The War at Home | Adult F/F Romance [COMPLETE]

Part I (new)

Only love and death change all things.

- Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran -

Winter 1946

Bristol

Everything changed after the War.

D-Day came and went but the fighting continued. The dying continued. Nazi Germany fell, and so did atomic bombs, care of the United States, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki four months later. The bombs alone killed up to a quarter of a million Japanese people, mostly civilians. The Third Reich killed untold millions. The War killed untold millions.

World War II concluded, nominally, on September 2, 1945. The world would never be the same.

The war ended but the dying continued.

The suffering continued.

The rationing continued.

It was a year before soldiers began returning home, and when they did Captain Jordana Freemantle, formerly an ambulance driver and battlefield surgeon in The British Army, was reluctantly among them. Jordie went from organizing field hospital units and liaising with the Women's Transport Service carrying injured combatants and shuttling vital military intelligence to attending women's fundraising luncheons at the Bristol Women's Institute and organizing appropriate daytime outings for her young children between shifts at St. James' hospital. Life at home was very different war, and she hadn't the first idea how she was meant to fight it, if she should fight it at all.

She was home now, deep in the heart of the biting Bristol winter, overseeing the care and feeding of her growing children. This was everything she had fought and come close to dying for many times. Knowing this did nothing to stop her wanting to march to the hospital and demand a complex surgery to scrub into. Jordie was tired of thinking; there was altogether too much to be thinking about, to be remembering. Hell was behind and on her shoulders and in her head. That wasn't where she wanted to live. Over there.

Jordie flicked open her silver-plated cigarette case to retrieve a cork-tipped Craven 'A'. She hesitated to light it, caught up watching Dawn squeal as she soared down the tall slide at the center of the playground.

Five months back from the last of the fighting and mending, Jordie still felt out of place in her vermeil gold jewelry and her utility suit and fascinator, more suited to a uniform of trousers, boots, and a military jacket meant to keep out the worst of the rain, or even the scrubs she wore in the mobile hospitals she'd commanded. Jordie wasn't meant for civilian life. She was never more certain of this than when she was alone with her children. Had she ever been so innocent of the horrors of the world?