Demons 2a/3
Title: Demons (2a/3)
Author: Alsike
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss, some Emily/Pietro Maximoff
Rating: NC-17 - Not just for sex.
Warnings: War, violence, threat of rape.
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds
Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Word Count: 5750 (all of Part 2)
Summary: Part 2 of Emily is a spy in WWI story. There is no actually historical accuracy intended in this. I’ve had this part written for a while, but it needed editing, and I woke up this morning and realized that it was September and my semester-hell has started, and I had totally planned to finish this over the summer. I have failed. So instead of working on Old Irish, or Syntax, or Sanskrit, I edited this. I hope it is, uh, coherent. (Part 2 in 2 sections on LJ, one part on DW)
Part 1
“Look,” Emma said. The papers from the briefcase were spread out over her lap, the soldier’s pistol at her side.
The spy blinked once or twice. It was probably possible to tell if she had memory loss based on what she did once she was fully awake. Emma waited. Her eyes focused on the papers, and in a jerk she was sitting up, searching for her derringer. Her hair was a wild clumped mess from the half-assed job at cleaning it, and the silk blouse she wore was rumpled and gaping open, exposing the smooth curve of too perfect - too usable - tits. Emma sat back, hand on her pistol, and waited for her to realize that she didn’t have a weapon, and she wasn’t in any place to protest about her briefcase being opened.
“Look,” Emma said again, more sharply this time, leaning forward slightly to spit the words. The woman glared, hatred vivid in her eyes. “I needed to know if I could trust you. Sometimes one person has to take the first step, and you weren’t in any position to stop me from making it you. So relax. You said you’re an English spy,” she gestured to the papers. “You’re a fucking English spy, congratulations.”
“You had no right-”
“I had every right. You’re sleeping in the same room as my children.”
The spy’s eyes flicked away. Emma followed her glance. Rebecca was cowering away from the fight. Jennifer was sorting through a meager pile of supplies, but looking over, looking worried. “So what are you going to do with me?” The spy asked slowly, her voice half a growl.
Emma’s hands shook, but she didn’t look away. This was stupid, but if this woman was right… “Two things. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years. I know the woods and mountains; I know the area. And the front is less than two miles away.” She shook her head. “You could hear them, couldn’t you?”
Emily nodded.
“You made a stupid mistake coming here. You can get across the border, fine, but you don’t get across no man’s land.”
“I was planning on heading north for a bit. I wasn’t planning on getting caught and staying here.” The spy cursed. “I don’t have time for this.”
“I see that.” Emma piled the papers up and started binding them together. “Then I’ll take you tonight.”
The spy’s head shot up and her eyes widened. “What?”
“If we can make it to the foothills, there’s a pass, it’s hidden, screened by forest. I should be able to get you through. But it runs close to the German outpost. If I take you, as a soldier, we might not die if we get caught. At least not right away.” She didn’t think about what could happen before then. If she did, she’d never step out of the catacomb. She had survived it once. Dying might be more merciful.
“You would do that?”
Emma shrugged. “If you can end this, it’s worth it.” She glanced over towards the alcove where Robert’s body lay. “It’s worth it.”
xXx
It was a grey day. The girl, Kitty, stood guard by the churchyard gates. Kurt and the nun did most of the digging. Emily offered to help, but Emma spat at her, telling her to rest her head and stop being an idiot. She sat in the grass, next to Jennifer, who sponged clean Robert’s face and hands. The littlest girl, Rebecca, watched curiously.
“Why is he so cold?”
“He’s dead, darling,” said Jennifer, hardly looking up from her scrubbing. “He won’t go to God with dirt under his fingernails,” she had said firmly.
Emily had been surprised, and then less surprised when she had heard Emma snort, a foot deep in the grave. “Not that he ever had clean fingernails in his life.”
“Is he in heaven?” asked Rebecca.
“Of course.”
“Are there sandwiches in heaven?”
“All sorts.”
“Oh,” Rebecca looked concerned by this. “Why does he get to go to heaven? He always used to tease me.”
The dead boy was blond and lanky, but one leg looked mangled and infected. Emily considered it. They probably didn’t have the tools for amputation, though if Emily could imagine anyone amputating a child’s leg with only a butcher knife, it was that nun.
They were three feet into the grave now, Kurt pausing to rub his blistering palms. He glanced over, meeting Emily’s gaze.
“I never liked him much,” he said in faintly accented French. “But he was better after we pulled him out, less of a bully. He used to say he wanted to be a soldier, but after… after the bombing, he said he wanted to be a priest.”
“He worried about his parents a lot,” added Jennifer. “But I suppose God manages, even if the only burial you get is under a pile of brick.”
It had started to rain by the time Kurt and Emma finished digging. There was no coffin. They wrapped the boy in one of the black habits and Emma passed him down to Kurt who laid him gently in the hole. Then he swung himself out.
Everyone stood as the rain kept falling, and waited. But the nun didn’t begin.
Emily watched her. Her face was vivid with brokenness. She breathed, her chest moving heavily, as if she could hardly manage it.
Whatever sort of demon she was, she was only human with these children.
Emily moved closer to the grave. She looked down at the black bundle on the dampening earth. All that hard work scrubbing too…
“How long will you vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words?”
Emma looked up, her eyes wide and suspicious. But she nodded, slowly.
“Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. God has barred my way so I cannot pass, and he has set darkness in my path. He has stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. He has destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope he has removed like a tree.”
She took a breath, and the children were watching her. They were frowning mostly. Translating it into French was hard enough; she had read it in English, so long ago, as literature, not religion. She didn’t know the Latin. Their French was good, but imperfect. Kurt bent his head, his eyelids pressed to his cheeks, and his lips moving. It looked like he was remembering the Latin as she spoke.
“He has kindled his wrath against us, and he counts us as his enemies. His troops come together, and rise up against us, and are encamped around about our home. He has put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My bone cleaves to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
And then, with the next few words, another voice joined hers, singing the Latin, as if this was the right passage. As if there truly could be hope out of anger.
“Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God has touched me.”
“Miseremini mei, miseremini mei saltem vos, amici mei, quia manus Domini tetigit me.”
The rain softened, a dribble of mud running down into the grave, and the body sank into it, slipping away.
“Why do you persecute me thus, God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?”
“Quare persequimini me sicut Deus, et carnibus meis saturamini?”
The next words rang out clearly as Emily spoke them, but there was no beam of sunlight, no sudden peace, just the distant sound of gunfire.
“But I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”
“Scio enim quod redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum.”
They waited, but Kitty made no cry of warning. The gunfire died away. Jennifer and Kurt picked up shovels and started filling in the hole. Emily took Kurt’s shovel. He had already dug the whole thing, he didn’t need to fill it as well. The last of the grave was filling up. The rain had stopped, but the sky was grey.
Emily fell silent. She did not say the last of it, she could not. But she could see in the slight nod from Kurt and the cold glance from Emma, that they knew what it was, and knew why she had not said it.
The voices died away, and there was silence, not the cry of a bird, not even the burst of distant gunfire.
Be afraid of the sword: for wrath brings the punishments of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.
xXx
They risked a fire, Jennifer heating up a saucepan of dirty water, and all the children stripping off their wet clothes and wiping themselves with warm wet rags. Emily helped dry the littlest one, getting her bundled into dry clothes once she was warm.
Rebecca sat in her lap and played with her hair. “Tell me a story,” she commanded. Emily closed her eyes, shaking her head slowly.
“I don’t know any stories.”
“You knew that story. I didn’t understand it though. Tell me a better one.”
“Rebecca,” Emma came over and lifted the girl off of Emily’s lap. “Go and ask your sister for a story. It will be easier to follow if it’s not in mediocre French.”
Emily glared at her. “My French is not mediocre.”
The nun laughed and handed her a bowl of heated cabbage and catmeat stew. It still looked vile. “It’s very… Parisian.”
“So’s yours.”
“When I want it to be.”
Emma settled onto the stone with her own bowl and they sat in silence for a while.
“Job,” she said, finally. Emily watched her and wondered if she should say that she only spoke the words she read in the nun’s face, in her hollow, broken sorrow.
“It seemed… relevant.”
Emma’s eyes were unexpectedly soft, and Emily felt guilty. She had thought that perhaps this woman was worse than she was. Her anger and the violence that ensued were too raw, too desperate, and the truth of her anger showed that she was pure in a way Emily could never be. Emily didn’t need anger to be cruel; she didn’t need broken children, and burials where she couldn’t overcome her tears. She was told to kill and she did it. It made her sick to be around this woman. Sick of herself.
xXx
“If I’m not back, you know what to do.” Emma said, as she took Kurt’s shoulder. He looked her in the eye, nodding carefully. He was upset, but he was brave. He had always been brave. He had the rifle, and he would protect everyone. “And if you need to run, just run. I’ll find you. I will not find you dead.”
Emma finished putting on her jacket. The bloodstain was merely a dark shadow now. Her belt, her cap. The spy watched her. “It’s not really a disguise, is it? You are a soldier.”
Emma whirled on her. How dare she say that? “I am not. There are no soldiers on my side!”
But Emily didn’t react to her anger, she just watched. Emma looked down at herself, at her own dirty hands. Perhaps she was right. This world held nothing but sin and pain, and she was no different. She would never be free of her own crimes. But it wasn’t the same. She shook her head.
“I’m no soldier,” she said. “If I kill, it’s because I chose to. I will never allow myself to be used to commit another’s sin. My own are enough for me.”
The spy flinched at that, as well she should. What was a spy but a hand without a heart? The woman turned away, knotting her blood-soaked hair up into a neat cosmopolitan style.
xXx
Part 2b
Author: Alsike
Pairing: Emma Frost/Emily Prentiss, some Emily/Pietro Maximoff
Rating: NC-17 - Not just for sex.
Warnings: War, violence, threat of rape.
Fandom: X-Men/Criminal Minds
Disclaimer: Not my girls.
Word Count: 5750 (all of Part 2)
Summary: Part 2 of Emily is a spy in WWI story. There is no actually historical accuracy intended in this. I’ve had this part written for a while, but it needed editing, and I woke up this morning and realized that it was September and my semester-hell has started, and I had totally planned to finish this over the summer. I have failed. So instead of working on Old Irish, or Syntax, or Sanskrit, I edited this. I hope it is, uh, coherent. (Part 2 in 2 sections on LJ, one part on DW)
Part 1
“Look,” Emma said. The papers from the briefcase were spread out over her lap, the soldier’s pistol at her side.
The spy blinked once or twice. It was probably possible to tell if she had memory loss based on what she did once she was fully awake. Emma waited. Her eyes focused on the papers, and in a jerk she was sitting up, searching for her derringer. Her hair was a wild clumped mess from the half-assed job at cleaning it, and the silk blouse she wore was rumpled and gaping open, exposing the smooth curve of too perfect - too usable - tits. Emma sat back, hand on her pistol, and waited for her to realize that she didn’t have a weapon, and she wasn’t in any place to protest about her briefcase being opened.
“Look,” Emma said again, more sharply this time, leaning forward slightly to spit the words. The woman glared, hatred vivid in her eyes. “I needed to know if I could trust you. Sometimes one person has to take the first step, and you weren’t in any position to stop me from making it you. So relax. You said you’re an English spy,” she gestured to the papers. “You’re a fucking English spy, congratulations.”
“You had no right-”
“I had every right. You’re sleeping in the same room as my children.”
The spy’s eyes flicked away. Emma followed her glance. Rebecca was cowering away from the fight. Jennifer was sorting through a meager pile of supplies, but looking over, looking worried. “So what are you going to do with me?” The spy asked slowly, her voice half a growl.
Emma’s hands shook, but she didn’t look away. This was stupid, but if this woman was right… “Two things. This is my home. I’ve lived here for ten years. I know the woods and mountains; I know the area. And the front is less than two miles away.” She shook her head. “You could hear them, couldn’t you?”
Emily nodded.
“You made a stupid mistake coming here. You can get across the border, fine, but you don’t get across no man’s land.”
“I was planning on heading north for a bit. I wasn’t planning on getting caught and staying here.” The spy cursed. “I don’t have time for this.”
“I see that.” Emma piled the papers up and started binding them together. “Then I’ll take you tonight.”
The spy’s head shot up and her eyes widened. “What?”
“If we can make it to the foothills, there’s a pass, it’s hidden, screened by forest. I should be able to get you through. But it runs close to the German outpost. If I take you, as a soldier, we might not die if we get caught. At least not right away.” She didn’t think about what could happen before then. If she did, she’d never step out of the catacomb. She had survived it once. Dying might be more merciful.
“You would do that?”
Emma shrugged. “If you can end this, it’s worth it.” She glanced over towards the alcove where Robert’s body lay. “It’s worth it.”
xXx
It was a grey day. The girl, Kitty, stood guard by the churchyard gates. Kurt and the nun did most of the digging. Emily offered to help, but Emma spat at her, telling her to rest her head and stop being an idiot. She sat in the grass, next to Jennifer, who sponged clean Robert’s face and hands. The littlest girl, Rebecca, watched curiously.
“Why is he so cold?”
“He’s dead, darling,” said Jennifer, hardly looking up from her scrubbing. “He won’t go to God with dirt under his fingernails,” she had said firmly.
Emily had been surprised, and then less surprised when she had heard Emma snort, a foot deep in the grave. “Not that he ever had clean fingernails in his life.”
“Is he in heaven?” asked Rebecca.
“Of course.”
“Are there sandwiches in heaven?”
“All sorts.”
“Oh,” Rebecca looked concerned by this. “Why does he get to go to heaven? He always used to tease me.”
The dead boy was blond and lanky, but one leg looked mangled and infected. Emily considered it. They probably didn’t have the tools for amputation, though if Emily could imagine anyone amputating a child’s leg with only a butcher knife, it was that nun.
They were three feet into the grave now, Kurt pausing to rub his blistering palms. He glanced over, meeting Emily’s gaze.
“I never liked him much,” he said in faintly accented French. “But he was better after we pulled him out, less of a bully. He used to say he wanted to be a soldier, but after… after the bombing, he said he wanted to be a priest.”
“He worried about his parents a lot,” added Jennifer. “But I suppose God manages, even if the only burial you get is under a pile of brick.”
It had started to rain by the time Kurt and Emma finished digging. There was no coffin. They wrapped the boy in one of the black habits and Emma passed him down to Kurt who laid him gently in the hole. Then he swung himself out.
Everyone stood as the rain kept falling, and waited. But the nun didn’t begin.
Emily watched her. Her face was vivid with brokenness. She breathed, her chest moving heavily, as if she could hardly manage it.
Whatever sort of demon she was, she was only human with these children.
Emily moved closer to the grave. She looked down at the black bundle on the dampening earth. All that hard work scrubbing too…
“How long will you vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words?”
Emma looked up, her eyes wide and suspicious. But she nodded, slowly.
“Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. God has barred my way so I cannot pass, and he has set darkness in my path. He has stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. He has destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope he has removed like a tree.”
She took a breath, and the children were watching her. They were frowning mostly. Translating it into French was hard enough; she had read it in English, so long ago, as literature, not religion. She didn’t know the Latin. Their French was good, but imperfect. Kurt bent his head, his eyelids pressed to his cheeks, and his lips moving. It looked like he was remembering the Latin as she spoke.
“He has kindled his wrath against us, and he counts us as his enemies. His troops come together, and rise up against us, and are encamped around about our home. He has put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My bone cleaves to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.”
And then, with the next few words, another voice joined hers, singing the Latin, as if this was the right passage. As if there truly could be hope out of anger.
“Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God has touched me.”
“Miseremini mei, miseremini mei saltem vos, amici mei, quia manus Domini tetigit me.”
The rain softened, a dribble of mud running down into the grave, and the body sank into it, slipping away.
“Why do you persecute me thus, God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?”
“Quare persequimini me sicut Deus, et carnibus meis saturamini?”
The next words rang out clearly as Emily spoke them, but there was no beam of sunlight, no sudden peace, just the distant sound of gunfire.
“But I know that my redeemer lives, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”
“Scio enim quod redemptor meus vivit, et in novissimo die de terra surrecturus sum.”
They waited, but Kitty made no cry of warning. The gunfire died away. Jennifer and Kurt picked up shovels and started filling in the hole. Emily took Kurt’s shovel. He had already dug the whole thing, he didn’t need to fill it as well. The last of the grave was filling up. The rain had stopped, but the sky was grey.
Emily fell silent. She did not say the last of it, she could not. But she could see in the slight nod from Kurt and the cold glance from Emma, that they knew what it was, and knew why she had not said it.
The voices died away, and there was silence, not the cry of a bird, not even the burst of distant gunfire.
Be afraid of the sword: for wrath brings the punishments of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.
xXx
They risked a fire, Jennifer heating up a saucepan of dirty water, and all the children stripping off their wet clothes and wiping themselves with warm wet rags. Emily helped dry the littlest one, getting her bundled into dry clothes once she was warm.
Rebecca sat in her lap and played with her hair. “Tell me a story,” she commanded. Emily closed her eyes, shaking her head slowly.
“I don’t know any stories.”
“You knew that story. I didn’t understand it though. Tell me a better one.”
“Rebecca,” Emma came over and lifted the girl off of Emily’s lap. “Go and ask your sister for a story. It will be easier to follow if it’s not in mediocre French.”
Emily glared at her. “My French is not mediocre.”
The nun laughed and handed her a bowl of heated cabbage and catmeat stew. It still looked vile. “It’s very… Parisian.”
“So’s yours.”
“When I want it to be.”
Emma settled onto the stone with her own bowl and they sat in silence for a while.
“Job,” she said, finally. Emily watched her and wondered if she should say that she only spoke the words she read in the nun’s face, in her hollow, broken sorrow.
“It seemed… relevant.”
Emma’s eyes were unexpectedly soft, and Emily felt guilty. She had thought that perhaps this woman was worse than she was. Her anger and the violence that ensued were too raw, too desperate, and the truth of her anger showed that she was pure in a way Emily could never be. Emily didn’t need anger to be cruel; she didn’t need broken children, and burials where she couldn’t overcome her tears. She was told to kill and she did it. It made her sick to be around this woman. Sick of herself.
xXx
“If I’m not back, you know what to do.” Emma said, as she took Kurt’s shoulder. He looked her in the eye, nodding carefully. He was upset, but he was brave. He had always been brave. He had the rifle, and he would protect everyone. “And if you need to run, just run. I’ll find you. I will not find you dead.”
Emma finished putting on her jacket. The bloodstain was merely a dark shadow now. Her belt, her cap. The spy watched her. “It’s not really a disguise, is it? You are a soldier.”
Emma whirled on her. How dare she say that? “I am not. There are no soldiers on my side!”
But Emily didn’t react to her anger, she just watched. Emma looked down at herself, at her own dirty hands. Perhaps she was right. This world held nothing but sin and pain, and she was no different. She would never be free of her own crimes. But it wasn’t the same. She shook her head.
“I’m no soldier,” she said. “If I kill, it’s because I chose to. I will never allow myself to be used to commit another’s sin. My own are enough for me.”
The spy flinched at that, as well she should. What was a spy but a hand without a heart? The woman turned away, knotting her blood-soaked hair up into a neat cosmopolitan style.
xXx
Part 2b