"I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness." - Angela Carter, The Lady of the House of Love
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As soon as Juliette arrived back at the airfield the following day she could already tell that nerves were running high. Everyone knew there would be no more postponing. As Colonel Sink had said in his letter to the regiment, tonight was the 'night of nights'.
After all of the preparations everyone had made the previous day under the impression that they would already be in Normandy by now, there was little to do apart from sit around and wait. Where the paratroopers were concerned, they still had to gather and attach all of their equipment to themselves again, and even though Juliette had seen them do it the previous day it still seemed like an impossible task seeing it all laid out before each of them. She was glad she didn't have to jump with all of that; she wouldn't be able to stand.
Thomas drove them all straight to where he recalled Easy Company being stationed, and she grinned when she saw the familiar faces. Toye looked to be just as happy as he was yesterday about having to carry their bucket loads of equipment.
"Boys," she greeted them when she hopped out of the jeep.
Bill squinted his eyes as he watched them all approach. "Where the fuck have you been?"
"Well, unlike you poor, unfortunate souls, we have a house and beds," Tom replied easily, shooting him a smirk. "Have fun spending the night in a tent?"
"Again," Malarkey muttered. Bill merely rolled his eyes.
The boys were all alight with jitters. Jules approached George where she saw him repeatedly counting his equipment.
"Ready to invade Fortress Europe?" she asked him, smiling.
He jolted in place before looking up at her, falling back into his easy smile when he saw who it was. "Born ready," he told her with a grin. "Are you?"
She patted him on the shoulder before taking a seat beside him. "Not my first rodeo, my friend."
Before he could ask, she added, "By the way, I've been meaning to ask you. How did that date with Mary-the-barmaid go? Was there a sequel?"
George stared at her for a moment, not seeming to recognise the name (which wasn't a good sign) before his mouth fell open in realisation. "Oh! Damn, you really have been gone a while." Jules shrugged before he continued. "We went out twice but, eh, I don't know. We didn't really click. Not like me and you, anyway." He nudged her with a wink and she rolled her eyes. "But then I met Mabel."
"Mabel?" Juliette echoed, intrigued.
"Mabel," he repeated with a nod. "Blonde. Works at the tailor's. Smokin' hot."
"Scale of one to ten?" she asked.
He grinned again. "Fourteen."
Jules whistled.
"Anyway, we went on three dates before her boyfriend came back. And then I met Amelia."
George continued to rattle off his many dates with many different girls and Jules listened intently with an amused grin. George seemed to be more in love with the idea of love than he was with any of the girls he went out with, but he was all excitement at the mention of each and every one of them - plus, he had obviously taken care to remember each name, which was sweet. Regardless, the female population of Aldbourne and all of the neighbouring towns the paratroopers had visited on their weekend passes (mainly Swindon, but apparently they had been to London a few times) didn't seem to mind. He had had rather a lot of successes, regardless, because he was talking for about ten minutes straight.
Eventually, he finished his monologue. "What about you?" He wiggled his eyebrows at her suggestively. "Any boys I should know about? Anyone I need to fight? Anyone I need to compete with?"
Juliette laughed. "My heart belongs to you, George," she told him with a dramatised whimsical sigh. "No competition."
"None at all?" he asked, narrow-eyed and suspicious. "I don't believe you."
There had, she supposed, been one. Just one. And she remembered the feeling of his lips vividly, even though the kiss had lasted mere seconds. But that was a painful memory, and a personal one, too. She hadn't even told Thomas what happened between her and Alex, and she didn't know if she ever would. Really, she thought, there wasn't so much to tell.
"One boy," she told him finally, and surprised herself with the confession. "But he's..." She couldn't even say it.
"What? He's a bastard?"
"No!" she exclaimed, perhaps rather a bit too passionately. "He was a dear friend of mine. He's gone now, is all."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry," George offered quietly. He clearly didn't quite know what to do with himself, or what to make of the statement. 'Gone' could mean a great many things, but she'd left it ambiguous intentionally.
Juliette shrugged. "It's okay. He was too good for me anyway."
Jules caught sight of Gene, who she hadn't seen at all the previous day, a little while later. She watched him from afar for a few moments, trying to gauge his countenance. Eventually she decided that he could use some cheering up. She left George and approached the medic from behind, tapping him on the shoulder and laughing when he jumped.
"Gene," she greeted, as had become tradition for her to do.
He gave her a small smile, and even in that she could see his nerves. Still, she chose not to mention it - each of the Americans were buzzing with anxiety, and in her experience the best way to handle it was to forget it even existed.
"Tom'll no doubt come looking for me in a bit to do his paint. You don't mind if I hide with you, do you?"
He chuckled lightly and shook his head. "Uh, no, you're fine."
Jules grinned and settled herself on the floor cross-legged, watching as he paused a moment before doing the same.
"What's your favourite colour?" she asked him, watching his face carefully as he formulated his response.
"Blue," he replied simply.
"What shade of blue?"
"Light blue. Like the sky."
Jules looked up and smiled into the sunlight. She realised then that she'd been wrong yesterday; the weather had indeed cleared. And just in time for D-Day (mark two). "Sky blue," she commented, nodding. "I saw a painting that colour once. In Paris. Well, I saw a few, really, but there was one that was really special. And the room wasn't very well lit, either, so everything glowed in the way where you kind of feel special for being able to look at it - like you're being let in on a secret or something." She glanced at him once when she spoke, though her mind was back in the Dancers' Foyer of the Paris Opera House. "Ever since, I've liked that colour a lot, too."
"What's your favourite?" he asked.
She didn't even hesitate. "Yellow." She smiled as she watched his eyebrows quirk a little bit. "It was my mum's favourite colour," she explained, letting the nostalgia wash over her. "And once upon a time I used to think that nothing could ever go too badly wrong if there was a little bit of yellow about, because it's such a happy colour."
"You don't think that anymore?" he wondered.
Juliette looked back at him and gave a half-shrug. "Some things are a bit too horrible to be cured so easily. But I still think it's nice."
She fiddled with the sleeve of her paratrooper ODs as she thought up more ways to distract him from his nerves, though when she opened her mouth to speak he beat her to it.
"Can I ask you somethin'?"
Jules shot him a grin. "Maybe."
A smile tugged at his lips but it faded quickly. "Are you scared?"
"Of the jump tonight?" she asked. He nodded. She contemplated how to answer this; on the one hand, she didn't want to seem smug that she really wasn't, or make him feel silly that he was (because she could see that he was, just like all of the others). But on the other hand, she wanted to be honest with him. He had always been honest with her.
"No," she said finally, the word emerging quiet and soft. She sent him a smile. "But I've jumped into enemy territory more times than I can count. My first time, though, I was terrified."
"Yeah?" he asked. Suddenly, that small smile was back.
"Oh, big time," she replied, laughing a little bit. "There were six of us back then, and we were all fresh out of training. Freshly put together, too, so we didn't really know each other very well. Tom and I did, because we trained together, but the others were practically strangers. And we'd met maybe once and all of a sudden we were in this aeroplane about to jump into occupied France. I sat in the plane and cried, I was so scared. I'd jumped out of a plane before, but this was different, because when I hit the ground I knew it was important. No mistakes this time, right?"
Gene nodded along, letting her know he was following her.
"When I hit the ground I crashed into it hard, because I let myself get so worked up I forgot my training. It hurt so much, but we had to keep moving. And the whole thing was such an ordeal - it was a baptism of fire of a mission. But when we jumped back into England, it was the best feeling in the world. I cried again afterwards, though. Mainly because I really didn't want to do it again. But you get used to it."
"How long ago was it?"
"That was in '39," she told him. "Right before the outbreak of war. I was..." She counted on her fingers. "Seventeen." Gene's jaw fell open and she giggled. "No minimum age to be a spy." Then she smiled again. "Anyway, you're supposed to be scared your first time. Even though you've probably done about a million practise jumps, it's different. If you're not scared you've got a problem, really, because it means you don't really understand what you're doing."
Jules didn't know if any of what she was saying was making him feel better, but she hoped that it was. When she looked to him once more she found him deep in thought, and she knew he was thinking hard on what he was about to do. But Juliette had launched herself into enemy territory enough times and in enough different ways that she felt she had experienced every single type of anxiety in existence, and prided herself on being able to identify them in other people. She hoped this final tactic would work for him.
"Hey, Gene?" she called quietly, breaking him out of his train of thought.
"Hm?" he answered, looking back at her.
"What's your biggest fear in the entire world? Not just right now, but always?"
He didn't even hesitate. "My family gettin' hurt." She smiled a little bit; she'd been expecting something along those lines.
"Well, you know what?" she told him, leaning closer as if she was sharing a secret. "There's no risk of that happening here."
He let her words sink in, mulling them over in his head. She was dutifully watching the other paratroopers when he looked up at her again.
"Yeah," was all he said, and Jules smiled to herself. She didn't know whether it had worked or not, but she was hopeful that it might have.
As her eyes were scanning the crowd of paratroopers all sitting on the concrete of the airfield, suddenly she sighed. "Tom's got the paint again."
"He seen you yet?"
She shook her head. "Don't think so. Oh - wait. Spoke too soon."
"Jules!" Tom shouted at her. Juliette sighed, but she was smiling.
"Tom!" she called back with equal enthusiasm.
"There's my favourite artiste," he commented as he came over. "Can I request a commission?"
"How much will you pay me?"
He rolled his eyes. "I'll pay you in not assigning you all the shitty jobs next mission."
"I'm always undercover. I get the shitty jobs anyway."
He grinned. "Pity." Then he threw a glance back over his shoulder. "I've already done Will and Martin - and yes, before you ask, they do look beautiful - but with a face like this I thought I'd better ask a professional."
She hummed her agreement. "Only the very best of the best can improve a face like that." She heard Gene chuckle and shot him a grin.
Thomas scowled. "Ha ha." Then he threw himself down on the floor in front of her and leaned in until his face was within her reach. "Paint."
"Yes, sir," she replied. She took the tin out of his hands and began to smear it across his face.
After a moment, she sat back and grinned. "I've made you a cat."
"Jules!"
"Fine!" She huffed and messed up her work, taking to smudging the black everywhere until he was covered in it. "Right, you're finished. Au revoir."
Tom rolled his eyes. "Je te laisse avec ton petit ami, dois-je?" I'll leave you with your boyfriend, shall I?
Jules glared. "He understands French, Thomas."
Tom grinned rakishly. "C'est embarrassant." Yes, she thought, it is.
"Adieu," he bid them. The white of his teeth was glaring against his blackened face when he smiled. Then he turned and disappeared back in the direction he'd come from.
Juliette rolled her eyes and desperately tried to bid the red in her cheeks to dull. She tried to take deep breaths as quietly as she could, hoping to neutralise the colour in her face. Eventually, she turned to Gene, hoping to God she had been successful. "Paint?"
He shrugged, so she got to work smearing it across his pale skin.
"You're an artist?" he asked after a little while.
She laughed quietly to herself, focusing mostly on not getting the grease in his hair. "I wanted to be. I used to paint a lot, but there's no time for it now. Besides, I haven't really had the inspiration. I wouldn't know what to paint."
Gene nodded to himself. Now it made sense, how she had talked at such length about colour. She had an artist's eye.
After she had finished Gene took the paint off of her, and just as he was about to start applying it she smiled suddenly. "Draw a butterfly."
He shook his head at her but she could feel him doing it, his pointer finger smearing the paint in curved lines across her cheek. When he'd finished he chuckled to himself, and she grinned. "How does it look?"
"Beautiful," he said. She laughed.
He set to work smearing the butterfly into oblivion then, before smudging the black across the entirety of her face. When he was done he capped the tin and handed it off to a soldier who had been waiting for it.
That was when a man who also had a medic's patch on his bicep approached, and gave Gene what he announced as 'air sickness pills' which Gene was to delegate to the platoons - one before takeoff and one thirty minutes in the air, he was told.
When the man left, Gene looked down at the pills and back up to Juliette. She laughed, understanding what he was thinking. "I'm all good," she told him with a smile. "Save them for the others. A few of your boys are already looking a bit green."
When Gene looked past her to the other paratroopers, Jules looked down at her hands and made a face at all the black that was smeared across them. When she tried to wipe them on her trousers, her sleeves fell down. She huffed. "You lot have such long arms," she muttered, pushing them right back up again.
Gene glanced back at her and shook his head with a small smile. He put the pills in his pocket and gently took ahold of her arm, pulling the sleeve back down and beginning to roll the fabric up for her. Juliette watched with wide-eyed fascination as he folded the sleeve all the way up until it rested just above her wrist, returned the arm back to her side, and then picked up the other one. She smiled to herself as she watched him do the same again.
Once he was finished, Juliette held up both of her arms and grinned, as though she was showing off his handiwork to him. "They're perfect," she declared, wondering why she hadn't thought to do that herself.
Gene smiled. He took the air sickness pills back out of his pocket and she knew he was about to leave to begin handing them out. Suddenly the warmth that had filled her left, and she frowned slightly. He opened his mouth to talk just as she threw her arms around his neck and rested her forehead on his shoulder.
He hugged her back and when they pulled apart she offered him a shy smile.
"Remember, it's okay to be scared," she told him, holding onto one of his hands with both of hers. "If you don't cry you're already braver than I was on my first time."
Gene nodded, his smile slightly broader than his usual ones. "I'll tell ya if I do."
This made her laugh. "Good. I'll be waiting to find out."
Juliette gave his hand a squeeze and reluctantly let him go, turning and watching as he gave the paratrooper closest to them his air sickness pills and recited when to take them. Beyond the soldier she caught Will's eye, and weaved her way through the masses of soldiers sitting on the floor until she reached him.
"They look really scared," Will commented quietly when she stood beside him. His eyes were on the paratroopers.
Jules had a small smile tugging at her lips. "Yeah. But so were we, once."