Stuck in the Middle with You

July 4th 1945

July 4th 1945

Berlin, Soviet-Occupied Germany

Artemis watched with a rifle slung over her shoulder as the humiliated, worn-down and pained Fascist prisoners were marched through the streets by the Americans. They forced the POWs to sing an American song, one Artemis couldn't understand. All she could understand was "hurrah, boys, hurrah!".

It irked her how they acted as though they themselves had conquered the city. Mother Russia had bled in the millions, they arrived first, yet the Americans barge in two months later and are permitted to garrison their own quarter of the capital? Where were the British and French in all this. It seemed like she had not heard anything about them since before the Motherland had even been invaded. Were the French all dead or something?

She smoked a cigarette trying to avoid her comrades. Sure, she respected a guy who served his country in war, didn't mean she had to like him. If this war had taught her anything it was that Fascism is the truest evil in the world, but some men in the Soviet Red Army were up there. Thankfully they'd never taken advantage of her, the one girl in the room. Still, they acted like cockheads, and some German newspapers she'd seen in empty homes reported her own comrades to be just as barbaric as the Fascists. Sure, she didn't particularly trust a German paper but it wasn't implausible for some of her comrades to be less desirable. She'd seen it plenty before the war, why should 3 years of gunfire change that?

"Hey." She heard a voice from beside her, obviously a male one. With a raised eyebrow she turned to look. It was late in the evening. Nowhere near midnight but quite a bit after sundown so as a lone woman in a dark city of warriors she was wary. She nodded and the guy tilted his head.

He was tall, though neither bulky nor skinny. If Artemis had to guess by his arms he had some muscle on him, just not enough to knock a man out with just a punch like some Red Army men she'd seen. "I heard you speak German?" He noted in said language, and that's when Artemis recognized him. She had seen him in the commander's tent earlier, standing straight next to the American counterpart of her general, though the Yank had a bucket hat on rather than the traditional officer's cap.

She took another drag of her cigarette. The Artemis of 1941 would never have dreamed of smoking, but three years of witnessing atrocities and killing countless Fascists made her hands shaky. She needed something to calm them and her mind. "Yeah, so I do." She replied in Deutsch.

As the Yanks marched past with the prisoners of war they'd been parading since beyond the Elbe, an American man and Soviet girl conversed in German in a defeated Berlin. The guy also pulled out a cigarette and lit it. "Cold night. Always hated Europe just for the weather." He small-talked.

Artemis nodded, not sure whether to like or trust this man. It had been thirty seconds and he hadn't made an obscene comment or advance on her, and that was genuinely more than Artemis had ever experienced from a man. "It gets much colder where I'm from. This is a tropical summer." She informed him, not an ounce of lie in her words. You never truly understood a Russian winter until you had to fight a solitary war in it three times over sitting in abandoned buildings by yourself with no warmth for hours upon hours.

He nodded, fixing his sleeve up to the elbow since it had fallen down. "If I don't know winter you don't know tropical summers. I'm Percy, by the way." He held out his hand to shake.

Sensing as though he had no intentions of assault, Artemis rarely shook his hand in greeting. "Artemis." She introduced herself.

The American took another drag. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm surprised at how many girl soldiers I've seen here." He commented, then immediately saw Artemis' stern face. "Okay, I can see you've taken that the wrong way. What I meant was... we heard all about you ladies in the West but... I thought it was exaggerated for, like, propaganda." He tried to rationalize it.