The Knives and the Nuns

This chapter has a really high squick factor. It gets worse after the ***s (what's it called when you do that?), so if you're eating, um, stop. Oh god, did I actually write that? No wonder this thing is rated R! Lots of references to rotting flesh and stuff. Farf really getting into his new role as Demon incarnate. Oh, ick. If you want, skip the bit between the two sets of ***s.

Schuldig couldn't hold back the sigh of relief when Jei, no, Farfarello turned to look at him, because, simply, Farfarello could look at him. It was only one eye that was gone.

"I saw something," Farfarello said in a strangled voice. "I saw something and my mind says it cannot be true. So my eyes must have deceived me. I will not have rebellion in my own body."

"What did you see?" Schuldig asked in macabre fascination.

"I saw my parents deaths. I saw Sister Ruth in the doorway." Farfarello raised his head to stare at the ceiling. "I saw the bloody knife in my own hands. God put these images in my mind, Christian. God is trying to fool me. God is changing what my eyes saw."

"Jei…" Schuldig wasn't sure if he should tell the young man that this had nothing to do with God. Even now he could feel the Truth, a burning bush in the desert of Jei's insanity.

"I will take out my eyes, that the Lord gave me to see," Farfarello began to intone. "I shall cut off my ears, that the Lord gave me to hear. I shall bite off my tongue, that the Lord gave me to taste. I shall-"

Farfarello froze mid sentence. It was like a patient, kept awake during brain surgery, who is frozen in the middle of a word by the application of pressure on the correct area of the brain. Schuldig ripped through Jei's mind, searching for something to extinguish that burning bush. He could live with Jei's self-mutilation, but this was something else. This was cutting of his nose to spite his face, literally. And it wouldn't stop there, Schuldig could tell. This 'Truth' would destroy Jei, unravelling his world until he cut to his brain to stop the whispered lies.

Memories were a hard thing to alter. They were hard even to find, as Schuldig was learning with Brad, but Jei's burning bush could also be likened to a pillar of fire, ever visible. But having found it, Schuldig could see no way of getting rid of it. He might be able to repress it, but that would mean repressing every association too. Who knew what kitchen cutlery or hotel bible could set Farfarello off again?

But if those association could be cut off from the memory… Well, it would be much less likely to resurface at all. Not impossible, but short of directly referencing it, which tended to throw Farfarello straight back into his "I'm God's victim" style of repression, it wouldn't turn up of it's own accord. Schuldig started to separate those tenuous links, the knives and the nuns.

He felt them give, felt them break. The memory became isolated, floating in it's own bubble of pain. Schuldig resisted the temptation to look deeper into it. That would only wake the memory. Farfarello needed not to remember, at all, ever. Schuldig wouldn't sate his curiosity at the expense of his friend. Farfarello was drawing a line between his old life and his new. Jei was gone. Dead. He could be resurrected, if the memory was opened, but he probably wouldn't stick around. Farfarello was here now, a one eyed, white haired, god hating, self-mutilating demon. Personality-wise, Jei had been Farfarello for years now, ever since the death of his parents, but he hadn't seen the line before. Farfarello had assumed he was the same person as Jei, somehow, despite the radical alterations. And now Schuldig was correcting that.

In some ways it made the younger man so much saner. Things were settled. The confusion had been cleared up. Maybe he'd be able to feel pain again, even. He would, one day, if he acknowledged that he killed his family and dealt with it. Schuldig had done his best to prevent that happening, but in one brief, selfish, malicious moment he reached in and pulled a few more cords. Farfarello was a good lay, and a good sparring partner. It would take something special for his mind to associate pain with hurting.

Schuldig withdrew and looked at him. Farfarello's eye refocused, and his mouth closed with a snap. That one tawny orb contracted until only a point of black remained in the owl-like iris. Schuldig had always found Farfarello's absolute control over his body a little disturbing. He could control those automatic reflex responses that people weren't supposed to be able to, what with them being automatic and all.

Staring into that black pinprick, Schuldig felt delicious shivers run up and down his spine. The gaping socket wasn't so bad to look at, once you got used to it. In fact it… well, Schuldig admitted to himself it practically turned him on. Sometimes Farfarello's self-punishments did that. Schuldig was, in his own way, as much of a sadist as Hertz.

* * *

Silvia woke to find a demon straddling her. It had white hair and one yellow eye. Some kind of putrid slime dripped from the raw black socket where the other one used to be. The demons flesh was a mass of scar tissue and still seeping cuts. It smelt of rotting flesh and pus. The remains of the optical nerve in that socket were rotting away, and the rancid juices continued to drip on Silvia's face.

Silvia screamed. The demon laughed. It was naked, she realised, and those seeping cuts extended across its entire body. It was male, she noticed, and some part of her mind insisted demons were sexless. Except when they weren't, like succubi and incubi. Somehow, though, she doubted this was a sex demon. It would be starving to death if it were. Even its tongue was cut, she realised as she watched it lick its lips. Her stomach heaved.

"What are you?" she murmured, unable to help herself.

"You helped me," it said. "You pushed me."

And then realisation hit. "You're Jei," she mouthed.

He stuck a finger in his eye-socket and stuck it in her open mouth. She started to scream, but that only allowed him to push the fleshy matter further down her throat. Chocking and gagging she through all her power at him and flung him across the small room. He hit the wall and slumped to the ground, bones cracking and popping.

Silvia vomited over the side of the bed, retching until her throat burned and her eyes watered and her stomach hurt. As she gasped for air again, trying to quell the dry heaving, she became aware of another sound in the room. The demonic man was still slumped against the wall like a discarded rag doll, but he was laughing like a jack-in-the-box. With a vicious twist she turned his organs against one another, and while the laughing took on a more breathy quality it didn't stop.

"Little girl, little girl," Farfarello began to chant, single eye fixed on the Asian girl. "Little girl, little girl, over stepped your bounds. Little girl, little girl released the hellhounds." He barked and snapped at her then, teeth clicking together. In the moonlight Silvia saw they had been filed to inexpert points.

"Names have power," Farfarello went on. "We must cut Schuldig's name from your head. It is a bad name that tells you nothing of him. A bad name bad people gave to him. Cut it out, cut it out."

Silvia couldn't take her eyes off him. With a smiled he pressed two fingers to the inside of his elbow ad began to bend the arm, slowly, slipping through a cut that had begun to heal, fresh blood poured anew a the glint of metal became apparent. It was a needle, long and sharp and glimmering black with blood in the moonlight.

Farfarello tilted his head to one side as he pulled the needle out of his arm. Silvia broke the arm, flinging her power at it. He ignored it, ignored the bone that began to push its way out through the muscle and skin. Pulling the needle out entirely her took a moment to lick the blood from it, seeming to savour the taste. Silvia felt her stomach heave again. Madame Dubois had never warned her about this. How was she to know the psycho would seek revenge?

He climbed to his feet carefully, one leg broken and the opposite hip dislocated. Silvia managed to shatter his kneecaps as he approached, but he didn't stop. Despair began to creep over her as he gripped the needle between his teeth and started to drag himself across the floor with his last good limb. Silvia broke the bones in that too, but he kept coming, like a snake on his belly. A serpent, a demon, sent by the devil.

Silvia curled up against the wall as the creature squirmed its way through her vomit unperturbed. As a last ditch effort she managed to create a telekinetic shield around her, but she didn't know how long she would be able to keep it up. She wanted to scream, but all that came out was a panicked croak. She watched the needle, hypnotised, as Farfarello struggled against the shield.

And then Silvia woke up, sweating and panting under what had been crisp white sheets. She had been having the nightmare for months now. She could even name the night it was, in the nightmare. The night before she was sent to replace Falbros's recently dead telekinetic. She had known her work to tear Schuldig and Jei apart had been good, but that was a reward beyond all expectations.

She always woke up at that point. It was funny, because she had woken up that night, having had precisely the same nightmare, but something felt wrong with the memory. Off-kilter. Like she'd woken up much earlier than she remembered, but couldn't fill in the gap.

~~~

Schuldig and Hertz had ripped predator from prey, Schuldig effectively shutting down both their minds in one fell swoop. Hertz had taken one look at Farfarello and shuddered.

"Send him to the labs. Get him cleaned up, but don't let them bring him around. I'd rather he was sedated for the next century," Hertz had growled in their common language.

"Ja," Schuldig had sighed. He was the one who had told Hertz about what Farfarello was doing. The girl on the bed, frozen in terror, had touched him deeper than he liked to admit. Maybe it was just because there weren't that many pretty girls at Rosenkreuz. Maybe it was because, well, she really had been amazing in bed. One day he'd have to sleep with one of her ex-boyfriends, provided she wasn't some kind of black widow who killed and ate all the helpless men she seduced, just to find out who really was better.

"What turned the boy's screw?" Hertz had asked. "He didn't use to be this insane."

"Some old memories started making themselves known," Schuldig had said. "I cut them off, but it's still having residual effects. He thinks he's a demon at the moment. So does she," he had indicated Silvia.

"I can see why," Hertz had said with grim humour. "He looks ferocious."

A group of grunts had run in, all non-psis or psis so weak they weren't worth training. They had taken the catatonic Farfarello away and started to clean the room. Hertz and Schuldig had just stood there, unmoving, while the bustled had gone one around them. It had taken some time, and by the time they were alone with Silvia the sun had started to rise.

"Wake her up," Hertz had commanded. "Convince her all of this was a dream."

"How are we going to explain our presence?" Schuldig had asked curiously.

"We won't be here. I trust you can do this without line of sight?" Hertz had asked scathingly. Schuldig, unwilling to admit he had only done this with someone's memories once before, and that had been Farfarello, had nodded firmly and followed his superior out of the small room.

Silvia had come back to herself to realise she was crouched up against the wall, recovering from one of the worst nightmares she had ever had. The sequence of events was too firmly burned in her mind for Schuldig to fully remove. She lacked the advantage Farfarello's insanity gave him. There was a distinct possibility that she would never recover.

Hertz had wanted her sent to the labs when Schuldig warned him of this. He had wanted her disposed of. Instead, Schuldig had asked one small favour.

"Put her in a field team. She's powerful. More than powerful, she's skilled. You don't want to waste that kind of talent; the Elders wouldn't look kindly on it. Besides, this will only serve to make her crueller. I know how minds like hers work," Schuldig had smirked in the knowledge that Hertz had to take his word on that.

Hertz had given Schuldig a long hard look. "Fine," he had bitten out eventually. "But bare in mind that none of this would have happened if you had left Crawford alone."

Schuldig had perked up at that. "Yeah, that's true." Even going through mental hell each night trying to decipher the contents of the codex Crawford had read was made bearable at the thought that it had meant he had got to sleep with Silvia. Sex made everything good, in Schuldig's world. Pity he wouldn't be getting much more of that from Farfarello.