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[niceofyoutoask]

Carwood Lipton was unsettled.
He eyed the bookshelf, and the variety of titles displayed, and his mouth set in a thin line of irritation.

It wasn’t so much that the bookcase was eager to provide him with titles like United States Army Logistics: The Normandy Invasion, 1944 and Manufacturing Systems Engineering: A Unified Approach to Manufacturing

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[niceofyoutoask]

Lipton picked up one of the chocolate chip cookies, and took his first bite. Alright, so, Lipton would be haunting the kitchen for forever now, because these were delicious. He chased the bite with the coffee, and wondered how they'd ever gotten by on k-rations.

He noticed Joe's avoidance, and was thankful for it. It was... reassuring when Joe agreed with him, if a bit worrisome as well. Joe had been here far longer than he, had all but settled down from what Lipton could see. If he was still adapting, well, that didn't bode well for Lipton getting used to anything in the near future. Then again, the alarmingly strange personality that Joe had temporarily adopted in very recent memory, and his current relationship with Webster were so obviously more disarming than just his own concerns. And those were just the things Lipton knew about his his three months here.

"Do you..." Lipton wasn't sure how to say this, how to describe how he'd been living with one foot out the door. "Your life here. You've got something, yeah? But you have a life back home, too. How do you reconcile the both of them?" There was some part of Lipton that was just waiting for when he'd drop back out just as abruptly as he'd dropped on to the island.

[soldier_singled]

It's a conversation he's had with Webster. Sometimes, guilty, Joe remembers talking about the wife he was gonna have, the nice Jewish girl with big soft titties, the kids he was gonna have. None of that seemed to matter anymore.

"I don't think about it," he admits. "I've got what I've got here, and it's enough. It's more than enough. So I don't get to have kids." He shrugs. "I've got Trisha. I've got Webster. I got everything I want. What's the point of wondering what I might've had back in San Francisco?"

[niceofyoutoask]

"But what if tomorrow you go back to 1945?" Lipton asked, cookie in one hand and coffee in the other, both for the moment forgotten. "How can you build a life knowing it's probably only temporary?" He wasn't judging, he wasn't critical, he just wanted to know.

When he'd volunteered for the war, he'd known there was a very real possibility he may not come back. He'd watched two men get shot through the head in just inches from his face. He'd been hit by tank artillery in Carentan, and shot close enough to the head to leave a mark on his cheek in Foy. He'd known that tomorrow he could die, but it would be an end, and it would be unfortunate, but it would have been simple. This, with alternate timelines and realities, was something else entirely. Somewhere, sometime, he had a wife, a family, a hometown. Here, he had boys he'd served with in a war that had happened over sixty years ago. And Lipton really had no idea where that left him, but right now it felt like somewhere in between.

[soldier_singled]

"I'd drive my cab and I'd try not to miss what I couldn't have anymore." Joe busies himself with spooning out a new sheet of cookies.

"Hell, maybe I'd go find him in Boston. We jumped into France, Lip. Anything's fuckin' possible."

[niceofyoutoask]

"Yeah," Lipton agreed mildly. He watched Joe and the progression of the cookies, remembering the one he held in his hand and taking another bite. Still just as good. "Yeah."