Hi, so here is another chapter and we are finally getting to the end as there are only three more chapters left! I hope that you enjoy this chapter and stay tuned for the next one as we slowly wind this down.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine just the characters that I have created along the way.

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A Sister's Love

Chapter 27-Father, Daughter

Brigitta and Georg fill in all the blanks as they reunite, Georg learns just what his daughters have been up to, and Liesl has a reunion finally with her father. Some new point of view as well.

For a very long time they just clung to each other. Brigitta had no idea what they looked like to the neighbours. The old man embracing the younger girl but she knew her neighbours well enough to know that at some point she was going to have to tell them the story least they start…embroidering the particulars.

But she didn't care. She really didn't care. All she cared about was her father and the fact that his arms were around her and that she was safe. Liesl had done her level best but until Friedrich the two of them had known there was a very good chance…a very realistic chance that neither one of them would see their family again. At least not in this life. The fact that they had, had a reunion with Friedrich had been one thing. The fact that they had now had a reunion with…well…that was another entirely.

She burrowed her face somewhere between coat and neck and breathed in.

He didn't smell the way she remembered naturally but she thought that he felt the same. It was hard to tell because hugs from their father (at least until their mother had turned up) had been few and far between but she knew at least that she was loved. Any lingering questions that had developed over the past five years as she had gone from child to woman had been put to bed in that one moment because the love that you felt for a child was resounding in the way that Georg Von Trapp hugged his daughter as if to feel every inch of her. His fingers digging into fabric and skin almost as if he thought that if he let her go for even a second, if he let his grip up for even half a heartbeat she would slip from his fingers.

Eventually though he did let go and she slipped from his grasp her feet landing on the stone pathway. She had not even noticed he had picked her up. She tried to wipe her face because at some point (unknown to her) she had clearly started crying but the tears kept coming thick and fast. It was alright though, her father was crying too.

It was an odd sight. Brigitta had never seen him cry before. In truth as a child she had never thought him capable of any emotion just the sheer coldness that came with his day to day persona. It had been jarring enough seeing him smile. It was bizarre seeing him cry.

"Brigitta" he said managing a small smile. She noticed with a pang that they came closer to shoulder to shoulder now. Once upon a time she had been the height of his waist. Now it was no longer. So much fucking time had been robbed.

"Oh my girl…Brigitta I didn't…Friedrich told me but I didn't dare hope…"

"He wrote to you?"

"No he's been wounded. He was at Iwo Jima…he's lucky he'll use his arm again but…when I think of how bad the reports are…they airlifted him back to the States and that has never been a good thing and then when he woke up he told me…and…we had to find the address but then I booked passage and—"

"Is mother with you?" she didn't care that it was rude to interrupt and once she supposed he would have given her that flat disapproving glare but this time he was staring at her as if she was the most precious thing in the universe and that was almost too hard to look at.

"No she wanted too but we thought it was best if she stayed behind with the family. Friedrich needed tending too, the nurses do their best but there are so many men and so little of them…she wanted to come. When she can come she will and bring everyone with her and…your little brother"

"Yes Friedrich filled us in on that"

As she said she realised she didn't know how much her brother had filled her father in on what had happened to them.

"How much did Friedrich tell you?"

"Not much" her father confessed running his hands over his face. She could see where the skin stretched and she looked at him and thought he had aged more in the last five years since she had seen him than he had the entire first decade of her life.

Or maybe it was her that had aged. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

"He told me the basics but then they had to keep him sedated. It was Kurt who managed to get a contact through the air force to confirm that there really was a Jon Van Braun—"

"You know about Jon?"

"I know you live in his house. Friedrich didn't get a chance to go into why"

Oh shit.

"You'd better come in" she said pointing to the house and picking up her fallen box. "You'd better come in and I can tell you everything"

"Yes…where is Liesl? I knocked for a while, well until I was sure nobody was home and then a woman told me you'd both gone out in a taxi but she wasn't sure where but that Liesl didn't look too well and—"

"Father" she said cutting him off as she opened the door. "Do you want a whiskey while I tell you this story?"

"A whiskey?"

"Cause I think you might need it"

Trust Friedrich to give the bare basics and forget about the truly important facts. A heads up to the whole son-in-law, baby on the way would have been brilliant.

But then again, Brigitta was smiling as she let him into the kitchen.

She couldn't help herself.

He couldn't stop staring at her. It was almost an obsession. He was cataloguing the differences in her. Her height, the fact her hair was shorter, the fact that she had not only turned into a woman but a woman he knew from experience that the boys would crowd around likes flies around a piece of chicken. Out of his seven…well…eight children Brigitta and Liesl had been the ones who had looked the most like him. Marta too. The rest had looked like his wife and there had been times when the drink and the guilt had ate at him that he had looked at Louisa and thought she was her mother come back to torment him for the fact that he had left two of her babies in a warzone.

The second Friedrich had told him his blue eyes cloudy with both pain and morphine he had felt his entire body lock down as if bracing for a mortal blow and hope that dull, dead flower in his heart had begun to grow. Maria next to him had wrapped her fingers so hard around his forearm that he had thought circulation was about to be cut off but then his son…no longer the boy he had once been but a man changed and scarred and manipulated by war had looked at him and Georg had looked into the blue eyes of his wife and had known…he had known…that he was telling the truth.

The rest had been a scramble for intelligence. Kurt had friends (and Georg knew what kind of friends they were but he had never given a shit what or who his son's sexual preferences were) and they had managed to get an address after a week of agonising waiting. Then it had been booking a passage (he was not going by plane if he could help it, he was a naval man through and through and more to the point he knew what the chances of going down in a plane were these days). Once he had managed to get passage it had been a waiting game, getting to Australia, getting through immigration in which he was pretty sure his son had broken several laws because despite his shabby appearance he had been treated as if he was diplomat and then he had managed to find the place.

The woman next door had told him where both his daughters were but there was an element of distrust in her expression when she had stared at him. Georg had known that these people had come very, very close to being invaded during the war and he also knew that his accent was still prominent despite his years in America. Brigitta's had almost gone after all. He had been prepared to knock until his knuckles had bleed but she had shot him a look that told him to shut up unless he wanted the police on his back and he had sat down on the stoop feeling utterly defeated.

Then he had heard it. It had sounded like a dream at first but then he had heard the snatches of song down the street. It had been the song Maria had taught his children to sing when they had been too afraid to go to him in the case of a thunderstorm. Someone had shouted across the street and he had heard an almost cheerful use of casual language that made him smile and then the song had stared up again. The problem was he had not heard his children's voices in a long time and it was almost hard to tell which one of them it was.

(As if he needed another reason to hate himself for his colossal failures as a father)

And then the dark haired girl had come round the corner and for one stupid moment Georg had thought that it was Liesl. Liesl when she was sixteen and Maria was trying to warn him that she was going to become a woman without him noticing. Back when the world was golden and the only thing that he had really been worried about was his feelings for his governess because the thought of an invasion seemed so, so far away.

But time moves on and time gets away from you at the best and the worst of times and this was it. The girl that rounded the corner in the purple shirt that was tucked into an economic black skirt that fit her figure (in a way he was sure he would find indecent when the shock wore off) was not his eldest, it was his middle child and the ten year old girl she had been eyeing him with that defiant gaze when he caught her reading something forbidden by the government or quite frankly too radical to set foot in his house, was gone to the confines of time and in her place was a woman grown who looked at him as if he was a ghost.

And now she was pattering around a little yellow kitchen fetching a dark bottle of whiskey and pouring a decent amount for him in a nice glass. She opened the fridge and to his amazement he saw her take out a bottle of white wine. She opened that and poured herself a little glass and then passed him the whiskey. She placed the bottle down on the table and then sat down wine in hand.

"Oh don't look like that" she said finally seeing no doubt, the expression on his face. "We both need something and there is a lot of the story that you have to hear and I have to tell"

Well that wasn't ominous at all was it? He took a sip of whiskey and let the taste of it burn down his throat.

"Go on"

"Well…what do you want to know?"

"Everything. Start from the beginning."

"We…I don't know how we got separated, one moment we were with you and the next…I genuinely don't know how it happened but I know Rolfe was there. Liesl had a blow to the head and he shoved us in a supply closet and told us to remain quiet. I think he was shot after that because three hours or so later the nuns found us. We stayed in the convent for about a month and then took a refugee train out of the country, first to Switzerland. We stayed there for about another two months and then that was when we met Jon. He had fought his way out of his father's house…he was a high ranking Nazi…and…and he had a house here, he was based in Australia and he had a grandmother and—"

"How did you get through immigration?" he asked cutting across her before he could stop himself. "I mean two young woman and a man…it must have raised some red flags if you were travelling together"

Brigitta took a sip of wine and stared at the wall for a second. Clearly she was thinking on the best way to phrase what was coming next. While she looked like him her facial expressions were so like her mother that it was almost easy to read her. For a girl who loved books his daughter was simply an open one.

"Brigitta"

"Liesl and him married"

Married?!

"MARRIED?!"

Brigitta watched him for a second and then nodded. Clearly this was a reaction that she had been expecting from him but really! Georg would challenge any man to take this news in a good way after five years. And it was five years wasn't it? The sixteen year old girl that he had known and seen and loved and ignored was now a wife at the age of twenty one.

"It was more for protection but they did fall in love" Brigitta said quietly watching him. "And Jon was a perfect gentlemen, they didn't…do anything until they were both sure that that was what they wanted. Right before he shipped out actually"

Georg contained his snort with great difficulty. He knew enough to know that love or not there was an element of going to war mixed in with that.

"And…and where is your sister?"

Brigitta tapped her nails against the glass for a long second.

"Well…you see Father…that's the other thing"

Oh he was not going to like this. He was sure of it. There was just something too…odd about her tone.

"Liesl's just given birth to her daughter. Well her and Jon's daughter that is"

Georg just downed the whiskey in one. It was either that or promptly have a coronary. Brigitta poured him another one and he downed that in one as well letting the burn take control of his voice. Once he was sure he could get his voice under control he spoke again but he had to admit that it was a struggle.

"I see"

"Father—"

"Brigitta I will not panic and I will not shout. Quite frankly I am very relieved you are alive. Liesl married and having a child is a much better scenario what has kept me up at night believe me"

That was the nicest way of putting it. The nightmares that had plagued him for the last five years…he would not wish them on his worst enemy. And considering what Herr Zeller had done to him that was saying something.

Brigitta nodded and then she shrugged. "And that's that" she said finally. "You have a granddaughter by the way. Elizabeth Brigitta"

"Good name"

He wasn't sure what else he was supposed to say to that other than that. Certainly he could not say what he was feeling. He was quite sure there were no polite words in the any of the languages he spoke to fully describe what he was feeling.

"Yes…and…and I know there are other things, things that matter, things that we have to say…Liesl and I but…but I don't think know is the time"

He had no idea what she was saying but he thought that that was a conversation for another day.

And there was one more thing that he needed to say.

"Brigitta…I need you to understand that…there has not been a single moment where I have not thought about you or Liesl. I need you to understand that. I…I know I have not been the best father to any of you. I ignored you all for years and in attempting to bury my own pain pretended that you did not exist. Some might say that it is divine retribution that I lose two of my children but I need you to understand that not a day…not a moment has gone by where you and your sister have not been in my thoughts and prayers. I tried…everything known to man, through the Red Cross, through Max when I was able to get communications across. I guess he must have thought that they were watching him…he never checked the abbey—"

"We also contacted the Red Cross, when we got to Switzerland. I do not think they ever got back in touch with us"

"Wouldn't have made much difference, now maybe things would have happened but back then they were so overworked and understaffed that there was not much chance before the war…and it doesn't matter…because you are here"

And it didn't matter. None of it mattered.

Brigitta nodded and smiled and took another gulp of wine. She went up to bed eventually making sure that Georg knew where the spare bedroom was. In truth it was because she was emotionally exhausted. It had seemed like years ago when she had heard news of the bomb dropping and not days.

She left her father down in the kitchen still clutching his whiskey glass and Georg before he went to sleep that night had to remind himself that this was not a dream—and she had not even tried to absolve him of his nagging, soul crushing, nightmare inducing guilt.

She took him to the hospital. Liesl was still rocking her little baby. Her smile was genuine when she saw Brigitta and then her jaw dropped as she saw their father standing behind her. Brigitta nodded. There was nothing else that either one of them could say other than to get swept away in the emotions that ruled the three of them. They were together, they were alive, they were in the same place for the first time in nearly five years and there was an ending in sight and as her father took a seat next to Liesl his fingers trembling and his mouth twitching with emotion as he took in the woman she had become (more so that Brigitta) she found she was watching them from the door her hand curled around the handle to the point where she knew her knuckles were white with the tension.

Today was not the day to have the conversation but she knew that at some point they were both going to have to because she looked at Liesl and Liesl looked back and she knew her sister had made her decision just as much as she had.

Neither one of them was leaving Australia now.

What that meant for this happy little moment, Brigitta could not think.

And there you go, I hope you like it and I will do my best to bring you the next chapter sooner rather than later.

Next Chapter-Georg, Brigitta and Liesl have a frank and honest discussion about what their future looks like when news of the war's end breaks out over the airwaves and Eugene Garvey makes another appearance.