Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It was a nice day. Victor sat on the terrace overlooking the sloping lawn down to the riverbank. Fields beyond. Low clouds and sheep. A pleasant breeze. The smell of summertime. Birds. Butterflies.

A nice day. Victor closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose. Counted to five. Opened his eyes.

Yes. A nice day. It was important to remind oneself when a day was nice. To be present in the moment, living it, enjoying it. That's what he'd promised to do. Victor tried to keep his promises.

The breeze ruffled his hair and for the first time in ages Victor wondered whether he should fetch a sketchbook. A common blue was fluttering about the edges of the terrace and kept landing on the edge of one of the other chairs. He'd not drawn a butterfly since that last common blue.

Victor closed his eyes again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. When he opened his eyes the butterfly was gone again.

This house and its grounds, recently the property of an aristocratic family, had been a present from Victor's parents. Perfect for getting him away from the village and the past. Away from the dead and his memories. His guilt. He did feel a little better out here. Distraction was easier. The quiet was nice. He'd not been back to the village in ten years.

Warmth on his face from the sun. The scent of flowers and grass. A desire to sketch. Here he was, living. Alive. He was trying.

Footsteps behind him. Dogs panting, their nails clicking on the terrace. A surprised voice, "Oh, I didn't expect to find you here!"

It was Charlotte. Victor's wife.

They'd been married a little over two years. Another match arranged by his parents, this time more because they were worried about him rambling around this old pile all alone in his grief. Thought the fact that his wife's late husband and her father had been earls hadn't hurt. Charlotte was decent and sporty, affable and easygoing. She was a few years older than Victor. Tall and robust and plain-faced with a shock of auburn curls, she liked her horses and her dogs more than she liked him, but she still treated him with respect and kindness. He did not love her and she did not love him. Neither of them saw that as a problem.

Victor didn't mind. He didn't mind her company. It had been a little lonely out here, if he was honest. Besides, marrying was something the living did. A thing that a person who was living fully and moving on would do. So Victor had done it. He'd promised he would.

Though he'd insisted they use simple, civil vows. He'd been afraid that he'd choke on the traditional ones.

Charlotte took the chair next to him and the dogs, both handsome spaniels, settled at her feet. Victor reached to pet the nearest one. It was nice to have dogs about. The spaniels tolerated him as kindly as their mistress did.

They spoke of nothing much. The weather. The farm across the river. Charlotte's children, Victor's stepsons, who were due home from school soon. The boys liked Victor slightly less than their mother and the dogs did, but they were good children. They and Victor largely stayed out of one another's way.

At last, Victor stood. Charlotte shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand and looked up at him.

"Not chasing you away, am I?" she asked.

"I thought I'd take a walk," Victor replied. These nice, normal moments were somehow hardest. Felt the most like a betrayal. He knew this was nonsense but he couldn't help it.

"Ah, smashing, walk with us!" Charlotte said brightly. She stood and snapped her fingers at the dogs, who got to their feet excitedly. "We'd been planning a walk down the fields, right my loves?"

"I'd like to see the last of the wisteria on the old chapel," he told her, averting his eyes. "Just...a quiet walk on my own. But thank you. Perhaps next time."

He could feel his wife's eyes on him. Then she sighed.

"Suit yourself," she said. She stroked the nearest dog's head and then added gently, "It's not good for you to go down there so much."

Victor flushed hot and cold. He wasn't down there "so much." Just a daily walk. Once a day. An improvement over all day each day and sometimes overnight, the way it had been at the beginning.

"It's a nice walk," was all he said, his voice tight. "Especially in this weather."

He forced himself to meet Charlotte's gaze. Her eyes were full of pity. But she shrugged.

"All right, enjoy the wisteria," she said amiably. "Come on, dogs. I'll see you at dinner, Victor."

"Yes," he said.

He watched her stride down the lawn to the path that went through the fields, the setters bounding ahead and scaring up yet more butterflies. Then he turned and went the opposite way, through the formal gardens to the chapel on the edge of the wood.

It was shady and cool along this path. The breeze rustled in the trees. There were bees busy among the flowers. Look, he was noticing. He was enjoying. He'd patted the dog and called him a good boy. This was living.

The chapel was small and unassuming, perhaps centuries old, built of moss-covered stone. Victor stopped to look at the wisteria growing around the door and up the wall, as he'd said he would. It was very pretty. He plucked a few blossoms. Next to the chapel was a small burying ground, the resting place for generations of the family who'd owned this estate. A few had been interred inside the chapel itself, under the stones of the floor. Beyond that was the wood.

It was a peaceful, restful place. A beautiful one. Victor took a small key out of his pocket and unlocked the heavy padlock on the chapel door.

The two wooden pews had long since been pushed to the walls under the narrow windows. In the center of the room was a sturdy wooden bier. Atop the bier was a satin-lined casket. He always kept the casket open. He didn't want her to find herself in darkness if she opened her eyes.

Not that she'd ever opened them once. Nor moved. Nor spoken.

Victor removed the wilted roses he'd brought last time. As ever he was careful not to touch her even though he longed to. It didn't feel right, not when she was sleeping. Gently he placed the fresh wisteria around her. The silk lining of the casket was beginning to fade and grow thin, he noticed. Victoria's white bridal gown, which she'd never worn in life, was going yellow and threadbare. Her skin was papery, mummified. Her eyes were gone and what remained of her closed eyelids were sunken. Her hands, folded over her chest, were nothing but bones.

For a long time he stood and gazed at her face. Willed her to move, to speak to him. He knew it could happen. He knew she could hear him when he spoke to her. But deep down, he knew that she'd never do it. Never, just as he knew she would never use a haunting spell to visit. Because she did not want him to be haunted. She'd told him so.

He'd promised her. He didn't know how difficult, how nearly impossible, the promise would be to keep.

Done with the fresh flowers, he held the wilted ones in his hands and sat down on one of the pews. He'd been surprised that he'd been permitted to remove Victoria from her family vault and bring her here. No one had objected, not even the Everglots, who had left the village anyway in the six months since she'd died. And Victor's father had probably paid someone. Everyone likely felt sorry for him, figured he was mad with grief and guilt and trying to make amends and trying to mourn his almost-wife whom he'd betrayed.

That wasn't untrue, not really.

As far as the world knew, Victor had run from his wedding rehearsal to sow some extremely last minute oats. By the time he'd stumbled back home the next day, Victoria had drunk an entire bottle of laudanum out of despair and a broken heart.

Again, not untrue, at least in the broad outlines.

Victor sat there in the dark chapel and breathed the old dust and new wisteria. He could only remember what had really happened in bits and pieces. His mind had done a very clever trick of making him forget. Likely so that he did not go entirely mad.

He could remember waking up in the land of the dead with the corpse bride. Emily. How he'd run, tried to escape. That had happened. He'd almost managed to get back to Victoria. The memory of how they'd sat together in her room was a precious one and he didn't think about it often. He didn't want to wear it out with too much handling. Victor closed his eyes. Deep, deliberate breath through nose. One. Two.

He'd been sitting at the piano with Emily and a new dead person had arrived. He'd turned to see Victoria in the middle of the pub. Pearly blue skin, hair escaping crazily from her bun, pupils like tiny pinpricks.

Victor bent over, hand over his eyes. This was where it got patchy. Just snapshots with nothing in between. I wanted to find you, to save you, this was all that I could think of, the only way I could think of, she'd said. He'd tried to drink from one of the bottles on the bar but had immediately been sick. The image of the broken bottle and the sick on the floor. Clutching Victoria to him desperately. She'd still been warm. That was such a clear memory. That she hadn't gone completely cold yet.

Unable to keep still he rose and walked back to the casket. She hadn't moved. With his imagination he could project how he remembered her face onto her skeletal grin, her missing eyes. How she'd looked at him, begged him, Go home, go back, live. Promise me you will live your life. Promise me you'll never do what I've done. Or this was all for nothing. In the old skeleton's room, that had been. Crows everywhere.

The dead bride, Emily, to one side. She had reached out a hand. You could stay with me, here. Be my husband.

Two dead brides. One begging him to go. One asking him to stay. In the end, he'd done as Victoria had asked. He didn't want her death to be in vain. He was only still here because he'd made her a promise. Victor took his promises seriously.

Blank, after that. Wiped clean. No idea how he'd been returned. His parents told him that they'd found him near the edge of the wood, clothes torn and filthy. By the time they got to the Everglot house they'd just found Victoria's body in her room. He was glad he didn't recall that part. Funeral. Questions about where he'd been. The time with the doctors. The next thing he remembered was the carriage ride back to the village from the private hospital. When it had been decided that he was moving out to the country place. And he'd asked to bring Victoria with him.

But...she wasn't truly here, was she? He touched the edge of the casket and wished it was her hand. The dead could walk, if they wanted. But Victoria did not want to. How was it she could be in the land of the dead, up and walking and talking, but here she was only a corpse? The same had been true of Emily. Despite the fact that she'd risen up from her grave, he knew, he'd seen it, her body was there under the oak tree when Victor had her disinterred and properly buried in her family plot. He thought it the least he could do.

She'd been there, in that book and crow filled room, but also in her shallow grave. Victoria had been there, holding him, but she was also in a lifeless heap in her room, an empty laudanum bottle beside her. And he'd been able to go back and forth, alive all the time. Maybe it was some strange magic.

Or maybe none of it had happened. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe he'd made up some story to cover a truth he couldn't remember. And now he was visiting the empty shell of the woman he thought he'd spend the rest of his life with, desperately hoping she'd wake and speak to him again.

It sounded crazy, that was for certain.

Victor swallowed. He reached into the casket and rearranged the wisteria around Victoria's face. As he did he spoke to her in a quiet voice. About the nice day outside. The butterfly he'd seen. Charlotte and the dogs and the boys coming home. How he was still here, still breathing, trying his best to live.

"I made a promise," he said, his fingers stopping just short of what had been her cheek. He withdrew his hand with a sigh. "It's very hard to keep. But I'm trying. I'm trying my best."

He did not stay long after that. He bid her goodbye and pleasant rest, until tomorrow. Softly he closed the door and locked it up tight. Victor stepped back into the warmth of the day, his heart back inside that casket in the dim and dusty chapel. But he was trying. He was still alive and it was a nice day. In and out he breathed, not counting this time, and let the dappled sun warm his face.

No one was there to see when Victoria raised her skeletal hands to her face and wept.