#every other verse makes me wish I was either holding pepper spray or handing it to Jonathan under a table

[see-arcane]

(Needless song dissection incoming)

Okay, I know the lyrics match up tonally with Jonathan's stay in Transylvanian Vampire Hell, hence 'so far from home~,' but it's starting to click home to me as something Dracula must have had on his brain as of/just after October 3rd.

The most obvious reason is that, like the rest of the @re-dracula tunes, it would only make sense to have "Inside You" happening within chronological order of events. Why backpedal all the way to the opening for a time-misplaced tune?

But the subtler reason it's most likely placed right around October 3rd's events? Potentially right after Dracula got a look at white-haired, hollow burning-eyed Jonathan in Piccadilly (and got duly mugged at kukri point)? The style of the song. It's a jaunty, whirling, waltzing, stage-ready melody.

The kind of song Dracula would likely never have heard and summarily gotten stuck in his head until he was in England and in reach of a stage. You don't need an invitation to a theatre! Everyone is welcome with a ticket! So he mills inside the same way he idled his way into wolf-browsing at the zoo, and takes in a show. And the music hooks his ear.

Cue today's spectacle, replete with making the one move guaranteed to enrage and devastate his runaway solicitor--so far from (his) home--and lay the groundwork for the young man ultimately crawling back into his thrall. Holiest love and all.

Jonathan won't stay put to be turned and take his place with the Brides like a good new addition? Jonathan wants to join his nuisance busy-brained beloved in mucking up Dracula's plans for England? Jonathan, the man who belongs belonged to him, wants to defy him, strike at him with more than a spade?

Fine.

Mina is damned by force. It is a heinous assault, but the job is done in minutes, the horror left to stain things in the bastard's absence.

But Jonathan? As the tune gleefully, insidiously implies, Dracula wants to shoulder him back through the gamut of their past roles, to take the time to make him plead for mercy that won't come (for him or her), wringing out the old doomed song and dance from his former captive until all the light he saw in his eyes--hollow-burning, strong, vicious, meaning to make the hunter the hunted--go out before Jonathan is dragged, beaten and broken at last, into the state he barely escaped in the castle.

And, like all the knife-twisting acts of that hellish summer stay, Jonathan will have to do it by choice.

Facing the wolves or waiting out the night.

Kill her or join her, my sweet friend. Don't look so sour, Jonathan. No one is forcing you to do this. Ha ha.

Even in his own sourest moods to come--and the bloodsucking fucker will have PLENTY to be sour about in future entries, get wrecked you undead prick--I imagine humming the little tune to himself will be some balm.

Ugh.