Title: As Innocence Dies

Rating: T

Summary: It isn't as terribly serious as what they'd make it out to be, but sometimes she wakes up screaming.

A/N: Set after episode six, 'Shot Heard 'Round the World'. Refresher: Sarah's cousin Tom dies.

I made up Sarah's aunt and uncle but the names are accurate. I live in one of the original 13 colonies and in a town from the colonial age and we have cool street names like 'Prince William' and 'Princess Caroline'. I took names from the streets.

It isn't as terribly serious as what they'd make it out to be, but sometimes she wakes up screaming.

It's the same dream every night, and she can never remember the outcome when she falls asleep.

She had known Tom since she was born and they had played together for years. They were both only children and he was like her older brother. She remembered playing with him in their countryside estates when she was young, and writing him letters as it became less proper for a girl of ten to be playing outside and Tom went away to school.

She remembers the garden and suddenly there she is. Tom is over by the foxgloves and she's so relived. She runs to him and embraces him and he scoops her up and spins her around—my, he's gotten strong since enlisting!—and her face hurts from smiling because Tom is alive. He is better and though it was a horrid mistake that was made, he isn't dead. She allows the thoughts to seep from her mind and lets happiness dull her sense for she doesn't know how long.

After what seems like an eternity she sees a daisy. They're her aunt's favorite flower and as she leans down to sniff it she sees there's something on her hands.

It's blood. Crimson and sticky and staining. She'd scream if her throat wasn't dry and her heart wasn't thudding and—

Suddenly Tom's not there, and she remembers him dying in her arms after the first battle. The scenes of his death plays before her eyes as she stands, holding a daisy, unable to move.

Then suddenly she's on the bridge, holding Tom again. He is not breathing.

She starts to scream.

Sarah wakes up with her voice almost completely gone, sitting straight up in her bed, and a scream dies quickly in her mouth. Her room is, thank goodness, separate from the others' by a floor and so they would not have heard her—Dr. Franklin is away, Moses works hard and therefore sleeps soundly, James is most likely out or too thickheaded to notice, and Henri sleeps like a log.

She takes a deep breath and steadies herself before laying back on the pillows. A few tears are already running down her cheeks and her hands begin to shake. She wants to get up and go to the window but she's unreasonably scared of getting up and going towards the shadows.

Instead she grabs her locket with one hand and her pillow with the other as the tears begin to flow. But it's been barely a minute when she hears a knock at her bedroom door. Her first thought is to shut her eyes quickly and hide underneath her covers to feign sleep, but once this is accomplished realizes it isn't very bright to do so. Moses will probably go tear the town down if he thinks the scream isn't from the house.

But just as she pulls out from beneath her coverlet the door opens anyway and it's James, not Moses.

Sarah gives a little cry of surprise and yanks her blankets around her chest and shoulders. "My word, James! Can't you wait for an answer before you go barging into people's bedrooms at midnight? It's hardly proper, especially—"

"Not when Henri and Moses think there's a burglar in the house! Speaking of which, if that was you making a ruckus up here you've waked the whole house. Your voice can curdle blood." James replies, crossing his arms from where he stands in the open doorway.

"I have 'woken' the entire house, and—I did?" her face falls slightly. "Then I apologize." she flops back onto her bed.

James is really quite content with going no farther then the doorway in the bedroom of a girl at night but manages a few steps. "Are you...you know, okay?"

"I am fine, James." Sarah speaks automatically and quietly. "And I'll thank you not to make such noise when everyone is already having trouble sleeping."

"I'm not the one screaming bloody murder in my room at midnight, are I?" he counters. She sighs and turns away to bite her lip very hard.

"Thank you, the point has been made."

"Look, if I don't find out what's wrong with you...Henri—Henri and Moses will be worried."

"Go away, James." Sarah is snapping at him now.

"Did a rat run across your bedspread again? Because we have farm cats for that."

"I haven't seen any rats tonight, thank you."

"Sarah—"

"James—"

There is a quick staredown that Sarah doesn't try to win. "I had a nightmare."

"Must've been some nightmare. Henri thought someone was slitting your throat." he looks away.

"It's...happened a few times." she stares at the stitching on the coverlet. "I haven't woken anyone else up before, I think."

"What is it about?" he asks.

"Tom." she says, and they don't talk for a moment. The silence is neither comfortable nor awkward.

"I have nightmares sometimes." he finally offers. "About fire. I mean, I know I'm not s'posed to remember anything and maybe I'm just imagining it, but..." he trails off.

"How terrible." Sarah says softly. Realizing her present state she hurriedly pulls up the blankets. After a time, she blurts out, "I can't believe this entire situation is real."

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"Real war. With England! It's going to happen now, James, and it's going to be fought here."

"Yes?" James wasn't exactly sure what the point was.

"Already one family—my Uncle William and Aunt Susanna—has been shattered from this war and it's barely begun. Aunt Susanna had three children before Tom, Mother said—all died before birth or shortly after. She loved him so—" she paused to keep for crying. "She cried for weeks the day he left for the army. And he wasn't even going to an assignment, but to be trained!" she knots the coverlet in her hands. "I've already told my mother, and she's told...Aunt and Uncle," her voice shakes. "They—they spoiled him so..."

James is silent, remembering his excitement when the first battle started, the feeling of 'finally' soon turning to dread when he heard of Dr. Warren's death; of Sarah sitting blankly on the bridge even after they take away the body of her cousin. Of the tarred and feathered man, of the sharp stabs of grey entering his childishly black-and-white world.

It's not the same thing as Sarah's experience but he says anyway. "That man I saw—the tarred and feathered one, who Moses took me to see—" he looks away. "He died yesterday. Infection. I could've stopped it."

"If you could've, then I could've stopped Tom from enlisting. He didn't even want to. But the Philips are military men, said my uncle and my father. I agreed with them because I didn't know the danger; after all, both of them were still alive. Sixteen, James. He was only sixteen."

"I'm sorry, Sarah." perhaps fighting doesn't seem like the answer anymore. Perhaps things are not as clear as they were a week ago; a month ago; a year ago.

"There will be no children left in this country after this war." muses Sarah almost to herself.

"What?"

"This war will make them all grow up—prematurely, but all the same."

"Like us." says James, suddenly feeling loss for something he didn't know was missing until now.

"Yes, I suppose." she turns to him. "It's not going to stop, is it?" her eyes reflect reality.

"I don't think so—not until it ends like a proper war." only, James realizes with a practicality he can't ever remember having before, war can last a very, very long time. Be very, very dangerous. Be very, very big.

So vastly big.

Now he can't believe the world is real.

The sun begins to rise they both realize Sarah must've woken the house earlier then they thought. They avoid eyes to exchange good days, since it is morning after all, and Sarah lays back down after her door closes and half-cries for Tom, who is dead, and that man who disagreed, who is also dead, for James and Henri and herself, who will have to grow up sooner then expected, and because she feels so lonely stuck on the wrong side of this war.

But somehow home doesn't feel so far away as across the ocean.

The thought scares her, and makes her think no, and yet a tiny part of her just understands what was missing now that she's acknowledged that thought. It's not going to make things any easier, whatever it means.

But nothing else is going to be, either.

A/N: In my headcannon, Sarah has one aunt and uncle, Susanna and William, and four cousins in order of age- Kate, Tom, Jane, and Georgina; however I broke from headcannon in this fic. I might include a sequel—the children growing up too fast because of the war is a topic that I love, and I believe that James' encounter with the tarred and feathered man and Sarah's with Tom are important turning points with them. (I know they were rather far apart, but for the sake of the fic pretend they were a week or two apart.) And I love a bit of scandalized indecency. Doesn't everyone?