#VTM OC | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

porcelainseashore · 3 days ago

Text

Poison Tree

Commissioned art by @medeaft

As Wynter lies dying in a stranger’s arms, she thinks back to her childhood home and the life she once led with the man who knew her inside-out, Lucien.

Content Warnings: Uncle/niece incest, blood, violence, murder, implied sexual content, pre-canon, coming of age, Catholic guilt, vampire turning, Giovannis being Giovannis.

And there she stood, wide-eyed and doe-like, transfixed at the sight of a stranger before her. Clothes tumbled out of laundry baskets, strewn across the floor, a river of dirtied cotton and cheap knock-offs from the dollar store. A distant rumble came from the side as a lone washer left unattended churned.

It wasn’t like Wynter to be caught unaware, freezing up, indecisive or unable to move, like a gazelle that had stalled a second too late. This stranger was different, more of an apparition behind her darkly veiled face, a shapeless expression shifting like sand, never holding one position for too long. Bony fingers swathed with Venetian lace creeping up her arms like second skin. Her scent layered with oriental spice and incense—the type you burned for the dead.

She should have ran. Trusted in her instincts and ran. Yet it felt as if she had been waiting for this moment her entire life. Bathed in the somber aura of this foreign woman. Teeth gleaming and eyes shining. It was worse than getting mauled by a lion. You would think one would know pain after twenty-three years of living with it. But the adrenaline didn’t kick in.

“Welcome to The Family,” she heard a voice say. “Welcome home.”

Overhead, an ugly metallic duct groaned and burst, shooting jets of steam into the room. The very same rushes, hisses, and squeaks of the pipelines rattling around the house that Wynter grew up in the Deep South. It was an old thing, stately, Gothic and foreboding, with spiralling stairways and trick doors that led to nowhere. As a child, she watched the shadows that stalked her during the night intently, musing if they would whisk her off someplace far away. She wondered why they lived there—in a house that didn’t feel like a house. Her parents never knew who they truly were. Their lineage could be traced back to the merchants that occupied the trade routes along the Silk Road. But that was all they could boast about.

“We are hardworking people,” her father proclaimed. As if to be hardworking was a defining quality of character. Perhaps the house wasn’t a coincidence. It was only natural they were drawn subconsciously to the call of their blood, like her. Certain inclinations never really went away.

Wynter was only a day old, balloon-headed and wailing, when her uncle—her father’s brother—Lucien, cradled her tiny body in his arms. She beat her clenched fists against his chest, which were really more like pathetic bumps, and he laughed and remarked, “What a strong little girl you are.”

She smelled his freshly shampooed hair, just as well as she could drink in the scent of his blood, noisily gushing through his veins, like raging water in a storm drain. Everything was so loud and jarring. His flowy, dark blonde locks whipped around in the wind, tickling her nose as he bent down to kiss her cheek. She could hear his thundering heart while she stirred in her sleep. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

Everyone said she wouldn’t be able to remember that. But who were they to determine something so personal to her? The sensory overload was real. What she experienced now was real. She knew she wasn’t normal when the first thing she noticed in a person was their pulsating jugular.

Her childhood was filled with frilly dresses, lollipops, and sun-baked knees as she ran about in a dizzying fit before sprawling out on the front lawn in the muggy heat. Lucien was always close by, omnipresent, keeping an ever-watchful eye on his niece. She had assumed that his overprotectiveness was due to the nature of his work. They said that he was a Lieutenant at the Criminal Investigation Division in a neighboring city. It sounded important to her as a kid. What sounded less important was when her parents teased him about his eternal bachelor status.

“There’s still hope.” Wynter’s father clapped him on the back. Lucien’s tresses were now tarnished brown and graying, but his piercing blue eyes remained vivid and alert. They crinkled as he gave a self-deprecating smile. “I believe God has saved one for me.”

At Sunday Mass, her father placed his hand on her head sternly, a warning to be quiet and pray. An opalescent rosary dangled between her thumb and index finger. She pressed her palms together, letting the beads indent her skin, but her eyes wandered over to his younger brother across the pews. From afar, he mouthed the word, “Kneel,” and she obeyed him on the cold, hard marble before the Lord.

Adolescence brought out the best and worst of Wynter, depending on who you asked. Instead of heated arguments and slamming doors, there were awkward silences and the fear of being touched. She arched her back uncomfortably at the lightest brush of her shoulder. It prickled her skin, sent hot flashes through her spine, and she had to suppress the urge to snarl.

“What kind of child shies away from their mother’s touch?” Her parents couldn’t understand her. But they waved it off as a phase. Pain riddled her body in those days. Her chest swelled, there was tenderness in her thighs, and an aching throb that rippled like a current. Boys turned to look when she walked past. She bled and sweated a distinct odor of vile desire—it was getting more and more difficult to pretend to fit in.

The energy had to flow somewhere. Confused and overwhelmed, she locked it up in her wrists, her limbs, her face, until the seizures came. She hid out in the school restrooms, bashing her body against the toilet doors when nobody was around, willing the spirit to return to its flesh. All she could think about was her father’s belt around a boy’s neck, the leather creaking as it tightened. A pair of pale hands. Her pair of hands. And it pleased her.

Lucien saw as Wynter withdrew into herself, spotted the signs where no one figured where to look. The hollows of her haunted eyes, her cheeks gaunt. She had a Beast even before she became one of them. In return, he fed and nurtured it. Satisfied her innate cravings by taking her on his hunting trips, where they set traps and shot fowl and game, each trophy more impressive than the next. He leaned his weight into her back, hand cupped over hers, her finger on the rifle’s trigger as she peered through the scope. Breathing in, his nose involuntarily nuzzled the crook of her neck. “Eyes on the prize, doll,” he rasped. Lips marking skin. She didn’t need to be told twice.

Her symptoms subsided as she learned to shoot a man dead. Arms outstretched, two hands gripping Lucien’s revolver high and tight, bracing for the recoil. Other times, she sat cross-legged, watching him strip and clean his gun with a blackened rag before oiling its parts. She enjoyed the methodical approach he took with it and imagined herself as his weapon, how his hands would smooth over her surfaces, ease the pain she had felt all these years. Only his touch was bearable.

As Wynter filled out, she took to hitching rides in cars with older men. It was performative—the rolled-down windows, the smokey, sweat-stained seats, her lips strawberry-sucked and forearms pressed against the frame, exchanging bold grins as their gaze lingered along the contours of her body. Assessing, calculating, the risk versus reward. On the weekends after church, she taxidermied fallen prey with her uncle, skinning and tanning, disassembling and putting them back together again. They worked quietly, and her skin bristled with life every time he came into contact, guiding her. But it was as close as they could ever be.

That terrible, sweltering summer, just crossing into alligator season, she got into the wrong car. And everything spiralled from there. Her would-be killer ended up as her victim; he didn’t expect her to fight back. Neither did he expect Lucien to lurk behind, in Wynter’s shadow, just as he had done since the day she was born. They strung the man up to a tree, his kneecaps blown off as he struggled and pleaded for his life. She noticed piss trailing down his pants as she pulled down hard on his legs. He gurgled. And it pleased her.

Lucien didn’t bat an eyelid when in a fury, Wynter hacked the man to pieces long after he was dead. He waited patiently until she had expended the last of her energy before covering up the mess into a ground-dug hole. Then, he asked if she wanted to go home.

She rubbed her eyes furiously until they were red and sore, a plum-bruised patch over the right. She rubbed them some more, wincing, and choking back mimicked sobs, but they remained dry.

“What is it, doll?” he urged. “Tell me, what is it you want?”

There was a sharp ache in her core, a guttural, strained sound she emitted, as if she had lost all concept of speech. She tugged at his arm, bloodied prints branding the rolled-up sleeve of his white collared shirt. His navy blue blazer had been tossed carelessly to the side. For a moment, he pursed his lips and hesitated, but he knew he was only delaying the inevitable. How could one escape generations of bad blood—was what they felt bad?—and the ghosts of their past? It had been destined before they existed, and no matter how much they tried to prevent turning into a replica of those that came before them, they were playing a losing game as their ancestors’ pawns.

When he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, drawing her in, she sighed into his chest, aware of the bob of his Adam’s Apple as he swallowed thickly in response. “I know, I know,” he whispered, threading his fingers through the waves of her ash black hair.

“Do you?”

Their eyes met. Almond-shaped. Two sides of the same coin. A flicker of recognition.

He was sick. She was sick. They had poisoned their own well and drank from it freely. How could he ever say no to her? If they were damned, then so be it.

He knelt beside her, just as he knelt by his bedside every night, hands clasped fervently in prayer, begging the Lord to show him the way. A wooden cross hanging precariously by a nail above the headboard, threatening to smite him down. He placed his cheek against her womb, his sublime angel of death. Then he peeled off her denim shorts and she suckled the warm blood from his lips like a primordial offering.

Wrists pinned and panting, Wynter took in the dazzling blue sky. If there was a God, why would he make Lucien in her likeness? She arched her back, he shivered, and she bit back a moan.

At the end, he removed a bejeweled ring from his finger and slipped it onto hers. “You will always be a Della Passaglia.” She dreamed of midnight drives in the cool air, her head in Lucien’s lap, jazz blues on the radio as he whistled along to the tunes. She dreamed of keeping her maiden name, his teeth marks on her wedding garter, and all the possibilities that they couldn’t be. And then, she grabbed her clothes and ran.

In the present, Wynter found herself staring face up at the woman who called herself Violetta. Mahogany set eyes boring right through her. Her cruel mouth sticky and sanguine. She knew that the world was unkind to little girls and she had never been more than one. When Violetta Embraced her, she died alone screaming in agony, crying out for Lucien. But he wasn’t there.

Dividers by @diableriedoll

#vtm oc #oc: wynter #giovanni #hecata #vtm night road #vtmnr #vtm #vampire the masquerade #world of darkness #my vtm writing #wynter-writing #porcelainscribbles

27 notes · View notes