Author's Note: I was wondering...when Gene pauses in that church and watches Renee tend to the soldier through the window...what is he thinking? This is a poor attempt at wondering. We'll never know what he's thinking for certain, but that's what fanfiction is for. :)
(Still need to edit this...so don't be too hard on any grammatical errors).
disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers and this is based on Eugene Roe's fictional portrayal, not the medic himself.
It is not the first time in his life that he wishes he were not so practiced in the art of restraint.
It is habit. Fits like gloves that he wishes he had in this bitter cold.
Like red-cross arm bands wrapped around reluctant arms.
He has become so accustomed to the brush of wistfulness that passes him by. It is as he listens to the men as they laugh and evade the shadows of doubt, apart from them in every way because he must be, because it hurts too much to have them near. It is as he sleeps in his foxhole, alone and cold, and does not care to think twice about his state of loneliness because this is how it must be (until he is free of this red cross, these packages of sulfa, the slow poison of morphine that feels like numbness, blessed apathy within the cruel grip of pain). It is here, now, as he stands still for as long as the burning black world will let him and watches the halo unfurl around her flaxen head like a golden flower.
It whispers into his ear, this questioning of his nature, and asks him why not. The box in his arms begins to grow heavy, but still he lingers on. Time is urging him forward again, but perhaps if he did not heed its desperate warning? Perhaps if he dislodged himself from the fabric from which he was fashioned and allowed himself just a moment of self-indulgence. Of human warmth and words of console and the fragile china blue of her eyes on him for more than just necessity, but attentiveness. For a moment, he wanted to be the epicenter of her world and revel in the feel of it. Wash his heart of its callused wall, behind which a once beating web of tangled emotions lay still and draped in cobwebs and atrophy.
Comatose. Dormant. And there is no heroine to wake it from its terrible dream.
Renee!
Her name echoes off the hallowed walls. It comes softly to him, filtering through the stone partition, in the form of a watery afterthought that strokes his cold-numbed ears. The light fades as she snaps her head toward the sound and her halo is nothing more but a beautiful blonde woman in a blue scarf. A backdrop of the bloodstained church meets his eyes and the mirage fades, withers to wintry ashes.
He blinks and the illusion is over. It tapers off into an empty slot of memory in his head, where it will wait, patient, for him to return to it. His only comfort.
She moves away. A fragment of beauty caught in the wound of war. One last flash of gold blinds him, and for an instant he cannot move, trapped in the aftermath of her reflection's disappearance from that dusty window.
Time pushes him on again, murmuring into his ear that he must go. He cannot linger here. His feet move like automatons as purpose revives again, their ink black gears turning over and over on its only function. To serve and to save.
A box of bandages in his arms and a shadow of regret cast over the stone-blue surface of his eyes, he leaves the church and the illusory angel behind him.
And the heart beneath its callused grave does not beat.