Timeless

Chapter 20

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.