Only a Paper Moon [ Band of Brothers ] 3

[15] The Dark Night

[ 15 ]

THE DARK NIGHT

Summary: "I'm not even sad anymore. I'm just exhausted." OR, Alice is joined by Nixon as she watches the sunset from her favorite dock in Zell am See. There, she confronts the dark night of the soul that has consumed her since Grant's shooting.

June 1945

Zell am See, Austria

Alice sat on the stones. The sun had warmed them all day. She sat cross-legged at the end of the dock, her tank top and shorts still dry. She hadn't wanted to swim. She just wanted to think.

The view over the Zeller See was beautiful in an oddly melancholic way. The towering mountains and dusky sky used a palette of blues, golds, reds, and pinks. Sunlight, fading along with the sun itself, reflected in the lake, creating a peaceful stillness of sky above and below the mountains. Beautiful, really.

But her heart ached. Even as the blue faded to pink and the pink faded to red, Alice stared at the waters. All around her, a stillness fell. Nightingales sang in the trees behind her. At the shore, the waves washed over the rocks and around the reeds. A wind rustled the plants. Stillness.

The last few days had been a mess. Her life was a mess. She had yet to see George since he'd stepped in front of her pistol. At the memory of his pleading, his insistence that she not take the shot, her throat tightened. He'd said anyone else could take the shot, but not her. Not her.

George had been right. He was always right about those kinds of things. A lot like Marc, really. Her brother had always known how to make people smile. He'd known the right things to say to the right people. She'd tried. Alice had tried to learn how to do that, how to comfort and champion. But it seemed since Bavaria, she had been the one they'd all worried over.

Alice looked down into the water. The rippling water reminded her of oil on canvas. The waves were brushstrokes, reds and violets and deep blues interplaying as far her eyes could see. Her shadow fell across the water closest to her. It obscured the beauty.

"Thought I'd find you here."

Nix. Alice twisted her body to look at him. He walked down the dock, hair a bit disheveled. In the fading light, his features blended almost like a Da Vinci painting. Her small smile grew as she tried to imagine him as an artistic masterpiece. She'd always loved his brown eyes. They were warm. Better than her own blue ones which did nothing but remind her of the lie of Hitler's Perfect Aryan.

"How long have you been down here?" Nix asked. He'd settled down beside her, sides touching. He took a drink. Then he turned to her. "Alice?"

She glanced his way. Her thoughts had carried her to all sorts of dark places. Places she didn't want to return to. Storage rooms of Parisian bars, hallways of troopships, barns in Holland, frozen medical tents in Bastogne. They haunted her dreams. She wanted to go back. She wanted to remember the gardens of Paris. She wanted to sun on her face and summers on the Côte d'Azur.

But then she looked at him. A little bit hurt, a little bit broken, just like her. And he was hers. She was his. So she smiled a bit, offering him a shrug. "An hour maybe."

Silence fell between them again. She could feel him watching, his gaze taking in every inch of her. She wondered how bad she looked.

"Luz asked about you," he continued. "And Malarkey."

She shot him a tiny smile again, pushing the hair out of her face as she turned from the water to him. The sun had almost completely set, its last rays shining over them. "Those boys worry too much."

Nix snorted. "Usually I'd agree with you."

Not this time, though. She understood his meaning. Gene had been by to see her, given her a soft-spoken lecture on watching her smoking and drinking. The same one she'd gotten every so often since Bastogne. The same one she suspected she'd get time and again for the foreseeable future. He'd made her promise to watch her cigarettes.

"I'm not even sad anymore," she murmured. Alice felt her resolve crumble. She couldn't hold this in. Holding in the anger had led to her surreptitiously ordering the execution of an unproven Nazi. Holding in the anger had led to her nearly shooting an American private in the head. Not that he hadn't deserved it. But Adelaide never would've done that. Before leaving Paris, she'd never have pulled the trigger. "I'm just exhausted."

"I know."

His response surprised her. She turned to him, met his gaze. He looked at her with the same expression he'd had on his face two nights ago. The same expression from when he'd shown up at her door after midnight, saying George Luz had gotten him, and defying the fear of court-martial by spending the night. She'd needed it. The warmth of his presence, the love in his eyes. It was a love she didn't have for herself. It was, perhaps, a love he didn't even have for himself. She could love him though. They could do it for each other.

Nix had asked her not to shut down. He reminded her of the need to speak. And so she decided to speak. "I don't know who I am anymore, Nix."

Saying it out loud made her pause. She didn't know. The girl she remembered growing up as would've hated everything Alice had become. But then, the girl who took the name Alice and trained to shoot rifles and translate enemy documents, something in her hated the Adelaide of Paris and Hamburg.

"What do you mean?"

She sighed. "I don't know who I am. I hate being German. But I'm not fully French, either. I'm not American." Tears welled in her eyes, and her throat tightened. It took a moment before she could speak again, her hand flying to her mouth as she tried to stuff her tears back down. Voice wavering, she continued on. "I don't know anymore! I hate them. And I hate that I hate them. I am them."

"Jesus Christ. Alice, you know you're not one of them," he insisted. "You of all people should know that!" He scoffed a bit, trying to maintain his composure in his frustration at her self hatred. "Damnit, Alice. You're the one who's insisted that not all Germans are Nazis for the past three years!"

Nix was right, of course. He was often right about those things. He'd been keeping her on track as far back as Toccoa. Back then she'd not seen it. On the Samaria, she'd nearly cut him out of her life forever for protecting her from herself. She always thanked God that she hadn't. The war had taken everything but had given her Lewis Nixon.

"I love you," she told him. She couldn't hold the tears back. Not when she sat in her favorite spot in all Austria. Not while she sat in the dark, the night around her, the sun gone beneath the horizon so that the only warmth came from the man on her left.

He pulled her into a hug. Alice closed her eyes. She tried to block out everything but the rhythm of his beating heart. She didn't know who she was. But she knew who he was. And she knew he'd help her find herself again. She may have been the one to defend the German people. But he'd been the one to defend the innocence of her previous life, the one before Marc took a bullet to the head and the Nazi pinned her against a wall. He said Adelaide had been strong.

She didn't know about that. But Alice did know that she trusted Nix more than she trusted herself. So she just tried to stay calm as she felt his fingers in her hair, and the warmth of his chest. The world was cold. But Nix was warm.