---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next day arrived with a pounding headache and the dawning realization that the brief reprieve experienced in the recent days was coming to a close.

Isabella hated it.

She lay still for a long moment, staring up at the familiar ceiling of Mrs. Harrison's spare room, watching the grey morning light ease its way through the curtains like it had no particular urgency, no awareness that the world outside was supposed to resume being difficult today.

The festival felt like a dream already. The lanterns, the crowd, the music, the drinks. Her brothers.

She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

‘Don't.’

She could hear Mrs. Harrison moving quietly in the kitchen below — the soft clink of a kettle, the familiar creak of the third floorboard. Normal sounds. Grounding sounds. Isabella focused on them instead of the dull ache beginning to creep up behind her temples that had nothing to do with last night's cider.

Well. Maybe a little to do with it.

She sat up slowly, and the room tilted in polite protest.

‘Never again’, she thought, and almost laughed at herself for thinking it a second time.

Getting dressed was an exercise in patience she didn't currently have. Her body moved through the motions mechanically — buttons, boots, hair pinned back with less care than usual — and by the time she came downstairs, Mrs. Harrison had already set a cup of tea at her usual spot at the table, steam curling up into the morning quiet.

"Sit down before you fall down," Mrs. Harrison said, not unkindly, without turning from the stove.

Isabella sat. "I'm fine."

"Mm." The woman's tone carried everything she was too polite to say directly. "Drink your tea."

Isabella wrapped both hands around the cup and obeyed. The tea was strong, sweetened heavily to placate her sweet tooth — the way Mrs. Harrison had learned she liked it without ever asking.

The silence between them was comfortable, the kind built over months of early mornings and evening piano sessions and letters read aloud by lamplight. Isabella was grateful for it. She didn't have the energy for words yet.

Outside, she could hear the village beginning its day. A cart, somewhere. Distant voices. The sound of men assembling, muffled, still a few blocks away, but distinct enough that she recognized it in her bones.

She drank her tea.

“Those brothers of yours are leaving today aren’t they?”

Isabella's hands tightened around the cup. “Yes ma’am.”

Mrs.Harrison hummed, busy as a bee as she scurried around the kitchen. “I didn’t expect you to…indulge…yourself so much last night.”

Isabella closed her eyes briefly. "To be fair, neither did I."

"Mm." The sound landed with the precise weight of a woman who had more to say and was choosing her moment. She set a plate of toast down in front of Isabella with the neat efficiency of someone who had been feeding people through difficult mornings for decades. "I will say, you deserved to relax after such a wonderful performance."

Something in Isabella's chest unknotted slightly. She hadn't realized she'd been braced for the other version of this conversation, one where she got the raised eyebrow and the pointed silence. It was a strange reaction, considering Mrs.Harrison had never berated her in the entire time being billeted in her home. 

"Thank you," she said, and meant it for more than just the tea and toast.

Mrs. Harrison settled across from her, smoothing her apron in that habitual way she had, like punctuating a thought. "I was watching near the back with the rest of the committee, you were spectacular.” She paused. “It was wonderful to see what your true self is really like.”

Isabella looked up from her cup.

"What do you mean?"

Mrs. Harrison settled her hands around her own tea, unhurried. "I mean that you spend a great deal of energy here making sure everyone is comfortable. Making sure the men are cared for, making sure you're not causing trouble, making sure nobody has cause to worry about you." Mrs.Harrison smiled. “You were happy.”

Isabella didn't answer right away. Outside, the robin was making its usual racket in the garden, indifferent to the weight of the observation hanging in the kitchen.

“When you’re up there, you don’t think about any of that,” she admitted. “All I wanted was to make sure everyone had fun.”

Mrs. Harrison nodded, like this confirmed something she'd already suspected. “It suited you.”

They fall back into an easy silence, a familiar warmth settling over the kitchen. 

It was the kind of quiet that had taken Isabella a while to learn how to sit in — not empty, but full, the way a room feels when nobody in it needs anything from the other. It was so different from what she was used to back home or how it was like in the barracks. She'd had it with Gene and Lieb, sometimes. Rarely with anyone else.

She finished her tea and toast slowly, the ache in her temples slowly receding as the alcohol left her system. Isabella couldn’t understand how Nixon managed to live like this, and she started to realize why Winters lived in such a perpetual state of worry about him. 

After some time, Isabella rose slowly, the grey light of the English day brightening the hidden golden streaks in her hair. She places her dishes in the sink and steadies herself against the inevitable pain the day will bring as she heads toward the front door. 

“I’ll be back soon, thank you for breakfast!”

The English summer cold met her on the step like a slap, and she was almost grateful for it. It did what the tea couldn't, scrubbing the last of the fog from behind her eyes as she pulled the cottage door shut and set off down the lane.

She didn't go toward the station. Not yet. Her feet carried her the other way without asking permission, the way they always did, toward the company.

It was habit by now, bone-deep. Even on a morning like this, with her brothers' departure hanging over her like a held breath, the medic in her needed to lay eyes on her boys before she could think about anything else. Just to count them. To know.

The village was waking properly now, and the company along with it, men in various states of dress and misery, the smell of cigarette smoke and boot polish, somebody's radio crackling out a tune two streets over.

"Well, would ya look at that," came a voice she knew too well. Guarnere was leaning against the low churchyard wall with his shirt half-buttoned and a grin that promised nothing good. "Our darling medic lives."

"Barely," Isabella said.

"Heard you put the whole pub under the table last night." Guarnere whistled, delighted. "Didn't think you had it in ya, Birdie. All that ‘I-don't-drink, I'm-a-good-Catholic-girl’ — and then the first cider hits English soil and you're off like a shot."

"It was one drink, William."

"It was one legendary drink, from what I hear."

"From who?" she said, narrowing her eyes — and immediately regretted the motion when her skull throbbed in protest.

"Easy, now." A broad, slow shape ambled over: Bull, unhurried as ever, a half-eaten biscuit in one enormous hand. He looked her over with that gentle, assessing calm of his and clearly found her wanting, because his mouth tugged sideways. "Lord. You look like somethin' the cat dragged in, dragged back out, and gave up on."

"Thank you, Bull. Every girl loves hearing that."

"Mm-hm." He held out the other half of the biscuit. "Eat that. It’ll soak it all up."

She took it, because you didn't argue with Bull, and because he was right.

"Here." And then Lipton was at her elbow, of course — Lip, with his canteen and that quiet, worried-mother look she privately thought made the two of them entirely too alike. He'd watched her doctor enough hangovers in this company to know the drill. "Small sips. There's aspirin in the aid station if Roe hasn't hidden it from you on principle."

"You're a saint, Lipton."

"I'm a man who knows what you're going to be like for the next three hours if you don't drink that." But the corners of his eyes crinkled. "Good show last night. Sink’s still talking about it — whole regiment turned out."

Something in her chest tightened and warmed at once. "You were all there?"

"'Course we were there." This from a softer voice — Shifty, hanging a little back the way he did, cap in his hands, smile soft. "Wouldn't've missed it. That middle song, the slow one — " He shook his head, like he didn't have the words and didn't want to embarrass himself reaching for them. "We don't get much music like that, where I'm from. Well. We do. But not — not like that."

It undid her a little, that. Shifty from his Virginia mountains, hearing something in her playing that tasted like his own home. She thought of the songs bluegrass drawl, of the porch and the marsh of home and Sparrow's Flight, of how music had always been the one language all of them spoke without needing to translate.

"Thank you, Shifty," she said quietly, and meant it down to the floor.

"Don't go fillin' her head," Toye grunted from where he sat on a crate, working boot polish into leather with the grim focus of a man who'd rather be anywhere else. He didn't look up, but the corner of his mouth moved. "She's already got two brothers tellin' her she hung the moon. She don't need us startin' too."

"Aw, Toye." She pressed a hand to her chest. "Was that sentiment? Should I sit down? I think I need to sit down."

"Sit down 'cause you're hungover," Toye said. "Not 'cause of me."

The little knot of them laughed, and for a few seconds the morning was just that, warm and loud and ordinary, her boys ribbing her in the cold while the village stirred around them. She could have stayed in it. She wanted to.

But the station clock was somewhere behind all of it, ticking, and Guarnere, of all people, was the one to notice the way her smile didn't quite reach.

"Alright, alright, leave the poor girl be," he announced, taking pity at last. "She's gotta go see them brothers off. They're leavin’ today."

The teasing dropped out of the air like a stone. Just like that, the morning remembered itself.

"Right," Isabella said, steadier than she felt. "I should — yeah."

Bull set a hand on her shoulder, brief and heavy and kind. "Go on, then. Nothin’ crazy is happening today," A beat. "Tell that pilot brother of yours to keep his fool head down."

"I'll tell him. He won't listen. But I'll tell him."

She squeezed Bull's forearm, gave the rest of them a crooked little wave, and peeled away before the ache in her chest could show on her face. The banter faded behind her as she went, swallowed up by the ordinary noise of the world waking, and she cut up the lane toward the aid station, which was how she nearly walked straight into Winters. 

He was coming the other way at his usual brisk, early-morning pace. Already dressed, already squared away, the only man in the company who looked like he'd slept the sleep of the genuinely untroubled. He stopped when he saw her, and Isabella felt her stomach drop clean through her boots.

Here it comes, she thought. The lecture. The mild, devastating disappointment. She braced for it the way she'd braced for it all morning without admitting that's what she was doing — ever since the pub, ever since the ‘did Nixon give you alcohol’ and the look that could melt steel and the awful certainty that she'd let him down.

"Corporal Vega," Winters said.

"Sir." She straightened on instinct, which made her head swim. "About last night, sir, I — I want you to know it won't—"

"Your brothers leave today." It wasn't a question. Of course it wasn't; Winters made it his business to know these things. He studied her for a moment with that steady, unhurried attention of his, the kind that never felt like judgment even when she was sure she'd earned it. "Your pilot and ranger."

"Yes, sir."

Something in his expression eased, softened, settled, the way a man settles when he's decided something. "Then I think I can spare you for the morning. Go see them off, Birdie. Properly."

She blinked at him. "Sir, I — about the cider—"

"We'll talk about Nixon's part in last night with Nixon." A dry note threaded through it, there and gone. "As for yours." He paused, and when he spoke again it was quieter, pitched just for her, no rank in it at all. "You carry a great deal, Isabella. More than most people in this company know. I'd be a poor officer, a poor man, if I begrudged you one night of acting your age."

The breath went out of her all at once, the thing held behind her ribs since the pub finally loosening its grip.

"Thank you sir," she managed, smile relieved.

"Go on." He nodded down the lane toward the station, and a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth "And Birdie, that was quite the performance. I’m sure if Sobel was still here, even he couldn't find a regulation to pin it to. Don't tell Nixon I said so."

He went on his way before she could answer, and Isabella stood there a moment in the cold, blinking hard, feeling like a stone she'd been carrying without naming had quietly been lifted out of her hands.

She let the feeling settle, breathed it in like the cold air, and carried on toward the aid station. She found out why he'd said ‘don't tell Nixon’ about thirty feet later. 

Nixon was sitting on the aid station steps like the morning had personally wronged him, elbows on his knees, flask dangling from two fingers, looking like death lightly reheated. His uniform tie was undone. His eyes, when they cracked open at the sound of her boots, were bloodshot to a degree that even she found impressive.

"Don't," he croaked, before she could say a word.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were thinking it. Loudly." He winced and pressed the heel of his hand to one temple. "God. Whose idea was the sun. I want a word with whoever signed off on the sun."

“I’d say that would be God Himself.”

She lowered herself onto the step beside him, slow and careful, because her own head was no friend to her this morning either. For a moment neither of them said anything. Two hungover people on a cold stone step, watching the village pretend to be a place where nothing was about to happen.

She understood, suddenly and completely, the thing she'd half-realized in the dark of her room last night and again over Mrs. Harrison's tea: that this was simply how he lived. Every morning. The flask, the bloodshot eyes, the wit kept sharp because the bottle kept everything else dull. She'd had one night of it and sworn it off forever. Nixon had built a whole life inside it. And for the first time she understood, with a pang that surprised her, exactly why Dick Winters wore that perpetual furrow when he looked at his friend.

"You facilitated," she said.

"I did." He didn't bother denying it. He took a small, fortifying sip from the flask, then offered it to her with a raised brow — a joke, mostly. She gave him a flat look, and he huffed something that might have been a laugh in better health. "Suit yourself. More for me."

"Winters wants to talk to you."

"Winters always wants to talk to me." He said it lightly, but she caught the flicker under it, the way she always caught it, the thing he buried so well that most people never went looking. "It's his cross to bear. Saint Richard Winters of the 506th, eternally disappointed, eternally showing up anyway."

He took another sip, then slid her a sideways look — and she knew that look. It was the one he got right before he made someone profoundly uncomfortable, purely for his own entertainment.

"You know who else was concerned about you last night?" he said, idle as anything, turning his flask over in his fingers. "And I do mean concerned."

"If you're about to tell me it was Sink—"

"Speirs."

The name dropped into the cold morning and just sat there.

Isabella turned her head, slow. 

"Mm." Nixon examined the flask like it had abruptly become the most fascinating object in Aldbourne. “Our resident ghost story. Set a glass of water down in front of you so quiet you didn't even clock it." He let it breathe. "Asked me — me — whether you had anyone to see you got home in one piece after you went out for some air. Funny thing." A slow, lazy turn of his head toward her. “Ron Speirs is the type to step over men bleeding into the dirt without so much as changing his stride. But God forbid Birdie Vega has one cider too many." 

Heat crawled up her neck that had nothing whatsoever to do with the hangover. "He's an officer. He was being responsible." 

"Sure he was."

"I think you’re lying to me.”

She knew Nixon wasn’t lying to her. Albeit fuzzy, she remembered talking to Speirs last night even if she couldn’t remember what it was she said.

"Kid." Nixon finally looked at her full-on, and there was that maddening glint, knowing and delighted and far too sharp for this hour of the morning. "Noticing things is the one thing I'm good at sober. Drunk, too — it's a gift and a curse." The corner of his mouth tugged. "And I'm telling you, Speirs does not spend that particular brand of attention on just anybody. You can take that from a professional."

"There's nothing to—"

"I didn't say there was anything." He held up his free hand, the picture of wounded innocence. "I said the man was concerned. You're the one who just went the color of a fire engine."

Isabella opened her mouth, found absolutely nothing useful in it, closed it again, and huffed. Nixon looked insufferably, thoroughly pleased with himself, and she had the sudden urge to push him off the step.

But that was the trouble with Nixon, he never stayed on the surface long enough to let you stay angry. Even now she could see the teasing light already guttering out of his face, the wit folding away to wherever he kept it, leaving behind the quiet, watchful sadness underneath.

She looked at him sidelong. And he looked back, and there it was again, the thing from the pub, the thing that had sent her bolting out into the night because she couldn't stand to be seen that clearly. That flash of recognition, mirror to mirror. He saw her, the version under the stage smile, the one who poured herself out into a crowd so she'd never have to sit alone with what was underneath. And she saw him, the sharp sad man behind the bottle, performing fine so hard it had become its own kind of prison.

Two sides of the same coin.

It didn't frighten her this morning. That was the strange thing. In the grey daylight, with her brothers' train an hour off and her head splitting, it just felt like the truth. Almost like company.

"It's a rough day to be hungover," Nixon said quietly, and for once there was no edge to it at all. He nodded down toward the station, where she'd be going. He shook his head slowly. "Hell of a thing, sending people you love off to two different ends of the same war and waving like it's nothing."

She swallowed. "Yeah."

"For what it's worth, Birdie." He tipped the flask toward the lane, a small, lazy salute. "You wave like a champ. Better than most. Now go, before I say something with a feeling in it and we both have to pretend it didn't happen."

It startled a wet, surprised laugh out of her, and she stood — careful, one hand on the cold stone rail — and looked down at him a second longer than she needed to. There was, she thought, no one else in the entire company she could have sat in that particular silence with. Not even Gene. Gene would have cared. Nixon just knew, and asked nothing of her for the knowing.

"Drink some water, Nixon," she said.

"Heresy," he muttered, and closed his eyes against the sun again. But as she went, she heard him add, low enough that he could deny it later. "Tell your brothers the company's proud of 'em. Just as proud as we are of you."

She didn't trust her voice to answer. She just smiled, pushed up off the step, and went to find Gene and Lieb — though as it turned out, she didn't have to look far. They were waiting for her at the edge of the aid station, the two of them, which meant somebody had told them she'd be coming this way. Guarnere or Lipton most likely. As she stood in front of them, Gene had her coat collar fixed before she could ask, just reached over and turned it up against the wind, the way he did, like it was nothing, like it wasn't the kindest thing anyone had done for her all morning.

"You look terrible," Lieb greeted her.

"I've been told. Repeatedly. By everyone."

"Yeah, well, you earned it." But there was no bite in it, and his eyes were doing that careful scan they always did when he thought she wasn't paying attention; checking her over, making sure all the pieces were where he'd left them. 

"I'm never drinking again."

"Sure."

"I mean it this time, Joseph."

"Sure you do, Birdie."

She caught Gene's eye over Lieb's shoulder, and the corner of his mouth twitched. She knew exactly what he was thinking — that she'd made him swear, swear, not to tell Liebgott about her talk of a person-shaped pillow, about clinging to his jacket like a barnacle and announcing to the world that he was warm and smelled Gene-like. And he hadn't. She could see it sitting behind his teeth, the whole ridiculous story, and he was keeping it, because she'd asked him to, and the loyalty of that small thing made her throat go tight all over again.

"What?" Lieb demanded, looking between them. "What's that look? You two've got a look."

"No look," She said.

"There's a look."

"No look, Lieb."

Gene only shrugged, the picture of pure Cajun innocence, and said, "Come on. The train won't wait on you, chérie."

The three of them walked to the station together, Lieb filling the silence with complaints because that was how he handled mornings like this, talking too much so nobody had to feel too much. Gene walked on her other side, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, saying nothing at all, which was his own kind of talking.

The platform came into view, and her heart climbed up into her throat, because they were already there.

Lucas was holding court, naturally, perched on a baggage trolley with that lazy ease of his. Buck standing steady at his shoulder, and Bucky already turned toward her with the grin she'd learned to dread the last few days. And there was Cameron, off to the side with his rangers, Billy and Jamie bickering over the last cigarette, and Eli standing close to Cam, close enough that you'd have to be truly looking to notice, the two of them angled toward each other and away from everyone else.

"There she is!" Bucky called, throwing his arms wide. "Lucas, you didn't tell me she was even prettier hungover—"

"Major," Isabella said flatly, "if the next words out of your mouth rhyme with anything, I will push you onto the tracks and I will not let anyone lift a finger to help you."

Bucky clutched his heart like she'd shot him. "Buck. Buck. She's perfect. I'm in love."

"I think you’re forgetting she pretty much stole twenty-four pounds off you last night," Buck said dryly.

"Worth it," Bucky said, and she found herself giggling at his reply for the first time since she’d properly met him.

It was a good few minutes, all of it. Buck and Bucky and the rangers and her two Easy boys folded into one loud, crowded knot on a the brisk-aired English platform, trading insults and stories, and for a little while it almost felt like the festival had never ended, like the reprieve might stretch one hour longer if they all just kept talking.

But the station clock kept moving, and the rails began to hum, and one by one the conversations quieted.

The others knew. They drifted back, Bucky herding Buck toward the far end of the platform with an uncharacteristic gentleness, Billy and Jamie suddenly very interested in their packs, Eli pressing something into Cameron's hand and murmuring something only Cam could hear before stepping away to give them the space they needed. Lieb and Gene fell back too, and Isabella was left in the small quiet pocket of the platform with the two people who had been hers the longest.

"So," Lucas said, hopping down off the trolley.

"So," she echoed.

"Try not to fall apart the second we're gone."

"I'll do my best."

He pulled her in, one arm and then both, and she pressed her face into his collar and breathed him in. "Keep your head down up there," she said into his uniform. "I'm not joking, Lucas. I know what the numbers are. I'm a medic. I know exactly what—" Her voice cracked and she hated it. "You don't get to be a hero. You have to come home. I’m serious."

His arms had gone tight around her, and when she pulled back his grin had slipped just enough for her to see it — the same thing she carried, the same ache and worry she carried for them since they left home. "Somebody's gotta keep your seat warm in Sparrow's Flight, songbird. Can't do that if I'm bein' a hero."

It startled the laugh-sob out of her she'd been holding down all morning.

Then Cameron. Cameron, who didn't crush her the way Lucas did, who held her like she was something he was setting carefully into his memory for later. "Write to me," he said into her hair. "Even when there's nothing to write. All the grey, icky rations and the foul Liebgott and all of it. I want all of it."

"I always write."

"I know." He pulled back, and his eyes were wet and he didn't bother hiding it, which nearly finished her. "I just like hearing you promise."

She reached into her coat then, before her nerve could go, and pressed her rosary into his hands, small and worn. "Take it. I'll get another, you know there’s a whole drawer back home." She closed his fingers over the beads. " I don’t care if you don’t believe in God, it’ll keep me happy. Bring it back to me. That's how I'll know it’s all over."

"Isa—"

"Bring it back."

He sighed, resigned to his sister's antics like always.

"I promise," Cameron whispered.

The whistle blew, long and final, and there was no more time, only the scramble of packs and last grips and Bucky calling ‘Lucas, come on!’ down the platform. Her brothers backed away from her toward their separate trains, toward their separate corners of the same enormous war.  Lucas walking backward with his hand raised in a wave he didn't break to give, and Cameron clutching her rosary to his chest like a man carrying water across a desert.

And then the trains took them, in two directions, with their respective colleagues, and the platform was loud and then it was empty, and she was standing in the strange English mid-summer cold with her hands shaking and Gene's coat suddenly settled warm around her shoulders, his arm steady at her back, Lieb close on her other side and saying nothing for once in his life.

"Come on, chérie," Gene murmured after a while. "Let's get you back."

She let them turn her around. And as she walked back into the village between her two friends — back toward the company, and the war, and the long stretch of whatever came next — Isabella breathed past the ache lodged behind her ribs and let herself, just for the walk, be the one who was looked after instead of the one doing the looking.

Her reprieve was over, as she'd known it would be.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------