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. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!