Ancient Wounds pt 42i/42ii
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, 42i
Deepest Shadows
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
--------------------------------------------------------------<3
The living were my world. They held what remained of my family, my loved ones and ever more distinctly my lover. They distracted me from the simple knowledge that I was the walking dead and brought death with me in my thirsting wake. All that lay beyond their safety and warmth was chaos and misery and struggle and strife, isolated in my own mind and without a companion and what I needed desperately to survive. I was lying to everyone wasn’t I? I was actively allowing them to believe that I was one of them, breathing, sleeping, eating and laughing like a living mortal man. But none of it was true, I had become something entirely different and there was no escaping that fact.
Finally one winter’s night in 1922 as I sat at my desk penning another ode to Emmanuel’s beauty, the reality of the situation washed over me like the filthy childhood waters of the Oulu river. I wasn’t ever going to age. I was in my thirty-third year of life and I looked barely out of my teenage years, I hadn’t changed! My face held no lines nor lost any of its fullness; my eyes had only grown brighter and my skin far more porcelain and supple. I was an eternal man-child, doomed to spend the rest of time herself in the body of a boy of twenty-three! I was too horrified to look at myself and immediately saw that all the mirrors in my home were ripped from the walls and shattered in the streets while I raved about my looks like a madman. My hectic fevered brain seemed to remember the books I’d been forced to read as young child about the portrait of a man that aged for him and I cackled to myself in the dim candlelight that perhaps I was the closest thing to Dorian Grey that should ever walk this earth!
The grief and pain of it made themselves known to me like thunder overhead, tightening my chest and pulling the strings of my heart with them. I couldn’t stay in the world of the living, for I did not belong there! What was I expected to do, live my life in the open with the mortals I adored who would one day wake in horror and disgust when they themselves were gray and I still trapped in stoic throws of timeless youth? Was I supposed to watch them recoil and scream for a priest to exorcise them of this demon sent by Him Beneath that had so long fooled them with his familiar guise? The sheer effort of such a good life seemed a fool’s trap and little more.
I knew the absurdity of Nature and Fate and Fortune can bear to know it .And perhaps my description of this, brief as it is, might bring absolution or consolation to others. The worst takes many a year to come, and longer still perhaps to pass.
The truth is, you cannot prepare another creature for this feeling, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this knowledge, I would wish upon no one in existence or time. I was alone, I went from room to room of my house banging on the walls and howling with my teeth clenched fangs bared like an animal and whirling. There was no solution, philosophers were fools and poets like ourselves sang and wrote lies!
It was simple, I was going to have to cut myself off from the living, and to do that, I was going to have to leave Finland herself. I pulled myself together late into the night, and as dawn broke over the icy Scandinavian city I had loved so well, I began to set my plan of exile. To truly honour those I cherished I must be true to my nature, and be dead to the waking world.
Thus the next few days were my preparation for such a horrible break. I ventured to a small arrangement of publishing offices where I was accustomed to meeting with my publishers, Jarno and newcomer Kai, who had taken over the position in Armas’s retirement. He was a rather weedy and nervously soft spoken young man, not unlike myself in my earlier years and I couldn’t help but feel partial guilt that he would never fulfill his ambition of publishing my work because I had no intention of penning a word.
“So what’s the subject of this particular volume of poetry?” Jarno smirked with warm sarcasm, as he was all too familiar with my obsessions with love, death and the luminous beauty of my sapphire-eyed blond mystery-muse.
“Love, of course” I smiled back forcedly, thinking it the most believable of off-the-cuff comments.
Jarno laughed lightly and mumbled something to Kai about how thankful he was the subject never failed to sell well, thrusting some papers into Kai’s unsteady hands and sending him out of his office to fetch one thing or another.
“I want to travel abroad,” I said suddenly, having to correct myself slightly “I think that differing scenery might be beneficial. Also there has been a demand for my books from a great many places, didn’t you mention?”
Jarno looked up surprised by my announcement, and seemed to consider my words for a few seconds before speaking.
“Yes, yes. Quite right. Our sister firms have wanted you for signings and talks on romanticism for a while now; I should have put the idea to you in the first place. Did you have somewhere in mind? London-”
Absolutely not, I thought. England was for you an Emmanuel remember? You’re leaving to be rid of all of this.
“How bourgeoisie Jarno!” I laughed trying desperately to shield my real motives “I may be in a great deal of money but I’m still a starving writer aren’t I? I want to be somewhere people will appreciate my work for what it is, not my name...”
This, though a rather arrogant comment in itself was actually true. Since the beginning of my career I had become quite disgustingly wealthy, and though I lived in lavish accommodation and style the majority of my money I fed back into the publishing industry in order to sell my work across Europe and further reaches of the world. First to our sister firm in England where I was received (vastly by the female population might I mention) marvelously well. I’d had hoped initially that it was for the merit of my work, that my perhaps my more intimate philosophies on love were shared mutually by others, but woefully a large portion of my sales were attributed to the controversy of my work’s lustful undertones. Jarno had laughed and called me the Baltic nation’s answer to Wilde, which made me squirm horribly and he soon learnt never to make such comparisons again.
I watched as Jarno thought quietly to himself, his pen rhythmically tapping against his forefinger as it rested on the light bleached wood of his desk. My mind races a thousand times over where can I go? Where won’t they find me? Where can I easily be lost?
“Where did you have in mind exactly-?”
“America” I blurted out suddenly without as much as second thought.
My publisher rocked back in his seat and cast and eye down to his documents as Kai once again appeared in the doorway, seemingly unaware.
“Well then,” he said “America it is”
I was going to America. Why? Well for one it was huge and the furthest possible distance I could imagine, but quite simply it was just the first place that popped into my thoughts. No one would know me there, and I could disappear from the mortal world completely in such an expansive, modern and busy place.
I later told Jarno that my work in progress was to be called All that I Had Come to Love and stipulated he arrange the purchase of a ticket to travel by sea, assuring him the long period travelling would do well for my creative mindset and focus. He arranged all of the essential paperwork as per requested over the coming weeks, which I would require for my three months abroad and meeting with the publishing house there.
The reality of the farewell was a bittersweet affair. The news of my departure I delivered to my brother Jesse and his family first. I sat with them one night in their parlor for a visit, a glass of red wine in hand that I would never drink from smiling down at my young namesake who was busy reading at my feet. I had so much quiet pride in this child as if he might be my own. The resemblance to me at his age, Jesse told me, was startling. It was true, we both imbued that strange angular beauty passed down from my mother, how I wished that she stilled lived to see him. Be glad she never saw you like this something spiteful said inside me.
I had said I was away to promote my work for a season and would return with tales of American life. Jesse and his wife took the news in their stride and asked only that I send books back for Ville the younger, to which I agreed. My home was to be used as they saw fit while I was away, no doubt for parties and the like my brother had joked (though I doubted not a word that he intended to do just that), and the necessary keys were handed over.
Saying my farewell to Emmanuel was an entirely more painful affair. But, unable to realize the gravity of my conduct I seemed at last content, convincing myself if only for a moment before entering the house that perhaps we would meet one another again in this life or the next. Tenderness was dominant in me as I was welcomed into the warmth of his home by the candlelight burning away the moons pallor at the doorway, the heat of it present in the apple’s of his wife’s cheeks where she lay in the comfort of an armchair with his two blonde daughters sleeping in her arms. Both of them were beautiful in their infancy, full of that newness of life that somehow struggles in such a harsh climate as Scandinavia, the testament to our people’s enduring soul. I could tell you their names and how I knew they would grow into their father’s beauty three-fold in womanhood, but I will not for their own sake. Best no one know these girls for anything but what they were, and leave them out of this macabre chapter in history. For or no reason I can grasp my mind thought of the tyrant Vuori in his own time, the warrior of the dark forest I had feared so much as a boy. I wondered what would become of this land when I was gone.
In the upstairs parlor I met my beloved the same as so many nights before, let myself give over to his hungry kisses in the firelight and words of devotion that seemed to mean so much more knowing we would be apart so very soon. I muttered between his biting teeth and embracing lips about my journey abroad and how long I would be away. Yes, I thought, yes let this be the way he hears it, let there be no torturous or awkward silence between us when he hears how you plan to leave him. Let him feel only this .
In his bed the sheets drowned both of in one another, the silk cold and eerie against the moist flesh of his body. I threaded my fingers into his gorgeous yellow hair as he kissed my throat, the nape of my neck, my nipples. I cried out as he prepared me with his warm fingertips for him, I began to weep when he was inside me. I was so happy. And after tonight, I would never hold him again. He licked away my tears, eyelashes against my shivering cheek. He pinned my hands above my head raked his nails along the underside of my white thighs. When he came he came for me, my name was on his mouth like a kiss and a lie. I smiled as we became entwined in each other, and thought of how tragic it was all this had happened. I wished that we had been born in the same body, so that I need never know the pain of his loss, the ache in my chest when we were apart.
“Do you love me?” I whispered coyly in his ear, once more that young boy in a field fearing rejection and still untainted by true heartbreak “Don’t mock me even if you think the answer is plain. I need to hear it from your own lips”
He was asleep. Live for me I thought, and the world will live itself