Hi, so here is another one and I hope that you enjoy this chapter.

A note-I know some of you have mentioned the swearing in this fic, I know that there is swearing. This story is going to have swearing in it. I know the film didnt but this is only loosely based on the film. I try to write Friedrich and Louisa as trying to deal with the terror and the trauma that is going on around them and their feelings which change for Louisa on her father especially many, times this story. If this bothers you then I'm sorry and I apologise in advance for future chapters.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine just this chapter.

Please Read and Review and let me know what you think.

And next chapter will take the point of view of someone...else for a sec.

Poetic Justice

Chapter 8-Identity Crisis

As news of the war gets increasingly worse everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the inevitable. And then Pearl Harbour happens. (Bit of a shorter filler chapter covering the events of the war).

The news was not good.

The news was never good anymore.

The war went badly from the second it started.

First there had been Dunkirk which had in tern led to the fall of France. They had sat around the radio listening to the stunned voice of the newscaster as he announced that France had fallen to the enemy. Relieved as everyone was to hear that many, many men had managed to get out there was the sense that in losing France—the battleground of the last war—something significant had happened. An ally was gone in terms of the resistance to the German rule and Louisa (for once) could not place any blame at her father's feet when he announced that he was going for a walk and did not come back for several hours.

It was a bitter blow to quite a lot of people. Their community in Wisconsin was small and mostly made of Austrian people but if you ventured out a little bit further into the town there was a great many people muttering about the fall of France. The loss was so sharp and so significant. There was not a man who had fought over there who had not lost something in those trenches whether it be a friend or a family member, a limb or just simply a part of himself along the way.

And that had been the tip of the iceberg.

The amount of territory that the Germans had managed to seize was staggering.

It wasn't just Austria, it was the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, Belgium, cities like Paris and Vienna were either being razed to the ground or being threatened with a bombing campaign so fierce that they had no choice. Countries such as the Netherlands simply opened up their doors. Poland was invaded in quick succession, the Channel Islands taken and they all knew that Britain would soon be next unless a minor miracle happened and the Soviet Union all the while began to press their own advantages.

And then shockingly Hitler changed tack. In 1941 when Louisa was sixteen nearly seventeen (and if that didn't make her think of Liesl then nothing else would!) Louisa had been watching her little brother crawl on the blanket on the floor when the radio had crackled to life to announce that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.

"Who the hell propose that idea?" their father had said his face contorted into a smile that was almost feral.

"I suppose his generals" Friedrich now a man desperate to go and fight said after the broadcast had ended.

"Perhaps but what the hell possessed him to follow through with it. The Soviet Union can amass a huge amount of man power from all over their collective territories and God knows Stalin will throw whatever and whoever he can at the advancing armies. No…the Eastern part of this war is going to become a bloodbath"

"At least he's not taken Britain" Friedrich pointed out. That was true. The little island had managed to stay firm against constant battering. Louisa had heard about what they were calling 'The Blitz' over there. In truth she had heard places like London, Manchester, Birmingham…cities that she had never heard off and would never get a chance to go and see, being hammered into the ground by a constant barrage of planes. And yet still the country was holding strong. By the skin of their teeth they were holding off the German advancement and from what Louisa read (because God knows news was just as important as food during that long year and a half where the world went to hell in a handbasket) it was driving the Nazi's mad.

America was still claiming neutrality but some kind of agreement had been made between her adoptive country and all the ones that were holding off German advancement and weapons were being shipped out to the Allied forces at an alarming rate. And besides…neutrality in this was a pipe dream. At some point they would have go in and like every other young person who had yet to understand the terrible cost of war the elder Von Trapp's were ready and waiting.

Louisa didn't know what she could do. She knew that they were taking woman, not as front line fighting troops (mores the pity because she knew that she would be just as good on the front line as any man and in some cases probably better with a gun than most) but she knew that they were taking them on in other forms. Nursing was the obvious choice but the more Louisa thought about it, it wasn't what she wanted to do. She didn't want to be stuck in a hospital cleaning and looking after the sick, if she was going to go then she wanted to go.

That left other avenues. There was of course nursing on the front but those positions were few and far between and to be honest she was not sure that she wanted to nurse full stop. There was the usual cooking, cleaning etc but again not something she wanted to do. If she wanted to cook and clean she'd be better of staying at home all the cooking and cleaning she'd been doing there over the last two years since Alexander was born.

There were other options but she didn't know how to ask for them. She wasn't entirely sure if she could walk into a recruitment office and tell the man there that she wanted to get the fuck out of this country and kill the bastards who had made her leave her own like a common thief in the night.

Friedrich had already decided what he was going to do.

The Marines.

He had told her this with an almost manic glint in his eye one night when they had snuck out onto the porch to smoke cigarette one December night.

"Why the Marines?" she had asked once. Friedrich had looked at her as if she was being impossibly stupid. It was such a big brother look that Louisa felt lighter than she had done in months in this moment. It was a brief second where everything felt normal and nothing had felt normal to her since 1938 when she had gone to bed an Austrian girl and woken up to be told that she was now a German woman.

"Louisa do use your brain, get your head out of Europe for a second and remember that there is another army advancing across large swaths of land"

For a second she didn't think, she couldn't think, of who he was talking about and then like he predicted her brain caught up with her and she realised who he was talking about.

The Japanese.

The Japanese were not talked about in the same way that the Germans were talked about. They were mentioned on the radio but so much of the news was taken up in the annihilation of a Europe that had barely recovered from the last war so to be honest Louisa had not been paying it much attention. She was sure during breakfast one morning oh so long ago Brigitta had mentioned something about them but to be honest she was beginning to forget.

"The Japanese already have large swaths of China, most of the smaller islands in the Pacific and if someone doesn't get a grip soon they'll advance all the way to Australia and New Zealand"

"Thought it was the British who were supposed to look after Australia and New Zealand."

Friedrich shrugged. "Think the British are a bit too occupied trying to keep Hitler away from their coastline at the moment" he said breathing smoke into the air.

It was a chilly night.

It was the first week of December.

"God I wish they'd hurry up with it" he said throwing his smoke to the ground and stomping on it.

"Who?"

"The government. Everyone knows it's got to happen soon. We need to add to the fight, God knows Britain won't end it alone"

"And you want to go"

"Course I do. This is bigger than me, bigger than our family. Bigger than anything I've ever seen before. This is about the future of the world. If I'm lucky enough to survive then I want to be able to tell my children that the reason they live in a world where they can say what they want and think what they want is because I gave myself to my country. I want to live in a new world, I saw a little of the one we were leaving after the invasion and I knew enough to know that I didn't like it. I can't be Rolfe"

Rolfe. Now there was a name she hadn't heard in a long time. Since that night in the abbey she'd not given him a second thought. Rolfe was a ghost consigned to the past and in her opinion she was better off leaving him there.

"Rolfe thought he was fighting for his country too" Louisa pointed out because credit where credit was due that was what the utter idiot had been thinking.

What Liesl had seen in him she still didn't know to this day.

"Maybe" Friedrich said. "But I wouldn't have been like that if we'd stayed. That's the point. I couldn't fight for the Nazi's. I like democracy too much"

Louisa let his words float around the air for a second and then with the scorn of a sister she laughed.

"Where'd you get that one? Book of powerful sayings?"

Friedrich had the grace to laugh.

It was odd, they had been close before in that way that brothers and sisters had been and perhaps the older Von Trapps had been closer than most. Friedrich and Louisa and Liesl had been bonded together by a shared distaste for their father blowing in and out of their lives like a gust of wind with the door open and so they had been close in order to protect themselves but now…the void that Liesl and Brigitta had made in their lives had brough them all closer together. Certainly she and Friedrich had been brought closer by it. They very rarely rowed anymore and that had to be a minor miracle in itself.

"You should make peace with father" Friedrich said quietly.

Except when he said shit like that.

"I am at peace with father"

"No your bitter with father. And your angry with him"

"Aren't you?"

"And what the hell am I supposed to be angry about?"

Louisa paused. There was the crux of the matter. Sometimes she felt like she was the only one who remembered the years of constant neglect, the way they were made to feel as if they were the millstone around the man's neck, as if they were the nightmare. It had reflected upon them all, they had…or at least she had…been made to feel like she was something wrong. Like there was something wrong with her. And then there had been the fleeing from Austria, the turn around to where he liked them again, the losing of Brigitta and Liesl. Liesl who would have talked her out of this impasse that she and her father were in, the two of them constantly walking on eggshells and never knowing when the bomb was going to go off. A complete mixture of metaphors.

Well…that was Louisa too wasn't it.

And then on top of that there was the conversation that they had, had in Switzerland and she still didn't know weather or not it had been her words—if she had been enough—to get him on his feet at the end of the day.

And there it was.

She'd never had the balls to ask him outright. Something about her father made her feel like a little girl sometimes. Like she was still trying to be enough, to be seen, to get his approval. Constantly.

"Don't you…doesn't it give you whiplash? How quickly it all changed? How he went from hating us to loving us"

"I don't think he ever hated us" Friedrich said quietly. "I don't think it was that simple as you try and make it out. I think he just…I think when he looked at us he saw mother and the life that he had, had and it hurt. And…yes I remember the feelings he used to inspire—"

"Aren't you angry?" she interjected before she could stop herself. Friedrich said nothing for a long time as he mulled it over.

"Yes" he said finally "But we can't be angry for the rest of our lives."

"Want to bet" Louisa muttered.

Friedrich smiled.

That night that had seemed to stretch on forever had been December 6th 1941.

By the next day America was at war. Friedrich had been right, it had been the Japanese that they should have feared. Pearl Harbour had been the straw that had broken the camel's back. It had taken them all by surprise and Louisa who had been at home watching her baby brother, now a toddling two year old had felt (God help her) an small sense of relief that the waiting was now over.

They were at war. For better or more likely for worse they were at war.

And finally she could go.

And there you go, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and I will bring you the next one sooner rather than later.

Next Chapter-We have Georg's point of view and as the world goes to war for the second time he thinks back on his children, his past and his future (some mention of events that take place in A Sister's Love)