All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

88: Afraid

Reading Gene's letters made Posey want to cry. She'd stayed up most of the night reading and then rereading them, finding both comfort and sorrow in the words he'd written. Even though he'd returned to the home he knew he seemed to feel just as lost as Posey did herself, a little rowboat lost in the middle of an ocean desperate to find some familiar land. Thinking of Gene at home in Louisiana, back in a place that should have felt nostalgic but instead felt brand new, made her feel less alone, but it also unsettled her; would the feeling ever fade? Even after she'd spent a while in Boston would she still feel as lost as she did now? Would the feeling last forever?

Posey spent the rest of the night writing and re-writing a letter in response. If only he was here, she thought, it would be so much easier to articulate what she needed to say. Gene had always been easy to talk to and his presence had always made spilling her heart out to him as natural as breathing, for she'd always believed he felt the same things as she did, equally as deeply as she did. They were two sides of the same coin, different in many ways but similar in all the ones that mattered. If he was here she wouldn't need to waste so much paper on flowery words that had no truth behind them, or else others that were so blunt the complexity in her feelings got lost entirely.

But he wasn't here, so she wrote and wrote and wrote until she'd written something somewhere close to the truth of how she felt.

After writing the letter and poring over it to make sure it was coherent, at some point Posey must have fallen asleep. She woke to the sound of a knock on her door and pushed herself up from where she'd been draped over her dressing table, the sunlight streaming in through the window and stinging in her bleary eyes.

"Come in," she called hoarsely, and ran a hand through her hair to tame it. She rubbed at her eyes and smoothed down her nightdress, then turned just as Mrs. Daniels came in.

"Josephine, dear, have you been up all night?" Her eyes scanned the screwed up balls of paper at Posey's feet and the letters strewn about the desk before taking in her haphazard state. "You look exhausted."

"Couldn't sleep," Posey answered around a yawn with a tired half-shrug. "And I thought these letters were due a reply after how long they've been sitting here."

Mrs. Daniels nodded and leaned against the wall beside the door, clasping her hands over her skirt and tilting her head as she regarded Posey thoughtfully. "I was thinking we might go shopping for some new clothes for you today," she suggested, smiling kindly. "For you and Jonathan," she added. "I know you have some of your old things here but you'll be needing clothes befitting a young woman now. You're not a little girl anymore."

Posey tried to smile but she knew it faltered, could feel her lips twitch at the edges before tilting back down again. "I think," she began tentatively, "I'd like to stay inside today, if that's alright with you. I want to get used to being here again." She wondered if Mrs. Daniels could tell what she really meant, or else whether John had told her that she'd become wary of going outside. She bristled to imagine that conversation; she wasn't frightened, as John always called it, just... chary. These days she much preferred to watch the world than to participate in it, to look at the outside instead of feel it. There was safety behind the glass that marked the boarder to a place she might call home, and of course there was no certainty that if she left the house it'd still be there when she returned.

Mrs. Daniels relented, as Posey had been sure she would, and the subject of clothes wasn't broached again until a week later when John decided he was desperate for some new ones. Posey stayed home as he ventured out into the city, envious of his ability to go off by himself even after all he'd experienced. The two of them should have been two peas in a pod with all they shared in common, yet where his experiences of loneliness and isolation had made him independent, hers had made her traumatised. She couldn't even set a foot out of the back door to stand in the garden, let alone hope to go out into the world on her own.