"Adjust" commentary
Sep. 2nd, 2023 05:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary of Dracula fic Adjust, part 5 of Compromise. Commentary includes spoilers through part 12 of the series.
First, about the title. I messed it up; it's the only one in the series which isn't a noun, and thus bothers me every time I look at it. It should probably be "Adjustment," but at the time I thought that didn't sound as right for the story and at that point I didn't care as much about consistency in the story titles as I now do. So I'm stuck with it.
“You would have killed us, wouldn’t you?”
The little trick of opening with a stark, provocative line of dialogue and taking a couple more lines to reveal the context of who is saying it always pleases me, even if it's a bit cheap. Here is is also supposed to make for a sharp transition from the end of Collusion, establishing that we're now in a new relational context. I like this opening.
I go back and forth on my feelings in general about this story, and there are things about it that I criticize myself for - the structure is lopsided, it's too dialogue-heavy, etc. But I've never stopped being pleased with this scene. Adjust marks a turning point in the series in a number of ways, but one of the important ones is the centrality of the brides as characters. They start to acquire some glimmers of dimension in Collusion, especially in Jonathan's scene with Ecaterina, but they remain very much in the background of the Jonathan/Mina/Dracula triangle. (Partly because that's a Jonathan pov story and he still really can't bear to see them as full people.) I wanted to build up their importance gradually, but this scene really is the pivot point in that.
Mina did not turn her head; she kept her eyes on the ceiling. “Yes. Not with my own hands, probably. The men would never have allowed it. But I would have helped.”
Important that Mina doesn't try to soften this, that she's honest with Ileana even though this conversation is deeply uncomfortable. I wanted this to communicate a lot about the developing relationship between them in a pretty short amount of time.
She tried to gauge the atmosphere of Ileana’s silence, whether it was horror or fury or resignation. But she asked only, “And have you changed your mind?”
At that, Mina did look at her, though she still could not read her expression. “I’m not supposed to have a mind of my own any longer, am I?”
Ileana groaned, and lightly hit Mina’s shoulder. “Stop it. You’re avoiding the question.”
From Collusion we know that very grim humor is something that Ileana and Mina do together, and here we get an example. (I think Mina's joke is funny, not sure if any readers do.) Also: Ileana's been living with Ecaterina for several centuries now and probably is highly on guard against people avoiding questions. She can give Mina a hard time about it in a way she can't always do with Ecaterina.
Mina looked away again. “I don’t know what I would do now. I would have to kill myself too, according to that principle.”
This was, she supposed, what passed for post-coital conversation in this iteration of her life. They were in bed. Mina had been given a strict regimen for how much touch she was supposed to receive and deal out, and it was most often with Ileana, for some reason, that the Count paired her. They could both have refused, she supposed, and conspired to keep it from him, but that would have required a degree of complicity that Mina did not think she could rely on, and it was, in any case, easier than when he watched, and directed. She would take what little mercies she could get.
The dry tone here (like Mina's below) is intentional, as is the delay in giving the context that this conversation takes place just after Mina and Ileana have had sex. These sexual encounters between the brides which are at Dracula's command but absent his direct involvement feel like a delicate thing to depict, and I wanted to make the dynamic as clear as possible while walking a pretty careful line on tone. We can see as well that Mina's relationship with the sex in which she is required to participate in this household has shifted from where she was during Jackal, though this is going to continue to evolve over the course of the series.
Also: note Mina's reflection on what it would take for Ileana and Mina to keep information from Dracula in which, if you've read ahead, you'll notice the title of a later installment. This story has a ton of foreshadowing; I'll try not to be too excitable in pointing it out (now I'm far enough along that can point it out!).
“He worried that you would, you know. Kill yourself.”
Mina’s voice was dry. “I didn’t think he worried about my well-being in the slightest degree.”
Ileana sat up, and Mina could tell for certain now that she had irritated her. “You know that isn’t true. But he told us all about you, before he and Jonathan left to bring you home. How you had conspired to kill him, and all of us. How you let Lucy die, who should have been our sister, and then consoled her murderers.”
I am really interested in how Dracula would have explained the events of the novel to the brides, and how they would have reacted to it; in particular I imagine that Lucy's death would have seemed horrific to them. References to Lucy in this series are few and far between; I try to be very selective with when she gets brought up. That makes this scene one of the only glimpses we have into how Mina is holding that relationship. At the same time, Mina and Ileana are also talking about Lucy as a slightly distanced way of talking about their own relationship, and about how Mina is relating to the other wives more generally.
Mina pulled the sheets around her body, uncomfortable, suddenly, with her nakedness. “I’m surprised you didn’t all despise me, then, if that was the portrait he drew for you.”
She could hear the restraint in Ileana’s voice, the careful caution. “Are you saying it was an inaccurate one?”
I don't think this line isn't quite right for Ileana's voice, but that's okay.
“No. No, he told the truth. Though I didn’t know what had been done to Lucy until….until after it was finished. She was my dearest friend. If it had fallen to me to kill her, even changed as she was, I do not know if I could have stood it. But I did believe it was the right thing to do. I still don’t think that any of us have a right to live, not when we each take so many lives to do so. I know his philosophy on it,” she added, before Ileana could begin to speak, “I don’t need to hear it repeated. Surely you must have felt a degree of moral repugnance about this, at some point.”
“Not enough to consider killing my sisters.”
Okay, there's a lot here. Major pin in all the stuff, here and below, about having a right or not to live as vampires and being willing to kill oneself and/or one's vampire siblings which will come back in a major way later in the series. Remember also that this exchange between Ileana and Mina is taking place after Ileana already spied on Mina's excursion to the village in Collusion where she attempted to lay the seeds for her escape plan, and though she's not saying any of that directly to Mina here, she may also be reacting to the knowledge that Mina is still willing in at least part of herself to enact a plan that could lead to all of their destruction.
I also want to invite all of you to be entertained with me at the thought of how many times Dracula must give his vampire morality lectures to everyone in this castle.
“You weren’t my sisters yet. All of you were my enemies, as far as I knew. All I knew of any of you was that you had harmed my husband.”
Now it was Ileana who would not look at her. “We were your sisters from the moment you tasted his blood, and you knew that. You felt it. That’s why he sent us to call to you, in hopes that you might recognize where you belonged and abandon the company of those who would have destroyed us all. But you didn’t come. And so he took Jonathan instead.”
The scene in the novel where the brides call Mina to join them is one of the most affecting parts of the text for me, and I can't think about it without getting a little tearful. Their death afterwards devastates me, and as a fic writer I am almost always trying to unwrite it and circling around and around that moment of them calling her, trying to make sense of the scene and my feelings around it. I don't I'll ever be done excavating that.
Mina felt tears prick at her eyes. How would it have been, to have gone to him then, come willingly through the snow holding their hands? Would he have been kinder to her, treated her less like a captured enemy? No; it was a useless fantasy. Think of how much he had gloated the first time, how cruel he had been when she had never seen him before, how his violence never gave her the chance even to consider coming willingly to his side. There was no other path where she could see herself choosing the sisterhood that she now shared with Ileana.
Another thread in this scene is the question of Mina's similarities to and differences from the other brides, which we really don't have enough information within the novel to reasonably hypothesize. A difference I guess at here is Mina's active involvement in fighting against Dracula even before the blood exchange, and how that means that her turning, aside from being cruel and nonconsensual as I imagine they all were, is characterized as well by a very particular quality of spite, this "captured enemy" dynamic where taking her isn't just a pleasure for Dracula on its own but also has this symbolic meaning as vanquishing a foe. This isn't a primary focus in the series, but it's something I want to keep thinking about.
This passage also shows Mina grappling with this question about her newly deepening traumatic attachments - would there be a way to have them that is not traumatic? The answer she comes to, which is a devastating one, is no, there wouldn't be.
Her voice, when she managed to speak, was quiet, “Do you hate me? For that? For everything he said?”
Ileana did not answer the question. “I do wonder what Lucy would have been like.”
“Better than me.” The words came from Mina quickly, with a bitterness she thought she had forgotten. “She was more beautiful than me, more charming, more graceful. You would have liked her more, all of you.”
I left the reason for Mina's bitterness here deliberately ambiguous - is she bitter at Lucy historically getting more attention than her, being better liked? Or is she bitter that Lucy, who she adored so much, was taken from her? Or both? Or something else?
Ileana tilted her head as she looked at Mina. “You were sleeping with her.”
She felt startled, two pieces of her life crashing together in a way she had never expected. “No! I mean, there was no one except Jonathan, and that only after we were married.”
I really didn't want to deal here with unpacking all of Mina's baggage about having sex with women and how she did or didn't understand her feelings towards Lucy and what it means for her that being a vampire also means she does this now, but it's all going on for her in the background.
Ileana laughed. “That’s insipid, Mina.”
Irritation and amusement mingled. “I suppose you’ve never been in love.”
Mina reverts here into a weird condescension towards Ileana (she's a married woman and Ileana never got to be) which really doesn't fit their context.
She was not prepared for Ileana’s confusion, or for her words, which settled in Mina like stone. “I love him.” A silence. “Are you saying that you don’t?”
Notice that neither of them need to use his name at any point in the conversation.
She wanted to get away, suddenly, but all she could do was sit up, curl her knees into her chest, put her face in her hands. “We’re done, we’re finished for tonight. Please let me be alone.”
To her credit, Ileana at once stood, began putting on her own clothing, laid Mina’s dress within her reach. “You know that he told me not to do that.” Cautiously, “Do you need me to bring him for you?”
Mina is getting this modeled for her and is getting directed into it, this dynamic of emotional reliance on the Count and going to him in moments of distress.
She did not laugh, though she wanted to. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. What would he do, with me panicking over something like this?"
“I don’t know. Take care of it.” A pause. “I’ll tell him. I can lock the door here, that should satisfy his requirement that you never be left alone. Will you manage until then?”
Leaving her in a locked room is really not the same as never leaving her alone, Ileana. Let's just imagine Dracula gave her a stern lecture about this later.
Mina nodded. She ought to thank Ileana, but she could not bear that.
When the other woman was gone and the door was locked Mina dressed herself, stood, paced. She tried to value these scant few moments without eyes upon her, but could not think of what to do with the time. She wondered what Ileana would say, and whether the Count would laugh. She had not thought herself expected to love him, but she supposed that it would be the one thing that could make eternity in his castle endurable. Jonathan had told her that it would be his own presence, the moments of leisure they would have together, but clearly he had been wrong. Perhaps that did make her captor her only possible source of solace, along with his wives who, she now had learned, appeared to believe she was as much a rebel in need of punishment as he did. How foolish she was, to imagine that Ileana’s irreverent jokes meant there was any true solidarity between them. She felt loneliness spread across her skin like lichen.
That last sentence is a little much, but I'm fond of it.
She was relieved to see that, when the Count arrived, his expression was one of indulgent affection rather than rage, and then, a moment later, felt repulsed at herself for feeling relieved. He shut the door behind him. “Now, was it the idea that you might love me that distressed you so, or that you might not?”
Mina laughed, hopelessly. “She also asked me whether I wanted to kill her.”
Dracula here is feeling incredibly fond of Mina, which I hope comes through.
"A reasonable question.” He stepped forward, and his hands were on her shoulders. “Mina, you can stop fighting.”
Turning point moment! This whole following exchange is crucial for the series as a whole. Mark the transition from him giving her permission to fight at the end of "Windows"; now he is giving her permission to stop.
The idea of escape surfaced in her mind, though she tried not to ever think of it in his presence, tried to weight it down so it would sink to the bottom of her consciousness and he would never notice it. She kept her thoughts away from the details of her half-formed plans. The delicate focus this took was enough that she spoke her mind, without considering the words. “I can never stop fighting.”
This series is of course very interested in the question of how you conceal things from someone with whom you are telepathically connected. Mina isn't great at it at this juncture.
She waited for his features to twist in rage, for his hands on her shoulders to become cruel and bruising. This did not happen. He was still, and his voice calm. “I don’t believe you value self-delusion any more than I do.”
She met his gaze. “What does that mean?”
“Think of what I have done to you, so far. Think of how I have entered into places where you believed yourself safe and claimed you there, how I have kept you as my prisoner with humans all around us, of all that I have done since you entered my home. Of how your husband now obeys my commands without question, even when I tell him to hurt you. You are lying to yourself if you think that you can win against me, still, or if you think that there is anymore for you to do. You have fought enough. You have made me respect your strength, and your bravery; your pride should not suffer with your surrender. It is done. Let yourself be here now.”
This is almost certainly my favorite passage in this story; it makes me very emotional to reread. As terrifying and warped as it is for Dracula it is also a deep expression of care to Mina: he respects her, and so she can stop fighting.
Saying it turns out to not be enough for her to fully make the transition, but it helps gets her there, and it puts the two of them on the same page in a crucial way; they are operating within this shared dialectic and so he can make symbolically and psychologically meaningful interventions within that dialectic. This sets us up for what will happen in Keys.
She closed her eyes. “I told Ileana that I still believe that none of us should live.”
“But you couldn’t kill her, could you?” She expected him to command her to open her eyes, to stop avoiding him, but he did not do that either, simply kept talking. “You feel the beauty and power of what is shared between you, and you could not destroy that. Just as you couldn’t kill me.”
She opened her eyes. “I thought I almost had.”
“Months ago, in the first panic of your changing. I would hazard that you understand, now, why Jonathan stopped you, and that it was not out of cowardice.”
She felt itching with the tension of not knowing when she would go too far and cause him to punish her. “Why are you being kind to me?”
Compare with Mina's inverse question to Dracula in Windows ("Why are you being so cruel to me?") as a marker of how much her perspective on him has shifted.
He smiled. “I know how to fit my methods to the time. You know that my cruelty has never come from malice.”
“And yet you still have Ileana watching me every waking minute, yet you will not let me so much as keep a journal -”
He put a hand over her lips. “Caring for you is not the same as trusting you. And I will not allow you to destroy yourself.”
She did not push his hand away from her mouth; instead she took a greater chance, and sent the question to his mind, Has that happened before?
I have nothing insightful to offer about this passage but will say that rereading it after finishing and posting Intransigence this totally wrecks me.
Okay, maybe I can say that I wanted to be careful to walk a delicate line here between setting up these terms and stakes and thematic echoes but not hammering them in so much that the big reveals in Complicity and Intransigence of characters' plans that the readers weren't previously told about weren't compromised (ha). This is one of the things I've really been learning in writing this series, how to plan these kinds of seeds and patiently give them time to sprout.
But he pushed her presence away, as smoothly as if he was accustomed to repelling such intrusions. “Do not presume too far. I will never tolerate disrespect.”
She opened her lips and kissed the fingers he pressed to them in apology. She didn’t mean it, but he would know that. And he would accept the form, she knew, until he could create the reality.
This builds on the oath scene in Windows and his framing to her of saying the words that will later become true.
-
“Mina, Jonathan, come with me.”
Welcome to: the scene in which Dracula Makes Some Mistakes.
This scene picks up where Collusion ends; I meant for readers to understand that the first scene happens earlier and so overlaps with the time that Collusion covers. I'm not sure if this entirely worked.
She felt terror fluttering in her chest, replacing the modicum of calm she had achieved in the length of his absence. He had spared them this for months, but, as she stood and followed him, it felt as if that night had just ended, Jonathan’s blank face as he touched her, the twist of it all into pain. She had felt hope, in the snow with him, alight with her mad plans and his silent, wary agreement. She had thought things could be changing. But the Count would destroy it again, would leave her alone, with no feeling but revulsion for her husband.
He did not bring them to a bedroom, though, only to what looked like a study, with a desk. Mina looked at Jonathan’s face, hoping for clues of what was happening. He seemed blanched, frightened, but resolute and unsurprised.
This scene has sections in it that I'm pleased with, but overall it's a bit of a mess, and that's reflected in the fact that I really never had a clear image in my mind of the room where it takes place or how it fits into the geography of the castle. I could say that it's supposed to be the same as the octagonal meeting room from Tower (which is the same as the room from No Touch of Pity and the room with the desk in For Every Grief That's Offered, but that would be a total retcon, I wasn't thinking of that room when I wrote this.
The Count shut the door. “Your shared act of rebellion has been brought to my attention,” he said simply, and Mina felt fury at first at Jonathan, who surely had betrayed her, but then came to her senses. Of course not. Ileana. Who must have followed them.
Ugh this reveal is so clumsy. Fine! It's fine.
Jonathan’s mouth opened, and she could see shock.
What was this, as though they were two misbehaving students brought before the headmaster? She remembered being a schoolmistress, calling girls up before the class after they had thrown notes to one another, and noting their their trembling shame. But he would surely not assign them lines to write. Idiot. She was rash and hasty and foolish. She felt weariness at the endless cycle of resistance and quelling, at how captivity never seemed to grow easier.
Notice how a) she immediately blames herself for whatever violence she imagines she's about to experience and b) how she's back in the fighting/surrender dialectic and the germane question is still whether or not she can stop. But Dracula and Jonathan are about to have a totally different conversation.
But the Count still spoke. “This was not what Jonathan expected to hear me say when I brought you here, Mina,” he said, his eyes locked with Jonathan’s, even as he addressed her. “He came to me, some weeks ago, to request that I force you to watch him being harmed. He wanted to give you the experience of watching him suffer without being able to help him, of knowing yourself complicit in his pain. He wanted you, I understand, to feel as disgusted with yourself as you did with him.”
She saw Jonathan flinch, lower his head. His shoulders were shaking, as if he wept.
She did not know what to think, where to direct her fury. She was still.
"But I think perhaps she is right to feel disgust towards you,” the Count continued, “while you present one face to her and another to me, and tell the truth to neither of us. She at least has told me that she will continue to fight, that she is incapable of ceasing her rebellion. Her actions are signs of my own failure to repair the sickness that she has made no attempt to hide. But you know that what I despise most is falsity.”
Something I do stand by is the choice to write this scene from Mina's pov; there's something effective in how it quickly becomes clear that the real conflict here is between Dracula and Jonathan but Mina is having her own reactions to all of it and also is putting together the context as she goes. I think this scene would have been much less interesting from Jonathan's pov, and also we need the nuance of Mina's varied reactions in order to see how she gets from here to where she goes in Keys.
However, "what I despise most is falsity" totally doesn't belong here, it's not sufficiently justified by what I've established about Dracula's character so far in the series, and it's definitely something that I'm projecting. It makes me kick myself a little but I don't think I'm taking it out.
Jonathan’s voice, then, finally, “What kind of apology do you want from me?”
“We agreed that, should you assist Mina in resisting me, you would die for it.”
She fell to her knees then, thinking fast, demanding his attention with desperation. “Please, I beg you, don’t kill him for my mistakes. He didn’t let me run away, he wouldn’t have - you wouldn’t waste his life on this. You wouldn’t. My lord.”
First time Mina kneels or uses the honorific of her own accord.
He deigned, for once to look at her. To look down at her. But she was too far gone in this for shame. “This is good, Mina. This is honest. If only I had brought you to this state months ago.”
“You knew my fears, always. You knew that it was only your threat against him that prevented me from screaming, the first time. If you killed him,” she said, grasping at the single flash of insight which came to her, “I would have no reason to obey you any longer.”
“Now that -” the Count laughed, shortly, “is self-delusion, my best beloved. But we can discuss it later. Jonathan. What reason have I for letting you live?”
'Best beloved' is cf the blood exchange, and it gives me a painful thrill to write it as a consistent expression of affection from Dracula to Mina.
Mina felt tension in her belly and shoulders, and was acutely aware that, from where she knelt, it would be difficult to quickly stand and run. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the position was so universally a sign of submission. She tried to listen, and strategize in the back of her mind.
I don't think this physical description here is quite right; when I think it through it doesn't quite make sense somatically. But again, not changing it now.
Jonathan’s voice, when he spoke, was clearer than Mina could have expected. “I am still useful to you.”
“Oh?” Mina could not tell whether the Count was surprised at Jonathan’s answer. He circled behind the desk, sat down. This, she thought, was also a position from which it would be difficult to flee (or attack) but in his case it seemed more a sign of confidence than vulnerability. How curious.
“You’re not enamored with me,” Jonathan said, and his voice was clipped and restrained, economical, “not as you are with Mina. You’ve….desired me, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop you. But I can still be useful. I can pass for human, and negotiate for you, act again as your solicitor, your clerk, anything you choose. People think of me as bland, unexceptional, and you know that will work to your advantage. It’s what I was for you from the first, helping you into London so smoothly that no one ever thought to question your presence. I am your entrance into modernity.”
Jonathan is being characteristically self-effacing here, but I also mean for there to be an element of truth in his analysis of his usefulness to Dracula, though we won't see quite how much until a little later in the series. The question of to what degree Dracula is "enamored with" Jonathan or Mina respectively I leave to the readers to decide. Suffice to say that this is the narrative of the relationships that Jonathan believes at this time.
The Count was leaning forward, and still Mina could not read his reaction. “And what of that could your wife, the lovely assistant schoolmistress, not accomplish as capably as you?”
“She’s a woman; there are many places from which she would be barred, or where she would be noticed, that I can enter with ease. And -” He swallowed; his eyes flashed towards Mina and then away. “you’re driving her mad. I don’t know what you’re doing or why it hasn’t happened to me, but she’s not thinking as clearly as she once did. Like all the others here. None of them could pass as human. Soon she won’t be able to either.”
I'd like to put a big post-it on this paragraph that just says GENDER STUFF.
No, I do want to talk about another thing here. Writing Mina's transformation over the course of this series has been one of the most challenging aspects of it; I want it to be emotionally believable and narratively effective, I want it to follow from her canon characterization while also taking into account the different place that this AU puts her in even at the start of the first story (at which point, I'll remind you all, she has been fleeing Dracula on her own for several years). Showing Jonathan's perspective on that transformation, both in his pov chapters and also as he articulates it here and then much later is a crucial part of that. I've struggled with this, and I'm sure Mina's character arc in the series doesn't work for all readers (especially in the later installments as she gets further and further along), but I feel proud of how I've gradually developed it.
Mina wanted to protest, as fury roiled in her, but she thought that, like the Count’s words to her, could wait. She would endure any of these indignities, if they would keep Jonathan alive.
“So you have some degree of perception which you had not previously revealed. Is that enough reason to keep you alive, if you threaten me?”
This line also strikes me as too clumsy.
Something in Jonathan’s careful restraint seemed to snap. “I threaten you less than anyone else within these walls! You know how your wives speak of you when you aren’t around; you know the resentment that they display sometimes even to your face. It was the first thing I saw of them, Ecaterina claiming that you had never loved her. And yet somehow I am the danger.” He paused, as if for breath (a mortal habit, still). “I think that you killed them, the men you had before me. I think that you have in some twisted way seen all of us as threats, potential usurpers of your throne. But you’re not a prince anymore, and I’m only a solicitor. I asked for your blood so that my wife would not be alone, and now I’ve betrayed you by neglecting to turn her over to your punishment when I should have. That is all. I have resisted you no more than that.”
MORE GENDER STUFF
Most of what I have to say about this paragraph is more directly about later installments, and some of it I should probably hold off on saying until I've finished the series proper. I will say that I love "you're not a prince anymore, and I'm only a solicitor." Jonathan!!
This flood of new information left Mina dizzy; she kept picturing Jonathan asking the Count for his blood, and felt sick. She gathered her skirts in her hands and stood, as silently as she could manage, unable to bear any longer her position of subservience between the two of them. The Count looked at her and said sharply, “I did not give you permission to stand.”
Mina's reaction here is more ugly co-victimhood comparison dynamics. Remember also Jonathan's "you didn't ask for this" in Collusion when he's trying to warn her away from friendship with Ileana, which lands even more sourly for her now.
"Nor to kneel, but I don’t think you complained of that.” I love this retort so much.The words tasted like vinegar. “Is what he said true? After your beautiful rhetoric of the unbreakable connections between all of us - there were others, who you murdered?”
“I hardly think you are in any position to pass judgment. What did you expect to happen if that letter you wanted to post did reach your hearty band of vampire hunters? Do you think anyone here - including your cherished husband - would survive, if they had their way?”
Crazy amounts of foreshadowing which is so gratifying to look back at now. I set it all up!
“Does that mean yes?”
He stood, and she felt a rush of triumph, at making him do so, at disturbing his confident composure. “You are still going to be punished, Mina.”
He doesn't answer he doesn't answer he doesn't answer! The two of them have so wrong-footed him. This section was tremendous fun to write.
“So you’ll lock me up again, starve me, deprive me of any chance for solitude or free movement? What can you do that you have not already done?”
He laughed. “That is not a question to which you want to know the answer.”
Her fists, useless against the bolted top of the coffin; scratching and biting at him as he held her down; her mouth at his sternum, and blood on her lips, cheeks, nostrils. He was right. She did not want to know the extent of his invention. The conversation had spiraled too fast, and she felt as if she had barely followed it.
“I think it is Jonathan who I will lock up now,” he was saying, soft, “we can continue our dialogue at greater leisure and in privacy.”
Because there are things neither of you want me to hear? she thought, but this time she held her tongue. She suspected that she had already heard enough which was not intended for her, and she intended to pore over it when her mind was her own.
Jonathan was trembling but, for the first time, Mina could not find it in herself to care.
And there's the rupture.
-
It was hours later, when the Count came to her. She did not ask what he had done to Jonathan, whether he had determined that he should die. She found that she very much did not want to mention him, to bring him again into the space between them. She wanted to forget the entire hideous conversation, all the layers of panic and betrayal mounting atop one another.
I realize now that I didn't specify this, but I meant for this to be the same bedroom in which we saw Mina and Ileana in the first scene.
This was the only reason she could understand afterwards for why she kissed him - lips against lips, teeth against teeth, harsh, sudden. She surprised him, she could tell, and he grasped her hair, held her still and prolonged the moment, till she was terrified at her own daring, though she did not try to fight.
Another example of Mina doing something of her accord for the first time. But how truly is it her own accord if she knows that's what he wants?
He drew away from her, finally. She said, “I know that you mean to punish me, but I do not think I could stand another didactic lecture.”
He smiled, and she watched her own response for any hint of answering joy or relief. “I hardly think that will be necessary. You understand the nature of your offense.”
“I do.” She undressed without being told - the clothing was not even hers any longer, these dresses they shared in common, and perhaps that made it easier to remove. She watched him watch her. He pushed her down and bit at the soft insides of her arms, at the hollow of her throat, until she cried out, left the wounds open till her skin was sticky with blood as he touched her. It did not frighten her so much any longer, losing blood, even so much as this, soaking through the bedsheet, for it felt now like a commodity which could be replenished, not the intimate substance of her body. It was no longer a perversion for him to consume it from her, not when his own had entered into and so profoundly altered her. She wondered, idly, whether her corrupted blood tasted different to him now than that of mortals; she herself could not tell, but perhaps her palate was not so refined. The thought nearly made her laugh.
I am quite pleased with this paragraph, which strikes the line I wanted it to strike between the horrific and the sensual.
She felt pleasure and not shame in those moments, though shame would of course return later, creeping insidiously, clinging to her like a vine.
When it was done, she asked him, “Was that a punishment?” and he laughed and kissed the back of her neck.
“Apparently not,” he told her.
“Am I going mad?” she asked in the silence, hoping in vain for an honest answer, but at a loss for how she could possibly trust whatever he gave her.
“No,” he said, without hesitation, “you are changing. You are not going mad.”
Compare with Ecaterina's: "it's not destruction, it's transformation" in the last story.
She did not want to ask any more questions, even as they lingered in her mind, did not want to think further about any of what had been said, what it could mean (Jonathan, alone now somewhere in the castle with a bolt on the outside of his door, faint and frantic with having no way out). She felt the silence, her own worn body, the lingering sting of the bites which he had worried into gashes.
“Tell me how you remember me,” he said finally, and for a moment her surprise stilled her.
“Don’t you know?” she asked. It had been one of his favorite pastimes, in the long period of their separation, as he tormented her with their mental connection, to watch his attack upon her over again through her eyes, to see himself as she saw him.
“I want to hear your words,” he said, and she found herself in no position to refuse, nor with any reason to.
She laid her head back, stared at the ceiling, contemplating, curiously calm. “I remember mist, filling my lungs, clouding my vision. Your eyes, your voice. It was so sharp and cold - it seemed as if there was no opening for mercy in you, that you were like a blade turned to the purpose of my injury. I thought you laughed at me. I remember when you pushed me against the wall of that train car and made me beg. I remember you sitting at my bedside and watching me die.”
I love this paragraph. I am so proud of it.
“Thank you,” he told her, and she tried to remember whether she had ever before heard him speak those words.
-
His punishment, when it finally came, also took place within her mind, for apparently, despite his anger towards Jonathan, he had not fully discarded his request. He forced his way into her mind and showed her Jonathan how he himself had seen him - weak and fainting under his wives’ hands; learning the lineaments of the Count’s desire; his back broken with injury, begging for the cessation of pain. Because it was the Count’s memories she saw through, she could see the beauty he saw in Jonathan’s suffering, the desire he felt, and it mingled with her own desire, her own admiration for his gentle beauty, so thoroughly that she was overcome by horror.
It's important to me that even as I am putting their relationship through absolute hell this story doesn't lose the thread of Mina's very real and very strong sexual desire for Jonathan; I didn't want it to go off the rails into a 'Dracula is Mina (and/or Jonathan)'s sexual awakening" narrative. And what a tangled mess it is, to be forced into this alongside a person you love and desire, to witness them hurt in sexualized ways and then to be made to experience desire for that! Gods I could write about these dynamics forever; I can't for the life of me understand why more people don't want to write fucked up Mina/Jonathan/Dracula stuff.
He left her alone, afterwards, so she could struggle through her the morass of her own feelings in privacy, and she was grateful for that kindness.
Dracula's about to (as we will learn a few stories from now) subject Jonathan to really horrific experiences of isolation, but for Mina this brief periods of being left alone are kindnesses.
-
She dressed with more care than usual, putting up her hair even though she knew the Count preferred it down, digging out the violet mourning dress which was her own (though she should consider nothing her own any longer) and wearing it with Ecaterina’s pearls. When she went to join her sisters, she quelled the upsurge of resentment she felt upon seeing Ileana and sat with Adria instead. Adria smiled at her and Mina thought suddenly of Lucy, head-uptilted, squinting at the sun.
This scene got a surprising (to me) number of votes in my crazy most disturbing sex scene in Compromise poll(it tied for second place!). I am so endlessly curious about how that happened. I'm not going to say that this scene isn't disturbing but for me it definitely doesn't make the top five.
She tried touching Adria’s hair, her shoulders, pretending a confidence that she did not in fact feel. She was still unaccustomed to the rules of this place, where, despite the stringent requirements of her obedience, to caress and kiss another was an expectation and not an impropriety. Adria’s hair was soft and smooth; she seemed gentle to Mina, still, though she had seen her many times covered in blood, ripping apart living bodies.
This was another delicate dynamic that I was trying to convey, this mixed wonder-horror-unease at being allowed/encouraged/required to be physically intimate in these ways, the strange sideways desire of it. Really what I'm getting out of writing this commentary is that I need to write more Mina & brides stuff.
She thought: I could not kill you. She did not speak. Ileana came to her, and sat at her other side, and put an arm across her shoulders. Mina felt the tension ease out of her body.
Stating the obvious, but vital for the larger series: Jonathan never gets a moment like this and he certainly never gets this kind of closeness with the other brides.
You can stop fighting.
There was a conversation going on that she had not followed, but at some point in it, Ecaterina turned to her. “You should learn Romanian,” she said, “it’s not fair, that we always must work to speak in your language, but you cannot even try to speak in ours.”
“I would like that,” she said.
She wanted to give them an apology, but it was too late, and she could not even herself have explained what she wished to apologize for. She thought again of Lucy, wan as she was towards the ending of her illness, alone and without answers. She imagined sitting with Lucy as she now sat with Adria and Ileana, how she could then have comforted her.
I don't know if readers find this as devastatingly sad as I do.
The Count, then, at the doorway, watching them. Mina felt her attention turn towards him, felt those of her companions do so as well; she was uncertain whether she should stand and go to him, making the ritual gestures of obeisance which he so often demanded. But he smiled, “Stay as you are,” he said, and joined Ecaterina, pulling her close to him. Mina saw her rest her head on her chest, and envied what seemed to her in that moment to be a trust, and a harmony, which she had so long been without.
And there's another turning point: she sees this and wants it and from here on will in some ways be trying to get access to that experience for herself.
She thought of nothing beyond that room, beyond the weight of Ileana’s arm and the texture of Adria’s hair. For a moment, her stratagems went quiet.
For a good...well, six years, this was where the series ended. In retrospect, it was an extremely cruel cliffhanger - lots of people thought Jonathan was dead (spoiler for the rest of the series, but he definitely isn't). But, as Dracula says, my cruelty doesn't come from malice (ha. sorry, I couldn't resist). It's difficult to reconstruct now exactly why I had to take so much time away from this story, though I think there were a lot of factors. 2015-2021 was not a period in my life where I was doing much writing in the first place. I had some big life changes, and had to take some time to sort all of that out before I could come back to vampire narratives and to this story. Which I did, and I am so glad that I have. But I feel some regret at having left people in suspense for so long! It must have been weird when I showed back up with the next update.
Having gone through this whole commentary, I think that I'm generally too hard on this story - there's a lot in it that's quite strong, and very moving, even if it's not as tight as some others in the series. Some people have told me it's their favorite, which I still don't quite understand and would like to! But there are definitely things in it of which I am very proud.
First, about the title. I messed it up; it's the only one in the series which isn't a noun, and thus bothers me every time I look at it. It should probably be "Adjustment," but at the time I thought that didn't sound as right for the story and at that point I didn't care as much about consistency in the story titles as I now do. So I'm stuck with it.
“You would have killed us, wouldn’t you?”
The little trick of opening with a stark, provocative line of dialogue and taking a couple more lines to reveal the context of who is saying it always pleases me, even if it's a bit cheap. Here is is also supposed to make for a sharp transition from the end of Collusion, establishing that we're now in a new relational context. I like this opening.
I go back and forth on my feelings in general about this story, and there are things about it that I criticize myself for - the structure is lopsided, it's too dialogue-heavy, etc. But I've never stopped being pleased with this scene. Adjust marks a turning point in the series in a number of ways, but one of the important ones is the centrality of the brides as characters. They start to acquire some glimmers of dimension in Collusion, especially in Jonathan's scene with Ecaterina, but they remain very much in the background of the Jonathan/Mina/Dracula triangle. (Partly because that's a Jonathan pov story and he still really can't bear to see them as full people.) I wanted to build up their importance gradually, but this scene really is the pivot point in that.
Mina did not turn her head; she kept her eyes on the ceiling. “Yes. Not with my own hands, probably. The men would never have allowed it. But I would have helped.”
Important that Mina doesn't try to soften this, that she's honest with Ileana even though this conversation is deeply uncomfortable. I wanted this to communicate a lot about the developing relationship between them in a pretty short amount of time.
She tried to gauge the atmosphere of Ileana’s silence, whether it was horror or fury or resignation. But she asked only, “And have you changed your mind?”
At that, Mina did look at her, though she still could not read her expression. “I’m not supposed to have a mind of my own any longer, am I?”
Ileana groaned, and lightly hit Mina’s shoulder. “Stop it. You’re avoiding the question.”
From Collusion we know that very grim humor is something that Ileana and Mina do together, and here we get an example. (I think Mina's joke is funny, not sure if any readers do.) Also: Ileana's been living with Ecaterina for several centuries now and probably is highly on guard against people avoiding questions. She can give Mina a hard time about it in a way she can't always do with Ecaterina.
Mina looked away again. “I don’t know what I would do now. I would have to kill myself too, according to that principle.”
This was, she supposed, what passed for post-coital conversation in this iteration of her life. They were in bed. Mina had been given a strict regimen for how much touch she was supposed to receive and deal out, and it was most often with Ileana, for some reason, that the Count paired her. They could both have refused, she supposed, and conspired to keep it from him, but that would have required a degree of complicity that Mina did not think she could rely on, and it was, in any case, easier than when he watched, and directed. She would take what little mercies she could get.
The dry tone here (like Mina's below) is intentional, as is the delay in giving the context that this conversation takes place just after Mina and Ileana have had sex. These sexual encounters between the brides which are at Dracula's command but absent his direct involvement feel like a delicate thing to depict, and I wanted to make the dynamic as clear as possible while walking a pretty careful line on tone. We can see as well that Mina's relationship with the sex in which she is required to participate in this household has shifted from where she was during Jackal, though this is going to continue to evolve over the course of the series.
Also: note Mina's reflection on what it would take for Ileana and Mina to keep information from Dracula in which, if you've read ahead, you'll notice the title of a later installment. This story has a ton of foreshadowing; I'll try not to be too excitable in pointing it out (now I'm far enough along that can point it out!).
“He worried that you would, you know. Kill yourself.”
Mina’s voice was dry. “I didn’t think he worried about my well-being in the slightest degree.”
Ileana sat up, and Mina could tell for certain now that she had irritated her. “You know that isn’t true. But he told us all about you, before he and Jonathan left to bring you home. How you had conspired to kill him, and all of us. How you let Lucy die, who should have been our sister, and then consoled her murderers.”
I am really interested in how Dracula would have explained the events of the novel to the brides, and how they would have reacted to it; in particular I imagine that Lucy's death would have seemed horrific to them. References to Lucy in this series are few and far between; I try to be very selective with when she gets brought up. That makes this scene one of the only glimpses we have into how Mina is holding that relationship. At the same time, Mina and Ileana are also talking about Lucy as a slightly distanced way of talking about their own relationship, and about how Mina is relating to the other wives more generally.
Mina pulled the sheets around her body, uncomfortable, suddenly, with her nakedness. “I’m surprised you didn’t all despise me, then, if that was the portrait he drew for you.”
She could hear the restraint in Ileana’s voice, the careful caution. “Are you saying it was an inaccurate one?”
I don't think this line isn't quite right for Ileana's voice, but that's okay.
“No. No, he told the truth. Though I didn’t know what had been done to Lucy until….until after it was finished. She was my dearest friend. If it had fallen to me to kill her, even changed as she was, I do not know if I could have stood it. But I did believe it was the right thing to do. I still don’t think that any of us have a right to live, not when we each take so many lives to do so. I know his philosophy on it,” she added, before Ileana could begin to speak, “I don’t need to hear it repeated. Surely you must have felt a degree of moral repugnance about this, at some point.”
“Not enough to consider killing my sisters.”
Okay, there's a lot here. Major pin in all the stuff, here and below, about having a right or not to live as vampires and being willing to kill oneself and/or one's vampire siblings which will come back in a major way later in the series. Remember also that this exchange between Ileana and Mina is taking place after Ileana already spied on Mina's excursion to the village in Collusion where she attempted to lay the seeds for her escape plan, and though she's not saying any of that directly to Mina here, she may also be reacting to the knowledge that Mina is still willing in at least part of herself to enact a plan that could lead to all of their destruction.
I also want to invite all of you to be entertained with me at the thought of how many times Dracula must give his vampire morality lectures to everyone in this castle.
“You weren’t my sisters yet. All of you were my enemies, as far as I knew. All I knew of any of you was that you had harmed my husband.”
Now it was Ileana who would not look at her. “We were your sisters from the moment you tasted his blood, and you knew that. You felt it. That’s why he sent us to call to you, in hopes that you might recognize where you belonged and abandon the company of those who would have destroyed us all. But you didn’t come. And so he took Jonathan instead.”
The scene in the novel where the brides call Mina to join them is one of the most affecting parts of the text for me, and I can't think about it without getting a little tearful. Their death afterwards devastates me, and as a fic writer I am almost always trying to unwrite it and circling around and around that moment of them calling her, trying to make sense of the scene and my feelings around it. I don't I'll ever be done excavating that.
Mina felt tears prick at her eyes. How would it have been, to have gone to him then, come willingly through the snow holding their hands? Would he have been kinder to her, treated her less like a captured enemy? No; it was a useless fantasy. Think of how much he had gloated the first time, how cruel he had been when she had never seen him before, how his violence never gave her the chance even to consider coming willingly to his side. There was no other path where she could see herself choosing the sisterhood that she now shared with Ileana.
Another thread in this scene is the question of Mina's similarities to and differences from the other brides, which we really don't have enough information within the novel to reasonably hypothesize. A difference I guess at here is Mina's active involvement in fighting against Dracula even before the blood exchange, and how that means that her turning, aside from being cruel and nonconsensual as I imagine they all were, is characterized as well by a very particular quality of spite, this "captured enemy" dynamic where taking her isn't just a pleasure for Dracula on its own but also has this symbolic meaning as vanquishing a foe. This isn't a primary focus in the series, but it's something I want to keep thinking about.
This passage also shows Mina grappling with this question about her newly deepening traumatic attachments - would there be a way to have them that is not traumatic? The answer she comes to, which is a devastating one, is no, there wouldn't be.
Her voice, when she managed to speak, was quiet, “Do you hate me? For that? For everything he said?”
Ileana did not answer the question. “I do wonder what Lucy would have been like.”
“Better than me.” The words came from Mina quickly, with a bitterness she thought she had forgotten. “She was more beautiful than me, more charming, more graceful. You would have liked her more, all of you.”
I left the reason for Mina's bitterness here deliberately ambiguous - is she bitter at Lucy historically getting more attention than her, being better liked? Or is she bitter that Lucy, who she adored so much, was taken from her? Or both? Or something else?
Ileana tilted her head as she looked at Mina. “You were sleeping with her.”
She felt startled, two pieces of her life crashing together in a way she had never expected. “No! I mean, there was no one except Jonathan, and that only after we were married.”
I really didn't want to deal here with unpacking all of Mina's baggage about having sex with women and how she did or didn't understand her feelings towards Lucy and what it means for her that being a vampire also means she does this now, but it's all going on for her in the background.
Ileana laughed. “That’s insipid, Mina.”
Irritation and amusement mingled. “I suppose you’ve never been in love.”
Mina reverts here into a weird condescension towards Ileana (she's a married woman and Ileana never got to be) which really doesn't fit their context.
She was not prepared for Ileana’s confusion, or for her words, which settled in Mina like stone. “I love him.” A silence. “Are you saying that you don’t?”
Notice that neither of them need to use his name at any point in the conversation.
She wanted to get away, suddenly, but all she could do was sit up, curl her knees into her chest, put her face in her hands. “We’re done, we’re finished for tonight. Please let me be alone.”
To her credit, Ileana at once stood, began putting on her own clothing, laid Mina’s dress within her reach. “You know that he told me not to do that.” Cautiously, “Do you need me to bring him for you?”
Mina is getting this modeled for her and is getting directed into it, this dynamic of emotional reliance on the Count and going to him in moments of distress.
She did not laugh, though she wanted to. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. What would he do, with me panicking over something like this?"
“I don’t know. Take care of it.” A pause. “I’ll tell him. I can lock the door here, that should satisfy his requirement that you never be left alone. Will you manage until then?”
Leaving her in a locked room is really not the same as never leaving her alone, Ileana. Let's just imagine Dracula gave her a stern lecture about this later.
Mina nodded. She ought to thank Ileana, but she could not bear that.
When the other woman was gone and the door was locked Mina dressed herself, stood, paced. She tried to value these scant few moments without eyes upon her, but could not think of what to do with the time. She wondered what Ileana would say, and whether the Count would laugh. She had not thought herself expected to love him, but she supposed that it would be the one thing that could make eternity in his castle endurable. Jonathan had told her that it would be his own presence, the moments of leisure they would have together, but clearly he had been wrong. Perhaps that did make her captor her only possible source of solace, along with his wives who, she now had learned, appeared to believe she was as much a rebel in need of punishment as he did. How foolish she was, to imagine that Ileana’s irreverent jokes meant there was any true solidarity between them. She felt loneliness spread across her skin like lichen.
That last sentence is a little much, but I'm fond of it.
She was relieved to see that, when the Count arrived, his expression was one of indulgent affection rather than rage, and then, a moment later, felt repulsed at herself for feeling relieved. He shut the door behind him. “Now, was it the idea that you might love me that distressed you so, or that you might not?”
Mina laughed, hopelessly. “She also asked me whether I wanted to kill her.”
Dracula here is feeling incredibly fond of Mina, which I hope comes through.
"A reasonable question.” He stepped forward, and his hands were on her shoulders. “Mina, you can stop fighting.”
Turning point moment! This whole following exchange is crucial for the series as a whole. Mark the transition from him giving her permission to fight at the end of "Windows"; now he is giving her permission to stop.
The idea of escape surfaced in her mind, though she tried not to ever think of it in his presence, tried to weight it down so it would sink to the bottom of her consciousness and he would never notice it. She kept her thoughts away from the details of her half-formed plans. The delicate focus this took was enough that she spoke her mind, without considering the words. “I can never stop fighting.”
This series is of course very interested in the question of how you conceal things from someone with whom you are telepathically connected. Mina isn't great at it at this juncture.
She waited for his features to twist in rage, for his hands on her shoulders to become cruel and bruising. This did not happen. He was still, and his voice calm. “I don’t believe you value self-delusion any more than I do.”
She met his gaze. “What does that mean?”
“Think of what I have done to you, so far. Think of how I have entered into places where you believed yourself safe and claimed you there, how I have kept you as my prisoner with humans all around us, of all that I have done since you entered my home. Of how your husband now obeys my commands without question, even when I tell him to hurt you. You are lying to yourself if you think that you can win against me, still, or if you think that there is anymore for you to do. You have fought enough. You have made me respect your strength, and your bravery; your pride should not suffer with your surrender. It is done. Let yourself be here now.”
This is almost certainly my favorite passage in this story; it makes me very emotional to reread. As terrifying and warped as it is for Dracula it is also a deep expression of care to Mina: he respects her, and so she can stop fighting.
Saying it turns out to not be enough for her to fully make the transition, but it helps gets her there, and it puts the two of them on the same page in a crucial way; they are operating within this shared dialectic and so he can make symbolically and psychologically meaningful interventions within that dialectic. This sets us up for what will happen in Keys.
She closed her eyes. “I told Ileana that I still believe that none of us should live.”
“But you couldn’t kill her, could you?” She expected him to command her to open her eyes, to stop avoiding him, but he did not do that either, simply kept talking. “You feel the beauty and power of what is shared between you, and you could not destroy that. Just as you couldn’t kill me.”
She opened her eyes. “I thought I almost had.”
“Months ago, in the first panic of your changing. I would hazard that you understand, now, why Jonathan stopped you, and that it was not out of cowardice.”
She felt itching with the tension of not knowing when she would go too far and cause him to punish her. “Why are you being kind to me?”
Compare with Mina's inverse question to Dracula in Windows ("Why are you being so cruel to me?") as a marker of how much her perspective on him has shifted.
He smiled. “I know how to fit my methods to the time. You know that my cruelty has never come from malice.”
“And yet you still have Ileana watching me every waking minute, yet you will not let me so much as keep a journal -”
He put a hand over her lips. “Caring for you is not the same as trusting you. And I will not allow you to destroy yourself.”
She did not push his hand away from her mouth; instead she took a greater chance, and sent the question to his mind, Has that happened before?
I have nothing insightful to offer about this passage but will say that rereading it after finishing and posting Intransigence this totally wrecks me.
Okay, maybe I can say that I wanted to be careful to walk a delicate line here between setting up these terms and stakes and thematic echoes but not hammering them in so much that the big reveals in Complicity and Intransigence of characters' plans that the readers weren't previously told about weren't compromised (ha). This is one of the things I've really been learning in writing this series, how to plan these kinds of seeds and patiently give them time to sprout.
But he pushed her presence away, as smoothly as if he was accustomed to repelling such intrusions. “Do not presume too far. I will never tolerate disrespect.”
She opened her lips and kissed the fingers he pressed to them in apology. She didn’t mean it, but he would know that. And he would accept the form, she knew, until he could create the reality.
This builds on the oath scene in Windows and his framing to her of saying the words that will later become true.
-
“Mina, Jonathan, come with me.”
Welcome to: the scene in which Dracula Makes Some Mistakes.
This scene picks up where Collusion ends; I meant for readers to understand that the first scene happens earlier and so overlaps with the time that Collusion covers. I'm not sure if this entirely worked.
She felt terror fluttering in her chest, replacing the modicum of calm she had achieved in the length of his absence. He had spared them this for months, but, as she stood and followed him, it felt as if that night had just ended, Jonathan’s blank face as he touched her, the twist of it all into pain. She had felt hope, in the snow with him, alight with her mad plans and his silent, wary agreement. She had thought things could be changing. But the Count would destroy it again, would leave her alone, with no feeling but revulsion for her husband.
He did not bring them to a bedroom, though, only to what looked like a study, with a desk. Mina looked at Jonathan’s face, hoping for clues of what was happening. He seemed blanched, frightened, but resolute and unsurprised.
This scene has sections in it that I'm pleased with, but overall it's a bit of a mess, and that's reflected in the fact that I really never had a clear image in my mind of the room where it takes place or how it fits into the geography of the castle. I could say that it's supposed to be the same as the octagonal meeting room from Tower (which is the same as the room from No Touch of Pity and the room with the desk in For Every Grief That's Offered, but that would be a total retcon, I wasn't thinking of that room when I wrote this.
The Count shut the door. “Your shared act of rebellion has been brought to my attention,” he said simply, and Mina felt fury at first at Jonathan, who surely had betrayed her, but then came to her senses. Of course not. Ileana. Who must have followed them.
Ugh this reveal is so clumsy. Fine! It's fine.
Jonathan’s mouth opened, and she could see shock.
What was this, as though they were two misbehaving students brought before the headmaster? She remembered being a schoolmistress, calling girls up before the class after they had thrown notes to one another, and noting their their trembling shame. But he would surely not assign them lines to write. Idiot. She was rash and hasty and foolish. She felt weariness at the endless cycle of resistance and quelling, at how captivity never seemed to grow easier.
Notice how a) she immediately blames herself for whatever violence she imagines she's about to experience and b) how she's back in the fighting/surrender dialectic and the germane question is still whether or not she can stop. But Dracula and Jonathan are about to have a totally different conversation.
But the Count still spoke. “This was not what Jonathan expected to hear me say when I brought you here, Mina,” he said, his eyes locked with Jonathan’s, even as he addressed her. “He came to me, some weeks ago, to request that I force you to watch him being harmed. He wanted to give you the experience of watching him suffer without being able to help him, of knowing yourself complicit in his pain. He wanted you, I understand, to feel as disgusted with yourself as you did with him.”
She saw Jonathan flinch, lower his head. His shoulders were shaking, as if he wept.
She did not know what to think, where to direct her fury. She was still.
"But I think perhaps she is right to feel disgust towards you,” the Count continued, “while you present one face to her and another to me, and tell the truth to neither of us. She at least has told me that she will continue to fight, that she is incapable of ceasing her rebellion. Her actions are signs of my own failure to repair the sickness that she has made no attempt to hide. But you know that what I despise most is falsity.”
Something I do stand by is the choice to write this scene from Mina's pov; there's something effective in how it quickly becomes clear that the real conflict here is between Dracula and Jonathan but Mina is having her own reactions to all of it and also is putting together the context as she goes. I think this scene would have been much less interesting from Jonathan's pov, and also we need the nuance of Mina's varied reactions in order to see how she gets from here to where she goes in Keys.
However, "what I despise most is falsity" totally doesn't belong here, it's not sufficiently justified by what I've established about Dracula's character so far in the series, and it's definitely something that I'm projecting. It makes me kick myself a little but I don't think I'm taking it out.
Jonathan’s voice, then, finally, “What kind of apology do you want from me?”
“We agreed that, should you assist Mina in resisting me, you would die for it.”
She fell to her knees then, thinking fast, demanding his attention with desperation. “Please, I beg you, don’t kill him for my mistakes. He didn’t let me run away, he wouldn’t have - you wouldn’t waste his life on this. You wouldn’t. My lord.”
First time Mina kneels or uses the honorific of her own accord.
He deigned, for once to look at her. To look down at her. But she was too far gone in this for shame. “This is good, Mina. This is honest. If only I had brought you to this state months ago.”
“You knew my fears, always. You knew that it was only your threat against him that prevented me from screaming, the first time. If you killed him,” she said, grasping at the single flash of insight which came to her, “I would have no reason to obey you any longer.”
“Now that -” the Count laughed, shortly, “is self-delusion, my best beloved. But we can discuss it later. Jonathan. What reason have I for letting you live?”
'Best beloved' is cf the blood exchange, and it gives me a painful thrill to write it as a consistent expression of affection from Dracula to Mina.
Mina felt tension in her belly and shoulders, and was acutely aware that, from where she knelt, it would be difficult to quickly stand and run. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the position was so universally a sign of submission. She tried to listen, and strategize in the back of her mind.
I don't think this physical description here is quite right; when I think it through it doesn't quite make sense somatically. But again, not changing it now.
Jonathan’s voice, when he spoke, was clearer than Mina could have expected. “I am still useful to you.”
“Oh?” Mina could not tell whether the Count was surprised at Jonathan’s answer. He circled behind the desk, sat down. This, she thought, was also a position from which it would be difficult to flee (or attack) but in his case it seemed more a sign of confidence than vulnerability. How curious.
“You’re not enamored with me,” Jonathan said, and his voice was clipped and restrained, economical, “not as you are with Mina. You’ve….desired me, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop you. But I can still be useful. I can pass for human, and negotiate for you, act again as your solicitor, your clerk, anything you choose. People think of me as bland, unexceptional, and you know that will work to your advantage. It’s what I was for you from the first, helping you into London so smoothly that no one ever thought to question your presence. I am your entrance into modernity.”
Jonathan is being characteristically self-effacing here, but I also mean for there to be an element of truth in his analysis of his usefulness to Dracula, though we won't see quite how much until a little later in the series. The question of to what degree Dracula is "enamored with" Jonathan or Mina respectively I leave to the readers to decide. Suffice to say that this is the narrative of the relationships that Jonathan believes at this time.
The Count was leaning forward, and still Mina could not read his reaction. “And what of that could your wife, the lovely assistant schoolmistress, not accomplish as capably as you?”
“She’s a woman; there are many places from which she would be barred, or where she would be noticed, that I can enter with ease. And -” He swallowed; his eyes flashed towards Mina and then away. “you’re driving her mad. I don’t know what you’re doing or why it hasn’t happened to me, but she’s not thinking as clearly as she once did. Like all the others here. None of them could pass as human. Soon she won’t be able to either.”
I'd like to put a big post-it on this paragraph that just says GENDER STUFF.
No, I do want to talk about another thing here. Writing Mina's transformation over the course of this series has been one of the most challenging aspects of it; I want it to be emotionally believable and narratively effective, I want it to follow from her canon characterization while also taking into account the different place that this AU puts her in even at the start of the first story (at which point, I'll remind you all, she has been fleeing Dracula on her own for several years). Showing Jonathan's perspective on that transformation, both in his pov chapters and also as he articulates it here and then much later is a crucial part of that. I've struggled with this, and I'm sure Mina's character arc in the series doesn't work for all readers (especially in the later installments as she gets further and further along), but I feel proud of how I've gradually developed it.
Mina wanted to protest, as fury roiled in her, but she thought that, like the Count’s words to her, could wait. She would endure any of these indignities, if they would keep Jonathan alive.
“So you have some degree of perception which you had not previously revealed. Is that enough reason to keep you alive, if you threaten me?”
This line also strikes me as too clumsy.
Something in Jonathan’s careful restraint seemed to snap. “I threaten you less than anyone else within these walls! You know how your wives speak of you when you aren’t around; you know the resentment that they display sometimes even to your face. It was the first thing I saw of them, Ecaterina claiming that you had never loved her. And yet somehow I am the danger.” He paused, as if for breath (a mortal habit, still). “I think that you killed them, the men you had before me. I think that you have in some twisted way seen all of us as threats, potential usurpers of your throne. But you’re not a prince anymore, and I’m only a solicitor. I asked for your blood so that my wife would not be alone, and now I’ve betrayed you by neglecting to turn her over to your punishment when I should have. That is all. I have resisted you no more than that.”
MORE GENDER STUFF
Most of what I have to say about this paragraph is more directly about later installments, and some of it I should probably hold off on saying until I've finished the series proper. I will say that I love "you're not a prince anymore, and I'm only a solicitor." Jonathan!!
This flood of new information left Mina dizzy; she kept picturing Jonathan asking the Count for his blood, and felt sick. She gathered her skirts in her hands and stood, as silently as she could manage, unable to bear any longer her position of subservience between the two of them. The Count looked at her and said sharply, “I did not give you permission to stand.”
Mina's reaction here is more ugly co-victimhood comparison dynamics. Remember also Jonathan's "you didn't ask for this" in Collusion when he's trying to warn her away from friendship with Ileana, which lands even more sourly for her now.
"Nor to kneel, but I don’t think you complained of that.” I love this retort so much.The words tasted like vinegar. “Is what he said true? After your beautiful rhetoric of the unbreakable connections between all of us - there were others, who you murdered?”
“I hardly think you are in any position to pass judgment. What did you expect to happen if that letter you wanted to post did reach your hearty band of vampire hunters? Do you think anyone here - including your cherished husband - would survive, if they had their way?”
Crazy amounts of foreshadowing which is so gratifying to look back at now. I set it all up!
“Does that mean yes?”
He stood, and she felt a rush of triumph, at making him do so, at disturbing his confident composure. “You are still going to be punished, Mina.”
He doesn't answer he doesn't answer he doesn't answer! The two of them have so wrong-footed him. This section was tremendous fun to write.
“So you’ll lock me up again, starve me, deprive me of any chance for solitude or free movement? What can you do that you have not already done?”
He laughed. “That is not a question to which you want to know the answer.”
Her fists, useless against the bolted top of the coffin; scratching and biting at him as he held her down; her mouth at his sternum, and blood on her lips, cheeks, nostrils. He was right. She did not want to know the extent of his invention. The conversation had spiraled too fast, and she felt as if she had barely followed it.
“I think it is Jonathan who I will lock up now,” he was saying, soft, “we can continue our dialogue at greater leisure and in privacy.”
Because there are things neither of you want me to hear? she thought, but this time she held her tongue. She suspected that she had already heard enough which was not intended for her, and she intended to pore over it when her mind was her own.
Jonathan was trembling but, for the first time, Mina could not find it in herself to care.
And there's the rupture.
-
It was hours later, when the Count came to her. She did not ask what he had done to Jonathan, whether he had determined that he should die. She found that she very much did not want to mention him, to bring him again into the space between them. She wanted to forget the entire hideous conversation, all the layers of panic and betrayal mounting atop one another.
I realize now that I didn't specify this, but I meant for this to be the same bedroom in which we saw Mina and Ileana in the first scene.
This was the only reason she could understand afterwards for why she kissed him - lips against lips, teeth against teeth, harsh, sudden. She surprised him, she could tell, and he grasped her hair, held her still and prolonged the moment, till she was terrified at her own daring, though she did not try to fight.
Another example of Mina doing something of her accord for the first time. But how truly is it her own accord if she knows that's what he wants?
He drew away from her, finally. She said, “I know that you mean to punish me, but I do not think I could stand another didactic lecture.”
He smiled, and she watched her own response for any hint of answering joy or relief. “I hardly think that will be necessary. You understand the nature of your offense.”
“I do.” She undressed without being told - the clothing was not even hers any longer, these dresses they shared in common, and perhaps that made it easier to remove. She watched him watch her. He pushed her down and bit at the soft insides of her arms, at the hollow of her throat, until she cried out, left the wounds open till her skin was sticky with blood as he touched her. It did not frighten her so much any longer, losing blood, even so much as this, soaking through the bedsheet, for it felt now like a commodity which could be replenished, not the intimate substance of her body. It was no longer a perversion for him to consume it from her, not when his own had entered into and so profoundly altered her. She wondered, idly, whether her corrupted blood tasted different to him now than that of mortals; she herself could not tell, but perhaps her palate was not so refined. The thought nearly made her laugh.
I am quite pleased with this paragraph, which strikes the line I wanted it to strike between the horrific and the sensual.
She felt pleasure and not shame in those moments, though shame would of course return later, creeping insidiously, clinging to her like a vine.
When it was done, she asked him, “Was that a punishment?” and he laughed and kissed the back of her neck.
“Apparently not,” he told her.
“Am I going mad?” she asked in the silence, hoping in vain for an honest answer, but at a loss for how she could possibly trust whatever he gave her.
“No,” he said, without hesitation, “you are changing. You are not going mad.”
Compare with Ecaterina's: "it's not destruction, it's transformation" in the last story.
She did not want to ask any more questions, even as they lingered in her mind, did not want to think further about any of what had been said, what it could mean (Jonathan, alone now somewhere in the castle with a bolt on the outside of his door, faint and frantic with having no way out). She felt the silence, her own worn body, the lingering sting of the bites which he had worried into gashes.
“Tell me how you remember me,” he said finally, and for a moment her surprise stilled her.
“Don’t you know?” she asked. It had been one of his favorite pastimes, in the long period of their separation, as he tormented her with their mental connection, to watch his attack upon her over again through her eyes, to see himself as she saw him.
“I want to hear your words,” he said, and she found herself in no position to refuse, nor with any reason to.
She laid her head back, stared at the ceiling, contemplating, curiously calm. “I remember mist, filling my lungs, clouding my vision. Your eyes, your voice. It was so sharp and cold - it seemed as if there was no opening for mercy in you, that you were like a blade turned to the purpose of my injury. I thought you laughed at me. I remember when you pushed me against the wall of that train car and made me beg. I remember you sitting at my bedside and watching me die.”
I love this paragraph. I am so proud of it.
“Thank you,” he told her, and she tried to remember whether she had ever before heard him speak those words.
-
His punishment, when it finally came, also took place within her mind, for apparently, despite his anger towards Jonathan, he had not fully discarded his request. He forced his way into her mind and showed her Jonathan how he himself had seen him - weak and fainting under his wives’ hands; learning the lineaments of the Count’s desire; his back broken with injury, begging for the cessation of pain. Because it was the Count’s memories she saw through, she could see the beauty he saw in Jonathan’s suffering, the desire he felt, and it mingled with her own desire, her own admiration for his gentle beauty, so thoroughly that she was overcome by horror.
It's important to me that even as I am putting their relationship through absolute hell this story doesn't lose the thread of Mina's very real and very strong sexual desire for Jonathan; I didn't want it to go off the rails into a 'Dracula is Mina (and/or Jonathan)'s sexual awakening" narrative. And what a tangled mess it is, to be forced into this alongside a person you love and desire, to witness them hurt in sexualized ways and then to be made to experience desire for that! Gods I could write about these dynamics forever; I can't for the life of me understand why more people don't want to write fucked up Mina/Jonathan/Dracula stuff.
He left her alone, afterwards, so she could struggle through her the morass of her own feelings in privacy, and she was grateful for that kindness.
Dracula's about to (as we will learn a few stories from now) subject Jonathan to really horrific experiences of isolation, but for Mina this brief periods of being left alone are kindnesses.
-
She dressed with more care than usual, putting up her hair even though she knew the Count preferred it down, digging out the violet mourning dress which was her own (though she should consider nothing her own any longer) and wearing it with Ecaterina’s pearls. When she went to join her sisters, she quelled the upsurge of resentment she felt upon seeing Ileana and sat with Adria instead. Adria smiled at her and Mina thought suddenly of Lucy, head-uptilted, squinting at the sun.
This scene got a surprising (to me) number of votes in my crazy most disturbing sex scene in Compromise poll(it tied for second place!). I am so endlessly curious about how that happened. I'm not going to say that this scene isn't disturbing but for me it definitely doesn't make the top five.
She tried touching Adria’s hair, her shoulders, pretending a confidence that she did not in fact feel. She was still unaccustomed to the rules of this place, where, despite the stringent requirements of her obedience, to caress and kiss another was an expectation and not an impropriety. Adria’s hair was soft and smooth; she seemed gentle to Mina, still, though she had seen her many times covered in blood, ripping apart living bodies.
This was another delicate dynamic that I was trying to convey, this mixed wonder-horror-unease at being allowed/encouraged/required to be physically intimate in these ways, the strange sideways desire of it. Really what I'm getting out of writing this commentary is that I need to write more Mina & brides stuff.
She thought: I could not kill you. She did not speak. Ileana came to her, and sat at her other side, and put an arm across her shoulders. Mina felt the tension ease out of her body.
Stating the obvious, but vital for the larger series: Jonathan never gets a moment like this and he certainly never gets this kind of closeness with the other brides.
You can stop fighting.
There was a conversation going on that she had not followed, but at some point in it, Ecaterina turned to her. “You should learn Romanian,” she said, “it’s not fair, that we always must work to speak in your language, but you cannot even try to speak in ours.”
“I would like that,” she said.
She wanted to give them an apology, but it was too late, and she could not even herself have explained what she wished to apologize for. She thought again of Lucy, wan as she was towards the ending of her illness, alone and without answers. She imagined sitting with Lucy as she now sat with Adria and Ileana, how she could then have comforted her.
I don't know if readers find this as devastatingly sad as I do.
The Count, then, at the doorway, watching them. Mina felt her attention turn towards him, felt those of her companions do so as well; she was uncertain whether she should stand and go to him, making the ritual gestures of obeisance which he so often demanded. But he smiled, “Stay as you are,” he said, and joined Ecaterina, pulling her close to him. Mina saw her rest her head on her chest, and envied what seemed to her in that moment to be a trust, and a harmony, which she had so long been without.
And there's another turning point: she sees this and wants it and from here on will in some ways be trying to get access to that experience for herself.
She thought of nothing beyond that room, beyond the weight of Ileana’s arm and the texture of Adria’s hair. For a moment, her stratagems went quiet.
For a good...well, six years, this was where the series ended. In retrospect, it was an extremely cruel cliffhanger - lots of people thought Jonathan was dead (spoiler for the rest of the series, but he definitely isn't). But, as Dracula says, my cruelty doesn't come from malice (ha. sorry, I couldn't resist). It's difficult to reconstruct now exactly why I had to take so much time away from this story, though I think there were a lot of factors. 2015-2021 was not a period in my life where I was doing much writing in the first place. I had some big life changes, and had to take some time to sort all of that out before I could come back to vampire narratives and to this story. Which I did, and I am so glad that I have. But I feel some regret at having left people in suspense for so long! It must have been weird when I showed back up with the next update.
Having gone through this whole commentary, I think that I'm generally too hard on this story - there's a lot in it that's quite strong, and very moving, even if it's not as tight as some others in the series. Some people have told me it's their favorite, which I still don't quite understand and would like to! But there are definitely things in it of which I am very proud.
