Natasha hid. She could hear the loud crack of gunfire around her, some close and some far away almost muffled, hidden under the smoke and falling snow.
It was heavy, it obscured the vision of the men out there, only a couple hundred yards away from where she hid in the tree line. Those were the other members of their little group. The survivors.
She sat straight on the snow, legs crossed in an attempt to prevent herself from sinking any deeper into its depth. Her trench coat was pulled tight around her - even with the caribou hide lining she felt herself shaking. Was she shivering with the inscecent cold, or through fear?
Regardless she gripped the rifle barrel in her gloves hand, knowing that under the thick hide her fingers were still white at the knuckle.
She had never been one for fear, never grown up with fear as an option. The air was thin, yet thick with smoke and bangs, snow and screams for help. Natasha knew she was breathing too fast, in a way that would only make her fear worse.
Who would be next? Alexander? Gregori? Petyr? She almost cared more now, now that Nikolai was gone, than she had cared before. The boys were all she had left, the boys and the little life barely hidden beneath her coat.
She knew she was a sitting duck, knew that it wouldn't be hard to find her, knew she wouldn't be able to stand in time nor fire her rifle quick enough if someone caught up to her now. She was too tired, too heavy to be of much use to anyone, let alone the Red Army.
She knew she should leave the men behind, find an opportunity and leave them before she got them killed. Like Nikolai. She knew that they deserved more, they had been promised a well-weathered soldier when she joined their little troop. Now they had a rather large and unbalanced- in body and mind - woman, who was no use to anything but a sofa or a stove.
The snow began to bite at her legs, she could imagine her blue-tinged toes yelling at her to move. But where? She was no longer able to pull her heavy body around, she knew her time was near, knew she didn't have much longer until she was out of action, then what?
She may not have matched the image of the perfect soldier but she was even further from the image of the perfect wife, the typical домохозяйка, or the typical Mama. Nikolai had made her see a life where she could have that.
Nikolai had produced a warmth in her, a kindness and yearning to nurture which she had never experienced before in her sixteen years of life. He gave her a love she had never had, an uncomplicated, true form of love, the type she had seen in American films.
She knew belief her glove was the dark ribbon he had tied around her ring finger. It was the same red, the red of the blood which had spurted from his chest and crawled across his white shirt. His blood had covered her hands, coating them as she had cried. Their love had been undying, yet he had died before her. There had been nothing but the bitter snow to clean the blood from her hands and even now she felt the blood there; staining her skin as it stained her memories.
The snow she had scrubbed her hands with had numbed her for the past few weeks, numbed her to the pain she felt in her mind and heart but not to the pain in her body. The pains in her back and her lower stomach. She knew their meaning but ignored them as best she could. She knew she could not prevent what was to come, but knew she wasn't ready. Wasn't ready to see Nikolai's blood coursing through the veins of another person.
So here she sat, in the snow, in the cold, and in fear of what her world would be. She had lost so much; her family in leaving Ivan and Yelena behind; her childhood, in behaving as a woman did to her husband; her love for Nikolai; her love for Russia.
Feeling another deep ache in her back her muscles clenched tight like her fist on the rifle barrel, she twisted away from the pain gasping quietly. She could not hide this much longer. The future was ready to be born, but she was not sure she was ready to meet it.