Work Text:
Gene is forgetting things. Time isn’t moving right. It scatters, loops backwards and sideways, trips him up when he could have sworn the path was clear. It pulls at his edges; it wavers and breaks. He’s never quite sure when he’s dreaming.
***
The window is sealed shut. He stares at it with a frown; he likes open windows. Likes fresh air, likes remembering how it feels when the wind changes directions. He’s not sure why he would have sealed it.
It was just in case, Babe tells him, eyes weary with an old kind of hurt. Just in case.
In case of what? Gene wants to ask, and doesn’t.
The air stays still.
***
Scarf. Gloves. Coat. Hat. Two pairs of socks and thick boots, the kind made for snow. He doesn’t know how he knows what snow boots look like, but he knows that that’s what he sees on his feet, laced up with a messy kind of intention, like whoever did it was trying not to be sloppy but wasn’t sure how.
Babe hands him a paper cup of coffee, and it’s only then that Gene realizes he’s standing on the sidewalk outside of a cafe. He mutters his thanks, takes a sip. It’s exactly how he likes it.
Babe looks at Gene with intrigue; with, maybe, a little bit of optimism.
“You with me today?” Babe asks, the words worn on his tongue like he’s said them a million times. Gene’s certain he’s never heard them before, but Babe looks hopeful, looks like he could be happy, and he doesn’t want to break him.
“Yeah,” he says, and nothing more.
Babe beams.
***
They walk. They talk. Babe tells him the latest about Bill and Fran, about the guys he works with, about how he wishes they’d stop reporting so much doom and gloom in the papers these days. It feels surprisingly normal.
Gene listens, nods, inserts a laugh when it’s appropriate, even means it once or twice. This feels normal, too. Feels like what he’s supposed to do, what Babe expects. The coffee is warm. Warm is good.
***
Warm wasn’t always good. It used to be a nuisance, used to mean mosquitoes buzzing around and sweat pouring down his back, kids fainting with sunstroke and never enough sleep at night. He used to jump into the bayou to cool off, when he was young, before he learned that that muddy water was hiding snakes, alligators, things that bite and tear. His father once grabbed him by the armpits and yanked him up onto the wharf, and only then did he notice the ridge of scales drifting towards him, the reptilian snout, the yellow eyes, shining, shining.
It was coming right up to you, his father shouted. Right on top of you, teeth and all, and you ain’t even notice.
His father had been right.
***
But warm is good, now, and so Gene drinks his coffee and listens to Babe and walks through a tangle of streets that all look the same. He wonders if he’s seen them before. He wonders where this is.
***
Time isn’t moving right. It scatters, loops backwards and sideways. It pulls at his edges; it ripples and bends. He’s never quite sure when he’s awake.
***
Blood under his hands. Blood and ice and, strangely, water. Brown water, soft water, water that laps up against the cypress knees and cattails with a sound like laughter. It scares him most of all.
“Gene,” someone says, and no one’s called him that since he was a baby, no one’s called him that in years. He’s something else, now, someone else. “Gene, c’mon, sit up, it’s alright.”
Blood. Ice. Silty brown water. The difference doesn’t matter. They all mean death.
***
Gene hums a tune he knew, back when he was young, back when he was whole.
Vole, vole, vole papillon, au-dessus de ma maison. Tournez, tournez, les jolis moulins. Frappez, frappez, mes petites mains.
Mes petites mains.
Mes petites mains.
Rice dishes. Clapboard houses. His Mama’s work-worn hands.
Gene doesn’t know why, but it hurts.
***
“You with me today?”
Gene doesn’t know what Babe means. He’s certain he’s never been asked that before. His body is a cavern, a sky without clouds, an empty space for wind to gust through and come right back out again.
“Alright, Gene,” he says, in a voice that doesn’t sound alright.
***
The window is sealed shut, but Gene can still see out of it.
The sky is gray, clouds rippling like a sheet hung out to dry. A bird darts past once in a while. Rooftops slice the air.
He’d like to be a bird. An egret, he thinks, but they don’t have egrets here. Things would make a whole lot more sense if they did.
***
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
It’s a voice Gene recognizes, young and Yankee and pulled tight with barely-contained tears. It’s a voice in the hall; Gene is in a bed. It’s a voice that he wants to comfort, a voice he knows, a voice he loves.
“No, Bill, you haven’t seen it. It ain’t like with the other guys. Not even like Buck. He’s not—he’s just not there anymore.”
Gene remembers Buck. Remembers Bill, too. It was cold, where he knew them, and it’s cold here.
“Yeah, if you want. Maybe it’ll do him some good, to see somebody familiar. I don’t know.”
Babe sounds cold. Babe sounds like he’s been crying.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Babe repeats. “Jesus. I don’t know what the fuck to do.”
***
Gene is forgetting things. Time isn’t moving right.
***
“I wanna go home,” he murmurs.
Babe looks up. They’re on a bench in a park made of sticks and slush. He’s smoking a cigarette like he can’t do anything else.
“What, you cold?” he asks, so patient, so tired.
Gene swallows. “I wanna go home.”
Babe takes him to a gray cement building, leads him up stairs, unlocks a door. This place smells like Babe, smells like Gene, or maybe the other way around. There’s a telephone in a narrow hallway. There’s a slice of bed visible through an open door. Babe’s things are scattered around, and so are Gene’s. The space is cluttered, but clean.
“Alright, come on,” Babe says. He strips his coat off, then goes to start on Gene’s. Gene doesn’t move. “Genie?” he asks.
Gene looks up at Babe through a film of tears he hadn’t realized were rising. “I wanna go home,” he whispers.
Babe’s face crumples. “Oh, Genie,” he breathes. Then Gene’s being pulled into a hug, so firm it’s hard to breathe. His arms hang limply at his sides; his face is buried into Babe’s shoulder with a hand in his hair, and the darkness looks like bullets, looks like floodwater, looks like a road that leads to nowhere and Gene’s future evaporating in his hands.
***
It’s winter. His little sister’s birthday is in winter. January twenty-something, and she’ll make a big fuss if there’s nothing planned. He ought to give her a call, pick out a gift to mail, maybe make the trip down. But he knows, somehow, that he can’t make the trip. The idea of it feels as impossible, as deadly, as trying to drive up to the moon.
***
His brother got married. At the start of ‘42, not long before Gene joined up. That was the last time he remembers all his family together. His parents, his older sister, the little kids running around underfoot while someone played an accordion and a few other someones strummed guitars; Gene himself had a pair of spoons tucked in his pocket for when he joined in. He'd always loved zydeco.
Marie had just had a baby, and he had been tucked under her arm, suckling at a stick of sugarcane she had given him to keep him quiet. He was loud, that baby boy, that tee-bébé. Marie said his soul was born singing. He was full to the brim with life.
It had been hot and muggy, even for February. Gene remembered sweating through his one nice shirt, his church shirt. He was old enough, by then, to know not to cool off in the bayou waters. He knew they housed danger, housed death; he just didn’t know how much.
***
Bill is here. There’s a woman with him that Gene doesn’t recognize. They sit on Gene and Babe’s ratty little couch; Gene and Babe are perched on kitchen chairs. Guarnere’s left pant leg is sewed up around the knee.
Bill is saying something—Wild Bill? Sergeant Guarnere? What is Gene supposed to call him, here?---and Babe is listening like there’s nothing more important in the whole entire world. The woman is looking at Gene, subtle but unmistakable. He wonders if she looks at him and sees all his gaps and holes, or if she just sees another war-torn man.
“Ain’t that right, Fran?” Bill says, and the woman blinks.
“Yes,” she says, pretty red lips turning up into a pretty red smile. She looks like she’s never been broken. Bill looks like a lucky man.
Gene turns his eyes on Babe while Fran talks. Babe has scruffy hair and tired eyes and a tense set to his shoulders that never goes away, even when he’s sleeping. Babe does not look lucky.
Bill leaves. He and Babe have a hushed conversation in the doorway, throwing glances at him that they think he doesn’t see. When Bill pulls him in it’s for a fierce hug, strong and tight, and Babe returns it until they look like one body. Gene doesn’t know if he’s hugged Babe like that since—
Bill and Fran leave. Babe shuts the door, leads Gene to bed. It’s late; they flick out the lights.
***
Time isn’t moving right. Why isn’t time moving right?
***
“Something happened,” Gene says.
He’s in bed with Babe; it’s dark, but neither of them are asleep. Gene can make out Babe’s dark circles from just the streetlight shining in through the blinds.
“What?” Babe asks, lifting his head an inch or two.
Gene doesn’t know how to articulate that there is a weight like the sky on his shoulders, only he doesn’t know what it is; that he knows there’s something wrong, knows he’s missing something, knows he saw something only he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know why he’s here.
“Something happened,” is all he can say.
Babe reaches up and cups Gene’s jaw. “Yeah, Genie,” he whispers. “Something happened.”
***
Something happened.
The war ended. Gene boarded a ship back stateside. Gene took buses and trains to Louisiana, to his family, to his home. Now he’s here, alone in the cold with Babe.
Something happened.
***
His mother used to cook corn bread and crawfish. His father used to row the pirogue, play guitar, smoke a big old cigar. His siblings used to play, running around with him and their other little friends from around the bayou. They used to sing. And it would rain in the summer, thunderstorms that crashed and shook the sky, and then they’d pass and everyone would keep on living.
There had been a war. It had been hard. Men died. Gene died, in a way, but found someone to bring him back to life with soft red hair and calloused white hands. And he knew that they were waiting for him, his family, his neighbors, his whole entire life. The knowledge kept him warm in Bastogne, kept him upright in Landsberg. It was half of what kept him going, even as his mind started to fracture and fail.
He has the other half, always right by his side, frazzled and sad as he is. But he still feels empty.
***
Gene stands at that window. It’s still sealed shut. But through it he can see spring struggling to seep through winter. The snow melts into puddles and creeks. The trees are just barely green with new buds. Ice has become water.
Water. Gene remembers the water.
Water beating the hull of the boat back across the Atlantic. Water raining down against the window of the train. Mountains becoming hills becoming marsh, water swallowing up earth, his fingers itching with how close he was to home after so goddamn long.
Something happened. Something happened.
***
Time isn’t moving right anymore.
***
Moments ripple and warp.
***
Gene is forgetting things.
There’s water past the window. Water and leaves.
He can’t remember. There’s something he can’t remember.
***
Why can’t he fucking—
***
Stepping off the train. A bus from New Orleans to Morgan City. Standing outside the station, a bag in each hand, hoping to bum a ride to Bayou Chene from someone with charity in their heart for a weary soldier. Already he was thinking in French again—this place’s version of it, at least—and it was in French that he sent up prayers as he waited, as someone pulled over and rolled down the window of his beat up old truck.
Saint Anthony, qui a reçu de Dieu le pouvoir spécial de restaurer les choses perdues, accorde-moi de retrouver ce qui a été perdu.
“Where you headed, tee-boy?” the man asked.
“Bayou Chene,” Gene answered, and it felt so strange to say those words again, to speak them to someone who had heard them before.
The man’s brow furrowed. His whole face was sun-leathered and brown. “Bayou Chene?” he asked. “Pute, son, you ain’t heard?”
Something happened.
“Heard what, sir?”
Something happened.
“Storm came through, sometime in summer. Big flood, lotta water. That whole part of the Delta ain’t nothing but sticks.”
Gene said nothing. He didn’t understand. Bayou Chene had survived dozens of storms with nothing more than a fallen tree or ten. There must have been a mistake.
The man’s face softened. “You had people there?”
“My family,” Gene said, hardly a whisper. “Everyone. Where—where’d everybody end up? I don’t—what happened ?”
“Hop in,” the man said, and it was the kind of invitation you’d give an injured man as you loaded him onto the Jeep. “Lemme take you.”
The ride was long and silent. Gene’s mind was a crooked wall full of papered-over holes, after the war, after so much death, so much loss, so many unanswered prayers. He felt it now more than ever, felt cold air and whole moments passing right through those holes without him even registering them. He’d been close to crumbling for months, had almost done it when he’d left Babe on that port in Austria with promises to write, but home had kept him together, the knowledge that his mother and his sister and his house and his dog could prop him upright until he was ready to stand on his own again. Now he felt tiny, fragile, a sapling facing down murderous winds. He felt every inch of himself that had weathered away since he’d last been here.
Cicadas chirped. Trees bloomed green and verdant. Spanish moss drooped and swung as the cypress knees rose up to meet them. It was all so familiar. It was all so foreign.
Storm came through. Whole lotta water. Time stretched and wrapped itself tight around the truck.
The man pulled up to the big live oak where the edge of town should have started. He cut the engine, looked at Gene all sad and sober. Gene just stared and stared. There had been houses here; he should be able to make out Marie’s, his friend Jackson’s, the stilts where his brother was planning on building a place for him and his wife, where it should have already been finished and John would be there, fishing rod in his hand and a smile on his lips, be there with Evangeline and their sha-bébé and Marie and hers and Mama and Daddy and the little two and everybody else, everything else, everything, everything.
But the man had been right. Gene stared at the water, the calm, glassy water, and there was nothing.
The man titled his head to the splinters of wreckage: a log stilt, a slant of roof, a dozen downed trees woven through with what used to be walls, sheets, chairs. Lives. “This is it,” he said.
Gene didn’t speak. He couldn’t. This was supposed to make him whole again. This was supposed to patch him up. This was nothing.
“Everybody that made it out went up to Morgan City. If your folks weren’t there, then they’re not nowhere.”
Gene didn’t breathe.
Time crumbled.
The man put the car in reverse and started back towards the city.
***
“Gene. Hey, Gene, can you hear me? Fuck. Alright, you’re alright. You’re alright, I promise, you’re—fuck. Okay, Genie, you gotta breathe, you gotta—No, you gotta talk to me in English, uh, parler anglais—Gene, baby, please. Get back from there, alright, just don’t—It’s just me. Just me, okay? There ain’t no Germans, ain’t no—no, there’s no water. There’s no water. I know, Gene, I know. I’m sorry. I know.”
Arms around him. Pain in his hand, cold all around. Red smeared somewhere; the floor, maybe, Babe’s face, maybe.
Gene looks up. He remembers.
“Babe,” he breathes, and it’s the only word he knows against a crushing flood of grief. Gene knows all about floods. “Babe.”
***
The man dropped him off, gave him the couple of crumpled bucks from his pocket. Gene blinked around the station. Everybody milling about like nothing had even happened, like time would ever straighten itself out again.
His hand picked up the phone, though he didn’t know when he’d found one. He called city hall, asked for names, asked for obituaries, listened to the familiar names until he couldn’t stomach it anymore. And then he called Babe.
"Hello?"
Babe's voice was thin and mechanical through the speaker. Gene was nothing.
"Hello?" Babe sounded annoyed in that way he always used to after a few days without cigarettes. "Anybody there?"
"Babe," Gene said, or maybe just thought of saying.
Babe paused.
"Gene?" he asked, tinny, unsure. "Is that you?"
"Babe. I think..." Gene couldn't get above a whisper; something hard and heavy sat in his throat, choked him. "I think my family, or my--my town, or, uh..."
Or what? What was he losing? Was there a word for it? Or was it something not unlike God--incorporeal, all-encompassing, and impossible to replace?
"Gene, are you alright?"
Gene was nothing.
Things blurred together after that. He stuttered and sobbed something incomprehensible into the receiver. He ran out of money; the call dropped; Babe called him back and Gene went straight on sobbing. He was pathetic, he was hysterical, but he'd spent an entire goddamned war being strong, and there was no more fight left in him. He was a city square hit by German shells, he was a house swept away by the kind of waters they wrote about in the Bible; he was broken.
Somehow, Babe was there three days later with an impossible kind of sadness on his face. Gene didn’t feel it. Already something had changed. Gene didn’t feel anything.
Babe loaded him onto the train and didn’t kiss him. Babe watched him as he stared at nothing, head dipping and bobbing with the rumbling of the train. Babe took him home.
But Gene joined up in 1942, and he won’t ever be home again.
***
“I’m sorry,” Gene murmurs.
Babe looks up for a second, just a quick shimmer of brown eyes, then goes back to work on Gene’s hand. Gene hardly even feels it when he pulls out one sliver of glass, then another. He only feels icy air, streaming in over their heads.
“Don’t gotta be sorry.”
They’re both on the floor. There’s blood, and glass on the floor, in his palm. He doesn’t know what he did, but he doesn’t think it matters.
“That was your window, though.”
Babe snorts, a sound with little humor. “Yeah, but my super’s a mean old hag. Maybe this’ll finally stop her heart.”
Babe moves to cleaning the blood off Gene’s hand with a wet rag, clearly not expecting a response. Something flickers behind Gene’s sternum; something softens his frown.
“She ain’t gonna keel over just yet” he murmurs. “You were late on rent, she yelled at you like she was twenty.”
Babe looks up again, but this time to stay. His eyes search Gene’s face. “You remember that?” he asks, the words carrying with them a fragile, awful hope.
Gene just hums. “Think she’ll be mad you broke the stove fan, too?”
Now Babe’s laugh is real. Exhausted, heavy, but real. He picks up a piece of blue fabric— Gene remembers it, how does he remember it? ---and starts winding it around Gene’s palm. It feels like a cool breeze, like a morphine lollipop. Gene is empty, but not in a bad way.
“Hell yes,” Babe says, and Gene can hear the smile in his voice. “But she won’t find out if nothing burns. I’m not worried. I got the finest cook in Philly right here.”
“You asking me to make you dinner, Heffron?”
Babe ties the bandage off, sits back on the cold tile, and grins. “You make whatever you want, Gene,” he says. “Just use my real name, yeah?”
Babe’s knee is right up against his, and it’s warm. Warm is good.
***
Gene steps outside the next day, feels the cold air, feels smoke move in and out of his lungs. There’s still glass glittering on the cement from the window that Babe taped cardboard over. Glass and ice and runoff engine oil. It’s nothing like home, but it’s home now. It has to be.
“Hey,” Babe says gently. The sun is still low and weak, filtered gray through the clouds, and Babe looks as fragile and beautiful as a butterfly in autumn.
“Hey,” Gene says. He feels empty, and impossibly light. He feels like he could float away. He remembers.
Babe looks him up and down, looks at the cigarette in his blue-bandaged hand. “You with me today?”
For once, Gene actually looks back. Babe seems caught by the strength of his eyes, or just the fact that he’s using them. There is so much pain. There is so much empty space. But there is also Babe, and a cigarette, and early morning light.
“Yeah,” Gene says, even though he’d rather not be, even though it was easier to be nothing at all. “I’m with you.”
***
Babe takes him to breakfast. It’s nowhere as good as what he used to eat, but it fills his stomach, and it’s from Babe.
Babe talks. Asks Gene questions, and sometimes Gene nods. Gene looks around, observes the other patrons. An old woman with a rip in her dress. A gaggle of teenage girls in kitten heels and bright smiles. A man and his wife and their dog, all pretending the others didn’t exist.
Babe is tired. Babe is pretty. Babe is here.
***
“Gene? What are you doing?”
Gene turns. Babe is looking at him with fear, and Gene realizes it’s because of the knife in his hand. He raises the half-onion he has in the other. “Cooking,” he says simply.
Babe drifts up and peers over his shoulder. Diced vegetables, a chicken breast, steaming rice. “Oh,” he says. He sounds surprised. He sounds like he doesn’t remember how to feel when things are easy. “Okay.”
But by the time Gene is finished, Babe is beaming at him like he’s won the lottery, and he talks and talks and talks all throughout dinner, and sometimes Gene talks, too, and Babe smiles some more.
***
That night Babe kisses him into the mattress, pulling back every few seconds to make sure that Gene is still enjoying it, that Gene is still with him, still here. Gene holds him tighter and wrestles him out of his shirt until Babe’s worries disappear beneath a white-hot need.
“God, I missed you,” Babe breathes against Gene’s lips as they move together, and when Babe gets a hand on him, Gene finally feels something good.
***
Something happened. Something happened in Europe, in Bayou Chene, in Gene’s broken, battered soul.
A lot of the time he can’t stand it. He’s desperate to go home, desperate to forget again, so crushed by grief that he can’t hardly move. But there are other times, too. Times when a bird flies past and Gene remembers beauty, or when someone plays music nearby and Gene remembers joy. Doesn’t feel it, not himself, not yet, but he remembers it, and that’s enough. Babe is with him all of the time, and that’s enough, too.
“Hey,” Babe says as they walk to get lunch—with Bill and Fran, Gene thinks, and he can’t remember right now but he knows he will soon. “You with me?”
Gene joins his lockstep, walks so their shoulders bump and their hands brush, warm, good. “Yeah, Babe,” he says, and he’s so tired, but he means it. “I’m with you.”