Warnings for Neo-Nazis, physical assault
"Please state your full legal name for the court."
It was the day of trial. There were a few reporters and interested strangers, but mostly, this was a family affair.
For that, they were grateful- though they knew it would make no difference in the end.
"Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Ludwig Beilschmidt."
He felt the sharp spikes of shock from the reporters and, from the defendants' table, a deep sense of unease. Gilbert caught his eye from behind the prosecutions' side and held their gaze steady.
I'm here, the gesture said. It doesn't matter what happens.
"And your relation to this case?"
"Gisela is my daughter," he replied. "I was the one who saved them."
Further back in the courtroom, the reporters scribbled frantically.
"I'm out of school, Vati. We're at the café now."
Gisela finished the voice message and put her phone away.
"He really wants you to check in all the time?" her friend asked, taking another donut hole out of the box they'd bought.
"Just when I've gotten somewhere. He used to want it all the time, but my uncle made him stop."
"Hm," Budur replied, and brushed some of the white powder from the donut off the hanging end of her hijab. "Well, I'm glad my parents don't make me do that, Zell."
She just shrugged in response.
"It's not that big a deal. And it's kind of nice, I guess. What do you think of me using makeup?"
"What?"
"I was thinking," Zell said. "It's Unity Day tomorrow. I thought I could do some kind of heavy mascara, some red here-"
She swept a finger across her upper eyelid.
"And some gold up here."
A swipe underneath the brow ridge.
"I'd have to actually buy some, but that's okay. I just wanted to do a little thing, you know, not like wave a flag around or something."
"You'd look good do it do it!" Budur exclaimed.
Her friend smiled and gestured out the window.
"You know where to get that stuff around here?"
"We'll find somewhere," Budur promised as Zell tipped the donut hole box to look inside.
"You ate all the powdered ones!"
Their search for a store that sold makeup sent them some blocks from the café, with entirely no success.
"Why is makeup so hard to find?" Zell grumbled. "Doesn't everywhere sell it?"
"We just need to find a supermarket somewhere," Budur told her. "It's Berlin- there should be one nearby. Cities have everything."
They stopped for a while and looked around, trying to orient themselves. Zell gave up after a few moments and took out her phone to get a map and text her father that she was 'looking around downtown'.
The red line on the map to the nearest supermarket had them going another two blocks and turning left into an intersection before doubling back up the larger avenue half a block.
"That's stupid," Budur declared, recognizing the intersection as a high-traffic area.
"Come on, short cut," Zell decided, heading for the smaller road between the two blocks on the way to the designated turn. "No intersection this way, and we'll just have to cross the street."
They turned onto the narrower connecting road and saw the crowd at the other end. Trading a glance, they got closer to look. As they approached, the noise of the crowd grew. There were a few angry yells, undecipherable at first, but as they grew in volume-
"Glatzen!"
"Rechtsextremisten!"
"Faschos!"
Budur started to slow.
"Zell, the police are out-"
Beyond the crowd, from the street, a flag appeared, bearing the Prussian eagle in a black cross.
Zell grabbed Budur's hand and began backing up.
"I think it's a National Democratic Party march let's go-"
They retreated to the other side of the street, where they would be out of any potential line of sight the marchers had, and stayed close to the storefronts for the marginal feeling of protection it offered.
"I didn't know there was supposed to be a march today," Budur said quietly.
"Unity Day is tomorrow," Zell reminded her. "I guess they're capitalizing."
The street was empty, everyone else nearby caught up in the march. When the bell on the door of an antiques store they were walking past rang as it opened, they paid it no mind until they were dragged inside.
"Your statement, please," the judge said, ignoring the reporters and the eager, sometimes almost hungry looks on the faces of the attending public not associated with the press.
The defense was working itself into a quiet frenzy. Germany could hear them; tail ends of their thoughts whispering in his mind.
"I was at work," he began slowly, thinking over his words as he pieced them together. Truth was necessary in a court room, but a disaster for privacy; and anything he said was going to be questioned, later, as humans doubted what they'd never seen and couldn't experience. "I was speaking with the Chancellor when I felt Gisela start to panic."
There was nothing quite like the bond between a Nation and their citizens; and nothing so close, so intimate, as the ones they had with their children.
Citizens lived at the edge of their thoughts, ebbing and flowing in intensity on the tides of public opinion, growing stronger in pace with the ease of communication and the flow of ideas, issues and causes seized for a week or two before being relegated to those truly devoted to them.
It was impossible to ignore; but it was familiar, a comfort. Background noise; distinguishable from personal thoughts in all but the most exhausted states and early moments of waking, dreams and flights of fancy.
With practice, and age, and physical proximity- eye contact, most cases- it was simple to tune into the mind of a particular citizen, the internal dial turning and sorting through the static to run one stream of conscious, one life story, in fast-forward parallel to their thoughts.
Their children- their true children, the citizens they'd raised and known every day of their lives and sometimes beyond, not the mass of life that compromised the body politic whose social bonds laid the framework of a Nation's existence- there was no tuning out. Physical distance didn't matter- they were always there, their emotions the wall paint and draperies where their fellows were the dog barking outside, the car driving by, the business of the neighbors. Thoughts were carefully ignored, blocked and locked away before reaching the level of conscious acknowledgement; no one better than a Nation for knowing the sacrosanct nature of 'private'; 'personal'; 'individual'.
It was a bond open both ways, parent to child, child to parent, the mortals open to sharing the sharp sting of disappointment, the horror and fear of betrayal, mental arms open for comfort and the utmost feeling of safety, a nudge of acknowledgement and the warm wash of love.
Death would shatter the bond, death or the utmost renunciation of the other- on the children's part, their existence free of dependence on the identities of others.
So when, in the midst of a short, nearly social conversation with his Chancellor, Germany was momentarily overcome with fear panic terror adrenaline help me save me please, and had to grip his superior's desk for support while the concerned questions about the state of his health barely registered; there was one place it could have come from, and a Nation's fine sense of self-preservation met and melded with a parent's protective instincts, impossible to ignore.
"Ludwig? Ludwig?"
His head was clearing as his mind adjusted to the emotional intensity spilling over. Nia, Heinrich- no; Gisela.
He waved the Chancellor off and leaned against the desk, trying straining to pinpoint his eldest daughter's location-
A step and he could be there-
But where-
"Deutschland-"
The destination was half-formed in Ludwig's mind but he pushed away from the desk regardless, the risk of a reprimand for leaving when he was about to be ordered much less of a problem than staying and listening, being caught, helpless, hopeless against the human elected by the very people he depended on for survival to own him surer than any slave.
The front of the antique shop passed in a disoriented blur by speed and shock. Zell was struggling as she and Budur were dragged behind the counter and into the back room. Blackness exploded in her vision as her head was slammed against the wall and she was released to stagger and fall against packing boxes, trying to grab them for balance as they collapsed under her weight, unable to stand herself from the dizziness and ringing in her ears.
The woman who had grabbed her wiped her hands on her pants, as though to scrape off dirt; and nearby her two companions still had Budur, the man trying to tear her hijab off as she screamed and clutched at it curling up defensively against the woman trying to grab her and force her down.
The woman stepped back for a moment and returned with a flexible metal stake in hand, meant for posting signs on and sticking by the roadside somewhere. It whistled through the air and Budur shrieked when it landed, the sharp end tearing through her sleeve and skin.
The room wasn't spinning quite so much and the fast angry thwsss-smack-thwsss-smack of the stake against flesh was clearer in Zell's ears now and she tried to move towards her friend but the woman who'd grabbed her came back with a box cutter.
The short blade slashed through the air and cut into the skin just too far back to catch the edge of her eye and dragged down, dipping into her eye socket but missing anything vital before tearing out down her face to corner of her nose. The pain was excruciating, overwhelming, and Zell screamed louder than Budur was as the gash started to bleed and poured red down her face. The shine on the blade was gone now behind the blood but it was coming back and this time she raised her arms and turned her head to block her face, but the woman was stronger and pulled her arms down and away and Zell was left scrabbling and clawing at her attacker's jacket and shirt as the large muscle in the side of her neck was cut through, sending agony screaming through her and drowning out everything else but the cool metal she'd found sticking from the woman's waistband and closed her hand around.
"I felt for where she was, to find out where I had to go to get to her, and I went. When I arrived, they had both been assaulted-"
It was like filing paperwork, casualty reports, glancing over the field doctor's erratic and hurried notations on time and cause of death.
"-Ms. Benici whipped with a metal sign stake and bleeding from the cuts and on her scalp where one of her attackers had torn off her headscarf and some of her hair in the process; my daughter gashed around the face and neck with a box cutter and concussed from being slammed into the wall; both of them bruised where they had been grabbed."
Paperwork was impersonal and even events that had been witnessed in horrifically minute detail could seem distant and detached when buried and sterilized under official constraints but testimony was not, no matter how hard he tried to keep it to the diction he'd memorized decades ago in tents behind the front lines; and he could feel the anger and loathing and hate from the day creeping back.
Zell pulled the gun out and discharged it once into the woman's gut before she could use the box cutter again.
The kickback jarred her shoulder and sent more searing pain through her neck as she tensed against the force and she pulled the trigger again, not aiming at all just trying to get the woman away from her.
The other two had frozen at the first gunshot and there were a few silent moments-
-Budur curled up on the floor.
-Zell shaking and deaf from the noise.
-the others watching, waiting to see if the gun would be turned on them.
-the woman dropped the box cutter to the concrete floor of the storage room and slowly reached for the wall, collapsing onto it before she could brace herself.
"Kameltreiber," she hissed before her breath gave out, a lung succumbing to some unseen damage from the hole in her chest Zell's second bullet had made. Her legs folded under her and she pitched forward, blood streaming out from under her jacket and down the back of her pants.
The other woman took one look at the shock settling across Zell's face and the way her hands shook uncontrollably and abandoned Budur, lifting sign stake higher as she approached, unnoticed by the girl on the floor who couldn't tear her eyes away from what she'd done.
Instinct took over where conscious thought hadn't managed to go, and Ludwig was at his daughter's side before he'd properly thought about it, staring straight at a neo-Nazi who was quickly faltering to a stop at the sight of the man who had materialized suddenly.
Eye contact-
Kunigard Wexler, Neuhaus am Rennweg, twenty-eight, too angry with the police to join the march-
A man's yells of pain and frustration provided background to Germany's quick probe of the woman wavering between advancing and running; caught in the uncertain discomfort of a citizen given their Nation's undivided attention.
He put a hand protectively on Zell's head, trying to dispel of some the shock seizing her up with his presence.
Kunigard ignored the doubt she still felt about confronting him as he demonstrated his side, and tried rushing him.
It took relentless training in agility to come close to beating a Nation in reflexes; and there was never a human born that could match for speed or strength. Ludwig's fist and Kunigard's face met, and it was her face that gave with a wet crunch as nose bridge and upper jaw broke on impact. She careened out of the way and tripped over some unpacked goods, sending them to the floor along with her.
Rudolf Langenberg, twenty-five-
Information about the second attacker, being thoroughly kicked about the knees by the girl he was attacking, came unbidden as Ludwig stepped behind him and caught the man in a grapple, dragging him away. Rudolf tried his best to escape but it was little more than an uncomfortable inconvenience for Ludwig, who kicked his legs out from under him and forced him down to kneel on the floor, tightening his grip enough that the man whimpered in pain at the display of strength.
"I am going to let you go, and you will stay down," Ludwig growled to him. "If you don't, I will make you."
He let go and Rudolf tried to scramble away. Germany grabbed the back of his coat, threw him to the ground and pinned him there with one arm. He took out his phone.
1-1-0
"Police-"
"This is Ludwig Beilschmidt calling from 0151-1811871 at Franz-Klühs-Straβe 49 to report an assault on my daughter and her friend. They have been beaten and badly slashed. One of their attackers has been shot twice and another has a broken jaw and nose."
"Mr. Beilschmidt please stay on the phone, officers should be arriving shortly. I know they attacked your daughter, but I need to you to stop the bleeding on the one who was shot-"
"I don't think that is advisable. I'm restraining the third attacker at the moment and would have to inflict more bodily injury to keep him from escaping if I let him go."
"Sir-"
There was a muffled call of "Police!" from the store area as officers detached from crowd duty on the march arrived.
"In the back!" Germany called, and returned to the dispatcher. "The officers have arrived. May I end this call?"
The door opened and officers entered, fanning out into the room.
"Yes, sir," the dispatcher responded, and Ludwig hung up, returning the phone to his pocket.
Two officers came to claim Rudolf and Germany stood, doing a quick sweep of the room. A female officer had handed Budur her hijab back and was trying to persuade her to keep it off until the EMTs arrived to look at her head. More officers were IDing Kunigard and the woman who had been shot, doing their best to staunch the bleeding.
"Miss, could you please put the gun down-"
"Don't arrest me don't arrest me please I wasn't-"
Ludwig pushed past the officers around his daughter took over for the officer who was applying pressure to the gash on Zell's neck. He held her close, and she dropped the gun.
"You're safe now, cara," he told her softly, doing his best to reinforce his words through the citizen bond. "You're going to the hospital, and everything will be sorted out afterwards. I'm here; I'm right here."
Zell grabbed his suit jacket and huddled against him.
"Helen Janson had already been shot by the time I arrived, but Kunigard Wexler and Rudolf Langenberg were still attacking Ms. Benici. I stopped them, then called the police and left with my daughter in the ambulance to the hospital."
"Is this your full statement, Mr. Beilschmidt?" the judge asked.
"It is."
"Prosecution," the judge called.
The lawyer Germany had hired to represent Zell and Budur stayed seated.
"No questions," he replied.
"Defense."
The lawyer on the opposite side of the room came out from behind her table.
"…You are, truly, the Nation of Germany?" she asked.
"I can present you with my identification card for the United Nations if you wish," he replied.
"No, that's-"
She stopped herself and redirected.
"The attack on your daughter and Budur Benici occurred during a short period of time, by your own admission. How is it that you arrived from an entirely different district of the city within such a short time frame?"
Germany rose. The judge began to order him back into his seat, but before the syllable was out of his mouth, Ludwig was standing before the defense lawyer.
"Like that, Mrs. Wetterman," he replied, hands clasped behind his back.
It took her a few moments to properly collect herself.
"And- you say you 'felt' your daughter panicking-"
Ludwig fixed her with a look. It silenced her immediately.
"'What the hell is he doing the bastard nearly killed me with shock just appearing like that it's not natural he's I didn't how the fuck that's mine stay away get away what if he can-'"
"Stay out of my head!" the lawyer screamed at him, thoroughly unnerved and terrified at the violation of a personal boundary she had never had to be protective of before.
Germany blocked the hand she tried to shove him away with.
"A Nation is given life by the collective identity of their people, Annaliese," he told her. "Knowing the thoughts and feelings of Germans is as natural and effortless for me as existing is for you."
"No more questions!" she snapped, and hastily retreated to her seat.
"You may return to your seat, Herr Deutschland," the judge told him.
The EMTs arrived and took them all out to the ambulances, where the police had set up another, smaller line to handle the crowd gathering to see what was going on. Rudolf was taken directly into a squad car that sped off- Kunigard and the shot woman were taken off in separate ambulances.
Ludwig rode with Zell, now clutching at his hand; and Budur, who had refused to be out of sight of her friend. She hid her face with her hijab for comfort while an EMT attended to her wounds.
At the hospital, Ludwig lent her his phone so she could call her parents and tell them what had happened while Zell's face and neck were stitched up. It made him dangerously furious to watch, to think about what had been done to his daughter, so after Budur was done he went out into the hallway and phoned the Chancellor to inform him that he wouldn't be returning to work that day and likely wouldn't show up tomorrow either; then a call to Gilbert to tell him he had to pick up his niece and nephew from school and a quick message in Feliciano's voicemail that laid out the bare facts and asked him to come to Berlin as soon as he was free.
The doctor called him back into the room when the stitches were done, and Ludwig waited with Zell while the doctor explained the procedure for changing the gauze bandages wrapped around her neck and what to watch out for as signs of something gone wrong. One of Budur's parents came and took her home while Ludwig was dealing with the medical paperwork and giving contact information to the police.
When they were done, Ludwig didn't even bother considering public transportation- he just walked them straight from the hospital room into the front hallway of their house.
"Vati," Nia complained, rushing to her father. "Onkel Gilbert-"
She stopped and stared at her older sister, stitched and bandaged and pressed up against their father's side.
"I know, kleine, Gilbert came and got you and not me," Ludwig said, brushing a hand over her hair. "Zell got hurt and I had to be at the hospital with her."
"What happened?"
"Later," he promised. "After Babbo comes over."
Nia perked up.
"Babbo's coming!"
"Ja. Go back to your brother."
Nia dashed up the stairs to the big second-floor landing and scrambled into the chair that let her look down at the door, waiting for Feliciano to appear.
Ludwig took Zell into the living room and sat her down on the couch, grabbing a blanket as he joined her and wrapping them both up in it. Zell leaned into him and he laid halfway down, cradling her.
"My face hurts," she whispered.
"I can get you some painkillers-"
"No," she said. "Don't leave."
They were silent until footsteps suddenly started in the hall.
"In here Feli," Ludwig called.
Feliciano appeared next to the couch and gave them each a kiss in greeting before he started murmuring reassuringly to their daughter in Italian as he clambered atop both of them, Ludwig adjusting a little so he could hold them both and keep Zell from being squished.
They settled in more-or-less comfortably together in a warm pile, breathing the same air and just being, until Zell spoke again.
"I… I shot someone; and I'm not sorry," she said in a very small, scared voice. It came out slowly, like it had to work its way out from the depths of her mind.
"That's okay cara," Italy told her softly. "They were trying to hurt you and you know when it's not okay to shoot someone. You're fine."
Zell started crying quietly and he started humming to her, and they spent the rest of the night on the couch together, loving in company.
Zell turned to watch him from the prosecution table as Ludwig went back to his seat. He smiled at her slightly, and gave a tiny nod.
She smiled back hesitantly and returned her attention to the judge, who was calling on a witness from the police who had responded to the 110 call.
Heinrich huddled against his side, bored and confused. Nia amused herself making faces at Gilbert, who made them right back.
Ludwig reached for Feliciano's hand and the other took it, dropping his head down to rest on his husband's shoulder. They watched the judge and the defense thoughtfully, sparing a moment to give Budur's parents, who were still trying to come to terms with the sudden revelation about the nature of their daughter's friend's family, short reassuring smiles.
The trial was a show and they all knew it. The judge's sentencing on the defense was inevitable given the evidence and testimony, and its deliverance warranted nothing more than slight relief that it was over.
Everyone was dismissed and Zell came straight to them. Some of the reporters' camera people snapped pictures of the family hug.
Gilbert interposed himself between them and his family.
"Thank you, Meinrad," he told their lawyer, shaking his hand.
"My pleasure, Mr. Beilschmidt," the man replied, and was set upon by the Benicis, from whom he had to once again refuse any form of payment, even as a gift, restating earlier replies about Germany covering all legal costs and that he was really in need of no more money.
Feliciano had a small, insistent child hanging off each hand.
"I think we should go, Ludovico," he told Germany as Prussia advised the Benicis and Meinrad, who'd finally caved and accepted an offer of dinner, to leave the courthouse out the back. "The twins are hungry and if we stay the press is going to swarm us."
Ludwig looked down at his daughter, in his arms.
"Are you ready to go, cara?"
She nodded, but didn't say anything.
Budur grabbed Zell as the other was getting her coat.
"You never said-" she trailed off, gesturing hopelessly at Germany.
Zell shrugged her coat on.
"It's not something we really spread around, Budur," she told her friend. "Things get awkward, and you have to do a lot of explaining, and people are obnoxious, and they don't have a lot of privacy in the first place. It's better to just not."
"I-"
Budur still looked lost.
"Can I ask about it, or is that obnoxious and awkward?"
Zell thought about it as she zipped up her coat.
"I know you," she after a moment. "So it might be okay."
"I'll call you then, okay?" Budur asked, backing away as she noticed familiar signs that her mother wanted to leave.
"Yeah."
Rudolf Langenberg was the only one out of the three to be well enough to actually attend their trial. The police were trying to escort him out, but he was having none of it.
"We did this for you!" he yelled, furious. "This is Germany; you are ours! You can't just give up and let people take you from us- you have to show them what will happen if they try, you have to make an example-"
Feliciano watched in concern as Ludwig tensed up across the shoulders, the stiffness straightening his spine and spreading down his arms; his fingers curling as fought to keep from forming fists.
Rudolf shook the police off and dashed over. Feliciano shooed the twins back between the courtroom benches towards Zell before he could reach them, and stood guard over the entrance.
Germany had a thousand things to say to him; a hundred thousand hurtful furious things about bigotry and genocide and death and history and ruined lives and people running scared through streets and villages and forests fleeing and willful ignorance as ghetto walls rose and people were stolen from their homes and trains chugged softly in the night towards urban death camps and others were killed where they stood where no one could hear and orders never questioned or silent disagreement as soldiers committed war crimes-
But as he turned on Rudolf, the man took in his Nation's fury and looked sadly, longingly, pleadingly at him; heartbreak on his face and in his voice.
"You're so close to perfect," he whispered.
And Ludwig froze, thoughts grinding to a halt as well as his breath, for a moment, and he stared blankly through him.
Gilbert slid up next to them and grabbed the back of Rudolf's head by his hair and got up in his personal space, forcing the man's head back to look at him.
"You're a fucking pig," he spat, sneering as he tightened his grip. "Stay the hell away from my family-"
He shoved Rudolf away, sending him stumbling back into the custody of the police.
"-and stop using my Eagle while you're at it."
Feliciano walked straight over to Ludwig, completely disregarding the press and the public and the police, grabbed his husband's face firmly, and pulled him into a kiss.
He could feel the tremors starting as Ludwig's mind started to function again, thinking back to that word; the men who had looked him up and down and seen a validation of their ideas, of an ethnic stereotype a thousand years old; who had taken the technical aspect of the idea of the physical representation of a people into the singular, an individual, and used the form it took to help justify their own ends.
And called him perfect, perfekt.
"Bellezza mia, amore mia," Feliciano whispered against Ludwig's lips, coaxing, stroking his face. "You belong to me. You are mine as much as I can make you so; and they can't take you from me."
Ludwig moved closer, to hold him tightly, and Feliciano wrapped his arms around the other's head as it dropped to his shoulder.
"I love you, I love you, I'm here…"
Ludwig inhaled sharply, and moved away. There were still some worrisome things Feliciano could see lurking behind his eyes- but outwardly, to others, he was fine.
"You've just ruined our respective public relations," he muttered, eyeing the press.
Feliciano leaned into his side and grabbed one of his husband's arms, wrapping it around his waist.
"Our bosses can take care of it," he said dismissively, reaching a hand out to Zell. Their daughter took it, and then Heinrich hesitantly grabbed her other free hand, and Nia attached herself to Ludwig while trying to get her Babbo's attention, and Gilbert slung an arm over his brother's shoulder for a moment and ruffled his hair before pulling everyone into a group hug- Nia giggling happily in the middle; Zell with her eyes closed, trying to wind down now that the trial was over; Heinrich trying to find a way to hug everyone at once, earnestly but unsuccessfully; Ludwig losing the dregs of his tension, if not his trepidation; and Feliciano smiling softly.
"C'mon," Gilbert told his family, breaking the hug. "We're done here. Let's go."
Author's Notes
Faschos (German): Fascists
Glatzen (German): Skinheads
Rechtsextremisten (German): Extreme right-wingers
Kameltreiber (German): Ethnic slur for Turks/Arabs
Perfekt (German): Perfect
Bellezza mia, amore mia (Italian): My beauty, my love