3Written 2011 - March - 12.
Edited 2013 - September - 11.
She gets the news. Hangs at her mailbox every morning to snatch up the paper with unabashed greed, devours it right there and then. Sometimes she flirts absently with the postal worker as she does so (a friendly woman with dark hair and darker skin whose smile and gait remind her of Valkyrie), and sometimes she just stands there and gets lost in the words.
She depends on those sheets of pulped wood and smudged ink, hangs on to them like a lifeline even as she scans through them, brisk and businesslike at first, then with as much attention and intimacy as a lover, divesting them of their mysteries and reading between their every line, trying to glean some mention of the person she desires.
Sometimes she finds it, and sometimes she doesn't, and she hasn't yet decided which feeling is worse - the knot in her stomach and the dull ache of her pulse when she doesn't, or the way her head hurts and her fingertips tingle and her breath utterly stops when she does.
Maybe they're just as bad as each other.
In due course, she will get on with her life, either tearing the newspaper, sadly devoid of the kind of news she's after, into indelicate shreds that are quickly added to her recycling bags, or else painstakingly preserving whatever article held her hope and her heart in the form of mention of the one upon whom she is so agonizingly intent.
She will go back into her house, and open all the windows, because she has running water but no electricity, and she needs whatever light she can get. She'll bathe, shivering furiously, and she'll get dressed again - properly, heavily, so that she can survive the weather. Once, when she first moved here, she wondered if the postal worker thought her odd, waiting around in her nightclothes, but then she remembered how very unlike nightclothes they look, and she laughed at herself for a bit.
By what light she can get, she will catch up on the sewing. It is neither the samplers nor pinafores she once worked at, but corpses, because the Nye lets her work at home now, understands how much pain it causes her to be in the Sanctuary, around all those people who are trying to capture and kill the one she so dearly adores.
She's very grateful to the Nye for that. She's very grateful to the Nye for a lot of things: how it so kindly hired her in the first place, how it's taught her so much, how it doesn't hold a grudge. She'd been worried, when first it found out that she had killed her former employer, and then that she had been the one the Sanctuary had employed to sew shut the Nye's eyes and mouth, to burn away its nose.
It had understood about that, miraculously. Had understood the pressure of the world, and the need to make it through to the next day. It has no say over the salary she receives from the Sanctuary, but whenever she goes up to deliver the last batch of corpses and pick up the next, it has a warm meal waiting for her. She never asks about the ingredients.
She makes it through life, somehow, manages to keep herself essentially together. There's enough to fill her time and her hands, though she's never distracted for long, and to preserve the steadiness of her heartbeat and the calm of her mind, she keeps up a litany at the back of her brain.
Valkyrie, she thinks quietly, Stephanie, Darquesse-and here she stumbles and something catches inside of her, whether the news came in today or not, because for all that it hurts her to think of it, there is something entirely glorious about that name, about the truth of the terrible, terrible woman she loves more than her own life, Darquesse, Darquesse, Darquesse - be safe. I love you.
I love you. Be safe.
And sometimes, when she's especially desperate, when there's been too much news or two little of it, when the cold's sneaked into her bed more than she wanted it, or when the corpses have been keeping the house too warm for comfort, she appeals to something else.
God, she thinks with not a little desperation, Universe, Creation, anyone who is listening.
Please. Look after her. Keep her alive.
I don't care about anyone else, myself included. Just her. Always her.
Please. Keep her safe. I love her.
I love her. Keep her safe.
It's obvious that either there is no one there to listen, or else that they aren't really listening, because in the end, it's Clarabelle that is Darquesse's downfall, Clarabelle in one of her worst moments and holding yet another thrice-damned scalpel.
She gets this way sometimes, when she panics just a bit and something else in her rises up to take over. She's not sure what to blame, and so she doesn't blame it on anything, just wakes up at the end of it and tries to clean up the corpses. She knows when it's going to happen, sometimes, can feel the buzz rising up in her blood and the rush start pounding out into her nerves, but sometimes she doesn't, and the first time she sees the object of her adoration once again, she is not expecting that thing in her mind to click into place.
Before she knows it, she is moving, and Darquesse, well, Darquesse doesn't quite know what to expect either, of this little girl of a figure, with the blue hair whose roots are fading to blonde, climbing her way to her over a heap of corpses, many layers of clothing stained red with the blood of others, and Darquesse holds still, uncertain, as Clarabelle grabs her jaw in her hands and kisses her. There's a moment when it seems like the world is slipping, when maybe, just maybe, a happy ending is possible and the news will report something good tomorrow, when Darquesse shifts a little closer and Clarabelle's heart goes still and steady for a moment.
The moment ends, and Clarabelle shifts her balance and Darquesse's along with it, and Darquesse tries to reach out with her magic, but it's just not there, and as she falls onto Clarabelle's lap, she notices, with horror, the viselike grip of Clarabelle's fingers around her wrist, glowing with a soft turquoise light.
"I missed you, you know," Clarabelle says conversationally. "I missed you like you would never believe. I craved you like something even an addict would fall on her knees in utter awe of. You were more than I ever knew how to hope to want.
"I wanted to keep you safe, you know. I wanted the world to fall in worship before you in the way I did. I wanted so very, very much for everyone to know how precious, how wonderful, how good you are. I wanted to keep you safe.
"I wanted everyone to know how beautiful and clever and wondrous you are. I wanted them to know until the end of days, because I wanted you to stay that way until the end of days as well. I wanted to make sure you would be safe and good and unchanging forever and ever, amen.
"I wanted the world to know your glory like I do, to sing your praises like every fiber of my being still does. I want you to be eternal, Darquesse. That's all I ever wanted."
Clarabelle smiles a serene little smile, and Darquesse looks up at her in horror. "All things die," Darquesse says, her voice uncertain, and she's slipping into Valkyrie now, a little bit. "Nothing is eternal. Everything changes."
"You won't, my love," Clarabelle says with a sweet, soft sigh. "You'll never change. I just can't let that happen."
And Clarabelle has a blade in her hand, a habit that she never grew out of, not since she was thirteen and her parents became too much of a bother to put up with, and Clarabelle slits Darquesse's skin open, watches the blood leak out and the life drain away. She watches the Name leave the body she once so greatly desired, and she watches the light leave her hand as the magic stops its work.
"I wasn't joking about forever," Clarabelle says lightly, bends down to kiss Valkyrie's lips for the first and the last time, because in these final moments there is nothing left of Darquesse, only Valkyrie and a heap of corpses that soon shall the girl of Ancient descent join, and then Clarabelle brings the scalpel one more time up to flesh for the kill. Darquesse may not be on this earth any longer, but this is not the only plane of existence that there is, and Clarabelle would just as soon be on her way to join her.
Clarabelle dies, and her blood mingles with that of the girl she once convinced herself she loved.