Hey! This has taken quite long again, but I do hope you enjoy the following chapter 4. At least it's quite long as a recompense for the long delay. :) Just to warn you, this story is progressing rather slow and lingering, meandering if you will, so if you tend to rather be one for quick developments – I will not rush this, for I enjoy reveling in every sensation, trying to get deeply into the feeling. Thank you for reading! Comments are always sheer joy! :)
4
It is the absence of everything.
Nothing is present, all is distant.
If there is one thing she feels, it is tiredness. The kind of tiredness that weighs heavily on mind and body, the kind that seeps deeply into the bones and down to the core. Like a seashell sinking down to the ocean floor.
Even if she were conscious enough to want to get a hold on anything, her surroundings, the people with her, the time of day even, she is still too far away from everything.
There is no strength within her body now and whenever she has the notion of some of that tiredness fading, losing the relentless grasp on her, there is a tinge of nausea that approaches her before any orientation, before she can gather any bearings and the fear of the pain she instinctively senses coming is enough to send her back down and further, further down, sinking deeper.
There are voices then. They must be shouting or she would not be able to hear them so clearly.
"Vanessa, stay here, please!"
"Let me to get to her, quickly or I'll send you out, Mr. Chandler!"
She feels movement around her and for the first time she wonders why they are so loud, so upset. Not much time can have passed, what would move them so?
She cannot leave them to their own devices, she cannot leave them alone when they are so upset, the urge to be with them, to help them arises within and she forces herself back to the surface, gripping tightly onto the borders of what she feels. Even though she knows it will bring pain.
"Why has she still not woken up, doctor?"
It is the father's voice now. How did he get there too?
"Pardon me, Sir Malcolm, but actions now, questions later. In short: She has lost a lot of blood. Before and after the shot wounded her."
There is a brief pause and she hears a door close with a sound that rings in her ears. There is so much noise.
"But Victor, tell me she's not…she's not…!"
Ethan.
The pained sound of his voice reminds her of her will to break through the surface.
She starts gripping again, she imagines her hands clawing at the textile around her, but there is still so little strength.
"No, Ethan", she hears the logically detached voice of the doctor reply with stern determination.
"She is still human and she is still breathing. How does her hand feel?"
She knows without seeing that he is asking Ethan this to distract him, to keep his mind off his despair. The doctor does not need to know this. He needs Ethan to stay calm.
"Cold", Ethan answers, strained.
There are different sounds now, the metallic sounds of medical tools again, the ones she knows so well. The doctor is preparing something, only halfway concentrated on Ethan's distress.
"There you have it. Blood loss", comes his dry reply.
"What can I do? Tell me, Victor!"
There is something in the deep, low timbre of Ethan's voice that she has only ever heard twice before; each of the times she had made him aim a gun at her. She recognises instantly that it is fear.
"Should she wake, keep her still."
The sound of a fingernail tipping against the glass of a syringe.
She is too distant from everything to feel repulsed or afraid.
Again? Must this be? she simply wonders. Is this not about her? If there is anything she wants, it is to continue sleeping if that is what it is. There will be no need to keep her controlled. She is too far away to react against the doctor's instruments.
But she feels Ethan's touch clearly now and it is so light, so tender that she thinks she is only imagining it.
The sound of her own breathing grows louder in her own ears. She hears herself breathe for the first time since…when has it all started? When has the world around her begun to tilt, to slip sideways?
A few audible breaths follow until there finally is light. She sees.
From where she is lying, she looks up at Ethan's face, immediately into the warm brown of his eyes.
What she finds there is an imprint of the fear she has heard in his words. And so many answers to questions she never dared to ask.
Will all be broken, will all be gone if she tells him how deeply she feels for him?
Will he leave her yet again, leave her to the dark figure she has always been?
Will he be scared and frightened away, sent to find another, another who would never cause him pain and only bring him bliss, the joyous happiness of being alike, being normal, being human, one of the ordinary, one of those whose stories she has grown up with and been raised on like any other girl although she has never been alike them in any other but her sensitivity, the way she was so easily bruised, so easily hurt by one whom she loved?
She knows that he is more than simply human, more than a man like those she has come to know, yet his darkness seems so much easier overcome.
It would never be enough to frighten her, to scare her away from him.
The certainty of this is the same certainty wherewith she knows her name, her body, her sensitivities.
They have been the only ones to handle each other with grace and not violence, with empathy and not terror.
Yet she would never blame him for leaving her behind, for choosing another.
He is not to blame for her feeling, for her having chosen him. She had chosen to love him and no other without ever remembering when she had made her choice.
When she had had him sit across her in Sir Malcolm's library?
When she had watched him shoot meaninglessly in order to entertain a cheering crowd that had lost the thrill in their own lives? They live for a different kind of thrill.
Or had it been when had taken her hand in his own, when she had been drenched in cold sweat, a broken little thing stripped of all its allure, scratching at her pallid skin, longing to open those veins that thrummed with another's power underneath her skin?
No one has taken my hand so sweetly for many years.
He was not responsible for her having chosen him and not another, for her having placed herself in his hands, for having committed to him her heart in its entirety.
What would she do with all the love she feels for him if he declines it?
What will she do with her heart that has been handed out, bestowed to one who would be overwhelmed with it for all the right reasons? She would never be able to place it back in her chest.
She could give it to their Lord, then, should he take it with all the darkness she has given way to. Would He forgive?
Ethan believes so, does he not?
She knows he is hesitant, reluctant to admit to it, but he does believe in forgiveness, in the good in everyone. That there can be absolution. Even in her case.
She thinks she can even see it in his glance now, as he is looking down on her from somewhere above.
She remembers that they are in his room and feels her back relaxing against – cushions? She cannot see anything but him, the face of the man she loves without limitations.
Still there is this gash stretching across the tanned skin of his cheek.
Does the doctor keep his pain away, too? With the syringes click-clacking or other medication?
She breathes in and out and his very presence so close to her appears to lift most of the weight off her that has been lasting on her, pulling her under and for the moment, she stops sinking deeper, further.
"Ethan", she mumbles, her voice that of a stranger, a weak imitation of what she knows it as and yet more than a whisper.
The relief this faint attempt at speaking earns her seems to set his eyes alight as it is visibly taking over his worried features.
"It's alright, 'Nessa, I'm here", he answers and his low voice rumbles soothingly through her body and again, he feels so familiar, so close to her battered, bruised core.
Trust, she has often thought, is much more than the knowledge of harmlessness, more than the certainty that one particular person will do you no harm.
Trusting someone with a secret and trusting someone with one's heart to her appear to be two completely different things that all too frequently get merged into one another as though they meant the same.
That a secret like hers is safe with someone is one thing; that she feels her heart and soul are safe with that someone entirely another.
Love is a grand word for it implicates so much and stands for nothing if there is no history accounting for why it even exists.
She knows as she looks up into those familiar brown eyes of his while the relief of him seeing her still somewhat close to life spreads across his features that have etched themselves in her every daydream, her every happy fantasy, that if that is what trusting him with her heart and soul means, she loves him.
"Miss Ives, can you hear me?" she hears the doctor ask then. Has he even spoken?
"Do you understand my words? I asked what you feel."
She tries to concentrate as the doctor's face appears at the edge of her vision, slightly blurred though and not as clear as Ethan's. Sky-blue clear eyes.
What does she feel?
She realises now that sunlight, bright afternoon sunlight breaks its way through the half-closed shutters, a golden sun, the kind of sun she remembers from when she was a little girl.
Ethan must know these gloriously golden rays.
She remembers that she has never been to America, but she can imagine him there, under this golden sun, crossing a field bared by the autumn or tending to horses with the kindness of his that matches no other.
And there is another thing she suddenly understands; it is that although the sun is shining, throwing bright golden rays through Ethan's room and across the bed, the cream white cushions and blankets, she does not feel any warmth.
Before she had come to her senses, she would not have noticed, but now she longs to hide away deep down in the warmth of her bedsheets and instinctively begins to shudder.
"I understand you are cold, Miss Ives", the doctor notes as Ethan carefully pulls her blanket up a little further. She must only have been halfway covered by it before, her arms and upper body exposed to the cold.
Her left arm feels so far away from her, but she avoids turning her head to catch a glance at it.
Instead, she feels herself reply to the doctor with a nod of her head and with a rush there is another feeling. The nausea she remembers from before returns with a flash and she feels bile rise within her throat, threatening her like a bad memory.
Even now she feels humiliation as she struggles to fight the sudden and all the more violent impulse to retch.
She sees Ethan quickly get up from her bedside to get something and with the help of simple willpower she manages to control herself until he has it.
Neither of the men she knows so well leave or awkwardly turn away.
"This was supposed to be better by now", she hears the doctor mumble.
So this has happened before, she gathers detachedly.
"What will help?" Ethan asks and keeps his voice down.
"Another one. But this is the last of those, she has had several already. This will do."
"Hope or knowledge?" There is no edge to Ethan's voice, only the need for reassurance.
"This will do, Ethan", comes the stoic reply.
Again, the metallic sound of his fingernail tipping against the glass body of the syringe.
Victor's face appears before her eyes now, closer.
"I am sorry, Miss Ives, for, again, this will hurt a bit. Now that you are conscious, there might be pain." There is true empathy in his professional words and that tiny, apologetic smile in one corner of his pale lips.
She manages to numbly look down her right arm as the doctor pulls back the blanket so her skin in the pale hollow between her upper and lower arm is exposed to him again.
She watches as he presses the vein, adjusts the syringe.
"Pain purifies", she hears herself utter without any particular emotion, as if to appease the doctor's worries, the words tumbling from her lips, an impulse.
She cannot remember who has told her this, but there it is, buried so deeply within her that it only comes out now, when inside is outside and within is out there.
As the tip of the needle enters her skin again, indeed there is pain, but she does not pay attention to it for in that moment, she feels Ethan's touch again, brushing ever so lightly against the fingers of her right hand and she instinctively grasps it, clinging to his warm skin with her remaining force, never to let go.
There is a dream next.
She knows it is a dream for she is not who she has been.
Something is different. She knows it although what it is she doesn't.
There is a void, a wide open space with darkness lurking around its edges.
A large dinner table like those she had grown up with amidst the darkness.
Upon her arrival, she is being scrutinised.
She knows each of the people sitting around the massive wooden banquet table.
First she sees Sir Malcolm, then the doctor, then Dorian.
She feels nothing as her gaze slowly wanders over their faces. Every pair of eyes is focused entirely on her which provokes cool shivers running, crawling, creeping down her spine the longer the moment drags on.
More seats are filled and as she looks closer, she recognises – Sembene, Gladys, Peter, Mina and she feels her entire body grow cold in a matter of seconds. Even her mother. Her father, the first one, the official one.
Are they not…?
"Have a seat, Vanessa. Sit among us as though you were one of us."
Sir Malcolm is the first to address her.
He smiles. It is one of his hard smiles that mean no kindness. The ones she has learned to fear as a girl.
With the shivers still creeping down her spine and an odd feeling in her stomach she obeys, taking her seat at the top of the large table that seems to have no end.
All eyes stare at her from all sides.
She cannot take looking back at them for longer than a second, so she looks down at the wooden surface of the table before her where there are no table sets, no dishes. Only glasses are there, one for every one of them.
They are all filled with crimson coloured fluid. Wine? she wonders.
In the corner of her right eye, she watches Mina as she takes the glass before her in her pale fingers that shine white in the half-light, the sharp contrasts between darkness and light.
She gasps audibly as Mina turns her glass upside down and with horror she watches the fluid spilling all over Mina's place at the table, staining Mina's white dress, running all over her skin and the wood of the table. The fluid oozes languidly, lazily.
"No, Vanessa. No wine is drunk here. It is only blood, you see. Do not fear what you know so well."
Mina's voice sounds drenched of all humanity, metallic and yet horribly spiteful. It makes Vanessa's stomach churn.
"Have we not shown you blood?" her first father joins in, Gordon, the one who Vanessa has never felt anything but polite familiarity for.
"Have you not seen everything? In our house, in our gardens?" asks Gladys, her eyes full of disdain. "How could no one see you were his? With all the sorrow you brought upon us, you showed your heritage."
Vanessa casts her glance back down, waiting for everything to be over, for all of them to be gone.
"And you enjoyed it, did you not?", she hears Dorian's voice ask, lasciviously and she looks back up to find him sizing her up with a sly little grin.
"Have you not cut my chest and – licked the blood off my heated skin?"
"Forbidden desires – were you not always drawn to them like a moth to the flame?" Mina asks, framing her face with her bloodied hands.
"Oh, how I wanted to save you. How I tried…" her mother Claire's eyes are filled with tears as she speaks those words.
Vanessa's head spins with all the voices, all the accusations and questions.
She longs to escape, to flee, but her feet seem rooted where they are and her hands lie on the surface of the table as though they were made of stone, numb and cold.
Suddenly, she sees Sir Malcolm look at her with concern in his light eyes.
"We make it hard on you, do we not? I guess we always have."
There is a pause and their eyes meet. A breath, shared almost, before he continues.
"Yet for all that we have done to you, for all the pain we've caused you, for all the more ostracised, disenfranchised we made you, you could never bring yourself to hate us. You only ever hated yourself. Loathed yourself even. For all you think you did."
Vanessa feels tears on her cheeks and soon they spill all over her chest, the dress she wears she cannot see and the wooden surface before her. They drip down her arms to her fingertips.
The doctor is suddenly looking at her as well, pale as ever. His voice is calm and low as he speaks.
"You simply never stopped loving us for the little good that was in us. Does that make you the worst of all of us? Or the only one truly worth saving?"
Vanessa swallows and some of her tears leave.
"Why did you not just hate us?", asks Mina.
"Me for destroying your family?"
Sir Malcolm.
"Me for bringing out the worst in you you thought you had banished long ago?"
Dorian Grey.
"Would it not have been so much easier?"
It is a darker voice and it comes from behind her, whispering in her ear. Dracula.
No. Not him!
Vanessa closes her eyes and suppresses the violent urge to tremble with every limb in her body. She will not show her fear, not now.
"No", she utters with her voice so small, so frail, so weak.
"Hatred is for those who do not seek to live."
Now he laughs the way she knows so well from all her other altercations with him. Demolishing.
"And you do? Do not attempt to tell me lies, Vanessa. I see through them for I know you far too well."
He draws out every single word now, relishing the sound of his own voice.
"You wanted to die from the moment you saw sin. The moment you saw what could be done. To you, to everyone. In the end, it made you an epitome of sin yourself. You became what you feared. And loathed yourself, did you not? So much loathing, so much hatred all for yourself?"
Vanessa bites back a scream and presses her eyes shut. Her breathing is ragged now, strained with pent-up dread and fear.
"You do not truly believe I ever surrendered to you? All those years of pleasure turning into pain, those years of fighting my very body. You honestly believed I would forsake all my battles so you could bite me and fuck me and drag me into the abyss alongside your wretched black spot of a soul?"
There is a moment without anything before words appear from within the dark behind her.
"But you let me."
Vanessa opens her eyes now.
"I did no such thing. I let him come. I tricked you. I waited. I knew he would find me. He would find what was left of me."
Her head sinks down onto the table covered in her tears and she thinks she can hear her heartbeat through the wood. So quick.
"And if it had to be over, it would be him. He would do it. He and no other."
A realisation hits her and her body grows cold all over again.
Her heart drops to her knees and she struggles to her feet, hastily letting her gaze search all the faces of those sitting around the massive table.
"Where is he? Why is he not here?"
"Yes, where is he?" retorts Dracula from somewhere behind and laughs another dreadful laughter.
"Where is your protector when you need him?"
He yells this question and Vanessa begins to shake. Her feet seem so weak now, carrying nothing anymore.
"He left you. He deserted you. He threw your desperate little heart right back at you."
Vanessa's breathing grows even quicker as she listens to those horrible words, her eyes searching frantically for the one person who is missing at this table.
The one.
The one.
"And yet!" It is everybody's voices conjoined now, stating it.
"Yet you need him. Yet you love him."
The table seems shrunken now, every one of the people coming closer, closing in on her, while Vanessa keeps searching for him, the one, the protector, the lupus dei and cannot find him.
The presence of all these people and the realisation that she does not find him are enough to drive the last remaining sense out of her.
And Vanessa screams.
The scream dies out on her cracked, dry lips and her lids fly open and she gasps for air and pants frantically, her heart still racing.
Her skin seems to be set aflame, there is heat everywhere and already she struggles against the bedsheets, so much heat and such a hastily beating heart with so small a body to carry it.
Her vision is blurred and she sees faces, the same two as before while she breathes heavily, focused on her racing heart and the heat that is taking over her.
"She's highly feverish", she hears the doctor utter. And for once, there is no professional detachment in his voice as he calls out orders.
"Get water, Ethan, now! And textile, anything you find! Quick!"
On the edge of her vision, she sees Ethan leave, barely suppressed panic visibly spread across his face as he practically runs out of the room.
Immediately she feels her hand reaching out for him before it is carefully put back on the mattress by the doctor. His touch is so cold against her hot skin.
She must have closed her eyes for when she looks again, Ethan is there and both men pull the blanket from her legs with quick, efficient hands, uncovering her body that still feels unbearably hot.
"Now, drench the pieces of cloth with cold water and wrap them around her calves, so. Let us put some more textile underneath her legs so the mattress stays dry."
The doctor's voice is low and she hardly listens nor does she feel the men's touch on her skin, the heat has taken over all her other senses.
"You needn't be so gentle, Ethan. She will hardly care right now. We need to lower her fever as fast as we can."
"Another fever dream like this…it's…horrible" she hears Ethan mumble as she feels the pieces of damp cloth being adjusted to her legs.
Another?
At first she feels nothing other than the heat on the skin at her legs, but slowly, very slowly, she starts believing that the textile is something akin to cold.
It takes so long.
Her head falls back onto the cushions, her hair a tangled, stringy mess.
Her eyelids shut and as the fever ever so slowly begins to lower, she reaches out again, blindly and her right hand finds Ethan's again.
"Please", she breathes, hardly having the voice to speak, "please don't leave."
She hears his breathing. Such a beloved sound, even now. All the more now.
His scent, of the wilderness, the woods, the dust of a foreign earth is the only one she can bare now. She believes to even smell the sun on him, such a lovely, light-filled scent.
"I won't. Never again, Vanessa. I promise."
She feels his fingers tenderly pull her messy, sweat-covered hair to one side of the cushion so her neck is less hot.
He has spoken in a soft, low voice, but the determination in those words is almost a visible, tangible thing and it would make her smile had the exhaustion not the best of her now and she feels herself drifting away yet again, dreading the world inside her head, but still feeling his hand safely around hers.