"Dear March - Come in -
How glad I am -
I hoped for you before -
Put down your Hat -
You must have walked -
How out of Breath you are -
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest -
Did you leave Nature well -
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me -
I have so much to tell -"
- Emily Dickinson, To March
-
"Jules?" Thomas called, knocking on her open bedroom door.
Juliette closed her book and looked up at him in the doorway, tilting her head to the side as she waited for him to speak.
Tom had his arms crossed loosely over his chest, one shoulder elevated from where he was leaning on the door frame. He wore a half smile. "Today's the day, Jules."
Jules laughed once, placing her book on her bedside table and leaving her hand resting there for a moment. "Did you manage to work out when he's most likely to be there?" she inquired, looking back to Tom curiously.
He nodded. "From what I can gather from the medic rotation they'll have him on inventory from 1700 to estimated 1830. Will you be alright sneaking in?"
"I'll just go through the fields. I'll have to leave early to make sure I'm there in time but the supply tent is on the edge of everything so it shouldn't be too hard. What are the yanks up to today?"
"Lectures, I think," Tom told her, smiling reassuringly. "The fields'll be empty, at any rate. They're beginning to train them in tactics on the ground - crickets, code words, things like that. My guess is it won't be long before they find out about the Normandy Invasion."
Jules smiled ruefully. "I feel sorry for them, really. They have no idea what's coming."
Tom laughed a little bit. "That was us, once."
"Excited and naïve," she agreed with a small giggle.
"And scared," Tom added.
"Terrified. But still so enthusiastic."
Tom laughed, in earnest this time. "We truly did have a death wish back then."
Jules shook her head, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. She shrugged one shoulder. "We had no idea what we were getting into, really."
Sighing out his nostalgia, Tom crossed the room to the window. "God, how things have changed since then." He paused, fiddling with the sheer curtain covering the window before looking back at Juliette over his shoulder. "Do you remember our first mission?"
"Vividly," she told him. They'd never spoken of it, but she knew it still haunted him, too. "Baptism of fire, that one."
"Oh, yeah," Tom laughed, looking back outside. More to himself than her, he muttered, "God, we had no idea."
A silence fell upon them, and Juliette merely watched him for a while as he gazed out across the fields of Aldbourne. Eventually, she asked, "Would you still say yes? If you were back in that moment, when they pulled you aside and asked you if you wanted to train for a promotion, and you'd experienced everything you've experienced now. Would you still agree?"
Tom hesitated, and Jules realised that she felt conflicted about her answer, too; it had been an awfully long war for them, and an awfully tough one too. But would she take it back?
"I don't know," he replied after a long while of contemplation. He turned back to Jules and watched her for a moment before glancing at the bed sheets pooled around her. "Would you?"
Jules shrugged, a regretful smile playing on her lips. "I don't know."
She left the house in plenty of time to make her way through the fields on the outskirts of the village, taking the scenic route to what she had deemed the Americans' side of town. It didn't take her as long as expected, likely because she had been deep in thought for the majority of her journey and that made her walk faster. With the time she had to spare, she sat behind a tree a little ways away from the strip of pavement that she would have to cross in order to get to the army medical supply tent. She was content to just sit there for a while, and wait.
When five o'clock hit she made her way briskly across that strip of pavement and pressed her back to the wall of a nearby building as she skirted around it. She held back as she watched whoever had been assigned to the tent for the previous shift leave. As soon as the medic was out of sight she snuck in and tried to position herself strategically; she needed to stand somewhere that wouldn't be visible to any passersby, but also wouldn't give Gene a heart attack when he came in.
In the end she resolved to perch atop the table she always used to sit on when she had watched Gene take inventory before. It was strange to be back, not merely in the tent but in Aldbourne; she had already been back for two weeks but this was the first time she had actually ventured out of doors. From Gene's perspective, she would have been gone for just over three whole months. She wondered briefly whether he thought all of them were dead, but didn't allow the thought to progress much further. One of them was.
She took to fiddling absentmindedly with the skirt of her dress, rolling the fabric between her fingers and contemplating Gene's lack of punctuality - had he been held up in a lecture that had overrun, or was an entirely different medic about to march through the entrance to the tent and create a whole lot of trouble for her? She worried at her lip without realising she was doing it.
Then she heard a sharp gasp. "Penny?"
"Gene!" she exclaimed, jumping off of the table and straight into his arms.
He stumbled back a bit with the force and didn't react for a few moments out of shock, but she soon heard his low chuckle. He hugged her back. "Hey, chérie," he greeted, and she could hear the smile in his voice. That smile she had imagined so many times over it was almost as though she was seeing it; that small, bashful tug of the lips. "You've been gone a while."
Jules nodded into his shoulder, letting out a small sigh. "Yeah. I didn't think we'd be coming back if I'm honest."
She stepped back from his embrace and watched as he ducked his head, still smiling but more reservedly with her eyes on him. "Well, I'm, uh, glad you did."
She smiled brightly. "Me too."
When he paused she hopped back up on the table, which made him breathe out a laugh, so he set to work on the inventory, just like old times. Jules felt that it must have been very bizarre for him, to be seeing her again - almost like seeing a ghost, perhaps.
"So," he began after a moment of checking bandages, "how have you been?" What he really meant was 'what the hell happened?' and Jules smiled just a little bit.
"Oh, you know, just -" she began, searching for words to encompass what had transpired since she'd last seen him. But she was struggling, because there was so much she couldn't tell him, and so much she wanted to. "You know what?" she resolved to say, shrugging her shoulders even though his back was turned. "I've been better."
Gene looked over his shoulder at her, and his eyes were sad; not sympathetic, necessarily, but sad. "'M sorry to hear that."
Jules smiled earnestly, because she knew he meant it. "I missed you," she said by way of reply. She grinned when he ducked his face from her line of sight.
"You did?" he asked.
She chuckled to herself. "Of course," she replied as though it should have been obvious because to her, at least, it was. It had always been a habit of hers to miss people dearly, regardless of how long she'd known them, and she'd certainly known Gene longer than most people she had come across during the war. She hadn't really even admitted to herself how sorely she'd missed him until she'd seen him again. There was something about that smile, she thought, that felt like home. And there was something about those clear blue eyes. When she had first looked into them again upon his entrance into the tent she had felt unexplainably warm, and that warmth had yet to leave her.
Juliette thought she could see Gene smile a little bit, taking a guess based on the subtle lift of his shoulders and shake of his head that tended to accompany his smiles. He didn't turn back to look at her. "I missed you too, chérie."
There was a short pause, the only sounds being the rustling of the plastic packaging on the bandages as Gene counted them and checked they were still sealed.
"I like when you call me that," Juliette said eventually, not really filtering the words. She was looking up at the top of the tent and trying to work out how it didn't seem to waver under the near constant stream of rain England tended to get in the winter months. It was March now, and she had missed the majority of the British winter entirely, as she tended to since being an agent, but she knew that that part of England would never change.
"'Cause it's French?" Gene wondered. He remembered what she had said the very first time he had ever called her that, back when he had been removing grenade shrapnel from her stomach as she writhed around on a kitchen table. "Feels like home, huh?"
Jules smiled. She didn't remember saying that, likely due to the morphine, but Alex had asked her about it since. He had asked her whether she wanted him to speak French with her more often, but she had said no, because it would feel artificial. She wondered whether she should have just said yes.
"Makes me feel safe," she agreed, a tiny smile tugging at her lips before she shook her head, as though dismissing all thoughts of nostalgia. "Anyway," she began, straightening up where she sat, "regretfully, I have a favour to ask you."
"Hm?" Gene prompted, glancing back at her once to demonstrate that he was listening before resuming his work.
"Officially, I'm not here," she confided, speaking matter-of-factly. "See, we weren't supposed to be gone for so long, and now that we're back we have a problem in that there's basically no way for us to explain to the others why we all just up and disappeared for three months."
Gene nodded. "I see how that could be an problem."
"So," Jules continued, having to force the words out against her will - she really hated asking for favours, "that would mean we would have a supremely difficult time of leaving the house to get, say, groceries, or post, so on and so forth..."
Gene chucked under his breath and glanced back at her. "So you want me to do it?"
"I'm really, really sorry to have to ask!" she burst out, and she really did look incredibly regretful. "I wouldn't ask if there was any alternative, but you're the only one who knows and there really isn't any other way. Plus, it would likely only be a temporary thing until we can work out what to say. Maybe, say, once or twice?" She was lying through her teeth, there, but that was what she was best at; lies seemed to spill out of her automatically when she didn't know what else to say. It couldn't be helped.
"Alright," Gene told her by way of agreement.
She sighed out her relief loudly. "Oh, Gene, you're a godsend! An angel!" she exclaimed. She wished she could offer him something in return but her hands were positively empty, both physically and metaphorically. "Thank you so much! We'll give you everything you need, of course - money, et cetera. You'll be like a courier of sorts."
Gene laughed quietly. "It's not a problem."
Jules smiled broadly at the back of his head. "You really are doing us such a massive favour. Is there any way we might pay you back?"
He brushed her away. "No, I told ya, it really ain't a problem. I don't mind."
She rolled her eyes at his insistence on not being repaid. "Well, think about it, at any rate. And if you come up with something and we're able to do it or get it for you, we will." Gene went to protest and she laughed. "Just think about it!"
"Alright! I'll think about it!"
"Good." She smiled proudly in her victory.
Jules knew she had to be getting back soon otherwise she'd be risking running into some of the other paratroopers, and then all of it would have been for nothing. But just as she was about to bid him goodbye, a thought popped into her head. "Oh! Did you have a good Christmas, by the way?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was nice." He faltered in his organising and turned to face her where he sat, dropping the bandage he was holding. "How was yours?"
Jules shrugged a little bit, thinking back on the conversation she'd had with Alex in the forest just outside of Bordeaux. "It was spent in good company," she told him, and offered up little else.
Juliette bid Gene goodbye a small while later, telling him once more how glad she was to see him and thanking him profusely for his willingness to help them out. Gene watched her retreat through the opening in the tent, thinking about how much duller her smiles seemed to be now. They still appeared just as often, which he was sure was just a habit of hers - something she did without thinking - but there was something sad flitting in her eyes now. He wondered what had happened in the three months she'd been gone, and whether that brightness he had come to associate with her would ever return.