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"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." --James Joyce

Nixon dreams of Aldbourne, because it was warm and safe and full of light, and because it was just a little bit strange. Right language with the wrong accents, cars that drove on the wrong side of the road, an odd patina of politeness covering every interaction with the locals. Just ever so slightly alien. He dreams of Aldbourne because he can remember it fondly without the sharp ache in his chest that accompanies dreams of home – and if home, in his dreams, is Toccoa rather than New Jersey, well, he doesn't dwell on that much.

He dreams of his mistress in Aldbourne, whose face is hazy and whose name never quite makes it off the tip of his tongue – he was already in the process of forgetting when he last saw her, mind already racing ahead past Normandy and Holland and on towards Germany (though not Belgium; this, he somehow hadn't foreseen). But he remembers that she was warm and soft and smelled nice, and there is nothing in this godforsaken foxhole that's any of those things.

When he opens his eyes, snow is falling.

When they first became entrenched in the Bois Jacques, each man dug his own foxhole. That lasted the better part of a day, until maybe that first sunset. The men of Easy Company are not idiots, and they learn quickly. It's been two or three to a foxhole ever since.

The men aren't idiots, but as any battle-hardened soldier knows, officers generally are. Nixon has his own damn foxhole, at least nominally. So do Buck Compton and Harry Welsh and, of course, Captain Winters. The formalities must be maintained.

Not one of those luxurious officer billets in Hotel Bastogne has been single occupancy since the first nightfall. (Well, except for Dike's. No one will sleep with Dike. But Dike spends half his nights over at CP anyway, so who the hell cares?) Military hierarchy doesn't stand much of a chance against the looming threat of frostbite; Harry sometimes passes the nights with the NCOs and Buck almost always bunks down with his men.

Dick takes his responsibilities as Battalion XO seriously, albeit with great reluctance; but even if he wanted to join his men in their foxholes, he couldn't. He's too valuable to be allowed to sleep on the front line. Fortunately, Nixon doesn't give a rat's ass for decorum. No one should sleep alone in this kind of cold.

Nixon often wakes up alone, sure, but that's mainly because he's never met a sunrise he couldn't sleep through. And anyway, Winters always has coffee waiting – or, at least, the unholy sludge that passes for coffee out here in Bastogne.

It works for them.

Dusk is falling, gently as the snow, and Nixon wonders why he feels the coldest when the wind isn't blowing. He takes a swig from his flask for the flush of heat and hunkers down to wait out the deepening evening.

"Captain Nixon?" Roe squats at the edge of his foxhole, peers down. "You got any morphine?"

"A syrette or two, maybe, yeah," Nixon replies, fumbling for his pack. His fingers are numb. He drops his flask in the dirt, swears, flexes his fingers. Somehow he manages to turn up his med pack. He's never had to use it.

Roe reaches over and nimbly sorts out the syrettes with a dexterity borne out of long practice. "Thank you, sir. You might wanna go easy on that," he adds, watching Nixon retrieve his flask.

Nixon swallows deliberately. "Are you going to give me a lecture on the evils of alcohol, Doc?"

"Plenty worse than whiskey out here, Captain," Roe says with a shrug. "You do what you gotta do to get through it. It's none of my business. But you gotta be careful mixing drink with this kind of cold. It can put you to sleep so sound you won't wake up again."

It's a tempting thought, Nixon can't deny that.

Roe meets his gaze evenly, and Nixon's the one to break first. "Hell, what's a Cajun kid know about the cold, anyway?" he grumbles.

"Nothing at all, sir," Roe says, and Nixon can hear the faint smile in his voice. He starts to get to his feet.

"Hold on a sec, Gene," Nixon says. He looks up at Roe, holding out the flask with a crooked grin. "Take it."

Roe presses his lips together, brow furrowing. For a kid that impassive, he sure can express a lot without saying a word.

"You're that low on morphine, you can't waste it on everyone," Nixon explains. "Doesn't mean you can't help numb the pain a bit."

After a beat, Roe nods and pockets the flask. He fades away into the twilight, footsteps crunching across the snow.

It's not Nixon's only flask, after all, and maybe this'll get the kid off his back for a while. Besides, he thinks, they've had to ration everything else they could get their hands on, he might as well start rationing the liquor as well. He's gonna have enough trouble scrounging for whiskey around here as it is – there are only so many excursions one man can take back to the town, not that they're any better supplied, and he'll be damned if he tarnishes his reputation as the go-to guy for booze now. Goddamn Krauts. Couldn't they give a guy warning before descending upon this previously overlooked level of purgatory?

And they say hell doesn't freeze over.

"Hey, Nix," Dick says, dropping down into the foxhole beside him. "Just passed Doc Roe. Sounds like he's pretty short on supplies."

"Yeah," Nixon says, flexing his hands and wincing at the renewed flow of blood to his fingertips. "Gave him a couple of morphine syrettes."

Dick slants him a long, considering look that has nothing to do with the depleted contents of Nixon's med pack. Nixon wonders whether Roe sent Winters over to his foxhole or vice versa; he's long suspected a conspiracy of captain and medic to keep the men of Easy in line. Lipton's probably in on it, too. He doesn't much care. "Pull the tarp over, will ya?" he says instead, hunching his shoulders. "Snow's getting in."

"The snow gets in anyway," Dick points out, but he grabs the tarp regardless.

Being pressed close along Dick's side is warmer than a couple of gulps of whiskey, and if Roe's right about mixing cold with alcohol, it's probably best not to chance it. His dreams aren't that good, and anyway, if he froze to death, Dick would kill him.

This kind of marrow-deep, unending cold isn't all that different from being drunk, really. Time passes in a numb haze of snow and dirt and trees. Nixon can't feel his feet or his fingers, his consciousness oddly divorced from his physical body, and that's a lot like intoxication, too. He walks through a waking dream, days bleeding into one another with a strange sort of monotony. It's an odd thing, this constant, tedious tension of war in the Belgian winter. Nothing really changes. He's beginning to think he'll always be here, has always been here, in this ice-encrusted forest in the armpit of Europe.

A patrol goes awry and they lose a replacement; three more guys get taken off the line for trenchfoot. Nixon stares at his maps for hours, certain therein lies their ticket out of this endless maneuver, a secret hidden somewhere in the swirls of topography and elevation only he can decode. It's not until Peacock blunders through the tent and knocks over a bench that Nixon realizes it's too dark to see clearly.

He stumbles into the nearest foxhole, not at all surprised to find Dick there. "Hey," Nixon says, voice thick with cold. "You all right?"

"Yeah," Dick replies, huddling under his sorry excuse for a blanket. "Long day, huh?"

"Something like that. Christ, Dick, gimme some of that – I thought I signed up for Europe, not the goddamned tundra."

Dick's lips twitch, the closest to a smile Nixon can get out of him these days, and lifts the edge of the blanket enough for Nixon to scoot in beside him. It doesn't actually make him any warmer, but what the hell.

He closes his eyes and the lines of the map are still there, imprinted behind his eyelids. He dreams of endless planes of cartography, X marking the spot of God knows what, and it doesn't matter because Nixon knows he'll never reach it.

Harry nearly bought it in that goddamn fucking dell; a fraction of a chance one way or the other, and it could've been Nixon. It could've been Dick.

Nixon's flirtation with sobriety ends that day.

That night, as the town of Bastogne burns and Harry lies bleeding on some camp bed in a tent masquerading as a hospital somewhere, Nixon hunkers down in Harry's old foxhole with a carefully hoarded bottle of VAT 69 and a more than usually urgent awareness of the fragility of the human body. It's hardly his first brush with mortality – jumping out of a mother-loving airplane, for starters – and God knows it's not the first time he's heard the screams of the freshly wounded. Or the last.

He's not sure why the latest close shave is hitting him like this, but he's pretty damn sure being sober is part of the problem. He can't fix the hole in Harry's leg, but he can fix this.

"Nix."

"Merry Christmas, Dick," Nixon says, speech still distressingly lucid. He's been putting away the whiskey with economical efficiency, but it's taking its sweet time to kick in. At least his face feels pleasantly warm, for the first time in God knows how long.

Dick clambers down into the foxhole. "It's past midnight," he says.

"Happy Boxing Day, then." Nixon scowls at him. "Now get off the goddamned front line before you get hit by a stray mortar shell."

Dick just regards him calmly. "I will if you will."

"Sink's gonna have your ass if he finds out you spent the night in the line of fire."

"The artillery's not hitting us anymore," Dick says with a sigh. "They're bombarding the town instead."

"For now."

"For now," Dick agrees. He nudges Nixon with his elbow. "What are you doing here, Lew? It took me more than an hour to track you down."

"How did you?"

"Lip came looking for me. I think having a captain this close to the front was making him nervous."

"Harry's an officer, too," Nixon points out petulantly. "It's his foxhole."

"Harry's not Infantry S-2." Dick looks him over, eyes startlingly translucent in the darkness. "He'll be fine, you know," he says, more quietly. "We've seen worse."

Nixon shrugs, takes another swig from the bottle. "I'm gonna have to find a new drinking buddy in the meantime, and it'll take forever to train him properly."

Dick's gaze is even, unwavering. "Yeah?"

And it could've been you, Nixon doesn't say. He thinks of the road in Holland where a stray bullet cut a neat trajectory through his helmet. Maybe some small part of what he saw in Dick's face at that moment is now reflected in his own expression, because Dick just nods and doesn't press him further.

They sit together through the night, shoulder to shoulder, and listen to the distant thunder of artillery over the town of Bastogne. Nixon drinks steadily and does not sleep at all.

When the powers that be offer him the pass back home, he just stares at it for a few minutes, uncomprehending. His vague mental images of the States paint a world of sunlight and mountains, sweat and showers and an apartment in New York with a wife and a kid and a dog. Why on earth would he want to spoil the illusion of home by going back?

Besides, Intelligence Officer isn't so much of an oxymoron that Dick can stand to lose him. He hopes. Or, at least, not as much as Dick could stand to lose certain other officers instead.

Nixon goes to find Dick with his solution.

Hours later, when Peacock's been successfully dispatched and Sink and Strayer have finally fucked off for the evening, Dick asks the inevitable question.

"Why didn't you take it?"

Fortunately, Nixon's had plenty of time to prepare his answer. "What, and leave you all alone in that hole?" he retorts. "You'd freeze to death, for one, and you know who Regiment's gonna blame for that. Or worse, Doc Roe'll get on the guys' asses to find you a new foxhole buddy, and you know it'll be Lip, and he'll be so damn polite about the whole business it'll hurt. And everyone will know you and Lipton are billeting together, and you just can't do that to the men."

Dick raises an eyebrow.

"Jesus, Dick, it'd be like overhearing your parents fuck."

Dick actually laughs, then – just a short huff of breath, misting in the frigid air, but a laugh nonetheless. Nixon takes victory where he can find it these days. "So, not Lipton, then," Dick says, the smile rich in his voice.

"Nope," Nixon says jauntily. "You're stuck with me."

"No problems with the men?"

"That you're bunking with Crazy Uncle Lew?" Nixon's mouth quirks wryly. "Nah. No one cares what he does."

Dick just watches him, a little too knowing, and Nixon has to look away.

When it happens, there's no particular reason for it. Or maybe there's every reason for it. He can't tell the difference anymore. It doesn't matter.

Nixon shudders out of a cruelly sunlight-tinged dream of grassy fields and dead soldiers, Muck and Penkala sharing a bottle of wine with Hoobler and his horseless, gunless German as distant mortar rumbles, to find the tarp over the foxhole was blown off-kilter sometime in the night. A few snowflakes dust his eyelashes. Nixon isn't sure what woke him – the renewed breath of wind on his cheeks, maybe, or the crack of twigs under Roe's boots as he walks the line in his ongoing watch.

Dick is awake, too, staring silently out into the frosty haze of a pre-dawn snowfall. The sounds of the forest are muted by snow, muffled by the reluctantly passing night. When Nixon stirs slightly, body still sleep-heavy but aware enough to shiver, Dick blinks and glances over.

The world feels thin and illusory at this hour, a pale imitation of reality, and Nixon isn't entirely certain he's not still asleep. The unforgotten dead wander the woods alongside the men on watch, phantom limbs and phantom memories, and no one who eventually emerges from Bastogne will ever be entirely whole again. The sensation is strangely freeing. He meets Dick's gaze easily, uninhibited. They're pressed very close together, sharing the moth-eaten blanket, bodies instinctively seeking to conserve warmth even in sleep. When Nixon tilts his head, he can feel Dick's breath on his lips.

His eyes are very blue.

It's natural as breathing to close the scant space between them. Dick's lips are cold, but they warm up quickly under his; Nixon thinks ruefully that he's just developed a kink that will last the rest of his life. When he opens his mouth, Dick matches him, and the heat sparked there fires a line down into the pit of his belly, suffusing him with warmth.

He'd like to say he's wanted this since Toccoa, or OCS, or since the moment they first met. But that's a lie. In all honesty, Nixon can't really remember their first meeting; it must've been that first day at Fort Benning, but he'd introduced himself to fifty other bright young men that day, and Dick hadn't stood out. He hadn't even been the only redhead. So the truth is, Nixon didn't realize how much he'd wanted this until after D-Day, when he'd hitched a ride on a tank and saw Dick walking there along the side of the road, grimy and exhausted and alive.

You do what you gotta do to get through it.

Nixon can feel the proof of life in his kiss, in the gentle brush of Dick's knuckles against his cheek. He reaches up to cup his palm along Dick's jaw, searching out the pulse of Dick's heartbeat with his fingertips. They're both alive in this frozen forest of ghosts, and that's reason enough.

Dick is never there, in his dreams, and for that, Nixon is grateful.

It gives him a reason to wake up.