We loved thee no matter what,
Thou, our holy Russian land.
Thou hast raised thy head high.
Thy face was shining like the sun.
She considered herself a fairly good judge of what she could bear. Any drunkenness on her part was very deliberate, she knew how to pace herself… she just didn't particularly want to. Especially not now of all times.
Drink kept her from having to seriously weigh the odds of the upcoming fight, and it certainly wasn't a pleasant thing to contemplate. Well, perhaps it was good for 'their' side, more generally, but for her and her sisters…
They weren't supposed to be here. That was painfully evident, in every kink and hurdle of their logistics. A very small portion of Russia's reparations was to be paid in shells, so the Germans wouldn't have to worry about reorganizing their military production, just to equip four doomed battleships.
Sevastopol was one of those four, and the upcoming battle felt like the miserable end to a sick joke. Well, she supposed she couldn't even call herself Sevastopol now.
She was lucky, being the only one of them not given a positively insufferable new name after her transfer to the Germans. She was Katharina die Große, while her sisters were Tannenberg, Masurian Lakes (Masuria for short), and Kovno. They were told to wear that shame and call it pride, now that they had been press-ganged into the German side. Well, all they had ever known was the German side, technically speaking, but they were Russian. Everyone knew it. Hell, Sevastopol knew she was Sevastopol before anyone bothered to inform her of her previous country. She knew herself, she knew her sisters. It was in her design.
In private, their German names were never used, but they had to maintain the illusion that this was something like an agreeable arrangement and not the four of them being forced into a fight at gunpoint. They were bringing twelve-inch guns to a fifteen-inch fight, it looked like, and they certainly couldn't boast armor like the Bayerns.
But the Ganguts did boast several inches on those girls, plus the looks of women grown. That felt like a cold comfort, considering that they didn't get much chance to use said bodies. She wasn't cruel enough to wish those little girls had Gangut class armor schemes, but… she didn't want her sisters to get sunk! Hopefully, the Bayerns would make it through the fight unscathed.
In fact, she could see a few of them now. A head of white hair bouncing excitedly before the Crown Prince of Bavaria. Or perhaps, if she was going native, the prince of Bayern and Bayern herself. She wore one of the white high-waisted dresses made for the whole class, the ones whose simplicity only highlighted the girl's charm.
It was a charm, but of a childish sort. Any attempts at stuffing them in military garb and getting menace or even quiet dignity out of them were vain. The Prince was smiling at the battleship with a sort of fondness that Sevastopol could not quite name… She never had anyone like a father, after all.
(It was easy to see Bayern like a child, especially if you were a man who had lost too many children too early. Rupprecht hoped the Navy knew what they were doing.)
The other Bayerns roamed the party: Baden was with Seydlitz and a gaggle of officers, who were probably discussing the upcoming fight. Wurttemberg was trying to stay out of the limelight for lack of interest in socialization, Sachsen was trying to hide her own attempts to sneak a drink. Because someone had decided the Bayerns were too small looking to drink.
It was a shame. The party had some unusually nice drink, considering how long the war had gone on. Admittedly, Sevastopol didn't know how long it had gone on for, considering it was all she had ever known, but she was reliably informed by the officers that the wine was a little too nice for their circumstances.
Cynically, she thought of rum rations or schnapps supposedly given to men before they went over the top. Perhaps that's what it was for Sevastopol and her sisters, but for gals like Hindenburg, it was probably more celebratory.
She didn't have the greatest attitude– she wigged a few officers out with her horns, to say nothing about personality– but she was quite impressive at a distance. The wings were tucked away, and she wore a lovely dress in black. She brought the German flag to mind with that flaming red hair and pale skin.
And then the Ganguts sat around a table, snow white and pale purple. White hair wasn't totally alien to Germany, and purple wasn't that much worse than Seydlitz's famous pink, but the Ganguts chose to be a little apart. Things just worked out better that way.
"Has Hindenburg done something with her horns?" Poltava mused. "I'd almost think she was looking to impress someone."
"Hindenburg? Impress someone?" Sevastopol groaned. "And I'm the tsaritza."
"Well, you are, Katya." Poltava chuckled. "But it's more likely than you might think. Hindenburg is a woman, after all." Well, 'their' Hindenburg was, the other wasn't. But that sort of name confusion was just part and parcel now.
"It's not a bad idea," Petropavlosk muttered.
"What's not?"
"I mean, this could be our last chance, right?" She checked her hair and stood up. "None of you have an officer you fancy? I wouldn't want to steal."
"You're not…" Sevastopol said, realizing what her sister was planning to do.
"Oh, you don't get to talk when you broke out the Rhenish vintage, Katya."
Drunkenness was a vice, but moderation could keep it from becoming a sin. You couldn't fornicate in moderation. That was the ghist of the defense Sevastopol tried to give, but it came out a bit… confused. In her defense, it really was a magnificient vintage, and she wanted every last drop of it out of the bottle by the end of the night.
(If the Germans were going to give, it was only fair they took. Germany had taken them from the motherland, with hopes of throwing them away in one grand confrontation. Perhaps it was small, but it was a little strike against the Germans. She'd fight as hard as she could, because that was what a ship in a fleet did, but if she could inconvenience Germany in a way that wouldn't hurt her, her sisters, or innocent girls like the Bayerns? She'd do it. Perhaps that was the strongest evidence that she was Russian under it all. She saw herself, on some level, as stolen. Kidnapped. Whatever term applied to her.)
Petropavlosk made to walk away. "You can go and make your peace with God, Katya. I'm gonna get laid."
Gangut and Poltava laughed, and Sevastopol sipped at her drink.
Vaguely, she heard Gangut warning her about becoming insensate, and Poltava saying something about not allowing pleasure to interfere with business…
Sevastopol had trouble opening her eyes. A hangover was the price she had to pay for yesterday, but she'd recover quickly, in time to be sensate for….
The battle. Great. She just remembered why she was drinking so fiercely in the first place. She knew drinking now would only make her worries a reality– or at least, she assumed, since no one was so lacking in brains as to come to a battle three sheets to the wind. Yet.
More pressing than the matter of her next drink was where she woke up: on a lap, with one of her ears pressing up against someone's shirt.
Squinting, she saw white hair and almost wondered if it was Gangut up there. But no, those eyes weren't red, but a perfect sky blue. That was already suggestive of her identity, but the patch sewn onto the front of her shirt left no doubts: the white and blue lozenges were the flag of Bavaria, meaning she was lying in Bayern's lap.
"Good morning, Katharina. Baden is grabbing some tea for you." It wasn't the genuine article, not when there were more valuable things for their extremely limited merchant marine to be carrying. Homegrown spearmint, maybe?
"Thank you." Sevastopol sighed. Ugh, she was a bit of a wretch, wasn't she? Making Bayern and Baden worry over her like this. But maybe she wouldn't be dragging them down for much longer. She'd hoped the order of battle didn't have her hiding behind their skirts. That would be pathetic.
"How are my sisters?"
"Kovno and Tannenberg are doing alright, from what I've heard, but nobody's telling where Masuria has gone…"
Was that a success for Petropavlosk, then? Her other sisters, she assumed, had tried to teach her a lesson about drinking in excess. She would have been a lot more miserable if she woke up under a table or slouched against a wall, certainly. Ugh, Bayern was the reason why she couldn't dismiss Germany entirely. The girl was too sweet.
Sevastopol saw a certain redhead come in and was almost cheered by the thought of some tea… but it wasn't given to her. Not yet. Because it was being carried by Baden.
Baden had the same soft, childish face as her sister, although a near-perpetual frown made her look older. Bayern was the oldest, but Baden had facilities for command. It was her job, her responsibility. And included in that responsibility…
"What were you thinking, drinking like that?" Was haranguing idiots like Sevastopol. Holy hell, this was not how she wanted to start her morning…
"Really, I don't understand how any of you like that stuff!" Baden continued. It would certainly be funny if Sevastopol's bad habits ended up making her a teetotaler. A bit of a waste, even…
It was well known (at least to connoisseurs such as Sevastopol) that the Grand Duke of Baden had sent a fine vintage to the ship, with the caveat that she'd drink it when she was of a proper age and the war was won. The idea of a war-winning battleship being chaperoned as she had a glass was amusing, at least.
Baden having the potential to win the war didn't make her any less of an annoyance as she extracted a promise of sobriety (at least for a while) out of Sevastopol. That was what she had to give in exchange for that tea, and it wasn't too steep of a price. Sevastopol had made her peace with that wine being her last drink, if worse came to worse. Well, maybe she could mooch some rum ration or something….
No. Bad. Unless she was actively dying, she shouldn't be drinking during battle. Not when her skills could mean the difference between life and death for the Bayerns or her sisters.
Thankfully, Baden eventually had mercy and left Sevastopol to her tea. With a bit of assistance from Bayern, she sat up straight and had a few sips as the other girl played with the pleats of her skirt. Was there something she needed? Baden had excused herself for business…
"Would you like to attend service with me?" Bayern quietly suggested.
Was it that time of the week already? Or maybe Bayern was just the sort of gal who went to daily mass every day.
"Just don't expect me to say the filioque," Sevastopol grumbled.
That was one of the stronger pieces of evidence regarding her connection to Russia. It would seem, to a Lutheran officer from Germany, like a relatively minor issue, if they knew the history at all. But Sevastopol had reacted strongly against it. That was a strange thing for an officer to imagine into her. Perhaps it was another sign that her Russian-ness ran a bit deeper than she thought.
She had wanted to see it, at least once. With her sisters, preferably. Was that too much to ask?
Farewell, homeland,
Remember us.
Farewell, familiar faces,
Forgive us.
This one came out of a lot of discussion with/done by the Kaiserreich lads (Severak, GhostPenSix, Talos/NewLeaderReborn, Antus) regarding the fates of Russian battleships.
These four (plus Volya maybe) are seized and dragged into a big 1918 scrap against the Brits. They're given cubes by the Germans.
The battle is really looking like a crossover episode though considering the Kongous might be showing up.
