A/N: Thank you to all that have reviewed. I'm sending good vibes to you all!
(www . youtube . com/watch?v=k7in-9E3ImQ)

Inspired by Dave Matthews Band and extratasty(dot)com.

III. Crash Into Me
who's got their claws in you my friend?
into your heart i'll beat again.

Lorena had never really appreciated how dim the lights were in bars. In fact, sometimes she even found it to be a nuisance, but as she slid up to the counter and sat down, she found it ironically perfect. She wanted to blend into the darkness. She wanted to drink away every thought in her head. She'd start fresh the next day.

"Scotch and soda, please."

No stranger had ever asked about Parker Hollis. Some people knew who did it. Some people didn't care. They heard "shot in the chest" and didn't want to know anymore. Lorena should have known that Captain Nixon would be the one to inquire further… S-2 and probing questions; they went together like Bacardi and Coca-Cola.

Her flaw, she knew, was her inability to stop her mouth from moving before the admittance came out. And the fact that she didn't care who knew anymore. It had been in the papers all along the East Coast, where her family's name was especially well known. It had traveled across the radio airwaves, so people in Oregon and Colorado could hear of the poor little rich girl who had been acquitted of murder. It was everywhere… except Europe. Because in Europe, Lorena knew, her problems were trivial, and in war, she would blend right in.

She rested her elbows on the bar top and let her head slip into her hands. It had only been twelve hours since her arrival, most of which she had slept away. They had her quartering with an elderly couple that lived above their bakery, which filled the rooms with the convivial aromas of freshly baked bread and pastries. But after the meeting, she hadn't felt much like talking or drinking tea and snacking on cookies. All Lorena had wanted was to scribble a few lines out and then rest… only the latter was accomplished.

The barkeep, a portly man in his early forties, placed the glass down in front of her with a knowing smile. Clearly, he had seen her type in there before. She did, after all, fit the bill of a woman who had her life together on the surface, but underneath it all… volcanic eruptions and crumbling cliffs, dynamite explosions and broken glass. She was a bundle of organs and blood and skin, a mess.

And she was in such a state that she was oblivious to the pairs of eyes that were on her. The men, though, watched her like a sparkly new toy, one with full breasts and bold, Italian features on a freckled, Celtic face. They talked amongst themselves, waiting it out before they made their moves.

"You sure that's her?" Sergeant Bill Guarnere asked, nudging at the other men around him.

"I don't know. When I talked to Captain Nixon, he said that she was crazy," Lieutenant Buck Compton said, the faint light shining on his pale blue eyes and bright, blonde hair. "She just looks lost."

"Ain't all broads crazy?" Guarnere joked.

"That one's gotta be to be here. I mean, who volunteers for this shit. Oh, wait…" said George Luz, the radio man for Easy, as he lit another cigarette.

"I heard she killed a man," a new kid, 'Babe' Heffron of South Philly, said. "She oughta get with Speirs. They can swap stories."

"She did," said Johnny Martin, an original Toccoa man. "It was in the papers."

The men watched her as she sipped from her glass, her eyes trained forward. She could suddenly feel the looks she was getting, the scrutinizing glances. She expected it, really. At Chilton-Foliat, one of the things that every female correspondent had been told was that many of the men longed for the comforts of home, particularly their beds and the women in them. They were going to get a lot of attention, sometimes more than they'd be used to.

For Lorena, this was an absolute fact. Since becoming a widow and a murderess, she had remained, needless to say, on the outskirts of the Atlanta social circles. She got up in the morning, went to work, chased down a few stories, went home, ate dinner, drank a glass of wine, fed the cat, and went to bed. Naturally, there were times in the middle of her day when she would stop for a coffee, meet someone who found her attractive, but it was only ever a meeting. She'd learn his name, he would learn hers, and that would be the end of things. Men hardly called on a woman who was known for any form of mental instability.

Suddenly, her senses were hit with the smell of a familiar aftershave. It was the kind that her brother had used. It was warm and welcoming with a hint of underlying masculinity. She associated it with suits and ties and books and… happiness. When she turned to her left, though, she didn't find her older brother, but another man… one who had filled a uniform with the glow of the Ivy League.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I hate to bother you, but are you Lorena Carlyle?"

Lorena met his gaze with an unintentionally hard stare. Whatever softness her dark eyes once had disappeared long ago.

"I am. Why do you ask?"

"Well, I'm a fan of your work, Ms. Holl—Carlyle," the young man said, pretending to be unaware of what her accusatory tone meant to say.

"My work?" Lorena was too surprised to pay much attention to the fact that he stumbled over her last name. "What's your name, Private?"

"David Webster, Miss Carlyle."

Private Webster, although he hadn't graduated from Harvard yet, knew a great deal of things about the world. He knew that Copernicus developed the theory of heliocentricity, that Homer wrote The Iliad, that English was a Germanic language, and that the woman sitting on the bar stool in front of him was of the great Boston Carlyles, owners of LC Glass Company.

Her grandfather, a Scottish-Irish immigrant, had been a lowly factory worker when he first came to the United States in 1864. After marrying one of the girls that worked on the assembly line, Liam Carlyle took the tiny amount of knowledge that he had gained about the glass industry and began his own company: LC Glass Co. By the time his son, Charles, took over the business in 1897, it was an empire, even surpassing that of Liam's former employer. The company upheld a strong family-oriented image until 1915 when forty-year-old Charles G. Carlyle married nineteen-year-old Lilla Fanciullo, who had only been living in Boston for a year. The good Carlyle name, spoiled by scandal, never fully recovered. Not even when Charles retired in 1938 and the responsibility went to Lorenzo Carlyle, the multi-talented male heir to the family fortune and Lorena's brother. Then came the death of Parker Hollis, Esq. in 1943, which ultimately sealed the fate of the business. The war effort, and both Lorenzo and Lorena's involvement, was the only thing that had saved them.

"And your father was my microeconomics professor one semester last year," he said.

"I'm sorry to hear that. He can be a bit of a tyrant when it comes to money and business. Especially to a Literature major."

Webster's eyebrows knitted together in confusion. "How'd you know?"

Lorena took a sip of her scotch. "You read the articles I wrote? And that's how you know my name?"

He nodded.

"Enough said."

"The Constitution was one of the only newspapers we got on the bases and I remembered you from the march."

"The march," said Lorena with a smirk. "I thought you looked familiar."

In December 1942, while transferring to Ft. Bragg from Camp Toccoa, 2nd Battalion force marched with full field kits and weapons to Atlanta. They created a stir throughout much of the state as they traveled 120 miles through the cold, wet Southern countryside, along the roads and in the woods. Photographers followed them in cars. Residents watched, awestruck, as the boys in olive drab tramped through their land. Lorena's editor sent her out to them one cold day, told her to travel with them. This war's going to pick up more soon and I might need to send someone over there. Don't let me down, Hollis. So, she dressed warmly in her long khaki pants and tweed jacket, and traveled east to where the men were marching in a perfect line along the side of the road. When they camped for the night, she took notes and typed out bits and pieces of the story on her portable typewriter. She slept in the car, the one that Parker had bought to apologize for the gash his belt buckle left on her head, for a few days while they camped behind the trees and hurried back to Atlanta to watch as Easy Company led the three-company parade through the capital city.

There were a few faces that had stuck with her, Webster's included, and a man from D Company, though she never caught his name. All she could remember about him, two years later, was a strong jaw and a crooked smile that she saw only once while she hiked between the camps.

"You got a lot of attention for that, didn't you, Miss Carlyle?" Webster asked.

The boy wasn't stupid. Lorena knew this for a fact. Anyone that survived one of Father's classes was intelligent; undeniably so, in fact. She sensed that he was an opportunist, but she didn't dare call him on it. If he wasn't going to bring it up, neither was she.

"Lorena, please, Private Webster." She finished the rest of her scotch. "My editor had mentioned something about a Pulitzer Prize, but I think he was just baiting me."

"It ruined the Journal, though," Webster said with a grin.

She allowed a smile to play across her lips. "You bet it did. And it's exactly what they deserved after boasting about having a best-selling novelist on staff for so long."

Webster laughed and stuffed his hands further in his pockets. It was also what they deserved for calling her a Yankee murderer, he thought. Between his body language and the sudden tension that occurred, Lorena knew that he wasn't speaking out of some uncommon consideration for her feelings. She felt sorry for him, because it was not something she would have done for him. She had lost the capacity to filter her thoughts and almost resented other people for being able to.

"Did you ever read the exposè that Sebastian Greene wrote for them about me?" she asked, trying to prove that she wasn't afraid of it.

"Six grammatical errors. I loved the response you did. A letter to the editor, wasn't it?"

"Yes," she said, smiling wider. "He also misspelled the names of my mother and father-in-law."

"Didn't your brother sue him for libel?"

"And sent a couple of guys that he knows from the North End of Boston to smash his car in with baseball bats, but Greene couldn't prove anything. It's one of the benefits of paying in cash."

Lorena laughed at the memory. A postcard came for her the same day that the news hit the papers. Sorella mia, I brought Fenway Park to you.

A sergeant, who Lorena recognized as Carwood Lipton from West Virginia, quieted the pub down. He spoke briefly. The company was moving out soon. Gloom came over the once lively men and the lights seemed to have dimmed once more.

"Well, Lorena," Webster said, straightening his jacket. "It was nice to finally meet you."

"You too, David," she said. "You too."

Lorena, drunk and tired, stumbled out of the pub hours later. The moon lit the way and cast gray shadows on the ground, turning into ghostly figures in her intoxicated eyes. Lorena smiled vaguely at the shapes and laughed to herself. The only things that never went blurry when she would try to drink herself numb were the faded scars on her hands, the dull lines that danced across her knuckles. Lorena… Lorena, darling…I want you to meet someone. This is Parker Hollis. He's one of my best students this semester. All the way from Atlanta. Mr. Hollis, this is my daughter, Lorena…She could still feel the sting of the belt as it went across her back, creating deep gashes in her skin and her soul. Hello Miss Carlyle. My, my! You're more beautiful than I imagined you would be…

Then, quite suddenly, she was falling after crashing into something hard and firm. From out of nowhere, or what Lorena thought was nowhere, a pair of hands shot out and wrapped around the top of her arms to pull her back onto her feet. Shocked by the swiftness of the motion, Lorena looked around, dazed and confused.

"It isn't safe for a woman to be wandering the streets like this so late," a steady voice said to her. "Especially not an American journalist."

Lorena pried her gaze from the bars on her rescuer's collar and looked up at his face, only to be met with a pair of eyes, lit up by the burning of a cigarette. She got the feeling that she had known him before, in a past life perhaps. She was finally speechless… almost.

"No, definitely not," she slurred. "My apologies, Lieutenant…" She read the name printed on his uniform. "Speirs."

Lt. Ronald Speirs stared down at the swaying woman and the expression on her oval face. Her eyes, dark and starry as the sky above them, were wide as they tried to focus and study him through the haze of the liquor she had consumed. A deep silver scar cut into her hairline and her Grecian nose had clearly been broken. Everything about her spelled trouble.

"I've seen you somewhere before," she said. "Am I dreaming again?"

So much trouble. The first time he had ever seen Lorena, she was traipsing through the woods to another group of soldiers, chewing on the end of a pen. There was a fresh scab on her forehead, hidden beneath a few strategically-placed locks of hair, and a small welt on her hand. Most people wouldn't have bothered to notice. Any woman that slept in a car and walked along the highways with a battalion of paratroopers wasn't exactly the type that would be without a few scratches, but Speirs saw the way that she pulled her sleeve over the raised flesh and continuously fixed her black curls over her other wound. Therefore, only months later, when the story of a woman who had been set free after killing her husband broke, Speirs was the only man in the 2nd Battalion who wasn't the least bit surprised. He smirked at her.

"No, you're not."

Lorena then remembered who he was: the man from D Company. She sighed, too drunk to be embarrassed.

"I'll just be on my way now," she said as soon as Speirs' grip loosened on her. "Thank you for catching me."

Speirs listened and watched as she moseyed toward the bakery, singing lightly. Si maritau Rosa The melody intertwined with her uneven footsteps and the ghostly shadow that followed her looked like it was dancing. Saridda e Phippinedda He could feel his chest tighten and he was unsure as to why. E iu ca sugnu bedda She must, he thought, be a witch. Mi vogghiu maritià

As he began to walk away, a glint of something on the ground caught his eye. Speirs bent down and picked up a silver pen, engraved with the initials L.G.C. He smiled, almost laughing to himself.

He had his excuse to see her again.

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