[fic]
Title: fibrosis
Fandom: XMFC
Word Count: 4000
Rating: Mature-ish.
Pairing: Erik/Charles, Schmidt/Torture
Warnings: Please see previous line.
Disclaimer: Mr Lehnsherr etc are the property of that there Marvel thing.
Summary: A life in scars. I know you’re not supposed to make self-deprecating remarks in your summary but JESUS THIS ONE WENT BADLY.
sole of the foot, shaped like a penny
The floors of this house were uncarpetted. To young Erik this was not unusual, though in the last house there had been a threadbare rug which, on days when Frau Stern had polished the floorboards, could be used as a means of very fast and rather dangerous transport from one side of the room to the other. In this house, Herr Bachmeier never polished his floorboards or came above the door to the third bedroom at all; Herr Bachmeier did his best to pretend that the Lehnsherr family were not living in his house, and the Lehnsherr family did their best to pretend they were not there either.
The walls of this house were undecorated, like every house that Erik had lived in but one; that house in the saddest, darkest part of Düsseldorf had been bare on the walls all over, except just behind Erik’s spot on the bed he and his parents slept in, there was a name scratched into the plaster with some sharp implement. A nail, perhaps.
The name read: Anne Kossel. Some one before him had wanted this tiny scrap of the world to remember her, and defied some punishment to announce her presence on the dust-stained wall of a back room. Erik had dug out the letters E. M. L. out of the fading plaster with his thumbnail, just below her name.
This house was silent as any house could hope to be, the sounds of Herr Bachmeier and his son’s lives as they were lived seeping upward through the gaps between the walls and the water pipes, snaking up the narrow stairwells to the cold attic full of candle stubs that Erik sat in. Sometimes there were newspapers. Sometimes his father left, quieter than the mice that scrabbled over the dust-strewn floorboards at dusk, and all Erik could hear for hours was the hasty thunder of his heart inside his scrawny chest, as his mother and he stopped up their breath waiting for his safe return.
There was nothing to do in this house but wait. Wait for newspapers. Wait for Tate to come home alive. Wait for the mice to crawl out of their holes and do their insolent rodent jig across the attic because they owned the place for longer and with more authority than the Lehnsherr family owned anywhere. Wait for the sun to come up again and strike off another day of hiding. Wait for the food that Niklas left at the foot of the ladder without knocking or speaking, as if he had simply forgotten about it. Wait for day to follow day, week to follow week, until they would have to leave this place again, as they had left every place before.
Muter drew, sometimes, silly pictures on the newspapers. A pig chewing on the letters, a hen pecking on Der Mittag and leaving footprints across what she said were really the words of Eulenberg, writing as “Der lächelnde Zuschauer”. The pictures seemed to be hiding in the newspaper until her pencil stub found them and coaxed them out, like mice hiding until the smell of paper-wrapped cheese drew them from their boltholes.
In such an empty house full of echoes and silences - Herr Bachmeier was not a wealthy man, and had sold his gramophone long ago - there could be no running about shod, no dancing to any strains of music floating up from the street. There were no doors to swing from (Erik’s favourite pass-time in restless moments), and aside from an almost pointedly-left copy of the New Testament which the mice have made ample use of, there are no books.
Erik removed his shoes, but not his socks, and practiced creeping across the floorboards as silently as a wolf over snow. He timed each step to fall in the rattle of pipes, the coarse cough of asthmatic pigeons on the roof above, smothering the faint sound of his toes on wood with the inadvertent sounds of life that erupted elsewhere without the caution he was forced to employ.
“I will be like the Poles, like the partisans,” he told Muter, as she smiled at his exaggerated sneaking. “I will move through the forest like a shadow.”
Erik had never even seen a forest.
“Like the Poles,” Erik repeated, and he stepped forward in time with the bang of water pipes against the wall below, and stood half-on the floor board and half-on a nail.
Pain like ice water enveloped his foot. In the six years since Kristallnacht he had learned to keep his tongue no matter the provocation, and even now, as his leg jerked him away from the hidden nail, blood soaking through his thin sock, Erik made no sound. He scrunched up his face like an old cloth and he sank his teeth so hard into his lip that this, too, began to bleed, but he uttered nothing more than a hard breath.
Muter took him in her arms so quickly he had no time to fall and make a thump on the boards; she took what little weight he had and slowly, slowly lowered them both until he sprawled across her lap. Muter stroked his face, and whispered that he would make a fine partisan, standing on every nail in the forest until there were none left.
Erik released his lip from his teeth and pretended to laugh. He was afraid in that moment of the strangest thing: his foot would become infected, as all the cautionary tales said - he had trodden on a dirty nail and now he would die of a fever. The fear of death chilled him only a little. Fear that Muter and Tate would be so distraught by his death that they would give themselves away flooded his nerves like a second stormfront of pain, and Erik shivered.
It will be okay, Muter said, stroking his hair. It will be okay.
thin white encircling each wrist, uneven and blurred
“Hello,” Marjam said, crouching beside his head. Erik could not yet bring his eyes into focus, and his skull still rang with the heavy blow. He recognised her voice, hoarse from either shouting or cigarettes, from the hotel. She sounded unamused, and he was sure that the greeting was some form of sarcasm.
His eyes squeezed shut to blot out the pain in his head and force the accompanying nausea down to a manageable backdrop, Erik began to take stock of his situation. From his protesting stomach and the way his hair hung upward from his head, as much as from his overall sense of gravity, he knew he had been suspended upside-down: something soft but tight was wrapped about his ankles, and as he twisted against it his whole body swung back and forth.
His arms were almost numb, dangling even further above - or rather, below - his head, bound so tightly at the wrists that he could not feel his fingers, only a dull pain in his thumbs. Erik could not tell what bit into his skin about his wrists other than it was not metal, and refused to move with the urgent commands he sent to it.
“We’ve heard about you,” Marjam said, and as she exhaled a thick stream of smoke struck his face and coiled into his nostrils unbidden. She did not elaborate on who ‘we’ were, and as Erik finally opened his eyes he was none the wiser as to where he was being held. “Escapologist Lehnsherr. No escape for you this time.”
As the dingy concrete walls with their fondly-clinging creepers swung back and forth, along with Marjam’s inverted features, Erik swallowed his nausea, ignored the pain in his head, and tried to concentrate on his ankles. Dried blood crackled under his nose, and the binding on his ankles gave him no answer; not metal, not wire.
"No idea how I do it?" Erik asked, twisting his head around to try to get her into his line of sight. Marjam stepped back out of his vision and blew more thick cigarette smoke across his eyes, stinging them to tears; Erik raised his eyebrows at this cheap trick, which he conceded must have looked very strange upside down.
“I will be interested to learn,” Marjam said. She must have remained in a crouch, her voice was very close to his head. “I will stand guard until you magic yourself out of your ropes, or a decision is reached on what is to be done with you.”
“All this time looking for me and you still don’t know what to do with me once you’ve got me,” Erik said with a razor-thin smile.
That anyone had heard of him at all was a cold slap to the face: how careless he had become to be captured a handful of times, and to be so elated at his own escape each time that he never stopped to find out who had him captive. So single-minded a pursuit of his goal that he never turned back to look at the devastation lying in his wake, or stopped to consider who might recognise his face, that people talked to one another about the man who escaped handcuffs and tore out fillings.
“We are discussing whether to pull out your fingernails or your teeth,” Marja said, and somewhere behind his head she moved; the cigarette smoke faded away.
“And not both?” Erik tutted. He grimaced at his own poor taste as much as the sudden pain in his wrists: Marjam, he supposed, must have twisted up whatever bound them until it bit further into his flesh.
“You are bleeding,” Marjam said simply.
“Undoubtedly,” said Erik, who had drawn the same conclusion from the faint tickle of something wet running down the outside of his thumb.
“Later today, maybe tomorrow,” Marjam added, releasing the bindings, “you will die.”
Above Erik's head his bound ankles hung from what seems to be a cloth rope; the cloth rope, however, were looped around a wooden beam held in place with metal nails, rusted and tenuous though they might be. The boots upon Marjam's feet were, similarly, blessed with steel toe caps.
"No, I don't think I shall." Erik thought about sharp edges, about knives and the shape they made against puny soft tissues, fabrics and flesh. He thought about the weight and heft of a knife, about the instinctive clustering of molecules to an infinitely sharp edge; he thought, as he swayed gently back and forth upside-down in a concrete building with the smell of cigarettes, Chechen cigarettes, wafting into his nostrils, about the way whetstones created only a fraction of the sharpness that metal was capable of.
When the cloth rope binding his ankles snapped, Erik landed on his back.
The ground was uneven, and his legs, as well as his hands, had gone to sleep, and so it took him a moment to roll onto his knees and begin sawing the tightly-bound, blood-soaked hemp cord from about his numb wrists. His hands had turned an unpleasant shade of purple, but at least Marjam was not likely to interfere.
Her attention was given over entirely to the splinter-thin shards of metal that had once been her boots’ grommets, and which were now acting as nails, thrust through the delicate bones of her feet to hold them down, pinning her solidly to the uneven ground. Marjam swore and whimpered under her breath, trying to pull her feet free without causing herself further pain, but it was clear from her wide eyes and lack of attempt to attack him that she suspected witchcraft.
“Thank you,” Erik said, extending his hand. Drying blood flaked from his skin, and with a loud rip the pocket of Marjam’s coat split. The knife came to Erik’s hand as obediently as a well-trained dog, and nestled there as if it had been made for his fingers and his alone. “I’m letting you live,” he added, pocketing the knife with a curt nod, “but if I see you again I won’t. Understand?”
one thick line down the inside of the left thigh, from groin to knee
Making a monster is not like making a man.
To make most things, one must add things together. To make a man, take a boy and add time and experience, add judgement and intelligence, add heartbreak and a tempering or forging of ambition.
To make a monster, one must take things away.
Klaus Schmidt was armed with a scalpel. He rarely armed himself with anything more; perhaps the impassive tiled walls, the armed guards, the thick leather and canvas weave straps, and the indubitable past experience that Herr Schmidt was capable of backhanding Erik hard enough to knock him unconscious were enough for his sense of personal safety. Certainly Erik had never seen him afraid.
As ever, Erik lay upon a ceramic autopsy table, its rivulets as familiar as the skin on his arms, waiting to lose blood, consciousness, or his temper.
“Guten Morgen, Erik,” Schmidt said with his infernal, unceasing good humour. He held up the scalpel for Erik’s benefit, letting the light catch the blade, and leaned over him with the cheery demeanour of a family doctor or some kindly uncle.
Erik said nothing, because there were no words to turn away Schmidt’s hand, and there were no words to untie him from that table. Schmidt and Erik were tied together by destiny, Schmidt told him, as he told him every morning. Schmidt and Erik were like father and son, really, and it was very silly of Erik to make such a scene every time, to resist so fully. Didn’t Erik know that he was a new and amazing form of life, a human weapon? He was destined to find his way into Schmidt’s hands, and learn how to be strong.
The scalpel was cruel and jagged. It was always blunt, and it was always dirty. This, Schmidt said (as he always said), was to encourage him to defend himself.
“I want you to stand up, Erik,” he said, “I want you to be strong. You have to fight back. That’s the problem with your parents. They just rolled over and let this happen. Like everyone.”
Erik said nothing, because there was a conductive plate pressing his tongue into the bed of his mouth.
“That’s the problem with people, Erik. They roll over and let everyone roll tanks over them. Jews, gentiles, Germans, the Dutch. You’re all the same,” Schmidt sang, as if he was reciting a children’s story. “You just roll over and raise your hands and wave your silly little guns.”
The scalpel bit into Erik’s leg with the ragged enthusiasm of a rabid dog. It was so unmedically blunt that it tugged on his skin as Schmidt thrust it downward, and for a moment as always his skin dimpled and bent but did not break. It tore more than it was cut; the moment of breaking was almost a relief, but it was followed (like always) by the determined ragged sawing through his flesh, and that was no relief at all.
“Of course this can end whenever you are ready, Erik,” Schmidt said, smiling as he cut so patiently through Erik’s thigh like a butcher with an inadequate cleaver wrestling with the carcass of a cow. “All you need do is bend the blade back and stab me in the hand again -”
Schmidt held up his unmarked hand for Erik to see, and waved its pale perfection in front of his straining, pain-teared eyes.
“Oh, I know you can do it, Erik. Pain and anger. Anger and pain.”
Erik closed his eyes and let Schmidt’s vile words pour over him like dirty rain from a broken gutter; bathed in shit, he let all his rage, his crushed and invalidate sense of justice, drain into his muscles and into his fingers. He tried to picture the blunt, dirty blade plunging into Schmidt’s eye.
Schmidt removed his hand from the handle. “Effective. Insane, but effective.”
Erik felt the scalpel pull through his flesh without any fingers to guide it; insane, but effective.
“Of course,” Schmidt said, “you didn’t do what I asked. Until you turn that bit of metal around and stick it into someone else, you’re not getting off that table. I don’t care how many furrows you plough in your own flesh.”
galaxy of raised white points across the backs of calves
When he came to the Promised Land, there was nothing but the fragments of broken promises blowing in the too-hot wind.
They spoke Hebrew; Erik had never learned. He had missed his Bar Mitzvah. After a year under the untender tutelage of Klaus Schmidt he had barely the last remnants even of Yiddish, the languages of pain and of German fully rooted in his mind. He picked it up as quickly as he picked up everything else, but the heat never settled with him. Waking to chapped lips and a warning to stay indoors at noon seemed as absurd as the idea of waking at all, day after day.
A new nation rising to emulate the old is a chaotic beast, and there were jobs to be found almost everywhere, even for awkward, unaccompanied teenage boys whose grasp on Hebrew was still so coloured by Yiddish (learn faster, learn faster) and whose identity as Jewish had been transmuted to Israeli without, as usual, anyone asking him. There were jobs for educated men and women, there were jobs for idiot labourers of the kind he was to become. There were farms to be worked, hospitals staffed, newspapers run, and laws to be upheld (and argued about endlessly).
Erik dug ditches for irrigation, and after a certain amount of effort, he dug them alone.
He’d meant only to join the army because it seemed a better bet than finding himself non-combatant. He was barely old enough, but it seemed The Galilee would be crushed before the settlements had even taken full root, and there was haste to be underway. No one cared that he was not yet familiar with anything more mechanical than a bayonet, and no one commented on how quickly Erik learned to field-strip and assemble his weapons, on how of them all, his guns never jammed, even in the worst conditions.
When the time came he was never sure quite whose artillery had exploded two meters behind him.
The force of the explosion threw him forward and had he not worn such suffocatingly thick clothes might have burned his back, too; Erik rolled as he had been taught and as instinct dictated, and the flames were extinguished.
Later they told him that he was lucky. Extraordinarily lucky, in fact. He had been missed entirely by the metal shrapnel of the shell, sheltered in part by the low wooden fence that lay between the blast and himself, and all that was required of the medic was to fish a thousand fragments of wood out of his muscle and skin.
Erik squirmed in frustration but lay still for the pain; nothing to be gained from hindering the removal of a fence-worth of wooden spurs from his calves. He had to concentrate, for now at least, on not bending the tweezers away from him the way he had learned on Schmidt’s table. Each little, gentle tug on his skin was hot pain, until the tugs became mere drops of water in an ocean of heat.
faint red bumps on the sides of the throat
Charles is aghast, but he should know better by now than to have crawled into Erik's mind in the first place. He claims he can see in Erik what Erik fails to see in himself: "goodness", whatever that mythical quality entails. Erik is certain that good men don't do what he has done, things which are necessary, but never good. Charles has his delusions, but they can hardly be supported by his regular trips around the confines of Erik's brain.
"I will hurt you," he sighs, pulling back as though Erik had uttered the words aloud, although that would have been difficult considering where his mouth was.
Erik releases Charles for long enough to say, "That is the point," as patiently as he can.
Charles shakes his head and toys all too gently with Erik's hair, fanning it between his fingers. "Do you not think you've been hurt enough?"
It's all Erik can do not to roll his eyes. "HARDER," he says emphatically, and he gives no other reply.
The pain long ago became little more than a way of keeping score: each extra agony endured another reminder of the strength he displayed in riding it out.
"Harder."
Of course, it would distress Charles to see this, this other leftover of Schmidt on his psyche, this other thing that has been done to him.
"Harder."
This desire to prove himself through suffering like some medieval Christian martyr is Schmidt's work as surely as his coal furnace of rage, his countless scars, and his mastery over metal.
"Harder."
But the point at which triumph becomes something less salubrious is probably his own doing; Erik feels no need to own it just yet.
“Harder,” he growls, though there will be blood soon if Charles does not release his grip.
“This is obscene,” Charles complains, although there is something in the way he breathes which suggests to Erik that perhaps he isn’t as distraught as he likes to think he is.
“You wanted to fuck me,” Erik says, so direct that Charles winces as if he wasn’t currently in a position no one could call platonic. “This is the price.”
“Price, like some sort of street prostitute?”
Erik starts to laugh, a wheezing rasp at present, and in his amusement he presses his face against Charles’s thighs, learning forward into his fingernails until the skin beneath them parts. “You think I haven’t?”
“I know you have,” Charles says shortly, “but I don’t want you to think of me as - as -”
“Relax,” Erik says with difficulty, “you know I don’t.” He says it with a little irony; were he ever to think of Charles as anything, Charles would know immediately. There is no point in attempting to hide, and so he learns now to be bald and unnervingly honest in his statements instead: I am going to kill Klaus Schmidt. You want to fuck me. This house is too big for merely being lived in. They are ready to fight.
“You’re bleeding,” Charles says, whipping his hands away frantically, as if Erik’s blood is somehow acidic. “You’re bleeding, Erik, I said this was a bad idea.”
Erik unsticks his face from Charles’s thigh and peers upward at him through an obscuring tangle of pubic hair and his own eyelashes. “How would you like it if I stopped before you were ready?”
“You’re bleeding,” Charles reiterates, as if Erik is somehow simple or immune to the notion of his own vulnerability. “This isn’t right.”
“And from what source, exactly, are you drawing your comparison?” Erik sighs, but he sits back and lets Charles go, he sits back onto his own feet, naked, and dabs absently at his throat. There are barely a few specks of blood, and his erection is already withering like a vine kept from the rain.
Charles is dressing huffily. He has a particular talent for throwing on his shirt and pulling on his trousers as an extension of conversation, and the tone of his enrobement is that of affronted morals, which Erik could hardly countenance what with having had his mouth on the man’s decidedly unprotesting cock not ten minutes ago. “You cannot -“
“Make you?” Erik tips his head back to fit his fingers into the red crescent marks and worry at them idly. “No, of course not. Only one of us can make the other do anything.”
“Erik.”
“I only asked,” Erik says, more to himself than to the mostly-dressed man standing by the doorway. “And you complied.”
Fandom: XMFC
Word Count: 4000
Rating: Mature-ish.
Pairing: Erik/Charles, Schmidt/Torture
Warnings: Please see previous line.
Disclaimer: Mr Lehnsherr etc are the property of that there Marvel thing.
Summary: A life in scars. I know you’re not supposed to make self-deprecating remarks in your summary but JESUS THIS ONE WENT BADLY.
sole of the foot, shaped like a penny
The floors of this house were uncarpetted. To young Erik this was not unusual, though in the last house there had been a threadbare rug which, on days when Frau Stern had polished the floorboards, could be used as a means of very fast and rather dangerous transport from one side of the room to the other. In this house, Herr Bachmeier never polished his floorboards or came above the door to the third bedroom at all; Herr Bachmeier did his best to pretend that the Lehnsherr family were not living in his house, and the Lehnsherr family did their best to pretend they were not there either.
The walls of this house were undecorated, like every house that Erik had lived in but one; that house in the saddest, darkest part of Düsseldorf had been bare on the walls all over, except just behind Erik’s spot on the bed he and his parents slept in, there was a name scratched into the plaster with some sharp implement. A nail, perhaps.
The name read: Anne Kossel. Some one before him had wanted this tiny scrap of the world to remember her, and defied some punishment to announce her presence on the dust-stained wall of a back room. Erik had dug out the letters E. M. L. out of the fading plaster with his thumbnail, just below her name.
This house was silent as any house could hope to be, the sounds of Herr Bachmeier and his son’s lives as they were lived seeping upward through the gaps between the walls and the water pipes, snaking up the narrow stairwells to the cold attic full of candle stubs that Erik sat in. Sometimes there were newspapers. Sometimes his father left, quieter than the mice that scrabbled over the dust-strewn floorboards at dusk, and all Erik could hear for hours was the hasty thunder of his heart inside his scrawny chest, as his mother and he stopped up their breath waiting for his safe return.
There was nothing to do in this house but wait. Wait for newspapers. Wait for Tate to come home alive. Wait for the mice to crawl out of their holes and do their insolent rodent jig across the attic because they owned the place for longer and with more authority than the Lehnsherr family owned anywhere. Wait for the sun to come up again and strike off another day of hiding. Wait for the food that Niklas left at the foot of the ladder without knocking or speaking, as if he had simply forgotten about it. Wait for day to follow day, week to follow week, until they would have to leave this place again, as they had left every place before.
Muter drew, sometimes, silly pictures on the newspapers. A pig chewing on the letters, a hen pecking on Der Mittag and leaving footprints across what she said were really the words of Eulenberg, writing as “Der lächelnde Zuschauer”. The pictures seemed to be hiding in the newspaper until her pencil stub found them and coaxed them out, like mice hiding until the smell of paper-wrapped cheese drew them from their boltholes.
In such an empty house full of echoes and silences - Herr Bachmeier was not a wealthy man, and had sold his gramophone long ago - there could be no running about shod, no dancing to any strains of music floating up from the street. There were no doors to swing from (Erik’s favourite pass-time in restless moments), and aside from an almost pointedly-left copy of the New Testament which the mice have made ample use of, there are no books.
Erik removed his shoes, but not his socks, and practiced creeping across the floorboards as silently as a wolf over snow. He timed each step to fall in the rattle of pipes, the coarse cough of asthmatic pigeons on the roof above, smothering the faint sound of his toes on wood with the inadvertent sounds of life that erupted elsewhere without the caution he was forced to employ.
“I will be like the Poles, like the partisans,” he told Muter, as she smiled at his exaggerated sneaking. “I will move through the forest like a shadow.”
Erik had never even seen a forest.
“Like the Poles,” Erik repeated, and he stepped forward in time with the bang of water pipes against the wall below, and stood half-on the floor board and half-on a nail.
Pain like ice water enveloped his foot. In the six years since Kristallnacht he had learned to keep his tongue no matter the provocation, and even now, as his leg jerked him away from the hidden nail, blood soaking through his thin sock, Erik made no sound. He scrunched up his face like an old cloth and he sank his teeth so hard into his lip that this, too, began to bleed, but he uttered nothing more than a hard breath.
Muter took him in her arms so quickly he had no time to fall and make a thump on the boards; she took what little weight he had and slowly, slowly lowered them both until he sprawled across her lap. Muter stroked his face, and whispered that he would make a fine partisan, standing on every nail in the forest until there were none left.
Erik released his lip from his teeth and pretended to laugh. He was afraid in that moment of the strangest thing: his foot would become infected, as all the cautionary tales said - he had trodden on a dirty nail and now he would die of a fever. The fear of death chilled him only a little. Fear that Muter and Tate would be so distraught by his death that they would give themselves away flooded his nerves like a second stormfront of pain, and Erik shivered.
It will be okay, Muter said, stroking his hair. It will be okay.
thin white encircling each wrist, uneven and blurred
“Hello,” Marjam said, crouching beside his head. Erik could not yet bring his eyes into focus, and his skull still rang with the heavy blow. He recognised her voice, hoarse from either shouting or cigarettes, from the hotel. She sounded unamused, and he was sure that the greeting was some form of sarcasm.
His eyes squeezed shut to blot out the pain in his head and force the accompanying nausea down to a manageable backdrop, Erik began to take stock of his situation. From his protesting stomach and the way his hair hung upward from his head, as much as from his overall sense of gravity, he knew he had been suspended upside-down: something soft but tight was wrapped about his ankles, and as he twisted against it his whole body swung back and forth.
His arms were almost numb, dangling even further above - or rather, below - his head, bound so tightly at the wrists that he could not feel his fingers, only a dull pain in his thumbs. Erik could not tell what bit into his skin about his wrists other than it was not metal, and refused to move with the urgent commands he sent to it.
“We’ve heard about you,” Marjam said, and as she exhaled a thick stream of smoke struck his face and coiled into his nostrils unbidden. She did not elaborate on who ‘we’ were, and as Erik finally opened his eyes he was none the wiser as to where he was being held. “Escapologist Lehnsherr. No escape for you this time.”
As the dingy concrete walls with their fondly-clinging creepers swung back and forth, along with Marjam’s inverted features, Erik swallowed his nausea, ignored the pain in his head, and tried to concentrate on his ankles. Dried blood crackled under his nose, and the binding on his ankles gave him no answer; not metal, not wire.
"No idea how I do it?" Erik asked, twisting his head around to try to get her into his line of sight. Marjam stepped back out of his vision and blew more thick cigarette smoke across his eyes, stinging them to tears; Erik raised his eyebrows at this cheap trick, which he conceded must have looked very strange upside down.
“I will be interested to learn,” Marjam said. She must have remained in a crouch, her voice was very close to his head. “I will stand guard until you magic yourself out of your ropes, or a decision is reached on what is to be done with you.”
“All this time looking for me and you still don’t know what to do with me once you’ve got me,” Erik said with a razor-thin smile.
That anyone had heard of him at all was a cold slap to the face: how careless he had become to be captured a handful of times, and to be so elated at his own escape each time that he never stopped to find out who had him captive. So single-minded a pursuit of his goal that he never turned back to look at the devastation lying in his wake, or stopped to consider who might recognise his face, that people talked to one another about the man who escaped handcuffs and tore out fillings.
“We are discussing whether to pull out your fingernails or your teeth,” Marja said, and somewhere behind his head she moved; the cigarette smoke faded away.
“And not both?” Erik tutted. He grimaced at his own poor taste as much as the sudden pain in his wrists: Marjam, he supposed, must have twisted up whatever bound them until it bit further into his flesh.
“You are bleeding,” Marjam said simply.
“Undoubtedly,” said Erik, who had drawn the same conclusion from the faint tickle of something wet running down the outside of his thumb.
“Later today, maybe tomorrow,” Marjam added, releasing the bindings, “you will die.”
Above Erik's head his bound ankles hung from what seems to be a cloth rope; the cloth rope, however, were looped around a wooden beam held in place with metal nails, rusted and tenuous though they might be. The boots upon Marjam's feet were, similarly, blessed with steel toe caps.
"No, I don't think I shall." Erik thought about sharp edges, about knives and the shape they made against puny soft tissues, fabrics and flesh. He thought about the weight and heft of a knife, about the instinctive clustering of molecules to an infinitely sharp edge; he thought, as he swayed gently back and forth upside-down in a concrete building with the smell of cigarettes, Chechen cigarettes, wafting into his nostrils, about the way whetstones created only a fraction of the sharpness that metal was capable of.
When the cloth rope binding his ankles snapped, Erik landed on his back.
The ground was uneven, and his legs, as well as his hands, had gone to sleep, and so it took him a moment to roll onto his knees and begin sawing the tightly-bound, blood-soaked hemp cord from about his numb wrists. His hands had turned an unpleasant shade of purple, but at least Marjam was not likely to interfere.
Her attention was given over entirely to the splinter-thin shards of metal that had once been her boots’ grommets, and which were now acting as nails, thrust through the delicate bones of her feet to hold them down, pinning her solidly to the uneven ground. Marjam swore and whimpered under her breath, trying to pull her feet free without causing herself further pain, but it was clear from her wide eyes and lack of attempt to attack him that she suspected witchcraft.
“Thank you,” Erik said, extending his hand. Drying blood flaked from his skin, and with a loud rip the pocket of Marjam’s coat split. The knife came to Erik’s hand as obediently as a well-trained dog, and nestled there as if it had been made for his fingers and his alone. “I’m letting you live,” he added, pocketing the knife with a curt nod, “but if I see you again I won’t. Understand?”
one thick line down the inside of the left thigh, from groin to knee
Making a monster is not like making a man.
To make most things, one must add things together. To make a man, take a boy and add time and experience, add judgement and intelligence, add heartbreak and a tempering or forging of ambition.
To make a monster, one must take things away.
Klaus Schmidt was armed with a scalpel. He rarely armed himself with anything more; perhaps the impassive tiled walls, the armed guards, the thick leather and canvas weave straps, and the indubitable past experience that Herr Schmidt was capable of backhanding Erik hard enough to knock him unconscious were enough for his sense of personal safety. Certainly Erik had never seen him afraid.
As ever, Erik lay upon a ceramic autopsy table, its rivulets as familiar as the skin on his arms, waiting to lose blood, consciousness, or his temper.
“Guten Morgen, Erik,” Schmidt said with his infernal, unceasing good humour. He held up the scalpel for Erik’s benefit, letting the light catch the blade, and leaned over him with the cheery demeanour of a family doctor or some kindly uncle.
Erik said nothing, because there were no words to turn away Schmidt’s hand, and there were no words to untie him from that table. Schmidt and Erik were tied together by destiny, Schmidt told him, as he told him every morning. Schmidt and Erik were like father and son, really, and it was very silly of Erik to make such a scene every time, to resist so fully. Didn’t Erik know that he was a new and amazing form of life, a human weapon? He was destined to find his way into Schmidt’s hands, and learn how to be strong.
The scalpel was cruel and jagged. It was always blunt, and it was always dirty. This, Schmidt said (as he always said), was to encourage him to defend himself.
“I want you to stand up, Erik,” he said, “I want you to be strong. You have to fight back. That’s the problem with your parents. They just rolled over and let this happen. Like everyone.”
Erik said nothing, because there was a conductive plate pressing his tongue into the bed of his mouth.
“That’s the problem with people, Erik. They roll over and let everyone roll tanks over them. Jews, gentiles, Germans, the Dutch. You’re all the same,” Schmidt sang, as if he was reciting a children’s story. “You just roll over and raise your hands and wave your silly little guns.”
The scalpel bit into Erik’s leg with the ragged enthusiasm of a rabid dog. It was so unmedically blunt that it tugged on his skin as Schmidt thrust it downward, and for a moment as always his skin dimpled and bent but did not break. It tore more than it was cut; the moment of breaking was almost a relief, but it was followed (like always) by the determined ragged sawing through his flesh, and that was no relief at all.
“Of course this can end whenever you are ready, Erik,” Schmidt said, smiling as he cut so patiently through Erik’s thigh like a butcher with an inadequate cleaver wrestling with the carcass of a cow. “All you need do is bend the blade back and stab me in the hand again -”
Schmidt held up his unmarked hand for Erik to see, and waved its pale perfection in front of his straining, pain-teared eyes.
“Oh, I know you can do it, Erik. Pain and anger. Anger and pain.”
Erik closed his eyes and let Schmidt’s vile words pour over him like dirty rain from a broken gutter; bathed in shit, he let all his rage, his crushed and invalidate sense of justice, drain into his muscles and into his fingers. He tried to picture the blunt, dirty blade plunging into Schmidt’s eye.
Schmidt removed his hand from the handle. “Effective. Insane, but effective.”
Erik felt the scalpel pull through his flesh without any fingers to guide it; insane, but effective.
“Of course,” Schmidt said, “you didn’t do what I asked. Until you turn that bit of metal around and stick it into someone else, you’re not getting off that table. I don’t care how many furrows you plough in your own flesh.”
galaxy of raised white points across the backs of calves
When he came to the Promised Land, there was nothing but the fragments of broken promises blowing in the too-hot wind.
They spoke Hebrew; Erik had never learned. He had missed his Bar Mitzvah. After a year under the untender tutelage of Klaus Schmidt he had barely the last remnants even of Yiddish, the languages of pain and of German fully rooted in his mind. He picked it up as quickly as he picked up everything else, but the heat never settled with him. Waking to chapped lips and a warning to stay indoors at noon seemed as absurd as the idea of waking at all, day after day.
A new nation rising to emulate the old is a chaotic beast, and there were jobs to be found almost everywhere, even for awkward, unaccompanied teenage boys whose grasp on Hebrew was still so coloured by Yiddish (learn faster, learn faster) and whose identity as Jewish had been transmuted to Israeli without, as usual, anyone asking him. There were jobs for educated men and women, there were jobs for idiot labourers of the kind he was to become. There were farms to be worked, hospitals staffed, newspapers run, and laws to be upheld (and argued about endlessly).
Erik dug ditches for irrigation, and after a certain amount of effort, he dug them alone.
He’d meant only to join the army because it seemed a better bet than finding himself non-combatant. He was barely old enough, but it seemed The Galilee would be crushed before the settlements had even taken full root, and there was haste to be underway. No one cared that he was not yet familiar with anything more mechanical than a bayonet, and no one commented on how quickly Erik learned to field-strip and assemble his weapons, on how of them all, his guns never jammed, even in the worst conditions.
When the time came he was never sure quite whose artillery had exploded two meters behind him.
The force of the explosion threw him forward and had he not worn such suffocatingly thick clothes might have burned his back, too; Erik rolled as he had been taught and as instinct dictated, and the flames were extinguished.
Later they told him that he was lucky. Extraordinarily lucky, in fact. He had been missed entirely by the metal shrapnel of the shell, sheltered in part by the low wooden fence that lay between the blast and himself, and all that was required of the medic was to fish a thousand fragments of wood out of his muscle and skin.
Erik squirmed in frustration but lay still for the pain; nothing to be gained from hindering the removal of a fence-worth of wooden spurs from his calves. He had to concentrate, for now at least, on not bending the tweezers away from him the way he had learned on Schmidt’s table. Each little, gentle tug on his skin was hot pain, until the tugs became mere drops of water in an ocean of heat.
faint red bumps on the sides of the throat
Charles is aghast, but he should know better by now than to have crawled into Erik's mind in the first place. He claims he can see in Erik what Erik fails to see in himself: "goodness", whatever that mythical quality entails. Erik is certain that good men don't do what he has done, things which are necessary, but never good. Charles has his delusions, but they can hardly be supported by his regular trips around the confines of Erik's brain.
"I will hurt you," he sighs, pulling back as though Erik had uttered the words aloud, although that would have been difficult considering where his mouth was.
Erik releases Charles for long enough to say, "That is the point," as patiently as he can.
Charles shakes his head and toys all too gently with Erik's hair, fanning it between his fingers. "Do you not think you've been hurt enough?"
It's all Erik can do not to roll his eyes. "HARDER," he says emphatically, and he gives no other reply.
The pain long ago became little more than a way of keeping score: each extra agony endured another reminder of the strength he displayed in riding it out.
"Harder."
Of course, it would distress Charles to see this, this other leftover of Schmidt on his psyche, this other thing that has been done to him.
"Harder."
This desire to prove himself through suffering like some medieval Christian martyr is Schmidt's work as surely as his coal furnace of rage, his countless scars, and his mastery over metal.
"Harder."
But the point at which triumph becomes something less salubrious is probably his own doing; Erik feels no need to own it just yet.
“Harder,” he growls, though there will be blood soon if Charles does not release his grip.
“This is obscene,” Charles complains, although there is something in the way he breathes which suggests to Erik that perhaps he isn’t as distraught as he likes to think he is.
“You wanted to fuck me,” Erik says, so direct that Charles winces as if he wasn’t currently in a position no one could call platonic. “This is the price.”
“Price, like some sort of street prostitute?”
Erik starts to laugh, a wheezing rasp at present, and in his amusement he presses his face against Charles’s thighs, learning forward into his fingernails until the skin beneath them parts. “You think I haven’t?”
“I know you have,” Charles says shortly, “but I don’t want you to think of me as - as -”
“Relax,” Erik says with difficulty, “you know I don’t.” He says it with a little irony; were he ever to think of Charles as anything, Charles would know immediately. There is no point in attempting to hide, and so he learns now to be bald and unnervingly honest in his statements instead: I am going to kill Klaus Schmidt. You want to fuck me. This house is too big for merely being lived in. They are ready to fight.
“You’re bleeding,” Charles says, whipping his hands away frantically, as if Erik’s blood is somehow acidic. “You’re bleeding, Erik, I said this was a bad idea.”
Erik unsticks his face from Charles’s thigh and peers upward at him through an obscuring tangle of pubic hair and his own eyelashes. “How would you like it if I stopped before you were ready?”
“You’re bleeding,” Charles reiterates, as if Erik is somehow simple or immune to the notion of his own vulnerability. “This isn’t right.”
“And from what source, exactly, are you drawing your comparison?” Erik sighs, but he sits back and lets Charles go, he sits back onto his own feet, naked, and dabs absently at his throat. There are barely a few specks of blood, and his erection is already withering like a vine kept from the rain.
Charles is dressing huffily. He has a particular talent for throwing on his shirt and pulling on his trousers as an extension of conversation, and the tone of his enrobement is that of affronted morals, which Erik could hardly countenance what with having had his mouth on the man’s decidedly unprotesting cock not ten minutes ago. “You cannot -“
“Make you?” Erik tips his head back to fit his fingers into the red crescent marks and worry at them idly. “No, of course not. Only one of us can make the other do anything.”
“Erik.”
“I only asked,” Erik says, more to himself than to the mostly-dressed man standing by the doorway. “And you complied.”