Fic: Currents

Title: Currents
Fandom: Dracula (novel)
Major Characters/Pairings: Jonathan/Mina/Lucy
Wordcount: 300 words
Rating: Mature
POV: Third person
Summary: Lucy finds them again, and they invite her in.
Notes: Originally written as a giftfic for yarnofariadne on AO3.

Lucy returned at the end of autumn.

Doctor Van Helsing’s hope was that the Count’s death would free her – end her, the unspoken current ran – and so it seemed for a time. Reports of lost children and pale ladies fell away. London’s streets went unhaunted. But Mina chanced to look outside one evening, and found a familiar ghost – there, gone, back the next night and lingering longer.

Jonathan understood without asking. He’d have followed her into undeath; how could she do less?

On the third night, they threw open the door to the lighted hallway, and called her inside together.

Pale she was, their absent friend, cold and thin, her eyes fixed on Mina’s collared throat. She shivered in the lamplight of Mina’s chamber, and her burial gown was rags.

“I should leave,” she said, and nothing more; a whole river ran beneath that voice. Freed or not, the Count’s death had changed her.

“Did you think we found you only to lose you again?” Mina said. She couldn’t say she wasn’t frightened, but she had no doubt. Jonathan’s arms were warm around her waist, and her hand didn’t tremble as she lifted it to the clasp at her collar.

One heartbeat, and fear resolved into simplicity: cloth drawn aside, Lucy’s mouth on her throat, the briefest sting. She remembered everything she’d wanted and never dared, and in the unreality of night, it seemed what was done for love was hardly done in sin.

The bed was soft when they fell upon it, Mina’s nightgown soft around her hips as Lucy knelt like a supplicant to drink. No teeth this time, only Lucy’s careful tongue pressing deep, tasting her, only Jonathan beside her still.

She closed her eyes, drifting without drowning, and swore to keep them safe from darker waters.