there's a ghost in our bed

[timetobuttonmash]

narrator/mrsdanvers. a danvich-style liaison.

The new Mrs. De Winter is... fine. She's painfully weepy, spineless, and stumbles around the hallowed grounds of Manderley like a bumbling deer in a china shop. Her fingerprints stain Rebecca's belongings, her footprints in the same places, and Mrs. Danvers cannot stand it. In the corner of her eye, she spots her looking out the window forelornly (in the morning room, where Rebecca once sat), and feels a pang of remorse.

The new Mrs. De Winter is a tad nosy, although she won't admit it to herself. It would be undignified of her, to acknowledge it so. The new Mrs. De Winter is a good wife to Maxim, who stays in the sights of the rose-garden, and who is surely not within the sight of the sea at this very moment.

She sits beside the window, knees curled to her chest. Haunting reminders of the last time she was in this room still grasp at her back, the ghostly hands of Mrs. Danvers holding Rebecca's nightgown to her nose, a chloroform of her own, and of her pounding heart. She thinks of the page she tore in pieces, back in Monte Carlo, the graceful script of Rebecca's handwriting disappearing by her own hand. That small feeling of triumph, the blip of destruction, well- What a fool she was, to think she had any power in the face of Rebecca's all-consuming presence.

It's sometime in the evening of another day when the pair find themselves in a certain room of the West Wing again. The room still has a strange, otherworldly shimmer to it. In the golden hour, the godrays catch on the ever-present specks of dust, and Mrs. De Winter feels, once again, like a trespasser.

Mrs Danvers hums to herself as she traces her bony fingertips across the second wife's collarbones. There is stale-lilac scented fabric draped on her shoulders. It is soft and light. The wife's eyes are prey eyes, wide and trembling and Mrs. Danvers feels righteous for it.

Mrs. Danvers smells of Rebecca's room. She's bony, like a skeleton. Mrs. De Winter feels like crawling out of herself, out of Rebecca's nightgown. She's in the wrong skin. If she looked hard enough, she might see a flash of Rebecca in Mrs. Danvers' eyes, that fire everyone seems to wax poetic about, and gulps in precious air.

Mrs Danvers' fingers sink knuckle-deep into her, and they feel like an intrusion. Nausea sets at the base of her stomach (at least, that's what she thinks it is). She won't entertain anything else, won't give the time of day to an awful, enroaching pang in her gut.

She turns her head away, unable to look Mrs. Danvers in the eye. She buries her face in Rebecca's pillows, her scent permeating every fiber of her being. Rebecca, who's presence hangs over her precious Maxim, Rebecca, who won't leave, Rebecca, whos rule everyone still follows. She closes her eyes, and tries to entertain a proper fantasy, of Maxim, perhaps, when they get to it- (eventually, they will get to it.) but in the end, it is Rebecca- in an amalgamation of warped, smoky features, who fucks into her body.

Her dreams have never been dull. This one may be the same as always. Horrible, vivid. In the corner of her eye, she might see the specter of an executioner, the blade at her neck.

How fitting, she thinks, impassive.

She feels a pulling at her gut, and convulses around the fingers inside her.

A wayward tear falls from the corner of her eye. She feels irrevocably trapped, and so the lost thing falls into a little death.