Writing is a thing!

Which I have not done in MONTHS!

So, here's a little something, that may or may not be crap, but at least it's writing, ya know?

--

“My life was a storm, since I was born
How could I fear any hurricane?
If someone asked me at the end
I'll tell them put me back in it”




The water is warm and clear blue, unlike the sordid gray of the ocean, which stank of bottom-feeders and decay. The Brimgate Islands are known for this, of course–the idyllic points of paradise nestling within their lavender-colored groves, the secret waterfalls thundering into placid pools, the temperate breezes soothing the skin.

Augusta is unimpressed.

It is her typical state of being.

Radomir, however, appreciates the water gently flowing between his calloused palms, the beauty of the moment. Still, he is an intimidating man even here, submerged up to his waist, the sun warm on his scarred backs and shoulders. He’d shorn his hair for the journey, and the water runs down the sides of his face, clings to his eyebrows, his eyelashes, his mouth.

“You are a mountain creature,” Augusta says from the edge of the water, her legs half in the lake as she reclines on a mossy boulder. “You should be afraid of the water.”

Radomir runs a hand across the left side of his face, wiping away the wetness there. “What good am I to you if water scares me?”

“True. You are endlessly fearless, regardless of the terrain.”

He takes the compliment with a grin then shrugs in a mock-modest way. “If I am fearless, then you are terrifying.”

“The very essence of my appeal, no doubt.”



“Guest-right,” Augusta sneers, glancing over her shoulder at the two micipna the Magister had sent to accompany them on the day’s excursion. They wear the blue tattoos of their station on their arms, their necks, their wrists. The taller one has a peculiar mark below his right eye, almost a burn, except cerulean. They stay on the perimeter of the waterfall, stoic, silent, mute as dumb beasts awaiting an order, but she does not trust them.

“Guest-right is an ancient tradition. It dates back–”

She holds a hand up, cutting him off. “Don’t. I know the history lessons. Some traditions are worth leaving behind. This is why the Vries do not frequently have guests.”

He smirks. “You cannot assassinate your way through the world.”

“I can’t,” she says pointedly, and his laughter is a deep rumble from his chest.

“It is guest-right that protects us now, here.”

“It is the Vries name that protects us here. You do not start a political war by murdering a visiting diplomat from one of the most powerful families from the mainland. Guest-right is the veneer the Trifecta hide their fear behind. I am tired of these niceties.”

“Yet your brother still lives.”

Augusta rolls her eyes skyward. “Harrow’s own ineptitude will be his downfall. I cannot usurp him. Once he has finally shown his true colors and ruined Albtraum, I will prove myself.”



Her hair is a dark coil down the back of her shoulder, gathered into the intricate braids the wealthy women of the island wear to show their status. She is sun-kissed in the water, her usually pale skin turned golden by the afternoons in the sun, a flush of peach over the bridge of her nose and the curves of her shoulders. She is still young, no touch of silver in her hair, no fine lines near the corners of her eyes or mouth, but she has made herself sharp, like her brother, a woman of angles meant to cut. A blade.

When she stands in front of him, he is a whole head taller. Her hands skim his shoulders, feeling the old scars from his years in the fighting pits.

He must look down at her, but she is the one with the gaze of iron and steel. When she catches his face in one hand, her thumb digs into the tender spot below his chin. “Do you ever miss the fights?”

“I miss the noise sometimes. The waterfall sounds like the pounding of the stadium footsteps, the cheering. This island is too quiet. It’s all birdsong and chatter.”

“You were exhilarating to watch.” Her thumb traces the curve of his bottom lip. Not too long ago, his mouth had been hidden by the metal bars of a muzzle; emboldened now, he presses a kiss to the center of her palm when her hand passes across his mouth.

He does not know what to do with his hands now that she is in the water with him, as naked as he is, her silken dress the Magister had loaned her left on the side of the lake. She presses her hips into him, returns her hands to his shoulders, pushing her nails into the muscle there. She can feel his excitement between them, see the way his gaze is heavy with desire and shame and uncertainty. Slowly, as though she may be a viper about to strike, he moves his arms to circle her waist, the very tips of her hair touching the ends of his fingers against the small of her back.

She has to push herself to her toes in order to press her mouth to his thick jaw, near his ear. “Tell me about devotion.”

Augusta knows that he would bury himself in her if she would allow it. That his head would dip to her neck to breathe her in and he would lift her effortlessly, held by his strength and the water both, her legs coming to anchor around his waist. He would kiss her eyelids, her temples, dig his battle-born fingers into the strands of her braid and unwind them with the tenderness of a worshiper. He would show her his devotion if she did not insist on the words.

But because she has, he presses his forehead against hers, his voice pitched low, and he tells about the kind of loyalty that is born in chains. He talks about the scent of blood in the air and the feel of death between his palms and the taste of frenzy on his mouth and the many ways his violence took the shape of allegiance.

I am back-posting Monday's AWS (which was more of a catch-up/work on a pre-existing piece since I had Internet issues) now.

This is my attempt at world-building, playing with limited POV, and creating dialogue. I give you the Brimgate Islands (a wasteland, warped version of where the Caribbean should be in today's time) and the Outgan Trifecta, which have a completely different view of shifters and culture compared to the Vries. Augusta goes on a diplomatic visit and does her thing.

( to make a creature )

Session three! ... three? Three, I think. Session # __ of AWS!
Needless to say, I am much happier with this week's results compared to last week's.

Some context: I wanted to keep this on Hadassa so that she's witnessing the event and thus does not know what's happened or what's going on in Orson's head. As a result, I think it can read like Orson just murdered poor Despina and is having a breakdown, but it's really that he's coming to terms with desiring her and struggling with his sense of self. So what do all good vampires do during times of existential crisis and blood lust? They go on a murder spree! While countless of victims may have died here, one of them was not Despina. Not yet.

I've read this like five times and I feel like I still missed some grammar issues. Tread lightly, I was under a time crunch, okay!

--

“Truthfully, I love you so much that I will defend you even from me.”
- Elías Nandino (1900-1993), from “Don’t Come Near Me“ translated by Don Cellini




Her dreams wake her before dusk. They are not good dreams, have not been good dreams for eons, and she comes to consciousness like a drowned victim struggling for air.

The house is silent or as silent as old houses can ever be; houses this old have a personality, a presence. They murmur and creak and whisper. The doors contain secrets, and the windows unlock memories. Still atop her mattress, a corpse except for the languid feline blinking of her eyes, Hadassa can sense rather than hear the noises of her home–the old floorboards and how they shift, the flaking of the gilded wallpaper, the rasp of the stairs, the rats scurrying inside the mostly empty pantry, the caretaker on the porch who waters the violet flowers lining the property. The sun is still a threat outside her barred windows with their heavy curtains, but she throws back her sheets anyway and slips into a silken robe the color of jade, belting it about her waist.

The sleep is still heavy on her. She rests one hand against her bed frame, fighting it, and eventually she can leave the room. Her steps are quiet and slow; she keeps to the shadows although all the windows are shuttered and the curtains drawn. The hallway is a mausoleum, the house a crypt. None of the candles have been lit, and there is no music from the victrola in the parlor. Outside, Linemell bustles and heaves, a booming crush of bodies and smells that dangerously beckon.

Hadassa is too old to be fooled by the punch-drunk promise of hearts or the temptation of veins. She ignores the hint of her hunger and steps more lightly now that the last urge to sleep dissipates from her bones. It is a privilege of her age, this ability to fight what comes most naturally to them, to protest against the organic call of her body and its desire to avoid the daytime hours. Passing closed doors, she can feel her children in those rooms, still dead to the world, so like statues in their stillness, but for a moment her heart overflows from their proximity. She has not had such a full house ever before, and there is a contentment settling over the estate now.

It is not until she reaches the bottom of the stairs that Hadassa becomes aware of a change, a difference. It is not a realization so much as a feeling. She turns her head to the left, waiting, some keen animal instinct making her alert. There is not a noise around her, but still she knows. Curious rather than afraid, she follows her intuition and is surprised to find Orson in the empty, unlit dining room. The windows here are covered by the same thick curtains as the rest of the ones in the house, but she cautiously eyes the hazy glow surrounding them. A sliver of the curtain has been left open, and the sun slices through the darkness, leaving a sliver of light across the floor.

With his head in his hands, Orson looks like a human again. Hadassa stands in the doorway, unnoticed, and studies him. He’s hunched at the edge of his seat, his elbows on the ebony dining table, his fingers gripping at his tousled dark hair. He’s closer than she likes to the light, and there’s an odd rawness to his right hand, the skin there the smooth redness of a fresh burn. She can see the long line of tension that is his curved back, the knotted, rigid muscles of his shoulders. He stinks of the city, of old blood, and his usually clean hands and clothes are dirty, stained. He has the scent of the grave around him, the kind of rot that’s internal and festering.

“Blood of my blood,” she says with her golden-amber voice.

Her voice startles him so much that he overturns his chair, and it clatters to the floor as he whirls to face her. His wolfish eyes are wild and dark, storming, and there’s blood in those eyes, blood on his cheeks. When he wipes his tears away, he leaves grit behind and stains his fingers more.

“Haddie,” he says, his smile shaking and feeble, and for a moment she sees a shadow of fear dance across his face before he veils it.

“What’s the matter?”

He shakes his head, and there is torture even in that smallest of movements.

“Has something happened?”

Again, he shakes his head but then gives a miserable laugh. “I am unwell, I think.”

“Unwell? Nonsense.”

Hadassa rights the chair and watches as he steps away from her, as he follows the curve of the dining table to the antique bar cart with its gold chrome finish. Orson has always been her least melancholic, her most fearless, her third progeny and in many ways her favorite after Nayeli, but Nayeli has been unbound for some time after leaving the fold many years ago. She has loved him for his viciousness, for his charming cruelty, for his selfishness that mirrors her own and teaches her justification and forgiveness. She has almost never seen him cry, never seen him tempted by madness or a desire for despair. He has been stalwart in this way, as inclined to this blood-life as any other natural born predator. It unnerves her, then, when he pours from the communal crystal decanter with a shaking hand. The blood he pours is old, fetid, the caretaker hasn’t yet replaced the previous night’s portion, but Orson drinks it anyway. He gags but upturns the glass, catching the last sluggish drops in his mouth.

“Tell me,” she says, her voice stern. “Tell me what has happened.”

He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. His fingers are trembling. There’s a crooked desperation to the way he grins, and he gestures with his empty red-stained glass, flourishing it above his head like a drunkard in a tavern. “You told me once that we are most like gods, do you remember? We kill indiscriminately. We live long. We die only from foolishness or by our own choosing. Do you think we tempt fate, being what we are?”

“Who is to say what is natural and what is not? We could be the natural progress of evolution or an anomaly or perhaps the fates made us to act as a balance to the order of things.”

“Natural,” he murmurs.

“Do you think I have the arrogance to assume that I know any of this? I was not told our secrets. I know no more than what I know, which is that I am what I am.”

“And what if you regret what you are?”

This, more so than anything else he has said, concerns her. She hides it, however, and crosses the room to him. He lets her take his face between her hands and closes his eyes with a choked sigh when she sweeps her fingers across his eyes, the dark fine hair of his eyebrows, down his angled cheeks. She presses her mouth to his tear stains. “You have to tell me what has happened. I cannot help otherwise.”

His hands cling to her waist, knotting the silk of her robe, and he dips his head to her shoulder. He peppers kisses up her neck, breathes in the familiar scent of her dark hair, trembling while she strokes her cold fingers across the back of his skull.

“Orson.”

He shakes his head and clutches at her.

She pushes too far. When he can sense her inside of him and surrounding him, her blood calling to his, her will asserting itself, he pulls away. “No,” he snarls, feral suddenly. “Not that, Hadassa. Get out of my head!”

For a moment, she wants to press him. She could do it. He is strong, but she is stronger, and he has inside of him, at the core of him, only that which she gave away from herself all those years ago; she can always best those who are still bound to her. It is her love for him that she acquiesces to after a moment; she apologizes for the invasion by guiding him back into her arms.

“You must sleep,” she says finally. “You are tired. You cannot fight the day and not expect to suffer from it.”

“Yes,” he agrees reluctantly, weakly, but he’s pressing his mouth against her neck again, over her collarbone, pushing his face into the folds of her robe, trying to nuzzle her shoulder. The affection is tepid, automatic, a desolate condolence for his behavior, and she untangles herself from him with a scowl of revulsion.

“Let’s speak tomorrow then, when you are more rested.”

When he slinks away, it is with stooped shoulders and a bowed head. So like a fallen hero, his clothing crumpled and stinking of human sweat and human blood and human death, his hands and face still dirty with gore. Hadassa watches him leave, folding her arms across her chest to fight against the chill that runs down her spine. Watching him fade into the shadows of the house is like watching a ghost retreat to hell.

Second writing session response! Feeling pretty good about the nice cut-and-dry, somehow miraculously-completed work from today, even if it's so sweet that you're likely to get a toothache from reading. Tread carefully.

--




“In your mouth,
I want to be laid to sleep.”
– Martina Werner, tr. by Rosemarie Waldrop, from “Monogram 23”



The poetry had been his idea.

In truth, all of the reading had been his idea.

Abigail had said yes, of course, because he was the prince but also because she had wanted to prove something to herself even if she was initially embarrassed. Some of the words had felt funny in her mouth at first, and it was difficult to remember which shapes created which sounds. She’d had to explain, too, how she’d learned her letters a little as a girl until her father deemed it inappropriate, and then she’d spent her days with needle and thread or learning how to ride the gentle mares in their stables or practicing dance and art. The lessons had made her well-suited for court life, but she’d never learned to silence the curious part of her soul, the part that gave voice to her questions and longing, that asked for stories from the eligible courtiers, that rang with wonderment.

Gerhard had told her, later, that this had been what had first attracted him to her, and a small part of her had felt seen then, appreciated.

(It is not what will attract Renan. He will not see her for her intellect but for something else entirely. He will not need her questions or her curiosity, and he does not care for poetry.)

Now, that part inside of her has grown like a sapling, and she looks forward to their lessons together. He always has her start with a new poem.

“Would I were … s-steadfast … as thou art,” Abigail says haltingly and in a half-whisper, “not in lone splendor hung a-aloft in the night…” Her eyes are at the end of the tip of her finger as it trails a line of writing from the book open in her lap. It’s a small leather-bound collection of poetry, the pages crinkled from time, the edges gilded. She had admired its beauty before she knew how to admire the words within it, and the struggle of learning to read the small type had diminished her appreciation some, even if it had amused Gerhard.

“And watching, with eternal lids apart, like Nature’s patient sleepless Er-erri-era–”

“Eremite,” Gerhard says, without judgment.

“Eremite,” Abigail repeats, forming the word carefully. She looks down at him, his body sprawled easily atop the duvet they’d spread in the garden, his head nestled close to her hip.

“A recluse. Usually a religious one.”

She pushes aside his dark hair to better catch his eyes, and he grins at her in the boyish and suddenly affectionate, spontaneously warm way that he has. “How do you know all of these words? I can’t imagine crown princes meeting many eremites.”

“No, but crown princes have the best of education.” He gestures with his eyes back to the book nestled amongst her skirts. “Go on.”

Clearing her throat, Abigail continues. “The moving waters at their priestlike task of pure abso—ablu—ablution round earth’s human shores, or gazing on the new soft fallen mask of snow … upon the … mountains and the moors.” She stops her reading aloud, huffing, and glances up at the branches above them. This is her favorite tree in her father’s garden, her favorite spot. It offers shade most of the day, and the leaves are deliciously sage-scented while the small buds of violet and pearl that drift down on the breeze get caught in her hair, making her feel like a child again. There’s a peaceful buzz of activity amongst the branches as bees and butterflies flutter amongst the flowers and that too can lull her. Gerhard likes it as much as she does, and they’re given privacy because of his royal standing, which makes the afternoons hum with lazy intimacy.

“I don’t understand,” she says after a moment, watching a blue-winged butterfly rest atop a branch of cream-colored blossoms.

“You haven’t finished it. Sometimes you have to see the end of a thing to better understand it.”

“Why would you want to be as steady and unchanging as a star?”

Gerhard shifts beside her, lifting a hand to shield his eyes so that he can follow her gaze up between the branches. The sun is still high, and the stars will not emerge for many hours, but Abigail seems to be hunting for them anyway.

“I would argue, I think, that man has always fought for stability. To stand still. To resist change, which is of course futile, and thus there is the tragedy.”

She makes a soft sound of understanding and returns to the poem. This time, she reads silently to herself, her finger still marking her place. When she finishes, she closes the book, then drapes herself backward so they are side-to-side on their backs. Her hand finds his between the length of their bodies, and their fingers tangle together.

“So?” he prompts after she has stayed quiet.

“He doesn’t want to be a star in the sense that he doesn’t want to be alone in the sky, watching, but he wants to never change so that he can lie with his lover. He wants to feel her breathing, forever, and if he cannot do that, he wants to die.”

“Very good,” Gerhard says with an obvious note of pride in his voice. His thumb traces her knuckles.

“It’s sad though, isn’t it, like what you said about the tragedy of it all? There’s loneliness and distance in a star, and they might be constant and dependable, but they’re so far above us.” She pauses, thinking, “I don’t think a star’s steadfastness can be achieved on earth, with people, I mean. It’s just the poet’s dream, it’s a fantasy.”

“Sometimes dreams make reality worth living. What would we be without our dreams?”

She gives him that noise again from her throat, like a punctuation to his thoughts, a soft vocal acknowledgement and agreement with his ideas.

His hand slips from hers when Gerhard turns on his side, propping himself up on an elbow. They’ve circled like Chinese symbols so that his head is close to her feet, as hers are to his. She’s barefoot, and he ghosts his right hand along the shape of her foot before slipping his fingers beneath the hem of her dress to stroke her ankle. In return, Abigail shifts to rest on both of her elbows, her back slightly arched, her hair flower-studded and a golden tousle around her cherubic face. She smiles across at him. He loves the feel of her bones beneath his hands, loves the softness of her skin, the easy honey-sweetness of her on days like this, and she opens herself always to his advances—to his touch, to his inquiries, to his mind. She is becoming, more and more, a bright spot on an often mundane landscape.

When he dips his head, he kisses the bump of bone by her ankle then the side of her calf. He pushes at her skirts to expose more of her skin, and Abigail laughs, shoving a hand into his curls to pause his exploration. “My father,” she says. “He can see straight into the gardens from the corner window of his study.”

“I’ll order him to look away.”

She laughs again before sliding gracefully to settle on the sides of her knees while adjusting the fall of her dress. Gerhard mocks a groan then, defeated, nestles his head into her lap, kissing the lace-pattern of ivy leaves intricately sewn into the gown’s fabric. She twines her fingers through his hair, a blush of color turning her cheeks the red of berries.

“Later, my prince,” she promises, “when we can sleep amongst your bedsheets and not rise again until the dawn peaks. We’ll make even the stars jealous.”

Abigail is true to her word.

His bedroom always smells of parchment and ink, of candle wax and fresh autumn apples, of ash from the fireplace and expensive leather. His bed is large, a goose-down mattress befitting royalty, and the sheets always feel clean against her skin. She likes to burrow beneath them like some woodland creature, losing herself against the bedding and his coltish limbs, wrapping and winding herself around him until she cannot decide where she begins and he ends. When they’re satiated, she’ll curl against his chest and let him do the reading, sometimes mimicking the shape of the words quietly to herself while she traces his ribs with her nails.

He, too, can be her tree in the garden, can lull her with his rhythm and his cadence.

3rd warm-up! Except not really because the muse took me in an entirely new direction, but it is what it is.

Welcome, audience members, to an early Gideon and Hadassa scene! Let me remind all new-comers here that Gideon was the original simp before Laith, so, Mena, if you're watching, well, be prepared for a horse of a (somewhat) different color.

Laith, we all know you simp better. No contest.

---



“All I am is what you can’t let go.”
Elisabeth Hewer

“That I keep wanting to stay should
count at least for something. I’m not done with you yet.”
Carl Phillips



Hadassa in Sindan, a copper-colored hood drawn up to hide the gleam of her eyes and the blood on her mouth, Hadassa blood-drunk and laughing from it, reeling the way the human men reel over their bourbon and gin. Hadassa as a child, her hair almost to her tiny hips, hair like a dark waterfall that spreads over a slaver’s calloused hands as he sears a scar into the tender flesh behind her left ear. Hadassa, older, long-legged and fierce-looking amongst a group of women in similarly-styled desert robes, her gaze defiant. Kalil then, his features indistinct but Gideon knows it’s him—he knows because Hadassa knows, because there’s something of the other man’s blood in him even now, and he’s cradling Hadassa’s face between his hands, smoothing her hair away from her high cheekbones, opening her mouth with his, but no, not this—Gideon pushes it away, lets the memories sift through him as sand through a sieve. Back to her childhood, to her mortal years, to the moments he knows so little of. He sees her, nearly ten, with an overly ripe blood orange between her hands, crouching in the dirt of an alley. He can smell it, its sweetness and warm acidity. Her fingers are sticky with the orange’s drippings, like her lips, and she’s greedy with hunger. She’s pushing the fleshy segments into her mouth, hardly chewing, but he’s losing the moment or it’s becoming another time, a new memory yet similar because he can sense her voracious, ravenous need, is almost struck in the stomach by the sheer force of her craving, and is she younger than before? Yes, a child still, but hardly school-aged, bare-foot and disheveled. Bruised on the neck, on her stickly arms, with a face smeared by dirt, and there’s a group of them, these child-urchins, clustered around a carcass, he thinks, yes, some mangled heap of bloody bits, a loathsome rotten corpse, thick with flies, but the children pick at it like carrion crows and —

“Not that,” she says, her voice steely and cutting through the fog of images abruptly.

Gideon groans. He’s frustrated. She doesn’t understand. He doesn’t care about it, the vileness of her mortal childhood, the shame she somehow still feels after so many centuries. There is not a thought of hers he could not curl himself around, not a memory he would not willingly share, not an image he could not recast in a softer light. He feels close to her like this, closer than any of the others can be, because this is his gift; this is what he seems to do better than any others, this reading of legacies, this traversing of blood-links to the past, and it’s the blood too, of course it’s the blood. Hers, rich and thick and powerful, spilling endlessly into his mouth from the tender flesh of the inside of her arm, and it’s him whose greedy now, whose licking feverishly at her skin, making a mess, who's pushing—pushing back into her veins, searching, feeling with his own invisible power amongst the wavelengths of her blood, until he has it, yes, Sindan again, that foreign place, a place of dark markets and deserts, and then there’s her hungry little girl’s face, her orphan’s face, her slave’s face —

“No,” she snarls, and he’s been thrown aside, ripped apart from her. He’s staggering, disoriented, crumpled on the cold floor of her bedroom, stupidly staring at the flickering flames from the many candelabra near the balcony doors. His face is stinging from the scrape of her nails even as it’s healing.

Hadassa is disappointed and tired and furious. She wipes the blood from her arm in one clean gesture, licks her fingertips afterwards, and says something Gideon can’t quite make out. There’s an ocean swelling between his ears.

“What?” he asks. The word comes out slurred, and he struggles slowly to his hands and knees. He feels both nauseous and, paradoxically, invigorated. He presses his palms into the cold marble flooring, trying to anchor himself back into this moment, this time and place.

She shakes her head.

When he grins up at her, his teeth are red from her blood, but he’s put his fangs away as a peace offering of sorts. He crawls forward, slowly, like approaching an animal who is threatening to flee, but Hadassa is no prey. She stands still, her mouth pulled into a thin line of displeasure, but he can tell how she hides her smile when he grabs the ends of her silken skirts, when he presses a kiss beseechingly to the fabric, when he ghosts his mouth across her fingertips like a gentleman.

“Apologies,” he murmurs, pushing himself to his knees and circling his arms around her waist. He burrows his face against her hip, kissing her there, turning his cheek to the flat of her stomach until she laughs, exasperated. “How may I atone?”

She untangles herself from him gently then but stoops so that they are face-to-face, eye-to-eye. One of her dusky hands brushes his cheek, pushes a messy blonde curl away from his eyes. He thinks she must be looking for something there, in the topography of his face, some lie or misgiving, a flaw he had not realized he wore so openly.

“You are not a man desiring expiation for sin. Don’t pretend otherwise, blood of my blood,” she says.

It is not what he was expecting. He sits back on his heels, scoffing some. “At least tell me what I did that was so terribly offensive.”

“You want too much, and you want too much too quickly. You do not respect boundaries, Gideon.” When he rolls his eyes, she snags him by the chin like a mother does a child, her nails sharp. “Kalil called it blood-walking, a rather romantic and misleading name for the way we can steal into a shared bloodline, and it is stealing, make no mistake. You may be able to see what another allows if the trust is there, if the donor is willing, but when you snake your way into gated paths, then you are treacherous. No better than the worm invading the rose garden.”

At this, he laughs, pulling free from her grasp. “A snake? A worm? What next, am I to be a spider?”

“Why not? Spiders are insubstantial creatures, easily crushed.”

“If you crush me, you will lose all your happiness.”

“If I lose Orson, I will lose all my happiness.”

He sneers at her then, but he wants to frown.

“You forget your place,” she tells him, not cruelly, as she rises to stand. “Like I said, you want too much too quickly.”

Gideon snatches a fist full of her skirts. “I want what you promised me.”

From below her, Hadassa’s expression is hard to read. Her face has become as smooth as polished gold. She tilts her head to the side in the softest of movements, like she’s curious or pitying. “Promises,” she says thoughtfully, “are also insubstantial.”

“Is that supposed to be profound?”

She’s annoyed again, he can tell by the way she yanks her dress from his fist, and the quick strides she takes to the balcony doors. She throws them open hastily, letting in the warm night air, but also the stink of the city.

Gideon gets to his feet. He wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve. After a moment, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Doubtful.”

“I am. I’m sorry. I’ve made a mess of the night, haven’t I? You can tell me it’s my typical behavior, I won’t deny it.”

She’s silent, her hands on the door frames, her eyes on the dark streets below. Truth be told, Gideon likes her annoyance, her irritation, her easy frustrations. He likes the way her eyes change from molten warmth to cold indifference. He likes her brutality, envies it even, and sometimes seeks it out. Her strength impresses him, almost as much as her capacity for violence.

“Let me take you out,” he offers. “I can find you a virgin.”

She laughs then, a short, surprised sound, but it’s enough to make him grin.

“Or an infant?”

More laughter, and he knows that she’s forgiven him when he folds his arms around her from behind and she leans back into the embrace. He nips at her ear, turns his face into the thick fall of her dark hair and breathes in her nighttime smell of lilacs and blackberries.

“What haven’t I given you?” she asks, and he hadn’t thought he’d hurt her earlier, hadn’t thought she’d cared.

“Nothing,” he lies.

This is a warm-up! Blowing off cobwebs and whatnot so that I can hopefully finish this Augusta piece that I've been working on, here and there, for a few months. Thanks to my Muffin who, as always, came through like a champ and requested some Sun and Roman war-time AU. Moral ambivalence and all that.

--




“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves.” – Olga Tokarczuk

“I am a phantom built out of pain.” – Olga Tokarczuk





If weariness had a smell, it would be this—gun oil and blood, dirt-rot, the nauseating sweet-stench of death and mustard gas. It’s Roman’s smell now too; he knows it, he’s aware, and it doesn’t matter how many showers he manages or how long he takes scrubbing the dirt beneath his fingernails, the trenches have become a part of him. The war is something he wears. He can’t wash it away, so he’s learned to accept it, to stop fighting for unattainable change.

Before the accident, before she loses her leg, Sunniva’s smell is medicinal: sterility, the metal of a syringe, blood and antiseptic, the lemon soap all the nurses seem to use. Roman finds it refreshing, and he marvels at the way her hair always smells clean, but he never tells her this. Instead, he brings her tiny trinkets whenever he returns from a stint in the trenches. Sometimes they’re literal trinkets–silk handkerchiefs (which she has no use for), a delicate silver ring that fits her pinky finger (equally useless but somehow charming), a lighter made from a used brass bullet casing (more practical). This time, he brings her a brown chicken egg, a handful of blueberries wrapped in a woman’s checkered dish towel, and a tin of molasses candy.

She looks up from where she’s washing her hands in a basin of red-stained water when he walks into her tent and raises her eyebrows. “How did you get this bounty?”

“I fished a boy’s body out of a well in Verdun.”

“That’s terrible,” she says, without any real emotion in her voice.

“He’d been fouling up their water. The mother was in hysterics. Her shoes scraped the pavement the entire time her husband was dragging her off.”

“What an interesting detail to remember.”

Roman shrugs as Sunniva wipes her hands dry, then she takes the food. She’s the most careful with the egg, tucking it gingerly atop some towels within a little metal bowl before nestling the blueberries in an empty coffee tin. The candy she opens, offering one to Roman. He shakes his head and takes a seat on her empty cot.

“You’ve been gone a while,” she says while unwrapping one of the molasses pieces. The candy is dark and shiny between her fingertips, just barely sticky at the top.

“Not so long,” he lies, lighting a cigarette. The smoke wafts up around his head, and she can tell how tired he is by the way he stretches his legs out in front of him and rolls his head on his neck, once, twice, a third time, his eyes closed. Something at the top of his shoulder, near the base of his neck, pops, and he cringes.

She sucks the piece of candy into her mouth and lets the warm, smoky flavor sit on her tongue. It’s a small delicacy, but beneath the sweetness she thinks that she can taste something else—a sickly treacle taste, like rotten fruit.

“So how did you really get it? The food?” she asks after a moment, rolling the candy from one side of her mouth to the other.

Roman’s eyes are still shut, and he doesn’t open them. He sucks on the end of his cigarette instead, hard. “The candy is from a dead Boche’s pocket. The blueberries from the side of the Voie Sacree.”

“And the egg?”

“For fishing the boy from the well. That part is true, except the father said he had half a dozen eggs, not one. What do I do with one egg? I asked him when he came back with it, after he dragged the woman away. I didn’t haul a corpse out of a well for one egg. He said a bunch of ugly things in French then, but you know how their language is. Even the ugly bits sound pretty. ”

“That’s why you did it, then, for the eggs.” It isn’t a question, and she looks at him blankly, at his relaxed posture, the dirt smeared across his face, the cigarette dangling between his thin lips, and the thatch of scruff covering his jaw and climbing up the sides of his cheeks. She can see the chain of his dog tags against his neck, the tags themselves tucked beneath the faded olive-brown of his open uniform collar. It’s as dirty as the rest of him.

He doesn’t reply to her, but he rolls his head on his neck again. Feels the same stiffness in his muscles.

When the candy is small enough to bite through, Sunniva crushes it between her back molars. Roman opens one eye, pitching the cigarette to the dirt floor. He grinds the tip out with his boot. “Does it taste like it came from a dead German?”

“No more than the egg will taste like grief.”

“Sehr gut,” he murmurs, and pushes himself to his feet.

He doesn’t say goodbye.

And here, for your satisfaction, a Laith origin story of sorts.

( & as dark as a heart )

Too lazy for a cut! Sorry-not-sorry.




“He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press ... against the firm red muscle of her heart." — Tim O'Brien, In The Lake Of The Woods

“Jesus Christ― "
"Is not here right now," the man in black replied, "and even if he were, he could not save you.” ― Brian Keene, A Gathering of Crows

“Behind every great hatred is a love story.” ― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors






What Gideon doesn’t tell her, what he never tells her, is that the mausoleum is his (she will learn this, eventually, from Laith). It is not his as in the tomb belongs to his ancestors or holds some skeletal remnants of his long dead relatives, but it is his by birthright―if death can be considered a kind of birth, which he knows it can.

As he had left Philomena to the rising sun and the beginnings of her metamorphosis, so Hadassa had left him, prone and blood-drunk on top of the same entombed coffin. For years he had visited the mausoleum on the anniversary of his human death, laying flowers on an altar nobody saw, for a date few others found so significant. It had felt right, this little tradition, just as it had felt right to break the urns inside and crack the western-facing stained glass window.

When Gideon carries the murdered nun, limp and unconscious in his arms, to the cemetery, she is already changing. Her green eyes flutter behind her thin eyelids, the dusting of freckles across her face marred by the smears of dirt and blood from the forest floor. The foliage in her hair too, and his skin under her nails, all of it evidence of the fight she’d tried to give. Her mouth is streaked with his blood, with hers.

“Do it again,” he’d told her after he’d drained her body of all that it could give and replaced it, mixed it, with his own strength and immortal vitality. She’d gagged against the wrist he’d pressed to her mouth at first, and then she’d clutched at it, her mouth working the skin with the same eagerness the way a babe latches to its mother’s nipple. She’d given a cry of protest when he’d taken it away and cried again from fear and pain when he’d tore into her neck once more, the wound gaping and raw, the blood in his mouth so like cannibalism now.

The death had hit her swiftly, but Gideon knows she’ll remember little of it. She’ll wear the massacre instead, on the long column of her throat, on the fabric of her stained collar and down, even, between her breasts. When he places her on the cool marble inside of the mausoleum, she grasps at his sleeve. Her eyes aren’t open. She’s mumbling something incoherent, her head lolling to the side. Her wrist drops to hang, seemingly lifeless, over the edge of the marble coffin, and Gideon does not think of Shakespeare’s doomed heroines: Ophelia, Juliet, Lady Macbeth, Lavinia. He thinks of Philomena’s precious Bible instead and of Salome’s request for John the Baptist’s head.






“What’s happening to me?” she asks the following night, her voice the crack of dry autumn leaves. Her eyes are bright from the blood, from the changing, but the rest of her is marred by sickness and death. Her hair is a tangled nest of red. There’s gore on her mouth and the wound on her neck is barely healed, clumpy with congealed blood. It will be red for weeks like a virus against her skin.

“You’re dying. It is a process, but like Lazarus you will be born again. To walk and hunt and feed and live.”

Philomena lets this sink it. The weight of the words seems to literally bring her closer to the ground and she sighs, a sound full of suffering, of despair, of confusion. Against the mausoleum floor, her hands are almost as white as the old marble now. Her nails scratch feebly, unconsciously, against it. “What are you?” she finally asks, looking up at him from the curtain of her hair. It is not the first time she has asked this.

Gideon’s grin is a nasty thing and it stretches his full mouth wide. “The same as you now. Unholy one. Blooddrinker. Descendent of Cain.” He gives a flourish of his hand in the air, his pale fingers dancing against the still crypt air. “Although I have never preferred such titles. We are as we are, much like any other animal.”

“No better than a beast then.” She gives a short disparaging laugh. This too sounds like the night now, the rustle of beetle legs and the snap of dry wood beneath a predator’s step. Her throat feels tender and unhealed but somehow arid, impossibly dry.

“Come.” He holds out his hand to her and, when she does not take it, he grabs her elbow and hauls her, unsteadily, to her feet. She tries to shrink away from him, and Gideon takes hold of both her shoulders. He pushes her snarled hair away from her face until he can stare into her eyes, her gaze still bold. “Enough. What’s done is done. Besides, what more can I do to you now?” He says it like a threat and laughs before letting her go.

The mausoleum door had once been bronze, but now it’s oxidized green, a shade like old pennies, and worn by time. It creaks when he opens it, the night air bringing in its cold and all the sounds and smells of the world. They seem to assault Mena; he can tell by the way she turns her face from it, how she lifts her dirty hands to her ears.

“Come,” he says again, and again he holds out his hand. “You stink.”





Her mortality assaults him. There’s only a little human left in her now, but the modicum of mortality that persists along with the stink of her vomit and the waste she’d expelled for her body to adjust, to change into this new creature, disgusts him. He can smell her death, smell how her skin rots before it shifts, hardens, whitens, how her blood fights then yields to his own, how even her nails are turning to glass beneath the thinner, weaker layer of keratin. They will decay within the next few nights and her new nails will be exposed, hard and glossy as pearl. He does not give her his heavy winter coat to hide her wretched state as he guides her through the Linemell streets, but he keeps a hand on her shoulder, the other pushing against the small of her back when she stumbles or tries to shield herself from the many sights and sounds of the bustling city.

“I cannot,” she says and digs her heels in when he comes to a stop in front of a bath house. There is genuine fear in her eyes.

Gideon’s fingers are like iron as they dig into the crook of her elbow. His nails cut into her skin when he presses his mouth to her ear. “Don’t be a stupid bitch. You can stay here, stinking, in these rags and I’ll leave you on these streets to fester like the idiot newborn you are or you can come inside, your modesty be damned. Consider it your baptism, my little nun.”

He must coerce her into everything, it seems. She winces from the electric light inside, from the rush of water in the sunken bath, the heavy steam scented with lavender and jasmine. The exotic mosaic tiling and stained glass windows stun her into silence with their beauty. She runs her fingers across the Turkish designs, the rich Arabian colors made all the more extravagant against her skin. When Gideon, crouched by the gold, oversized faucet, looks up at her, he realizes that she’s crying. Small blurs of reddish tears beneath her eyelids, sticking to her long copper eyelashes. She doesn’t even seem to be aware of it.

“Over here, little nun,” he says, and it’s the first time his voice hasn’t been cold in months.

Philomena turns, startled, as though she’d forgotten for one blissful moment that he was there. She looks at the water, wide-eyed, and at him. Her fingers close into pale knots against the tattered remains of her clothing, clothing he’s responsible for ripping, for tearing. It’s all she has left and her fingers worry against themselves with the revelation.

“I—”

“You can.” Still soft. Insistent, confident, but soft.

“You will feel better,” he adds when she does not move.

She shakes her head, hair wilted from the oppressive steam and sticking to her nervous, angled face. Her fingers won’t stop fidgeting against her chest, clutching her dress.

Gideon’s patience is thin. He grits his teeth before, with the turn of the faucet knob, he tells her again, “Come here.” The final syllable breaks some invisible barrier between them and suddenly, painfully, he seems to be everywhere, as omnipresent and invasive as a spirit. He is pressing beneath her skin, against her bones, pushing at her muscles. He is dragging her forward, her body unable to resist, and she cries out, a shrill, shattering noise, her fingers raking at the sides of her face, clutching her own head, as though she can remove the infection that is him with her own hands.

Shaking, trembling, Philomena breathes raggedly. She does not remember walking across the room to the low steps leading into the bath. She had thought Gideon had dragged her, but he is still by the faucet. He’s gathering an assortment of oils and ointments and washes from a nearby bar cart. Looking over his shoulder, he does not give her a chance to ask and instead says, “I am more a part of you now than your God ever was or will be.”

The declaration seems to be enough for him because he turns his back to her. It takes her a moment to realize that he is giving her privacy. Another moment, and she notices how thick the steam is, how like smog. The water itself is murky, full of bath salts and oils, and she thinks this, too, has been a kindness of sorts.

“Philomena.”

It’s a warning. How long has she been staring at the water?

Quickly, before she can think, she removes her ruined clothes and slips into the bath. The heat is almost unbearable. It pervades her entire body, and every ache that she thought she had forgotten, every bit of grime that she had collected as some obscene armor against (or testament to) the last twenty-four hours, begins to coalesce.

She’s crying again, those same little wet smears as before. She’s unaware of it again. She keeps crying even as Gideon, kneeling at the edge, lifts each of her hands from the water and scrubs away the dirt and blood beneath her nails. She cries while he collects her tangled hair between his hands and guides her head back until the full length of it is submerged. He works the lather between his fingers, into her scalp, and she cries, staring straight ahead at the beautiful tiling.






When it’s over, when he seems satisfied by the look and smell of her, she is hardly even present. She is riding some warm tide, made numb from shock but also from the heat of the bath, the perfumes in the air, and the steady, blessedly unpainful, work of his fingers.

Gideon, wiping his hands on a towel, walks towards the door. There’s a small mulberry-colored rope dangling there, and it sends a cacophony of chimes through the hall when Gideon pulls it. Outside, there’s a soft flurry of noise, but Philomena smells the woman before she’s even knocked on the door. Philomena sits up, the water still at her collarbones, and looks at her maker. A foreign expression is struggling to take form on her face. Gideon, like her, can hear the maid’s heart through the walls. He can hear the whirlpool of her blood.

Gideon leans against the tiled wall and folds his arms over his chest. He smiles knowingly, one foot tapping a heartbeat’s rhythm. “What you feel inside of you? That insatiable hunger? That longing and ache and fury? That’s me too.”






The washmaid is pretty and voluptuously plump. She is not much younger than Philomena, but she has the calloused, experienced hands of the working class with a contrasting bare-faced freshness that makes her radiant. Her toffee colored hair is pulled up and wrapped in a white scarf, the ends of her curls flopping messily over the sides, and her cheeks are the colors of strawberries from bustling between steaming, humid rooms. She wears a linen skirt that she’s tied up near her knees and her chest is wrapped in simple cotton bands so the soft curves of her stomach and hips and the fleshy, sensual weight of her naked arms are all exposed.

“Mr. Edwards,” she says, cheerful, dipping into a quick curtsey. “We did not know to expect you tonight. I would have had the Madame prepare your usual room.”

“Quite alright, Tenley,” he tells her.

She darts her eyes up and down his clothed figure. Even his shoes are still on. “Is the bath disagreeable, Sir? I must say the jasmine is awfully strong, and I always took you for a bergamot fellow myself.”

He waves his hand dismissively then points through the steam. “The lady, Tenley.”

Tenley squints her warm eyes, focusing through the steam, then smiles with a glint of mischievousness. She dips another curtsey before approaching Philomena. Tinley has her arms full of soft towels which she places carefully next to the bar cart before plucking an amber oval shaped bottle from the top. “Missus,” she says softly by way of greeting before kneeling near Philomena’s side. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, we just don’t see many ladies here. Not that it’s completely uncommon or unheard of. Most prefer the washouses by the station since we cater to the gentlemen of Linemell, but a quid is a quid, as the Madame always says, and everyone deserves to be pampered.”

When Philomena does not respond, Tinley’s smile twitches and she flicks her eyes to Gideon who strolls slowly closer. He nods at her reassuringly.

“Might I …?” Tinley asks, but she does not wait for a response. She slips Philomena’s wet hair away from her naked shoulders and neck with the casual expertise of one accustomed to nudity and pleasure. After pouring a small amount of oil from the amber bottle she’d chosen earlier and rubbing it between her palms, she glides her fingers down the back of Philomena’s neck and over the tops of her shoulders. Tinley manages this for all of ten seconds before the redheaded woman is shoving away from her, pushing towards the other side of the bath.

“Stop,” she says, urgently, but hardly above a whisper. Philomena keeps her back to the washmaid. And then, eyes lifting to Gideon, she says, “Make it stop. Please. I can’t… I can’t bear it. It’s so loud. Make it stop. If it doesn’t stop, if it doesn’t stop, I can’t― “

Tinley stands and steps back, her brows knitting together in concern. “Mr. Edwards?”

“Shh,” Gideon says, and Tinley thinks he is talking to the woman in the bath, but then he has cool hands on her hips, her shoulders, and he’s loosening the fastening of her bindings. He’s slipping the scarf from her hair, letting her golden curls fall, ghosting his mouth below her ear and she almost doesn’t feel the quick slice of pain against her throat.

Philomena refuses to look. She’s crossed her arms across her own body, she’s dipped further into the bath, but she can smell the instant Gideon’s teeth break the girl’s skin. The scent of the blood, caught between Tinley’s neck and Gideon’s mouth, makes her nauseous with hunger. Her mouth pools, like an animal’s, with spit. If the girl’s heart had been loud before, it was deafening now. She is sick and desperate all at once. She has never felt such a desire, such a yearning. It’s as though her entire being has been replaced by an empty pit, a gashing maw. She doesn’t even have time to think of God or sin or damnation, but she’s keenly aware of Gideon walking Tinley forward, urging her down the marble steps, into the waters like an offering. And that’s what this is, isn’t it? An offering because the girl isn’t even frightened. She’s glassy-eyed and flushed, her hands clutching, grasping, in an odd needy way at the arm Gideon has draped around her stomach, like she wants to get closer to the monster feeding at her neck.

When Gideon draws back, his mouth red, he catches Philomena’s eyes, his face half-buried against Tenley’s curls but his gaze vicious.

He doesn’t have to tell her to come this time. She does it willingly, rapidly, forgetting her modesty and shame in the haze of newborn bloodlust and the desire to quell the throbbing ache that she’s become. Gideon releases Tenley from the step, and the washmaid stumbles into the bath, disoriented, into Philomena’s clutching arms. There’s a trail of blood down the girl’s throat, and Gideon watches as Philomena licks there, her fingers holding Tenley’s face, pressing against her skull, bruising the skin, as the girl awkwardly bends to accommodate the taller woman. When Philomena tears at the girl’s throat, against the bite Gideon has made, she gives a terrible groan of urgency and hopelessness. It isn’t enough. She doesn’t have his fangs; they haven’t come through. She has dull, weak, dying human teeth. She has to tear, Tenley’s skin caught between her useless incisors.

Maybe it’s the tearing, the pain, or maybe Philomena, simply so unaccustomed to this new, tortuous life, has no concept of how to use her own influence on others. Either way, Tenley’s eyes, once so cloudy and content, are bright and terrified. She’s screaming, struggling, the water churning between them with her distress, but Philomena is stronger, more brutal, more demanding.

Once the blood touches her, she is no longer herself.

After this night, she will struggle. She will fight against it, this new being that has come to live inside of her, this murderer.

But here? Now? With Tenley dying in her arms, with the blood salty and rich, coating her throat, soothing her parched insides and filling her with an unprecedented love, Philomena gives in.






She doesn’t remember leaving the baths, seeing Gideon’s dreadful home, or how she’d fallen into such an unresponsive sleep in the depths of his basement. But she wakes with a terrible, sudden force, and she’s immediately sick.

He’d dressed her in the same tattered clothes from the night before, and all the efforts of the bath seem to have been wasted now. Only the hunger remains.

And Gideon.

She vomits again, tears stinging her eyes out of memory, like her body still thinks she’s living. “Why?” She gasps around the black bile and wasted blood. It smells foul, like swamp and noxious decay. Philomena clutches her stomach then turns to be sick for a third time, doubling over, ropes of the vile remnants trailing from her mouth.

“You took in her death,” Gideon explains, shrugging a shoulder. “You must stop before the heart does. You were gluttonous, little nun.”

“You let me!” She groans, digging her fingers into her own mouth to desperately scoop out the fetid blood.

“Now, now,” he chides. “Why would I do such a thing?”





The hunting becomes harder and easier, a nightly testament to their battle of wills and her own ravenous desires.

The boy is simple because he’s fragile, delicate.

He smells like chemicals, like the stink of the factories. They waft up from his skin and his eyes are wet and tired behind his dirty hair, and in him Philomena thinks she can sense all his ancestors before him, and she’s surprised he doesn’t recognize her for what she is. For what they both are as Gideon trails, lazily, behind her in the alley—fingers skimming the brick while he whistles an old forgotten tune. He has the collar of his coat turned up against the cold, and he’s already losing the warmth from his own fresh kill, but he’s devilish all the same. It’s the gleam in his steely blue eyes, like a hawk scenting a kill.

Philomena had refused the whore and, before he could stop her, had rushed from the brothel to avoid lunging at the tender arm Gideon had offered. Now, he’s making sure she feeds, and she can feel his presence lurking at her peripheries, the thick tension in the air an invisible sign of his command.

He’d picked a child. Her first. A street urchin barely over the age of ten. It’s a punishment for refusing the whore, she knows, and feels guilty for each.

Still, Philomena tries anyway. “Run away.” She tells the child, but the words get lost in the hunger pooling on her tongue and come out as a croaking whisper.

The boy stares at her for a long moment then says, “What are you?” He takes a step back.

So he does sense Mena for the monster she is and maybe even Gideon behind her, but not in a way he can fully acknowledge. Somehow this is worse and better at the same time. Her life has become a cycle of paradoxes.

I’m sorry, she wants to tell him, but she grabs him instead. She holds him when he fights and still, still her teeth are not sharp enough. It’s so much worse this way, so much harder than it should be. There is no mercy, and she makes a mess of it. When it’s over, the urchin’s skin is staining red. It’s not a stain that he’ll ever be able to remove now. His pupils are fixed and dilated, his mouth open in a way he’d never let it hang in life.

Gideon steps over Philomena. She watches, dazed, as he grabs the boy’s chin between his cruel hands, presses his knee against his forehead, and snaps the hinge of his jaw as easily as cracking a walnut. Before she can do more than give a horrified, bewildered gasp, Gideon is digging his fingers into the corpse’s mouth, forcing his hand in impossibly deep. He curls his sharp nails into the gumline, by the back canine tooth, and pulls. The tooth is stubborn because the body is still fresh, but his nails cut into the bloody root and with a wet audible tear it eventually loosens. He shifts his fingers to the other side and pulls the left one out.

Gideon lets the body drop. He rattles the canines in his bloody hand like dice then holds out his palm to Philomena.

“Here,” he says, smirking, “while you wait for yours to grow in.”






“Are there others?” she asks while they prepare for the coming sun, her long knees drawn up to her chest. She hates this basement, the smell of it, the damp earth and the old bones and the dried blood and the misery. It suffocates her from every corner.

In contrast, Gideon is unperturbed. He swings himself down easily from the broken opening above, using the shattered, busted remnants of stairs near the bottom as a landing matt. Basque caws as though unimpressed and fluffs his wings, balancing on half a floorboard above his master.

He does not answer her.

Philomena looks at Basque. “Why does he follow you? And do your bidding—he does, doesn’t he? How can you speak to him? Or him to you?”

Again, Gideon does not answer. He drags an old chair, mildewed and missing a leg, from one dark corner and situates it against the far wall. Folding his long body into it, Philomena knows he’ll sleep like that, a posed statue.

She stares at her hands. “You took my life and gave me this, and yet you will tell me nothing? Teach me nothing?”

At this, Gideon scoffs. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do? You refuse to eat, yet you want other lessons? Be what you are and then see how gracious I can be.”

Philomena lifts her gaze to him, unflinching, and there is something of her old self still there. “I see no grace in you.”

Mockingly, he reaches down and grabs a handful of dirt, dirt that stinks like the grave, and flings it at her. She turns her face but feels the bits of soil scatter across her cheek, her eyelashes, her lips.

“Careful, or I’ll come over there and rip your virgin cunt bloody with my teeth. Or maybe you would like that? Maybe that’s why you test me so.”

He watches as she draws a breath, settling herself. She brushes the dirt from her face and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, nestling her cheek against the top of her knees so that she can stare into the darkness to her right.

“Will I die if I do not eat?”

“I will not allow you to starve.”

“Will I die?”

He groans, exasperated. “You will be a wraith. A fate worse than death. Emaciated and no better than a walking corpse dug from a grave.”

She is silent, considering. It annoys Gideon.

“Be thankful Linemell is a city of sinners and death. We can kill with hardly a worry. You waste such opportunity on this relentless ordeal. Think of what we could be, Philomena, together. What triumphs—”

“No,” she says, simply, honestly.

He scowls at her although she cannot see the expression before telling her, sardonically, “No martyr was ever sainted without first suffering.”

Here we go, the final set of shorts, the second half of the thank-you gift! daintiestmartyr, I hope you enjoy!

Notes!

* There’s some repeat kiddos in this second set of shorts, but I intentionally tried to make them differ completely in tone, mood, and, well, even the subject matter. Also, it’s okay to have favorites. There, I said it!
* The Haven and Luke short is toxic as hell. It’s essentially a drunk fight-and-fuck scene, but things get nasty and violent. I also begin in the middle of it, so there’s not much context as to WHY they’re fighting. I just wanted them to fight. Fair warning.
* In an effort to not write sex scenes for every single short (I have to practice writing something else, damn it), I accidentally get Margot and Jasper into a bit of a tiff. So sorry. They deserve better. I don’t know how to write happy scenes! They're so boring! I said that too, okay!
* Harper and Oriol’s short is set a short time after they’ve started getting physical as a trio with Zane but before they’re going behind Zane’s back together due to their ~pair bonding~.
* Introspective!Palmer is the hardest thing to write. He really doesn’t get enough time/attention in my brain, so I struggled to, well, think about what he’d think about.
* The final short introduces a new set of characters! As a surprise! I kept it all vampire-centric to avoid stepping on fleshing out the nun’s personality and details and all that creative licensure. I’m also really digging the idea that older vampires “claim” territories, so Gideon gets to claim Linemell, running off lesser vampires and defending his turf until some bigger baddie comes in. If that ever happens.

( so Eden sank to grief )

I've had this sitting in my Drive for a few months now. I felt all inspired during the late summer, and then work sucked away my creativity. I did some editing and tried to wrap it up, but I'd completely forgotten where I intended to take this! Don't you just hate it when that happens? Seriously. Like how dare you, brain! Not being able to remember plans for months ago! C'mon!

I know it was supposed to delve more into Lene and Roman being AU good guys helping refugees and build to their relationship but ... nope. That's mentioned, but I felt like I needed another 8 pages to really explore everything that I was setting up. Lene doesn't even really clearly become the shepherd, which was the position she was supposed to take from Anders. Oh well!

( tired of things that break )