
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12248325.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      A_Woman's_Face_(1941), Original_Work
  Relationship:
      Torsten_Barring/Laura_Erika_Barring
  Character:
      Torsten_Barring, Laura_Erika_Barring
  Additional Tags:
      Incest, Uncle/Niece_Incest, incest_(consensual), Underage_-_Freeform,
      Necrophilia, Necrophilia_roleplay, Sexual_Roleplay, Ageplay, Dancing,
      Slow_Dancing, Romance, Darkfic, Het, Dark_Het, Historical, 1930s, 1940s,
      World_War_II, Daddy_Kink, daddy/daughter, Age_Difference, Older_Man/
      Younger_Woman, Heterosexual_Vaginal_Sex, heterosexual_anal_sex,
      Heterosexual_Anal_Sex_(female_receiving), Anal_Sex_(female_receiving),
      Female_sexual_agency, Erotica, Carrying, costume_porn, Androgynous_male
      character, Dominant_Male_Character, Submissive_Female_Character, Queer
      Het, Bisexual_Male_Character, Bisexual_Female_Character, Genital_Shaving,
      Historical_References, Fairy_Tale_Elements, Princes_&_Princesses, Playing
      Dead, Period_Attitudes_Towards_Sexuality_and_Gender, Dominant_Androgynous
      Male_Character, Intelligent_Submissive_Female_Character, References_to
      Shakespeare, Diablerie, references_to_rape, Violent_Sex, Hurt/Comfort,
      Fanart, Inspired_by_Fanart, BDSM, Tenderness, glamour, elegance, Missing
      Scene, Literary_References_&_Allusions, Romanticism, Mythology_-
      Freeform, PWP
  Series:
      Part 8 of Devilry
  Collections:
      Conrad_Veidt
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-10-07 Words: 3827
****** Cupio Dissolvi ******
by Snowgrouse
Summary
     “There’s one fairytale princess I quite like,” Torsten said and
     dragged his fingertips up the small of my back, my nipples hardening
     against his suit just as I could feel him hardening against my belly;
     our heat rose with our pulses, our pulses with the music's, the
     orchestra playing faster and faster. “That version of Snow White,
     where she's dead when the prince comes to her, makes love to her--or
     at least the prince thinks she’s dead. And that’s the point," he
     said, his eyes as sharp as shards of glass; as if to follow a cut
     made, he now pressed his lips to my jugular. "Do you follow me?”
     “I follow you,” I said, and to demonstrate, I let myself fall dead in
     his arms, completely listless, lifeless but for the fraction of a
     second, so that we both staggered; he had to catch me to stop us from
     falling over. And oh, but the helpless, high-pitched moan he let out
     now, at my acquiescence, my surrender, my promise of the liebestod to
     come: the way his eyes widened, the way his cock leapt against my
     dress!
     “We’re going home,” he rasped as the song reached its crescendo, his
     lips as wet against my ear as I was wet between the legs; he swept me
     off my feet and carried me to the taxi waiting outside.
Notes
     A little piece to accompany a (worksafe) portrait I made of Torsten
     and Laura, included in the header (full size here). Normally, I
     accompany my manips with little ficlets, or just a few lines of
     dialogue to anchor them more firmly to the characters. Bonita's
     ballgown made me think they were about to go dancing, but then, one
     thing led to another, and soon Laura was playing dead in Torsten's
     arms and whoops, a caption had become a proper fic. So, here you are.
     P.S. To those of you wondering about internal chronology: this is a
     missing scene from somewhere around the beginning of Dance_With_the
     Devil, when they've just moved to the States.
See the end of the work for more notes
[http://snowgrouse.aikamuna.org/Fakes/torstenlauraembrace.jpg]
(Click_to_enlarge)
***
"What is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of
doing evil.
And man and woman know from birth that in evil is to be found all sensual
delight."
--Baudelaire
***
That night, Daddy took me dancing.
He'd laced me into a ballgown of pink and peach tulle, the bodice embroidered
with lush, pale pink hibiscus, a smattering of silver stars and sequins here
and there: a piece tasteful yet voluptuous, one a connoisseur of the erotic
would immediately have recognised for the colour of a fresh young vulva, its
petals unfurling for the first time, glittering with the dewdrops of virgin
desire.
He said I looked like a princess.
But noblewomen rarely dream of becoming princesses, I reminded him, knowing as
we do the heavy yoke that it brings with itself, the restraints of noblesse
oblige: the iron shackles of etiquette, the scold's bridle of decorum, the
chastity belt of morality. That's why all true princesses dream of freedom, I
told him, concocting wild fantasies of coarse peasantries instead of court
pleasantries: Marie Antoinette with her shepherd’s crook and lamb, a bizarre
opium dream of what the Rococo nobles thought the carefree peasant.
I told him this as he danced me across the ballroom floor with exquisite skill,
using the power of his body, the heat of it to swirl me around as if
brushstrokes to paint the parquet with, so as to make the entire room glow with
our passion, greater than that of any of the other dancers.
“But you're feeling like a princess right now, aren't you? Is that what you're
trying to say?” he chuckled in my ear, then twirled me away to drink me in with
his gaze, his eyes sparkling with fatherly pride as he once again captured my
body against his. “I believe that in some languages, we could indeed be called
that; a prince and a princess. And here in America, were we to style ourselves
that--I quite like the ring of it, actually--nobody would contest it! The
country's so full of ex-nobles; nobody'd ever bother to check," he laughed, a
dry, cracking, mocking laugh--a derision for America I shared, having developed
it in our very first weeks here. "Do you know," he continued in a sarcastic,
pitying croon, "in Russia, before the Revolution, they had so many princes and
princesses they had to demote some of them to keep the economy from collapsing-
-their allowances swallowed half the country’s budget!”
"Definitely not a princess, then," I shuddered, knowing the fate of the Russian
princelings and princesslings. Just this past week, we’d met one of them: an
elegant lady who had been a Grand Duchess in her time, only forty but
prematurely gray from worry, all her jewels but cheap imitations: she’d had to
sell all her heirlooms to survive. “At least not a real one,” I said, now with
a more flirtatious tone to change the mood we were in; I met Torsten's eyes
boldly, pressing my belly against his groin. “But perhaps something out of a
fairytale. Perrault, Grimm: before they were sanitised, neutralised, spayed.”
“Ah!” he cried--or, rather, gasped: a plosive, perverse little sound as his
lips snapped open, gleaming a blood-wet red the way they always did, obscene
even in the dim candlelight. “There’s one fairytale princess I quite like,” he
said and dragged his fingertips up the small of my back, my nipples hardening
against his suit just as I could feel him hardening against my belly; our heat
rose with our pulses, our pulses with the music's, the orchestra playing faster
and faster. “That version of Snow White, where she's dead when the prince comes
to her, makes love to her--or at least the prince thinks she’s dead. And that’s
the point," he said, his eyes as sharp as shards of glass; as if to follow a
cut made, he now pressed his lips to my jugular. "Do you follow me?”
“I follow you,” I said, and to demonstrate, I let myself fall dead in his arms,
completely listless, lifeless just for the fraction of a second, so that we
both staggered; he had to catch me to stop us from falling over. And oh, but
the helpless, high-pitched moan that he let out now, at my acquiescence, my
surrender, my promise of the liebestod to come: the way his eyes widened, the
way his cock leapt against my dress!
“We’re going home,” he rasped as the song reached its crescendo, his lips as
wet against my ear as I was wet between the legs; he swept me off my feet and
carried me to the taxi awaiting outside.
On our way home, I lay in his arms as still as I could, as cold as I could,
suppressing my breathing, willing my very heartbeats into slowing down, down,
down. But inside, a laughter like champagne bubbled within my belly as I felt
how tense Torsten was from his excitement: his hands shook as he caressed my
hair, and from underneath the fabric of his trousers, I could smell fresh sweat
and just a hint of pre-ejaculate. His thighs shifted nervously underneath my
head, a movement by which he was trying to disguise--or, perhaps, shake off--
their trembling; his muscles were as tense as those of a bloodhound
anticipating a feast.
So often he'd choked me, struck me, whipped me until I'd passed out for a few
moments; yet as far as I knew, he'd never yet taken me while I was fully
unconscious.
But there was a reason for that, he soon told me. The words we exchanged as we
made it to our apartment made it clear to me that his greatest thrill--whatever
the perversion we were exploring--lay never in my complete innocence, ignorance
or unconsciousness, but in my absolute consciousness of the acts I was
committing, my willfulness, my eagerness to explore it all without guilt. Rape,
the spiking of drinks, true necrophilia revolted him because they were too
easy, he said. They were crude and unskilled fumblings compared to the art of
true seduction, and miserably lonely besides, he sneered in disgust: they were
never true duets of debauchery, bereft of the pleasure of knowing you had truly
corrupted someone, each one always a one-man act. They were always but extended
forms of masturbation, he said, always but the pathetic dissolute imposing his
sad, lone fantasy on the body of another. "What's the point fucking a mere
object, something that's unable to respond, unable to scream and beg you for
more?" he scoffed. "When you could use a silk handkerchief for the same
purpose? No, no: only when there is an equal understanding between two demons,
a consensus of sin, a partnership of evil, if you will--only then does one even
begin to scale the heights of true fulfillment."
And until he'd found me--"the sweet little virgin girl with the soul of a
Babylonian harlot"--he said he'd always thought such a union but wishful
thinking, an unattainable ideal: that Baudelaire and de Sade had been but
fantasising, masturbating whenever they'd been speaking of women with an inborn
capacity for evil. Thus, Torsten had already given up on ever realising his
dream, having made the mistake of searching for an equal outside the Barring
family: over and over again, he'd been bitterly disappointed by his women and
his men, them always having been hampered either by stupidity (so that they'd
only ever cared for the physical satiation, never truly understanding the
philosophical, intellectual, spiritual dimensions of worldly sensuality that
were so crucial to Torsten, his very lifeblood) or, after a promising start,
his accomplices had been crippled by remorse, after which they'd done an about-
face and vaulted back into the suffocating, life-hating depths of Christian
morality.
Indeed, he said, it was in my inciting all this, my accomplicehood in all this,
my culpability in all this--that I would myself be deriving pleasure from
playing the corpse--that he revelled in the most: in short, what he found most
arousing was the depth of my own depravity.
That, he would never cease to marvel at, his hands trembling, his eyes adoring
from what I could see of him from underneath my supposedly-closed eyelids: he
let out a womanish, high-pitched whimper of disbelieving delight as he
struggled with my lax and leaden limbs, spreading them for entry. My immediate,
first instinct was to move, to shift, to spread my legs myself--but I was
damned if I was going to disappoint him, now. Therefore, I forced my muscles
into a deathly stillness, fighting my body's reflexes, even that muscle tone
that keeps a resting person in a given position. In fact, Torsten could barely
penetrate me at first, so used to my eagerly helping him with the act; his cock
slipped and missed its mark and he huffed impatiently, yet with great
excitement, too, as he realised just how much work he had to do to rearrange my
body for his taking.
At first, he entered me slowly, holding me with a shocking tenderness quite
unlike his usual, tearing passion: it was clear to me that now, through my
stillness, he had suddenly become acutely aware of my fragility. My
listlessness must have reminded him of my mortality in a most visceral manner:
Scarlet Woman or not, this was nevertheless also the soft body of a teenaged
girl that he was now holding in his arms, a body he was indeed capable of
breaking, having already come so close to doing so with his more violent
whippings, orgies, drug cocktails. There was an attitude of worship, an almost
humble gratitude to his touches, now, a dreamlike quality to his movements as
he began to make love to me as if I were awake, yet gone from this world
forever: a Romantic poet who'd exhumed his beloved from the grave. He covered
me in exquisite, slow kisses that I had to fight to not respond to, my very
denial become his fulfillment. Each one of his caresses was so full of
passionate intensity it was as if with their aid, he could turn back the clock
to when I had still been unbroken by him, unsoiled by him, untainted by him:
every reverent brush of his lips a re-consecration of my body.
But as soon as I was pure once more, as soon as I was virgin once more, the
beast in him stirred into wakefulness and began to defile me, feast upon me
once more. For now that his first shock, his immediate reaction to a dead Laura
was over, he seemed to remember our conversation from before, of the lone and
private nature of true necrophilia: with great relish, he let himself sink into
an utterly inhibited, utterly selfish, utterly narcissistic experience of
gorging himself upon my dead, unresponsive flesh.
Now, my not being there allowed him to let go of all pretense of chivalry, all
concerns of whether I was enjoying myself or not: he, like all men, being
obsessed with performance, was at times hampered by his own standards,
frustrated by his need to prove himself as lover. For all his femininity, for
all his androgyny, he was still at times sabotaged by that most masculine of
all neuroses: the need to be better than, harder than; the need to conquer,
overpower, overcome. There were days when his self-doubts turned into utter
madnesses, madnesses by which he hurt not only himself but us both with his
paranoia: he would even dare suspect I had faked my orgasms, would refuse to
believe me when I told him I had indeed been sated by this or that act! For a
man so concerned with invoking desire in a woman, so single-mindedly fixed upon
the idea of turning her inside out with pleasure, the "results" themselves--the
number of orgasms I had, his perceptions of their seismic magnitude, his
assumptions of how many per cent of my body had been sated by the night's fuck-
-could at times override the pleasure itself, defeating the object.
I had at times thought him the erotic equivalent of a genius composer, that's
true. But just as all the great geniuses of history, his neurosis, his
perfectionism could become so debilitating it'd turn against his art,
needlessly slowing him down with unnecessary friction: at worst, some minor
detail, like him having chosen the wrong kind of tie for that particular
night's role-play, could emasculate him completely. All of this was about
power, of course: if he felt in control of all the details, the more powerful
he felt, but conversely, the more importance he invested in those details, the
more power those details wielded over him. The irony of it was that while the
rest of the world thought that feminine qualities were what weakened a man,
deteriorated a man, in Torsten's case it was masculinity that emasculated him:
even he would admit that once a man believed his prick would fall off at his
acknowledging a failure, admitting he was wrong about something, letting a
detail slide, it would indeed become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet whenever
he let himself be his feminine, sissy, faggot self, laughing at such puffed-up
male power complexes through a cloud of flowery perfume, was he happiest: only
by letting go of neurosis for the sake of pleasure, only by spreading his legs
to the unpredictabilities of life and making them a part of his erotic play did
he become human once more. And when his madness was at its worst--at least,
thank gods, Torsten knew when he was being mad--the only way he could be shaken
out of his neuroticism was a physical "kick up the ass" as he called it, a
chemical shock treatment in some form or another: things that'd pervert any
another man--a pint of liqueur, a shot of morphine, a cock or several up the
ass--would normalise Torsten, jolt him back to his old self once more.
And now, it was my death that became his liberation, his perversion-restoring
drug rushing through his veins: it was as if he were a vampire growing stronger
and stronger as he imbibed my stillness, heaviness, unresponsiveness. The
illusion of not being watched, not being sensed, being able to get away with
anything made him so hard inside of me it was as if he were spearing me,
impaling me with an iron bar, furthering my delirious visions of vampires: he
howled through his nostrils as he threw himself into a revelry truly Dionysian.
Now, his soul could truly break free from the fetters of civilisation: now, he
was free to obey but Desire, but Instinct, throwing off the disguise of the
cultured gentleman, allowing himself to become fully animal.
An animal, he grunted and whimpered on top of me, pawing at my flesh, biting
it, sniffing it, thrusting wildly into me, making disgusting little noises in
the back of his throat; he snuffled against my breasts, lapped at my pussy like
a dog. Then, when he'd had enough, he mounted me once more and fucked me so
hard the bed creaked, all the while groaning against my cheek, drops of his
foaming saliva pooling in the whorls of my ear.
And I? I could not believe the pleasure I derived from this, much more than I
had bargained for, orgasm reaching me before I'd even had a chance to reach for
it myself. I did not move an inch, and he never brought his hand to my
clitoris, yet his thrusts were so violent and my freshly shaven vulva so
swollen, so wet and so sensitive even in its death--a woman's equivalent of
angel lust?--that but the pounding of his pudendum against mine was stimulation
enough. I was but the silent earth at autumn, ravished by the sky, penetrated
by a loving rain: fecundated, still, yet teeming with a quiet pleasure within,
a secret, silent pleasure vibrating through me in subtle waves. I felt a
freedom, a sublime dissolution in death as I floated there, completely free of
pretense and performance myself, weightless in spirit as my body lay heavy upon
the bed, dead, dead.
I imagined my limbs were as stone, weighing me down into the mattress; I
imagined a piece of apple caught in my throat, an erotic asphyxiation. Or
myself as Persephone and Torsten as Hades, I slowly suffocating to death as he
dragged me down into the underworld, plunging headfirst into an endless
darkness, my lungs crushed and my eardrums turned inside out by the descent.
The only thing alive was Torsten's cock, his wonderful cock beating into me,
brutally pounding me as if he were trying to gut my carcass with it, and
perhaps he was, bizarre images of meat being hung, cut and tenderised running
through my feverish brain. I lay so open for him, so loose and so relaxed for
him that there was no question of discomfort, of pain, all such concepts having
left me at death: I was gone, now, so how could I have felt that he was too big
for me, that he was thrusting in too fast, that there was too much friction,
that he was bruising my womb? I had become so pliant, so yielding, all of me
become but give: now, my muscles no longer struggled against him, fought his
penetrations even at reflex level. I had not a care in the world, having left
the world; I knew no worry, myself free of that hideous neurosis that often
insinuates itself even into the bedroom like a virus, ruining the most
beautiful of joinings: will I have an orgasm this time? Will he let me? Or will
it hurt?
No, no: such questions were immaterial, as I had found nothingness, and in
nothingness, bliss: now I knew what the Eastern mystics had meant when they had
equated Nirvana, the cessation of Being, the Void with ecstasy. There was no
struggle left in me at all, mental or physical: only freedom. Only the slide
and glide of Torsten's flesh inside of me, my body a river rushing him towards
his end: all of me the deep, dark waters of Lethe around him, buoying him,
lovingly carrying him as he swum within my flesh towards his own dissolution.
The muscles that would ordinarily clutch at his cock, those of my vaginal
walls, my anus--none of them struggled, now, and with great ease, he flowed
into me and out of me, into me and out of me, on and on and on.
He cried out and tensed atop me--there, a warm wetness splashing against my
womb--but as he so often did at the crest of orgasm, he quickly plunged himself
into a new assault, a battery of deliberately violent thrusts, spurring himself
past the fatigue that fells most men at ejaculation. Again, he sought to
stretch out his pleasure, to spin it out, chasing another orgasm; another
surprised, feline whimper escaped his lips as he slid inside of my ass with no
resistance whatsoever, he only having used our own fluids to ease his way. He
beat the pillows with his fists, moaned into them the way he always did when he
was fighting against coming too soon, but to no avail: almost as soon as he'd
entered me, he came again, now juddering on top of me, kicking at the sheets in
his own personal death throes.
"Laura, Laura, Laura," he sobbed on top of me a graying, balding Romeo,
frenzied in his necrophiliac heat, kissing his dead beloved's lips; his tears
were hot upon my cheeks, my sex slurping grotesquely as his sobs and still-
sheathed cock sent his sperm bursting out of me.
I let him weep there for a while, let him play to the end this passion-play he
needed to enact, still lying dead there as he howled out his tragedy, now
pouring his soul into me as he'd poured his sterile sperm into my dead womb.
I made a great show of opening my eyes, the lightest of moth-flutters against
his ear, then cheek; my first deep breath in an hour was the most exquisitely
measured little gasp of a newborn kitten. "Daddy?" I asked, my voice light,
young, sweet; I attempted to put my arms around him, but they fell onto the
mattress again. Sleepily, I whimpered underneath him and continued, my heart
leaping into life, my chest aching as I watched his face above me, his glowing
marvelling of me, as if I had indeed come back from the dead. "Daddy, is that
you?" I said, a voice tiny, sleepy, a child's. "I had the most awful, awful of
nightmares, Daddy! I thought I was dead!"
He let out a broken, terrible, cracking laugh and caught me in his arms,
rocking me in his embrace; he clasped his hands all over my back as if to
reassure himself I was still there, rubbing my arms as if to return circulation
to them, as if he had just rescued me from drowning. "It's all right, little
Laura. Daddy's got you. It's all right, it's all right, it's all right," he
murmured, more to himself than me, it seemed.
It was then that I knew for certain that my suspicions had, indeed, been right:
for a moment, there, he had just lived through his greatest fear--that of
losing me, of his excesses finally having killed me.
I shuddered as I met his eyes, the desolate emptiness in them that was still
reflecting a world that had no Laura Erika Barring in it.
And what was my own greatest fear if not a world without Torsten Henrik
Barring, my Daddy, a world without our togetherness, our soul-twinhood, our
symbiosis in sin? I could no longer bear to look him in the eye; I clutched him
violently and forced my voice to remain in the register of the little girl, the
little girl lost and found, now happily reunited with her father once more.
"Don't cry, Daddy," I said, my little hands tender and childishly clumsy upon
his naked back, the warmth of his body radiating into mine. "I'll never leave
you, I promise. And when we die, we'll die together."
"Hand on heart?" Torsten said with a weak smile, pulling back, his eyelashes
even sharper and blacker now that they were glistening from tears; yet, now, I
could see myself reflected in his eyes once more, and that was all that
mattered.
I kissed his hand and placed it over my heart, and lay my forehead against his.
"Hand on heart, Daddy. No matter what anyone says. We'll be together until the
end of time."
"Until the end of time, my child," he whispered, swallowing back his tears and
kissing my eyelids; "until the end of time."
End Notes
     Freely rebloggable Tumblr promo post for the fic, complete with the
     manip, here.
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