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mor-beck-more-problems · 4 years

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Poison and Wine || Morgan & Miriam

Just two undead gals being pals.

@meflemming

The hide, not yet treated, floated in the water like forgotten flotsam after a wreck, or perhaps a dead body. Morgan had only floated in the deep after coming back from the dead, where she could rise or sink at will. She couldn’t imagine how she might have looked if her curse had tried to drown her instead, if Remmy would have had to fish her out with a hook, or their bare hands, but maybe it would have been something like this. “And you say this helps you feel more alive?” She asked, curious underneath her snark. “Do you think this is like, a thing for people like us? Searching for life in more death?” she mused.”I’ve spent a lot of time this past month watching animals die and thinking about taxidermy.”

Hair pulled back and sleeves rolled up, Miriam added a few chemicals to the water so that the hide didn’t damage while it soaked. It’d be a while before it was ready to go into the liming process, but she had a few pieces in various states of treatment to show off to Morgan since the other woman had been curious enough about the process. “Well, perhaps it’s a thing for you, but this goes a bit further back for me,” Miriam said, lips quirked up. She washed her hands, explaining, “Leatherworking has been in my family since before we moved to White Crest several odd generations ago. Though, I will admit, the process of dying has become much more interesting. I suppose since I can’t do it again…” She raised an eyebrow. “Taxidermy, though? An interesting pursuit. A fun one, too, I’ve heard.”

“I didn’t take you as someone into tradition, Mim,” Morgan said. “You seemed like such a renegade. Still, I mean you’re heading this operation by yourself. And everything here is…” More than a little impressive. Even to her undead senses, the leather workshop was rich with the smell of creation, death into a different kind of life. The tools were heavy, plain, and simple. The tables, spacious. Everything had its place, its purpose, its balance. It looked like the most beautiful puzzle to Morgan. “Yeah, you can’t really watch your own death, you only remember the part where it hurt, and where it was quiet. Or--I mean, do you? Still remember?” She sped along with the other train of discussion, just in case it was too personal, even for the strange bond of undeath between them. “Yeah, well, my girlfriend dabbles and I spent a lot of time in the shed where she works. Playing with glass eyes and small specimens she’s done. It’s kinda neat, how they get suspended in time, sometimes a little prettier, a little happier looking than they were before. Some of them still look alive, if it weren’t for how still they are. It’s...interesting, I guess. I think skinning the critters is going to be the hardest part, if I ever try. I kinda go apeshit for some nice, raw, dead tissue.”

“I have a head for business and a talent for making things, dearest,” Miriam said breezily. “And I put more work into this business than my father ever did. I actually make things. He simply ran them.” She looked around her home workshop, everything neat and orderly and accounted for. Her father had it built for her after… well, after. No windows for sunlight to escape in, and it was connected to the house through the wine cellar. It was the perfect workspace for all sorts of work, and Miriam took more than a little pride in it. She grew quiet, trying to think of her death. The car wreck, the pain and the heat of it, was still fresh on her mind. “I remember it rather clearly, though I couldn’t even begin to tell you when the troubles of my life ended and the troubles of my unlife began. Someone, though, came along, and here we stand. Making leather.” She walked over to a piece that was closer to being finished, the hide already cured and turned into actual leather. She’d been toying around with it, a messenger bag, perhaps, tooling floral designs into the flaps of it. On the table in front of it was the designs sketched out more clearly onto paper, so she had a rough idea on what she was creating. Next to it was a sketch of a pair of heeled boots she thought about attempting, though it’d been quite some time since she’d attempted shoes. “It’s all a bit macabre how we make beautiful things out of death, isn’t it? Jackets, taxidermied animals, it was all living once and we… I don’t guess I could say that I’m doing much to preserve it, but.” She looked Morgan over. “You’re still very new to all of this. Control comes with experience. Until then… Perhaps you can help her with the less bloodied parts?”

Morgan hadn’t considered that Miriam’s work would be a pragmatic choice. But she’d never had anything passed down to her except her curse, nothing she could use or consider her own. She was used to using whatever she had on hand, though. And this, well, she could admit was a pretty good ‘whatever’ to lean on in a crisis. “Do you identify more as an artist or a craftsman?” She asked, hearing Miriam’s pride in doing the heavy work on her own. “Oh, yeah, I think...that’s the hope right now. I haven’t really got up the nerve to see her while she’s working, but I fiddle with the tools sometimes, the glass eyes. It’s weird, what pains people will take to make something fake look like it has a spark of life. Although, I think it’s all in the lid sculpting, from what I can tell. Even in people, it’s the skin that signals emotion, or the eyebrows,” She gestured to Miriam’s own expression with a smirk.

Morgan wandered over to the work in progress, ghosting her finger along the shapes tooled into the leather. “With leather I guess it’s different,” she said. “What do you think about, when you’re making it into something? What are you trying to capture?”

Considering the question, Miriam cocked her head to the side, considering her work. “I suppose it depends on who you ask. One of my teachers in college would have said an artist. Between my sketches, and I’ve dabbled in other mediums. But some businessmen I’ve worked with would say a craftsman. All the work that goes into the craft, the labor behind it. But you asked me.” She paused. “I’d say there’s an art to the craft. I can do practical. I made a saddle once. Someone recently asked me for a harness.” Though, that one seemed to be more for pleasure than practicality. “But I like detail, and adding artistic flair to my work. I want it to be personal. When I do something, I like it to be one of a kind. I have two employees for the shop in town. We all work everything by hand, though they rarely cure their own leather. I buy supplies for them, and they make it lovely. They make it into art. So, I suppose it’s all about the piece, really.” She smirked, allowing her face to be more expressive. “There’s your convoluted answer for the day. Though I’m sure I’ll have more. And people don’t want it to seem fake. They want it to seem preserved. A dear family pet isn’t really dead, only sleeping by the fire. They want the illusion of well-preserved life.”

Miriam looked over at the piece, moving a bit closer to Morgan. How strange; she was rarely around other members of the undead. It was almost as quiet as if she was alone in the room. Not a single heartbeat between the two of them. “Mostly I’m trying to capture what the buyer wants,” she said wryly. “But sometimes, I’m simply playing around. I think about what looks pretty. If it’s something I could stand to own myself or not. I might see a design in something and think I can do it better, so I make the attempt. The end result is either something that can be sold at an extremely high price or an extremely low one.”

“You’re gonna hate this, but putting my spin on a commission was my favorite part of the alchemy-crystal game,” Morgan said, looking thoughtfully at the sketches on the table, carefully picking up one sheet, then the other. “Every once in a while I got some really boring, overly-detailed request, usually ugly too. But some people would say, I want an amethyst mirror, I want a smoky quartz ring holder that reminds me of my cat’s left paw, and that was it. That middle space, where what they want becomes part of the challenge, or the fun, was the best. I don’t even know how many sketchbooks like these I threw out.” She brushed her hands on her skirt, as if dusting away the memory, the longing for those hours. “Whatever I do next will be the old-fashioned way, don’t worry,” she said wryly. “A set up like this would be nice. It feels lived-in, for lack of a better word. I bet you could pass a whole day here and not notice a thing. Or maybe that’s just me? Time has a way of getting slippery. I’m not good at coming home when I’m supposed to unless I set an alarm. If it wasn’t for everyone else, I don’t think I’d mind so much. Days and nights don’t mean as much when you don’t sleep. But I guess that’s different for you, you sleep a little, right?” She danced her fingers on the edge of the table, pressing down, testing how much of it she could feel. “Do you have anyone, that makes time matter for you?”

“You were certainly good with your craft,” Miriam said, only a bit begrudgingly. She had the decanter Morgan made in the house, filled with quality bourbon. She’d yet to actually drink any of it, but she stared at it sometimes, torn between being disgusted and impressed. “I’ve always liked it when customers give me that bit of creative license, the freedom to give them what they want without it being too specific.” She did raise a single eyebrow a bit at Morgan’s comment. “Morgan, dear, I know it’s not quite the same,” not as wholly wrong, “as it was before, but, for better or worse, you’ll always be using magic with whatever you apply yourself to for the rest of your days. There’s no more old-fashioned way.” She looked around, taking pride in her workshop, the one place that she felt at home. “I do pass the whole day in here occasionally. Sometimes several days. No eating, no sleeping, no noticing the time until it’s pointed out to me.” She shrugged, leaned against the workbench. Miriam didn’t slump; she was raised better than that, but she did grab a pencil and twirl it between her fingers, thoughtful. “I sleep?” She hated how it sounded like a question. “Not for long, and it’s not… I don’t particularly dream or anything. I suppose it’s just rest. The closest I got to sleeping lasted for several years and was closer to death, I think.” She watched Morgan’s fingers and the slight dent in the table they caused. She didn’t say anything about it, though, too focused on the question. Did she? No. She had acquaintances, occasional dalliances, but no one who made time matter. That had been Theo and his family and her family. They were all gone now. Now, all she had was revenge, and that didn’t make time matter; it just made it drag. “I have my work,” she said breezily, while not being specific as to what work she meant. “It’s no person, but it serves its purpose.”

“What do you mean no more old-fashioned way? Like, because--” Because she was dead? Or un-dead rather? Morgan hadn’t thought of it that way before. Obviously what had happened to her wasn’t the norm. Dead people, generally speaking, did not come back. The soft nothing space she had slept in was the end of all things. There were no more sunrises or lovers or rabbits any more than there was no more sleep, no more taste. And with magic dead inside her, she carried that betrayal. She hadn’t thought that it was keeping her alive, somehow. That it had seeped into her corpse and carried her through her existence. But if it wasn’t her heart, what else could she call it? “Because of what I am? W-what--” She looked down at her hands, pasty and dead and--still, somehow hers. “Does that ever bother you? That you’re a little magic too? That the same energy in the universe that I used to control is part of why you’re still here? I just-- I’ve never even thought of it that way before,” and now that she had, now that she could, her mouth quirked upwards in a small guilty smile of wonder. How could she never have asked herself that before? And how did Miriam know, and want to comfort her with that truth? “I just wonder how you could, much less say it so easy like that.” She looked at Miriam thoughtfully, and wondered if her loneliness had been part of why she’d felt drawn to her before. She’d lost so much, even before she died, and she knew pain well enough to become bent and twisted by it. How heavy must it be to do that? “You should let yourself have people, Miriam,” she said. “Sometimes they’re the only thing that makes a day mean anything.” She held her gaze for as long as she could. Morgan wasn’t sure if Miriam would listen, if she knew that she meant it, but she hoped. Morgan rubbed her hands on her skirt and reached under the table to pop the dents she’d made smooth again. “Is there, uh, anything else I can see?”

“On the nose,” Miriam said quietly. “We’re just dead things reformed by something impossible to truly understand until we’re no longer quite dead.” She’d spent hours thinking on it, fretting about it. What she was, what made her, or, rather, unmade her. She had, for the early years, clung desperately to the idea that she might have survived that wretched car crash. It wouldn’t have killed her. She would have been fine. She’d been resentful of others like her, particularly those who weren’t bound to the town or molded by white-hot revenge. Eventually, she’d come to terms with magic, what it was and what it was for. “I have no problem with magic, Morgan. I truly don’t. It’s a beautiful thing, you know. But it doesn’t belong with humans.” How humans perverted magic. They used it and twisted it into beautiful things, sometimes, like Morgan’s crystals, but also awful, wretched things. “Magic corrupts them all, in the end. Kills them. It killed us.” Miriam places a hand over her unbeating chest. “Only difference is that it keeps us alive as well.” She knew she wasn’t going to get Morgan to see her side. Spellcasters, even former ones, rarely did. Though, she supposed that was usually because the conversation was a bit one-sided; she talked, they screamed. It made it so hard for them to hear her. The last one had screamed until he couldn’t; he’d been about useless, unable to tell her about any local covens or even how to fix her White Crest-locked predicament. He left his shoe, too. She saw it out of the corner of her eye but was careful not to draw too much attention to it. Instead, she met Morgan’s eyes and smiled. “Perhaps you’re right. It’d do me good to have,” she paused, ruminated on the word, “friends. We are so useless alone.” She clapped her hands together and looked around. “There’s not too much else going on in here, but there’s a set of stairs and a tunnel that connect to the house’s wine cellar so I can avoid sunlight. My mother’s idea.” It was also so the staff wouldn’t see the family’s bloody secret lurking around in the dark, but still. It was a nice gesture. “I have a fairly decent collection of alcohol. It’s practically useless unless in large quantities, but it’s pretty to look at.”

“A car killed you, unless there’s more to the story. Not that you have to share either, but—” Morgan shrugged, mouth stretched in a sympathetic grimace. “But my family curse killed me. So you’re not wrong there. I just didn’t think about magic as bringing me back. The magic I did before didn’t really look like this.” She slid off her cuff and showed the scar near her wrist in the shape of Remmy’s mouth. “But you’re right. Nothing else to call it.” She tugged the cuff back down and tugged on her sleeve for good measure. “And I am, about having friends. I don’t know how much you believe me, but I mean it. You should get to have people, Miriam. It means a lot, to be known.” She smirked at the idea of the wine cellar. “Hey, at least you can get drunk at all. I’m down to appreciate the aesthetic though.” She wandered over to the walls, looking for the stairs and room in question. She’d thought there’d be more, but it was almost a relief to see that Miriam held on to some of her humanity, even with the side murder.

“A car headed to confront my husband, who was only using me for money so that he could fund his coven’s magic is what killed me,” Miriam said with a shrug. It was fine. She’d come to terms with it. Her jacket was on the back of the chair she was standing near. She stroked the sleeve gently. “See, it’s magic that’s keeping us alive. Not what human’s can practice, of course.” They were doomed if spellcasters learned how to do whatever bullshit it was that made vampires and zombies. Then again… Necromancers. Miriam fucking hated spellcasters. She smirked, though. “Well, I do thank you for that, Morgan. I should invest in some people. Friends.” She batted her eyelashes, knowing it probably wouldn’t work with Morgan having a girlfriend but not being one to turn down an opportunity. “We can be friends, I hope? Put all the silliness of the past behind us?” She led the way to the stairs, wondering if she should move the shoe but deciding against it. “Have you tried mixing alcohol with, I don’t know, organs? That might get you a little buzzed. Blood always helps me.”

“People aren’t investments,” Morgan childed mildly. “It doesn’t necessarily speak badly of you if things don’t ‘pay off’ the way you want. What speaks well of you is that you try anyway.” She answered Miriam’s fluttering lashes with a coy smile, a roll of her eyes. It was a little late to pretend there wasn’t something of a connection between them. Mriam understood what it meant to walk through death in a way like she did, and without a reason to fear her, Morgan found the return of a feeling she’d had before: a wish that Miriam would let someone ease her pain a little, that she would let go and allow herself a different way of being. “We can be friends, yeah,” she said gently. “And, tragically, no boozy combo I’ve tried yet seems to take the edge off. So that’s one point for vampires!” She followed Miriam towards the dark hall, trailing her fingers on the wall. She noticed a stray shoe strewn absently as she went, pointing to it as she asked, “Do you, uh, get a lot of company down here?”

“Nonsense,” Miriam said. “I was always taught that people were investments. Good ones, if you went about it the right way.” But she could see what Morgan was saying. Relationships were meant to be enjoyed. They were good things, usually. Unfortunately, when all was said and done, Miriam had done a bit too much to allow anyone to get too close. She didn’t regret any of the wretches she’d killed; why, she could barely even remember their faces. Sure, the first few times had been rough, and sure, she ached for something to fill the whole inside of her, the one that wasn’t desperate for revenge and blood. But she was quite good at pushing all of that aside, pretending she was whole. She was still a young vampire, after all, more years in the ground than she’d spent as a creature of the night. Perhaps she’d eventually get used to feeling like this. And, if not, well. She’d read that vampires could turn it all off, if they so desired. Whatever would happen to her if she couldn’t feel her anger and rage? Her thirst for revenge? She didn’t know. Maybe she’d find out. “Darling, you can still go out in the sun. I’d trade all the booze in the world for a nice day sunning down at Dark Score. But maybe we can find something out there for you.” Looking at the shoe, she gave Morgan a wink. “Well, I did say I liked to have dalliances, didn’t I?”

Morgan winced, feeling guilty for bemoaning her eternal sobriety when Miriam couldn’t even watch a sunrise. She couldn’t feel a sunburn or a winter chill anymore, but she could stand in the light and the snow and imagine what it was like. She could remember, at least for now. “What, you mean drinking away the undead existential crisis isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?” She asked wryly. “That’s a fair point, you know,” she said. “More than. Sorry. Although, apparently there’s a giant squid in the lake that may or may not eat people, so maybe you’re not missing out on too much.” She really didn’t need to know anymore about Miriam’s dalliances, however charming calling them that sounded in her dated cadence. She scampered down the stairs after Miriam, ready to leave all of that behind and see the rest of her place.

“There’s nothing like a drunken bender every few weeks to destroy your liquor cabinet,” Miriam joked. Though, she wasn’t actually joking, seeing as how she could smell last week’s rage in the form of spilled wine all over the cellar. She sucked in her cheeks frowning. “I forgot about the mess down here. Those undead existential crises tend to end in a bit of broken glass.” She gave a short laugh, but she could clearly smell blood, human blood, underneath all the wine. And if she could, she figured Morgan could as well. “It’s nothing to apologize for, darling. And I have heard about the squid. See, I can’t recall anything like that happening back when I was alive.” Miriam really needed to learn to clean up after herself better. And, perhaps a wine cellar wasn’t the best place to torture a little witch bitch into giving her information on a coven she apparently didn’t know anything about. There’d been some spilled wine, spilled blood, and a new rosebush in the garden. But no cleaning of the wine cellar. It was a shame, too. In her rage she’d managed to break a few bottles of very pricey vintage. It was a waste on all fronts. She walked over to the stairwell leading to the house, a sigh on her lips as she stepped over the mess. Miriam gave Morgan a tight smile. “I’m sometimes unaware of my own strength and anger, these days.”

Maybe if she hadn’t died and made a passtime of stuffing her face with viscera, Morgan wouldn’t have been able to notice the difference between wine and bloodstains on sight. She might not have been able to sense some bits of dead skin, dead something, ground into the floor. But she was salivating in a way that made her clench up with undease. Why was she feeling the hunger pull? Why was there blood mixed with broken glass. Morgan stopped short, surveying the mess. She looked up at Miriam’s thin smile, too sharp to reach her eyes. She didn’t need to ask, she shouldn’t. The whole reason she had stayed away from Miriam for so long was because she knew what she was capable of. She didn’t just carry darkness in her, she had hatred. The kind of hatred that lead to a mess like this. Blood spread in so many directions couldn’t be from anything swift or easy. She backed away slowly. “Y-yeah, um...I can see that. That’s…” The smart thing to do would be to come up with some non threatening question to indicate she didn’t care or at least wasn’t going to push. But as she crept back up the way she came, eyes fixated on the stains she couldn’t un-see as blood she asked, “Who was that? How many...how many people do you bring down here?”

Miriam frowned. A part of her recognized that she should apologize, try to start this over and appeal to the tentative friendship that had been forming between the two of them since before Morgan even died. Miriam wouldn’t lie, she’d grown a bit fond of the witch even while she wanted to kill her, just as she’d always been fond of Theo’s sisters and friends. But Miriam had been raised to not apologize, even before she’d been turned, so she didn’t, couldn’t. Whatever. “It’s mostly just wine, you know,” she said as a way of explanation. But that wasn’t good enough, probably. Readjusted. She smiled, an attempt to soothe. Sometimes, Miriam forgot that she was more bite than bark. “Morgan, I would never harm you, you know. Not anymore. I have no reason to even try.” She adjusted her posture, trying to appear non threatening, but she could no more do that than get Morgan to forget their first encounter. So, she sighed and took a seat near the steps that led to her house. They were on opposite sides of the wine cellar, at an impasse. “I don’t ask for names,” she said. “And she didn’t have any information. Just a drifter, lucky bitch.” Really, Miriam couldn’t be to blame for killing the woman. She’d practically rubbed it in Miriam’s face that she could leave and perform magic while Miriam was stuck in this town as a living corpse. She closed her eyes and took a soothing breath that she didn’t need. “I don’t know. Not many. Wine cellars make terrible places to conduct business, you know. Too many breakable things that I don’t want broken.” She ran her finger through a dark, sticky substance near her heel.

“Miriam--” Morgan began, her voice soft and heavy with disappointment. What had she expected? Where was the surprise in any of this? She stopped, tugging on the roots of her hair as she tried to take in the cold, matter-of-fact way Miriam talked about her killings. It reminded her of Deirdre when she was at her worst, when she was the thing her mother wanted her to be. How could Miriam be this way in so short a time, after one heartbreak? Had she loved him that much, that nothing could exist for her besides that hurt? She let out a long sigh. “I know you wouldn’t, Miriam. I know that,” she said. “But I wish you would let this go. Or at least that I could understand how--why this is so important to you. If it’s so fulfilling, why do you have to turn yourself off like that.” She nodded in her direction, taking in all the signs, the hard lines, the heaviness of the apathy. It was somehow more horrible to look at than the blood. “I just...if it was really that worth it, I don’t think you would have to be like this about it. I think if you understood you can have something besides hating people who never hurt you…” What? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see another version of Miriam hiding under the darkness, exactly. She knew she was lonely, driven, proud. Sometimes, under the weight of her death and her un-life, she could be funny. But Morgan didn’t know what else. She just wanted to believe it existed. Another breath. It was stupid, she didn’t need to breathe at all, but if she could float some air into her, maybe she could understand why she felt this upset over something she should have known all along.

There was a part of Miriam that wanted desperately for someone, anyone, to understand. She couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t from a lack of trying. After she’d killed Theo, when the high from it all had faded away, she’d cried until she couldn’t. Her mother had been the one to find her, a bloody mess, a shadow of a human being, sobbing over what was left of the husband she’d killed. Her mother, prim and proper, who had left the rearing of her daughter to her stern and more business-oriented husband when Miriam had been more interested in leathers than satins, didn’t know how to react to seeing her child the murderer. The monster. She never did. And yet she’d tried to comfort. And Miriam had let her, had thought this was a one and done situation. But there was no such thing. She couldn’t explain the hunger or rage that was only quieted by others’ screams. Morgan would certainly never understand it. Instead, Miriam kept her face impassive as she licked the blood and wine off her fingers, her eyes flashing red at the taste. She smiled, both sharp and sanguine. “Dearest, I’m only being myself.” She leaned back against the steps. “At least, what’s left of me.” Her hate must be fed to be tempered. She’d learned that the hard way. Miriam would stop if she only knew how.

Morgan lingered in the stairwell, wondering again what in all the earth she had been thinking of in coming here. Why she didn’t have her fill of Miriam from the last time. Had she really set aside the hatred in her eyes over a shared dread of eternity? Was the numbness, the pain between them really enough to scrub away the things she’d done? When she’d been alive, Miriam had sent her to the flipping hospital, of all things. She looked at the woman, resigned and stubborn on the ground. She was so lost she couldn’t even argue with Morgan, couldn’t even fight her.

Morgan crossed the room, stepping over the mess out of respect for the dead. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know sorry’s are stupid, but since I actually know how it is to wake up and feel chunks of yourself missing, I feel like I’m allowed. And--I just don’t think those empty spaces have to stay that way. Not for you, or for anyone else. There has to be something different, something better for you.” She bent down, closer than she had ever been to Miriam yet. She ghosted her fingers over Miriam’s hair and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I wish you would look for it some more,” she said. Then she turned back the way she’d come and left.

Not meaning to, Miriam flinched back from the tenderness of Morgan’s touch. She hadn’t experienced anything like that in so long. Not even the people she’d slept with recently had been tender. But she didn’t cry, for what it was worth. Didn’t allow tears to even begin to well in the corners of her eyes. But she felt worn around the edges and seen. It was fucking with her head a bit. Did Morgan seriously think she could be redeemed? After all that she’d done? There was no redemption for her, only vengeance and the final death that it would bring. This was what she knew, what she felt in the pit of her cold heart. But she couldn’t find the words to say it. Instead, she said, “Shut the door on the way out, sweetness.” It wasn’t loud, and it lacked her usual bravado. She stood up slowly, a phantom feeling in her bones, like her true age’s weariness was catching up to her, and she went in the opposite direction. She was going to have to clean up herself, it seemed. Didn’t matter. She had a bit more time on her hands than she planned for the evening, anyway.

#wickedswriting #poison and wine #wr miriam #wr chatzy #wr miriam chatzy

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