Work Text:
"Mother always suspected something was wrong with us," Lucille says, dreamily, almost conversationally, as she strokes the brush over and over and over through Edith's hair. Something in her touch is almost tender, almost loving. Edith wants to retch. But all she can do is lie, powerless, nearly insensate, and endure the leaden heaviness of her limbs and the crawling gentleness of the brush moving through her hair.
Poison. They'd poisoned her. Why such a surprise to find that they'd drug her as well?
"Of course," Thomas' rich, deep voice says, from somewhere near the foot of the bed, and Edith hates herself just a little for how she still responds.
He steps into Edith's vision, still so beautiful, somehow even more so with his hair disheveled, in only his shirtsleeves. The secret smile that crosses his face, though, goes over Edith's head. She does not need to be able to see Lucille's face to know that she shares it. "She never dreamed the truth."
Edith endeavours, once more, to raise her head, an arm, whatever. One finger responds, a lazy waggle before it drops once more in exhaustion. Lucille's hands in her hair never falter.
"Did you think you could keep your little indiscretion from me?" Lucille asks, and there is a bite beneath her friendly, almost amused tone. Edith struggles to raise the tongue that seems to have turned, in her mouth, to a slab of stone, but then Thomas smiles and runs a hand through his hair, and Edith realises they've begun to talk as though she's no longer in the room.
As though she's already dead.
"Never," Thomas says, stepping closer to the bed, never so much as glancing down at Edith's prone form, never taking his eyes from his sister's face. "You know full well we have no secrets from each other."
Lucille laughs as though he's made some grand joke that only they two can comprehend. The maddening stroke, stroke, stroke of the brush never ceases.
"I know how much you want her," Thomas says, drawing ever closer, his voice low and soft as a lover's.
"As much as you do?" Lucille says, the bite slipping away, leaving only the amusement in her voice.
Thomas laughs. "You know the answer to that, as well. Exactly as much as you do."
For the first time, he looks down at Edith. Lucille leans over, as well, her dark head slipping into Edith's vision. Edith looks from one to the other, her eyes darting in her leaden head, searching for the sliver of sympathy she'd thought she'd seen in Thomas' eyes, however briefly. But what she sees only makes panic prick all the sharper at her chest.
Their smiles, she thinks, looking from one pale face to the other. They're identical.
"She is lovely, is she not?" Lucille muses, not taking her eyes from Edith's face. There's something hungry, even predatory, in her eyes.
"A morsel," Thomas says, as though echoing her thoughts. "Perfectly edible. Don't you think she'd taste sweet?"
"As honey," Lucille says, almost before Thomas finishes speaking. Her fingers brush, cool, against Edith's cheek. "Poor little Edith."
Edith's eyes flick from Sharpe to Sharpe. Her tongue is still as a headstone in her mouth, heavy and immobile, but Thomas and Lucille meet each other's eyes and then turn back to her with those eerily similar smiles, as though they've heard the words Edith couldn't manage to make.
Thomas sits on the edge of the bed, beside Edith. He holds out a hand, without looking away from her face, and Lucille hands the brush over without so much as a glance in his direction. Thomas takes it, and resumes brushing out Edith's hair. In all this, he doesn't break the rhythm Lucille had set. If Edith had not watched Lucille hand over the brush, she wouldn't have known it had changed hands.
"Poor, beautiful little Edith," Thomas says, softly, almost to himself, and Edith nearly sobs.
"Only child," Lucille says, as though finishing Thomas' thought. Her spidery fingers card through Edith's hair, begin to weave the side she'd brushed into a braid.
"You've never really known what it's like to be close to someone," Thomas says, with a darting glance at Lucille, whose mouth twists in a smile that seems somehow mirthless.
"Not the way we are," she says, abandoning her braiding to tuck a blonde curl back behind Edith's ear. A shiver skitters its way down Edith's spine, a shiver that, despite everything, is not wholly unpleasant.
She tries, desperately, to turn her head away, but it's far too heavy to move. Her limbs still lie like dead things, flat on the bed.
She feels like a butterfly, trapped in the killing jar, fluttering helplessly against the glass.
It seems to take a lifetime to make her tongue shift in her mouth. The croaking whisper that escapes Edith's throat sounds like no human language, but still, Lucille seems to catch her meaning.
"What are we to do with you?" she asks Edith, before turning her gaze up to Thomas.
His smile is all sweet innocence, the darkness clearing from his eyes for a moment that Edith thinks will break her heart. "I think we should keep her. At least for a little while longer."
"She does own a business," Lucille says thoughtfully, brushing a caressing hand across Edith's brow. "There would be no need for another's fortune, not unless poor management were to run it into the ground."
"And you are not capable of managing anything poorly," Thomas says, all praise, eyes on his sister, and Edith wishes once again to retch.
Lucille hums, somewhere deep in her throat. She shifts, as she sits on the bed, her skirts a silken rustling beside Edith’s head.
“Would she be enough to keep us satisfied?” she asks, quite clinically, Edith thinks, for what she realises must be Lucille’s meaning.
After Lucille’s words, trapped as she is within her own leaden body, the feeling of Thomas’ hand closing on her knee sends an electric jolt through Edith. Even through the fine fabric of her nightdress, she can feel the heat of his skin, the inexorable gentleness of his fingers curling around the inside of her leg. That night, the night they’d been trapped by the snowstorm, flies back to her mind, sending a hot shameful flush all through her. But Thomas does not move his hand, merely letting it rest, possessive and so warm, on Edith’s knee. Try as she might, she can focus on nothing else. Try as she might, she cannot move.
“I don’t know,” Thomas says, and his voice has taken on a mocking edge that, Edith realises, she had only associated with Lucille. “We shall have to find out.”
Lucille leans forward, and Edith has just enough time to register surprise before she is being kissed, quite expertly, on the mouth. Even if she were not heavy all over with whatever the Sharpe siblings have dosed her with, Edith thinks, she would not have known how to respond. Would not have been able to respond.
She does not know that she would have immediately pushed Lucille away, and at the thought, is suddenly and shamefully grateful to the drug for at least giving her an excuse.
When Lucille draws back, her smile is the most self-satisfied Edith has ever seen it. She looks at Edith as though she is the cat, and Edith the cream. “What’s the matter, sweet morsel? You seemed so eager for our kisses when you thought Thomas gave them.”
Edith’s heart thunders in her ears. She looks to Thomas, the one she had relied upon to be sane - more sane, but her heart sinks, a great hollow opening in her chest, when she sees only a mirror of Lucille’s triumph in his face.
It softens, melts, though, as he meets Edith’s eyes, as one who realises a joke has gone too far.
“You thought you married Sir Thomas Sharpe,” he says, apologetically, his hand sliding slowly a little higher up Edith’s thigh, his touch gentle, his warm, warm fingers finding rest on the soft, sensitive place just above her knee. Edith draws in a sharp breath, and holds it. “We...misrepresented ourselves.”
He darts a quick, lost look at Lucille, who sighs, reaching up to tangle a lock of Edith’s hair between her fingers. “So pretty. Like woven sunlight,” she says, half to herself, before giving it a tug, hard enough to hurt. The sting in Edith’s scalp is welcome after all the soft, caressing touches, like a little reminder of what danger she finds herself in. Like a little reminder that she is more than a pretty doll to be stroked and handled however the Sharpes please. “The world out there responds better to him. In here, however...the house is my domain.”
Edith’s confusion must show on her face, because Lucille leans down, until she is all but breathing her whispered words into Edith’s ear. “You have no brothers or sisters, you could not know... They called us unnatural. Put us away, in the dark -”
“Punished us for making a sound,” Thomas agrees, seamlessly picking up the rhythm of Lucille’s sentence. His grip tightens on Edith’s thigh, and a choked cry dies in her throat.
“Punished us,” Lucille continues, picking up where Thomas left off without breaking stride, as seamlessly as she had handed over the brush, “for whatever they pleased. For nothing at all. We had to learn -”
“- to hide it. To act alone. Though...not perfectly. One must take the lead. Mother -”
“She called us monsters,” Lucille says, breaking the rhythm with a moment of contemplative silence.
Thomas shakes his head. A single stray curl falls away from his face, and Edith wishes she didn’t feel compelled to reach up and tuck it back behind his ear. “We don’t know if she ever knew how right she was.”
At last, Edith manages to make her tongue obey her. “We?”
Thomas and Lucille both fix their eyes upon her.
And then they both smile, again, those strangely identical smiles.
“We don’t do well apart,” Thomas says, with a glance at Lucille.
“Distance treats us ill. Besides which, I lack the social capital,” Lucille says primly. “He lacks the spine. But together...”
“The whole is greater,” Thomas finishes for her.
Edith stares. Their smiles falter.
“You,” she manages, before her tongue once more fails her.
“We,” Thomas says, and Lucille says, at the same time, their voices blending into one.
Edith looks from one to the other.
Then she turns her gaze away, to the high, dark arches of the ceiling overhead.
“When we...” The voice is Thomas’, and Edith wonders if that means anything, if they only chose it for her benefit. His hand tightens again on her thigh, his fingers points of heat through her nightdress. “It was both of us. Both of us with you.”
“And it always will be,” Lucille’s voice says, smoothly.
The hand that closes over Edith’s other thigh is slender and spidery, cooler than Thomas’. Edith keeps her eyes on the ceiling until her vision starts to blur. Somewhere in the corridor outside, something - something not of the living - drags its shifting, scraping way over the floorboards.
The Sharpe siblings’ hands, ever so gently, ease Edith’s legs apart. She tries to raise her head, but it falls directly back against the pillow again, too heavy to hold up.
“Don’t worry, little butterfly,” Lucille’s voice sing-songs, and Thomas’ catches it up, the same rhythm, the same cadence.
“We’ll treasure you forever.”
Pinned under glass, Edith thinks, the tears pricking at her eyes hot and shameful. She can almost move. She could almost break free.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and lets the tears spill, burning, down her cheeks.
Somewhere in the depths of the house, she can hear, faintly, the sound of a woman sobbing.