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This is not how you are to die, my dear, father says to you one time, a fire raging across your little frame. You are the eldest of six, so pale and beautiful and so very much father's favorite. You are the first from your mother's womb, but you are the third to fall ill to the deadly disease that plagues the noble Karnstein's.
You shall be old and fat, stuffed full with life, he says to you, wiping your sweaty forehead, and you remember your brother so little in your shaking arms. He died in the night, his face grey and distorted when you woke, and you had screamed and screamed through your weak throat.
Father is here now and your lovely, lovely Gottfried is immortal in stone. You are certain to follow him soon.
Mircalla, father says and, oh, how you are his favorite, Mircalla, you will not let God take two children from me.
But they are waiting, you want to say, your sweet mother and your tiny Gottfried. They are calling me, you want to say, but can only cough weakly. Father says your name and begs you to stay.
(It is years later, across lands and buried under dirt and sand, that you wish the pull of fever had claimed you. The picture of your family bloody and laughing presses against your teeth as you choke around blood, and you wish oh so dearly that God had burned you away in that fever until you were nothing more than ash for father to wipe away.
They call to you, and how you wish to see them so terribly.)
+
You tangle your fingers and laugh breathlessly, your dressing courting around your knees.
(You are eighteen and young and reckless and drunk on champagne. It's called waltzing, someone tells, from lands over. You giggle around the word, waltzing, and dance dangerously with sin pressed against your rosy cheeks.)
+
Why, you cannot help but slip, why. Your fingers are bright and slippery and trying to keep yourself whole and together. The man who ripped you open smiles, and you cough bloody around the word.
I don't want to die, you think, please dear God, I don't want to die, pleasepleasepleaseplease -
+
You wake in shit and blood and dirt caked under your fingernails. There is a woman you do not remember, a women with red across her lips and her fingers brushed through your hair. You close your eyes, your mind filling with screams and dying and your unanswered prayers whispered into warm unforgiving air (but maybe God did answer your prayers? you think, because the man is gone and your body is not split open and raw.).
The woman brushes at a tear that trails down your cheek and you want to sob at the loveliness of it.
"What is your name, lämmchen?" she asks and you cry for her sweet, sweet voice.
+
The woman you now call Mother takes you by the hand, leading you down the hallway and breathing your name holy. Mircalla, she says, I have something for you.
Your new body thrums from excitement, fingers tightening around hers in anticipation and your throat singing for stolen blood. You wonder how much you will be allowed this time, how much she will carefully give you in slow sips.
Your new ears can hear a crash from the other side of the door and Mother smiles at you sharply. Go ahead, darling, she says and twists the door open before you.
There is a man there who turns to look at you, eyes widening in primal fear. You blink, remembering his grin. Why, you had said, and pleasepleaseplease, and you remember him, hot and heavy over you as your skin ripped open under his callous care. He is saying something now, holy words passing across his lips, and his hands make the cross when you look at him.
God above, please! you think he screams, and you cannot help but laugh at the sound of it. Your new fingers find his face and your new teeth find his neck, ripping open his jugular messily.
(And Mother comes in, later, when blood is down your chin and across your hands and the man is a pale, dry pile at your feet, she smiles so, so sweetly. Gods do not answer the prayers of men so weak, she says.
You shiver, finding your own god in her gaze.)
+
You rip men apart, gore between your teeth and a giggle at their screams. Their blood is warm in your mouth and you can remember the feel of your body between slippery fingers seeping into the warm summer air. You remember the please seared to the underside of your ribcage, and you crush windpipes beneath your pretty, pale fingers.
+
You are reborn in blood, screaming and thrashing and red between your teeth. You are reborn in death, necks snapped beneath your hands and your lips to pale columns of flesh. You are reborn, Mircalla, leaving the naive wondrous girl in the dirt curled up with all your sins.
But you still think of her some times, wondering if she is alone and cold in the ground. Mother smiles at you when you mention it one time, off handed and bored, and she responds with something about Versailles and starting a revolution. She doesn't mention the girl she left in the ground, but you can't find it in yourself to care.
+
There is a girl that giggles against the sharp of your collarbone. She whispers something in Russian, something slow and heavy, her lips pressed against your skin. You grin a little, forgetting you have no heartbeat for her lips to trace, and find the curve of her waist.
"If I should ever find another companion as you, I do not think I would ever need a man to marry," you say, a laugh to you when she stops.
She grins, her dimples peeking dangerously. "Oh, Millarca you are a delight!"
And you can't help the small laugh that leaves you, pure and charmed. The girl's smile fades as she gazes at you.
"I very much enjoy your laugh, dear Millarca," she says, the pull of her fingers finding your lips, "There is a small sadness I see in you, and it is always a pleasure to see you smile so truthfully - almost as rare a gift as a ruby." She traces them, slowly, her thumb pressing against a peeking canine dangerously. You blink.
But then she is smiling tipsily and pressing her curious lips to your own and fingering the metal chain of your necklace.
(You don't think about the ache in your dead heart when Mother takes her under the cover of darkness. You don't think about your frown and Mother's pleased smile at the sight of her sprawled next to you on the bed. You do, however, think about the girl's dimple and her sweet, clumsy Russian against your frame.)
+
You are a diamond, shining, shining, shining.
("My glittering girl," Mother says, quietly, her thumb swiping across the blood on your cheek, "you are my greatest treasure." She pops her thumb in her mouth, sucking it clean, and you believe her down to the marrow of your bones. You shiver and ache to cradle her hand against your face.)
+
"Dance with me," Ell says, her fingers tangled with yours so tightly and an incredible smile across her lips. You cannot describe the twinge in your dead heart or the coiled heat in your stomach, but you swallow around parched tongue and laugh when she pulls you fluttering across the floor. You think of the blood swimming through her veins and imagine no piece in any museum could compare to its beauty.
"Come away with me," you whisper, later, against the pounding of her temple. You can hear the works of the young Johann Strauss fill the room and you can imagine Ell so wonderfully bright next to you. "Come with me," you say, your lips finding the warmth of her cheek.
(When she says yes, you think your dead heart just might sing.)
+
You beg to drain Ell empty as you claw against your tomb of ivory. Pleasepleasepleaseplease, you want to say to Mother, her neck under your hands and twisted when she claws at your face. You'll do anything, anything, for one more day beneath the sun so that you might catch flame and flutter away across the wind. Please, you sob around lungs full of gore, please, Mother, please, please.
You remember little Gottfried choking to death as you slept, you remember father, and oh god how you wish you had died those days, rotten away and eaten already. You think of the girl that was left in the ground decades ago, young and beautiful and clean, and you pray that she might take your place.
(letmedieletmedieletmediepleasegodjustletmedie you cry and cry and try to rip your veins open with bone and nail. It's futile, trying to end your endless life. Mother knew this though, she knew you would scream and cry and try and pull yourself inside out.
You should have known better, she would hiss, her fingernails digging against your empty wrist. Mother is cruel, but you should have known, should have known, should have known.
You know now - drowninginbloodandEllohgod, you know.)
+
It is not hard to lose yourself to images of blood and gore when you drown in it, you realize. There are minutes, days, years, when you forget the way the light looked across Ell's fair skin; only able to imagine the blood at her throat and the taste as it slides across your tongue. You can imagine her jugular slit so prettily and poured over you, the sacrificial lamb to your sins as blood clots in your throat and under your fingernails and behind your eyelids.
You can see it so clearly, Ell's wide eyes and frightened grip when you grin, your lips bloody and open as you drain her dry. (But later, with the sun in your hair and the sky across your eyes, you will regret these such thoughts about your lost love, fingers trembling so terribly.)
+
You're dead. Youaredeadyouaredeadyouaredead - Mother never saved you, never pushed life back into your veins. That man still cuts your insides until the blood wells up in your mouth, until your gown is red and ripped, until the dirt shifts over your head. Mother? Mother, where are you? you cannot help but ask now because Mother sat with you and waited. Mother pulled you up and brushed the dirt from your bloody corset. Mother pushed the hair from your eyes and wiped your cheeks and nudged you to the terrified man, watching as you drank him dry.
She is nothing more but a shattered memory now, empty and cutting.
Mother, you cry, mothermothermother.
+
The world is scratching at the inside of your skull. You have not moved for a long time now (months? years? centuries?) and it itches along your brain, insistent and painful.
You can't remember what the sky looks like anymore, just black on black and choking, but - but there is something there. Maybe? It feels like your eyes are aflame and a claw of something blocks the shards of the stuff that is not black. And the feeling, god, the feeling piercing the sides of your head, like nails to your eardrums (screams, you will realize later, when bodies lay scattered around you and blood drips from your teeth.).
But then you are on fire and crying because you cannot see black, just white that pulses through your brain. That feeling, that noise, is pinning you to your grave, and you don't understand how you knew anything but the dark and choking.
A sludge of gore falls from your nose and your throat when you claw yourself free, air sliding in empty space. You cry, oh god, light and fire and pain, and you feel like your body might burn up from the fever that should have claimed you with the rest of your family. Your hair falls from you in clumps, dark and dirty, and your blinded eyes try to find the dark.
"Ach mein gott," you can hear then, loud and guttural, "Ach gott."
And, ach gott, you hear them, their screams, and their cries for God, and their pulse fluttering against their throats. You sob.
+
It is far too dark in this tiny, cramped place. Your hands shake around your copy of The Sun Also Rises, paper crinkling and ripping under your nervous fingers. There are whimpers, somewhere, and a child sniffles against the neck of his mother, thousands of hearts beating in your ears, and Ernest Hemingway's name trembles in and out of your vision. It's the only thing to remind you that you are not back deep in the ground, choking and dying and screaming.
"You alright?" someone asks at your side, suddenly, when you cannot stop the wince as the siren wails loudly outside the bunker. He's old, the someone, with a chunk of his face missing and eyes that look at you deeply. You alright, he asks you, and you want to cackle at the words of it.
You could count off on your fingers just how many languages you can repeat the words back to him, but you can't find them squirmed across your tongue, true and strong. "Fine," you say, because this little man wouldn't understand. Centuries on this rock, and you don't think you could ever forget the sound of bombs screaming through the sky.
"War wounds," the someone says, an explanation to the tremor that runs through your old bones, "Never did get used to the raids, meself."
You nod a little, attempting to shoot him a convincing nervous smile, and you try to imagine explaining you'd never been in a raid, no, your mind is filled with cracks of light seeping through the dark and screams and blood, so much blood. Your youth was not spent huddled in the corner as the world was ripped to pieces, you cannot explain, because your youth was silk gowns and flustered boys and the sound of cracked necks as you drank them all until they ran dry.
The old man looks at you with half his face and wisdom in his eyes, and you think you are at least three times his age.
You push out a breathy sigh to his concerned face, and repeat, "Fine."
+
You think you see them sometimes, Ell and Mother. You will be crossing the street in Prague, sunglasses sliding down your nose and a book between your fingers, when they are there, alive and whispering your name. Ell (lovelyEllwhotastessofine) will be waiting in a dress, far outdated and far too modest, with light in her eyes and a small, giggled yes against your palm. And Mother (mothermothermother), she will be there with arms open and an apology against her teeth. You see them and, if only for a moment, you can forget.
But you blink and they are not there, of course, only your mind catching the light with a funny distort.
(You miss them most of the time, with a heavy ache in your chest and bile against your throat. You are so very tired of being alone, stuck in a mind that has been broken up and flipped inside out. So, when you miss them and the sparkle in their eyes at the sound of your voice, it is easy to picture them in Austria with the light.
You swallow a shuttering breath because sometimes you cannot help but imagine Mother and Ell as dancing flames through the halls of Ambras, screaming out your name. You have to press your fingers to the curve of your forehead and count backwards from ten and try to remember your love is dead and Mother cannot find you. One, two, three, you realize just how much of you was left in the dark choking.)
+
Your wrists never healed right. There is an angle to them and they crack every time you roll them and it reminds you of the muffled noise in the blood. You had spent the first long while in the dark banging against edges of your prison as best you could, even when bones split through your skin and your stolen blood mixed with Ell's.
And, there's a girl in Belarus, one who presses her fingers to the cracked bones and asks if they are okay. From the war, is all you can say, because how else might you explain?
+
"Mircalla," you hear, a soft whisper in the cold spring air, and the memory cuts you like glass. The cup of tea and AB positive splinters under your fingertips, and your mouth salivates, jaw twitching, and you can feel the vomit at the back of your throat. Mother, Mother. "My darling Mircalla."
There are fingers to the curve of your cheek, the spot where your cheeks should be bright and red and flushed with a bright youth. Tears are stuck behind your eyes, and the cup clatters against the saucer noisily because you cannot control the shaking. "Mother," you stutter, because your mouth is stuck around the word.
Mother smiles and you cannot help but think her eyes sparkle. "Darling."
There is blood between her teeth and your mind remembers the blood clotting between your fingers with the pounding of dirt shifting onto your prison. "Mother," you say again because, you should have known better.
"You always were a nostalgic one," Mother says, fingers then at the spine of the book on the table separating the two. You do not mistaken her tone for that of affection, not again.
I loved you once, you think because you did, remembering the crack of spines beneath your thumbs. I love you still, because you think you still do. Mother takes your hand then, cold and strong in her own. It's just like the night you died, hands around your wrists as she helped pull you up from the dirt and shit and blood.
Mircalla, Mircalla, Mircalla, she says, fingers against palm, and you sigh, Mother, Mother, Mother.
+
The game is always the same - you smile, you bat your eyes, you touch soft skin and watch the blush. The times are different now, with new music and new short clothes and new ways to slip your fingers between thighs. Mother watches you and waits for the moment when your dead human heart will take over, bleeding remorse. But she forgets how many times you have played this game into warm soft necks. You whisper, you kiss, you bite the insides of elbows and sends girls running.
(There can be great satisfaction in small revenges, you say later, and feel courage run through your dead heart.)
+
You need to come back, Mother texts you one time, when there is a girl in your bed and on her back as careless flirtations in whispered German pass between you. You stare at the pixelated text later when the girl is gone and your bed is cold and empty. Mother finally adds, please, and you know it is not a plea.
You swallow, typing, okay.
+
Laura Hollis is something.
Laura Hollis is really fucking annoying.
She is nothing but five foot two of pure determination and go-get-'em! attitude, and you are honestly starting to think you'd rather suffer through 80's fashion again than deal with this child's passive-aggressive murmurs in your direction. You are nearly eighty percent certain your midget-sized hurricane of a roommate has angrily huffed in your general direction at least seven times now, muttering not-so-quiet and not-so-nice names about you as she types furiously and makes repeated calls.
You groan a little.
"Come on, cupcake," you start, stomach swooping pleasantly at the condescending edge to your tone and the way Hollis's shoulders tighten, "the sooner you accept Maddy is not coming back, the better off you'll be."
"Betty," Hollis says. Her fingertips are white around the sharpie she has been using to scratch notes. "Her name is Betty, you insufferable shell of -" she cuts herself off, angrily slamming the sharpie against the table, staining her notebook with a long streak that shows at least three pages later.
You can't help the slow grin across your face. The world is going to eat this girl alive.
+
Sometimes you cannot be sure this isn't the dream. You sit in the light with the sun and the breeze against the pale of your cheek, a fear deep and heavy in you grows, scared it is just the imaginings of your broken mind in that dark pit. You are not a woman of faith like your father was, but when you wake gasping and close to a scream, you pray and pray this world is not of your making.
+
"You need to take care of this," her mother says, fingers to the curve of your elbow. Her nails are sharp enough to draw blood with the right amount of pressure, and you try not to flinch away. "Your friend had better stop asking questions, or she just might have another disappearance on her hands."
"Fine," you respond, trembling when you think about the coffin.
Mother smiles and kisses your cheek.
+
Sometimes, you have very bad days.
(These are the days when you are nothing but anger and sharp teeth. Days when you find a girl, sweet and unsuspecting, and drink and drink, because this is what Mother created you to be, because the girl you were supposed to be is still buried in the ground, choking or ash you do not know. You drink but cannot kill them, only help their drunk, giggling bodies stumble to bed and remind them just how much alcohol is running through their veins.
You hate these days the most of your wretched existence, when you have to run to the mountains and crack a tree to chipped slivers because if you don't break something else you might break instead.
You run and run from everything until you fall and scream.)
+
"That's just the way the world works, cutie," you say, swallowing hotly. The world is what you make it, and you have made it cruel and unforgiving with blood beneath your tongue and death in your teeth.
+
You breath comes stuttering, fingers in claws around your ankles and your face pressed to the curve of your knees. You are still tied up in the ground, nose clotted with blood and unheard screams on your tongue, and maybe there is no escaping it. Maybe it was what Mother wanted, a chunk of yourself gone and buried like the rest of your family.
These are the times when you wish hell would hurry up and claim you, when the world shrinks down to the ground beneath your two feet, when your old bones ache and you want to beg all the gods you know for some kind of release.
(Maybe you already have one, you think, when Laura brushes her thumb across you knuckles and looks at you so softly. But you are a naive fool if you think it will end in anything other than blood and pain.)
+
Laura smiles at you, tongue peeking a little from between her teeth, and, god, you are eighteen without centuries of atrocities to your name.
+
Is this how I am to die? you want to ask your sweet dead father, am I full of enough life for you? The sword is burning up inside you and Laura is crying so beautifully.
You jump and ache for the fires to consume you.