“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.

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.