All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

82: Fellas

With the moving of the front line came the moving of the aid station, and Posey's aid station was moved away from the 506th altogether. She supposed it was for the best, really, but that didn't make it any easier to leave the men behind. Now they were attached to a different regiment in need of medical support whilst Easy moved into a town with supposedly less military pressure.

Each day blended into the next when working as a nurse. There was no need to hide anymore, not now that all of the men from Easy had long since been sent off to evacuation hospitals or back up to the line and no more were being sent in, and Posey found herself being trusted with more and more responsibility. She'd seen a lot of what Gene had done out on the line which made her reasonably handy in a crisis, but she wasn't trained, and the job of a nurse at an aid station was, naturally, quite different to the job of a combat medic. Still, she was allowed to clean wounds as well, now, as opposed to just clean floors and take inventory and comfort the traumatised.

Her thousand yard stare was becoming a problem. She couldn't seem to get out of her own head. She'd be given a task and set to completing it but if she wasn't sufficiently occupied she'd find herself drowning, worrying and wondering and staring straight into the abyss. 

She caught herself thinking about Bill often - and Toye and the others, of course, but Bill most of all. He'd lost a leg whilst out on the line. She wondered how he was doing. Was it getting him down, having to be cared for so rigorously in recovery? Did he miss the men like she did? Did he worry about the future like she did, now that it didn't look the way he'd expected it to?

"What are you thinking about?" asked the soldier she was supposed to be reading to. Posey's head shot up from where she'd zoned out staring at the pages, a guilty expression passing over her face before the soldier laughed. "It's alright," he assured her. "I don't really care for Dickens anyway."

Posey laughed softly under her breath and closed the book, setting it in her lap and folding her hands over it. "Sorry," she said, offering the hint of a smile. "I'm a million miles away most days."

"Aren't we all?" answered the soldier, a man she remembered was named Harry. "So what were you thinking about?"

Posey shrugged, watching her fingers trace over the lettering on the cover of Great Expectations. "I'm not sure, really," she confessed, though that was a lie; she'd been thinking about Bill, just like she always did, but Harry didn't need to know as much. 

"You got a fella?" he asked, as though reading her mind.

Posey smiled and nodded. "Yeah." Was Bill her 'fella'? He might have been, once. Either way, the way to prevent the soldiers from flirting was to tell them you were already spoken for, so that was what she did. 

"Can I tell you a secret?" Harry asked, shifting over in his bed to get closer to the edge she was sitting beside. "You look like you're good with secrets."

Posey couldn't help but laugh. "I know a thing or two about secrets," she replied.

"I thought so," said Harry knowingly. He shot a glance at the other side of the room, checking for potential eavesdroppers, and Posey did the same for her side, and when she turned back to him he was leaning in close. "Are you ready?"

"Absolutely."

"I do too," he confided, the words seeming to both thrill him and terrify him at the same time.

"You do what?" Posey asked, her eyebrows furrowing together in confusion.

"Have a fella," he elaborated, watching her expression closely. 

Posey smiled softly and his shoulders relaxed, his face warming and opening up again. "Is he a soldier?" she wondered. She rested her elbow on the book's front cover and her chin in her hand, watching as Harry's face lit up at the thought of the man who had his heart.