Chapter Text
"I shall be with you on your wedding night."
Victor’s feverish mind dwelt on the Monster’s grim promise to him since the date of the wedding had been set. As the sun began to lower on the day of his wedding, Victor felt the end of his turmoil drawing impossibly near. Any moment he could take his last breath but he did not fear such things any longer. These evil events must see an end and if his keen suffering would end with them then it would be all the better.
His only regret is that Elizabeth will mourn one more inexplicable loss. So fragile a thing as a lady’s heart would be exceedingly strained by such hardships as the loss of a husband on the very day of their union. Still his father and remaining brother would take care of her. Her heart would ease with time, poor lady. When she had mourned him fully she might marry another, though he doubted she would. The two of them had been intended for one another nearly all their lives so she would naturally be reluctant to consider any man but him even after his death.
Victor was pulled from his thoughts by the sudden sound of a scream. It came from the direction of their bedroom, the direction of his bride.
Oh, good Lord, no!
—Three Years Earlier—
Elizabeth wandered the grounds of the estate, looking at the breeze swaying the tops of the trees and at the pale blue of the sky far above her head. She tried to remind herself that there was an entire world that existed beyond the limits of this house, but for all her effort the world and all the wonders one might find there felt so much farther away than ever before.
There were a great deal of comforts in her life that she should be grateful for. She was as educated as was proper for a lady, had many fine things, and did not need to work to support herself. There were many that did not know where they would find their next meal, many without shelter from the elements. The lady told herself she should be content with the limitations of her station.
The lady was not content. Throughout the whole of her life not a single purpose to which she had been put had been of her choosing. Since her infancy she was intended for Victor. While her aunt and uncle had made it known that the engagement could be called off if either of them objected to the union, nearly two decades of expectations and purpose were set against uncertainty over what her life could be outside of her assigned place and limitations in freedom put upon sex, how could she have ever mustered the strength to refuse?
Then her aunt had died and in her final days she had instructed the young lady to take over the responsibilities of lady of the house from then on. These duties included the task of raising her younger cousins, so her life was now doubly not her own.
The final blow had been when her youngest cousin, whom she had adored despite the responsibility for him being forced upon her, had died. Nay, not merely died, William had been murdered. Strangled by an unknown hand. What purpose she had been given had died with him and now all she could do was wait for the time when her future husband decided he had tired of the spoils of the great wide world and returned to take the spoils that patiently waited at home for him.
Victor had returned home at once after learning of William’s murder. His pallor was so like a man in exceeding illness that everyone, including Elizabeth, could not help but worry that grief alone may be the man’s undoing. He ate very little, slept even less, and seemed to live only within what frightening thoughts that played behind his eyes.
Elizabeth knew of such fervid pains so had tried to speak to him of their shared grief. The idea had come to her head that feeling less alone might give them both strength to persevere but Victor had only pulled away from her efforts to comfort them both as if her knowing of pain would only add to his own.
When they were but children they had been dear companions, yet as they grew older the two had been pulled away from one another by the ever widening gap of social hierarchy. When they entered into society Elizabeth was expected to speak with the ladies and Victor with the men and they no longer faced the world together. Now when the pair spoke Elizabeth could only see hints of the boy she had cared for beneath a stranger that had grown out around him like the layers of a tree.
And she would marry that stranger some time in the nearing future. She would be his wife, take his name, maintain his house, bear his children, raise his children, die in his house, and when she is buried the only marks on the stone to indicate that she was rotting in the soil beneath, or indeed that she had lived at all, will be the words “And Wife.”
She feels herself sinking deeper and deeper into the dark hole of that future. The soil of a nameless grave, already falling in around her and beginning to catch in her lungs. She should scream for help, claw at the dirt as it piled in around her, fight for her life, but her grave would not be visible to any but herself and to be mad enough to fight meant being thrown into crueler fates. Her entire being would never be anything more than this place and these people. A certainty was growing within her that even with a peaceful marriage and many children, she would always be alone and unseen.
"Why do you weep, sweet lady?" A rough dry voice teased gently from somewhere past the trees and she felt her shoulders tense at the unexpected presence. The speaker sounded like a man but there was something different in the quality of the voice, as if the uncanny shape of human speech was being carved out from distinctly inhuman vocalizations.
"Who is there!?" She called to the trees, but no response came. The little hairs on her arms and neck prickled with the knowledge that unseen eyes were watching her as she wandered alone and unprotected. She turned determinedly and marched back to the house. She did not break into a run, not out of bravery, but because her imagination told her that running would only encourage a voice such as that to chase.
By the time the doors of her home were shut fast behind her, she was uncertain that the voice had not been entirely imagined or that it had been anyone with ill intent. She did not speak of it to anyone. She knew that a voice asking why she wept would not in itself be seen as a cause for concern and to act as if it was would be adding more stress upon already frayed nerves.