#One can only imagine what Asclepius lost when he was brought back

[gingermintpepper]

In light of my recent Asclepius and Apollo musings, I feel like it's the perfect time to post this, actually.

How do you build a human being? 

Bold question. Foolish question. But a question it is all the same. 

The memory of his father’s consternated expression is still bright behind his eyes, that unusually furrowed brow, the tension in his gentle jaw. He didn’t falter in his setting of Asclepius’ broken shin, hands perpetually steady and sure, but he hesitated for a conspicuously long moment as though reluctant to give an answer. In this body, he resembled Orpheus something fierce. The same flaxen curls of his hair, the same delicate eyelashes that stand stark against the dark brown of his skin. Often Asclepius wondered if his elder brother was nothing but a body built to suit their father’s preferences. The subtle wrinkle of skin around their eyes when they smiled was the same, and the steadiness of their hands, the soothing power of their presence. 

And Orpheus did not bleed like Asclepius did. The blood in Asclepius’ veins were as red as any human’s, any mortal’s, but Orpheus seemed not to bleed at all. Even when he’d suffered the same fall down the crumbling cliff as Asclepius had. Even when his skirts had ripped and jagged stone sliced into his shanks. 

Even so, Orpheus was unmistakably alive. His eyes were rich with grief fresher than any blood spilt from the worst of Asclepius’ wounds, his counsel too, was tempered with the wisdom of a life well lived. So even at the apex of his most perfect, inhuman beauty, Asclepius never once doubted that his brother was a human being. Just that he was more divine construct than flesh and blood. Just that their father had built for himself a son that would not break as easily as all the others. 

His father stayed silent for so long that Asclepius assumed it would be one of the million questions that would go unanswered. Then, just when the last of his bandages had been wrapped - 

“A human body is easy to build,” he’d had that faraway look on his face as he spoke, like he was speaking to the horizon. Or a version of Asclepius that was not quite here. Such things happened from time to time. “Any flesh would do. From men, or animals, or even monsters. Any flesh would do.” Their gazes had locked then, and Asclepius would never forget the flecks of gold which swirled in his father’s blue eyes, the weight of divine words rattling at the boundaries of their mortal apparatus, “But the breath of life, a living soul? That is beyond your means as a mortal man. You ought never seek it.” 

(Asclepius would remember these words when he revives a man for the first time at the age of nineteen. He’s surprised to find that his father is wrong for once. Souls are easy to source when they’re already eager to return to their mound of flesh.) 

[coraxaviary]

Asclepius

Preface:

This is an experimental delve into x reader that became angsty and dark. It ended up with a lot of sad, not much x reader. I’m still not sure if I can write good x reader because this experiment went off the rails. It was fun to write, though.

Anyway, this is a reader insert + Roe vignette in Bastogne.

Word Count: 2.2K

Warnings: Canon-typical blood.

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In the cold, cold frozen blue-gray of French winter, the scent of blood, acrid and metallic, mixes with the drafty air of the chapel. The groans of the wounded float upwards to the heavens like a choir of battered angels. You imagine the wisps of life floating unbound from the near-dead, rising from airways like holy bits of ghost past the glass panes and through the vaulted ceilings.

Someone new is brought in screaming, and you can almost see the golden smoke of vitality leaking from his mouth with every new breath of terror. He is not exceptional. The church is filled over capacity, and you are left using cotton sheets stripped from beds.

In this church, you have learned the American words for “mother” quickly. When they leak from almost every soldier’s mouth on his way to the euphoria of death, they take a permanent place in the back of your mind. Among your universe of French, a small expanding world of English grows, against your will, pressing insistently against the inside of your head. Echoes of no and please and all the other desperate mindless pleas of the dying men grasping at their last moments of lucidity collect, like tips in a jar.

Not all men die in groaning, crying messes. Some of them just go quiet, the trickling blood streaming from small bullet-shaped shreds louder than their actual sobs. These are a little better, because you know they don’t go through their last moments in pain, even though they’re already floating away into some heaven or hell that awaits the slain of the Second World War. Some of the men actually survive, and you count yourself blessed for only a moment after you finish tying a bandage or fixing a splint, only to leave them a few moments later, leaving the rest of their lives in the copper-stained hands of fate.

You look up at the crucifix in the front of the church. Or the hands of God, you suppose, the gold of the crosses gleaming duly in vivid contrast to the floor, which is shining brighter with blood than even the yellow metal things that hang coldly at the front, like a reminder of the color of heaven in Revelation, which for this moment – this week, this month, this year – seems farther away than ever.

Mama, this one moans brokenly, crying in fear, through bubbling blood that becomes a sputtering fountain, pluming up wrongly through his airway and sheeting down his face, into his eyes, getting into his hair. At this point, you turn away, let someone else do the honors of sweeping blood off his face, telling him he’ll be alright, muttering worthless words in a language they don’t know. You’ve lost the conviction behind the sayings a long time ago, and you let someone else who has been here for a few months less do the honors.

There is movement at the front of the cathédrale again, and you look up to receive the next one. This one has nothing where there should be a hand, a forearm, and a bicep, and there are splinters of wood – more like planks – jutting out from his torso like a half-circle of a saint’s nimbus. Except these soldiers are no saints, and he is shaking with pain, uncontrolled cries coming from his mouth every few seconds when he’s moved.

It’s him, you recognize, with the one that he just brought in. The medic, who comes into town routinely with more wounded men all the time – if the bombed-out, shelled-out fragments of rubble can even be called a town. You recognize the dark hair, the steely eyes, the dutiful set of his shoulders. There is blood always on him, around him, and he is a study in lights and darks; he goes about his medic’s mission with a calm hand and soft words. You would conclude in a different time that he belonged here, in the chapel, like the messenger Hermes, delivering news of life and death, leaving red fingerprints on the paper and guiding souls like a psychopomp into the gray beyond.

But today, you see him as less of a numen and more of a man, because his lips are set in a grim line as he clutches the makeshift tourniquet in desperation, gritting his teeth and holding the man down at the same time. You rush over and fall into the choreography of staunching blood, twisting fabrics, ripping uniforms. Your arms pass over and under Roe’s as you dance over the dying man, and you think fleetingly that it is unfair that the only time you ever move so gracefully is when yet another soul is leaching away.

The man is starting to fade. Roe slaps at the side of the soldier’s face once, twice, says something to get him to stay awake. The man clutches weakly at your dress, and you let him, because it’s not important that he’s coloring your dress a little darker red when he could be saved. His eyes start to drift closed anyway, and Roe is louder and more insistent, eyes going wide and mouth opening wider in a discordant yell, saying something like no, stay awake, and lying that it’s okay, you’re gonna live until he dies finally, and you stop winding the sheets around the splinters jutting unnaturally from his side. His hands fall from your shoulders limply, slowly.

You both stare at his blue eyes, looking so alive. Blood is still making its way out of his body. It is almost as if he could draw breath any second, and you consider giving his chest some pumps to really make sure, because Roe looks heartbroken – like he frequently does in that jacket, stained with the patchwork marks of God-knows how many have passed on in his care, screaming and clutching and begging. Roe looks at the splinters in the man’s side like they are Germans themselves, and his face hardens almost imperceptibly before he reaches out, and with incongruent care to his demeanor of passing rage, he gently slides the eyelids closed before drifting back into the tired, hard-eyed state of shivering misery that is all too familiar in this bone-chilling winter.

He stays and lingers for a few minutes, helping with other men who are, in the eyes of triage, manageable. And then he disappears, and you follow, not knowing why, because outside in the snow there are the winds of chill that hold like a vice around your bones. But outside there are less dead bodies – at least where you can see them – and so you reason that this is maybe an escape. You bring some supplies for him, but you think more about Roe than the things you are giving him.

“Hey, medic.” It comes out more like médical, but it sounds similar anyways.

Roe looks up, startled for a second before relaxing in the slightest at the sight of you. It is a small comfort that he reacts like this, with a bit less tension, and you don’t know why, but you stand in front of him with arms full of bedsheets.

He gives a noncommittal grunt and then looks at the bedsheets.

“Bedsheets?” he asks, and you nod. At least you can understand this, and you sit down beside him with the box.

“All we have,” you say, hoping he understands.

He looks like he tries to smile at that, and there’s a slight relaxation in the tension of his mouth before he looks up at you and takes the box. “Merci,” he says in response, and there’s a certain familiarity in the term, like he knows enough French to get by.

“You, ah…” you trail off, grasping at English words, moving your tacky, rust-colored hands in the frigid air. The damned language. So indelicate. “Speak. Well.”

Roe’s lips curve upwards at this, and you feel a sort of satisfaction that you made this burdened Army medic smile. “I know some,” he says in a strange form of French, but with ease.

“You speak?” you say in slight surprise, because not much can evoke a substantial reaction from you anymore after being a witness to the violent delineation between life and death, listener to the countless forms of mother that these Americans use in diversity. You think you can count more than four, but this is not the time to think about that. You force yourself back to the present.

“Yeah, I do. Cajun French.”

“Hmm,” you murmur, wondering what else there is to be said, because suddenly you don’t want Roe to leave. He exudes a force of life, and you want it, thirsting after vitality amidst the cloud of death. Suddenly you don’t want to go inside the cathedral ever again, even though you know you’ll be back inside without doubt, breathing the mist of souls when someone else is brought in with their feet blown off into particles of meat.

“Don’t got anything else?” Roe asks. He holds up the box with stiff, cold arms.

“No, I am sorry,” you say. You are sorry about a lot of other things, a litany of them, in fact, like the man who died with the halo of tree wood tangling in his intestines, but you stay quiet, watching flakes of snow drift down from the heavens. Awakening memories that are just starting to be buried under a fresh snow isn’t courteous.

“Oh,” says Roe with the tone of a man who is accustomed to disappointment. “A’right.” It’s not alright, and you both know it, but you stare at his red hands and his dark eyes with something you know is unmistakable attraction, but something you know is grossly inappropriate in this time of bloodshed and chaos.

You wonder if it would be different if you had lived in America, or if Roe had met you in summertime Bastogne when the trees are green and solid and not bursting with hellish unpredictability, and when the ground isn’t frozen, but covered with grass and small white flowers. When the cathedral doesn’t look so foreboding and it is once again an expression of divinity on Earth.

But it is a dream – a universe that does not exist. You met Roe during the War to End all Wars, in a small fragmented city in the dead of winter, both of you frozen to the bone, drenched in American blood, and shivering in shared misery. You are together only as long as the forces of fate permit, until one of you is killed by bullet or shell or cold, or maybe until Roe moves away with the campaign.

When he moves away, untouched by artillery – and this is one thing you are optimistic about and hope to God you won’t regret – when he goes away, he will continue to save them from death: snatch them right from the arms of the black looming terror that seems to define the pale days of Bastogne.

Maybe you’ll move away from this place that you can barely stomach as it is, when it’s all over, and find out that Roe is safe in America or with an occupying force in England or Germany or maybe even France. If the war goes your way.

Roe gets up to leave, and you must push all of the wanting down deep and smile, hoping he’ll come back in one piece to this small, wrecked, frozen place to see you before the 101st leaves.

“I’ll see you soon?”

Roe sighs out a breath, and for a second you think of the unsaid implication that his return means another man in trouble, gurgling and charred, but the ghost of a smile touches his face. “I’ll see ya soon.”

You nod. “Good,” you say, briefly and with the least bleakness you can manage.

Roe nods. “Good.” And he turns around and leaves. You know he’ll catch a ride back into the forest, and you don’t want to watch him go, so you turn to go back into the church.

Out of the corner of your eye, he hesitates, and you think he will possibly come back and say something – anything at all that would make this better. He doesn’t, though, and you move on through the cathedral doors, thoughts of a greener France dying in your head as your mind goes directly to triage, assessing the new arrivals at the door.

You hear a car rumbling past, and know that Roe is on that one, going to save some more men from a death alone in the snow.

Some men will slip through his grasp, but he will save more than you can. It’s something about his spirit – the presence. The comfort. You can feel it and you know the men can feel it, too.

No, he’s not Hermes, you decide, looking back up at the vaulting arches of the ceiling high above – the paintings of celestial skies somehow untouched by the mire of red and stink of copper. Hermes is the one who guides the already-dead. He’s Asclepius, the one who brings them back from the brink. 

You allow yourself to smile for a moment, and then you get back to work in the cathedral until you cannot continue anymore.

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