"Distance" commentary
Mar. 8th, 2024 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chthonic_cassandraAuthor's commentary for Distance, part 9 of Compromise. Commentary includes some vague spoilers through the end of the series.
I don't love this title. It's fine, it does what it needs to do, it's an abstract noun so it fits into the naming pattern for the series, but it's on the nose in slightly the wrong way and just feels tonally a little off.
“Mina, wake up.”
The last time we were in Mina's pov in "Keys" we ended with her finally falling asleep. By starting here with her waking up I meant to give a light sense of continuity despite the considerable time jump.
She shifted in the haziness of waking, the chain rattling as she began to uncurl her legs. “Is it night already?”
The familiar sound of his laugh tore apart all remnants of sleep. “The sun set almost an hour ago.”
Mina oversleeping post-transformation is something that I put into "Windows" and then just decided to keep as a character detail.
She opened her eyes and saw him kneeling down beside her, felt his touch at her ankle, heard the click of the key in the lock. The shackle fell away. Mina exhaled, stretched out her legs in the soft dirt and pulled herself up to sitting, her shift tangling up by her knees. She reached for his hand with her own and kissed his palm, savoring the cold of his skin against her lips. He touched her cheek for a moment, in acknowledgment of the gesture.
The image of someone chained inside a coffin is of course not my invention. The example that I always think of is a card from a vampire tarot set someone gave me when I was a teenager; the image for the ten of wands was a girl curled up inside an open coffin, manacled at her wrists and ankles. It deeply unsettled me, and has haunted me all these years.
Within the context of the series, of course, the Mina and restraints arc started all the way in the eponymous first story, when the Count keeps her continuously bound in the train car ("You haven't been sleeping much."/"You keep me tied up."/"One can sleep that way."/"I'm not used to it yet."). I meant for Mina's casual acceptance of it in this opening to succinctly index for readers the immensity of the shifts within her since the first episode.
“Go get dressed now. I want you in the library in two hours.”
She nodded, told him, “Yes, my lord,” and then he was gone, leaving her alone in the darkness. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft, rustling noises of the castle around her. She could feel the cool weight of the layers of earth and stone and in her mind she offered them a greeting. There was gratitude there, in her sternum, for this moment of solitude. She let the feeling seep into her like rain.
You too can cultivate a daily gratitude practice to endure your imprisonment at Castle Dracula!
But seriously - there were a lot of things that I felt I had to do very delicately in this story, mostly around conveying Mina's internal state, which I know I am going to be talking about over and over throughout this commentary. More than any of the other stories in the series, this one starts with a stasis in the theatrical sense, an ongoing present state that is about to be disrupted and changed.
In service of establishing that stasis, it was very important that we get a glimpse early on into something that is beautiful, and pleasurable, about the (un)life she is presently living, but that it not tip the line into romanticizing; Mina's not delusional, and it should be clear that she's not delusional. The literal facts of this opening are harsh and disturbing - she's chained in a coffin! - so I tried to contrast that with detail that conveys softness (the word 'soft' gets used several times in the story directly, including twice above), gentleness. I am quite happy with the way that balance worked out in this opening, and specifically in the above passage, with its hints of Mina's moments of noticing the natural world in "Windows" and "Jackal."
And then it was done. Mina stood, brushed the dirt from her shift, and went upstairs.
The others were already dressing; she could see the jewel colors of their dresses gleam from the open chests in which they kept them. Ileana stood with her back to the door, still in only her shift. Mina came up behind her, wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek.
This dressing scene with all the women is meant to parallel and contrast the all male tailor shop scene we just got in "Appraisal." I also felt it was important that we see Mina initiating the casual physical affection that she is getting used to as a norm in "Adjust," and in particular that we see glimpses of the particular closeness between her and Ileana which is going to get further extrapolated in "Complicity."
Ileana turned her face to kiss Mina in return, and then showed her the brown dress she held between her hands. “I haven’t worn this one before. Do you think it will work for me?”
She nodded. “It was mine. My clothing always fits you.”
Mina uses the past tense now; the clothing isn't hers anymore (cf. "Nothing I have in mine any longer" in "Windows"). Also this was meant to call to mind the clothes sharing between Dracula and Jonathan which we also got more of in "Appraisal."
She helped Ileana put the dress on over her head, and then began fastening the long row of buttons up her back.
“You woke late,” Ecaterina, on the other side of the room, was almost finished putting up her hair.
“I know. It keeps happening, I don’t know why.”
“You should be more careful,” Ileana said, smoothing her skirt with her hands. “Sometime he’ll get tired of waking you and leave you chained all night.”
Mina thought about the shackle dangling from the wall, tight around her ankle as she sat for hours with her book, learning the patience which came from helplessness. She didn’t laugh. She fastened the final button at the back of Ileana’s neck just as Ecaterina touched her shoulder and handed her a dress in deep blue, with flowers pricked out in white upon the bodice. She stepped into it, letting Ecaterina do up the laces. The dress was sleeveless, with a low neckline that left the top of her shift visible above it. She watched Adriana where she sat brushing out her black hair.
Going to try to keep my tangents about the clothing to a minimum but the dress Mina is putting on here is a 16th century Russian one. I don't make it more obvious because Mina herself neither notices nor cares and it's seriously not the point of the scene, but I do have Dracula identify it as such in his internal monologue in the next story.
There's some fanart of the brides which shows them in clothes from different historical eras representing the times they were turned in, as if they were frozen in those moments. I love that idea, but here I liked also the confusion of timeline and era that comes from them sharing clothes between them (and, as we see later, learning how to make the clothing of eras not their own); Ileana in one of Mina's 1890's dresses, Mina in a dress from Ecaterina's time (and both of them wearing them without the undergarments that would have been appropriate to their original settings).
“Library again?” Ecaterina asked her.
“Yes. In two hours.”
“Good. Ileana is with him later.”
Ecaterina had finished briskly with the laces; Mina stepped away from her and tried to adjust the dress around herself; the skirt was narrower than she had anticipated. She ran her hands through her hair, wincing at the tangles. At her wince, the others groaned.
“You really must brush it every night, Mina,” Ecaterina said mildly.
This idea of Mina post-transformation lightly neglecting physical self care is one that I first explored, rather more weirdly, in Minor Initiations (a story very much related to this one in some convoluted ways). I think I do a better job with it here, where it also functions, along with the oversleeping, as a quiet indicator of her low-level depression and the ways in which she is relying on the external structures of the relationships and hierarchies to keep herself going.
Adriana held out a hand towards her. “Come,” she said, “let me.”
Mina came and knelt down in front of her. As she felt the gentle pressure of her brushing, she imagined the threads of her brown hair between the brush’s tines, mingling with Adriana’s black, Ecaterina’s gold.
I am perhaps overly enamored with this hairbrush image.
-
He was in the library already when she arrived, holding her journal between her two hands against her abdomen. He was working on something, taking notes. He gestured for her to sit down. She did and waited for him, watching the easy movements of his hands. She thought about how she liked his handwriting. She played at practicing how straight she could keep her back.
The power dynamic is everywhere, in every single subtle interaction, in all the physical choreography of these scenes.
Finally, he finished and put his work aside. Mina could feel the pressure of his gaze as he regarded her, silent for several moments.
“I will be traveling soon,” he said breaking the silence, “to Budapest. I will be gone for several weeks.”
Although this story encompasses much of the same timeframe as "Appraisal," it was always clear to me that "Appraisal" had to come first for narrative and pacing reasons. I didn't think that the brief jump backwards in the timeline would be too much of a problem as far as narrative clarity, and I think I was right.
A feeling that she could not name caught in her throat, and she did not know what to say. “Oh,” was what finally came from her mouth.
“I am bringing Jonathan with me.”
Her mind was bright suddenly with images, memories, sensations. Panic rose in her throat. He reached for her, his fingers closing at her knee. “Be still, Mina. Focus.” She looked at him, at his eyes, the darkness at their centers. She felt herself calm. “Stay with me.”
She nodded. “I am here.”
“Good.” He watched her for another moment before he continued. “This will be the longest you have been apart from me since you arrived. I expect it to be challenging for you.”
She had known that there would be times when she was left alone in the castle with her sisters; she would have known from the logical inference of her own experience of his journey to England, even if the others had not made reference to past travels. But now she found she could not quite imagine what it would be like.
Dracula's travel habits are going to become a major point of conflict for the rest of the series, but I didn't want to overplay my hand here. I set up some of it back in "Acculturation," but I wasn't sure how much readers would be thinking of that when we got this scene, so I tried to introduce the tension around it gradually in this story.
“What about you?” She found herself asking, almost without thinking about it, “Will it be challenging for you, to be apart from us?”
He reached for her hair, and she was glad that Adriana had brushed it for her. “Yes,” he said simply, “it will. It always is. But, in truth, the toll of the separation rests more heavily on all of you than it does on me; that is the nature of our bond. I trust that you can bear it. The others will help you, and I will arrange matters such that all of your needs can be accounted for. But it is likely to be arduous.”
This is one of those Dracula statements that manages to frustratingly circle around actually answering the question directly. They're fun to write.
She wanted to ask why he was leaving, what it was that could take him away from her, from them, if the separation would cause all such sorrow. But he would tell her if he wanted her to know; asking would serve no purpose. She let the questions hum inside her like a plucked string until they went silent.
Very pleased with the last line of that paragraph.
“Now come,” he said, holding out his hand, “let me see.”
She handed him the journal, and sat in stillness as he spread it open on the table before him, turning to the last night’s entry, all the lines of her shorthand laid bare.
The language of this command echoes his earlier command to Mina to undress in "Windows," and of course the description of him reading the journaling is purposely quite sexualized; this is as intimate an act of exposure as the sex they will have later in the story.
Dracula's choice to change tactics from forbidding Mina to keep a journal (as he did in "Collusion") to encouraging it but making it another site of surveillance and exposure is a canny one which demonstrates his psychological attunement to Mina at this stage; being forbidden to keep a record was intolerable, it pushed her further away from him into resistance and rebellion. Her experience of his intrusion and surveillance in this realm is far more ambivalent (see the ways she interacts with the choice to share or conceal her and Jonathan's journals in canon), and it turns the journal keeping into a site of connection between them and a way that her giving up of control to him can be an active, repeated, continuous process. It also sets me up for the narrative reversals in "Concession" which will end the arc of their relationship.
-
Later that night, he spent time alone with Ileana in the bedroom. Mina helped Adriana and Ecaterina prepare a bath for her to take afterwards, carrying heavy buckets of water up from the well in the courtyard and setting them to heat.
Mina at this point has learned and been socialized into a very particular ethic of care which is normalized between the brides; they can't intervene in whatever is happening to Ileana, they wouldn't think of it, but they can make sure she has a bath ready to take afterwards.
When Jonathan acted in this way towards Mina at the beginning of this series, she found it repellent; in its more developed form, amongst these women with whom she has only developed a relationship within this traumatic context, she is able to adopt it without friction.
When it was finished, Ileana didn’t want to be with anyone but Ecaterina. Mina and Adriana stripped the bed together, gathering up the bloodstained sheets, the now-discarded brown dress which Mina once had called her own. Mina tried to imagine what the rhythms of the night would be in his absence, not for a single night or two but for weeks on end.
More than any other story in the series "Distance" has its day-in-the-life qualities (that's also the stasis thing I was talking about above), and so I got to indulge my fixation on the domestic life - and most particularly the laundry arrangements - of Castle Dracula. We can also see another site of development in Mina's character, from not caring about the origins of the bloodstains on the sheets in "Jackal" to washing Ileana's blood out of them for her.
We don't see what Dracula does to Ileana here because it's private, from Mina and from the readers.
There would be fewer sheets to wash, at least. But beyond that she found it difficult to imagine.
-
Her own turn came again several nights later, on the night before he left. It was one of those nights when he wanted to take his time. He had her lie back with her legs spread, looking at all of her body, and made her climax twice before the intercourse began so that when he finally penetrated her she felt so sensitive that, even with her years of training, she still could not keep herself from begging him to stop. He bit her during his own climax and the pain of it was bright and glittering as stars. Afterwards, he held her until she stopped trembling.
This is the most detail we ever get in a sex scene between Dracula and Mina in this series. It was important to me that the tone be matter-of-fact, almost clinical; the only figurative language in the above paragraph describes her experience of pain, and not of pleasure. The habitual language ("one of those nights") marks this out as one experience of many, familiar to Mina at this point. I meant for it to be coldly horrifying; I don't know if I succeeded for anyone else, but it makes me shiver every time I reread it.
“I keep remembering the first time,” she told him, when she had found her voice again.
“Which one?” he asked, his hand upon her abdomen.
Possible first times he thinks she could mean: the first time he bit her; the blood exchange; the sexual assault on the train; the first rape. But he sort of knows she means the last of those.
“In this bed, I mean. How much I fought. God, I hated you then.”
When I write Dracula/Mina affection, this is how I like to write it: always with this edge, this explicit acknowledgement of the violence between them which is the whole origin of their relationship. It is a dynamic with which I am very preoccupied and which I come back to in different ways in a lot of the things I write; it's also not one I find in many texts. This exchange is sort of a peak of it.
“You were very brave,” he said, “then as now. I admired your integrity, how you fought until I had truly overcome your resistance.” He kissed her throat, tongue against the marks he had just made and the gray scars beside them. “But, Mina - a part of you still hates me. Never forget that. That human woman who I murdered, who I ravished from her daytime life - it is in the truth of her to hate me, and she will always be there, in the core of you. She must exist alongside the inhuman self who I have watched come to flower.”
I love this paragraph, and to me it is crucially important not just for this story but for the series as a whole. We'll see Dracula and Mina alone together later in the series, in both "Tower" and "Intransigence," and then they'll have really important interactions in "Concession," but in all those places they are very much reacting to, impacted by other characters and their actions; this is the last time we really have a scene that is just about the two of them, and in that sense it's the culmination of a part of their arc, the next step from "My way of loving is brutal and merciless but it is real"->"You can stop fighting" ->"Don't give me any keys until I'm ready for them."
It's not incidental that what Dracula says here is very close to Adriana's thesis statement (sort of the thesis statement for the entire series) in "Concession."
She thought of being without him for weeks, and she wanted to weep. “I love you,” she said, “I belong to you.”
“You do. My beloved. I will come back to you, always.”
I really struggled emotionally with writing this story. Partially that was straightforwardly about the emotional content of the material for me, the ways that it's personal, how painful it is to have written Mina over the arc of the series to this point. But part of it was also some simmering anxiety about imagined readers, the kind which I normally try very hard to set aside. It intruded for me here. I felt very aware that most people who read Dracula fanfic don't actually want to read about Mina being in this kind of state, in this kind of relationship to Dracula. I get that, I really do - I get not wanting to read about this dynamic at all, or not about your dear character, who in canon is able to so powerfully resist, being forced into that kind of dynamic.
But it's a dynamic that matters to me, and that I care about exploring; a lot of the point of writing this series has always been to explore it. The compromise of it, the compromises that are how people survive, how sometimes the traumatic attachment is the only thing that can make the situation livable, endurable. No one has to want to read about that, but the truth is that I do want to write about it. And I was quite nervous - still am, to tell the truth - about how people would respond to that. It's a strange thing, this half-consciousness of one's audience, and writing something that you have good reason to believe is going to make people unhappy is complicated.
She remembered planning to kill him, so many years ago, and felt a jolt of panic in her belly. What a horror she had almost inflicted upon her sisters, the coffin intercepted, never making its way home. For a moment she wanted to plead with him not to leave, not to enter again into a human city where he would be among enemies, but she knew that it was not for her to question his judgment. At the same time, another part of her seemed to watch in disgust. Who was she, to feel such desperation at the prospect of his absence? How weak, how shameful.
This should recall to mind Mina's conversation with Ileana in "Adjust" about Lucy, and about Mina's complicity in the planned killings of the brides.
At his voice, though, the thoughts quieted. “I am so proud of you, Mina. Your journey into this life was exceptionally difficult, and you have done well. I am very pleased with your progress.”
A point to track - how often do we see Dracula praising Jonathan in this way? What's going on there? What does that mean for them?
She turned towards him in the bed, reaching for his body. “Thank you,” she told him, “thank you, my lord. Thank you.”
-
The next night, she watched from a window as they left. It was just dusk, the fading light a soft gray edged with violet. She watched the box of earth loaded onto the carriage, the horses hitched to it. A wind came through the window, catching at her hair, her skirts. The carriage made a turn, went out of sight, and Mina stepped away.
It occurs to me that this is a pretty cinematic little paragraph. It doesn't map on exactly to any Dracula movies (I think?) but the colors are totally out of the Werner Herzog Nosferatu (as so many of my images ultimately are).
After that, for the first few nights of his absence, she thought that it would not be so difficult after all. He had arranged things so that little in their daily lives needed to change. He left captives in the dungeons for them, enough to satiate their hunger, if modestly, until his return, and so Mina did not have to contend with the intimidating prospect of leaving the castle to hunt without his direction.
The prose here is...fine. I don't love it. It does what it needs to do. As I'll talk about below, I was sort of writing this scene as quickly as I could to get through and really did not have the will to go back and refine everything as much as I did in some other parts of the story.
She continued to sleep bound; he left the key to her shackle in the others’ hands, so that each day they exchanged between them the responsibility of fastening her chains at dawn and and unlocking them again at dusk. Mina felt some embarrassment at being treated differently, marked out as still needing a more visible kind of restraint, but the embarrassment was faint, and she could almost find an edge of pleasure in it. She was being seen in what she needed, and attended to as such; that was all.
Mina almost enjoyed the quiet of those nights, the respite from the pain and pleasure and constant discipline. She sat for long hours alone in the library, reading, writing in her journal, taking in the presence of the books, the several centuries of accumulated knowledge arrayed around her. She took out her old journals from where they were kept and sat with the pile of them on her lap, not opening or reading them, but just feeling the accumulated weight of the years, the surety of time’s passing.
The physical distance did not weaken the mental connection between them (of course not; didn’t she know that from long ago?) and perhaps once each night she felt the touch of his presence reaching out to her, a slight pressure upon the surface of her mind. He was still there and, in those first few nights, that felt like enough.
But it wasn’t enough. Night upon night passed and as they did she felt a hunger burgeoning in her skin which, in its intensity, she could only compare to that for blood. She needed him. His hand in her hair, on the back of her neck, the sound of his voice as he told her what to do. Desperation crawled throughout her body. She felt the absurd impulse to get on her knees, though there was no one for her to kneel to. The feeling that she herself was unreal - a shadow, a dream, someone else’s memory - kept flickering in her mind, itching at her. It was like a kind of madness, one she had not known before.
This was certainly the most uncomfortable passage in the story to write, and probably one of the top ones for the entire series. Sitting with Mina's internal experience here and then trying to find words for it felt downright agonizing. I knew exactly what this passage needed to communicate, but it was one of my most teeth-gritting experiences writing fic.
She could see that the others felt it too. They started sitting together more, as Mina found herself reluctant to part from them even for her time alone in the library, but they barely spoke, just huddled in one room of the vast castle as though trying to get close to a fire in the cold.
One night, as she sat there, ostensibly trying to read but really just tracing the threads of the tapestry on the wall opposite to her, she noticed a soft, keening sound. She turned to look; to her surprise, it was Ecaterina, curled in on herself, arms folded, scratching with her nails at the flesh of her shoulders. Mina saw the angry red marks come up upon the fair skin.
That last sentence has such Byatt cadence and I didn't realize it until now. Something about the use of the definite article. Hmm.
This scene is crucial for the rest of the series, and I do hope I got it right. Seeing Ecaterina in this state should be startling for the readers, as it is for Mina - up to this point we've seen her as collected, poised, sure of herself, the most together person in the room (more on top of things than Dracula, at times). We know, because it's said in "Collusion" and "Acculturation," that she's the one who told Dracula in canon that he "never loved," but in the series we haven't seen that bitterness from her, and something there should feel a little off, like we haven't gotten the full picture. That's because we haven't; even when we were in her pov in "Acculturation" there are so many evasions and half-truths and places of glancing away.
I think for most of us who write fic, there are specific unresolved questions in canon that we circle around and around and come back to in various ways, slanting or directly, along with particular moments within canon that are central to us like primal scenes. Compromise has a few that it centers around, which tend to be my Dracula preoccupations across the board. Jonathan's "unknown land" and the question of what it would actually mean for him to do that is a big, obvious one which I think a lot of fans grapple with in their own way. The brides' invitation to Mina in the snow is another one. Both of those, of course, open up these thorny questions about co-victimhood and compromise which the series grapples with over and over.
But also at the center of the series, though not clearly in focus until now, are the linked questions of: why does Dracula try to travel? and why does he leave the brides behind when he does? This problem, of why he leaves the brides behind and what his departure means for them, totally preoccupies me. The answer adaptors/fans often come to - he's gotten bored/tired of them and they are relieved at the freedom which comes with his departure - is plausible enough, but doesn't personally interest me. For me there's a real, challenging relational problem in that question, and I am interested in seeing it as the site of a major rupture which will take the remainder of this series for them to work through.
So here's a crack in graceful Ecaterina's beautiful poise, at the intense dysregulation occasioned by the callous absence of the person who has established himself so intensely as her/their attachment figure. Contending with that crack is going to set one half the rest of the plot in motion.
They had all turned at the same time; Adriana seemed as frozen as Mina felt, but Ileana swore under her breath, a Romanian curse that no one had bothered to teach Mina yet. She clambered to Ecaterina’s side and bent over her, grasping at her hands. “Ecaterina - sister - Katya - tell me what you need. Please.”
Okay, this is a totally ridiculous detail, but about the name thing here - I spell Ecaterina's name as so because that's the Romanian spelling, and so naturally the one that she and Dracula would be using for the transliteration out of Cyrillic. However! Katya is not a Romanian nickname, and it would be totally weird to spell it with a 'c'. But the inconsistency bothers me. I have decided to tell myself that the consonant shift makes a point about the secrecy, and the fact that as a nickname it is something that the other characters only use for her in moments of very particular intimacy and/or distress.
Mina heard Ecaterina take a slow, shuddering breath, watched her shift her hands to let Ileana grip them. Her voice, when she spoke, was hoarse, and her Romanian sounded accented in a way Mina had never noticed before. “It’s just - sensation, pain. It’s been too long.”
The voice here isn't quite right, but trying to get Ecaterina's tone in this compromised (ha) state was challenging.
Ileana nodded, but her voice still shook. “We can do that. Ecaterina? Listen to me. We’re here.”
Ecaterina let Ileana help her to stand, and take her by the arm. Mina stood, but looked to Adriana, unsure if this was something meant to remain private, but as soon as their eyes met, Adriana took Mina’s hand. They followed Ecaterina and Ileana to the bedroom, the one he most often used, with the carved bedposts. Ileana was guiding Ecaterina to lie down on her stomach. “Help me,” she said, as much imploring as commanding, and Mina felt an aching in her belly. She knelt on the bed beside Ecaterina and took her hand, as Adria eased Ecaterina’s dress and shift down until her back was bare.
Ileana was opening the drawer to the dresser; there was a rattle of metal. Mina saw that she was holding one of his knives. She came back to the bed, and Mina shifted to give her room, without letting go of Ecaterina’s hand. Ileana’s own hand was steady, though Mina could see tension in her tightly closed lips.
It was important here to convey just how destabilizing this is for Ileana. She is trying to meet Ecaterina's needs and hold herself together, especially as she is aware that she's setting a tone for Adriana and Mina about how to respond to this situation, but it is very difficult. This sets us up for her outburst in the next story.
Mina tried not to flinch as Ileana brought the knife down, making clean, shallow cuts across Ecaterina’s skin. One line of spilling red; two; three. Mina felt Ecaterina’s grip on her hand loosen, saw the tension going out of her shoulders. “Is that enough?” Ileana asked softly.
There's the softness again. Are we at 6 times this story? I'm not keeping count.
“Not yet.” Ecaterina’s voice sounded clearer, even with her face in the mattress.
Another cut, and another, and another. When it was finally done, the first of the cuts was already starting to close. Ileana leaned over and the licked the blood from Ecaterina’s skin, and gestured for Mina and Adria to do the same. Mina did.
Afterwards, Ecaterina groaned slightly, shifted onto her side, and reached up to pull Ileana down with her. Mina let herself curl up into their bodies, aware of Adria doing the same on Ecaterina’s other side. Mina’s face was in Ileana’s hair, which smelled faintly of candlewax. The four of them lay, curled together in the bed where he had so many times taken each of them, on the mattress from which they had so often stripped sheets stained with each other’s blood. Mina wanted to cry at the deep, aching hurt of his absence. She wanted to cry with how much she loved each of them. The air was still.
This paragraph moves me very much, rereading it. I love these characters.
-
The Count and Jonathan came home on the night of a summer rainstorm, and both of them were soaked through with it by the time they stepped into the front hall where Mina and the others waited for them. Their clothes, Mina noticed, were new; she found herself wondering if they could not also have bought an umbrella in Budapest.
The quotidian details of the rain and the wet clothes felt so right for the 'day-in-the-life' elements of this story, and I was so pleased when I came up with them. Also the mild sharpness of Mina's thought about the umbrella, which should remind us that, despite how much she's changed to survive her situation, she's still herself.
The Count smiled, and held out his hands to them; she came with the other wives into his embrace. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jonathan attending to the luggage.
Among the things this scene needed to establish clearly were the delicate threads of differential treatment and resentment between Jonathan, Mina, and the other brides. Some of this has been implicit already (in Jonathan's long isolation from the others during the time jump; in the basic question of why he's being brought to Budapest when the others aren't) and some of it was explicitly stated by Jonathan himself during the big trio confrontation scene in "Adjust" ("You're driving her mad...none of the others could pass as human"). But it needed to be clear here because, like (and related to) the question of Ecaterina's decompensation in the Count's absence, it's going to create the conditions that make the climax of the story possible.
It was challenging to weave in because it's subtle, and because it cuts both ways. Within the castle, there are ways that Jonathan is treated poorly compared to the women - he's an outsider, excluded from their community, spending years locked alone in his bedroom. At this homecoming, the others are wrapped up in this space of polygamous affection, while he is on the sidelines acting like the hired help.
At the same time. He got to go to Budapest for a men only vacation (?). The Count took him to the theater, and the bookstore, and bought fancy clothes for him while the women sew their own. He calls the Count by his first name, at least sometimes, while the women consistently use the honorific.
It's a mess of a situation, and it's such a glaring psychological error from Dracula who is, at least in times, in my characterization, a pretty strong psychologist. And no one's going to say it outright because it's too subtle for that and also the dynamics of the relationships make that impossible, but it's very much there.
Ecaterina was the first to unwind herself from the embrace, still holding one of the Count’s hands. “We have a fire started upstairs,” she told him.
He laughed. “And you think my clothing will be ruined soon if I do not take it off to let it dry. You are subtle as ever, my dear.” Mina thought it might be a rebuke, but then he kissed her. Ecaterina arched her neck up to him and Mina felt a nervousness that she could not have named ease its grip. “Come then,” he said, “I want all of you with me.”
I think Ecaterina and Dracula's flirtation is a little sweet, in their weird way. Sorry.
Mina felt aware of Jonathan’s stillness as he stood outside the circle of their embrace. Finally, the Count turned to him. “You too,” he said, switching to English, “you’ve done well on this trip. I believe we can delay your return to your room for a time.”
I realized in retrospect that this moment sort of spoils the reveal of Jonathan not knowing Romanian in "Intransigence," but I am telling myself that Mina isn't really paying attention so it works anyway.
They gathered upstairs; Adria took the new coats and hung them by the fire, where they released an acrid smell of wet wool. The Count sat and let his wives gather around him; Ecaterina on one side, Adria on the other, Ileana winding herself around them. Mina felt a desperate longing to kneel but hesitated, her fingers tangling in her skirts. The Count looked at her, and she overcame her hesitation, took the steps towards him and settled down on her knees. At the feeling of his fingers in her hair, relief rushed through her.
Lots of layers here - Mina's awareness of her own reliance on the submission, and on the attachment relationship, to regulate herself, and the whole range of things she feels about that; Dracula not actually commanding it (this time) but waiting for her to do it of her own accord which forces her to acknowledge actually wanting/needing it; the humiliation of Jonathan's presence.
Jonathan sat in another chair, a few feet away.
The Count had gifts for them; from a sturdy crate, sealed well from the rain, he and Jonathan took out bolts of fabric, fashion periodicals which Ecaterina immediately began to examine, books in several languages. He handed one of those to Mina; it was a Henry James novel, newly published. She turned it over in her hands.
In a much earlier fic (Home) I wrote Dracula wishing that he could have brought presents for his wives back from England, and I thought about that passage when writing this story.
“Tell us,” Ileana said, “what did you see? How has the city changed?”
Mina didn’t know if she wanted to hear the answer; what did it matter to her, how the world was changed, if she wasn’t there to see it? This was her world, now. But - a new Henry James novel. She had been rationing out the English books in the library, only letting herself a read a new one every few months and taking her time in rereading those with which she was familiar. She had half-forgotten, somehow, that new books were still being written.
One of my personal and pervasive fears is running out of books to read, so this passage was written from a place of great empathy.
“Why don’t you answer, Jonathan,” the Count prompted, “what did you notice?”
It took several moments for Jonathan to speak, and when he did his voice was measured and slow. “The trains are faster. There are more electric lights now - we went to the theater and they used them there. They were so much brighter than gas.”
Tone isn't quite right on this dialogue; I find writing Jonathan a little challenging, and especially in this very weird relational situation. It works well enough.
Mina wondered what it was they had gone to see in the theater. She didn’t ask.
“It’s been less than a decade,” the Count said, “the changes were minor, to my gaze. Even if it is a new century.”
“We missed you.” It was Adria, her voice soft.
“I know,” he said, “and it is a joy to return to all of you.” He turned to Ecaterina. “How did Mina do?”
She wanted to curl her shoulders inward in shame, but his hand was still there, in her hair, and she did not let herself move.
“She did very well,” Ecaterina said, “there was nothing that merited punishment.”
Normalized question and response there, charged in the very fact that it is not treated as charged.
“I am very pleased,” he said. And then he was standing, drawing Mina to her feet as he did so. “In the bedroom, now,” he told them, turning to the other women and including them in his command, “why don’t you show me how glad you are for my return.”
There was an instant when Mina thought Jonathan to be included in this instruction, and terror was icy in her veins. Jonathan seemed to think so too; he started, and half rose from his chair. The Count shook his head, in a tiny movement. Jonathan settled back down, and Mina let herself calm again.
The five of them went together to the bedroom. Mina undressed without being told, watching as Ileana reached for the buttons on the Count’s shirt. He caught her wrist. “Wait for my direction,” he said, “don’t guess at it. You both know this.” He waited until each of them had murmured an apology. “I want to see the two of you together, then, to start,” he told them, “since you are so eager.”
This moment is partly here to demonstrate, like the opening of the library scene, the pervasiveness and precision of the control, the exactitude with which they are expected the embody the submission. This is the Count in a good mood, being easy on them. It's also another moment linking Mina and Ileana.
They did as he commanded. Mina felt soothed by the solace of his return, so that even the sting of earning his rebuke so quickly barely lingered with her. She could tell that he was pleased to have all of them there with him, together, bodies close together, barely fitting at once in the bed. It was easy to follow his will, first with Ileana, then pleasuring him herself, then watching him with Adria as Ecaterina and Ileana embraced. She felt a heady awareness of the shared blood which ran through all of them, which held them close no matter how far or long he might journey away from the castle.
For a moment, Mina remembered being a child, an unwanted girl passed between relatives and trying to be helpful enough to earn her keep. How different this was now. From this home she would never be sent away - punished, yes, humiliated, made to suffer, but always kept close, always held tight.
It has been part of my headcanon for Mina's backstory since I think 2006 that she was raised by her aunt and uncle after her parents died, and that they were reasonably materially generous but not excessively so, that she always felt she owed them. The particular detail and charge of this passage is partially inspired by the version of Mina's backstory referenced in PsychoPomposity's One Flesh which you should totally read if you haven't.
I keep references to Mina's pre-canon life very, very sparse in this series, which is for a lot of reasons but partially about communicating the claustrophobic environment of the castle and the way that the trauma of the transformation and everything that attends it so fully severs her from her earlier life (and subsequently the problem that Jonathan's continued presence poses to that defense). I thought for a long time about whether or not to include this one, and decided that it was a crucial enough character note to break the pattern.
It's parallel and inverse to Jonathan musing in "Appraisal" about the life he could have had if he hadn't met the Count; it's a glimpse into those needs of Mina's that were unmet before her new life - this need for family, for belonging, for being valued. In the novel she gets that from the surrogate family of the vampire hunters, who adore and treasure her even if they sometimes (to my mind as a reader) take advantage of her skills and willingness to be of help. This is another way, a much more intense way, for that need to get met. This is not to say that Mina secretly needed/wanted this, anymore than Jonathan's thoughts in "Appraisal" about his sexuality mean that he secretly wanted his relationship with Dracula. But those attachment needs, and the ways that they are being fulfilled by Dracula and the wives, are true and real and they matter.
When it was done, the Count wanted to speak to Ecaterina alone. Ileana went out to the courtyard; Mina and Adriana went back to the room with the fireplace from which they had come. By the time they arrived, Jonathan’s chair was vacant.
Mina bent down to gather up the new books the Count had bought, arranging them into a pile she could carry to the library. Adria went to fetch the suit jackets from where they dried before the fire. Sitting back on her heels, Mina paused to watch her. “Adria,” she said, “might I ask you something? It’s not something prohibited, but I’m not sure if he would be pleased with my asking.”
Adria put the jacket down and turned to look at her, “Ask,” she said, “I won't promise that I will answer.”
Adriana has so little dialogue before this scene! I was glad I could spend some time with her here but wish I could have worked more in earlier.
Mina took a breath. “I know you’ve been alone with…with Jonathan. I won’t ask what he’s had you do together, but - how did he seem to you?”
Adria made a noise in her throat as if of fond exasperation. She crossed the room and sat next to Mina. “You were right,” she said, “I don’t think he would be pleased that you asked me this question. But even so, I wouldn’t know how to answer. He’s like any of us, Mina. How would you say that I seem?”
It was interesting to write here the things that Adriana is seeing clearly that Mina isn't, and also the significant things about Jonathan's present state that she is missing.
She wanted to protest that he was clearly not like any of the rest of them, with his new suits and trips to Budapest and his exemption from their time in bed together. But she didn’t.
This is as close as Mina - as anyone - gets to naming the resentment/differential treatment stuff I was talking about above.
“Why are you both so angry with one another?” Adria asked.
Mina felt tears hot in her eyes. “He had a choice,” she began, “he was given the option of death instead of this and I never -“ she stopped. No, that wasn’t it. “He thought that we could stay the same,” she said finally, “that we could live here and follow our lord’s dictates and be husband and wife around the edges. But I can’t do that. I can’t be here without changing, without transforming - I couldn’t endure that. And I don’t know that we can forgive one another for that.”
The "he had a choice" is of course horizontal victim blaming nonsense, and she's said as much to Jonathan earlier in the series during their awfully cruel exchanges. But at this point part of her knows it's not accurate, and she stops herself and says something that actually is, as we will find out quite belatedly in "Intransigence," entirely on point. She does actually know Jonathan very well, despite their estrangement. Unfortunately, she isn't in a position now to relationally act on her observations in a way that can repair anything.
Adria’s voice was soft. “You will have to find a way. I don’t think he can keep Jonathan separate from us forever.”
Mina remembered the Count’s voice, long ago. Touch him, Mina. She could not. She would refuse, she would beg him - but that, as the Count would surely remind her, was self-delusion. She was silent.
“I was very desperate, when he first took me,” Adria said, “I prayed, for hours at a time - I held to my rosary even when it burned my fingers, night after night until he finally took it away from me. I was so afraid of Ileana and Ecaterina. When they were kind, I thought it was the devil tempting me.” She put a hand on Mina’s back. “You see. We all transform. We must. Jonathan will understand.”
This paragraph feels like the thing in this story that is just most obviously my writing voice; I could point out half a dozen passages in other stories of mine that sound notably similar. (It occurs to me that perhaps my Adriana voice is the closest to my default writing voice? I'll have to look at "Concession" and think about it.) Despite/because of that, I like it very much. It felt important to give just a small glimpse into Adriana's own arc at this moment, both for Mina and for the whole progression of the series.
Mina knew she could not tolerate any more of this conversation tonight. She pressed Adria’s hand in her own for a moment. “Thank you,” she said, “for tolerating my questions, even when they can’t be answered. I want to put these books away.”
They separated; Mina to the library, Adria to deal with the clothing. Alone with the books, Mina took out her journal, to record her impressions of the night - the Count’s return, his gifts, the time in bed with all of them, her conversation with Adria. She thought about sitting there, perhaps as soon as tomorrow night, while the Count read her journal, all the weeks of entries waiting for him, all her account of what had transpired in his absence. Watching his face, trying not to anticipate how he might choose to correct the transgression of her question to Adria. She read back over what she had written. She made sure she was leaving nothing out.
There is something erotic, again, in the writing the accounts to be read, erotic and vulnerable and threatening. And that's where we end.
I don't love this title. It's fine, it does what it needs to do, it's an abstract noun so it fits into the naming pattern for the series, but it's on the nose in slightly the wrong way and just feels tonally a little off.
“Mina, wake up.”
The last time we were in Mina's pov in "Keys" we ended with her finally falling asleep. By starting here with her waking up I meant to give a light sense of continuity despite the considerable time jump.
She shifted in the haziness of waking, the chain rattling as she began to uncurl her legs. “Is it night already?”
The familiar sound of his laugh tore apart all remnants of sleep. “The sun set almost an hour ago.”
Mina oversleeping post-transformation is something that I put into "Windows" and then just decided to keep as a character detail.
She opened her eyes and saw him kneeling down beside her, felt his touch at her ankle, heard the click of the key in the lock. The shackle fell away. Mina exhaled, stretched out her legs in the soft dirt and pulled herself up to sitting, her shift tangling up by her knees. She reached for his hand with her own and kissed his palm, savoring the cold of his skin against her lips. He touched her cheek for a moment, in acknowledgment of the gesture.
The image of someone chained inside a coffin is of course not my invention. The example that I always think of is a card from a vampire tarot set someone gave me when I was a teenager; the image for the ten of wands was a girl curled up inside an open coffin, manacled at her wrists and ankles. It deeply unsettled me, and has haunted me all these years.
Within the context of the series, of course, the Mina and restraints arc started all the way in the eponymous first story, when the Count keeps her continuously bound in the train car ("You haven't been sleeping much."/"You keep me tied up."/"One can sleep that way."/"I'm not used to it yet."). I meant for Mina's casual acceptance of it in this opening to succinctly index for readers the immensity of the shifts within her since the first episode.
“Go get dressed now. I want you in the library in two hours.”
She nodded, told him, “Yes, my lord,” and then he was gone, leaving her alone in the darkness. She closed her eyes and listened to the soft, rustling noises of the castle around her. She could feel the cool weight of the layers of earth and stone and in her mind she offered them a greeting. There was gratitude there, in her sternum, for this moment of solitude. She let the feeling seep into her like rain.
You too can cultivate a daily gratitude practice to endure your imprisonment at Castle Dracula!
But seriously - there were a lot of things that I felt I had to do very delicately in this story, mostly around conveying Mina's internal state, which I know I am going to be talking about over and over throughout this commentary. More than any of the other stories in the series, this one starts with a stasis in the theatrical sense, an ongoing present state that is about to be disrupted and changed.
In service of establishing that stasis, it was very important that we get a glimpse early on into something that is beautiful, and pleasurable, about the (un)life she is presently living, but that it not tip the line into romanticizing; Mina's not delusional, and it should be clear that she's not delusional. The literal facts of this opening are harsh and disturbing - she's chained in a coffin! - so I tried to contrast that with detail that conveys softness (the word 'soft' gets used several times in the story directly, including twice above), gentleness. I am quite happy with the way that balance worked out in this opening, and specifically in the above passage, with its hints of Mina's moments of noticing the natural world in "Windows" and "Jackal."
And then it was done. Mina stood, brushed the dirt from her shift, and went upstairs.
The others were already dressing; she could see the jewel colors of their dresses gleam from the open chests in which they kept them. Ileana stood with her back to the door, still in only her shift. Mina came up behind her, wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek.
This dressing scene with all the women is meant to parallel and contrast the all male tailor shop scene we just got in "Appraisal." I also felt it was important that we see Mina initiating the casual physical affection that she is getting used to as a norm in "Adjust," and in particular that we see glimpses of the particular closeness between her and Ileana which is going to get further extrapolated in "Complicity."
Ileana turned her face to kiss Mina in return, and then showed her the brown dress she held between her hands. “I haven’t worn this one before. Do you think it will work for me?”
She nodded. “It was mine. My clothing always fits you.”
Mina uses the past tense now; the clothing isn't hers anymore (cf. "Nothing I have in mine any longer" in "Windows"). Also this was meant to call to mind the clothes sharing between Dracula and Jonathan which we also got more of in "Appraisal."
She helped Ileana put the dress on over her head, and then began fastening the long row of buttons up her back.
“You woke late,” Ecaterina, on the other side of the room, was almost finished putting up her hair.
“I know. It keeps happening, I don’t know why.”
“You should be more careful,” Ileana said, smoothing her skirt with her hands. “Sometime he’ll get tired of waking you and leave you chained all night.”
Mina thought about the shackle dangling from the wall, tight around her ankle as she sat for hours with her book, learning the patience which came from helplessness. She didn’t laugh. She fastened the final button at the back of Ileana’s neck just as Ecaterina touched her shoulder and handed her a dress in deep blue, with flowers pricked out in white upon the bodice. She stepped into it, letting Ecaterina do up the laces. The dress was sleeveless, with a low neckline that left the top of her shift visible above it. She watched Adriana where she sat brushing out her black hair.
Going to try to keep my tangents about the clothing to a minimum but the dress Mina is putting on here is a 16th century Russian one. I don't make it more obvious because Mina herself neither notices nor cares and it's seriously not the point of the scene, but I do have Dracula identify it as such in his internal monologue in the next story.
There's some fanart of the brides which shows them in clothes from different historical eras representing the times they were turned in, as if they were frozen in those moments. I love that idea, but here I liked also the confusion of timeline and era that comes from them sharing clothes between them (and, as we see later, learning how to make the clothing of eras not their own); Ileana in one of Mina's 1890's dresses, Mina in a dress from Ecaterina's time (and both of them wearing them without the undergarments that would have been appropriate to their original settings).
“Library again?” Ecaterina asked her.
“Yes. In two hours.”
“Good. Ileana is with him later.”
Ecaterina had finished briskly with the laces; Mina stepped away from her and tried to adjust the dress around herself; the skirt was narrower than she had anticipated. She ran her hands through her hair, wincing at the tangles. At her wince, the others groaned.
“You really must brush it every night, Mina,” Ecaterina said mildly.
This idea of Mina post-transformation lightly neglecting physical self care is one that I first explored, rather more weirdly, in Minor Initiations (a story very much related to this one in some convoluted ways). I think I do a better job with it here, where it also functions, along with the oversleeping, as a quiet indicator of her low-level depression and the ways in which she is relying on the external structures of the relationships and hierarchies to keep herself going.
Adriana held out a hand towards her. “Come,” she said, “let me.”
Mina came and knelt down in front of her. As she felt the gentle pressure of her brushing, she imagined the threads of her brown hair between the brush’s tines, mingling with Adriana’s black, Ecaterina’s gold.
I am perhaps overly enamored with this hairbrush image.
-
He was in the library already when she arrived, holding her journal between her two hands against her abdomen. He was working on something, taking notes. He gestured for her to sit down. She did and waited for him, watching the easy movements of his hands. She thought about how she liked his handwriting. She played at practicing how straight she could keep her back.
The power dynamic is everywhere, in every single subtle interaction, in all the physical choreography of these scenes.
Finally, he finished and put his work aside. Mina could feel the pressure of his gaze as he regarded her, silent for several moments.
“I will be traveling soon,” he said breaking the silence, “to Budapest. I will be gone for several weeks.”
Although this story encompasses much of the same timeframe as "Appraisal," it was always clear to me that "Appraisal" had to come first for narrative and pacing reasons. I didn't think that the brief jump backwards in the timeline would be too much of a problem as far as narrative clarity, and I think I was right.
A feeling that she could not name caught in her throat, and she did not know what to say. “Oh,” was what finally came from her mouth.
“I am bringing Jonathan with me.”
Her mind was bright suddenly with images, memories, sensations. Panic rose in her throat. He reached for her, his fingers closing at her knee. “Be still, Mina. Focus.” She looked at him, at his eyes, the darkness at their centers. She felt herself calm. “Stay with me.”
She nodded. “I am here.”
“Good.” He watched her for another moment before he continued. “This will be the longest you have been apart from me since you arrived. I expect it to be challenging for you.”
She had known that there would be times when she was left alone in the castle with her sisters; she would have known from the logical inference of her own experience of his journey to England, even if the others had not made reference to past travels. But now she found she could not quite imagine what it would be like.
Dracula's travel habits are going to become a major point of conflict for the rest of the series, but I didn't want to overplay my hand here. I set up some of it back in "Acculturation," but I wasn't sure how much readers would be thinking of that when we got this scene, so I tried to introduce the tension around it gradually in this story.
“What about you?” She found herself asking, almost without thinking about it, “Will it be challenging for you, to be apart from us?”
He reached for her hair, and she was glad that Adriana had brushed it for her. “Yes,” he said simply, “it will. It always is. But, in truth, the toll of the separation rests more heavily on all of you than it does on me; that is the nature of our bond. I trust that you can bear it. The others will help you, and I will arrange matters such that all of your needs can be accounted for. But it is likely to be arduous.”
This is one of those Dracula statements that manages to frustratingly circle around actually answering the question directly. They're fun to write.
She wanted to ask why he was leaving, what it was that could take him away from her, from them, if the separation would cause all such sorrow. But he would tell her if he wanted her to know; asking would serve no purpose. She let the questions hum inside her like a plucked string until they went silent.
Very pleased with the last line of that paragraph.
“Now come,” he said, holding out his hand, “let me see.”
She handed him the journal, and sat in stillness as he spread it open on the table before him, turning to the last night’s entry, all the lines of her shorthand laid bare.
The language of this command echoes his earlier command to Mina to undress in "Windows," and of course the description of him reading the journaling is purposely quite sexualized; this is as intimate an act of exposure as the sex they will have later in the story.
Dracula's choice to change tactics from forbidding Mina to keep a journal (as he did in "Collusion") to encouraging it but making it another site of surveillance and exposure is a canny one which demonstrates his psychological attunement to Mina at this stage; being forbidden to keep a record was intolerable, it pushed her further away from him into resistance and rebellion. Her experience of his intrusion and surveillance in this realm is far more ambivalent (see the ways she interacts with the choice to share or conceal her and Jonathan's journals in canon), and it turns the journal keeping into a site of connection between them and a way that her giving up of control to him can be an active, repeated, continuous process. It also sets me up for the narrative reversals in "Concession" which will end the arc of their relationship.
-
Later that night, he spent time alone with Ileana in the bedroom. Mina helped Adriana and Ecaterina prepare a bath for her to take afterwards, carrying heavy buckets of water up from the well in the courtyard and setting them to heat.
Mina at this point has learned and been socialized into a very particular ethic of care which is normalized between the brides; they can't intervene in whatever is happening to Ileana, they wouldn't think of it, but they can make sure she has a bath ready to take afterwards.
When Jonathan acted in this way towards Mina at the beginning of this series, she found it repellent; in its more developed form, amongst these women with whom she has only developed a relationship within this traumatic context, she is able to adopt it without friction.
When it was finished, Ileana didn’t want to be with anyone but Ecaterina. Mina and Adriana stripped the bed together, gathering up the bloodstained sheets, the now-discarded brown dress which Mina once had called her own. Mina tried to imagine what the rhythms of the night would be in his absence, not for a single night or two but for weeks on end.
More than any other story in the series "Distance" has its day-in-the-life qualities (that's also the stasis thing I was talking about above), and so I got to indulge my fixation on the domestic life - and most particularly the laundry arrangements - of Castle Dracula. We can also see another site of development in Mina's character, from not caring about the origins of the bloodstains on the sheets in "Jackal" to washing Ileana's blood out of them for her.
We don't see what Dracula does to Ileana here because it's private, from Mina and from the readers.
There would be fewer sheets to wash, at least. But beyond that she found it difficult to imagine.
-
Her own turn came again several nights later, on the night before he left. It was one of those nights when he wanted to take his time. He had her lie back with her legs spread, looking at all of her body, and made her climax twice before the intercourse began so that when he finally penetrated her she felt so sensitive that, even with her years of training, she still could not keep herself from begging him to stop. He bit her during his own climax and the pain of it was bright and glittering as stars. Afterwards, he held her until she stopped trembling.
This is the most detail we ever get in a sex scene between Dracula and Mina in this series. It was important to me that the tone be matter-of-fact, almost clinical; the only figurative language in the above paragraph describes her experience of pain, and not of pleasure. The habitual language ("one of those nights") marks this out as one experience of many, familiar to Mina at this point. I meant for it to be coldly horrifying; I don't know if I succeeded for anyone else, but it makes me shiver every time I reread it.
“I keep remembering the first time,” she told him, when she had found her voice again.
“Which one?” he asked, his hand upon her abdomen.
Possible first times he thinks she could mean: the first time he bit her; the blood exchange; the sexual assault on the train; the first rape. But he sort of knows she means the last of those.
“In this bed, I mean. How much I fought. God, I hated you then.”
When I write Dracula/Mina affection, this is how I like to write it: always with this edge, this explicit acknowledgement of the violence between them which is the whole origin of their relationship. It is a dynamic with which I am very preoccupied and which I come back to in different ways in a lot of the things I write; it's also not one I find in many texts. This exchange is sort of a peak of it.
“You were very brave,” he said, “then as now. I admired your integrity, how you fought until I had truly overcome your resistance.” He kissed her throat, tongue against the marks he had just made and the gray scars beside them. “But, Mina - a part of you still hates me. Never forget that. That human woman who I murdered, who I ravished from her daytime life - it is in the truth of her to hate me, and she will always be there, in the core of you. She must exist alongside the inhuman self who I have watched come to flower.”
I love this paragraph, and to me it is crucially important not just for this story but for the series as a whole. We'll see Dracula and Mina alone together later in the series, in both "Tower" and "Intransigence," and then they'll have really important interactions in "Concession," but in all those places they are very much reacting to, impacted by other characters and their actions; this is the last time we really have a scene that is just about the two of them, and in that sense it's the culmination of a part of their arc, the next step from "My way of loving is brutal and merciless but it is real"->"You can stop fighting" ->"Don't give me any keys until I'm ready for them."
It's not incidental that what Dracula says here is very close to Adriana's thesis statement (sort of the thesis statement for the entire series) in "Concession."
She thought of being without him for weeks, and she wanted to weep. “I love you,” she said, “I belong to you.”
“You do. My beloved. I will come back to you, always.”
I really struggled emotionally with writing this story. Partially that was straightforwardly about the emotional content of the material for me, the ways that it's personal, how painful it is to have written Mina over the arc of the series to this point. But part of it was also some simmering anxiety about imagined readers, the kind which I normally try very hard to set aside. It intruded for me here. I felt very aware that most people who read Dracula fanfic don't actually want to read about Mina being in this kind of state, in this kind of relationship to Dracula. I get that, I really do - I get not wanting to read about this dynamic at all, or not about your dear character, who in canon is able to so powerfully resist, being forced into that kind of dynamic.
But it's a dynamic that matters to me, and that I care about exploring; a lot of the point of writing this series has always been to explore it. The compromise of it, the compromises that are how people survive, how sometimes the traumatic attachment is the only thing that can make the situation livable, endurable. No one has to want to read about that, but the truth is that I do want to write about it. And I was quite nervous - still am, to tell the truth - about how people would respond to that. It's a strange thing, this half-consciousness of one's audience, and writing something that you have good reason to believe is going to make people unhappy is complicated.
She remembered planning to kill him, so many years ago, and felt a jolt of panic in her belly. What a horror she had almost inflicted upon her sisters, the coffin intercepted, never making its way home. For a moment she wanted to plead with him not to leave, not to enter again into a human city where he would be among enemies, but she knew that it was not for her to question his judgment. At the same time, another part of her seemed to watch in disgust. Who was she, to feel such desperation at the prospect of his absence? How weak, how shameful.
This should recall to mind Mina's conversation with Ileana in "Adjust" about Lucy, and about Mina's complicity in the planned killings of the brides.
At his voice, though, the thoughts quieted. “I am so proud of you, Mina. Your journey into this life was exceptionally difficult, and you have done well. I am very pleased with your progress.”
A point to track - how often do we see Dracula praising Jonathan in this way? What's going on there? What does that mean for them?
She turned towards him in the bed, reaching for his body. “Thank you,” she told him, “thank you, my lord. Thank you.”
-
The next night, she watched from a window as they left. It was just dusk, the fading light a soft gray edged with violet. She watched the box of earth loaded onto the carriage, the horses hitched to it. A wind came through the window, catching at her hair, her skirts. The carriage made a turn, went out of sight, and Mina stepped away.
It occurs to me that this is a pretty cinematic little paragraph. It doesn't map on exactly to any Dracula movies (I think?) but the colors are totally out of the Werner Herzog Nosferatu (as so many of my images ultimately are).
After that, for the first few nights of his absence, she thought that it would not be so difficult after all. He had arranged things so that little in their daily lives needed to change. He left captives in the dungeons for them, enough to satiate their hunger, if modestly, until his return, and so Mina did not have to contend with the intimidating prospect of leaving the castle to hunt without his direction.
The prose here is...fine. I don't love it. It does what it needs to do. As I'll talk about below, I was sort of writing this scene as quickly as I could to get through and really did not have the will to go back and refine everything as much as I did in some other parts of the story.
She continued to sleep bound; he left the key to her shackle in the others’ hands, so that each day they exchanged between them the responsibility of fastening her chains at dawn and and unlocking them again at dusk. Mina felt some embarrassment at being treated differently, marked out as still needing a more visible kind of restraint, but the embarrassment was faint, and she could almost find an edge of pleasure in it. She was being seen in what she needed, and attended to as such; that was all.
Mina almost enjoyed the quiet of those nights, the respite from the pain and pleasure and constant discipline. She sat for long hours alone in the library, reading, writing in her journal, taking in the presence of the books, the several centuries of accumulated knowledge arrayed around her. She took out her old journals from where they were kept and sat with the pile of them on her lap, not opening or reading them, but just feeling the accumulated weight of the years, the surety of time’s passing.
The physical distance did not weaken the mental connection between them (of course not; didn’t she know that from long ago?) and perhaps once each night she felt the touch of his presence reaching out to her, a slight pressure upon the surface of her mind. He was still there and, in those first few nights, that felt like enough.
But it wasn’t enough. Night upon night passed and as they did she felt a hunger burgeoning in her skin which, in its intensity, she could only compare to that for blood. She needed him. His hand in her hair, on the back of her neck, the sound of his voice as he told her what to do. Desperation crawled throughout her body. She felt the absurd impulse to get on her knees, though there was no one for her to kneel to. The feeling that she herself was unreal - a shadow, a dream, someone else’s memory - kept flickering in her mind, itching at her. It was like a kind of madness, one she had not known before.
This was certainly the most uncomfortable passage in the story to write, and probably one of the top ones for the entire series. Sitting with Mina's internal experience here and then trying to find words for it felt downright agonizing. I knew exactly what this passage needed to communicate, but it was one of my most teeth-gritting experiences writing fic.
She could see that the others felt it too. They started sitting together more, as Mina found herself reluctant to part from them even for her time alone in the library, but they barely spoke, just huddled in one room of the vast castle as though trying to get close to a fire in the cold.
One night, as she sat there, ostensibly trying to read but really just tracing the threads of the tapestry on the wall opposite to her, she noticed a soft, keening sound. She turned to look; to her surprise, it was Ecaterina, curled in on herself, arms folded, scratching with her nails at the flesh of her shoulders. Mina saw the angry red marks come up upon the fair skin.
That last sentence has such Byatt cadence and I didn't realize it until now. Something about the use of the definite article. Hmm.
This scene is crucial for the rest of the series, and I do hope I got it right. Seeing Ecaterina in this state should be startling for the readers, as it is for Mina - up to this point we've seen her as collected, poised, sure of herself, the most together person in the room (more on top of things than Dracula, at times). We know, because it's said in "Collusion" and "Acculturation," that she's the one who told Dracula in canon that he "never loved," but in the series we haven't seen that bitterness from her, and something there should feel a little off, like we haven't gotten the full picture. That's because we haven't; even when we were in her pov in "Acculturation" there are so many evasions and half-truths and places of glancing away.
I think for most of us who write fic, there are specific unresolved questions in canon that we circle around and around and come back to in various ways, slanting or directly, along with particular moments within canon that are central to us like primal scenes. Compromise has a few that it centers around, which tend to be my Dracula preoccupations across the board. Jonathan's "unknown land" and the question of what it would actually mean for him to do that is a big, obvious one which I think a lot of fans grapple with in their own way. The brides' invitation to Mina in the snow is another one. Both of those, of course, open up these thorny questions about co-victimhood and compromise which the series grapples with over and over.
But also at the center of the series, though not clearly in focus until now, are the linked questions of: why does Dracula try to travel? and why does he leave the brides behind when he does? This problem, of why he leaves the brides behind and what his departure means for them, totally preoccupies me. The answer adaptors/fans often come to - he's gotten bored/tired of them and they are relieved at the freedom which comes with his departure - is plausible enough, but doesn't personally interest me. For me there's a real, challenging relational problem in that question, and I am interested in seeing it as the site of a major rupture which will take the remainder of this series for them to work through.
So here's a crack in graceful Ecaterina's beautiful poise, at the intense dysregulation occasioned by the callous absence of the person who has established himself so intensely as her/their attachment figure. Contending with that crack is going to set one half the rest of the plot in motion.
They had all turned at the same time; Adriana seemed as frozen as Mina felt, but Ileana swore under her breath, a Romanian curse that no one had bothered to teach Mina yet. She clambered to Ecaterina’s side and bent over her, grasping at her hands. “Ecaterina - sister - Katya - tell me what you need. Please.”
Okay, this is a totally ridiculous detail, but about the name thing here - I spell Ecaterina's name as so because that's the Romanian spelling, and so naturally the one that she and Dracula would be using for the transliteration out of Cyrillic. However! Katya is not a Romanian nickname, and it would be totally weird to spell it with a 'c'. But the inconsistency bothers me. I have decided to tell myself that the consonant shift makes a point about the secrecy, and the fact that as a nickname it is something that the other characters only use for her in moments of very particular intimacy and/or distress.
Mina heard Ecaterina take a slow, shuddering breath, watched her shift her hands to let Ileana grip them. Her voice, when she spoke, was hoarse, and her Romanian sounded accented in a way Mina had never noticed before. “It’s just - sensation, pain. It’s been too long.”
The voice here isn't quite right, but trying to get Ecaterina's tone in this compromised (ha) state was challenging.
Ileana nodded, but her voice still shook. “We can do that. Ecaterina? Listen to me. We’re here.”
Ecaterina let Ileana help her to stand, and take her by the arm. Mina stood, but looked to Adriana, unsure if this was something meant to remain private, but as soon as their eyes met, Adriana took Mina’s hand. They followed Ecaterina and Ileana to the bedroom, the one he most often used, with the carved bedposts. Ileana was guiding Ecaterina to lie down on her stomach. “Help me,” she said, as much imploring as commanding, and Mina felt an aching in her belly. She knelt on the bed beside Ecaterina and took her hand, as Adria eased Ecaterina’s dress and shift down until her back was bare.
Ileana was opening the drawer to the dresser; there was a rattle of metal. Mina saw that she was holding one of his knives. She came back to the bed, and Mina shifted to give her room, without letting go of Ecaterina’s hand. Ileana’s own hand was steady, though Mina could see tension in her tightly closed lips.
It was important here to convey just how destabilizing this is for Ileana. She is trying to meet Ecaterina's needs and hold herself together, especially as she is aware that she's setting a tone for Adriana and Mina about how to respond to this situation, but it is very difficult. This sets us up for her outburst in the next story.
Mina tried not to flinch as Ileana brought the knife down, making clean, shallow cuts across Ecaterina’s skin. One line of spilling red; two; three. Mina felt Ecaterina’s grip on her hand loosen, saw the tension going out of her shoulders. “Is that enough?” Ileana asked softly.
There's the softness again. Are we at 6 times this story? I'm not keeping count.
“Not yet.” Ecaterina’s voice sounded clearer, even with her face in the mattress.
Another cut, and another, and another. When it was finally done, the first of the cuts was already starting to close. Ileana leaned over and the licked the blood from Ecaterina’s skin, and gestured for Mina and Adria to do the same. Mina did.
Afterwards, Ecaterina groaned slightly, shifted onto her side, and reached up to pull Ileana down with her. Mina let herself curl up into their bodies, aware of Adria doing the same on Ecaterina’s other side. Mina’s face was in Ileana’s hair, which smelled faintly of candlewax. The four of them lay, curled together in the bed where he had so many times taken each of them, on the mattress from which they had so often stripped sheets stained with each other’s blood. Mina wanted to cry at the deep, aching hurt of his absence. She wanted to cry with how much she loved each of them. The air was still.
This paragraph moves me very much, rereading it. I love these characters.
-
The Count and Jonathan came home on the night of a summer rainstorm, and both of them were soaked through with it by the time they stepped into the front hall where Mina and the others waited for them. Their clothes, Mina noticed, were new; she found herself wondering if they could not also have bought an umbrella in Budapest.
The quotidian details of the rain and the wet clothes felt so right for the 'day-in-the-life' elements of this story, and I was so pleased when I came up with them. Also the mild sharpness of Mina's thought about the umbrella, which should remind us that, despite how much she's changed to survive her situation, she's still herself.
The Count smiled, and held out his hands to them; she came with the other wives into his embrace. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Jonathan attending to the luggage.
Among the things this scene needed to establish clearly were the delicate threads of differential treatment and resentment between Jonathan, Mina, and the other brides. Some of this has been implicit already (in Jonathan's long isolation from the others during the time jump; in the basic question of why he's being brought to Budapest when the others aren't) and some of it was explicitly stated by Jonathan himself during the big trio confrontation scene in "Adjust" ("You're driving her mad...none of the others could pass as human"). But it needed to be clear here because, like (and related to) the question of Ecaterina's decompensation in the Count's absence, it's going to create the conditions that make the climax of the story possible.
It was challenging to weave in because it's subtle, and because it cuts both ways. Within the castle, there are ways that Jonathan is treated poorly compared to the women - he's an outsider, excluded from their community, spending years locked alone in his bedroom. At this homecoming, the others are wrapped up in this space of polygamous affection, while he is on the sidelines acting like the hired help.
At the same time. He got to go to Budapest for a men only vacation (?). The Count took him to the theater, and the bookstore, and bought fancy clothes for him while the women sew their own. He calls the Count by his first name, at least sometimes, while the women consistently use the honorific.
It's a mess of a situation, and it's such a glaring psychological error from Dracula who is, at least in times, in my characterization, a pretty strong psychologist. And no one's going to say it outright because it's too subtle for that and also the dynamics of the relationships make that impossible, but it's very much there.
Ecaterina was the first to unwind herself from the embrace, still holding one of the Count’s hands. “We have a fire started upstairs,” she told him.
He laughed. “And you think my clothing will be ruined soon if I do not take it off to let it dry. You are subtle as ever, my dear.” Mina thought it might be a rebuke, but then he kissed her. Ecaterina arched her neck up to him and Mina felt a nervousness that she could not have named ease its grip. “Come then,” he said, “I want all of you with me.”
I think Ecaterina and Dracula's flirtation is a little sweet, in their weird way. Sorry.
Mina felt aware of Jonathan’s stillness as he stood outside the circle of their embrace. Finally, the Count turned to him. “You too,” he said, switching to English, “you’ve done well on this trip. I believe we can delay your return to your room for a time.”
I realized in retrospect that this moment sort of spoils the reveal of Jonathan not knowing Romanian in "Intransigence," but I am telling myself that Mina isn't really paying attention so it works anyway.
They gathered upstairs; Adria took the new coats and hung them by the fire, where they released an acrid smell of wet wool. The Count sat and let his wives gather around him; Ecaterina on one side, Adria on the other, Ileana winding herself around them. Mina felt a desperate longing to kneel but hesitated, her fingers tangling in her skirts. The Count looked at her, and she overcame her hesitation, took the steps towards him and settled down on her knees. At the feeling of his fingers in her hair, relief rushed through her.
Lots of layers here - Mina's awareness of her own reliance on the submission, and on the attachment relationship, to regulate herself, and the whole range of things she feels about that; Dracula not actually commanding it (this time) but waiting for her to do it of her own accord which forces her to acknowledge actually wanting/needing it; the humiliation of Jonathan's presence.
Jonathan sat in another chair, a few feet away.
The Count had gifts for them; from a sturdy crate, sealed well from the rain, he and Jonathan took out bolts of fabric, fashion periodicals which Ecaterina immediately began to examine, books in several languages. He handed one of those to Mina; it was a Henry James novel, newly published. She turned it over in her hands.
In a much earlier fic (Home) I wrote Dracula wishing that he could have brought presents for his wives back from England, and I thought about that passage when writing this story.
“Tell us,” Ileana said, “what did you see? How has the city changed?”
Mina didn’t know if she wanted to hear the answer; what did it matter to her, how the world was changed, if she wasn’t there to see it? This was her world, now. But - a new Henry James novel. She had been rationing out the English books in the library, only letting herself a read a new one every few months and taking her time in rereading those with which she was familiar. She had half-forgotten, somehow, that new books were still being written.
One of my personal and pervasive fears is running out of books to read, so this passage was written from a place of great empathy.
“Why don’t you answer, Jonathan,” the Count prompted, “what did you notice?”
It took several moments for Jonathan to speak, and when he did his voice was measured and slow. “The trains are faster. There are more electric lights now - we went to the theater and they used them there. They were so much brighter than gas.”
Tone isn't quite right on this dialogue; I find writing Jonathan a little challenging, and especially in this very weird relational situation. It works well enough.
Mina wondered what it was they had gone to see in the theater. She didn’t ask.
“It’s been less than a decade,” the Count said, “the changes were minor, to my gaze. Even if it is a new century.”
“We missed you.” It was Adria, her voice soft.
“I know,” he said, “and it is a joy to return to all of you.” He turned to Ecaterina. “How did Mina do?”
She wanted to curl her shoulders inward in shame, but his hand was still there, in her hair, and she did not let herself move.
“She did very well,” Ecaterina said, “there was nothing that merited punishment.”
Normalized question and response there, charged in the very fact that it is not treated as charged.
“I am very pleased,” he said. And then he was standing, drawing Mina to her feet as he did so. “In the bedroom, now,” he told them, turning to the other women and including them in his command, “why don’t you show me how glad you are for my return.”
There was an instant when Mina thought Jonathan to be included in this instruction, and terror was icy in her veins. Jonathan seemed to think so too; he started, and half rose from his chair. The Count shook his head, in a tiny movement. Jonathan settled back down, and Mina let herself calm again.
The five of them went together to the bedroom. Mina undressed without being told, watching as Ileana reached for the buttons on the Count’s shirt. He caught her wrist. “Wait for my direction,” he said, “don’t guess at it. You both know this.” He waited until each of them had murmured an apology. “I want to see the two of you together, then, to start,” he told them, “since you are so eager.”
This moment is partly here to demonstrate, like the opening of the library scene, the pervasiveness and precision of the control, the exactitude with which they are expected the embody the submission. This is the Count in a good mood, being easy on them. It's also another moment linking Mina and Ileana.
They did as he commanded. Mina felt soothed by the solace of his return, so that even the sting of earning his rebuke so quickly barely lingered with her. She could tell that he was pleased to have all of them there with him, together, bodies close together, barely fitting at once in the bed. It was easy to follow his will, first with Ileana, then pleasuring him herself, then watching him with Adria as Ecaterina and Ileana embraced. She felt a heady awareness of the shared blood which ran through all of them, which held them close no matter how far or long he might journey away from the castle.
For a moment, Mina remembered being a child, an unwanted girl passed between relatives and trying to be helpful enough to earn her keep. How different this was now. From this home she would never be sent away - punished, yes, humiliated, made to suffer, but always kept close, always held tight.
It has been part of my headcanon for Mina's backstory since I think 2006 that she was raised by her aunt and uncle after her parents died, and that they were reasonably materially generous but not excessively so, that she always felt she owed them. The particular detail and charge of this passage is partially inspired by the version of Mina's backstory referenced in PsychoPomposity's One Flesh which you should totally read if you haven't.
I keep references to Mina's pre-canon life very, very sparse in this series, which is for a lot of reasons but partially about communicating the claustrophobic environment of the castle and the way that the trauma of the transformation and everything that attends it so fully severs her from her earlier life (and subsequently the problem that Jonathan's continued presence poses to that defense). I thought for a long time about whether or not to include this one, and decided that it was a crucial enough character note to break the pattern.
It's parallel and inverse to Jonathan musing in "Appraisal" about the life he could have had if he hadn't met the Count; it's a glimpse into those needs of Mina's that were unmet before her new life - this need for family, for belonging, for being valued. In the novel she gets that from the surrogate family of the vampire hunters, who adore and treasure her even if they sometimes (to my mind as a reader) take advantage of her skills and willingness to be of help. This is another way, a much more intense way, for that need to get met. This is not to say that Mina secretly needed/wanted this, anymore than Jonathan's thoughts in "Appraisal" about his sexuality mean that he secretly wanted his relationship with Dracula. But those attachment needs, and the ways that they are being fulfilled by Dracula and the wives, are true and real and they matter.
When it was done, the Count wanted to speak to Ecaterina alone. Ileana went out to the courtyard; Mina and Adriana went back to the room with the fireplace from which they had come. By the time they arrived, Jonathan’s chair was vacant.
Mina bent down to gather up the new books the Count had bought, arranging them into a pile she could carry to the library. Adria went to fetch the suit jackets from where they dried before the fire. Sitting back on her heels, Mina paused to watch her. “Adria,” she said, “might I ask you something? It’s not something prohibited, but I’m not sure if he would be pleased with my asking.”
Adria put the jacket down and turned to look at her, “Ask,” she said, “I won't promise that I will answer.”
Adriana has so little dialogue before this scene! I was glad I could spend some time with her here but wish I could have worked more in earlier.
Mina took a breath. “I know you’ve been alone with…with Jonathan. I won’t ask what he’s had you do together, but - how did he seem to you?”
Adria made a noise in her throat as if of fond exasperation. She crossed the room and sat next to Mina. “You were right,” she said, “I don’t think he would be pleased that you asked me this question. But even so, I wouldn’t know how to answer. He’s like any of us, Mina. How would you say that I seem?”
It was interesting to write here the things that Adriana is seeing clearly that Mina isn't, and also the significant things about Jonathan's present state that she is missing.
She wanted to protest that he was clearly not like any of the rest of them, with his new suits and trips to Budapest and his exemption from their time in bed together. But she didn’t.
This is as close as Mina - as anyone - gets to naming the resentment/differential treatment stuff I was talking about above.
“Why are you both so angry with one another?” Adria asked.
Mina felt tears hot in her eyes. “He had a choice,” she began, “he was given the option of death instead of this and I never -“ she stopped. No, that wasn’t it. “He thought that we could stay the same,” she said finally, “that we could live here and follow our lord’s dictates and be husband and wife around the edges. But I can’t do that. I can’t be here without changing, without transforming - I couldn’t endure that. And I don’t know that we can forgive one another for that.”
The "he had a choice" is of course horizontal victim blaming nonsense, and she's said as much to Jonathan earlier in the series during their awfully cruel exchanges. But at this point part of her knows it's not accurate, and she stops herself and says something that actually is, as we will find out quite belatedly in "Intransigence," entirely on point. She does actually know Jonathan very well, despite their estrangement. Unfortunately, she isn't in a position now to relationally act on her observations in a way that can repair anything.
Adria’s voice was soft. “You will have to find a way. I don’t think he can keep Jonathan separate from us forever.”
Mina remembered the Count’s voice, long ago. Touch him, Mina. She could not. She would refuse, she would beg him - but that, as the Count would surely remind her, was self-delusion. She was silent.
“I was very desperate, when he first took me,” Adria said, “I prayed, for hours at a time - I held to my rosary even when it burned my fingers, night after night until he finally took it away from me. I was so afraid of Ileana and Ecaterina. When they were kind, I thought it was the devil tempting me.” She put a hand on Mina’s back. “You see. We all transform. We must. Jonathan will understand.”
This paragraph feels like the thing in this story that is just most obviously my writing voice; I could point out half a dozen passages in other stories of mine that sound notably similar. (It occurs to me that perhaps my Adriana voice is the closest to my default writing voice? I'll have to look at "Concession" and think about it.) Despite/because of that, I like it very much. It felt important to give just a small glimpse into Adriana's own arc at this moment, both for Mina and for the whole progression of the series.
Mina knew she could not tolerate any more of this conversation tonight. She pressed Adria’s hand in her own for a moment. “Thank you,” she said, “for tolerating my questions, even when they can’t be answered. I want to put these books away.”
They separated; Mina to the library, Adria to deal with the clothing. Alone with the books, Mina took out her journal, to record her impressions of the night - the Count’s return, his gifts, the time in bed with all of them, her conversation with Adria. She thought about sitting there, perhaps as soon as tomorrow night, while the Count read her journal, all the weeks of entries waiting for him, all her account of what had transpired in his absence. Watching his face, trying not to anticipate how he might choose to correct the transgression of her question to Adria. She read back over what she had written. She made sure she was leaving nothing out.
There is something erotic, again, in the writing the accounts to be read, erotic and vulnerable and threatening. And that's where we end.
