Chapter Text
“You ready to see Marge?” Gale doesn’t answer but John reckons there aren’t adequate words anyway to express everything lurking in the melancholy twist of his not-quite-a-smile, so he doesn’t press. “Yeah, I’ll bet…Form 1A.”
“Checked.”
Pre-flight checks. John’s mouth remembers the shapes of them better than his mind does, so he lets them roll off his tongue without too much thought to tangle the words up and spit them out in the wrong order. They get through them without trouble, much to John’s relief, and then it’s a quick taxi, a lining up on a runway he suspects he’s going to keep seeing in his dreams long after he’s settled down somewhere just barely close enough to excuse a visit or two a year, no more no less, to see the man he’d flay himself open for.
They trundle forward, then roll, then gallop, and they’re in the air and headed for home. It’s a beautiful day in East Anglia but the fact that it’s England means they still have to cut through a thick layer of clouds before they reach altitude, the world abruptly nothing but gradations of white too numerous and indistinct to describe, shapes and infinite shades seeming to come and go so subtly it’s either a trick of the light or the eyes. Still, they’re climbing, so some few minutes later they break through into the sun overhead and Gale relaxes beside him, shoulders loose and a less complicated smile on his mouth than when he hadn’t answered the question about Marge. He’s always loved to fly, and John has always loved him, and that’s never going to change.
“Not long now ‘til we’re home,” Gale hums like there isn’t still the entirety of the Atlantic ahead of them to cross, not to mention the southern coasts of England and Ireland until they reach even that – hardly a short journey.
“American soil here we come,” John grins anyway. Humoring Gale is as easy as it ever was, no matter the heaviness of everything else unspoken sitting like lead weights wrapped around all his ribs. For good measure, he parrots “Not long now, Buck.”
May 28, 1945
Two pilots – war heroes and former prisoners of both the German Luftwaffe and their own minds – are making the journey from England to a new Air Force base on the coast of Maine, and from there? Home, to embrace the sweet promises of the post-War American dream. The future they truly long for, however, a very different future than the ones they’ve been promised, cannot be found on the other side of the long journey across the Atlantic. Instead, as they’ll come to learn very soon, it may only be found in the Twilight Zone.
