Chapter Text
Dear Chuck,
This letter comes to you from the deck of a ship I don’t remember the name of, mid-way across the Atlantic. My number finally came up in the shuffle (or more likely Speirs got wind that Toye wrote to Luz letting us know that you’re all in the same place and he rigged the shuffle, because you know how much he likes to play fairy godmother) and so I’m on my way back to California. I’ll be across the harbour before you know it, sitting at my mother’s dinner table eating terrible meatloaf while she pretends she isn’t crying, and making polite conversation with my sister’s 4F husband.
I hate boats. Pretty sure I told you that on the way out. Not entirely sure which trip I’ve hated more – being trapped like sardines watching Tab pine and listening to Lieb and Wild Bill bitching at each other, or the relative peace and quiet of a thousand strangers. Not a single man I know on this boat, Chuck. Which is why I think Speirs rigged the shuffle. Either that or Winters and Nixon pulled some string to get me home faster.
I’m going home to Oakland, but I’m not staying. I’ve got a cousin who owns a business in San Francisco and there are jobs going there, and a few apartments in his building open. So I’m going to be there, and from what I can tell from Toye’s letters you’ll likely be out by then. Can’t imagine you’ll want to go back to your parents after all that, so I’ve lined us up a place with enough room for you, me and Tab. Don’t bitch or tell me I shouldn’t, that you don’t need us to, or whatever you’re thinking. You do need us to, and you’re not the only one.
I’m gonna tell you this because I know you won’t tell Tab I did, but he’s fucked, Chuck, he’s really fucked. I have no idea how to put it in a letter so I’m not even going to try but I have no god damn clue what’s going on in his mind at the moment and frankly some days what little I’ve guessed makes me scared to ask. So I’m dragging him to California, after he’s gone home to let his mother cry on him , and sticking him in an apartment with you and me and hoping between the two of us we can… I don’t know. There’s no fixing it, I think we all know that by now. I will personally settle for it just not getting any worse. For him, and for me. And for you. Especially for you.
Do you know, this is the longest we’ve been apart for three god damn years? I think I miss you and Tab more than I miss my ma. If you ever tell her I said that I’ll fuck you up.
I’ll post this letter when we make land in New York. I might get to you before it does, who the fuck knows what the mail man is like these days. Toye says you’re doing alright. I hope you’re doing alright. I’ll see you soon.
Your friend,
Pat Christenson
**
Pat,
If you can’t read this, it’s because I’m writing it on my knee on the first train of my three-train trek from New York to Indiana. It’ll take me two days to get home, I don’t even want to think about how long it will take me to get to San Francisco. Sitting here watching the fields go by almost makes me miss the march to Atlanta. Not quite, though.
I’m guessing you’re already in San Fran by now. Speirs was true to his word and let me stay with the men til the end – Dick and Nixon left four days before we did, and Luz, Babe and I were the last of it. If you think spending a winter in foxholes with them was bad, you should have tried living in a tin can with just the two of them for weeks. At least no one tried to kill us.
New York was. Well. I suppose I’ll tell you about it when I get to you. I’d like to think I can imagine the look on your face but somehow I think my memory doesn’t do it justice. I hope Chuck is doing OK. Toye’s letter said far too little, and the fact that Bill didn’t write about it at all makes me uneasy, but it doesn’t really matter, does it.
This letter isn’t worth the stamp, as it stands, but I haven’t got anything else to say right now that I can put on paper. I’ll pick it up once I’m home.
--
I knew it was going to be strange coming home, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for how strange, or the ways in which things wouldn’t be strange. All my brothers are back now too, so all five of us are under the same roof again for now which we haven’t been in years, since Mikey went to college in 35, and it’s… Well. We’re all aware of just how damn lucky we are that all five of us made it home. Five sons, my parents have, and we all went to war, and we all came home. The Johnsons who live over the road lost all three of their sons, one in Cassino, where Guarnere’s brother died before we jumped into Normandy. There are so many boys from this neighbourhood dead in Europe. Somehow I hadn’t really thought about it. Somehow it felt like we were the only people in the war.
Our ma is spoiling us rotten, and it’s good to be home, but I don’t think I can stay here long. There’s a kind of peace sitting around the table with my brothers, in a way, because they know what it was like, or if they don’t they know what they went through and they know what they lost, so they can imagine. But we were so close once. And now we’ve all been to hell and back and we’ve got new brothers, brothers who were with us in hell, and now we don’t quite understand each other the way we used to. It’s like we’ve all been knocked into shape, and the ways in which we fit together before don’t work anymore, because we’re not the same as we were. Jimmy has nightmares, he wakes the whole house screaming at least once a week. He’s so damn angry about it. Mine are silent. Always the same. Always Landsberg.
Shit I’m sorry, this is a miserable letter. I feel all out of shape being here alone. Even though I’m not alone. I wonder how long it will take us to get used to not being Easy. Thank fuck you had a new plan to give me. Thank fuck for you in general, you and Chuck. I’ll be here another week, so I don’t completely break my mother’s heart, and then I’ll start my trek across the country. I’ll call for the address in a few days.
As always, your friend, Tab.
**
Everything looks exactly the same. He gets a cab from the station out to his neighbourhood, and he walks up the path to his parents’ house the way he did every single day of his life before the war, and everything looks the same. His mother’s roses. The slightly wonky step up to the porch. The ding in the garage door where Paul backed the car into it when he was learning to drive. It all looks exactly the same. He’d looked at himself in the mirror in New York, Nix over his shoulder as he shaved, and he couldn’t tell whether he looked the same as before or not. He was 19 when he left home, he’s just 22 now. It might as well have been a decade.
There is a split second where he doesn’t want to knock on the door, and then he does. Through the frosted glass he can see the shape of a woman moving down the hall. He’d know her anywhere, and all of a sudden he’s five again and she’s coming up the steps to school to get him after his first day and his eyes are full of tears and how is it possible that he’d forgotten this? How is it possible that he hadn’t fully realised just how much he’s missed her? His mother. His mother.
She opens the door and there’s a moment where she just stares at him. He’s crippled by a sudden terror that maybe she won’t know him. Maybe too much has happened. And then she makes a noise like a bullet through flesh and sways on her feet and he reaches out to catch her. She feels so much smaller than he remembers, even though he hasn’t grown.
“Oh,” she says, and it’s a broken noise. “Oh, my baby.”
“Hi mama,” Tab says, reaching out to steady her, propping her back up onto her feet. “I’m home.”
She laughs, breathless and disbelieving. “Hi Floyd,” she says, and then turns back into the house. “Boys! Michael! Floyd’s home!”
Apparently, he is just in time for dinner. His father meets him at the threshold of the dining room, a little greyer than Tab remembers but still the same, and he shakes his hand before he allows himself to pull his youngest son into a hug. There’s a single moment where he’s alone with his parents before the inevitable onslaught of brothers hits him.
Mikey’s first, oldest, nearly 30 now, and he sweeps Tab off his feet as if he’s still just a child and then there’s Jimmy and Paul right behind him, the twins, they pile on, and last down the stairs is Arthur and when he throws himself at them they all hit the floor. For a moment they’re all under 10 and wrestling on the hall carpet and then their mother raises her voice, just like she did 15 years before, and demands that they behave like civilised people, wash their hands for dinner and sit themselves down at the table. Like good little boys, they do as they’re told.
Their mother says grace. It’s the first time he’s eaten a meal under a blessing in years and the sound of the words, words he’d heard every day in his childhood, makes him feel like crying. He leaves his head down for longer than he needs to and across the table Paul kicks at him, gentle, and just like that he remembers that they all fought a war too. They were all in Europe too.
They eat dinner, and then they sit with their parents in the living room just like they always did. It’s like 1941 all over the place except Tab is a completely different person and when he starts looking closely at his brothers he can see that they are too. He can’t see quite how yet, can’t put his finger on it, and the details don’t matter because they’re his brothers, but… There’s distance, maybe, alongside a new closeness from the shared experiences that they’ll maybe never talk about. He knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his brothers left just as many boys in Europe as he did. Mikey and Jimmy and Paul and Art have their own Skip Mucks, their own Donald Hooblers and Bill Kiehns, their own Eugene Jacksons and John Julians, best friends and brothers and boys they wanted desperately to keep alive and couldn’t. He doesn’t have to explain any of this to them, even if he isn’t the same now, he doesn’t have to tell them why, because they know the shape of it.
His father does too, he realises. His father left boys in Europe too.
**
To you both,
I’m safely back home, and wanted to write you briefly before I head off to California. It’s been strange being home, though I’m glad I went. I was right though, I’m not fit for life here anymore. I can’t quite tell if that’s the war, or the pair of you. I’m not sure I can separate the two. There is so much I want to say and I don’t know how I could possibly put it down on paper without feeling ridiculous, though I’m sure I’ll learn, or it will be a long however many months. Be patient with me.
Don’t write back to this address, I’ll be gone before you get this, I’ll telegram when I have an address in San Francisco. I don’t know where we’ll end up yet, but Pat has it all in hand. I’m looking forward to being back with him and Chuck. I’ve felt very alone since leaving New York, which perhaps isn’t surprising. I haven’t been alone since Toccoa. And obviously I’m not alone now, because I am crammed into my parents’ tiny house with my four brothers and every single person my mother has ever met coming by for tea, but I don’t think I realised before quite how different having Easy is to not having them.
I think of you both all the time.
Always, your Bunny
**
He stays as long as he can, which in the end is nine days. Tab tells his parents separately, sits with his mother in her small, warm kitchen, breathes in the scent of fresh bread baking, like every day of his life before Easy, and tells her about Chuck. Tells her all about the brothers he found at war, tells him about the way that Pat and Chuck saw him, knew him, fought for him and with him, the whole way through the war. He tells her about what happened to Chuck in Zell Am See, and watches her face, watches her realise what it is he’s actually saying.
“I’m going to San Francisco,” he tells her. “I need to go and be with Chuck. He’s… He got shot in the head. He’s going to need help getting his life back together, and Pat and I are going to do that. I know… I know you’d prefer me to stay here,” he says, and looks at her, really looks at her. “But I can’t, mama.”
She takes a deep breath, sighs long and hard, and then gives him a look that is full of knowledge of who he is, who she raised. “You’re a good man, Floyd, my baby, and I’m proud of you.”
He tells his father in fewer words, later that day over whiskey and a smoke on the porch with his brothers, once he knows his mother has already had a chance to pass the information on. His father claps him on the shoulder and says nothing.
And just like that it’s settled. Tab is leaving for San Francisco in two days. He writes to Dick and Nixon - Lewis, Lewis, Lewis - telling them he’s on his way, and finds himself for the first time since he got on the train really considering New York.
It feels like another life, the night he spent with them, but the closer he gets to San Francisco the more it feels like it's something that might belong to him for good. He misses them with the same visceral ache of missing Pat and Chuck, the same sense that these men are something vital to him, something essential and integral to who he is. The future is completely unclear. There is nothing certain about where he will be, who he will be, the shape of his life in a year… But they’ll be there. Dick and Nixon, Lewis, they’ll be there. If he closes his eyes he can feel it still, the brand of the two of them on his skin, inside him, bruising and perfect, the tone of Dick’s voice when he said I love you, God I love you , the look on Lewis’ face as he held him safe and steady and let him take everything Dick could give him… It’s the last thing he sees every night before he falls asleep.
He wakes, every morning, slightly disoriented and surprised that he’s alone. He thinks perhaps that in between dreams of a camp full of the corpses of his brothers, he dreams of the two of them, curled around him like they did in the foxhole, in the bed in New York, and wonders if that’s why he wakes missing the weight of them. They barely slept, that night in New York, too busy with sex and discovery and too unwilling to waste the time they had, but he did drift there, safe and surrounded. Dimly, Tab wonders if they found it strange to have him between them, when they’re used to being together. Wonders whether with time they’ll find a different pattern, or if it will always be him, bookended between his officers, the men he’d have followed to hell, the men he’ll follow to Nixon, New Jersey.
He misses his real life, the life he’ll have with them, even if it’s something he hasn’t even met yet. It’s waiting for him, there in a big house he’s never seen in New Jersey. The two of them, his, as soon as he can be there with them. All he has to be is patient.
Hopefully, it will be easier to be patient in San Francisco than it is at home. Tab’s in the house he grew up in for nine days, and it’s hard, not just adjusting to the way in which the person he became in Europe lines up against the people his brothers are now, the people his parents are after years of worry, but also the way in which the rest of the life he left behind keeps nudging up against them all. Endless teas with ladies from the Church, evenings in the bar with his father and the men of the neighbourhood, the boys he grew up with, some of whom know what he went through and some of whom don’t and the ghosts of all of the dead ones. His mother sends him out on errands and Tab walks through the neighbourhood saying hello and smiling and feels like an actor on a stage. He hears Luz in his head, constant parroting of utter nonsense, remembers Luz mimicking Horton in that field, the look on Sobel’s face when Tipper handed him the map, and then promptly remembers what happened to Tipper, and to Horton and feels a little like he might be sick.
“Floyd?” the voice is familiar and that’s all that stops him swinging when the small hand lands on his shoulder. “I thought that was you.”
Tab manages to get the paratrooper back in his box as he turns around, best smile on his face, because she deserves it. “Grace,” he says, and takes hold of her hand, just to put some space between them.
“Hi,” she says, looking up at him, eyes shining full of tears in her sweet, sweet face. “I’d heard you were home. Are you…”
Are you alright? Are you staying? Are you still who you were? Are you still someone who might want to be with me?
He answers the easy one. “Just for a few more days. I’m going out to California, got a buddy from there who was hurt pretty bad, a couple of us are going. He… He’ll need help, and there’s work out there.”
It’s the cowards’ way out and she deserves better, although he never promised her anything, purposefully set her free when he left after a handful of dates and stolen kisses, agreed they wouldn’t write, but he’s known her all his life and she… Once upon a time he’d thought he might one day want to marry her, before Toccoa, before Normandy, before Bastogne. After that, he’d known he couldn’t. Couldn’t come home and marry Grace Harper, or any girl who’d known him before. Couldn’t come home and marry anyone.
Grace gives him her best smile in return and he knows in an instant that she understands him perfectly. “That sounds very noble, and very exciting,” she says. “Fancy, San Francisco! I truly wish you all the best, Floyd, and I am so very happy to see you home safely.”
He’d never really deserved her, Tab thinks, but there are plenty of men who will, and she’s more than likely already met one or two of them. He’s done as right by her as he possibly could. She’ll be fine.
**
Nixon,
I’m sending you the enclosed letter in the knowledge that you will know where to locate the recipient. Previous strictures as to the keeping of said recipient still stand.
]R.Speirs
**
“Is that Speirs’ writing?”
Nix looks up from the letter, still not quite able to decide whether he’s angry or amused, and turns the full wattage of his smile on Dick.
“Yes,” he says, “But it’s not for me, he’s sent a letter to send to Bunny.”
Dick frowns a little. “Why would he do that?”
Folding Speirs’ note between his fingers, Nix gives Dick his best smile, “Because, darling,” he says, the shape of the endearment new and intoxicating on his tongue, “The man isn’t an idiot.”
Dick bites his lip on an answering smile. “No,” he says. “I suppose not.” He pauses. “So, Bunny is sweetheart, and baby, and I’m darling, am I?”
“Yes, my love, you are.”
They’re at the table in the breakfast nook in their kitchen, soaking in the sunshine of a rare lazy morning, drinking coffee that actually tastes like coffee, and it’s still a novelty for them both, a little luxury, even after Austria. Nix puts the letter down on the table and Dick rests a hand on top of it, contemplative.
“That night,” Dick says, “In Hagenau, you said that Speirs was a person you’d thought about, maybe.”
He had said that.
“Before his Lipton obsession,” Dick continues. “Not after?”
Nix wonders what it is Dick is actually trying to say here. “Well, the initial appeal was still there, I suppose, he’s an attractive man and you know how much I love a competent officer,” he punctuates that with a leer, deliberate and lewd. “But after that, really, god I think mainly I just felt sorry for him.”
Dick nods. “Because he’s like us,” he says. “But he’s alone.”
“Yeah. I mean… It’s not like it was just the three of us, but yeah. He was alone.”
There’s a long moment where Dick rolls this round, hands flat on the table. “He spotted us, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Nix nods. “Not right off the bat, I don’t think, but certainly after Hagenau. Like knows like.”
“Most of the time.”
Most of the time. Sometimes, like and like is Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon and it takes a year for one to know the other. It’s been discussed enough that it doesn’t need to be said again.
“Most of the time,” Nix repeats, and he laughs. “And I’m fairly sure he spotted Luz, because…”
“Because Luz.”
“Yeah, and thank god for that because some days honestly I think that man was the only thing keeping the company on its feet.”
Dick smiles, a soft, small thing that’s reserved only for the rare pleasant moments of a long, miserable war.
“Do you think Speirs noticed Bunny?” Dick asks.
Nix is not in the habit of keeping things from Dick, but Tab has always been the exception to that rule, and he thinks they’ve reached a strange sort of balance with Speirs. Dick considers the man a friend. It’s not something to be taken lightly, and it’s not something that would necessarily survive all the details of the ways in which Nix suspects Speirs noticed Bunny.
“Maybe,” he says, because sometimes loving Dick Winters means lying to him, a little. “Enough to send a letter here, anyway.”
**
Sergeant Talbert,
I sent this to Nixon, New Jersey, under the assumption that if you weren’t there they would know where to find you. Please rest assured that I can very clearly visualise the look on your face right now, and it’s not at all convincing. Please send them both my best.
I hope by now, wherever this letter reaches you, that you’re safely in the States and reaccustoming yourself to the realities of not being a soldier. I left Europe a week or so behind you, having tied up the last strings of Easy and all it’s glory and am now home myself. It is deeply strange to me the way in which while in theatre everything felt like someone else’s life and now that I have returned to I feel like perhaps Europe was real life and this way of living belongs to a different life. I’m sure I recall a conversation to that effect over bad brandy and requisition slips. I cannot recall whether we reached a resolution.
I’ll be staying with the army, as we discussed in Austria, and the rest of what we spoke of there remains true. I’d very much appreciate it if you could pass on an address for Sergeant Grant when you have one, as I’d like to write to him myself, and I hope that if you see him you will give him my very best wishes.
R.Speirs
**
Dear Harry,
Presumably by now you’re back in Wilkes-Barre making babies, having successfully run off Kitty’s new 4F boyfriend. I hope she’s pleased with her parachute silk and whatever Nazi silverware you eventually managed to rescue from Speirs. A lot has changed since we saw you last, I’m sure you noticed that the war is over, so this letter comes to you from Nixon, New Jersey, rather than some unpronounceable island in the Pacific.
We’ve been back for a handful of weeks now and so far the process of adjusting seems to be smooth, although I’m aware we’re at an unfair advantage as we’re not having to navigate the transition alone. I think your words were “nauseatingly codependent” and I’m sure at the time I’d have told you to fuck off but you probably have something there, my friend.
As I said, things have been relatively smooth here. I wrote my sister when the war ended and she had the house on standby, so we weren’t greeted by dustsheets and racoons, but the place feels far too big right now with just two of us. Likely that won’t be the case forever but more on that later. Once I give you the real news you’re not going to read anything else so I might as well get all the rest of it out of the way first.
My father declined to meet us at the business when we returned, and also declined to meet us in New York (which, good, we were busy) and so directed us to his Head of Personnel who took one look at Major Richard Winters and declared that he’d been looking for a candidate to take his place and that Dick and his oak leaves would do nicely, and then he quit on the spot. Dick made me VP of something or other, and I have a rather charming office with a comfortable couch and a secretary called Mary-Anne who is old enough to be my grandmother’s grandmother but still somehow gets more done every day than the rest of the company combined. Except Dick, obviously. I have no clear view of my own responsibilities but I feel that’s fairly typical of a Nixon at Nixon Nitration. I drink coffee and bother Dick. It’s much like being in the army in that respect, except that I get to sleep in a bed and drink from a glass and eat food that tastes like food and no one has tried to kill me or take Dick’s boys from him for a good few months. The first week on the job Dick sat with me in the dark on the back porch and told me how strange it is to be responsible for men with no fear of them dying. I don’t miss it.
There are things I do miss. I miss you, that should go without saying, and I miss Lip, and I have to say to a certain degree I miss Sparky too, there’s something very comforting about a man like that in the depths of Hell but I struggle to imagine him in this world. I miss the men, as a concept and as individuals, and now I miss them all it seems easier to miss the ones we left in Europe. Dick is writing the families again, for each and every one, now that we’re not censored, now that he can be honest, now that he has time to get each and every letter right. I don’t know how he does it Harry, I swear to god. And I’m so glad he’s not writing one to Kitty. I’m sorry about that fire. It was stupid. We weren’t in a dell. I was just cold. You’ll tell me you were cold too and not to be an idiot. Tough fucking luck.
Apart from all that, we have news, and Dick informs me that I’m responsible for imparting it to you, because I’m better at this sort of thing than you are, and though he’s demonstrably not wrong I still don’t see how anything could qualify a man to write this letter. I know Dick and Speirs both wrote you after Chuck Grant was shot. He’s recovering well, apparently, and once we were all free to make plans, Christenson and Tab decided that instead of going home they’d go out to San Francisco, and stay there for a while to make sure that Grant got his feet under him and could pull his life back together. You know how we always said that the best men in Easy were the ones you wouldn’t notice? Case in point - Christenson. Anyway, they anticipate being out there for the foreseeable, but Harry, when Tab feels able to leave San Francisco, he’ll be coming to New Jersey, to us.
You asked him in Hagenau if he was the problem, and he wasn’t. He’s the solution.
I wish I could see your face right now. Please rest assured I’m aware I owe you several drinks. Tell Kitty I’ll foot the bar bill at your wedding.
Your second best friend,
Nix
**
Harry’s been back in Wilkes-Barre nearly three months by the time the letter arrives, married to Kitty for a fortnight, still getting used to the completely bizarre reality of the world after war and the fact that they have this house, the two of them, this life, this future… He’s not sleeping, but not because he has nightmares, mainly because he can’t quite bring himself to close his eyes with Kitty right there next to him. Not yet. Not when it doesn’t quite feel real yet.
So, he’s the happiest he’s ever been, but he’s also absolutely exhausted, and so when he reads the end of Nix’s letter he thinks for a moment that he might be hallucinating. He almost hands it to Kitty to check, but… He hasn’t yet found a way to explain Dick and Nix to Kitty. He doesn’t have a way to put it into words, how they are, the fact that they are to each other what she is to him. They’ve never spoken about it, not really, hinted at it, danced round it, understood each other perfectly, but never spoken about it.
Talbert will be with them in New Jersey. He wasn’t the problem. Harry remembers, clearly, one of the clearer memories of the war, the shuttered, shattered look on Tab’s face in the ruined streets of Hagenau, the way Harry had obviously stumbled, well-meaning, into something rich with suffering. Just like everything else. And then just after that, the sheer rage, so fleeting but so clear, running across Nix, a man who’d never looked at him like that, ever, and… Well. Maybe he should have seen this one coming.
**