Title: Totentanz (Dance with Death)

Author: Triskell

Fandom: Elisabeth (Austrian musical)

Pairing: Death/Rudolf

Rating: PG-13, allusions to slash/suicide

Author's Note: I'm aware that many of you won't be familiar with Empress Elisabeth of Austria or her family. Rudolf, Elisabeth's son, committed suicide in his 30s, in Mayerling, a small hunting castle near Vienna, with his young lover Mary. In the musical, Elisabeth and Death (as an attractive young man) share a passionate love/hate relationship. Italics indicate lyrics which I've translated into English.

TOTENTANZ

© Triskell, December 21st, 2003

Your hand is cold, sinewy, skin like silk sliding across my cheek, brushing away tears I cried when I was a boy. You held me in your arms then, close and tight and warm, a ghost of my mother's love and yet much stronger than all she ever gave me. She loved me in silence, from afar, her tenderness and help but a shadow, a story told to me by those few women who yet dared to speak with anything like awe of her.

All I wanted was my mother, and then you came - pale, strong, present in my nightmares and when I woke. I could not name you, I called you friend, only now I see eternity in your look, an eternity I cannot have. You have come to take me, to end my longing, my pain, my endless tries to be like her. To make myself an image of my mother. If I were your mirror, mother, you would see yourself in me. But I am not. No mirror, no glass worthy of your look, your smile or touch.

The shadows are growing longer, Death reminds me. I have not forgotten you, I see you. Too well, too close. You promise me oblivion and more, much more. You smile, your breath against my neck, my cheek, cool. I shiver and you grasp my shoulder, hold my arm, pull me against you. So warm when we touch, though your skin is ice. You burn me. Your desire is stronger than my fears of you, you take me, turn me, move me. I break away. Once more I break. Still so much in the land of the living that I cannot let you touch me. Not yet.

I want your hands, your cold hands, to run across my skin, to chill me, drag me under into nothingness. Silk that strips me from my thoughts, my feelings, myself. Naked, raw, bleeding from want of warmth, falling into your feverish iciness. No!

Mother, I need you!

But there is no help from you, mother. You cannot turn towards me, see the mirror image of your soul, your burning heart. Death calls me, mother, and he seduces me. Each word snakes around my brain and pulls, fraying my reason, pushing against my head, hurting. But at night, he comes and his words are heat, passion, a new reason, a love shining too brightly to let go, I need a beacon, I need him.

Death opens up his arms and I fall into them. I fall, mother. Death's breath is cold, his skin like ice and his face is young, feminine, too pretty, too soft… I pull the trigger, mother and as the girl falls away, stripped away like silk from a paling corpse, Death steps forward; no one but us now, just us, his arms, so tight, so strong, so close! Mother! So near, he pulls me in and touches me and calls me to him; he loves me, needs me, chill lips burn me, beautiful, deadly, burning cold, so cool, so soothing, like the metal in my hand, the trigger, the tri…