#a drabble bc idk the crimson wave hit over the weekend and with it a deluge of winnix tears

[evidenceof]

the other day i imagined the kinds of postcards nix and dick send each other after after. if they fell in love during the war and never pursued it stateside (yk, true to life etc). dick never takes the job. lew never tries to force him. they marry who they marry but send each other postcards.

dick's are all from pennsylvania, if only to show lew existing buildings and street corners, 'this isn't hicksville, lewis.' sometimes dick gets a hold of postcards of places he'd like to visit and send them to lew. lew tells himself it's only out of curiosity, the need to be out in the world when he buys himself tickets those same beaches, mountains, and quaint little towns from dick's wish-i-was-there postcards. lew sends dick a different one of different views, an i-wish-you-were here from the same places. dick keeps them in an album beside the fading photograph of him and nix in their pinks and greens. when nix has had too much to drink, his handwriting loops together furious ts and js the same way dick writes in cursive on the back of landscapes.

at some point lew tells dick that he's terrible at correspondence. dick says he knows this, he has always known this. but he doesn't tell lew they've been sending postcards to each other at least once a month. because dick wishes he wasn't counting and lew's busy doing the same. lew sends two postcards from the same place to make up for it. dick's album runs out of space so he buys another.

lew keeps dick's postcards in different coat and touser pockets. he knows he likes finding dick everywhere even in the insides of his dinner jackets. the closest thing he has now, a measly substitute he knows, to falling into step behind his best friend. dick's postcards are folded and refolded, dog-eared and thumbed down. they fall out when lew fishes out his flask from the same pockets. once lewis almost abandons the latter altogether, when the postcard, mountains of austria, was caught by an errant breeze. on the back dick wrote that one of the cows had given birth, and that he had celebrated by having not one, but two (can you believe it, lew?), cups of ice cream. lew caught the thick rectangular thing in time, all new beginnings and old habits he wished he could witness. his flask now dented forever.

they never say, 'i love you.' but at some point they stop writing, 'your friend,' and instead sign off to say, 'yours,'

'always' is left unsaid but they never stop sending each other postcards. 'yours, lewis nixon' 'yours, dick winters'