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One hour to Coup de Ville.
(One hour to rest)
What seems like thousands more were already behind them, but only a drop in the bucket compared to what lies ahead. Fortress Europe, and are were just as many men trying to repel invaders as there were men trying to subdue villainous forces. Corpses to count, too—Meehan, the line of troopers ready to jump behind him, and John Hall, the youngest victim of them all. Dick hollowly listens to the scuff of his boots on the French cobblestone and counts as he leaves the fiery view on the hill. Has to remember them all, he reminds himself, as he numbly makes his way through the steam, dark-shape bustle, and grunt-growls of jeeps towards some less quiet place. Has to remember. He doesn't dare count the bullets that whiz by, harmless, and dig into someone else, or the tracer rounds that glow as they arch into the violent, black-orange sky. He doesn't dare count how many times—
There's less than an hour before 2nd Battalion's set to move south. Everyone's either bustling about, or finding the nearest spot to be as motionless as possible, for as long as possible. Soldiers hang wordlessly in every shadow, every nook safe from a jeep rumbling by, sprawled where they'd collapsed to their butts. The immediate medication is a warm cigarette or unconsciousness. Dick barely recognizes his own exhaustion now. Residual adrenaline and bone-deep pains do their best to keep him running instead—at every urge to sleep some new wound keens out in pain and wakes him up properly. Not necessarily where Roe can touch it, but…
(Less than an hour)
Dick lets out a tired sigh, feeling much like a harnessed draft horse, feet clodding slowly and heavily beneath him, neck bowed, hips saddled with supplies and clinking softly. He finds himself a little unclaimed patch of dirt behind the Great War monument in the nearby courtyard and sits down.
(Just a little while)
In the meantime, he can count the soldiers slumped against this monument of war. One—
"There you are."
"…two," Dick breathes absently.
The voice draws closer and the figure—No helmet? Since when wasn't Nix wearing a helmet in the open?—reliably turns from a murky khaki-green blur to Mrs. Nixon's baby boy turned soldier. "Done sulking yet?" he asks. "It's just you're a difficult man to find in the dark, you know. Here."
Nixon slides down the cold marble beside him and sits thigh-to-thigh. Shoves a canteen cup into his hand. Dick can hardly believe it when a savory whiff of soup licks up his chin and up to his nose, and the metal cup is nearly too hot to hold. His fingers gingerly flex around it and he look over at Nixon—an intelligence officer intelligent enough to wipe off the cat-that-got-the-canary grin before Dick can catch it.
"What's this?"
"Dinner. Just eat it. Had to trade a service for a French wife's time and effort," he says with a mischievous smile.
"No, I couldn't—haven't you eaten anything?" Unfortunately, he feels the previously deflated sensation in the wake of Hall's death begin to crumble away and uncover a very profound hunger. He stares into Nixon's eyes, only hoping it doesn't show he's secretly hoping he's not. Something Dick would never admit—but there's a lick of humor in those dark eyes that say Nixon knows anyway.
"Potato soup? Please, Dick—my palette's far too refined for that. I wouldn't be able to stomach it," he replies, barely able to keep a straight face. Dick nods a silent thank you, and Nixon smirks his silent welcome.
Dick hungrily tips it to his mouth.
(How long left?)
In the high glow, both moonlight and firelight, Nixon's hair is a dusted gray brown, and his eyes are cartoon ink-black as he glanced up into the sky, attempting to read the time by the shades of lifting darkness. The grease covering his face paints it a sickly charcoal, chalky faint black, turns his mouth just the slightest deep tinge of orange-pink in contrast. Something too soft, too precious in how his helmet-tousled hair falls over his forehead makes Dick wish he could send him home, away from here. Fold him up in an envelope and send him home. Find him waiting safely unopened in his mailbox, never once peppered with flak or met by ill-intentioned steel. Kissed and sealed closed—an elated soldier's homecoming letter, not his placeholder. Never to be delivered to some weepy-eyed widow
(Or a much closer widower)
from a man with too many colorful pins on his olive drabs and too many years to perfectly school his face.
The soup isn't quite enough, and Dick muses to himself that it wasn't really the soup that leaves him so unfulfilled as the last few morsels slide into his mouth. Still hot as blood on tongue. He'd accidentally bit his tongue that very first jump in anxiety, he and Nix again pocket-to-pocket on the plane, young and untested.
"Thanks, Nix," he says quietly, and hands back his canteen cup. Nixon grunts an affirmative and stops to make sure everything's licked clean before putting it away, and Dick watches. Imagines there must be a way to keep him alive through all this.
(There must be)
Nixon's berry-dark tongue runs along the raised
(just a minute more)
edge of the cup, lapping up the last traces of soup, his inky eyes slightly unfocused, chin lifting. Adam's apple pulses, once, twice. That sloped, solid cut of his jaw is surely a family trait, mottled black by grease and perpetual stubble, but his face is so youthful still, almost babyish at just a certain bowed angle. High cheeks, full lips, a moving, expressive mouth sometimes only barely holding back a wine-rich laugh or relished, "Fuck
(so I can get the courage to say)
this," when the days grow too long.
("Shut your fucking trap, Gonorrhea!")
Nixon politely ignores Dick staring at him for only so long, before he breaks him out of it by turning those ink-drawn eyes his way. He watches his friend look lost for a moment, as he seems to snap out of reverie. "Hey. You okay?" he asks softly.
Dick sits up straighter, dipping his head, then shaking it. "No—no, it's nothing."
"Hmm. That was a triple negative," Nix says, still watching closely. He pauses to think. "Which is still a negative, I believe. Hall still on your mind?"
The violent, black-orange sky with hot-white, insect-like strings of tracer rounds burn on. And there's a little fly buzzing at the back of Dick's mind that still hasn't stopped hovering over some wound. Yeah, Hall is still there. He'll probably never leave, either. Buzzing so loud now, as Dick remembers finding the dead
(not even old enough to buy a beer)
soldier's body briefly, that he can't hear what Nix has just said. He begins to stand up and Dick's voice jumps out of him. But thankfully not very loud. Small favors.
"Don't leave, Nix."
He's already stood up, and looks down at Dick. "Just going to get us some water." He lifts up his canteen, and it sloshes about. "It's not empty, but it's, you know…" He seems to be waiting for some kind of explanation as to what Dick meant.
Dick doesn't have one.
"Okay," Nix says, almost too immediately once he realizes this. He waits a little longer, takes a slow breath, and relaxes. "Okay, Dick, okay. I won't." And gently settles back down beside him for the
(few, few minutes of)
rest of the hour.