“Und von den Frauen, Nichts”

by Bennu

 

A/N: This is my fragile first attempt at writing Domicrushing. Please be accordingly gentle. May I also take my time to announce my displeasure at the increasing numbers of crapfic Mary Sues in this section. Hang your heads in shame. Shame, I tell you!

 

The title means “And for the women, nothing”. Ph33r my mad German skillz…

 

For Ann V., from whom all grace in my life originates.

 

 

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He doesn’t love me.

 

I’m as painfully aware of that fact as I am of the strap of my eyepatch, grinding across my forehead in the blazing heat. It’s always there, itching, begging to be plucked at and adjusted and worried; but I can’t. I won’t. Fidgeting is a sign of worry – worry is a sign of weakness, and weakness is the deathmark.

 

So I can dodge. I’m good at that, damn good. The thought flies after me like a bullet, and I’d better make sure I’m not in its path, that I find someone else for it to destroy. Because I’ve gotten this far. I’ve survived, and I’m going to do it someday – I’m going to make him smile. For me.

 

Maybe.

 

He smiled for me once before. I remember that as clearly as I remember the bruises and the brilliant freedom of that one gunshot in the night – goodbye, daddy dearest! – and so I remember it perfectly. Perfectly. I was eleven, and working in a tavern for bread and pity. I was surrounded by stinking, awful men, but nobody touched me. They knew as well as I knew that I was a killer. No one could touch me; I would just dodge. That is, after all, what I’m best at.

 

And then one day he came in. I had never seen such a being in my life, walking as casually as if he owned the whole damn planet, in a fine jacket and with his hair drawn back into a tiny little tail. Either nobody spoke, or the overwhelming silence in my ears was just too loud to hear them. He conferred briefly with an older man in a little bowler hat, whom I had served something like schnapps or seltzer to or God knows what, and then wandered languidly back out onto the street.

 

I followed him. There surely wasn’t enough courage in me to have let me do what I did, but there was desperation aplenty. If I’d lost him then, I would have died. So I chased after his long strides and flung my arms around his leg, like a tiny child. And I didn’t let go.

 

That’s when he looked down at me, quizzical at first, as if trying to figure out what exactly I was. Then, his mouth turned up into a smile, and he patted me fondly on the head, like a benevolent uncle.

 

That was it. I loved him, right then and there, and I never really did let go of him. He’s never complained or tried to push me away; he’s never brought you close now either, hisses a voice in the back of my head, but I dodge it.

 

I tried so hard for him. To be as tough and untouchable as he was, as perfect. I wanted to be good enough for him, enough to catch his attention and keep it. No other man was worthy for me. Only him, just him – and for years, he moved, unchanging, through my world, and never smiled for me again. I grew up into a woman, as pretty as anyone could want (and many people did, but never him), and he stayed exactly the same, frozen to the outside world. Frozen to me, even as I longed so much that it felt like a fire had replaced my heart.

 

But he didn’t love me. It seemed he didn’t love anyone.

 

Eventually I froze into that idea – I was chasing an uncatchable prize, a man with no heart that a mortal could touch. And I was right, mostly. No mortal being could find his heart, because he had given it away to be cased up in feathers and glass.

 

Does he know I followed him into that chamber – the one none of us were supposed to enter? Does he know I saw him open up the cage of his soul before that glowing, half-machine angel – what no one was supposed to see? Did I really hear him say those words, half-sobbed whispers (that dropped into my mind like stones and cracked my frozen self into a thousand shards that lodged themselves like splinters in the hopeful corpus of my life? Does he know that?)

 

Those words that I knew, then, I would never hear for me? The smile I would never see?

 

– He knows. He does not care.

 

And I can’t dodge that.