(no subject)
Author: yours truly, ExMaverick aka Jess
Title: Ancient Wounds
Rating: PG
Summary: Prequel to my vampire fic Deepest Shadow. Ville recounts the events of his mortal life growing up in the poverty of 20th century Finland, wrought with grief, sex, romance, passion and abuse leading into his birth to darkness.
His lengthy tales are imparted to the sleepy mind of his young lover, but only in the seclusion of his own darkest thoughts does he begin to relive the greatest obsessions and deepest hurts rooted in his bygone and decadent time.
Warnings: sexual content
A/N: I have no beta, please excuse any mistakes herein
Pairing: Vam,Ville/Jonne, Ville/OC (in parts)
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5i, 5ii, 6, 7, 8, 9i, 9ii, 10i, 10ii, 10iii
11, 12i, 12ii, 13, 14i, 14ii, 14iii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20i, 20ii,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32i, 32ii, 32iii, 33,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41i, 41ii, 40iii
Deepest Shadows
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
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“We are bound only by three laws my love,” I began “never to walk in the sun, never to bare our own young and to take human life to continue our existence. Besides, these three things, the world is yours”
Your eyes were quick still and mute as you accepted this wisdom. I held your face in my hands the night your were made like a child and kisses your lips chastely. There was no end of praise that I could heap upon you. I saw things in your blood when you died for me that will haunt me forever. You had been cast out by your family as a child and only in death was the full picture revealed.
Candles. I saw a hazy alter decorated for Mass, the finest embroidered alter cloth and the thickest brass candlesticks. The image of the crucified Christ shining in the light, a colourless and thin carving from wood. The back of your still chubby, naked calves being stuck repeatedly in the dim light. The sound of you crying for your poor mother. Leviticus. Oh lord Leviticus, not this boy I thought, not to be punished this timeless and senseless sin! The vision had gone as swiftly as it had come.
“Ville,” you said finally, using my birth name for the first time in many, many years “Stay with me all of tonight, if you can. There’s so much freedom now, and I am frightened”
……
seemed my acclaim had stretched even to the corners of my unreadily pastoral homeland, because Emmanuel himself has ambushed me on one of my visits with a copy of my first work Flowers of Evil as we lay enveloped in his heavy bed linen.
“Didn’t you think I knew it was you?” He laughed, throwing the over-read publication by its broken spine clear off the bed “even in a place like this Ville your reputation as a writer precedes you. I had to have this sent down by a family friend in Helsinki, they won‘t stock your work here. You know what they‘re like, your deemed far too passionate”
“Oh really, pray tell me more?”
He pinned me back to the mattress and my body was alive for him against the freezing night.
“The preachers even held a meeting over whether the more heated verse would corrupt the women,” he continued, his yellow hair falling over us like a curtain “ such delicate irony, honestly”
I smiled and let my hands wander over the milky flesh of his shoulders, letting my fingertips slip to the small of his back where they clung contently through heavy breath and childish laughter.
For one reason or another my mind cast to Ovid, who’s work has so long ago fallen out of favour with the Roman empire for their allusion to patriotism and the desires of the flesh. I spoke his words with my hands buried in his hair lovingly-
“ What’s more these kisses were better than I’d taught her,
She seemed possessed of knowledge that was new.
They pleased too well-bad sign! Her tongue was in them…”
“And my tongue was kissing too?” Emmanuel purred, capturing my mouth.
He relit something inside me in that time, and from this impassioned reunion I penned my sonnets of adoration to create my latest work Winter Sings your Love. I remember how much it fed me, stronger than the blood ever could. The nights we lay against one another brought the carnal reality of our youth back into play, and in him I saw all that I had loved in my youth and in myself, that stubborn fearlessness I had needed so much when we were first lovers.
In the coming months my existence once again had a narrative, I would visit him almost every night I could and away from him would be spent scribbling furiously at my desk the pros of my paragon’s dedication. I wrote thousands of poems in his name in those months, those years. The works of Winter begat the epic poetry of Resurrection and Ninth Circle. I was mad with inspiration.
I made my peace with Emmanuel’s bride. She was young and blessedly kind, and though a word was never shared on the subject between us I was sure she knew about her husband and I. It was a quiet understanding, for you could see it in her tired youthful eyes and her wearily pregnant belly that she knew she had married too young. She held his heart in hands that would never withhold it from mine. To her I was wise and she adored my books which I would bring at her request in great numbers, something in her so reminding me of my darling Suvi who herself was now a great woman of business.
He put me in rapture, but by my heart I knew only that this bliss could not last forever. It was on one quiet night after visiting him that the voices from the manor caught the wind and spoke to me one last time, he shall grow old and perish, but where will you be in eternity when he breaths his last, Ville? Would you dare to watch him wither, or would you bind yourself to his grave for all time and let your broken heart keep you company into the dawn?
That was the reality of it. I was forever, he was not. The night I realised it was the night Mina gave birth. I remember seeing his age in his blue eyes evermore as he gazed stricken with joy at his children, born screaming into the world with all its promise and danger. He would live to see them grow, and then he would die. And I would remain to look into the faces of his descendants for all time, the blue of their eyes mocking me in resemblance those with which I had fallen so deeply in love perhaps hundreds of years
previous.
I lay at home that night in my bedrooms in a rapture. I sobbed and tore at my hair; I tore at my clothes as naturally as if it had been a newborn custom until parts of me were naked. I knocked over my desk and chairs and threw my work into the fire, cursing their worthlessness.