#roenee

[[Mandatory pre-fic Author's Notes! (I haven't had to type these out like this in years... the FF.Net rush just hit me in full force.) Woohoo--happy HBO Secret Santa 2025! That's right, DB: I was your Mysterious Benefactor. I WAS SO SECRET AND SUBTLE. I even pretended I didn't know what to call BRN. I suppose You Were Fooled 😏

In all seriousness, I was so excited when I got your username in the exchange! We are fellow BRN warriors, and I wanted to make something Really Good as both a form of Warrior Solidarity and as a kind of gratitude for all your kind words over the past year! I don't know if I say it enough, but it really doesn't go unnoticed when you leave comments (or make art!!! what the heck???). I hope this really weird thing I made hits you so right, just in time for Bastogne Season!

Final notes: unfortunately, Tumblr doesn't have quite as much freedom when it comes to formatting as AO3 does. Thank you for giving me permission to crosspost this on AO3 as well! I do think the version over there is a little more Complete, but all the intended text IS below. (In two separate posts... Tumblr isn't built for this kind of crazy. If the links aren't up yet when you get to the end, refresh and try again! They should be working a couple minutes after I post!)

Happy Secret Santa-ing!]]

It is January first, New Year’s Day, and the company is slog-slog-slogging back to Luzery, one final supply run before their push back towards Foy. Brief relief, a short respite. They will not go so far south as Bastogne.

The distinction between Luzery and Bastogne seems unclear, mostly political, a matter of borders and someone drawing and redrawing a map. In lived fact, of course, there is no difference between one part of the world and the other, not when your feet are freezing and soaking through from sweat. There is only hard dirt, and snow. There is only the damp.

Slog-slog-slogging has been a kind of relief, because enough of it drives the feet from numbness through the terrible itching of nerves waking up again and then, finally, into the pale heat of exercise. It is only a little warmth, it is no great excitement, but in great droves it keeps skin and flesh alive. Gene hates to order a man off the line after seeing him remove his boots, hates to be confronted with the wizened, blackened curl of trenchfoot and frostbite. Slogging along is a great help in these matters, though it is nothing that anyone wants to do.

Alongside him, slogging away in familiar silence, is Babe Heffron, who has a nicer coat than Gene does but has been good enough not to brag about it. It goes all the way to his ankles, parting only where his legs dart out in Gene’s periphery, and obscures his whole outline in dark, dense wool. Unlike Gene, he has to carry his rifle over his shoulder, in case some action should come unexpectedly and require immediate readiness, and it clanks against his pack on every step.

It has become Babe’s preference to slog alongside Gene in the past few weeks, and Gene could not really explain why, since Babe likes to pass his time by talking and Gene never has anything to say to him at all. But he is privately grateful for the company. He used to march next to Smokey Gordon, and has been bracing himself to go it alone.

The wind bites into the back of his neck, slipping under the collar of his shirt, and Gene shrugs his shoulders up.

Around them is rubble, hard-packed and filthy. This is not the center of town, not yet, but the forest and hillsides have given way to something that used to be a neighborhood, with paved streets and the remains of buildings, and there are occupants who mill aimlessly among it. Civilians, trapped by the siege or with no other place to go, who have not yet evacuated. Who maybe have no plans to. They watch the company as they move along, and Gene looks at the ground some ten paces ahead of him. He does not like to look at the faces of civilians, not here. It is not like Holland, where every person was filled with a bursting, all-consuming love for them as Americans, as rescuers. The Belgians are not certain the occupation will be over; they have no faith in American soldiers; indeed, they know what happened to Holland after. Gene does not blame them. Still, he cannot raise his eyes to theirs and see that blank, hollow look, as if the hope has been scraped out from behind and left only the hunger and the distrust.

Behind him, the wind intensifies, tearing along his coat as if looking for a way in. It carries on it a voice, and in his ear–

“Eugene?”

Familiar. Strange. Not as he would have expected it.

It is not Babe Heffron’s voice beside him, or any other man’s voice from his company, and when it touches his skin his stomach turns and pains him. There is no reason for it to be here, in Luzery, or indeed anywhere on earth. A woman’s voice.

“Eugene,” she says again, more certainly this time. His body tries to stop, but he pushes it on, his heart suddenly agitated, his hands suddenly damp in his pockets. “Excuse me, please, let me through…”

His body riots, he is desperate to stop. He will bend, he will cave in. Agitated, he pushes at himself, imagining individual contractions of muscles and sinews, imagines the way the knee bends under the pressures of flexion, pictures the whole of the leg and urges it to go on.

A voice that has carried not just the weight of itself, but of every other memory of every other woman. It has become singular, a voice that appears when he reads letters from his mother and his sisters, which swallows theirs and replaces it with its own. In this way, it has become both basic and sacred to him. It lives inside him, in the hollows between his shoulders and his spine.

“Eugene, wait–”

The last desperate days of December come rattling down the pipe, and Eugene is in a perpetual freefall through them. Christmas morning comes and goes, and somehow, he is still blinking in the daylight on the other side of it.

So, back to work.

The rounds are the same as usual, and he keeps his head down as he does them. Little to report at 0700 hours. First Sergeant Lipton has the beginnings of a cough, but he tells Eugene he’s staying ahead of it. “Hot water,” he agrees, when he’s given his prescription, “and I’ll see if I can get some sleep. Thanks, Doc.”

“Just make sure it’s hot,” Eugene reminds him, “boil it, and as soon as you can swallow it, get it down quick. If you not careful, you’ll end up with whatever Malarkey’s got.”

“I’m certain that’s who gave it to me,” the sergeant says, arms folded, tucking his chin into his coat. He grimaces and shakes his head, almost sulky, an expression Eugene recognizes too well by now—he sees it on every man, one day or another. He’s disappointed in himself. He feels he’s let his men down.

Gene doesn’t try to comfort him, much. He pats the sergeant’s bent knee once. Looks him in the eye. “Just stay ahead of it,” he says, and clambers out of the foxhole.

Even moving is hard in cold as extreme as this. As he unfolds, Gene always gets the sense that his joints are creaking, like an old child’s doll that sticks from dust and unuse. The numbness makes it hard to feel anything anymore, but somehow, he can always feel the heat leaving him.

Still, he’s grown accustomed to it, and his bare hands help him push along to Sergeant Randleman’s foxhole, where he sits like a stone figure while Sergeant Martin sleeps against him.

“Sergeant,” Gene says, sliding in alongside him, “how’s your shoulder?”

“Fine,” Randleman says.

It’s difficult to get much out of Sergeant Randleman, which Gene doesn’t mind, because he doesn’t know what to do with what he does get from almost everybody else. Randleman doesn’t make him talk, or at least, doesn’t make him come up with anything other than his laundry list of checks.

He injured his shoulder in Holland, and like all injuries that aren’t given proper time and attention to heal, it’s healed slowly. Gene’s worried about long-term damage, and checks on it regularly. Pressure checks, getting his hand on the skin and making sure it flexes and moves the way it’s supposed to. Randleman rarely gives him more than a grunt in return.

As he’s buttoning back up, Randleman asks, “you need me to wake Johnny up?”

“How long’s he been out?”

“We traded off about an hour ago.”

Gene shakes his head. “Let him sleep,” he decides. “It’s hard enough out here to get it without some damn medic kicking everybody awake all the time.”

“Uh-huh,” Randleman says. And then, as he sloshes his tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other, “you getting any?”

“Uh,” Gene says, unintelligently, “huh?”

“Sleep,” Randleman clarifies. “You getting any sleep, Doc?”

“Oh, uh,” Gene says, and shrugs. “What I can, I guess.”

Randleman nods. “You should shack up with somebody,” he says firmly. “Two heads is better than one. You sleep better. Warmer, too.”

Gene presses his lips together and nods, forcing himself not to look down at his flimsy coat. He doesn’t want to say what he’s thinking, which is that being cold in a foxhole alone and being imperceptibly less cold in a foxhole with someone who snores is not much of a tradeoff. It isn’t the sort of thing you say to your officers, even NCOs, and anyway he couldn’t come up with a witty way to say it, and anyway Sergeant Randleman is a good man, who’s saying it out of his deep well of concern for his men. It isn’t as if he’s trying to be clever.

So, instead, he says “yes, Sergeant,” and starts tucking his kit back into place.

He catches T/4 Luz on his way back to his own foxhole, towards the end of the round, as his hands have gone red and raw. Luz is very good to him, and offers him a cigarette and a light, which he takes.

“You better check on Joe tonight,” he says, meaning Sergeant Toye, “I don’t think his feet are in much better condition than they were on Christmas. You been up around the OP yet?”

“I went by last night,” Gene tells him, “I missed Toye, I guess. Thought he wasn’t on the OP until the New Year.”

“Sounds about right,” Luz says. “I bet he got somebody to trade with him, the rat. He’s always trying to wriggle out of rest, isn’t he? Say, how’s Bill’s penis?”

He’s grinning when he asks, and walks along next to Gene amiably as they talk. Gene finds himself grinning, too, though he looks away when he does so, not wanting to seem overly friendly. Luz is always overly friendly with everyone, and no one ever seems to mind it, but it would be best not to emulate that—Luz can do it because he is easy to like, and Gene can’t do it, because he isn’t.

“I think you better ask him yourself,” Gene says, “a man’s health is a doctor’s secret.”

“Well, you know I would, Doc,” Luz says, “but I got my ‘asking about Bill’s penis’ privileges revoked, in an incident I can’t relay here. Anyway, it’s hardly a secret, is it? He goes around hollering about it all the time.”

“That’s from his mouth, not mine,” Gene says, grinning. “You just gonna have to figure some way around it, if you really gotta know, huh?”

“You’re a harsh mistress,” Luz says mournfully, and shakes his head. “Am I dropping you off here?”

“This is my stop, sure,” Gene says, and gestures with the cigarette. “Thanks for the smoke, Sergeant.”

“Eh, my pleasure,” Luz says, shrugging, as Gene half-hops and half-slides back down into his hole. “I can’t go around life without having a bunch of people owe me favors. Hey, how are you on supplies? You still looking for morphine?”

“I wouldn’t say no to morphine, if you’ve got it,” Gene says, but Luz shakes his head, so he goes on with “that’s alright, they got a supply run in to us. We doing okay.”

“Yeah,” Luz says, a hand in the pocket of his new overcoat. He shifts from one leg to the other and looks away irritably. “We’d be doing a lot better if they’d quit shellacking us on the regular, huh?”

Gene shugs and looks down at his hands, starting to slump down into what passes for sitting. He doesn’t really know what to say.

“Hey, Doc,” Luz says after a moment of silence, “I gotta hook up with Lieutenant Dike, you see him on your rounds?”

“Uh,” Gene says, embarrassed to say what he knows Luz is already expecting him to. “No, I must have missed him. Uh, Lieutenant Compton’s about half a mile down that way,” he adds, like a consolation prize, and points. “What is that, west?”

“Yeah, that’s west,” Luz says. “Alright, I’ll see if I can hook up with him. Christ, it’d be easier if they’d let us pick ‘em, huh?”

He grins conspiratorially at Gene, then turns westward and shuffles off. Gene watches him go, then glances at his companion.

Luz had not acknowledged any other person in the foxhole, because there is no other person here. Nevertheless, Gene watches Renee adjusting herself in the snow. The little breeze that dips down into the foxhole catches minutely in a few fine strands of hair.

“How did it go?” She asks him.

“They all playing tough,” he says, sighing, and pulls his helmet off his head. He misses the warmth, of course, but the sweat in his hair needs to dry out, and quickly. He’s itchy enough as it is. “It’s like pulling teeth.”

Renee shrugs. “Like farmers,” she agrees. “You’re out of Vaseline.”

He glances at her, and blows out his cheeks. “You couldn’t have reminded me when Luz was here?” He asks, less because he’s really frustrated and more because frustration agrees with him in bad weather. Anyway, he knows she won’t take it any other way than how he means.

“You didn’t remember,” she tells him, and shrugs. “C’est ne pas grave, ouais, oui? C’est ne pas urgent.”

“Oui, d’accord,” he agrees, waving his hand dismissively. “It ain’t. It ain’t.”

They sit together in the foxhole, Gene shivering in his jacket, Renee impartial in her coat. He likes to imagine the coat; he hates to think she would be cold.

The church collapsed three nights ago, on Christmas Eve, A Very Merry Christmas and God Bless You, spraying fire and smoke and glass like sand in a ripping beach wind. That means today is the twenty-eighth of December, now that the sun is peeking through the bitter grey skies again. Renee has been here, waiting in his foxhole (or, indeed, behind every quiet corner) for almost three days.

He wonders if tearing the bandanna did it.

Somehow, he doubts it—or, maybe, it confirms another suspicion he has. He only knew Renee for three days (she has now been dead for as long as he ever knew her alive), but he never sensed from her in that limited time that she was attached to any physical thing. Her spirit would not be tethered by a strip of blue cloth.

His own guilt, however–

Are you guilty? Have you done anything wrong?

Maybe guilt is the wrong word. That simple strip was everything that he had of hers, and it had gone cold long before it ever touched his hand. He had only carried it with him an hour or two, as a token of grief, before he had torn it.

But—but he had only torn it in that moment because he had imagined, had sensed, somehow, the feeling of cold, rough hands over his own. Guiding him. The way you guide a child’s hands as you teach them to knead bread, your hands over the backs of theirs.

They had been joined, however briefly, by the work. He would not refuse her, he had thought, by failing to go on doing the work. Her hands on his.

“The pneumonia is going to sweep through them if they won’t sleep,” Renee says/Gene thinks. “Somehow, you must convince them to rest.”

“They gonna fight it,” Gene says(/Renee thinks?). “They don’t think ahead like that. You know, they figure they might be dead tomorrow, so they not gonna sleep now.”

“They are afraid of death?”

“Uh-uh,” Gene says, his brows furrowing, shaking his head. “They, uh… they don’t want to… they afraid of letting each other down. That’s the truth.”

“And you?” Renee asks. She turns slightly, relaxing against the dirt, which doesn’t roll or settle around her. “You’re afraid of letting them down, c’est vrai?”

When Gene found the bandanna that night, it had not been near anything else. It was cloth, alone, trapped in the rubble. It had not been near her body—it had not been near any bodies. He had not seen any bodies in that church. There is something suffocating—and intoxicating—about that. There is something so impossible, and so delicious to believe.

“I have to check on Joe Toye,” he tells her, deciding not to answer the question she has asked him. The question he is asking himself. “He got away from me on the OP last night. I gotta wait for him to come back on rest. I’ll get him then.”

Renee watches him, her eyes moving minutely over his face. Her lips are pursed slightly, and they part when she breathes in, as though preparing to say something. But she stops herself, or perhaps Gene can’t think of anything for her to say, and so she breathes out without incident. Watching him, still. Wondering at something.

She is deciding what to say, Gene thinks, but she won’t decide until I’ve turned the issue over in my head and have something really clever for her. Renee wouldn’t have one of those stupid, silly, early-in-the-brainstorm ideas.

Every day, she becomes more beautiful. It’s enough to make a man wonder why he’s doing it to himself.

“Soldiers are difficult to care for,” she says at last, and sighs, tucking a hand under her head. Her hair spills slightly, strands coming loose and trailing in the air. “They’re resentful of being helped. They think they have to do it all on their own.”

“Maybe so.”

“Maybe?” She smiles, but does not laugh, because he does not know what the sound of it would be if she did. “Don’t ‘maybe’ me. You know it’s true! C’est pareil pour toi! The last time I saw you…”

She stops, suddenly, and Gene feels the cold pierce him. He looks away, crossing his arms over his chest.

“That was different,” he says. “I was… that was different.”

Without looking, he knows she’s watching him in profile. Her hair is spilling free without her bandanna (missing, taken by someone) to restrain it. The colors of her face are vibrant; more vibrant every day. Blue eyes, pink lips, flushed cheeks blotchy from the cold. He can’t remember if she was ever so vibrant when she was alive. He wonders if anyone could be as vibrant as she is to him now.

“I wish I’d caught you,” she tells him, “the last time you were in Bastogne.”

“I couldn’t’ve told you anything anyway,” he says, out loud. To her, to himself. “Could barely talk to the people who were there.”

“At least, I could have talked to you,” Renee says, and looks away. “Like you talked to me.”

“Did it help?”

She smiles. “No,” she says. “But you talked to me, anyway. I wanted to talk to you… you looked lost, like you couldn’t remember why you were there. I shouldn’t have let myself get pulled away.”

“You were stretched thin,” he says. “Too thin. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” she says sadly. “I should have got to you.”

The wind whips at him very hard, tearing at the raw skin of his face. He doesn’t move to tuck his chin into his jacket. Somehow, the pain does not seem to be touching him, the part of him that knows how to wince and recoil.

“I heard someone say that before,” he says at last, brow furrowing. “Did you say that to me?”

Renee shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says, “maybe you heard it somewhere else.”

Gene has come up with any, and every, reason not to return to Bastogne since the night the church was struck. They have a new aid station now, still posted up in the town, but on the edges of it. Not such an easy target, not a civilian population. Finally, the United States military has remembered its mercy, now that it has secured its first stubborn victory. Too late for Renee, it has remembered.

So now, there is rarely any reason to travel deeper into Bastogne anyway, except for the supply drops, which occasionally fall there, and which Gene is not particularly called on to recall. And if he was, he would shirk the duty where possible. The reason why is simple: he does not want to know. He is not ready for the answer he is certain he will receive.

Dawn has broken, and around the hole in the ground Gene finds himself in there is that soft susurration, the slowly rising tide of bodies stretching and creaking. Warming up cold joints, waking, walking along, humming a tune. Someone is singing Oh Shenandoah, and Lieutenant Compton has not yet heard it and stopped them. Clanking, as of metal on metal, the hollow clanking of tin on tin. Someone, somewhere, is getting hot chow, although when it will make its way as far as Gene is anyone’s guess, and whether it will still be hot is another story entirely.

He did not know Oh Shenandoah before coming to Europe, and it has no nostalgic ties for him. One day, that great American tune will make him nostalgic for Belgium, for these long nights where no one can find any morale but to share the tunes and poems of their childhoods, to pour them from one mouth into another. It goes like this, one man will say to another, and tunelessly: away, we’re bound away, across the wide Missouri.

And another man will say, does anybody know the verse with the girl in it, I’m desperate for a verse with a girl in it. And his mate will ask about that picture of his wife, and his mate will ask what the point of wives is out here, is anybody really married this far from home?

“At least there’s no rush for more prophylactic kits,” Gene tells Renee as he opens his bag to go through it, “we been out since Paris, and maybe we never gonna need them again.”

“Hey,” says another voice, not the one Gene expects to hear, and he startles, his bag jerking in his hands, as Edward Heffron slides into his foxhole with him with some heft and a thump. “You can’t tell a man that, Doc, some of us are only getting by day to day on the promise of needing a prophylactic kit tomorrow!”

Gene’s hands fumble, his body suddenly askew. Not something he expected, not something he prepared for, now a reality he must accommodate for. Scrambling, like a log in a river twisting under your feet. “Heffron,” he says, somewhat breathlessly, “I wasn’t talking to you, what the hell you sneaking up on me for?”

“Sneaking up’s a funny way of putting it,” Heffron says, “just last night I had it on good authority that I have an ‘elephantine gait’. That’s Buck’s word for ‘walks like a noisy son of a bitch’. Here,” he adds, and shoves a tin dish into his hands, “breakfast, with love from Rita Hayworth.”

It’s warm. Gene is torn, as all the men perpetually are, between keeping his hands warm until the food goes cold, or eating the food while it’s still warm enough to be edible. It looks like beans again. It smells like feet. He holds his face over the opening, lets the rising steam touch his face.

“Thank you,” he says after a moment, and glances sideways at Heffron, who’s looking at him in a bit of a funny way. “I didn’t know they were serving up yet.”

“They’ve been hollering half an hour,” Heffron says sharply, “you oughta listen or you’ll starve. They ain’t gonna make no special exception for you if you miss ‘em. Who the hell are you talking to, anyway, since you ain’t talking to me?”

“Uh,” Gene says, suddenly embarrassed. On instinct, he glances across the foxhole again, to the place where Renee has been sitting, wanting support.

But she is gone. She often is, when men come calling, some private thing he can only bear to imagine without an audience. So, he is alone.

“Just me,” he says after a moment, lamely, and scoops a spoonful out of his tin as a distraction, “uh, you know, doing inventory.”

“Out loud,” Heffron says, as though this is conceptually unbelievable. This time, when Gene looks at him, his expression of irritation is genuine.

“Uh-huh,” Gene says, “so what? We got sound discipline I didn’t hear about or something?”

“I’m just asking,” Heffron says, and holds up a hand appeasingly, “I thought Ralph was over here or something, that’s half of why I came over in the first place, alright? Geez, you sure know how to make a guy feel welcome.”

“Well, you didn’t give me time to roll out the red carpet,” Gene says, hunching his shoulders, shrugging and trying to shrug the argument off. “Look, I lose track when I go over it in my head sometimes, alright? I didn’t think anyone was around.” And then, suddenly desperate to get ahead of it, “shit, you probably think I’m crazy.”

“Not crazy,” Heffron says, and Gene glares at him again, “just a little strapped for company, that’s all. You got somebody to hole up with today?”

The question everybody wants to ask, Gene thinks, trying not to feel bitter about it. The unfair thing about it is how understandable it all is. Wouldn’t he worry, if he saw another man sleeping alone? After all, holing up together is not some question of human companionship out here—it is desperate, a question of human survival. A lookout, and warm bones. The cold makes the body heat up, which makes the body sweat. All efforts are made to keep those bones dry, Dry Them Bones, Them Dry Bones.

A noise, and a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.

It’s different for Gene than it is for the rest of them. There are… ramifications, regrettable, which need managing and which he is in no condition to manage. Sharing space with the other men, sleeping pressed together the way they do, like little boys, like brothers, crawls upon his skin. It is impossible to describe in any way he could make them understand.

It’s better, really, to sit alone. He has no intention to slip quietly into the great beyond some night, which he knows is his company’s prevailing fear. Human survival. But so far, the work has kept him warm, in that it has kept him running. And he has not had to live with—yes, he has not woken up wracked with that terrible fear, sudden and shocking, he has not woken up with it in some time. Yes—it’s better to sit alone.

And it cannot be explained, not with his whole self intact.

“Spina was supposed to,” he lies, “haven’t seen him all morning. Probably someone else needed him worse.”

Heffron grins at this, and affects an expression of theatrical stupidity. “Two medics in one foxhole?” He asks, his voice absurd as well. Gene realizes, to his (shameful) delight, that he’s trying to imitate Lieutenant Dike. “What’s gonna happen if you get hit?”

Quickly, Gene looks down at his tin, so that Heffron won’t see him laughing, struggling to keep reins on it. “Hey, leave the impressions to Luz, huh?” He says, feeling warm, his cheeks lighting up as the muscles of his face flex. “Spina tell you about that?”

“He tells me everything,” Heffron says lightly, and Gene glances along to see him grinning, too, visibly pleased with himself. “Which is how I know he was not planning on holing up with you, you little sneak. I’ve been prescribed, Eugene, the doctor says I’ve got to inflict myself upon you. What do you say, huh? Don’t make it harder on me, I’ll properly be in trouble.”

Gene grimaces, but it isn’t worth fighting—most things in the military aren’t, their reasons and manners obscure and immutable.

He says nothing, because he never prefers to, and it doesn’t seem anything he’s been called on to answer. He only lets his shoulders shrug, his head shake, and his breath rush out in one long push through his nose. There is no fighting it. Only sitting, and accepting the orders of your superiors, and watching each other in low light when the dark begins to creep in around you.

It is Easter Sunday, and Gene is in his mother’s house. He knows the day immediately by smell, the fire in the pit outside coughing up that thick charcoal scent. And the bodies in the house, so many moving bodies. His sisters laugh and talk with his mother. His father walks through with an irritation that is a kind of confidence. The wood is not where he remembered putting it, which means someone has moved it, which means someone is in trouble.

Someone is smoking a cigarette, but not Eugene. Eugene’s mother doesn’t like her sons to smoke, even though the other boys and men who work on the crawdad boats all do and offer cigarettes to him often. She has held his hand before, and said baby, don’t you go getting all that smoke on you, you know I love you. Don’t you go smoking before you grown, baby. You still got time to get grown.

He still got time. He is only fifteen or sixteen or seventeen. Mama never says when grown is, but his oldest sister says grown is nineteen, and his younger-older sister says grown is when you have a girl and you know you gonna marry her. And then they laugh. And they laugh at him, but not in the ways boys do, which makes it alright.

You just our little baby brother, Winnie says, sometimes, and Minnie says, you just a late bloomer, don’t you let them bother you. The late flowers come up more beautiful, and all the girls want them because all the ones everybody snatched up early go and wilt early, too.

He likes to stay here, inside the house, even though there isn’t much room for an extra body. The men all stand around outside, smoking cigarettes, tapping ash into the fire pit where the pig cooks, laughing roughly, admiring one another’s work. Gene doesn’t like to spend much time with them, although his father tells him he’ll like it more when he’s older.

Gene doesn’t think so. His father’s friend Orey, who has had three wives and been left by all of them, has a forge in his shed, which his father helped him build. For Lent, he has been fasting throughout the day and working there, playing serious with iron, and before the service on Friday, he showed Gene and his brothers what he has made, and made them hold it in their hands. Nails, though you couldn’t imagine that’s what they were. Not tame, household nails that you tap-tap-tap with to put up a picture or put siding back on with. These are the wild kind, like hogs instead of pigs, and when he was made to hold one, Gene felt the fear come flooding up through him like river water springing through the hull of his pirogue.

They’re exactly the kind they would have used, Orey had told him, and Gene’s brothers had grinned uncertainly, held them up in the light, measured them against their palms. When they crucified our Savior, they would have used ones just like this. They take about two days to make, each. That’s the size they were, in those days.

And one of his brothers said, they’re heavy. Wow, they’re heavy. And Gene had felt the nail in his palm, the weight of it, and known that it was true. And Orey had said, they are, they are. Not so heavy as the weight of the world. Think about what our Savior carried on his back, knowing these were waiting for him.

He had been afraid, then, really afraid, and he had gone mute, and not known what to say. The boys had talked to Orey, and he had shared a cigarette with them and told them not to tell their mother, because it helps with feeling hungry during the fast. But Gene had not wanted to, and he had said piously that feeling hungry was the point, when in fact he had not wanted to go behind his mother’s back. If he had said so, his brothers would have laughed at him, in the way that boys do. It would have been awful.

It is better to be here, in the house, with his mother and his sisters, who tease him more sweetly, and only mind as much as they worry. It smells like cooking, and the heat drives the sweat out of his skin and through the shirt on his back. The nail is still in his hand.

“Drop it in the pot,” Renee says. “When no one is looking.”

Gene feels the weight of the nail in his hand, a massive metal spike, raw black iron dimpled with imperfections. His sister is stirring the pot on the stove, and it bubbles and lifts the lid in occasional burps of steam, but does not bubble over. She does not pay either of them any mind, moving through the world, chatting with their mother about seasonings, about getting a slice of pig belly off the men in the back to throw in.

Someone will notice, he says, I would have to take the lid off. Winnie is there, she won’t like it, she will ask what I’m doing.

“No one will ask,” Renee tells him. “Wait until she goes, and drop it in.”

Gene opens his palm slightly and tips it, letting the nail roll down along the length of his hand to his crooked fingertips and back. Orey worked hard on making it, he says, what if it’s damaged, what if the tomato eats all the iron away, what if there’s nothing but a little household nail left over at the end, like when you suck an anise seed down to the root?

“Good,” Renee says. “It’s evil. Can’t you feel that?”

He can.

“It will make everyone stronger,” she says, softly, “the iron will make your blood stronger, and your mama’s blood stronger.”

Everyone will be angry.

“Yes,” she says, sadly this time, and for the first time he turns to look at her and sees her standing across the room from him, pressed into the corner. “Everyone will be angry. They won’t understand that you’re helping them, and they will be angry.”

Behind him is the sound of a cane tip thumping on wood, and too late, Gene stumbles forward to move out of his grandmother’s way. This whole house moves out of her way when she comes thumping along, her gait heavy, her hands wide and hard. He is too late, and catches one of those hands upside his head.

“Eh la bas,” she says, her voice leathery, “trees stand and don’t move because of the roots, couillon. What’s your excuse?”

She scolds him, and he sulks. But it is never so painful to be scolded by her as by his mother, because she scolds his mother too, and his father, and the pots on the stove and the birds in the air and the steps on their back porch when they bend and make her stumble.

“And you dirty, too,” she bemoans, and holds him by the cheek while he winces and complains, “you not helping nobody, boy, you go wash up and get out the way.”

And his sisters say oh, grand-mere, he is helping, and she scolds them too, and the sound of the chatter dies away around him.

There is a window in his bedroom, which he shares with his brothers, with no shade but the net they pin up over it for the mosquitos. There is the cot too, the one the three of them share, and the desk that Charlie made, and the chair their father made, so they would have somewhere to sit and read during their school years. There is no paper on the desk now, or any books. The breeze comes in through the window, and Gene stares out through it, at the trees and the grass.

In the chair, Renee sits perfectly still, her eyes shut, her hands in her lap. Her hair is up, still, and the hairbrush sits on the desk. She is naked, and he wonders if that means he is, too, but does not look down to see.

Slowly, carefully, he unpins the braids in her hair, brings them down off her head, feels them unfurl and go on unfurling. It seems to go on forever, hair pouring over his hands like river water. How long could it be? When he unbraids them, they are a few feet long; as he starts to run the brush through her hair, it begins to pool around their feet.

She does not move, and she does not speak again. Her voice is like his grandmother’s, he thinks.

When he looks out the window again, at the trees and the grass, he sees them—a mirror image, a long way off, Renee in the chair his father made and him behind her. They are surrounded by the trees, and dappled by the shadows and the light. Her eyes are open there, looking across the distance, through the window, back inside. Watching him.

Renee is dead. Eugene knows that. She is not really in his hands, in his foxhole, in his mother’s home. But the smoothness of her skin, the way her gaze strikes him… these things intoxicate. He feels…

Of course, the dead can come home. But how could it be, for her? If she was reaching across some divide, clinging to scraps of the living—would she reach out to him? Doesn’t she have a mother, a father, some lover, some brother? Some child, maybe?

Does he know anything about her? He realizes suddenly that the war has made orphans all across the continent, has eaten its way through families like termites in soft wood. Does Renee have someone else to reach across to?

Spirits wander, he thinks, and runs his brush again through her hair. They look for warmth, for a gap to leap across. A bright spot, a hand to pull them through. If she is alone, that is, if circumstances left her alone on earth before she departed, is it so impossible… so impossible to imagine she might reach out to hands more humble than her own?

Gene comes awake with a start. Something, somewhere, is exploding. Close? A barrage?

No—faraway. His body relaxes again. There is no rising tide of bodies lifting themselves, of sergeants hollering, of instructions running down the line. No immediate danger. Just a way of keeping us awake, he thinks sourly, and tries to settle down again.

It’s warm here, under the dense blanket covering the opening of the foxhole, and the other blanket wrapped around his body. Two blankets, he thinks, squinting, his mind starting to properly wake. They get one each, standard issue. Where did the second one come from?

The warmth is for two reasons, he realizes, too late. An extra blanket to keep it in, and an extra body to make it.

Heffron is pressed against him, arms askew over his waist, face against his neck. Their helmets are jarred against each other, and Heffron’s is threatening to fall off. He’s snoring, and his breath is warm on Gene’s neck.

Early morning, probably. White, cold morning light, filtering in through the cover.

Hot breath on his neck, skating over fine hairs, like something touching him. Gene’s heart hardens in his chest. He takes a quick breath in, the cold stinging inside him. All over him, under the blanket and his jacket, he feels his skin begin to stand on end, lifting up, thrumming like a generator.

It’s been too long.

Paris was supposed to be a relief. You can do anything in Paris—anything. It isn’t like England, where the risk was almost too great, or Holland, where the opportunity was too meager. There are such places in Paris as Gene has dreamed of all his life, or so the men say (their lips curled back in fascination and disgust). Public places, where you can order drinks at the bar and oysters at the table, and you can dance. You can dance with the people you really want to dance with, and no one will drag you away.

They were supposed to get leave, after Holland, and Gene was going to use his to go to Paris alone. He was going to take a little time to get away from the rest of Easy Company, to stay away from Americans for a while. Maybe he wouldn’t have danced. He has it on good authority that he isn’t much good at dancing.

But he would have had oysters. And he would have seen men, the kind you can go on looking at without them taking offense. And he would have done something—anything. You can do anything in Paris. He would have taken relief.

It comes in shifts, getting your leave, and Gene wasn’t one of the first to get his after Holland. He had been patient, since everyone had said they wouldn’t be deployed for a month or more, and he had thought maybe about having leave over Christmas, and being with someone warm and accommodating for the holiday so that the world wouldn’t feel so small and tight and cold in his chest.

And then…

Coming to the Ardennes had all happened very quickly, like a bad dream. There had been no time. Men who had been on leave had been called back. Men who had leave scheduled had been informed it was being cancelled. And then they had piled into transports, shivering. Waiting to wake up.

No relief. Not a word. Not one chance to be touched.

It’s coiled up tight inside of him, now, buried under the meat in his chest. His skin aching with the need to be touched, that relief never given. And Heffron, ignorant, innocent, with hands around his waist, with breath so close it feels like a kiss—a kiss! On skin as desperate as his!

In fact, it makes him angry. The anger pierces. In some ways, it relieves—it gives him control again.

“Wake up,” he snaps, and elbows Heffron in the side, “let me check that hand.”

Heffron grunts and shifts. He pulls away, and that tension curled up inside Gene’s chest releases. He breathes out with a sigh and sits up properly, shifting his legs.

His skin is too excited, still, too active. But they’re bundled up quite well down here, and Heffron won’t see him clearly until he’s under control again. It’ll be alright.

“You couldn’t wait another half hour?” Heffron says, rubbing at his face irritably. He has a thin fuzz of stubble coming in on his chin, the hair so pale it’s hard to see in the low light. “I was dreaming about a girl, I was about to get to the good stuff.”

Gene grimaces. “Don’t tell me that now,” he says, “that why you had me in your grip?”

He expects to see Heffron startle or blush or stammer, expects to hear an excuse or an apology or a distraction, but Heffron just laughs. He grins quite unabashedly, as if it has never occurred to him that he might genuinely be mistaken for… for a certain kind of person, as if he has never had to defend himself from a legitimate accusation.

“Your loss,” he says, giggling still, that wheezy accordion laugh pumping in and out of him, “if you’d been dreaming about a girl, too, we could’ve had a grand time.”

“Not with you behind me,” Gene says, “there’s some things I know I’d be bound to notice.”

It feels too direct the very second he says it, a bridge too far, and once it’s out Gene’s whole body seems to freeze up—but Babe just goes on laughing, and somehow, it softens him again. 

It’s all just a joke. Gene is not on trial. He is not being cross-examined. He is, quite simply, in on it. Babe hasn’t let him in so much as assumed he was already there.

“Enough joking around,” Gene says, and grins, “here, give me that hand, let me have a look.”

The bandage hasn’t been changed since Christmas morning, since there was too much happening and Babe’s superficial injury had not been a priority. The blue and white fabric is stained where old blood soaked through and dried out. Gene picks the knot apart with his fingernails and gets a look at his palm underneath.

It’s coming back together quite well. A thick patch of scab has closed the incision, and there’s no sign of infection or gangrene around it. The cold weather is good for one thing, and one thing only: it has limited the spread of bacteria, and helped the wounds heal more straightforwardly.

“Looks good,” Gene tells Heffron, holding him by the wrist and gently turning his hand this way and that. “Think you can keep yourself from picking at it?”

“You know, I do have some self-control,” Heffron informs him, and when Gene releases his wrist, he pulls it gently back and examines the scab himself. “Itches like hell, and I haven’t touched it once. Pretty gross, huh?”

“Keep it clean,” Gene says, “and you shouldn’t need to bandage back up. If you worried you gonna scratch, I can tie it back on for you. Otherwise…”

He shrugs and trails off. Heffron holds his other hand out, expectantly, and Gene drops the bandage into it.

“I think I can control myself,” Heffron says, flexing his fingers, “thanks, Doc. So what do with this?”

Gene—who had been halfway turned to his medical bag again, ready to take an inventory and make a plan on which foxholes to hit in which order—glances back, surprised, to see Heffron holding the bandage up in his fingers. The fabric is crusty, caked in old blood, formed into distinct wrinkles where it sat in crevices and froze in its knot. The blue-and-white pattern is barely visible anymore under the stain.

“Uh,” he says, brow furrowing, “you want it back on?”

“No, no,” Heffron says quickly, waving his hand as if brushing the question off. “I just, uh, you know. I figured, uh, well. Am I supposed to wash it, or something? You know. So you can… I dunno. Use it again, or something?”

Gene squints at the fabric, lips pursed in confusion, before the realization hits. The scarcity of the siege is still laying on all of them, and Heffron must have overheard Spina or himself talking about the inventory, the low supply, the bandages made of strips of sheets. He is worrying about the company. He is worrying about Gene.

“Oh, uh,” he says after a moment, trying not to smile, overwhelmed with sudden fondness, “we can’t wash them properly out here, we don’t have boiling water. We can get more,” he adds, and puts a hand on Heffron’s shoulder comfortingly, “we got an aid station now.”

“Right,” Heffron says, and looks at the fabric in his hands, not letting go of it. “Right. I just thought, uh, you know.”

“Yeah,” Gene says quietly. “We doing okay. We can take care of everybody.”

Heffron nods, staring down at the fabric. This close, Gene gets some of the radiant heat from his body, imagines he can feel it in his hands through Heffron’s jacket. His shoulder rises and falls with his breath, the slow pump and pulse of muscles and living human machinery.

The part of him that did not go to Paris will not let him let go.

“I was wondering,” Heffron says, after a moment, “uh, where it came from, you know?”

Gene looks at him, and suddenly Heffron looks back. Their eyes meet, and they both seem to freeze.

“Because, uh,” Heffron continues, as Gene’s mind starts to grind, “it looks different, you know, from the other stuff we’ve been using, and I was kind of wondering, you know. Why it looks different. Uh. You know, since it’s not…”

When Gene blinks, sometimes, he sees it there again. Trapped in the rubble. He knows the geometry of destruction by heart, seared forever into him. Every jagged angle of splintered wood, every deep shadow that seems to go on forever. And there, amongst it—sudarium! Sudarium! Had Veronica been so amazed?

Did not Tiberius consent to be touched by her? Was he not spared, and the sickness driven out of him, by that relic made holy by the filth of human sweat and pain? Was he not spared?

Gene swallows. “Town,” he says, stupidly, “just spare… um. In town.”

“Oh,” Heffron says. He presses his lips together, unreadable. Is he confused, Gene wonders? Heartbroken? Beaten down, tired, nervous? “How’d you get it?”

The whistle and scream breaks the silence, and they leap. Artillery, crying out like a field of slaughtered animals, throats open and blood draining.

Someone, distant, bellowing we’re gonna get it now, boys, and someone else crying out to stay down, stay down. A monkey on a stick! They crack the whip and we jump, Gene thinks, and rolls over onto his knees.

Movement, Heffron’s arms on him, Heffron’s weight on him, and the earth shakes with a scream and a cry. The shattering noise of a tree bursting. Black ash and splinters come down on the blanket over their hole like hard rain.

This is fear, now, and Gene is afraid, really afraid. His whole body arches and curls like a guard dog, growling, watching the gate, every hair raised.

He jams a palm at the top of his helmet, and hears the cry medic mingle with the next whistle, the promise of death. Heffron’s hands on him. He coils and springs, and bursts in one movement into the light of day.

Palms scramble at the snow and the dirt, big clumps scraping at him as he forces his way up, up, barely off his knees into the shock of cold, and, hands still skimming the ground like some wild ape, he begins to run. Now he can hear the shouts, the calls, and he follows them blindly, his eyes still squinting and useless in the light.

Tree burst. The crack, the rip, and then the flaying splinters, three inches long at points—his hand comes up, astride his face, he remembers pulling splinters out of necks, out of throats, if you are unlucky they will pierce so deep there is no hope left as the air leaks out of you. Stay down, stay down, 

Stay Down!

Stay close to your Mother, to the Earth, and do not pray now except for her arms to hold you. Whistle—scream—deaf to the world, blind to the world, stumbling as the shock of it strikes too close, and leap!

He falls sideways and rolls halfway to a hole. Hands grab at his clothing and pull, and Gene gasps for breath, tumbling into a familiar, warm pair of bodies. “Gotcha, Doc,” says Bill, his friend Bill Guarnere, who is holding him like a child holds a doll.

“Who’s hit?” Gene shouts over the sound so thick in the air he despairs of getting his head above it.

“It must be Skip,” Buck shouts, laid out on his belly, his rifle in both hands, “that’s Malark calling.”

“Where?”

“Hold on,” Buck says, and his head jerks around wildly, trying to get his bearings, “wait for an opening–”

But there is no time to wait, and someone cries out medic! again, it is Malarkey’s voice, Don Malarkey, Sergeant Malarkey—and Sergeant Guarnere pats his back and says “straight ahead, Doc, you can’t miss it,” and Lieutenant Compton shouting go, alright, Doc, go–

He sees her in the distance when he launches himself up, his arms and legs springing like a lizard’s, flinging his body into motion. His head crests over the dirt, the bare clutches of Mother Earth, her arms breaking away from him and giving him a direct, clear line of sight–

The snow billows up, thick and swirling like fog, dark with the dirt that heaves up alongside it. The path is impossible to see, it must be found by memory. Outside the sight of any living man. And there, on the far side of the obstruction, he sees her running, clear as anything. Clear as day. One arm raised.

Even as he tries to justify it (stress/panic/exhaustion/sleep deprivation/other) medically, his body lurches onward. The body is wiser than the mind, in some ways. Her arms are stretched out to him—if he makes it to her, she will catch him–

C’est ne pas urgent, she says, and he clutches his helmet with one hand and his bag with the other, loose and slapping at his legs, and he runs straight towards her.

Sky lights—red/white/black/brown/orange—an explosion and a shockwave behind him, pushing–

With a stumble, he falls forward into another foxhole (barely a ditch, not finished, not properly dug out, not enough time, they must have gotten tired or gotten surprised) and feels the air and the heat ride over his back. Someone is yelling for him, very close, grabbing at his arms and his coat.

“Doc,” Sergeant Malarkey says, “he got it in the leg, you got to grab it, I’ll cover you!”

“Easy,” Gene says, his eyes flashing red/black/white, explosions burned into them, a tower collapsing, trying to blink them back. “I got you, Muck, let me see it.”

“He’s crying over nothing,” Skip Muck tells him, and gives that wheezing laugh of a man trying to hide how much pain he’s in. Gene takes in the sight of him and takes his ankle in one hand, one easy movement. “It’s just tree blast, you can’t even call this being hit!”

“You goddamn better be hit,” Gene snaps, as he feels the sweat pouring down his neck, heart pounding, fear of death, never did see Paris, “you been screaming for me in this shit for no reason and I’ll wring you out myself!”

He cries out in pain when his leg is pulled, and Gene fumbles for the scissors in his pocket to cut the leg of his pant away. The splinters of wood stab out of his flesh at angles but, critically, he is sans shrapnel. Gene breathes out.

On his neck, a hand presses into him. Rough skin, cold, careworn.

“It’s not bad,” he tells Muck, “you not bleeding bad, Skip, you alright. You gonna be alright.”

“Let me stay on the line,” Muck says, desperately, and then yelps in pain as Gene pulls a splinter out of him, “I can stay on the line, Doc, just patch me up–”

“Alright, alright,” Gene says, not paying much attention. Fingers dragging down his neck, into his hairline. Fingers, fingers–

He reaches up to brush the sensation away, moving anxiously, and as his hand meets hers (knuckles scraped/flesh cold/joints sore/there/there/there) the air goes still

silent

As suddenly as the barrage began.

They look up, all three heads turning to the sky. They don’t dare speak, their mouths full of held breath, the air quite tight.

Long moments, and then someone yelling “stay in your foxholes, stay in your foxholes,” and the scant sounds of a few pairs of footsteps up and running.

Gene looks up at the horizon, between the trees, searching for a figure. She’s here, he thinks desperately, she’s somewhere. If he can only find her, can only see her, can only know. Can only get one more glimpse of skirt and apron and jacket, that long black coat… If he can get one more, just one…

Malarkey hits his shoulder with an open palm. “I’ll cover for you, Doc,” he says reassuringly, and Gene glances at him, meets that wide-eyed gaze, the one Malarkey uses when he’s trying not to look afraid. “I won’t let them sneak up, alright? You work on his leg.”

“Right,” Gene says, “right. Yes, Sergeant.”

Muck is not hit bad. In fact, he will later claim that he has not been hit at all. His leg is little more than a matter of picking out splinters, all of them quite thin, and very few of them particularly deep. Sergeant Malarkey apologizes for calling, but Gene tells him not to.

“Before you got here, he was hollering like crazy,” he explains, waving an arm at Muck’s leg. “He said he wasn’t gonna call for you, but he was bleeding like anything, too.”

“Better to call when you not sure than take the chance,” Gene tells him. “You don’t want to make a mistake the other way around. You okay?”

“Sure, we’re okay.”

The barrage does not start again, not even after twenty minutes, and no one else calls for him. Muck does not need to be carried back off the OP, and neither he nor Malarkey can abandon their hole when they’re meant to be on watch. So, after Muck’s leg is cleaned and wrapped up, Gene unfolds himself from their ditch, where he is one man too many, and begins the slow process of picking his way back through the field.

He needs to think about this. He needs time to think about this.

Before, when he has seen Renee, he has been… imagining her. There is some kind of control there. He chooses what she wears, how she sits. It is not always on purpose, not every detail—some things seem to just fill themselves in—but it has come from him, and… and there are rules. He does not touch her, for one thing. If he tried, his hand would pass through her. She is not a real thing, a physical thing.

But her hand had been there. Cold flesh, trailing on his skin. Rough skin, exactly as it had been when he had last seen her, when they had worked together. And when he had gotten lost in the fog, when he had not known where to go, she had.

The dead and the living do not see each other, not really. There are some individuals, gifted, who can reach out…

Stop, he tells himself, his teeth gritting in his mouth. More than anything else, he is furious with the inability to just let go of that. The idea of that.

Renee is not really here. She has not really been here. Wanting it to be true—wanting to have the hand that could reach out and take hers, slipping through the veil to put some warmth back into that cold flesh—wanting the honor of that, too, wanting to be that kind of person—does not make it true.

He has never seen the dead walk the earth. He has never seen those trapped spirits, who need a quiet guide to carry them along to where they ought to go. He is not that kind of person. All the wanting and praying in the world has never opened his eyes to them.

In fact, he has no idea if Renee is dead or alive. He has not asked anyone. He has not asked the CO who she volunteered under, or any of the men who have been evacuated from the church, or the black girl who he has occasionally seen up on the line, helping to evacuate the wounded in the distance.

Why? Because he is a coward. Why is he a coward? Because he does not want to die. Would it kill him? A part of him. It would kill a part of him.

She’s waiting for him in his foxhole. Babe is not there anymore. He has gone to speak with his friends, Gene thinks, and feels a surge of anger at the idea of it. Gene is not Babe’s friend. Gene is not anyone’s friend.

Petulantly, he considers striding right past her, ignoring her and beginning his rounds early. He’s busy, he doesn’t need her. He doesn’t need to talk to anyone.

He walks past her, not looking at her, and is halfway to the chow line before he stops, suddenly ashamed. No one else can see her, and no one else wants her. He doesn’t need her, but she needs him.

He pivots, not caring if Sergeant Martin (walking past him, nodding amiably enough at him) sees him or thinks it’s strange, and stomps back.

“They gonna make us move soon,” he tells her, as he slides back into his hole, “don’t get comfortable.”

Renee looks up at him from her hands, which are folded awkwardly in her lap. She’s been crying, he realizes too late. Her eyes are red, and her lips are pursed.

Gene looks down, frustrated and humiliated. He’s always doing that—he doesn’t know how to treat women. Somehow, he always makes girls cry. He doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what they want from him, except that they want him to be a man, a goal nebulous and unfair and always, always failed.

“Is he going to be alright?” Renee asks. Her voice is slightly tight, the way it was the last time they spoke to each other. Really—to each other, not past each other. “Your friend?”

“He’s fine,” Gene tells her, “it wasn’t serious. His friend was just worried about him.”

She looks at him—looks him in the eye, briefly, before glancing down at his chin, at his hands. Her lips form an ‘oh’, and she nods—’oh, I see’. And then she looks away.

She is something he has made, Gene tries to reassure himself. She is something he imagines, because it soothes him to think of her. It is easier to talk to someone you can predict.

Across the foxhole from him, not touching him, Renee sniffs and crosses her arms over her chest. She is not so impervious to the cold now as she was the last time he imagined her. And, it occurs to him, she is not so soothing to see.

“Why did you have to volunteer?” Gene asks, bitterly, and she looks at him sharply. He has startled her. “Why did I ever have to meet you?”

Her lips purse, and after a moment she shrugs and shakes her head. “Je ne sais pas,” she says shortly. “C'était insensé.”

“C'était, ah,” he says, “C'était fou, couillon, tu devrais–”

“Ouai, d’accord,” she snaps back, so fiercely it startles him, “c'était insensé, c'était fou, c'était suicidaire! What does it matter? I did it, it was my choice! Mine! Not yours! How dare you bring me here just to berate me? After all I did for you?”

Gene looks away, scolded, clutching himself around the chest. “You should have run,” he says stupidly, his eyes hot with anger, “when you heard artillery, you should have run.”

“I should have abandoned my patients,” she says coldly, “is that what you think?”

He can feel her eyes on him, roaming his profile. She is not hungry for him in this moment—he repulses her. Childish, neither boy nor man, little more than a tantrum on the dark ground. 

“I wasn’t in the building when it was hit,” she tells him, and her voice is softer now, but no warmer. “I was outside, having champagne. For Christmas. I left my patients alone so I could say Merry Christmas to no one. So we could sing Adestes Fideles. I left them alone.” She swallows. “Do you know how shameful that is?”

“You were in the building,” Gene says. “I found your headscarf there.”

“I went back inside,” she tells him. “When the building was struck, I heard my men calling for me, and I went back for them. I saved six lives.”

“Well, one of them should have been yours,” he snaps. “What the hell were you thinking? Don’t you know you’re no good to anybody dead?”

“Don’t you?” She asks.

Bitterly, Gene reaches for his bag, anxious for something else to do. He should find his spade, he thinks, they’re going to be moving to a new position soon. No one has said so, but he can feel it in the air. They’ve been targeted too thoroughly.

There’s never any settling. Once your foxhole is finally deep enough, once you can keep your head down during a barrage, someone comes along and tells you to dig a new one. We’re moving thirty yards up. Just clean the blisters on your hands and start digging again.

“Should I open up my arms and take all the abuse you want to save for yourself?” Renee asks, when he doesn’t answer her. “You want to talk about better alive? Ta maman dira quoi? Do you think she wants to hear that you could have waited safely during a barrage, but you went out running anyway, and now she doesn’t even get to bury you?”

“It’s not the same thing,” he tells her. “You volunteered. This is my job.”

“That you volunteered for.”

He looks at her sharply, and she meets him, eye to eye. Blue eyes, bluer every time he looks. The veil of the Virgin was never so blue as those eyes. He has never drowned in water so blue, never felt anything fill his lungs the way she does.

“You’re angry because you understand,” she says, “I’m sorry that you have to. But that’s all it is. You would have done the same.”

He would have.

“C'était fou,” he says again, and sinks into himself. “It shouldn’t be like this. I never should have let it get this way.”

Renee breathes in through her nose and releases it slowly, shifting across from him. After a moment, she scoots her foot forward and gently—almost shyly—taps the toe of her beaten leather flats against his combat boots. “There’s nothing shameful about it,” she tells him. “You prayed for this. For the fortitude of saints. To live for others.”

“To live for others,” Gene says, and breathes out hard, breath hot in his nose and ghosting over his lips, “to die for others. That’s all it is, huh? What, am I born to die? To lay this body–?”

He stumbles on it, familiar and old but, crucially, not his. Not his words, not his memories.

Like Oh Shenandoah, the words are not familiar to him, not one of the great American tunes he grew up wrapped up in. He has never heard it before. He knows every line by heart.

A land of deepest shade, Renee says, tears beading in her eyes, and he knows that she is afraid now, really afraid. Unpierced by human thought.

It is very dark. He feels his chest caving in, and heaves all over, clasping at himself. His eyes are hot, a thudding pressure behind them—he swallows, gasps, his head spins–

“I won’t,” he pants, wanting to stand up for himself against her, suddenly pathetic and vulnerable under that gaze of hers that he cannot bear to meet, suddenly shriveling like the rougarou in the light. “You can’t ask me to, you got no right, you got no right at all–”

Thudding on his back. Someone saying his name, as if trying to wake him up. Gene shuts his eyes and thrusts his arm out, makes contact.

Someone yelps like a kicked dog, a full “yeowch!” And the whole world goes white again, the horrible dirty white and grey of reality.

Anger, already roiling, surges. Gene wheels on the intruder, nostrils flaring, and comes up short. Babe Heffron is sitting half-slouched in the foxhole with him, gripping his jaw with one hand and glaring fiercely at him.

He should apologize, says a part of Gene’s brain, he’s just struck Heffron in the face, full-palm and full force. He’s lucky it wasn’t his nose. He should apologize.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He snaps instead. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on patrol.”

“I didn’t realize you were my fucking CO,” Heffron snaps back, “and that you knew what I was ‘supposed’ to be doing! Fuck is your problem? I come over here to see if you’re okay–”

“How I’m doing,” Gene says, the anger starting to snowball forward entirely out of his control, “is none of your business! If you not here with orders, you shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Well, good thing I am,” Heffron says, and, reaching past Gene to grab his abandoned spade off the ground, leans in close and pushes it into his chest. “We’re on the move again, right? We’re sideshuffling east a half a mile just to get some goddamn exercise in. Where the hell is this coming from, anyway? Since when do you want to act so goddamn tough?”

What will become of me?

Miserably, Gene feels the fight go out of him, and his body seems to deflate in his clothes. Who is he to Heffron? Who is he to anybody? What the hell is he fighting and spitting about, anyway?

“Alright,” he says, and breathes out. Vent it off, he tells himself, man cannot live on bread or anger alone.

Every enlisted man’s first walking stick is his entrenching tool, and wordlessly, side by side, they both jam its spear into the hard earth outside the foxhole and haul themselves up. There is a quality to their motion, habitual, rehearsed, synchronized. Like dancers. Graceless, in all other respects, except for that special quality of togetherness which makes even the lumbering seem marked with some strange beauty.

Around them, in steady movements, the company begins to file miserably through the trees like the dead going home. From far away, every one of them is a ghost. Long, dark coats. Grey wool, or black.

Gene has not managed to take a wool coat. He is not a good scavenger, he is not clever about scrounging, and anyway he is not possessive. He seems to have survived in the one he already has, and there are not enough coming in on resupply to resupply everyone. He takes some small comfort in watching the distant figure of Sergeant Lipton, one of their best who has also gone without.

Babe Heffron remains beside him as they walk, but says no more. Gene is surprised by that (he is often surprised by Heffron) in both respects. Gene has behaved badly; he is sensible of that. It would be sensible if Heffron departed, made distance, spent no more time with him, found better company, et cetera. Somebody he could talk to.

Ah! And won’t he talk? Babe Heffron’s voice is a balm to him, and only now in its absence does Gene realize he misses it terribly. Always, when they walk, it is run-run-running circles around some other man, songs and stories and jokes told poorly to his own amusement, and wheezing laughter, close enough to hear and far away enough to laugh safely at. No threat of being caught smiling, no threat of being pulled in.

But now it is gone, no voice and no laughter. He does not want to talk to Gene, since nobody particularly does, and that would not be so awful if only he would talk to somebody else, if he would not insist on keeping both of them in stiff silence.

After a moment, Gene can bear it no longer, and breaks it.

“You on orders again?” He asks, looking over his shoulder, and Heffron startles, glancing up at him from some reverie.

“Huh?”

“Keeping an eye on me,” Gene clarifies. “Spina tell you to dig in with me again?”

“It may surprise you to know,” Heffron says, irritably, “that I am occasionally capable of independent thought.”

“That don’t surprise me,” Gene says, and looks ahead again, smiling to himself. “It worries me, though.”

“Well, you can keep your worries for yourself,” Babe says. “I’ll have you know that Ralph Spina is a busy man, Eugene. They’ve got him marching to the aid station and back again half a dozen times a day, it seems like. He ain’t bursting with free time and energy to boss me around about babysitting you, savvy?”

“Okay, okay,” Gene says, and holds up an appeasing hand. “So you decided to babysit me yourself. I got it.”

“As a matter of fact, I was investigating a scene,” Babe says, and comes up abreast with Gene, so that they are walking shoulder to shoulder, instead of filing in line. “I left my chow tin in your hole and I had to come back to get it anyway, before we started moving out, and I hearken—that’s college speak for ‘hear’—some kind of throw-down drag-out fight! Who the hell were you talking to?”

Gene hunches his shoulders up around his ears, suddenly embarrassed. “No one,” he lies, and stuffs his hands in his pockets.

“Bull-shit ‘no one’,” Babe says, “you were carrying on like you were about to light someone up! Come on, spill. Who’s in trouble?”

Gene blows his cheeks out. If humiliation has one benefit in Bastogne, it’s that it’s the first thing that’s made his face feel warm without getting it wet, too. Hot steam can’t compare.

“No one,” he says, after a moment of deliberation. “I was praying, alright?”

Babe snorts humorlessly. “Sounded like a particularly aggressive prayer,” he says, “where’s that one on the rosary?”

He should say nothing. Gene knows he should say nothing, let it roll off his back.

It doesn’t matter if Babe thinks he’s lying or not. It doesn’t matter if Babe likes him or not. Being liked is not the point; being trustworthy, whether or not he is trusted, is the point. It’s his job to care for the men, not their job to care for him.

Renee was right about one thing: he has prayed for the fortitude to do so. He has begged for the strength to overcome those base, human needs.

But somehow, around Babe, the base, human anger comes leaping out of his mouth.

“So what?” He snaps. “What, you never got pissed off about it before?”

When he looks, Babe is looking back at him. Expression dark; unreadable. Not smiling. Not familiar enough, not someone Gene can read. Like a hand on a hot stove, Gene darts away again, and stares back at the endless trudging snow.

Their boots creak. The wind whips a fine mist of snow up off the dunes, and it sprays over their legs.

Next to him, Heffron pats at the pockets of his jacket until he finds a packet of cigarettes. The lighter sparks—the smell floats. Metal click of a cap being shut.

In his periphery, a hand reaching out to him, and Gene glances sideways to see Heffron offering him a lit cigarette. “Thank you,” he says, and takes it.

On and on they walk, and then the call goes up to stop and start digging. That’s how it always is: they go from remote patch to remoter patch of frozen earth, blister their hands on their entrenching tools, and stay there just long enough for the cramps to die down before being ushered up and doing it again. When Gene starts, he sees Heffron sling down his bag and set in digging, too.

“Hey, take it easy,” he says, “don’t split your hand open, huh?”

“My hand is doing just fine,” Heffron replies, and grunts with the effort of driving his spade’s edge into the ground. “Why don’t you worry about more important things, huh? Like getting this hole dug before it gets dark, since it seems like we get the sun for about ten minutes per day out here.”

Gene nods, more to himself than for Heffron’s benefit, and flexes his palm against the handle of his tool. The skin there is raw and aching, which he needs to find a way around so he can go on working. Some new way of gripping it will get him through.

“I thought you normally holed up with Sergeant Guarnere,” he says, conversationally. “Everything okay with you two?”

“What?” Heffron squints over at him. “Yeah, Bill’s fine, Gene. Won’t shut up to everybody about his penis, by the way, not exactly a treat for the faint of heart.”

“Okay,” Gene says, shrugging. “And you guys okay? You haven’t, uh… you not fighting or anything, right?”

Heffron snorts. “Dig your side,” he says, “leave the conflict resolution stuff to Lip, huh?”

“Right,” Gene says. “I just, uh, if you guys having trouble–”

“Gene, I’m not over here because I’m avoiding him,” Babe says, and tosses a scrap of dirt across his body, into another grimy pile of snow and earth. “I’m here because I’m digging in with you. Got it?”

It’s like digging into stone sometimes. The snow gives in quite easily, but under the snow is a packed layer of ice, where it compresses down, melting and refreezing under the snow above it. Sometimes it’s thick, real thick there. And under that, the earth! Wet with rainwater and streams and all the water of the world, which freezes solid as one great chunk. Into this, their hands drive steel, repeatedly, unforgivingly. The wood handle bites hard into flesh, rubs and rips until the irritation becomes too great to bear.

“Oui, I got it,” Gene says. “I just don’t know why you bothering.”

“To be honest, I wish I didn’t have to,” Babe says. He is an impassive figure, bent double and working the ground, just the same as Gene. “If you would just come have dinner with the guys one of these nights, or get in a hole with somebody else, instead of going off on your own all the time, I wouldn’t!”

Here, he looks up, glances across the short distance—very short, only a matter of inches—between them.

“I don’t know what’s going on with you,” he says, “But it don’t look good from out here, Eugene. If someone doesn’t keep a hand on you, you’re gonna start cracking up.”

Gene glares at him. He does not say that he is already cracking up.

In fact, he does not have to. They have reached the point in digging where the work overwhelms them entirely. Halfway down any dig, it becomes increasingly difficult to care about easy conversation, as the dirt moves faster and the spades go deeper.

It’s not unique to men who don’t prefer to talk. Around them, the Ardennes falls silent as six dozen men succumb to the desire for the work to just be over with, to knuckle down and get it done. NCOs wander between holes, checking in, encouraging the rest of the enlisted men, and beyond that there is only the sound of wind, and rustling trees.

Louisiana does not have such trees. According to the other men in the company, the ones from the north, this isn’t how they’re supposed to grow. The Ardennes, or perhaps only the section of it they currently reside in, is a sort of artificial forest, trees planted in straight lines to grow into lumber. That’s why the Germans are so able to zero them, again and again—all they have to do is look down the hallways of this built environment, see dark coats moving on white snow, and fire.

There is something sickening about a manmade forest, and Gene’s stomach turns when he thinks about it too hard. Created by men to replace what they stripped from their Mother, a pale imitation of Glory they did not understand and did not respect until it was far too late to turn back to Her. And now they plant trees that suck the soil dry, that feed no animals, that serve no underbrush or stream. They plant them not to replenish, but to take. To continue to take.

Well, it’s the same the world over. They do the same in the Mississippi, don’t they? And that greed is coming to Atchafalaya, too, the greed of New Orleans men who want more gold, more liquor, bigger parties, greater boats. There is no way to protect Her, not when the greedy are so rewarded for their sin. Those who want will take, and take—and great and terrible will be their eternal reward. The eye of a needle…

“I have got to stop,” Heffron says, and tosses his entrenching tool down. “My blisters are getting blisters, and for what?”

He collapses easily into the divot they’ve made in the earth, and Gene looks down at him, his spade still full.

“Don’t throw that on me,” Heffron says, grinning. “Come on, we lost all our light, didn’t we? We’ll have to go on digging tomorrow.”

“You think Sergeant Lipton’s gonna wanna hear that?” Gene asks, now thinking about throwing his spadeful of dirt all over Babe’s coat, making him splutter and flail. After all, he’s laid out too comfortably, tearing his helmet off and resting his sweaty head on his hands. His stomach and chest totally undefended, heaving with the effort of catching his breath.

If he did it, Babe would yelp, and Gene would laugh, and it would be like they were friends. And Gene could collapse down next to him, shoulder to shoulder, the two of them pressed together easily, with no suspicions between them. And Babe might say, you ain’t so bad, Roe, you know what? You’re alright with me…

Quickly, Gene turns his face away and tosses the dirt to the side, into the pile he’s been building.  And he sighs, in a put-upon sort of way, as Babe tells him it doesn’t matter what Sergeant Lipton wants to hear, “we’re in here deep enough and there ain’t no point trying to build Rome in a day, huh? We’ll finish tomorrow, when we’re fed up again and my hands ain’t so goddamn cold.”

“Alright,” Gene says, and sinks to a sitting position, his knees tucked up against his chest, carefully not touching Babe’s reclining body with anything but the toes of his boots, “but if he comes around and we in trouble, I’m telling him you made me stop.”

“I ain’t making you do anything,” Babe says, “go on and dig if you want!”

“I ain’t gonna dig if you ain’t gonna dig,” Gene says, “I think I’m running out of Christian compassion.”

“I can’t believe you’ve still got any,” Babe says. Carelessly, he reaches up and rifles a hand through his hair, red and sweaty and sticky with grease. Gene watches him, fingers flexing reflectively until he crosses his arms over his chest, tucking his hands into his armpits. “I think I left all mine behind in Holland.”

“That ain’t true,” Gene says, “you rotten with the stuff.”

Babe looks at him, not saying anything, and Gene is aware that he has made some mistake, that it was not an appropriately soldierly or appropriately masculine thing to say. Too kind, maybe, or too barefaced, not wrapped up well.

But he can’t do anything about it now that it’s out of his mouth, and Babe can think whatever he likes, and if he doesn’t like it there’s no one keeping him here, so Gene reaches for the lip of his helmet and tugs it off with a grunt. The air is cold on his scalp, his skin tightening under the pressure, and he reaches up to rub and scratch. The work gets him hot.

“I should go do my rounds,” Gene says after a moment, “sun’s down. Guys probably need a check-in.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Babe says, quite easily. “You ain’t been sitting for five minutes. Why don’t you just stay here for a while, catch your breath?”

They really are too close. The hole they’ve been digging is little more than a long trench in the earth, without any room to sit upright. It’s barely wide enough for two bodies to fit, and just long enough to recline. If they don’t dig it out more, they’re going to have to sleep back-to-belly, locked together under a pair of ratty blankets.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Renee asks.

Gene blinks hard, as though snowblind. There, stretched out next to Babe, clear as day, is Renee, pressed against his shoulder in her jacket and dingy apron. She’s propped up on an elbow over him, the way husbands lie sometimes when they’re talking with their wives. Her hand is on his shoulder.

“It’s not about what I want,” Gene says, “I can’t.”

“Why not?” Renee asks.

“Sure you can,” Babe agrees. “The first step of not cracking up: stealing every moment you can for yourself! I know you don’t get many, you ought to use them if you’ve got them.”

Renee’s hand slides over the curve of Babe’s shoulder, down the front of his chest, and Gene fixates on her, fascinated and panicked. He doesn’t react to her at all—of course, she is not really here. She is not here, Gene reminds himself, and blinks hard, trying to banish her from his vision.

Not now, he wants to tell her, this isn’t a good time. We can talk about this later. You have no business showing up here.

And, shamefully, furiously, get off him, just stop touching him.

“It’s not my fault that you won’t,” she says, “I’m only trying to help.”

“Well, you’re not helping,” he mutters, and squeezes himself in closer. Arms tighter, knees closer, balling himself up.

He can’t watch it happen—it aches, all over—and he cannot stop watching. Renee leans over Babe as he reclines, quite easily, as if she belongs there, and she touches just as easily, as if she has permission to. Her fingers stroke strands of hair away from his face, which fall back into place as though they had never moved at all. With her knuckles, she traces the line of his cheekbone, slides it down along his jaw.

“I think I’m helping more than you want to admit,” Babe says, oblivious, as her fingers find the sensitive skin of his neck under his scarf. “Why do you have to go on acting tough when there’s nobody around, huh? Why don’t you just act like a person sometimes?”

“Stop,” Gene says helplessly. Neither of them will.

“You don’t talk to anybody,” Babe says, irritably now, still staring up at the deep grey sky, the light of the sun dying, dying, dying around them, leaving them in the dark. “You don’t even talk to me! Luz can’t get a word out of you! Luz can get Randleman to talk, and you don’t even bite. You do it on purpose, don’t you? Cut us off?”

“All you have to do is lie down,” Renee says. “You think he’s beautiful, don’t you? His hair, his skin. You don’t have to take everything. Why don’t you just take a little?” She leans in, her mouth at Babe’s ear, and Gene knows the smell of his sweat is intense there, sour and stale, that foul animal smell that permeates all of his clothing, that Gene wants to know intimately, to recognize with his eyes shut.

When she kisses him there, the skin will be rough with stubble, and surprisingly warm. And he will shudder, sensitive, put an arm around her. He would lay out, under careful hands, under a mouth like that. Wet breath, chapped lips.

“I can’t do it,” Gene says, and his chest collapses in a panic, stupid words coming out, “I can’t get close like that, or it’s gonna kill me, you understand? I can’t–”

He sucks a breath in.

“It’s different for me,” he says, “it’s not the way it is for other men. I can’t—if I get close like that, I’m gonna go to pieces. And I can’t—I can’t let everybody down like that. I can’t go to pieces like that.”

He rubs his scalp again, ears hot, feeling desperate.

“Everybody relying on me,” he mutters. “I can’t go to pieces on them like that.”

Babe stares at him, silent, and Gene looks him in the eye.

Are you hurt? I can’t read you. Are you angry? Do you see me? Do you hate me?

After a moment, Gene looks down at his hands, at his lap. He snatches his helmet up off the ground and brushes the dirt off of it, arranging to jam it back onto his head.

“Eugene, please,” Renee says. He shakes his head, not looking up at her. “Eugene. Just lie down. He’s here now. He’s warm now. It’s dark now.”

“Just shut up,” he mutters.

“No one will see,” she tells him. “He’s aching for you. He’s waiting for you. Lie down. He’ll pull you in.”

“Damn, I didn’t even say anything,” Babe says, and Gene glances up, embarrassed. “Why don’t you wait a minute, huh? Give me a minute to come up with something stupid.”

“I wasn’t–” Gene says, embarrassed. “I just—I was talking to myself.”

“Well, knock it off,” Babe says, “he can’t talk to you, he’s busy! He’s talking to me!”

It startles him. It makes him laugh. Funny—a moment ago, he wouldn’t have thought he was capable of laughing at anything. His body loosens as if under a marlinspike, like a buntline hitch coming free at last.

“You need some better company, Roe,” Babe tells him, smiling with real pleasure. His cheeks crinkled, his nose squashed and red. “That guy ain’t much of a conversationalist, is he? No wonder you’re getting weird.”

“I’m not getting weird,” Gene says, and straightens up, brushing dirt and snow off the seat of his pants, “you just paying attention. So long.”

There is a window in his bedroom, which he shares with his brothers, with no shade but the net they pin up over it for the mosquitos. Gene stares out through it, at the trees and the grass. The wind is warm, balmy. It has the smell of spring on it, the surge of water rising in Atchafalaya, insects laying eggs, pennywort spawning and spreading under the cypress trees.

You are back here again. Why?

In the chair in front of the desk, Renee sits perfectly still, her eyes shut, her hands in her lap. Her hair is up, still, and the hairbrush sits on the desk. She is naked. He wants to see her, and he is embarrassed of wanting to.

It is better that he does not look—he does not know what her skin should look like. It is better that he does not touch her—that he can only wonder if it would be smooth, milky as a marble figurine.

Stop coming here. There is nothing here for you.

Slowly, carefully, he unpins the braids in her hair, brings them down off her head, feels them unfurl and go on unfurling. It seems to go on forever, hair pouring over his hands like river water. The river is rising—the river grows hungry. It will surge up, soon. It will devour them.

Baby, go home.

When he looks out the window again, at the trees and the grass, he sees them—a mirror image, a long way off, Renee in the chair his father made and Babe standing behind her. They are surrounded by the trees, and dappled by the shadows and the light. Her eyes are open there, looking across the distance, through the window, back inside. Watching him.

I love you, baby. I don’t want to see you get hurt, baby. You go on home now. Don’t you come here no more.

They’re both looking at him, their eyes open. Babe’s hands run down her hair, pulling it back away from her shoulders, and then down her neck, over her shoulders. They slide forward, quick and confident, and he takes her breast in his hand.

Gene stands stock still. His palms start to sweat.

Renee’s hands find Babe’s, the places where he touches and cups her, and she heaves, her head turning, as he leans in to kiss her neck. Her body, naked—he does not know any better—she does not look any way a human really could—he does not know any better. Below her neck, he cobbles together a woman, part pinup, part statue, part diagram.

How do I desire you, he wants to ask, I don’t know what to do with you. What do I do?

He wants to run his own hand down her shoulder, the Renee in his hands, in his chair, but when he looks down, she is gone. He reaches out again, through the empty space.

Then, up—hands outstretched, reaching for the window

But there is no window there now. It has been covered up with black sackcloth.

This house is shut.

He scrambles at the cloth, palms sweating. Trapped. Around him, distantly, he hears a great cry. People are singing hymns, rough voices. It is hard to sing for them through the sorrow, and the sorrow means they must go on singing. When words fail, and your mouth opens and you begin to wail, and moan, and beat your chest, and no one who sees you can understand except for God, who is in such pain as you are, because all of your pain, He feels.

They are singing and he cannot stand it, he wants to tear his hair, he wants to crawl under the desk and hide there. They are singing around a bed, because the last rites have been read and now there is nothing that anybody but God can do except sing. Waked by the trumpet sound, they sing, almost screaming, I from my grave shall rise…

I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.

When he goes out into the main room of the house again, the body will be there, and everybody will be there to see it. He is twelve years old, and he is hiding in his room because if he doesn’t see the body, the life has not really passed away, and no one has really died. If you do not see the body…

It is dark. What a great relief, that it is still so dark, when he gasps awake, his body coming alive. What a great relief.

The tears are streaming down Gene’s face, and his whole body feels pummelled. A martyr’s body, dragged out into the woods, stripped naked, pummelled with sticks and switches, left out there to bleed and die.

What did Irene do it for? Why did she break herself trying to save him? Why did she have to find him broken, put him back together, and watch as he went back to his death?

He breathes in, ragged and hard, and around him there is shifting. Too late, he realizes there is a body behind him, pressed against him. Touching him, speaking to him.

“What the hell,” Heffron mutters in the dark, so close Gene can feel his breath on the back of his own neck, “settle down, huh? I wasn’t even getting frisky.”

His voice is thick with sleep, and Gene thinks it must be the middle of the night still. Neither of them has been called to be on watch. They are lying like lovers, and Gene has startled awake and brought him out of the deep.

The tears are hot on his face. Gene swallows, licking his lips and regretting it. Tasting salt.

“Eugene?” Heffron asks. “I’m just messing around, you know?”

Gene takes a breath, sharply, so that Babe won’t hear it shaking. It has become very important that Babe not see the tears, not know that they are there. In the dark, the former is easy, but the latter is hard.

Men on the front lines do not cry; not when their fellows are hit, not when they are hit, not when the pain or exhaustion become so intense they overwhelm him entirely. Perhaps they shed their tears in private, if tears are called to come. But to be seen crying, to let your fellows see you… it is not a thing of humiliation, this not-crying, but of solidarity. You will not let your comrades down. You will not force them to see your loss of valor, for the loss of one man’s valor injures all men.

He cannot let Heffron know he has been so affected. He cannot shake, or gasp for air, or rub at his face to clear them away. Gene shuts his eyes, hard enough to squeeze out another round, which gush down across the bridge of his nose.

“Oh, hell,” Heffron says. His palm runs over Gene’s arm, from elbow to shoulder. He is trying to comfort me, Gene thinks, and then, miserably, he has noticed.

He ought to say, don’t bother, I’m alright now. He ought to say, what the hell are you rubbing me for, I’m not your girl and I don’t need you. He ought to say, you’ve got it confused. I’m not crying. It’s the wind. It’s the cold. It’s something in my eye.

“I was thinking about my family,” he says, thickly, and swallows.

It’s a humiliating thing to say, and behind him, Babe stiffens all over. A mistake, a misstep. In this foxhole, they are brothers; Gene’s humiliation is Babe’s humiliation, too. Something awful he has now forced on both of them.

Babe will know what to do. He will say something disaffected soon, tell Gene it’s alright, go back to sleep. He will act as though it doesn’t really matter that Gene has broken that sacred, masculine trust they all rely on one another to uphold. In the morning, he will pretend nothing has happened, and Gene will pretend as well, and Babe will laugh and joke the way he always does. Then, the end will come, and Babe will drift towards stronger men. Men who will not humiliate him with their own humiliation. He will go to the sacred safety of their arms, and be kind to Gene, the way all the rest of them are, and worry about him from a distance, the way all the rest of them do. He will not come back here.

Vaguely, he is aware that Babe’s hand is still on his arm. After a moment, it moves again, stroking along the line between his shoulder and elbow and back again.

Softly, then, Babe says “that’s where the scarf came from, right? The blue one?”

It surprises Gene, and he glances over his shoulder without meaning to, half-turning to look at Babe. In the tight space of their foxhole, Babe has to shift to allow this, and he does apparently on instinct, so that Gene is lying on his back and Babe is on his side beside him. “What?” He asks, stupidly.

“This one,” Babe says, and gestures with his injured hand. “I mean, the one you gave me. It was yours, right? From home?”

Despite Babe’s waving, the scrap from Renee’s headscarf is not tied to his hand anymore, and it takes a moment before Gene realizes what he means to say. “Oh,” he says, when he does, “no, I… it wasn’t from home.” And then—because there must be a scrap of truth, something must be shared, he cannot bear to go on without that— “it was… from a woman, in Bastone.”

Babe grins, one of those full-face ones that seems to take him over entirely. “Oh, is that right,” he says, the gravity of their conversation lifting slightly. “You dog. Is that why you were doing supply runs?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Gene says. His face is slightly hot at the insinuation, but he scowls as best as he can. “We weren’t… she was one of the nurses, alright? At the aid station in Bastogne. Civilian volunteer.”

“Nurses,” Babe says, “that’s not such a tough thing…”

He pauses, then, and Gene can see his eyes darkening as he thinks. The weight of realization is coming down over him, and suddenly Gene cannot bear to look. He turns his head away a little.

After a moment, Babe asks, “was?” And Gene feels his body go tight. Like a line snapped into place under the pressure of a sudden wind in the sail.

“She was in the aid station,” Gene says. “The one that got hit.”

Soon as from earth I go, what will become of me?

“I don’t know if she was inside,” he says, because Babe has stopped speaking and is only looking at him, and he feels naked as a martyr, he feels crushed under some enormous weight, a thousand heavy stones, More Weight. “I found that, there, I went in to see… but everything was collapsed, and I don’t know if she was inside, and I…”

More weight.

“...I know I have to go,” he says, shaking his head, “the next time somebody’s called, I have to go back there and find out. For sure. And I can’t… I can’t ask. I have to, and I can’t.”

Babe is watching him. That brief flash of gaiety has been sucked out of him again, and Gene feels stupid and resentful for taking it away. It wouldn’t really have mattered, would it, to have lied and played along? To have let him smile and laugh, to come up with some story about some girl who giggled all the time, who Gene was panting after in that totally standard, unremarkable way?

He looks up, and realizes the cloud cover has broken above them, has let in the perfect, still light of the stars, the low-hung moon. It’s beautiful out here. It’s cold—so cold you can almost hear them. He never knew the cold was so quiet, the way snow eats up every echo and leaves every noise a pure, perfect note. Nothing reverberates. Nothing spreads. The cold consumes it all.

“Was she beautiful?” Babe asks.

It is soft. It does not startle him. It comes over him in a wave, and Gene shuts his eyes and lets himself be pulled under by it.

Was she? He tries to imagine her, to call her to him. She has been in his foxhole so often, on the field with such constance, he knows how to imagine every inch of her. But is it true? Has his memory warped, has she changed?

Come to me, he thinks, Show Yourself.

But Renee does not come. She leaves him alone, in the dark. With a companion, in the dark.

“I don’t know,” he says after a moment, and opens his eyes.

“Don’t know,” Babe says, and shoves at his arm a little bit. “What do you mean you don’t know? Sheesh, you’re kicking around a girl for days, you’ve got to be paying attention to a couple of things!”

“It wasn’t like that,” Gene says, smiling now. Babe is propping himself up on an elbow over him, and he thinks, this is the way she was lying with him before, her where he is and he where I am. He looks up into Babe’s face, which is close and quite scraggly with stubble and mess. Every inch of it is very clear now that his eyes have adjusted; he can see the length of his eyelashes, the acne building up on his forehead near his ear. “She was… a little older, I guess. I didn’t think about her that way.”

“Older, huh,” Babe says, in a tone of voice that indicates that he’s not impressed with this explanation.

They really are very close to each other. It is warm, being so close. Soothing, relaxing, a warmth you can ease into. In the dark, and the middle of the night, half-drugged on exhaustion and hunger, Gene can no longer remember why it was so important to stay away from other human bodies. The heat is such a relief—such a relief.

“She was different,” he says, his eyes on Babe’s lips, on his jaw. “She could… lay her hands on people, and settle them down. Men in pain, crying out for God or somebody… and she’d come and lay her hands on them. And they’d settle, like… she was taking the pain out and carrying it away.”

Babe’s lips press together, and Gene watches them, transfixed. He doesn’t dare to look up at his eyes. Somehow, the intensity of that might kill him.

“Some people are like that,” he says, “you know. They, uh… they have hands like God’s hands.”

Babe swallows. “God’s hands,” he says.

Gene does look up, then, as the courage touches his heart. Babe is looking at him, his eyes dark. There is something in him that Gene cannot name, but that he recognizes instantly. A kind of urgency, an intensity. Undirected, potent.

And it comes upon him, then, that he must tell Babe everything, here and now. What soothes the soul is confession, blessed confession! Is anything sweeter? And here in the dark, lying in their dirt bed the way lovers do, Gene trusts him more completely than any other ear on earth, more than any priest or silence of sanctified spaces, more than halls of decadence and piety. 

Everything, everything! The surety and insanity of it, the great wave of faith and doubt that has unmoored him. (Angel, vision, spectre, fantasy?) Babe breathing carefully now, their breath running over one another’s, their hearts pounding. Everything.

Now! His urgency matches your own! Feel it on his breath!

“Babe,” he breathes out, and his tongue and throat unsticks, “I think something’s… happening to me.”

Babe’s breath shudders once—in, out. A catch. A line without a hook. “Yeah,” he says hoarsely, “I think it’s happening to me, too.”

And then there is nowhere to place the words because there is no space between them any longer, nowhere for the confession to go. There is only heat, lips and tongue.

Gene would not have done it. He tries to understand this, as he parts his lips and tips his head. 

Babe must have started it. Why–? Of course, he is aching. Does he know how much? Gene runs his fingers tentatively over the curve of Babe’s shoulder, tracing the bubble of the jacket where it pulls away from his body before he finds his jawline and catches him. Does he know how to handle it? Does he know how to handle Gene, or will he need to be shown?

They break apart, Gene breathless, Babe giggling. “I didn’t mean to do that,” Babe says, panting, grinning, giggling, “I didn’t think you, I mean, I didn’t think–”

“Shut up,” Gene interrupts, and grabs him by the nape of his neck, and kisses him again.

One day was not sufficient to dig more than a shallow trench, and they are pressed into one another, body to body. Gene turns, trying to roll, until they are belly to belly. Shuddering as he does.

They kiss frantically, breathless and unable to catch up. Legs tangle to make room. When they lock (two bodies, one body, one sculpture writhing in the snow), he can feel the bulge of Babe’s erection against his hip. Stirring.

“Gene,” Babe says, breaking away again, “I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know–”

Gene does not bother to answer him, does not murmur I do in his ear. Again, he holds him roughly, again he kisses him. He does not mean to be rough—he ought not to be rough—but his body is shaking and singing, suffering with every moment apart. It is impossible to control. It is over for him now, really over.

Babe is as desperate to speak as Gene is certain they cannot. Open air, a full field of sleeping or half-sleeping bodies around them. The snow eats the sound, but only as much as it can swallow at once. To help it, he must swallow as much of it as he can himself, must hold his mouth to Babe’s and take every sound, moaning, vibrating, shuddering–

Hands grasp at his waist, and Gene realizes they are both fumbling at each other, grabbing big handfuls of nothing through thick layers of clothing. Desperate to touch each other, totally unable to.

In his arms, Babe shudders and squirms, and Gene runs his hand down Babe’s back, takes him by the hip. This time, he breaks away, aware vaguely of saliva sticking to the indent under his lip, and presses his mouth to the shell of Babe’s ear. “Here,” he whispers, and his whole body lights up at the way Babe moans against him, muffled in his jacket collar. “Like this.”

He rocks his hips, grinds against him, the pleasure forcing its way out of his mouth in a single shameful bark. Barely more than breath, skirting over Babe’s ear, moving a strand of his hair. And Babe, in his arms, clumsy–

No shame in it, this new, unexpected sort of virginity. Gene guides him. Slides his hand down his hip, takes his ass and guides him to grind back.

It seems to dissolve into heat, that lightheaded pleasure. They kiss, breathing hard in the space between each one, chasing something like satisfaction—there is never any satisfaction out here, not in this kind of cold. Not even from yourself. Your hands, out here, are clumsy, too cold, you can’t even get relief with a hand in your own trousers, too inexact–

Inexactitude! What does that matter, when you are pressed against another body, a warm body, an aching, moaning, heaving body? What delicacy is needed, with hands grabbing roughly, with the certainty of his erection hard against your hip?

“Fuck, fuck,” Babe manages, in between kisses, when he should be gasping air in so he doesn’t drown in it, “when did you learn to do this?”

“Why, what,” Gene asks, stupidly, need-need-needing and lit up like molten roux, “is it good?”

Babe giggles. “You’re not gonna stop, are you?” He asks, sighing, shuddering. “‘Cause I don’t think I can take it, you know, if you wake me up now, don’t wake me up now.”

Molten. Running through him. Neck-shoulders-chest-stomach, the bones come together bone to bone, his groin, his cock. Desperate, rocking, chasing.

“Babe,” he groans, and leans in to muffle the sound of it on his neck, in that place where the sweat sticks and dries. When he gasps, it fills him up, sour and animal and stale, his, something he is taking for himself at last. “Please, Babe…”

Lips kissing his cheek, the raggedy place where stubble meets his hairline. Babe’s in his ear, stroking his arms and his back, moaning “Gene, Eugene—fuck, Eugene–” and he shudders all over because—because he has never heard it. Now, it seems he has never heard his name before.

He does not make love to men who know his name. He has never heard his name said here, in this trembling place right before orgasm, he has never felt so desperately present, pinned into place–

“Be quiet,” he hisses into Babe’s ear, “someone could hear.”

There’s no resistance this time, when he forces his mouth against Babe’s again, when he pushes his tongue into his mouth. He feels the moan more than he hears it, the low rumbling, the vibration of a body in ecstasy reaching upwards, reaching through his mouth into him.

When Babe yelps, and his whole body goes stiff–

He struggles then, trying to pull away, but Gene holds him fast, grinding desperately as he does. With a grunt, Babe puts a hand on the base of his neck, near his collarbones, and shoves, forces him away.

“Look at this,” Babe mutters, “there’s a mess! You couldn’t have given me a second to–?”

But Gene’s desperate, now—terribly close, and selfish with it—and he can push hard, too. He grabs Babe by the shoulder and shoves him, rolling him onto his back and rolling on top of him. His hands find the top of Babe’s head, his mouth finds Babe’s mouth–

He ruts like a dog, like an animal possessed, his body rioting and rolling, and all of Babe’s protests seem to fall away. “Fuck,” he whimpers instead, hands grabbing at Gene’s waist, and then, hoarsely, “let me see, huh? Fuck, on me, do it—do it on me, Gene–”

It should be a kiss—another kiss—but Gene slumps down further, and bites that corner of Babe’s neck, the part of him that reeks. And when Babe yelps, his body heaving up under Gene’s, he cums growling.

Hard breath.

“Fuck,” Babe says. “Fuck.”

Gene does not move. He breathes out, hard, against Babe’s neck. One-handedly, he fumbles for their blankets, which have shifted off them in the shuffle, and tugs them back over the two of them.

“Get off,” Babe says.

“Fuck off,” Gene says. It makes Babe giggle. He does not move, half-expecting Babe to roll him, but Babe doesn’t.

“Eugene,” Babe says, “what do we do now?”

“Nothing,” Gene says. “Get a rag, I guess. You got one?”

“Yeah, I got one,” Babe says. “It ain’t clean.”

“Nothing’s clean out here,” Gene says. “Pass it over.”

All those thoughts about clumsy hands and too-cold skin and relief, Gene discovers, are entirely his own problems, and apparently are not shared by other men. Babe does have a rag, and parts of the rag have a shape to them. Gene selects a part of the rag that does not resist pressure, and tries not to think about this too hard.

“Maybe a rinse would help,” he can’t help saying, though, as he passes it back. “Get some of it out.”

“Right, I’m going to break the ice off a shaving basin so I can wash cum off a rag in it,” Babe says, fumbling it down his own waistband. “So sorry that I have not made freezing my fingers off a top, top, top priority. I’ll get right on it.”

Gene thinks about having a cigarette, which seems like the right thing to do in a situation like this, but decides not to. He only has three left in his ration pack, and he doesn’t know when the next supply drop is coming. If he doesn’t need one, he’ll hold off.

“Gene,” Babe says again, “what do we do now?”

“We could go back to sleep,” Gene says, purposely misunderstanding.

“Roe,” Babe says.

“Alright,” Gene says, and rolls halfway off, legs still tangled. He props himself up on one elbow, over Babe, and takes a moment to enjoy looking at him; the mess of his hair, his stubble, chapped lips, round, dark eyes looking back at him. Realization in those eyes, a soft, seeking helplessness. He ought to stroke his cheek, to cup his face in one hand like rainwater—but he hesitates, and does not do so. “We don’t got to do nothing. This is ours, understand? Between us.”

“Yeah,” Babe says, looking up at him.

“We gonna go to sleep,” Gene says. “Tomorrow, it feels… it’s different, when you wake up. You probably gonna ask me to forget it ever happened.” He breathes out. His palm itches with the desire to reach out and touch. “If you ask me to, I’ll ask you to.”

Babe shakes his head mutely. He looks young, in the dark; his big child’s eyes catching what passes for light out here, watching Gene’s face. “I won’t ask,” he says, “I can’t ask. I can’t forget.”

“I can’t, either,” Gene says. And he does touch him, now, takes his cheek in one hand, feels the warmth and the texture of stubbled skin, and Babe’s eyes flicker, but do not close. “But I will, if you ask me to.”

It is December thirty-first now, New Years’ Eve, the last day of a year he is desperate to outlive. He does not dare to pray for it. There is something blasphemous, or superstitiously heavy, about praying for one day more.

December thirty-first, and they are being shelled again. They have woken up to it, still tangled, gripping one another more tightly than before, the earth shaking, their bodies shaking alongside it.

Gene does not move. Wrapped up in those arms, he cannot move.

Well, what of it? He is hungry, and tired, and worn-through, and he does not think he can take it when he hears another voice calling for him. It seems so impossible, now, that he should pull himself up over the side and run along, skittering like some insect under fire.

A mistake has been made—he has allowed his body to be warmed—he has allowed himself to want to live. This cannot hold. No military man can stand it.

Hearing medic and moving; that is an instinct now, it is something animal and reactionary. He does not need to call upon it, does not need to find his bravery. The struggle is not against fear, but against exhaustion.

No, let me stay here.

There is an arm around him, over his shoulders and his head, and somebody shouting at him to stay down, and Gene wants to obey this. To forgo all training, to betray his company, to stay in these arms that cling to him and beg him not to leap up and out.

Whistle. Scream. Contact.

Let me stay here.

Whistle. Scream. Contact. Scream.

Someone familiar, who he loves as a brother, screaming for him like a child for their mother, “where the fuck is the medic,” who he now hates for wanting him, for needing him–

“Eugene,” says someone, Babe(/Renee?), “get moving!”

Arms release and Gene reaches up, feels a cold, rough hand take his, lets Renee pull him up out of his corner of Mother Earth, and he is run-run-running over the dry, desolate snow.

Run! Boots creaking, snow squeaking, thin white mist flying and the sound of bullets whizzing! The cold in your bones all the way down, no more muscles or lymphatics or pleasure left, you have left it all behind! There is only now, there is only this moment! Run!

“It’s Joe Toye,” Renee tells him, and Gene whips his head around, trying to see her on the horizon, “it’s his arm.”

His boots stumble, half-remembering the way, the foxholes too new, the dirt unfamiliar. Terrain slips and yelps under his feet.The snow and fog is thick, it bites the skin of his face, it stings his eyes and forces them shut, and he stretches his hands out blindly, grabbing at the ground, the only way to move forward.

Renee is here—where? She always appears in the tree lines, and he cups one hand around his eye so he can squint into the wind. For days, now, she has marked his path, she has shown him the way. 

Forty days and forty nights! Forty years wandering in Midian, and another forty in the desert! Moses, Moses, go down, Moses!

He has begun to trust her more than his own ears—sounds can be thrown, can echo, can be something other than what they appear, but Renee always stands at the edge of his vision. Soon, soon, he will see her if he can make her out, pointing, running, always in motion herself…

Another blast shakes the earth, and it juggles him. He hops as he tries to land, stumbles, falls on his hands. His palms will be cut—his palms sting from the pain. Surface level injuries are sharper, easier to locate from the specificity that shallowness gives them. The change of PH on the open nerves makes them contract–

“Eugene,” Renee calls to him, and he looks forward, searching blindly–

Something hits him hard, body to his body, and he’s flung sideways, toppling and rolling. He skids in the wet snow, slush and mud, one second of contact more than enough for it to sog-sog-sog into his jacket and freeze tight to his skin. He yelps in pain.

“Fuck,” Sergeant Toye wails, gritting his teeth. Bad aim. Gene has landed on top of him.

“Sergeant,” Gene says, half declaration, half apology, and he struggles up onto his hands and knees, trying to get off as much as he can. Their legs are tangled together, and Gene is leaning over him with no wiggle room in any direction. “Give me your arm.”

Two man hole, Toye splayed out over the bottom of it and T4 Luz peering up over the top. Gene jerks his neck up too far to get a look at the tree line and feels the shudder and jerk of a bullet skimming his helmet, drops his head down again like a turtle retreating into his shell. Luz firing, the sound of it deafening.

“Doc,” Luz says, turning his head, “he’s hit in the arm, I don’t think he’s bleeding too bad under there. What do you need?”

Shrapnel.

Toye takes pain like a prize bare-knuckle boxer, wheezing and grimacing but still fumbling for his ammo with his good arm. “Luz, here,” he groans, as Gene fumbles for his scissors, cursing the world and cursing his luck, “there’s more in my bag.”

“You hit bad, Sergeant,” Gene shouts, starting to cut, “Luz, we gonna have to pull him out and get him off the line. You stay on my mark, alright?”

“Fuck,” Toye groans again.

“How’s your supply of morphine?” Renee asks, from the other side of him. Her hands cradle his neck and his shoulder, holding him still as Gene cuts.

“Not too bad,” Gene tells her. “It’s in my bag. He’s only gonna need one.”

He holds a hand out, and she passes a syrette to him. Rough hands, cold hands, skin chapped and torn, splitting where the pressure becomes too much. Beautiful hands.

When her face fades from his memory at last, he will still remember her hands, every inch of them. The only part of her that feels real.

“Hold him there,” he tells her, and she takes Toye by the shoulder, holds him steady until Gene can stick him. “Good. Toye, you doing just fine, you doing just fine.”

“Don’t,” Toye says, but he says it too late to stop the injection. “I can take it, Doc. Don’t take me off the line.”

“You can’t call Luz until you clear his armpit,” Renee says, and circles the inside of Toye’s arm with a finger as he goes limp in her arms. “Something could travel and sever the artery. You can’t move him like this.”

“Oui, d’accord,” Gene says, the syrette jammed unceremoniously into Toye’s collar, tweezers in his hand. Then, conscious of his bedside manner, stays out of English, away from Toye’s understanding. “Et si quelque chose se débranche? Il est déjà couvert de sang.”

“Non, c’est ne possible pas,” Renee says. “Rien n'a percé.”

“Passe-moi la chiffon, au cas où,” Gene says, and starts to pick. “Je n'ai pas fait tout ce chemin pour lui perdre.”

Luz is quiet as Gene works, watching the tree line, but he turns attentively once or twice to ask Gene how it’s going. The space is tight—it would have been tight for two men, and the addition of two bodies is obviously unwelcome—and Renee has to keep ducking out of the way when he moves.

Toye won’t be able to walk, now that the morphine is riding him, so Gene binds him up in rags and scribbles a desperate tag to shove into his pocket. Finally, when Luz glances back again, Gene nods, points to Toye’s other arm, and jerks his head. They have been together long enough, the Toccoa men, to communicate without speaking, to understand these silent orders.

They take Toye, one man under each arm, and leap up onto the field. Heads down, hands against their helmets, holding themselves together, they begin to half-stumble, dragging him along the snow as his feet fumble and give out below him.

Luz only needs to go as far back as their first clearing, someplace they can get proper aid—as good of a man as Luz is, he is not aid. Gene is fumbling with Toye’s wrap as they lay him out in the snow.

“We need a transport,” Gene says, “he’s got to go back to the aid station. Can you get someone up here?”

“Sure, I can make a call,” Luz says, “and then I gotta get back, Doc, they’re missing a lot of hands up on the OP. Can you take him on your own?”

“I’ll be alright,” Gene says.

Luz starts working the radio, a familiar patter of phonetic alphabet salad drowning out the sound of anything else, and Gene leans down close over Toye, feeling for his pulse. Underneath him, the Sergeant cracks an eye open and lets out a terse little breath.

“Hey, Doc,” he mutters. “Don’t send me back, huh? I can stay on the line.”

“You’ll be right back,” Gene tells him softly, one hand on his chest. “Steady on, huh? Take it easy, you just gotta relax.”

Toye grunts and grimaces.

Next to them, there’s the sound of the radio receiver making contact, and Luz is back up, patting Gene’s shoulder. Gene pats him back, one hand on the back of his knee—wordless, all okay here, get going—and he starts to dart back. Alone now, waiting for the transport, Gene reaches deep down inside himself and hunts for comfort.

“Doc,” Toye says.

“You alright, Joe,” Gene tells him again, “they on their way, alright?”

“Doc,” Toye says again. “You gotta keep the chatter down around the other guys, alright?”

Gene opens his mouth and then hesitates. He is being asked to come into the world again. He does not know what to say.

“You’re talking to yourself,” Toye says. “I keep my damn mouth shut, Doc, but you gotta be careful, alright? You can’t be doing that in front of the fussy types, huh?”

He lifts his hand slightly, drowsy with the morphine, and Gene takes it quickly, not wanting to leave him cold.

“We can’t afford to lose you,” Toye says, seriously. “Don’t get hit, Roe. Don’t get taken off the line, alright?”

“Alright,” Gene says, squeezing his hand. And then he looks up, sees the approaching shape of a transport, chugging at speed through the snow, and waves an arm. “Here!”

He doesn’t realize it’s John Prior’s team until he sees the black girl leaping down from the passenger side. By then, it’s too late to run. By then, she’s seen him, too, and her eyes flash and sharpen with recognition.

“Vous,” she says. Her voice is higher pitched than he had imagined, and with a blink, he realizes she is not very old, maybe nineteen or twenty at the most. She is younger than Renee was—much younger. “Je vous reconnais. Vous parlez français.”

It takes a second—a moment of adjustment—and then Gene’s training rushes up, and he surges to meet her. “Ouais,” he says, “L'étiquette est sur son col. Morphine dans l'haut du bras droit. On va.”

“Merci,” she says, “Nous n'avons pas besoin de vous, on peut le ramener nous-mêmes. Retournez à votre poste.”

Renee, he wants to say. Your friend Renee, my friend Renee. What has happened to Renee?

In fact, he is too startled by her to say much. Her clarity, her sharp confidence has surprised him. A few days ago, she was silent in his presence, demurring to Renee in a particularly civilian manner. Now, away from his eyes, some metamorphosis has taken place. Since the body in the church—the burst artery—since he saw her last—something has hardened, something has turned to iron. She has a military air about her, not of obedience but of command.

She turns to the soldiers on the transport, who are already bringing a gurney, and barks at them like a sergeant. She points, too, and Gene realizes that they don’t speak any French, that she doesn’t speak any English. That she commands them anyway.

“C’est Eugene, eh?” She asks, and he glances up.

“Ouais,” he says.

“Merci, Eugene,” she says, “Nous n'avons pas besoin de vous.”

Most of the guys want to know how it was, if Toye was hit bad, and Gene has no sooner gotten his daily rations from Dominguez than he is surrounded by a little crowd of worriers and well-wishers. He nods when they ask questions, to show he is listening, and tries to catch every gaze thrown to him.

Toye is a kind of idol to the company, their golden calf, the epitome of valor. In a way, Gene can understand it. When life is hard, selfish men say that God has abandoned them, because in that moment they do not understand the form of His favor, and men believe they can understand everything. They cannot conceive of things beyond their scope, and foolishly, they insist this means they must not exist, like an infant when their mother hides behind a tea towel.

So, a man vulnerable in this way, gullible in this way, suffering and freezing and hurting, surrounded by the cold and the oppressive scent of death… And anyway, one must be charitable in understanding the pain of his fellow man. A man who may think, God has abandoned me, but Joe Toye never will.

Babe Heffron is not in the crowd around him, which Gene knows because he looks from face to face, looking generally, certainly not looking for him. Bill Guarnere is, which is almost the same thing, because whatever Sergeant Guarnere knows, eventually, Babe Heffron will know, too. Still, the absence is…

Well, he notices the absence. He feels anxious, aimlessly anxious, though he could not explain why.

“Just his arm, huh?” Sergeant Guarnere is saying, and nodding and laughing to himself. “Hell, it’ll take a hell of a lot more than that to knock Joe over. Huh?”

The other guys agree that it will take more than a little shrapnel to knock Joe over, and that You Have Said It, Bill, and other things of this nature. They strike one another’s shoulders with their open palms, and they laugh. Nervously, and trying not to seem nervous, they laugh.

Gene’s eyes move—one face, to the next, to the next. He looks for those half-hidden expressions of real panic. A golden calf, a golden idol. Nebbuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon. If Joe Toye can be hit, can be taken off the line, can’t anyone?

He remembers which men, in that careful way of a trained medic. It feels more real to some of them, when it’s Joe Toye, it feels real in a way it hasn’t before, and the fear threatens to become visible. Tonight, he will go to their foxholes and sit with them, talk with them and smile at them. He will put a hand on their knee, and tell them how well they’re holding up.

Sometimes, they need him to put his arms around them. He does, when they need him to. They need him the way children need their mothers, the way children never show that they need their fathers. And he will direct them into each other.

When Lipton pushes through the crowd, Sergeant Guarnere is clapping Shifty Powers on the back, laughing with him, saying “I told him, didn’t I? Told him I’d get to the states before him. No way some shrapnel is gonna take him out. God makes the Irish like coffin nails, don’t he?”

“Hey, you said it,” Don Malarkey says, from somewhere else in the crowd, as Lipton’s hand finds Gene’s shoulder. “Not me! Nobody’s gonna say I had to tell Bill how tough we are, huh?”

“Sergeant,” Gene says, as the rabble rouses around him.

“Hey, Doc,” Sergeant Lipton says, and grins lopsidedly at him. “Can I steal a couple of minutes?”

Gene acquiesces, although it’s really a relief to be pulled away. The faces, the noise and the people, had rolled into overwhelming while he wasn’t looking, and as they move off, he takes a deep breath of air. Relief—relief he didn’t know he needed. Pressure on his chest, More Weight, finally lifted.

They both have their tin plates, and Sergeant Lipton walks next to him quite easily, swaying but not quite swaggering. Lipton makes him feel comfortable; his demeanor does not ask anything of Gene’s. Simply put, there is no performance review to fail.

“I’m just checking in,” Lipton says, after they’ve gone a hundred paces and left the crowd behind. “I haven’t seen you in a few days. Wanted to make sure you’re doing okay on supplies.”

“Yes, sergeant,” Gene says obediently.

“You getting enough to eat?”

“Uh,” Gene says, “yes, sergeant.”

“Alright,” Lipton says. “I’m not trying to be overbearing. I guess we keep missing each other in the chow line.” He grins, laughs a little in a friendly sort of way. “I guess I was kind of shocked to see you there today.”

Gene smiles too, looks down at his plate. “Those boys keep me running,” he says.

“I know that’s right.”

“Heffron’s been bringing me rations,” Gene adds, “you know, we’ve been in the same hole a couple nights now. Sergeant Randleman told me I better.”

“Well, he’s not wrong,” Lipton says, and scoops up a forkful of something pale and hopefully flavorless. “I’m glad to hear that. Is that, uh, keeping you occupied?”

“Oh, well,” Gene says, awkwardly. There is food in his hands (he has not had an appetite in some time, in some long time), and now he takes a bite of it for something reasonable to do. While he chews it, he thinks of something to say. “You know, I stay occupied pretty well. I’ve had the same damn song stuck in my head for two days.”

Lipton grins, looking sideways at him. “That right?” He asks. “Anything I know?”

Gene shrugs. “It’s old,” he says, “it doesn’t have much of a tune. You know that one, uh, it starts like… ‘am I born to die’?”

“That’s Idumea,” Lipton says, sounding slightly incredulous, sounding quietly delighted. “I didn’t know anybody outside the Blue Ridge knew that one. It’s, uh, it’s a Sacred Harp hymn, I think.”

“Sacred Harp?” Gene asks, frowning. “That’s protestant, isn’t it?” And then, quickly, remembering the variety of men and men’s lives in the company, “not that there’s anything wrong with being a protestant.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Lipton says, and he laughs. “Idumea, huh. We always sang that at… oh, at celebrations of life, I guess.” His smile falters a little. “Funerals, things like that. You know.”

“Oh,” Gene says. “We, uh… I don’t think we ever sang it in church. Guess I don’t know where I heard it.”

“Idumea,” Lipton says again, the word rolling around in his mouth like a pearl. It has swept him under, and Gene takes his silence as an excuse to shovel a few more bites into his mouth. The first mouthful has woken his stomach up in some way, and he suddenly feels hungry. “Maybe you heard one of the guys singing it, huh?”

“Maybe so.”

They are quiet for a few moments, walking aimlessly, and Gene eats a little. Notices, in that way he does casually, that other men do not approach them when they walk past them. That’s funny; people always seem to need Gene, and it’s rare that he can walk anywhere in daylight without being called on. For Sergeant Lipton, it’s much the same.

Maybe together, these things cancel out. Gene ponders on it in his heart.

This being so, he is utterly unprepared for Sergeant Lipton to say “you know, there’s not a lot of Easy Company guys back at Bastogne; I heard they moved Smokey. I bet Toye would really appreciate seeing you.”

He knows what it means, of course, for Sergeant Lipton to say it. Every man does. Gene’s lips press tightly together, his neck hot, the anger spiking quickly up through him. The hunger dissipates, and he lowers his plate a little.

“Alright,” he says, after a moment. “Who told you?”

“Told me what?” Sergeant Lipton says, innocently.

Gene snaps a look at him before looking away. Who else was there–? Luz, he thinks viciously. George Luz was there. George Luz made that call and turned right around and went straight to Lipton and ran his fat mouth, like he always does. You got to get rid of him, Lip, he said, he’s cracking up. He’s cracked. He can’t do it. He’s wrung out, he’s through.

“Look,” Lipton says, “it’s standard operating procedure, and you haven’t been doing it. Spina’s done the last five runs on his own. You were supposed to go back with Toye anyway, hook up with the surgeons back there, right?”

“They had runners on the field,” Gene says staunchly. “I gave their nurse his tag and the sign-off. It’s the same thing.”

Sergeant Lipton looks sideways at him. He’s got that lopsided look on his face, like he’s deciding how to handle Gene. Something has become inconvenient, and now it is a matter of handling.

“Sergeant,” Gene says, and he feels a little desperate now, fights to keep it out of his voice, to stay in control. “I’m not coming off the line. We’re too short. The men are going to need me tonight. Toye getting hit is going to affect them. You know that.”

Sergeant Lipton goes on looking at him, lips pressed together. All it will take, Gene knows, is a reminder that they are part of a chain of command, that if Lipton says jump, it is not part of Gene’s job to ask how high. All it will take is the phrase ‘that was an order’, all it will take is Lipton deciding he has had enough. All it will take is a decision.

Finally, Lipton sighs. “You’re on the next supply run,” he says, “they need someone who knows medical equipment, and Spina’s earned a break. Understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Gene says, and demurs, looking down. “Tomorrow?”

“If we’re lucky,” Lipton says. “Roe, I’m keeping an eye on you, understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Get it under control,” Lipton says, and while his voice is not unkind, it is severe in a way it never has been with Gene before. “They depend on you. Especially the Toccoa men. I don’t know if they’ll be able to pull it back if you get knocked out of this thing.”

Knocked out, he says. Just like that. Gene’s eyelids flicker, like one great shudder, and he is relieved to be looking away.

“Yes, Sergeant,” he says, and feels the world move around him.

The war is over.

Gene doesn’t believe it. Some days he’s sure he’ll be back in a cold foxhole, that all this mountainous beauty is a mirage.

Yet, he wakes to sun-filled mornings, warm, the call for a medic far away. He tries to enjoy this peace, the hunger of the past fading bit by bit. Laughing with his fellow soldiers is easy now, he takes up their offers for a drink or sharing a smoke.

But when the night settles back in, Gene’s thoughts drift back to Bastogne. To Reneé.

In such a short amount of time, their bond grew, transformed, a feeling Gene never thought possible. The silence shared between them spoke volumes and her touch has never left his soul.

Crawling back into the memories is a hollow ache, a wish for what could have been, but forgetting Reneé is a more terrifying thought and Gene lets his mind take him back to those cold days of the war.

~~~

His movements are stilted, repetitive.

Wood goes there, shrapnel in another pile. When yet another soldier is on death’s door, Gene is running into the church.

Reneé and Augusta stick by his side, other medics slip in as well. They’ve saved a few soldiers today, but the less lucky are too numerous to count.

Gene tries to wipe the blood off his hands, but they’re stained, reminding him of his failures. He walks the lines of makeshift beds, blank as unfocused eyes look back at him while others cry out in endless agony.

He can’t even offer them a touch of morphine to ease the pain. Anger crawls along his skin, despair has wrapped around his heart. Screams echo in Gene’s ears and he stumbles out of the church, hoping the cold air will stop his frantic mind.

There’s a few soldiers still cleaning and Gene walks over to help, despite his thoughts telling him he’s of little use. The soldiers barely acknowledge his presence, they hand plank after plank along a line, making just enough space for Gene to edge in. The silence is pervasive, but the pattern eases Gene’s racing heart.

Gene works until his fingers are numb, he doesn’t dare let his mind drift. The winter day nips at his skin, his eyes start to water, but still he carries on. Time doesn’t exist, Gene ignores the setting sun until someone grabs his arm. Taking a long needed breath, Gene comes back to himself, though he’s slow to remember his surroundings.

Reneé’s touch is warm and she opens Gene’s hands, using a rag to dab at the fresh cuts that litter his palms. A few red beads dot along deeper lines but Reneé is dutiful in her care.

“You shouldn’t work yourself so hard,” she tells Gene, wrapping torn sheets around his injuries.

A response is far from Gene’s mind. He glances up to meet Reneé’s eyes and his heart twists at the understanding that looks back at him. When Gene is all bandaged up, Reneé places a hand on his face, her shoulders drop ever so slightly.

“Come inside. Before you have to go back.”

Without protest, Gene follows her into the church. She weaves them effortlessly through soldiers, rubble, until she reaches a small alcove. From a kettle she pours coffee into a chipped teacup and hands it to Gene.

As if accepting a precious heirloom, Gene cradles the cup before taking a small sip. The liquid is scalding, but Gene doesn’t complain. It warms the path down to his stomach and the dilapidated walls surrounding them are a barrier to the outside world.

Gene shivers, the cold and his scrapes catching up to him. Had Reneé not come by, Gene wonders if he would’ve worked himself to exhaustion. The thought isn’t exactly unwanted. If he could wake up tomorrow away from the battlefields, he wouldn’t complain.

Signing up for the war wasn’t a question. He was ready to serve and sacrifice, to fight to the bitter end. He didn’t balk when he was made a medic, but as the days pass, he wants to know if killing a nameless face is easier. Too many names rattle around in his mind, those he could have saved if he just had enough supplies. If he even knew what to do.

He takes another sip of coffee, staring into a pile of crumbling brick. Footsteps approach and Gene blinks at the sight of Reneé coming back into the room, her hands tucked under her arms. He hadn’t even heard her leave.

“They’re heading out,” she says. “Will you be back tomorrow?”

Gene gives a small shake of his head, the slightest shrug. As much as he wants to see Reneé, he doesn’t want to bring her another wounded soldier.

Gingerly, she takes the cup from him, laying her palms flat against Gene’s bruised knuckles. The two are not so quick to pull away from each other, both their gazes stuck on the tender embrace. The cup is set to the side, then Reneé examines Gene’s hands one last time.

“Stay warm, Eugene,” Reneé voices her prayer. “Stay safe.”

Gene nods, his heart echoing the same sentiments. Before he can do much else, the call for him comes and he sighs when their hands drop. He doesn’t expect Reneé to come along, but her footsteps follow him all the way through the church.

Gene thinks to glance behind, many times, yet he never does. With all the unknowns the war brings, if there’s something, someone he can believe in besides his men, Reneé jumps to the forefront.

Just before he hops into the jeep, Gene pauses. He looks back at Reneé despite an almost primal fear telling him if he stares too long, she’ll disappear.

Clear as day, Reneé stands just beyond the fallen entrance of the church, arms still wrapped around her body. Questions sit in her eyes, there’s a small hope on the edges so rarely found in all of this madness

Gene musters his best smile and when Reneé nods, he finds the courage to get into the jeep.

~~~

Gene’s emotions sneak up on him like a hunter lying in wait.

At first, he passes it off as nerves, the way this war crowds into every corner of his mind. When the feeling doesn’t fade, that’s when Gene begins to worry.

There’s not a time or a place for that in all of this destruction and chaos. If anything, his struggles will only increase tenfold. He holds himself at a distance from his own men for a reason.

So, when he sees Reneé, Gene does his damnedest to keep it cordial, avoids lingering around her. If Reneé notices, she doesn’t make a fuss. She has her own concerns of helping soldier after soldier. In a way, it’s a relief that neither acknowledges the space that ebbs and flows between them. Gene doesn’t know where he’d start, what the point would be.

They’re sitting outside, away from the others when the cracks start to show. Despite the bitter air, they savor this company, the silence that settles between them. Gene notes how often Reneé twists the hem of her apron, the constant wiping though there is no more to be washed away.

Gene doesn’t think as he reaches out, takes one of Reneé’s hands into his own. She doesn’t pull away, but there is a sudden stiffness and Gene blushes at his mistake. He starts to let go, until Reneé lays a hand on top of their joined ones.

“Even in all of this,” she muses.

Gene swallows, dares to meet Reneé’s eyes. What looks back is fondness, then her stare wavers. Out of sadness or acceptance, Gene does not know. Perhaps, it is both.

Reneé does her best to scoot closer to Gene, their knees knocking together. In another time, Gene is already thinking of flowers to buy her, where in Bayou Chene he’d take her first. Instead, they’re surrounded by smoke and ash, savoring what little happiness they can find. Gene fights back his tears, his resentment. Yet, without the war, he would not be here, knowing what it’s like to love Reneé.

“I will not ask you to make a promise,” Reneé starts, voice just above a whisper. “I am thankful to know you, Eugene.”

Gene nods, stares at his hand in Reneé’s. If he could, he’d take her out of here, get them both on a boat back to the States. Then again, that’s a fool’s errand. He would not even dream of asking her to leave her home, and his men need him. To abandon all of it would be outlandish, worth a court martial and then some.

Gene does his best to keep his fears at bay and appreciate this time with Reneé. They are alive, they are able to embrace and hold tight to what is dear.

It has to be enough, but the jaws of reality clamp down and Gene isn’t sure what he believes in anymore.

~~~

Seeing Reneé isn’t a habit.

In fact, Gene is thankful he hasn’t had to bring someone into town for a few days now. The only reason he heads in is on Winters’ insistence and Gene can’t argue with his commanding officer.

When he arrives at the church, he tends to Smokey and holds his hand though he knows too much has changed. They say he’ll be moved out soon, but it’s not soon enough.

The bombs echo around them, every second is a gift, yet unspeakable horrors lie in wait. Gene’s heart is torn between his men and the nurses, a growing need to keep them all safe, but an agony knowing there’s only so much he can do.

Gene supposes he could talk to Smokey, to sort out his mind, but he never has been good at speaking of the matters of the heart–let alone Smokey having to contemplate his own future if he makes it out of this hell.

So lost in his own thoughts, Gene doesn’t notice the grunt from Smokey, but then the man clears his throat.

Gene panics, mind already racing, but then the world comes to a stop. Sitting on Smokey’s chest is an orange cat. The poor thing is skin and bones but it nestles on top of Smokey, tucking its legs underneath its body. Its purring is loud, eyes closing and all Gene and Smokey can do is exchange a look.

“Well, at least someone’s happy,” Smokey huffs, but the faintest smile traces along his mouth.

A little bit of warmth sprouts inside Gene and he slowly gets to his feet.

“Coffee?” he asks Smokey while one eye stays on the cat.

“Might as well,” Smokey murmurs.

Gene nods, makes his way through the collapsed halls and piles of wood. It’s easy to find the coffee, even easier to find Reneé. Exhaustion covers every inch of her face but the moment she catches Gene, a transformation occurs.

A smile grows, her hardened stare begins to soften. Not that Gene wouldn’t find her beautiful at her worst. To be graced by her presence alone has meant more than Gene can begin to express.

“Coffee,” Gene says, then shakes his head.

He knows how to talk. Reneé deserves more than a one word conversation.

“Here,” Reneé hands a full cup, unbothered by Gene’s stilted awkwardness.

She has another cup ready to go and she leads Gene back to Smokey. How she manages to read his mind again and again, Gene hasn’t the faintest idea, but perhaps one of these days, he’ll ask her.

A coo leaves Reneé when they make it back to Smokey, she comes over to pet the cat. Setting the cup of coffee to the side, Reneé also brushes Smokey’s hair away from his forehead, holds a hand against it.

“Feeling alright,” Smokey tells her. “Got another one of your nurses checking up on me.”

Reneé’s smile blossoms and she helps Smokey drink from the cup. Somehow, the cat doesn’t mind being jostled around, it sticks as close to Smokey’s chest as it can.

“Do you have a name picked out?” Reneé looks from Smokey to Gene and back again.

Both Gene and Smokey glance at each other for the answer, a small laugh leaving Reneé when the silence lasts for a little too long.

“I’ll give it to Gene,” Smokey volunteers him much to Gene’s chagrin. “How about a good Cajun name?”

Gene’s mind goes blank, especially with three pairs of eyes on him. The cat blinks expectantly and Gene scrambles to remember something from home.

“Ambroise,” Gene blurts out, thinking of the old man who lived just down the road.

As if satisfied, the cat stretches its paws out towards Smokey’s face and lays its head down on its arms.

Reneé repeats the name, gives Smokey another sip of coffee. “If you need me to take the cat away…”

“Nah,” Smokey attempts to shake his head. “It’s nice.”

When Reneé looks at Gene, he feels a spark in his chest. His cheeks hurt from smiling, but he doesn’t drop the expression. For just a little while, they’ve found a bit of happiness and with this newfound calmness, Reneé remains in their company.

When Smokey drifts off, it’s then Reneé stands, giving the cat one last pet before she inches closer to Gene.

“Do you think he’ll walk again?” Reneé asks, voice low.

Gene gives a helpless shrug, his medical knowledge nowhere near what Smokey needs.

“I suppose alive is better than dead,” Reneé sighs. “The cat will be good for him. I’ll make sure it’s fed.”

There’s a slight worry, a question if an animal can be taken care of at a time like this. Then again, if a cat can’t survive, what chances do his men have? Gene’s concern must be evident on his face because Reneé takes hold of his arm with a firm, comforting touch.

“You are doing more than enough,” she tells him, making Gene meet her gaze.

Gene wants to believe her, but the lives he’s lost haunt his dreams, his mistakes drive stakes into his heart. In an attempt to push his darkness down, Gene reaches out, strokes a bent knuckle against Reneé’s cheek.

“You…,” Gene swallows, trying to find his voice. “We’re lucky to have you.”

He winces, his words lackluster at best. To his relief, Reneé does not mock him, though he’s sure she never would anyway. She takes his hand, holds it close, and though her skin is cold, Gene hasn’t felt this warm in some time.

“I should get back,” Gene murmurs.

Already he’s spent too much time in town, away from the foxholes. He’s not the only medic, but to put it all on Spina while he’s gone isn’t fair.

Reneé nods her understanding and in a heavy silence, they make their way outside of the church. The jeep is already running but just before Gene can walk towards it, something wraps in between his calves.

He looks down to see Ambroise, the cat, weaving between his legs, a small meow leaving it as it looks up at Gene.

Reneé gives a small giggle, picks up the cat and her smile grows as it tries to paw at Gene.

“He wants to go with you,” she holds the cat so it can put both its paws on Gene’s shoulder.

The corner of Gene’s mouth quirks and he gives the cat a pet, scratches under its chin.

“You gotta stay here,” Gene tells Ambroise. “Keep an eye on Reneé and Smokey.”

The cat meows again and Gene gives it a final pet before heading to the jeep. As the vehicle pulls away, Gene watches Reneé, his smile unstoppable. Reneé has taken one of the cat’s paws in her hand, making it wave goodbye to Gene. The scene takes Gene back to Louisiana, when he left his family, and a heavy ache surrounds him

Had he known this would be the last time seeing Reneé, Gene would’ve stayed until the artillery began to fall. He would’ve done all he could to keep her safe.

However, fate is not so kind and Gene can only be thankful for the time he did have, the memories that will forever stay in his heart.

~~~

Gene is surprised when his request is granted.

He expected questioning, some resistance, but soon enough he’s traveling across Austria, back into the war-torn cities that have become a blur.

After a few days of travel, Gene’s transportation rolls up to the barren town, houses caved in, the rubble ever pervasive.

Except now there’s a mix of locals and soldiers, all doing what they can to clean up what the war wrought on them. Gene passes by one group after another, his feet leading him to what he knows so well.

The church is nothing more than a fragment, the memories unknown except to a precious few. Gene swallows around the lump in his throat, his hand reaching into his pocket. He still has the other half of the scarf, the frayed edges reminding him of what he lost, what he gained.

A few people bustle to and fro, but then from behind a large pile, a figure appears and Gene’s heart stops.

The blonde hair, the bun with stray hair wisping away, the tender eyes that hold the weight of the world. It can’t be. A strangled noise leaves Gene and this catches her attention.

Reneé stares and Gene is sure it’s a mirage. The seconds tick by, then Reneé races over, arms thrown about Gene’s shoulders. Frozen in place, Gene struggles to believe, his mind trying to figure out where the trick is.

Ever so slowly, he wraps his arms around her and a shuddered breath leaves him. Reneé is alive. She’s breathing, warm, real. The first tear slips out and Gene hugs her so tight, intent on never letting go.

Their embrace is slow to end, but when it does, Gene rests his forehead against hers without thought.

“I thought—your scarf—,” he starts, unable to collect himself.

“I went back for Ambroise,” Reneé smiles through her tears. “Silly little cat.”

“Ambroise,” Gene thinks of that scrawny orange thing, so inconsequential yet a prominent marker in his hectic life.

Reneé lights up and she takes Gene’s hand, tugging him towards a makeshift shelter. Lifting the flap, Reneé presents Ambroise to Gene, the cat curled up on a rations crate. There’s not a rib to be seen, the orange lump twice as big as when Gene first met it.

At the noise, Ambroise wakes itself up, yawns and stretches before hopping off the crate. The cat trots over to Gene, rubs up against his legs, already purring.

Gene chokes around a sob, he kneels down to pet the cat. After everything, Ambroise, Reneé, they’re alive and well. This is a miracle, some faraway dream, but Gene does not wake up. The touch on his arm, the hug around his neck, all of it is real. He tries to calm his crying but it’s endless now, relief, love, his emotions pour out one after another.

Reneé kisses his cheek and Gene’s heart lifts, the two of them softly laughing as they try to wipe at each other’s tears. Ambroise joins in, butting its head against Gene’s chin, then Reneé’s face.