Chapter Text
The year is 1903, you are yet still young, and a small tragedy befalls your household.
One day your hale and healthy tutor is sitting with you in the study, inking corrections onto your arithmetic, though it needs very few. The next, a courier is on the steps of your rowhouse, and you are intercepting a letter from him—no, wait. From his family, actually.
You learn that when you open it. You also learn that he has passed away.
People talk, of course. You listen. And so you come to hear that a man was mauled by an animal in the park across town on that very same night. But it couldn’t be him, right? He was older and did not live in that direction. The letter made it sound so peaceful a departure. You imagined him passing in his sleep. It couldn’t be him.
Out of respect, a week passes and you languish with the literature he left you. Your studies are important and you are lucky to have them, even if they happen at home and not in some great, mahogany lecture hall. That doesn’t stop you from watching out your pretty window as the local boys come and go from the university, your face dark with envy. A week is too long to read and read with no instruction. Who will you discuss The Picture of Dorian Gray with while it remains fresh in your mind? Should you not be honoring his memory by finding a new tutor posthaste?
You bring it up at dinner that night. You get what you want easily. Even better, your new tutor is found quite quickly.
And thus, on an evening just after the autumn equinox, a fire lit to warm and brighten the study, you shake his cold, bony hand and make the acquaintance of Viktor.
Just Viktor.
He’s not very tall, hollow in the face, and walks with a pronounced limp. He cannot be much older than you, but he exudes an intelligence beyond his years. An old soul, the housekeeper said. His eyes are startlingly sharp, so bright a brown you could really call them amber, honey, or high karat gold. Any of those, certainly, but beautiful suits best. They are his most magnetic feature, aside from the weapon that is his voice. He could use it to have you do anything, surely, but he mostly uses it to correct your pronunciation when you study French or to scold you when your mind drifts reading bone dry Tolstoy.
He comes in the dark and leaves in the dark, and after the first time you make him laugh hard enough to see that one of his canines is both crooked and freakishly pointy, you wish he’d stay longer.
He’s familiar, somehow. Night after night you can’t place it. Can’t even tell what exactly is familiar about him. But how could you?
You didn’t know, yet, that he’d been watching you.
It would be a long time before you knew that.
Years.
They pass quickly, in the spring of your life. But the springs and summers themselves pass without Viktor. So much sunlight, and yet they become the darkest part of your year, when he returns to Prague. Frankly, you don’t understand why he ever leaves. It’s beautiful, from the few pictures you’ve seen and the way he’s described it. You wish he’d write, or perhaps send you a small postcard. He never does, that first year he departs and leaves you in the hands of a boring, retired headmaster for those six long months. You check the mail every day and receive nothing but a formal, dispassionate notice that come October he intends to return to his post. No return address.
When he does, it’s as if he never left. He tucks himself up to the old oak table in front of the fireplace, just across from you, and it’s much like opening a bookmarked page. For a moment, lost to excitement, you feel brave enough to ask him personal questions. He does not like personal questions. He considers them a breach of formality between teacher and pupil. But emboldened, you finally ask what prevents him from starting your sessions earlier. Surely your family could afford more of his time? That’s all you want. You enjoy these lessons so.
He smiles. It’s a thin-lipped thing, but always sincere when you earn one. “I spend my days at the University. There is much to be learned here, many advancements in science, that I might take back home and share. I cannot come to you any sooner.”
Your fingers trace the gilt lettering of the book before you. “I like to walk near the school grounds, you know.” The fire is rather warm. You look at it, not at him. “I might wait for you. We might walk together. You might instruct me as we do.”
He laughs at your boldness, but a quiet chuckle. “Unattended? I believe your family would be quite upset.”
“Are we not unattended now?” you counter. And indeed, you are alone with the pocket doors drawn shut to keep out distraction, because Viktor is Viktor and he is no threat to your modesty. So they believe. It’s an utter disservice to him. “You would make a perfectly fit chaperone.”
His hand is cold and soft when it takes yours across the table—takes you by surprise, too. You’re stunned by the warmth of the gesture. “Wait for me here, please,” he asks, and you agree rather bonelessly.
You do not bring it up again. You reach a threshold for bravery you cannot surpass on the very first day of that season. But when the next spring approaches and you grow desperate, you ask if he might write to you. He politely refuses. The spring after that—because once when he looked especially ill, he put his hand on your knee and that certainly meant something, right?—you ask if he might leave a picture for you to pray over for his safe return. You have no higher power to pray to, but he need not know it would go under your pillow or into a locket, in truth. He politely, shyly refuses that too.
The year is suddenly 1908. By the time you’ve spent twenty five years on this earth, and he has come and gone four times, you are properly in love with him. How interesting it is, to love a man you know so little about. But surely, you do.
Which is why it’s a shame that you next turn twenty six and are betrothed by your family to the first man that will take a woman of your age, who is too intelligent for her own good. You’ve grown mouthy, with a thirst for independence that doesn’t befit your station. You’re becoming a burden; have overstayed your welcome in the very home you grew up in. You’ve also sabotaged every courtship attempt you’ve been subjected to in the last few years, one man on your mind, until now the choice has been taken from you. You wanted it back.
More than anything, you wanted Viktor to come back; to fall into his arms and sob; to at least be able to write him a tear stained letter saying this is the last winter you’ll ever spend together. But you had to wait another agonizing month. During it, you found fragile acceptance. This was always to be your fate. Viktor did not want you anyways.
So when he finally shows up to the door on his usual cold, dark evening and the housekeeper escorts him inside, you calmly wait in the study. No tears, no dramatics; just you, standing before the fireplace to greet him. As always, he takes your hand as if to cordially shake it, but something different washes over his face, staring at yours. You didn’t recognize it then, but it was realization. You have one of your own, too, as you stand there and look long at the face of your one-sided friend. Whereas you have matured into your features, his have remained much the same. How jealous he must make people, to age so gracefully. Where did he hide his picture, your Dorian Gray?
You invite him to sit and get off his feet—to settle into your usual places. And to follow the formula, you ask the same meaningless question you do each and every year: “I trust you had a pleasant journey?”
He’s supposed to say yes and promptly move on.
But instead he asks in a tone you’ve never, ever heard before: “What is that?” He’s looking at your hand. He sounds livid, and he’s looking at your hand. The stone perched in platinum upon your finger sparkles faintly in the low light, and you snatch your hand into your lap with a sigh. Suddenly, you do want to cry.
“As of a month ago, I find myself engaged,” you tell him like it’s a dull, passionless fact. Of course, you can’t bring yourself to look at him when you say it.
“…To be married?”
Your laugh is a humorless thing. “Of course, what else could I mean?” Then it occurs to you: “Why is it that you may ask me personal questions, but I may not ask you the same?”
“That is irrelevant,” he snaps, brute forcing the conversation to his strange ends. He reaches forward across the table to take your chin in his hand; to make you look at him. His hand is cold. Always so cold. His voice is softer this time; his thumb strokes across your cheek before he lets go. “Is this what you want?”
Nobody had asked you that. You shake your head no with such vigor that you can feel your hairpins shift against your scalp, fisting your dress white knuckled, but that can’t stop the truth now. “I want my freedom. I want control. I want…” You, but the way he’s looking at you steals that word away.
Who is this dark and wrathful and determined person sitting across from you? The one who says, “I will make it so,” like a promise, as though he has any bearing on the situation?
“How?” you whisper as conspiracy blooms thick in the space between you. “What could you do to prevent this?”
He snatches up his cane and gets to his feet, so resolute that he’s willing to abandon the session when he has never once before. “Give me time.”
And then he is gone.
—-
You expect to wait, naturally. You’ve had years of practice waiting for him, though it’s different this time. You suddenly can’t predict what will happen; there is no formula to follow. But you’re almost certain, now…
He wants you too.
You dress for bed that night, crawl between the blankets, and spread your legs as if for him. You’ve done it many times. It’s all you’ve ever known. You’re quickly wet enough to slip in two fingers, to fuck yourself on them until you’re panting softly and whispering his name into the darkness. This house is old and solid; you have the only bedroom on the main floor. Nobody will hear.
But there’s footsteps in the hallway. You pause for them to pass, though who would walk this floor at so late an hour? It’s very late, indeed. Only at the last second do you realize that they’re not normal; they’re odd little clusters of three. Why is that familiar?
You withdraw your hand when the sound stops in front of your door. Something is wrong. A chill sweeps your body, and it slowly dawns on you that you are well and truly scared. Terrified as you lie paralyzed and watch the doorknob turn.
But before you see anything, there comes a voice from the shadows. It says, just a whisper: “It’s me. Please do not scream.”
You’d know that accent anywhere. And it’s true, as it has always been true, that Viktor’s voice could get you to do anything. You do not scream, though something deep and primally terrified of the dark says that you should. You simply sit up in bed and beckon him closer in a hurry. It’s not lost on you that he locks the door before he comes to sit on the edge, tenderly taking your bewildered face in his hands. Cold, cold, cold.
“How did you…?”
He shushes you softly and shakes his head. “Tell me again.”
Your lips part, confused, as you study his face so close to yours.
“Tell me again,” he repeats, “why you wish not to be married. The whole of it, please.”
You cannot deny him. It spills from you. “I want my freedom, truly. I have never wanted to be bound to someone else that way, and to be subject to the expectations that come with it. I was never made to be an obedient, maternal homemaker. My greatest love has been learning… with you, Viktor. We hardly spend much time together, and yet it means everything to me.”
For five years—sometimes long, sometimes short—have you wanted his attention like this. If you weren’t already so wet, you would be, with his languid, honeyed stare ticking back and forth from your eyes to your lips. He wets his own and whispers, “Go on.”
“You must know by now that I want you.” He is in your room, on your bed in the middle of the night and you did not scream, after all. It’s why you are suddenly emboldened to finally, finally look him in the eye. To take hold of his bony wrist where it yet cradles your face, stroking the back of his hand with your thumb sweet and slow. To confess: “I’ve loved you for years.”
”Oh, miláčku.…” he murmurs. His breath is faintly metallic, and the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up. But why? It’s only Viktor. “You have yet to learn what love is. You have yet to learn what it is to love me. But I will show you, if that is what you wish.”
”I do,” you agree all too quickly, so scared of losing what you have only just gained. “Of course I do.”
It’s all the invitation he needs to kiss you. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted. All that you’ve ever imagined, those slow, tentative, innocent little presses of your lips to his, quiet beneath the crackle of the dying fire. It’s only when your hand fists into his coat, pulling him in for more that the hunger starts to change—to build. You feel it keenly between your legs, a rhythmic throbbing that syncs up to your heart.
It worsens, deliciously, when he slips off his shoes and crawls into bed with you properly. When his kisses turn open-mouthed, and his tongue brushes past your lips. You find the taste of his mouth faintly metallic too and figure: Oh well. If you’re kissing a man with consumption, it’s far too late already. You cannot bring yourself to care about that or much else, the more he licks into your mouth and swallows down your soft, shameless whines. Your head swims thick with only thoughts of how good he makes you feel. When you reach for others—wait, did he ever say he loved you back?—they simply melt away.
You do not protest when his fingers pluck at the neckline of your shift. You do not feel a single shred of shyness when he pulls away to expose the swell of your chest and admire it. You are nothing but agreeable. Your limbs feel heavy. With great effort, you reach for his tie; fair is fair, and of course you want to see every inch of his body too. But he catches up your brash little hand quicker than you can blink.
The hand that holds you is gentle; the lips that lavish your skin are urgent. He kisses the pulse point of your wrist, drags his tongue over it so languidly—nothing short of worshipful. Your heart only beats faster, fluttering just there beneath your skin and his lips. His eyes fall closed in reverence, and he groans like he can sense his effect on you—sweet, low and needy. You are his echo, of course. You need more, and thus your left hand drags itself up your stomach to grasp and roll the stiff little bud of your nipple.
That is the first thing he notices when he opens his eyes, dark and blown, an amber eclipse. The second is the ring you’re still wearing.
“Remove it,” he hisses, and you don’t need to be told twice. You’d pitch it across the room if he hadn’t snatched and shoved it into his breast pocket first. For safekeeping, of course. He’s going to get you a better one, right? He said he was going to help.
Later, your mind whispers before the fog rolls back in. There is nothing to worry about, with Viktor. You are safe. You are wanted. Are you loved?
Your head lolls, heavy on your neck. Your skin tingles pleasantly everywhere he’s kissed it. “I want you to touch me,” you murmur, because he’s yet neglected where you need him most.
He shuffles you back into the bank of downy pillows against the headboard. His hand is on your thigh, hiking up your pretty white nightgown, and you part your legs for him eagerly. He looks perfect, crouched between them. “I have been touching you, moje lahůdka,” he huffs, bemused.
You pull it up higher still until it’s in a gossamer bunch above your hips. You want him to witness you swollen and glistening wet for him; to see the mess he makes of you untouched. “Here.”
His low, appreciative hum is resonant. He’s not truly interested in toying with you; does not hesitate to indulge in his wants or your own.
It’s better than you ever imagined, when his hand cups between your legs and the heel of his palm rubs your sweetest spot; when his fingers slide down the seam of you; when they catch the dip of your wet little cunt and press in sinfully slow. He watches, spellbound, as you writhe for friction and take two of his fingers to the hilt. That’s all he can stand before he swears beneath his breath, dragging you back against his mouth with a hand tangled in your hair. It’s a sloppy, inelegant kiss—perfectly debauched, the way he pants against your lips. He’s making you feel so, so good.
He deserves to feel good too, doesn’t he?
You reach down to palm the outline of his cock through those dark, woolen trousers. It punches a breath out of him, that gentle caress. His head drops to your shoulder, and your other hand fights gravity to stroke the soft, lovely hair at the nape of his neck; to soothe and encourage and hold fast to him. You seal your fate.
Viktor positively trembles, perhaps from the exertion of dragging his fingers in and out of you, as he kisses your neck tentatively. Licks your neck, a little more confidently. Scrapes his teeth against your neck, boldly. It feels divine, and you’re shaking too. The urge to scream rises in you again. You’re close to breaking, after all. You’re very, very close. That is nothing to be frightened of.
“Do you want this?” he whispers, his voice stripped raw. His lips wander lower and lower, trailing wet, open-mouthed kisses down your collarbone to the top of your breast. “Do you want me? Only me?”
And what can you say but, “Yes,” and, “Always,” as you beg him to make you cum?
The feeling is rapturous when he does, like white hot pleasure pulsing thick through every nerve, every vein. So transcendent it’s almost painful. Your eyes white out. You screw them shut against the explosion of sensation anyways, bright and all consuming. It’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before from your own fingers, and it catches fire in your chest too—right where his lips are lavishing your breast. You writhe through it, nuzzling into his hair as you soundlessly sob and soak his fingers to the cadence of his soft, wet moans against your skin. Those quiet noises are so sweet.
Such a shame, that your heartbeat is starting to drown him out. Slower and slower, it thumps in your ears. You’re coming down already, aren’t you?
Something smells metallic again. Really, very metallic.
It still feels so good, though, like embers of pleasured bliss burning low in your body; like drifting asleep in the bath. It still feels good, even when he takes his hand from between your legs and grips your waist hard. His hand is warm and wet. Finally, you made him feel warm.
And you? Oh… You feel warm and wet too. Down the front of your body: Warm and wet and slick with your nightgown clinging to your skin like you sweated it through. From the intensity, you must’ve.
But it’s okay. Viktor won’t mind. Viktor, who is so very good to you; who cares for you so well. Sweet, shy, brilliant Viktor, you love him very much. You think of him always, even now. You stroke his dark, lovely hair. Or well… You try to. You can’t feel it—not his hair nor your fingers nor your hand. Your arm slips from his shoulders and drops, leaden, to the bed.
Lead. Metal. Copper.
You smell blood.
Fighting sleep’s embrace, there’s just enough willpower left in you to open your eyes. Your lashes are damp like you’ve started to cry. Have you? Feeling is fleeting, but Viktor is cradling your head. His touch is kind, his thumb sweeping soothing arcs against the top of your spinal cord. You can’t lift it, your head. You can hardly think. But you can see, for there is an old standing mirror where often you preened for your studious evenings together, or picked yourself apart for the features you imagined he didn’t care for. Though your vision swims, you are reflected in it as you always are.
Just you, alone in that mirror, hovering slack and painted red.
Viktor has no reflection.
One last desperate adrenaline spike has your head lolling forward. What you could feel and smell is all confirmed. Your eyes did not deceive you. Blood is seeping down your body from perfect little bite marks punctured into your breast, staining the white of your nightgown deepest, deathly crimson. And then there is Viktor—such a tender monster—cradling your limp body, deeply focused on drinking you down.
You are bleeding out into the hungry maw of a vampire you so erringly loved.
Yes, vampire. It’s not a dream—you can tell. In the end, the only dream was that a predator might care for its prey. And it is the end. You are dying.
You do not want to die.
A scream well and truly rises in your throat now. Viktor feels it coming first and claps a bloody hand over your mouth. With slow, syrupy grace, he unlatches his teeth and rises from your lacerated breast, blood smeared and congealed around lips that’d kissed you so gently minutes ago. He does not wipe his mouth. “I did ask you not to scream,” he chides, leaning in to kiss away the tear slipping down your waxen cheek. Then another, and another, until your face is smeared red too and he’s laying your rag doll body back against the pillows. “You have nothing to fear from me. I would never truly hurt you.” He releases your mouth when you slacken fully, stroking back your hair. “Did it not feel good? I tried to make it feel good.”
You nod weakly. Your vision is rimmed in black.
He smiles. It’s that precious smile you remember from when he’s rather pleased with himself. You cannot see his teeth. “Come, let us fix this,” he says as your eyes slip closed. Then, urgently, he calls your name.
You’re distantly aware of something cold and seeping wet pressed to your lips; that he’s prying your mouth open and urging you to, “Drink. Please, please drink—you must,” in a voice far too scared to belong to a monster. Something truly putrid drips against your tongue, slips down the back of your throat. It burns like dry ice, and yet you frantically swallow it down. It’s vile, his blood, for that is surely what it is, and yet you crave more. More, more, more until your body wakes up, and you’re clutching his arm to your mouth because even if you’re not sure you want to be this—what he’s making you—it’s preferable to death. You want to live.
You drink deep from him, gulping and messy like it’s water and you’re parched, until he has to rip his arm from your clawing, iron grasp. The trance is broken, then. You’re promptly scrabbling back against the headboard, far away as you can get, breathing hard with burning lungs. It’s not reassuring that the way he’s staring at you is a reflection of your own face: Utterly horrified.
“What have you done?” you ask desperately, clutching at your naked chest. Your heart still beats scared and sure beneath your hands, somehow.
He calms and considers for a moment. “I have acted in accordance with your wishes,” he says slowly, as if he genuinely believes that to be true. “The freedom to be with me is now yours. You will be as I am.”
The audacity. To think you care about that, in this moment, after everything that has just transpired. Freedom, at what cost?
Your voice cuts a hysterical edge. “That was it? Was it really so simple to turn me?” In no significant way did you feel different, yet. Your body is warm, your heart still beats, and your teeth are normal when you touch them. You are not ready to believe that you will change.
He looks quite apologetic to tell you: “The painful part will follow, I’m afraid. Your body has not died yet.”
The tears come flowing unbidden, though you feel completely numb. They are normal too.
“You have a choice,” he tells you, scooting closer. You wipe the amalgamation of blood, snot and tears from your face and take his hand, for at the end of your human life, you were still needy. Indeed, he doesn’t care that you’re filthy; he kisses that hand all the same. You’ve been through a harrowing night, the two of you. And you will go through much, much more.
“You may either choose to stay and let the transformation run its course. Your family may watch you die, and ideally put you in the ground before they see you change. Or...” His hand tightens around yours. He has a preference. “You may gather your things and leave a note. Say that you have run away. With me, preferably; I would like them to know. Leave with me tonight, and I will do what I can to ease the suffering.”
That choice is how you end up on your knees, stoking the fire back to life in your bedside hearth. You cannot stay. Viktor feeds the flames your soiled, bloody linens in torn up shreds while you stuff a trunk with your favorite things. Everything burns but the nightgown you wore—he insists on keeping it as a token. A new one, but you don’t have the presence of mind to catch that implication. All you can manage is putting yourself back together and penning a note several times over until your script is clean and free of tremors; a note for which you will feel eternally guilty. Viktor approves, though.
You mention him.