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therealslimshakespeare · 2 days ago

Text

|| Strip Search

Summary: having been tipped off by some inner informant, one of the German officer’s attempts an inspection while the women are at their showers- an altercation ensues.

Warnings 18+ contains mild spoilers: despite the title no such search actually happens, however there’s also an array of other hard things in here. Such as, reference to past rape and medical experimentation, brief suicidal ideation, unwanted pregnancy, violence, threat of strip search, death of a guard dog.

Thank y’all for your patience while I worked at this, it’s got a lot more action than I’m usually comfy with so it grew me, hope it is also enjoyable for you. 🥰 and to miss Christi who helped me overcome my writers block

Edited by my exhausted little eyes, have mercy and lemme know if changes are needed

Circa: Feb 1944, previous fic

Maureen is pleased with how faded the bruises are as they wash. It’s late February, water is frigid, there’s no towels still and yet they finally have showers.

For some it took months for their bruises to fade and Maureen took morbid, officerly interest in their progress. For herself the cuts on her own hips look like jagged white bolts of lightning, harmless tokens of a past no longer of consequence, her hands are marred, mildly misshapen with sickening little pits where there should be nails. But they work.

Gale’s twin cuts on his cheeks have turned purple and remain. He had finally told Maureen of them, how they came to be, a week after Benny already had. One for flak, one for honor. He had kissed her after, as if testing whether she’d want him still. His cuts remain and so do the long winter nights she fights not to panic in, but the want remains, for both of them. It is oddly strong in this tired place.

Lu’s face looks smudged most days but it’s the dusky circles under her tired young eyes and nothing more, nothing fresh, her jaw a clean slate once more. Her breast is jagged and lumpy when she runs the soap over it but no longer hot to touch. The Mercury salve that Maureen forced on her day after day must have done its job. It glittered when they did it under a bulb, Maureen and told her to think of it as war paint, silver on bronze, Lu had broken her first grin in weeks and never fought it again. Even mentioned it when Maureen hadn’t gotten to it that day. It’s jagged but it’s not infected.

One of the sergeants has a swastika cut into her hip, she tried hiding it at first but Maureen has watched during showers as it faded from vibrant crimson to a dull, resigned lavender. Just like Gale’s cheeks. Just like everything in this camp, it’s grown tired and worn and pale.

Except for Ida’s child. Maureen is sure her Colonel’s ruse has not worked, skulking in the corner of showers, always wearing her coat, never mentioning the pains and the hunger and the vomiting -Maureen is pretty sure most of the other women know; they simply don’t speak of it. Smith knows; sweet Lu gives Maureen looks as if asking her to help Ida somehow, as does Gale. Bucky and Brady look at her like she’s a threat. Maureen was once hopeful, then she went mad, now she’s tired. Not even the cold showers hold the capacity to make her feel sorry for herself any longer. She’s too tired for that.

No, instead she watches the bruises, she watches Ida and guards her with her own pale, wane and goose-pimpled body. One little barrier of flesh between their officer and the rest. It’s futile and Maureen finds herself sickly fascinated by watching Ida’s form do anything but shrink in this dismal place. Week after week, same shivering soaking in this damp and gritty shower room but the change is always spectacular.

Miraculous. Sickening.

Ida’s hipbones stick out as always, her hips as lean as a boy’s, but her once meager chest is now swollen into plush handfuls that any starlet might be proud of, the effect is ruined by the caved in hunger of her pronounced sternum.

This, her officer, has grown grotesque.

It did not hit Maureen quite so hard before. She had been scared and aggravated and jealous just as Ida’s symptoms had been vague and nebulous. Looking at the terrifying gnarled dome of Ida’s abdomen, Maureen finds herself sickened by a very sudden rush of reality. It is her own worst fear, to be forced to carry a child made in such evil, to have some entity take up residence inside oneself and leach all vitality and strength from her. For one’s own body, one’s shell to be a threat without any consent from that very being. Today Ida looks unmistakably with child, it is not the bloat of hunger or the curves of a more endowed woman, she is emaciated and yet she is enlarged.

And Maureen knows the thing is not swimming dead in there, Bucky Egan lays his hands on that distended stomach nightly and coos in the privacy of the bunkroom about kicks and flutters as if it were a thing to be celebrated. As if he were its father, as if Ida wants it at all, as if it won’t be shot along with its mother as soon as it’s discovered. Or given to the dogs.

Maureen feels her chest squeezing close to unbearable, it’s not a hard thing to do when so very cold. Blood clots form, hearts enlarge. She finds cold discourages nausea. Nothing like a cold pack to the belly on a hot day, a bottle of bubbly pulled straight from the ice pail and held to the throat. Her stomach is settled, her heart constricts.

They have plans, her friends, both the ones who call it a child and the ones who call it “the current most pressing issue.” They have radios thanks to Smith and Gale and maps and provisions. Fritz the guard, by Maureen's own daring and cajoling, has proven an utter subvert, they have papers forged by the Poles and stamped by Fritz. They look legitimate, they look official, they make out Bucky and Ida to be a farmer and his wife. The time to dare is any day now, and Maureen knows it’s not a moment too soon for Bucky’s mental stability, for Fritz’s job security and for Ida’s likely travail.

Maureen is glad of it, she is glad to have aided it in a small way. She’s sick all the same, since it is all so futile. She is late to help and she is sorry for it, but her mind is unchanged.

At night she dreams of Sergeant Forsyth bleeding out on the cement of the prison floor, mauled to death by the dogs, just out of reach of her friends behind bars; every night Maureen dreams of Forsyth and she dreams of Lu’s torn breast and every night the memory mangles itself into imagination until it is of this child.

A Brady. A German. A child. The current most pressing issue. Torn to pieces. Why waste a bullet.

And still, Maureen cannot bear to think of Ida having to push out the child of one of those men. Not even safe and remote in the Polish woods somewhere with Bucky Egan happily receiving the spawn from between her legs.

Those men and their cruelty will haunt her even then. Maureen used to be jealous of the woman, angry at her recommended demotion from pilot to bombardier, grateful she was not so stubborn or so sober herself. Nothing in the world could make her jealous of Ida Brady now, not when looking at the still mottled skin, marred and scarred by the very hands that made that thing, that grotesque belly.

Ida had gotten into a fight earlier in the week. Maureen wondered and Brady accused her of purposefully trying to harm herself. For all her offers of willingness to help, to abort, to erase, Maureen had no real concept of how to execute them even if accepted. She had not been in the end, and her relief was as strong as her worry. And now Ida had turned to this.

“It’s a life and it’s mine.” Ida had told her, and somewhere along the way Maureen had forgotten the woman might think that, and loath it all the same. When someone jumps off a bridge, warms the bath and slits their wrists, writes a note and closes the garage, they don’t deny it’s life. That the life is theirs. They just can’t bear it anymore.

Looking at Ida, freshly bruised and with a belly so taut the outline of her child’s positioning is in stark relief, Maureen can now so easily imagine her unable to take it. It is grotesque, it is Maureen’s worst nightmare, it is hard to look at it or acknowledge but here it is, large and real and possibly will be gone soon. And Ida is having to bear it.

Maureen wonders if she’ll ever even see her colonel again. Bucky either. Or if they’ll show up in the states when it’s all over with a blonde little girl in tow. Bucky insists it’s a girl -John Brady looks at him with utter grief each time.

Ida says nothing those times. She has come to say less and less. She still speaks to Smith when needed, she will tell Bucky to not be rash, she huddles with her brother and they make each other snicker but there are no other words she finds or uses these days unless it is to ask Maureen her worthless opinion.

Otherwise, Ida Brady has gone quiet.

Except for when she sings. Softly and always a little sad lullaby of a song, folksy and homesick. It makes many of the boys fall asleep. It makes Maureen cry with a pillow smothered over her face and Gale’s hands squeezing her forearm comfortingly. It brings Jack and Bucky’s lungs out of disuse to make a harmony. Crank sometimes, too. It’s the saddest thing in all the world.

“If you miss the train I'm on

You will know that I am gone

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

A hundred miles, a hundred miles

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

Lord, I'm one, Lord, I'm two

Lord, I'm three, Lord, I'm four

Lord, I'm five hundred miles from my home

Not a shirt on my back

Not a penny to my name

Lord, I can't go a-home this a-way

This a-way, this a-way

Lord, I can't go a-home this a-way”

“When are you going to try for it?” Maureen asks her now, hushed voice still echoing loudly in the tiled place, poor water pressure hardly making a splash amongst the line of showers. She should wait to ask in privacy, to respect the delicacy of the escape plans, but she cannot bear this quiet or the gingerly tolerance that has grown up between them lately.

“When the full moon wanes.” Ida answers, only her eyes flick up, wary but searching and she instantly adds. “I wish you could come.”

There were not enough papers or chances. Gale is staying, too. Maureen is less happy with that assurance than she was a month ago. She wants Gale out now. She was mad then at his risks, she is scared now at his resignation. She wants them all out before they die here.

“I want all of you out.” Ida’s voice says it at the same moment, it cracks but not from emotion, she sounds ill. Most of them have some sort of congestion from the cold.

The woman hates being the center of so much risk and expense of life, hates being a jeopardy that requires so much sacrifice when she is the officer, the ranking one who should be last to leave the ship. Maureen thought she’d find that more validating, instead her chest hurts and she will, perhaps, be missing her friend soon. Mourning her, grieving even.

Maureen decides to say what she wanted to say when she thought they were going to die, lined up in the muddy square of Ravensbruck, before survival, religion and bellies, the ever increasing madness of forced proximity along with resurfaced memories and dotted amnesia all drove Maureen to become ugly and bitter. “You’re a rock.” she mumbles the compliment to her colonel as she splashes her armpit free of the burning lye.

“I want you all out.” Ida repeats so guiltily Maureen has to harden her heart not to grow worse than tired and become snappish, it hurts so very much. She was going to be better, she promised Benny that. She thinks of his lies, how good he is with the nice ones.

“We’ll get out. Just you wait and see.” she says, they both know it’s lies, they both know Ida and Bucky will likely be shot a few yards out the gate, and no one will follow, “And your brother’ll be the first one I haul out by the scruff of the neck. Trust me.”

“You’ll look after him, won’t you.” Ida asks but it’s not a question; it’s a compliment even if she knows they won’t get out, she knows Maureen cannot prevent what happens to him anymore than Ida herself has been able to, “You always were so brave that way.”

Brazen. Crude. Liberal. Those are qualities Maureen did not anticipate being called upon for triaging hurt men. Boys that she liked, respected even, boys she wanted safe and not even aware of such cruelty. Jack’s bruises do not fade with the others, they start small but grow ugly and larger day after day along his forearms, needle holes festered and lips gone violet. He won’t let Maureen check anywhere further, she wonders if he’s let Ida.

“You know I will.” Maureen swears, because she will try, “Buck said the Kommandant was inclined to intervene.” she adds hopefully and all it does is send the most wretched look across Ida’s face. Lateness in these cases is too late, Maureen would know, she thinks of her own brother, his innocence and his spark and a little late was too late to really matter.

“It’ll be better when I’m out.” Ida rehearses to herself. She sounds so much like Jack in these moments it makes Maureen’s skin crawl. “He’s doing so much of this so we can -can have supplies.”

To escape, to live in the wilderness, to raise a child on the edge of the world.

Maureen comes alongside her, wondering what she’d have liked someone to say to her the day she found she had to protect her brother from her uncle, from her priest, and even her father in some small way. When she found out and yet couldn’t ever seem to manage it like she wanted, she had cursed her mother then, for being gone and she kept on cursing her and the specter of her in every woman since, stranded ever since with the guilt that gnawed where a beating heart should be. “You’ll make good on his trust, Colonel.” she squeezed Ida’s hardened bicep under the spray, an arresting comfort, because Jack was different from Lance and he wasn’t a kid and he wasn’t Maureen’s to fuck up, “You’ll get out of here and we’ll close ranks and he’ll be fine. He’ll make it, too.”

“You been playin’ poker with Smith again?” Ida turns her face to her, hair grown out just long enough to cut across her forehead and temples in ink-like slashes, “You’re getting awful good at bluffing.”

Maureen grins back, “Always was sir, just lost it for a bit.”

Ida regarded her for a minute with a half endeared look Maureen realized with a jolt she had not seen since Thorpe Abbots, not directed at her at least.

“Sorry about your cheeks.” Ida muttered, almost bashful.

Maureen’s hands flew up to her cheekbones out of instinct, the bruises from the book long gone and the incident left behind over a month ago. It was like Ida to let things bother her months later; when Maureen tried imitating her in that exercise she found herself utterly exhausted. “Even, like that,” she nodded to Ida’s swollen belly, “you hit harder than the gestapo.”

Seemed like a good thing to say, the way the remorse left Ida’s face and a wry look of pride warped her lips briefly. She looks painfully like her brother with her swan neck strained in the cold and the chopped length of her hair flopping into her eyes.

“You should let me trim up your hair before you go.” Maureen realized, her hand gingerly darting out to rake the hacked off locks back from her eyes, only to hesitate at the last minute in unsurety if the familiarity was welcome anymore.

Ida simply leans her forehead into Maureen’s palm and the world settles alright and forgiven in her chest: trust.

“Make it one of those chic little cuts?” Ida suggested.

“Chicest farmer’s wife this side of the rhine.” Maureen agreed, “You’ll have everyone wondering why you settled for that oaf, Egan.”

There was the saddest flash of mirth on her face for a brief instant. “Tell me straight then-“ Ida began with a crease to her brow that promised a talk about logistics, but just then a commotion outside drew their attention.

It was not uncommon for whoever was guarding the door to have a spirited bit of chirping with any hapless passersby, sometimes an argument over shower times with some batch of men who didn’t care about giving the women privacy, or worse, a full on altercation over the same. There were no locks on the inside of the drafty room, making the boys’ guarding presence essential, and so far, always effective. It was Crank and Demarco on duty today, and Maureen strained to hear their words as their voices rose outside, more than typical.

“You finish, I'll go look.” Maureen muttered, patting Ida’s arm and going to dress as her paltry shower was in fact complete.

She was shrugging on her sweater, great coat in hand, when she pressed her eye to the slat, a gust of northwestern wind and the sight of guards on the steps giving her a shock. Benny wasn’t letting them by, and that was the only reason they weren’t in here already, and that reason could be put aside with a shove or a bullet. She sees one of the krout officers reach for his sidearm as he goes up the first step, toe to toe with Crank on the second, and that was all Kendeigh needed to swivel round and yell at her girls to dress. She can see their miffed and startled faces, too morosely caught up in their cleanliness to even notice the impending danger. Most of them are stark naked, except for the few who are trying to use the few flight suits left as towels. Ida doesn’t even turn off her tap, she charges towards the hooks on the opposite wall and Maureen realizes the farce is quite over, every single girl here has seen that belly now.

She puts her eye back to the gap in the slats. Crank is closer than last time, his sleeve almost by her eye on the other side of the wall, she guesses he’s trying to hold onto the door handle. Benny is in an officer’s face, baiting death. It’s not a situation that will last peaceably for many more seconds. There’s side arms out, a dog straining at the leash.

Maureen feels a rustling by her side and she could have guessed who it was before an accented voice mutters beside her, “How’re we going to secure this.” Sanchez is shrugging on a coat while keenly eyeing the wooden loops this side of the door, loops usually capable of holding a board as a lock, one on each door, sliding a beam through makes it impressively strong. But like all things in this place, security is absent, there’s no beam, no pole, no nothing, the wooden rings are empty and without the presence of their securing beam they look mockingly like handles.

“Doors open in.” Maureen reminds her. It’s not an excuse, they’ll have to find a way to lock them, keep them closed, they both know that.

Crank can’t hang on when he’s been shot.

That’s a cold truth that simply settles and Maureen once again tastes the feeling of going up, of sitting in the glass nose, rocking her eye against the rim of the bombsight, bruised cheekbones from the jarring turbulence of deathly flak bursts; it's foggy, faint and nostalgic but it’s an enjoyable cocktail nonetheless, one she’s missed: bold flavors of action hitting the tongue, washed down by responsibility, afternotes of terrified vitality.

“They’re onto the belly.” Sanchez is saying, listening to the useless argument Benny is holding with a pistol pointed at his chest, buying time like only a man that brave and that smart can.

The belly, Sanchez says -it’s not a baby here. That’s what Maureen had been trying to say before. She feels like she and Sanchez might’ve been real tight in another life. As is, they're about to die together trying to keep shower doors shut a little longer so that Ida can get shot a little later.

There’s a gunshot outside. It goes through the eaves of the roof and Maureen doesn’t really think when she decides to thread her arm through the wooden rings and makes a fist. Crouched towards the room, and half starved into willowy thinness, she gets the whole limb through there, one wooden ring at her shoulder, another right above her elbow. Her back to the door. Arm as a beam. She saw a picture of a princess doing this for the royal nursery when she was a precocious child, raiding her aunt's library. It comes to her now. The impulse. It’s always fucking childhood, everything she does these days is some gut impulse from some fucking childhood memory.

Sanchez looks at her like she’s mad, then grips Maureen’s wrist with truly maniacal determination. She gets it, Maureen thinks with relief. Sanchez will hold onto Maureen’s arm when they push, and it won’t last long but it’ll be something. “It’ll snap.” Sanchez observes, staring at Maureen’s strained elbow.

She feels the first push of someone trying the door, expecting less resistance. It’s just a cursory push. Maureen braces her back and gets ready for pain. She’d handle it better if half the girls weren’t still naked and panicking.

Including Ida, who’s only managed her trousers and shirt, belly utterly obvious beneath some man’s borrowed drab. It makes Maureen froth with anger.

“No!” Is all Ida says when she notices Maureen’s bizarre configuration as human barrier, rushing at her in horror, “you let me out and I’ll give myself up.” Ida is saying and Maureen cannot believe she’s not gotten her fucking coat on yet. “I’m who they want.”

Maureen thinks she laughs. Because the idea of trading Ida for months in here without Ida is a good joke. The logic of the escape doing the same somehow doesn’t settle. Maureen’s only feeling is rage, her impending sacrifice of a good arm is likely to be in vain if her colonel doesn’t put a fucking coat on soon. Real soon. There’s a pounding on the door at her back.

They’re giving them the courtesy of knocking. Next they’ll shoot at the door. Sanchez actually looks ready to take Ida up on this stupid fucking martyrdom. Her grip loosens on Maureen’s wrists, looking relieved that she doesn’t have to serve as one half of this gruesome, human lock.

“Fucking hold on.” Maureen snaps at her, and Sanchez does, after throwing Ida Brady a look that suggests she is to blame for this and she’d happily serve her on a platter to the thugs outside. That’s about all Maureen’s fuzzy, battle primed mind needs to give her steel in her madness; they didn’t get this far, they didn’t fall apart and glue each other back together, they didn’t befriend German guards and allow German doctors to hurt their best just to roll over when they got tested. “Nobody gets searched, nobody gets handed over. We said not again.” She looks past Ida and directly at Lu Smith, who is actually visibly shaking she’s so scared, and still half naked, but her eyes look like they’re of the same mind.

That’s Maureen’s ticket, she can count on Lu wanting to die with her rather than go through it again. Rather than hand Ida over. “Smith,” he grits out, “get the colonel’s coat. All of you, the hell is wrong with you? — get your fucking coats on.”

Vaguely she can hear the German officer on the other side telling her to let them in, that he can hear them talking in here. That it’s just a customary inspection. She feels Sanchez tighten her grip on her wrist and wonders from afar how many places along her arm will break from this. If Gale will come out to see what all the commotion is about. If the Kommandant ordered this or if this is one of the guards' ideas of being a proactive subordinate.

There’s the rattle of the door behind her back. A push and mounting pressure.

Foggy, fuzzy, somewhere between waiting for it to be over and waiting for it to calm down, because being over never meant it didn’t still hurt, it will hurt just as bad for a few minutes after- Maureen learned that quickly, she learned to stay away after the pain, long enough for the tearing reality to hit less, and so she waits. She’s good at waiting for it to be over. And when it’s over she’ll feel it then, that heady rush of coming back into the body, that nerve wracking and tingly feeling of being aware again and mad as hell about it. It dulls the pain, it collects a terrible collateral of innocent bystanders, but it's better than remembering the thing itself. Until then, she waits and gets ready to float away. And if she screams it’s all lost in the gunshots and Sanchez’ yell and the commotion of everyone else who doesn’t want this to happen.

She hears the crunch, that part she can hear and she can feel others around, finally some fucking help, other girls throwing themselves at the door, pushing back, giving just a tiny bit of room for Maureen’s nerveless arm. They’re all in their overcoats, the ones piling on the door, stepping between her skidding legs, shoving their shoulders into the wood alongside Sanchez. Maureen thinks if she was really here for this, she’d be feeling pride. It’s nice to not be alone, it’s nice to have a pack, it’s nice to know she is not alone in feeling feral and discontent with this sorta of death. This is how she wanted to go in the yard in Ravensbruck when all her friends stood quietly in line and all but allowed it to happen- if that had been the plan. This time she’s not alone, there’s girls with their teeth barred and arms that are braced and solid as steel in their desperation. Dying alone isn’t just about numbers, it’s about mentality, too. It feels rather like when the fort got toasted, knowing they were done for but all of them done for together and none of them wishing otherwise. It was worth staying in a nose-diving B17 to be together rather than jump and die alone in the wide blue sky.

Maureen hears the shot.

She doesn’t know how it is but the ones that hit somehow have a peculiar ring to them, like they’ve got an invisible decibel attached that heralds their purpose. This solitary shot, amongst a load of lead thrown at them was made to strike home. Sergeant Abott, Maureen thinks it is, slumps down beside Maureen, looking unharmed due to the layers of her greatcoat, but her hand pressed to her hip tells where the damage was done. She looks more angry than pained but she doesn’t get to her feet again.

“Sweet Jesus, they've got a gun to Crank.” -Maureen doesn’t know who says it but it explains the sudden lack of agony. She tells herself not to come back yet but the curiosity nags. Cowards! -of course the German fucks would abandon an unlocked door with a bunch of girls behind it to put a gun to a stray Captain’s head.

Dimly through hazed eyesight, Maureen can see Ida speaking to Abbot who's now on the floor, they’re interrupted by Sanchez and then those two go at it, crack for crack and Ida’s rank comes out on top.

Everyone is in their coats. It’s the only comfort for Maureen when Lu Smith grabs hold of her unharmed shoulder and begins to pull her away from her death spot. “Shh, shh we’re gonna bargain it out.” Lu tells her as she tries to fight against the unwanted rescue but Sanchez has abandoned her too, Maureen’s wrist is limp and unheld, hardly attached to her when it threads back through the wooden rings, and Lu keeps ahold of it as it slinks out, boneless and revolting even to herself.

“Kendeigh, hang on.” Ida tells her through the fog that comes when reality tries to come back too soon, and Maureen wants to beg her not to do this, not to give herself up after all this.

Fuck’s sake, Brady, let some sore sucker die for you for once.

Laying on the floor, with Lu’s gentle hands holding her mangled limb together, Kendeigh feels the whipping rush of weather when the door opens, it shouldn’t feel so close to betrayal to see it thrown wide but it hits that way anyway. There’s about five guards on the step, sideways in her line of vision, and Benny is telling Murph, who must be somewhere out of sight, to “go get Cleven. Now!” Maureen’s curiosity regarding the Kommandant is relieved- he isn’t there. It’s just some rogue officer and his little minions, chomping at the bit to invade them at showers.

“What is it that you needed us so urgently?” Ida is tall enough to be toe to toe with the officer on the threshold and it takes the pressure off Crank who’s poor threatened head gets set free. “You’ve shot one of my girls.”

“You resisted inspection.” He returned.

“Because you violated agreed conduct.” Ida shot back. “We were showering.”

The man shook his head, “Others do not get immunity from random searches. Why should you?”

“Because we have been guaranteed such.” Ida was saying as Maureen drew up her legs from beneath her and made a go at kneeling, aided by Lu’s hand at her back.

Demarco had shifted closer on the steps and Maureen met his eyes, the way he clocked her injuries and searched Lu for the same, back down to Abbott who did not rally from her place on the floor. “Smith,” Maureen gritted out, “put some pressure on Abbott’s hip.”

Maureen stood up with difficulty, her entire arm a mass of throbbing flames that hung too limp and heavy from her shoulder, she staggered briefly before one of her girls righted her.

“Egan is comin’.” Benny added to the argument Ida and the officer were having. “Clarke will be right behind. Let’s all just- fucking cool it.” he suggested, pointedly at the German whose position was growing more precarious as attention gathered outside the showers.

The German chose not to cool it, with the short calculation of a very petty and none too bright man, he slipped the leash on his dog before Maureen could even blink. The vicious thing bounded in and latched onto the first overcoat it could focus on, snarling and yanking with its steel jaws, ripping the heavy wool and exposing fragile flesh beneath. Before any of them could do more than jump, Benny was on the dog, hand in his collar like the snarling thing was his own pet, his knees aimed in a devastating strike on its under ribs. The animal gave a wheezed howl from the breakage and let go of its would-be victim, jaws snapping wildly at Benny who was just out of reach.

“The hell is goin’ on?” Egan’s sudden presence in the showers and his bellowed demand shook the group. “Put that fuckin’ gun up, put it up. The hell is goin’ on here?” he addressed the German officer, who stood there with his pistol still half out of his holster and his eyes darting from Bucky’s towering form to the trapped dog beneath Benny’s knees.

He rallied, briefly as if remembering suddenly who was prisoner and who guard, “Inspection.”

“Not durin’ showers, ya don’t.” Bucky volleyed back. “Been agreed, ya little over eager beaver. Shot two of my girls over this?”

“M’not’shhhot.” Kendeigh tried to assure but it came out thick and slurred and likely lost under the noises of Benny’s exertions and the dog’s dwindling whines. The overlapping talking was cacophonous, echoing and surreal in the tiled room. The wind that had been so frigid seeping in through the gaps now poured in through the open door and froze the puddles ‘around the drains as they swirled. Maureen couldn’t feel her arm anymore, she couldn’t feel much of anything.

But Ida was still standing there, right within reach, her coat on, Bucky next to her. It would be alright.

For today.

“The doctor was given a lead-“ the officer protested.

“You obey the doctor now?” Bucky snapped back and before that line of reasoning could be continued, the sound of jackboots crunched outside and the Kommandant himself came in view, Colonel Clarke beside him, lockstep as if mutually offended by this breach of order.

Maureen watched the two German officers level back and forth, their men watching, Hans part of the newly arrived party backing up the commander. The officer’s pistol was returned fully to its holster.

“A misunderstanding.” The Kommandant assured Colonels Clarke and Brady in turn, his observant gaze taking in Abbot and Kendeigh’s bloodied hands and Benny still retraining the snarling dog. “There are rumors, our doctor is concerned. Female issues, ja? Pregnancies. I trust none of you would be so stupid?”

He looked over the women and there was, as if by joint consensus, a violent shudder passing through them in denial.

“Your government fixed you, no doubt.” The Kommandant looked satisfied with his own assurance and it made Lu shoot Maureen a hazed look of shock. “So there will be no trouble, ja?”

“We won’t strip.” Maureen croaked. “If that’s what the inspection’s about. We won’t.”

An irritated look crossed the Kommandant’s face, as if he found the subject more unsavory than truly concerning. “It will not be necessary. This was carried out without authority. Those not needing medical care may go. You-“ he pointed to her specially, “should see our doctor. Her too.” -to Abbot. “Unless you protest even that?”

It hung there, a dare and a challenge. Ida’s face blanched briefly; the doctor an ever sore subject in this place but to Bucky, who had as little awareness of the rumbling subterfuges and threats from the doctor as the cat under their shack, it seemed a perfectly plausible choice. Maureen saw him look at her with exasperated expectancy and steeled herself with his own naïveté. If she refused, it would look bad for them all. If she went, even if the doctor proved himself interested not just in catholic school boys but in used up debutants too, it would in a way be working for them- proving her to be truly infertile. Barren as the ground outside, stomach flat as a pancake. One girl searched, it was better than pushing the point, it would buy Ida time.

“I need a doctor.” she agreed with a grin, trying to flap her crushed arm for emphasis and finding she had very little motor skills left. “Abbot worse.”

“Good.” The Kommandant looked cheered now Bucky had ceased to glower with all the rage of a fury unleashed, the matter resolved with a single clap of the man’s black leather gloves, “Hans,” he addressed the boy, “put that dog down. Colonel Clarke, there will be damages to be paid.”

Maureen watched Benny turn his face away, hand shaking in the collar when Hans' tall boots stopped short of the half dead animal. A single shot ran out, the wheezing whines stopped. “C’mon Lu, it’s over.” she heard a Benny mutter to the girl as he got up with a stiff grunt, sounding like he himself wasn’t so alright either.

“Kendeigh-“. Ida muttered low, sidling up to her, hand on her unmaimed shoulder and a deep concern Maureen had only associated with Gale brimming in her eyes, “That d-“

“I need that doctor.” Maureen croaked back, assuming her meaning, “Abbot even worse,” she repeated, “who’ll you send with her? Smith? Nah, Ida, I’ll go. Fucking testicular humanoid of a surgeon doesn’t even care about us women, you know that. Be fine.”

“I was going to say,” Ida pressed on, eyes looking very steely hazel and even a little gentle under the film of what might have been tears had Maureen any surety in her own foggy observances left, “that door business? More insane than your flying that Stearman under the bridge in Boise.”

Maureen’s world fuzzed a little harder, training memories and the mellowed thrill of a dared stunt coursing diluted but present through her veins, “Oh.” she felt drunk with it. “Oh that.” she knew her face was splitting in a smile, it was a traitor like that, always when Ida was being earnest.

“Stupidest, bravest, fucking idiot.” Ida gripped her once bruised cheeks and shook her with each saying, lean musicians’ hands, hands that could pull a bomber from a nose dive, hands that had wrenched open a jammed door, “I’ll have some of that hooch for you when you get back.”

The thought of liquor and the warm relief it promised made Maureen think life half worth the living again. Poor Abbott could use some, too. Unharmed but oh so cold with her white skin and violet veins and lips of iris blue, Maureen could only think of Ida, how it might tint her cheeks if she had some. She wanted that for her. “Y’shou’d try some.”

Ida gave her a smile, sad but agreeable, like she was thinking of a longer game plan than Maureen could imagine. “Maybe I will.”

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