daniel webster (occupation: recluse) (ex_published349) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-08-22 22:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | !penny dreadful(s), *log, daniel webster, mina murray |
[Log: Penny Dreadful]
Who: Daniel Webster and Mina Harker
What: Noms.
Where: London, Penny Dreadful.
When: Now.
Warnings/Rating: Mild.
Mina thought the moon gibbous. She'd no scholarly knowledge about moon cycles, and study of the firmament hadn't particularly been of interest before, but she felt certain the moon was gibbous on this night. It was a lovely word--gibbous-- and she tried it on her tongue, as if her altered state meant the syllables would taste different there.
Everything felt different now. The world was clad in magnificence, and she'd longed for a brighter word than bright once. In her youth, on that gilt shore of her girlhood, she'd longed for language to describe what she would have in the world. She envisioned ballrooms, candles flickering and dance cards on ribbons suspended from wrists like bird bones. She would dance all evening, and her partner would be enamoured, and she wanted a word for that brightness, for that world she'd been so certain would be hers. Never a doubt had she, never a moment of faltering. The world of her girlhood was devoid of shadows, bereft of understanding, and lacking in depth. She'd been a shallow thing, as pale of constitution as she was pallid of face. Traditionally pretty, and a vacancy between her ears, she'd clung to Vanessa and found the other girl's darkness ugly, and yet beloved.
Until it all changed.
The world was no longer gilt. The world was no longer bright.
And yet, and yet...
The night sung. It was a lark freed, a song upon the night air. She could hear an owl, just there. She could hear the cart wheels from streets off. She could hear the river, the sound of the water as it caressed the bricks that entrapped it. The moon was beautiful, and the pale girl beneath it looked to not belong in these streets. Her little boots, buttons along the side, were calfskin. Her dress, lavender and cream, was nothing acquired at a bespoke dressmaker. The ribbons in her hair were buttery soft and grey. She wore no hat, and she wore no veil. Her hands were ungloved, pale and delicate, fingers spread long by piano and harp, these accomplishments marking the girl for quality, despite the social impropriety of uncovered hands. Her eyes were beryl, and she was young. There was wonderment on her face as she looked at the sky, and she'd no fear as she passed the women of the docks, pox and rouge to hide the scars upon their faces, emaciated and hopeless. The scents did not trouble her, thought she could smell them all in frothy layers of sweat and sick and dying.
She turned in a circle, arms outstretched, and she ignored the voices that called her mad, that asked her price, that approached and concernedly offered to return her to her father, her husband.
The opium den called to her then, its sweetness something not experienced in life, and now unknown in death. Her little boots clicked upon the cobblestones, and the man at the door knew not what to make of her. Perhaps it was her smile that gained her admittance, and perhaps they would simply allow all inside, even unaccompanied young ladies. More likely, it was the look in her eyes, something too discerning, some intelligence in the vapidly pretty face, something feral in those jewel eyes.
She hummed as she made her way through the hanging drapes, shredded at the ends in their pretty reds and golds, men and women laid upon pillows behind them, as if hiding from themselves. She peeked, and she peered. Hungry, but not yet famished, and she was well looked after at home. But curious little thing, she pulled aside fabrics, and she looked until something caught her eye. Something dreadful, something ending, something that--once--she would've considered beautiful. It was his feet; he looked as if he could dance on them, proportioned and not ungraceful of leg. She entered his space, his sphere. She asked no permission, this monster that seemed an angel. She sat upon a pillow, and she deeply inhaled death, opium tar, sick and filth. "Hello." Refined and cultured, soft and young, and she regarded him as if this were a sitting room, and he a gentleman caller with a casket already measured.
This particular man had ensconced himself in a coveted corner, muffled on all sides by moth-eaten carpets the color of fresh blood. He was like many of the others there, dressed in the mild good taste of a book-keeper or poor relation, his shirt only a little stained and open at the throat, his vest obviously second-hand and missing all but one button. The opium brought men low in more ways than one, and like most he was reclining, supported by his rolled coat and a stack of carpets not currently in use. A small oil lamp, heinously dangerous in a matchstick building like this one, was sitting on a low table with one broken leg, and it cast a weak yellow light over the tiny space. He had his back to it, because he was peering down at the pages of a book, bound small like most books of the period. This edition had no mention of the author, but he knew it well enough anyway, and he wore a small, vague smile as his glassy eyes roved vaguely over the page, as much of it obscured by the bad light and the thick smoke as his own obvious lack of coherent focus.
He wasn’t long for this world, the man with the book, and it was clear. His drug of choice obviously put this fact far from his mind, but it was immediately and intimately true. He had a waxy complexion, like one already dead, and there was no life or color to his eyes except for the enlarged depth of the opium in the width of his pupils. More telling was the alien sound of his breath, a shallow hissing of air occasionally interrupted by a wet death’s rattle that hitched and pulled at his whole body. It made the pages of the book shiver. His dull curls were damp with a cold sweat he obviously didn’t feel, and his lips were dry and split with dried blood.
He didn’t look up from the book when she moved in, obviously accustomed to the shifting of people outside the domain of his opium haze, but he did when she spoke to him, slowly, as if his head had a great weight. He waited a moment to see if she disappeared, or grew extra limbs, but when she did not, he twisted his tattered lips into an approximation of a smile. “I don’t know you.”
"No. I smelled you dying, and I was curious of you." Her tones were what authors would call dulcet. Sweet, etiquette and politeness, and she bore no stains upon her exquisite dress, no callouses upon those long pale fingers stretched out by refinement and polite entertainments. Her beryl eyes were bright and unmarred by opium-red or digested black in the centers. She was as pristine as a girl just stepped from her dressing table, and she sounded dulcet. In other words, she was quite boring, truly, and she had spent a lifetime thus. She was doll for the head of a table, a mother for a kindly word over the head of a nanny at tea, a wife made for outings and looking well upon the arm of her husband. She was an accessory, and she gave the impression of one as she sat there, a contradiction among pillows and the scent of death and depravity.
Her oceanic gaze dropped to the book he held, and there was an interest there that was incongruous with the girl's face. One such as she was not made for books, surely, but she leaned at the waist, the move one not at all sensual and all defiance of the corset that bound her tightly. Not sensual, because this girl was not brought up to be sensual. She was brought up to be the sunlight in a sitting room, sweet and insipid, a gentleman's daughter and well dowered, not that it had served her well, that promised trunk of treasures and trinkets upon a wedding day.
She knew not the title of the book he held within his grasp; it was not familiar to her, and her literary education had come at the hands of a man preferential to poetry. Her memory was exceptional, a gift of this new life, and she would recall if she had familiarity with the title. "You're dying, and I do not think you mind terribly. Darkling, are you like you my companion, half in love with easeful Death?" She did not reach for the book, though she could take it without his notice should she wish it. It was a new realization, this, and she pondered it quietly as the sweet and sickly smoke layered itself upon his dying like a blanket cast over a figure on a deathbed. "I would ask the author of the book, but it is not so important as why this book is chosen to be your last? Of all the books, why this?" There was a respect there, something billowing thick in her voice that said this was a question of import, because she'd no notion what cracked spine she would choose to house between her fingers were she to die again.
He frowned at her, the edges of his mouth drifting down in rice-paper folds: a mild, complacent expression of vague untouchable distress. He stared at her for a little while through his sparse dark lashes, thinking her over, drawing blank after blank in his weakened memory as he tried to place her face. He thought her one of his many phantasms, and her words suggested she was not a pleasant one, despite her golden looks. A little pearl on the fading red velvet cushions, she was present as much to be a torment to him as she was to the pink-tongued, white-fanged oyster that made her. “I’m not dead yet,” he said, showing no taste for her words. Some poets relished death, sought to express it in their posturing and verse, but not this one. He had come to avoid thoughts of his own mortality, and as the book came gently down to rest on his lap, it was clear that her attempts to bring forth the immediacy of his looming end did not make him happy.
When her eyes dropped, he held the book out to her, a first edition he enjoyed smudging with his filthy fingertips (to make it more his). It took some considerable effort for him to lift anything, so the gesture was no mild suggestion, but a proper peace offering. Once she took it (a foregone conclusion in his mind, and one said mind was likely to generate if she did not concede) he spread his fingers down his breast, looking for frayed pockets. He plucked out a tainted cigarette that was completely unnecessary given their surroundings, and lit it with a sparkling silver lighter from an age not yet arrived, uncooperative fingers making the rough cube splash gold light in spears between them.
“It was on sale,” he advised her, through a pale stream of scented smoke.
"No. You've not died yet," she agreed, her voice made for the head of a table and soothing spats during suppers with names on placecards. It was the job of the wife to ensure that the seating was just so and devoid of opportunities for strife during the fish course, and her voice was a thing cultivated for failures in this regard. But he was not incorrect in his assumption that he still lived, for she could hear the blood moving sluggishly in his veins. She would like to say it sung to her, the churn of his blood, but it did not sing. It did not so much as whimper, his blood, and he was not very lovely to look upon. She was no angel of death that could see him and find the beauty in his visage. Though, still, she thought his feet quite good for dancing, and she reasoned a moustache could only help matters when it came to his profile.
The book he held was proffered, and she took with those defiantly gloveless fingers. Scandal in bare fingertips, and she closed her hand upon the leather with grand reverence. She cracked the spine carefully, after a close perusal of the finger-marked binding, and she looked upon words.
"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his," she read, and she had a very good voice for reading. It was cultivated during nights not remembered, with a man not recalled.
She looked up from the pages to regard the corpse upon his cushions, and she closed the book once more and handed it back with the same reverence as which it was taken. She made the assumption that he was stating the book was chosen because of its nominal price, though she'd never purchased a book, and so she could not be certain. Regardless, she felt the statement to be untrue, and she blinked those jeweled eyes over that that pretty and pallid blankness. "That is why you purchased it, perhaps. Or, rather, why you were pleased with your purchase, but I do not believe it explains the choice of work for this place." But she relented, and it showed upon her youthful face. "Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know," she quoted, and her smile was softer in the flicker of the lights that surrounded them. "Even Mister Keats did not always wish to speak of death."
Daniel was not soothed by her urbane manner; to the contrary, he was unnerved by it. He was not from this place or this era, and he was not brought up to its manners and social roles. Daniel, in his intent to disguise himself in the early days, had entered a class of merchants from foreign lands, a strange in between of dangerous people that had too much money and not enough patriotism. His direction through the social orders since that time had been sharp and directly downward, sparing him the drawing rooms and dinner halls in which this woman had been raised. Her almost robotic voice, though melodic and measured, lacked warmth and titillating spontaneity. Dark curls tilted askew with the direction of his chin, he listened to her read, and then quote, as if no words were truly her own. She read well, but he was not reassured.
His faded blue eyes met hers when she looked up. He was slow to repossess the book, but once he did he folded it in his pale hands and brought it close to the loose folds of his waistcoat.
“Did you know him personally?” he asked of the poet, who had the good taste to like books, fruit, and music, but obviously hadn’t tasted the sucker punch that was Italian wine versus the tickle of the French.
Daniel fixed his eyes abruptly on a spot to her left. “Tell me, did you bring a cat with you?” he asked, in his vague, opium dream voice. He erupted into a short, hacking cough after this statement, one that tastes of blood. He quelled it with a breath from the cigarette.
Mina was not meant to be soothing. Even before the nepenthe of unsweet death, she'd been merely ornamental. A blank over a nothingness, and no one seemed to care. Vanessa, perhaps, in their youth, and she'd urged the young girl with the blonde curls to be more, to dig deep into a soul that harboured silly nothings. But Mina had not understood, and it was only pain that had taught her to feel anything with depth. Such feeling was bitter on the tongue, and it was not allowed of women of her class. She was meant to smile when required, and with little care for what lived between her ears when it was not time for smiling.
"You do not respond," she said, some bright understanding in those beryl eyes, incandescent light casting halos around a girl deserving of none. "You've not learned? It is a dance here, a chess match, a skill to respond without responding, but you have not mastered it. Mastery leaves the asker unaware their question went without response." She considered him, book transferred back, and the question about M. Keats between them in the poppy-sweet air. "Or perhaps you simply do not care. Men might, you know, not care. Women have not the luxury, even upon deathbeds." She could be a doll, pretty, the angel-haired blonde, but there was something behind her eyes that was too melancholy for it, flickers like the oil lamps, and dolls were not meant for despondency.
"Had I known Mister Keats, I would tell him that death is not something to be enamoured of. It comes with great expectations, and it goes like a quiet tide." She looked at the dull pulse that thrummed at his throat. "If one is lucky, it comes quickly, and it does not come at the hands of a loved one. If one is lucky, there is no betrayal save one's body. If one is lucky, one remembers--or perhaps I have that wrongly. If one is lucky, one forgets." Haunted. "I have a close acquaintance named Victor--I know, it is not done for an unwed woman to befriend a man, but I am like a thing tarnished, and it matters little. Victor, he is obsessed with death."
It was terribly ill-bred, but she slipped from her cushions to kneel in front of his, her backbone corset-straight, and the closeness something incongruous with a girl raised in chastity. "Are you wedded? Do you leave behind lovers, children, spouse? Or is it words only, pages between a book left to mourn you? A comedy of errors to keep you warm at the last." Curiosity, and the little blonde had it in spades now, fearless in a completely different way from the fearlessness of her youth. "Perhaps a cat. I did not bring it, but what is its name?" There was interest in those eyes, and the cough that erupted smelled of blood to her delicate little nose. She salivated, and she leaned closer, and her teeth were perfectly little points against her bottom lip, little daggers in white, and hunger made her nostrils flare with a delicateness that might have been taught once by a nurse or nanny or governess, so fine was it, so fragile.
Daniel, for all of his nasty commentary and rampant prejudice against pretty much everyone, was put ill at ease by women with nothing but fluff for brains. Intelligence was as essential to common conversation as oxygen, and though he was soaked deep in his cotton dreams, her words seemed to make little sense. He stared at her as pieces of the noise drifted past his head, sometimes picking up colors in a way they never could in the waking world. “There’s none of that here.” His “here” was clearly not Britain, nor even London. It was the opium fog and the East End, the starving and the rotting. Daniel’s teeth alone suggested he did not belong in such a place, coming as he did from the fluoride-washed echoes of the modern century. “Women can say what they like, always. It is only if you care about the effect of what you say. Men do not have consequences.” He exhaled a breath of smoke and thought of a dragon he had been once.
“You know a lot about death?” He didn’t doubt it. A lot of people here did. The children died in their cradles and the men in their cups. “Will you come closer? I haven’t touched anything as clean as you in a while, I think. I won’t hurt you.” He smiled, because he thought it very unlikely she was afraid of him. He had too much nepenthe in him to be worried about her on a surface level, but something inside him could sense the predatory gleam in her eye.
Instead of thinking further on it, he inhaled a sodden breath and then looked past her at the cat again. It was sitting on its haunches and watching him. “I don’t know. Seems like a nice one, though. Very clean.” He was taken with this idea of paleness. “It would miss me, if I was gone. My friends would.” For a moment he looked uncomfortable, even sad, but it was a moment quickly past. “No books mourn me. I do not write those kind of books.”
"No chess?" she asked of his words. She looked about the space, the hangings, the cushions, the sweet stink of something she was beginning to understand belonged to transcendence. She looked back upon him, there and reclined. "No rules of what must be said, of what should not? Perhaps it is so here," said the brainless little thing, fair blonde against cheeks reminiscent of alabaster, "but this is not the world. This is a thing carved from it. Out there, it matters what is said. Women are not free to say what they like, and only a man would think it so. Caring about the effect makes it sound frivolous, a silly consideration, a ribbon at the haberdasher, a brim at a milliner, but it is not thus. Without reputation, a woman has nothing here. It is only a man who would say it matters only if one cares for consequence. Consequence is losing your roof, losing your food. Consequence is life as a spinster aunt, something everyone reviles and mocks, something no one truly wants the responsibility of. Consequence is the docks, the girls there. Have you seen them?" She laughed a little laugh, bitter bile in the sweet sound. "I knew none of it, you see, until my station changed." Jonathan Harker was no idle gentleman. No, the man she'd been hurriedly married to was a man of law, a man who worked in an office daily. His work was respectable, of course, but it was rather a long fall for the daughter of a man knighted and landed.
"I know about death." Haunted eyes, and she knew little, and yet she knew all. It was fitting for her, this brainless dollhouse creature with her unsettling education in rather improper areas. "You can't hurt me," she said, and she knelt forward upon knees cushioned in layers of expense. She was near to him now, the skirts of her finery brushing against his trousers. Very close, and she fancied she could hear the sluggish beat of his heart in her ears. She'd no idea if that was true, as she'd no real understanding of herself yet. She was a thing newly made, despite not being newly made at all. She was conundrum, there, and impropriety against delicate kneecaps.
Behind her, he saw something she knew was not there. Somehow, she was certain she could sense anything that existed in the space with them, and there was nothing. The cat, perhaps. "Is it whatever you smoke here, that causes you to see the cat? Or is it an effect of dying?" She asked it with a morbid curiosity, and she reasoned Victor would know the answer. Another time, perhaps she was to ask him. But, now, there was nothing but the hunger mounting in her, climbing from unmentionable higher. She was hardly thinking as she crawled upon him, onto this man in all her virgin vestments. He reeked of ends, and he spoke of books and being missed.
"Who will miss you?" She posed the question from close to his cheek, and she was soft and light upon his emaciated form.
“Side game,” Daniel said, mind clearly wandering and eyes going vague as people and places moved gently forth and back in front of vision she couldn’t share. “I like chess, but I don’t play the games you’re good at.” He knew her type, the type she was raised to be and even the predator she wanted to be, and he was, truthfully, not impressed by either. “The rules don’t matter to me, haven’t for a long time. They matter, if you want to stay alive, stay healthy. I don’t care about things, and neither do you. So you’re just a mouthpiece.” He lifted a hand, four fingers, and tapped them against his thumb, miming talking. “I’m not going to cry for you.”
He gave another hoarse, bloody sigh, one she could no doubt taste in the air, and leaned against her. He wasn’t looking for support, only contact. She was cool where he otherwise felt nothing.
Shifting, he looked past her, and watched the cat. It purred, squeezing its eyes gently closed as it watched him. When it saw he was watching, it purred louder. He thought he could see the vibration through the honeyed air between them. He smiled at it, tired. “I wouldn’t know the difference.” Daniel pushed the flat of his hand over the spine of the book, rocking it up on one end and balancing it on his knee as he tipped his temple sideways in her direction.
"I wasn't taught games. You mistake me with my dearest sister. She has machination, and I have none. I have only the knowledge that men are not to be trusted, and that women are to be trusted less." Truth, this understanding made her bitter beneath all that pale skin and paler hair. It had not always been thus, but there was naught for it now. "I stopped caring long before I worried about gravedirt and beyond, but that is my pain and I choose not to share it, as you do not share your pain with me. One conversation, and you've no idea what burrows beneath my skin. Surface things, perhaps, but not the birth of said things. Like you, I was young and trusting once." She smiled perfect little teeth in a perfect little row of even white. "I am no mouthpiece, and you are very bad at chess."
He leaned forward, but she leaned back, disinclined to give him the contact he sought. He was not very nice, and she was done with things that weren't very nice to her.
Cat and book, and she realized he would tell her nothing, that he discounted her as the men of her age discounted women who looked the part of dolls on shelves. Pretty, trained, perfect for wife and mother, but not made for loving the way dark-haired girls with a wildness inside them were. She disliked him greatly, this man who preferred the spine of a book to her weight upon his lap.
And it was impulse, surely, that ate the blue of her eyes away and turned them black as night. Those little rows of white grew and grew, like little daggers hid behind perfect lips in a vacuous little face.
She knew she should not do what her belly urged her to do, as she was being circumspect now. Dracula had a plan, and it was large and vast, and she needed to be cautious. He trusted her to behave well, but she could hear that thready pulse in her ears, and she was so terribly hungry, and he was neither kind nor polite.
She leaned close to his throat, lips parted and fangs bright in the dingy room of curtained death.