Chapter Text
It’s dark in the box.
The contents, musty soil, as grey as ash, shifts with the roiling waves. Logically Jonathan knows he is sealed in a crate in the cargo hold of a ship, travelling to England. However, as he sits there with eyes half-lidded, his mind wanders down other paths. Sometimes the box feels warm, and safe, an embrace of earth that is somehow now his. Other times, it’s like a tomb, and he can barely hold back the scream trapped at the back of his throat.
Dracula is staying above deck, he knows that much. Of course, he visits him often enough, dragging some half-dead poor soul to Jonathan’s hungry mouth, feeding him like he’s a baby bird. He tucks him back into the dirt like he’s putting a child to bed, caressing his cheek with an indulgent smile.
Jonathan misses him when he’s gone. He has something of an insight into his antics through the memories of his latest meal, but it’s not the same as being with him.
He can’t remember when he started wanting that.
Dreaming is a new favourite past time, or rather, it’s all he has. He dreams of the past - his memories are scattered and torn, with some more damaged than others. Memories of Mina especially are so obscured, it’s like he’s trying to watch them through running water. Even the attempt makes his head ache. His Mother, however, is clearer. There are times when he closes his eyes yet can see her as though she stands before him.
Her face is pale and wan, her hair so light it almost bone-white. She usually looks at him sadly, in his memories. He only remembers her smiling once, when he was a tiny child. They’d been left alone in the garden, and they’d played, his Mother rolling in the grass, laughing gaily. She’d been ripped from her wild girlhood, root and stem, and married off to his Father. An iceberg of a man who’d taken great pleasure in crushing her underfoot.
Jonathan had been at boarding school when she’d succumbed to typhoid. His Father informed him in a letter weeks later, when she was already underground. It takes everything in him to convince himself that the look in his dream-Mother’s eyes is merely melancholy, and not judgement.
He can’t let his dreams of her bleed into the others. Sometimes the past is unreachable, and the images that fill his mind's-eye are of Dracula. Dracula’s mouth on his own, on his neck, between his legs. His fists clench and unclench during those dreams, and he rides the wave of longing with a low moan, as he waits for the wave of self-disgust that he knows will follow. The wait is growing ever longer.
Hours stretch into days, and the days unfold into weeks. Dreams and blood and loneliness combine, until time feels like it no longer ticks at all; he is suspended, between places, between loves, while the sea rocks him like a babe. Metamorphosis. The box is neither an embrace nor a tomb. It is a chrysalis. The broken shards of Jonathan Harker are reformed, his parchment skin turning to ivory, his shattered nail beds becoming home to what could accurately be termed talons, his teeth sharpening to points behind full lips. His awareness of reality slips away, as he sinks into a stupor, half-awake and yet dead to the world.