isolt marcello

I'm more alive than I've ever been

It was truly proving a fruitless errand, Isolt's attempt to explain to her husband how profoundly hopeless she had become in the wake of their loss. How sorrow, agony, and more than a small measure of ire had coalesced within her to form a conflagration that had burned away anything of value that may have remained inside of her. She was but a fleshy carapace acting only as a vessel for the ashes of what once had been. A pathetically insufficient monument to the aspirations that had all but promised themselves to her. To them.

But she could not have expected him to comprehend the extent of the anguish that she felt. After all, he had only held their daughter for the barest moment... Isolt had held her for nine months. Nine months' worth of a mother's hope, a woman's dreams for a future that had turned to sand and had disappeared quickly from tightly clenched hands. In a way, she was holding her still. Isolt had lost so much of herself that it was difficult to discern if there was truly anything left at all aside from flesh and fangs. There was hardly any way that he could have been made to understand; his strength was not hers.

And so she proffered up her final goodbye in the only fashion that seemed appropriate... if there was such a thing in a moment like this. But as she rises from her husband she is taken aback to feel the presence of his fingers pressing into the smooth pallor of her arms, forcing her back to her knees before him. The look of confusion and, perhaps, consternation that presses harsh lines into her otherwise angelic (albeit haggard) features slacken almost instantly as her cerulean eyes meet those of her husband. Her entire body feels as though sand fills its every cavity, as if she might be sent asea into a promisingly peaceful slumber.

The crimson-haired vampire is almost... peaceful in the way that her shoulders seem to wilt as though relieved of a loathsome heft. A calm encompasses her like the soothing arms of a lover, her resolve slackening greatly, her husband's words very nearly a lullaby echoing in the vastness of the void that expands inside of her. For a moment she is free from the shackles of remorse that have held her for so long that she has almost entirely forgotten what it is not to feel their lengths tugging at her.

Scenes of her pregnancy pass against the screen of her mind's eye- the moment that she had discovered that this impossibility had become her reality, the ultrasound where she and Damon had first heard the tenacious thrum of their daughter's heart, the moment that her water had broken... all of these memories suddenly become hazy. Soft, like an image projected upon rippling water. And then Lillian's face fills the mind of her mother, her infant features as perfect as ever they had been... but they too begin to soften about the edges, these memories that were so very dear, collapsing like the flesh of an overripe fruit. Realization dawns then, peeling the silky veil away from the truth of her husband's deceit to reveal a thing so raw, so intense, that it is almost petrifying.

Rage rears its head.

The clicking free of unsheathed fangs is lost, consumed by the sound of her hand as it collides solidly with Damon's cheek, breaking the lock of their eyes. But a second passes before Isolt clasps fiercely at her husband's shoulders to force him up and into the closed door at his back. Her fingers clench ruthlessly into the fabric of his shirt, the pinch of her own fangs upon the pillowy cushion of her lower lip hardly of any consequence to the seething mother. Crimson tears leave their glistening treads upon the smooth pallor of Isolt's cheeks as she allows her piercing gaze to meet that of the man opposite her. "How dare you," she hisses, her voice naught more than a choked whisper, her digits curling ever tighter into his shirt, the slight give against her fingertips betraying the surrender of a seam somewhere. "How could you even think about... erasing her? You were her father, you were supposed to love her... protect her, but instead you would rather we just forget about her?!" The words are issued in what is nearly a roar for all of its ferocity, though what comes next is almost lost entirely to the sobs that break free of the shattered mother. "Didn't you love her?"