July 4th 1945

Berlin, Soviet-Occupied Germany

Artemis watched with a rifle slung over her shoulder as the humiliated, worn-down and pained Fascist prisoners were marched through the streets by the Americans. They forced the POWs to sing an American song, one Artemis couldn't understand. All she could understand was "hurrah, boys, hurrah!".

It irked her how they acted as though they themselves had conquered the city. Mother Russia had bled in the millions, they arrived first, yet the Americans barge in two months later and are permitted to garrison their own quarter of the capital? Where were the British and French in all this. It seemed like she had not heard anything about them since before the Motherland had even been invaded. Were the French all dead or something?

She smoked a cigarette trying to avoid her comrades. Sure, she respected a guy who served his country in war, didn't mean she had to like him. If this war had taught her anything it was that Fascism is the truest evil in the world, but some men in the Soviet Red Army were up there. Thankfully they'd never taken advantage of her, the one girl in the room. Still, they acted like cockheads, and some German newspapers she'd seen in empty homes reported her own comrades to be just as barbaric as the Fascists. Sure, she didn't particularly trust a German paper but it wasn't implausible for some of her comrades to be less desirable. She'd seen it plenty before the war, why should 3 years of gunfire change that?

"Hey." She heard a voice from beside her, obviously a male one. With a raised eyebrow she turned to look. It was late in the evening. Nowhere near midnight but quite a bit after sundown so as a lone woman in a dark city of warriors she was wary. She nodded and the guy tilted his head.

He was tall, though neither bulky nor skinny. If Artemis had to guess by his arms he had some muscle on him, just not enough to knock a man out with just a punch like some Red Army men she'd seen. "I heard you speak German?" He noted in said language, and that's when Artemis recognized him. She had seen him in the commander's tent earlier, standing straight next to the American counterpart of her general, though the Yank had a bucket hat on rather than the traditional officer's cap.

She took another drag of her cigarette. The Artemis of 1941 would never have dreamed of smoking, but three years of witnessing atrocities and killing countless Fascists made her hands shaky. She needed something to calm them and her mind. "Yeah, so I do." She replied in Deutsch.

As the Yanks marched past with the prisoners of war they'd been parading since beyond the Elbe, an American man and Soviet girl conversed in German in a defeated Berlin. The guy also pulled out a cigarette and lit it. "Cold night. Always hated Europe just for the weather." He small-talked.

Artemis nodded, not sure whether to like or trust this man. It had been thirty seconds and he hadn't made an obscene comment or advance on her, and that was genuinely more than Artemis had ever experienced from a man. "It gets much colder where I'm from. This is a tropical summer." She informed him, not an ounce of lie in her words. You never truly understood a Russian winter until you had to fight a solitary war in it three times over sitting in abandoned buildings by yourself with no warmth for hours upon hours.

He nodded, fixing his sleeve up to the elbow since it had fallen down. "If I don't know winter you don't know tropical summers. I'm Percy, by the way." He held out his hand to shake.

Sensing as though he had no intentions of assault, Artemis rarely shook his hand in greeting. "Artemis." She introduced herself.

The American took another drag. "Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm surprised at how many girl soldiers I've seen here." He commented, then immediately saw Artemis' stern face. "Okay, I can see you've taken that the wrong way. What I meant was... we heard all about you ladies in the West but... I thought it was exaggerated for, like, propaganda." He tried to rationalize it.

Artemis dropped her smoke on the floor and crushed it with her boor before taking hold of her backpack strap over her shoulder and walking in the other direction. She heard Percy curse behind her before rushing to catch up. "Wait! Wait, I phrased that the worst possible way possible. Lemme redo. Uh, good on you women for getting out there and defending your country. I admire your bravery." He said more respectfully this time.

Artemis' face was not very pleased as her angry doe eyes stared the taller guy down. Without breaking eye contact she reached down and pointed at the various medals on her chest. "You see this? Medal for the defense of my home city, Stalingrad. Medal for the liberation of Warsaw. Medal for the victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War. Medal for battle merit. And this one," She pointed to the fifth and final medal on her shirt. "You know what this one is for?"

Percy shook his head awkwardly and slightly afraid, feeling like a child being chastised.

"Medal for courage. I earned this for being executed by a German firing squad. I was shot twice in the chest and all the other women died. But I survived. I crawled my way out, fixed myself up and waited for my comrades to catch up, and while holding my ground I killed three retreating Fascists in the long grass with a rifle while starving and dehydrated. I fought for my life so no steps back were taken and I barely made it out. I don't need some Yank boy telling me how good of a soldier I am. I earned these medals, what have you done? Where's your medals?" She asked, quite peeved with him.

Percy was quiet now, quite embarrassed and awkward at how mad she had gotten at him. At the same time, he himself was quite ticked off at her comments. "I left them with my gear. I don't like to show off. But I have other medals I can't take off." He said, unbuttoning his shirt.

Artemis watched as he pulled it down slightly, revealing his upper chest. Just below his collarbone there was a long gash that stretched between each side of his neck. "Guadalcanal, 1943. I was captured and my squadron tortured by the Japs. You haven't seen brutality until you've fought those monsters. The others were executed, I was lucky. It was a recruit with a sword to my neck. He shook too much, his hand drifted and when the order came and he slit, it missed my neck. But I bled, and I fell, and thinking we were all dead they dumped us into the water. It took me hours to crawl back to friendly lines."

He then pulled up his shirt to reveal a scar along his right ribs. Artemis was right, he did have quite a bit of muscle. "Makin Atoll, same year. I never saw who did it, just heard him. They have this war cry, Banzai. It's the last thing you hear before they drop down from a tree or charge out from the grass and gut you. Next thing I woke up in the ward. Months later I was shipped to England for the Normandy landings."

For the first time in her life, Artemis felt turned on. She had finally found a man who impressed her, his scars and horror stories excited her in a way she never felt before. Always one to be defiant, Artemis looked him square in the eyes again. "Yet after millions of my comrades lost their lives thousands of kilometres into our heartland we still beat you Capitalists to Berlin by two months." She countered, trying to elevate her position.

Angry, Percy slammed his fist on the wall and stood in front of her, cornering her. Artemis felt so small in between him and the building. "I've travelled tens of thousands of miles across two seas and four continents. I helped remove Japanese occupation from half the Pacific, I helped overthrow the Fascists in Italy, we freed France and took half of Germany while you Commies lost ten million men. While you struggled to beat a nation on your own home turf we were busy winning the rest of the war you never bothered to notice. Your people selfishly stood by while evil conquered the world and only after it threw you from your high horse did you cry for justice and here you are judging me for running late. Well, I'm sorry Miss that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. You get it? I was busy, I mean we had a lot to do. Singlehandedly overthrow an empire and save the world's largest ocean from conquest, invade this stupid continent twice and clean it of all the shitheads and evil and liberate nations that you fuckers left to rot for five years while you helped the Germans carve up Poland. For the record, you only beat us here because we slowed down to honor a pact." He growled.

Artemis sneered and pushed him. "My friends and family died defending my country! My people were brutalised by those men! You insult me insinuating we are but cowards! Cities could be built with the bodies of my comrades who gave their lives to defeat the evil of Fascism. They saw twenty four million innocent Russians lay dead from this war, how many Americans were murdered by those jungle-monkeys? Half a million. You Americans will never know sacrifice like we do." She argued.

Percy barked at her again. "You think you know sacrifice? War? Hell? If you think you know Hell then you have never visited China. I have. The things those Japs did over there were a million times worse than anything Hitler could do here. Besides, you more than make up for what the Fascists did. Two million German women raped by your 'comrades', so they say. Is that your Great 'Patriotic' War?" The heated marine shouted.

Artemis was stunned by that. "Th-that's not true. Fascist propaganda has infested the West. Your scars mean nothing compared to the scars of my people. Your scars are weak, ours present valor!" She patriotically defied him.

Artemis gagged as his hand closed around her neck and he pushed her against the wall. Their bodies connected, Artemis' silver doe eyes connected still with his sharp sea-green ones in nationalistic fervor. The way Percy growled when he was made just made her legs twitch and falter.

"If you've got scars then by all means strip and show me them. I'll show you mine. I promise there ain't a square inch of my torso that's unmarked. Japan, Italy, Germany, I've taken my fair share of bullets in this fuckin' crusade against evil, and I promise you that any day of the week America could bend your mother Russia over and fuck her senseless."

Artemis struggled for air, her boots still planted on the ground but weak at the knees. Her head poking out from underneath the Russki hat made her look a thousand times cuter to him. Artemis blushed as Percy made the sexual comment. "Is that a challenge?" She asked quietly, yet still with that air of defiance they were both struggling to maintain.

The eyes of a shocked Percy widened slightly before a smirk grew on his face.