Devourer of Sins

DEVOURER OF SINS CHAPTER TWENTY SIX (NC-17)
Disclaimers Apply

A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, I think Joris needs to go on recon for that box... and you kick ass for beta-ing and translating! InterNutter, TC and Maxwell Pink are superspiffygroovy for archiving. Muchos so. Readers/Reviewers: I love you for your feedback...I wish it were for a more noble reason, like I love you for your mind, but no...I just want you for your feedback...call me a letch if you must, but I'll make it up to you with smut...lol.


"And I thought living at the Boardinghouse was fucked up, yo..." Todd hunched over his knees, toying with his shoelace in affected idleness. "At least there, we didn't have Spider Man1 goo..."
Kurt sighed. "It's not Spider Man goo...it's....something."
"Thank you for that astounding use of adjectives, Kurt," Jean sighed, irritated and verging on a headache. "We're being kept in the dark here, guys. The Professor and the others think it's for our own safety, the less we know the less of a threat we are to whoever is doing this and whoever wanted us in the first place. But you know what? This is stupid. If it's happening to us, at our own home now, we deserve answers!"
Lance and Rogue exchanged uneasy glances. Neither knew Jean's moods intimately, but they knew her well enough to realize how close to the surface her temper was running in order for her to make such an outburst. Rogue spoke next. "Look, if they're gonna keep us in the dark, we have to make our own light, you know? Find out what we can on our own. It ain't right that we're being treated like we're babies..."
Scott cleared his throat and there was a general murmur of dissent, all preparing for one of his self-righteous speeches about how they needed to work as a team, rve rve Xavier's rules and maintain order. Instead, they were surprised when he said, "I agree with Rogue. We've got to figure out what they're hiding from us. And when we do," he said, rising to his feet and crossing his arms defiantly, "we're going to deal with it ourselves."

"I don't think I like this vigilante thing Scott has going," Kitty said, snuggling close to Kurt on the sofa in the rec room. She toyed idly with his tail, paying special attention to the spore ore of fur where the splint had rubbed him temporarily bald. Her fingers barely skimmed his super-sensitive skin and Kurt shuddered involuntarily, gently removing the prehensile appendage from her grasp. "Sorry," Kitty muttered at Kurt's pained look. "Time and place, huh?"
"Sort of," he sighed. In truth, he had been hesitant about making advances while strange things were going on. He had no way of knowing for sure if Kitty was "right" again, as he put it to himself.atzcatzchen ist...gestresst. Sehr, sehr gestresst. Vielleicht ist hier etwas im Wasser. So muss es sein... wir hatten keine Probleme bis zu diesem Jahr, oder? Jetzt ist alles komisch... sie ist nur gestresst. Genau. Stress. _ 2 He had repeated it to himself until he almost believed it, but he knew in his heart of hearts that there was more to the strange behavior of his best beloved than mere stress. He knew Kitty, despite all her problems, was not given to fits of derangement. _Shiva aside, she isn't crazy...there are strange things in the Universe and we're some of them, but Kitty's visions or whatnots weren't mental illness...they were...her... _ He realized that she was speaking and apparently expecting an answer, her eyes narrowing as he twitched mildly, coming back to the present. "Sorry, Liebes...what were you saying?"
"Nothing important," she said, slipping into a minor sulk. Kitty tucked a lozenge-shaped pillow under her chin and drew her knees up, distancing herself effectively from Kurt.
"Katzchen, don't get all mopey on me," he sighed, tugging the pillow free from her full-body grip. "I was just thinking of the past and how strong you were."
"Flattery," she groused, "will get you everywhere." She took the pillow back and promptly whacked his arm with it.
"I'm not flattering you, Katzchen. I mean it...you didn't crack after all that stuff with your family, with Tabby..." He slid closer to her reluctantly laying his tail across her lap again. He was almost relieved when she did not take it back up but rather laid her head on his shoulder and sighed. Kurt toyed with the ends of her ponytail, recently re-adopted after her stint of loose curls. He did not even want to dwell on the personality shifts over the past few days. It was the day after Christmas3 and it did not feel remotely, to him at least, like the holiday had even occurred. "Did you like your present, Liebes?" he murmured into her hair, drinking deeply of the strawberry scent.
"Mmmm..." she was half asleep, lulled by his radiant warmth and heartbeat, tiredness seeping from her bones. "Very much." She touched the cool silver on her right index finger4 with her thumb, feeling it's almost comforting presence there. The ring was plain on the exterior, but on the inside of the band was inscribed in Hebrew "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine."5
Kurt leaned back against the arm of the sofa, drawing Kitty with him. She was nearly fully asleep, her breathing becoming slow and even, her body relaxing to the point of near-bonelessness against him. He was loathe to wake her, despite the fact her was no where near tired enough to go to bed. She settled against him and Kurt twined his limbs around her in a feat of contortion that would have made lesser mutant's legs cramp. "Schatz," he murmured, knowing that some part of her mind could hear him even if she was asleep, "I promise I'll do a better job of protecting you in the future. This year has been terrible for you and sometimes I half expect you to run away or tell me to fuck off, just to get some rest. I love you so much that it almost hurts sometimes and when you suffer, I feel it. I'm not ashamed to admit that I wished your pain on myself, on someone other than you-usually whoever had crossed me recently. I know that's not...good...of me, but I did. Katzchen, I promise that I won't let anything bad happen to you this year." _That's all I can do...promise...and that's sure to be broken. _ Kurt closed his eyes against the frustration rising in his breast and instead just let himself _feel _ : Kitty's weight against him, her slow breathing and occasional somnolent murmurs, the faint twinkle of the colored lights on the tree, how it all seemed to melt into one sensation, flowing through his veins, drowning out all the pain and confusion of the past few weeks. Kurt willingly ignored the slick, sloppy hiss issuing from the vicinity of the foyer, writing it off to the old house settling as he found that he was, indeed, tired enough to sleep after all.

She moved down the hall wetly, her form still nascent. It had not been easy to escape her binding in that bright, white room, but she had. His blue form was neatly stuffed inside the massive cold box she had found along one wall. The box's contents had been laid asunder on any flat surface she could find, the nature of each packet ignored, despite the slight tug she felt towards some of them, as if it were something she needed, something she was missing. Already, that evening had seen her feeding three times, twice from a human, and she knew she needed only a few drops more to be strong enough for her true form. The murmurs in the small room next to the big, cold entryway had led her to her intended, the two she knew would be her coup de grace, the two she needed, wanted, desired, more than anything. Their blood would be sweet and her thirst would be slaked, but they were for later, when she could enjoy them. The taste of the large, beast-like man's sin was fresh on her lips, mingling with blood and a small amount of skin. While not innocent, the man had little to feed from. Disabling him was a drain on her body, a drain on her resources and she knew she must feed soon to maintain her state. The girl was an unexpected surprise. She was tall, lithe and pale, her skin fairly glowing in the blue-white light of the room. "Hey, Beast, can I have some of that gel gunk for cuts? I hurt my...the fuck?" She had not seen the woman yet, and the other was pleased. The disorder of the lab is what drew her eye, samples thawing on tables, degrading quickly in the warmth of the room. Beast's massive blue hand lay visible from beneath the lid of the freezer, the mass of his body not allowing the lid to close all the way, but the girl still did not see that. Instead, she closed in on the lab bench, tendrils of silver smoke rising from a package, wrapped and dated with the word "BIOHAZARD" blazing across the red plastic. "Beast?" she said, not as loudly as before but with a quake in her voice that betrayed her fear.
"Mine," the woman said softly, stepping forward from the shadows, naked and damp.
"Jubes, what the Hell..." Rogue's eyes had gone wide then flashed fire at the sight of the naked form. "What're you doing?" The person she thought was Jubilee reached out one hand and seized her about the throat, not even flinching at the skin-to-skin contact. Rogue felt true fear, it's copper tang flooding her mouth and making her skin crawl as she was lifted off the ground, her feet kicking uselessly out of a sense of self-preservation, seeking purchase where there was none. The person with Jubilee's eyes stared up at her and she realized then that no, those were not Jubilee's eyes. Jubilee had life in her eyes-these were dead, flat. "Who are you?" she choked out, her breath strangling as the hand about her neck tightened.
"Devourer of Sins, Eater of Filth...Call me as you must but in the end, you will all fall to me!" In a savage jab, she pressed her thumbnail into Rogue's neck and a rivulet of blood poured forth.
Rogue found her strength and kicked hard, making contact with the woman's torso. She hit the ground with a cry and a thud, her neck screaming pain and her lungs burning with each inhalation. She did not have long to rest, though-the woman was on her in a moment, hissing in a language unlike any Rogue had ever heard, lapping at her neck with a pointed tongue that was sickeningly warm and dry, smearing the hot blood coursing from the puncture in her neck across her skin. _Why isn't she dying? She's touching me! What's going on? God, help me! _ Rogue did not have the wherewithal or strength to cry out or even struggle. Every word by Poppy Z Brite6 and Anne Rice flashed through her mind and she thought how ironic it was, she was being bled to death by an apparent vampire. _Hell, if I exist, why shouldn't they? Maybe they're mutants, too...God, dying hurts... _ A tiny part of her consciousness, such as it was, knew that she was not really dying, and that same part told her that soon she would wish she were. The woman feeding from her stood and kicked her in the ribs, sending Rogue rolling a few feet. The teenager stared at the world from glassy eyes, her breath hitching and wheezing, the blood at her neck clotting thickly blowllowly. She heard her own pulse throbbing slowly, a death knell, she thought. Beast's hand twitched and drew her attention. _Oh, good...I'm not going to die alone... Damn it, and Todd's gonna think I stood him up. I don't want him to see me like this...I hope Jean finds me. She'll clean me up... _ Her mind went cloudy, thoughts becoming nonsense, childish songs and images dancing around, vying for space with horror and desperation. With another wheezing, hitching breath, Rogue fell unconscious.
Tlazolteotl waited until she was sure her charge was completed before she left, images of that girl's life dancing through her mind. The boy...she is jealous and he feeds it. He will taste as sweet as she...
1 I'm picturing that symbiotic suit he had for a while and Ink Spot (I think that was the name...) Okay. Marvel Girl signing off...
2 Very, very stressed. Maybe something is in the water here. It'd have to be...we didn't start having problems until this year, did we? Now everything is all weird...she's just stressed. That's it. Stress (sidenote: Foxy rocks for translating on top of beta-ing!)
3 Yeah....kinda deviated from my habit of making the dates in the story mirror reality...oh, well. deal w/it...lol.
4 Traditional finger for wearing the wedding ring in Judaism. The right finger is the finger of intelligence, the one that points to the words when reading the Torah. Like the left ring finger is associated w/love and the heart b/c of the Greeks...so there.
5 Line from the Song of Solomon, which, at the risk of being considered sacrilegious by some, is quite...heated.
6 Very, very dark Goth author. Very dark.