This is obviously all kinds of wrong with a bunch of trigger warnings. Then again, the source material isn't exactly a meek Sunday sermon. There really isn't much right about the Seed brothers, their terrificness as fanfic subjects aside.
He is a beautiful fraud, his faith so paper-thin that she can clearly see the shapes of his sins writhing behind. A cursed shadow theatre playing in his eyes.
Greed.
Pride.
And wrath, oh wrath most of all.
She wonders that he could fool his brother so easily, for so long.
Still. He fools his brother still.
And she wonders how someone so faithless could manage to put so much belief into a simple band of gold.
"Joseph won't let me through the Gates unless I can get you to reach Atonement. It seems only fair then, that for ease of confession I tether you to my side. How fortunate that he agreed to my idea."
They put flowers in her hair and the petals matches her bruises, brushing softly against her battered temples. They pull a flowing dress over her head, it is far too big, but she supposes it only matters that it is white.
They leave her barefoot, should she try to run.
Then they lead her up the aisle, and she does not fight them, she keeps her head high and refuses to be cowed. Will not give them the satisfaction. She is vastly outnumbered anyway, one against hundreds, and she can see weapons gleaming out of the corner of her eye.
He waits for her up by the broken altar, and his eyes burn, and she knows exactly which word he fantasises about carving into her skin.
Pride.
Pride, to join the sloppily tattooed Wrath on her chest.
As she stands next to him, his hand of iron around hers, his smile playfully soft and his eyes dancing with violence, he leans down to whisper in her ear.
"You are a wild little thing, aren't you? A hellcat, wrathful and proud. I will enjoy taming you. Enjoy cleansing you of sin."
She ignores him and stares straight ahead as his brother, the Father, intones the words that will tether her to him for eternity.
Or until she can see him dead.
He laughs a little, gentle puffs of air across her swollen cheek, as if he can hear her thoughts loud and clear.
"You are mine now, Deputy."
He digs his nails into her hand as they turn to face the congregation, and as she stares upon the neat rows of worshippers and prisoners she can smell her own blood.
Wed as she is to John the Baptist.
He takes her to his personal ranch in Holland Valley, drags her forcibly across the threshold in a grotesque parody of newlywed bliss, her spitting and hissing the entire time. He sets her down upstairs in the bedroom, and visibly enjoys how fight or flight is at war in her eyes. How trapped, impotent instincts wrecks her entire body.
He starts to remove his vest and shirt, and huffs a laugh at the look on her face, at the involuntary step she takes back.
"Don't worry, little wife of mine. When we consummate this marriage, it will be because you want it." His voice lowers, becomes a growl, and she takes another step back, hits the wall. "When I fuck you, it'll be because you beg it of me."
"That won't ever happen," she snarls, and she's never been so sure of anything in her life.
He grins at her, and he's such a handsome, affable monster, isn't he?
"We'll see, Deputy. Why don't you start by telling me your name?" He throws his hands out, smiles broadly with that peculiar mix of vulnerability and blood-thirst. "We're married, after all!"
She laughs at him because it is better than crying, then goes to lay down on the floor. Goes to sleep in a little strip of moonshine.
He lets her.
She is given only impractical, stupid dresses to wear. Floaty and ethereal, so thin as to almost be transparent. She has never worn a dress in her entire goddamned life, now it is all she has got.
That fucking bastard.
And she is not allowed any shoes. John Sees is not a daft man.
It does not stop her trying.
The first time she runs he lets her get quite far. Far enough away to hold hope on her tongue, heady and sweet.
A calculated cruelty, of course.
She can feel a small part of her breaking off, falling away into the grass, when he catches her tantalisingly close to freedom.
She cries without tears as he carries her back home.
He taunts her over dinner, with that sibilant lawyer's voice of his. "Ah, look at you now, little wife. Once such formidable, deadly foe, now with your claws cut and a collar about your neck. How delightful."
"Fuck you," she says sweetly, and fantasises about the possessions and properties of his she will blow up when she finally manages to escape, starting with this ranch. Because escape she will. Attempting to eradicate the cult in Hope County will not be relegated to memories, it will once again become fact.
"But still not meek, are you?" he continues, and gesticulates with a piece of bread. "No, you would tear my jugular out if you could. That's good! Our children will be strong, and what else but strength is needed when repopulating a new world? But I wonder... are you Lilith, or are you Eve?" he asks, and his smile is beatific and his eyes are knives.
She feel nausea burning her throat, directs all the pooling bile at him.
"Which one of our children shall be Cain and which one shall be Abel?" she snarls, and she thinks of blood drenching green fields. "Should we name a girl Delilah?" She bares her teeth, more rattled by him than ever before. "Fuck, I wish I had done more. I wish I had blown your fucked up brother's fucked up little cult sky high when I had the chance."
He stills at the insult to Joseph, the Father. Rage is eternally brimming over in his gaze, a blue flame, ice cold and feral, but now it grows hotter than ever before. He wants to hit her, she can tell, but clenches his fists instead. "I would never strike my wife," he murmurs to himself, and she is fairly sure she does not believe him.
Not one little bit.
He likes the look of blood and his own fingerprints a bit too much.
The second and third and fourth time she runs he laughs as he drags her back. "You are a most unwilling Eve," he drawls in her ear, "running at such speed from the promise of Eden."
Time spins, moves and shivers in the air around her. The rope burns fade around her wrists, and her hair, once sensibly touching her ears, now tumbles in wild curls about her shoulders.
John likes touching it, whenever she allows him near enough, but tells her that it flames with sin. She calls him a hypocrite, and he hums in amusement and perhaps assent.
She wanders around the same rooms, day in and day out, and she is not allowed contact, interaction, with anyone but him. She will hold her arms up by the windows, convinced her skin is becoming transparent, sure she can see daylight clean through . Outside she can see all the Peggies tasked with keeping her under guard, and with the continued reinforcements and extensions of John's own bunker. Further away some stray Angels aimlessly roam the fertile fields of Holland Valley.
But she, she is trapped on the inside, and there is no one to talk to but him.
He returns in the evenings, soaked in river water and blood, and tells her tales of baptisms and cleansings of Resistance members.
He does not say it, but she knows, is certain, that the bloodlust he is not allowing himself to take out on her he is instead extending to the Resistance. Her friends. Every time she frustrates him, disobeys him, snarls at him, he comes home dripping with more blood than holy water.
She screams silently into the floorboards at night.
"Perhaps your wife should come stay with me for a while," Jacob says, idly carving into a large red apple with his knife. "I see defiance in her still. Not an awful lot of Atonement. Perhaps some time with me would help bring her to heel. Or maybe with Faith? Faith could work miracles on her."
She moves behind John before she even realises what she is doing, and ignores the knowing look on Jacobs face as he strokes the wolf by his side.
"I've got my wife right where I want her, Jacob, thank you anyway," John says, and she can hear the bubbling possessiveness in his voice. She hates herself for her relief. Better the Herald you know, she thinks after Jacob returns to the Whitetails, and she laughs until she screams. Then she goes and breaks some mirrors, because she is terrified that she will accidentally catch sight of what is in her own eyes.
John finds her on the floor in the bathroom, thoughtfully fingering some shards.
The next day all mirrors are gone.
She forgets her own face.
One day he catches her over the dead body of a Peggy in their hallway. The man had ventured a little to close to the open front door on his rounds, and she had pounced, frustrated and bloodthirsty.
He toes at the body indifferently. "However did you do this? I see no blood."
"Broke his neck. T'was easy." She hates how breathless her voice sounds, so alive with a little murder.
He laughs then, like she has never heard him laugh before, cheerful and booming and genuine.
"Oh, little wife of mine. You're so like a house cat, swiping at songbirds through a crack in the window." He wipes at tears of mirth, looks down again at the body by his feet. "Leaving corpses as presents for your owner on the hallway mat."
She moves swiftly against him, for the first time since before they were wed she actively tries to hurt him. Maim him.
"You asshole!" she screams. "You've taken everything from me. I'm see-through when you're not here, a fucking ghost!"
She may be deadly and ferocious, but she is also tiny, and in body to body combat with John Seed she could never come out on top. He swiftly has her against the wall, her wrists clasped in his hand and slammed against the wood above her head. His body presses against hers, his breath hot on her face.
"Settle down now. Enough of this. Don't make me do something I might regret." He punctuates each sentence with a small slam of her body into the wall. She struggles for a while longer, then stills, then squints against the blue of his eyes.
"You son of a bitch," she says, almost gently. He is close, so close, she feels him all over, and it is too overwhelming, she has been starved of sensation for so long. Even so, she swears it is he who moves the final little inch, brushes his lips against hers. He does nothing more though, just keeps them there, and she whines low in her throat with the need to just submit to him and let this long struggle finally be over.
He lets go of her wrists, moves one hand to the base of her throat and the other to touch her frantic heartbeats. She is still shackled like this, held fast by him.
"Are you finally ready for Atonement, Deputy?" He whispers it softly, so softly, sweet poison ready to drip into her mouth.
She gives him the word he hates the most, speaks it against his lips.
"No."
The fifth time she tries to run he drags Hudson in front of her, and executes her with a shot clean through the back of the head.
He never once lets go of her eyes.
"And to think you still could have saved her in exchange for your name, little wife," he sighs in faux sadness, making patterns with the toe of his boot in all the blood.
She sputters, hyperventilates, and wipes Hudson's brains from her eyes. "You...you didn't give me the option! You didn't say!"
"Oh, didn't I? Terribly sorry, Deputy, must've slipped my mind."
An even bigger part of her is torn off, and she can feel fault lines spreading across her entire self.
She does not try to run again.
The moon is full and awash on snow the night she finally gives in, and she crosses the bedroom floor to viciously shake him awake.
"I need to feel something," she tells him. "I need warmth. You've made cracks in me, and you are worrying away at them all the time, wedging your fingers in them, widening them, letting in the chill. You evil, crazy motherfucker. I'm so cold."
He pulls the cover down, invites her in, and she wants to scratch the triumph out of his eyes even as she settles by his side.
He is warm, so warm. Kept alight by hellfire, she supposes. He smiles at her, victorious and languid and sure, even as he is on his back and she on her knees above him.
He grabs her chin, pushes his thumb between her lips. "Say yes," he growls. She shakes her head. She will not. Instead she surges downwards, dives into him. Kisses him so hard their teeth clacks together, digs her nails into his collarbones.
Begs with her body, not with her mouth.
A pyrrhic victory, but she will take what she can get.
He removes her dress and underwear and he is gentle. She is not, she is trying to scratch lines through his tattoos, through all of his sins. He huffs a laugh. "Oh, you still think so much of your claws, Deputy. I trimmed them down a long while ago."
He flips her onto her stomach, featherlight fingertips down her sides, breathes his lips down the bumps of her spine. He whispers brimstone on her, and it tickles.
She looks at him over her shoulder, and she knows her eyes are blown and her lips swollen, but she cannot bring herself to care. Her voice is raspy with too many emotions when she speaks.
"I don't want you to do it like that. I don't want you to be gentle."
There's an eclipse in his gaze, the sky of his irises thin rings around growing blackness, and his smile is knowing and quite insane.
"Do you think that would absolve you of agency? Do you think that if I'm rough, violent, you can close your eyes and pretend that you don't want this, that you're being forced? No." He bites her neck as he sinks into her, and she groans at the stretch and the burn. "No," he says again, and punctuates with a sharp thrust, snaps his hips so fiercely that she slides along his silken sheets. "You are to keep you eyes wide open, wife of mine. You will not be allowed to forget that you chose this, that you came to me. That you lost, and I won." He chuckles as she proves the abhorrent truth in his words, moves her hips back against him to seek more friction, more burn. He pulls out, and moves her onto her back, then slides right back into her again. He tenderly brushes her hair out of her face, and viciously hisses into her ear. "Eyes on me, Deputy. Eyes on your husband."
She stares up at him, digs her heels into his back to urge him on, make him go faster. "You're a bigger sinner than me."
He pants out a low laugh, wraps his long fingers about her throat, squeezes ever so slightly. Just enough. "Jury's out."
He moves faster, thrusts so hard her heart is dislodged in her chest. She will not be long, nor will he - self loathing and failure are potent aphrodisiacs; victory tastes so sweet.
"Tell me your name," he grinds out through clenched teeth.
"No," she breathes.
They come together, and it is whiplash and terror and bliss.
Afterwards he holds her tight. He runs his fingers along the fingerprints and puncture-kisses on her skin, says that everyone will know that now she is truly his. He licks her tears from her face and tells her that they taste delicious, almost as delicious as she.
The next day he wakes her at dawn, and she is bathed in pink as he carves Lust onto her right hip.
That one is fair enough, she thinks, that one he can have.
He draws a flower on her stomach with her blood, then draws the lines outwards, paints an entire garden on her chest, with blooms tangling around Wrath.
"Tell me your name, Deputy," he murmurs into the finely drawn lines, his very own Garden of Eden made with blood.
He has forced her to give him everything else, and he has forced her to give it to him willingly. He cannot have this.
He cannot have her name.
"No," she sighs and pulls at his hair, groans at the feel of his beard dragging up her chest, her collarbones, her neck. He smiles against her mouth, and kisses her like he wants to swallow her tongue and her heart and her name.
He flips her over, and falls upon her, and he tears her to pieces, and then he puts her back together again.
He carves Greed on her lower back one afternoon out on the wrap-around porch. She turns to look at him over her shoulder, on his knees behind her, concentration etched onto his forehead as he etches into her.
"Whatever is this for?" she asks calmly.
"Covetousness, Deputy. You still covet freedom, do you not?"
"No," she says, and he laughs heartily at the lie.
"And...you covet me. You're greedy for how I make you feel, what I do to your body, your mind. Greedy for submission, greedy for your chains."
This time the lie dries out on her tongue, and she hisses at the knowing look in his eyes. Desire bubbles up inside her and she chooses to ignore how dependent she has become on the oblivion only he can give. His hands tightens on her hips, possessive and fierce, and she moves back against him, refuses to voice her assent. Shows him instead.
He takes her up against the porch railing, ruts into her so hard the wood creaks. He has got his fist about her hair, forces her head back, forces her to see all the Peggies politely averting their eyes from the coupling.
She does not care.
Then they lie on the rough wood. John obsessively traces the new sin on her skin, just slightly too hard, and she is grateful for the pain.
There are no mirrors left for her to see, but it feels like he carved in cursive this time.
It spirals out of control, of course, and they both lose their slippery grip.
He gives her his knife, asks her the carve along the Lust and Greed tattooed on his arm.
"You've made me an even bigger sinner, it's only fair that you cut it deeper into me."
She skilfully runs the knife along the letters, enjoys drawing his blood and watching it run. She does not drive the knife through his heart though, and she cannot let herself think about why.
Somehow he reads her thoughts, pushes her hair out of her face with a bloodied hand so that he may have unfettered access to her eyes. He slides inside her, stretches her, fills her all the way up to her soul, but holds still until he has spoken his piece.
"Do you know, Deputy, when you finally tell me your name I will carve it into my heart. It can never be flayed from me then, no matter how far we fall."
"Please, just fuck me," she whispers, and strokes his hot forehead, trying not to cry. He, he laughs in victory that his own little prophesy came true.
It looks like they are both losing this damned battle.
That was not meant to happen.
Then one morning he comes running into the bedroom, pulls her out of the bed by the arm and drags her across the floor to the window. He throws the shutters open so hard that they slam against the wall.
"Behold the end of the world, Deputy. Joseph was right after all."
And so they stand together and watch the three mushroom clouds rise on the far horizon, marring the blue sky. Fire is approaching and soon all will be ash. She can already feel the heat.
Or maybe it is the heat from John, as he embraces her from behind. Brushes his lips across her temple in a facsimile of tenderness, digs his fingers hard into her sides.
"The world is ending, Deputy. Now won't you tell me your name?"
Absently she strokes his wrist where he holds her to him. What a shackle he is, what a chain, holding her together like he is.
"My name is Lilith," she whispers "and my name is Eve."
I am Lilith. I am. I am.
I am also Eve.
He bites her neck in admonishment. "Tell me. Your. Name."
Almost idly she ponders what would be worse: turned to ash in Joseph's Collapse, or spend the next decade locked in a bunker with her husband, losing every last bit of self?
She genuinely does not know.
She turns around in his arms, strokes his cheek, and for the first and last time gives him the word he loves best.
"Yes."
Further evidence, if further evidence was needed, that I will always be drawn to the most DAMAGED, fucked up psychopath.
Unbeta'd. Unplanned. I'm just gonna go back to work on my Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling/Will Graham fic now. It's more sane.