Archive of Our Own

“I had a drink tonight,” Dick said in the billet.

“Good for you,” Nix said. He was squatting on the floor, fiddling with the latch on Dick’s footlocker. “I had about ten, and more where that came from soon as I can remember your damned combination.”

“You must be doing pretty well if you’ve forgotten that. Though frankly I’m surprised you haven’t abandoned all pretense and just swapped the lock out yourself.”

“Yeah, well,” Nix said. “A man’s got to maintain some sense of decorum. And besides, I can’t completely take over. You still need some storage space for your wings and halo.”

“Hmm,” Dick said. “I’d have taken a pair of wings the other night.”

“I’ll say. You could’ve glided right down into the DZ like some kinda falcon.”

“Falcon?”

“Maybe more like a redtail hawk. You can tell them from below by the pale underbelly.”

Nix looked up to see how the joke landed. The corner of Dick’s mouth twitched. Satisfied, Nix freed a new bottle of whiskey from the cradle of the footlocker and held it to his breast like a baby.

“Ah, here we go,” he crowed, jubilant. “Here we go!”

Nix’s lips got very red when he drank. Dick thought he looked younger, too, mischievous like a kid who’d stolen into a dinner party to finish off the dregs of the glasses. He could only make the comparison because Nix told him once he’d done exactly that, gotten thoroughly hammered and gone reeling into the parlor singing at the top of his lungs.

“How’d your parents take that?” Dick had asked.

“Oh, they were suitably horrified. I was eleven. You know, it’s a terrible thing,” Nix said solemnly, “to be cursed with such excellent taste for liquor at such a tender age.”

There was little charm in drunkenness for Dick, but he found Nix charming anyway. It was a paradox he was still learning to deal with, and even if he wasn’t he wasn’t sure he could find it in him to begrudge Nix a drink tonight, same as he’d taken the bottle from Guarnere and swigged in the name of platoon morale. Some circumstances, Dick thought, required a loosening of moral fiber. That was another thing he was learning in the Airborne, the war his cruel teacher. Tonight, though, Dick didn’t yet know just how cruel. Tonight all he knew was the relative safety of these four walls, and Nixon’s drunk flush, and that for the moment he could slump on the narrow mattress as unconcerned as he’d ever be in this mangled version of Europe. Later he would bear himself up in far worse holes in the ground, but not tonight.

“Bill Guarnere thought I was a Quaker,” he said. He was a little sore over it, not because he had anything against Quakers, but because of the way his mind kept turning over all the blood and muck that dyed the idea ironic. But Nix must have missed the tightness Dick felt around his eyes, because he laughed and laughed and snorted into his drink, and didn’t seem to consider irony at all.

“I’m not sure I can blame him,” Nix said, flopping down beside Dick on the bed, holding his drink aloft so it didn’t slosh. “You’re pretty wholesome, Dick. You could sell oatmeal no problem.”

Dick never knew quite what to say to these periodic appraisals of his character, so he didn’t say anything. Nix leaned back on his elbows and the mattress dipped, sending their thighs sliding into contact. It was innocuous; they’d been in each other’s pockets for the better part of two years, and the Army had a way of eroding personal space. It was if they’d all become a company in more than name, a collective of atoms that bonded and drifted apart at will. There was a comfort in it, thought Dick. An ease, and not for the first time he felt acutely grateful to have shaken out alongside Nix way back at Toccoa.

“You think we’ll go back to England?” Nix asked conversationally.

“You’d know better than me.”

“But I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know, Nix,” he said.

He was so tired all of a sudden, and he knew that gulp of booze was nothing but he swore he could feel it anyway. They played this game sometimes, like they were just two G.I. Joes, like Nix didn’t have a head full of all the places Easy could go to die.

“The Lake District’s nice this time of year,” Nix said. “We could take a driving trip. Leisurely, you know? We could picnic.”

The other game they played was the one where Nix planned long, meandering holidays, the stuff of sleeper cars and monogrammed luggage. Chicago and New York and Cannes and Florence and Vienna, always in some hazy peacetime, and always the two of them. This game perplexed Dick. They stuck together circumstantially these days, but surely future Lewis Nixon could come by better travelling companions.

“Picnic, huh? You picnic a lot at Yale?”

“Never underestimate the power of a good picnic. See, you get a perfect summer day, the kind that’s just a hair too hot. Languid. You want to get a little sweaty. Then you get a nice soft blanket and a selection of fine comestibles—”

Dick laughed. “Oh, of course, comestibles.”

“Shh, you. And a good bottle of wine. The wine is the most important part.”

Dick kicked at Nix’s ankle. “Obviously.”

“So you have your blanket and your picnic basket and your girl”—here, inexplicably, he elbowed Dick— “and you get in the car and tool around the countryside til you find the perfect field. There should be wildflowers, probably. Or clover. Or both, hell. And tall, sweet grass. And then you lay out your blanket and your—”

“Your comestibles?”

Another elbow. “Exactly. You lay everything out, and you lay yourself out, and you pop the cork on your vino, and there you go.”

“Sounds nice,” Dick said, because it did. “I’m sure your young lady in Aldbourne will have a wonderful time.”

Nix shrugged. “Nah. It rained cats and dogs the whole time we were over there, remember? Cold, shitty. Probably rain the rest of the summer. Rain’s the natural enemy of picnics.”

Privately, Dick thought young ladies in Aldbourne might be the natural enemy of marriage, but he tended to avoid the topic altogether. What do you know about marriage, anyway, Dick Winters. This was what he imagined Nix would say if he brought it up, though probably he’d just laugh, snuffle into his drink again and jostle Dick and change the subject.

Dick had never met Kathy. Nix showed him a picture of her once; she was very pretty, fair haired with big eyes and a neat cupid’s-bow mouth. Nix said their daughter favored him, dark and ruddy-cheeked, and the thought of a miniature Nix cheered Dick away from the vague unease thoughts of Kathy generally engendered. Sometimes he thought of Nix with her—of Nix with women, period—and felt fairly paralyzed by an admixture of discomfort and fascination he was loath to dwell on at all, let alone attempt to describe. He was wary of Nix on a weekend pass; Harry Welsh would swim up from the depths and invoke Kitty at the end of a soaked evening, but he’d have dragged Nix all the way down with him before he got around to it, and Nix’s reserves of self control didn’t nearly match Harry’s.

Once at Aldbourne Dick had gone along with them, danced with a few nice girls while Nix danced one long dance with one, pressed right up close to her and spoke into her ear and made her throw back her head and laugh. She wore a dress the color of red wine, Dick remembered; one dance partner told him the girls all stained their legs with tea to approximate stockings, and he kept catching himself watching her legs as Nix squired her past him on the floor, round and round and round. Silk or skin, he couldn’t tell the difference. He guessed Nix probably could.

The three of them walked back together that night, Dick and Nix and the girl. Dick’s hands were in his pockets. Nix rubbed the girl’s pale arm where the cool air stippled it with gooseflesh. They were talking about the weather, about nothing in particular. Dick had an attic room in a cramped but cozy little house; Battalion had Nix set up somewhere altogether different and ostensibly more private. They came to Dick’s and halted, milling around in the road. It became clear to Dick that Nix wanted to go to bed with the girl, would take her home and do just that without intervention.

He spoke carefully. “Lew, do me a favor and come up? I’ve got something I’ve got to show you.”

“Sure,” Nix said, his tone speculative. He squeezed the girl around the shoulders. “We’ll all three come up, huh?”

Dick kicked at the turf. He shook his head. “Army business,” he said, the words feeling overlarge on his tongue. “It’s, uh. Classified. Sorry, ma’am.”

She blinked, smiled a big polite smile. “It’s alright,” she said. To Nix: “Shall I phone you, then?”

Nix frowned between them, dropped his arm and took Dick by the shoulder a measure more harshly than he had the girl. He held up his other hand quellingly. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes, but—dammit. Here, just stay put, would you? I won’t be a minute. You,” he said to Dick, jerking his head at the doorway. “Come on.”

Dick let them in and they stood in the darkened front room. Nix made no move for the stairs. “What’re you doing?” he asked in a harsh whisper. He stood close; his breath was cloying.

“I was—” Dick swallowed. He found abruptly he had no good answer; he’d read the moment wrong, and now felt nothing but green and ill at ease. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “You go on. It can wait until morning.”

Nix gave him a look Dick had never seen him wear before—defiant, coltish, the same look Dick imagined he’d favored his father with on many occasions. He looked like he might haul off and punch the wall, or punch Dick in the face. His fist clenched and his arm twitched upwards.

“Lew,” Dick said quietly.

Nix seemed to deflate then, scrubbed a hand down his face and looked at the floor, the closed door, anywhere but at Dick. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” And then he was gone, out the door and down the street without another word.

That night Dick lay awake a long time, and when he saw Nix the next day he was subdued, reticent. It took Dick the better part of the afternoon to realize Nix was embarrassed. But by evening, drink in hand, he’d more or less snapped out of it and was back to business as usual where Dick was concerned. He stuck closer to home after that, let Harry go out without him some and didn’t make a show of taking phone calls. It wasn’t the last time—there was plenty of lipstick on Nix’s collar in Aldbourne—but it was the last time Dick saw him do it. That night was the closest they’d come to fighting, and Dick was in no hurry for it to happen again. If this also required a certain degree of loosening up on his part, well. So be it.

And besides, Dick thought, it wasn’t as if it was any of his business anyway.

***

They did go back to England after all. After Normandy, after Carentan and their first real taste of war. There was a restlessness to the men on the flight back Dick couldn’t remember from before, even in the muggy hold of the troop ship all those months ago. They drilled by day, and by night they passed the time playing cards and darts and hazing the first crop of replacements. One night Dick sat next to Nixon at a table at the Officers’ Club, drinking water. There was a band, and a swirl of dancers, and Dick watched Nix watch them.

“Why not go?” Dick asked presently.

“Go?”

“Dance.”

Nix looked at his drink. “You asking?”

Dick laughed at that, though he thought he felt the same disequilibrium between them as he had the night he’d gotten between Nix and the girl. Another night of dancing. “I’ve got two left feet,” he said. “Sorry.”

And that made Nix chuckle, which was better than nothing. “I look lessons,” he said.

“Of course you did.”

“I’m very good.”

“I don’t doubt it.” They were both laughing now, and oh yes, it was so much better. Nix looked alive now behind the eyes.

“I was a hot ticket, Dick. The toast of the ’36 social season. My waltz was—and is— unparalleled.”

Dick shook his head. “You’re very talented, Lewis,” he said, and something about saying his full name imbued the air, the evening, with a peculiar gravity. Maybe it was the music, maybe it was because they were going back to the front. Nix had come into Dick’s room earlier tonight and asked him how he felt about tulips and wooden shoes. “Market Garden” sounded almost as wholesome as oatmeal.

“Who names these things, anyway?” Dick asked. “Do they sit at a big round table and throw words around ’til a couple stick together?”

“Sounds about right,” Nix said. “But I think we have the Brits to thank for this one.”

The band played one more tune, and Dick rose to leave. “I’m calling it a night,” he said as he got to his feet. “Harry’s over there with Buck and a pack of cards, I think.”

Nix downed the rest of his drink in one swallow, sucked on his lower lip. “Oh,” he said finally. “Well. Not sure I’m feeling flush enough tonight for the likes of them.” And Dick felt good about that, though probably he shouldn’t.

They walked back together under a very dark sky, the waning moon a neatly-bitten sliver that barely shone at all. Dick couldn’t see a thing under that thin moon, couldn’t see Nix beside him or the hedgerow that ran along the road. There were accidents almost nightly, he’d heard, all over the countryside; people rushing dauntlessly up and down lanes narrow as capillaries, headlights narrowed to slits beneath blackout covers. He took a deep breath and strained his ears for the purr of an encroaching engine. Surely, he thought, if a car came along they’d hear it first, have time to bail out onto the verge.

“It’ll be daylight,” Nix said. “The jump. They won’t give the okay without at least some moon, and this one’s on the way out.”

Dick craned his neck at the stars and nodded. His eyes were beginning to adjust; he could almost see Nix now, a great pale blot moving through the dark. All around him were diffuse smudges of color, like the ones that pop beneath the lids when you rub your eyes. Dick used to do it as a kid, lie in bed and press his fingers to his eyeballs to make the colors dance on the ceiling. He used to imagine he had some sixth sense, couldn’t know that these miniature explosions were nothing but the consequences of a stubborn retina dreaming up light where there was none. His mother caught him at it once, or maybe he’d told her, pridefully, of his special talent. If you don’t stop that, she’d said, you’ll go blind, and he’d blushed and felt as sick as if she’d caught him at something else entirely. She needn’t have worried; henceforth Dick held all such quirks of physiology at a comfortable remove and continued to do so out of habit.

Now he watched Nix come on beside him in the dark, nothing but white hands and a white face, his hair and eyes eaten up by the gloaming.

“It’s a nice night,” Dick said. “Not for jumping, but.”

“But,” Nix said. He veered close and checked Dick lightly, shoulder to shoulder. Dick shoved his hands down deeper into his pockets, and listened hard for oncoming traffic.

***

Much later, they sat shoulder to shoulder again and watched Eindhoven burn. Dick thought idly that he shouldn’t find it so impressive, but he guessed it was human nature to err on the side of awe no matter the circumstances. He watched Nix’s face in the firelight, and he must have stared a little too long because Nix caught him at it, whipped around to face him and broke out in a nervy grin.

“What? Do I have shit on my face or something?”

“I—no. It’s just—“

“I could feel you staring. Gave me the creeps.”

“Sorry. Just looking at nothing.”

Nix nodded. “Thinking?” He was very close. He lit up another cigarette, and let the smoke twine up to join the great mass of clouds aloft over the city, glowing pink and orange in an untimely sunset.

“Trying not to,” Dick said.

Nix always had something in his mouth, a smoke or the lip of his flask. He plucked the cigarette out now and held it between his thumb and forefinger, and Dick tried not to think and tried not to look at the end of the cigarette where it was a little soft and soggy, where it probably bore the imprint of Nix’s teeth. Most of the men in Easy smoked but Dick thought he was developing a particular association nonetheless. Smoke always clung to Nix’s clothes; already its acrid tang jerked at a long and tangled thread of sense memory.

I just don’t think it can be good for you, Dick says, nodding at the smoke that curls into the sky atop that nosebleed of a hill.

I heard it builds up lung capacity, says Nix. He’s still gasping from the climb, his t-shirt translucent with sweat.

“Thank God we got out from under Sobel,” Nix said, as if he’d dredged up the same flavor of memory. And that was something worth thinking about, for certain. That was something to be grateful for, now while they could still see fire and wince at it.

In Bastogne, Dick would daydream about Eindhoven.

They were in an orchard. The trees were full of fall apples, the ground studded with them. By day drowsy wasps would trundle from fruit to fruit, drunk on ferment, but tonight the air was still as if in deference to the burning town. They’d kicked out a flat enough circle and set themselves down together. Dick had made the rounds of the men once earlier, but maybe he ought to do it again. The thought nagged at him, and he gave up a small and self-indulgent groan at the thought of rising.

“You said you were trying not to think,” Nix said. “So stop thinking. They can hear you thinking in Washington.”

“Mmm. In that case, it’s out of season for tulips. And Market Garden is a terrible name for an offensive.”

Nix laughed outright at that, loud enough that Dick saw a trio of men look askance yards off, from the place they too berthed under the trees. Little knots of Easy men, strewn about the orchard like the apples. He really ought to get up and talk to them.

“They’re fine,” Nix said.

“Who’s fine?”

“The men. The men are fine. And none of them would begrudge you some shut-eye.” He swatted at Dick’s thigh. “See, I told you you were thinking too damn loud.”

There was nothing to say to that, so Dick cast one last look around and eased himself down on his back petulantly. But there was no denying he was beat; he felt numb with exhaustion.

“There,” said Nix, sprawling lengthwise beside him, propping his elbow on the grass, propping his cheek up on a hand. Again, he was close. He had his helmet off, and Dick could see a muddy-looking scab running up into his hairline. But he was trying not to think, wasn’t he. He shut his eyes, opened them again. Nix was still there, still close, still watching him. He fingered the nascent scab idly; on impulse Dick turned and reached up to bat his hand away. Don’t worry it, he meant to say, but he didn’t have the chance. The move was ill-timed, and their fingers brushed. Their hands caught in midair and dropped to the earth together. The expression on Nix’s face reminded Dick of earlier, in the road. Nix’s helmet had been off then too, the scorch mark on his forehead a small red mouth.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Dick said softly.

“Whatever you say,” Nix said, and obliged him by shutting his eyes and lying down, pillowing his head in the crook of his arm. But he seemed to have forgotten about his hand. It still sat atop Dick’s, and Nix seemed unlikely to do anything about that fact at all. When Nix’s breathing evened out Dick retrieved his fingers, slippery now with perspiration and several days’ worth of Dutch grime. He wiped his palm off on the front of his uniform and kept his mind clear until sleep took him.

***

The thing that made fighting possible, Dick thought, was the pure physicality of it. The movement, the choreography. He’d told Nix he couldn’t dance, but writhing through a lowland field on his belly, he considered that perhaps this wasn’t quite true. He drew a floppy silk map from his shirt front and considered the steps to follow.

Orders, sir?

Up the middle, wait for the red smoke.

When he ran he thought of nothing but the way his lungs burned, the slightly bloody taste in his mouth. His nose was running in the chill air; he snuffed it back into his throat. If he was running to run he’d have hocked the sputum free, but now he charged up the dike with snot and spittle clinging to his lips. When he gained the top conscious thought came crashing back, and the first thing that came to mind was that the German took an awfully long time to turn around. His face as he did so was blank, guileless, a kid who’d never truly spared a thought for the possibility of death, and even as he met Dick’s eyes he seemed to shrug: Try it.

Dick did.

And the first shot starts the dance over.

***

In theory, Battalion CP should’ve been a Godsend. The chow was hot, the showers hotter, and Dick had a softer bed than he’d slept on in months. Nix was there, too, close enough to pop in at intervals and pester Dick in a way he should have welcomed unequivocally. Should have. But looking at Nix these days made Dick’s gut churn the same way the food did (too rich, maybe, too copious), the showers did (his skin itched), the bed did (made his back ache, and it was too quiet at night.)

Maybe a smarter man would’ve taken his luck and run with it, but Dick knew from the moment Sink’s gift horse opened its mouth that he was going to take a good hard look. With Sink, with Strayer, he made a show of adjusting, but with Nix—well. Dick had work enough at Battalion to justify making himself scarce. Not talking to Nix made him feel only marginally less strange than the alternative, but given the choice he supposed he’d take it. For he could see Nix’s face at the crossroads, in the aftermath. He could see Nix’s face and he could see the German kid’s face and the more he thought about it the more they blurred together. Nix had seemed just as young shrugging off Dukeman dead and twenty-two injured. The fact that Dick somehow ascribed less goodwill to him than to a bona fide stormtrooper was perhaps better off unexamined.

He’d sequestered himself in his quarters one night with a stack of reports, his new orderly under advisement that Captain Winters was very busy and was not to be disturbed without direct orders to the contrary. He’d been staring at the same inventory for a solid half hour when the door swung open and Nix came swaggering in.

“How’d you get past Zielinski?” Dick asked without looking up.

“What the hell’s a Zielinski? There was some owly-looking kid loitering around outside, if that’s who you mean. He beat it as soon as I looked at him sideways.”

Dick sighed. “What do you want, Nix?”

Nix slid his flask from his back pocket, took a long draw off of it. “Okay,” he said finally. “What’s eating you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dick said, squinting performatively at the form before him on the desk.

“Oh, come off it. You’ve been impossible to pin down ever since Sink moved you up to XO. Figures that when I finally get you off that line you’re harder to find than ever.”

Dick looked up at that. “What do you mean, get me off the line?”

“Huh? Oh. Nothing. I just meant—”

Pack your gear, Sink had said, after Nix had trotted up to tell him never mind Dukeman, never mind Webster’s leg or Boyle broken on the road. “Did you know?” Dick asked.

“Know what?”

“Did you know they were promoting me?”

Nix set the flask down on the edge of the desk and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Of course not. How was I supposed to know Horton was going to get it?” He took his hands back out, picked the flask up again, ran his thumb around and around the cap. He might as well have been pacing, wound up as he was.

“Lew, come on.”

“I might’ve heard a thing or two. But it’s no secret they like you at Battalion, and it never has been. Sink’s been gunning to get you up here one way or another for who knows how long.”

“And it never occurred to you to mention it?”

“It was just rumors. There’d have been no point. And besides, we—I think it’s better sometimes when we just—”

Dick let his head fall into his hands. Nix was right, was the hell of it. Dick had no grounds to go off half-cocked at the notion of Nix playing close to the vest—that was his job, after all. Rumors, secrets, hearsay: the barest whispers of an idea spun into maps and troop allocations and battle lines. Why should it smart so that Dick found himself among them? Why should he feel like a scale model on some long-studied sand table?

“If you’re going to wheel and deal with me and my men, the least you can do is keep us from blundering into two kraut companies,” he said. “And don’t give me all that about pretty good for Dukeman. You’re not the one writing home to his mother.” He blinked. His sudden venom surprised him.

“Jesus Christ, Dick,” Nix said. “They’re my men too.”

They lapsed into silence. Dick felt rather than saw Nix take up the flask and drink. Dick couldn’t look at him, and that was yellower than Dick Winters thought himself capable of. He let the silence stretch as long as he could stand it, until the feel of Nix’s eyes on him made him feel like crawling out of his skin.

“I’ve got to get through these reports,” he said at last.

Nix sighed. “Okay.” He turned to go. Dick heard the heavy step of his boots along the floorboards.

Dick grabbed up his pen. He made as if to jot a note in the margin of the inventory, but produced only a nonsensical scribble. He could feel Nix’s eyes on him, and thought back to the foyer of that little house in Aldbourne, each of them staring across at the other, Nix blowing like an angry horse. Dick wasn’t any better than that now.

He dropped the pen. “Lew?”

He’d have lied to say he didn’t notice how fast Nix turned. “Yeah?”

“You’re right,” Dick said. “I’m sorry. They are your men too.”

Nix smiled, a wan, tight quirk of his lips that was really more like one of Dick’s. Which was to say, not much of a smile at all. “Night, Dick,” he said. He nodded at the stack of paperwork on the desk. “Good luck with all of that.”

Dick chewed on his stack of papers and the conversation with Nix through the night and into the next morning. When it got light enough he hoofed it down to see the men, feeling vaguely guilty for griping about his back when he saw the field they’d made their billet. He could feel the gulf between himself and the non-coms building already, and tried not to regret it.

“They’re taking well to Moose. Er, Lieutenant Heyliger, sir,” Lipton said. Dick thought he caught a hint of apology in his tone. He also thought he ignored it rather valiantly.

“Good,” he said to Lipton, favoring him with a pinched smile that only served to remind him of Nix’s earlier. Nix, who he wouldn’t see again until later in the evening, staggering past with Harry, and there was no mere hint of the apologetic in the look Harry shot him then.

“He’s real broken up about something tonight,” Harry said, having taken Dick by the elbow. “You have any idea what?”

Dick swallowed. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t.” And it wasn’t a lie, not really. Because Nix was Nix, and he never needed much of an excuse. “Get him to bed, though, will you? We’ll be wanted at HQ early tomorrow.”

Harry nodded quickly, and then the two of them were gone. As he watched them weave down the street, Nix leaning heavily on Harry’s shoulder, he indulged himself in the briefest moment of self-pity. It wasn’t an emotion Dick was especially given to—on balance, he thought, one could always stave it off, find a host of things in life to be grateful for. But tonight he felt beset by a keen and piercing wistfulness, exacerbated now by the sight of his two friends together in a place Dick found entirely inaccessible.

He went back to his quarters and played at working, called Zielinski for coffee and dismissed him again. When he went to bed it was only to stare at the rafters, caffeine marching through his veins. He sighed. That had been a bad idea in what felt like a whole day’s worth of them one way or another. At some point he must have fallen asleep, though, because he awoke to sun streaming in through the windows, filling the room with dilute light. A rap came at the door, Zielinski’s nervous tremolo announcing, unsurprisingly, that Dick was wanted at headquarters.

“Along with Captain Nixon, sir,” he added, and Dick wasn’t sure how to take the fact that his brand-new orderly seemed already to have sorted them as a pair. Still, when he’d washed and dressed he went to Nix’s room without question and let himself in unannounced. It wasn’t as if he’d be greeted at the door anyway. The sight of Nix bundled away in the sleeping alcove, the coal-black mop of his hair just protruding from a mass of blankets, made Dick feel paternal in a way he disliked. He turned away from it and stared out at the street, at the troopers drilling and the bustle of materiel, and he thought that if they sat around until March at least he might be able to make some sense of things. But then he looked at his watch and it was coming on for 0800, so he left his idle thoughts to fog up with his breath on the glass and went back over to the bed with no small measure of chagrin.

Nix made no move to get up when Dick shook him, only growled and burrowed deeper beneath the quilt. His face was pink and creased with sleep. An oily human funk issued from the bed, and through his paroxysmal haze of irritation Dick thought that at least Nix was alone.

“Ten minutes,” Dick said, to which Nix groaned again and rolled over. For Pete’s sake, it was like talking to a child, and Dick frankly didn’t think he had the patience. Especially on next to no sleep, which was in retrospect his primary defense for what happened next.

***

“Jesus Christ,” Nix said, bent double at the washbasin. The faucet produced no more than a trickle of icy water, and Nix was cursing a blue streak as he tried to direct as much as possible onto the top of his head. “You don’t fuck around, do you, Dick.”

Dick’s mirth had ebbed somewhat, replaced by a wary sort of optimism. Maybe he had just accosted Nix with a pitcher of urine, but as Nix had lunged for him with his pillow in the aftermath it seemed they’d somehow transcended the unpleasantness of the previous day. Which was a series of phrases Dick would never have anticipated stringing together, but what was the saying, after all? War is hell.

"Sorry," Dick said, feeling abashed. At the sink Nix pawed ineffectually at his neck with a flannel.

“You know, for all you didn’t want to be late we sure are going to be now. Unless you want me to show up to a briefing with Colonel Sink reeking like an outhouse.”

Dick snorted. “Give that here,” he said, crossing to the basin and taking up the washcloth. He stuck it back under the anemic stream of water. When it was as soaked as he could get it, he swiped it over Nix’s back, his shoulders.

“God, that’s cold,” Nix said. “Of all the times to go and douse me in piss, you had to do it in Holland in October in this drafty fucking garret.”

Dick wrung out the washcloth into the basin and soaked it again. “You needed a shower, anyway,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “And you know, Nix, it does beg the question why you saw fit to—to do that instead of using the head like a decent person.”

“See, that’s you assuming I’m a decent person.” He shrugged. “What can I say? The indoor plumbing chez moi leaves much to be desired, and last night it seemed like an awful lot of effort to stagger outside.”

“Some men might call that rock bottom,” Dick said lightly, and Nix rolled his eyes.

Nix towelled himself off and squinted at his reflection. He parted his wet hair and ran a comb through it til it fell perfectly, a slick helmet parted severely to one side like a schoolboy’s. Dick couldn’t stand to look at the time. Tardiness set the back of his neck tingling unpleasantly, and that was more than just the Army’s influence. Dick’s father used to say that on time was five minutes early; he got the feeling Nix lived by a rather more relaxed definition. He caught Dick’s eye in the mirror as he lathered his face, having apparently decided that if nothing else he ought to make a good showing. Dick watched the razor liberate clean, raw-looking strips of Nix’s cheek.

“What?” Nix had caught him looking.

“Nothing,” Dick said. He sighed. He was suddenly reluctant to go out into the morning. “Nix, we’ve gotta—”

“I know, I know. Duty calls.”

In the days and weeks that followed Dick tried valiantly to hold on to that morning in Nix’s bedroom, to the reluctant grin Nix shot him, the clout of the pillow across Dick’s solar plexus. Unsavory as the impetus was, there had been a purity to the moment he would struggle to find again, with Nix or with anyone. Moose Heyliger nearly died courtesy of a jumpy sentry; that was the first thing. When Dick found the hapless private later and told him they thought Moose would at least make it to the hospital, had to listen once more to his cascade of apologies, he could summon nothing but a bone-deep sorrow. The fall wore into winter and the men settled into Mourmelon, and Dick cursed the version of himself who’d ever thought it a good idea to wait til March for anything.

“I think I might be going crazy,” he said to Nix over his desk, over yet more coffee provided by a solicitous Zielinski. Dick was trying not to hold that against it. “I swear I’ve signed the same requisition order five times.”

“Keep this up and we might just drive you to drink,” Nix said, rubbing his hands together in exaggerated glee.

“And you’ve got the good stuff right there in my footlocker. It’s all very convenient.”

Nix wagged his finger. “Not so fast,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think whiskey’s your drink, Dick. You strike me as more of a beer man.”

“Really.”

“Or champagne, maybe. Given the right motivation Dick Winters might just be the type to knock back the bubbly, really tie one on.”

Dick leaned back in his chair. He thought his spine might have melded to the back by now; it popped disconcertingly as he stretched, and he made a face. “Sounds like a fun guy, this Dick Winters. I’d like to meet him.”

“Oh, trust me, you do. He’s one of a kind. Just don’t let the mild-mannered exterior fool you.”

Dick yawned at that, bringing an end to their repartee. His eyes watered, and when they cleared again Nix was watching him. He looked like he wanted to ask a question, like he held the words in his mouth carefully. When he spoke again he seemed to talk around them.

“You look exhausted,” Nix said. “If I didn’t know I’d never guess you hadn’t seen the business end of the war since October.”

Dick opened his mouth to say that that was the problem, and besides, it seemed to him that business was all he ever did anymore, enough bureaucracy and paperwork for a score of bankers. But he felt like a heel complaining about it, even to Nix. He’d had a letter from Buck, from the hospital, and besides, none of the men were complaining. When he saw them now in passing their salutes were jaunty, the lines of their bodies lax in a way that troubled the officer in him even as it gratified the man. Hadn’t they earned it? For them, Dick could take his lumps behind a desk.

“What would you do if you could do anything right now?” Nix asked.

Dick squinted at him. All this hemming and hawing to ask me that? He thought about it. “Take a bath,” he said at last.

***

“Paris,” Dick said, waving the pass at Harry. “Did you know about this? Do I really have to go to Paris?”

Harry looked at him. “You don’t have to do anything. Except fight this damned war, apparently. I don’t think any of us have got a whole lot of choice about that.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “Why’d he have to go and do it?”

“Look, you know him. He means well. He wants the best for you—”

And didn’t that made Dick’s gut clench unpleasantly. He scrubbed at the nape of his neck. “Oh, c’mon, Harry.”

“He does, and he thinks Paris is the best. So, you get Paris.”

Dick sighed. “He could go, if he likes it so much.”

“He’s going to Aldbourne.” Harry shrugged, as if it were all very simple. “And besides, that’s not the point. The point is that you look like hell, and frankly we’re all a little concerned that the next set of memorandums is going to send you around the twist for good. So go to Paris. Loosen up a little, and then come back and tell Nix and me all about it.”

“You’re going to Reims?”

“Ah, who knows. If I can get a ride. Might just loll about here and get caught up on my correspondence. But hey, Marlene Dietrich. That’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, my friend. Be a real shame to miss it.”

“Huh. Maybe I ought to go to Reims.”

Harry clapped him on the shoulder. “Nah, you don’t want to go to Reims. C’mon. Gay Paree, Dick. You can’t miss it, it’s the one with the tower.”

The Eiffel Tower was dark by the time Dick got there, wandering around the city by night. He rode the Metro to the end of the line and picked his way back to his hotel for lack of anything better to do. Free of distraction, his mind was free to whirl and ruminate. For the first time in his life Dick could see the allure of drink. He couldn’t fault a man for seeking respite from racing thoughts, even if the liquor was just something to slow them down like thick mud sucks and slurps at tires, and even if it was only for a little while. He thought of Nix back in the office in Mourmelon and imagined him holding up a tumbler of whiskey as if to toast. He was better in company than Dick was; he knew the right things to say. Dick, in a crowd, always found himself looking for the exits. It made sense that Nix would want a partner in crime, that there was part of him that really did wish Dick would pick up one vice or another.

The bath, when Dick got it, was well worth the effort, and he didn’t think he’d have any trouble telling Nix as much. He slid in with a sigh, the water so hot and his skin so chilled that for a moment he couldn’t tell the difference. Reflex goosebumps rose on his arms and neck, and he slid as deep as he could without his face going under, the nape of his neck and his earlobes kissing the surface.

Dick wasn’t a person who had trouble admitting he was wrong. He thought he might quirk his mouth when Nix asked how Paris was. He might even wink. They’d both know that Dick had taken his bath, soaked til the water cooled and turned in for the night. Nix would grin wildly at him and sock him in the shoulder and crow You dog! anyway, and he’d be the happier for it. Dick could take a little tedium for the sake of the men, and he could take a hint of moral turpitude for Nix.

He was eager to get back to Mourmelon, which he supposed might have been Nix’s goal all along. When he arrived he slipped among the men in front of a film reel, half-listened to George Luz needling his fellows and scanned the low and fractious light for Nix. But he found Buck instead, and then the lights came up and they were going to Belgium, and Dick had other things to think about.

It was only after he’d canvassed every possible piece of cold weather gear, in service to his doubt Lieutenant Dike would manage, that his thoughts turned to Nix again. He wondered if Nix had made it to Aldbourne, if he’d even gone. He wouldn’t put it past Nix to send him off to Paris knowing full well he himself would stay behind to pore over maps of the Ardennes. Again he felt a prickle of anger to match the ire that night just after his promotion. He shook his head as if he could dispel the emotion that way, then turned around only to smack right into Nix himself, appearing as if conjured.

Nix’s hands flew up unbidden to grab Dick around the upper arms. “I was looking for you,” he said. He looked Dick up and down and frowned. “Shit, you got a coat? You’re going to freeze where we’re headed.”

Dick had thrown his coat in with the meager cache of supplies they were taking to the front, but he thought he’d keep that piece of information to himself. “Yeah, I was just trying to scare one up,” he said.

“Good,” Nix said. “Good.” He had a coat, its thick olive drab collar turned up against the cold already. It seemed to Dick that the wind had kicked up the moment the move into Belgium had been announced.

Dick realized belatedly they were still clutching one another. He ducked his head and Nix dropped his arms, grinning sheepishly. “Sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m glad to see you. I was afraid I was going to have to cuddle up to old Foxhole Norman all the way to Bastogne.”

In the end Nix marched off into the melee and returned with a coat for Dick, and for all his diffuse guilt Dick had to admit he was glad for it on the drive. He’d never hated an open jeep more, the frigid air whipping around his entire body save where he and Nix were pressed up against each other in the back. Sleet smacked them wetly across the face, running down into their collars, insult to injury. At least he wasn’t driving; a coat might be had but gloves were apparently too much to ask for, and Dick’s hands were numb enough in his pockets as it was.

Nix leaned over so his voice wouldn’t be carried off by the wind, his mouth close enough to Dick’s ear to be its own source of warmth. “I’ve gotta tell you,” Nix said. “I think this is going to be a rough one. The 110th slowed the Panzers enough to get us into the Ardennes, but they took a hell of a beating doing it.”

Dick shrugged. “We can take a beating,” he said.

Nix looked at him for what felt like a very long time. “Sure we can,” he said. “It’s just that—”

“What?”

“Aw, nothing. I just… I think I got a little soft back in Mourmelon. Think I was soft before then, if you want to know the truth. This whole thing was starting to feel far away.”

“You’re not soft.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to be a shock, is all,” Nix said. “For all of us.”

***

By the time they actually talked about Paris, the shock hadn’t so much worn off as frozen solid, and they were in a foxhole huffing onto their bare hands against frostbite. On the line, the world was falling down around their ears, and unease simmered in Dick’s chest as he heard the distant call for a medic.

“Hey,” Nix said, his tone a parody of lightness. “Eyes on the prize here, Dick. I’m starting to think there’s someone else.”

In the middle distance, a great crash: the mortar first and then the trees plunging to earth in its wake. Dick hadn’t known trees were so loud when they fell, so destructive. After the very first barrage he’d walked out to the line on reconnaissance to find chunks of exploded timber big enough to take out a car, let alone a man. He’d seen the splayed corpses of the pines cut a swathe of forest thin and sharp as a knife-edge or wide as a bomb blast, and he’d seen men struggle out of foxholes through six feet of ice-limned evergreen. There’d been ten more volleys of mortar fire since then, and Dick was beginning to suspect there wouldn’t be a forest left when they were done.

"Hey." Nix said again. He clapped Dick on the thigh. “Let’s chat. How was Paris? You never told me.”

MEDIC! again.

Dick twitched.

“You’re not a medic,” Nix said.

“No, but—”

“But nothing. Stay the hell in here, will you? Don’t think I don’t know you’re about fifteen seconds from bolting for that line. You can’t do them any good right now. You sure as hell can’t do them any good dead. So sit tight and tell me about Paris.”

Nix’s voice was trembling. Nix was trembling, Dick realized. They’d ridden into Bastogne side by side and they’d both seemed to come to the conclusion they ought to stay that way. The rest of the men had too, Dick noticed; they’d split off into twos and threes, however many’d fit in a foxhole. They kept their heads down mostly, shambling together at mealtimes, quiet and spooky like deer at a salt lick. And smoking, always smoking. Nix was smoking now.

“I took a bath,” Dick said.

Nix giggled. On the line everything had gone quiet again, and the iron band around Dick’s ribcage loosened up a fraction. “How was Aldbourne?” Dick asked.

“You don’t want to know about Aldbourne.”

“Tell me anyway,” Dick said.

“Oh, well,” Nix said. “It wasn’t Paris, first of all. Second of all, I—well, let’s just say I think my young lady has a thing for men in uniform, and the more the merrier. Not completely sure she remembered my name at first.”

“I’m sorry,” Dick said, because that seemed the thing to say.

Nix waved off the platitude. “She was happy enough to have me there. And I can’t say I’ve got much room to go getting my feelings hurt.” he said, stubbing out his cigarette longer than was strictly necessary.

“Still,” Dick said slowly. “It’s no good, is it. If you…care for someone.”

Nix rolled his eyes; Dick could see them glisten wetly in the low light. “What would—” he shook his head. “Never mind.”

“What would I know about it? Well, nothing much, Nix.”

“I told you you didn’t want to know.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Yes, you did. But it’s all right.” Dick sat up, feeling as if he was unwinding from a rope’s tight coil. Nix had a tarpaulin slung partway over the mouth of the foxhole and when Dick drew it back cold air flooded in to chase out the warmth they’d built up so carefully over the hours, the fetid product of shared body heat and nervous stomachs, but warmth nonetheless.

“God, go if you’re going,” Nix groaned. “No need to linger on the threshold. And anyway, I said I was sorry.”

Dick barked a laugh and cuffed Nix lightly on the back of the head before he could stop himself. Then he clambered the rest of the way out of the foxhole and pulled the tarp back over Nix, who grumbled and sank deeper into his coat.

Against his better judgement, Dick walked out along the line. Now and again he could hear the Germans from across the forest, their voices carrying strangely the way sound does on water. He could hear Easy too, voices he recognized, and even the ones he didn’t had a familiar cadence, that affectionate sort of grousing that said Shove the fuck over, Malark, your bony Irish ass is amputating my foot and meant Thank God I’m here with you in this wasteland. I might love you. Please don’t die.

It’s no good, is it. If you care for someone.

He walked until he met the edge of D Company, til Speirs loomed up beside him. “Thunder,” Dick said, and Speirs’s grin in the thick dark was all the flash he needed to see. All around them the snow glowed blue in the thin moonlight, and Dick could see Speirs’s gloveless hands, his wan axe of a face. It reminded him of that night in England, walking home with Nix and worrying about cars.

“Hey, Ron,” he said.

“You’re way off your line, sir.”

“Just taking a look around. I couldn’t sleep.”

Speirs nodded. “I’m doing the same. Those goddamn krauts won’t shut up. Might as well be talking right in my ear, the way the sound travels. Say, you hear anything about a supply drop any time soon?”

“No. Artillery’s still too thick on the ground. But Captain Nixon got word a whole Panzer division’s splitting off to cross the Meuse, so maybe things’ll lighten up.”

Speirs craned his neck, looked up at the starless sky. “Maybe,” he said. Dick was beginning to numb up again. He shuffled from foot to foot and made to move on, back down the line the way he’d come. He’d find Doc Roe, maybe, see if he hadn’t gotten his hands on some more morphine. His movement ruffled Speirs and he nodded once more at Dick before melting back into the trees in that vulpine way he had. There was something, Dick thought, wired differently in Speirs than in any of them. He wasn’t always sure whether or not to be grateful for it.

He stayed a long time with Eugene, talking over casualties and the lack of bandages and swearing up and down to find a pair of scissors any which way he could. By the time Dick made his circuitous way back to Nix’s foxhole, dawn was breaking in the east and Nix was long past waking.

***

“I heard Patton’s in Bastogne,” Nix said in the tent. He passed Dick a cup of what passed for coffee and Dick fumbled with it, his fingers wooden with the cold. The hot liquid spilled over his wrist, bright pain lancing along his skin, but still he moved slowly, as if through water.

“Damn,” he muttered, and Nix looked surprised. “Sorry,” Dick said. “I’m just—” He shook his head, set the tin cup down on the rickety camp table at the tent’s center and rubbed at the tender skin of his wrist.

“Let me see that,” said Nix, snatching up Dick’s hand before he could protest.

His skin was rosy and livid where the coffee had spilled. It stung, but worse for Dick was the soaked wool of his sleeve and the shirtsleeve beneath it. Wetness of any kind made the cold that much less tolerable; that Dick struggled through his morning shave on a daily basis was a testament to his high standards for appearances. And possibly a futile one, as he’d noted the last time he’d eyeballed himself in his little round pocket mirror. He looked like hell, was the long and short of it, and he felt like hell too. If the latter wasn’t patently obvious to the men, Dick thought, shaving was worth it.

Nix watched Dick shave every morning with an affectionate bemusement that Dick wasn’t certain how to interpret. So he didn’t, the same way he wasn’t interpreting the pads of Nix’s fingers running softly over his skin now. They sat in the tent that way for what felt like a very long time, because it was cold and Dick’s blood seemed extra sluggish this morning, and because Nix’s hand on his felt nice in an animal sort of way, the way Dick imagined two cats felt nice all curled up together. Belatedly he realized what it would look like, this feral stab at comfort, and jerked away as if burned all over again.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Yeah, sure,” Nix said, and took a drink of his coffee.

“Patton?”

“Oh. Apparently somebody saw his jeep up at headquarters. You know, I hear he’s a lot shorter in person.”

“Never mind that, what are you waiting for? Get up there and tell him your master plan to take Berlin in the next—” Dick looked at his watch. “—Fifteen hours.”

It was a weak joke, but Nix favored him with an equally weak grin anyway. “That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten it was Christmas Eve. Hell, that’s all kinds of time.”

“Berlin by Christmas,” Dick said. His smarting hand shook as he held his cup up to clink against Nix’s. Already the wet wool of his sleeve had frozen.

“Berlin by Christmas,” Nix echoed. He sighed, gave Dick a long look. “You know, I don’t think I like gallows humor on you,” he said. “Makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

There was a movement out of the corner of Dick’s eye then, and he turned, one hand on his gun. But it was only Lipton, there to ask about Lieutenant Dike and if Dick thought anyone might be out to talk to the men today, “Given that it’s Christmas, sir.” He looked from Dick to Nix and back with a quizzical expression on his face, as if they wore some look on theirs that gave him pause. Nix started telling Lipton about Patton’s jeep. Dick turned away, tucked his chin to his chest and tugged his scarf up over his mouth and exhaled into the soft hollow it made. His lips would chap later, but now all he wanted was that transient gust of humidity and to forget about the look on Nix’s face. He was laughing now, Lip telling him something or other that had his eyes lit up, and Dick could just about imagine he’d looked that way all along.

***

Dick woke with a slowness that felt like swimming. In the distance he could hear a sound: a grate, a pant, here and gone again. As he came fully to consciousness he realized the sound wasn’t in the distance at all but right up close, and that he was all tangled up with Nix. He was warm. There was a fall of freezing dirt against the nape of his neck, yes, and a sliver of chill air drifting under the tarp. But for once in this miserable train of days he was waking up mostly warm, and if the pitch dark was any indication he still had hours yet before dawn.

Lew was moving. His hand was moving, and his breath—oh.

“Nix,” Dick said hurriedly. “Nix, Nix, I’m awake.”

Nix gave a defeated groan.“Fuck, of course—ah, of course you are.” He sounded winded. “Sorry, sorry, I thought you were—” He shook his head, curled away. Then there was cold again, a wide flat blade between them. Dick was still drowsy. Surely that accounted for the way he pulled at Nix, crawled back over to him and pillowed his head on Nix’s shoulder where it had been.

“It’s cold,” he said, and he was downright plaintive, shamefully so.

“Dick—”

“Stay here. I don’t care.”

Nix took a deep breath. If there was tension between them in the foxhole he took it all into his body and left Dick as boneless as he’d been a moment ago. And all right, Dick thought. All right, if you can’t be boneless around Lewis Nixon then who can you. He turned his head. Just an inch or two and his cheek was against Nix’s neck.

“You don’t have to stop,” Dick said.

The heavy rustle of fabric. He took another breath and Dick could feel his muscles bunch under all that wool and cotton, the folds of blanket, and he knew Lew had put his hand back. “Jesus Christ. It felt good, okay. That’s all,” Nix said. “That’s all. Nothing feels good anymore.”

Dick pressed his fingers to the underside of Nix’s jaw. “I know.”

“Goddammit,” Nix said. “Dick, you’ve got no vices.”

“No,” Dick said, and Nix nodded frantically, and Dick only realized later that he’d meant one kind of No and Nix had meant the other.

“You know, they asked me if I liked girls,” Nix said.

“Huh?”

“When I signed up. During the psych evaluation. They ask you that?”

“I don’t remember.” If they had, Dick was sure he’d answered in the affirmative, just tossed it off without thinking. He liked girls. There was nothing not to like about girls.

“I said yes,” Nix offered.

“Well, don’t you?” Dick felt cotton headed and stupid. His scalp itched. He hadn’t showered in two weeks and he smelled disagreeable. A bead of sweat eked its way from his hairline down into a sideburn, and he scratched at it. God, all this snow and here he was sweating.

Nix laughed; his whole body shook with it. “Sure I do,” he said. “Besides, you think I’d be here if I’d answered any different? There’s 4-F and then there’s 4-F, right?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Dick said.

“Nothing. I’m just talking. You know how I talk.”

“Lew—”

“Go back to sleep,” Nix said.

Dick turned his head then, and put his lips on Nix’s neck.

“Dick,” Nix said. “Go back to sleep.” He swallowed; Dick felt the scrape of stubble over his nose. He breathed out, blew a hot cloud over Nix’s skin, and Nix shuddered. “I’m telling you,” he said. “You don’t want to.”

“Shut up,” Dick said, and set his mouth to Nix’s throat again, over the elastic pulse of his jugular vein. They sat in silence. Dick couldn’t hear a thing save the clamor of their breathing. Noise discipline, he thought hysterically. The way they carried on they’d be picked out of the dark in a heartbeat. Presently he felt Nix stir, heard him sigh. His right arm flexed against Dick’s body and Dick shifted responsively. Nix cursed under his breath then, as if at the knowledge he’d been detected, though Dick gasping like a bellows next to him could hardly pass for deep enough sleep to miss it.

“I said I didn’t care,” Dick whispered.

“Doesn’t make it better.”

“I want—” I want you to feel good, he thought. He couldn’t say it.

“You want to sleep,” Nix said heavily, turning inwards so his forehead clunked against Dick’s. “You’re warm again,” he said. “So shut your eyes, okay? Just—”

“You want to talk?”

Nix snorted. His hand twitched between them. The way he’d moved meant his knees were knocking into Dick’s, and they weren’t so close this way but Dick could look into the void that ate the space between them and imagine he could see Lew’s arm working, the frantic motion of it. He could feel it stir the thick air. He was still sweating. Nix was too, or else Dick was sweating on him.

Dick tried again. “About your girl,” he said. “Or your wife, or anyone. I don’t know if it’s better to talk.”

“It’s not,” Nix said.

“You could tell me about her,” Dick said. He was babbling. He didn’t know which her he meant, and he didn’t want to hear about any of them. But he wasn’t sure he could stand this non-quiet, all the space it took up.

“You ever make love with a girl, Dick?”

“I don’t think--”

“Just answer the question.” Nix was looking down now, like he was watching his hand.

“Maybe,” Dick said, and Nix blurted a laugh.

“Maybe,” he echoed. “God, trust you. But it’s...it’s sweet, that you’re like that. It gets me, you know, right here.”

He reached out and grabbed a handful of Dick’s coat, jerked him forward at the level of his heart. Dick’s mouth brushed Lew’s as if by necessity. There was something salty on his top lip, the perpetual nasal runoff that froze on all their faces lately. This wasn’t a kiss, Dick thought. They weren’t kissing. His brain somehow demanded he make the distinction.

“Why’s it sweet, Lew?”

What a question. Dick didn’t know what he meant by it. But it was so dark, and if he let his mind wander Dick could almost forget that they were talking. He might still be asleep, after all. He might be dreaming. Maybe you could dream that kind of a question. He got the impression he should be offended, that Lew would think of him that way. But he wasn’t, not exactly.

“I can’t figure you out,” Nix said. “Sometimes I think I have, and then--ah.” He shook his head, dropped it to look at the floor. Dick was left with a faceful of his hair and his forehead and this time he did it, pursed his lips and brushed them across Nix’s skin.

Nix gasped and stiffened. At first Dick thought it was because of the kiss, but then Nix curled in on himself again, still breathing hard. He looked at his hand with distaste and wiped it off on the hem of his coat. When he’d done that he slumped against the wall of the foxhole; Dick could see the pale line of his throat flocked with migrating beard.

“I’m sorry,” Dick said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know.” He was sorry it had to happen, he supposed, though not precisely sorry that it did. But he didn’t think he could say that to Nix in a way that made any sense, so he didn’t bother to elaborate.

Nix stretched a hand out blindly, reaching, and Dick hesitated a moment before taking it. When he did he wrenched Nix closer, all business, as if helping him up from sitting. “Well,” he said. “I hope you--”

“Oh, God,” Nix said. “Dick, don’t.” He extricated himself from Dick and got out from under the blanket. “Here, you take this,” he said, covering Dick back over, tucking him in like a child. “It’s almost three. Right? It’s got to be almost three. I’ve got patrol.”

“You’ve only got patrol because you gave yourself patrol,” Dick said.

“And I want a smoke. So. You bundle up, and I’ll be back.” Nix reached out and patted Dick’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Dick said, for lack of anything better. It wasn’t until Nix had quit the foxhole altogether in a gust of bracing air that Dick thought to tell him he was pretty sure Nix did have him mostly figured out after all.

He lay in the dark for a long time. Sleep was lost to him, but that went without saying. He was tired in the dragging, cellular way he was tired every moment of every day here. His body felt leaden, like he might sink into the earth on the bottom of the foxhole as into a grave. Yet his brain churned on, his thoughts running to the day ahead and the day after that. Not to Foy, not to troop maneuvers or Lieutenant Dike, but to Nix in the tent in the morning.

He was the worst kind of idiot, and no kind of leader to let it trouble him so. And probably Nix had nothing of the sort on his mind as he crunched along out there on the line, and probably in the morning Dick would hate himself for not catching a wink when he had the chance. But still, he thought. He’d rest easy tomorrow night, when Nix had squinted at him at least once with his usual anti-meridiem ill humor, poured a quantity of whiskey into his mug and offered to do the same for Dick the way he always did.

When he couldn’t stand the foxhole any longer he got up and went into the CP himself and started a sad pot of coffee. He stood there stirring needlessly, as if any amount of babying could convince it to be more potable. He wasn’t at it long before he heard a sound behind him, the step so familiar he didn’t bother with even the most cursory gesture at his sidearm.

“Headed back to bed?”

“Think I’m up for the day, actually,” Nix said, coming alongside Dick. He nodded in the direction of the foxhole. “We ought to air the place out a little, huh?”

“Sure,” Dick said. “You want some coffee?”

Nix made a face. “I don’t have the stomach for that swill this morning.” He took his flask out of his pocket and tipped it in Dick’s direction. “Cheers,” he said.

Dick wasn’t exactly heartened, but Nix stayed in the tent and sat shoulder to shoulder with him on the bench as usual, so he guessed he’d have to count it as a win.

Sometime over the course of the day he began to feel lightheaded and strange, a scratch like a hairshirt taking up in the back of his throat. He drank the whole pot of coffee in the interest of chasing it away, and when he finished it and went for more Nix gave him an odd look and took away the coffee can.

“You feeling all right? You look peaky.”

“Do I?”

“You’re even paler than usual.”

“Well, thanks, Lew,” he replied. His mouth felt carved of marble; the words wouldn’t come out right, and as offhanded as he’d meant the comment to be it served only to make Nix look at him with more concern.

“Dick,” he said, reaching his hand out. “Lemme--”

The gesture took Dick aback and he blinked and ducked his head. Nix clapped his palm over Dick’s forehead anyway. As he did so he winced and apologized, and Dick had the same sense of swooping disequilibrium he’d had last night in the foxhole when he’d tried to tell Nix that as a matter of fact he had his fair share of vices, or maybe just the one.

“You’re burning up,” Nix said.

“Great,” Dick said.

“Yeah, great. That’s all we need, you keeling over with pneumonia or something.”

“I don’t have pneumonia.”

“Or hell, tuberculosis. Let’s really go for broke. You’d make a pretty fetching consumptive, I think. Real dramatic, hacking up blood to match your hair.”

“Mmm.” Dick didn’t feel hot. He felt as cold as he’d been last night, save for the warm, dry plane of Nix’s hand. He tried and failed not to lean into it. “You probably shouldn’t sit so close.”

Nix didn’t move, but he did drop his hand and put it back in his pocket. “I think I’m pretty well screwed, Dick, if you want to know the truth. The die’s been cast.”

“Yeah,” said Dick. “I guess it has.” A weight came into the air then like the sweet seep of gas. Dick didn’t know whether or not to breathe.

“About last night,” Nix said softly. “I, uh...I thought we might forget it ever happened.”

“Oh. Sure,” Dick said. He felt as if he were floating somewhere up above the tent.

“Because things happen, you know, and it doesn’t mean--”

“No, of course not,” Dick said automatically.

“Well, good,” Nix said, swiping his palms along his pants-legs, although the tone of his voice and the sour downturn of his mouth could have fooled Dick. “Well,” he said again, perhaps a hair more decisively. “I’m wanted up at HQ, so I guess I’d better get the lead out. Should have something for you later about Foy.”

Dick nodded. “Foy, right. Keep me informed, will you?”

“Of course,” Nix said. “Look, Dick, would you take care of yourself? You’ll send a man off the line if he so much as sneezes. You might consider taking your own advice.”

Dick picked at a pale rind of hangnail. “I can’t leave them out here,” he said.

Nix gave him a searching look. “No, I guess you can’t,” he said after a minute. “At least do me a favor and keep yourself warm. I’ll see what I can scrounge up for you at Regiment.”

“Thanks, Nix.”

Nix nodded and half turned, turned back again. “Any time,” he said.

After Nix left Dick kept at the hangnail til it bled, then shoved the finger into his mouth. Stupid, he thought, as copper ran over his tongue. Why give sickness any more of an inroad? But Nix had been right, hadn’t he. Dick was burning with it already.

***

He didn’t have pneumonia, at least not according to Doc Roe, who listened intently to Dick’s breathing and pronounced it, in clinical terms, “not shitty enough yet.” Nix had loitered on the periphery of the whole examination, ready to make his apologies to Doc and spirit Dick up to the nearest regimental surgeon or at least somebody with a goddamn stethoscope, Dick, for God’s sake.

Dick felt bad enough to know his performance as XO was suffering but not so bad as to be past caring, which was its own peculiar sort of hell. He hunched in the tent and draped his scarf over his head, plunked his helmet down on top of it.

Nix giggled at him. “You look like a pissed off owl,” he said, to which Dick couldn’t muster an appropriate response. His poor showing made Nix feel sorry enough to heat him up some water and mix it with a liberal quantity of lemon powder.

“This’d be vastly improved with a little of the Vat,” he said. “And honey, but that’s a lost cause.” He took his flask out and waved it around. “C’mon. No ulterior motives, I promise. I’m only offering for medicinal purposes; absolutely no fun included whatsoever.”

Dick sighed deeply, which triggered a spell of rib-cracking cough. He was so tired of coughing; he thought he’d bring a whole barrage down on top of them with just his coughing to guide the shells in. Eyes streaming, he waved his hand at Nix, who stared at him in disbelief before uncapping the flask and sloshing a measure of whiskey into Dick’s cup.

“Not too much,” Dick said hoarsely.

“Perish the thought.”

Nix pushed the cup towards him. “Drink,” he said. “You sound like you’re hacking up a lung; d’you know how hard it is to get any sleep with you around?”

“Sorry,” Dick said. They’d kept to the same foxhole; Dick had wondered about it, after that night, but apparently even Nix’s desire to forget what had happened couldn’t trump the allure of another warm body.

“Don’t apologize,” Nix said. “Just drink.”

Dick drank.

The whiskey burned, and the lemon powder had a laundry-soap aftertaste, but when Dick sighed again the cough didn’t catch, and that was enough. “Thanks,” Dick said. “It’s good.”

“Of course it is,” said Nix imperiously. He set his hand on Dick’s knee and took it away again--just a pat, and so quickly that Dick found himself uncertain the gesture had happened at all. But Nix’s eyes were bright, his cheeks pink under their hedge of stubble, and Dick felt warmer now than he had any right to be, which was objective evidence of something.

They talked more in the night, now. When there was silence between them it felt alive, a stalking thing, and who knew what it might do. So they talked to ward it off, about the company and about Dike, and how maybe they should’ve sent him off on Nix’s furlough instead of Peacock.

“He didn’t deserve it,” Nix said, and Dick had to agree. He’d have liked to shunt Dike off in any other direction, but the relief in Peacock’s eyes when Nix gave him the news had been real. Dike might pull himself together yet, Dick thought, though when he said as much to Nix he didn’t seem especially confident.

“Yalies,” Nix said. “That’s your problem.”

Dick couldn’t argue with that one way or another.

They talked about other things too. “You’re a father,” Dick said once, barely bothering to hide the incredulity.

“These things happen,” came the response.

“It just happened?”

“It was a shock,” Nix said quietly. “It--we were married. You might think that was how I got married, but no. Only just, but enough for it to count. I don’t know why it was a shock. I mean, you get married, you make babies. Hell, it’s what half the men in this company are gagging for.”

“I think the babies might be beside the point,” Dick said.

“Well, lemme tell you, they’ve got a way of becoming the point whether you like it or not.”

“I’m beginning to get that idea.”

“You think it’ll be better,” Nix said. “You--you think it’ll change things, and you’re right, but it doesn’t work the way you think.”

“No?”

“No.”

Silence again, rising up impermeably. Once it was there, the longer it was there, the harder it was to fight back down again.

“You’ll be a good father, Dick,” Nix said. His voice was rough.

Dick elbowed him softly. “I didn’t ask.”

“Still.”

“It’d make a more convincing compliment if it didn’t sound like you were trying to sell me on a job you’d quit.” He said it without thinking, and it was only after the words were out, hanging there, that it occurred to Dick that just this once silence might’ve been the safer bet.

“Ha,” Nix said. “That’s a good one. Is that what I did, do you think? Quit?”

The worst thing, Dick thought, was that the question sounded genuine. “Lew, that isn’t--”

“No, no, you’re probably right. You’re probably right. Ran away to join the paratroops. It may as well have been the circus.”

“There was a war on,” Dick said.

“Awfully convenient, don’t you think? God, Kathy hates the fucking war. Means she can’t hate me the way she wants to for leaving.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”

Nix ignored him. “Do you hate the war?” he asked.

“Sure,” Dick said. “Don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Who wouldn’t hate this shitshow, who wouldn’t give anything he had to go back to his parlor on Park Avenue, his little wife bringing him his cocktail and his dog bringing him his goddamn slippers and his kid squalling about something?”

Dick made a face. “Nix--”

“What if I said I’d rather stay here in a foxhole with you? That I never thought about taking that furlough, even for a minute? You’d think I was a mental case.”

Nix was breathing hard in the dark; even in the relative warmth Dick could see his breath. He cast off his blanket, and Dick was certain he was a hairsbreadth from climbing out of the foxhole. He shot a hand out and grabbed him by the pants-leg. When he spoke it was quickly and without thinking. Better that way, really.

“Don’t,” he said. “You want to stay, then stay. I don’t fault you for it.”

Nix laughed at that, a bark Dick didn’t much like the sound of. “Don’t you? There’s at least four things to fault me for, if you’re counting. I am.”

Dick yanked Nix closer with one hand and drew the blanket back over them as best he could with the other. “Well, I’m not,” he said. “I’m trying to get some sleep. Here in a foxhole, with you.”

***

After Foy Nix found him in an alley. In the street the men milled around. They talked over the day, each convivial over his stay of execution. Dick felt too taut to be among them, afraid he’d blow apart if spoken to. Nix slouched up through the growing dark and stood with his hands in his pockets while Dick paced a circle, counterclockwise and then back the other way, dirty snow churning under his boots.

“Dike’s getting transferred,” Nix said by way of greeting. “Gets shipped off the line first thing tomorrow. Do you wanna say something to him, send him off?”

“Do I look like I want to say something to him?”

Nix raised an eyebrow. “Yes, actually. Now, whether or not you should...”

Dick snorted. “Exactly,” he said.

If Dick was a smoker, he’d be smoking now. Nix was, so he lit a cigarette and watched Dick pace. “I thought you were going to take off across that field today,” Nix said softly.

“Yeah.” If he was being honest, the field between the Bois Jacques and the godforsaken shell of Foy was what kept Dick in the alley now. He could feel his earlier inaction crawling all along his nerves like ants. If it made any sense at all he’d run until that feeling went away, but it didn’t and he couldn’t and so he paced. And cursed Dike, and felt uncharitable for doing it but also didn’t much care.

“He was nervous,” Nix said.

“Dike, you mean?”

Nix nodded. “All that yawning. You ever notice that? It was a nervous tic, I think. I think he thought if he could disappear long enough he could just...give it a miss. Get far back enough that the nerves couldn’t touch him.”

“I don’t care,” Dick said.

“I don’t blame you,” Nix said. “I’m just saying.”

“Men are dead,” Dick said. “I don’t care.”

He thought of his bloody handprint on Moose Heyliger’s ambulance, of the way Doc’s admonishment rang in his ears and had for days afterward. “He ought to have known. If he couldn’t do it, he ought to have known before he got out in the middle of that field and froze.”

“He knew,” Nix said. “He just got himself in too far to come back from. See, that’s what happens when you’re told you can have anything, Dick. You wind up with your back to a wall in the middle of a firefight wondering what the fuck you were thinking.”

The implied comparison set Dick’s teeth on edge. “You’re nothing like him.”

“Oh, I am,” Nix said lightly. “It’s all right. Different walls, though, and different firefights.”

“I wish you wouldn’t--”

“I said, it’s all right.”

Nix came closer. Dick sighed, stopped his peregrination at last and leaned up against the brick. Nix settled beside him and slumped so that they were shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. If anyone saw them they wouldn’t think anything of it. After Bastogne you’d think it strange if two men in one spot weren’t half in each other’s laps. Anyway, it was still cold. Dick was shivering despite his coat, despite his pacing.

“There’s food,” Nix said. “They set up a chow line. You want some food?”

“Nah. I’m okay. You should go, though. I think I’ll stay here awhile longer.”

“What, and wear a hole straight down to China? Come on. Come get something to eat. We’re not staying here tonight,” he added, voicing what Dick already knew.

What he didn’t know was whether he’d heard it somewhere or just assumed, or if he’d simply intimated their departure from some ineffability that clung to Nix in the growing shadows. The latter was becoming increasingly likely. Around them the wind was kicking up again and chasing flurries off the looming rubble; Dick kept catching the movement out of the corner of his eye and imagining snipers.

They ate around a sad little fire that Dick could’ve mistaken for roaring, for all he hadn’t seen a proper fire in weeks. Harry in his dell weighed heavy on him, and by the look Nix gave him across the flames Dick could see he was thinking the same thing. Harry had seemed untouchable, Dick thought, but he supposed they all had once.

After dinner the call came to move out, and the whole company seemed to creak and groan into motion as one. Nix let his head loll back on his shoulders and closed his eyes and took a very long drag on his cigarette, white smoke billowing up into the sky to mix in with the cloud cover. Pale gauze draped the moon and Dick had been out here long enough to know he ought to hope for it to thicken up. Warmer, for one; that and the thought of a well-lit convoy out of town made him nauseous. Dick got up first, went over to Nix and offered him a hand. Nix took it without hesitation and allowed himself to be pulled, just for a moment, into Dick’s arms, and Dick thought of the shape of his mouth in the tent the morning he told Dick to forget about what happened in the foxhole.

Dick didn’t sleep that night. The road out of Foy was rock-studded and muddy and pocked with great craters the jeep had to detour around. Nix did sleep, or pretended to, slumped over against the passenger door. When the grey dawn came they alighted from their jeep and found the line again and Dick said goodbye to Nix and thanked God for Ron Speirs, though he wasn’t entirely sure God cared to hear those sorts of prayers.

***

When Nix effectively promoted Dick to major he blushed and fidgeted, and Dick half knew what was in that box but he felt a rush of adrenaline anyway. In the jeep afterwards, moving back from the line at last, Nix wore his sunglasses despite the weak late winter light and pretended not to watch Dick, monitoring him for some sort of late-onset reaction.

“What?” Dick muttered at last. He glanced in the mirror. In the back seat Harry was dozing and Speirs looked near to it.

“Just thinking about those oak leaves. Wondering whether or not you’re going to yell later,” Nix said quietly. “It was pretty thrilling the last time, but I’m not sure I’ve got the constitution for it at this point in my military career.”

“Had a little too much excitement lately, Lew?”

“Plenty for this lifetime, thanks,” Nix said.

There would be more, but it wouldn’t come courtesy of Dick.

He could remember the time when he’d first been vaguely concerned about Nix’s drinking--not because he thought it interfered but because, on the train to New York (to the troop ship, to England) it had occurred to him to wonder how precisely Nix was going to go to war.

But Nix had done it, whiskey-steeped or no, and once that had been good enough for Dick. Now, as the war began to ebb, he found himself with the freedom of mind to worry again. He wasn’t given to fretting. He was the type to look hard at a potential problem and do little else until he was absolutely certain it met the definition, by which point he’d already got the answer worked out anyway. But now it didn’t much matter whether Nix was a problem for Dick, because he was a problem for Regiment, and these days the two were indistinguishable.

Sink wanted a meeting, and when he got the memo Dick knew instantly what it was about. The knowledge sat in his belly like a brick. Again he steered clear of Nix for fear he’d see it written all over Dick’s face, and again he sat up nights and wondered what it was about Nix that gave him such a horror of discovery.

***

“I know he’s a friend of yours,” Sink said from behind his makeshift desk at the CP.

“Sir?”

“I’m not entirely certain Regimental S-2 is the best fit,” Sink said. “Between us, of course.”

“Of course, sir,” Dick said, quashing the urge to argue out of sheer gut-check loyalty. On a good clear day and given the inclination he had no doubt Nix could think circles around anyone at Regiment, but he’d been under the weather for far too long.

It occurred to Dick suddenly that he might, in short order, be handing Nix transfer orders. The idea hardly bore thinking about; he was about as willing to go through with it as he had been the second patrol in Haguenau, but there was no sleight of hand here, no story to spin. “Colonel, I--”

“Can you work with him?” Sink asked.

Dick felt cold all over. Somehow this was the last thing he’d expected.“Yes,” he said, trying not to sound breathless. “I can.”

***

He began to follow along on the evenings Nix played cards with Speirs and Lip and Harry, and he drank, sure, but they all drank. Dick wasn’t sure he could tell the difference. And if Nix finished up his bottle first, if he dealt himself out and went rifling through Dick’s footlocker for the umpteenth time, well, that was no different than any other night Dick had known him.

Sometimes he played with them, though it wasn’t much fun. Sometimes he sat in the corner and read, or skimmed over reports. Tonight he had a dogeared pulp, a detective novel he’d found kicking around his billet. He tried to concentrate on the story, facile though it was, but mainly he found himself thinking of the man the book had belonged to. He’d pencilled his first name in the inside cover, Tom written out in a spidery hand. Dick wondered where he’d been, where he’d gone from here.

When Nix got up Dick followed after him. He didn’t speak until the two of them were alone in Dick’s room, Nix kneeling before Dick’s trunk and fumbling with the lock.

“You need the combination?”

Nix started. “Jesus, you’re like a ghost,” he said. “Right color, too. No, I’m all right, thanks. Haven’t lost it yet, not unless Ma Winters went and got herself another birthday. What’s up? The party get too raucous for you out there?”

“No,” Dick said weakly. “I just thought I’d come and see what you were doing.”

“Oh, you know,” Nix said. “Replenishment.” He took the bottle out and set it beside him on the floor, pawed around in the footlocker. It wasn’t until most of Dick’s belongings had been strewn over Nix’s lap that he sat up, frowning. “Well, shit,” he said. “Could’ve sworn I had another couple bottles.”

“Better make it last, then,” Dick said. “Or you’ll have to start drinking the local.”

Nix snorted. “Never,” he said, but he sounded pressed, like someone had him up against a wall, and Dick didn’t like the thought of being the one responsible.

He’d thought to talk to Nix about the meeting with Sink, about getting Nix back to Battalion for good, and about the strange mix of disquiet and elation he felt about it--though maybe not in precisely those terms. But standing here looking at Nix’s furrowed brow, the dark smudges under his eyes, Dick couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Anyway, he reasoned, Nix was drunk. And it wouldn’t go well, was in fact predisposed to go badly. Dick felt as if he hadn’t been like this in a room with Nix in a long time, under a roof and in no imminent danger, and he’d rather just be there than have a serious conversation about Nix’s future in the Army. It was perfectly understandable.

“Why’re you looking at me like I’m getting called into the headmaster’s office?” Nix said, taking another drink. Something else had come into his eyes now, something Dick might have seen once before. Or maybe not; it had been pretty dark.

“Back where I come from we just called him the principal,” Dick said.

“What a fascinating cultural exchange this is. You know, I could talk about your hayseed roots all night, Dick.” He got to his feet and stretched, looking as if he meant to settle in and do just that.

Dick laughed. “Sure you can stand to miss your card game?”

“I think they’ll manage without me.”

They sat on Dick’s bed, Nix cross-legged at the foot and Dick leaning back against the thin pillow. The bed wasn’t much of one, more cot than anything, its frame made of metal as flimsy as a folding chair. There were better places to sit in the room, the original occupants’ shabby armchairs pulled up alongside the fireplace. They could light a fire, Dick thought, a real one this time. No light discipline tonight, and chimneys all over town were belching smoke already. They talked awhile, about Lancaster County and how Dick had wrestled in college but had to give it up, and Nix managed to listen intently and hum in sympathy at intervals and not make any untoward comments at all, which frankly Dick found a little disappointing.

“This is a real upgrade, huh?” he said when the conversation died away. He was thinking of the bois, letting himself be a little bit comfortable, a little bit content. Nix didn’t answer; he was staring down into his glass of whiskey, unblinking.

“You okay?” he asked Nix.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah, yeah. I’m just thinking.”

Dick had his shoes off. He thought very hard about sliding his sock-clad foot beneath Nix’s thigh. “What about?”

“Just--” He bit his lip, looked up at Dick. “Would you jump with another division? If you had the chance?”

“What, and two-time the 101st?”

Dick said it lightly, but the look on Nix’s face seemed to suggest that he’d thought of it exactly that way. Jumping again--the thought tugged at Dick’s heartstrings even as the ghosts of old butterflies wheeled in his belly. He was fairly certain he’d never match the thrill of a combat jump: the sting of adrenaline, how he’d found a way to take his fear and hold it fast, dwell inside it and let it wash over him.

“Why do you ask?” His mouth felt slightly dry. “Have you got the chance?”

“Yeah,” Nix said. “Maybe.”

Later Dick would know there’d been no maybe about it; perhaps he knew already. But Nix had made it sound as if he were asking Dick for permission, as if that mattered a whit in the Army, and the moment felt off-kilter and strange.

“Heck, Lew, I think I’d have a hard time saying no,” he said.

Nix laughed, ran a hand back through his hair. “I guess you would,” he said. “God, you remember what it was like, the first time? They said if we hesitated we’d wash out and I swear, Dick, I spent the whole way up half-convinced I wasn’t going to be able to do it.”

“But all the drills we did,” Dick said. “All the run-throughs. There were men we thought might balk at the door, when it came time, but you were never one of them.”

They’d talked about it, even--Dick and Nix spoke in practical terms, of who might not make it past that final hurdle, but the men were meaner, joshing and placing bets.

“Still,” Nix said. “I didn’t know. I thought--I thought here I’d gone and done this thing, joined up, and my old man, and Kathy--they all thought I was crazy. So I thought, what if they were right, what if I got up to the threshold and crapped out after all.”

“But you didn’t,” said Dick.

“No.” Nix looked down at his glass. He ran his finger round and round the rim, skin on glass producing a thin and mournful sound. “No, I got to the door and went right out after you, didn’t I. And I remember--the wind was so strong up there, and so cold, and when I got my chute open and I felt it catch I realized I barely even cared about that, about whether or not I was going to plummet to my own death because I’d done it, I’d actually done it--”

“Yeah,” Dick said, grinning.

“--And screw Stanhope Nixon, and screw Kathy, we were going to be paratroopers.”

Dick raised an eyebrow. “We?”

Nix was suddenly very close, his face florid with booze, and Dick could remember like it was yesterday. That night they’d stood shoulder to shoulder and Nix looked pink and bleary just like this and they’d come through hell and high water and Sobel and Dick was so happy, they were both so happy.

“Wouldn’t have been worth a damn without you,” Nix muttered. “None of it.”

Dick’s eyes were on Nix’s mouth, the wet slip of his tongue as he ran it over his bottom lip. He smelled like whiskey. But Dick had smelled drink on him so often that it was just him, just Lew, and he couldn’t sift through the mix of concern and disapproval and affection that smell stirred up, not when Nix was close like this. He reached up and curved his hand around the back of Nix’s neck. Nix looked dumb with disbelief. He shivered, and all the hairs on the back of his neck came up, and for some reason that just made Dick smile harder.

“What are you doing?” Nix whispered.

Dick didn’t reply, just kissed him softly on the mouth. And this was a kiss, not just some incidental proximity of lips. This couldn’t pretend not to be what it was. The lights were on, for one thing.

Nix hummed in surprise and tensed as if to draw away. Dick nearly let him, but then Nix’s tongue darted into his mouth, hot and wet. Just the tip, just for a second, but it was evidence enough of desire for Dick to tighten his grip on Nix’s neck and pull him in close.

“We shouldn’t,” Nix said automatically, as if he’d been storing up the response in his head for just such an eventuality. “Dick, we--it’s not--”

Dick let his forehead rest on Nix’s shoulder. His hand was still around his neck and he could feel Nix’s pulse hammer beneath his fingers. He kissed the place where the beat felt strongest.

“Oh,” Nix said, barely a word, just the release of breath.

“We can stop,” Dick said.

“Yeah,” Nix said. “Yeah, we should stop.” He was breathing hard, shifting paradoxically closer to Dick as he spoke.

“You don’t want to stop,” Dick said.

Nix shook his head, and so Dick kissed him again, pulled Nix down on top of him on the bed, his fingers caught up in the placket of his shirt. Nix kissed him hard for a moment and Dick thought his heart might hammer free of his chest for all it seemed to batter against his ribcage.

“Jesus, Dick, the door,” Nix said suddenly. He rolled off abruptly and staggered to the door Dick had pushed ajar behind them what felt like hours ago. He shut it quietly and ran his hands around, looking for a lock. Finding nothing, he dragged one of the armchairs over and wedged it under the knob. Then he turned and looked at Dick. He looked wild, hair a rumpled mess, face red. He looked like he did in the mornings. His shirt was mostly untucked.

Dick sat up, feeling his earlier confidence draw back like a retreating wave. “You want to forget it?” he asked. If he did, Dick thought, it would be all right. After all, they’d mostly forgotten about Bastogne.

“I want to lie down,” Nix said. “Shove over, will you?”

He cut the light and came back over to the bed, lay down next to Dick on top of the sheets. He curled onto his side and folded his hands between his cheek and the pillow. Dick wanted to touch him. He put out his hand and tugged on Nix’s collar; Nix tucked his chin and brushed his lips over Dick’s knuckles.

“God,” Nix said. As before, barely a word. He winced like it pained him to say it.

“What?”

“What,” Nix echoed. “You get me in here and you--you lay one on me and all you can say is ‘what.’ You’re something else.”

“You started it,” Dick said, his face hot.

Nix slid a hand out from under his head and combed Dick’s hair back, fingers playing over Dick’s forehead. “No,” he said. “You started it.”

They lay there for what felt like a long time. It seemed to Dick that Nix drew closer and closer until their faces were side by side on the understuffed pillow, their noses brushing, Nix’s lashes beating like wings on the cotton as he blinked.

“I’m real drunk,” he said.

“No you’re not,” Dick said. “I’ve seen you drunker.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

Dick sighed. “It’s all right.”

“Let’s sleep,” Nix said. “I’m trying to get some sleep here and you’re just--you’re making it impossible.”

Dick laughed at that, because he sounded just as put upon as he did in the mornings. All a-simmer at the nerve of the sun, rising like that, and the nerve of people, expecting him to regain consciousness, to function alongside them.

“I’m sorry, Lewis.”

“You ought to be. Your damn mouth, Dick, it’s right there.”

“I’ll go,” Dick said. He was still laughing.

“Like hell,” Nix said, and kissed him again.

***

When Lew came back from Varsity, from not dying, Dick fought everything that threatened to crawl up out of his throat and leap at him as he sat slopping whiskey all over that nice wooden table. He was careless and he made Dick mad and the thought of him blown to pieces over the German countryside made Dick madder.

He told him about the demotion; Lew snapped back about the mission, about all those letters. Dick went over to him and put his hand to Nix’s pallid cheek and said, “I told Sink I wanted you back.” He made as if to kiss Nix’s mouth, but Nix pulled his hand away and went out of the room and shut the door and threw an empty bottle.

Speaking of letters--When Nix showed him Kathy’s Dick turned away and swallowed a laugh. It served Nix right, Dick thought, and hated himself for it. You might not know it to look, but there was a secret streak of meanness in him. Nix got a kick out of it. He tried to tease it out now and then, could live off a glimpse for years, dragging it out in mixed company like mythology.

This one time Dick cracked a guy’s spine, swear to God, drove him to the infirmary myself and the whole time the poor sap’s crying for his mama saying Dick goddamn Winters--

Dick didn’t have it in him to be angry with Nix after that, after Kathy and then Landsberg, because what was the point. Nix drank himself out of Regiment, back to Battalion and back to Dick, and so what exactly did Dick have to complain about? He dragged Nix against a hastily locked door and kissed him soundly by way of making it up to him, the letter and the dog and the laughter and everything else.

Nix undressed him, got his tie off and his shirt off and got Dick down to his skivvies. He pushed Dick onto the bed and knelt on the floor between his legs. He kept his clothes on, and Dick wondered if this was some kind of retribution for the foxhole, if Nix thought to make Dick come apart in front of him this time. He put his hands on Dick’s thighs and ran them down to his knees, his calves. It was embarrassing, being looked at like this, and Dick flushed and groaned, shifting under Nix’s gaze.

“Lew,” he said, his voice slightly strangled.

Nix’s version of an answer was to fasten his lips to the inside of Dick’s thigh. Dick felt gooseflesh rise up all around the place where Lew’s mouth was, and again he flinched, his hands twitching where they rested on the quilt.

“No cheating,” Nix said, and Dick didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but thought that if anyone was cheating it was Lew, because there was absolutely nothing fair about what was happening now. He said as much, and Nix laughed softly.

“You sit here,” he said. “And you let me have my fun. You’ll like it, I promise.”

“But--”

“Would I lie to you?” He kissed Dick’s thigh again, and his mouth was very wet.

They hadn’t--they hadn’t. They’d kissed themselves to sleep that first night, and whenever else they could, but little else. Dick wanted time, mainly, and he hadn’t had time until they got well into Germany. Tonight they were billeted on the third floor of a rather stately townhome, abandoned petunias languishing in a windowbox outside. Dick wasn’t sure why the sight of them should touch him so, but it did, and it had made him want to kiss Lew, and that had made Lew want to do other things.

Nix hooked a finger under the waistband of Dick’s shorts and it took everything in him not to curse. But Lew didn’t progress from there, just slid his finger from one of Dick’s hipbones to the other and chuckled at the breath Dick drew. Already he felt hot, flushed with blood and hard in his shorts. He was sure he must be pink as those petunias, but when he looked down at himself he saw only white cotton and skin like skimmed milk, the kind of skin that burned if you looked at it crosswise and broadcast every last vicissitude. He very nearly cursed again. It seemed an awful lot to look at, but here Nix was, nosing along the crease of Dick’s thigh.

He felt as if he were thawing out, long-dormant wants become liquid again. Had he ever let himself think of this, with Lew or with anyone? He was no ascetic, not really. He couldn’t lay claim to that kind of purity. But in war, he’d thought, it might be sensible to keep baser desires well at bay.

When Nix took Dick into his mouth Dick couldn’t keep his hands on the bed; he flailed until he found Nix’s shoulders, composure a lost cause. He was too close for that, strung up too tight, and in the end so fearful was he of crying out that he pulled away before he was quite finished coming, hauled Nix up by the armpits and kissed him with his mouth still full. He tasted himself, foreign and alkaline, and it sent a jolt of surprising pleasure through him.

“Jesus,” Nix said, swallowing. He drew back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his face wild. “You--”

Dick raised an eyebrow, belying the way his heart pounded. Perhaps it was too much, too far. But Nix just shook his head, crawled up the bed and took Dick’s face in his hands, and by the way he moved it was clear he wasn’t long for the world either.

Afterwards they lay on the bed together. Dick was preoccupied; now that his heart was slowing again he began to think of the world outside the door.

“Harry will miss us,” he said

“Harry’s passed out downstairs,” Nix said. “But all right, I’ll get decent if you’re worried about it.” He sat up, struggled back into his clothes and went to pour himself a drink. He’d brought up a bottle of something; Vat 69 was still in short supply, apparently, and Nix had a bit of a hair trigger about it.

“How’s that taste?” Dick asked.

“Like turpentine, Dick, thanks for asking.”

“Nix--”

“No, no, I know you’re very concerned that I’m not maintaining the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed. Only the best, et cetera et cetera.” He sloshed his glass full and took a gulp. “Christ, that’s bad.”

“So stop drinking,” Dick said.

Something about those words changed the tenor of the moment, chased the tenderness from the room like an airing out of smoke. He hadn’t meant the statement as an indictment any more than he had the first time he told Nix to quit squirreling his whiskey away, and he’d meant it in specific rather than general terms. But it seemed they were talking about more than just this glass, this bottle, this night. Nix looked stricken.

“What’s wrong?” Dick asked.

“I can’t stop,” Nix said. “Not now. I’m sorry.”

Dick stared a moment, then he got up from the bed and went over to the sideboard where Nix leaned heavily like he thought he might fall over. His hands shook around the glass. Dick took it from him, took Nix’s hands and and folded them against his chest.

“It’s all right,” Dick said. “Nix, it’s all right. I understand.”

But it was more than understanding; there was something about Lew at loose ends that made Dick tender. The way he slouched into a room, the way his Ray-Bans rode low on the bridge of his nose so that Dick’s fingers itched to slide them back up and brush his fringe off his face for good measure.

In Goering’s wine cellar he and O’Keefe swung their torchlights over a thousand dusty bottles and O’Keefe said simply, “Damn.” Dick hadn’t for a moment questioned who’d get first stab at these particular spoils, and maybe he should’ve been ashamed but fact was he’d always been a sucker for Lew in high spirits.

So on V-E Day hell froze over and Dick Winters drank champagne, because the war was halfway over and because Nix said he’d like it.

They stood out on Dick’s balcony, the dark like velvet all around them. Off in the night they could hear the whoops and laughs of the men; somewhere someone shot up a flare and bloodied a patch of sky. The pop and sparkle set Dick’s nerves alight and he sucked at the neck of the bottle to quell the sting that ran along his synapses that reminded him of artillery and made him want to fling himself under the furniture on impulse.

“Well? How is it?”

Dick dragged a hand across his mouth. The bubbles made his nose itch and he sneezed. He was aware that there was a stumbling, kindergarten sort of cuteness to the moment, and he hated it even as the look Nix gave him nearly made him blush.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“Oh, really,” Nix said. “Just fine, huh. That’s why you’ve killed half the bottle.”

“I have not,” Dick said, a lone hiccup loosing itself along with the words. Dick had his arm around Nix’s waist and he could’ve just as easily been drunk on that alone. So there.

Nix reached for the bottle and prised it gently from Dick’s fingers. “Go easy; you’ll get sick.” He took a generous swig himself.

“Looking out for me?”

“Always. S’why I’m here, if you want to know the truth.”

Dick couldn’t look at him, not while he was saying things like that, not even after all that champagne. He coughed. “What, not God and country?”

“No, nothing that poetic. Just this gawky redhead I got mixed up with back at OCS. Had to keep him out of trouble somehow.” He pulled Dick to him. “And you know what they say: you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”