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The Ruined Abbe	By : pip Category: M through R > Quills Views: 2536 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Quills, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Author’s Note: Well, this was a bugger to write. I came very close to giving up on the whole thing, having spent a long time yesterday getting precisely nowhere. It’s a challenge, and I don’t foresee it getting any easier. To take a thing that really, even to a die-hard atheist like myself, is shocking, and somehow soften the edges, make it readable. I just don’t know if I’ve managed to do it.
If you’re reading this, please let me know your thoughts, whatever they are.
Thank you to willa – I’m glad you’re enjoying the psychology. I was so worried that the dream Sade was too cold, since I think I lost a reader on another site. But, Coulmier’s guilt demands that. If I wrote him warmer, he would be false.
Warnings for this chapter: Quite serious blasphemy, hand job, mentions of whipping, psychological torture.

Chapter Fourteen
The punishment soon stopped being arousing, and by the time it was over, Coulmier felt as though he watched what happened to him from far away. His appeals for clemency had not been heard, and yet Sade was not so much brutal with this whipping as he was deliberate. It was likely that his back now had an intricate crisscrossing pattern of welts and red strips of pain.
Indeed, his pleas for mercy had only seemed to result in a kind of increased zest on the part of his tormentor. Now, though, it was done, and all of the parts of his body that had been exposed to the Marquis’ touch seemed to burn with some pain or another as if Sade was some kind of punishing sun. From the back of his shoulders to the top of his thighs, and soon, he was sure, there would be the usual violation.
Every now and again, he inhaled with a deep, shuddering breath, noting the faint coppery smell of his own blood. He had to remind himself that this was merely a dream, and that whatever injuries he sustained here, he would not carry them back with him into the real world. The trouble with that of course was that the real world was still and stagnant, and everything that was happening to him, happened here with Sade.
Here was where he lived. In the real world – unless he unlocked his door soon and faced his fate – he was slowly dying.
It was while he mused upon these weighty thoughts that Sade settled beside him on the bed, still clothed, watching the expressions that flitted over his face. For his own part, Coulmier looked back just as searchingly. What were these dreams about really? If they had not passed with the Marquis, then what did they want from him? And what was it that made this dream version so cold?
Because of the way he was bound to the bed, his arm lay between them, but it wasn’t really a barrier to touch, and Sade reached out to his face with one hand, his thumb heavy on Coulmier’s lower lip.
“You would have me back!” Sade exclaimed in sudden realisation, and Coulmier turned his face away, trying to escape that thumb, as if the Marquis had just stolen that truth by way of a silent confession he wasn’t aware of. At the sound of his laughter, Coulmier looked at him again.
“Not like this,” he said honestly.
“You would prefer a warmer remembrance of me,” Sade stated, a musing smile on his lips. Clearly, he wasn’t insulted by the slight.
“Yes.” The admission was painful in some way, entwined as it was with loss, grief and guilt.
“Dear Abbé,” he said with a sigh, “we all have to pay for our follies eventually, one way or another.”
“Is there any escape?” he asked, without even a flicker of hope.
The malicious smile Sade gifted him with made his close his eyes, sorry to have asked the question. “You would not count it as such.” The answer was so unexpected that for a moment Coulmier feared he had misheard. A way out? An escape from these terrors that haunted him? Was it possible?
“What is it?” he asked quickly, greedy for it, opening his eyes again so eager in his desire for some kind of mercy that he could bear the Marquis’ enjoyment of his plight.
“It’s quite simple. If you don’t want to dream it, then you must write it down.” Sade grinned as if he knew it was impossible.
“No,” Coulmier responded, and the Marquis only smirked.
“As I said, yet, you gave me the same instruction yourself once. Do you remember?”
“I am not insane!” Coulmier snapped. Sade only smiled, again.
“Aren’t you?”
Was he? Isn’t that what these dreams were all about? Wasn’t he losing his sanity slowly, quietly, in private, while the world went on around him? Or were these dreams a natural consequence of the part he had played? He might be broken and shattered and unable to face the world, but he wasn’t mad. No. “Neither was I,” the Marquis said quietly, as if he had followed every line of Coulmier’s thoughts.
There was silence between them for a moment or two, broken only by Coulmier’s occasional sounds of pain as he shifted his body around, trying to find a way to lessen it, and all the while the Marquis studied him. “You’ll continue my work in the end, because the consequences are limitless.”
A dull, heavy, hollow feeling centred on his heart, and he swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“Patience,” Sade said enigmatically. Again there was silence, while Coulmier tried to envisage the concept of limitless depravities. He called to mind the things Sade had written, and what might still be buried in that horrific imagination until he had to ask.
“What made you write the things you did? I know we talked of this before, but what of innocent, wholesome pleasures? Why could you not write of those?”
“They did not concern me.”
Coulmier sighed, annoyed at the brush off. “You can’t just dismiss – ”
“I dismiss nothing,” Sade said with a superior sneer. “The things you speak of. They were not notable. But the things I wrote about…” Sade’s eyes began to get a gleam of passion that Coulmier had rarely seen. “They exist. They are within us, but we don’t admit them. We tie each other and ourselves into knots with endless self-perpetuating guilt and commandments.” He sneered, and raised his hand as if writing the next words in the air above. “Thou shalt not want.”
Shaking his head, Coulmier frowned. “That isn’t –”
“It amounts to the same thing,” Sade said impatiently, cutting him short again. “Don’t be obtuse. You know it as well as I do.” He stopped and raised an eyebrow. “Better, I should wager, given the fact that you actually made vows.” Coulmier coloured slightly at that, since Sade was the reason he had broken them, not Madeleine. The thought was not comforting.
“They exist,” the Marquis insisted, “and, like us, when they are ignored, they only shout the louder for our attention.” He frowned, as if displeased at being tricked into the argument, and moved away, off the bed, leaving Coulmier to himself for a little while.
At last, after busying himself around the cell, he returned. “It is time,” he said.
Worn out from suffering, dazed by the conversation afterwards, and taken with his thoughts, Coulmier had only been superficially taking notice of what Sade did. Now he came back from his reverie, and watched as the lengths of cotton cloth that held his wrists were loosened and his hands were set free.
Suddenly, he groped at the Marquis’ bare arm, his eyes following it to a naked shoulder and chest. So, he had undressed then. Time, isn’t that what he had said? A sense of inevitability made him close his eyes briefly, because he knew what had to come next. Didn’t it always? His ankles were still bound, spread apart, and after wresting free of his hands, the Marquis knelt on the bed behind him. Insistent fingers dug into his hips, pulling him up, encouraging him to put his weight on his knees.
His sphere of vision enlarged as he did, and instead of staring at the featureless sheet that covered the bed, he found himself drinking in the texture of the walls, the colour of the furniture. He winced when his arse met the Marquis’ body, the soreness and bruises still so new. But he could save his back, and he did, by resting on his hands and knees for it. Even if he could bring himself to write it down, how would he describe it? Pain? Pleasure? Both? Or perhaps destruction.
So inured to what Sade usually demanded, he didn’t notice anything amiss until the Marquis reached out to the chair beside the bed, where he’d left something. The large oaken cross from his wall was put before him, on the sheet beneath his face, daring him to look at it.
Coulmier surged up in shock as if afraid of it, instinctively trying to get up, pulling his legs so violently that he lost his balance and would have fallen back onto the bed if Sade had not caught him. There was a violent scuffle, before Sade had him under control. One strong arm wrapped around the front of his body, holding them both in a kneeling position, taking in both of his arms so that all he could do was raise his forearms and attempt to dislodge the Marquis.
It was no use. He wasn’t weak, and his own muscles bulged slightly against Sade’s restrictive forearm, but he was tired and in pain, more of it now that the raw skin of his back was pressed against the Marquis’ chest. He could feel Sade’s every muscle, every wiry hair that covered his body. “No,” he protested then, falling to language when it was clear there was no escape.
“Shh,” Sade whispered, his voice a ragged, hungry groan in his ear. And he felt it, how his resistance was exciting him, couldn’t help but be aware of it, their bodies so flush together, and he shook his head, pulled his ear away from Sade’s lips. One arm was wrapped around him, keeping him still, and the other hand… Coulmier roared in outrage when Sade didn’t do what he expected.
Instead of using that hand to violate him, Sade reached around and began to use that terrible and wonderful grip on him, pumping him slowly so that blood rushed to the organ, swelling and engorging it.
Now he understood the awful intention, and he growled, long and low, trying to get his body under control while Sade continued to massage him, his hand moving quick, then slow, and tight, and so pleasurably that Coulmier wondered if this contradiction would kill him. He would rather die than do what Sade wanted. His toes and his hips were the only parts of him he could move, and his toes scrunched tightly while he snapped his hips back and forth, managing only to either push himself into the sinful pressure of that hand, or press himself back, rubbing his burning skin against Sade’s prick.
Suddenly the hand left him, and if he could, he would have sagged in relief, his eyes squeezed closed and his head wrenched away at an angle, as if it would escape without the rest of his body if necessary. The fingers of Sade’s hand tangled in his hair, and then made a fist so that he cried out at the pain, tears springing up behind his eyelids, his head pulled back until he opened his eyes on the ceiling of his cell.
“You will watch,” Sade’s voice said, menace in every syllable, “or I will do this again and again until you do.” Sade used the tip of his tongue to trace the shape of his ear, while Coulmier’s shock ran so deep he couldn’t put a name to it. The fingers relaxed and left his hair, and he obediently looked down, hardly able to think, and the shape of the cross filled his eyes and his mind.
“Better,” Sade noted, and began the pumping anew. “Now, we shall continue.”
“Please,” Coulmier begged, desperate and breathless, “no!”
The gravity of it took his breath away. Had he thought his eternal soul in danger so long ago, when he began this strange dalliance? That had been nothing to this. “Please, don’t!” he said again, urgently. Sade only laughed quietly in his ear.
His body shuddered as it tried simultaneously to obey the sheer physicality of touch, and the deeper need to be unresponsive. Every bit of pleasure he felt was countered by a clear sense of dismayed anguish that held off the inevitable just a little longer. And all the time he stared at it, his hands still busy trying to move Sade’s arm, his hips still caught in that maddening little dance as he tried desperately to get free.
His breath came in alternate long gasps and short grunts, and yet in the end, Sade had too much experience to fail in this. Coulmier felt something in him tighten like a spring, and then release as it moved outwards, unstoppable, relentless.
Instead of a moan or a breathless cry, he almost seemed to hum desperately, still denying it until he came with the word “No” on his lips, utterly unable to stop it, seeing his issue drawn from him, only to fall on that cherished thing, the sacred heart of his whole life. It was so devastating that as Sade milked the final few strands of it from him, he felt himself stop fighting, his body heavy and yet still the Marquis held him up for it.
“Forgive me!” he gasped, still exhausted from the fight, knowing that it would never be enough, that there were some sins one could never be sorry for, only altered by, and though he wasn’t speaking to Sade, his was the only answer he received.
“Not now, or ever.”
Those words followed him as he finally closed his eyes, falling away from it all until he found himself on the floor, the cell dark and undisturbed, and he was so thirsty he felt he might immediately faint. But he couldn’t. Not to go back there. Not yet.
With a strength that came from fear of what might happen next, Coulmier somehow pulled himself to his feet and stood in the middle of his room, trying to decide what to gather together. Better if he were to take everything, and so he did. The wooden cross with its sacred heart he got down from the wall, though he could barely look at it. His statuettes of the Madonna and the Crucifixion, his religious books and scrolls. He took his robes, reasoning that he could make do with nightshirts. Everything that had any religious significance had to go, so that when he dreamed again, Sade could not make use of them.
Eventually, everything he could lay his hands on was out in the passageway outside his door. It wasn’t lost on Coulmier how this would look to those who found it. But this wasn’t a rejection. On the contrary – he was keeping those things safe. And himself.
There was quite a diverse heap of possessions outside his door. Even his chalice was out there. He hadn’t realised he had accumulated so many, and he fingered the last object, his rosary, with regret. Since Sade had swallowed his previous one, this was new, and he had barely begun to know the count of the beads, even with his endless prayers over the past few days. With an aching heart, he kissed it and placed it outside along with the rest, then shut and relocked his door.
Feeling rebellious, he sat down at his table and waited for sleep, or unconsciousness, but mainly for Sade. The burst of activity had made him dizzy and lightheaded, and he rested on his hands, sprawled in the simple wooden chair.
He wasn’t waiting for long.
- 13
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- 15
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The Ruined Abbe