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Time didn’t have much meaning out in the forest, not the way it had before. There was the frozen bitter dark of deep night and the hazy chill of the early morning, the frosty reflected daylight that stretched like homemade taffy, each hour followed by a longer one, on and on and on until Dick’s eyes were aching in his skull and the creeping, icy gloom of evening was almost a relief.
The only time that meant anything was time-with-food, or time-with-coffee, because then there was the hope of being warm (if you could call it that), just for a precious handful of heartbeats. And there was the time when mortars shrilled and trees skewered anything within twenty feet, when the gap between one breath and the next stretched and contracted so dizzyingly that he couldn’t be sure he was still breathing, all thought drowned out by the frantic, hysterical babble of wherethehellisthegoddamnedfoxhole?
Nothing changed the fact that they were always here, always cold, and always waiting. Sometimes Dick wasn’t sure he could remember the warmth of a real bed and four wooden walls. Sometimes he stared out at the broken finality of the Ardennes forest, at the smears of blood and frozen dirt and the slate-dull sky, and he wondered if his entire life before this had just been a mirage. A dream seen through eyes dazzled by reflected light.
And then the wind would slam him sideways, clawing at his ribs and his gut, and he’d remind himself that those thoughts were about as useful as a match in a blizzard. He needed to be focused. Efficient. He needed to lead his men to the best victory with the fewest losses.
But dear God, what he wouldn’t give to be warm.
***
He couldn’t stop his hands shaking, could barely drink without the cold metal mug rattling against his teeth, chilling his lips and chin even as lukewarm liquid slid over his tongue and reluctantly warmed his middle. He held the cup close, shoulders hunched over it in an ineffectual attempt to keep his fingers from numbing in even this brief foray from his pockets.
“The trick is to forget that you’re cold.”
Nix grinned at him from just beyond the battered field tables and drooping stretch of damp canvas that marked Dick’s improvised office, his flask halfway to his lips. “At least half of that shivering is entirely psychological.”
Dick wrapped his fingers more tightly around his mug and forced himself to swallow another mouthful of tepid bitterness, grimacing. “Having a bit of trouble with that one Lew.”
“Knew there had to be something you weren’t good at.” Nix took another swig, staring into the space above Dick’s head. The moment lingered, distant sounds of soft words and slow footsteps muffled as only snow and fog and fear could manage.
“F Company lost five men last night. Two foxholes at about 0300 hours.”
“Wh—” Dick cleared his throat. “Who?”
Nix frowned vaguely at the snow, brows knitting. “Jacobs, Little, Callahan, Johnson and Hartford. Callahan was staff sergeant.”
Snow and dirt and blood, that’s all that’s out here— Dick jerked his mind back to Nix’s words, to his men and his job. “Does Geoff know who he wants to advance?”
“He was thinking Larkin, but I told him to find you this afternoon anyway.” The slosh of liquid, faint sounds of swallowing, the clink of meeting silver. After two and a half years, the sounds of Lew drinking were almost comforting.
“Larkin’s a good choice.” Dick nodded wearily. “If you see Thomas tell him to send a squad from Dog over to help Fox hold the line.”
“Yeah.” Slosh, swallow, clink.
Dick closed his eyes against the clipped bleakness in Nix’s voice. They’d been living out of chilly foxholes for nearly a month, huddled within four dark dirt walls and listening to the whistle of flying mortars and the wailing screams of wounded and dying men. A month of joint-numbing cold and blood-chilling fear and death hanging in the air like the fog, so close and dense they were breathing it, so familiar they only noted it in terms of strategy. D Company lost half a platoon, so tell Fox and Easy to stretch a little further— remember to move the rest of that platoon back from the line for a day or two—
Nix coped by drinking so steadily it was a wonder he managed to stay coherent long enough to communicate with Regiment, and Dick… Dick wasn’t sure he was coping at all. Numbers and maps and tired faces swarmed on the inside of his eyelids every time he tried to sleep and his ears rang with desperate words and hysterical laughter. There were times when Dick wasn’t sure who he was anymore.
“You gonna finish that?” Nix gestured at the half-empty mug with a restless movement, tucking his flask into his jacket, and Dick held the cooling drink out to him wordlessly. He tried not to lean in when Nix’s warmth settled against his shoulder, but the ridged press of wrinkled cloth at his side implied a lack of success. He watched Nix thread his fingers through the mug’s handle, tracked the movement to Nix’s lips, his friend’s scowl as the drink met his tongue, and kept his mind carefully empty.
“What’s a guy gotta do to get a decent cup of coffee around here?” The edge of humor in Nix’s voice was blunted with apathy, but Dick quirked his lips into a distracted smile anyway. The effort was all that counted anymore.
Nix took another cautious sip, stared at the trees, “You really ought to stop worrying so much.” He met Dick’s eyes levelly, “It doesn’t do anyone any good if you make yourself sick.”
Dick flicked his gaze to the snow and tried not to think about the warmth radiating from Nix’s shoulder, “I’m fine, Lew.”
“No, you’re a shivering mess of nerves and good intentions wrapped up in a Captain’s uniform.” Nix’s voice was gravelly from exhaustion, hoarse with exasperation, “You’re doing everything you can Dick, the world wouldn’t end if you spent a few hours at headquarters just to get warm.”
Dick shoved his shaking hands deep into chilly pockets and ducked his head against the shudder that slithered up his spin and threatened to glue him to his seat, a vibrating icicle. “The—” he sucked in a quick breath, “—men need me here.”
Nix snorted, “Yeah, fine. I’m sure the men will be grateful when you contract hypothermia and end up dying of malnutrition.” His tone ground bluntly on Dick’s tattered nerves. Dick frowned shakily, thin lipped, and stifled the sharp reply crawling up his throat. Some words just weren’t worth the energy it took to say them.
Silence stalled uncomfortably between them, idling conspicuously until Nix jerked to his feet in frustration, leaving Dick even colder in his wake.
“I’m just saying that it wouldn’t kill you to think about yourself once in a while.” He gestured aggressively at their bleak surroundings, “This place is getting to you; everyone’s ready to break and you won’t even acknowledge that you need just as much help as anyone else.”
“I’m not on the line—”
“Goddammit Dick, that’s not the point!” Nix was almost hissing now, volume only held in check by weeks of noise discipline and the eerie stillness of their surroundings, “You never give yourself a break and you need to realize that it’s not your fucking responsibility.”
Dick stared at his friend, at his dark hair tangled with frosted dirt and weeks without washing, his breath puffing out in steamy huffs and his body held in the sharp, bright lines of anger, watched his shoulders droop and his face loosen into resignation.
Nix sighed and let an aborted gesture fall, helplessly incomplete, “You need to take care of yourself.”
Take care of yourself, take care of the men, hold the line, type up a goddamn report so that people with warm food and clean clothes and four walls around them can read it and ignore your advice. Smile for the camera Dick, they don’t want to know how cold you are—
“I’ll be all right, Lew.” He had to be all right.
A shaking head, lips terse and motions stilted, “I’m gonna go see if I can get anything more on Foy” thrown irritably over a retreating shoulder and Nix was gone, trudging into dank fog. Dick chewed on the inside of his cheek distractedly–that went well—and tried to control his trembling limbs long enough to ease a field notebook out of his coat. Sink would be expecting an update soon.
“Captain Winters?” Liebgott peered at him through what passed as a doorway, “you wanted to see me?”
“Yeah,” Dick stared at his hands, hauled himself to his feet and patted at his pockets until he found the right slip of paper, “Yeah, give this to Lieutenant Foley; regiment wants to know exactly how we ended up…”
There wasn’t enough food or blankets or ammunition and they were all hanging onto sanity by sheer dint of willpower, but the war still went on and Dick’s job went with it.
***
“Yes sir, I understand that, but they’re going to be awfully vulnerable in full light and the cover is extremely limited— yes sir. I understand sir.”
He wanted to hit someone—preferably one of the idiots up at Regimental HQ who never spent more than a few hours in the forest—just long enough to remember that it was cold out there—and who thought that midday attacks were a good idea. He wanted to order a predawn attack despite his orders, he wanted to pull all four companies off the line and let someone else take care of this goddamn mess of an advance, he wanted to push Lew against the side of his foxhole and—
He sucked air through his teeth so hard his gums burned and pinched the bridge of his nose angrily, —not a good line of thought Dick, get ahold of yourself— and forced the rising tide of restless aggravation to the back of his mind.
“Was that Strayer?”
Dick sighed, “Yeah,” turned to wearily skim his gaze over Nix’s outline in a by-now-habitual check for injuries and ignored the itch in his fingers to check more thoroughly. “Regiment wants second battalion to lead a daylight frontal assault on Foy; third is going to back us up from the rear.”
A slight shift in weight made snow drift gently off Nix’s shoulders. “We knew it was coming.”
“You know Lew, I was kinda hoping we’d get reinforcements before then.”
Nix grinned, a sarcastic tilt of the lips. “You really have gone mad if you believed that.”
“Hm, must have.” Dick felt a smile tugging at his mouth, humor easing the vise-like tension between his shoulder blades, “You willing to eat with a madman? I could boil some snow.”
“I’ll have to check my busy social schedule, but yeah, I could probably squeeze that in.”
Dick huffed a breath of laughter and shuffled over to light the tiny camp stove and dig out a packet of the dehydrated powder that passed for soup. Nix grabbed a wobbly camp chair and dragged it closer, so that maybe between them they could keep the warmth somewhere useful. He looked like a particularly haggard raccoon, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his hands clenched tightly around his mug. Dick set a mug of snow on the stove and tried not to let his eyes linger too long.
“So who’re you going to send?”
Dick watched the stove’s single teardrop of flame, eyes unfocused with thought. The answer clawed its way out of his mouth despite the reluctance of his vocal chords.
“Easy.”
“Even with Dike in charge?” Nix sounded more resigned than surprised. Dick grimaced fretfully.
“Dog’s lost too many men to really be effective and Fox is almost eighty percent replacements now. Most of them haven’t seen real head-on combat yet and I don’t want this to be their first test.”
“Watching their new friends and heroes bleed out in the snow doesn’t count as a first test?”
“You know what I mean, Lew.”
Nix nodded, a loose jerk of the head, “I know,” he agreed, “I just think— Look, I think you should be sure that you’re choosing Easy because it’s really the best idea and not because you have more trust in the men you know.”
“I’m sure.” Dick poured the powder into his melted snow and stirred. “It’s the best of a bad set of options.”
“Seems like that’s all we get these days.” Nix held out his mug and Dick poured half the soup into it. His hands shook, making the rims rattle together.
“You okay there?” Nix asked.
“Just cold.” Dick pulled his hands back near his core, where it was easier to keep them steady. Nix watched him like he didn’t quite believe it.
“If you says so. Cheers.” He raised his mug with something that was almost a real smile.
“Cheers,” Dick echoed.
He made it almost to the end his soup before the next round of mortars hit.
***
The sun had long-since set when Nix found him and dragged him into a foxhole.
“Sleep, Dick. Why are you even still out here? Do you want me to find you’ve tripped over a tree root and broken your neck in the night?”
“I was checking the line.” Filling gaps and assessing morale and injuries. The men all know they’ll be advancing soon, even if they don’t know the details. Half of them are tense as harp strings, and the other half are either restless or too benumbed to care any longer.
“Not in the dark you’re not. Come on.”
They pressed together in the earth, huddling close with hands shoved deep into pockets. Nix’s head rested heavily on Dick’s shoulder, their legs touching from thigh to knee as they tried to make themselves as small as possible. With a blanket wrapped securely over his uniform and Nix’s heat radiating into his side Dick was as warm as he was going to get, and he was suddenly so tired he was clumsy with it, his limbs too weak to resist gravity and his nerves dulled to laziness. If the world ended now he wouldn’t even be able to move. Dick pushed his face into Nix’s hair, breathing in musky warmth and the lingering smell of alcohol and waiting for sleep to finally take over for a few hours.
“You’re shaking again.” Nix’s voice was muted, his mouth and nose muffled in Dick’s neck. “You still cold?”
Dick shook his head, nose brushing Nix’s scalp before the pressure on his chest lifted and he opened his eyes to meet a stare bleary with worry.
“I’m fine.”
Nixon’s concern didn’t waver. “You sure? I can feel the vibrations through my skull.”
He sighed. “I’m just tired. That’s all.”
“Christ Dick, normal people go to sleep before they get that tired.”
Dick thought about the men on the line and the value of just a few words from someone looking out for them. He thought about the importance of late-night patrols and the bitter, consuming darkness that waited before dawn, but he didn’t have the energy to argue so he just closed his eyes to Nixon’s frown and prayed for unconsciousness. A handful of seconds later heat again seeped into his chest and shoulder as Nix’s nose pressed against his throat. Just a few hours of sleep, that’s all he needed…
Dick opened his eyes feeling as if he hadn’t gone to sleep at all, but his legs and neck were complaining of the tell-tale stiffness that came with sitting to long up against a dirt wall, and the world was slightly better lit. Just a little before dawn, he thought.
And then he realized he was warm, dizzyingly, unbelievably warm. Like he was in a furnace, like he was a furnace, emitting heat from his palms and his stomach and Lew’s head on his shoulder was positively burning and—
Oh for Pete’s sake, Dick. Get a grip.
His brain finally caught up with the rest of his body as he became very aware of Nix’s nose and lips pressed into the side of his neck and Nix’s weight leaning into him, all down his side in a scorching line that seemed to be directly connected to his groin. Dick closed his eyes and stifled a mortified groan at the realization that this was lust rising through his chest and heating his limbs, lust that had snuck up and taken advantage of his exhaustion and the fog in his head to whisper temptingly about the tickling scratch of Nix’s stubble and the damp warmth of his breath and how good it would feel to have all of Nix’s weight against him, pressed down his front and burning the cold out of his bones.
He ground his teeth against the image and clenched his fists until his fingernails bit into his palms. He tried to control his breathing, tried to control something, because God knew his body wasn’t listening to him and his mind was drunkenly reasoning that Lew probably wouldn’t even mind being woken up—
And then Nix was awake, letting out a soft groan as he shifted briefly and sat up, leaving Dick’s shoulder cold and bereft even as the heat in his belly rushed to inform him that his friend’s side was still connected to Dick’s, a spot of fire that was brighter and infinitely more welcome than the snow above them. He could hear Nix’s uniform shift softly with the groggy movements of a man not quite aware but determined to function anyway, and he did his best to appear deeply asleep, as if he wasn’t reining in the urge to pull Nix back down next to him. Even if none of them slept deeply anymore.
“Dick?”
He kept his eyes closed and tried not think about the tingling sparks at the tips of his fingers or the way every inch of him was tuned into Nix’s movements, his shifts in balance, the muzzy morning-hum of his voice. He could feel the moment Nix turned to face him properly, felt his friend’s stare like a flare across his face.
“Hey, you okay?”
Dick nodded jerkily, willing it to be true with all the concentration he could muster. “I’m fine.” After a moment of silence he opened his eyes and met Nix’s skeptical affection steadily.
“I’m fine.” He repeated.
Nix smirked and shook his head resignedly. “Whatever you say” slipped past his lips in a puff of exasperation as he reached for his flask and rolled to his knees. “You know, if you get sick out here it’s a long way to headquarters and a warm bed. Besides,” the flask rose to Nix’s mouth, steadied, withdrew, and it was only when a shabby uniform cuff interrupted his line of sight that Dick realized he’d been staring at his friend’s lips, “they’d probably want to leave Dike alone in charge of Easy if you left.”
“Can’t have that.” Dick’s voice echoed oddly in his own ears, distant and disconnected. Nix was staring at him again, dark brows contracting into lines of confused worry. A moment froze, crystallized, fused itself to another, and Dick began to wonder if he’d missed something, some important question and Lew was waiting for an answer—
Nixon leaned forward abruptly, one hand steadying his weight on Dick’s knee and the other pressed against Dick’s forehead firmly, concentration painted sloppily across a face that was much closer than Dick was prepared to deal with. His breath caught against his ribs, hard and sudden, Nix’s heat burning against his face and his knee and down his thigh like sunburn, hovering tortuously near his hips and over his chest, and he was reaching between them, he could feel the rough texture of Army-issued clothing just beyond his fingertips— and Nix retreated, drawing back his arm and watching him, considering.
“You’re a bit warm, but not enough for a fever.”
Dick laughed breathlessly, “I’m not ill ,Lew,” dug his fingers into cool cloth and tugged so that Nix jerked forward, eyes wide for a flashing instant before he caught himself on Dick’s shoulder and the cold earth at his back, and Dick pushed closer, pressed his lips to a mouth still sour with whisky and told his last gibbering vestige of common sense to take a hike.
He half-expected Nix to flinch away, especially when the hand on his shoulder clamped down forcefully, fingers pressing white-hot points of pleasure-pain through four layers and deep into his skin, but he didn’t. When Dick started to pull back Lew followed him, one firm kiss after another until he was thrust flush against the cold wall of the foxhole and arching towards Lew’s blazing heat. He tangled his fingers in dark curls and pulled himself even closer, found every possible point of contact and exploited it greedily, nerves trembling with agonizing sparks of pleasure and warmth as Lew’s hands curled around his neck and held him in place at the shoulder and Lew’s lips teased breathless, impossible noises from his mouth with careful kisses and electrifying brushes of half-grown beard that left him gasping. Lew’s hips pressed down on him, grinding until he could feel the rolling thrusts of Lew’s arousal against his hip.
“Oh hell,” Lew muttered against his ear. “I want to—can I—” And then he ducked under the blanket and Dick felt Lew’s hands on his belt.
“Lew.” He grabbed at his shoulders. “Lew.”
Lew poked his head out of the blanket.
“Are you objecting?”
“No, I just haven’t—”
Lew kissed him again, wet and sloppy.
“Like this,” he said, and guided Dicks hand into his hair, over the top of his skull. “Just hold on.”
And then his hands were back working on Dick’s trousers, and then his mouth was on Dick’s cock.
Dick held on and stayed quiet and did his best to not pull Lew’s hair out when orgasm ripped through him. It didn’t take long, and Lew stayed on him, warm and welcoming, until he was spent. A few seconds later he felt Lew shudder against him with hot, panted breaths.
He wished, desperately, that they were almost anywhere else. Then Lew kissed his cock and the inside of his thigh, and zipped and buckled him back up. Dick dragged him up out of the blanket for another kiss.
“I’ll take that as a vote of encouragement.” Lew chuckled against his jaw, hot puffs of air breaking across his cheek, “Not shivering now, I notice.”
Dick snorted, let one hand curl at the nape of Lew’s neck, said dryly: “I’ve got other things on my mind.”
“Yeah?” he could feel the curve of Lew’s smirk against his skin even as open-mouthed kisses patterned over his lips and chin, “Good. I’ll have to see if I can keep it that way.”