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O DEATH WON'T YOU SPARE ME OVER 'TIL ANOTHER YEAR

PERSONALITY Gene is as much a product of the folks that raised him as he is of his time. Polite, forthcoming, empathetic and a bit sheltered in his upbringing but not terribly naive, he's the sort of man that's gentle because he chooses to be, he's made it his nature rather than it being something he was innately born with. He is soft-spoken but stern, with a backbone made just about out of steel, and he believes in being fair to everyone he encounters until they give him a reason to act otherwise. Honesty is one of his highest tenets, and he avoids lying whenever it isn't absolutely necessary to someone else's survival or wellbeing. As the eldest of four boys, he took a rather natural role as a protector to his siblings, forever chasing after them to keep them out of trouble. Their mother died of cancer when he was ten years old, and his role transitioned into that of being a nurturer as well. His father - who is a good man, and the model for all that Gene holds himself to be - raised his boys as best he could afterwards. To be respectful, to lack in judgement, to do their best to live right by themselves and their morals and God. Gene joined the military at eighteen and it's safe to say that shaped much of his life. He ended up being shunted into medical work due to a meticulous nature and his own natural predilection towards caring for others, and he took to it well. It was said by a fair few folk that he had the steadiest hands in the 505th, and that was something he allowed himself a bit of pride in. He's friendly, but he doesn't really consider himself to be friends with people, by and large. He holds himself apart by nature and necessity. Partly this is due to the whole 'ghost' thing, and partly because of the whole 'medic' thing. Reggie was his best friend from the time he was fourteen years onward, and he never really felt he lacked in that department. After his death, it was a void that he wasn't terribly inclined to fill. Gene is the guy who will remember your name, your birthdate, your sweetheart back home and your blood type, he'll bring you your favourite smokes while you're laid up in an aid tent, but friendship requires reciprocation of a sort he isn't in a position to offer. It's not on account of stubbornness or stoicism, he's just careful about the people he surrounds himself with. Thanks to his family's support and care, war didn't especially twist him. He does suffer from night terrors in the aftermath, but he's better off than a lot of other folk were in that time, on account of his family actually being willing to discuss mental wellness and work at the emotional aspect of healing that follows the outset of conflict. ABILITIES Gene sees ghosts. There isn't a big to-do over it, no egregious hurrahs. He - and all the men of his family line, going back as far as anyone can remember - simply have. As a wartime battlefield medic, he is damn good at stabilizing patients and keeping people alive when the chips are down. Of course, he's limited by the antiquity of his time as far as procedures go, and a lot of what medic work boiled down to in the war was 'slap sulfa on the wound, dress it, throw a morphine syrette at them and haul their ass back to an aid station'. He is at best only functionally literate, having left school at a perilously young age, and most of what he learns is a matter of memory or rote rather than actual reading. He fakes it well, however, and tends not to let on how much he struggles with the written word. He's also passably fluent in French, knows enough German to get around, and could fake his way through navigating the other romance languages in a pinch. Otherwise, he's a normal baseline human, an average 5'9 male in combat ready shape (depending on canon point, haha.) No frills, no muss, no fuss. MISC He smokes Chesterfields, but he'll take Lucky Strikes in a pinch. He gambles with the boys in his platoon so he can hoard cigarettes and portion them out as needed. Nobody expects the medic to have a good poker face. His favourite movie is Wings. You're damn right he plays baseball. The Queen Mary is the ship that saw the 82nd Airborne back across the Atlantic. The USS Monterey is what ferried them across to North Africa. He's honestly a little tired of Vera Lynn.

ABOUT Gene is a medic with the 82nd Airborne Division, 3rd Brigade, 2nd Battalion in the 505th, L Company. He's a T-4, which shakes out to the NCO rank of Sergeant. After the War, he used the GI Bill to go to college and gain an education as a veterinarian. Oh yeah, and he sees ghosts. HISTORY Gene was born on January 11th, 1924 to Jesse Hicks and Victoria Leigh Dunbar in Agathine, Alabama. His childhood, even marred as it was by the Depression - which hit Alabama almost especially hard given its industries - was a happy one, and his parents were both warm and openly affectionate people. His mother was a nurse in the Great War and a teacher afterwards, and his father worked in the Bankhead Mine, a coal processing organization. His parents were polyamorous, and as a result he also had someone he called an 'aunt' named Ysobel. Several things of note happened in succession in his childhood. His mother fell ill in a time when cancer treatment wasn't advanced enough to save or even much prolong her life, and she passed shortly thereafter. Her ghost hung around, though, for several years afterwards simply to be with her family, and she was able to give them love and guidance. His father was injured in a mining incident in 1935 and was unable to provide for his family as he had before. Gene left school and got work in a slaughterhouse. The job was never a steady thing, but sort of a 'who is going to show up first and work for scraps today' type of veritable Russian Roulette, and the work itself was hard and not particularly kind to the psyche. He was lucky most days to make more than a buck fifty in a ten hour shift, though he was allowed to bring home the leavings from the slaughterhouse floor - things that consisted mostly of what was considered inedible or unsaleable. He made friends with a German lady who used to make sausages out of the odds and ends he brought home, and between the work he did and the odd jobs his father could round up, they kept their family from starvation or excessive desperation. In 1938, Gene went to New York for a carpentry apprenticeship with Ysobel's younger brother Ezra. It was here that he met Reggie Holiday, the man that would become his best friend. Reggie was a year older than him, the son of affluent doctors, and the platonic love of his life, whoops. And then Pearl Harbour happened. Gene knew instantly he was going to enlist, and he did it on the morning of his 18th birthday without so much as a by-your-leave. Long-used to making decisions independent of his family unit, he neither asked nor consulted them in doing this, something that his younger brother Albert would come to resent (and something that eventually lead to Al joining the Marines in the Pacific Theatre.) He served until the end of the War, received his honourable discharge and then went right on to the Alabama Polytechnic Institute to learn veterinarian medicine. He opens up his own clinic in Agathine and runs it with the help of his brother's wife Tabetha, who wants to be a vet herself. As far as the War itself goes, he was with the 505th right up until the end. He did his training in Casablanca, North Africa, and then on to Kairouan in Tunisia after it was liberated from the Axis. He served in most of their major engagements, beginning with Operation: Husky in Sicily. Alongside his unit, he dropped into Gela. He was also part of the advance guard that took Naples. The unit was then shipped to North Ireland for a time, where they underwent preparation for D-Day. He was right in the mud up until the Battle of the Bulge, where shortly before his 21st birthday he was hit by a treeburst during a shelling just outside of Ste. Vith. He received a wound of some severity - that merited his evacuation back to London, and two and a half weeks of convalescence there. He walks with a bit of a limp afterwards, and as not all the shrapnel could be safely removed at the time he has frequent battles with infection in the area as pieces of wood and metal work their way to the surface. Later in life, the injury will warrant the use of a cane.

BASICS NAME: Eugene Hicks CANON: Original CANON POINT: Flexible AGE: Flexible, again. I play him anywhere from 18-35. Usually on memes, he's around 21/22 and post-war unless otherwise indicated in the context of the thread. STATUS: Gene's gray-ace but panromantic. He never marries in canon. OCCUPATION: Paratrooper, and then veterinarian RESIDENCE: Agathine, Alabama AU: Totally into it. I have a modern AU with him as well, and I'm willing to throw him into other canons when and where he fits. RELATIONS FATHER: Jesse William Hicks, 1903-1948. Was a miner until he broke his back in an accident, works as a medical assistant in the years that follow. MOTHER: Victoria Leigh Dunbar, 1899-1933. A suffragette from New York, she was a nurse in WW1 and moved to Agathine, Alabama because it was the hometown of a friend of hers that died in the war. She met Jesse Hicks in 1922 and they married the following year after a rather gentle courtship. She became a school teacher during this time, and never spoke about her time as a nurse save with Jesse and her lover Ysobel (#polyamory). SIBLINGS:   Albert Hicks, 1925-1994. Al is the most vitriolic and stubborn of Gene's siblings, he's got a bit of a mean streak when it isn't being tempered by those around him. He joined the Marines in 1943 and fought in the Pacific Theatre. He married Tabetha Connoly from San Diego (born 1927) and they have three daughters together. (Billie, born 1946, Lula Anne and Janet, both born in 1951)   Johnathan Hicks, 1927-1967. John is the thinker of the siblings, the one that's logical and rational and everyone's metaphorical 'rock'. He becomes an engineer and spends most of his time overseas, working to rebuild Europe after the War.   Robert Hicks, 1930-2018. Rob is far and away the dreamer of the group. Artistic, playful, exceptionally flirtatious while being genuinely sweet about it, he is usually everyone's favourite. He goes on to be a mechanic, though he plays instruments and sings on the side. He marries three times in his life, somehow manages to stay friends with all his exes and has four children, three girls and one boy. BEST FRIEND: Reginald Holiday, 1923-1943. Reggie was originally from England, the son two doctors. Both were educated overseas and came to America to start their professional careers, and both made a decent life for themselves. Reggie and Gene met while Gene was doing a carpentry apprenticeship in New York when Gene was fourteen and Reggie a little older. They became fast friends. After his parents died in a car accident, Reggie spent several months staying with Gene's family in Agathine while the estate was sorted out, and then he went back overseas to live with his grandfather. Reggie ended up getting involved in the SOE during the war, and was executed as a spy in September of 1943. His ghost sought Gene out to warn him, and to ask him to pass on the sensitive information he'd learned. This later leads to another SOE Agent realizing that Gene can speak with the dead.

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