Hi, so here is another chapter and I hope that you enjoy it. There will be a bit of a timejump with the next one as well.
Disclaimer-Nothing is mine just this chapter my plot stories and the creation of any OCs in this story and their backgrounds.
Also I don't know about a lot about World War II American Military Command Structure so any and all mistakes I do apologise.
Please Read and Review.
Poetic Justice
Chapter 14-Pathetic
There is a time jump and Louisa is still working, still at odds with her family and yet just as everything is getting better an opportunity comes along that she just can't say no to…literally.
As 1943 came steadily to a close there was a sense in the country to get up and get moving. There was an urgency to get the war finished. The gains that the Nazi's had made had stopped now. They had come under tremendous fire with the Russians and the Russian's had all but thrown everything and the kitchen sink (a saying that might be American through and through but one Louisa liked) at it and they were slowly being pushed back. The British had gotten something that might resemble a decent hold in Italy and the American's were clearly preparing for something. Louisa might not know exactly what it was but she knew that she was helping them prepare for it.
She had risen through the ranks neatly gaining the rank of Corporal through sheer force will and (she suspected) a lack of officers and even though she spent the mornings and the nights reading some of the most horrendous stuff in her life, she thought that she was at doing something. If reading this stuff, if seeing the numbers and translating anything that might be a little bit of help delayed a death or helped the troops re-evaluate their plans then she was doing something and that had to be…something.
She found she liked it. Military life came with a kind of structure that reminded her of her childhood and so it was easy to fall back into those patterns. It had always been harder for her to fall out of them after all. Falling back into them was as easy as breathing. Get up in the morning before dawn, get dressed, make breakfast, be silent until spoken too, get to work. All of it was normal and so she fell back into the silence that had defined her entire childhood.
She shared a barracks of sorts with other girls for the first two weeks and then an apartment with three of them. It was closer to the office and Marisol, Audrey and Annika all worked out of the same office that she did. They were all translators, all of them had fled from their homes and they got on reasonably well. She had forgotten the comfort and indeed the power of female friendship. It might not be a close friendship but it was a start and Louisa found that it was nice having someone to come home to even if Audrey was engaged, Marisol had a revolving door of lovers and Annika seemed to only want to invite woman home. It gave her an insight into a world she had not experienced. Everything at home was so much prim and proper and nice and neat and done respectfully. Louisa liked borrowing cherry red lipstick and going out in their uniforms on the town and seeing several of the men look at her. She had never been one for male attention—she was the daughter of a famously beautiful woman, the stepdaughter of another and the younger sister of another and so she had always been in the shadows watching as Liesl had gotten all of the male attention.
Now it was her turn and whenever they went out she sipped her cocktail and she thought it was funny that boys in uniform even younger than she did wanted to dance.
But it was all passing the time really, everyone knew that soon they would have to invade Europe. There were plans in the works everyone knew and soon they would come to their conclusion and the men would be shipped off in their thousands. Already if you went to the Marines you did basic and then you were shipped out within seconds. Every man that the Marines could get was going.
Friedrich had mentioned once that he had gotten to some island that was unnameable even to her father and that it was infested with crabs. On one of the Sundays that she had been able to get off work and get the bus back (missing mass much to her mother's disappointment and Louisa's eternal relief) she sat her now two year old brother on her lap and demonstrated what a crab was with hands that became pincers. Alexander his hair almost as fair as Maria's had laughed and crowed and clapped his hands together thoughally excited for most of the afternoon. He was speaking now she realised and she was the one who had taught him how to say "Crab"
Which with a two year old's lisp came out as "Ab or Abby" for crabby.
"Yes" she's said as they had sat down for dinner. "Crabby, exactly what father is"
"Very droll Louisa"
But Louisa caught the smile and she smiled back. It was a genuine moment between the two of them and neither one of them had genuine moments anymore. It was nice…it was normal.
She didn't try to overthink it. So much of her job was overthinking things and she didn't want to bring it home. Besides she was so tired sometimes that when she got home she poured herself a glass of vodka often enough took one sip and then passed out in bed.
But she was feeling good about herself, the distance between her and her family, her insistence that living away from them was for their own good was actually true. Louisa had been called many things in her life but she had never been called an optimist, hell, she had never considered herself an optimist but for this brief little moment of eighteen months as she went from ordinary girl to enlisted woman, she found that she wanted to believe that they could make this work.
Would she have the best relationship with her father that he'd had with any of his children? No.
But they might be able to salvage something out of the scrap heap.
And that had to be worth something.
Surely?
And then like a guilty thing, it all fell apart.
She had been called into her commanding officers, office. Captain Viktor Jablonski was American-Polish by birth with a hatred of the Nazi's that rivalled her own. He was late forties and many said that his hated had been because his was Jewish and his father had been forced to leave his mother and his younger brother behind and escape out of one of the many moves against the Jewish race. Louisa didn't know how much of that was true. You learnt on your first day in the Office of Strategic Services that unless you wanted your teeth punched out you did not discuss other people's family lives, their reason for being in the service or why they had left their own country in the first place.
It was a thing that was not discussed.
Ever.
She had been working on an intelligence report that had come in from the Austrian resistance. It was not making as much noise as the French and the Belgium ones but it was there and Louisa would take any and every piece of news from her homeland that she could. If there were people in Austria that still believed in the Austria that had existed before the invasion then she wanted to help them.
She had been sat on the floor of the office her papers spread out before her when her Captain opened the door. As long as the work got done he never cared how they did it and Louisa found sitting on the floor looking down at the papers made it go quicker.
"Von Trapp I need a word, my office. Leave everything"
"Yes Sir"
She scrambled to her feet wiping her hands down her uniform.
"Von Trapp would it kill you to do something with your hair"
"I tie it back Sir"
"Yes well. Half of it seems to be escaping"
Louisa resisted the urge to sigh and then tugged the offending blonde lock back into the bun that was secured at the back of her head. Her Captain sighed too as if he was tired, very, very, tired and then he looked her over.
"You'll do. I've got someone who wants to meet you"
"Sir?"
They ducked and dived down the corridors. One of the things about these offices was that they were built like mazes.
"Yes. They want an Aryan look a like for a mission overseas"
Louisa stopped dead.
"Overseas?"
"Yes overseas" he said stopping with her. "Do you know anything about that?"
Overseas.
Suddenly she could see her father in the car after they had seen Friedrich to the war telling her that with her looks she would be sent overseas.
Christ he was going to have a fit when he heard about this.
Louisa wasn't though. She was excited.
What she was doing was important but it had not been what she wanted to do. She had wanted to go overseas and do something on the ground for a long time. Now she was being trusted with it.
Or at the very least now she was being told she looked the part.
"Von Trapp this is Captain Ernest Ben Mordecai, he's one of our operatives on the ground in Belgium. Ben Mordecai this is Corporal Louisa Von Trapp"
This was the moment she supposed. This was the battle cry.
She stepped forwards.
"You're going overseas?"
"To London and then onto a command post in Belgium yes father"
"You're going overseas?"
"Just for a few months I can't talk about why but there is nothing dangerous about it. They just need someone in London to help with a plan and then to be on the ground in Belgium. They have offices in Belgium too"
"Hidden ones, secret ones"
"Yes but…I can't get into it. Not really, I've already told you what I can tell you. But something big is happening, it's like I'm on the chessboard and I just have to be played"
It was the best metaphor she could give him without telling him what she was really doing. Louisa couldn't legally tell him and even if she could she was sure that she would find a way to lie to him because the thought of telling her father that she was being posted through London to Belgium so that she could assist the resistance and interrogate prisoners of war was more than she thought he could genuinely handle.
And that was saying something.
The truth was they needed an blonde haired, blue eyed girl who spoke the language to be on the ground when the invasion happened. As soon as the allies took France, the plan was to hook up through Holland and then into Belgium. Louisa looking at the maps could see the sense of it. She was to be the point person between the allies and the resistances, they were all primed and ready to go on D-Day (as her new boss had told her they were tentatively calling this one) and they just needed the go ahead.
It seemed simple enough. Granted it was probably dangerous, it was incredibly dangerous only made more so when she was told that she was to commit suicide to avoid capture.
"That's as much for your benefit as it is ours" Captain Ben Mordecai had said sternly. "This isn't an operation where they're will be a rescue mission, I don't care if you work your way through the entire resistance, you leave them all and get yourself to safety if you have to. What matters is what you know and the Germans know that. Fortunately you look enough like the ideal woman for them to maybe buy yourself some time. But if it looks bad you crush a cyanide pill and consider your duty to your country done and dusted."
"Yes Sir"
Was there anything else she could say to that?
Was there?
Really?
"…anything else you want to tell us?"
That was her mother who was watching her with eyes that told Louisa she knew very well Louisa was lying through her back teeth when it came to this.
"No. It's simple and straight forwards and—"
And her father had just walked away. Just got up from the table and walked away.
Well…there went all that progress down the drain. Louisa should have felt more about that but if truth were being told she was too excited to feel anything other than a desperate need to get on with it. She had gone into the special service because she had known this was an outcome that she wanted.
To be on the ground.
To be doing something.
God why couldn't he understand that?
"Pathetic" she said quietly to her soup bowl and her mother frowned at her looking for the first time angry. Maria never really did anger Louisa mused. Disappointment, yet in copious amounts but not anger.
Now she looked angry.
"Darling sometimes I think you can be very unfair" her mother said quietly in that cross tone that Louisa had never heard before. "I don't think you've ever considered his feelings"
"Perhaps not" Louisa said honest in the face of honest criticism from a very honest woman.
Besides at this point what was the point? A weeks time she would be gone.
(One day she was sure that she would regret this bout of apathy. But today was not that day)
"But to be fair I doubt he's thought of ours before you arrived either"
Her mother shot her a long look that stirred up something that might once have been shame but Louisa just stared her down. If there was to be a reckoning between her and her father it would come much later. Towards the end of…of whatever this was.
Right now there was more important things.
Right now she had to win the war. Or at the very least help to win the war.
But there was another reason she wanted to keep this to herself.
"The plan" her new officer had said watching her closely. "Is to eventually cross into Germany and Austria. If you are still alive which I cannot guarantee then I am going to need you to deal with the high ranking Nazi's. We have a rough idea about the ones who are in the high ranking officials but once we get into the countries that we need to were going to need to weed them out like rats."
Louisa nodded.
Her Captain looked at her closely.
"I know you have a personal connection with Austria—you were Austria—"
"I am Austrian" Louisa corrected him before she realised that she actually wasn't supposed to correct an officer. Though the small smile she received told her she might have gotten away with it.
"Sir"
She caught the two men looking at each other and wondered when men were going to stop looking over a woman's head believing she wasn't smart enough to understand what was going on around them.
A clue.
Louisa did understand.
She understood quite a bit.
Back at home she watched her mother bustle around with her youngest sibling and she turned back to her soup.
She didn't know the full story but she knew this much, if she ran into Herr Zeller when she got into Austria (and she believed with everything that she had that they would get over the boarder and back into Austria one day soon) then Herr Zeller and Fritz and Rolfe and all the others who betrayed her and her family and who helped tear them apart would find that the Allied advancement, the Russian's pressing down from the East and the American's and the British from the West, would be the least of their worries.
Vengeance was mine saith the Lord (or something like that) she though as she drew a figure eight into her soup. And vengeance would soon be hers.
Anger…anger was a good emotion to take into war.
But it was not everything.
She just didn't know it yet.
And there you are, I hope you enjoy this chapter and I will do my best to bring you the next one sooner rather than later.
Next Chapter-Louisa is in Belgium trying to keep her head above water as the war drags on, being in the thick of it and wishing to be in the thick of it is not the same and then suddenly something happens that puts her morality to the test.
