Author: Chauni

RP Session: Tesya

Scene: A bit of backstory on my character, written for Ryce-chan, a wonderful friend of mine who plays Vintillo to her.

My father loved me once. It seemed so long ago, on a time when his eyes weren’t glazed over with business matters roaring in the back of his head, drowning out my childish falsetto, my eager eyes that always sat with some sort of innocent glitter, like the moon sat in them and the light in the sky was only a pale reflection. Occasionally, we would go to the park, we would play the games, we would sit in the parlor and he would sing to me as he pressed my little fingers down on the appropriate ivory keys that were attached to the blackened piano that sat beside one immense window. He would take me to church every Sunday, just before noon, and would recited the Lord’s Prayer and Apostle’s Creed in a loud voice, one that made the world his and everyone else powerless to it.

He loved me.

It wasn’t uncommon at the time for a woman to lose her life giving such to another. The advancements in health care and technology were slow, lagging, dragging it’s ignorant feet like swollen pegs. My mother fell disease to life, and faded away at my first wail.

Part of me believes, wants to believe, that he did not think it to be my fault that Mother passed on, but logic screams different. At times, I would hear him speak with colleagues, with family members, stare at a painting of her in a broad summer dress, and turn blank eyes to me, closed off and hidden, thoughts kept under some sort of lock I could never shatter. She was his only love, and to the day he passed, he wore her wedding ring on his smallest finger, beside his own band. I inquired into this, and he told me in the kindest voice:

“This was the only thing that they would let me take.”

But he had so much more of her than I did. He carried memories, beliefs, ideals and images inside his soul, and I never met her. Instead, as she pushed me into this world, I gripped her womb and tore it out with me.

She bled to death on wrinkled white sheets.

When I was old enough, my father pushed me towards religion, reading to me the stories of Christ in the yellowed pages of our family Bible before bed. We would gather on the floor, kneeling, with our hands folded and the words of sanctity dripping from our lips like wine. Afterwards, he would pull up the thick blankets and let me shuffle beneath, before brushing back my hair and pressing dried lips to my forehead.

When I was twelve, he changed occupations and suddenly I did not see him anymore. Days slipped past unnoticed, and the house grew comfortable only when it was my sole breath passing through the hallways. Nights when I saw candlelight flickering underneath a door were awkward; we grew distant in months. Prayers before sleep were unheard of, work taking precedence. Sunday mass was abandoned; the park no longer existed, much like me.

I took to the Catholic church in a fervor afterwards. I would spend days, singing with the choir, bowing my head while clinging to a rosary that bit into my flesh until it grew stained with my blood. I lit candles while dreaming of my mother, and slid into confession booths with the image of my father behind my lashes. The Bible sat beside the table beside my high bed, the ribbon she wore in her hair the night she passed moving through the pages every night.

Studies were simple for me, things I barely gave second thought to on most days. Homework was finished moments within opening the book, then promptly forgotten until class begged for the knowledge the following day.

I missed my father, but the priests told me not to worry, that he would be all right, that God would see him through and he would be at my side soon.

I had my epiphany when I was nineteen, realizing that my entire life had led up to one pinnacle moment, one definition. My feet, clad in little white slippers, beat against the puddles that lined the streets, the image of a crucified Christ and habit still in the forefront of my mind. I had to tell Father, had to tell Daddy what I would become, what I would slide into, what purpose was solely mine!

I came home to a gentleman knocking on my door, his dark brown eyes turning to look at me with something I was unaccustomed to.

Pity.

The afternoon in the rain is a blur to me even still. I stood beneath a dark umbrella, someone’s hands soft against my shoulders as I stared on with nothing left. The marble angels of the rich, the cool slates inscribed with many families, the crypts and mausoleums held out frigid fingers, offering to soothe the agony I felt as I watched them begin to shovel the dirt upon his sleek box. I heard whispers; I heard weeping, but none of it was my own.

He was coming home to tell me that he had taken several days off, several days to spend with me and only me, world be damned. He was going to tell me about how he had reached his own epiphany, seeing how distant the world was to him, how far away I was.

He was coming to tell me he loved me.

They found his body when some shrieking woman had stumbled upon it by accident in a drunken foolish stupor. I was bestowed with no details, no motives, no suspects. It was too “messy” of a topic for a young woman of my place in high society, captured within the walls of some pretentious class of people too busy and too rich to love.

The next day, I stormed into my church, screaming about the cruel ignorance of “divine love”. They believed that I had a mental breakdown, that I wasn’t aware of what I was doing as I toppled the tower of candles, pooling scarlet wax onto the marble floor, and threw several precious Bibles against the colored glass, sending spidering cracks along the images. They claimed I wasn’t awake when I denounced God, when I spit on the crucifix and cursed the Pope. They told me I wasn’t aware when I drove the rosary into my palm, crimson bubbling forth like cheap wine, and smeared it across the eyes of a marble statue of the Madonna, crying out how blind the world is, and the only color in God’s eyes was red.

I never entered a house of God again, and I still find solace in that knowledge.

I spent a great deal inside, staring out the windows, mute, as if there were no sounds to convey the quiet hush that had settled over the beating of my heart. I dressed in white only, a mockery of everything I had been thrust into, as if innocence still clung to me like sunlight in summer. I let my buttery hair slip down past my waist in length, let the ends split and growing tangled, let the house go unattended until inches of dust gathered on mantles and pictures.

Several months passed until I finally grew tired of the non-life I was leading. My patience was always thin, but never towards the two things I had recently lost. I slipped on the white shoes I had worn the day I saw pitied eyes, brushed the hair that was braided the day I watched the earth cover him. I wore the coat that still bore blood and candlewax on the hour that my purpose faded away.

It was cold the day I felt his arms, the way the wind blew down through my hair like fingers. I can never forget his face, the elegant shape and angles, and the hair that slipped just past the collar. His movements were otherworldly, his breath more frigid than the air surrounding us. His words teased the edges of my consciousness, and his kiss was warmer than any religion, any love, there in the darkness of some forgotten alley while the ladies of the night sold their souls for a few dollars and a drink just twenty feet off.

I wear his kiss like a brand now, sleep wrapped in the cool arms that could bring me no greater comfort. No God or other foolish deity could bestow this sort of pleasure, this sense of duty and security. Everyone has shunned me, has turned dispassionate eyes unto me, and now I shall do the same for them.

You are my purpose now, my sweet Vintillo.

Whisper your coaxing words into my soul, even as I turn trusting eyes towards you. Your lips make my world; your eyes end it. You are my God, my one true belief, and I shall follow you until the day I pass on from this realm, bound in ribbons and blood.