Band of Brothers fic
Boys Missing Shoes [Winters/Nixon, PG-13]
By Chloe
* * *
Lewis Nixon takes a swig from his flask and says to you with drunken clarity, “kiss me like you are going off to war.”
“I’m already off to war,” you tell him.
“So kiss me any way at all then,” he says.
You consider saying his name, saying No Nix, no Lewis, that’s really not a very good idea. But you don’t remember ever using his first name, even though he calls you Dick. You think it’s because Winters is hard to shorten. Dick sounds more personal, more comfortable. You started calling Nixon “Nix” within a week of knowing him. Better that way, more familiar, brotherly. If you called him Lewis now it might jar him a little, get him to stop smiling at you in that sweetly sardonic manner that belongs only to him.
“There’s not going to be any kissing,” you offer instead.
“Now Captain,” Nixon says. “That isn’t very fair at all. I haven’t kissed anyone in months and here I am offering-”
“Now here you are plastered,” you say and Nixon sort of shrugs gracelessly and takes an overly careful sip from his flask like he’s acknowledging the truth of your words.
“Drunk but lucid, lucid but sane,” he says.
“Nix, you haven’t been sane since I met you, and I don’t think you’ve been sober either.”
There, saying his name makes you feel better somehow, gives you some kind of footing where you had previously just been dangling. Nixon is reclining on one of those fancy fainting couches except it’s dirty. You are sitting on the edge of the bed that you claimed as your own when the officers took over this house as HQ. Hours ago Nixon came up to get his booze out of your footlocker and since you were only writing up a short report he decided to stay a while, and a while, and a while.
“Harsh but true, that’s our Captain Winters,” he says with a nod at you like he is about to segue into an impromptu soliloquy.
You laugh noncommittally.
“Have I always been harsh?” you ask yourself more than Nixon, but know you are going to get some kind of answer from him.
Nix cannot help himself. He always has to say something, something snappy and light or suddenly cryptic. His moods work funny and his sentences follow. He’s almost childish with his fancies. He is the only childish alcoholic that you know, but you cannot yet admit that Nixon is an alcoholic. Your friend Lewis Nixon, he drinks because the war is so bad, because it has affected him so strongly, because he is in pain. He didn’t drink this much when you were stateside, you tell yourself, even though you know that he did drink a lot then and that it has only gotten worse since you shipped out together.
“Eh, you’re not so harsh, Dick. Sure you won’t kiss me, but I think that’s okay. That’s not your own fault."
After he speaks, you look directly at him for the first time since he invaded your room boisterously with the expectation--like a little boy--that you would stop everything and play with him.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Not my fault?” you ask.
“Sure,” he says, “I’ll tell you why.”
You keep your eyes on him, you watch him sip his flask to wet his throat and his lips. You half expect him to do vocal exercises before he begins speaking again.
“When I was a boy,” Nixon says and you realize foolishly that he hasn’t really told you all that much about when he was a boy.
“When I was a boy,” he starts again, “my parents took me to upstate New York and we stayed at the home of this old oil mogul who had mines in South Africa and a crazy Russian brother-in-law who had married the man’s maiden sister and flew a plane with skis over the lake there. And there were cats and horses and fancy cars like the ones my father had and even though I was never much for cars I was in awe of the whole thing.”
He pauses, takes a breath, keeps going and you have no idea where.
“There were so many people,” he says, “and I was used to people, but there were so many people at this man’s house and even though it was a house, it was more like a hotel that moved as though it were a great machine oiled with its owners’ black gold and everyday it was the same wonderful routine. In the morning we would run across the lawn and down to lake after breakfast and we’d spend the whole day laughing and swimming, and the dogs-there were dogs, too-would swim with us. Us, I’m saying us aren’t I? Me and the oil mogul’s son-that was the us- would spend the whole day swimming and we’d canoe out to this little island with one of the dogs and he had a son, Dick. The oil mogul had a son my age. I was fifteen. Do you see, Dick? Do you see?”
You are on the verge of slipping away from Nixon’s voice when he says your name for a second time.
“Do I see what?” you ask him, and you want to see what he is trying to tell you in his own brand of avoidance, you really want to see. You just cannot find the point in this fairytale summer story, you don’t understand what lakeside manors and fancy cars and dogs have to do with you being harsh or why you won’t kiss him, even though you suspect you might now if he asks because you like how incoherent he was a moment ago, and you like how the color rose in his cheeks due to something other than drink. You like how passionately he just spoke at you even though you do not know what the point was.
“Do you see,” he says slowly like you are an idiot child or the drunken one, “why you will not kiss me, but why I will kiss you?”
Nervousness rises like bile in your throat, and for too long a moment you just look at one another. You must look sallow and pale in the dimming light of this bedroom. The sky is as grey as your skin must be. Somehow you feel scruffy despite being shaven, dirty despite your recent shower. You can hear the men of Easy Company two houses over. They are celebrating their short reprieve from war with drink and new rations that have been gathered. There is more chocolate. There is enough to around-even to the replacements and the Easy boys who have found their way back from being AWOL too long. Everyone is in a good mood tonight; you have given them the equivalent of a night-off.
Nixon keeps his eyes on you, doesn’t even drop them to his own hand when he raises his flask to his lips. He is waiting for you to make your own conclusion, but instead you think of the brand new officer-with his opalescent skin and puppy-dog features, with his West Point degree and his eager and uninformed desire for combat-who you are ordering elsewhere tomorrow. He does not belong here with Easy Company’s living casualties of war. He does not belong here with you, or plastered Nixon who seems to want you.
You think of the Germans your boys have captured, who until they are given serial numbers will be assumed missing or dead-most likely dead-by their families, yet unreached by the International Red Cross which takes care of sordid things like casualties and captures and boys missing shoes.
“Dick,” Nixon says, finally breaking the silence that was filling up the room and drawing you mentally toward the little fainting couch, or maybe downstairs to coo at the German prisoners and somehow comfort them even if the desire to comfort is out of character for you. Nix’s story made you feel intoxicated and confused; his droopy dark eyes are asking you to comfort him instead. “Dick, do you want a drink?” He offers you his flask and you take it.
The metal is warm in your frozen hands, and the liquid inside sloshes against the walls. It occurs to you that you don’t actually know what Nixon drinks when he does, or how he keeps coming up with new bottles of hard liquor and not the various kinds of wine that seem to fall off trees like apples here in Europe. You take a sip and the booze-scotch, it seems-burns your throat sweetly.
You drank after D-Day, and you haven’t since. You drink tonight because your stomach is just as upset and your hands are threatening to start shaking on you. For a moment you contemplate shell-shock, but then realize how stupid you are. You are only aroused; but you haven’t felt like this in so long that the way your entire body is humming feels like trauma.
“Lewis,” you say, but swallow your words before they come. Outside, there is raucous laughter from the enlisted men. You can hear glasses clinking.
“Yeah, Dick? What?” He looks worried. The light from the portable lamp you have set up makes Nixon’s feature look sharper than they are, casts his rounded cheeks into shadow, and hides his facial hair.
“I think I might understand a little,” you say and are hit with the mental image you have been trying to avoid, just like Nixon tried to avoid saying it straight out. You can him cutting through the water on his side, slimmer and younger. Beside him there is a blond boy his own age, and they dive beneath the water and come up smiling under the sunlight. You haven’t seen bright sunlight in so long, you haven’t swum either.
In your head you see Lewis Nixon, and the childhood friend your have conjured for him, running under the sky brushing pine trees of a tiny island. You see a dog lounging on warm rocks while the boys share the secrets of teenagers and drink from the same flask Nixon carries now, engaging in dangerously stupid rebellion. You see the dog sleeping and Nix-called Lew, by this mysterious boy-sits awake with his friend under the summer stars, and they embrace and you understand what you really did understand in the first place even if you didn’t want to.
“I think I understand a lot,” you say.
Nixon-real, living Nixon, who you know smells of alcohol and soap and maybe the army-looks skeptically at you and gets up unsteadily from his couch to come and sit by your side.
“How much do you understand,” he asks you when he is settled and has taken his flask back.
“Does that make you a queer?” you ask.
Nixon laughs. “Only in some cases,” he says and wrinkles his nose. “If I weren’t here I’d be with some sweet girl with a sweet, high laugh.”
You know he isn’t lying because you remember being on-leave at Officer’s Training and you remember Nixon being scolding for lipstick stains and occasional stains of another kind. You remember watching him go out on a weekend pass and you remember watching him come home giddy and stupid. You never took your weekend passes off-base, even when Nixon invited you along.
“Hmmmmm,” you say.
“What?”
“I don’t have a sweet, high laugh,” and Nixon grins roguishly at you and takes a long gulp from his never-emptying flask.
“You’re not much of a girl, either,” he says.
“Well,” you say and cross your legs waspishly because you still have an erection.
Nixon touches your skin then, just presses the palm of his hand against your cheek. You are used to him touching you. At first he would force contact, come up and place a hand on your back, stand close to you; rest an arm over your shoulders. He made you uncomfortable for a while because you don’t come from one of those affectionate families; you didn’t get hugged all that often when you were a kid. His hand is warm and smooth on your face; his fingers aren’t calloused like your own. You lean into his touch because you have to, not because you want to.
He looks you over and your permanently pursed lips fall open like a fish’s. He makes a noise low in his throat and pulls his eyebrows together so hard that you can tell he’s concentrating on something.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what would happen if I were to kiss you now. Maybe not like a soldier going off to war, but a kiss none the less.”
“I might punch you in the jaw,” you say, but know that you will really just kiss him back. “I’m not a queer,” you say.
“Neither am I,” Nixon replies. “Although I was popular in high school.”
“What-”
But Lewis Nixon has closed the gap between you and his hand has slipped from your cheek to the back of your neck and he is kissing you. Your legs uncross themselves and you slide unintentionally, maddeningly closer to him on this borrowed bed. There is no punching involved in this kiss, except perhaps your rapidly beating heart punching against your ribs. He tastes like he smells, like you expected him to and when he pulls back without even touching his tongue to your lips, you feel bereft.
“Fuck,” you say and you have never been much of a swearing man.
Nixon looks at you quite seriously and smoothes his hands through your fiery hair. “I guess you do understand then,” he says and goes to kiss you again.
You stop him with a hand on his shoulder and take his flask away. You put it on the floor.
“Are you kissing me now because I wouldn’t kiss you or because you are drunk?” You do not mean to sound hurt, or insecure. You didn’t even realize that you wanted Nixon to kiss you about ten minutes ago.
“I’ve been a lot drunker than I am now,” Nixon says. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since before D-Day.”
You remember walking among the tents with Nix. He mentioned Chicago. He wanted to take you there and you’d never been. You remember the way he stood so close to you in the early dawn. He had been drinking then, too. Some people are more affectionate when they have been drinking; when Nixon has been drinking he wants to kiss you. Nixon always seems to be drinking. It works out then.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”
He kisses you again and this time you do not think of anything. You do not think of the German prisoners or your boys who sit around shooting the shit two houses over. You do not think of the dying Jews that you will find in a few days because you don’t know about them yet. You do not think about Nixon, New Jersey where you will eventually go home with this man, and you do not think about the war.
For the first time in years, you do not think at all.
* * *
And so ends my first BoB fic. Hope it wasn't all too horrid, since I know I was majorly lacking in something called plot.
By Chloe
* * *
Lewis Nixon takes a swig from his flask and says to you with drunken clarity, “kiss me like you are going off to war.”
“I’m already off to war,” you tell him.
“So kiss me any way at all then,” he says.
You consider saying his name, saying No Nix, no Lewis, that’s really not a very good idea. But you don’t remember ever using his first name, even though he calls you Dick. You think it’s because Winters is hard to shorten. Dick sounds more personal, more comfortable. You started calling Nixon “Nix” within a week of knowing him. Better that way, more familiar, brotherly. If you called him Lewis now it might jar him a little, get him to stop smiling at you in that sweetly sardonic manner that belongs only to him.
“There’s not going to be any kissing,” you offer instead.
“Now Captain,” Nixon says. “That isn’t very fair at all. I haven’t kissed anyone in months and here I am offering-”
“Now here you are plastered,” you say and Nixon sort of shrugs gracelessly and takes an overly careful sip from his flask like he’s acknowledging the truth of your words.
“Drunk but lucid, lucid but sane,” he says.
“Nix, you haven’t been sane since I met you, and I don’t think you’ve been sober either.”
There, saying his name makes you feel better somehow, gives you some kind of footing where you had previously just been dangling. Nixon is reclining on one of those fancy fainting couches except it’s dirty. You are sitting on the edge of the bed that you claimed as your own when the officers took over this house as HQ. Hours ago Nixon came up to get his booze out of your footlocker and since you were only writing up a short report he decided to stay a while, and a while, and a while.
“Harsh but true, that’s our Captain Winters,” he says with a nod at you like he is about to segue into an impromptu soliloquy.
You laugh noncommittally.
“Have I always been harsh?” you ask yourself more than Nixon, but know you are going to get some kind of answer from him.
Nix cannot help himself. He always has to say something, something snappy and light or suddenly cryptic. His moods work funny and his sentences follow. He’s almost childish with his fancies. He is the only childish alcoholic that you know, but you cannot yet admit that Nixon is an alcoholic. Your friend Lewis Nixon, he drinks because the war is so bad, because it has affected him so strongly, because he is in pain. He didn’t drink this much when you were stateside, you tell yourself, even though you know that he did drink a lot then and that it has only gotten worse since you shipped out together.
“Eh, you’re not so harsh, Dick. Sure you won’t kiss me, but I think that’s okay. That’s not your own fault."
After he speaks, you look directly at him for the first time since he invaded your room boisterously with the expectation--like a little boy--that you would stop everything and play with him.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Not my fault?” you ask.
“Sure,” he says, “I’ll tell you why.”
You keep your eyes on him, you watch him sip his flask to wet his throat and his lips. You half expect him to do vocal exercises before he begins speaking again.
“When I was a boy,” Nixon says and you realize foolishly that he hasn’t really told you all that much about when he was a boy.
“When I was a boy,” he starts again, “my parents took me to upstate New York and we stayed at the home of this old oil mogul who had mines in South Africa and a crazy Russian brother-in-law who had married the man’s maiden sister and flew a plane with skis over the lake there. And there were cats and horses and fancy cars like the ones my father had and even though I was never much for cars I was in awe of the whole thing.”
He pauses, takes a breath, keeps going and you have no idea where.
“There were so many people,” he says, “and I was used to people, but there were so many people at this man’s house and even though it was a house, it was more like a hotel that moved as though it were a great machine oiled with its owners’ black gold and everyday it was the same wonderful routine. In the morning we would run across the lawn and down to lake after breakfast and we’d spend the whole day laughing and swimming, and the dogs-there were dogs, too-would swim with us. Us, I’m saying us aren’t I? Me and the oil mogul’s son-that was the us- would spend the whole day swimming and we’d canoe out to this little island with one of the dogs and he had a son, Dick. The oil mogul had a son my age. I was fifteen. Do you see, Dick? Do you see?”
You are on the verge of slipping away from Nixon’s voice when he says your name for a second time.
“Do I see what?” you ask him, and you want to see what he is trying to tell you in his own brand of avoidance, you really want to see. You just cannot find the point in this fairytale summer story, you don’t understand what lakeside manors and fancy cars and dogs have to do with you being harsh or why you won’t kiss him, even though you suspect you might now if he asks because you like how incoherent he was a moment ago, and you like how the color rose in his cheeks due to something other than drink. You like how passionately he just spoke at you even though you do not know what the point was.
“Do you see,” he says slowly like you are an idiot child or the drunken one, “why you will not kiss me, but why I will kiss you?”
Nervousness rises like bile in your throat, and for too long a moment you just look at one another. You must look sallow and pale in the dimming light of this bedroom. The sky is as grey as your skin must be. Somehow you feel scruffy despite being shaven, dirty despite your recent shower. You can hear the men of Easy Company two houses over. They are celebrating their short reprieve from war with drink and new rations that have been gathered. There is more chocolate. There is enough to around-even to the replacements and the Easy boys who have found their way back from being AWOL too long. Everyone is in a good mood tonight; you have given them the equivalent of a night-off.
Nixon keeps his eyes on you, doesn’t even drop them to his own hand when he raises his flask to his lips. He is waiting for you to make your own conclusion, but instead you think of the brand new officer-with his opalescent skin and puppy-dog features, with his West Point degree and his eager and uninformed desire for combat-who you are ordering elsewhere tomorrow. He does not belong here with Easy Company’s living casualties of war. He does not belong here with you, or plastered Nixon who seems to want you.
You think of the Germans your boys have captured, who until they are given serial numbers will be assumed missing or dead-most likely dead-by their families, yet unreached by the International Red Cross which takes care of sordid things like casualties and captures and boys missing shoes.
“Dick,” Nixon says, finally breaking the silence that was filling up the room and drawing you mentally toward the little fainting couch, or maybe downstairs to coo at the German prisoners and somehow comfort them even if the desire to comfort is out of character for you. Nix’s story made you feel intoxicated and confused; his droopy dark eyes are asking you to comfort him instead. “Dick, do you want a drink?” He offers you his flask and you take it.
The metal is warm in your frozen hands, and the liquid inside sloshes against the walls. It occurs to you that you don’t actually know what Nixon drinks when he does, or how he keeps coming up with new bottles of hard liquor and not the various kinds of wine that seem to fall off trees like apples here in Europe. You take a sip and the booze-scotch, it seems-burns your throat sweetly.
You drank after D-Day, and you haven’t since. You drink tonight because your stomach is just as upset and your hands are threatening to start shaking on you. For a moment you contemplate shell-shock, but then realize how stupid you are. You are only aroused; but you haven’t felt like this in so long that the way your entire body is humming feels like trauma.
“Lewis,” you say, but swallow your words before they come. Outside, there is raucous laughter from the enlisted men. You can hear glasses clinking.
“Yeah, Dick? What?” He looks worried. The light from the portable lamp you have set up makes Nixon’s feature look sharper than they are, casts his rounded cheeks into shadow, and hides his facial hair.
“I think I might understand a little,” you say and are hit with the mental image you have been trying to avoid, just like Nixon tried to avoid saying it straight out. You can him cutting through the water on his side, slimmer and younger. Beside him there is a blond boy his own age, and they dive beneath the water and come up smiling under the sunlight. You haven’t seen bright sunlight in so long, you haven’t swum either.
In your head you see Lewis Nixon, and the childhood friend your have conjured for him, running under the sky brushing pine trees of a tiny island. You see a dog lounging on warm rocks while the boys share the secrets of teenagers and drink from the same flask Nixon carries now, engaging in dangerously stupid rebellion. You see the dog sleeping and Nix-called Lew, by this mysterious boy-sits awake with his friend under the summer stars, and they embrace and you understand what you really did understand in the first place even if you didn’t want to.
“I think I understand a lot,” you say.
Nixon-real, living Nixon, who you know smells of alcohol and soap and maybe the army-looks skeptically at you and gets up unsteadily from his couch to come and sit by your side.
“How much do you understand,” he asks you when he is settled and has taken his flask back.
“Does that make you a queer?” you ask.
Nixon laughs. “Only in some cases,” he says and wrinkles his nose. “If I weren’t here I’d be with some sweet girl with a sweet, high laugh.”
You know he isn’t lying because you remember being on-leave at Officer’s Training and you remember Nixon being scolding for lipstick stains and occasional stains of another kind. You remember watching him go out on a weekend pass and you remember watching him come home giddy and stupid. You never took your weekend passes off-base, even when Nixon invited you along.
“Hmmmmm,” you say.
“What?”
“I don’t have a sweet, high laugh,” and Nixon grins roguishly at you and takes a long gulp from his never-emptying flask.
“You’re not much of a girl, either,” he says.
“Well,” you say and cross your legs waspishly because you still have an erection.
Nixon touches your skin then, just presses the palm of his hand against your cheek. You are used to him touching you. At first he would force contact, come up and place a hand on your back, stand close to you; rest an arm over your shoulders. He made you uncomfortable for a while because you don’t come from one of those affectionate families; you didn’t get hugged all that often when you were a kid. His hand is warm and smooth on your face; his fingers aren’t calloused like your own. You lean into his touch because you have to, not because you want to.
He looks you over and your permanently pursed lips fall open like a fish’s. He makes a noise low in his throat and pulls his eyebrows together so hard that you can tell he’s concentrating on something.
“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what would happen if I were to kiss you now. Maybe not like a soldier going off to war, but a kiss none the less.”
“I might punch you in the jaw,” you say, but know that you will really just kiss him back. “I’m not a queer,” you say.
“Neither am I,” Nixon replies. “Although I was popular in high school.”
“What-”
But Lewis Nixon has closed the gap between you and his hand has slipped from your cheek to the back of your neck and he is kissing you. Your legs uncross themselves and you slide unintentionally, maddeningly closer to him on this borrowed bed. There is no punching involved in this kiss, except perhaps your rapidly beating heart punching against your ribs. He tastes like he smells, like you expected him to and when he pulls back without even touching his tongue to your lips, you feel bereft.
“Fuck,” you say and you have never been much of a swearing man.
Nixon looks at you quite seriously and smoothes his hands through your fiery hair. “I guess you do understand then,” he says and goes to kiss you again.
You stop him with a hand on his shoulder and take his flask away. You put it on the floor.
“Are you kissing me now because I wouldn’t kiss you or because you are drunk?” You do not mean to sound hurt, or insecure. You didn’t even realize that you wanted Nixon to kiss you about ten minutes ago.
“I’ve been a lot drunker than I am now,” Nixon says. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since before D-Day.”
You remember walking among the tents with Nix. He mentioned Chicago. He wanted to take you there and you’d never been. You remember the way he stood so close to you in the early dawn. He had been drinking then, too. Some people are more affectionate when they have been drinking; when Nixon has been drinking he wants to kiss you. Nixon always seems to be drinking. It works out then.
“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”
He kisses you again and this time you do not think of anything. You do not think of the German prisoners or your boys who sit around shooting the shit two houses over. You do not think of the dying Jews that you will find in a few days because you don’t know about them yet. You do not think about Nixon, New Jersey where you will eventually go home with this man, and you do not think about the war.
For the first time in years, you do not think at all.
* * *
And so ends my first BoB fic. Hope it wasn't all too horrid, since I know I was majorly lacking in something called plot.