human frailty 1/5
Gwyaoi (the only place where this is archived is down) and because of the redux people want to read it so I'm going to post it again.
enjoy
Human Frailty
by Seraphim Grace
Word Count: 50,035
Warnings: Angst. Lemon, blood-play, character death, suicide, vampirism, gore, other. Gratuitous use of real historical figures.
Pairing: 1x2x1
Notes: AU, first person, deliberately shifts tenses. Duo POV, insert with Heero POV. This is set in a parallel time-line, using the detail that Heero was 15 in 1995 (when GW came out) this means he was born in 1980. This means I’ve worked him out so he’s the same age as me approx (he’d be 25 this year) so you can work out all the details of his life, but he’s 18 or 19 when he meets Duo.
Place: 3rd in the 50k category; artwork coming soon.
The water is cold about my skin; even the weight of your flesh against mine could not warm me now. It is too late for that. The night is no longer as velvety; the moonlight no longer feels like silk along my skin. The night cannot love me when I can no longer love myself. Instead I love you.
The echo of your words hangs heavy in the small bathroom. The tiles are stained with the traces of steam, of warmth, of light. There is a crust of scum from the soap on the dish. The fixtures are white with scale. I trace the outline of what you said, cursed with an eternal moment as I watch the full moon from the bath in which I lie.
It will be dawn soon and the window that now so effortlessly shows the moon will show the rising sun and this all will be in vain. It will be over, lost to the stains and the scum and the scale. Without you there is no reason for me to be, without you there are only the stains and the scum and the scale.
This ending is ignominious.
It is strangely fitting.
--
Your skin is golden and tactile in the lamplight. I can’t help but touch it, feeling the brush of the hairs of your arm bristle against my fingertips, the way your eyes lazily rise from the page you are reading, the warm smile before your eyes fall back to the words.
The cushions of the chair hold your heat as I run my hand over the nap of the woven fabric, feeling its slight coarseness against the pads of my fingertips. It is rough compared to your skin, it lacks the heat, the slight dampness because the night is warm; and your indulgent smile.
The chair is a rich dark green, the colour of a wine bottle. You are wearing a pale blue shirt that brings out the colour of your skin and the detail of the mole on your forearm. Your book is a paperback well beloved and dog-eared. More than anything I want to snatch it away from you, to throw the book across the room, and be the focus of your rapt attention.
I listen to the steady rhythm of your breath, the soft intake and exhalation as it stirs and coils against your lip, I can see the tip of your pink tongue as it peeks between pale thin lips in concentration, the furrow of the skin between the dark hair of your eyebrows as the author takes you to where I cannot follow. Your blue eyes skim and flicker as they read the words I cannot fathom. Sometimes, unaware of yourself, you mouth back the words you have read, tasting them, your pink tongue curling around them with the curiosity of a new lover, or an army invading a country it had never even heard the name of. The look on your face is that of Alexander first casting eyes on the subcontinent of India, a mixture of curiosity, wonderment and disgust. You know that I’m staring at you, taking in the details of the pores of your skin, the follicles that might become a beard if you give it a chance, the lines of your jaw, the curve of your lips, the shadows under your eyes. I read you as intently as you read the book in your hands.
You exhale deliberately to let me know your displeasure, a sound that is not quite a snort as you fold your long legs up underneath you. I can see the expressive striations of blue and violet and gold that surround the event horizon that is your pupil, the flush of dark hair at the open collar of your shirt, the silver chain against your dark skin, your Adam’s apple which bobs when you are excited and feels sensationally meaty against my teeth, the pulse of your throat. The way your chest rises and falls with your lungs in a beauty that you are never aware of.
I can’t help but smile at your displeasure, the slow tug of the side of my mouth until I give in and smile; my lips remain closed, though. It is my concession to those times when you stare at me, drinking me in as intently as I watch you.
You smile in response, your lips tugging open slightly to show a warmth inside and you lay down the book but say nothing. There is no anger in your features, no disgust, only love and fondness.
I cannot accept it.
The sprawl of the city outside our window is a blanket of fireflies, or a constellation of stars laid heavily against the hills.
I never hate myself more than when you smile at me, so open, so loving, so free. I hide so much of myself from you and you offer me everything, every hooded emotion, every breath that passes your lips.
I don’t lie, but I don’t need to create falsehoods when I lie to you.
The city is sprawled awkwardly like a fat man squatting around us. The lights are a fragmentary beauty, they show other warmths, other lives. In other rooms other lamps reveal similar scenes, of other lovers watching each other surreptitiously or as openly as I did. I can’t help that I watch you so intently. You fascinate me, you draw my eyes almost against my will.
The imprint of your head on the pillow is a warmth I know in the hollow of my armpit. “What are you thinking?” you ask me, your voice a rumble amidst the buzz of electric lights, amidst the silence of the night, and the sparkle of other lights - other rooms and other lives. Hundreds of thousands of people live in this city, but sometimes I believe, with the arrogance of humanity, that it is just you and me. Sometimes, with all my arrogance, I wish it was. Then I am disappointed again because that can never be. There will always be other people between us.
“How tired you look,” I answer calmly, surprised at the words that escape me, “how fascinated by a Russian trollop you can be, how the words of a man long dead hold your interest.”
“Men die,” you tell me with a slight smile on your lips, “words don’t.” You look away, your eyes looking to the floor, “Anna Karenina is immortal, despite her suicide.”
I decide to indulge you in this; the distant look of longing for a world that is not, nor never can be, your own. You crave a world of adventure, a world of danger, a world I try so hard to keep you safe from. When did the hunter, I wonder, become a pampered pet that strains at the cages that keep it safe? Soon you will shirk this cage I have made you, soon you will cast aside the wings that keep you safe. With the arrogance of mortality, I know this, I have always known this, but yet, selfishly I cling to this moment, pray for one more minute, one more hour, one more day, before you walk away. So I watch you closely, I learn and relearn every detail of you, every facet, I hoard your image over and over again, waiting against hope for you to leave me.
You will.
Your kind always do.
--
I understand the dark. I know it and it knows me. The dark does not change. It is immutable. Like I thought that I was. I know darkness. I understand darkness. But I know that the dark changes me. I need the dark, but it doesn’t need me. The dark simply is; it is I that change. The night is a sea I swim in whether I want to or not. More often than not, now, I do not see the wonders of my underwater world and simply wish to drown.
--
The college campus is dark and ominous at night. There are whispers amongst the heavy trees and drunken students lurch from lamp post to lamp post. The rural setting brings me comfort; I love the smell of the trees after the brief rain. I can hear the yowling of foxes and the laughter of drunkards. It smells clean and fresh, of fine and the sharp sting of a cigarette in the darkness.
People talk and laugh, the sober guiding the lost home to their dark tower blocks and loveless halls of residence. They go to sleep, to talk, to drink, and to fuck. Once it was churches I haunted, a shadow amongst the cold Latin chanting and the sweet smell of incense, then I moved from place to place, from college to college.
I like this place. I like the welcoming feel of it. The fact I can walk into any lecture and just listen and learn. I can’t understand the words on the screen but I can follow what they tell me about books I’ll never read, films I’ll never watch, politics I’ll never care about.
It has other advantages, I tell myself. It has you.
I caught sight of you sitting on the steps by the book shop. The college, unlike many of the others I have known, is perfectly self contained, everything you could need within easy walking distance. You were sitting there with friends, quiet amidst their chatter, picking away at the food in your hands with no real care what you ate. It was a mechanical process to you, something you did because your body needed to. You sat there as they smiled and laughed and gestured, and you listened, and you understood, but you, yourself, were silent.
You wore a light tee emblazoned with the legend “Welsh Rugby” and the flush on your throat told me that you were drunk in ways the stench of alcohol could never have. People smell of alcohol for so many reasons; there are only a few reasons that you flush. I learned that later. So stoic, so beautiful, with your wide sharp cheekbones and the dark lashes that frame your brilliant blue eyes. Your hair was a tussle of unruly dark strands swept back by an impatient hand, as if it needed to be cut, as if it had reached that length of in between where it is unmanageable. Not long enough to restrain and not short enough to just behave on its own.
Of course it is not nearly the length of mine. I watched as you felt the weight of my gaze upon you and, emboldened by alcohol, you smiled at me. I changed my mind about you then: I looked at the barely restrained violence of your thighs, the power in your shoulders, the black slashes of your eyelashes, and I decided in that minute that I wanted nothing more than to run my fingers over the ripples of your abdomen, to scrape my teeth over the curve of your hip. It made the decision easy. I didn’t return your salute. I turned and walked away.
You were not for the likes of me.
--
It didn’t stop me wanting you. I could have died for you, for the rustle of your hair against my breath and the short innocent smile that you offered me. I have seen many things, I have performed miracles, and I have stood at the crossroads at midnight to dance with the devil. Yet your smile both fascinated and horrified me. If you knew me, I wondered, if you knew what I was, would you still smile at me that way?
--
The campus, which once felt so small and intimate, was suddenly a self enclosed universe, with its own sun and its own moon. Everything changed, and you did it with a smile. The last person changed it with a kiss. I hungered for you, your imagined smell drove me half mad around corners when I thought I smelt it. My mouth watered at the mere thought of you. Yet I did not search you out; if I saw a similar mop of dark hair I turned and walked the other way. More than once I left because I thought that I had heard your voice. You drove me to distraction, and then you were unaware of my existence.
When I heard women talk I believed they talked of you. I would feel the coarseness of your hair between my fingers, the taste of coffee in your saliva, the heat of your breath on my face. The very thought of you made me hard and hungry. When I fed that hunger I wanted to feed from you. When I slept I dreamt of you.
You drove me insane, you fascinated me, and I didn’t even know your name.
I should have left the campus. I should have relocated. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, but nor could I leave you behind.
--
Nevermore is a joke that has certainly gotten old over the years. It has been a hotel, a club, a restaurant, and an opium den. It has moved many times through many cities, but it has never changed hands or name. Officially it is my home. It is a dark space of black lights and matte steel, of heavy thudding bass lines and pressed bodies. There are booths and heavy dark wood stools. There are lights behind the bar; they illuminate the liquor and the glasses. Lit from behind the grenadine looks like blood. The bartenders come and go, but Dorothy always remains.
She looks luscious in black velvet; a sweetheart neck reveals an expansive décolletage. Most men see Dorothy and see her blonde hair and her heaving bosom. They see what she wants them to see. She is everything to me: my mother; my sister; my lover; my friend; my enemy; my absolution and my damnation. What I am Dorothy made me. The years give us a strange closeness. Even my name is a variant of hers. She is wise and terrible and beautiful. She fascinates and terrifies me in equal measure.
I love her as much as I hate her.
Time and again, however, I am drawn to her.
--
There are no mirrors in Nevermore. It is something that everyone notices eventually.
She has threaded a black ribbon through her hair. It is a darker blonde than most favour and her skin has paled to the colour of cream; her eyes are a murderous aquamarine. Her lips still press together and purse without her realising. It is a sign of her amusement. People underestimate Dorothy because she is beautiful, but she is as dangerous as she is lovely. She sways to the drumbeat, as sinuous as a snake, and as deadly as a viper. Her heels are tied up her calves with the same ribbons she has in her hair and around her forearms. A diamond the size of my thumbnail hangs from each ear. When she sees me she smiles, her perfect reptile smile.
We are drawn to each other, Dorothy and I.
She crosses the floor through the dancing throng as if they were a figment of her imagination. She calls me by a name I gave up, a name that ties me to her, though years have passed since I have seen her last. She pours us drinks from a bottle behind the bar; she holds it out for me. The glass is warm in my hand. Dorothy is the perfect hostess as she leads us to her office. The outer wall is black glass, deliberately scratched matte. It means she can see out but there is no reflection and they cannot see in.
She has decorated her office to look like the inside of a Chinese brothel. There are screens all over, some lacquered with phoenixes and dragons, some with elaborate fretwork. Chinese robes hang from the walls. She burns incense to cover up the underlying smell. It is very different from what I expected. The last time I was in here it was a Parisian salon. The portrait, however, of the three of us, remains pride of place over her desk, protected and priceless. It was out of place in the Parisian salon, it is out of place in the Chinese brothel.
She peels off the dress, pulling a robe about her shoulders; the ribbons, heels and diamonds she leaves, though. There was a time that she only wore her diamonds, but she has mostly grown out of it. If she was hunting then she might have done that. Nevertheless she crosses her legs with a passive slowness, a beautiful gesture designed to drive men wild.
It is what we do, Dorothy and I, get underestimated and drive men wild. We take what we want regardless of the cost. It’s what we were trained for.
She asks me why I have come to her.
I tell her that I simply did not want to be alone. She offers me her reptile smile. She calls me her srdechni and I stay with her, not because I have no other place to go, but because I don’t want to be alone. I want to drink in the familiar smell of her, incense and the lemony herby perfume she has worn for years. I want to lie with my head in the curve of her neck and her legs entwined with mine and the way her fingers twine though my braid.
She has only done this once to me: she appeared at my door, her hood up and her eyeliner smudged. We turn to each other in the dark times. Yet I turn to her far more often than she to me. Only once did we ever turn to him.
We are a fraction of what once there was, all that remains, a happily shattered family, drawn again and again by mutual loneliness. I suppose the technical word for what we are is a kiss but you will never hear us call ourselves that. We are a family, Dorothy, Treize and I - a strange family, driven apart as often as we are together, but a family nonetheless.
Dorothy asks no questions, she knows instinctively that I won’t answer them. I never have but she has never asked. Dorothy and I are the same, embittered and beautiful.
I sleep that night in her silk draped bed, clinging to her as if she answers all the problems I might ever run across. I lie there for hours, just breathing in the familiar smell of her, lemons, verbena, russet roses, incense and underneath it, the smell of something else: the smell of her.
--
Sometimes I wish I was more like you, comfortable in myself: I laugh, I joke, I watch you with barely restrained patience but it is a mask I wear, for you, for my friends, never for my family. You ask me to introduce you to my family, such as they are. The concept of you meeting Dorothy gives me chills and cold sweats. Not because I am afraid that she won’t like you, because she will, but because of what will come later: she’ll sit on your small couch when you leave the room, she will light a cigarette that she uses to mask the smell of her breath and then she’ll ask me why I always do this to myself. Why I still harbour pretensions for your kind “he’s a catch, Duo, if you were like him, but you’re not, we’re not.”
She will pull her hair back behind her ear, her face illuminated by the slow pulls on her cigarette. She will tell me to get out before I get hurt again. In her callous way she means me no harm, she wants what is best for me, but she’ll do it in the cruellest way. She’ll remind me of what I am, of what you are, of how different we are by our intrinsic natures. She’ll tell me to take what I want from you, and nothing more. To walk away while I still can.
I have lost before; I am weak despite the jokes and the obvious physical strength. You are beautiful, vibrant and vital. You fascinate and entrance me, but my imaginary Dorothy is right, you’ll be the death of me.
Yet still I am afraid to do what I should and walk away from you.
You will kill me, and I will do my best to help you.
--
Dark thoughts entrance and paralyse me. I am old, given to deep depressions and inane rages. I lie in this bath with no future and too much past. I am old, and you are what Treize calls a mayfly. You wake, live for a single day and then die. He asked me once, when we were deep in our cups, how you could bear to go on with such short lives, knowing that no sooner had you started something than you died.
I asked how we could bear to go on when we didn’t.
Death makes life valuable, Treize told me that. Our lives are long and tedious, and totally without worth. In all my years I have done nothing, I have written no books, I have composed no symphonies, built no monuments. My legacy, such as it is, I leave with Treize and Dorothy. I stand to the front and left of Dorothy’s portrait, and as a statue among many such in Treize’s pleasure garden. That is how our kind remembers: with the money that we have no lack of, we commission our likenesses for those we leave behind.
I have asked Treize to prepare something for you.
The miniature I have of the three of us may be priceless - it should be in a museum - but I would give you something just for you, not my family memento of me and my family whom you will never meet. Nicholas, the artist, asked if all such monsters were as beautiful or as heartless as we.
Treize laughed and laughed. “But, Nicky,” he had said in his perfect way, “we’re not heartless at all, that‘s the rub.”
It’s the great irony of us, that we are not heartless.
Loving you is proof enough of that.
It is not you I am angry at, nor is it Dorothy who made me what I am, or Treize who taught me to exploit it. Not you who loved me, Dorothy who treasured me or Treize who chose me.
I curse the heart that the years didn’t kill in me, the heart that cannot help but, by its very nature, betray me.
This night is longer than I wish it to be - why is it my time vanishes with you, but lingers without you?
--
You ask me about myself, sitting on the bench at night, your ankles crossed out in front of you, stretched out in a lush line. You are wearing cheap white trainers, and your jeans have seen better days. Your hair is windswept in the cool October wind. The promenade you have chosen for us to meet is lit by a string of lights and a passing boat blares its horn at the city. “It looks like a giant floating birthday cake,” I mutter under my breath at the sight of it.
You fix me in place with those impossible blue eyes, eyes the exact colour of the waters of Biscay after a storm, eyes in which I could all too easily drown. “Tell me about yourself,” you say. It is a command, your voice a deep rumble in your chest. “You are a mystery to me,” you say, “and I don’t like mysteries.”
“You like me,” I answer tartly.
Your smile is predatory and wicked. “I’d like you even more if I knew more of you than your name.”
For an instant I consider telling you everything: of telling you about what I remember of the passage of years; of what happened all those years ago in the Russian court where I gave up my name; in England where Dorothy, Treize and I were a scandal about town; in the small church in Ireland were I lost my faith; about Hilde who I thought I loved until I met you. I remember the aftermath of what happened the last time I spilled my terrible secret, of the bloodshed and the heartbreak that inevitably follows such a declaration.
I just smile at you and begin to tell you a story that is at once completely true and the biggest lie I have ever told.
I’m from America, I say - having spent the last century there it is true enough - I have a brother and a sister, I say, we are a family of sorts. My sister owns a club in London and my brother lives in Moscow where he works for the government. I’m the baby, I tell you, just drifting till I find my niche.
You ask about my name, unusual as it is. In this I can tell the truth.
I say how when I was very young that Dorothy and I were inseparable and that our brother started to call me “Dorothy Duo”, as we were living in Italy at the time; eventually it just got shortened to Duo which I liked better than my given name anyway.
Your smile intrigues me. “There you go, Duo,” you say. “You told me two things about yourself even if you didn’t mean to. You told me your sister is called Dorothy and that you lived in Italy.” Your smile is vulpine now, but is mischievous rather than dangerous. “It’s not so hard,” you continue, “to tell me everything. Tell] me about your parents,” you say.
Again I tell you the truth. “They died a long time ago -“ my voice is blunt, “- I don’t remember them.
You apologise with your hands on my face, they are chilled, and your lips are like slices of fresh peach. Yet your kiss is warm and I can taste salt in your saliva and garlic on your breath, a faint half remembered tang. I lose myself in the feel of the soft short hairs on the back of your neck, the heat of your lips and the erratic beat of your heart, glad of the awkward silence to deflect the questions that I can’t answer.
A passing elderly couple comments sweetly on young love, fooled by my slight frame and long hair into believing me a girl. I take the word and roll it on my tongue against yours, into your mouth, your fingertips and your breath. I mingle the taste of it against the taste of you and find it pleasing. Yes, I think to myself, as I press myself tighter against you on a bench at the bay, under the lights and the chill October sky, the word is love.
--
I spoke to Dorothy yesterday, we lamented that out kind can only use the most basic aspects of the high tech cells that Treize insists we carry. We met for coffee in an overpriced bar that she insists on still calling a salon. What is the point, she asked me, of giving us camera phones that can’t record our images; that can’t relay our voices. We could manage, she told me with a laugh, and with one of those old cells that we used to laugh at because all we do is text.
When you asked me for my number I almost went cold stammering out that I’d be more than happy to text but I really wasn’t good on the phone. You just laughed and said, “Who is, these days?”
It wasn’t the reason Dorothy and I met, it was just a topic of conversation.
Although the date seems insignificant to your calendar our kind is never alone for it. I suppose even Treize found his comfort among the gathering of the Old Ones. Dorothy and I met for coffee and shared a banal conversation that never touched on what really bothered us, and held hands on the table.
Part of me wondered what would happen if your mortal curiosity had led you to follow me, but I quashed it down: I had told you the truth, that I was going into the city to meet my sister.
Dorothy and I might be as different as chalk and cheese but she is my sister and under the waves of guilt that I felt for surviving when so many of us fell, for the mourning for the brothers and sisters that I lost in the Day of Fire I came to treasure her. I always loved her, even when I despised her. I imagined how it would look, meeting a beautiful woman and holding hands. I braced myself to tell you.
You trusted me however and did not follow.
So Dorothy and I sat in an Italian coffee shop talking in medieval Italian and recounting the simple banalities of our lives. We did not shares the amusing stories of what had happened since we last spoke, or even the fond ones. We talked of television programs, and people on the tube.
The Day of Fire is the closest thing our kind has to a ritual, and that is all. We met to share an ageless grief and talk of nothing, pretending for one night, to be mortal.
--
We are entertaining some of your college buddies, who, despite the years of our affair, still do not know how to take me. Matthew maintains, in his boorish “rugger” way, that I am just your wealthy friend. Relena, who recognises me as a rival, is too busy with her legal practise to make more than a passing bid for your affections. She reminds me of someone I used to know. Simon you describe as happily married; his wife is a limpet of a person with dead eyes. Sylvia shines in the way that only women who know their own worth do, and Wufei baffles me. The two of you are so different that it amazes me that you are friends at all. He calls you Yuy and me Maxwell, expecting in return to be called Chang, and takes deep breaths at Matthew’s cheap homophobic jokes.
I beg off the food explaining that as the chef that I ate more than my fill sampling each dish, but drink heavily of the wine. I am like a shuttlecock this evening, tossed between the inane and ancient jibes of the homophobic Matthew, who everyone else ignores though Sylvia suggests is over-compensating, and Relena’s drunken passes at you.
The longer the night goes on the drunker and angrier I get. You told me to invite Dorothy and Treize, and I amuse myself by imagining them here, Dorothy picking at the chicken whilst baiting Simon and his lacklustre wife to amuse herself as Treize holds court at the other end of the table with a few perfectly placed barbs. If that did not work then Dorothy would say, “What is the point, Srdechni, of inviting us to feed and then serving chicken. I understand that this one amuses you, but the rest are free.” Then we would feast as we once did, before the Day of Fire, we would feed over many nights, we would bewitch them with promises and pleasures they could never otherwise know and we would glut our fill.
The more wine I drink the more it appeals to me to just reach across the table and rip Matthew’s head from his shoulders whilst Relena screams and screams. Simon’s bland wife would faint and Simon would vomit, Wufei and Sylvia would ask simply why I didn’t do that sooner.
Your reaction I do not ponder at all.
“What’s your opinion, Duo?” you ask snapping me out of my fantasy of violence. “About the chateaux in France, do you think that they’re haunted?”
I belatedly recall that Relena had been talking about the jite in which she had holidayed and the strange noises she had heard. The villagers had told her that the old house was haunted. It sounded to me more like they were laughing at her expense when the house had mice.
I empty my cup before I answer.
“My older brother,” I say, “works in government and he told me a story about a certain chateau in the Ardennes region of France that he had had off an old Russian soldier, who had heard it off a French resistance officer that swore it was true.
“This Chateau was notorious in the area as being the home of an ancient demon that called itself “Gebieter”, and once a year it would descend into the village and feast on the youth of maidens, and the village and Gebieter profited from the arrangement.”
Relena and the banal wife are listening with bated breath, the rest with amusement, Matthew with barely concealed disdain. “Over the centuries Gebieter got older and changed the terms of his agreement. He asked only that his chateau be maintained and for a single night a willing youth be sent to him. The next morning the youth would return, apparently unharmed, and the blessing of Gebieter made the town prosperous and its people healthy.”
I fill my cup and empty it before continuing. “By the Second World War even the villagers didn’t really believe in the legends of Gebieter but nonetheless they kept the agreement because they saw no harm in it.”
Wufei’s expression suggests to me that he has heard this story before.
“When the Nazis invaded the area they heard the legends of the demon and decided to use it to their advantage. They seized the chateau to use as a communications base and from Paris they hired an actor to pretend to be the demon.
“To further the ruse they took young girls from the village and slit their throats before exsanguinating them.” I drink more of the rather fine wine, emboldened by it. “Communications from the chateau stopped suddenly one night. The actor was dragged into the village by a mob, where they put a stake through his heart and chopped off his head. They cut off his arms and his legs and burned them, burying the ashes separately. His skull and his heart were sent to the Vatican, as was common for demon kills, and his torso hung for the birds to peck at.”
I look at the horrified faces around the table. “They never found the soldiers, so yes, Relena, I suppose it’s possible that your jite was haunted.”
Wufei looks at me for a moment before he bursts out laughing. Following his lead Matthew guffaws, “You really had us going there, Duo, great story.”
I return to the solace of my wine cup. The story is entirely true. I heard it first from Treize and then from Gebieter himself, who complained that he never did like the taste of Germans, that they were too bland for his palette, but for them he had made an exception. He also told the villagers how to kill the actor so no one else would get the bright idea of impersonating him.
Of all the old ones I have met, and to many I am still only a youngling, Gebieter scares me most.
Across the table you look at me strangely, as if wondering either why I know such a tale or why I would tell it.
I turn away from your eyes and back to the cup of wine, as if daring you to say “you’ve had enough” or to tell Relena finally that you’re not interested, or to tell Matthew that I am your lover, that you enjoy having sex with me, that you like giving head, that you enjoy rimming and that he should either accept that or get his repressed arse back to whichever part of Wales he comes from.
You never will, not because I embarrass you, but because it would be déclassé.
I know you love me; I know Matthew’s opinion doesn’t matter to me; I know you won’t leave me for Relena, but knowing and accepting are two different things.
--
We argue that night, not for the first time. I seriously doubt that it will be the last. “You never tell me anything about yourself,” you shout, your face red and your veins throbbing. The bed we stand either side of is like a mountain between us. “You never stay the whole night. You won’t move in with me and we’ve been together two years. I know nothing more of you than I did when we first met.”
I am drunk and it makes my tongue slack. “If you knew anything of me then you would not wonder why I won’t stay, why I won’t move in with you.” My fists are balled at my sides and my eyes stare at the chequered pattern of the bedspread. Do you know how much I hate arguing with you? “It’s not like you make an effort to tell anyone that we’re lovers.”
“You won’t introduce me to your sister,” you counter, “I have to hear from Wufei that she only lives a stone’s throw away. Aren’t you worried that she’ll disapprove of me?”
“Dorothy would chew you up and spit you out,” I yell, “and Treize would take you from me to remind me that no one will ever love me like he does.” It is the absolute truth and it horrifies you. “I don’t want to share you. I can’t stay the night.” It is time for a little truth. “I’m UVA intolerant.” It is a legitimate medical condition that we have long since exploited for our own purposes. How we laughed when we first heard of it. “Your curtains aren’t thick enough, I would blister and burn.”
Your mouth makes a wordless oh of realisation, your anger fading like mist. “Why didn’t you tell me?” You circle the bed in a few confident steps and put your arms around me, laying your head on my shoulder.
“What?” I ask, still drunk, still angry, but with my own inadequacy now, “That I’m a freak?”
“No,” you say, “that such a simple change to my curtains would mean that you would stay.” You look up at me, and I see the striations of your eyes, blue and violet and gold. “And I thought you were just a night owl.” Your fingers creep up to the back of my neck and pull my head down so it’s almost level with yours though we stand of a height. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Duo,” you say, “I love you, I’ll understand.” And at that my heart shatters into a million pieces because there are so many things I can’t tell you.
--
Prolonged exposure to direct sunlight does not kill us - we are notoriously hard to kill, after all - but it does hurt us. The pain is elegant, though, and cleansing; it burns away the impurities and reminds us of what is important.
Most of what you know about us is untrue.
The only truths among the lies are this: we are long lived and immune to disease; and we must feed, though not to the extent that you expect. We take a pint, or thereabouts, and then we are glutted, much as if you had managed a pint of milk in one sitting.
We can eat, we can drink, and we can love and therein lies the tragedy. We are all too human to survive such long lives. It is easier, I think, to face mortality when it brings such rewards and so little loss.
--
You hold me firm in the perfectly strong circle of your arms, pressing me against the strength of your pectoral and abdominal muscles. I feel your hips against mine. This is the closest I can get to Heaven. I pull away, almost against my own will. “Not here,” I say, “I can’t stay the night here, but you can stay the night with me.”
I like the smile that lazily and sexily sprawls across your face, the way your fingers twine through mine. You rub your hips against mine in a manner that you’re never really aware of, a way that drives me mad with want. “Just tell me it’s not far,” you whisper in my ear, “I really want to fuck you.” The obscenity is punctuated with a hot wet lick that makes me groan.
“It’s not far at all,” I tell you, “thank god.”
“Or we can fuck here, and then go,” you suggest, “You look so very fucking sexy when you scare the shit out of Matthew.” You only cuss when we’re like this, face to face, chest to chest, and cock to cock. You have slipped your thigh between mine to rub it against my erection. It’s all I can do to stand. “Chang told him that your brother was Russian Mafia and that’s why you were only seen at night, and that if he continued to continued to annoy you, that you would just kill him outright.” You laugh, scraping your teeth over my throat, over my jugular. Your laughter is a hot wet exhalation on my skin. More than anything I want to tumble you into the bed and spread myself open to your hands and mouth and cock.
No, I pull away with the very last of my reserve, that last iota that is not driven mad by wanting you. “Not here,” I stammer, “I can’t stay here, I really want to, but not here, I want you to fuck me in my own bed, to wake up tomorrow afternoon with you. Or we can fuck here and now and I’ll leave again.”
Your kiss lingers as you suck my lip into your mouth. “Just let me get my coat.”
--
My apartment is just a short taxi ride away. At this time of night I tend to get the same driver, an old Irish woman who wears a wool hat regardless of the weather, and chatters on about nothing. She opens the door for you. “Hello, Mr Maxwell, is this your young man? Why he’s as handsome as you said. I don’t think Mr Maxwell told you about old Nan, did he, probably a hundred better things to talk about with a man as handsome as you.” She sits down and starts to drive - she knows the way, I don’t have to tell her. “Why if I was only forty years younger, Mr Maxwell, I’d have to aim my cap at him.” I laugh, I only use this taxi firm and I know Nan well. She’s a harmless old woman and her chatter is calming. “Now, I wonder what you said, Mr Maxwell, that he finally decided to go uptown to see that fancy flat of yours.”
“I asked him, Nan,” I tell her, “he’s never been invited.”
“I bet he hasn’t seen that pretty as a picture sister of yours,” she continues, “she was in my cab the other day, dispatch said she asked for me, special like. Not given to talking like you are, Mr Maxwell, but she said that you told her about old Nan, who took you home every night. I asked her if she was married and she said she wasn’t, she didn’t strike me as the sort to be a good wife, mind you, but she didn’t like me calling her Miss Maxwell.”
“It’s not her name,” I tell Nan to Heero’s horror: he thinks I would never tell him this, but these details he has never asked me and I wouldn’t think to volunteer. “It’s Catalonia,” I tell her. “She was married, but he left her.”
“What kind of man would leave a woman as pretty as that, and she moves like a Lady, why her house is even nicer than yours, Mr Maxwell, but I suspect that you know all about this, Mr… She leaves it open for you to answer.
“Yuy,” you tell her.
“That’s an unusual name, where’s it from?” And as simple as that the topic is changed as if we never mentioned Dorothy at all.
--
You pause for a moment as I open the door. I am expecting an explosion, some hint of displeasure about what Nan has, through solid months of extrapolation, managed to wheedle out of me. Instead you look around amazed as the simple, yet understated, luxury that Treize and Dorothy arranged for me. Every year or so I will be invited to Nevermore or Koblensk and my flat will be redecorated, with or without my consent. This year the theme is suede. There are heavy suede curtains over all the windows and doors, and velvet curtains on the bed. It is an odd mix of old Europe and New York. I don’t really care for it.
“Welcome to Chez Maxwell,” I say with a smile, hoping that it covers my nervousness. I’m not supposed to invite your kind here, it is one of the few rules that everyone else ignores and I have kept slavishly. I would be summoned back to Treize if he discovered it. “Would you like the grand tour?” I am almost shaking.
“No,” you answer, “I knew that you were independently wealthy but…” [You] are gaping. I didn’t expect that. “Now where is that bed of yours, you promised me that you would sleep with me and I fully intend to hold you to it.” More than anything I want to kiss you; instead I just stand there and let you guide me to the bed.
--
Not that I suppose that it really matters but Dorothy’s husband was called Alejandro and she honestly loved him. At the time someone made the tasteless joke that she loved him as much as she was capable of love, but that was unfair. She loved him utterly and completely, and I think she still does. She wears a locket with a miniature almost exactly like mine, and on the other side she still wears his picture.
It started like many a love affair. At the time Dorothy and I really were younglings, and Treize still travelled the world with us. At the time we were living in Granada under the shadow of the mighty Alhambra, which had recently been liberated from the Moors. The entire court of both Castile and Aragon were in residence as they planned what to do with Italy as France made moves towards Venice, unwilling to see Naples in Hapsburg hands.
She met him when she was working for the queen on Treize’s insistence. I flitted about like a social butterfly. Alejandro was important enough that he travelled with the court, but not enough to have any sway. He was tall and golden, with really good skin and thick blue-black hair. He was unremarkably handsome except for a chipped front tooth that gave an ordinary face a rather appealing personality. He was never in a position to warrant Treize’s curiosity but it was clear that he was smitten with Dorothy from the start.
He used to appear on the both of us from nooks and crannies about the palace to serenade her or to give her small gifts. It took many months for her even to stop to listen to him. He called her his golden angel and spent hours starting at her across the court, and everyone knew of his infatuation. In fact, the queen herself told Dorothy to whet her appetite on such a handsome man.
Treize did not care. He warned her, however, that she was not like him and that she must not, at any cost or for any reason, reveal her secret to him. In fact he said that it would stop the rooms if she was coerced to his desire, but he would not force her. We were his courtesans but never his whores.
She gave in to his desires and something changed in her: although her normal manner is one of amused disdain she was absorbed with him. For months her conversation was devoted utterly and totally to Alejandro. She spoke to the other members of our family and me, and then she beseeched Treize to let them marry.
He refused.
I was called into his presence with her and he explained in length why, because Treize could be manipulative but he was never cruel with us. He sat before us, very much a king before his vassals. When he spoke to us it was with his whole attention, something he still does for me and Dorothy that he never did for the others. When we had done well we were crowded unto his lap like beloved children, the youngest of his family by some margin, and wont to make mistakes.
He told Dorothy that she had to remember that Alejandro was not like us, that unlike us he would grow old and die, and that any love she had for him would be tempered by this fact. She would have to go into exile with him throughout his life, so she would be alone at the end, and inevitably she would lose him.
He actually sounded sorry to tell us that.
She asked if he could make Alejandro one of us.
I think that was the worst thing she could have asked him.
Treize turned his face away before he answered her. “It is a possibility,” he said. “However, Dorothy, both you and Mishka-“ he always called me Mishka and still does, “-were brought into our family as children. Dorothy, you were seven, Mishka you were only five. You had years to grow into the knowledge of what we were, accepting it with the innocence of children. Alejandro does not have that luxury. If you tell him then you will become bound by our laws: if he can keep the secret for a year and a day then we will bring him into the family and he will be one of us, forever. But bear this in mind, my little one, before you make your decision.”
Dorothy wept for days on end, being asked to choose between the man she loved and her family.
Then she and Alejandro vanished. Treize like a doting parent took me into his bed because I had shared a bed with Dorothy. He comforted me when I cried but it wasn’t the same.
Then on St Stephen’s she came back without Alejandro. She came to me just before the dawn and that night begged Treize for forgiveness. He asked if it was done. She nodded.
They had run south to Seville where they had married in secret. On their wedding night Dorothy told him her secret, confident that he could keep it. He didn’t believe her, she said, so she proved it.
He ran into the streets shouting demon and the church came to investigate. To get away she had to kill them all, even Alejandro. She was distraught - to this day I don’t think she really got over him. She still wears his miniature and on his birthday and St Stephen’s she spends the night with Treize.
He forgave her utterly and totally and still treats us like his adored children. Even now, years later, he still pulls us unto his lap to lavish us with attention. When we are with him we sleep in his bed, secure in his scent of briar roses.
He forgave her. We all forgave her. But she never did forgive herself.
She never speaks of him, or the time that she spent alone with him, other than it ended in his death.
She never loved again, at least not with the same passion. After the Day of Fire, when it became necessary to choose a name, she picked Catalonia in what was obviously his memory. She still wears his wedding ring amongst all her other jewellery.
But if it changed her, I never saw it.
--
Your family you have not kept secret from me. I know about the accident that stole your parents from you and left its mark under your heart.
I have even met your uncle, whom you describe as a dusty old scholar. He shakes my hand nervously, as if he’s worried how to take to his nephew’s male lover. “So,” he says, shifting his thick glasses so that they cover even more oh his bushy grey eyebrows. His grey hair is slicked back into a stubby ponytail. “Heero tells me a linguist,” he says, “is that so?” From there we fall into a familiar conversation about medieval languages and the beauty lost by their modern counterparts.
You sit silent and watch me as I grow more and more animated, waving my hands as I enthuse about infinitives and the variants that Dante used, how we shouldn’t use them as a model for Florentine linguistics. I smile at you warmly before I turn back to your uncle.
At the back of my head I make the decision that Treize would like your uncle Jay; even as I wittily, in my opinion, maintain the conversation, I can see the two of them in my mind’s eye.
He asks me why I know so many languages, yet makes no obvious reference to my lack in English, something that astounds you. I can read and write many languages, but although I speak it competently I can’t read English.
I tell him that my brother is in government so my sister and I spent years travelling with him.
He smiles before he turns back to you. “You’ve caught a good one here, boy, don’t you let him go.”
“Believe me, Sir,” you answer, “I have no intention of.”
For a moment I bask in the warmth of your possessiveness. “Of course,” your uncle continues, “I may have to borrow him; how’s your Ottoman age Polish?” I laugh and answer him in kind.
“Yes, boy,” he laughs, “if you ever let him go, call me, I’ll have to steal him away myself.”
--
The college is dark and cold. The rain slicks down the glass of the windows. Your hair is pressed flat against your face which is still round with puppy fat. Your eyes are large and brilliant against the slickness of your rain soaked skin. Your jeans are moulded to the shape of your thighs, and are tight against your calves. Even your shirt has gotten soaked through your jacket, and you are leaving a pool of water on the tiles of my entrance hall. I don’t know why I invited you in, or even if you just pushed your way in once I opened the door.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” you tell me. Your voice is crisp and firm, and you take a wet squelching step towards me; involuntarily I step back, away from you. “I want to know why.”
I am clutching a towel that I fetched for you close to my chest like a shield, and your eyes have mine in a tight grip. I am frozen in place like a mouse before a cat.
“How did you find me?” I ask - to my knowledge you have only seen me that one night that you smiled at me weeks ago. Obviously I am mistaken.
“Don’t you have an answer for me?” you press. Your eyes flicker with anger and I can smell a heady blend of emotions from you: fury, lust and uncertainty.
“I,” I start, but the words fail me.
“You have chased me and then you run when it looks like you might catch me. More than once I have gone to speak to you and you have walked away. No one even knows your name.” I watch a conflict of emotions as they play across your face. “Have you nothing to say to me?” Your lips are still twitching with anger, and then you step forward, decision made. Your hands clutch the side of my face so I cannot get away and forcing me against the wall you kiss me, hard. Your tongue flickers at my lips demanding entrance and without question I acquiesce.
We stand there for several minutes before your hands tug away the towel in my hands and throw it out of the way. I know I should push you away. I know that I should say no but it has been so long since you smiled at me, and I can taste your pulse on my tongue, your lips are simultaneously soft and firm, I can feel your cock stirring against mine through two ridges of denim. It startles me into action. I pull back. “Duo,” I gasp, “my name is Duo.” With an amazing hunger you catch my earlobe between your teeth. I take a step towards you, accepting the inevitable. “The bedroom’s through there,” I manage, pushing the edges of my fingernails into your scalp.
We don’t make it that far. We tumble to the floor, your hands tugging at the hem of my tee whilst I fumble with your jacket. I’ve never known a hunger like this: I want to devour you, to pull you into my body until I am a part of you. We are writhing against each other like a pair of cats. My tee tangles in my braid as you pull it up, with half of the buttons undone I push your shirt down around your waist and sink my teeth into the cords of your shoulder. Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue as I lap the wound I have made.
You rip open the button-fly of my jeans with an easy jerk of the wrist before you slid your hand inside. I can’t keep the gasp of surprise from my throat, your want is hot and musky, but your hand is cold from the rain. “Duo, my Duo,” you mumble as I arc into your hand.
“Yours,” I manage, all conscious thought driven from my mind with the subtle pressure of your fingertips, the rough skin of the skin between your fingers and thumb I am almost driven insane by the ridges of your palm against my erection.
Your mouth seizes the skin of my throat, to swallow the noises I make before they escape. You savage my throat like an animal, teeth and tongue in perfect harmony.
I do not even bother to undo the zip of your jeans, just slide my hand inside, cupping it over the strength of your erection, treasuring each vein and ridge, the weeping tip and the feel of the crisp hairs against my hand.
We buck against each other’s hands and glue our mouths together, grunting and grasping. I want more- this can never be enough.
I use my free hand and the carpeted floor to pull down my jeans so they pool around my knees to give your hand room to play. “Fuck me,” I gasp into your mouth, “I want you to fuck me.”
Your answering moan gives me spasms. “Soon,” you manage. “Soon.” And with a sputtering aching gasp I come in your hand. You follow soon after, your face contorting, your mouth open and your eyes screwed shut. A delicious red flush spreads across your chest and throat and I feel a second surge of lust knowing that I did that to you.
“Bedroom,” I stammer. “I really want you inside me. I want you so deep I can feel you fucking the back of my throat. I want to feel your hips bang against my ass so hard it bruises.” You can’t answer that so you scoop me into your strong arms and manage the few steps to the bed where you throw me. I take the opportunity to shimmy out of the jeans where they’ve gathered like a shackle about my ankles. For a second you stare at my nakedness sprawled out for you, and I can feel the lust coiling in my belly in a way that I’m sure that I’ve never felt before. I want you. I want you to want me. I want this to never end. Inevitably, though, it must.
--
You asked me once about my parents. I told you the truth, that I couldn’t remember them. I remember nothing before Treize and even after that there are huge gaps in my memory. Treize tells me it’s normal, that there is only so much room in my head for memories. I know the information that is held in the Silver Book because Treize has never withheld it from me, though sometimes I forget those who fell in the Day of Fire. I was recently with Treize and I walked through the gallery and I was hard pressed to remember the name of the little girl who sat on Lucrezia’s lap. We had taken her in because she had nowhere else to go, and there was talk of making her one of us. I had to look up her name, but when I read the name Mariemaia I remembered the smell of lilacs in her hair and the feel of her in my arms when she sat on my knee.
There are very few listings in the histories of your kind about what happened in Prague on the 18th January 1799. Treize, Dorothy and I were in England at the time, following an invitation to winter at a country estate in Derbyshire. It saved our lives.
We had lived in Prague for years, moving between Prague and Rome following the tide of politics as they interested Treize. Lady Une, Lucrezia, Milliardo, Trois, Cat and Mariemaia were left behind in the large townhouse, because it was only a small excursion.
Treize had become very powerful, and like all powerful men he had attracted enemies. His name was Duke Dermail, but you will not find reference of him in your histories. He hired mercenaries from all over Carpathia, a nasty group indeed.
They broke in early in the morning. Mariemaia was in bed with Lucrezia, Milliardo said that they didn’t stand a chance. They cut off their heads and set the bed alight. Trois and Cat were left to the fire, they were on the top floor and they had blocked the doors, trapping them inside.
Milliardo and Une barely escaped with their lives. Une lost her mind, she was very badly hurt and when she slept to heal she didn’t wake up. She still sleeps to this day, in Treize’s palace. She is now a beautiful living statue.
Milliardo came to London; he was badly scarred since fire had burned the left side of his face so it looked like melted wax. He wore a silver mask to cover it. He told us of the treachery of Dermail, of the deaths of our family, of the loss of Une, which I think Treize took hardest of all.
He told us that they had come from Carpathia.
We caught the next ship out.
I do not care to linger on what happened next. Needless to say they were all killed and legends were born of the horrors that we wreaked. What I remember most clearly is licking the blood from Dorothy’s face.
Milliardo coined the phrase the Day of Fire just before he asked Treize to kill him.
They had been together longer than I had been alive.
We are very hard to kill. If not for the rain just after the Day of Fire, Trois, Cat and Lucrezia could have been revived. We only need the ashes and a drop of our blood. Time will heal their wounds. There are ways, however, to end it. The heart must be completely destroyed; a wide wooden stake is best for this. Then the head must be severed. Catholic witch hunters used to send the head and the heart to the Vatican to make sure we could not be revived. The limbs are severed and burnt, the ashes gathered to be kept separate. The chest cavity is split open and the genitals cut away. What is left is thrown to the birds and the beasts. With the heart and the head the body can still be revived but it takes centuries to heal. I think that’s what Treize kept them.
Watching him broke my heart, both Dorothy and I offered to take the burden or to help at least, but he refused. He did it all himself, he gathered the head, heart and lungs in a beautiful wooden box that he carries with him everywhere. We all lost in the Day of Fire, but we lost brothers and sisters. Treize lost the two people who made him whole.
He drove Dorothy and I away, never so far that we couldn’t return, but no longer were we his favoured pets, brought everywhere at his side. Suddenly we were thrust out into the world on our own. The fabulous parties we had fed from no longer invited us in. Unsure what else to do we clung to each other. For a century or more we toured the world. Dorothy favoured theatres to feed, she appears to fall asleep on some man’s shoulder and take her fill. I took to midnight masses.
--
We are at the cinema. It is a film that features all manner of movie monsters, some based on fact, some created by a wary populace. Frankenstein’s monster is portrayed as a lumbering brute. “He was erudite and brilliant in the book,” you whisper in the darkness. Count Dracula amuses me no end. I remember meeting Treize in Paris for a performance of the Resurrection of Lazarus. He wore almost the same outfit then. I picture him pulling his cape over the lower half of his face and waggling his eyebrows like Bela Lugosi. I laugh out loud. You turn the attention away from the painfully bad movie to look at me. You reach out and clutch my hand. “This movie’s awful.” You tell me.
“I know, but we might as well wait it out, there can’t be much more of this rubbish.” I say, turning my hand and twining my fingers through yours.
“I can think of something better to do to waste our time.” You sound mischievous, I turn to look at you, away from the demon hunter on the screen and find myself being kissed. I am forced to agree with you. This is a much better way to waste time- a much better way indeed.
--
I rouse myself from cat cream-satiation and stand beside your bed to look down at where you’re coiled around your pillow, your skin is marbled with rich blue and purple veins and I am reminded of just how long it’s been since I last fed. I swallow convulsively, licking my lips again and again. I can almost taste your blood.
You look like a little boy lying there; the remnants of our lovemaking are raised welts from my nails and cooling on your stomach and thighs. I can feel your semen and excess lubricant seeping out of the crack of my ass. My lips feel swollen and my balls are tender and aching from your touch.
I am torn by my need to stay with you, and my need to feed. The part of me that Treize raised is telling me to feed from you. It is not like I will kill you, or even truly incapacitate you. You would not remember me feeding, and I could use you like so many of the mortals that have shared our lives throughout the years, cultivated for food and sex.
Dorothy’s pet is called Walker, and he has been with her for ten years now. Walker doesn’t know our secret, he never will, no more than Treize’s pet. They are almost furniture, or servants. Their kisses taste of duty.
Yours taste of power and love and fire.
I dress quickly and pay a prostitute for food. She will wake in the hotel room sluggish and well paid. It has been a long time indeed since I killed in my hunger. Then I return to the uptown flat that I share with you, I shower before I climb back into the bed with you.
You roll over and press your head into the curve of my collarbone. “Daisuki da.” You murmur, still mostly asleep. You always talk in Japanese when you’re mostly asleep.
“Ee,” I answer, breathing in the scent of you and our lovemaking, “boku mo da.”
enjoy
Human Frailty
by Seraphim Grace
Word Count: 50,035
Warnings: Angst. Lemon, blood-play, character death, suicide, vampirism, gore, other. Gratuitous use of real historical figures.
Pairing: 1x2x1
Notes: AU, first person, deliberately shifts tenses. Duo POV, insert with Heero POV. This is set in a parallel time-line, using the detail that Heero was 15 in 1995 (when GW came out) this means he was born in 1980. This means I’ve worked him out so he’s the same age as me approx (he’d be 25 this year) so you can work out all the details of his life, but he’s 18 or 19 when he meets Duo.
Place: 3rd in the 50k category; artwork coming soon.
The water is cold about my skin; even the weight of your flesh against mine could not warm me now. It is too late for that. The night is no longer as velvety; the moonlight no longer feels like silk along my skin. The night cannot love me when I can no longer love myself. Instead I love you.
The echo of your words hangs heavy in the small bathroom. The tiles are stained with the traces of steam, of warmth, of light. There is a crust of scum from the soap on the dish. The fixtures are white with scale. I trace the outline of what you said, cursed with an eternal moment as I watch the full moon from the bath in which I lie.
It will be dawn soon and the window that now so effortlessly shows the moon will show the rising sun and this all will be in vain. It will be over, lost to the stains and the scum and the scale. Without you there is no reason for me to be, without you there are only the stains and the scum and the scale.
This ending is ignominious.
It is strangely fitting.
--
Your skin is golden and tactile in the lamplight. I can’t help but touch it, feeling the brush of the hairs of your arm bristle against my fingertips, the way your eyes lazily rise from the page you are reading, the warm smile before your eyes fall back to the words.
The cushions of the chair hold your heat as I run my hand over the nap of the woven fabric, feeling its slight coarseness against the pads of my fingertips. It is rough compared to your skin, it lacks the heat, the slight dampness because the night is warm; and your indulgent smile.
The chair is a rich dark green, the colour of a wine bottle. You are wearing a pale blue shirt that brings out the colour of your skin and the detail of the mole on your forearm. Your book is a paperback well beloved and dog-eared. More than anything I want to snatch it away from you, to throw the book across the room, and be the focus of your rapt attention.
I listen to the steady rhythm of your breath, the soft intake and exhalation as it stirs and coils against your lip, I can see the tip of your pink tongue as it peeks between pale thin lips in concentration, the furrow of the skin between the dark hair of your eyebrows as the author takes you to where I cannot follow. Your blue eyes skim and flicker as they read the words I cannot fathom. Sometimes, unaware of yourself, you mouth back the words you have read, tasting them, your pink tongue curling around them with the curiosity of a new lover, or an army invading a country it had never even heard the name of. The look on your face is that of Alexander first casting eyes on the subcontinent of India, a mixture of curiosity, wonderment and disgust. You know that I’m staring at you, taking in the details of the pores of your skin, the follicles that might become a beard if you give it a chance, the lines of your jaw, the curve of your lips, the shadows under your eyes. I read you as intently as you read the book in your hands.
You exhale deliberately to let me know your displeasure, a sound that is not quite a snort as you fold your long legs up underneath you. I can see the expressive striations of blue and violet and gold that surround the event horizon that is your pupil, the flush of dark hair at the open collar of your shirt, the silver chain against your dark skin, your Adam’s apple which bobs when you are excited and feels sensationally meaty against my teeth, the pulse of your throat. The way your chest rises and falls with your lungs in a beauty that you are never aware of.
I can’t help but smile at your displeasure, the slow tug of the side of my mouth until I give in and smile; my lips remain closed, though. It is my concession to those times when you stare at me, drinking me in as intently as I watch you.
You smile in response, your lips tugging open slightly to show a warmth inside and you lay down the book but say nothing. There is no anger in your features, no disgust, only love and fondness.
I cannot accept it.
The sprawl of the city outside our window is a blanket of fireflies, or a constellation of stars laid heavily against the hills.
I never hate myself more than when you smile at me, so open, so loving, so free. I hide so much of myself from you and you offer me everything, every hooded emotion, every breath that passes your lips.
I don’t lie, but I don’t need to create falsehoods when I lie to you.
The city is sprawled awkwardly like a fat man squatting around us. The lights are a fragmentary beauty, they show other warmths, other lives. In other rooms other lamps reveal similar scenes, of other lovers watching each other surreptitiously or as openly as I did. I can’t help that I watch you so intently. You fascinate me, you draw my eyes almost against my will.
The imprint of your head on the pillow is a warmth I know in the hollow of my armpit. “What are you thinking?” you ask me, your voice a rumble amidst the buzz of electric lights, amidst the silence of the night, and the sparkle of other lights - other rooms and other lives. Hundreds of thousands of people live in this city, but sometimes I believe, with the arrogance of humanity, that it is just you and me. Sometimes, with all my arrogance, I wish it was. Then I am disappointed again because that can never be. There will always be other people between us.
“How tired you look,” I answer calmly, surprised at the words that escape me, “how fascinated by a Russian trollop you can be, how the words of a man long dead hold your interest.”
“Men die,” you tell me with a slight smile on your lips, “words don’t.” You look away, your eyes looking to the floor, “Anna Karenina is immortal, despite her suicide.”
I decide to indulge you in this; the distant look of longing for a world that is not, nor never can be, your own. You crave a world of adventure, a world of danger, a world I try so hard to keep you safe from. When did the hunter, I wonder, become a pampered pet that strains at the cages that keep it safe? Soon you will shirk this cage I have made you, soon you will cast aside the wings that keep you safe. With the arrogance of mortality, I know this, I have always known this, but yet, selfishly I cling to this moment, pray for one more minute, one more hour, one more day, before you walk away. So I watch you closely, I learn and relearn every detail of you, every facet, I hoard your image over and over again, waiting against hope for you to leave me.
You will.
Your kind always do.
--
I understand the dark. I know it and it knows me. The dark does not change. It is immutable. Like I thought that I was. I know darkness. I understand darkness. But I know that the dark changes me. I need the dark, but it doesn’t need me. The dark simply is; it is I that change. The night is a sea I swim in whether I want to or not. More often than not, now, I do not see the wonders of my underwater world and simply wish to drown.
--
The college campus is dark and ominous at night. There are whispers amongst the heavy trees and drunken students lurch from lamp post to lamp post. The rural setting brings me comfort; I love the smell of the trees after the brief rain. I can hear the yowling of foxes and the laughter of drunkards. It smells clean and fresh, of fine and the sharp sting of a cigarette in the darkness.
People talk and laugh, the sober guiding the lost home to their dark tower blocks and loveless halls of residence. They go to sleep, to talk, to drink, and to fuck. Once it was churches I haunted, a shadow amongst the cold Latin chanting and the sweet smell of incense, then I moved from place to place, from college to college.
I like this place. I like the welcoming feel of it. The fact I can walk into any lecture and just listen and learn. I can’t understand the words on the screen but I can follow what they tell me about books I’ll never read, films I’ll never watch, politics I’ll never care about.
It has other advantages, I tell myself. It has you.
I caught sight of you sitting on the steps by the book shop. The college, unlike many of the others I have known, is perfectly self contained, everything you could need within easy walking distance. You were sitting there with friends, quiet amidst their chatter, picking away at the food in your hands with no real care what you ate. It was a mechanical process to you, something you did because your body needed to. You sat there as they smiled and laughed and gestured, and you listened, and you understood, but you, yourself, were silent.
You wore a light tee emblazoned with the legend “Welsh Rugby” and the flush on your throat told me that you were drunk in ways the stench of alcohol could never have. People smell of alcohol for so many reasons; there are only a few reasons that you flush. I learned that later. So stoic, so beautiful, with your wide sharp cheekbones and the dark lashes that frame your brilliant blue eyes. Your hair was a tussle of unruly dark strands swept back by an impatient hand, as if it needed to be cut, as if it had reached that length of in between where it is unmanageable. Not long enough to restrain and not short enough to just behave on its own.
Of course it is not nearly the length of mine. I watched as you felt the weight of my gaze upon you and, emboldened by alcohol, you smiled at me. I changed my mind about you then: I looked at the barely restrained violence of your thighs, the power in your shoulders, the black slashes of your eyelashes, and I decided in that minute that I wanted nothing more than to run my fingers over the ripples of your abdomen, to scrape my teeth over the curve of your hip. It made the decision easy. I didn’t return your salute. I turned and walked away.
You were not for the likes of me.
--
It didn’t stop me wanting you. I could have died for you, for the rustle of your hair against my breath and the short innocent smile that you offered me. I have seen many things, I have performed miracles, and I have stood at the crossroads at midnight to dance with the devil. Yet your smile both fascinated and horrified me. If you knew me, I wondered, if you knew what I was, would you still smile at me that way?
--
The campus, which once felt so small and intimate, was suddenly a self enclosed universe, with its own sun and its own moon. Everything changed, and you did it with a smile. The last person changed it with a kiss. I hungered for you, your imagined smell drove me half mad around corners when I thought I smelt it. My mouth watered at the mere thought of you. Yet I did not search you out; if I saw a similar mop of dark hair I turned and walked the other way. More than once I left because I thought that I had heard your voice. You drove me to distraction, and then you were unaware of my existence.
When I heard women talk I believed they talked of you. I would feel the coarseness of your hair between my fingers, the taste of coffee in your saliva, the heat of your breath on my face. The very thought of you made me hard and hungry. When I fed that hunger I wanted to feed from you. When I slept I dreamt of you.
You drove me insane, you fascinated me, and I didn’t even know your name.
I should have left the campus. I should have relocated. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, but nor could I leave you behind.
--
Nevermore is a joke that has certainly gotten old over the years. It has been a hotel, a club, a restaurant, and an opium den. It has moved many times through many cities, but it has never changed hands or name. Officially it is my home. It is a dark space of black lights and matte steel, of heavy thudding bass lines and pressed bodies. There are booths and heavy dark wood stools. There are lights behind the bar; they illuminate the liquor and the glasses. Lit from behind the grenadine looks like blood. The bartenders come and go, but Dorothy always remains.
She looks luscious in black velvet; a sweetheart neck reveals an expansive décolletage. Most men see Dorothy and see her blonde hair and her heaving bosom. They see what she wants them to see. She is everything to me: my mother; my sister; my lover; my friend; my enemy; my absolution and my damnation. What I am Dorothy made me. The years give us a strange closeness. Even my name is a variant of hers. She is wise and terrible and beautiful. She fascinates and terrifies me in equal measure.
I love her as much as I hate her.
Time and again, however, I am drawn to her.
--
There are no mirrors in Nevermore. It is something that everyone notices eventually.
She has threaded a black ribbon through her hair. It is a darker blonde than most favour and her skin has paled to the colour of cream; her eyes are a murderous aquamarine. Her lips still press together and purse without her realising. It is a sign of her amusement. People underestimate Dorothy because she is beautiful, but she is as dangerous as she is lovely. She sways to the drumbeat, as sinuous as a snake, and as deadly as a viper. Her heels are tied up her calves with the same ribbons she has in her hair and around her forearms. A diamond the size of my thumbnail hangs from each ear. When she sees me she smiles, her perfect reptile smile.
We are drawn to each other, Dorothy and I.
She crosses the floor through the dancing throng as if they were a figment of her imagination. She calls me by a name I gave up, a name that ties me to her, though years have passed since I have seen her last. She pours us drinks from a bottle behind the bar; she holds it out for me. The glass is warm in my hand. Dorothy is the perfect hostess as she leads us to her office. The outer wall is black glass, deliberately scratched matte. It means she can see out but there is no reflection and they cannot see in.
She has decorated her office to look like the inside of a Chinese brothel. There are screens all over, some lacquered with phoenixes and dragons, some with elaborate fretwork. Chinese robes hang from the walls. She burns incense to cover up the underlying smell. It is very different from what I expected. The last time I was in here it was a Parisian salon. The portrait, however, of the three of us, remains pride of place over her desk, protected and priceless. It was out of place in the Parisian salon, it is out of place in the Chinese brothel.
She peels off the dress, pulling a robe about her shoulders; the ribbons, heels and diamonds she leaves, though. There was a time that she only wore her diamonds, but she has mostly grown out of it. If she was hunting then she might have done that. Nevertheless she crosses her legs with a passive slowness, a beautiful gesture designed to drive men wild.
It is what we do, Dorothy and I, get underestimated and drive men wild. We take what we want regardless of the cost. It’s what we were trained for.
She asks me why I have come to her.
I tell her that I simply did not want to be alone. She offers me her reptile smile. She calls me her srdechni and I stay with her, not because I have no other place to go, but because I don’t want to be alone. I want to drink in the familiar smell of her, incense and the lemony herby perfume she has worn for years. I want to lie with my head in the curve of her neck and her legs entwined with mine and the way her fingers twine though my braid.
She has only done this once to me: she appeared at my door, her hood up and her eyeliner smudged. We turn to each other in the dark times. Yet I turn to her far more often than she to me. Only once did we ever turn to him.
We are a fraction of what once there was, all that remains, a happily shattered family, drawn again and again by mutual loneliness. I suppose the technical word for what we are is a kiss but you will never hear us call ourselves that. We are a family, Dorothy, Treize and I - a strange family, driven apart as often as we are together, but a family nonetheless.
Dorothy asks no questions, she knows instinctively that I won’t answer them. I never have but she has never asked. Dorothy and I are the same, embittered and beautiful.
I sleep that night in her silk draped bed, clinging to her as if she answers all the problems I might ever run across. I lie there for hours, just breathing in the familiar smell of her, lemons, verbena, russet roses, incense and underneath it, the smell of something else: the smell of her.
--
Sometimes I wish I was more like you, comfortable in myself: I laugh, I joke, I watch you with barely restrained patience but it is a mask I wear, for you, for my friends, never for my family. You ask me to introduce you to my family, such as they are. The concept of you meeting Dorothy gives me chills and cold sweats. Not because I am afraid that she won’t like you, because she will, but because of what will come later: she’ll sit on your small couch when you leave the room, she will light a cigarette that she uses to mask the smell of her breath and then she’ll ask me why I always do this to myself. Why I still harbour pretensions for your kind “he’s a catch, Duo, if you were like him, but you’re not, we’re not.”
She will pull her hair back behind her ear, her face illuminated by the slow pulls on her cigarette. She will tell me to get out before I get hurt again. In her callous way she means me no harm, she wants what is best for me, but she’ll do it in the cruellest way. She’ll remind me of what I am, of what you are, of how different we are by our intrinsic natures. She’ll tell me to take what I want from you, and nothing more. To walk away while I still can.
I have lost before; I am weak despite the jokes and the obvious physical strength. You are beautiful, vibrant and vital. You fascinate and entrance me, but my imaginary Dorothy is right, you’ll be the death of me.
Yet still I am afraid to do what I should and walk away from you.
You will kill me, and I will do my best to help you.
--
Dark thoughts entrance and paralyse me. I am old, given to deep depressions and inane rages. I lie in this bath with no future and too much past. I am old, and you are what Treize calls a mayfly. You wake, live for a single day and then die. He asked me once, when we were deep in our cups, how you could bear to go on with such short lives, knowing that no sooner had you started something than you died.
I asked how we could bear to go on when we didn’t.
Death makes life valuable, Treize told me that. Our lives are long and tedious, and totally without worth. In all my years I have done nothing, I have written no books, I have composed no symphonies, built no monuments. My legacy, such as it is, I leave with Treize and Dorothy. I stand to the front and left of Dorothy’s portrait, and as a statue among many such in Treize’s pleasure garden. That is how our kind remembers: with the money that we have no lack of, we commission our likenesses for those we leave behind.
I have asked Treize to prepare something for you.
The miniature I have of the three of us may be priceless - it should be in a museum - but I would give you something just for you, not my family memento of me and my family whom you will never meet. Nicholas, the artist, asked if all such monsters were as beautiful or as heartless as we.
Treize laughed and laughed. “But, Nicky,” he had said in his perfect way, “we’re not heartless at all, that‘s the rub.”
It’s the great irony of us, that we are not heartless.
Loving you is proof enough of that.
It is not you I am angry at, nor is it Dorothy who made me what I am, or Treize who taught me to exploit it. Not you who loved me, Dorothy who treasured me or Treize who chose me.
I curse the heart that the years didn’t kill in me, the heart that cannot help but, by its very nature, betray me.
This night is longer than I wish it to be - why is it my time vanishes with you, but lingers without you?
--
You ask me about myself, sitting on the bench at night, your ankles crossed out in front of you, stretched out in a lush line. You are wearing cheap white trainers, and your jeans have seen better days. Your hair is windswept in the cool October wind. The promenade you have chosen for us to meet is lit by a string of lights and a passing boat blares its horn at the city. “It looks like a giant floating birthday cake,” I mutter under my breath at the sight of it.
You fix me in place with those impossible blue eyes, eyes the exact colour of the waters of Biscay after a storm, eyes in which I could all too easily drown. “Tell me about yourself,” you say. It is a command, your voice a deep rumble in your chest. “You are a mystery to me,” you say, “and I don’t like mysteries.”
“You like me,” I answer tartly.
Your smile is predatory and wicked. “I’d like you even more if I knew more of you than your name.”
For an instant I consider telling you everything: of telling you about what I remember of the passage of years; of what happened all those years ago in the Russian court where I gave up my name; in England where Dorothy, Treize and I were a scandal about town; in the small church in Ireland were I lost my faith; about Hilde who I thought I loved until I met you. I remember the aftermath of what happened the last time I spilled my terrible secret, of the bloodshed and the heartbreak that inevitably follows such a declaration.
I just smile at you and begin to tell you a story that is at once completely true and the biggest lie I have ever told.
I’m from America, I say - having spent the last century there it is true enough - I have a brother and a sister, I say, we are a family of sorts. My sister owns a club in London and my brother lives in Moscow where he works for the government. I’m the baby, I tell you, just drifting till I find my niche.
You ask about my name, unusual as it is. In this I can tell the truth.
I say how when I was very young that Dorothy and I were inseparable and that our brother started to call me “Dorothy Duo”, as we were living in Italy at the time; eventually it just got shortened to Duo which I liked better than my given name anyway.
Your smile intrigues me. “There you go, Duo,” you say. “You told me two things about yourself even if you didn’t mean to. You told me your sister is called Dorothy and that you lived in Italy.” Your smile is vulpine now, but is mischievous rather than dangerous. “It’s not so hard,” you continue, “to tell me everything. Tell] me about your parents,” you say.
Again I tell you the truth. “They died a long time ago -“ my voice is blunt, “- I don’t remember them.
You apologise with your hands on my face, they are chilled, and your lips are like slices of fresh peach. Yet your kiss is warm and I can taste salt in your saliva and garlic on your breath, a faint half remembered tang. I lose myself in the feel of the soft short hairs on the back of your neck, the heat of your lips and the erratic beat of your heart, glad of the awkward silence to deflect the questions that I can’t answer.
A passing elderly couple comments sweetly on young love, fooled by my slight frame and long hair into believing me a girl. I take the word and roll it on my tongue against yours, into your mouth, your fingertips and your breath. I mingle the taste of it against the taste of you and find it pleasing. Yes, I think to myself, as I press myself tighter against you on a bench at the bay, under the lights and the chill October sky, the word is love.
--
I spoke to Dorothy yesterday, we lamented that out kind can only use the most basic aspects of the high tech cells that Treize insists we carry. We met for coffee in an overpriced bar that she insists on still calling a salon. What is the point, she asked me, of giving us camera phones that can’t record our images; that can’t relay our voices. We could manage, she told me with a laugh, and with one of those old cells that we used to laugh at because all we do is text.
When you asked me for my number I almost went cold stammering out that I’d be more than happy to text but I really wasn’t good on the phone. You just laughed and said, “Who is, these days?”
It wasn’t the reason Dorothy and I met, it was just a topic of conversation.
Although the date seems insignificant to your calendar our kind is never alone for it. I suppose even Treize found his comfort among the gathering of the Old Ones. Dorothy and I met for coffee and shared a banal conversation that never touched on what really bothered us, and held hands on the table.
Part of me wondered what would happen if your mortal curiosity had led you to follow me, but I quashed it down: I had told you the truth, that I was going into the city to meet my sister.
Dorothy and I might be as different as chalk and cheese but she is my sister and under the waves of guilt that I felt for surviving when so many of us fell, for the mourning for the brothers and sisters that I lost in the Day of Fire I came to treasure her. I always loved her, even when I despised her. I imagined how it would look, meeting a beautiful woman and holding hands. I braced myself to tell you.
You trusted me however and did not follow.
So Dorothy and I sat in an Italian coffee shop talking in medieval Italian and recounting the simple banalities of our lives. We did not shares the amusing stories of what had happened since we last spoke, or even the fond ones. We talked of television programs, and people on the tube.
The Day of Fire is the closest thing our kind has to a ritual, and that is all. We met to share an ageless grief and talk of nothing, pretending for one night, to be mortal.
--
We are entertaining some of your college buddies, who, despite the years of our affair, still do not know how to take me. Matthew maintains, in his boorish “rugger” way, that I am just your wealthy friend. Relena, who recognises me as a rival, is too busy with her legal practise to make more than a passing bid for your affections. She reminds me of someone I used to know. Simon you describe as happily married; his wife is a limpet of a person with dead eyes. Sylvia shines in the way that only women who know their own worth do, and Wufei baffles me. The two of you are so different that it amazes me that you are friends at all. He calls you Yuy and me Maxwell, expecting in return to be called Chang, and takes deep breaths at Matthew’s cheap homophobic jokes.
I beg off the food explaining that as the chef that I ate more than my fill sampling each dish, but drink heavily of the wine. I am like a shuttlecock this evening, tossed between the inane and ancient jibes of the homophobic Matthew, who everyone else ignores though Sylvia suggests is over-compensating, and Relena’s drunken passes at you.
The longer the night goes on the drunker and angrier I get. You told me to invite Dorothy and Treize, and I amuse myself by imagining them here, Dorothy picking at the chicken whilst baiting Simon and his lacklustre wife to amuse herself as Treize holds court at the other end of the table with a few perfectly placed barbs. If that did not work then Dorothy would say, “What is the point, Srdechni, of inviting us to feed and then serving chicken. I understand that this one amuses you, but the rest are free.” Then we would feast as we once did, before the Day of Fire, we would feed over many nights, we would bewitch them with promises and pleasures they could never otherwise know and we would glut our fill.
The more wine I drink the more it appeals to me to just reach across the table and rip Matthew’s head from his shoulders whilst Relena screams and screams. Simon’s bland wife would faint and Simon would vomit, Wufei and Sylvia would ask simply why I didn’t do that sooner.
Your reaction I do not ponder at all.
“What’s your opinion, Duo?” you ask snapping me out of my fantasy of violence. “About the chateaux in France, do you think that they’re haunted?”
I belatedly recall that Relena had been talking about the jite in which she had holidayed and the strange noises she had heard. The villagers had told her that the old house was haunted. It sounded to me more like they were laughing at her expense when the house had mice.
I empty my cup before I answer.
“My older brother,” I say, “works in government and he told me a story about a certain chateau in the Ardennes region of France that he had had off an old Russian soldier, who had heard it off a French resistance officer that swore it was true.
“This Chateau was notorious in the area as being the home of an ancient demon that called itself “Gebieter”, and once a year it would descend into the village and feast on the youth of maidens, and the village and Gebieter profited from the arrangement.”
Relena and the banal wife are listening with bated breath, the rest with amusement, Matthew with barely concealed disdain. “Over the centuries Gebieter got older and changed the terms of his agreement. He asked only that his chateau be maintained and for a single night a willing youth be sent to him. The next morning the youth would return, apparently unharmed, and the blessing of Gebieter made the town prosperous and its people healthy.”
I fill my cup and empty it before continuing. “By the Second World War even the villagers didn’t really believe in the legends of Gebieter but nonetheless they kept the agreement because they saw no harm in it.”
Wufei’s expression suggests to me that he has heard this story before.
“When the Nazis invaded the area they heard the legends of the demon and decided to use it to their advantage. They seized the chateau to use as a communications base and from Paris they hired an actor to pretend to be the demon.
“To further the ruse they took young girls from the village and slit their throats before exsanguinating them.” I drink more of the rather fine wine, emboldened by it. “Communications from the chateau stopped suddenly one night. The actor was dragged into the village by a mob, where they put a stake through his heart and chopped off his head. They cut off his arms and his legs and burned them, burying the ashes separately. His skull and his heart were sent to the Vatican, as was common for demon kills, and his torso hung for the birds to peck at.”
I look at the horrified faces around the table. “They never found the soldiers, so yes, Relena, I suppose it’s possible that your jite was haunted.”
Wufei looks at me for a moment before he bursts out laughing. Following his lead Matthew guffaws, “You really had us going there, Duo, great story.”
I return to the solace of my wine cup. The story is entirely true. I heard it first from Treize and then from Gebieter himself, who complained that he never did like the taste of Germans, that they were too bland for his palette, but for them he had made an exception. He also told the villagers how to kill the actor so no one else would get the bright idea of impersonating him.
Of all the old ones I have met, and to many I am still only a youngling, Gebieter scares me most.
Across the table you look at me strangely, as if wondering either why I know such a tale or why I would tell it.
I turn away from your eyes and back to the cup of wine, as if daring you to say “you’ve had enough” or to tell Relena finally that you’re not interested, or to tell Matthew that I am your lover, that you enjoy having sex with me, that you like giving head, that you enjoy rimming and that he should either accept that or get his repressed arse back to whichever part of Wales he comes from.
You never will, not because I embarrass you, but because it would be déclassé.
I know you love me; I know Matthew’s opinion doesn’t matter to me; I know you won’t leave me for Relena, but knowing and accepting are two different things.
--
We argue that night, not for the first time. I seriously doubt that it will be the last. “You never tell me anything about yourself,” you shout, your face red and your veins throbbing. The bed we stand either side of is like a mountain between us. “You never stay the whole night. You won’t move in with me and we’ve been together two years. I know nothing more of you than I did when we first met.”
I am drunk and it makes my tongue slack. “If you knew anything of me then you would not wonder why I won’t stay, why I won’t move in with you.” My fists are balled at my sides and my eyes stare at the chequered pattern of the bedspread. Do you know how much I hate arguing with you? “It’s not like you make an effort to tell anyone that we’re lovers.”
“You won’t introduce me to your sister,” you counter, “I have to hear from Wufei that she only lives a stone’s throw away. Aren’t you worried that she’ll disapprove of me?”
“Dorothy would chew you up and spit you out,” I yell, “and Treize would take you from me to remind me that no one will ever love me like he does.” It is the absolute truth and it horrifies you. “I don’t want to share you. I can’t stay the night.” It is time for a little truth. “I’m UVA intolerant.” It is a legitimate medical condition that we have long since exploited for our own purposes. How we laughed when we first heard of it. “Your curtains aren’t thick enough, I would blister and burn.”
Your mouth makes a wordless oh of realisation, your anger fading like mist. “Why didn’t you tell me?” You circle the bed in a few confident steps and put your arms around me, laying your head on my shoulder.
“What?” I ask, still drunk, still angry, but with my own inadequacy now, “That I’m a freak?”
“No,” you say, “that such a simple change to my curtains would mean that you would stay.” You look up at me, and I see the striations of your eyes, blue and violet and gold. “And I thought you were just a night owl.” Your fingers creep up to the back of my neck and pull my head down so it’s almost level with yours though we stand of a height. “You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Duo,” you say, “I love you, I’ll understand.” And at that my heart shatters into a million pieces because there are so many things I can’t tell you.
--
Prolonged exposure to direct sunlight does not kill us - we are notoriously hard to kill, after all - but it does hurt us. The pain is elegant, though, and cleansing; it burns away the impurities and reminds us of what is important.
Most of what you know about us is untrue.
The only truths among the lies are this: we are long lived and immune to disease; and we must feed, though not to the extent that you expect. We take a pint, or thereabouts, and then we are glutted, much as if you had managed a pint of milk in one sitting.
We can eat, we can drink, and we can love and therein lies the tragedy. We are all too human to survive such long lives. It is easier, I think, to face mortality when it brings such rewards and so little loss.
--
You hold me firm in the perfectly strong circle of your arms, pressing me against the strength of your pectoral and abdominal muscles. I feel your hips against mine. This is the closest I can get to Heaven. I pull away, almost against my own will. “Not here,” I say, “I can’t stay the night here, but you can stay the night with me.”
I like the smile that lazily and sexily sprawls across your face, the way your fingers twine through mine. You rub your hips against mine in a manner that you’re never really aware of, a way that drives me mad with want. “Just tell me it’s not far,” you whisper in my ear, “I really want to fuck you.” The obscenity is punctuated with a hot wet lick that makes me groan.
“It’s not far at all,” I tell you, “thank god.”
“Or we can fuck here, and then go,” you suggest, “You look so very fucking sexy when you scare the shit out of Matthew.” You only cuss when we’re like this, face to face, chest to chest, and cock to cock. You have slipped your thigh between mine to rub it against my erection. It’s all I can do to stand. “Chang told him that your brother was Russian Mafia and that’s why you were only seen at night, and that if he continued to continued to annoy you, that you would just kill him outright.” You laugh, scraping your teeth over my throat, over my jugular. Your laughter is a hot wet exhalation on my skin. More than anything I want to tumble you into the bed and spread myself open to your hands and mouth and cock.
No, I pull away with the very last of my reserve, that last iota that is not driven mad by wanting you. “Not here,” I stammer, “I can’t stay here, I really want to, but not here, I want you to fuck me in my own bed, to wake up tomorrow afternoon with you. Or we can fuck here and now and I’ll leave again.”
Your kiss lingers as you suck my lip into your mouth. “Just let me get my coat.”
--
My apartment is just a short taxi ride away. At this time of night I tend to get the same driver, an old Irish woman who wears a wool hat regardless of the weather, and chatters on about nothing. She opens the door for you. “Hello, Mr Maxwell, is this your young man? Why he’s as handsome as you said. I don’t think Mr Maxwell told you about old Nan, did he, probably a hundred better things to talk about with a man as handsome as you.” She sits down and starts to drive - she knows the way, I don’t have to tell her. “Why if I was only forty years younger, Mr Maxwell, I’d have to aim my cap at him.” I laugh, I only use this taxi firm and I know Nan well. She’s a harmless old woman and her chatter is calming. “Now, I wonder what you said, Mr Maxwell, that he finally decided to go uptown to see that fancy flat of yours.”
“I asked him, Nan,” I tell her, “he’s never been invited.”
“I bet he hasn’t seen that pretty as a picture sister of yours,” she continues, “she was in my cab the other day, dispatch said she asked for me, special like. Not given to talking like you are, Mr Maxwell, but she said that you told her about old Nan, who took you home every night. I asked her if she was married and she said she wasn’t, she didn’t strike me as the sort to be a good wife, mind you, but she didn’t like me calling her Miss Maxwell.”
“It’s not her name,” I tell Nan to Heero’s horror: he thinks I would never tell him this, but these details he has never asked me and I wouldn’t think to volunteer. “It’s Catalonia,” I tell her. “She was married, but he left her.”
“What kind of man would leave a woman as pretty as that, and she moves like a Lady, why her house is even nicer than yours, Mr Maxwell, but I suspect that you know all about this, Mr… She leaves it open for you to answer.
“Yuy,” you tell her.
“That’s an unusual name, where’s it from?” And as simple as that the topic is changed as if we never mentioned Dorothy at all.
--
You pause for a moment as I open the door. I am expecting an explosion, some hint of displeasure about what Nan has, through solid months of extrapolation, managed to wheedle out of me. Instead you look around amazed as the simple, yet understated, luxury that Treize and Dorothy arranged for me. Every year or so I will be invited to Nevermore or Koblensk and my flat will be redecorated, with or without my consent. This year the theme is suede. There are heavy suede curtains over all the windows and doors, and velvet curtains on the bed. It is an odd mix of old Europe and New York. I don’t really care for it.
“Welcome to Chez Maxwell,” I say with a smile, hoping that it covers my nervousness. I’m not supposed to invite your kind here, it is one of the few rules that everyone else ignores and I have kept slavishly. I would be summoned back to Treize if he discovered it. “Would you like the grand tour?” I am almost shaking.
“No,” you answer, “I knew that you were independently wealthy but…” [You] are gaping. I didn’t expect that. “Now where is that bed of yours, you promised me that you would sleep with me and I fully intend to hold you to it.” More than anything I want to kiss you; instead I just stand there and let you guide me to the bed.
--
Not that I suppose that it really matters but Dorothy’s husband was called Alejandro and she honestly loved him. At the time someone made the tasteless joke that she loved him as much as she was capable of love, but that was unfair. She loved him utterly and completely, and I think she still does. She wears a locket with a miniature almost exactly like mine, and on the other side she still wears his picture.
It started like many a love affair. At the time Dorothy and I really were younglings, and Treize still travelled the world with us. At the time we were living in Granada under the shadow of the mighty Alhambra, which had recently been liberated from the Moors. The entire court of both Castile and Aragon were in residence as they planned what to do with Italy as France made moves towards Venice, unwilling to see Naples in Hapsburg hands.
She met him when she was working for the queen on Treize’s insistence. I flitted about like a social butterfly. Alejandro was important enough that he travelled with the court, but not enough to have any sway. He was tall and golden, with really good skin and thick blue-black hair. He was unremarkably handsome except for a chipped front tooth that gave an ordinary face a rather appealing personality. He was never in a position to warrant Treize’s curiosity but it was clear that he was smitten with Dorothy from the start.
He used to appear on the both of us from nooks and crannies about the palace to serenade her or to give her small gifts. It took many months for her even to stop to listen to him. He called her his golden angel and spent hours starting at her across the court, and everyone knew of his infatuation. In fact, the queen herself told Dorothy to whet her appetite on such a handsome man.
Treize did not care. He warned her, however, that she was not like him and that she must not, at any cost or for any reason, reveal her secret to him. In fact he said that it would stop the rooms if she was coerced to his desire, but he would not force her. We were his courtesans but never his whores.
She gave in to his desires and something changed in her: although her normal manner is one of amused disdain she was absorbed with him. For months her conversation was devoted utterly and totally to Alejandro. She spoke to the other members of our family and me, and then she beseeched Treize to let them marry.
He refused.
I was called into his presence with her and he explained in length why, because Treize could be manipulative but he was never cruel with us. He sat before us, very much a king before his vassals. When he spoke to us it was with his whole attention, something he still does for me and Dorothy that he never did for the others. When we had done well we were crowded unto his lap like beloved children, the youngest of his family by some margin, and wont to make mistakes.
He told Dorothy that she had to remember that Alejandro was not like us, that unlike us he would grow old and die, and that any love she had for him would be tempered by this fact. She would have to go into exile with him throughout his life, so she would be alone at the end, and inevitably she would lose him.
He actually sounded sorry to tell us that.
She asked if he could make Alejandro one of us.
I think that was the worst thing she could have asked him.
Treize turned his face away before he answered her. “It is a possibility,” he said. “However, Dorothy, both you and Mishka-“ he always called me Mishka and still does, “-were brought into our family as children. Dorothy, you were seven, Mishka you were only five. You had years to grow into the knowledge of what we were, accepting it with the innocence of children. Alejandro does not have that luxury. If you tell him then you will become bound by our laws: if he can keep the secret for a year and a day then we will bring him into the family and he will be one of us, forever. But bear this in mind, my little one, before you make your decision.”
Dorothy wept for days on end, being asked to choose between the man she loved and her family.
Then she and Alejandro vanished. Treize like a doting parent took me into his bed because I had shared a bed with Dorothy. He comforted me when I cried but it wasn’t the same.
Then on St Stephen’s she came back without Alejandro. She came to me just before the dawn and that night begged Treize for forgiveness. He asked if it was done. She nodded.
They had run south to Seville where they had married in secret. On their wedding night Dorothy told him her secret, confident that he could keep it. He didn’t believe her, she said, so she proved it.
He ran into the streets shouting demon and the church came to investigate. To get away she had to kill them all, even Alejandro. She was distraught - to this day I don’t think she really got over him. She still wears his miniature and on his birthday and St Stephen’s she spends the night with Treize.
He forgave her utterly and totally and still treats us like his adored children. Even now, years later, he still pulls us unto his lap to lavish us with attention. When we are with him we sleep in his bed, secure in his scent of briar roses.
He forgave her. We all forgave her. But she never did forgive herself.
She never speaks of him, or the time that she spent alone with him, other than it ended in his death.
She never loved again, at least not with the same passion. After the Day of Fire, when it became necessary to choose a name, she picked Catalonia in what was obviously his memory. She still wears his wedding ring amongst all her other jewellery.
But if it changed her, I never saw it.
--
Your family you have not kept secret from me. I know about the accident that stole your parents from you and left its mark under your heart.
I have even met your uncle, whom you describe as a dusty old scholar. He shakes my hand nervously, as if he’s worried how to take to his nephew’s male lover. “So,” he says, shifting his thick glasses so that they cover even more oh his bushy grey eyebrows. His grey hair is slicked back into a stubby ponytail. “Heero tells me a linguist,” he says, “is that so?” From there we fall into a familiar conversation about medieval languages and the beauty lost by their modern counterparts.
You sit silent and watch me as I grow more and more animated, waving my hands as I enthuse about infinitives and the variants that Dante used, how we shouldn’t use them as a model for Florentine linguistics. I smile at you warmly before I turn back to your uncle.
At the back of my head I make the decision that Treize would like your uncle Jay; even as I wittily, in my opinion, maintain the conversation, I can see the two of them in my mind’s eye.
He asks me why I know so many languages, yet makes no obvious reference to my lack in English, something that astounds you. I can read and write many languages, but although I speak it competently I can’t read English.
I tell him that my brother is in government so my sister and I spent years travelling with him.
He smiles before he turns back to you. “You’ve caught a good one here, boy, don’t you let him go.”
“Believe me, Sir,” you answer, “I have no intention of.”
For a moment I bask in the warmth of your possessiveness. “Of course,” your uncle continues, “I may have to borrow him; how’s your Ottoman age Polish?” I laugh and answer him in kind.
“Yes, boy,” he laughs, “if you ever let him go, call me, I’ll have to steal him away myself.”
--
The college is dark and cold. The rain slicks down the glass of the windows. Your hair is pressed flat against your face which is still round with puppy fat. Your eyes are large and brilliant against the slickness of your rain soaked skin. Your jeans are moulded to the shape of your thighs, and are tight against your calves. Even your shirt has gotten soaked through your jacket, and you are leaving a pool of water on the tiles of my entrance hall. I don’t know why I invited you in, or even if you just pushed your way in once I opened the door.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” you tell me. Your voice is crisp and firm, and you take a wet squelching step towards me; involuntarily I step back, away from you. “I want to know why.”
I am clutching a towel that I fetched for you close to my chest like a shield, and your eyes have mine in a tight grip. I am frozen in place like a mouse before a cat.
“How did you find me?” I ask - to my knowledge you have only seen me that one night that you smiled at me weeks ago. Obviously I am mistaken.
“Don’t you have an answer for me?” you press. Your eyes flicker with anger and I can smell a heady blend of emotions from you: fury, lust and uncertainty.
“I,” I start, but the words fail me.
“You have chased me and then you run when it looks like you might catch me. More than once I have gone to speak to you and you have walked away. No one even knows your name.” I watch a conflict of emotions as they play across your face. “Have you nothing to say to me?” Your lips are still twitching with anger, and then you step forward, decision made. Your hands clutch the side of my face so I cannot get away and forcing me against the wall you kiss me, hard. Your tongue flickers at my lips demanding entrance and without question I acquiesce.
We stand there for several minutes before your hands tug away the towel in my hands and throw it out of the way. I know I should push you away. I know that I should say no but it has been so long since you smiled at me, and I can taste your pulse on my tongue, your lips are simultaneously soft and firm, I can feel your cock stirring against mine through two ridges of denim. It startles me into action. I pull back. “Duo,” I gasp, “my name is Duo.” With an amazing hunger you catch my earlobe between your teeth. I take a step towards you, accepting the inevitable. “The bedroom’s through there,” I manage, pushing the edges of my fingernails into your scalp.
We don’t make it that far. We tumble to the floor, your hands tugging at the hem of my tee whilst I fumble with your jacket. I’ve never known a hunger like this: I want to devour you, to pull you into my body until I am a part of you. We are writhing against each other like a pair of cats. My tee tangles in my braid as you pull it up, with half of the buttons undone I push your shirt down around your waist and sink my teeth into the cords of your shoulder. Your blood tastes sweet on my tongue as I lap the wound I have made.
You rip open the button-fly of my jeans with an easy jerk of the wrist before you slid your hand inside. I can’t keep the gasp of surprise from my throat, your want is hot and musky, but your hand is cold from the rain. “Duo, my Duo,” you mumble as I arc into your hand.
“Yours,” I manage, all conscious thought driven from my mind with the subtle pressure of your fingertips, the rough skin of the skin between your fingers and thumb I am almost driven insane by the ridges of your palm against my erection.
Your mouth seizes the skin of my throat, to swallow the noises I make before they escape. You savage my throat like an animal, teeth and tongue in perfect harmony.
I do not even bother to undo the zip of your jeans, just slide my hand inside, cupping it over the strength of your erection, treasuring each vein and ridge, the weeping tip and the feel of the crisp hairs against my hand.
We buck against each other’s hands and glue our mouths together, grunting and grasping. I want more- this can never be enough.
I use my free hand and the carpeted floor to pull down my jeans so they pool around my knees to give your hand room to play. “Fuck me,” I gasp into your mouth, “I want you to fuck me.”
Your answering moan gives me spasms. “Soon,” you manage. “Soon.” And with a sputtering aching gasp I come in your hand. You follow soon after, your face contorting, your mouth open and your eyes screwed shut. A delicious red flush spreads across your chest and throat and I feel a second surge of lust knowing that I did that to you.
“Bedroom,” I stammer. “I really want you inside me. I want you so deep I can feel you fucking the back of my throat. I want to feel your hips bang against my ass so hard it bruises.” You can’t answer that so you scoop me into your strong arms and manage the few steps to the bed where you throw me. I take the opportunity to shimmy out of the jeans where they’ve gathered like a shackle about my ankles. For a second you stare at my nakedness sprawled out for you, and I can feel the lust coiling in my belly in a way that I’m sure that I’ve never felt before. I want you. I want you to want me. I want this to never end. Inevitably, though, it must.
--
You asked me once about my parents. I told you the truth, that I couldn’t remember them. I remember nothing before Treize and even after that there are huge gaps in my memory. Treize tells me it’s normal, that there is only so much room in my head for memories. I know the information that is held in the Silver Book because Treize has never withheld it from me, though sometimes I forget those who fell in the Day of Fire. I was recently with Treize and I walked through the gallery and I was hard pressed to remember the name of the little girl who sat on Lucrezia’s lap. We had taken her in because she had nowhere else to go, and there was talk of making her one of us. I had to look up her name, but when I read the name Mariemaia I remembered the smell of lilacs in her hair and the feel of her in my arms when she sat on my knee.
There are very few listings in the histories of your kind about what happened in Prague on the 18th January 1799. Treize, Dorothy and I were in England at the time, following an invitation to winter at a country estate in Derbyshire. It saved our lives.
We had lived in Prague for years, moving between Prague and Rome following the tide of politics as they interested Treize. Lady Une, Lucrezia, Milliardo, Trois, Cat and Mariemaia were left behind in the large townhouse, because it was only a small excursion.
Treize had become very powerful, and like all powerful men he had attracted enemies. His name was Duke Dermail, but you will not find reference of him in your histories. He hired mercenaries from all over Carpathia, a nasty group indeed.
They broke in early in the morning. Mariemaia was in bed with Lucrezia, Milliardo said that they didn’t stand a chance. They cut off their heads and set the bed alight. Trois and Cat were left to the fire, they were on the top floor and they had blocked the doors, trapping them inside.
Milliardo and Une barely escaped with their lives. Une lost her mind, she was very badly hurt and when she slept to heal she didn’t wake up. She still sleeps to this day, in Treize’s palace. She is now a beautiful living statue.
Milliardo came to London; he was badly scarred since fire had burned the left side of his face so it looked like melted wax. He wore a silver mask to cover it. He told us of the treachery of Dermail, of the deaths of our family, of the loss of Une, which I think Treize took hardest of all.
He told us that they had come from Carpathia.
We caught the next ship out.
I do not care to linger on what happened next. Needless to say they were all killed and legends were born of the horrors that we wreaked. What I remember most clearly is licking the blood from Dorothy’s face.
Milliardo coined the phrase the Day of Fire just before he asked Treize to kill him.
They had been together longer than I had been alive.
We are very hard to kill. If not for the rain just after the Day of Fire, Trois, Cat and Lucrezia could have been revived. We only need the ashes and a drop of our blood. Time will heal their wounds. There are ways, however, to end it. The heart must be completely destroyed; a wide wooden stake is best for this. Then the head must be severed. Catholic witch hunters used to send the head and the heart to the Vatican to make sure we could not be revived. The limbs are severed and burnt, the ashes gathered to be kept separate. The chest cavity is split open and the genitals cut away. What is left is thrown to the birds and the beasts. With the heart and the head the body can still be revived but it takes centuries to heal. I think that’s what Treize kept them.
Watching him broke my heart, both Dorothy and I offered to take the burden or to help at least, but he refused. He did it all himself, he gathered the head, heart and lungs in a beautiful wooden box that he carries with him everywhere. We all lost in the Day of Fire, but we lost brothers and sisters. Treize lost the two people who made him whole.
He drove Dorothy and I away, never so far that we couldn’t return, but no longer were we his favoured pets, brought everywhere at his side. Suddenly we were thrust out into the world on our own. The fabulous parties we had fed from no longer invited us in. Unsure what else to do we clung to each other. For a century or more we toured the world. Dorothy favoured theatres to feed, she appears to fall asleep on some man’s shoulder and take her fill. I took to midnight masses.
--
We are at the cinema. It is a film that features all manner of movie monsters, some based on fact, some created by a wary populace. Frankenstein’s monster is portrayed as a lumbering brute. “He was erudite and brilliant in the book,” you whisper in the darkness. Count Dracula amuses me no end. I remember meeting Treize in Paris for a performance of the Resurrection of Lazarus. He wore almost the same outfit then. I picture him pulling his cape over the lower half of his face and waggling his eyebrows like Bela Lugosi. I laugh out loud. You turn the attention away from the painfully bad movie to look at me. You reach out and clutch my hand. “This movie’s awful.” You tell me.
“I know, but we might as well wait it out, there can’t be much more of this rubbish.” I say, turning my hand and twining my fingers through yours.
“I can think of something better to do to waste our time.” You sound mischievous, I turn to look at you, away from the demon hunter on the screen and find myself being kissed. I am forced to agree with you. This is a much better way to waste time- a much better way indeed.
--
I rouse myself from cat cream-satiation and stand beside your bed to look down at where you’re coiled around your pillow, your skin is marbled with rich blue and purple veins and I am reminded of just how long it’s been since I last fed. I swallow convulsively, licking my lips again and again. I can almost taste your blood.
You look like a little boy lying there; the remnants of our lovemaking are raised welts from my nails and cooling on your stomach and thighs. I can feel your semen and excess lubricant seeping out of the crack of my ass. My lips feel swollen and my balls are tender and aching from your touch.
I am torn by my need to stay with you, and my need to feed. The part of me that Treize raised is telling me to feed from you. It is not like I will kill you, or even truly incapacitate you. You would not remember me feeding, and I could use you like so many of the mortals that have shared our lives throughout the years, cultivated for food and sex.
Dorothy’s pet is called Walker, and he has been with her for ten years now. Walker doesn’t know our secret, he never will, no more than Treize’s pet. They are almost furniture, or servants. Their kisses taste of duty.
Yours taste of power and love and fire.
I dress quickly and pay a prostitute for food. She will wake in the hotel room sluggish and well paid. It has been a long time indeed since I killed in my hunger. Then I return to the uptown flat that I share with you, I shower before I climb back into the bed with you.
You roll over and press your head into the curve of my collarbone. “Daisuki da.” You murmur, still mostly asleep. You always talk in Japanese when you’re mostly asleep.
“Ee,” I answer, breathing in the scent of you and our lovemaking, “boku mo da.”