these, our bodies possessed by light (tell me we'll never get used to it)
Okayyy, I just have some ~things to say before we get to the fic. I’ve been desperately trying to kick it into some form of decency since January some time and... I don’t know, it just really wasn’t working. It kept going through massive changes and I’ve deleted it completely a few times after being super frustrated and had to start all over again, and yeah, I just couldn’t get my words to work properly. It’s about five and a half months later and... I can’t say that I like it very much more than I did when I was deleting it completely (haaa, I deleted it yesterday but then felt weird and restored it from the recycle bin) but I decided that I needed to get this shit out of my system and post it so I can ~move on~ because it’s driving me crazy. So, that’s what I did, here it is. Um, I know it’s awkward in some places and probably really off-character and clichéd but, this is all I could manage to get out. I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll be back again with something that sucks less for you guys.
these, our bodies possessed by light (tell me we'll never get used to it)
Band Of Brothers. Winters/Nixon. ~4,080 words. General spoilers of the series.
thank you to
j_p_fan for the beta ♥
They draw together seamlessly, without explanation; two different sides of the same spectrum. The once parallel lines of their entirely separate existences begin to tangle and knot. It happens in beats between glances that linger just a moment too long, the whisper of words that are never even spoken aloud and smiles that are just a little too wide to mean anything else.
They don’t meet in the middle, but somewhere else entirely; somewhere off-centre, almost obscured from the eyes of the rest of the world; some where they both fit.
---
They run up Curahee together in the dark.
It’s better this way; with nothing but the moon and stars to light their way, with nothing but the sound of the gravel as it crunches under their feet. There’s no sun burning his skin, no cries of “Hi-yo Silver!” as he struggles to suck air into his lungs. There’s just Dick; keeping pace two steps ahead of him, the autumn air lukewarm against his bare skin. As he runs he imagines the ground tearing apart behind him and Dick; a black hole, expanding for eternity, dragging everything into nothingness. He turns his head to his right and Dick grins at him, easy and open.
Three miles up, three miles down. They run.
---
Nix had liked Harry Welsh from the moment he saw him - all Irish charm and gap-toothed grins - and he likes him right now. The wall they’re leaning against is rough against their backs, even through the material of their shirts but they slump against it anyway; letting it take their weight. The world has turned soft and smudgy around the edges, like an oil painting almost, from a bottle of Vat 69 passed back and forth between them.
“So, how long have you known, Winters?” Harry asks, words running together at ends as he stubs out the end of his cigarette on the ground next to him, and presses the bottle back into Nix’s hand.
“Since...” He tries to work it out but the numbers twist and contort in his head. He takes a long pull from the bottle, the liquid feeling warm as it slips down the back of his throat. It’s fine; he figures they don’t mean much anyway, “Since we signed up.”
“Huh.” He takes the bottle back from Nix and laughs a little before lifting it to his mouth, “Really? Not longer?”
“Nope. Why?” He stretches his arm to take the Vat back from him and frowns slightly.
“I don’t you guys just seem so...” He makes a series of vague hand gestures in the air and looks at Nix, “You know.”
Nix laughs back loudly, his head foggy, “No, I have no idea what you mean, Harry.”
“You’re just so... together.” He grins wide and open, like he’s proud of himself, at Nix and lights another smoke, “You know, a unit.”
The bottle suddenly feels too light in the palm of his hand and he lays it on the ground in front of their feet. He stares at it as) he rests his head back against the dirty wall behind him and blinks onetwothree, “Yeah.”
---
“I’ll see you in Normandy.” Dick sounds so sure it’s hard not to believe him, hard to think anything except they’ll both make it through this. He hands his faith over to Dick and trusts it will be safe there. He’s thankful for that.
“You okay, Nix?”
Nix just nods and clenches his jaw, gritting his teeth together. He lets his eyes wander over the man in front him, committing every detail Dick to memory; locking it tight in his chest like a promise. He feels his mouth fill with words that mean too much to be spoken aloud.
“Alright.”
There’s so much he wants to say, but he can’t let this become a goodbye. Instead, he just lifts his hand, ignoring the way he’s starting to tremble and lets his fingers brush against Dick’s arm for a moment. Dick smiles at him in a way he’s never seen before and it makes him ache somewhere deep in his bones.
“I’ll see ya, Lew.” Nixon salutes just once and forces out the ghost of something that used to be a smile as he watches Dick walk away, certain and steady, and if he lets his eye linger a little too long, it doesn’t matter. This could all be over anyway.
---
Lewis Nixon learns too much in the war.
He learnt how his friend’s blood feels as it spills out, hot against his fingers, oozing under his fingernails. How men that are dying sound when they are screaming for help. How it feels to lie to your men, telling them that everything’s going to work out okay, when he isn’t sure that any of them are going to make it out of this still breathing.
He learns how much one person can take before they snap, shattering into a million shards of broken glass, how to give men briefings on what could easily become massacres, The weight of a body in his arms as he carries it out of the line of fire.
Dick’s smile makes him forget. It chases the demons away, into the shadows at the corners of his consciousness, and holds them there. Sometimes, it feels like Lew knows who he is when Dick is smiling at him. (He keeps a still image locked away in the back of his mind like a photograph, only taking it out when it’s safe, smoothing his fingers over the edges and tucking it away again.)
---
He finds Dick sitting by Battalion CP, leaning back against the brick, staring off quietly into the distance. The withdrawn, beaten down look in the eyes of his best friend scare him in a way that the German army have never managed to. He takes the last steps towards Dick, softly, as though walking up to a wild horse, a frightened child.
He holds the canteen of water out to him without even thinking, watching Dick’s hand shake as he reaches out to hold it. Suddenly, he feels more helpless than he ever has before in his life.
“You’re alright, Dick.” He knows even before he speaks them that words are meaningless, empty. Dick looks up at him, shaking all over now. Lew just breathes out long and slowly through his nostrils and slides down the wall to sit next to him, thighs pressed together through the thin layer of their pants. For a moment, he thinks about running. Tangling their fingers together and just running away from this place. Go somewhere they would never be found. Somewhere safe, just the two of them. Instead he bites the inside of his cheek and concentrates the way Dick’s fingers curl around canteen in his lap.
“Yeah, I’m alright.” Dick’s voice is shaking too now, sounding small and vulnerable, sounding so unlike himself and something cold falls inside Lew’s stomach. He reaches out to lay the palm of his hand on Dick’s shoulder, digging his fingernails in just slightly, feeling the tremor that runs through him, just under the thin, pale layer of skin there.
“Yeah,” A grenade goes off over the hill just behind them, “Yeah, okay.”
They don’t head back right away.
---
In Bastogne the cold gets everywhere. It works its way into the rations and uniforms, it drags its way into their bones. The cold gets inside his head, invades his dreams. When he closes his eyes, Dick is all he can see. Dick lying on the ground, bleeding out against the Carentan rubble.
“Come on. Come Dick, stay with me.” The desperation in his voice sounds foreign, even to him and the words flood the air around them, the blood feeling too hot and alien against his hands, “Come on, you’re okay. You’re alright.” His fingers leave a trail of red behind as he sweeps them over Dick’s forehead.
He can hear the blood gurgle in Dick’s throat as he tries to scream, he sees it spill from his lips; running down his cheek like a river, staining his teeth red. He buries his hands deep in Dick’s thick, red hair and pulls him tight against his chest. Come on, come on, come on. He screams when he sees the light go out in his best friend’s eyes.
He’s still screaming when he wakes up. His throat feels raw and Dick’s looking at him like he needs saving. He just reaches into a pocket for his hipflask and crawls out of the foxhole, trying to ignore the pinpricks of Dick’s gaze on his back. He needs air, needs room for his thoughts to breathe and they crash and collide with the walls of his skull.
He opens his mouth to catch the snow on his tongue and each flake tastes like sulphur and blood, it makes his head hurt. The sky above turns a pale pink as he slides back in beside Dick.
---
Dick’s pretending to be asleep when Lewis stumble-walks into the barracks, the empty bottle still hanging loosely between the fingers of his left hand. Lew knows he’s awake. You spend enough time with someone; you get to know every little thing about them. Can read them down to the very last detail, the half-finished words at the bottom of their worn-out pages. He knows Dick is awake.
He leans in close, his breath warm and wet against the shell of Dick’s ear. Smell of whiskey and words slurred just slightly, “You know, Dick,” he stops for a second, drags cold air into his lungs, “There are times when I think I’m in love with you. Just how fucked up is that?”
Dick doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even twitch. Of course he doesn’t, Nix thinks. He just keeps his eyes closed and his breathing even. Nix lets himself fall back onto his crappy mattress and watches his best friend, hair shining too-bright even in the darkness. He sits and watches until he falls asleep. Neither of them ever mentions it again.
---
They exist only in the grey areas, between words that could have been spoken, the moments just after the crack of the gunfire rings out against the unmarked sky. They are the start of a story that never began, fragile like a spider’s web stretched out between the tips of his fingers.
He squints and looks towards the sun sinking into the horizon, behind the ruins of what used to be someone’s home, behind fields covered in bullets and bodies of dead soldiers. Dick’s hand is warm, solid weight on his shoulder. It lingers.
“Come on, Nix, we’ll dig in for the night.” As he watches Dick walk back to the CP, the sky turns a shade darker.
---
Lewis Nixon counts.
He counts the number of bodies each day, the number of men that rushed headfirst into the hail of bullets and fire, the number of heroes decomposing in piles on the ground. He counts gunshots in the night, bursts of flame against the black sky. He counts the number of letters he has to send to families of dead soldiers under his command.
He lies awake at night, counting Dick’s breaths when he lies next to him asleep in their shared foxhole, just to make sure. (He counts.)
---
Somehow, there is still something solid about Richard Winters; something unbreakable and sure. Even after all they’ve been through and everything that they’ve seen; the world around them is bombed out and burning, covered in the blood of innocent human beings and broken spirits, he remains untouched; a singular patch of pure white snow in the middle of a bloodstained battlefield. Nixon can’t help but cling to that. He digs in with his fingernails, uses it as his one foothold in the midst of all this chaos; the moonlight in a pitch black forest at night.
Sometimes Nix almost hates him for it. Almost hates him for being so strong. Almost hates him for being the only hero left in this theatre of seemingly pointless destruction. He never could quite manage it. He needs the sureness of Winters like he needs the feeling of a bottle in the palm of his hand, a cigarette between his fingers. He needs him.
(Sometimes he’s scared to touch him. Like somehow he’ll drag Dick down into the dirt with him, somewhere Richard Winters has never belonged. He’s too good for that, he doesn’t deserve it.)
---
“There you are.” Nix doesn’t turn around to face him, just keeps on throwing stones into the river in front of him. “Been lookin’ for you.”
“Yeah?” He feels Dick sit next to him and pick up his own stone, rolling it around in the palm of his hand.
“Yeah, I was.” Dick doesn’t throw his stone, just keeps it still, his fingers curled around it carefully, like it might break. The gesture hits Nix as so Dick that it makes his teeth ache a little bit, makes his fingertips burn with the need to touch. God, he needs a drink. His canteen feels heavy against his thigh, but the thought of Dick looking at him, the thought of clear blue eyes clouded with knowing and disappointment makes him settle for a smoke.
“Well, now you’ve found me. Lucky you.” He says, blowing out the smoke slow and steady, watching as it curls in the air around them both.
“What do you think they’re doing right now? Back home, I mean.” Dick’s voice sounds distant, like he isn’t sat next to him at all. His eyes are blank and unfocused, as he faces the water in front of them.
Nix’s laugh is short and bitter, curdling in his throat, “I honestly try not to think about it too much. I mean, look around. All the fun they’re missing out on here? I feel bad for them.”
He sees Dick nod, a tiny jerk of muscles and clenching of his jaw, the tension almost tangible in the air, “You know, I don’t even dream about them anymore. I used to. All the time. I dreamt about my mom, my sisters, my friends; all of them. Dreams so vivid I could make myself believe they were real. They stopped some time in Bastogne” There’s a long pause and Dick turns to face him, his eyes too bright, “Home just feels so far away.”
Nix crushes the stub of his cigarette into the ground next to him and lights a new one without a second’s pause between the two actions. He doesn’t smoke this one though, just watches as it burns between his fingers.
“Like I said, I don’t think about it all that much.” He picks up another pebble and hurls it into the water, watching the ripples.
“A civilised place for civilised men.” The sound of memories echoes heavy in Dick’s voice and the pressure of it is too heavy on Nixon’s chest. He keeps staring forward at the river, remembering to breathe, “Do you remember that, Lew?”
He can feel Dick’s eyes on him and he feels loose and disconnected at the base of his spine. He turns his head towards the dirty brick of the wall of the CP behind them. Once upon a time the wall was part of a house, now it barely stands; covered in ash and blood, products of this war. He breathes out through his nose and cracks the knuckles of his right hand.
“Yeah, Dick. Yeah, I remember.” When it comes, his laugh sounds hysterical, erupting from his chest like lava. Flowing thick and fast, scorching everything it touches, burning bright against a blank sky.
Dick’s eyes meet his; a single hand outstretched across the chasm. He feels Dick’s fingers close lightly around his elbow and for a fleeting moment, he can feel the edge of forever at his feet; the curve of the earth. He tries to hold on but it always melts away, slipping through the gaps in his fingers like ashes in the palm of his hand, sand in an hourglass. They all have a countdown.
---
Lewis Nixon falls apart and Richard Winters stitches him back together again, a single red string sewing him shut at the corners, the places where the fractures at starting to show. But Lewis Nixon has been falling apart his whole life, sooner or later there’s going to be too much scar tissue to patch it up. Lew knows that Dick will always keep trying though, because Dick doesn’t like retreating. For Lewis, he will find a way.
---
“What would you do if I kissed you right now?” The words taste like danger in his mouth, almost a dare; almost begging. He breathes out through his mouth and back in through his nostrils, counting to five as he goes, slowing the world down, “I mean it Dick. What would you do?”
The question hangs, suspended, in the frozen dead air between them. Like a parachute tangled in the branches of a tree; caught in no man’s land in the space between their bodies for a beat before Dick shakes his head slowly and rolls to face the opposite way, turning away from him, “Your drunk Nix. Go to sleep.” (He thinks he imagined the rough, hurt edge in Dick’s voice. He hopes that he did.)
Lewis just shrugs and pretends that it’s okay, taking another pull from the bottom of the bottle and lets himself drift away into the snowy static, the low rumbling of a continuous drumbeat in his ears, thinking about what it feels like when he’s falling towards the earth.
---
Sometimes, Lewis lies awake at night and just watches Dick breathing. Just to make sure. He presses his thumb down onto the barely healed over scar on Dick’s shin and closes his eyes. Exhale. Dick brushes the palm of his hand over Nix’s forehead, lingering over the ghost of wound that never even happened.
In this war, the past and the future do not exist. They all survive inside a singular tense. There is only the ever-present weight of rightnowthissecond pressing down on their chests, cracking their ribcages; suffocating. Somewhere in the back of his skull, he clings to the half-formed thought that maybe someday, when this - this train wreck filled with too many bodies and too much blood - is cleared away, they could begin. They could become something other than the vague outline of a prologue, something other than a blurred promise that was never even said aloud. They could.
Maybe.
---
He falls into the room hazy, an empty bottle left on the doorstep behind him. He blinks and the room swings violently to the left. Unhinged and off centre, caught somewhere between the beginning of a sentence that’s still caught in his throat and a cough. Between the prologue and the start of the story. He cocks his head to one side and everything fades out of focus.
“You okay, Nix?” Dick’s voice sounds likes he’s underwater. Nix blinks hard and turns anticlockwise to face the man standing behind him, every movement feels too heavy; it’s like he’s drowning. Dick’s eyes seem too blue against his pale skin, red hair too sharp. The world is too bright, it hurts his eyes. A laugh catches in his throat and he lays a hand of the chair next to him for balance, tightening his grip until it nearly hurts (and then he grips on harder).
Dick takes another step forward. Nix thinks he can feel the warmth radiating off his body, bridging the gap between them and his chest hurts with something that feels too big to hold inside; he imagines it piercing through his skin, rushing out of his body. He bites down hard on his lower lip to stop it from trembling and giggles softy, burying his head in Dick’s shoulder; shutting out the rest of the world, keeping it solid and still around them. Dick is the safest thing he has ever known, the most certain; like a compass pointing to magnetic north, like the sound release cord being pulled on his parachute. Dick has become his anchor; holding him steady, keeping him grounded. He breathes in deep and it all feels like too much. There’s so much light in him, all he ever wanted was some of it for himself. A candle to light the way through the dark.
He wants to kiss him; the realisation comes slow and unsurprising. He wants to bathe in his light, wants to feel Dick open up and let him in. He wants it all. He isn’t sure when it was that he fell in love with strong, sure Richard Winters but it feels like it’s been forever, and maybe that’s the whole point. He’s been running in circles for so long he can’t remember when they began.
“You’re goin’ to have to stop me, Dick.” Lew’s voice sounds soft, blurry around the edges, even to his own ears. His lips move against the spot where neck turns into shoulder and he shivers, “You’re going to have to stop me.”
Dick says nothing, his voice frozen inside his throat. Nix lifts his head and looks him in the eyes, breath streaming out against his cheekbone, “All you have to do,” he runs his fingertips over the line of Dick’s jaw, “is tell me to stop.”
Dick doesn’t pull back or hesitate; he never was one for second-guessing. He just curls his aching fingers into the front of Nix’s shirt and clings on; he tastes like a last chance on a Sunday morning and the cool side of the pillow, like the light being turned on after sitting in the dark for too long.
The moment their lips touch, he imagines the world shuddering around them, time bending until it snaps. He can feel the steady rhythm of Dick’s heartbeat against his tongue and the curve of jaw under the tips of his fingers. This isn’t the stuff fairytales are made of, not even close, but that’s okay. Everything is clearer than it’s ever been before; brighter. It all makes so much sense that he feels like he’s breaking apart; shattering from the inside out. He can’t decide if he wants to cry or laugh, so he just curls his hand around the back of Dick’s head, presses their foreheads together.
“It’s all right, it’s all right. Jesus Christ.” he whispers it over and over, like a prayer sent to a God he doesn’t even believe in anymore. (And when he feels Dick’s knee bump against his through their uniforms, he thinks that maybe - just maybe - it is.)
---
Their fingers and palms fit together flawlessly. Nix stares down at them and thinks of the brown bones of skeletons, hanging inside their glass museum cabinets.
He squeezes harder; squeezes until his knuckles turn white. Dick turns his head to face him and he smiles, just a little bit; like he understands. He probably does. Dick always understands him. Somewhere in-between the constant screaming of dying men so young they haven’t even had a chance to live yet and the never-ending sound of gunfire, he’d become fluent in the language of falling apart; fluent in the language of Lewis Nixon. He knows what every silence means, recognizes every breath, every tiny movement.
Dick squeezes back.
“Lew...” Nix catches Dick’s words on his tongue and smiles against his mouth; this is what they’ve been heading for all along; loving Dick feels a little like learning to breathe all over again, a little like learning to fly. (He feels something inside his rib-cage splinter and fall apart, he wonders if Dick heard it too.)
---
“I will take you to Chicago one day, you know.” Lewis whispers against the skin on his back, the hard edge of his teeth scraping lightly against the notches of his spine, his fingers spread out across his back like the points of a compass. He says it with so much clarity and conviction that he almost makes himself believe it.
(He catches Dick’s breath in his own mouth and squeezes his eyes tight shut; all he can see is Dick’s face and a million points of brilliant white light. He lets his fingers drift to the pulse point in his neck and he counts in time, one two three four, feels the blood roaring just under the surface of their skin.
They’re still alive.)
these, our bodies possessed by light (tell me we'll never get used to it)
Band Of Brothers. Winters/Nixon. ~4,080 words. General spoilers of the series.
thank you to
j_p_fan for the beta ♥
They draw together seamlessly, without explanation; two different sides of the same spectrum. The once parallel lines of their entirely separate existences begin to tangle and knot. It happens in beats between glances that linger just a moment too long, the whisper of words that are never even spoken aloud and smiles that are just a little too wide to mean anything else.
They don’t meet in the middle, but somewhere else entirely; somewhere off-centre, almost obscured from the eyes of the rest of the world; some where they both fit.
---
They run up Curahee together in the dark.
It’s better this way; with nothing but the moon and stars to light their way, with nothing but the sound of the gravel as it crunches under their feet. There’s no sun burning his skin, no cries of “Hi-yo Silver!” as he struggles to suck air into his lungs. There’s just Dick; keeping pace two steps ahead of him, the autumn air lukewarm against his bare skin. As he runs he imagines the ground tearing apart behind him and Dick; a black hole, expanding for eternity, dragging everything into nothingness. He turns his head to his right and Dick grins at him, easy and open.
Three miles up, three miles down. They run.
---
Nix had liked Harry Welsh from the moment he saw him - all Irish charm and gap-toothed grins - and he likes him right now. The wall they’re leaning against is rough against their backs, even through the material of their shirts but they slump against it anyway; letting it take their weight. The world has turned soft and smudgy around the edges, like an oil painting almost, from a bottle of Vat 69 passed back and forth between them.
“So, how long have you known, Winters?” Harry asks, words running together at ends as he stubs out the end of his cigarette on the ground next to him, and presses the bottle back into Nix’s hand.
“Since...” He tries to work it out but the numbers twist and contort in his head. He takes a long pull from the bottle, the liquid feeling warm as it slips down the back of his throat. It’s fine; he figures they don’t mean much anyway, “Since we signed up.”
“Huh.” He takes the bottle back from Nix and laughs a little before lifting it to his mouth, “Really? Not longer?”
“Nope. Why?” He stretches his arm to take the Vat back from him and frowns slightly.
“I don’t you guys just seem so...” He makes a series of vague hand gestures in the air and looks at Nix, “You know.”
Nix laughs back loudly, his head foggy, “No, I have no idea what you mean, Harry.”
“You’re just so... together.” He grins wide and open, like he’s proud of himself, at Nix and lights another smoke, “You know, a unit.”
The bottle suddenly feels too light in the palm of his hand and he lays it on the ground in front of their feet. He stares at it as) he rests his head back against the dirty wall behind him and blinks onetwothree, “Yeah.”
---
“I’ll see you in Normandy.” Dick sounds so sure it’s hard not to believe him, hard to think anything except they’ll both make it through this. He hands his faith over to Dick and trusts it will be safe there. He’s thankful for that.
“You okay, Nix?”
Nix just nods and clenches his jaw, gritting his teeth together. He lets his eyes wander over the man in front him, committing every detail Dick to memory; locking it tight in his chest like a promise. He feels his mouth fill with words that mean too much to be spoken aloud.
“Alright.”
There’s so much he wants to say, but he can’t let this become a goodbye. Instead, he just lifts his hand, ignoring the way he’s starting to tremble and lets his fingers brush against Dick’s arm for a moment. Dick smiles at him in a way he’s never seen before and it makes him ache somewhere deep in his bones.
“I’ll see ya, Lew.” Nixon salutes just once and forces out the ghost of something that used to be a smile as he watches Dick walk away, certain and steady, and if he lets his eye linger a little too long, it doesn’t matter. This could all be over anyway.
---
Lewis Nixon learns too much in the war.
He learnt how his friend’s blood feels as it spills out, hot against his fingers, oozing under his fingernails. How men that are dying sound when they are screaming for help. How it feels to lie to your men, telling them that everything’s going to work out okay, when he isn’t sure that any of them are going to make it out of this still breathing.
He learns how much one person can take before they snap, shattering into a million shards of broken glass, how to give men briefings on what could easily become massacres, The weight of a body in his arms as he carries it out of the line of fire.
Dick’s smile makes him forget. It chases the demons away, into the shadows at the corners of his consciousness, and holds them there. Sometimes, it feels like Lew knows who he is when Dick is smiling at him. (He keeps a still image locked away in the back of his mind like a photograph, only taking it out when it’s safe, smoothing his fingers over the edges and tucking it away again.)
---
He finds Dick sitting by Battalion CP, leaning back against the brick, staring off quietly into the distance. The withdrawn, beaten down look in the eyes of his best friend scare him in a way that the German army have never managed to. He takes the last steps towards Dick, softly, as though walking up to a wild horse, a frightened child.
He holds the canteen of water out to him without even thinking, watching Dick’s hand shake as he reaches out to hold it. Suddenly, he feels more helpless than he ever has before in his life.
“You’re alright, Dick.” He knows even before he speaks them that words are meaningless, empty. Dick looks up at him, shaking all over now. Lew just breathes out long and slowly through his nostrils and slides down the wall to sit next to him, thighs pressed together through the thin layer of their pants. For a moment, he thinks about running. Tangling their fingers together and just running away from this place. Go somewhere they would never be found. Somewhere safe, just the two of them. Instead he bites the inside of his cheek and concentrates the way Dick’s fingers curl around canteen in his lap.
“Yeah, I’m alright.” Dick’s voice is shaking too now, sounding small and vulnerable, sounding so unlike himself and something cold falls inside Lew’s stomach. He reaches out to lay the palm of his hand on Dick’s shoulder, digging his fingernails in just slightly, feeling the tremor that runs through him, just under the thin, pale layer of skin there.
“Yeah,” A grenade goes off over the hill just behind them, “Yeah, okay.”
They don’t head back right away.
---
In Bastogne the cold gets everywhere. It works its way into the rations and uniforms, it drags its way into their bones. The cold gets inside his head, invades his dreams. When he closes his eyes, Dick is all he can see. Dick lying on the ground, bleeding out against the Carentan rubble.
“Come on. Come Dick, stay with me.” The desperation in his voice sounds foreign, even to him and the words flood the air around them, the blood feeling too hot and alien against his hands, “Come on, you’re okay. You’re alright.” His fingers leave a trail of red behind as he sweeps them over Dick’s forehead.
He can hear the blood gurgle in Dick’s throat as he tries to scream, he sees it spill from his lips; running down his cheek like a river, staining his teeth red. He buries his hands deep in Dick’s thick, red hair and pulls him tight against his chest. Come on, come on, come on. He screams when he sees the light go out in his best friend’s eyes.
He’s still screaming when he wakes up. His throat feels raw and Dick’s looking at him like he needs saving. He just reaches into a pocket for his hipflask and crawls out of the foxhole, trying to ignore the pinpricks of Dick’s gaze on his back. He needs air, needs room for his thoughts to breathe and they crash and collide with the walls of his skull.
He opens his mouth to catch the snow on his tongue and each flake tastes like sulphur and blood, it makes his head hurt. The sky above turns a pale pink as he slides back in beside Dick.
---
Dick’s pretending to be asleep when Lewis stumble-walks into the barracks, the empty bottle still hanging loosely between the fingers of his left hand. Lew knows he’s awake. You spend enough time with someone; you get to know every little thing about them. Can read them down to the very last detail, the half-finished words at the bottom of their worn-out pages. He knows Dick is awake.
He leans in close, his breath warm and wet against the shell of Dick’s ear. Smell of whiskey and words slurred just slightly, “You know, Dick,” he stops for a second, drags cold air into his lungs, “There are times when I think I’m in love with you. Just how fucked up is that?”
Dick doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even twitch. Of course he doesn’t, Nix thinks. He just keeps his eyes closed and his breathing even. Nix lets himself fall back onto his crappy mattress and watches his best friend, hair shining too-bright even in the darkness. He sits and watches until he falls asleep. Neither of them ever mentions it again.
---
They exist only in the grey areas, between words that could have been spoken, the moments just after the crack of the gunfire rings out against the unmarked sky. They are the start of a story that never began, fragile like a spider’s web stretched out between the tips of his fingers.
He squints and looks towards the sun sinking into the horizon, behind the ruins of what used to be someone’s home, behind fields covered in bullets and bodies of dead soldiers. Dick’s hand is warm, solid weight on his shoulder. It lingers.
“Come on, Nix, we’ll dig in for the night.” As he watches Dick walk back to the CP, the sky turns a shade darker.
---
Lewis Nixon counts.
He counts the number of bodies each day, the number of men that rushed headfirst into the hail of bullets and fire, the number of heroes decomposing in piles on the ground. He counts gunshots in the night, bursts of flame against the black sky. He counts the number of letters he has to send to families of dead soldiers under his command.
He lies awake at night, counting Dick’s breaths when he lies next to him asleep in their shared foxhole, just to make sure. (He counts.)
---
Somehow, there is still something solid about Richard Winters; something unbreakable and sure. Even after all they’ve been through and everything that they’ve seen; the world around them is bombed out and burning, covered in the blood of innocent human beings and broken spirits, he remains untouched; a singular patch of pure white snow in the middle of a bloodstained battlefield. Nixon can’t help but cling to that. He digs in with his fingernails, uses it as his one foothold in the midst of all this chaos; the moonlight in a pitch black forest at night.
Sometimes Nix almost hates him for it. Almost hates him for being so strong. Almost hates him for being the only hero left in this theatre of seemingly pointless destruction. He never could quite manage it. He needs the sureness of Winters like he needs the feeling of a bottle in the palm of his hand, a cigarette between his fingers. He needs him.
(Sometimes he’s scared to touch him. Like somehow he’ll drag Dick down into the dirt with him, somewhere Richard Winters has never belonged. He’s too good for that, he doesn’t deserve it.)
---
“There you are.” Nix doesn’t turn around to face him, just keeps on throwing stones into the river in front of him. “Been lookin’ for you.”
“Yeah?” He feels Dick sit next to him and pick up his own stone, rolling it around in the palm of his hand.
“Yeah, I was.” Dick doesn’t throw his stone, just keeps it still, his fingers curled around it carefully, like it might break. The gesture hits Nix as so Dick that it makes his teeth ache a little bit, makes his fingertips burn with the need to touch. God, he needs a drink. His canteen feels heavy against his thigh, but the thought of Dick looking at him, the thought of clear blue eyes clouded with knowing and disappointment makes him settle for a smoke.
“Well, now you’ve found me. Lucky you.” He says, blowing out the smoke slow and steady, watching as it curls in the air around them both.
“What do you think they’re doing right now? Back home, I mean.” Dick’s voice sounds distant, like he isn’t sat next to him at all. His eyes are blank and unfocused, as he faces the water in front of them.
Nix’s laugh is short and bitter, curdling in his throat, “I honestly try not to think about it too much. I mean, look around. All the fun they’re missing out on here? I feel bad for them.”
He sees Dick nod, a tiny jerk of muscles and clenching of his jaw, the tension almost tangible in the air, “You know, I don’t even dream about them anymore. I used to. All the time. I dreamt about my mom, my sisters, my friends; all of them. Dreams so vivid I could make myself believe they were real. They stopped some time in Bastogne” There’s a long pause and Dick turns to face him, his eyes too bright, “Home just feels so far away.”
Nix crushes the stub of his cigarette into the ground next to him and lights a new one without a second’s pause between the two actions. He doesn’t smoke this one though, just watches as it burns between his fingers.
“Like I said, I don’t think about it all that much.” He picks up another pebble and hurls it into the water, watching the ripples.
“A civilised place for civilised men.” The sound of memories echoes heavy in Dick’s voice and the pressure of it is too heavy on Nixon’s chest. He keeps staring forward at the river, remembering to breathe, “Do you remember that, Lew?”
He can feel Dick’s eyes on him and he feels loose and disconnected at the base of his spine. He turns his head towards the dirty brick of the wall of the CP behind them. Once upon a time the wall was part of a house, now it barely stands; covered in ash and blood, products of this war. He breathes out through his nose and cracks the knuckles of his right hand.
“Yeah, Dick. Yeah, I remember.” When it comes, his laugh sounds hysterical, erupting from his chest like lava. Flowing thick and fast, scorching everything it touches, burning bright against a blank sky.
Dick’s eyes meet his; a single hand outstretched across the chasm. He feels Dick’s fingers close lightly around his elbow and for a fleeting moment, he can feel the edge of forever at his feet; the curve of the earth. He tries to hold on but it always melts away, slipping through the gaps in his fingers like ashes in the palm of his hand, sand in an hourglass. They all have a countdown.
---
Lewis Nixon falls apart and Richard Winters stitches him back together again, a single red string sewing him shut at the corners, the places where the fractures at starting to show. But Lewis Nixon has been falling apart his whole life, sooner or later there’s going to be too much scar tissue to patch it up. Lew knows that Dick will always keep trying though, because Dick doesn’t like retreating. For Lewis, he will find a way.
---
“What would you do if I kissed you right now?” The words taste like danger in his mouth, almost a dare; almost begging. He breathes out through his mouth and back in through his nostrils, counting to five as he goes, slowing the world down, “I mean it Dick. What would you do?”
The question hangs, suspended, in the frozen dead air between them. Like a parachute tangled in the branches of a tree; caught in no man’s land in the space between their bodies for a beat before Dick shakes his head slowly and rolls to face the opposite way, turning away from him, “Your drunk Nix. Go to sleep.” (He thinks he imagined the rough, hurt edge in Dick’s voice. He hopes that he did.)
Lewis just shrugs and pretends that it’s okay, taking another pull from the bottom of the bottle and lets himself drift away into the snowy static, the low rumbling of a continuous drumbeat in his ears, thinking about what it feels like when he’s falling towards the earth.
---
Sometimes, Lewis lies awake at night and just watches Dick breathing. Just to make sure. He presses his thumb down onto the barely healed over scar on Dick’s shin and closes his eyes. Exhale. Dick brushes the palm of his hand over Nix’s forehead, lingering over the ghost of wound that never even happened.
In this war, the past and the future do not exist. They all survive inside a singular tense. There is only the ever-present weight of rightnowthissecond pressing down on their chests, cracking their ribcages; suffocating. Somewhere in the back of his skull, he clings to the half-formed thought that maybe someday, when this - this train wreck filled with too many bodies and too much blood - is cleared away, they could begin. They could become something other than the vague outline of a prologue, something other than a blurred promise that was never even said aloud. They could.
Maybe.
---
He falls into the room hazy, an empty bottle left on the doorstep behind him. He blinks and the room swings violently to the left. Unhinged and off centre, caught somewhere between the beginning of a sentence that’s still caught in his throat and a cough. Between the prologue and the start of the story. He cocks his head to one side and everything fades out of focus.
“You okay, Nix?” Dick’s voice sounds likes he’s underwater. Nix blinks hard and turns anticlockwise to face the man standing behind him, every movement feels too heavy; it’s like he’s drowning. Dick’s eyes seem too blue against his pale skin, red hair too sharp. The world is too bright, it hurts his eyes. A laugh catches in his throat and he lays a hand of the chair next to him for balance, tightening his grip until it nearly hurts (and then he grips on harder).
Dick takes another step forward. Nix thinks he can feel the warmth radiating off his body, bridging the gap between them and his chest hurts with something that feels too big to hold inside; he imagines it piercing through his skin, rushing out of his body. He bites down hard on his lower lip to stop it from trembling and giggles softy, burying his head in Dick’s shoulder; shutting out the rest of the world, keeping it solid and still around them. Dick is the safest thing he has ever known, the most certain; like a compass pointing to magnetic north, like the sound release cord being pulled on his parachute. Dick has become his anchor; holding him steady, keeping him grounded. He breathes in deep and it all feels like too much. There’s so much light in him, all he ever wanted was some of it for himself. A candle to light the way through the dark.
He wants to kiss him; the realisation comes slow and unsurprising. He wants to bathe in his light, wants to feel Dick open up and let him in. He wants it all. He isn’t sure when it was that he fell in love with strong, sure Richard Winters but it feels like it’s been forever, and maybe that’s the whole point. He’s been running in circles for so long he can’t remember when they began.
“You’re goin’ to have to stop me, Dick.” Lew’s voice sounds soft, blurry around the edges, even to his own ears. His lips move against the spot where neck turns into shoulder and he shivers, “You’re going to have to stop me.”
Dick says nothing, his voice frozen inside his throat. Nix lifts his head and looks him in the eyes, breath streaming out against his cheekbone, “All you have to do,” he runs his fingertips over the line of Dick’s jaw, “is tell me to stop.”
Dick doesn’t pull back or hesitate; he never was one for second-guessing. He just curls his aching fingers into the front of Nix’s shirt and clings on; he tastes like a last chance on a Sunday morning and the cool side of the pillow, like the light being turned on after sitting in the dark for too long.
The moment their lips touch, he imagines the world shuddering around them, time bending until it snaps. He can feel the steady rhythm of Dick’s heartbeat against his tongue and the curve of jaw under the tips of his fingers. This isn’t the stuff fairytales are made of, not even close, but that’s okay. Everything is clearer than it’s ever been before; brighter. It all makes so much sense that he feels like he’s breaking apart; shattering from the inside out. He can’t decide if he wants to cry or laugh, so he just curls his hand around the back of Dick’s head, presses their foreheads together.
“It’s all right, it’s all right. Jesus Christ.” he whispers it over and over, like a prayer sent to a God he doesn’t even believe in anymore. (And when he feels Dick’s knee bump against his through their uniforms, he thinks that maybe - just maybe - it is.)
---
Their fingers and palms fit together flawlessly. Nix stares down at them and thinks of the brown bones of skeletons, hanging inside their glass museum cabinets.
He squeezes harder; squeezes until his knuckles turn white. Dick turns his head to face him and he smiles, just a little bit; like he understands. He probably does. Dick always understands him. Somewhere in-between the constant screaming of dying men so young they haven’t even had a chance to live yet and the never-ending sound of gunfire, he’d become fluent in the language of falling apart; fluent in the language of Lewis Nixon. He knows what every silence means, recognizes every breath, every tiny movement.
Dick squeezes back.
“Lew...” Nix catches Dick’s words on his tongue and smiles against his mouth; this is what they’ve been heading for all along; loving Dick feels a little like learning to breathe all over again, a little like learning to fly. (He feels something inside his rib-cage splinter and fall apart, he wonders if Dick heard it too.)
---
“I will take you to Chicago one day, you know.” Lewis whispers against the skin on his back, the hard edge of his teeth scraping lightly against the notches of his spine, his fingers spread out across his back like the points of a compass. He says it with so much clarity and conviction that he almost makes himself believe it.
(He catches Dick’s breath in his own mouth and squeezes his eyes tight shut; all he can see is Dick’s face and a million points of brilliant white light. He lets his fingers drift to the pulse point in his neck and he counts in time, one two three four, feels the blood roaring just under the surface of their skin.
They’re still alive.)