All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

70: Name

If Posey had ever thought she'd known what it was to be cold, she stood corrected. Never had she been as cold as this. Never had anyone been as cold as this, she was sure. The cold was inside of her by now, so rough on the air that it had made its way into her blood and was freezing her from the inside at the same rate it was freezing her from the outside. Her teeth chattered, her hands shook where they were buried beneath her arms, and her ears ached fiercely. Still, when she heard footsteps approaching her foxhole, she mustered the strength to look up at her new visitor and shoot them a wry grin.

"Not you again."

"You know what, Wells -" Bill began as he hopped into their foxhole, but there was no bite to his words. Instead, she could hear the grin he was wearing as much as she could see it, and her eyes were hardly anywhere else.

"What?" she teased, laughing to herself as she buried her face in her collar once more.

Bill grumbled something unintelligible in reply as he got comfortable, squeezing in next to her and trying to hide his shivering. Posey shot him a glance and smiled sadly. "And here I was thinking Holland was bad."

Bill snorted. "Yeah. Belgium takes the fuckin' cake, huh?"

"You said it."

After arriving in the Ardennes last night, a forest in Belgium a little ways away from a town named Bastogne, they'd had little in the way of protest from the krauts. No one really knew what was going on yet - aside from the officers, probably, but the information hadn't been passed down. This either meant that the information on their position and goal weren't that important or that the situation was... unfortunate, to say the least. Posey's money was on the latter.

"The sky's pretty, at least," Posey commented, changing the topic of conversation lest it send her into a spiral. She couldn't let her mind wander too much for she was sure she'd never come out on the other side if it did. As far as she was concerned, there was only the here and now. She was here and it was bleak but she couldn't think about anywhere else, about home or Boston or Aldbourne or Holland. She couldn't be in two places at once.

The sky really was pretty, though - half blue, half lilac, and completely lovely - which was a matter Posey was torn on. In one sense, she was grateful, for it was infinitely easier to wake up into a day that you knew was going to be difficult if the world looked just that little bit lovelier all the while. On the other hand, a place like this didn't deserve to have pretty sunrises. It didn't deserve to have pretty anything. Posey had been there less than a day and she already despised the place, for it was freezing and much too big for them all to cover the line and the enemy were closer than they'd ever been before. And there was something lonely about it, too. All that open space between foxholes made your mind want to wander, and Posey's mind didn't always want to wander to the nicest of places.

"You and the damn sky," Bill said with a small, almost fond shake of his head. "Why you always lookin' at the sky?"

"Haven't got much of anywhere else to look when my head's always in the clouds," she replied. Looking over at him, she smiled warmly. "That's what my mum used to always say about me. That I have my head in the clouds. What do you think?"

Bill nodded, laughing under his breath. "Think she was right," he said, giving a nod. "Don't ever fuckin' think things through, do ya?"

"Act first, think later. That's how you keep life exciting." Posey grinned. "Anyway, you've got some of that in you, too, I think. You just tend to make better decisions than I do while you're at it."

"Yeah, well, that ain't hard," Bill answered, smirking.

Posey rolled her eyes, fighting the laugh bubbling up in her chest. "If you just came here to insult me -"