WHAT WELL-MEANT DID

They've found the concentration camp. It's the most horrific thing Nixon has ever seen, but he's got a job to do even as alcohol flows through his veins and anger towards Sveta and the whole damn war distracts him. The chapter is from Nixon's perspective as he reports to the nearby women's camp, a mirror image to the one that Easy Company was still reeling from discovering.

As Nixon wanders through the camp, he sees the golden stars on the chests of the Jewish prisoners. It shocks him to his core, even though he, as an intelligence officer, had more idea of the Holocaust than the average soldier. He comes across seven women with infants in their arms huddled together, accepting blankets and food from Americans. Its too much for him, and he leaves. Just as he turns to get in his jeep, a soldier flags him down. Suspended between himself and another soldier is a dirty, exhausted blonde haired woman. He realizes its Zhanna between their arms. Hatred fills his veins, both at himself for taking her on the failed mission and Sveta for her angry words.

...nowhere again...

She had forgotten what it felt like to be warm. Zhanna's body was in a constant state of numbness, submerged in a river of ice, though her feet were on dry land. She was frozen, her heart dully beating, but it didn't really matter.

Pulled from the wreckage and the smoking ruins, Zhanna's feet had failed her before she made it out of the gate. Nixon and Winters shored her between them, holding her gingerly like she would shatter if mishandled. Her breath rattling in her chest, she might have. She was only made of ice after all. Zhanna could still walk, still move, though dimly. Anything to part ways with this cursed ground.

They lifted her into the jeep and wrapped her in a wool blanket that was too tight, much too tight. Didn't they know she was made of ice? She didn't pay attention to where they were going, she could only remember where she had been. Where she had been and who she had followed.

To Stalingrad. To Smolensk. To America. To England. To France and Holland.

Zhanna had followed her everywhere. Zhanna had followed her and she had followed orders but she had forgotten to follow her instinct. Her instinct had led her to the wrong plane, the wrong jump zone, and the wrong place. Or maybe it wasn't the wrong place? Maybe Zhanna's place was with her people, the race and the countryman that she had too long run from?

With prayers lifted at night when no one could find the strength to lift their heads, Zhanna had thought that she had finally fought enough. That this was where her debts would be paid in full. She had told herself she would fight until she was dead. Maybe Zhanna had taken her final breath long ago and she hadn't stopped running long enough to realize it.

She caught a glimpse of herself in this rearview mirror, a wraith of a girl. Hair cut close to her head in downy tufts, eyes sunken deep in her head. She looked young but her face had an age that Zhanna didn't know had fallen upon her. How many days had passed since she had jumped from that plane? How many years had it been? When had she stopped breathing, when had her heart stopped beating, and when had she ignored it and kept pushing?

Winters was pressed too close on her left and Nixon trembled to her right, threatening to crumble her into dust. Their relief on their faces was too much, too warm, too much of everything after the darkness she had been in.

The sun was too warm, she was going to melt. Their closeness, their skin, was too much. She would surely break.

Zhanna was just a little girl, made of ice, who hadn't listened to her mother or father. She had trusted too quickly. She had devoted herself too fully. Zhanna had followed orders. She had kept herself safe and Sveta too. She hadn't realized that she was sheltering her own enemy.

She had followed orders until she couldn't. She had remained loyal until she couldn't. She had paid her debt until she couldn't any longer. Three weeks in that place. In that hell. Or was it three years?

She didn't care about her debt any longer. Zhanna didn't owe her life any longer. How could she? She was dead.

"Easy," Dick said, as he lifted her from the jeep. She had shuddered at the touch, the ghosts of hands tracing her arms and body before she had turned to ice. Zhanna leaned on his arm, trying not to tremble at the contact but succeeded to make it into the house that Battalion Command had taken up post in.

It looked like the Samsonov home. Dark, rich, and red. She paused in the hall, barely hearing a word that was said, as memories washed over her, like boiling hot water. Zhanna had been fourteen years old when she crossed the threshold of the Samsonov family. Poor, malnourished, and Polish. Not much had changed in the seven years since. Only the reminder of the eyes and hands that had finally caught up to her etched deep into her arm.

Her eyes had never been as dark as the men from the shadows. The anger and the hunger that had been in the NKVD agents eyes. Zhanna saw it in the camp guards too. She saw Sveta in their eyes.

"Captain Samsonova was very happy to hear of your liberation," Winters said. His voice was dim in her ears but Sveta's was loud, though only in memory.

"Your family could never have taken you."

Zhanna nodded. Sveta had never looked at her with that visage of Samsonov power before. Before that moment, that is. Eyes red. Cheeks red. Zhanna's clenched fists, a dark blue.

"They left because of you..."

Polish. Jewish. She had thought hiding it would have been enough. Though the necklace was gone, Zhanna felt it tighten around her throat. The tattoo on her arm burned with an icy flame.

"You were too weak."

"Do you want us to find her?" Nixon asked.

"That's why you need the Americans. You rely on them."

Zhanna pushed herself off of Dick's arm, standing on her own two feet. Her threadbare socks and worn shoes sunk deep into the plush carpet. She had been standing in this entrance hall for several minutes too long but her legs couldn't move and she couldn't take a step without assistance.

But she couldn't lean on anyone. That was reliance.

"Find her?" Zhanna repeated, breathlessly. Her blue lips were chapped and the frost crackled as she moved them for the first time in weeks. She wasn't fully dead then, just frozen. Just frozen.

"No," She said, quickly. Her brain was iced over, a lake in the dead of winter and Nixon had just thrown a stone into its center. Slowly, she began to crack. Slowly, she began to understand.

Find Svetlana. No. No, she didn't want to find her. Zhanna didn't want Svetlana to find her. She didn't want to be seen. If she could find a shadow to hide in, a safe place to crawl back to that would be enough. She had protected too much, trusted too fully, and given up so much for a shadow that had turned on her, twisting around to drive a knife of recognized fears and weaponized words into her back.

"No, no," She shook her head. Turning to Dick, she didn't care if she looked weak. "No, I don't want to-"

"Zhanna!" Head snapped to the top of the stairs, her vertebrae cracking in the sudden movement.

Brown eyes swimming with tears. She was crying. Zhanna didn't know she could cry. She looked so in place here, this copy of her home. Of course she did. Those eyes knew the Samsonov home. They knew this town. They knew her.

Svetlana ran down the stairs, tears flying down her cheeks, as she stumbled over herself in Russian. "Zhanna, oh my god, I was so worried about you. Zhanna, I was scared…"

Scared. Svetlana Samsonova had never known fear. She only knew how to inflict fear. She could inflict fear with only those eyes. Those eyes. The three weeks of hell were reflected in those eyes.

Svetlana lunged for her, arms open wide. Like an enemy. Like an embrace. Like she loved her.

No.

Zhanna took a step back, her legs giving out in her haste. Arms encircled her, lifting her up but not enclosing her. They didn't hold her back, they lifted her up. They were the closest feeling Zhanna had to home in seven years, all open doors, waiting warmth, and soft holds. She could have sobbed in relief but that was weakness and Zhanna wasn't weak. She dug her nails into Winters's collar, pulling herself upright and closer, begging him.

"I need to go. Dick, prosić…..please…."

Please. She couldn't look at her when all she saw was horror and death in those eyes.

Please. Her family had died because of the Samsonovs and their friend, Stalin.

Please. Zhanna couldn't shatter in front of her. Because that was a weakness.

He just nodded. Her body gave way in relief and she could have been anywhere in the world but in Germany, in that moment. Sky-high with a parachute strapped on her back, ready to fly like a bird. Knee-deep in snow, losing friends and family but knowing who she trusted and who she didn't.

She was lifted up, up, up, leaving behind the startled cries and confusion of Samsonov as Dick carried her out of the entrance hall. Ceilings and doorframes flitted past, her head lolling against his shoulder as he carried her into a back room that would have been a drawing room if not for the army. It was an office. His, it seemed.

He set her on the sofa, easily, where she curled up on her side, the thick wool blanket still wrapped tight around her. Curled up like a child after a nightmare.

Desk. Friend. Cabinet. Window. Door.

Breaths came in gasps, threatening to crack her icy lungs. Stammered words of refusal, fear, and disgust were falling from her lips like fresh snow but she couldn't keep them in check. She had never spoken so freely, finally recognizing what she wanted and who she didn't.

"She won't come in here." Dick said.

Zhanna let a shudder run through her body, her thin arms and legs trembling at the thought of being near her. Being near them. They shared the eyes. Eyes that had surely been watching her every move. Eyes that were nothing if not calculating. Zhanna blinked rapidly, shedding the scales of frost that had coated her eyes, blurring the lies that she had told herself. She had been foolish, blind maybe, but not weak.

Her eyes shut tight, for a second more, trying to avoid the pieces of memories, young and old, but the stench that seemed to rise from her was too much, pulling her right back down among the alleys. Fear, sweat, and hopelessness. Brown like her eyes, brown like the wood of her bunk, brown like the poison-soaked rifle that Zhanna thought she had earned.

Zhanna had to open her eyes again and when she did, there was no brown staring back at her. Only a pale blue. Like ice.

"I….I lost my rifle," Zhanna muttered, sheepishly. Winters wouldn't want to keep her around when she couldn't even be useful. She had been useful when she was a sniper, with her thirty kills branded on her forehead. That's why he had been so kind to her, that's why she had been welcomed to readily. She was a sniper. She was useful. What use was she if she didn't have a gun?

A little voice inside her whispered. "You are only a sniper because of Sve-"

Zhanna balled her fists, the calluses and cuts from over the years proof that she had earned that title. She had earned that gun. But she didn't have it anymore. She couldn't deny that.

"Don't worry about that," He soothed, pulling up a chair to sit beside her place on the sofa. His red hair and blue eyes were nothing like the brown she had come to look for in a crowd. He looked nothing like her.

"Nix has it," Dick said. "He saved it for you."

Nixon had been Svetlana's enemy and Zhanna had taken it upon herself to make him her own enemy too.

"I...I don't have much left," She admitted. She didn't have a family, her journal, or the only friend she had ever known. She didn't have her ally and she didn't have a hand to grasp. Zhanna had always been poor but she always had something.

"You are lucky," DIck said.

You make your own luck, Zhanna.

"I don't believe in luck," she said. There wasn't luck, there was power which lends itself to opportunity.

"Neither do I," Dick said. "But I think you are the exception."

There was no deliberation, there was no moment of hesitation. She reached for his hand, calloused and rough, dwarfing her own. She reached for it and found that it was already reaching for her.

He was warmer than the sun, brighter than the light streaming in from the windows. She shuddered but it wasn't in fear. Her shoulders relaxed and she leaned back against the pillows, clutching the hand tightly with both of her own.

They didn't withdraw the gesture when Nixon's footsteps echoed down the hall and Zhanna's uncertain eyes focused on him. He looked broken, with mussed hair and shadowed eyes.

"Hey," He said.

Zhanna's cracked lips split apart in a smile.

"I guess you are stuck with me again," she said, trying to forget about the woman in the entry hall or the ties she may have had once. Zhanna wasn't weak. She wasn't lucky, either. She was just a Polyakov.

"Yeah, I guess so," Nixon's eyes wandered to their joined hands but didn't comment. "Sink wants Zhanna moved to the med tent. She needs to be quarantined and given proper care."

"Of course," Dick said.

"I'll check to see if the coast is clear," Nixon said, moving towards the door again. He paused, his hand resting on the doorframe.

Zhanna looked down at her still trembling hands clasped firmly around Winters's. She would have to let go but she wasn't sure she wanted to do that yet. It had been so subtle, she hadn't noticed the slowly loosening joints in her body.

Dick stood, their hands pulling away. "I need to speak with Sink," He muttered.

Zhanna nodded. He brushed past Nixon, who still lingered by the door.

"You know," Nixon said. "Dick was right."

"About?" Zhanna asked.

"You."