Hey guys! I know that I've said that previous chapters have really kicked my ass, but this one takes the freaking cake. It's also the longest chapter to date. Caution: Some dark shit, murder, the usual. Enjoy!
Laurien's body had long since started shivering violently by the time that she turned the corner onto her street and saw him walking in her general direction. She inexplicably moved behind a cherry blossom tree that stood before one of the nearby houses and peaked her head around the corner, only to see that Erik had stopped and sat down on the steps to her house. He ran a gloved hand over his tired face before his head fell back and his eyes opened to look up into the blinding heavens, as soft tendrils of snow drifted down lazily and landed on his flushed skin and reddish hair.
She felt her feet slowly carrying her out from behind her hiding spot and over to him as she saw the pained expression on his face, his eyebrows raised and his mouth moving just slightly into forming soft words as small transparent clouds of breath were released into the air before him, almost as if he were praying to whatever being was above listening before lowering his head into his hands again.
She padded forward as quietly as she could before stopping dead in her track as he heard the rustle of her feet in the snow and glanced up. He got to his feet, visibly wincing as the movement pulled at the tender skin of his stitched abdomen, his wide eyes shining brightly in a mixture of relief and worry, prompting a horrible wave of guilt to well up inside her as she saw it. She felt her foot lift tentatively as it started to take a step back, the guilt being overtaken by a sudden desire to run, but she forced herself to move toward the man in front of the house.
Laurien slowed to a stop in front of him, not meeting his gaze as she took in the way that his chest raised slightly faster as she felt his warm fingers brush lightly against her frozen injured hand. She lowered her eyelids, taking a deep shuddering breath before slowly sliding her hand in his, letting his warmth seep gradually into her skin as his grip tightened comfortingly around her. She opened her eyes and glanced up at him, a faint golden hue surrounding the edges of her vision as she gave him a small sad smile.
A flicker of alleviation appeared on Erik's face before rapidly fading into confusion as her gaze turned hard and green again on the turn of a dime when she looked up at the house. "I need to show you something." She murmured softly, a tired breath releasing itself from her body as the effort to keep her voice steady slowly drained her of her energy.
"What is it?" He asked, though she didn't reply for a few moments as her eyes caught the subtle twitch of a muscle in his jaw as he clenched it.
"The truth." She uttered finally, before letting go of him and dashing up the stairs of the house.
Laurien flung the door open with her powers as she heard him call after her, her pace speeding up to a slight run as she neared the wall of tape, tearing it down so violently into a sticky pile that fragments of wallpaper were ripped out along with it, before she leapt over it and sprinted down the hallway. The sounds of her rapid footsteps were accompanied by the fainter noises of Erik following a ways behind, a small curse muttered under his breath as he stepped over the heap.
"Laurien." His voice rang off the walls of the hallway, following her to where she stopped dead in her tracks in front of the first room, her hand an inch away from the handle.
Erik had finally caught up to her, grabbing her upper arm in a tight grip that a parent would use to control their runaway child. "Laurien, what are you doing?"
"I'm dealing with it." She murmured, not taking her eyes away from the age stained door.
"Dealing with what?"
"Just-" She said stiffly, desperately searching for a word to explain herself, but she quickly grew frustrated, as she felt her fiery wall of resolve being beaten down with each passing second that she stood dormant. She ripped her arm out of his grip and impulsively grabbing the handle and pushing it open.
She instantly felt the breath being sucked out of her lungs as she stared wide-eyed into the room. She glanced quickly at Erik before moving through the doorway, pulling her scarf up to her nose as the blown up dust threatened to make her sneeze violently.
She looked around, clutching her chest as an intense phantom pain blossomed from the old scars that marked her skin. Laurien felt an overwhelming wave come over her body as her mouth ran dry, trailing along a familiar craving that prompted her to take a few steps forward to open many of the drawers of the small desk until she found what she was looking for.
"What have you got there?" Erik asked as her fingers fumbled over the opening of the box that she had unearthed.
She finally opened it and held up a small packet of cheap cigarettes in response as she grabbed the lighter that was taped to the bottom of the nearby desk, muscle memory taking over.
"Should you really be doing that?"
She shook her head, but placed one in her mouth anyway and lit it, taking a deep drag before letting out a puff of smoke as she sighed blissfully. "Fuck, I've missed this."
Erik frowned disapprovingly. "I didn't take you for a smoker, especially with you being a runner and all."
"I am the master of contradiction." She mumbled from behind the cigarette, crossing her arms comfortably over her chest as she felt herself calming down.
"Whose room is this?" Erik asked as he neared the dusty window, flipping the latch with a wave of his hand before it swung open and promptly fell off the hinges, plummeting to the ground outside.
"I forgot it did that." She commented, chuckling softly as she heard the shatter of faint shatter of glass below. "And to answer your question, it was my brother's"
"Bastijn?"
"No." She said, taking another deep drag of her cigarette, letting the tobacco burn her lungs just enough to give her a needed dose of strength. "It was Dan's"
The look of shock on his face was enough to make her laugh again, but she suppressed it, feeling like it would prompt a coughing fit. She then settled for a wry smile instead.
"Yeah, I guess I never mentioned that I had an older brother, did I?"
"No, you most certainly did not." Erik murmured as he looked around the room. The walls were covered in a vast array of propaganda posters from various wars, ranging from a picture of a boat sinking with the large caption of 'Loose lips might sink ships' to even a poster of, who Laurien now knew to be, Uncle Sam pointing at her. There were so many that she could barely even see the faded blue pinstripe wallpaper beneath it.
"I don't understand." He said finally, shaking his head. "It didn't mention him in your file."
"No, it did not." Laurien muttered as she kicked a waste bin with her boot, frowning when she noticed a single crumpled up ball of paper within it. "I made sure to censor some of the official papers before I left London, I'm sure it was the same file that was sent over to the CIA when they brought together Division X."
She looked up to catch his expression of incredulity, and she cocked her head. "I have some good friends in high places."
He continued staring at her disbelievingly until he shook his head, seemingly putting the matter aside as there were much more important things to discuss at the moment. "So, why have you been hiding him?"
Laurien ran her fingers through her hair, before clutching the caramel strands tightly in her fists as she banged the back of her head against the wall, trying to push out the emotional pain that clung to her nerves. "He did a bad thing."
"Does Charles know?"
She looked at him blankly as she released her grip on her hair. "What do you think?"
"What did he do?"
"Look, before I say what he's done, I feel that it's necessary that I explain something to you first." Laurien urged, her voice ringing out clearly in the room as her eyes flashed dangerously. "Dan was a good man."
He nodded, taking a seat against the opposite wall, the bottom of his shoes just brushing hers. She tapped his foot, squinting her eyes momentarily before she remembered the matter at hand and started her story.
"He was only five years older than me, but he was old enough to remember a time before Holland was occupied by the Nazis." She saw Erik squirm minutely at the mention of the word, so she continued down a different path. "I never met my Opa, I only saw proof of his existence in pictures and stories that my parents and their friends would sometimes bring up during dinner parties. He died before I was born, but Dan got to meet him, and I was always jealous of him for that."
"I'd never heard of how he died until Dan told me when I was fourteen. He said that before I was born, our father and our Opa would leave the house almost every night, but they would never explain why. One night, Dan set up a plan to sneak out and follow Opa, who apparently went alone that time, because my father wanted to stay back and be with our mother, who was expecting me at any time."
"Dan was only five, so Opa caught him almost instantly and was going to send him back, but apparently where he was going was so important that he couldn't waste time, so he took Dan along with him. It was then that Dan discovered where they'd been going all that time." She said, a small proud smile creeping gradually onto her face. "They were part of the Dutch resistance."
"The others gave him hell for it, but Dan said that he could tell that Opa was proud to bring him. He put him in a back room and had some woman resistance member keep him busy with some stories as the others talked." Laurien chuckled suddenly as she flicked some ash from the cigarette. "He told me some of those stories, they were so strange and morbid. I specifically remember one about a lonely bunny that was so desperate to get friends that he got himself bitten by a rat, though I guess, for it to make sense, I should explain that he was lonely because all the other rabbits cast him out for being posh since he hadn't any scars or marks on him."
"Was that the end of the story?"
"No, the posh rabbit got rabies from the rat and died a few days later after killing all of the other rabbits in a fit of insanity."
"She said that to a five year old kid?" He asked, furrowing his brow in incredulity. "What was her goal there?'
"To teach him that running into a potentially dangerous situation just for the honor of a mark to boast about to your friends is absolutely asinine?" She suggested, shrugging her shoulders. "He said that he didn't fully understand what she was trying to say until much later."
"So he was there in the back room with that woman, when they hear shouting and gunshots. The woman picked him up immediately and hid him in an armoire, telling him to stay there until she comes back for him. Dan said that there was a specific moment that was permanently ingrained in his mind, when our Opa-" She stopped as her voice broke, bitterly pursing her lips, angry that she couldn't say it without wavering, even though she hadn't been there to witness it. She cleared her throat and continued. "When our Opa burst into the room and had his head blown off by an SS officer who had been following him."
"Dan told me that he repeatedly heard the bang of the shot that killed Opa in his ears for months after it happened, and how it had sprayed the woman's face with his blood and brain matter, right before she pulled out her gun and shot the officer in the throat."
"She didn't make it too far before three other officers entered the room and shot her repeatedly. The officers left the room, as quickly as they'd come, but there were still the sounds of machine guns obliterating the other resistance members in the other room. I remember Dan telling me that he would never forget the silence that followed, as he waited in that armoire."
Laurien's glance flicked up to see Erik where he sat across from her, narrowing her blue eyes as she wondered whether there were actual tears in his eyes or if it was just a trick of the light.
"I don't know how he got back to the house in one piece, but he did." She said gently as she scratched her nose when a bit of snow from the open window landed on it. "They lost around ten people, including my Opa, my Uncle, and many of our family friends. No one was ever the same after that night."
"It was ultimately the triggering factor for Dan's lifelong obsession." She stated, looking back up at all the posters, suddenly realizing for the first time that there was a black spade painted on the ceiling, making her frown in confusion. "Took him all the way to fighting in Korea."
"But wouldn't he have had to be-"
"Yeah, he was sixteen when he joined. Lied about his age in his file and was sent off for a year and a half when my parents thought he was at boarding school."
"What?"
"Yeah, I know it sounds as stupid as it really was, but he was a gifted liar and claimed that they were too preoccupied with the twins to notice that anything was amiss. He came home in one piece, or two, I guess. He lost his pinky finger somehow, but never exactly talked about what had happened over there. The only thing he did talk about was the hand to hand combat training that he'd picked up from one of his bunkmates. Which is how I learned to fight."
"He only taught me after our parents had died, when we'd moved to Belgium to be with my aunt. We practiced in the nearby forest in the summer when it was too hot to do it out in the farm fields where we usually went in the spring and autumn, and in the winter months, we would push all the furniture in the living room to one side to make a nice clearing. He was as good a teacher as I could ever ask for, but I had to be careful."
"Why?"
She opened her mouth, but hesitated as she picked at the corner of one of the posters with her nail, stretching her neck to the side as she tried to shake off the reminder of the immense pressure that had once been applied there during one of his incidents.
"He was prone to flashbacks of what he'd witnessed in Holland and Korea, I didn't want to trigger him. He never told me what they were of in detail, but I assume that he wanted to kill the soldier that shot our Opa, even though the woman still got him." She cleared her throat. "Anyway, our parents' death was a bit too much for him to handle after he came back from Korea, so he became a devout alcoholic when we settled in Belgium."
"That must have been difficult."
"Yeah, but I couldn't really blame him for it, considering how good and potent Belgian beer is."
"Laurien." He chided.
She shrugged, before continuing with her story. "I got him out of it eventually, he got a steady job working at one of the farms here, helping our aunt, Mathilde, take care of the twins, as I went to university in London for nursing and English. Things were rather good for a few years until Mathilde got sick and passed away. I took some time off from my studies to keep an eye on Dan, seeing as he had gotten worse."
Laurien paused, zoning out to the point where she didn't even notice when her cigarette had burned all the way down to her fingers, prompting Erik to reach forward and take it before it burned her, extinguishing it on the floor with his foot as she suddenly came back to her senses and flexed her hands anxiously.
"One day, I go out for groceries." She starts; taking deep breaths, as she knows that keeping her breathing under control is the only way she's getting through this with most of her emotional sanity in tact. "I come back and I immediately know that something is wrong."
"I go into the kitchen and- and one of the kitchen knives is missing from the cutlery drawer. I went down the hallway and as I neared his room, I felt something on my feet." She said, her toes unconsciously twitching inside her boots. "There was an unusual smell, I still remember what it was like. Stale and muggy, a coppery tang mixed with something I have never been able to pinpoint, but through it all, I knew that the house reeked of death."
"I opened up this door." She nodded her head toward the open doorway, discretely wiping away a rogue tear that had escaped through the tired barriers of her eyes. "And they were here, Bastijn and Roosje, dead on the floor."
Erik moved to comfort her, but she backed away sharply and pinned his body against the opposite wall with her powers. "Don't." She urged, her voice suddenly desperate and panicked. "Not now, or I'll never get through it."
Her shoulders sagged in relief when she saw him nod silently and she slowly released him. "They were only twelve years old." She gritted her teeth bitterly, her face hot and wet as she forced out her next words. "The autopsy said that their tongues had been cut, their eyes gouged out, and their fingers cleaved off at the knuckle. I never knew why he did that specifically, but I'm not sure that I want to know."
"I didn't get a good look at both of them, but it was long enough. Next thing I knew, there was a knife sticking out of my chest and he was stabbing me." She said, her voice lowering into a faint whisper as her fingers fumbled nervously around the base of her neck. Laurien shook her head. "I fell on my back and saw the same wild look in his eyes that he would get during his flashbacks. He didn't know what he was doing, probably thought that he was back in Korea, fighting the enemy again."
"How did you get out?" Erik asked quietly.
"I panicked, as to be expected in the circumstances, and when he came at me again with the knife, I-" She looked down at her restless hands, twisting her knuckles hard enough to break them. "I buried it into his eye socket."
"So you killed him?"
"Yes, but not that day." She stated truthfully, feeling his eyes burrowing into her as she avoided his gaze. "He escaped, and when I recovered, I tracked him down for two years until I finally found him in East Berlin and killed him."
She sighed, clenching his fists. "You see, Erik, I can't be angry with you anymore for getting your revenge. I would be an absolute hypocrite if I continued, but the thing is that I can't forgive you for what you did after killing Shaw." Laurien said from behind gritted teeth, shaking her head angrily. "You had no right to do what you did, trying to take the lives of thousands of innocent men."
"I know." He murmured, making Laurien glance up in surprise that he'd finally admitted it, but she lowered her eyes again, reminding herself not to get her hopes up.
"After that day, I made the promise to myself to never get attached to anyone again, a promise that I broke the day I met you and Charles. But after almost losing Charles, I was reminded by what I had vowed, and I didn't know it at the time that I left the mansion to come here, but-" She opened her mouth, but hesitated, the words desperately trying to shove themselves back down her throat as they protested themselves. "Erik, I'm not going back to New York."
Erik's steely blue eyes went wide in panic, as he got to his feet. "What? No, Laurien, you have to go back to them, they need you!"
"No, I can't go through it again, I can't lose anyone else." She mumbled, digging her nails into her arm. "Madame Girard was right, my whole family is gone, Dan was the last person I had left and I snapped his neck!"
He suddenly knelt down beside her and grabbed her face, holding it tightly between his hands as he forced her to look into his frighteningly fearful eyes. "Darling, I can't allow you to do this to yourself. After all you've been through, you deserve a family that will love you and keep you safe at all costs, I have no doubt in my mind that they would all lay down their lives to protect you."
"Don't you see that's what I'm fucking afraid of?" She cried out, tears flowing freely from her wide blue eyes as she ripped herself from his grip and stood up. "If anything, I want to be the first to die, I can't live with these horrors in my head for much longer, Erik, and I don't want any more of them."
"Then we'll go to Charles!" He suggested pleadingly. "He can make you forget, and you can live in peace."
"Jesus Christ!" She snapped, throwing her hands up in the air. "It's never that fucking simple!"
"It could be, let's just try."
"What about you then?" She asked, changing the spotlight on him as she felt her blood pumping loudly through her veins, her emotions boiling over. "Don't you deserve a family as well?"
He took a step back. at the sudden turn. "I have one." He growled.
She let out a sharp humorless laugh that echoed around the small room. "You can't possibly mean the Brotherhood? A team full of mutants who were formerly working for the man who killed your mother in front of you, including the sister of your best friend who you left completely paralyzed on a beach in the middle of nowhere."
"Laurien-"
"It's killing you, Erik, being around them. They're egging you on to do terrible things without even a single thought to the consequences. That cut was a close one, and you haven't even explained these yet." She said; closing the distance between them and prodding the bruises around his neck and jaw line none too gently with her fingertips.
Erik grabbed her wrist tightly, wrenching it away from his face. She looked into his eyes and almost gasped from the sucker punch of emotion that rammed into her. He opened his mouth, but suddenly changed his mind and placed a firm hand on the back of her neck before pulling her in and capturing her lips with his.
Laurien grunted in surprise, but quickly melted into his body as she grabbed a hand full of his hair and deepened the kiss, her pent up frustration getting the best of her. His hands drifted down to the small of her back and pressed her against his pulsating body, his heart beat racing in time with hers. He grabbed her around the waist and pushed her against the wall, placing a leg between her two and methodically rubbing it against her, eliciting a muffled moan of pleasure from Laurien as her eyes flashed a dazzling combination of deep purple and gold.
She bit down playfully on his bottom lip, and he reciprocated with a quick nip of his own before his mouth traveled down wetly to her collarbone. Laurien gripped his shoulders tightly, using the leverage to wrap her legs around his solid waist and prop her up as he kissed her neck before returning to her mouth. Erik's hands grabbed her thighs and carried her away from the wall and toward the bed, causing her to panic and break away from the kiss.
"No, not here. My old room is a few doors down." She gasped, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath.
He nodded understandingly, a small smile pulling at his lips before she kissed him again, her hands clutching at the back of his borrowed shirt, wanting it to be off immediately.
She opened up the door to her room unknowingly with her powers as he carried her out of Dan's room and into hers, before throwing her down on the bed. He ripped off his shirt, revealing the bandages wrapped around his abdomen. For a moment, Laurien was afraid that they might rip his stitches again, but when she glanced up and met his eyes, the thought was pushed to back of her mind, as he climbed on top of her.
So yeah... stuff happened. I had difficulty writing for this reason specifically, and I've been avoiding writing a sex scene, so most stuff happens behind the scenes. Hope you don't mind but I could write it if you guys wanted me to. In other news, I saw Batman V Superman yesterday, and... Oh man, I hated it. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the dialogue and every time Lois Lane had to be saved, like sheesh! Though at least I got to see the trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse on the big screen. Anyways, I've been binge watching Daredevil on Netflix, so that more than makes up for the crappy DC movie. I frickin' love Frank Castle! I highly recommend the series. Even as I'm writing this right now, The Punisher is stabbing some guy with a broken bottle. Yikes!
I'm really freaking out about this chapter, I'm so anxious to know what you guys think. I've been tossing and turning over how I was going to deliver the information and will admit that there was a lot of doubt and fear going on. Am I going off the deep end? Or am I doing okay? Thanks again guys, hope you enjoyed and please review!