The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

Bonus Chapter: What Happened Next?

A/N:

hi everyone! i hope your holidays have been especially merry this year if you celebrate and that your 2024s are filled with unrivalled amounts of love, joy, and happiness! so i suppose this is the end (again). charlie means a lot to me and i'm sad to say goodbye, but all good things must come to an end. the same as i bid farewell to juliette and then posey, i now gift you with the end of charlie's story as a way for me to say goodbye to her too. will i ever write her again? maybe! i'm not going to say never, same as i won't say never about my other characters, but for now it's a very bittersweet goodbye.

this final bonus chapter covers many years and tells the story of charlie and floyd's lives together. it starts on the valentines day following the final chapter, which takes place a couple of months before the last bonus chapter (sorry it's confusing), but other than that it shouldn't be too hard to follow or place on her timeline. i hope it gives you all the closure you need to say goodbye to charlie along with me!

i won't say too much more considering i did wax lyrical in the final author's note, but thank you so much again for following along. i'm so grateful to all of you for sticking with me.

without further adieu, here it is. i hope you love it. all the love <3

***

He was waiting for her on Valentine's Day.

Even though they'd seen each other on three separate occasions in the last three years, he had come to see her on Valentine's Day. And she'd only noticed him because her friends had noticed him first, had started gushing about the gorgeous man on the opposite side of the street and how they wanted whoever he was waiting for dead so they could take the roses in his hands themselves.

"Charlie," Betty, Charlie's roommate, said, grinning from ear to ear as she matched the man's face with the one she'd seen in Charlie's photo album. "I think you have a visitor."

All of a sudden all eyes were on Charlie, but Charlie's eyes were on Floyd. Floyd. Here, in Stanford, leaning against a tree on the small patch of grass across the street from her dorm building. With a bouquet of red roses in one hand and a package in the other and his eyes on a bird hopping around at his feet.

Oh, she was in love. She was in love again, just like she had been the first time. She lit up just at the sight of him, felt her chest seize up when he smiled. That face, those eyes, that smile. If she didn't get over there in the next three seconds she was sure to pass out from lack of oxygen.

"Excuse me," she mumbled without looking at her friends. Then she was checking both ways before crossing the street in the lull between cars, giggling nervously as she approached a still-oblivious Floyd.

"Are those for me?"

"Freckles," Floyd breathed. His head snapped up and his eyes found her immediately. And in an instant he was lighting up, too, his entire being seeming to lift off of the ground. He smiled wide and took a step closer to her, his eyes flitting all over her face. "Charlie."

"Hi," she whispered, meeting him halfway. "What are you doing here?" The last time she'd seen him had been just after the semester had started, some time back in January when he'd been down in California for work. Before that, she'd come back to Kokomo to visit, upon the request of his family, and before that had been when she'd stayed at his family's house over Christmas. All of this was still so incredibly new - she hadn't expected to see him here at all, let alone with gifts for Valentine's Day.

"I wanted to ask you something," Floyd replied, smiling down at her. He looked at the red roses in his right hand and then at the package in his left before offering them to Charlie. "Will you be my valentine?"