He was beside himself with anger. For the first time in years, he couldn't come up with an idea. Even as a child, he'd been gifted with the ability to come up with plans off the top of his head, but now? He couldn't keep the thoughts straight in his head.
The Führer had given him an important mission, but how was he to complete it if he couldn't think up a good plan?! He'd been pacing back and forth in his room for weeks, his hands running through his short blonde locks. He'd asked his closest comrades, all of which had no better luck than he did. The good doctor had even feigned stupidity, bent over his specimen and staring up at his leader with his strange glasses.
"I don't know what you mean, mein Major," he'd said with an air of irritation at being interrupted in the middle of one of his experiments. "Our mission is to create a Midian army and go after the vampire Alucard as well as England. Our mission is war. It's as simple as that." The captain had stared back stolidly before shrugging, and even Warrant Office Schrödinger had shot down the question is his own childish way before flouncing off to bother Zorin in the showers.
How did they not understand?! Their mission was war, but to have war you must move the troops, and to move the troops you had to think about secrecy! They couldn't just send naval fleets of vampires across the channel; it wasn't like the olden days, when they only had torpedoes and airstrikes to worry about! And they couldn't very well march across the ocean, could they?!
He was the commanding officer—it was his job to make sure that they all were able to perform their duties. How could they do anything without being able to get to England first!? It kept him up at night, the thinking. He lost his appetite; his shining eyes grew dull. No one else seemed to be worried about it; they were all busy with their own tasks. Only he suffered.
And so he walked the empty halls of the metal hangar they were staying in, hidden well in the South American jungles. He paused as he heard the familiar crooning of Rip van Winkle, who was in the midst of her self-imposed exercise routine to "cut down fat", as if she had any to cut. The woman was skin and bones as it was, and the suits she wore, while feminine enough, didn't do anything to help her look like anything more than someone's kid sister.
He tapped his foot along with her a cappella performance, unfamiliar with the song she was singing but enjoying the rhythm of it. Usually she sang her operas or sometimes even children's rhymes and television jingles while she did the exercises, but today it was a song of war ministers.
"Neunundneunzig kriegsminister, streichholz und benzinkanister; hielten sich für schlaue leute," she crowed to the empty room, ducking and twisting and turning so fast that one wondered if she danced or was pretending to fight someone. The Major sighed; if he had been in a better mood, he might have popped in and praised her for keeping the faith, as it were. Not everyone sang of war so beautifully as she did.
The song haunted him again that night, when he was in his office working. The radio buzzed static, but he finally found a station and was listening when the remembered melody struck him and he sat up from his work, looking at the speaker curiously.
"Die nachbarn haben nichts gerafft, und fühlten sich gleich angemacht; Dabei schoss man am horizont auf neunundneunzig luftballons!" He smiled to himself and hummed along with the tune, enjoying the story unfolding in the words. One simple mistake had led to the destruction of the world by a fierce war; what a nice thought. Even better, that they had bombed each other out of existence.
Now it was stuck in his head, the song about the ninety-nine toy balloons. The words of the song stirred something in his mind and suddenly he was eight-years-old, standing on the bank of a river with his baby sister. He barely remembered his own childhood, simply because it wasn't beneficial to his work in his present life, but now he thought about that time on the river.
He was going to sail his armada of paper boats, and she had a balloon on a string, bought with a coin their mother had given them to spend in town. They were supposed to split the coin, but his sister had seen the balloon and he had always doted on her, being a good older brother. So there she stood, her three-year-old legs wobbling under the strain of standing on an incline as she watched her brother line up and prepare the fleet for their journey, pretending that he was an important war minister.
They properly christened the fleet with pretend confetti and solemn speeches before setting the wax-covered paper shapes into the water and releasing the balloon, letting it float into the bright sky as they waved goodbye to the brave "soldiers" going off to war. By the time they looked up again, the balloon was just a colored dot in the blue abyss.
His memories weren't usually so clear, but this one he remembered vividly. He could feel the breeze blowing his bangs out of his face, the sweaty stickiness of Leisl's hand as he held it to keep her from tumbling down into the river, the sparkling vivacity of the water in the sunshine…. He paused for a moment, basking in the joy of remembrance, so rare to him. He hardly remembered anything good about his life—mostly he lived in the presence, only delving into the past to examine his mistakes in order not to repeat them.
"Max!" Leisl chirped in his mind, her childish lisp slurring the name as she grinned toothily at him. He felt the ghost of a laugh in his chest, but then it was pushed aside as his thoughts turned darker. "Max!" shrieked his sister, now twenty years old, her dark hair tumbling into her face and hands held out imploringly as the soldiers dragged her away, kicking and screaming. "Max! Hilfe! I'm your sister!"
He had miraculously kept himself from trembling, his hands clasped behind his back as he watched her fight her captors. He'd closed off his heart, trying to make his eyes hard as he looked away from her.
"No sister of mine would harbor Jewish scum in her home. I have no sister," he said coldly, and sealed her fate as well as his. His superior had clapped him on the shoulder, chuckling as her screams faded away into the background.
"Very good choice, officer. It's sad to say that these things happen, but… think of it as pruning a rosebush. In order for you to bloom brightly, the withered buds must be clipped away." He watched the soldiers load her into the van along with the filth they'd found living under her floorboards. "In any case, I'll be sure to let them know that you have what it takes to excel in the Führer's army."
"Yes, thank you," he had smiled at his boss, saluting as the older man went away. He'd never seen Leisl again and had burned every picture he'd owned of her, but her eyes still haunted him in his nightmares at times, along with his mother's weakened voice as she begged him to take care of his sister after her death.
He growled and twisted the dial on the radio viciously, turning it off. He had no time to be thinking about such things. He had taken care of his sister, just like he'd taken care of the prisoners of war and the Jews and the Gypsies, and anyone else who had stood in his way.
Throwing aside his work, he peeled off his shirt and crawled into bed, fluffing the pillow under him and sighing as he removed his glasses. The soldiers' sounds were muffled through the closed door, and he heard Zorin say something snippy to the Captain as they walked by. Schrodinger and the Doctor were rearranging the equipment in the lab below his room; he heard them both growling at each other as glass tinkled and then the doctor shouted "Hört mir zu, you bumbling excuse for an officer!" as something crashed and Schrödinger yelped in pain.
He fell asleep to these familiar sounds, but close to dawn he awoke. Sitting abruptly in bed, he stared at the gray light. It was as clear to him as anything, as if he'd known it all along—he knew now how to bring his army across the ocean. His boat wasn't the answer; it was Leisl's luftballon, high in the sky….
"Balloons," he whispered to the empty night. "No. Zeppelins." He rolled over and clambered out of bed, reaching the phone on his desk. It rang three times before the Doctor's sleepy voice answered on the other end of the line.
"Doctor, get the men and have them meet me in the assembly hall. I have the answer."
Afterword: This was supposed to be a silly oneshot for something Ketti and I are brewing. But I ran with it, and now it's its own thing. Sorry! (OWO)7