The ghost of many a German Knight

Looks down on us from his azure height,

And as we gaze on the Rhine's bright blue,

We feel its tide is German too!

So long as we have blood to tun,

So long as we can hold a gun,

So long as we can wield a brand,

No foe, O Rhine, shall tread thy stand!

Württemberg was the latest of her sisters, and if you were comparing them by armor, the greatest. Kinks in the previous designs had been worked out, and there was extra weight in her displacement budget which had been used to carefully apply more armor. If it was just a simple comparison of numbers, she'd have something to write home about.

But every second of time spent with shipgirls in the Navy proved it was more than simple numbers at play. Of course, they were important– no amount of gumption changed penetration characteristics– but a ship could be judged by her personality now, how she composed herself, how she treated her siblings and comrades and admirals.

From the moment she came into being, she knew, intuitively, that she was part of a set. Part of it was gut feeling, the other portion was getting a slam-tackle of a hug from Sachsen almost the moment after she came to be. She had a tiny bit of height on her sisters, but not nearly enough bulk to prevent herself from being bowled over.

They were a strange sort of set, the four of them. At the very least, Württemberg didn't have to deal with disappointment from her officers: they had all made their peace with the Bayern class's youth back with Sachsen. There was some vague hope she might have turned out different, but from then on they knew the Bayerns were to be a set… even if their hair color varied.

Baden, the second eldest, shared Württemberg's vibrant, inhuman red hair, although her eyes were yellow where Württemberg had a brown so dark you'd think it was black most of the time. Still, their shared red hair seemed like a foreshadowing of their bond.

Look, Württemberg loved all her sisters. That was as much of a part of her as a hull or guns. But she had always felt a bit more strongly about Baden. Sachsen and Bayern were unabashedly themselves, brilliant white hair matching well with innocent, uncomplicated minds. They didn't need to ruminate on themselves, pick out exactly who and what they were. Bayern was Bayern and Bayern was lovely for it, but Baden saw herself as needing change, in particular, she saw herself as needing to be like Friedrich der Große.

Well, Baden wasn't quite bold enough to try copying the "my child" schtick, because it would have only seemed laughable, but she tried in other ways. Emulating her style of speech and accent, styling her hair the same way, and even trying to get into music before realizing she couldn't carry a tune to save her life.

Her attempts at mimicking Friedrich's style of leadership usually fell flat: the maternal affection, the "rewards for a job well done, my child…" Baden could pull off a "my dear," maybe, when addressing Württemberg or one of her sisters, but she would get tongue-tied while trying anything like that on someone who looked older. It seemed like she was trying to pour herself into the wrong sort of mold.

That was something to be grateful for when it came to Friedrich, she supposed. While she might have been a touch pushy about getting Württemberg to socialize, she bought precious time. Every day that Friedrich served as the flagship, Baden had more time to hammer out her identity, to figure out her own particular leadership style.

Whatever her sister decided to be, she would always know something: Württemberg was right there. Always at her side, a constant. Friedrich wanted a flagship to succeed her. Derfflinger wanted someone who would live up to her legacy, utilizing her crew well. The admirals wanted naval victory.

And all Württemberg wanted was Baden. No conditions, no hurdles to clear. If they lost their ships tomorrow or if Baden sustained some grievous injury, Württemberg would love her sister just the same.

She hoped Baden understood that.

The four of them all shared a room, with Sachsen and Bayern having well-established positions on the top bunks. Well, when they weren't out and about. Even without Navy business and battles, they were all very busy girls. Baden was busy to her own detriment and Württemberg abhorred it, but she knew that her sister was doing it entirely so they would be safe…

Urgh. Why couldn't keeping them safe and happy be easy?

Still, if one of them had to do it, Württemberg would leave the grand tactical considerations to her sister. Baden spoke with the admirals, she was learning the art of leadership from Friedrich herself. Perhaps there was some irony there, the girl named after the Grand Duchy coming to hold sway over Kingdoms. But things as lofty as dramatic irony and fleet formations weren't Württemberg's business.

Their relationships with their namesake states were interesting. Or rather, their relationships with the heads of their namesake states, because the news of their existence had yet to be made public. Already, princes and dukes strained to impress them, hoping that their respective Bayern sister might somehow improve their prestige or popularity.

(Or maybe they really saw them as sweet little children who deserved gifts for fighting so bravely. One assumption might have been logically safer, but Württemberg preferred the assumption that was safer in the literal sense. Assuming benevolence from others was not a sustainable habit.)

Bayern proudly wore an Edelweiss hairpin of silver and enamel, a gift from the King of Bavaria. It was pretty cute. Baden could listen to The Watch on the Rhine with a little music box while she waited to be old enough to drink the wine the Grand Duke had sent her. Sachsen had received Meissen porcelain, and it felt like the entire base broke out in a sweat when she did.

A gift had been sent from the Kingdom of Württemberg before they really realized the… overarching theme of the Bayern class. Some people found Württemberg's use of it inappropriate, but she didn't particularly care about their thoughts, especially not when her gift had such obvious practical use.

Despite the intricate decoration– the leaves and boughs carved into the polished wood, the frolicking deer depicted in gleaming metal– there was one very definite purpose for a rifle. A hunting rifle, because that was the sort of sport that the King favored, but a gun that shot bullets still. It was a very nice gun and it came with an invitation to hunt with the King himself, but she didn't practice for such an occasion. In fact, the idea of having to keep up with royal niceties in some isolated wood with a king was a very unpleasant thought.

There was another reason she brought that rifle to the range and bothered with something as underpowered as human small arms. Call her a cynic, but Württemberg didn't believe that things would be all gifts and dances forever. Baden's mind was out at sea, Bayern and Sachsen had their heads in the clouds, so that left Württemberg to consider threats on land.

With power and political influence came assassins. Or perhaps they'd just attract kidnappers, but either couldn't be allowed anywhere near her family. They were a spectacularly obvious point of failure, and she could only thank her lucky stars the public reveal hadn't occurred yet. The idea of a crowd? Merciful God, just imagine thousands of people all in one place, where a single pistol could cause as much naval disruption as a racing torpedo!

(She didn't get much of the excitement over people anyway. She supposed her officers were nice, but they weren't like shipgirls. How could the others get so close so easily? Württemberg's dislike of social events and habit of excusing herself early meant she saw things happening on the periphery, whispered words and clumsy exploration with clammy hands… It made her skin crawl.)

Yeah, she knew this probably wasn't a good attitude for a shipgirl, being doubtful of others and cynical. An unwillingness to cooperate with your crew kneecapped the efficiency that made Kansen so useful in the first place. Hell, she had needed a marine to show her how to operate a gun…

What an uncomfortable situation. There were so many vexing unknowns in the world, so many dangers lurking in the shadows, and yet they were just expected to… jump in! There were times when Württemberg struggled to predict what her sisters would do, much less the general public, the people who lived without cubes.

Were they in some sense a separate species? Were shipgirls a sort of… parasite? No. They were symbiotic. They gave military service, the humans gave them lives. One party could live and survive without the other… and it certainly wouldn't be humans on the losing end of that match, unless Württemberg picked up a pickaxe and started learning about how to process explosives.

The rifle bucked against her shoulder, and another hole appeared in the target downrange. Bullseye. It wasn't a perfect simulation of what it would be like, because the targets weren't moving, but she couldn't imagine asking one of her officers for that.

(Something told Württemberg the officers wanted their shipgirls dangerous at sea and nowhere else. Hunting was a respectable hobby. Blowing her way through human-shaped targets would make her look dangerous in a way fifteen-inch guns somehow wouldn't. Admittedly, she struggled to guess what people were thinking at the moment, but she could draw logical, if cynical, conclusions. They wouldn't be permitted to run wild.)

It was only natural that they took some damage during battle, but Württemberg was glad to see that only she had come out of this scrape with much damage. Heck, none of them had bodily damage beyond a few scrapes and bruises, although Württemberg's larger half would have to spend some time being repaired thanks to a nasty hit to a turret.

The moment they had touched solid ground all of her sisters rushed to her side, with Baden giving her officers only the barest courtesies before dashing away. True to form, it was Sachsen who arrived first, slamming into her with a hug. "Würt! Are you alright?"

"Fine."

"You shouldn't run into an injured person like that, Sachsen! Be careful!" And there was Baden, her lovely red hair tamed by a pitch-black ribbon. Another habit picked up from their naval seniors, who realized the obvious utility of not having your hair flapping around wildly.

"Again, I'm fine." Württemberg sighed. "Nothing hurts but my hand."

"Your hand?" Sachsen gasped, seizing her right wrist and lifting it up to see… a perfectly normal hand in a glove, the skin pale white and completely untouched. A few calluses, courtesy of obsessive shooting and work with the ships, but no wounds.

Baden took her other hand much more gingerly, starting to work the glove off before Württemberg let out a little hiss. That hurt… but it needed to be done. "Get it off." She said.

"I'm not hurting you?"

"I'm fine."

Baden nodded. "Right." The glove came off and Baden squinted. "Is this a break?"

"I think so."

"Würt! You broke a bone and didn't get it looked at?"

"We still needed to get home." Speaking of getting home… it seemed that the last member of their little band had finally gotten off her own boat. Bayern saw the way her sisters were looking at Württemberg's hand and pulled out a handkerchief.

"How are you, Würt?" Bayern asked, reaching out and wiping a smudge of something or other off of Württemberg's face. She hadn't even noticed it.

"I said I'm fine."

"We need to get you to a doctor," Baden said. "Sachsen, go fetch Derfflinger if she's not already on the way."

What followed was a simply mortifying amount of attention from both shipgirls and the men. All of her officers came to check up on her, and a helping of the sailors came by as well. Sachsen gladly took anything the men offered to her, saying that she'd carry it for Württemberg… It was mostly just rations and such. No flowers or anything, just because they'd been on a ship for a while.

(Oh no, they were going to come down to wherever she was being fixed up, and they'd leave things near her room… Friedrich had flowers and sweets in piles near her door when she got injured. Would they try to talk to her? She'd prefer notes, but even then, there would be so much emotion in there…. Why were the men so quick to adapt, to treat her like a little sister or a close friend? They barely knew anything about shipgirls!)

The moment she got her splint, there was a sudden turnaround. The lack of younger-sibling coddling she had been dreading was brought to a sudden end so that she could barely eat a meal without Bayern offering to feed her soup or Sachsen making sure she was eating enough. Everyone opened doors for her, Baden would take time from her busy schedule to write for her because Württemberg had the monstrous bad luck of taking a break in her dominant hand.

It felt like a reversion, except she didn't really have anything to revert to. She had no stage of infancy. She could jump straight into protecting her sisters, and not being capable of doing that… She hadn't even gained her injury nobly protecting her sisters or anything! It seemed like it had been aimed at her. She supposed it fortunate that she was strong enough to bear it…

Honestly, being treated like some sort of invalid was worse than the actual injury. Her sisters had gone from accepting her help with a quick "thanks" to doubting that she could pack a suitcase by herself.

Speaking of… she was packing for a trip, actually. While sisters were still needed at sea, she had been 'freed up' for a couple of months, at least, while they repaired her ship. That was time enough for her hand to recover, but she didn't actually provide much for the repair. Sure, she had a better feeling than the average person as to what exactly was wrong with the ship, but an expert like Derfflinger could know that while doing repairs.

So someone very high up in command decided that she could help the war on other fronts. It was decided that making propaganda of her with the splint would only serve to make shipgirls look weak– which was bad– and the reveal was still some time away, so she wouldn't be forced into an ordeal that mortifying. However, there was a list of figures who did know and could be impressed…

There wasn't much chance of her catching a train when there was so much focus on the Western front, so she would be taking a glamorous car trip to her namesake state. To Württemberg. She would be seeing the King, the very same one who sent her a rifle. (Her splint meant she wasn't in much of a state for hunting, though.)

"Are you thinking white ribbon or black ribbon for your hair, Würt?"

"Whichever you like."

Bayern sighed. "You haven't made a single choice about what you're going to wear!"

"You know better."

"I've picked out two options which I think would both look good on you. Now pick." She held the two strips of fabric out in front of her. Barring the color, there was practically no difference between the two. The same unadorned, flawless strip of fabric, either black or white.

"Come on, I know you can do it!" Bayern egged her on, a brilliant smile on her face. Baden chuckled as she folded up blouses and carefully stacked them up.

Württemberg looked Bayern in the eye, almost wanting to ask for her choice again, but she quickly broke contact, her gaze drifting over to the right. To a flower hairpin that sat like a single, resilient bloom above the snow.

"White," Württemberg said.

"Yes!" Bayern cried, grinning. "Perfect! You'll look brilliant!"

It was a tiny choice. Miniscule. But it made her so happy… "I… I… thank you Bayern. I'll miss all of you."

"And I'll miss you!" She wrapped Württemberg in a hug and turned. "Come on, Baden! Get over here. Join the hug! And then we'll hunt down Sachsen!"

"While in a hug?"

"Of course!"

(Before they went, Sachsen ran off somewhere and brought a photograph of the four of them back. It was nice to hold onto.)

William II, King of Württemberg, was on a break from the difficult business of running a state during a war. The suffering that his people and the greater German people bore due to this war pricked at his heart. His walks, all the times he saw the people, they were poisoned in retrospect. Had his kindness toward the people formed the sort of image that young men charged over the trench's edge for?

He was some part of that grand Württemberg and Germany, the ones men sacrificed their lives to. The postcards and the prints, of his face formed something greater… and it seemed like another potential focus of that process was on the way. When he first heard of the Navy's women, he had thought it some strange joke, but the Kaiser was certainly insistent…

His 'neighbor', Fredrick II of Baden, had apparently taken some issue with his own shipgirl. Strange word. To the point, sure, but strange. Fredrick felt a fool for giving a girl that age wine, if William remembered correctly. It was a worrying thought, someone too young to drink being in war, and it added another level of absurdity. This process, whatever it was, was supposed to produce warriors, wasn't it? Noble fighters for the fatherland?

He and his queen watched as a car puttered up to them, its passenger hidden away inside. There she was. The other Württemberg, the ship and the woman he had invited on a hunting trip as a gesture of goodwill. Whoever she was… she fighting at sea for them, sustaining serious damage.

The car came to a stop and the driver stepped out, circling around to open the passenger door. A small, heeled boot slipped out the door, and his heart sank.

She couldn't have been out of her teens, and from his own experience raising a girl, he wouldn't say she looked much older than sixteen, maybe even fifteen. One arm hung in a splint, yet she tried to grab her things from the car before the driver stopped her.

A child. His Pauline and her ill-fated siblings had all been born before the turn of the century, some three decades before, but his was still a parent's heart.

She looked a bit more than twenty years younger than his daughter, but she was supposedly a few months old. The thought that the girl had dropped from the ether was absurd, almost to the point of wondering if she was some young waif, pressed into a conflict of massive scale.

(His wife wondered something similar. She had a familiarity with the kingdom's orphanages and the Women's Union, perhaps enough to see if a girl like this had been plucked from somewhere… if she was even a Württemberger. If she wasn't spawned into existence somehow, surely someone would remember that hair and those eyes. She supposed the girl had found some way to be independent and support herself, but it left a bitter taste in her mouth.)

She looked around as if trying to catch a glimpse of everything, but it didn't look like a teenager's simple curiosity. It looked like someone searching for threats. What had the Navy done?

Württemberg stood before them now and dipped into a curtsy. Well, as much of a curtsy as could be executed with one working hand. "Your Majesties. SMS Württemberg, at your service."

"We are pleased to meet you," he smiled.

"I must give you my heartfelt thanks for the rifle." And there was the first hint of a real smile from the girl. Not necessarily full-hearted, more a little curve of the lips, but he could understand that. There were times when it felt impossible to smile. It just seemed quite unfair that someone so young could find herself in such a rut.

"I hope you've made good use of it."

"I've made great use of it, sir. Ah, Your Majesty." She fiddled with one of the buttons on her shirt, looking quite awkward.

"Is something wrong?" He asked.

"It's just… ah, I'm left-handed, Your Majesty." she didn't tell him as much as she told a paver a little to the left of his foot.

"So you need a left-handed rifle. Of course. Perhaps we'll have that hunting trip yet." It would probably seem more like her hunting trip, with him in an advisory role. He didn't have the body he used to.

"Perhaps."

It wasn't a healthy thing, to be staying up this late, but some might say he didn't have much health to lose at this point. Thoughts of Württemberg kept him up, and when his servants informed him the girl was still up, roaming the halls…

Well, he had a duty to the grander Württemberg, and perhaps he had a duty to the junior as well. He found her in the library, staring at an aged painting.

Slowly, he took a seat next to the girl, and she didn't ask him to go away. For a while, there was nothing more than the glow of electric lights as she continued to observe the painting.

"My daughter and first wife." He said.

"You remarried?"

"It was expected of me."

Württemberg fell silent for a few moments, before reaching into a pocket. She pulled out a photograph and held it up, as if comparing to the painting. She was in it, alongside three other girls.

"Your sisters?"

"Yes."

And then he realized why a young girl would be roaming the halls, incapable of sleep. "You miss them."

"I do. So much. I just… I couldn't say it the way I wanted to before I left." She frowned.

"Any word spoken is better than none," William said. "All the words you say will never feel like enough." He wanted Marie forever. A thousand years of conversation would have still been too little.

"I would recommend some sleep. It's what they'd want for you. Perhaps… if you please, I could discuss speeches and rhetoric with you tomorrow."

Initially, I picked The Watch on the Rhine because hurr-durr German WW1 era song, but just on the right bank… there's Baden. Technically the imperial territory of Alsace would separate Baden from the French, but still.

Title is from the Bible and was part of the motto of the Swabian League. This is an easy connection to Würt while also showing her strong, if poorly expressed love of her sisters and her willingness to defend them.