All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

24: Musketeers

Posey didn't know that she could confidently say her fear had ever gone away. Ever since leaving England it had been there. Even when she was sitting idle at Mrs. Daniels' house, twiddling her thumbs and reading books beside a lit fireplace. Fear seemed to have been a constant in her life even since before she left England, when the Germans had started dropping their bombs over her home. But with time and long days and lots of things to keep her busy, at some point that fear had started to dull.

Of course, she always felt the icy stab of foreboding when she snuck out of the barracks in the middle of the night, and again when she would be back laying in bed, thinking of what the consequences might be if she was ever found out - really found out, by someone important. But there tended to always be other things to worry about. The fear had come to resemble radio silence as opposed to the cacophony of full-volume music rattling around in her skull it had been initially.

Now, though, as she stood out on the deck of the RMS Samaria, a troopship bound for where she could only pray was England, she thought she might be sick.

It was a different sort of fear to what she'd felt on the ship over to America. She should have felt happy, she knew, but all she felt was nervous. There was so much uncertainty. After everything, she wasn't sure she'd made the right decision. What would her mother say once she saw her? She'd had to pay an awful lot of money to make sure Posey was evacuated so far away, after all. And what would the US Army do once she'd gone - try to get her for desertion, sure, but what about when they discovered that a Joseph Wells from Boston serving in Easy Company didn't actually exist?

Posey regretted that she hadn't gotten to say goodbye to Mrs. Daniels one final time.

Secretly, all of Second Platoon, and likely the rest of the company, too, had assumed they'd all get to go home before being sent overseas. Posey knew she'd already said a decent goodbye after Christmas, but there was still so many things she wanted to say - she had new stories to tell Mrs. Daniels, ones she couldn't tell in letters. Still, she had to remind herself that it was okay because now she was really going home, home home, and she'd get to see her mum and her brother and that meant everything. Maybe one day she'd visit Mrs. Daniels but until then she'd have to content herself with writing. Plus, once she was home she wouldn't have the army monitoring and censoring her letters anymore - in a few weeks she'd be able to write Mrs. Daniels to her heart's content.

"Doin' okay, Wells?" Roe asked, seeming to appear out of nowhere. He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and ducked his head to meet her eyes.

Posey nodded, largely to clear her head of her reverie. "Yeah. Fine."

"Seasick?" he wondered.

She shook her head. "Nervous."

"Right." Roe stuck both of his hands into his pockets and offered a small smile. "Well, ain't much I can do about that but if you wanna talk..."

Posey sent him a smile. "I know. Thank you. But I'm sure you've got a whole load of seasick paratroopers to deal with anyway so I won't keep you."

Roe laughed a little bit and nodded. "Yeah." He tapped her once on the shoulder before retracting his hand. "I'll be back out in a while if you decide you wanna talk."

"See you then, then, I suppose," Posey said, smiling a little bit.

"See you then."

There was a chill in the air out on the deck, the wind thrashing at her ODs until one side was plastered to her and the other was letting in so much air she was frozen. The bite to the air reminded her of home, of England; she could hardly believe she was going back. At last, her odyssey had come to an end. Of course, she still had a little while left to get through, but home was so close she could almost taste it. Even in the bitter chill of the wind on the sea, she felt warmed by the prospect. Finally, she was homeward bound, and for real, this time. Directly homeward bound. Or she hoped so, anyway.