Chapter Text
It was freezing. That was the first thing Eugene Roe noticed when he jolted awake, the remnants of his nightmare still tangled in his breath. The cold didn’t just exist, it inhabited him, pressed deep into the bones, a kind of cold that didn't allow for clarity, only survival. His body ached from the floor beneath him; wooden, warped, and dusted with the remnants of hay, and the faintest light leaked through the broken slats in the barn’s roof.
Since Bastogne, the ghosts hadn’t stopped. They came each night, dragging through his dreams with the weight of frost and blood. The ones he couldn't save; faces blurred by snow, voices gone thin in the wind, stood beside him while he slept, silent witnesses to his failure.
He blinked hard, forcing their images from his mind, though they clung like smoke. When he finally sat up, his limbs protested; shaky, stiff, exhausted. Every muscle felt half-frozen, but he moved quietly, instinctively, like a man hunted. Carefully, he edged toward the barn door. It was barely holding together; wood soft with rot, hinges rusted to silence. He pressed his hand against it, gentle as prayer.
Easy Company had been ambushed on the approach to Foy. The attack had scattered them, confusion thick in the snow-choked forest. Some of the men had regrouped; Gene had not. Somewhere in the chaos, he’d lost the thread that tethered him to the others. And now he was here, cut off, hiding in a ruined farmhouse on the edge of enemy lines, surrounded by German soldiers who had set up camp not knowing they had a ghost in the barn.
He hated himself for losing Easy; not in the shallow, theatrical way of boys ashamed of clumsiness, but in the deep, marrow-gnawing way that only failure could breed. The Toccoa men would be searching. That thought alone turned his stomach. If they were looking for him, they were risking themselves. That was the last thing he wanted, men dying for the sake of a medic who couldn't keep up.
The door betrayed him anyway. A quiet fracture at the top, a splintering whisper as the damp wood shifted in his hand. He ducked without thinking, instinct drawing his body into the hay, heart thudding in the hollow space beneath his ribs. He held his breath, counting seconds. One. Two. Five. Ten.
Outside, only silence. The kind of silence you don’t trust. He strained his ears, heard the vague hum of voices in German, the rustle of boots, the occasional metallic clink of gear. They were close. Closer than comfort would allow.
Gene was trapped. A prisoner, not by bars or rope, but by chance. By fear. By war. The Germans didn’t know he was there, but that was no guarantee they wouldn’t find him. And if they did, no Geneva Cross sewn onto his coat would save him.
---
Babe Heffron was sick. Not just with the cough that had lingered since Bastogne, rasping in his chest like some half-buried ember refusing to go out, but with everything. The war, the waiting, the freezing silence between gunfire. It sat in him like a poison he couldn’t sweat out.
The German ambush had come a week after Bastogne, as sudden and brutal as a slap. And in that moment, in the chaos and the smoke and the screaming, Babe realised he hated them. Hated them in a way that went deeper than anger, a hatred that felt old, ancestral, like something inherited. He’d thought he'd reached his limit back in the woods, but this... this was different.
He’d thrown himself into the dirt, found cover in a shallow depression left by an old mortar shell. Around him, the field lit up with tracer fire and shouting. He stayed low, heart hammering. Somewhere out there, a voice cut through the noise; Luz, calling for a medic. That was normal. That was routine. He could picture Gene already running, boots pounding across frozen ground, kit slung tight, hands already reaching.
But the calls didn’t stop.
When Babe finally dared to lift his head, he saw Luz, still lying in the open, hands clutching at his leg, blood dark in the snow. No sign of Eugene.
“Fuck,” Babe muttered, then climbed from his cover, one cautious movement at a time, scanning for Germans. The field had gone eerily still. He sprinted to Luz’s side, dropped to his knees, and pressed down hard above the wound, blood soaking through his gloves in seconds.
Malarkey was suddenly beside him. Then Lipton. Perconte. All of them crowding in with the same expression, the same question already forming.
“Where’s the doc!?” Perconte bellowed, his voice cutting into the air like a flare.
No answer came, no familiar silhouette breaking through the mist, no calm voice, no steady hands.
Instead, it was Spina who came running, his medic’s bag slung over his shoulder, boots kicking up frost, his face pinched with something between confusion and fear. Babe rose and intercepted him halfway, grabbing at his arm.
“Spina, have you seen Gene?”
Spina blinked, chest heaving. “No. I heard Luz shouting for a medic... figured Doc would already be there.” He shook his head. The air seemed to thin.
“Jesus Christ,” Babe muttered, his throat tight. “You’re saying you don’t know where he is either?”
Spina looked away, his silence sharper than any answer. Then he pushed past Babe and dropped beside Luz, already working.
“God, please,” Babe whispered, the words sticking in his throat. Please let him be safe. Let him be crouched behind a wall. Let him be catching his breath. Let him be anything other than alone and bleeding out in a ditch they hadn’t thought to check.
---
It had been three days since the Germans set up camp. Three days of silence, of pacing slow, calculated circles around the cold rot of the farmhouse. He no longer counted time in hours, only in noises: boots on gravel, voices outside, the creak of the barn’s frame in the wind. The soldiers hadn’t moved. And it no longer seemed like they were going to.
Each night, Eugene had prayed, not with conviction, but with something quieter. Desperation. He whispered for Easy’s safety, for Lipton, for Winters, for Babe. For someone to still be looking for him. Though lately, he wasn't sure God was listening. Or maybe He was, and simply chose not to answer.
His rations were nearly gone. The last crust of bread had been divided like communion; slowly, reverently. Hunger gnawed, but worse was the knowing: if he stayed, he would die. Either from starvation, or from being found like an animal cornered in the straw. The Germans didn’t know he was here, yet. But hiding wasn’t survival anymore. It was surrender.
So Eugene Roe, hands trembling and throat dry, made his choice.
He wrapped the white medic band around his hand and held it out like a flag; an offering, or a plea. Without giving himself the luxury of doubt, he pushed open the barn doors. The cold hit first, then the shouting.
Shouts in German. Boots grinding against frost. Rifles raised in an instant.
For a moment, he was sure they’d shoot him. He felt it; death, close and waiting, just a heartbeat ahead. But then a voice cut through the chaos, loud and clipped. An officer barking orders. The rifles lowered, but not far.
They brought him, under watchful eyes and silent suspicion, to what passed as the German command post: a farmhouse kitchen stripped of warmth, reeking of smoke and sweat and something metallic.
The officer, Lieutenant Müller, someone murmured, watched Gene like a butcher deciding if an animal was worth the blade.
“Bitte,” Eugene said hoarsely. “I mean no harm.”
Müller answered in sharp German, his voice like broken glass. A young soldier stepped forward to translate, face pale and uncertain. “He wants to know what you were doing in the barn,” the soldier said. “And if you’re a spy.”
Müller spoke again, harsher this time, gesturing toward Eugene’s hands. The translator hesitated before relaying it. “He says… he’ll break your hand if you lie.”
Eugene swallowed hard. His hands, those same hands that had patched men back together through blood and snow, suddenly felt small and breakable. “Tell him I’m not a spy. I got separated from my unit during an ambush. The barn was just… the safest place I could find. Until you set up camp there.”
He forced himself to stay upright, to meet their eyes. “I swear to God, I’m just a medic. I don’t know anything. Please.”
But Müller didn’t blink. Suspicion hung in the room like smoke. And then, without another word, two soldiers stepped forward and grabbed him. He didn’t resist. There was no point. His strength had left him days ago.
They dragged him through the house, down a hall, around a corner. The floorboards groaned beneath their boots. Somewhere behind him, the door closed.
---
Three days. That’s how long it had been since Eugene Roe vanished.
Three days since the medic who had stitched them back together through Bastogne’s worst had disappeared into the frozen woods and not returned. And with each passing hour, the weight of his absence deepened; unspoken, but felt in everything.
Spina hadn’t stopped moving. He was everywhere, all at once; tending to wounds, checking on rations, patching what little he could. But there was a hollowness in his rhythm now, his eyes flickering to the tree line more often than necessary, always looking.
And Babe Heffron had gone quiet.
That, more than anything, unsettled the company.
Even Bill Guarnere, who had an answer for everything and a joke for anything else, couldn’t get through to him.
“C’mon Babe, you gotta talk to me man,” Bill said, pulling him gently along by the arm as they walked the perimeter. His voice was soft for once, not the usual bark. “Hell, we’re worried about you. Luz and Perconte won’t stop pestering me about your absence. So I need you with me, man, even if it's just to keep those bastards at bay.”
He gave a half-hearted laugh at his own joke. But Babe didn’t so much as blink.
Bill glanced sideways at him. “Look, I get it, alright? It’s Gene. We’re all scared. But you can’t go shuttin’ down like this, you hear me?”
But Babe’s eyes were locked on the ground ahead, like he was seeing something no one else could.
Please, God. Don’t take Eugene Roe from us. We need him. As much as he needs us. Please, not him. The prayer looped endlessly in Babe’s mind; quiet, constant, like a heartbeat. It had replaced almost every other thought. He ate when he had to. He slept when his body gave out. But nothing felt real except the space where Eugene should have been.
He spoke only to Winters. Brief, hushed conversations at the edge of the command tent, always circling back to the same question: What’s the plan? How do we find him? Nixon stood nearby for most of those talks, as though his mere presence could lend clarity, or comfort.
On one particularly bitter night, while the wind screamed through the trees like some distant shelling that never reached them, Dick Winters spoke low to Lewis Nixon, his voice stripped of its usual resolve.
“I don’t know where he could possibly be,” he confessed. “I don’t even know where to start.”
The words cracked something in the air between them. Nixon turned to him, startled not by the admission itself, but by the quiet in which it landed.
Winters, stoic and unshakable Winters, was uncertain. Nixon was by his side in an instant.
“We’ll find him, Dick. We will. I’ll put the best men on it. Hell, I’ll go myself if I have to. And if we don’t, if we can’t, he’ll make it back. You know he will. He always does.”
Winters said nothing. But he nodded, once, and Nixon felt it. A silent pact sealed in the cold.
Somewhere out there, their medic was still breathing. He had to be.
---
Eugene tried to follow what the Germans were saying, but the words blurred together; sharp, fast syllables like teeth snapping shut. He understood none of it. The young soldier who’d been translating for him, who Eugene learned was called Friedrich when the boy had quickly apologised to him for the behaviour of his superior, was clearly struggling to keep up. He cast Eugene nervous glances between each question, as if unsure whether to speak at all.
They’d tied him to a wooden chair, his hands wrenched behind his back so tightly he could no longer feel the tips of his fingers. Still, he could move them, barely. That was something. That meant blood was still moving.
Lieutenant Müller had spent over an hour shouting questions at him inside the cramped, smoke-heavy command post. When it became clear that Eugene couldn’t give him what he wanted, the lieutenant’s anger turned into something quieter, colder.
It started with punches. Quick, impersonal. A reaction, not yet cruelty. But cruelty, Eugene had learned, never took long to arrive. The questions didn’t stop, but soon the beatings began to punctuate them. Not for information anymore, but for entertainment.
His lip was split, the right side of his face was aching as a bruise began to bloom; his left eye was already starting to close. “Please sir, please stop. I don’t know anything,” Eugene managed, voice raw and small, the words pushed out in the hope they might make them relent.
Müller said nothing at first. Then, in slow, deliberate English, thick with accent: “Grab the American’s left hand.”
Two soldiers obeyed. Eugene struggled instinctively, but there was no strength left in him. One man gripped his wrist, the other pinned his forearm against the chair.
“If the prisoner doesn’t answer my next question,” Müller said, now standing directly in front of him, “you break his little finger.” He smiled; not wide, not theatrical. Just a thin, satisfied line across his face. That was worse.
Gene’s breath caught. His fingers twitched.
“No please,” he stammered, his voice breaking. “Not my hands. Please, take anything else. Just not my hands.”
They were his only tools. The hands that had held dying men together. That had stitched life back into torn skin. His hands had done what his voice never could. And now...
Friedrich hesitated, his face pale. But he translated Eugene’s plea anyway, quiet and almost ashamed. When he finished, he looked away.
Müller’s grin grew. He stepped forward, just close enough that Eugene could smell the tobacco on his breath.
“Now, American,” he said. “Tell me where your soldiers are. Or I’ll break every finger on your hand.”
Then, without warning, he spat in Eugene’s face.
Gene recoiled as far as the restraints would allow, choking back tears. He didn’t even try to wipe the spit from his cheek.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I swear, I lost them. I don’t know where they are.”
He barely had time to understand what was happening before Müller gave a simple nod.
And then the pain came.
It wasn’t sharp at first; it was thick, blinding, something that swallowed his breath whole. A cracking sound, and then a pulse of white-hot agony that ran from his fingertip to his shoulder. He didn’t scream; not out of strength, but out of shock. It stole the air from his lungs.
He refused to look at his hand.
He couldn’t.