Fic: Stations of the Cross
Title: Stations of the Cross
Fandom: X-Men
Pairing: Mystique/Nightcrawler
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: incest, non-con, sacrilege and a lot of little things that make it all worthwhile
A/N: A cross of St. Andrew is shaped like an X, because that's the shape of the cross on which he was crucified. A censer is a container, hung from a chain, in which incense is burned. 2260 words. I'm hesitant to post this in any coms, since X-Men fandom usually runs more toward the OMG!ANGST than, well, bondage and sadism and rape and all that. ^_^;;
Pure stillness reigned like a font of absolution, flooding the church to its highest beams. Colours in fire from the falling sun poured in through high windows so that the scattering of shadows seemed to swim like shapeless fish in the burning air. The invasion of her footfalls barely stirred the tiny motes of dust drifting like suspended sand around her ankles, no echo, scarcely a sound beyond the muffled tap of black flats against the remains of carpeting which may once have been red.
Nothing moved in the dark corners or in the ocean depths of the distant ceiling, but she knew he was there. She’d tracked him down with little difficulty; there weren’t so many abandoned churches in Boston. She’d wanted to come sooner; larger movements intervened, but the world had slowed down somewhat, at least for her. So she found him, again, in a church of St. Andrew, and now he was hiding, watching, waiting for her to make her move.
But he moved first, sending sharp ripples through the quiet with a sound like a silenced pistol firing through bedding. That was her cue.
“Is someone there?” It was like calling through water, tossed stones of echoes striking the walls. No response. “I know you’re there. It’s okay, you can come out.”
The softened gunshot sound came again, this time to her left, and a halting voice from the shadows. “Es tut ich Leid, Fraulein. I did not mean to startle you.”
“Oh, it’s alright.” Her predatory instinct settled in cold beside her hatred and lent to her voice the perfect proportions of sweetness and hesitation. “I’m probably trespassing, anyway.”
She could hear the smile in his voice, knew it from memory, shy and mischievous. “Then, I suppose, we both are.”
Her eyes had adjusted to the shifting dark, and she saw him, blurred behind the thin veil of shadow he thought would shield him. From anyone else, it would have.
“Do you live here?” Nice, pretty girl, just happened by. She wanted to draw him out, bring him closer, close enough to touch.
“Ja. Well, most of the time.”
He wore black, barely distinguishable from his skin in the dimness. A charity from Xavier, she imagined; the last time she’d seen him, he’d been in rags, and she’d known him immediately in spite of it. The coat was still there, a few faded spangles grasping at spare bits of light. He looked like a strange magician, a priest of the occult drifting amid ruins of the sacred and shattered stained glass. It suited him.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Danke.” His voice was flush with fragmented pride, king of a broken castle built for someone else. “It is safe, I think, and very quiet.”
She stepped forward. “Are you a priest?”
“Nein, no. I am- Please.” He lifted his hands. “Do not come closer.”
“But I can’t see you.”
“Yes, I- I do not wish to frighten you.” A thin edge of terror crept cold into his voice, slicing through infinite gentleness. He was afraid she would run away.
“I’m not scared. Please, come over here,” she beckoned kindly, like a friend. Like a mother.
After a moment’s pause, he moved hesitantly forward. The water-gold sunlight caught in the air around him, casting shadows on his skin, lighting him from all sides like a ghostly halo.
The demon priest. Saint Kurt of the derelict chapel. Her son.
She smiled sweetly. “That’s better.” He grinned back, far too pleased at being met with something other than horror. “What’s your name?”
“Kurt. Wagner. I-.” He blinked, as though dazzled. “Who are you?”
She fought back the impulse to choke as she said “My name’s Raven.”
“A very beautiful name.” He slid toward her, scarcely an inch, and she almost imagined he bowed, just slightly. “For an even more beautiful lady.”
Too easy. She moved closer, close enough to smell the sulfur, the acrid smoke of burnt earth, that clung to him like armour. Close enough for now. “Are you flirting with me?”
This time, he really did bow, a controlled, graceful motion made ridiculous by the peripheral swishing of his tail. “Nein, mein liebe, only paying a compliment.”
“Oh.” Another step. “That’s a shame.” The distance between them had become vacuous, a tidal pull eddying her errand toward its fulfilment. “I was kind of hoping you were.”
She thought about killing him, erasing all evidence of her past mistake. It would be simple, quick; it would be satisfying. She wondered, briefly, if his eyes would still glow, luminous in the dark, with all the life gone out of them.
He was still smiling shyly. It would be so effortless, over in a moment, but it would serve no purpose. Not today, then. Maybe she would find him again, when she had a better reason.
She slipped forward a pale hand to brush a lock of black hair away from those bright eyes. He almost flinched away, torn between disappearing and purring in perfect pleasure. She wondered how long it had been since anyone actually touched him. Her fingers lingered, tracing the path of a sacred symbol as it snaked over his cheek, tips burning on the heat of his skin. She followed the rise up to his lips, soft and mobile, scorching, and his breath formed a film of perspiration in the arch between her thumb and forefinger.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
He might have stopped her if he hadn’t been so paralyzed by disbelief, but he didn’t move and yielded without thought to the invasion she laid against his mouth. Neither did he notice the little patch she pressed to the circle of scar tissue at the back of his neck, an item of her own devising, just enough of the so-called Cure to stop his disappearing trick. There would be no exit, not till she was finished.
He tasted of fireworks, exploding in the soft space beneath her tongue, and blood welled into the slipstream as she nicked her lip on his razor canine. The sudden taste of copper seemed to shake him back into the moment.
Holding her away with gentle force, his startling eyes questioned and pleaded. “Fraulein… Raven….”
“Don’t.,” she said, easing a hand along the sharp edge of his jaw. “Please.”
He hesitated, faltered only for a second, but it was enough.
All things equal, he could have beaten her, even if she had not been stripped of her gifts. But nothing was ever equal. He was tired and uncertain, the time between his meals measured in days; he was truly at his weakest, and she took him completely by surprise.
One hand around his wrist, the other gripping his collar, she spun him around and smiled at the sickening sound as his head connected with the edge of a broken pew. Another blow and she felt him go slack in her grip, dazed enough to be docile to her purpose.
On the altar dais, the broad chair where the celebrant priest would have rested was centred, its back formed by the heavy crossed beams of St. Andrew’s cross. This was her goal, dragging him viciously up the steps to the foot of the sacramental throne. From behind the X of the martyred saint, a great crucifix rose, the carven Christ gazing down with sadness and compassion on the violent scene below.
Her victim grasped at her arm, pushing weakly at the fingers twisted in his collar. She delivered a kick to the side of his head and let him fall, beaten, beneath the towering symbol.
Swinging above the centre altar was a copper censer, its chain disappearing into the depths of the distant ceiling. The musky smell of incense still hung about it, and she imagined him lighting the dark grains, prostrating himself, enveloped in a heavenly haze. One good pull and the long chain came clattering down in a crashing pile. As she gathered the loops of metal, a flicker caught her eye; a single small candle burned in a rack to the side of the tabernacle. On a thought, she retrieved the little light and set it within easy reach.
He realized what she was doing as she leaned him roughly against the skewed cross, and, even then, his oppositions were weakly desperate. He must have tried to teleport and, finding that he couldn’t, now sought only to delay the onslaught. Seeing his frail fight, she grinned wickedly and punched him low in the gut; he would be still for a bit, now.
Wrapped across his arms and waist, the chain held him up, kept him in place; snaking down his legs, it pulled his body flush with the shape, spread him open like a specimen for dissection. And she intended to take him apart.
Using his body for leverage, she climbed up onto the cross, one long leg braced on either side. Thick blood covered half of his face, flowing in contours around the angelic whorls etched into his skin. Drawing close, she ran her tongue around the rise of his cheek and across his bruised temple. With his blood bitter in her mouth, she put her lips to his ear and said softly “Wake up.”
His head lifted, weary eyes casting about; his mouth worked feebly as he met her mocking stare, and, finally, he forced out a whispered “Why…?”
She laughed and kissed him hard; his body tensed between her thighs, and she could almost taste the bile rising in his throat.
“Because,” she purred into his mouth. His pants were so threadbare, the fly ripped open at a pull, nothing but skin underneath. He gasped, and she slid her free hand up the inside of his thigh. “Because you deserve it.” She touched him, fingers deft, and he writhed beneath her, his sex growing hot against whatever will he had left. With a sweet, chaste kiss on the bridge of his nose, she placed a hand on either side of his face and looked directly into his eyes. “Because I can.”
Pulling the elastic tie from her black hair, she wrapped it tight around his testicles. She wasn’t about to let him have release, not until this was finished. Legs still wrapped around the cinched centre of her victim and his cross, she leaned backward to pick up the little candle. With her other hand, she stroked his battered face, tenderly, saying in a soft voice “My beautiful little boy.” The confusion in his face became unfocused agony when she poured the burning wax along the length of his sex.
As his cry of pain dissipated into the far corners of the church, she blew out the candle and tossed it to the floor with a smile of pleasure. He panted and pulled against the restraints; she stilled him with a hand around his throat, forcing his head back into the trench between the crossed beams.
“Look up,” she growled. “There’s your god.” He cried out and twisted against her, his tail thrashing about the lower beams. She jerked his head up and struck him hard, then forced him back choking. At the same moment, she lowered herself onto his flesh, closing around him and revelling in the sounds of anguish that poured from the corners of his mouth like blood.
“Let your saviour see your sin,” she hissed between his gasps. His body heaved, and she moved with him, forcing him deeper into her, slamming his back into the cross with every surge of her vicious rhythm. His sobs tumbled down in the form of shattered words, German.
“…die Sünden von meiner Seele, die Sünden… von meinem Körper….”
The pressure and pleasure rising in her fragmented the language away from comprehension. She focused her mind only long enough to press flush against him and whisper with the utmost venom “And with your own mother.” The perfect hopelessness in his voice as it faded set her to overflow, and she threw back her head in a noise of triumph as she came, clenching around him, her nails digging into his throat. The sound of her completion rang like breaking bells in the sinking red light of the church, and she shuddered the end with a laugh and a sigh.
Her victim moaned in pain as she lifted off of his still-hard sex. She released her grip and raised his head toward her. With a smile, she gently kissed his bloody mouth before wrapping both hands around his neck and holding tight until his bright eyes fluttered closed, unconscious.
Dark shadows descended from the vaulted ceiling to fall about this tableau, as though they were sinking to the bottom of some inverted ocean, falling away from the last waves of sunlight skittering across the church floor. The sanctuary had floated completely into the depth of early night when, satisfied that the worst had been done, she turned her back upon the desecrated altar and paced evenly toward the high front doors. Behind her, hanging from the crucifix with his wrists bound about the cold neck of the Christ figure, was her victim. Witnessed by no one but sightless stained-glass, blood and semen pooling in his clothes and dripping in thin streams to the tile below, was her son.
Glancing momentarily at the back of her hand, she noticed a dark flush of blue, colour familiar as her own skin. Without pausing in her stride or looking over her shoulder, she willed it away, back to the pale flesh to which she had grown accustomed. Then she passed into the shadowed street and smiled.
As always, feedback keeps me writing.
:shadowen:
Fandom: X-Men
Pairing: Mystique/Nightcrawler
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: incest, non-con, sacrilege and a lot of little things that make it all worthwhile
A/N: A cross of St. Andrew is shaped like an X, because that's the shape of the cross on which he was crucified. A censer is a container, hung from a chain, in which incense is burned. 2260 words. I'm hesitant to post this in any coms, since X-Men fandom usually runs more toward the OMG!ANGST than, well, bondage and sadism and rape and all that. ^_^;;
Pure stillness reigned like a font of absolution, flooding the church to its highest beams. Colours in fire from the falling sun poured in through high windows so that the scattering of shadows seemed to swim like shapeless fish in the burning air. The invasion of her footfalls barely stirred the tiny motes of dust drifting like suspended sand around her ankles, no echo, scarcely a sound beyond the muffled tap of black flats against the remains of carpeting which may once have been red.
Nothing moved in the dark corners or in the ocean depths of the distant ceiling, but she knew he was there. She’d tracked him down with little difficulty; there weren’t so many abandoned churches in Boston. She’d wanted to come sooner; larger movements intervened, but the world had slowed down somewhat, at least for her. So she found him, again, in a church of St. Andrew, and now he was hiding, watching, waiting for her to make her move.
But he moved first, sending sharp ripples through the quiet with a sound like a silenced pistol firing through bedding. That was her cue.
“Is someone there?” It was like calling through water, tossed stones of echoes striking the walls. No response. “I know you’re there. It’s okay, you can come out.”
The softened gunshot sound came again, this time to her left, and a halting voice from the shadows. “Es tut ich Leid, Fraulein. I did not mean to startle you.”
“Oh, it’s alright.” Her predatory instinct settled in cold beside her hatred and lent to her voice the perfect proportions of sweetness and hesitation. “I’m probably trespassing, anyway.”
She could hear the smile in his voice, knew it from memory, shy and mischievous. “Then, I suppose, we both are.”
Her eyes had adjusted to the shifting dark, and she saw him, blurred behind the thin veil of shadow he thought would shield him. From anyone else, it would have.
“Do you live here?” Nice, pretty girl, just happened by. She wanted to draw him out, bring him closer, close enough to touch.
“Ja. Well, most of the time.”
He wore black, barely distinguishable from his skin in the dimness. A charity from Xavier, she imagined; the last time she’d seen him, he’d been in rags, and she’d known him immediately in spite of it. The coat was still there, a few faded spangles grasping at spare bits of light. He looked like a strange magician, a priest of the occult drifting amid ruins of the sacred and shattered stained glass. It suited him.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Danke.” His voice was flush with fragmented pride, king of a broken castle built for someone else. “It is safe, I think, and very quiet.”
She stepped forward. “Are you a priest?”
“Nein, no. I am- Please.” He lifted his hands. “Do not come closer.”
“But I can’t see you.”
“Yes, I- I do not wish to frighten you.” A thin edge of terror crept cold into his voice, slicing through infinite gentleness. He was afraid she would run away.
“I’m not scared. Please, come over here,” she beckoned kindly, like a friend. Like a mother.
After a moment’s pause, he moved hesitantly forward. The water-gold sunlight caught in the air around him, casting shadows on his skin, lighting him from all sides like a ghostly halo.
The demon priest. Saint Kurt of the derelict chapel. Her son.
She smiled sweetly. “That’s better.” He grinned back, far too pleased at being met with something other than horror. “What’s your name?”
“Kurt. Wagner. I-.” He blinked, as though dazzled. “Who are you?”
She fought back the impulse to choke as she said “My name’s Raven.”
“A very beautiful name.” He slid toward her, scarcely an inch, and she almost imagined he bowed, just slightly. “For an even more beautiful lady.”
Too easy. She moved closer, close enough to smell the sulfur, the acrid smoke of burnt earth, that clung to him like armour. Close enough for now. “Are you flirting with me?”
This time, he really did bow, a controlled, graceful motion made ridiculous by the peripheral swishing of his tail. “Nein, mein liebe, only paying a compliment.”
“Oh.” Another step. “That’s a shame.” The distance between them had become vacuous, a tidal pull eddying her errand toward its fulfilment. “I was kind of hoping you were.”
She thought about killing him, erasing all evidence of her past mistake. It would be simple, quick; it would be satisfying. She wondered, briefly, if his eyes would still glow, luminous in the dark, with all the life gone out of them.
He was still smiling shyly. It would be so effortless, over in a moment, but it would serve no purpose. Not today, then. Maybe she would find him again, when she had a better reason.
She slipped forward a pale hand to brush a lock of black hair away from those bright eyes. He almost flinched away, torn between disappearing and purring in perfect pleasure. She wondered how long it had been since anyone actually touched him. Her fingers lingered, tracing the path of a sacred symbol as it snaked over his cheek, tips burning on the heat of his skin. She followed the rise up to his lips, soft and mobile, scorching, and his breath formed a film of perspiration in the arch between her thumb and forefinger.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
He might have stopped her if he hadn’t been so paralyzed by disbelief, but he didn’t move and yielded without thought to the invasion she laid against his mouth. Neither did he notice the little patch she pressed to the circle of scar tissue at the back of his neck, an item of her own devising, just enough of the so-called Cure to stop his disappearing trick. There would be no exit, not till she was finished.
He tasted of fireworks, exploding in the soft space beneath her tongue, and blood welled into the slipstream as she nicked her lip on his razor canine. The sudden taste of copper seemed to shake him back into the moment.
Holding her away with gentle force, his startling eyes questioned and pleaded. “Fraulein… Raven….”
“Don’t.,” she said, easing a hand along the sharp edge of his jaw. “Please.”
He hesitated, faltered only for a second, but it was enough.
All things equal, he could have beaten her, even if she had not been stripped of her gifts. But nothing was ever equal. He was tired and uncertain, the time between his meals measured in days; he was truly at his weakest, and she took him completely by surprise.
One hand around his wrist, the other gripping his collar, she spun him around and smiled at the sickening sound as his head connected with the edge of a broken pew. Another blow and she felt him go slack in her grip, dazed enough to be docile to her purpose.
On the altar dais, the broad chair where the celebrant priest would have rested was centred, its back formed by the heavy crossed beams of St. Andrew’s cross. This was her goal, dragging him viciously up the steps to the foot of the sacramental throne. From behind the X of the martyred saint, a great crucifix rose, the carven Christ gazing down with sadness and compassion on the violent scene below.
Her victim grasped at her arm, pushing weakly at the fingers twisted in his collar. She delivered a kick to the side of his head and let him fall, beaten, beneath the towering symbol.
Swinging above the centre altar was a copper censer, its chain disappearing into the depths of the distant ceiling. The musky smell of incense still hung about it, and she imagined him lighting the dark grains, prostrating himself, enveloped in a heavenly haze. One good pull and the long chain came clattering down in a crashing pile. As she gathered the loops of metal, a flicker caught her eye; a single small candle burned in a rack to the side of the tabernacle. On a thought, she retrieved the little light and set it within easy reach.
He realized what she was doing as she leaned him roughly against the skewed cross, and, even then, his oppositions were weakly desperate. He must have tried to teleport and, finding that he couldn’t, now sought only to delay the onslaught. Seeing his frail fight, she grinned wickedly and punched him low in the gut; he would be still for a bit, now.
Wrapped across his arms and waist, the chain held him up, kept him in place; snaking down his legs, it pulled his body flush with the shape, spread him open like a specimen for dissection. And she intended to take him apart.
Using his body for leverage, she climbed up onto the cross, one long leg braced on either side. Thick blood covered half of his face, flowing in contours around the angelic whorls etched into his skin. Drawing close, she ran her tongue around the rise of his cheek and across his bruised temple. With his blood bitter in her mouth, she put her lips to his ear and said softly “Wake up.”
His head lifted, weary eyes casting about; his mouth worked feebly as he met her mocking stare, and, finally, he forced out a whispered “Why…?”
She laughed and kissed him hard; his body tensed between her thighs, and she could almost taste the bile rising in his throat.
“Because,” she purred into his mouth. His pants were so threadbare, the fly ripped open at a pull, nothing but skin underneath. He gasped, and she slid her free hand up the inside of his thigh. “Because you deserve it.” She touched him, fingers deft, and he writhed beneath her, his sex growing hot against whatever will he had left. With a sweet, chaste kiss on the bridge of his nose, she placed a hand on either side of his face and looked directly into his eyes. “Because I can.”
Pulling the elastic tie from her black hair, she wrapped it tight around his testicles. She wasn’t about to let him have release, not until this was finished. Legs still wrapped around the cinched centre of her victim and his cross, she leaned backward to pick up the little candle. With her other hand, she stroked his battered face, tenderly, saying in a soft voice “My beautiful little boy.” The confusion in his face became unfocused agony when she poured the burning wax along the length of his sex.
As his cry of pain dissipated into the far corners of the church, she blew out the candle and tossed it to the floor with a smile of pleasure. He panted and pulled against the restraints; she stilled him with a hand around his throat, forcing his head back into the trench between the crossed beams.
“Look up,” she growled. “There’s your god.” He cried out and twisted against her, his tail thrashing about the lower beams. She jerked his head up and struck him hard, then forced him back choking. At the same moment, she lowered herself onto his flesh, closing around him and revelling in the sounds of anguish that poured from the corners of his mouth like blood.
“Let your saviour see your sin,” she hissed between his gasps. His body heaved, and she moved with him, forcing him deeper into her, slamming his back into the cross with every surge of her vicious rhythm. His sobs tumbled down in the form of shattered words, German.
“…die Sünden von meiner Seele, die Sünden… von meinem Körper….”
The pressure and pleasure rising in her fragmented the language away from comprehension. She focused her mind only long enough to press flush against him and whisper with the utmost venom “And with your own mother.” The perfect hopelessness in his voice as it faded set her to overflow, and she threw back her head in a noise of triumph as she came, clenching around him, her nails digging into his throat. The sound of her completion rang like breaking bells in the sinking red light of the church, and she shuddered the end with a laugh and a sigh.
Her victim moaned in pain as she lifted off of his still-hard sex. She released her grip and raised his head toward her. With a smile, she gently kissed his bloody mouth before wrapping both hands around his neck and holding tight until his bright eyes fluttered closed, unconscious.
Dark shadows descended from the vaulted ceiling to fall about this tableau, as though they were sinking to the bottom of some inverted ocean, falling away from the last waves of sunlight skittering across the church floor. The sanctuary had floated completely into the depth of early night when, satisfied that the worst had been done, she turned her back upon the desecrated altar and paced evenly toward the high front doors. Behind her, hanging from the crucifix with his wrists bound about the cold neck of the Christ figure, was her victim. Witnessed by no one but sightless stained-glass, blood and semen pooling in his clothes and dripping in thin streams to the tile below, was her son.
Glancing momentarily at the back of her hand, she noticed a dark flush of blue, colour familiar as her own skin. Without pausing in her stride or looking over her shoulder, she willed it away, back to the pale flesh to which she had grown accustomed. Then she passed into the shadowed street and smiled.
As always, feedback keeps me writing.
:shadowen: