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Nix liked to think that he always knew what to say, that everything that made its way out of his mouth was exacting and able to garner whatever emotion he needed. So when he snapped and said, “you run into any bacon sandwich, do the same, all right?” to Dick, whose only response was an unnervingly measured, “yeah,” before rearranging his face to look unhurt, Nixon knew he had inflicted pain.
The feeling of wanting to kick himself after this realization recoiled into Nixon’s system so viscerally it stopped him in his tracks as he was exiting Dick’s newly billeted quarters. The feeling was only exacerbated when he strained his ears to listen for any kind of whining or sound of displeasure only to be met with eerie silence from Dick upstairs. Nixon winced before he clambered back up the few steps he had gone down.
His best friend had been prickly at best since the morning. However, it was the muted contempt and the typhoon of emotions that sat behind his green blue eyes long before that, right after Easy’s October 5th operation that made Nixon restless when he couldn’t afford to be. It became a stretched out rain cloud that has since then plagued Dick and therefore by willing association, Nix.
Which is why when Dick doused him with a pitcher of his own piss to wake him up, Nix almost welcomed the rogue playfulness at his own expense. It earned him a few sweet seconds of wrangling up Dick, punching him and wringing his arms allowing some of the liquid to wipe off on his friend’s otherwise pristine uniform. Moreover, it managed to coax out a measured chuckle from his friend. Nix felt sure that maybe now, Dick would surface from the pool of his thoughts, that was until they reached HQ. After a quick word from Sink, Dick’s eyes lingered to Nixon who had been conferring with a Colonel Dobie, and the wall went up again. Operation Pegasus was in full swing and Nix found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on gunning down enemy lines when he was trying to figure out a way to blast through Dick’s own personal barricade. All the brooding and the coldness on both their fronts unsurprisingly made him less patient around his best friend, and much more generous when pouring himself a glass of Vat 69.
Bacon sandwich. He winced. The sentence still bounced around in his head by the time he made it back up to Dick’s quarters. His friend was staring out the window again, standing straighter than any person grappling with a torrential bout of pain should be allowed to. Dick’s hand was gripping the window so tightly, his knuckles were turning white.
“Still here? I swear I’m not hiding any bacon sandwiches in my desk, Lewis,” Dick says, not looking away from the window. Nix laughs quietly, surprised at how sad it sounded, and completely unsurprised that Dick sensed him hovering.
Dick hums in acknowledgment and Nixon takes this as permission to seat himself on the crate in front of Dick’s desk. It dawns on Nix that this is the first time in weeks that he and Dick have had more than a few minutes to sit with each other outside of mandatory briefings. Neither of them really had time to think, objectives and reports were taking up more and more of their time the further down enemy lines they went. His eyes drift from the half organized paper towers on Dick’s desk to Dick’s back, tense and unyielding to whatever ache continued to plague him. The silence between them was rarely uncomfortable, such was the case now. If anything Nixon relished it, almost as if the lack of each other’s company left something cold and hollow in his chest that was now beginning to mend itself with Dick in the room. In the quiet, Nix replays the two weeks, flinching at all the words and sentences he carelessly threw Dick’s way.
“Not bad for Dukeman.” Dick echoes Nixon’s words tonelessly while he stared shell-shocked at the field of German and Polish corpses. The coppery red of his hair in stark and bright contrast to the gray of everything else, but softer and much kinder than the red bleeding through the soil. Nixon had little time to regret saying it, noticing then how Dick clenched his hands together to stop them from shaking, before the latter stood up and moved away. He knows Dick would turnover the memory of Dukeman’s death again and again in his mind until he was undoubtedly convinced that it was his fault as commanding officer.
The image of Dick’s eyes that seemed to go vacant and glassy after managing to press down on six, maybe seven keys on his typewriter. He seemed only half there when they joked about Nixon’s dependency on his stock of Vat 69. Nixon frowns at the fresh memory of himself just minutes ago saying, “All that work for two pieces of paper?” Dick smiled at him politely, always so tolerant of the way Nix retreated into cleverness when he couldn’t process the other’s pain. The look on Dick’s face was all but an echo of the same one he wore at the crossroads, and Nix knew he was thinking about the corpses again.
Then Nix thinks of the blank recognition on Dick’s face when Sink offers him battalion command. It was a face that looked a lot like humble gratitude to everyone else. But Nixon knew where to look for nuances in Dick’s facial muscles, the ones that betrayed sadness and guilt. He found it at the quirk of his eyebrows and in the way his friend’s usual small smile was made even more miniscule. It was the same tight smile he gave Moose after he debriefed Dick on Easy’s role in Operation Pegasus. From where he stood, Nixon could read his friend’s eyes, the ones that almost equated his newly minted higher rank to retreat. Somehow, knowing all this, Nixon decided to throw him the line about bacon sandwiches.
Nix admits to himself that he’s been careless about Dick all week. The cold front his friend had put up threw him off not because it was unusual for Dick to retreat into stoicism, but because it was the first time Nix didn’t quite have the coordinates to help him out of the stupor. It felt like the first time he couldn’t reach him. The frequent skirmishes and flurry of intelligence activity left no room for him to reassess Dick’s situation and his own aggravated state. He felt so ill prepared for the feeling of helplessness and the break in routine (his right side felt cold without Dick tethered to him). He doesn’t question why he feels the need to hold his friend with both his hands, metaphorically speaking. He already knew the answer to that even if he wouldn’t say it out loud.
“Come on. What’s on your mind, Dick?” Nixon says it softly like an apology because neither of them were accustomed to saying sorry. Tone would have to account for meaning. “Nothing banging down at our doors right now. So I’m here, somewhat sober. You can tell me.”
Dick turns to him slowly as if knee deep in the muck of his thoughts, trudging out of it felt like the entire endeavor would suck the life out of him. For a fraction of a second, there’s guilt and shame on his face but he masks it quickly with his usual practiced calm. Nixon notices though, unfortunately. He always notices. And it makes his hands ache in an odd way, a pain that comes from commanding every muscle to resist the urge to reach out and pull Dick in and never let go—a vain and wishful attempt to shield him from pain. It was an urge that bubbled volatile, that refused to go dormant since Toccoa.
“I don’t know.” Dick puts his fingers to his forehead, pressing against his pale flesh in small circles. “Maybe I’m just tired, Lew.”
He suddenly sounds so young when he says it. Nix feels his hands twitch, the strength to resist the urge petering slowly out of his fingertips. Dick’s tone is even, but it’s the way he says Nixon’s name like it's a restrained plea, an indication that he just needs Nix to understand, that even if he wants to, he doesn’t have the energy to explain. It’s heavy with a kind of trust that Nixon knows Dick reserves only for him. It lets Nix hear him be petulant and unsure. The familiar feeling of Nix’s stomach plummeting and dragging him down slinks in like clockwork whenever Dick sheds off his rank and his stubborn need to keep up appearances like a heavy waterlogged coat in front of Nix—and only ever in front of Nix.
Nixon pushes himself off the makeshift seat, the fatigue of the week somehow crashing down on his muscles at the very same moment, and walks towards his best friend. It feels almost like an exhale being around Dick even under measly circumstances, and his body reacts to it by allowing whatever facade he puts up for regiment to crumble. There were no words he could really offer him, he knew that. Eloquence rarely staved off the feeling of grief and unnamed pains. And more often than not, as the weeks so clearly revealed, words are clumsy and cloying in the face of death and war. So instead, Nixon decides to give in to the urge and pulls Dick in, hooking his right arm over his friend’s shoulder if only to test his reaction, to see if he’d flinch. And when he doesn’t, Nix guides his left hand to the small of Dick’s back to close the distance between them, pull Dick into an embrace, and cage him in his arms. Dick’s forehead falls on his collarbone and Nix’s flesh underneath it thrums with heat, making him hold Dick tighter, tighter, tighter like he was afraid he would dissipate from the grief.
“I hate it for you. All of it,” Nixon mumbles quietly, maybe too bitterly, into Dick’s hair that smelled faintly of army soap and sweat. It takes all of him not to press his lips against Dick’s skull now that they were so close. At this, Dick’s arms pull him closer, desperate for the contact, like he wanted to bury himself inside Nixon’s torso. He feels Dick decompress. His best friend’s chest expanding slowly as it releases a bone deep sigh he’d apparently been holding in for a while. A quiet settles between them and something that resembles contentment.
The inevitability of each other consistently proved to be the most welcome and best kind of comfort they’d have in the war. It was something that was almost impossible to take advantage of when bullets and bombs descended so closely and willingly at their feet, only missing them by a few inches. Admittedly, he physically and mentally couldn’t give up drinking and Dick Winters this far out into the Allied advance, but at least one of those things made him a better person, made his heart ram against his chest in a way that didn’t feel like the beginning of dying. Nixon rests his nose on the nook between Dick’s neck and shoulder, and inhales involuntarily, his lips now brushing on his friend’s collarbone. He feels Dick shudder not unpleasantly before he realizes what he’s doing. But Dick doesn’t move away so Nixon decides to say whatever was on his mind.
“We’re lucky to have you, you know?” He says “we” because he hates how earnest he sounds. But he feels too soft and too vulnerable breathing in his best friend’s scent, and too content in the way Dick just lets him. Orderlies walking into the room be damned. “Hell, I’m probably the luckiest.”
Nix shrugs, pulling away if only to look at Dick in the eyes, just so he knows he means it. There’s a twitch of smirking disapproval in his friend’s eyebrows that Nix dismisses by stroking Dick’s blonde peach hairs with his thumb, surprising himself and Dick. But once again Dick doesn’t flinch, and again Nix takes it as permission to continue even after Dick’s eyebrows relax to their usual calm.
“Don’t be difficult about it, Winters,” Nix says quietly. “Just take it, it’s yours whether you like it or not. You already questioned my intelligence once tonight, don’t go wounding me again.” Dick laughs at that. Nix feels his friend’s shoulders move against his and realizes that Dick hasn’t let him go.
“Wasn’t your intelligence I was questioning,” Dick says quietly, smirking and almost rolling his eyes. “It was Dobie’s.”
“Dick, Pegasus is as foolproof as it can get at this point. Don’t be so hard on the man, he’s already British. He’s preoccupied with enough problems.” Nixon laughs, melting into the lightness that was now in Dick’s voice.
“Yeah? Didn’t seem too preoccupied when he took his time eyeing you up and down at HQ this morning,” Dick says it so easily it almost comes off as nonchalance. Nix knew better though, and the edge in Dick’s voice made his stomach flip from what dangerously felt like giddiness.
“Is that—Afraid I’m gonna run off to be some other man’s intelligence officer, Captain Winters?” Nix says teasingly, nudging Dick’s shoulder with his nose. He doesn’t know what he means by the gesture, or just how far he’s willing to take it, but it seems apt and light, if only a little suggestive. Nix decided he wanted it to be.
“Shut up, Lew,” Dick huffs out, petulant again. It’s a weak attempt at a comeback and the closest thing Dick can get to whining. Lew finds himself frustratingly endeared.
The yellow light of the room seemed less sickly now and it casted a glow around Dick that made his coppery hair look like the reds of autumn, and the blues and greens in his eyes too comforting. It shoots a fresh pang of emotion into Nix, realizing he would do anything, absolutely anything to scrape off the horrors of war from his best friend’s shoulders, or at least bear some of its weight with him. In the glow, their proximity (so close he can count the freckles on Dick’s nose, tries his best not to linger on the color of Dick's lips), his own relief of seeing his best friend moored back to shore, and the feeling of Dick’s hands that now felt steadier but just as desperate as it was moments ago, all serve to make Nix feel drunk and maybe a little braver.
“Don’t worry, Dick. I’m all yours.” He meant to say it more playfully, but it catches in his throat and comes out more like a promise. Too late to take it back. Not that Nix wanted to, not when the words felt right and good this time. They’re both grinning, simultaneously pushing and pulling the implications of the statement in their heads before settling in the middle: deciding it was true.
“Good,” Dick managed to say a little possessively, making Nix’s stomach somersault for the second time. He tilted his head so his nose brushed Nixon’s forehead, tickling him with his own dark, dark hair. “Guess that makes me pretty lucky too.”
He says it before pulling away, just in time to produce enough room between him and Nix, before Zielinski ambled in loudly with a fresh tower of paperwork. Nix laughed at the sight, earning a confused look from the orderly, while Dick huffed out a quiet sigh of exasperation. If Zielinski was at all bothered by the proximity between the two of them, he made no indication. Unwilling to leave, Nix falls asleep somewhat pathetically on the sad excuse of a cot in Dick’s quarters while he watches his best friend burn through more of the work that could’ve waited ‘til morning.
Maybe tomorrow they’ll pretend none of it happened, that all of it had just been words he and Dick needed to say to climb out of the muck. But then they’d both be lying to each other, and they never did. So Nix decides, when he feels Dick sit beside his sleeping form just for a while, that it all was undoubtedly true. That it was a promise that would just have to keep evolving into different shapes until all of them became familiar. He doesn’t know about Chicago, but this at least was a promise he knew he could keep for Dick Winters for however long he’d let him.