you're too young & eager to love

Back-posting here because I forgot to post two weeks ago somehow.

I’m trying to be creative after weeks of waking up at 4:45 AM, teaching three blocks in a row, and adjusting to learning three (THREE) new digital platforms for the school year, as well as an entirely new block schedule. Exhausted? You do not know the meaning of the word!

I’m trying to chug through! Like that little persistent engine.

The prompt is a carry-over from the last session, which was just “future,” but we wanted Linemell, and I like quotes, so you’re getting one.

But honestly this is a big pile of crap and a waste of both Hadassa and a good quote. It doesn’t even get to the future aspect.


“When love is sharp it outlives the body
[…] I could cut your throat with my love."
-Yelena Moskovich



After the exsanguination, you retreat from the city.
You used to love its broken, wretched landscape. The factories churn such smog that even the daytime could feel dark while the damp alleys—festering like open wounds with the destitute, the unlucky, the forgotten—would call to the eternal snake inside of you, the beast with its hungry stomach and sharp teeth. Stalking the cobblestone streets had thrilled you, left you bloody-mouthed and wonder-struck with the lure of the hunt; the city’s throats were a fount to be pulled, and you were rarely satiated. To some, you had been beautiful in your viciousness, your ruthlessness. Yours was a name alone that could ward off potential threats, and so maybe you had overstayed your welcome, had become too comfortable in Linemell. Maybe withdrawing from the city was unavoidable, in the end, because nobody was meant to find comfort for too long within its grim, stony walls. Even Ravenstone with its angelic bells chiming each evening is not enough to cleanse the city of its filth, although the church tries.
The church tries, but you cannot.
You are not used to being unable.
You had only known that the city changed for you, much like the house itself, and the sudden awareness had settled over you like the dirt of graves or a ghost’s caul. The Victorian with its aged wood and elegant columns, its wide sprawling gardens and large wrap-around terrace, stood mute and dull for all its grandeur once the Vannier House had its vengeance. Justice? Retribution? You do not know what to call it, the blemish that is your fledgling’s betrayal or the sacrifice that had been done for your sake or the bloody reckoning that had followed.
Baron had cried, of course. His wrinkled hands had clutched at you, and he’d sobbed with the frank indignity of the elderly. It had been Kostya that had pulled him away, worried that you might hurt the old caretaker when you arguably needed him most, but you hadn’t. You had let him kiss your hands, his mouth paper-thin and wet against your palms, your smooth knuckles. He’d even grabbed at your skirts, the elegantly stitched fabric looking vulgar when held so tightly in his wrinkled, liver-spotted fingers. You told him that the house was still to be cared for in your absence, but you think a part of him had known that you were abandoning the city. He would not see you again, not in his lifetime, but he would be like Argos, old and very tired, waiting with painful hope for your return.
You don’t pity him.






You wear your grief like a shroud.
For a while, it is permissible.
It is enough.






You cannot say their names, his or hers.
It’s unfair to the girl, but your pettiness and anger will not let your mouth shape the sound of her name. It is the anger that feeds you when the sorrow has passed, and you are angry at her too—her child’s face, her cherubic eyelashes, her rosebud mouth, and then her precociousness, her willfulness, her meek human heart that had beat a rhythm he had been unable to ignore.
What had she had, you wonder, when you want to torture yourself. What is it that made her so much more desirable than you? A wisp of a child, untouched by eternity. What was worth the betrayal?
And such a betrayal it was.
The core of you, the small black heart inside the creature you feed, the part that has been with you since Sindan, this is the part that cannot conceive of forgiveness. He had deserved his death, and maybe the girl had deserved hers, but you had deserved none of it. Even during the private moments where you have only your own company to lie to, you cannot seem to trick yourself into delusion. You want the fault to be yours, only you cannot find where the trouble began. You sift through your memories like a miner sifting for gold, and each time you are empty-handed at the end. You knew him for the selfish, hungry, charming, pitiless creature he was—he had mirrored you in many ways, this you can admit, but he had done such a grievous wrong, such a sleight that you could not comprehend.
It is the burden of motherhood, you think, the hidden fear of losing that which you hold most dear, the weight of a disappointment so crushing that it feels inevitable.






Some of your children become mothers, become fathers, become parent-siblings bound by the legacy of blood-work. You’re happy for them, but the happiness is a pallid, perfunctory thing, a feeling on the edges of your soul. Distantly, you can tell how ill-fitting motherhood is to Vida. She brings her typical aloofness to the role, and you seem to comprehend that she’s setting up franchises rather than forming a home, which is why she stays with you. Or maybe that too could be apathy. Maybe she’s happy to be kept in the fold. You can’t say. You don’t ask.
You become a quiet thing. Laith, still adoring, still enraptured, does not mind. He continues to wrap you in fabrics you do not wear. His talented fingers stitch together wonderment and dreams, dresses like stars, but they hang in your closet, unable to be admired by anyone. They hang like skin, like skeletons on the noose.
Kostya visits. You haven’t given him a gift in some time. He asks about the house, about the current caretaker, about whether or not you want to stay in this new city with its gray buildings and gray people. It is enough, it is fine, you reassure him. He looks at you like he misses something about you, but he doesn’t press. It’s not his nature.
“Have you heard?” he asks. “Gideon is stirring up the muck in Linemell.”
You think of your mercenary, your warrior, and a hint of a smile plays across your face. “He is holding the city, I trust.”
“He can do that much.”
“What is this muck then? Vida says he’s living in squalor, one of those condemned row-houses from the turn of the century. It’s to spite me, of course.”
“He’s hunting one of Ravenstone’s.”
This amuses you, but you don’t say that. Instead, you lift your eyebrows and glance out the window as though you expect to see Gideon there, rage-filled and resentful. “How do you know this?”
“You like me to keep an eye on him, so I do. Not often, of course, because he wants to prove himself capable in some way that might matter, but I check from time to time.”
“For me?”
He nods. It’s a simple truth, not sentimental.
“I doubt he will follow through with whatever scheme he has brewing. He’s always wanted attention, that’s what this is. But then … maybe it would do him well, siring another.”
“He is violent. It will not be easy.”
You want to tell him that nothing ever is, no matter how long you live. Eternity brings few rewards in this aspect. Instead, you shrug. Gideon is as he is, and you appreciate that consistency. Even his hatred reeks of love.

Another AWS session down! I've lost count. I think this might be 5.

Some context: I wanted to explore Despina and Orson meeting and leave a set-up for future meetings, the next most logical being her debutante party where the community is formally acknowledging that she's Maxine's legacy and the next in line for the Vannier Head-of-House position.

( for fate may hang )

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.

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.

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

( & as dark as a heart )

This is long overdue! Ridiculously so, in fact. I started it in April and just now got around to finishing it. It's supposed to be a bit of a Hadassa character study, and I struggled with setting a bedroom scene that pivots into flashbacks. Ignore my struggle with tenses. I couldn't figure out the best way to incorporate those moments; initially I was going to italicize them but the transition into those moments became jarring and then I made it all past tense and past perfect tense and then I confused myself and just ... fuck it! Who cares?!

The ending is a bit abrupt or maybe doesn't fully fit for this piece, but I kept it because I liked it anyways.

Other notes? Sindan is just a made-up name for Morocco. Or a Morocco-inspired city.



( a hollowness, a strain )