I do not own American Horror Story: Freak Show.
And I do not own a Massimo. Or an Elsa. *Whew*
Everything That Has a Beginning Has an End
(This chapter rated M for gore, just to be safe)
Elsa's Dark Pinocchio
"I've got no strings
To hold me down
To make me fret
Or make me frown
I had strings
But now I'm free
There are no strings on me."
-Disney's Pinocchio
Fraulein Elsa Mars was trying not to shatter.
Because Massimo, her Italian carpenter, was returned to her.
And the gulf between them was too wide, too deep, too vast to cross.
And it was destroying her.
When she had finally summoned the inner strength to release him from her relieved, desperate grip, she had drawn back and looked into his deep, dark eyes.
She had seen gentility.
Proper decorum.
And nothing else at all.
His love for her, his all-consuming love, was gone.
Vaporized, bled away.
Gone.
Just as he had said it was in that hideous letter so many years ago.
He, a man, simply looked upon her, a woman.
And nothing more.
She had cast her gaze down and away, refusing to accept the truth emanating from his core.
Asked him if he wished to accompany her to her tent.
For refreshment.
Or a bite to eat.
Converse, pass the time.
Anything at all.
And he, having not seen her in sixteen long, dry years, had politely refused her.
Refused.
And simply requested a quiet tent in which to slumber after his long journey.
A vision had arisen behind her eyes.
Her reaching out, slapping his lined face.
Screaming into that passive visage to see me! I am here! You are here! See me! Love me!
Then taking his precious, gentle face in her hands and kissing his lips.
Lovingly. Passionately.
Willing him to wake from his living dead torpor.
And finally, finally, being cherished once again.
And happy.
And truly, truly loved.
But she had not.
She had wrenched her emotions into a stranglehold and curtly nodded.
Guided him to an empty tent.
And left him alone there.
Escaping to her own tent, she'd released her emotions in a flurry of rage and heartbreak that no one, ever, would see.
No one.
And the one person to whom she might have allowed to see her grief she could not.
For she had killed that person.
Thrown a knife right into her eye.
Staged a ridiculous suicide.
And now wished she could take it all back.
Because then she may not have felt so all alone.
But now she was here.
In the barn where her best friend's miserable, hurting, handless son lay helpless and waiting.
And she, Elsa Mars, had brought him a miracle.
A master craftsman.
The main attraction.
And a flask of strong whiskey.
The opening act.
Which she now shoved in the boy's mouth, quite against his will.
She had no soul just then for pleasantries, to listen to the pitiful bag of bones argue and whine.
It was all she could do just to hold herself together as it was without expending energy to coddle him.
Because behind her approached her Italian, long gone these many years and now returned.
Returned and removed.
She remembered doing this, this reaching out, so long ago in Munich.
Her hope, her love, her personal feeling of validation and self-fulfillment.
It made her sick now, made her swell with longing and regret.
And so the experience was not quite the same.
But she did catch a whiff of nostalgia as Massimo introduced himself to her lobster boy, those surreshing dulcet tones resonating straight to her bone marrow as they always had done.
And she found herself captivated again.
Loving him again.
Believing in him again.
Just a little.
Stowing his syringe away, daring to look him in the eye, if only for a moment.
And listening to him weave his dream for the crippled man-child in the bed.
Remembering what it was like to have true hope, true possibility, true purpose.
Feeling Massimo touch her arm, ever so lightly, as he moved around the dimly lit space.
And promising to herself that she would not ask for, hope for, more.
Watching him take measurements. Her showing the supine creature in the bed her secret wooden legs.
And insisting, no, demanding that the sorry, self-pitying child see Massimo, revere him for the savior he truly was.
It was almost against her will.
But they were there, those words and actions, out into the air.
It was the most honest she had been with herself, and anyone, since her impromptu confession to Ethel Darling.
And it hurt.
It hurt so badly.
And he, the beautiful bastard, speaking to her in Italian, rhythmic, divine language she had once so loved to hear flow silken from his lips.
Now cut her to shreds as he murmured.
And just as before, she clung to every word, every syllable, every nuance of it.
She could barely understand him now, it had been so very long.
But she did understand.
And she repeated his words, slowly, back to him.
And listened to her soul yearn like violin strings in the aching melancholy of the lost ever after.
She did not think she could not bear it without cracking apart and bleeding out from within.
Deep down.
That heart rending nostalgia.
In Greek it literally meant 'pain from an old wound'.
And so it was.
Those wounds that had never quite healed.
Not for her.
Grievous, soul-scarring wounds.
Knowing the truth.
That was bad enough.
Hearing Massimo's story all over again, from his very own lips instead of words and lines on paper, was worse.
Much worse.
And it threatened to tear her apart.
She had told him, moments before, that he had been a fool.
And he had taken the slight from her, with a quiet, knowing smile as he always had.
A fool, she had said.
And, yes, he had been.
But so had she.
It was she who had ignored his growing darkness, refused to see it.
She who had wallowed in her grief so completely, sloshing its filth out onto his soul.
Staining it, blackening it, poisoning it.
Until he threw away everything they might create together.
Just to raze to the ground those who took her legs.
She trembled and quaked within herself as he told the story.
She couldn't help it.
She added her own parts, such as they were. Even managing wistful smiles and passing glances of fond memories.
Before the savagery and cruelty of their ruin took hold of her again and she could go no further.
And Massimo continued the reminder of his story on, without her.
Because she was weak, had been weak.
And he had been strong, so strong.
Once.
Until the monster-in-chief, as the whimsical bastard termed it, had broken his strength.
And his humanity.
The tortures he had faced, the miseries he had endured.
Hers, as bad as it had been, had lasted mere minutes.
His had lasted months.
Because of her.
Cruelties and subjections she could never imagine.
But had haunted her nightmares and waking visions ever since she had learned of them.
So casually, so lightly, so removed and unaffectedly, Massimo told the story.
Of how the man had crushed, burned, and annihilated his humanity.
His love. His joy.
His soul.
All because of her.
He told it as if none of it mattered any longer.
And maybe to him it did not.
Which was perhaps the greatest torment to her of all.
And she, the cause of all his pain, sat witness to his demise.
Because she owed him that.
In her love. In her loyalty.
She owed him the pain it caused her to hear it all spoken aloud from his very own lips.
And know it was her fault.
When he said she did not write him back after reading that horrid, terrible letter he had penned, his dark, deep eyes locked with hers.
And she saw no judgment.
And no hate.
And no love.
And she could not stop her tears.
And Jimmy Darling, the handless fool, still thought that true love and romance would overcome all, trump all, darkness and evil.
Would, could win.
Which was a lie.
And one day, if he continued on this mortal coil long enough, he would come to recognize that lie for what it truly was.
A fool's errand.
A sham.
A waste.
A carnival ruse.
Because if she and Massimo could not live on together, there was no hope for her in all this world at all.
Not truly.
And the greatest savagery would be that she would endure on.
With that knowledge.
Alone.
Without Massimo.
It seemed near the end of his story that he almost began to feel.
Something.
But then buried it down again.
With an empty smile.
And a flippant, shallow colloquialism.
Before he gathered his instruments.
And fairly fled the darkened barn.
Leaving Elsa with her refreshed grief.
And a handless baby in a bed.
Massimo
He told her he could not love.
Could not hope.
Could not grieve.
And that was true.
But there was one thing that he could do.
He could hate.
And keep it all inside.
The waking hours for Massimo Dolcefino were manageable for the most part.
He busied himself with mechanical tasks.
Mechanical interactions.
Mechanical existence.
Then, when the night closed in and his eyelids drooped, he returned.
To those darkened rooms.
To the locked cells.
To the pain and anguish and torture.
Of Dr. Hans Groper.
A fool, he had been a fool.
Elsa was correct on that observation.
He had dispatched them all, one by one.
And then been shot, caught, entrapped.
By a monster.
He had told Elsa the truth.
His body had survived.
But only in the most basic sense.
The creature in human guise had done everything he could to bring his helpless victim to the brink of death.
And then cruelly torn the release of death away from him.
And let him live.
Just to begin the process all over again.
Massimo had yearned for death, prayed for it.
Reached out to it with open, trembling, blood-spattered arms.
But the Angel of Death had never arrived to visit upon him her kiss of peace.
And so he had lived on.
Until he had been set free from those cells.
Where he had left his humanity, his heart.
His soul.
And now in the waking hours, with practice and determination, he could survive.
Except around her.
Elsa.
Once the love of his life, the rare and beautiful bird. Crippled yet healing and whole.
Within and without.
Once he had lived for her.
And now, her flowery light perfume scent mingled with the stench of ozone as Groper seared with electric fire his most tender of fleshly parts.
The sound of her voice partially drowned out by the screaming of the tortured man still echoing within his own head.
As his body endured torture after torture after hideous torture.
The touch of her was the touch of the electrodes, the burning iron, the blood stinging his eyes as he suffered time and time again at the hands of the one who found him a mere plaything.
To be discarded away in darkness and shivering, biting cold for days at a time.
To lay in his own filth and bile and squalor.
With no reprieve or liberation at all.
To press his lips to her skin, as she so obviously wished for him to do, would be to taste death.
His death, flaunted to him so many times by Dr. Groper. And then taken away only to present again at a later time when he silently pleaded for it so.
The sight of her face overlapped with the grim, inhumane visage of a man staring down at a science experiment of less value than a insect.
And those cold, cold, dead eyes filled with dark fascination at his latest consideration of the brutalized thing before him.
As he walked away from the bleeding, filthy, wretched pile of man flesh collapsed, twitching and writhing upon a cold, concrete floor.
The mere sight of Elsa, so changed and yet so very the same, reminded him of his failure. Shoved it in his face as a punished dog to a pile of its own stinking refuse.
Her in the light and love of life.
What he could have had if not for his commitment to her, his all-consuming vengeance.
In the name of the lady Elsa.
And so, even as he had once loved her, he now hated her.
So deeply that he could actually feel nothing at all.
Which was a saving grace of sorts, really.
For otherwise, he might have soundlessly, mindlessly strangled the very life from her body.
At any given moment.
In the darkest crevices of night, he still awoke from slumber, sweating, fighting, gasping for air.
From vivid recollections of his time as Hans Groper's captive specimen.
And when those instances occurred, he was not himself.
And those were the times when he was most dangerous.
And for all those reasons, that was why Massimo Dolcefino felt he had no humanity left in him.
And chose remain there, out of reach from her.
Because whatever else he was in this world, he was not intentionally cruel.
And would not intentionally hurt her.
Though he did make her weep with his tale relayed to the boy in the bed.
Made her eyes and entire soul within open and vulenerable to his words, to his meaning.
To his revelations.
Because she must understand.
As much as he could allow.
And then when the boy was seen to and his story was told and his amore was heartbroken and distraught yet again, he fled.
Because though he was without humanity, he was not without gentility.
And he could no longer face her yearning, her tears, her bleeding existence.
And he could not comfort her.
Because he was not a man.
Any longer.
He was only Massimo.
A simple carpenter.
With a soul and heart of wood.
And that was not enough.
Long chapter for me, yeah. But I am not going through that again.
*Proffers boatloads of Kleenex*
Wow, I didn't really anticipate how dark that would be until I wrote it. Sheesh.
But I can't apologize. I'm only telling their truth, in the end.
So basically for Massimo, aversion therapy here. Of the most gruesome form. Until there are no strings of humanity holding him together. Or so he thinks. :/
It looks like there's no way out for our tragic pair, I guess.
But I'm known for happy story endings (save for the previous one) so you'll just have to decide if you trust me.
Well, do you?
Thanks to brigid1318, 8Girls8Boys, sweet Grace, GG, and jessicalangefan for holding my hand and coming into the darkness with me. We'll find the light at the end I'm sure. :)