veni vidi vici mortalitas (victoria/emily) r
title: veni vidi vici mortalitas
fandom: corpse bride
character(s)/pairing(s): victoria/emily
rating: r (violence, death, femslash)
word count: 888
author's note: don't ask what posessed me to write fic for an animated movie. femslash fic, at that.
summary: au. victoria doesn’t need to be told when she wakes to hardwood against her cheek and her trachea exposed to the cool night winds.
Funnily enough, death turns out to be much easier than life.
…
Perhaps funny isn’t the correct word.
+
If someone were to have asked Victoria under which circumstances she would eventually die, she probably have sputtered and told you not to bother with such morbid considerations. But in her mind the thought would fester like a worm in her ear (somewhere in the future Emily is laughing) leading her to long, sleepless nights and hours spent staring down from her balcony at the little, joyless people trudging about.
How should one wish to die? She supposes in one’s sleep, painlessly floating away on a dream. That seems the responsible way; no mess. Yes, she nods certainly to herself and the bobbing forms, that is most likely.
But that’s not terribly exciting, now is it?
(She certainly never would have suspected being murdered by her new husband in a room clacking with the bones of the dead.)
She’d never mastered the lesson of being careful what you wish for.
+
The blade slices the thin skin of her throat and she almost doesn’t feel a thing.
+
Victoria doesn’t need to be told when she wakes to hardwood against her cheek and her trachea exposed to the cool night winds. She ignores the sympathetic pats of half-decayed hands. Somewhere distant she recognizes Lord Barkis is missing and in his place stands a puddle of blood, one distinct from hers, and drag marks.
She hones in on the desperate shouts, on Emily’s fingers pressed to her mouth as if that will stop Victor from raising the glass to his lips. Her hands are bloodstained.
Victoria scurries and shoves. The goblet clatters to the floor, spraying poison all over the church carpet.
“No,” she protests firmly, stepping back. Emily’s arms wrap around her shoulders. “You need to live, because we can’t.”
She feels Emily nodding against her ear and places a hand over the other woman’s, resting beside her once beating heart.
+
When she was alive, Victoria slept beneath a crucifix. Said her prayers every night, asking God to bring love to her life, to drench the world in color. This was not what she had in mind, and in a way she feels rather betrayed. Where are the halos and clouds? Moreover, where was her happy ending?
She never imagined God with a twisted sense of humor.
Here she sleeps in a coffin, when she sleeps at all. She finds she doesn’t need rest, but she craves it, lusts for the easy mindlessness of unconsciousness. Emily whispers that that’s to be expected, that they all have trouble adjusting after passing over. Passing away.
She accepts Emily’s comforting embrace.
+
The endless night becomes effortless and she learns to love the boisterous clamor of death, the vicious colors that stain her steps and the jagged line of flesh falling from bone. She doesn’t even mind the blue-ish hint to her skin; it brings out her eyes.
It’s strange how much closer death is to her image of an ideal life than life ever was; she learns to laugh at this. Emily always laughs with her.
She tastes absinthe for the first time after what could be months post-mortem, could be years. (Time doesn’t matter here.) Victoria loves the burn, the way it could almost make her feel alive without all that tricky living business.
+
Emily maneuvers Victoria’s fingers into proper position on the piano keys, explaining the skinny black ones and the wide, white ones and the pedals down below.
She picks up the notes fairly quick considering she’s got a friendly worm named Saul itching to move into her head, and she looks on her companion with deep gratitude. Her mother never allowed her to learn, and she’d resigned herself to the idea that as a lady she’d get the piano cover slammed on her fingers, every time.
But the dominos toppled, the vase tipped over, the tombstones cracked in such a way, and she ended up here. Sometimes she thinks of Victor, worries over him, her almost-husband with two dead not-quite-wives, but mostly she knows he’ll be just fine.
She hikes her skirt up, starts wearing her hair down.
+
It’s not long, not long at all, before she begins to wonder what Emily is thinking about when she smiles shyly over at her, a ghostly blush haunting her face in a way that’s probably in her imagination. Before she starts to consider the frayed fabric of that cursed wedding dress, whether it would hurt if she palmed the exposed stripes of her ribs, or if Emily kissed the ravine of her neck wound.
(She knows it wouldn’t; pain only exists here in hearts and minds.)
But it turns out she could never have anticipated the jolt in her chest when Emily takes her hand or smoothes over the fabric gathered at her hips, petticoats and corset long abandoned, looking at her like she doesn’t even notice that her head wobbles a bit if she turns too quick. It’s better than absinth and dancing in a way totally improper for a lady and guiltless sinful thoughts, all combined. Emily giggles nervously above her in the darkness of a closed coffin as Victoria shushes her.
It’s an odd day when you feel grateful for your own death.