Sabine Wren (resistandfight) wrote in light_of_may, @ 2014-02-07 23:42:00 |
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Entry tags: | #flashback, #solo, victoria |
Well, I can't forget this evening or your face as you were leaving
Who: Victoria (and NPCs)
Where: A monastery somewhere in the rural area around Paris
When: The night after Gabriel left (late 1880s?)
Warning: Vague unsettling imagery, displays of violence, suicidal thoughts, etc it’s a bingo
What betrayal could be worse than that of your loved ones?
Victoria didn’t know.
This was the first day after Gabriel had left the city. Left her. She had thought in embracing him she would be able to keep him by her side forever, where they could be happy and create together and inspire each other...and now here she was, sitting on the cold hard floor of a monastery. Alone and cold, wet from the rain, make up running down her face. If only he could he see her now. But of course he wouldn't care, he had left her like this, he was the cause of all this despair. This utter, utter loneliness that cut at her like daggers. To think Victoria thought she had finally found her happiness, her reason for eternity. The one little thing she no longer needed to envy her sister for.
The screaming was making it hard for her to think. Without looking away from the empty fixed point she had laid her eyes on Victoria shushed the wailing men sprawled out around her. “Is this what heartbreak feels like? More like emptiness? Like something wasn't broken, rather...ripped out?”
The man she looked at did not answer, simply repeated ‘please’ over and over and over again until more bloody tears fell down Victoria’s cheeks and she closed her eyes, looking away. She did not open them for some time.
A distinct smell of smoke invaded her nostrils now. Victoria only vaguely recalled having dropped every bit of lamp oil onto the drapes and thrown the lamps themselves over them as she walked further in; that must be it. There were more cries but they were far away and soon enough all choked by coughing. Eventually they would stop. She had read about it.
“How do you become the most important person in one’s life, how do you get them to give you their heart, their soul, their everything and then leave them all alone in the name of some...ideal you cannot possibly reach because it’s not your ideal, it’s another’s, a master’s, and you're simply convinced you must achieve the exact same one?”
Victoria searched for answers in the men’s eyes, focusing on each of the live ones for a few seconds before moving on to the next. Nothing. No answers. Even when she screamed, all her rage hurled out the back of her throat in one simple release of air, they simply cried more.
“I grow weary of crying. I grow weary of you. I am as much finding my salvation here as he is going to find his true north out there. Only I have the good grace to know that.” She stood up, needlessly smoothing a hand over her torn dress. There was no saving it now; much like these men, Victoria realized, as she looked back down at their cowering limp bodies.
Closing her eyes, Victoria dashed in preternatural quickness from one to the next, her fangs and nails making short work of them. The cacophony of screaming and wailing was the only thing that drowned her own thoughts. It was like a dance to her; twirling and dashing and hacking and slashing to a rhythm and beat that no one could hear but Victoria herself. Once they were but limp, lifeless body parts paving the floor of the monastery Victoria was no longer sure how long she had been in there. What she did know was that the fire was chasing her now, its warmth edging closer and closer to her body.
Should she bother to run?
She could see it now, golden and red tongues licking the walls and everything in their wake, the wooden furniture popping and snapping as it burned. And there Victoria stood, the flames dancing in her eyes as she danced in the very edge between life and death, between a daring escape and a failed attempt at one.
No.
Gabriel did not deserve this, she thought at last. He had left her, he did not deserve her life. He deserved nothing, much less the best she had to offer, which was herself.
No.
One last look at the flames, at the sweet, warm release from heartbreak, and Victoria twirled the tail of her dress around and ran. Down and through, down and through, to the inevitable back entrance and then, at last, to the humid air of the Parisian outskirts.
Panting as though she still drew breath, Victoria took the padlock of the servants’ entrance and locked the wooden door behind her. She could faintly hear the people on the lowest levels of the monastery who hadn’t managed to flee in time. They were knocking, pleading, trying the lock. “No!” She screamed. “You will burn like I burn, you will ache like I ache, and you won't ever feel the mercy of a lover’s embrace like I won’t.”
After all, her life was much too precious, but Gabriel could stand to feel a few others in his conscience.
If indeed he had one.