"Leave-Taking"
I come bearing fic, for anyone who wants it (because I certainly don't want it anymore). Wintersnixon, for once.
Leave-Taking
"I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end...."
--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Not five hours into your 48-hour pass to England, you come home plagued by a dream that isn't yours. You wake with a start in the muggy air of the train, your cheek shockingly cool against the window, sweating, shivering, floundering in the eddies of this dream -- dreamed, you think, on another dim train hurtling eastward. You wake remembering little, only that once you were late somewhere (a field, a road?), and it won't happen again.
You're a quick study, loath to repeat a mistake, and have been since before the Army got hold of you. In prep school, it only took one run-in with the master's ruler for you to memorize your lessons, or else to cheat, to write formulas and dates discreetly on the backs of your hands. Some things never change: now you're trying to cheat time, racing back on the evening train to Mourmelon, Mourmelon and the little room that you and Dick share.
He's not due back until late tomorrow. The first night you hardly sleep, stirring at intervals in your narrow bed, half-expecting him to come in cold from the street. The second night you don't even bother. You set out a case of Vat 69 and a pile of the latest intelligence reports, and like hunkering in a foxhole, you settle down to wait, the night contracting into this one vigil, this one burning lamp.
Dick returns earlier than you expected. When you hear him on the stairs, you only have time to disguise the alcohol behind a mountain of paperwork. It's stupid, but you do it anyway; because you won't come home drunk, nor will you let him come home to find you drunk. Not yet.
"How was your trip?" asks Dick as soon as he gets through the door. He's usually not much for idle conversation, and the question is strained. So is he, when you look up at him: strained, rigid, pale.
"It was fine," you say, and don't mention the claustrophobia of the train, or that somehow you know the nightmare he's been having, or that there was no girl you went to visit. "Aldbourne's lovely this time of year. Rain, rain... more rain." You try a grin. "How was yours?"
"Oh, fine too."
"City of lights, huh?" you offer lamely.
"Yeah, city of lights." He pauses, avoiding your eyes. "So they tell me. I didn't see much. Rode the Metro to the end of the line, walked to my hotel... came back." His voice is hollow, ranging, expansive, like the desolate whistle of the tree branches against your window. "I'm going to bed, Lew," he says, and slips into the adjoining room.
"Well," you say to the emptiness, subdued, "maybe I will have a drink." You choose a bottle from its hiding place, but you don't open it, because its hard, contoured weight reminds you of a canteen in your fist, and heat bright as glass, and the pull of your disused calf muscles as you squatted by a roadside. Under your breath, you murmur, "To the end of the line," and you think about that, too, that remote finger of the Paris Metro crooked into the city's back pocket. You've come up against your share of blind alleys in the middle of the night -- there's a reason you know to buy your Vat 69 by the case -- and that's why you replace the bottle and follow Dick.
His room is at once familiar and uncomfortable. You step in gingerly, cagily, aware in every nerve of entering someone else's territory: one thing the Army has taught you assiduously is where the lines of propriety lay. You probably cross more than a few when you sit next to Dick on the bed and rest a casual hand on his shoulder.
"If you're going to sleep," you say, "why do you still have your coat on?"
Dick looks at you. "I was about to take it off."
"That's why they gave you an aide," you reply teasingly, "because you can't do anything for yourself." You reach up and undo the first brass button on his uniform coat, and a part of you shrinks from this flouting of unspoken law. What a stupid, hackneyed way to think of it, "a part of you" -- but there's something to that, because foggily you remember a biology professor at Yale who asked with an affected drawl if perhaps Mr. Nixon could explain to the class why a head injury might cause one's pupils to dilate differently. The answer (you have it memorized now, because you hate to be wrong) was that in the event of brain damage, the primitive system that allows independent dilation sometimes takes over. So it's like that, you think with preternatural calm. Here on the bed beside Dick, you put aside the part the Army has superimposed, and you operate on long-buried instinct.
Dick just keeps looking at you, unblinkingly. You smile and continue the job one-handed, with the other hand traveling along his neck, fingers stroking his jawline in passing. You finish at last -- Dick moves for the first time, shrugging out of his sleeves, staring -- and as you take the coat, you feel in the pocket the crumpled bulge of his 48-hour pass. Touching it, you find yourself momentarily frozen by guilt without knowing why -- as though you were the one who went away first. You set the coat aside in disarray, inside out; know the feeling.
Dick swallows and says, "For a city of lights, it sure was dark."
"Because you went there at night," you say, and then, with less bravado, "I'm sorry, Dick. I thought you wanted to go." His eyes shift, and in them you see the unending bloody sprawl of that crossroads near Nijmegen where you stood beside him in the dust, and the flash of his exposed throat as he gratefully gulped from your canteen. You remember with the clarity of pain how that was the first time you were really afraid of the war.
He smiles and says, "No harm done." And maybe not, maybe not, but just barely. That's all the reason you need to duck in and kiss that clean shell-like curve of his throat, with your forgotten hand exploring the back of his neck. Dick, startled, arches up reflexively with his palms pressed to your shoulders, and lets you.
This is the first night you sleep together, though you're in no way strange to each other. It's only perplexing because it's never happened before, not in the low bunks of Toccoa or the crude shelters of Normandy. Or maybe it has, you muse as like a swimmer you lithely submerge yourself in sleep, the world realigning itself waterily; maybe it's happened many times before, only without touch. You've shared the intimacy of lovers since long before France.
Later, in the Ardennes Forest, you will sleep together almost every night. Many of the men will, when the four walls of the foxhole begin to close in: propriety can't compete with the possibility of warmth. There will still be nights when it is so cold that your breath freezes in your throat, and waiting for Dick you will succumb and drink furtively for hours, and creep off to sleep numbly under a tarp alone. More often, though, you will be with him until morning. Sometimes Sergeant Lipton will come into the tent with a report on such mornings, while the two of you are sitting hip to hip or scalding your hands on the same cup of coffee. Lipton, you will often suspect (have always suspected) is no fool; but as First Sergeant it's his job to know things. In any case, he will never say anything, just smile on occasion and go about his business.
One morning you will be dragged out of vague, sheepish slumber under your tarp by a young officer with a letter. The order will say that you can go home for a while, to a place where you don't choke on your own breath and the trees don't explode almost daily.
You'll send Lieutenant Peacock in your place. You'll wait with Dick instead to sleep the long, nightmarish winter together, because you've always been a quick study, loath to repeat a mistake.
This time, you'll stay.
Leave-Taking
"I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end...."
--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Not five hours into your 48-hour pass to England, you come home plagued by a dream that isn't yours. You wake with a start in the muggy air of the train, your cheek shockingly cool against the window, sweating, shivering, floundering in the eddies of this dream -- dreamed, you think, on another dim train hurtling eastward. You wake remembering little, only that once you were late somewhere (a field, a road?), and it won't happen again.
You're a quick study, loath to repeat a mistake, and have been since before the Army got hold of you. In prep school, it only took one run-in with the master's ruler for you to memorize your lessons, or else to cheat, to write formulas and dates discreetly on the backs of your hands. Some things never change: now you're trying to cheat time, racing back on the evening train to Mourmelon, Mourmelon and the little room that you and Dick share.
He's not due back until late tomorrow. The first night you hardly sleep, stirring at intervals in your narrow bed, half-expecting him to come in cold from the street. The second night you don't even bother. You set out a case of Vat 69 and a pile of the latest intelligence reports, and like hunkering in a foxhole, you settle down to wait, the night contracting into this one vigil, this one burning lamp.
Dick returns earlier than you expected. When you hear him on the stairs, you only have time to disguise the alcohol behind a mountain of paperwork. It's stupid, but you do it anyway; because you won't come home drunk, nor will you let him come home to find you drunk. Not yet.
"How was your trip?" asks Dick as soon as he gets through the door. He's usually not much for idle conversation, and the question is strained. So is he, when you look up at him: strained, rigid, pale.
"It was fine," you say, and don't mention the claustrophobia of the train, or that somehow you know the nightmare he's been having, or that there was no girl you went to visit. "Aldbourne's lovely this time of year. Rain, rain... more rain." You try a grin. "How was yours?"
"Oh, fine too."
"City of lights, huh?" you offer lamely.
"Yeah, city of lights." He pauses, avoiding your eyes. "So they tell me. I didn't see much. Rode the Metro to the end of the line, walked to my hotel... came back." His voice is hollow, ranging, expansive, like the desolate whistle of the tree branches against your window. "I'm going to bed, Lew," he says, and slips into the adjoining room.
"Well," you say to the emptiness, subdued, "maybe I will have a drink." You choose a bottle from its hiding place, but you don't open it, because its hard, contoured weight reminds you of a canteen in your fist, and heat bright as glass, and the pull of your disused calf muscles as you squatted by a roadside. Under your breath, you murmur, "To the end of the line," and you think about that, too, that remote finger of the Paris Metro crooked into the city's back pocket. You've come up against your share of blind alleys in the middle of the night -- there's a reason you know to buy your Vat 69 by the case -- and that's why you replace the bottle and follow Dick.
His room is at once familiar and uncomfortable. You step in gingerly, cagily, aware in every nerve of entering someone else's territory: one thing the Army has taught you assiduously is where the lines of propriety lay. You probably cross more than a few when you sit next to Dick on the bed and rest a casual hand on his shoulder.
"If you're going to sleep," you say, "why do you still have your coat on?"
Dick looks at you. "I was about to take it off."
"That's why they gave you an aide," you reply teasingly, "because you can't do anything for yourself." You reach up and undo the first brass button on his uniform coat, and a part of you shrinks from this flouting of unspoken law. What a stupid, hackneyed way to think of it, "a part of you" -- but there's something to that, because foggily you remember a biology professor at Yale who asked with an affected drawl if perhaps Mr. Nixon could explain to the class why a head injury might cause one's pupils to dilate differently. The answer (you have it memorized now, because you hate to be wrong) was that in the event of brain damage, the primitive system that allows independent dilation sometimes takes over. So it's like that, you think with preternatural calm. Here on the bed beside Dick, you put aside the part the Army has superimposed, and you operate on long-buried instinct.
Dick just keeps looking at you, unblinkingly. You smile and continue the job one-handed, with the other hand traveling along his neck, fingers stroking his jawline in passing. You finish at last -- Dick moves for the first time, shrugging out of his sleeves, staring -- and as you take the coat, you feel in the pocket the crumpled bulge of his 48-hour pass. Touching it, you find yourself momentarily frozen by guilt without knowing why -- as though you were the one who went away first. You set the coat aside in disarray, inside out; know the feeling.
Dick swallows and says, "For a city of lights, it sure was dark."
"Because you went there at night," you say, and then, with less bravado, "I'm sorry, Dick. I thought you wanted to go." His eyes shift, and in them you see the unending bloody sprawl of that crossroads near Nijmegen where you stood beside him in the dust, and the flash of his exposed throat as he gratefully gulped from your canteen. You remember with the clarity of pain how that was the first time you were really afraid of the war.
He smiles and says, "No harm done." And maybe not, maybe not, but just barely. That's all the reason you need to duck in and kiss that clean shell-like curve of his throat, with your forgotten hand exploring the back of his neck. Dick, startled, arches up reflexively with his palms pressed to your shoulders, and lets you.
This is the first night you sleep together, though you're in no way strange to each other. It's only perplexing because it's never happened before, not in the low bunks of Toccoa or the crude shelters of Normandy. Or maybe it has, you muse as like a swimmer you lithely submerge yourself in sleep, the world realigning itself waterily; maybe it's happened many times before, only without touch. You've shared the intimacy of lovers since long before France.
Later, in the Ardennes Forest, you will sleep together almost every night. Many of the men will, when the four walls of the foxhole begin to close in: propriety can't compete with the possibility of warmth. There will still be nights when it is so cold that your breath freezes in your throat, and waiting for Dick you will succumb and drink furtively for hours, and creep off to sleep numbly under a tarp alone. More often, though, you will be with him until morning. Sometimes Sergeant Lipton will come into the tent with a report on such mornings, while the two of you are sitting hip to hip or scalding your hands on the same cup of coffee. Lipton, you will often suspect (have always suspected) is no fool; but as First Sergeant it's his job to know things. In any case, he will never say anything, just smile on occasion and go about his business.
One morning you will be dragged out of vague, sheepish slumber under your tarp by a young officer with a letter. The order will say that you can go home for a while, to a place where you don't choke on your own breath and the trees don't explode almost daily.
You'll send Lieutenant Peacock in your place. You'll wait with Dick instead to sleep the long, nightmarish winter together, because you've always been a quick study, loath to repeat a mistake.
This time, you'll stay.