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“You seek to threaten me with death? If you seek to threaten me, threaten me with life.”
- “Resurrection” - Penny Dreadful 1x03
“I could not see a single thing,
Words from my eyes did start—
They spoke as chords do from the string,
And blood burnt round my heart.”
- “First Love” - John Clare
The things she remembered about her last life, her first life, came in flashes.
Her mother’s voice, a Gaelic lullaby that curled over broken brogue, white linen cloth that might have been her dress, and in the summer, soft blue cornflowers passing under her hands like silk. Other things flickered through the ether, a fingertip’s reach away, other people’s voices blending around words that she didn’t recognize, names that didn’t register. Somewhere low beneath her and above her at once, something cracked wide open, spilling her out of it like the yolk out of an egg.
She sat bolt upright in the water, gasping for breath that she realized she didn’t particularly need. Her ears were full, plugged and unbearably loud at the same time, and, like a baby, she blinked her eyelids open slowly, the world blurring into focus around her.
“Darcy,” someone was saying. A pale someone, skinny arms extended toward her, the only light in the darkness, before the sky above them broke apart with lightning. “Darcy! Darcy - it’s alright, you’re safe, you’re with me. Dear God, you’re safe.”
Her teeth clashed with her lower lip, trying to find the vibrations that matched the bloodshot blue eyes boring into hers. The water weighed heavily over her bare skin, and when she tore her gaze away from him, she saw that she was naked under its surface.
“Victor,” her mouth discovered without her forming it on purpose. “Victor...what…?”
The corners of his lips turned up in a disbelieving smile. He exhaled one breathy laugh. “Darcy, darling, you’re - you’re alright. It’s alright, you’re safe with me.”
“Victor?” she whispered. His name tasted like copper on her tongue.
“Yes, I’m here.” His hands found either side of her face, and for one blissful moment, the ether drew close again, her eyes fluttering shut as she let her cheeks remember the feel of him holding her, remember the slightly chemical smell of him, along with the mild sweat in his clothes. “I’m here. I’ve got you - are you cold?”
“Yes.” Her jaw clenched on the final wet sound, and she felt herself sliding into an upright position, her fingers - also pale, unfamiliar, shaking - grasped the rim of the tub she’d been submerged in. Hair slunk messily down her shoulders and across the swell of her breasts; Victor took an involuntary step back, his cheeks going soft pink. “Victor, I...what’s happened to me?”
He didn’t answer at first, turning away to fetch her a towel which he draped around her shoulders as he helped her to her feet. She couldn’t help but shiver, but it was a reflex more than a real feeling; cold was not unfamiliar, yet she wouldn’t reject the warmth of his skinny frame wrapping around hers.
When she was sat by the meager fireplace in his flat above the laboratory, he crouched in front of her, wringing her hair dry in a fisted cloth. “You were sick,” he explained, each word escaping with some difficulty. “You’d been helping - with Doctor Foster in the consumption ward.”
Her hand came instinctively to her mouth, as if to catch the blood that she might have passed through it in another time.
“Jane,” she said, her friend’s tawny brown hair tied up into a firm bun drifting listlessly to the front of her mind. She remembered the ward: the pale-faced patients, lips tinged with red, stale air thick with death. The white linens of her caretaking uniform matched the linens of their beds, at least until the thin sheets had stained with every hacking cough before they were ripped from the world, eyes open and glassy. Jane Foster, her friend and her mentor, the closest thing she’d had to a sister in London, with her kind eyes, her steady hands, and her sharp, honest tongue. “Where is she?”
“Gone back to America.” He got his feet under him, searching the wardrobe before he found her a gown, laying it on the bed beside the small crackling embers of the hearth. “After you...after you’d fallen ill.”
She remembered the beds at the ward, so cold and too small, the thrashing coughs of the other patients in the dark of night. She remembered her own chest rattling with death, and now, in Victor’s apartment, the raw pink scars that ran across her collarbone and down her sternum.
“I called for you,” she said, his name halfway on her lips before she realized this was another memory, a moment ripped from her lying at Jane’s side with a cool sheen of sweat on her forehead, the world curling to darkness around her. “You were - we were friends. And...you saved me?”
He hesitated to answer, throat bobbing once while he took the nightgown from the bed and helped it over her head, hand lingering by her cheek once she was covered. “Yes.”
She closed her eyes and reached through the darkness for the past, for her childhood days lying beside him in the sunshine and laughing, running through the fields outside his father’s manor, reading poetry that escaped his lips like music in the wind. Finding each other in London after he’d gone off to school and she’d followed Jane like a loyal fawn to her doe. His cheek growing warm and pink when she’d pressed her lips to it in farewell.
“Oh, Victor,” she whispered, blinking her lashes open. She covered his knuckles with her own hand, let her unfaltering gaze find him, blazing, as the thunder cracked above them again. “Your lies do not become you.”