skidmo_fic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skidmo_fic) wrote2009-09-01 02:13 pm
skidmo_fic) wrote2009-09-01 02:13 pm
Five Times Druitt Tried to Kill Tesla (NC-17)
Title: Five Times Druitt Tried to Kill Tesla
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Druitt/Tesla
Word Count: 3347
Warning: Sex and violence. Lots of violence. And violent sex.
Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me...sadly
Feedback: yes, please.
Summary: Just what it says on the tin.
A/N: Just one of those things that popped into my head, you know? Epigraph comes from the song “Blood” by My Chemical Romance
So give them blood, blood, gallons of the stuff!
Give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough.
So give them blood, blood, blood.
Grab a glass because there's going to be a flood!
I.
The first time was an accident. Nikola is fairly certain about this.
They all experienced this in the beginning, this loss of control, this buildup of rage, this overwhelming, overflowing need for violence.
John’s was aggravated every time he used his powers, and in those first few weeks he was nearly impossible to predict, and even Helen had a difficult time soothing him.
He teleported into Helen’s parlor one evening when she and Nikola were poring over a dusty old book about vampires, searching for some way to keep Nikola’s surges of rage in control.
Perhaps Nikola was too close to Helen. Perhaps he let his fingers graze her thigh. Perhaps he looked at her, as he often did, with too much affection.
Whatever it was, when John appeared and saw them together, he went completely mad. The table the book rested on was sent flying, and Nikola instinctively placed himself in front of Helen when they sprang from the settee. John’s eyes were wild and wide and he gave no warning before his hands were around Nikola’s head, twisting harshly and snapping his neck.
He vaguely heard Helen’s gasped, shocked, “Nikola!” as he fell the floor, felt the bizarre sensation of his heart stopping, his limbs losing all feeling, felt John’s form drop heavily to the floor beside his.
“Helen…I…I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“Nikola,” Helen says again, softer this time, cradling his head in her lap, and he wants to lie like this forever, coddled and cooed over and petted by Helen, but he can feel the bones knitting back together, feel his spine repairing itself as feelings of all sorts flood back through his body, and he can’t school his reactions well enough to stop the gasped intake of breath when his lungs start working again.
“Nikola!”
He smiles faintly up at her, making no move to dislodge his head from her lap. “Well, that was certainly…different.”
II.
She wants to inject him with something. A test. A drug. Something unnatural.
Something to control him, and he doesn’t want or need to be controlled.
She can’t see it, though. Can’t see that he is discovering his heritage, realizing who and what he is for the first time in his life. Doesn’t see that when he gives into these urges it’s nothing more than him accepting the power he’s always had without knowing it.
When she comes at him with the needle, the rage inside him can’t be contained. She wants to stop him, hurt him, make him less than he is.
And he can’t have that.
So he stops her.
Ironically, it’s her blood that brings him back to himself. She’s pinned beneath him, gasping for air as his fingers dig into her throat, and the trickle of blood down her temple catches his eye. He lets go of her throat to lick it up, and she gasps out a faint, weak, “Nikola, please….”
And then he sees her. Sees Helen. Sees the woman he can never confess his love to.
And he is so horrified at himself and what he almost did that he can’t even stay to apologize or make sure she is all right. All he can do is leap up and flee the room, the house, needing to get as far away from her as he can.
It’s Druitt who finds him eventually.
Nikola’s hands are shaking around his tumbler of brandy, not because he’s frightened, but because he is trying so hard to rein in his transformation, to prove that he can control himself without the medication.
But Druitt never bothers trying to control himself. There’s a flash of red, and Nikola finds himself pinned against the wall, all of Druitt’s weight at his back.
“You could have killed her.”
It’s meant to frighten him, he’s sure, that gruff whisper of John’s voice, the touch of John’s breath on the back of his neck. But it doesn’t. It excites him.
It excites him in a way no man ever has.
It’s like the way he feels when Helen shares a secret smile with him, or when she straightens his tie before he leaves her house, or when their hands brush accidentally. It’s like the way he’d felt after injecting her, when she’d curled her fingers around his, squeezing for all she was worth.
It’s like that, but different. Darker. More dangerous.
And he isn’t supposed to feel this way, he’s certain. Not with Druitt ready to snap his neck again. Not with the solid weight of a man pressed against him, holding him down.
He knows the Bible, knows what it says about such things. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” He remembers reading it, his father standing over him, as he wondered what it meant exactly.
He also knows what the church had done to his ancestors, and he wonders if this isn’t another thing they forced upon the people. Another arbitrary restriction used to keep their power.
So when John pushes against him one more time, whispers, “You nearly did kill her,” breath ghosting over his ear, Nikola pushes back, physically and verbally.
His hips push back until they connect with John’s groin, rubbing against it, and he growls, “Is this how it’s going to be, John? Are you going to treat me like one of your whores? Have your way with me, then slice me up and dump me in an alley somewhere?”
Until this moment, he’s never understood the sexuality of John’s violence. He’s always attributed John’s actions to his inability to deal with what the Source had done to him.
He understands now, though. The violence is John dealing with it. He gives in to his primal urges, lets himself go on the prostitutes of London in a way he never would with Helen, and when he’s done, he disposes of the evidence of his brutality in the most brutal way possible.
“Do it,” Nikola says, pushing back against John again. “For god’s sake, just do it!” He’s nearly begging, and the part of his mind that isn’t intent on goading Druitt in any way possible is telling him that he honestly doesn’t even know what he’s asking for.
But John apparently does, because his hands fumble at the fastenings of Nikola’s trousers, and soon they’re dropped to his ankles. Nikola feels movement behind him that he assumes is John opening his own trousers, and for a moment he’s the man he was before all this began.
More than that, he’s the boy who left home to study in Graz. The young man who went to America on a friend’s recommendation. The quiet, brooding youth who first attended a lecture in Oxford where he met the most remarkable woman.
And he’s scared.
But the moment he feels the burn and stretch and horrible, amazing, excruciating, exquisite pain of John forcing himself inside Nikola, all that fades away.
It burns, it aches, it fills him like nothing ever has, and he wants more. He can feel his body repairing itself as every brutish thrust of John’s hips tears it apart.
And it’s fucking marvelous.
He feels alive and right and bursting with energy.
His hands brace against the wall and John’s lay over them, holding him there, and Nikola concentrates through the glorious pain on sending out rhythmic bursts of electricity in time with John’s thrusts.
And then, all his attempts at concentration, at control are ripped from him as John’s cock hits something deep inside him, and he screams, and his body is shuddering, shaking, and he shoots his release over the wall, and John grunts behind him, coming as well, deep and hot inside him.
For a moment, it seems to Nikola as if they could be lovers. John’s forehead rests against his shoulder, and Nikola can feel his breath, sliding out over the sweat on his skin like a caress as they both catch their breath, regain coherency.
And then John shoves off him and growls, “Pull your trousers up.”
Nikola does so, beginning to feel like that foolish schoolboy again. He’s just got himself composed when Druitt flips him around, pinning him to the wall.
The rest happens almost too quickly for him to comprehend. There’s a sharp, bright pain in his belly, and John’s voice in his ear, whispering, “You’ll never touch her again,” and Helen’s voice coming up from the stairwell, calling his name.
And then John is gone, and Helen steps into his flat just in time to see the gash on his stomach healing.
He lets her think he did it to himself out of remorse.
III.
He hasn’t seen Druitt in months. Not since…
Not since Nikola had lost control and nearly killed Helen.
Not since it had been decided it would be best for them all if he were to go to America, at least until Helen had perfected the combination of drugs that was keeping his transformations in hand.
He comes home from work late, as he usually does, and the moment he enters the room, he knows someone is there. He can hear their pulse, smell their sweat, but before he can deduce who it is or where in the dark room they are, there’s a brief flash of light and then John’s arms are around his waist, squeezing tightly, too tightly, so tightly Nikola can’t breathe.
“What if I squeezed until you popped, eh?” John whispers in his ear. “What then? Could you come back from that? What if I just keep killing you over and over again until it sticks?”
He can’t answer, of course, doesn’t have the breath to, and John squeezes harder still. Nikola feels his insides relocating, pushing together, jostling against one another, and he wants to gasp for breath but he can’t, and it doesn’t occur to him to fight back, doesn’t even cross his mind that he is much, much stronger than John, because he hasn’t been for all that long.
His vision swims, and he fights to stay conscious, but soon he can’t fight anymore. His body goes limp in John’s arms, and John squeezes again, as though he really would pop Nikola like an overfilled balloon.
And then he lets go, shoves Nikola’s body to the floor and kicks it.
“It’s no fun. Killing you, or almost killing you. You always come back. There’s no satisfaction.”
Nikola can’t answer yet, his lungs are still crushed, his parts still migrating back to their proper locations.
“Maybe if it were bloody,” John muses above him, and Nikola is hauled to his feet again.
He only just manages to get in one gasp of air before the knife slices through his throat, and the first thought that crosses his mind is that he’ll need a new suit, and doesn’t John know that he can’t afford it on his salary, doesn’t he care that Nikola is practically desolate?
The wound on his throat heals before he even has the chance to feel woozy from lack of blood.
“It’s no use,” he says, and as he looks at John, that part of him he’s fought so hard to control since coming to New York flares up, and he struggles to push it down.
“What isn’t?” John snarls, fingers closing around Nikola’s throat again, crushing his windpipe. “Killing you? I know. But it makes me feel just a little better each time.”
He remembers, now, that he can overpower John easily, and with one shove, John goes flying back against the wall.
“She’ll find out,” Nikola says, because it’s the most hurtful thing he can think to say, and he wants to hurt John, wants to make him feel anger, rage, helplessness, before he’s killed.
“Someday, no matter how careful you are, she’ll find out.” He brings a knee up hard against John’s stomach, gratified by the pained groan he gets in return. “And do you know what will happen when she does?”
John’s fist connects with Nikola’s cheek, and Nikola takes a moment to wipe the blood away before flipping John around, shoving him face first against the wall. As long as they’re touching, John can’t teleport away from him.
“She’ll realize,” he continues, his voice gone deep and dark with the transformation he’s no longer attempting to control, “what a monster you are and have always been, and she’ll come crawling to me for sympathy.”
John growls and struggles underneath him to no avail.
“And I’ll take her in,” Nikola continues, drawing one, sharp fingernail just along John’s hairline, just to see the blood well up and slide down the back of his neck. “I’ll take her in and make her mine in ways you never could.”
He laps at the blood gathering in John’s collar, tastes his fear, his anger, his helplessness.
And he gives John one more hard shove before stepping back.
John is gone in a flash, and Nikola smiles to himself.
“Coward.”
IV.
No one, not even Helen, has seen Druitt for years. Nikola hasn’t even thought about him. He’s been busy with his work. His death ray is almost completed, and it’s been taking up nearly all of his time. Helen comes to see him every so often, to make sure he’s eating, that he’s still taking his medication, and every now and again, James comes with her, and it’s like old times. Nigel doesn’t get out much anymore, and if he did, Nikola’s sure he wouldn’t want to be with the rest of them. He has a family now, a wife and daughter, and The Five would only take that and twist it, ruin it for him. Nigel knows this, and Nikola can’t blame him for staying away.
But no one’s seen any sign of Druitt for a very long time now.
Nikola has his own theories about what John’s been up to. Bouncing around time and space killing prostitutes and causing mayhem, no doubt. James still blames himself for not having seen sooner that it was his friend who was responsible for those girls’ deaths all those years ago. Druitt’s managed to work up some sort of serum with Helen’s blood to keep him living, but it doesn’t do much for the instability.
Still, despite all this, Nikola isn’t terribly surprised when he retires to his room one night, pours himself a brandy, and discovers he’s been poisoned.
“Really, John, cyanide? Couldn’t you have chosen something that wouldn’t ruin my nightcap?”
“You…” The voice is just behind his ear, and Nikola doesn’t turn to look. “You don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve either of them.”
He smiles. “Perhaps you should have thought about that before running off into hiding. I’m still here, after all.”
His chair gets spun around, and he finds himself face to face with John. “It should be me,” John says, and Nikola recognizes that look in his eye, knows it means this evening will end in blood. His or John’s or both. “I should be the one who…”
“Yes, but you aren’t,” Nikola interrupts, his voice almost gentle. “I am. It’s me they come to see, me they check up on. Just as I said it would be.”
John lunges for him, hard enough to knock Nikola’s chair over, slam the back of his head against his desk. John’s face fades into blackness for a moment, but Nikola can still feel it as he’s hauled up onto his desk, papers scattering, brandy decanter crashing to the floor, and just before his vision comes back, Nikola has the fleeting notion that it’s a good thing he keeps his plans in his head instead of on paper or he’d really have to be cross with John.
And when he does come to, John is laid out on top of him, pressing him to the desk, already rutting against him, and Nikola laughs.
“Can’t get enough of me, eh, Johnny? Is that why you came back? Because you know I’m better than anyone else you’ve ever had? Because you know I’m the only one who can take it the way you want to give it without falling apart, without breaking?”
The knife at his throat catches him off guard, and John slices deep this time, much deeper than before, so deep Nikola can feel his breath gurgling in his throat, so deep he starts to feel the entirely unfamiliar sensation of bleeding out, limbs growing heavy, vision fading even as he feels his body knitting back together and John tearing off his trousers.
He’ll have to buy a new suit again, but this time he can afford it.
By the time he comes back to his senses, John has Nikola’s legs hooked over his shoulders, and Nikola has only just taken his first blood-free breath when it’s knocked from him again by the savage force of John’s first thrust.
John’s fingers wrap around his throat before he has the chance to take another.
It goes on like this until Nikola begins to lose count of the attempts John makes. The knife finds its sheath in various vital organs. John’s hands choke him or snap his neck or squeeze his innards or suffocate him.
It’s a miracle of biology that Nikola comes at all, but he does, eventually, seconds before John, both of them screaming out curses at the other.
John pulls out roughly and is gone in a red flash, and Nikola thinks he might actually have bruises after this.
V.
For once, Nikola finds John rather than the other way around.
He’s stuck in his research, and the only ones capable of helping him are the other members of The Five. Nigel’s long since dead. James would only try to talk him out of it. And Helen…well, he’s not quite ready to see her again. Not yet.
So he finds John. It isn’t difficult. He’s been keeping tabs on all of them since his disappearance. He knows nearly all of John’s hideouts.
He had to nurse John back to health first, of course. Ironic really, that Helen should be the one trying to kill John and Nikola the one trying to save him.
And once Nikola is sure Druitt’s not going to die on him, he begins to reason with him.
“Don’t you see, John? This is our chance. Our chance to build the world the way it was meant to be. To change the future. To create a society that will flourish and grow.”
It had taken some work to set up a place that could keep John from teleporting away. He’d gotten the idea from Helen and her sanctuaries, and it taken a bit of tweaking, but he’d managed to rig a similar device. With a little practice, he’d be able to keep John from disappearing just by touching him.
“You’re mad, Nikola.”
He laughs. The words mean nothing coming from Druitt. “Look who’s talking, Johnny.”
It was disappointing, really, to have it end like this. Druitt made a few valiant efforts to escape, strangling Nikola or knifing him from behind, but Nikola had taken precautions, and the field keeping John from teleporting was completely independent of him, so a momentary lapse in concentration here or there wasn’t going to make much difference in the long run.
In the end, he has to strap John to a table to keep him still, and it’s become increasingly obvious that John isn’t going to help him with this, no matter how logical Nikola is being.
He stands over John, slowly unbuttoning John’s shirt, and John squirms under him.
“Is that what this is about? You want to get your own back after all this time? You can’t fool me, Nikola. You were practically begging for it.”
“You mistake me, Johnny,” Nikola says, smiling calmly at him as he opens John’s shirt, splaying his hand across John’s chest. “I’m not going to fuck you. I’m going to fix you.”
Sharp fingernails slice into John’s skin, and Nikola gives off his first current.
“Let’s see if electro-shock therapy can cure Jack the Ripper.”
fin
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Druitt/Tesla
Word Count: 3347
Warning: Sex and violence. Lots of violence. And violent sex.
Disclaimer: None of these characters belong to me...sadly
Feedback: yes, please.
Summary: Just what it says on the tin.
A/N: Just one of those things that popped into my head, you know? Epigraph comes from the song “Blood” by My Chemical Romance
Give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough.
So give them blood, blood, blood.
Grab a glass because there's going to be a flood!
I.
The first time was an accident. Nikola is fairly certain about this.
They all experienced this in the beginning, this loss of control, this buildup of rage, this overwhelming, overflowing need for violence.
John’s was aggravated every time he used his powers, and in those first few weeks he was nearly impossible to predict, and even Helen had a difficult time soothing him.
He teleported into Helen’s parlor one evening when she and Nikola were poring over a dusty old book about vampires, searching for some way to keep Nikola’s surges of rage in control.
Perhaps Nikola was too close to Helen. Perhaps he let his fingers graze her thigh. Perhaps he looked at her, as he often did, with too much affection.
Whatever it was, when John appeared and saw them together, he went completely mad. The table the book rested on was sent flying, and Nikola instinctively placed himself in front of Helen when they sprang from the settee. John’s eyes were wild and wide and he gave no warning before his hands were around Nikola’s head, twisting harshly and snapping his neck.
He vaguely heard Helen’s gasped, shocked, “Nikola!” as he fell the floor, felt the bizarre sensation of his heart stopping, his limbs losing all feeling, felt John’s form drop heavily to the floor beside his.
“Helen…I…I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“Nikola,” Helen says again, softer this time, cradling his head in her lap, and he wants to lie like this forever, coddled and cooed over and petted by Helen, but he can feel the bones knitting back together, feel his spine repairing itself as feelings of all sorts flood back through his body, and he can’t school his reactions well enough to stop the gasped intake of breath when his lungs start working again.
“Nikola!”
He smiles faintly up at her, making no move to dislodge his head from her lap. “Well, that was certainly…different.”
II.
She wants to inject him with something. A test. A drug. Something unnatural.
Something to control him, and he doesn’t want or need to be controlled.
She can’t see it, though. Can’t see that he is discovering his heritage, realizing who and what he is for the first time in his life. Doesn’t see that when he gives into these urges it’s nothing more than him accepting the power he’s always had without knowing it.
When she comes at him with the needle, the rage inside him can’t be contained. She wants to stop him, hurt him, make him less than he is.
And he can’t have that.
So he stops her.
Ironically, it’s her blood that brings him back to himself. She’s pinned beneath him, gasping for air as his fingers dig into her throat, and the trickle of blood down her temple catches his eye. He lets go of her throat to lick it up, and she gasps out a faint, weak, “Nikola, please….”
And then he sees her. Sees Helen. Sees the woman he can never confess his love to.
And he is so horrified at himself and what he almost did that he can’t even stay to apologize or make sure she is all right. All he can do is leap up and flee the room, the house, needing to get as far away from her as he can.
It’s Druitt who finds him eventually.
Nikola’s hands are shaking around his tumbler of brandy, not because he’s frightened, but because he is trying so hard to rein in his transformation, to prove that he can control himself without the medication.
But Druitt never bothers trying to control himself. There’s a flash of red, and Nikola finds himself pinned against the wall, all of Druitt’s weight at his back.
“You could have killed her.”
It’s meant to frighten him, he’s sure, that gruff whisper of John’s voice, the touch of John’s breath on the back of his neck. But it doesn’t. It excites him.
It excites him in a way no man ever has.
It’s like the way he feels when Helen shares a secret smile with him, or when she straightens his tie before he leaves her house, or when their hands brush accidentally. It’s like the way he’d felt after injecting her, when she’d curled her fingers around his, squeezing for all she was worth.
It’s like that, but different. Darker. More dangerous.
And he isn’t supposed to feel this way, he’s certain. Not with Druitt ready to snap his neck again. Not with the solid weight of a man pressed against him, holding him down.
He knows the Bible, knows what it says about such things. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” He remembers reading it, his father standing over him, as he wondered what it meant exactly.
He also knows what the church had done to his ancestors, and he wonders if this isn’t another thing they forced upon the people. Another arbitrary restriction used to keep their power.
So when John pushes against him one more time, whispers, “You nearly did kill her,” breath ghosting over his ear, Nikola pushes back, physically and verbally.
His hips push back until they connect with John’s groin, rubbing against it, and he growls, “Is this how it’s going to be, John? Are you going to treat me like one of your whores? Have your way with me, then slice me up and dump me in an alley somewhere?”
Until this moment, he’s never understood the sexuality of John’s violence. He’s always attributed John’s actions to his inability to deal with what the Source had done to him.
He understands now, though. The violence is John dealing with it. He gives in to his primal urges, lets himself go on the prostitutes of London in a way he never would with Helen, and when he’s done, he disposes of the evidence of his brutality in the most brutal way possible.
“Do it,” Nikola says, pushing back against John again. “For god’s sake, just do it!” He’s nearly begging, and the part of his mind that isn’t intent on goading Druitt in any way possible is telling him that he honestly doesn’t even know what he’s asking for.
But John apparently does, because his hands fumble at the fastenings of Nikola’s trousers, and soon they’re dropped to his ankles. Nikola feels movement behind him that he assumes is John opening his own trousers, and for a moment he’s the man he was before all this began.
More than that, he’s the boy who left home to study in Graz. The young man who went to America on a friend’s recommendation. The quiet, brooding youth who first attended a lecture in Oxford where he met the most remarkable woman.
And he’s scared.
But the moment he feels the burn and stretch and horrible, amazing, excruciating, exquisite pain of John forcing himself inside Nikola, all that fades away.
It burns, it aches, it fills him like nothing ever has, and he wants more. He can feel his body repairing itself as every brutish thrust of John’s hips tears it apart.
And it’s fucking marvelous.
He feels alive and right and bursting with energy.
His hands brace against the wall and John’s lay over them, holding him there, and Nikola concentrates through the glorious pain on sending out rhythmic bursts of electricity in time with John’s thrusts.
And then, all his attempts at concentration, at control are ripped from him as John’s cock hits something deep inside him, and he screams, and his body is shuddering, shaking, and he shoots his release over the wall, and John grunts behind him, coming as well, deep and hot inside him.
For a moment, it seems to Nikola as if they could be lovers. John’s forehead rests against his shoulder, and Nikola can feel his breath, sliding out over the sweat on his skin like a caress as they both catch their breath, regain coherency.
And then John shoves off him and growls, “Pull your trousers up.”
Nikola does so, beginning to feel like that foolish schoolboy again. He’s just got himself composed when Druitt flips him around, pinning him to the wall.
The rest happens almost too quickly for him to comprehend. There’s a sharp, bright pain in his belly, and John’s voice in his ear, whispering, “You’ll never touch her again,” and Helen’s voice coming up from the stairwell, calling his name.
And then John is gone, and Helen steps into his flat just in time to see the gash on his stomach healing.
He lets her think he did it to himself out of remorse.
III.
He hasn’t seen Druitt in months. Not since…
Not since Nikola had lost control and nearly killed Helen.
Not since it had been decided it would be best for them all if he were to go to America, at least until Helen had perfected the combination of drugs that was keeping his transformations in hand.
He comes home from work late, as he usually does, and the moment he enters the room, he knows someone is there. He can hear their pulse, smell their sweat, but before he can deduce who it is or where in the dark room they are, there’s a brief flash of light and then John’s arms are around his waist, squeezing tightly, too tightly, so tightly Nikola can’t breathe.
“What if I squeezed until you popped, eh?” John whispers in his ear. “What then? Could you come back from that? What if I just keep killing you over and over again until it sticks?”
He can’t answer, of course, doesn’t have the breath to, and John squeezes harder still. Nikola feels his insides relocating, pushing together, jostling against one another, and he wants to gasp for breath but he can’t, and it doesn’t occur to him to fight back, doesn’t even cross his mind that he is much, much stronger than John, because he hasn’t been for all that long.
His vision swims, and he fights to stay conscious, but soon he can’t fight anymore. His body goes limp in John’s arms, and John squeezes again, as though he really would pop Nikola like an overfilled balloon.
And then he lets go, shoves Nikola’s body to the floor and kicks it.
“It’s no fun. Killing you, or almost killing you. You always come back. There’s no satisfaction.”
Nikola can’t answer yet, his lungs are still crushed, his parts still migrating back to their proper locations.
“Maybe if it were bloody,” John muses above him, and Nikola is hauled to his feet again.
He only just manages to get in one gasp of air before the knife slices through his throat, and the first thought that crosses his mind is that he’ll need a new suit, and doesn’t John know that he can’t afford it on his salary, doesn’t he care that Nikola is practically desolate?
The wound on his throat heals before he even has the chance to feel woozy from lack of blood.
“It’s no use,” he says, and as he looks at John, that part of him he’s fought so hard to control since coming to New York flares up, and he struggles to push it down.
“What isn’t?” John snarls, fingers closing around Nikola’s throat again, crushing his windpipe. “Killing you? I know. But it makes me feel just a little better each time.”
He remembers, now, that he can overpower John easily, and with one shove, John goes flying back against the wall.
“She’ll find out,” Nikola says, because it’s the most hurtful thing he can think to say, and he wants to hurt John, wants to make him feel anger, rage, helplessness, before he’s killed.
“Someday, no matter how careful you are, she’ll find out.” He brings a knee up hard against John’s stomach, gratified by the pained groan he gets in return. “And do you know what will happen when she does?”
John’s fist connects with Nikola’s cheek, and Nikola takes a moment to wipe the blood away before flipping John around, shoving him face first against the wall. As long as they’re touching, John can’t teleport away from him.
“She’ll realize,” he continues, his voice gone deep and dark with the transformation he’s no longer attempting to control, “what a monster you are and have always been, and she’ll come crawling to me for sympathy.”
John growls and struggles underneath him to no avail.
“And I’ll take her in,” Nikola continues, drawing one, sharp fingernail just along John’s hairline, just to see the blood well up and slide down the back of his neck. “I’ll take her in and make her mine in ways you never could.”
He laps at the blood gathering in John’s collar, tastes his fear, his anger, his helplessness.
And he gives John one more hard shove before stepping back.
John is gone in a flash, and Nikola smiles to himself.
“Coward.”
IV.
No one, not even Helen, has seen Druitt for years. Nikola hasn’t even thought about him. He’s been busy with his work. His death ray is almost completed, and it’s been taking up nearly all of his time. Helen comes to see him every so often, to make sure he’s eating, that he’s still taking his medication, and every now and again, James comes with her, and it’s like old times. Nigel doesn’t get out much anymore, and if he did, Nikola’s sure he wouldn’t want to be with the rest of them. He has a family now, a wife and daughter, and The Five would only take that and twist it, ruin it for him. Nigel knows this, and Nikola can’t blame him for staying away.
But no one’s seen any sign of Druitt for a very long time now.
Nikola has his own theories about what John’s been up to. Bouncing around time and space killing prostitutes and causing mayhem, no doubt. James still blames himself for not having seen sooner that it was his friend who was responsible for those girls’ deaths all those years ago. Druitt’s managed to work up some sort of serum with Helen’s blood to keep him living, but it doesn’t do much for the instability.
Still, despite all this, Nikola isn’t terribly surprised when he retires to his room one night, pours himself a brandy, and discovers he’s been poisoned.
“Really, John, cyanide? Couldn’t you have chosen something that wouldn’t ruin my nightcap?”
“You…” The voice is just behind his ear, and Nikola doesn’t turn to look. “You don’t deserve her. You don’t deserve either of them.”
He smiles. “Perhaps you should have thought about that before running off into hiding. I’m still here, after all.”
His chair gets spun around, and he finds himself face to face with John. “It should be me,” John says, and Nikola recognizes that look in his eye, knows it means this evening will end in blood. His or John’s or both. “I should be the one who…”
“Yes, but you aren’t,” Nikola interrupts, his voice almost gentle. “I am. It’s me they come to see, me they check up on. Just as I said it would be.”
John lunges for him, hard enough to knock Nikola’s chair over, slam the back of his head against his desk. John’s face fades into blackness for a moment, but Nikola can still feel it as he’s hauled up onto his desk, papers scattering, brandy decanter crashing to the floor, and just before his vision comes back, Nikola has the fleeting notion that it’s a good thing he keeps his plans in his head instead of on paper or he’d really have to be cross with John.
And when he does come to, John is laid out on top of him, pressing him to the desk, already rutting against him, and Nikola laughs.
“Can’t get enough of me, eh, Johnny? Is that why you came back? Because you know I’m better than anyone else you’ve ever had? Because you know I’m the only one who can take it the way you want to give it without falling apart, without breaking?”
The knife at his throat catches him off guard, and John slices deep this time, much deeper than before, so deep Nikola can feel his breath gurgling in his throat, so deep he starts to feel the entirely unfamiliar sensation of bleeding out, limbs growing heavy, vision fading even as he feels his body knitting back together and John tearing off his trousers.
He’ll have to buy a new suit again, but this time he can afford it.
By the time he comes back to his senses, John has Nikola’s legs hooked over his shoulders, and Nikola has only just taken his first blood-free breath when it’s knocked from him again by the savage force of John’s first thrust.
John’s fingers wrap around his throat before he has the chance to take another.
It goes on like this until Nikola begins to lose count of the attempts John makes. The knife finds its sheath in various vital organs. John’s hands choke him or snap his neck or squeeze his innards or suffocate him.
It’s a miracle of biology that Nikola comes at all, but he does, eventually, seconds before John, both of them screaming out curses at the other.
John pulls out roughly and is gone in a red flash, and Nikola thinks he might actually have bruises after this.
V.
For once, Nikola finds John rather than the other way around.
He’s stuck in his research, and the only ones capable of helping him are the other members of The Five. Nigel’s long since dead. James would only try to talk him out of it. And Helen…well, he’s not quite ready to see her again. Not yet.
So he finds John. It isn’t difficult. He’s been keeping tabs on all of them since his disappearance. He knows nearly all of John’s hideouts.
He had to nurse John back to health first, of course. Ironic really, that Helen should be the one trying to kill John and Nikola the one trying to save him.
And once Nikola is sure Druitt’s not going to die on him, he begins to reason with him.
“Don’t you see, John? This is our chance. Our chance to build the world the way it was meant to be. To change the future. To create a society that will flourish and grow.”
It had taken some work to set up a place that could keep John from teleporting away. He’d gotten the idea from Helen and her sanctuaries, and it taken a bit of tweaking, but he’d managed to rig a similar device. With a little practice, he’d be able to keep John from disappearing just by touching him.
“You’re mad, Nikola.”
He laughs. The words mean nothing coming from Druitt. “Look who’s talking, Johnny.”
It was disappointing, really, to have it end like this. Druitt made a few valiant efforts to escape, strangling Nikola or knifing him from behind, but Nikola had taken precautions, and the field keeping John from teleporting was completely independent of him, so a momentary lapse in concentration here or there wasn’t going to make much difference in the long run.
In the end, he has to strap John to a table to keep him still, and it’s become increasingly obvious that John isn’t going to help him with this, no matter how logical Nikola is being.
He stands over John, slowly unbuttoning John’s shirt, and John squirms under him.
“Is that what this is about? You want to get your own back after all this time? You can’t fool me, Nikola. You were practically begging for it.”
“You mistake me, Johnny,” Nikola says, smiling calmly at him as he opens John’s shirt, splaying his hand across John’s chest. “I’m not going to fuck you. I’m going to fix you.”
Sharp fingernails slice into John’s skin, and Nikola gives off his first current.
“Let’s see if electro-shock therapy can cure Jack the Ripper.”
fin
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"Can’t get enough of me, eh, Johnny? Is that why you came back? Because you know I’m better than anyone else you’ve ever had? Because you know I’m the only one who can take it the way you want to give it without falling apart, without breaking?”
The whole idea expressed in those words is beyond awesome. I love the idea of Nikola being the person he's perfectly fine being brutal with. You managed to pull off some real gore in this while still making in strangely alluring and a real glimpse into a massively fucked up relationship.
Hee!
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HAY! Icon twins. :D
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Fascinating.
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It always makes me smile when you like my slashy stuff. :D
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I found this while searching for Druitt/Watson, actually (and I appreciate the nod to that here! I can't figure out why none seems to exist), and I am very glad I did. I love how you get into their heads and poke around in the dark places of their minds, and also how through them we get a few glimpses into the rest of this truly bizarre group and their background.
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