Author's note: This is the first fic of a planned series, and I should explain where it comes from. My favorite CD in my (modest) music collection is Simon and Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. Listening to it can make me cry, if I'm in the right mood. And it's beautiful. Etc etc *insert more gushing here*. Anyway, it's my favorite, and I've thought in the past that it might be interesting to build a fic project around it somehow. Then I saw Inglourious Basterds recently for the first time and things seemed to fit- so here goes. It's kind of a challenge for myself. There are 12 songs, so 12 shortish fics will be coming. They will be related and chronological, but (I think) will be able to stand alone as well. Plots that I have in mind now tend to be Donny- and Wicki-centric, but this may change as I write. Feedback welcome- I've never written in a WWII setting before at all, so this is rather new to me.

Rating: T for violence and lots of bad language, including ethnic slurs, etc. Possibly sexuality, smoking, and/or drinking in the future, but none at the moment.

Here we go…

You Can Tell the World

Oh, you can tell the world about this,

You can tell the nation about that.

Tell 'em what the master has done,

Tell 'em how the gospel has come,

Tell 'em how the victory's been won.

The first time they did it was nerve-wracking.

Sgt. Donny Donowitz could still remember how it had felt. The fluttering nervousness in his stomach as they waited. The anger that was there, too, as the jeep came around the bend and he heard the four Gestapo agents in it speaking German, chatting easily to each other, laughing. This was different than Italy. This time, it was just him, and Lt. Raine, and seven other men, and they were fuck-knew-how-many miles behind the enemy lines, and they were there to be cruel. They were there to scare the living shit out of the krauts, and it started now.

Right now.

On the road, the jeep slowed, the tone of the German voices changed. They had seen Wicki, up ahead, waving them down. Wicki spoke the language, so he was the bait, for today.

The jeep ground to a halt, gravel crunching under the tires.

Wicki said something. The officer in the passenger seat answered back, a question. And from the bushes, Raine gave the signal.

After that, Donny wasn't nervous anymore.

He didn't really remember closing the distance between the bush he had been crouching behind and the jeep. He did remember grabbing the officer in the passenger seat by the shoulders and hauling him bodily over the top of the door, and kneeing him in the head on the way down. He remembered Lt. Raine taking on the driver- he had grabbed the man by the sandy brown hair, yanked his head back, slit his throat, and then reached over and shut the jeep off all in the same motion, in the blink of an eye. The driver slumped forward, gurgling and twitching. Donny went for the nearer man in the back seat, but Omar and Kagan were already yanking him out, and Zimmerman and Smitty were taking care of the guy from the front seat.

That left one more German in the back, a thin, clerkish-looking man. Raine opened the door on that side and hauled him out too, his hands and sleeve sticky with the blood of the driver. The kraut fell to his knees, hands up, gibbering in fear, and Donny paced around the jeep to stand over him with his gun, and he had gloated- yeah, he had gloated and felt satisfied to see the guy practically shitting his pants.

How many Jews had that one killed, after all? Or shoved onto trains to die?

In the end, of course, Raine had let him go. Let him go with a broken wrist (courtesy of Raine himself), and likely broken ribs (courtesy of Donny), and the sight of his comrades being scalped burned into his mind (courtesy of Smitty, Omar, and Zimmerman, and all sloppy, messy jobs, as it was the first time they'd ever done it), but let him go. And he went, crying and limping down the road the way they had come from. The Basterds stripped the uniforms from the bodies, to use later, took everything they might need from the jeep, and somebody carved Fuck You Krauts, and a Star of David or two, into the paint on the jeep's hood, and that was their first mission, accomplished.

They felt good. Proud. Keyed up, laughing over nothing in the aftermath of it. Wild and unstoppable. It wasn't until after that that Donny started preferring his baseball bat to all other weapons, or that Raine took up carving swastikas into the foreheads of the chosen survivors, but that was the start of it.

They were here. They had done this. They were Jews, and they were basterds, and they were going to keep doing it, all the way to Berlin if they fucking had to.

And that Gestapo asshole, cradling his limp wrist and breathing around the pain of cracked ribs, could go tell the world.

Next up: Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream