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hordak-entered-the-chat · 4 days

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The maiden awakes curled up in the sofa of their private sitting room.

Master bedroom, silence outside their door, curtains shut as tightly as possible to keep the bastard sunlight far from heart and skin alike, and the fireplace just remade by some servant whose name she knows not. Her head hurts - not excessively, nor in that latent way that leaves her dizzy, but enough for her to make note of it as soon as warm ambient light hits her eyes - and her throat is parched for something fresh though bitter in its unripeness. The tips of her fingertips have taken on a deep purple hue from staying too long in the same position. A normal person might find it foul. And yet she feels warm, perhaps even safe. Not that she ought not to, of course; this is their house, their rooms, and thus the one place where she has the right to return to her senses following an unplanned nap and not be rushed to gather her wits as swiftly as she is able to. Here, languidness is encouraged. Alcina herself makes a point of reinforcing this idea by gently urging her wife to lay back down the moment she notices her rising her tiny, frail frame onto her elbows with a look of confusion draped over her pretty face.

“Please, dearest, no need to run off like that. You were only asleep a little while.”

She is in her nightgown - the one with the puffy sleeves that accentuate her broad shoulders and the pearl-like buttons running all the way up to her neck - which she brings out from her extensive wardrobe only when winter is at its apex and Maria will often catch her standing by the fire, arms wrapped around herself and a cigarette held tightly between her lips, as she waits for the chambermaid to place hot coals underneath their mattress, make sure their windows are sealed closed, and refill the hot water bottle she has had for over four decades by now (and which Maria is certain will one day deteriorate in their arms, wetting their laps and prides in the process). The weather today is apparently cold enough for her to have added another bed-jacket on top of the ensemble, of cream-colored wool woven into a thick fabric, as well as the matching socks Maria saw Cassandra knit just the week prior. She looks… Cozy. Or as cozy as a woman of her station allows herself to be. From across the sofa the maiden finds it a little hard to tell it so, but Alcina’s dark hair is still damp from their bath, twisted neatly into pincurls kept flat against her scalp by a silk scarf of bold crimson-and-gold floral patterns, save for where she has parted the hair over her Cadou and pinned back the curls to let what is exposed of her parasite to breathe as she, herself rests for the day. Supposedly it helps prevent necrosis of the skin, but by now it is a thing done out of habit rather than for the sake of utility. She has a steaming teacup in one hand and half-eaten biscuit in the other.

“How long, exactly?”, asks Maria as she rubs the sleep from her eyes. Long enough to roughen the edges of her voice, she notes, and for her daughters to have retired for the day if the stillness that runs in the hallways is of any indication.

“You missed the final third of the picture - and good thing, too, as the ending was impossibly dull. Here, the butler just brought this up.”

Alcina, in all her flamboyant circles and extended motions, licks the crumbs off her thumb before stretching over to the coffee table, where the usual bedtime tea-set has been carefully laid out by the staff. She pours the thick contents of the teapot into another cup using both her hands and an abundance of caution not to shatter any of the priceless porcelain (it happens monthly anyways, but Maria would rather the maids pick off shards from their carpets than make her wife feel unfit for what she considers an informal expression of her care, so nobody says a thing) before passing it on to her.

“There you go”, she mutters amicably, then promptly busies herself with picking the best custard-covered galettes from the silver tray.

“Thank you”. Maria sinks further into the cushions, eyes fixed on the television set that seamlessly slides behind the wooden detailing of their walls. Neither of them care much for technology, and she doubts that will ever come to change, but she is nonetheless still taken aback by how lifelike the images now are, not to mention that the object itself is nearly as thin as a sheet of paper. None of that unpleasant sound of the valve pulsing into life, either. Truly a wonder of engineering. Musing on this with a small smile at the corners of her lips, the maiden blows on her tea and, not truly interested in the movie as much as wishing to make up conversation, inquires: “What happens at the end?”

Mid-sip, Alcina’s eyes roll. “Oh, it is dreadful. She marries one of those insipid man-things after all.”

“Which one? The poor girl had three to pick from.”

“I do not know, nor have I any intent to find out”, admits the Lady with a huff after a moment of snobbish yet pensive silence, “They all look the same to me. Really, you used your time better than I did. Such a disappointment of a storyline.”

“Fair enough.”

Her response ends on a yawn, the kind that draws deep and poignant, and Alcina places her teacup aside to give her wife a knowing look.

“We should get you to bed. Those lessons with our little beast have been working you to the bone, have they not? Clearly you are spent”, she says. “Come, darling, you must rest.”

“No, no, no. Not yet - we barely spoke all evening.”

“Maria, it is quite late.”

One glance at the grandfather clock in the corner of the room would confirm as much. Still, the sense of exhausted desperation that bubbles within the maiden’s chest as soon as Alcina goes to stand and undoubtedly drag the both of them to bed - where she knows a greedy and clammy darkness will overtake her from the heart downwards, leaving her to suffocate on the scent of lilac and nightmares that were not meant to belong to her in the first place - leads her to nearly spill her tea as she blindly reaches out to grab onto her wife’s wrist. The gesture startles the both of them. Damn. She tries her best to pass it off as clumsiness, putting to the test her casual smiles paired with that feminine nonchalance she has no doubt will rile the Lady of the Castle up, but the skeptical curve to Alcina’s eyebrow kills all her hopes.

Best to go out with a swansong, the maiden bitterly reminds herself before scolding her expression into something akin to simple tiredness, and not the twitching contortions that nearly resurface as she continues to hold back the sensation that she just had to crawl her way out of a trap set up by her own subconscious.

“Oh, please”, she pleas as she pulls herself nearer to Alcina, “It seems that we see each other less and less these nights.”

It is no lie. There’s always some urgent business matter to attend to, some mortal hoop they must jump through at the right time in order to guarantee that the foolish concerns of the outside world are locked well beyond the gates to their domain; and with a child they are meant to raise into weapon and god alike setting yet another barrier between them, those calming mornings where they would lay in each other’s arms and do little more than talk about nothing in specific until sleep took to them as kindly as death already did had gradually become a rare, then rarer, then practically unheard of event. Immortality has lately painted itself as the most stressful of idlenesses. Maria suffers greatly at its cost and, though not even under threat of excommunication would she ever admit to it, so does Alcina. It feels so very tempting, to do what they can to go back to the old days if only for a few hours.

But Alcina is no fool. No idiot, either, and to insinuate that she would ever be unaware of what goes on in her home would be one of the vilest offenses you could ever inflict upon her person. She can tell the exact shade of purple that blooms beneath her wife’s tired eyes. She counts how often over the week one of the maids timidly approaches either she or one of their daughters to inform them that the mistress fell asleep in the drawing room with a book in her hand and her trusted guard dog laying by her feet. And every time Maria startles herself awake, a dying gasp stuck at her throat, Alcina bites back the urge to complain about her own rest being interrupted and instead takes to running her fingers along her wife’s back until she is no longer shaking. Though she would like just as much for things to be the same, they are not. Age has found its way to catch up to them. And, really, she is well aware that there are worse fates than having the woman she loves dream while in her arms, tucked safe and sound from all the dangers that lurk about right outside her domain. So, she moves the maiden’s feet off her lap and smiles apologetically.

“Wait here. It will be just a moment.”

“… Sure”, Maria eventually agrees, and looks on with something forlorn in her stare as Alcina saunters off out of sight. The sounds of her sock-covered feet on the polished floor would ignite fear in the hearts of any mortal - familiar, they would think, only much too large and heavy to be human - but to them? That is the music of domesticity.

By the time she has returned from the dressing room adjacent to the bedroom, a king-sized blanket balanced in her arms like a folded handtowel, Maria has finished the last of her tea and is at the verge of dozing off again. She watches her wife sit back down at the edge of the sofa from half-lidded eyes.

“I said I don’t want to sleep yet.”

She sounds like a child in that moment. A strange phenomenon, indeed, when her youth has been resting in a dusty crypt for long decades. But Alcina merely rolls her eyes.

“And I will respect your decision despite my differing opinions”. She lightly smacks the maiden’s thigh. “Scoot over. I cannot cuddle you if you are sprawled out like that.”

She need not ask twice.

Only once Alcina has carefully slotted herself into the space between the fine upholstery and her wife’s curled up form at the edge of the seat, then brought the blanket over the smaller woman alone does Maria raise a suspicious eyebrow and ask: “Won’t you be cold?”

There are not many linens fitted to her large stature, but their privileged financial situation means they can afford the extra yards of fabric needed for their seamstress to put together enough pieces for the Lady not to feel like a monstrosity vile beyond description every time the chill hits her skin and she longs, rather mundanely at that, for the universal comfort that is resting underneath the bedcovers to wait out the bad weather in the company of a nice book. She could have taken the duvet from their bed, or asked the chambermaids to bring another one from the wardrobes down the hall. She did not.

Her question hangs in the air for a few moments, decaying unpleasantly, but then Alcina’s arms tangle around her form with the determination of grapevines and her cold lips find the spot where the maiden’s neck meets the softest portion of her jaw, in which the warmth accumulates in some semblance of liveness, and her affections linger in this pleasant mixture of chaste devotion and a suckling of the skin that would draw blood were she to place any more effort into the matter.

“Not if you keep me warm, dearest.”

In truth, either of the alternatives would involve relying on the staff in some way or another, and she wanted to do this on her own.

Maria guesses as much.

“Then I will.”

“Good. Would you like to hear about how my evening went?”

“Yes”, sighs the maiden, not even realizing how she has already sunk back into her beloved’s curves. A kiss distracts her, then another, until she eventually remembers that she was midway through a sentence. “Yes, I would like that. Very much.”

“Alright, then. If that is what you wish...”

Maria dares not protest when she feels strong, gentle fingers working their way through her hair. Rather, despite a most real desire to indulge in this moment of intimacy, she cannot resist the urge to fully close her eyes this time around. Nor can she stop another yawn from escaping her tired lips. “It is”.

With a hum that borders on a lullaby and the same slow motions of her fingers, Alcina keeps to her offer. “It started, I suppose, like most of my days do. I went through the salesbooks for the last month, then the ones for the castle proper. Utilities, maintenance, the new orders our stewardess has put through. Anything and everything that must be accounted for.”

“The insurance for my new car?”

“Taken care of. Likewise for our daughters’ allowances - constantly adjusting them for inflation is such a drag, but the mathematics of it is quite invigorating.”

“Yet you do it with your eyes closed.”

“Years of practice have their use”, laughs Alcina with an arrogant smile upon her lips, though it would be clear to any witness hidden behind curtains that the glint in her eyes is fondness, not condescension. “Then, I went through my notes for the last candidates. Hopeless, the lot of them, though they do say failure is the mark of progress.”

At that, the maiden grips the arm draped over her waist a little fiercer. “You will figure it out. I have faith in it.”

Foolish, sweet creature who lives in a daydream, wishes to drawl some buried part of Alcina that is betrothed to pessimism; except uttering such a thing aloud would put her own hypocrisy underneath a limelight. And she is above that. Or, at the very least, she wishes herself to be. “You need not worry about that, pet. Truly.”

“Miranda does.”

It would be the opening statement of a quarrel, of the sort that steals from them two maids and another dressing mirror, were if not for the innocent manner in which Maria then twists around so that she may nuzzle unabashedly into her wife’s chest, drawing her own lanky arms around her frame, and closes her requiescence with a key of gold by placing the most well-meaning of pecks where the skin of Alcina’s neck folds into what to the maiden is her adorable double-chin. “… Eva finished her reading of Hamlet today.”

“And it only cost us three separate tutors”, scoffs Alcina. Her irritation is only partially genuine, as shown by how she goes on to distract herself by braiding a lock of her wife’s hair, undoing her work, and braiding it again.

“Well, yes, besides that other nanny who stepped in between the last two. Christ - See, I might as well pick up her studies from here onwards. Kids are so very entertaining when they are six.”

“That is at your discretion.”

They share a breath, deep and languid, between them.

Motherhood is exhaustion dressed in a different costume. A fact they have been constantly reminded of these last few years.

Nonetheless, Maria relaxes once more when she feels her hair be distractedly but softly twisted. It is the sort of comment she will never make unprompted - the personal, nostalgic variety - that her mother used to do the same, a full lifetime ago; only with red lacquer on her nails and a quiet musing about how much hair she has delivered in Hungarian instead of Alcina’s melodic Romanian, hissed through fangs.

“Is there anything you would like her to read?”

The maiden pushes for broadening her daughter’s education with influences from all her lineages.

Sometimes, if her moods are mellow, Alcina indulges her.

“Nothing in particular. Her Greek needs to become considerably more advanced before we can introduce her to the epics or any of my favorite poets”. She traces the tip of her nose along her wife’s hairline, smelling the tuberose shampoo as well as the scent of the kill still pungent in both their breaths. “But you are fond of Austen, and so is Daniela. With her accent being yours, that seems to me like a good direction to take. Fitting.”

“Hm”, comes the maiden’s mumbled agreement.

“In any case”, continues Alcina as listens to the fireplace crackle in the distance, “I am looking forward to our jaunt to the countryside - a fortnight and three days, from tonight if you will recall. We shall have plenty of time to ourselves, then, and with little talk of business or daughters to distract us from it. I take it you are as relieved by it as I am.”

And though her arrogance has cost her the price of deafening silence many times before, this is one of the few occasions where it being followed up by soft snoring feels as satisfying as the most thunderous applause. For there lays Maria, lips parted and eyes closed, with her body resting delightfully defenseless in the arms of a killer so contemptible, history itself could hardly cope with the full extent of her tale. The same killer who then runs a gelid knuckle along the side of her beloved’s face with the greatest amount of care, to ensure she would not be unduly ripped from the sleep which no longer came without its sacrifices.

“Dearest?”, calls the Lady of the Castle in what was so faintly a whisper, her own mouth has barely moved from its expression of wonder. “You have fallen asleep, haven’t you?”

And if you were a creature as small as a fly on the wall, dear reader, or a spider lingering about near the ceilings; and as curious as a maid who would risk her eyes by peeking through the keyhole to capture snapshots of a marriage in the hopes of filling the dark void of loneliness within, then the scene you would find might even lead you to forget the gruesome, cruel, vile nature of the two protagonists at its very center. For you would think not of Lady Dimitrescu, queen of her humble world of blood and death. No…

You would see Alcina, in her frilly nightgown and thick socks, carrying her fast-asleep wife to bed with the caution of someone handling what they love very much. Towering and monstrous. Yet oh-so-benevolent in the way she fluffs every single one of their pillows before gently pulling the covers over the both of them.

And you might even catch her reserved smile, then, right as she reaches over the bedside table to turn off the flickering lamp. The only smile that does not derive from the suffering of another.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Otherwise the kiss she presses to the maiden’s forehead right after, lingering until she has the courage to pull away and rest back into the mattress with a melancholic tilt to her posture, would not be so pure as to cleanse them of more sins than they deserve.

“Goodnight, draga. Sleep well.”

And, to herself just as she slips into her own dreams, she later adds:

“I told you so…

…You were…

Tired, too.”

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