the grit of sand in your veins

by specficslut (homosociality)

Summary:

En Sabah Nur takes over alpha Charles's body and usurps his bond with omega Erik. What happens before, and after.

Chapter 1

Summary:

As the Apocalypse marches on, En Sabah Nur taunts alpha Charles about how he'll use Charles's body to get what he wants from omega Erik.

“I have never occupied the body of a mated man before,” En Sabah Nur says. Charles bares his teeth. “I have never taken a mate of my own. I am glad that you found each other. A mind-walker with talents like yourself and a man with power over the earth the likes of which I have never seen before. I am glad that when I subsume you, I will not be mated to a weakling, but to a creature fit to be the consort of a God.”

“He doesn’t want you,” Charles says, firm in his resolve. Firm in his belief in Erik. “He doesn’t want this.”

“I have experienced his life through his eyes,” En Sabah Nur sighs, as though Charles is little more than an insect buzzing around his head. “It’s been years, hasn’t it? Years since you lay together, limbs entwined in the night. And yet he still remembers how to pleasure this body. He has turned the moments you spent together over and over in his mind, memorizing them, what gave you pleasure, what made you smile. That will be useful.”

Charles licks his lips. The desert air stings his eyes, dries his mouth. “The Bond won’t last with what you’re going to do to it. You’ll just kill me, you won’t take him with you.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” En Sabah Nur says. “If so… I will just have to mate him the old-fashioned way then.”

“You stay away from him,” Charles spits, fury flaring in him like a geyser. It is dangerous to antagonize someone stronger than you; that’s a lesson he learned well over the years with his stepbrother looming like a shadow over his life. But this is too much. The idea of this man using Charles’s hands to hurt Erik, who is dazed, who is confused, who is in no state to consent—no. Unthinkable. He and Erik haven’t lived together as mates in years, like En Sabah Nur said. But the Bond still flickers between them—the surge of agony that had stretched from Poland to New York when Erik’s wife and daughter had died, the permanent effects of a mating between alpha and omega. A mating they had thought, when they were very young and very stupid, would last forever.

As En Sabah Nur’s horsemen lash him to the transference table—Charles has seen into En Sabah Nur’s mind, knows what is coming for him—Charles sets his eyes on Erik, staring blankly at the wall. Gazing into nothingness as though what Charles and En Sabah Nur—”Master,” Charles remembers Erik calling him, and it makes his skin crawl, Erik who has spent every moment of his life trying to make his way out of the shell of the child that was helpless and hopeless, utterly at Shaw’s pitiless lack of mercy—speak of has nothing to do with him, nothing to do with the Bond that Charles knows is the thing that Erik always cherished most, in spite of their estrangement, until his daughter. “Erik,” Charles calls out. “Erik, don’t do this. You know what he has planned for you. You know it’s not what you want. You know it’s not what they would want—”

“Stop,” Erik says softly. “You never knew them. Don’t speak of them.”

“Are you so lost?” Charles cries out. En Sabah Nur watches with amusement. “Is the man I loved—” the man I love, in spite of everything, in spite of the way Erik had moved on, because Charles never had, could never abandon the man that had loomed so large in his heart from the moment he jumped into the water to save him— “gone forever? Erik, you are stronger than this—stronger than him—are you gone from me? Are you gone entirely?”

“Yes,” Erik says.

En Sabah Nur laughs softly, a deadly sound, vipers in the nest. “Go and prepare for the end of the world, my sweet,” he says, and Erik turns on his heel and leaves. Without even glancing at Charles. As though he means nothing to him.

Charles thought he knew despair. But it seems that Apocalypse has yet more to teach him of the art of hopelessness.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Erik wakes.

“Papa,” Nina says, “it’s time to go.”



Erik opens his eyes. Sunlight shafts across the heathered cashmere bedsheets, dyed royal azure and gold. A servant, cringing and bowing, tells him that Death is wanted by the Great Lord’s side. Erik nods to dismiss him, then sits up, letting the sheets pool around his waist. Sunlight hits his skin, warms it. As he rises from bed, a twinge of soreness in his backside reminds him of the Great Lord’s favor. He puts on his armor and departs.



The hallways of the Grand Temple are very quiet. No one speaks, unless absolutely necessary. They stop and turn to watch as he moves swiftly down the halls. Death is rarely seen outside the Master’s quarters—Erik prefers to spend his time dreaming, drifting loose and untethered in sleep. He rarely wakes and goes out to see the world he has wrought, the world with its metal wrenched from it, its steel beams and support struts, anything not made of stone and wood slagged and crumbling. The reversed polarity of the Earth’s spin buzzes wrongly on his skin. Dreams are better.

The Great Lord rules from a grand hall which arches as high as the pyramid they dwell in. Erik pushes open the heavy doors with his powers and walks the long walk to En Sabah Nur’s throne, raised high above the floor on which petitioners and slaves—and they’re all slaves, one way or another—prostrate themselves. Erik ascends the stairs until he’s just feet from the throne, flanked today by Famine and War. He kneels.

“Rise,” the Great Lord says. Erik rises. Then, because he knows what is expected of him, he comes to straddle his mate’s lap. En Sabah Nur smiles, a surprisingly tender expression on his stern face, and runs his finger through Erik’s hair. Erik sighs and rests his head on the Great Lord’s armored shoulder, the way he likes. En Sabah Nur doesn’t ask him how his morning is; he already knows. Instead, he says, “There has been a rebellion in the Northwestern Quadrant. I would like you to… take care of it.”

“Yes, alpha,” Erik says. He doesn’t ask why Famine or War aren’t being sent out. If Death is called upon, it is because no one else’s powers—save the Great Lord’s, and it would be blasphemy for him to fight his own battles—would suffice.

En Sabah Nur strokes his face, and Erik curls into the touch, the way he likes. Famine looks at him with a strange expression—almost like pity. “Go forth,” he says. “Crush my enemies.”

And Erik goes forth—the way he likes—and does so.



He flies to the rebellion point. Not in an airplane—Erik pulled all the airplanes from the sky the day before the first day of the Great Lord’s reign—but under his own power, the wind whipping through his hair. Now that the most powerful telepath in the world reigns, Erik is no longer allowed the helmet that En Sabah Nur gave him as a gift. Mental privacy is a thing of the past. That’s all right. He only wants one thing anyway, and the Great Lord knows it.

Famine has cleared the way for him, sent the clouds skittering on their path. Erik rides the great blue, slicing through it like a sharp knife. His mind is blank. He tries not to think when he is awake, tries not to be too conscious of the things happening around him. He keeps his chin tilted up, to escape the scene flashing by below him—devastation, still devastation, after years. Every piece of metal wrenched from the earth and broken up into so many fragments. After he destroyed the world, he was unconscious for four days and four nights. In the moment, he’d felt like he could go forever, reach through to the very core of the world and upend it, drawing strength from the magnetic fields thickening like honey around him, but the instant geomagnetic reversal took place darkness hit him like a truck.

When he woke, En Sabah Nur had been at his side, smiling at him. And Erik’s whole body had been oriented toward his new mate, the way it had once turned towards the previous occupant of that body. The way it had once turned toward Charles.

The rebellion is based out of what remains of New York. Manhattan is gone—blasted to a dead zone, so much metal, so much hubris—but the smaller communities are still struggling by. Erik lands at the campsite where the Great Lord’s forces have set up. Ordinary people—mostly mutants, some not—who have pledged their lives to the Great Lord’s service in exchange for privileges. The commander comes to greet him with a low bow. Without the helmet, he is less recognizable, but his red and purple armor mark him as what he is: Death, consort to the Great Lord, the most powerful omega in the world.

“Appraise me on the situation,” Erik tells him, and the commander does so. A small group of rebels, mostly mutants, some not, who have set up in the woods outside Allegany. They’ve taken over a small town as a staging area, cleared out all the civilians except those who sought to join their number. There are still those who resent all that was lost from them the day before the first day of the Great Lord’s reign. Their numbers might be few, but they’ve managed to repulse every attack thus far, meeting En Sabah Nur’s forces on the field of battle fearlessly and competently.

But Death is here now.

Erik rises into the air and summons all the metal, lying inert on the ground, shapes it into several large and heavy balls. Cannonballs, writ large. And then he hurls them into the town, splintering roofs, destroying the semblance of a community the rebels have made for themselves in this small town. At once, cries rise up from the town—they know they’re under attack, and they know who has arrived to take command of the troops. Erik can hear them, carried along the air on magnetic waves of sound.

“Summon your forces,” he tells the commander. “They will be here soon.”



A salt-tang on the air—blood, perhaps, or the smell of copper filament used as garottes, as trip wires. Explosions. Red light on the horizon, drenching the sky like paint, like dye, soaking into the earth.

They beat the rebels back to the city limits. Several of them fall; several more barricade themselves in. Erik could tear them down with a thought, could bury the entire city several miles under the earth by increasing the magnetic pull between it and the earth’s core, but he won’t. That would be overkill. The point of these battles is to prove that no one can stand against the Great Lord, and for that, at least, one must be left alive.

He returns to what once was Cairo on wings of magnetic force.



The Great Lord calls Erik to attend him in the bath. Erik rises from their bed. Steps over the floor where the pieces of his armor have been stripped off. He’s no longer Death, just Erik. He steps naked into the massive bath down the hall from their bedchambers, takes the steps down into the bath until he is submerged up to his shoulders. His mate lounges back against the wall of the deeply recessed pool. Beckons to him. Erik goes.

As he sinks down on En Sabah Nur’s cock before he’s quite ready, Erik throws his head back and clutches compulsively at the shoulders that once were Charles’s shoulders, shudders as the lips that once were Charles’s lips leave kisses along his neck, his collarbone. He bounces up and down on his cock as water sloshes around them, gasping as the alpha’s cock splits his cunt open. He likes the pain. It is when he feels realest, like the haze that has been hanging over him since his daughter died is thinnest, like the cloud that fogs his mind and thoughts has opened and he can see the trembling, beautiful sky.

He rides En Sabah Nur furiously, until his thighs burn and he’s spurting into the water, but his mate’s stamina has always been greater than his own, and after he collapses forward on En Sabah Nur’s lap, the Great Lord clutches Erik’s hips with bruising impossible force and continues to work him up and down on his cock. Erik mewls. His world narrows to the lapping of water at his back, the cock twitching inside of him, the painful gaping hole in him that is only filled when he’s being fucked. Finally, finally, he can feel the knot nudging at his hole, and with a cry he grinds down until it’s fully inside of him and he feels his mate begin to come.

Exhausted, he rests his head on En Sabah Nur’s shoulder. When the knot goes down, come leaks out of him, but the Great Lord takes a cloth and wipes at his ass until he’s clean enough—not that it matters, he’ll have him again before the night is through—and Erik, still shaking, wets his hands with honey-scented ash soap and runs the suds over En Sabah Nur’s scalp.

He remembers doing this for Charles, once upon a time.

He remembers doing this for Nina.



He doesn’t dream.



A salt-tang on the air. Thunder rumbling overhead—Famine is not the only one who can control lightning, which is electricity moving past itself fast enough to generate a magnetic field. Below, people scream. He tears apart barricades—crushes someone unfortunate enough to be standing below it as it comes down. He shears the shingles from the roofs and drives them into people’s necks. Around him, the Great Lord’s army approaches, taking some hits themselves, but driving back the rebels, capturing and executing them. Erik tips his head back. Savors the ozone leeching from the air.

Slowly, the rebel forces diminish, until it’s just the rebel leader. Erik stares at the boy, who is blasting back anyone who tries to grab him with reddish beams from his eyes—an energy discharge that reminds him of Alex, though far more controlled. It takes a moment for Erik to recognize him. He was in Cairo that day, or what was left of Cairo, trying to stop the Great Lord from taking his throne. Erik descends from the air in front of him, powerful magnetic warping fields deflecting even the kinetic energy of his eyeblasts. The boy screams at him, an inarticulate cry of rage.

“You!” he shouts. “You bastard, you’ve taken everything from us—”

Erik says, “As a traitor to the rule of En Sabah Nur, you will be taken into custody—”

“—you traitor, all you’re capable of is death and destruction—”

“—and interrogated for the identities and locations of your co-conspirators. There is no path to a quick death, but if you surrender, I will see to it that you are disposed of humanely after the Great Lord is done with you—”

“—you have no idea, do you, you’re just a soulless son of a bitch, you have no idea what it’s like to lose, what you’ve done to all of us—”

Like lightning flashing overhead, reality crashes over him. Just for a moment. But it’s enough.

Erik stops. He turns to look at the boy. Scott; he remembers Hank shouting his name. “There’s a hole in the world,” he says softly, and Scott shuts up. “There’s a hole in the world where the person you’ve lost is, and nothing can ever fill it. You look and you look, you make others suffer or you do what you think they would have wanted, but it gapes, at the center of the world and in the center of you, and it gets bigger all the time, crumbling around the edges. More of you falling into that abyss. There’s a hole in the world, and the world is nothing without what was once there to give it meaning.”

Scott doesn’t say anything after that, just lets himself be mutely taken into custody. Erik knows what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that he’s lost, but he won’t break, won’t give up his collaborators.

Erik knows better.



The Great Lord is eating when Erik finally arrives back at the Grand Temple. Scott will be transported over ground, in the usual ways; it will take a few weeks for him to arrive. Erik kneels at En Sabah Nur’s feet, accepts a morsel of meat when En Sabah Nur gestures for him to open his mouth. Pork. He doesn’t like the taste, still, but old concepts like keeping kosher have been swept away by the new world order, the new religion. He licks the juices from the Great Lord’s hand, and he smiles at him, running his thumb over Erik’s mouth.

“What news have you brought me, my sweet?” he asks.

“The rebellion is dead,” Erik tells him. “The leader is on his way here for interrogation.”

“Good,” En Sabah Nur purrs. “You’ve done well.”

Erik’s heart pounds in his ribcage. “So I can see her?”

“Of course,” he says, and offers Erik another morsel. Erik lets En Sabah Nur hand-feed him, the thought of tonight making him dizzy, making his heart light, like a bird shifting and fluttering in the cage of his ribs.



He lies in their bed, face-down, hips and ass up, the blue and gold of their sheets bleached strange colors by the moonlight. As his mate presses inside him, Erik turns his head into the pillows and thinks of his daughter. It distracts him from the pain, from the thrusts so forceful that they shove him halfway up the bed. His toes curl in pain-pleasure; he fists the sheets hard enough that they stretch, threaten to tear. He can feel the involuntary contractions of his cunt as he tries to milk his mate, to wring from him every drop. But En Sabah Nur was kind enough to render him sterile. He can’t think of carrying a child. Not again.

He feels raw, torn-open, and not from the fucking, from that brief reminder of reality. He’s been wandering around in a bubble of magnetic force, and today Scott had pierced it open. Reminded him of his loss. Sent the wrenching, lifeless grief back into his heart.

He’ll see her again. Soon. He just has to endure this first.



In these dreams, it’s Charles’s face smiling at him, cruel and bright, not a tinge of blue to his skin. He leans forward, kisses his forehead. “Go,” he says, “she’s waiting for you.”

“Charles,” Erik whispers, and Charles’s smile melts into something warm and understanding, that peculiar unconditional love that he only had the pleasure of feeling for one whirlwind month in September of 1962. He wonders if it’s just his mind, making up stories, or if some part of Charles really remains in En Sabah Nur’s mind—the part that gives him these dreams. The Great Lord has promised him. A glimpse of Nina with every success, a slice of the life she never got to live every time he submits, every time he lets En Sabah Nur spill his kingly seed into his body. But the beauty of these dreams—he thinks En Sabah Nur might not be able to imagine it. But Charles could.

Or maybe that, too, is a dream.

“Go,” Charles says. So Erik turns his back on him, into the woods, the bright-blue sky soaring above him, Nina’s friends already flocking to the well where she holds court. When she spies him, she brightens up, and flies into his arms.

“Papa!” she shouts. “You’re back!”

“Yes,” Erik says. “Yes, my love, I’m back. And I’m not going anywhere.”

Notes:

I am at tumblr as homoethics. Please comment; constructive criticism welcome.

I didn't think this was going to have a second chapter, and yet. Subscribe for updates, I guess?