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thrillingdetectivetalesMARGINALIA
Joseph Liebgott & David Webster
Author's Note: Written for a request over on the Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme:
“AU set in either BoB or TP. Everybody hates Leckie. So does Liebgott. Web begs to differ. (Friendship or slash, writer's choice. Background Webgott is a plus.)”
Apologies to Steinbeck, who I really don’t like but also probably doesn’t deserve Liebgott’s derision. I’m not going to apologize to Leckie, who likely does, but I promise all the shit talk is in good fun and I, myself, am a fan of Leckie’s even though he’s kind of the worst.
No offense is meant to either secretaries or folks who suffer enuresis of any kind.
Marginalia are defined by Wikipedia as “marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, or illuminations.” Take that how you will.
Thank you to Muccamukk for giving it a spag check and helping me make it flow better. Prompter, I hope you like it!
You can read it here on AO3.
“The hell’re you gettin’ all gussied up for?” Joe asked, glancing over at Webster from the comic book he had splayed open across his knees.
His fellow marine was hunched in front of a little shard of mirror propped atop a couple of empty ammo crates they had stacked into a passable end table on the other side of the tent, fussing with his uniform shirt and making occasional dissatisfied noises under his breath. He had clearly just come from the beach, hair still half-damp and sticking up in fluffy little tufts at the back of his head. He even appeared to have made a haphazard effort at shaving—which, for Webster, was largely an exercise in futility—his standard five o’clock shadow resting a shade lighter than usual under the tanned plane of his jaw.
Webster didn’t bother turning around, frowning down at a button and responding absently, “Nothing, really. Some of us just like to bathe once in awhile.” He paused, and glanced around until he caught Joe’s eye in the mirror, adding pointedly, “You might want to think about it. Preferably sometime before you develop your own atmosphere.”
Joe snorted and returned his attention to the comic laid out in his lap. It was one of those detective stories about the man who dressed up as a giant bat—a few steps to the left of Joe’s usual fare but he was hardly spoiled for choice out here in the middle of the goddamn ocean.
“Careful with the compliments, there, Harvard, or I’m gonna wonder if you’re steppin’ out on me,” Joe drawled, licking his thumb and turning a page, because he knew it’d piss Webster off.
Sure enough, he only managed to contain himself for a second before whining, “You know, when you do that you get your spit all over it, and then every guy that reads it after you is getting a handful of your spit anytime he turns a page.”
“The fuck do I care if another guy has to deal with my spit?”
“Well, maybe you don’t,” Webster allowed, jerkily rolling his sleeves up to settle just below his elbows. “Figured you might care about all the guys who licked their way through it before you, but what do I know? Maybe sucking another fellow’s spit off your fingers is a hobby of yours.” He unrolled one of his sleeves partway and considered it for a second before huffing a tiny sigh and rolling it back up as he muttered under his breath, “Far be it from me to begrudge a man his pastimes.”
“You’re really stuck on this,” Joe observed. “You writin’ a dissertation or somethin’? They got a program on the transitive properties of human saliva back at Harvard?”
Webster shot a truly venomous glare over his shoulder and Joe grinned right back at him, close-mouthed. He wasn’t finished with his current page yet, distracted as he’d been by Webster’s proselytizing, but he licked his finger again and flipped on anyway just to watch the ripple of red heat that swept up the back of Webster’s neck.
“Hilarious,” Webster snapped. “I’m just saying you might as well go around and open-mouth kiss the whole battalion if you’re committed to tonguing every funny book you come across.”
“They should be so lucky,” Joe replied serenely. Webster rolled his eyes, tugging at the tails of his shirt and tucking them into his waistband. Joe closed the comic and pushed himself up onto his elbows, gesturing to Webster’s fresh duds. “Seriously, what’s with the spit and polish? You got a hot date or what?”
“I told you, it’s nothing,” Webster insisted. “I’ve been wearing the same dungarees for nearly a week, wanted a change while I could still get one.”
“How very civilized of you.”
“I thought so,” Webster agreed. He continued to primp for another few minutes, running his fingers through his dark hair to pull a few wayward curls back off his forehead, while Joe studied him with his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
The thing about Webster was that he approached tidiness as a sort of social currency. He liked to be clean as much as any of them did out here in the tropical wilds, but neither was he particularly bothered when he and Joe had been sharing a foxhole for six weeks and their dungarees were so saturated with mud, sweat, and blood that they threatened to stand up on their own when removed. Unless, of course, he stood to impress someone by putting his fastidiousness on display, at which point a clean-shaven cheek and a crisply pressed uniform—or as near to both as Webster could manage—became an imperative rather than a luxury.
There were only a few people that Webster would bother to make such an effort for, none of whom were Joe and none of whom Joe particularly liked. Webster had terrible taste in books and even worse taste in people, as evidenced by the on-again, off-again arrangement he had with the narcissistic, self-professed librarian from How Company that he thought Joe didn’t know about. Joe wasn’t in the habit of trying to save people from themselves, but neither did he desire to see the first competent assistant gunner command had dropped into his lap shipped back stateside because he bent over at an inopportune moment.
“Yeah,” he said, swinging his legs off the cot with a huff and dropping his bare feet to the sand-encrusted floorboards. “I ain’t buyin’ it.”
Webster arched an eyebrow at Joe over his shoulder. “I wasn't aware that I was selling anything.”
“Bullshit,” Joe snorted. “What is it? You talk Barrow into puttin’ the grass skirt back on? ‘cause the man wears it well, but I’ll tell you right now, Web, I think you can do better.”
“On Pavuvu? Hardly,” Webster replied, fighting a grin. He looked down at himself and smoothed a hand over the placket of his shirt. After a moment of consideration he reached up and undid his top button, letting his collar flap loose against the sun-bronzed skin at the hollow of his throat. “Anyway, it’s not Barrow. Though I appreciate the vote of confidence, I guess.”
“It’s not Barrow,” Joe echoed slowly. Webster gave his head an absent shake in reply. Joe leaned his weight back on his hands and announced with a triumphant lift of his chin, “But it is someone.”
Webster heaved a sigh and threw his head back to stare imploringly up at the ceiling of the tent with his hands splayed wide. “Why?” he groaned, scowling at the heavens. “Why can’t you let this go?”
“Why can’t you just tell me what you’re up to?” Joe shot back.
“Because it’s none of your goddamn business!” Webster snapped, wheeling around to try and glower Joe into submission. It was never going to happen—Joe had honed his stubbornness under the disapproving glares of various Liebgott women over the years. Even the gentlest of his Aunt Betty’s black looks was mean enough to strip paint. He wasn’t about to knuckle under to the likes of a prissy New York college brat, even if Webster did look worryingly like Joe’s ma with his hands planted on his hips like that.
“It damn well is my business!” Joe protested. “Anything that could leave me down a man is my business, Webster, and some piss-and-vinegared new boot runnin’ off to get up to God knows what trouble without so much as a by your leave definitely fits the bill! Who’s gonna haul the gun around next time we ship out if you land yourself in the brig, huh? ‘Cause I sure as hell ain’t doin’ it!”
“I’m only your assistant because some jackass up in officer country thought it would be a bright idea to stick the two of us on the same gun,” Webster snarled, jabbing a finger through the air at Joe. “And I haven’t been a new boot since Guadalcanal!”
“Newer than me,” Joe sneered. He liked the way Webster’s face flushed when he got all worked up and nothing took him there faster than a liberal measure of Joe’s patented condescension.
“Christ, it never ends with you, does it?” Webster griped, cheeks pinking prettily. He crossed his arms over his chest, pale eyes bright in his rage-ruddy face. “You’re not my keeper, Lieb! Or my secretary.”
“I sure as shit ain’t your secretary,” Joe agreed with an amused huff. He reached up and put his hands to his chest, arching a pointed eyebrow. “Ain’t got the tits for it, for one thing,” he observed, miming a lewd heave of his nonexistent rack.
“I mean that I’m under no obligation to arrange my schedule with you,” Webster said sourly.
Joe smirked. He could always tell when he had Webster up against the ropes because he started pulling out those fifty-cent words, like maybe his vocabulary could save him where his composure failed.
“Look,” Joe said, dropping his hands back down and wrapping his fingers around the frame of his cot, “you might as well just tell me, save us both some trouble.”
“There wouldn’t be any trouble if you would just let it go.”
“If you don’t tell me,” Joe warned amiably, “I’m just gonna follow you out of here.”
Webster’s chin jutted mutinously forward, eyes narrow and furious as he blustered, “You certainly will not!”
“I could give you a head start,” Joe offered. After a moment of consideration, he shrugged. “Camp ain’t that big, Web. I’ll find you eventually. ‘Course we could always duke it out,” he suggested. He tilted his head back and forth, clicking his tongue thoughtfully. “Way I remember it, that didn’t go so good for you last time we tried it, but who knows? Maybe you’ll get a lucky shot in.”
Webster rolled his eyes. Stubbornness and capitulation warred across his face in a divine ballet of flaring nostrils and twitching eyebrows. Joe grinned.
The other thing it was important to know about Webster was that he liked having a secret, but with enough wheedling he liked confessing one just as well. Joe’d had months to perfect his technique, suss out all the weak joints in Webster’s armor where he might best apply pressure, and, as he always did, Webster crumpled beautifully under the strain.
“Christ,” he hissed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Fine! I’m going to see Leckie, alright? No clandestine love affairs with marines in grass skirts! No secret bare-knuckle boxing ring, or whatever madness you’ve been imagining—just a few books and a cup of coffee and some decent conversation, for once!”
“I think we’re conversing just fine,” Joe said hotly. Webster cut him a flat glare.
“We’re arguing,” he corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“Yeah,” Joe agreed, injecting as much derision as he could summon into his tone, “the difference being that only one of those two things relies on sharing the same air as Leckie.”
“I like Leckie,” Webster said.
“Trust me,” Joe snorted, shooting Webster a pointed look, “everybody knows exactly how much you like Leckie.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Webster shifted his weight, curling in on himself a little and flicking a quick, nervous glance toward the door of the tent. Joe rolled his eyes.
“Nothin’,” he said drily. “Not a goddamn thing, Web.” He sucked his teeth and added out the side of his mouth, “Pretty rich, though, you givin’ me shit for swappin’ spit when you’re about to go let Leckie bloviate all over you.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Webster demanded, confused. Joe shook his head and tried to wave him off, but Webster wouldn’t be deterred. “No, seriously,” he insisted, stepping up so close he almost caught Joe’s bare toes under his bootheels. “What’s your problem with Leckie?”
“My problem?” Joe sneered, leaning up into Webster’s space. “Is that Leckie’s a self-righteous, self-centered son of a bitch. And he’s Asiatic.”
Webster didn’t even flinch.
“Everyone here is Asiatic,” he dismissed with a roll of his eyes. “You can’t not be, between the Japs blowing your buddies all to hell and then watching your buddies turn right around and desecrate the dead like it’s some kind of Biblical restitution.”
“Sure,” Joe allowed, pushing himself to his feet and making a point not to notice how close he and Webster were, “we’re all a little Asiatic, but Leckie’s for real crazy, Web. You know that, right? I mean, the guy just got back from an institution, for Chrissakes.”
“He had a medical condition!” Webster protested. “The psych ward was the only one that had any room left. It wasn’t like they sent him away for being crazy.”
“Grown man can’t stop pissin’ the bed?” Joe said skeptically, putting his head to one side. “Sounds pretty fuckin’ crazy to me.”
“It’s because it’s wet out here all the time,” Webster explained. “It happens to a lot of guys stuck on the islands, Leckie says.”
“Well, sure, Leckie would say that,” Joe agreed, “because he doesn’t want to admit that he’s fuckin’ crazy.” Webster’s brow furrowed further. He opened his mouth to argue the point but Joe held a hand up and cut him off. “I don’t even care that he’s crazy,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “Fella’s crazy, he can take medicine for that, or talk about his feelings or some bullshit. The bigger problem you’re refusing to see here is that Leckie’s an asshole. There ain’t no fuckin’ cure for that, Web, medical or otherwise.”
“Clearly,” Webster drawled. “Otherwise you’d be taking it three times a day.”
Joe shook his head and turned on his heel to stalk away from Webster, stomping over to the little collection of empty cans in the corner where they kept the various bric-a-brac they’d amassed dragging their light 30mm all over the godforsaken Pacific Theater. It was a collection of peculiarly shaped abalone and dark, smooth stones, spent shells and little scraps of paper upon which Webster had jotted snatches of florid prose in his neat finishing school copperplate. Joe rifled through the various bits and bobs so he had something to do with hands beyond grabbing Webster by the shoulders and shaking him, rattling his brain around in that pretty head of his until he finally understood.
Webster, either blind to the danger he was currently courting or, more likely, mulishly willing to risk it, strolled after him, expounding, “I know Leckie’s got a rough edge, but he’s just - ”
“An unholy prick?” Joe suggested before he could finish.
“Opinionated,” Webster snapped. He waved a hand at Joe. “I would think you, of all people, could appreciate that, since you’re clinically incapable of keeping your thoughts to your damn self.”
“I do appreciate it,” Joe agreed, saccharine. He brought a hand up to his chest and batted his eyelashes, adding, “I’d appreciate it even more if he stuck to sharing those opinions with fellas who give a good goddamn about what he has to say ‘stead of spoutin’ off anytime he sees me in the street.”
Webster scoffed and rolled his eyes again. He was going to give himself a migraine, doing that, and it’d be Joe up all night with him, making sure he had enough water and petting his hair when he whined—which they would both conveniently forget, come morning—not Saint Leckie, Patron of Pedantic Egotists.
“I don’t know why I bother,” Webster sighed. He shook his head and then straightened up and said sternly, “You don’t have to like that I’m spending time with Leckie, and, anyway, you’re not invited.”
“Great,” Joe replied curtly. “Glad we got that settled.”
He turned his back to Webster and shifted a few of the cans over to get into the shallow wooden pallet underneath, which he’d claimed for his own private storage. There wasn’t much in it—a handful of particularly poignant letters from back home and a few dog-eared Flash Gordon comics, his straight razor and shears, a rinsed-out entree can from a long-forgotten K ration where he kept the occasional coins he earned tidying necklines or shortening overgrown hair back down to marine standard.
There was also a book. Joe had suffered through ten minutes of Leckie’s company to pick it up a week and a half ago, and if he could manage to return the damn thing without having to interact with Leckie at all, more was the blessing.
“Take this back, would you?” he asked, holding it up over his shoulder without bothering to look up at the wounded disapproval he was certain he would find in Webster’s face. Joe liked to stir the pot a little from time to time, sure, but he wasn’t a masochist.
Webster’s fingers brushed against Joe’s when he reached out to take it, warm and vaguely clammy, the way everything was in the island humidity. The faint touch sent gooseflesh rippling up Joe’s arm in a tingling wave. He shook it out and went back to his little hoard of personal effects, rearranging them with a far more meticulous eye than he usually bothered employing to spare himself the bitter awkwardness of watching Webster leave.
Webster was silent so long that Joe figured he must have crept his way out of the tent to go darken Leckie’s doorstep when he murmured from over Joe’s shoulder, “Why do you have this?”
“Jesus Christ!” Joe hissed, falling back on his ass with a shocked, full-body flinch. He glared up at Webster and brought a hand up to rest over his chest, pulse thudding hard under his palm. “What the hell, Web?”
Webster was peering down at the book in his hands with his soft mouth curved into a frown. It was a battered and salt-encrusted copy of John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, which Joe had listened to Webster wax rhapsodic about often enough that he was mildly offended by the way Webster was handling it, as gingerly as if Joe had just tossed him a live round. His eyes were dark and serious when he glanced up to meet Joe’s gaze.
“Why do you have this?” he asked again, holding the book up as if there could be some confusion as to what he was talking about.
Joe arched an eyebrow at him and said slowly, “I was readin’ it.”
Webster sighed through his nose and flicked his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I know that,” he grumbled. “Just, why this book, specifically?”
Joe frowned, hunching his shoulders and crossing his arms over his chest. “I thought you liked that book.”
“I do like it,” Webster nodded. He flipped the book over and skimmed the blurb along the back. “It’s one of my favorites. It’s half the reason I decided to go to war.” He shook his head fondly, smirk tilting up on one side. “It’s why I was going to see Leckie, actually,” he admitted, opening it up to fan through a few of the pages. “I wanted to see if he still had it.”
“Well,” Joe said, lifting his eyebrows and letting a short gesture to the volume cradled in Webster’s hands do the rest of his speaking for him.
“I didn’t think you were much of a Steinbeck fan,” Webster admitted, tucking the book under his arm and reaching up to scratch at his eyebrow.
Joe snorted. “I’m not,” he agreed and climbed to his feet, brushing his hands off on his dungarees. Webster frowned.
“Then why bother reading it?”
“I don’t know,” Joe shrugged. He wrapped his hand around the back of his neck and scrubbed at the soft fuzz at the base of his hairline. His face felt hot, but Webster wasn’t ribbing him for it like he normally would, so maybe Joe was just imagining things. “You talk about it so much I figured maybe there was somethin’ there I just wasn’t seein’.”
He figured that would be the end of it, that Webster would nod and commend Joe for his willingness to concede to matters of superior taste in literature and be on his way. Instead, Webster nodded, glanced down at the book again, and asked, “What did you think?”
Joe frowned. “What?”
“The book,” Webster explained. He looked back up and there was something soft in his expression that Joe wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. It made his stomach twist and his face flare even hotter. “Did you like it?”
“Not really,” Joe admitted. He’d never pulled his punches where Webster was concerned and he wasn’t going to start just because there was a fuzzy, gooey edge to the curl of Webster’s grin that made his pulse pound. “Steinbeck is a pompous windbag, even when he’s writing about interesting things.”
Webster huffed a laugh and ducked his head. “Tell me how you really feel,” he invited, his voice warm and low.
Joe swallowed against the sudden tightness in his throat and licked his dry lips.
“I always do.”
Webster considered him for a long, thoughtful second. “No,” he said, sounding certain but unbothered, still watching Joe with a naked tenderness that made Joe’s skin prickle like he was alight with firecrackers all the way to his toes. “Not always.”
Joe opened his mouth to respond and closed it again when he couldn’t figure out what to say. Webster had already turned away by that point, carting the book over to his cot and flopping lazily back onto it with his boots up on the edge and his knees splayed out. He cracked the book open and propped it against his stomach, by all measures settled quite contentedly into his usual reading posture without any intention of rising back out of it anytime soon.
Joe watched him suspiciously for a second and then wandered back in the direction of his own cot, caddy-corner to Webster’s across the tent, and the abandoned Bat-man comic therein.
“I thought you were going to Leckie’s,” he blurted, surprising himself and Webster both when he came to a sudden stop in the middle of the floor.
Webster laid the book back and frowned curiously at Joe through the parted V of his knees. Joe’s stomach lurched again, a ghost of the same nerve-twanging anticipation that boiled in his gut before an assault but brighter, better.
“Why would I?” Webster asked. His smile was wide and soft and sweet. “You had what I needed right here.”
Joseph Liebgott & David Webster
Webster heaved a sigh and threw his head back to stare imploringly up at the ceiling of the tent with his hands splayed wide. “Why?” he groaned, scowling at the heavens. “Why can’t you let this go?”
“Why can’t you just tell me what you’re up to?” Joe shot back.
(Or: in which Webster really likes Robert Leckie and Liebgott really doesn’t.)
Author's Note: Written for a request over on the Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme:
Apologies to Steinbeck, who I really don’t like but also probably doesn’t deserve Liebgott’s derision. I’m not going to apologize to Leckie, who likely does, but I promise all the shit talk is in good fun and I, myself, am a fan of Leckie’s even though he’s kind of the worst.
No offense is meant to either secretaries or folks who suffer enuresis of any kind.
Marginalia are defined by Wikipedia as “marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, or illuminations.” Take that how you will.
Thank you to Muccamukk for giving it a spag check and helping me make it flow better. Prompter, I hope you like it!
You can read it here on AO3.
“The hell’re you gettin’ all gussied up for?” Joe asked, glancing over at Webster from the comic book he had splayed open across his knees.
His fellow marine was hunched in front of a little shard of mirror propped atop a couple of empty ammo crates they had stacked into a passable end table on the other side of the tent, fussing with his uniform shirt and making occasional dissatisfied noises under his breath. He had clearly just come from the beach, hair still half-damp and sticking up in fluffy little tufts at the back of his head. He even appeared to have made a haphazard effort at shaving—which, for Webster, was largely an exercise in futility—his standard five o’clock shadow resting a shade lighter than usual under the tanned plane of his jaw.
Webster didn’t bother turning around, frowning down at a button and responding absently, “Nothing, really. Some of us just like to bathe once in awhile.” He paused, and glanced around until he caught Joe’s eye in the mirror, adding pointedly, “You might want to think about it. Preferably sometime before you develop your own atmosphere.”
Joe snorted and returned his attention to the comic laid out in his lap. It was one of those detective stories about the man who dressed up as a giant bat—a few steps to the left of Joe’s usual fare but he was hardly spoiled for choice out here in the middle of the goddamn ocean.
“Careful with the compliments, there, Harvard, or I’m gonna wonder if you’re steppin’ out on me,” Joe drawled, licking his thumb and turning a page, because he knew it’d piss Webster off.
Sure enough, he only managed to contain himself for a second before whining, “You know, when you do that you get your spit all over it, and then every guy that reads it after you is getting a handful of your spit anytime he turns a page.”
“The fuck do I care if another guy has to deal with my spit?”
“Well, maybe you don’t,” Webster allowed, jerkily rolling his sleeves up to settle just below his elbows. “Figured you might care about all the guys who licked their way through it before you, but what do I know? Maybe sucking another fellow’s spit off your fingers is a hobby of yours.” He unrolled one of his sleeves partway and considered it for a second before huffing a tiny sigh and rolling it back up as he muttered under his breath, “Far be it from me to begrudge a man his pastimes.”
“You’re really stuck on this,” Joe observed. “You writin’ a dissertation or somethin’? They got a program on the transitive properties of human saliva back at Harvard?”
Webster shot a truly venomous glare over his shoulder and Joe grinned right back at him, close-mouthed. He wasn’t finished with his current page yet, distracted as he’d been by Webster’s proselytizing, but he licked his finger again and flipped on anyway just to watch the ripple of red heat that swept up the back of Webster’s neck.
“Hilarious,” Webster snapped. “I’m just saying you might as well go around and open-mouth kiss the whole battalion if you’re committed to tonguing every funny book you come across.”
“They should be so lucky,” Joe replied serenely. Webster rolled his eyes, tugging at the tails of his shirt and tucking them into his waistband. Joe closed the comic and pushed himself up onto his elbows, gesturing to Webster’s fresh duds. “Seriously, what’s with the spit and polish? You got a hot date or what?”
“I told you, it’s nothing,” Webster insisted. “I’ve been wearing the same dungarees for nearly a week, wanted a change while I could still get one.”
“How very civilized of you.”
“I thought so,” Webster agreed. He continued to primp for another few minutes, running his fingers through his dark hair to pull a few wayward curls back off his forehead, while Joe studied him with his eyes narrowed suspiciously.
The thing about Webster was that he approached tidiness as a sort of social currency. He liked to be clean as much as any of them did out here in the tropical wilds, but neither was he particularly bothered when he and Joe had been sharing a foxhole for six weeks and their dungarees were so saturated with mud, sweat, and blood that they threatened to stand up on their own when removed. Unless, of course, he stood to impress someone by putting his fastidiousness on display, at which point a clean-shaven cheek and a crisply pressed uniform—or as near to both as Webster could manage—became an imperative rather than a luxury.
There were only a few people that Webster would bother to make such an effort for, none of whom were Joe and none of whom Joe particularly liked. Webster had terrible taste in books and even worse taste in people, as evidenced by the on-again, off-again arrangement he had with the narcissistic, self-professed librarian from How Company that he thought Joe didn’t know about. Joe wasn’t in the habit of trying to save people from themselves, but neither did he desire to see the first competent assistant gunner command had dropped into his lap shipped back stateside because he bent over at an inopportune moment.
“Yeah,” he said, swinging his legs off the cot with a huff and dropping his bare feet to the sand-encrusted floorboards. “I ain’t buyin’ it.”
Webster arched an eyebrow at Joe over his shoulder. “I wasn't aware that I was selling anything.”
“Bullshit,” Joe snorted. “What is it? You talk Barrow into puttin’ the grass skirt back on? ‘cause the man wears it well, but I’ll tell you right now, Web, I think you can do better.”
“On Pavuvu? Hardly,” Webster replied, fighting a grin. He looked down at himself and smoothed a hand over the placket of his shirt. After a moment of consideration he reached up and undid his top button, letting his collar flap loose against the sun-bronzed skin at the hollow of his throat. “Anyway, it’s not Barrow. Though I appreciate the vote of confidence, I guess.”
“It’s not Barrow,” Joe echoed slowly. Webster gave his head an absent shake in reply. Joe leaned his weight back on his hands and announced with a triumphant lift of his chin, “But it is someone.”
Webster heaved a sigh and threw his head back to stare imploringly up at the ceiling of the tent with his hands splayed wide. “Why?” he groaned, scowling at the heavens. “Why can’t you let this go?”
“Why can’t you just tell me what you’re up to?” Joe shot back.
“Because it’s none of your goddamn business!” Webster snapped, wheeling around to try and glower Joe into submission. It was never going to happen—Joe had honed his stubbornness under the disapproving glares of various Liebgott women over the years. Even the gentlest of his Aunt Betty’s black looks was mean enough to strip paint. He wasn’t about to knuckle under to the likes of a prissy New York college brat, even if Webster did look worryingly like Joe’s ma with his hands planted on his hips like that.
“It damn well is my business!” Joe protested. “Anything that could leave me down a man is my business, Webster, and some piss-and-vinegared new boot runnin’ off to get up to God knows what trouble without so much as a by your leave definitely fits the bill! Who’s gonna haul the gun around next time we ship out if you land yourself in the brig, huh? ‘Cause I sure as hell ain’t doin’ it!”
“I’m only your assistant because some jackass up in officer country thought it would be a bright idea to stick the two of us on the same gun,” Webster snarled, jabbing a finger through the air at Joe. “And I haven’t been a new boot since Guadalcanal!”
“Newer than me,” Joe sneered. He liked the way Webster’s face flushed when he got all worked up and nothing took him there faster than a liberal measure of Joe’s patented condescension.
“Christ, it never ends with you, does it?” Webster griped, cheeks pinking prettily. He crossed his arms over his chest, pale eyes bright in his rage-ruddy face. “You’re not my keeper, Lieb! Or my secretary.”
“I sure as shit ain’t your secretary,” Joe agreed with an amused huff. He reached up and put his hands to his chest, arching a pointed eyebrow. “Ain’t got the tits for it, for one thing,” he observed, miming a lewd heave of his nonexistent rack.
“I mean that I’m under no obligation to arrange my schedule with you,” Webster said sourly.
Joe smirked. He could always tell when he had Webster up against the ropes because he started pulling out those fifty-cent words, like maybe his vocabulary could save him where his composure failed.
“Look,” Joe said, dropping his hands back down and wrapping his fingers around the frame of his cot, “you might as well just tell me, save us both some trouble.”
“There wouldn’t be any trouble if you would just let it go.”
“If you don’t tell me,” Joe warned amiably, “I’m just gonna follow you out of here.”
Webster’s chin jutted mutinously forward, eyes narrow and furious as he blustered, “You certainly will not!”
“I could give you a head start,” Joe offered. After a moment of consideration, he shrugged. “Camp ain’t that big, Web. I’ll find you eventually. ‘Course we could always duke it out,” he suggested. He tilted his head back and forth, clicking his tongue thoughtfully. “Way I remember it, that didn’t go so good for you last time we tried it, but who knows? Maybe you’ll get a lucky shot in.”
Webster rolled his eyes. Stubbornness and capitulation warred across his face in a divine ballet of flaring nostrils and twitching eyebrows. Joe grinned.
The other thing it was important to know about Webster was that he liked having a secret, but with enough wheedling he liked confessing one just as well. Joe’d had months to perfect his technique, suss out all the weak joints in Webster’s armor where he might best apply pressure, and, as he always did, Webster crumpled beautifully under the strain.
“Christ,” he hissed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Fine! I’m going to see Leckie, alright? No clandestine love affairs with marines in grass skirts! No secret bare-knuckle boxing ring, or whatever madness you’ve been imagining—just a few books and a cup of coffee and some decent conversation, for once!”
“I think we’re conversing just fine,” Joe said hotly. Webster cut him a flat glare.
“We’re arguing,” he corrected. “There’s a difference.”
“Yeah,” Joe agreed, injecting as much derision as he could summon into his tone, “the difference being that only one of those two things relies on sharing the same air as Leckie.”
“I like Leckie,” Webster said.
“Trust me,” Joe snorted, shooting Webster a pointed look, “everybody knows exactly how much you like Leckie.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Webster shifted his weight, curling in on himself a little and flicking a quick, nervous glance toward the door of the tent. Joe rolled his eyes.
“Nothin’,” he said drily. “Not a goddamn thing, Web.” He sucked his teeth and added out the side of his mouth, “Pretty rich, though, you givin’ me shit for swappin’ spit when you’re about to go let Leckie bloviate all over you.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Webster demanded, confused. Joe shook his head and tried to wave him off, but Webster wouldn’t be deterred. “No, seriously,” he insisted, stepping up so close he almost caught Joe’s bare toes under his bootheels. “What’s your problem with Leckie?”
“My problem?” Joe sneered, leaning up into Webster’s space. “Is that Leckie’s a self-righteous, self-centered son of a bitch. And he’s Asiatic.”
Webster didn’t even flinch.
“Everyone here is Asiatic,” he dismissed with a roll of his eyes. “You can’t not be, between the Japs blowing your buddies all to hell and then watching your buddies turn right around and desecrate the dead like it’s some kind of Biblical restitution.”
“Sure,” Joe allowed, pushing himself to his feet and making a point not to notice how close he and Webster were, “we’re all a little Asiatic, but Leckie’s for real crazy, Web. You know that, right? I mean, the guy just got back from an institution, for Chrissakes.”
“He had a medical condition!” Webster protested. “The psych ward was the only one that had any room left. It wasn’t like they sent him away for being crazy.”
“Grown man can’t stop pissin’ the bed?” Joe said skeptically, putting his head to one side. “Sounds pretty fuckin’ crazy to me.”
“It’s because it’s wet out here all the time,” Webster explained. “It happens to a lot of guys stuck on the islands, Leckie says.”
“Well, sure, Leckie would say that,” Joe agreed, “because he doesn’t want to admit that he’s fuckin’ crazy.” Webster’s brow furrowed further. He opened his mouth to argue the point but Joe held a hand up and cut him off. “I don’t even care that he’s crazy,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “Fella’s crazy, he can take medicine for that, or talk about his feelings or some bullshit. The bigger problem you’re refusing to see here is that Leckie’s an asshole. There ain’t no fuckin’ cure for that, Web, medical or otherwise.”
“Clearly,” Webster drawled. “Otherwise you’d be taking it three times a day.”
Joe shook his head and turned on his heel to stalk away from Webster, stomping over to the little collection of empty cans in the corner where they kept the various bric-a-brac they’d amassed dragging their light 30mm all over the godforsaken Pacific Theater. It was a collection of peculiarly shaped abalone and dark, smooth stones, spent shells and little scraps of paper upon which Webster had jotted snatches of florid prose in his neat finishing school copperplate. Joe rifled through the various bits and bobs so he had something to do with hands beyond grabbing Webster by the shoulders and shaking him, rattling his brain around in that pretty head of his until he finally understood.
Webster, either blind to the danger he was currently courting or, more likely, mulishly willing to risk it, strolled after him, expounding, “I know Leckie’s got a rough edge, but he’s just - ”
“An unholy prick?” Joe suggested before he could finish.
“Opinionated,” Webster snapped. He waved a hand at Joe. “I would think you, of all people, could appreciate that, since you’re clinically incapable of keeping your thoughts to your damn self.”
“I do appreciate it,” Joe agreed, saccharine. He brought a hand up to his chest and batted his eyelashes, adding, “I’d appreciate it even more if he stuck to sharing those opinions with fellas who give a good goddamn about what he has to say ‘stead of spoutin’ off anytime he sees me in the street.”
Webster scoffed and rolled his eyes again. He was going to give himself a migraine, doing that, and it’d be Joe up all night with him, making sure he had enough water and petting his hair when he whined—which they would both conveniently forget, come morning—not Saint Leckie, Patron of Pedantic Egotists.
“I don’t know why I bother,” Webster sighed. He shook his head and then straightened up and said sternly, “You don’t have to like that I’m spending time with Leckie, and, anyway, you’re not invited.”
“Great,” Joe replied curtly. “Glad we got that settled.”
He turned his back to Webster and shifted a few of the cans over to get into the shallow wooden pallet underneath, which he’d claimed for his own private storage. There wasn’t much in it—a handful of particularly poignant letters from back home and a few dog-eared Flash Gordon comics, his straight razor and shears, a rinsed-out entree can from a long-forgotten K ration where he kept the occasional coins he earned tidying necklines or shortening overgrown hair back down to marine standard.
There was also a book. Joe had suffered through ten minutes of Leckie’s company to pick it up a week and a half ago, and if he could manage to return the damn thing without having to interact with Leckie at all, more was the blessing.
“Take this back, would you?” he asked, holding it up over his shoulder without bothering to look up at the wounded disapproval he was certain he would find in Webster’s face. Joe liked to stir the pot a little from time to time, sure, but he wasn’t a masochist.
Webster’s fingers brushed against Joe’s when he reached out to take it, warm and vaguely clammy, the way everything was in the island humidity. The faint touch sent gooseflesh rippling up Joe’s arm in a tingling wave. He shook it out and went back to his little hoard of personal effects, rearranging them with a far more meticulous eye than he usually bothered employing to spare himself the bitter awkwardness of watching Webster leave.
Webster was silent so long that Joe figured he must have crept his way out of the tent to go darken Leckie’s doorstep when he murmured from over Joe’s shoulder, “Why do you have this?”
“Jesus Christ!” Joe hissed, falling back on his ass with a shocked, full-body flinch. He glared up at Webster and brought a hand up to rest over his chest, pulse thudding hard under his palm. “What the hell, Web?”
Webster was peering down at the book in his hands with his soft mouth curved into a frown. It was a battered and salt-encrusted copy of John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, which Joe had listened to Webster wax rhapsodic about often enough that he was mildly offended by the way Webster was handling it, as gingerly as if Joe had just tossed him a live round. His eyes were dark and serious when he glanced up to meet Joe’s gaze.
“Why do you have this?” he asked again, holding the book up as if there could be some confusion as to what he was talking about.
Joe arched an eyebrow at him and said slowly, “I was readin’ it.”
Webster sighed through his nose and flicked his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I know that,” he grumbled. “Just, why this book, specifically?”
Joe frowned, hunching his shoulders and crossing his arms over his chest. “I thought you liked that book.”
“I do like it,” Webster nodded. He flipped the book over and skimmed the blurb along the back. “It’s one of my favorites. It’s half the reason I decided to go to war.” He shook his head fondly, smirk tilting up on one side. “It’s why I was going to see Leckie, actually,” he admitted, opening it up to fan through a few of the pages. “I wanted to see if he still had it.”
“Well,” Joe said, lifting his eyebrows and letting a short gesture to the volume cradled in Webster’s hands do the rest of his speaking for him.
“I didn’t think you were much of a Steinbeck fan,” Webster admitted, tucking the book under his arm and reaching up to scratch at his eyebrow.
Joe snorted. “I’m not,” he agreed and climbed to his feet, brushing his hands off on his dungarees. Webster frowned.
“Then why bother reading it?”
“I don’t know,” Joe shrugged. He wrapped his hand around the back of his neck and scrubbed at the soft fuzz at the base of his hairline. His face felt hot, but Webster wasn’t ribbing him for it like he normally would, so maybe Joe was just imagining things. “You talk about it so much I figured maybe there was somethin’ there I just wasn’t seein’.”
He figured that would be the end of it, that Webster would nod and commend Joe for his willingness to concede to matters of superior taste in literature and be on his way. Instead, Webster nodded, glanced down at the book again, and asked, “What did you think?”
Joe frowned. “What?”
“The book,” Webster explained. He looked back up and there was something soft in his expression that Joe wasn’t sure he’d ever seen before. It made his stomach twist and his face flare even hotter. “Did you like it?”
“Not really,” Joe admitted. He’d never pulled his punches where Webster was concerned and he wasn’t going to start just because there was a fuzzy, gooey edge to the curl of Webster’s grin that made his pulse pound. “Steinbeck is a pompous windbag, even when he’s writing about interesting things.”
Webster huffed a laugh and ducked his head. “Tell me how you really feel,” he invited, his voice warm and low.
Joe swallowed against the sudden tightness in his throat and licked his dry lips.
“I always do.”
Webster considered him for a long, thoughtful second. “No,” he said, sounding certain but unbothered, still watching Joe with a naked tenderness that made Joe’s skin prickle like he was alight with firecrackers all the way to his toes. “Not always.”
Joe opened his mouth to respond and closed it again when he couldn’t figure out what to say. Webster had already turned away by that point, carting the book over to his cot and flopping lazily back onto it with his boots up on the edge and his knees splayed out. He cracked the book open and propped it against his stomach, by all measures settled quite contentedly into his usual reading posture without any intention of rising back out of it anytime soon.
Joe watched him suspiciously for a second and then wandered back in the direction of his own cot, caddy-corner to Webster’s across the tent, and the abandoned Bat-man comic therein.
“I thought you were going to Leckie’s,” he blurted, surprising himself and Webster both when he came to a sudden stop in the middle of the floor.
Webster laid the book back and frowned curiously at Joe through the parted V of his knees. Joe’s stomach lurched again, a ghost of the same nerve-twanging anticipation that boiled in his gut before an assault but brighter, better.
“Why would I?” Webster asked. His smile was wide and soft and sweet. “You had what I needed right here.”
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