Hi, so here is another chapter and we have only six more chapters left. The next chapter will be Jon's point of view and then we go back to Liesl and Brigitta for the final chapters.

And there is a massive cliffhanger/shock at the end of this chapter which I know none of you have been expecting but I hope I have laid out the groundwork for this in previous chapters. Suffice to say the next chapter will be a reckoning.

Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine just the character of Jon.

Re-feeding syndrome is a legitimate medical condition and was a problem when freeing the victims of the Holocaust, the American, Russian and British troops did their best to feed them and found that they were eating food so fast it was causing massive medical problems. In keeping the people locked up to find a place big enough so that they could properly be feed and medicated it was the best way of keeping them alive. The reaction of the men who had to give those orders is reflected in this chapter with the characters of Jon and Nicholas.

Please Read and Review.

A Sister's Love.

Chapter 24-Sometimes That's Just The Way It Is

Jon meets Louisa as they attempt to deal with the aftermath of what they found in Germany as the allies advance deepens and as word hits the front line about Hitler's suicide a shocking family revelation is made.

"Can I help you?"

Shit and there she was.

The second he had heard that her name was Louisa Von Trapp, Jon had, had to work hard to make sure that the hysterical laugher that was threatening to take over him didn't come out. Now was neither the time nor the place for hysteria but he was sure that he was going to scream at some point with it and it was not going to be very nice for anyone in the vicinity.

"I don't know" Jon said truthfully. Now that he could see her he could see the resemblance to her sister's. Louisa Von Trapp had her sister Brigitta' s height and cool posture and certainly the stare but the eyes were all Liesl's. In fact looking into the big blue eyes of the girl standing in front of him (not that Jon was an old man even though he felt like one—he had admit that Louisa had to be not much older than eighteen) he could see the resemblance to his wife in a shocking way despite the fact that they had different hair colour. Even the chin pointed forwards in a way that reminded him of Liesl.

"Okay" Louisa Von Trapp said looking at him critically. Jon saw that she was wearing what looked like black trousers that had seen better days and tucked into it was a black shirt that he was willing to bet was stolen from a washing line. Clearly it was a man's because half of it was tucked into her trousers and the other half was loose around her back. Her boots were caked in mud and blood and were old, tired brown leather and came to her mid calf and her blonde hair was tied back in a messy kind of knot at the back of her head that looked as if she had not untied it or ran a brush through it in several days. She carried a side arm and Jon was impressed to see that it was a luger. Somehow this woman had managed to gain the sidearm that belonged to the SS and how she had achieved that he really did not know.

It didn't detract from how attractive she was. Jon couldn't blame the Captain for the way he looked at her (though he had done his best not to the poor sod—but he was used to the charms of the Von Trapp girls and he knew when he was staring down the end of the long tunnel).

"My name is Jon Van Braun"

"Good for you"

"I'm Liesl's husband"

For a moment she nearly staggered. She'd been overseeing the separation of clumps of cheese from a big cheese wheel that Jon was willing to bet that the American's had simply walked into a shop and stolen along with the bread the water and the wine (though he thought that he knew who that was for) and she caught herself on the edge of the lorry before she slipped entirely. A lock of her blonde hair came out and she shoved it back impatiently staring at him with those blue eyes so like her sister.

"Liesl?" she said finally forcing herself back to a standing position and shooting a glare at the Captain who was watching them with shrewd eyes.

"You know—"

"And Brigitta"

At this her knees really did give out and Jon went down with her watching. He was aware that the Captain was watching them as well and his expression was not very nice.

"They are alive" she said very quietly. Jon handed out the photograph. He had taken it one morning as they had been making breakfast. Brigitta had screamed that her hair was a mess and Liesl had jumped nearly a foot in the air and split tea over the place. It had been a simple morning before it had all gone to shit. Looking at where he was now he had to admit that that might have been one of the best days of his life.

"Yes" he said finally handing her the picture. She stared at it for a long time and then handed it back to him and forcing herself to her feet and him with her.

"Thank you" she said simply and then she turned away.

"Seriously? That's it?"

"What do you want?" she said not looking around. "You want me to fall to my knees and thank God that their alive? Believe me I could do that but I won't. I've seen too much and done too much and lost too much to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me crumble. Brigitta is alive, Liesl is alive. My father can live a normal guilt free life. It's enough. Doesn't change the fact that the war is still on"

"That's a mean way of looking at life" Jon said softly. Blue eyes looked at him.

"You don't know anything" she said harshly and when she spoke her accent came out strongly just like her sister's. "You don't know anything about my life. My sister's are alive. Forgive me if I don't break down in public"

Jon for the life of him couldn't understand her. Somewhere between Austria and Germany she had gone from being the carefree girl that Liesl had described and had gone to being a woman on a mission. He could understand bottling your emotions when there was no other reason to do so but he had expected…more…

But then again, said the voice inside his head, how would you react after five years if you heard your sister was still alive and in another country married and apparently doing well?

Yeah he could understand that. Even thinking of his sister was causing a migraine to form behind his eyes.

"Look" Louisa Von Trapp said finally. "I appreciate you telling me this man I really do, but I just don't have the time to deal with it. What are your orders?"

"Excuse me?"

"After this are you coming with us?"

"I…I assume so, all I know is that I'm to stick with this unit cause you need a translator"

"Yeah cause I'm just chopped liver" Louisa said bitterly. "Soon we'll leave here and then we'll push into Germany. This lot want to take Hitler's summer home and I want to be there when they do. I have intelligence to gather so please excuse me"

She turned and left and Jon wondered if it was perhaps because she wanted to hide her face. He understood not wanting to show any weakness but he thought looking at her that she was nothing like her two sisters.

That being said though he also thought reasonably, he had no idea what life had been like for her or what she had seen.

"Problem Seargent?" came a cool voice from behind him and he turned around to see Nicholas Heath staring at him with that cool look that said he was not impressed.

"No Captain. I'm just…I'm her brother in law apparently"

Captain Heath's eyes widened. "Jesus" he said softly and then he paused before reaching into his uniform pocket before lighting up a cigarette. He passed one to Jon and he took it letting the smoke settle in his lungs and then up out into the cool air.

"You didn't recognise her when you arrived?"

"No. It's…my wife is her sister they were separated when they fled Austria. I don't think either one of them has heard from the other since 1939."

Nicholas blew out a round of smoke.

"Huh." He said his eyes on Louisa's figure. "I guess that might explain a lot. Does the name Zeller mean anything to you?"

"Zeller?"

"She's fixated on him, says he's her mission. Don't know what that means because I didn't think she was on a mission. She's a translator while she's here but all her notes have him written all over it"

Carefully Nicholas didn't say how he had seen these 'notes' and Jon didn't ask. So much of the war was living by the day never knowing if you would see tomorrow and besides, he married a woman he had just met on a whim. Who was he to judge?

But he raked his memory for the name. Brigitta had mentioned him once he was sure but he could not remember the memory. He knew the name of course. His grandfather had, had a name Zeller, his father had been given his second father's name Van Braun after his biological father had died when he was a small boy but the connections between the two had faded over time. In terms of what a fairly common name meant to the Von Trapp girls he simply couldn't think.

"Sounds familiar" he said softly. "But I don't know…I…my father is German. He's here somewhere and the name just sounds…familiar."

"Austrian-German?"

"German born and raised. He had me with an Australian woman but…it's complicated"

"Usually is" the Captain said softly.

"Have I been assigned to you?"

"Yeah. The brass don't like the idea of us using Louisa too much, they think she hides in the foxholes most of the time. Problem is she does most of the work herself. Makes some of the men look bad. Also she's a fucking nightmare when it comes to taking orders. Can't keep an opinion to herself for love nor money."

Jon smirked. "Believe me it's a family trait"

"Yeah. Listen I need you to speak some German. We have to stop feeding them"

"What?" he said aghast.

"Yeah" Nicholas said looking older than he was which was probably in his late twenties. "Army surgeon says there at risk of something called re-feeding which basically means that they are going to eat themselves to death and we have our orders to retreat back to the town…Army medical corps is taking over and General Taylor's on his way."

"You want me to tell these people that we have to lock them back up again and stop feeding them?"

Nicholas nodded. For a second he looked achingly young and Jon felt the same way. They'd had perfectly normal lives before some lunatic with an ideology had screwed them and dragged them here. Suddenly his hatred of the hierarchy that his father had kissed the ring to, was strong enough to turn his vision red.

But what was the point? None.

"Damn crying shame but let's get it done Sergeant"

He threw the cigarette in the mud and scrubbed hand over his face wishing he could rip the skin off and sleep away the last five years until they were nothing but a hateful memory (Liesl and Brigitta excluded of course). Never had he been so regretful about the fact that he could read, write and speak fluent German.

Three days later the news of Adolf Hitler's suicide by bullet hit the front line. Jon had been reading the reports of more camps trying to keep his drinking to a minimum when he had been told. General Taylor had taken one look at the camp and had declared martial law and despite the local's protests that they hadn't known the camp was there they were sent to clean up.

That had been the easy part. The reports coming in showed that this was not an isolated incident. There were hundreds of these camps cropping up around Germany, Poland, other areas of the axis land base, the Netherlands had one that had been used as a main transit camp. The worst was the one that seemed to be mentioned several times in dispatches coming from the Eastern Front. Jon understood very little Russian but he knew enough to know that the talk of a main camp in Poland where most of the Jews seemed to be deported too was the talk of much horror even amongst the battle hardened soldiers of the Soviet Union. Talks of mass graves, ovens for bodies, gas chambers, children and the elderly being separated from everyone else…

God it was enough to make you want to put your head down on the desk and never get up again.

When the news had come to him it had been from one of the men who had given him a bottle of stolen beer. Jon had nodded his thanks and cracked it open when he was sure he was alone and had drank it thinking. So much had been lost because of this man. Hundreds upon thousands upon millions of men, woman and children were dead or displaced. The world had been almost razed to the ground, lives had been ruined and countries would never be the same again. The new world was coming around the corner and Jon was not sure what it would look like and as he sat there he felt a terrible sense of anger wash in with his bone deep apathy at the fact that the monster that had made all this pain possible had blown his brains out rather than face a trial.

"Should have killed himself five years ago" the Private—Jacobson had said his face grim under the mud his eyes black almost with a savage kind of triumph. "Saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble"

"Yes" Jon said to the empty room looking down at the images of the Concentration Camps that the Allies had managed to send so that the Command could see. "Yes he should have done…but he didn't"

He was in that room for a long time and when he eventually went to bed his face was wet.

In the morning he was back to normal.

Eventually they had to leave and press deeper into Germany. They were heading to the Nazi fortified town of Berchtesgaden. It was as Louisa had said as they had climbed into the back of the van, the Australian, the Austrian and all the American's alike, the one place where you could call yourself a True Nazi. It had been a summer resort for most of the high ranking officials in the Third Reich but it had also been where many other dignitaries had met to, anyone who was anyone in the regime had said they'd had dinner there. Jon was sure that there was at least one British MP who'd been married somewhere between here and Berlin and silently they went into the town with watchful eyes.

It was beautiful, Jon who had spent most of his summers in Germany had forgotten the simple beauty of the country that he had once claimed his own. The stones were white washed and the brass gleamed. The sun shone down on them and he could see the sky was a perfect cloudless blue, at some point he was sure they would cross into Austria which is where his father had been dispatched at the same time he had crossed into Germany the first time. He had been so close…so fucking close. Even now he still shook his head as he thought about the uncertainty of the whole thing, the unfairness, the reality that was this world at war.

The sun warmed them and the breeze made them think—or at least made him think that they were anywhere else. Command decided that they would spend the following nights in the hotel and any thoughts of comfort and the luxury of a warm bed and a hot bath went out the window when he saw that the banisters at the bottom were shaped into the head of Hitler himself.

Louisa caught him staring.

"It's the one place where there's no excuse" she said softly. "It's just a pity most of them have ran."

"Hmm"

"Look" she said pushing some of that blonde hair out of her eyes. "I don't know about you but I need a hot bath, some clean clothes and a stiff drink. Tomorrow…if we've not been given orders why don't we talk? We should talk, I need…I'm ready to hear it. Liesl, Brigitta all of it. It's just…there in that place…the thought of stopping even for a second to talk or to think…"

"I understand" and really, he did.

"You don't know what's its been like" she said quietly staring at a rather ugly picture on the wall. "For us…left behind…I have been…terribly wicked. I didn't realise it until I was here and…" she trailed off biting her lip in an expression that wouldn't have looked out of place on her sister Brigitta when a new book was presented to her or she was dealing with a difficult math problem.

"You seem to handle yourself rather well" Jon said. In truth he was not sure what to say to this.

"We should talk" she said finally tearing her eyes away from the picture and her thoughts out of the dark place they had been in. "When we can we should…I should like to know everything"

He nodded and she turned and left saying to one soldier who was intent on looting the silver that she needed the guest book so she could take note of the names of the people that had once stayed there. Jon watched her aware of the Captain's eyes on her and he saw in that moment the vulnerability in his eyes. Clearly he was not the only one concerned and confused and utterly in love with a Von Trapp.

He sighed cracking his neck to the side. He needed to sleep. God he needed to sleep.

But first he had a job to do. Both London and Washington would want to know those names and he needed to get a list too.

He moved towards the main room when there was a shout that had him reaching for his side arm and dropping into a crouch without a second thought. Training ingrained in him had him moving closer clapping one soldier who couldn't be more than seventeen and clutching his rifle his knuckles white on the arm.

"Private?"

"German man sir, found him crouching with a girl behind a chair, we didn't even see him. Looks like he's prepared for a suicide mission. Shouting in German and I think Austrian"

"Cover the door Private if there's more I don't want them to get out. Where's the Captain"

"With the…her…I mean Lous…I mean Lieutenant Von Trapp sir. You gotta give her credit sir she's not one to shy away from the crisis. She's seems to recognise him too"

"No" Jon said with a wry grin straightening up. "I think that's a family thing Private"

He pushed into the room gun raised and then he nearly dropped it.

He knew who that man was. And more to the point he knew who the girl was that he was pointing the gun at. Everyone in the room was watching and he stood there his mouth open as his father pointed a gun at his sister in an attempt to take them both out in some bizarre murder suicide ritual that you usually only read about in the papers.

"Father" he said flatly and for one second the blue eyes flitted to him and he was looking at his father for the first time since he had come home after the Austrian invasion to find him trying to convince his sister to leave. His sister looked at him too though Jon only had eyes for his father and his cold blue gaze that looked at him with all the warmth that he had shared when he had ordered him to leave least he be killed.

"You" the man said pointing one of his two guns, one at his sister and the other had been pointed…at Louisa? He swung the second gun to Jon not that it made much difference. His face was still filled with hatred.

"Me" he said grimly.

There was shivering second of silence that turned into a long minute and then Louisa Von Trapp spoke to the room at large her voice coated in a terrible, shocking surprise that seemed to cut through the very air of this still and terribly frozen room.

"Hang on" she said turning to look at him her eyes wide and her expression stunned.

"Your father is Herr Zeller?"

And there you go. Did you expect that? And I will bring you the next chapter sooner rather than later.

Next Chapter-The Van Braun family have a final reckoning which ends in blood, death, tragedy and inevitable closure. Word reaches the allies of the German surrender.