The Fine Print: As always, the great Dan Knauf and the folks at HBO own Carnivale and all its characters. However, it's beginning to look like they are never going to show us this scene, so I had to write it myself.

The Things You Can See From a Doorway
By EllisBelle

Iris was nearly at the bottom of the stairs when she felt his rage wash over her, battering her like a breaking wave.

"Irina!"

As the sound of her name echoed through the house, Iris frantically scanned the living room but there was no one else in the house. Only the two of them. And Norman. Iris's eyes focused on Norman's door.

She was reaching towards the doorknob, could almost feel its cool surface turning beneath her palm, when she felt his fingers close around her forearm like a vise.

Justin spun her around to face him and with a feral snarl, pushed her back into the wall. Justin's angry face towering above her was suddenly replaced by a bright flash of pain as her head hit with enough force to jar her teeth. Iris felt tears welling up as she blinked against the pain and mounting fear. Justin had never willingly hurt her before. She desperately wanted to believe that he wouldn't hurt her now. But she had seen the haunted, vacant faces of all those girls, seen their broken and scarred bodies. He had made sure she had seen them all.

"Let me go, Justin," she warned, her voice taking on a practiced edge. Years of experience had taught her how to use that particular tone to put her little brother back in his place. Iris prayed that it would work now, that she could somehow gain the upper hand.

Justin stared intently down into his sister's face, narrowing his eyes in contemplation. He released her arm, left it throbbing. Iris unconsciously rubbed at it with her other hand, as the blood rushed through it once again. She meet Justin's gaze defiantly, refusing to let him see her fear. His expression had gone cold and unreadable.

And then he laughed. "That, my dear sister, doesn't work on me anymore."

Iris's lower lip shook with barely contained anger. How dare he mock her? She couldn't stand to look at him, so she looked past him, over his shoulder, towards the window. The diffused morning sunlight played out through the oblivious, swaying leaves of the tree, casting dancing, changing shapes across the floor. It reminded her of a broken mirror, how the faint lamp light had reflected and shone in each hateful shard as she spread it across the floor, how the reflections grew brighter as she crawled through it towards her makeshift alter, how strange it was that the bloodied pieces could still shimmer even while she pried them from of her flesh. Her face burned as she remembered her desperate prayer. Tears started to flow freely down her cheeks before she could stop them. Her penance.

She had to get away from him, didn't want him to somehow read her act of supplication—her penance was hers alone. She wanted to be outside in the light, to feel the breeze cool across her skin. She tried to shove past him, to go to the porch, but he blocked her efforts, moving his body closer to hers, caging her against the wall with his arms.

The tattoo burned on his chest in front of her, filling her line of vision. She put her hands flat against his chest, spread her fingers out against his skin, until they seemed like mere extensions of the inky branches. Her fingers gradually bore down into his chest, the nails digging into his skin, leaving crescents of blood in their wake.

"Iris." She began to shake violently.

He grasped her wrists, easily encircling both of them with his hand, wrenching them above her head, pinning them to the wall.

"Be still."

He breathed out the words, barely above a whisper. Beneath his fingers he felt her muscles relax, the knots of tension unknitting, leaving her body liquid against his.

Justin smoothed his free hand lovingly down her face.

"That's better, now isn't it?" he said, pressing his mouth to hers in a chaste kiss even as he trailed his finger down her throat to toy with the top button on her dress. He laid his face beside hers, his lips almost touching her ear. "Why must you constantly fight me for control?" he asked. "Oh, Iris. It doesn't have to be like this." He kissed her neck just below her earlobe, let his lips linger on her pulse. He waited for the shiver that had followed that touch a thousand times before. But she remained still and hollow. He released her wrists, letting her arms fall down to her sides. Studying her face for any reaction, he ran his hands up her arms, letting his fingers creep beneath her sleeves, to caress her forearms.

He kissed her forehead, kissed her cheek, moved his hands to her throat and slid them down. "I don't want to have to punish you—to hurt you," his voice trailed off as he began to unfasten the buttons that ran down the front of her dress, one after another. A casualty to his growing haste, one tiny black button unthreaded and fell to the floor, forgotten. "But you are so willful."

His hand slid inside her dress, teasing across her breast, through the thin material of her slip. "So very willful." He grabbed handfuls of her dress and pulled it up over the tops of her stockings. Justin leaned forward against her, pressing his hips to hers, crushing his painful arousal between them.

Grasping at her thigh, he pulled her leg up around him, pulling her closer to grind himself against her through their clothes. Justin let his hand roam beneath her dress, relishing the feel of her silky stocking and her even silkier thigh beneath his hand. He could almost feel her stocking clad legs rapped around his waist, tightening—as she tightened around him, crying out. When his hand grazed around her knee, he felt something unfamiliarrough. He released her leg, lowering it to the floor and looked at her in growing concern. He dropped to his knees before her. He slowly pulled her stocking down to reveal a network of cuts, raised like pulsating veins across her knee.

He had a sudden revelation of her kneeling, praying. Shining bits of mirror, reflecting her pain, biting through her skin. Her penance. Her knees weeping blood. He had done this to her just as surely as if he had laid the trail of broken glass himself and dragged her across it.

Justin ran his fingers lightly over the cuts, some of them still puckered and raw—bent his head and nipped at the bit of unbroken skin beside her knee, darted his tongue at an unmarred freckle—Iris's freckles. They were inexplicable. No one else in their family had them. At least, he couldn't remember it if they did. She, in a rare vein of vanity, hated them. But he had always loved them. They accentuated her body—scattered across her shoulders and outlined her collarbone, spread across her thighs like constellations. But the dusting of freckles across her knees had always been his favorite. He had tried to count them one night, kissing each one in turn. He started at her toes and managed to reach her left knee before she couldn't stand it any more and drew him up into her waiting arm.

He closed his eyes in shame and revulsion. His hand reverently caressed the back of her knee, as he moved his lips against her sacrificed skin, silently mouthing two words into her—"Forgive me".

"Alexsei."

He looked up at her, surprised to find her blue eyes watching him, her fists clutching handfuls of her dress until her knuckles turned white—surprised that she had somehow regained her will.

"That doesn't work on me," she whispered hoarsely, echoing his own words in answer to his unspoken question.

Justin fell back away from her, watching her as if she were one of his visions.

Iris's hands let the crumpled material from her dress fall; only to disappear beneath it, then reappear sliding her underwear down her legs. When she tried to step out of them and her shoes at the same time, she stumbled and bumped ungracefully against the wall.

That simple awkward movement. It took all of Justin's practiced self-control not to touch himself, to bring himself to some sort of release, as he watched her. At that moment she reminded him so much of the skinny little girl who had once been his whole world. A wave of possessiveness washed over him. She was his and his alone—his own flesh and blood, his lover. He was the only one who had ever really touched her, who had seen her like this—the only one who had ever been inside her, body and soul.

Iris held her hand out to her brother in unmistakable invitation. A pained expression shadowed her face when he did not take her hand.

Still kneeling before her, he pushed his hands back up her legs, spreading them as he went. His sister's legs had almost been his undoing that night he first went to Chinatown to begin the painful process of his transformation. The site of her legs stretched out on the couchbare feet, smooth calves, and what he knew lay hidden beneath the bottom of her slip. Princes and prophets alike threatened to be forgotten when she stirred and he watched the play of muscle in her inner thigh. She was his one weakness. Eve offering the apple. The one thing that could tempt him to forget.

He teased the skin at the juncture of her thighs with his mouth. She sighed and opened her arms towards him, once more trying to draw him up to her, but he made no move to join her. Instead he dipped his head and buried his face between her legs. Mortified, Iris tried to get away from him once again, but she was caught between his seeking mouth and the unbending wall. "Alexsei, what. . ." she gasped. She grasped down at his face and shoulders trying to pull him away, but he would not relent. He only pressed his mouth harder into her. "Don't. What are you do" her words were cut off by a sharp intake of breath as his tongue found her center. His hands grasped her more firmly as she protested, his thumbs pressing into the dips above her hipbones.

Once again she fought. Fought against him, his mouth, and the wonderful, terrible things he was doing to her body. Fought against herself and the way her body was responding. Fought just to pull the air in and out of her lungs.

As his mouth continued its assault, her hips unconsciously thrust forward. Her hand clutched at his hair, holding him closer to her, as the other grasped for support against the wall, her nails digging thin grooves into it. She finally relinquished her grip on her self. Iris quit thinking, let her body take over, let the lower angels rule. A chorus of moans and gasps, each one more uncontrolled than the next broke from her lips.

Iris covered her mouth with her palm, frightened by the sounds she was making. She felt the knot of exquisite tension start to build in the balls of her feet, up to her calves, tightening her thighs, up into her stomach and spreading through her chest. When he grazed his teeth across her, Iris's whole body exploded. All her control, her sense of cohesion, shattered like the mirror.

To Be Continued . . .