Dark Shadows: The Red
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prose_alchemistTitle: The Red
Author:jordannamorgan
Archive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for allusions to vampirism and blood.
Characters: Barnabas.
Setting: 1795, during Barnabas’ earliest days as a vampire.
Summary: He sees a great deal of red now.
Disclaimer: They belong to Dan Curtis Productions. I’m just playing with them.
Notes: Written for the prompt of “Red” atfan_flashworks. Just a little character piece here, as I tentatively poke at a fandom I haven’t touched in seventeen years.
When he calls himself an animal in his changed state, he means it literally.
It is not only the instincts and compulsions inside him that have changed, but the way he perceives his outward surroundings. Scents and sounds seem magnified a hundredfold, making even the most familiar room into a new realm of sensations: the soft scurry of insects within walls, the faint tang of wine that a servant had spilled months earlier. …Meanwhile, by contrast, the world feels somehow dull and frozen against his fingertips. Hard and soft, hot and cold: he detects these tactile qualities still, but in a strangely distant way, as if through a veil. In time he realizes that veil is the nerveless chill of his own flesh, a constant reminder that everything he touches belongs now to a world he has lost. For all he is still wretchedly bound to a physical body, he is nonetheless a ghost, caught in the divide between living and dead.
Yet it is his eyes which bear witness to the change of his senses that most haunts him. The moonlight or even starlight to which he is now beholden is as clear as the day once was. Where a mortal man would be blinded by darkness, he sees every line and shade of his surroundings in startlingly sharp detail; but the colors are not what they were. The dusky blues and greens of night dominate his vision, draining away the warmth from everything that should be bright with sunshine hues. Even in the ample indoor glow of candles and firelight, yellows and oranges seem to fade in his view…
But somehow, not the red.
And he sees a great deal of red now, in every sense of the term.
He sees it gushing from pale throats, each time his mind surfaces from the ecstasy of feeding to find another limp body in his arms. He sees it behind his own eyes when he thinks of Angelique, of Reverend Trask and Nathan Forbes. Worst of all, he sees it in the very veins of those who he has not yet harmed, like the seductive beckoning wave of what should be a warning flag.
Perhaps it is a deliberate part of the curse that the red is still so vivid to him, every drop of it underscoring the vicious cycle he cannot break free of. How like Angelique it would be to take such pains with her revenge, to consider every last finishing touch of her handiwork that could possibly enhance his anguish.
This is why, when he kills for his own motives rather than that of the beast in him, he does it with the inhuman strength of his hands. In the course of his own vengeance, he will not use a blade or blunt instrument, will not break the skin if he can possibly avoid it. Those who have provoked his wrath will certainly die, but they will not add to the sea of red he is already doomed to spill. Instead they perish with his hands wrapped around their throats, choking and gasping for the air he no longer needs. Perhaps this personal code is a mere travesty, but he must do something to distinguish between the deaths of the innocent and the guilty… even if the truth is that the innocent suffer much more by him, from his hands and his fangs alike.
It is a shameful irony that he can make the tidiest job of his most willful acts of destruction. Rage only leaves his mind cold and clear, perfectly in control of his violence toward his most intimate foes; yet his need causes him to savage the bodies of strangers for whom he feels no malice. His unwilling crimes are the ones that mark him with the red, with the stains of guilt he avoids in the murders he commits gladly. Perhaps in that, there is some small measure of justice after all, for it could not be his change alone that makes him capable of the things he has chosen to do. How black had his heart been all along, that he could even consider more killing than his curse demands of him?
That thought may be what gnaws at him more than any other. In the desolate minutes before the dawn, as he lies in his coffin and awaits the too-brief respite of his daylight death, he wonders if he truly deserves what he has become. He wonders if there had not always been a hidden monstrousness in him, a more human kind of evil that the curse only gave new power and expression to.
Perhaps he does deserve his fate—but those who have become his prey do not. No sin could warrant the terror he visits upon them in their final moments. That is all he is sure of anymore.
For others’ sakes if not his own, he knows that this must end… but he does not know how.
In the meantime, the rivers of red continue to flow.
© 2020 Jordanna Morgan
Author:
jordannamorganArchive Rights: Please request the author’s consent.
Rating/Warnings: PG for allusions to vampirism and blood.
Characters: Barnabas.
Setting: 1795, during Barnabas’ earliest days as a vampire.
Summary: He sees a great deal of red now.
Disclaimer: They belong to Dan Curtis Productions. I’m just playing with them.
Notes: Written for the prompt of “Red” at
fan_flashworks. Just a little character piece here, as I tentatively poke at a fandom I haven’t touched in seventeen years.When he calls himself an animal in his changed state, he means it literally.
It is not only the instincts and compulsions inside him that have changed, but the way he perceives his outward surroundings. Scents and sounds seem magnified a hundredfold, making even the most familiar room into a new realm of sensations: the soft scurry of insects within walls, the faint tang of wine that a servant had spilled months earlier. …Meanwhile, by contrast, the world feels somehow dull and frozen against his fingertips. Hard and soft, hot and cold: he detects these tactile qualities still, but in a strangely distant way, as if through a veil. In time he realizes that veil is the nerveless chill of his own flesh, a constant reminder that everything he touches belongs now to a world he has lost. For all he is still wretchedly bound to a physical body, he is nonetheless a ghost, caught in the divide between living and dead.
Yet it is his eyes which bear witness to the change of his senses that most haunts him. The moonlight or even starlight to which he is now beholden is as clear as the day once was. Where a mortal man would be blinded by darkness, he sees every line and shade of his surroundings in startlingly sharp detail; but the colors are not what they were. The dusky blues and greens of night dominate his vision, draining away the warmth from everything that should be bright with sunshine hues. Even in the ample indoor glow of candles and firelight, yellows and oranges seem to fade in his view…
But somehow, not the red.
And he sees a great deal of red now, in every sense of the term.
He sees it gushing from pale throats, each time his mind surfaces from the ecstasy of feeding to find another limp body in his arms. He sees it behind his own eyes when he thinks of Angelique, of Reverend Trask and Nathan Forbes. Worst of all, he sees it in the very veins of those who he has not yet harmed, like the seductive beckoning wave of what should be a warning flag.
Perhaps it is a deliberate part of the curse that the red is still so vivid to him, every drop of it underscoring the vicious cycle he cannot break free of. How like Angelique it would be to take such pains with her revenge, to consider every last finishing touch of her handiwork that could possibly enhance his anguish.
This is why, when he kills for his own motives rather than that of the beast in him, he does it with the inhuman strength of his hands. In the course of his own vengeance, he will not use a blade or blunt instrument, will not break the skin if he can possibly avoid it. Those who have provoked his wrath will certainly die, but they will not add to the sea of red he is already doomed to spill. Instead they perish with his hands wrapped around their throats, choking and gasping for the air he no longer needs. Perhaps this personal code is a mere travesty, but he must do something to distinguish between the deaths of the innocent and the guilty… even if the truth is that the innocent suffer much more by him, from his hands and his fangs alike.
It is a shameful irony that he can make the tidiest job of his most willful acts of destruction. Rage only leaves his mind cold and clear, perfectly in control of his violence toward his most intimate foes; yet his need causes him to savage the bodies of strangers for whom he feels no malice. His unwilling crimes are the ones that mark him with the red, with the stains of guilt he avoids in the murders he commits gladly. Perhaps in that, there is some small measure of justice after all, for it could not be his change alone that makes him capable of the things he has chosen to do. How black had his heart been all along, that he could even consider more killing than his curse demands of him?
That thought may be what gnaws at him more than any other. In the desolate minutes before the dawn, as he lies in his coffin and awaits the too-brief respite of his daylight death, he wonders if he truly deserves what he has become. He wonders if there had not always been a hidden monstrousness in him, a more human kind of evil that the curse only gave new power and expression to.
Perhaps he does deserve his fate—but those who have become his prey do not. No sin could warrant the terror he visits upon them in their final moments. That is all he is sure of anymore.
For others’ sakes if not his own, he knows that this must end… but he does not know how.
In the meantime, the rivers of red continue to flow.
© 2020 Jordanna Morgan