare against the tawny bars of Merriell’s fingers. “Fuck, look at you.”
He squeezed just this side of too hard, twisted his wrist on the upstroke, and reveled at the desperate hitch in Eugene’s breath. The corners of his eyes gleamed wetly and he was holding so tight to the fabric of Merriell’s jacket that Merriell was certain the seams would pop any second.
“Let go for me now,” he coaxed, rolling the ball of his thumb over the head of Eugene’s prick, smearing a thick bead of precome across its purpled velvet surface and then sliding his hand back down until his knuckles brushed the dark thatch of curls below. “I can feel you right there, ma beau, you’re so close.” Eugene slumped forward with a whine, hips jerking erratically into Merriell’s grip, and Merriell nosed fondly at his temple. “G’won, cher,” he breathed, “letcha’self have it.”
Eugene was silent as he came, face red and eyes shut, teeth gritted so hard Merriell half expected to hear them creaking. He spilled hot over Merriell’s fingers and Merriell did what he could to catch the mess, trying his best to spare their uniform jackets an unseemly stain with less success than he might have hoped.
Ah, well, he thought, shaking his hand out over the toilet bowl and then holding it awkwardly a little way off from his body so as not to further ruin anything. It was late enough that nobody ought to notice once they were back out on the street.
Eugene tucked his face into the curve of Merriell’s shoulder and panted against his throat, spent and exhausted, clinging like a kitten while he slowly came back to himself. Merriell considered vaguely that it was a pity they hadn’t anyplace to lie down. He’d always liked the way Eugene would curl himself in tight and close in the wake of his pleasure, settling warm over Merriell with all the comfortable familiarity of a favorite afghan.
His stomach churned with the realization that he wasn’t likely to see the experience repeated anytime soon, if ever again, and he sucked a sharp breath past his teeth. Eugene made a curious noise and Merriell shushed him, tilting his head to drop a kiss into the mussed auburn nest of Eugene’s hair.
“Goddamn, Sledgehammer,” he sighed approvingly, stirring the locks at Eugene’s crown. Eugene hummed his agreement and lingered there for a little while longer, content to let Merriell prop him up until his legs held steady underneath him.
They disentangled themselves some moments later, performing an awkward shuffle to get out of the stall without inflicting greater damage about their persons. They washed their hands side by side at the sinks and Eugene ducked down when he was finished to scoop water over his sweaty face. He took a slurping drink from his cupped hand and then pressed the back of his wrist delicately to his mouth as though embarrassed. It was as strange and charming an affectation as any of the disparate characteristics that had welded themselves together to construct such a singularly intriguing individual as one Eugene Sledge. Merriell ached to recognize that he may never again be a party to it or any other of Eugene’s many varied quirks.
He didn’t realize that Eugene was watching him in the mirror until the gentle rush of water from the faucet cut off with a shrill grind. Merriell started, gaze clearing and lifting to meet Eugene’s in the tarnished glass.
He looked somber and sallow in the stark overhead lights, mouth pressed flat and eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
“What?” Merriell demanded, leaning against the sink at his hip. He crossed his arms over his chest and arched an eyebrow. “Somethin’ on my face?”
Eugene shook his head, a bare tilt back and forth. He sighed and scrubbed at his jaw, one hand braced over the lip of the sink.
“I don’t understand you,” he admitted.
Merriell barked a bitter laugh up at the smoke-stained ceiling tiles. “You and all the rest of the world, cher,” he grinned. “Don’t worry, you’re in fine company.”
Eugene, not seeming to find this quite as amusing, shook his head again and straightened up, turning to look at Merriell head on.
For just a second, Merriell wished he hadn’t. It was easier to see him reflected in a pane of glass, already one step removed from the selfish heat of Merriell’s touch, than to be so viscerally aware of his whole form standing right there in spitting distance.
“I’ve been about as clear as I can think to be,” Eugene continued, as though he hadn’t heard a word Merriell said. Maybe he hadn’t, caught up as he was in whatever thought had him looking so hunted and hard-fought. “I thought we were on the same page, Snaf.”
“Genie,” Merriell said slowly, shaking his head and offering a shrug, “I dunno what you’re talkin’ ‘bout.”
“I know you don’t,” Eugene snapped irritably. He gestured vaguely in the air with one hand, the other crossed snug over his chest. “That’s the whole problem in a nutshell.”
“How about you clear it up for me then?” Merriell asked shortly, that molten edge of irritation flickering back to life even under the lazy, lingering pleasure of a truly superb orgasm.
“Alright,” Eugene agreed, squaring himself up like he was readying for a blow. Merriell shifted cautiously back. Eugene may not be the most skilled at close combat but he was surprisingly scrappy and Merriell wasn’t sure precisely what he was after now that they’d gotten that last fuck out of their systems. Eugene nodded, a shallow, certain dip of his chin, and announced, “I want to come home with you.”
Merriell rolled his eyes. “Well, Jesus, Sledgehammer,” he drawled with no small amount of relief. “What’d you think, I was gonna leave you to sleep at the train station? I figure we’ll walk back to mine and get you a ticket in the morning.” He cut Eugene a pointed glance and teased, “Better hope my mama didn’t get around to throwin’ out that couch she’s been houndin’ me to get rid of while we were sittin’ pretty in a tropical paradise.”
“No,” Eugene said, stern and low. He didn’t so much as smirk, that dark gravity settled into him like granite. It made Merriell’s pulse pick up, thick and sticky and curdled like rancid molasses. “I don’t mean tonight. I don’t want just tonight, Snafu, if I come home with you I want - ” He faltered, voice breaking and eyes glistening with a sudden slick sheen. “I want to stay.”
For a long, silent second, Merriell stared, convinced he couldn’t possibly have heard right.
“What?” he croaked, and Eugene said it again.
“I want to stay.” He took a step into Merriell’s space, not close enough to crowd but the intent in it was clear. “With you.”
Merriell licked at his dry lips, drummed his fingers against his arms, and considered Eugene with a wary frown. “How long?”
Eugene made a helpless noise and shrugged with his whole body.
“I dunno,” he said. There was something crazed at the edges of his eyes—a distant cousin of that same madness that had seen him poised over a dead man’s mouth in ghoulish imitation of his fellow Marines, knife in hand, with only Merriell to pull him back from the edge of the bluff where a soul’s humanity went to die. “As long as you’ll have me.”
Merriell shook his head.
“You don’t mean that,” he said grimly.
“I do!”
“You can’t mean that,” Merriell corrected sharply. He pushed right up into Eugene’s space, digging a finger meanly into his chest, and snarled, “What the hell d’you think you’re doin’, here, Gene? Talkin’ like you ain’t got better to do than trail around after some dog tired Marine like a stray starvin’ for table scraps when we both know you got a whole feast and more waitin’ for you at the end of that rail line.”
“Maybe I don’t want to go back yet,” Eugene said defiantly, lifting his chin. Merriell wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss him or slug him. “Maybe I ain’t ready.”
“Ready for what?” Merriell scoffed, the sore-edged rage in his belly boiling over. “For your mama to cry and fuss over you, cook all your favorite foods? Or for your daddy to shake your hand, welcome you back? Tell you how proud he is to see you in them greens?” He huffed and shook his head again. “What about your brother? Or that little blonde-headed friend you were so excited to find on Pavuvu you nearly got your ass thrown on kitchen duty for wrestlin’ in the street? You think you’re gonna disappoint every single one of them, not showin’ up back home, and they won’t come lookin’?”
“So what if they do?”
“So what!” Merriell parroted, throwing his hands up. “What d’you think your family’s gonna have to say when they find you shacked up in the bayou with another man? Huh? Think they’re gonna come ‘round for dinner on the weekends? Have a nightcap on the porch and congratulate us?” He sucked his teeth and shook his head derisively, turning away. He stalked the few steps to the furthermost wall and then spun on his heel and came back, pacing as a caged animal and reaching up to tug his cap off so he could get a hand through his dense curls.
“Tell me,” he muttered scathingly, drawing to a stop just in front of Eugene's calm, determined face, “the hell kinda man makes it all the way through a goddamn war and out the other side again and the first thing on his mind ain’t goin’ home!”
“The kind of man I am, I guess,” Eugene said, sharp. His gaze was fierce and dark and unyielding. “The kind of man who thinks that maybe home ain’t where he left it when he went away to war.”
The bottom dropped out of Merriell’s stomach.
“I mean it, Snaf,” Eugene said, deadly serious, stepping in so close their boots touched. “I think the two of us got a real shot, so long as we stick together.” He leaned in, voice close and low and quiet. “So tell me: what kind of man are you?”
There had been a night back on Peleliu, the two of them dug in deep in a filthy little foxhole at the far end of the line. They’d stuck together most nights since Eugene towed him off the airfield, ears ringing and head spinning after that shell burst knocked him on his ass, and this one was no different.
Merriell had taken first watch, scanning the dark and distant tree line with Eugene slumped down in the dirt beside him, shoulder butting up against Merriell’s hip and poncho draped over him like a blanket. He had his eyes screwed stubbornly shut, like he might trick himself into catching a decent wink of sleep if he just kept them closed long enough. It didn’t seem to be working, but Merriell had to admire his commitment.
Every little while a flare would whistle up and explode overhead, bathing the world in angry red light, and Eugene would tense and shift and make soft, discontented noises. Merriell watched him with one eye as he settled back down, the knot of his brow softening and the careful, measured rhythm of his breath wheezing gently through his nose.
He had pegged Eugene for queer a few short days after he’d wandered into the second squad tent in his squeaky clean field gear looking for a place to hang his hat and been summarily turned away. He was nowhere near as blasé about his inclination as quite a few of the other men around camp felt they could afford to be this far from American soil, but like called to like and Merriell had been looking.
As though he could tell that Merriell was thinking about him, Eugene made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and pushed himself up onto his elbows with a huff.
“Alright there, Sledgehammer?”
“No,” Eugene snapped. He shook his head and reached up to scrub a hand over his face with a sigh, correcting immediately, “I mean, yes, I’m fine. Just can’t sleep.”
Merriell snorted. “Welcome to war, private.”
“Is it always like this?” Eugene asked, tilting his head back to stare up at the star-spattered sky. A clattering burp of machine gun fire rattled in the distance.
“Like what?”
“So - ” he shook his head, searching for the right word. When it didn’t come to him within a few seconds he sighed, frustrated, and settled lamely on, “Busy?”
“It’s war, Sledgehammer,” Merriell grinned, leaning his weight companionably into Eugene’s side. Eugene grunted but didn’t shy away. “What’d you think everyone was gonna do? Pack their shit up at six o’clock and head on home?”
“No,” Eugene said, and cut a quick, withering glare up at Merriell’s smiling face. “Just thought - I dunno. Thought maybe it might settle down a bit, sometimes.”
“Well it don’t.” Merriell rolled his eyes and reached down to muss Eugene’s auburn fringe. “Ain’t got but an hour left on watch, there, Gene. Better catch a few while you still can.”
Eugene squawked quietly and batted Merriell’s hand away, grumbling to himself about not needing mothering from the likes of Merriell and settling back down into the dirt as he tugged the poncho up to his chin.
“You ever think about it?” he asked a while later. He had given up any pretense of trying to sleep by this point, though he was still lying awkwardly at the bottom of the foxhole with his shoulder to Merriell’s hip. Sometime in the intervening minutes he’d hooked a hand absently around Merriell’s ankle and Merriell hadn’t bothered kicking him off.
“‘Bout what?” Merriell asked, glancing down. “War?”
“Settling down,” Eugene corrected. He looked young and tired in the muddy gray light of the Pacific moon, gaze trained intently on Merriell’s face as if he was particularly invested in the answer.
“Like back home?” Merriell arched an eyebrow.
“Yeah.”
“Nah,” Merriell snorted and shook his head, raising his eyes to the swaying palms and the sinister wedges of shadow pulsing dark between them. He took a long breath through his nose and left his answer at that—ambiguous and dismissive. With any luck it’d put a pin in Eugene’s budding desire to swap late-night confidences if Merriell didn’t offer him anything especially useful in return.
“What, never?” Eugene asked, oblivious to Merriell’s brusque discomfort or else just ignoring it. He could be surprisingly uncouth when he had his dander up about something and for whatever reason this topic of inquiry had lodged itself in his craw.
He dragged his thumb in a slow, thoughtless stroke around the curve of Merriell’s ankle, skimming the little knob of bone and drifting up toward his calf in a warm, fond line. Merriell shivered and licked his cracking lips. He blinked down at Eugene, who was watching him with a soft, wounded expression that made Merriell want to bite at his mouth until he bled. Merriell shook his head again.
“Pretty little wife ain’t in the cards for me, Sledgehammer."
Eugene’s breath hitched, eyebrows lifting toward his hairline with surprise. His mouth curled up at the edges, like this hadn’t been the answer he was expecting but he was blatantly delighted by it anyway. That had been the very first time, there in the dark and the mud with the jungle looming alive and treacherous all around them. Eugene reached out for him, sweet and strong and certain in the muggy night, and despite his better judgment, Merriell reached back.
Eugene was just as infuriatingly fearless in the dingy light of a dirty public bathroom as he had been in that filthy foxhole, and later in the firing line on Okinawa, staring Merriell down with his heart carelessly bared, confident that he would come out of this unexpected ambush unscathed. For a brief and bitter moment, Merriell hated him for it.
“What kinda man do you think I am, Sledgehammer?” he sneered, aiming to buy himself a little room to think.
“An irritatin’ one, mostly,” Eugene shot back, without hesitation. He shifted his weight and sighed, gaze dipping to the floor. “Look, I ain’t gonna force you,” he promised, shaking his head. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go. There’s another train out in an hour and a half.”
“What are you, a porter now?” Merriell snapped. He felt raw and exposed, like his skin had all been flayed off and he was just muscle and bone and bundles of nerve endings stinging in the open air.
“I checked the schedule before we left Chicago,” Eugene admitted. He said it quietly, like it was somehow shameful to have explored the contingency. He waved a hand between them and added reluctantly, “I wasn’t sure how this was gonna go. Figured you might not appreciate puttin’ me up when I was already overstayin’ my welcome, if you didn’t just slug me flat out.”
“I ought to,” Merriell muttered. “Solid pop to the teeth might shake out that nonsense rattlin’ around in y’head.”
“You ain’t said no,” Eugene interrupted, so loud and sudden that Merriell nearly flinched back at the force of his words. Eugene’s features softened, apologetic, and he reached out with a slow, careful hand to brush the sleeve of Merriell’s jacket. “I know you think I’m a fool, Snaf, but you still haven’t told me to go.”
Merriell glanced down at their hands, barely a millimeter of distance between them. He took a shaky breath and nudged his knuckles against Eugene’s, who took the invitation for what it was and threaded their fingers easily together. Merriell felt frozen, whole body alive like the inside of a live mortar round before the heat ignited and the pressure tore it into shrapnel.
“You told me once you didn’t want a wife,” Eugene pressed. “I don’t want one either. I ain’t askin’ you to be that for me and God knows you wouldn’t put up with it long if I tried to be for you.”
Merriell couldn’t help the little snort that escaped him at the thought—Eugene floundering his way through all the old Shelton family recipes in the interest of having something hot waiting out on the table for when Merriell got home. It would be a travesty even if, by some miracle, he didn’t burn the house down.
“We can figure something else out,” Eugene coaxed. He sounded surer, sweeter with the resurgence of Merriell’s humor. “Plenty of folks shackin’ up nowadays to save on rent,” he explained. “Or there’s places we could go, out on the coast or in the city. Nobody’d know us and they wouldn’t care.”
“You been thinkin’ about this, huh?” Merriell risked a glance up, heart clenching at the naked adoration in Eugene’s face.
He shrugged, squeezing Merriell’s fingers and offering with obviously affected nonchalance, “Had to kill time in China somehow.”
Christ but he was beautiful, all those funny features in combination adding up to so much more than just the sum of their parts. Still half-wrecked from their dalliance and looking totally unbothered by his state of disrepair with those liquid-dark eyes and that ruthlessly boyish face, he was a few of the things that Merriell had always wanted for himself and more that he had never known he might have needed.
Merriell’s pulse pounded in his ears, stomach roiling with fury and terror and a vibrant little flickering thing that felt strangely like hope. He swallowed, thick, and said hoarsely, “Place I had before the war might be tight, with two of us. Only one bedroom, you know?”
Eugene laughed, an ebullient wave of sound that rose in joyous waves to the ceiling and flooded effervescent out into the hall. Merriell leaned in to kiss him, desperate for a taste of it. By many measures it was not a particularly impressive kiss, giddy and off-center and featuring entirely too many teeth, but it was one that Merriell knew he would remember, even so.
“I think we’ll manage,” Eugene grinned a few long seconds later, voice soft against his mouth, and yes. Merriell supposed they would.
Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Merriell had figured out pretty early on that the war was going to haunt him one way or another. He just hadn’t expected it to manifest quite like this—the privileged son of some prominent Alabama doctor baying like a stray at Merriell’s heels for permission to follow him home.
Author's Note: This fill was written for the Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme, which, if y'all aren't already participating, you really should because it's super fun. The prompt was:
"Canon divergence. Sledge wakes up before Snafu leaves the train."
Thanks to
muccamukk and scandalinbohemia for looking it over in early draft form and convincing me that it wasn't total garbage. The version posted below hasn't been officially beta-read so any mistakes are mine.You can also read it on AO3.
“What’s it like?"
Merriell glanced over to find Eugene peering curiously at him across the narrow alley between their seats. They were tucked into the rearmost passenger car on the streamliner carrying them along the last leg of the trip home, with only each other left for company now that Burgie’d been safely delivered back to the family ranch.
Eugene made a very fetching picture in his crisply pressed dress greens with the flat Texas oil fields speeding past the window beside him. The late afternoon sunlight was weaving orange-gold highlights through his auburn hair where he sat with his chin in one hand and his big, dark eyes trained expectantly on Merriell’s face. He was hale and healthy again, the sharp edges he had honed on Okinawa nearly buffed back down to their original softness by the battalion’s long engagement policing the streets of Peiping—befriending the locals and getting fat off of sticky rice dumplings and big bottles of warm Chinese beer.
It suited him, Merriell thought as he sprawled back in his seat, extending his legs so that his feet nudged against Eugene’s where they were splayed midway into the narrow alley between benches and neatly crossed at the ankle.
“What’s what like?” he asked, just to see the wry tilt of Eugene’s smirk and the long-suffering way he rolled his eyes.
“New Orleans.” Eugene’s accent pulled the familiar words in new directions, the skew of his tongue stirring a little prickle of proprietary heat in Merriell’s chest. “You didn’t talk about it much, over there.”
Merriell couldn’t really argue the point. The silence had been purely self-preservation at first—thinking about home would only make the pain of separation that much worse, so he kept his mind on more prescient matters, like sighting the mortar true and making sure that none of the sores the jungle rot had eaten into his skin were any more infected than usual. After Guadalcanal, it became part of the mythos. Snafu was a harder, meaner man than Merriell in many ways, and it behooved his reputation not to jaw about the sisters he never wrote, or how badly he missed his daddy’s jambalaya.
Eugene had only really known him as Snafu—heaping derision onto the replacement boots and digging teeth out of dead men’s mouths and screaming abuse at one another through the freezing dark—and somehow managed to befriend him anyway. He liked a jagged edge, did Eugene; had plenty of his own shallowly buried underneath that honey-thick accent and genteel manner, as Merriell and all the rest of their company had discovered over time and exposure.
A little more of the ragged jigsaw that made Merriell into Snafu had been slipping away with every mile they put behind them, and to Merriell’s baffled delight Eugene seemed equally as fond of the man he must see emerging, eager to learn him just as intimately.
He worried his teeth against his lower lip, studying the anticipatory arc of Eugene’s eyebrows and the affectionate cant of his grin for a moment before he sighed, “What d’you wanna know?”
“Just, how it is, I guess?” Eugene shrugged. “I ain’t ever been.”
Merriell considered this for a long moment.
“‘bout the same as anywhere else, I expect,” he offered. “Prob’ly ain’t a whole lot different than it is in Mobile. Tighter quarters, maybe. More folks around.” He glanced out the window for a second, and then back at Eugene with a smirk. “Better music, too, I’ll bet.”
Eugene snorted, flicking his gaze away. “I don’t know,” he hedged, teasing. “Our bandstand really gets to swingin’ at the Christmas party the church puts on. Old Tommy Pellkenny is a dab hand on the horn.”
Merriell sucked his teeth, shaking his head lazily as he drawled, “Can’t dance in front of your mama and the preacher and Tommy whoever the way you can dance in the halls in New Orleans, cher.”
Eugene laughed outright at that, good humor etching deep dimples into his pink-flushed cheeks. A few of the other passengers glanced over to see what the hullabaloo was about but their attention didn’t linger long—the novel sheen of a couple of Marines returning from war had tarnished in the forum of public goodwill months before Company K hit home soil, and Merriell’s handful of forcibly rejected attempts to flatter the feminine clientele in this particular train car certainly hadn’t done that reputation any further favor. Not that he much minded. All that dog and pony had largely been to lift Eugene’s floundering spirits, anyway.
“Well,” Eugene said once he’d settled down again, picking at a loose thread sticking off his sea bag, “I guess you’ll have to show me someday.”
His voice was unusually subdued, almost shy in a way that stoked the banked heat of affection in Merriell’s chest, sent it running sticky all through his ribs. The pink stain in Eugene’s cheeks had flooded all the way out to his ears and he was watching Merriell cautiously from beneath the russet fan of his lashes.
Merriell nudged their boots together. “Someday,” he agreed. It felt like a promise in the still air between them. “Sure.”
Eugene’s answering smile was small and soft and sweet. It didn’t even show his teeth, but it wrung Merriell’s heart out like a dishrag. He swallowed around the tender knot in his throat and continued with forced levity, “You welcome ‘round my place anytime, Sledgehammer. Don’t even gotta be Christmas or nothin’, there’s no end of a party in the French Quarter. We’ll have you dancin’ the Louisiana two-step ‘fore you can blink.”
“Whatever you say, Snaf.” Eugene sat up and rolled his eyes, mouth curling at the corners. He stretched his arms up over his head, a contented hum rumbling through his chest. “How long we got ‘til your stop?”
Merriell shrugged, guessing by the angle of the sun, “‘nother coupla hours?”
Eugene made a quiet noise of frustration and leaned over until his forehead was pressed against the window, dark eyes trained blearily on the shifting horizon.
“What’sa matter Sledgehammer?” Merriell knocked their knees together. “Thought you musta been enjoyin’ my company, keen as you are to come visit me at home.”
“It ain’t that,” Eugene snorted. A little burst of fog sprang along the windowpane from the general vicinity of his nose, dispersing just as quickly as it had appeared in the muggy afternoon. “‘m just tired.” He shook his head clumsily against the glass, staring dimly into the middle distance as he sighed. It was a heavy thing, hanging leaden in the air. “It feels like I’ve been tired for a hundred years.”
He was pale under the lingering flush of pleasure, shadows dusted like bruises below his eyes.
“Go on and sleep, then,” Merriell said.
“Can’t,” Eugene intoned with good-natured gravity, glancing over with a grin. “Gotta see you off, yet.”
The heat suffusing Merriell’s chest spilled all the way out to his fingers, bubbling furiously like a pot of water left abandoned on the stovetop.
“Sleep,” he ordered sternly, knocking their boots together once more. “I’ll wake you up before I go.”
Eugene pressed his mouth into a flat, suspicious line. He was swaying gently in time with the train as it rocked underneath them. “You promise?”
Merriell watched him for a long moment, each of Eugene’s features picked out along the edges in a wash of buttery summer sunlight, and then extended his arm across the aisle.
“Pinky swear,” he said, curling all but his littlest finger into a loose fist. Eugene arched a highly skeptical eyebrow but the stain in his cheeks glowed even brighter when Merriell winked at him.
“Fine,” he muttered, whipping a hand out to wrap their pinkies together for a brief, lovely moment before sinking back into his seat and folding his arms over his chest. He shifted around for a second, settling himself against his sea bag with his head tipped back toward the ceiling and his eyes closed.
Merriell took the unexpected opportunity to study Eugene with unabashed openness, gaze trailing up the elegant column of his throat, along the aquiline slope of his nose, across the wide cushion of his mouth. His hair had been freshly cut—shorn short and neat around the ears and neck, with a crisp part combed slightly to one side and set with pomade. He had abandoned his cap as soon as was respectable, as even the jauntiest of tilts did little to offset the unfortunate angle of his ears, and the gaps at the cuffs of his sleeves highlighted his sender wrists.
“Quit it,” Eugene muttered out of nowhere.
Merriell blinked, caught out, but replied breezily, “Quit what?”
Eugene cracked his eyes, narrow and glittering with amusement. “I can feel you watchin’ me.”
“You didn’t complain about it nearly so much on Peleliu,” Merriell replied. Eugene snorted, his whole chest lifting, and let his eyes droop shut once more.
“Ain’t nobody tryin’ to shoot us here.”
“Not yet,” Merriell allowed. “Give me time.”
Eugene snorted again, a tiny huff through his nose. “You go botherin’ that pretty brunette again, you’re on your own and you deserve anything she gives you.”
Merriell bit down on a grin and shook his head. “Shut up, Sledgehammer.” Eugene smiled, smug and content with his eyes still closed as Merriell murmured, “Get you some sleep ‘fore I change my mind.”
..........
By the time the train rolled into Terminal Station, Eugene was well and truly lost to the depths of a serene doze. He was slumped over onto his sea bag, chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm, breath wheezing softly out of his slackened mouth on every exhale.
He had drifted toward wakefulness at a few previous stops, when disembarking passengers or fresh boardees shuffled past with their luggage, but sank easily back into sleep at a murmured word of assurance from Merriell. This time, he just snuffled a little and shifted to press his face into the canvas under his cheek.
Merriell pushed himself to his feet as the car rocked to a stop, smirking fondly and shaking his head. He hoisted his own sea bag off the overhead luggage rack and slung it over his shoulder, straightening the lapels of his jacket as he turned back around to peer down at his slumbering companion.
The whole scene resembled nothing so much as an oil painting—all the colors of Eugene’s uniformed punched jewel-dark by the dim gold beams of the overhead lights, with deep, charcoal shadows smudged at the hollow of his throat and over the soft planes of his face. Merriell’s breath stuck in his chest, brittle and thin, as Eugene dreamt peacefully on, the inky ribbon of the Mississippi refracting silvery sparks of moonlight through the window behind him.
What good would it really do to wake him, Merriell wondered. They would salute each other, maybe shake hands or embrace for a second if they were feeling especially affectionate, and then wander off in their own separate directions, back to their own separate lives. Eugene had good intentions, wanting to wave Merriell safely off and making idle and likely fruitless plans to visit in the future, but the road to damnation was paved with greater kindnesses than these and Merriell had seen enough of hell for one lifetime.
He tore his gaze down toward the well-scuffed floorboards of the train car and turned away, shuffling forward with a step that dragged as though his boots were filled with sand and iron.
It was better this way, he insisted to himself. Better to pinch this hope off the vine before it saw a chance to blossom and spare them both the pain of the thorns that came after. Better that Eugene should wake up peacefully back in Mobile—with his parents and his brother and that cherub-faced friend of his from How Company merrily awaiting his return—and forget all about Snafu Shelton with his blood-stained Ka-Bar and his horde of gold teeth.
Merriell froze in his stride on the threshold of the car, the narrow doorway just ahead hanging open to the sticky Louisiana night, stars winking like distant tracers against the velvet dark.
Don’t look back, he warned himself, and grasped at vague memories of Lot and his wife, turned to a pillar of salt for his selfishness. He wasn’t going to ruin Eugene the same way.
He took a slow, shuddering breath and one jerky step, and then another, and another, until he was perched at the top rung of the car’s short flight of stairs, half his body hanging out into the molasses-thick night with the familiar bustle of the sleepless city all around him. He glanced over his shoulder, to the other end of the platform where the snaking silhouette of the train disappeared back into the dark, and climbed down. There were a handful of sailors in crisp white uniforms bobbing among the crowd of citizens in their traveling finery and Merriell picked his way through without much effort. A couple of well-dressed men gave him somber nods and some of the women smiled prettily from beneath their dainty hats but on the whole nobody spared him a second glance.
The hum of conversation suffusing the area buzzed like a great swarm at the forefront of his attention, so it took him a moment to recognize his own nickname cutting through the din.
“ -af! Snafu, I said stop, damn it all!”
Merriell wheeled around to discover none other than Eugene Sledge shouldering his way gracelessly through the throng, many of whom were staring askance at the vaguely wild-eyed Marine bowling ruthlessly past unsuspecting civilians and swearing aloud as he went. He had a faint mark on one cheek—the reddened texture of his sea bag imprinted on his skin—and a few locks of his hair had broken free of their careful coif to flop raggedly over his forehead.
“Sledgehammer?” Merriell said dumbly as Eugene stalked forward.
“Who the hell else would it be?” Eugene snapped. As soon as he was close enough, he reached out to shove hard at Merriell’s chest with both hands. “Whad’ja think, I was gonna let you just get away with it?”
“The hell’s gotten into you?” Merriell asked, staggering back with the force of the blow and dropping his sea bag off his shoulder with a heavy thump.
“What’s gotten into me?” Eugene hissed. He stepped in close with his shoulders hunched up toward his ears. His skin was peppered with angry red blotches, jaw set and teeth clenched the same way they’d been on the ridges of Okinawa just before he bawled that shavetail lieutenant out for fussing over what type of weapon his Marines used to kill Japs so long as they got the job done. “You left me alone up there, Snaf! What happened to wakin’ me up, sayin’ goodbye, huh? You too good to keep your promises now we ain’t sharin’ a foxhole anymore?”
Merriell had known that Eugene wouldn’t be best pleased when he woke up in Mobile to find Merriell conspicuously absent, but the fervor of his vitriol was a bit of a surprise. While Eugene was possessed of a highly combustible temper—not altogether unlike Merriell himself—his fuse was usually markedly longer than this. It was true that Merriell had been relying on a considerable distance from the immediate blast radius of Eugene’s temper to preserve his own comfort in the immediate aftermath of his minor betrayal, but he hadn’t expected a reaction of quite this magnitude, even so.
“I decided to let you get some rest,” he drawled, falling back on nonchalance to mask how nearly the radiating waves of Eugene’s fury had taken his knees out from under him. “So what? You fixin’ to fight about it?” He flicked a quick, pointed glance over the whole of Eugene’s person. “Clear as hell you need it. Look at you, barely a hundred miles from home and still halfway Asiatic.”
Eugene narrowed his eyes. His gaze was sharp and blood-black in the watery moonlight. Merriell’s stomach clenched, hot, as it pierced straight through him. He was vaguely aware that people were staring, openly captivated by the tawdry little scene they were putting on. Eugene didn’t seem to notice at all; or, if he did notice, he had decided that he simply didn’t care. Eugene was funny like that.
“I always knew you were a bastard but I didn’t figure you for yella.”
“That’s ‘cause I ain’t and you damn well know it.” Merriell grabbed Eugene’s lapel, yanking at it to pull him off-balance. Eugene stumbled a little but went right on glaring mutinously at Merriell from a spare few inches away.
“You got a better name for it?” he demanded. “‘Cause where I’m standing it’s plain, pitiful cowardice all the way through.”
“Jesus Christ, Gene.” Merriell rolled his eyes, temper broiling molten in his gut. It was a unique talent of Eugene’s, this ability to summon Merriell’s poorest nature with such immediate and unerring success. “I’m sorry I didn’t wake you, alright? Happy?” He pushed Eugene back with a half-hearted shove, releasing his grip on Eugene’s jacket, and sneered, “Now go on, get your fool ass back on the train ‘fore it leaves you here.”
As though roused by the reminder, the engine car rumbled and lurched, low whistle wheezing loud across the platform. Eugene didn’t even blink, just thrust his chin mulishly forward and reached up to wrap his fingers white-knuckle tight around the strap across his chest that Merriell only now realized connected to the sea bag full of personal effects and worldly treasures that Eugene had slung over one shoulder.
Merriell stared at him for a long, uncomprehending moment, red-faced and defiant in the gauzy light off the streetlamps, and then huffed a bitter gust of laughter. “Oh, goddamnit,” he breathed, shaking his head and wrestling against the grin tugging viciously at his mouth. “You asshole.”
“You said anytime,” Eugene accused, steadfast and stubborn. “Right now seems just as good to me as six months on, or was that all bullshit, too?”
Merriell shook his head again. “You’re a selfish son of a bitch, Sledgehammer. Gonna give your mama a nasty shock when her baby boy don’t climb off that train in Mobile.”
“I’ll send her a wire,” Eugene assured him briskly.
Merriell tapped his foot in an irritated staccato against the platform. “Maybe I got nowhere to go, huh?” he suggested, crossing his arms over his chest. “You stop and think about that before you came runnin’ out here?”
“If you ain’t got nowhere, then we’ll find someplace together,” Eugene retorted, insistent and aggravated. “That’s what we do, Snaf.” He frowned and gave his head a little shake, suddenly seeming to realize that they were drawing a crowd. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and twisted the strap of his sea bag in both hands, muttering darkly, “I don’t understand why you’re being so difficult.”
Merriell stared at him askance. Eugene’s tender complexion was splotched unattractively with the evidence of his anger, broad shoulders sloped inward under the weight of his wounded pride. His edges had gone fuzzy in the silken haze of smoke and steam ebbing through the air and the low light of the streetlamps carved deep, ghastly caverns around his hooded eyes.
Merriell had figured out pretty early on that the war was going to haunt him one way or another. He just hadn’t expected it to manifest quite like this—the privileged son of some prominent Alabama doctor baying like a stray at Merriell’s heels for permission to follow him home.
“‘Course you don’t,” he sighed, bending to hoist his bag up off the ground. He turned toward the nearest of the station house’s high, arched doorways and waved a hand over his shoulder, beckoning, “C’mon then. If we’re gonna air our dirty laundry, let’s get outta the damn street, at least.”
Eugene fell into step without complaint, silent and somber at Merriell’s shoulder as he forged ahead, weaving through the milling travelers and curious rubberneckers to lead Eugene to the relative privacy of a cramped public bathroom at the station’s northernmost end. There was a lone sailor loitering inside who looked up with interest when the two of them walked in, but he hustled along after barely a glance at whatever he saw in Merriell’s face.
Once they were alone, Merriell dropped his bag in the corner and wheeled on Eugene, herding him until he was pressed awkwardly back against one of the sinks, boxed in between Merriell’s arms with his sea bag abandoned carelessly to one side. With half his breath knocked out of him, Eugene only got as far as a thin, “Snaf, what - ” before Merriell caught his mouth viciously against his own.
Their teeth clicked and Eugene yelped, bracing himself with one hand curled over the lip of the sink at his back and reaching up to fist the other furiously in the fabric of Merriell’s uniform jacket. He opened to the kiss without hesitation, mouth hot and wet and welcoming, tilting his head in search of a better angle and moaning gently when he found it. Merriell swallowed the sweet little sound and rolled his hips up against Eugene’s. Neither of them was anywhere approaching hard, not yet, but Eugene keened low in the back of his throat and matched the motion anyway.
“The hell was that for?” he murmured breathlessly against Merriell’s mouth as soon as he had room to speak. His words were a warm rumble ghosting over Merriell’s cheek while their lips brushed and noses bumped.
“Awful lotta work, strandin’ yourself in New Orleans just for a lay, Sledgehammer,” Merriell teased, ignoring the question in favor of nosing along the blade of Eugene’s jaw. He sucked a lazy kiss at the hinge just below his ear and savored the way Eugene shuddered under his mouth. “Ought’ve said somethin’ sooner. Those train stalls are tight but we’d’ve managed.”
“What?” Eugene sounded dazed and distracted, likely by the hand Merriell had moved to cup him through the placket of his trousers, stirring his soft cock to attention.
“S’what you wanted, right?” Merriell asked as Eugene rocked into the curve of his palm. “A farewell fuck? Last good time to remember me by?”
Eugene froze. He flattened his hand against Merriell’s chest and pushed him back just far enough to catch his gaze. When Merriell looked up into his face Eugene’s brow was furrowed low over his dark eyes, swollen pink mouth pulled down into a frown.
“Is that what you think?”
Merriell’s stomach lurched but he licked his dry lips and replied with all the aloof detachment he could muster, “Ain’t it?”
Eugene studied him for a long, still moment, features darkening like a steely thunderhead rolling in over the sun, and said shortly, “Right.”
He surged forward, tightening his grip on Merriell’s jacket and bringing his other hand up to hook over Merriell’s belt. The force of his momentum carried them clumsily back into one of the stalls, halfway tripping over Eugene’s sea bag as they went. Merriell hissed as he knocked his elbow against the doorframe but Eugene didn’t so much as glance over, black eyes pinned dangerously to Merriell’s own.
As soon as the door had swung halfway shut at his back, Eugene was working Merriell’s buckle off with shaking fingers and slipping his belt loose.
“Lock that,” he ordered briskly, dropping to his knees right there on the filthy tile and stripping Merriell’s trousers down his thighs as he went.
Merriell reached absently for the stall door, fumbling the lock into place just as Eugene got his shorts yanked down, wrapped one hand around his still mostly-soft cock, and guided it into his mouth. He sucked hard at the head, tongue pressing a point of wet heat just under the ridge, and Merriell slammed his palm flat against the door with a bang that echoed percussively through the empty room.
“Fuck, Gene,” he sighed, threading the fingers of his other hand loosely through Eugene’s dark hair. He rocked shallowly forward into Eugene’s mouth and Eugene made an encouraging noise that hummed deliciously through Merriell’s rapidly stiffening prick. He gripped at Eugene’s hair a little tighter and pushed more forcefully. The hot, slick slide pulled a raw groan up from his belly, punctuated by the soft, wanton sounds leaking out from the corners of Eugene’s mouth.
Eugene curled his palms slackly over Merriell’s thighs, sighing through his nose and letting his eyes flutter shut as Merriell took his face in both hands. He was a vision, kneeling there—russet hair and pale skin all wrapped up in Marine service greens with that lush, berry-stained mouth stretched wide around Merriell’s cock.
“Missed seein’ you like this,” Merriell murmured, thrusting his hips forward. They’d been spoiled for privacy back in Peiping and having Eugene this way had quickly become one of Merriell’s most favored pastimes. It was second only to spreading Eugene out underneath him and watching him pant and shiver and plead while Merriell took him at his leisure, but that was hardly feasible in a public bathroom stall.
The reminder of precisely where they were, separated from the general masses by a short walk and a thin wall, ignited a pinwheel of bright sparks in Merriell’s belly. He rocked into Eugene’s mouth in long, smooth strokes and shuddered at the desperate way Eugene groaned around him.
“Yeah, Genie, that’s it,” he babbled, dragging his thumbs gently along the soft hollows of Eugene’s cheeks where his jaw was stretched open. “Fuck, you feel good. Want your mouth on me all the time. What if I keep you on your knees like this forever, huh? Keep that pretty mouth open for me. Never let you close it up again.”
The words were largely nonsense though the sentiment was true enough. It lit Eugene up like a firecracker and he gasped through his nose, tongue fluttering as he fought to swallow around Merriell’s prick. Merriell moaned. Eugene gripped at his thighs so hard there would likely be a smudged array of plum-dark bruises scattered there in the morning and pushed his face forward at the same time that Merriell rocked his hips, so his cock drove even deeper into Eugene’s throat.
Merriell chased his pleasure in the heat of Eugene’s mouth for a few long, hazy moments. He cradled Eugene’s face in his hands and rutted as deep into the slick pressure as he could without risking damage. He was spilling lust-soaked snatches of praise in a nonsensical torrent of adulation that had Eugene’s fair complexion glowing pink like a lit-up strawberry even though his eyes were closed, russet lashes fanning down his cheeks, soft and spiked wet at the outside edges.
“Fuck, cher,” Merriell moaned. His belly twisted white hot, clenching tighter and burning brighter with every sloppy drag of his prick through the wet circle of Eugene’s lips. There was a tender knot tangled behind his sternum that had throbbed into existence the second he turned his back on Eugene where he slept in the train car. It ruptured and split open without any warning, bleeding out to all of Merriell’s rawest edges, and he was overcome with a sudden, aching need to meet Eugene’s gaze, to pin this moment in his memory forever.
“Open your eyes,” he breathed, voice low and pleading as he stroked his thumbs along the high ridges of Eugene’s cheeks. “C’mon, Genie, look at me.”
Eugene’s brow pinched for a second and he made a soft, wounded noise in the back of his throat. When he looked up, his eyes were big and glossy and dark and Merriell felt the heat in them catch along the length of his spine like a match-head against striking paper.
“Gene,” he gasped, fixing the visual in his mind with a half-crazed desperation. “Gene, you’re so - fuck.” In a few shallow thrusts he was coming against the flat, wet warmth of Eugene’s tongue, groping blindly for the wall of the stall to try and hold himself up against the undertow of the sparkling white wave that crashed over him.
Eugene swallowed everything down without complaint, wrapping his arms around Merriell’s thighs for extra support. It was an old habit—Eugene was well familiar with the way Merriell’s bones tended to go liquid when he came, having caught a resultant knee to certain fragile parts of his anatomy a time or two in the past.
When Merriell finally floated back down from the heights of his orgasm it was to find Eugene with one arm still curled possessively around Merriell’s leg and his other hand tucked past the waistband of his trousers. He was stripping his dick in quick, almost pained strokes, hadn’t even bothered pulling it out of his shorts first. He had his eyes squeezed shut and his forehead pressed against Merriell’s hip and he was spitting little shards of noise past his clenched teeth with every pass of his hand, mouth swollen and jaw still glistening wet.
“C’mere, cher,” Merriell murmured, reaching down with trembling hands to tug at the collar of Eugene’s jacket and urge him to his feet. He didn’t want to let Eugene come like this, kneeling as a beggar ignored in supplication. Merriell wanted to get his hands on him, stoke that fire in his belly until it immolated, burn himself into Eugene’s memory as surely as Eugene was burned into his own. If this was all they had, Merriell was damn well going to make it count.
Eugene made a quiet, broken noise and turned his face into Merriell’s thigh. He shifted under Merriell’s hand but made no move to rise, so Merriell yanked a little harder, goading, “C’mon, Genie, get on up here. Let me get a look at you.”
Eugene hissed a slow, shuddering breath and swore miserably in a hot gust against the bared skin of Merriell’s thigh.
Merriell snorted and carded his fingers through Eugene’s sweat-damp fringe, watching as he gingerly withdrew his hand from the depths of his trousers, blinking blearily and wiping his palm absently over his knee. Eugene braced himself against the wall to push shakily off the floor and Merriell hooked an arm under his elbow and towed him the rest of the way up.
“There you go,” Merriell soothed, nose nudging Eugene’s cheek as Eugene half-collapsed against him. “That’s it.”
He licked his way into Eugene’s mouth, chasing the taste of himself and marveling at the way Eugene keened, loud and high and tingling against Merriell’s teeth. There was a tremor skittering sweetly under his skin and he clutched at Merriell’s shoulders with a wanton abandon they hadn’t had the opportunity to risk since before they’d trooped onto the sardine-packed transport ship back in the Port of Tianjin.
“Snaf,” Eugene gasped, pulling back just far enough to breathe. “Please.”
“I got you, cher,” Merriell assured him, clumsily kissing Eugene’s jaw.
He pushed Eugene’s drawers out of the way, palming over the blood-dark head of his cock, and was rewarded with a groan.
“That’s it, Sledgehammer,” he crooned, wrapping his fingers around the silken heat of Eugene’s prick and fisting it in loose, lazy strokes. Eugene was leaking like a faucet, hard as an iron girder, and slick with precome all the way down his length. He pushed greedily up into the circle of Merriell’s hand and whimpered at the drag, cock flushed so ruddy it shone like an artillery flare against the tawny bars of Merriell’s fingers. “Fuck, look at you.”
He squeezed just this side of too hard, twisted his wrist on the upstroke, and reveled at the desperate hitch in Eugene’s breath. The corners of his eyes gleamed wetly and he was holding so tight to the fabric of Merriell’s jacket that Merriell was certain the seams would pop any second.
“Let go for me now,” he coaxed, rolling the ball of his thumb over the head of Eugene’s prick, smearing a thick bead of precome across its purpled velvet surface and then sliding his hand back down until his knuckles brushed the dark thatch of curls below. “I can feel you right there, ma beau, you’re so close.” Eugene slumped forward with a whine, hips jerking erratically into Merriell’s grip, and Merriell nosed fondly at his temple. “G’won, cher,” he breathed, “letcha’self have it.”
Eugene was silent as he came, face red and eyes shut, teeth gritted so hard Merriell half expected to hear them creaking. He spilled hot over Merriell’s fingers and Merriell did what he could to catch the mess, trying his best to spare their uniform jackets an unseemly stain with less success than he might have hoped.
Ah, well, he thought, shaking his hand out over the toilet bowl and then holding it awkwardly a little way off from his body so as not to further ruin anything. It was late enough that nobody ought to notice once they were back out on the street.
Eugene tucked his face into the curve of Merriell’s shoulder and panted against his throat, spent and exhausted, clinging like a kitten while he slowly came back to himself. Merriell considered vaguely that it was a pity they hadn’t anyplace to lie down. He’d always liked the way Eugene would curl himself in tight and close in the wake of his pleasure, settling warm over Merriell with all the comfortable familiarity of a favorite afghan.
His stomach churned with the realization that he wasn’t likely to see the experience repeated anytime soon, if ever again, and he sucked a sharp breath past his teeth. Eugene made a curious noise and Merriell shushed him, tilting his head to drop a kiss into the mussed auburn nest of Eugene’s hair.
“Goddamn, Sledgehammer,” he sighed approvingly, stirring the locks at Eugene’s crown. Eugene hummed his agreement and lingered there for a little while longer, content to let Merriell prop him up until his legs held steady underneath him.
They disentangled themselves some moments later, performing an awkward shuffle to get out of the stall without inflicting greater damage about their persons. They washed their hands side by side at the sinks and Eugene ducked down when he was finished to scoop water over his sweaty face. He took a slurping drink from his cupped hand and then pressed the back of his wrist delicately to his mouth as though embarrassed. It was as strange and charming an affectation as any of the disparate characteristics that had welded themselves together to construct such a singularly intriguing individual as one Eugene Sledge. Merriell ached to recognize that he may never again be a party to it or any other of Eugene’s many varied quirks.
He didn’t realize that Eugene was watching him in the mirror until the gentle rush of water from the faucet cut off with a shrill grind. Merriell started, gaze clearing and lifting to meet Eugene’s in the tarnished glass.
He looked somber and sallow in the stark overhead lights, mouth pressed flat and eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
“What?” Merriell demanded, leaning against the sink at his hip. He crossed his arms over his chest and arched an eyebrow. “Somethin’ on my face?”
Eugene shook his head, a bare tilt back and forth. He sighed and scrubbed at his jaw, one hand braced over the lip of the sink.
“I don’t understand you,” he admitted.
Merriell barked a bitter laugh up at the smoke-stained ceiling tiles. “You and all the rest of the world, cher,” he grinned. “Don’t worry, you’re in fine company.”
Eugene, not seeming to find this quite as amusing, shook his head again and straightened up, turning to look at Merriell head on.
For just a second, Merriell wished he hadn’t. It was easier to see him reflected in a pane of glass, already one step removed from the selfish heat of Merriell’s touch, than to be so viscerally aware of his whole form standing right there in spitting distance.
“I’ve been about as clear as I can think to be,” Eugene continued, as though he hadn’t heard a word Merriell said. Maybe he hadn’t, caught up as he was in whatever thought had him looking so hunted and hard-fought. “I thought we were on the same page, Snaf.”
“Genie,” Merriell said slowly, shaking his head and offering a shrug, “I dunno what you’re talkin’ ‘bout.”
“I know you don’t,” Eugene snapped irritably. He gestured vaguely in the air with one hand, the other crossed snug over his chest. “That’s the whole problem in a nutshell.”
“How about you clear it up for me then?” Merriell asked shortly, that molten edge of irritation flickering back to life even under the lazy, lingering pleasure of a truly superb orgasm.
“Alright,” Eugene agreed, squaring himself up like he was readying for a blow. Merriell shifted cautiously back. Eugene may not be the most skilled at close combat but he was surprisingly scrappy and Merriell wasn’t sure precisely what he was after now that they’d gotten that last fuck out of their systems. Eugene nodded, a shallow, certain dip of his chin, and announced, “I want to come home with you.”
Merriell rolled his eyes. “Well, Jesus, Sledgehammer,” he drawled with no small amount of relief. “What’d you think, I was gonna leave you to sleep at the train station? I figure we’ll walk back to mine and get you a ticket in the morning.” He cut Eugene a pointed glance and teased, “Better hope my mama didn’t get around to throwin’ out that couch she’s been houndin’ me to get rid of while we were sittin’ pretty in a tropical paradise.”
“No,” Eugene said, stern and low. He didn’t so much as smirk, that dark gravity settled into him like granite. It made Merriell’s pulse pick up, thick and sticky and curdled like rancid molasses. “I don’t mean tonight. I don’t want just tonight, Snafu, if I come home with you I want - ” He faltered, voice breaking and eyes glistening with a sudden slick sheen. “I want to stay.”
For a long, silent second, Merriell stared, convinced he couldn’t possibly have heard right.
“What?” he croaked, and Eugene said it again.
“I want to stay.” He took a step into Merriell’s space, not close enough to crowd but the intent in it was clear. “With you.”
Merriell licked at his dry lips, drummed his fingers against his arms, and considered Eugene with a wary frown. “How long?”
Eugene made a helpless noise and shrugged with his whole body.
“I dunno,” he said. There was something crazed at the edges of his eyes—a distant cousin of that same madness that had seen him poised over a dead man’s mouth in ghoulish imitation of his fellow Marines, knife in hand, with only Merriell to pull him back from the edge of the bluff where a soul’s humanity went to die. “As long as you’ll have me.”
Merriell shook his head.
“You don’t mean that,” he said grimly.
“I do!”
“You can’t mean that,” Merriell corrected sharply. He pushed right up into Eugene’s space, digging a finger meanly into his chest, and snarled, “What the hell d’you think you’re doin’, here, Gene? Talkin’ like you ain’t got better to do than trail around after some dog tired Marine like a stray starvin’ for table scraps when we both know you got a whole feast and more waitin’ for you at the end of that rail line.”
“Maybe I don’t want to go back yet,” Eugene said defiantly, lifting his chin. Merriell wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss him or slug him. “Maybe I ain’t ready.”
“Ready for what?” Merriell scoffed, the sore-edged rage in his belly boiling over. “For your mama to cry and fuss over you, cook all your favorite foods? Or for your daddy to shake your hand, welcome you back? Tell you how proud he is to see you in them greens?” He huffed and shook his head again. “What about your brother? Or that little blonde-headed friend you were so excited to find on Pavuvu you nearly got your ass thrown on kitchen duty for wrestlin’ in the street? You think you’re gonna disappoint every single one of them, not showin’ up back home, and they won’t come lookin’?”
“So what if they do?”
“So what!” Merriell parroted, throwing his hands up. “What d’you think your family’s gonna have to say when they find you shacked up in the bayou with another man? Huh? Think they’re gonna come ‘round for dinner on the weekends? Have a nightcap on the porch and congratulate us?” He sucked his teeth and shook his head derisively, turning away. He stalked the few steps to the furthermost wall and then spun on his heel and came back, pacing as a caged animal and reaching up to tug his cap off so he could get a hand through his dense curls.
“Tell me,” he muttered scathingly, drawing to a stop just in front of Eugene's calm, determined face, “the hell kinda man makes it all the way through a goddamn war and out the other side again and the first thing on his mind ain’t goin’ home!”
“The kind of man I am, I guess,” Eugene said, sharp. His gaze was fierce and dark and unyielding. “The kind of man who thinks that maybe home ain’t where he left it when he went away to war.”
The bottom dropped out of Merriell’s stomach.
“I mean it, Snaf,” Eugene said, deadly serious, stepping in so close their boots touched. “I think the two of us got a real shot, so long as we stick together.” He leaned in, voice close and low and quiet. “So tell me: what kind of man are you?”
..........
There had been a night back on Peleliu, the two of them dug in deep in a filthy little foxhole at the far end of the line. They’d stuck together most nights since Eugene towed him off the airfield, ears ringing and head spinning after that shell burst knocked him on his ass, and this one was no different.
Merriell had taken first watch, scanning the dark and distant tree line with Eugene slumped down in the dirt beside him, shoulder butting up against Merriell’s hip and poncho draped over him like a blanket. He had his eyes screwed stubbornly shut, like he might trick himself into catching a decent wink of sleep if he just kept them closed long enough. It didn’t seem to be working, but Merriell had to admire his commitment.
Every little while a flare would whistle up and explode overhead, bathing the world in angry red light, and Eugene would tense and shift and make soft, discontented noises. Merriell watched him with one eye as he settled back down, the knot of his brow softening and the careful, measured rhythm of his breath wheezing gently through his nose.
He had pegged Eugene for queer a few short days after he’d wandered into the second squad tent in his squeaky clean field gear looking for a place to hang his hat and been summarily turned away. He was nowhere near as blasé about his inclination as quite a few of the other men around camp felt they could afford to be this far from American soil, but like called to like and Merriell had been looking.
As though he could tell that Merriell was thinking about him, Eugene made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and pushed himself up onto his elbows with a huff.
“Alright there, Sledgehammer?”
“No,” Eugene snapped. He shook his head and reached up to scrub a hand over his face with a sigh, correcting immediately, “I mean, yes, I’m fine. Just can’t sleep.”
Merriell snorted. “Welcome to war, private.”
“Is it always like this?” Eugene asked, tilting his head back to stare up at the star-spattered sky. A clattering burp of machine gun fire rattled in the distance.
“Like what?”
“So - ” he shook his head, searching for the right word. When it didn’t come to him within a few seconds he sighed, frustrated, and settled lamely on, “Busy?”
“It’s war, Sledgehammer,” Merriell grinned, leaning his weight companionably into Eugene’s side. Eugene grunted but didn’t shy away. “What’d you think everyone was gonna do? Pack their shit up at six o’clock and head on home?”
“No,” Eugene said, and cut a quick, withering glare up at Merriell’s smiling face. “Just thought - I dunno. Thought maybe it might settle down a bit, sometimes.”
“Well it don’t.” Merriell rolled his eyes and reached down to muss Eugene’s auburn fringe. “Ain’t got but an hour left on watch, there, Gene. Better catch a few while you still can.”
Eugene squawked quietly and batted Merriell’s hand away, grumbling to himself about not needing mothering from the likes of Merriell and settling back down into the dirt as he tugged the poncho up to his chin.
“You ever think about it?” he asked a while later. He had given up any pretense of trying to sleep by this point, though he was still lying awkwardly at the bottom of the foxhole with his shoulder to Merriell’s hip. Sometime in the intervening minutes he’d hooked a hand absently around Merriell’s ankle and Merriell hadn’t bothered kicking him off.
“‘Bout what?” Merriell asked, glancing down. “War?”
“Settling down,” Eugene corrected. He looked young and tired in the muddy gray light of the Pacific moon, gaze trained intently on Merriell’s face as if he was particularly invested in the answer.
“Like back home?” Merriell arched an eyebrow.
“Yeah.”
“Nah,” Merriell snorted and shook his head, raising his eyes to the swaying palms and the sinister wedges of shadow pulsing dark between them. He took a long breath through his nose and left his answer at that—ambiguous and dismissive. With any luck it’d put a pin in Eugene’s budding desire to swap late-night confidences if Merriell didn’t offer him anything especially useful in return.
“What, never?” Eugene asked, oblivious to Merriell’s brusque discomfort or else just ignoring it. He could be surprisingly uncouth when he had his dander up about something and for whatever reason this topic of inquiry had lodged itself in his craw.
He dragged his thumb in a slow, thoughtless stroke around the curve of Merriell’s ankle, skimming the little knob of bone and drifting up toward his calf in a warm, fond line. Merriell shivered and licked his cracking lips. He blinked down at Eugene, who was watching him with a soft, wounded expression that made Merriell want to bite at his mouth until he bled. Merriell shook his head again.
“Pretty little wife ain’t in the cards for me, Sledgehammer."
Eugene’s breath hitched, eyebrows lifting toward his hairline with surprise. His mouth curled up at the edges, like this hadn’t been the answer he was expecting but he was blatantly delighted by it anyway. That had been the very first time, there in the dark and the mud with the jungle looming alive and treacherous all around them. Eugene reached out for him, sweet and strong and certain in the muggy night, and despite his better judgment, Merriell reached back.
..........
Eugene was just as infuriatingly fearless in the dingy light of a dirty public bathroom as he had been in that filthy foxhole, and later in the firing line on Okinawa, staring Merriell down with his heart carelessly bared, confident that he would come out of this unexpected ambush unscathed. For a brief and bitter moment, Merriell hated him for it.
“What kinda man do you think I am, Sledgehammer?” he sneered, aiming to buy himself a little room to think.
“An irritatin’ one, mostly,” Eugene shot back, without hesitation. He shifted his weight and sighed, gaze dipping to the floor. “Look, I ain’t gonna force you,” he promised, shaking his head. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go. There’s another train out in an hour and a half.”
“What are you, a porter now?” Merriell snapped. He felt raw and exposed, like his skin had all been flayed off and he was just muscle and bone and bundles of nerve endings stinging in the open air.
“I checked the schedule before we left Chicago,” Eugene admitted. He said it quietly, like it was somehow shameful to have explored the contingency. He waved a hand between them and added reluctantly, “I wasn’t sure how this was gonna go. Figured you might not appreciate puttin’ me up when I was already overstayin’ my welcome, if you didn’t just slug me flat out.”
“I ought to,” Merriell muttered. “Solid pop to the teeth might shake out that nonsense rattlin’ around in y’head.”
“You ain’t said no,” Eugene interrupted, so loud and sudden that Merriell nearly flinched back at the force of his words. Eugene’s features softened, apologetic, and he reached out with a slow, careful hand to brush the sleeve of Merriell’s jacket. “I know you think I’m a fool, Snaf, but you still haven’t told me to go.”
Merriell glanced down at their hands, barely a millimeter of distance between them. He took a shaky breath and nudged his knuckles against Eugene’s, who took the invitation for what it was and threaded their fingers easily together. Merriell felt frozen, whole body alive like the inside of a live mortar round before the heat ignited and the pressure tore it into shrapnel.
“You told me once you didn’t want a wife,” Eugene pressed. “I don’t want one either. I ain’t askin’ you to be that for me and God knows you wouldn’t put up with it long if I tried to be for you.”
Merriell couldn’t help the little snort that escaped him at the thought—Eugene floundering his way through all the old Shelton family recipes in the interest of having something hot waiting out on the table for when Merriell got home. It would be a travesty even if, by some miracle, he didn’t burn the house down.
“We can figure something else out,” Eugene coaxed. He sounded surer, sweeter with the resurgence of Merriell’s humor. “Plenty of folks shackin’ up nowadays to save on rent,” he explained. “Or there’s places we could go, out on the coast or in the city. Nobody’d know us and they wouldn’t care.”
“You been thinkin’ about this, huh?” Merriell risked a glance up, heart clenching at the naked adoration in Eugene’s face.
He shrugged, squeezing Merriell’s fingers and offering with obviously affected nonchalance, “Had to kill time in China somehow.”
Christ but he was beautiful, all those funny features in combination adding up to so much more than just the sum of their parts. Still half-wrecked from their dalliance and looking totally unbothered by his state of disrepair with those liquid-dark eyes and that ruthlessly boyish face, he was a few of the things that Merriell had always wanted for himself and more that he had never known he might have needed.
Merriell’s pulse pounded in his ears, stomach roiling with fury and terror and a vibrant little flickering thing that felt strangely like hope. He swallowed, thick, and said hoarsely, “Place I had before the war might be tight, with two of us. Only one bedroom, you know?”
Eugene laughed, an ebullient wave of sound that rose in joyous waves to the ceiling and flooded effervescent out into the hall. Merriell leaned in to kiss him, desperate for a taste of it. By many measures it was not a particularly impressive kiss, giddy and off-center and featuring entirely too many teeth, but it was one that Merriell knew he would remember, even so.
“I think we’ll manage,” Eugene grinned a few long seconds later, voice soft against his mouth, and yes. Merriell supposed they would.