you're too young & eager to love

Penny Dreadful built up my heart and then shred it to pieces. I am still mourning the ending.

Writing helps. Ethan and Vanessa, to me, will always be them on the moors.

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If you could only see the beast within me.
- “Howl”

All those that go beneath, do so at their peril.
- Oscar Wilde



The storm had not begun begun softly.

There is no gentle spatter and a gradually increasing intensity. There is nothing, and then there is a torrent of great fat drops, and Ethan is soaked with it in seconds, hair plastered to his brow and temples and shirt stuck to his skin. No reason to run now, although he thinks he can still feel the presence of the wolf loping across his brain, gnawing its way down his spine. He stands for a moment and tilts his head back and lets the rain bathe his face and his body, wash his hands clean as he spreads them, a hundred cold fingertips tapping against him and gliding down him in trickles and rivers.

He rubs the water out of his eyes, and there she is.

Vanessa is bleached bone in the darkness, half-caught in the doorway of the cottage, a ghostly silhouette in the backdrop of a wet moor. The wind whips her dress and scatters the rain but she does not retreat, and he knows she is waiting, watching. He can smell her hope and fear and, beneath that, her resignation.

There’s a question in the air between them, and the silence is thick with possibility.

“I walk with you,” he says, as he’s said before, honest in his sincerity but sudden in his frustration.

There are some feet between them. Vanessa can feel the darkness encroaching. She can hear the cries across the storm clouds and the ones within her, low and deep, painfully but sweetly sinful. Primordial. As always, she is uncertain of which of her longings is the one she is meant to follow. Here he stands before her, this wild, precise man, this hired gun, this fierce and unflinching protector, and she hesitates on the brink of the threshold. Here he is, a moral man with blood behind his teeth and claws beneath his skin. She thinks, at times, that for all his unbridled yearning he is hungry for a hand at his neck, for despite the stubborn set of his shoulders, his great height and steady hands, Ethan is so very lost. He is aimless in this world of shadows and seductions, unmoored from the loves and the lights that he so desperately craves.
The moon is hanging low, half lost in storm clouds, it’s glow casting shadows across the moor. It is an omnipresent reminder to them that there is so much out of their control. Ethan understands, she knows, the pull of the familiar loss of control.

But then, so does Vanessa.

Her voice is a scratch of sulfur in the night, heating the storm-thick air. “You have a monster and madness about you, but even the moon casts light. … There is only darkness where I walk, Mr. Chandler.”

She sees it in him then in the line of tension along his jaw and the way his strong fingers curl in towards his palms, clenching. Lightning crashes and something flares in Ethan's eyes, something darker and more knowing, something not docile at all. For Ethan it’s as if something dark and thick has broken loose and surged up in him, something locked away for a long time, and he stares at how she looks and how she is, and he wants to protect her as much as he wants to devour her. He wants to take all that sharp aristocratic prettiness and uncertainty and ruin it, shred it, to reveal the poison and sting beneath.

All that darkness within her, that deep well of hidden water.

And him: a predator, a monster, all that she has unknowingly loved since she was a child. A wolf made civilized against its will, a monster seeking honest blood. A dog, perhaps, in search of a master to lay down beside. A creature capable of withstanding a scorpion’s sting.

The lightning crashes again, and it feels like possession. Blindingly bright and throwing their combined shadows against the cottage as she takes a step forward into the night, completing the transformation. They look like a single creature, a mutation. Like that ravenous beast he is.

Vanessa can hear the heaviness of his breathing. The rain pelts her skin, as cold and unkind as shards of ice. Ethan lets her take another step closer before bridging the gap between them in long, quick strides. He had wanted Dorian (with all his poison beneath his petals and the mirror behind his eyes), he had wanted Brona (with her sadness and secret gentleness, that bright burning but quickly fading flame), wanted those weaker things than he. But he wants her more, her with the Devil’s shackle already latched around her delicate ankle, her with the strength to match his weakness and the cruelty to shield his kindness. He looks at her then as though he would have her hide herself between his ribcage and heart.

But Vanessa knows, with her sorrow and her deluge of darkness, that to embrace the shadows is to be devoured, spat out, and reborn as something worse than you were before.