Chapter Text
Alcina Dimitrescu is dead. One need only look at the ruined Castle, the sooty corpses of flies, and the crystalline statue of the Lady, returned by a Duke with pity in his heart and an eye for a bargain in his head. Milena had surrendered it easily enough: what could gold buy now when compared to having the last remains of her Mistress? She didn't know that, upon her death, Alcina Dimitrescu would become this cold, glimmering thing. She wonders if even the Countess knew that.
“Love is a mysterious thing, isn’t it?” The Duke asks her as he hands her back the statue of her late Lady. Milena is wordless at that. In response to what she trades away - gold from the locked coffers - he clicks his tongue and spares her a smile. “Remember, Milena: nothing loved is ever truly gone.”
He leaves soon after, carried away by a drift of snow. And then she is alone.
It doesn't last long.
Mother Miranda comes slouching back soon after. As does the hum of the Black God. At night, Milena sinks into that bed they used to share - but hadn't for weeks, for months maybe. The Lady and her daughters had been starving. Part of saving you includes saving you from myself, she’d snapped one day when Milena had pressed too hard, cried too openly, about their lack of closeness. I eat girlflesh - how much of that is left? In the middle of long nights, Milena wished the Lady had eaten her. It would've been better than watching her starve. Better than being all that remains in this empty Castle. No fire crackles now. The Lady's things collect dust - as does the shining statue of the Lady herself, despite Milena's careful ministrations.
The first sign that something is not well with the mind of the maid is that the tunnel Mother Miranda had identified to her as the site of her laboratory - the site where she had once become Holy, as the legend went - is emanating faint music.
Milena is frightened at first. Part of her is concerned that Mother Miranda is up to something odd down there, desecrating her mistress’ final resting place – it’s bad enough, really, that she has to share the castle with her. She’s bitter: Mother Miranda showed up so many times in the sixty years of Milena’s service and yet in her Mistress’ hour of need she’d been absent as a windless night. She has seen Mother Miranda’s power. She knows that if she had only come in that last hour that the Lady would not have died. Only now does Mother Miranda see fit to come. To sully the only aspect of her Lady that’s left. The rage grows steadily in Milena, a dirty and unfamiliar feeling. She feels that the grief will overtake everything eventually; burn it all to ruins. Her heart is a ticking time-bomb and every day she waits and she waits to rip out Miranda’s in return for what she has caused.
It will come. If she doesn’t believe that it will, then she will lose her mind entirely. But she will not be like Miranda or like the Countess. She will not fall into the spiral of loss. She will keep her head long enough to see it through. If only that music would stop. Day and night, the music plays - a trumpeting faraway record. No matter the room she sleeps in, no matter the time of night.
She wants to wail and cry that it’s late and Mother Miranda has to be quiet or she’ll disturb that cold crystal bust perched on the Lady’s desk in her former chambers. Milena has been going to such great lengths to take excellent care of the beautiful dead thing; polishing it, whispering to it, keeping it in the sunlight to watch the right of light burst through it. Sometimes she sees herself in it. She knows she can’t age - not since the Lady saved her from the sickness - but the glimpses she catches are of a tired, wan woman.
Once again night comes. Once again, she cannot sleep for the noise.
Time trickles by. There is nothing else left: Milena succumbs to the music eventually.
So she decides to investigate.
“I know, I know,” she mutters to the silent bust of her Lady that stands tall on the desk while she hooks her shoe over her ankle, hopping. “But it isn’t as if I have much else to do!” And in the silence, she curses herself. The Lady would purse her lips and sit back regally, waiting for her to think on her rash words. Waiting for her to realise she’d been too impulsive and scattered, and that meant rude . Waiting for her to apologise. “I’m sorry. I only meant - ”
Her eyes catch the glittering rock. She falls silent. The reality is that it’s only the cold, crystalline statue. Not the woman she’d spent sixty years of habit with. She stands still, takes a gulp. Then she fixes her skirts, and averts her eyes. Milena presses two fingers gently to the hip by way of goodbye.
She already feels as though she is losing her mind as she puts on her coat and heads into the night with a lantern in hand.
She is convinced of it - mind: lost! - when she bursts into the tunnel. The music is deafening inside of the Cave. Turning the corner into the darkness renders an old sight - some gold-lit, lamp-laden place with air that heaves with brandy. Somehow, impossibly, she is surrounded by what can only be described as one of those glimmering dance halls from her former Mistress’ stories. Figures spin in intricate dances, all to the beat. But something is wrong - very wrong - with them. Not one of them has a face.
Her eyes widen. It makes no sense. This place should be dirt. Dirt at most . Not… not all of this. Not an ornate hall with paintings and luxury and bars and faceless party-goers. Everyone in the Village has been dead for months! Everyone but her.
This can't be real. But when Milena looks behind her, she can still just about see the outskirts of the castle dungeons, confirming that she is deep beneath the ground. But ahead of her, there is again light and music and people eyelessly dancing and arching towards each other as though they are talking and laughing - only, with no mouths to open.
Except one.
"Oh! Damn it.” That voice is familiar. A young woman stands there, expensive dress and fur coat draping over her, with a glass titled. She stands at a normal height for a woman - an abnormal height for this woman. Her face is wound up into a scowl, but it's softened by years, and years, and years of youth. “Are you meant to be standing there? This is a dance-floor.” She asks, tone heavy with accusation. In her hand is an empty wine glass, and she stares at Milena’s chest where she’d stopped sort of, and presumably spilled some wine.
There she stands: Countess Alcina Dimitrescu. Inexplicably. Impossibly. Young (as young as Milena had been when she entered the castle all those years ago) unmarked, untouched, as vibrant as Milena has ever seen her. Alive. Wonder of wonders - she is there, alive.
"You're wearing my drink." The Countess continues, the sentence noticeably constructed to obscure any blame. The young Countess’ hand hovers over Milena's chest. Green eyes flicker over to a huddle of faceless party-dwellers, and the young woman huffs at Milena, before clearly deciding that she ought to do something.
"I got you good, I'm afraid." The Countess is chatty, full of talk and genial, well-drilled manners. Milena looks down. The other woman’s pale fingers dust Milena’s collarbone once, twice. There is nothing in the glass. There is nothing on Milena. The Countess is a bustle of activity, scowling as she fusses over a spill that never happened. She continues on, even grimaces at the sensation of wine that isn't there on her fingertips. Milena could have been convinced that the whole thing is a dream, if not for the smell of perfume and the tickle of the young Alcina’s fingers brushing her collarbone. Milena is awestruck, barely hearing a word out of the other’s mouth, and feeling as though her entire existence is caving in on itself.
This is everything Milena could have ever hoped for, this chance to see her again, and she’s close to taking the young Countess in her arms and bawling (and how wonderful it would feel! To be able to wrap her arms around Alcina’s waist and hold her in the way that she never could before!) but when their eyes meet, there is something not quite there. The knowing, affectionate tenderness is gone. Her eyes, Milena thinks, are not even her eyes in the way that Milena had known them; they are clear and sharp and green.
The next obvious thing is that Alcina Dimitrescu has a thick American accent, more pronounced and practiced than the Lady’s own when she spoke English. This must have been when she lived in America, Milena thinks. The Countess gives the glass to Milena. "Fetch me another, and you can sit with me and my friends. You're here with the Maryland Finishing School, right?” Her eyes dart away. “Excuse me, I -- Hattie, you better grab that booth or so help me!"
And with a very genuine, girlish giggle, Alcina Dimitrescu slides into a pack of faceless dancers, her fingers wrapping into the malformed hand of whoever she holds. In a matter of seconds, the hand became small, tanned, detailed. She’s being tugged away suddenly, and were it not for the primal fear that grips Milena at the thought of losing her in the faceless crowd, she would have found herself smiling at the very youthful laugh that she hears.
But there isn’t time, and the crowd is closing between them as someone takes her former mistress’ hand - Hattie, she realises vaguely, the girl from the old photos that had caused such trouble. She reaches out and tries to grasp onto her, onto her hands, onto her arms, but she’s numb and slow. She drops the glass and pays it no mind - her entire heart is being whisked into the dancefloor. She whimpers out a barely audible: “Wait..!”
The music drowns them out. Once again, Milena is alone.