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Player Handle: Zod Name: Antoinette Cecily Winthrop Place of birth: TBD Age: 74 (born November 1941) Age of embrace: 22 Clan: Ventrue Sect: Camarilla Species: Vampire Derangements: No Disciplines:
Appearance: It isn't that Antoinette is not pretty. She has a soft expressive face with large eyes, full lips and a delicate snub nose, and her skin is very fine, almost like porcelain. However, her demeanor is quiet, even diffident, especially around people she admires. She dresses properly but plainly, in skirt suits typically of a shade of gray, the only occasionally pop of color a soft pink or burgundy pocket square or pinstripe. If the event requires evening dress, Antoinette dons the least dramatic of little black dresses and keeps her jewelry tiny and delicate: single diamond studs in her ears, a chain necklace with a charm smaller than her pinky fingernail.
Her black hair is usually held back in a ponytail or up-do, and she wears glasses she no longer needs due to a fondness for the remembered feel of them on her nose and ears, and for the habit of pushing them up while she's thinking. Her makeup is subtle and always in nude shades, her fingernails a classic French tip. She has a soft and pleasant voice when she speaks, and only speaks when she has something to say. Though she can seem mousy, often mistaken for a secretary or servant in the presence of more regal Ventrue, it is when she speaks her mind that she proves why she was Embraced. She is not only intelligent, but knows how to convey that intelligence to others, and can make her point firmly without seeming abrasive. Her blue eyes can be sharp and her manner gently brisk, but very rarely. Usually her expression is more dewy, like she's lost in thought.
Her build is slender and willowy. She seems waifish, with particularly delicate wrists and ankles. She has a habit of scanning the area around her constantly, and will pick up discarded glasses at an event or take a waiter aside to adjust his tie, because everything must be perfect in her world and her vicinity. This adds to her impression as less than a peer and has been the subject of her Sire's complaints for decades, particularly when his childe avoids scrutiny by disappearing off to fetch drinks or arrange a car for another vampire.
In truth it is obvious that attention makes Antoinette uncomfortable and that the process of observation and activity suit her agile mind. Though her Sire Antoine-Cecile hopes someday they'll make a princess of her, Antoinette is happiest in the shadows.
Her current favorite perfume is Rose Ikebana by Hermessence. It's subtle and feminine with notes of lemongrass and of course, rose.
Haven: "Haven: WIP" Antoinette makes her Haven in a Notting Hill townhouse. She was raised in a time when the ante chamber was carefully designed as the 'face' of the house, and the front room was designed for the effect it would have on visitors and on those that called at the door.
Her front room greets visitors immediately with books. Books, books and more books. The ante room is lined with built in bookcases, floor to ceiling filled with volumes. The shelves even nestle around an archway leading into the dining room, and hang behind a gracile wrought iron spiral staircase that leads to the next story.
The bookcases are arranged by language first, then by subject matter. There is one rather comfortable chair, a grey blue suede armchair, in the corner.
Antoinette is a technophile, and almost everything in her home is remote controlled, including the dining room table, which can sink into the floor at the push of a button. The dining room is sparsely decorated, but set with a rather low hanging crystal chandelier, and with a reproduction of Raffaello's Sibyls on the ceiling. Two throne like carved wood chairs are set in a corner with a small mosaic topped table between them. The table bears a slender cut glass vase usually filled with fresh flowers, and the opposite corner of the room has an antique mini bar.
To the left heading into the dining room is another archway heading to the kitchen. Conversely to the eggshell walls of the previous room, the kitchen is painted brick red, with black marble counter tops and all the latest gadgets. Unfortunately most of them have never been used. The kitchen always smells of lemon verbena cleaning solution and the bundles of fresh herbs dangling beside copper pans and a set of knives, above a large butcher block kitchen island.
A small unobtrusive door, which is always locked, leads to the pantry and basement level. If one was given access (or broke in, past the security key code and voice lock), they would find themselves first in a small and narrow pantry, mostly empty shelves. There are a few old jars here and there, some tool boxes, but nothing to warrant keeping a pantry at all, much less under such security. There's barely room for a larger man to walk between the shelves from the steps down from the kitchen, but after a claustrophobic trip through, a visitor would reach a second door. This door is also locked, but simply, with a key.
The basement area proper is located past that door. It's mostly unfinished and older than much of the rest of the house. There's a curious smell that is both pleasant and unpleasant, as if someone had put sachets of potpourri around to provide a spicy counter-point to the scent of rot that lingers here. At the moment, there's nothing to be seen down here, but there is the sense, from the portable metal furnishings, older and rustier than anything she would permit in the rest of the house, of secrets kept, of contingency plans. Just looking at this room brings a faint sense of unease, like a person might get shut in here and never get out.
There's also a large chest located in a tiny alcove past another security door, with nothing whatsoever else inside or able to fit in with it.
But enough of the basement! Upstairs is much nicer. Just up the staircase from the entry room, there is an oddly shaped mezzanine that looks down on the door. This area is set up like a sitting room, but designed for more occupancy than the one-or-two-chair setups downstairs. The furniture here has Baroque lines, curves and swirls of dark wood padded with deeply studded leather padding. The color choice is masculine, confined mostly to browns edging toward black, bronze, and a strange silvered rust. There are two couches and four free-standing chairs, matching in style but none entirely alike, and a scattering of sleek topped tables decorated with intricate clear glass sculptures. On the opposite side to this arrangement is a baby grand piano. Large paintings hang on the wall a bit behind the seating arrangement, between the two doors leading further into the upper floor: John William Waterhouse's Pandora, Jackson Pollock's Guardians of the Secret, and Gustav Klimt's the Kiss.
The rest of the upstairs contains two bedrooms connected by a large bathroom. The one on the left is furnished opulently, with a ebony four-poster bed decked in emerald, an old-fashioned free-standing wardrobe, and a free-standing full-length mirror. An inset alcove set with a cushion for reading or relaxing is backed with a painstaking recreation of the view outside the bower in Rossetti's Lady Lilith (though this is subtle enough that few would notice at a glance.)
The bathroom is a strange blend of classic and space-age. There is a massive walk in tub in rose-brown marble, a vining tree to soften the rest of the effect, but the most obvious television in the place is here, and every utility (including the water taps for the tub) look on loan from some futuristic museum. A TOTO toilet with automatic open, close, recycled water etc., a towel warming drawer, led temperature control water faucet scratch the top of the iceberg.
The bedroom on the right is smaller and demure in comparison. The small narrow bed is surrounded by a canopy and curtains in a subtle rose color, and there are several more bookcases as well as a cream colored fainting couch and a two-tiered table stand for a state of the art sound system and a carefully displayed Scott Cao violin- a 1743 Cannon STV 1500. Behind the table is a bookshelf full of records, all of them classical or jazz. There is a broad mp3 variety available as well, though it appears Antoinette skipped over cassettes and CDs completely, or already replaced them. The record currently on the turntable is "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106, BB 114" by Béla Bartók (obviously not always, but this is Antoinette's favorite song and so she often has it out).(TBC)
History:
"Roger Winthrop: Shadows of the Past Antoinette's father, Roger Winthrop, was a former ghoul. His domitor, Antoine-Cecile de la Tour d'Auvergne, was an older and powerful Ventrue who kept a herd, and chose his ghouls, from the top names in local business, though of course the girl didn't know it growing up. What she knew was that her father was always busy, always working, and always unhappy. He was a cold husband and a dictatorial, rather terrible father.
What he was going through, was, of course, something that she couldn't understand. He had been bereft of the blood of his Domitor, left adrift to his own devices with only the lingering sensation that he had made a terrible mistake, lost the most important love in the world. Everything else was meaningless except the grind to do better, to improve, to be loved again. But he grew older and bitter while waiting, because he kept making the same short-sighted mistakes in his business, and was slowly driving his company and what was left of his fortune to the ground.
Antoinette was born three years after the last drop of Kindred vitae burned out of her father's veins, very shortly after he tried to distract himself with a young, beautiful trophy wife. Her name is Antoinette Cecily Winthrop, which ought to highlight the obsession that surrounded her daily life. Born and promptly forgotten by too young a mother and too old a father, Antoinette was immediately shuffled off to a nursery to be raised by nannies. She almost never saw either of her parents until she entered primary school, but she was nurtured, taken to play dates, and encouraged in her talent in maths and sciences.
She was always a bit shy, but smart, and very careful about her clothes and appearance even by age five or six. Antoinette did very well in school, but never received any praise from her father, while her mother wanted to dress her up like a doll, wanted her to be more outgoing. Her teachers always liked her, and she had a few friends among the classmates. If she admired or liked someone, she would find a way to make friends.
By adolescence, when boys started to notice her, her mother encouraged her to go out and have her debut. There was a huge party, a magnificent spectacle, but within the pomp and circumstance, the lead actress deliberately slipped out of the limelight. She had tried, oh how she'd tried! But all the questions had to do with what designer she was wearing, what shade of lipstick, which young man she would be dancing with next. Whenever she opened her mouth to say anything more than a single-word response, someone cut over the top of her with another question, or her mother regaled them with an anecdote she had made up out of whole cloth. Antoinette felt as if she was nothing more than a mannequin that was being carted around and referred to by her name. She felt more and more uncomfortable with every glance, with every hand that drew hers on to the dance floor, until she was forgetting basic steps and felt as if her cheeks would never be cool again. She ended up spending the evening with the chefs smoking out back, listening to them talk about their families and practicing her language skills. Her mother was, of course, furious.
Shortly after this, Roger started to show signs of mental deterioration. They were subtle at first, but after a few mishaps with servants, Antoinette stepped in to the rescue. Everything had to be perfect for her father. She managed the entire household, between school and studies, in such a way that nobody else suspected (or they suspected as little as she could arrange) about Mr. Winthrop's decline, and she was there when she could be to whisper words in his ear if he forgot them in an inopportune moment.
This was when Roger truly acknowledged his daughter. He told his associates he was teaching her business, so she could support her future husband, who would be heir, and they both endured the calculating leers, but in private he started grooming her. He taught her how to read the books and when he was particularly lucid, would quiz her about the fundamental aspects of business and about their family, and corporate, holdings.
After secondary school ended, Antoinette gave herself over full time as her father's caretaker. She took all his dictation, alone in a room, and found herself staring more and more often at pages that didn't make sense. She helped him as his body failed, and after performing certain tasks regularly, she began to anticipate his needs. But it simply wasn't possible to hide his illness from his employees and his rivals, and soon enough some of the mistakes were noticed and some very powerful, very ambitious men started to smell blood. One in particular pressed signing of a disastrous contract, insisting it was necessary that Roger look at it and sign it that very moment, particularly on seeing the old man was currently bedridden. When Antoinette tried to look it over, the smug snake informed her that it was a waste of time, that "a woman wouldn't understand." What she understood was that this man wanted to ruin her father and take away everything he'd built, to take advantage of him in a moment of weakness. She still hoped for Roger's full recovery, though she knew this was more than unlikely.
In one of her least heroic moments, Antoinette broke down. She sank to her knees right there and cried like a child. It was so intense and so distracting that it bought them the evening, but it was still mortifying for her. Disgusted pity in the eyes of her father's enemy and shock on the faces of the servants when they came, because they had never seen Antoinette just bawl like that, and weren't expecting it of her at seventeen. Still, she folded away the moment into the litany of humiliations and mistakes she catalogued inside herself and focused on what needed to be done. Roger needed to be protected. The family money and the future of the business needed to be assured. She dried her eyes, ordered a cup of tea, and sat down to assay the contract.
It took her all night, thousands of notes made and upwards of a dozen books scattered around her father's desk, but she finally made the notations and edits she believed Roger would have done in his prime, and drafted a counter-proposal to be presented to his colleague when the man returned the next day. For the next two years after, Antoinette got little sleep. She was teaching herself to be her father's ghost-writer, and soon caught and corrected the old mistakes that Roger had been making for decades. She was a young woman, and she was attracted to the lures of the new, to the technological achievements and opportunities that making these 'gadgets' universal in homes could bring. She slowly started channeling some money into forward-thinking investments, into electronics companies, namely those that dealt primarily with personal entertainment and home security. These investments were solid and well-researched, subject to her already exacting thoroughness, and had real tangible pay-offs relatively quickly.
"Antoine-Cecile de la Tour d'Auvergne: Seigneur Meanwhile Roger's health got a little better, enough so that they could keep up the charade. Sometimes Antoinette believed he thought he had actually dictated these policies to her. Sometimes it was best to try to make sure he kept his mouth closed, because what came out would be heart-breaking nonsense. But one night she went in to Roger's room to begin her nightly work and to care for him if he needed it, and saw there was another man there, one she did not recognize. The man was not very tall, but he exuded a sense of old fashioned nobility and power. When she opened her mouth to ask what he thought he was doing there, or call for the servants, or whatever she might have done upon seeing an unfamiliar man, he looked at her and told her to be quiet like a good girl. Her mouth closed itself hard enough that her jaw ached. Next, the man told her to sit down and gestured at a chair by the side of the room. Antoinette's body puppeteered itself over to that chair and pushed her down on it. She could almost feel marionette strings, a physical presence pushing her limbs into working. The man had very beautiful, very distinctive, blue eyes, she thought.
The man turned back to Roger's bedside and woke him with a stir of a hand on his shoulder and a soft word. Their surname. Roger woke, clearly not lucid, but his face broke into the most exquisitely happy smile Antoinette had ever seen. She had hardly ever seen her father smile, and now he beamed with pleasure. She thought he was saying her name for a moment, and struggled to get up, but couldn't. But he stopped midway through: all he said was, "Antoine." And then, "Seigneur."
The man began to praise Roger, which made him smile even more happily. His face looked like it would crack, he was smiling so hard. The man talked about how Roger had finally fixed his little bad habits, and he was going in a really interesting direction (he was speaking French, now, and Antoinette didn't pick up all of it completely). But as they talked, this man began to frown. He wasn't stupid, and it was immediately clear to him that Roger's mind was regressed and chaotic. He didn't have the mental acuity to have been doing what was done. His expression grew more and more shuttered, and Roger started behaving like a pitiable child, begging him to look kindly on him, to let him 'taste it again.' Antoine finally shook off the old man's grasp and commanded him to close his eyes and sleep. It was almost a kindness.
Antoine went over to the desk at his leisure and began reading Antoinette's work from the last few nights. "This is a woman's handwriting," he murmured and then looked up directly at her. "Your doing?" As if freed from a spell at being addressed directly, Antoinette could speak again, but she was too confused, riding on a cocktail of emotions over the state her father had been in and the impossible weight of Antoine's presence. All she could do was nod.
"All of it? The business, the investments. It was all you?" Antoine continued to question her, and she continued to helplessly nod. Antoine went over to her and sat in the chair next to her and asked her complicated questions about her activities for the past few years, about her concept of policy in general and why she, a girl younger than twenty, had taken it on herself to perform such a charade. Antoinette answered him haltingly at first but grew more animated as she got into areas she was excited about. Antoine watched her speak, and listened, and then commanded her to write up a document that sold their company and holdings to a subsidiary of a multinational group he controlled. The name would not be his, but the will would be, he assured her. This way when Roger died, and he was not long for this world, Antoinette would continue to run things from the shadows. He wanted, he said, to watch her grow and to see how she developed. She was an unpolished stone right now, but he could make her into something glorious.
When Antoine spoke, it was impossible to say no. Antoinette found herself drafting the document exactly as he requested she do and arranging Roger's signature. She was only able to make one small protest regarding her father. "But, can't you make him better?"
"I could keep him alive. In that disgraceful state. But I'm not going to," Antoine said briskly, then he commanded her to kneel at his feet. He made a small cut on his thumb with a pen-knife and grasped her head by the hair, holding her still for him. Then he smeared his blood like crimson lipstick over her mouth. He spent most of the rest of the night there, conditioning her not to be able to speak about him, ensuring her obedience, and feeding her little tastes of his blood. By the time the night was over, Antoinette understood that look that had come over her father's face when he opened his eyes to see the Ventrue there, because that faint smile of approval Antoine gave her was the most safe, the most blissful, home she had ever known.
Antoine was, as she would learn he always was, true to his word. Though the company was now shrouded in the blinds of several shell corporations and supposedly headed by somebody else, Antoinette continued to hold the reins. She had to work through proxies in general, particularly as they became larger and more powerful, and branch executives took her guidance and made even bigger miracles happen. Antoinette was repeatedly encouraged to marry, to continue the family legacy and find a strong, intelligent mate to help her rule her assets. Much of this pressure came through family and friends, who could not understand that the most she understood about romantic love came through her feelings for her Domitor, and that she had a secret job that kept up so much of her life that squeezing a suitor into it would burst it at the seams.
But she let them introduce her to men, and she invented some way to get out of seeing those men again. Meanwhile she had been ghouled at the tender age of nineteen, and remained girlishly slim, fresh-faced and child-like in her appearance for the next decade of hard lessons, acquisitions, power building, and awkward first dates. What she didn't realize was that Antoine was testing her, again and again, in a variety of increasingly complicated and sadistic ways. The only part of her that he did not understand was her complete lack of interest in being a wife or a mother, particularly given her caregiving nature. As his ghoul, she was not going to get pregnant, but also he had no intention of keeping her as his ghoul for very long. She couldn't function as part of his herd, as she was not the right gender or age, and the entire thing was continually grooming her and testing her to see if she could be a Ventrue vampire.
Her first test was Dominic. The name on the papers Antoinette had only been too happy to sign, with her Domitor's blood still red on her lips, was Dominic Lassiter. She could have been forgiven for believing that the two would never meet, but into the ring of potential suitors came this dark horse.
Putting his name on the company had been a complicated game in itself. Although Antoine had claimed that he ultimately controlled the entire conglomerate that Dominic's holdings were a part of, Dominic himself made it clear that the situation was a great deal less cut and dried than that. Antoine and Dominic were friends, and their business interests overlapped in a variety of areas. Dominic had more than enough to do with the companies he owned and managed, and his primary interest was in information and security, which made some of the directions Antoinette wanted to go right in his wheelhouse. But he was not one of Antoine's ghouls and he was teaching Antoinette as a personal favor to Antoine. He made this, and the fact that if he liked, he could take her company right out from under her, abundantly clear from the beginning.
"Dominic Lassiter: Locked doors, Lady Bluebeard" He then made it clear that he believed the easiest way to take on her education was for them to be married.
Unlike the men Antoinette's mother chose for her, there were several instant reasons for her to reject a proposal from Dominic: he was not a nice man, not at all. He was a hard man, so smart and so perceptive that sometimes he left the girl reeling with a phrase; he was practical to a fault, ruthless, and conducted all his business and all their courtship (which consisted of Dominic dropping a box with a very expensive diamond ring on the table at the restaurant and telling her to come up with a suitably romantic proposal story for the papers) took place at night.
They had a whirlwind engagement. After the wedding, Dominic did fulfill his end of the bargain, teaching Antoinette everything anyone would like to know about the cutthroat world of international business. He was never kind, and his hand was faster than his tongue if he thought she was being obstinate or dull, but he never once underestimated her or behaved as if there were anything in the world she couldn't understand because of her gender. In fact, he not only expected her to understand everything, he expected her to master it in one or two attempts. He was not a patient man, and even though they supposedly lived together, he was home only one or two hours every night and gave those grudgingly. He accepted her as Antoine's choice for his protégé, and taught her very similarly to what he would for anyone, with the exception that she was his wife. But he was a very busy man- Antoinette suspected very early he was a vampire, like Antoine, but with a different set of powers.
He never gave her that look that made her will turn to water. But there was something about him that was just impenetrable. But the odd thing was the way he treated her as his wife: they didn't sleep together, even in the same room. He never kissed or tried to touch her, except in the most peremptory of ways. A kiss in greeting, which had an almost sardonic feel about it and at first made Antoinette acutely uncomfortable. A hand guiding the small of her back. Once, before they got to know each other very well, Antoinette expressed her confusion over his distance with an ill-considered snap that he must not find her attractive at all, even for a business arrangement. When her ears stopped ringing from the backhand, he told her something she never forgot: "You don't know much, little one. Not much at all. You're an experiment. You're one of d'Auvergne's little games. My job is to give you the rules of the game; your job is to win. As for me, think of yourself as honeymooning in Bluebeard's Castle. There isn't a single locked door you want to peek inside."
He encouraged her to attend university, which was still unusual for a woman at that time, but would fill in some of the gaps in her education, and harden her rather soft resolve when it came to public scrutiny. It was difficult to juggle classes and course work with the demands of her business, but Dominic arranged a house near to the university and started working various aspects of her school work into their lessons. He frequently outright contradicted something a professor taught her, but he also insisted that attending even those classes filled with 'lackwits and liars' was good for her.
Antoine visited once every few months. He was informed about her progress in general, but he always had questions for her. Complicated questions about some risky but lucrative business move she had made. Flat out skepticism about her school curriculum choice that she had to defend. Most of the time he came to the home when Dominic was out, but once or twice they all met. The men had a cognac while Antoinette stood by the sideboard and tried not to feel, or act, like a child called to the Headmaster's office. At one of these meetings, Antoine startled her with an entirely different sort of question.
"Would you like a child?" he said. "I understand that many women consider motherhood to be the most rich, the most rewarding, experience of their lives. I worry that you forget sometimes that you are a woman, Antoinette."
The question was not meant flippantly, she understood, and so she tried not to give it a flippant answer. She had been married to Dominic, at least in name, for about a year. She was still a very young woman, but old enough that she ought to have been thinking about children. But in the life she had, with the secret business decisions, university, Antoine and his blood, and of course a husband with no interest in her virginity, was not the kind in which she even considered it. She tried to picture this setting, but with a tiny person swaddled up in a basinet on the floor, perhaps halfway between where the two vampires were sitting, and blanched because the alternative would be to laugh at the ludicrousness of it all. And she wasn't fool enough to laugh at Antoine.
Finally, timidly, and as politely as she could manage, she said, "I'm afraid that I don't... think that Dominic could give me a child. E-even if he wanted to."
Antoine made a face. "Of course he can't, and you ought to be thankful for small miracles. But we could arrange it, if you liked. A young man who looks enough like the Mask Dominic is wearing that nobody would suspect anything. Of course, you would have to go without the blood for a while. Probably at least a year."
Antoinette's own blood ran cold in her veins at the thought. She had to fight down a growing sense of panic and school her expression to submissive consideration. "Is this something... you would like me to do, Seigneur?" she asked, hoping to all hopes that he would say it was her choice, and in a way that made her believe it.
But he steepled his fingers and looked at her with his impossibly blue eyes and said firmly, "Yes. You are a woman, Antoinette. You are twenty years old. You have to learn a few lessons that are not about numbers and acquisitions."
She could do nothing but acquiesce. It was the most terrifying moment of her existence. She had only been kissed sardonically by Dominic. She could not imagine sharing a bed with a stranger. She didn't really want a child, not if it meant that her world would be tossed upside down. How could she balance a baby with her business, with her studies? What if it was all too much and she stopped improving and Antoine didn't want her back? What if he just abandoned her? She had a sudden mental image of her father, crying in his bed, clawing weakly at the Ventrue's sleeve. She did not want to be that.
"I will find a-" Antoine began, but Dominic cut him off.
"I will find an appropriate man," he said flatly, ignoring Antoine's indignation at being interrupted. "She's not going to be your ghoul for a year, d'Auvergne. She's still my wife. And she still will be if you turn fickle and decide you're through with this game."
He squeezed her shoulder on his way out of the room.
Antoine kissed her, and stroked her hair. "It will be hard at first, not seeing me. But you will be my good girl, and prove to me that you are ready for the next step." She could only nod and cling to him and promise that she would.
Even though everything had changed, it seemed deceptively the same for the next few months. Dominic didn't speak of the conversation at all, and Antoinette hid her growing panic and fed her chaotic emotions into her duties. She was almost able to pretend nothing had been decided, that Antoine had changed his mind, as she unconsciously counted down the days till she would see him again. But he didn't come. Her withdrawal period was not one of her finer moments, but she survived it, and faced with a certain dull, hopeless emptiness the first month bereft of Antoine's vitae.
Dominic was a weird sort of knight in shining armor, but he helped her through it simply by refusing to allow her to give up. She felt by turns manic and listless, but he expected her to acquit herself as well as she ever had. There was still more to learn, and it was nearing the end of her semester. The routine anchored her, and learning- and expressing that learning- got her spirits up little by little, until she started to see a future and a light at the end of the tunnel again. She had felt two things for Dominic prior to that month: respect and fear. Now she started to feel a strong affection, although she wasn't certain how it would be returned.
One night she asked him what Antoine had meant about 'his Mask.' "Locked doors, Lady Bluebeard," he replied, but he kissed her on the hand.
Just after the end of Antoinette's first semester and just before grades were posted, Dominic set up the deflowering. Two men entered the house that night, one of them resembling Dominic, the other a tall Nordic blond. Almost at a glance, Antoinette could tell the other one wasn't her husband; he looked intensely nervous, even afraid, and there were minute differences in his appearance: more brothers than twins. The blond spoke with Dominic's voice, instructing Antoinette to prepare dinner for two. He did not introduce the other man by name or introduce him to her. When the other man asked him if he was really sure he wanted this, Dominic manhandled him over to the table, shoved him down in a chair, and informed him coldly that they had an arrangement, he knew his part in it, and that if he wanted to get out of his 'indiscretions' with his skin, he would do exactly as he was told.
Antoinette tried not to shudder at the sugar-coated razor blade in Dominic's voice, or wonder aloud how and why he looked totally different than he ever had to her before. She prepared dinner, and the three of them sat in awkward silence. Dominic sipped at a glass of wine. They made conversation, stilted and uncomfortable. The brown haired man who resembled what she thought of, or had until that moment, of Dominic, complimented her cooking. She thanked him. Dominic asked her a few questions about what she expected her grades to be, she answered. Then he told them to leave the table and to go to the bedroom.
He dragged a chair in to a corner and sat in it, and the shadows washed over him. His voice continued though, familiar, commanding. Dominic told the other man, step by step, exactly what to do. He instructed him on how to touch Antoinette, how slowly to unzip her dress. Where to kiss her. Where to bite. At first Antoinette was trembling, as afraid as the stand-in in front of her, but sensations started to wash over and through her. Dominic clearly knew what he was doing, or what he was commanding done, and he was paying close attention to her every hitch of breath, her every flush of pleasure. It was all, she realized, entirely about her. Dominic was watching, while another man made her writhe on her bed. His proxy. And while the other man's fear made him hesitant at first, the flesh was willing, and they consummated that night.
This continued, every night, for an entire week. The man, whose first name turned out to be Arthur (she never learned anything else), stayed at their home. Dominic would enter wearing a different skin. Sometimes he was the blond man. Sometimes he was a redheaded woman. Antoinette nearly dropped a plate the first time she heard his decisive, familiar inflection from a female voice. Every night, after dinner, the three of them went to the bedroom. The sex kept getting better and better, After a week, Antoinette went to a doctor to be tested for pregnancy. They found a positive result. When she returned to her home, Arthur was gone.
"Most men who cheat me," said Dominic when she asked him about it, "have a much less pleasant final week than making love to my beautiful wife. Locked doors, Lady Bluebeard."
She missed the sex, after Arthur was gone. She tried to hide it. It was wanton, un-ladylike to even think such a thing. But she missed the sound of Dominic's voice saying those dirty, sweet, pleasurable things. She fueled her frustration into the business, but eventually let a little bit of those feelings slip. She didn't think she had ever seen Dominic look so flattered before. "Well, come to the bedroom, little one," he said. "I'll show you how to do it to yourself." The idea was scandalous, but Antoinette was gradually becoming more and more clear how little scandalous really meant. Dominic liked to see her come, that was more than obvious.
She started telling him regularly, weekly, that she wanted to see what he really looked like. He responded by showing her a different face every night. The average height, average build, brown haired, brown eyed, halfway attractive Dominic she had married turned into a black haired beauty with an hourglass figure, a rotund bald man with bad olive skin, and once, notably, a perfect incarnation of the painting of Jesus her grandmother had on her bedroom wall. Antoinette didn't back down. Neither did Dominic.
She was visibly pregnant by her next semester, and oddly, this made her treatment a little better. People looked at her as less of an oddity. She was a married woman starting a family. They still might be confused as to why she was there, but her grades had been very good and her husband was a supporter. She went from being radical to being eccentric. And Antoinette found, despite herself, that there was a certain magic to growing another life inside her body. Sometimes it was painful, usually it was uncomfortable, but she started to look forward to the day the baby would be born, and not simply because it meant she had cleared this hurdle and Antoine might want her back again.
"Dora and Antoine: Birth and Rebirth" The baby was born on August 19, 1962. She was born during broad daylight, so no one was present except the mother and her doctors. Antoinette thought on the circumstances of her own christening, and the two vampires in her life, and firmly named her Dora. "Gift." Dora Lassiter was a beautiful baby, and with a surge of confidence she didn't know where it came from, Antoinette told Dominic that evening that she 'had his eyes.' He laughed, and it only sounded a little bit bitter.
Antoinette had been worried that adding a baby to her life's busy equations would be untenable, and she wasn't being needlessly paranoid. Dora was a great deal of work, and she was also frequently sick as a baby. They arranged to have a maid come and stay at the house to help her, but the woman took so much instruction that Antoinette sacked her within a week. It was simply easier, she explained, to do everything herself rather than waste her precious time telling someone twice how to do it properly. In addition, she worried that anyone they hired might gossip over the odd family arrangement or hear something they shouldn't. Antoinette had grown up in a house full of servants, but she was leery of hiring even one.
Dominic eventually provided a nanny, because he had absolutely no patience for how exhausted Antoinette had become. Antoinette, in love with her daughter at first sight, insisted she would not let someone else raise her child, but she welcomed the breaks to work or to sleep or to plan improvements for her company. She supposed that the act of becoming a mother had changed her, but not in the way she believed Antoine had intended. She didn't feel more in touch with her feminine side or less eager to prove herself in a 'man's' world, but she felt more in control of her life than she could remember feeling for a long time. She would have given up that control in an instant for the pleasure of being Antoine's ghoul, but she had it in her to also fear and dread the effect he had over her. To wonder if there was potential for her that was higher than having most of her emotions occluded by rapturous obsession.
She was thinking this when once again the three of them gathered in the parlor. Thinking this when Antoine-Cecile de la Tour d'Auvergne questioned her about motherhood. "Dora is a gift," she told him candidly. "I love her more than my life."
"You would kill her if I asked you to," Antoine said. Antoinette felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. She swayed on her feet. She wouldn't, not that, not even for him. She clawed at the sideboard, trying to get out of the room before he caught her with his voice or his impossible blue eyes and asked her to do it.
Antoine caught her by the arm. She strained past him, finding Dominic, pleading with him. "Dominic, don't let him make me-" was all she got out before Antoine commanded her to silence.
Across the room, Dominic Lassiter got up and said with a tone of absolute disgust, "My boon to you is resolved, d'Auvergne. When you're finished with the girl, I would like you out of my territory."
Antoinette tried to call after him but her mouth wouldn't work.
"Don't you want to drain her?" Antoine asked, never breaking eye contact with Antoinette. "Her blood is useless to me. But I'm sure the blood of someone you love would be especially sweet."
"Do you know what I think?" Dominic snarled, but Antoinette could feel his strong grasp catch her above both elbows, shaking her back. His hands were weird- the fingers long and gnarled and twisted, like the hands of a hag in a fairy tale. Long broken black claws split through the skin at dizzying angles to the bones. "I think you're even uglier underneath your mask than I am under mine."
The claws brushed her neck as he undid her hair, then pulled it aside, twisted and pulled it as he knew she liked. It wasn't a blessing in that horrible moment; it was one more pleasant thing ruined. But when his fangs found her throat, there was ecstasy in the Kiss. In her heart beating as if it wanted to fling itself out of her and impale itself on what lay in his chest- or what lay in Antoine's. She was so confused and she was so lost.
Then she collapsed into Dominic's arms, there on the floor, and Antoine bit the pad of his thumb, let the blood pool up over it, and smeared it on her mouth again. He forced his thumb into her mouth and commanded her to drink. She drank, and in the daze of it Antoine's arms replaced Dominic, and they were alone in the house. Except for the baby, and her nanny, whose heartbeats were ever so clear in the next room.
Antoine pulled her to her feet. "We are Ventrue," he said. "We don't sit crying on the floor. Come now, it's nearly dawn." He paused. "And you would kill her, if I asked you."
Red was streaked across Antoinette's face as she nodded.
The two of them, sire and childe, had one particular thing in common: they believed in doing things right. Antoine spent the first few weeks expending on what little knowledge of vampire and Camarilla society Antoinette had learned. He taught her the Traditions exhaustively, quizzing her about various loopholes and areas of influence until he was satisfied. He was influential enough not to have time every night to teach her, so often he would give her 'homework,' entire volumes of insight and answers she was to deliver the next sundown. When he was finished with the Traditions, he gave her the history, the nobility and the duty of the Ventrue Clan, and spent half a year with this. Then a few weeks on the structure and ranks of the Camarilla, proper etiquette and forms of address, and how she would continue to control her business holdings as a vampire.
She was glad to have something to focus on, to keep her mind occupied with memorization and iterations and history rather than to think about what had happened to Dora after that night. Would Dominic see that she was cared for? Antoinette wished she had a decisive answer, but there was something so enigmatic about the man, who she knew now was one of the primary Nosferatu in the city. Probably he would want to wash his hands of all of this, get rid of everything that reminded him of a bad memory, of a boon he'd owed... and paid. Whether Dora was alive or not, Antoinette knew she would always hang in the back of her mind. Her baby. What would life have been if she could have raised her, watched her grow, taught her things? It wasn't a life she had had any right to, but hidden deep in that spot way back, Antoinette thought it had been particularly cruel of Antoine to allow her to want it. She still did not understand why he had insisted she bear a child, then simply abandon it.
She knew very well that there was another shoe to drop. She knew Antoine well enough to realize Dora had become another piece in the complicated game that he played, but the only way she had to even attempt to protect her daughter was to learn as best she could how that game was played. And she was changing too, because she was a vampire, and because to drink hot blood, in more than the Shakespearian sense, requires a certain hardness of conscience.
"Blood Type: My Bright Mirror" Blood was another puzzling matter. Antoine explained to her that Ventrue were selective, and that each had a different dietary requirement when it came to their intake. It was not something that was bandied about, since it could be used to target the vampire in question. But why it would be the case that she violently rejected the blood of his herd was unknowable to her. What she did know was that heartbeats, blood, roused a singular hunger inside her, a strange fury of sorts at times, but only certain humans had a... scent to them, a rich sweetness, that called to her. She detected that scent, very faintly, one evening after her lessons, and went out to Antoine's garden to see a young woman standing by the fountain.
Perhaps because Antoinette had been trying so hard not to think of her daughter, but only to think of her lessons, and of Antoine, who despite herself she still loved, but it struck her as she gazed at this girl in the moonlight that she looked very much like Dora would look in eighteen or twenty years. Like Antoinette wished for her to look. She had soft, rich brown curls, large eyes, and in fact, the two women could have been sisters. But this girl- Dora in eighteen years- had all the natural majesty that Antoinette did not. She exuded confidence. Her lips were rouged, perhaps overly so, her nails were painted a pink-red color, and she wore a scintillating silver dress. Why was she here? Antoinette wondered. She went to the girl to talk.
The girl was called Lorraine, and she was the granddaughter of a man who had some business with Antoine. Antoinette noticed a bodyguard standing a ways toward the house. She ignored him for now. The girl smelled so very sweet. She could not remember feeling this way about anyone's blood except her sire's. Impulsively, she took Lorraine's hand in hers, and they began to talk. Almost instantly, she had Lorraine's full attention, which was a strangely intoxicating experience. They talked for upwards of an hour, and then Antoinette could bear it no longer and asked the bodyguard to leave them. She didn't yet know how to command with her gaze as Antoine did, but her place in the household made him acquiesce for a moment, just moving beyond the door. He looked uncomfortable, and she supposed the strangely Sapphic flavor of the interaction would disturb many, perhaps even herself a few years earlier.
She lowered her lips to Lorraine's throat and drank. And drank. Until the body in her grasp was cold, the heart no longer beating. She wanted to be devastated, afterward, staring at this delicate girl. But she only felt more hungry. The only thing that concerned her, really, was if Antoine would be angry. This was the grand-daughter of an associate of his. But when he came out to the garden and saw them, he only shrugged. "Did she say grand-daughter? She was his whore. He will replace her and say not a word of it."
Antoinette stared down at the body again. Was this what she was to drink of? Whores? What did that say about her? But she kept looking at the gentle curl of brown hair against the long neck, of the silver dress. She wanted to know what lip rouge the woman was wearing. What nail polish. She did some research, and a week later, Antoine brought eight dancing girls from a troupe in the town into the house for a performance. Two of them had dark hair and dark eyes, but only one exuded that beautiful, sweet aroma.
Antoinette had been practicing, and with a little effort, she was able to make the girl be still. She washed her and used a perfume of essential rose oil on her throat. She curled the girl's long hair with a curling iron. She did her mouth in a crimson hue, like Antoine's blood must have looked on her own lips, and dressed her in a gown made for herself, but far too fancy for her to ever wear: white, like sequined snow. She removed the girl's nail varnish and did it again, in brilliant red. She moved them to look at themselves in the mirror. They could have been sisters, this girl the bright reflection of what she might have been, herself the girl's shadow. She realized then that it was not about Dora, and had never been about Dora. The girls were herself, powerless dolls of nineteen.
She relished the look of ecstasy on her doll's face as she drank her blood.
Notes: Antoinette speaks French, Spanish, German and Italian. She can get by with a few phrases in a variety of other languages, but would not understand conversation spoken in them in the same room. Her feeding preference is for Caucasian women between 18 and 25, with dark hair and dark eyes. Preferably, she dolls them up in exquisite costumes and often has an elaborate few hours out with them before the Kiss.
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