[font "Times" The Lieutenant crept forward, coat swishing around her legs, trying to traverse the dusty, rubble dotted floor. The windows weren't broken. A slip of logic, perhaps, but the rubble was agonizing to hear. The slow grind of a foot as she shifted her weight, hands out but not too far from her. Nearing the first motionless, white figures.
Her eyes were steady on the one she was nearing. Glancing away only briefly to make sure she could tell where the boundary of pew and of the floor touching hem of the ghostly figure. But as she grew near, the fabric moved just so.
The black clad soldier stopped cold, face intense, eyes wide.
The fabric of the sheet moved just so. Just by the suggestion of a face from inside. A breath. Chills wracked down her spine, the pale woman stiffening. Her shoulders tightened, drawing closer to herself. She shifted, hands moving to grasp the fabric of the trench coat. and pull it near. Making herself smaller. She had to get through the pews, some scattered haphazardly throughout the sanctuary due to blast and fleeing, to the altar. The dead soldier there had a gun. And perhaps it had ammunition this time.
Advancing slowly, the Lieutenant took her time to be silent. Passing the figures, she came to a crushed, fallen heap of wood that was once a pew. She glanced to the side, seeing two of the white figures standing there, near a couple of candles on a low, remaining leg of a pew. The light danced across them. Her eyes slid to the other side, seeing that one of the figures was next to her now. Right next to her.
Her eyes slid back to the pew in front of her. A stretch, when taken slowly, but she could hopefully make it over, if she didn't slip. Noise.
Painfully slowly, she shifted, stepping over the rubble and the wood splinters... There was a breath of disturbance from above. The hanging, black figures, moving absently. Suspended by nothing.
The woman - demarcated by the flyaway, dirty blonde swathes streaked in soot that were stuffed underneath the hat. Too long for the soldier she was impersonating. Her body filled the man's uniform well. She was tall, very tall, and her shoulders were wide, masculine. Her figure solid, matching the masculine lines of the uniform. Her eyes, an unnatural gold, glinted in the semi-dark as the flare's light swung over the scene.
The soldier grew still. She felt something. This dream was so familiar. She had it now and again enough that she dreaded it, knowing its breadth well. Being heard. being [i found]. But her goal was not to be heard. Her head turned, swiveling, those eyes sliding to the edges of their sockets. Streaked in soot and grime.
Unnatural, yellowish gold eyes looked directly at the pale face in the balcony. The flames of the prayer candles, those of which were still burning, glowed in the backs of those eyes like some animal's as they looked to him. He was caught in that gaze as her eyes widened, realizing his form contrasting with the pipe organ he was standing before, in its dark wood.
Nicholai felt something shift in the dream's fabric. Perception swept over him. The script for the recurring dream's fabric moved something that appeared, ghostly, in front of him. It was the shadowy figure of a young man in a dirty, ill-fitting suit. Dark hair and dark eyes like him. But young and smooth jawed.
Something akin to horror passed over the woman's face, seeing him.
Desperation flooded her, realizing he could [i see her]. Her head turned to the gun at the altar. The dead soldier slumped beside it.
A decision passed over her face. The horror drained away. Instead it was empty. Empty resignation was the shell that remained in place. The woman's body shifted, her heel scraping just so.
The black shrouded figures shifted in the vaults of the ceiling as a tremble seemed to pass through them. Activating them. Making them aware. Listening. The air grew thick. Full of static like the energy before a lightning strike. The woman had made it halfway across the sanctuary floor, woven her way through the figures, over the fallen, crushed wood.
She was a blur as she shot forwards, immediately diving as one of the shrouded figures on the floor whirled around, swinging a long arm with long, blind, grey, human fingers. The soldier rolled and found her footing as the disturbance snapped in the air where Nicholai was. The black figures moving, shifting, seeming to turn and try to hear where the noise was coming from.
All at once figures started darting down, a blur, and then just there, on the floor. They reached out with coils of roiling, living fabric and cracking limbs and grinding, wheezing, human noises.
The figure that appeared near Nicholai suddenly came into focus, sending a wave, a beat from himself as he entered, moving finally. A Russian soldier in his coat and warm cap emblazoned with a red star. A teenager, he looked like. His blind eyes suddenly saw, and a rifle was in his hands.
The Lieutenant 's hand shot out for the rifle on the altar, vaulting over another pile of pews.
"Nemetskiy soldat!" the young soldier shouted, cocking the rifle and taking aim in one motion.
In a second breath, the weapon was discharged. The German soldier, the woman's, head snapped to the side. Blood immediately spattered up across the white figure nearest to her as she tumbled, hands splaying out to catch herself on a knee.
A cough. A wheeze. Movement.
The soldier's head turned, much slower this time, and Nicholai could see that she had taken the shot in the mouth. Mangled, difficult to focus on blood and flesh and the glint of teeth from the torn wound in the side of her cheek, all freely bleeding, were what was left of the lower jaw of this woman. The exit wound was lower. Blood was glittering in dark gem smears across that black uniform. She wheezed, trying to gather herself. Eyes bleary and stunned. Blanked out as more moved behind her eyes. Recollections. Things Nicholai, with his thumb on her subconscious, was partially privy to. For what little sense it made.
The city streets. Choking smoke, the taste of acrid, burning flesh and hair. Flashes of unbearable heat. The shouts of men. The crack of rifles bouncing off of blasted, brick streets. Stepping in a hole blasted in the street and trying to catch herself but falling. Blood. Blood on your hands. Your blood. Russian. Hands. Someone prying the bullet out of your mouth with their knife, cutting more flesh as he went. Pain. Pain. Pain. Grabbing his sidearm. Shooting him. Getting shot.
All this interspersed with the descent of the black figures, all at once this time, from the ceiling. Their arms were out, searching, trying to touch. To find. To find the soldier...