i.
He had landed under pearl-grey skies in Paris, the two-hour train ride to the west a quiet mix of reading, sleeping, and piano music (Clair de Lune, mostly) piped through headphones at barely audible levels. Absentmindedly thumbing through the textured pages of his paperback, he couldn't bring his mind down from the clouds it seemed to be hovering in, no matter how hard he tried.
Stepping off the platform at Caen, his throat involuntary tightens, all of his nerves suddenly and briefly shot with pain. On the train he left behind the appearance of tranquility, as he drags his beat-up luggage behind him to the curb on the outside of the station.
At twenty years of age, Eugene Roe seems much older, not in his face but in the way he carries himself. His eyes speak of a past that manifested itself in his bones, in his movements, and in a certain heaviness of his entire body, like he is permanently bolted to the ground beneath him. It makes a sort of sense though, to those that know Gene; the deaths of his parents in a car accident halfway through his second year of university, pre-med, left him shattered, knocked completely off his center. This was not the first holiday he'd spent struggling to fill in the outlines he could almost see of them at the Christmas table, but it was the first during which he'd resumed the tradition of visiting his grandparents in Normandy in the winter.
Their apartment was too far to walk, even in warmer weather, and neither Agnes nor Andre could still drive. In the cab that speeds him through the center of the city Gene's mind wanders inexplicably back to the dreams he has been having the past few weeks. Saturated yet blurred shadows of men, bloody, dirty, their screams heard as though through an earful of water. He moved in slow-motion, hands and feet magnetized to invisible positions of experience and care. It doesn't make sense to him that he would have nightmares of emergency rooms, only being a student of medicine and not yet a practitioner, or of wartime, having never served or endured similar trauma. His parents' deaths, which occurred when he was away at school, seemed to have taken place on a separate astral plane entirely. The images of men burned in his memory, he can't shake these dream-world feelings of numbness. A bone-rattling chill, also from these nightmares, night-terrors even, fused together with his grief and left an icy shadow over him. When Gene finally arrives at the apartment at 14 Rue Saint Martin he slowly makes his way up the steps, smiling at the doorway for his beloved grandparents, but feeling in his heart that melting any piece of this strange kind of armor would be near to impossible.