So I had a dream the other night that Spalko and Karov were cannibalistic goldfish that got their heads chopped off, and I decided it was time to write another chapter to ease my mind. I needed to remember that they were characters, not fish hell bent on eating each other. Here you go... *awkward silence*

Thanks as always to my wonderful beta reader, and everyone who reviews this story.

Probability, Spalko had come to realize, was a fickle thing. Battle after battle, she expected to collapse, to feel the fragile life inside of her crumble. She expected to take a bullet, to toss away her last breaths into chilly air and gunfire smoke, utter something significant in her last words to be romanticized for generations to come.

Each time she engaged in combat, she systematically weighed the odds that she would die, and the longer she spent at war, the lower her odds of survival became. She didn't know how many weeks had gone by since she had hunched against a dying tree and told Karov that she was with child. That had been late autumn, as the last leaves fell. It had to have been at least a month.

So why, she wondered as they drove the caravan toward a prospective outpost nearly half-way through Austria, was she still alive? And how had she managed to carry her unborn child through a war zone?

"I do not know whether to love or loathe scientific anomalies," she murmured to herself, gnawing on the end of an unlit cigarette as she leaned on the door of the small army car. In the other seat, Karov snorted.

"How long have you been asking yourself that question?"

"I could ignore it quite well. But now… it has gotten more difficult." She massaged her temples.

"Are we still discussing scientific anomalies, or something else?" She could feel his eyes drift downward from her face to her stomach.

"Not entirely sure," she replied, her voice barely audible. She shivered slightly, the wind stinging her face. The weather seemed like December; the cold was nearly unbearable. They would all have frozen by now had they not grown accustomed to winters in the Soviet Union. She had become consistently greatful for her overcoat; not only because it warmed her, but because it had eventually become the only thing that could hide her pregnancy from her soldiers.

She sighed into the unlit cigarette, watching tiny shreds of its paper fly out behind her and vanish in the morning air. Listening to American radios when she could not get ahold of Soviet stations brought on Yuletide music and nostalgia. She had learned the English language during her adolescence, in preparation for the war, figuring it would be a handy skill to have as long as they were in a tense alliance with the British and the Americans.

Ahead of them, gunshots rang out, and the fore-guard car spun, its wheel punctured by a bullet. Karov kicked his heel against the breaks, skidding along the icy road. Several German soldiers were concealed in the brush ahead, firing at the caravan.

Spalko clambered out of the car, loading her automatic rifle and crouching down beside the fore-guard. She could just barely make out movement in the thick forest of dead trees spread out on either side of the road before them. She fired at first glimpse of a head and shoulders, only enough of her enemies visible to take aim at.

A bullet whizzed past her, just barely missing her head, and her stomach coiled. It had been relatively easy to ignore her pregnancy in the midst of battle, since it had not yet begun to impair her physically. She could force the thought from her mind and remain focused on the tasks at hand. Yet there had come a point where the moment she removed her overcoat, she was very obviously with child.

Even now, she could feel the soft swell beneath her uniform, the cold butt of her rifle pressing against it as a constant reminder of the stakes at hand. It was the first time she had felt such a welling of protectiveness under open fire, and it took her by surprise.

With a deep breath, Spalko tried to redirect her thoughts toward the offensive, creeping forward with her men. She caught a quick glimpse of Karov, his eyes begging the question, "What the hell are you doing?" as she inched toward the Germans.

Spalko glared at him over the front line. I am acting as a commanding officer is expected to act. She slipped between two of her soldiers and gestured for them to follow. She was a captain in the army; she might as well act like one.

Her stomach clenched, and an instinct welled up inside of her to leap back into the truck, but she fought it. She was a commander; she could not slip behind the lines in cowardice. Yet each time a bullet whizzed past her, her hand flew once more to the bump of her stomach, clutching the folds of her overcoat as if it would protect her unborn child from the danger surrounding her.

She narrowed her eyes, catching another flash of motion in the trees, and aiming her automatic. She motioned her men forward in a V-formation, keeping low to the ground and picking off their opponents one by one. Another bullet flashed inches past her head, whizzing by the tip of her ear. She gritted her teeth, halting in the road. The shots had ceased, and with the slightest motion of her hand, her team open fired on the tree line as she slipped back into the formation and out of the line of fire.

Karov was on one knee on the hood of their truck, aiming at the German ranks. Spalko herself propped her gun atop the car to keep it stable, bringing it as far from her stomach as possible without arousing suspicion from her men. She could almost view the gun as poison to the baby she carried, tainting the innocence of new life with the burdens of war.

As the spray of gunshots tossed up the ground, Spalko shouted to Karov, "We ought to retreat! I do not want our unit to become prisoners of war!" It was clear they were outnumbered nearly two to one. Several of her men had gone down already, and she could see that the Germans' line of fire was far thicker than their own.

Karov nodded in response, his eyes flicking between her face and his automatic. There was little time to think over their decision. Spalko fired rapidly into the enemy ranks hidden in the trees, until she was nearly out of bullets. Slipping her gun over her shoulder, she whistled to the remaining men in the unit. They had begun with twenty-two men in the formation, the other ten securing cargo in the trucks. They were a small unit, but their purpose was infiltration, not open front warfare. Now, there were only fifteen men in formation, and they reacted immediately to her call and raced back to the trucks. She noted, in her peripheral vision, that the young face of Private Arman lay bloodied in the dirt, another casualty of the war.

Shaking herself, she barked orders to the company, directing them to the closest trucks and clearing them from the area as quickly as possible. The Germans were still firing on them; the unit had to move before they lost anymore men. She had no time to ponder life and death at the moment.

Karov slid into the driving seat, their former front guard secured in trucks behind them. There was no use for a front guard as they were cutting their losses, making a retreat now before they were captured.

Before Karov could turn the truck around as the others were doing, a bullet hit the windshield, inches from Spalko's forehead. She cursed loudly, hissing under her breath, as the glass shattered, and its fragments flew in every direction. She could feel the pieces of glass embed themselves in her face, cutting her cheeks and her nose, even her forehead. In her peripheral vision, the cut beside her eye was beginning to bleed, and she was quite sure the others had as well.

"Drive!" she snapped at Karov, her breath hitched, the pain almost unbearable. Luckily, none of the glass pieces had been buried too deeply in her skin, and had missed her eyes. The blood loss would not be fatal, but it hurt like hell, and she would eventually lose consciousness if she could not get her hands on a gauze. He only had to glance briefly at her face before he spun the small truck around as quickly as he could, away from the constant fire of the German troop.

"Shit," Spalko muttered, touching the cut on her forehead and feeling the sticky sensation of fresh blood. "Drive faster!"

"We can only follow them!" Karov shouted back, gesturing through their broken windshield at the other trucks in front of them. "Just hold out until we get to base camp. We don't have a choice." Spalko could see Karov had taken some of the blow as well, though most of the glass had missed him; his cheek had a harsh line slicing through it, and his lip was cut and swollen.

It only then occurred to her that probability might have finally caught up to her. She would not die from such a wound as this, but the baby—her hand drifted back to her abdomen, her thumb rubbing soft circles on the rough fabric of her overcoat.

"I'm sorry," she whispered again, because it was all she could think to say. She thought back to the battle, the overwhelming urge to protect the child within her. Some deep love had welled up in her heart and spilled over. She felt it still, the fierce, protective love for such a tiny, fragile life so close to such death and destruction.

I will not be domestic, she thought to herself, and she knew it to be true. She could not be domestic, but she could not deny the love she felt for her child already. It clawed at her, burning in her chest, stewing with all the guilt and remorse she had kept buried for so long.

It was terrifying.

Spalko looked up at the greying sky. A horrid slush had begun to fall, neither rain nor snow, the awful type of sleet that seeped through uniforms and had left her shivering many a night on the Petrov base. She shrugged deeper into her oversized uniform, her frame seeming to shrink before Karov's eyes. She seemed so small, huddled in her overcoat in the van, her hair falling into her face as sleet soaked into it. It was a sharp contrast from how she usually stood, tall and straight-backed before her soldiers. She had always been such a huge presence then, giving orders and leading drills. Now, she appeared no less gaunt-faced and broken than the rest of them, although perhaps a bit better at channeling her emotions into her work.

Karov could not help but chuckle silently to himself as he examined her face through the slush. She still retained the proud furrow of her brow and the set of her jaw, locked in an expression of stubbornness. Even as her wounds from the glass bled messily on her face, she was proud and beautiful, as she had always been.

Finally, Spalko turned his way, clenching her jaw to keep it from chattering. "What are you looking at?" she snapped, but there was no fire in her voice. Her hand, he noticed, was still rested over the bump of her belly. She would not be able to hide it for a great deal longer, even with her oversized coat. Eventually she would have to take leave, and Karov expected that he would try to take leave as well.

That, of course, was highly optimistic, considering their current situation. If she lost enough blood, she would most likely lose the baby. Karov could feel his nerves jump fearfully at the thought. He had become more aware perhaps even than Spalko of the unborn baby. He had watched her gnaw resentfully for weeks at unlit cigarettes, but he had seen her at night, gingerly fingering the stretched skin in grim fascination and reverence and even love, daresay.

She had become just as invested, despite her better interests, as he had. Love, had become inevitable as death.

"Irina," he said, watching her stare bleakly out the frozen windshield, concealing the pain of her injuries.

"Damian," she acknowledged without even looking at him.

Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, Karov took his right hand from the steering wheel and reached out for her midsection until his fingers found the soft swell of her abdomen. Spalko pressed her lips together, her eyes narrowed, but said nothing, reaching up to wipe blood from her chin and her jaw and watching it mix with the wet slush in her hand.

"I love you," said Karov, squinting through the slush at the road in front of them. There was no deep breath, no grandiose build-up to it. The words slipped naturally from his tongue, without the embellishment of a great declaration.

"I love you," Spalko repeated, her eyes drifting down to his hand, still pressed against her rounding belly. Her voice stuttered slightly from the cold, and she shook the blood and freezing water from her hands and laid them atop Karov's. "I'm sorry."

They drove back in complete silence.


The base camp was fading to quiet as the caravan returned, a bonfire crackling. They did not have to worry about a German invasion; this was territory they had already laid claim to. Spalko climbed out of the car with a lack of her usual grace, her vision impaired by the blood from her forehead that had trailed down into her eyes in the slush.

She marched as purposefully as she could to the first aid bunker, aiming to snatch a roll of gauze, or anything they had to stop the bleeding. She pushed through the tent flaps, her stomach roiling at the sight of so many mortally wounded soldiers. The vast majority of them had arrived wounded at this camp, and were only dying of infection because they had not received treatment on the front.

"Gauze?" she requested of the resident doctor.

The doctor did at double take at the sight of her face, shards of glass embedded everywhere he could see.

"Find a cot, Captain," he said. "Sit down, and allow me to remove the glass from your injuries."

Spalko shook her head. "With all due respect, Doctor, I can do that myself. I just need gauze, and I'm sure you have more serious injuries to attend to."

"I'm sorry, Captain Spalko, but I will have to request that you sit down so I can take a look at the wounds."

Jutting out her chin, Spalko sat down on a small, unoccupied cot as the doctor examined the glass in her face.

"And I recall that you took a bullet to the shoulder as well, a few months ago?"

"Indeed. But that has long since healed."

"Allow me to check to make sure no infection has formed."

Spalko rolled her eyes, holding up her arm just to demonstrate that the joint worked perfectly fine.

"Please remove the overcoat."

She stiffened. "No!" Her voice was loud and panicked, and a momentary hush fell on the bunker. She repeated much more quietly, "I will not."

"Captain, if you do not remove your overcoat, I cannot check for infection."

"I'll take the risk," Spalko growled, sliding off the cot and marching quickly out of the tent, with little consideration for the feelings of the doctor. She hurried back to her and Karov's bunker to find him preparing for bed.

"Might as well go to sleep early," he said with a shrug. "Besides, look outside." The slush had turned to soft snow, coating their camp in a blanket of white broken only by the bonfire crackling in the center. "It's quite beautiful, don't you think?"

Peering back out the door of the bunker, Spalko's lips curved into a dry smile. "Quite so. Although I don't think it will be so pleasant in the morning."

She shook off her overcoat, hanging it over the end of her bunk and sat down, tugging at the gauze she had taken from the doctor's tent. She fingered at the glass in her forehead, picking at it with her nails until it came loose, and she winced visibly before covering it with gauze.

"Here." Karov sat down beside her, and she turned to face him, already tugging at the second piece of glass, lodged along her temple. Karov's fingers met her own, and it came loose, like a young child losing a tooth.

It was a long process, prying free each shard, and the pain was decidedly worse than getting shot. Karov placed the last gauze on her chin, and she frowned at him through the bandages.

"This is familiar," she said bitterly, her jaw clenched in pain.

"Something about near-death experiences, Captain," replied Karov with a smirk. Spalko shed her uniform and put on the rough sweater she always slept in, grimacing as it settled unevenly over the bump of her stomach.

"How long?" she asked Karov, standing in front of him. "How long before the soldiers notice?"

"I don't know. Maybe a month. Maybe less."

"Damn it all," Spalko muttered, groaning quietly. She almost wanted to sit back down next to Karov, but it brought back memories of the evening she had first realized she was pregnant, as they leaned against the bunk and searched for the right answer to their problems, ultimately deciding that there wasn't one.

"It's a bit heart-warming, actually." Karov offered a lopsided smile, almost hopeful. "That we have defied probability so many times."

"Don't get your hopes up," Spalko drawled, and Karov held out his hands again.

"May I?"

She rolled her eyes. "Sure."

He pressed his hands to either side of her abdomen, grinning, to hold his hands to the bare skin that lay between him and their child, without the barrier of a thick army coat. It was not often he was allowed this privilege; it had not been granted since the morning after their transfer of base camps. His eyes crinkled warmly as he felt the curve of her belly swelling since the last time. It was a moment of simple contentedness in a world of complications, and hope surged through him that maybe, somehow, they would survive. It gave him the courage not to take his hands away.

Hesitantly, he took Spalko's hand and drew her closer to him until he could press his ear against the surface of her stomach and hear a blissful, wonderful silence that was just as meaningful as if he had heard a heartbeat. He knew that she had tensed, fingering the end of her sweater anxiously. She was quite near trembling from overwhelming emotion that she had done her best to suppress for so long.

"Damian." Her voice broke the reverent silence, cracking with pain. She held her hand to his cheek as he listened to the silence of an unborn baby's innocence—innocence of the torture the world was dragging them through. "I am sorry."

It was the fourth time she had said it. She still did not quite know what she was sorry for, because she could think of nothing she regretted. Yet guilt was eating her alive.

"Do you… feel anything?" she asked, as he lifted his head. Her face was both perplexed and overcome with sentiment, but her lips had tightened, as they always did when she tensed.

He shook his head. "No. Well, I feel all sorts of things, but not physically, no. Why?"

"Because I can feel it kick." Her face was unreadable. Etched in its lines was immeasurable love, but also a soul-crushing, indescribable suffering. But he swore that through the candlelight and the stiffness of the gauze on her cheeks, for only a moment, he could see a genuine smile.

Since it was the holidays, I decided a bit of fluff (well, ish) was in order. But you do get the battle I promised you. This will quite possibly be my last update of 2014. So, happy holidays, hope you cut yourselves a break from the craziness of reality for a while.

-Valkyrie