Author's note:
Apologies for the delay. Some writers block on this one. Full-time job and all. There's more explicit racism in this one, as Natalia encounters some Germans. Depiction=/=endorsement, but you all know that, this is a CNC forum after all. I figured I owed you the warning anyways.
The Long Winter
With the parasite gone and a scheme to snare Heinrich, I could put all that had happened to me into some rational context.
But when I was stuck with the men he'd let have me, my breath caught in my throat. Often I found tears leaking from my eyes on the march, more than the biting wind called for. The bruises on my wrists and thighs faded only slowly.
In the long nights of our journey back to our part of the war, I quivered with fear. When I slept my dreams were of pain, or humiliation so physically intense and degrading that I woke often with my own fingers inside me, and shame and grief so thick in my throat I could've choked. Nights like that, I had to finish, only then would the torment leave me, as nausea passes after vomiting.
Worse were the nights where I dreamed, but the dreams were of darkness; when I woke my heart pounded, but my body was dry and taut and felt far from me, like I was down in the depths of a hard despair and nothing would ever relieve it, not the rising sun or the roaring cannon, only the final, silent sleep.
On we marched, through the ice fields of silent, desolate armies and over the graves of thousands, through villages where chimneys stood out of the blackened ruin like tombstones, and where the grief stricken peasants had frozen upright after they watched the Germans at their work. This was the worst of the war to bear, this hopeless ruin under the bright winter sun. The whole span from the Arctic shore to the sea of Azov was given over to the Kingdom of Death. And here the Christian prophecy ruled, and the horsemen of it rode unleashed within the hearts of men, and the reveille trumpets heralded suns of no warmth, and moons the color of blood.
Both armies were utterly exhausted before Moscow by then and could scarcely maintain coherent patrols of their rear echelons, so we moved easily. The Germans compensated for this with ruthless massacre and punishing raids, against companies when they could find them, villages when they could not, so that it was the worst season yet to be a Partisan.
All through our journey I felt a tension building in me. Consciously, I knew it was a want of sex, the way you understand from a train timetable that the locomotive will cross such an embankment at such an hour.
I felt empty.
Sometimes, when talking to Lev, this emptiness nearly overcame me and I wanted to beg him to fuck me.
Though he held me in his arms as we slept, it was not the platonic embrace of brother soldiers, nor a lover's touch, but some deeper intimacy of broken things, as after a blast the glass of the window and the champagne flute lay entwined in the rubble.
Then we reached the woodlands and our brothers.
I'd never been so happy to see Vladimir. It'd been nearly a month since we set out, a week to get to Moscow, a week and a half there, a week and change back. But we had the radio.
He looked changed, thinner and gaunt. Kiril was similarly wasted. A third of the men had died or vanished. Victory curdled into a war of attrition.
I went to Vladimir that night. The unit was deep in the woods, back in dugouts and huts. He was drunk.
When I saw him, my stomach fluttered. I wanted him. I needed his body, the weight of him, the smell of him. My muscles and my bones ached for such pressure. I could never be still again until a man had taken me.
I later encountered others who developed a similar fever after severe rape, a psychological reversal of pain by the embrace of it. Even at the moment I knew how strange it was. Shame and disbelief tinged the want, made it more desperate, more heedless.
"You've been fucking the Prussian," Vladimir said.
"It was part of the deal," I said. "Not that I want him. He hurts me."
He snorted. Then he rose from the low bunk where he lay with his liquor and slapped me.
"You like it when he hurts you, don't you."
"No," I said. He struck me again, harder; I staggered. Then I shoved him. Vladimir stumbled and fell back on his cot.
"You stupid dog," I said. "Wandering around in the wilderness with no master, taking it out on whoever will bear it because they're weak."
"Stuck up bitch," he said from down there. "Komsomol whore."
"If you didn't want him to," I said. "You should've forbidden it."
"He does what he wants."
"Oh I know." I loomed over him. He reached up to grab my wrist. I shook his hand loose. He looked pitiful then, and I thought about leaving his dugout, seeking out Kiril or Heinrich or Lev, or one of the men who'd raped me on the road to Moscow, thought about drinking everything I could and stripping naked in the snow. Anger rose in me, hot as a magnesium flare. I hit him. "You fucking coward."
I landed a couple good punches before he had my wrists. I countered the grip and jerked him from the bed, marveling at my strength. I kicked Vladimir in the belly and he sagged away.
"He fed me to the men," I said. "They all raped me. But I lived and came back to you. And all you can do is wallow."
"He what?"
"He let four of the men take me," I said.
There was a hard edge to his voice when he spoke next. "Four?"
"All save Lev."
Vladimir rose, crossed to me. His physicality was different now, he had a stake in this beyond desultory resentment.
"And I won't fuck you anymore," I said. "Not if you're going to cum inside me."
"Who do you think you are?" He said. "You bourgeois slut."
Then he grabbed my right wrist with one hand and my throat with the other and shoved me to the wall, using his elbow to pin my left shoulder in place so I couldn't strike him.
"You don't get to decide who fucks you," Vladimir said.
"Neither does Heinrich," I said. This gave him some pause. He pressed on my throat until I couldn't speak. My eyes watered. But I was getting wet.
"He was always a lying bastard," Vladimir said. I nodded against the pressure of his hand, and he eased it. I breathed heavy, half-choked.
"Like you're any different."
He threw me across the room. His strength had returned. I stumbled and slammed into his cot, and cried out.
He crossed to me, struck me again before I could get my guard up. He forced me back onto the rough blankets and pulled on my belt so hard the worn leather snapped loose from the buckle. He pulled it free from the loops and pulled my trousers down.
"Tell me how it was," he said, his stubbled face close to mine.
Control had passed between us several times, whipsawing with whoever had the physical initiative. It was more than I'd gotten previous times, an affirmation that I had some strength, some capacity to choose. My breath was ragged, my body afire with want and hate.
"Natasha." He slid his hand into my underwear. I parted my legs for him, moaned soft at his familiar touch. "Tell me what they did to you."
I shook my head. It was too humiliating to confess it here, wet, burning and ready for him. The memory was ice in my veins. My eyes welled a bit as I thought of the pain and confusion I'd felt the next morning, how hard I'd fought, how the liquor made my head reel, how they'd fucked me each twice, and left my thighs and cunt slick with their cum.
I couldn't cum thinking of that.
But he slid his fingers into me, folding them up to reach the spot inside me that made me gasp. And there it was.
"Tell me," he commanded. I said nothing. He withdrew his fingers, half stood. I sat partway up, confused by his behavior. He was illegible.
Then I saw the broken belt in his hand.
Next I heard the whistle and the leather struck me across the face and I slid sideways, breath frozen for a heartbeat, my face paralyzed with the cold sting that follows broken skin. Damn him, damn him. I shielded my head with my hands as he struck me again, the belt leaving stinging trails on my hands and forearms. I buried my face in the blankets.
He whipped my exposed ass then.
