Fandom: Band of Brothers
Author: Epigone
Pairing: Lipton/Luz, with allusions to many other pairings thrown in
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Present tense. Violence, sexuality, the whole deal. Spoilers for pretty much the entire series.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: As I said when I first posted it-- "Who'da guessed it, quiet little Lipton: SO COMPLETELY MORBID."
Date Written: Summer of 2004
Author's Notes: With a nod to Oscar Wilde, for giving me a title (although the source poem itself has nothing to do with the fic). A wave to Katherine, for wanting it, and to Damson, for writing this pairing so well in "Fragment" that my brain was devoured. And a full-body tackle to Meredith and Amber for asking after it, encouraging it, and finally beta-ing it.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Each Man Does Not Die
Carwood Lipton, going to war, believes from the very start that he will die. It's a secret he stores away covertly, like the dirty magazines or extra smokes the other men hide in their footlockers. He knows his responsibility to them as soon as he makes sergeant, before most of the other NCOs have even sewn on their stripes. So if sometimes he's lying in his dim bunk on charge of quarters and he wonders how it would feel to take a bullet in the throat, he never says anything. He owes it to these boys, he thinks as he listens to the sound of their slumber behind the door (never considering that most of them are his own age); he owes it to them to keep this watch over their dreams. Let them feel themselves invincible.
They believe in a sanitized war, and he doesn't begrudge them it. All of them, the nicknames and voices he comes to know -- Shifty in his round drawl talking about hunting deer in the silent forest, Guarnere with his sharp tongue bragging about brawls in the streets of Philly, even Web, later, expounding in his brash and clinical way upon justified conflicts -- all of them can't help believing in it. They're twenty years old, glutted on the milk of a country that has never before known fear. Lipton has tasted that country himself, has ranged barefoot through its fallow fields and woken to its mourning doves and seen its Technicolor wars in LIFE magazine, but he was weaned too young. He alone knows the dull, cold clench of being ten years old and watching a father's large, pale, false-looking body being pulled from a wrecked car. That responsibility, too, compresses him into something quiet and contained.
In December, Easy marches over a hundred miles from Toccoa to Fort Benning. By the end, many feet are nearly frozen. Lipton moves among the men discreetly, encouraging them, shivering. While he's taking his turn supporting a stumbling private, he hears someone begin to sing in the line ahead of him: George Luz, the short dark one whose voice he hardly knows, distorted as it so often is by mockery. It's nothing special as voices go, but it keeps them walking, and others join in; and when Luz looks back in satisfaction, Lipton feels his own burden lightened a little. He doesn't even notice until he takes off his boots at Benning that his feet are so swollen that he will have to soak them for days.
In March they continue north to Camp Mackall, where the wind carries a whiff of home. Lipton moves heavily again, dreading the thaw, the war that creeps closer with the burgeoning heat. In exercises, he often finds his pulse racing at breakneck speed, as if the men who erupt out of the trees are truly Krauts with bayonets at the ready. The first time Captain Sobel makes a mistake that costs them a position, the training officer instructs him to leave five casualties behind. Sobel, irate, panicked, points to More, to Popeye, to Luz, to Muck, to Lipton.
They obediently lie flat on their bellies, watching the rest of the unit melt away in the green glow of dawn. Lipton hears Luz start to hum, absently, a little off-key, as natural as breathing. He closes his eyes, and he imagines himself dead here, in the sweet rotted stench of old leaves, with Luz at his ear humming "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" soft and low.
Normandy isn't the first time they drop from the sky, but it feels like the last. Glancing around the plane at the faces dazed with anti-airsickness pills, Lipton feels that finality settle like a stone in his gut. For hours, he drifts in and out of a half-drugged stupor, and each time he wakes he must again turn his mind from the thought: How many will even live to see the ground? But he knows that he's jumpmaster, and so at last he rouses himself and returns to his duty.
Hoobler is nodding beside him, evidently dreaming, because every now and then he grunts and presses into Lipton's shoulder. Lipton allows himself a smile before he nudges the other man in the ribs and murmurs, "Hey, Hoob, lean the other way. I gotta get up."
Hoobler cracks an eye and looks at him with brief but perfect lucidity. "Goddammit, Lip, I can't sleep on Tipper."
Then his eye rolls back and his weight shifts, and Lipton can move out from under him. Smiling again, he gazes around the groggy circle of faces made strange by charcoal smears and the semi-light. There's Hoobler, fierce and forward but seeming to need him sometimes. (That's another thing he doesn't think too deeply about, how once they drop Hoobler might give him that sick, needy look when he's hit, and maybe that does happen someday.) There's Guarnere, as brave a man as he's ever seen, but who just for a moment leaned into his arm when he said, Sorry about your brother. There's Tipper and Malarkey and Sisk and Liebgott and Luz and all the others. A small bloom of warmth unfolds in his chest to be their jumpmaster, the one whose watch they sleep on.
He clambers to his feet, finding his balance in the motion of the plane, and steps across to the open door. Outside, the sky is filled with obscure shapes of other planes and the wispy spirals of their paths, so that the night seems to seethe and flow over itself, molten. He lies on his stomach with the floor cold and the wind streaming past, and far beneath him the Channel, too, crawls as a body, the great somber sea-change of the Allied invasion. It stirs him, but abstractly, not in the way sitting in that circle of faces does.
A hand taps his back, and he stiffens, preparing to return to the men and solve whatever problem has arisen. But in a moment Luz pushes him down almost playfully, saying, "Don't get up, Sergeant, for Chrissake. Everybody's fine." He hunkers down on level with Lipton's face. "Everybody's asleep. 'Gentlemen, Doc Roe is handing these out for airsickness,'" he quotes snidely. "'Actually, boys, we'd just like to drug the shit outta ya so nobody pisses his pants at 1,000 feet.'"
"Why aren't you asleep, then?" asks Lipton, and as an afterthought adds, "Don't call me 'Sergeant' like that, Luz, it makes me feel old."
"Why aren't you asleep?" returns Luz challengingly. "It just takes a lot to knock me out" -- and that's true for both of them; Lipton is responsible, and Luz, Luz is restless. More so than usual, it seems. Lipton realizes that he should have laughed at the impression, because it unsettles Luz not to get that rote reaction. A short silence ensues between them as Luz slides farther up, all the way to the precarious edge of the floor, and gazes out. "You are old, Lip," he says, unexpectedly solemn. "Nobody else can do this."
They watch the void together, until the first tracers begin to appear through the clouds, swift bright flashes like heat lightning. That's when Luz drifts off, with his head on the small of Lipton's back. He's not like Hoobler; if Hoobler needs someone there, he knows how to ask for it, even in sleep. Luz twitches spasmodically, but the closest he can come to tenderness is to roughly burrow against Lipton, butting with his head.
Lipton doesn't mind. He gives what is his to give, noiselessly, in the terminal darkness of the sky.
When he jumps, this is a part of him that never sees the ground.
Carentan is where combat finally becomes personal. Lipton has seen the enemy before, in the D-Day attack on Brecourt Manor, but in a way the entire experience up until now has been like sitting in that tree overlooking the German guns: watching men fall from a distance, almost without sound.
In Carentan, sound is all that exists. At one time, he stumbles down the echoing road with Luz at his heels, blinded by dust. A German soldier emerges from the rubble mere yards away, but the Easy man in front of them (the dust, the sun, the smoke are too much, and they can't identify him) raises a gun and shoots him point-blank. There's something curiously intimate in it all, which may be why, when they crouch together on a street corner to orient themselves, Luz steadies himself on Lipton's elbow.
They pause here, breathing heavily. Lipton almost asks Luz how he's doing, because it occurs to him that this may be the first time Luz has seen real fighting. Instead, he leans forward and glances around the edge of the sheltering building, tensely, rising on the balls of his feet, and he says, "How good a shot're you, Luz?"
"I'm no Shifty," replies Luz, his voice drawn tight as a wire. Lipton waits with eyes trained on the street, allowing him a moment. When Luz speaks again, he sounds less shaken, or else he's compensating well by affecting Shifty's drawl: "But I reckon I can do all right."
Lipton shoots him an unamused look. "All right enough to cover me? Because I think we're getting in deep here."
"Yeah, yeah, okay," says Luz, chastened.
They start forward again, Luz a step behind with his gun rattling in his hands. Time escapes them in the endless weaving of streets; they seem to chase it only to lose it like sunlight on water, endlessly retreating. Carentan is withering all around them, is theirs to rebuild: every step they take seems to create a new town, every hurried glance down an alley reveals corners that were not there before their passage. The world is swelling, expanding, and at some point they are separated. Someone else watches Lipton's back for a while, he forgets who, and when he catches up with time again he's standing high above the town on a ramshackle staircase with the shudder of an exploding grenade just behind him, watching the German guns zero in. The Easy men below look impossibly small, as though he could raise his hand and blot them all out. Racing down the stairs, he marvels that he can speak at all, but it's something larger and firmer than himself that makes him yell to get the hell off the streets, like the burning rigidity of his muscles when he helped a cluster of strangers extract his father's corpse from the car.
When his feet touch the cobblestones, the world reaches its limit of expansion: too much weight and momentum to support. Implosion. The shock throws him backward into nothingness.
He doesn't know how much time passes, only that he smells blood before he tastes it, and feels Talbert's approach before he opens his eyes. Talbert's hands examining him are deft and certain, no fear whatsoever, which is a welcome change. Talbert is a good man, content to do this, to slip in through the haze and the staccato howl of mortars and never even be recognized. Lipton realizes this with an involved sort of internal logic, wandering through the labyrinthine paths of his own mind, searching for death at the center.
But Talbert's hands gradually strip away each layer of numbness, bringing him back down, as if descending the staircase the rest of the way. Lipton can hear him now, speaking calmly. When he reaches down and rips something and says, "You're okay, Lip. Everything's right where it should be," that's when Lipton knows he is alive -- because of the low throb of shame, remnant of some more civilized age, that spreads in his crotch at the touch.
Talbert lifts him and helps him toward the rear. It's slow going. Every few blocks the pain remembers itself and rushes eagerly back at him, so that they have to stop and let him gasp against a wall. Everyone is advancing now, flowing past them, though a few stop to give words of encouragement. Luz, when he arrives, is the first to offer more.
"Floyd!" Lipton hears Luz's voice say, exhilarated and a little overwhelmed, while they're lingering by yet another stone wall and he's searching detachedly for some vacant place without pain. "How we doin'?" -- all gravel and bravado and stupefaction.
"Okay," says Talbert, but Lipton knows he's worried. They're caught out in the open.
"Okay there, Lip? This guy treating you right?"
Talbert replies in a low voice, probably some strained retort, but Lipton can barely make out his own words: "Doin' okay, Luz."
Luz moves up beside him, inserts himself between Lipton and the wall, so that Lipton is leaning on him instead. He draws Lipton's nearest arm around his neck and straightens up: still a hair shorter, but easily supporting the weight. Talbert, apart, says nothing until Luz grunts, with his ragged breath on Lipton's bleeding cheek, "C'mon, Floyd, let's haul him outta here." Talbert joins them then, supporting Lipton under the other arm, and they move out.
Maybe it's just blood loss, or the stab of his injured leg, or the way the air vibrates with gunfire that makes Lipton imagine what isn't there. But as they walk, every fractional brush of Luz's chin or shoulder or thigh inspires again in him that thrill of mingled shame and gratitude. Everywhere Luz's hands touch him, the world returns to manageable size.
By Bastogne, Lipton's wounds have fully closed into jagged scars, although the side of his face still aches and feels alien when it's cold -- which is all the time, now. Other things, he learns, do not heal. The night after the German shelling, there is still blood in the snow: where Toye and Guarnere fell, where Hoobler's Luger went off, and, he knows without going to look, in the clearing where Julian was mowed down and the blasted hole where Muck and Penkala died.
Once he makes certain that all of the casualties have been transported, there's little left for him to do but return to his foxhole and Luz, who has been sleeping fitfully in the same spot since the attacks. Lipton doesn't even think to send Luz off to another hole, although when he slides down in the ground beside him, his shivering can't be blamed solely on the temperature. He doesn't allow himself to dwell on it, but his body retains the profound sense memory of that morning: the concussive thud of exploding trees, the tingling of ice on his face, and the too-long moments when he held Luz. Just a mistake, Luz scrambling over him, knees and hard angles and panic, and Lipton clutching him out of sheer adrenaline. Still, a mistake that haunts his muscles, washing through him when he forgets to deny it.
Luz sits and rolls over, regarding him foggily. Lipton can pinpoint the exact moment when the dream in his eyes turns to recognition.
"Hey, Lip," he says, with an obligatory attempt at a grin.
"Hey," replies Lipton, sitting down opposite him.
"Been out figuring the butcher's bill?" asks Luz, and immediately winces. "Sorry. Don't answer questions that fuckin' dumb."
"I never do."
"I know." Luz puts his hands in his lap, an oddly reserved gesture. Looks down at them. "Listen, uh. Maybe--" He draws closer, edges in between Lipton and the side wall of the foxhole. "Your hole has gotta be on the wrong side of a hill of something, because it is," touching Lipton's knee, "really," his arm, "damn," the bottom edge of the scar on his cheek, "cold."
"Luz," says Lipton, staying perfectly still, his elbows thrust against the back wall. "So--"
"So, conservation of heat, I was thinkin'. They teach you that in basic, Lip." His tone is difficult to interpret: teasing, edgy, muted.
"Okay." Lipton slides over farther so that Luz can move in next to him. They stare at each other for a long time before Luz leans into him, tentatively at first, but with his full weight when he meets no resistance. Lipton's elbows slide down the wall, so that he's nearly lying on his back, with Luz pressing into him. Luz's mouth finds the underside of his jaw, and his muscles tense, his throat closes down. Luz is very good at this, and yet somehow all Lipton can think of is the night before they jumped on Normandy, when in his sleep Luz shoved into Lipton roughly, not knowing how to ask. "Okay, Luz, okay. This isn't really...."
"I know," says Luz, muffled, in between kisses. "But can't we just, just do this?"
Lipton is trembling, his fingers scrabbling for purchase in the dirt. A little wildly, he says, "I don't think right now... right after Toye and Guarnere and the others... I'm serious, sometimes I don't even know who's alive anymore--"
"I hope you still are," says Luz, his hand on Lipton's arm, "or what I'm doing here's prob'ly illegal in most states. Good thing we're not in the U.S., huh?"
"No, Luz," and he twists away from the embrace. "I'm First Sergeant. I can't."
Luz scoffs, shaken. "You been First Sergeant since the day you put on the uniform. The Army's just finally catchin' up. And you're the one that told me once I shouldn't call you 'Sergeant.'"
"You shouldn't. But you also shouldn't call me--" And he doesn't know; what was it that Luz's voice said against his skin, what human word was in that contact? "We shouldn't do this here. I've got a whole company to think about now."
"You always have," says Luz defiantly, but he's on his feet. "Fine. I'm about to freeze my ass off sitting in one place so long. Gotta get back to my hole." He drags himself over the lip of the crater, shaking the snow from his hair; pauses. "Listen, it was just -- really goddamn cold in this hole alone."
"It's all right," replies Lipton, forcing a smile. As Luz turns away, he adds, too quietly to be heard, "I know."
He stares at the sky for the rest of the night, and goes out to walk the line early, before most of the men are awake. Occasionally a deep, rattling cough like a machine gun startles him, a harbinger of the hacking chorus he will hear at breakfast. Heffron has it worst; Lipton's halfway to the appropriate hole before he remembers that Heffron won't be there.
He takes a wide circuit of the encampment on his way, with the German line at his back, the clatter of their mess kits already beginning to break the silence. The Germans are very effective, he'll give them that, but it doesn't endear them to him. Not like Perconte dozing with his toothbrush, or Liebgott, fierce and flushed in some violent dream, pillowed on his rifle. Or Malarkey, sleeping with one arm flung out, Muck's cross gleaming dead silver between his fingers. Lipton goes and speaks to him softly until Malarkey opens his dazed eyes, tucks the arm under his tarp, and promptly falls back to sleep.
Lipton glances over the others in turn -- even Captain Winters in his hole, with his back to the cold. In the space behind him, Lipton can just make out the arch of Lieutenant Nixon's shoulder, the smudge of his hair. He registers them with less acuity; they inhabit separate territory, officer country. A superficial distinction, maybe, but only superficial here, because the boundaries blur in Bastogne as surely as the freeze comes. Lipton appreciates such boundaries, dwelling in no-man's land.
A little past Nixon and Winters, he finds his man. One arm draped over Spina, Heffron is curled lissomely in the medics' hole, as though he too automatically seeks the healing that won't come. Roe is already up, sitting on a log nearby and blowing on his fingers halfheartedly.
Lipton joins him, rubbing his own hands together -- less from chill than from a need to establish this sympathy. Roe shifts to allow him more room on the log, and when he speaks, it's diffidently, to the stretch of mountainous, white-tipped tarps and the supple blue creek of smoke swimming through the trees from the German cooking fires.
"Mornin', Sergeant." Roe doesn't call anybody by nicknames, that's well known, but he also doesn't call any other noncom by his rank.
"Mornin', Doc."
"You wan' me to take a look at that scar?"
Lipton realizes he's been rubbing it absently; it still doesn't seem to be his. "It's closed up pretty well," he says, but allows Roe to probe it gently. It still hurts when pressed, as though some shard of that day's horror is left in, and maybe that's why he finds himself touching it so often, why he lets Luz finger it or Roe examine it. It reminds him that nothing ends -- not even himself.
"That it has," Roe admits. "Pretty well."
"How's Heffron?" asks Lipton abruptly. "He sounded bad at breakfast yesterday."
Roe moves his head, as though he intended to look back at Heffron and then thought better of it. "We keep him warm, he'll be all right."
"Of course he can stay with you as long as he likes," says Lipton, before it occurs to him that Roe didn't ask outright.
Roe colors faintly. "That's prob'ly best, sir."
They sit together chafing their hands, listening to the unexpected stillness on their side of the woods. It's broken in a minute by a barking cough from Heffron, and Lipton turns swiftly, only to watch him sigh and settle down again in the warmth of his small shared hollow.
When Lipton turns back, Roe is regarding him wryly. "Sergeant," he says, "you know, if somebody'd picked you, jus' by chance, you'da made a real good medic."
Lipton smiles at him as long as he can hold it, accepting the compliment, but he sees again, very clearly, Luz's expression as he stood on the edge of the foxhole, his fingernails nearly blue, his lips so chapped the blood was starting on them.
"No," Lipton says without inflection; "no, not really."
The room that Speirs assigns to Lipton in Haguenau reminds him of a crypt. He lies in the lone bed under the heaviest blanket that the commander could beg, borrow, or steal in town (he suspects the last). There was no apparent tenderness in the gesture; Speirs simply showed up in the late afternoon, curt and sharp-edged, after the other men had drifted away, and laid the neat blanket on the foot of the bed like an order.
Lipton is not one to refuse an order. Sleep eludes him, but he stays where he is, alternately sweating and shaking, the close air bearing in on him. Sometime after dark, Luz appears in the doorway, ill at ease, hands behind his back.
"Hey, Lip," he says.
Lipton braces himself against the headboard and sits up as best he can. He gives an experimental cough, but it turns into a fit, and he has to suffer through it under Luz's scrutiny. When he recovers, Luz says, "How you feelin'?"
"Better," Lipton replies quickly. Judging from the quirk of Luz's mouth, he's unconvinced. "Don't I look it?"
Luz doesn't worry himself too much about decorum when talking to superior officers: "Besides looking like general shit, you're white." For some reason, this makes Lipton lower his gaze and flush. Luz laughs and amends, "Now you look a little better."
"How are the men's quarters?" asks Lipton, looking at the bed.
"We just came from Bastogne," says Luz, and there is the faintest note of shock in it still, pure clinical white-eyed shock of the kind they saw in that soldier who dug a foxhole through the frost with his bare hands. Lipton looks up, trying to catch it, but Luz stops him with a smile. "Anything's good after that. I just came from quarters, actually. Grant had a game of poker going. I crapped out." He sounds clumsy, fumbling, apologizing for not being here to carry papers or stir the silence or sit too close on the sofa in the front room with his hip snug against Lipton's.
He crosses the floor and sits on the bed instead, and he brings out the mug he's been concealing behind his back. "Somebody made coffee for the game. I dunno where they found it." He leans in to pass over the mug, and Lipton notices the bruise-black smudges beneath his eyes; wonders how many nights he's been sleeping sick in this musty mausoleum of Haguenau while Luz hasn't been sleeping somewhere else. He takes the mug, and there's no heat to it at all. "It's not warm anymore," says Luz, hair in his face and hands empty.
"No," concedes Lipton, "but thanks." He tries to drink some of it, for the sake of appearances. Sitting here, he's finally dozing off, his chest heavy and cavernous, the rich brown scent of coffee reaching him from afar and the mattress dipping under Luz's added weight.
Luz deftly takes the mug from him when his eyes close, and he can hear it rattle on the floor nearby.
"You want that blanket on?"
"I think I'm supposed to want it," he says vaguely. "Lieutenant Speirs brought it."
Luz's laugh rolls over him, or is that the darkness--
He sleeps. Sleeps shallowly, half-in and half-out, so that sensation rises and recedes and rises again: Luz's laugh, Luz's hands. He thinks he feels Luz creep in beneath the covers with him once. But he wakes later, dawn and gray and aching and alone, and when Luz visits him again there is no such secret in his eyes. So that was just a trick of the fever.
The first afternoon that he is well enough to walk, he makes his way down the road to the men's quarters. (He doesn't know which platoon; sometimes this is something he forgets, because they are all his.) They are palpably relieved to have him on his feet again, even though he can still feel the pallor of his face. Somehow he can't leave them, so this first night back he finds an extra cot and drags it into the common room, just outside the door to their makeshift barracks. He takes some good-natured jokes about how he thinks he's still at Toccoa on CQ duty, but Shifty donates a pillow and Hashey drums up more coffee, and they all look at him gratefully as they toss down their cards and turn in for the night.
Luz sleeps closest to the door.
By the time they reach the green panorama of Austria, the men expect to live. That's what Major Winters said in his last briefing with Lipton, sitting at his desk with the murky beginnings of a tan while Nixon, fair-skinned as ever, boldly sat on his desk. The men might start reclaiming that old fantasy of invincibility. They have to be cared for, now more than ever.
They do expect to live. Lipton stays with a group of them in a sprawling, outdated hotel, and each morning he sits by as they drink and swear and swagger. They don't reclaim their invincibility, but they stake out something else: freedom. They colonize it just as they colonize their new home, gradually exploring its crevices, attempting to use the stoves, putting up their feet on the covered sofas. They find abandoned cars and go joy-riding; they organize another hunting party in the local forest in honor of Shifty's new M-1 rifle, come home with a few scrawny rabbits and a multitude of ticks.
Lipton watches. He wakes early and helps with breakfasts and deals cards, but when Janovec runs off the road and Grant gets shot, he's still getting blood on his hands.
Sometimes he ventures into town, just to look, and unthinkingly brings his gun along, the strap slung over his shoulder, the butt comfortingly solid when it jogs against his hip. Lieutenant Welsh finds him this way one afternoon -- or rather Lipton finds Welsh, lazing in the town square with a bottle pilfered from a local store.
"Lieutenant," calls Welsh. It doesn't even register, this word that means (somehow he knows, though Winters hasn't said it yet) that the men are his for only a short while longer. He takes two more steps, and then the familiar weight on his shoulder slides away. He turns and is met with Welsh, swaying slightly, lifting the gun.
"Lip," says Welsh, laughing. For him, Austria is no different from anywhere else. He's a soldier even stunned-drunk in the white heat of this sterile little plaza, so he can laugh about it. "The war's over."
Lipton doesn't believe him.
He retrieves his gun and returns to the hotel, which stirs in faint echoes when he opens the door. It reminds him of his unofficial sickroom in Haguenau, undefined and empty.
("The mausoleum of all hope and desire," he thinks suddenly. One slow evening on guard duty in Germany, Webster roughly thrust a tattered book into his hands, desperate for connection. "Here," he said, almost as though they were strangers, "you're from West Virginia, aren't you? Here's the only Southern writer I'd say is worth watching." Lipton never did more than skim the book, but now it occurs to him that he should ask Webster for the author's name. Before they all go home.)
He stands with his hand on the door, still and inward, cultivating this thought, until Shifty wanders in from a side hall.
"Afternoon, Lieutenant." Just after the promotion it was like the first days of Toccoa all over again, the men not knowing how formal to be with him. Now it's only Shifty and a few other shy ones who give him that jolt.
"Shifty, where is everyone?" he asks, depositing the rifle on a table in the sitting room.
"Gone down to the lake," Shifty says, eyeing him curiously. "Too hot for them Yankee boys, I guess," he adds, and grins conspiratorially.
"Probably so, but I'm gonna go join 'em. You all right here?"
"Fine," says Shifty. He fidgets and glances up. "Really, um, most of us don' need lookin' after anymore. Sir."
"I know, Shifty," replies Lipton, but that's a lie.
He's never been down to the lake himself. Throughout his stay in Zell am See, it's merely been a blur on the outskirts, bright and fixed as the sun. He picks his way down; the town surrenders ungraciously to wilderness, finally overrun by long grass at the base of the sloping hill. Then there is the water, limned with sand shimmering like pearl in the light, dotted with Easy men wading and wrestling. Webster and Liebgott are nearest: Webster's back is to him, but Lipton can see that odd mixture of intensity and intimacy in the way he sits arched forward. Liebgott is on his feet facing him, enthusiastically debating a point, if his gestures are any indication. Lipton turns away without waving. He can't look at Liebgott without remembering.
(the Landsberg camp. As soldiers ushered a ragged crowd of prisoners back behind the skeletal fences, Lipton stopped for a moment, disoriented, and closed his eyes. Opened them. Liebgott was up on the back of one of their trucks, curled in on himself almost like a child, crying while the nearby men discreetly looked away. Lipton jogged over and reached through the slats of the bed to pat his knee awkwardly, as he had done for Buck in the deep freeze of Bastogne. Liebgott grabbed hold of his outstretched hand. His tears were grimy, streaking his cheeks, and he said, fierce and fetal and ancient, "Who the fuck are we to live?")
Lipton still doesn't know.
He leaves the men, continuing along the bank until the lake noses out into a cove among the trees, where the scalloped curve is marred only by one sagging pier. Here he removes his shirt and boots, and steps in.
His body remembers the supple movements of swimming, remembers them as soon as he feels the bracing chill on his bare feet. He lets it. He moves with uncalculated grace, and if he thinks it is only in the most rudimentary way, about the silence of the hotel and the cold pull of the water and the way his roaring breath sounds hollow and stretched in his ears underwater, as it did some nights last winter when the pneumonia was especially bad, like being in an ever-lengthening tunnel away from light. He dives, into the dark.
When he bobs up for air, Luz is sitting dangling his legs over the edge of the dock, a few feet away.
"Luz," he says in surprise, "aren't you here with the others?"
"Saw you come this way," Luz offers simply. He skims the lake's surface with a heel. "Never seen you swim."
"Hard to find the time."
"Yeah, I guess, when you're in the middle of a war," Luz says, and grins a little. "There's time now."
Lipton wanders closer, blinking at him.
"It's not over yet. The war."
Luz bites his lip and looks at him unreadably, hunched forward, a vague dusky shape against the blue. As Lipton comes within reach, Luz takes him by the arm. Lipton can just feel the pulse humming in his fingers.
Luz says, low in his throat, "The war is over, Lip." And he doesn't say anything more, but he asks.
"Okay," says Lipton, his voice still staggering over itself for air after his long dive into oblivion. He leans his weight lightly against the pitted wooden dock, Luz's legs pressing into his chest. He tilts his head back, so far back the sun seems to wheel and fall like a faraway star, and Luz's hands come to rest, one on each of his shoulders.
Here, with the water cold on his legs and Luz's mouth warm on his, he begins to believe that he will live.
~Fin~
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