Epilogue

August 8, 1945

Chicago, Illinois, United States

For most of the three years after John and Lorne left Spain, Elizabeth Weir stayed, continuing working for the Office of Strategic Services in the highest reaches of Madrid society. In the summer of 1944, after the Generalissimo had long ago abandoned his German allies to the fate of history, she had been transferred to Paris to begin the long process of bringing war criminals to justice.

The horror of what they were seeing, even before the first of the camps was uncovered, weighed on those working on gathering evidence and finding the guilty. With a group of high-ranking allied officers, General Hammond had taken Elizabeth to see Dachau, a concentration camp in the otherwise idyllic Bavarian countryside. It was there that he had told her to go home, to recharge her energies, to remember life as they were swimming in the machinery of death.

And the first thing she wanted to do was not see her mother and father in the city or even at the family home in the Hudson Valley, but to rush to Chicago… She stayed in New York long enough for her sister's wedding, but only barely.

Elizabeth was standing in the Robie House near the University of Chicago campus with a glass of wine in her hand and paying a bit more attention to the beautiful house and its incredible construction rather than the members of the university's science and math faculty around her. She had caught a train from New York because a friend had told her that John might be attending the conference, and she had sat listening to the speakers politely, but she was at least honest with herself when she admitted that the subject matter was way over her head.

And she hadn't seen John there.

She had made up her mind to leave and pretend she hadn't ever come here on this schoolgirl lark when she saw a man standing in the doorway, looking at her. It was Major John Sheppard, with a crisp brown uniform, battle ribbons over one breast pocket and battered pilot's wings. A slightly crushed hat was under his arm, with the internal structure taken out in the very non-regulation way many pilots seemed to prefer.

She wanted to run up to him and hug him despite the crowd of scientists, mathematicians and engineers, but she remembered her manners and managed to slowly walk over with a grin on her face. As she drew near to him, her years of training to be a lady failed her and she threw herself into his arms in an enveloping hug.

"You look very good, Major. Tanned."

"So do you, Major." He smiled, emphasizing the not quite real OSS rank. "I've been stationed out in New Mexico, little place called Los Alamos."

She chuckled. "It's too bad I left that submachine gun in Europe. I could shoot you for that."

He just grinned. "Come on outside, I know a great set of stairs we can sit on and talk."

Naturally she slipped her arm into his as they walked and settled under the shade of a tree.

"Are you home for good, Elizabeth?"

"I'm afraid not," she replied, "My sister was getting married and General Hammond sent me home on some leave. I'm going back in a few weeks to work as a translator and interrogator of German prisoners. Try to sort the bad guys from the really bad guys." As she spoke she tried to sound excited about the work, but with the news coming from the Pacific a few days before all she could think was that in the grand scheme of the war what she had done was very little.

Socialized for the cause, she had told her sister in an embarrassed moment before the wedding.

"You'd be good at it. You are good at reading people." John fiddled with his hat.

"Do you still keep up with Marcus? Does he still have that annoying habit of running into airplanes as he jumps out of them?"

John chuckled. "Last I checked he'd gotten himself into B-29s over in the Pacific. He's the kind of guy who'd like the idea of his plane being bigger than anyone else's plane."

She smiled at the thought, "Boys and their toys."

"You were the one with lots of guns, lady," he pointed out with a grin.

"Point."

"How's the ex?"

"Jack died at Normandy." She said it matter-of-factly, but quietly. "He spent three years trying to get into the war and he finally succeeded. He once told me that when he was twenty years old he was sure he'd die in France. He was right, just twenty-seven years late."

All John could do to that was just nod. They'd all lost friends.

"At least he was doing something for the war."

"So were you."

"I keep trying to tell myself that, but really…"

"No, really, Elizabeth. You helped save the free world."

"John, have you been watching too many propaganda films?"

He looked around as if to see if anyone was listening, and then spoke very low. "You know that bomb they dropped a couple of days ago, on Hiroshima?"

"I've been hearing some bits about it, some sort of secret weapon. Like a really big bomb."

"Bigger than you can probably imagine. The Germans were trying to build one too, and that scientist you danced with… he's the one who was trying to do it. He needed a supply of uranium from Africa because Germany didn't have a natural supply. That U-235 you thought was a reference to a u-boat. All they had was taken from a warehouse in Belgium in 1940. You helped stop them from getting more. Elizabeth, I know a lot of scientists and engineers who prayed for people like you."

Elizabeth listened quietly, not wanting to interrupt.

John put his arm around her and pulled her towards him, whispering now quietly in her ear. "You told me once that you wanted to save the world. Don't ever question again that you had a large part in doing just that."

He held her for a little while before moving a bit of her hair behind her ear. "I sincerely hope your parents are shocked about a grown woman who came halfway across the country on an off chance of seeing a guy."

She smiled. "My mother is probably still having a fit. I take some comfort in this."

He laughed at that. "You have a strangely cruel streak in you Elizabeth. However, I think I want to take you out to dinner anyway, and dancing… without the Nazis and the scary Italian women."

"You still remember that?"

"Remember? I still have nightmares about her."

"You have nightmares about Spain?"

"And dreams…. About this amazing woman I thought I might never see again."

He stood up and offered her a hand to help her up. She kept hold of his hand and leaned into him as they walked into the evening air.

fin