Magda
Disclaimer: I do not own any aspect of Young Dracula, no, not even Magda. *sob*
When she was young, barely twenty years old, she loved all the black lace that was sewn onto the hems of her dim dresses, and the splendour of the colour scarlet as it spilled across fabric. When she was twenty five, with long eyelashes and belladonna in the eyes (it wasn't poisonous to vampires) and scarlet lips and black lace dresses she met a man who won her affections over a game of chess (he cheated; she would've never gone with him had he played fair).
They waited just over two hundred years, simply because Magda couldn't do it, and she didn't know why. She was a beautiful monster, with riches piled high and golden rings on her fingers. Yet there was never a time when Magda let go of it all, and just let the world see her for who she was.
Truthfully she lost who she was as soon as she let herself forget why when she was a child, she wanted to play dress up with the china dolls other breather children played with, instead of reading dusty old tomes about vampire law.
Her first child was a girl, called Ingrid with baby blue eyes that never seemed to change other than gaining specks of violet in them, and full lips, a pale complexion and a much too innocent mind. Well, Magda had managed to ruin her innocence and her love for her when the second child after a night where they had both had too many bottles of Duchess to see straight, a boy was born with baby blue eyes that turned sapphire and hair with a feather like quality.
When her husband would gripe to her about how their son Vladimir (known as Vladdy to her husband - she never understood his silly nickname) wasn't interested in the fun of biting breathers and instead preferred playing with them (do not play with your food Vladimir!), Magda held back the words "he gets it from me" because she was a vampiress and she wasn't a child anymore.
Vladdy would grow out of it, just like she had.
(But oh, sometimes she wished she hadn't)
The Count became clingy, his eyes not containing the malicious glint they used to, his curtained hair making him look aged and his cheekbones making him look gaunt, instead of distinguished and handsome. His fingers were more like bone with every passing day, and the only reason that Magda stayed so long was she hadn't met somebody else with enough money to take her in, who was as handsome as the Count had once been.
In those final months, she developed characteristics she had never had before; she pouted and pressed her lips together more whenever she had the urge to laugh, or smile in a non-sexy way and practised it on Vladdy who had simply looked at her and asked why Mummy wasn't smiling. She fought the words "Mummy isn't smiling because Mummy can't stand to be around your father anymore. Mummy isn't smiling because these might be the last memories you have of me, and I don't want you to remember me as something other than Countess Dracula."
But she said them at night, as she tucked her sapphire eyed son into bed. Not that he could hear them, captured in the realms of sleep.
That was the whole idea.
She also began to call Vlad 'Vladdy' more often, knowing that it made her youngest bristle at the unfairness of being subjected to a humiliating nickname when his sister was not (when she was younger, Crone had always called her Magdalia, because she liked to show that she was proper, and did not give her child nicknames - even if that wasn't her name).
The final new mannerism was calling nearly everybody "darling" when she finished a sentence. This worked in nearly every instance: she called the Count darling as he kissed her neck and she looked round the room for other suitors, she called Ingrid darling when she told her that she wanted to be just like her (don't be) and she called Vlad darling when he asked her why she was never around anymore, and she called the handsome and rich werewolf darling as he promised to make her his black hearted bride.
(So, maybe she didn't call everybody darling. She called only the most important people darling, like they were jewels in an ornate box that needed the right motivation to still twinkle around her neck like stars in the night)
Years passed, and Patrick was just as young and handsome and rich as he had always been, and she was just as beautiful and captivating and evil as before.
And she missed her children.
The thought came to her, quite out of the blackness one day, when she was feigning sleep in her coffin, a habit she had picked up back in the 19th Century. So she travelled to Translyvania, to her old castle, without Patrick, telling him "this is something I have to do by myself".
Also, she didn't want Vladdy and Ingrid to lay eyes upon the man she left their father for. She didn't quite know why.
But the shock she got when she arrived - it almost made her stilled heart begin beating once again.
The castle was empty, the nurseries empty - her children, gone. And as she stepped out of the castle at nightfall, the peasants hands itched towards pitchforks and torches, only slowed by her magical gaze.
The Count had run away, like the coward he was, and dragged her babies with him.
Magda was their mother, and she was the one who could track them down.
And she did, arriving in a wave of red lips and black lace and pale cheeks and ebony hair, and she tried to avoid looking in her little darling's (the children, the children, think of the children - she met his eyes straight on) eyes, as suddenly she felt very young, and it wasn't because of the make up products that apparently made her younger.
It was the fact Vladdy and Ingrid seemed pleased - well, ecstatic - to see her. She knew that it wouldn't last, but she would take advantage and run her long fingers and sharp fingernails through their soft hair and sing them a little known Transyvanian lullaby so quiet she could barely hear her own song - the Count wouldn't be able to.
And then she was gone, in a flurry of dresses and petticoats and sarcastic remarks and red lipstick prints on letters never sent.
Magda was with Patrick, who she loved, she truly did, as much as she could love (she never told him that she loved him because that would be admitting that he'd affected her heart and her head and Magda was untouchable) but there was a niggle of doubt that had never been in her mind before saying You Love Them More.
Them was Vladdy and Ingrid, who seemed more and more like her every single day (don't be).
Somehow, in between the coming and going and letters and slayers and jealously and Wolfie (darling, you were never meant to be - you make everything so much harder, I can't fail another child so you'll have to go - the Count thinks he's so fabulous at raising my children so he can have another) Magda missed them growing up.
She missed Ingrid's so called soul mate, a half fang who apparently had a gift for drawing and shaggy hair and who died fighting for Ingrid (she appreciated it). She missed Vlad's transition from naiveity to knowledge, brown to black, bright to dark, the need to escape the vampire life to accepting it, to wearing the crown of the Grand High Vampire and The Chosen One (if she had stayed around would she have a finger in the pie, so to speak- but no, she would not think that way).
She missed their blood mirror birthdays.
She missed everything.
And Magda did not feel, she did not regret, she did not ache when she lay with her lover by her side at night.
Magda did not pray for another chance, another go at reality, she did not caress the one family portrait they had that had been painted many years before every dawn and every dusk, she did not feel a solitary tear crawling down her cheek whenever she thought of her decisions.
She did not think about them every single god awful day of her unlife (she was not running on borrowed time, she wasn't, she wouldn't).
Madga Westerna did not love.
She did not hurt.
She did not regret, she did not miss.
She did not yearn for a second chance.
That's what she told everyone, that's what everyone thought.
Magda, however, did lie.