Never Forget

by CSIGurlie07

He knew those brown eyes. He just didn't know how.

Brown eyes.

Of all the things he thought might haunt him in his duties as a soldier for the Third Reich, he had never expected the worst of them to be a pair of wide brown eyes.

After enlisting, and during training, he had imagined the horrors of war. Killing his first enemy soldier, seeing his comrades blown to bits by hidden mines right next to him, crawling through puddles of their remains in his drive to carry out whatever objective his unit had been assigned.

But he never saw any of those things.

After finishing training, he had been shipped to Poland, assigned to one of the work camps there. And he had only been there for a few days before he saw them, wide and filled with fearful uncertainty as they read the words that arched over the gates she and the rest of them were being herded through.

Arbeit macht frei.

Their owner, a girl not much younger than himself, had a heart-shaped face framed by dark curls, but he barely noticed the other features when those eyes locked onto him. Brown eyes stared back at him with an intensity that took his breath away. His heart flopped in his chest, and he stared back until his fellow guard on duty elbowed him in the side to ask him a question.

When he looked back, the eyes and the girl they belonged to had blended into the masses, vanishing into the depths of the camp.

But the brown eyes did not haunt him at that point. He barely gave them a second thought for several days, in fact, until one evening he was confronted with them yet again while he was standing duty in the courtyard.

She was in line at one of the dozen tables set up, clad in one of the plain uniforms that had been issued to her and the other prisoners during processing. The brown curls were gone, her hair cropped close to the scalp and covered by a drab scarf. But to his surprise, the missing locks only made her eyes more striking, making him freeze as she was shoved closer to the table.

And just as before, she seemed to feel his gaze, and she looked towards him with an inscrutable expression. She flinched when her left arm was yanked from her side, but she continued to hold his gaze even as one of the administrators read out a number while a needle rapidly pierced the skin of her inner forearm, leaving a series of crude blue numbers in its wake.

A single tear leaked from those brown eyes that accosted him so completely, and traced its way down smudged cheeks. There was pain there, but what shook him to the core was how expressive they were, as if begging him to tell her she was only dreaming, while simultaneously so guarded and wary, accepting him, an armed guard, as a part of her new reality.

It was only upon this second sighting, however, that he realized he knew those eyes.

Somehow, something about them was inexplicably familiar. He had never met her before in his life, of that much he was certain. He had grown up in Vienna, while the train she had arrived on had come from the fringes of Poland. She was a Jew, and his own blue eyes ensured that, as part of the upper echelon of the Fuhrer's vision for the future, he would not have met in her in casual society even if she had been Austrian.

But somehow, he knew those eyes regardless.

And then they were gone again, their owner pushed away from the table to make way for the next poor soul to receive their identification number, and prompted back to the crowded barracks. He watched her go, unable to tear his gaze away. Now that her eyes no longer bore into his he could notice that her head was bowed, though her shoulders were square, not yet slumped in defeat like the others'.

She disappeared quickly, cradling her newly inked arm against her body as she went. And just like that, he pushed her out of his thoughts once more. He turned back to his duty, and after a few minutes, she was little more than a curious afterthought. He dismissed the strangely familiar eyes with a shrug of his grey-clad shoulders, and let the moment of fluttering recognition fade.

But those eyes would not leave him be.

They haunted him, in the weeks and months that followed. He would catch glimpses of those brown orbs when the inmates assembled for roll call, and when the inmates were shuffled to and from the factories for work details. He watched her grow thin, and pale, just as all the other prisoners did. But her eyes remained the same, as sharp and bright as the day she arrived.

And each time her brown eyes met his blue ones, an electric shock seemed to burn its way into his soul.

The first time it happened, after seeing her receive her identification number, happened over a table of jumbled gears and old parts of factory machinery. He was on rounds, pacing the long aisles of seated women as the pored over the parts, sorting the usable from the ruined. And there she had been.

Her hair had grown since that day in the courtyard, with longer pieces sticking out from the scarf still tied around her head. She was not talking with the others, but appeared to be listening as she worked. Her eyes—those brown eyes—flicked between the table and her companions, an amused spark dancing within them. Gone was the shocked stupor he had spotted those first few days here, much to his surprise, but there was a new wariness there, one that each of the prisoners had come to possess.

She did not notice his approach, and as he neared her table, something her neighbor said caught her ear, and her lips curled into a smile.

White teeth emerged from behind pale lips, and brown eyes lit up with mirth. Her entire face was transformed, and the weariness disappeared for an instant, revealing the young woman behind the sickly pallor of her smudged and dirty skin.

His gait hitched slightly as his boot caught on the stone floor in his distraction. The audible scuff brought those eyes up to him as he approached, and for a moment he almost froze. For a moment, she was smiling at him, the mirth in her gaze was for him. His heart jumped to his throat, his head turned to hold her gaze for the one, two, three steps in took to bring him abreast of her seat.

His lips, of their own volition, almost lifted to return the grin, but he remembered himself in the next instant as the brown eyes tore themselves away from him, the smile dropping from her features as she bowed her head to focus on the table in front of her.

And then he was on his way, moving past her with a calm stride. He passed several times throughout the course of the day, and though his attention was drawn to her each time, the eyes remained glued to the table. For the first time, he let the confusion and shock at the strange sensations still swirling in his gut as he recalled the sight of those dark, piercing eyes glancing up at him. His efforts to place her in his memories kept him awake that night, but when nothing specific, nothing more than the unshakeable feeling that he knew her, came to mind, he finally abandoned the task in the wee hours of the morning.

Similar instances followed him as the months passed, and each additional encounter was more puzzling than the last. For months he never came closer than five feet from her, but as time went on, he found distance meant absolutely nothing. It did nothing dampen the effects of her gaze, and his stomach always churned mysteriously whenever he found those eyes.

They were always changing, those eyes, always a new light or glint in their depths when they locked gazes. They seemed to scan the entire spectrum, save for one blatant exception. They never once took on the dull, glassy-eyed look the majority of the inmates reverted to. They never turned passive—they were always moving, always active.

He saw them everywhere.

He saw them clenched in discomfort, when he once found her curled against a stack of bunks in the barracks. Her arms wrapped around her midsection, bracing herself against the familiar symptoms of hunger pains. At that point he had learned to recognize the face around the eyes, and he'd been able to spot her rapidly shrinking frame from among the crowd of prisoners.

And two nights later, he saw them again, wide and dewy as he pressed a piece of hard bread into her hand. That was the first time he ever saw confusion in her eyes, as her exhausted and sleep fogged mind tried to wake enough to understand what he was doing for her. But even before comprehension hit, she cradled the bread to her chest, and a flash of gratitude was all he needed before slipping back into the shadows.

He saw them filled with warmth, which seemed out of place in the harsh life of the camp, some weeks later, when he discovered why she had been so hungry before. He followed her swift shadow to a seldom-used shed, and peeking through a knot hole in the door, saw her kneel, and offered the precious bread to another, a child, who had somehow found refuge among the skeletons of unused farming equipment. Those eyes glowed as she watched the little girl ravenously bolt down the chunk of bread that suddenly seemed too small.

Surprise shone in them the next time he delivered his gift of bread, when she pulled back the cloth to find not one, but two hunks of bread. Even then, neither of them spoke—he gave only a nod, and a knowing arch of his eyebrow to convey his discovery of her so carefully guarded secret.

And then, she smiled a smile that was for him alone, as she nodded in understanding. Then he left her to her sleep, content with knowing he would not find her curled against the pain of persistent hunger. He could help bear the burden of her secret, the secret he knew would have eventually killed both her and the child.

And he was at peace, knowing he had made the right decision in helping her.

He was not a monster.

Later, almost a month after he'd followed her to the shed, he did not see her eyes. But when something brushed against him in the morning bustle to get the inmates to the factories, and pressed something small and round into his hand, he knew it was her. He tucked the object in his pocket without looking at it, waiting until the inmates were all indoors before he brought it back into view.

It was a small, wooden medallion, perhaps an inch in diameter and a quarter-inch thick, and at first glance made his brow furrow in confusion. It was rough and unfinished, the wood coarse beneath his fingertips, and it wasn't until he flipped it over that he saw the shape of a single, familiar flower sketched on other face.

It was edelweiss.

Drawn in what appeared to be charcoal, the round flower heads in the center of the blossom were slightly smudged, but the many points of the delicate star formed by the petals were as clear as day. The bloom was familiar, even in its crude rendition, and sparked a pang of nostalgia deep in his chest. The flower, even in the frigid winter of Poland, was home to him. And to her, it was a token of gratitude, in her desire to show her appreciation for his charity in the only way she could.

He tucked it into his left breast pocket, resting close to his heart.

It was after he entered the factories after the workers that he finally found her brown eyes. They sought him out this time, and even the dismal lighting in the workroom could not shadow the eagerness within them. Her brow rose in question as he neared, and he nodded, accepting the gift with the faintest of smiles. Her head bowed over work then, but not before he had spotted the flash of joy that flooded those familiar orbs.

He continued on, as if nothing had happened.

But later that night, he spent much of the night running his fingers over the wood's rough surface, studying the dark, charcoal lines in the dimmed lights of the barracks. The edelweiss was the flower of his homeland, of Austria, and it was in looking at the familiar bloom that he realized how far from his home he truly was.

He did not think to wonder why, of all the flowers she could have sketched, she had chosen to give him the gift of edelweiss.

When he was transferred to another camp in northwest Germany, he was pleased to discover that she was among the prisoners going with him. Somehow, she had managed to find the child. He found those brown eyes, uncertain but unafraid, staring back at him over the child's shoulder from amongst the assembled inmate. Part of him wondered if the journey would be good for the child, but he quickly realized that if the little girl would starve if she stayed. So he stood by and watched them file into the overcrowded livestock car of the train, before turning and boarding the plush coach car at the front, where he sat in the designated cushioned seat that would take him to his new command.

He did not see them disembark—the camp's existing security force oversaw that process, while he went to report to his new superior. And in the weeks that followed, he sat behind a desk, isolated from the goings on within the actual prison. He saw paperwork, and reports, instead of witnessing it himself.

At first, he enjoyed the new comfort, the heated office that warded of the chill of the winter air, after having spent so long plodding over frozen dirt floors. But as time went on, he found himself looking for brown eyes, whenever his trip from his quarters to the office took him near the chain-link fence that bordered the prison yard. He missed those eyes, and the emotions that danced behind them. He yearned for her— and the unusual interaction they had shared in Poland.

He still did not know what it was that existed between them. He could not define it, could not give it a name. But he could no longer deny he was drawn to her. And now he feared for her, when he saw the skeletal figures shivering within sight of the fence, the poor souls left to wither and fade as illness ravaged their bodies.

It was then that memories of those eyes began to haunt him. He saw them when he closed his eyes, and warped his dreams into nightmares when they turned black and dead. Even waking, they never strayed far from his mind, looking over his shoulder as he filed and typed and read. And when another soldier regaled the rest of the office with tales of how he had taken a little thing with pretty brown eyes, something dark and searing churned in his gut.

The practice was not unheard of, however unsavory—some female inmates exchanged favors for extra privileges or rations. And there had been whispers of guards taking women anyway, even when they were unwilling. He tried to ignore most tales of conquest, but the mention of brown eyes set him on edge.

His mind immediately jumped to her, but he reminded himself that brown eyes were common in the camps. There had to be thousands of brown eyes here, and the chances that the ones in the guard's tale were hers were slim. He buried the flush of dark emotion, the emotion he could not identify. It was not jealousy, but there was an unmistakable dose of anger, along with a dash of protectiveness he knew it was not his place to feel.

But then, almost two weeks later, he found himself inside the chain-link fence, moving among the inmates with the same bragging guard as his guide. He was there to substantiate a report, to verify its credibility, but his attention was more focused on his ceaseless search for her.

And finally, almost by accident, he found her.

She was barely recognizable, and he would have passed her by had she not chosen that moment in time to look up as he moved by. Her body was frail, so much more emaciated than she had been in Poland. A scabbed abrasion, or maybe an infectious rash, marred the alabaster skin of her neck, almost reaching her cheek before dipping below the edge of her threadbare frock. The child, he noticed, was nowhere in sight.

But the sight that made him freeze on the spot was that of the bruises that circled her wrists.

Five distinct bands of bruised flesh that were just beginning to turn green wrapped around each of her sticklike wrists, leaving no doubt in his mind as to what had happened to her.

It took less than an instant to notice all of it, before his eyes fixed themselves on hers. And for a moment, a dangerously evident delight crossed her features when she recognized him. She almost, almost smiled at him—but then brown eyes darted to his companion, and her sickly pale cheeks flushed with embarrassment as she returned her attention to the mud frozen beneath their feet.

He watched her with a heavy heart, until his guide pointed out her pretty brown eyes.

In a flash, the guard's snide remark was cut short when his nose was flattened by the unyielding fist that caught him unawares.

The anger that overwhelmed him dulled his senses for a moment, muffling the audible crunch that reverberated up his arm. His fist had acted of its own accord, when the guard's comment, the bruises, and the shame in her brown eyes all clicked into place. Rage at the injustice, at all the injustices that were embodied in one frail girl, asserted itself with a vengeance, and the guard paid the price.

The guard dropped like a stone, and did not get up. The girl, along with the other prisoners in sight, froze in shock at the sudden act of violence. She stared at the fallen guard, and then brown eyes looked up at him in a mixture of shock and confusion, but to his surprise, there was no trace of fear in her gaze.

But then, suddenly, she burst into a round of hacking coughs. They shook her emaciated frame with crippling force, nearly sending her toppling off her feet. Brown eyes disappeared beneath clenched lids that closed against the wracking coughs, and it seemed like an eternity before they eased enough for her to look at him again.

With a jerk of his chin, he motioned for her to leave, to distance herself from the scene of the incident. Luckily, there was little chance the guard would remember seeing her, or what had caused his future migraine. And it would be easy for the incident to swept under the rug, since he outranked the guard. But if she was present when the guard awoke, there would be nothing he could do to protect her if things went south.

She hesitated for only a moment, a flash of gratitude sparking in her eyes before she scurried away. He could not keep his gut from clenching as he watched her disappear, with no guarantee he would have another opportunity to find her again. But he satisfied himself with the knowledge that she would be safe, at least for now. And she had survived this long—she could survive until he was able to see her again.

At least, he hoped she would.

The months passed, and the winter faded to spring, though it was impossible to notice in the camp. The only difference between seasons was the longer days. The temperature remained frigid, and so close to the dismal condition of the prison only made the cold more penetrating.

He spotted her only twice in the weeks that followed, but each time, his heart sank a little lower as he witnessed her growing even more weak. Her pale cheeks became sunken, and her thin lips seemed almost blue in the pale light of the wintry sun. She grew so skeletal that the only thing he could recognize about her was the jolt that still ran through him when his eyes met that familiar brown. He never once saw the child, and to his chagrin, he doubted the little girl had survived the harsh winter.

Even behind the scenes, among the soldiers and the administrators, conditions were deteriorating.

The British and Canadians were closing in, marching ever closer as the weeks progressed. Communication with Berlin fell silent, though weekly reports from the front kept them apprised of the failing defenses. The lack of word from headquarters made them all nervous, and whispers of mutiny and desertion spread as the enemy inched closer.

And as the tension behind the scenes built and the administrators began to panic, the conditions within the fence worsened. Rations for the inmates decreased, and the guards began to ignore them more than ever before. Those who were ill were left where they were, the infirmary forgotten, and work details ceased to operate, leaving the inmates in the enclosure at all times.

When he looked back at that time, it would mostly remain a blur. He remembered the panic of the staff as documents were burned, with the enemy almost knocking at their gates. He didn't bother with it himself—all one had to do was look at the camp and see the state of the inmates to know what was going on. Destroying the paper trail would do nothing to pull the wool over the eyes of the British forces.

But the night the commanding officer of the camp made the executive decision to flee the camp would remain seared into his memory for all his years to come.

It happened when the chaos of the evacuation was in full swing. He had already made his choice to disobey the commander. He was staying, regardless of what consequences he would face for his role in the horrors of the camps.

He was in his office when the first of the shots rang out across the camp, turning his blood to ice.

In an instant, he knew what it meant. He was out of his chair in a flash, sprinting to where the shots had come from. He moved through the camp directly, knowing that going around would take too long to reach them. Inmates scurried from his path, desperate to stay out of his reach. But all he was aware of was the repeated cacophony of gunshots that beckoned him further and further into the camp, until he ran into the chain-link fence that stood between the prison yard and the southern fields.

And there, through the gaps in the fence, he witnessed the most harrowing scene the human mind could conceive of.

A dozen guards had gathered a mass of prisoners, all of whom stood huddled and terrified in front of a pit that had recently been dug. As he watched, the guards forced a line of inmates from the crowd, herding them to the edge of the pit, where they shivered and trembled while the guards lined up behind them, rifles in hand.

Then, with a staccato of thunderous gunfire, the inmates dropped, tumbling into the waiting pit.

His stomach threatened to turn, but he found himself immobilized behind the simple but effective barrier of the metal fence. And then, before he could even blink, the next line of victims was forced up to the edge of the pit, and his gut clenched in panic when he saw her.

She was so frail, so thin, that she looked like her legs might collapse at any moment. Her gaze was fixed on the mass of bodies in front of her, which even he could see peeking over the edge of the pit. But from the distance at which he stood, in the growing darkness, he would not have recognized her had it not been for the small, equally skeletal child she held in her arms.

Even though her thin arms struggled to keep the child aloft, quaking with the effort, she clung to the child desperately.

She kept the child's face pressed against her shoulder, so that the little girl could not look behind them to see the rifles aligning their aim. The child's arms hung limply, either too frightened or too weak to lift the grotesquely thin limbs around her neck, but the little girl's narrow shoulders shook with frightened sobs he couldn't hear.

How the child had survived so long, he did not know. But with a sinking stomach, he realized the how no longer mattered.

He watched with an aching heart as a guard barked an order, and the rifles lifted.

But then, as if she felt his gaze, her head lifted.

Brown eyes cut through the growing dark, and for the first time, he saw fear in them. Terror and horror pooled deep within them, and he wondered if she saw the same in his. Her pales lips were moving rapidly, whispering words of comfort into the child's ear, or maybe offering a prayer to the god for which she had been targeted.

He couldn't blink, couldn't breathe, and when the cascade of gunfire came, they rocked his world more forcefully than if the bullets had punched through his own body.

He could not tear his eyes away, forced to watch as she crumpled, collapsing into the pit with the rest of the line.

And then she was gone, out of sight, one more nameless Jew in a mass grave. Something within him fractured, and everything he knew he should be feeling—anger, guilt, heartbreak, outrage—was overshadowed by the shroud of numbness that settled over his awareness.

The world dimmed around him, but before the next line of prisoners followed her into the pit, he was finally able to turn his back.

He turned and walked away, not even flinching when the next round of gunshots echoed across the camp. He ignored the cowering inmates still within the confines of the camp, and solemnly made his way back to his isolated office.

But by the time the moon reached its zenith, most of the personnel had disappeared from the camp. Soon, only those who had chosen to stay behind remained. They all fastened white armbands to their sleeves, in a show of surrender, but only he left the confines of the office again.

This time, he left for good.

He went to the supply shed first, and procured a shovel from its depths, and then made his way around the accursed fence. He followed it until he reached the southern fields—the fields that were now a graveyard.

The stench of human rot told him that it had been in use for long before that night, most likely as a convenient dumping ground for those who had died in the infirmary. He moved stiffly to the pit he had seen her disappear into, and when he reached the edge of it he did not hesitate.

Tossing the shovel aside, he stepped into the jumble of corpses, ignoring the muted crunches that sounded under his boots, the brittle bones that no longer had any body fat to protect him from his weight.

He moved to where he had seen her fall, and began to carefully lift and turn the bodies in order to see their faces. He was patient as he checked each and every one, moving steadily deeper into the pit as he continued his search.

Finally, after so many bodies, bodies he did not count, he found her.

Three bloody holes peppered her back, while a fourth had raked across her arm, slicking her skin with blood. The thick liquid had cooled in the hours since her death, in the still-frigid March air, but it made his grip slip and slide on her skin as he turned her over.

Brown eyes stared back at him, sightless and cold.

Only now, for the first time since he had first seen her that dark autumn night in Poland, the customary spark of familiarity didn't send him reeling. There was no sense of recognition, nothing to feel for the empty shell he held in his arms.

Whatever had made her so familiar to him, whatever had drawn him to her, had died with her.

He had not been drawn to brown eyes.

He had been drawn to the life behind them.

But that no longer mattered—not anymore. He knew in his heart what he needed to do. For reasons far beyond his state of mind to comprehend, he knew she deserved more than the putrid mass grave as a final resting place. One more grave, one large enough for only one person, would be dug that night.

But when he went to lift her from the pit, a soft cough caught his attention. He almost ignored it, especially when the sounds of the approaching British marching through the valley could be detected at the fringe of his awareness. But then the fearful sob of a child made him freeze.

He lifted the girl from where she lay sprawled. There, nestled beneath her, was the child.

Trembling, shivering from terror and cold—but unharmed.

The sight jolted him from his numbed trance, and he blinked in disbelief. He glanced at the girl he had set aside, awed by the realization that, somehow, her frail and broken body had been enough to shield the child from the bullets that had taken her own life.

Wide eyes— these were green—stared fearfully up at him, tears coursing down her grime- coated cheeks as she waited for him to make his move. It was obvious that she knew exactly what had happened; she was not young enough to be confused or unaware. She would remember that night too, just as clearly as he would.

Gently, he reached down and gathered the child in his arms, pulling her shivering form from the wreckage of human bodies in which she had lain for hours. His touch did not ease her tears—in fact, they only multiplied, and she began to openly sob into his shoulder. But spindly arms wrapped weakly around his neck, clutching as best they could at the surprising tenderness being offered from an unlikely source.

He was almost moving to pull both himself and his new ward from the grave when he discovered he now had to make a choice.

He had come to bury the girl properly, to give her the respectful burial their unusual relationship urged him to give her. But the child in his arms was weak, and freezing to the touch. She would not last much longer unless he immediately moved her somewhere warm.

If he waited until after he had interred the girl, the child would be buried beside her.

Looking at the broken and lifeless shell of the girl, it took him only a moment for him to make his decision. The girl had died, doing what little she could to prolong the little girl's life as long as possible, just as she had done in life. She had risked starvation to give the child food, and, even in death, had shielded her from the heartless cruelty of the guards.

Now, he would honor her sacrifice.

He knelt, repositioning the child so that one hand was free to clasp the girl's left wrist. Turning it slightly, he wiped away the blood that had crusted over her forearm, exposing the blue faded numbers that still lingered beneath her pale flesh. A moment was all it took for the series of numbers to sear themselves into his consciousness.

He did not know her name, but he would know her number.

And he would never forget that number, not for the rest of his years.

When he reached up and respectfully closed those brown eyes for the last time, he did not know that he would die only ten years later, from an aggravated case of typhus. Nor did he know that when his last breath passed his lips, those numbers and brown eyes would be his last thought.

He did not know that he would be buried with a small wooden medallion clasped in his hand.

What he did know was that he had to do everything he could to ensure the child's safety.

That meant leaving the girl behind, and lifting both himself and the child from the nightmarish pit.

He moved stiffly, and then carried the child towards the camp, where he realized that the British had finally arrived. A few soldiers spotted him, and lifted their weapons in his direction. But their commander, a man with a sharp but knowing gaze, ordered them to stand down. Somehow, perhaps because of the child, or maybe recognizing the haunted look in his eyes, the commander decided he was not a threat.

He was guided to the medics that had accompanied the British soldiers, and the child was ushered to the front of the growing line of surviving inmates that were looking for relief. He did not relinquish his hold on her, nor did her arms release their grip on his neck. The medics worked around the awkward embrace, inserting an IV in her tiny hand before wrapping them both in a large, thick woolen blanket.

He sat with her for almost a day, trying to coax the child to eat the porridge that had been prepared for the liberated inmates. It was taxing, but eventually the child did eat before falling asleep. It was then that he set her down on the cot that had been prepared for her. He watched over her for a few minutes, unable to resist the need to protect the rasping breath that rocked the child as she slept.

He would learn later that the other German soldiers who had surrendered had been recruited into burial detail for those victims who had been left to rot in the open. The British commander had spared him though, for some reason that was never shared with him, and he did not question it. He may have wanted to be the one to bury the girl, but he had found a more important task, one that the girl herself had valued above her own life.

The commander, on top of allowing him to stay with the child, eventually gave him a set of civilian clothes, so that he could not be identified as a German soldier. Some of the British soldiers grumbled, but the decision was honored, and when they all moved out of the camp, he sat with the child on his lap in one of the convoy trucks.

But even though the commander had essentially absolved him of his sins, he never once forgave himself.

In the weeks, months, and years that followed, he never once felt the weight of his guilt lift from his conscience. He would have ended his own life in repayment for the deaths he had done nothing to prevent, but his silent promise to a girl he never properly met stayed his hand.

His absolution was forced to wait, in favor of caring for the child he had assumed responsibility for.

He learned the child's name the day after the camp was liberated, and it was the only word for weeks that she could understand from him. She never once questioned his nationality or his role in her imprisonment as she grew older. In fact, they never really spoke of it at all, leaving the whole thing buried deep within their own psyches.

In time, his attachment to her became more than obligation.

He loved her, as a daughter of his own—the only daughter and only family he would come to know. He never married before the typhus claimed him, but at his deathbed a green-eyed girl held his hand while he drifted away to memories of haunting brown orbs.

And when a former Marine sniper exited the elevator of a Navy federal building fifty years later, he didn't understand the flash of something that coursed through his veins when he caught a glimpse of brown eyes framed by dark curls in the middle of his squad room.

But his thirst for vengeance quickly devoured the sensation, and he brushed by the young woman without a word as she moved to speak with the new Director. Except, his eyes involuntarily drifted back to her when his senior field agent apprised him of the situation.

He did not recognize her name, did not recognize her face, but something tickled at his gut every time those brown eyes left him wondering where and how he might have met her before.

Later, he would come to attribute the odd sensations as some subconscious recognition of the features she shared with her brother, the man he was hunting. But when that man lay sprawled on his basement floor, and his own blue eyes looked to the top of the stairs to find those guarded brown eyes filled with tears, he would try to reconcile them to those of her brother.

And he could not.

So when he saw them again in the squad room, this time almost a month later, his heart flopped in his chest as they stared up at him with a hopeful gaze. He tried to be angry at what had happened the last time their paths had intersected, but instead felt something else, something indescribable.

And when she misinterpreted his words, and turned away to disappear from his life forever, he found himself chasing after her.

He had never run after anyone other than a suspect or potential ex-wife before in his life, but he sprinted after her. And by some grace of god he just managed to sidle into the elevator before the doors fully shut.

He knew he had made the right decision when those brown eyes, which had once been so wary of him, struggled to hide her uncertainty from him. When he convinced her to return with him—when his hand came up to swat the back of her head—the certainty that he somehow knew her cemented itself in his mind.

Those hauntingly familiar brown eyes creased into a smile and gave a hoarse laugh, and he found himself grinning in return. When the doors reopened onto the squad room, the mirth disappeared from his features but lingered in his soul.

He knew nothing about the girl that followed him towards the rest of the team, but he knew in his gut that her presence was right. Something had been made right, he realized. And just like all of his hunches, this certain knowledge had no sense, no specifics.

But this strange and unforeseen bond that no one else could see—he knew it from somewhere.

And looking into those familiar brown eyes, he came upon another certainty.

She knew it too.