Work Text:
Letter to Lucy Westenra, from Mina Harker (not sent, undated)
My dearest Lucy,
Great deliberation has been taken as to whether this letter shall be a waste of ink, since you have been freed from your mortal torment and undead cage, but I have come to understand that any word to you is a great pleasure, never a waste. Even if I shall be denied the grace of sealing the wax on this parchment, and worse, denied prizing your own words from your own seals in correspondence, I write anyway, for there is not much else that my mind can do when so addled.
Lucy, are our woes a mirror? I have been turning this question over in what remains of my head, and no answers have found me.
Did your blood too ache with that of stranger's spit? Did your mind wander to dark pits, and should it wander, was it so dark and treacherous a trek of imagination as mine? Oh, how did you do it? How do I do it? How do I contain the worst of my condition, the pains and the hunger? How do I ignore the foreign fashion in which my teeth sit inside my gums, sharper by the moment? How do I make friends with the pall that has fallen over my thoughts? My clarity comes in rare glimmers and I cannot hope to capture it with any consistency. How did you survive it? I suppose, considering your fate, how did you survive it as long as you did?
Speaking to air only makes this growing hollowness in my chest spread. My soul and my being have to make room for an emptiness that no brightness, no cheer, no friendship nor fondness can ever touch. My reminiscing of you only grazes the dark. I wonder if I was only a flicker of candlelight in your own growing absence, before you were filled whole with yourself upon true, complete death.
I would give anything to burn more resolutely. A bonfire, yes, or a great star. If I had tried harder, given more fuel to bring up a great amber inferno of myself, I could have lit your weary soul and warred off that ever dark spectre. Oh, Lucy, I would have burned myself to cinders to bring you light!
And yet now, I sit here, with a strong bonfire of friends with burning coals for hearts, and I know it is only red, empty air. It cannot fill, only illuminate. There was nothing I could have done differently. There was no protecting you. That is what curdles my stomach with sickness most. I did all I could for you, and for myself, and I failed.
So I reach into the hollows to find some evil to grasp. As horror drags me in, I will hold on, and I will find the end. I will find answers in the great dark that has taken hold of both of us, from which you were freed. Nothing I could do, but everything I can find in these catacombs of myself. I am sorry if I am never myself again. But as our doctoring friends conduct vivisection and as Mr. Morris and Art dress game and as Jonathan, sweet Jonathan, scales walls and descends to the chapel, I shall undo myself to find what tormented you and I.
I promise. I promise. I promise. Even as I go away from myself now, I promise.
I missed writing you.
Your loving
Mina
What is left of her, at least.