while the cat is away, the mice will play.
he knows better than to think the cat stays any away longer than just a few moons – doing who knows what, across the seas and enchanting her thorny fingers around the necks of high brow societies. it’s any wonder how she’d not been in the news at least once; perhaps a few glimpses on the internet in candid photos of fanciful soirees with the rich, but nothing more.
it left a bad taste in Steve’s mouth.
A JOKE. she was playing them all, and no one was the wiser except those unable to lift opposition to the shadow puppeteering. all this, for the people Alexia wanted to wipe out or enslave, like the Queen ant to her drones, her pawns. ( didn’t she just want to live with this chance the virus gave her? didn’t she just want to have the normal life that she’d never gotten as a child? ) and he- just a rotting echo in the backdrop of a few displaced memories and unfortunate instances. the luck of the cards, since Rockfort, had never been once anything but dealer’s choice.
swallowing, the redhead bridges the gape between them in a few hollowed steps in the kitchen that she never used. the manse was like a dollhouse, each corridor filled with culture. falsified. Steve leans harmlessly against the granite counter-top, gazing dubiously at the Ashford woman. just being in the same room fires off emotions collective of wires being crossed. rage and serenity, fear and loathing – a twisted manifestation of other things that cause the boy nothing but emotional whiplash.
in a tepid approach, he speaks. “so uh.. what’re you making?” it’s an attempt to not carve straight into the real reason she summoned him into the room. Alexia Ashford doesn’t cook. or does she? all Steve knows is the gleam of that knife, chopping up some kind of unfamiliar vegetable. still. the knife remains.
Never in her life has she attempted to do something so mundane, so pointless, as cooking - that’s what servants were for. Even now, there would be little point. The servants bring her food, and she attends dinner parties and plays along if only to maintain the facade. No matter how expensive or exquisite the food, it tastes like ash. Rotten and dusty.
She does not move, but her gaze fixes on Steve; peering from the side of her eyes, and in the light, the faint yellow glow that tints them. Unnatural. His thoughts are always in her head, and she finds them....childish. That glimmer beneath all of his attitude, the hope that remains, the curiosity - didn’t she want the normal life she never had as a child? Impossible. She was not born but created, not a daughter but a clone of a woman centuries dead. Her heart was black and rotting before it began beating. There was no normal life and no concept of it.
How could she want what had never existed?
One with a death wish may think dear nosferatu still had her in his chains from the grave. His legacy of failure, but beneath it, the legacy he had left behind - what he’d done to these children.
Again, she remains still, but tilts the blade in her hand - angling the light just right.
“You are getting too brazen, Steven. Your attitude is...causing problems. Are you hoping for a saviour? They would not spare you from their slaughter, child. Remember, you too, are a monster.”
pixelskylines
prguitarman
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
