WHO Kyos WHEN July/August WHERE Enodia WHAT Less of a scene and more an extension of a bio? WARNINGSpretention, vague references to incest, mentions of animal death
Kyos has lived the entire thirty years of her life in the house of her father.
No. Not entirely correct.
Start again.
Kyos had survived the first thirty years of her life within-
Not right again. Let’s try once more.
Once upon a time there was a little girl called Drusilla Agrippina. She had been born in Massachusetts in 1991 to a father who longed to control the entire world, but had to settle for a company and a daughter instead. Logic dictates that there must have been a mother, but every one of Drusilla’s childhood drawings had only a blank space where that woman should have existed. Drusilla was not enough mothered and too fathered.
Skip a little ahead:
At night the Enodia is quiet, but it doesn’t feel like other hotels. Kyos doesn’t know this about the Enodia, however. She has never stayed in any hotels before this one, because she has never travelled, nor has she left home. I told you: she is has lived thirty years in the home of her father, and she is still thirty.
She knows, though, that this hotel belongs to the goddess Hecate, and that this is a goddess she had no currency with as child.
We’ll need to skip back a little to that.
Drusilla was taught, from an early age, about the great gods of Rome, but she was taught – by her father – that her father was a greatest of them all. He told her that when Rome was at its greatest, he was its greatest Emperor. Caligula the Great, everything in greatness, and everything his.
Drusilla understood immortality before she understood death. When her dog died, Drusilla let him sleep on the end of her bed for three days before a horrified maid removed him. Drusilla was heartbroken: how would he return from the dead if his body was taken?
Father had to explain: only Father – Holy and Powerful, a God Among Men, the Emperor of an Empire that Should Still Exist – comes back. All other things, save those blessed like himself, must die. Drusilla, one day, must die.
Drusilla cried and cried and cried. She didn’t want to die, and she missed her dog. He would never come back to her. Father would always come back, he promised, but only he.
The other gods she was taught to respect and to worship, and even before she was tall enough to properly reach the shrine, Drusilla lit the candles and incense and made her prayers. She was taught fealty to the gods that came second only to fealty to her father.
(The small kitchen at the top of the Enodia has been made open to Kyos and the others living there, and she takes advantage of this at all hours. The emperor that grows inside her is always hungry, and Kyos isn’t surprised by it anymore. Both Kyos and the emperor share a sire, and he was ever-hungry himself. They both learned their hunger from him, and Kyos is trying to learn to channel it into some sort of new path. (We can only wish her good fortune.)
Kyos cannot bring herself to think of the emperor as a child, even though she feels it kicking and squirming and making its presence clear. In less than a month she is supposed to bring this life into the world, and until then Kyos doesn’t know what to do with herself.
It is a half-life, here in the Enodia, here pregnant with the emperor, here waiting for what will happen next. She has so rarely gotten to make her own choices, and now that she’s got that choice... Kyos is finding that there is a strangling sense of indecision to making decisions.)
Drusilla was always smart- private tutors and the finest lessons that money could buy and a natural desire to learn. But she was smart in only the ways her father wanted her to be. Book smart, smart at reading people, smart at handling herself. Not smart enough to question him.
Drusilla was the woman that fired the gun that killed Caligula. This time around.
But Drusilla was also the woman that ran into the night, praying to all the gods of her childhood for one of them to intervene and save her.
Drusilla was taught to keep to herself. Drusilla was taught that secrets were secrets, and that walls were to be kept strong and firm, and that questions were to be pushed aside. Her life was to be a private room kept locked, and only Caligula held the key.
But Kyos has taken the key, and she is slowly unlocking doors. Some of them don’t want to shift at all, and she has to shove her whole body against them to even have them budge. Sometimes the sound of it makes her worry the whole building will come down around her if she succeeds. And there are some doors that are unwilling to shift at all, as though welded completely shut, but Kyos returns to check them again and again.
In her first two weeks in the Enodia, Drusilla barely leaves her room. (She was still Drusilla then, you see. She was cycling through names she read in magazines, trying them on like a dress that didn’t fit and discarding them again. Hecate told her that she had time, but there was the tick tick ticking of a timer inside then-Drusilla now-Kyos. Not even a goddess could slow that timer down.)
In week three Drusilla left her room, and at the beginning of week four when she decided to talk to someone, she told them her name was Kyos. The name hadn’t stuck to her when she'd been alone in her own hotel room, but when someone said it back to her, Kyos wrapped her hands around it.
She starts talking to more people in the hotel, asking them questions and letting them ask their own. She is honest, where she feels it’s safe. It’s uncomfortable to be honest and makes her feel a little sick, but Caligula had so forbidden honesty with others that it feels like a rebellion. It feels like shooting him in the head all over again. So: I am on the run (she tells them) from my father. (We know who her father is, but Kyos doesn’t share that with the new people she meets. It’s fine for us to know, we won’t go running to tell Caligula were she’s hiding. But other people? Even in this safe hotel, how can she be sure what words escape it?)
She tells people that she’s not keeping the baby, because that feels good and grounding to be able to say aloud. She tells people that she’s from out of state and that she lived along a river. She tells people that she likes horses, and that she likes poetry.
Every time she shares something about herself, no matter how inane, she feels her guts tighten with anxiety, feels her neck muscles tense, feels like she has done a bad thing. The poor thing, she’s been so well trained into it, but she’s fighting against it. She’s been fighting against her father for months, even though she doesn’t even know if he’s alive again.
(He isn’t, not yet, but within a week he will be, and he will be sending people to try and find her. Kyos doesn’t need to know this for sure yet. Let’s give her a little while longer without that knowledge.)
But those doors, the maybe-they're-welded-shut doors, they started to crack a little with each conversation. They're starting to let the daylight in.