FIC: No End to This Unraveling (Buck/Luz)

I've been working on this for a while, and now I'm finally throwing up my hands and just posting it. I've got to exorcise this stupid thing before I try geeksicle's challenge. So, thanks to tobiascharity for being Unoffical Military Consultant, to caudelac for originally hooking me up with the poem from which I ripped my title (it's here, for the curious, and it's absolutely sublime), and to minttown1 and garnettrees for willingly beta-ing even though they didn't know the fandom.


No End to This Unraveling
                                                                                                "Why
                                                                                                is there no end
                                                                                                to this unraveling."
                                                                                                --Bruce Weigl, "Elegy for Peter"


(August 30th, 1944; Aldbourne, England)
After their assault on Normandy, the veteran members of Easy Company had begun to define the war in degrees of stupidity: revocation of weekend passes, training exercises on leave, chickenshit officers. But for Luz, the single stupidest thing came during one of those times when it was barely even a war at all, when it was just bright, close-quartered Aldbourne in a lull and their first engagement already an indistinct legend that impressed replacements over beers. The single stupidest thing was that the first time Luz ever got hurt was in a goddamn game of darts.

He wouldn't have pegged Buck Compton as a devious man, but he had been desperate. He'd conceived of a scheme brilliant in its simplicity: find someone the men wouldn't suspect, have him shoot left-handed all night like an amateur, and then when some poor idiot put money on the table, rack up a pile of winnings. Brilliant, but no one would believe Luz by himself, and Lipton, when approached, merely gave that amused, noncommittal smile and shook his head. Buck, eavesdropping, surprised them both by breaking in.

"You're a fast talker, George," he had said. "I'm convinced. Where do I sign up?" Luz had given him the once-over and commented wryly, "The last time you said that to someone, you ended up in the paratroopers," but all he could think of was how Buck was the first of them all to call him George.

And Luz appreciated the offer. He needed funds for a last night on the town, and Buck was the one to get them. The others trusted Buck, with his wide, guileless grin, his strange frankness. So it was that they stood brushing shoulders in the brown, stuporous heat of a bar one evening: and Luz, watching the long slumberous uncoiling of Buck's arm releasing the dart, had begun to trust him, too.

Buck, without prior consultation, accepted two packs of cigarettes as their prize, but Luz could not be angry. Disappointed, yes, but not angry. He stayed disappointed until Buck took him aside to a corner and murmured, "I'm sorry."

"I tell you," said Luz sardonically, "I asked you to make us a few bucks, and you get us two packs of smokes. I can see how you might have mixed them up, though."

Buck smiled, a flash as swift and shattering as the look that later would skim over his pale eyes (later, later, when England was a blur of heat and hope). Their private corner began to collapse as other men drifted toward the dartboard, and Buck leaned over, patted Luz on the arm, and pressed both packs into his hand. His contrite voice said, close to Luz's ear, "You keep 'em all, George. I don't smoke that much, anyway."

A shudder went through Luz, and he flushed without knowing why. Maybe it had been too long since someone had reached out to him; too long since that night before Normandy when, weighed down with equipment, he had been half-lifted into the black belly of his plane. Maybe he'd wrestled too long with anonymity, trying on the voices of others, and here now was Buck, speaking in his ear and calling him by name.

Buck was already moving away, but over his shoulder he suggested, "We've just got different reasons for gambling. I don't want to go looking for something out there," and the sweep of his arm included all of it, the murmurous pubs and the lonely girls and the unlit streets unfolding through the night like seams split in the Earth. Maybe the Earth was coming to pieces, anything was possible in the late-summer limbo of '44, but Buck, moving, unbroken and still moving, said, "There's this girl waiting back home, so there's nothing else for me to look for."

And then the shudder that Luz felt was pain, like the shrewd lunge of the dart; pain caught him through the throat as Buck went away. Bull's-eye, he thought ironically. He closed his hand around the two packs and stood in the low light of the bar, swaying. Something had lodged right where he should have been able to swallow, a little node of lingering ache.

Luz only won two packs of cigarettes that night, but that was fine. He stored them in his footlocker and rationed them, so that he might smoke the last one on the day the war ended. He put them away and went to bed hollow but for the radiation of that private knot of pain, and he didn't mind being flat broke on his last night in civilization. Somehow, he no longer wanted anything out there in the darkness either.

*             *             *             *             *             *             *             *             *
(December 16th, 1944; Mourmelon-Le-Grande, France)
Outside the movie house, the streets rippled with chaos, the universal law of wartime entropy: men joining their platoons, sergeants gathering equipment. Luz and Joe Toye emerged together into the gusting snow, white-breathed, but Luz held back at the door.

He was still smarting from Lipton's remark in the theater. Joe he didn't mind, because it was Joe's nature to tell him to shut up, but he'd never earned Lip's quiet disapproval before. Sometimes it was too difficult to tell when the jokes became an annoyance, when he strayed too far into absurdity; too difficult to tell until Lip glanced back and said sharply, "I'm tryin' to watch this." It stung a little even now, so he let Joe go ahead and leaned against the wall for a quick smoke.

He waited half in shadow, watching the fierce blooming of the trash-can fires on every corner. A group of platoon leaders gathered on the opposite side of the road, warming their hands. Luz was preparing to snuff his cigarette and join the rest of Easy when Buck appeared in the doorway and halted there, red-eyed and staring, wavering in the unreal illumination.

Almost no one had seen him since his discharge from the hospital, with four healed holes in what Luz had once dubbed his best asset. Luz had heard the word from Malarkey that Buck was different, but he hadn't believed it at first. Buck, Luz had thought, didn't change, like something he once heard Webster murmur in a low, wondering, phantasmal voice at nightfall in a foxhole, while they watched the constellations flicker into being: "I am as constant as the northern star." (Harvard lit. majors had to be good for something, anyway.) But Buck did change. Buck was laid low in a ditch in Holland, and disappeared for a time -- a time when Luz drank a little more than usual, slept a little less -- and then at last he came back to them, and stood transfixed on the threshold of a movie house in Mourmelon with the firelight passing stark as a flare over his face.

On an impulse, Luz asked, "Smoke?" and offered the cigarette. Buck hadn't seen him there before, but there seemed to be no shock left in him, so he merely shook his head. Silence began to creep in again, and then Buck looked up and, without meeting Luz's eyes, said, "Actually, George, I could use one, if we could get off this goddamn street." Luz pretended not to notice the way his voice cracked like the cold snap of ice; he brought him around to a narrow alley just out of sight of the other men.

There they huddled in the lee of the building, and Luz passed Buck the cigarette. After a drag, Buck returned it and, jerkily, covered his face.

Luz cursed silently. This would be easier if he didn't respect Buck, as he respected no one else except maybe Lip and Captain Winters. He reached over and placed his hand lightly on Buck's shoulder, he rummaged through his memory for the last moment of warmth they had known, and he said (as though it were only a game of darts, only the thud of a near-miss), "You're having a tough night. People have tough nights."

He could feel Buck laugh, with an effort, under his arm. That was all that mattered. When Buck uncovered his face, his eyes still had that dazed cast, but he'd stopped shaking.

"You're just the same, George. Always know what to say."

It seemed as good a time as any. Luz let the cigarette drop and gracelessly closed the gap between them. He didn't know quite what he was doing, only that he found himself leaning on Buck in the close alley, the heady scent of smoke high in his nostrils. "What would you do," he was saying, a playful echo, "without George Luz?"

Still Buck showed no surprise, and after a moment he chuckled. "I'm sure you know you have a reputation for playing grab-ass, but considering the state of mine, can we just skip that part?"

Luz felt enough surprise for both of them, but he laughed as well. "We're outta order anyway. We've already done the smoking." Neither found this especially funny, but at least it was noise beyond the clamor of soldiers and the throb of passing planes. Buck's fingers settled on the back of Luz's neck, and then he was shaking again, or maybe Luz was, or maybe it was only the jeeps rattling up around the corner.

No time remained for anything more, because already Lieutenant Peacock's voice rose above the others, calling for Lieutenant Compton. Buck touched Luz awkwardly, not quite an embrace and not quite a caress, and said in a flat voice, "I may live to regret this one. My girl...."

Luz tilted his head up and grinned crazily, still disbelieving the pressure of Buck's hand.

"If you live," he said, "what's there to regret?"

Buck averted his gaze, a spasm of unnamable emotion crossing his face. In the quickening snow, he stepped away toward the mouth of the alley, and he did not answer.

*             *             *             *             *             *             *             *             *
(January 9, 1945; Bastogne, Belgium)
Luz slept in an unfamiliar foxhole for hours, the chill burrowing insidiously through him. Lip lay nearby for a long time, a cigarette dying in his mouth. He was not warm either, but he stayed up, staring blankly at the cloistered forest, and that was comfort enough. Luz dozed on him, and half-woke when at last he moved.

"I'm going to see what we can do for Muck and Penkala," Lip said wearily. "You wanna stay here?" Luz nodded gratefully, drowsily, and rolled again into unconsciousness.

He slept more deeply then, stiff and still as rigor mortis. He found dreams beneath the surface of slumber, like forgotten mines that swelled up and burst in the cold, and sometimes in that dim no-man's land, he couldn't skirt them. Sometimes the packed wall of the foxhole fell away, and he remembered--

He struggles from beneath the branches of a fallen tree, courtesy of the last shelling attack, and pauses. A faint cry comes to him. Lip has gone to check on the men, but he left in the opposite direction, and someone among the trees is crying. Luz swallows, touches his rifle for reassurance, and follows the sound.

At first he thinks there is nothing wrong: Buck stands in the clearing, tall and erect as ever, as if at attention. But his helmet is off. Luz finds that strange, a soldier exposed in the middle of the Bastogne winter, and he finds it strange how pale Buck is bareheaded, how his hair looks as colorless as the snow. And it's Buck crying, without tears, his mouth open, his eyes dilated and fixed on the bloodied bodies of Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere.

Doc Roe comes soon after and sets to work without asking questions. Luz is thankful, because he has no answers.

He convinces Buck to stumble to a nearby log, all the while murmuring nonsensically to him, thinking detachedly that even now Buck is without duplicity, out in the open, fully exposed. Luz sits beside him on the log, warming Buck's hands in his own and talking, of all things, about the movie they saw during that respite in Mourmelon, does Buck remember that, and the exact way Marlene Dietrich asked, "Got a penny?" When he catches a glimpse of Lip emerging from farther down the line, he breathes a sigh of relief and, telling Buck to sit tight, he flees for reinforcement.

By then they're moving Joe and Bill, the rusty smell of blood everywhere. For a moment the world rushes in on Luz and the sky seems to recede through the lengthening tree trunks, and all he can do is watch them in their private agony. Behind him, Lip puts a hand on his shoulder and fights for his attention:

"How's Buck?" Luz doesn't answer. "Luz--"

"Luz." He stirred. Lip had crawled down beside him again and was shaking him gently. "C'mon, that's enough. You're going to get too cold. Gotta move around a little."

He obeyed, sitting up and supporting himself against the dirt wall. He was safe in Lip's lonely foxhole, in the depthless frigidity of night, and just a few hundred yards away, in the hole where he should have been, Muck and Penkala were dead.

"We got their dog tags," said Lip dully. Then, in the measured tones of a soldier making a report, he added, "We hear Toye and Guarnere are getting pulled back soon, out of the aid station. Heffron's still pretty torn up about Guarnere, so he's bedding down with the medics tonight; not exactly regulation, three men in a foxhole, but what the hell. And you're staying here, at least for the night... if you want." He put a hand on Luz's knee, and Luz needed make no reply. "And Buck--" A pause. "They're taking him off the line. He's not coming back."

"Luz, how's Buck?"

"He's fine," says Luz, because he can make it true if he finds the right words, like hitting on precisely the right inflection for an authentic impression. Like "Got a penny?"; that one took him many long nights in the foxholes, when there was nowhere else for the mind to go, nothing else to say.

"You sure?"

Lip shivered. "You got any more cigarettes, Luz?"

"Always," replied Luz. There was one tucked away at the bottom of his pocket that he had taken from his footlocker just before they left for Bastogne. It was a lucky charm of sorts, the last of the cigarettes he'd won on that night in '44 thanks to Buck's steady hand. Touching it, he felt again the splinter of exquisite pain catch him through the throat, and he recalled Buck's wide, easy smile and the warmth of his grip. He pulled out the cigarette and pressed it into Lip's hand, as Buck had done to him five months before, Buck who grinned and told him fondly, "You're a fast talker, George."

Lip gave Luz an exhausted smile and held his arm in brief, silent understanding--

Lip's fingers rest on his shoulder, and Luz says, "Yes, he's fine." He glances back at Buck, slumped on the log, gone away into himself. Buck is always going away -- leaving Luz stunned with two packs of smokes in his hand, leaving him blushing like a kid behind the Mourmelon movie house, and now this. It's almost funny that Luz has probably worshipped Buck a little ever since they met, and only now does he have a chance to say anything that matters.

He exhales.

Lip's hand went away, he noted vaguely, and then it was funny, funny and tasting of bile, funny that the passing contact of a hand meant more than anything he could say. Funny that after almost a year of every conceivable human emotion, all that he could feel was bitter irony, hunkered there in the frosted ground while Lip, who didn't smoke, lit up. After all of the fast talking, all of the appropriation of other people's words, his own voice was too small to encompass the enormity of this: trees in tatters, Heffron trembling in his sleep beside Doc Roe, Joe and Bill lying side by side. For almost a year, he had known the stupidest and most truthful part of the entire goddamn war -- Buck, who pierced him in a bar and loved him in an alley and left him, cold, in a frozen wood in France -- and when the time came, he could only turn to Lip, who supported him by the shoulder, and surrender what was left.

There is a moment of absolute, concussive clarity, like the shock of a shell before pain fills the gap, and he says to Lip (because there is nothing else to say, no jokes, no answers, only the unending echo of a year's dying):

"I think you should probably go talk to him now, huh?"

And Lip had, had gone and knelt and somehow formed words, soft as the snow, that no one else ever heard. Lip had, because it was his job-- and because Luz, alone, could not.