"Keys" commentary
Nov. 24th, 2022 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary of Dracula fic Keys, part 7 of Compromise
Mina felt like the sound of the woman’s heartbeat would drive her mad.
This is a very typical type of opening sentence for me, as I realized when I did this meme last year: short, scene-setting, declarative. I liked it also as a light callback to Jonathan's fears in "Collusion" about Mina going mad.
The screams and cries were difficult too to bear, but they faded over the nights, as the woman tired herself out and lost hope of rescue. The heartbeat never stopped. She heard it, felt it even from rooms away, the steady pulse resonating through her own blood and bones. She noticed as it sped up, gradually, the woman’s heart struggling to cope with the regular blood loss she sustained each night.
I agonized a little about the prosody of "difficult too to bear" but ultimately decided it's fine, it's very much my voice as a writer and I don't care if others might find it clunky.
This story includes very little exposition, and of course follows very closely on the events of Acculturation, though I mean it to be clear from this paragraph that we have had a small time jump, as there is to some extent between each story in the series (the one between Windows and Jackal is the smallest, of course).
I've thought, over the years, about the structure of this work as a series - why am I not writing is as a single multi-chapter story, rather than a series of one-shots? Aside from the first story and maybe "Windows," none of the stories really stand alone without the previous installments, and I do pretty minimal exposition. But these really are - or should be, if I get what I'm doing right - individual stories, each with their own small internal arcs, even though they are also part of a larger interlinked one, and while I mean them of course to be read in sequence, I can't quite countenance presenting them as chapters of one fic, because they're not. But it does leave me curious how this structuring decision impacts people's reading experience, both those who have read it story-by-story of a period of years and those who've read multiple parts in sequence.
She didn’t understand how the others could think clearly about anything else with the heartbeat underneath, so close, almost within reach. Mina was always hungry; feeding once every four nights, and taking only enough to leave the woman alive, left her with a constant gnawing need which the awareness of the woman’s closeness only exacerbated. She kept thinking about the moment of biting down, her teeth piercing the soft flesh like the skin of a fruit, the warm gush of the blood -
I am really very into this fruit/flesh simile, for a number of reasons. One of those is a private silly joke about fruit bats. But, more seriously, I like it as an analogy for the sensory pleasure of biting/blood drinking (one which at least makes it feel more personally accessible to me as a reader), and I am also of course into the symbolic resonances of fruit (apple, pomegranate, etc) for Mina within this context. I am having some unformulated thoughts here too about food preparation and vampires and the trope in some other media about vampires being repulsed by human food versus Dracula in canon feeding Jonathan. I once wrote a story where Dracula feeds Mina apples. I don't know.
“Mina, you’re not paying attention.” Ileana sounded irritated.
The others had started teaching Mina Romanian, which she enjoyed, except that she had found it almost impossible to focus. “I’m sorry,” she said, then remembered the intention of this time together and struggled to search for the equivalent words of apology in Romanian.
Okay, so the language-learning thread. A very careful reader will have caught hints of this already: Dracula telepathically translating Russian into English for Mina on the train; Mina wanting Jonathan to use his German fluency to help with her escape plan; various small language barrier moments between Jonathan and/or Mina and the wives; Ecaterina's caginess with Mina about her own native language in the scene repeated between "Adjust" and "Acculturation." But in this story it comes to the forefront and becomes one of the central thematic threads.
Given the centrality of language here, I wrestled with whether or not this story should in fact include actual Romanian text (and had similar questions about some different languages in the next story). Ultimately I decided against it, partly because of the likelihood that, however much research I did, I would probably mess it up, but partly because it would have given the story a different texture. It would have made the whole thing more geographically and historically rooted, but taken it a little out of the realm of psychodynamic entanglement. In these stories, I want enough detail to ground the reader in specificity, but not enough that it becomes meaningfully about a particular place and time in a real way.
Ileana shook her head before Mina could find the the words. “We’ll try again tomorrow night,” she said, standing. It was Ileana’s turn tonight. “We have time, you know.”
Common activities in Dracula's castle, according to Assimbya/chthonic-cassandra: reading, torture, language study, and fiber arts.
Mina laughed. “I do hope it won’t take me a century to achieve fluency.”
Notice Mina's new capacity here, however tenuous, for future projection - she's talking as if she will be there, with them, in a century.
She felt gratified to hear laughter in response, and to feel Ileana’s hand on her shoulder. “If it does, we might mock a little, but we won’t pass judgment.”
Mina placed her hand over Ileana’s. “I am glad to know that.”
Ileana kissed her on cheek, almost softly. “Sister. I’ll be back soon.”
She watched Ileana leave, trying not to think with envy about what she was going to do (copper on her tongue).
I wanted to hold next to each other the (perhaps still surprising) ease of the physical affection between them alongside the horror of what they are actually doing to this captive.
On the other side of the room, Ecaterina and Adriana had laid out a garment over the table, and were conferring about something to do with it. Mina considered offering her help, and then thought about the sewing classes at school, and how they had been among the only ones in which she had never earned top marks. Adriana had broken her characteristic reserve a few nights ago to tell Mina that the elaborate, idiosyncratic embroidery on some of the clothing they shared was her own. The two of them certainly did not need her assistance.
She decided to offer it anyway. She stood and walked over to them, seeing that the garment on the table before them was a coat already stiff with embroidery, of a fashion which she couldn’t place but associated with long ago times. It was ripped in some places and stained in others; she gathered they were attempting to restore it. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked, feeling almost as though she was interrupting.
Ecaterina and Adriana totally have this fascinating centuries-long historical clothing preservation and reconstruction practice going on. It is not what these stories are about but it is definitely happening.
Ecaterina’s smile was gracious. “You can talk with us,” she said, gesturing to a chair a couple feet from the table. Mina sat down. She watched as Ecaterina took out a basket from under the table and removed from it several spools of thread, offering one to Adriana. She held it close to the embroidery on the coat and shook her head.
“I feel embarrassed that I’ve been so slow with Romanian,” Mina said, watching as Ecaterina took back the spool of thread and offered Adriana another. The two of them seemed so at ease with one another, familiar with the pattern of this work.
(Remember - each morning at Whitby, rising with Lucy and going simultaneously, without words, to make the bed they shared together. The white of the sheet held taut between her hands, sunlight streaming in, the satisfaction of laying the blankets down without a wrinkle.)
Ecaterina didn’t look up from the work, but her voice was friendly. “What Ileana said was true; you have time.”
“How did all of you learn English?” Mina couldn’t tell whether the question was rude. Should she be worrying about rudeness here, with them?
This moment cracks me up. It's sort of Mina as ignorant but well-intentioned British person trying to talk to foreigners, but of course that's not at all the situation she's in. Put it down to Dracula the novel's imperialist anxieties.
“He likes languages,” Ecaterina didn’t seem to have taken offense. “He wanted us to practice with him.”
Mina caught herself feeling fond at the image of the four of them practicing together, of the Count making mistakes, checking a book to correct himself. “It must have taken a great deal of work.”
Notice: in Ecaterina's reminiscences about language lessons with the Count in the previous story, it was her own mistakes being corrected by him. But it matters to Mina in this moment to imagine the Count in the process of learning, not being perfect as something; this is an avenue through which she can start to feel fondness towards him.
Ecaterina almost shrugged. “We had time too. He says that he wanted to learn the language since your Elizabeth was in power, but it’s only been maybe in the last half-century that he brought us into it. Adria was young, though, and she had to be more focused on her own training then. She didn’t always join us.”
The idea of Dracula getting curious about England during the reign of Elizabeth I is partly a private joke on my part about Ivan IV's correspondence with Elizabeth, but that's really just on me.
Adriana, who was intent on picking out the stained threads of the embroidery with a delicate metal tool, didn’t look up when Ecaterina said her name. Not for the first time, Mina tried to imagine Adriana as a human girl - shy, modest, perhaps pious. Perhaps praised for her embroidery. A rush of compassion, and of a feeling that she might tentatively have called love, filled her.
Adriana, as the most reserved of the wives, is also the easiest for Mina to project onto, which doesn't mean her assumptions here are inaccurate.
From the other room, the heartbeat sped up. There was a muffled scream, more of pain than anything else.
“Do you know any other languages?” Mina asked.
It was okay with me for this juxtaposition to land as partially humorous, but I couldn't let it tip over into WWDITS-type tonality.
Ecaterina tilted her head to look at her, hands resting lightly on the table. “You certainly are adept at making polite conversation. Do you know any other languages?”
She would think later about why Ecaterina evaded that question, she decided. “I do. I thought of myself as quite talented with languages, as it happens. Before this. I was a teacher. Never fluent, but I studied French.” (Marking up the girls’ papers, correcting their grammar.) “Also German.” (Sitting in a coffee shop practicing with - )
The absence of Jonathan's name in this story was meant to be extremely pointed, and this moment was me making it as blatant as I possibly could. (I love writing fan fic, where you can just do these things.) Psychologically, we've just seen Mina told by Ecaterina in "Acculturation" not to mention Jonathan unless the Count does so first, and before that not wanting to think about him when she kisses the Count in "Adjust." The widening chasm between them, of course, has been perhaps the major arc of the story so far.
I got a handful of comments, largely in the long time-gap between the posting of "Adjust" and "Acculturation", from people who were feeling very anxious about Jonathan's fate in the series and the possibly that he had been killed, as the Count threatens to do in "Adjust." I did mean "Acculturation" to make it clear at least that this was not what had just happened at this juncture in the story, but I was also very aware that this installment continued to leave readers in suspense about Jonathan's fate. Sorry, everyone, I guess? (not really sorry) It's the way the story had to go.
“You should keep up with those. Ask if you can go to the library, when he next comes. We have books in both of those languages there.”
Mina didn’t want to say that the idea of asking him for anything still mortified and frightened her, that she feared if she let him know what she wanted he would forever hold the threat of taking it away over her head. She decided to push, a little. “Don’t I also need to focus on my training?”
Mina's fear here should remind us of some moments in "Jackal", particularly his threat to deny her clothing because he knows it scares her. And the journal stuff in that same story. You might say that the two parallel major image clusters of the series are cloth (background) and text (foreground).
This made Ecaterina laugh outright, mouth open. The sound of her laugh reminded Mina of the Count’s, and she wondered how long Ecaterina must have been with him, how closely she might have grown towards him like a vine. It seemed rude to ask. “Oh, we all know that you need that, Mina.”
These Victorians, continuing to worry about rudeness even while Ecaterina is being really quite obnoxious to Mina here, even if not in a mean way.
Ileana came back. No blood on her face; she must have cleaned herself up. She was carrying the pitcher which they had left in the woman’s room filled with water; it was now empty. “We have to give her more water before morning. Do I need to go down to the well again?”
There's a well in a courtyard which is accessible to the wives from their more restricted quarters even when they're not allowed in the rest of the castle, as now. This has been an established part of layout of Castle Dracula according both to the Werner Herzog Nosferatu and the Assimbya fan fiction universe for many years.
“We should have enough up here,” Ecaterina said. “Mina, you can do it.” She reached to a belt at the waist of her dress and unfastened a key. “Here.” Mina took it, feeling the press of the metal into her palm, and then took the pitcher from Ileana.
As she refilled the pitcher from a bucket they kept on the stones near the bath, she thought about how long it had been since she had locked or unlocked a door on her own. She liked the feeling of the key in her hand, liked its turn as she unlocked the door of the room in which they kept the human woman. It felt like trust.
I am so so curious by at what point in this story it becomes clear to people that this key situation is Not A Good Thing; in writing the story, I went back and forth about whether I was being too subtle or too blatant in my foreshadowing.
Inside, she saw that the woman wasn’t unconscious, but she was close to it. She lay on the bed, and flinched when the door opened, tried to curl away, but it was clear that she was no longer in a position to fight. Mina could smell sweat in the room, and the chamberpot they had left for her and not bothered to empty, but underneath it all was the smell of the woman’s blood - warm, alive, so close to her. Mina felt revulsion and hunger at once.
Mina's about to make the comparison herself very shortly, but I wanted this section to already echo the details of Mina's own captivity and death in "Windows" - the woman on the bed, curling away but unable to fight, the bodily details of her sweat and the chamberpot.
The room was sparsely furnished. Mina crossed to put down the pitcher beside the bowl on a side table, but realized that the woman might be too weak to fetch it herself, and brought the side table to beside the bed instead. She was aware of the woman watching her as she did, brown eyes wide and liquid. Mina poured some of the water into a cup and held it out. The woman laboriously pushed herself to sitting and took it, hand shaking. The water disappeared down her throat in moments.
She must be ravenously hungry, Mina realized. They weren’t bringing her food - Ileana had said that she would be dead before it really mattered - but only water, without which the blood loss would kill her far more quickly than they wanted. Mina had eaten little, on the train ride to the castle, but she had been given food, with attention paid to what she might be able to stomach. This woman’s suffering had been accounted of less significance than her own.
My partner told me that this was the moment when he realized it was a set-up - that it didn't make sense for them not to give the woman food if they meant to keep her alive for a while - but I'm not sure if that's how it read to anyone else. They don't mean to keep her alive permanently, after all, and it doesn't matter to them how weak she is.
When I reread this section, mostly I just feel upset imagining how awful it would be to be starving while you slowly die of blood loss.
The woman held out her now-empty glass; wordlessly, Mina refilled it. There was dried blood crusted across the woman’s neck and chest, sweat along her hairline. Mina thought about pouring more water into the bowl and wringing out a cloth into it, bathing the woman’s face and neck tenderly, taking out the chamberpot for her. She thought about the Count handing her his handkerchief, about him cleaning up her vomit from the floor of the train car. She turned on her heel and left the room.
Ahh. Makes me so upset, even/because I wrote it. Notice here the distinctions Mina is beginning to become aware of between violence meant to create an attachment relationship (what was done to her) and violence where the victim is treated as disposable.
-
Ecaterina never asked for the key back, so Mina didn’t give it to her. It left a metallic smell on her fingers, almost like blood. She kept it in the pocket of her petticoats.
I guess here's the place to talk about the Bluebeard thing. I think most people who read this story end up getting this, but just in case: yeah, this is a Bluebeard story.
I love Bluebeard, and I love doing Bluebeard-Dracula fusions. The parallel is basically spelled out in canon with Jonathan in the castle with the locked doors, and I played with that a long time ago in this Dracula as fairy tale story I wrote as a treat in Yuletide back in 2008. A few years later I had a larger-scale Dracula project (not fic, and so not on the internet) where a whole section of it was structurally based on Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle, with which I am obsessed. So the Bluebeard thing in this story happened very naturally, and didn't take a lot of thought or work on my part; those images and tropes are very close at hand for me.
The next night, Ileana asked her if she wanted another language lesson. “I’d like to read a little by myself, if that’s all right,” she said, realizing as she did so that she was looking to Ecaterina for permission. Ecaterina nodded.
Mina did try to read. Daniel Deronda. She had to pause every page or so, pace the room until she felt like a captive leopard. She felt glad that there was no one to watch her; it had been awful, the Count’s dictate that she never be left alone. But, of course, he had known exactly how awful it would be for her.
Again, this is a thing probably most of you caught, but: this is the book Jonathan gave her back in "Collusion."
She did not mark how much time passed before she put down the book, went to the human woman’s room, and went inside.
This is a thing I like to do as a writer sometimes, and especially in parts of this series, where, even though I'm writing in a relatively tight third person, I don't give the reader full access to the PoV character's interiority, so that I'm not spelling out their decisions for you until they happen. I like this as a light little narrative trick, and when you have characters for whom telepathic surveillance is a real threat, I think it can add interesting tension around what is concealed from who when (including what the characters are concealing from themselves). I do this in an even more marked way in the next (most recent) story. Another text that plays with this a lot in ways I often think about is The Library at Mount Char, whose narrative about resisting someone who feels omnipotent was hugely influential for me, including on this series.
The woman didn’t scream, just clutched the blankets on the bed to her chest and swallowed hard. Mina sat down on the edge of her bed. The woman wasn’t looking at her; she was looking at the open door, which Mina had not bothered to close behind her.
Mina knew, as surely as if she could see inside her thoughts, what she must be thinking. She remembered the fantasy of running across an open space, when her own legs were too weak to stand.
Again, a direct callback to the first few installments, including the door that's left open because there's no way the captive could flee.
She could carry this woman, she thought, in her arms as if she were precious. She could bring her down to the kitchen where Mina had baked her ill-fated cherry pie and feed her with her own hands, putting the sweet preserved fruit into her mouth. She could take her down the mountain and leave her in a house where they would clasp a crucifix around her throat and ring her bedroom with garlic flowers.
A few things about this paragraph. One is that I had to bring back my ridiculous pie scene, sorry everyone.
The fantasized image of Mina feeding the woman by hand was to some extent inspired by Catherynne Valente's Deathless, which includes an extremely memorable similar scene between the protagonists. More importantly for the arc of the story, though, Mina is imagining carrying this woman through the castle as Dracula carried her, though in her fantasy she is carrying her toward the human world and not away from it. Mina holding this fantasy should feel like a major transition for her character, who experienced herself as so fully helpless, so locked into the role of victim in the earlier sections of this story. Now she knows herself to be also a perpetrator, which means that she has both the power to harm and the power to refrain from harm. Even as that power is restricted for her in other ways (what would happen to her, one wonders, if she did try to rescue this woman?). This is very complex, but it is also a big shift for her.
The "as if she were precious" makes me tear up just as Mina is about too. The idea of seeing someone who has been marked off as disposable as precious gets to me very deeply, and it's important here that Mina is having this reaction to a woman who is nameless to her, to whom she has never spoken (to whom she can't speak - there is, of thematic significance in this context, a language barrier), who is likely a peasant without much access to education. We get a parallel scene in the next episode, but there are also going to be some very important differences.
Mina felt tears running down her own cheeks.
“It will only hurt for a moment,” she said, though she knew the woman wouldn’t understand her words, “and then it will be over.”
There are a lot of things to say about why Mina does this, what she thinks she's doing and what she's actually doing and what Ecaterina is about to say she's doing, but one thing is undeniably true, which is: for Mina it wasn't over.
She reached for her, and the woman cried out and tried to struggle; Mina felt the hands pushing against her chest, frantic in their weakness. She pulled the woman’s hair away from her neck and drank, and did not stop until the heartbeat went silent.
Obviously the circular structure here closing out this section of the fic before we get into the denouement: we started with the heartbeat and we end with Mina silencing it.
-
When the others found her sitting with the woman’s body, Ecaterina grabbed Mina by her hair and threw her across the floor. Mina landed bruisingly on her side and elbow. Ileana grabbed the woman’s body and, finding it stiff, tossed it on the floor, kicked at it.
We got the image of the vampire sitting with the victim's body before, in "Collusion", and we'll get it again.
“You selfish girl, you killed her,” Ileana said, “and we don’t know when we’ll get another, he told us to make her last -“
“It was cruel,” Mina said, “we were torturing her, I couldn’t -"
Ecaterina shook her head, a hint of a smile on her face. “No, Mina,” she said, “you were hungry.”
Thanks Ecaterina.
Mina couldn’t argue with that. She stayed where she’d fallen on the floor, looking at the woman’s body a few feet away, the neck twisted at a broken angle on the flagstones. The stone was cold beneath her, and the blood still sweet on her tongue.
I liked how this staging places Mina at the same physical level with the body, the contrast between the two bodies both sprawled.
“You had orders,” Ecaterina said, “you’re the last of us, and in his absence you do what we tell you. Did you think you were above that?”
Mina was shaking. “I’m sorry.” She wished again that she could remember the Romanian. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that I’m above you.”
Notice how the accusation of pride/hubris, of having considered herself to be different from the other wives is what really gets to Mina.
“Take off your dress.” Ecaterina told her. Her voice was soft; Mina thought about how many times the Count had given her this order, and how many times he must have given it to Ecaterina too. She reached behind her to the laces and took off her dress, which left her in a chemise and petticoat. She should have been grateful for the underclothes, but it felt worse to undress there, as though the dead woman was watching. “Stand up,” Ecaterina commanded. Mina did.
“Hold her, Ileana.” Ileana grabbed Mina’s arms and twisted them behind her back, held her there. She tried not to flinch at the strain in her shoulders.
They brought her to another room and chained her to the wall, wrists held up at the level of her head. She couldn’t stop trembling, tears in the back of her throat, listening to the key click in the shackles. She realized that she hadn’t imagined this would be done to her in his absence, and while she would be lying to herself if she thought that made it worse, it did make it different.
“You deprived the rest of us of sustenance,” Ecaterina said, “so you’ll serve as such until we have another source of blood. Adriana, it was your turn tonight; yours is the right to begin.”
"You'll serve as such" is such Dracula phrasing. Do we think he scripted this?
Mina hadn’t been looking at Adriana; she did then, and saw that she had blanched, that there was some expression on her face that Mina could only describe as horror. But surely that could not be right. She said something to Ecaterina, in Romanian, to which Ecaterina responded in the same language.
We should remember here that Adriana is the youngest here other than Jonathan and Mina and, while many aspects of life in the castle may be normalized for her, she may not have seen a peer going through this process of breaking/training before.
Mina felt a tightness in her belly and remembered the feeling of her knees on the floor. She realized that she had missed something. “I apologize,” she said again, “I was selfish and lost control. Please take my blood in recompense.”
She imagined the Count’s smile then, his hand on her head. This is good, Mina. But no one was there to say it. Ecaterina just nodded, tightly, perhaps with satisfaction, but it didn’t feel the same.
The callback here to the formal hierarchy dynamics, which Mina is starting to internalize, just as she is starting to internalize the Count. But there's something emotionally unfulfilling about not having him there to complete his part of the dynamic.
Adriana approached her, and Mina tilted her head to expose her neck. She didn’t cry out at the cold pain of the bite.
-
They left her chained for three days and three nights, and all three of them fed from her. The pain in her shoulders kept her from sleeping, and she quickly lost more blood than she had drunk from the human woman. The room had no windows, but during the days she felt an uneasy restlessness at her own inability to sleep, as though the sunlight stole in through the cracks in the walls and maddened her. It wasn’t like the mortal experience of going without sleep, which she had done sometimes as a human though she had never made a habit of it. This was more as though her body, kept unnaturally alive through whatever power granted her immortality, longed to return closer to death during the daylight, felt agitation at being kept from doing so, the edges of delirium creeping up to the edges of her mind. Alone, without anyone to watch her, she thrashed against the chains, though she felt ashamed even as she did so at the indignity of it.
I am going here with the novel canon that vampires are not actually burned by sunlight, that they can go out during the day if they want or need to, so I was interested in alternative reasons why they did sleep during the day. The idea that vampire sleep is closer to death is one that I've played with before and rather appeals to me.
Since writing this story I've come into contact with other vampire canons that play with vampires suffering while they stay up during the day, both WWDITS, where they very entertainingly go totally loopy, and the Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood, in which they have blood come out of your ears in a way that I can't take seriously as a viewer. But in both of those series vampires are also burned up by sunlight.
During those nights they did not leave her alone; they used the room where she was chained to talk, sew, play chess, with a certain courtesy, as if they wanted to ensure that she didn’t mistake this punishment (if punishment it was) for a statement of rejection from the circle of their care. In moments she felt acutely humiliated before them, standing barefooted upon the stone, her hair tangled around her. But there was no mockery, only the teeth in her throat over and over, the familiar pain of it, each of them each night, one after the other.
As others have noticed: this punishment isn't sadistic or malicious; it's just matter-of-fact. It was very important to convey that clearly and I'm glad that, at least for some readers, I did.
On the fourth night of this, the Count interrupted them before they bit her. “Enough,” he said, voice echoing through the small room. Mina felt sobs crashing in her chest like waves.
There's an echo here of Dracula interrupting Jonathan's attack in canon, except that relationally this is almost the inverse of that episode. The only thing that remains the same is Dracula's perverse role as rescuer within a scenario he himself allowed to occur.
Wordlessly, Ecaterina handed him the key to the shackles. He unbound her; Mina tried to stay on her feet, but her knees buckled beneath her. The Count caught her and lifted her into his arms. She felt relief. She wondered how long it would take until her shoulders stopped hurting.
He brought her into a nearby bedroom, and laid her down there. She pushed herself on her elbows and watched him kneel in front of her, open his shirt, cut a thin line across his chest. She reached out for him; he took her hand, helped her pull herself up. Mina knelt up and pressed her mouth to the wound. There; his hand in her hair, soothing her, holding her there. His gasp, barely audible, at her tongue against the wound.
When he let her go she pulled away from swallowing his blood with reluctance. “Thank you,” she said, the breath thick in her throat, “thank you, my lord.”
He helped her lie down, and from above her again pressed the wound on his chest to her mouth. She felt the blood on her face, staining the white of her chemise.
This is the October 2nd blood exchange, but the emotional choreography is all flipped, the things that were horrors there are now something to be grateful for. Remember how, all the way back in the first story, Mina asked the Count if he would keep doing this to her, keep reenacting the blood exchange, asked if, "Is that how this works?" So. Yeah. Yes, it is.
Finally he lay down beside her, and she started weeping. He didn’t say anything, just rested his hand across her throat; she didn’t know whether in comfort or in threat, and wasn’t sure any longer that there was a difference.
“I missed you,” she said, her voice sounding young and plaintive to her own ears.
“I know,” he said, and something came together in her mind, with a click like a key turning in a lock.
“You knew. You intended, you planned for - you knew I would do that, you all knew -"
“You can stop fighting, Mina,” he said, just as he had said to her weeks ago, “I know what you need.”
She laughed, and could hear the inflection of the delirium in her voice. “You do know. You know everything. I can tell from the books in your library. Romanian, English, French, German." She thought of the Dostoevsky on the train. "Russian. I don’t know what else. Ecaterina was telling me about how you started studying English long before I was even born. You’ve known my own language longer than I’ve been alive. You look at me and read me like some code to which only you have the cipher.”
What Mina doesn't know here is the extent to which Ecaterina was involved, as we saw, in strategizing all of this with Dracula. She's attributing this kind of omniscience and total competence to him that he hasn't fully earned. That isn't to say that he didn't orchestrate this plan himself; I don't want it to read like Ecaterina is operating as some kind of hidden power behind the throne figure without which he is ineffective. But there's a nuance that's not accessible to Mina.
He watched her, as though he was waiting for something. She watched the wound on his chest clot and finally close.
“Languages are like keys,” she said suddenly, “and all the keys here belong to you. Shorthand is like one we’ve kept from you.” The thought made her start crying again, and he held her. She closed her eyes, shaking in his arms. He hadn’t asked for this, she realized. He’d demanded everything else from her, taken everything else away from her, but he hadn’t asked for this. It was her only chance to offer something of her own accord. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you our shorthand. I will have no secrets from you. Please, don’t give me any keys until I’m ready for them.”
Ahhhhhhhhhh
Writing this scene was such a tightrope! It's an absolutely crucial, pivotal scene, and I knew it had to come out of the arc in such a way that it actually landed for readers as emotionally persuasive, that they actually believed Mina's capitulation.
I've gone to a lot of effort to establish that all of this is traumatic for Mina, it is incontrovertibly against her will. I've also had a lot almost-fakeouts already where she gives in to Dracula in various partial ways, which are meant to read as genuine - she's not pretending any of those times - but psychologically incomplete. Their conversation in "Adjust" where she tells him that she can't stop fighting is crucial here; there is a part of her that honestly wants to stop fighting - it's exhausting, it's miserable, it's lonely - but she can't make herself. There's an implicit ask, when she tells Dracula this, that he figure out a way to her over that, though she would be horrified if anyone pointed out that this is what she was asking for, as she genuinely wasn't on a conscious level. But this should land differently, and, if I've done my job right, it should feel believable that she's gotten to this point.
I knew that the shorthand piece was the most persuasive way of demonstrating that this capitulation is different, is complete. There's no other way she would give up that piece of herself, and that piece of her and Jonathan's relationship.
He kissed her hair, her cheek, her throat, her lips. “Yes. Oh, my dear, beautiful Mina. My best beloved. I am so proud of you.”
“I need to rest,” she said, “I know it’s not yet dawn, but I’ll go mad if I don’t. Please let me, my lord.”
He nodded. “I’ll bring you downstairs,” he said, but first helped her ease off the bloody chemise and petticoats. She didn’t protest her nakedness, even when he didn’t give her new clothing before he picked her up. She let him carry her down the hallways and the staircases into the basement, and he laid her down in the coffin where she had died. He dug earth from the packed ground about the coffins, and laid it gently around her, her native earth now of the land in which she had been reborn. It was cool around her body, and smelled rich, real, good. Mina let herself rest.
Of course, another inverted mirror here, this time of the scene of Mina's death in the coffin in "Windows."
I am pretty happy with this story! I think it's tight and effective and has its little elegances. I hope you all like it too.
Mina felt like the sound of the woman’s heartbeat would drive her mad.
This is a very typical type of opening sentence for me, as I realized when I did this meme last year: short, scene-setting, declarative. I liked it also as a light callback to Jonathan's fears in "Collusion" about Mina going mad.
The screams and cries were difficult too to bear, but they faded over the nights, as the woman tired herself out and lost hope of rescue. The heartbeat never stopped. She heard it, felt it even from rooms away, the steady pulse resonating through her own blood and bones. She noticed as it sped up, gradually, the woman’s heart struggling to cope with the regular blood loss she sustained each night.
I agonized a little about the prosody of "difficult too to bear" but ultimately decided it's fine, it's very much my voice as a writer and I don't care if others might find it clunky.
This story includes very little exposition, and of course follows very closely on the events of Acculturation, though I mean it to be clear from this paragraph that we have had a small time jump, as there is to some extent between each story in the series (the one between Windows and Jackal is the smallest, of course).
I've thought, over the years, about the structure of this work as a series - why am I not writing is as a single multi-chapter story, rather than a series of one-shots? Aside from the first story and maybe "Windows," none of the stories really stand alone without the previous installments, and I do pretty minimal exposition. But these really are - or should be, if I get what I'm doing right - individual stories, each with their own small internal arcs, even though they are also part of a larger interlinked one, and while I mean them of course to be read in sequence, I can't quite countenance presenting them as chapters of one fic, because they're not. But it does leave me curious how this structuring decision impacts people's reading experience, both those who have read it story-by-story of a period of years and those who've read multiple parts in sequence.
She didn’t understand how the others could think clearly about anything else with the heartbeat underneath, so close, almost within reach. Mina was always hungry; feeding once every four nights, and taking only enough to leave the woman alive, left her with a constant gnawing need which the awareness of the woman’s closeness only exacerbated. She kept thinking about the moment of biting down, her teeth piercing the soft flesh like the skin of a fruit, the warm gush of the blood -
I am really very into this fruit/flesh simile, for a number of reasons. One of those is a private silly joke about fruit bats. But, more seriously, I like it as an analogy for the sensory pleasure of biting/blood drinking (one which at least makes it feel more personally accessible to me as a reader), and I am also of course into the symbolic resonances of fruit (apple, pomegranate, etc) for Mina within this context. I am having some unformulated thoughts here too about food preparation and vampires and the trope in some other media about vampires being repulsed by human food versus Dracula in canon feeding Jonathan. I once wrote a story where Dracula feeds Mina apples. I don't know.
“Mina, you’re not paying attention.” Ileana sounded irritated.
The others had started teaching Mina Romanian, which she enjoyed, except that she had found it almost impossible to focus. “I’m sorry,” she said, then remembered the intention of this time together and struggled to search for the equivalent words of apology in Romanian.
Okay, so the language-learning thread. A very careful reader will have caught hints of this already: Dracula telepathically translating Russian into English for Mina on the train; Mina wanting Jonathan to use his German fluency to help with her escape plan; various small language barrier moments between Jonathan and/or Mina and the wives; Ecaterina's caginess with Mina about her own native language in the scene repeated between "Adjust" and "Acculturation." But in this story it comes to the forefront and becomes one of the central thematic threads.
Given the centrality of language here, I wrestled with whether or not this story should in fact include actual Romanian text (and had similar questions about some different languages in the next story). Ultimately I decided against it, partly because of the likelihood that, however much research I did, I would probably mess it up, but partly because it would have given the story a different texture. It would have made the whole thing more geographically and historically rooted, but taken it a little out of the realm of psychodynamic entanglement. In these stories, I want enough detail to ground the reader in specificity, but not enough that it becomes meaningfully about a particular place and time in a real way.
Ileana shook her head before Mina could find the the words. “We’ll try again tomorrow night,” she said, standing. It was Ileana’s turn tonight. “We have time, you know.”
Common activities in Dracula's castle, according to Assimbya/chthonic-cassandra: reading, torture, language study, and fiber arts.
Mina laughed. “I do hope it won’t take me a century to achieve fluency.”
Notice Mina's new capacity here, however tenuous, for future projection - she's talking as if she will be there, with them, in a century.
She felt gratified to hear laughter in response, and to feel Ileana’s hand on her shoulder. “If it does, we might mock a little, but we won’t pass judgment.”
Mina placed her hand over Ileana’s. “I am glad to know that.”
Ileana kissed her on cheek, almost softly. “Sister. I’ll be back soon.”
She watched Ileana leave, trying not to think with envy about what she was going to do (copper on her tongue).
I wanted to hold next to each other the (perhaps still surprising) ease of the physical affection between them alongside the horror of what they are actually doing to this captive.
On the other side of the room, Ecaterina and Adriana had laid out a garment over the table, and were conferring about something to do with it. Mina considered offering her help, and then thought about the sewing classes at school, and how they had been among the only ones in which she had never earned top marks. Adriana had broken her characteristic reserve a few nights ago to tell Mina that the elaborate, idiosyncratic embroidery on some of the clothing they shared was her own. The two of them certainly did not need her assistance.
She decided to offer it anyway. She stood and walked over to them, seeing that the garment on the table before them was a coat already stiff with embroidery, of a fashion which she couldn’t place but associated with long ago times. It was ripped in some places and stained in others; she gathered they were attempting to restore it. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked, feeling almost as though she was interrupting.
Ecaterina and Adriana totally have this fascinating centuries-long historical clothing preservation and reconstruction practice going on. It is not what these stories are about but it is definitely happening.
Ecaterina’s smile was gracious. “You can talk with us,” she said, gesturing to a chair a couple feet from the table. Mina sat down. She watched as Ecaterina took out a basket from under the table and removed from it several spools of thread, offering one to Adriana. She held it close to the embroidery on the coat and shook her head.
“I feel embarrassed that I’ve been so slow with Romanian,” Mina said, watching as Ecaterina took back the spool of thread and offered Adriana another. The two of them seemed so at ease with one another, familiar with the pattern of this work.
(Remember - each morning at Whitby, rising with Lucy and going simultaneously, without words, to make the bed they shared together. The white of the sheet held taut between her hands, sunlight streaming in, the satisfaction of laying the blankets down without a wrinkle.)
Ecaterina didn’t look up from the work, but her voice was friendly. “What Ileana said was true; you have time.”
“How did all of you learn English?” Mina couldn’t tell whether the question was rude. Should she be worrying about rudeness here, with them?
This moment cracks me up. It's sort of Mina as ignorant but well-intentioned British person trying to talk to foreigners, but of course that's not at all the situation she's in. Put it down to Dracula the novel's imperialist anxieties.
“He likes languages,” Ecaterina didn’t seem to have taken offense. “He wanted us to practice with him.”
Mina caught herself feeling fond at the image of the four of them practicing together, of the Count making mistakes, checking a book to correct himself. “It must have taken a great deal of work.”
Notice: in Ecaterina's reminiscences about language lessons with the Count in the previous story, it was her own mistakes being corrected by him. But it matters to Mina in this moment to imagine the Count in the process of learning, not being perfect as something; this is an avenue through which she can start to feel fondness towards him.
Ecaterina almost shrugged. “We had time too. He says that he wanted to learn the language since your Elizabeth was in power, but it’s only been maybe in the last half-century that he brought us into it. Adria was young, though, and she had to be more focused on her own training then. She didn’t always join us.”
The idea of Dracula getting curious about England during the reign of Elizabeth I is partly a private joke on my part about Ivan IV's correspondence with Elizabeth, but that's really just on me.
Adriana, who was intent on picking out the stained threads of the embroidery with a delicate metal tool, didn’t look up when Ecaterina said her name. Not for the first time, Mina tried to imagine Adriana as a human girl - shy, modest, perhaps pious. Perhaps praised for her embroidery. A rush of compassion, and of a feeling that she might tentatively have called love, filled her.
Adriana, as the most reserved of the wives, is also the easiest for Mina to project onto, which doesn't mean her assumptions here are inaccurate.
From the other room, the heartbeat sped up. There was a muffled scream, more of pain than anything else.
“Do you know any other languages?” Mina asked.
It was okay with me for this juxtaposition to land as partially humorous, but I couldn't let it tip over into WWDITS-type tonality.
Ecaterina tilted her head to look at her, hands resting lightly on the table. “You certainly are adept at making polite conversation. Do you know any other languages?”
She would think later about why Ecaterina evaded that question, she decided. “I do. I thought of myself as quite talented with languages, as it happens. Before this. I was a teacher. Never fluent, but I studied French.” (Marking up the girls’ papers, correcting their grammar.) “Also German.” (Sitting in a coffee shop practicing with - )
The absence of Jonathan's name in this story was meant to be extremely pointed, and this moment was me making it as blatant as I possibly could. (I love writing fan fic, where you can just do these things.) Psychologically, we've just seen Mina told by Ecaterina in "Acculturation" not to mention Jonathan unless the Count does so first, and before that not wanting to think about him when she kisses the Count in "Adjust." The widening chasm between them, of course, has been perhaps the major arc of the story so far.
I got a handful of comments, largely in the long time-gap between the posting of "Adjust" and "Acculturation", from people who were feeling very anxious about Jonathan's fate in the series and the possibly that he had been killed, as the Count threatens to do in "Adjust." I did mean "Acculturation" to make it clear at least that this was not what had just happened at this juncture in the story, but I was also very aware that this installment continued to leave readers in suspense about Jonathan's fate. Sorry, everyone, I guess? (not really sorry) It's the way the story had to go.
“You should keep up with those. Ask if you can go to the library, when he next comes. We have books in both of those languages there.”
Mina didn’t want to say that the idea of asking him for anything still mortified and frightened her, that she feared if she let him know what she wanted he would forever hold the threat of taking it away over her head. She decided to push, a little. “Don’t I also need to focus on my training?”
Mina's fear here should remind us of some moments in "Jackal", particularly his threat to deny her clothing because he knows it scares her. And the journal stuff in that same story. You might say that the two parallel major image clusters of the series are cloth (background) and text (foreground).
This made Ecaterina laugh outright, mouth open. The sound of her laugh reminded Mina of the Count’s, and she wondered how long Ecaterina must have been with him, how closely she might have grown towards him like a vine. It seemed rude to ask. “Oh, we all know that you need that, Mina.”
These Victorians, continuing to worry about rudeness even while Ecaterina is being really quite obnoxious to Mina here, even if not in a mean way.
Ileana came back. No blood on her face; she must have cleaned herself up. She was carrying the pitcher which they had left in the woman’s room filled with water; it was now empty. “We have to give her more water before morning. Do I need to go down to the well again?”
There's a well in a courtyard which is accessible to the wives from their more restricted quarters even when they're not allowed in the rest of the castle, as now. This has been an established part of layout of Castle Dracula according both to the Werner Herzog Nosferatu and the Assimbya fan fiction universe for many years.
“We should have enough up here,” Ecaterina said. “Mina, you can do it.” She reached to a belt at the waist of her dress and unfastened a key. “Here.” Mina took it, feeling the press of the metal into her palm, and then took the pitcher from Ileana.
As she refilled the pitcher from a bucket they kept on the stones near the bath, she thought about how long it had been since she had locked or unlocked a door on her own. She liked the feeling of the key in her hand, liked its turn as she unlocked the door of the room in which they kept the human woman. It felt like trust.
I am so so curious by at what point in this story it becomes clear to people that this key situation is Not A Good Thing; in writing the story, I went back and forth about whether I was being too subtle or too blatant in my foreshadowing.
Inside, she saw that the woman wasn’t unconscious, but she was close to it. She lay on the bed, and flinched when the door opened, tried to curl away, but it was clear that she was no longer in a position to fight. Mina could smell sweat in the room, and the chamberpot they had left for her and not bothered to empty, but underneath it all was the smell of the woman’s blood - warm, alive, so close to her. Mina felt revulsion and hunger at once.
Mina's about to make the comparison herself very shortly, but I wanted this section to already echo the details of Mina's own captivity and death in "Windows" - the woman on the bed, curling away but unable to fight, the bodily details of her sweat and the chamberpot.
The room was sparsely furnished. Mina crossed to put down the pitcher beside the bowl on a side table, but realized that the woman might be too weak to fetch it herself, and brought the side table to beside the bed instead. She was aware of the woman watching her as she did, brown eyes wide and liquid. Mina poured some of the water into a cup and held it out. The woman laboriously pushed herself to sitting and took it, hand shaking. The water disappeared down her throat in moments.
She must be ravenously hungry, Mina realized. They weren’t bringing her food - Ileana had said that she would be dead before it really mattered - but only water, without which the blood loss would kill her far more quickly than they wanted. Mina had eaten little, on the train ride to the castle, but she had been given food, with attention paid to what she might be able to stomach. This woman’s suffering had been accounted of less significance than her own.
My partner told me that this was the moment when he realized it was a set-up - that it didn't make sense for them not to give the woman food if they meant to keep her alive for a while - but I'm not sure if that's how it read to anyone else. They don't mean to keep her alive permanently, after all, and it doesn't matter to them how weak she is.
When I reread this section, mostly I just feel upset imagining how awful it would be to be starving while you slowly die of blood loss.
The woman held out her now-empty glass; wordlessly, Mina refilled it. There was dried blood crusted across the woman’s neck and chest, sweat along her hairline. Mina thought about pouring more water into the bowl and wringing out a cloth into it, bathing the woman’s face and neck tenderly, taking out the chamberpot for her. She thought about the Count handing her his handkerchief, about him cleaning up her vomit from the floor of the train car. She turned on her heel and left the room.
Ahh. Makes me so upset, even/because I wrote it. Notice here the distinctions Mina is beginning to become aware of between violence meant to create an attachment relationship (what was done to her) and violence where the victim is treated as disposable.
-
Ecaterina never asked for the key back, so Mina didn’t give it to her. It left a metallic smell on her fingers, almost like blood. She kept it in the pocket of her petticoats.
I guess here's the place to talk about the Bluebeard thing. I think most people who read this story end up getting this, but just in case: yeah, this is a Bluebeard story.
I love Bluebeard, and I love doing Bluebeard-Dracula fusions. The parallel is basically spelled out in canon with Jonathan in the castle with the locked doors, and I played with that a long time ago in this Dracula as fairy tale story I wrote as a treat in Yuletide back in 2008. A few years later I had a larger-scale Dracula project (not fic, and so not on the internet) where a whole section of it was structurally based on Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle, with which I am obsessed. So the Bluebeard thing in this story happened very naturally, and didn't take a lot of thought or work on my part; those images and tropes are very close at hand for me.
The next night, Ileana asked her if she wanted another language lesson. “I’d like to read a little by myself, if that’s all right,” she said, realizing as she did so that she was looking to Ecaterina for permission. Ecaterina nodded.
Mina did try to read. Daniel Deronda. She had to pause every page or so, pace the room until she felt like a captive leopard. She felt glad that there was no one to watch her; it had been awful, the Count’s dictate that she never be left alone. But, of course, he had known exactly how awful it would be for her.
Again, this is a thing probably most of you caught, but: this is the book Jonathan gave her back in "Collusion."
She did not mark how much time passed before she put down the book, went to the human woman’s room, and went inside.
This is a thing I like to do as a writer sometimes, and especially in parts of this series, where, even though I'm writing in a relatively tight third person, I don't give the reader full access to the PoV character's interiority, so that I'm not spelling out their decisions for you until they happen. I like this as a light little narrative trick, and when you have characters for whom telepathic surveillance is a real threat, I think it can add interesting tension around what is concealed from who when (including what the characters are concealing from themselves). I do this in an even more marked way in the next (most recent) story. Another text that plays with this a lot in ways I often think about is The Library at Mount Char, whose narrative about resisting someone who feels omnipotent was hugely influential for me, including on this series.
The woman didn’t scream, just clutched the blankets on the bed to her chest and swallowed hard. Mina sat down on the edge of her bed. The woman wasn’t looking at her; she was looking at the open door, which Mina had not bothered to close behind her.
Mina knew, as surely as if she could see inside her thoughts, what she must be thinking. She remembered the fantasy of running across an open space, when her own legs were too weak to stand.
Again, a direct callback to the first few installments, including the door that's left open because there's no way the captive could flee.
She could carry this woman, she thought, in her arms as if she were precious. She could bring her down to the kitchen where Mina had baked her ill-fated cherry pie and feed her with her own hands, putting the sweet preserved fruit into her mouth. She could take her down the mountain and leave her in a house where they would clasp a crucifix around her throat and ring her bedroom with garlic flowers.
A few things about this paragraph. One is that I had to bring back my ridiculous pie scene, sorry everyone.
The fantasized image of Mina feeding the woman by hand was to some extent inspired by Catherynne Valente's Deathless, which includes an extremely memorable similar scene between the protagonists. More importantly for the arc of the story, though, Mina is imagining carrying this woman through the castle as Dracula carried her, though in her fantasy she is carrying her toward the human world and not away from it. Mina holding this fantasy should feel like a major transition for her character, who experienced herself as so fully helpless, so locked into the role of victim in the earlier sections of this story. Now she knows herself to be also a perpetrator, which means that she has both the power to harm and the power to refrain from harm. Even as that power is restricted for her in other ways (what would happen to her, one wonders, if she did try to rescue this woman?). This is very complex, but it is also a big shift for her.
The "as if she were precious" makes me tear up just as Mina is about too. The idea of seeing someone who has been marked off as disposable as precious gets to me very deeply, and it's important here that Mina is having this reaction to a woman who is nameless to her, to whom she has never spoken (to whom she can't speak - there is, of thematic significance in this context, a language barrier), who is likely a peasant without much access to education. We get a parallel scene in the next episode, but there are also going to be some very important differences.
Mina felt tears running down her own cheeks.
“It will only hurt for a moment,” she said, though she knew the woman wouldn’t understand her words, “and then it will be over.”
There are a lot of things to say about why Mina does this, what she thinks she's doing and what she's actually doing and what Ecaterina is about to say she's doing, but one thing is undeniably true, which is: for Mina it wasn't over.
She reached for her, and the woman cried out and tried to struggle; Mina felt the hands pushing against her chest, frantic in their weakness. She pulled the woman’s hair away from her neck and drank, and did not stop until the heartbeat went silent.
Obviously the circular structure here closing out this section of the fic before we get into the denouement: we started with the heartbeat and we end with Mina silencing it.
-
When the others found her sitting with the woman’s body, Ecaterina grabbed Mina by her hair and threw her across the floor. Mina landed bruisingly on her side and elbow. Ileana grabbed the woman’s body and, finding it stiff, tossed it on the floor, kicked at it.
We got the image of the vampire sitting with the victim's body before, in "Collusion", and we'll get it again.
“You selfish girl, you killed her,” Ileana said, “and we don’t know when we’ll get another, he told us to make her last -“
“It was cruel,” Mina said, “we were torturing her, I couldn’t -"
Ecaterina shook her head, a hint of a smile on her face. “No, Mina,” she said, “you were hungry.”
Thanks Ecaterina.
Mina couldn’t argue with that. She stayed where she’d fallen on the floor, looking at the woman’s body a few feet away, the neck twisted at a broken angle on the flagstones. The stone was cold beneath her, and the blood still sweet on her tongue.
I liked how this staging places Mina at the same physical level with the body, the contrast between the two bodies both sprawled.
“You had orders,” Ecaterina said, “you’re the last of us, and in his absence you do what we tell you. Did you think you were above that?”
Mina was shaking. “I’m sorry.” She wished again that she could remember the Romanian. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that I’m above you.”
Notice how the accusation of pride/hubris, of having considered herself to be different from the other wives is what really gets to Mina.
“Take off your dress.” Ecaterina told her. Her voice was soft; Mina thought about how many times the Count had given her this order, and how many times he must have given it to Ecaterina too. She reached behind her to the laces and took off her dress, which left her in a chemise and petticoat. She should have been grateful for the underclothes, but it felt worse to undress there, as though the dead woman was watching. “Stand up,” Ecaterina commanded. Mina did.
“Hold her, Ileana.” Ileana grabbed Mina’s arms and twisted them behind her back, held her there. She tried not to flinch at the strain in her shoulders.
They brought her to another room and chained her to the wall, wrists held up at the level of her head. She couldn’t stop trembling, tears in the back of her throat, listening to the key click in the shackles. She realized that she hadn’t imagined this would be done to her in his absence, and while she would be lying to herself if she thought that made it worse, it did make it different.
“You deprived the rest of us of sustenance,” Ecaterina said, “so you’ll serve as such until we have another source of blood. Adriana, it was your turn tonight; yours is the right to begin.”
"You'll serve as such" is such Dracula phrasing. Do we think he scripted this?
Mina hadn’t been looking at Adriana; she did then, and saw that she had blanched, that there was some expression on her face that Mina could only describe as horror. But surely that could not be right. She said something to Ecaterina, in Romanian, to which Ecaterina responded in the same language.
We should remember here that Adriana is the youngest here other than Jonathan and Mina and, while many aspects of life in the castle may be normalized for her, she may not have seen a peer going through this process of breaking/training before.
Mina felt a tightness in her belly and remembered the feeling of her knees on the floor. She realized that she had missed something. “I apologize,” she said again, “I was selfish and lost control. Please take my blood in recompense.”
She imagined the Count’s smile then, his hand on her head. This is good, Mina. But no one was there to say it. Ecaterina just nodded, tightly, perhaps with satisfaction, but it didn’t feel the same.
The callback here to the formal hierarchy dynamics, which Mina is starting to internalize, just as she is starting to internalize the Count. But there's something emotionally unfulfilling about not having him there to complete his part of the dynamic.
Adriana approached her, and Mina tilted her head to expose her neck. She didn’t cry out at the cold pain of the bite.
-
They left her chained for three days and three nights, and all three of them fed from her. The pain in her shoulders kept her from sleeping, and she quickly lost more blood than she had drunk from the human woman. The room had no windows, but during the days she felt an uneasy restlessness at her own inability to sleep, as though the sunlight stole in through the cracks in the walls and maddened her. It wasn’t like the mortal experience of going without sleep, which she had done sometimes as a human though she had never made a habit of it. This was more as though her body, kept unnaturally alive through whatever power granted her immortality, longed to return closer to death during the daylight, felt agitation at being kept from doing so, the edges of delirium creeping up to the edges of her mind. Alone, without anyone to watch her, she thrashed against the chains, though she felt ashamed even as she did so at the indignity of it.
I am going here with the novel canon that vampires are not actually burned by sunlight, that they can go out during the day if they want or need to, so I was interested in alternative reasons why they did sleep during the day. The idea that vampire sleep is closer to death is one that I've played with before and rather appeals to me.
Since writing this story I've come into contact with other vampire canons that play with vampires suffering while they stay up during the day, both WWDITS, where they very entertainingly go totally loopy, and the Southern Vampire Mysteries/True Blood, in which they have blood come out of your ears in a way that I can't take seriously as a viewer. But in both of those series vampires are also burned up by sunlight.
During those nights they did not leave her alone; they used the room where she was chained to talk, sew, play chess, with a certain courtesy, as if they wanted to ensure that she didn’t mistake this punishment (if punishment it was) for a statement of rejection from the circle of their care. In moments she felt acutely humiliated before them, standing barefooted upon the stone, her hair tangled around her. But there was no mockery, only the teeth in her throat over and over, the familiar pain of it, each of them each night, one after the other.
As others have noticed: this punishment isn't sadistic or malicious; it's just matter-of-fact. It was very important to convey that clearly and I'm glad that, at least for some readers, I did.
On the fourth night of this, the Count interrupted them before they bit her. “Enough,” he said, voice echoing through the small room. Mina felt sobs crashing in her chest like waves.
There's an echo here of Dracula interrupting Jonathan's attack in canon, except that relationally this is almost the inverse of that episode. The only thing that remains the same is Dracula's perverse role as rescuer within a scenario he himself allowed to occur.
Wordlessly, Ecaterina handed him the key to the shackles. He unbound her; Mina tried to stay on her feet, but her knees buckled beneath her. The Count caught her and lifted her into his arms. She felt relief. She wondered how long it would take until her shoulders stopped hurting.
He brought her into a nearby bedroom, and laid her down there. She pushed herself on her elbows and watched him kneel in front of her, open his shirt, cut a thin line across his chest. She reached out for him; he took her hand, helped her pull herself up. Mina knelt up and pressed her mouth to the wound. There; his hand in her hair, soothing her, holding her there. His gasp, barely audible, at her tongue against the wound.
When he let her go she pulled away from swallowing his blood with reluctance. “Thank you,” she said, the breath thick in her throat, “thank you, my lord.”
He helped her lie down, and from above her again pressed the wound on his chest to her mouth. She felt the blood on her face, staining the white of her chemise.
This is the October 2nd blood exchange, but the emotional choreography is all flipped, the things that were horrors there are now something to be grateful for. Remember how, all the way back in the first story, Mina asked the Count if he would keep doing this to her, keep reenacting the blood exchange, asked if, "Is that how this works?" So. Yeah. Yes, it is.
Finally he lay down beside her, and she started weeping. He didn’t say anything, just rested his hand across her throat; she didn’t know whether in comfort or in threat, and wasn’t sure any longer that there was a difference.
“I missed you,” she said, her voice sounding young and plaintive to her own ears.
“I know,” he said, and something came together in her mind, with a click like a key turning in a lock.
“You knew. You intended, you planned for - you knew I would do that, you all knew -"
“You can stop fighting, Mina,” he said, just as he had said to her weeks ago, “I know what you need.”
She laughed, and could hear the inflection of the delirium in her voice. “You do know. You know everything. I can tell from the books in your library. Romanian, English, French, German." She thought of the Dostoevsky on the train. "Russian. I don’t know what else. Ecaterina was telling me about how you started studying English long before I was even born. You’ve known my own language longer than I’ve been alive. You look at me and read me like some code to which only you have the cipher.”
What Mina doesn't know here is the extent to which Ecaterina was involved, as we saw, in strategizing all of this with Dracula. She's attributing this kind of omniscience and total competence to him that he hasn't fully earned. That isn't to say that he didn't orchestrate this plan himself; I don't want it to read like Ecaterina is operating as some kind of hidden power behind the throne figure without which he is ineffective. But there's a nuance that's not accessible to Mina.
He watched her, as though he was waiting for something. She watched the wound on his chest clot and finally close.
“Languages are like keys,” she said suddenly, “and all the keys here belong to you. Shorthand is like one we’ve kept from you.” The thought made her start crying again, and he held her. She closed her eyes, shaking in his arms. He hadn’t asked for this, she realized. He’d demanded everything else from her, taken everything else away from her, but he hadn’t asked for this. It was her only chance to offer something of her own accord. “I’ll teach you. I’ll teach you our shorthand. I will have no secrets from you. Please, don’t give me any keys until I’m ready for them.”
Ahhhhhhhhhh
Writing this scene was such a tightrope! It's an absolutely crucial, pivotal scene, and I knew it had to come out of the arc in such a way that it actually landed for readers as emotionally persuasive, that they actually believed Mina's capitulation.
I've gone to a lot of effort to establish that all of this is traumatic for Mina, it is incontrovertibly against her will. I've also had a lot almost-fakeouts already where she gives in to Dracula in various partial ways, which are meant to read as genuine - she's not pretending any of those times - but psychologically incomplete. Their conversation in "Adjust" where she tells him that she can't stop fighting is crucial here; there is a part of her that honestly wants to stop fighting - it's exhausting, it's miserable, it's lonely - but she can't make herself. There's an implicit ask, when she tells Dracula this, that he figure out a way to her over that, though she would be horrified if anyone pointed out that this is what she was asking for, as she genuinely wasn't on a conscious level. But this should land differently, and, if I've done my job right, it should feel believable that she's gotten to this point.
I knew that the shorthand piece was the most persuasive way of demonstrating that this capitulation is different, is complete. There's no other way she would give up that piece of herself, and that piece of her and Jonathan's relationship.
He kissed her hair, her cheek, her throat, her lips. “Yes. Oh, my dear, beautiful Mina. My best beloved. I am so proud of you.”
“I need to rest,” she said, “I know it’s not yet dawn, but I’ll go mad if I don’t. Please let me, my lord.”
He nodded. “I’ll bring you downstairs,” he said, but first helped her ease off the bloody chemise and petticoats. She didn’t protest her nakedness, even when he didn’t give her new clothing before he picked her up. She let him carry her down the hallways and the staircases into the basement, and he laid her down in the coffin where she had died. He dug earth from the packed ground about the coffins, and laid it gently around her, her native earth now of the land in which she had been reborn. It was cool around her body, and smelled rich, real, good. Mina let herself rest.
Of course, another inverted mirror here, this time of the scene of Mina's death in the coffin in "Windows."
I am pretty happy with this story! I think it's tight and effective and has its little elegances. I hope you all like it too.
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Date: 2022-11-25 03:36 am (UTC)“This is the October 2nd blood exchange, but the emotional choreography is all flipped, the things that were horrors there are now something to be grateful for. Remember how, all the way back in the first story, Mina asked the Count if he would keep doing this to her, keep reenacting the blood exchange, asked if, "Is that how this works?" So. Yeah. Yes, it is.”
Oh my god, the image of the Blood Exchange Scene occurred to me when I read it, but not their exchange in the first story of the segment!
Also this is not the place to say this, rather it should be in the fic’s own comment session, but one thing that I forgot to comment before and that always jumps out to me in chapter in particular is also the idea of repetition and ennui… In terms of, I read Mina’s attempted small talk and I know that, given time, things will become more familiar – but it is quite something, to imagine someone like Mina isolated from society for eternity, repeating the same topics, rereading the same books… Immediately makes you wonder about the other wives too, how their own personalities changed to adapt to this, how they do to pass their time… Suddenly the conversation about the embroidered garment becomes so much more (and Mina’s attempt at baking a pie so much more poignant? I actually love that bit and I’m glad you included it!)
Thank you so much for sharing these comments for the three fics!