Title:
There Must Be a WordAuthor: Meredith Bronwen Mallory
Pairing: Winters/Nixon (yes, I know I'm unimaginative ^^:)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: It's slash; don't like it, please don't read it. This never happened-- I pulled all this out of my aging behind. ^_~ It's FPS. No, really! *nods to self* Two removals... dramatization... yeah....
Summary: Dick Winters knows something unusual is going on, but he can't seem to find the right word.
Notes: I knew it would happen eventually. It was... *darth vader voice* inevitable. That's right, I've written Nix/Winters. *hangs head* Help. Me. Many thanks and much love to Leigh, who is quite possibly the most wonderful person in the world-- she beta-ed this and convinced me to post it. She also got me into BoB to start with. I don't know if I should kiss her or shoot her. ^_~
As always, I must thank you for taking the time to read this. If I could trouble you a bit more and ask you to comment.... I would be very much in your debt. ^_^
So, without further ado...
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There Must Be A Word 1/1
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
http://www.demando.net/
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(Once, in the dusty smoke and fading panic of a successful mission, he caught sight of familiar lines bundled onto a stretcher. Another broken form, bleeding screams and crying blood, and then Winters was running before he even thought about it, across the open field. His calves ached, his feet bent towards cracking from crouching in the foxhole, not breathing, waiting-- he felt these small discomforts, boots crunching in yellow-green grass, thinking how once Doc Roe had started counting time for a pulse and stopped at only three. One-and-two-and-- gone. He felt so strange, staring down at the face of the unfamiliar replacement in that stretcher, because each pounding of his boots against the earth had said it's nix it's nix god please no but it's nix. The relief was terrible, merciless, curdling his insides as he watched the suffering and could only think, thank god it's not nix. His heart was in his throat, he could taste the mixing, one-day-too-old flavor, and it surprised him because at that moment he was sure he had no heart at all.)
The first time Nixon said, 'This should not be happening', Winters had seen his own vague question reflected back in those dark eyes. Instead of wondering what his friend was talking about, he'd instead been taken aback by the openness of his own expression in inky-black monochrome. How he could see everything there, confusion and affection and-- what?
"What shouldn't be happening?" he'd asked, while Nixon turned away to study the British planes as they rumbled and quaked overhead, wings and propellers screaming, 'You turn next! Your turn!' Lewis just shook his head, lips curving around his cigarette, and it was only then that Winters realized he'd offered the other man a light and their hands were still touching. He'd thought, 'I should move my hand', but Nixon's skin had a feeling he was trying to put a name to, the bones were a welcoming shape under his finger tips. They stared at each other, and then Nix sat back against the crate, legs akimbo in the grass, folding his hands behind his head as a 'thanks for the light' fell from his lips.
(In the library of one of the few houses still standing in Carentan-- over-cast gray light through the dripping glass windows, and he picked up a book. Green leather, gold lettering, finely bound. He thumbed through it gently, the French words jumping uneasily under his gaze, thinking how funny it was that you could use the same alphabet and come up with something completely different. Closing his eyes, closing the book, he inhaled the scent of paper and smoke and slow evenings in a town that now boasted a citizenship of ghosts. Very briefly, the scent drew flickering images of a little redheaded boy playing with toy blocks, fire casting light over his game; his own hands smelt of blood, dissolving everything away like acid, like a poison you can't recognize until it becomes a part of you. Eyes open, head up-- and there was Nix, framed by the dark-wood threshold, posture tired and somehow concerned.
"French was bad," Nixon said, moving his hand as if continuing some unheard conversation, "but it was better than Latin." His lips smirked, but his eyes only smiled, and Winters was conscious of that gaze on him, Nixon looking his fill. "'Latin is a language, dead as it can be," the grin widened, "first it killed the Romans, now it's killing me."
The laugh that came from Winter's throat had no air behind it, "That so?"
"We used to write that in our text books," Lewis shrugged, crossing the carpet in his muddy boots to take the book from Winter's hand. He flipped to a random page, nodding to himself while Dick watched, captive, as his friends lips moved silently to shape the foreign words. "Economics," he set the book down, "even worse." A hand on Winter's elbow, leading him back out into the gray-washed street.
He wonders why he remembers this-- something so calm, so trivial. Wonders why, in the chilled, narled claws of a Bastogne foxhole, he looks down at Nixon sleeping slouched against him and thinks about a baby-faced boy kicking his feet, squirming and scribbling mocking rhymes in illicit pen. He brushes a finger against Lewis' cheek, too numb to feel texture; those dark eyes open, recognizing, sleepy and so briefly full of trust, as if the years haven't yet caught up with Nixon's dreaming.
Someone says, "Go back to sleep." Someone else presses lips to a chilled forehead, breathing easing back into the peril of dreams.
There must be a word for this feeling.)
When Nixon pauses, when he stops to look at Dick, or to keep their shoulders touching, Winters doesn't say a thing. When they finally have a roof over their heads instead of a tarp, beds instead of cradles of dirt, Winters still sleeps huddled in the same bed with his best friend. He traces Lewis' hand with his fingers, sometimes, presses them together to compare size and shape, moves down the wrist to feel the curtailed tide of blood, because really Nixon sleeps like the dead and that has never been a comfortable thought. They get up in the morning and do their jobs-- Nixon drinks, Winters watches, cleans up the bottles, helps the other man up the stairs.
"If--" Lewis mumbles one evening, leaning heavily against Dick in the threshold of their room, "What if--" And there's silence while he kicks out his shoes, collapsing on the bed after tossing his shirt carelessly to the floor. "There's a war still going on, you know," Nixon laughs a little, dryly, watching Winters watch him with worried eyes. "What happens if you-- Dick, those kids... Damnit, what would I do? Then. If."
Winters nods, forcing the muscles to work because the ones in his throat won't; he gets in bed beside Lewis, every body part matched and spooned, and finally understands what his face must have looked like when Nixon almost got it in the head.
There's a feeling you could only say in French-- deja'vu; that slow chill winding up the back of your spin, the fading click of an image in your mind's eye. I've been here before, I've done this before. Not rational, not logical, but a concept so familiar that the word had been absorbed and adopted. Deja'vu, thinks Winters-- and it's just about the only French he knows, aside from 'I'm an American' and 'put down your weapons'. He reaches gently over Nix to dowse the oil lamp, bringing the flame down until only the muggy-half light of the steetlamps and moonlight-- faded gold and silver-- aids his eyes. It seems strange, still, to sleep in a bed, though he's certainly been doing it a lot longer than he was ever in Bastogne. Somehow, that doesn't matter-- Bastogne was forever, and even now it seems like it hasn't stopped. He'll wake up, stiff and feeling hunted, to hear the sound of German artillery that-- for all its power-- never seems to drown out the screaming. Shivering, Winters pulls the quilts up-- two, three layers, because the cold is in their bones and may never be driven out. Nix is warm against him, smelling of expensive liquor and cheap cigarettes and sleep. Didn't the Japanese-- crazy, suicidal race-- also have a single word meaning something like 'honorable death'? Dick thinks he remembers reading that in a war journal, somewhere... Strange how you can exchange a word in one language for two or three in another. Not always an even trade. There's a space in his mind, a silence waiting to be filled when he figures out just what to call what it is between them; Winters and Nixon, why he always seeks the other man out, why all these small touches don't unnerve him, but rather spur him on, always looking. Always afraid that, tomorrow or the next day or just ten minutes from now, he'll will be confronted with a broken body, and the face on that body will belong to Lewis and this time there will be no taking it back.
Deja'vu.
People shiver and say 'someone just walked over my grave', but Winters wonders what you say when someone 'walks over the grave' of someone you...
He takes Nix's hand in his own, and closes his eyes.
(Nixon was sitting perched on the desk, kicking his legs like the schoolboy counterpart in Winter's mind, just being a nuisance while his friend tried to type. Kicking, drumming up a rhythm until Dick fairly shoved him off the desk, playful, but firm
"You cutting in on Luz's territory?" Nixon raised an eyebrow, easily gaining his balance-- and that's what made Winters realize that he had just touched the other man's behind, that he had curved his hands around those slim hips before pushing away. He swallowed hard, looking at his fingers as they hovered over black keys, wondering what combination of Roman letters could encapsulate what this was.
"Nah," he said finally, "it's just that I only have room for one annoyance on this desk, and the typewriter takes up most the space."
"I'm more useful," Lewis flipped back, but he was already halfway down the steps by the time Winters looked up.)
Austria is heady, like sweet honey after tasting ash, and Winters again feels the fullness of that dark gaze as he dives off the pier. The water embraces him, compensating for each movement-- rippling, changing.
'I thought I'd drag you along with me,' said Nix, and earlier, in the guise of a joke-- 'I have to go with him'. Nix finally smiling in the Alpine sun, making jokes about redheaded Eskimos. Dick takes a deep breath and plunges himself under water, listening to the sound of the lake in his ears. No words, no words for this feeling, in any language he's searched yet. There has to be one, though-- a word-- because humans label everything. Nixon, laying back in a soft leather chair, idling tossing a novel from hand to hand. Think of all those animals running around with Latin names, he'd said, amused. When Bull dragged a deer back on his powerful shoulders, Nix said, 'cervus nippon taiouanus' and laughed himself silly, while Liebgott muttered about college rotting your brain.
"I was about to come in after you," Lewis shouts when Winters bursts to the surface for a grateful gulp of air.
"You would not," Dick shakes his head, pulling himself back from the water. His hand reaches for the towel, but Nix already has it, holding it loosely, bending down to look his friend at eye-level. "You said it was too cold."
"Would to." He dries Winters' hair like he's giving a playful noogie. "Would to," says Nixon, and Winters more feels the words than hears them. "Would to." They're standing very close on the pier and Dick is breathing hard-- suddenly it's not his breath he hears, but Nixon's, the beat of Lewis' blood instead of his own. This is not a nightmare of washed-out grays and hard blues; this is Lewis, and they're going to New Jersey, and what shouldn't have happened already did, long before either one of them thought to stop it. If they could have.
(a shiver, a look-- absolute familiarity with a street you've never seen, a yearning for a taste of something you've never had before. dreaming how it will all end, and then opening your eyes to watch the very same thing)
Richard Winters leans forward, very slowly, grateful to be met. There are hands on his shoulders, firm, needy-- tracing down his back. He puts his own hand on the back of Lewis' neck; soft, dark hair, warm skin.
There must be a word-- it's right here, pressed between Nixon's lips-- a cypher with no clue to pronunciation. Elusive, hard to hold under your tongue; crisp and accented and fresh.
Lewis is saying it over and over again, lips on Dick's bare shoulder, without making a sound.