"Collusion" commentary
Nov. 11th, 2022 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary of Dracula fic Collusion, part four of Compromise.
You let it pour around you like water. All the focus, the energy turning towards him. Remaining alert to what he wants and what he commands. It is a strange kind of listening, and one which takes practice. It is impossible, at first, to focus on anything else. The intensity of your attention dulls the rest of your world, as if you were underwater and could hear nothing except your own heartbeat.
It would be a lie to say it ever becomes easy, but eventually it is easier to listen than it is to fight, to shake your head as if you could ever get the ringing out of your ears. Your mind is beginning to erode. Thinking takes longer. Everyone else seems like a bad imitation of themselves, too bright, too loud, too false. You listen. Survival exists in the beats between commands, between outbursts of rage. Everything is slipping out of your hands. It is such satisfaction to have this, this one thing which remains solid. You listen.
I was so nervous about this installment. I originally (...in 2009) intended "Compromise" to be a one-shot, and so much of the point of that initial story was about the opacity of Jonathan's experience to Mina, and how painful that is for her. Once I decided to turn it into a series and began (very gradually) planning it out, I knew that an installment from Jonathan's perspective would need to come at this point in the story, but I wasn't sure how the pov switch would land after the first three installments, or how a reader would respond to Jonathan's character as I've written it here.
The second person opening is partly an acknowledgment of the abruptness of the transition, though I'll point out here that there's nothing actually in it which unambiguously identifies Jonathan as the addressee, and I meant - not necessarily for ambiguity in that, but certainly for the possibility of it applying to multiple characters. I tried out a few different other options for an opening, including just beginning with the paragraph below, but this is what stuck.
-
Mina and Ecaterina were playing chess. Jonathan made a pretense of reading (Wordsworth, in fact, of all things, which he had not expected to find in the Count’s library), but in reality he was watching them as carefully and intently as he dared. Mina had never excelled at chess - she had, Jonathan thought, a tendency to assume that her opponent thought as logically and honorably as she herself did, and thus had difficulty anticipating their moves - but she had always been a respectable player, enough that his games with her had been exciting and closely matched. But now she seemed to have trouble even remembering the rules. She stared at the board for minutes on end, only to end up choosing the simplest and most obvious moves. And every sound or sudden movement from those around her made her start back and lose her focus.
The idea that, even before the transformation, Jonathan is better than Mina at chess was a characterization choice that interested me - I wanted to make a point that, while Mina is an observant person and an extremely strategic thinker, she doesn't naturally tends towards the sort of close attunement to subtle social cues and interpersonal dynamics that I imagine Jonathan (and also Lucy) to naturally be focused on.
I always have a thing in my Dracula fic about which books everyone is reading, and what books the Count keeps in his library, which speculation is a site of mild entertainment for me, even though my ideas aren't always that plausible. I do think Jonathan would be a Wordsworth fan.
It was agonizing to watch, and eventually Jonathan could not stand it any longer. He put down his book and went to her side. “Would you like some help?” he asked, making a point of keeping his voice quiet and even.
Mina laughed. “Am I really that bad?”
“You’re out of practice,” Jonathan offered, “perhaps I can help remind you.”
“One could call that cheating, Jonathan,” Ecaterina remarked mildly.
“You’re going to win anyway,” Jonathan retorted, “you could at least allow her a dignified defeat.”
“I hardly think that your intervention will provide that,” Ecaterina answered, laughing, and Jonathan tried not to snap at her. She did not mean to be cruel.
But Mina pushed back her chair and smoothed her skirt. “I may as well concede now, if things have become so dire. It’s true that I don’t have much pride, but I should think I have enough that I don’t want anyone cheating on my account.” Her voice was light. “Thank you for the game.” She stood up and left. Her movement was restrained enough that she could not be said to have made some sort of petulant exit, and Jonathan was unable to discern what it was she might be feeling. He could not exactly run after her.
I thought a lot about the symbolic choreography of this scene, which is meant to start the reader thinking about the dynamics within the household in a way that the previous installments haven't invited.
Ecaterina smiled at him. “Would you finish out this game with me, then?”
Jonathan clamped down on the remnants of panic that rose up in him, and returned the smile. “Certainly,” he told her, and settled down in the seat Mina had vacated, looking down at the tangled mess of the pieces on the board.
His mind, however, remained only half on the game. There was no way he could take the Count aside and tell him in private that he thought Mina was losing her mind. The one to ask about his concerns should in fact be Ecaterina, who had seen this process from a vantage point adjacent to his own more times than he could bear to think of, and thus should know, theoretically, if something had gone wrong, but he was only now coming to a place where he could stand to be in a room with her without terror, and the vulnerability of asking such a question did not seem tolerable. No way, of course, to ask Mina herself.
Pin here: "more times than he could bear to think of" is the first mention of the possibility that the number of brides/consorts/captives currently in the castle may not be all there ever were.
For an instant he remembered her with blood on her thighs, calling him Traitor! and heat washed over him. He moved what had been Mina’s bishop forward.
Ecaterina won the game, but it took longer than it might have. They put away the pieces together, fingers brushing as they did so. When they were done, she caught his shoulder. “You’re thinking too much,” she told him, “it’s not your responsibility.”
She pulled his head down towards her own and kissed him. Jonathan thought of refusing, thought of turning aside and asking whether the Count had given permission. But it would only be a delaying tactic. He knew how it would end, and he would rather not do this under the Count’s intent gaze. He worked on not thinking.
Another first in the series: this moment is the first time we see some of the casual(ish?) physical affection and intimacy that is the norm between members of the household. This is a very important element of the story I want to tell, but I always feel that I am walking several very fine lines in writing it - I didn't want to sensationalize those scenes, as I definitely did in some of my earliest Dracula fic, and I also didn't want to write anything that could be a construed as a "sex between the victims is an act of resistance" narrative (a la recent YA Girls of Paper and Fire which as a trauma narrative rubbed me all the wrong ways). These interactions are sanctioned by the Count, are indeed part of the abuse he requires, and at the same time there's also a ton of intricacy and emotional complication there.
-
When the wolves led him to the castle, it was Ecaterina who the Count placed to guard him. He knew her, then, only as the nameless woman who had made the first claim to his blood. It horrified him, how weak his body was in comparison to hers, how little he could even think of resistance under the fog of her hypnosis. She left bite marks all over his body, and it was only when he was delirious with the pain and the need to get out that the Count came to him.
(He knew, later, that what Ecaterina had done to him in those nights was not her choice, that she was acting under command, as he would, as any of them would. This did not make him less afraid.)
Does he really understand, though? This parenthetical aside is as much for the reader as anything - Jonathan remains very internally divided about this question, in some ways. The brides are too foundational a part of his initial trauma with the Count for him to identify with them as we see Mina in this story beginning to.
“I have not yet decided,” the Count said, “whether or not to let you die. For a mild-mannered Englishman, you have done so much to thwart my plans. I could drain your blood out here, and then show your rotted corpse to your wife, watch her weep.”
I sort of wrote that story too, about the time that I wrote the original "Compromise." I think it's even more of a darkest timeline AU than this one.
Jonathan knew what the alternative was to death. But he had promised Mina that he would not let her go there alone.
May I just take a moment to point out that I wrote this long, long before the entirety of tumblr had a collective freakout about the "unknown land" line? Sorry, obnoxious moment over.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, “Do you want me to ask you for mercy?”
The Count smiled, and though his face was unlined and his hair dark, Jonathan saw the man who had, months ago, kept his house-guest locked in his bedroom for days on end. “For my blood. I will kill you either way; the question is only whether you will wake again. It would please me to see you beg for what I had to force down Mina’s throat.”
See how the Count is already enamored with playing the two of them against each other, even before he has Mina captive. He rather sets Jonathan up for the guilt and self-blame he is later holding.
Jonathan felt tired. “I can’t play your games,” he said, aware that he might be asking for his own death with his brusqueness. He remembered the care he had taken to remain polite with the Count before he knew what he was, how he never spoke openly in anger even when the Count threw Jonathan’s letters into the fire. What an effort that seemed, now. “Maybe Mina could, but I’m not as quick with words as she is. I don’t want to die, though maybe that makes me a coward. I don’t want Mina to be alone. You must know both of those things, otherwise you wouldn’t bother toying with me like this. Make your choice.”
This is what passes as rudeness to Jonathan when addressing his captor; his standards are a little different than a normal person's.
Also: yeah, that final line in this paragraph always makes that moment in Phantom echo in my head. Unfortunately.
The Count stepped forward, and touched Jonathan’s face, tracing the arch of his nose, the curve of his cheekbones. Jonathan tried not to flinch. He held the Count’s gaze and thought of wolves beneath his window, Mina screaming that she was unclean while he tried to still her trembling. “I think I’ll keep you,” the Count said, “for now.”
I love writing the Count just being absolutely weird in the ways that he touches people; I don't want people to picture this as a typical sexy-threatening caress, but as something rather stranger. Also, Jonathan trying not to flinch cf. Mina in the first story.
-
“Why am I the only man?” Jonathan asked once, when his body ached too much for caution.
The Count did not smile. “None of the others survived,” he said simply.
Okay. So this thread of the series is a result of a lot of pondering on my part about different ways of reading the Count's desire and intentions for Jonathan vis a vis his desire and intentions for his female victims (who we need not also necessarily assume he has the same intentions for as one another, of course). If I am writing a story where he does choose to turn Jonathan and keep him alongside his brides, then why is he the only man?
What I'm building up in the background here should be glimpses of some of the Count's own baggage around gender and sexuality, ways in which he might be inclined to see/treat a male victim differently from a female one. This hasn't come to the forefront yet in the series, but I wanted to start it simmering here.
-
He came upon Mina with Ileana, laughing. The air was thick with firelight, and Jonathan startled at the sight of them so close, Ileana’s arm across Mina’s shoulders, their thick, loose hair almost mingled. Mina’s laugh had a brittle, shrill quality that he did not recognize, and the edge of the sound made him want to silence her, as if there was some valve he could turn to stopper up the flow of the noise. He realized, with a twinge of nausea, that Ileana was joking about the Count, mocking him. He imagined the words traveling between the stones of the wall, along the narrow chain which was each of their mental connections to him. He imagined the Count storming in and grabbing Mina by her hair.
Sound of laughter cf. water glasses? The impression I wanted to give here is that, while Jonathan is altruistically concerned for Mina's safety and well-being, there's a more selfish element to his reaction here too - the way she's acting here annoys him, he doesn't like it. But he could never say that directly.
From the other end, this is probably one of the first times in the series that we've seen Mina laugh.
He quelled his impulses and did not interrupt, only settled down on the other side of the room as they ignored him. He watched the fire and tried not to listen to them.
He saw Mina glance towards him and then away. He saw Ileana kiss her. He saw Mina close her eyes and keep still.
When Ileana left, he could not resist approaching Mina. “Please, be careful with them,” he told her, trying to keep his voice neutral, afraid that visible emotion in any direction might make her wrench away from him.
When he is upset, Jonathan gets quieter and more neutral; Mina's the one who sometimes gets louder and more emotional.
She looked up into his face, her lips set firmly, her eyes steeled. “Why? What do I have to be afraid of?”
“You know what they did to me. Mina -”
She laughed. “They are my sisters now; there is no difference between us. If you still fear them, then you ought to be afraid of me as well.”
Very important line for the series as a whole!
The words felt like danger, bitter, sharp as they left his mouth. “It’s not the same. You’re not a monster, you know that. You didn’t ask for this.”
Projection much, Jonathan? He's holding a lot of guilt and internalized victim-blaming about this, which he isn't able to talk about directly, to Mina or otherwise.
“And Ileana did?” When Jonathan did not immediately answer that, she continued, “You’ve never bothered to ask any of them, have you?”
Jonathan’s mouth was dry. “They could easily be lying to you, trying to gain your confidence -”
Mina stood. “As could you.” A beat. “I’ve seen how you touch him, how you ask him for comfort after your nightmares. Did you return my journal only because he told you to? Do you do anything, now, which isn’t what he’s told you to do?”
Her voice was becoming loud. “Please, Mina, stay calm, or you’ll get us both punished.”
“Did he even have to force you? Do you even know what it’s like, fighting until your wrists are so worn out that they’re trembling, choking on his blood? He told me he would dash your brains out if I screamed. What did he tell you?”
Ahh this whole scene was so hard to write.
In the novel, Mina and Jonathan's unconditional support of one another in the aftermath of their overlapping but distinct traumas is a beautiful and hopeful narrative of solidarity and mutual support. But I was interested in exploring the messiness of co-victimhood, and the ways that the pressure of those shared experiences can warp something that started as solidarity. It's always interesting for me to get comments on this series that take either Jonathan's side or Mina's side in these arguments, since a lot of what I am doing as the series goes on is deliberately complicating and messing with identification and sympathy. I'm always interested in how the reads for people.
Jonathan did not know whether what he was feeling was anger, or shame, or grief. “I can’t excuse my actions to you,” he said, “I don’t have any answer which would satisfy you. I’ve done what I thought I could.”
“You just want me away from the rest of them because you’re jealous that I’ll never touch you again.” Mina threw out the words like venom.
He thought, until the Count commands you to. He thought, you never used to speak like this. He said, “You know I couldn’t touch you even if I wanted to.”
On the train she had kissed him, once, and it had made the Count laugh. He had not fully realized, then, that it would be the last time she touched him of her own accord. He should have. He thought of her red-rimmed eyes as she bent over his sickbed. He thought of how much they had lost.
Note that the sickbed is the same memory Mina thought of in "Jackal," from the other side.
Mina laughed. “At least he grants us some mercies.”
Jonathan refused to storm from the room like a child. He returned to his seat and watched the fire. It comforted him to think of how it was at once shifting and unchangeable, how lighting up a pile of kindling entailed the same actions and results here as it would in England, that if he held his palm too close it would still sting and burn. He waited for Mina to leave first.
-
“Come hunt with me,” the Count told him, “the women can wait for their share.”
I realized after finishing the story that the time jump backwards here is really confusing, and then couldn't figure out how to fix it. Alas. It's still a crucial scene.
Jonathan came, and did not have words for the joy he felt in the brisk air, with the open sky above him and the cries of owls breaking the night. The woman they took was beautiful, and Jonathan was becoming skilled enough at hypnosis that could make it so that she did not feel pain or fear when he bit her. It felt good to drink his fill, instead of forever sharing her a victim with the Count’s wives and, as the youngest, waiting for whatever they chose to leave him. His body felt comfortable and sated, enough that he could almost ignore the part of his mind which still felt guilt and horror.
Important that the way Jonathan is tolerating the hunting here is by taking his victims' consciousness of what is happening to them away; compare with how the Count accuses him at the end of the story of avoidance of the reality of what he (the Count) is doing to to Mina.
When it was done, the Count told Jonathan to undress in the snow and touched him there, kissing him with a mouth that still tasted like the woman’s blood. Jonathan did not make a sound. He let his body feel pleasure and did not think.
When it was done, they sat beside the corpse, and the Count stroked the fur of the wolves who came to feed on it. “Soon I intend to leave,” he said, “and bring Mina back with me. It should take some weeks.”
Very pleased with the image of the Count petting the wolves.
Jonathan stared at him. “You know where she is?” he asked, finally.
The Count nodded. “I believe so. Roughly. And once I am close enough, I can find her through her connection to me. She will not be able to conceal herself.”
Jonathan looked at his own palms, which were flecked with blood. “I want to come with you,” he said.
“Why?” Jonathan could not read the Count’s tone. “Do you think that will be easier for her?”
Part of the tragedy of this story is how much Jonathan wants to believe this to be true; he desperately wants there to be a way for him to mitigate Mina's suffering, for them to have a life together that is tolerable enough even within the confines of what Dracula allows. The idea that his presence might make some aspects of it worse for her is not something he is willing to consider (even though the blood exchange, Mina's central trauma in the events of the novel, was characterized by Jonathan's incapacitated presence).
Jonathan nodded. “I will do whatever you ask of me in return.”
“You know that I will not allow you to soften my cruelties towards her, or put your own body between her and me. If she screams, or cries, or begs me to stop, you will not be permitted to go to her to dry her tears.”
“I understand,” Jonathan said.
“If you interfere, or help her to resist me, I will lock you up, and you will not be allowed to see on another. If you continue to do so, I will kill you.” The Count’s voice was calm, even.
Neither Jonathan nor the readers should accuse the Count of springing anything on them! As a writer, it's sort of satisfying to write the Count laying out his plans and threats very plainly, and then developing the story such that it still could catch someone off-guard when he actually does what he had threatened.
Jonathan nodded, though he wanted to move as little as possible.
The Count smiled, finally. “I have never had a couple before, both my own. I am looking forward to it.”
-
One night, soon before dawn, the Count found ink on Mina’s fingers.
This is a Clarissa reference.
“My dear,” he told her, turning her hand between his palms, “I told you that I did not want you writing. Do you forget my commands so quickly?”
They were together, all of them. It would be easy for Mina to break the Count’s gaze and turn towards Jonathan, tell them all about the journal he had placed in her hands. They would be both be at fault then, but Jonathan perhaps more so, since disobedience from Mina, at this stage, was almost to be expected. But she did not. She grasped the Count’s hands and knelt, with more grace than Jonathan would have expected. “I am sorry,” she said, “punish me as you will.”
Jonathan watched carefully, working to keep his expression impassive.
“I don’t want you alone any longer,” the Count said, “Ileana will stay with you at all times now, until I decide you have earned back my trust. We cannot have you doing anything rash.” He touched her hair. “I’ll punish you tomorrow night, two hours after sunset. Come to me then.”
Note the difference in how the Count punishes Jonathan vs Mina - Jonathan is isolated, locked up alone, and Mina contained and deprived of privacy. This is parallel, too, to Jonathan's captivity in the novel vs Dracula's invasion of Mina's bedroom during the blood exchange. It's also psychologically crucial to the evolution of the series.
He turned away and left Mina on her knees. Jonathan saw her stumble as she stood, rub a hand wearily over her eyes. He did not go to her.
The next night, Ecaterina said she wanted Adriana and Jonathan’s help cleaning out a disused wing of the castle. He went with her, and tried not to listen for screams. Ecaterina and Adriana moved in and out of English as they spoke, making it difficult for Jonathan to follow the conversation. It was some relief to have mindless, physically engrossing work. He and Adria were both of a similar height, and at least a foot taller than Ecaterina, which occasioned some simple, light laughter as they tried to dust the corners of the rooms, jokes which required little facility in one another’s languages.
He thought of Mina calling these women her sisters, and tried not to think of Ecaterina’s teeth in his shoulder. He asked her, “How do you stand it?”
She turned to look at him, and with her yellow hair tied back she looked more human than he was used to seeing her. “What?”
“Watching,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse to his ears, “seeing him destroy us.”
There's something that really gets me still about the intimacy and vulnerability of Jonathan asking Ecaterina, who so terrifies him, this question.
Ecaterina wiped her hands on her skirt. “It’s not destruction,” she said, “it’s transformation. If you believe that, then there is no pain in watching.”
Jonathan remembered the wind, and the joy of strength in his arms and blood in his mouth. He tried to remember what Mina looked like hunting, but he could not think of her as anything but a blur in those moments, part of a pack. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said.
Adriana was still scrubbing at the mildewed stone of the walls. Ecaterina put a hand on the back of her neck, fingers kneading the muscle. “I love Adria like a sister, but I have hurt her when he asked me to, or held her down while he did. I knew she would be better for it later, and worse if he and I let her imagine me as some sort of ideal protector.”
“You told him once,” Jonathan said, startled at his own daring (for he had never spoken so recklessly to her, to any of them, not in all the time he had been living - or not living - there), “that he didn’t love, that he’d never loved. I remember that.”
Ecaterina smiled. “What does it mean, for a priest to love those he initiates, or a king to love his vassals? His caring is unlike the love we can feel for each other. You resign yourself to that, and value it for what it is.”
Such a dodge! Yet another through line: Ecaterina evading questions.
“But you’ve felt anger too, you’ve felt resentment.” It was not a question. “I heard you.”
Ecaterina tilted her head, as though listening to the wind. “He’ll be finished with her soon; you can go clean yourself up to console your wife, Jonathan Harker.”
He brought a copy of Daniel Deronda from the Count’s library and found Mina curled up in a bedroom, Ileana next to her, laying out playing cards across the mattress. He offered her the book. “I thought you might like something to read,” he told her, “or we could read it together, if you want.”
Jonathan's idea of help here (and in earlier parts of the series too) is always distraction - he's not willing to hear about what Mina has been through, to talk to her about it. His own avoidance and detachment makes that psychologically untenable for him. But the distraction really isn't working for Mina. And so they are unable to connect.
Mina reached out and took the book from his hands, opened it with a spread of her narrow fingers. He watched her eyes skirt over the page and tried to guess if she was absorbing the words, if her mind could process them any longer.
I recently reread The Crimson Petal and the White and realized that the phrasing of the description of Mina opening the book comes from there.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” she told him finally, “perhaps later.” She closed the book and laid it aside. He nodded to her, and left.
-
Later he would find the note folded in his clothes, and not know how long it had lain there. Shorthand, clear and comprehensible though blockier than his own. We can still get out, it said, but I need to know that you want to leave with me.
-
He came to the Count and stood before him, not wanting to show the presumption of sitting in the chair across from his without being directed to do so.
I left the timeline of this story a little ambiguous here, but we are supposed to understand his request to the Count as directly connected to the receipt of the note and his ambivalence about it.
“I have something to ask,” he said, “but I don’t want to question your judgment. If you think I am wrong, or my suggestion is inappropriate, please know that I will respect whatever you tell me.”
The Count nodded, and gestured for him to sit down. “I understand.”
Jonathan sat, and inhaled sharply, though he did not need the breath. “I would like you to hurt me in front of Mina.”
The Count’s face was carefully blank. “Why?”
The words poured from him, untrammeled. “She thinks I’m different from her - she thinks I could hurt or protect her, and I know both of those are wrong. I don’t think she’ll understand that our positions are the same unless she sees you push me past my limits, past the place where I can now easily accept what you demand. And until she knows that she can’t stop it either.”
(Mina crying over his journal, Mina making him swear to kill her, Mina subjecting herself to hypnotism in order that they might better understand the Count’s movements. Mina who would never have hurt anyone if she had a choice, who held Arthur when he wept over Lucy’s death, who comforted Renfield, who transcribed their journals until her wrists ached.)
He is remembering this Mina, who suffered for the sake of others, because he knows how much this request in particular would hurt her.
“You want me to make her complicit.”
I want you to make her stop hating me, was what Jonathan wanted to say, but he didn’t. Instead he looked straight into the Count’s eyes and said, “Yes.”
The Count reached out to touch Jonathan’s throat. He relaxed into the gesture, into the contact. “You know that I will also need you to accept your own complicity in her pain. To stop averting your eyes when you see me touch her.” Jonathan was silent, and the Count continued, “You know I have been watching you, my most proper young solicitor.”
“I’ve done everything you asked of me,” Jonathan said finally, feeling the Count’s long nails against his skin.
“But you’ve withdrawn yourself from it. You’ve done everything you can to avoid the feelings it evokes in you to see your wife naked, or kneeling to me, or with blood on her mouth. Even when I had you hurt her, you were doing your absolute best to see her as nothing but a body beneath your knife.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. “I’ll work on it. I’m sorry.”
The Count withdrew his hand. “We shall see. I think your suggestion is a good one; I’ll consider it, and when it ought to be implemented. Of course, the occasion must be unexpected. For now, I have other matters I would like to discuss; I think it time we gave you more responsibility, and a chance to employ some of your education. I would like to put you in charge of my business affairs.”
-
I’m still waiting for your answer.
-
“Why are you doing this?” Ileana asked, examining the bowls and spoons with curiosity, “You know none of us will be able to eat any of it.”
Mina smiled. The Count was away, but, at her request, he had left them with flour and sugar and butter and eggs. They were all gathered in the kitchen, which had not been used since Jonathan’s previous stay, examining her acquisitions with no small degree of confusion.
I have no good excuse for this scene.
“I like the smells,” she said, “and the feeling of the flour on my hands. Maybe I won’t, when I’m your age, but for now there are still things I miss about being a human.”
Jonathan sat at the table in the center of the room, and thought that it was just as well that they could not eat, as Mina would have a difficult time baking anything edible in that kitchen. He knew the stoves in which she was used to cooking, modern, iron things which permitted some degree of control over temperature, and everything in the room must date back several centuries. But he kept quiet, and watched.
It took time, but, especially in the Count’s absence, they had time in abundance, and Mina found an old jar of pitted cherries which must have been left from Jonathan’s visit, and baked a slightly burnt, lopsided pie. Jonathan saw her flushed with the eat, flour in her hair, and could almost think for a moment that it was his wife he watched. What she made did not appear edible to him any longer, but there was a pleasure in pretending that she would put it on the table and they would eat together.
(He wondered, idly, who it was who had cooked for him, those years before. Adriana, who was young enough to perhaps still remember how? The Count himself?)
Mina seemed giddy with her success. “It would be a shame to let this work go to waste,” she said, as if to herself, “I could bring it down to the village; surely there’s a family there who would enjoy it.”
Ileana was skeptical. “We’re murderous monsters, Mina. We can’t exactly deliver neighborly baked goods.”
Mina laughed. “I haven’t been here long; no one would recognize me. Jonathan can come and make sure I don’t get myself into trouble.”
If she had asked Ecaterina, she probably would have been refused but, Jonathan observed, Mina had been canny in asking Ileana, who agreed, perhaps because of the fun of doing something which the Count might have forbade them. She agreed to follow them in animal form, for safety’s sake. Jonathan said little. He watched Mina, and could not tell whether her hectic energy was joy or fear or distraction.
It makes no sense that Ileana agrees to this. Ugh, plot hole. I was too attached to the pie-baking to let go of it.
But he knew he could feel something in her change as they stepped out of the castle the first time, he knew, she had done so for any purpose other than hunting. He decided to say what he was thinking. “You can’t run now,” he said.
He saw her bite her lip. It must be a more painful habit, now. “I wasn’t going to. For one thing, I know how high the likelihood is that you’ll help Ileana drag me back. I do expect, however, to make it clear to as many people as I possibly can that I am the new housekeeper in Castle Dracula, that I have absolutely no idea about the rumors concerning my employer, and that I’d like to know how to post a letter to my friends in England. And I expect you to use your German to help me do so.”
“What makes you think I’ll help you do any of that?”
Mina didn’t look at him. “You haven’t told him about my notes. You haven’t responded, either, but you haven’t told him.”
Jonathan did not look at her either, and they continued down the path in silence.
-
They were there, before the house where Mina had been living in secret. It seemed wrong to Jonathan that the Count could feel her presence as if a chain bound them together, while Jonathan could have walked by this building and never knew that she was inside.
This would be a good moment to explain the genesis of the Compromise series altogether.
The first story came out of a present I received for Yuletide in 2007, an understated and deceptively simple little Dracula AU called Lights and Night. The premise of that fic was that Jonathan had been turned by Dracula, and Mina had for a period of time been fleeing both of them; the story shows the moment when they catch up to her in Paris. I loved the fic, and kept thinking about how the story would continue. A year and a half later I wrote "Compromise," which wasn't quite a direct sequel - it's tonally very different, and my Mina and Dracula in particular tend towards a little higher emotional pitch - but there are a couple of references in the first story, like Jonathan having packed Mina's luggage, that are a nod to the gift story that inspired it. Quickly the series took on a life of its own, but I continue to think very fondly and with gratitude about "Lights and Night." This section here is another direct nod, and could be the moment before the start of that story.
Anticipation immobilized him. What would she think, seeing him again? She would be terrified, but would she also feel relief? Would she tell him how much she had missed him?
His greatest fantasy, which he knew was far beyond the plausible, was that, when she saw him at the Count’s side, she would come willingly, tell them that she would give up her long-defended freedom, if only it meant that they could be together.
Jonathan, as we know, would and does and did do this for Mina.
He thought of all the things he wanted to say to her, but, in the end, none of them were anything more than I love you.
“Are you ready?” the Count asked, and Jonathan could feel him watching, the close focus of his gaze on Jonathan’s face.
He held in mind for a single instant a perfect image of Mina as she had once been, long before he had ever met the Count, animated and at ease as they talked together over coffee. He would never know that Mina again, and he was no longer the man she had fallen in love with. And he nodded. “I am.”
Ahhhhh. I know I wrote it, but this part still gets me.
-
The Count returned from his journey two nights after their excursion into the village. There were the greetings to which Jonathan had become accustomed, ritualized and sycophantic, and then there was, again, the abruptness of his commands.
“Mina, Jonathan, come with me,” he told them, and Jonathan saw a flash of unguarded terror in Mina’s eyes before she could control himself. He stood slowly, feeling sick. It was one thing to ask for this in the abstract, and another to have the prospect of it imminently before him. He thought, for a brief, histrionic moment, of declaring that he had been wrong, he had misjudged the situation, begging the Count not to do whatever it was he had planned based on Jonathan’s careful words.
But he said nothing. He steeled himself against pain and humiliation, and with Mina he followed the Count into the depths of the castle. He thought of Ecaterina’s hand on Adria’s neck, and hoped that, one day, he would be able to meet Mina’s eyes again.
You let it pour around you like water. All the focus, the energy turning towards him. Remaining alert to what he wants and what he commands. It is a strange kind of listening, and one which takes practice. It is impossible, at first, to focus on anything else. The intensity of your attention dulls the rest of your world, as if you were underwater and could hear nothing except your own heartbeat.
It would be a lie to say it ever becomes easy, but eventually it is easier to listen than it is to fight, to shake your head as if you could ever get the ringing out of your ears. Your mind is beginning to erode. Thinking takes longer. Everyone else seems like a bad imitation of themselves, too bright, too loud, too false. You listen. Survival exists in the beats between commands, between outbursts of rage. Everything is slipping out of your hands. It is such satisfaction to have this, this one thing which remains solid. You listen.
I was so nervous about this installment. I originally (...in 2009) intended "Compromise" to be a one-shot, and so much of the point of that initial story was about the opacity of Jonathan's experience to Mina, and how painful that is for her. Once I decided to turn it into a series and began (very gradually) planning it out, I knew that an installment from Jonathan's perspective would need to come at this point in the story, but I wasn't sure how the pov switch would land after the first three installments, or how a reader would respond to Jonathan's character as I've written it here.
The second person opening is partly an acknowledgment of the abruptness of the transition, though I'll point out here that there's nothing actually in it which unambiguously identifies Jonathan as the addressee, and I meant - not necessarily for ambiguity in that, but certainly for the possibility of it applying to multiple characters. I tried out a few different other options for an opening, including just beginning with the paragraph below, but this is what stuck.
-
Mina and Ecaterina were playing chess. Jonathan made a pretense of reading (Wordsworth, in fact, of all things, which he had not expected to find in the Count’s library), but in reality he was watching them as carefully and intently as he dared. Mina had never excelled at chess - she had, Jonathan thought, a tendency to assume that her opponent thought as logically and honorably as she herself did, and thus had difficulty anticipating their moves - but she had always been a respectable player, enough that his games with her had been exciting and closely matched. But now she seemed to have trouble even remembering the rules. She stared at the board for minutes on end, only to end up choosing the simplest and most obvious moves. And every sound or sudden movement from those around her made her start back and lose her focus.
The idea that, even before the transformation, Jonathan is better than Mina at chess was a characterization choice that interested me - I wanted to make a point that, while Mina is an observant person and an extremely strategic thinker, she doesn't naturally tends towards the sort of close attunement to subtle social cues and interpersonal dynamics that I imagine Jonathan (and also Lucy) to naturally be focused on.
I always have a thing in my Dracula fic about which books everyone is reading, and what books the Count keeps in his library, which speculation is a site of mild entertainment for me, even though my ideas aren't always that plausible. I do think Jonathan would be a Wordsworth fan.
It was agonizing to watch, and eventually Jonathan could not stand it any longer. He put down his book and went to her side. “Would you like some help?” he asked, making a point of keeping his voice quiet and even.
Mina laughed. “Am I really that bad?”
“You’re out of practice,” Jonathan offered, “perhaps I can help remind you.”
“One could call that cheating, Jonathan,” Ecaterina remarked mildly.
“You’re going to win anyway,” Jonathan retorted, “you could at least allow her a dignified defeat.”
“I hardly think that your intervention will provide that,” Ecaterina answered, laughing, and Jonathan tried not to snap at her. She did not mean to be cruel.
But Mina pushed back her chair and smoothed her skirt. “I may as well concede now, if things have become so dire. It’s true that I don’t have much pride, but I should think I have enough that I don’t want anyone cheating on my account.” Her voice was light. “Thank you for the game.” She stood up and left. Her movement was restrained enough that she could not be said to have made some sort of petulant exit, and Jonathan was unable to discern what it was she might be feeling. He could not exactly run after her.
I thought a lot about the symbolic choreography of this scene, which is meant to start the reader thinking about the dynamics within the household in a way that the previous installments haven't invited.
Ecaterina smiled at him. “Would you finish out this game with me, then?”
Jonathan clamped down on the remnants of panic that rose up in him, and returned the smile. “Certainly,” he told her, and settled down in the seat Mina had vacated, looking down at the tangled mess of the pieces on the board.
His mind, however, remained only half on the game. There was no way he could take the Count aside and tell him in private that he thought Mina was losing her mind. The one to ask about his concerns should in fact be Ecaterina, who had seen this process from a vantage point adjacent to his own more times than he could bear to think of, and thus should know, theoretically, if something had gone wrong, but he was only now coming to a place where he could stand to be in a room with her without terror, and the vulnerability of asking such a question did not seem tolerable. No way, of course, to ask Mina herself.
Pin here: "more times than he could bear to think of" is the first mention of the possibility that the number of brides/consorts/captives currently in the castle may not be all there ever were.
For an instant he remembered her with blood on her thighs, calling him Traitor! and heat washed over him. He moved what had been Mina’s bishop forward.
Ecaterina won the game, but it took longer than it might have. They put away the pieces together, fingers brushing as they did so. When they were done, she caught his shoulder. “You’re thinking too much,” she told him, “it’s not your responsibility.”
She pulled his head down towards her own and kissed him. Jonathan thought of refusing, thought of turning aside and asking whether the Count had given permission. But it would only be a delaying tactic. He knew how it would end, and he would rather not do this under the Count’s intent gaze. He worked on not thinking.
Another first in the series: this moment is the first time we see some of the casual(ish?) physical affection and intimacy that is the norm between members of the household. This is a very important element of the story I want to tell, but I always feel that I am walking several very fine lines in writing it - I didn't want to sensationalize those scenes, as I definitely did in some of my earliest Dracula fic, and I also didn't want to write anything that could be a construed as a "sex between the victims is an act of resistance" narrative (a la recent YA Girls of Paper and Fire which as a trauma narrative rubbed me all the wrong ways). These interactions are sanctioned by the Count, are indeed part of the abuse he requires, and at the same time there's also a ton of intricacy and emotional complication there.
-
When the wolves led him to the castle, it was Ecaterina who the Count placed to guard him. He knew her, then, only as the nameless woman who had made the first claim to his blood. It horrified him, how weak his body was in comparison to hers, how little he could even think of resistance under the fog of her hypnosis. She left bite marks all over his body, and it was only when he was delirious with the pain and the need to get out that the Count came to him.
(He knew, later, that what Ecaterina had done to him in those nights was not her choice, that she was acting under command, as he would, as any of them would. This did not make him less afraid.)
Does he really understand, though? This parenthetical aside is as much for the reader as anything - Jonathan remains very internally divided about this question, in some ways. The brides are too foundational a part of his initial trauma with the Count for him to identify with them as we see Mina in this story beginning to.
“I have not yet decided,” the Count said, “whether or not to let you die. For a mild-mannered Englishman, you have done so much to thwart my plans. I could drain your blood out here, and then show your rotted corpse to your wife, watch her weep.”
I sort of wrote that story too, about the time that I wrote the original "Compromise." I think it's even more of a darkest timeline AU than this one.
Jonathan knew what the alternative was to death. But he had promised Mina that he would not let her go there alone.
May I just take a moment to point out that I wrote this long, long before the entirety of tumblr had a collective freakout about the "unknown land" line? Sorry, obnoxious moment over.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked, “Do you want me to ask you for mercy?”
The Count smiled, and though his face was unlined and his hair dark, Jonathan saw the man who had, months ago, kept his house-guest locked in his bedroom for days on end. “For my blood. I will kill you either way; the question is only whether you will wake again. It would please me to see you beg for what I had to force down Mina’s throat.”
See how the Count is already enamored with playing the two of them against each other, even before he has Mina captive. He rather sets Jonathan up for the guilt and self-blame he is later holding.
Jonathan felt tired. “I can’t play your games,” he said, aware that he might be asking for his own death with his brusqueness. He remembered the care he had taken to remain polite with the Count before he knew what he was, how he never spoke openly in anger even when the Count threw Jonathan’s letters into the fire. What an effort that seemed, now. “Maybe Mina could, but I’m not as quick with words as she is. I don’t want to die, though maybe that makes me a coward. I don’t want Mina to be alone. You must know both of those things, otherwise you wouldn’t bother toying with me like this. Make your choice.”
This is what passes as rudeness to Jonathan when addressing his captor; his standards are a little different than a normal person's.
Also: yeah, that final line in this paragraph always makes that moment in Phantom echo in my head. Unfortunately.
The Count stepped forward, and touched Jonathan’s face, tracing the arch of his nose, the curve of his cheekbones. Jonathan tried not to flinch. He held the Count’s gaze and thought of wolves beneath his window, Mina screaming that she was unclean while he tried to still her trembling. “I think I’ll keep you,” the Count said, “for now.”
I love writing the Count just being absolutely weird in the ways that he touches people; I don't want people to picture this as a typical sexy-threatening caress, but as something rather stranger. Also, Jonathan trying not to flinch cf. Mina in the first story.
-
“Why am I the only man?” Jonathan asked once, when his body ached too much for caution.
The Count did not smile. “None of the others survived,” he said simply.
Okay. So this thread of the series is a result of a lot of pondering on my part about different ways of reading the Count's desire and intentions for Jonathan vis a vis his desire and intentions for his female victims (who we need not also necessarily assume he has the same intentions for as one another, of course). If I am writing a story where he does choose to turn Jonathan and keep him alongside his brides, then why is he the only man?
What I'm building up in the background here should be glimpses of some of the Count's own baggage around gender and sexuality, ways in which he might be inclined to see/treat a male victim differently from a female one. This hasn't come to the forefront yet in the series, but I wanted to start it simmering here.
-
He came upon Mina with Ileana, laughing. The air was thick with firelight, and Jonathan startled at the sight of them so close, Ileana’s arm across Mina’s shoulders, their thick, loose hair almost mingled. Mina’s laugh had a brittle, shrill quality that he did not recognize, and the edge of the sound made him want to silence her, as if there was some valve he could turn to stopper up the flow of the noise. He realized, with a twinge of nausea, that Ileana was joking about the Count, mocking him. He imagined the words traveling between the stones of the wall, along the narrow chain which was each of their mental connections to him. He imagined the Count storming in and grabbing Mina by her hair.
Sound of laughter cf. water glasses? The impression I wanted to give here is that, while Jonathan is altruistically concerned for Mina's safety and well-being, there's a more selfish element to his reaction here too - the way she's acting here annoys him, he doesn't like it. But he could never say that directly.
From the other end, this is probably one of the first times in the series that we've seen Mina laugh.
He quelled his impulses and did not interrupt, only settled down on the other side of the room as they ignored him. He watched the fire and tried not to listen to them.
He saw Mina glance towards him and then away. He saw Ileana kiss her. He saw Mina close her eyes and keep still.
When Ileana left, he could not resist approaching Mina. “Please, be careful with them,” he told her, trying to keep his voice neutral, afraid that visible emotion in any direction might make her wrench away from him.
When he is upset, Jonathan gets quieter and more neutral; Mina's the one who sometimes gets louder and more emotional.
She looked up into his face, her lips set firmly, her eyes steeled. “Why? What do I have to be afraid of?”
“You know what they did to me. Mina -”
She laughed. “They are my sisters now; there is no difference between us. If you still fear them, then you ought to be afraid of me as well.”
Very important line for the series as a whole!
The words felt like danger, bitter, sharp as they left his mouth. “It’s not the same. You’re not a monster, you know that. You didn’t ask for this.”
Projection much, Jonathan? He's holding a lot of guilt and internalized victim-blaming about this, which he isn't able to talk about directly, to Mina or otherwise.
“And Ileana did?” When Jonathan did not immediately answer that, she continued, “You’ve never bothered to ask any of them, have you?”
Jonathan’s mouth was dry. “They could easily be lying to you, trying to gain your confidence -”
Mina stood. “As could you.” A beat. “I’ve seen how you touch him, how you ask him for comfort after your nightmares. Did you return my journal only because he told you to? Do you do anything, now, which isn’t what he’s told you to do?”
Her voice was becoming loud. “Please, Mina, stay calm, or you’ll get us both punished.”
“Did he even have to force you? Do you even know what it’s like, fighting until your wrists are so worn out that they’re trembling, choking on his blood? He told me he would dash your brains out if I screamed. What did he tell you?”
Ahh this whole scene was so hard to write.
In the novel, Mina and Jonathan's unconditional support of one another in the aftermath of their overlapping but distinct traumas is a beautiful and hopeful narrative of solidarity and mutual support. But I was interested in exploring the messiness of co-victimhood, and the ways that the pressure of those shared experiences can warp something that started as solidarity. It's always interesting for me to get comments on this series that take either Jonathan's side or Mina's side in these arguments, since a lot of what I am doing as the series goes on is deliberately complicating and messing with identification and sympathy. I'm always interested in how the reads for people.
Jonathan did not know whether what he was feeling was anger, or shame, or grief. “I can’t excuse my actions to you,” he said, “I don’t have any answer which would satisfy you. I’ve done what I thought I could.”
“You just want me away from the rest of them because you’re jealous that I’ll never touch you again.” Mina threw out the words like venom.
He thought, until the Count commands you to. He thought, you never used to speak like this. He said, “You know I couldn’t touch you even if I wanted to.”
On the train she had kissed him, once, and it had made the Count laugh. He had not fully realized, then, that it would be the last time she touched him of her own accord. He should have. He thought of her red-rimmed eyes as she bent over his sickbed. He thought of how much they had lost.
Note that the sickbed is the same memory Mina thought of in "Jackal," from the other side.
Mina laughed. “At least he grants us some mercies.”
Jonathan refused to storm from the room like a child. He returned to his seat and watched the fire. It comforted him to think of how it was at once shifting and unchangeable, how lighting up a pile of kindling entailed the same actions and results here as it would in England, that if he held his palm too close it would still sting and burn. He waited for Mina to leave first.
-
“Come hunt with me,” the Count told him, “the women can wait for their share.”
I realized after finishing the story that the time jump backwards here is really confusing, and then couldn't figure out how to fix it. Alas. It's still a crucial scene.
Jonathan came, and did not have words for the joy he felt in the brisk air, with the open sky above him and the cries of owls breaking the night. The woman they took was beautiful, and Jonathan was becoming skilled enough at hypnosis that could make it so that she did not feel pain or fear when he bit her. It felt good to drink his fill, instead of forever sharing her a victim with the Count’s wives and, as the youngest, waiting for whatever they chose to leave him. His body felt comfortable and sated, enough that he could almost ignore the part of his mind which still felt guilt and horror.
Important that the way Jonathan is tolerating the hunting here is by taking his victims' consciousness of what is happening to them away; compare with how the Count accuses him at the end of the story of avoidance of the reality of what he (the Count) is doing to to Mina.
When it was done, the Count told Jonathan to undress in the snow and touched him there, kissing him with a mouth that still tasted like the woman’s blood. Jonathan did not make a sound. He let his body feel pleasure and did not think.
When it was done, they sat beside the corpse, and the Count stroked the fur of the wolves who came to feed on it. “Soon I intend to leave,” he said, “and bring Mina back with me. It should take some weeks.”
Very pleased with the image of the Count petting the wolves.
Jonathan stared at him. “You know where she is?” he asked, finally.
The Count nodded. “I believe so. Roughly. And once I am close enough, I can find her through her connection to me. She will not be able to conceal herself.”
Jonathan looked at his own palms, which were flecked with blood. “I want to come with you,” he said.
“Why?” Jonathan could not read the Count’s tone. “Do you think that will be easier for her?”
Part of the tragedy of this story is how much Jonathan wants to believe this to be true; he desperately wants there to be a way for him to mitigate Mina's suffering, for them to have a life together that is tolerable enough even within the confines of what Dracula allows. The idea that his presence might make some aspects of it worse for her is not something he is willing to consider (even though the blood exchange, Mina's central trauma in the events of the novel, was characterized by Jonathan's incapacitated presence).
Jonathan nodded. “I will do whatever you ask of me in return.”
“You know that I will not allow you to soften my cruelties towards her, or put your own body between her and me. If she screams, or cries, or begs me to stop, you will not be permitted to go to her to dry her tears.”
“I understand,” Jonathan said.
“If you interfere, or help her to resist me, I will lock you up, and you will not be allowed to see on another. If you continue to do so, I will kill you.” The Count’s voice was calm, even.
Neither Jonathan nor the readers should accuse the Count of springing anything on them! As a writer, it's sort of satisfying to write the Count laying out his plans and threats very plainly, and then developing the story such that it still could catch someone off-guard when he actually does what he had threatened.
Jonathan nodded, though he wanted to move as little as possible.
The Count smiled, finally. “I have never had a couple before, both my own. I am looking forward to it.”
-
One night, soon before dawn, the Count found ink on Mina’s fingers.
This is a Clarissa reference.
“My dear,” he told her, turning her hand between his palms, “I told you that I did not want you writing. Do you forget my commands so quickly?”
They were together, all of them. It would be easy for Mina to break the Count’s gaze and turn towards Jonathan, tell them all about the journal he had placed in her hands. They would be both be at fault then, but Jonathan perhaps more so, since disobedience from Mina, at this stage, was almost to be expected. But she did not. She grasped the Count’s hands and knelt, with more grace than Jonathan would have expected. “I am sorry,” she said, “punish me as you will.”
Jonathan watched carefully, working to keep his expression impassive.
“I don’t want you alone any longer,” the Count said, “Ileana will stay with you at all times now, until I decide you have earned back my trust. We cannot have you doing anything rash.” He touched her hair. “I’ll punish you tomorrow night, two hours after sunset. Come to me then.”
Note the difference in how the Count punishes Jonathan vs Mina - Jonathan is isolated, locked up alone, and Mina contained and deprived of privacy. This is parallel, too, to Jonathan's captivity in the novel vs Dracula's invasion of Mina's bedroom during the blood exchange. It's also psychologically crucial to the evolution of the series.
He turned away and left Mina on her knees. Jonathan saw her stumble as she stood, rub a hand wearily over her eyes. He did not go to her.
The next night, Ecaterina said she wanted Adriana and Jonathan’s help cleaning out a disused wing of the castle. He went with her, and tried not to listen for screams. Ecaterina and Adriana moved in and out of English as they spoke, making it difficult for Jonathan to follow the conversation. It was some relief to have mindless, physically engrossing work. He and Adria were both of a similar height, and at least a foot taller than Ecaterina, which occasioned some simple, light laughter as they tried to dust the corners of the rooms, jokes which required little facility in one another’s languages.
He thought of Mina calling these women her sisters, and tried not to think of Ecaterina’s teeth in his shoulder. He asked her, “How do you stand it?”
She turned to look at him, and with her yellow hair tied back she looked more human than he was used to seeing her. “What?”
“Watching,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse to his ears, “seeing him destroy us.”
There's something that really gets me still about the intimacy and vulnerability of Jonathan asking Ecaterina, who so terrifies him, this question.
Ecaterina wiped her hands on her skirt. “It’s not destruction,” she said, “it’s transformation. If you believe that, then there is no pain in watching.”
Jonathan remembered the wind, and the joy of strength in his arms and blood in his mouth. He tried to remember what Mina looked like hunting, but he could not think of her as anything but a blur in those moments, part of a pack. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said.
Adriana was still scrubbing at the mildewed stone of the walls. Ecaterina put a hand on the back of her neck, fingers kneading the muscle. “I love Adria like a sister, but I have hurt her when he asked me to, or held her down while he did. I knew she would be better for it later, and worse if he and I let her imagine me as some sort of ideal protector.”
“You told him once,” Jonathan said, startled at his own daring (for he had never spoken so recklessly to her, to any of them, not in all the time he had been living - or not living - there), “that he didn’t love, that he’d never loved. I remember that.”
Ecaterina smiled. “What does it mean, for a priest to love those he initiates, or a king to love his vassals? His caring is unlike the love we can feel for each other. You resign yourself to that, and value it for what it is.”
Such a dodge! Yet another through line: Ecaterina evading questions.
“But you’ve felt anger too, you’ve felt resentment.” It was not a question. “I heard you.”
Ecaterina tilted her head, as though listening to the wind. “He’ll be finished with her soon; you can go clean yourself up to console your wife, Jonathan Harker.”
He brought a copy of Daniel Deronda from the Count’s library and found Mina curled up in a bedroom, Ileana next to her, laying out playing cards across the mattress. He offered her the book. “I thought you might like something to read,” he told her, “or we could read it together, if you want.”
Jonathan's idea of help here (and in earlier parts of the series too) is always distraction - he's not willing to hear about what Mina has been through, to talk to her about it. His own avoidance and detachment makes that psychologically untenable for him. But the distraction really isn't working for Mina. And so they are unable to connect.
Mina reached out and took the book from his hands, opened it with a spread of her narrow fingers. He watched her eyes skirt over the page and tried to guess if she was absorbing the words, if her mind could process them any longer.
I recently reread The Crimson Petal and the White and realized that the phrasing of the description of Mina opening the book comes from there.
“Thank you, Jonathan,” she told him finally, “perhaps later.” She closed the book and laid it aside. He nodded to her, and left.
-
Later he would find the note folded in his clothes, and not know how long it had lain there. Shorthand, clear and comprehensible though blockier than his own. We can still get out, it said, but I need to know that you want to leave with me.
-
He came to the Count and stood before him, not wanting to show the presumption of sitting in the chair across from his without being directed to do so.
I left the timeline of this story a little ambiguous here, but we are supposed to understand his request to the Count as directly connected to the receipt of the note and his ambivalence about it.
“I have something to ask,” he said, “but I don’t want to question your judgment. If you think I am wrong, or my suggestion is inappropriate, please know that I will respect whatever you tell me.”
The Count nodded, and gestured for him to sit down. “I understand.”
Jonathan sat, and inhaled sharply, though he did not need the breath. “I would like you to hurt me in front of Mina.”
The Count’s face was carefully blank. “Why?”
The words poured from him, untrammeled. “She thinks I’m different from her - she thinks I could hurt or protect her, and I know both of those are wrong. I don’t think she’ll understand that our positions are the same unless she sees you push me past my limits, past the place where I can now easily accept what you demand. And until she knows that she can’t stop it either.”
(Mina crying over his journal, Mina making him swear to kill her, Mina subjecting herself to hypnotism in order that they might better understand the Count’s movements. Mina who would never have hurt anyone if she had a choice, who held Arthur when he wept over Lucy’s death, who comforted Renfield, who transcribed their journals until her wrists ached.)
He is remembering this Mina, who suffered for the sake of others, because he knows how much this request in particular would hurt her.
“You want me to make her complicit.”
I want you to make her stop hating me, was what Jonathan wanted to say, but he didn’t. Instead he looked straight into the Count’s eyes and said, “Yes.”
The Count reached out to touch Jonathan’s throat. He relaxed into the gesture, into the contact. “You know that I will also need you to accept your own complicity in her pain. To stop averting your eyes when you see me touch her.” Jonathan was silent, and the Count continued, “You know I have been watching you, my most proper young solicitor.”
“I’ve done everything you asked of me,” Jonathan said finally, feeling the Count’s long nails against his skin.
“But you’ve withdrawn yourself from it. You’ve done everything you can to avoid the feelings it evokes in you to see your wife naked, or kneeling to me, or with blood on her mouth. Even when I had you hurt her, you were doing your absolute best to see her as nothing but a body beneath your knife.”
Jonathan closed his eyes. “I’ll work on it. I’m sorry.”
The Count withdrew his hand. “We shall see. I think your suggestion is a good one; I’ll consider it, and when it ought to be implemented. Of course, the occasion must be unexpected. For now, I have other matters I would like to discuss; I think it time we gave you more responsibility, and a chance to employ some of your education. I would like to put you in charge of my business affairs.”
-
I’m still waiting for your answer.
-
“Why are you doing this?” Ileana asked, examining the bowls and spoons with curiosity, “You know none of us will be able to eat any of it.”
Mina smiled. The Count was away, but, at her request, he had left them with flour and sugar and butter and eggs. They were all gathered in the kitchen, which had not been used since Jonathan’s previous stay, examining her acquisitions with no small degree of confusion.
I have no good excuse for this scene.
“I like the smells,” she said, “and the feeling of the flour on my hands. Maybe I won’t, when I’m your age, but for now there are still things I miss about being a human.”
Jonathan sat at the table in the center of the room, and thought that it was just as well that they could not eat, as Mina would have a difficult time baking anything edible in that kitchen. He knew the stoves in which she was used to cooking, modern, iron things which permitted some degree of control over temperature, and everything in the room must date back several centuries. But he kept quiet, and watched.
It took time, but, especially in the Count’s absence, they had time in abundance, and Mina found an old jar of pitted cherries which must have been left from Jonathan’s visit, and baked a slightly burnt, lopsided pie. Jonathan saw her flushed with the eat, flour in her hair, and could almost think for a moment that it was his wife he watched. What she made did not appear edible to him any longer, but there was a pleasure in pretending that she would put it on the table and they would eat together.
(He wondered, idly, who it was who had cooked for him, those years before. Adriana, who was young enough to perhaps still remember how? The Count himself?)
Mina seemed giddy with her success. “It would be a shame to let this work go to waste,” she said, as if to herself, “I could bring it down to the village; surely there’s a family there who would enjoy it.”
Ileana was skeptical. “We’re murderous monsters, Mina. We can’t exactly deliver neighborly baked goods.”
Mina laughed. “I haven’t been here long; no one would recognize me. Jonathan can come and make sure I don’t get myself into trouble.”
If she had asked Ecaterina, she probably would have been refused but, Jonathan observed, Mina had been canny in asking Ileana, who agreed, perhaps because of the fun of doing something which the Count might have forbade them. She agreed to follow them in animal form, for safety’s sake. Jonathan said little. He watched Mina, and could not tell whether her hectic energy was joy or fear or distraction.
It makes no sense that Ileana agrees to this. Ugh, plot hole. I was too attached to the pie-baking to let go of it.
But he knew he could feel something in her change as they stepped out of the castle the first time, he knew, she had done so for any purpose other than hunting. He decided to say what he was thinking. “You can’t run now,” he said.
He saw her bite her lip. It must be a more painful habit, now. “I wasn’t going to. For one thing, I know how high the likelihood is that you’ll help Ileana drag me back. I do expect, however, to make it clear to as many people as I possibly can that I am the new housekeeper in Castle Dracula, that I have absolutely no idea about the rumors concerning my employer, and that I’d like to know how to post a letter to my friends in England. And I expect you to use your German to help me do so.”
“What makes you think I’ll help you do any of that?”
Mina didn’t look at him. “You haven’t told him about my notes. You haven’t responded, either, but you haven’t told him.”
Jonathan did not look at her either, and they continued down the path in silence.
-
They were there, before the house where Mina had been living in secret. It seemed wrong to Jonathan that the Count could feel her presence as if a chain bound them together, while Jonathan could have walked by this building and never knew that she was inside.
This would be a good moment to explain the genesis of the Compromise series altogether.
The first story came out of a present I received for Yuletide in 2007, an understated and deceptively simple little Dracula AU called Lights and Night. The premise of that fic was that Jonathan had been turned by Dracula, and Mina had for a period of time been fleeing both of them; the story shows the moment when they catch up to her in Paris. I loved the fic, and kept thinking about how the story would continue. A year and a half later I wrote "Compromise," which wasn't quite a direct sequel - it's tonally very different, and my Mina and Dracula in particular tend towards a little higher emotional pitch - but there are a couple of references in the first story, like Jonathan having packed Mina's luggage, that are a nod to the gift story that inspired it. Quickly the series took on a life of its own, but I continue to think very fondly and with gratitude about "Lights and Night." This section here is another direct nod, and could be the moment before the start of that story.
Anticipation immobilized him. What would she think, seeing him again? She would be terrified, but would she also feel relief? Would she tell him how much she had missed him?
His greatest fantasy, which he knew was far beyond the plausible, was that, when she saw him at the Count’s side, she would come willingly, tell them that she would give up her long-defended freedom, if only it meant that they could be together.
Jonathan, as we know, would and does and did do this for Mina.
He thought of all the things he wanted to say to her, but, in the end, none of them were anything more than I love you.
“Are you ready?” the Count asked, and Jonathan could feel him watching, the close focus of his gaze on Jonathan’s face.
He held in mind for a single instant a perfect image of Mina as she had once been, long before he had ever met the Count, animated and at ease as they talked together over coffee. He would never know that Mina again, and he was no longer the man she had fallen in love with. And he nodded. “I am.”
Ahhhhh. I know I wrote it, but this part still gets me.
-
The Count returned from his journey two nights after their excursion into the village. There were the greetings to which Jonathan had become accustomed, ritualized and sycophantic, and then there was, again, the abruptness of his commands.
“Mina, Jonathan, come with me,” he told them, and Jonathan saw a flash of unguarded terror in Mina’s eyes before she could control himself. He stood slowly, feeling sick. It was one thing to ask for this in the abstract, and another to have the prospect of it imminently before him. He thought, for a brief, histrionic moment, of declaring that he had been wrong, he had misjudged the situation, begging the Count not to do whatever it was he had planned based on Jonathan’s careful words.
But he said nothing. He steeled himself against pain and humiliation, and with Mina he followed the Count into the depths of the castle. He thought of Ecaterina’s hand on Adria’s neck, and hoped that, one day, he would be able to meet Mina’s eyes again.
