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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The arrival of the Second Battalion into Berchtesgaden was like running through a ghost town. Fluttering curtains and broken glass crunching under the tires and boots of the Americans. It was empty, leaving nothing but the echo of shattered windows and whispers of paratroopers down the empty alleyways.
Zhanna shivered, thought the wool blanket was still wrapped tight around her shoulders. A taut viel of reverence was strung between every man as they swept through the streets of a once idyllic city built under the shadow of Hitler's nest. It was too familiar, this empty feeling and the anticipation but it was an unwelcome familiarity. These homes had been filled with people like the Samsonovs. People who wanted people like Zhanna dead.
The paratroopers were respectful, at first, but as the pillaging and looting of homes began, all reverence for the families who had once made their homes on the mountain was lost. Zhanna tried to keep a hold of it, remembering the empty homes and broken windows of Stalingrad, or she would have, if the Nazi swatstika didn't glare down at her at every turn.
She couldn't enter the buildings, even as the CP and the barracks were distributed. And she sure as hell didn't ask to join the men on their trip up to the top of the mountain. That mountain could have been an altar, the temple of the ideas that she was in variance with. While Dick and Nixon had wandered and looted of their own, she sat on the steps, watching the sun climb in the sky.
Birds flitted through the eaves of the buildings, paratroopers setting up perimeters disrupting their peaceful nests, and Zhanna's brow furrowed, as the birds circled their home, trying to find a safe place to land.
With Hitler dead and the seat of his rule under Allied control, the war could only be a few weeks or even days from ending. To finally have an end to the only constant that Zhanna had known was too good to be true and it came too late. She wanted the war to end when the jump wings were still shiny and new. She had wanted the war to end when she still had her thoughts on paper, hair brushing her neck, and milky clean skin. The end had come too late. She was already dead, wasn't she?
She didn't have a nest to land in, her wings were tired and what did she have to show for it? The men had medals and stories and while Zhanna had the rank of Captain, any promotions in the American Army didn't matter to the Motherland. She had no place to land when her flight from the Motherland ended. Home had been first with her parents, and then with Sveta, or so she had thought.
Victory in Europe came sooner than anyone expected. While her quarantine was finished out between the bright room in the officer's billet and the sun filled patio below, Zhanna had spent little time exploring the surrounding mountains and had certainly no bounty to call her own. Like a magpie, bringing shiny bits back home, Malarkey would occasionally bring a few offerings to Zhanna's nest of blankets. Under the watchful eye of Spina, she would chat and smile, trying to convince him that everything really was alright. And, no, she would not take the silver chain with its glittering diamond that Malarkey offered. But still he left them, glittering in the sunlight and Zhanna watched the light flit off them, wings casting shadows overhead.
