Author's Note: I wrote this in a stream of consciousness style for Roe's thoughts. A 2k word-limit one shot. I started with a one-word prompt that I'd been thinking about all day (the dichotomy between Frankenstein and his Creation) and went on from there. Perhaps it doesn't make sense, but I just typed whatever came to my head and I don't intend on editing one bit of it. What it is...well, that's what I intended it to be. This is written from the heart, the soul, the mind had nothing to do with this.
Let me know what you think.
disclaimer - I do not own Band of Brothers and this piece is a reflection of Shane Taylor's fictional portrayal of Eugene Roe, not the real man himself (bless his soul and may he rest in peace).
He has dreams about it. Dreams about taking people apart. Because that's what he is, right? A limb pusher. A heart starter. Not a man, but a breath of life on the lips of the half-dead and the already gone.
He isn't whole. Has he ever been whole? All he is…is pieces. Vats of sinew and gallons of blood fused together to resemble something like skin that stretches over bones that move and a heart that [used to] doesn't feel.
He is a creation. Like Frankenstein's monster - a creature born of good intentions, but left out in the cold. They love him (when he is there, whispering into their darkest night to raise them from the dead, the angel of resurrection), but when they see him, they see patches of purpose that don't quite fit and they can't understand. Perhaps there is no repulsion, no hatred that the Creation faced, but the lack of translation sculpts and shapes a chasm between medic and soldier that no amount of compassion could ever conquer. He can never be like them. He is different from them. When they compare purposes like scars, the ghosts of his wounds encompass not the surface-value, but pry deep into arcs of suffering, ones that could swathe the world in martyrdom if he unraveled each scar for it to see.
That is what he is…Frankenstein's last creation. His magnum opus.
They fit into their function (guns and orders and shouts for him that feel like knives twisting, sinking deeper, into raw wounds that taste of maggots and rot and the fall of Rome). And he fits into his own (stabs of morphine and stark-cold assurances that feel warm against dying flesh).
Separation bleeds hopelessness. Without each other, hope is lost. The world will turn to ash.
Perhaps they weren't meant to feel whole. It's why there's faith and soul mates and destinies and all of that poetry meant to inspire fate - drawing together what is incomplete. It's why writers take to drinking (muses flee their half-finished pages) and lovers leave the porch light on (for their lost halves that have wandered too far). It's how children lose their innocence (because it's not just a big blue sky anymore, but a big blue cage that keeps them locked in shackles of bone).
Humanity is only a whole when it's together. By himself…he is just a missing cadence in a thriving heartbeat.
His eyes are open. They search for places in the dark that don't hold those images. The ones that conjure up the question of his sanity. But there is no edge to the night. It stretches on forever. It holds the morning sky hostage, at gunpoint perhaps (because this is war and all he can think about is guns and the result of them, holes and scarlet streams that dig deep into the mouth of winter). There's an explosion of stars as the trigger pulls, the recoil resonating in streaks of brilliant color across the paling heavens. The dawn sinks to its knees. Dying. Beseeching him, a simple medic (human, not made of stars) frozen into the mold of his foxhole, for his breath of life. So that it can have just one more taste of what living could have been like...if the end could not be found.
He can't reach from here. His bloodstained hands can't wade through mortality to find the consoling light. He is only human, after all. A piece, a creature of martyrdom. Not the whole, just a color in the bigger picture. The body of day rots, a corpse of light, and he watches as the enemy night takes his place. A blood moon rises. Not because it is red, but because of what it has done. It can never wash the stains of its regret from its existence.
He looks down at his hands that read like words in a book. Engraved into the lines of his palm are the stories of lives that are left half-finished or never written at all. They were written in scarlet ink, once as alive as the men who lived these tall tales, made them true (something larger than myth and men).
But just as the legacy of the dead withers, the color fades to rust.
A transient need for nicotine ghosts through him. Slowly, it allays, and the yearning spirit sinks back into its grave. Forgetful. Wistful. His hands still twitch, warnings of atrophy, of frostbite, of anything that might lift him from the slow suffocation of breathing in shallow thoughts. There is no oxygen there. Only chokes of smoke and cries for medic on the air.
Night is a torment. It only brings sleep. Sleep, in turn, offers only dreams. It doesn't know what to offer anymore in the stead of reverie (it no longer knows the face of home, the yielding skin of love). He never sleeps without dreams anymore, his mind an ever-spinning spindle. It spawns. It creates. It weaves its dreams that drip with blood and fear, all of it the same, intermixing because it doesn't know itself from the abstract reflection of the inner man that it used to be (no, not anymore). He closes his eyes, his head against the back of the tree (it cradles him into its arms that are scarred with winter, the bark rough against the softness of his scalp), and he watches as the dream unfurls again.
Hands dipping into open bodies. The bodies, they don't scream anymore. They're shells now, but the fragments of the man that used to live in there, who used to laugh and cry and shout and love. He extracts the love, keeps it for later, stores it in his heart and hopes that he can stitch it into the dog tags that are homebound, unlike this shell of flesh. The laughter echoes as it escapes, thrusting its vibrant hands toward the sun to warm its frost-infested bones. Before it can escape the opaque mists that lay heavy (like a sore) upon war-torn trees, it suffocates on a snow-riddled sky. Bastogne breathes in the dead carcass like oxygen. The forest feeds on foreign beauty, on contentment that is not its own, on strength itself. It is a parasite, he knows, and he is feeding its desire; he is only delivering them into the clutches of the white-painted monster.
His eyes open. Wide and groping through omnipresent darkness. The dead-cold white air feeds on them and the sensation, it stings, but he is numbed by realization. It isn't a nightmare. It isn't sleep that brings him these painted swan songs of dying night.
Waking. Living. Wandering through the phases of surviving, bleeding, gasping, dying. Imagination has nothing to do with it. It can't be blamed.
It is why. Why he is only a piece. A separate being from the rest of the men. Why he sacrifices soul mates and fate that hangs itself, a glittering noose, on the pearl-white edges of the stars. Because the dream is real. The nightmare is no longer a specter that chases him through the chasms of his deepest, darkest fears. It is flesh and blood.
Perhaps this is why the Creation dreams of angels and demons and the blur of mankind in between. Because the love he stores, in the corridors of his heart, it is all for them, and they would restore it to life (no longer a mind-made memoir, an intangible brush of beauty)…if only…if only he were like them.
(all around him, the settling gloom...it plays. Revels in the air like a sweet, somber nocturne)
Perhaps Victor Frankenstein isn't the creature of soul, the epitome of human, after all.
(the seduction of cigarette smoke returns with a vengeance. his flesh-steeped fingers twitch once more with the arousal and they are only marred reflections of the beautiful white hands sculpted from marble stone...the ones he left back home.).
He is the fall.