Chapter Text
Humans amass a lot of ~things. More things than you could fill a room with, which is easily demonstrated by the singular knapsack of items stored in your dorm room cupboard. Your roommate is not similarly spartan, she and Betty’s knick-knacks and pictures remind you of an Edwardian drawing room and every surface is cluttered.
But this doesn't mean you haven’t kept anything in three centuries of living... You are far more sentimental than you will ever admit.
Sentimentality is a dagger your mother can cut you with. The sense of entitlement she feels over your un-life has never wavered, her reminders that she created you and took you from all the things you naively hated in life are all too relentless to be forgotten. This entitlement makes your box of keepsakes hers, by right, and not yours. Though even you were surprised the first time you went to Silas and saw it in her rooms, hiding in plain sight on a dresser you remember from her apartments in Paris. Fuck that, you weren't surprised at all, what better way to remind herself she owns the paltry remnants of your human life and your long life as a vampire. Nothing is your own. You remember going to it instinctually, running your hands over the gold lettering, the intricate curling M that merges into the K. Of course, she catches you looking and turns to you, beaming.
“My darling girl, don’t you see how dear you are to me that I kept your little keepsake box safe all this time!” You thanked her falteringly and had gone to pick it up to take back to your dorm but her hand comes to rest on its top, right over your name and pushes it back down to the dresser. “I think I should keep hold of it for a little longer, don’t you?”
****
You've been alive…undead again for all of about five hours when you realise the box is still there. Laura is fast asleep, her limbs wrapped around you as a reminder you are there, which makes you smile. Contentedly, you stay until Laura shifts and hungry as you are, you kind of want to stay in case she wakes up and thinks you never came back at all. You tuck her in with a fastidiousness of which even your nanny would have been proud even checking that the yellow pillow is secure beneath her head where she'd flopped sideways. Just in case, you leave her an abundance of sticky notes saying ‘just getting blood, you’re exhausted- sleep!’ and do not draw little hearts in the corners.
The large metal gate that dominates the entrance to your mother's quarters is ajar and it feels wrong that you are able you slip through unannounced. Anxiety settles low in your stomach... Even when deserted, your mother’s apartment is as creepy as fuck. You tiptoe past the fashionably minimalist lounge and for the first time ever you stand outside your mother’s bedroom door and don’t knock. It feels like a very delicious sort of sacrilege. The room is a time warp, seemingly unchanging from how you remember rooms looking the first time you lived in England, a little time after you were turned. In the entire time you've known your mother her bedrooms have always looked like this, same sturdy four poster, same dark furniture but an ever-changing array of little treasures displayed here and there. You feel the temptation to ransack the place. But in the end you only take the box.
Laura is nap ruffled and yawning when you return. “Wassat?”
“Your German is really not improving cupcake.”
“Ha-ha” Laura deadpans. She then makes the exaggerated point of asking in German, which you probably deserve.
“It was originally a jewellery box, a present from my mother…my human mother.” You pick it up, pausing to let Laura get a good look before sweeping the sunglasses and the reddish bag from the top of your bed with your free hand.
“There.” You announce, placing the box dead centre.
“Right where it belongs.” Laura adds, standing up to admire it with you.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”