Chapter Text
Summer gives way then to the cold snap of autumn, the warning that winter will soon come to wipe the slate clean for another distant-seeming spring. Summer's end has always held a note of poignancy—days of freedom traded for schoolwork and watching the clock—but the transition this year is worsened, Dick finds. Crops will be harvested, green singed by cold, skies dim with lifeless cloud, and Nixon's absence remaining like some unclosed wound.
As September dips into October, there are fewer reminders of Lew's presence and the distance between seems more and more indelible. Or, Dick sometimes corrects himself, the norm had always been distance—existences separate from each other, opposite by birth and nature—and they'd simply regained that norm. Their summer had been an accidental pinching of the strings to bring them together. They'd simply snapped back into place, lest they distend too far, fray and break.
The teeth of grass against his bare feet revives toes submerged in water and a handful of grapes, but with the cold quiets the most visceral bite of memories. The once half-empty room where he could find a snoozing and peaceful lump kicking off the blankets, head buried beneath a pillow, is wholly empty now. He returns the routine of his life before the abrupt arrival of a well-to-do with a bloodied nose, and he notices the quiet. No talkative shadow hanging about, no knowing flash of dark eyes when he turned to look. Dick finds himself in the misdst of conversation and momentarily compelled to turn to his side and look for someone to confide to, or just give him a smirk and shrug. At first it's enough to absently brush the feeling off; focusing on the person and the present event is enough to tide him over for a while. But it becomes more persistent in time.
When it's dark, more and more he wonders if his storytelling's needed east of him, and there's an empty bed and a Nixon combing the halls for unguarded cigarettes.
Nixon exercies every vice he can get his hands on to occupy himself. Studies also keep him busy enough, but once schoolwork is finished and teenage depravity gone trite, he can't bring himself to simply bask in a job well done or indulge another wicked impulse. It's only another goddamned report, another test, another demand he prove his measurable worth. Just another broken rule, another impulsive risk, usually for the briefest of illicit pleasures.
The difficulty in memorizing Latin charts comes no where near the difficulty he has in not reliving at every warm breath of summer that settles into the room a touch of a hand burning like high-noon sun. Someon laughs too loud, lips spread too wide, and he'll recall a smile that was a country onto its own, language and geography unique. He can all day be schooled in things that hardly matter without real trouble, but when he wakes up at night and is ripped from a sunny place, he feels wronged by the whole world and he couldn't give a damn if he wrongs everyone in return. His headmaster, an imperious and exacting man, would discipline someone with a half-pleasured look to him. Nixon would remember that violent delight on a different face, with the unbearable tenderness of fingertips inspecting a bruise just a ghost behind. In every action lay a potential trap.
He cannot wash the feeling Dick brought him away, a thing made all the more potent in it's abrupt absence. Nor can he set loose that longing—homesickness, in a strange way—in the touch of a curved and pretty girl, who mixes a silly, nervous little laugh with a gulp of arousal. He pointedly does not compare her to a boy in Pennsylvania and tries to transfer it all away from him by kissing her and clutching her hips close. But even then the dim light through his closed eyelids reminds him.
School is less fun than he remembers.
They are both dreaming about summer when the first real snowfall arrives in late October. Miles away Nixon continues sleeping, but a gallop of bare feet on the floorboards announce Ann before she near plunges through Dick's halfway open bedroom door that morning. She is fumbling to tie her knit red scarf around her neck all the while. "Wake up!"
Usually a prompt riser—awake even before his father some mornings—Dick lingers a moment longer where he lays. It is a Saturday, after all, and even he can appreciate a good, lazy morning. Especially when, just beyond the hazy barrier between him and sleep, waits a hunching, sullen figure smoking behind the barn.
Then she pounces and rattles out his plesant dreaming. Groggily he sits halfway up, greeted by an ecstatic smile on the edge of his bed and the luminous light of winter snow glowing in the room. "Come on, Dick! While the snow's still cold!" she giggles. When he doesn't immediately stand, she tugs him eagerly along by the wrist.
"Give me a moment, please," he protests, tugging against the up-sweeping river current that is his sister this morning. "Even I'm not awake yet."
"Well, hurry up! I'm going outside, with or without you!"
She runs back out of the room, a still merrily laughing blur. The sound of her snow boots thudding against the floor echoes through the hallways and fills them with noise of life. Thud, thud, thudding like blood within a vein, eagerly bound for all destinations. A faint smile rests on his face as he rummages for his winter clothing. He shudders as his bare feet touch the floorboards and they feel near icy against his skin. He shifts his weight gingerly, flexing his cold toes to restore warmth, until they are safely covered in wool socks. When he's fully ready to plunge into the first snowfall, standing in the doorway, he hesitates. The light of sunlight behind silver cloud paints the world a heavenly white—it has been a significant snow fall, enough to blanket the ground in a few solid inches and clothe the pine trees. His breath, already faintly visible even at the kitchen window, curls against the glass and fogs. He hears Ann's squeal of joy as she falls backwards into the snow and smiles.
It's not the first time he wishes Nix were there with him—"Christ, you woke me up for snow? Sensible creatures are hibernating through this stuff," he thinks he'd say—but he opens the door and jumps out into the white despite it.
Just as summer will come again, he knows they will see each other again. As sure as there is grass beneath the snow waiting to grow at spring's first hot breath.
Nixon, however, is still sleeping, cheek pressed against the mattress as he wraps around half his pillow, shivering slightly beneath his too-light blanket as snow collects at his windowsill and a few vividly remembered fingertips touching his face.