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Chapter Text

ENGLAND

Eugene can feel the man's gaze on him and its heat prickles over his skin and makes his hairs stand on end down the side of his neck. He recognises it for what it is, like a strong searchlight shining bathing one half of him in gold. 

There were certain bars he’d heard whispers of in New Orleans, where certain men were rumoured to go and watch and wink. Eugene had made do with normative bars in Louisiana’s darkest corners where abnormal men might wait for you in the bathroom or corner you out back if you looked at them with intent in the early hours between pitch black and dawn.

The contenders at bars the American Army frequented in quaint English villages were heaving with usually similarly slim-pickings, but tonight there might be a risky chance. 

He could die tomorrow, after all. 

Probably would die tomorrow.

What was a little risk, now? After all he’d seen in Normandy and beyond?

At the urinals earlier, under buzzing white electrics and at the risk of being seen by other men, The Man had thrown him The Look. One of tempting bravado and hunger. 

Eugene supposes it’s impossible to misread someone when they look at you like that with their dick in hand.

Eugene looked right back. 

(His first mistake. One of many)

He hadn’t expected this, here, now, but he’d take it. He couldn’t believe his luck, quite frankly. He nods, and exits the toilets, too risky here, but he’ll head back to Spina at the bar to wait for his chance.

The place is filling up with Soldiers; American, British, Canadian, the like. There’s a few women also, probably English, Army too, or workers and farmers.

His breaths come shallow. He doesn’t dare twist to look to his left where he knows the other man has gone to sit across the bar with Bill and a few others.

He ordered whisky earlier to the surprise of Spina who had thought he was teetotal for some reason. Supposes he’s not the type to get rowdy or sullen, and so maybe it’s hard to imagine he likes a whisky such as he does. 

He orders another now, and finally chances a glance and spies the young man who is returned and leaning over to say something to Bill that makes the other man laugh, chin thrusting forward in amusement. They look like old friends. He must be from another garrison. Then he flicks a look back at Eugene again, and the heat returns. He sees that Spina has gone from their spot, and is actually now sitting right next to this newcomer, in the booth.

The Philadelphians always drift together, find each other by their turns of phrase and unique way of moving physically and mentally through life, and Spina is no exception. 

Spina waves him over, but Eugene just smiles into his glass, shaking his head slightly. He always sits alone. 

He likes it that way, he thinks.

Eugene doesn’t recognise this new man. He’s chatting away to Bill and he looks young, but he’s got a confidence about him. He must be from another regiment. He reasons again, because the replacements for Easy usually sit separate at this stage, none so bold as to blend in seamlessly this quick, plus his uniform is different. 

He’s tall, Eugene notices, with coppery auburn hair slicked down neatly, warm dark brownish grey eyes, thick short brows and lips housing a gentle smile, a round sloping high forehead, high cheekbones, a long nose, long oval face. He’s kind of deceivingly innocent-looking, joyful. Probably a ladykiller. A wisecracker too, cackling along with Bill, Spina and the others.

Eugene swallows, turns back to the bar and watches the condensation drip down the side of his glass. He follows the trail with his finger and sees in the reflection as The Man comes to join him at the bar, and orders his own drink and a round for the table. Beer. Then he turns boldly to Eugene, who bites his lip as the pressure rises.

He holds out his hand for Eugene to shake in the space between them. He has clean, neat nails, but thick, strong worker’s hands. 

“Heffron.” His voice is kind of simultaneously nasal and husky. “Babe Heffron.”

The name rings a bell, but it’s not loud enough to alert Eugene anywhere other than in the back of his mind.

“Eugene Roe.” Eugene replies. His voice is low and slow. He gestures with his head to the others. “They call me Doc.” He points to his medic’s band.

Heffron raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement. A smile. He seems a little nervous, Eugene observes. Sweat shining on his brow.

Heffron’s drinks are delivered then, and he takes a shaky sip. Eugene swallows on nothing first, then downs most of his drink and places the glass on the bar, wipes the cold wet ends of his fingers dry on his pressed trouser leg and dips them into his breast pocket to retrieve his cigarettes. He pulls one out with his lips. 

He has a lighter in his pocket, but he waits for Heffron to hastily pull out his own. It’s brassy-gold, flicks open smoothly, and the flame burns bright. 

Eugene leans slowly over, without breaking eye-contact, and allows Babe to touch the flame to the end of his cigarette.

Heffron starts to sweat harder, something curling deep in his belly. Desire, strong enough to hurt. 

He wants to cup Eugene's cheek but he can’t, so he settles for watching him smoke, perfectly formed lips wrapped around the filter. Smokes his own and tries to distract himself for now by throwing a comment on the card game going on viciously behind them.

“The stakes are risin’” He says, then puts his hand to his mouth thoughtfully.

Eugene admires him from afar. Takes a drag.

“Game?" Heffron asks.

Eugene shakes his head. ”Oh, I’d only lose.”

Heffron’s eyes flash. He leans forward. ”Wanna bet?"

"Well everyone’s a winner if they don’t mind losin’” Eugene says, and there’s a thinly veiled offer underneath.

Babe stares at him then, and Eugene thrills inside. 

“Listen good…” He says, leaning forward, lowers his voice. “I’ve a room to myself, left of the aid station. I'll leave the lampshade on in the window ‘fore I go to sle-”

“Babe! Game?” Bill barks, interrupting. “And bring the fuckin’ drinks!”

Eugene jerks back from Heffron, makes it seem like he was just adjusting his posture, sips this drink, staring at the wall. His vision goes fuzzy for a second, almost whites out in fear of the thought of discovery. A soldier passes and jostles his back, jolting him from his slide into terror, then Heffron whispers “I’ll find you” and he coughs in awkward relief.

Babe turns back with an armful of pints to placate the restless Bill. “Yeah yeah yeah deal me in.”

“Gene?” Ralph calls, already knowing the answer, from boring hours at the training facilities with nothing but grumpy combat medics to play with and time to kill.

“Naah count me out” Eugene says, and Ralph nods in confirmation, rolling his eyes.

“Ah comeooon” Bill complains.

“You don’t want me on your team.” Eugene murmurs barely loud enough for them to hear.

Babe jumps off the barstool and heads over to join them. “Was nice ta’ meet’cha’” he says loudly over his shoulder with a wink.

Bill is still running his mouth. “Yeah, well if anyone injures himself I’ll be sure to call you, Doc!”

Eugene smiles in acknowledgement, shaking his head.

“Hey what am I here for?” Spina throws up his hands.

“No one’s faster ‘an the Doc!” Bill points at Eugene. “I bet if I was wounded now, he could reach me from over there, faster ‘an you could jump across this table!” 

He slaps the table to illustrate his point, pints sloshing. This incites a flurry of groans and laughter across the group, which soon devolves into another chaotic card game.

The evening ticks on.

The men roar on the other side of the room. The bar is getting more and more crowded, people losing inhibitions and awareness. Getting drunk before the time to drop is nigh. Storming before the calm. Someone cracks open a bottle of fizzy. A glass shatters and some of the men mock whoever dropped it, the bar back cleans it up hurriedly. 

Time passes slowly but eventually Eugene takes his leave. The men don’t expect anything different, this is common behaviour for the doc.

“G’night". He says smoothly, and only wobbles slightly when he stands. Whisky oozing through him warm and pleasant. He nods at the men, eyes flickering just once to Heffron, whose gaze is piercing with anticipation now.

Heffron watches him go shamelessly. Waits 30 minutes. Makes his excuses. And follows.

Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck. He thinks, skirting the side of the road in the dark. He unbuttons his jacket in preparation, one by one, it’s something to do with his fingers.

Bad idea bad idea bad idea bad idea. 

He makes it to Eugene’s private room unseen. The light is on, just like he said it would be.

Heffron knocks just once. Eugene peeps through the closed curtains, looks up and down the road, then opens the door a crack and yoinks the other man through by the front of his jacket.

“This way.” He whispers.

Eugene is wearing his white undershirt and a pair of navy-blue shorts with his army socks still on. 

Heffron can see that he has long spindly arms and legs. Boney elbows and knobbly knees.

He leads Heffron a few steps over to the first door on the right, into a small room with a single bed. 

There is a trunk on the floor, a bedside table with a lamp, a painting of a green landscape with cows in it hung on one wall and a small wooden cross hanging opposite the window with the lamp. The double curtains are closed.

“Wow… So medics get the luxury treatment eh?”

“Huh?” Eugene frowns.

They stand there for a second, in the near-dark.

Heffron clears his throat. “So.. are you-”

“No more personal details.” Eugene asserts, interrupting.

“Okay…” Heffron holds up his hands in surrender. “How you wanna go ‘bout this?” There’s a flicker of uncertainty. 

Eugene concludes he is green to this. He takes a deep breath, then walks slowly towards the other man.

Eugene is a little shorter, but only a little. When he gets close, Heffron’s breath hitches and his chin retreats into his neck as he aims to stare down at Eugene’s face. 

Up close, Eugene sees that Heffron’s cheeks are pink and so are his lips. He has ginger stubble on his chin.

Heffron sees that Eugene’s eyes are blue. Says as much…

“Like a secret… You won’t know until you’re up close…” Heffron mutters, because it was true.

Eugene doesn’t know what to reply with, so he licks his lips, rests his hands on Heffron’s chest, smoothing over his shoulders. 

Then he eases forward, and softly, softly, brushes their lips together, gentle-like. He pulls back a tiny distance, looks up at Heffron with all the wanting he had to hide in public, eyes almost crossing he’s so close, then Heffron leans down and they kiss. 

It’s soft, then the kiss deepens. Eugene brings his hands up to Heffron's lapels and tugs, pulling his unbuttoned jacket off his shoulders. Heffron’s hands skirt up his sides, pushing his white t-shirt up and feeling the bare skin underneath. Eugene gasps a little, lips parting, and the other man takes the opportunity to plunge and deepen the kiss further, becoming a lot more forward with his tongue as he licks into Eugene’s mouth.

Eugene lifts his arms and Heffron rids him of his shirt, and they walk back towards Eugene’s single bed.

Eugene spins Heffron at the last second, so that he falls backwards, ending seating himself on the edge of the bed which creaks under his weight. Eugene kneels between his legs and pulls down his zipper, shoving his hand down Heffron’s underpants frantically, then nuzzling his thigh.

Heffron gasps, a hand in Eugene’s dark, neatly cropped hair. 

Eugene has his mouth on him, and sucks him with fervour until he releases embarrassingly quickly without warning, down his throat with a barely contained shout. The medic gags slightly, but swallows. 

Then Heffron pulls the other man up onto his lap and starts to pull him off with clumsy enthusiasm. Eugene bites his shoulder, then pushes away from Heffron’s shoulder to grab some lubrication from under the pillow, shoves it into his hand and moans right in his ear, when Heffron slicks the movement.

Heffron can’t believe his luck! The medic is so handsome it’s frightening. He trails a finger from his thin perpetually-frowning brow, down his sharp cheekbones and jaw, then presses three fingers under his jaw, thumbing at his bottom lip. Eugene’s eyes are closed, he grinds up into Babe’s other hand and clings around his shoulders, opens his mouth and lets Heffron’s thumb slip inside. 

“Jesus Christ!” Babe doesn’t realise he says it out loud.

Eugene comes with a muffled groan, and he is in heaven, he thinks.

“What?” He asks as soon as he catches his breath.

“It’s just- you’re-” Heffron replies as if in hypnosis.

They breathe together, coming back to themselves, heart rates slowing back down, stickiness cooling on the fabric of their clothes and on their hands. 

Eugene lifts his forehead from Heffron’s shoulder, grabs some tissues from the bedside table, wipes his hand, then Heffron’s then both of their stomachs.

“That was no different from gals, really.” Heffron remarks through panting, and Eugene glares daggers at him, extracting himself from his lap and plonking down onto the far corner pillow of the bed.

He snickers. “Hey I don’t mean nothin’ by it, just that it weren’t that different… In the end” He holds up his hands, wincing as he digs the hole deeper. 

Eugene rolls his eyes and grabs a cigarette from the pack in his jacket pocket which hangs from the bedpost. 

“Gimme that.” Heffron says and chuckles at Eugene’s scandalised expression, even as he goes to get a new one. 

Heffron lies down next to him, puts his hands behind his head, and basks.

Eugene, bare boney knees pulled up to his chest, crammed against the wall and this brash young soldier, watches him for a moment peacefully. Thinks about how he’ll probably never see this man again. 

“Y’oughta be goin’…” he murmurs, a gentle let-down. 

Then Heffron leans away from Eugene’s prone form to look at the small alarm clock. “Jesus fucking christ! It’s nearly tomorrow!” Heffron exclaims. 

Eugene shushes him.

“We’re jumping tomorrow!” Heffron whispers animatedly.

Eugene’s eyes flash in confusion. “We…”

“We”, Heffron gestures between them, with an expression that says ‘duh!’ “Easy company. Air division.”

Eugene’s heart drops. Fuck. And that’s when he realises, perhaps in one of his most mortifying moments to date, that Heffron was a replacement for Easy Company, and curses god above. He kneels upright, and his hand goes to his lips in disturbance. Mind racing, brows furrowed.

Heffron laughs. “Hey why ya lookin’ at me all dopey like that?” He sits up, reaches out to poke Eugene’s cheek and he flinches away. His face drops.

“But- your uniform.” Eugene scrambles for answers.

“Oh. Yeah I know! What a disaster! I had to borrow one from the supply whilst mine gets fixed. I ripped a big fuckin’ hole in the seam. Heh. Collecting it tomorrow.”

“I can’t believe this.” Eugene shakes his head in a disapproval, grimacing. 

“Big deal-”

“I wouldn’t have- We shouldn’t have-” He starts ushering Heffron off the bed.

He had seen the name before Heffron was on the list. The list of replacements. The list of potential patients.

Heffron seems to realise the mix-up now. 

“Hey, hell I ‘aint gonna tell anyone, if that’s what you’re worried about. Is that what you’re worried about? 

Hey, just fuckin’ don’t worry…”

“I know you won’t-”

Huffing, Eugene scoots off the bed, grabs his undershirt from the wooden floor, puts it back on and sits back down on the edge of the mattress. 

He scrubs a hand over his scalp. 

Babe watches him, thinks he looks small all of a sudden, the t-shirt too big on his slender form.

Eugene doesn’t know how to explain to this enthusiastic replacement who had just had his hand down his pants, that he would never have slept with him had he known, because he’s seen men ripped to shreds, held them screaming in his arms, smelt the stench of piles of corpses in sand, pushed organs back into some poor child's stomach, and all the while, he was glad, so glad he didn't know most of their names, let alone how they usually smelt, how they looked when they climaxed, how their laughs sounded in dusky, lamplit rooms, and what their mothers called them when they were kids.

“I got a girl back home. If that makes you feel any better…” Heffron deigns to mention. “I ‘aint gonna be following you around lookin’ for tail if that’s-”

That doesn’t make Eugene feel any better in the slightest. “You oughta be takin’ your leave now huh?” He says, gentle but firm.

About to argue, instead Heffron sighs, dressing himself, pulling his trousers up solemnly, then chuckling to himself at how he hadn’t even lost more than his jacket during the encounter.

He looks to Eugene one last time. The other man is lost in thought, chin resting on his elbow, smoke curling from his lips. Cheekbones casting shadows in the faint moonlight, the warm lamplight. 

The cross on the wall at his back seems suddenly to carry a heavy weight, it watches Heffron with panoptic surveillance.

He waves a hand at Heffron, shooing him off.

Heffron grins, sneaks away into the incoming dawn, confused but strangely elated.

“See ya tomorrow…”

He makes sure he is unseen as he sneaks back to barracks.

***

HOLLAND

His first patient in combat after Easy Company parachutes down on Holland is himself.

Over Holland, under the sun, Eugene jumps from the plane, his parachute opens a little too late and sends him careening out of control and onto barbed wire that drags sharp under him as he thrashes, and his leg is sliced open.

On all sides soft, dewy, ironic grass stretches like a teasing sea of safety mats, and of course, Eugene lands on the barbed wire fence. 

At least none of the men in his charge seem to injure themselves too badly, there’s a sprain, some bruises, but they’re doing well so far.

There’s no shooting, yet.

Luckily, on his leg it’s a flesh wound that he knows exactly what to do with, it’s right bellow the knee, down his calf, and he’s lucky it didn’t tear an artery, though the blood spills alarmingly fast. 

He catches up with the rest of the group with nothing but a slight limp, and no one sees that he’s wounded until after the fighting is over and they’ve retreated. He guesses it’s because if anyone did see blood on his clothes, they would’ve assumed it was someone else’s as per his Modus Operandi.

Of course, it’s Heffron who notices him wince and bare his teeth, a moment of weakness he foolishly allows himself after finally tending to all of the wounded, and sending the ones who needed it on their way.

The adrenalin has worn off and has him aching. 

There were many men he could not save. Defeat in battle means wounded and dead. Even Buck Compton was shot. Johnny Martin was pacing up and down like a caged tiger because Bull Randleman was missing.

Heffron makes his way over with a frightening intensity. They haven’t spoken since… that night. Eugene barely looked him the eye when he gave him his air-sickness pills before the flight.

Eugene can’t stand it, knows he’s caught, and so lowers himself down at the edge of a piece of wooden farming machinery nestled amongst unharvested wheat.

“Doc. You hurt?” Heffron crouches down next to him, the wooden wheel at his back. The sun shines down on him. 

He looks alive. That’s something.

Well Eugene can’t exactly lie, what with the bandage on his leg. 

He settles for: “m’fine.” Because he is. He is fine.

“Mmhmm I don’t fuckin’ think so boy!” Heffron notes the way Eugene’s brows knit together, how he leaves his leg still out in front of his body, only his eyes move, scanning like a cornered animal.

“Huh.” Eugene sniffs. “Don’t boy me boy-”

“Ah c’mon, how old are you anyway?”

“Twenty one years in October.”

“Yeah? Well I’m 19.” Heffron states.

“Okay.” Gene says weakly. “Want a medal?”

“Gene. Right? Gene?” Heffron’s teeth flash around the word. He draws out the ‘e’.

Eugene lets his eyes close for a second, begging for some peace.

“You don’t have to pretend you don’t remember my name.”

“Gene. Heh.” Babe raises his eyebrow. “You ‘aint much older than me boy.” He laughs. 

His laugh is the same stiff Philadelphian bark Eugene first heard at the bar in England. He swats him dully with a peace of tarp he’s been fiddling with from the floor rubble.

“A lot can happen in a year.” He grumbles, feels as though he just turned one thousand years old.

“Now, will you let me see the wound?” Heffron presses.

Eugene stares up at him, can’t believe that this is happening to him, but sees that Heffron means well. 

“Go ahead.” He concedes.

Heffron is surprisingly very gentle, holds Eugene’s foot in his lap, and rolls up his pant-leg to reveal the bandages, and underneath, the jagged cut. 

“Jesus Christ that looks painful. Is that painful?”

“What do you think?” Eugene says flatly.

“Heh.” Heffron thinks for a second. “I think it’s probably fuckin’ painful.”

Eugene rolls his eyes, but feels his touch on his leg and where his palm rests gently on his ankle like a syrupy burning. He peers over at the wound where he’s leant back on his elbows. Huh. It does look painful.

“Spina!” Heffron screeches as Ralph wanders past. “Take a look at this will ya?”

Ralph’s eyes widen in shock and surprise. “Gene! You alright?” He races over and checks on the wound.

“I’ma be alright Spina, I’m okay. It’s just a little scratch.”

“That’s a purple fuckin’ bleedin’ heart right there Gene!” Heffron says, squeezes his leg, then gets up to join the other guys.

Eugene can’t help but watch him go. 

The sky is baby blue with white fluffy clouds, and Heffron seems to become a part of it like some grand painting. Webster mentioned about Van Gogh being from here, and Eugene remembers a book in the library a long time ago, seeing something like the colours now he recognises. Ochre yellow, baby blue, fleurs roses… swirling and-

“Oh boy, are you alright there Gene?” Spina puts a hand on his forehead. “You’re lookin’ mighty pale…”

***

Chapter Text

BASTOGNE

The trees part and he spots some of the men circled around the mini gas flame that heats the coffee and beans when they can get some. They squat on empty wooden crates or chunks of tree, bundled in faded khaki, caked in smoke and there’s acrid gunmetal in the air, but inexplicably, they're laughing. 

Eugene scans each man for any signs of change, any symptoms that weren’t there last he was in the woods. Sitting on a chunk of tree stump, he tucks his frozen fingers into his collar and rests his chin on his knuckles, unnoticed by the small gathering until Heffron, (because of course it’s Heffron, it’s always Heffron) raises his head to look around, cautious like a meerkat in a watchtower. 

Eugene notices that he’s absently chewing on the chain of his necklace, that is until he spies him out the corner of his eye and gets up on cracking, creaking legs to aggressively offer him a steaming tin cup of coffee.

Eugene always sits with the men, but not in the circle. 

He figures there’s a slight relief in the men at this, because nobody really wants to get too close to him, and that’s because if you’re close to Doc Roe it can’t mean anything good. After you’ve seen his features up close, witnessed his pores and the stubble on his upper lip, the real blue of his seemingly black eyes, felt the timbre of his voice vibrate through his hands rather than in the air, you were either going to the aid station on stretcher, or to hell in a hand-basket, and no one wanted to stick around to find out. 

In this sense, some of the men were a little scared of him. In awe, maybe, but a little scared. He could tell.

Eugene peers up at Edward Heffron who is still standing there, and tries to smile, but a part of him is loathe to take something from someone in his charge who could do with a little warmth. That Heffron would keep sacrificing his warmth when he was shivering cold, sacrificing his fuel when he was wasting away. 

All the men were. 

Eugene has seen him give Julian part of his rations on a few occasions, a kind gesture if he was anywhere else but here, so he must be stupid, Gene reasons, finding his thoughts becoming harsher in the cold. How will he stay alive if he gives up half his meals to the replacements? 

Each soldier must take his own, because they all need to survive this war.

Later Gene gives up his meal to another foolish replacement who spilt his dinner in the sleet and doesn't notice the discrepancies of his inner argument. But if he was challenged, he’d argue that it was the job of the men to fight, and his job to look after the men in a voice that would be the last word, offering no room for argument.

Presently, the effect his attempt to smile has on Heffron is to make his features droop in concern, so Eugene figures he must’ve failed and quickly stops trying, averts his gaze to the frozen laces of his shoes. Heffron shuffles his steel toed boot and nudges Eugene’s own, till he realises he hasn’t taken the extended coffee, so he reaches for it selfishly selfishly and pulls it close to his chest as if that might warm him up a little. 

He thinks maybe Heffron will go away now, and leave him in his solitude.

In the last night and day Eugene Roe has seen more displaced limbs than he thinks anyone should ever have to see. Packed gauze into spurting or oozing wounds for what must’ve been hours on end. 

There’s so much blood under his fingernails. 

He slipped face-down in the mud earlier because the echo of gunfire interrupted his exiting of the truck and so now he’s just covered in dried brownish-reddish matter, unable to distinguish between the earth and the last dregs of vitality oozed from some soldier whose name he never discovered down in the broken basement of the church-come-hospital.

Eugene knows he’s good at his job. One of the best they have in fact, though he doesn’t observe that with much pride. 

He’s got what it takes to survive in the army because he has no attachment to anyone or anything. 

He wishes that Heffron would understand that as soon as he starts on nicknames he may as well throw in the towel, because to be good at this job is not just to be calm under pressure, it is to be calm in the face of death’s welcoming embrace, and you can’t keep going through 5 whole stages of grief when every other man that passes through Eugene’s fingers slips right through the veil to their end.

***

“Heffron. Hey Heffron, you okay?” He asks because he needs to know. He always needs to know if Heffron is okay, and it fucking hurts, because he wishes he didn’t.

“Gene! What is with the Heffron bullshit huh? You know my name, why dont’cha use it?” 

It seems that he’s pissed off. Eugene is stumped. “Oh. U-uh it’s Edward right?” He tries.

“‘Edward’ are you serious? Only the Goddamn Nuns call me Edward!” He rips off his gloves one by one, slams them down on the frozen ground.

Eugene is looking at him in blatant confusion. Like this is puzzle he just can’t solve. A quiz he simply doesn’t have the answers to. 

Eugene’s job is to fix up the men. He knows this. 

Heffron is one of the men, and he’s frustrated, upset because Eugene never learned his nickname or how to be intimate enough to use it, and he doesn’t know how to fix this, because he doesn’t know why Heffron would even care if he used his nickname or not. His brain just can’t fathom.  

So, he changes the subject: “Hey listen I need to know whether you kept your morphine from Holland.”

Clearly this was the wrong thing to say because Heffron’s face twists even angrier. 

“No ya asked me already! Remember?!”

“…No. I don’t recall.” He says to himself because Babe is already storming away.

***

Eugene remains stoic and stone-like. 

He can handle all this pain. 

He can take everyone’s screaming and yelling and abuse when he presses down hard on a wound, and he can take the cold, and he can take all the blood and guts and grief because he’s always, always been alone.

Just Eugene and his prayers, Eugene and his hands, Eugene and himself.

He can take the fact that none of it matters in the end anyway because they’ll all die here in the woods soon enough, because he’s in the futile business of healing during a war. It’s a joke on the cold horizon really. 

He's always been alone. Kept his distance off to the side. His mama used to make an effort to push him to approach the other children, but he was happy watching from the edges. It worried her, he knew. But he thought she oughta know that he was happy, really he was. Would roam on his own up and down the bayou. 

And when he took issue with her protests, she said: ’aint no problem going up and down the bayou, but why not take a friend? 

His brothers would wrestle and he would sit on the sidelines and keep score. That was alright in his book, but his Mama’s own happiness came from spending time with her chatterbox friends, wives of husbands of the community, singing in church and baking with his sister and most boys his age didn’t watch in a cloud of smoke like him, so she could not understand. 

He’d started smoking at 13, like his father. Probably his growth was stunted, like his father, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.

Although maybe she should’ve given up on Eugene, like she did his father, she let him be. Pushed for years, to no avail, but she kept him close, let him be, gave him love.

When he went to war she was horrified, but a part of her smiled secretly because she thought he might find his tribe.

So he sits with the men, but not in the circle.

“No shower in Bastogne eh?” Heffron teases. 

Eugene has been trying not to look at the flames of Heffron too long lest he become dazed. He usually makes sure nothing can get past the cool abalone shell of his surrounding exterior so carefully shaped.

But the Philadelphia native has a hacking cough that just won’t go, and Spina won’t always be free to look after his own, and so Gene has to check him over more often now.

Pneumonia has it’s claws in too many of the men.

“The queue was too long.” He jokes flatly.

Heffron laughs. His rigid squawk of a laugh is practically the same in the cold as it was before, ‘cept now it’s a little more rigid, and a little less squawk.

Eugene sips his coffee, and it does warm him. He can smell it from the steam that wafts up to his chin, can feel it on his boney fingers, and the warmth of it slips down his throat to his core. It feels really very nice. Compared to the blood and mud drying into cracks on his skin and clothes.

He closes his eyes.

Heffron looks down at him with reverence. “Enjoy it, Gene.” Then he leaves him to it. He opens his eyes again, and the other man has gone to sit back beside Bill.

“Babe.” Eugene whispers and tips the cup towards his retreating back in thanks.

***

The first time he freezes, it’s after he’s been running and running for supplies for what feels like hours. It may well have been. He’s lost track of time.

“Scissor, I need scissors, get me some scissors, do you have scissors?” 

The adrenaline wears off like a punch in the lungs and he’s struck for a second, reeling, alone and shaking just trying to keep his breaths deep. He grunts and sticks his tongue between his teeth, eyes widening for just a second as he tries with much difficulty to breathe. Or was it a minute? An hour?

He gasps when the lights start going overhead, twisting a piece of string in his fists. They almost look beautiful, like fireworks he’d seen back in New Orleans once, until the machine gun fire starts and shatters the illusion. He usually whispers prayers to himself until his breathing slows down, but now as the rumbling increases, Eugene’s anxiety builds like a storm brewing in anticipation.

“It’s gonna get busy pal!” Lipton barks a warning. Gene steals himself, then solidifies, feels it going too far, like in an ancient fairy tail where the hero is turned to stone.

Loses himself in one moment, wakes up inside another moment with no knowledge of how he got there.

“Hey Gene! Let’s go! Let’s go!” 

Gene doesn’t seem to hear for one long, awful, stretching moment, short circuiting until suddenly he springs to action, the key finally turned in the ignition.

The problem is, stabilising a wound on the battlefield, relies on immediacy of care. Timing is everything. All of it. The only thing that matters. Time is of the essence. Time is essential. The difference between life and death is a matter of seconds, and Eugene uses those seconds up thawing where he is frozen shut.

The guilt eats him up inside.

***

“O Lord, please, please,

grant that I shall never seek so much 

to be consoled as to console, 

to be understood as to understand, 

or to be loved 

as to love

with all my heart. 

With all my heart.”

***

“Someone shouts medic, an’ he’s always right there.”

“Yeah, that’s his job Bill.”

“You know like how- you’ll know this if you ever had a cat…” Bill starts.

“What?” Babe frowns at him in question, but lets him continue. 

“Ya ever had a cat Babe?”

“Yeah” Babe answers, riled. ”My ma has three fuckin’ cats, matter of fact, what ya tryna’ say?”

“Listen listen! Ya cat disappears, you seen him an hour ago, and then ya friends in the next town over are callin’ sayin’ they seen ol’ slinky prowlin’ through their back yard. But you know for a fact he only went missin’ an hour ago, and it doesn’t take an hour to get to your neighbours back yard.”

“Jesus Christ! What?”

“I’m sayin’ like teleportation. Cats can do it. That’s how it is with Doc Roe.”

“Your sayin’ Doc Roe is like a cat.”

“In that he can teleport is what I’m sayin’.”

“Yeah…”

“Yeah! You see him at the aid station one minute, 5 minutes later we under fire, and he’s at the front lines with an injured guy already on a stretcher before we even get to the bullets!”

“Heh.” Babe concedes “Yeah. He is fuckin’ fast.”

Like the Olympics, Babe thinks, the way he springs forward to sprint. There’s even a starter gun and everything.

Bill is watching him with an eyebrow raised.

“You an’ the Doc are buddies now?”

“As buddy as can be with the Doc…” Babe shrugs, and he would be sweating if he weren’t so fucking cold. But Bill would never suspect anything, he just didn’t think that way.

Bill nods for a beat of acknowledgment. Then he raises his head. “Think you can get him to do something about my pissin’ needles?”

“I think he’s got a few things more important than that to worry ‘bout, Bill. Jesus.”

“Eh.” Bill shrugs. “You an him pals though?” He asks again.

“Yeah what’s it to ya?” Babe sweats even though it’s minus-a-million degrees.

“I just noticed! Don’t get it twisted.”

“I like helping out is all. He and Spina need it, so I’ll do it. Better than watchin’ the Goddamn fuckin’ line eh?” He chuckles.

“Yeah I get it.” Bill chuckles too.

“Jealous?”

“Nah I ‘aint jealous ya fuck. I’ll stick to fightin’ krauts, you cozy up to the Doc all you want.” He jokes.

Babe pretends he really means it, and gets a warm fuzzy feeling inside. 

Babe had almost written Eugene off as some shy boy who wasn't worth time dealing with. Pretty, sure, but shy. Quiet. And shy people usually put Babe off. He needed a good amount of pushback to bounce off of. It was just his way. Like Bill. If you were quiet with Bill he would abuse you until you abused him back, then he shut up out of respect. Well, he never really shut up, but he did respect you a bit more. 

Babe wasn’t one to verbally abuse a stranger, but he couldn’t stop talking if he tried. And with Babe, it was a genuine thing. He really just wanted to connect, to joke around. When someone was too quiet, he became suspicious, started to babble in their silence, felt he had to fill the empty space with words, he always concluded that they were judging him, because if they were judging themselves so much they couldn’t even say one thing, how much must they be judging him for saying whatever came into his head first?

But after that one night, where he got to touch him, and then seeing how much the guys all respected the Doc and hearing his voice and seeing him move the way he moved, Babe couldn't help but become fascinated.

Realised the guy wasn't shy exactly, just… reserved. Well, maybe he was a little shy, but not in the way babe hated where people were too timid or insecure to even look you in the eye.

Gene would look you in the eye alright, he was so sincere it was painful sometimes, so genuine it burned. Babe realised the guy was just a little awkward, but so was Babe, and Gene was just conserving himself, had as much courage as the rest of them put together. 

And Babe found he didn’t mind Genie’s silences the way he minded it in other people. He didn’t mind being silent with Gene, and when he did feel the need to fill the silence, he didn’t feel inauthentic. Gene seemed to enjoy listening to him rant about whatever came to mind. 

Doc Roe could say more with a raised eyebrow and by pursing his lips than Babe could say with his own talk radio show. Eugene’s voice is deep and slow, undulating. When he’s angry, it sounds like the urgent bass of some complicated jazz song.

Now, in Bastogne, Babe sees Eugene with even fresher eyes. The man runs through explosions like Ronald Speirs for Christ’s sake. 

***

One time, he runs straight in the vague direction of Babe and Julians’ foxhole towards whoever in the distance had been screaming “MEDIC!” through the fire and brimstone.

“You guys hit?” He yells at a sprint, jumps into Babe’s outstretched arms.

“What the fuck are you doing? Are you crazy?” Babe asks, concerned, and for a second, as bombs drop around them in slow motion, trees exploding and splintering into thousands of shards, Julian the replacement curled up in a ball down by his feet, he holds Eugene to his chest and squeezes, presses his face into the back of his neck and they both scream.

Then as soon as it happened it’s over, because the bombing lessens, and Liptons screaming for them to “stay!” in their foxholes, and Eugene doesn’t care because someone is calling for him, and he’s out of Babe’s arms in a flash and running, running towards the blood and misery. Even as the shelling starts again, and Babe curls up with Julian and they both think, simultaneously flabbergasted, of their little combat medic dodging hellfire whilst the rest of them cower underground

Later, they have some kind of soup in the dark, twitching and trembling, and Eugene returns on the back of a small truck from Bastogne where he’d taken the injured soldier, and funnily enough, he’s smiling lightly, but there us blood on his boots and under his fingernails again. He checks every man over, including Babe, who leans into his touch when he puts a bloodstained hand on his shoulder, and then, only then does he sit on an upturned crate and smoke a cigarette.

He eats some soup because Lipton practically forces him to.

Babe stares at Eugene in horror because he realises this is it for him. All he sees. Babe has the blood of others on his hands. But to be the guy they call every time someone is wounded. To know that the next time someone calls your name it will be because someone new is hurt. 

How can you not associate yourself with death? 

Gene is an apparition. 

Ghostly and ice cold, yet somehow his voice is warm, his hands are calming.

****

Well, Babe is on Eugene duty now. Winters practically put him up to it. 

They have shared looks that Babe knows means he’s gotta step up. Not that he needs convincing.

Food is so desperately precious in these conditions you really know it’s bad when someone starts preferring to go hungry. Especially someone as scrawny as Eugene Roe.

You hear rumours. Whispers of men who were never the same. 

Everyone knows a crazy old man down the street, and it was the great first war that did that, and if it was bad then… Well, the men liked to think they were stronger now, lead better, trained better, that the higher ups would protect them, but living in the future made for better technology for better killing. For better or for worse, married to death they were, and the men reacted in different ways. 

Babe found he was relentlessly relentless. Others froze with it. Catatonic. Shell shocked. Blank behind the eyes. There were hints of it in Buck, that reminded him of crazy old man Mclusky whose wife and children left him bound to the streets of Philadelphia. Only understood by cardboard boxes, rats and alley-cats.

Well, Gene is showing signs of slowing. And it is frightening. Something in Gene has shut down. Shut off. He's losing his link to reality. His body isn't connecting to his mind as it should. He’s blank, adrift somewhere under blankets of snow.

***

Dick Winters watches, arms crossed and attentive. 

Remembers Eugene tapping his arm after the battle at the crossroads, after he shot first and foremost that young German boy, who had looked at him for a millisecond or a millennia so innocently. 

Though he was a Nazi with a weapon, he’d also been a child, and- 

“You’d like some coffee sir?” Eugene had asked softly, with a self-effacing smile in the aftermath. 

Dick had thanked him, and meant it, because a hot drink didn’t cure him of his guilt, but it was a small comfort, and that was important, that was Eugene through and through.

“One for the Doc…” Babe requests another ladleful of pitiful stew to be scooped into a second tin.

Winters sees it for what it is.

***

Eugene is squatting up against a thin tree. His face is permanently frowning now. He barely registers Babe handing him the measly meal. Can’t quite get his eyes to move. His mouth to speak. His face just… flickers.

Everyone stands when the Colonels “words of encouragement” are read out. 

Not Eugene. 

He’s paralysed, just like Smokey and a thousand other men had been. He remembers them all.

Apparently it’s Christmas Day. 

Eugene wont move. Not for that.

Everyone, even Luz, is quieter than usual lately, but Eugene is staring with spiral eyes like he’d never even seen a soldier before. Let alone a whole group of them.

Babe nods at Eugene when he gives him the tin, because that was all the comfort he could offer right now and Eugene just blinks up at him like it was the first time he’d noticed he was there.

Realising his faltering attention, seemingly embarrassed or self conscious, Eugene looks down at his feet, then hurriedly pulls a cigarette from his pocket and lights it.

“He okay?” Luz whisper-asks in Babe’s ear later, when Eugene is still sitting there, still as a statue.

“I’m lookin’ out for ‘im” Babe whispers, and Luz nods, reassured.

“That’s good.”

Babe notices how Eugene doesn't ask for help. It becomes apparent that the thought doesn't ever even cross his mind. It’s not something that occurs to him. The idea that he could need assistance of any kind. Because that’s factory settings for him. He starts from a place of isolation. Well, he scrounges, he collects, he does the rounds, he sends Spina off for supplies, but he’s a well oiled machine in solitude. 

Babe just can’t relate to that sentiment in the slightest.

Thinks of his Ma’s overcrowded living room and the endless striving to be heard. The pitching up and up until everyone’s just yelling and no one’s listening. Babe starts from a place of indignation, he knows that much.

***

There are two screams for medic in the early hours when the shelling starts up again, one to the left, and one to the right. Spina and Babe are running to left, but there’s no sign of Gene, so they go via where they reckon his foxhole is.

Eugene just gets to sleep when the noises recommence and he just simply cannot move, he’s gripped by terror like when he was a kid and the ghosts came through the house. He hides under his blanket. Under the blanket is dark and the ghosts can’t see him.

“MEDIC!”

They find him scrunched up and quaking. Babe holds out a hand but Eugene doesn’t even lift his head to see it. Spina is about to jump down into Gene’s foxhole, but Babe shoves him out the way. 

“Move! I got ‘im!” he shouts and Spina claps him on the back appreciatively and runs off to answer the second call for a medic.

He leans over Eugene, tugs away the blanket and lifts Gene up by the front of his jacket. “Gene! C’mon you gotta get up the cap’n’s yelling.”

“Okay…” Eugene trails off, gripping onto Babe’s arm like a limpet and decidedly not moving at all.

“Okay?” Babe literally shakes him, to no avail.

“Roe!” Screams Winters over yonder.

“Okay.” Eugene says again, his eyes not focused on anything but the middle distance.

“Okay get up! Not okay lie down! C’mon, move! Jesus Christ!” He pulls Gene all the way up by the waist until his body starts moving like clockwork whether or not his mind caught up yet.

He comes back to himself in an explosion of adrenaline that rips through Babe’s palm and has him cursing as blood wells up, but he smiles at the back of Eugene’s head because at least he’s moving.

Eugene runs to the source of the screaming, but at the sight of Welsh bleeding out groaning on the floor, he freezes, mouth agape, eyes wide as can be. 

He blinks like he’s in a dream. Everything should be slower, but it’s moving too fast.

Finally he does what he needs to do, but just barely. 

He’s in a total daze. Can’t seem to get himself out of it. His thoughts are just coming too slow.

Babe sees when Winters suggests Eugene get a hot meal in town.

***

It seems like a joke because when he reaches the town, it’s burning. He runs to the church as a car without a driver almost runs him down, and the sky opens up in a rage full explosion. The door is smouldering. Inside is only bodies and rubble.

Bastogne was always all wrong. Discarded piles of bricks and bodies and bodies and more bodies, no where else to put em’, great shards of wood and burnt spirals of shuddering metal that had melted and bent into imitations of the smoke curling up in the near distance.

Eugene had bitten his thumbnail, smiling encouragingly at the wounded, but when he stared at the mangled ripped flesh against which nurses hopelessly tried to press gauze and boiled shredded blankets he knows he won’t ever stop seeing it. 

When he tries to sleep at night, when he daydreams, if he ever survives, he knows he will never get rid of those images that have burned themselves onto his retinas. The hot red insides of the dying bodies of strangers steaming in the cold.

“Eugene are you- Are you alright?” Eugene feels he might cry if Renee looks at him like that any longer so he’s glad when she’s called away. He didn’t know that was the last time he would see her.

***

“You follow them around like a goddamn duckling!” Bill remarks.

“The ugly duckling!” Luz adds.

Babe pulls the ugliest face he can to scare them off. It doesn’t work.

One day, Babe is following Spina like a goddamn duckling, and feels like a clumsy idiot after he falls in a German foxhole, on top of a goddamn German no less, and almost gets his ass shot off because of it. 

Wasn’t funny in the moment, but at least he and Spina have something to lose their shit laughing over now, and a good story for the other guys. Morale and all that jazz.

Anyway, they make it to the next Battalion, and they’ve got an aid station with boxes of supplies and a surgeon. 

In that moment, Babe truly understands then that Gene is not a God, and he’s doing his best but he’s severely under-supplied, under-staffed, under-everythinged and he feels himself filled with purpose. 

He would help Gene in every spare moment he wasn’t fighting.

There’s no replacing Eugene. Winters is rightly concerned, because Eugene, like Lipton, was indispensable to the morale and the safety of the group, worked so tirelessly hard to make sure everyone was as okay as they could be, that his exhaustion was like a doom-indicator. They simply could not lose Roe.

Babe resolves to become the unofficial Medic’s Bodyguard. He wouldn’t say it out loud, but he sees the title all in lights like at the pictures. Jazz-hands! 

He would help them any way he could. 

Combat medics were unarmed, only trained in self defence, and though apparently protected under the Geneva convention, the brave faith alone that krauts wouldn’t shoot them just because they had an arm band with a cross on would not save them. They’d all seen Krauts disrespect that rule, and Babe wasn’t about to trust them on that, and so he resolved to fight for the unguarded medics and look out for them wherever they went. When he wasn’t needed for his Soldierly duties of course.

He was puffed up proud with it, found himself a purpose beyond just murdering the enemy. Found himself something to protect. The medics protect them, and he protects the medics. When he wasn’t watching the line, he went on supply runs to the other battalions with Spina. He helped them organise what pitiful kit they had. He made sure Gene got his dinner and had enough water and blankets.

Once, Babe half jokingly suggested Gene go to Lieutenant Dyke for an aid kit, and is shocked to see him actually going and asking. How he found the disappearing Lieutenant was lost on Babe but the audacity of Eugene had him chuckling so hard it triggered a coughing fit. He was so sincere sometimes.

He thinks Winters is going to scold him later when he’s following Eugene and carrying boxes for him, but their leader actually pulls him aside, and tells him to keep at it, so he does.

Dick touches the side of his arm. “Someone’s gotta look out for our Doc.” He smiles. Nixon is back there under a canvas, smoking and watching the interaction with interest. 

Babe nods, a little nervous around all this authority. “Sir?” He’s wondered about Nixon, attached to Dick Winters the way he’s attached to Eugene Roe.

“You seem to be doing a fine job of it, Babe. Keep it up. Hang tight.”

Babe nods with more vigour this time. “Sir.” They salute each other, and he almost drops his precariously balanced boxes as he scrambles to catch up with Eugene again.

And that’s how officially he was put on Eugene-duty. A fine excuse to sit close to the other man and talk his ear off. But Eugene doesn’t seem to mind. Doesn’t seem to freeze up again at least, and that’s all that matters for now.

***

“Everythin’ okay? Babe?”

“Yeah.” Babe whispers. He wipes an itch in his nose and Gene sees the gash across his palm. His chest hurts with the shock of it.

“Hey how’d you do that?”

“You did that.” Babe says, resigned and exhausted.

Eugene looks up at him in horror. “I’ll fix it up” he assures Babe guiltily.

Babe looks away in righteous indignation, ever one for theatrics.

Eugene pauses, looking down at Renee’s scarf, all the bandage he’s got right now. The situation is dire. 

Renee’s headscarf is what he had retrieved from the rubble. Striped in blue. There would be no more coming from that destroyed church. 

Renee had used every scrap she had. Bedsheets, undergarments all boiled at the last breath from lips of soldier or civilian, relieved of their fabric sheaths immediately upon death. 

The only good thing was Renee. 

“Chocolat! pour vous.” 

Renee refuelled him when he ran out. Not the food or drink, not even supplies though she helped with all that too. No; Renee replenished his ability to care for others. She gave to Eugene, and he gives to Babe. He can see it now. She wants him to be happy, and she channels her love through her healing hands empowering his own.

***

Battalion wanted a recognisance patrol. 

“Kraut hunting!” They said.

Eugene didn’t flinch. “Alright. I’ll go.”

When Martin puts a tough palm on his chest stopping him in his tracks, excuses die in the back of his throat, but he wants to go, he cant bear to leave his men behind. 

He sucks the inside of his mouth until it starts to hurt and he smokes instead. He frowns into the abyss. Hearing gunfire and able to do nothing as he hangs back where he’s been told to stay.

Later Eugene squinted at the floor, a husk. It’s like a wound that he can always see but can never close when moral was low. He felt responsible for Babe’s pain. Babe, who was staring hunched over forlorn into the centre of the circle of melancholic men. His hair mussed, eyes glazed over. His cough sounded horrendous grazing his throat on the way up. 

Gene knows there is a link between the soldiers mental state and their survival. Knows he has to find ways of protecting them from their own despair if he can. Does his best. But he can only get so far when his own mind is cracking in the frost.

Babe side eyes Eugene like he was searching for something. Eugene wishes the soil would open up and swallow him because he is sure Babe wouldn’t find what he was looking for.

He got the chocolat from his bag and fingered the foil wrapping. It was a small comfort pressed to his lips. Knew it’s would be all he had to give, but he couldn’t give it then, not in front of all the men. Not when it meant so much and he knew he couldn’t hide it.

Later when he found Babe tucked under Spina’s arm and a blanket nose red, under eyes grey and spidered.

“Gotcha” Gene nearly insisted on sharing the optimistic smile that Renee had given him, but for Spina’s clenched teeth, his half shaking, half gently rocking. Babe was distraught.

“Heffron.” He pulls out the chocolate. “Hey Edward. Eat it” He is so gentle, so encouraging, it breaks through Babe’s daze and he takes a tentative bite.

“Good.” He says. “Chocolat! pour vous.” He thinks.

“I promised him if he got hit, I’d get his stuff and bring it to his Ma. You know?” Babe’s face started to crumple, mouth twisting with the effort not to cry. The tears come anyway. “Now the fucking krauts’ll strip ‘im” his voice shook.

“H-Hey. N-no it’s okay-“

“It’s not!” Babe growled “It’s not okay. I shoulda got to him.”

Eugene couldn’t look Babe’s terrible grief in the eye. But he could make sure sandwiched between two medics, that Babe was warm as he slept for one night.

***

He looks at Babe’s hand again where he holds it out crooked and waiting. 

She would’ve wanted him to use it now. 

He rips it into a strip.

Babe turns to him, eyes glinting and a smirk on his face again.

“Hey Gene. You called me Babe.” He says like Gene performed a miracle.

“I did? When?”

“Just now.”

He looks down at Babe’s lips and back up at his eyes. “B a b e” he tries it out again. “Guess I did” he smiles. It’s so comfortable, so familiar, so impossible to avoid, slipping, falling into this intimacy, this knowing, he can’t help but smile because it feels nice.

“Heh heh” Babe chuckles. “B a b e” he imitates Eugene’s southern drawl and his head wobbles in teasing amusement.

“Heffron” he backtracks, suddenly most unamused. “Watch the goddamn line.”

Babe laughs. 

Eugene can’t quite muster the same, but he does feel a tad bit peaceful, tending for someone he cares about, even if he can’t admit it, even if it was him that hurt Babe. Better he cut Babe than the Krauts, he supposes.

Babe always recovers. Somehow, even after Julian, in this cold. His cough can’t even stick around to hurt him, and he’s teasing Gene like before Bastogne. 

Sometimes he lets himself think that if he can just be close to Babe, if he can just be near him for long enough, then maybe he won’t lose himself. Babe seems to have enough gusto to pull them all through. 

The thought frightens him.

“I think I oughta be going-” He says, imagines abruptly Babe, lying cold and purple in the snow like the dregs of a battalion he found a few days ago, stiff and with icicles hanging from their teeth in gaping mouths.

“Nah.” Babe shakes his head, obliviously smiling. His teeth are very white for a soldier. “Stay a while.”

***

He gasps every now and then in the cold.

Babe is asleep. 

‘Hey what do you call those people again? Those Cajun healers?” Spina asks to distract them from the putputput of gunfire in the distance.

Gene smiles, snuggles closer to Babe and Spina for warmth. “Traiteurs. You know my Grandma was a traiteur.”

“Your grandmother?”

“Uh huh”

“No shit.”

“Uh huh she was. Laid her hands on people and cured ‘em. Took away sickness, cancer, you name it.” Like Renee. Like Renee. That’s why he’s thinking so much of his Grandma lately. It’s that same pose. That firm hand on the forehead like they can breathe love through their fingertips into another.

“Your Grandma did that?” 

Gene nods. 

“You shittin’ me.” Spina looks at him with wonder.

“I ‘member she used to pray a lot.”

“Heheh yeah I guess she had to.”

“Talked to God about the pain she pulled out. Asked him to… carry it away.” He looks at Spina, all proud. “That’s what she did.”

“I’m still tryn’a figure out why they picked me for a medic. I’ve had enough playing doctor. Hey what about you?”

Eugene pales. 

He cant find the words to answer. He knows he should reassure Ralph, he’s an un-ending help to Eugene, and he doesn’t need magic at his fingertips to be so. But he misses his Grandma and the sunshine so badly suddenly it physically hurts.

He wakes up from a nightmare. 

Babe and Spina are still alive, though Babe looks half dead. He crawls out from under the blanket leaving his warmth for Babe who draws the blanket edge close to his face.

***

Eugene is overcome with a panicked pain that cuts up through his chest. He winces. Curls in on himself.

Babe, who had been snickering not two seconds ago turns to look at him in confusion. “Hey Gene what’s wrong? What the fuck are you doing?”

“I cant-“ He starts to try to get up in a panic.

“Hey, hey Gene whassamatter?”

“Don’t y’understand? I- we can’t do this.”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

Eugene can’t answer him so he just grips his wrist. Smooths Renee’s headscarf over Babe’s palm.

Babe can feel him tremble.

“G- Gene come on.” Babe tries to soothe him.

Eugene sighs. He stays put. Babe reaches out hesitantly to touch his face, but stops before he makes contact, hovering. 

“It’s okay.” He says, echoing what Gene had said to him, and he hadn’t believed him right away, but he believed him now, and wanted to return the favour.

This too shall pass his mother used to say. Cliche, really, but fucking true. Even now, Babe tries to believe.

Eugene turns biting the inside of his mouth to look at him. 

Babe’s dark eyes always seemed almost black against his pale skin in the snow, but bright, somehow.

“I-” Babe starts, the words catch in his throat like shards. He knows Eugene won’t stand for it. But he could never help himself when it came to saying what he wanted to say. 

“I want to- touch- you again.” He spits it out. There are memories, of before the fighting, of Eugene’s whispering and soft skin and a light on in the window just for him.

Eugene, if possible, goes even whiter than the snow.

“Uh huh…” He says, and it’s not a question or an answer, and it’s awkward, so awkward. 

No birds have lived in these trees here for a while now, but if there were, they would’ve stopped singing. If only to prolong Babe’s anguish.

Babe’s eyes are big and pleading almost. He’s handsome, and charming, and brave, and caring, and Eugene is going to lose him to some bullet or shard or explosion.

He scrambles up the ragged walls of the foxhole, and is gone before Babe’s fingers can close around his arm, his sleeve, his ghost.

Babe clenches his fist in the space he fled from.

***

“I get it you know” Ralph Spina mutters on another frozen dusk or dawn through a stubble-lined grimace,“my Ma said I couldn’t name the Turkey-birds in the yard or I’d get attached and wouldn’t let her kill em’ come Christmas dinner time. And oh boy was she right. I bawled my damned eyes out over young Timmy the Turkey!” 

Lieb finds him mildly hilarious and snickers quietly so as not to alert any Germans. 

“You’re the turkeys, see?” Ralph chuckles.

“Aint that the truth” says Liebgott. He makes a gobble-gobble sound effect and they fall about laughing under their breaths. It’s the most jovial Babe has seen Liebgott in months.

“But Ralph-“ Babe asks half-joking. “You didn’t learn from Timmy? You use all our Goddamn nicknames.”

“Yeah but you and me Babe- an’ Lieb here, we bounce back. Poor Gene just ain’t the ‘water off a ducks back’ type a’ guy. So he gotta take precautions. That’s all.”

“Eh.” Babe nods solemnly.

“Typa’ quack you mean” Liebgott cracks another terrible joke.

Babe rolls his eyes.

***

Gene is worried about Babe, who has lost the wing he was taken under. Bill Guarnere and Babe Heffron would bleat at each other off to one side, so entrenched in their mother tongue that some words became unrecognisable for those who weren’t well versed in the linguistics of Pennysylvia. Occasionally trip-wiring each other into explosions of laughter that rang dangerously through the woods so that Mama Lip had to tell them to: “Shut the fuck up, or else!”. Bill would wave him off but they’d quiet down considerably after that because it wouldn’t do to disrespect ya mother, they’d joked. Choosing instead to whisper hushed in each other's ears about this guy and this street and the next.

Gene plonks himself down in Babe’s foxhole. It’s empty save for the Philadelphian, who is 40% lost in thought, 60% watching the line, but acknowledges his arrival with a signature lopsided expression. It’s weighted with a melancholy, but still comes under the definition of a smirk.

It’s been a few days, Eugene thinks, since Babe reached out and he ran away. Hard to tell with all the shelling, hard to know when the forest looks different every day from the trees that burst into violent shrapnel shards of bark, and the foxholes, emptying as one by one they're picked off, it’s hard to tell how much time is passing when the days are dark and the nights are bright with flares and explosions.

Eugene hunkers down, closes his eyes for a second, feeling Babe’s presence next to him, like the atmosphere Babe charges and displaces can touch the skin of his face somehow. He thinks if Babe got up silently, he could tell without using his five senses, through his insides like a pulse. Like when you can tell if an alligator swam by the boat if you sat deep enough down in the basin and listened.

“Know anything bout boats Gene?”

Eugene’s head snaps up. Babe smirks at him again, waiting. Handsome…

After a second, in which he recovers from the apparent mind-reading abilities of the private next to him, Eugene nods, “I know bout’ boats…”, pressing his lips together in a small smile. “Went every day to school on one, so I oughta know.”

“You went to school on a boat?!” Babe frowns remembering something. “Thought you never even went to school Gene?”

“I went to school fo’a while. ‘Till I was eleven, maybe twelve.” He squints up at the tree canopy as if searching for the memory above his head. “Didn’t like it much, anyway, then I’d go cast the shrimp net with my pere”

Babe blinked at him. “We got something almost in common there Genie.”

Gene looked up at him questioning.

“I dropped out at 16. Worked the shipyard with my pop.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He pauses, laughing to himself. “Street smarts! That’s what we got.”

“Uh huh.” Gene says. “It’s kinda sad.”

“What is?”

“That we gotta get to know each other here, you know, rather than anywhere else.”

Babe thinks he might blush. “Well, if it weren’t for the war, we woulda prob’ly never met Genie.”

“Mm…”

Gene drifts away, then. Lost in thought. 

Babe watches him, wondering about young Genie working his hands to death when even he was sitting his exams.

Gene remembers how he used to be ankle deep in some mud-slick corner of the bayou, slinging the net forth and pulling it back, his father yelling a fit at him when the catch was too small. He wanted the fat shrimp, the ones that jump real high and splash you with swampy water.

Now he’s grateful his feet are still somehow dry, something he can’t say for Joe Toye, for whom his advice hadn’t mattered in the end. 

His Grandma would’ve said that somehow Toye sensed what would happen. She might claim, had she been alive to hear of it, that Toye ignored Eugene’s reminders and rotted from the knee down because whether he knew it or not, his body saw it written and acted accordingly. 

He shakes off her musings because that route leads to belief in something. Whether that something be inevitable death or inevitable hope, Eugene needs to stay neutral to it all. A clockwork preventer of infection and bleeding in the field. That couldn’t include pondering the paths of the spirits beside him as he runs from foxhole to foxhole. 

He remembers his duty. To care for the men. 

Caring for Babe is caring for the men.

“You okay Babe?”

Babe looks at him and his eyes flick to his lips and back up and there is wanting in them. Eugene knows that look. But there’s just nothing they can do about it here, now, and when the war’s over, there’ll be nothin’ they can do about it then neither. It’s almost comforting, the total hopelessness of this situation he finds himself in. Because he feels it too, he thinks.

“I’m okay Gene. I’m glad Bill’s outa this war at least.”

***

Babe is a sinner. A sinner with a type. 

His friends back home would say the target of his affections at a dance might usually (often) be someone slender, dark haired, button-nosed, someone who blushed pink in the cold, softly spoken… and so on, and so on…

He knows the Nuns were right about some things, but they were wrong about who he was, and they were wrong about much more than that.

Eugene with his snow white complexion so pale he was lilac purple under the eyes, cheek bones high and sharp, thick hair naturally stuck up like after an electric shock, thin, dark, furrowed brows, permanently creased in the middle, sloped down at the sides like he was perpetually mulling over a very complicated mathematical equation or a philosophical question.

And, well looks were one thing, looks were what made Babe hook up with sweet Doris of the dancehall back home, the thing that attracted Heffron to Doc Roe in the first place, and maybe the Nuns would be right, if it wasn’t more than that, but it was. 

It was frighteningly more than that. 

It was a pull, a feeling of safety, that he could be his whole true self, that he could tease and be teased, laugh and cry and sleep in the vicinity of. 

It was, for example: admiration. 

Of how Gene could get away with anything. There were only a few men on earth who could escape scot-free after upturning Perconte’s entire bag of belongings and rifling through looking for scissors. All he got in return was an exasperated: “C’mon Doc!” 

The men trusted him because he was a quick thinker, and he saved lives, and he could get to you when you thought all hope was lost. He was respectable, an angel through and through. He was soft and kind and warm and admirable in all this death and destruction. 

Sometimes Babe was overcome with panic that someone else might harbour the same feelings as him and try to take Gene away. Well. The war could certainly do that.

Eugene with his small bright eyes, pinched delicately closed now, round lips pressed together in tension even in the light sleep he seemed to have slipped into. Babe could reach out and touch him he was so close. He was supposed to be watching the line, gun slung over his shoulder, but the snoozing medic to his right was too much of a draw.

He couldn’t help but imagine a world where he has Eugene on his arm, the halls decked out on a Philly Christmas Eve, bunting and glitter and candles, and they spin together in a waltz (because he couldn’t see Gene doing the jitterbug, (though now he thinks about it, that would probably be mighty fun, teaching Gene to jitterbug like a pro) but he sure could swing him around in a waltz), and no one in the crowds bats an eyelid because it’s totally normal and natural and he would even get compliments and his friends teasing him about how he caught such a beauty and Genie would blush and-

Gene sniffles gently in his sleep, and Babe has to stop himself from verbally acknowledging how endearing he finds it. He breaths deep and goes back to watching the line.

Ah fuck he’s fucking fucked. 

Infatuated. He realises with a cold wet stone in his stomach. 

But he’s ecstatic too. Can’t help it. In days as bleak as these, it was the dreams in your head you could escape to that kept you going. He hopes Gene had something to imagine that kept him warm too. 

He’s next to Eugene, he’s tasted him, he might get to again if he’s lucky! He thinks it’s too cold here to even bother trying, but after this, if they make it, they could try. Try to make it further. The idea that that could be what he wants makes him cough, which wakes Gene up and Babe curses himself violently for disturbing the other man’s much needed rest.

Gene frowns, eyes barely opening, confused.

“You okay?”

“I’m okay.” Babe pulls himself together, quieting his cough to a dull wheeze. “Eh it’s okay Genie, you go back to sleep.”

Eugene jolts, is about to stand. “Gotta check on-”

“Just sit with me a minute yeah? I mean- fuck, you gotta relax sometime.”

Eugene eyes him warily, then seems to concede, exhaling as he shifts position. To Babe’s elation, he edges closer, so close in fact that they are touching shoulder to shoulder, ribcage to ribcage.

“Watch the line Babe.”

Babe does as he’s told, after all, his name was used correctly. Eventually, he feels the weight of Eugene’s sleepy-head on his shoulder. Positive reinforcement. He thinks with a smirk.

***

THE CHURCH

Eugene is staring at him. 

Babe has been sharing cigarettes with the boys behind him, listening to the choir, sneaking glances over at Lipton and Speirs near the entrance who are edging closer and closer to each other in the candlelight, and it could be mistaken as something, well, but it most certainly ‘aint that…

Couldn’t be…

The Church is like heaven compared to the hell of Bastogne, but they’re not moving off the line yet apparently. This is just a stopover. More like heavens waiting room, or a warm purgatory, but the doors will open and let in the cold again come morning. The men are just- exhausted isn’t even the right word. Malarkey may as well be dead. He’s gaunt in a way Babe didn't think was possible. 

Anyway, Babe can tell Eugene is staring at him because he keeps trying to stare at Eugene, and is thwarted by the eye contact that immediately befalls him every time he attempts it. 

He finds himself thinking how come Eugene gets to do all the staring? Then he starts wondering why Eugene is staring at him. Starts thinking he might just have the same reasons as Babe and got there first. 

Interesting… Babe can’t help but smile to himself. He lights his cigarette and preens, tries to look handsome, holy under the spell of the angelic voices floating around them.

He falters. 

Some of the men are crying at this display of innocence and beauty, and he’s imagining the company medic might be looking at him with lust. 

The Nuns would be furious. But the Nuns called him Edward and that was not his name. The Nuns beat him and screamed at him and the other boys, and he didn’t agree with them then. He has a tiny cross around his neck that feels sometimes like a rope. 

His mother would be horrified. His father wouldn’t dare look at him. But he just can’t bring himself to care. What was sodomy but a small thing in the face of all they had seen? 

He wanted something like what he could’ve had with Doris, but it would be better because it would be with Eugene. How was that so evil? How did that hold up on the scales weighed against the raping and pillaging and burning and bombing and torturing and murdering they had seen and heard of during the war. 

And both sides had done it. 

And neither side could stomach a little love between men? 

The logic just didn’t suffice. Never had. He didn’t listen to the Nun’s when they were spitting right in his eye, beating his back raw, and well he wouldn’t listen to them now they were the supposed angel on his shoulder inside his own goddamn head.

He wondered what church was like in Louisiana. 

Maybe Eugene is thinking the same things. 

He risks a glance back over, and is rewarded with the opportunity to stare to his hearts content. 

Eugene is checking the bandages on Perconte’s ass. Babe can take the chance to look across the room past the candles the singing girls, past the other men, some weeping, some passed out, some coughing, chatting, grumbling, and finally his eyes land on Eugene, who is of course making sure another soldier is okay. 

The curve of his ear, the sharpness of his cheekbones, his slender neck and his rumpled uniform with slouched medical bag still attached at the hip. 

He is almost too much for Babe to look at, and suddenly he is caught. The bandage is apparently just fine and Eugene is turning and Babe can’t look away. Their eyes meet and it’s like the choir stops, the men all fade away and it’s just Babe and Eugene, Eugene and Babe, Babe and Eugene, Eugene and Babe. 

He can feel their hearts beating as one. 

Eugene stares and Babe stares back, and though their expressions remain carefully slack, Babe knows they are both just so very glad to be alive.

Chapter Text

HAGAUENAU

It’s still winter, but it feels almost like spring. Something growing.

Joe Liebgott had been pretty quiet through Bastogne. You could say it was the cold that had frozen him up and stoppered his motormouth, but Eugene took note of the way he’d started revving up again just as one David Kenyon Webster returned to them in Haguenau. 

Love and hate were really very thinly separated. 

Babe helps the medics unload new boxes of supplies into a makeshift aid station in the basement of a house in a strategic spot near the back of the town.

It’s not suspicious because there are other soldiers helping too, and it’s also not suspicious because Babe is friends with Ralph Spina, they’re both from Philly after all, and so he goes often to see the medics for a lot of reasons, only one of them being Eugene Roe, and so no one could look at it and ask questions, raise an eyebrow, wonder why he sits idling time away with the Doc when he perhaps should be with the other men.

When Gene gets his sights set on all the plasma, bandages and morphine, his face alights with an adorable, childlike, triumphant grin in the amber lamplight, maniacally, he actually giggles, and it’s almost scary to Spina and Babe who share a look of quiet amazement.

Babe imagines Gene might just go out and find himself a wounded kraut to patch up, just to use the fresh supply and know there is more when he’s finished.

He also feels concern blast through him and settle in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to be very close to Gene all the time, but he wanted to send him away from all this simultaneously. He was not okay. He was subdued, would flicker into the middle distance and flicker back seemingly at random, and seem confused by his own behaviour. Would start a conversation and trail off, and move on to something else. Like everyone else, he would flinch at explosions of gunfire in the far distance, but he wouldn’t seem to recover, would retreat on step further into himself. There were flashes of his usual wit, his easy-going warmth, his healthy optimism was not gone, but he just, wasn’t always there.

He actually tries to get Gene transferred away after all the slowing down and freezing up.

“Lieutenant Winters, Sir?”

“At ease, private.”

“Sir. May we eh- speak in private?”

“Go ahead, Babe.”

“I know you had your eye on Doc, same as me, and I just- I wanted to ask you, Sir, if- I just think that the Doc has had a tough time, and if anyone deserves a break it’s him, Sir. I wonder, if you could get him transferred out for a rest, some good food…”

“Heffron.” Winters puts a hand on Babe’s shoulder. Shakes his head. His voice is gravelly. “I see all you’ve done for our Doc, but we need him now and we’ll need him tomorrow. He’ll make it. He’s a strong one. Hang tight. Keep watching over him, and allow him to watch over us.” 

“Thank you sir.”

Though in actuality he agrees with the private, Winters knows they’re off the line soon. Knows it’s only one or two more days before Eugene Roe can have his well-deserved peace. Just two more days. 

But he can’t very well tell Private Edward ‘Babe’ Heffron that. 

However little does he know, or at least he should know better, that being off the line does not necessarily equal peace.

***

So they are all stuck here, on the line, waiting for death again. 

Easy company, in the mud and the cold still, but with partially-ruined roofs over their heads and some grub to eat. 

There are almost fist-fights over chocolate and cigarettes, but Perconte finds a complex system of a way to divvy them out as equally as he deems possible.

The showers are a welcome change. 

Babe doesn’t bother slicking his hair down anymore all neat, but he does shave, and that feels good. 

His hands are almost crippled from cold. Can’t seem to get warm. Eugene regrets there’s not much he can do about that when he goes to see him. At least it’s yet another excuse to see him.

Babe regrets it means there’s not much he can do with his hands to warm Gene up either, and says as much under his breath with a mischievous smile.

Eugene rewards him with a sort of wide-eyed shy smile that quivers and doesn’t quite meet his eyes, but Babe has hope.

***

The basement smells of gunpowder and the high vinegar scent of old wine bottles spilt and smashed. 

Every now and then dust falls from the ceiling, but no one notices in the adrenaline-fuelled tornado of the prisoners and easy company screaming over each other and Jackson is coughing up blood and shudder-rattling in a way that doesn’t leave much hope.

“You’re okay Jackson, take it easy. Shh. Okay, okay.” 

Babe later thinks on those words, how Eugene lies so sweetly, so necessarily, so beautifully like a charm or a poem. Thinks that many men are lucky for that to have been the last voice they heard. One with rhythm and soul to it, one with heart and kindness in its contents.

At Doc Roe’s entrance the entire room quiets down. Woe betide anyone who should get in the way of his work. His voice is soothing to Jackson who had up until this point been screaming, rasping and spluttering all hell, and his touch seems to slow all that down. 

“Okay..” he whispers again to Jackson. He looks inside the boys mouth, examines his face in extreme concentration. 

“Light! I need some light! Get me some light.” He orders, with all the authority of a surgeon because that is what he has earned these last couple years. “Alright look at the flame. Jackson look at the flame. Alright. That’s good.” 

He searches Jackson’s teary pupil. It is dilated and does not shrink at the flame. He wills it to, but it remains fixed and large. If there is any saving him, it needs to be done immediately, and by someone with a goddamn doctorate. They have to get him to the aid station. Now. 

“Alright let’s get him out of here.” Time is of the essence.

The guys holding the stretchers move far too slow for his liking. Jackson screams as soon as Eugene takes his hands off of him and yells “Get him out!”

At that moment, something hits the roof of the building next to theirs so that the whole earth is shaken, and they all fall to floor. 

This panics Jackson further. 

“Jackson!” Gene yells, trying to anchor his soul to his body.

The young boy is choking. “I don’t wanna die!” He screeches. 

“Jackson you are not gonna die! You’re not gonna die! I need you to hang on!” 

Jackson seizes. 

Eugene knows he’s gone. Feels his pulse stop with a rough finality under his blood streaked thumb. 

The room goes silent.

He sits back on his heels and takes off his helmet, breaths in once, steels himself, then seeks the eyes he always seeks. He finds Babe with one turn of his head. He can’t look away, in fact. Tunnel vision. 

Babe tilts his head in question, and can tell the bad news through just this one look. Babe stares back at him for one long moment. Takes the brunt of the responsibility from Eugene’s shoulders and turns to the men, letting them know what happened. 

Jackson is dead.

***

The next morning, Babe and Eugene walk together past the makeshift kitchens, and they run into Private Roy Cobb, who’s as drunk as a skunk and swaying violently against the wall.

Eugene immediately goes to help him, but Cobb sees him and balks.

Babe looks on warily.

“Cobb. You okay?” Eugene asks gently.

Cobb seems to writhe in place.

“Hey Doc!” He spits like the name is venom. His jaw thrashes. He jerks away from Eugene’s kindly touch like it’s a curse. 

“Jackson’s dead because of you.” He points, empty glass bottle held loosely between his fingers.

Babe snarls at the guy. “Watch who you talkin’ to there-”

“Cobb, I hear you, but I ‘aint no real Doc, okay?” Eugene tries reasoning. Even up against total moronic behaviour, he remains calm. “I can stabilise a wound, but Jackson needed someone more qualified ‘an me.”

“But if you had got there earlier!” Cobb slurs his speech now, the very words poisoned with vitriol. “I seen you- everyone seen. You ‘aint got the fucking wits about you any-anymore.” 

Eugene frowns. For a second, Babe worries, but then he’s pointing a delicately boned finger at the drunk. “Oh like you can handle it all huh, Cobb? Why don’t you come get some water-” 

Cobb lurches forward aggressively now.

“Shut up! Faggo-”

Babe punches him in the jaw before his can finish. 

A word like that was very dangerous, even said by someone no one would listen to.

Cobb punches back, but he’s drunk and unstable and he soon falls to the floor, but his momentum drags Babe down with him. 

The bottle smashes to shards on cement. They roll in the mud groaning in pain. 

There’s blood above Cobbs eye and under Babe’s lip where they must have cracked their egg-heads together.

Gene is furious. “Get up! The both a’ you!” 

He has to stitch them both up, muttering under his breath the whole while. He scoldingly calls the pair of them “wasters” and “grown adults who should have some sense” the entire time because his supplies are being used unnecessarily. 

Babe keeps his mouth shut, though he cant believe Eugene would bother treating the barely conscious asshole slumped next to him on their makeshift medical table.

Later, Babe pleads stretching a freshly stitched lip, follows Gene into his billet, tries to touch his arm but Eugene shrugs him off. 

Claims he’s heard worse. 

Men have said terrible things to him when they were in pain, after all. 

But after he’s thrown Babe from his room to go on the second patrol, he strips down to his under things, crawls beneath a tattered blanket with his knuckles up hard against his teeth and cries for the first time in months. Maybe years.

He weeps because it strikes a nerve.

Eugene cries that night because he’s guilty. 

Though he made sure to be waiting up for the patrol, listening to the bullets and the screams, hearing the shouting and the chaos, he was guilty of freezing in the moment of need, and being unable to run or to help. 

Johnny Martin found him staring at the wall and hauled him up. He was guilty of being too slow, and then when he got there, and Jackson died under his hands, guilty still, of being too busy thanking god it wasn’t Babe lying there to really mourn the boy.

He cries for Renee, he cries for Bill Guarnere and Joe Toye, Skip and Muck and Hoobler, for all the men dead. American and British and Canadian and French and German. 

The tears come, and they don’t stop. Not for a long time. When they finally slow, and he has a chance to gather himself before

And like he has a sixth sense, at a little after 2AM, Babe, lips still blood red, feeling inadequate in the face of all Gene has seen, but here all the same, pushes his way back into Eugene’s room, sits on the edge of his bed and holds his hand. 

Tells him there is no second patrol. Winters says so. (Privately Babe blesses Winters for keeping them safe, for prioritising them over the war machine, but he curses the army for making them go on that one last patrol, and then demanding another. What if it was the straw that broke the camel’s back? What if Gene never recovered?)

He tells him it’s not his fault.

Then Eugene cries again because it was easier for him to carry on thinking of the men as flesh. Muscle and blood. Meat and nothing else. And now his nightmare has come true, it’s beautiful and it hurts.

He cries for he knows what he’s always known; he can never not be wrong in the eyes of the law and worse than that, in the eyes of God. And he finds he doesn’t care. He can’t even begin to imagine what his parents would say if they knew all that he’d seen and done. 

He doesn’t care. He grips Babe’s hand.

“We’re off the line in the morning, Genie…” Babe whispers, stroking his wrist, like that’s any relief now in the dark.

And Eugene surges forward and up, pressing their lips together. Finally, finally. Babe’s fingers curl at the hair on the nape of his neck, palm cupping his cheek, is other hand holding his side and he is kissing him back hard, taking and taking, tongue in his mouth and it’s filled with a strength and something bigger than them both.

Babe pulls back with a gasp and Eugene takes the chance to pull him in closer so that his weight is on top of him. They roll on the bed until it creaks alarmingly loud and they have to stop despite the heat and hardness between them.

There is no time, no privacy for long enough and Babe has to leave, has to let go of Eugene before someone comes though the door, but the kiss is a promise, and Eugene’s leg up around the back of Babe’s thigh had been a foreshadowing, and though Eugene presses Babe away from himself, and Babe gets up to open the door with one last lingering look at Eugene’s kiss-swollen lips and red-rimmed eyes and pink nose, he leaves elated and rosy for he knows there could be more to come…

***

AUSTRIA

Austria is deceptive in its beauty, the rolling blue and vast ochre green ombre. Grey to white tips of the peaks meeting the fluffy clouds in heavenly glory.

It tortures Eugene. 

Too close to heaven the veil is just as thin as it was when they were in the depths of the hell of Bastogne. Soldiers who have seen death so commonly when finally faced with peace, seem to start to pick up the slack in the apparent safety of the mountains. 

Gene can only be thankful he hadn’t been optimistic enough to dare to have hope that the mass killing was over. He thinks the shock would’ve been the end of him had he let his guard down. 

Some idiot replacements start bickering over something stupid and point their guns at each other, half joking, until one of them goes off. And it’s not funny anymore. One of them is bleeding from the side of his head, the other is standing there in shock. 

Babe sees the whole thing. Knows Gene will materialise in a moment, waits with bated breath as a small crowd gathers.

“Move! Move. Comin’ through. Gimme room. Outa my way.” Eugene is there in a flash. Already kneeling to check on the wound. “You lucky to be alive, boy. Huh? You tryna’ head butt that bullet?” 

He and Ralph heft the young (too young) man onto the flatbed as he groans in pain and humiliation.  

Then someone pipes up and tells Eugene what happened. 

When men were killed this far in to the war, they had fought side by side for five years at that point, some of them, those that were left anyway, and to lose someone at this late stage, when they were brothers and friends and knew each others deepest souls and broken and built together, killed together, laughed together it was a time to live not to die. And so it was threatening to them all and it hurt when it happened.

Injuries were terrible on their own, but it was the unnecessary, the easily avoided, that got to Eugene. When replacements died it was the worst. It was the worst for everyone, but combining foolishness with injury in youth, and you had one very angry Doc Roe on your hands.

One forgot Eugene was only 22 years old, such was the weight his words held.

"You oughta be ashamed!" Eugene’s voice almost breaks the way it’s trembling with rage. He stands there, stance wide, and fists clenched. The air seeming to whip up around him like fire. “You know better, you oughta be ashamed." He spits between the two boys.

“Get off me!” The injured one yells, and Babe lurches forward, almost about to injure him further. 

“What are y’tryna die?” Gene asks, really asks. “You injured in the head in more ways than one? Huh?” 

The replacement shuts the hell up.

Eugene stops Babe’s aggressive approach with a placating hand gently held up, so that Babe thinks to himself Christ! Because he realises he’d do anything if Eugene said so, and forces himself to put his rage elsewhere, rounding on the other replacement.

“Get outta here!” Babe grabs the uninjured boy by the scruff of the neck and shoves him away from the scene. “We’re fightin’ the Germans not each other.”

“And we aint fightin’ them much any more, anyway.” Says Spina.

Eugene gives one last blazing glare at the guilty private, sends a softer look to Babe, and hops onto the truck. 

“Numb nuts!” Spina shouts and the sound passes with the engine he revs as they speed away.

***

Dear Babe

I hope you are well, Ma is always asking after you, like I have access to you telepathically or something. So I thought I’d gain access to you through literary techniques.

You better bring us back some souvenirs from Europe eh?

I have learnt to drive, and saved up and bought a car. Now I’m driving my own dates around. Can you believe?

I just need to move out of Mam’s and I’ll be free!

I hope you aren’t still into Doris. Let me tell you, she’s moved on alright!

Everyone’s basically back to normal here. Even though I know there’s still fighting over in Japan and the like. I hope it all stops soon.

Glad you aint dead.

Love

Your lil sis

Dear Annie

Thanks for your letter, I didn’t know you could write!

Yeah I’m safe and sound, all is well. We need enough points to come home. I have plenty but I need a few more yet.

I’m in Austria right now. I’m sure you’ve heard, we took Hitler’s Eagle’s nest, (Ma would say his decoration style leaves a lot to be desired… among other things…) now we’re waiting for the War to be over in the countryside. It’s amazing, I wish you could see it. I don’t know how anyone could get so evil in such a beautiful place as this. You know?

Nah me and Doris wouldn’t work out.

There’s someone I want you to meet

Fuck you I want a car!

I’ll be back home in no time, you tell Ma that.

Tell the date of yours that too on pain of death. I will be crosschecking whoever the lucky guy is IN PERSON. 

But well done on the job and the car and the boyfriend… that's SWELL!

Babe

***

They were thawing out. Eugene finds that he thinks of Bastogne in fits of anxiety at night, or in slow builds of anxiety in the day, like a growing fog, but then it lifts and he realises he isn’t in the same waking nightmare anymore. There is no longer a tangle of black and white in every direction, and he isn't buried underground waiting for his men to die. He thinks maybe that’s what happened to him. He had been so certain they would all die, that he figured he may as well be dead too, similar such as the feeling was of being already buried in foxholes to that of lying in the coffin six feet under. 

Like poor private Blythe (it seemed so long ago now, that he was treating that blue-eyed boy,) who went blind because perhaps he simply didn’t want to see anymore.

Eugene too, was just an extension of his own beliefs. The only way you can survive, is if you are already dead. His body just took the concept a little too far, so that his brain couldn’t catch up.

If he might as well be dead, why wouldn’t his body shut down like it had? He figures that was the answer, that probably, that was the last of it.

The days get longer. The light turns more faded like a photograph. The drinking, the hangovers, the nothingness. The wounded still pile up. Eugene imagines a pile of all the human bodies he couldn’t save. How big would it be? It would be tall and bloated and red. He shakes his head of this particular thought.

He fingers the tightly stacked row of plasma containers like running his hand over the keys of a piano. Examines the form of the little silver cans and boxes, the glass bottles shining. Like sewing kits but for the fabric of the human body. Too little too late he had a full stock of supplies. 

But the men still found ways to use them.

He sits on a wooden chair, and lights a cigarette, feeling the smoke fill his lungs and resting his free hand on his hip and distracts himself by allowing himself to think about what he really wants to think about: Babe.

Funny how the war was sitting and standing and waiting and smoking and drinking, and then it was seemingly relentlessly hiding and ducking and running and shooting, and now it was sitting and standing and waiting and sitting again.

Playing cards and darning one’s own socks and scavenging in neighbouring towns for delicacies, and occasionally packing gauze into a pulsing wound.

But now, he felt that he was waiting, quite frankly, for Babe. Craving, even.

Babe’s face was lined now, the war had carved it gently. A man with coppery hair stuck every which way like a flame, and eyes that still danced and a smile that still flashed bright white and teasing and warm.

He was surprisingly thoughtful. It was easy to mistake him for one of his hard-headed friends - Joe Liebgott or Bill Guarnere, who, though not stupid, did tend to blunder through life - however Eugene was pleasantly struck by Babe’s ability and or willingness to remember what Eugene had told him, to think about him and what he might need. 

It was touching, to be listened to.

The situation he finds himself in is an odd one.

He and Babe had had met in the bathroom of a pub in England, each looking for nothing more than a warm body.

But now they were colleagues and even friends and there was still this thing that happened between them that could happen again given the right circumstances, and whatever had linked them in the cold of Bastogne, where it was warm bodies that they needed to survive, and cold bodies all around, had grown and evolved into something massive before either of them had a chance to get hold of it. It had outgrown them both. Their bodies left behind from the initial lust and now feeling everlastingly bound together in something deeper.

How could that translate going forward?

Babe had grown a lot these last few years. He was no longer the enthusiastic puppy dog that Eugene first encountered, now he seemed to be resolved in wanting to prove his maturity and Eugene was more than happy to oblige.

It was only a matter of time, before Babe heard what he was asking for and gave it to him.

***

“Hey Liebgott!”

“Baaaaaaabe.”

“You got a second?”

“What?”

Babe gestures for him to follow. They end up round the back of the storeroom. No one around to listen in. “In California, you had… Eh. For guys- For guys-”

“Guys… like us?…” Liebgott prompts.

“Mmhmm” Babe sniffs, nodding continuously, looking around.

“What?”

“Eh…”

“Don’t take offence Babe, but I ‘aint attracted to Philadelphians.” Liebgott tilts his head, an apologetic grimace on his face.

Babe cringes. “Jesus fuck- That’s not what I’m askin’ for-”

“Well ‘scuse me! What the fuck else was I s’pposed ta think?”

“I’m- I don’t know how to-” Babe scrubs his hands over his face, flushing.

“Spit it out for fucks sake! I ‘aint gonna tell on you.”

“I have someone I want to- you know, with. And I need… supplies. Okay?”

Liebgott frowns for a second, clearly in thought then gasps. “The Doc?!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Babe hisses, rounding on him aggressively.

Liebgott sneers but changes his voice to a whisper. “I fuckin’ knew it! Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Babe pauses, glaring at him. 

A beat.

“Don’t tell Webster.”

“I ‘aint gonna tell.” He looks somewhere off in the distance, smiling cheekily.

“Don’t tell him. Lieb.”

“I aint gonna!”

“I know you.” He jabs a finger. "I’ll give you a fuckin’ Hersheys bar eh? How’s that? Just don’t tell him Lieb. He’s probably a fuckin’ blabbermouth and I don’t want a fuckin’ Section 8.”

“You think I would be fucking him if I thought he was a snitch? He can keep a secret.” Liebgott chews on his lip. “Ah but gimme the Hershey’s and I’ll keep it to myself. For now.”

“Good. But know I’ll make it a stalemate. Fuckin’ tell Genie ‘bout you two if you say a word.”

“Genie huh?” Liebgott teases, grinning maniacally then shrugs. “Ah I trust Doc not to say anything.”

Babe feels himself flush. Damn. Genie just had to be the most trustworthy guy on base. “Anyway.” He scrambles flustered. “Can you help me out or not?”

Liebgott decides to torture him further. “I can. But the question is, will I?”

Babe glowers something violent.

“Yeah. Come with me buddy, I got you.” Liebgott snickers. “Damn. I can’t believe this. How’d you bag a guy like that? I mean look at you. And then look at him. I mean. You must have a real fat cock Babe.”

“SHUT. UP!”

“Alright alright.” Liebgott laughs and leads Babe to his Billet where he has a stash.

***

The war is over. 

The whole garrison is drinking. For the second night in a row. Speirs and all. Even Winters joined in the celebration, seemed mostly like he was making sure a plastered Nixon made it safely back to his bed, but he smiles and waves and jokes around with the boys.

Babe parties for hours, but after a while he feels like he can see the gaps too clearly. The spaces left behind of all the guys they had lost. Because there weren’t really that many of them left. There are a sea of men he doesn’t know, that didn’t make it past Bastogne, that don’t and could never understand what he and Lieb, Spina and Lipton, Martin and Randleman had been through. They found themselves less rowdy, more inside jokes and tight knit energies. 

He misses Bill and Julian.

Then he seeks out Eugene, because he always does, always will. Finds him sitting with a few of the guys he doesn’t know all that well around a petrol fire.

Eugene’s cheeks are all pink in the flickering light. Babe notices how he’s already tanned a little bit in the Austrian sunshine. He’s pink in the sun and the snow.

“Read my mind.” Eugene says, all serious.

“What, no hi hello how are you?” Babe sits next to him on an upturned barrel, tries not to roll away, with an unbalanced yelp.

Eugene actually laughs at him and Babe thinks he would fall in the mud and drown if it made Eugene chuckle like that again.

“Read my mind” Eugene’s words are slurred.

“Eh?!”

“Read. My. Mind.”

He’s glaring, eyebrows knitted together, nose scrunched up a little bit, eyes blazing.

Babe stills, the air shimmers. 

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Eugene stares into his eyes, Babe stares back chuckling at first, then semi-serious and he thinks he might be in love.

“Genie…”

They can’t kiss, so they smoke a cigarette, sucking down smoke and staring into each other’s eyes to the point where it seemed to freak out whoever the fuck it was that was sitting with them, and Babe is glad to see them go.

“You wanna get outta here Genie?” He asks, low into Genie’s ear once the strangers have gone.

“Uh huh.” Gene nods. The movement is endearingly over-exaggerated.

Gene swigs his whisky, offers it to Babe who happily gulps it down before handing it back. It’s burning in his chest.

Gene frowns and tips it upside down. There’s only a drip left. 

Babe cackles.

“C’mon you mmmiserable mmmoocher” This time Babe’s words are slurred.

“Who was that anyway?” He asks of Genie, arm around boney shoulders, and it’s okay, plenty of the men do this when they are drunk and it’s no big deal.

“I dunno.”

“You don’t know who that was you was sittin’ with?”

“No.”

“You’re a funny one Genie, I gotta tell you…”

***

In the supply room there are rows of wooden shelves. Crates and boxes stacked on bottom, other items taken out of the boxes to have on hand, carefully separated and organised. Rubber tubing here, syringes there, bandages here, glass containers there, and all of it waits in the stillness in the dark for use, though tonight, one shelf is teetering dangerously close to falling.

A steady back and forth, back and forth, a rocking, a rhythm, a beat, a heart pumping.

There is a table tucked away in the back corner, and Eugene has a grip on the far edge of it, back arched, the contents of this table had been displaced in a hurry. And the surrounding shelves are rattling with each thrilling wave. He grips, white-knuckled, because he might fly over the other side with the force of which Babe is thrusting inside him.

He finds that he is making noises he should be embarrassed about but isn’t, because he feels only that he should be quiet for fear of being caught, and not that he would be unsafe in front of the one who draws out the sound.

He is growling, almost, can’t help it. 

Babe enters him again and it presses something internal that creates this guttural, spellbinding pulse of pure pleasure. It had been painful at first, he had had to take control of his breathing. Babe had used one strong finger, opening him up slowly like he was precious and needed coaxing, then two, then three, then another appendage, held his hand and kissed his spine and remained still until he indicated it was okay to move.

He shivers and sweat beads on his temples, sheening across his back.

There are tears in the corners of his eyes and he gasps, hears Babe gasping too, animalistic, reaches his trembling hand behind him and Babe grasps it again and interlocks his fingers over Gene’s. Then he bends it and gets their arms underneath with one heave, pulls Gene up backwards so that his back is to his chest, hands gripped together over his heart, the other is on his hip to keep him there, finger tips pressing his stomach. It is almost obscene, like he is trying to feel himself inside through Gene’s flesh.

Gene’s back is arched and Babe has his chin hooked over his shoulder and he can’t take it anymore, he is overcome, and he makes a louder noise and Babe shushes him and then immediately contradicts himself as he thrusts and moves his hand down lower. And they are both moaning now, and then Eugene is seeing stars as he is touched inside and out and feels like something has exploded white light from his chest and it’s like he is totally blank and free, but held and safe and rocked, back and forth through the whole thing.

They come down, breathing heavily, and Eugene almost falls forward and down. His legs are shaky like a foal, and Babe pulls a chair over and sits down, collapsing him onto his lap, hugs him close again around the waist and they breathe together, high.

Babe touches his cheek and finds damp and Eugene jerks his head away, embarrassed now, but Babe just holds his palm there, coaxing his head slowly, slowly so that they can look at each other finally.

Their mouths meet, and Eugene feels he is in shock. Realises he never thought he would be able to have this.

And it’s terrifying. 

His breath hitches. There is an electricity in the stale storeroom air. A frightening certainty that what they have done is different from before. They had fit together, so perfectly, it had been so right and felt good.

Babe resolves there will be a next time, and that when it happens he wants to do this face to face so that he can look into Gene’s eyes like he is now.

Eugene prays for a few more minutes of this perfect numbness, lets his head fall back and Babe kiss his adam’s apple, and he gulps when he raises himself back up and Babe is still as beautiful as before.

They clean themselves up and sneak over the road to Eugene’s quarters, hand in hand through shadow. They need to be careful as there are still soldiers drunkenly stumbling back to bed, and eventually they make it, sober and stealthy, into warm sheets and hold each other before dreams take ownership of them.

But the mist lowers itself like a curtain over Eugene. 

In the bayou, there was a morning fog that clung to the skin and enchanted you in such was that you could easily become lost following the shadows of herons down winding waterways. 

His pupils contract slightly as he notices the dawn’s imminent return, it washes pink over Babe’s fluttering eyelashes and he knows with a horrible ache in his chest that his truth is that he cannot and should not be allowed this, that he is lucky to have had it once, that he has to let it go now, for the good of them both.

There was something peaceful about that.

***

Babe wakes up, and expects, when he reaches out his hand, to find a soft underside of an arm or a ribbed flank rising and falling but Genie is gone. 

He groans. 

Blinks confusedly up and scowl-spies the bedside table. The clock tells him he has to be in formation at 1100 and it’s 1030. 

Fuck. 

Where the fuck is Genie? Why didn't he wake him?

But Babe splashes water on his armpits, dresses himself, smoothes himself down and clicks his heels together, makes the march to the green where Spiers is probably waiting to drill him into shape.

Lipton, Luz and Perconte nod at him as he finds them looking just as hungover as he feels. Lipton looks better than the rest of them, but Babe thinks that might be because anything looked better when compared with near-deathly pneumonia.

“Morning” Babe manages to wheeze.

Luz bares his teeth in empathy, his dark eyes flashing. “Morning”

“Morning” Perconte squints up at him. “You get some last night eh?”

Babe snorts “None of ya business Perco.”

“Come oon the town was heaving with blondes.” 

“Eh he likes the hair dark.” Says Luz casually.

Lipton raises a somehow-knowing eyebrow.

Babe scratches the back of his head, nausea crawling up the back of his throat.

Slowly the men start stumbling over in fits and starts, lining up in formation, or talking in hushed small groups. Babe scans the crowds but cannot spy the one he seeks.

Liebgott and Webster join them five minutes later, also looking worse for wear.

They grumble greetings. 

“Lieb, I told you we’d be late.” Webster whines.

“Shuttup Web.” Liebgott stands close to Babe and nudges him with his elbow and a overdramatic wink.

Webster’s mouth hangs open. “You’re incorrigible.”

“I don’t know what that means-”

“It means-”

“And I don’t want to! Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Jesus fucking Christ” Babe echoes dazedly.

“Fuck!” Lieb says in acknowledgment.

Webster’s mouth hangs open and closes like a fish for one sheepish second, then he rolls his eyes at the pair of them, folding his arms and going to stand next to Lipton.

Babe and Liebgott share a cigarette, trying to raise eyebrows at each other in code. 

“You an-” Liebgott shrugs a shoulder and Babe follows his gesture and sees Spina standing at attention far to their left, then he moves and Gene is revealed to be standing behind him, looking wan and ghostly.

Babe’s cigarette almost falls from his mouth.

He grunts in reply. “Yeah.” And he coughs as Liebgott grins in praise. “But ah..” He whispers. “He fuckin’ dipped after…” 

Liebgott presses his lips together in commiseration.

Babe asks “Ah.. You?…”

“Yeah. But ah- Well, you know how it is-” Liebgott says. He looks vulnerable for a second and then it’s gone.

“Between you-”

“Yeah, between us…”

Webster is staring like a kicked puppy. 

Eugene hasn’t looked their way once.

“Fuck.” Mutters Babe.

“Fuck.” Liebgott nods.

“ATTENTION!” Spiers arrives and they are very busy for the next few hours.

Babe takes note somewhere in the back of his mind how Lipton shifts at the sight of Spiers and wonders whether he likes the hair dark too. 

***

It’s three days before Babe finally has the time to look for Eugene, seeing as the medic is ignoring him. 

He finds him round the back of the makeshift medical office chain-smoking with his scrawny arms stained up to the elbows again in fresh blood. He shifts at the sight of Babe, but there are no other signs of acknowledgement.

Babe is somehow shocked by this gruesome sight because of course he is. Babe was kind of always appalled by all that they saw because something innocent, some flame of youth in him had never dulled. It kept him safe, it kept him going. He’d seen the worst of it, and he was still going somehow. He knew somewhere deep down that it was because he could still react with horror that meant he was still alive.

"Can we talk, please?"

Eugene’s thin eye brows knit together, but his eyes are wide. The thousand yard stare was fitting to Gene’s description, like many other soldiers.

“Eugene."

Eugene jolts minutely like he just noticed Babe’s presence, which is mighty concerning to Babe who naively thought that era of near-catatonia was over for the older man.

"What? Talk bout what?"

"About!-" Babe has to stop himself from shouting in panic, takes a calming breath. He starts again "About us.”

A pause. “Now?” He puts his cigarette out in a small ceramic ashtray.

“Yes now!”

"What is there to say really?" Eugene proclaims with a damp smile. His dark eyes are still wide like a deer in headlights.

“Jesus. You gotta be shittin' me!" Babe scoffs. "C'mon Gene, you left! Why did you leave?"

Eugene starts to look around him like there's people watching behind every canvas tent and tree. His shoulders hunch in on themselves. He literally shrinks before Babe's very eyes.

Babe feels cruel like he's salting a slug, putting a magnifying glass over an ant.

"Genie..." he almost whispers, reaching out towards the shrivelling Eugene, who pulls another cigarette from his front pocket and lights it

"I uh-“ He lights the cigarette, takes a drag which just serves to make his skin look pallid and grey. “I don’t got the why. ‘Kay? I don’t know. It’s not anything you did, I just had to get out-“ Eugene admits, his voice trembling. He won’t make eye contact. "I don’t know why."

“Hey, hey it's okay." Babe, relieved, concerned, heart aching, touches his shoulder now. 

“M'sorry." Eugene mutters, taking another drag and shaking his head, looking down. 

Babe sighs and stares up at the heavens as if to ask what the fuck he was supposed to do now. 

He sits beside Eugene on the bench.

“It's okay to not know why Genie, I was just asking. Ya know? That’s okay. I promise."

“Okay." Eugene nods, dares to look up at Babe.

At the eye contact, Babe is overcome with feeling and grabs Eugene, pulling him into an awkward one-armed hug. Eugene stiffens, breath hitching, then slowly, slowly relaxes into the touch.

***

Spiers had held the hand of Chuck who had been needlessly shot through the head late one night by a drunken replacement.

He had gripped it and Eugene could see him shaking. He never thought he’d see someone like Spiers shake.

Now they sit side by side, smoking outside the hospital. They are waiting for the brain surgeonto be finished. 

Spiers had insisted on staying, even though Gene made it clear it was okay for him to leave, that he could handle this alone if need be.

Spiers had practically threatened one of the nurses telling her to make sure she let them know when the surgery was over. She had almost argued, but Eugene smoothed things over with her after with a warm-toned and polite technique of asking nicely. Spiers looked at him funny afterwards, a little confused, a little admiring.

His hands are scarred and actually quite delicate, fingers long and boney not dissimilar from Eugene’s own.

He passes Eugene a new cigarette, their fourth, and then his hands hang between his knees.

Eugene takes the smoke and adjusts his position on the concrete step they find themselves on. 

“Lipton says you’re the best medic.”

“Well uh- I don’t know about that Sir.”

“I believe him.”

“Thank you Sir. I try my best, with what I know. But I don’t know any more than what they taught me.”

“Lipton says you used to freeze up?”

“You believe everything Lipton tells you Sir?”

“I’m only asking out of concern. I want you to stay healthy.”

Eugene looks at him for a long while. “Yeah I freeze up sometimes. It happens, but not so much any more. I think it was the cold you know.”

He takes a long drag.

“Hm” Spiers sighs. “I think in some ways, we are the same.” He scrubs a hand over his eyes.

Eugene starts at that. 

Spiers continues. “You er- feel it’s best to be dead already. To deal with all the- with everything. Right?”

“Well-“ Eugene pauses, wide-eyed. “I hadn’t put it into words like that-”

Spiers voice becomes thick with something passionate and new. “You don’t have to think that way. Okay? That’s what I have learned. You can be alive, and hold it all. It’s possible. It’s painful, but it’s possible. I think so anyway.”

“Okay.” Eugene says, and doesn’t believe him.

***

“Gene! You’re only Twenty-fuckin’-three.”

“Okay, so we’re both too young for all this, we oughta see if we can make it.”

“What does ‘make it’ even mean?” Without you… Babe couldn’t say, didn’t know what he was asking for.

“Like find a job and- live? Be happy and not be- be-” Eugene wasn’t sure what he was trying to claim.

“I get it I get it.” Babe gestured with a sweeping arm.

Eugene blinked. “You do?”

“Nah- but I think I get the goddamn gist alright?”

Eugene smiles, ducks his head.

Babe sighs.  “You wanna go home. Right? So do I.” It feels like Eugene is made of silk and he’s slipping through his fingers and there’s noting he can do to stop it.

“Eugene…?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you write me?”

“I ‘aint all that good with writin’”

“Don’t matter! Please just write me.”

“Fine.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll do it.”

Babe hands him a cigarette as if in reward.

***

OVER, LIKE THE WAR.

Babe catches Eugene just as he is about to pull himself up onto the departing train. There is a screaming whistle. He feels desperate all of a sudden, because Doc Roe, whom he has looked at almost every day since he replaced the first dead of easy company, is leaving for Louisiana, and somehow during all this terrible fighting, his rare smile has become the one thing Babe lives for.

“Genie-“

Eugene turns to look back at Babe with an eyebrow raised ever so slightly, everything zeroes in as their eyes meet. 

He frowns. 

“Babe…” he whispers.

It’s snatched away by the wind. 

Then he turns away sudden.

“-You watch yerself yeah?” Babe chokes out.

Babe sees nothing but the other man’s slight silhouette as the train roars an expulsion of steam and he wants so badly to call out and pull him back, be close to him, and then Eugene is nodding into the shadows, but pulling himself up and out of sight onto the dusty carriage and the train is whistling and trundling down south and away until there’s just a faint rattling of the tracks.

He heaves his massive backpack over one shoulder and makes his way to the other side of the station where his own train would depart in the opposite direction in ten minutes time.

"Yeah, you watch yourself." Babe mutters, to himself mostly. 

END OF PART ONE