[fic] Magdalene 2/4 (Nc-17; X-Men First Class/Inglourious Basterds crossover)
2/4
Sucker love is heaven sent
You pucker up, our passion's spent
My heart's a tart, your body's rent
My body's broken, yours is bent
Placebo - Every You Every Me
The officer is prepared for an attack, as he should be, and things get a little messy. He is on his knees now, coughing blood on the supposedly expensive carpet with a handle of a large hunting-knife sticking out of his stomach, a gash on the corner of his eye bleeding rapidly down his cheek.
“We were at war!”
“War?” Shosanna laughs bitterly. ”That’s your excuse?” She shakes her head. “You cannot understand war. It’s understandable, of course, with all the human traits it requires, but one person can never understand it. No matter who you are, no matter where you stand, you cannot understand.”
“And what the fuck is your excuse?” the officer howls, maybe hoping the sound will draw some of his attention away from the sickening pain. He is a trained killer too, he knows as well as they do that wounds like his can take days to kill him. At this point the only hope he has left is that Shosanna and Erik have some sense of mercy and the decency to put a bullet through his head before it, and it makes the whole situation a lot more beautiful. Shosanna nods and Erik kicks him in the ribs for making too much noise.
“Living in a cellar like rats because of you? Being poked with needles and ripped open and tortured because of you? Having our families killed because of you? Hiding and fearing and dying because of you? Pick one."
“Needles?” There’s a trace of hysteria coloring his voice now. “You don’t fucking believe in that Nazis doing human experimenting in order to create super-soldiers bullshit?”
Erik twists the blade in his entrails without lifting a finger.
*
“You confuse me, my friend,” Charles says thoughtfully after maneuvering into their shared hotel room, kicking off his shoes and sitting on his bed. Erik is already lying on his own, pretending to read as the telepath’s mind touches the border of his own. It still feels peculiar but it’s not unpleasant. “And what confuses me even more is that I don’t mind, most of the time.”
Erik makes a noise suggesting he has heard him but has no intention of commenting and makes a sideway glance or two as Charles continues shedding his clothes and folding them much more neatly than he would sober.
“Tell me about her?” he says, much more quietly, throwing an almost shy look at Erik.
Erik puts his book down but shakes his head. “Maybe someday. Maybe never.”
“Then tell me about yourself,” Charles pushes on, now in his boxers and undershirt, and before Erik has the time to stop him, making his way to sit on the edge of Erik’s bed instead.
“You told me you already know everything.”
“I may have exaggerated just a tiny bit to make you stay. A very tiny bit.” He narrows his eyes and shows with almost no space at all between his thumb and index-finger just how tiny that bit is. “But, you know.” Charles lifts his hand, hesitating for a moment where to place it, and pats Erik’s knee. “Tell me something. Anything, really. Can’t sleep. Too much noise.” Coming from a telepath’s mouth it means too much noise in his head and not in his ears, that much Erik has learned of his gift.
“Should I read to you?” Erik asks, the words escaping from his lips when he should teach Charles a lesson or two about invading people’s personal space.
“Oh. Please do.” With a surprising grace Charles settles down beside him, Erik escaping as far from him as he can and picking up his book Charles has partly landed on. He’s drunk and he’s not and they’ll never talk about it, but for now Charles digs his way under the blanket and Erik clears his throat.
“Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease, developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.”
*
“Switch?” Shosanna suggests after they have taken their seats, offering him a worn copy of Les Misérables. Erik accepts the book, handing her The Idiot in return. When there’s no police or military to stop the train from leaving, Victor Hugo keeps in occupied enough as the railroad takes them towards west.
*
They agreed on taking turns driving; they didn’t make it to the first state line before Erik ordered Charles to pull over and give up the wheel. He could entertain himself, with a book or a newspaper or the music from the radio; Charles just keeps talking. This morning, though, he’s quiet for once, falling back to sleep on the passenger’s seat as soon as they hit the highway.
*
“So,” Shosanna laughs and closes the book, running her fingers on its cover. “Supposedly it was about Jesus Christ?”
Erik shrugs. “About the human ability to be good and the human tendency to look down on it. So about the basics of Christianity at least.”
“Do you think you could ever believe in God again?” She doesn’t ask if he believes.
“It was a piece of subtle refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to become a writer - and that he did not learn it better.”
“Friedrich Nietzsche. How convenient.”
“He had a point there.”
Shosanna picks a cigarette from a pack on her nightstand and lights it. “Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.”
*
“Who’s your favourite author?” Charles asks somewhere along the road in Illinois after waking up and demanding a cup of coffee in a diner.
“T.H. White,” Erik yawns, drawing back to earth from his thoughts. “He wrote The Once and Future King.”
“Isn’t it rather… British?” He knows there’s a glint in Charles’ eyes even if he doesn’t turn to look.
“It’s rather universal, really.”
“Who are you reading now?”
“Nietzsche,” he confesses, having found a reasonably prized copy a couple of days earlier.
“Oh.” Charles pauses for a moment, obviously trying to recall something. “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster?”
Erik refuses to take the hint and shoots back with a smirk. “And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”
It shuts Charles up, for a little while.
*
“Am I a woman to you?” Shosanna asks, her voice hoarse and thoughtful, with one final brush of her lips (their carefully painted artificial red worn off by now) on the side of his cock.
Erik disapproves the question by grunting and pulling her up from her knees by the blond hair his hands are knotted in. “I don’t know what you are.” He claims her mouth with a rather brutal kiss of tongue and teeth to give himself a moment to collect his thoughts. “Woman, man, person, idea, ghost, everyone, no-one. I don’t know, and I’m heading for the conclusion I don’t give a fuck.”
Erik is sure she already knows, even when he has no clue of how and when she has picked it up: the fact he has bedded a woman or two but prefers the quick and dirty anonymous lays with beautiful boys in dark alleys and filthy apartments, hating himself when he looks at their faces and sees nothing. Shosanna is something else, here and now, and it’s not about her body but her mind, even if he enjoys the curves and scars of both.
“Bend over.”
She does, gripping the windowsill as Erik pulls up her skirt and pulls down her panties. He doesn’t bother to pay attention to the rest of their clothes but leaves an angry bite-mark on her lower back before shoving her legs further apart. She’s wet enough and inhaling in a sharp hiss as Erik thrusts inside of her.
*
The redheaded mutant kid is stoned and keeps muttering about fish, but what amuses Erik enough not to smack him in the head is Charles trying to keep a straight face. He might ask, later, what drugs do to a telepath, since it’s obvious this one is nursing fond memories of his Oxford days.
Not much. I can’t keep off people’s heads but their thoughts are much more interesting that way. Fuzzy, though.
No, you surely can’t. Keep out of people’s heads.
Projecting, Charles shrugs and grins at him disarmingly.
Erik lifts an eyebrow and concentrates on constructing an image making it clear that he’s very much aware of what the telepath has been doing in his unusually long shower the other morning.
Charles coughs and blushes with a quick you give too much credit for my arse, my friend before pointedly returning his attention to the kid.
*
“Come to America with me.”
The mixture of cum and her own fluids dripping down her thigh is rather mesmerising, and Erik knows the only option is to say yes.