December 27, 1944

Never had Alice been so glad to hear Patton's name as when she woke on the 27th to news that the siege had broken. With the supply routes clear and evacuation possible, Alice spent the majority of the day in Bastogne itself, getting wounded prepped to go and assisting Nixon with gathering information from the 3rd Army.

The evacuation of the wounded improved her mood dramatically. Harry and Smokey got removed to a real hospital. Skinny, doing meaningfully better, stayed. Alice chewed him out for it, but the medics agreed he'd be able to return to combat soon enough. His smirk had somehow managed to both infuriate and amuse her.

She thanked God for the 3rd Army. Of course, if anyone had asked for her opinion on the matter, she'd have denied it. Not for her pride, but for the pride of the men on the line and the wounded themselves. Most of the enlisted had never set foot in Bastogne, hadn't seen how truly desperate life had become for civilians and soldiers alike. She understood why the men on the front lines refused to admit they'd needed help. If anyone asked, she would say they hadn't.

And that was probably true. But breaking the siege at the end of the 26th of December did a lot more for morale than the time it would've taken for the 101st alone, so she didn't complain. Only a fool would refuse assistance. Well, a fool or a paratrooper.

When Alice returned to the CP by way of a jeep, the light of the evening had started to fade. She found it empty. No one in foxholes, no one in the tents. A gentle silence fell around the whole area. Alice found her mind drifting. As she stood, body as still as the trees around her, she gazed at the snow on the ground.

Suddenly, with the siege broken and the battle going much better for her allies, the snow felt less like a terrible threat, and more like a blanket of purity all around her. Despite her body trembling from the cold, she smiled. Not a big smile, but a gentle one. A genuine small smile at the quiet around her.

As she reached down and cupped the snow in her thinly-gloved hands, she closed her eyes. Any part of her skin that the gloves didn't cover burned. The way snow could burn, the dichotomy of such a prospect, stopped her in her tracks for a moment. It felt nice, thinking about mundane things instead of who would get hit next. 

Nostalgia crashed over her as she moulded the snow into a ball. It packed well. Another smile graced her features. No more dry snow. Now it was wetter, warmer perhaps. Alice took a deep breath as she gazed down at the ball of snow in her hands. The burning had turned to numbness.

With another small smile, Alice lowered herself to the ground. Exhaustion consumed her. The day's activities had drained her of energy. Sitting in the snow, she placed the little snowball in front of her and started packing more on to it.

Before she really realized what she was doing, Alice had built a small snowman. The emotions the sight conjured up were all sorts of contradictory and yet somehow, appropriate. The melancholic nostalgia, a sort of bittersweet sentimentality, gripped at her voice and kept her quiet as she looked at the three balls of snow that had formed a little snowman.

Only when someone came and crouched next to her did Alice take her eyes away from the snowman. It took all of half a second for her to know it was Nixon. Intuition, perhaps. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and as her thoughts were pulled away from her rabbit hole of musings, she turned and looked at him. 

Nixon turned from her to the snowman. After he took a sip at his flask, he shrugged. "It's a little small."

A tiny laugh broke through her silence. "I wouldn't want to scare you, if you'd walk into the CP and found a stranger made of snow in the middle of the area."

He stood back up. "Thoughtful. Might've shot it." 

"Never can tell with you." She accepted his help to stand up off the ground. Her legs and backside were completely frozen from sitting in the snow for however long she'd been there.

Nixon smirked again. "Oh yes, me and my renowned itchy trigger finger."

The way he'd said it caused her to snicker. But when Nixon raised his foot to push at the snowman she smacked his arm. "Hey! Stop." Alice frowned at him, crouching down again to look in it's little face. "It didn't do anything to you."

He didn't laugh. For a moment he just watched her, crouched before the small snowman, and wondered about this version of Alice Klein. He'd gotten so used to the Alice who spent her time coming up with sassy remarks or smirking when she could show off her aim. Suddenly the thought that maybe this was a small look at Alice before the war, before that night in Paris, before the Maquis, made his breath catch. She'd talked about leaving her old name behind, about how that person did not exist anymore. But Nixon had always doubted that. And suddenly, watching Alice smile at the small snowman, a piece of innocence in the midst of proof of the horrors mankind was capable of, what he suspected had finally been confirmed. Adelaide Klein was still in there.

For the first time in a very long time, Nixon didn't know what to say. He replayed in his mind all the interactions he could remember, back to Toccoa up to the present moment. He'd never doubted her incredible capacity to love, to support another. Usually she did so with restraint. Her ability to hide herself had impressed him from day one. The way she could say exactly what she felt, telling no lie, and still have said absolutely nothing at all had been what caught his attention in the first place. 

That, and the fact that she was a woman from Europe training to be an American paratrooper. 

Dick spoke often of her helpfulness with the men. That had gone all the way back to Toccoa, too. He'd heard about, rather than seen, how she'd helped Docs Roe and Spina care for the sick platoons. Both he and Dick had even talked about how she'd have made a good medic.

If the war had been kinder, maybe she'd have done that. But she'd learned how to shoot a gun too well to go back to patching up wounds. Then again, he supposed, if the war had been kinder, she'd be back in Paris with her brothers, and her sister, and her parents. Instead she was crouched in front of a foot tall little snowman in the middle of the war torn Ardennes.

"Hey, have you two eaten?"

At Dick's voice, both of them turned around. He strode over to them. It took a moment for him to register the snowman in the dark, but when he did, Dick just looked from it, to her, to him. He said nothing.

"I have, yeah," Nixon replied. He felt oddly relieved to have been interrupted by his best friend. "Alice?"

She stood and nodded, yawning. "Yeah."

"Good." With a sigh, he shrugged. "Strayer wanted us to go over some more reports from Patton."

With something more to do, all three of them relocated into one of the small tents. Wooden chairs were more comfortable than frozen ground. Before long they dug into the combat reports, maps, casualty numbers,  and supply lists from the 3rd Army and the 506th, trying to come up with some plan for the next move to send up to Strayer and Sink.

By the light of two oil lamps, they slaved on for several hours. Numbers and letters blurred together. Around 2200 hours, Alice leaned back in her chair and yawned. She shook her head. "I need a break."

Nixon snorted. "You can say that again." As soon as Alice got up from her spot and went over to another seat inside the tent for a change of scenery, he propped his feet up on her vacant chair. One drink later, he'd dropped the papers back to the table and shook his head. "We're going to get nowhere when we're this tired. We need a distraction."

Dick frowned, but he agreed. "Fine." He sat back as well and put his reports down. "What'd you have in mind? And no drinking games."

"Tu Préfères." They both turned to her, and she hesitated. "I don't know the English name, if you have this game. Um, it's a game of choices. You give someone two options, and they have to choose between them."

Both of them smiled, Nixon actually grinning. He nodded. "Would you Rather."

"Would you rather," Alice said slowly. "That's a good name."

"Ok, I'll start," Nixon said. He took a cup of now cold coffee from the table. "Dick, would you rather swim across the Rhine, or manage the whole Division?"

At the same moment that Alice snorted into her drink, Dick just sighed. "Are there Germans on the Rhine?"

"Hm, not if you're careful."

"I'll take the swim," he muttered.

They traded questions for a while, all of them fairly harmless. But eventually Dick saw that they'd never be getting back to work. Leaving them to sleep, convinced they'd be at it for much longer than he intended, Dick just said goodnight quietly. This left Nixon and Alice.

They sat opposite each other. With Dick gone, Alice dragged his chair over so she had a footrest as well. One oil lamp lit the tent structure, poorly at that, but she didn't mind. With Dick gone, it was Nixon's turn. Alice closed her eyes.

"Ok. Would you rather live in Paris or Hamburg after the war."

She gave a tiny sigh. Once she'd opened her eyes, she shrugged. "I don't know. I would love to return to Germany. I spent 14 years there."

"So Hamburg?"

"Fine, I'll go with Hamburg. But I think I'd prefer the country." She paused, thinking up her question. "Alright, Nix. Would you rather never smoke again, or never be able to drink Vat 69?"

"What an awful question," he muttered. "Never smoke." It took him several moments to come up with his next question. He leaned back again. "Would you rather go back and never join the paratroopers, or keep things as they are?"

The effect was instantaneous. She straightened in her seat. Alice's arms crossed over her chest in some form of self protection or comfort. But she didn't refuse to answer. Instead she just considered her choices in silence.

"I think," she began, "I think that I would stay here. I've made too many friendships here, too many bonds with the people in Easy, to throw that away. Everyone from Toccoa," she added. "All of you, I couldn't throw that away."

It took a moment for her to glance back over at him. When she did, she could see him thinking. Usually it made her smile, the fact that she could practically see the wheels turning inside his brain. They'd made Nix the S-2 for a reason. And even if he was able to mask it, balance it with jokes and alcohol, he was far from stupid. In fact, she thought he was sometimes a bit too observant.

"My turn," she said. Alice leaned forward, taking her legs off the seat across from her. If he wanted to play this game, the game within the game, she could too. If he wanted to use this to pick her brain, then she'd have just as much fun. "Would you rather be from a family with no name and no money, but have no expectations placed on you? Or, be a Nixon."

The moment he heard the question, Alice watched him release a breath. Next came the drink of Vat 69 that she'd also been expecting. The silence, however, came as a surprise. She'd anticipated some sort of biting remark between hearing the question and forming an answer. Instead she was met with silence.

"It'd be a lot harder to find endless Vat 69 if I wasn't a Nixon," he pointed out with a smirk. 

His cheeky wink did nothing to fool her, but Alice said nothing more as he downed a large drink. After another moment of watching him, she just yawned. Her watch read almost midnight. With a brief stretch, she pushed in her chairs. "I better go sleep."

"Right. Don't let the frostbite bite," he said.

Alice laughed under her breath. Leaving him to his musings, she slipped out of the tent and strolled through the CP. She passed two corporals on their way to somewhere. They chatted quietly. Soon enough she stood before her foxhole. After slipping beneath the tarp, she yawned again. The cold air irritated her lungs and she suppressed a few coughs into her blanket. Finally, with thoughts of home in her mind, she drifted off to sleep.