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see-arcane · 1 year

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The conflict in other couples: "she doesn't like me back, he's in love with my best friend, he's cheating on me with my sister, he treats me like dirt, we bicker and fight all the time while our friends are saying it means we should get together"

The conflict in the Harkers: "I'm very pious and religious and righteous and proper due to being raised in a society where a woman must be so while having to pray extra hard due to my background and lack of family or I'd not survive, and he's blasting Highway To Hell in his victorian airpods"

I (21 F) am unsure how to approach my loving husband's (22 M) increasingly heretical habits, especially as I (very much a Christian!) seem to be his inspiration. WDID?

To be clear, there is nothing on Earth or in Heaven (or in Hell, as my husband seems very prepared to visit) that could make me love this young man any less. He is my soulmate and there is no changing that. He feels the same towards me...and that may be a problem.

You see, recent harrowing events have conspired in our lives. All caused by a certain individual who will not be named. We'll call him 'DeVille' (excuse the pun, it was not my idea). DeVille, though deserving of pity for his own plights in my opinion, really was thoroughly monstrous. Be it leaving porters without a tip or committing mass murder for a snack or, closer to home, harassing, imprisoning, and/or forcibly conscripting victims into his undead thrall. My best friend suffered the latter. My husband came close to the same, but escaped. I was preyed on last, and was nearly turned in full.

But my husband and our friends prevailed! DeVille was destroyed in time, I was cured! All is well!

Mostly.

You see, ever since the night DeVille attacked me, my husband has been...different. You'll think I'm being hyperbolic, but his hair truly did go from brunet to full shock-white in the space of minutes when I told everyone what happened. Later, I learned that while he and our friends were out sabotaging DeVille's lairs, he also came near to slaughtering the fellow with a kukri knife. Not just in the privacy of the building; he scaled down a house wall and chased DeVille out into the street--where he fled.

This was after he had sworn aloud that he would sell his soul to kill DeVille. (And before meeting my pity for the fellow with a furious decree that if God gave him the chance, he would send DeVille directly to Hell himself.)

That much I could write off as mere passion on my darling's behalf. I will confess it, it was almost as thrilling as it was worrying. It might have been fine if that were all. Only I fear I pushed the issue without realizing. Knowing the stakes, I insisted our friends make an oath to me to give me a posthumous euthanasia--that is, destroying me/my corpse if I were to succumb to the vampiric poisoning and die--so I could not rise as a vampire.

Our friends agreed.

My husband did not.

He agreed to read me a burial rite, he remained wholly, icily focused on killing DeVille with the others, but He Never Agreed to Destroy Me. Much later, after DeVille was ended, he gave me his journal to read* (*many of us were keeping journals to record the whole ordeal as it happened). A section of it was in shorthand that only he and I could read.

And in that section, he had made his own vow, long before I made the euthanasia request. He wrote that if I were to become a vampire, he would too. He was so opposed to my ending in any form, that he would rather join me in Hell than raise a hand to me.

(I do not dare to wonder what might have happened if our friends really had made a move to make good on their promise. He never once took his hand off the kukri since that awful night of the blood. He still wears it today.)

But even here, now, in our safe present, there's more! Though he still attends church and will occasionally pray to (or swear at!) God, he seems increasingly drawn away from the mild state he shared with me prior to this ordeal. He has taken to a brazenness I would never have expected of him outside the privacy of our own home.

He has raised questions with me and with one of our older scholarly friends, how it is that God allowed DeVille, over 400 years old and a nobleman when we crossed him, to run around unimpeded for centuries and allowed two of our dear ones to die, if we were in fact part of some blessed crusade on His behalf. Likewise, he demanded to know how it was I was burned by the Eucharist barely heartbeat after I'd been assaulted by DeVille, saying,

"Is the Son so quick to judge that he would injure someone for an attack inflicted on their body, when their soul remains pure? Why is that?"

Receiving no answer he found satisfying--frankly, I think it was a trick question--he used it as an excuse to start stockpiling books of myth and lore from countries far more archaic than even those that were scoured during our hunt. In that vein, he has also taken to throwing out his old travelogues--he calls them all rubbish now--and has thrown himself into becoming an omniglot and scholar of other lands in his own right. All of which is not so terrible, I know, for seeking knowledge is never a sin.

What troubles me is that he has shown increasing interest in the gods of pagans. Especially in such powers as Milda, Dogoda, Eros, Astarte, Freyja, Inanna, Kamadeva and--I can hardly believe it--Lilith herself! Even Lucifer and Asmodeus! ...Though I admit the latter three's notes are compiled in the same pages he has dedicated to the test of Abraham and his near-sacrifice of Isaac. There are many points in this pile to do with questions of damnation by disobedience/rebellion (Lucifer and Lilith), the seemingly hallowed act of forcing another (Asmodeus) to do one's work for another (Solomon), and the nature of sacrifice as it pertains to loving/obeying God above all else, or else.

...

If nothing else, I cannot say he is not pious. But between all these gods beyond God, I cannot say if he is the man of faith he was when we married, overseen by the nuns who nursed him to health.

I am not asking for advice on how to change him. I am asking for advice on what I am to do.

For I find myself, against all sense, beginning to enjoy the changes that have come packaged with this change. He is brazen in so many things now; things I, a teacher of etiquette, would never have dreamed possible outside of fantasy.

He takes my arm or my hand wherever we walk. We share kisses in public--often in full view of other couples whose husbands are in full bray when complaining about their wives. When he is addressed after I ask a question, my husband makes a point of speaking solely to me or to the man's wife, regardless of how elevated the topic. He also has a habit of somehow introducing talk of advances in divorce law into such chats, and how much property a divorced woman could be expected to attain under the right circumstances...

And that's to say nothing of the New Woman activities.*

*It turns out he's been a supporter of the movement even before the business with DeVille! He was as shocked to learn that I wasn't! Now it seems that's no longer the case.

I've been introduced to members of the New Woman wave and have been shocked to discover so many of them look like the girl in the mirror! I suppose that's what I get for being so slow to broaden my social circle--and perhaps taking a view too many from the Punch comics. Even so, it all feels terribly scandalous to be meeting my husband's new-old friends in this space, reading their literature, and finding myself agreeing with so much of it.

More so, when my husband seems to have no end of fun in verbally trapping some of our friends in conversation that pokes holes in their benign, if (yes fine I will say it) belittling, regard to women, showing admiration only when they have 'man's brain' such as I have. It has snowballed so far that he is now catching everyone in tripwires to do with all the assumptive work that goes into deciding a person's character merely by sex, by skin, by nation, and, yes, by skull.

Lombroso is now a dirty word in his vocabulary, especially as he initially found as many regal as nefarious traits in DeVille's countenance; he with his Roman nose and wise forehead. Physiognomy has departed from my husband's habits. And I must admit, he is making fast friends after doing so. As am I.

But enemies too.

"Where is the science in this, exactly?" he has grated out at more than one ponce casting sneers at one friend for his nose or another for her brow.

It is a striking thing to see, this ghost of the morbid huntsman he was back on DeVille's trail. His eyes burn anew, the air chills, and even the hardiest of men all take a pace back. (Though I note that most of our bosom companions take a pace forward. And perhaps take a drink to hide their smile.)

"Is it truly science or is it bias and bluff in masquerade, a con snuck under the noses of scholars who see it flatters themselves? You will forgive me, sir, if the only proof you have to offer for a body's lesser status is that you do not personally find them pretty enough, or pallid enough, or rosy enough for your tastes. How curious it is, that this 'science' has such a habit of lauding only one sort of man or woman, the better to excuse poor treatment of anyone who is not their twin. 'Of course they must be stupid! They must be a villain! They do not look like me!' I know from experience that even the finest vessel can carry nothing but horse dung behind the eyes. And truthfully, I can smell the reeking heap that passes for your character from here."

It does help that, following such scenes, or those in which he sees I am upset that some snide commenter has thrown a slight his way (none of which appear to bother him, but he is always bothered that I am bothered), he takes great pleasure in acquiescing to any physical challenge. His trimness hides a Herculean strength, and he no longer even pretends to struggle in those schoolboy scuffles of an arm wrestle. He once tipped up a horse carriage to kick a child's ball loose--in full view of his peers.

My husband is always humble as a rule and the dearest, gentlest sweetheart as a rule; but now he shelves both these traits with abandon when he feels the urge to gut some cad's pride out of him.

These and other scenes have become the norm for us. Extreme heights of passion and compassion on one end, extreme lows of disdain on the other, and a medley of worldly-to-pagan study over it all. He has shrugged off so much of the restraint and faith he lived in before and, though he would never force me to do likewise, he has left the door open and waiting, as he sits on the staircase to a strange and unknown land. And it all began when he decided to put me over God and the Devil both. I do not know what to do.

Especially when every day, I feel less and less like I should do anything but walk down with him.

Advice?

#might have gotten a bit carried away with this one #but I needed a break #mina harker #jonathan harker #dracula #dracula daily #holiest love

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