Chapter 53
Previously: The Rose of Whitby – Chapter 52
Unwillingly, John’s hands go up to his neck. He hurt her? Why? No!
Of course he dreams of a wife and a mother of his children, but Darcy, he knew she couldn’t ever be his wife but she seemed so willing and happy to have him there. He can all but feel her hand in his, the way she looks at him burned into his mind, the sound of her laughter like a beacon through the fog of his existence. All the things he felt he could do because of her. All the future he suddenly seemed to have.
She wouldn’t even tell him herself? For a moment, he wants to shout with anger, but then his balled fist relaxes into sadness. If he’s hurting her, causing her issues, worse, dhampir issues, of course she needs to take care of her drac. She loves her drac so much and he knows that Gregory is a dolt about it. John thought he tried supporting her in it, he did, but if it’s his very blood… Oh no, he never meant to poison her. Fuck, he hurt the one person he wanted to protect. He’ll have to protect her, his girl, even if that means having to stay away.
Lifting his head, ignoring the sting behind his eyes, he realizes that Gregory had kept talking. He didn’t hear a word of it and going by the empty reassurances and ‘there, there’s John doesn’t think he missed anything of importance, because one thing is clear, Gregory wasn’t explaining any further. He just did his usual thing, focusing on the emotion and trying to get rid of it. As if anything Gregory says could heal John’s broken heart.
Cutting him off, John barks more than asks what Darcy needs from him. Does he turn around right here and vanish into the night? Is that what she needs? Gregory just laughs and tells John that she just wants him to marry, it would be so sad if he just left.
Marry? As if John right now feels as if he’ll ever look at another woman again. As if right now all he wants isn’t to shout and rage so he can tell himself he is angry rather than heartbroken. But then he looks up again, at all the bats and moths circling, and he realizes that Darcy is hurting, too. She must be trying to look out for him the only way she can when his very presence is apparently a problem. He can do anything for her, can’t he? Fists tight again, all he can do is nod at Gregory before he storms into the house without a further word. He suddenly isn’t even hungry anymore. If Darcy is starving herself of him then he feels like starving himself is just fitting for both their pain.
~~~~
Darcy looks at Gregory when he returns, she knows how hurt John must be, that this must be as hard on him as it is on her and she wants nothing more than to run to him and hug him. Tell him that she’ll fight through this. She’ll ask her mother, she’ll do whatever, maybe she can’t bite him anymore but there has to be something… all those thoughts come to a crashing stop when Gregory tells her that John didn’t say much but said that sure he’ll marry.
That’s what John focused on? He already… moved on? Just like that?
Oh… he must have realized how bad she is for him. Of course she is.
It still hurts. It hurts so much and no, she can’t stand Gregory’s arms around her, the way he’s trying to distract her, the way he’s trying to get her to bite him, the way he’s about to throw her over a shoulder to bring her down to their dungeon.
No! He can’t always just ignore emotions and distract her.
But he’s taking her protest as her playing hard to get, her fists against his back as her playing rough already, and if he’s that insistent then maybe she is wrong, maybe he really knows best. He’s her husband after all. She probably is just being a silly girl.
So she stops protesting and tries to let him distract her, although no, it doesn’t reach her heart. Her heart feels like there’s a drac wrapped around it that doesn’t know how to stop howling with a sudden sense of loneliness.
~~~~
She still feels lonely when she throws herself into the paperwork for the upcoming official wedding again… by herself. The empty seat next to her still smells faintly of John and suddenly that gives her no sense of calm at all.
He had been there, every day he had been there and made her worries seem just a little bit smaller, just a little bit less all encompassing. He’d been her rock and now that suddenly no longer means her safe haven, it means the rock tied to her ankles as she feels her worries close over her like dark waves.
Suddenly all alone, the paperwork piles up, making her feel like she’s drowning only more, like her howling drac is not in pain but dying. Maybe she can at least make herself faster? Maybe she can get her drac to run even though she doesn’t feel like she can run alongside it any longer.
She feels like her drac is off in a corner and John in the other and now she’s standing there unable to feel safe with either. Feels like she’s standing between them and has to protect John from her drac… while he’s not even looking at her.
The howl on the inside breaks free as her drac surfaces together with the sense of, yes, more strength, but that sensation crumbles in a moment when she realizes that she was so stupid as to burn blood. Blood she can’t replenish without draining Gregory more. He says it’s alright if she just bites him, but it feels wrong. She doesn’t want to be bad for him!
And she’s the lady of this household, it’s her territory! She should have a blasted right to the blood of her humans!
Realizing what she just thought, the howl turns whimper. That’s the obsession, isn’t it? This, exactly this, is why she has to fight. A right to John’s blood… no, no she can’t possibly be this bad for him even if he turned his back on her. She can’t, she has to be good. Please, she just wants to be good for the ones she loves… oh, but she doesn’t love him, does she?
She’s obsessed. Why does it not feel more wrong then? Why can’t she tell the difference to Gregory?
She must be even worse of a wife than she feared. She has to do better and the only way she can is do what Gregory needs from her, so she turns back to the paperwork and keeps working, maybe that’s the only thing she’s good for. Work for him.
And work she does, day in and day out, when she doesn’t let Gregory drag her to the dungeon when he says that she’s working too hard. She knows he’s trying to distract her. She knows that he’s trying to give her the space she needs to deal with her drac when he vanishes after they are done again. She knows she’s just too much. She really knows, because she’s too much for herself, too.
Her drac, her beloved drac, the one thing she felt like she finally understood, seems so uneasy now. It’s pacing and growling and scratching at the corners of her mind to go to John. It’s whimpering and just can’t understand why she can’t go to him. It makes her feel like crying and screaming in rapid succession.
Sometimes she finds herself chewing her own hand bloody as she fights with thoughts of how this is unfair, how John shouldn’t be able to just move on. Thoughts of hunting him down and binding his fate to hers no matter what he told Gregory haunt her.
She knows it has to be an illusion that her own blood in her mouth tastes of John, but it’s all she can think of. She already threw his chair out… the window in fit of rage she didn’t know how else to quell.
She normally would curl up with her drac, she would hide in the maze and cry on her night friends, but she doesn’t dare leave her room, her study, or the dungeon. She doesn’t dare to go anywhere she might catch a sniff of John.
Not when everything in her is shrieking to wrap herself around him, to let her drac sink its fangs into him and claim him. He’s hers! He should be! How is this not love?! How can this feeling of being so intermingled with him that her own blood tastes of him not be a sign of them belonging together?!
No, she can’t be bad for him!
She’s down to pleading with her drac within the week.
Some days, she doesn’t know how she could hold out without her mother. Her mother, who understands her. Her mother, who has a drac and knows the feeling. Her mother is there for her, reassuring her the feeling will go away eventually. Her mother, who keeps talking to her gently about other blood and maybe she is right, maybe she needs to go outside her household. Maybe her territory is too small, but all she can think of right now is the pain of feeling John slowly fading away inside of herself.
~~~~
Lucy is holding Darcy yet again. Singing low to her, because words have long stopped to do anything about the pain. She knows that pain, she’s been obsessed herself. One of the many mistakes she made as a young vampire. Just one more thing she didn’t know better because there was nobody to teach her.
She never wants Darcy to have to feel like that again. She hates that she was too late in preventing it from happening in the first place.
At least Darcy is agreeing slowly to drinking from more people. Even through the obsession, she’s sensible, all Jack’s girl. Lucy knows that right now it hurts not to drink from John, but it will be better once the obsession has passed and Darcy has enough variety to reunite her fangs with John.
She’s glad that Gregory managed to get Darcy to agree to the temporary stop Lucy recommended, it’s going to be worth it in the end.
~~~~
Every day that Darcy knows she’s never going to drink from John… her John!, again, hurts worse.
Gregory keeps telling her it’s okay to just drink from him but it doesn’t feel like it. But she can’t think about it, really, she doesn’t feel like she can think about anything. Everything is a blur underneath the inferno that is her drac’s hurt feelings
It doesn’t matter. She can still work. She has to work, it’s the only thing that is even scarier. The looming official wedding, the looming chance of ruining everything with having to be in front of people. The looming chance to give herself away if she smells John doing his duty and playing security for her.
No, no, she can’t think about that!
She can’t think of anything else but to ask Arthur for one more thing, one more task, one more piece of work. Anything to stop trembling and feeling frantic. Anything to help herself to not howl along to her hurt drac. Anything to stop feeling like the entire place is coming down on her.
And then Arthur forgets to close the door on her study after him when he quickly tries to check in with her, and it doesn’t matter that John walks by half a corridor away. The very air suddenly tastes of him, and she has to jump and barricade herself in her room, down a flight of stairs and in the dungeon to not turn into a bloodthirsty fury hunting him down right that moment.
~~~~
Arthur looks after Darcy in confusion- did he say or do anything wrong? He didn’t do anything differently from any other time… he thinks? But she looked really upset- well, as far as he can tell, with her having her hands over her mouth. He does think that was an “I’m sorry!” she shouted as she rushed past him. So maybe it wasn’t something he did?
He feels awkward and confused, and it makes him shift on the spot before he leaves Darcy’s study again- it doesn’t seem like she’s coming right back?
He wonders what’s going on. The closer they’re getting to the wedding, the more… strained everything seems to become? He gets it, the strain of having to host a social event like that and to make sure it’s above board and doesn’t get them into trouble weighs on him, too. But Darcy never seems cheerful anymore. Not even at the animal hospital. He remembers how happy she was when he offered to help out, and, well, she still is, but she’s not… bouncing, or taking him by the hand to show him something, or anything like that, like she did at the start. And he hardly sees John around at all. And if he does, all John does is grunt and nod and go back to whatever it is he was doing.
Come to think of it, he never sees them together at the same time anymore? For the first few days, when he popped in before lunch to check on the animals and give Katharina a pet, Darcy and John were always there, looking after things, too. He thought that was their routine, but now it’s always just Darcy, and John is there earlier in the morning.
He wonders if they had a fight? He hopes not? But if they’d had a fight, they’d be angry with each other, right? Neither of them seems angry. Well, he supposes John could be and he might not be able to tell. But the only one Darcy got angry with was Gregory… Arthur winces at the memory of how loud she shouted at him that one time when Gregory tried to pet one of the mice, and it bit him, and he flung it away in reaction and the poor mouse hit the floor so hard there was this impact sound… An impact sound he really didn’t need a reminder off, flesh and bones against a hard surface.
Thankfully, this time Arthur was there, this time he could do something, this time, it was only a little mouse he could heal and scoop up and put back into its cage before it even recovered from the shock.
Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned the hospital at all to Gregory… But why? Gregory is his best friend! And it was only an accident. Gregory even is always in human form there, after Arthur and Darcy told him in no uncertain terms to not scare the mice and rats. And also, while Gregory was there all the time for the first few days after he heard about it, lately he’s stopped coming around again. It’s not like he has much to do there, so he probably got bored now that it’s not a new thing anymore.
Maybe that’s why John went there at different times- maybe it was Gregory he was avoiding. Arthur’s pretty sure John doesn’t like Gregory much. So maybe now that Gregory’s not there anymore, John will change back?
Arthur kind of hopes so. It was nice when it was all three of them, working together.
The official wedding really can’t be done and over with soon enough, as far as he’s concerned. There’s still so many little minutia to organise, sometimes it feels like it’ll never end and they’ll never get there and they don’t have enough time, but on the other hand, if they had more time that would mean it would be longer until this is behind them. He wishes he could just skip forward to after the wedding, like in a book when there’s a section you don’t like to read- just skim through it until it’s over. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work like books, so he’ll just have to survive it.
Everything will be better again once that’s over, he tells himself- it has to be!
~~~~
Nothing helps! Even down in the dungeon Darcy feels like the entire room is filled with John’s smell. She asks the house spirit for a bottle of perfume and buries her nose into it.
Nothing.
She chews on a leather strap and still her entire mouth tastes of nothing but his blood.
She presses her hands over her ears and still her drac is howling so loudly that she thinks she’ll go deaf.
Gregory finding her down there and again trying to distract her doesn’t help either… she can’t even fully remember what he did afterwards, her only relief is the taste of his blood in her mouth.
It’s the only thing she still can taste by the middle of the next week. The only thing that will stay down, too. She hasn’t been able to sleep or to eat human food. She hasn’t been able to do much of anything.
Days and nights and faces and words all blur together into the sound of her drac’s howling.
The one time she remembers she broke out of it was when there was John’s name on a piece of paperwork. She remembers her own wail and the bloody tears. She remembers begging Gregory to help her, to get John out of her, to not let her misery keep going. She remembers begging him to release the blood she can’t have anymore. She remembers the house spirit even putting a drain into the dungeon floor…
But she also remembers Gregory’s lack of comprehension and confused look. The way he tried to tell her it’s all okay, that he’s there for her… but then he didn’t do anything. How he grew restless when she couldn’t manage to settle down, and finally how he left her again.
She’s just too much she guesses. Maybe if she keeps crying bloody tears, she can get the blood out herself.
~~~~
This all just fucking sucks! His girl… John bites his lip and sighs. Not his girl. Darcy is hurting. Hurting badly.
He thought it would get better if he keeps away. Wasn’t it him that’s bad for her? Why does it look to him as if she’s only getting worse? It’s been nearly two weeks! Endless days of not even seeing her at a distance.
Gregory is grumbly about her being moody, Arthur is in a frenzy about her apparently working like a maniac on the preparations.
John should be there! He should be fucking helping her. But no, here he is. In a fucking outbuilding with the strictest advice from Lucy and Seward about no matter what happens, to not let Darcy in. To not even invite her in.
He wishes he knew if he could go close to her at least in his dreamscape. But if he makes her drac sick, then that’s probably not okay either. He has nobody to ask, he’s just lying in the bed, not even feeling like his own dreams anymore.
His dreamscape was his haven and escape for as long as he can remember, but now he’s looking at his ship and all he sees is that Darcy isn’t standing on deck with him. Now he’s walking down the beaches of his private island only to not feel Darcy’s hand. Now he can’t go to a place loud enough to not hear her voice missing so loudly that he can’t hear anything else.
He feels so pathetic about having made a dream copy of her. So pathetic about having cried on her. So pathetic and useless. Since she’s gone out of his life, all his insecurities have crept back in. Without her, he’s not a real man, he doesn’t feel like half a man without her at his side.
What’s it even all good for? What is he good for? Maybe he should have stayed on the fucking ship. He hurt her more. He hurt the only person he ever loved. If he’s a man at all, he’s one of those assholes after all, and that stings more than missing Darcy so fucking bad.
Only tossing around restlessly in the first place, it doesn’t take him more than a second to bolt upright at the sound of scratching on the door. What the fuck? Then his blood freezes. Claws. That’s claws on his door, and he doesn’t fucking care that he’s only ever heard one wolf, he just knows that’s Darcy out there. The pain in her voice is so unmistakably her.
He wants to run to the door, wants to fling it open, and if she kills him, maybe he deserves it!
The howling turns human-voiced shrieking. He doesn’t need to see her to know she’s crying. She’s hammering on the door. And yes… fuck, she is threatening. She’s demanding him, demanding his blood, demands her right to it!
That’s… he wants to say she’s right. Everything in him wants to just let her, but her voice is so distorted, that must be her drac. She’s hurting. She’s hurting like that because of him. He did this to her and he hates himself with a cold fury right that moment.
He knows that she can’t come in with her powers without an invitation. If he lets her in without inviting her, maybe her drac stays outside and he can hold her human side at least?
No! What the fuck is wrong with him?! That’s the same as if somebody offered him to hold his old female body. Fuck no! He’d never do that to her! She saw his soul! He will not let her soul suffer outside only to make himself feel better by pretending he’s doing at least something for her!
No! He’ll always love her for her drac, too. It’s part of her, it’s who she is. It’s who he loves, so he has to sit still and not give in to her pleading and threats. He has to be strong for her. He is the reason her drac hurts. He has to stay away…
It’s so hard. It’s so fucking hard!
Wait, why did she suddenly go quiet? Is she alright? Oh fuck, what can he do? What should he do?
Then he hears Lucy’s voice.
Thank fucking God! Or whoever! Just, his girl… he means, Darcy, doesn’t have to do this alone. Lucy must have flown back in from visiting with Godalming. Just in time, fucking just in time. Darcy has somebody out there with her. Of course Gregory is nowhere fucking to be heard out there. Not that John’s surprised, but it still makes him angry. Impotently angry. He still can’t do more than listen to the receding voices out there.
The next morning, he still can’t do more than stare in abject horror at the ground in front of his door, completely drenched in blood. What did Lucy do? Is that all Darcy’s blood? Then he realizes that it’s his blood that’s hurting Darcy… maybe… maybe that was the only thing Lucy could do?
It only makes him want to hold Darcy more, but he knows he can’t… He probably never can again and that makes him wish it was his blood directly seeping into the earth, not his blood from Darcy’s veins.