The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

Bonus Chapter: What Happened Next?

"Always always?" Charlie asked.

"Always always," Floyd confirmed. "For as long as you want me."

"What if I want you forever?"

"Then you'll have me forever."

Charlie grinned. Floyd might have known, for he pulled away from their hug right then and looked straight at her face, as though seeking out her smile, and grinned himself when he found it.

They couldn't seem to stay away from each other after that.

Charlie would dedicate any weekend she wasn't snowed under with schoolwork to making the trek to Alexandria, Indiana, just to see him for a day or two before she marched herself right back down to school again. Floyd would take any job that saw him travelling to California and monopolise whatever time he could to travel to Stanford, even just to see Charlie for an hour. He would take odd Mondays and Fridays off of work to come and see her, would pretend to be sick to stay longer, would have to clutch his chest in an attempt to ease the ache in his heart whenever he had to leave to head back home.

He surprised Charlie with a visit when he could tell, from the sound of her voice over the telephone, that she was having a hard time. Exams were coming up, she said, and she didn't like the books her professors were making her study and everyone else seemed to understand the texts better than she did and, above all else, she was so tired all the time she wanted to sob. But she explained everything breezily, nonchalantly, as if it wasn't all that important, and it was the faked light and airy tone of her voice which worried him more than anything. She'd never felt the need to fake anything with him before.

He waited across the street from her dorm building as he always did. At some point in the three months he'd been visiting a bench had appeared on this patch of grass, and he liked to think someone had noticed him and put it there just for his use. (Unbeknownst to him, Charlie's parents had paid her a visit not long after one of Floyd's and she'd told them about how he always waited for her over there. The following week, the bench had appeared and Charlie had spent all day reading on it.)

Floyd wondered about the flowers he'd brought while he waited on the bench. Charlie's favourite flowers were pink roses, but she loved when he got her red roses because they were classically romantic. Today, he'd brought yellow, in the hopes the happy colour might cheer her up, but now he was second guessing himself. Maybe he should have just gotten pink - if they were her favourite, surely they'd cheer her up better than any other colour. Or maybe red, since they always made her blush. Or maybe he shouldn't have gotten roses. He always got her roses. Probably, she was so deathly bored of roses she would cry just at the sight of them.

And she did. Cry at the sight of them, that is. But not out of boredom.

"Fuck," Floyd muttered when she crossed the street to him in floods of tears, his cheeks burning with embarrassment. He hastily put the bouquet of yellow roses back down on the bench and stepped in front of them in an attempt to hide them. "I'll get different ones," he blurted when Charlie was almost in front of him. "Whatever you want. Lilies or daisies or sunflowers or whatever you -"

"They're so beautiful," Charlie lamented as she threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. "No one's ever gotten me yellow roses before and I love them so much."

Floyd's frown at her tears only deepened along with his confusion. "Freckles," he cooed softly, stroking her hair, "why are you crying, angel?"

"Everything's -" A hiccup interrupted her sentence. "- so horrible. Everything's all wrong."

"What's wrong?"

Charlie, her voice muffled where her face was still buried in his shirt, began to list off reasons why everything was all wrong: she'd gotten a bad grade on her last test and the next one was next week, she hated the books she had to read, there was a boy in her class who wouldn't leave her alone and a girl who hated her guts for no reason, one of her professors reminded her of Lieutenant Dike, and - and this was the biggest reason, evidenced by how she all but screamed it out - Floyd didn't live close to her.