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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Smile, Sveta.
Her mother's voice, lyrical in its kind gentleness, echoed in her mind. Do what is necessary, play the game, wear the mask. So instead of letting her irritation and anxiety and anger paint an unpleasant expression on her face, Sveta stood with her head high. She couldn't smile, not now. But she could keep from glaring. That little lie came all too easily.
They'd arrived only half an hour ago. When the jeep they'd taken from the train had rolled up to the American military base, Sveta hadn't had many words for it other than sad. The jeep driver had rambled on about their current location being new and temporary, that across the river there were better accommodations that the airborne recruits would get to use after they got their wings. She'd listened carefully, said little.
There had been lots of marching from the men not dying of exhaustion. Chants echoed in the barren center of this Fort Benning. They sang as Russia burned.
The Colonel had asked for Zhanna first. For the briefest of moments, Sveta had felt herself starting to get angry. Not at Zhanna, never at Zhanna. But she'd not come halfway around the world, trekked through Russia to North Africa, laid low in Tangier, been smuggled to England and then to America only to be treated as second.
The usual twisting frustration from those thoughts knotted her chest. She was only first because of her name. Samsonovs always went first. But she hated what the name stood for. Sveta could see the hypocrisy in her own thoughts. She hated it.
With Zhanna gone, she'd been left to fight off the stares. Standing outside the small wooden structure now holding the colonel and Zhanna, she was alone. The stares came from curiosity, surprise no doubt at seeing a woman holding a rifle and wearing a side-cap. But then some had turned hostile.
They'd seen the Soviet symbol. It sat front and center on her brown woolen pilotka. Red star, golden hammer and sickle, it seemed to be everything these Americans feared. Well, perhaps not everything. The Nazi swastika probably made them angrier. Hopefully.
At first, she'd just been with Sergeant Evans. He'd not said much now that they'd reached their destination. His tight stance and reluctance to look at her made Sveta sure he was one of the majority who saw her and saw the enemy.
Smile, Sveta.
Then he'd been called away. Left to her own devices, Sveta became less careful about maintaining her image. The men had continued to drag their feet. She noticed a few of them appeared exhausted in a way she hadn't expected even from training. Those men stayed away from her. She guessed some of them didn't even notice her.
At least it meant less smiling. Sveta tried, for her mother. But even two years later, her mother's voice in her head brought pain more than anything else. Sveta still remembered the sound of the bullet, the red stain as blood had poured from her mother's temple onto the bed. They'd thrown the whole mattress away. Her father had said she'd been weak.
