Gift Exchange, Christmas 2010 (for ifreet)
*squeaks in under the wire, covered in tinsel and wrapping paper shreds*
Title: le geste oublié, l'action supplémentaire
Fandom: BoB
Recipient: ifreet
Author: omphale23
Format: Fic
Character: Dick Winters (Nixon/Winters heavily implied)
Request: BOB, Winters/Nixon FIC
Notes: I couldn't resist taking a new crack at our original pairing in this. The title is from Rilke, Vergers, XLI. ifreet, I hope you like how it turned out!
***
That spring, in a tiny flat in London, they didn't say goodbye. No promises made, no more than vague intentions to meet again on the other side of the Atlantic. Neither of them mentioned Chicago or New York or anything having to do with home. When Lew stepped onto a ship bound for the States, Dick wasn’t waiting on the dock to wave farewell. (He didn’t ask Lew to wait for him, to save a place, to make plans. They were not that sort of men, and never had been).
But Dick had long ago memorized the address, and if he’d forgotten, he could have sent a letter to Nixon, New Jersey and relied on the trappings of wealth to do the rest.
All of his efforts fell apart, caught up in the sharp diagonals of Dear Lew, silence clumping into the empty space below. Once, he managed a few paragraphs, stilted sentences full of England is strange without your laugh and I’m not entirely sure that the Army knows what to do with me now that violence has receded. Dick’s courage failed at the signature, unable to choose among Sincerely and Take care and Yours Truly. He tore the page into tiny pieces and didn’t try again.
He'd offered his telephone number, in a dark room in Belgium, when neither of them believed that it would mean anything (could believe they’d make it that far). Whispered the 2-5 exchange under his breath, half-convinced that Lew was already asleep, and if not, certainly too drunk to remember the conversation that prompted it.
The day he stepped off the train onto Pennsylvania dirt, Dick found the whole family waiting, aunts and uncles and parents, even his baby sister, grown tall and thin in his absence. He smiled, shook hands, carried his own bag to the car. The sun was shining and neighbors waved and his mother's chatter slid around him, filled in the spaces in the conversation, wound around the replies Dick couldn't (wouldn't, maybe, didn’t, shouldn’t) offer quickly.
On the table in the hall rested a pile of papers. They counted backward, a calendar in reverse. Each day, from Lew’s return to civilian ranks to his own, neatly labeled in his mother’s careful handwriting. Message from Mr. Lewis Nixon and Please telephone when you hit Stateside and Local Nitration Works short one redheaded personnel manager, please advise.
Dick crumpled the pages into a ball and threw them into the trash. Later that night, as the house settled into stillness around him and he paced the rooms once more (checking for threats he left unnamed, unconsidered), Dick found the rescued notes smoothed beneath the paperweight on his bookcase.
Lew continued to phone every day, leaving messages that Dick gathered up from the hall table and sorted into a neat stack, folded in his footlocker beneath the Army-issue socks he wouldn't throw out (too warm, too many memories of making do and his mother bent over a darning needle, layered with the smell of fir trees and cordite). Dick had ignored the notes, tried to settle back into life.
Once, just once, as he stood in the kitchen doorway and shook his head, no, please don’t tell him, his mother hesitated (she’d raised him not to lie, to confront his weaknesses and accept them, to admit his mistakes). At the dinner table, she told his father, "Such a polite young man, always asking how we're all doing, even when he's in a hurry." A week later, it was, “He sounds lonely, in that big old house. Forlorn.” (She had a soft spot for lost little boys, and Lew had been lost more often than most.)
Dick excused himself and walked away, marched himself around the block until the buzz and roar in his thoughts quieted to a familiar hum. On the way home, he stopped at the telegraph office and sent a terse reply. PLEASE DONT STOP SORRY FULL STOP.
Lew ignored the request (of course he did, he always ignored orders he disliked, he never changed).
His father watched Dick gather up the pages each night, silent, and never mentioned the expense of long-distance telephone relays. His father's friends stopped by, made small talk, hinted about job openings and VFW meetings. Offered him drinks, down at the local Elks. Asked about the action he'd seen, their faces wistful at half-forgotten French names. (He never had a reply, couldn't imagine beginning such a story, simply shrugged and let them believe him modest).
When the church bells jangled, Dick curled into his blankets with a pillow over his head. Even after the daily calls trailed away in disappointment, the ringing followed him into fitful sleep on Sunday mornings (ten, eleven, late enough that Saturday was surely a fading ache in Lew's head, early enough that the rest of the Nixon dynasty wouldn't notice). Dick started unhooking the receiver on Saturday nights, replacing it just before his father's keys clicked in the lock.
He caught his mother conspiring down the line, but she hushed as he slipped past up the stairs. (Her voice would murmur under the bedroom door, and Dick didn’t listen, didn’t interpret the pauses, didn’t think about the distances voices could travel through wires).
The messages were joined by telegrams, crackling paper in anonymous typescript. NEW JERSEY TOO QUIET STOP PENNSYLVANIA PROBABLY STULTIFYING STOP AT LEAST COME VISIT STOP WILL HAVE THE HOUSEMAID MAKE UP A NICE ROOM FOR YOU STOP HAVE VERY EXPENSIVE SHEETS FULL STOP. After that, Dick forced himself out of bed on his day of rest. He dressed neatly in clothes that smelled faintly of camphor. He sat in a pew, listening to psalms and hearing whistles and explosions.
The telephone chimed as they walked in the door after services, but his mother looked at Dick's expression the first week and left it ring.
There were ghosts on the line. Men Dick didn't mention, voices he no longer heard. Lew would understand, eventually. (Lew wouldn't understand. Or he wouldn't care. Dick pretended not to know the difference.)
He ignored the telegrams (awful, the way they followed him around, appearing at the bank, the hardware store, wherever his mother sent the messenger in search of Dick, her patient cheer wearing on his nerves until he snapped at people who asked innocently about his future). He read them only at night, in the thin warmth of the desk lamp. HOUSE TOO BIG STOP ENJOYING HOT WATER STOP MORE STUBBORN THAN YOU THOUGHT STOP DIVERSIFYING MY PORTFOLIO STOP THAT MEANS MAY BUY STOCK IN WESTERN UNION FULL STOP.
The leaves fell, and children rattling sticks along the fence out front left him gasping. The pile of library books next to his bed rose and fell, like tides and tracer bullets, economics and chemistry battling against James and Dos Passos.
Deer season opened. Bundled into wool and his cheeks stinging in the cold, Dick hesitated in the field, stiffened and froze with a buck in his sights. His father ignored the stuttered pause, carried on as if nothing were wrong, even when it happened again, even when Dick jumped at the echoing roar of nearby hunters.
They didn't bring home any game, and his mother sighed and shook her head, handing Dick another telegram as he hung his coat beside the door. CANNOT WITHSTAND ANOTHER RIDICULOUS DINNER STOP PREFER RISKING WRATH OF SOBEL TO ONE MORE ELIGIBLE DEBUTANTE STOP WILL BOOK A TICKET TO PODUNK PENN IF NECESSARY BUT CHICAGO BETTER STOP HAVE ALMOST UNLIMITED FUNDS AND COPIOUS FREE TIME STOP CAN WAIT WHILE YOU CONFIRM DEFINITION OF COPIOUS FULL STOP.
Dick cleaned his shotgun and snapped it into the case. He sat at his desk, up under the eaves in the bedroom he'd slept in for a decade, and started a dozen letters. Wrote out telegrams until the words blurred together and reworked themselves into apologies.
In the end he destroyed them all, swearing roughly when he burnt his fingers on a shaking match. As the night began to shift to gray Dick shook himself, locked his gun into the cabinet next to his father’s, and failed to sleep for the rest of the night. (He’d dreamed of nothing but scarlet and whiskey and snow for months, and hardly objected to the change).
The next morning, just as the first sunlight hit the eaves, Dick made his way downstairs. He stared at the telephone for a long moment, wrapped his fingers around the receiver, and took a deep breath as he began to dial, one-one-zero, counting out the seconds until the operator came on the line.
Title: le geste oublié, l'action supplémentaire
Fandom: BoB
Recipient: ifreet
Author: omphale23
Format: Fic
Character: Dick Winters (Nixon/Winters heavily implied)
Request: BOB, Winters/Nixon FIC
Notes: I couldn't resist taking a new crack at our original pairing in this. The title is from Rilke, Vergers, XLI. ifreet, I hope you like how it turned out!
***
That spring, in a tiny flat in London, they didn't say goodbye. No promises made, no more than vague intentions to meet again on the other side of the Atlantic. Neither of them mentioned Chicago or New York or anything having to do with home. When Lew stepped onto a ship bound for the States, Dick wasn’t waiting on the dock to wave farewell. (He didn’t ask Lew to wait for him, to save a place, to make plans. They were not that sort of men, and never had been).
But Dick had long ago memorized the address, and if he’d forgotten, he could have sent a letter to Nixon, New Jersey and relied on the trappings of wealth to do the rest.
All of his efforts fell apart, caught up in the sharp diagonals of Dear Lew, silence clumping into the empty space below. Once, he managed a few paragraphs, stilted sentences full of England is strange without your laugh and I’m not entirely sure that the Army knows what to do with me now that violence has receded. Dick’s courage failed at the signature, unable to choose among Sincerely and Take care and Yours Truly. He tore the page into tiny pieces and didn’t try again.
He'd offered his telephone number, in a dark room in Belgium, when neither of them believed that it would mean anything (could believe they’d make it that far). Whispered the 2-5 exchange under his breath, half-convinced that Lew was already asleep, and if not, certainly too drunk to remember the conversation that prompted it.
The day he stepped off the train onto Pennsylvania dirt, Dick found the whole family waiting, aunts and uncles and parents, even his baby sister, grown tall and thin in his absence. He smiled, shook hands, carried his own bag to the car. The sun was shining and neighbors waved and his mother's chatter slid around him, filled in the spaces in the conversation, wound around the replies Dick couldn't (wouldn't, maybe, didn’t, shouldn’t) offer quickly.
On the table in the hall rested a pile of papers. They counted backward, a calendar in reverse. Each day, from Lew’s return to civilian ranks to his own, neatly labeled in his mother’s careful handwriting. Message from Mr. Lewis Nixon and Please telephone when you hit Stateside and Local Nitration Works short one redheaded personnel manager, please advise.
Dick crumpled the pages into a ball and threw them into the trash. Later that night, as the house settled into stillness around him and he paced the rooms once more (checking for threats he left unnamed, unconsidered), Dick found the rescued notes smoothed beneath the paperweight on his bookcase.
Lew continued to phone every day, leaving messages that Dick gathered up from the hall table and sorted into a neat stack, folded in his footlocker beneath the Army-issue socks he wouldn't throw out (too warm, too many memories of making do and his mother bent over a darning needle, layered with the smell of fir trees and cordite). Dick had ignored the notes, tried to settle back into life.
Once, just once, as he stood in the kitchen doorway and shook his head, no, please don’t tell him, his mother hesitated (she’d raised him not to lie, to confront his weaknesses and accept them, to admit his mistakes). At the dinner table, she told his father, "Such a polite young man, always asking how we're all doing, even when he's in a hurry." A week later, it was, “He sounds lonely, in that big old house. Forlorn.” (She had a soft spot for lost little boys, and Lew had been lost more often than most.)
Dick excused himself and walked away, marched himself around the block until the buzz and roar in his thoughts quieted to a familiar hum. On the way home, he stopped at the telegraph office and sent a terse reply. PLEASE DONT STOP SORRY FULL STOP.
Lew ignored the request (of course he did, he always ignored orders he disliked, he never changed).
His father watched Dick gather up the pages each night, silent, and never mentioned the expense of long-distance telephone relays. His father's friends stopped by, made small talk, hinted about job openings and VFW meetings. Offered him drinks, down at the local Elks. Asked about the action he'd seen, their faces wistful at half-forgotten French names. (He never had a reply, couldn't imagine beginning such a story, simply shrugged and let them believe him modest).
When the church bells jangled, Dick curled into his blankets with a pillow over his head. Even after the daily calls trailed away in disappointment, the ringing followed him into fitful sleep on Sunday mornings (ten, eleven, late enough that Saturday was surely a fading ache in Lew's head, early enough that the rest of the Nixon dynasty wouldn't notice). Dick started unhooking the receiver on Saturday nights, replacing it just before his father's keys clicked in the lock.
He caught his mother conspiring down the line, but she hushed as he slipped past up the stairs. (Her voice would murmur under the bedroom door, and Dick didn’t listen, didn’t interpret the pauses, didn’t think about the distances voices could travel through wires).
The messages were joined by telegrams, crackling paper in anonymous typescript. NEW JERSEY TOO QUIET STOP PENNSYLVANIA PROBABLY STULTIFYING STOP AT LEAST COME VISIT STOP WILL HAVE THE HOUSEMAID MAKE UP A NICE ROOM FOR YOU STOP HAVE VERY EXPENSIVE SHEETS FULL STOP. After that, Dick forced himself out of bed on his day of rest. He dressed neatly in clothes that smelled faintly of camphor. He sat in a pew, listening to psalms and hearing whistles and explosions.
The telephone chimed as they walked in the door after services, but his mother looked at Dick's expression the first week and left it ring.
There were ghosts on the line. Men Dick didn't mention, voices he no longer heard. Lew would understand, eventually. (Lew wouldn't understand. Or he wouldn't care. Dick pretended not to know the difference.)
He ignored the telegrams (awful, the way they followed him around, appearing at the bank, the hardware store, wherever his mother sent the messenger in search of Dick, her patient cheer wearing on his nerves until he snapped at people who asked innocently about his future). He read them only at night, in the thin warmth of the desk lamp. HOUSE TOO BIG STOP ENJOYING HOT WATER STOP MORE STUBBORN THAN YOU THOUGHT STOP DIVERSIFYING MY PORTFOLIO STOP THAT MEANS MAY BUY STOCK IN WESTERN UNION FULL STOP.
The leaves fell, and children rattling sticks along the fence out front left him gasping. The pile of library books next to his bed rose and fell, like tides and tracer bullets, economics and chemistry battling against James and Dos Passos.
Deer season opened. Bundled into wool and his cheeks stinging in the cold, Dick hesitated in the field, stiffened and froze with a buck in his sights. His father ignored the stuttered pause, carried on as if nothing were wrong, even when it happened again, even when Dick jumped at the echoing roar of nearby hunters.
They didn't bring home any game, and his mother sighed and shook her head, handing Dick another telegram as he hung his coat beside the door. CANNOT WITHSTAND ANOTHER RIDICULOUS DINNER STOP PREFER RISKING WRATH OF SOBEL TO ONE MORE ELIGIBLE DEBUTANTE STOP WILL BOOK A TICKET TO PODUNK PENN IF NECESSARY BUT CHICAGO BETTER STOP HAVE ALMOST UNLIMITED FUNDS AND COPIOUS FREE TIME STOP CAN WAIT WHILE YOU CONFIRM DEFINITION OF COPIOUS FULL STOP.
Dick cleaned his shotgun and snapped it into the case. He sat at his desk, up under the eaves in the bedroom he'd slept in for a decade, and started a dozen letters. Wrote out telegrams until the words blurred together and reworked themselves into apologies.
In the end he destroyed them all, swearing roughly when he burnt his fingers on a shaking match. As the night began to shift to gray Dick shook himself, locked his gun into the cabinet next to his father’s, and failed to sleep for the rest of the night. (He’d dreamed of nothing but scarlet and whiskey and snow for months, and hardly objected to the change).
The next morning, just as the first sunlight hit the eaves, Dick made his way downstairs. He stared at the telephone for a long moment, wrapped his fingers around the receiver, and took a deep breath as he began to dial, one-one-zero, counting out the seconds until the operator came on the line.