Hi, so here is another chapter and I hope that you are enjoying it so far and will enjoy this one. We are now over halfway and we are ploughing full steam ahead into the fourteen chapters that are left.

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A Sister's Love

Chapter 16-Comfortably Numb

Liesl has a plan which Jon gets as feelings between them develop. Brigitta has a pen pal. Both Von Trapp girls miss Edith and the power of a strong female influence and the War begins to come home when the American troops begin to hit Australia's home soil. Kind of a small filler chapter.

They buried Edith in a simple ceremony in the graveyard three blocks away from her house.

It was simple and it was sweet and it was a small funeral. Liesl thought that the woman that Edith had been meant that she deserved a great funeral, a state funeral but she was like one of the many other men, woman and children of this war who would fade away from memory in time and whose courage and presence would remain nameless and faceless.

She had taken in two refugees despite every warning not too. She had loved them and raised them and paid for them and educated them and she had done it in the full view that many a woman or man would not have done what she had done.

And now it was consigned to this. Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.

Edith was dead.

Jon had said nothing about the grief that he was so obviously portraying, that he was so obviously feeling. Liesl dressed in black had planned the wake and she had gripped his hand and held it tight as the grave had been lowered and she had been surprised at how much it had mattered that he had gripped back.

And she was also surprised at how much she had liked that.

There was a sense that something was changing between them, something was building and adapting and changing between them and she wanted to chase it down regardless of what the consequences would be but she was also nineteen. For all the jokes that Rolfe had made she was terrified by what it meant to be a wife. She had been an adult and a woman for a long time, hell she had grown up overnight that night in the convent but she was scared of the feelings that grew within her whenever she saw Jon yawning in the weeks afterwards, whenever she made him breakfast, whenever he went to bed shucking up his hair at the back or whenever he told her with that slow dangerously soft smile that he was going to take in some work. It was easy between them and yet there was always separate bedrooms at the end of the night and she laid awake because when she closed her eyes she found that her husband was cropping up in her dreams in a way that made her very thankful nobody in this house could read minds.

And also in a way that Rolfe had never cropped up. Rolfe had been innocent and sweetness and the light that came with your first love. Rolfe had never been dangerous and dark and passionate. He had never inspired those kinds of dreams before. And yet Jon did.

It was most frustrating and what was the worst part? The fact that there was nobody around who could tell her what to expect. There was no mother, real or her stepmother around, there was no Edith. There was nothing and nobody and no one and Liesl who had clung to such relationships when she had been gifted them found that she was struggling without them.

That in itself was odd. She had been a motherless child for most of her adolescence and she had resented both her parents for making her the way she had been. Then her step mother had come into the picture and things had been wonderful for the sum total of two days and then it had all gone to hell in a hand basket.

And there was no mother to speak to when it came to complicated feelings, no older sisters, no Edith, nobody.

And so, she had no idea how to deal with it other than to throw herself into work.

She had decided to become a nurse.

She wrote to Susannah to tell her that and found that Brigitta had took the letter to be posted with her own. But she had decided to become a nurse. It was hard work, tiring work and she walked home several times at night alone and collapsed into bed her whole body aching, only to be forced awake by her alarm clock several hours later.

It did mean that she and her sister were forced further apart and a part of her wanted to speak to Brigitta, to speak to her about the grief that hung over both of them like a dark cloud but her sister seemed to be remarkably cheerful when it came to things such as these. Liesl did not understand but to the honest she was so tired that it was all she could do not to let herself fall ill with the hours she was working and the sights that she was seeing.

Jon on the other hand was more supportive than she thought he would be. Well…as supportive as Jon ever got. He had always been one to keep his emotions close to his chest and this had not helped. But he had told her that she would make a wonderful nurse one day over dinner and that if she wanted to enter the military he would make sure she got a fair shake.

She had told him no but his response had been gratifying all the same.

The hospital she worked at in Melbourne was not as badly hit as the ones like Darwin and they had nothing compared to the field hospitals that littered places like Peleliu and Guadalcanal, places like Coventry in London and Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. She knew that she was lucky but it did not do anything to stop the horror that gripped her when it came to the day to day business that came with dealing with the men and woman (sometimes) that came back from the war.

The ones that came to Melbourne were generally in need of months of recovery but the worst of their injuries had already been seen to in the mobile army units that served on the front lines. That being said it was clear that when the wounds weren't physical there were a lot that were mental. Also coming in with the influx of Australian soldiers were the American's several of whom were being medically evacuated back to Australia one of the nearest friendly countries available.

It was not uncommon for them to wake up whatever nurse was on duty and It was no uncommon for them to take time when they woke from whatever nightmare gripped them for them to realise that they were actually safe.

The American GI's were always charming, many of them younger than she was and always up for a flirt and a laugh, a card game or nine times out of ten desperate for a cigarette. Liesl liked many American Marines that came through the door and she found that she especially liked the ones that read. There had been one by the name of Bob (or so he had asked her to call him) who could recite Shakespeare with an ease that would have made any student jealous and when she had said she was from Austria he had plagued her for any information about her country in a way that had made her laugh.

Eventually however they had to be shipped out. That was the way of the world and working in a hospital had taught her the hard way that it was best not to get attached to these men who were here one day and then were gone the next either on their own two feet or tragically in a body bag. It made her respect them all the more for their sacrifice and it made her hate the Nazi's even more. It made her hate deluded tin pot dictator's more and she found that she could not blame many of the patients for their language when it was directed at the Germans even though most of them were fighting the Japs.

"We hate them both equally" Bob had told her when she had asked him once. She had been in the process of changing his IV so his last blood transfusion could begin and she had laughed despite how unprofessional it might have seemed.

However nobody minded.

Yes it was hard work. Yes it was hard back breaking work that left her exhausted and mentally and physically pushed to the point where she didn't think she could be mentally and physically pushed more than what she was suffering already but for Liesl she had to admit that it was the right call to make. She was happy for the first time in a long time and she felt useful for the first time in a long time. Jon had to go back to his office and plan his spy ring or whatever it was that he did and she watched him go with a regret in the morning that she didn't think about at lunchtime.

Yes she wanted to be with him.

But if he didn't want to be with her…

Well…at least she always had this.

She was being useful for the first time in her life and she loved every single second of it.

Dear Eugene

Bollocks what could she write next?

She knew what she wanted to write. But the problem was knowing what she wanted to write and actually writing down on the clean, fresh piece of paper were actually two different things entirely.

Brigitta chewed the edge of her fountain pen and paused. She didn't know why she was writing this in the first place, just that he had shoved a piece of paper at her before they had left Darwin with his address written on it and had told her write him.

What did that even mean?

Apart from the obvious?

She wished that her mother was here. Or Edith, or even Louisa. Even Liesl though she knew Liesl was having her own troubles. Liesl who came home so tired but so satisfied that it was not even worth prodding her for a conversation any more and far easier to let her get some sleep, a hot meal, a change into some fresh clothes and a hot bath for once.

That just left her on her own for a long time.

She had taken to going to the local library quite a bit. She had been a bookish child and it was very easy for her to escape the reality and collapse into the world of her ink and paper twin.

But that was not all she was doing.

It was high time they got a response from the Red Cross and she had written to them again. She had not told Liesl she had posted the letter but she knew that it needed to be sent again. It was coming up to nearly four years, they needed answers one way or another. And Brigitta was not a child anymore.

She winced looking down at the ink that had stained her fingers as she had dithered about what to write.

She needed to write.

Something.

Anything.

Not just to Eugene but to herself. For herself. For the children she would have, for the people who would look back on this terrible war and would want to learn more and the more she thought of that the more she liked the idea and the more that she wanted to share it with the one person other than her sister who she was convinced would listen to her and give her his honest and kind opinion.

And that was what she needed.

So it was very easy for her all of a sudden to find the words to write.

Boys.

Nothing was ever simple with them was it? They should have had a lesson on how their minds worked at school. For Brigitta it would have been more useful than learning maths anyway. For what good would algebra ever serve to a normal human being?

But she was getting ahead of herself and instead she grabbed another clean sheet of paper, wiped her hands on the piece of kitchen cloth at her side and rewrote her first sentence and then the next and then the next until it all came out words tumbling after words as if she had been waiting all this time to be able to speak them.

Dear Eugene,

I have been thinking of writing a book…

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

Next Chapter-Jon is posted overseas and before he goes he and Liesl have it out about their feelings which leads to a shocking conclusion. And then a shockingly familiar face is found in a hospital where Liesl works and the lives of the sister's will never be the same again.