#av.fic

It was the cold that eventually woke him—the morning cold that seeped through his covers and buried itself deep within his bones until he shivered into consciousness much earlier than he’d intended, half-wondering why the ground of his foxhole felt so soft.

The culprit was the furnace, he learned once he dragged himself out of bed and down into the basement, armed with a cup of coffee that didn’t stay hot nearly as long as he’d have liked.

Nix didn’t know a whole lot about the inner workings of major household appliances—it wasn’t something the men of his family tended to concern themselves with. But he was nothing if not resourceful when the situation demanded it, and deduced soon enough that whacking the thing on its side got it going again… for a little while, anyway, before it sputtered to a stop once more.

He spent the morning and much of the afternoon in this way, trudging up and down enough times that he started to feel a sense of kinship with Chaplin’s protagonist in Modern Times. At around three-thirty, the furnace took its final dying breath, and no amount of poking and prodding (and kicking) could get it to rumble back to life. In keeping with his character, Nix swore up a storm and made the trip upstairs a final time in solemn defeat. If Dick were there, odds are he’d have gotten to the root of the issue already and been well on his way to working out a fix. But Dick had been four days gone and wouldn’t be back for another three, and though Nix was well within his means to have a handyman in before the day’s end, the thought of having to interact with another human being when he’d planned on moping well into the night was unappealing enough for him to choose weathering the cold.

Besides, he thought wryly, these would hardly be the worst conditions he’d spent a winter night in. 

—

The thing about wallowing in solitude for days on end was how accustomed to silence one became.

It wasn’t something he was used to. As a child, there’d been Blanche and their nanny and the constant onslaught of his father’s colleagues and mother’s society friends, parties and dinners and galas he’d been made to attend trussed up like a doll in a suit and shiny black shoes. At school there were always hoards of other boys, and after that there was Kathy, a constant in his orbit even when he’d slight her in favour of the bottle. And that was to say nothing of the army, a beast in its own right.

It was to say nothing of Dick, in whose orbit Nix had been for so long he sometimes had a hard time remembering how to live without the force of Dick’s gravitational pull keeping him tethered.

Dick’s going home for Christmas wasn’t by any means the longest they’d spent apart in the time they’d known each other. It was the first time he’d been gone since moving to New Jersey and moving in with Nix, and Nix had come to face the sour reality that a week without Dick in peacetime was markedly different than a week without Dick during war, when there were things to do and briefings to deliver, and people much more important than he to please.

It was shameful, he knew, the ease and speed with which he began to fall back on old bad habits. How his bed called to him and his bottles called to him and how most of the time, he wasn’t strong enough to say no. But there was time enough until Dick got back, and Nix being Nix would no doubt pull himself together before his return, all evidence of his admittedly pathetic spiral swept away like waves on sand.

—

Afternoon melted into evening with the same syrupy slowness of the preceding days, and it found Nix wrapped in a knitted blanket he’d swiped from Dick’s room, sprawled out on the couch in a rather undignified manner. The house was dark save for the glow emanating from the fireplace, which cast the living room in flickering shades of orange and gold. It likely wasn’t very smart, taking himself with stoking the flames when he fully intended on getting drunk enough not to know up from down, and he figured Dick would probably be upset if he succeeded in burning their house down, but well. It was an issue for a future Lewis Nixon to reckon with. He wouldn’t be seeing anyone until tomorrow evening, when he’d have to emerge from his self-imposed drudgery to make an appearance at his parents’ home, but until then he was happy to revel in a misery of his own making.

He thought about Dick, pictured him sitting tall and handsome at his family’s dinner table. He imagined the Winters home was warm and lived-in and filled with laughter and love and sensibility and all those sorts of things that bred people as good as Dick. He looked around their own living room, considered the new furniture and high, airy ceilings and wondered not for the first time whether Dick regretted his decision to take Nix up on, well, everything. Usually, when Dick was around, he could sense when Nix got morose about things like this, and had a knack for saying things like I like the bakery you went to this time a lot better or What do you think about starting a vegetable garden? that Nix could tell were meant to assuage him without needing to be explicit. Dick was shrewd like that. Thoughtful. Nix supposed it was why he made such a good officer. Part of the reason, anyway.

They had a radio in the living room—a handsome Philco floor model, nothing to scoff at despite being a few years old already. It was one of the few things Nix had been adamant on keeping in the divorce, and Kathy in her magnanimity hadn’t put up much of a fight over it. Dick liked to have it on most evenings now, and Nix had learned that he had a special, almost obsessive affinity for Inner Sanctum Mystery. It wasn’t quite to Nix’s own taste, but he liked the way Dick sat enraptured for the half hour every week, reveled in the faux-annoyed glances he’d shoot Nix whenever he deigned to offer bits of clever commentary.

Nix contemplated turning on the radio now, spent about half a minute weighing the benefits of at least trying to conjure up some Christmas cheer, before conceding the fact that he had no one to impress and no pretences to maintain.

He drank in silence instead, and wondered whether Dick would appreciate a call tomorrow morning (or afternoon, rather, as Nix had no intention of being up until the sun was well high in the sky).

It was this silence, save for the occasional crackle of kindling, that allowed Nix to catch the rumbling of the car pulling to a stop outside. He frowned, straightening from his slouch. He wasn’t expecting visitors—they didn’t typically get visitors to the house (this was largely Nix’s own doing; the house he shared with Dick was one of the only places where Dick allowed himself to fully let go, and Nix didn’t take all too kindly to anything that disturbed its sanctity). He briefly considered the likelihood of a burglar trying his luck. He figured the darkened windows that faced the street might make for an attractive enough target, though theirs was a decent enough neighbourhood, and besides, Nix’s own car still sat parked out front.

He pushed to his feet, bemoaning the immediate loss of the warmth he’d accumulated, and after half a moment’s consideration, draped the blanket around his shoulders in a poor approximation of a cloak, one hand holding the two top corners together secure against his chest.

He ran through a list of potential culprits as he made the short trip from living room to front door, from Blanche, to one of his buddies from Yale, to Eisenhower himself, and back around to a burglar by the time he reached his destination.

A peek through the curtains had him freezing in disbelief.

Dick was walking up the long driveway, nose buried in the collar of his coat as he bent his head down against the wind.

Nix blinked. He shot a look over his shoulder towards the living room, where he had left the bottle of Vat he’d been intending to finish. It was still near full. He knew this. He was certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that he hadn’t drunk nearly enough to be seeing or hearing things just yet.

The handle of the door jiggled as Dick inserted his key on the other side of it. Nix turned back around and wasted no time gripping the handle from the inside and wrenching the door open.

“Oh.” Dick blinked at him, surprised. One hand hovered in the space between them, still reaching for the key that sat embedded in the lock. “Hi.”

“You’re here,” Nix said, rather stupidly.

Dick looked down at himself, as if checking to make sure he was in fact there. “Yeah,” he said, offering Nix a small quirk of his lips. “Really astute observation, Nix.”

Nix shook his head. Dick’s sense of humour had an irritating tendency to rear its head at the most inopportune of times. “Yeah, but why are you here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

Dick shifted in place. “Will the answer to that determine whether or not you let me in?”

Oh.

Nix stepped aside to let Dick pass over the threshold, suddenly all too aware of the biting air he was letting in to the already chilly house. Dick closed the door behind him and turned to face Nix properly as he pocketed his key once more. The cold clung to him still, entrenched deep into the wool of his coat, and it washed over Nix as Dick bent to set his bag down. Nix couldn’t suppress the shiver that ran through him, and he pulled the blanket more snugly around himself.

“Is that mine?” Dick asked, nodding at it as he shucked off his outer layers. He’d foregone his gloves, and his fingers were red and stiff for it. He flexed and curled them a few times, trying to work some feeling back, and like he’d done a thousand times before, Nix resisted the urge to take both of Dick’s hands between his own and envelop them until they were warm and pliant once more. Instead, he gave Dick a half-shrug and a noncommittal grunt and turned back toward the living room. He was willing to wait for answers until he was back in front of the fire.

“It’s freezing in here,” Dick muttered as he followed behind him.

“Furnace crapped out this morning.” Nix resumed his place in the middle of the couch. The fabric had once again grown cool to the touch, though the room itself was markedly better than their foyer had been.

“Couldn’t get anyone in to look at it?”

“Nah,” he lied, omitting the fact that he hadn’t tried. “Besides, I kind of figured it’d just be me dealing with it until after Christmas at least.” He leveled a pointed look at Dick. “Thought you’d be making merry elsewhere tonight.”

Dick fidgeted where he stood, eyes darting between Nix and the armchair that he usually favoured. Nix watched him back evenly. After a moment, Dick lowered himself down beside Nix, sinking back against the cushions with a drawn-out groan. Nix tried to act like the choice didn’t surprise him—like everything about Dick wasn’t throwing him for a loop tonight. Dick’s head fell back against the top of the backrest, eyes fluttering shut, and Nix granted himself a brief moment to sit and look, to let his eyes rove over the line of Dick’s throat, how the glow from the fireplace caught on the red in his eyelashes, made the freckles—faded some now that it was winter—dance across his cheeks. He picked up his glass from where he’d left it and downed whatever was left before reaching for the bottle again.

“Must have been a long drive back.” He said it mainly just to say something, but also because he knew  the trip would’ve taken Dick at least a couple of hours, given both the weather and Dick’s civilian propensity for minding speed limits.

“Mm. Wasn’t so bad.”

When he turned back, Dick was watching him with an intensity that made Nix’s breath catch in his throat.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Dick.” 

Dick sighed. He didn’t look at Nix when he spoke next, turning his gaze towards the fire. “Figured you might want some company.”

Nix frowned. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. “You figured?”

Dick shrugged. “Maybe I just didn’t like the idea of you alone.”

Something cold took root in Nix’s chest, sitting heavy against his sternum. Pity wasn’t something he’d ever taken kindly to, and for it to come from Dick felt like a bigger slap in the face than it would from anyone else. He knew he was too reliant on the other man for his own good, knew that it was probably painfully obvious how much he needed Dick to anyone with eyes. But Dick had never made him feel any less for it, even though he must have known how pathetic for him Nix was, and it was something Nix had been eternally grateful for. Until now, it seemed.

“So you’re telling me you what, left mom and pops high and dry on your first Christmas back in years because you felt bad for little old me?” He tried his best to stretch the words out in an unaffected drawl, but he could hear the hint of bitterness that crept in, and Dick must have been able to as well, given the way he snapped back around to look at Nix again.

“Lew—”

“You didn’t have to do that, Dick.” He took a long drink, mostly to give himself a few seconds to regroup. “I’m fine. Just peachy. Seeing the family tomorrow.”

“Right. I’m sure you’re thrilled about that.”

“Okay, you got me. But still. You didn’t need to cut your own Christmas short. What’ll your mother think of me?”

Nix didn’t think it possible, but Dick looked embarrassed at that. “Ah. Well.” He reached a hand up, ran it over his hair (over, never through. Never enough to muss it up the way Nix would if given half the chance). “Think she was maybe a bit relieved to see me go.”

That stopped Nix short. It didn’t sound in keeping with any of the things he’s heard about Edith Winters, who he’d always imagined harboured an intense dislike for him for keeping her son away from home.

“I was maybe a bit distracted over the last couple of days,” Dick continued. “I was… well, I thought— I mean I wanted—”

He cut himself off, shaking his head. Nix remained silent, equal parts enraptured and puzzled. Of the two of them, Dick was rarely the one at a loss for words. Nix couldn’t quite manage to draw his eyes away from the twitch of Dick’s jaw as he swallowed and collected himself.

“Maybe… maybe I didn’t like the idea of you alone because I wanted to be here instead.”

And Nix looked at him, really looked at him for what felt like the first time that night—the incessant drum of his fingers over his knee, the way Dick couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to look at Nix or not, the pink on the high points of his cheeks that Nix didn’t think had anything to do with the cold—and something that felt dangerously like hope ignited in his chest.

—

Once, in Austria, Nix had thought Dick might kiss him. The high that ran through the men in the wake of VE Day was infectious, and the sounds of merriment rang through the streets loud enough that Nix could hear it all the way up where they were sitting on the balcony of Dick’s room.

As testament to the momentous nature of the day’s news, they’d both been drinking—Dick just enough to lower his inhibitions and Nix not so much that he was as far gone as he’d have liked. Not so much that his heart didn’t lurch when Dick’s arm fell heavy on the armrest of Nix’s own chair; not so much that his breath didn’t hitch when Dick’s head rolled lazily to the side and he looked at Nix through heavy-lidded eyes. For all that he’d thought about Dick in ways he shouldn’t have, time and time again, he’d never actually considered the possibility of Dick ever returning his affections. Dick, who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and didn’t curse, and whose face was always clean-shaven and hair cropped to standard; it wasn’t until that night in Austria that Nix felt a stirring of optimism outweigh the baseline resignation that seemed to run through him at all times.

But Dick hadn’t kissed him, hadn’t done much of anything but continue to put Nix on edge; but that was par for the course, and so Nix sat on that balcony all night and let Dick look his fill, and in the morning there was still work to be done and things to never be discussed, and so it went.

—

As far as similarities go, there weren’t many to be found between that balcony in Austria and their living room in New Jersey. Nix had dared to hope, back then, and he’d been sorry for it—but there was something different about tonight. Maybe it was the days spent alone that had made him soft; maybe it was some inkling of Christmas spirit bubbling to the surface; and maybe it was the fact that Dick, who’d always held his cards close to his chest when it came to matters of the heart, seemed to have laid them on the table, in some roundabout way, for Nix to pick up and make do with as he saw fit.

What Nix saw fit was to throw all caution to the wind, set down his glass, and press his lips to Dick’s, the way he’d thought about doing for nearly as long as he’d known him.

It was just about as chaste as a kiss could be. Dick’s lips were still beneath his own, the tip of his nose cold where it pressed against the side of Nix’s own, but when Nix pulled back after a few seconds, Dick’s eyes took a moment to flutter open again, and they met Nix’s for only the briefest moment before Dick leaned in again. It was better, the second time around. One of Dick’s hands found Nix’s waist under the blanket still pooled around him, and he fisted the fabric of Nix’s sweater, tugging him closer almost on instinct. Nix let himself be pulled, balanced his weight by bracing his own hands on Dick’s shoulders before tracing one up to cup his jaw, and then up again further to tangle his fingers in Dick’s hair the way he’d been wanting to for what felt like a lifetime.

When they broke apart this time, Nix couldn’t help but laugh, a soft, disbelieving chuckle that he pressed into Dick’s shoulder as he leaned against him. Dick’s breathing was heavy in his ears, shaky on the exhale, and somehow that served to make Nix all the giddier.

“Lew,” Dick said, tugging on his sweater again, and Nix sat back. “I came home because I missed you. You understand that, right?” 

“Yeah,” he said, running his thumb over his bottom lip. He watched as Dick’s eyes tracked the movement and let out a breath of laughter. “Yeah, I think I understand just fine now.”

“Good. That’s— that’s good.”

“Right. Although…”

“What?”

Nix smiled at him sweetly. “I hope you know this means you’re coming to Christmas at Stanhope’s.”