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There’s a knock, firm and swift, on the door.
It drags Lew from the pits of slumber by the ankles, kicking and screaming. He fights the crust built up in his eyes, prying them open as he blinks himself awake, the single stream of sunlight from the split in the hotel curtains already too much, and wonders who the hell has come knocking.
He hasn’t put in for a morning wake-up call. He never does.
“Go away!”
Lew manages to shout this despite the burgeoning hangover that makes his stomach roll and pounds mercilessly at his sweaty temples, promptly pulling the bedsheets back over his head and closing his eyes. Lew is aware, vaguely, numbly, that he’s facing the wrong end of the bed, the pillows squished beneath his socked feet. He’s on his stomach, arms stiff under his head, contemplating crawling his way up to the head of the mattress, when another knock sounds at the door.
The hotel staff, it seems, are persistent.
With no small amount of effort, Lew manages to sit up. He’s facing the windows and draws the white bed linens around his shoulders like a cape while he summons the courage to stand and get the door. The bedsheets to which he clings are drenched with a foul cocktail of flop-sweat and drool. Lew thinks, distantly, of the robe hanging in the bathroom, but he can’t be bothered. Instead, he spares a glance of reconnaissance down at himself, and discovers that, at least, he is wearing underwear.
Lew looks at his watch. It’s two-thirty in the afternoon.
Another knock should have, by his highly qualified estimation, sounded already, but a deafening silence eats up every inch of the suite. The temptation to sag back into the mattress is overwhelming. Lew sinks, and then—the brief but efficient sound of the lock twisting—the door to hotel suite 427 swings open.
Dick Winters walks with a confident stride into the room, bidding his thanks to the hotel clerk who stands in his shadow, clutching a master key, and closes the door behind him.
Lew chokes on his own surprise, sputters inelegantly, and rights himself in a tangle of sheets on the bed.
He cannot even rouse enough dignity to speak.
Dick is wearing civilian clothing—Lew doesn’t think he’s seen Dick in his civvies since OCS—, and it pains Lew how nice and put together and attractive Dick looks in the pressed white shirt and the gray trousers and the stupid fucking corduroy cardigan. His hair is perfectly combed, his face perfectly shaved, his expression perfectly composed in that old army way.
Lew hates how fucking self-possessed Dick is.
He is paralyzed as Dick wades through the debris of Lew’s previous evening—over a pair of dirty trousers, around a sodden bath towel, pass the tie hanging from the shade of the standing lamp—to hover at the foot of the bed. Lew watches in abject horror as Dick observes the scene with his keen officer’s eye. The hotel carpet is lush and burgundy and peppered with glass from the shattered bottle Lew had thrown at the wall sometime late last night or early this morning, and the wallpaper of the suite is fine and stylish, a striped off-white and gold pattern, now stained with a blood-splatter burst of the Vat 69. Ashtrays on the nightstand and coffee table overflow, and there’s an entire steak dinner left to decay, untouched, on the sofa. This is to say nothing of the burn marks from forgotten cigarettes on the carpet and cushions or the graveyard’s worth of empty liquor bottles which decorate the room like translucent tombstones.
Watching Dick with his head and shoulders still obscured by the bedsheet, Lew tries to enjoy the look of dismay on Dick’s face, if only so that Lew doesn’t drown in his own shame.
“Look at you,” Dick says, finally, and the familiar cadence of his endearing Pennsylvania inflection has Lew’s stomach flipping, his heart racing. God, he might actually be sick. “You’re like a house falling down.”
“Don’t I know it,” Lew admits. He intends for it to come out as self-deprecating as always, but the words are chased by a pitiful sort of whimper that Dick graciously ignores, and Lew’s chest tightens with some mélange of humiliation and defeat.
“I heard you were bad, but I thought Spiers was exaggerating to make me feel better.”
Ah, Spiers. So, that’s why Dick’s here. The filthy rat.
But Lew is too terrified to muster any real anger at his former colleague—Lew doesn’t have friends anymore—so, he settles for watching Dick some more. In fact, he finds, that it is impossible to look away from the familiar slope of Dick’s broad shoulders, the familiar sheen of his coppery hair, the familiar—
Moving to the windows, Dick takes one curtain in each hand and flings them open, flooding the room in the pale light of a foggy New York day. Lew winces, mutters a curse, feels the pulse of a headache, but ultimately finds himself defenseless. Dick then takes a sitting chair by the back and swings it around to face the bed and lowers himself into it in a single smooth and efficient movement. Elbows on his knees, he leans forward, the picture of patience.
The weight of Dick’s stare—the one that could, right from the very start of things, see directly through Lew and his bullshit to the squishy, helpless inside of him—is too much to bear. And it becomes clear—because really, there’s only one way this can play out, and at the very least, he owes Dick that much—that Dick won’t be the first one to break. So, Lew drags himself to the edge of the mattress and flails around for his pack of smokes on the bedside table. “You don’t mind, do you?” He lights the Lucky Strike before Dick can respond, takes a long, burning drag, and wraps himself up in a careful toga of bed linens.
Dick studies him in all his splendor. “Sleeping in socks. Always a bad sign with you.”
“Looks like my vices caught up with me last night.”
“Last night?”
The hint of bitterness in Dick’s voice delights Lew to no end. He knows he deserves it, and Lew has always, ceaselessly, relentlessly, been a glutton for punishment. Especially when Dick is the executioner.
“Last year, then.”
The cigarette is a welcome distraction. Although it doesn’t kill Lew’s sudden urge for a drink, the fag helps to dull the bite a little, and so when the cherry burns his fingertips, Lew lights another.
“Yeah, sorry, I just—” Lew tumbles off the bed, nearly careens into the windows, his feet trapped in a cobweb of sheets. “I’ve gotta take a piss.”
The en-suite has a luxurious clawfoot bathtub, which Lew naturally whacks his ankle against with a yelp as he beelines for the toilet, barely remembering to kick the door shut behind him. He takes his time, washes his hands after, and glares at himself in the winged, gold-rimmed mirror which hangs above the sink. What he sees there affords him no surprises—an angry, spent shell of a man, who looks not unlike old roadkill, rotting and cold.
Lew craves another cigarette, but there aren’t any in the bathroom. For some odd reason he can’t fathom, there’s no alcohol, either. And so, Lew takes a shuddering breath, slips into the hotel’s standard issue bathrobe, and goes to face the music.
He’s not two steps out of the toilet when he says something glib—his best and most beloved armor—, but just like old times, Dick manages not to take the bait, and that more than anything, annoys the hell out of Lew.
“Hungry, Dick? That’s a twenty-dollar steak. I’m sure the house staff can heat it up for ya.”
Lew saves himself the indignity of slumping back on the bed, choosing instead to go for another cigarette which he smokes gazing out the window at Manhattan, wondering, half-heartedly, how the world is continuing to carry on when Dick Winters is sitting in his hotel room as if seven months’ worth of distance doesn’t linger between them.
“Is this all you’ve been up to, Lew? Did you really just decide to stop living?” Dick asks. All at once, he looks as weary and spent as Lew feels. “No. Never mind, I’m too tired to know.”
Dick reclines in the chair, deflating some, and it’s then that Lew notices the barely-there shadow of half-moons under Dick’s eyes and the tightness of his mouth, his brow. “I’ve just spent four hours on a train. I’m stiff, I’m tired. And you stink.”
Lew manages to pull a face of affront, though he is all too aware that the foul odor which hangs in the air like smog is the rancid reek of his own body. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting company.”
Rising to his feet, Dick tells him, “I’ve got a room downstairs.”
And Lew feels an instant stab of guilt. The hotel, one of the city’s finest, costs a small fortune, and Lew knows the bill for the room must’ve eaten up a month’s worth of Dick’s salary. It’s on the tip of his tongue to offer to cover the tab for him, but Lew, disgraced former intelligence officer that he is, is still wise enough to know to swallow the offer whole before it ever sees the light of day.
“I’m going to go and have a nap, and then you and I are going to talk.”
“Is that an order, Major?”
Lew hates that there’s no bite behind his words, but he’s, unfortunately, quite breathless because Dick is standing close enough that Lew can count the freckles on the bridge of his nose—a constellation which Lew has memorized and mapped out across the front cinema screen of his brain.
With pinched lips, Dick drops a hand to Lew’s shoulder.
It is the first time in since the end of the war—those seven long, torturous, silent months—that Dick has touched him. It would probably be too much to suggest that Lew feels some of the dark shroud that clings to him lift with the heavy weight of Dick’s warm palm. But Lew shivers, and believes it does, anyway.
“Take a shower. Give yourself a shave.” Dick glanced around at the wasteland of the suite. “And for pete’s sake, let the maids come in and clean some of this up. You can’t live this like, Lew… I’ll meet you in the hotel restaurant for dinner. Six o’clock sharp. Don’t be late.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Then, Dick is gone as suddenly as he came, and left alone, standing in the wreckage of his own life, Lew wonders if this is all a daydream.
Lew walks the gallows with whiskey on his breath and a nervous sweat on the back of his neck.
Dick is already seated at the table when Lew is ushered into the hotel restaurant by the demure hostess. He offers her a polite, if somewhat tight, smile and orders a drink before his ass hits the seat cushion.
Lew is alarmed to find that Dick has changed into a suit for dinner, one which, though made of cheaper quality and poorer cut than Lew’s own suit, hugs Dick’s lithe body like a glove and makes him look unbearably handsome in the low-lighting.
“Nice suit,” Lew grumbles for lack of better greeting and sits down like a student before the headmaster, willing, if not ready, for a scolding.
A waiter brings Lew his whiskey, and Dick doesn’t have the decency to look surprised or angry about it. Lew downs the drink in two swift gulps, eyes locked on Dick’s unwavering gaze, and immediately orders another.
Ah, finally, there.
The muscle tic in Dick’s jaw, Lew thinks, is more satisfying than his last—admittedly, pitiful and sloppy, self-inflicted—orgasm.
“So,” Lew beams. “What did you want to talk about?”
Dick takes a moment, drinking in Lew in all his self-destructive glory, the worm of a nostalgic smile twitching against his mouth, as if he can’t believe that so little and so much has changed after all this time. Dick sips at his water.
“Your friends are worried about you, Lew.”
“Haven’t you heard, Dick? I quit the friend business some time ago. We just couldn’t turn a profit.”
“It’s nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
Lew’s grin is a little mean. “Have you managed to find one?”
The same pimple-faced waiter returns with Lew’s second whiskey and asks to take their dinner orders. Dick orders the chicken with a salad, Lew orders the steak, bloody.
“You have some speech prepared, right?” Lew swirls the drink in his hand, the swish of amber liquid in the glass tumbler all too known to him. He takes a calming mouthful. “That’s why you came. Because Spiers said I’d taken a swan dive off the deep end, but wait, if anyone can lecture ole Nixon back to life, it’s Major Winters. So, let’s have it, shall we?”
A common misconception about Dick is that the man doesn’t get angry. This, of course, is grade A, premium quality bullshit. Dick is one of the angriest guys Lew has ever met. Dick’s just an expert at keeping his temper under lock and key.
But boy, is it spectacular when he unbolts that door.
“No speech.”
Dick isn’t angry when he says it, not even the hint of ire, just the hollow trace of sadness. Like he’s already given up. Like he’s only there to tell Lipton and Spiers and Welsh that he tried.
“Why the hell are you here, Dick?”
“Why are you doing this to yourself, Lewis? Is it because of…us? Are you—” Dick hesitates. “—ashamed?”
Lew snorts and downs the rest of his whiskey in a single gulp. “Only every time I look at your face.”
Then, Lew witnesses, with a stunned sort of horror, as Dick collapses in on himself, the walls of his collected façade crumbling like sand. Lew watches the grains tumble through the hourglass until Dick’s all used up.
“I see,” says Dick, softly, despondently. He’s got the look of shell shock. Lew is frozen as Dick removes the napkin from his lap, places it atop the table, and pushes his chair away to stand. Before he does, Dick levels Lew with a look of utter heartbreak, and Lew hopes—prays—that he’s imagining the unshed tears in Dick’s blue gaze. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Lewis. I never meant—it wasn’t my intention to—to sully you in any way. I hope you know that. You will always have my respect and my friendship, should you ever want it.”
Dick stands, but its Lew who feels like he’s falling, stomach bottoming out, and he realizes with a keen jolt of panic that Dick has performed an alternative reading of his words.
“I’m not ashamed of us—!” Lew shouts as he stands, banging into the table and sending the plates and glasses clattering about. “Christ, Dick, I’m not ashamed of what we did. I am—” The noise which springs forth from him is a wretched, piteous creature, and Lew fights to remain upright as his attempts to reign in the miserable thing of it. “I am ashamed of what I said to you that night. Of how I treated you when you asked—”
When you asked me to stay. When you asked me to try. When you asked me for an after, for a home, for a life, together.
The words get caught up inside him, metastasizing somewhere near his spleen.
He’s aware, abstractly, that he and Dick are in a crowded, upscale restaurant with two dozen witnesses, but they are the last of his concerns. During the war, Lew had always been willing to face a court martial or a firing squad for Dick—it was all the shit that came after that became the problem.
Dick is lingering at the edge of the table and staring at him, mouth soft in a little ‘o’, cheeks flushed—and Lew feels it. Knows that this is the moment that decides the forever.
If Lew lets him go now, he’ll never press his forehead to the slope of Dick’s collarbone, make himself a home in the hollow of Dick’s throat or the warmth of his armpit, and fall asleep there. For the rest of his life, he’ll never fall asleep again without the medicated assistance of handful of Blue 88 pills and that ole familiar comfort of the Vat 69, and he will always, always, always want for and wonder after his redheaded, fearless boy.
“I should’a said yes.”
Dick’s mouth snaps shut and he visibly swallows. “Do you mean that? —really?”
Lew loathes himself for the doubt in Dick’s voice, for the fact that Lew is the reason Dick worries that he isn’t enough.
“You were always the better man, Dick. That was never the question.”
I wish I had been braver for you, for us.
The hostess materializes at Dick’s elbow. Her uniform is pressed, her hair perfectly coiffed in a stunning set of victory girls, her lips a brilliant cherry red. “Sirs, is everything alright?”
A hint of embarrassment colors Dick’s cheeks, but before he can respond, Lew reaches into his pocket for his wallet and throws a wad of cash on the table. “We’re all done, ma’am.” He adds, at the mild pinch of discontent of her face, flatly, “Family emergency.”
By some miracle of a God Lew thought had long forgotten him—or maybe it was the other way around—, Dick follows Lew, wordlessly, back to his hotel suite, and Lew finds himself beyond grateful when he realizes that the maids have, in fact, cleaned and tidied the place.
“I didn’t come here for this,” Dick tells him.
“Why the hell not?”
Lew is desperate to feel him, to dig his fingers into the tender flesh of Dick’s belly, to taste the skin of his shoulder, to sink his teeth into Dick’s thigh, to be consumed by him. But the bitter taste of shame still lingers in his mouth and the edge of worry still hangs from the crow’s feet that hug Dick’s eyes.
Dick must read the longing on his face, because he says, in a quiet voice, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Lew.”
Lew hears it for the plea it is. Don’t break my heart again.
“I want to tell you I’ll be a better man, Dick.” Hope and desperation claw their way up his throat, and goddamn it, Lew needs another drink. “Can the wanting be enough?”
Dick studies him for a moment that lasts a small eternity. “Do you love me?”
They both know he can’t say it, even though it’s true, and Lew isn’t sure which of them he hates most—himself for his inescapable weakness, or Dick for asking him in the first goddamn place.
Without needing any help from Lew, Dick soldiers on, ever the leader. He steps into the space between them until their chests brush and raises a hand to cup Lew’s left cheek, the intimate gesture sending Lew’s heart hammering double-time in his chest. The pad of his thumb kisses Lew’s bottom lip. “Sometimes, I wonder if loving you is some kind of punishment. What else can it be when the person you love won’t let themselves love you in return?”
Lew feels every ounce the yellow-bellied coward that he is. But beyond his shame and his fear and his spinelessness, there is a seed of hope sprouting in between the cracks of his ruined heart. He wants, more than anything, not to fuck this up.
Lew knows that he will not survive Dick walking away from him twice.
“If anyone’s being punished here, Dick, I’m fairly certain it’s me.”
“You’re punishing us both.”
“Misery loves company. What can I say?” Lew is too distraught to care about the sudden dampness he feels on his cheeks. He yearns to reach for Dick. To grab him by the suit jacket and hold on for dear life. But he knows he lost that right a long time ago. “You poor, unlucky bastard—to love a mess like me.”
“I can’t do this for you, Lew.”
Dick is looking at Lew like he’s awaiting orders, or bad news. Beneath Dick’s heartbreak and fear, Lew can see his own hope reflecting back in the laugh lines around Dick’s mouth and the pink dusting of his pale cheeks. Lew has never doubted that Dick wants him—he’s only ever doubted that he deserves Dick.
Lew thinks about the first time he jumped from a C-47. How the worst part had been the anticipation, the agonizing journey between suiting up on the ground and taking flight well before you were ever allowed to step into the open door. The easiest part of it had been the precise moment when he just jumped.
“I’m afraid,” Lew whispers, and he watches Dick gather up the admission and tuck it away safely somewhere deep inside himself. “I’m afraid I won’t be enough for you, or I’ll fuck it up and lose you somehow, and I’m not like you, Dick. I won’t survive it.”
Dick is steadfast as always. “Yes, you will.”
Nervous fireworks begin low in his belly. Just like a jump, he feels the anticipation build at the tips of his fingers and behind his eyes. This is the hardest part. Lew knows what comes next, and he tells himself to be brave.
Lew surrenders, then. His hands find purchase on Dick’s waist, and he draws him impossibly closer. When Lew moves to kiss him, Dick shifts forward to meet him, mouth falling open, soft and pliant beneath Lew’s lips.
This is it. Lew stands in the open doorway of the future, and he jumps.