Collaboration with @silmarilz1701
Svetlana knew how to play the game. She'd been caught in the political drama of Stalin's inner circle since birth. The only child of one of Stalin's closest friends, she grew up in the limelight, scrutinized by frie...
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Zhanna was fifteen when she first saw the Bolshoi Ballet, only five seats away from Josef Stalin himself. The Samsonovs, in all their love of performance and smiles, had been avid observers of the arts. The Samsonovs and the Stalins, along with the rest of the inner circle, would attend the ballet in Moscow, their bloody hands staining the velvet. Zhanna had been lucky enough to go. She sat beside Svetlana, praying that her Polish blood wouldn't taint the air the purest Russians breathed, as she watched the pinks and reds dance upon the stage.
They were like swans, floating across the dark wood of their lake. Smiles painted serene on their faces, joined by the hand as they stepped and bowed. They performed with grace but the stretch of their muscles sent aches and strains of sympathy through Zhanna's own. Awestruck, Zhanna hadn't stood for the final applause, as the dancers bowed. She had sat, their glistening faces and pearly smiles seared into her mind.
They smiled through it all but underneath they were all muscle, sinew, and shattering bones. No matter how they slipped, snapped, or fell, the smile never dropped and their heads never lowered. They were porcelain puppets suspended in the air, pawns to the music and subject to the strings that tugged them along.
Easy Company weren't swans or graceful but Zhanna saw in them the same tension and suspension as those dancers on the stage. Now given the nickname of the "battered bastards of Bastogne," Easy and it's men had the appearance of slipping one too many times. Dirty, battered, and exhausted, Zhanna was relieved to know that her darkened eyes fit perfectly among the faces that surrounded her in the transport truck that rumbled them into their next stop.
The truck, like the ones they had taken into Bastogne, that could fit a whole squad of men jammed tightly together, were nearly empty. Second Platoon was a husk of its former strength, faces missing and still missed.
"Why aren't we fucking moving?" Liebgott groaned, as snow began to fall harder around them. Zhanna looked up from her worn boots, not exactly ballet slippers, and saw that the trucks were idling, lining the sides of the streets.
"Is this it?" Heffron didn't sound enthused at the sight of their new position. Perched on the banks of a river where the enemy was firmly planted, Haguenau was as battered as Easy Company. Shells of houses and pockmarked sidewalks could have been foxholes and snow-covered craters.
Malarkey stood, holding onto the bar for support. He was as exhausted as Zhanna felt but his face showed it quite plainly. His eyes were dark as he studied the town, not saying a word no matter what storm brewed across his brow. It wasn't Bastogne but it wasn't exactly paradise, either.
"Hey guys. Some lieutenant told me to report to Second."
Zhanna didn't recall the owner of the voice and face before her right away. It belonged to someone she hadn't seen in months, before she had shivered in a foxhole. Webster. He had left them in Holland. He smiled, clean shaven and face free of grime, as if he had been gone four minutes, not four months.
