Mastermind

Chapter 23

A/N: A little bit filler....and I apologize for that! I woke up with some blood clotting and it's been a bit rough today 😅 next chapter will hopefully make up for that! As always, let me know what you think!
Chapter Text
The day before D-Day, Ruth felt like she was running around as a chicken would without a head.  It was for more than one reason that consumed her thoughts.  D-Day was everything that they had been working for and it represented a real hope that the war might be able to be finished soon.  Everyone was hands on deck and working to the best of their ability to make things happen.

Ruth hadn't slept for more than 45 minutes at a time, taking short naps when she could afford it.  But even her dreams were plagued with the other particular issue that she was having and its name was Robert Rosenthal.

How dare he weasel his way into her heart yet again and how dare she go too far and let him touch and kiss her like she had?  She was foolish and damned to hell, most certainly for her actions.  Robert Rosenthal was someone that she needed to be untouchable.  Needed to keep her distance from. 

If not for the fact that they were enemies, then certainly for the fact that whatever fake relationship they had going on was going to be complicated by the all too real lust that the two of them felt.  But she wasn't so foolish a woman as to pretend that Robert Rosenthal didn't make her physically weak in the knees simply because of how he looked and the fact that she trusted him.

Nor was she immune to the fact that she desperately needed someone in a carnal nature—and not just because she was lonely.  Ruth needed the comfort that came from being with another person physically.  And whether that meant she was sitting atop his face and having a heady pleasure course through her or she was on her knees and showing him straight to the seventh heaven, she didn't care.

She just knew that she needed something like that and soon—or she might just lose her damn mind. 

Speaking of losing one's mind was the very vision of Harry Crosby, practically a madman at this point.  Ruth rushed past the man, eager to get her next set of paperwork to the Colonel.  She didn't have time for the tired ramblings of Crosby, who hadn't slept in three days and was practically the walking dead.  She had far too much on her mind to worry about what was going on with him.

There was Abe and Rosie who she needed to worry about as a whole—because the two of them were going up in the skies on D-Day and that meant she was going to be praying the entire time that they would just come back alright.  There was Liesel, who by all intents and purposes, was her legal ward for the time being—and Ruth truthfully knew nothing about raising a child, let alone a teenage girl who was now getting in trouble at school and that had been put on the backburner for the week.

There was the fact that her mother had sent a damn package with so many of her personal effects from home—including her personal diary that she had taken the time to hide (mostly because it contained several secrets and a rather embarrassing Valentine that happened to be the only one she had ever received).  It was a rather damning thing, having the very diary that contained her younger self's thoughts on Robert Rosenthal—hell, he took up half of the damn thing and that was mortifying in and of itself.

The tip of Ruth's pencil snapped and she just let out a frustrated sound, quickly grabbing for another pencil to finish off the paperwork.  Signing her name, Ruth had just moved out of her office when she caught sight of a group of men carrying Harry Crosby towards the Hospital Wing.