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A Curious Face Born from Debris
🕑 Added 2019-10-15 20:02:21 +0000 UTCThe Junkenstein event begins today, and I managed to get my Junkenstein-themed Spiderbyte out just in time! Halloweeny but not very spooky, featuring Bride Sombra and Countess Widowmaker and some cameos. Teen+, just over 4,000 words.
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Her new life begins in the middle of a storm.
She knows she was made, not born. At least, not this time around. She knows what she was made for, but they created her without a memory, not without a will. Their mistake.
She avails herself of the massive library and names herself after the shadows she prefers. She watches the mad scientist, and she learns about his work.
In a matter of days, her would-be husband works for her. So does his monster and his small army of automatons.
They move into the servants’ housing out beyond the garden. The scientist does not care as long as she allows him into his laboratory. The monster does not care at all.
The fools do not tell her the home doesn’t even belong to them.
The comtesse who owns Chateau Guillard arrives during another storm. She stands silhouetted in the doorway, as surprised to see Sombra as Sombra is to see her. Her golden eyes are flat and appraising, and her nostrils flare. Then the newcomer merely shrugs. “You may dine with me. Then I will decide whether you can stay.”
In her short life, Sombra has grown accustomed to giving the orders. She agrees to the comtesse’s terms if only for the novelty of it. She can snap her neck later if things go poorly.
They sit across from one another in flickering candlelight, feasting from a table set by the servants who return when the comtesse does. Sombra only realizes that she is ravenous once the food is set in front of her. It has not occurred to her to eat before now; this body seems paradoxically to run without sustenance yet to remember it once needed it. She chalks the hunger up to a sense memory, and she chooses to revel in the textures and the tastes that pass her tongue.
The comtesse is ravenous too. She eats with a fervor that Sombra suspects other people might disapprove of; she also eats as if she does not care what other people think. Sombra wonders idly how it all fits in such a slender body, but she is not put off by it.
When her plate is mostly empty and her glass drained, the comtesse’s tongue flicks out to catch the blood dark drop of wine on her bottom lip, and then her eyes narrow on Sombra. “How did you arrive at my home?”
“I can’t answer that.”
Her eyes narrow to golden slits and her nostrils flare. Sombra can’t quite get over the sense that she is being scented. “Are you the experiment?”
“I suppose I am.”
“You smell dead.” The comtesse’s nose wrinkles delicately, but she doesn’t seem especially displeased.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Sombra admits slowly. She glances down at her hands, at the thick thread binding her hands to her wrists, and she imagines dabbing perfume there. Something to cover the scent. She is not ashamed, but she is aware that exploring the larger world might become… difficult, should she fail to blend in appropriately. “What does that smell like?”
“Like meat I do not want to eat.” The comtesse gives her a lingering once over, then she abruptly stands. “Come with me.”
She doesn’t wait to see if Sombra follows before she moves on. It’s that more than anything else that convinces Sombra to go with her. The comtesse leads her down a stone hallway, the heels of her boots clicking in the spaces between the long running rugs. They arrive at the largest suite of rooms, the ones Sombra chose for herself. She watches the comtesse scent the air again, then she turns her cool gaze back to Sombra. She says nothing, only raises one eyebrow, and Sombra knows she knows.
Previously, she thought the full closet and other accessories strewn about the room were put there for her — for the mad scientist’s would-be wife. The familiarity with which the comtesse moves through the room reveals how wrong Sombra was.
She takes her time investigating the room, hunting down all the ways that Sombra has put it out of order. She seems more amused than anything else, although her face is difficult to read in the darkness. She does not bother to turn on the lights until she catches Sombra squinting. Sombra watches her lift the corner of her silk sheet, plainly curious about the bed’s disuse when the rest of the room has been lived in.
“Do you have a name?” Sombra asks when she can no longer tolerate the silence.
“Amélie.” She doesn’t look at Sombra when she speaks, instead focusing on an array of perfume bottles. Her fingertips dance along their tops, then she plucks one up. “This. You may keep it.”
“Will it cover the smell?”
Amélie shrugs. “You will smell better to me. Who knows what others will think?”
It smells almost like bourbon. Sombra dabs it onto her wrists and behind her ears, then she tucks the bottle into the pocket of her skirt. “Thank you.”
Amélie looks her over once again, lips pursed thoughtfully. “You may stay,” she declares. “Pick a room that isn’t this one.”
——
They coexist. It is the only word Sombra can think of to describe the way they circle each other, neither antagonistic nor especially close. Sombra wears the perfume every day, and she spends most of her time in the library. She is not dead, but she is not alive. The skin is beginning to grow too soft around the threads binding her together. She does not care to think of what might be happening on the inside.
When she needs to distract herself from her concerns with her slowly decaying body, she observes Amélie. Sombra is convinced that there is something wrong with her. She does not need lights; even Sombra needs those, and she is not alive. No one else complains about the way Sombra smells. That may only be manners, but surely there would be a sign they noticed. Her appetite wanes as the days pass, but she still eats more than it seems she should be able to.
The servants appear to be afraid of their mistress. They step lightly around her. Sombra wonders how much they are paid, if they are willing to stay despite their visible nervousness. And she does not act like any of them, nor even like the mad scientist and his monster out in the garden.
She does not act like a person, exactly.
They still dine together sometimes. Tonight, they watch each other from across the table, going through the motions as though either of them is anything like other people.
“What are you looking for?” Amélie asks. “In the library.”
“I am not sure yet.” Sombra isn’t sure if she is ready to admit that she fears her body breaking down. She fears becoming a corpse. She suspects she was before, and that is why she can’t remember her old life.
She should have known that Amélie, with her strange sense of smell, would be able to guess anyway. “You are decaying.”
“Yes.” Sombra sees no reason to lie to someone who will know she is lying.
Amélie makes a thoughtful sound. “The scientist is not an idiot.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Amélie’s lips twitch. It might be amusement. “He must have had a plan for you. His monster has existed for years. You can’t be a failure.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“You are too smart.”
It’s Sombra’s turn to smirk. “Are you flirting with me, Comtesse?”
“I merely stated a fact. I do not flirt.” Her pale cheeks are flushed, though, and Sombra suspects it is not only from the wine.
“And why not?”
“Because I have more important things to do.”
“Like rescue poor little undead girls.” Amélie doesn’t answer that, and Sombra decides to have mercy. She doesn’t want to end up out in the cold for teasing her hostess too much. “What do you do with your time?”
“I have an estate to run. Villagers to pacify. A scientist to keep busy so he does not go on another tear.”
“So does that mean you have some influence over him?”
“Some.” Amélie’s eyes sharpen, narrow to little slits. “You want something.”
Sombra smiles behind her wine glass.
In the morning, she visits the scientist in his house by the garden. It’s guarded by the still, silent husks of his automatons. She thinks his monster might be a guard too, but all he does is look her over then shuffle aside to let her in.
Junkenstein looks up from his workbench, his eye comically huge behind the goggles he wears. “You again!” He doesn’t sound upset to see her, although he does shift as if he’s nervous.
“Me again.”
“If you’re gonna be here, you can hand me the whatsit.” He flings a gloved hand in her direction. She picks up something like a socket wrench someone has welded metal spikes onto, too bemused by his utter lack of bad feeling toward her to even consider refusing. He wields it like a mallet, giving a resounding whack to the metal he’s working on. She doesn’t know what the tool is for, but she’s almost certain it’s not that. “Did you want something?”
“I want to know what you did to me, and whether it’s different from what you did to it.” She points at the monster.
“It is a him.”
“Well, he looks… well-preserved.”
Junkenstein stops what he’s doing to squint at her. Then he rounds the workbench, and with neither warning nor her consent, he grabs her arm to prod at the skin. She snarls and pushes him back. When he stops hunching over, her nose barely reaches his chest, but her grip on his neck is stronger than either of them would have guessed.
He giggles and doesn’t fight it. Only pats at her arm. “Ho ho ho! Strong! I love a good surprise.”
“You didn’t build me this way?” Her grip loosens only enough to let him speak comfortably.
“Wasn’t sure what I was building! It’s more fun that way. At least you didn’t explode on me.” He wiggles prosthetic fingers at her, and she sighs.
“The comtesse says that if you don’t find a way to fix me, she’ll turn you over to the villagers.”
He pauses to squint at her, and for the briefest moment, she wonders if he might actually be dangerous. Then he giggles like an idiot again. “Fine, fine. Let’s make a deal. Let me do a few tests—” he pinches her, testing the stretch of the skin “—and I’ll get the old Witch in here to help.”
“That’s all?”
“Normally I’d ask for gold, but you’re my very first.” He sighs dreamily and pats her cheek, which she works very hard not to respond to by squeezing the life out of him. “Like a daughter to me.”
She recoils then. “A daughter? You were going to marry me.”
“No, no, he was. My beautiful children, together forever.”
“Ugh.”
She sneers at him, but she finally lets him go, and she agrees to his tests. In exchange, for now, he seems excited to have an audience capable of following along with his raving, and he tells her how she is different from his first monster.
Junkenstein was given a gift by the Witch of the Wilds to bring his first to life. He has since been trying to recreate the phenomenon through his mad experiments instead. Sombra is his first, and thus far only, success. He doesn’t know why she lived and the others didn’t. He doesn’t know much of anything, preferring instead to tinker — “improvise,” as he puts it.
She lets him weigh and measure her. She answers an impromptu questionnaire about everything from her appetite to what abilities she woke with. Literacy, it turns out, was an unexpected gift. His monster had to be taught, but she was reborn with it.
He assures her that he has contacted the Witch, but that she will come on her own time. Sombra returns to him the next day and the next, allows him to poke and prod at her. At night, she dines with the comtesse, who seems to find it all amusing.
The Witch does not approach, but the full moon does.
Sombra wouldn’t pay any attention to it, except that the servants whisper about it, and she does not like not knowing things. They are wary of the full moon, and they behave strangely. Although their uniforms are plain, many of them now gleam with silver jewelry.
All the floral arrangements in the chateau are now the same tall stalks of clustered purple flowers. They’re brought in from the greenhouse en masse, and there’s a bouquet in every room. There are bowls of salt in every room too, and through her eavesdropping Sombra learns these are meant to guard the threshold when the time comes — for what, she still doesn’t know.
Amélie looks paler than usual at dinner, all the color drained from her cheeks. Her eyes are glassy and she sniffs a great deal. She says she has allergies, but Sombra wonders if she is sick. Despite this, she is ravenous. She eats three whole steaks, so rare they are still bleeding, but she only picks at her vegetables. She does not speak much except to tell Sombra that she will be away for the next three days, but that she will return.
She is gone in the morning, and so are most of the servants. There is a cook left for Sombra and a maid to tidy her room, but she does not actually need these things, and she dismisses them both to wherever it is the other servants have gone.
Sombra wanders the empty halls, and she wonders at how silent the chateau can be.
Junkenstein didn’t leave though. He is still out in the garden house, toiling away at his bizarre experiments. But he too has a bouquet set by the door. When she asks about it, he only giggles nervously.
Sombra does not sleep, so she is awake to hear the howling that night. She watches in fascination as the goosebumps rise on her arms, and she wonders if this is what the others are so afraid of. She is not afraid. She thinks the howl sounds sad. Lonely, maybe, although she has recently read about projection, and she wonders, in the privacy of her room, if that is what this is.
When she can no longer bear it, she leaves her room again. In the library she tries to research salt and various animals that howl, but she finds nothing of value. There is a book on botany though, and she finds a lovely illustration of the flowers that adorn the chateau: monkshood. One of the other names for it is wolfsbane, and with that she first learns the word werewolf.
She digs through tome after tome of old folktales. Shortly before dawn, the howling finally ends, and she finds herself put off by its absence. It was her only company.
She supposes she should be afraid like the servants. Like the scientist. But she can only wait eagerly for Amélie to return; perhaps Amélie left out of fear, but Sombra suspects it is no coincidence that her symptoms match some of those left in the book. She thinks of Amélie’s sense of smell and her gleaming golden eyes, and for the first time since her rebirth, Sombra feels her own heart pound.
The second night, the howls are worse. They accompany her through the chateau to Amélie’s quarters, where she searches and searches until she finds the trick drawer in the rolltop desk. Inside are two rings, one a broad, simple gold band and the other an enormous sapphire set into delicate golden filigree. There’s also a small leather journal. The pages are tattered and worn with age.
Sombra learns the name Gérard Lacroix, and she knows what happened.
On the third night, she can no longer stand to hear the howls.
It takes her an hour wandering the grounds to find the source: perversely, the sound comes from the mausoleum in which Gérard Lacroix is interred. There are footprints in the snow here but no people; she wonders if the servants bring Amélie breakfast in the morning, and which ones she trusts to do so.
Inside it appears at first there is only a sarcophagus, one which she cannot open even with her considerable strength. But when she pokes around, digging fingers into the stone walls, she finds the hidden latch that opens the secret door. The wall cracks and a door swings away from her, and she follows the torch-lined steps down. Distantly, she recognizes that it gets colder the farther she goes, but it does not affect her the way it does other people.
At the bottom of the stairs is another door with a wooden chest beside it. Inside the chest are blankets and clothing; the clothing is the final confirmation she needs about the wolf’s identity.
The howling has stopped, but there’s a low whine just on the other side. This door is locked, but she’s come prepared for that eventuality. She isn’t sure what she’s doing, but her hands move as though they know, and the lock eventually opens with an echoing clang of metal.
The first thing she sees on the other side are the gleaming golden eyes. They stare curiously back at her and they do not look away.
She has never seen a wolf, but she suspects this is a large one. Its fur is a black so lustrous it shines almost blue even in the yellow light of the torches. It is beautiful, and it does not seem so scary even now. One of its back legs is locked into a shackle, but it has forced its way out of the others. She wonders if that happens every full moon, or if the wolf heard her coming.
It bares its teeth at her when she draws nearer, but it does not attack. It doesn’t even close the distance between them.
“Do you know me like this?” she asks.
The wolf’s ears twitch, but it cannot speak. When she touches the cuff on its leg, it snarls at her, but it does not bite.
“You don’t scare me.”
Still, the creature backs away from her until it bumps into a wall.
She doesn’t know why she does it, but she sits in the center of the room, and she waits until it comes to her. She thinks about the stench of death that surrounds her, and she wonders if it is only that the wolf wants fresh meat.
It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that she sits still and patient, and the wolf finally lies on its belly and stares up at her, and it does not howl for the rest of the night.
In the morning, she watches as the fur falls away and its limbs twist and tremble. She listens to the quiet cries that slowly morph from doglike whimpers into a woman’s voice. Slowly, Amélie emerges from the wolf. Her hair is matted and she has bags under her eyes and her skin shines with cold sweat, but she is beautiful.
She moves her jaw, wincing as her teeth slowly recede into something more human, and then she says, “I am cold.”
Sombra understands, and she brings her clothing and blankets, and she picks the lock on the shackle around Amélie’s ankle. Amélie dresses without any sign of embarrassment, then she sits cross-legged on the ground across from Sombra, finger-combing her wild, knotted hair.
“I did not hurt you.”
“Do you usually?”
“I have before.”
“Gérard,” Sombra says, and Amélie only nods. Whatever guilt she lives with, it seems she has come to terms with it. Sombra asks for the story anyway.
They were newlyweds, and although the marriage was arranged by their families, they were very much in love. Three months into their marriage, they were returning late from a gala when their carriage was attacked. The creature managed to bite Amélie, but their escort quickly ran it off.
They thought they had gotten away without any real harm until the following full moon. Amélie awoke in a bed full of blood with no memory of the previous night.
“I have learned to live with what I am, but that does not mean you are safe.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Comtesse.”
“You should be.”
“Should I? When we first met, you told me I smelled like meat you did not want to eat. Maybe the wolf feels the same.”
Amélie stares at her, and then she laughs. It’s a pretty sound, even if her voice is roughened from all the howling. “That may be true. I did not want to eat you.”
“I thought you didn’t remember anything.”
“Not at first. Not for many months. I do now. I am always present inside the wolf now.”
“So perhaps you have more control over it now. Maybe I’m not the only one who’s safe.”
Amélie doesn’t answer that, but she does look thoughtful.
—
The cold weather is helping Sombra hold together, but she worries if the Witch does not come soon, she will not have much time left. She does not want to regret anything. Two weeks after their full moon together, Sombra kisses Amélie, who does not pull away.
When the full moon comes again, Sombra visits the wolf, who spends the first night with her head in Sombra’s lap. On the second night, they wander the grounds together, and the wolf does not attack anyone. On the third, Sombra brings her back into the chateau, and Amélie gets to wake in her own room in sheets that smell like wet dog.
Amélie asks her not to leave and says she will ensure Sombra is taken care of in return. Sombra thinks she should not promise anything, and yet she promises Amélie that she will stay.
The Witch finally arrives three nights later during another storm, and she is as intrigued by Sombra as Junkenstein was. Sombra allows herself again to be poked and prodded at.
The Witch tsks. “You aren’t alive the way you should be.”
“I figured.”
“Men and their gadgets cannot recreate what my magic can do. I’m surprised he accomplished even this much.”
Sombra doesn’t like to sound plaintive, but she can almost hear it in her own voice when she asks, “Can you fix it?”
“Not for free. You will owe me a favor.”
“I can pay upfront. I don’t want to owe anything.”
“Then you can rot.” The Witch shrugs.
Sombra has no leverage here. Begrudgingly, she agrees to owe the Witch of the Wilds a favor, although it unnerves her to do so.
“How would you like your body? I can make you beautiful.”
“She is already beautiful,” Amélie says from the corner, eyes flashing angrily before her cheeks go pink.
“I want to be alive, not just not-dead,” Sombra says. “I don’t care what that looks like. But I don’t need you to change me.”
The Witch nods, and she produces a spark at the end of her staff. “So be it.” She then quickly shoves the glowing end into Sombra’s chest. She can feel her heart pounding again, and her lungs expand, and she feels cold all over. The stitches at her wrists fall away, and her skin itches everywhere else she was sewn together too.
It’s over almost as quickly as it began. When the Witch pulls her staff away, Sombra nearly stumbles, suddenly weak in the knees. Sombra’s hands feel as strong as ever, but now she is aware of the way her pulse runs through her body, of every rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, and she knows she is truly alive now.
It feels like a miracle, and yet the Witch does not even bother to check her results. She only looks at Amélie. “And you?”
Amélie tips her chin up haughtily. “I have nothing that needs changing.” Despite the boldness of her proclamation, her eyes flick to Sombra, who can only smile at her.
Sombra doesn’t know what her life was before, and she does not care. Neither does Amélie. They only are the people they are now, and those are the people who are slowly falling in love.
Sombra’s new life begins in the middle of a storm, with a witch and a werewolf and promises she does not mind fulfilling.
