The Courage to Bear: A Band of Brothers Fanfiction

A Photograph in Snow

Winter, 1945

Bastogne

He tried not to think about it. 

Think about something else, like Doc Roe had suggested in his husky, Cajun drawl. Death was expected in combat. As when he'd seen his other friends killed or wounded, he had to let it roll of his back like water. Keeping fighting the current. Stay focused. 

So Babe thought about his mother and her brilliant, red hair, the same shade he had inherited. Irish woman that she was, Mother Heffron was so proud that at least one of her children had been born a redhead.

Red. He envisioned a boy on an icy, forest road, christened by enemy fire, bleeding out dark red onto the snow.

Think about something else.

Babe Heffron closed his eyes and huddled down into the snowy foxhole, his feet numb in his jump boots. He thought about the streets of Philadelphia drenched in the throws of a summer storm. Lightening crashed overhead, thunder rolled over the misty buildings.

Artillery explosions, tearing both trees and bodies apart. Guarnere was hauled away with the flesh barely hanging from his leg bone. Toye had lost his shin completely. Then Compton lost his mind.

Think about something else. Anything else.

The Krauts hadn't completely stripped Julian's body. Johnny Julian of Vincentown, New Jersey, just a kid with eyes like gleaming shards of coal, who had so genuinely asked Babe to get his things back to his mom if anything happened. There wasn't much left after the German troops were done with him. Even though Allied troops did the same thing to their enemy dead, the thought of Julian's stolen belongings boiled in Babe's chest. 

He had been just a kid. A damn virgin. He'd admitted it with no shame. A good kid from a nice family.

Babe dug into his coat pocket and pulled out two sealed envelopes. One was addressed to Mrs. Cadwell Julian and the other to Miss Daisy Julian. There was also a photograph, dog eared and smudged from being clutched like a good luck charm. 

In the pale light of a deep winter's dawn, Babe held the photo to the burgeoning glow. It had been taken at the seaside. The girl on the left was in a wool cardigan, her arm hooked with Julian's as the wind whipped her dark brown hair around her smiling face. An older woman stood on the other side of him. His mother. The two women huddled around Julian like he was their baby chick. Julian couldn't have been more than sixteen in the picture, though there was no knowing. He'd had a baby face, like Heffron.

The girl and the woman had the same smile. Though they both appeared happy, the joy didn't leech into their dark eyes. The girl was still serious, even as she laughed. But not hard, not cold. Merely grey as the sky melting to dawn overhead.

Babe tucked the letters and the photograph into his pocket as shells sailed overhead like comets. With any luck, he'd be able to get home and mail the letters to Julian's family. Though he doubted it. With any luck, he'd meet his end there in the snow and frozen sod, blown to pieces like Muck and Penkala.

He couldn't imagine what he would tell them, if he ever met the girl and the woman in the photograph. How he'd explain why he had come home, while their beloved Johnny had not.