Author: linaerys (my fansite: http://www.geocities.com/linaerys/kroenen/index.html)
Title: Made in Hell: Consummation (3/3)
Pairing: Ilsa/Kroenen
Rating: NC-17 for just about everything (violence, torture, self-injury, very kinky sex, S&M)
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Mike Mignola and Guillermo Del Toro
Feedback: pretty please with sugar on top
Summary: After teasing you people for 6000 words in the previous chapters, this is it. It mostly stands alone, but also follows Chapter 1: Flirtation and Chapter 2: Courtship. In my version of their world Kroenen is human in 1930, not yet immortal and still without the facial surgery.
The Story So Far: Ilsa has found she likes to kill for power, Kroenen insists on supervising.
Interlude (2004)
Ilsa still remembered each time as if it were yesterday. The frenzied nightly couplings with Grigori had faded into a mélange of pleasure in her memories, but no one stood out. It had only been a few times with Karl, and never after Grigori, but she could remember every moment. She looked at him sharply, and the ever-present tick tick tick of his clockwork seemed louder. She wondered if he were directing her thoughts, as he had done in the past when training her. He could never completely take her over, but he had subtler controls at his disposal and had led her when she let him.
No, Grigori had severed that bond with his last coming. Karl came to her as a supplicant now, though he tried not to admit it. His vision was still stuck in the Germany of yesteryear, all his thoughts still bent on a thousand-year Reich. What was sixty years of ignominy for a nation that would live millennia?
Ilsa idly wondered if he still bore the scars she gave him, or if they were subsumed under the years of tinkering with the sand and clockwork body his gods had given him. That first scar on his hand, from her angry stab with the letter opener, that was gone with his hand to some other dimension. Or no, that was gone earlier, when he had flayed that hand to the bone. For his improvements he said . . . or was it his own version of Van Gogh's ear?
Idle thoughts . . . Ilsa tried to bend her mind back to studying. Perhaps he still bore the scar on his shoulder. He had placed her hand and her knife there, and showed her the way.
Chapter 3: Consummation (1930)
"Strasser is still, ah, lessened, and I need a companion for tonight's event," he said to her.
"You rather need a keeper," she muttered. As she expected he said nothing. He seemed inordinately cheery, and that frightened her more than anything that had happened to her yet. The things that made Kroenen happy made most shudder in horror, and Ilsa fought a shiver that crept over her skin. She was excited, and it wasn't just fear. She tried to tell herself that it was simply like looking at a train wreck, but her interest was nothing so wholesome.
He flexed his arm, probed at it through his shirt, and seemed to grimace a little. "It didn't work," he said under his breath. His hand came away lightly stained with blood.
"What is it?" asked Ilsa.
"I need to fix something," he said dismissively. "Go get a dress to wear." Ilsa walked closer instead.
"Can I help?" she asked. She wasn't sure she wanted to or whether he would accept.
"You won't enjoy it," he said, but beckoned her along anyway.
Men, thought Ilsa. She followed him into a different laboratory, this one not, thankfully, tenanted. He sat down at a workbench and rolled up his sleeve. His skin was milk white and seamed with red scars, and protruding from his arm was a piece of steel. Ilsa fought the urge to recoil.
"I need to fix this. It worked on number 212. I don't know what happened here."
Ilsa's eyes grew wide. "You do to yourself what you do to them?" she asked in a whisper.
"The human body is so frail," he replied. "An unfit servant to the will that commands it. I merely make some additions." He drew one of his ever-present scalpels out of his breast pocket and widened the cut in his arm. His face showed very little reaction, but Ilsa saw beads of sweat stand out on his upper lip.
"I have to go into the hand a bit to reattach the wires. Can you please hold it down?" Kroenen said lightly. Ilsa looked at him sharply. He sighed. "There are some autonomic responses I am not able to control. Yet. Reflexes." Ilsa complied. His hand was very cold. He made three expert cuts, and his hand jumped lightly in Ilsa's. She could see the wires within, curled around bone and tendon.
At his request she fetched him more wire and pliers. She tried to emulate his light and emotionless tone, but found it difficult. At times she had to turn away, and at times she caught herself staring at his face--he furrowed his brow sometimes with concentration, and his pulse seemed to be higher, but, for all that, he could have been cutting into someone else, not the limb attached to his own body.
Finally Kroenen seemed satisfied with his repairs. Kroenen asked Ilsa to hold the edges of the wound together while he sewed. He took his time and made neat little stitches that would do a seamstress proud. Ilsa bit back a hysterical giggle at the mental picture of him hemming a lady's dress rather than suturing his own flesh.
He finished the last stitch and Ilsa pulled her hands back. The fingers on her right hand were bloody, and, without thinking, she licked the blood off her index finger. She stopped the moment she realized what she was doing, but then she looked at Kroenen and saw the dark, speculative look in his eyes. The atmosphere was suddenly thick with tension.
"Go," he said quietly. "Get ready for this evening." There was a promise in his expression that Ilsa could not help returning. She did not want to leave now, not with all this potential ripe in the air, but she turned to go.
[][][]
Ilsa met him at the banquet hall wearing her favorite black dress. The waist was cinched and the skirt blossomed out to emphasize her strong hips and thighs, those most German of attributes. This was the same dress she had worn for Strasser, and when she put it on she felt a hint of the blood and sex from that night still clinging to it.
They walked in arm-in-arm, and before a moment had passed men and women started approaching her, making introductions, passing her gifts, begging her to pass along a request to the estimable doctor. Through some link to him she knew who to dance with, who deserved her attention and who did not, who she should string along if they asked for an assignation and who should be rejected.
She drank little, but felt drunk anyway on the eddies of power that whorled around her. She had never been this close to so much of it. It was amusing to let people think that she and Kroenen were some kind of item. The shock of seeing him with a woman made some of the guests lose their composure and reveal more than they wished.
"Now I suppose you want your reward," he said as he prepared to leave, after he had spoken with everyone he needed to and sewed the seeds for the next crop of political shifts. Merely making eye contact with him made her pulse race and her face heat with the promise from earlier in the evening that remained between them, unfulfilled.
"Yes, yes I do," she said breathlessly.
"Any of the young men over there are safe," he said, gesturing at a gaggle of twenty-something men lingering near the punch bowl.
"But they're true Germans," she protested, "Aryan, Party members." He drew her hand to his lips in a parting gesture.
"I would not have you sully yourself with anything less," he said, and walked down the stairs away from her.
Ilsa couldn't work out whether to feel insulted or flattered, but she pushed the question out of her mind and went to mingle with the blond youths indicated by Kroenen. A few shied away from her, scared, she supposed, after seeing her keeping Kroenen's company, but one young man, Peter, happily accepted her attention.
She easily persuaded him to join her in the alley behind the hall, where she kissed him with growing urgency. He hiked up her skirt but before he could do anything else, she extended her knives and pinned him to the clammy stone wall behind him. She touched his mind enough to keep him quiet and started to put the knives to his neck, his arms, his chest. Blood flowed through his shirt, staining the white red, and his eyes grew wide with terror. A miasma of blood and sex filled the air around her and she drank it in.
Just as she was about to finish it, she saw a figure beyond the alley. In her euphoric state she did not stop to panic, instead preparing to enthrall and kill this man, too, but as he came closer she saw the bug-like glass lenses of Kroenen's mask, and recognized his graceful walk. She watched him as she killed the boy. He came over and looked down at the blood covering her hand, and she took her other hand and placed it on the cheek of the mask for just a moment. He pulled back as if even such tenderness as this were alien to him.
"It didn't last long enough," she said, wiping her hands on the boy's jacket. "I got bored, or he stopped giving me power." Kroenen reached out with a leather-gloved hand and took her wrist, the wrist that still had a knife extended from it. He lifted it slowly to him and let the point rest gently against his shoulder.
"I can show you how," he said.
[][][]
They did not speak in the car, as if speaking would break the spell, derail them from the path they traveled. Some spell held her suspended between strong attraction and an equally deep repulsion, and she felt she could scarcely breath. When they reached his house, he took her red-stained hand and led her in through a different door, upstairs to a small bedroom. Ilsa shivered as she passed over the threshold. Had she been expecting this? Hoping for it? Was she even here of her own free will? She wasn't sure.
He took off his gloves and hat and reached to take off the mask, but Ilsa came behind him and helped him undo the straps that held it in place. She cradled it gently in her hands and placed it on a table. He seemed paralyzed so she started unbuttoning his shirt for him.
"Show me," she whispered. He finished taking it off and backed toward the bed with Ilsa following. She was scared to look at his eyes, so she looked at his scar-covered torso instead. Most of them seemed to be from knife cuts, except a bullet scar on his upper arm. Some looked brand-new and some decades old. He leaned down to her and touched his lips to hers just briefly before he lay back on the bed. Ilsa got up on top of him; part of her still recoiled at touching him, and her skin crawled, but the rest of her moved inexorably forward.
She could feel his eyes searching her face but still kept hers lowered. She followed where his hands pointed her, slowly drawing shallow lines with her knife. The room was silent except the sound of their breathing.
"Just a little of your blood will make it better," he said with a wicked smile. His torso was covered in shallow cuts. She opened her mouth to protest, but some curiosity kept her silent. He much stronger than his leanness suggested and he rolled her onto her back effortlessly.
"Just once," she said. She wanted to sound firm and in control, but she half-gasped the words instead. She flinched as his scalpel broke the skin of her neck. She half expected him to drink it from her like some peasant vampire, but he licked off the scalpel instead. She could feel his growing urgency at the sight of her blood, but did not want to be trapped under him--he had enough control lying on his back. She forced him back over with a sharp smile and a knife at his throat.
He was right: the power in the room was greater now, with her blood and his mingled. She licked her lips as if she tasted chocolate on them, her consciousness started to give way to the trance state in which she killed. She held him down and continued undressing him with little nicks and cuts wherever she passed.
She was about to push him inside of her when he sat up and grabbed he wrist and said "cut me deeper," in a harsh whisper. Ilsa did not like to be brought back to reality, so she looked blank for a moment. "Enough teasing," he said, "give me a real cut. Leave a scar I'll always have."
He guided her hips onto him and pulled her wrist toward his shoulder. He drew a line down his bicep with one finger and nodded for her to follow with her knife. "To the bone," he commanded. She did as she was told, and a wave of magical power filled her as she made the cut. The blood filled her vision as it spilled out over her hand and the blade. He pulled her hips hard against him, and was done.
When her trance of pleasure and bloodlust receded she looked down at him, at the satiated expression on his face. She could see bone in the cut in his shoulder, and she thought she was going to be sick. She got up shakily, ran out of the room.
She wanted to get the memory of his face and his body out of her head, and worse, the memory of her willing participation and enjoyment. She scrubbed the blood off her hands and face in the bathroom. Her legs shook like jelly, and her face in the mirror was ashen. In her own blue eyes she saw only his, mocking and hungry for more.
Title: Made in Hell: Consummation (3/3)
Pairing: Ilsa/Kroenen
Rating: NC-17 for just about everything (violence, torture, self-injury, very kinky sex, S&M)
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Mike Mignola and Guillermo Del Toro
Feedback: pretty please with sugar on top
Summary: After teasing you people for 6000 words in the previous chapters, this is it. It mostly stands alone, but also follows Chapter 1: Flirtation and Chapter 2: Courtship. In my version of their world Kroenen is human in 1930, not yet immortal and still without the facial surgery.
The Story So Far: Ilsa has found she likes to kill for power, Kroenen insists on supervising.
Interlude (2004)
Ilsa still remembered each time as if it were yesterday. The frenzied nightly couplings with Grigori had faded into a mélange of pleasure in her memories, but no one stood out. It had only been a few times with Karl, and never after Grigori, but she could remember every moment. She looked at him sharply, and the ever-present tick tick tick of his clockwork seemed louder. She wondered if he were directing her thoughts, as he had done in the past when training her. He could never completely take her over, but he had subtler controls at his disposal and had led her when she let him.
No, Grigori had severed that bond with his last coming. Karl came to her as a supplicant now, though he tried not to admit it. His vision was still stuck in the Germany of yesteryear, all his thoughts still bent on a thousand-year Reich. What was sixty years of ignominy for a nation that would live millennia?
Ilsa idly wondered if he still bore the scars she gave him, or if they were subsumed under the years of tinkering with the sand and clockwork body his gods had given him. That first scar on his hand, from her angry stab with the letter opener, that was gone with his hand to some other dimension. Or no, that was gone earlier, when he had flayed that hand to the bone. For his improvements he said . . . or was it his own version of Van Gogh's ear?
Idle thoughts . . . Ilsa tried to bend her mind back to studying. Perhaps he still bore the scar on his shoulder. He had placed her hand and her knife there, and showed her the way.
Chapter 3: Consummation (1930)
"Strasser is still, ah, lessened, and I need a companion for tonight's event," he said to her.
"You rather need a keeper," she muttered. As she expected he said nothing. He seemed inordinately cheery, and that frightened her more than anything that had happened to her yet. The things that made Kroenen happy made most shudder in horror, and Ilsa fought a shiver that crept over her skin. She was excited, and it wasn't just fear. She tried to tell herself that it was simply like looking at a train wreck, but her interest was nothing so wholesome.
He flexed his arm, probed at it through his shirt, and seemed to grimace a little. "It didn't work," he said under his breath. His hand came away lightly stained with blood.
"What is it?" asked Ilsa.
"I need to fix something," he said dismissively. "Go get a dress to wear." Ilsa walked closer instead.
"Can I help?" she asked. She wasn't sure she wanted to or whether he would accept.
"You won't enjoy it," he said, but beckoned her along anyway.
Men, thought Ilsa. She followed him into a different laboratory, this one not, thankfully, tenanted. He sat down at a workbench and rolled up his sleeve. His skin was milk white and seamed with red scars, and protruding from his arm was a piece of steel. Ilsa fought the urge to recoil.
"I need to fix this. It worked on number 212. I don't know what happened here."
Ilsa's eyes grew wide. "You do to yourself what you do to them?" she asked in a whisper.
"The human body is so frail," he replied. "An unfit servant to the will that commands it. I merely make some additions." He drew one of his ever-present scalpels out of his breast pocket and widened the cut in his arm. His face showed very little reaction, but Ilsa saw beads of sweat stand out on his upper lip.
"I have to go into the hand a bit to reattach the wires. Can you please hold it down?" Kroenen said lightly. Ilsa looked at him sharply. He sighed. "There are some autonomic responses I am not able to control. Yet. Reflexes." Ilsa complied. His hand was very cold. He made three expert cuts, and his hand jumped lightly in Ilsa's. She could see the wires within, curled around bone and tendon.
At his request she fetched him more wire and pliers. She tried to emulate his light and emotionless tone, but found it difficult. At times she had to turn away, and at times she caught herself staring at his face--he furrowed his brow sometimes with concentration, and his pulse seemed to be higher, but, for all that, he could have been cutting into someone else, not the limb attached to his own body.
Finally Kroenen seemed satisfied with his repairs. Kroenen asked Ilsa to hold the edges of the wound together while he sewed. He took his time and made neat little stitches that would do a seamstress proud. Ilsa bit back a hysterical giggle at the mental picture of him hemming a lady's dress rather than suturing his own flesh.
He finished the last stitch and Ilsa pulled her hands back. The fingers on her right hand were bloody, and, without thinking, she licked the blood off her index finger. She stopped the moment she realized what she was doing, but then she looked at Kroenen and saw the dark, speculative look in his eyes. The atmosphere was suddenly thick with tension.
"Go," he said quietly. "Get ready for this evening." There was a promise in his expression that Ilsa could not help returning. She did not want to leave now, not with all this potential ripe in the air, but she turned to go.
[][][]
Ilsa met him at the banquet hall wearing her favorite black dress. The waist was cinched and the skirt blossomed out to emphasize her strong hips and thighs, those most German of attributes. This was the same dress she had worn for Strasser, and when she put it on she felt a hint of the blood and sex from that night still clinging to it.
They walked in arm-in-arm, and before a moment had passed men and women started approaching her, making introductions, passing her gifts, begging her to pass along a request to the estimable doctor. Through some link to him she knew who to dance with, who deserved her attention and who did not, who she should string along if they asked for an assignation and who should be rejected.
She drank little, but felt drunk anyway on the eddies of power that whorled around her. She had never been this close to so much of it. It was amusing to let people think that she and Kroenen were some kind of item. The shock of seeing him with a woman made some of the guests lose their composure and reveal more than they wished.
"Now I suppose you want your reward," he said as he prepared to leave, after he had spoken with everyone he needed to and sewed the seeds for the next crop of political shifts. Merely making eye contact with him made her pulse race and her face heat with the promise from earlier in the evening that remained between them, unfulfilled.
"Yes, yes I do," she said breathlessly.
"Any of the young men over there are safe," he said, gesturing at a gaggle of twenty-something men lingering near the punch bowl.
"But they're true Germans," she protested, "Aryan, Party members." He drew her hand to his lips in a parting gesture.
"I would not have you sully yourself with anything less," he said, and walked down the stairs away from her.
Ilsa couldn't work out whether to feel insulted or flattered, but she pushed the question out of her mind and went to mingle with the blond youths indicated by Kroenen. A few shied away from her, scared, she supposed, after seeing her keeping Kroenen's company, but one young man, Peter, happily accepted her attention.
She easily persuaded him to join her in the alley behind the hall, where she kissed him with growing urgency. He hiked up her skirt but before he could do anything else, she extended her knives and pinned him to the clammy stone wall behind him. She touched his mind enough to keep him quiet and started to put the knives to his neck, his arms, his chest. Blood flowed through his shirt, staining the white red, and his eyes grew wide with terror. A miasma of blood and sex filled the air around her and she drank it in.
Just as she was about to finish it, she saw a figure beyond the alley. In her euphoric state she did not stop to panic, instead preparing to enthrall and kill this man, too, but as he came closer she saw the bug-like glass lenses of Kroenen's mask, and recognized his graceful walk. She watched him as she killed the boy. He came over and looked down at the blood covering her hand, and she took her other hand and placed it on the cheek of the mask for just a moment. He pulled back as if even such tenderness as this were alien to him.
"It didn't last long enough," she said, wiping her hands on the boy's jacket. "I got bored, or he stopped giving me power." Kroenen reached out with a leather-gloved hand and took her wrist, the wrist that still had a knife extended from it. He lifted it slowly to him and let the point rest gently against his shoulder.
"I can show you how," he said.
[][][]
They did not speak in the car, as if speaking would break the spell, derail them from the path they traveled. Some spell held her suspended between strong attraction and an equally deep repulsion, and she felt she could scarcely breath. When they reached his house, he took her red-stained hand and led her in through a different door, upstairs to a small bedroom. Ilsa shivered as she passed over the threshold. Had she been expecting this? Hoping for it? Was she even here of her own free will? She wasn't sure.
He took off his gloves and hat and reached to take off the mask, but Ilsa came behind him and helped him undo the straps that held it in place. She cradled it gently in her hands and placed it on a table. He seemed paralyzed so she started unbuttoning his shirt for him.
"Show me," she whispered. He finished taking it off and backed toward the bed with Ilsa following. She was scared to look at his eyes, so she looked at his scar-covered torso instead. Most of them seemed to be from knife cuts, except a bullet scar on his upper arm. Some looked brand-new and some decades old. He leaned down to her and touched his lips to hers just briefly before he lay back on the bed. Ilsa got up on top of him; part of her still recoiled at touching him, and her skin crawled, but the rest of her moved inexorably forward.
She could feel his eyes searching her face but still kept hers lowered. She followed where his hands pointed her, slowly drawing shallow lines with her knife. The room was silent except the sound of their breathing.
"Just a little of your blood will make it better," he said with a wicked smile. His torso was covered in shallow cuts. She opened her mouth to protest, but some curiosity kept her silent. He much stronger than his leanness suggested and he rolled her onto her back effortlessly.
"Just once," she said. She wanted to sound firm and in control, but she half-gasped the words instead. She flinched as his scalpel broke the skin of her neck. She half expected him to drink it from her like some peasant vampire, but he licked off the scalpel instead. She could feel his growing urgency at the sight of her blood, but did not want to be trapped under him--he had enough control lying on his back. She forced him back over with a sharp smile and a knife at his throat.
He was right: the power in the room was greater now, with her blood and his mingled. She licked her lips as if she tasted chocolate on them, her consciousness started to give way to the trance state in which she killed. She held him down and continued undressing him with little nicks and cuts wherever she passed.
She was about to push him inside of her when he sat up and grabbed he wrist and said "cut me deeper," in a harsh whisper. Ilsa did not like to be brought back to reality, so she looked blank for a moment. "Enough teasing," he said, "give me a real cut. Leave a scar I'll always have."
He guided her hips onto him and pulled her wrist toward his shoulder. He drew a line down his bicep with one finger and nodded for her to follow with her knife. "To the bone," he commanded. She did as she was told, and a wave of magical power filled her as she made the cut. The blood filled her vision as it spilled out over her hand and the blade. He pulled her hips hard against him, and was done.
When her trance of pleasure and bloodlust receded she looked down at him, at the satiated expression on his face. She could see bone in the cut in his shoulder, and she thought she was going to be sick. She got up shakily, ran out of the room.
She wanted to get the memory of his face and his body out of her head, and worse, the memory of her willing participation and enjoyment. She scrubbed the blood off her hands and face in the bathroom. Her legs shook like jelly, and her face in the mirror was ashen. In her own blue eyes she saw only his, mocking and hungry for more.