Very Funny That The Symptoms Of Blood Loss Include Making You More Uncoordinated And Cognitively Impaired.

Her boss had another guest round. The sort that appreciates her special cooking. The sort that was polite enough to thank her for her impeccable manners.

She wonders when these manners started.

Was she simply a child who looked for praise at every opportunity, and found politeness to be the best way of getting it? When she grew older, was it the way she acted when she distracted herself from everything going on? When she grew yet older, was it the best way to respond to the hatred and contempt of some horrible people while mitigating the risk of harm to herself? Was it a habit she learnt when she started working as a maidservant? Did she become polite as a result of exposure to her new family’s habits? Was she never polite at all?

She turns to the mirror she’s polishing.

She looks into her own eyes.

She makes herself forget this moment.

She’s further along with her work than she thought she would be. Time really does fly sometimes.

She finishes polishing the mirror, and moves to her next job. She is to take the bins out.

It’s beneath her, really, but some of the regular staff are ill, so she steps in.

She takes them out past the gates to the property, the rain barely bothering her.

She remembers the phone Elizabeth gave her, the one with her number already typed in under the contact name ‘Elizabeth :)’. She remembers checking it over to make sure it was free of tampering and tracking based on what she had learnt from the few other Kindred she had had conversations with. She remembers sharing recipes and advice about work and fashion tips and compliments. She remembers Elizabeth promising to take her clubbing. She remembers the excuses she made - ‘too much work’ or ‘I’m ill’ and so on. She remembers her sympathy and her care and her… love, not in the way all the stories she read as a little girl described it, but rather shown through the kind of affection she learnt about in the 80s, all there in the palm of her hand.

She remembers the day the order came from on high. Something about unacceptable security risks and compromised channels and unsafe technology. She remembers crushing the phone in her fist, watching the fragments of metal and glass and plastic dig into her dead skin and fall across the cold floor. She remembers the lies she told about getting into an altercation the next time Elizabeth came round.

She looks for a puddle nearby, one close to the lights on the outside of the building.

She stares into her own eyes, and makes herself forget this moment.

What on earth is she doing over here? She has bins to take out. So she does this.

When she enters inside, she goes to talk to her boss. She seems to be losing time at random, and this may make her less suitable for her role. As she explains, he looks on impassively, and tells her to get back to work. She’s only been here thirty-one years, and while he trusts her opinion on professional matters, he is unwilling to deal with this when she is so new.

She catches and prepares his meal, presenting it to him in accordance with proper protocol.

She deals with the aftermath, twisting the corpse into all kinds of flowers. She takes joy in this. She remembers doing this countless times over the past decades. So many moments, preserved perfectly in her unliving brain. She has honed a skill, and is proud of this.

Her flowers are so pretty.

She finishes her jobs for the day.

She retires to her room, and sits on the chair in front of her dresser, staring into the mirror at her own face.

Today has been a bad day. She’s had days like this from time to time, maybe once a decade.

She remembers the first time this happened, half a year into her work here, feeling alone and abandoned and scared. She can’t remember any of the other times, but she remembers her way of dealing with this, of getting back to her usual self so that she can work and keep up her manners.

She tries to remember it all. She lets the emotion overtake her. She loves her job and she loves her role and she loves her building and she loves her sire and she loves her skills and she loves her flowers and she doesn’t mind being a vampire and she feels something hard to describe for Elizabeth. She takes these, and sets them to one side in her own mind.

She remembers the rest. She feels lonely and scared and hateful and vindictive and spiteful and wounded and hurt and injured and tired and so many more things.

She gets the impression that this time it’ll stick.

She makes contact with her own eyes.

She makes herself forget this moment.

She is sat staring into her mirror. She knows what this means.

She makes herself forget this moment.

She makes herself forget this moment.

She makes herself forget this moment.

She makes herself forget this moment.

…

Her boss is having a guest round this evening. The sort that’ll appreciate her special cooking.

She goes downstairs to meet her boss. He looks like he has realised something profound.

His mouth says nothing beyond what is usual.

His face and eyes and movements say only these words: ‘Ophelia, I’m sorry.’

She doesn’t know what he would be apologising for.

It’ll soon be thirty-two years of this work.

She turns away, and politely starts her day’s tasks, quite content with her life.

babygirl you look like an absolute angel tonight (there is a streetlight behind you and i have astigmatism)

Mean Girls (2004) House MD (2009)

I called a boy in my class a 'fucking twink version of dracula' and I feel fulfilled

been building a collection of posts from like minded individuals

She sits on the chair, legs crossed, waiting in anticipation.

Her friend takes an object, shows it to her to reassure her.

Explains what it is, how it works, what it does. Something to do with electromagnets, currents in the brain, and depth of stimulation.

Explains how it can have an impact on activity in specific parts of the brain.

She doesn’t understand half of it, but she gets the gist, and it sounds fun.

A couple of switches are flicked. Maybe a button is pressed, or a large dial is turned.

Her friend moves the object back, holding it to the side of her head.

Nothing happens.

She opens her mouth to enquire, and gibberish falls out. She can’t even form a word, let alone a sentence.

Her friend smiles.

She blushes.

She does not collapse, or raise her hands to cover her face. She wouldn’t be a good test subject if she did that.

Her friend moves the object to the back of her head, and flashes of light appear in her vision.

Her friend moves the object to the top of her head, and she jolts a little bit, her senses feel off.

Her friend moves the object to the front of her head.

Her mind goes blank.

If she could plan, or reason, or imagine, she would hear the pleasure in the voice of her friend as she explains the role of the frontal lobe in complex thought.

As it is, she sits limply, eyes open and empty.

The object is removed, turned off.

Thoughts rush back into her mind.

Her friend takes her hand.

Moves it up to her lips.

Thanks her for being such a perfect thing to study.

Kisses the back of her hand.

Once more, her mind goes blank.

She smiles, stands, and together they sweep out of the room.

He jumped off the balcony, says Nicolas. The beast overtook him, maybe he saw a particularly delicious looking Kine and the last vestiges of his hunger, for he does not seem the type to finish his meals, reared their ugly head.

Shade himself seems shaken by this suggestion. At the very least she fixed his legs after the fall. Of course it hurt more than natural healing ever would have, but he has not been as good a guest as he could be, so clearly it is deserved.

Of all of them, he seems to cling to his humanity the most. He rejects her work and her vicissitude out of fear or hatred, yet seems to try to empathise with Nicolas, as though such a thing is even possible.

If she could remember how to, she would laugh.

She remembers how Nicolas talked about Elizabeth, her Elizabeth, as though she were no different from the blood bags the Camarilla driver had graciously given them. He thinks of her as an object, but is so crude about it. Would one take a bite out of a particularly useful vacuum cleaner, or drink from a lovely painting? No, Elizabeth may be hers, but her purpose is not to be consumed.

She resolves to keep a close eye on Elizabeth when she next comes for work.

She resolves to keep a close eye on Nicolas, lest he prove himself to be less polite than she thinks.

But, back to the matter of Shade. He seemed to wish to present her with some overwhelming truth about her own existence. He reacted with shock to the news that she had barely left the premises - indeed that she was actually incapable of it - as well as the revelation that she had never been paid a wage, and that she simply worked because she had been told to.

None of this seems particularly odd to her. Is there any particular reason it should?

For Maria he seemed to show great disdain, acting as though she had abandoned her in the house of a stranger, when she was clearly busy with work or preoccupied by some other matters.

She would never abandon Ophelia, right?

These matters have been gnawing on her since she invited the coterie to stay at hers - one of the many reasons for which she made Shade’s legs hurt so very badly. She resolves to dispel her concerns for now, and focus on the task at hand.

Shade fell victim to the beast, and jumped.

Dear Nicolas told her this, and she has no reason to distrust him. He may arouse her suspicion in some regards, but he has yet to lie to her.

But poor Shade. She could spend hours listing the reasons for which she is coming to dislike him. His barely disguised fear, his constant oscillating between treating her and Nicolas as pitiful victims and dreadful monsters, his anger leading him to threaten one of her guests under her roof, his unending infantilising insistence on calling her ‘kid’ out of some deluded paternal affection towards the unfortunate misguided girl he sees her as.

To know that this is the case could well and truly break him. As one of her guests, she has a responsibility to avoid that.

So she lies. It does not matter if all can see that she is lying. The purpose is not to be believed, it is instead to plant seeds of doubt.

‘The balcony is in some disrepair, and I have been meaning to fix it for a while.’

None of this is true.

But, just maybe, it could delay Shade’s inevitable descent towards the savage and violent clutches of the beast until he is out of her house and far away from her Elizabeth.

And if that is not the case, and he is moved to damage what belongs to her, she will tear him apart and rebuild him in the image of the monster that he tries so desperately to avoid being.

Nicolas seems to dislike him as well. Maybe after his limbs are made useless, she should hand him over to Baudelaire for a while before she reshapes him. He has, after all, wronged him.

It would be the polite thing to do, would it not?

timeloop this timeloop that. you people are sooo repetitive similar to something else i’m aware of

putting your hand in the mouth of a girl who's prone to biting is an excellent way to display how absolutely broken she is. but watch out