There is no hero's welcome. Their return to Southampton is a relatively quiet affair, which is perfectly fine with Fitz. He doesn't know what he'd expected to feel like after his first experience in combat, but he hadn't expected to feel like such a failure.

There's an underlying feeling of disappointment and frustration, not just in his company, but in the entire battalion. All they had done was retreat. The job of the Highlanders had been to save what was left of the original BEF and to cover their withdrawal, but all they had done was retreat and save themselves. It was an entire week of withdrawal, one ten mile march at a time.

Fitz tries to think of any small victories in the days following their return. As a unit, the battalion of Glasgow lads had successfully manned the long thinly-held 130 mile line for four days. They'd held up under fire before the order to retreat finally came. As a soldier, he knew now the terrifying feeling of knowing enemy rounds were aimed for him. He'd even fired his rifle twice, though the only times he'd managed to squeeze the trigger, he'd been shooting blind without eyes on an actual human target. He'd hardly call it battle hardened. Mostly he feels like all he'd done was run away.

Of course, in the letters to his mum he'd told her it had all been very uneventful. Little more than a week long camping trip in France. He hadn't encountered any Germans and he certainly hadn't been shot at and fled from them. He tells her instead about the wonderful private billets here in Bedford that they've been allotted for two weeks of recovery, about the kind townsfolk and local caterers who are feeding them well.

Their only duty is guarding the local post office and the power station and neither are particularly arduous tasks. It's dull duty that his fellow soldiers hate, but he's happy to not be bombed or shot at and grateful for the dull monotony. He returns to the small flat where he and two other soldiers are billeted after pulling sentry all afternoon.

The town has opened its doors to the Highlanders. Every home with any available room is housing at least two soldiers. His landlady is a short matronly woman who has sent two sons off to the Royal Navy and seems eager to have young men in the house again. She greets him warmly as he arrives in and pulls off his service cap. When she informs him she's put a kettle on for tea and that she'll be doing the wash tomorrow it's a comfort that feels almost like being home.

"I also mailed your letters," she adds absentmindedly as she totters around the kitchen.

"My letters?" Fitz repeats in question, even though he'd heard her properly. "But they - I - I didn't ask - " he stammers.

"I know. I saw them sitting there by our bed and took the liberty, dear. The least I could do."

Fitz's mouth goes dry as he tries to thank her for the kind gesture. He'd wanted to send his mum's letters off, of course, but he had no intention of sending anything off to Jemma. The larger the stack of letters he'd written to her grew, the more embarrassed he'd felt about the attachment he'd clearly developed for her in a week's time. Inviting him to write her the occasional letter was one thing, but the pages of letters he'd written her were quite another. Removed now from the loneliness and terror that had gripped him in Normandy, he feels foolish having written so fervently to a relative stranger.

Likely intrigued by the numbers of letters he'd addressed to a single Sheffield address, his landlady can't help but ask if he has a sweetheart..

"No, not a sweetheart," he dismisses, though the words feel like a bit of a lie. "Just a friend."

Somehow, he's not sure if those words are even right either.

He tries not to think about her much as days crawl by and turn into weeks. He convinces himself that, beyond their shared love of science, there had been nothing there but civility and kindness behind her actions that evening in London.

The battalion soon leaves the comfortable private billets in Bedford and the landlady that reminds him of his mum. Instead they move to a camp in West Suffolk that they build themselves. Instead of four walls and a warm mattress, he shares a canvas tent with three other squads and has a stiff camp bed. The necessary steps they take to make the tent safe from an air attack, digging it in beneath the oak trees and surrounding it with sandbags, reminds him of what they'd just left behind in France. The terrifying thought that the chaos across the Channel could easily be brought here grips him whenever they hear the news every day about another airfield or radar station bombed by the Luftwaffe. He worries about his mum and hopes she's okay and not too worried about him. He tries not to worry about Jemma.

He wishes she would become a distant memory, that he could make himself forget the six hours he'd spent in her company nearly two months ago. He wishes he didn't have to fight the urge to write her everyday.

Their mail finally catches up with them in August. It takes nearly an hour to pass out the letters that have accumulated in the weeks since returning from France . There are four letters total for him when they call his name, three are from his mum. The fourth is written in script that should be unfamiliar, but somehow isn't. He recognizes it immediately. The graceful ordered letters are perfectly formed. He never knew handwriting could look like so much like a person before, but he doesn't even have to look at the Sheffield address to know it's from Jemma.

Somehow he resists tearing open the letter in front of his platoon. He tucks it away in between his mum's letters and returns to his tent, where he sits down atop of his foot locker and engrosses himself in a letter written nearly two months ago.

It's nearly four pages long. She tells him how wonderful it had been to receive his letter, how much she'd liked hearing about the countryside in Normandy, how she'd read the papers and tried her best to stay abreast of the events there, but nothing was very specific. She tells him to be safe and says she'll write again soon.

The following day a stack of letters, so large it earns several whistles from his squaddies, arrives. This time she doesn't try to be so chipper. She tells him how afraid she is, upon seeing the date he'd sent the letter, that he's become a POW. She briefly explains what became of her peculiar test in London, how she'd received a letter that told her to report to a remote Buckinghamshire village for a clerical position eleven days later. His heart soars at the thought that she's only in Buckinghamshire and curses that they're not still billeted in Bedford where he could have walked to see her.

The letters continue to pour in over the course of the week. His lack of a response hadn't deterred her from writing. While he had been embarrassed by his five letters from France, she has written him eighteen times in the last two months. Some are long and some are short. She talks about nothing and everything. Her landlady and the girls she rooms with. The book she is reading. Chamberlain's latest speech to the House of Commons. A crossword puzzle from the Telegraph falls out from between the pages of one of them. At the top she has written 5:18. He grins, recognizing the challenge and immediately goes to work.

He completes it in five minutes and twenty-two seconds and sends it back to her with a five-page letter. He apologizes four times for not writing her more upon leaving France, but doesn't know quite how to explain himself. He tries to tell her how they'd moved camps twice and how mail had been so slow to catch up. He tells her how he'd been in Bedford for two weeks and how sad he was to leave, how they built the camp here at Denston Hall from the ground up, and how much he's enjoying the monotonous life there.

It takes almost three weeks of stunted correspondence for their letters to sync up. Bombs begin falling on radar stations and RAF regularly by the time they can carry on a stilted conversation, and it seems like the invasion of the island is imminent. Her excitement upon receiving his first response is palpable. She tells him not to apologize and asks if he is allowed to leave the camp and could they perhaps meet in Cambridge sometime this month. His sergeant spots the corners of his mouth turning up as he reads the invitation in the letter and takes the piss about what could possibly cause Private Fitz to smile.

"Do the liberty buses run to Cambridge?" he asks, hoping the sergeant won't pry too much.

"They'll take you to Newmarket." Fitz can see he's suppressing a smile. "Are all those letters coming from Cambridge?"

"N- no," Fitz replies much too quickly. The sergeant seizes the letter from his hand and looks at the postmark with an ever-widening grin.

"Have you got a sweetheart, Fitz? The lads said they thought you might."

Fitz shakes his head vehemently and the sergeant just roars with laughter at his denial and walks away.

He's not alone on the bus to Newmarket the following weekend and has to endure the same series of questions from men in his battalion about what's waiting for him in Cambridge. He doesn't know how to respond to the questions about who he is meeting. A friend he'd met in London. A girl he'd promised to write. He's adamant about not calling her anything else.

His knees bounce nervously as he waits for her on the platform at Cambridge Rail Station, constantly adjusting his service cap and fidgeting with the cuffs of his sleeves. She sees him before he sees her, quickening her pace, and racing to him, making the crowd part for her.

"Oh, Fitz." The words sound in his ear as she exhales loudly and throws her arms around his neck.

"Hi."

Much like his measly five letters, his lame greeting does nothing to dampen her enthusiasm. She grips him tightly, longer than even his mum hugs him. His arms don't quite envelop her the way hers do. He stretches his fingers out, wanting to squeeze her just as tight, but paralyzed with uncertainty. Her frankness and unabashed emotion surprise him.

"I was so worried about you." The words are muffled into his neck and he shivers at the feel of her breath on him.

"M'alright," he dismisses, pulling away from the hug only because he thinks another moment of being pressed this close to her might cause his pants to tighten. "Just been digging ditches in Denston all week."

"I can't believe you're so close." She beams. "Of all the places to be stationed."

"I wish we were still in Bedford." He tells her about how his landlady had reminded him a bit of his mum as they begin to walk from the rail station. He doesn't seem to know where they're headed, but she seems confident in her direction of travel. There are few cars, which he knows is because of the petrol rationing, but it somehow makes it feel like the city has emptied just for them.

Reminders of wartime are there, mostly the touch of sandbags, and the sound of RAF training aircraft circling overhead, but the University is remarkably insulated. There are students punting on the River Cam and a small picnic by the brook. He asks if she's ever been here before.

"No, but I always wanted to." Her breath catches at the first glimpse of the College lawn.

"Me too." He smiles wistfully at the coincidence, wondering if they ever would have crossed paths if they'd attended University at the same time. Perhaps that would be them discussing a lecture under the trees. He wonders if she's pondering the same paths their lives could have taken as she gazes at the students, who somehow despite all that's going on look carefree.

"Do you think they'll come here?" Her voice is unusually small and quiet.

"Who?"

"The Germans." Now her voice is nearly a whisper and he can see now she's not gazing at the students, but at the sandbags piled up around the ground floor of a building. He feels stupid now for even having to ask her to clarify what she meant with planes roaring overhead and him clad in battledress. She makes him forget they're at war. He wonders if that's why he liked writing her so much when he was in France.

"No." He tries his best to sound confident for her. It seems to work because she doesn't ask any more questions about the war again. Instead she talks again about how much she'd wanted to attend Cambridge, but how her parents wanted her to go to a proper women's college.

"My father wanted me to go to Edinburgh," Fitz explains shortly. The remark sparks an inquiry from Jemma about where exactly his father is. "Last I heard the Black Watch was in Africa somewhere."

The short reply tells her all she needs to know and the questions about his father cease. He allows his mind again to wander, imagining a world where their parents hadn't forced their paths away from this place. A world where perhaps they'd found each other sooner and the world wasn't at war.

She tells him about the science journals she's been able to get her hands on in the last few months, babbling first about a paper on the bactericidal action of penicillin and then a Russian-American who has built an amphibious aircraft with a rotor configuration that flew straight up in the air. He asks more questions than she can answer about both, positing on the uses of both in wartime. Each time he makes an inquiry it seems to make her smile.

She doesn't talk much about her job. All he can get out of her is that she is a clerk of some kind. When he presses her for further questions, she loses her articulateness and begins stammering incomprehensible answers that don't make sense or changes the subject completely.

Now it's his turn to smile.

"You're a terrible liar."

"I'm not lying!"

"I mean, really awful," he teases again at her overly impassioned denial. She's not laughing though. She looks pained, like she's in some kind of physical discomfort. They pause momentarily, halfway across a covered stone bridge somewhere by St. John's College. He comments on the neo-Gothic architecture and she tells him how this was one of Queen Victoria's favorite places to visit. The mindless conversation, the fact that they both know all the intricacies of this place, seems to put her at ease.

He doubts she is merely a typist at a radio factory, as she claims, but he also knows if what he suspects is true then she can't say anything further. And he doesn't know much about Jemma Simmons yet, but he senses she is loyal. So he doesn't ask the question he desperately wants to ask. Whether this interview she'd gotten back in June through her old Maths professor involves working for the Home Office. He just asks her if she can send him some of these publications she's reading and tells her to keep sending crosswords because they're tied now at three and have yet to determine who can complete it the fastest.

His uniform draws more attention than he'd like. He imagines soldiers don't frequently walk the grounds of Cambridge, remarking on Department Heads and professors he'd wished he had.

They pause atop another bridge, this one a unique curved footbridge built entirely of straight timbers. He remarks on what a brilliant bit of engineering it is and how clever the tangent and radial trussing is to make it appear curved. "You know the current engineering chair was the first ever Fellow in Mechanical Sciences at King's. He designed most of the bridges for the Metropolitan Railroad."

"You like bridges," she remarks with a smile.

"I just like building things," he shrugs simply. "I suppose bridges were the first things I ever built when I was small. You know, with blocks and things. I liked the idea of...supporting things. Making things of use. Things that will last."

"And yet you didn't join the Royal Engineers." She cocks her head in question. Sometimes he gets the idea when she looks at him that she's still trying to figure him out.

"Engineers mostly blow bridges up," he reminds her with a raise of his eyebrows.

"They can build them too."

"I think they blow up more than they build," he insists with a laugh. He doesn't want to spell out for her that the reason he didn't join the Royal Engineers was simply because it was precisely what his father had wanted, and for once in his life he didn't want to do exactly as he'd bid.

"How do you know so much about the chair of Engineering at Cambridge?"

"I told you. I worked in the lab at the University in Glasgow. Got to read quite a bit about what was happening in the field."

"And then you joined the Army," she mumbles the words to herself more than to him. She's trying to figure him out again.

"And then I joined the Army," he repeats anyway.

Two RAF planes fly in formation on a training run overhead. Two boys out on the lawn whoop and holler and wave as they pass by. Fitz can't help but think about how the pilots of the RAF have been exalted while his Battalion's return from France had gone almost entirely unnoticed.

"Seems like everybody wants to fly a Spitfire these days," she remarks, noting the adulation on everyone's face as they watch the planes fly by.

"Those aren't Spitfires, they're Hurricanes," he remarks calmly.

"And when did you join the RAF?" she sputters in surprise, but he can tell she's impressed.

"Mostly you can tell by the wings. See how they're not elliptical like the Spitfires. Also look close when it comes by again, at the radiator housing, how it's right below. It's not like that on a Spitfire." He notes the obvious look of wonder on her face and explains himself. "There's not much to do when you're pulling sentry except watch the planes that come round," he explains, though he knows none of the other soldier in A Company watch the aircraft with the same technical eye he does. He can sense from the way she's looking at him that she knows that too. "The sound of the Spitfires too. The engine. You hear it once when it comes to save your arse you don't forget it." The words are the first he's spoken about his time in France and she grows quiet, but much like he hadn't pressed her on whatever work she is doing for the government, she doesn't press him.

When they pass the ruined buildings and rubble from an air attack on the way to the Rail Station, she links her arm around his. He tells himself it's simply to steady herself as they walk past the uneven terrain, but she doesn't remove it when they return to the smooth pavement. Even as they arrive at the Station she seems reluctant to let go of him. He wants to ask if they're courting, but lacks the courage. They make plans to see each other again soon, but neither can say when.

Letters back and forth between Camp Denston and Bletchley fill the time in between his next visit to Cambridge. He writes her nearly every day and receives a letter just as frequently. Neither can tell about the work they're really doing. Instead they exchange crosswords and talk about their days. They write a little about the war. About the Italians in Greece, U-Boats in the Atlantic and the Japanese in Indochina. Neither want to talk about the bombs that fall daily and the terror that grip the country. The fear and uncertainty is obvious in nearly every word. He thinks perhaps that's why they comfort themselves with scientific certainties and theories they can reason through. He doesn't know how she has access to so many published papers, but she seems to enjoy sharing the summaries with him and hearing his thoughts. One is all about rendering serum chemically stable by freeze-drying it. He writes back about the possibility of applying the same process to other pharmaceuticals, maybe even food and laughs about how much his field rations could improve. Other times it's about the synthetic rubber she hears the Americans are manufacturing for tires, which makes him wonder if they will be used on tank tracks going to Africa.

Always the letters are signed with the same formal farewell. The two words that tell him they are most certainly not courting. Your dear friend, Jemma.

There's an attachment there that speaks to more than friendship and scientific inquiry though. When he tells her he's saved up his wages to come and visit her in Bedford, her happiness is obvious through the pages. The actual letters on the page are more rushed and hurried, like she can't wait to tell him how excited she is to have him there. Likewise, her disappointment is clear when his leave is revoked after an abrupt move from Camp Denston to the stables at Newmarket. Her words are forcibly cheerful, trying to make it seem as if there aren't forty more kilometers between them now. Still he's determined to see her again.

There are two air raids along in as many weeks. His battalion helps support the anti-aircraft defenses for two straight days, but the Luftwaffe don't show up in full force. Then there's word the invasion is finally coming and all four Battalions in the Division stand to for nearly a week. Still he's determined to see her before they leave for Winter Quarters.

It takes three buses and nearly four hours to travel to Bedford with most of his time being spent waiting to catch the next bus. He thinks about what he'll say to her when he sees her after two more months of nothing but words on a page. There's evidence of air attacks in the little town he called home this summer. Two months ago the village was untouched by the war aside from housing a battalion of Scottish infantrymen. Now there are piles of rubble where he knows rows of buildings used to stand.

"It's awful." Jemma looks out at the wreckage. "Everyday I hope maybe that'll be the last of it."

"You haven't had any air raids, have you?"

"See a few planes fly over, but that's all."

"That's good." He's relieved to hear whatever she is doing she seems as insulated as the students at Cambridge. "Two bombs fell on camp this month, but nothing - "

"You were bombed?" she cries out in alarm. "Why didn't you tell me?"

He gives a dismissive shrug and reminds her that he's been bombed before, to a much more terrifying extent. He can see she looks upset by the news and asks her what's wrong.

"You just...never really talked about France."

"Not much to tell really."

"I didn't know you were bombed."

"Everyone that was in France was bombed," he states matter-of-factly. He wants to add that lately everyone in England is getting bombed too, but he senses that will just make her more upset.

He remembers all too well how small her voice had gotten when she'd asked him if he thought the Germans were really going to invade.

Sometimes he has a hard time believing that it's been five months since he ran from the Germans. She's right. He hasn't talked with her about France at all. There's so much about his time there he's never shared with anyone. He knows he'll never tell his mum, but sometimes he wants to tell Jemma about the waves of people and mass of undisciplined rabble they'd had to push through. How they'd had to leave so many people behind. He still remembers the pitiful fleeing caravans they came across that had obviously been attacked by the air. The sight of overturned hand-barrows and broken heirlooms, the dead horses with their legs straight up in the air. The corpses. He'd never smelled death before and hasn't been able to forget the sweet sickly aroma since.

"I think we're moving to Winter Quarters soon," he tells her abruptly.

"Winter quarters? Where will that be?"

"Don't know. Been hearing north. So probably back in Scotland somewhere."

"Oh." Her disappointment is as evident as his. Still she tries to smile. "That'll be nice, won't it? To be back home. Maybe you'll get to see your mum.'

He just smiles and nods his head, hoping it can disguise the obvious. He wants to tell her he'll miss her, how letters and a crossword won't be nearly enough.

"I'll write you as soon as I have a proper address," he says instead, hating himself for being such a coward.

"Please." The plaintive request makes him wonder if she wants to say something more.

She doesn't.

They sit in silence for a moment on a bench by the bus depot. He doesn't know how to say goodbye and it seems like neither does she.

"Do you really have to leave so soon?" she asks instead, though he knows she knows the answer.

"It takes three buses to get back," he informs unhappily.

"Right," she replies glumly. They both sink into silence. The island is being terrorized from the air. He's not sure what the future holds, whether the invasion will really come, whether he'll go to Winter Quarters or down to the Mediterranean. He knows two months isn't a guarantee.

"Jemma - "

"Fitz - "

They utter each other's names at the same time and speak the next words in unison.

"Be safe."