Below The Belt: Victoria
She never examined why she picked that jaw
Content note: this issue has uncut art and extended character material. The explicit art is at the very bottom, behind the wall, clearly marked. Skip whatever you need to skip.
Allo Allo!
Okay, so last week I told you there’s a line in chapter one where Victoria refuses to think about why she picked that jaw. That left eye and not that right one. She calls the question uncomfortable, then she calls it MEANINGLESS, which is so much worse, and then she goes upstairs and writes a letter to her son.
And then I said, and I quote, “next week I will.”
So here I am. Answering it. In public. Voluntarily.
One correction first, because I was sleepy and made a bit of an oopsie. I called Emile a three year old who’d been dead for one thousand and ninety five days. He wasn’t! He was never three. He was a potential never been reached. He was born still (which…is pretty close to personal for me) and the one thousand and ninety five days are counted from the day he didn’t come, and what she writes at the top of every letter is…
you would have been three by now.
(Ow)
She does the arithmetic every time she picks up the pen, and she gets it right every time, because nothing says grief like your own genius stabbing you in the tear duct and you refuse to let it win…
Again.
Two housekeeping things: Nothing here goes past chapter six, and where I’m hiding something you will know, and that includes hiding it from the people who pay me(because I’m fair like that).
The last section is explicit and it lives behind the subscriber wall, so if you’re not a member you simply won’t be shown it and nothing above it needs a warning.
What I can get past Meta
So did you see that
There’s a block here you’re not being shown!
Two generations I threw out and exactly why each one failed, plus the actual working file for the picture that did not give me nightmares. The prompt, the LoRA stack, the negative, the seed, the settings. Everything you’d need to go and make one yourself.
I give it away back here because I’m not precious about the method. $6.66/month or $69/year and it opens ;)
So…Why that jaw?
Right.
Her grief has a name and a shape before the Oratory, before the storm, before the entire…build a man situation.
The name is Emile who SHOULD have been born, alive, on a Tuesday in November. He was perfect, exactly how she knew he would be.
Just…much quieter then he should’ve been.
She held him for six hours and did not cry, and the nurses thought she was in shock. Victoria doesn’t do shock. She calculates; she examines, she studies, she searches for what went wrong then corrects it.
Just as she did at seven years old with her father’s pocket watch.
…This wasn’t a watch, a clock, a formula with a misplaced symbol in the wrong place.
This was not a problem to fix. It just didn’t work.
There was no error, no cause, nothing to fix, no one to be angry at.
What she lost was not a person she knew. What she was lost was potential, evidence.
She never fed him once, never got him wrong once, never had a single boring Tuesday with him. Somewhere in the third trimester she worked out that she would have been good at this.
That she could be a mother.
Then the demonstration got cancelled and the funding got withdrawn and she is left holding a hypothesis.
This is a woman who does not believe anything she cannot demonstrate. She has exactly one unfalsifiable belief about herself and that is the one.
Eighteen months later Henri died on a transit crossing nobody had inspected and now she lost the only person who believed that she could be warm.
Emile would’ve been proof. Henri was the WITNESS.
He was the only person alive who witnessed this precise, sharp, and formidable woman talk to an unborn child and cried at a broken music box in a market. He was the only one who knew that woman ever existed.
So she is left with no child, no experiment, no witness.
She tried to back to work after Emile. Three days of silence, of ‘shock’ and she told Henri “I need to go back to work.” He stood by her, he let her process, he let her work because he knew wife and knew that she needed to feel as outstanding as he knew she was. She was a fantastic, accomplished scientist, versed in Galvanic Biology, so getting back to work, getting back to her proven competence, began to help her heal.
Then Henri died.
And she had nothing left.
She went to grave robbing SECOND, as a last resort to getting SOMETHING back.
Okay. The jaw.
She’ll tell you she selected for tissue structure. Galvanic compatibility. Anatomical integrity. All three of those are in her notes and as an expert, all are reasonable.
She’s also full of shit.
She checked tissue structure, galvanic compatibility, anatomical integrity, and whether she could stand to look at it every day.
She was curating.
She has never once called it that. She has a doctorate, a basement, a corpse budget, and nobody left alive to say her name in a certain way.
And the hands are how you know.
She was more specific about the hands than about any other part. They came off a sculptor’s apprentice who died of a fever, clean, hands unmarked, and she got them ON PURPOSE.
In the letters she writes to Emile: you would have been an artist.
So he reaches for things with a delicate tenderness with no source. It’s the loveliest thing about him.
She bought those hands for her dead son.
He can’t know; he has no idea who Emile or Henri are. He only knows that she keeps looking at him and almost but never quite SEES him, and he eventually finds the word for it in one of Henri’s poetry books.
The word is palimpsest. Yes that was a new word for me too.
He is a surface to her. Underneath her handwriting is the text she’s actually trying to read. He does not tell her this for a very long time and when he does, it is not gentle.
Another block you’re not being shown.
A page out of the actual character file. All seven bodies he’s assembled from, what each one contributes, and what leaks through from each of them into a man who was technically ‘born yesterday’.
$6.66/month or $69/year.
Why Frankenstein? Was it because of Frankenstein 2025?
…Yes.
Fuck you.
…Just kidding! But seriously, go to hell.
Look, I had the idea of gender bending Victor into Victoria for a long time and the 2025 movie just pushed it to the top of mind.
Victor, in the movie, had an abusive father that informed how shitty of a dad Victor is to his creation before just up and abandoning him.
Victoria, colored by absolute grief and unexamined rage, does the opposite. She teaches him the alphabet in an afternoon and starts him on technical documentation. She does his sutures herself, and she keeps him below the smog line because above it the city would see him.
She doesn’t want to share the emotional price she paid for him. She doesn’t want anyone to see what she could’ve been. However, he also can’t see that either.
Victor abandoned his creature.
Victoria wants her creature for the wrong reasons and he has to live with that, contend with ghosts that his creator sees instead of the giant man she made.
Victor wanted to prove that he can be God.
Victoria just wanted what God denied her.
Neither look at the cost of what they made. Only the creature knows.
There’s a score, and this week broke my own rule
One track per chapter, and it lives on the chapters themselves now, so you press play at the top and read with it running underneath.
This week is chapter six with Track 06, City Below the Smog.
Thirty eight BPM, C minor, an industrial hiss that comes in early and never leaves, brass buried where you can hear. There is nothing above the mid-range in the entire mix cause nothing develops upward.
The smog line is a lid, and now it’s a lid you can hear.
Next week
Nobody Came Looking. A dark reverse harem, a narrator in a room somebody organised without her input but with her needs in mind. It should scare her and she knows it.
She just ignores it.
Away from grief, steampunk, and the ethics of necromancy. Still it’s own brand of romantic horror.
The door, since you got this far
Everything you just read is free and it stays free! I’d rather be read than paid, in that order, and it isn’t close.
What’s back there: Victoria and the rest of the novels chapter by chapter months before Kindle Unlimited gets them, the character files, the working prompt for every piece of art I make, and the art itself, the tasteful kind and the foul kind.
$6.66/month or $69/year. Patronage, with teeth 🐺
Victoria posts on Thursdays. Chapter one, The Cathedral of Grief, is free to anybody.
Love yas, lovelies!
The members version of this post keeps going past here. It’s the uncut art, and it’s the entire reason the cropped one at the top exists.