title: the book of sand
fandom: weiss kreuz/neil gaiman's sandman
characters: crawford/schuldig, bit of farfarello & nagi, the endless, and other surprise appearances.
word count: 12,137 (whoa, whoa.)
rating: nc-17, for sex, mild violence, liberal use of a word that starts with f and ends with uck, and ~ schuldig, in general.
notes: This is probably understandable, even if you've never read any of the Sandman comics. Basically: "There are seven beings, that aren't gods. They existed, before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist long after the last god has gone. They are - more or less - embodiments of the forces of the universe. They are named - in order of age - Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was Delight before). That is all you need to know." (Brief Lives)

part ii, the wasteland

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Öd' und leer das Meer.

~ eliot

Bradley's mother is beautiful — six feet tall, heavy-lidded eyes, and black black hair that makes men want to go home and strangle their wives. And she's got Old New England shipping money. Good breeding. At least, until she ran off and married that boxer from Brooklyn when she was eighteen and stupid.

He's dead, now. Lost a fight when he was supposed to win or won a fight when he was supposed to lose, or just kept pissing off the wrong bookies, and it's amazing they didn't kill her and their little boy too. It's just another excuse for those high society Greenwich cunts to call her a witch. She's fucked half of their husbands, and the other half think about her every time they jerk off. Crazy fucking witch.

She came back to Connecticut three years later and lives in her dead daddy's house, where she doesn't do anything but take care of that little boy. That frightening little boy with hair like hers. He stares and sits so still it's easy to lose track of him if the room is just dark enough. He smirks like you're the punchline of a joke you don't even get. And he's too damn polite for a kid that age, says please and thank you and offers to pour you a glass of iced tea, like you're not there to fuck his pretty mommy, and that creeps you the fuck out. Just what does he know? What the hell does he know?

Brad is six when the girl visits him for the first time. He would have been surprised to wake up and find her rifling through his comic collection, if he hadn't already seen it happening the night before. She holds up an issue of House of Mystery.

"I can't believe they're still printing this," she says. "Personally, I like his brother better."

Brad rubs his eyes, gropes for the eyeglasses on his nightstand, and the girl comes into focus. She has a disturbingly compliant face, and is slightly pigeon-toed. She's got hair like his, but blacker and heavy-looking, wisps of it climbing around the sides of her neck. She has makeup on her right eye that reminds Brad of the Wedjat amulets he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, back when they lived in the city. She is carrying a black folder; there is a white sticker on the tab. The name written on it is B. Crawford.

"Can I help you?" Brad asks.

She laughs, crisp and alert. "Not really. But everyone's been making such a fuss about you, I just wanted to come and see for myself."

"Ah. All right then," Brad is upset about the intrusion, but sees no need to be rude. "Would you like to come downstairs for a cup of coffee?"

He's still clumsy. His hands are entirely disproportionate when compared to his arms, but he is already developing a taste for smart clothing, has sampled both red and white wine, taken an interest in Europe, and dislikes being called Bradley. The comics, he tells himself, those'll have to go soon as well.

"No thanks. Really, I was just dropping in for a looksie." She shifts on her feet, and suddenly reverts her eyes to the black folder in her hands, thumbing across several pages before finding the one she wants. "Now, that's too bad. Such a nice kid."

"That has my name on it."

"Of course. It's your biography. Every step you will ever take, every word you will ever say. The exact taste of the ham sandwich you will eat on July 14th, 1997. The last thing you'll think before you die. But really, it's just an excerpt from a much much larger book."

"Can I take a look?," Brad asks.

The girl tilts her head, and spirals a strand of black hair around her index finger. "Nobody is supposed to see their own file, Bradley. Problem with you is that you already have."

She shrugs and looks at her wrist, but she's not wearing a watch. The girl seems to realize this after a moment, and reaches out instead and pinches his cheek. "I really must be going now. So much work to do. And you and your little friends, you guys are going to keep me real busy. "

Brad rubs his cheek with the back of his hand. He's not entirely sure what has just happened. "So, I guess I'll be seeing you again then?"

The girl winks. "Before you know it, peach."

The year Brad turns thirteen is the last year he spends in Connecticut. In August, two men in expensive grey suits appear on the front porch and his mother sends him upstairs. She says, "Whatever you do, stay in your room. Stay in your room and lock the door and don't make a sound."

It doesn't matter. He's seen what happens clearly enough in his foresight, but the three of them speak a language he doesn't understand. The harsh syllables echo in their dark-carpeted living room. He hadn't even known his mother spoke German — halting over-articulated German, but German.

He asks about it, after the men leave, and she smiles and touches his hair and tells him, "Such a beautiful boy. Such a special boy. You've been accepted to a school. A school for special boys like you."

This confuses Brad, but he is also vaguely pleased. He's skipped two grades already, but his classes bore him. He had been taunted for his age until he threw a left hook, and the kid had to have two surgeries to reconstruct his shattered cheekbone. It had taken a lot of mommy's money to keep Brad from being expelled (and a lot of nights of the Dean coming around the house, after they'd figured he'd gone to sleep). Now no one speaks to him, which is all the same. They are all so ordinary. Endless repetitions of the same basic model.

Two weeks later, his mother is helping him pack. Only a few somber-colored dress shirts and a pair of slacks. One wool coat. "Austria can get cold," she explains. "But they'll have a uniform for you when you get there."

A man in a black Mercedes Benz arrives in their driveway to take him to the airport. His mother doesn't begin to cry until she walks him to the door. Then she's on her knees and kissing his face, making drooping pathetic noises. There are saliva and tears on Brad's face, but not his own. "Don't worry," he tells her. "I'll be back for Winter Break."

She laughs and cries at the same time; some pure inarticulate sound. "Right," she says. "Right."

The architecture of Rosenkreuz is not particularly striking. No columns, no high-steeped roofs, no thick opaque windows. It looks more like a hospital than a school. But the air is charged and dense. Even the clouds conform into grandiose shapes; arches, steeples, summits.

On the day of his acquisition, Schuldig is undressed and bound to a stretcher so that his head can be shaved. This is not standard procedure, as most new entrants have already suffered enough trauma that having their hair taken seems like a comparatively pleasant ordeal. But Schuldig is eight-years-old and he has blood on his mouth, and the nurse that had initially approached him with the clippers is in the next room. He can tell by the thoughts of the doctors that her fingers are so mangled it's not likely they can be reattached.

He is ten pounds underweight and has ammoniac breath and serous fluid in his tissue, and only speaks enough to call the nurse a dog-faced whore. Rosenkreuz doctors are usually more curious than sadistic — rather keep the brain intact to poke and prod around in — but they wouldn't mind seeing this kid's head dripping down the white walls. Not at all.

A new nurse empties a syringe into his arm. The drugs give Schuldig a euphoric, strange kind of feeling, almost like vertigo. When he wakes four days later, he is still dizzy. There are ugly welts forming on his arm from a series of vaccinations. Every three hours, a woman appears and gives him more drugs — drugs to make him calm, antibiotics, drugs that will inhibit his telepathy (he has no idea what that word means, but they keep using it to refer to him).

He throws a lot of them up; half-chewed tablets that taste worse on the second run, his own sick yellow saliva.

Mostly, Schuldig sleeps.

When Desire finally finds her twin, she has her fat fingers against Schuldig's head, soothing. "That one is mine," Desire warns. "Mine."

"And mine too," Delirium piques, from behind.

Despair withdraws. The hooked ring on her index finger leaves a trail of blood on Schuldig's irritated pink scalp. Her laughter is interrupted by a wet cough; there are fungoid spots on her tongue, and she wipes away phlegm with the back of her hand. "But this place," she says, "this place belongs to me."

She pauses for a moment, looks from Delirium and back to her twin and then mutters: "Why did you have to bring her?"

In five years, Schuldig can speak four languages and understand so many others, he no longer bothers to count. He grows tall, and carries himself with an awkward, aristocratic kind of grace. He is well acquainted with the whirling miscellany of the human brain. He knows how to hitch a ride in an occipital lobe, silent and watchful, knows how to shift through memories in the temporasomething— so many damned names, why do they want him to know all these fucking names? How can you put a name on knowing how to crawl right into those neurons and trigger them wild or pinch them shut forever?

Six months after his acquisition, he'd learned it was best to cooperate with the tests. Zener Cards with stupid little stars and circles on them. Genzfeld experiments that left him sobbing and sobbing into the empty white noise in those headphones. Sensory deprivation, isolation, blindfolds wrapped too tightly around his head. Statistical analysis of his results had placed him as a Level 8. Before then, they had assumed telepaths lost the ability to function in other capacity beyond Level 5.

Schuldig, twelve-years-old, is not entirely sure what this means — only that it keeps the staff from blowing his brains out whenever he is brought in for disciplinary action.

Crawford had Seen the red-haired boy long before he'd ever seen him; slumped into a desk at the back of the classroom where they teach Advanced Psychic Shielding. It's a class for older students and the red-haired boy is too young to be here. His cuticles are bloody. He is wearing an ill-fitting uniform, and has to roll the sleeves up to his wrists and there's a bruise there and little crescent moon marks from someone else's fingernails.

Brad usually sits at the front of the room, but he's running late today, and the only desk left is the one next to the red-haired boy, but he doesn't make a fuss about it. He Saw that too.

Eventually, Brad has to turn and snap at the boy to stop fidgeting. "Can't concentrate."

"Fuck you," he says back in English, which sounds foreign to Brad, because he's heard nothing but German for three years now. So polite, to curse at him in his native language.

Brad rolls his eyes and turns around. But at least the kid quiets down a bit.

Then, later that week, he crashes into Brad's chest while storming out of the bathroom. It's painful. The boy has too many knuckles and kneecaps and smells like cigarettes and pine disinfectants.

"I didn't even know you were there," he says, and sounds amazed.

Brad ignores him.

Schuldig plops down besides Brad again while he's eating breakfast on Saturday morning. Brad frowns. He's been getting on well with a talented telekinetic — a few years older than him, who's about to graduate and will probably be on a field team before the year is out. He is supposed to sit there today.

"I saw a movie about America once," the kid says. He talks with half-a-biscuit in his mouth. "There was cowboys. Rode horses from town to town and robbed banks and had gunfights with each other. Was it like that where you lived?"

"Yes," Brad says, but only because he's distracted by the vision scrolling across his mind. Suddenly, he decides he really doesn't care whether or not the telekinetic gets to sit with him anymore.

One year later.

For a moment, Crawford is afraid Schuldig's ribcage will collapse beneath him. The boy's collarbones are crushed painfully against his.

How can they even align this way? Schuldig is a full head shorter than him — or is he? Schuldig is always shuffling from one foot to another, picking at the skin beneath his nails, tugging at that aureole of hair. It's hard to take an exact impression of height..

Brad doesn't know who he manages to steal cigarettes from — they are always a different brand, most of them stale, and he lights up another before he's even done with the last. He only stops smoking when Brad is fucking him, and only because he wants to kiss, bite at Brad's jawline, suck on his bottom lip.

Crawford only complains about the taste of Schuldig's mouth until Schuldig starts fiddling with his tie, hands suddenly losing their agility. It is Rosenkreuz institution wear: grey blazer, grey tie, grey slacks. Can't have too much color, too much stimulus for some of the younger ones.

Brad likes to strip it off Schuldig layer by layer, sloughing the weight off the younger boy's shoulders — ritualistic, this, a deep personal symbol for Brad but not for Schuldig, who squirms and resists Crawford's methodical hands. Schuldig aims only for speed, wanting to be out of those itchy regulation t-shirts, get his hand around Brad's cock.

They have to sneak up to the roof, sometimes. The teachers have taken too much of an interest in the prodigal precognitive boy from America to not be monitoring his room. And Schuldig is rooming with a high-level empath who can only be out of the dorm for so long before risking a severe traumatic episode. Schuldig thinks he's probably scheduled for termination, but he's also got a red folder an inch thick with his name on it, and he doesn't want to dwell on that sort of thing.

It's cold today on the rooftop. Autumn is embalming summer. The distant mountains only silhouettes, each day whiter at the summit. Every time a stiff wind blows, the trees are bared a bit more.

Schuldig, shivering in his boxers, clamps his teeth together. "Fuck, who's stupid idea was this?"

"Yours," Brad says evenly. Schuldig presses against him. He tries to shove his arms down the length of Crawford's sleeves, but he can only squeeze his forearms in, fingertips brushing the inside fold of Brad's elbows.

Their erections press together through cloth; Crawford doesn't make a sound, but Schuldig feels something rattle in his chest. He tries to move back and start undressing himself, but their arms are trapped and Schuldig loses his balance, topples into him and smacks his nose against Crawford's breastbone.

"Ow," he says.

"So clumsy," Brad says, drawing back more carefully this time. "It'll be a wonder if someone ever picks you for a field team."

He kisses a bruise on Schuldig's shoulder and Schuldig jumps, but his hands don't pause over the button on Brad's pants.

"Guess there's no point in letting you fuck me anymore, then. This whole relationship is based on cronyism, you know. "

"Ah," Brad says. Then laughs. "Where did you learn that word?"

Crawford wonders briefly whether or not to say the sentence that wants to follow, but Schuldig moves first — their mouths together again, Schuldig's hands cupping the back of his neck. He draws them both down unto that dirty blanket one of them brought up here three months ago. Brad likes the feeling of Schuldig's goosebumps beneath his palms.

Crawford thinks he hears the younger boy say: Mm, think we could manage to snag a cup of coffee from the kitchen? — but no, that won't happen for a while longer.

Schuldig grins against his mouth, aligns his hips against Crawford's and open his thighs. Brad's hands crawl into his hair, tightening around his skull, and normally he can't stand being touched, it's like pressing his ear against an amplifier. Not with Brad, though. Just hands, tugging at the hair at the nape of his neck, hands moving down his torso, hands lifting up his hips, positioning, one hand on his penis, a rhythm, an alignment, angles locking into angles, crevices filled, limbs tangled.

There is a sound in the distance, like a cork-pop. A gunshot, maybe, but far enough to ignore.

When it's over, they'll dress too quickly. Night is coming and they're both shaking now, with no friction to warm them. Schuldig will finally say: "Mm, think we can manage to snag a cup of coffee from the kitchen?"

And Crawford will shake his head, because he knows the night watchmen will catch them if they try. He kisses Schuldig again. The boy looks sleepy, drunk, telepathy reawakening. In the hallways, they'll go back to ignoring each other — too dangerous, too dangerous to even raise the suspicion of friendship, especially with Schuldig and his inch-thick red folder.

Schuldig looks down, picks at something trapped beneath his nails. They're chewed up, always snagging in Brad's skin. It's surprising, because Schuldig is so vain, vain enough to make Crawford laugh, and Schuldig laugh a little too.

"Guess I'll see you later then," he says, and looks up because he wants to see Brad's eyes, wants to see if he can catch his pupils expanding and contracting, those little tell-tale signs of precognition that he hasn't entirely learned to suppress yet.

"Guess so," Crawford says. Which is good enough.

Neither of them notices the androgyne with feline-gold eyes, stroking her nipples absently through the fabric of her red blouse, watching them, smiling.

The one time Brad tries to tell Schuldig about his childhood, he is called Muttersöhnchen, and that's the end of that.

"Well, at least I can remember," he mutters angrily.

"I do remember," Schuldig tells him, which isn't entirely a lie. His earliest memories are like a children's model of the world, twinged with bewilderment and darkness. Somewhere, lurking, there is a villain: a fat naked woman squatting on his chest, asphyxiating him with her weight, running a sharp point from his jaw to the base of this throat.

He can remember her wet mouth against his ear, "Oed' und leer das Meer."

Desolate and empty is the sea.

There are other memories. A girl with striped sneakers and an anxious whispering voice. She has one green eye, one blue. She takes his hand. Tells him: "Schu, you're my favorite. I want to show you something wonderful."

But he knows he can't go with her. Can't go or he'll never come back.

He's embarrassed to tell it. Brad says, "Those were just dreams. Pull yourself together."

But later, Schuldig will still feel that cool palm settling on his forehead. A quiet murmur of a remembered future to ease him back to sleep.

"Leaving me here?" Schuldig asks. He doesn't sound sad. Angry, maybe, but resigned. He's on Crawford's bed, watching him pack, distrustful of this new professional aura and his clean ivory suits. Crawford graduated a week ago, but his placement on a team doesn't commence until tomorrow. He'll spend the next two years in Berlin, then if he's a good little boy, they'll promote him. He will be.

Look at you, acting like a bitch on your big boyfriend's bed, Schuldig thinks, but it doesn't stop him from saying, "I can't believe you're leaving again."

"Again?" Crawford says. His brows are locked. "What are you talking about?"

Actually, Schuldig realizes, he has no idea.

At one AM, the alarms go off. By one-fifteen, a sixth of the building is on fire, and groups of students are crushed against each other in the halls, a mass of disembodied arms and legs, painted with ash. Schuldig hopscotches from one mind to another until he reaches the source of this disturbance — two pyrokinetics, and one telekinetic of astounding power — caught midway through their escape attempt. They know they're going to die. Now, their plan has been stripped down: take as many others with them as possible.

Schuldig doesn't find this particularly inspiring. It is the other feeling, strange, distant, but somehow known. The electric singe of other people's panic on his brain.

It is a feeling as old as the universe. Older. The crashing nonsense tides of primordial sea. The feeling of snake venom in his eyes. The heat of fire on his face. Chaos.

Chaos.

Schuldig makes it onto the rooftop, and notes idly that his old blanket is still there. He scales down the side of the building and watches a boy in flaming clothes run out across the lawn.

He can hardly contain his own excitement.