Chapter Text
Prologue: Kindred Spirits
When Frederick turned around with a pistol in his fist, Shoshanna’s defenses appeared. She could feel the invisible force wall around her, but she remained unshaken and standing on her feet. Zoller was blasted backwards with the sheer force of her power, a power she had not yet named. His oncoming bullet ricocheted off the protection that surrounded her with a sharp ting. She relished in the whimper that escaped his mouth, the one that had incurred her sympathy but moments ago.
When her forces had relented, his gun was lying on the floor. She picked it up and put a bullet through his head.
-
The theater was an inferno.
She had known the risk of dying today, had made no promises to Marcel of her return.
Two men stood with machine guns on the gilded balcony, their dark eyes filled with a hatred that made her want to kiss them between their eyebrows. They were dark-haired and swarthy, but it was the rage in their eyes and not their coloring that ensured her they were Jewish. She loved her people too dearly to pass them by without an acknowledgment, an indication of her love for them, and when she touched her two fingers to her forehead, they returned the gesture in the barest flicker of salutes.
She left through the back door just before the theater blew to smithereens.
-
Her name was Shoshanna. And she was his older sister.
She could control electromagnetic fields, manipulate them till they rose with the fury of a thousand waves in a tsunami and descended upon the swine who’d infuriated her. Protection was her forte for she’d hidden in a basement long before she’d burned the theater down. The force surrounded her, tangible and versatile, and when Erik pointed his gun to shoot her down, the bullet rebounded and she remained unscathed.
He caught it, showed her his open palm and the bullet inside it.
The transparent glare of her force field lessened till it was invisible. “Nice trick,” she said in French.
He was not so forgiving. He spun the bullet around his fingers, narrowed his eyes in a glare. “What are you?”
She smiled. Her rouge was so red it seemed as if blood dripped from her lips. “I am the angel of vengeance. I am the instrument of my people that never forgives and never forgets. I am Judith reborn to cut Holofernes’ head.”
The bullet flew against the wall opposite him with such force that it shattered into pieces. He stood still and tilted his arm until she saw the numbered tattoo on it.
Her forces disappeared without a sound. “You are my brother,” she whispered, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “My little brother.”
-
They ate in the restaurant below the hotel Erik was staying in. Shoshanna lit a cigarette, her newsboy cap casting a shadow over her face.
“What brings you to Geneva, little brother? It can’t be the good weather.”
Erik’s hands were clasped, a pleasant smile affixed on his face for passersby, but he knew that Shoshanna knew the thoughts that stirred in his head. She was not a telepath, but the connection between him and her crackled with energy. They had a shared bond, and it wasn’t only that they were Jewish. It was what they did with it.
“I’m here to visit a bank. I have a debt to pay.”
“And who is your debtor? I should think him quite miserly, forcing you to travel like this. Does he demand interest?”
Erik drank long and deep. “Oh yes,” he said. “Oh yes.”
-
“Your French is quite good,” she told him, half-illuminated by the lights of the passing cars beaming through the window. They were in his hotel room, clothed, thank you very much, and taut as bowstrings. If she were not Jewish Erik would have cut her throat hours ago. If he were not Jewish Shoshanna would have shot him hours ago.
“Yours is even better. Say, I never caught your name. Or where you’re from.”
“Shoshanna.” And she stirred from her place on his bed, paced the room till she was standing near the window. “And I come from France.”
“France. Occupied and now liberated. Why did you leave?”
She turned to him, her palms open, her expression wondering. “For the same reason you didn’t go back.”
Erik’s mouth tilted bitterly, and then relented. This girl exuded danger. She could make him feel, and it had been a very long time since his emotion had been tangled inextricably with someone other than the beloved that rejected him and the monster that created him.
When he spoke, his voice was raw. “Do you regret surviving, Shoshanna?”
She turned her eyes to him, blue-green and profound. She was a hazy beacon in the dark. He wondered where he had seen her before. “No, little brother. I do not. But I say that out of pride. I never could have allowed my enemies to take me. Sometimes I wish I was dead after all.”
-
When his business at the bank was done, he conducted a little research. Old newspapers and accounts where her face was only a footnote, for the sheer blood lust it represented didn’t fit in well with the clean liberation story the public wanted. Every single report he read accredited the Basterds with Operation Kino and--here, Erik’s mouth curled with fury--a Nazi who’d been working for the Allies all along. But the mysterious film with the beautiful and unhinged blonde in it and the Negro who testified to its origins was key to the story. Erik had heard it many times before, a dissipating rumor that was confirmed in less mainstream accounts of that night fateful to the war and the fate of his people.
Shoshanna was the Giant Face.
Erik knocked on the door to Shoshanna’s room. She answered it, dressed in a silken robe, her mouth curling into a smile, her eyes surprisingly tender.
The urgency died in Erik’s throat, and all he could do was stare at her in perturbation mingled with awe.
“You killed Hitler.”
“That I did, little brother.”
“They thought that you were dead, burned in the fire.” His voice was hoarse.
She laid a hand, cool and gentle, on his cheek. “Am I just a ghost then?”
He made a deep noise at the back of his throat. “Don’t toy with me,” he hissed.
“That’s not what I’m doing. Tell me, Erik, are we ghosts of our former selves? We wander and loiter in a world that has long forgotten our woes. Our enemies are dead or have moved forth with their lives. We are most certainly dead, but we still have to wake up in the morning and remember. Sometimes we can’t sleep because our memory is that long. What are we, Erik? What are we really?”
He placed a hand on her hip, and like the metal that he controlled and manipulated at his will, her hips arched towards his.
“We are what they made us,” he said, his teeth gritted, his voice rough and broken at the same time. “Weapons forged with terror and cruelty.”
-
They met at a restaurant downtown, not keen on being seen together in the same place too often. She was smoking a Gauloise when he reached her, its fumes forming curlicues in the chill night air. She offered him a box of cigarettes. “Take your pick, little brother.” He did and she lit it for him.
They walked to the restaurant. Neither of them were particularly hungry, but Shoshanna knew that they were starving. Souls like theirs were always starving. For blood, for sex, for a self-actualization that had diminished when they ran in terror with blood and dirt on their faces. Well, on her face at least. She didn’t know his story. But the string of numbers on the inside of his forearm cast an impression in her mind.
They sat at the restaurant, smoking in silence. She finally said, “You never did tell me your business at the bank.”
Erik exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. After a short moment of silence, he spoke, “I’m looking for somebody. A. . . man. Who made me what I am.”
Shoshanna’s green eyes were unreadable. “And what will you do to him when you find him?”
Erik smiled. It did not scare her. Her own smile was very similar and she felt that she was looking into a mirror. “Unspeakable things.”
Her hand inadvertently slid across the table and brushed against his. Erik held onto it, his thumb stroking the inside of her palm.
“His name?” Her voice was very quiet.
“Klaus Schmidt.”
Shoshanna stubbed out her cigarette. Erik noticed that the filter was stained red.
“I’m coming with you.”
-
“Herr Klaus Schmidt,” drawled Shoshanna. Her tone had acquired a mocking lilt and she smiled an ugly smile that made her look beautiful.
They were in her room and Shoshanna was bent over a journal filled with telegrams, letters, and photographs. She leafed through the frayed pages, the stench of old paper filling the air.
He traced a hand along her hip as he looked over her shoulder. She bent into him and grasped his hand, digging her nails into the soft flesh of his palm.
“Where did you get all this information?” he said. She felt the rumble of his tenor, his breath warm on her neck, and clutched his hand tighter.
“What if I told you I was a government-sanctioned agent?”
He chuckled low and dark. “There’s nothing government about you.”
She let out a hiss. “Here,” she breathed. “Klaus Schmidt.”
She removed a page from her journal. There was a black-and-white photograph taped to it and Erik’s sharp intake of breath emanated as a hiss from his mouth. He looked at the photograph how he hoped to look at Klaus Schmidt when they’d meet again, and whatever guard he’d held around Shoshanna was now thoroughly dropped. He didn’t mind that. She’d led him to Schmidt after all, his exact face in a notebook and his addresses in the past ten years scrawled beside it.
Shoshanna was leaning over his shoulder, her blue eyes unspeakably tender. “What did this terrible man do to you, little brother?”
It was her proximity and the impact of seeing the face of the monster who haunted his nights and motivated his waking days that undid him. He grasped Shoshanna’s arm and scraped his teeth against her lips in a consummate mockery of a kiss. She let him, before tendering his movements by wetting his lower lip with the tip of her tongue. He felt her pressed against his lap in her trousered long and lithe legs, felt her cool hand touching his warm and wet face.
He was weeping. How long had it been since he last wept?
“Whatever he did,” Erik said in a gasping, shuddering breath, “will be exceeded by what I do to him.”
His face creased and broke. He had no capacity to feel humiliated by his candid emotion, his raw weakness, not when Shoshanna cradled his head against her breast and murmured, “That you will, little brother. That you will.”
-
That next day, rays of sunshine filtered through the glass, painting Shoshanna's bare throat with light. Her blouse was undone, exposing the tentative heave of her breasts, the freckles splayed across her midriff. In the morning haze, Erik looked at the blue vein palpitating against her throat. He thought of how difficult it would be to snap her neck clean, if her God-given gift would slam him into the opposite wall before he could even so much as brush his hand against her tender throat. He thought of how tenuous life was, how not even her mutation could protect her if he was quick enough. He thought of the Gestapo shooting his family clean in a cold forest in Poland. He thought of his uncle Erik resisting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto only to die.
He thought of Shoshanna's family, what they had been through. How they had died.
He thought of them both. The survivors. Cursed like Cain, wandering the earth forevermore.
He thought of all these things, the sun restoring him into consciousness.
He thought of the first day they met.
It had been on Rue du Marché, a sweet, respectable street of shops and restaurants. He had been searching for a Swiss army knife to bend and twist at his will. His power was useless without the necessary materials to supplement it.
And that was when he noticed her.
He noticed the keen shuffle of her gait, and the lithe grace with which she moved like a wary panther waiting to strike. But most of all he was stunned by her ghostly blue eyes.
They shared but a glance before she continued on her way.
She was beautiful. Anyone could see that, and Erik had long ago become desensitized to the enthrallment of beauty. His sudden curiosity caught him thoroughly off guard.
Her hand was fisted in a large bag. The hum he felt in his fingers when she passed him by confirmed his suspicions. There was a gun in it.
He followed her for two blocks before she disappeared among the Swiss pedestrians. He felt the disappointment in the pit of his stomach of losing her, as if he'd known her personally.
She found him again that evening. At his hotel. He should've known that the pain he'd seen in her eyes had taught her the core lesson of survival. The lesson to kill first if she wanted to survive.
And she tried to kill him.
And God stalled the deed.
Her eyes fluttered open. The sun was wholly in the sky, dawn melting away.
Her smile took his breath way. "Thinking of ways to kill me?" she murmured. His heart wrenched with the sweetness of her voice.
He didn't say anything.
She sighed and lifted herself from the bed, the blanket falling from her shoulders. Her blonde hair was askew. His eyes burned into her body.
"I've been thinking the same thing."
He only nodded.
"How easy it would be. . . And yet my hand stops me. I don't know why." She looked at him curiously. "You are the same?"
"Yes," he whispered.
"I thought so. You would've killed me by now if you weren't."
She was right. He didn't know what stayed his hand. "You killed Hitler," he offered.
"And that is what stops you?" She was amused.
"No." He shook his head. "You showed me Klaus Schmidt."
She did not say anything.
"Come to America with me."
There was no surprise or curiosity in her wide blue eyes. Neither was there any enigma. Just abstraction and the color of her irises, the pinpoint of her pupil.
"You have business there too. I can feel it."
"What will keep you from killing me?"
He smiled sardonically. "Maybe I'll let you kill me first." He leaned his head and touched her lips to her skin. They whispered along her throat, her collarbone. He kissed that palpitating vein he'd been eyeing earlier. She sighed. "You did, after all, kill Hitler."