AN: I think this is the fic Mary Kelly has been waiting for me to write. It is very loosely tied to the Cruror Mos Sicco (The Blood Will Out) series, specifically "Whispers on the Edge of Dark". There are some historical notes at the end.
Rating: Teen+, with warnings for Jack the Ripper.
Spoilers: Kush, I guess? It's AU, anyway. Or at least very unlikely.
Disclaimer: How do I not own them? Let me count the ways…
Character/Pairings: Mary Kelly, John Druitt
Summary: It's been ten years since Whitechapel. That doesn't mean the streets are safe.
The Monster and Mary Kelly
It's been ten years since Whitechapel. That doesn't mean the streets are safe.
He stands in the shadows, like he did before, and waits. It's an old game now, one born in London and perfected in Edinburgh, New York, Paris and Rome. He's done the grand tour since he was last here, and marked his trail in red across the map. He'd learned to hide the bodies, if he wished to avoid spectacle, and how to display them to his advantage if he did not. And tonight, he thinks, tonight there will be a show.
The girls who walk the streets here have changed. Their skirts are shorter and their make-up more brazen, but what he misses most is the breath of fear that always permeated the air. He had brought that here, his blade giving life to the stuff of nightmares by wreaking bright death on the cobblestones, and now it was gone. They had forgotten him, and tonight he would make them remember.
He waits for a long time before he finds the one he wants. She is old enough to remember, old enough to know better than to think her biggest worries are a black eye or an unplanned child. If she was born here, if she grew up on these streets, she will know his story. She might even recognize him when he finally lets her see his face.
Almost as soon as he's honed in on her, she stops walking, stops looking about for customers like the others do. A smile curves his lips when she cuts across the street and disappears into an alley. She has made it all too easy. He will have to make her pay for that, and the idea fills him with such delight that he braves the street lamps to cross the road on foot instead of simply teleporting into the alley.
Her red hair is dark black without the gaslights to show its colour. Her blood will be the same, dark until the morning finds her. By the time the paper is put out, though, the iron red stains will have sunk into the stones so deeply that not even the London rains will be able to fully unmark her death. She is about halfway down the alley, and he is about to teleport right behind her when she stops again, and turns.
"See something you like?" she says, her voice high and harsh.
"Yes," he replies, so quietly he's not sure she'll hear him, but she must, because she takes a step towards him.
"I'll bet you do," she says, and when the meager light falls on her face so that he can see her, her smile falls too.
He is prepared to take her, then, right on the cusp of fear, but when her expression settles, it's not fear he sees. It's hate. The way Helen had looked at him just before she fired. This woman does indeed know who he is and what he's done, but she is not afraid of him, and, as with his former fiancée, he finds the blood lust momentarily quelled by a sudden wave of curiosity.
"Who are you?" he whispers, waiting for the curiosity to subside so that the killing edge will return.
"My name is Mary," she says. "Mary Kelly."
He recoils. It is not possible, not even remotely. Because he's killed Mary Kelly, he killed her ten years ago in her flat. He'd followed her one night and she'd eluded him, but had seen him, and so he tracked her again. He had seen her speaking with Helen, and knew that his anonymity was about to run out, so he had waited until she was alone in her apartment, and then…then he had killed her so violently that the papers refused to publish any photographs, and most of the details had to be heavily sanitized for print.
"Do not lie to me," he says and feels the rage curling in his chest, ready to be unleashed.
"I do not lie," she says. "I met Helen, I spoke with her outside my rooms, and that night, I was murdered. Except you didn't do your homework. You didn't know that sometimes other girls, ones who are in trouble, use my rooms after their procedure to rest until they can go back home. You killed another Lizzie that night, and when the paper said it was me, I had sense enough to take the warning and disappear."
The story is too fantastical not to be true. His mind reels around it. She's been free the whole time. But, he remembers, she's here now. There is no reason he cannot put history to rest.
"How did you know me, on the street just now?" he asks.
"The same way I did then," she says. "I can read men's thoughts. That's why I went to Helen in the first place. Usually I have to touch them, but you, John Druitt, you think louder than church bells on Sunday."
"And still, you are not afraid of me," he says. "Even though you can hear exactly what I want, what I am going to do you."
"I can hear all the rest as well," she replies. "The hatred, the self-loathing, the black despair. You're a very troubled man, and you haven't decided yet if you're really going to do it."
He snarls at her, rage seething through him, and still she did not flinch. He has never been so angry and so unmoved to murder, not since the whole nightmare started.
"Prove it," he says, through clenched teeth. "Prove that you are not afraid, I will let you live."
Mary Kelly is tall, for a woman, and he is long accustomed to slouching when in company so as to not be completely above the conversation. She closes the space between them, and pushes off her heels to extend her height those last few inches. Her mouth on his is cold and calculating, and neither of them reacts to the kiss, but it tells him everything he needs to know.
When she pulls away, she is smiling and there is something wrong with him. He feels blood in his mouth, dripping from his lips in startlement as he staggers back from her. His hands clench at his stomach, finding his coat in ruins and damp as the blood seeps through it. His blood, he realizes as his knees give way and he falls forward to land on the cobblestones. There will be bruises, he thinks. If he lives.
She leans forward to whisper in his ear. The knife is still in her hand, blade darkened with the night and the blood, but her eyes have a familiar brightness to them, and he knows that tomorrow, the cobbles on which he kneels will be red.
"That was for Whitechapel," she hisses, and turns to walk away from him, her head high and her step unmarred by fear of any monsters she might encounter in the night.
He is gone by the time she reaches the end of the alley, but she does not look back.
fin
AN: So, Mary Kelly! She was widely suspected of being an abortionist, which would have made her quite useful to the other women who worked in Whitechapel. At least one person claimed to have seen her after her death, and there are about a million theories about whether or not she was actually a victim of the Ripper. I've stitched about six of them together and then made stuff up for good measure.
Gravity_Not_Included, February 26, 2011