Chapter Text
“So are you still like all the other fools? In this place piety lives when pity is dead, for who could be more wicked than that man who tries to bend divine will to his own!” ~ Dante Alighieri, Inferno.
A man holds him in his dreams, a smile on a stern face, light behind the eyes as if beholding for the first time the blaze gifted by a titan, stolen from gods.
The man laughs, more of a short breath really. He leans over the soiled sheets as a midwife toils around the room ordering for fresh ones from servants. kisses his wife's cheek still damp with the fatigue of birth.
Whether they had ever been in love or if it was simply the only gratitude he'd ever afforded her could not be named. But nonetheless she'd given him a son.
They say something to one another and the man looks back down at the bundle in his arms, and with the finality of a gavel. Says a curse and a prayer wrapped into one. “Victor.”
But there is something off in this dream, he’s had it before. But this is different.
The edges, ripple.
Gleaming like liquid silver as his fathers gaze lands on him from across the room.
And the room quivers.
“Victor,” the man practically gleams, mouth turning up in a fox's smirk, but oh how it still makes him feel like prey. Alongside him his mothers features washed away by time a morphing portrait of a remembered woman. “Are you going to introduce us?”
He feels his own face settle in confusion, as he sees that blaze reignite in his fathers eyes.
But, no it can't be. The whole room seems to light up from the glare of it, he can feel the sweat dripping down his neck as a burning like no other bubbles across the flesh of his hands as he frantically looks down to see the red leather peel away to mottled bleeding hands.
He screams, as his father tuts “I did warn you about your hands.” The baby in his arms starting to wail.
But another sound joins the crescendo, a growling voice, crying out for him.
And then he feels it, a presence at his back.
The dream shakes around him as the edges burn like vellum.
And he sees it. The red angel, in all of its terrible glory.
But only cold dread seeps into him at the sight of it as the fire sears his arms.
It raises its long wooden arm, as the baby continues to scream, taking off its mask to reveal its hellish skull beneath.
And a cruel understanding settles in the room, the way understanding grips the heart of a rabbit when a hawk's talons reach its flesh. It was death and it had at last come for him.
He tried to scream but his throat clogged, he couldn't breathe. As the angel crept closer arm outstretched.
A wave of blood sprang forth from his mouth like a cherubim fountain, he wretched and yet he felt no reprieve of air, endless amounts of blood it seemed, enough to fill the sea, his meager throat not enough to hold it, so it spilt fourth from his eyes and nose, ears swimming with it.
The angel reached its hand to his face, blood smearing on his cheek, he closed his eyes, the only tenderness to the burning everywhere.
All was dark as the baby wailed, his mother humming a tune. His father, ever the delicate gentleman, taunted once more, “Man can not control death, Victor.”
Numbness started at last, his fingers and toes tingling with the sensation of cold. But the final breath would not come, hindered by the fluid that poured with the rolling sound of waves.
And just as he did as a boy, outstretches his arms, a crucifixion of his own making, as the numbness spreads.
Only for the hand to change. Larger, colder.
Peeling open his eyes, in the sea of red a face, contorted, in all its grotesque perfection. Crying a single word “Victor.”
He inhales, and screams.