WELCOME TO THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM.

    "Millie," she signs again; at first, it's because it's all she can remember. Her hands falter in midair.

    It's been so long. That face, gleaming in the darkness with its wild, beautiful eyes, like prisms of obsidian, has as much in common with the face in Larissa's memory as the aloof, faintly smiling statues have in common with the raw granite, pink as flayed muscle, from which they were first hewn. So much has been carved away. Larissa can't stop looking at her. She finds herself moving forward, one stride, two, then stopping.

    She starts to sign again, slowly. The words come, but she has to speak aloud with them, each part of her reteaching the other. (She realises that Millie could have availed herself of technology to help her hearing, or that she now might be able to perceive the resonance of a vampiric voice as her senses have grown, or none of these--it's that the terms of engagement have changed in ways she doesn't yet know, that they are not those people anymore. She doesn't quite know if Millie will attack her.)

    "I am..." It doesn't feel right to say it, but “was” is untrue, too. "I am Livia. What are you..." Her hands stop, trembling in midair. She was about to ask Millie what she's doing here, but here is a perfectly sensible place for her to be: Egypt, on the Nile, where her human life, as she'd told Larissa, came to an end, where she had been cut adrift by her creator, left to sink or swim on the black water of the night. She tries again: "I can't believe..."

    An urge swarms her, crowding out her sense. She needs to take Millie into her arms. She needs to have her close, to feel their bodies together, to wrap herself around Millie, to put her teeth in her neck and hold her, and to never let her go again. I can't believe it's you, she'd been about to say. I can't believe you survived. I can't believe you're so near to me that I can touch you. And she wants to touch her. She needs to touch her. Amenhotep, Horemheb, Rameses, Akhenaten, all stone. Millie: flesh.

she leaps. to strike? or snuggle? (that word is so very human — snuggle. as if she and livia are not vicious creatures of the night. as if they have any business snuggling.) she slams spectacularly into livia and suffers full-body quakes. her needy arms wrap around livia, ravenous, feeling the shape of her body through fine, draped cloths. livia was always tall; livia was a walking miracle. millie would fling herself to the ground and kiss her feet if it didn't mean releasing livia.

❛ you are alive, ❜ she marvels. her greedy hands clamp around livia's perfect, glorious, glassy face, the way millie often grips her animals. her thumbs press in on hollow cheeks. beautiful. perfect. a moving sculpture. how is the earth so lucky? how is millie worthy to hold and behold? ❛ how can it be? ❜

didn't she watch livia die? but that was her fatal error: stupid stupid stupid STUPID STUPID STUPID. she did not watch livia die. she watched domina's destruction and she, with poor eyesight and poor hearing, assumed livia followed. even the most base of scientists know that assumptions are for the STUPID. she should have learned never to rely on her pathetic senses!

but now she touches livia — livia! livia, and not someone stealing her divine face! millie's fangs throb viciously with want to sink into livia's neck. she feels unspeakable fury towards domina — IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MILLIE WHO TURNED LIVIA. it should have been she whose fangs sliced into livia's warm, fluttering, human neck and drank her scorching blood and… she involuntarily releases a guttural groan. feelings to which she is unaccustomed pelt her like boulders — never has she felt the desire to turn another until now, but the object of her desire was already turned. millie was robbed of the opportunity to make her darling livia hers. her foot stomps once, twice, then a third time. the ground crumbles to rubble beneath her foot. she doesn't care. she'll lay luxor to ruins and it still won't be enough.

ㅤㅤWHO'S THE REAL YOU ?   THE PERSON WHO DID SOMETHING AWFUL , OR THE PERSON WHO'S HORRIFIED BY THE AWFUL THING  YOU DID ?   IS ONE PART OF YOU ALLOWED TO FORGIVE THE OTHER ?

    "You're all she's been talking about for months," Mel says, with the flippant ease that's her due as the younger sister. Larissa would die on the spot, except that Millicent is rubbing her shoulder, and it feels very nice, and she wants to experience it for as long as she can. "Oh, Doctor Clyde and I this, Doctor Clyde and I that. No, I can't come round, Doctor Clyde and I are going here and there and everywhere."

    Larissa's dignity can only tolerate so much in silence. "I really don't think it was so bad as all that."

    "You've never talked so much about a girlfriend before. Vik, what did I say about it? I said, it must be love."

    Vikram passes Millicent a plate with one of everything. "She's trying to say we're excited to meet you."

    Mel puts a glass into Larissa's hand, then Millicent's, then Vikram's. "At first, I really thought you were her dentist," she says and wanders across the room toward the nightstand, where her phone lies. She peers down at it, rolls her eyes, and walks away. "Because she'd only say 'doctor'. Doctor, doctor, doctor."

    "Millicent has a Ph.D," Larissa says inanely and takes a large gulp of her cocktail.

    "I was like, I'm her precious baby sister, and she can't come meet me while I'm on lunch, 'cause she needs to hang out with her dentist? I'm seeing Dr. Clyde this afternoon, Amelia. Amelia, I was just speaking with Dr. Clyde, and she said the most interesting thing... And I was so confused, because Rissa has great teeth. Then she said something about animals so I looked up 'animals doctor clyde' and there you are. You're the coolest person she's dated, I think."

    "By far," Larissa mumbles into her glass. "Vikram, could I please have the bacon?"

    Vikram passes the entire plate of bacon, and a fork with it. "She's joking," he clarifies to Millicent. "We knew you weren't a dentist. It was just a surprise to hear your name so often. Larissa is a very private person. It's how we knew you were special. It means a lot to us to have you here."

    "Mum was just texting me that I ought to be ready to 'receive guests' soon." Mel sits on the floor with Vikram, nearly sloshing some cocktail out of her glass, and rolls her eyes. "Receive guests. What am I, the bloody Queen? Come on, now. Rissa, just one piece of bacon, then you have the rest. Okay, Mill--top five animals you've stuffed."

    "Amelia!" Larissa doesn't know why she's trying to intervene. She doesn't think it's meant as a tease, but she has a sense of Amelia's personality in the room, an enormous and blindingly-bright presence, crowding in on Millicent, who is certainly unprepared for such a determined charm offensive so early in the morning.

help me, bloody mary. tastes like a second chance. she wants to apologise again, and it still wouldn't be enough — while you were saying my name so often, i had you blocked and was on one of my sprees — but exposing their arrangement before mel and vikram would be worse. no, cool (???????) doctor clyde is not really in a relationship with larissa weems and never has been and never will be. millicent's here because larissa… ah, but that one still evades her. she takes another sip of her second chance, an asymptote before absolution, and her eyes flick back towards larissa. her darling rissa, with the familiar flushing of her pink cheeks, the wideness of her tired and guarded eyes that always hold a little too much hope for millicent's understanding. she sees larissa now but imagines her years ago, still hopeful, because perhaps she hadn't yet known that life is full of people like hermione and millicent and… and mel. no malicious intentions, yet mel's existence says something pretty damning about larissa's, doesn't it?

❛ a zebra, ❜ millicent faintly says. her voice falters, caught in that yucky wuh-oh feeling. ❛ a giraffe. two of them. an iguana. an armadillo. but what i want to stuff most of all is a peruvian bear. ❜ she clears her throat, then returns a hand to larissa's shoulder. her touch is gentler this time. it's an apology; evidently, last night's sorry for this, sorry for that was not enough and never will be. who is she to eat and laugh with larissa's delightful sister when millicent abandoned larissa — larissa, who was speaking kindly behind her back? the same larissa who told the board — and there it is. the anger returns. it crashes and clashes into the guilt spectacularly and neither wins, or they both win, which is to say that millicent loses and larissa especially loses.

❛ thank you for asking. ❜ hermione weems dead on castle grounds, covered in bolts. but who'll shoot millicent? she doesn't know what to do with herself. her gaze lands on vikram now, whose soft eyes don't seem to reveal the sharpness millicent spots deep within. he's intelligent. and so is mel, and larissa may be one of the most cleverest people millicent's ever met. ❛ i was… so excited when larissa extended the invitation to me. i'd been asking to meet her family for some time now, and… ❜ she breathes loudly through her mouth. ❛ she's special to me, too. if i were to stuff her, i'd place her at the entrance of the museum. the finest among the collections, i think. ❜

    Millicent touching the gods is so breathtakingly presumptive that Larissa can only stare. It's not that she believes in their divinity--she never has--but neither has she handled the statuettes for more than the necessary moments to wrap and unwrap them when she moves the hoard, and from time to time, to relieve them of dust. They could be children's toys in Millicent's hands.

    Millicent returns to her. She laughs. She asks for a promise. Larissa is still stunned, staring down at her and thinking about her voice in her dream: Help me kill one. And, Would you give me the world if I asked for it? She has a vague sense that Millicent's hands aren't clasping her own; they're inside her chest, touching the black heart that she's woken from its long, cold sleep, pushing fingers into valves and chambers Larissa has never seen, leaving the prints of her nails dug into the sensitive meat.

    "I promise." What would it mean to give Millicent the world? To buy it for her? To kill for the privilege? She'll do what's necessary. The certainty of that night at the party is back: the feeling that this is the person she was meant to find, that this is someone who is hers, utterly; but perhaps that's wrong--perhaps the thought should flow the other way. That she is who Millicent was meant to find. That it's Larissa's who is Millicent's, utterly.

millicent returns victorious from the kiss, cheeks flushed in the throes of memory —streaming through the sky. larissa cannot blush for her, which is fine. millicent will blush enough for them both. but from the way larissa looks at her, millicent dreams up every unseen emotion crackling within. miraculous how something deceased brims with so much life. millicent retains those icy, dearly beloved hands that rest in her own and she squeezes them with the sweetness of what it felt like to press her lips against them.

light your incense.

❛ last week, ❜ she says, ❛ i told you i'd worship you eternally at the centre of my collections. ❜ because how couldn't she? ❛ i want the opportunity to do that. i want you. I WANT THE WORLD. i want… ❜ the same thing she'd been thinking about that night of the party. she looks from one gleaming eye to another. she'd kiss them, too, if she could. larissa's eyelids while she sleeps will have to do.

but her gaze is also locked, on clyde; she sidesteps misstep with due rapt attention, angling her head to listen, nodding, and nodding thoughtfully again.

then clyde pulls a soft laugh from her-- a fan.

"oh, is that so?" she leaks a sly smile. "well, that's very kind. and it certainly means something, coming from you. i have followed your work for some time now, and i appreciate your approach. there is something so... holistic about it, reduced of human bias. it has been a pleasure to hear you speak in person tonight, and very informative."