fic: pseudonyms
pseudonyms
inglourious basterds. predestination does not allow an altering of history, try as you might; berlin after the war. shosanna, hellstrom, shosanna/hellstrom, shosanna/fredrick. 5684 words. rated nc-17. AU.
notes: OH SHIT SON. so this actually happened? aka, this pairing ate my brain over the course of exam week and over the course of two days, despite being strung out and hungover post-finals, my brain threw up this? without question, this business would not have happened without the glorious endearlings. also, this is AU. big time AU. like, AU as in this darling trio ran off to Berlin post-war and stirred up some shit AU. that said, this is dark and filthy and strange, and i've managed to bastardize Inglourious Basterds, so go enjoy and be merry.
Names like pain cries, names like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented, names forbidden or overused.
(Richard Siken, Saying Your Names)
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
(Cormac McCarthy, The Road)
1.
This is a story that starts with blood, and much like all stories that start with blood, it ends in blood as well. The discerning would call this a full circle, a coming right back to where we started from, like maybe there’s some set path that we’ve all set out on and try as you might, the stretches of map and land and sea you traverse, you wind up right back where you started from.
The discerning would be wrong. The discerning don’t like to be wrong. They like to think their observations earn them something close to a truth, but it doesn’t. Small details can be misleading, and they don’t like that either.
But this story doesn’t end where it started. To end where this started you’d have to go back to France, and they weren’t going to do that. They could never do that. To do that would mean death, would mean blood, the same blood that was emptied at the end anyway, but these here are two men and a woman, not prophets. You don’t know where and when the blood’s going to spill unless you’re holding the gun, and even then, there are no sure bets.
The point is, when your number’s up, your name’s going to be called.
You can only put off the inevitable for so long before it finds you yet again.
-
2.
Fredrick still calls her Emmanuelle.
Hellstrom knows better. Hellstrom calls her Shosanna when he needs her name at all.
-
3.
You are unfamiliar with the way this story went. Someone took a wrong turn, someone let their hand slip and the cards dealt were shown and when you skip a step to the ending the predetermined outcome is no longer predetermined.
For example: Hellstrom knew the truth about Emmanuelle when he picked her up at her cinema. The woman who descended that ladder and crossed the street to him was no Emmanuelle Mimieux and he had known this. Colonel Landa had known too.
“She goes by Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Mimieux,” Landa had said. “Nice name, yes?”
Hellstrom had granted half a nod and lit another cigarette. Landa had leaned in.
“Her real name is Shosanna Dreyfus. I do believe that says it all.”
Second: Hellstrom was supposed to kill her.
“Get rid of her,” Landa said after their meeting.
“Sir,” Hellstrom said. “And Goebbels? The cinema, the premiere?”
Landa waved a hand. “Leave that to me.”
Hellstrom smiled.
“And Zoller?”
“Ah. The brave private will just have to endure the burden of young love thwarted and heartbreak, I’m afraid. Here today, gone tomorrow. Ships in the night, that sort of thing.”
The story you know did not transpire as such, and that’s fine. In this story, there are no heroes and our characters read the last page of the book before understanding the plot.
Hellstrom did not kill her. Zoller was a problem. Hellstrom did not go to La Louisiane that night. The Third Reich fell, the cinema burned, and the three of them were on the outside, the three of them ran. Emmanuelle Mimieux was wanted for the murder of the souls trapped inside the torched cinema and Major Dieter Hellstrom was an enemy of the state and wanted for trial.
Fredrick Zoller was still a hero, but that was to be expected. Dark times, they said, and they would cling to the few stars they still possessed.
This brings us to the present, and yes, of course, there are unanswered questions, but aren’t there always. We will not skip to the last page of the book (they all die), we will not try to understand why (they had it coming), but we do know this:
They arrive in East Berlin before it is known as East Berlin. There are no divisions drawn yet, the war has only just ended, the upper echelon of the Third Reich barbequed in Shosanna Dreyfus aka Emmanuelle Mimieux’s former place of business. Zoller will take the burgeoning East German film industry by storm while Shosanna runs the bookstore under their flat and Hellstrom flirts with alcoholism and indolence, the tables turned, a stroke of irony, as he is the one now in hiding.
Their flat is small. There is a kitchen and a too large butcher block table in the center of it. The room smells stale, of old smoke and dinners of years past. There is no door that leads to the bedroom. There are two beds, there is one window. They share a bedroom. They share a flat. They share a flat over the bookstore Shosanna will operate and own. There are two beds that form an L-shape, one perpendicular to the other, each bed along one of the four walls. The bathroom is cramped and the water does not warm.
It sounds quaint. It is not.
-
4.
Shosanna never addresses the bold question: why are you here?
There is nothing for you here, she rationalizes.
There is nothing out there either.
-
5.
“They want you on the stand,” Fredrick tells Hellstrom. Shosanna is in the next room, her body curled in on itself and a book in a corner along the window.
“Lucky me, eh,” is his answer. He lights a match and then a cigarette, throws the burnt match in the middle of the table and inhales.
“They want your goddamn neck,” Fredrick says, more serious this time.
“I imagine they would.”
“They want hers too,” he hisses.
Hellstrom smiles without teeth and lines crinkle around his eyes.
“How fascinating.”
-
6.
This is the world they live in now. It is a world of shadows, no less dangerous and insecure than the world they had left, but at least then there had been sides to be chosen. Shosanna shelves books and feigns ignorance, feigns that she does not care for the world that exists outside her front door. Hellstrom drinks, puts out cigarettes against the wood desk of the register. His French is far superior to her German. She imagines it a sign of power that he refused to speak it before, in her city, her country. She is learning; he does not acknowledge that he is teaching.
Fredrick tells them he is going to be a star.
-
7.
Fredrick loves her. He has made this much abundantly clear. But it is not Shosanna Dreyfus he loves; it is the brief glimpse of Emmanuelle Mimieux, cinema proprietress, that he loves. He tries to bring her back, gentle her out with kind words and glances that speak openly of his adoration.
“I never did anything to hurt you,” Fredrick tells her.
Shosanna does not know what words exist to explain this. She does not know how to explain something so base as my people, your people, my family under the floorboards, my family buried underground. She should not have to explain these things, and he should not look at her like she is the one that is destroying him.
He has seen death, and she knows this. But he has not seen it in the up close, the too bright, the people you love with everything you love about them taken and gone. He does not know that, and she will not explain that.
So instead she will shrug. She locks these things, these people away. Her family, her Marcel, herself. She will clutch the clean glass in her hand and run a dishtowel over it, inside it. From the other room a record will play and some nights Hellstrom hums along with it. It makes her scared, it makes her nervous, there is nothing soothing about it.
Fredrick will put a hand on her arm and she knows that she hates him.
Shosanna hates him. She hates Hellstorm, too. She hates both men, she hates that her stomach can twist and knot out of fear in the presence of the one and not the other. Fredrick watches her like he loves her, like he knows her.
Hellstrom watches, too. He follows her with his eyes in a way that makes the small hairs on the back of her neck and her arms stand on end.
The point is: she watches him too.
-
8.
Shosanna thinks about killing them both. Sometimes she thinks of killing them. In the middle of the night, she imagines it, it could be so simple. A pillow over the face held tight. Fetch a knife from the kitchen. Both men carry guns, she could steal them both - point, shoot, bang, bang. Set fire to the building. Poison them. Fingers pressed in the right pattern around a bare throat.
She knows that Fredrick would never consider these things. The closest he has ever come to cruelty was when he told her, “I forgive you your heritage,” and she had done little more than stare blankly at him.
Hellstrom would kill her. He could kill her. She knows this, just as sure as she is about Frederick. What she does not know is if he imagines it in the same vivid detail she does. Shoshanna begins to imagine the inverse, and instead of her knees bracketed on either side of his ribs and her hands clutched tight around his neck, fingers squeezing in, they are his and she is the one who lies prone beneath him.
(Hellstrom does imagine these things, albeit more lust-infused than Shosanna’s mind will supply. It has become less about murder and more about her, begging, “please.”
Woman came from Adam’s rib. He’d like to remind her of that).
-
9.
“You have a customer,” Hellstrom announces from behind her. Shosanna does not jump.
Hellstrom looks more dangerous out of uniform than in.
There are the sharp lines of his body, violence contained and incarnate. There is no uniform, no code to bind him, but rather untethered brute strength.
Let’s say Hellstrom is a devil. Let’s call him this to his face. Let’s say he’s a devil and spit words like that in his face, and if you do that, you’ll notice one thing immediately: pride. He might not be a devil, devils might not actually exist, might not be meant for this world, might just be a moral construct to keep us fenced in between the twin temptations of right and wrong and good and bad, but he is proud of the idea that if devils walk this earth he could be among them.
He is a man people call a bad man, and a man who has done bad things. He is less proud of these things he has done than the label it has earned him.
In this small flat in Berlin, two out of the three of them are striving for reinvention. Shoshanna is adept at this, she has done this before, and this he knows because her neck was meant to be his to catch.
Dieter Hellstrom is a proud man, and to him this is yet another sin he will not be pardoned for.
He does not know how to become someone else. He does not desire it.
Most days he thinks he should have raised his pistol and said, “do your worst,” because that’s another thing people like to say:
Devils aren’t long for this world.
-
10.
The first time Fredrick slept with Emmanuelle, the first time Shosanna slept with Fredrick, Hellstrom was there.
Fredrick was on top and Shosanna was completely silent.
She rolled over and Hellstrom could see the side of her face. Her eye caught his and he smirked. She held his gaze for longer than he expected.
Brave girl, he had thought.
(Know this, she slept with him because she could, because there is a such thing as power in sex and the idea of diminishing another man to something senseless, a thing that begs for release, that appealed to her baser senses.
And perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps loneliness can bleed into us in ways we don’t recognize and we do things we thought we could never condone. Maybe that happened.
Maybe it didn’t matter. She still is not Emmanuelle).
-
11.
Mademoiselle Mimieux is more plain than beautiful. Hellstrom had told Fredrick this that very first day, that first meeting among the three. Hellstrom’s mouth had been sickening sweet with the champagne and the girl had been in the company of Colonel Landa. Hellstorm told Fredrick she was more plain than beautiful.
Fredrick had barely offered him a glance, but instead smiled and shook his head.
“Admirable spirit, however,” Hellstrom said.
“What?”
-
12.
So many wolves so hungry for the slaughter, and he thinks the problem might be that they’ve run out of lambs and have begun to hunt their own kind.
This Shosanna is hardly doe-eyed though her eyes are wide, bright, too bright, but her lower lip does not tremble and he thinks that’s what he wants from her.
Frederick never chooses wisely.
-
13.
Routine is simple. Her bed is his bed is her bed. His body fits easily with hers, and Frederick smells like a man, and as much as she would be loathe to admit it, there is some small comfort in that.
Hellstrom does not know these things. What he knows is that her bed is Zoller’s bed is her bed. He knows that she has sex with Fredrick but watches him the entire time.
Her eyes lock with his and his cock twitches. Hellstrom does not touch himself, but he watches her. Her eyes are wide, wet and gleaming in the darkened room, and she doesn’t blink - he doesn’t blink. Shosanna sucks in a breath and bites her bottom lip. From underneath her (the sharp bend of her shoulder and the pale skin of her back that does little to hide the bones underneath) he can hear Fredrick say, “Emmanuelle.”
Shosanna does not blink and she does not look away. She arches her back slightly, her breasts small and white and bared for him. She lifts her hips and lowers them, and if Fredrick groans, Hellstrom does not hear him. Hellstrom’s eyes dart from her breasts to her eyes, and she is still watching him, she is still looking at him, her breath catching, and Hellstrom finally relents, slides a hand down the front of his trousers.
When he squeezes, hard, and he pulls, his hips buck, and Shoshanna gasps. He likes to think it a coincidence.
(He jacks himself, long, firm strokes, and she watches him, her eyes too big and too dark, and her breasts bounce as Frederick moves beneath her. He fights the temptation to close his eyes and instead, quiet, slow, and deliberate, he pushes the thin blanket off of himself. He drags his trousers down, past his hips and takes a ragged breath in. He lays there for a moment, nude save for the trousers gathered at his knees, and looks at the beams stretched across the ceiling. Their shared bed rattles and creaks, and when Hellstrom looks back over to her, she is bent forward over Fredrick, her fingers wrapped tight around the wrought iron headboard.
Hellstrom locks eyes with her and smiles, dark and predatory, and skims a hand down his bare belly, stopping just short of his cock. Shosanna makes a wet sound that is half a swallow and half a whimper.
His fist is tight and still not enough, but he pumps hard and fast, licks at his lips, his eyes don’t leave hers, and he wants to taste her, he wants her to slick that already open mouth of hers around him, wants her to suck him down, he wants to be the one inside her, he wants her to scream, he wants her to cry and to beg, he wants her to hurt, he wants her, he wants her -
He comes silently, his body shaking with it.
Shosanna comes, too, on a long and broken, plaintive moan. Hellstrom watches as Fredrick’s hands rise, caressing up her sides, along her rib cage. He shushes her, murmurs something Hellstrom cannot hear. Hellstrom smiles again, and Shosanna finally looks away).
-
14.
The fact of the matter is that the violence has been brewing since they met. The fact is, this man was ordered to kill her and this woman would not mind achieving the same for him.
It works much the same as spilled kerosene. All it takes is that unexpected spark, that small burst, the shock of metal meeting metal with perhaps a little too much strength, and the entire thing goes up in flames.
Hellstrom teases, he calls her their own little chambermaid.
She slaps him across the face, hard, and his front tooth nicks his bottom lip and it bleeds. He smiles with stained teeth and he strikes her; Shosanna raises a hand to her cheek and stumbles back. She raises a hand to him again and he rebuts her, pushes her back and they both stumble with the force.
She punches and she kicks at his legs and they wind up grappling on the floor. His hands grab at her waist and her hips, pull at her arms and try to steady her, but she wriggles against him, her nails sharp and they scratch down the side of his neck. He catches her below the chin and she gasps; her fingers curl into the flesh of his cheek as she pushes her weight against him.
They tire at the same moment and her body slumps against his, and he makes no move against her. Her face is close and her breath hot on his mouth. There is a smudge of her own blood at the corner of her mouth and his knuckles are scraped and they sting. Shosanna takes a deep breath in and her body shudders with it, like she has just stopped crying. Her eyes, red-rimmed, are dry.
That night at dinner there is no conversation, just the scraping of metal against china.
“What happened to you?” Fredrick finally asks.
Shosanna’s gaze does not waver. “I fell down some stairs,” she says. She does not look at Hellstrom but takes a long draught of her wine.
“You?” Frederick asks Hellstrom.
Hellstrom clears his throat and swallows. “Me too,” he says.
-
15.
People are apt to give in to what they believe to be a natural chain of events.
Simply put: Hellstrom fucks her in the kitchen. The first time she is bent over an old kitchen table and halfway through an Edith Piaf record skips and stops.
(And you are asking, of course you are asking, how could she possibly let this happen? She wants it, and that’s the painful and true part, she wants it, and pay attention, she might still hate him but she wants him).
She is wet for it (wet for him is what he would like to think, but he is hardly sentimental, though the idea does cut in a gratifying way) and her hips arch, try to follow the path of his hand. A regular French whore, he muses, and perhaps this was why Frederick was so taken with her in the first place. But, no. That’s not it. He’s seen enough of her to know by now that was never her.
His body easily dwarfs hers as he holds himself over her. He can’t see her face, her chin is tucked into her chest, she is holding herself up by her forearms against the table, and her hair obscures his view. She is positively shaking with it, her breath sharp and rapid, his chest flush with her arched back. He grabs a fist full of her hair and draws it back from her face; her cheeks are flushed and her bottom lip is caught between her teeth. She looks guilty, ashamed - he likes that. He laughs, mouth against her ear.
Her knees slide wider apart and there is a loud noise as she hits the heel of her hand against the top of the table she is pressed against.
He bites at the skin of the back of her neck and she makes a hot and sticky noise in the back of her throat.
He kisses her for the first time after. Their teeth click and her mouth gapes open and his tongue slicks along her top lip. He grips the back of her head tight and his fingers tangle in her hair. Shoshanna’s fingers curl into the front of his shirt and her front teeth catch on his bottom lip. He can taste blood; he imagines, so can she.
He slides a bare leg between her own and he can feel her, still wet, against his upper thigh. Hellstrom groans into her mouth.
The kiss smarts same as that slap to the face.
-
16.
The second time is different. It is quiet, it happens in the bedroom, mid-day, summer. Her skin is damp and so is his. She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat as he parts her thighs, his grip tight on her hip. He is moving too slow, his body feels heavy and tired, as though his muscles won’t yield to his will.
After, they lay still in his bed, the front of her body flush against his. He stares at her. She is a fascinating creature. Shoshanna watches the open window. There is no breeze and the curtains do not move. She takes a deep breath and it sounds more like a shudder.
“Why are you here?” Hellstrom asks slowly. Shoshanna turns her gaze to him and blinks, once. Her eyes are huge and do not waver from his. Her body is hot against him and he wants to touch her. His hand twitches at his side but he does not reach.
Shosanna rolls away from him and lays flat on her back. The blankets twist around her ankles and she lays there, nude, and lights a cigarette with a match.
“I have not decided where else to go,” she says quietly. He almost believes her.
-
17.
If this, then that.
If she shuts the door, he will open it. If she runs, he will chase.
She won’t run.
-
18.
The third time, Fredrick catches them.
The bathroom, and maybe this was them tempting fate. They both were loud, Shosanna gasping and begging the word, “please,” a word Hellstrom does not think he had ever heard from her before. He grunted against the column of her throat, spoke without thinking, called her a good girl, didn’t mean it, asked her if she could take it, and knew that she could. Shoshanna’s ass was perched on the lip of the sink and her hair caught, static, against the dirty pane of the mirror.
Frederick stands in the doorway. “What,” is all Fredrick says, and then he falls silent.
Hellstrom turns his head to look at the other man. Shosanna leans forward and rests her forehead against Hellstrom’s temple; he can hear her swallow thickly, her arms looped around his neck. Hellstrom is still inside her, and almost as though against her will, Shosanna makes a small movement with her hips towards him and he slides into her deeper. Hellstrom grits his teeth and steadies her with a tight and bruising grip.
“You’re more than welcome to watch,” Hellstrom says. Shosanna’s eyes are closed, her forehead pressed against him. Her fingers are firm along the cut of his jaw and Frederick’s eyes flicker along her bent and naked frame, her body wrapped around his.
“Emmanuelle.” Fredrick says the name softly. Hellstrom can feel Shosanna’s chest expand as she inhales.
“That’s not my name,” she says, and her lips brush against Hellstrom’s cheek as she says it.
Fredrick stands there for a beat longer and the crestfallen expression on his face amuses Hellstrom. Shosanna does not look at him or the door. Fredrick shuts the door behind him.
Hellstrom starts to laugh, the sound unfriendly and cruel. He grabs her by the nape of the neck and pulls back, exposing the column of her throat to him.
“This like before?” he asks, more a growl than a question. “You like it when we watch, is that it?” He thrusts hard and her body shakes, her shoulder blade hits the mirror. “You want him instead?” he bites off.
Shoshanna smacks him with the flat of her hand. Her hand meets the side of his face, curls into a fist, pounds into his shoulder and he pounds into her, relentless.
“Tell me,” he snarls then gasps for breath.
“No,” she moans, and her legs can’t touch the floor, she is bent between him and the wall, the mirror, her ass almost in the bowl of the sink. The porcelain is cold against her skin and the metal faucet digs painfully into the small of her back. Hellstrom stills. “No,” she moans again, her blunt fingernails biting into his upper arms.
“No?” he questions, out of breath. “No, what?” He thrusts once and her elbow hits an empty glass; the glass falls from the edge of the sink, shatters. Her eyes flash, furious. “No you won’t tell me?” He thrusts again, and Shosanna’s hands slip from his biceps to his shoulders, around to cling at his upper back. “Or no you don’t want him.”
She pushes against him and raises herself off of the sink. Hellstrom’s cock slides out of her with the motion, and he groans, she gasps, at the loss of sensation. Shosanna pushes him again, pushes him hard and he stumbles back, back to the wall, and then slides to the floor. Her hand threads through his hair and jerks his head back; she straddles him, her cunt wet against him but his cock not inside her.
“I hate you,” she hisses, and Hellstrom palms her breast. He pinches her nipple and she grunts; she grips his face with both hands. “You’re a monster,” she says, as evenly as she can but her chin trembles, betrays her. Her face is too close to him, so he kisses her. He doesn’t think, he kisses her, his mouth covers hers and her tongue is pink and wet as she licks around his. He slides a hand between them, and her body has become frighteningly familiar to him, to his touch. He slides back into her easily enough, and she stops kissing him as his hips arch and he fills her.
“You wish Fredrick was here?” he hisses, a smile cutting his face in half.
“Fuck you,” she gasps, and he rolls her, her back bare against the dirty tiled floor. He holds her hands above her head and she does not try to wriggle free from his loose grasp. The floor is too hard against his knees, but it doesn’t matter. He lifts one of her legs over his shoulder and spreads her wide open; her eyes water as he pushes in too deep and too fast, but she does not tell him to stop. Her wrists are small in his hands.
“What do you want?” he asks her in a drawn out whisper. He twists his hips and her fingers twist with his, still raised high over her head. Her grip is tight on his fingers and she huffs out a breath as he moves into her.
“Fuck me,” she grits out. Her heel digs into the center of his back and it almost hurts to breath. “I want you to fuck me,” she says in a hurry. Her voice is desperate, but her face is the same, that same hard look she greeted him with that first day outside her cinema. “I want you - Dieter - ”
“Jesus, fuck,” he gasps, and he doesn’t know what it is, he thinks it is her saying his name, but he can’t be sure, he can’t stop now. They no longer speak, except for sounds that are merely parts of words, no more names, the crook of her bent knee is sweaty against his shoulder.
“Shosanna,” he grounds out against her ear, and he comes, one hand still clutching hers and another at the small of her back, raising her hips to meet his. Shosanna shakes beneath him, her body wracked with gasping, sobbing breaths, her face wet.
She has started begging again, a scrambled mixture of please and oh, god and his name, she won’t stop saying his name, Dieter, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.
-
19.
“Do you love him? Fredrick asks her that evening.
Shosanna cocks her head to the side and stares at him. She wonders if she was to say yes that would make this easier for Fredrick. She imagines it would. After this stretch of time with him, from what she knows and has learned of him, he is the sort of man to pardon certain indiscretions if done out of love.
“No,” she tells Fredrick, and he nods.
“Do you love me?” he asks.
“No,” she repeats without hesitation.
“I am trying so hard,” Fredrick hisses. And she knows the problem in an instant. It is that simple; she isn’t trying at all. She does not want to try.
“I,” she starts, and then she stops. She shakes her head and turns to leave.
She returns to the bedroom. Her robe is loose around her frame and she sits down on the edge of Hellstrom’s bed. She lights a cigarette.
She told Fredrick that she did not love him, she told him that she did not love the other man either. She is unsure if this is the truth. Shosanna does not know how to explain it, she just knows it makes her feel ill to even consider it - that she hates him, that she hates Dieter (and she does not know this either, when he became an actual man with a first name as opposed to whatever he was before), but that she needs him all the same. That he makes her hurt, that he makes her body feel like her own again.
Shosanna can hear running water from the next room and her knees bump together, she is still damp and sticky between her legs. She inhales tightly.
Some things get lost along the way, she does not say.
Hellstrom enters the room, towel low-slung and hair wet, drops of water dotting his shoulders. Shosanna watches him openly. He drops the towel and opens a drawer, pulls out a pair of trousers, his back a sharp, firm line turned toward her.
He looks at her over his shoulder as he bends and pulls the trousers up his legs. Her posture is hunched and her robe gapes open in the front, hiding nothing. Hellstrom stares.
She falls asleep in his bed before the sun sets. When she wakes, it is late, it is early, that gray area between sleeping and waking, morning and night. That gray area where the shadows paint themselves in contorted shapes along the walls and you can’t decide if you are staring at reality, at nightmares, at a mangled depiction of yourself. Hellstrom stirs next to her, and she wonders if she has made a choice. Her robe is still loose around her frame and his hands are not on her body.
Why are you here? she does not ask.
When she wakes, when the sun rises hot and the morning spills across the floorboards and over to him, over to her, Fredrick will rise as well.
There will be a click first.
-
20.
The blood stretches in an arch and splatters across her face.
-
21.
Hellstrom dies in his bed. His blood soaks the pillow and sticks in her hair. There is a bullet at his temple and his eyes are wide. She does not cry. She does not feel relief either.
“Had you met previous,” Fredrick clears his throat and starts again. “Had you met before, before all of this, he would have killed you.”
Shosanna’s eyes are flat. “And I him.”
Fredrick places the gun on the table.
-
22.
Shosanna shoots Fredrick and Fredrick shoots Shosanna.
Shosanna is shot, bullets to the gut, and when she goes down her blood spilled is a darker stain of red than the dress she wears. Frederick will shoot her. Hellstrom had called Fredrick a friend out of simple lack of other words, and if his own blood wasn’t already poured out by this same friend and smeared in the next room he would have said: my friend shot her. My friend shot me.
The thing is, try as you might, you can’t alter fate. Many years before they each had been brought into this world. Each of the three took that first gasp of breath, and that was it, they had agreed. They each had said: yes, I accept this. Yes, I will live this life.
Yes, I will meet this death.
If at the end of this Dieter Hellstrom was supposed to lie dead in a basement tavern, damp in the metallic, teeth-biting stench of spilled blood and liquor alike, then Dieter Hellstrom was to lie dead. At a small basement tavern once known as La Louisiane Dieter Hellstrom was to meet death head on. He was to be shot, to take a knife to the back of the head, and expire. The order of these offenses is immaterial for the result achieved would have been the same: the young major would die, along with several of his fellow men and traitors alike.
Such is war, you would have to say. These were dangerous times.
But you forget that dangerous times don’t just stretch with war, but rather with the dangerous people themselves.
If this, then that.
If they run, they’re going to find them.
This is a story that ends in blood.
-
fin.
inglourious basterds. predestination does not allow an altering of history, try as you might; berlin after the war. shosanna, hellstrom, shosanna/hellstrom, shosanna/fredrick. 5684 words. rated nc-17. AU.
notes: OH SHIT SON. so this actually happened? aka, this pairing ate my brain over the course of exam week and over the course of two days, despite being strung out and hungover post-finals, my brain threw up this? without question, this business would not have happened without the glorious endearlings. also, this is AU. big time AU. like, AU as in this darling trio ran off to Berlin post-war and stirred up some shit AU. that said, this is dark and filthy and strange, and i've managed to bastardize Inglourious Basterds, so go enjoy and be merry.
Names like pain cries, names like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented, names forbidden or overused.
(Richard Siken, Saying Your Names)
Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.
(Cormac McCarthy, The Road)
1.
This is a story that starts with blood, and much like all stories that start with blood, it ends in blood as well. The discerning would call this a full circle, a coming right back to where we started from, like maybe there’s some set path that we’ve all set out on and try as you might, the stretches of map and land and sea you traverse, you wind up right back where you started from.
The discerning would be wrong. The discerning don’t like to be wrong. They like to think their observations earn them something close to a truth, but it doesn’t. Small details can be misleading, and they don’t like that either.
But this story doesn’t end where it started. To end where this started you’d have to go back to France, and they weren’t going to do that. They could never do that. To do that would mean death, would mean blood, the same blood that was emptied at the end anyway, but these here are two men and a woman, not prophets. You don’t know where and when the blood’s going to spill unless you’re holding the gun, and even then, there are no sure bets.
The point is, when your number’s up, your name’s going to be called.
You can only put off the inevitable for so long before it finds you yet again.
-
2.
Fredrick still calls her Emmanuelle.
Hellstrom knows better. Hellstrom calls her Shosanna when he needs her name at all.
-
3.
You are unfamiliar with the way this story went. Someone took a wrong turn, someone let their hand slip and the cards dealt were shown and when you skip a step to the ending the predetermined outcome is no longer predetermined.
For example: Hellstrom knew the truth about Emmanuelle when he picked her up at her cinema. The woman who descended that ladder and crossed the street to him was no Emmanuelle Mimieux and he had known this. Colonel Landa had known too.
“She goes by Emmanuelle. Emmanuelle Mimieux,” Landa had said. “Nice name, yes?”
Hellstrom had granted half a nod and lit another cigarette. Landa had leaned in.
“Her real name is Shosanna Dreyfus. I do believe that says it all.”
Second: Hellstrom was supposed to kill her.
“Get rid of her,” Landa said after their meeting.
“Sir,” Hellstrom said. “And Goebbels? The cinema, the premiere?”
Landa waved a hand. “Leave that to me.”
Hellstrom smiled.
“And Zoller?”
“Ah. The brave private will just have to endure the burden of young love thwarted and heartbreak, I’m afraid. Here today, gone tomorrow. Ships in the night, that sort of thing.”
The story you know did not transpire as such, and that’s fine. In this story, there are no heroes and our characters read the last page of the book before understanding the plot.
Hellstrom did not kill her. Zoller was a problem. Hellstrom did not go to La Louisiane that night. The Third Reich fell, the cinema burned, and the three of them were on the outside, the three of them ran. Emmanuelle Mimieux was wanted for the murder of the souls trapped inside the torched cinema and Major Dieter Hellstrom was an enemy of the state and wanted for trial.
Fredrick Zoller was still a hero, but that was to be expected. Dark times, they said, and they would cling to the few stars they still possessed.
This brings us to the present, and yes, of course, there are unanswered questions, but aren’t there always. We will not skip to the last page of the book (they all die), we will not try to understand why (they had it coming), but we do know this:
They arrive in East Berlin before it is known as East Berlin. There are no divisions drawn yet, the war has only just ended, the upper echelon of the Third Reich barbequed in Shosanna Dreyfus aka Emmanuelle Mimieux’s former place of business. Zoller will take the burgeoning East German film industry by storm while Shosanna runs the bookstore under their flat and Hellstrom flirts with alcoholism and indolence, the tables turned, a stroke of irony, as he is the one now in hiding.
Their flat is small. There is a kitchen and a too large butcher block table in the center of it. The room smells stale, of old smoke and dinners of years past. There is no door that leads to the bedroom. There are two beds, there is one window. They share a bedroom. They share a flat. They share a flat over the bookstore Shosanna will operate and own. There are two beds that form an L-shape, one perpendicular to the other, each bed along one of the four walls. The bathroom is cramped and the water does not warm.
It sounds quaint. It is not.
-
4.
Shosanna never addresses the bold question: why are you here?
There is nothing for you here, she rationalizes.
There is nothing out there either.
-
5.
“They want you on the stand,” Fredrick tells Hellstrom. Shosanna is in the next room, her body curled in on itself and a book in a corner along the window.
“Lucky me, eh,” is his answer. He lights a match and then a cigarette, throws the burnt match in the middle of the table and inhales.
“They want your goddamn neck,” Fredrick says, more serious this time.
“I imagine they would.”
“They want hers too,” he hisses.
Hellstrom smiles without teeth and lines crinkle around his eyes.
“How fascinating.”
-
6.
This is the world they live in now. It is a world of shadows, no less dangerous and insecure than the world they had left, but at least then there had been sides to be chosen. Shosanna shelves books and feigns ignorance, feigns that she does not care for the world that exists outside her front door. Hellstrom drinks, puts out cigarettes against the wood desk of the register. His French is far superior to her German. She imagines it a sign of power that he refused to speak it before, in her city, her country. She is learning; he does not acknowledge that he is teaching.
Fredrick tells them he is going to be a star.
-
7.
Fredrick loves her. He has made this much abundantly clear. But it is not Shosanna Dreyfus he loves; it is the brief glimpse of Emmanuelle Mimieux, cinema proprietress, that he loves. He tries to bring her back, gentle her out with kind words and glances that speak openly of his adoration.
“I never did anything to hurt you,” Fredrick tells her.
Shosanna does not know what words exist to explain this. She does not know how to explain something so base as my people, your people, my family under the floorboards, my family buried underground. She should not have to explain these things, and he should not look at her like she is the one that is destroying him.
He has seen death, and she knows this. But he has not seen it in the up close, the too bright, the people you love with everything you love about them taken and gone. He does not know that, and she will not explain that.
So instead she will shrug. She locks these things, these people away. Her family, her Marcel, herself. She will clutch the clean glass in her hand and run a dishtowel over it, inside it. From the other room a record will play and some nights Hellstrom hums along with it. It makes her scared, it makes her nervous, there is nothing soothing about it.
Fredrick will put a hand on her arm and she knows that she hates him.
Shosanna hates him. She hates Hellstorm, too. She hates both men, she hates that her stomach can twist and knot out of fear in the presence of the one and not the other. Fredrick watches her like he loves her, like he knows her.
Hellstrom watches, too. He follows her with his eyes in a way that makes the small hairs on the back of her neck and her arms stand on end.
The point is: she watches him too.
-
8.
Shosanna thinks about killing them both. Sometimes she thinks of killing them. In the middle of the night, she imagines it, it could be so simple. A pillow over the face held tight. Fetch a knife from the kitchen. Both men carry guns, she could steal them both - point, shoot, bang, bang. Set fire to the building. Poison them. Fingers pressed in the right pattern around a bare throat.
She knows that Fredrick would never consider these things. The closest he has ever come to cruelty was when he told her, “I forgive you your heritage,” and she had done little more than stare blankly at him.
Hellstrom would kill her. He could kill her. She knows this, just as sure as she is about Frederick. What she does not know is if he imagines it in the same vivid detail she does. Shoshanna begins to imagine the inverse, and instead of her knees bracketed on either side of his ribs and her hands clutched tight around his neck, fingers squeezing in, they are his and she is the one who lies prone beneath him.
(Hellstrom does imagine these things, albeit more lust-infused than Shosanna’s mind will supply. It has become less about murder and more about her, begging, “please.”
Woman came from Adam’s rib. He’d like to remind her of that).
-
9.
“You have a customer,” Hellstrom announces from behind her. Shosanna does not jump.
Hellstrom looks more dangerous out of uniform than in.
There are the sharp lines of his body, violence contained and incarnate. There is no uniform, no code to bind him, but rather untethered brute strength.
Let’s say Hellstrom is a devil. Let’s call him this to his face. Let’s say he’s a devil and spit words like that in his face, and if you do that, you’ll notice one thing immediately: pride. He might not be a devil, devils might not actually exist, might not be meant for this world, might just be a moral construct to keep us fenced in between the twin temptations of right and wrong and good and bad, but he is proud of the idea that if devils walk this earth he could be among them.
He is a man people call a bad man, and a man who has done bad things. He is less proud of these things he has done than the label it has earned him.
In this small flat in Berlin, two out of the three of them are striving for reinvention. Shoshanna is adept at this, she has done this before, and this he knows because her neck was meant to be his to catch.
Dieter Hellstrom is a proud man, and to him this is yet another sin he will not be pardoned for.
He does not know how to become someone else. He does not desire it.
Most days he thinks he should have raised his pistol and said, “do your worst,” because that’s another thing people like to say:
Devils aren’t long for this world.
-
10.
The first time Fredrick slept with Emmanuelle, the first time Shosanna slept with Fredrick, Hellstrom was there.
Fredrick was on top and Shosanna was completely silent.
She rolled over and Hellstrom could see the side of her face. Her eye caught his and he smirked. She held his gaze for longer than he expected.
Brave girl, he had thought.
(Know this, she slept with him because she could, because there is a such thing as power in sex and the idea of diminishing another man to something senseless, a thing that begs for release, that appealed to her baser senses.
And perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps loneliness can bleed into us in ways we don’t recognize and we do things we thought we could never condone. Maybe that happened.
Maybe it didn’t matter. She still is not Emmanuelle).
-
11.
Mademoiselle Mimieux is more plain than beautiful. Hellstrom had told Fredrick this that very first day, that first meeting among the three. Hellstrom’s mouth had been sickening sweet with the champagne and the girl had been in the company of Colonel Landa. Hellstorm told Fredrick she was more plain than beautiful.
Fredrick had barely offered him a glance, but instead smiled and shook his head.
“Admirable spirit, however,” Hellstrom said.
“What?”
-
12.
So many wolves so hungry for the slaughter, and he thinks the problem might be that they’ve run out of lambs and have begun to hunt their own kind.
This Shosanna is hardly doe-eyed though her eyes are wide, bright, too bright, but her lower lip does not tremble and he thinks that’s what he wants from her.
Frederick never chooses wisely.
-
13.
Routine is simple. Her bed is his bed is her bed. His body fits easily with hers, and Frederick smells like a man, and as much as she would be loathe to admit it, there is some small comfort in that.
Hellstrom does not know these things. What he knows is that her bed is Zoller’s bed is her bed. He knows that she has sex with Fredrick but watches him the entire time.
Her eyes lock with his and his cock twitches. Hellstrom does not touch himself, but he watches her. Her eyes are wide, wet and gleaming in the darkened room, and she doesn’t blink - he doesn’t blink. Shosanna sucks in a breath and bites her bottom lip. From underneath her (the sharp bend of her shoulder and the pale skin of her back that does little to hide the bones underneath) he can hear Fredrick say, “Emmanuelle.”
Shosanna does not blink and she does not look away. She arches her back slightly, her breasts small and white and bared for him. She lifts her hips and lowers them, and if Fredrick groans, Hellstrom does not hear him. Hellstrom’s eyes dart from her breasts to her eyes, and she is still watching him, she is still looking at him, her breath catching, and Hellstrom finally relents, slides a hand down the front of his trousers.
When he squeezes, hard, and he pulls, his hips buck, and Shoshanna gasps. He likes to think it a coincidence.
(He jacks himself, long, firm strokes, and she watches him, her eyes too big and too dark, and her breasts bounce as Frederick moves beneath her. He fights the temptation to close his eyes and instead, quiet, slow, and deliberate, he pushes the thin blanket off of himself. He drags his trousers down, past his hips and takes a ragged breath in. He lays there for a moment, nude save for the trousers gathered at his knees, and looks at the beams stretched across the ceiling. Their shared bed rattles and creaks, and when Hellstrom looks back over to her, she is bent forward over Fredrick, her fingers wrapped tight around the wrought iron headboard.
Hellstrom locks eyes with her and smiles, dark and predatory, and skims a hand down his bare belly, stopping just short of his cock. Shosanna makes a wet sound that is half a swallow and half a whimper.
His fist is tight and still not enough, but he pumps hard and fast, licks at his lips, his eyes don’t leave hers, and he wants to taste her, he wants her to slick that already open mouth of hers around him, wants her to suck him down, he wants to be the one inside her, he wants her to scream, he wants her to cry and to beg, he wants her to hurt, he wants her, he wants her -
He comes silently, his body shaking with it.
Shosanna comes, too, on a long and broken, plaintive moan. Hellstrom watches as Fredrick’s hands rise, caressing up her sides, along her rib cage. He shushes her, murmurs something Hellstrom cannot hear. Hellstrom smiles again, and Shosanna finally looks away).
-
14.
The fact of the matter is that the violence has been brewing since they met. The fact is, this man was ordered to kill her and this woman would not mind achieving the same for him.
It works much the same as spilled kerosene. All it takes is that unexpected spark, that small burst, the shock of metal meeting metal with perhaps a little too much strength, and the entire thing goes up in flames.
Hellstrom teases, he calls her their own little chambermaid.
She slaps him across the face, hard, and his front tooth nicks his bottom lip and it bleeds. He smiles with stained teeth and he strikes her; Shosanna raises a hand to her cheek and stumbles back. She raises a hand to him again and he rebuts her, pushes her back and they both stumble with the force.
She punches and she kicks at his legs and they wind up grappling on the floor. His hands grab at her waist and her hips, pull at her arms and try to steady her, but she wriggles against him, her nails sharp and they scratch down the side of his neck. He catches her below the chin and she gasps; her fingers curl into the flesh of his cheek as she pushes her weight against him.
They tire at the same moment and her body slumps against his, and he makes no move against her. Her face is close and her breath hot on his mouth. There is a smudge of her own blood at the corner of her mouth and his knuckles are scraped and they sting. Shosanna takes a deep breath in and her body shudders with it, like she has just stopped crying. Her eyes, red-rimmed, are dry.
That night at dinner there is no conversation, just the scraping of metal against china.
“What happened to you?” Fredrick finally asks.
Shosanna’s gaze does not waver. “I fell down some stairs,” she says. She does not look at Hellstrom but takes a long draught of her wine.
“You?” Frederick asks Hellstrom.
Hellstrom clears his throat and swallows. “Me too,” he says.
-
15.
People are apt to give in to what they believe to be a natural chain of events.
Simply put: Hellstrom fucks her in the kitchen. The first time she is bent over an old kitchen table and halfway through an Edith Piaf record skips and stops.
(And you are asking, of course you are asking, how could she possibly let this happen? She wants it, and that’s the painful and true part, she wants it, and pay attention, she might still hate him but she wants him).
She is wet for it (wet for him is what he would like to think, but he is hardly sentimental, though the idea does cut in a gratifying way) and her hips arch, try to follow the path of his hand. A regular French whore, he muses, and perhaps this was why Frederick was so taken with her in the first place. But, no. That’s not it. He’s seen enough of her to know by now that was never her.
His body easily dwarfs hers as he holds himself over her. He can’t see her face, her chin is tucked into her chest, she is holding herself up by her forearms against the table, and her hair obscures his view. She is positively shaking with it, her breath sharp and rapid, his chest flush with her arched back. He grabs a fist full of her hair and draws it back from her face; her cheeks are flushed and her bottom lip is caught between her teeth. She looks guilty, ashamed - he likes that. He laughs, mouth against her ear.
Her knees slide wider apart and there is a loud noise as she hits the heel of her hand against the top of the table she is pressed against.
He bites at the skin of the back of her neck and she makes a hot and sticky noise in the back of her throat.
He kisses her for the first time after. Their teeth click and her mouth gapes open and his tongue slicks along her top lip. He grips the back of her head tight and his fingers tangle in her hair. Shoshanna’s fingers curl into the front of his shirt and her front teeth catch on his bottom lip. He can taste blood; he imagines, so can she.
He slides a bare leg between her own and he can feel her, still wet, against his upper thigh. Hellstrom groans into her mouth.
The kiss smarts same as that slap to the face.
-
16.
The second time is different. It is quiet, it happens in the bedroom, mid-day, summer. Her skin is damp and so is his. She makes a soft noise in the back of her throat as he parts her thighs, his grip tight on her hip. He is moving too slow, his body feels heavy and tired, as though his muscles won’t yield to his will.
After, they lay still in his bed, the front of her body flush against his. He stares at her. She is a fascinating creature. Shoshanna watches the open window. There is no breeze and the curtains do not move. She takes a deep breath and it sounds more like a shudder.
“Why are you here?” Hellstrom asks slowly. Shoshanna turns her gaze to him and blinks, once. Her eyes are huge and do not waver from his. Her body is hot against him and he wants to touch her. His hand twitches at his side but he does not reach.
Shosanna rolls away from him and lays flat on her back. The blankets twist around her ankles and she lays there, nude, and lights a cigarette with a match.
“I have not decided where else to go,” she says quietly. He almost believes her.
-
17.
If this, then that.
If she shuts the door, he will open it. If she runs, he will chase.
She won’t run.
-
18.
The third time, Fredrick catches them.
The bathroom, and maybe this was them tempting fate. They both were loud, Shosanna gasping and begging the word, “please,” a word Hellstrom does not think he had ever heard from her before. He grunted against the column of her throat, spoke without thinking, called her a good girl, didn’t mean it, asked her if she could take it, and knew that she could. Shoshanna’s ass was perched on the lip of the sink and her hair caught, static, against the dirty pane of the mirror.
Frederick stands in the doorway. “What,” is all Fredrick says, and then he falls silent.
Hellstrom turns his head to look at the other man. Shosanna leans forward and rests her forehead against Hellstrom’s temple; he can hear her swallow thickly, her arms looped around his neck. Hellstrom is still inside her, and almost as though against her will, Shosanna makes a small movement with her hips towards him and he slides into her deeper. Hellstrom grits his teeth and steadies her with a tight and bruising grip.
“You’re more than welcome to watch,” Hellstrom says. Shosanna’s eyes are closed, her forehead pressed against him. Her fingers are firm along the cut of his jaw and Frederick’s eyes flicker along her bent and naked frame, her body wrapped around his.
“Emmanuelle.” Fredrick says the name softly. Hellstrom can feel Shosanna’s chest expand as she inhales.
“That’s not my name,” she says, and her lips brush against Hellstrom’s cheek as she says it.
Fredrick stands there for a beat longer and the crestfallen expression on his face amuses Hellstrom. Shosanna does not look at him or the door. Fredrick shuts the door behind him.
Hellstrom starts to laugh, the sound unfriendly and cruel. He grabs her by the nape of the neck and pulls back, exposing the column of her throat to him.
“This like before?” he asks, more a growl than a question. “You like it when we watch, is that it?” He thrusts hard and her body shakes, her shoulder blade hits the mirror. “You want him instead?” he bites off.
Shoshanna smacks him with the flat of her hand. Her hand meets the side of his face, curls into a fist, pounds into his shoulder and he pounds into her, relentless.
“Tell me,” he snarls then gasps for breath.
“No,” she moans, and her legs can’t touch the floor, she is bent between him and the wall, the mirror, her ass almost in the bowl of the sink. The porcelain is cold against her skin and the metal faucet digs painfully into the small of her back. Hellstrom stills. “No,” she moans again, her blunt fingernails biting into his upper arms.
“No?” he questions, out of breath. “No, what?” He thrusts once and her elbow hits an empty glass; the glass falls from the edge of the sink, shatters. Her eyes flash, furious. “No you won’t tell me?” He thrusts again, and Shosanna’s hands slip from his biceps to his shoulders, around to cling at his upper back. “Or no you don’t want him.”
She pushes against him and raises herself off of the sink. Hellstrom’s cock slides out of her with the motion, and he groans, she gasps, at the loss of sensation. Shosanna pushes him again, pushes him hard and he stumbles back, back to the wall, and then slides to the floor. Her hand threads through his hair and jerks his head back; she straddles him, her cunt wet against him but his cock not inside her.
“I hate you,” she hisses, and Hellstrom palms her breast. He pinches her nipple and she grunts; she grips his face with both hands. “You’re a monster,” she says, as evenly as she can but her chin trembles, betrays her. Her face is too close to him, so he kisses her. He doesn’t think, he kisses her, his mouth covers hers and her tongue is pink and wet as she licks around his. He slides a hand between them, and her body has become frighteningly familiar to him, to his touch. He slides back into her easily enough, and she stops kissing him as his hips arch and he fills her.
“You wish Fredrick was here?” he hisses, a smile cutting his face in half.
“Fuck you,” she gasps, and he rolls her, her back bare against the dirty tiled floor. He holds her hands above her head and she does not try to wriggle free from his loose grasp. The floor is too hard against his knees, but it doesn’t matter. He lifts one of her legs over his shoulder and spreads her wide open; her eyes water as he pushes in too deep and too fast, but she does not tell him to stop. Her wrists are small in his hands.
“What do you want?” he asks her in a drawn out whisper. He twists his hips and her fingers twist with his, still raised high over her head. Her grip is tight on his fingers and she huffs out a breath as he moves into her.
“Fuck me,” she grits out. Her heel digs into the center of his back and it almost hurts to breath. “I want you to fuck me,” she says in a hurry. Her voice is desperate, but her face is the same, that same hard look she greeted him with that first day outside her cinema. “I want you - Dieter - ”
“Jesus, fuck,” he gasps, and he doesn’t know what it is, he thinks it is her saying his name, but he can’t be sure, he can’t stop now. They no longer speak, except for sounds that are merely parts of words, no more names, the crook of her bent knee is sweaty against his shoulder.
“Shosanna,” he grounds out against her ear, and he comes, one hand still clutching hers and another at the small of her back, raising her hips to meet his. Shosanna shakes beneath him, her body wracked with gasping, sobbing breaths, her face wet.
She has started begging again, a scrambled mixture of please and oh, god and his name, she won’t stop saying his name, Dieter, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.
-
19.
“Do you love him? Fredrick asks her that evening.
Shosanna cocks her head to the side and stares at him. She wonders if she was to say yes that would make this easier for Fredrick. She imagines it would. After this stretch of time with him, from what she knows and has learned of him, he is the sort of man to pardon certain indiscretions if done out of love.
“No,” she tells Fredrick, and he nods.
“Do you love me?” he asks.
“No,” she repeats without hesitation.
“I am trying so hard,” Fredrick hisses. And she knows the problem in an instant. It is that simple; she isn’t trying at all. She does not want to try.
“I,” she starts, and then she stops. She shakes her head and turns to leave.
She returns to the bedroom. Her robe is loose around her frame and she sits down on the edge of Hellstrom’s bed. She lights a cigarette.
She told Fredrick that she did not love him, she told him that she did not love the other man either. She is unsure if this is the truth. Shosanna does not know how to explain it, she just knows it makes her feel ill to even consider it - that she hates him, that she hates Dieter (and she does not know this either, when he became an actual man with a first name as opposed to whatever he was before), but that she needs him all the same. That he makes her hurt, that he makes her body feel like her own again.
Shosanna can hear running water from the next room and her knees bump together, she is still damp and sticky between her legs. She inhales tightly.
Some things get lost along the way, she does not say.
Hellstrom enters the room, towel low-slung and hair wet, drops of water dotting his shoulders. Shosanna watches him openly. He drops the towel and opens a drawer, pulls out a pair of trousers, his back a sharp, firm line turned toward her.
He looks at her over his shoulder as he bends and pulls the trousers up his legs. Her posture is hunched and her robe gapes open in the front, hiding nothing. Hellstrom stares.
She falls asleep in his bed before the sun sets. When she wakes, it is late, it is early, that gray area between sleeping and waking, morning and night. That gray area where the shadows paint themselves in contorted shapes along the walls and you can’t decide if you are staring at reality, at nightmares, at a mangled depiction of yourself. Hellstrom stirs next to her, and she wonders if she has made a choice. Her robe is still loose around her frame and his hands are not on her body.
Why are you here? she does not ask.
When she wakes, when the sun rises hot and the morning spills across the floorboards and over to him, over to her, Fredrick will rise as well.
There will be a click first.
-
20.
The blood stretches in an arch and splatters across her face.
-
21.
Hellstrom dies in his bed. His blood soaks the pillow and sticks in her hair. There is a bullet at his temple and his eyes are wide. She does not cry. She does not feel relief either.
“Had you met previous,” Fredrick clears his throat and starts again. “Had you met before, before all of this, he would have killed you.”
Shosanna’s eyes are flat. “And I him.”
Fredrick places the gun on the table.
-
22.
Shosanna shoots Fredrick and Fredrick shoots Shosanna.
Shosanna is shot, bullets to the gut, and when she goes down her blood spilled is a darker stain of red than the dress she wears. Frederick will shoot her. Hellstrom had called Fredrick a friend out of simple lack of other words, and if his own blood wasn’t already poured out by this same friend and smeared in the next room he would have said: my friend shot her. My friend shot me.
The thing is, try as you might, you can’t alter fate. Many years before they each had been brought into this world. Each of the three took that first gasp of breath, and that was it, they had agreed. They each had said: yes, I accept this. Yes, I will live this life.
Yes, I will meet this death.
If at the end of this Dieter Hellstrom was supposed to lie dead in a basement tavern, damp in the metallic, teeth-biting stench of spilled blood and liquor alike, then Dieter Hellstrom was to lie dead. At a small basement tavern once known as La Louisiane Dieter Hellstrom was to meet death head on. He was to be shot, to take a knife to the back of the head, and expire. The order of these offenses is immaterial for the result achieved would have been the same: the young major would die, along with several of his fellow men and traitors alike.
Such is war, you would have to say. These were dangerous times.
But you forget that dangerous times don’t just stretch with war, but rather with the dangerous people themselves.
If this, then that.
If they run, they’re going to find them.
This is a story that ends in blood.
-
fin.