a thousand years in perfect symmetry | the pacific | snafu/sledge | [1/2]
title: a thousand years in perfect symmetry
pairings: snafu/sledge, sid/gwen
rating: pg-13
content: band of brothers, the pacific, generation kill crossover. modern day au. language. cardiac disease.
summary: the illness in his heart cannot be healed by love alone. (in which snafu chips away sledge’s shell of insecurity and naiveté, and sledge shows him how to care in return.)
words: 10.930
beta: girl-on-sunshine & scratchywilson
disclaimer: this whole universe is nothing but sheer imagination. none of it is real; nothing mentioned ever happened or has anything to do with the actual veterans. no profit is being made; no copyright infringement is intended. the title is by los campesinos!
author’s notes: please notice everything i know about cardiac diseases and heart transplants is stolen from the internet and perhaps not 100% accurate. if you happen to know the subject better than i do, please excuse any mistakes or point them out to me, thanks.
Sledge wakes up because the window is open and the spare room, painted a shy shade of marigold, is bathed in soft light that smells of early mornings. His lashes are caked with sleep. When he looks outside to the sun wavering just behind the stray clouds, he wishes it was still late summer. He’s not fond of autumn and its crumbling leaves, even if they’re gleaming in rusty reds and deep tangerines.
A fresh breeze, tinted with gardenias and rain-slick concrete, tickles the fuzz on his arms and sweeps away the last husky remnants of night. He slips his thighs and knobbly knees into a pair of track pants with worn draw stings that are long frayed along the edges. It’s the only one he brought the whole way from Mobile through Indianapolis to Chicago’s south side.
Frank Ocean is on the radio with Sid humming along softly from the kitchenette, waiting for his bread to leap out of the toaster. “I’m glad to have you here now, Gene,” he says when butter melts on his golden-brown slice of cinnamon toast. “Can’t believe your folks let you go, though.” Cacti plants with tiny blossoms are lined up on the narrow window sill, arranged in order of size and colour. Strangely, they remind Sledge of life.
“I’m eighteen. I can look after myself.” Sledge’s face crumbles a little like pressed flowers tend to do. “At least for a year or so,” he remembers. Until he gets his new transplant.
Sitting on one of the wooden stools at the breakfast bar, he’s spreading jam over his breakfast before he pops the pills he needs to keep his body from killing itself.
Sid’s smile suddenly displays a full row of straight, pearly teeth. “M’not a virgin anymore, by the way. Got myself a girlfriend.”
“What about Mary Huston?” Sledge can feel his molars crunch when he thinks about her French tipped fingers and the way her hairline would glitter in the dim evening sun dangling low over Alabama’s horizon. “You used to be so smitten.”
“Look who’s talking!” Sid’s words send crumbs flying onto the linoleum floor. “But. I don’t really care about her anymore. Not like that, anyway.” He chuckles softly. “You’ve got her all to yourself now.”
“Sure, man.” Neither of them mentions the endless line of exuberant boys with broader shoulders and less freckles on the bridge of their noses than Sledge clutching to the hem of her floral skirts. “Don’t you have any classes?”
"Yeah, you’re right. Busy, busy.” Sid grabs a messenger bag he didn’t have when they were in high school. “Don't die while I'm gone," he calls, not sugar-coating the matter.
Sid makes things easy for Sledge, dissipates the strain of worry that’s constantly engulfing his mind and heart. That’s why they still share a friendship built over sandcastles and monkey bars, wound tightly with time. That’s also why he followed him to Chicago despite his parent’s concerns for the maimed organ caught in his chest that isn’t pumping blood, oxygen and nutrients to the rest of his body quite like it should.
"I shall try," he waves after him, but his eyes are glued to photos of a girl with fuchsia cheeks littering the kitchen cabinets, wondering if that’s the one who managed to steal Sid’s heart from Mary.
The sun’s kissing the earth goodbye with orange-red lips when Sid stumbles back into his ground-floor apartment, smelling of work and flour and preheated ovens. Sledge is curled up on the sofa, his white and jittery hands hidden in the crooks of his armpits. “How was your day, bakery boy?” he asks, ignoring his defiant heartbeat. The spaces between his toes aren’t clammy, neither are his palms, so it’s okay.
“Gwen says she wants to meet you.” Sid drops his bag of heavy college books, while undoing the apron he wears at work, and zips up a hoodie until it meets the sharp tip of his chin. “I’m fixing to go to the store,” he says then, “to get some healthy food now that you’re here.”
Sledge is sure Sid wants to ask him what to buy. He could give him a detailed list his mama tucked into the inside pocket of his bag. Instead he says, “I’ll come.”
Sid eyes how the gelatine bones in his fingers tremble with the strain of opening his pill bottle. “Gene,” he sighs, but Sledge only shakes his head. He isn’t quite ready to feel like porcelain again - frail and threatening to crack at any moment.
He won’t let a sick bundle of veins and arteries take over his life, not yet.
They stroll down Embers Lane after Sid made sure to convince Sledge to wear more than just a thin sweater to keep the cold from settling in his bones. The street is lined by pale houses with crumbling fronts and picturesque bay windows that project into side streets smelling of honeysuckle and cloves rather than piss.
When they round a group of guys testing who can shout butt fuck the loudest, rain starts bleeding from the sky. Sid ushers them inside a shop with a yellow awning saying Toccoa Grocery Store in narrow, almost squiggly letters, and a Help Wanted Needed sign hanging in the window.
“You know,” Sledge says when he puts a zucchini and berries and tubs of plain yoghurt into the shopping basket, “I could work here, maybe. It’s close and everything.”
Sid throws a carton of red, seedless grapes at him; Sledge’s favourites. “Need to talk to Sobel then, he’s the big boss here or something. Acts like it, anyway.”
Sobel is a stern man with tight shoulders and a spine so taut it could snap beneath his ridiculous Toccoa vest at any moment.
“Are you even out of school yet, boy?” His smile is derisive, brittle around the edges.
Sledge can feel his trapezii brace, making the bones in the slope of his neck crack. “Yes, sir,” he mumbles, meekly. The pulsing of his heartbeat keeps his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth and almost keeps him from talking.
“Well, you - ” They notice a short guy with tattoos trailing down the skin of his forearms standing in front of one of the cooling shelves. A sticky trail of milkshake is dripping off his lower lip. Sledge can see a muscle twitch in Sobel’s jaw.
“Tomorrow, eight o’clock.” Sobel pushes a bright orange vest against the sharp dip of Sledge’s breastbone and leaves with hurrying feet and scolding hands.
The rain has gone from fat plopping drops to random barely-there sprinkles by then.
+
The next morning comes slowly, creeps along the seams of a rain-swept night and into the room Sledge will one day start calling his. He curls his toes into the duvet that rests heavily on his chest, not yet ready to let go of the Mary-shaped dream still tickling his fingertips.
Pulling on a cable-knit sweater with sleeves that flap around the tiny bones in his wrists, he goes to brush his teeth and scrub away the dryness in the back of his throat. The wall mirror shows him the blue tinged skin just below his eyes is run through by navy veins, and that he desperately needs a haircut. It’s nothing he doesn’t already know.
Sid is eating a bowl of multi-coloured cereal in the glare of the hazy morning sun that’s flooding the narrow space between the breakfast bar and messy kitchen counters when Sledge’s circulatory system is stable enough to keep his pills from slipping though his fingers.
“We’re meeting up with Gwen at Bravo later,” Sid announces. His eyes crinkle with a smile. “It’s on Riverside Promenade, the street that’s all flowery and shit. You’ll find it.”
Four hundred heartbeats later, Sledge reaches Toccoa and slips into his vest. Sobel is already waiting with taunting eyes and arms crossed over his sternum, an artificial smile stretching his mouth.
Sledge is sure the back of his neck and the skin around his cheekbones blotch a heated shade of red, even though he’s dead on-time.
“Good morning, sir,” he tries, but Sobel stays stiff from the tips of his boots to his lashes. He straightens the wings of his collar that shines a deeper hue of pumpkin than Sledge’s, and nods his head in the direction of a guy who is stacking a myriad of canned soup with languid, flowing movements.
“I want you to stick with Shelton today.” His voice is clipped, rushing through quickly-smirking lips. “He’ll show you around.”
Snafu is a viscous supernova compressed into silent diamond glances and brassy words, but Sledge doesn’t know that yet. Now, he’s just Shelton, a boy who chain smokes in front of No Smoking signs, gaze tired and heavy beneath a sweep of dark lashes.
“Who’re you, then?” he asks with a distant, flimsy smile, cerulean swimming in his eyes like wet paint. The neckline of his tee is falling far past his protruding clavicles, making them jut out like cinnamon razor blades.
“Eugene Sledge.” Flushing suddenly, Sledge feels oddly self-conscious about the way his sweater is too big in the shoulders, flapping loosely around the sharp slopes. “I just moved here from - ”
“Yeah,” Shelton interrupts him, waving a hand that silently screams whatever. Sledge feels his chest tighten. “Just follow me.”
At first, Shelton makes him carry box after box of glistening oranges and juicy berries he usually eats with granola and milk. After that, he has to refill the canned goods shelves in a twirl of second hand smoke and watery blue stares, and in the afternoon, he wipes the floor, guides the mop along dirty sneakers and hastening oxford shoes.
Sledge feels good with a kind of normalcy aching in his bones he doesn’t usually experience. It makes his back strain and his fingers shake, and his heart, though dealing with attrition gnawing at its edges, still beats steady and reliable.
Later, when things are getting ridiculous and he’s to dusting the tomatoes displayed in a palette on a low table, his hands become sweaty, clammy, and he rubs them against the thighs of his jeans.
“Look, Shelton, I - ”
The individual knobs in Shelton’s long neck creak when he lifts his chin abruptly, stiff from watching Sledge work. “Don’t fuckin’ go around callin’ me that.” The baritone words drip off his lips like molasses, but they’re sharper somehow, like he means it. Sledge tries to not let them squeeze his throat shut.
“ - I don’t really think I have to do this,” he finishes, anger bubbling hotly in the pristine cage of his ribs but not daring to infect his tone. His fingernails bite crescent-shaped marks into his palms, now balled into useless fists against his legs.
“Well, no,” Shelton drawls, complacency drawn around his irises in electric blue dots, and Sledge doesn’t really know what else to call him. “I just wanted to see you sweat.”
Shelton skips what’s left of his shift with a lavish smile and a cantaloupe he didn’t pay for carried in the arch of his elbow.
+
Riverside Promenade is overloaded with ivy climbing up stucco walls and flamboyant flowers blooming beside the sidewalks, just like Sid said. It smells of pollen, viridian greens and dove-grey rain.
Sledge reaches Bravo dripping and with shaking bones. The front door is made from old wood painted sangria red and framed with even more ivy that curls along the brick walls. It gets lost where the walls go off into a beer garden’s fence. He isn’t sure if he should go inside, because, god, he isn’t of age yet and this is a bar, but he can spot Sid through one of the multi-pane windows, so he opens the door with a jittery push.
There is no room for anonymity in this bar, no quiet drinking into oblivion. Everyone seems to know each other, clinks bottles and pints while cursing loudly about life and its flaws or girls and the sway of their hips.
Already huddled deeply into the billow of smoke and false bravado that lurks even in the farthest corners of the room, Sledge winds his way through brawny men’s shoulders, greeted by indifferent eyes. He realizes he’s never been a stranger anywhere before.
“Jesus, Sid,” he gasps when he sits across him at the wooden table, round and with tiny ornaments that don’t seem to match each other, “this place is full of cops.” He rubs his hands, pale as moon dust and flecked with freckles, over his knees, kneading the flesh there worriedly through his trousers.
“Nah,” Sid assures him, delighted by his panic, “the ginger one at the bar is just picking up his drunk-ass boyfriend. And the serial killer lookalike over there comes here after his shifts to hit on Lipton, who’s a cop, too, but it’s all good.”
“I thought this was a coffee shop. Bravo sounds like a coffee shop.”
“You don’t even drink coffee.” Sid’s tie-dye laugh easily carries over the crowd of tipsy men with big mouths and even bigger beers.
“I don’t drink alcohol, either,” Sledge protests. He doesn’t know anything about liquid courage and the pleasant vertigo that comes with drinking. He’s eighteen, he’s not supposed to. (Then again, maybe he really is.) He’s always built his life around his illness, prepared to let go of it again if necessary, not leaving any space for alcohol or caffeine or feeling like everyone else.
After two hundred heartbeats of looking around - he counted them, of course, to make sure his pulse didn’t get lost - his eyes meet blue ones, partly hidden behind copper lids.
Shelton has to crane his neck to look back at him, the long, smooth hollow of his throat prominent in the yellow light from above the bar. When he doesn’t blink, wet indigo patches start simmering in his eyes, peeling back the muscles that hide beneath Sledge’s skin to peer right into him and take apart his insides.
It’s Sledge’s first glimpse of the opalescent gaze Shelton endows only sparsely. His breath lurches. “Who’s that?” he asks. He shapes his words as if he doesn’t already know because he feels like he really doesn’t know at all, and his palms prickle with a strange shade of curiosity, an itch he can’t scratch away.
“That’s Snafu.” Sid licks his lips and doesn’t smile, his tone not light anymore or floating over the table between them. “Well, Gwen said so. Bit of a dick, really.”
"Takes one to know one," Sledge mumbles impishly, loud enough for Sid to hear. Though, pulling his beige sweater over his knuckles, he inwardly lets Snafu roll over his tongue again and again. It tastes sweeter than Shelton, but sharper at the same time.
Gwen arrives in a swirl of skirts and blonde ringlets that cascade around her face like a fair waterfall. When she sits, Sid slides his chair closer to hers and greets her with a private smile that speaks of an entire library filled with little moments Sledge hasn’t witnessed.
“Gene, I want you to meet my lovely girl of, what? Two months?” He says it with his whole gold dusted face stretching into a huge grin that wrinkles around the corners of his mouth.
Gwen seems almost too perfect; they do - the way her fingers curl around Sid’s broad wrists, fond with memories and the infatuation that’s painted across their coral-coloured smiles. She’s nothing like Mary. Sledge likes her, anyway, or maybe precisely because, and decides the pang that’s swirling in his guts isn’t a twisted sort of jealousy he can’t explain, but pure, genuine happiness that’s perhaps a little stained along the seams.
+
Sledge gets almost used to living with Sid and the sounds Chicago makes at night after a week of waking up with orange blooming behind his eyelids and a handful of pills, all different colours and sizes, neatly prepared by his plate. The trees now look like someone splashed them with paint during his sleep and he’s found a new doctor that’ll care for his heart.
Today’s morning, still pale and quiet, hugs the air with nebulous arms when Sledge enters Toccoa, leaving a trail of foot-shaped mud puddles behind he’ll later have to clean up himself. Snafu is puffing on a cigarette as usual, to pass the time, maybe, or simply to see flushing ire twist on Sobel’s face when he smells the obvious remnants lingering in the air between the shelves Snafu is supposed to restock. He comes over to where Sledge is standing in the depot, starting to count boxes of TV-dinners.
“Want a drag?” The question comes from between his teeth and has to fight its way through the cloud of smoke.
“Not much of a smoker,” Sledge replies. It sounds weak and he knows it, but for some reason Snafu’s piercing gaze sparks a series of goosebumps that races alongside the freckles on his pale skin, makes his cheeks rouge up with heat.
Snafu only lifts his chin the way he does sometimes and drops a low yeah before he leaves like he arrived: slow, gliding, like the approach of a cat sneaking up on its prey.
+
The floor creaks under his feet when Sledge steps out of the autumn sunbeams and into the flat, for once not shivering and damp. His nose is runny, anyway, and his cardiologist won’t thank him for that.
In the tiny shower he turns on the faucet, lets the spray douse him and droplets pool in the valleys between his ribs for little moments. The hot water quickly pinks his shoulders, and his eyes fall shut. By the time he crawls out of the cloaking warmth again, a rye bread is freshly sliced and waiting for him, as well as Sid with an awry smile.
With Sid leading him, Sledge walks down Embers Lane in the direction of Bravo, passing a rundown laundromat and chartreuse to sandy coloured apartment buildings that don’t reach too far into the sky.
On the balcony of the one of the top floors, three stories high, Snafu sits with his legs poking out through the gaps of the railing. He stares down at Sledge with his always darting eyes, lips parted around a smoke in a sharp toothed smile.
It’s only a fleeting moment, four heartbeats perhaps, until Sledge is dragged away by Sid’s arm looping around his waist. Snafu’s nostrils flare in something like irritation but his eyes don’t seem to care.
He sits in a fading puddle of lukewarm yellow sunlight by the river, huddled on top of a quilt Hoosier, a friend of Sid’s who taught him how to swallow shots without retching, threw at him. Hoosier is blond and wry with a miniscule stubble on his lower jaw. Sledge isn’t sure if he should like him.
Gwen’s hair is up in a messy bun, her face alight in the rare sun that’s gilding the afternoon one of the last times this year, while Sid is running around with most of the guys Sledge passed on the street this past week, chasing a ball through two sticks that make for a goal post.
Sledge and his heart and the dust in his lungs, they aren’t much into socializing. He still doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, in the middle of people he could know, should know, maybe, but doesn’t.
Gwen is an exception, though. She is cute and wispy, with lips like oversweet drinks and an air of calmness surrounding her that stops the anxiety in his veins the way only Sid and his mama do.
“How did the two of you meet?” he asks into the peaceful quiet, his tongue almost trembling with curiosity. Sid never said anything but starry and fetching and mine mine mine.
“Oh.” Shifting, Gwen tucks her legs underneath her, barefoot on the soft quilt. “We met in the bakery. It belongs to my uncle and auntie, you have to know. He was actually very kind and sweet.” She smiles silently with the taste of memory on her tongue.
“I can’t imagine,” Sledge laughs, blinking.
Gwen likes to smile without showing teeth. She’s so very different from Mary, from Sid, but somehow they fit just right. Their bones click and lock, and they grow around each other’s spines without ever crunching. Their hearts overlap.
It has to be nice, Sledge thinks, being in love.
The sky is a plum purple on their way back home, night already fallen. Snafu isn’t sitting on the balcony anymore, of course he isn’t, but Sledge can’t help himself and checks, anyway, with dully glittering particles of hope in the caverns of his heart.
+
The first cracks his cardiovascular system showed when he was seven, right in the centre of it. It’s just a murmur, they said, but his dad, he knew better.
He was nine when he needed his first transplant.
“You grew so fast, boy,” is what his new Chicago doctor says, “your heart won’t be able to handle you much longer. It’s possible that we have to move up the operation date.” He smells of antiseptic and too expensive cologne.
All Sledge notices is the dry, dusty rust gathering at the back of his throat.
That day, Sledge is late for work. Snafu and Sobel are arguing in the fresh produce section. It isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.
“This is serious bullshit, sir, I won’t do it,” Sledge hears when he rounds the frozen meat. The leaves sticking to his shoes look artfully flicked with paint and he knows he’ll have to sweep out each of them later.
“You work at my command!” It feels like Sobel is emphasizing his entire little speech, gums sore and toes curled in his pointy-toed boots. “You very well will do this or I can guarantee you - ” He pauses, tugging on one of his sleeves, and shifts his anger from Snafu to Sledge who just passed the nearest aisle. “You’re late,” he says, trying to appear as if he carries any authority at all. He likes to wear his vest like a uniform.
“I’m sorry, sir, I had an appointment. Here’s a note from my doctor,” Sledge hedges, forcing himself to swallow, but nothing in Sobel’s eyes indicates that he cares.
“No,” he says superciliously, rage still alight in his skin peeling look. His face is the colour of puce. “You didn’t tell me beforehand. It's against regulations!”
Wednesdays are slow days full of barrenness and tired eyelids; Sledge didn’t think Sobel would mind, but he should have known better.
Snafu just smiles at him through slow lips and cerulean that’s hidden behind a row of fluttering black.
Sobel makes him rearrange the depot after his shift, ostensibly because of reasons. Snafu offers to help, his features calmer, smoother, less intimidating. It sparks surprise in Sledge’s guts but he doesn’t mind the company, the second heartbeat thrumming in the room.
“Why doesn’t he just fire us?” Sledge asks, annoyed before he even starts to do as he was told. Somewhere in the back of his skull, his mind is still shaking with the doctor’s words. His throat feels like it’s filled with thick, wet paint up to his tonsils.
“Why don’t you just quit?” Snafu retorts. He pulls a Marlboro from inside his vest. It smells faintly like peppermint. “See, Sledge,” he explains with waving hands, cigarette kept between the bones of two fingers, “that prick needs us just as much as we need his goddamn money. No one else would put up with the shit he pulls all the time.”
Sledge is sure he’s never heard Snafu say his name before. He listens to it like he listens to music, and buries the soon to be memory deep inside his belly where it can’t touch his heart. “That’s against regulations,” he mocks then, pointing at the cigarette, facetious and with false sincerity on his face, to distract himself from the sudden tingling in-between his ribs.
Snafu takes a heavy pull. “Fuck Sobel,” he says. His voice sounds like silk and burned ash, echoing from the taupe walls. “It’s Snafu, by the way.”
“I know.” Sledge feels a blush colouring his cheeks like war paint, but he doesn’t mind it much. It’s Snafu. He’s allowed to say it now, like he’s earned it somehow. It makes him feel special and he likes that.
The smoke from inside Snafu’s mouth creates wisps of clouds in front of his face, shrouding him like a curtain he’s never going to lift. “Why don’t you have any classes? You look like you should go to college,” he asks, maybe genuinely curious.
“I’m taking a gap year,” Sledge shrugs, and starts placing Raisin Bran boxes on one of the shelves.
“Workin’ in a fuckin’ supermarket?” Snafu sounds like he, in a way, expects more of Sledge. The look in his eyes, dark like a storm looming just over the horizon, says the same.
Sledge feels too hot all of a sudden, seen through and judged. He offers, “I’m going to become a teacher one day.” (At least that’s what he’s told himself since he was nine. He used to have dreams of his castaway heart, somewhere in a pile of trash; horrid dreams about scalpels tearing the flesh of his chest apart, and that he wouldn’t make it. So he learned to force the picture of a shiny future into his brain, one that would help him stay alive.)
“Yeah?” Snafu rolls his shoulders with a crack, then his neck, feline, like a cat. All the bones tucked smartly underneath his skin show in a stripe, running from atop his collar only to hide in his hairline. “I think I’ll just stay here.”
Sledge can’t help himself but stare, his heartbeat sticking tightly to the front of his ribcage.
+
It’s early in the evening but already darkening outside, and the phone that he barely uses buzzes on the bedside cabinet where it lies right beside a nearly empty box of tissues.
“Hello, sweetheart,” the voice on the end of the line intones. “I just wanted to see how they treat my baby boy over there.”
“Mama,” Sledge sighs softly, kneading at the sudden soreness behind his temples. I miss you. He sits down on the edge of his mattress, crumpling the duvet a little. The wall lamp casts a strange array of shadows around the room.
“I’m you mother, I worry.” He imagines her pinching his cheeks the way she does, until a pink layer spreads that shushes the scary pallor resting there, or muttering at the bugs in her garden that dare to eat her leaves. “Your father does, too. Now tell me, Gene, how are you?” Her usually prim voice is full of barely concealed worry. Sledge doesn’t know what to say besides the handful of things he won’t.
“Fine, really. The doctor says I’m fine.” The lie sits heavy on his tongue, weighting it down, but he doesn’t want to think about her fading smile. He knows the way her hand wanders to her chest in sorrow too well already, like a photograph burned into the back of his skull.
“I’m glad, darling,” she says, relieved. “But you know you can come home at any time, right?”
“Right.” He stares out at the cotton candy coloured sky, lilac rolling over it in streaks of clouds, and doesn’t think of going back any time soon, or how his maimed heart will probably force him to.
+
That Friday morning is a velvet blue with crisp clouds sticking out against the murkiness. On his way to Toccoa, Sledge steps over leftover puddles from last night’s storm, and crumbled leaves in amber and orange-red that will soon fully brown with decay. He’s early, pale thumb skating lightly over his knuckles while he waits for the first customers to arrive. When Snafu appears, huddled into a fur-lined denim jacket Sledge has never seen before, their shift is already one hour in. He smells wet and of dirt and smoke, but warm nonetheless.
“My dog died,” Sledge gushes for no apparent reason. “My mother called. To tell me, I mean.”
Snafu’s eyes soften measuredly. His hair sits awry on his head, whipped around by one of the many Chicago winds. “M’sorry,” he says, Sledge’s grief not lost in his ears while he peels off his jacket.
Sledge dares to think that maybe he’s gentle beneath the imperceptible muscle and tissue and bones.
“Come home with me today.”
“What?” Sledge asks, a blush stealing over his cheeks while he tries to sell fruit schnapps to a small guy with unruly curls and his teeth slightly ajar. His girlfriend has her hair up in pigtails, one higher than the other. “Um. Have a nice day,” Sledge waves after them.
“I’m pretty sure you understood me just fine.”
“’Course, yeah.” Nodding while rubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand, Sledge shakes away the confused crease in-between his brows. “I - yeah.” He would like to touch the dip between Snafu’s shoulder blades, and his jugular, where the blood pumps right against his skin, but he isn’t that stupid.
Instead, he stares at the watch he wears above his sweater’s sleeve, hand circling around the veins and the bones of his wrist, and converts the remaining hours of their shift into heartbeats.
+
Sledge is rocking on his heels in front of the woolly-violet sunset with his hands in his pockets while Snafu slips his house key into the lock. His rolled up sleeves show off slim, cinnamon wrists.
When they reach the top floor, Sledge is already out of breath thanks to his heart. Snafu chooses not to mock him. “Welcome to my two-room shithole,” is what he says instead when he opens the door to his apartment with a tiny wave.
Stepping into Snafu’s home is a bit like stepping inside of Snafu himself. They are greeted by thick wisps of peppermint cigarette smoke and the smell of coffee mixed with laundry detergent. There is no couch, but a soft, leathern armchair and a coffee table littered with empty Marlboro Smooth packs.
“This place reeks of your bad habits,” Sledge states and a small smile blooms on Snafu’s face. It’s nice for once.
They sit on the balcony’s floor, legs poking out between the thin metal bars. It reminds Sledge of lavender nights and eyelids at half-mast. The air is chilly but not too much and he doesn’t want to complain, much less break the spell that’s keeping his heart at bay right then.
Two colourful cups of tea are placed between them. Sledge takes his with more honey than water, while Snafu drinks it very pure and very bitter. Nestled in their laps, they both carry a plate of yesterday’s mac and cheese from the fridge.
“You look tired,” Snafu notes, taking a long pull from his cup.
Frazzled is what Sledge would call it, but it’s not like sleep would do much about that. “I’m fine.”
Snafu nods and pulls a cigarette from his pants pocket. “So, tell me about yourself.” Wisps of fresh smoke slip through his lips. The timbre of his words speaks of unwavering seriousness, as if he cares, but Sledge is sure he doesn’t. Snafu doesn’t even care about his own beauty and his flaws; he doesn’t take care of his future and the soft parts of his body. Sledge can see it in his hands, almost grey with dryness, his lungs, and the yellowing wallpaper in his flat.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, anyway, because maybe. His heart beats like a kick drum in the middle of his throat as if it’s trying to escape.
“Somethin’. I dunno,” Snafu shrugs with the opaque indifference Sledge knows so well. It’s in the corners of his mouth, dripping sometimes. “You look like the complicated type of person, with a past and all that.”
Sledge swallows heavily, one two three times in unison with the pounding beneath his ribs. “Well. I had a heart failure when I was little,” he tells his fingernails, but the tremor in his voice reaches out for Snafu, wraps around the soft shells of his ears that move a little while he chews. “Don’t know if that’s complicated enough.”
Snafu is watching Sledge’s waxen hand, spellbound by a vein winding down its freckled back like a river or a derelict road on a map traced far too many times. Sledge has known that route for a long while, can guide the tips of his fingers along it, eyes closed, without hitting any of the marks that are there from thick hospital needles. “Got a transplant then,” he continues, nervously dragging his fork through the sauce on his plate, “but I’m slowly growing out of it.” He doesn’t know how to explain that the heart currently residing in his chest isn’t his, that it won’t make it another two years. Soon, he’ll have to take the bigger pills again to prevent his body from rejecting the foreign organ he’s going to get, and later rely on IV medications to make it from day to day.
Snafu doesn’t want to hear of that, anyway, it seems. “Should stop the smokin’ then, shouldn’t I?” he simply says, and crushes the short butt of his gleaming Marlboro in the ashtray.
When he turns to face Sledge after a second caught between silence and speaking, long neck bend a little, there's a sheen of sweat atop his upper lip. His eyes are pale but intense, and Sledge can feel his pulse stutter. The muscles in his legs start to tremble, but Snafu doesn’t mind, just puts a hand in the small space in-between and touches their foreheads together. He smells of soap and tea, coated with an everlasting veil of cigarette smoke.
“This okay with you, Sledgehammer?” he asks, exhaling a bundle of hot air that makes his words ghost over Sledge’s mouth.
Sledge shivers at the newly blossomed nickname, feels the dust of hair on his arms and thighs rise with a prickling that covers his skin. He nods quickly, too eager, but just in time with the throbbing staccato of his heart. Snafu’s lashes tangle with his. They flutter like gossamer wings around his owlish eyes before his tea-warm tongue slips out to tease his lip, to glide across the burning flesh in a slow rush only Snafu could provide.
Sledge tucks his hands in between his thighs, unsure what to do with them, and meets Snafu’s, hot and dry, so chapped the skin stretching over his knuckles almost ruptures. Snafu tangles their fingers lightly, and finally, finally fits their mouths together in a kiss. His other hand sweeps against Sledge’s ribs, pressing them like keys on a piano.
It all aches in a way that feels like blood vessels bursting with pleasure.
Curled up under his own comforter, Sledge still notices his lips tingle, swollen and slick with spit like a phantom limb: prickling, burning, not really there but consuming him all the same.
next
pairings: snafu/sledge, sid/gwen
rating: pg-13
content: band of brothers, the pacific, generation kill crossover. modern day au. language. cardiac disease.
summary: the illness in his heart cannot be healed by love alone. (in which snafu chips away sledge’s shell of insecurity and naiveté, and sledge shows him how to care in return.)
words: 10.930
beta: girl-on-sunshine & scratchywilson
disclaimer: this whole universe is nothing but sheer imagination. none of it is real; nothing mentioned ever happened or has anything to do with the actual veterans. no profit is being made; no copyright infringement is intended. the title is by los campesinos!
author’s notes: please notice everything i know about cardiac diseases and heart transplants is stolen from the internet and perhaps not 100% accurate. if you happen to know the subject better than i do, please excuse any mistakes or point them out to me, thanks.
- all you can hear is the sound of your own heart. and all you can feel is your lungs flood and the blood course. but, oh, i can see five hundred years dead set ahead of me, five hundred behind. a thousand years in perfect symmetry. --los campesinos!
Sledge wakes up because the window is open and the spare room, painted a shy shade of marigold, is bathed in soft light that smells of early mornings. His lashes are caked with sleep. When he looks outside to the sun wavering just behind the stray clouds, he wishes it was still late summer. He’s not fond of autumn and its crumbling leaves, even if they’re gleaming in rusty reds and deep tangerines.
A fresh breeze, tinted with gardenias and rain-slick concrete, tickles the fuzz on his arms and sweeps away the last husky remnants of night. He slips his thighs and knobbly knees into a pair of track pants with worn draw stings that are long frayed along the edges. It’s the only one he brought the whole way from Mobile through Indianapolis to Chicago’s south side.
Frank Ocean is on the radio with Sid humming along softly from the kitchenette, waiting for his bread to leap out of the toaster. “I’m glad to have you here now, Gene,” he says when butter melts on his golden-brown slice of cinnamon toast. “Can’t believe your folks let you go, though.” Cacti plants with tiny blossoms are lined up on the narrow window sill, arranged in order of size and colour. Strangely, they remind Sledge of life.
“I’m eighteen. I can look after myself.” Sledge’s face crumbles a little like pressed flowers tend to do. “At least for a year or so,” he remembers. Until he gets his new transplant.
Sitting on one of the wooden stools at the breakfast bar, he’s spreading jam over his breakfast before he pops the pills he needs to keep his body from killing itself.
Sid’s smile suddenly displays a full row of straight, pearly teeth. “M’not a virgin anymore, by the way. Got myself a girlfriend.”
“What about Mary Huston?” Sledge can feel his molars crunch when he thinks about her French tipped fingers and the way her hairline would glitter in the dim evening sun dangling low over Alabama’s horizon. “You used to be so smitten.”
“Look who’s talking!” Sid’s words send crumbs flying onto the linoleum floor. “But. I don’t really care about her anymore. Not like that, anyway.” He chuckles softly. “You’ve got her all to yourself now.”
“Sure, man.” Neither of them mentions the endless line of exuberant boys with broader shoulders and less freckles on the bridge of their noses than Sledge clutching to the hem of her floral skirts. “Don’t you have any classes?”
"Yeah, you’re right. Busy, busy.” Sid grabs a messenger bag he didn’t have when they were in high school. “Don't die while I'm gone," he calls, not sugar-coating the matter.
Sid makes things easy for Sledge, dissipates the strain of worry that’s constantly engulfing his mind and heart. That’s why they still share a friendship built over sandcastles and monkey bars, wound tightly with time. That’s also why he followed him to Chicago despite his parent’s concerns for the maimed organ caught in his chest that isn’t pumping blood, oxygen and nutrients to the rest of his body quite like it should.
"I shall try," he waves after him, but his eyes are glued to photos of a girl with fuchsia cheeks littering the kitchen cabinets, wondering if that’s the one who managed to steal Sid’s heart from Mary.
The sun’s kissing the earth goodbye with orange-red lips when Sid stumbles back into his ground-floor apartment, smelling of work and flour and preheated ovens. Sledge is curled up on the sofa, his white and jittery hands hidden in the crooks of his armpits. “How was your day, bakery boy?” he asks, ignoring his defiant heartbeat. The spaces between his toes aren’t clammy, neither are his palms, so it’s okay.
“Gwen says she wants to meet you.” Sid drops his bag of heavy college books, while undoing the apron he wears at work, and zips up a hoodie until it meets the sharp tip of his chin. “I’m fixing to go to the store,” he says then, “to get some healthy food now that you’re here.”
Sledge is sure Sid wants to ask him what to buy. He could give him a detailed list his mama tucked into the inside pocket of his bag. Instead he says, “I’ll come.”
Sid eyes how the gelatine bones in his fingers tremble with the strain of opening his pill bottle. “Gene,” he sighs, but Sledge only shakes his head. He isn’t quite ready to feel like porcelain again - frail and threatening to crack at any moment.
He won’t let a sick bundle of veins and arteries take over his life, not yet.
They stroll down Embers Lane after Sid made sure to convince Sledge to wear more than just a thin sweater to keep the cold from settling in his bones. The street is lined by pale houses with crumbling fronts and picturesque bay windows that project into side streets smelling of honeysuckle and cloves rather than piss.
When they round a group of guys testing who can shout butt fuck the loudest, rain starts bleeding from the sky. Sid ushers them inside a shop with a yellow awning saying Toccoa Grocery Store in narrow, almost squiggly letters, and a Help Wanted Needed sign hanging in the window.
“You know,” Sledge says when he puts a zucchini and berries and tubs of plain yoghurt into the shopping basket, “I could work here, maybe. It’s close and everything.”
Sid throws a carton of red, seedless grapes at him; Sledge’s favourites. “Need to talk to Sobel then, he’s the big boss here or something. Acts like it, anyway.”
Sobel is a stern man with tight shoulders and a spine so taut it could snap beneath his ridiculous Toccoa vest at any moment.
“Are you even out of school yet, boy?” His smile is derisive, brittle around the edges.
Sledge can feel his trapezii brace, making the bones in the slope of his neck crack. “Yes, sir,” he mumbles, meekly. The pulsing of his heartbeat keeps his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth and almost keeps him from talking.
“Well, you - ” They notice a short guy with tattoos trailing down the skin of his forearms standing in front of one of the cooling shelves. A sticky trail of milkshake is dripping off his lower lip. Sledge can see a muscle twitch in Sobel’s jaw.
“Tomorrow, eight o’clock.” Sobel pushes a bright orange vest against the sharp dip of Sledge’s breastbone and leaves with hurrying feet and scolding hands.
The rain has gone from fat plopping drops to random barely-there sprinkles by then.
+
The next morning comes slowly, creeps along the seams of a rain-swept night and into the room Sledge will one day start calling his. He curls his toes into the duvet that rests heavily on his chest, not yet ready to let go of the Mary-shaped dream still tickling his fingertips.
Pulling on a cable-knit sweater with sleeves that flap around the tiny bones in his wrists, he goes to brush his teeth and scrub away the dryness in the back of his throat. The wall mirror shows him the blue tinged skin just below his eyes is run through by navy veins, and that he desperately needs a haircut. It’s nothing he doesn’t already know.
Sid is eating a bowl of multi-coloured cereal in the glare of the hazy morning sun that’s flooding the narrow space between the breakfast bar and messy kitchen counters when Sledge’s circulatory system is stable enough to keep his pills from slipping though his fingers.
“We’re meeting up with Gwen at Bravo later,” Sid announces. His eyes crinkle with a smile. “It’s on Riverside Promenade, the street that’s all flowery and shit. You’ll find it.”
Four hundred heartbeats later, Sledge reaches Toccoa and slips into his vest. Sobel is already waiting with taunting eyes and arms crossed over his sternum, an artificial smile stretching his mouth.
Sledge is sure the back of his neck and the skin around his cheekbones blotch a heated shade of red, even though he’s dead on-time.
“Good morning, sir,” he tries, but Sobel stays stiff from the tips of his boots to his lashes. He straightens the wings of his collar that shines a deeper hue of pumpkin than Sledge’s, and nods his head in the direction of a guy who is stacking a myriad of canned soup with languid, flowing movements.
“I want you to stick with Shelton today.” His voice is clipped, rushing through quickly-smirking lips. “He’ll show you around.”
Snafu is a viscous supernova compressed into silent diamond glances and brassy words, but Sledge doesn’t know that yet. Now, he’s just Shelton, a boy who chain smokes in front of No Smoking signs, gaze tired and heavy beneath a sweep of dark lashes.
“Who’re you, then?” he asks with a distant, flimsy smile, cerulean swimming in his eyes like wet paint. The neckline of his tee is falling far past his protruding clavicles, making them jut out like cinnamon razor blades.
“Eugene Sledge.” Flushing suddenly, Sledge feels oddly self-conscious about the way his sweater is too big in the shoulders, flapping loosely around the sharp slopes. “I just moved here from - ”
“Yeah,” Shelton interrupts him, waving a hand that silently screams whatever. Sledge feels his chest tighten. “Just follow me.”
At first, Shelton makes him carry box after box of glistening oranges and juicy berries he usually eats with granola and milk. After that, he has to refill the canned goods shelves in a twirl of second hand smoke and watery blue stares, and in the afternoon, he wipes the floor, guides the mop along dirty sneakers and hastening oxford shoes.
Sledge feels good with a kind of normalcy aching in his bones he doesn’t usually experience. It makes his back strain and his fingers shake, and his heart, though dealing with attrition gnawing at its edges, still beats steady and reliable.
Later, when things are getting ridiculous and he’s to dusting the tomatoes displayed in a palette on a low table, his hands become sweaty, clammy, and he rubs them against the thighs of his jeans.
“Look, Shelton, I - ”
The individual knobs in Shelton’s long neck creak when he lifts his chin abruptly, stiff from watching Sledge work. “Don’t fuckin’ go around callin’ me that.” The baritone words drip off his lips like molasses, but they’re sharper somehow, like he means it. Sledge tries to not let them squeeze his throat shut.
“ - I don’t really think I have to do this,” he finishes, anger bubbling hotly in the pristine cage of his ribs but not daring to infect his tone. His fingernails bite crescent-shaped marks into his palms, now balled into useless fists against his legs.
“Well, no,” Shelton drawls, complacency drawn around his irises in electric blue dots, and Sledge doesn’t really know what else to call him. “I just wanted to see you sweat.”
Shelton skips what’s left of his shift with a lavish smile and a cantaloupe he didn’t pay for carried in the arch of his elbow.
+
Riverside Promenade is overloaded with ivy climbing up stucco walls and flamboyant flowers blooming beside the sidewalks, just like Sid said. It smells of pollen, viridian greens and dove-grey rain.
Sledge reaches Bravo dripping and with shaking bones. The front door is made from old wood painted sangria red and framed with even more ivy that curls along the brick walls. It gets lost where the walls go off into a beer garden’s fence. He isn’t sure if he should go inside, because, god, he isn’t of age yet and this is a bar, but he can spot Sid through one of the multi-pane windows, so he opens the door with a jittery push.
There is no room for anonymity in this bar, no quiet drinking into oblivion. Everyone seems to know each other, clinks bottles and pints while cursing loudly about life and its flaws or girls and the sway of their hips.
Already huddled deeply into the billow of smoke and false bravado that lurks even in the farthest corners of the room, Sledge winds his way through brawny men’s shoulders, greeted by indifferent eyes. He realizes he’s never been a stranger anywhere before.
“Jesus, Sid,” he gasps when he sits across him at the wooden table, round and with tiny ornaments that don’t seem to match each other, “this place is full of cops.” He rubs his hands, pale as moon dust and flecked with freckles, over his knees, kneading the flesh there worriedly through his trousers.
“Nah,” Sid assures him, delighted by his panic, “the ginger one at the bar is just picking up his drunk-ass boyfriend. And the serial killer lookalike over there comes here after his shifts to hit on Lipton, who’s a cop, too, but it’s all good.”
“I thought this was a coffee shop. Bravo sounds like a coffee shop.”
“You don’t even drink coffee.” Sid’s tie-dye laugh easily carries over the crowd of tipsy men with big mouths and even bigger beers.
“I don’t drink alcohol, either,” Sledge protests. He doesn’t know anything about liquid courage and the pleasant vertigo that comes with drinking. He’s eighteen, he’s not supposed to. (Then again, maybe he really is.) He’s always built his life around his illness, prepared to let go of it again if necessary, not leaving any space for alcohol or caffeine or feeling like everyone else.
After two hundred heartbeats of looking around - he counted them, of course, to make sure his pulse didn’t get lost - his eyes meet blue ones, partly hidden behind copper lids.
Shelton has to crane his neck to look back at him, the long, smooth hollow of his throat prominent in the yellow light from above the bar. When he doesn’t blink, wet indigo patches start simmering in his eyes, peeling back the muscles that hide beneath Sledge’s skin to peer right into him and take apart his insides.
It’s Sledge’s first glimpse of the opalescent gaze Shelton endows only sparsely. His breath lurches. “Who’s that?” he asks. He shapes his words as if he doesn’t already know because he feels like he really doesn’t know at all, and his palms prickle with a strange shade of curiosity, an itch he can’t scratch away.
“That’s Snafu.” Sid licks his lips and doesn’t smile, his tone not light anymore or floating over the table between them. “Well, Gwen said so. Bit of a dick, really.”
"Takes one to know one," Sledge mumbles impishly, loud enough for Sid to hear. Though, pulling his beige sweater over his knuckles, he inwardly lets Snafu roll over his tongue again and again. It tastes sweeter than Shelton, but sharper at the same time.
Gwen arrives in a swirl of skirts and blonde ringlets that cascade around her face like a fair waterfall. When she sits, Sid slides his chair closer to hers and greets her with a private smile that speaks of an entire library filled with little moments Sledge hasn’t witnessed.
“Gene, I want you to meet my lovely girl of, what? Two months?” He says it with his whole gold dusted face stretching into a huge grin that wrinkles around the corners of his mouth.
Gwen seems almost too perfect; they do - the way her fingers curl around Sid’s broad wrists, fond with memories and the infatuation that’s painted across their coral-coloured smiles. She’s nothing like Mary. Sledge likes her, anyway, or maybe precisely because, and decides the pang that’s swirling in his guts isn’t a twisted sort of jealousy he can’t explain, but pure, genuine happiness that’s perhaps a little stained along the seams.
+
Sledge gets almost used to living with Sid and the sounds Chicago makes at night after a week of waking up with orange blooming behind his eyelids and a handful of pills, all different colours and sizes, neatly prepared by his plate. The trees now look like someone splashed them with paint during his sleep and he’s found a new doctor that’ll care for his heart.
Today’s morning, still pale and quiet, hugs the air with nebulous arms when Sledge enters Toccoa, leaving a trail of foot-shaped mud puddles behind he’ll later have to clean up himself. Snafu is puffing on a cigarette as usual, to pass the time, maybe, or simply to see flushing ire twist on Sobel’s face when he smells the obvious remnants lingering in the air between the shelves Snafu is supposed to restock. He comes over to where Sledge is standing in the depot, starting to count boxes of TV-dinners.
“Want a drag?” The question comes from between his teeth and has to fight its way through the cloud of smoke.
“Not much of a smoker,” Sledge replies. It sounds weak and he knows it, but for some reason Snafu’s piercing gaze sparks a series of goosebumps that races alongside the freckles on his pale skin, makes his cheeks rouge up with heat.
Snafu only lifts his chin the way he does sometimes and drops a low yeah before he leaves like he arrived: slow, gliding, like the approach of a cat sneaking up on its prey.
+
The floor creaks under his feet when Sledge steps out of the autumn sunbeams and into the flat, for once not shivering and damp. His nose is runny, anyway, and his cardiologist won’t thank him for that.
In the tiny shower he turns on the faucet, lets the spray douse him and droplets pool in the valleys between his ribs for little moments. The hot water quickly pinks his shoulders, and his eyes fall shut. By the time he crawls out of the cloaking warmth again, a rye bread is freshly sliced and waiting for him, as well as Sid with an awry smile.
With Sid leading him, Sledge walks down Embers Lane in the direction of Bravo, passing a rundown laundromat and chartreuse to sandy coloured apartment buildings that don’t reach too far into the sky.
On the balcony of the one of the top floors, three stories high, Snafu sits with his legs poking out through the gaps of the railing. He stares down at Sledge with his always darting eyes, lips parted around a smoke in a sharp toothed smile.
It’s only a fleeting moment, four heartbeats perhaps, until Sledge is dragged away by Sid’s arm looping around his waist. Snafu’s nostrils flare in something like irritation but his eyes don’t seem to care.
He sits in a fading puddle of lukewarm yellow sunlight by the river, huddled on top of a quilt Hoosier, a friend of Sid’s who taught him how to swallow shots without retching, threw at him. Hoosier is blond and wry with a miniscule stubble on his lower jaw. Sledge isn’t sure if he should like him.
Gwen’s hair is up in a messy bun, her face alight in the rare sun that’s gilding the afternoon one of the last times this year, while Sid is running around with most of the guys Sledge passed on the street this past week, chasing a ball through two sticks that make for a goal post.
Sledge and his heart and the dust in his lungs, they aren’t much into socializing. He still doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, in the middle of people he could know, should know, maybe, but doesn’t.
Gwen is an exception, though. She is cute and wispy, with lips like oversweet drinks and an air of calmness surrounding her that stops the anxiety in his veins the way only Sid and his mama do.
“How did the two of you meet?” he asks into the peaceful quiet, his tongue almost trembling with curiosity. Sid never said anything but starry and fetching and mine mine mine.
“Oh.” Shifting, Gwen tucks her legs underneath her, barefoot on the soft quilt. “We met in the bakery. It belongs to my uncle and auntie, you have to know. He was actually very kind and sweet.” She smiles silently with the taste of memory on her tongue.
“I can’t imagine,” Sledge laughs, blinking.
Gwen likes to smile without showing teeth. She’s so very different from Mary, from Sid, but somehow they fit just right. Their bones click and lock, and they grow around each other’s spines without ever crunching. Their hearts overlap.
It has to be nice, Sledge thinks, being in love.
The sky is a plum purple on their way back home, night already fallen. Snafu isn’t sitting on the balcony anymore, of course he isn’t, but Sledge can’t help himself and checks, anyway, with dully glittering particles of hope in the caverns of his heart.
+
The first cracks his cardiovascular system showed when he was seven, right in the centre of it. It’s just a murmur, they said, but his dad, he knew better.
He was nine when he needed his first transplant.
“You grew so fast, boy,” is what his new Chicago doctor says, “your heart won’t be able to handle you much longer. It’s possible that we have to move up the operation date.” He smells of antiseptic and too expensive cologne.
All Sledge notices is the dry, dusty rust gathering at the back of his throat.
That day, Sledge is late for work. Snafu and Sobel are arguing in the fresh produce section. It isn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.
“This is serious bullshit, sir, I won’t do it,” Sledge hears when he rounds the frozen meat. The leaves sticking to his shoes look artfully flicked with paint and he knows he’ll have to sweep out each of them later.
“You work at my command!” It feels like Sobel is emphasizing his entire little speech, gums sore and toes curled in his pointy-toed boots. “You very well will do this or I can guarantee you - ” He pauses, tugging on one of his sleeves, and shifts his anger from Snafu to Sledge who just passed the nearest aisle. “You’re late,” he says, trying to appear as if he carries any authority at all. He likes to wear his vest like a uniform.
“I’m sorry, sir, I had an appointment. Here’s a note from my doctor,” Sledge hedges, forcing himself to swallow, but nothing in Sobel’s eyes indicates that he cares.
“No,” he says superciliously, rage still alight in his skin peeling look. His face is the colour of puce. “You didn’t tell me beforehand. It's against regulations!”
Wednesdays are slow days full of barrenness and tired eyelids; Sledge didn’t think Sobel would mind, but he should have known better.
Snafu just smiles at him through slow lips and cerulean that’s hidden behind a row of fluttering black.
Sobel makes him rearrange the depot after his shift, ostensibly because of reasons. Snafu offers to help, his features calmer, smoother, less intimidating. It sparks surprise in Sledge’s guts but he doesn’t mind the company, the second heartbeat thrumming in the room.
“Why doesn’t he just fire us?” Sledge asks, annoyed before he even starts to do as he was told. Somewhere in the back of his skull, his mind is still shaking with the doctor’s words. His throat feels like it’s filled with thick, wet paint up to his tonsils.
“Why don’t you just quit?” Snafu retorts. He pulls a Marlboro from inside his vest. It smells faintly like peppermint. “See, Sledge,” he explains with waving hands, cigarette kept between the bones of two fingers, “that prick needs us just as much as we need his goddamn money. No one else would put up with the shit he pulls all the time.”
Sledge is sure he’s never heard Snafu say his name before. He listens to it like he listens to music, and buries the soon to be memory deep inside his belly where it can’t touch his heart. “That’s against regulations,” he mocks then, pointing at the cigarette, facetious and with false sincerity on his face, to distract himself from the sudden tingling in-between his ribs.
Snafu takes a heavy pull. “Fuck Sobel,” he says. His voice sounds like silk and burned ash, echoing from the taupe walls. “It’s Snafu, by the way.”
“I know.” Sledge feels a blush colouring his cheeks like war paint, but he doesn’t mind it much. It’s Snafu. He’s allowed to say it now, like he’s earned it somehow. It makes him feel special and he likes that.
The smoke from inside Snafu’s mouth creates wisps of clouds in front of his face, shrouding him like a curtain he’s never going to lift. “Why don’t you have any classes? You look like you should go to college,” he asks, maybe genuinely curious.
“I’m taking a gap year,” Sledge shrugs, and starts placing Raisin Bran boxes on one of the shelves.
“Workin’ in a fuckin’ supermarket?” Snafu sounds like he, in a way, expects more of Sledge. The look in his eyes, dark like a storm looming just over the horizon, says the same.
Sledge feels too hot all of a sudden, seen through and judged. He offers, “I’m going to become a teacher one day.” (At least that’s what he’s told himself since he was nine. He used to have dreams of his castaway heart, somewhere in a pile of trash; horrid dreams about scalpels tearing the flesh of his chest apart, and that he wouldn’t make it. So he learned to force the picture of a shiny future into his brain, one that would help him stay alive.)
“Yeah?” Snafu rolls his shoulders with a crack, then his neck, feline, like a cat. All the bones tucked smartly underneath his skin show in a stripe, running from atop his collar only to hide in his hairline. “I think I’ll just stay here.”
Sledge can’t help himself but stare, his heartbeat sticking tightly to the front of his ribcage.
+
It’s early in the evening but already darkening outside, and the phone that he barely uses buzzes on the bedside cabinet where it lies right beside a nearly empty box of tissues.
“Hello, sweetheart,” the voice on the end of the line intones. “I just wanted to see how they treat my baby boy over there.”
“Mama,” Sledge sighs softly, kneading at the sudden soreness behind his temples. I miss you. He sits down on the edge of his mattress, crumpling the duvet a little. The wall lamp casts a strange array of shadows around the room.
“I’m you mother, I worry.” He imagines her pinching his cheeks the way she does, until a pink layer spreads that shushes the scary pallor resting there, or muttering at the bugs in her garden that dare to eat her leaves. “Your father does, too. Now tell me, Gene, how are you?” Her usually prim voice is full of barely concealed worry. Sledge doesn’t know what to say besides the handful of things he won’t.
“Fine, really. The doctor says I’m fine.” The lie sits heavy on his tongue, weighting it down, but he doesn’t want to think about her fading smile. He knows the way her hand wanders to her chest in sorrow too well already, like a photograph burned into the back of his skull.
“I’m glad, darling,” she says, relieved. “But you know you can come home at any time, right?”
“Right.” He stares out at the cotton candy coloured sky, lilac rolling over it in streaks of clouds, and doesn’t think of going back any time soon, or how his maimed heart will probably force him to.
+
That Friday morning is a velvet blue with crisp clouds sticking out against the murkiness. On his way to Toccoa, Sledge steps over leftover puddles from last night’s storm, and crumbled leaves in amber and orange-red that will soon fully brown with decay. He’s early, pale thumb skating lightly over his knuckles while he waits for the first customers to arrive. When Snafu appears, huddled into a fur-lined denim jacket Sledge has never seen before, their shift is already one hour in. He smells wet and of dirt and smoke, but warm nonetheless.
“My dog died,” Sledge gushes for no apparent reason. “My mother called. To tell me, I mean.”
Snafu’s eyes soften measuredly. His hair sits awry on his head, whipped around by one of the many Chicago winds. “M’sorry,” he says, Sledge’s grief not lost in his ears while he peels off his jacket.
Sledge dares to think that maybe he’s gentle beneath the imperceptible muscle and tissue and bones.
“Come home with me today.”
“What?” Sledge asks, a blush stealing over his cheeks while he tries to sell fruit schnapps to a small guy with unruly curls and his teeth slightly ajar. His girlfriend has her hair up in pigtails, one higher than the other. “Um. Have a nice day,” Sledge waves after them.
“I’m pretty sure you understood me just fine.”
“’Course, yeah.” Nodding while rubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand, Sledge shakes away the confused crease in-between his brows. “I - yeah.” He would like to touch the dip between Snafu’s shoulder blades, and his jugular, where the blood pumps right against his skin, but he isn’t that stupid.
Instead, he stares at the watch he wears above his sweater’s sleeve, hand circling around the veins and the bones of his wrist, and converts the remaining hours of their shift into heartbeats.
+
Sledge is rocking on his heels in front of the woolly-violet sunset with his hands in his pockets while Snafu slips his house key into the lock. His rolled up sleeves show off slim, cinnamon wrists.
When they reach the top floor, Sledge is already out of breath thanks to his heart. Snafu chooses not to mock him. “Welcome to my two-room shithole,” is what he says instead when he opens the door to his apartment with a tiny wave.
Stepping into Snafu’s home is a bit like stepping inside of Snafu himself. They are greeted by thick wisps of peppermint cigarette smoke and the smell of coffee mixed with laundry detergent. There is no couch, but a soft, leathern armchair and a coffee table littered with empty Marlboro Smooth packs.
“This place reeks of your bad habits,” Sledge states and a small smile blooms on Snafu’s face. It’s nice for once.
They sit on the balcony’s floor, legs poking out between the thin metal bars. It reminds Sledge of lavender nights and eyelids at half-mast. The air is chilly but not too much and he doesn’t want to complain, much less break the spell that’s keeping his heart at bay right then.
Two colourful cups of tea are placed between them. Sledge takes his with more honey than water, while Snafu drinks it very pure and very bitter. Nestled in their laps, they both carry a plate of yesterday’s mac and cheese from the fridge.
“You look tired,” Snafu notes, taking a long pull from his cup.
Frazzled is what Sledge would call it, but it’s not like sleep would do much about that. “I’m fine.”
Snafu nods and pulls a cigarette from his pants pocket. “So, tell me about yourself.” Wisps of fresh smoke slip through his lips. The timbre of his words speaks of unwavering seriousness, as if he cares, but Sledge is sure he doesn’t. Snafu doesn’t even care about his own beauty and his flaws; he doesn’t take care of his future and the soft parts of his body. Sledge can see it in his hands, almost grey with dryness, his lungs, and the yellowing wallpaper in his flat.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, anyway, because maybe. His heart beats like a kick drum in the middle of his throat as if it’s trying to escape.
“Somethin’. I dunno,” Snafu shrugs with the opaque indifference Sledge knows so well. It’s in the corners of his mouth, dripping sometimes. “You look like the complicated type of person, with a past and all that.”
Sledge swallows heavily, one two three times in unison with the pounding beneath his ribs. “Well. I had a heart failure when I was little,” he tells his fingernails, but the tremor in his voice reaches out for Snafu, wraps around the soft shells of his ears that move a little while he chews. “Don’t know if that’s complicated enough.”
Snafu is watching Sledge’s waxen hand, spellbound by a vein winding down its freckled back like a river or a derelict road on a map traced far too many times. Sledge has known that route for a long while, can guide the tips of his fingers along it, eyes closed, without hitting any of the marks that are there from thick hospital needles. “Got a transplant then,” he continues, nervously dragging his fork through the sauce on his plate, “but I’m slowly growing out of it.” He doesn’t know how to explain that the heart currently residing in his chest isn’t his, that it won’t make it another two years. Soon, he’ll have to take the bigger pills again to prevent his body from rejecting the foreign organ he’s going to get, and later rely on IV medications to make it from day to day.
Snafu doesn’t want to hear of that, anyway, it seems. “Should stop the smokin’ then, shouldn’t I?” he simply says, and crushes the short butt of his gleaming Marlboro in the ashtray.
When he turns to face Sledge after a second caught between silence and speaking, long neck bend a little, there's a sheen of sweat atop his upper lip. His eyes are pale but intense, and Sledge can feel his pulse stutter. The muscles in his legs start to tremble, but Snafu doesn’t mind, just puts a hand in the small space in-between and touches their foreheads together. He smells of soap and tea, coated with an everlasting veil of cigarette smoke.
“This okay with you, Sledgehammer?” he asks, exhaling a bundle of hot air that makes his words ghost over Sledge’s mouth.
Sledge shivers at the newly blossomed nickname, feels the dust of hair on his arms and thighs rise with a prickling that covers his skin. He nods quickly, too eager, but just in time with the throbbing staccato of his heart. Snafu’s lashes tangle with his. They flutter like gossamer wings around his owlish eyes before his tea-warm tongue slips out to tease his lip, to glide across the burning flesh in a slow rush only Snafu could provide.
Sledge tucks his hands in between his thighs, unsure what to do with them, and meets Snafu’s, hot and dry, so chapped the skin stretching over his knuckles almost ruptures. Snafu tangles their fingers lightly, and finally, finally fits their mouths together in a kiss. His other hand sweeps against Sledge’s ribs, pressing them like keys on a piano.
It all aches in a way that feels like blood vessels bursting with pleasure.
Curled up under his own comforter, Sledge still notices his lips tingle, swollen and slick with spit like a phantom limb: prickling, burning, not really there but consuming him all the same.
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