Author's Notes: Just got back from a little trip about an hour ago. This here is an interlude. The calm before the next storm. :)
Disclaimer - I don't own Eugene Roe or Band of Brothers.
They like to think he's some kind of angel.
He likes to think they're wrong.
If he's an angel, then he has fallen. This can only be Hell. Nothing beautiful can come of this. Of cold and death and black and war. Hell is where pain lives. Where it breathes him in and he takes them in his arms. They are exhaled from the lungs of suffering. He bleeds into them. The angel of death. He seeps into their veins, their bodies, and he turns their lips blue. Stains the warm pigments of their skin white as the face of winter. Their eyes close and he never even feels his fingers drifting over the lavender-hued lids like falling petals.
Sometimes, he saves them. It's only when someone finds them first. His hands calm, they soothe, they exhume the fear and he swallows it whole. The fear is his now. He never lets it go. When it enters the doors of his being, it wipes their bloodstained fingers on his conscience, leaving their hand prints engraved in him for eternity.
Thinking. It's more like a necessity now. To curb the inevitable. To preserve the tearing edges of his sanity.
Yes, to think. So human. It proves he is nothing more than flesh. Nothing greater than the imagination of God. He wonders if angels can think. He's never seen one, but he's felt them before. He's sure of it. When his meme died, he felt the fingertips of her spirit as it brushed over him. To say goodbye. To bid adieu. No, they don't think. Angels know. They know when it's time to live and when it's time to die and where to trace the vestiges of the in-between lines. To laugh, to cry, to feel nothing at all. Feelings are the shades of grey.
He listens to his thoughts. They tell him something. Whisper a little light into him and the darkness scatters for a moment. It rests again.
He doesn't know anything anymore.
He hides the wounds, but the scars…puckered skin and pearl-white edges. They leer at him through their parted flesh.
He's no healer. He's no saint.
Those scars. They never die.
copyright of Harlequin Sequins, 2010.