A/N – My one and only het-fic. And if you can get your way through the whole thing, you may understand why. I didn’t mean for it to come out this way, but through Caterina I have really given voice to my own deep disgust for what I was born into. Caterina attempts to escape her mortality through a unity with Isaak, who she deems to be some sort of god, and she comes to a horribly fantastic understanding of the world and what the Orden truly is.

If you can understand the irony in the title of this fic versus the name ‘Israel’, then I did a better job than I could have hoped.

This is middling between PG13 and R. It’s anything but explicit, but the questions it deals with very possibly might upset some readers.

This was originally meant as a fic for Trydain. I promised it months ago and only now finished it, but I don’t know if this is quite appropriate to dedicate it to someone. Well, Try, take it anyway. You won’t get another het fic from me.

Sheol

By PikaCheeka

I.

I almost shot him.

I didn’t even think about it. It was almost a reflex, my reaction to seeing a man of the enemy’s ranks in MY city. I was out alone, which ever had me on edge, and though I wore plainclothes and ordinary contacts, and I hadn’t curled my hair, he would know whom I was

Just as I knew who he was.

But as I wavered there uncertainly, he raised his head from the newspaper and smiled lazily. I ducked back behind the shelf without thinking, without even considering how obvious it was that I was hiding from him. Though I suspected that he was more amused than irritated, or even hostile.

“Madame Sforza.” It was the same fluid baritone I despised so much. Why was he here? This was my city. “It really is unbecoming of a ruler to run from her adversary.”

“Von Kämpfer.” I said stiffly after a moment. I didn’t even know his title. He may have given it to me at one point; along with a dozen other useless facts about himself he so enjoyed spewing off whenever he met someone.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“No.” The answer came out so quickly, so easily, it surprised even me. But he did not seem the least perturbed, only showed his teeth in a hideous grin, as if he knew something more about me than I myself did.

“How very rude. And I was doing my best to accommodate a nervous young woman.”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s not as if I could poison it, you know. It will be coming directly from the waitress. And I was never very fond of that sort of murder. Seems so irrevocably boring.” He showed his teeth again, and I found myself wondering if he wasn’t a human nor a Methuselah, but something else entirely.

“I do not condone-“

“Sit.”

He said it so definitively I obeyed without even realizing this was not my father and I was not a child, but this was my enemy and I was afraid.

II.

He was surprisingly quiet, which caught me off guard more than if he had talked the entire evening. I had never suspected he would be so quiet, not from out few short meetings, not from what I had heard of him beforehand. He seemed almost…shy, as if he had never been around a woman before. Were there any women in the Orden? I had only ever heard of one, and she seemed young, though with Methuselah it was hard to tell. And judging from his relationship with Von Lohengrin, which hardly seemed platonic, age hardly mattered to him. No. There was something about me that frightened him.

William had warned me about him, had warned us all against him. He was mad, uncontrollable, and he was just as likely to betray Cain in some wild scheme as he was to kill any one of us. Wordsworth was perfectly convinced he belonged in an institute, yet at the same time he violently opposed anyone who called him evil. He insisted he was simply miserable, and needed help.

Isaak had killed his fiancée, and still the power he held over William as a friend was immense. I had been told time and again how dangerous his charisma was, his charm that seethed off of him, made him invincible and loved regardless of what he did, who he was. I knew all of that. I was prepared, and yet still I allowed myself to be pulled under. Because I saw what William saw.

I saw the obdurate pain in those eyes, black as they were. Hollow as they were. He was not from the Abyss. He was the Abyss. Abbadon.

He was lost and he knew it, but he still desperately longed to be saved. That was why he dragged the boy around with him, the boy who could have been an angel had he not destroyed him. He was his lifeline. He had told me so in nearly as many words that night, as if I wanted to know exactly what he did to his adopted son in bed.

“What are you?” I understood it was a rude question, but he had already managed to transcend those laws and mores of common morality, and I no longer cared much for what he thought. That was a lie though.

He smiled after a long moment, too many of his teeth showing for the hundredth time that evening. He was not a human. That was undeniable.

But he wasn’t a Methuselah either. “I’m a mage. Do you really have the desire to know anything more? I thought you, oh, what was the word you used, despised me?”

“I never said that,” I snapped.

“Haughty, aren’t we? I know one of your Order said that…”

I bit back a denial of the Church being an Order. His fanatical terrorist organization was an order, or an Orden as they called it; my Church had nothing to do with it. “Methuselah.” I knew it was wrong, but his nonchalant answers were getting to me. “No. Abomination.”

That stopped his smile short. He immediately froze, and I bitterly wished I had never said it. Enemy or not, I knew it was cruel to call anyone such a thing. Especially when they really were one.

The silence carried on for much longer than I cared for, though it didn’t seem to faze him in the least. He only stared out the window, past me, rubbing his chin every so often. “Would you care to really see an abomination?” he finally asked.

He laughed when I said yes. I think I surprised him, or perhaps I only tell myself that. He and I both knew within moments of meeting what this would come to. At least he was civil enough to ask. He flicked out his phone and spoke calmly in Italian, likely for my benefit. I knew he spoke German normally, both in the Orden and to his servants, though he often used English as well. Italian sounded odd with his accent as if the very timbre of his voice was too harsh for such a language.

“Have you ever thought about the night of your death?” he said then, clicking his phone shut and narrowing his eyes.

But he broke out laughing before I could even respond, before I could slap him and run. I had a stiletto knife, but I had no intention of using it. I knew it would not harm him. Things like him live forever, have lived forever. He was something made manifest, though what I did not know, and even if he had been born, it was by no natural means. He was a vomiting-up of some hideous thing, be it a feeling or an ideology, that had finally forced its way into this world. “You’re acting like a child,” I snapped, and he smiled lazily.

“You’re not as gullible as most members of the Church. Because you never intended to be a part of it, did you? You despise it.”

I was taken aback by this, more than anything else he had said that night, but I said nothing in response. It seemed neither of us were keen on answering the questions of one another. I only stirred my drink for a long moment, staring down at the elusive greenness of it. I had watched him down several shots of absinthe before I dared try one myself, and to be honest, I found it repulsive. But he did not ask me how I felt on the matter and didn’t seem to care at all. He only sat there with his smug, self-satisfied smile, his narrow eyes unreadable and dark.

“You’re very easy to read, Madame Caterina.”

“You aren’t so enigmatic yourself.” It was both a lie and a truth, as he endlessly confused me, but never surprised me.

“Someday you will leave it.”

“That isn’t for you to question,” I answered just as curtly.

He leaned on the table now, resting his narrow chin in his still-gloved hand. “Would you care to stay with me for the evening?”

I met his eyes steadily, knowing already I would say yes, as if it had been predetermined before I even sat down. I knew what would come of this, and still I went through with it, as if I wanted it to happen, as if I wanted it with a fatalistic, crude longing to end everything. One last fantastic defiance against the Church which had so suppressed and shaped my life since I was conceived, since before I ever had a chance to have a voice in my fate. I did not need to answer, for after a moment he moved to stand, reaching out to me with his other hand as he picked up his coat and flung it over his shoulder. There were no words but only the silent command, and again I allowed myself to be led by some force deeper than my own. Again I allowed myself to be used and guided through life with no words, no resistance, only a fiery hatred for all that was and is and will be. But this time I reached out and accepted the hand of not the Church, but the devil himself, and I felt for the barest of moments that for the first time in my life I was obeying my heart, obeying the true God, though the moment he wrapped his fingers around mine and I realized they were cold I knew I was fooling only myself. I was still being passively, stupidly, led to my slaughter. It was only defiance because this time I allowed myself to follow a darker, even more primitive and deadly beckoning than I ever had before.

III.

The portraits frightened me. I knew he had killed his parents; William had told me that much, and yet he still kept pictures of them up. All three of them together, his parents smiling, their arms around their mad son who would later kill them, some of them taken probably not even a year before it happened. I knew he did not regret it at all, knew even as he stood there and posed with them, he was feeding himself on their dying screams. Killing them was his retribution, his revenge against them for birthing such a monster as he was. I knew it would be polite to ask about them, but I could not bring myself to do so and the silence condemned me.

“How much has he told you?” He would not say his name. It was taboo to him. I had long suspected that whatever their relationship was so long ago, it was deeper than mere friendship. Why else would he kill the fiancée of his best friend?

“Enough for me to know better.”

“But not enough to obey.”

“Maybe I simply didn’t care to.”

“Maybe you’re just stupid.” He said it with the same charming smile on his face, but surrounded by photos of those he had murdered, I no longer felt so comfortable with accepting that which I had no choice but to accept. It was easier to play stupid, to feel as if I could do nothing but only accept and endure, as women have been taught to do for centuries and beyond. Accept and endure and weep for that which they never had the right to ever call their own, but still lamented its loss all the same, for virginity is something men have invented only so that they may triumph over it, and because it has been imposed upon them women have come to feel so sharply its loss and their subsequent lowering into darkness.

But no. I could still tell myself that he was unlike anyone else, as he was like no man I had ever known, if he were truly a man at all. He did not, could not care for that purity if all his lovers had been men and boys, beings who did not even have to worry about losing something that really did not matter to them because that perfect transcendent potential that is called virginity can never be destroyed in the boy, as the boy can access it again and again and never feel the weight of mortality bear down upon him, that mortality forced upon the rest of us by both God and Man, that mortality which even in the great Book I live by is called a punishment. “Where’s Von Lohengrin?”

“Dietrich?” He shrugged after a moment. “He ran away again.”

I glanced at him, and as I did I saw over his head a photo apart, a portrait of him and the boy and in that moment I knew that I was nothing. The boy was perfect and beautiful and made of endless potential and mystery no matter how many times he was ravaged, as the haunted look in his eyes proved that he had not lain with the older man once but a hundred times. And despite all of that it was clear by that very same look how deep whatever incomprehensible emotions he had for his lover were. “Again?”

“He does it about once a week. He’s at the age where he likes to fight a lot. I know exactly where he is. He called me last night and told me he’d be home in the morning.”

I was attracted to his darkness, his complete disregard for everything I had been raised to love and respect. Laws meant nothing to him. He followed his own twisted sense of justice and never seemed to look back, though perhaps the death of Rose was the one weakness he had. And because of that he could not possibly see me as all other men saw me; I refused to believe that. He was antedeluvian, primordial, of an age where there were not men and women but only oneness, a oneness that he had seen both sides of as he accepted from and gave to other men who he did not quite see as men in bed, and because of that I did not have to feel subservient but only natural and fated and following a deep mindless instinct that women have been taught ages ago not to obey. He was mine.

His mannerisms were of a forgotten age, and I knew it wasn’t all carefully studied to be so. There was something so very archaic about him, in everything he did. He had knowledge of the world before the first Apocalypse, before the failure of the Second Coming. Even if his body was of this century, his mind was not. That was why he was what he was, a magus and a terrorist; his world was incompatible with ours, and he acted out violently against it.

But there was something mysteriously empty in his actions. He seemed to lack any true malice for those he hurt. Except, again, Rose, whose body he had personally torn apart, whose corpse he had calmly, callously, dropped before William’s, smiling emptily with her blood smeared on his face and congealing over his eyelashes and under his nails so deeply I knew that was why he still wore gloves. It was not that he was without passion; no, he seemed to be made entirely thereof. But he seemed to be running from something. Retreating further and further into himself until there was nothing left but this masque that was all he now was.

Impenetrable.

I knew I could not change that, could change nothing. I knew he would likely forget this encounter within hours, and yet I still wanted to go ahead with it anyway. I was not doing this for him. I wasn’t even going to pretend I was. I was only indulging myself, and he was fully aware of this. He did not bother to speak of love. There was no love. We were both alone, and that was all that tied us together. I wondered dully what Cain would think. I was sure he would find out, from what Isaak had hinted at about his relationship with him. Isaak was worse than a servant, and yet he had no problem with this despite his blood. He relished the mindless freedom that came with being led by another, relished the feeling of being guided. It gave him a meaning to his deep and endless chaos, while for me being led held an order to nothing, as I was not built of the same primordial ooze that he had been lifted out of. I was nothing but a sickeningly hollow casket razed out of the dust of modernity, a barren land without life and as empty as the Nile mud was full of life, and because of that I felt an empty defiance to nothing that was all I was.

“It is because,” he whispered after a long moment, “I have already played the role of God, and one day I will again. Let him act the part for a time.”

He had no words for me. They were only for his Dietrich. I suppose that should have disturbed me, knowing that this man had a boy half his age for his steady lover, but as he didn’t seem to mind ignoring that for the night, I felt I could only do the same. I knew I could not fill whatever void he was feeling over whatever had happened between the two of them, and neither of us pretended I could. He could never feel any love for a shell, for a being as disgustingly condemned to mortality as I was, being what I was and being born into what age I was born into, just as I could never feel any love for something so full of life and terrible raw beauty. It was all only fate driving us and death I longed for and in him I found both personified, while what he saw in me I could never know or understand as he was something so alien and other to me it was meaningless to question. I had not met the boy, only ever heard of him, and whatever he was, while he was clearly not of the same stuff and mud as the magus, he was ethereal and esoteric and as ageless and beautiful and alive as he himself was. And I knew in their bed sky met earth and fire met water, but never heaven and hell, as they were so old as to be far beyond that, as eternal and ageless as the darkness which everything sprung up out of. It made me smile to know I understood what they were to one another, and it made me hate the world as I knew I could never be such to anyone.

And a part of me still bitterly wished it were something more than it was.

IV.

“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

“I am not a child,” I snapped back haughtily, hating him for asking the question I knew I could not answer, though the moment I said it I knew me reply was absurd. His true lover was a child, and not only a child but a boy, and therefore would never be made of dust even when he was no longer a child. No; I did know what I was doing, only I did not know why, and for that I was even more of a child than anyone he had ever known.

“I assume you mean a yes.” He smiled and pulled me to him, already slipping his hands down to the small of my back, crushing my body against his which was hard and powerful and streamlined like nothing I had ever known before. And I felt myself stiffen despite everything I had so stolidly commanded myself to accept; he recognized immediately what was happening and when he lowered his face to my own he bared his teeth and whispered that nothing mattered.

Nothing mattered but him and me and the moment and whatever happened there on out did not matter because we were meant to lie and accept and endure. But he could read my mind and he whispered that No, We Would Not Only Endure. He spoke to something deeper within me that I myself did not ever dare acknowledge, and whether it was pure manipulation or not did not matter any longer, as he was entering, forcing, his way into my very mind, clawing at the insides of the casket and seeking to find that which I had always felt was never there. He calmly clawed at the decayed, empty flesh within and dug up that which the dead dust of life had caked over and crushed from the moment I was born, but in doing so he dirtied himself by that same mortal contradiction which he never felt within his boy. And even as it happened I wondered when he would realize who and what he was coupling with, when he would discover that he had not learned or even uncovered the mystery that is said to be woman, but only found a void and a contradiction, as that is all we are and ever will be thanks to Eve who had only wanted to know the mystery and in wanting to know what can not be known, closed off that mystery to her kind forever.

The pain did not matter, though it was exquisite. It only reminded me that I could still feel and breathe and know that I was alive in some way or another, and though he was stripping me of that one single thing man had ever given woman, he did it in such a way I felt no loss, as he was from a time when it was not so much a gift and something to revere and honor as something that really was only there when it was honored in that stupid, sickening way men revered the purity of a woman. I knew little of sex but from what I did know, he did not behave as a normal man, and I wondered dully if this wasn’t sex at all, but something else entirely as he nuzzled his face against my own and did not ever kiss or even touch me, but only entered and held. There was something animalistic, primitive, and perfect about it, something that did not dominate or even acknowledge that I was a woman and not another boy-lover. Because nothing mattered. It is not the gender or the body as we have been taught to understand in this age but the single moment and in that moment itself one knows the transcendent, and that moment does not care who or what you are but it simply is.

He was stronger than I had ever suspected him to be and underneath his clothes he was nothing but whipcord and raw energy, the sort of thing the most ancient of beings, the crocodile and the jackal, were made of. His dusky skin was interwoven, not decorated but made of, a thousand ancient tattoos that seemed to be only a manifestation of something greater, not ever needled into him but beings which had seeped through his skin from deep within and became physical, just as he was something which had existed for eternity and was only recently born into this body of his, which itself did not even belong in this time. He was smooth and hard and perfect and though I knew I was not the first to lay under him, he made me feel as if I was, as if he were born of such a thing that every moment of his life was something new entirely, as if he did not live in time but outside of it, and therefore nothing bored him but nothing interested him either. I felt I was coupling with Time, and because of that I did not have to endure, but only be.

V.

Despite his manner, there was something almost businesslike in his nature, and I could not help but wonder if that was what true passion and simplistic, raw, energy was reduced to in this world. And when it was over I lay there shuddering and shaking, my heart pounding horribly against his as if it was forcing me to remember that I was alive after all, that I was nothing but a stupid empty body. He lay beside me, his eyes open and again unreadable, and I suddenly felt as if he might not start laughing as madly and hysterically as those Nile beings he so reminded me of. I could not look at him and as time passed he twined his hard legs around my soft ones and pulled me back towards him, moving to wrap his arm around my shoulders and hold the back of my head.

He forced me to look into his eyes, and in them I saw nothing. Nothing and nothing and that was what his kind was reduced to in this world. He was a god, a god abandoned and forgotten and hopelessly lost in this new world that did not allow its beings to feel or touch or even know passion and instinct and all that drove man to live and thrive for so many years so long ago. He was a god, and he was nothing because being who and what I was I could not even begin to understand him, though I knew he was so simplistic and raw and pure there was nothing to even understand. And all at once I knew what he had brought me there for. He had wanted to show me.

The question I already knew the answer to rose unbidden from my lips, my stupid transient body which was already feeling the pain and exhaustion from its coupling with that which was so far greater than it. “What does the Orden want?”

“Nothing.”

“As if you don’t know.”

“I told you. We desire nothing.” At this he looked at me, puzzled, as if his answer were enough and he could not understand why I was not accepting it. But I knew he was not puzzled and he was simply irritated that he now was forced to live in such a world whose inhabitants refused to accept and comprehend all that he was.

“That’s absurd!”

“Every single member of the Orden desires something different. We have no goal.”

“Then how can you hold together as a cohesive group?” Though I knew the answer, I knew the answer just as much as I knew the Orden was nothing but a collection of wrathful, forgotten gods who could only ever be acknowledged again as such if they forced their way into this world. They were raw and primeval and ancient and all-powerful but completely and utterly alone in the world which once so openly accepted that, the world which now suddenly worshipped nothing but death and all that came with it. The race of Gods founded by Cain, the first being ever made to bear the burden of mortality and dust, the first being ever brought into this endless death that we now call life through the womb of the first woman. Gods made mortal so that we may understand, but still we are too dumb and stubborn to care.

“Because we all long for the same thing.”

“That’s what I just asked and you said nothing.” Tell me so that I as a mere mortal may understand. He was doing this on purpose, playing the innocent while he killed thousands with a wave of his hand as if humanity was nothing. Because as humans we had already signed a contract with death and we were so dearly in love with it that it did not matter at all when we actually died; we only lamented those gone and feared it because we felt that it was proper, and even that which once was passion had died. Our death is not their death, because true death is something beyond us and instead we only have the law of death which we abide by but do not accept all the same.

“We desire nothing. We desire what you call death.” He finally said, leaning over for a cigarillo on his nightstand and sighing. “We desire eternity. A complete silence, for eternity.”

“Then why not have a mass suicide and save everyone else the trouble?”

He laughed at that. “I want silence for the whole world. You know, Caterina, I can’t stand noise.”

“Don’t you play the organ?”

“I despise noise.” He said, and he turned away and lit the cigarillo and suddenly I felt terribly, horribly alone, as if whatever feeling had suddenly come crashing down on him had forced its way upon me as well, as if I were intimately connected with him forever but he had suddenly realized that I was not like him, and from our coupling he had touched and known the dust of mortality, and out of our single transcendent moment I had been made to accept what I had already known, and he had been forced to be a part of it. And because of my disgusting, damnable womanhood I realized I could never couple with a god. I could never attain such a perfect unity with the beyond as he had with his boy-lover, for I was forever tied to mortality. I was death incarnate, as all women are, as all women have been from the moment the serpent first seduced the first stupid Eve and condemned her not only to a obligatory idea of false purity placed on her by the ever-wrathful Adam, this idea that cut her off from potential and the mystery the moment she felt she touched it, this idea that created in her mortality which man need not feel now that it was hers alone to bear, but also to mere idiotic endurance. Accept and endure and open up to mortality and from that moment on they were forever beings of this earth and only this earth, with that sickening idea of purity forced upon them by men who never had the need to feel it or death or anything else, as they could lie and feel the life-that-is-more-than-life-and-can-never-be-equated-with-this-life and leave again, ready to perform and attain it again and again and never be crushed and destroyed by that moment, while the moment a woman experienced that unity which we so stupidly do not understand any longer, they are dead. Dead and dead and dead and filled with another stupid hollow being already growing dusty in the womb, dusty because that which it was created in is only made of dust, while the man, the eternal and primordial river-being, walked away, leaving her and all that is within her alone to collect the dust of hideous mortality and be forced to live in this blind, deaf, and dumb world so full of screaming.

Screaming that no one could hear but the gods, and I knew why Isaak longed for silence.

VII.

“And Caterina?” he caught my arm at the doorway.

I reflexively pulled back. All trust was gone. If it had ever been there. “What?”

“You shall name him Israel.” He whispered, and he released me with a laugh as immortal as he.

I still hear his laughter every night, every time I am reminded of that night when I feel ill in the morning, when my brother looks at me coldly and shakes his head, when my clothes no longer fit as they should because of the life that they really only mockingly call a life, for life is really only a long slow dying, that is really only another death, I suddenly carry. His life and my dust that is not life are there within and out of that dust shall come the child I have no choice but to name the name he ordered me to name it, as from Sheol he shall be born. And I know that in the end I shall only endure and endure and that is not living, not living at all but really dying, because death forever fools us into thinking we are untouchable, fools us into thinking every life is a life and not another death. I carry dust and I am dust and dust can do nothing but endure.

But he shall live forever.