"Intransigence" commentary

[chthonic_cassandra]

Author's commentary for Intransigence, part 12 of Compromise. Spoilers through the end of the series.

About the title - 'intransigence' is, of course, a direct antonym of 'compromise.' I decided for this penultimate installment in the series that I wanted to just go for that, and also signal the disjunction between the character decisions/stances in this story which could be described as intransigent and what the series title suggests is the overall movement and focus of the broader arc.

They took an evening train. Seven minutes late, Mina noted - she had caught a glimpse of the posted schedule in the station, though no one had given her the tables beforehand. The high whistle startled her, the vibrations of it moving through her body as she had not remembered that they did. The air thick with smoke, the engines stirring in their rattle and clank, like great, lumbering beasts. It sent sparks shuddering through her torso even as she kept her spine straight and still, her attention alert.

Intended verbal echoes: "They took a train into Romania"/"They took a train to Budapest."/"They took an evening train." This is very blatant echoing, almost skirting the edge of what I thought might be too much, but I wanted to walk that line and let this story really bring us full circle to the first one on many levels. As beginning with the echo in Appraisal was meant to signal the time jump and shift into the next phase of the arc, beginning with a variation on it again here should clearly and firmly communicate that we're going back to the beginning of the series, we're going to tie those pieces back together; it also gives us a triptych with Appraisal and suggests that there's a narrative thread running specifically between these three stories. I scatter many very specific echoes of the first story throughout this one.

I had an earlier version of the outline for the series in which this was the final installment and I squeezed the entire denouement into it from Mina's PoV. It rapidly became clear that this was structurally the wrong choice, partly because I wanted to have a story from the point of view of each of the six characters, but just as importantly because Intransigence has its own narrative and relational arc in Mina's internal work to reconcile her relationship with Jonathan, which needed space to breathe and really get the weight it deserves, while the threads that needed to get wound back together in Concession were more varied. It also felt important, structurally, to have the mirror to Compromise of a story almost as completely contained within the space of the train as the first story was. The things that are broken for Mina in that train compartment a decade ago need to be repaired (to the extent they can) within another train compartment going in the opposite direction.

Though Compromise (here referring to the eponymous first story and not the series; there is no way of doing this which is not confusing) was always 'the train story' in my head while I was writing it and for a while after, there's not as much actual train content in there as perhaps there should be; I can justify that for point of view reasons and say that Mina's focus was reasonably elsewhere and she did not get to fully appreciate the train experience at that time, it still feels like something of an oversight. I wanted to rectify that here, both for the story's sake and, in universe, for Mina's own, so I try to integrate sensorily specific train descriptions when I could; leading with these early felt important.

In Tower we see Mina "consoled by the prospect of train schedules in her future," but here it turns out that Jonathan and Dracula haven't actually given her the train tables in advance after all. This does not bode well.

Invigorating, too, was the smell of living humans, so close, sweat and breath and blood. And heartbeats, too many, the rhythms of them pulsing through her. Strain in the backs of the men who heaved up the chest filled with Transylvanian earth and carried it towards the sleeping car; excitement in the heartbeat of the child taking a train journey for the first time. A polite, uniformed porter took Mina’s hand to help her into the train, and she could feel his pulse, even through the gloves that concealed the chill of her own skin. Mina swallowed. She wanted, very much, to rip the man’s throat out.

Another intended echo with Appraisal and Jonathan's overwhelm at being around large groups of humans again. We haven't seen Mina interact directly with humans since she killed the woman in Keys.

I feel like I use the formulation "[x], too, was [y]" too often in my writing, but I like it a lot.

She did not. She lifted her eyes courteously, thanked the porter in her best Romanian, and tried to remember to breathe at appropriate intervals until, finally, the train compartment was latched closed and it was only the three of them and the single window. The silence settled.

“Whose wife am I supposed to be this time?” Mina asked.

Reference back again to Compromise, which ends with Dracula referring to Mina as wife to both himself and Jonathan (I'm going to try to keep pointing those references out in this commentary, but it would be nearly every other line).

This line from Mina has humor to it, but also this sharp edge of bitterness which we will see in her throughout the early part of the story. She is not at ease with this situation, and she is very much thinking about that first train ride as a trio.

“Vlad’s,” Jonathan said, handing her the counterfeited passports. He held them carefully, with the tips of his fingers. Their hands did not touch. “We thought that would be the most sensible story, since I’m still purporting to be in his employ.”

The counterfeit passports are another detail brought back from Compromise.

Track the thread of Jonathan and Mina's hands throughout the series and then specifically this story. Jonathan's care not to let his hands touch Mina's here should remind us of the accidental (?) brush of their fingers as they cross paths in the library in Appraisal.

Mina spread open the passport that was supposed to belong to her. There: her full given name, with his surname and title affixed. She folded it closed again.

I have a light, persistent fascination with the idea of Dracula getting Mina to pass in social contexts as a culturally normative type of wife; it shows up as a sidenote in a number of fics of mine, but I've never really extrapolated it and probably should sometime.

“You can be my beautiful young English bride,” the Count said, “whose acquaintance I made during my first trip to London. It was a tumultuous courtship, but a passionate one, and after some years of marriage we are finally making another visit to the homeland she holds so dear.”

Now that they're out of the castle, Mina has dropped out of addressing Dracula in her head by honorific, and he's the Count again.

He was smiling, as though he wanted her to join in the joke with him, but her head was still pounding with the human heartbeats and she was not in the mood. “I do hope you have a story ready for why you chose a nameless assistant schoolmistress to be your wife,” she told him dryly.

Some very particular Dracula character stuff here; I wanted us to get to see a side of him we haven't quite gotten so visibly to this point in the series, though we've gotten glimpses. He's being playful here, flirting in a way which is predicated upon the assumption that she'll join him in this imaginative engagement which references the horrors of their shared history but as something which can be joked about. Dracula's expectation that Mina will respond in kind, and the fact that he's about to keep up the premise are meant to suggest that this is not an unknown mode of interaction between them at this point, even if Mina is not playing along today.

“Is it so strange? In James’ novels the foreign nobility always seem to choose enterprising young English women to elevate by marriage. Or Americans, even.”

I talked about this in the commentary for Tower, but I really like playing with this idea of Dracula reading himself against the foreign noblemen of Henry James; there's a literary continuity between those characters and the more extreme 'evil foreigner' characters of the gothic novels of which, metatextually, Dracula himself is one, and I enjoy drawing out these possible further paths to think through Stoker's Dracula's engagement with England through books.

Mina thought, but did not say, that she was not the English woman of the Count’s acquaintance who could most readily be mistaken for a Henry James heroine. Instead, she twisted the wedding ring on her finger. “They certainly don’t choose widows, even in the novels.” She looked at Jonathan, quickly, and then away. “We had him declared dead, you know. There was even a death certificate issued. That may pose some problems, when we suddenly make a reappearance.”

My own 'Lucy Westenra as Jamesian heroine' thing is already established.

She is being dry about it, but Mina is truly angry about being left out of the planning process for this trip, and is taking what opportunities she can to point out how Dracula and Jonathan may have fucked things up without her input.

She had given the death certificate to Jack, she remembered; she hadn’t wanted to look at it, hadn’t wanted it in the house. She remembered his grave expression as he assured her that he would keep the document safe and tried to urge her to stay with him for tea, maybe spend some nights with him or with Arthur. She shouldn’t be alone, he told her. She had told him that she wouldn’t put anyone else in danger on her behalf, not ever again. She’d left London a few weeks later. She had never seen any of them again.

Jack et al have not been mentioned for quite a long time in this series (could the last direct reference before this be all the way back in Windows when Mina remembers being hysterical after Jonathan's disappearance?). Mina is thinking about them now in a way that she really hasn't for years because she is out of the closed world of the castle and back around reminders of her human life, traveling back towards her human home. But also I want to poke the reader into remembering that these characters exist and are out there before we get to the climax of this story.

“Such a crowded place, your London,” the Count said, “it offers the novel luxury of anonymity. We’ll vanish into it, unnoticed.”

“We’ve worked out all the details, Mina.” Jonathan’s voice was steady. “There won’t be problems.”

Mina let it drop. She looked at carpeted floor, the unfamiliar pattern of it. How often did they replace it, she wondered. Perhaps more frequently if it was stained. But this wasn’t the same train compartment, of course; probably not even the same train. Still: how many people must have journeyed along these tracks, their lives progressing, changing, moving forward, while she had been calcifying into the walls of his castle.

Direct echo of Jonathan looking for the tea stain on the train carpet in Appraisal, though Mina's thoughts about it run a little more practical. Mina's thoughts about her life not moving forward on a human path also should remind us of Jonathan's musings in that same story about the paths his life could have taken if he had not been turned; I wanted to show Jonathan and Mina echoing one another, the ways they remain deeply linked despite the intensity of their estrangement at this stage.

I am pleased with the obvious but pleasingly light imagery of the train tracks as life's progression and my use of the word 'calcifying' which feels so right for this passage.

The Count’s voice jolted her from her reverie. “We’ll have to be cautious in how we feed, during the journey. Choose those traveling alone, and drink from them only when they are under hypnosis. We’ll avoid killing. We’ll have an epidemic of anemia aboard, but likely few will be willing to report their peculiar dreams.”

“Have you told the crew again that I am ill?” Mina couldn’t resist asking.

The Count smiled. “You’re not dying this time. And we don’t need the same precautions. I can trust you not to run out of here screaming, my love.”

Thanks Dracula.

When the dawn came, they went to the sleeping car. They had two compartments reserved, but when no one else was in the corridor they all three went together into the one under the Count’s name, where the chest of earth had been placed underneath the small, curtained bed. It was too large for the space, out of place in the narrow compartment. But they all fit inside of it, the Count between Jonathan and Mina, their bodies pressed against one another.

Okay, so. The biggest plot hole in Compromise, which I find utterly mortifying but have so far been unable to fix, is the absence of the boxes of dirt. What was I thinking! Why did I leave them out! I love that part of the Dracula vampire mythos, and it becomes an important part of the rest of the series! I found a way here to make it work with the train setting, but I feel acutely aware that this makes the error in the first story even more glaring.

I love love love the image of all three of them sleeping in the dirt together.

Mina, who had slept in a coffin alone since the day he first nailed her dying body into one, felt uneasy with other bodies so close to her own, but she focused on the familiar rigidity of the shackle on her ankle, which the Count had hooked into the wall of the chest. Her strength now was such that she could had pulled it from its hook if she tried, but the feeling of the restraint soothed her, and with the rattle and clank of the train beneath, she slept.

How far we have come from Compromise: "You haven't been sleeping much [...]/You keep me tied up/One can sleep that way." Important that now it has very clearly become a form of regulation she relies upon; the restraint doesn't even have a meaningfully practical purpose in this context where it is clearly flimsier than could hold her with her vampire strength.

-

The next night she woke last, as usual; the Count and Jonathan had already dressed. The Count kissed Mina’s hair and unlocked her shackle. “I’m going out to hunt,” he said, “I’ll bring someone back for you both.”

Mina brushed the dirt from her shift and began to unbind her hair from the braid in which she had slept. She couldn’t manage the new upswept styles in which Ecaterina had dressed her hair for the journey, but her hands still remembered how to fix a neat, unassuming bun at the back of her neck. It would have to do.

I am really into all the physical details of vampires sleeping in dirt, and Mina brushing dirt off her shift really moves me in this scene.

On reread it bothers me that I never specify when people are and are not wearing shoes in this story.

Jonathan was sitting on the bed, watching her. Finally he asked, his voice low, “How often does he restrain you?”

Mina didn’t look at him. “Most days,” she said shortly. “Sometimes during the night if he thinks I need it.”

As we saw in Distance, the regular restraint is a major part of Mina's daily life, and one that has become very normalized for her, even if there are still prickles of associated shame. The fact that it can be new to Jonathan, and horrifying, speaks to the magnitude of his isolation from the rest of the household.

“It’s not a punishment?”

Mina picked up the gray skirt and felt at the waistband for the tiny, hidden spiral of Adriana’s embroidery there before she answered. She rubbed her fingers over it, imagining the small, precise movements of Adria’s hands. “It helps me.” She wasn’t ashamed of that, she told herself. But she didn’t look at him.

This is the gray skirt Ecaterina and Adriana were sewing during Complicity, of course. I'm very selective about when I mention the other brides directly in this story, because Mina herself is for a very concrete reason avoiding thinking about him, so it's significant that she does so here in an attempt to anchor herself in her life in the castle and alleviate her shame. She is fundamentally not ashamed of being seen by them in her relationship with Dracula, but very much is ashamed of being seen by Jonathan.

“You hated it,” Jonathan sounded as if his voice would break, “I remember -“

We know, though Mina doesn't and nor does a reader encountering it for the first time, that long before this Jonathan has made the decision to orchestrate his murder-suicide with Mina; his withdrawal and detachment throughout this story is in that context, of having already come to the conclusion that the woman in front of him, who he loves, must die for her own sake. I thought of this exchange between them thus as one that's happening very much against Jonathan's better judgment, coming out of emotion that is too much for him to hold back; he knows that, from the perspective of the choice that he's already made, there's no point in having this conversation. But it hurts too much to see this in Mina.

Do we think Jonathan doubts that choice? He can't let himself, not much, because he can't let himself consciously think about it; it has to be so deeply submerged in his mind that Dracula doesn't notice it, which means he does not have space to agonize. But, until the final moments, he still has the option of turning back; he could confess to Dracula and foil his own plan. Does he ever consider that?

“Well, I remember that it was only to make sure I didn’t do anything foolish -“ she hated the way her voice soured, how her tones lowered into a parody of Jonathan’s own. Mina stopped herself. After a beat, she fastened the skirt and tried to calm herself. “I’ve changed, I mean. That’s one of the ways.”

This is a glimmer of their dynamic from the early parts of the series; their respective relationships with the other members of the household have developed in that time, but their relationship with one another has, how shall we say, calcified.

Jonathan handed her blouse to her. “I know that, Mina. I know.”

She pulled the blouse over her head and smoothed it under the waistband of her skirt. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Jonathan’s face, but she raised her eyes enough to see his hands resting upon his knees. He had changed too. How cruel she had been about that, once. The Count had told her so many times that her anger in those first years had been only natural, the falcon thrashing in the net before it is tamed. But her talons should never have scratched Jonathan. One day, perhaps, she might learn how to apologize to him.

Mina's not wrong here, but the error which led to Jonathan being "scratched" in this way is Dracula's and not her own; more on this below.

I brought the falcon image back from Dracula and Mina's conversation at the start of Jackal, which is going to get evoked again quite shortly.

-

The Count brought a young woman back with him to their compartment. Mina rarely saw him work his hypnosis so completely on anyone, and found herself fascinated with the woman’s blank and fixéd gaze, her smooth movements as he led her delicately by one hand. He did not even need to speak aloud to direct the woman to sit, to unfasten her collar, to bare her neck. The woman’s spine was as straight as the railroad tracks beneath them and Mina, remembering the whippings she and her sisters were given if they slouched, shivered.

Jonathan and Adriana's respective facilities in hypnosis is a minor theme in the story, but to this point we haven't seen Dracula demonstrate his own.

Mina was still the youngest, even here, and so still she took her fill last. The woman’s spine remained straight and her body stayed soft and pliable even as the Count and Jonathan bit her. She did not even flinch in pain.

She wondered how the woman would remember this night, what kind of nightmare would linger with her. She thought of Lucy’s bare, gashed feet in the graveyard. Suddenly she felt a rush of gratitude at what she had been spared, the fact that, after those first two nights in Carfax, this was not the way the Count had chosen to take her. How well he knew her, when he let her fight.

There's a truth to this for Mina, which she acknowledged back in Jackal when she begrudgingly admitted to herself that Dracula was right about her preferring to be able to fight during the first rape; this is a way that he has been right about her. At the same time, she's also doing that common traumatized person thing where variations on an experience which are different from how oneself has experienced it seem worse because they're not the one that you've had the experience of enduring oneself.

Jonathan stopped after the scant few mouthfuls of blood he was allowed. It was Mina’s turn. She took the woman in her arms and drank.

-

When the hypnotized woman had been safely returned to her seat, they unpacked their books. Mina had been given some say in what they took this time, and had chosen a few familiar novels for comfort on this most tenuously uncertain of voyages. Middlemarch. Dickens, though the selections of his work that the Count owned were dreadfully idiosyncratic. Someone had packed The Golden Bowl.

Missing scene where Mina interrogates Dracula about his preferences in Dickens novels.

She picked it up from the suitcase and held it in the Count’s direction. “We’ve just read this one.”

“Jonathan hasn’t.”

“You’re giving it to him last? That doesn’t seem fair.”

The Count smiled at her. “He reads more slowly than we do.”

There's a glimpse here of what the fantasy of a true trio dynamic between the three of them could look like, in this moment of shared familiarity and affection. This opens up this sense of hope for her there, until...

Mina laughed, startled into delight at recognizing the accuracy of the observation. Jonathan’s face remained politely blank. She realized suddenly that he had not understood the exchange.

...the moment is shattered.

She switched back to English, embarrassed at her inadvertent rudeness. “You didn’t teach him Romanian.” It was obvious, now that she considered it, recalled which conversations he had participated in over the years. But she still felt surprise.

“I was working on my German,” Jonathan said, “there was never time.”

In the context of the significance of language and language-learning through the series, this revelation lands as a big deal for Mina, and should land significantly for the reader too, though it's information that was possible to guess at least from Distance if nowhere else. For Mina, learning Romanian has been a significant part of her integration into the household and her process of building relationships with Dracula's other wives; concretely learning that Jonathan has been left out that reifies the dynamic of his exclusion, and the ways in which she has been treated differently. The contrast between Romanian as the internal language of the household vs German as this language of external liasing, the language Jonathan uses to help conduct Dracula's business affairs in Budapest, is also marked.

Both German and Romanian will, however, show up mixed together in Dracula's ciphered journals in Concession.

Mina pressed the book between her palms, unsettled. “I suppose not. My own German must be a wreck by now. I haven’t practiced at all.”

“There will be time enough,” the Count said, “for both of you to repair your linguistic gaps.”

Echoing Ecaterina's statement about Mina having time for language study in Keys; but this time the sense of expansive time to repair errors which Dracula asserts all of them as having may not be so accurate.

Mina supposed there would be. She thought of how the first use the Count had made of Jonathan had been as an English conversation partner. She thought about the night before her death when the Count had let his other wives feed upon her, how terrifying and humiliating it had been to know that they were speaking about what they would do to her but to be unable to understand what it was they said. Hastily, she handed Jonathan the book. “We were just saying that it’s your turn with this one. And your relative reading speed was an object of commentary. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that you couldn’t understand.”

He took the book from her. “I don’t take offense.”

Mina knew that. Somehow, it did not make her feel any more at ease.

-

The next night, no one woke her when the sun went down. Mina woke alone in the dirt, took a moment to recall where she was, and then saw the Count and Jonathan on the narrow bed together.

They were both nearly silent in their pleasure. Mina curled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, the chain dangling from her left ankle. It had been part of her training not to avert her gaze, and so she watched them, Jonathan’s body bent beneath the Count’s, the rhythm they kept together. Jonathan’s arched throat and the Count’s scarred back. These two bodies that she knew more closely than any other, these two bodies that she had learned how, through varied and diverging paths, to desire.

We see three sexual interactions solely between Dracula and Jonathan in the series: in Compromise after Dracula sexually assaults Mina and makes her agree to comply with him; in Tower when Jonathan is trying to persuade Dracula to bring Mina to London; and then here. None of those scenes are from Jonathan's perspective, and I specifically chose to omit a Dracula/Jonathan sex scene from Appraisal where one could easily have gone.

This scene of course is yet another direct callback to the first story; back then, Mina closed her eyes as to not see what is happening; this time, she watches unflinchingly. Her making the link to her training in not averting her gaze is the first of two crucial moments in this scene when something clicks into place for Mina in beginning to fit Jonathan into the relational ethic she has learned in her relationship with the Count's other wives, applying what she has learned about appropriate relational behavior there to help her understand how she should be treating Jonathan now. With her vampire sisters, Mina learned that she was supposed to look, that to avert her gaze from either their intimacy with or punishment by their mutual lord was disrespectful, was leaving them alone. (Which is not to say that there is not a framework for privacy in those relationships but, as we see in Distance, that's moderated through who is in the room.) So she watches Jonathan and Dracula.

I am pleased with my articulation of Mina's thoughts about Jonathan and Dracula's bodies here, and find myself getting tearful reading it over again. There is something very potent and very vulnerable in Mina's reflection on these two different experiences of sexual desire, the one that Mina experienced from this organic and human place and the other that was forced upon and written into her, coming together like this.

The Count met Mina’s eyes for a moment so fleeting she could almost have imagined it and then turned Jonathan on his back. She felt almost as though he was doing it for her benefit, spreading their husband out for the pleasure of her gaze. She didn’t let herself make a sound, even when Jonathan closed his eyes, face transfixed with feeling, and mingled wanting and repulsion ran through all of Mina’s body.

This is the first time we get Jonathan described as both Mina and Dracula's husband, after Mina has already been described as both Jonathan and Dracula's wife starting in Compromise. Tremendous thing for Mina that she is now experiencing that as going both ways.

I want this triangulation to be persuasively erotic (and also horrifying of course, as always, like all the sex in this series) as well as densely relationally entwined. I am happy with how this scene came out.

When they were done, Jonathan lay back on the bed, wrung through with all of it, and the Count finally unlocked Mina’s shackle. There were blood smears on Jonathan’s back, from the Count’s nails.

Mina dressed efficiently, and watched the Count go back to Jonathan and touch his hair. She looked for the basin of water with which the compartment was equipped; it was empty. “Should I refill this?” she asked the Count, thinking that she wouldn’t be able to hold her head up before Ecaterina next time she saw her if she didn’t. He nodded, and she fetched more water from the washroom, which was less trouble at least than getting it from the well in the castle, gave it to the Count with a rag, and sat upon the closed top of the wooden chest as he sponged the blood from Jonathan’s skin.

And there's the second of those click into place moments that I named above. The ethic that Mina has learned her is concrete and specific and deeply felt; you don't try to protect one another from harm by Dracula, but you always make sure you draw a bath for the other person afterwards. There is deep care there, which Mina is trying to express to Jonathan, but he has not been integrated into that community and so the care is not fully legible to him, even as it is not unrelated to the care he was trying to offer to Mina (and which she found horrifying, and rejected) as she was first brought into vampirism.

Finally, the Count stood. “Mina,” he said, “come about the train with me. Jonathan needs quiet for now.”

What the hell is that aftercare Dracula! Why do you always think leaving Jonathan alone is the right choice!

It was past supper time. The voices of the passengers were hushed. The Count took Mina’s hand and turned to mist with her, drawing her with him along the floor of the train, through car after car, into the train’s inner workings, around gears and valves and pistons, until they turned back to their human forms beside the glowing coals and the mechanical stoker doing its tireless work, where the heat would have beaded sweat onto their brows if they had both been mortal still. Mina felt exhilarated and disordered. The Count put his hands on Mina’s waist and pushed her against the wall.

I needed a moment for Dracula and Mina alone together which felt compelling and appealing for her, and specific to the two of them and their relationship. And what would be more romantic for Mina than getting to fully make contact with the inner workings of a train in mist form? This is one of the only times we get to see Mina experiencing her vampire abilities as a site of power and possibility and capacity, the way we see Ileana enjoying the wolf transformation in Complicity, and I thought it was important that we get one of those before the climax of this story. It's significant also that they are attuned to one another in this scene, that he pulls her along into it without needing to coordinate. This is the final time we will see Dracula and Mina alone together in the series.

I really need a felt sense of physical setting when I write but am also very much not mechanically minded; I looked at so many train diagrams to try to wrap my head around them to write this brief paragraph.

“You’re insatiable,” she said hazily. She remembered vaguely that Jonathan had once given her the impression that he took them each in rotation, one per night, the way lurid books had suggested Turkish sultans did in their harems. What a lie that had been.

Jonathan had this impression because he was not at the time, and never ends up being, integrated into the group sex which is such a major part of the sexual interactions in the castle.

He laughed. “You’re the one who needs satiation, my dear.”

She knew that he could feel the tight coil of her arousal; the joy of the transformation had not eased it. She flinched.

“You don’t have to berate yourself for enjoying that.”

Mina looked at the machinery around them, the curves and angles of the metal. “My lord -“

“You’ve enjoyed watching me with Ecaterina and Adriana. With Ileana. There’s no shame in this.”

Dracula is really trying to repair this, and he is in fact getting somewhere with Mina, but he is way too late.

“I know. It still feels different, even after…I used to comfort him, when he woke from his nightmares of you.”

“As have I. As I do with all of you. And as you do with one another.”

Mina remembered: a different train car, the Count’s hands on Jonathan’s face as he told him he was not locked in. Ecaterina holding Adriana as she trembled.

Cf this very very important Dracula-Mina exchange in Compromise:

"...and that now, when he wakes up from nightmares of you, you have the audacity to try and comfort him -"

He cut her off, irritation in his voice. "Nothing is that simple, and you know it, Mina." She looked at him, direct. He continued. "Someday, you shall be coming to me for comfort, and I will give it to you, because I respect my obligations. My way of loving is brutal and merciless, but it is real, and you understand it far better than you pretend to."

It lands differently and more clearly for Mina now, who knows it to be true experientially.

The Count was looking at her with an expression she could not read. “I never intended to ruin your love for one another. I do not believe that I have done so now, but if I have then I regret the error. I want to have you both together. I always have.”

Dracula is telling the truth and, in his own weird way, being sort of vulnerable here. He honestly didn't want to have this effect; he messed up and he almost knows it.

Mina could feel what it was he wanted; he was sharing the fantasy with her. Herself and Jonathan both brimming with desire for one another and held tight under his control, him deciding whether and when and how they were permitted to touch one another until they were desperate with longing. Her own arousal wound tighter as she took it in.

This is a potent and compelling fantasy; it should be so to the reader, as it is to Mina here. A lot of Dracula and Mina's erotic life together takes place mentally; Dracula sharing this fantasy with her directly through their mental connection is at once something very invasive (think of how invasive it is already in this scene, that Dracula can feel Mina's arousal, she can't hide that from him) and also something which has an edge of vulnerability for him at the same time. This is a relationship (such as it is) which began with a month of dueling mental connection warfare. This is their thing.

Was there any way, she wondered, for it to have always been that way, without the distance that had been effected between them? Perhaps if he had turned them both at the same time, at once, if Mina had been spared the lingering dread of years with the Count’s blood poisoning her before she died. But now Mina would always remember Jonathan in his ensorcelled sleep as the Count forced his blood in her mouth, Jonathan cleaning up the tea as the Count touched her for the first time. How was that different from how Ileana had held her down the time he had used a knife on her and she couldn’t manage to stay still?

Okay; as Mina is trying to work this out, maybe it's a good moment to talk about where Dracula went wrong.

Mina's getting some things right here, and I see the source of the estrangement between herself and Jonathan that she's identifying as not unrelated to the source of the estrangement between Jonathan and the brides. In both cases, Dracula erred by making the other party a central part of the originatory traumas he created for Mina and Jonathan, causing a rupture that becomes very difficulty to bridge.

For Jonathan, the brides' initial attack on him during his visit to the castle is his first vampiric trauma, his first exposure to this type of violence, and one that he experiences without the traumatic attachment he subsequently develops to Dracula in his role as Jonathan's maker. Dracula positioning himself in the role of Jonathan's rescuer in the attack by the brides is a choice which serves traumatic bonding between himself and Jonathan, but it makes it much more difficult for Jonathan to bond with the brides.

Contrast that with Mina's experience; they do bite her in Windows while she's dying, but only after she's already been brought pretty far into the arc of her transformation, and she experiences Dracula as directly in control of that incident; immediately after they draw a bath for her, bringing her into the ethic of care I was discussing above, and her experience of them is one of primarily similarity rather than difference ("There was nothing which distinguished them except time."). Dracula pairing Mina up with Ileana as something of a peer mentor helps with this even further.

I don't know that Jonathan's initial traumatic associations with the brides were insurmountable; if Dracula had given Jonathan a mentor among them, either Ecaterina (who appreciates his politeness and decorum) or Adriana (who shares his 'still waters run deep' quality and might have been able to help him find a path to reconcile his contradictory feelings without the need for severe dissociation), possibly it could have been overcome. But for various reasons Dracula finds himself deskilled around Jonathan, and makes choices that are less than attuned.

A similar thing applies from the other direction; as Mina articulates in the paragraph above, Dracula makes Jonathan, and specifically Jonathan's inability to protect Mina, a core part of her foundational traumas with him. Dracula enjoys those triangulations, but indulges that at the expense of choices which would serve the long-term absorption of Mina and Jonathan's relationship into his household. He also too frequently listens to Jonathan when he makes suggestions (starting with accompanying Dracula to abduct Mina in the first place) which would go against Dracula's better judgment).

Mina didn’t know. Perhaps it was the fact that Jonathan had averted his eyes.

And also that.

The Count was watching her train of thought, contemplative. “I know that I have made mistakes with both of you. I am sorry for that. I had never done this before, taken both members of a couple, but you should not have suffered on account of my experimentation.” His hand on Mina’s sternum. “I will do what I can to rectify those errors.”

Genuine apology from him here.

Mina nodded.

“I want you together. You know that. I know your dread of this, and I am being patient with you, but I will ask it of you, and soon.”

Following that apology, the return to this insistence: he'll make allowances for his own mistakes, but that does not change his fundamental expectations of her.

She did know. She noticed, quietly, that though she was frightened, the panic which had been so strong when first he told her he would be taking her to England with them was gone.

He kissed her. She felt his hands in her hair, and knew he wanted to pull out the pins and let it spill down her back. But he drew back, a regretful smile on his face.

She smiled back. “It was your choice to take me to a place where we have to maintain human appearances.”

He laughed. “I’ve brought you to one of your beloved trains, Mina. You should be more appreciative.”

Very cute, you two.

-

The next night, he sent the two of them out together to hunt. Since Jonathan was the only one who had practiced hypnosis, this largely meant Mina accompanying him while they both tried to make a show of pretending at mortality, which was more difficult than Mina had thought it might be.

They went to the dining car, where Jonathan ordered them both tea. Lemon for himself and milk and honey for Mina. Mina lifted the cup to her lips and inhaled the scent of it; strong and good, more vivid than she could have experienced it as a human. She felt a stirring of frustration that she could not take a sip.

I really feel for Mina here - what an awful experience to not be able to drink tea! My headcanons for how Jonathan and Mina each take their tea have been consistent for at least 17 years.

Dining cars are another train setting staple which went unused in Compromise and so I really did need to give them some space here.

“You could try counting your breaths.”

Jonathan’s voice was so soft that for a moment Mina thought she had misheard him. She put the cup down. “Pardon me?”

“It’s what I do, to remember to breathe regularly when I’m not speaking. It helps.”

Mina almost made a joke about not realizing her attempts at passing for human were that bad, but swallowed the thought. They were that bad, and she knew it. “Thank you. Did he teach you that?”

Compare to in Collusion, when Jonathan tries to help Mina with her chess game and she does take offense and make the joke. She is really trying to do things differently with Jonathan this time.

Jonathan shook his head. “He mostly just told me things to focus on to keep from reacting in…untoward ways to being around them. But I prepared extensively for Budapest. I had a great deal of time to think.”

Yet again - Dracula left Jonathan so very alone!

He must have, Mina thought. Practicing his German alone. She could have asked about how he had spent his time, the past several years when they had been apart. She could have asked about Budapest. But she would have hated it if he had asked her about her time with the Count’s other wives.

I'm not sure Mina's theory of mind is solid here; it's unclear whether Jonathan would in fact have disliked being asked about this time as she would have, or whether he would taken it as a statement of care.

“If we’re supposed to be passing,” she said instead, “then I suppose we should now be acting like…how do a foreign nobleman’s wife and his solicitor act together?”

He smiled, tentatively, catching her tone. “I admit I have no idea. Very professionally, I’d have to imagine.”

She smiled back. “Perhaps not. Perhaps we’d be having an affair.”

His smile froze. “Mina -“

“It’s a game, Jonathan. We could be having the affair right under his nose, terrified that he’ll find out. The consequences could be dreadful if he did. But we can’t manage to keep apart from one another and so we steal what few moments we can -“

Mina is trying to do the same kind of playful flirtation with Jonathan here that Dracula tries to do with her at the start of the story; they're both playing with these fantasies which take elements of truth from their own relationships and draw them out imaginatively and pleasurably. She is genuinely trying to connect with Jonathan here through that.

His voice was quiet. “I don’t find any of this amusing.”

And again similarly, Jonathan doesn't play along just as Mina didn't. But while Mina had a wry 'very funny, not this time' attitude, Jonathan finds it at once too close to and too far away from the truth to be anything but agonizing.

He would, she thought. She didn’t say it. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand where it lay upon the table, palm open.

Next hand moment for our tracking; Mina wants the contact and doesn't let herself reach for him.

There was a middle-aged man sitting alone at the corner of the dining car, nursing a single glass of wine. “On the left,” she said softly, “we could take him.”

Jonathan glanced so swiftly that a mortal would have missed it, and then nodded. She saw him gather himself and prepare for the task of the hypnosis.

-

Several nights later. The train wound its way on past Vienna and made its way towards Zurich. An unusual number of passengers had come down with a wasting illness, but were no deaths, at least not so far. Mina considered many things quietly in the back of her mind and one night she took her hair down and knelt on the bed.

Writing from this scene until the end of the story had a high wire act feeling to it; it was exhilarating to finally get there and also I really wanted and needed to stick the landing. The series had been building to this for so long and I wanted so badly to get it right.

It felt important to we don't actually get Mina's thought process here, that we see many of the steps of the journey she takes to get to this moment but we don't actually see precisely what the shift looks like inside of her, she maintains some privacy around that.

Her loosened hair and kneeling are physical signifiers of matching herself to what Dracula desires as we've seen in earlier stories.

“I think that I’m ready. If you wish for it, my lord.”

Like giving up the shorthand, this is something that Dracula could have forced (and that, in this case, he did force once and has indicated he will force again), but Mina makes the choice to offer it willingly, which is meaningful to her.

He was silent for a several moments, and Mina was briefly afraid that she had overstepped. But then he leaned down and kissed her forehead. “My dear one. I am very pleased with you.”

Jonathan, who had been dressing on the other side of the cramped compartment, stopped midway through buttoning his shirt. The Count beckoned him towards them and, when he came, reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind Jonathan’s ear. “Our wife is ready for you,” he told him, his voice almost tender.

For Dracula, this is a significant amount of affection expressed towards both Mina and Jonathan.

I got a comment specifically pointing out the intensity of "Our wife is ready for you" and I love that line very much too; it's loving and haunting and terrifying and it gestures towards the immensity of all the things that this trio relationship can mean to the three of them.

Slowly, Jonathan sat down upon the bed. Mina reached for his hands, lifted them, pressed them palm to palm with her own, cold fingers entwining. She counted breaths. As long as he looked at her, as long as he didn’t turn his eyes away as if she was a hypnotized victim, then she could do this. His gaze remained steady. Mina reached for his shirt and began undoing the buttons he had just fastened.

Finally: Mina reaches for him, their hands touch. Mina touches Jonathan of her own accord! As all the way back in Jackal/Collusion/Adjust she thought she would never do again. But Jonathan's own agency is not part of the conversation.

The Count came behind Mina and reached for the hem of her shift; she raised her arms to allow him to lift it over her head and found herself exposed before them both. She closed her eyes, suddenly dizzy. They both desired her, and to feel herself at the center of their wanting was almost too much to bear. Wife to both of them. By law and by blood and by oath and by dedication.

This makes me emotional to reread. I am very pleased with the physical choreography of this scene and how it demonstrates and illuminates the emotional content; I think it's one of the most effective sex scenes I've ever written in that regard. Mina understanding herself finally, in an embodied and felt way for the first time, as simultaneously wife to both Dracula and Jonathan through their different channels of commitment and binding is such an intense, cathartic culmination of one of the major, agonizingly protracted arcs of the series. This scene is as much a climax as the final one in this story.

Hands on her shoulders; the Count’s, pulling her down backwards, crushing the discarded shift beneath her, until her head rested upon his chest. With a single hand he pulled her knees apart. “Pleasure her,” he told Jonathan, and without hesitation he obeyed.

Mina tensed at the feeling of his mouth and tongue, as she always did when the Count did this to her, a part of her fearing the close of sharp teeth upon her soft flesh. But the Count stroked the hollow of her throat until she relaxed enough to enjoy it, enough to reach for Jonathan, to run her fingers through his hair, to touch the smooth curves of his shoulder-blades.

I think people don't talk enough about the intrinsic terror of receiving oral sex from a vampire. They have fangs!

We should be thinking of the sex scene between Jonathan and Ileana in Complicity, when this was also the act Dracula required, but when Ileana was not permitted to follow her own pleasure in the way Mina is about to in the next paragraph.

But she did not want to reach climax so soon, did not want to feel pushed past it into the fragile sensitivity to which the Count so often brought her and so before she did she extricated herself from between the Count’s knees and pushed Jonathan onto his back, pressed his hands down above his head and took him inside of her. He groaned, as he had not when she had seen him with the Count before and Mina felt a thrill of satisfaction. No, not that he was hers, for he was not - never had been, for even before all this the claim they had held on one another was devotion, not belonging, but now they were both his, both of them, both held together in the prison and the safety of it, and Mina thought suddenly that she could look forward to the coming centuries if they were like this, frozen in this place, Jonathan beneath her and the Count behind her, his hands on her body, his teeth scraping at her throat and in her the pride in taking what she thought she would be unable to take, the gratitude at being granted something she had not known she wanted.

I am so happy with the final run on sentence in this preceding paragraph. There it is. There it is! I could talk about it forever, but also it says what I want it to say, it's complete in that way.

"Devotion, not belonging" cf Jonathan in Tower: "She was never mine, not in the way that she is now yours." It goes both ways; their parallel thoughts here is another wistful glimpse of the ways Jonathan and Mina remain connected, even when neither of them can see it.

At once a part of her wanted in a new, surprising impulse, to bite Jonathan. She looked behind her shoulder to the Count, who had seen the thought, and he shook his head. He said to her, in her mind, Not now. It would be too much for him. Mina remembered then human Jonathan stretched beneath Ecaterina, rapt with terror, and felt another wave of gratitude to her lord, who knew them both so well, who pushed them but not past the limits of what they could endure.

This paragraph does not feel quite as perfect as the one before it, but it's fine.

I love you, she said, “I love you,” out loud, in her mind, in English, in Romanian, over and over and over, taking breath upon unnecessary breath to form the words.

This is intensely romantic and heartbreaking in context of what is about to happen.

-

They continued their travel, by train and by steamship and by train again and by coach until finally they were at the Count’s Piccadilly house. She had never been there before, consigned as she had been at that time to the logistics and records. Jonathan, she knew, had.

There were so many outlines for this story which got bogged down in the logistical details of all this travel and then eventually I cut all of that and focused more tightly on what was important.

They brought the luggage inside, and Mina fell to the task of the setting the first room to rights. Jonathan lit one of the lamps and set it at the front window, where it flickered against the dusk. Looking out the windows, Mina almost remembered something, and then thought instead of Ecaterina twisting her wrist behind her back.

For obvious reasons this story cannot talk about the brides' plan - Mina needs to not be thinking about it - but I needed to bring the reader's attention back to it, especially after the headiness of Mina's rapture in the last scene.

I meant for Jonathan placing the lamp in the window to be a prearranged signal in his own plan, but there wasn't room to spell it out, nor was it important.

The Count told them he was going out to hunt, and would bring a victim back for them to share. They were all hungry after the meager portions of their journey. He kissed both of them before he left.

Mina was unpacking the Count and Jonathan’s suits. There would be a closet, surely, in which they would hang; they would not need to rely upon the chests in which they had all kept their clothing folded in the castle. The house would probably have running water too, she thought, suppressing a shiver of delight.

I feel you, Mina; running water is extraordinary. And after all your time filling baths with well water at the castle I want you to have it.

But there: a hand upon her shoulder. Mina turned and saw Jonathan’s face for only a moment before she felt the hard pull of a will grasping upon her own, dragging her down. She fought, but she had no experience resisting hypnosis, and the pull was inexorable as the tide. She was submerged.

Jonathan's capacity for and work on hypnosis has been emphasized for a while in the series, and we know from "Appraisal" that he and Adriana have been practicing on one another, so he knows how to hypnotize another vampire; we've already seen Adriana using her own capacity for the sake of the brides' plan in Complicity, so Jonathan doing the same should fit and feel plausible. And, as we were reminded earlier in the story, Mina isn't very used to being hypnotized, it hasn't been a frequent part of her experience with Dracula at all.

-

When she regained consciousness, Mina was lying down on a flat surface, and she could barely move. She thought at first that it was a nightmare, but when she tried to thrash against the bonds she realized that she was held not by the Count’s chains or by the unyielding walls of a coffin, but by a crucifix upon her chest, heavy as a boulder weighing her down. She fought harder.

And here we go. After well over a decade I got to do this reveal. I remain curious whether anyone guessed the nature of Jonathan's plan before this moment. If I threaded the needle right, then it should come as a surprise but then feel plausible and even perhaps inevitable in retrospect looking back at his arc to this point.

I don't think this ever gets clearly revealed (and we don't hear from the point of view of the characters for which it would be most emotionally significant) but this whole scene is in Lucy's mausoleum.

(Implication here that Mina thinks at first that she could be in a nightmare because this is a nightmare she regularly has; the experience of waking into undeath in the nailed-shut coffin was a deeply horrifying one for her.)

“Mina, please be calm.”

It was Jonathan’s voice. She turned her head. There he stood, a few feet away from her, still as stone.

“I wish I could come closer, I wish that I could comfort you, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

A reader rightfully pointed out the agonizing contrast between this and Dracula and Mina's earlier conversation about comfort, which is an important resonance; it is also a direct echo of the moment between Mina and Jonathan back in Compromise when she reaches for him, asks him to come to her to offer comfort and he tells her he cannot. Here that separation between them, the inability to be close, has been very concretely literalized by the holy objects.

Scattered in a circle around her, crumbs of the holy host. The other reason for the weight upon her limbs.

She found that she could still speak. “What’s going on?”

Jonathan spoke slowly, as if he had to take time to choose each word. “It’s going to end soon. I know this is terrifying now, and it will be for a little while longer, but I promise that it’s going to end soon.”

Jonathan, I know you want that to be comforting. But.

Mina tried to fit the pieces together in her mind, but she couldn’t make them match; something was missing. “Jonathan, what did you do?”

What Jonathan's done and is doing is so shocking to her, so inconceivable at this point that it takes her a long time to understand what should have quickly clicked into place for readers. Important to remember here that Mina has been at the castle for a full decade at this point; time enough for this truly to become her life.

In Adjust we see Mina make that internal transition and abandon the hope of rescue; one of the central elements of that shift for her is her emergent love for the other brides (specifically Ileana in that story, but all of them) and her contention with what it would have meant to be a part of engineering their murders (as she was in the novel). She realizes that she can no longer bear that possibility; later, in Distance, as she is struggling with Dracula's trip away, she has a similar moment of visceral horror at imagining what his death would mean for her and the others. But Jonathan hasn't been with her on that same internal journey.

“I wrote a letter.” He almost smiled, but it was as though his mouth refused to fall into the curve. “I sent it from Budapest. Our friends will be back soon, once they’ve finished with him. They’ll end it for both of us. It will be painful, but it will also be quick. We’ve both handled worse. I’m sorry for the holy objects now, they’re just in case…” His voice trailed into silence.

This plan, we should all remember, was precisely Mina's own during Jackal/Collusion. But everything was new to her; she did not have the skills Jonathan later acquired; and she was not playing Jonathan's crazy long game.

This was another place in which earlier outlines of the series had more detail and tried to get more concrete about the chain of events; I also decided it was fundamentally irrelevant and bogged down the story, though we will get a couple tiny hints when Adriana is looking into Jack's mind in Concession. One thing that is (should be) clear is that Jonathan had to send the letter as a leap of faith, without hope for the possibility on an ongoing interchange to explain himself. I lightly foreshadow this as a method of coordination in Appraisal, when Jonathan reflects on the difficulty of arranging for Dracula's different requests to be met solely through letter communication.

"We've both handled worse" fucking twists at my heart. These two; I love them. Jonathan's apology for the holy objects in diction echoes his minimization of Mina's bondage right at the start of Compromise which Mina already bitterly threw in his face earlier in this story. There are some ways in which he really hasn't changed.

Mina felt rage, deep in her abdomen. She wanted to scream. “You had no right, you had no right to make this decision for the both of us.”

He looked at her, grief open upon his face. “But I’m not. You did. I’m just doing what you asked of me.”

One of the many heartbreaking things here is that they're both right; both of their positions are justifiable. Readers will of course naturally have different reactions to this scene, will find themselves more on Jonathan's side than Mina's or vice versa, but if I am doing my job right we should be able to feel the weight and emotional truth of both of their perspectives. There is no easy answer, and it's awful, both sides of it.

That time felt so far away that it took her several moments to understand what he was saying. The burial service, the oaths, the men on their knees before her, all the tears. “That was - I don’t want that anymore, that was a different time. Jonathan, please -“

“You told me. Even if you changed and said you wanted it no longer, you said. I’m sorry. I betrayed you then, I didn’t swear - I thought it would be different, I thought our love was so strong that - I thought we could go into it together, me at your side, into the darkness, and not lose ourselves. I thought it true when he offered me the choice of blood or death, I thought it when he told me he was going to come take you and each time I told myself that I was doing it because I didn’t want you to be alone. I told myself that we could make a life for ourselves within it, circumscribed maybe but tender and true. But I was wrong.”

Jonathan is speaking with direct honesty to Mina for the first time in a very long time. This was all very emotional to write, and to read over again now. Deeply tragic. Don't have much to add.

He was crying. Mina felt the tears upon her own cheeks.

“You weren’t wrong. It has taken time, maybe, and at times it has been awful, truly so, but on the train, when were together, I felt -“

“I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you. I’m sorry that I thought I knew better than you did, that I put my selfish wish to have you still, even in a transfigured form, above your own choice. But I’m making amends now.”

Jonathan is apologizing for not listening to her while not listening to her in the present. Tragically, if Jonathan a decade ago, in Compromise, had been able to say any version of this to Mina then, it would have meant a tremendous amount to her, and everything might have been different. Jonathan shares with Dracula this tendency towards honest but mistimed apologies that are not actually what the recipient presently seeks an apology for.

Mina shouted so loud that her throat felt hoarse. “Listen to me! You’re talking to the Mina of fifteen years ago, not me. I’m in front of you, here now, and I’m telling you that I don’t want to die. And I don’t want to lose you either.”

She saw him squeeze his eyes shut, and then open them again. “This isn’t the true you speaking. This is a perversion of you, something that he’s twisted you into, just like he’s done to me. The Mina I knew would be disgusted at the both of us. The Mina I knew wouldn’t kneel to him without being asked, she wouldn’t say she loved him, she wouldn’t teach him our shorthand -“ His voice broke.

In parallel to the ways Mina lashed out at Jonathan in the first few episodes of the story, now Jonathan is naming these elements of Mina's present life about which she feels such deep shame, which she struggles so hard to reconcile, as evidence of false consciousness, which is extremely hurtful to her. (Cf the moment in Distance when Mina hesitates in her urge to spontaneously kneel at Dracula's side because she feels Jonathan watching. What an awful thing to get confirmation that yes, in fact, he did take that moment as evidence of what he now describes.) Mina's reactions to Jonathan in Concession have to be understood in response to this, in response to, from her perspective, to Jonathan deciding she deserves to die because of the ways she has adapted to her captivity and found meaning in it.

He may not be trying to be cruel (how could he be, if at least in part of him he does not believe the Mina he is speaking to is a true self?), but he is actually deeply, deeply angry, and has been holding that inside for years. He truly does experience Mina as having betrayed him, having betrayed their relationship.

“It’s a compromise, Jonathan. It’s always been a compromise. This isn’t the life I would have chosen, for either of us, but it’s the one we have. And I - somehow, I’ve found a way to live within it. And maybe that’s a perversion, maybe it disgusts you, but there’s joy in it for me, now. And beauty. And love. Not just with him, I mean, but with you. And also with -“

Series thesis statement! Series thesis statement! Big sparkly letters around this one!

Their names were on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t want to say them, as if it would conjure them into this fate with her, pinned down with crucifixes upon their breasts. But wait. Ecaterina twisting Mina’s wrist behind her back. No; push past the fog of it. Their plan. A glimmer of hope, like a star; her former friends would not have found the Count alone tonight.

And there we go. It was tricky to find a way to transition this incredibly intense scene into reorienting the reader to the plot, but I liked doing so out of Mina's honest assertion of her love for the other wives and visceral horror at the thought of losing them. Throughout the whole preceding scene, worry on Dracula's behalf has been in the back of Mina's mind (think about her experience of that fear during Distance, and Ecaterina's concern for the risks of his journey to England in Complicity), but the urgency and shock of what's happening with Jonathan has taken the center of her attention.

I loved getting to this payoff of bringing the plotlines together; incredibly satisfying to show that Ecaterina has been right, even if she did not anticipate the precise direction from which the danger came.

But Jonathan was oblivious to the winding paths her thoughts had just taken. “That’s what I hoped for, once. God, Mina, I might have made that same speech to you back when you kept fighting him. But it’s not true.”

At this point, Mina checks out of the conversation with Jonathan; she's done. He's denied the reality of her experience, has uncompromisingly (intransigently!) expressed a belief that she is no longer capable of meaningfully exercising agency or having wishes that are listened to, and she's given up trying to persuade him otherwise; her hope now lies with her vampire sisters. There is, of course, a lot more that Jonathan and Mina could say to one another, but neither of them are in a place where they could meaningfully hear it, understandably so.

Think. He had ways of being alerted when one of them was in danger, of feeling their distress, and surely he must have felt hers now, but if he himself was engaged in fighting adversaries then he might be unable to respond. But there were connections between all of them, too; she knew this, even if she had not yet learned how to make use of them. She felt for them, grappled in her mind trying to search for something with a texture like to her bond to him, feeling a sense of vertigo as she did so. She found something, maybe. She thought of a strong line of thread between Ecaterina’s fingers, between Adriana’s, of white roots in Ileana’s hands. She forced her distress and her fear and her desperation into it.

I wanted here to evoke my description of Dracula's experience of his mental connections to the five of them in Tower; he also connects to the image of the thread in Ecaterina's hands, which speaks to the centrality of her role within the family and the continuity and stability in how each of them experience and love her.

Even as she did, another part of her felt ravaged with grief, confounded by the question of how Jonathan could feel as he did, could wish things that to her had somewhere along the way become unthinkable. Hurt for him sat sharp in her chest, beneath the crucifix, rising alongside her rage. But she didn’t know what else there was for her to say, pinned down as she was, like a sacrifice.

“It won’t be long,” he was telling her again, and she thought he was crying and a part of her cared, “it won’t be long now.”

And she did not know how much time passed in the silence of her anger and confusion but then there was commotion, and human hands, moving with the eerie smoothness of compulsion, were brushing aside the crumbs of the host, taking the crucifix from her chest and then she could sit up and arms were around her and there was hair in her face and someone was crying and perhaps it was her and there was Ileana, her sister, her beloved, holding her with a tightness that only her immortal body could endure without discomfort and she was safe she was safe she was safe.

This story was always going to end with a cliffhanger (the only proper one in the series!), but I went back and forth a little on precisely where to draw the line. Ultimately I decided I wanted to resolve the question of whether Jonathan's plan had succeeded before the break and let the reader get the relief of Mina's rescue before leaving them here. In the moment that Mina remembers the brides' presence, the question of Mina and Dracula's survival has already meaningfully been answered; to end without clear resolution on that would feel a little cheap and artificial. The question of Jonathan's fate is going to take more working through for all the characters to come to, and it's going to depend on Dracula's own internal arc, which Concession will give us the missing pieces to at least partially understand (though I leave some of it opaque intentionally).

“I see,” the Count said, “that we all have a great deal to discuss.”

I gave Dracula the last word here to signal the transition in focus that's going to happen in Concession. The mild, wry tone of his final statement could be read in a few different ways, and I know it certainly left a lot of readers deeply worried for Jonathan (sorry! This was intentional on my part, but sorry!), but it is meant to confirm that he's neither deeply decompensated and broken up about what is happening, nor is he out of his mind with rage. We'll get more of his actual internal state in the next story.

Well. That was a lot of commentary! I remain very satisfied with this story, for the most part; it's not perfect, and I can see transitions which could have been smoothed out, but I think it truly does stick the landing; it feels like probably one of the strongest things I have ever written to this point. It was meaningful to spend some time with it again in writing this, and I hope, if you've made it to the end here, that you enjoyed doing so as well.