A/N: Thanks for reading! We are really excited to bring you this chapter.
...run from the light...
Zhanna | AdamantiumDragonfly
For all her newfound confidence around Nixon and Winters, Zhanna saw very little of them in the weeks following the battle of the crossroads. Part of it was her own choice, an attempt to distance herself from the momentary show of weakness and the secret that had slipped from her lips before she could curb it. The rest boiled down to Zhanna not crossing paths with either captain. They were much too busy preparing for the latest tactical feat, Operation Pegasus.
Nixon was particularly involved, ready to put the disaster of Market Garden behind them while Winters had been promoted to Executive Officer of the Second Battalion, placing him firmly behind a desk in the uppermost room in Battalion CP, a place Zhanna rarely visited if she could help it. Sveta spent more time in its walls than Zhanna, giving her a place on Operation Pegasus. That and her ties to the Russian military.
Operation Pegasus was a midnight mission across the Rhine to retrieve a battalion of stranded soldiers. The main front was led by Heyliger, Welsh, and the British Colonel Dobie. To everyone, particularly Zhanna's, surprise there were a few Russians among the British ranks. While the men practiced with the boats and Sveta marched about with purpose, Zhanna had retreated to a corner of the camp. Winters placed her on shore detail last minute, with the task of watching the bank for the boats and assisting with the unload. The mission itself went off without a hitch on her end, the riverbank was cold and her feet were numb long before the final boat beached.
The sand gritty between her jump boots and her socks, Zhanna grimaced. The reminder of her less than active role, a less than distracting hour spent on the beach, didn't leave her particularly ready for enjoying the party that followed. She hung back, away from the Russians and Sveta. Zhanna didn't have a shadow to hide in so she made her own, in a corner of the barn with Skip, Penkala, and Malarkey to shield her from view.
They had been more hesitant around her, noticing the change after the battle on the crossroads. Janusz had been transferred, the last thing she had seen of him was a flash of dirty blond hair as he was loaded in the transport. There was nothing to be done so Zhanna didn't bother. She didn't bother to worry about a lot of things, choosing to distract herself in any way she could. Why bother crying over her parents when she could keep fighting, keep pushing. She would be molded to the River's current anyway. Why fight the inevitable?
"Do you know these Russians?" Skip asked.
"Do you know every American?" Zhanna asked. "Don't ask foolish questions."
"Jesus, someone's testy," Malarkey said, downing another beer. Zhanna didn't think she was being unreasonable, perhaps a little sharper. But she didn't like the look on Sveta's face and she didn't like the anger that dripped through the air, hanging on every surface.
"Are they not the friendly kind?" Penkala asked.
"Most aren't," Zhanna muttered. "At least not to me."
Nixon hadn't asked why her cousin had ended up in the SS. He hadn't asked any of the questions that were no doubt burning inside him. He had kept his distance. He had allowed her the space she needed.
For what? What did she need space for? Healing? You couldn't heal from a gaping wound, something torn from your heart.
Zhanna's ears caught the only snatches of Russian, cutting through the curtain of English. And then Sveta's voice.
"Stalin has ears everywhere, comrades."
Her blood cooled. Even there, in that hot barn with the bodies of soldiers, British and American, alike, Stalin couldn't be forgotten. Stalin, who had sent her parents to their deaths. Who had haunted her childhood as a very real ghost. The NKVD, Alexander Samsonov, and the Red Army. They had taken so much from her and the Russians on the other side of the barn were the reminder of that. Zhanna shivered, the feeling of dark eyes flooding back to her. They pierced through her wall of allies and Americans. Skip couldn't keep her safe from the eyes, and Buck wouldn't have been able to, even if he was here. Space. She needed space. Maybe not to heal but to cool off.
Cool before her whole body burned with the flush of the eyes and the heat, the beer twisting in her stomach. She had to get out of here.
She slipped past the mortarmen, past Bull, past Talbert, and into the cool night air. She didn't know where she was going. Where could a Polish girl go in the middle of the American camp? They were all expecting Zhanna Casmirovna and her sniper rifle, the picture of the Red Army. They didn't know that those Russians weren't her allies, weren't her comrades, but had been the ones who had torn her family from her. Not those two soldiers, specifically, but what they stood for. What the Russian emblem on their uniforms promised. Zhanna had been so proud of that rifle, the one she would give anything to hold at that moment, but now she wondered if that would have been enough to save her from the NKVD? From Stalin?
Where could she go? Where was she going?
Zhanna couldn't go back to Poland or to Russia, now that Agata and Casimir were not…
But where was she going now? She had left the barn as if running would put to death the fears. The eyes. The past. Where could she go?
Her eyes darted upwards, to the dark form of the CP, where a patch of light poured out of the uppermost room. A room Zhanna had never entered but provided the only sanctuary. The only safe place. Winters. She would go to Winters.
Footsteps followed her. Heart pounding, breath fast. This was it. One of the soldiers had been able to snatch a whiff of the Polish blood in her veins. Footsteps in the dark had been the call for many arrests. When there were footsteps in the alleys of Stalingrad, there would be an empty home when the sun rose. A wide-open door. A missing family. Zhanna was next. Her parents were dead and now, she couldn't stay alive any longer. The image of their reunion had been enough to ward off the men of shadows from her childhood. But they were dead and Zhanna was all alone. Again. And she had left the only Samsonov on hand in the barn, several hundred yards away.
Footsteps. Heavy boots. Drunken in weight and a little unbalanced.
Zhanna didn't have her gun with her and while she had tussled with Buck in the training yard in Aldbourne, he had always gone easier on her. She couldn't take down a drunk and angry Russian soldier. He would have a gun. And Zhanna didn't have a weapon through her birthright. She was going to die. Or worse. Neighborhood women and girls that Zhanna had seen every day would disappear into the night, killed on sight if they were lucky or raped before being shipped away for further atrocities. Rumors spiraled in the alleys of Stalingrad.
But Zhanna wasn't in Stalingrad. She was in Holland.
Her pace didn't slow while all this raced through her mind but quickened in the terror that now coursed through her veins. Sveta had always been on edge but Zhanna didn't think her friend knew what it was like to have this kind of fear. Breathing wasn't easy.
"Leaving the party so soon, Casmirovna?"
She let out a shuddering sigh of relief and stopped, in the middle of the dark road. Nixon stood behind her, and when Zhanna met his eyes, they weren't the same shade of shadow as the NKVD. They were warm. Something Zhanna had never seen in Sveta's eyes.
"You scared me," Zhanna said, her hand reaching for the collar of her shirt to loosen the layers.
"Why?" He took a step so he was in line with her, towering over Zhanna.
"I thought you were one of the…" Her voice trailed away, uneasy by his sudden closeness.
"One of the Russians?"
Zhanna nodded, her mouth too dry to continue. He knew that she was uncomfortable but he didn't know the extent of it. He didn't know that the Soviets could smell disloyalty in the air. His eyes were warm but also questioning. They were always trying to solve some complex puzzle.
"Why don't you come with me?" He glanced at her. "Unless you have somewhere else you'd rather be?"
"I was going to find Captain Winters," she stammered.
"What a coincidence," Nixon said, reaching for his flask and shaking it. The faint slosh of his chosen liquor told Zhanna he was running low. "So was I."
There wasn't much of a choice so Zhanna didn't try to offer an argument. At least she knew this threat. At least Nixon had to keep her alive so he could finish solving her. That was a comfort, at the very least. Zhanna's feet were soft on the cobblestones now, her American boots scuffed into comfort now. They had been hard and caused many blisters when she had first received them, back in Benning. When Zhanna's mind was clear and she still thought her hopeful prayers were doing something.
The stairs up to Winters's office creaked, filling the silence that yawned between them, Zhanna and her unlikely savior.
"Lew," Winters said, when Nixon pushed open the door. He sounded relieved to see a familiar face, his body relaxed and languid in the office chair but shot up when Zhanna followed the intelligence officer up the stairs. "Casmirovna."
His tone changed. Zhanna didn't care to notice though her mind did snag on the shift. He motioned for them to sit down. Zhanna took the only other available chair, forcing Nixon to scrounge for a crate of paperwork that he overturned to use as a seat.
While the officers engaged in polite small talk, discussing the success of the mission and other things that applied to their easy friendship, Zhanna stared at the desk, studying its contents. A typewriter, half-written with the date of the Crossroads battle. A fountain pen that Zhanna plucked up, twisting between her fingertips lazily, almost hypnotically. There were stacks of papers and memos that were surely as dull as nails but Zhanna didn't pay attention to any of them. She watched Winters, who was watching her out of the corner of his eye. When, for that split second, their eyes locked, the flush of the fire, the Russians, and that barn all came rushing back and she jerked her gaze away.
"You've been uncharacteristically quiet, recently," Nixon said.
"I'm always quiet, aren't I?" Zhanna's fingers twisted around the pen, their circle of confidence strung together by a quiet understanding. That Zhanna didn't want to discuss it. That Winters wasn't going to press her. It seemed Nixon wasn't ready to comply.
"More than usual. Are things not all well with the family?" He said, standing up. He snatched a key off of Winters's desk, beside the typewriter, and unlocked a footlocker in the corner.
It was a low blow, considering Janusz was, to their knowledge, in a POW camp.
"No," Zhanna said, her eyes fixing on the bottle of whiskey that he withdrew. Numbing. Burning. The sensation of alcohol on her lips was enough to make her eyes water in want. "Tell you what," She said, as Nixon made the connection between her glistening eyes and the bottle of Vat69. "You get me a glass and we can talk about it all night."
"Really?"
"That's what you want, isn't it?" Zhanna said. "To solve the riddle that is the Russians?"
"Yeah but it's not as fun when you are given the answers," Nixon mused.
"I can always stay silent."
"You drive a hard bargain."
"So what will it be?"
"Got a glass?" Nixon asked Winters. He had a coffee mug, which would suffice for the intended purpose. Then he turned to her. "How does a Russian sniper end up with a cousin in the SS?" Nixon asked, pouring the whiskey into her mug and taking a swig straight from the bottle.
"He's Polish. Forced conscription. I have never met him before, to be perfectly honest."
"You are quite worked up over a cousin you've never met before," Nixon said. Zhanna coughed, from the intensity of the question and the sharpness of the whiskey.
"He brought some upsetting news," Zhanna admitted.
"Upsetting? You weren't invited to Christmas?"
"I don't celebrate Christmas, Nixon," She said, looking around. She half expected him to have a pen and paper. "Aren't you going to take notes or something?"
"Don't need notes," Nixon said. "Mind like a steel trap."
"Of course you have," Zhanna said, downing the rest of the whiskey and raising the mug for a refill.
"You didn't answer the question."
"I did," Zhanna said, waving the mug under Nixon's nose. "But it required a follow-up question that will have to be bought."
Nixon sighed, resigning to pay the price for information, while Winters looked on in horror. Whether it was the booze consumption or the waspish conversation, Zhanna didn't really care what caused the horror. She just needed more Vat 69.
"What was the upsetting news?" Nixon took another swig from the bottle, a confident dose of the tonic that loosened Zhanna's lips and boosted Nixon's ego. He must have thought he was doing some grand intelligence operation but in reality, Zhanna was just ready to burst. She had to tell someone and for free alcohol, she would gladly tell him.
"My parents are dead."
It was Nixon's time to splutter. Winters caught up his typewriter, trying to save the paper from the spray of whiskey but it was to no avail. The piles of memos were victims to Nixon's surprise and even Winters didn't seem to mind all that much. They were too occupied staring at Zhanna aghast, trying to figure out how to respond.
"Six years I thought they were alive and now, turns out, they died in '41," Zhanna laughed dryly and finished off her whiskey. Nixon didn't even try to stop her, just relinquished his hold on the bottle.
"Jesus, Casmirovna," He said. It could have been referring to the mortar round of information that she dropped or the amount of liquor she was adding to her mug.
Zhanna shook her head. "That's not my real name."
"What?" Both Nixon and Winters this time.
"That's Casimir, my father. Casmirovna."
"Your real name?" Winters asked but Zhanna shook her head, smiling dimly.
"You aren't a part of the game," she chided. Turning back to Nixon, she said, "And that question is going to cost you more than you have,"
She dropped the now empty bottle of Vat69 to the ground, where it clattered against the wood. Zhanna sloshed the contents of her mug, the thinnest layer of whiskey remained, one sip, really. "Better think carefully," She said.
"I don't think I want that to be my last question," Nixon said, looking at the bottle empty at his feet. "Your parents died in '41. What about Samsonova's mother? Didn't she die in '40?"
They couldn't have known anything about Veronika's death other than the date. Zhanna wouldn't tell Nixon anything. She would lie for Sveta, till her dying breath. No one needed to know what had happened to them that August night. No one needed to know what they had lived through.
"I don't know anything about that," she said, trying to cover the fear that had gripped her heart, the door that had flashed in her mind.
"Didn't you live with them at the time?" Nixon pressed. "Surely you know something,"
"Sveta was never a part of the deal, Nixon," Zhanna said, downing the last drops of her mug and setting it on the desk with a thump. "Try again next time."
Silence stretched between them for several frantic heartbeats. Zhanna couldn't relax, not now that the two pillars of Easy company had seen the surface of her nightmares, her darkest secrets. They knew Agata and Casimir were dead. They would soon know, if they put two and two together, that she wasn't the full red-blooded Russian that the Airborne thought she was. Nixon looked as if he wanted to test the end of the game, to push it and keep pressing but, after moments of internal struggle, he leaned back in his chair and sighed.
"I guess getting the answers saved me some time," He conceded.
"Better get a new hobby," Winters said, softly, his fingers resting on the keys of the typewriter. Zhanna laughed softly, placing the pen back on the desk with a click of metal on wood. Nixon could think that he had solved all the riddles to Zhanna but she knew that it was only the tip of the iceberg.