Archive of Our Own

I.

To say that he had noticed Liebgott would be a statement, and it would be true, but it also would not fully capture the situation. Liebgott was very noticeable. This was true in a general sense--Liebgott did not know how to keep his mouth shut, and though he was built like an anemic twig he had quickly moved to the front group in every Currahee run, possibly out of sheer spite--but it was also true in a private sense particular to Webster that he was not proud of. He’d told himself firmly that he had left all that behind him in prep school.

It was certainly not the kind of thing he was going to do anything about in the army, in the fucking paratroops. When the government psychologist had asked him at the Boston induction center if he liked girls he had answered yes without even fully realizing what the question had meant. Which was probably a good thing for whatever records they were keeping on him. He had gone on a date with a Radcliffe girl just the week previous, and though it had not been a notable success he had kissed her in the shadows beside the entrance to her dormitory and felt normal about it. Her name was Betty and she’d known more about Chaucer than he did, which had been lowering, as he thought about Radcliffe girls more as possible marriage material than fellow scholars. Probably that was rude of him.

Betty however was back in Massachusetts, almost the entire Eastern Seaboard away from Webster who was here in Georgia noticing more things than he should about a fellow private he would soon be jumping out of airplanes beside. If he could manage not to get thrown out for conduct unbecoming to a soldier between then and now.

The extent to which he spoke to Liebgott was far smaller than the extent to which he noticed him generally; their longest conversation had likely been their first, when Webster had introduced himself--this was before he’d known that he was going to begin to feel abnormal, psychologically, about Liebgott--and Liebgott had said, “Hey, like the dictionary.” And Webster had said yes. And then the guy beside Webster had said something about Harvard, because Webster had made what he already realized was the grave error of mentioning that. And Liebgott had whistled between his teeth and said, “Big shot, huh?”

And that had been it.

When they got weekend passes to the nearest town, which barely deserved the name, and when the passes weren’t revoked, which was infrequent--mostly they all got very drunk and tried to flirt with local girls who had not yet tired of the bullshit quotient an influx of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old males brought with them inherently. Even if they were heroes in the making. Liebgott was always at the front of these maneuvers, as he was always at the front of the Currahee runs, as he was always at the front of any situation that promised trouble. He had gotten in a brawl with some jerkoff in F Company their first week here and it had already become a minor legend. Sobel had chewed him out and George Luz had prepared a dramatic recounting of the whole incident, with voices, in mere hours.

The trouble Liebgott was looking for in the two-bit hillbilly bar was of a different kind, however. Or possibly it was the same kind only he was going about it in a different way. If he was looking to get hit then the way he was leering at the girl behind the bar was definitely going to do it, sooner or later, though whether it was going to be her or her hypothetical but probable boyfriend (husband? they married young down here) or a fellow paratrooper doing the hitting was at this point anyone’s guess.

Possibly he wasn’t leering. But he was definitely doing something, with his eyes, and the way he was smiling at her, which was not unsuccessful in making him look extremely attractive despite (here Webster tried desperately to think of Liebgott’s least-alluring qualities) that he had a face like a hatchet and probably weighed less than that girl did even soaking wet. Matinee idol material he was not. Webster had to look away from the whole scene playing out because it was raising his blood pressure, and other things, too badly.

They had to go back to camp that evening before anything could happen with Liebgott and the girl but that was hardly comforting in an existential sense. None of them got laid all throughout training, as far as Webster was aware, which was discomforting in a more physical and embarrassing way. Despite all his protestations about prep school and the habits learned and then abandoned therein, the experience of laying in the dark pretending not to listen to half a dozen guys jerk off was patently familiar.

Liebgott was not one of those guys, because he was in a different barracks, and most of the time Webster was deeply thankful for that. There was a point at which the particularly ugly and difficult training days were almost a blessing, because then at least everyone including Webster would pass out immediately upon hitting their beds.

North Carolina was more or less like Georgia except that instead of being forced through ridiculous and exhausting training courses they were forced through ridiculous and exhausting field problems. They would’ve at least provided some longed-for mental stimulation except that Webster, his uniform jacket distinctly lacking in chevrons, was not expected to think even a little bit. The thinking was left to people much stupider.

On one of these problems Liebgott was in his squad--orange, they had armbands like they were on teams at school--and Webster spent too much time thinking about that. About Liebgott beside him in the fatigues that seemed too big, always, on his stickish frame, but that nonetheless seemed to fit him perfectly. Or: that he seemed to feel utterly at home in. Liebgott has settled into being a soldier in a way that Webster still hadn’t, though he'd thought something would have happened by now, a switch turned in his mind or his spine like he was a wind-up toy sent in with the rest of them like so many wooden brainless fools.

It was, perhaps, thoughts like this that were preventing that change from overcoming him.

Liebgott, though, was easy in his uniform, easy with a rifle in his hands. Easy hunkered down next to Webster behind an earthwork, his helmet big on his head in a way that should make him look like a kid playing dress-up but that instead looked like something he'd crafted with his own hands for the purpose of his protection. Crude but purpose-built. Like all of him: put together from spare parts, unerringly.

Liebgott snapped his fingers in front of Webster's face, and Webster startled. "Hey, Web, pay some fuckin attention," he said.

"Yeah," Webster said, stupid. Liebgott wasn't the first one to call him Web but he'd definitely be thinking about it for a while. "What?"

Liebgott muttered under his breath, not in English. That surprised Webster for a moment. "Was that German?" He hadn't caught it.

"No, it was English and you're losin your fuckin mind," Liebgott returned, though he seemed more annoyed than mad. "It seem weird to you that we've been sittin here this long?"

"I thought it was restful," Webster said, ironically. As if doing anything in Liebgott's vicinity could be restful.

Liebgott gave him a look like Webster was trying him. "Imma go look for the other guys."

"No you're not," Webster said, grabbing the edge of his jacket as Liebgott went to stand. "If they're not here, they got delayed, or they're 'dead,' quote-unquote, and they've forgotten us and we get to not have to do anything unbearably stupid for like, ten minutes."

Liebgott looked at him like Webster was a whole different species. "Do what you want, Webster," he said, and then took off. His jacket slid through Webster's finger and thumb like sand, and he sighed, knocking his head back against the grassy mound.

Wouldn't that be nice. He sat for another minute, then followed behind Liebgott.

*

The machinery of the war ground them onward, across the ocean, though a period of interminable waiting in an England that was almost suspiciously bucolic. All of them, crisp-uniformed, jeeps rattling down cobblestone roads, put paid to that pretty quickly. In a week the grass was cut up with tire marks, and cigarette butts covered the ground like someone had tossed them there by the handful. Lieutenant Nixon lectured them every other day about being gracious guests but he didn't sound much like he believed it, and only grinned when the men ragged him for it.

Something about all of it grated at the nervous animal part of Webster's brain. He wanted a plane to jump out of just to get it over with. Being held here, with hot food and pretty English girls and PX cigarettes and beer, made him think of cattle in a stockyard. A few weeks in he bought a .45 from a provisions officer and a holster to go with it, just to assuage that jittery headlong feeling. He was impatient to get on with it all, even if it was horrible.

Liebgott saw him wearing the pistol in its holster the next day, and he actually stopped walking before raising his eyebrows up as far as they would go. Like all his bodily energy had to go in to making faces at Webster, no excess for locomotion or anything else.

Webster said, “What.”

“That’s some fuckin cowboy shit, Web,” Liebgott told him. There was a little knob of chewing gum in his cheek, which probably meant that he had run out of cigarettes.

“I thought I’d go prepared.”

“Uh-huh,” Liebgott said, and snapped his gum. “We are prepared, that shit’s just showing off.”

It shouldn’t be a big deal, but like with everything when it came to Liebgott Webster felt it down low in his chest, incendiary. There was something about Liebgott that made you want to win against him, to beat him down and make him see you were right all along.

Or maybe that was just Webster. “If we land in the middle of some field full of Germans, I’d like something more at hand than my M-1, actually,” Webster said, and then wished he hadn’t said actually at the end, which made him sound like a teenage girl about the whole thing instead of what he was, which was right.

“Yeah, O.K.,” Liebgott said, but not like he really believed him. Webster opened his mouth to argue some more but Liebgott clapped him on the arm and distracted him. “Go get ‘em, Tom Mix.”

And then Webster was left staring after him, not sure if he was more pissed that Liebgott hadn’t been convinced or hadn’t thought it was worth it to stick around and find out if he could be. That night at the pub Webster said to Toye, “You know, M-1s are hard to handle at close range,” and Toye gave him a look like he was losing his mind. Webster was not losing his mind, but he was by that point pretty wasted. It was lucky, when you thought about it, that this was the craziest thing he was doing.

*

“Hey, Web!” Liebgott called, over the head of the guy he was giving a mohawk. The airstrip was bright and dusty, and Webster had to squint to see anything, even with the thumb-width black stripes painted under his eyes like he was an outfielder. He blamed that for why he'd gotten within shouting range of Liebgott without realizing it. He was so nervous about the upcoming jump that he felt like his brain was floating an inch or two outside his skull.

The mohawk Liebgott was executing was half-done, the right hemisphere of the guy’s scalp shockingly pale in the sunlight, Liebgott’s hand proprietary on the crown of his head. That made Webster think about all kinds of things he didn’t want to, like Liebgott’s hand on his own head, keeping him still or pushing him down.

Idiotic. Worse, what Liebgott said next--”Let me do you!”

“Not in a million years,” Webster called back, coming closer. His voice was steady, thank God.

“Aw,” Liebgott said, smirking at him. “C’mon, Web. Maybe you’d look tough, instead of, you know, like you do now.” The smirk widened.

“As if I’m letting you get anywhere near me with that,” Webster said, nodding to the razor in Liebgott’s hand, just a flash of light in the sun.

“Hey, I know what I’m doing,” Liebgott said, offended maybe for show, maybe for real. It was hard to tell with him, sometimes. “You don’t trust me, Web?”

That was a joke, Webster thought, he hoped. He wasn’t sure. He trusted Liebgott with his life, like all the rest of the guys, because he had to--but he was aware too of the awkward gap in between them. Whenever they spoke Webster felt a sensation like missing the curb and stepping down into the gutter; neither of them could quite forget who they were outside the uniform, not the way they could with the others. They were too aware of that gap, that missed step between them, to be as close as they--as Webster--wanted them to be.

He didn’t know what Liebgott wanted. “I don’t trust you not to make me look ridiculous, no,” he said, hoping to cut a conciliatory path. “You’d enjoy it too much.”

The smirk was back, in full force. “I knew it. You’re too vain.”

“Vanitas vanitatum,” Webster said.

“O.K., professor,” Liebgott said, but like he’d won the argument. Still smirking. Webster felt like he’d received some kind of prize. Successfully navigated a conversation with Private Liebgott, didn’t make him hate me. Like a merit badge to sew onto his old Boy Scout uniform at home, a little green circle with a razor blade in its center.

II.

“You never join in games,” Webster said.

They were back in Aldbourne, after all of it. Back in the enlisted men’s pub like Normandy had only been a dream, a nightmare they had shed by simply opening their eyes again. Webster only wished it were that simple.

He and Liebgott were sitting at one of the tiny pub tables that littered the room; Webster had his knees bent up under it and Liebgott had his spread wide, to fit. Liebgott had tucked his feet around the legs of his chair and hunched his shoulders forward, and looked like some kind of strange bird. Perched, all the angles of him in delicate balance. In New York once at a museum Webster had seen a sculpture made of oddly shaped pieces of metal, all counterbalanced against each other to create a whole, recklessly beautiful contraption. Looking at Liebgott made him think of it.

“Nope,” Liebgott said. He took a final drag off his cigarette, stubbed out the butt in their table's ashtray.

The pub was steaming hot and crowded, and there was a poker game going in the middle of the room that had become something of a spectator sport: Luz by all appearances was running the table. But Webster was over here, following only incidentally as he braced his notebook open and tried to find words to describe what had just happened to them all; or else what they had all just done. Liebgott had sat down across from him, not shouldering his way into the game the way he did everything else.

“Why not?” Webster asked. “It seems like your kind of thing.”

“What seems like my kinda thing.” It should’ve been a question but Liebgott didn’t bother to pull it up into one, left it flat and uninviting.

“You know,” Webster said. “Being one of the guys. I know why I’m sitting over here--”

“Cause everybody thinks you’re annoying?”

That stung, though Webster tried not to let it show on his face; he must not have been very successful, because he and Liebgott looked at each other for a long moment, and then Liebgott relented, with a little nod, almost a flick of his head. “Webster, don’t be fuckin stupid,” he said, with a sort of sigh, like Webster was exhausting him.

“I’m not being--I’m asking a question,” Webster said. And you’re the one who sat down here, he didn’t add.

“I don’t join games cause the guys play for money,” Liebgott said, like he was explaining something to someone who was dense but also not really worth the effort.

"Yes," Webster said. "So?" He had guessed that Liebgott didn't come from much, but most of the guys didn't; no one played too far beyond the means of their army pay.

"So," Liebgott said, in the same bored, barely-tolerant tone, “if I play, I could win. If I win, I’m a dirty, cheating Jew. That answer your fuckin question?”

Webster blinked, and blinked again. That wasn't where he'd anticipated this going. “I don’t think any of them would think that,” he said, feeling obscurely defensive of the other men.

“Oh, you don’t? Well, there’s a fuckin load off my chest,” Liebgott said sardonically. He lit another cigarette, long fingers fluttering over the pack, the matchbook. He breathed out a puff of smoke, more or less directly in Webster’s face. Webster tried not to cough. “If Professor Webster here says it ain’t so, then it ain’t. Right?”

“That’s not what I meant.” He remembered thinking, a month ago on the airstrip, how thrilling it felt to sidestep Liebgott’s anger, to find a foothold and not be sucked down under the tide of his disdain. Now he felt himself knee-deep, and sinking fast. “I just think you’re selling them short. They like you.” A little sting at that; the guys liked Liebgott, in fact, a lot better than they liked Webster.

“Yeah, sure,” Liebgott said. “And they’re gonna keep liking me, so long as I ain’t takin any money off of them.”

“You could play for cigarettes.”

Liebgott looked at him like he was approximately the dumbest thing this side of the German line. “Webster,” he said, “why don’t you try shutting up.”

There was a low whistle and a short burst of snorting laughter. Webster hadn’t realized they were being listened in on, and from the brief startled look on Liebgott’s face he guessed that Liebgott hadn’t known, either. They'd been pitching their voices under the general hubbub of sound, and somehow that had made Webster think they were inaudible, in their own bubble of existence apart from everyone else. "You tell him, Lieb," someone said. Webster didn't turn around to check who it was.

He and Liebgott looked at each other for a second, then Liebgott only rolled his eyes, got up and left. Webster didn't think Liebgott was disdaining him but that could also have been wishful thinking and the strange slantways angle his thoughts took around Liebgott. He wanted him to come back, but not to continue the conversation: he wanted a do-over, a second chance, wanted Liebgott to return and sit down and try the conversation over again.

Stupid. Webster stubbed out his cigarette next to Liebgott's in the ashtray, and went back to his notebook.

*

Holland was mostly a fuck-up even if it had its moments, and about the third thing Webster felt after his whole calf seemed to flicker and disappear and then come back to him feeling white-hot--the third thing he felt, after the shock and the pain, was relief. This was his ticket, maybe not out for good, but out for a while. He'd grown sick of it, deathly sick, sick of the exhausting tennis match between boredom and fear that his nerves had been playing since they got to Europe. At least in the hospital he might be able to read a little.

By the time he made it to the aid station his leg hurt more, a lot more; he laid down on the ground in a quiet corner and tried not to think about it. It mostly didn't work. He knew better than to ask for morphine; being surrounded by a lot of men much worse off than he was should've in the scope of some great cosmic fairness made him feel better, but in fact it only made it harder to forget his own leg's weird and constant throb.

Roe knelt beside him after maybe half an hour, though time had become less reliable in the monotony of the pain, his own and the other men's, their yelling and sobbing and cries for their mother. That last, he thought, was such a cliche; he could never put it in a book, he probably wouldn’t even write it in a letter home, because it sounded so contrived, so maudlin. But it was true.

Roe looked done-in, his face so pale it was nearly white and his mouth set in a small hard line. "Anything besides the leg?" he asked Webster.

"No," Webster said.

Roe unwrapped the field dressing, said, "Shit." He wrapped it up again. "It hit muscle, I can't do nothin about that."

"England?" Webster guessed. He tried to sound stoic and not elated.

"Yeah." Roe rubbed his temple with the heel of his thumb. "Wait here, the transport'll be around."

"Thanks," Webster told him, but he had already stood up.

After that Webster closed his eyes, wished for sleep or at least some milder form of oblivion. He didn't think it had worked, until there was movement just beside him, the rustle of wool and caked mud that made up the average composition of a set of ODs; opening his eyes to see what was going on felt like swimming up from deep underwater.

It was Liebgott. He was crouched down, frowning a little; there was mud streaked on his face. “Hey, Web, Jesus,” he said. “The fuck happened to you?”

He put a hand on Webster’s chest like he wasn’t even thinking about it. Steadying. “Leg,” Webster managed, still feeling muzzy.

Liebgott twisted to look down at his leg, which by now was so red with blood that it made that bandage seem foolish. It made Webster nauseous to look at.

“Christ,” Liebgott said, but under his breath. With his head turned Webster noticed for the first time the bandage on his neck, and something about the sight of it made his stomach turn over.

“Lieb,” he said. “Your neck--”

“‘S nothing,” Liebgott said, like he was only half paying attention. “Doc said it’s fine.” He looked back up at Webster’s face. His hand was still on Webster’s chest, fingers curled lightly around his collar. “Doc gonna look after that?” and he jerked his head towards Webster’s leg.

Webster shook his head. “Getting evac’d. England.”

“Fuck,” Liebgott said.

"Lieb," Webster said, but then didn't know what he wanted to say after that. Or: he did know, but even with the pain and the shock he knew better than to say it. don't go or even worse, don't leave me. He wanted Liebgott's big capable hand twisted in his jacket-front forever, or at least until his leg stopped hurting so much. He wanted Liebgott to keep talking to him in that soft quiet voice he brought out only when people were pretty fucked up. Webster didn't mind being fucked up, if Liebgott would keep talking to him like that.

He didn't say any of it, because he might be crazy generally and in pain at the moment but he wasn't stupid. But, in a miracle-type occurrence, Liebgott didn't leave. He sat there with his knuckles a weight against Webster's chest and said only, "Jesus, Web, fuck," a couple more times, but that was enough.

He stayed until Roe came back with a stretcher and said, "All right, Webster," in the tired, colorless voice that he slipped into when he was past the point of exhaustion. "Ambulance is here. Liebgott, grab his shoulders.”

“I can stand,” Webster said, uncomfortable suddenly with the idea of being so helpless in front of Liebgott. He hadn’t minded, indeed had actively wanted, Liebgott there as a comforting presence, but he didn’t want Liebgott to have to aid him physically, like Webster was a child or something below him.

Roe and Liebgott both gave him skeptical looks.

“I walked all the way here,” Webster pointed out, annoyed at being doubted. He sat up, paused a moment to let the blood realign itself in his body so his head wouldn’t spin.

“That was the shock,” Roe said, but he sighed and took Webster’s hand, pulled him up to standing. It was sort of incredible, Webster thought, how much more his leg hurt now than it had before; it seemed somehow unfair.

“I’m fine,” Webster said preemptively, because they were still looking at him like he was going to pass out on them.

“Sure, tough guy,” Liebgott said, putting a hand to Webster’s chest in something between a comforting pat and a bracing smack. He didn't do anything mortifying like offer a hand but he did amble alongside as Webster made his way, slower than usual, to the ambulance. He was nearly casual about it, but Webster noticed he didn't light a smoke, or do anything else that would occupy his hands. It annoyed Webster a little, which was almost comforting: annoyance seemed like a normal sort of emotion to have about Liebgott.

They got to the ambulance, which was more or less just a jeep with a red cross painted on the side, and Roe gave him a hand up and went around to speak to the driver. Liebgott called, "See ya soon, Web," walking backwards, away towards the rest of the men.

"Yeah," Webster said, too quietly for him to hear. He relaxed back, closed his eyes. The relief of the thought of the hospital, in front of him like a traveler's mirage, was like a warm bath.

III.

The hospital was not, exactly, what he thought it would be.

In the ship across the channel his mind was too full of slippery, tangled nausea to grab hold of anything like a full-formed thought, but he pictured, vaguely and impressionistically, land on the other side, quiet and clean sheets and electric light and a book. But when he made it to the hospital, after being in another jeep and a train and finally a truck, he felt too sick and exhausted to think about anything. Even sleeping seemed like it would take enormous effort, to jar his mind from its numb rut into something so calming.

The bed he got was clean, but he wasn't, still in his uniform that was dirt-crusted and sweat-soaked and now bled-on. It took hours--he didn't know exactly how long; there were no clocks and his own mind, dipping in and out of hazy half-sleep, was no help--for a nurse to come by to change the bandage on his leg, blood half-dried and dirty. It took another nurse, after another few hours, to help him bathe, an unexpectedly humiliating procedure--this despite his protestations that he was all right, he could do it himself; the fact that his leg had gone stiff and he could no longer stand reliably pretty much undermined this--and change him into greyish overwashed hospital pajamas. It was good to be more or less divested of grime and dirt but he didn't feel clean, the way he'd hoped.

He realized quickly that nothing in a hospital was ever really clean. It was sanitized, boiled and stripped of germs, kept carefully away from the air and dirt, but never clean. Everything had had the blood and shit and vomit washed out of it so many times that its current state of cleanliness had a sort of exhaustion in it, an expectation of future defeat.

Another nurse, on the second--third?--day, told him he was running a fever. This came as not entirely a surprise.

But his wound--his, with a sort of proprietary air--wasn't infected, and the fever went down, and he was left with only boredom and a different kind of exhaustion. He was woken up something like a half-dozen times a night by screaming or moaning from across the ward; in answer to at least one of these incidents the nurses would rush in and take one of the moaning screaming men away, and at least once every morning they came in, more demurely, and took away to the morgue what had been, when they'd all gone to sleep, a man, and was now only a empty body. When Webster asked what he needed to do to get a room--not a private one, just an actual room, with only a handful of other men; not this charnel house--one of the nurses, a plain-faced no-nonsense woman named Susanna, gave him a pitying look. "Get a commission, Private," she said, and moved on to the man beside him.

He had hoped to have time to read and to write and to organize his mind, which felt shuffled and scattered. But the hospital was the opposite of a help. His mind felt cold and numb, stuck in its state of chaos and unable to reorder itself. He couldn't write; he could barely read. Everything felt dull and purposeless. A hospital alone shows what war is, he thought, and then couldn't remember where he'd gotten it from.

Once he was allowed out of the hospital proper and into rehabilitation things were better. He was on a different floor, in a room with seven other men, which felt like heavenly privacy after the wide-open ward. It being the dead of winter, they weren't allowed outside; Webster took the crutch he'd accepted as a more than fair price for being allowed to move around on his own, and made his way up and down the long hospital corridors. He felt weak and newly-hatched, unsteady after a month spent almost entirely in bed.

He didn't read newspapers. Anything happening outside the gray-white walls of the hospital seemed hyper-real, terrifyingly concrete. Nothing that happened inside it was real at all, only a fevered dream of suffering and pain. Webster had the wild thought, more than once, that when he left the hospital he would find the war over with, entirely in the past.

As soon as he did get out, it was made abundantly clear to him that this kind of thought had been the height of idiocy. Once he could walk without the crutch the doctor had deemed him healed, and he made an agonizingly slow journey through gray and frozen English countryside, then across the channel in another crossing that made him miss the C-47s, something he'd thought essentially impossible. Then it was on through France, a France shattered by German occupation and then all over again by Allied liberation. As he passed through one bombed-out town after another, he used his school French to chat with the locals, who were notably less friendly than the Dutch had been last summer; they made sure to tell him that most of this had been done by American bombers, preparing the way for last June, or simply missing the targets they'd meant to hit.

At each replacement depot he told the commanding officer that he was with the 101st, the 506th, Second Battalion, Easy Company. He wasn't a replacement; he had somewhere to go. They wanted to put him with some miscellaneous regiment and he kept saying, no, he needed to go back to Easy Company. The kind of dumb military loyalty he'd always found mystifying and embarrassing, and here he was, just as bone-headed as all the rest. All I kept saying to everybody was, I want to go home, he thought, sitting in another cold hollowed-out building serving as a depot. And they sent me home. When he realized what that was from, he laughed to himself, some mild hysteria mixed into it for good measure. Doesn't anybody believe me?

It took over a month, but he finally figured out where Easy was, some city at the very edge of Germany. Holding the line. When he stepped off the transport jeep in Haguenau, he felt, for a few brief minutes, a sort of relief.

That was ludicrously short-lived. Easy was more tattered and hardened than he could've imagined, thinned out and worn down and scarred over to protect itself, uselessly, from future harm. That they were cold-shouldering him in the course of all this felt patently unfair: he wanted to protest, don't you know how hard I worked to get back here, but they would only scoff. He could hear their answer already, like he was writing dialogue for a play and not his own life: oh yeah, you think you worked hard?

He heard this kind of reply in Liebgott's voice, inside his head, which was really only to be expected. That Liebgott had appointed himself ringleader of Easy's scorn was, in general, unsurprising: Webster had noticed this about him from the first, that he drew naturally to the front of any situation that seemed like it might require a sharp word or a thrown fist. But in a more personal sense it threw him badly off-guard. In the hospital he had thought about Liebgott perhaps more than he should have, but there had been something calming in the thought of him, an entirely new development in the course of his thoughts about Liebgott. He'd thought about Liebgott crouched next to him in the makeshift aid station, his knuckles against Webster's chest, his careful monitoring of Webster's limping walk to the ambulance. Webster had thought that that had maybe changed things, had made some kind of difference.

He had feared that that change would be erased by his time away; he hadn't thought to worry that it would cause some kind of inverse reaction, morph into Liebgott's new sharp, shattering disdain of him.

He told himself it wasn't really about him. What all of them were doing, what Liebgott was doing, was just a sort of instinct, like the psychological version of a porcupine putting its back up, or a skunk dousing you in stink. They were just trying to protect themselves, within the limits of available resources. If you ended up with a faceful of needles, it was your fault for getting too close in the first place.

That's what he told himself, but it didn't really work. He'd expected to be welcomed; he'd expected them all to be mirrors of his own relief at the thought of coming back to them. That was what you got, he thought bitterly to himself, for succumbing to the kind of buddies-in-a-trench, army nonsense. And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here. He'd thought he was better than that, than wanting that.

Something traitorous had been planted there in his heart, though. About the army, and about Liebgott, too. Like they were connected, and maybe they were: in a base fundamental way of course he never would've encountered Liebgott if it wasn't for the great democratizing sweep of army bureaucracy, but also on a headier, subconscious level there was some way that Liebgott and the army and the war itself had been compacted together in Webster's mind. From the first Liebgott had a been sort of brash emblem of what giving himself over to it all might look like; Liebgott remade himself into a paratrooper with a kind of glorious abandon, every element of it, the physical training and the tough-guy attitude and the fearless flinging of himself off the jump towers, seeming not to cause him any difficulty but rather, in contrast, seeming to make him more himself. Webster had never dedicated himself like that to anything. Webster had thought that he might find that kind of all-consuming purpose in the paratroops, but it hadn't happened, for so long--and then when it had, at some point while he rotted in that English hospital bed, it hadn't done him any good. It wasn't doing him any good now.

All of which was to say that when Liebgott offered him a hand up into the transport truck, finally, after everything, Webster felt it right at the center of his chest. It was an offering, and it was a badge, and it was a sort of demarcation: a border between the country unto itself that was Easy Company and the no-man's-land where Webster had been banished. And it was only natural that it was Liebgott who was the one to get him across it, that invisible wall. Webster took his hand, and felt the sharp tug of Liebgott's wire-strong arm, pulling him up and over.

IV.

They leapfrogged from town to town throughout Germany, sometimes staying a night, sometimes two. One time they were rousted up to move again before they'd managed to sleep at all. It was repetitive and dragging: there were no German Army stragglers, only bitter worn-down civilians, and Webster felt less like the victor in a rapidly ending war than he did a nanny for sullen children.

Today they were clearing out a building of flats, officially requisitioned for the night. He'd been sent in with Liebgott and a few other guys as a clearing team, led by Winters, who at least lent a calmer aspect to the chaos than Captain Speirs, who only seemed to revel in it. But the chaos was there nonetheless, shouting and crying and turned-over furniture and broken dishes. It gave Webster a headache, and the fervent desire to go back outside.

It didn't seem to affect Liebgott at all. As they'd crossed over into Germany, Liebgott hadn't made it any kind of secret that he hated these people, hated every last German in the country, soldiers and civilians. Still, though: he took the time to listen when people spoke to him, and when they started figuring out that he could understand them they flocked to him, pleading and asking questions. Webster tried to draw some of it, but everyone spoke so rapidly and all on top of each other that he had to keep asking them to repeat themselves.

Liebgott fielded it all, switching back and forth between German and English as he replied to the residents of the apartment building and translated for Winters and then talked back to Winters, which Webster thought took some balls, before going back to the residents. He was impassive to the Germans' faces, not showing any emotion at all, but explaining everything calmly and impersonally. Which, Webster thought, in the midst of all the shouting and the doors kicked in, was something close to a kindness.

He would never point any of this out to Liebgott himself, because he wasn't stupid and he liked his head where it was and not bitten clean off, but he thought about it still. Liebgott kept saying, "Est ist nur für eine Nacht, komm, nur für eine Nacht," but he sounded more tired than angry. When he started swearing at them, he switched to English, which Webster thought was nearly considerate. "Komm schon, you fucking people," Webster heard him call over the heads of a family who were weeping in the doorway of their once and future apartment.

Both of them ended up outside the building, directing the final stragglers out and hearing last pleas about having nowhere to go. Webster had gotten spit at a couple of times and he didn't think Liebgott had at all, which he didn't think was fair in the least: Liebgott was much more of an asshole, generally speaking, than he was. He was expressing this, and Liebgott was only smirking, infuriatingly. "It's cause your accent's fuckin awful, Web, you sound like a GI--"

One of the last women to leave the building was clutching a suitcase to her chest, and glared equally at them both, Webster was gratified to see. When she started cursing, though, she chose Webster as the target of her ire: Webster didn't even understand it all, but there was something in there about him being a goddamned son of a whore, et cetera et cetera.

"Aw, halt die Fresse," Liebgott barked at her, and she rounded on him, outraged. "Heraus hier. Ja, los!"

She listened, but not without spitting at him first; it missed Liebgott's boot, and he only gave her an unimpressed look. When she had left, Webster said, "What was she even saying?"

"Nothing that ain't true," Liebgott said, and then trip-stepped ahead of Webster as they went back into the building, avoiding the shove Webster had aimed for him. "Nah, I take it back, I don't know your ma. Probably a perfectly nice lady," Liebgott went on, turning and walking backward down the narrow hallway, so he could continue ragging on Webster without interruption. "Ain't her fault she ended up with, you know--fuck," he said, as Webster took a swipe at him. He dodged it easily, and danced backwards, face split open in a grin. "You gonna hit me, Web?" he said, sounding delighted by the prospect.

"No," Webster told him, with as much dignity as he could muster, which wasn't a lot. "You'd enjoy it too much."

Liebgott scoffed. "Enjoy beating your ass, you mean," he said easily. A statement, rather than a threat.

"You wish."

"How many fights you been in, Webster?" Liebgott asked, still grinning at him. "You do a lot of brawling in your dorm? Or, hey, prep school--what if someone read a sonnet wrong, you know, what else're you gonna do about that except deck 'em?"

He was so fucking pleased with himself; on that principle alone Webster sort of wanted to punch him in the eye, just to prove he could. He wanted much more to twist his hands in Liebgott's jacket and push him back against the wall, with its paper bubbled and peeling; wanted to slam him into the plaster so that Liebgott felt it in his bones. There was this strange moment they were suspended in, had been since they left Haguenau, where it felt like they were paying attention to no one but each other. Webster felt a little like he was going crazy, like all the attention he'd focused on Liebgott since he'd met him, basically, had been stored up in some kind of battery and was being beamed back to him. He didn't know whether he could trust it, or whether Liebgott was just messing with him, or whether Webster was making it all up in the first place because he really had gone finally off the deep end of his own consciousness.

"Christ, you're a pain," he told Liebgott, and Liebgott said, "Uh-huh," unrepentant. They had reached the narrow stairs and so Liebgott had to face front again in order to climb them, though he craned back around to say, "You know, Web, you want some pointers, I could teach you," and Webster forgot briefly and horribly what the conversation had been about.

His stomach did a sort of backflip even as he remembered that they'd been discussing Webster punching him, or at least the potentiality of it. "You know, I went through the same training you did," Webster said, glad his voice came out pissy and not as unsteady as he felt. This strange new reality of him and Liebgott being friends, or at least people who were mildly obsessed with each other such that they spent a good deal of time together, felt delicately balanced, mysterious in its beginnings and mysterious in what sustained it. Webster wasn't sure what to do, or not do, to maintain it, but he was pretty sure showing in any way that he'd like Liebgott to show him things other than landing a punch was not it.

Liebgott made an unflatteringly dismissive sound. "This ain't about army training, Web," he said. He was climbing the stairs two at a time, but he didn't seem to be trying to get away from Webster: that's just how he did everything, impatient with the world.

Much as Webster would give a lot to get Liebgott's hands on him in any capacity he knew he wouldn't take him up on this, not only because Liebgott would be annoying as hell about it but because Webster was sick of any and all kinds of violence. He'd like to never fire his rifle or strike out at anyone ever again. And though he'd still like to shove Liebgott around a little that, he thought, was only a natural reaction to the way that Liebgott's body was always coiled for violence, braced for impact and ready to strike back at a moment's notice. Webster wanted to hold him down, make him relax a little.

Little chance of that. Liebgott braced his hands on each of the narrow stairway walls, swung himself up the last three stairs all in one go, before jogging off to find someone to report to. Webster followed behind him, taking each stair in its turn. He knew he'd catch up. Or maybe he wouldn't. The thought made him walk faster, following the last flash of Liebgott around the edge of a doorway.

*

The next week they were in yet another town for the night, finding billets in the bombed-out extraterrestrial landscape that used to be neat streets and homes. Speirs had grabbed Liebgott to go into a likely building with him and translate, and had taken a few other men with as the evacuation team.

They were billeted two men to a bunk, they were informed, when Speirs and Liebgott and the rest came back out; Speirs told them to choose their own bunkmates, possibly to keep anyone from getting murdered in their sleep and possibly because he just didn't care that much. Webster was standing directly to Liebgott's left when this announcement was made and he found himself looking very carefully at nearly anything else available.

He was busy noting the precise angles of the fractured timber roof of the house opposite when someone whacked him on the arm. It was Liebgott. "C'mon," he said, easily. "Let's go find something good before the other guys get to it, huh?"

"Yeah," Webster said, stupidly, and followed him inside. It quickly became obvious why they were doubling up--it was more a boarding house than an apartment building, smaller than what they usually requisitioned. But the roof was intact, all four walls still standing. Looking at the state of the town, Webster could well believe this was their best option.

He followed Liebgott up to the third floor before they found anything, in what looked like a kids' room, with three single beds along a wall that slanted sharply up towards the peak of the roof. Luz and Malarkey had already claimed the bed nearest the window; Liebgott threw his duffel down on the one by the door that at least was pushed up against a wall, so only one of them would be in danger of rolling off the side all night.

There was food in the house's kitchen, a mixture of C rations dumped out into pans and heated on the real stove, and whatever people could scavenge from the cabinets. Liebgott was always especially eager to clear out whatever the Germans had secreted away, and he would check the backs of cupboards and the corners of drawers for anything they hadn't taken with them. It usually wasn't much. Though this time, his entire forearm angled inside a drawer, he looked at Webster and grinned. "Ha," he said, and drew out a little packet, paper crumpled around what had clearly once been a much larger portion of whatever it was.

Liebgott looked down at it, and then smoothed out the wrapper. Chocolate, if Webster had to guess, from the packaging. "Huh," Liebgott said, still looking at it, but his expression had changed, drawn down into something less triumphant.

"Lieb?" Webster asked.

Liebgott glanced up at him. "'S nothing," he said. "My dad used to talk about this kinda chocolate, said they could only get it in Vienna." He looked back down. "Weird." Then, to Webster's surprise, he stuck it in his pocket; one of the outer ones, so it wouldn't melt.

Webster wanted to tell him to just eat it, that there was no way in hell it would survive until he got back to California, whenever that was. But Liebgott knew that already. And Webster found it oddly charming, one of the glimpses of soft underbelly that Liebgott showed only on occasion. He never seemed to put any particular effort into hiding the fact that he had a wider range of emotion than the average comic-strip hero, but he never went out of his way to remind anyone, either. He played his streetwise tough-guy role so convincingly that it had occurred to Webster at some point that he might not be playing it at all, that not everyone in the world was going through life watching themselves like a filmstrip and thinking, well, that wasn't particularly convincing, was it? Liebgott was always convincing. Liebgott seemed unable to be anything but himself.

When they'd eaten the C-ration stew--which was improved by the heat but not by the experimental combination of flavors, which made the whole thing taste somehow even more like metallic salt--they went back to the room. Webster sat up against the headboard and when Liebgott climbed in next to him it was the opposite way around, his back to the footboard and his boots up by Webster's elbow. Which was the perfectly normal way to do it. Webster had given himself a firm talking-to on the subject of imagining things about this night and he knew it hadn't worked by the little dip of deeply idiotic disappointment in his chest as Liebgott settled in.

The worn paperbacks that circulated through the company were all things Webster had read already; right now he was carrying around Ethan Frome in a battered oblong Armed Services copy which offended his aesthetic sensibilities but did convey the words to his mind; so he allowed it. Sometimes at night he dreamed about bookstores, libraries, whole buildings constructed for books and quiet and that certain clean paper smell. He thought that if he ever got home that was the second thing he'd do, after the bath but before the meal of food with distinct textures and varied flavors: he would pick up one of his books from home and open it, press his face to the pages, hope that somehow inhaling the glue-ink-paper smell would restore something in him that it felt like the war had frayed away.

Something knocked against his hip, and he realized after a startled moment that it was the toe of Liebgott's boot. When Webster looked up at him Liebgott said, "Gutes Buch?"

He was being an asshole, which anyone could tell by the way the corner of his mouth was hooked up, half a smile, half a warning. Webster hadn't even been looking at the book at all, lost for a minute in the idea of a place that wasn't this, that wasn't the war. "Oh, sehr witzig," he said sarcastically, which morphed Liebgott's expression into a quick bright grin.

"Was ich meinte sagen--"

Before he could finish ribbing Webster, Luz's voice piped up from the opposite side of the room: “Jeez, cut it out,” he called across to them. ”You two sound like a coupla fuckin krauts.”

“Oh, yeah?” Liebgott said, half sitting up and his whole tone altered, his body gone taut with the sudden encompassing anger he always seemed so primed for. Webster had just enough presence of mind to sit up himself, catch Liebgott's arm before he lurched toward Luz. “Say that again, I’ll make you sound like a fuckin--”

“Joe,” Webster said softly, without fully meaning to. He didn’t think he’d ever called Liebgott by his first name before, even in his head, but in the moment it seemed right. And something about it seemed to work; Liebgott subsided a little, still muttering mutinously. Webster kept a hand on his arm, just in case.

"Er ist ein Idiot," Webster said to him, quietly, maybe hoping quixotically to make him smile. Or at least stop glaring in Luz's direction and relax again. Liebgott didn't smile but he did turn his glare on Webster, and in Webster's current fucked-up kind of existance that still counted as a win. He could take it, he wanted to, wanted to absorb all of Liebgott's attention like a sponge. Bad or good.

It was this kind of thinking that let Webster know that he was in some amount of trouble.

"Meinst du, er kann das verstehen, oder?" Liebgott said witheringly, and then swung his gaze back around to Luz, glaring still. Webster understood that he was continuing the conversation not to say anything to Webster in particular but to prove a point, which to the best of Webster's understanding was something along the lines of, that he would say whatever the fuck he wanted, in whatever language he wanted, and nothing anyone could say would stop him.

And also, Webster thought--it was wearing on all of them, stomping their way through these German towns, moving all the time and dealing with the screaming children and crying women and the old sad men, but he and Liebgott were the ones who actually had to talk to them, the ones who could actually understand what they were saying, and if Webster was having a bad time of it he guessed Liebgott was having it worse. All of these people said, over and over, Wir sind kein Nazis, and Webster wasn't sure he believed them and he knew Liebgott sure as hell didn't; yeah, right, Liebgott would mutter under his breath, and then went in and talked to them in that expressionless voice, because he'd been told to. They were surrounded by people who weren't the enemy but maybe were, and Webster felt constantly unsettled by it. A soldier you knew would shoot at you, his uniform proclaiming what he stood for, what he meant to do. Webster didn’t know anything about these women, didn’t know what they believed, what they might do about it. He was the one with the gun but he still felt disturbed by it. Liebgott would never admit to it--because he wanted to be tough, because he didn't want to be singled out and already was, in more ways than one. But Webster would bet cash money that he got it too, that unsettled feeling.

Or maybe he didn't. Liebgott didn't see things like that, looked at the whole world like everything in it had hard edges. This or that. He probably wasn't unsettled; he probably just hated them all.

That kind of outlook seemed almost calming, at this moment, to Webster. That kind of uncomplicated hate. Maybe that was why Liebgott picked fights so much, he thought, looking over at Liebgott himself who'd settled back against the end of the bed again but wasn't even pretending to do anything except glower at the reinforced knee of his ODs, drawn up in front of him like a shield.

Webster wanted to do the right thing, to knock him out of this mood, but he didn't know what that was. The right thing. Instead he went back to his book, watching Liebgott over the top of its spine, until they had to sleep.

*

When something did happen, with him and Liebgott--at last, he might say, if he'd ever at any point expected anything to happen, which though his mind was active on the subject he never truly had--it happened casually, quietly, almost by chance. It was in one of the endless half-exploded billets, ragged and open to the foolishly bright German sky. An old hotel, this time, its roof and top two floors blasted off but still with plenty of room for them all. Hotel made it sound fancier than it was, anything nice about it long since stripped away, but there were double beds with real mattresses and four walls around them. Ceilings and floors, too, at least so long as you didn't go up too high.

It was an ordinary night, better than most, but still Webster couldn't sleep. Talbert had complained earlier about the softness of the beds, that he wasn't used to that anymore, but Webster didn't think that was it; he had longed for this, the soft beds and the decent rooms, and he felt almost like he had as a child in an exciting new place, unwilling to surrender his experience of it to sleep.

Finally, in a fit of frustration, he sat up, slipped out of the bed he was sharing with one of the replacements and out of the room, careful not to disturb the other two guys sleeping on the second bed. He grabbed his jacket on the way out but didn't bother with his helmet or anything else. He'd slept--or tried to--in his boots, just like always.

The hall was quiet and entirely dark, but once Webster made it to the stairway it was brighter: the stairs went all the way up through the ruined floors of the hotel, opened up to the starred night sky.

Webster climbed up, and up, to the first of the floors that had been deemed uninhabitable but still had most of its walls intact, a ceiling over parts of it. He stepped into one of the rooms, filled with rubble and half-destroyed furniture, a haze of dust and ash fuzzing the outlines of everything. At the other side of the room the window stood bare and open, the glass shattered away.

He had taken only a few steps forward before a voice to his left said, "Jesus, course it's you."

Webster jumped, a basic physiological reaction that he was ashamed of as soon as it happened. He wheeled around. "Liebgott?"

Liebgott hauled himself up from where he'd been sitting, against the wall next to the window. Webster hadn't noticed him there at all; so much for all his army training, he thought.

There was no indication as to what Liebgott had been doing, no book to be read or rifle to be cleaned. He wasn't even smoking. "Heard someone coming," Liebgott said. "Shoulda guessed it was you. Anyone ever teach you how to be fuckin stealthy?"

"Well, I didn't think I'd need to be," Webster snapped, caught off-guard. "What are you doing up here?"

Liebgott shrugged. "Nothing," he said. Webster gave him an incredulous look; Liebgott shrugged again. "Sleeping," he admitted then, easily; "or tryin to."

"You know there are actual beds downstairs?"

"Yeah, and if they're so great, why are you up here?" Liebgott said.

"I couldn't sleep," Webster told him, testily. "Is that what you want to hear?"

Liebgott put up his hands. "Jesus, Web. You wanna pick a fight, do it with someone else." His voice was hard-edged, and when Webster looked closer, he looked in the mostly-dark as exhausted as Webster felt. Liebgott was usually the first person ready to pick a fight with Webster; in the past weeks he'd done it joyfully, constantly, and Webster had basked in it.

"Sorry," he said.

"Fuckin--don't, never mind," Liebgott said, waving him off. Webster at first thought he looked almost abashed; but then he thought the darkness must be obscuring even more than it seemed. They were standing close together, but Webster could still hardly see him.

Liebgott took off his helmet, set it on the ruined bed and shoved a hand through his hair. "Christ, it's quiet," he said, casually, diverting them from any of the more difficult paths they could go down. "Where the hell are our planes when you want 'em, right."

"It seems like they've been here already," Webster said, gesturing around them. There was something soft-edged about Liebgott with his helmet off here in the dark, the hard outline of him blurred a little. Webster found himself taking another step forward, staring hard to try and bring him into focus.

Liebgott didn't say anything, didn't even pretend to hold up his end of their barely-there conversation. He only looked at Webster, who realized, too late, that he was now very close to him.

"Hey, Web," Liebgott said. His voice was soft, but Webster couldn't tell if the softness was kind or dangerous. "Whatcha lookin at?"

Webster swallowed, hard. "Nothing."

He tried to look away, but in a quick unexpected movement Liebgott reached up and caught his jaw, his thumb pressing on one side and the four tips of his fingers on the other. He laughed a little, just a huff of breath. "Oh yeah?"

"Liebgott--" Webster started, feeling suddenly and uncomfortably turned-on, and even more uncomfortably wracked with dread and something akin, if not identical, to guilt. His voice came out unsteady.

And then: with the hand not on Webster's face, Liebgott grabbed Webster's wrist. Looking Webster dead in the eye, he set Webster's hand on Liebgott's own belt, palm over the buckle.

"Oh," Webster said.

Something in him felt shaky and insubstantial, unbelieving: at the same time, though, Liebgott's clear intent, the way Webster could feel Liebgott's gaze on him even more than he could feel Liebgott's hand on his jaw or the cold metal of his belt buckle, went through him like steel.

It was all, in the end, very simple. He could stop worrying now, he thought, with a kind of abstracted relief: there was suddenly only one clear path forward. He curled his fingers over Liebgott's belt, fit his thumb under the tail of it to press it back and open.

Liebgott let out a breath, almost a sort of sigh. He dropped his hand from Webster's jaw, instead fisting a hand in the front of his jacket, knuckles pressing through layers of wool to his breastbone. Webster thought suddenly of Holland, laying there waiting for the ambulance to take him away to safety, and Liebgott's hand curled in his jacket then, too. He thought of the way Liebgott had spoken to him, quiet and calm. That was the best memory he had of Liebgott, up to this point.

Webster leaned forward, not sure what he was trying to do. Kiss him, maybe, though it wasn’t like he didn’t know that was stupid. Liebgott turned away which was probably for the best and instead Webster opened his mouth on the hinge of Liebgott’s jaw, sharp jut of bone under his tongue. When Liebgott’s mouth fell open he could feel it, the mechanics of his body opened up to Webster, transparent to him.

Webster’s fingers were stiff with cold and shaking a little and so it took a minute to unbutton Liebgott’s fly and his shorts; but he was determined, indeed aggressively single-minded, and persevered. When he touched Liebgott finally Liebgott made a sound that Webster could feel in the vibration of his jaw bone.

He hadn’t touched anyone’s dick in so long, including his own. Desire jolted in him like his body was a cold car engine, being ground up to a high gear before it was ready. He could feel himself getting hard and it ached.

He didn’t know if Liebgott was feeling the same but his cock was hardening and hot in Webster’s hand, and when Webster drew it through his fist Liebgott shook a little, his whole body trembling next to Webster’s. It didn’t take very long, a series of hard strokes and Liebgott made a sound almost like he was in pain, a low desperate moan like there was something inside him gone awry. But Webster felt the hot rush of his come and knew it must’ve been some kind of pleasure, even a strange distant one. If he himself felt unfamiliar with the ways in which his body could provide good things rather than bad, he wondered what it was like for Liebgott. He wondered how long it had been for him, if it had been before the winter, longer.

When Liebgott stuck his hand in Webster’s pants the first thing Webster noticed is that it was cold as hell: his lean strong fingers were like ice, and Webster said, “Jesus, your hands are cold,” and Liebgott said, “Shut up,” and then, "The fuck d'you think yours felt like?” But he stuck his hand up Webster’s shirt for a minute, warming it against Webster’s stomach, which was nearly as uncomfortable but also almost sweet in a way that kept Webster’s mouth shut about it. Anyway, he wasn’t quite sure he was ready for it, Liebgott touching his dick, which was now desperately hard but also felt tender as a bruise.

When Liebgott did shove his hand back down and wrap his fingers around Webster’s cock Webster made some kind of sound he couldn’t explain; it hurt and it was the best thing he’d felt in weeks and he needed Liebgott to stop and wanted to make sure he never did. “Didn’t I tell you to shut the fuck up?” Liebgott said, but sounded only his regular amount of ticked-off about it. He did however let go of Webster's jacket, and stick the first joint of his thumb inside Webster’s mouth; maybe just to get his point across. He took his hand off Webster’s dick to spit in his palm, which made Webster self-conscious about the fact that he hadn’t done the same. He hadn’t meant to be rough with him. But Liebgott had come, and fast, and everything was so jittery and outside of time that Webster was hardly keeping up.

Then Liebgott was touching him and if Webster thought he was outside of time before now he was in a sort of black hole, everything suspended in oblivion. He closed his eyes without meaning to. The fingers of Liebgott's hand the thumb of which was in his mouth were spread across the side of Webster's face, over the shell of his ear. Webster leaned into them, a brace for his head that felt hot and insubstantial.

Something about the confident capability of the way Liebgott was jerking him off was just as hot as the actual motion of Liebgott's hand on his dick, Liebgott stripping him down to his component parts with ease. Still, it took Webster a bit to finish, like his body couldn't quite remember how. When he did, he inhaled so sharply it made his temples ache, but made no other sound.

Liebgott let go of his dick, and there was a soft rustle of cloth. Webster opened his eyes, felt dizzy for a moment. Liebgott was pulling his hand away from Webster’s face. He had one of the printed army handkerchiefs in hand, but he was looking, not at that, but at his other thumb.

He said, "Jesus Christ, you fuckin bit me."

Webster gaped at him. "Well," he said, slightly breathless, "you're the one who stuck your finger in my mouth."

Liebgott was trying to examine his thumb in the scant moonlight coming in through the window. He tipped his face up to shoot Webster a look that Webster couldn't see precisely but assumed was pissy. He threw the handkerchief he'd been using to clean up at Webster's head; Webster caught it, neatly, and used it to wipe off his own hand.

If he had felt mildly delirious before, he thought, the feeling was no better now. For some reason he'd always imagined that if something like this happened between them it would change things irrevocably, realign the world of them. Instead, they were still here sniping at each other. He didn’t know if that was better or worse than his imaginings.

"Lieb," he said then. He felt duty-bound to say something, but he didn't know what it should be: Liebgott didn't look scared or guilty or full of regret, didn't look like he was waiting for Webster to apologize or pretend it didn't matter. He wasn't looking at Webster at all, at the moment.

"Huh?" Liebgott said, still examining his hand in the thin light. "Fuckin hell, Web, I'm gonna have teeth-marks on me for a week."

Webster attempted to breathe normally. He carefully rebuttoned his shorts, then the fly of his jump pants. "And whose fault is that?" he tried, and Liebgott looked over, smirking at him a little, so it must've been a fine thing to say. He wasn't used to this: you either stayed quiet or you left, if things were all right, or else there would be recrimination or snide remarks or anger or sometimes tears. All through school, and the few times it had happened in college, it had all followed a pattern he'd understood. He should've expected, if he could've expected anything about this, that Liebgott would not follow a pattern of doing things that made any sort of sense to him.

"Aw, he's funny," Liebgott said, dryly, and then grabbed his helmet, dangled it from two fingers by its chinstrap. "See ya around, Web," he said, and then, just like that, he was gone.

V.

In the aftermath, Webster felt, somewhat, without any previous experience to verify the feeling, like he might be losing his mind.

Certainly he wasn't doing well with sleep, or noticing things outside his head, or thinking about anything except Liebgott's thumb in his mouth and how easily Webster himself had fallen apart in the bare cold German hotel room with Liebgott's hand on his face and on his dick and Liebgott's eyes large and fixed on Webster in the half-light. Webster felt like he had broken some obscure promise to himself, and now he could never go back; though if he tried to ascertain what that promise might have been the only thing he mind supplied to him was something along the lines of, don't be fucking odd about it.

The problem--one of the problems, out of many--was that Liebgott didn’t seem to have any compunctions in that or any direction. Liebgott could be difficult and ornery and hot-headed, he could be a lot to handle, he could be exactly where you didn't want him to be saying what you didn't want to hear, and somehow Webster had always thought that in the wake of this, if there ever was a this, which he'd never really thought there would be--he'd always thought Liebgott would be the difficult one. He hadn't known how, exactly, but he'd thought he would be moody about it, or twitchy, wound up even tighter than he usually was.

Instead it was Webster making a fool of himself. Or trying very hard not to, which was indisputably worse. Liebgott still acted like they were old friends, which for Liebgott meant mostly that he made it his mission to prod and agitate and irritate Webster as much as possible, and then sit back and grin once he finally got Webster to snap at him. Webster's plan, after that night--that fifteen minutes or so--had been simply to steer clear of Liebgott and then maybe, when he retrieved his dignity, perhaps several months from now, he could risk a conversation again.

He'd thought this plan was actionable. He'd even thought Liebgott would welcome it--surely, in the wake of this kind of thing, the easiest and best thing to do was not make eye contact again for a goodly period of time.

But he hadn't counted on how fucking annoying Joe Liebgott could be. Or--he hadn't fully made allowance for the idea that for Liebgott this might've just been a friendly hand on his dick, and not the culmination of a couple years of trying to be a certain kind of person and then failing, calamitously, in the space of just a handful of minutes.

But Liebgott was pushy and loud and had never apparently encountered the concept of self-doubt, and they were all on top of each other to begin with, half their lives now spent crammed into transport trucks and the other half crammed into makeshift, one-night billets where no one had their own space and it wasn't worth it to try and carve out anything for yourself. Liebgott needled him and chatted to him and seemed to make it his personal mission to get Webster to notice him as much as fucking possible. As if that had ever been a problem. Webster didn't think Liebgott was even trying to get him to touch his dick again, because all he'd have needed to do for that was to shove Webster in a closet or something. Webster would've gone along with it in a minute, which was a fact he wasn't proud of but knew about himself nonetheless. It only made him want to ignore Liebgott more thoroughly.

It wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed it. It wasn't that he couldn't have stopped it then or didn't want it to happen again. He wished he could say it was the principle of the thing, and it was, somewhat, but mostly he was just fucking embarassed. Or ashamed, an insidious voice in his mind suggested; but embarrassed seemed like the better thing to be. Shame was something more terminal, a symptom of a diagnosis he didn't want to hear.

He wasn't inverted, and he was sure as hell Liebgott wasn't either. Liebgott talked about girls back home and could match dirty stories with any of the guys, and while Webster had technically never gone further with a girl than heavy petting they, the girls and the stories, sounded real enough to him. Some of the guys were clearly talking out of their asses, when they bragged about things they'd done with women, and one of the many reasons Webster tried to to stay the hell out of it when this kind of conversation got started was that the idea of sounding like them left him sweating. Mostly he tried to leave the room, or pretend he was asleep.

About a week in to all this Liebgott seemed to change tack, from primarily trying to get a rise out of Webster to just talking at him like Webster was doing anything like holding up an end of the conversation. He talked to Webster about girls, which annoyed the hell out of Webster, and the future, which annoyed Webster even more--though halfway through about the third time Liebgott walked him through his post-war plans for a wife and a houseful of kids it occurred to Webster, maybe belatedly, that Liebgott might be trying to do something like put him at his ease. That in his own, Liebgott-ish way, he was trying to tell Webster that he, Webster, had nothing to worry about. Liebgott, for one, could keep things straight in his head; Liebgott understood which way was up, Liebgott knew the difference between real life and a helping hand in the last dragging days of a war that just wouldn't quite end.

Webster didn't know if that made it better or worse. Worse, because it made Webster the asshole in every way, the one who couldn't get with the program about what it meant or how to act about it; but better because Liebgott was telling him could un-fucking-bend about it all. Liebgott was offering him a hand out of his own mind the way he'd offered him a hand up to that transport truck in Haguenau: an offer to realign themselves, get back something that had been knocked off-course.

It wasn't that Webster wasn't grateful. He was. He tried not to be a piece of shit to Liebgott about it and was pretty sure he mostly failed but he started trying to behave more like a fucking person around him again, at least. It didn't have to mean anything, and acting like it did was only mortifying for them both. He could get the message. He could play along.

Still, nothing else happened, not as they crawled their way through Bavaria. Webster sort of wished Liebgott wouldn't give him a choice, would shove him in that closet and then Webster could go along with it and pretend that was all he was doing: going along with it. Then he told himself firmly that he was glad it was done with. Then he caught himself staring as Liebgott cleaned his rifle one night in their billet, his hands streaked with oil, each piece coming apart and back together in an easy choreography under Liebgott's care. And he wondered exactly who he was fucking kidding.

He turned over on his own lumpish mattress, facing the wall instead of Liebgott. The wall was easier, duller, without any of the temptation to go to his knees and let Liebgott put his oil-grimed hands in his hair, do whatever Liebgott wanted him to do.

Webster closed his eyes. If the shame was going to be there, he thought, it might as well make itself fucking useful; but it couldn't even do that. If he was going to think about all of this anyway then what was the point. He wondered how Liebgott did it, lived life so easily. He wondered what it was like.

VI.

Liebgott seemed fine, mostly, after Landsberg.

Or: they all drove back from the camp, not quite looking at him directly, keeping space around him even in the crowded back of the truck. His face was in his hands but he’d stopped making the small harsh sounds that meant he was crying. He cried like he didn't quite know how, nothing coming out of him formed into a sob or a wail, a traditional kind of grief. Webster was intensely aware of how little Liebgott would want them all to witness him like this, but Liebgott cried like he didn't have a choice.

When they got back to Landsberg proper they all filed out and left him to put himself back together before joining them, the kindness of privacy that only people living on top of each other for years could rightly understand. But he didn’t--put himself back together, join them. He stayed, unmoving, in the back of the truck. None of them were stupid or brave enough to go try and talk to him.

It was Winters, finally, who went to him, in the almost-dark. Winters said a few words none of them could hear, and clapped Liebgott on the leg, a steady, bracing sort of gesture. Liebgott finally dropped his hands and looked at Winters and Webster was too far away to read his expression. His body formed a sort of defeated comma, curled around itself. Winters said something else and then turned, and when he walked away Liebgott followed him, climbing down from the back of the truck stiff-limbed, not quite like himself again yet.

Besides that, he seemed fine. He went to mess and bunked down with them all and bitched and griped about being shunted every which place for no reason, the way they all did. Stuck on the road outside Berchtesgaden he got out and sat in the warm Bavarian sun like the rest of them, and Webster caught him with his eyes closed and his face tipped up towards the sky, screwed up in the sun but otherwise peaceful.

Webster had the strange urge to draw him: a line for his throat, another for the way his hair swooped over his forehead. But he couldn’t draw, he couldn’t paint, he had only ever been good for one thing so he wrote down in his notebook, Joe Liebgott, turned golden in the sun like a statue of some old god--

And then he didn’t know what to write next, and rereading it it sounded stupid, and revealing. That drop in his stomach, like he was going to get caught out. So he scratched out the lines--not enough to completely obscure them, who knew what he’d want to come back to later--but enough that anyone trying to read it would have a hard time, would know that he knew it wasn’t any good. He realized, after a moment of thinking like this, that some part of him was still planning on dying here, his last writings pulled from his bloody pocket, a Wilfred Owen of the modern day.

Dumb, unbearably so, but the idea that he was going to get back to the States alive still seemed dumber. When he looked back Liebgott’s eyes were open again, and he was picking at a hangnail, his fingers tensed and arched, just as lean and lovely as the rest of him.

Webster ducked his head, and stared down at the page that was now scratched out, meaningless.

VII.

In Austria Liebgott was hard-edged, honed sharper, but still essentially himself. The bruises under his eyes were darker but he still grinned at the guys when they were talking shit over their only marginally edible food; if you caught him when he didn't think anyone was looking he got a spare pinched look on his face, but it would melt away when he sensed someone there. Grant, who shared a tent with him, said that sometimes at night he'd wake up and Liebgott would be gone, but no one knew where he went and he was always back by breakfast the next morning.

The officers were trying to keep them busy, mostly in a half-hearted attempt to keep them all from drinking themselves to death. But even the stupid pointless drills and PT left them all plenty of time to do whatever they wanted, which after years of training and the fucking war was worth its span in gold. Webster had cased the houses in town for reading material and had come up with a lot of insane Nazi shit and also a battered old volume of Kant, which he toted around with him and worked his way through line by line. For once he was glad he read about a quarter as fast in German as he did in English, because he didn't know when something else was going to show up that would be worth his time.

In terms of reading materials, at least. The first time Liebgott found him off by himself, tramping up the wooded hill to the tree Webster had sprawled himself under, Webster braced himself for Liebgott to rib him about the book or not being with the other guys or what the fuck ever Liebgott felt like, and he'd already opened his mouth to defend himself--he wasn't sure how--when Liebgott stopped in front of him and didn't say anything. He was wearing his summer uniform shirt but had left it untucked and unbuttoned over the pale-green stripe of his undershirt, and something about the prominent line of his belt around his narrow hips made him look like a gunslinger in a Saturday afternoon movie. He remembered Liebgott saying, what felt like lifetimes ago, That's some fuckin cowboy shit, Web.

They ended up behind one of the trees, Webster's T shirt catching on the rough bark. The trees here were massive, uncircleable by even two people reaching their arms out around their trunks. Some of the guys gave them spooked looks, avoided the forested areas, but Liebgott didn't seem to mind. Or, at least, he was here now, his hands on Webster's hips, pushing him back against the trunk.

Webster clutched at Liebgott's shoulders, the only thing at hand to hold on to. They were the same height, give or take a inch or two, which meant that to avoid staring directly at one another took some evasive maneuvering. Neither of them bothered, for whole, long seconds.

Like the last time, in the moment none of Webster's arguments in regards to why this was a bad idea seemed particularly salient. Liebgott was here and warm, his shoulders under Webster's palms all bone and stringy muscle. There was no great debate, or torturous decision to make: Liebgott was here and the animal part of Webster said yes and now and please and nothing else. His mind was blessedly silent.

Liebgott was still looking at him, shrewd. Like he was looking for something behind Webster’s eyes, rummaging through the desk-drawers of his brain. Webster didn’t like it. But instead of saying anything Liebgott only reached down, started working open Webster’s fly.

Liebgott jerked him off, hand working Webster's dick, his other forearm braced across the top of Webster's chest, holding him in place with a kind of casual assurance that did things to Webster that Webster didn't entirely know what to do with. Liebgott didn't even need to touch his dick, he though with a tinge of delirium; if he would just hold Webster against surfaces with his wiry strength, only half-deployed, keeping Webster in place like it was an afterthought, Webster could do plenty with that.

Webster held on to the sides of Liebgott's open khaki shirt, knuckles nudging up against his ribs. When he came he knocked his head back against the tree, let out a breath like he'd been sucker-punched.

He kept his head tipped back for a minute, his vision full of leaves and bits of sky and not Liebgott. "Jesus."

Liebgott snorted at him. Webster thought of going to his knees but that seemed a little drastic, so instead when he could look at Liebgott again he did and he unfastened his belt and touched him in turn. He remembered to spit in his hand first this time, but Liebgott was wetter this time, too. The idea that he'd been hard while he jerked Webster off was incredible, in its original sense, without credit. But here was the proof. Liebgott's uniform trousers were so big on him that with his belt undone Webster could fit his hand down the front of them without worrying about the fly.

It brought them up close to each other, though, up closer. Webster had the thought that he could kiss him, easily: lean in and catch his mouth and Liebgott wouldn't have enough warning to turn away. He could pull back once it happened, obviously, but Webster with a flush of sated overconfidence thought maybe he wouldn't. He had the feeling that if he could get Liebgott to kiss him once he could get him to keep on kissing him. Webster had been told before that he was a good kisser, and he'd let it go to his head.

With Liebgott's fly still buttoned it didn't give Webster much room to maneuver so he drew out his now somewhat sticky hand and dealt with the fly and then the waist-buttons of his shorts for good measure and then went back to touching Liebgott's dick. Liebgott was still leaning his forearm against Webster's chest but now instead of holding Webster in place he seemed to be relying on Webster to hold him up. He fisted his hand in the shoulder of Webster's T shirt and dropped his head down, and because of the angle Webster could see the vulnerable nape of his neck, the strip of skin pulled taught over the knobbed bones of his spine. Webster wanted to scrape his teeth over those bones. When Liebgott came it was with no sound at all.

Liebgott straightened up, let go of his shirt. Webster buttoned himself back up and Liebgott did the same. Webster felt tongue-tied, missed the feel of Liebgott's knuckles pressed to his shoulder through the cotton.

Liebgott was still breathing a little harder than normal but he didn't look the way Webster felt, which was unwound and muzzily pleased. There was something in Liebgott drawn tight as a bow-string: it had been there when he'd come to find Webster and it was still there now. He didn't look unhappy but he hadn't let go of it, either; or it hadn't let go of him. Webster wondered if Liebgott had come looking for him this afternoon in the hopes that it might.

Liebgott looked at him for a minute, tongue tucked behind his teeth. The same look he'd had before, but this time he didn't put his hand on Webster's dick to end it so finally Webster said, "What?" sharper than he'd meant to.

"Nothing," Liebgott said. Then: “You gonna be fuckin strange about it again?”

Webster scoffed a little, mostly in surprise. He could feel his face go hot, and he hoped it didn't show.

“I’m just sayin,” Liebgott said, with a shrug. Like he was talking about the weather. No skin off his nose. “Your, you know, giant Harvard brain didn’t seem to do too hot with it last time.”

“Please," David said, quickly and awkwardly, "stop talking." He couldn't look at Liebgott, suddenly: he had somehow hoped--senselessly--that it could all simply never be mentioned again. He had never talked about it, about things like this, not even to tell someone not to talk; it was all just understood. That Liebgott was talking now about how they hadn't talked about it seemed too bizarre to put words to.

“Yeah, fat chance,” Liebgott said easily, but then paradoxically fell quiet and just looked at Webster for a minute, which Webster could feel though he was staring with great intensity at nearly anything else. "O.K.," Liebgott said, finally, like that settled it.

"O.K.," Webster said quickly, like if he responded fast enough he could prevent Liebgott from saying anything further about it. The pleasant post-sex feeling had dissipated almost entirely. He felt mildly ill.

Liebgott stared at him for one more long second, then: "You're such a freakshow, Web," he proclaimed diagnostically.

Webster opened his mouth and then couldn't think of anything cutting to say in return. "Shut up," he landed on, finally.

Liebgott smiled suddenly, a little crooked. "That hurt, Web, I'm gonna be thinkin about that," he said, patently unserious. "You coming?" he asked, stepping backwards, towards the tents.

Webster said, "No, I'll," and gestured to the book, discarded on the leaves. Liebgott shrugged, and took off. Webster watched him go, and then thought maybe he shouldn't. He looked back down at the book and then when he looked up again, Liebgott was gone.

*

They went on that way for a few strange, sideways weeks, everything lit eerily golden by the hot Austrian sun. They messed around back in those same woods, bits of dead leaf clinging to Webster’s hair, his T shirt; they found out-of-the-way valleys in the foothills of the towering mountains, they sprawled behind an ancient stone wall with Liebgott’s knees spread on either side of Webster’s hips, his nose pressed to Webster’s hair. Once they went up into the attic of one of the grand, uncanny homes--Webster thought they might pick somewhere more comfortable, like an actual bedroom, but Liebgott ranged through the rest of the house with a restless unease. Webster followed along in his wake, without saying anything. Liebgott had talked a big game about looking for loot but in the end he dropped the few things he picked up like they’d burned him. When they'd made it to the attic, surrounded by crates and boxes and furniture under holland covers, Liebgott had looked around like he was lost, like he couldn’t make sense of something. Webster had thought to suggest that they turn around but Liebgott ended up getting him on his back on the wide bare floorboards, wood soft with age and making mellow creaking sounds as Liebgott leaned over him, as Webster shifted and arched his back when Liebgott grabbed hold of his dick through his ODs.

They never kissed; they never used anything but their hands with each other. Liebgott never tried for anything else and Webster, despite his wild thought back in the woods about going to his knees, never got brave enough to really do it. It was what it was. And it was already a strange, intense kind of thing: they never talked while they were touching each other, never even really looked at each other straight-on while it happened.

But it was all-consuming, at least for Webster. Something in him had decided to surrender to it, some secretarial feature of his brain sorting it into something to be dealt with and thought about and worried over later. While it was happening it was just itself, without greater meaning. This was, he imagined, how Liebgott saw it, how Liebgott saw a lot of things. Each minute lived within itself, no thought for the one before or the one coming after.

Around the other guys Liebgott treated Webster the same as he always had, or had at least since they left Haguenau; he ribbed him and prodded him but he also sought him out, reliably and without comment. He'd taken to handing Webster things, like tin cups of coffee in the mess, or bats when they were lined up for batting practice; he passed him broken-off pieces of D ration chocolate and bottles of whatever was being handed around that particular night. Webster didn't think anyone else had noticed; he wasn't entirely sure Liebgott had noticed, in truth. Liebgott didn't offer any of this to him like it was a gift, or a question: he didn't seem to be asking if Webster wanted it, but acted instead like it was already Webster's, Liebgott himself providing a mere helping hand in getting it where it needed to be.

It wasn't as though any of this was in any way romantic. But Webster was aware that he was letting it go to his head, regardless. He'd started drinking less in the evenings, which the whole company spent getting reliably hammered, solely because he had acquired a haunting paranoia that he would do something irredeemably stupid on accident if he didn't have at least one or two of his wits still about him.

Liebgott seemed to have no such concerns. When he got past a certain point of drunkenness he went quiet and sullen, but until then he was only loose-limbed and more relaxed than Webster had seen him since England; since Georgia, maybe. He laughed at the guys' stupid jokes so hard he made horrible snorting sounds, and it was only in watching him cackle at some half-witty dirty joke one night that Webster realized that it seemed so notable because Liebgott hardly ever laughed at all anymore in the regular, more or less sober world.

Webster didn't know what to do about that, or any of it. Webster was, truthfully, barely keeping himself together, between the dreams he kept having and the drinking he was trying to keep a handle on and the barely staved-off nervous collapse he could feel coming for him at some point about whatever was going on between the two of them. Attempting a solution to any of it seemed unapproachably daunting; the best he could do, he felt, was keep everything in careful balance. Like if he kept still enough at the center of it all, it would realign itself into something stable, something understandable.

VIII.

And then: the mission, the pocket of eerily beautiful mountainside, the old man in his little house who could've been anything. Speirs had set the mission but it was Liebgott who'd asked Webster along, and Webster hadn't felt like he could refuse. He wanted to be there for Liebgott, wanted to be someone he could count on. He'd been pissed off at Speirs for asking Liebgott to do it, siccing Liebgott on that man like he was a dog to be pointed towards a target and let loose. They all knew Liebgott wasn't doing well, all of them with eyes. He didn't sleep; he had started walking around like he was holding his body together by willpower alone. Any one of the other guys could've been sent to look into it in his place.

But Speirs picked Liebgott and Liebgott picked Webster, and so Webster followed him with a vague kind of determination that he would do something, put a stop to it. For Liebgott's own sake, if nothing else.

But Liebgott didn't want to be saved by him and Webster didn't know what, in the end, to do. To find out only in this moment of crisis that he had no idea how to reach Liebgott at all was like taking the next step on a known path and finding only air. He thought he'd been gaining ground with Liebgott but Liebgott had only let him think so, Webster understood now: when it really mattered Liebgott could slam the door that had cracked open between them shut without a thought. Without hesitation.

*

They avoided each other for a few days after and then there was an evening where a whole group of the guys descended on a pub of sorts outside Zell Am See that Shifty had found on a scouting mission. It was a good walk from their tents but they were all bored out of their skin, looking for anything to occupy them. If that anything included alcohol, it was all for the better.

When they got there Liebgott wouldn’t speak to the bartender, wouldn’t even look at her. Liebgott never fraternized with the locals, curled his lip in disdain at the guys attempting to chat with civilians or fuck German girls. So Webster ordered drinks for all of them. He came up to one of the tables, juggling glasses, to hear Liebgott saying, “I can’t believe Ein Bier bitte is beyond you hicks. Jesus Christ.” Everyone laughed.

That laugh struck Webster as unfair, somehow: it was the kind of joke Webster himself would never be able to make. He set down the glasses and took the guys’ hearty backslaps and crows of delight as thanks, did his best not to think about the way Liebgott didn’t so much as glance at him.

He had come up behind Liebgott’s shoulder, so he couldn’t get a read on his expression unless Liebgott turned around, and that made Webster suddenly irritable. He wanted to see Liebgott’s face; he wanted to understand where they stood. He wanted to say to him, Sorry you think not shooting a man in the fucking back is a dealbreaker.

A dealbreaker for what being the question. A friendship--yes, sort of, though outside of Webster's own stupid fucking head Liebgott hadn't been anything different to him than any of a dozen Easy guys, before he got back from the hospital. Since then, things had been different; had been different even before Liebgott’s hand down his pants in the half-lit German night. Liebgott had singled him out, had ragged him the hardest but had also turned around the fastest. An ironic wink; a sincerely offered hand. Liebgott had tested him, and Webster had passed.

He wanted Liebgott to test him again. Not like he had up on the mountain; he wanted the reward to be Liebgott’s attention again, not a dead man and Liebgott’s half-out-of-his-head respect. He wanted to be able to say the right thing, to snatch Liebgott out of harm’s way, to play the hero and for Liebgott to be grateful and forgiving.

Liebgott was neither of those things, now or ever. So it was stupid for Webster to wish. Right now, Liebgott was a set of hunched-up shoulders and the neat V of his hair against the back of his neck, the preternaturally pale skin all the Easy guys had come out of Bastogne bearing like a badge. Webster stared down at the back of his neck: dark hair, ghostly skin. He wondered if Liebgott could cut his own hair, if he was that good. He wondered if Liebgott would ever look at him again.

“Hey, Web,” Garcia said, “sit down, why dontcha.”

“Actually,” Liebgott said, angling his elbow over the back of his chair as he turned towards Webster. “This table’s full.”

“There’s a chair right--” O’Keefe said from the adjoining table, before falling silent with a little oof that spoke of a well-aimed elbow.

Webster remembered back to about thirty seconds previous, when all he’d wanted for was Liebgott to look him in the eye. Now that he had--gaze fathoms deep, and none of them friendly--Webster couldn’t remember why he would have ever wished for something so eminently stupid.

But he couldn’t back down. Something in his blood sang it: if he turned away now he might as well have never come back from that thrice-damned hospital.

“There’s a chair right there,” he said quietly, and no one elbowed him to stay quiet. Webster was aware, dimly, that they were being watched by a notable portion of the guys in here. He’d known in an abstract way that Skinny had told people what had happened up on the mountain but the press of attention made it real, suffocating.

“No there ain’t,” Liebgott said. He was still sitting, his chin tilted up to look Webster in the face. The line of his jaw looked sharp enough to slice open anything dumb enough to come near. “Not for you.”

“Don’t be a child.”

A muscle in Liengott’s cheek twitched. “Don’t be an asshole. Or, is it just a natural kinda thing with you? Cause that would explain a lot, actually.”

Smirking grin. Someone laughed, just a little, and then quickly stopped.

“Joe,” Webster started. Liebgott was strung up so tight that Webster wondered, if he put a hand to him, if he would be able to feel the shiver of tension under his skin.

Liebgott stood up then, kicking his chair back so savagely that it fell sideways with a hard thud on the wide plank floor. He was right up in Webster’s space, the two of them practically nose to nose. Webster wanted to grab him, but then he didn’t know what he wanted to do next after that, and that scared him.

He felt oddly like he was in a film with Liebgott, that they were acting out parts not quite their own. Like Liebgott was miming an anger that was different from his own, displaced from it. Webster didn't doubt that his anger was real: but it seemed far-off, ungraspable, nothing to do with the way he was standing in front of Webster now, angling for a fight.

Webster's self-respect wouldn’t let him take a step back, so he made his tone as distant as he could when he said, “You’re making a scene over nothing.”

“Yeah, all right, you and your stick up your ass,” Liebgott said. “You too good for this, that it? The rest of us down here in the muck and the blood and the fuckin guts, but you’re too fuckin good for it.”

Webster had to restrain himself from rolling his eyes. “Listen to yourself, Lieb,” he said. “Drop the tough-guy act and let’s sit down and drink our beers. All right?”

“Don’t treat me like a goddamn kid.”

This time Webster did roll his eyes. “Oh for Christ’s sake, Liebgott--”

The punch was unexpected in the moment but not, Webster reflected, pain radiating out from his cheekbone, on the whole. They’d been standing too close for Liebgott to get a good wind-up, but it still hurt like hell. The whole pub had shivered, almost, with the impact; some guys had half-risen from their chairs, but Webster stayed calm and on his feet, so no one joined in yet. If there had been anyone left who was still minding their own business, they weren’t anymore.

Webster's mouth tasted like a new penny, bright copper. He spat onto the sawdust-strewn floor, and what came out was mostly blood.

Liebgott was looking at him, not just unrepentant but with a look of hard, exultant expectation. Webster only blinked at him, blinked again. The punch had made his eyes water, but it was only a physiological reaction, like falling out of a tree. Your body just didn’t know what else to do.

“Hit me back, Webster,” Liebgott said, almost under his breath. A strain of that hard expectation in his voice: come on, come on.

“No,” Webster said. “Fuck.”

“C’mon, you shit,” Liebgott said: hardly even angry anymore, wound tight with a sort of wanting. “Hit me back.”

Webster wanted to. How good it would feel, to really brawl with him, to get his hands on him like that. Pin him to the floor, sawdust in his hair, his skinny hard body trapped under Webster’s own. Liebgott might fight dirty but Webster was bigger than him, by a fair margin: he could keep him down. They had never messed around like that, Liebgott always scrambling on top of Webster if they made it horizontal. He didn’t like it, Webster had guessed; being trapped. Webster could do it, could hold him down and scare him a little, keep him wherever he wanted him. He could win this fight, could see every step of it.

But he didn’t want to really hurt Liebgott, didn’t want to make him afraid. Didn’t want to know whether he’d really do it, or if he’d pull his punches, let Liebgott hurt him instead.

“Webster, c'mon,” Liebgott snapped at him, getting impatient. “Hit me back. You fuckin coward. Hit me back.”

The was a hiss of indrawn breath around the room. You didn’t call anyone a coward here if you didn’t mean it, didn’t call an Easy man--a Toccoa man--a coward unless he had done something really bad.

Webster understood then, suddenly and sickeningly, the full scope of how upset Liebgott was about the mountain, the cottage, the man who might or might not have been a monster. He thought he'd understood before but he hadn't. He wished revelation hadn't come like this.

“You think you’re so much fuckin better than me,” Liebgott said, his voice still low and dangerous. You could hear people breathing, that’s how quiet it was in the pub. “You think you got your head full of books and that means you understand something us dumb fucks don’t. Well, you got it backward, Web.” The nickname was only mocking. “You don’t understand shit. The sooner you stop playing dress-up as a soldier and go back to your nice fuckin life the better it’ll be for all of us. Fuckin coward.”

“Fuck you,” Webster said, all he could manage. His throat felt abnormally tight, so much so he almost thought to touch it, check that something wasn’t there, pressing the breath out of him.

He knew Liebgott was only saying what he thought he needed to say to get Webster to hit him--knew Liebgott was just finding bruises to press, tender points to exploit. He wasn’t even very good at it, Webster thought distantly; he was picking things that were too broad, too obvious. Even the hurt of Liebgott calling him a coward was one step removed from the real thing: it hurt not because it was the worst thing for him to hear, but because he knew it was the worst thing Liebgott could think of to say to him.

“Hit me back,” Liebgott snarled, his composure finally frayed away, and before Webster understood what was happening Liebgott’s hands were twisted in his jacket-front, he was shoving him back, he was launching himself at Webster, teeth bared.

“Ho-ly shit,” Luz said from somewhere behind Liebgott, and then suddenly he and Malarkey were there, on either side of Liebgott, tugging him off. They were neither of them large men, but they had more muscle on them than Liebgott did, and even with the fight he was putting up they managed together to pull him back, leave Webster fine but shaking.

“Let’s get you outta here,” said a voice next to him, and then there was Heffron, tugging at his arm insistently. Webster stumbled after him, not able to help looking back over his shoulder as he did. But he couldn’t see anything; everyone had finally surged out of their chairs, and between him and Liebgott there was now a wall of khaki and olive drab.

“Jesus fuckin Christ,” Babe said, pulling Webster out into the alleyway behind the bar. He sounded a little like he was at the end of his rope. “Christ, Webster, what did you do to him?”

“What did I--” Webster started, disbelieving.

“Listen, never mind,” Heffron said. “Let’s just get you back to your tent. Jesus Christ.”

I didn’t do anything, Webster wanted to protest, but Babe wasn’t who he wanted to say it to and after all that was the problem, wasn’t it. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t pulled the trigger after Liebgott had screamed at him, shoot him, but he also hadn’t done anything to stop Liebgott in the first place. He had gone in, checked the doors and windows, made sure Liebgott wouldn’t be ambushed, and then he had stepped outside like nothing was happening, like he couldn’t hear Liebgott cracking apart inside. Look what you did--

He had been a coward, but not for the reasons Liebgott had said it, just now, up so close to Webster that Webster could’ve--he didn’t know what. Shooting him or not shooting him, that old man running away, wasn’t the deciding moment, the hinge on which that bright afternoon had turned. It was when he had stepped out of the house. Not standing by Liebgott and not stopping him. Just stepping away.

Heffron was giving him a weird look, and Webster realized his own breath was coming out too-loud and ragged. He paused on the road, braced his hands on his knees, tried to breathe normally. "I'm fine," he said, though Babe hadn't asked. "I'm all right."

But he wasn't sure that he was. He had known something had fractured but he had been too upset in his own right to worry about it: he had been pissed at Liebgott and pissed at the situation and pissed at the whole scaffolding of decisions that had put them both up on that mountainside, him and Liebgott and Skinny made to be judge and jury and executioner of that man's life. He hated the fucking war, and it was over and it was still ruining things, cracking people open and emptying them out of anything besides anger and hurt and violence.

He'd known something had fractured but he hadn't realized just how bad the break had been, hadn't seen the bone poking through skin until just now, too late to set it back to heal the way it had been. He remembered thinking, over and over again, how fine Liebgott had seemed, despite everything. Maybe, Webster thought, he was himself simply very stupid. Maybe if he'd stopped wanting Liebgott to be all right so badly he could've done something, instead of just stepping outside of it all.

He wanted suddenly, breathtakingly, to go back. He didn't know where--to the pub, to the hillside, to some time before that when everything could've changed. The regret was so visceral it felt like an illness, something gone horribly wrong deep inside him. He wanted to go back, he didn't even know where to, and fix it. Keep it all from falling apart.

It was too idiotic a feeling to be borne and still Webster felt it, felt sick with it. He wanted to turn and go back to the pub but he knew it wouldn't help. It was too small. Everything had already ground on around them, the nightmare machinery of life moving forward, ceaselessly, to the end of the world. This, this tiny rending apart of two people who had sort of liked each other, sometimes, was nothing to it. A tiny casualty of a great system.

Heffron said, "Webster?"

And so Webster stood up again, feeling hollowed out, and kept walking.

*

That night, Liebgott came to him in a dream.

They’re back in the C-47, its unbearably thin metal exoskeleton muffling nothing. The wind, the explosions, the whine of bullets. Webster is at the front on the line, hears himself bellow One O.K. into the cacophony.

Liebgott is standing opposite him. He’s in his gear but not his helmet, hair falling over his forehead like it always does when Webster shuts his eyes and thinks of him. Even in the dream Webster says, “You shouldn’t be here.” Liebgott needs his helmet. “It isn’t safe.”

Liebgott only looks at him. He’s smoking, another archetypal sort of Liebgott behavior that he does in Webster’s mind all the time. Webster should be watching for the light but instead he’s watching Liebgott. “Will you tell me?” Webster asks him; he means about the light. Liebgott only shrugs.

More explosions, more noise. Webster is only looking at Liebgott, who looks so relaxed, so tough, so ready for anything. Webster is ready for nothing. He wonders if they might stay on the plane, forever.

“Green light, Web,” Liebgott says.

And David woke up.