October 20th, 1893 — Daphnel Home

Belle lay on her bed, a mixture of anticipation and trepidation gnawing at her as she clutched a vial of Spiritus Sancti in her hand. Victor had been living as a ghost since his untimely passing, and she had longed to reconnect with him in a way she hadn't thought possible. The promise of the drug had seemed too tantalizing to resist, and so, here she was, ready to experience the ethereal.

The vial trembled in her hand as she unscrewed the cap, taking a deep breath to steady her racing heart. Was this foolish? Possibly. Or a chance at something truly extraordinary. With a determined resolve, she tipped the vial and drank its contents. The liquid tasted bitter, and her vision blurred as the room spun around her. Her body went limp, her limbs giving way, and she slumped lifeless into the soft coverlet of her bed.

But Chris was not gone. She could see her own lifeless form. Panic gripped her briefly, but she forced herself to calm down. This was what she had wanted, after all. Floating above her body. She felt weightless, a curious sensation that both thrilled and terrified her. As she moved her hand, she saw it pass through the nightstand as if it were made of mist. The world was different now, and she was a part of it in a way she'd never imagined.

With cautious curiosity, she floated toward the wall nearest to her. It was an experiment that she couldn't resist. As she approached, she half-expected to be stopped by an impenetrable barrier, but to her amazement, she passed through it effortlessly. The sensation was like nothing she'd ever experienced. She could feel the textures of the wall pass through her, but it wasn't uncomfortable - odd but not uncomfortable. It was as if she were made of the same substance as the world around her. On the other side of the wall, she could see her dressing room, the mess of garments that she had abandoned last night too tired from her late night sojourn with the Order, her maid really should have put them away already.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

Victor drifted through the wall into his wife's bedroom without hesitation; the trepidation where he lingered in the hallway and fretted over not being physically capable of knocking had long since passed, and he'd gotten into the habit of talking as he moved into any new space so that he didn't startled the people inside too much with his abrupt entrance. "They said you'd gone to bed early," he said as he floated in. "Headache, or..."

And then he spotted her on the bed. It was immediately obvious that she wasn't asleep: she was laying on top of the sheets instead of between them, and she was still dressed, and as he hovered closer he could see that her eyes were open — but empty. He knew that empty look. His own eyes held it on New Year's Eve. He felt suddenly cold — impossible to really feel, as his body didn't circulate blood or produce warmth any more — but this was a psychological cold that settled on him, psychosymptomatic — the chill of the grave.

"Oh," he breathed, almost silently. Had she been sick? She hadn't said anything to him about it, but he hadn't been talking to her much lately; she'd been so busy with her brother's campaign, always flitting about, and he'd been busy with his own pursuits. She could have been sick, and he probably wouldn't have noticed. But even if she had been sick this was terribly sudden. Someone ought to have noticed if she'd had symptoms, even if it wasn't him, and someone should have recommended her to a healer. If she was going to waste away it should have happened after convalescing in bed for weeks with top tier healing talent flitting in and out every hour, not just when she'd gone to bed early one night. But there was no mistaking the emptiness in her eyes. She was dead. She was dead and she was gone, and he was here, and he would always be here and now there was one less person in the world who cared that he was.

"Oh," he said again, and this time it had a mournful bent, though he wasn't sure if he was mourning her or mourning himself all over again.

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Fabulous set by Lady!

Christabel was musing over the banalities of the arrangement of her wardrobe before she braced herself for the glide back through the wall into her room, she shivered at the feeling, it was truly disconcerting.

She stopped short at the sight of her husband, translucent and wavering over her bedside. She hadn't wanted him to find her, not like this now, not now. She had wanted to experience this before telling Victor, to ensure that it worked, and now, her experiment was met with a soft, surprised echoing "oh" of her own.

Her translucent form moved closer to her own bedside, her husband's presence casting a peculiar, somber mood over the room. Belle tried to muster words to explain but found her voice as ethereal as her form. She followed Victor's gaze to her lifeless body, which seemed to have triggered a realization that mirrored her own moments ago. Her body was here, but she wasn't. She was now just a wraith, a specter, a ghost in her own bedroom.

Her open eyes were particularly disconcerting - with trembling hands, Belle reached out to close her own lifeless eyes, an instinctive and macabre act, but her hand passed through her own cheek. The realization hit her like a chilling gust of wind. She was truly separated from her corporeal self, and the feeling was almost overwhelming.

In her spectral state, she drifted back a step, hovering beside Victor, I can explain' she started, wondering if she could - what could this possibly look like, a healthy woman went to bed, and a ghost now stood in her place.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

He ought to tell someone, he thought distantly as he stared at his wife's body, but he wasn't sure who to tell or what to say. And anyway, it was hard to feel any sense of urgency about it. She was already gone, he was sure — a healer rushing in now would do nothing to bring her back. He had time. Time to process, time to think, time to feel.

Or at least he thought he did. He was not expecting to be interrupted by the very wife whose death he was trying to process. He could not bring himself to speak when he saw her glide into the room. His mouth fell open in obvious shock. He didn't recover himself until he saw her reaching to try to close her own eyes, at which point he was so viscerally reminded of his own series of emotions on seeing his own corpse that he actually cried out to stop her — not that it had any effect.

"Oh god," he said, feeling as though he was going to be sick. (It wasn't a physical possibility, of course, but the nausea was no less real: what else was he meant to do with this churn of emotions in his gut?) He wasn't even seeing her, at this point. He was seeing his own neck bent the wrong direction at the bottom of the stairs. He was sitting in the upstairs room of the Flint house with Oscar, trying to ignore the body between them. He was falling into the mausoleum in Asphodel and finding himself surrounded by decay and unable to avoid picturing it all happening to his own body, down in the earth. "Dear god."

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Fabulous set by Lady!

Belle watched, her spectral form hovering acorss the bed from her husband, her corpse between them, as he stared at her lifeless body, lost in a distant world of memories and grief. Her presence was an unexpected interruption to his silent contemplation, and she felt his surprise wash over her as he turned his gaze toward her. His mouth fell open in shock, and Belle was acutely aware of his emotional turmoil.

She paused for a moment, holding back from touching him. It was evident that he wasn't seeing her; his gaze was not fixed on her, but rather on a thousand miles and nearly a year away in the past, a place she couldn't reach. No doubt reliving those moments that had shattered their lives and brought them to this eerie juncture.

"Victor?" she whispered, the sound soft and gentle, an attempt to bring him back to the present. But it was as though her words couldn't penetrate the depths of his memories. His pain was palpable, even without her sense of corporeal touch.

Feeling a sense of desperation to connect with him, Belle circled the bed, her ghostly form moving with the ease of habit around the obstacles in the room rather than through them. She approached him from the other side, her insubstantial hand tentatively reaching out to touch his upper arm.

"Victor, can you hear me?" she asked again, her voice a soothing murmur. She longed for him to recognize her presence, to understand that she was here, that they were sharing this inexplicable and surreal experience together. She needed to bring him back from the abyss of his memories, back to this ghostly present.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

When Victor had died he'd had to spend a lot of time with his body, standing guard over it in an otherwise empty room while he was ostensibly sleeping. Jasper had been off to secure a polyjuice potion, Bea had been in bed as an alibi. Victor's main job at that point had been to ensure that no one saw him — his body or his spirit — until the time was right tomorrow. It had been a deeply traumatizing experience, though he hadn't allowed himself to realize it for months. He'd had to push through it for their plan, for Bea, for the family as a whole.

Christabel didn't need to be here with her corpse, he realized. There was no reason to linger here.

"Let's get out of here," he said, pulling his eyes off of the body and towards her spirit. He wasn't sure he had really fully processed what it meant that she was here as a spirit, for either of them, but he could figure all of that out after they'd put some space between them and the deathbed. "Get away from it. The body."

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Fabulous set by Lady!

Victor's words cut through the heavy quiet, and Belle realized that he had no reason to linger here with her corpse. Her initial experiment had taken an unexpected turn, and she now stood before her husband.

His words made Belle's translucent form shiver with relief. Perhaps she could explain, make him understand that she wasn't truly gone. But she felt a growing worry that he had misunderstood her ghostly appearance. As they moved into the room attached to her bedroom, Belle couldn't help but glance back at her lifeless body, her eyes still eerily open, the empty vial clutched in her hand gripped with a rictus. She knew that this would be an unsettling sight for Victor, and she needed to clarify the situation.

Gently, she stopped him in his tracks, her insubstantial hand resting gently on his arm. "Victor, we need to speak," she implored, her voice soft but urgent. She looked into his eyes, hoping to convey the seriousness of her words. "There is something you need to understand."

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

Victor glided into the dressing room and stopped just before he would have touched her hand — it was a habit at this point to respond to what would have been touches from living people just a half second before, to save them both the unpleasantness of an accidental touch. He wasn't really looking at her as he moved, and he'd raised both hands to run them fitfully through his hair. Belle was saying something, but it was impossible for him to hear her. There was only one thing his mind could focus on; one question he couldn't move past. Once they were clear of the body it was only a matter of seconds before it burst out of him.

"Why did you stay?" He looked at her now, expression a little wild and a little desperate, and hoping dearly that she would not answer because I love you.

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Fabulous set by Lady!

He seemed lost in his own thoughts, running his hands through his hair fitfully, and he didn't respond to her pleas, lost in a place she couldn't reach him. Victor's focus shifted, and he finally turned to face her. His expression was a mix of wildness and desperation. His question came out in a rush.

"Why did you stay?"

It was a question she hadn't expected. It burned the air and it left her feeling hollowed out. The weight of it settling in her stomach like a stone. It was a question she had avoided for months, a question that had haunted her in the silence of the night. Why had she stayed when it had been so clear that her love for him had not been reciprocated? She had known that even before they married, but it had seemed wrong somehow to abandon him.

"I... I stayed because I am your wife," she faltered, her voice trembling with uncertainty. It was the simplest answer, the truth, but it didn't address the depth of the emotions and the complexities she felt. Belle wanted to save his feelings, but how could she convey the unspoken sentiments that had bound her to him, even if they were not always reciprocated? She couldn't find the words to explain the myriad of emotions that had kept her by his side.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

No, no, no, he thought, and while he managed to keep from saying it she could certainly have read it on his face. His brow furrowed and his mouth curled in anguish.

Victor did not recall having made any conscious choice to stay at the moment of his death, but he recognized that if he had, at that moment he would have chosen to linger. He couldn't have left Beatrice like that, left the family to clean up his death without him. It was a sense of duty that had kept him past death... but that didn't mean he hadn't had plenty of time to think it through and regret it since. His family had needed him for maybe forty-eight hours, and he was going to be here forever, long after they had all died. It had been ten months since his death, but he was still wrestling with that — not that there was anything he could do about it. His fate was sealed, whether he regretted it or not.

And now Belle had been doomed to the same eternity, lingering here while loved ones rotted and buildings fell to disrepair, and she was here for him. She had done this for his sake, and she couldn't have known the magnitude of what had happened — he hadn't, until the dread of it crept into his mind in pieces over the months after his death. Their marriage had condemned her to this. He had ruined her.

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Fabulous set by Lady!

The anguish etched across Victor's face was painfully clear to Belle. He hadn't spoken it aloud, but she could read the despair in his expression, the turmoil in his furrowed brow and twisted mouth. She wished she could reach out to him, touch him, offer some comfort, but his physical distance and the protectiveness of his posture made that impossible.

She hadn't known that her answer to his question might hurt him, and she couldn't have anticipated the depth of his anguish, the overwhelming sense of betrayal that seemed to radiate from him. It almost broke her heart to witness it.

"Victor," she said, her voice filled with pleading, an earnest attempt to bridge the emotional chasm between them. "What would you have had me do instead?"

Belle's question was genuine. She had made her choice, out of love, duty, or perhaps a blend of both, and she had stayed to be with him, to try to make a life with her husband. It had been a disaster - they had been lost in their own grief, he had pulled away, and she had been too far underwater to follow him.

But now, she needed to understand what he expected of her, what he believed she should have done differently, even if she feared his answer would only deepen the pain they both felt in the limbo in which they were both living.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

"I don't want to be here!" he nearly shouted. He hadn't meant to say it, but the words had exploded out of him immediately in response to her impossible question. What would he have had her do instead? What did it matter now? He knew from firsthand experience there was no way to go back and choose differently, after the moment of death had passed — if in fact it had ever been a choice in the first place. She was here with him now, destined to be here forever, and there was nothing either of them could do about it — but how was he meant to carry the weight of that guilt with him for the rest of eternity? That he was the reason she had lingered?

The fact that he had raised his voice at her and the content of his words caught up with him all at once, and he regretted having spoken. He raked his hands down to cover his face, hiding the tangled mess of emotion on his face from view. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said, words running together into a jumble. "I'm so sorry."

He was going to spend eternity apologizing to her.

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Fabulous set by Lady!

Victor's outburst hit her like a physical blow, and she took a step back as if recoiling from a physical strike. The shock on her face was evident, her translucent features slack with disbelief. His words were like a wound, and the pain they carried cut deep.

"Victor... I..." She struggled, her voice barely more than a whisper. The last ten months of her existence had been marked by her determination to stay by his side, a commitment born out of love and her duty, or so she had believed. It had been her choice, her solemn commitment to their marriage, that even death could not part them.

But now, his words echoed in her mind, and they resonated with every doubt she had ever had about her place in the Daphnel family, her worth as a wife, her role now in the house and society. Her brother's words before the marriage, her mother's reminders since — they all came crashing down on her. She had feared that no one truly wanted her here, and now, it seemed her fears had become her reality, and most significantly he didn't want her here.

Belle's heart, unbeating as it was, ached with a sorrow she had not thought possible. The silence that lingered between them was thick with pain, regret, and an overwhelming sense of isolation. The feeling of drowning that had taken her in the immediate aftermath of his death returned and she felt like she was drowning.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

Victor pulled his hands even farther down, enough that he could look at her while still cupping his fingers over his mouth and jaw. He shouldn't have said anything — obviously. If he could have taken the words back he would have, but there was no going back — just as there was no going back on the fork in her road that had seen her lingering here, and no going back on his own. The only thing to do moving forward was the same thing that he'd been doing for the past ten months: making the best of a bad situation and studiously avoiding thinking about all the worst parts. He'd been composed almost every moment since his death, but this — the suddenness of her death, the visceral reaction he had to watching her try to close her own eyes, the shock of the whole thing — had rattled him enough to lose his facade. Of course it had, because hell, but it wasn't like any of that was her fault. Presumably she hadn't chosen to die in the first place (though had he spotted the empty vial in her corpse's hand he might have calculated those odds differently).

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said again, shaking his head. "I'm so sorry, Belle, I shouldn't have — I just never wanted this. I never wanted this for you," he said, finally dropping his hands and letting his shoulders slump slightly. "God, I'm just so sorry."

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Fabulous set by Lady!

Victor's remorse was palpable, and as he dropped his hands, his shoulders slumped slightly. He apologized again and again, expressing his regret and despair over the situation they now found themselves in. Belle wanted to console him, to ease the turmoil within him, but his rejection had left her cold.

With an almost mechanical gesture, she raised a hand to silence him, a sharp motion that echoed with her frustration. She stomped her foot on the carpet, a gesture that, under different circumstances, might have intrigued her with the absence of sound that followed. But now, she was too consumed by her emotions to consider such curiosities.

"You shouldn't have, but I am glad at least that you're being honest with me at last," she said, her tone flat, her lips threatened to pull downwards as she fought back tears. She wrapped her arms around herself, a futile attempt to ward off the overwhelming feeling of isolation that threatened to swallow her whole.

"And you needn't apologize, husband," she added, this last said with her voice taking on a razor-sharp iciness. "All things that can be very easily rectified."her tone clipped and final.

  

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I am my mother's savage daughter, The one who runs barefoot cursing sharp stones

I am my mother's savage daughter, I will not cut my hair, I will not lower my voice
MJ made glory

Her emotion hardly registered to him, but he had given off apologizing at her gesture. As she finished, however, his face clouded with confusion. That was the whole point of his reaction — that what was done was irreversible.

"What do you mean?" he asked, mind racing. He finally took note of her body language: she was angry. Did she intend to leave him? Was that what she meant by rectify? That wouldn't fix anything. It wouldn't give either of them any increased comfort in the face of eternity, and it wouldn't lessen his guilt for having brought her to this. Or did she mean that she was going to try and force him to be happy? That was... rather difficult to believe, but she was nothing if not determined to a fault.

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Fabulous set by Lady!