Author's Notes: Sweet A.K, you're the greatest! Go check out her story The Butterfly Effect. It's fantastic! :D

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers or its characters. I only own my OC.

CHAPTER V;; Gold

Fire rained down on us. It broke through the wall of fog overhead and tore into the ground, making it bleed deep, warm earth that lay dormant beneath the frost. Another one exploded nearby; I threw both arms over my helmet just to keep it on in the midst of all this confusion.

Skinny was screaming. His hands wouldn't stop reaching for the shrapnel lodged deep into his leg.

"Put sulfa on that leg, Thomas!"

Roe's voice rose over the deafening blasts. He rifled through his bag with blind fingers and groping hands and God there was so much blood. There wasn't enough morphine to stop the screaming. We'd just have to think over it. It was our job. It was what we were trained to do…the steadfast pillars in a building crumbling all around us.

He'd told me to administer the morphine two seconds ago. No, make that four. It took two seconds to think in these conditions. I couldn't think. I wondered, dully, if Gene would hate me for that. But it was a silly thought.

Stop thinking. Save the leg.

Skinny told us to save it. Salvage it for someone who needed it. I couldn't think of anybody who needed it more, but really, all that tumbled through my cognizance at the moment was how my ears hurt and my hands were sticking to the frost (or was it sticking to me?) and my fingers just couldn't work fast enough to get this done.

"Fuck, Gene, I've only got two hands!"

His jaw was clenched tight. "Well use the goddamned things and help me out here!" He turned to Luz. "That jeep here yet?"

"It's comin', doc!" George shouted over the rumble of the endless detonations.

Spray of dirt and blood-stained snow crashed over us like waves.

Breakers of earth on the shores of filth and war.

George pressed his ear against the receiving end of the line. Roe and I were already gathering the rest of Skinny's unscathed limbs into our arms. "It's here, doc! C'mon, let's get him out of here! Move it! Move it! Let's go!"

A shell landed a few feet away from us as we struggled to balance his weight. The ground groaned beneath our legs and tried to shake off the pain like a wounded dog; Roe and I lost our footing. Skinny went down with us. He threw back his head and let out of a wail that no banshee haunting the rolling, green-hued mists of Ireland could ever attempt to match.

God, grant that my ears should never be the same after this. Deliver unto me mercy...that I should never hear the sound of pain again.

The jeep rolled to a stop in front of us. Roe bounded into the passenger's seat as Skinny was secured to the front by two men who had taken him from us. His eyes were fixed in a dark, distant stare. The feel of it penetrating every last piece of me was otherworldly. Haunting.

"Stay here!" He ordered. "Take cover and keep safe until I get back!"

I obeyed.

Days passed in successive blurs. One came, stayed a while, then bowed out before I knew it was even over. They all piled on top of the other, providing nothing new to mark the stagnant time, and so I forgot there was even daylight. That there was a moon. That there was snow.

Eugene's concern over the lack of morphine and proper bandages intensified twofold. I found myself waking up to an empty hole after his latest visit to Bastogne. Panic would churn in my empty stomach and I'd startle awake, claw my way out of the fissure in the earth. I'd look for him, call out his name in my head as if he could hear me, as if he would answer. Ten minutes would trace me in its outline. Then twenty. Only then, in the panic, did reality feel too close for comfort.

Sometimes I'd wake to find him in half-dug crevices, passing from hole to hole, shivering and begging for aid kits. The occurrence, at first pegged merely as a short-lived necessity, became routine. Over and over and over I'd wake and panic and seek him in the darkness. Part the curtain of gloom and try to find the lost shepherd. The protector needed protecting.

Something was coming loose. In both of us. Too much red, not enough warmth. I didn't want to lose him. He was the closest thing I had to family besides the boys.

And then there were the other nights.

The ones where I found him.

And he was by my side, his head caught in sleep's delicate web.

The fear would be gone.

Julian was dead.

Before dawn, I roused from a cruel dream. The same one, over and over, and I couldn't escape the reel. Julian. The shot. The strangled look in his eyes. Blood melting into the snow. The Red came. I tried to stop him, tried to deter his reason, but there was no other function for Him but to take. Never to give, but to steal what is ours. What is human.

Julian was dead in waking. He was dead in sleep. There was no escaping the reality of it. It just was and it would eventually come to always be. Twenty years wasn't enough.

The transition back into the conscious world left me breathless and I gasped for air as I crawled out of my old sanctuary. Find a new one. Move on. Survive. The ghost of our dialogues over boot camp and life after the war decomposed into the soil and I didn't go back to that mausoleum. The sepulcher. It was another beaten path behind me.

During those few days, Lipton often invited me to stay with him. Or I'd nestle between Luz and Martin and Malarkey, who were all more than hospitable when it came to human contact and warmth. Sometimes, I'd rouse from a shallow doze and listen to the sound of Luz's measured breathing. Martin's metrical heartbeats that thrummed in my ears like plucked strings. Lipton's gentleness surrounding me like a shielding husk.

All of them provided some variation of comfort as I bereaved the loss. They didn't know it, that they were filling in the holes his departure had left behind, and yet their presence left me feeling undamaged. Untouched. As if they had felt the pain before and recognized its specter in my mannerisms, my altered conduct.

Eugene had been right. It hurt. It hurt too much to care.

I'd push through. If I learned anything from these men, it was how to escape the quagmire. Let things go.

But Julian was still dead and I hadn't even heard the shots that took his life. It had been a combat patrol just the day before. He'd been young. Hopeful, even. Martin felt guilty. After delivering the news to the Captain, he had rubbed the deep creases of his furrowed brow with his thumb, holding onto an unlit cigarette as if it were his sustenance. His salvation.

Life had barely begun to bloom before his eyes. Now it was gone. Snuffed out like a burning candle whose wax hadn't even begun to melt.

Babe took his death the hardest. He'd been watching as the Red stole the boy's soul right out of his mangled body. He had been there. Unable to stretch out his hand and save him. Unable to move. Just watch him choke on his own life.

Straight out of the bedlam of gore and orders and the ceaseless shooting, Julian was taken away. The bullets just wouldn't stop coming. It wasn't his fault; they couldn't get to him in time.

The next morning, after the worst of Babe's period of grief had passed, we all wondered silently at the cure. I knew as I watched the soldier, dark shadows underlining the last vestiges of his guilt, crouch before Eugene and hand him a tin full of beans. The healer didn't even see him. He never ate a thing, even as the rest of us wolfed down as much as we could as fast as we could. Like it would be our last.

An announcement rolled in around breakfast, the bearer of good news in the form of Colonel Sink, who relayed a message from the top regarding our position outside of Bastogne – everything from the North, East South and West was stopped cold in its tracks.

Roe just stared ahead, battling some inner demon, wrestling some unseen entity. The food was abandoned. Everyone else commented on the latest enlightenment from our superiors. Whether it was too good to be true, to see the campaign in this icy fortress nearing its conclusion. Or just propaganda. A morale boost to keep us going.

I revisited our old foxhole. He followed me there, gravitating toward the abandoned shelter as if by the pull of a magnet. As if he knew too that we were both breaking somewhere. The cracks were reaching deeper into us. How do you fix something you can't see? Soak them into bandages? Patch them up with sulfa?

His eyes settled on me. I tried to breathe, but my lungs wouldn't open. They wouldn't take the air in. They were giving up, collapsing, caving in.

I didn't even feel it at first. The sensation of his arms enclosing around me. It was the sound of his voice in my ear that tore down the floodgates, let everything flow free. I was resurrected with a gasping sob, tears swimming before my eyes. I was dizzy, I was falling, but there he was. There to catch me at the bottom.

My fingers trembled violently as they searched for him. They snagged on his collar and fisted in the material that was cold and damp with falling snow. Like the old woman in Bastogne...like Julian. Dying alone.

Oh! Say! Let us fly, dear

Gene took the desperate hand into the calm.

Where, kid? To the sky, dear!

Hushed me with soft prayers as his fingers knotted and twisted and buried themselves in my hair.

Oh you flying machine,

He sang. Sang a song that exhumed from the graves of my past.

Jump in, Miss Josephine.

He was there when I awoke.

It was dark again. I couldn't even remember falling asleep, but I could remember the daylight. Colonel Sink's message. Falling apart in his hands. It all rushed back so quickly that my head began to spin and I groaned, pressing a cold hand against my forehead to steady the spinning ground. Movement beneath me. No wonder it was so warm.

"You okay?" He asked.

The world was steady again. The trees, as I looked up at them, were still.

He took my hand and put something into my palm. "Here," he said. "Eat this. You'll feel better."

My fingers were so cold that it didn't warm. Whatever he had slipped into my grasp didn't feel anything but numb and cold. Nothing.

I stared ahead. My throat was dry. "I swear sometimes that you're an angel."

He didn't say anything. Didn't try to refute the accusation, the theory, whatever it was to him...perhaps it was nothing at all. Just description that didn't quite fit. Kept slipping when he tried it on. An image we all tried to box him into, make him make sense to us when we couldn't understand. But even our savior needed to be saved. He was just as human. His skin was cloth of the same kind we wore. His halo that used to blind me, used to carry me away into visions of angels and trumpets fashioned of gold, was just the sunlight reflecting off the snow.

Eugene Roe was a man that inspired a steady stream of prose. Beautiful was one. Fragile, another.

I knew this as well as he did. But there was no denial on his part. He just listened. Always listened. Even when we were far away, buried in the worries that our obligations entailed, he still watched. He still heard.

"You wanna know why?" I asked. I didn't wait for an answer; I wouldn't get one anyway. "Because whenever I'm around you, things feel different. Like I can tell you every horrible thing I've done in my life and you'll forgive me, no matter how terrible it was. No matter how much your heart sickens at the mere thought of it."

His eyes stayed on me. I couldn't tell what they were feeling, couldn't hear what they were saying, if their endeavors were to stay the prelude to my confession or to let them flow freely.

"You asked me a month ago why I was here," I began. "I never told you because I was guilty then. I was guilty of killing my brother because of a stupid, reckless decision that I made and that I came to find would change the course of my life forever. I watched him die because of me. His blood is still on my hands, Gene. Look at them."

I held them out. They were shaking. They were stained scarlet.

"I can't get them out. The stains. They're going to haunt me for the rest of my life." I didn't try to fight tears. Not anymore. "But the shame…it's gone. I can't find it anymore. When I think about my brother, about what I had done, about the life I ended, I don't feel the guilt gnawing at me. I don't feel it….I just feel…at peace."

I heard Gene's smile. I heard it. That was how audible the sound of its advent really was. Something alive in the midst of all these dead things. Dead men, dead trees, dying hopes.

"You've been talkin' to God," he said.

It wasn't an accusation, but something like relief blooming in the wake of the declaration. I looked at him. The smile was still there. I prayed that it would be permanent, but nothing out here was for forever. It was too fragile to survive the phases of eternity.

"Yeah," I confirmed his speculation. A tear fit perfectly into the curve of my jaw; it stayed a while, a dew drop holding on to the last breaths of night. "Yeah, I have."

All it took was a word. A step. A glance.

It could happen there. In the crevices of those little moments that we used to take for granted. A shelling. A bullet. A bayonet. And they were gone. In the middle of a smile or a goodbye, it could happen. We used to believe that in a moment, there were miracles. Little tendrils of beauty in the countenance of our embodied existence that flickered like stars. We all knew it now.

If anything was taken from this experience, it was our innocence. What little we had left of it, if there was any at all, was invested in the childish fairytales of conviction. That was a half-truth, while the ugly half waited in the shadows, a monster waiting for conception in the empty womb of encroaching war. Waiting to be born in the blood of battle.

Sometimes it was just misery instead.

The Red waited for no one. If I learned anything, watching the men suffer the cruelty of Bastogne, it was that there was no bargaining with Him. He waited on nothing. Not even hope. He decided when and where and how it was going to happen and there was no questioning why, no begging for another chance, no looking back.

It occurred to me, somehow, that he my have even had a voice once, a face, a soul of his own and was forced to feel the last strands of his life snapping and twisting and fraying as he was lifted from a dying body. Forced to suffer the numbness of phasing into oblivion. If there was anything left to feel at all in the aftermath.

Just the sounds. The cries, if there were any. The last breath leaving stagnant lungs. The resonance of a shattered hourglass.

We learned to cope with it. We had to. There was no choice in the matter.

If there were choices and there were enough to spare, we'd have one. We'd be home.

It was getting older.

It aged with me. We endured the slow sway of the pendulum together. The lullaby of passing time. It bore its own scars that shared stories of the families that read from its passages and stored in them its wisdom. The cover bore the signs of their use. Fingerprints that did not belong to me. Fragile, arching lines that, together, with skin, spoke to me of the lively, jam-stained hands of a little girl. A living appendage. Alone, it was nothing more than memory.

Fate passed it to me for a reason. For what reason, I had not known. I was desperate for an anchor and this simple book, these jam-stained papers and written songs with living voices, saved me in a way that I thought I could never be saved again. It protected me as I lay in the snow, in the unmoving shrapnel, waiting. Waiting for light. For love. For faith. For the advent of change.

Here it came. It was in my grasp.

I never even heard his footsteps. It was his way, to ghost through the world as if apart from it, a separate soul that lived behind a wall of glass. They crushed ice and rocks and snow beneath them, but the echoes passed over dead ears. On the limbs of trees that let them fall into oblivion, unheeded, insignificant. Even the sun turned its back on them. No one heard them but me.

"Kate."

I didn't hear my name. In the form of a christening, an identity, was a concealment. A smokescreen.

Please.

I looked. There he was. Quiet. Alive. His edges were tearing, the stitches wouldn't hold. He took a step forward. Every fissure was cast in gold-dusted light, light that left nothing in the shadows to wither and to be dismantled by the reluctance of dutiful restraint. Not anymore. Every scar and open wound alike was bare for me to see.

Another step. And another. Until he stood over me, towering, a citadel of pale skin and dark eyes and hands buried deep in graves of gore. He fell apart in my arms. A paper doll who'd strayed to close to the fire and curled at its charred edges and burned with the pain of regret. Of wishing he could have, but knowing he never did. Nothing escaped him. Not a whimper, not a sob, no salted wings of shedding tears. I couldn't see my reflection in his stone-blue eyes; just Gene. Just him.

Lips parted like curtains. Warm curtains that imparted to me, to save, to keep, little morsels of damaged soul. To heal the wisps of his being, like he healed them. Gray and blue and flecked with the scarlet of life, he left pieces of himself in their wounds. The pearl-white edges of the scars that healed. In me.

But there was no breeze to make them dance, just the thin shudder of a breath that walked the tightrope of decision. Of resolve. To live and let die what couldn't transcend the borders of the past.

His hands. The hands that clasped in prayer. Doused in wishes and hopes and paper-thin veils of devotion that would never reach him. Hands that trembled and fisted and had lost too much and felt too little in their wasted years of youth. They unfolded. They reached for me and draped over the angles of my face like silk. Callused silk. If there could ever be such a thing, it was Gene who would make it.

He leaned, closer, gentle, and his dark eyes were watching me. Every spark of reaction, every cove of sentiment. He broke me into pieces so that I could fit into his grasp, promising to put me back together again. I wanted him to. Please, make me break. Make me crumble. Destroy me and build me and replace the cause that brought me to him. Restore it with the effect…the one that would make me stay.

It was impossible to feel nothing in a moment like this. I felt everything. It spilled out of me. It trickled over his hands, stained them with my insides and the color of butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

And then there was no pause. No reflection.

His eyes closed. His lungs gave way to a breath laced with ice and I felt it rise and fall against my skin as he folded me into him, stole me from the world and the light. Surrounded by war and by filth and by despair, there was still beauty left in the tarnished naissance.

The gap closed between us and his lips brushed, like feathers, against mine. So soft and uncertain was the embrace that I almost couldn't feel it. They unraveled. Silk against silk. Breath against breath. His mouth tasted like wet velvet cigarettes and the cold and smoke and the thin stubble of lingering boyhood bristled against my skin. But nothing in my life had felt more glorious, more sublime. I'd never kissed a boy before.

But it was Gene.

Gentle, healing, beautiful.

Like his hands.