I KNOW I KNOW, it's a lot of updates for one day, but I need to be able to update tomorrow along with the finale and have a fitting chapter that you guys can read haha!
April 1944
If Kathryn Egan thought that her time on the base had been horrific in any way, shape, or form—she had been dead wrong. Arriving in France shortly after 3600 tons of bombs had been dropped between France, Germany, and Belgium was unlike anything she had ever seen before. It was horrific .
Riding down the street in a Red-Cross cart, Kathryn had to force Annika not to look outside. After Kathryn had so kindly been relieved of her duties at Thorpe Abbot, Annika had volunteered to follow her to her next assignment. Something about needing to stick together and how she didn't want Kathryn to be alone right now.
But Kathryn was doing fine. That is, she felt as though she were doing fine. In the few weeks she'd had since leaving Thorpe Abbots and being reassigned, this was probably the most sober she'd been since October. That was a startling realization, but not one that she was altogether quite ready to address yet. It wasn't a problem if she didn't start drinking here. And how hard could that be?
Relief missions were the worst for her—though she knew that Annika's tender heart was probably faring much more worse than her own sensibilities were. Everywhere she looked, there were soldiers. This was just the portion that they had taken of France. And though it was small, it had been hit hard in the blasts delivered by the Royal Air Force.
Bodies littered the streets and crying was such a normal sound in the background, it was just background noise to her at this point. Kathryn didn't know how to handle the crying anymore. Didn't know how to tell these people that everything they were doing was so that this damned war could end—but that didn't justify the fact that so many innocent people had been killed.
She wondered, silently, if the nurses in this war would come out of the whole thing with more blood on their hands than anyone else's. It made sense, in quite a literal way. It was the nurses who held the hands of men who slipped from this life. It was the nurses who worked on children and people caught in the air raids—and had to just keep going. Had to just keep doing their jobs.
Kathryn adjusted her knees, gaze falling on the other two nurses in the cart. Rhoda Laurens was a striking woman, and older than most of the nurses that Kathryn knew. Rhoda's husband was a member of the Royal Air Force and she had left her three children in the care of her sister as she joined the ranks of nurses willing to help in the field. Kathryn wasn't quite sure how Rhoda could handle it all. It would be awful having to leave children in the middle of all of this.
Rhoda tended to have a mothering attitude, and though they'd only been together for two days—Kathryn already knew that Rhoda was the undisputed leader of their little troupe. Next to her was Inez Dickson. Both were British natives, and Inez was from the countryside. She had initially wanted to be a midwife before all of this, but the war had called for her hands to be put to other uses—namely as a nurse in the war.
They were both rather quiet, not that Kathryn minded the silence all that much. Still, it was strange to not have Poppy chattering her ear off about her latest conquest or interest. It was strange not to have Laura's quiet and steady presence next to her, always encouraging her to keep going. And it was even strange not having Barbara to give her a look of exasperation.
It felt as though the girl that Kathryn had been when she arrived in London was long gone. That girl had been wide-eyed, with delusions of grandeur and making it through the heart with a whole heart. She hadn't kept her heart though. The pain hadn't made her stronger, it had just made her colder. And it had taken her heart from her. It was just an aching, gaping—hollow in her chest now.
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Kathryn found herself struggling to readjust back into the rhythm of things. She understood what Rosie meant—about going away after being on a roll. It threw things off. And it wasn't just because she was sober and had full mental faculty. Maybe that was a part of it—the horror here was just a little jarring in ways that it hadn't been before.
Before, Kathryn hadn't been working on civilians. She had been working on pilots. Men who knew what they were doing when they were going up in those planes. They knew that the planes were barrels for them to be shot in, like fish. They knew that they could burn up or freeze and lose limbs or life.
Before, Kathryn didn't have to work on children who were covered in burns. She didn't have to hold a little girl, burnt beyond recognition and clinging to life. She didn't have to pretend that more medicine was on its way. And she certainly didn't have to hold that little girl in her lap and sing to her a song, barely able to get the words out.
She hadn't ever cried over a patient until that little girl slipped from this world and was taken to rest under a sheet—next to so many other bodies. Kathryn had never broken down like that, words unable to be formed. Kathryn had never collapsed onto the ground, blood coating her hands and unable to even get a breath in.
Later, she'd attribute it to the panic of being sober. The panic of not knowing what to do with her thoughts. Because before, she had been drunk and she had been drinking and it had distracted her. It had numbed the reality and the horror of the deaths that she had seen and it had made things seem far away. As if there was some sort of wall of reality that separated her from the cold and harsh truth of life.
She didn't have that now.
Now she was just on her own.
Annika had held it together better than she had. And it made her feel like she was just a weak little girl. Like she needed someone to hold her hand and make her feel better. She hated that feeling . Felt it creeping up her chest like some sort of weed that was choking her out and stealing away her breath.
It was as if she could hear her brother's tone of voice. Just a kid. Grow up. This is war. People die.
The next time that Kathryn worked on a child, she didn't shed tears. She just moved on as quickly as she could. Because at the moment, all she could do was to repeat the motions and try not to think about it.
She didn't sleep in France. The sounds of people crying in the streets lingered like some sort of ghost. Like when the bombs had hit, these people had been frozen in the moment and could not escape. She wondered how people lived like this—how anyone could realistically get through this.
This was not Thorpe Abbot. She had been horribly spoiled being on that base, away from the action. Away from the real cost of the war. And maybe her brother knew that about her. Maybe Bucky had seen what she hadn't been able to see—that if she had been out here with the other members of the Red Cross or the other nurses, she would have been broken beyond repair and there would be no way to fix it.
Maybe when he pulled strings to make sure that she ended up at the same air base, it was his way of trying to protect her. And maybe in some way, she should have been grateful that he was thinking about that at all. She certainly hadn't been thinking about it at the time. But all Kathryn felt towards her brother was resentment .
It made her sick to think about the fact that she had been there. Hidden away, innocence and naivety preserved. She didn't deserve that—in the same way that these people didn't deserve to be caught in the crossfire of a war much larger than anyone else. It was masochism. She knew that this sudden fascination with staying out on the front wasn't healthy.
Wasn't normal .
But why should she get to be safe and happy on a base when her brother and Buck were out there in some damn Stalag? Why should she get to have reassurances and the knowledge that she'd get to go home when they didn't have that?
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"Makes you miss Thorpe Abbot, doesn't it?" Annika questioned, picking at her rations as she glanced out of the field hospital.
For a moment, Kathryn was just silent. "I don't miss it."
Annika swallowed dryly, gaze flickering up to look at Kathryn Egan. She hadn't been the same since Buck Cleven had gone down—and everyone who knew her knew that. Still, she should be glad that Kathryn didn't have a flask in hand and wasn't drinking herself half-to-death out here. It was a simple and tender mercy, but one that she'd take.
"Yes you do."
"No," Kathryn grit the words out, picking at her food. "I want to be out here."
"That's bullshit," Annika's normally dulcet and sweet tone had shifted to one of irritance. "You don't want to be out here!"
"We're doing more out here, Ani," Kathryn said simply—as if that somehow explained everything.
"What about our friends?"
"What about them? They're fine. We're the ones out here."
"Exactly," Annika let out a huff of air, blowing at a stray strand of hair that had flown from her cap. "It's like you don't even care that we're out here. They're bombing the cities and we could die!"
Kathryn said nothing. Because what was she supposed to say to that? Say that she felt, in some small way, that she deserved it more than these children? That it should be her suffering out here. But Kathryn Egan couldn't say that. Instead, she squared her shoulders and she let the cowardice show.
"I didn't ask you to follow me out here, Annika."
"No, you sure as hell didn't." Annika snapped. "But I'm out here because I care about you! But you don't care about anything anymore, do you?"
A beat of silence.
Annika just shoved her food down onto the table, a sick feeling rising in her stomach. "You don't feel anything, do you?"
Silence.
"No, I don't."
Dear Buck (and Bucky),
I'm not sure when this letter will reach you. I hope it reaches you before the spring. In March, I was transferred off of Thorpe Abbot. I won't be able to tell you where I'm going and this will likely be my last letter for a long time—I don't expect I'll be able to do much writing where I'm going.
I want you to know that you're in my thoughts every single day. That I wait for you to both come home. That I'm praying for this war to end so I can see you both. And that while I don't know what the future holds, I still, very much, believe in both of you.
So please, for the love of God, don't prove me wrong.
Please keep going. Keep living and breathing, keep working hard each day to remember why you're there, to remember why you were fighting in the first place.
All my love,
Kathryn