#basilonehc

[basilone]

Today’s rendition of “congratulations, Eva, you played yourself” is brought to you by more shippy goodness than I could ever hope to fit into a single fic. I started bulletpointing these and, well, they have kind of formed a story onto itself? So I’m just going to dump all of these right here because I am in my feels today and need to share the feels.

Random Ron/Chuck headcanon stuff because my brain will not shut up about these two:

They first connect in Toccoa during one of the few exercises designed for the whole battalion. Speirs, fed up to all hell with Fox Company’s latest inability to function that has left them cornered, hisses out a rapidfire series of instructions that Chuck coolly picks up and gets done without issue. “At least you didn’t panic, sir,” says Chuck, after, and a pointed look at a very irate captain Sobel tells Speirs all he needs to know about how Chuck feels toward people who panic in a crisis.

They’re not buddies after that, exactly, but Chuck has the rare ability to hold a conversation with just about anybody. On the rare occasions he finds himself elbow-to-elbow with Speirs at Toccoa, he will merely observe things out loud for Speirs to add to at will. Chuck accepts an offered cigarette in trade every time. It’s not until the tactics sessions with Welsh and Nixon that Chuck fully realizes Speirs’s pointed remarks in conversation about people and their surroundings were a way of teaching and preparing him for war.

Being in different companies, they rarely see one another during the first part of the war. Chuck hears all the stories about Speirs and dignifies himself enough to shrug at them. It’s not that he knows better – hell, if he knows the man as well as he thinks he does he’d say at least three-quarters of these stories are true – but more that there are immediate concerns that need attending and Speirs is not any one of those.

The Bois-Jacques forest is a disaster. Chuck thinks he’ll never be warm again – dreams of Californian sunshine make everything so much worse – and the lack of company leadership has him conferring with Tab more than ever before. There’s a moment he thinks he’s just about ready to jump out of his skin. Very nearly does. Very nearly shoots Speirs on the spot for popping up out of the fog without warning. The irate “oh, sure, let’s get yourself fucking killed, sir, and get my head chopped off by the brass for it” Chuck lets loose is met by a rather amused “you’d get shot, not decapitated” that Chuck rolls his eyes at before he can stop himself. He knows Speirs is not as bad as some claim when the man merely smirks and offers him a cigarette. Chuck accepts. Speirs’s nod feels like he passed a test.

Chuck finds himself elbow-to-elbow with his new captain a lot after Foy. At first, he thinks it’s because he is one of the few people Speirs remembers by name. (After all, it takes Speirs three increasingly annoyed tries before he cottons on to Talbert, Tab, and Floyd all being one and the same person. Chuck is just easier like that, because he’s never been Charles and only rarely Grant to this company.) Chuck doesn’t realize it’s more than just familiarity until he hears Speirs adjust a tactic on the spot after he mentioned offhand why the old one wouldn’t work. Speirs never asks for his opinions outright, but merely comes to stand beside him and offers Chuck the space and time to speak.

Speirs damn near crumbles at Landsberg. Chuck thinks he’s the only one who can tell that the man’s speech gets snappier, his hands shake, and his eyes turn wild in the aftermath. There, in the dark, in the night, amid the ruins he knows he’ll never find the words to speak about, he comes to sit beside his captain and bridges the gap between their hands. Isn’t surprised when Speirs squeezes back just the once and then lets go. The next day, Speirs’s voice is steady once more.

Victory is more dangerous than war. The Eagle’s Nest, so high above everything else, makes Chuck feel like he could just step over the edge into the sky and never fall down. “Call me Ron,” murmurs Speirs, drunken, languid, beautiful, out there on the balcony, as Chuck laughs and thinks he may just have conquered the whole world. “If I do, sir,” he says, and the formal address suddenly is the most difficult thing he’s ever said out loud, “I’ll never call you anything else again.”

Familiarity is the most dangerous game of all. Chuck’s relatively sure that Nixon, at the very least, has noticed how Speirs’s first instinct is to catalog entries and exits to a room and how his second instinct is always to look for Chuck. “You’re reading his mind and it freaks me the hell out,” is Tab’s most-heard complaint as they move further into peace. And Chuck tries, really tries, to keep the gnawing feeling of longing in his stomach that swoops so treacherously at Speirs’s proximity at bay. It doesn’t stop him from telling a joke and enjoying Speirs’s brief huff of laughter, or from arguing about a night patrol set for the anniversary of D-Day, or from rolling his eyes at the man from across a crowded room as Easy’s daily chaos takes hold. It doesn’t stop Speirs from sitting with him at night, with a cigarette shared between them, nor does it hold the man back from tentatively sharing stories about home that Chuck hums acknowledgment in all the right places to.

Speirs is all Chuck remembers from the weeks following his almost-but-not-quite-dying experience. Speirs’s hand, so warm and heavy in his own, that anchors him to this world. Speirs’s voice, reading out loud to him long before he has speech to answer with. Speirs’s presence, even at night, even at odd hours, right there with him as he wakes from nightmares to find half of them turned into reality. Chuck finally surrenders, he does, and calls him “Ron” when the sound of any s he tries to say turns sibilant and crumbles into pieces on his tongue. Ron’s eyes are strangely light from there on out.

Chuck makes it home before Ron does. Goes through the whole nine yards of recovery feeling like something is missing from him. The doctors think it’s to do with his speech, his restricted movement in his left arm, his slight limp that gets worse on his bad days. He knows it isn’t anything to do with that. Doesn’t find the words for what he’s missing until the phone rings one night and it’s Ron on the other side of that, his speech measured and yet strangely comforting, his voice warm in Chuck’s ear as one of Chuck’s stories has him laughing out loud, and he finds himself sitting on his bed at three in the morning cradling the receiver and daring to dream.

They meet at a halfway point somewhere in the middle of nowhere following mutual protests over having the other come see them – “it’s not fair,” Ron says, “you coming all this way on that salary” – “it’s not fair,” Chuck replies, “to let you travel all that way when you just got home from being halfway around the world” – and it should be awkward and strange and all the things they say homecoming is supposed to be like for a soldier.. except it really isn’t, and Chuck thinks he could get used to the sight of Ron casually rolling up his sleeves and the sound of Ron’s laughter streaming out more unreservedly than ever before and the warmth in Ron’s fleeting touches that turn more frequent with time.

In every universe, in every timeline, in every instance, Chuck is the one who kisses Ron first. It’s something he doesn’t spend a lot of time deliberating about. It’s something that just happens – when Ron’s smiling at something he said and his eyes crinkle with softness, or when they’re arguing and Ron’s being so fucking stupid he can’t cope, or when Ron’s being that brand of daring he likes so well, or or or.. – and it’s something he will never apologize for. He’s rarely the one to instigate the second kiss, because Ron’s way of controlling a situation is to face it head-on and confront it with the same alarming intensity he approaches anything else.

Chuck can settle down wherever. He’s learned to roll with the punches life throws his way, and Ron’s continued career in the military is sometimes the biggest punch of all. Chuck lives alone in those moments when Ron is needed somewhere, when he needs to share Ron with the rest of the world, and he’s quietly proud of Ron in a way he’ll never say out loud. He never even considers restricting it, knows some battles are just something Ron needs but will never ask for, and he picks up a few tricks from Ron’s wilder adventures that are as amusing as they are interesting. (Tab still complains that all Chuck’s pet names for his goddaughter – Tab’s eldest girl – are in Russian and thus vastly confusing. Ron just laughs and kisses him every time Chuck sleepily calls him solnishko.)

In another reality, or perhaps even in this one, Ron is actually an adept painter whose depictions of war and trauma are startlingly vivid and colorful. He’s rarely seen without splotches of paint marring his skin – up to his elbows in all things bright and dark – and Chuck has a good laugh every time he discovers a random streak of paint in Ron’s hair. What nobody knows is that Ron also illustrates every single one of the children’s stories Chuck has come up with over the years.

These two don’t marry. Chuck merely raises an eyebrow at the idea, while Ron shrugs and calls it the most unnecessary formality. They’re not always joined at the hip, or even located in the same space. There have been times Ron was halfway around the world. There have been times Chuck threw his hands in the air and went off to their summer cottage all by himself. Their fights, on the rare occasions when they happen, are big and ugly and confrontational without fail. There is just one constant: they always come back to each other. They fall back together every time as though not a single second has passed since they saw each other last, as though they can hear the unspoken apology and open their arms wordlessly to each other again, as though it’s always just going to be them together at the end of all things.