Soldier's Things - Defiant

Nix had managed to put off fighting with his father for the first week Dick was staying with them. It hadn't been as hard as he'd expected. A strange switch had been flipped in his father's head now that his son had come home from war having served with one of the better known units in the war. Stanhope had always held a kind of pride for his son - even Lew could see that. After all, he'd done well in school, he won his sailing competitions, he'd volunteered to serve and had graduated from OCS as a 2nd Lieutenant. None of that mattered when they would get into their regular battle royales, however. Nix was a let down, on those days, a disappointment, just short of a complete failure.

That undercurrent was absent in this fight. Some hind part of his brain seemed aware of this as he dug both hands into his hair, shutting his eyes as his father shouted. Stanhope was just angry, and for once, Nix couldn't be sure that he was actually at the root of it. The words battering at him all seemed the same, but the frustrated drive wasn't behind them.

"You need to take this seriously!"

Nix tipped his head back, refusing to open his eyes. "I do-"

"I don't think you do, Lewis! I don't think you do! This is your life now, no more playing around with your army buddies-"

"What Army budies!" Nix finally forgot that Dick was sitting out on the front porch sharing what had to be an awkward glass of iced tea with his mother - who was long since adept at pretending she couldn't hear her son and husband curse at each other. "It's just Dick, Stan. Just Dick! He is the only person I've spoken to in the past week! He is the only person I know anymore. Don't you get that? Katharine is gone back to her parents and she took Daniel with her."

"Exactly! And what are you going to do about it? If you had any sense you would bring her back, Lewis, you wouldn't just let her run off with your son."

"She is divorcing me, Stan, what about that do you not understand?" Nix turned, but his father's voice stopped him from actually walking away.

"She can't divorce you if you don't let her! That's not how this works, Lewis, that's not how being a husband works-"

"And what do you know about being a husband!" Lew's voice rose in decible, finally rising above his father's volume, "what do you know about any of this, you damned old fool! You don't know anything!"

He didn't pause to see if his words showed up like a slap across his father's face, to see if they'd landed as he'd intended them. The screen door smacked shut behind him and Dick was already on his feet as Lew thumped down the front stairs. He could hear his friend, polite to the very end, apologize to his mother before Dick's footsteps echoed his on the stairs, then softer behind him on the front walk. Nix didn't slow down, turning a sharp right down the drive. He needed to be off the property, away from the house, his parents, from this nightmare of a life that seemed to be slowly sucking him down into a quagmire.

"Lew-" Nix didn't slow down as he half walked, half ran down the drive, even though he could hear Dick trying to catch up. He hit the road and didn't break stride, crossing it without looking for traffic and pushing into the trees on the otherside. There was a creek about half a mile through the woods where he'd smoked his first cigarettes, drank his first booze, kissed his first girl, basically did everything his father would have hated.

He only slowed his pace once he was certain he wouldn't be seen from the road and Dick was at his shoulder in a minute. They walked in silence, ducking under branches and pushing back brambles, trying to stay on the overgrown path. Their shows crunched softly on old leaves, spot coming mottled through the treetops. His first crashing arrival into the treeline had quieted the birds and there was only the occasional whistle or trill. Instinctively, they walked a foot or so apart although they were perfectly in line. Smaller targets, more ground covered, one round wouldn't take them both out at once. Nix only glanced at Dick once and the redhead was watching the trees, his shoulders back and his jaw set. He wondered if his fingers were itching for a gun. Nix's weren't. They never had. His rifle had been ornamental. He wondered if his father had any real notion of what it had all been like.

The sound of the creek faded in slowly as they neared it, swollen with fall rain, frothy up near the top of the hill where it came over a short fall. Dick and Nix stopped at the same moment on the edge of the slope and immediately Nix could feel Dick's gaze on him.

"You know my dad almost killed a man when he was at Yale?" Nix didn't know why he said it.

"Really." As usual, Dick sounded as though Nix were relating a story he'd heard a thousand times, even if Nix knew him well enough to tell he was surprised.

"Yup. Bashed his head in with a metal bolt. I never really knew why, but I figure that doesn't matter."

Dick nodded once, but didn't say anything. Nix watched him impassively for half a minute, trying to see if the question was there, trying to see if Dick wouldn't balk at this conversation. But Dick never balked at anything.

"Did he ever hit you, Lew?"

"Sure." Nix shrugged, as though he hadn't just been praying Dick would asked, "but never like that. Smack in the face some times. Caught my mom a good one once or twice, but she served him right back, so-" Another shrug. He felt like a seventeen year old, somehow, trying to impress a girl. The thought made him take a step forward, starting down the steep slope to reach the creek. Dick followed without urging.

"Thing is, I might have liked it better if just gave me a good belt every so often. But that isn't what it comes down to. Never does. He just likes to chase me out of the house, make me so angry I can't talk right, like that proves how much smarter he is or something." The last time Nix had spoken about his father like this, it had been with Katharine. Nix came to a stop with the toes of his shoes just barely in the water and thought of David. He brought a hand up over his eyes and tried to imagine himself ever raising a hand to his son.

"He's bitter."

Nix looked up, taken off guard. "What?"

"He's bitter, Lew. He's jealous. You did better in school, right? And you didn't have to leave because you nearly killed a man."

Nix snorted and shook his head. "No, I left to learn how to kill men."

"You left to fight a war. Did your father serve?"

"No, no, he was too young. Well-" he gave Dick a look that was attempting to be smug and only sort of succeeding. "That and he was too busy trying to club a man to death."

"The point is, you've proved yourself in ways he couldn't seem to manage." Dick sat suddenly, catching himself on a downed tree, and started to pull off his shoes. Nix watched him stupidly. Socks off, Dick rolled the bottom of his pants up and stepped into the running water, biting his bottom lip just barely in reaction to the cold. Nix felt his stomach clench.

"Have I proved myself?"

"Yes." Dick watched the water run over his feet, then looked up and his smile wiped the doubt off Lew's face. "You have."