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Lewis Nixon spends the first night he's had indoor plumbing in a long time—like a modern human being, thank god—hunched over it, nursing a stomach full of the finest European spirits and his favorite whiskey that's quickly turning itself inside out. Maps were reviewed, intelligence scoured, sorted, stamped with approval or thrown aside like empty, useless guns. By sundown, he was more or less set loose to do as he pleased. So he drank. It pleased him most, when Dick was entranced by the own slow but determined search and peck of his fingers on the typewriter, and loathe to break pace.
He wandered harmlessly into the attic where said Major had squared away, squaring off with an order for two copies of mission reports. After, of course, the orderly had finally taken Dick's orders to take the night off. He wandered back out a few minutes later, unable to deter Dick Winters when he put his fire-haired head down and worked.
He celebrated doubly under the Dutch skies to make up for Dick's somberness, and drank in proportion. On playfully weak knees he clamors up the stairs to their quarters when he and the drinking boys of Easy finally knock back everything within reach. A lantern's light still burns in the attic—Dick and his literature, he thinks dizzily. An east coast education has long made him wary of the term. He giggles a little aimlessly at the thought of Dick Winters—who is earth unbroken by a till, and early mornings working before the sun comes up and sleeping before dark—writing flowery literature like he read in college. Lurking in Parisian cafes and smoking over a manuscript will never be his Dick Winters. Webster, maybe, not Winters.
Boots heavy and stomach suddenly heavier, it's all Lewis can manage to shrug off his jump boots before sickness comes over him.
He paws at the chipped white walls of the unfamiliar commandeered room to keep him standing when he knows he's going to be sick and searches for the bathroom door. It's almost embarrassing as an intelligence officer to blink dumbly for a drunk minute around before finding it. He collapses on his knees like a dropped marionette and throws his arms around the toilet as nausea robs him of all balance. His head spins a little, then his stomach lurches. He vomits twice, with only a few delirious gasps between goes, before he vaguely hears Dick moving about upstairs.
Lewis believes it's only to close the attic door and block out the noise, and lets his neck loosen. His forehead, which is feverish against the cold comfort of plumbing, is plastered with sweat and hair. His body is reacting to the alcohol in his blood negatively now. Only an hour or so ago, it had eagerly opened up to it, embracing it like a sweet girl from home it hadn't seen in months.
Since that typewriter came between me my plans, I just can't get much rest, Lewis muses to himself, settling his cheek against the rim to sigh wearily, eyes closed to keep from spinning. Tonight he's toeing the line of safe consumption. His body agrees, and evicts the substance from his stomach wholesale. It's a waste of decent food, as well. It's been a long and wearing trek from the Normandy beachhead to a bathroom in an alien Dutch house, and he's wasting the first real meal and real shelter in weeks.
Nixon has no energy to be startled when Dick reaches down and eases his head up to flush said waste of food and booze away. He lets it settle again when he receives a grunt of discomfort. Nixon presses his whiskey-fevered face against the cold porcelain and keeps his eyes closed, his legs lying crooked and useless beneath him. Pressure from Dick's boot touches one knee, a shin brushes his thigh.
"Don't intelligence officers know their limits?"
"Only hafta know coordinates and how to say, 'Go fuck yourself,' in German, Dick," he grumbles weakly, his sickness showing in his voice. "Tha's all."
Dick's voice remains watchfully somewhere above. Apparently, the reports are waiting. No way they're finished at this half-decent hour.
"How much tonight, Nix?"
Lewis pauses to squelch another visceral urge and grimaces around the taste. "Enough." And then, having satisfactorily answered his friend, stinging sickness takes hold and funnels back out. Lewis grips the rim on both sides as the painful heave passes, leaving an acidic trail down his throat and fire on his lips.
When the sensation dulls to a throb and his panting evens, Dick is tugging off his outer jacket—only hung halfway on his body to begin with—to rub his back.
"Let it be a lesson to you, then," comes the even voice. Nixon feels the room grow comfortably small and warm, despite the lecturing tone he can feel on the back of his neck as Dick's neatly controlled breath.
Dick's hand is flat and warm and soft at the edges, but strong and definite as a whole. Calluses earned by a rifle's trigger, a rope's burn, and the bucking lines of a parachute trace little circles between his shoulder blades and his palm smoothes along the knots in his shoulders. They ask—more than demand and force—Nixon to relax. He does, in the same way he drank this night—because there's nothing else to do when Dick Winters has made a decision.
His stomach gurgles unhappily again and Lewis shudders against the relative cold night air, his feverish skin barely registering the heat of his Dick's hand but all of its touch.
And, despite the coaxing, he empties the last of whiskey and mashed potatoes and cooked meat before collapsing boneless around the toilet's structure. He's panting loudly again, threatening to upset himself into a dry heave.
Dick leans closer now and runs his hand around to Nixon's stomach, patting it neatly once before continuing the rhythmic, ocean-sway of his palm against agitated muscle. He even murmurs words of quiet reassurance near his ear, almost like his mother had when he'd eaten something sour or fallen asleep with a bad cold. "Finished?" he asks after a minute. There's just a hint of a smile in it, but Nixon can't open his eyes to see it.
He mutters, "Go fuck yourself," in German, and even though he can't understand it, Dick realizes it and laughs against his back, filling the stomach Nixon had just managed to empty with something that will sit much better and makes him just as dizzy.