*slinks back to the fandom after writing nothing for like a year and getting yet another unnecessarily long POTO-related username*
So I've been sorta lurking on the Proboards for a while, doing nothing, but I had to take advantage of this month's prompts, because Halloween is, like, my favorite thing. This is only sort of supernatural, but I tried to get some Gothic imagery and stuff in there. Please leave a review, especially if you favorite~
Salzburg looks like it's melting that day. The frigid drizzle that falls from the sky blurs the city into indistinct shapes, watery and distorted as a Monet painting. A small, quick-footed figure skirts around the side of a church, wearing a blue shawl, a straw hat, and carrying a bundle of flowers.
The girl, about nineteen years old, leans against the church wall, letting the overhang protect her from the rain for just a moment, and longs for a better hat. It is cold as well as damp, and she rubs at her fingers, trying to gain back the heat that has been lured out of them. She knows she doesn't have much time before her uncle will be looking for her, but somehow she felt that she had to go to the cemetery today. It has been far too long since she went. Mother and Father died so long ago, but she does her best to visit their graves on a regular basis, perhaps to let them know that she has not forgotten them, even though the years she has lived without their presence have long surpassed the years with it. Visiting means she gets to pass the nearby abbey, too, from which she can sometimes hear an ethereal singing that makes her want to push open the gate and venture in.
The girl looks up at the torso of a stone angel that protrudes from the church not far above her and suppresses a shudder, wishing her impulse hadn't commanded her to go today. She's sure that in sunlight the angel would look lovely, its mouth open wide to sing of God's glories, but in today's misty downpour, its parted lips only give it an impression of hollow malaise, as if it is giving up; letting itself breathe in the water and drown. When did you get so morbid, Maria? The young woman thinks to herself, and decides that it is simply the gloomy atmosphere of the day.
She shakes the water from her flowers and carries on into the cemetery, for once wishing to be back at her uncle's house soon. The flowers, a combination of white roses and coltsfoot, her mother's favorite, stand out in the dimness like a candle. She hurries down a row of gravestones as fast as she can while carefully reading the names. Ordinarily she wouldn't have to; she has come here often enough that she has the location of her parents' graves memorized, but the rain is blurring the features of each marker, rendering them almost indistinguishable as they stretch endlessly, indomitably, into the mist. At last she finds her parents, and bends down to place her flowers there.
Time to hurry back, she tells herself, but even as rain funnels down the back of her neck, she hesitates, staring at the names on the grave, the names of these people who never saw her grow up, who never saw her graduate college, who will never be there to give her a last hug before she - hopefully - enters the Abbey soon. Maria doesn't always think like this when she comes here; she has learned to move beyond pain. But somehow, with the flowers already withering as the water batters them, and the chill pervading the air, and the entire world looking like it might simply wash away around her, the barrier between the living and the dead seems thinner than usual, and they are closer to her mind.
Maria shakes her head and pulls her shawl tighter over her shoulders. I must try to think of happy things. She blows a kiss at the tombstones and is starting to turn away, when she catches a figure several meters down the row out of the corner of her eye.
It's a man in a long black coat, standing impossibly still and so shrouded by fog she could almost mistake him for a phantom, a mirage. Even at this distance, she can tell he's handsome by the sharp, bold slants of his profile, but the way he stares so steadily at the grave in front of him is unnerving. Tiny streams meander, snakelike, over his face and waterfall off his fingertips, and Maria notices that the man is holding a bottle in his limp, white hand. Something about this vision freezes her in place - an aristocratic man standing as still as a statue, pale as marble; legions of tombstones behind him; surrounded by billowing fog; completely unaffected by the rain as if it isn't even touching him, as if he is somewhere far away. He gives off a deep, broken sadness as a fire gives off smoke, and Maria is somehow reminded of a barren tree, of the bottom of a bottle, of the drowning angel from before.
She feels a pang of sympathy for him, and thinks Lord, may you ease this man's suffering, whoever he is and whoever he's grieving for. She turns to leave, keeping an eye on the man as she walks. The sight of him is certainly arresting, all the elements in the scene composed as if by an artist in some dark painting. She finds her path curving a bit so that she can read the grave he is looking at so fixedly - Agathe Whitehead von Trapp. Maria notices a bundle of edelweiss laid at the foot of her grave. Distracted from where she's going, she doesn't realize that she is walking straight into a gravestone, and she runs into it with little cry of surprise.
At once, the man turns around, and Maria freezes, unsure of what to do now that his gaze has turned to her. For a few moments they simply stand, frozen as if in a photograph. The two appear in small flashes through the flickering sheets of rain, making them appear to be only a shifting glimmer of black and a shifting glimmer of blue, tiny in the vast, hushed graveyard. His face is still somewhat obscured, and for a few moments he simply stands there; his eyes are shadowed but Maria knows he's looking right at her. She glances at the bottle in his hand again and straightens up, taking a step back.
The man takes the tiniest step forward. In a voice that sounds lost and confused and almost hopeful, he calls, "Agathe?"
Maria's throat closes up. Agathe. Who does he think she is? His wife, perhaps, slumbering beneath his feet? "I - I don't think I'm the one you're looking for, sir." she says shakily, twisting her shawl in her numb fingers.
"No?" he replies in a very quiet voice. His dark form stands out sharply against the silvery fog and he looks almost as intangible as a shadow. A cold draft breathes on the back of Maria's neck.
"No," she answers slowly, stepping back again.
He steps forward once more, close enough now that Maria can make out his features. His eyes are deeply, startlingly blue in his white face, like iced stars. She is transfixed by the raindrops clinging to his eyelashes like beads; she wants to run her thumb over them, set them free.
The man stares at her a moment longer before raising a hand to smooth back his hair. The blank look in his eyes dissipates somewhat, like someone slowly waking from a dream, and he looks down at the ground. He seems more like a man, then, less like the spirit he originally appeared as. "Do forgive me, Fraülein." His words are faintly slurred, the end of one slumping into the beginning of the next. "I...I don't know what I was thinking."
"Oh," Maria says. "It's alright." What else can she say in such a situation?
"It's just," the man studies her. "That for one moment you looked - I mean, I could hardly see you through all this," he gestures vaguely at their surroundings. "But - your build reminded me of her's."
Maria simply nods, not knowing precisely who this her, this Agathe, is, but she has dealt with drunk men before. This man is not as drunk as he could be, but it's best not to contradict him, to simply let him run out of steam.
"You just appeared there, Fraülein," he continues, almost talking to himself. "You were only a silhouette in the fog and your silhouette reminded me of her, it really did." He laughs joylessly and adds, "Anyone could've mistaken you for a ghost!"
Same to you. She thinks, but the only ghosts she's seeing now are in his slightly unfocused eyes. Part of her longs to go, but there is a certain fascination about him, and something in her pities him too much to leave him here.
"Are you alright?" she asks, stepping towards him. "How long have been out in this rain? Maybe you should get back home."
"I'm quite alright, Fraülein," he smiles a very empty smile. "Home - yes - I ought to -" He turns his head back to Agathe von Trapp's tomb. "And yet - it's just like what happened with you, my thinking you were a ghost. I - I keep seeing all these little bits and pieces of her everywhere - people will place their hands in their laps the way she did, or a woman will brush back her hair the way she always used to - and the children -" He turns his back to Maria, facing the grave of this woman who has brought him here on this cold day. "It's the worst with them - Friederich has her smile, and Gretl has her nose, and Louisa her eyes, little pieces of her in all of them - "
Does he even know he's still talking to me? Maria stands paralyzed, mystified by this incoherency. She is positive, now, that it is his wife buried here. The intensity of his grief is frightening.
He laughs another hoarse laugh. "Do you have any idea how strange it is, seeing her in glimpses, not as a whole? It's like - it's like - it's like she's been dismembered, and she's all scattered around, and it - is - exhausting." He falls silent, the only sound the oblivious pattering of rain. The man gives a shaky sigh. "I just want her to be with me again. All of her, the real her."
Maria stares at him with wide, grave eyes. She doesn't, indeed, have any idea how strange it is. The two of them may both have people buried here, but she isn't the same as this man. She cannot remember enough of her parents to see scraps of their ghosts everywhere she looks. She is forever bonded to them through her love for them, but they do not loom over her life like a shadow. She doesn't suffer the kind of pain that makes someone drink by a grave on a dark, frigid day.
"You really ought to get inside, sir," she says, softly but firmly. "You don't want to catch a cold, do you? And it sounds as though you have children to get back to -"
The man suddenly turns back around, eyes flashing. "Do not presume you can tell me what to do, Fraülein," he growls. Maria can't decide whether the slur in his voice makes him more or less threatening. "You don't know me, and I - I do not know why I told you anything. I shouldn't have."
Was it because I reminded you of your dead wife, or are you always talkative when you're intoxicated? "Please, sir," she says. He's mad at her now, mad at the world, but she wants to try one last time to make him see sense. "You shouldn't say out here in the cold -"
"It's always cold." he answers flatly. "Always." He faces Agathe von Trapp's tomb again. Silence swells in the air between them, until he says "I don't know if you're always so stubborn, but if it pleases you, Fraülein, I promise I will go home shortly." A distinct bite of anger is present in his words. "But not - " and his voice breaks, here, cracking like a branch. "Not yet."
Maria knows that there isn't anymore she can do for him. It pains her to see such suffering, and she wonders what he would be like when he's happy and sober. She has the feeling they might rather enjoy each other, if that was the case. But right now, she can't ease his grief anymore than she can bring their loved ones back from the afterlife.
She finally turns and walks away, looking over her shoulder as she goes. He looks more and more like an apparition the farther she goes, mist enveloping his figure like an embrace, as if he has already halfway left the world, and grows ever closer to joining his Agathe in the ground below.