O Magnum Mysterium

O Magnum Mysterium

A very belated Christmas gift for the dear Flower, who adores this pairing as much as I do. Sorry it’s so incredibly late! <3

A big thank you to queerapostate for the excellent beta.

NOTES: This is a time stamp from a Winnix universe I haven’t published the first establishing fic yet for, so I hope it’s not too confusing. xD The short points are they leave New Jersey, they get a rundown farmhouse, grow some livestock feed, Dick battles with his PTSD, Lew battles his alcoholism and there’s both strife and happiness. Once I get the other story finished, I’ll rope them all into a series.

Also! The choral piece mentioned is Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium.” It’s my very favorite and the sole catalyst for this fic. Here’s a link to the best version (in my opinion.)

https://open.spotify.com/track/31zjVEWfYxkeuuSnUHyUz3?si=3tlZhoH3R1ux1ydHAX2uSw

There are six Catholic churches in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Dick Winters visits five of them, his irritation and worry compounding with each crossed threshold, before he finds what he’s looking for.

It’s dark outside by the time he makes it to St. Mary’s. The temperature is rapidly dropping and the coat he threw on in the rush from the house does little to prevent the wind from snatching at his torso. He shivers, blowing into his hands before tugging at the iron latch handle of the entrance. The chime of bells at the top of the hour serve a melodic welcome as he shuts the thick door behind him, and with it the cold. The candlelight is dim enough that his eyes take a blinking moment to recalibrate after being in the snow-bright landscape outside.

At first, he’s taken aback by the splendor of the architecture and art within. It’s an unfamiliar style of worship, looming and lousy with decoration at every turn. Dick is used to a more humble religion. One without gold and marble. One that can be practiced in the lonely forests of Belgium by unlearned men in holes in the ground. A common man’s worship in a common tongue.

In the warmth of a thousand candles and the sacrament of the scenes painted on the walls, he can pick out nuances he knows and stories he cherishes and bridge the gap between the sects. He can look past the ceremony and see a place where a mosaic of people from different backgrounds and ages might gather to pray and serve.

Behind an altar crowned with poinsettias and greenery, the apostles and saints reach towards the gates of Heaven in a baroque style triptych. The frescoes on the dome are cracking in places, the oil and tempera separating from the plaster, but it ends up serving as a compliment to the historic brick and marble.

This place is old. The aura is old. The prayers that are patinated in layers on the friezes are old and the devotion resonating within these walls are an echo that can be felt rather than heard. So many souls have stopped here before, seeking something as he does. Surely some found what they were after. He hopes his luck sides with them.

Dick’s guard drops a hair and though it holds all the awkwardness of waving to a dear friend only to find out it’s a look-alike stranger, he crosses himself before making his way into the sanctuary.

He gives the crossing a scan, eyes darting to the handful of heads meandering along the altar or scattered amongst random pews. None of them are the person he seeks and with a grimace, he’s just about to turn on his heel and make for the final unchecked church across town, when the slightest movement draws his eye to the left.

There – shielded behind a line of towering columns. He’s sitting in the middle of the nave, on the farthest side of the aisle, closest to a magnificent pieta statue surrounded by red candles. Sprawled over the back of the pew like it’s a personal lounge chair. The darker side of the church, the long shadows cast by the flames shift and sway like an organic thing, softening the stone and somehow making the grandeur more domestic. A nook in which sinners can burrow and avoid their penance being on display.

It makes sense. Lewis Nixon would never willingly venture into a house of God unless there was a decent hiding spot.

Dick makes his way over to where he sits, taking great care to walk as softly as possible to avoid making a clatter of footfall on the stone. He slides into the pew behind Nixon, who makes no indication he’s noticed his arrival. He perches on the edge of the bench, elbows propped just to Nixon’s left.

“What are you doing here,” Dick whispers testily into his ear.

Nixon doesn’t startle. Instead, he wings a brow and flashes a smirk over his shoulder that suggests the answer should be obvious. He points up to the altar where the priest has just ceased communion for the evening and then to the choir shuffling in to assemble along the tabernacle for rehearsal.

“Thought it’d be nice to have dinner and a show,” he says, sounding pleased with himself.

Dick’s mouth goes pinched and he grits his teeth. His ire is too potent at the moment for Nix’s characteristic glibness to be charming. He has half a mind to drag him out into the street by his ear like an unruly child.

“I’ve been looking for you for hours . The house isn’t fit for guests, the cow and horses didn’t get brought in, and your sister arrives on the 8 o’clock train. Not to mention the active war zone you left of the kitchen.”

Nix’s sigh is dramatic and world-weary. “A man can’t make pies from scratch without a creative process.”

“You didn’t leave a note, Nix. I had to telephone Isabella Burris to find out where you’d gone.”

Nixon hums in false sympathy and slouches further down, somehow taking up more space than before. “And you said having a stalker wouldn’t come in handy.”

Dick leans forward on the edge of his seat, his grip on the wood at Nix’s shoulder groaning in warning from the pressure.

“Lewis,” he says, measuredly, each syllable given its own weighted pause. “It’s time to come home. It’s Christmas Eve.”

Nix ignores him, squinting up at the Madonna that casts a watchful eye on their scene from up on her pedestal.

“What do you think went through her mind when the angels told her, Dick? That her baby boy was doomed to become a sacrificial lamb.”

With a sigh, Dick drags a hand down his face, circling back up to press at the tension headache that’s gearing up behind his eye sockets.

“Nix–“

“Do you think she would have turned the job offer down if she’d known how it would end? Hell, would any of us have said yes to death if we’d known?”

“Nix, where’s the bottle?”

Nixon grins over his shoulder again, and pulls his coat lapels open to flash the inner pockets. Then he throws his hands wide, as if inviting Dick to pat him down.

“There isn’t one,” he promises. “This is genuine, all natural Nixon existential rumination.”

He has no reason to doubt Nix. Shameless creature that he is, he’s never lied about his drinking before. Or the relapses. It’s taken almost three years, countless tribulations and a brief fracturing of their relationship, but the sobriety streak is finally starting to hold. Nix has found other ways to overpower the demons in his head and Dick has never been prouder of him. Determined to be as supportive a partner as he can be, he’s learned to read the warning signs, the little flags that are raised when Nix’s will is in danger of collapsing. There have been no flags recently. He’s on good terms with his sister again and though his mother’s illness is a stressor, he’s been coping well. The fall harvest was more bountiful than they’d anticipated so the money is alright for a while and the furnace on the back of the farmhouse is holding steady from Nix’s most recent repairs. There is no external reason he can see for diving back into a bottle today. Still, there’s a nagging of guilt at having to interrogate him, and Dick ducks his head.

“I had to ask,” he says, in way of an apology.

There’s no sarcasm in Nix’s smile. Just a forgiving fondness. “I know.”

It occurs to Dick then; Nix has sought the sanctity of an unfamiliar Catholic church on Christmas Eve, sober and in sound mind, with a necessity strong enough to abandon his hosting responsibilities. He’s left Dick to fret about his whereabouts in order to meditate alone in the shadows.

There’s a reason. Nix doesn’t do whimsies. He doesn’t make Dick worry anymore without justification.

He stands and circumnavigates the end of the pew to slide into the spot next to Nix, readjusting the ends of his scarf into his lap with a gentle clearing of his throat. The impending and formidable list of remaining chores to do before day breaks is pushed outside the boundaries of the space they occupy, momentarily unimportant. Dick glances briefly at Nix, who doesn’t acknowledge his new position, then raises a parallel gaze to the Madonna.

They wait.

After a few bars of warm up, the choir picks up a gentle, harmonic piece that starts soft and raises in dynamic like undulating waves. The acoustics blend and twirl their sound into something much grander than their eight member count suggests. Something ethereal and angelic.

Dick rations his breathing, allowing the weight of preparing the farmhouse for Christmas on schedule to get carried away into the dulcet overtones. It’s easy.  To ground himself and sit down for a change, to let his mind slowly switch into observation mode instead of action. It’s a setting so rarely used. Too many things to keep the farm and the business and the relationship working and never enough hours in the day.

He can’t recall the last time he sat down to breathe deeply. To invite music into his consciousness instead of stress.

“Oh great mystery and wonderful sacrament,” Nix translates softly, tilting his head to catch the elongated vowels of the next sung phrase. “That the animals should see the newborn Lord storytelling? Trifling? Shit, hold on. Iacentem in context. Ah! Lying. Lying in a manger.”

“You speak Latin?” He shouldn’t be surprised at this point that Nix can still surprise him.

Nix flashes him a smirk that could be considered flirty. “Only enough to be abysmal at it.” He waggles his heavy brows. “My tongue is much better suited for other things.”

Despite the inevitable start of a flush at the innuendo, Dick frowns, shoulders stiffening. He cuts a quick check of the perimeter to double check for potential eavesdroppers. “We are in a church, Lew.”

Nix gestures up and down the length of his reclining figure. “The Lord knows what He made when He made it, Dick. I make no apologies.”

“So it’s a nativity hymn,” says Dick, attempting to steer the conversation back into neutral territory.

Sensing a potential spike in Dick’s hard earned requiescence, Nix backs off, ducks his head in a half-hearted nod.

“More or less,” he tells him. “This is more of a Gregorian mimic than a true chant. It’s sort of splicing where the admiration is aimed, between mother and child. The subject narrative is messy. But their intonation is good – as far as I can tell.”

He forgets sometimes, that Nixon is not only ivy-league educated, but well versed in categories rarely mentioned. He’s heard him pick out complicated Rachmaninoff compositions on charred, out-of-tune pianos in bombed out buildings, has seen him tinker tractor engines back to wholeness after complete dissection. Nix knows the steps to three forms of waltzes and can hold his own against politicians in discussions of economic merit. He’s bored with the daily crossword puzzles in the newspaper and can recite Shakespearean sonnets from memory if the subject being mocked is worth the joke.

The Lew he knows is whip-smart and clever to a fault, his intelligence the cause of a good many daily struggles, including his penchant for laziness and the need to drown his claptrap memory with booze.

It’s easy to forget he is also the more sensitive of the two of them.

Guilt suddenly gnaws at Dick’s repose and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. He’s missed something. Something small and perhaps vital lost to the hustle and bustle of trying to perfect a false image of what happy holidays should look like, instead of paying attention to what was in front of his face.

He wants to ask, to demand what the oversight is so he can correct it quickly and not fall victim to his shortcomings as a partner until after Christmas has passed. But Nixon’s posture, sprawled and feline as it is, is distant. Something tells him it would be the wrong choice. Instead he twists at the waist to face Nix, using body language to telegraph what he should have opened with as soon as he laid eyes on him in the pew.

I’m here now, Lew. I’m listening.

It takes Nixon until the second chorus to speak again. He’s still staring up at the Madonna, like she might drop down to offer some insight if he squints hard enough.

“You remember that night in Rachamps?” he asks.

How can he not remember in a place like this? “Sure.”

“You told me you didn’t want to be Battalion anymore.”

“I remember.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Making Battalion? Or wanting out of it?”

“Either.”

Dick reflects for a moment, hands in his lap. He draws up the harsh mental image of Foy’s snowscape, the white soiled with angry, viscous red. He thinks of the men, slumped and drained in pews similar to these, the candlelight doing no favors to the deep lines etched in their blank faces. He thinks of the ghosts he brought back home with him instead of the bodies he left.

It had been the only time he’d confessed his doubts of being a leader out loud. Nix had sat vigil with him until the candles had died and the first break of dawn had started to stream through the stained glass, sacrificing sleep to bemoan the heavy weight of responsibility with Dick instead.

“It doesn’t really matter what I said, Nix,” he sighs at last. “It was war and it happened and I did the job.”

Nix fixes him with a shrewd, victorious look. The one Dick hates, the one that suggests he might as well be made of glass for how well Nix can see through him.

“That what you tell God?”

Dick refuses to meet his eye, annoyed at being led into a trap. “You know it isn’t,” he says softly.

Nixon falls silent again, but there’s a lean to his posture in Dick’s direction now. Immeasurable and small. Dick is encouraged nevertheless.

“What happened?” he risks asking in the same low tone.

Without a word, Nix reaches into his coat pocket, fishing around for a moment with something that's jammed against the seam. He pulls out a Christmas card, tastefully ornate and crumpled slightly around the edges, and drops it unceremoniously into Dick’s lap.

Dick flips open the card and gives the cheerful well wishes within a perfunctory scan. The handwriting is feminine and unfamiliar.

“Who’s Betty Ann Rollins?”

Nix grins again, but this time it’s the grim one that suggests he’s skirting the frayed edge of his cool.

“Oh, the sister of one of those kids who died in Operation Varsity. I wrote her a letter wishing her condolences for her brother getting blown to smithereens for his country and she wrote back to wish me a Merry Christmas. Same as last year. And the year before that.”

He can see it now, the way Nix’s dimples wobble just for a millisecond, the way his throat bobs as he struggles to swallow. Little tells leak through that betray his cavalier exterior and let the heartbreak he doesn’t let anyone but Dick glimpse at. The heartbreak he’s tried for years to poison and drown.

Sitting alone in the church pew, without the defense of liquor, all on his own, Nix suddenly seems so small and vulnerable. Dick has the strangest urge to tuck him into the tails of his coat, to bolster up his defenses with an extra layer of wool in case it might help. But though the nave is sparsely populated, they’re still in public and Dick has never resented a church building so much as he does in this exact moment.

He risks overlapping his pinkie with Nix’s, the smallest touch to bridge the distance between them. Nix blinks quickly a few times but offers no other reaction. Nothing to draw attention to them. Pragmatic, even in the face of his grief.

He’d been so upset that day. Operation Varsity: the only time Dick had been left behind and unable to plummet with him into hell. He can still recall Nixon’s drawn face in perfect clarity. He’d been so worried, had wanted nothing more than to take Nix up in his arms the moment he laid eyes on his intact form, the rush of relief at seeing him whole and hearty making him dizzy. But Nix had changed that day. Something small and fundamental had cracked and even after all this time, Dick has never managed to patch it quite right. His normal cocky confidence was rattled, his eyes black with anger and husky voice dripping heart blood with each short word.

He’d asked Dick’s opinion on how to phrase that letter, worried not a tick for his own demotion but only about crafting a letter that might save his soul if worded just right. Dick had been so furious with him, his weakness, too exhausted and worried and sick of the waste himself to have much empathy left. He hadn’t handled the situation well, letting Nix drink himself unconscious rather than deal with his fractured resolve. He’d been drowning at the time too. Instead of throwing him a life preserver, Dick had simply turned the other way. For all intents and purposes pouring the remnants of a whiskey bottle over Nix’s choking, gasping mouth on the way out the door. It still plagues him now and then, when Nix’s nightmares so violently interrupt their shared bed and leave them both sleepless with memory.

He’s so much older than he was then. Maybe the years might argue but he feels it in his mind, in his threadbare soul.

He hopes he cherishes Nix better now.

The choir dips into a melancholy, hushed segment of the hymn that seems written only to accompany Nixon’s mourning. The alto’s dissonant chord strikes something painful and bittersweet behind Dick’s ribs and he wraps the entirety of his digit around the place a wedding band would sit on Nix’s finger if he made the rules.

Then he tucks the card carefully into his own coat pocket with his free hand and sits back with deep breath. He holds it, squinting pensively up at the nearby altar, and then exhales slowly through his nose.

“I think,” he starts slowly, “Mary might have been strong enough to choose love.”

Nixon turns to him then, his beautiful dark eyes haunted and glassy. His brow furrows a fraction in question.

Dick lifts a shoulder carefully. “Well. I imagine, no matter how profound her sorrow was, the love she had for her child would trump it. That no matter what it costs her, she would choose the same outcome for that reason. That she might eventually come to see her sacrifice as a strength, the way the rest of us do.”

Nixon scoffs, the noise wet and undignified, and turns his head away so his bone structure is in stark profile and his devastation half hidden. His tongue darts out to lick at his chapped lips, one after the other.

“How the hell is that a strength?”

“Those who can mourn the dead are always the strongest, Lew,” Dick answers softly. “There’s no pain in paradise. Only in surviving here and remembering.”

He’ll outlive Lew. He can feel it in his bones. The way old timers with arthritis pocking their joints can feel when rain is nigh. One day he will carry Lew out of their lives together in a heavy box and wake up the next morning alone. Remaining but lacking. Shot back into the pallid, monotone world without Lewis Nixon’s color.

He likes to think he won’t regret it all when that time comes. That he’ll still carry such a strong torch for this brilliant, perceptive, titanically flawed man to the end of his days and count his life blessed. Perhaps that’s just purposefully calloused thinking. He’s not sure. He’s never done this before.

For the moment, Nix accepts his answer and shirks back into his own fortress of thoughts. Dick withdraws his hand and they part organically, still close enough for comfort without being intrusive.

“Tell me more about this Heaven with no pain,” Nix says.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,” Dick recites diligently, his voice a murmur and almost inaudible over the swelling of the choir. “And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

“Former things, huh?”

“Yep. That’s all they are now.”

Nix is staring up at the Virgin again, but his glare has lost some of its harshness. There’s something wistful, some hint of childlike wonder, to his reflection. “Sounds promising.”

“I’ve always thought so.”

“So you still think I’ll make the cut?”

He’s always hated having to defend his stance on this with Nix. Especially since his relationship with God has been through an upheaval in the past few years and the foundation of his beliefs shifting and evolving the way natural things under immense pressure shift and evolve rather than crumble. He doesn’t know how to convince a good man to grant himself amnesty. He’s still fighting that battle on his own. And he might never win.

“Well finally attending Church certainly gives you some points,” Dick tells him, flashing the lopsided smile he saves just for him.

Nix snorts and Dick relaxes a fraction, glad to break through his somber mood, if only for a little while.

The choir reaches its pinnacle, the climax of the soprano rising to the arched ceilings to shatter gently like a million points of light. It falls like rain to join the flickering candles and for one brief moment, the whole church is illuminated with radiant ringing gold. Something swells in Dick’s chest, making everything tight and as the harmonies slide gracefully into a major chord resolution, there’s a great release that feels as close to absolution as he’s ever been. As if the song itself could flood out and touch them with a gilded hand, baptizing them just for one night.

Nix sucks in a ragged breath and when Dick glances over at him, his eyes are misty.

“Damn,” he breathes, enraptured. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Dick is not watching the choir. His gaze is trained on Nix’s face.

“Yes it is,” he agrees.

“What does your heaven look like, Dick?”

Dick watches the candlelight flicker in Nixon’s wide, shining eyes, highlighting the wild peaks of his dark hair, the Christmas lights back lighting his silhouette like a halo, and the luminous harmony of a choir wreathed around him. Watches as he succumbs to the magnetic pull of Dick’s offered support and leans into his personal space like he’s got a right to, in view of the priest and patrons and Christ Himself. Watches as he’s moved to tears by a dead language praising a God Dick loves so dearly, the same one Nix can’t bring himself to forgive. Watches him fall in love against his own will with the concept of an eternity that’s peaceful.

There is not the shame there once was in thinking he’ll go to no Heaven where this man can’t follow. Only a serene sort of resolution.

“Something like this,” Dick murmurs to himself.

“How’s that?” Nix leans in to hear him better. Close enough to bump their shoulders together.

“I said I’m not sure,” clarifies Dick, a bit louder.

The song dies down, its last whisper-soft notes lingering sweetly in the air and leaving behind a sense of glowing warmth that seeps into the bones. Lightens the load of the weary and serves as a brace for venturing back out into the cold. The few gatherers who rise sporadically from the pews do so with happy sighs, their faith threaded back together and their hearts filled with sonorous gold.

Dick waits until they’ve cleared and then puts a gentle hand to Nix’s knee, shaking him out of his reverie and back into the present.

“Come on, Lew,” he says. “Let’s go home.”

Nix gives his head a shake, clearing the last remnants of the music’s spell from his ears and uncurling from his seat to start at the buttons of his coat. He stands and slides out of the pew, waiting for Dick with eyes clearer than before.

In his distraction, he’s missed the closures on a few buttons and with a chuckle, Dick beckons him closer. Starts to erase the mistake one button at a time.

Nix winces and shies away as his fingers graze his neck. “Your hands are cold,” he complains. “Why aren’t you wearing your gloves?” He waves Dick away with a disgruntled face and takes over the task himself.

“Sorry,” says Dick.

Nix gives him that smile again, the one too fond to be completely teasing and it produces the same warm buzz inside Dick’s chest that hymns do.

“That’s alright,” Nix tells him. “I’ll just have to warm you up in the car. Can’t have you botching your perfect wrap job on the presents due to numb fingers, can we?”

There are six Catholic churches in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

But there’s only one Dick Winters returns to every December, just long enough to stop in and hear the choir rehearse a motet about Mary’s quiet joy and sorrow at being brave enough to bear the burden of love and everything that comes with it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/36341782

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