They all fear him and he's come to find that it's something he can live with.
Fear is better than disrespect because then, well…he doesn't like to think of what comes then. All of the human feelings he's tried to bury, deep in unmarked graves that he can't dig up until all of this is said and done, will be dredged up from their untimely deaths and then the cycle repeats itself.
He gets angry. Sometimes, he can't control himself. He's human, can they blame him? (of course they can, because they all think he's as far from human as the fallen angel himself, as a statue carved out of the features of a man, but as cold as stone can be).
All of this rage that comes from watching men die over and over and over again, men he's known for years, men he loves (it's dangerous business, loving someone, loving too many people for a heart to count, but someone's gotta do it)…it consumes him and he phases into auto-pilot, leaves his body for a moment. Recedes into a pleasant numbness, the only release he knows, until it's spent (it held on as long as it could, but there's only so much apathy a heart can spare) and he realizes what he's done. It's the pangs of regret that echo through him for days afterward, like the massacre of the German POW's, and he has to deal with it. Just like everyone deals with it. Sheltered in a time capsule for later, when all is quiet and there's no one but himself to blame.
Most of the time, he keeps to himself. Patrols the foxholes, cigarette tucked in between his fingers or nestled in the corner of his mouth as he just prowls, no thinking, just mechanics, through the darkness. It's been this way since basic, since primary. Hell, it's probably been like this longer than he can remember because most of what he recalls is the here and now. There's no time for strolling down old memory lane. The beaten path before him is all he knows and all he cares to think about for now.
But still, he walks. It takes his mind off the things he's seen. Of everything he's heard, from the cries for medic and the nocturne of the dying (sometimes they're hard to distinguish, but he remembers that one is an octave higher, the other lower) all the way down to the silence that makes him ache deep down in bones he never knew he had before. Sometimes he thinks his body grows new ones just to make room for all the pain he's locked away for later, brimming over, and there's no place to put it all. It just feels that way. But it probably isn't.
He doesn't talk much (except for the orders he calls out to his men over the deafening sound barrier of barrages or reporting to higher ranking CO's, but that's not talking, it's just the call of duty). Never has, never will. Everything they need to know about him he puts into facial expressions and that's enough for most of them, the ones that are well aware that he's no force to be reckoned with. It hasn't earned him much popularity, not like that Luz from E Company (little shit he was sometimes), but he doesn't mind it so much.
Solitude is an old friend, one that visits often from home, and it's where he feels the farthest away from where he really is.
And when he is alone, he lets himself dream. If only for a little while, when it's dark and he blinks at the stars and they blink back, a silent communication between creatures of different worlds. With his gun at his side, standing erect, eyes in the darkness, and his helmet still stubbornly fixed upon his weathered brow, Ronald Speirs allows himself for just a moment to miss home.
But then the bullets come. They break through the fragile memories that are too hard to walk through and live again (like glass), scattering them to the wind, and the automaton wakes again. The one with eyes of stone and a mouth carved out of marble. The man who likes to walk deep into the night because it's the only thing he remembers how to do that doesn't involve people dying at his hands.
Just outside of Carentan, on a night that bleeds rain and convulses with white stabs of lightning, he meets a young boy named Blythe. Young, because there's not a trace of age in his face, not one fingerprint of time. And boy, because there's an innocence in Private Albert Blythe's wide eyes that saves nothing, reveals all, and doesn't understand why fear is such a dangerous emotion to hold onto when it feels like his entire world is being torn apart beneath his feet.
He tells Blythe what it is to be a soldier because he cares, not because he wants to scare the poor kid. He tells him that all of this, these bullets, these dying men, the passion play of life and death, it all amounts to nothing in the end.
When all you can count on is dying, the hope fades away. It seeks shelter in a place where clouds are more than rain, another facet of suffering, but instead are pictures in the sky. A place where laughter is more than just a blockade in front of lunacy, but the animation of mirth coming to life in the form of beauty, unhinged, unbroken.
He knows there is no hope. There are no dreams. The sky is only blue because God tells it to be so, not because he's made it that way. His life is not in his hands. Everything that he sees, everything he feels and touches and hears and holds is all an illusion that he has been told to see. And it is a comfort, knowing none of this is permanent, but a gateway to a place that knows no pain, knows no loneliness or sickness. Where war is just a moving picture beneath his feet. That is what he thinks of, if it becomes too much, but he doesn't tell this to Blithe. It's his own comfort, something he worked hard to find in this blood-riddled graveyard, and he has no intention of sharing it.
As the thunder of war rolls onward, ripples through the days that follow his encounter with this young soldier, he watches as his men succumb to the horrors of battle. There is always a cigarette lit, somewhere, hidden in the depths of foxholes or wafting in from the guards on patrol. It makes them calm, makes them feel like the hands that shake and the nerves that twitch and everything that feels like falling apart at its seams are all just a figment of their imagination. Lighters are passed around like party favors. Cigarettes become currency. He doesn't partake of this new economy.
But he keeps his mouth full of smoke. It feels too empty and he's afraid it will atrophy if his lips don't have something to do, so he shoves it full of nicotine, coaxes it to life again because he's through with words. Words are just painkillers that don't dig deep enough. The old wounds they try to heal begin to rot beneath their deceiving surface. Beneath the blood and flesh that feels like scars.
He takes to silence like a drug. A dirty habit.
And soon, when days have withered and a month in this picturesque hell settles into the folds of reality, war becomes him.
He wears it like a crooked smile.
A reprieve soon reaches them, and they all can forget about D-Day and Carentan for a while. Life goes on the way it always has. They fill their nights up with cards and darts and beer and girls until they're so sated with civilian life that they can't remember what it's like to hold a gun anymore. But he remembers. His hands curl over the ghost of the trigger beneath his finger and it trembles with the need to pull it, to feel the recoil as it threatens to slam him into the ground, and he's one step closer to getting home. To ending this war with the ending of another life. If he concentrates on something other than being nothing more than a murderer in a uniform, then it feels more justified. It feels a little less wrong.
In this place, it's hard not to pretend like the war is nothing but a terrible dream. The kind you wake up from in a sweat, the sheets twisted around you like arms that rise from Hell to take you in, to swallow you whole, and then the floodgates rupture in the wake of consciousness. The images burn as they trickle back in, slowly, as to remember the taste of them going down, but it was all just a dream. Just the warped mimicry of reality in a mind that is much too cryptic for its own good. And that's what they recite, prayer by prayer, plea by plea, to whatever angels may be near enough to hear such supplication. That it was just a dream, nothing meant by it, and everything is okay. It's a calming mechanism. A placebo effect, if you will.
But he knows better. Knows that the time will come when this evasion of beer and girls and darts will be replaced with coming face to face with everything they wished so ardently that they'd never have to suffer through again. Guns and k-rations and exhaustion that will transcend the memory of every sleepless night they've ever had. And again, these men will have to face a nightmare of the most terrible kind.
The real kind.
He still walks. But instead of weaving through foxholes with a rifle on his back, he replaces his usual posture with something more fitting of the current setting. He tries to filter into the life of a regular man, a man that has never watched someone die before, that has never been an instrument of death. But he's outgrown the image. It feels too tight as he tries to slip it on and he let's it go, just like that, as easy as throwing caution to the wind, because there's no use hanging on to what's been dead and gone for so long (so long that he can't remember the boy he was, the life he had back home, none of it comes to mind when he searches for it, even in the right places where he thought he'd left it before).
His hands find their way into his pockets, seeking the comfort in the lined material of oblivion. His head starts to swim and it hangs forward from the weight of all his thoughts that dart through every corner of it, ghosts in the snow, and he doesn't realize he's been tracing the footprints left behind in the dirt that, for once, isn't polluted with water. It's dry as old, cracked bones and it doesn't feel right, being in England when the rain isn't here. Like something's missing from this place of sanctuary.
Part of him doesn't know what to do with all of this relief. It seems too dangerous to hold onto in times that promise nothing in return for sacrifice.
And just like that, Aldbourne is traded in for Holland. The cycle begins again.
The months bleed together. Blanched colors that don't mix well and give way to a white December. He's in Bastogne, now. Bastogne with its icy fortress carved out of trees and snow. There's nothing else, just snow that's as unrelenting as the shells that find them in the night. It's colder here than anything he's ever known and sometimes, if he's unlucky, he'll pass a foxhole occupied by a man that's been frozen solid, lost somewhere in the arms of the night, never to return.
A lot of them like to complain about how cold it is. Mostly because it passes time, hours that are spread too thickly over the fear of another shelling, of more trees splintering over their heads like halos of the earth. They sit around empty circles, secretly mourning the bare epicenter where a roaring fire should have been, stroking life back into their numb fingers, coaxing the threats of trench foot out of their boots. But there was no fire. It would draw too much attention.
He isn't one to complain. At least not aloud, where people could hear. It's taken so much time and effort to build up the reputation he has, the one that has them cowering in fear every time he offers a smoke or a lighter to ignite the ones that hang in the corners of their mouths. It's become somewhat of a joke to him. A private jest that he keeps all to himself and doesn't care to let them in on.
Because too much of this war has been spent on trying to make sense of destruction, on making him stronger, letting him thrive on the separation of himself from the others, and a dependency on solitude has been formed in the wake of such endeavors. If they knew him at all, they would want to know him better. And that he just couldn't allow.
The day before the attack on Foy, he offers three men a smoke. Christenson, Perconte, and a replacement whose name he never cared to ask for.
They all stare as he turns his back and he could feel the fear seep out of their eyes like stagnant blood from a rotting wound. He laughs and as a reward for his efforts, he allows himself a nice dose of nicotine that seeks to calm the nerves that don't quite care anymore about all the shit they've seen.
Because there's only so much apathy a heart can spare, after all.
copyright of Harlequin Sequins, except for Ronald Speirs, who is portrayed by Matthew Settle in Band of Brothers and is based on a real soldier who fought during WWII.