I know her eyes remain / At least I know she'll never fade / She moves about / I watch her move right across the floor and fade to grey / Belladonna lives inside us all in little ways
Headcanons:
I have never met a vampire personally, but I don’t know what will happen tomorrow: For an island that runs on blood, one would expect Victor to be a bit of a greater commodity. He is rotting from the inside out, his body turning foul and putrid as the very thing that kept him alive slowly drowns him, filling his lungs and eating him from the inside out as his body shreds itself, lesions he will never see coating his organs. And yet, despite that, he is permitted to remain on the ship, sailing it however far he can before going the other way again. Over and over this goes, and Victor has yet to be tied to a tree for the rot and blood that pulses within him. He can’t even remember the last time he had seen one of the island’s smaller, more blood-thirsty residents. It seems impossible that he could have made it this long without being expected to feed his new home with the very thing killing him. Perhaps he will jinx it by thinking such a thing. Is it bad how badly Victor wants to have jinxed it? Is it a note of his personal failings that he feels an obligation to the place that stopped the disease from taking him any further down the path to corpsehood? Perhaps. Perhaps he was always meant to find this place, to bleed himself dry in its thickets and on its thorns. He wouldn’t know. Victor’s never been involved like that. And though he would rather sink to the sea floor than admit it, he wishes he could have been. A debt owed is a debt to be paid and Victor doesn’t really like the idea of owing an island.
A dream within a dream: There is a surreal, impossible quality to the island that taints every memory Victor has of the world beyond it. When that fog tinges his memories, there is a time when he forgets the beast that lurks in his lungs, curled around his heart and mind and he becomes, for a moment, nothing more than a pirate, a caricature of himself in some little boy-king’s imaginings. And then the heat and the wet of the island will come and turn his chest into a mockery of lungs and all he can do is cough and cough. It feels, at times, as if both sides are the dreamings of the other. One, the pirate sailing master that occasionally dreams a tragedy of his own. The other, a man touched by death and blood dreaming of nothing more complicated than the waves. They live within each other and sometimes, Victor forgets which is which. He suspects it may be avoidance of the reality he ran from, but why should that matter? He ran so far that death can’t touch him anymore. Perhaps a little avoidance is exactly what he needed. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with finding immortality with blood in your chest. And perhaps he is trying and failing to lie to himself.
Searches after horror haunts strange, far places: It had been sheer chance that brought Victor into touch with the crew of the Jolly Roger. If it hadn’t been for that gigantic vessel that radiated menace and promised suffering, Victor would never have thought there had been a chance like Neverland. But he would be lying if he said he hadn’t taken to the sea in a desperate attempt to find something, anything that would stop the rot inside him. Everyone knew that tuberculous spelled death and that there was no real hope beyond fresh air and exercise to slow the progression. A ship promise both in ready supply and as a sailing master, Victor was to spend more time on deck than almost anyone else, sextant and map in hand. He had no idea if it had slowed the disease enough to get him to Neverland, but God was smiling on Victor that day. The miracle cure had been found, though it held him more in a state of limbo than anything else. He stands now partially rotted on strange, forgotten shores and thanks anyone listening for giving him that much of a chance. It was more than his sister had gotten, after all, and though he never dared mention her out of shame and regret for running when she needed him the most, he was determined to make the most of it. He was the last of his family and while the same thing that had eaten them from the inside out now lived in him, there was a chance. One chance was all Victor had asked for and he was determined to make the most of it. The sea had delivered an impossible ask, after all.
And with strange aeons even death may die: So many of the people and people-adjacents on this island have never met death. Charlie has, as has Ace. Ace perhaps had the closest brush with it in a way that Victor would recognize, but it is something different to know you hold suspended self-destruction in your very body. There is nothing on this island but time. Perhaps, if Victor waits long enough, it will die before he does. Perhaps it will crumble to dust like some crew members have before his very eyes. He already has outlasted the one person that could spill his secret to the crew. Victor misses Tristan, of course he does. The crew is the only family worth having in this damned place, but Tristan was smart. Victor is convinced he knew and every day sparked a new fear that that would be the day the secret spilled out from Tristan’s lips, that Hook would push him from the ship because he was wrong and diseased and entirely too dangerous to remain, lest he kill all of them from his own idiocy. Victor has outlasted Tristan, who was the second-most likely thing to kill him on this island. Surely he can outlast the tuberculous?
Random OOC Thoughts:
Victor fancies himself the dodger of death and the incarnate of rot among the pirate crew thanks to his disease. I do think it’s thematic for him to be weirdly close with the concept of death, which doesn’t exist in Neverland the way it does elsewhere. If it did, though, I think Victor would be the closest to it. If he were a Magnus Archives character, make him an avatar of the Corruption. Horror media that make me think of Victor: Annihilation, The Babadook, and above all The Last of Us. Also, he's very Karna from The Ravening War to me. I won't even lie about that.