Bring Her Home

Flora Stewa... Soldat

1944

Flora laid in the icy white blanket for what felt like hours. The throbbing, stabbing pain came and went like an unsteady heartbeat.

She flashed back to Bucky and Steve screaming her name. Why couldn't she grab Bucky's hand? As she was falling, she'd seen him lose his grip and nearly fall. Steve had caught him. Yet she was the one that fell from the freight car. That one car had ended all the hope she knew. Was it all hopeless or was there a chance for rescue... For a homecoming?

Why wasn't she dead? Dr. Zola's experiments. What had he done?

Pain. Far worse than anything she'd ever felt. She glanced at her left arm to see that her arm just above her elbow was gone. Crimson droplets of ichor soaked pure flakes of white, leaving a stain that could never be washed away. Melted and forgotten perhaps, but never wiped clean. Wincing, she ripped off part of her jacket and wrapped her arm as best she could.

She needed to get back to her friends, to the man she loved, but she was pretty certain moving was about the worst idea possible.

Slowly, Flora sat up and instantly collapsed in the snow. She uttered a prayer that rescue would soon come.

Maybe ten minutes later, or was it an hour; she didn't know. Time blended together. Eventually, she heard an engine motor. She would be able to go home. To live a quiet life with Bucky, if he was still alive.

A bespectacled man walked up to her and her eyes instantly widened as she tried to shy away.

"Now, now, Private Stewart. You can't run from us."

She whimpered as she was put into a car. Her severely injured arm hit the side of the car roughly and she let out a pained cry.

"Easy," Dr. Zola said. "She is of great value."

Great value? The only value she wanted was in the eyes of her friends and the man she loved.

They arrived at a base and somehow, Flora knew everything was about to change.

Flora Stewart became nothing more than a memory to all but a small few. After two decades of resisting, she became the Soviet Union's greatest soldat and the world's most feared ghost.