Warning: soft sm*t ahead.

Chapter Summary: More encounters with Karl's "mysterious" powers, as well as his budding hatred and paranoia brought on by the villagers' cruelness towards him.

X

1945

Karl spent many years with Moreau in his clinic. The two struck up an odd sort of kinship, with Sal providing careful mentorship and Karl responding with his signature veiled enthusiasm. Though they never spoke on it, they were both afraid of what Jebediah would do if he found out about Karl's deviant interest in dissecting human anatomy. But Jebediah had grown sick and quivery in his old age. It wasn't common for someone of the strong Heisenberg bloodline to succumb so easily to illness, and all within the village suspected that Jebediah was one of the last among them to suffer from the terrible flu that had decimated their population some twenty years ago.

And yet, Jebediah's withering attention span made it easy for Karl to shun his work and sneak out of the factory to visit the Sal. Though part of him was, admittedly, horrified by the thought of his father dying, he couldn't help but feel as if there was an opportunity to be made. Ken - his damned pansy bastard of a twin brother - hadn't bothered to make an appearance at the factory since he left of his own accord over sixteen years ago. Karl doubted that Jebediah even remembered what his other son sounded like. Thus, there would be no question as to who would inherit his father's factory.

Or so Karl naively assumed

And so! He took the books that Sal gave him and studied them in the dim firelight of the stove in his room. Many nights he spent tracing his finger over the worn pages, sounding out the foreign-sounding scientific names of the human body. Cerebrum…cerebellum…corpus callosum. He liked the way that the words rolled so effortlessly off his tongue. There was a grandiosity to the coiling syllables that tasted so sweet, and so American.

His knack for bodily education was undeniable, born, as it was, from natural curiosity. The pages of Sal's books dampened beneath his wandering, ink-blackened fingers. It took less than a week for Karl to become a connoisseur of the muscular pathways and the intricate mapping of human veins. Now, every time a factory worker was injured on the job, he was more than happy to whisk them away to Moreau's Clinic.

It was obvious that Sal was suffering from some mysterious ailment of his own. The old clinician's hands had begun to quiver so much that he could barely hold on to anything for too long, and his vomiting bouts had increased in alarming frequency. His skin had begun to turn an ugly shade of fish-belly gray, and he walked with a stoop that he claimed was nothing more than a product of old age. A ridiculous thought, Karl figured, as Salvatore Moreau couldn't have been a day over forty-five. Once, whilst clasping hands at the end of a rather gruesome experimental surgery, a cluster of boils had erupted all along the back of Sal's hand. He had been quick to hide it, but not before Karl had noticed several more of its kind hidden beneath his coat sleeve.

"Maybe it's time you let me cut you open…take a peek and whatever lies beneath that ugly skin," Karl had once told him in a joking manner. But Sal hadn't seen the humor. His cheeks had bloated around a wet belch before he shook his head and spit on the floor.

"Nothing but mold and bones," he had croaked before rushing out the door to vomit upon the docks.

Nothing but mold and bones.

Well! Karl wasn't stupid, or so he liked to think. He had long since suspected that Sal had been another one of Miranda's sick experiments. Though Sal never outright admitted to it, the lustful way that he droned on and on about the Prophetess was enough to rid Karl of any doubts.

Now, he sat back in a wooden booth with his boots crossed daintily upon the table. In one hand he held one of Sal's old medical notebooks, and in the other, he balanced a cigarette between two fingers. Spending time with Sal had exposed him to the possibility of doing something with his life beyond cowering beneath his father's whip and eternally toiling before the roaring furnaces. Thus, for the first time in his life, the cold confines of his cellar room had lost their familiar appeal.

So he had made his way over to an ancient bar on the opposite side of the village. He had hoped to be able to study his books in peace, seeing as no one on that side of the village really knew him, but had been dismayed to find that a ragtag group of deviants led by his brother had already taken over the spot. But Karl was no punk, and he technically wasn't doing anything that would merit his brother's wrathful attention. And so he stayed put, focusing on the chatter in his brain to drown out the sound of the drunken revelry. The group of men had caught a Lycan and trussed it up in the center of the room. It was a small, pitiable thing with shriveled limbs and a twisted spine.

As Karl watched from the corner of his eyes, someone lobbed a glass bottle at the creature and laughed as it roared in response. Marianne was there, of course, stumbling around the room as she dug frantically around the bowl of an overturned hat. He had never seen her so high before, but he didn't blame her. He could tell by the way the men were snickering at her that she had probably made a week's worth of money in the span of an hour - all at once, most likely. The woman was nothing if not a trooper.

"Penicillin," Karl muttered to himself as he scanned the newspaper spread out upon the table. "A bacteria-killing mold…" He took a long drag of his cigarette and blew the smoke up at the ceiling. Why was it always mold? If he was more of the spiritual type, he would have been inclined to think that the universe was trying to tell him something. A few feet in front of him, Ken gave a raucous laugh and braced his boot against the Lycan's back before giving a swift push.

"What did you say?" Came a musical voice from behind him. He startled and quickly gathered his newspapers together. But it had only been Mihaela: the village's horse wrangler and Ken's right-hand woman. Her deep brown eyes squinted slightly as she took in the blush spreading across Karl's cheeks. There was no other woman in the village who had a face like hers: milk-tea tan with sharp angles and a nose so pointy that it could slice a man in half. Realizing that Karl had been struck dumb, she ignored him and leaned over his shoulder to look at his newspapers. He couldn't help it. He leaned over and surreptitiously sniffed the fountain of black hair spilling over her shoulder. God, it was glorious. He had never been close enough to a woman to smell her hair before….well, aside from Marianne. And her hair definitely didn't smell as nice as Mihaela's.

"You don't get out much, do you?" Mihaela said as her eyes lazily scanned the blurry headlines. "Shame. You have a nice voice…when you're not talking in bullshit scriptures, I mean. Say the thing that you said before, the p-word."

"The wha-?"

"Christ, boy, you act as if I'm making you say 'pussy.'" She watched him suddenly succumb to a fit of rather fake-sounding coughs and raised her brows. "Oh…you really don't get out much. Ken told me that you've probably never fucked a woman. Say the word, Karl."

"Y-you mean 'penicillin?'"

"Mm," she bit her lip at this and he suddenly felt as if he couldn't breathe. "Like that. Pin-neh-sillin? Voice of the Devil come down to Earth, you've got. Tell me, what do you think it takes to make the Devil come, anyway? To earth, I mean."

"I-"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Ken's voice suddenly rang out. Karl gave an inward groan as Ken hopped across several tables and crash-landed before them. "Mihaela, what are you doing?" His brother yelled. The black inkings on his head had become smeared with sweat."Don't touch the zealot! Who knows what ancient-ass disease he picked up from papa, wasting away in the fucking factory..."

Mihaela gave a full-bodied sigh and stood up, but not before giving Karl's arm a surreptitious squeeze and whispering 'find me later,' beneath her breath. Karl suddenly realized that he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a shaky puff as he watched Mihaela rock her wide hips over to the other side of the room. Marianne watched her down a beer, then turned and cast Karl a scowl so hot that he could feel it across the room.

"Hey, asshole!" Ken growled, snapping his fingers in Karl's face. "Keep your eyes off what you can't handle, boy. That there is a real woman - nothing like riding a pony."

"What the fuck are you insinuating?" Karl hissed, though he couldn't take his eyes off Mihalea's fantastic backside.

"Sorry," Ken said in a syrupy-sweet falsetto. "You don't ride ponies. The only thing you ride is your left hand. Isn't that right, brother?"

The crowd broke out in laughter at this. There was that familiar heat rising in the pit of Karl's stomach, the one that made him want to rear up and shove his brother's face into the table. But he couldn't - he was outnumbered, and if he lashed out at Ken he'd probably receive several beatings at once from the other man's thuggish cronies. There was a whistling in his ears, growing higher in pitch, drowning out the sound of Ken yelling your scriptures didn't prepare you for that one, did they? Karl's fingers tensed around his glass until the fragile walls shattered in his palm.

"-eh? What's this?" Ken was saying. Karl shook the red-hot blurriness from his vision and realized that Ken had snatched up one of his newspapers. "News from America? I'll tell you all you need to know about America." Ken tossed the paper down and stood tall with his shoulders back. The men around him immediately fell silent, the entire group of them leaning into him like obedient children. It was then that Karl realized that it wasn't Ken's youthful exuberance or flaming trajectory through life that he was jealous of: it was his commanding and magnetic sense of showmanship. Ken could talk about a fly on the wall and keep an entire room enraptured for hours.

"In America, the only thing you have to fear is two things: an American woman's frontside, and her backside. You see, out there in the land of the free, the women have tits so large that you'd ricochet right off the planet if you ran into them straight-on!" The crowd laughed at this as Ken wrapped a strangling arm around his brother's neck and shook him. "And don't even get me started on their asses. Them things are so big that you'd need a ladder and a map to reach the top, and you might still get lost on the way there. And if you think that's impressive, let me tell you about their-"

"The hell would you know about American women?" Karl asked heatedly. Ken turned and looked him dead in the face. He was so close that Karl could see the yellowing of his eyes. Sclera, cornea, retina…There was a quiver in Karl's jaw. He would have reached out and raked his fingernails straight through his brother's eyeballs if there were fewer people in the room.

"The hell would you know about women?" Ken countered. "You've probably had your shit shoved so far up your ass by those factory men that it's painting pictures in your brain-"

Karl reared up with a roar and flung himself around. Laughter was all around him as he hunched his shoulders and stormed across the room. Something heavy and made of glass shattered across his back as he set foot upon the stairs leading to the second story of the bar. Still, he kept his face lowered as he lifted a shaking hand to his mouth and lit his cigarette. There was a soft rattle all around him, growing so loud that it began to drown out the sound of laughter behind him as he climbed the stairs. He couldn't believe what he was seeing - the nail heads embedded in the wall were actually shaking. The coldness began to spread along his back teeth as he began to run up the stairs, running away from the odd phenomena and the voices growing louder in his head. The laughter was coming from within now, but not from his own mouth. He gave a pained whine as he braced his sweaty palms across his mouth and closed his eyes. The nails were beginning to pop out of the wall like shrapnel, nicking his skin and bouncing off of his clothes. He had no idea what was happening, but it had happened before: objects made of metal moving of their own accord around him, knives jumping off the dinner table when he reached for them - all of it coinciding with the mysterious chatter in his head and the coldness of his back teeth. It only ever happened when he was upset and, at that moment, he was beyond pissed.

The wooden boards along the stairwell began to shift and become unhinged as he bounded up the stairs. The nails were everywhere now: littering the floor and making him stumble when they rolled under his boots. They were sticking to him, and though he tried to shake them off, they remained fixed firmly to his skin. The very floor beneath his boots was rattling and warping as if something beneath him was trying its hardest to force its way out.

There was a door at the end of the hallway. He knew that it led to the bar matron's room, but he didn't care. He flung it open, whirled around, and reached for the lock. But before his fingers could even make contact, the metal slide slunk through the double loops with a loud 'clank,' locking him in.

He quickly withdrew his fingers and placed them between his teeth, biting down hard as he muttered prayer after prayer to himself. His heart beat began to slow and the chill in his teeth faded away. The brain chatter died down until all he could hear was his own ragged breathing. All at once, the metal nails that had been stuck to him fell away from his skin and he gave a relieved sigh.

"...you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried," he whispered to the ceiling as he fingered the cross hanging upon his chest. "The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts…the crucible is for silver - fuck! FUCK!" He kicked the door as hard as he could and then hopped backward with his boot braced against his palms. He had been thinking about his brother but, at some point, it hadn't even been Ken anymore. Instead, Karl imagined himself in Ken's place: surrounded by an audience, cracking witty and raunchy jokes to stupid, drunken, adoring sycophants. Hating Ken was as hard for Karl as hating a captivating villain atop a golden stage. His desire to be such a showman was a constant plague upon his jealous, outcast heart.

"Oh, fuck me," Karl moaned as he wrung his hands across his jaw.

"Do you want me to?"

He spun around and squinted his eyes at the dark. There, at the other end of the room, stood Mihaela with her back braced against an old desk. Either she was drunk or simply didn't care that the unbuttoned flaps of her shirt were teasing a rather fantastic view of her breasts. Slowly, she slid her boots off and padded over to Karl in her bare feet. His body went tense as she wound her arms around his neck and nuzzled her nose against his chin.

"You're so tight…and hard," she murmured as she dragged her finger down his shoulder. The feel of her touch made the inside of his skull erupt in tingles. Tentatively, he placed his hands on her sides and slid them down to her waist. Something in his throat caught and he quickly looked away. But he couldn't keep his hands off her, couldn't believe that what was happening was real.

"You're playing with me," he said with some difficulty as she slunk her hands down and began to unbuckle his belt. "This is another one of your cat-and-mouse games-"

"Maybe," she said. Having unbuckled his belt, she suddenly reached up and yanked the flaps of his shirt aside. He gave an ungainly sputter as she ran a cool hand along his chest, stopping every once in a while to finger the thin keloid scars built up over years of being dragged behind his father's horse. "Is that going to be a problem, Karl?"

"N-n-n-no, I just-" Unable to take her gentle teasing anymore, he grabbed both of her wrists and held them crossed against her chest. "Why-"

"Because I'm curious about you," she purred as she stared him down with those bottomless brown eyes. "All of the women in the village are. You're strange but you have a…presence about you. Not like Ken. No, your brother's becoming a stupid, lanky rogue. Mother Miranda knows that. That's why she-"

"Stop," Karl ordered. "Enough about that withering cunt Miranda." He couldn't bear to hear the sound of Miranda's name, not with the look in Mihaela's eyes making him hard already. It was quickly growing hot and cramped in the small room. Everything between them felt sticky, heated, and electric. Already, he could feel himself throbbing at the very sight of her staring back up at him. It would have been the perfect time to ask her why everyone was so fond of saying his name in the same breath as Miranda's, but desperation was quickly overwhelming him and pushing away all inhibitions. In an undeniably clumsy manner, he shoved her hands beneath the waistband of his pants and curled his toes as she grabbed him.

"Fer f-fuck's sake," he muttered as she began to work a particular and unfamiliar magic.

"God, that voice," she said in a trailing whisper that was utterly delicious to his ears. "Lucifer's tongue-"

She yanked her hands out of his pants and pulled him deeper into the room. Her back collided with the desk again as he put his hands on her face and began to kiss her. It was the first time that he had ever kissed a woman, and yet it was the least romantic thing that he had ever experienced. The two of them jostled awkwardly against each other as they rushed to remove their clothing. One of her pale legs wrapped around his waist, filling the room with the scent of her as he reached between their legs and pushed himself inside of her. They both gasped and quickly looked away from each other as he rocked against her body, causing the legs of the table to squeak and bounce against the floor. If the party raging below wasn't so loud, everyone in the bar would have heard them hissing and moaning and cursing as she gripped the edges of the table as if her very life depended on it. So far had she been pushed across the surface that she was on the verge of falling off the other end, but still he thrust with a frenzied madness into her until he was standing on the tip of his toes with his pants twisted hopelessly along his boots.

"For Your name's sake, O Lord," he said between heavy grunts as she twisted her fingers in his hair. "Pardon my iniquity, for it is great." One last thrust before he braced his hand across her face and released himself inside of her. The sheer euphoria of the moment was crippling, and never-ending - not even as she shoved him back with a warning kick to the chest. But the pleasure hadn't only been his, judging by the vacant look in her eyes and sweaty, heaving chest. Her body gave a jolt of its own accord and she quickly snaked her hand between her legs. She removed it, took one glance at her wet fingers, and cast him an annoyed glance.

"Really, Karl?" She said with venom that was quick to kill the post-sex high that he was riding.

"What?" He said with a huff that made his entire chest dip. "You were holding me down! How the hell was I supposed to pull it out-"

"Not that. The fucking bible verse. We were in the middle of fucking."

"Had to warn the Lord that my inequity would be great, beforehand. And it was pretty fucking great, wasn't it?" She glared at him and his face fell. "W-wasn't it?"

"Can't say much when I didn't expect much," she said as she began to pull her clothes back on. His eyes danced back and forth across the room as he watched her gather her things in a seemingly angry hurry.

"Then why the fuck did you do it if your standards were so god-damn low!?"

"Because, truthfully, Karl," she said, still struggling to catch her breath as she opened the door. "I felt bad for you. I know how jealous you are of Ken. I wanted to give you a chance to be him for once…bask in his glory, you know? Build you up a bit." She looked back up at him with eyes that seemed to flash in the dark before saying. "It really is a shame, you know? Nothing in your life will ever live up to this sad little moment. Bye, Karl."

X

She had closed the door in his face. For the longest time, he had simply stood there in shock, listening to her feet thumping down the wooden staircase. Everything inside of him still felt twisted and coiled and heated from having finally got somewhere with a woman. But it didn't feel good anymore. Instead, he felt sick - sick of himself, to be exact. He simply couldn't believe that he had fallen for such a coy little trap, that he had actually let himself believe that there was one person in the village who didn't find him odd and untouchable.

But no, it had all been a lie. But, oh, how his heart had risen at her saying I'm curious about you. All of the women in the village are.

Lies, lies, and more lies sawing across his heart like a bow upon the strings of some worn-out instrument.

Slowly, he began to pull his clothes back on, careful to avoid touching the scars and familiar firm bruises across his body. He couldn't bear the sight of himself, much less the smell of her still hanging around his hips. Many times he had woken up in his small room and glanced hopefully in his mirror - hoping to catch the reflection of someone bigger, bolder, and braver. But it had always been the same thing: scars, soot, and skin so darkened by the furnace's flames that he stood out like a sore thumb among the unique paleness of the village inhabitants. Maybe it was time to go back to the Potter's Field and stay there for a few nights. He had never had any problem with the Lycans, and if they found his presence as disturbing as the villagers did then they were too dumb to say anything.

Back down the stairs he went, keeping his gaze downcast as he took them two-by-two. His newspapers were still spread out along the table, but he was too ashamed to wade back into the bar to retrieve them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Marianne glance up and watch him make for the door. She was quick to jump up and scurry after him, keeping a safe and silent distance all the while. Mihaela was draped lovingly across Ken's lap, with the latter holding his nose wedged against her neck. Karl could feel her staring at him, could feel her utter disdain for his entire being all along the side of his bruised cheek.

The bell above the door gave a soft tinkle as he pushed it open and lifted his head into the ice-speckled gusts of wind blowing across the wind. Damn, he wanted to cry. But years of working in the factory and inhaling heavy dust had dried his tear ducts right up. For once, he couldn't hear the mystery chatter in his head, and this brought him an inexplicable sense of loss like he truly was alone.

But not quite.

The bell above the door gave another tinkle and Marianne stepped out into the moonlight. She was still holding the upside-down cowboy hat in her frail hands, and for once she was staring him directly in the eye. There was a milky grayness to her irises that made him wonder if she was going blind. Maybe that's why she clung to him like a thistle on the sleeve: she couldn't see the horror that others saw in his Devil's eyes.

She walked carefully towards him with her shoulders hunched against the cold. The poor thing was barefoot and wearing only a thin silk slip that had long since faded to parchment yellow. Though she was shivering, there was a resoluteness to the way that she moved that made him realize that she had sobered up, and rather quickly.

"R-r-rock, paper, s-scissors?" She asked, her tiny voice lost in the grandeur of the whistling wind. He shook his head and nestled his chin deep into his collar.

"Not right now."

"Even though I walk through the valley of the s-s-shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are w-with me," she said from between chattering teeth. He shook his head again.

"I don't wanna hear about God right now."

"I wasn't talking about God, Karl."

He stared over her shoulder distractedly then, realizing what she meant, graced her with a small smile. Her face seemed to light up in response to this, and so he threw in a small chuckle meant more for her benefit than his.

"Whatcha got in the hat?" He asked, tossing his chin at her hands. She looked back down as if she had forgotten all about it, and then jolted her head to the side.

"M-more money than I've ever held at once," she said in her strange, halting voice. "Been working hard a lot lately, you know, g-giving the men in the v-village all I've got. I'm t-tired but it's worth it b-because…" she tossed her head again and tightened her hold on the hat. "W-well, you see, it's enough money to h-hitch a ride on over to America."

"Really?" He said in tired disbelief.

"The Duke said it would c-cost about this much," she said as she gave the hat a little shake. He could hear the coins rattling around inside. "A-and, there's a little more for…unexpected expenses like…" Her voice trailed off as she gazed off into the distance. "W-well, whatever unexpected expenses you may encounter."

It was the most that he had ever heard her speak at once, and yet he was not listening and had thus completely missed the fact that she was offering the money to him. He was still thinking about the moistness of Mihaela's breath flushing across his cheek, and the utter look of disgust that she had given him before walking out the door. He could sense Marianne staring at him, and he found the pointedness of her gaze uncomfortable.

He opened his mouth and watched as the white mist tumbled off of his tongue.

"I fucked Mihaela," he said for no other reason than the fact that it was on his mind. He saw Marianne straighten up from the corner of his eye and he smiled deviously, happy to think that he could make someone jealous.

"You w-what?"

"I said…I fucked…my brother's…girl," he said slowly, emphasizing each word because he was a cruel, broken bastard who just wanted to hurt somebody.

"Y-you had s-sex with her?"

"That's what fucking means, doesn't it? You're the village whore, you should know."

Marianne was quiet for a long time, simply watching him watch the mist of his breath. Then he saw her shoulders slump and she bent down until she placed the hat on the ground. Slowly, she began to gather up all of the money that she had made and stuff it into her pockets. There were holes in the lining of her dress and the coins were falling out, but she didn't care. Then she grabbed the hat, lifted herself, and took a few steps towards him.

"I did it all for you," she said but, once again, he barely even heard her. She stopped when she was right in front of him and seemed to hesitate for a moment before tenting the tips of her fingers along his chest. Her touch was nothing like Mihaela's: it was soft, weak, and questioning. "She hurt you, didn't she? I can see it in your face." He said nothing to this, choosing instead to focus on the quiver in his jaw and the smarting along his eyes.

The height difference between them made her cling onto his collar and lift herself on her tiptoes as she placed a dry kiss on the tear track running along his cheek.

"Goodbye, Karl," she said before turning away and walking across the snow. He didn't know why, but the sight of her narrow ass, skeletal legs, and bare feet caused an indescribable feeling to well up within him. He wanted to run after her and pull her close to his chest if only to feel someone's heartbeat against his again, but it was too late for that. And so instead he stood there with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, sniffling as the snow fluttered past his face.