Chapter 5: The Night Before
The air in the Nissen hut was thick enough to chew. It tasted of sweat, damp wool blankets, and the faint metallic fear that seeped from forty-seven waiting men. Orders had come down at dusk: all units, confined to quarters. Final preparations. The invasion fleet was assembling in the ports, a silent, gargantuan fact looming just beyond the horizon.
Castiel moved through the narrow aisle between the cots, his boots clicking on the concrete floor. He was making his rounds, a final inspection before the long night. His face was a calm mask, his posture erect, but his gut was a knot of cold wire.
To his left, Private Jenkins knelt beside his bunk, rosary beads threaded through his shaking fingers, his lips moving in silent, frantic prayer. Further down, two men from Ohio were engaged in a tense, whispered argument over a chessboard, the pieces slammed down with more force than strategy. In the far corner, a group huddled around a single, dog-eared pin-up photo, their jokes too loud, their laughter sharp and brittle. Most just lay on their cots, staring at the corrugated iron ceiling as if they could see through it to the stars, and to what lay beyond.
Castiel noted it all. The prayer, the bravado, the silence. It was all data. It told him who might freeze, who might run, who might channel their terror into useful action. He mentally catalogued it, a morbid ledger.
He realized he was unconsciously looking for a particular face, a specific brand of chaotic energy. He didn’t see it.
Sergeant Winchester’s cot was made, a regulation tightness that was itself a minor surprise. His medical bag, however, was open on the blanket. Castiel paused, looking down at its contents. Neat, organized, but not by any manual. Rolls of gauze next to a pack of Luckies. A hemostat clamp beside a small, polished flask. Sulfa powder packs stacked like a house of cards. And tucked in the side pocket, three sticks of Wrigley’s chewing gum.
The man was absent.
Castiel’s jaw tightened. Of course. Even on the eve of the greatest military operation in history, Winchester couldn’t follow a simple confinement order. A flash of hot, familiar frustration rose in his chest. He turned to the nearest soldier. “Private. Where is Sergeant Winchester?”
The man, a lanky kid named Riley, looked up from a letter he was writing. “Saw him head out the back, sir. Maybe an hour ago. Said he needed air.”
“He said, or you assumed?”
Riley swallowed. “He said, sir. He said, ‘Tell the Lieutenant if he asks that I’ve gone to inspect the air quality. It’s sub-par in here.’”
A few muffled snorts came from nearby cots. Castiel ignored them. He gave a curt nod and continued his circuit, completing the inspection with methodical precision. But the missing medic was a hole in his situational awareness, an itch he couldn’t leave unscratched. He couldn’t have Winchester drunk in a ditch or arrested by the MPs the night before they shipped out.
After ensuring the platoon sergeant had the watch, Castiel grabbed his trench coat and slipped out the rear door of the hut.
The night outside was cold and clear, a vast, black dome pricked with indifferent stars. The damp English chill cut through his coat instantly. From the far side of the compound, the thump-thump-thump of artillery practice continued, a relentless, hollow heartbeat that vibrated in the ground beneath his feet. He stood for a moment, letting his eyes adjust. The camp was a landscape of blacked-out shapes and murmured sounds. He thought about where a man who wanted to be alone, but not too alone, might go.
He walked past the motor pool, the trucks sitting like sleeping beasts. Past the silent mess hall. He found him on the outskirts of the compound, near a piled stack of empty wooden ammunition crates, just beyond the reach of the perimeter lights.
Winchester was sitting on an upturned crate, a dark silhouette against the slightly less dark sky. His elbows were on his knees. In one hand, dangling between them, was a bottle. The amber liquid caught a sliver of distant light as he moved.
Castiel approached, his steps deliberate on the gravel. Winchester didn’t turn. He must have heard him.
“Sergeant,” Castiel said, his voice flat.
“Figured you’d come looking.” Winchester’s words were slightly slurred, the edges softened by whiskey. He took a slow drink from the bottle, not an eager gulp, but a measured sip. “Inspection go well, sir? Everyone praying hard enough? Writing nice letters to their sweethearts?”
“You are in violation of confinement orders.”
“Yep.” Winchester nodded agreeably. “Add it to the list. Court martial me. Send me to Leavenworth. Sounds peaceful.”
Castiel took a step closer. “Get up. Return to your quarters. Now.”
For a long moment, Winchester didn’t move. Then he let out a long, weary breath that fogged in the cold air. “Look, Lieutenant. Novak.” He used the name like a tool, trying to pry open a space between ranks. “I will go back. I will. And in the morning, you can have me dig latrines from here to London. You can put me on charge. I don’t care. But right now, please. Just go away.”
The raw plea in the words, stripped of all arrogance, was more disconcerting than any insolence. Castiel didn’t move. He studied the shape of the man on the crate—the slump of the shoulders, the head bowed not in sleep but in a heavy weariness. This wasn’t the defiant medic from the parade ground or the pragmatic statistician from the tent. This was something else, something eroded.
“What is wrong, Sergeant?” Castiel asked, the question leaving him before he could judge its tactical merit.
Winchester barked a laugh, a short, dry sound. “What’s wrong? Jesus. You’re a piece of work.” He took another sip. “Tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the day after that. We’re loading onto those goddamn boats. And then we’re going to a beach with a friendly name. And a lot of those kids in there, praying and writing letters, are going to die. That’s what’s wrong. That’s the big picture, sir. The grand, fucking strategy.”
“I am aware of the strategic reality,” Castiel said, his voice tight.
“Are you?” Winchester turned his head then. In the poor light, his face was all shadows and angles, his eyes dark hollows. “Do you ever think about it? Not the plan. Not the maps. The actual… mechanics of it?”
“Think about what?”
“Death.” The word sat between them, simple and final. “Not as a concept. Not as a ‘reduced operational capacity.’ The messy, stupid, boring reality of it. The sound it makes. The smell. The way a guy looks at you, right at the end, and he’s not a hero or a coward. He’s just… confused. Like he can’t believe this is how the whole thing ends. On some stupid piece of dirt, with some stupid piece of metal in him.”
Castiel was silent. The artillery thumped in the distance.
Winchester shook his head, looking back at the bottle in his hands. “You asked me about my medals. The numbers. The survival rate. You want to know what those numbers are? They’re names. Every percentage point is a guy. Frankie Millar, who had a photo of his sister’s dog tucked in his helmet. Took a piece of shrapnel the size of my thumb in his thigh. I got to him, tied it off, he lived. That’s a point. Carlo Rizzo. Gut wound. Smelled like copper and shit. Held his hands in mine and talked about a baseball game in Brooklyn until he stopped talking. That’s a point lost. The numbers… they’re just the pile of names you can’t forget. The ones you got, and the ones you didn’t.”
He swirled the whiskey. “And now I’ve got forty-seven new names. Riley.Jenkins. Dwyer. Novak. And I’m sitting here with this bottle because I know the numbers. I know, statistically, that I can’t get to all of them. No matter how fast I am, no matter how much gum I have in my pockets. Some of those kids in there are already dead. I just don’t know which ones yet. And I have to look at them, and joke with them, and pretend I don’t know that.”
The confession was poured out not with self-pity, but with a chilling, factual exhaustion. It was the after-action report of a soul.
Castiel found he had no manual for this. No regulation covered the weight a medic chose to carry. He thought of his own insomnia, his own ledgers of tactical decisions that became life-or-death equations. But his was a command responsibility, abstract until the moment of execution. Winchester’s was intimate, hands-on. He didn’t send men into fire; he met them there, in the middle of the fire, and tried to pull them back out.
“The responsibility for their lives is mine,” Castiel said, the words feeling inadequate.
“Bullshit,” Winchester said softly, without heat. “It’s yours until the first shell lands. Then it’s mine. You’re responsible for getting them to the dying place. I’m responsible for what happens there. We’re a team, see?” He lifted the bottle in a mock toast. “A real good team.”
Castiel stepped fully into the faint light, coming to stand a few feet from the crate. “The drinking does not help.”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Winchester countered. “It quiets the names down for a few hours. Turns them from screams back into just… names on a list. You got a better method, sir? Besides starching your uniforms and memorizing field manuals?”
Castiel didn’t answer. He looked out at the dark field beyond the crates. The cold was seeping into his bones. He should order him back. He should confiscate the bottle. He should report him. Every rule dictated it.
“You believe your… methods,” Castiel began, choosing the word carefully, “give them the best chance. You stated this as fact.”
“It is a fact.”
“Then carrying this…” He gestured, searching for a term that wasn’t ‘burden,’ wasn’t ‘guilt.’ “…this anticipation of failure. It is a liability. It clouds judgment.”
Winchester finally looked up at him, and for a second, the ghost of that cocky grin flickered. “You think I don’t know that? You think I want this?” He tapped the side of his own head. “This ain’t a choice. It’s just… what’s left. You do this job long enough, the numbers stop being numbers. They get faces. And voices. And they don’t shut up.” He took a final, long pull from the bottle and then set it down carefully on the crate beside him. “So I drink. And I joke. And I break the rules. Because the one rule they don’t put in the manual is that to do this, you have to care enough to run into hell, but you can’t care so much that it breaks you when hell wins. I haven’t found the balance yet.”
He stood up, a bit unsteady but not drunk. The alcohol seemed to have metabolized into a deeper, more sober fatigue. He faced Castiel, his hands shoved in his pockets. “I’m ready to go back now, Lieutenant. I’ll take my punishment.”
Castiel looked at him. He saw the arrogant sergeant, the brilliant medic, the haunted man—all layered into one tired figure on a muddy English field. He thought of the chewing gum on the requisition list. He thought of the hands that would use it.
“There will be no punishment,” Castiel said, the decision forming as he spoke. “Return to your bunk. Get what sleep you can. I will need you sharp.”
Winchester’s eyes narrowed, suspicious. “Why?”
“Because tomorrow, or the next day, we load the boats. And when we hit the beach, I will be responsible for getting the platoon to the objective.” Castiel met his gaze, his own blue eyes steady in the dark. “And you will be responsible for the numbers. For the names. I am… apportioning responsibility as I see fit. Do you understand your orders, Sergeant?”
The meaning hung in the cold air: I am trusting you with the part I cannot do. The messy, intimate, hellish part.
Winchester held his gaze for a long moment. The defiance, the anger, the weariness—it all seemed to settle into a grim, accepting focus. He gave a slow, single nod.
“I understand my orders, sir.”
“Good. Dismissed.”
Winchester picked up the bottle, looked at it, then bent down and placed it carefully behind the stack of crates. He didn’t finish it. He just left it there, a half-answered question in the dark. Then he turned and walked, hands still in pockets, back towards the humming, fearful light of the Nissen hut.
Castiel did not follow immediately. He stood alone in the field, the artillery practice finally having ceased, leaving a ringing silence in its wake. The cold was absolute now. He looked up at the stars, those ancient, indifferent navigational points.
He had come out here to retrieve a disobedient soldier. He was returning with the grim understanding that he had just formally delegated a portion of his own soul to a reckless, brilliant, broken man. It was not in any manual. It was not command. It was a pact, forged in whiskey and cold dread, on the edge of the abyss.
He took a deep breath, the air sharp in his lungs, and turned to walk back. The names, he realized, were now his, too. All forty-seven of them. And one more, louder and more complicated than all the others: Winchester, Dean.