Phoenix (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
birdburning) wrote2012-06-30 04:20 pm
birdburning) wrote2012-06-30 04:20 pm
[fic] you cut her hair
Title: you cut her hair
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: R
Summary: Ruth Lehnsherr almost could have survived.
Notes: Major, major Holocaust triggers. This is my field of study (genocide scholar), but...if anything in here seems wrong, to anyone, please comment.
Erik's past is a number on his arm and a direction he must travel.
No one thinks or dares to ask: what else was it? Not even Charles. Damned Charles, who said everything and meant it.
Charles, of course, knows Erik used to have a little sister too.
*
Ruth, they said, would be safe. She would be smuggled to freedom and renamed--her, then Erik. They couldn't go at once together or both to the same place. But their parents loved them desperately and Erik promised to find her again anyway. Like a fool, Ruth believed him. No. Like a six year old girl, she believed her eleven year old brother.
They were both small. The ghetto stunted them, tiny things, but to her he looked tall when he pointed to Ruth when asked which child they were taking first: her, she's hungry. Then, softly, because he was a good boy: please, miss.
They took Ruth away and called her Anya, and for a while--a year, a whole year, nestled in with a sweet grandmother who pretended she belonged to a long lost daughter, Anya was safe. Anya gained weight and grew taller, although she didn't go to school, and her grandmother Sofia kept her safe and fed and loved. Ruth had a grandmother, too, before. But she had stayed in Dusseldorf and that meant she was dead. Ruth cried, but Anya played quietly at her grandmother's feet. She had to do this to survive, and like most people she did want that. They had no news of her family, but nestled in Sofia's arms she--Ruth and Anya--told herself that they were safe too. After all of this they would be together, Sofia too, and they would be all right.
They shot Sofia in the kitchen.
*
Erik always thinks he sees her, in the camps, for the flash of a second. Everyone with family whose fate is unknown does this. You see them, because your own mind will destroy you if it can, and at least if you know--you know, they are in this horror with you, and that is worse, or they're dead and that is so much better. But if you don't know, you see them everywhere. He sees her at a distance, or at work. In someone's arms or by herself. Tiny, helpless Ruth, who is always six in his mind even if she must be older now. Erik long since stopped caring about time.
He sees her everywhere. He doesn't hope she's alive. That hope is too insane and brave for this place, to hope she is alive and free--because being here is death, but slower. Worse death. Because they kill you before your body, and Ruth has no chance. She could never--
No. Erik hopes it was quick. A bullet or a shower where the gas was cranked high. It was quick and she doesn't have to die like him. Die before her body.
He sees her everywhere. So when he really sees her, he can't believe it.
*
Ruth is on a train and knows it's not taking her back, ever.
She should die, so quickly. She should die in some way she doesn't know but feels in the shuffle of the line she is split into, but men--no, not men. Nazis. These are not men. If they make her nothing she will refuse them as well, and that's a spark in her heart, maybe the last. They killed her grandmothers. So. Nazis. They take her from the line and say her name, and she answers it, afraid, and sees a man holding what may be a photograph standing aside. Smiling.
No. He is a Nazi. She is terrified of his smile, either way. But Ruth is put in a different line. They cut her hair and tattoo her arm, and the last is the worst because Jews don't do that. No good person does. But at seven she is perceptive enough to know that they aren't supposed to be people anymore. Her arm hurts and infects, lightly, but her number remains readable.
*
Erik's healed perfectly.
He is accorded--certain privileges. For one, no one is supposed to shoot him. He wishes they would, but they don't. He is struck only so much. He is fed enough to be healthy. When he is sick he is treated. So. Erik is alive, in a sense.
One of his workmates, new, snarls at night after Erik returns and goes to bed: "Hello, pet. Glad to see you back. Do you fuck him? I can smell--that must be lamb. Are you his little whore, you--"
"Shut up," says the man who is the son of a rabbi.
Another man asked how he could call himself that. His father was dead. You were the son of a rabbi. You were, but now you're not. The man had smiled--he had smiled, after everything they did, although his smile was agony. He said, I'm alive. As long as I am and I know my father is with God, I am the son of a rabbi.
People with real faith left are the hardest to kill, Erik has noticed. He doesn't think he envies them, but he's been dead for a while.
"Why?" The man above snarls. "Why, do you want to fuck him t--"
"He knew what he was doing, when he worked. None of us did. They send him to the hospital, not a house. We'll all be dead in about six months. We won't have to do this anymore, or live with it. Don't envy him. Don't hate him. They'll make him live with this." The son of a rabbi is quiet. "Erik, how long--"
"A while," Erik answers, with closed eyes.
The silence--
The silence isn't comfort, or an apology. But it isn't pity or hatred, either. So. The next six months, he will not be so tormented. Every six months, they kill everyone but Erik. Every six months, it starts over.
*
Ruth is so easy to love that she is never entirely abandoned. She is tiny and inexplicable, here, and these walls and fences are filled with mothers of dead children and sisters of dead siblings, and their empty arms yearn for her. She is so easy to love, even terrified, and so she is never totally alone. And yet. And yet.
There is always a little extra for her. Not from the women who ache to be her mother (because is alive and it hurts so much, so much) who have nothing to spare, but from them. The Nazis. A little more in her bowl. A scrap of bread. Fewer beatings. These keep her alive, but no one, especially not her, understands why. They don't pity children here. They kill them. So why? Why is this done? But Ruth is pretty.
"If they take you," a women says, "Go. Do what they say, and don't cry. They don't like crying."
Ruth hears: if you don't do what you're told, you'll have to do it anyway, and you'll cry, and it will be bad for you.
All Ruth used to know about what they mean was the creak of her parents' bed, sometimes. The creaking always lulled her back to sleep, thinking they were rocking each other, like Erik did to her when she had nightmares. He always said she was ridiculous, but he held her tight and protected her anyway. Brothers do that.
Now, she knows better. Not from herself. But they take girls from bed with screams or only little, heartless sighs, and sometimes they don't wait. So Ruth knows a lot more now than she used to. She wonders if she'll scream or sigh, if it happens. Decides she'll make no sound. Knows this is a lie: she'll scream, then cry. But she can pretend.
She is loved, so much. There is no place for that here when you can't even know how to survive yourself, but so many of them have stopped caring. No one but her in this part of the camp is under fourteen, at least officially. She is what they latch their broken hearts to, and Ruth--Ruth loves them all back. She does, as hard as she can. The Nazis want to make her not a person, but she is. She is. She is a person and she loves as hard as she can.
*
"We should smother her," a girl close by her says. She must think Ruth is asleep. Ruth has that kindness in her, to think the girl thinks she is asleep. "Look at her. She can't make it. Do we want to starve her to death instead? Have her raped and shot? They won't question it. She's so small."
None of her mothers say a word. Ruth knows not all of them are asleep, but she forgives them. People wonder how she stays so good but--she's not good. She just knows she's going to die no matter what she does, and she's young enough to believe that after dying is a better place to be. Anywhere is better than this. So it's easy, actually, to seem good, when good is only thinking that she will see her brother again.
"If you try it," a woman above says, quietly--one of the Jews who is a Communist too, Ruth knows her voice, double dead, "I'll kill you first."
"Why?" It's not a cruel question. Ruth is wondering too. She forgives the girl close by her.
"Because when we kill our children, we're exactly what they say we are." This is part of the truth, she can tell, but not the whole thing.
They become closer. Especially when Ruth really does sleep and--the girl close by, sometimes people just die. Or they don't just die. She knows, she should feel guilty or even angry, but she clutches the hand of a woman named Sarai and never, ever wants to let go. Sarai is going to die. Especially when they put a pink triangle on her and Deenah. But Ruth wants her to live. She wants all of them to live. But Sarai catches some disease and dies anyway, and Ruth can barely be around because she does have to work. She risks the fever--because who does it matter to, anymore?
Sarai does die. So does Deenah. So does almost everyone. All of them but her. She is still loved. She doesn't deserve it.
*
Today, Erik is deflecting bullets. Deflecting is easier than catching, and it isn't as if collateral damage is even in Schmidt's vocabulary. So, he's trying. Erik has not always cooperated, but eventually you become exhausted, as a child, and by eventually he means immediately--you cannot cope with harm to others. Even if they aren't your mother. Erik is actually quite easy to make behave. So today he is trying to deflect bullets from a dummy and is just horrifically, unspeakably grateful it isn't a human body.
Except Erik can't do this. They're too fast. He can't slant them aside no matter what tactic he tries, gritting his teeth. But at least, at least--
Schmidt sighs and Erik doesn't allow himself to shatter, because he knows that sigh. He must be even stronger. He braces himself, closes his eyes. Concentrates.
"Erik?"
No.
"Erik!"
No.
Her tiny arms (skeletal) clasp around his waist, and all he can think is: no. No. No. Not screaming, like he did once. Just no. No. No. As flat and hollow as his heart. This is not happening. He refuses this happening. No, no, no.
"Erik, I missed you so much--" and he hasn't cried since mother but he cries now, tearing her off the floor and into his arms which cannot keep her safe, and he realizes Schmidt is gone. He is gone and left two bowls of soup, and Ruth is so light in his arms. Oh, God.
He is going to kill his little sister after the half hour Schmidt gives for eating.
He is going to kill--
No. No. No. He is not who he was when their mother died. He is Erik now. He is someone whohas done unspeakable things and he is not going to kill her. He wished her dead for so long but she's here, clutching him, and Erik won't let her die a second time. No, no, no. Not her. Not her. They can't have her like this.
"Ruth," he chokes out, "You need to eat."
He lets her be sick after she finishes her bowl of soup, hating himself for not thinking of how small her stomach was now--but oh, God, she was so small, he was desperate to press life into her. They can't have her. The next bowl, his but he didn't need it, she ate slowly. He rubbed her back and--Ruth. It was her. Perhaps he had seen her, but now that she was here and breathing he couldn't wish she was dead. He's going to do this. He's going to save her.
"Good," he says, quietly, when she keeps it down.
"I love you," Ruth says, crying, and oh, God. If there is one left. You will not make him kill Ruth, you will not, will not--
It feels like Schmidt is gone for seconds. But it's always half an hour. Erik wants to clutch her and tear out of this place, but he knows what his captor can do. And he knows that he can't save Ruth, except--he will. Damn everyone. He will. She will breathe as long as he does.
Erik flawlessly sends every bullet away from his sobbing, frightened little sister. Every one. When it's over Ruth rushes to embrace him and babbles, disconnected but so beautiful because she's alive, he did this, his little sister is alive and crying at him and--and still, he distrusts, because he isn't an idiot. He's right when they take Ruth away and Erik feels like they took the scraps of his heart too. But Ruth is alive. He made her eat and he deflected bullets. Ruth is alive and, suddenly, so is he.
*
Before all of that, Ruth watches a sparrow.
It's down inside a lavatory, which reeks and burns her eyes. The bird seems worse off, affer bumbling in here. Ruth thinks: I could eat it. If I kill it. I want to live as much as a bird does, but I don't have wings. Before, Ruth would have cried at hurting a bird. Been sick at eating it raw, like she thinks of now.
But now she catches the sparrow, despite claws and beak. Despite wings. She will kill it and eat it and live a little longer--except. Does she really want to live as much as a bird wants to live? She strokes its so soft feathers and thinks: no. I don't want to, anymore, and a sparrow has more to live for than me. And Ruth can't kill it. There is so little alive in here that even her stomach can't stop her from carrying the sparrow out and throwing it to the sky.
But not before she whispers to its back, putting maybe all that is really left of her hope into it: go find Erik and take--part of me with you, this part. This part that wants you to be free, the part that is still me, still a person, still Ruth. Go, go, go, go fast, go back or forward but don't stay here, please. Please, sparrow.
For a moment before it's gone she is terrified the barbed wire will snake up and snatch down her bird--she saw, once, a woman try to throw her baby over a bit of fence. Stupid, because a baby had nowhere to go and anyway the other side was actually only more camp. They were about to shoot the women. Ruth knew, sick in her heart, the woman wanted her child to have even seconds more than her. But she didn't throw hard enough, high enough. The baby screamed until the Nazis shot it. Ruth thought later: what baby could have survived such a fall, anyway? If you wanted to kill it just smother it, so tiny, can't last--Ruth thinks sometimes they should kill her, but she doesn't know how to ask or kill herself without hurt. And she still doesn't really want to die, which is awful. She wants to live even here. Even like this, even if dying is better. It's awful. But she wants it, even if not as much as a bird.
What Ruth, and Erik, and Schmidt don't know, if that if she were older, perhaps twelve--
*
Erik is with the other Sonderkommandos when he finds her, which means only one thing.
He is used to death, in a way. These corpses are no different or less pathetic than the last, and the last time he did this he had thought it must be such a relief. But now he has Ruth to think of.
Erik is going to escape with her, he has decided, that or outlive this with her. He is alive because she needs a living brother and she is alive, herself, and she is the only thing Erik has left in this world. He can't remember how old either of them are, but he knows five years is between them and she is so small that it frightens him. One bowl of soup she could hold down means nothing. Schmidt has said she is earmarked as immune to summary execution or the gas, she is not to be killed, but Erik knows this place better than Schmidt. That's not good enough. There are so many other things--she can't outlive, he decides, sick in his heart. But they will escape. He'll find a way, to hell with it, even if they die leaving he keeps a bit of his promise--
But he turns another naked girl over and she stares at the ceiling.
No, he thinks. Not over and over. Just once. He knows it's her instantly, he gets no moment of confusion before loss. It's her, he knows, and the only thing he doesn't understand is why. Schmidt has never been anything but scrupulously honest with Erik. He has kept every promise he's made, but here Ruth is. He doesn't understand because they both know Ruth made him perform brilliantly in his outrage. He doesn't understand that he simply--can't understand. Not a thing.
"You knew her," says the son of a--his name is Levi, Levi, and now Erik will remember this forever because between the two of them no one else touches Ruth until they burn her. Between them, Ruth's eyes are closed, and she is not shoveled into the furnace, she is carried. Erik did none of this with Levi for his father. But Levi does it for him. After, when work is done, Levi says he will pray for her.
"Ruth," Erik can rasp, "Ruth Lehnsherr, she's my sis--she was--"
"Go to bed, Erik."
In a month Levi will be dead. Erik will be here. Ruth is already gone. Why are the best dyimg while Erik survives?
They take him to Schmidt that very night. He sits, still and unmoving, as he looks at the bowl of stew set for him. He took two bites that tasted like ash and set down his spoon. He breathed in his sister today, he must have. Some little piece of her, a fragment of what she was reduced to a cinder.
"Erik, don't you like your dinner?" Schmidt chides.
"You could have," Erik says, softly. Perhaps Ruth makes his tongue soft.
"What?"
"You said," Erik goes on, "You weren't going to have her killed. But I burned her today. You could have kept her alive, and you didn't."
"Erik, don't be ridicu--"
Before he can finish Erik has flung himself at him because he will not accept ridiculous out of his mouth, because that was her word--don't be ridiculous, but I am ridiculous she would always say, they killed his father and his mother and finally his sister and he has no reason not to knock a flimsy table aside and try to bury a sharpened butter knife in Schmidt's throat.
Schmidt breaks three of his ribs and returns him to his barracks, saying only: "I will find out how this happened, Erik."
Schmidt is angry too, and Erik believes him. Ruth didn't die at his order. At someone else's, then. He will kill them as well.
Schmidt is swift about it. Only two days later, Erik is ushered back and placed in a room with a man and a snip of barbed wire. Schmidt tells him, this man--and he looks at him with such distaste, Erik knows this to be true--thought I had too many pets. And wanted to humble me, a bit. So, Erik. Enjoy yourself.
He flexes the wire as the man stands terrified. The wire is floating, after all.
"I could make this quick," Erik says, "But you killed my little sister."
It's not quick. Schmidt comes to him in a room of viscera and smiles, asks how it felt, and Erik, who is clenching barbed wire in his palm, says: "Right."
*
What Ruth, and Erik, and Schmidt don't know, is that if she were older, perhaps twelve, she would have been able to save herself.
The bullets would have turned to falling petals before Erik could even touch them, and Schmidt would have clapped, delighted, and Erik would have looked sick--but Schmidt would have sequestered her away in a cell, away from gas or gun, and kept her alive. There would have been torment, but she would have been alive.
Erik would free them both, eventually. He would never leave her. They would run together, or just Erik would, snatching her up when she was too tired, and Ruth would have made their trail impossible to follow, mixed and muddled. Eventually they would have collapsed, panting, Erik clutching her to his chest.
"I'm going to kill him," Erik would have said.
"I'm coming," Ruth would have told him.
And since the last time he thought she was somewhere safe he was so horribly wrong, he would take her. It's her vengeance, too. It's her loss as much as his, her pain, her emptiness.
But with two of them, it gets better. Ruth would Erik not all is lost, good things can survive, there is hope even in impossible places--she never would never speak any of that, never would think to, he just would see it in her. Just like in Erik she would see that strength remains in the world, that there is love still, no one may touch the purity of their hearts.
One day, Erik would have smiled again and said: "You're being ridiculous."
Ruth would have been so, so ridiculous. Because she was alive and it could be done. She could be ridiculous again.
Like when, after Erik would be torn from the water, she would use the power of Charles' mind to say damn it, Erik, shut up and do what he says.
Charles would have been enchanted, loved her immediately and thoroughly, although differently from her brother. Ruth would have approved of this.
The students would have loved her.
But none of this happens.
*
What Ruth has is only a light unfurling when she dies. It doesn't save her. But it was powerful, in soft ways, even barely born.
Her sparrow breaks her wing on the window of a kind, lonely man, who is delighted when the bird he nursed back to health nests in his very yard when he set her free. He leaves plenty of food for her and her two chicks, guards his garden from predators, and loves watching them from his window. They thrive. Her two chicks, male and female, fledge and go free.
They, too, are incredibly lucky. They live a long time and nest often. They never face real danger and neither do their offspring. Almost no sparrow dies of old age, but they do, like their mother. And this luck travels. Their offspring always thrive. They survive almost everything. Every generation is blessed.
Erik has no idea, but by the time he leaves Europe he is always around at least one of Ruth's sparrows. They adore him for no reason they know, and since Erik is determined but not heartless--well. Let little birds love him for no clear reason. He puts it down to stillness and they eat from the palm of his hand. He meets Magda with a sparrow on his fingers, a sparrow that stays.
Even in America--people bring birds, occasionally. Sparrows flutter on Charles' estate. He has plenty of birdseed, plenty of space that he keeps all predators from. So the sparrows prosper. When Charles is adored--they adore him too, and if he naps in his wheelchair he often wakes to sparrows at his feet. He always has something to feed them with. Charles loves sparrows. Charles loves everything, and it makes the sparrows happy.
*
A soul cannot be flown by wing. A soul goes--wherever it goes.
But Ruth loved Erik so much.
She doesn't leave him a soul. Instead:
Lorna, eldest, is so strong. Her rebel mother was somewhat bemused by a bird at her window so often, but--why not? At least she had something to look at. Lorna is eldest and hums with the power Erik shares, which has nothing to do with metal. They are survivors, the best kind, and the sparrows go. She doesn't need them.
Pietro is impossibly quick, because--go, go, go, go back or go forward but don't stay here. But because Pietro is a good brother, he usually is going back. Back to save his sister, back to save everyone, back to protect and right wrongs and be so good in his way. Pietro can move through time, when he finds it in himself. Correct things that sparrows can't.
Wanda. Wanda has a light unfurling that will save her life.
Her heart is good and it is so, so easy to love Wanda. To love her, to love all she does. Wanda is protected by anyone who has even a sliver of a heart: so easy, to love her. Every band of oddities she joins strives to protect her. But in the end, Wanda--every world is a choice. But only she knows where they are. So they think they save her and don't remember how she saves them. The sparrows guard her mostly delicately.
Years and years later, Wanda thinks: thank you.
No need to address it. They've been talking for a while, she knows her niece. Not in her time, not in hers, but--they have somewhere else. There, there are sparrows, a little girl named Ruth, and promises.
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: R
Summary: Ruth Lehnsherr almost could have survived.
Notes: Major, major Holocaust triggers. This is my field of study (genocide scholar), but...if anything in here seems wrong, to anyone, please comment.
Erik's past is a number on his arm and a direction he must travel.
No one thinks or dares to ask: what else was it? Not even Charles. Damned Charles, who said everything and meant it.
Charles, of course, knows Erik used to have a little sister too.
*
Ruth, they said, would be safe. She would be smuggled to freedom and renamed--her, then Erik. They couldn't go at once together or both to the same place. But their parents loved them desperately and Erik promised to find her again anyway. Like a fool, Ruth believed him. No. Like a six year old girl, she believed her eleven year old brother.
They were both small. The ghetto stunted them, tiny things, but to her he looked tall when he pointed to Ruth when asked which child they were taking first: her, she's hungry. Then, softly, because he was a good boy: please, miss.
They took Ruth away and called her Anya, and for a while--a year, a whole year, nestled in with a sweet grandmother who pretended she belonged to a long lost daughter, Anya was safe. Anya gained weight and grew taller, although she didn't go to school, and her grandmother Sofia kept her safe and fed and loved. Ruth had a grandmother, too, before. But she had stayed in Dusseldorf and that meant she was dead. Ruth cried, but Anya played quietly at her grandmother's feet. She had to do this to survive, and like most people she did want that. They had no news of her family, but nestled in Sofia's arms she--Ruth and Anya--told herself that they were safe too. After all of this they would be together, Sofia too, and they would be all right.
They shot Sofia in the kitchen.
*
Erik always thinks he sees her, in the camps, for the flash of a second. Everyone with family whose fate is unknown does this. You see them, because your own mind will destroy you if it can, and at least if you know--you know, they are in this horror with you, and that is worse, or they're dead and that is so much better. But if you don't know, you see them everywhere. He sees her at a distance, or at work. In someone's arms or by herself. Tiny, helpless Ruth, who is always six in his mind even if she must be older now. Erik long since stopped caring about time.
He sees her everywhere. He doesn't hope she's alive. That hope is too insane and brave for this place, to hope she is alive and free--because being here is death, but slower. Worse death. Because they kill you before your body, and Ruth has no chance. She could never--
No. Erik hopes it was quick. A bullet or a shower where the gas was cranked high. It was quick and she doesn't have to die like him. Die before her body.
He sees her everywhere. So when he really sees her, he can't believe it.
*
Ruth is on a train and knows it's not taking her back, ever.
She should die, so quickly. She should die in some way she doesn't know but feels in the shuffle of the line she is split into, but men--no, not men. Nazis. These are not men. If they make her nothing she will refuse them as well, and that's a spark in her heart, maybe the last. They killed her grandmothers. So. Nazis. They take her from the line and say her name, and she answers it, afraid, and sees a man holding what may be a photograph standing aside. Smiling.
No. He is a Nazi. She is terrified of his smile, either way. But Ruth is put in a different line. They cut her hair and tattoo her arm, and the last is the worst because Jews don't do that. No good person does. But at seven she is perceptive enough to know that they aren't supposed to be people anymore. Her arm hurts and infects, lightly, but her number remains readable.
*
Erik's healed perfectly.
He is accorded--certain privileges. For one, no one is supposed to shoot him. He wishes they would, but they don't. He is struck only so much. He is fed enough to be healthy. When he is sick he is treated. So. Erik is alive, in a sense.
One of his workmates, new, snarls at night after Erik returns and goes to bed: "Hello, pet. Glad to see you back. Do you fuck him? I can smell--that must be lamb. Are you his little whore, you--"
"Shut up," says the man who is the son of a rabbi.
Another man asked how he could call himself that. His father was dead. You were the son of a rabbi. You were, but now you're not. The man had smiled--he had smiled, after everything they did, although his smile was agony. He said, I'm alive. As long as I am and I know my father is with God, I am the son of a rabbi.
People with real faith left are the hardest to kill, Erik has noticed. He doesn't think he envies them, but he's been dead for a while.
"Why?" The man above snarls. "Why, do you want to fuck him t--"
"He knew what he was doing, when he worked. None of us did. They send him to the hospital, not a house. We'll all be dead in about six months. We won't have to do this anymore, or live with it. Don't envy him. Don't hate him. They'll make him live with this." The son of a rabbi is quiet. "Erik, how long--"
"A while," Erik answers, with closed eyes.
The silence--
The silence isn't comfort, or an apology. But it isn't pity or hatred, either. So. The next six months, he will not be so tormented. Every six months, they kill everyone but Erik. Every six months, it starts over.
*
Ruth is so easy to love that she is never entirely abandoned. She is tiny and inexplicable, here, and these walls and fences are filled with mothers of dead children and sisters of dead siblings, and their empty arms yearn for her. She is so easy to love, even terrified, and so she is never totally alone. And yet. And yet.
There is always a little extra for her. Not from the women who ache to be her mother (because is alive and it hurts so much, so much) who have nothing to spare, but from them. The Nazis. A little more in her bowl. A scrap of bread. Fewer beatings. These keep her alive, but no one, especially not her, understands why. They don't pity children here. They kill them. So why? Why is this done? But Ruth is pretty.
"If they take you," a women says, "Go. Do what they say, and don't cry. They don't like crying."
Ruth hears: if you don't do what you're told, you'll have to do it anyway, and you'll cry, and it will be bad for you.
All Ruth used to know about what they mean was the creak of her parents' bed, sometimes. The creaking always lulled her back to sleep, thinking they were rocking each other, like Erik did to her when she had nightmares. He always said she was ridiculous, but he held her tight and protected her anyway. Brothers do that.
Now, she knows better. Not from herself. But they take girls from bed with screams or only little, heartless sighs, and sometimes they don't wait. So Ruth knows a lot more now than she used to. She wonders if she'll scream or sigh, if it happens. Decides she'll make no sound. Knows this is a lie: she'll scream, then cry. But she can pretend.
She is loved, so much. There is no place for that here when you can't even know how to survive yourself, but so many of them have stopped caring. No one but her in this part of the camp is under fourteen, at least officially. She is what they latch their broken hearts to, and Ruth--Ruth loves them all back. She does, as hard as she can. The Nazis want to make her not a person, but she is. She is. She is a person and she loves as hard as she can.
*
"We should smother her," a girl close by her says. She must think Ruth is asleep. Ruth has that kindness in her, to think the girl thinks she is asleep. "Look at her. She can't make it. Do we want to starve her to death instead? Have her raped and shot? They won't question it. She's so small."
None of her mothers say a word. Ruth knows not all of them are asleep, but she forgives them. People wonder how she stays so good but--she's not good. She just knows she's going to die no matter what she does, and she's young enough to believe that after dying is a better place to be. Anywhere is better than this. So it's easy, actually, to seem good, when good is only thinking that she will see her brother again.
"If you try it," a woman above says, quietly--one of the Jews who is a Communist too, Ruth knows her voice, double dead, "I'll kill you first."
"Why?" It's not a cruel question. Ruth is wondering too. She forgives the girl close by her.
"Because when we kill our children, we're exactly what they say we are." This is part of the truth, she can tell, but not the whole thing.
They become closer. Especially when Ruth really does sleep and--the girl close by, sometimes people just die. Or they don't just die. She knows, she should feel guilty or even angry, but she clutches the hand of a woman named Sarai and never, ever wants to let go. Sarai is going to die. Especially when they put a pink triangle on her and Deenah. But Ruth wants her to live. She wants all of them to live. But Sarai catches some disease and dies anyway, and Ruth can barely be around because she does have to work. She risks the fever--because who does it matter to, anymore?
Sarai does die. So does Deenah. So does almost everyone. All of them but her. She is still loved. She doesn't deserve it.
*
Today, Erik is deflecting bullets. Deflecting is easier than catching, and it isn't as if collateral damage is even in Schmidt's vocabulary. So, he's trying. Erik has not always cooperated, but eventually you become exhausted, as a child, and by eventually he means immediately--you cannot cope with harm to others. Even if they aren't your mother. Erik is actually quite easy to make behave. So today he is trying to deflect bullets from a dummy and is just horrifically, unspeakably grateful it isn't a human body.
Except Erik can't do this. They're too fast. He can't slant them aside no matter what tactic he tries, gritting his teeth. But at least, at least--
Schmidt sighs and Erik doesn't allow himself to shatter, because he knows that sigh. He must be even stronger. He braces himself, closes his eyes. Concentrates.
"Erik?"
No.
"Erik!"
No.
Her tiny arms (skeletal) clasp around his waist, and all he can think is: no. No. No. Not screaming, like he did once. Just no. No. No. As flat and hollow as his heart. This is not happening. He refuses this happening. No, no, no.
"Erik, I missed you so much--" and he hasn't cried since mother but he cries now, tearing her off the floor and into his arms which cannot keep her safe, and he realizes Schmidt is gone. He is gone and left two bowls of soup, and Ruth is so light in his arms. Oh, God.
He is going to kill his little sister after the half hour Schmidt gives for eating.
He is going to kill--
No. No. No. He is not who he was when their mother died. He is Erik now. He is someone whohas done unspeakable things and he is not going to kill her. He wished her dead for so long but she's here, clutching him, and Erik won't let her die a second time. No, no, no. Not her. Not her. They can't have her like this.
"Ruth," he chokes out, "You need to eat."
He lets her be sick after she finishes her bowl of soup, hating himself for not thinking of how small her stomach was now--but oh, God, she was so small, he was desperate to press life into her. They can't have her. The next bowl, his but he didn't need it, she ate slowly. He rubbed her back and--Ruth. It was her. Perhaps he had seen her, but now that she was here and breathing he couldn't wish she was dead. He's going to do this. He's going to save her.
"Good," he says, quietly, when she keeps it down.
"I love you," Ruth says, crying, and oh, God. If there is one left. You will not make him kill Ruth, you will not, will not--
It feels like Schmidt is gone for seconds. But it's always half an hour. Erik wants to clutch her and tear out of this place, but he knows what his captor can do. And he knows that he can't save Ruth, except--he will. Damn everyone. He will. She will breathe as long as he does.
Erik flawlessly sends every bullet away from his sobbing, frightened little sister. Every one. When it's over Ruth rushes to embrace him and babbles, disconnected but so beautiful because she's alive, he did this, his little sister is alive and crying at him and--and still, he distrusts, because he isn't an idiot. He's right when they take Ruth away and Erik feels like they took the scraps of his heart too. But Ruth is alive. He made her eat and he deflected bullets. Ruth is alive and, suddenly, so is he.
*
Before all of that, Ruth watches a sparrow.
It's down inside a lavatory, which reeks and burns her eyes. The bird seems worse off, affer bumbling in here. Ruth thinks: I could eat it. If I kill it. I want to live as much as a bird does, but I don't have wings. Before, Ruth would have cried at hurting a bird. Been sick at eating it raw, like she thinks of now.
But now she catches the sparrow, despite claws and beak. Despite wings. She will kill it and eat it and live a little longer--except. Does she really want to live as much as a bird wants to live? She strokes its so soft feathers and thinks: no. I don't want to, anymore, and a sparrow has more to live for than me. And Ruth can't kill it. There is so little alive in here that even her stomach can't stop her from carrying the sparrow out and throwing it to the sky.
But not before she whispers to its back, putting maybe all that is really left of her hope into it: go find Erik and take--part of me with you, this part. This part that wants you to be free, the part that is still me, still a person, still Ruth. Go, go, go, go fast, go back or forward but don't stay here, please. Please, sparrow.
For a moment before it's gone she is terrified the barbed wire will snake up and snatch down her bird--she saw, once, a woman try to throw her baby over a bit of fence. Stupid, because a baby had nowhere to go and anyway the other side was actually only more camp. They were about to shoot the women. Ruth knew, sick in her heart, the woman wanted her child to have even seconds more than her. But she didn't throw hard enough, high enough. The baby screamed until the Nazis shot it. Ruth thought later: what baby could have survived such a fall, anyway? If you wanted to kill it just smother it, so tiny, can't last--Ruth thinks sometimes they should kill her, but she doesn't know how to ask or kill herself without hurt. And she still doesn't really want to die, which is awful. She wants to live even here. Even like this, even if dying is better. It's awful. But she wants it, even if not as much as a bird.
What Ruth, and Erik, and Schmidt don't know, if that if she were older, perhaps twelve--
*
Erik is with the other Sonderkommandos when he finds her, which means only one thing.
He is used to death, in a way. These corpses are no different or less pathetic than the last, and the last time he did this he had thought it must be such a relief. But now he has Ruth to think of.
Erik is going to escape with her, he has decided, that or outlive this with her. He is alive because she needs a living brother and she is alive, herself, and she is the only thing Erik has left in this world. He can't remember how old either of them are, but he knows five years is between them and she is so small that it frightens him. One bowl of soup she could hold down means nothing. Schmidt has said she is earmarked as immune to summary execution or the gas, she is not to be killed, but Erik knows this place better than Schmidt. That's not good enough. There are so many other things--she can't outlive, he decides, sick in his heart. But they will escape. He'll find a way, to hell with it, even if they die leaving he keeps a bit of his promise--
But he turns another naked girl over and she stares at the ceiling.
No, he thinks. Not over and over. Just once. He knows it's her instantly, he gets no moment of confusion before loss. It's her, he knows, and the only thing he doesn't understand is why. Schmidt has never been anything but scrupulously honest with Erik. He has kept every promise he's made, but here Ruth is. He doesn't understand because they both know Ruth made him perform brilliantly in his outrage. He doesn't understand that he simply--can't understand. Not a thing.
"You knew her," says the son of a--his name is Levi, Levi, and now Erik will remember this forever because between the two of them no one else touches Ruth until they burn her. Between them, Ruth's eyes are closed, and she is not shoveled into the furnace, she is carried. Erik did none of this with Levi for his father. But Levi does it for him. After, when work is done, Levi says he will pray for her.
"Ruth," Erik can rasp, "Ruth Lehnsherr, she's my sis--she was--"
"Go to bed, Erik."
In a month Levi will be dead. Erik will be here. Ruth is already gone. Why are the best dyimg while Erik survives?
They take him to Schmidt that very night. He sits, still and unmoving, as he looks at the bowl of stew set for him. He took two bites that tasted like ash and set down his spoon. He breathed in his sister today, he must have. Some little piece of her, a fragment of what she was reduced to a cinder.
"Erik, don't you like your dinner?" Schmidt chides.
"You could have," Erik says, softly. Perhaps Ruth makes his tongue soft.
"What?"
"You said," Erik goes on, "You weren't going to have her killed. But I burned her today. You could have kept her alive, and you didn't."
"Erik, don't be ridicu--"
Before he can finish Erik has flung himself at him because he will not accept ridiculous out of his mouth, because that was her word--don't be ridiculous, but I am ridiculous she would always say, they killed his father and his mother and finally his sister and he has no reason not to knock a flimsy table aside and try to bury a sharpened butter knife in Schmidt's throat.
Schmidt breaks three of his ribs and returns him to his barracks, saying only: "I will find out how this happened, Erik."
Schmidt is angry too, and Erik believes him. Ruth didn't die at his order. At someone else's, then. He will kill them as well.
Schmidt is swift about it. Only two days later, Erik is ushered back and placed in a room with a man and a snip of barbed wire. Schmidt tells him, this man--and he looks at him with such distaste, Erik knows this to be true--thought I had too many pets. And wanted to humble me, a bit. So, Erik. Enjoy yourself.
He flexes the wire as the man stands terrified. The wire is floating, after all.
"I could make this quick," Erik says, "But you killed my little sister."
It's not quick. Schmidt comes to him in a room of viscera and smiles, asks how it felt, and Erik, who is clenching barbed wire in his palm, says: "Right."
*
What Ruth, and Erik, and Schmidt don't know, is that if she were older, perhaps twelve, she would have been able to save herself.
The bullets would have turned to falling petals before Erik could even touch them, and Schmidt would have clapped, delighted, and Erik would have looked sick--but Schmidt would have sequestered her away in a cell, away from gas or gun, and kept her alive. There would have been torment, but she would have been alive.
Erik would free them both, eventually. He would never leave her. They would run together, or just Erik would, snatching her up when she was too tired, and Ruth would have made their trail impossible to follow, mixed and muddled. Eventually they would have collapsed, panting, Erik clutching her to his chest.
"I'm going to kill him," Erik would have said.
"I'm coming," Ruth would have told him.
And since the last time he thought she was somewhere safe he was so horribly wrong, he would take her. It's her vengeance, too. It's her loss as much as his, her pain, her emptiness.
But with two of them, it gets better. Ruth would Erik not all is lost, good things can survive, there is hope even in impossible places--she never would never speak any of that, never would think to, he just would see it in her. Just like in Erik she would see that strength remains in the world, that there is love still, no one may touch the purity of their hearts.
One day, Erik would have smiled again and said: "You're being ridiculous."
Ruth would have been so, so ridiculous. Because she was alive and it could be done. She could be ridiculous again.
Like when, after Erik would be torn from the water, she would use the power of Charles' mind to say damn it, Erik, shut up and do what he says.
Charles would have been enchanted, loved her immediately and thoroughly, although differently from her brother. Ruth would have approved of this.
The students would have loved her.
But none of this happens.
*
What Ruth has is only a light unfurling when she dies. It doesn't save her. But it was powerful, in soft ways, even barely born.
Her sparrow breaks her wing on the window of a kind, lonely man, who is delighted when the bird he nursed back to health nests in his very yard when he set her free. He leaves plenty of food for her and her two chicks, guards his garden from predators, and loves watching them from his window. They thrive. Her two chicks, male and female, fledge and go free.
They, too, are incredibly lucky. They live a long time and nest often. They never face real danger and neither do their offspring. Almost no sparrow dies of old age, but they do, like their mother. And this luck travels. Their offspring always thrive. They survive almost everything. Every generation is blessed.
Erik has no idea, but by the time he leaves Europe he is always around at least one of Ruth's sparrows. They adore him for no reason they know, and since Erik is determined but not heartless--well. Let little birds love him for no clear reason. He puts it down to stillness and they eat from the palm of his hand. He meets Magda with a sparrow on his fingers, a sparrow that stays.
Even in America--people bring birds, occasionally. Sparrows flutter on Charles' estate. He has plenty of birdseed, plenty of space that he keeps all predators from. So the sparrows prosper. When Charles is adored--they adore him too, and if he naps in his wheelchair he often wakes to sparrows at his feet. He always has something to feed them with. Charles loves sparrows. Charles loves everything, and it makes the sparrows happy.
*
A soul cannot be flown by wing. A soul goes--wherever it goes.
But Ruth loved Erik so much.
She doesn't leave him a soul. Instead:
Lorna, eldest, is so strong. Her rebel mother was somewhat bemused by a bird at her window so often, but--why not? At least she had something to look at. Lorna is eldest and hums with the power Erik shares, which has nothing to do with metal. They are survivors, the best kind, and the sparrows go. She doesn't need them.
Pietro is impossibly quick, because--go, go, go, go back or go forward but don't stay here. But because Pietro is a good brother, he usually is going back. Back to save his sister, back to save everyone, back to protect and right wrongs and be so good in his way. Pietro can move through time, when he finds it in himself. Correct things that sparrows can't.
Wanda. Wanda has a light unfurling that will save her life.
Her heart is good and it is so, so easy to love Wanda. To love her, to love all she does. Wanda is protected by anyone who has even a sliver of a heart: so easy, to love her. Every band of oddities she joins strives to protect her. But in the end, Wanda--every world is a choice. But only she knows where they are. So they think they save her and don't remember how she saves them. The sparrows guard her mostly delicately.
Years and years later, Wanda thinks: thank you.
No need to address it. They've been talking for a while, she knows her niece. Not in her time, not in hers, but--they have somewhere else. There, there are sparrows, a little girl named Ruth, and promises.