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Donny is still pacing but winding down.
It's gone quiet, cigarettes are being lit around the clearing. Post-coital, Smitty thinks, then bites the inside of his mouth until he winces. He stops before he draws blood. That would be counter-productive. His eyes water (a physical reaction to certain kinds of pain, he hasn't cried since bootcamp), but he holds his smile through it.
“Hey, Utivich, we anywhere near some water out here?” Donny says. He's still speaking slightly too loud.
Smitty knows the feeling of your pulse pounding so loud or your ears ringing so you feel like you have to yell over it. He doesn't look up.
"We're not going to get a wash for, um," he studies the map in his memory for a moment, retracting thin veins of ink, "at least two days.”
There's a round of rueful chuckles from most of them, and one low German curse from Stiglitz-- the man likes to be clean.
"Aw, shit, Donny," Omar says and laughs his annoying laugh.
Donny laughs, too.
Smitty shifts on the rock he's perched on, and studies the leaf litter. There's no point in looking at Donny, he'd seen the gore-soaked painting that used to be their Sergeant in the making.
Smitty consults the map in his mind again, but that's not even a conservative estimate, he'd only factored in maybe one fight between here and there. Could be two and half days.
"At least two days," Smitty says. He shrugs. He tries to sound sorry, and he manages it when he stops thinking about blood drying on the Sargent's skin and thinks about all the places his skin is chafing and the dead man smell of his boots.
"That so?"
Smitty glances up and jerks back because Donny's right there. Right there, larger than life and about as bloody. Smitty kicks himself for being so intent on ignoring what was right in front of him he let it get this close without realising.
Donny's only a few inches taller than him, really, but he looks like a giant (a real golem) as Smitty looks up. His chest hair is matted with gore, his vest stained, fingers literally dripping dark red. He wriggles them a little in front of Smitty's face and a long slick strand flies off his fingertips, viscose and shining.
Donny wiped his hands earlier, Smitty saw it then and can see it now, drying across the thighs of his trousers. Smitty realises some of the laughter earlier must have been for Donny, running his fingers through Headless Heinrich to get them nice and wet.
Donny looks down at him and says, "Yeah, well, we're gonna share the load then, Utivich."
And he's still blinking stupidly up at Donny as his heavy hands land on his cheeks, Donny's fingers drag over his skin and press through his hair wetly, thickly, only to twist a red drooling curl of his hair across his forehead with a delicate flick of his practised, hairy wrist.
Smitty opens his mouth to say something, because that's what would be normal here, he's got to push Donny's hands away and laugh, and say, ‘fuck, Sergeant, aw man’. But he opens his mouth and it just stays open, silent and damning.
Donny frowns at him for a split second, then goes back to smiling and pats his cheek.
"Why don'tcha see if we can't hit that river a little sooner?"
Smitty nods gratefully, and pulls out the waterproof map in the unlikely case he's misremembered something. Donny's knee knocks his as he walks away. He feels blood roll down his forehead like cold sweat, and keeps his fingers firmly on the map.
There's as much boredom as there is blood.
And there's a considerable amount of blood.
That's part of the reason Smitty's in trouble here. No one should be alone with his thoughts for so many hours, this late at night.
So he sits attempting to remember whole verses of poetry, or prayer, but for all he's here to avenge his people his family were just never that religious, and the line of poetry he's stuck on is entirely counter-productive to keeping his mind where it should be: for blood and wine are red, and he can't recall what comes after that at all. And what is that? It's Wilde, yet another thing he shouldn't know or care about.
He doesn't scratch at the blood drying on his cheek, though. The stink of it is all over him, filling his nose. Dry flakes of it crack on off his skin when he smiles a little, and he forces his mouth into an expressionless line.
Blood and boredom.
He glances around the forest. All's clear outside his head. It's a full moon and he can see as far as he's ever going to in a place where the trees are less than five feet apart.
He curses under his breath, nearly as silent as if he'd only thought it. He's as used to the necessity of cursing in the place as he is to the necessity of silence (but then, he'd been used to that a long time).
It's hero worship, because it can't be anything else.
Donny is larger than life. He's no more within Smitty's reach than a film star, ten foot high technicolour.
He can't tell if he develops the fixation on his Sergeant because of the blood, or if...
That's a lie, he thinks firmly, and presses his palms hard against the rough bark on the tree he's leaning on. There's no reason to lie, now.
He's so far from home he might as well be in another dimension, another time, on the goddamn moon.
It's hard to let go of old habits though, even when what there is to fear from letting go isn't near as bad as what he's been living every day for months now. His worst fear and favourite obsession at home is unavoidable here.
If he doesn't think about it, he'll have to think about everything else.
When he was fourteen and even skinnier than he is now, he'd been knocked down by Bobby Sanders. Not just once, not that it was an isolated event, this was just the first time that drew blood.
He'd spent as much time crying as he had just sitting in his room and pressing the cut across his lip to open it again and again and again against his fingers. To taste it, but mostly, to hold his fingertips up shining red and press them together until they stuck and pulled apart in stringy red lines. To paint across his bare knees until it dried.
He can still see a russet coloured face drawn on his kneecap, smiling up at him. It changed expressions a little when he moved his leg, cracking and flaking.
The other thing about thinking about this here and now is everyone here is just as fucked up as he is. Sick, skinny little queer Jew boy.
Shit, Donny has to be worse.
Donny is the craziest of them all.
"Utivich! What're you doing all the way out there? You wanna get left behind when we break camp or what?"
Smitty shakes his head and pushed his palms against the bark of the tree again, then takes a breath and attempts to answer him out loud. Attempts not to think speak of the devil just because he's appeared.
"No, sir."
Donny strides into the little clearing, swinging his bat gently by his side like the extension of his arm it's grown to be.
"Ah, can it with the ‘sir’. We know each other too goddamn well for that shit,” Donny says with a sharp edged grin. He leans against the tree opposite Smitty, one palm resting on the end of the bat, one foot planted against the tree trunk.
Smitty knows he means "we" as a generalisation, "we" the Basterds, but he still hears it as we, “you and me”. Just for a second, until his rational brain kicks in.
They don't know each other.
Smitty can smell blood on the breeze: not fresh blood, not old blood, somewhere between spill and inertia. Decay.
It could be Donny, could be the bat (leave something like that in the wet and it'll soak it up. Smitty's never been close enough to smell but he wants to be), it could be the ten Nazi corpses sprawling in a limp pile, in the clearing beyond this one.
"You smell that?" Smitty says before he realises it's going to come out of his mouth.
Donny quirks a thick eyebrow at him, but sniffs the air. He smiles slowly, a dirty grin Smitty thinks belongs to the battlefield, to victory. To shattered skulls and pulpy, ruined scalps.
"Yeah," he says. "Smells good, right?"
Smitty nods and smiles back at him, hasn't smiled a real smile like this since three days ago when Donny really got to let loose. They're due for another show soon.
"Hey, you got a smoke?" Donny asks.
Must be the reason he trekked out here to check on Smitty himself. Everyone's been running out of smokes. The thin tasteless ones the Krauts carry aren't favoured by anyone, but they'll smoke them if they're all that's to be had.
Except Donny. He's never actually seen Donny smoke anything that's touched a Nazi hand.
He shakes his head at the same time as he fumbles for the packet he'd picked out of a corpse's pocket. He offers it with a shrug.
"I know you don't," he starts, but Donny talks over him.
"Fuck Utivich, these're redder than the underside of a Nazi scalp."
They are kind of bloodstained, half the packet had been soaked when he'd dug it from under a wet uniform breast. He'd thrown the dampest ones away before he'd pocketed them, but they were still fairly sticky. They'll dry out.
He doesn't mind.
He'd just forgotten for a moment back there that maybe he should.
Donny looks at him for a long second before he barks out a loud laugh, loud enough Smitty jumps and coughs out an answering laugh to try and cover it.
"You really gonna smoke 'em?"
"Yeah," he says, "I mean. Sure." He pulls one out of the pack and scratches at the half-dry blood on the paper, then pops it in his mouth, even though he doesn't really feel like one. Donny's looking at him still smiling, still amused, but there's something else there — something he can't quite make out. Donny's really looking at him.
"You're a crazy little sonofabitch, Utivich."
Donny stands up straight and Smitty raises one hand in an awkward wave goodbye, but Donny's stepping forward, not turning away. He's got a little book of matches out and Smitty remembers he's got a cigarette in his mouth. Of course.
He lights Smitty's cigarette and Smitty sees the dried blood under his finger nails close up. He glances up and Donny's looking back at him, gaze dark as intense as usual, but Smitty's not used to seeing it from this angle. This close.
He closes his eyes against it, it's too much, blinding as muzzle flashes up close in the dark. He doesn’t know what to do with it.
He inhales and tastes. It's... just smoke, but while he's got his eyes shut, he can pretend it's more.
"You ain't never had a blood brother, Utivich?" Omar cocks a cocky eyebrow at him. If Smitty has to hear his drunken snigger one more time tonight he's going to consider risking Aldo's wrath to sock him one.
"We're all fucking blood brothers,” Wicki says quietly and flicks a sliver of grime out from under his fingernails with a rusty nail he's pried out of the old kitchen table. His chipped brown cup holds just a little of the rotgut Aldo had handed over to them after taking a sip and proclaiming it too weak for his tastes.
Smitty takes the last as a shot, feels like it's stripping the inside out of his windpipe, landing blood hot and flesh heavy in his stomach. Despite that, it was still easy to believe Aldo was used to stronger.
He feels his face flush hot, hotter with annoyance. Wicki's wrong. Blood brothers should fucking mean something, and they do, but.
It's less important. It's more. It's.
"It's not the fucking SAME," Smitty says and only realises the volume at which that comment comes out when he feels his already hot face blaze hotter.
Omar laughs at him again, Wicki smirks, and Stiglitz glances up just to roll his eyes, which is a hugely mocking expression on his normally stony face. Alcohol has worked little magic on any of them. There's no rough-housing now, not how it had been fresh out of the barracks and gotten their first taste of liquor in weeks. Not now.
Half of them have already fallen asleep against the walls. Kagan's face-down on the table, drank himself into oblivion after they'd toasted Hirschberg. They're all too tired to really let it affect them, and some things it can't make any of them forget.
Smitty's embarrassed to find he's maybe the least stable person in the room as he shakily gains his feet.
"I'm gonna go piss," Smitty mumbles, just to be out their line of sight. He can't even tell if he needs to go, everything below his eyes is tingling and useless. He just want to be outside, just so no one's looking at him anymore. He feels suddenly like he's back in high school and Sanders and his blue-eyed boys are watching him get undressed to gym class. He feels naked.
Aldo nods at him calmly from his watchful position near the door, away from the rest of the men, and Smitty nods back automatically. He'd thought Aldo was asleep. Fuck it.
He's pissing a steady stream against the barn.
"Hey, Utivich. You wanna be blood brothers?"
He nearly jumps out of his skin, and he pisses on his boot with the aborted motion to his gun, letting his dick swing for a second.
Donny laughs and it's on the tip of his tongue to say fuck you Sergeant but he's not-- not quite that far gone.
So Donny's followed him outside. Donny's their Staff Sergeant: it's his job to look after the men. That's what he does, in his way. But he's not the kind of Sergeant that'll make it obvious he's looking after you. He waits for them to come to him.
Last time there was a petty squabble between Omar and Kagan (over toilet paper. They fought most over the small things, nothing that mattered too much mattered at all) Donny's intervention was to physically separate them from the writhing, schoolboy style wrestling when they rolled into the camp fire coals. Kagan had fallen on his ass, spat a mouthful of blood, and been smart enough to keep his mouth shut.
Omar got up to his knees and talked back: "But Donny he fuckin'—" was as far as he got before Donny stood up straight, his to-attention stance and gestured with his bat towards Omar's face.
"But sir, he fuckin', is what I think you mean. And Private? You keep goin' we're gonna see how much you give a shit about a scrap of t.p. when you're suckin' my dick with no teeth. You get me?"
"Yes, sir."
That was the end of it.
Donny wasn't the coddling type.
Smitty finished pissing, the back of his neck itching, and his eyes screwed shut in an attempt to get the world to stand still.
He breathes deep and turns around and he's glad he'd held his tongue. Donny cuts a menacing figure almost any time of the day, but at twilight with a knife the size of Aldo's pride and joy in his hand he looks like the spectre of death.
"Borrowed it from the kitchen. Old Mrs. Werner won't need it no more, huh?" Donny says, obviously catching whatever look it is Smitty can't keep off his face.
Now Smitty looks closer, it's not a knife you'd use to kill and skin someting like Aldo's, it's the kind he's seen his mother chop onions with.
"So, you wanna to be blood brothers?"
"Why?" Smitty asks simply. He doesn't really have the capacity to make the question more specific but he wants to know what the hell Donny's doing.
"Because who the fuck knows when it's gonna be our turn to eat dirt,” Donny says flatly, before smiling again, “What's a little pain if you get to cross it off the to-do list?"
"But why—” Smitty tries to insist, because it seems important that he knows. Donny's looking at him again, all intense and too close up.
"You ain't gonna like it if I tell you."
"Well I want to know. No secrets between brothers, is there?"
"Heh, you really wanna know, huh? You remind me of someone back home,” Donny says, and plants a hand on the barn wall just above Smitty's shoulder, leaning in close. Smitty sways a little, but doesn't take a step back, like maybe he should. The barn wall is behind him anyway.
"What's so bad about that?" Smitty says, his stomach swooping, anticipation or alcohol. Donny's breath is hot and smells like the rotgut they've all been drinking.
"You remind me of a girl I went steady with, okay? Aw, see I told you you weren't gonna like it."
Smitty has no idea what expression is on his face, but Donny seems to be reading it wrong because he doesn't. He doesn't actually care, he realises. He's a skinny little queer kid and apparently everyone can tell, he can't quite leave that behind. But he doesn't care, because he can have this.
He's so drunk his knees feel like they've been hollowed out and filled with buzzing insects. Beehives. He pissed on his fucking boots, and his Sergeant wants to... he wants a lot of things, probably. Things he's probably never wanted before and won't ever want again. Things Smitty is willing to give.
Smitty doesn't care beyond the knife hanging in a perfect fighting grip from his thick fingers. His fingernails still have blood under them. He can't see it in the dark, not clearly, but he knows.
“I don't care,” Smitty says and grins.
Donny's hand comes off the wall and stops short of Smitty's cheek. Smitty reaches down and grabs the wrist of his other hand, tugging it up by his wrist. Donny lets him.
“Blood brothers?” Smitty says.
The hand that's hovering around his cheek drops and Donny glances away only for the second it takes to line up the knife's tip with the palm of his own hand. He looks at Smitty as he draws a thin line across his skin, the barest flinch in the flare of his nostrils. Smitty holds his gaze for a beat but can't keeps his eyes off the cut, the red red red that wells up, bead by bead, until it meets and merges a line. It gradually gives into gravity and rolls over the heal of Donny's hand.
“Gimme your hand,” Donny says, quiet and rough.
Smitty offers his hand blindly, then finally looks away from Donny's when he feels the knife tip press into his skin. It stings, then nothing — there's nothing, until the sting starts up again in earnest, then the blood, then the burn, then it throbs like — his knees almost give out.
He plants his free hand against Donny's chest, and when he looks away from his bleeding hand, Donny's still watching him. He presses their palms together without a word or a warning, and Smitty hisses as their broken skin meets and tugs faintly at the edges. Donny's grip is hard, and it cancels out the pain of the cut for a long second.
“You gotta shake on it,” he says. He sounds like he's smiling, Smitty doesn't look.
The rivulet of red than runs along the seam on their sealed palms drips from the bone of his wrist.
“She had your eyes, big fuckin' blue eyes with dark eyelashes. Nice hair too, a bit lighter than yours but — yeah. You got her eyes.”
Smitty looks up at him and nearly asks what? But then he remembers, and Donny lets his hand go. It throbs again, the hurt comes rushing back with the blood.
Donny's going to — and his lips are big and rough against Smitty's, but all he can really feel is the slick wetness where Donny's cupping his cheek with his bleeding palm. He feels Donny's flesh catch and part against his cheek, the faint ridge of the cut, the hot trickle of blood and how it's dripping now, one long and slick and ticklish line down to his chin. Down his neck, cold now.
Into his mouth.
Smitty’s rubbing his cheek against Donny's hand the way Donny's rubbing his lips against Smitty's.
And he groans, a blood wet little sound as their lips slide, an obscene and accidental wet smacking noise escapes between them. Donny answers his noise by pushing harder, his lips, now tongue, his hand, his hips.
Smitty's back hits the piss-stained barn wall. He brings his injured hand up and mirrors Donny's hand on his own face, the wound catching on the rough stubble on Donny's jaw. He breaks the kiss and chases the taste of copper out of his own mouth, over his own fingers, and down the side of Donny's neck.
And if he couldn't taste blood blood blood blood blood then maybe he wouldn't be doing this.
But if he didn't have some far away girl's eyes, maybe Donny wouldn't be either.
It's okay for the same reasons Donny came out here in the first place: no future is certain, so there's no reason not to give the ridiculous or take the impossible.
It's not so bad, when Smitty thinks about it. There are worse things.
Donny presses his tongue into Smitty's mouth, and Smitty swallows blood.