Disclaimer: As stated in the summary, this story is "slash", meaning that it deals with homosexuality. If you are uncomfortable with this, please do not read on. I do not expect to ever change my stance on slash - I'm very devoted to it in fanfiction - and I have no illusions about changing yours. It would be most beneficial to the both of us if we allowed each other to coexist and create in our own spaces.
Secondly, I'd like to make a few things very clear. Many fans of the Band of Brothers miniseries are upset by slash stories considering the accuracy of the film and the fact that the men these characters are based off of are still around. This is understandable, but I have my own personal views on it; I'd like to make it perfectly clear that I do not know the men of the 101st Airbourne, nor do I think I will ever get the chance to meet them in this lifetime. Their relationships to one another, friendly or otherwise, are absolutely none of my business. I do not pretend to assert that events in this story happened, could have happened, should have happened, nor do I prefer this story to the real events. What happened during World War II was adapted into a book, and then adapted into a miniseries, which for all it's accuracy did indeed hollywood-ize these happenings.
The faces I envisioned while writing this story are those of actors Ross McCall and Eion Bailey, who I believe did an excellent job in the film and had an undeniable chemistry, whether you believe it to be purely platonic or romantic. This fanfiction is confined entirely to the movieverse characters, and NOT the real veterans - I reiterate, NOT the real veterans. Again, if this does not sit well with you (which I would understand if it did not) you are free to continue browsing Please do not read on. Once more, I have defended my position when it comes to writing Band of Brothers slash and do not see myself changing it in the near future, nor do I expect I will change yours.
Lastly, I would like to say that I do not write slash in order to cause harm, as I do not see homosexuality as a negativity or a perversion. I ultimately write slash fanfiction to explore the deeper side of the characters, delve into the layers of the film, and create stories about love and what intolerance can do to a person. That is my aim. So if you are still with me, I hope very much that you enjoy.
Wild nights. Wild nights!
Webster rolls over, stares at his palm, feels the grit against the side of his face. He is drunk.
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
"Shit," Joe's voice is wet and sticky, his eyes, his lips. "Guess they don't teach you how to hold your fuckin' liquor at Yale."
Webster's eyes - so blue it hurts - move from the smoothed mounds of his own hand to the dirty boots to the bloused trousers to the thin fingers and sharp smile of Joe Liebgott, crouched before him, staring him down. The curve of his teeth match the arc of the bruise beneath the shoulder of Webster's regulation military blouse. Might I but moor tonight with thee.
"Harvard," Webster says. "I went to Harvard."
"Same fuckin' thing," Joe tells him, and for once in his life, Webster does not even want to correct him.
Futile the winds
To a heart in port
Done with the compass
Done with the chart
"What?" Joe asks, leaning forwards. "Speak up."
"Nothing," Webster says, and tries to push himself to his feet. The ground is sucking him under. "Emily Dickinson."
"Who?" Joe asks.
Might I but moor tonight with thee.
Webster remembers a time - a time? More like an era, years and years before - when he had sworn off drink without ever having tasted a drop. He had just finished studying Charles Baudelaire and had all but carved his poetry into his own flesh, he had been so enamoured. Les fleurs du mal. He had been taught - he laughs at the thought of it now - by a notorious wino of a professor. He had taken it all in, a naive, starry-eyed freshman, ardently memorizing it in half-learned French and devouring the English translation as though all his life he had been starving, starving.
It was easy to deny himself of something he had never even tried, however, and now in what seemed like an entire lifetime away, Baudelaire's prose - Au coeur d'un vieux faubourg, labyrinthe fangeux - was as irrelevant as a nursery rhyme. Nice to read, perhaps, but ultimately meaning nothing, nothing, nothing...
"Joe," Webster closes his eyes and allows himself to be helped to his feet. "Jesus Christ, I think I'm drunk."
"I think you are too, college boy," Joe Liebgott says, laughs, sneers. "I think you are too."
As Webster stumbles, as he collapses against Joe's side and Joe buoys him up, wraps his arm around his back and smiles into his mouth briefly, tangibly, burningly, Webster knows where this is going.
You smiled, you spoke, and I believed,
By every word and smile - deceived
Walter Savage Landor, Webster thinks. Not a favourite of his prof, an author he had rushed through in order to move onto Baudelaire all the faster. Webster had agreed at the time - he had always agreed - and had barely scanned the text. But the words seemed to resonate with him now, under the touch of Joe's smile, a smile that had him secretly, guiltily captivated upon the first viewing of it.
"Come on, Web," Joe slurs, and although Webster can remember every line of every poem he has ever studied, it takes him a moment to recall the name of the village they are in.
-0-
Whenever he and Joe ended up like this, Webster had always resorted to the literature in his head. Peaceful, logical, beautiful - lines of text that went two by two through his mind, memorized. He knew Baudelaire off by heart, knew Donne like he knew his own hands, knew Emily Dickinson as well as any lover. He became even more fluid when drunk, the poetry was so tangible he sometimes said it out loud without meaning to.
"Speak up," Liebgott would say, angrier and angrier every time Webster let a line or two slip. "Speak up, college boy."
But let not this last wish be vain; Webster always wanted to say, wanted to touch his face, smooth his hair, whisper it against his mouth. Deceive, deceive me once again!
"Speak up," Joe Liebgott says, the contrary Webster only falls silent.
The streets of Schoonderlogt are empty, the darkness only broken by the occasional shaft of golden light from a pub, a stable, a bedroom window. Webster is swamped entirely by words, too many words that crowd in his mouth and leak from it's corners, he wants to speak Dickinson and Yeats and Shakespeare - good God! Shakespeare and every beautiful damn thing that crazy man had ever laid upon paper - or maybe he just wants Liebgott to kiss him again, like he did the night before, to kiss him so completely, utterly, entirely. Were I with thee, wild nights should be our luxury!
"God dammit," Liebgott says, "can never understand a god damn word you say, you know that?" Webster realizes he has been speaking aloud.
Charles Baudelaire, diseased and lovesick on the streets of Paris, watching as his work - his poetry, his life, his soul - becomes synonymous with sin. William Yeats, writing from behind the mask of Crazy Jane and her wayward lover, Jack the Journeyman, lamenting sin and sex and religion. Emily Dickinson, peering out from between her curtains, anchored in the solitary blackness of her room furiously scribbling out lonely poem after lonely poem after lonely poem - this is a letter to the world that never wrote to me.
Webster all of a sudden cannot see the peace in literature anymore. It is chaos. It is ripping and tearing and crying and loving. It is the pain and hope and lust and sensation of Joe Liebgott's eyes seeking out the darkest alley in Schoonderlogt and pulling him in.
-0-
If Webster was unsure as to how drunk Liebgott was before, he knows now. He knows because Liebgott never touches him unless his eyes are as wet as the back of his throat and his mouth tastes like the bottom of a whiskey bottle. The kisses are fast, pressed, hurried, hurried...Liebgott is all the things that Webster's words are not. Rough. Anxious. Centered and heavy and physical. Hungry. His hands slide down Webster's front, rip open the fly of his pants, his mouth catches roughly at a spot on his neck and the alley spins and for a moment, for one single, wordless moment Webster's mind is blank.
He tries to speak Joe's name. It comes out as a blur between his lips.
-0-
When Webster wakes he will remember very little. He will not know that it will be his last peaceful day with the company, will not know that a young SS member miles away is carrying a bullet that will soon rip through the muscle in his leg and ground him, will not know that he and Liebgott will not speak for months after they take him away. He will not know that while he rests and heals, the boy that makes all the literature he ever learned dance wildly through his mind will be freezing in a foxhole, watching the trees around him explode and resenting him harder and harder. All these things he will not know. All he will understand, as the morning bleeds through the darkness of the night, is that he will not be able to read Emily Dickinson again without seeing sharp eyes between the words - done with the compass, done with the chart - feel the run of wandering hands throughout the sentences - wild nights should be our luxury - see that smile through the lilt of the mysterious stranger's poetry.
Might I but moor tonight with thee.
Might I but moor tonight with thee.