Mina ficlets
I've been writing a lot of these lately, and thought I might as well post them here. A few are just insane, and some are threatrical_muse prompts.
theatrical_muse: What’s the lamest excuse you’ve ever given for something you’ve done?
I suppose that would have to be the evening right after we had killed the Count, when Jonathan and I lay next to one another in bed, close to sleep. His arms were around me, and I knew that everything should be all right from now on, that we would finally have a chance to live together as husband and wife, that we would now be content.
But, for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself from crying.
I cried and cried, the tears turning to full out sobs as I wept, and I was crying for everything and everyone. For Lucy, lying asleep on her bed, those awful red marks so clear. For Quincey, always kind, always brave till the very end. For the Count, a look of peace on his face finally as he faded into dust. And most of all I wept for myself, still stained, despite the fact that Van Helsing said that my soul was saved, still unclean, still damned.
Jonathan tightened his hold around me and whispered gently. “Mina, dear, what’s wrong?” I want to speak, to explain all my feelings, but I felt as thought I was suffocating, just as I had when the Count pressed my head against his chest and I couldn’t manage the words. Instead I said only. “I’m fine. Just not feeling quite well.”
While we may have vanquished the monster, he had not relinquished his hold over me.
~
watchingDraculamovies!Mina (for mhari)
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Mina and Jonathan were about half way through watching the movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, and the ‘Mina’ and ‘Dracula’ characters were having a romantic dinner together as the ‘Dracula’ character told the ‘Mina’ character that she was the reincarnation of his wife.
Jonathan put an arm around Mina. “Don’t worry, dear, it’s all right. It’s just a movie. We know that didn’t happen.”
Mina continued looking at the screen in horror. “But it…it’s completely disgusting! How can people make up lies like that? And the way they portrayed Lucy! She was nothing like that, and it’s an insult to her memory to say that she was!” She paused, looking at Jonathan. “And I do hope it was nothing like that with you and…those women.”
Jonathan’s reply was perhaps a bit too hasty. “Oh, no, of course not! You know I would never betray you like that!” She smiled at him. “Of course, dear.” And she returned to her ranting. “I never fell in love with the Count, I did my best to end the evil he was spreading in the world, and to free myself from it! Why is that so difficult for the people who created this abomination to understand?”
Jonathan waited till she had calmed down slightly, and then said. “But there is one thing here that is correct…Professor Van Helsing was quite like that.”
Despite herself, Mina laughed. “You’re right.”
They watched the movie in silence for some time, and then they got to a scene in which the ‘Mina’ character was entering a bedroom in Dr. Seward’s asylum. Mina began to shake slightly at that, but continued watching. But when the scene had progressed a little further and the ‘Mina’ character was angry at the ‘Dracula’ character, hitting him fruitlessly over and over, Mina couldn’t resist hissing angrily under her breath, more to herself than Jonathan. “Had I done that to him he would have caused me to be in enough pain that I never thought of doing so again.” Jonathan glanced at his wife worriedly, but said nothing.
Then, when the ‘Dracula’ character bit the ‘Mina’ character, Mina gasped and began to twist her hands together violently in her lap. Then the ‘Dracula’ character opened a vein in his chest and the ‘Mina’ character put her mouth of it, and Mina bit her tongue to keep from dissolving into sobs at the familiar scene. But by biting her tongue she drew blood, and that taste, too, reminded her of that night. She put her head in her hands and sobbed for several long moments as Jonathan watched, feeling powerless and incapable of doing anything to help her.
Then, suddenly, Mina stood up, took the disc of that awful movie out and snapped it in half. Letting the pieces fall to the ground, she left the room.
~
SeducingVanHelsing!Mina for jiasachan
“It was always quite obvious how you felt.” Mina said, her voice quiet. “From the way you looked at me, the admiring tone in your voice when you spoke to me, the way you would always sit slightly closer to me then anyone but Jonathan did. She laughed bitterly. “If you think I didn’t notice, then you must think that I’m far more naïve then I ever was.”
The elderly Dutch professor seemed quite shocked by her words. “Madame Mina, now, really…” But she cut him off and continued speaking. “You couldn’t save Lucy, but you did manage to save me. Why, I wonder, is that? Why did you let her be taken by the Count and then decide that there was no other option than having her own fiancée drive a stake through her heart? Then, when the same thing happened to me, it was decided that we should all go to Transylvania because of course you didn’t want to have to drive a stake through my heart! All well and good, but did you refrain from making cruel comments about what had happened to me even the day after they had taken place? And don’t you think the way your eyes passed over me in that month hurt immeasurably, when I could hardly bear to have my husband kiss me?”
Van Helsing seemed quite wordless at all her accusations, and there was a long pause before Mina said, with a smile. “So I believe I shall give you what you want.” And she leaned in to kiss him. He never saw her take out the knife.
~
child!Mina for frivolous-jo
“Daddy! Daddy!” Mina ran out the door and down the street as soon as she saw her father coming through the window. She was normally quite calm and collected, at least for a seven year old, but whenever her father came to visit all that was gone. He, too, looked excited to see her. When he reached her he picked her up, twirling her around as she giggled. As he put her down, holding her hand as they walked back to her aunt and uncle’s house, Mina’s father said to her. “I have a new book for you today.” She looked at him with childish admiration. “You do?” He nodded, smiling, and took out a copy of “The Canterbury Tales” from his bag. Her eyes lit up. “Thank you!”
Her father watched, bemused, as Mina ran to her bedroom and put the book on a small shelf where she had been keeping all the books he gave her. She looked up at him and grinned, her eyes full of innocent adoration.
-
Mina arrived in the park, and there, in their favorite spot was Jonathan. He was eight, and nearly a whole year older than her, but they had been friends for as long as she could remember. When he saw her he smiled and waved. She waved back and hurried to where he sat, clutching her notebook and pencil to her. Almost as soon as she sat down next to him, crossing her legs, a slightly younger girl with wild blonde hair ran towards them. Mina smiled and stood up to hug her as she reached them. “Mama had visitors,” said Lucy, slightly out of breath, “I had to stay and have tea with them.”
“Let’s play Kings and Queens,” Jonathan said suddenly, “I can be the King, and Mina can be the Queen.”
“I’ll be the Princess!” Lucy piped up.
Mina looked down at her feet and mumbled. “I’m not pretty enough to be the Queen. Lucy should be the Queen.”
Jonathan got to his feet and put an arm around her. “That’s nonsense. You have to be the Queen. After all, we are going to get married.”
She smiled shyly. “I suppose you’re right.”
~
theatrical_muse prompt: Talk about something you inherited. (It could be an object, a physical attribute, a belief, etc.)
I inherited my father’s love of books. He was a bookseller, and whenever he came to visit me, he would bring me a new book of some sort, whether it was a collection of fairy stories or a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis in the original Latin. I treasured them all equally, and would hold them close to me when he was gone and I was lonely, enjoying the scent of the pages. I lived with my aunt and uncle, you see, and wasn’t able to see him much.
He died when I was twelve. I cried a great deal, and it was only Jonathan’s arms around me as we sat on our favorite stone bench in the park that eventually made me stop. Jonathan and I had our first, hesitant, awkward kiss there two years later. Father never met Jonathan, but I think he would have liked him.
I didn’t know my mother very well at all. From the portrait of her that my father showed me, I look almost nothing like her, and inherited only her hair, which, like mine, is dark brown and curls slightly. She was gorgeous, with stunning green eyes and the posture of a Queen. I look more like my father, far more.
I inherited her locket though, a heavy, expensive heirloom with room for a small picture inside. I never wear jewelry, so it was never much use to me. Most of the time it gathered dust at the bottom of a drawer, beneath scraps of paper and pens and notes I’d taken.
Then Jonathan had to go away, on a trip for his job. It was an important opportunity for him, and the first major assignment he had. It was a great honor that he would be trusted like that at only twenty-four. But he would be gone for a long time, and we had just gotten engaged recently. Neither of us were looking forward to the separation.
So I gave him the locket. I put a small picture of myself inside and gave it to him and kissed him and told him I’d write him at least three times a week.
And I hoped that, maybe, for once, my mother might actually end up helping me, in a roundabout way.
But, of course, that’s not the way things happened. They never do. And these days, I really do wish I never gave Jonathan the locket.
~
theatrical_muse prompt: That which does not kill us only makes us stronger
I wish this were true, I do with all my heart. Because I’m one of the survivors of these trials, one of the four of us who managed to live through it all. Well, it’s five, really, but Van Helsing doesn’t seem to count, given the way he wandered off to find new people to aid, new unlikely cases to interfere in. So it was just the four of us left, scars beginning to form as we sat around a table and tried to make idle conversation.
We all bear both the visible and invisible scars of our experiences. You can see it in Arthur’s eyes, the sadness the pain that I think must have been there since h had to drive a stake through poor Lucy’s heart, and perhaps from even before, when that heart stopped beating.
John is rarely around, mostly retreating back to the asylum to immerse himself in the lives of others, in their sad tales, but when he is he doesn’t seem to be really here. It’s almost as if he has distanced himself to protect himself from our shared memories.
Jonathan bears perhaps the most obvious mark of all we’ve gone through; his prematurely grey hair. Who knows if shock or fear did that to him, but I love him for it nevertheless. Sometimes when he lies asleep in bed beside me, I run my fingers through his hair. The texture of it hasn’t changed. He wasn’t scarred that deeply, or at least I hope note.
But none of us really knows what happened to him in the castle. I’ve read his journal from that time, he’s handed it to me, but I think some days that it wasn’t the whole story. But I never bring it up, because I know the memories would hurt him to talk about.
As for me…Yes, I’ve been changed. But I’m not stronger. I was strong enough before everything. Actually, I was strong enough when Lucy died, strong enough to take care of Jonathan and be certain to cry only when he was asleep. Strong enough to hold Arthur in my arms as he cried over his dead fiancée.
I wasn’t strong two months later.
I wasn’t strong when the Count pushed my face down on his chest and forced me to drink his blood. I wasn’t strong when I cried and cried for hours afterwards.
I tried to be strong in the next month, when I let myself be hypnotized twice a day, my mind completely connected with that of the man I hated more than anyone else in the world. I tried, I tried very hard.
But I think I failed, in the end. When I saw Quincey dying and the Count turning to dust, the strength that I had been attempting to hold onto slipped away.
And I’m weak now. Nearly every night in my dreams I relive the night when the Count made it so that he had complete power over me. Sometimes the place or the sequence of events is different, but it’s always similar to what actually happened that night.
And when I wake up, in a cold sweat, I know that it hasn’t all made me stronger, and that I’ll never be as strong as I was before it happened.
theatrical_muse: What’s the lamest excuse you’ve ever given for something you’ve done?
I suppose that would have to be the evening right after we had killed the Count, when Jonathan and I lay next to one another in bed, close to sleep. His arms were around me, and I knew that everything should be all right from now on, that we would finally have a chance to live together as husband and wife, that we would now be content.
But, for some reason, I couldn’t stop myself from crying.
I cried and cried, the tears turning to full out sobs as I wept, and I was crying for everything and everyone. For Lucy, lying asleep on her bed, those awful red marks so clear. For Quincey, always kind, always brave till the very end. For the Count, a look of peace on his face finally as he faded into dust. And most of all I wept for myself, still stained, despite the fact that Van Helsing said that my soul was saved, still unclean, still damned.
Jonathan tightened his hold around me and whispered gently. “Mina, dear, what’s wrong?” I want to speak, to explain all my feelings, but I felt as thought I was suffocating, just as I had when the Count pressed my head against his chest and I couldn’t manage the words. Instead I said only. “I’m fine. Just not feeling quite well.”
While we may have vanquished the monster, he had not relinquished his hold over me.
~
watchingDraculamovies!Mina (for mhari)
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
Mina and Jonathan were about half way through watching the movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, and the ‘Mina’ and ‘Dracula’ characters were having a romantic dinner together as the ‘Dracula’ character told the ‘Mina’ character that she was the reincarnation of his wife.
Jonathan put an arm around Mina. “Don’t worry, dear, it’s all right. It’s just a movie. We know that didn’t happen.”
Mina continued looking at the screen in horror. “But it…it’s completely disgusting! How can people make up lies like that? And the way they portrayed Lucy! She was nothing like that, and it’s an insult to her memory to say that she was!” She paused, looking at Jonathan. “And I do hope it was nothing like that with you and…those women.”
Jonathan’s reply was perhaps a bit too hasty. “Oh, no, of course not! You know I would never betray you like that!” She smiled at him. “Of course, dear.” And she returned to her ranting. “I never fell in love with the Count, I did my best to end the evil he was spreading in the world, and to free myself from it! Why is that so difficult for the people who created this abomination to understand?”
Jonathan waited till she had calmed down slightly, and then said. “But there is one thing here that is correct…Professor Van Helsing was quite like that.”
Despite herself, Mina laughed. “You’re right.”
They watched the movie in silence for some time, and then they got to a scene in which the ‘Mina’ character was entering a bedroom in Dr. Seward’s asylum. Mina began to shake slightly at that, but continued watching. But when the scene had progressed a little further and the ‘Mina’ character was angry at the ‘Dracula’ character, hitting him fruitlessly over and over, Mina couldn’t resist hissing angrily under her breath, more to herself than Jonathan. “Had I done that to him he would have caused me to be in enough pain that I never thought of doing so again.” Jonathan glanced at his wife worriedly, but said nothing.
Then, when the ‘Dracula’ character bit the ‘Mina’ character, Mina gasped and began to twist her hands together violently in her lap. Then the ‘Dracula’ character opened a vein in his chest and the ‘Mina’ character put her mouth of it, and Mina bit her tongue to keep from dissolving into sobs at the familiar scene. But by biting her tongue she drew blood, and that taste, too, reminded her of that night. She put her head in her hands and sobbed for several long moments as Jonathan watched, feeling powerless and incapable of doing anything to help her.
Then, suddenly, Mina stood up, took the disc of that awful movie out and snapped it in half. Letting the pieces fall to the ground, she left the room.
~
SeducingVanHelsing!Mina for jiasachan
“It was always quite obvious how you felt.” Mina said, her voice quiet. “From the way you looked at me, the admiring tone in your voice when you spoke to me, the way you would always sit slightly closer to me then anyone but Jonathan did. She laughed bitterly. “If you think I didn’t notice, then you must think that I’m far more naïve then I ever was.”
The elderly Dutch professor seemed quite shocked by her words. “Madame Mina, now, really…” But she cut him off and continued speaking. “You couldn’t save Lucy, but you did manage to save me. Why, I wonder, is that? Why did you let her be taken by the Count and then decide that there was no other option than having her own fiancée drive a stake through her heart? Then, when the same thing happened to me, it was decided that we should all go to Transylvania because of course you didn’t want to have to drive a stake through my heart! All well and good, but did you refrain from making cruel comments about what had happened to me even the day after they had taken place? And don’t you think the way your eyes passed over me in that month hurt immeasurably, when I could hardly bear to have my husband kiss me?”
Van Helsing seemed quite wordless at all her accusations, and there was a long pause before Mina said, with a smile. “So I believe I shall give you what you want.” And she leaned in to kiss him. He never saw her take out the knife.
~
child!Mina for frivolous-jo
“Daddy! Daddy!” Mina ran out the door and down the street as soon as she saw her father coming through the window. She was normally quite calm and collected, at least for a seven year old, but whenever her father came to visit all that was gone. He, too, looked excited to see her. When he reached her he picked her up, twirling her around as she giggled. As he put her down, holding her hand as they walked back to her aunt and uncle’s house, Mina’s father said to her. “I have a new book for you today.” She looked at him with childish admiration. “You do?” He nodded, smiling, and took out a copy of “The Canterbury Tales” from his bag. Her eyes lit up. “Thank you!”
Her father watched, bemused, as Mina ran to her bedroom and put the book on a small shelf where she had been keeping all the books he gave her. She looked up at him and grinned, her eyes full of innocent adoration.
-
Mina arrived in the park, and there, in their favorite spot was Jonathan. He was eight, and nearly a whole year older than her, but they had been friends for as long as she could remember. When he saw her he smiled and waved. She waved back and hurried to where he sat, clutching her notebook and pencil to her. Almost as soon as she sat down next to him, crossing her legs, a slightly younger girl with wild blonde hair ran towards them. Mina smiled and stood up to hug her as she reached them. “Mama had visitors,” said Lucy, slightly out of breath, “I had to stay and have tea with them.”
“Let’s play Kings and Queens,” Jonathan said suddenly, “I can be the King, and Mina can be the Queen.”
“I’ll be the Princess!” Lucy piped up.
Mina looked down at her feet and mumbled. “I’m not pretty enough to be the Queen. Lucy should be the Queen.”
Jonathan got to his feet and put an arm around her. “That’s nonsense. You have to be the Queen. After all, we are going to get married.”
She smiled shyly. “I suppose you’re right.”
~
theatrical_muse prompt: Talk about something you inherited. (It could be an object, a physical attribute, a belief, etc.)
I inherited my father’s love of books. He was a bookseller, and whenever he came to visit me, he would bring me a new book of some sort, whether it was a collection of fairy stories or a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis in the original Latin. I treasured them all equally, and would hold them close to me when he was gone and I was lonely, enjoying the scent of the pages. I lived with my aunt and uncle, you see, and wasn’t able to see him much.
He died when I was twelve. I cried a great deal, and it was only Jonathan’s arms around me as we sat on our favorite stone bench in the park that eventually made me stop. Jonathan and I had our first, hesitant, awkward kiss there two years later. Father never met Jonathan, but I think he would have liked him.
I didn’t know my mother very well at all. From the portrait of her that my father showed me, I look almost nothing like her, and inherited only her hair, which, like mine, is dark brown and curls slightly. She was gorgeous, with stunning green eyes and the posture of a Queen. I look more like my father, far more.
I inherited her locket though, a heavy, expensive heirloom with room for a small picture inside. I never wear jewelry, so it was never much use to me. Most of the time it gathered dust at the bottom of a drawer, beneath scraps of paper and pens and notes I’d taken.
Then Jonathan had to go away, on a trip for his job. It was an important opportunity for him, and the first major assignment he had. It was a great honor that he would be trusted like that at only twenty-four. But he would be gone for a long time, and we had just gotten engaged recently. Neither of us were looking forward to the separation.
So I gave him the locket. I put a small picture of myself inside and gave it to him and kissed him and told him I’d write him at least three times a week.
And I hoped that, maybe, for once, my mother might actually end up helping me, in a roundabout way.
But, of course, that’s not the way things happened. They never do. And these days, I really do wish I never gave Jonathan the locket.
~
theatrical_muse prompt: That which does not kill us only makes us stronger
I wish this were true, I do with all my heart. Because I’m one of the survivors of these trials, one of the four of us who managed to live through it all. Well, it’s five, really, but Van Helsing doesn’t seem to count, given the way he wandered off to find new people to aid, new unlikely cases to interfere in. So it was just the four of us left, scars beginning to form as we sat around a table and tried to make idle conversation.
We all bear both the visible and invisible scars of our experiences. You can see it in Arthur’s eyes, the sadness the pain that I think must have been there since h had to drive a stake through poor Lucy’s heart, and perhaps from even before, when that heart stopped beating.
John is rarely around, mostly retreating back to the asylum to immerse himself in the lives of others, in their sad tales, but when he is he doesn’t seem to be really here. It’s almost as if he has distanced himself to protect himself from our shared memories.
Jonathan bears perhaps the most obvious mark of all we’ve gone through; his prematurely grey hair. Who knows if shock or fear did that to him, but I love him for it nevertheless. Sometimes when he lies asleep in bed beside me, I run my fingers through his hair. The texture of it hasn’t changed. He wasn’t scarred that deeply, or at least I hope note.
But none of us really knows what happened to him in the castle. I’ve read his journal from that time, he’s handed it to me, but I think some days that it wasn’t the whole story. But I never bring it up, because I know the memories would hurt him to talk about.
As for me…Yes, I’ve been changed. But I’m not stronger. I was strong enough before everything. Actually, I was strong enough when Lucy died, strong enough to take care of Jonathan and be certain to cry only when he was asleep. Strong enough to hold Arthur in my arms as he cried over his dead fiancée.
I wasn’t strong two months later.
I wasn’t strong when the Count pushed my face down on his chest and forced me to drink his blood. I wasn’t strong when I cried and cried for hours afterwards.
I tried to be strong in the next month, when I let myself be hypnotized twice a day, my mind completely connected with that of the man I hated more than anyone else in the world. I tried, I tried very hard.
But I think I failed, in the end. When I saw Quincey dying and the Count turning to dust, the strength that I had been attempting to hold onto slipped away.
And I’m weak now. Nearly every night in my dreams I relive the night when the Count made it so that he had complete power over me. Sometimes the place or the sequence of events is different, but it’s always similar to what actually happened that night.
And when I wake up, in a cold sweat, I know that it hasn’t all made me stronger, and that I’ll never be as strong as I was before it happened.