Half Sick of Shadows » Band of Brothers [2]

14: The Last Dream

"I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul." - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

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Tom returned to England via a supply plane and, presumably, was sent either to HQ or just a very secret hospital. Juliette never found out, because it never came up and she never really thought to ask. All that mattered, really, was that he ended up safe and back on home turf. That was one less person to worry about.

In his wake, she was left to be the team commanding officer. Utterly terrifying. When Will had to take down their first set of morse code orders under her command she felt sick to her stomach. She would have to be the one to decide what to do with the information they were given, and how was she supposed to know she was making the right call? So many lives in her hands, and lives she cared about, too. Again, utterly terrifying.

Their orders told them to stick with the company of paratroopers and help them penetrate further into France, using whatever methods they saw fit. This meant generally travelling at either the front or the back of the group and taking reconnaissance or taking out telephone lines that were bound to be in use by the Germans. It was the easiest work they'd had in years, and so incredibly low-stakes it was almost unbelievable.

They travelled for multiple days, sleeping in foxholes and sending out patrols and setting up here and there and everywhere. In the entirety of that time Juliette avoided Gene like the plague. She knew it was rather horrible of her, but it hadn't been terribly hard. Really she avoided bumping into him because she didn't know what she'd say. She rather regretted what she'd said to him in that field; she had let herself be vulnerable, and she had had to square things with herself that she had tried to deny and ignore.

She had had to square with herself that she had decided she could love Alex in a romantic way, and then he'd died and she'd gone back to Aldbourne and all it took was one look at Eugene Roe and it was like Alex had never even kissed her. And that was horrible. It felt like some sort of a betrayal, and so she tried to snap herself out of it by avoiding the medic at all costs. She had managed to convince herself that maybe if she avoided him for long enough he would grow to resent her. This was a long shot, because she hardly thought that Gene had a nasty bone in his entire body, let alone either the desire or the ability to turn on a friend so easily. But she felt so incredibly horrible about what she had done to Alex that she tried it anyway, stupid though it was.

During the times that it was necessary for the team of spies to integrate into the midst of the company, she found herself gravitating most towards George Luz, who in turn could generally be found amongst the trio of Malarkey, Skip, and Penkala, or the duo of Bill and Toye. Frank Perconte was always with him regardless of who they were in the company of, and though Jules hadn't been too close to Frank in Aldbourne, she got to know him as a rather feisty and incredibly funny man through her proximity to him within their days travelling through France.

"Hey, George, what was it you said again?" Frank asked, trying desperately to recall a story from when they were training in Aldbourne. He had been explaining how him and Skinny had convinced George to impersonate one Major Horton into getting their platoon moving again after their old CO, Captain Sobel (who Juliette had never met but had been told about) had messed up the map reading on their practise manoeuvre royally.

George laughed once and tilted his chin down to begin his impersonation. "What is the goddamn hold up, Mr Sobel?!" he exclaimed through a voice much deeper and much more Southern than his own. His ability to imitate people really was uncanny.

Jules had burst into a fit of giggles, and though he had gone on to recite more lines of the great gulling she hardly heard them through her laughter. As she was laughing she misstepped and tripped, and Frank had steadied her with a roll of his eyes.