A/N: So this part takes place entirely in Ireland which means...no Klaroline. :( They will, of course, be back in the next section (and Caroline in particular will be heavily featured). Nobody has fun being a vampire on TO or TVD, and so that's what I wanted to explore, to have this lighthearted (if murderous) carousing and show that eternity doesn't have to be all doom and gloom and single man tears.

Also, yes, the book Tim references during the scene between him and Kol in Christchurch Cathedral is a real one. It's called 'Brotherly Love' by Mary Anne Graham.

The title of this fic has been snagged from Yeats' poem: 'On Those That Hated "The Playboy of the Western World".


2014, Dublin

The moon has deigned to show herself tonight, and lies softly on the trees.

The front gate is majestic with that glimmer of imperial silver.

He wraps his fingers round the bars, and cocks his head.

There is a certain hush imparted by mental illness, children come to test their mettle at its gates, men ward their chests with that useless crossing of the breast, woman perhaps feels within her own that instinctive shudder of maternal compassion.

But you can be sure she keeps walking.

You see, the human mind is so fragile.

What does it understand of true psychosis- of course there was that Hannibal chap a few years back who fed his guests only the best and fattest of their friends, of course their televisions blabber at them of this faraway thing, war, but man in all his relative normality will never grasp how his brain can simply crack, and in its gaps develop a fondness for corpses, a taste for murder, a proclivity for children.

You see, darlings, you seal it away not to diagnose it, but to disdain it.

You wish it to wither beneath your collective contempt, and fade as the fashions will, quietly into the next season where better hemlines prevail, and more daring necklines debut.

But he rather likes it.

The psychoses, he means; last season's hemlines were an eye pestilence.

He rips the gate out of the ground with a loud screech, and lets it fall.

He steps over it.

Tim tosses him his bat.

He cracks his neck, and looks up at this fortress of the damned with a smile.

Remember, darlings.

He does ask that you hold all applause until the end.


Here's a tip: you always spread out.

So he is centered squarely between Tim and Enzo (you always frame the handsomest), with just enough space between shoulders to allow for that casual swinging of arm or bat, and the strut that, if executed correctly, takes up just a bit more space than necessary in this world you are about to own.

Tim is smoking.

Enzo checks his hair in one of the windows they pass.

He hefts the bat over his shoulder and begins to whistle some pop tune or another he heard this afternoon on one of the local stations.

Never be afraid to throw in a skip or two, darlings.

You want to have fun and be yourself, after all.

The woman at the front desk looks up with a frown.

He steps forward and gives her his best smile, and she blinks for a moment- yes, darling, he knows, you have to recover a bit from him- and then the eyes skim over his shoulder and flick up to find Tim with his cigarette between his fingers.

"I'm sorry, sir, smoking's not allowed."

He takes the cigarette from Tim and has a good drag on it, then flicks it into the bin beside her desk.

The bat is handed off once more to Tim, and her shoulders gently taken in his hands when she starts up with a yell, and now he leans in and focuses on her eyes until they glass over with his will.

"Just a quick question and a request, darling. Where are your drugs, and I'm going to need a list of your worst offenders. Have you got a good murderer or two for me? A really deranged one. I'm not going to be satisfied with some little crime of passion. Surely someone's calmly cooked and eaten their husband recently, or you've some burgeoning serial killer who dissected their youngest sibling and put them back in the cot so their mother wouldn't know it was them."

"What do you think we're breeding here in Ireland?" Tim asks incredulously.

"Well, over a century ago some of their best stock escaped, and look at you now. I have high hopes."

"We mostly house mentally-ill prisoners."

"Excellent. You must have a few standouts in their midst."

"We do," she says robotically. "The drugs are in some cupboards in the nurse's station. I can give you whatever you need."

"We'll take one of everything. Just direct my friend here to your best." He lets go of her shoulders, and holds out his hand for his bat, nodding at Tim.

The bin is beginning to crackle in earnest now, the flames tonguing over the lip of it to take swipes at the polished wooden desk.

Tim swings his rucksack from his shoulder and begins to indiscriminately sweep little bottles and syringes from the cupboard she unlocks; Enzo leans his shoulder against the wall beside him, looking amused. He nods at one of the bottles. "Mate, if you can take two of those and come out the other side still ready for whatever murder party this is all inevitably going to turn into, I'll eat your hat."

"You will not eat my hat," Tim replies, sounding affronted.

He lets himself into the rooms the woman helpfully unlocks for him, and to each of his new recruits says to just do what comes naturally to them, don't worry, darlings, about what offense the Garda might take, think of the headlines, why settle for the merely infamous when you can have the famous, that Hannibal chap got his own show, after all-

The desk is on fire when he ambles back down the hallway with the woman at his side.

Tim and Enzo have snacked on two caretakers he sees when he rounds the desk, and Tim takes out his gun now and blows half of either's neck away, to hide the fang marks.

He turns to the woman.

He's not Nik, so he doesn't bother caressing her cheek, or offering those slithery reassurances of the serpent to poor gullible Eve.

He smashes in her face with the bat, and leaves her still gurgling on the floor.

The patients precede them into the night.

He throws his arm fondly round Tim as he watches them go, and kisses the corner of his mouth.

"Well, what did you get?" Tim asks him, looping an arm round his own neck, and wiping what must be some of the woman's blood from his chin. He sticks his thumb in his mouth, and sucks it off.

"One shot his mother to death after she refused to bang him; another ate his friend's penis, and you'll have to wait for the news to find out what the third and fourth did."

"Ah, Jaysus. Good-bye, me fair Dublin," Tim sighs wistfully.


He's a bit out of practice, but he divvies up the lines quite neatly with the bank card he's taken from the wallet of the man who should have known better anyway, drug dealing, darling, it always comes back to bite you in the ass.

Or rip out your throat.

Tim's eyes water when he takes his first sniff, but he coughs, tips back his head, wipes what residual white is left under his nose, and knocks back a good several lines.

They are chased by a large swig of Jameson and a handful of pills from one of the bottles scattered across the floor.

"What are those?" he asks, snagging a few from Tim before he can put them back.

"Dunno."

They knock the bottle necks of their respective alcohols, and switch for a moment, he tipping back a long drink of Tim's Jameson, Tim his Boru.

Enzo dumps another gram of cocaine onto the table. "Gentlemen; don't make a friend feel like a third wheel," he says, and holds out his hand for the bank card.

He gives Enzo the smile that has been known to spontaneously combust more than a few undergarments. "You're welcome to join in at any time."

Tim hunches his shoulders, and swigs half the Jameson.


They crash three cars into several downtown buildings, steal one of the coaches from Bus Eireann's main station, drive it into that quaint little pond just inside Stephen's Green, set the worst of the street performers on fire with one of his own torches.

He believes (it's all a bit of a haze) at least three statues are the worse for wear, Croke Park was privy to some of the best sex he's ever had (Tim is quite aggressive with a dozen lines and that unknowable combination of pharmaceuticals in him), and at least one old woman had her common decency compromised by stunned observance of said best sex of his life.

Someone is drowned in the Liffey; he doesn't remember the man's face.

Anyway, they were only playing. Is it his fault humans are so delicate?

Tim dies twice, once by vomit (terrible thing to choke on), the second by his own hand, when they decide, giggling, to shoot a bottle of bourbon off his head.

Enzo goes into some kind of convulsions, sweating out his vices, so they helpfully store him in the freezer of one of those twenty four hour stores of convenience, and hide behind a shelf of crisps waiting for the clerk to find him.

Tim keeps having to stifle his giggles.

"Shh, darling," he whispers, trying not to laugh.

There is the occasional patter of the late-night customer, the bored clacking of the clerk's nails, that restless shifting of all the little miscellaneous products which are at the mercy of employees' pressing boredom.

The tension has gone out of the wait, so Tim begins kissing his neck.

For a moment he retains his vigilance, trying to keep his mind divided, the one half attentive, the other titillated, but you know him, to anything with the prefix 'tit' goes his attention, so he turns round and grabs Tim by the hips and they all but collapse onto the crisps shelf, leaning all their weight against it as they kiss each other frantically, all the finesse sanded off by drink and drug.

One of the shelves collapses; the crisp packets avalanche across the floor.

Tim steps on three of them, trying to get out of the way in time, and falls back against a rack of biscuits.

He blurts out several laughing curses righting it.

"You ok?" the clerk calls out, narrowing her eyes at them when they peek out from behind the shelf.

"We're just looking, thank you."

"Thanks a million," Tim adds, clearing his throat when another laugh threatens. He presses his lips together and awkwardly scratches the back of his neck.

"Well, what the hell was that, then?"

"Don't worry, darling, we'll pay for it all. And clean it up. Would you mind adding one of the lollies out of that freezer near the front to my tab? I'll just start on this, then," he tells her innocently, and bends to begin gathering up crisp packets, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She's not pleased, but it isn't as though she's anything else to do, so with a little huff she rounds the counter, and clicks across the floor to the freezer where Enzo lies in blue repose beneath some of those horrid microwave chips and several cartons of Ben and Jerry's.

They abandon all pretense of their clean-up to watch her prize up the lid.

She drops it with a scream.

Enzo is collected before the Garda can arrive, Tim laughing so hard he stumbles on three cobblestones, trying to navigate through his tears, and nearly drops Enzo's feet.

"Fuck me," he wheezes as they sprint down an alley, Enzo's thawing corpse here and there offering to the cobblestones a loud plink to nearly drown the whispers of the pursuing cops.

"Well, somebody had a good night," a man calls from the entrance to Temple Bar, and Tim almost vomits up the rest of his Jameson at the look that follows when suddenly there materializes behind them a good half dozen Garda.

The Temple Bar district has shed a good portion of its tourists at this hour of the morning, but they've still a few drunken stragglers to push through, and him bearing more than half of Enzo's awkwardly-positioned weight as Tim succumbs to another fit of laughter, tripping over the curb they hurtle.

"Coming through, lads!" he hollers, and drops Enzo's feet. "Aw, shit, lad! Keep going! They're right behind us!"

It's surely a curious scene to those not too sloshed to look up from their mugs and spot some tipsy idiot making increasingly clumsy grabs for the heels of a man who looks suspiciously pale, even for Ireland, while his friend labors on flawlessly, both his hands still snugly beneath the frosty armpits, half the city's police force in torch-brandishing pursuit.


Next day Enzo has pressing business with a particularly bendy lady friend, so he decides to put to use some of that gentlemanly conduct Elijah spent untold centuries beating into him, and takes Tim on a date.

They're sharing a hotel room, but he knocks politely on the door anyway, and waits with his present behind his back for Tim to open it.

"I stole this especially for you," he tells him, and holds up the pistol he plucked from a militant's stash he went all the way to Derry to loot, a little squeeze of shyness suddenly in his breast as Tim turns it in his hands.

"You didn't have to do that."

He looks down with a smile at his toes. "Do you like it?"

"It's grand, me love," Tim replies, and when he looks up, the whole face is lit up beneath the hat.


They kick in the doors of the Bank of Ireland just before opening hours.

"I'm going to need whatever money you have in the cash drawers. And the safe," he compels one employee while Tim holds the other five at gun point. "Now, darlings, I can't say you won't be hurt. I don't like to make promises I might not be able to keep." He hops up onto the counter, and holds out his arms to either side. "But I promise we're all going to have a good time."

The doors are blocked.

Two of them make it; the rest do not.

Celebratory blow jobs for everyone!

Well, not those damp survivors who look just a little too troubled for any more fun. Humans can only take so much, after all.

But he's sure they enjoy watching.

In front of Trinity College, they empty their bag of euros into the air, and watch friend turn suddenly upon friend, all those inventive uses of what puny human tools they can transform into weapons.

He sees one old woman skewer a young student's hand with the tip of her umbrella.

Someone is shoved into the street, and splattered all over the front of a bus.

"I feel just as Robin Hood must have."

"Well, there's your good deed for the year," Tim says, and claps him on the back.

"Didn't I just commit one? I'm a more humane human than most humans themselves."

Tim grabs him by the head, and bends down to kiss it, keeping his chin on the spot for a moment afterward, and at least having himself a good smirk over his superior height if he's got no other advantages to flaunt. "Come on, then, Saint Kol. I'll compel you a drink."


It takes a mere three days for at least one of his escapees to repay his kindness.

Tim is watching the television in their room when he comes in one blustery Thursday afternoon, shaking the rain from his hair, and from his beard wiping those little leftovers of a particularly tender snack.

"Your handiwork, I'm guessing?" Tim asks, and inclines his head at the screen.

"-found with half his face eaten away just days after the escape from Central Mental Hospital of Liam Cullen, notorious for his 2008 attack of a local Dublin man, in which he stabbed and removed the victim's penis, and then…consumed it."

He smiles.

He ducks back out into the rain with Tim at his side, just to test the atmosphere, to revel in that strange weight which enough people can lend to the very air when they have to the very roots of them been shaken by this fundamental truth of mankind.

The sheep is always a mask, darlings.

It's happened not far from their hotel, happily; just a quick jaunt round the corner and there's the bright tape, and the grim Garda, and in clumps those huddled rubber-neckers who challenge the rain just for their dose of tragedy.

He feels the whoosh of Enzo's arrival against his neck. "You're a fast worker, mate."

"I've got good instincts for which ones will pay out quickly. I'm handy at horse races." He claps once. "Speaking of which! Anyone want to head down to the track for the evening? We could steal a few of the horses. Take them steeple chasing." He mimes clearing a few hedges with his hand.

Tim has taken a step back, so that it's just he and Enzo shoulder to shoulder now, and slips both hands into his pockets, hunching the broad shoulders as he always does when he's out of sorts.

"What's wrong with you?" he asks, turning to lightly kick Tim's ankle with the toe of his boot.

"Nothing," he says, and takes out his cigarettes. "I don't like horses, that's all."

"You mean you're scared of them."

"Sure, I'm the eejit for wantin' to keep a safe distance between meself and something can kick the bollocks into me throat because it didn't like its shadow."

He nudges Enzo's shoulder with his own. "Let's gently peer pressure him into stealing the first one."

Tim scowls at him, unlit cigarette in his mouth, and his hands searching out the elusive lighter among his various pockets.

He unearths it from his own, and holds it out.

"You could ask, before you take it."

"I could. I prefer a light scolding. How are things with oh-what's-her-name-again?" he asks Enzo, stealing Tim's hat and settling it rakishly on his own head. Keeps a few of the larger drops out of his eyes, at least.

He skips back a step when Tim tries to take it from him.

"Still bendy," Enzo tells him. "She has a few friends, actually."

"Just as bendy?" he asks, ducking Tim's grab once more.

"Oh yeah," Enzo replies, with an intriguing touch of appreciation in his voice. "And everything's also still supernaturally…bouncy for its age. Actually, if you're interested, they're throwing a party tonight. Something like a 'rave', they told me?"

"No party starts until I get there." He grabs Tim's hands and traps them against his chest. "What do you think, darling? Shall we watch these nubile mummies play the trampoline to Enzo's…tramopliner?" He cocks his head. "How old are they, anyway?"

"Somewhere in the 300 range. None of them would tell me exactly."

"I like my meat a little fresher," he says, and roughly slaps Tim's ass. "But I'd be happy to watch." He gives Enzo that particular smile once more, and the slow pass of the eyes which lingers in all the right spots.


Enzo's ladies have commandeered a bar in one of the rougher areas of Dublin, a neighborhood which a mortal man might turn up his collar at, and hurry his way through all those premonitory flinchings of the neck which always senses first the tiptoe of the reaper.

But he flashes the bundle of euros he's pinched from he doesn't remember where, and twirls Tim's watch like any idiot sightseer, because what's the fun, darlings, in wearing his immortality in those substandard tints of the mortal eye?

He snorts nearly six grams from some man's eternally firm stomach, and coaxes Tim into licking a shot from his belly button.

There's the blurring of the walls, the strangely saturated faces with their blares of red lips, blue eyes, the nervous jolting of his heart and all the hairs on edge every time he is brushed by a wandering hand, the floor revolves, the faces smear-

He sniffs another line.

There isn't anything for it but to take off his shirt (too many admirers, darlings, with all their centuries to mourn), and spinning it above his head, he tosses it across the bar and throws his arms over his head.

Enzo is nicely competent at staying on the beat, even with a glass of whatever cocktail it is he's been abusing all night in his hand, not a drop spilled as they both jostle against one another, hands in the air, Enzo's high glittering in his eyes and warm in his cheeks, the floor wobbling, wobbling, till he must place his feet a little more carefully, and grip the hips of the girl who's clearly been waiting all night for him to take such initiative.

She leans back against him, and loops her arms round his neck.

He sets his chin on her shoulder and jerks his head at Tim, who is sitting by himself at the bar nursing what isn't nearly enough whiskey to stir his party beast, as they say.

He thinks.

"Come on, Tim."

He shakes his head and then ducks it, shifting his feet a bit on the stool. "No thanks."

"Come on."

He laughs a little. "I can't dance."

He takes the girl by the wrist, and spins her under his arm, her hair whipping him, raising little goosebumps everywhere it touches down, and over her shoulder Tim's eyes, so bloody blue, the lashes not merely black but onyx, raven, whatever cheap thesaurus violation now escapes his muzzy head, the spots of alcohol like cosmetic in his cheeks, the lips freshly apple-poisoned-

"You're very handsome," he calls out, and with the girl's back against him once more, he props his hands on both her shoulders and crooks either finger at Tim.

"Oh, sure, and you're caked off your bin."

"I don't know what you've just said to me." He spins the girl again.

She gives his chest a thorough groping.

Tim does not appear overly pleased.

"But I do know you're very handsome, I'm very handsome, we should combine our handsomeness right now, on this dance floor. There will be a spotlight. It will highlight these just right." He gestures to his abs. "And everyone will applaud us, and throw their panties at us."

"I told you I can't dance, you lunk."

"Yes you can. I've seen you."

"Not like that. I don't do the-" He flaps his hand around. "-the arms in the air, just fucking about dancing. I'm too long. I look like I'm having a seizure."

He hears Enzo let out a cheer behind him, and something shatters.

Onstage, two men are feeding from a woman, who has a hand down both their trousers.

The men taste her blood off one another's tongues.

The song fades away; he feels the next begin its infant vibrations in the floor.

There is a shifting of the crowd, the press of sweaty body against sweaty body, he catches another whiff of cocaine, the brisk sting of some apple cocktail trod into the floorboards, that roaring of the blood which, up in so many throats, and brisk in the breasts, smites, Zeus-like, his ears.

He lets go of the girl and turns round to dance with Enzo for a moment.

There is a girl to either side of him, and a drink in either of his hands.

They pass them back and forth, and he finds when he sips from one that they're spiked with something he doesn't recognize, and shudders his way through a jolt that reaches his very tiptoes, the veins for a moment surfacing underneath his eyes, and the nape hairs staticy with his pleasure.

He leaps round in time to the music to face Tim once more.

"Tim. Tiiiiim. Timothy. Patrick. Pat. Paddy."

Tim looks down at his feet, but he's laughing.

"I don't know what to do with 'O'Sullivan'." He joins in one of those shrill "whooooo!"s which originate who knows precisely where, and catch like fever.

He slicks his hair back and glides his way through something Youtube tells him is called a 'moon walk'.

He plants one foot and pivots crisply, pointing at Tim with both fingers, and jabbing them in time to the music, throwing his arms up once more and leaning now to either side with those little pulses that a lesser man could never pair with that Latin gyration of the hips that has felled far more pious men.

Tim shakes his head, but he's laughing.

"Come on, darling." He goes back to gesturing with his fingers. "Come on, Tim. Tim. Tim. Timmy."

"Ah, fine, fine," Tim says, and knocks back the rest of his drink.

Tim blurs into the crowd.

He tosses up his arms in triumph and blasts off another "Whoo!" in Tim's ear that must nearly take the poor thing off.

"You're off tonight," he says, draping his arms round Tim's neck, letting his fingers tangle in the little kick of hair at the nape.

"I'm all right."

"All right. Then loosen up." He grabs Tim's arms and flaps them about for a moment, hitting some nearby girl in the face, to which Tim stammers out an apology, and then cuffs him good-naturedly upside the head.

He sets Tim's hands on his hips, just above the waistband of his jeans, so he can feel the fingers warm on his bare skin, and savor how the cocaine has flayed the first layer of him, and left his nerves singing at a brush.

He smells the hot pulse of the woman whose boyfriend has set her roughly on the bar, and kneels now with his head between her legs, teeth in her thigh, the sweaty musk of her arousal, the under layers of hard alcohol, soft vanilla-

He watches the pulse in Tim's neck, and imagines what it would be to suck at it, to feel the fine tendons flex beneath his lips, and the lean hips push into his own, experience with all his fresh senses the cock stirring against his own, and the hands clench holes in his hips-

He trails the very point of his tongue up the side of Tim's neck, and listens to his breathing change.

The crowd knocks them apart for a moment.

The lights blind him for the three startled seconds it takes him to blink the spots from his eyes, and then another flash of the strobe paints their faces in carnival relief, he sees a syringe change hands, a man latch onto his partner's neck, the blind ecstasy which for a moment grips a woman's face in the blissful aftermath of her latest line, and he bumps once more into Tim.

He feels the hands on his face a moment after they touch him.

He loses all his rhythm when Tim kisses him, and for a moment just stands with his head back, blinking up at him.

Someone presses the needle into his hand.

He injects Tim first when he holds out his arm, missing the vein twice while Tim sucks on his earlobe, and he feels the reverberations all the way into his toes.

It's vampire blood, he realizes as he presses the needle smoothly into his skin and pushes what he hasn't already emptied into Tim through the vein. Not as intimate as taking it directly from the throat, but the rush is instant, he feels his head reel, his cock twitch, the bar tilts, Tim grows a halo beneath his hat.

He doesn't quite remember the rest of the night.

He does recall racing Tim through approximately ten grams of cocaine, and licking he knows not whose blood from Tim's stomach.

The hotel afterward, another needle, the brief fire of the cocaine in his nostrils, and somewhere in the furthest depths of his fuzziest memories, Tim's cock inside him, and prior, past, he doesn't remember, but he does see the two of them stripped to the skin, drinking from Enzo, while on the bed his bendy lady friends rabidly enjoy one another.

Some unidentifiable knot on the bed, his limbs entangled with a stranger's, Tim kissing his neck, what he mistily identifies as a mouth on his cock, and a clit under his tongue-

He comes to beside four people he has never seen before.

There is a dead woman on the floor.

Tim is still high.

No one else is yet conscious, but the dead woman gets quite a show, if he says so himself.


It's later discovered they did not go home with Enzo, but after those ten grams rampaged their way through what at best guess was a good dozen pubs, three of which they were ousted from for indecent liberties with one another and, in one memorable instance, a particularly discomfited man in a leprechaun costume.

The dead woman Enzo can't identify.

The man they picked up from a gay bar.

But he is flattered, boys, that they pictured him in the very depths of their depravities.

"Was the man we picked up from the gay bar ugly?" he asks with concern.

"I wouldn't have taken him home," Enzo replies.

"Did I fuck him?"

"No, no, lad; I remember most of it. You only fucked me," Tim assures him, and he lets out a breath. "I think someone had your cock in their mouth, though, and there was a lass- Jaysus, boyo, we're not good addicts."

"But I didn't fuck the ugly man? Was he sucking my cock?"

"No, no, wait- I think it was me."

"Who had his cock sucked by the ugly man? That's a relief."

"No- who sucked your cock, eejit."

"You were kissing my neck. I remember that.

"But I don't think you're remembering it in sequence. We were fecking round, we did drink from some lad, and he drank from us-"

"So there was another vampire there?"

Enzo shakes his head, looking amused. "I was with you up until you left for the hotel. There was no other vampire, mate."

"So we imagined him, then?" Tim asks.

"You're sure there was another man, and he was ugly?"

Tim points at him. "I told you not to take that whole bloody bottle of pills you stole off that man in Temple Bar! You didn't even know what they were."

"You stole them, darling."

Tim opens his mouth, snaps it shut, fusses with his hat. "Jaysus. Jaysus, lad."


Ah, he does look better, with the fresh shine of Ireland on him, and the brother gone from his shoulders.

And walking the boardwalk railing with just his hands, legs straight above him, the one hand preceding the other, just as certain sure as the sober boots on the cobblestones, and all the little wee ones gathering for a gawp, holding their breaths for the Liffey's triumphant taste.

Enzo joins him for most such shows, so he leaves the lads to their preening, walking away down the boardwalk to smoke in peace, and turning himself round from time to time to mother hen the worst of their antics.

"Don't you be stabbin' him!"

Worse than a child, the fecker.

But, ah, he does look happy. When a man's fresh-polished with it, and shines from his eyes and his cheeks, you know it's no actor's sham, and sure the heart's struck nearly clean out of you by it.

Even if-

Oh, lad.

He sees the eyes you're making at their new friend, and do you think he doesn't know what it means for him, then?

He draws in the smoke, bit more shaky than the last hit, and holds it in his lungs.

You have a good time with the timid lad, until you don't.

He turns up his collar.

The clouds let a trickle down his neck, the wind takes a swipe for his hat, the eejits get a good shaking from this midday gust, and tangle the legs with a laugh.

He pulls his hat a little lower and strolls away with the hands in his pockets, rolling the fag from one side of his mouth to the other.


"It's called 'youtube'. You can find just about anything you want on here, except porn. You can find that too, they just normally take it down pretty quickly."

Kol tips the laptop he lifted off some lad in a Starbucks toward Enzo. "You see, we type in, for instance…'Donald Trump singing wig' and voila, darling- just look at all those results."

"Who's Donald Trump?" Enzo asks, leaning over the table to squint at the laptop.

"Donald Trump would be so disappointed in you."

He shakes his head with a laugh, knocks back a good pull of the Guinness he's set on the edge of the pool table, adjusts his hat, eyes the cue ball and that pesky striped little six that's eluded all his best shots, the smug motherfucker.

"Now type in 'pole dancing bear'. Go on," Kol encourages.

"Fuck me," he blurts out when the cue ball glances off the six and gently taps instead the three. You go on and fuck yourself now, do you hear him, then?

Floor must be uneven, of course, he thinks, and rocks the table a little to test it. Ah, yeah, you can hear the little clunk earlier on the one side than the other, and Mick behind the bar there, he's got the conspiracy glint in his eye, you can smell the scheming nearly thick as the beer.

"What the hell are you doing, Tim?" Kol calls out to him from the other side of the pub, shooting him an amused look and lounging back in the booth with his hands behind his head.

"The floor's fucked. It's not level."

"No, darling, you're just awful." He nods toward the table. "Come and look at this."

"I'm concentrating."

"On what? You're playing yourself and still losing."

He extends his middle finger. "Why don't you sit on this and twist until it tears something?"

"You don't have to get touchy, darling. It's not going to make you any better at pool."

"Fuck you," he says amicably enough, and leans over the table once more, measuring the heft of his stick, and with a squint of his eyes judging the distance between the cue ball and that cunt of a six.

"Cat call him," Kol suggests to Enzo. "He always gets all red and it ruins his focus. But don't sound too serious about it, or else I'll get jealous and have to kill you."

"Thanks, but I'm not tight roping that line, mate."

Kol wolf whistles. "What's a boy like you doing in a place like this? I want to lick everywhere that makes you sweat."

"Shut up, you."

"Excellent comeback, darling. How does the next part go? Is it one of those 'your mama' jokes?"

He waves him off with the stick, readjusting his hat, and giving that six the eye, fasten down on your knickers, lad, it's him and you, and he's the fresh crick cracked out of his neck, and they sing the ballads of his grip-

Well and the beau seems to like it well enough.

"You don't even know what a 'your mama' joke is, lad," he says, and fires away.

"Fuck!" he snaps.

"Your mama is so fat she sat on a rainbow and Skittles popped out of it. Also, she was better at pool than you."

The bartender's away helping some lad along to at least the two sheets, so he picks up that six and hurls it right at Kol's head, and of course the hand flashes out nimbly and catches it a good few inches from his face, the smug shit grin splitting the handsome cheeks.

Kol hooks his wrist in a perfect hoop shot that nets the six in the left corner pocket.

"I hate you," he sighs.

"Neither one of us believes that, darling."

"Fine. But don't you be talking about me ma."

"She would have liked me," Kol muses. "I'm always a big hit with parents."

"Right. You must charm the pants right off them."

"Actually, yes. There was one woman -this must have been, oh, I can't even remember how long ago it was- you could see right away where she'd got her looks soon as you glimpsed her mother and father. Anyway, they all loved me. And I do mean loved me."

He cocks one of his eyebrows at Kol, leaning on his stick. "Three students at Trinity College the first time I enrolled, back in the 20s. They were all straight, big strapping jocks, the lot of them."

Kol cocks his head. "And how did you manage that? I mean, other than the obvious, which is 'just look at you'."

"Don't you be kissin' me arse. You won't be smoothin' over your jabs that easily."

Kol mimes a prick in his mouth, and smirks at him.

"Anyway, they were always picking on me, and I got sick of it."

"So you made them all gay?" Enzo asks.

"I taught him well," Kol adds.

"Will you be telling the story for me, then? I joined the boxing club, and beat the right shit out of them. When you do that enough times, a man either kills you, or he respects you."

"So little Timmy Underdog boxed his way to admiration, and then in a twist worthy of only the best gay porns, they all took turns bending over a locker room bench for you."

"Am I telling the story, or are you?"

"I've already told it in my head. You massaged a bottle of oil all over your chest, while they emptied their water bottles over their heads and stood like statues as the droplets highlighted all their best gym work. Then they formed an orderly circle around you, and you all took turns making out with one another, very slowly, very leisurely, while you stroked one another's cocks. Then you fucked them all, realized with a pang in your heart that none of them could possibly measure up to a certain handsome English boy, and ate them. The end." He shifts a little in his seat.

"Is that how all your stories about me sexual conquests end?"

Kol wiggles his eyebrows at him. "I don't see you with any of them now."

"All right, boys, stop flirting. I need to know what 'Puh-wa-ned' means." Enzo interrupts, tilting the laptop screen toward Kol.

He glances over at it. "Oh; it's pronounced 'powned', darling." He blurs to the pool table, snatches the stick for himself, and in half a second clears the whole bloody surface, and giving to the chalked end of the stick a whiff of the cooling breath, he straightens up with a wink. "It's what I've done to Tim just now."

Then there's the hands on his collar, and a smacker to the lips leaves him a bit glazed, and Kol tells them, "This place is dead. Let's go somewhere we can find things to break," and saunters right out the door.


The bartender smiles widely at her, of course.

They're always besotted on sight, silly little humans.

Not that she blames them, of course.

Just look at her hair.

"Did two idiots pass through here?" she asks him without compulsion, leaning just perfectly on the counter, so her arms present her breasts with even more perk than nature has lent and never taken away.

He laughs. "You're going to have to be more specific than that, I'm afraid."

"One of them is Irish, tall, about twenty or so, dresses like an old man. He'd have an Englishman with him, a few inches or so shorter, looks like an insufferable ass?"

"Doesn't every Englishman?" he asks, giving her a sly little smile as he wipes down the counter. "I've been to England. You'll have a much better time of it here, lass."

She touches his arm, and leans forward with a smile, looking up from beneath her eyebrows just as Nik has for centuries snared supernatural and man alike. "I'm certain I will. But first I need to know if they came through here. It's very important."

"Had a couple of men in just an hour or so ago who could have been the ones you're looking for. Big lad, playing pool in the corner, had on one of those old man hats. Didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him, but he was talking to someone in one of the booths. There were three of them, though, not two."

"Three?"

"Yeah. The place won't start picking up till later tonight, so there were only half a dozen or so in at the time, so I remember them. There were two men sitting in that booth over there." He points helpfully. "They had a laptop. Ordered just a couple of drinks. They both had English accents. Then there was the Irish lad; he had a Guinness. Good man."

"Did you hear a name or anything like that? Perhaps where they were heading after this?"

"One of them called the Irish lad 'Tim'. I don't know where they were off to."

She gives him her sunniest smile. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."

For that she kills him quickly.

And Mother says there isn't a humane bone left in her body.


He remembers when the Helga sailed on up the Liffey bold as your brass bollocks.

That was when Dublin realized, oh shitsey daisy, these British lads mean business.

There was that day what the good and faithful optimistics of Ireland call 'rain shine'; you could see the Liffey confused with it, here the dimpling of the drops, there the sun flirting with that green and murksome surface, all coy, so, you could tell the ol' bitch was after breaking a man's heart, and himself just sitting on the railing of the Ha'Penny, watching her flee before this awesome portent of Dublin's own End Days.

He was mostly still human himself, and he thought, with Kol and the mother still fresh inside him, oh, the feckless mortality of all his bloody favorites.

He had himself a cigarette.

He checked out the arse of the lad who scrambled out of the GPO after his friend.

He watched the guns open with a roar, felt beneath him the trembling of the railing, heard from inside Dublin's tenements the shrieking of the dumbstruck mothers.

Over the side of the railing went the cigarette.

Onto the balls of his new and acrobatic feet, balancing there fine as you please, hands in the pockets, hat cinematically rakish on his head.

He'd never seen any sort of building defeated like that before, you stood there looking up at them all day, they started to fade into that sort of peripheral mist by which all life passes you by, if you're not careful, there was the eternal shadow crouching on your shoulders, and altering in the sweetest of grannies the cut of the cheekbones, so's in the one eye the perdition of Hyde, and in the other the fresh gullibility of Jekyll, and then-

Oh, Jaysus, he heard the loudest sound of all his twenty-five years.

He saw one of the flat windows explode, and the curtains billow in this artificial wind, and he'd fucking swear a left nut to you, Dublin herself flinched, old stones, they know, a fine sight smarter than 85% of your damn voting public anyway, and Dublin, oh, she felt it in her bones.

He was on his 18th cigarette when the GPO gave a dusty gray sigh, and buckled.

Like a fecked cake, he thought, and started to cry.

And can you picture it, some old granny, she comes toddling on out to him with a blanket, and shoos him down off the railing, and he's got the snot smeared practically down to his knees, and his eyes blind with the soot, he forgets to smell her neck, and slaver after her blood, he's led to the stoop of some shop, and sat down like a child while she fetches what tea and biscuits haven't been pinched by the looters.

"She'll come through it; she'll come through it," the old woman keeps telling him, resettling the blanket on his shoulders, and making sure the tea is, if not piping, at least enough to warm the cherry out of his nose.

"My son's in there," she tells him as the GPO catches fire. "She'll come through it."

Father, give me a sign, and I'll wrap me cock in rosaries and drain the wild goats out the Ring of Kerry. They're real fuckers anyway, he thought.

And he did wait.

The old woman caught a stray bullet, and he tried to think of the goats, and how Jesus, if he disapproved of all that lying with man and whatnot, must surely frown at the eating of His most pious followers, but, ah, reason with any starving lad.

She was a bit stale. He remembered Kol mentioning that, how the old ones were always a little more…chewy, you had to shake down the first sips, smack the lips, let the nape skin shiver just a little like any boy trying to get down his cold remedies, till the instincts took you by the bollocks and gave you a right good shake and said listen here, lad, don't you be turning your nose up at a meal.

Children somewhere are starving.

He held her nicely enough afterward, with his wet face buried in her shawl.

He takes a draw from his fag, and blows it out away from the boardwalk, letting his right leg dangle down off the railing, toward the water.

He was still so bloody young.

He didn't know, cities don't die like that, nationality doesn't die like that, history will never build a big enough gun, no mother will birth the required ambition, and those bloody Irish- go on and knock them down, they'll take your fecking head off.

The cigarette's got a final exhale in it, and then he flicks it over the side, into the Liffey.

He hears a cheer behind him, turns to see the ridiculous boat lorry with its load of tourists proudly wearing their Viking helmets, who point to him and wave.

He feels, occasionally, one of those fond pangs you get for eejit children when the humans look at him like he's just a lad, oh a daft one to be sure, dressed like their grandfather, but harmless enough, handsome young man, and puppy-like in the eyes, you could trust your sister to him, or take him home to the mother.

The boat lurches away into traffic; the city swallows their shrieks.

He hops down from the railing, dodges the young man who comes begging for a euro, in right bits, you can tell he is, and away down the boardwalk he goes, making for O'Connell bridge, where the pedestrians are shoulder to shoulder, and he can see in their midst a young thief flitting between pockets, lifting anything the tourists haven't nailed down.

Sun's out today, and all manner of white-cheeked peekaboo playing about the arse end of the shorts. They'll be sporting the Irishman's tan tomorrow; thank Christ he's dead.

He rolls up his sleeves.

O'Connell Street melds smoothly into Westmoreland, and he lets himself be jostled gently along, past Trinity College, past the Irish Whiskey Museum, up onto Grafton where there are the lads in their black paint, perfectly motionless, some of the tourists stopping for a gasp when there's a cry let out by the quickest of them: "No, they're real people!" and the locals on about their business, never you mind the fiddlers, the jugglers, the beggars, here's Jim with his accordion and oh Jaysus, Benny's back with the violin, and the man from Bolivia tottering round on his sticks just outside Stephen's Green.

He sees a lad depriving some chatty tourist of her purse contents while she gobs on to her friend, and is that how a gentleman's after acting, then?

He punches the man in the face, and snags the wallet before it hits the cobblestones.

There are a few cries when the man drops, and the best of the Samaritans rushing to his side, wondering was it the heart felled him (he landed that hook right quick, and anyway, who would go punching a man in broad daylight like that, when he's not got enough pub in him to deserve it), and bless her dumb heart, the lass just blathering right on to her friend, never the wiser to her lighter purse, her cursing thief, his bleeding knuckles.

He slips the wallet back into her purse.

But as Fate would decree it, he's pressed in by a group of fellas in fine suits, and shuttled along down the road trapped here where there are too many eyes for the quick nip up to one of the empty side streets, and the lass' voice muffles everything fine and decent in this rare yellow day.

"I know, but some of their signs, like, aren't even in English. And yesterday I'm trying to get a sandwich, and I can barely understand the dumb bitch anyway, and then she asks me if I want crisps with it, and she holds up a package of chips. They're fucking chips, bitch. Did you know their pancakes aren't really pancakes, either? They're more, like, crepes or something. And if I'm going to eat crepes, I'd rather do it in Paris, you know, not some buttfuck nowhere hole where everything looks like mold. What shit. My parents agree to pay for my whole trip abroad, and they can't even bother to send me to like, France, I get goddamned Ireland and I'm supposed to act like this is some kind of opportunity of a lifetime?"

He slides his forefinger and middle carefully back into her purse, and helps himself to the wallet once more, lifting it silently between these two fingers.

The passport he leaves.

Christ forbid she encounter any difficulties on her way out the fucking door.

He rifles through the wallet, takes the whole mess of the euros and the dollars and distributes them throughout his pockets, leaves the cards in their slots, walks away with his hands in his pockets.

Kol has fecked off somewhere with Enzo, but he's left three voicemails and a text detailing their rampage through the city, if and he's up for a bit of fun.

The latest places them at Panti's, a gay bar down Capel street, where he finds them drunk on cocktails and dancing with three lesbians.

"You're Lindsay Meyer today," he says, and flips the wallet at Kol, who still catches it without a fumble, pissed off his ass and with either arm around a lesbian.

"Have you been robbing people without me?"

"Just charge something really expensive to the cards."

Kol has fished the girl's license from one of the pockets. "Oooh- nice, Timothy. Is she still among us?"

"Yes."

One of the lesbians is drunkenly trying to dance with him.

Kol pulls her back by the collar of her shirt. "No, no, darling. He needs to be very drunk for that. And it would help enormously if you had a cock."

"I'm transitioning, if that helps," one of the girls says, giving him a wink.

He ducks his head and scratches at the back of his neck. "No, no, that's all right. I just came here to talk to me friend."

"Friend, friend, or friend friend?" another one wants to know.

"We're fucking," Kol elaborates, swaying just a little.

"Oh, this is the one you were telling us about, then," one of the girls says, and hands him another drink.

He knocks it back smoothly.

"I'd fuck him if I were straight," the girl on Kol's left says in approval.

"Right?"

"Who are we today?" Enzo asks, having listened in from the bar, and popping over now to take a look at the wallet Kol is going through, his arms still hooked around the necks of the girls.

"Tim robbed some girl called Lindsay Meyer."

"You're a pickpocket?"

"Usually just when someone really deserves it, darling. Maybe she was taller than him?"

"Or she asked him out."

"Oh, you lads stop teasing him. You've got him quite red enough, anyway, you arseholes."

"Thank you for your concern, darling, but I don't take orders. Not even when their bearer is astonishingly beautiful."

"And gay," the girl replies, cocking an eyebrow at him. She smacks him across the chest with the back of her hand. "And don't you be flirting with me in front of your boyfriend!"

"Well I'm off," he interrupts, before Kol can respond, and pivots round to step back out into the sunshine.

Kol has followed him into the street. "Are you mad at me?"

He turns round to face him, the hands in the pockets once more, one of them fiddling with the watch, click tick click, but he knows the lad's wise to that, so he leaves off his fussing and makes a fist of his awkward fingers, wondering can his friend scent that little cold trickle of sweat down his neck, and hear the chatter of the old bones knocking together in their shaking fists?

He's just watching you outgrow him in little stretches, is all.

And he doesn't know-

Can he watch the heaving of the grave dirt over the old friendship, and see, maybe time doesn't take a man, death doesn't take a man, but sure you never escape that human defeat, there will always be another, greener, shinier, better?

"I'm not mad at you," he says quietly.

"Why are you running off?"

He shrugs the shoulders so they nearly touch his ears, hands still in his pockets. "I just want to explore the city. It's been a while since I was here, and Dublin is one of me favorite places."

"So I'll go with you."

He sighs. "You're having fun here."

"I'll have fun wherever you're going."

He would have the eyes of a puppy shooed into the corner without his pat, the fucker.

"Just stay, Kol. You're drunk, you've a wallet that isn't yours, the world is your oyster. Anyway, she was a real asshole. Buy yourself something nice."

"Why don't we go shopping together?"

"Oh, I've enough cash on me to keep me busy for a while. She was carrying almost a thousand euro. You two have a nice day, all right? I'll see you later, at the hotel."

But he goes instead to Christchurch Cathedral, with the copy of Bleak House has got all the little white wrinkles of love on the spine, and is dog eared at all his favorite passages.

Man was lonely, so God put a book in his hand.

Dear Father who art maybe in heaven, he used to believe that.

But when was the last goddamned time you did a thing for bloody any of them, when his stupid shitbrained self had the rosary round his fifteen-year-old prick so that Jesus might smite the stirrings for Sean McNulty- ah, no, he just had to shuffle round the mother, sweating through her usual maternal check-ups, how was the job treating him, then, and was he eating all right- yeh, yeh, sure Ma, and then the choke down of the breakfast and off out the door, heart in the throat, for sure he must have something of the devil in his eyes now, and oh his poor, poor mother, who reared him just right- sinless white she were, and what unjust sentence was this, Satan in her own child, breathing the flame and tingles when the boys passed him by and maybe just a half-arsed tickle for pretty Suzie in her ruffles.

And then he asked you-

He asked you for his friend.

And he has him back, he has him back-

But he's still angry.

He sits in your pews pretending he likes the candles, he likes the smell of the wax melt and the soft rainbows of the stained windows, there's the grand lift of the organ music, you feel the chorus to your bones, there is always within you, from the smallest Slovak chapel to the grandest London cathedral, that slow hoarfrost of the peace when at first touch of the toes upon the stones, you feel the baptismal rainbow, the sanitization of white robe, devout organ-

And then he always eases himself down, and he remembers, he believed so hard.

And you just left him swinging.

His mother died 103 years ago, and every birthday, he lays the old favorite peonies on the grave, and sits down to tell her oh, he went to so and so, Ma, the weather was grand, there's a new one swinging his prick round like a hammer, lousy fecking moustache on him, and can you believe, 1941, and still they're after invading Moscow at her most blustery.

He won't forget that, lad.

Don't be thinking anything of him running back here like so, he just doesn't know, where does a man go when he's loneliest, when he remembers forgetting is the slowest of all deaths, and Jaysus, you can die so many of them?

Will you be telling him, then?

Please?


He slips in quietly, though he knows Tim will hear him anyway, and sits in the very back pew.

Christchurch Cathedral has for hours shut its doors to the public, which, barred from its saints, turns to its sins. He has to shut his ears to their festivities, and focus instead on the faint hiss of the candle flames, and the various settlings which all old buildings undergo, the random pops of the foundation, those creaks of tortured ceiling tile, hassled by rain and wind.

There are clouds enough to stifle the moon tonight, but a distant streetlight spills its cheer over the tiles, and what corner hovers beyond its reach is wakened by the candles.

He likes to touch the pillars of such places, and imagine himself back through what stories the marble must have witnessed, and the benches have born.

But he hears that's for the introspective, so of course you won't tell.

He leans forward and drapes his arms over the pew in front of him, waiting for Tim to speak.

You can see the tension in the nape of his neck. The hair almost covers it, but the little curl at the end ruins it, kicking up off the white and vulnerable skin, so you can tell how the tendons have locked, and are struggling for what peace he has wrestled from these walls.

"You can talk or not," he says at last, keeping himself propped on the pew. "It's all right if you want to just be quiet."

The nape relaxes just a touch.

There's a heavier weight to silences in places such as this; the candles are suddenly thunderous, the distant street light sizzles with that still incomprehensible magic of technology, the rain pings a sudden handful of grapeshot off the windows.

He listens to Tim's breathing, and laces his fingers together, setting the point of his chin on the back of the pew in front of him.

"Did you have a nice shopping trip?"

"Not really. Oh, she's completely ruined, darling, don't worry about that. But I thought I might come back to find the hotel room empty."

He hears the nervous thumbing of whatever book Tim has in his hands, and sits upright once more, bouncing one of his legs.

"You don't like Enzo."

"He's fine."

"Well, there's only one other option, darling, and I'd prefer you didn't like Enzo. No offense to him. Good man. Almost as big of a hit with the ladies as I am."

Tim slips down a little in his seat, he hears the shush of trousers on wood, the head dips, the hat is lifted, the bangs are carefully sifted, and combed flat once more.

He bounces his leg again.

The book is ruffled once more, the streetlight flickers, Ireland discharges another angry handful against the roof.

"All right. I said you didn't have to talk. Do you mind if I sit here for a while longer?"

Tim ducks his head again, and rubs the back of his neck. "I'm not mad at either of you. I just…" He shakes his head. "I just think maybe…he's going to…I don't know. Fuck." He sighs.

"Replace you?" he guesses. "Is that how I've made you feel?"

"I'm just whining, lad."

"No. You get to feel however you feel about it." He wets his lips, unlaces the fingers, folds them together once more. "I'm sorry."

Tim shifts so he is sitting sideways on the pew, one of his legs up on the bench, an arm draped along its back, turning so he's looking over his shoulder, out across all the benches between them.

He's got his sleeves turned back to the elbow, and picks at one of them now, rolling it down to his wrist.

"You just have to tell me-"

"I can't." Tim lifts his hands helplessly, lets them collapse back into his lap. "I can't. I just- I don't know what to say."

"You could start with something like, 'Kol, I feel like you're being an exclusionary prick'." He tries to catch Tim's eye so he can smile, and let him know with all a smile can convey where words fail, it's going to be smoothed over, but his friend shakes his head, and tips it back to instead look at the ceiling.

He wonders, what is it a man finds in a ceiling, that he directs his heaviest griefs there, and lies in breathless anticipation of its counsel?

"I can't just go up to a man and ask him, 'Hey, there, you wouldn't be getting tired of being me friend, now would you?' I'm afraid of what he'd say. I don't have those kinds of bollocks, Kol. I don't want to know. Not like that, not bang on the mouth, with a man looking you right in the eyes, and you can see in him what you already knew, but for a little while hid from yourself." He flicks his eyes down from the ceiling, and cuts them over the pews between them. "You don't know what it is, to have words just stick in you. I don't mean it badly. Fresh out of the daughter's bed, you could talk your way right into the mother's." He smiles a little.

He clasps his hands between his knees now, and bounces both his legs, one after the other, vibrating the pew just slightly, his tongue coming out once more to return what moisture nerves have drank from his lips.

His hands burn through his jeans.

He chafes the sweat of his palms onto his knees.

"You mean how I can't say it, you know what I'm talking about, because it never ends the way I want it to. It ends." He shrugs with his hands, and looks up to find his own answers in the ceiling.

"I wanted love to be like me. I wanted it to last forever." He looks down at his hands, feels them like ice against his knees, he thinks, Nik, Bekah, Elijah, any one of you could have changed it- you could have shown him-

He shakes his head. "It's like a curse." He laughs, but it's one of those laughs, which are not really laughs at all. "You know, I gave up once, and I tried to run away with my sister. And she wouldn't go. And I thought- that's it. It's just never- it's just never." He shrugs.

He wets his lips again, and looks up at Tim. "I do, though. You know?"


He hates to see the poor fucker struggle so. "Maybe you could tap it out in Morse code, and the universe will cock its ear, and wonder, what the fuck is that, then, and go about its business."

That gets a smile, and he's hopping to see it, even if is buried underneath all those smug layers of beard.

"I read this book once-"

"Is this the one about the couple that has Morse code sex?"

"You always butt in on my best stories."

"Because you're terrible at them. Once it took you five times to get a punch line right, darling."

"So anyway, this lad and this lass were having the Morse code sex-"

"And he sent up a great big volcano gush of vanilla-flavored sperm."

"Vanilla and musk, pardon you. It was a beautiful symbol of their love. And it was a Mt. Vesuvius eruption of sperm- no, no, wait- that was a different one."

"You see what I mean?"

"Ah, fuck off. As I said, they were having the Morse code sex, and through that they could express how they truly felt, even though his brothers kept butting in and trying to keep them apart. They were brother and sister, and the others didn't approve. Well, they weren't really brother and sister, the lass just grew up across the street, and the other brothers thought of her as a sister. Or, wait, I think her parents died, and they took her in- yeah, and so the older brothers, they thought of her like a sister, growing up alongside her like that, except the one, he had the trots for her-"

Kol bursts out laughing. "This is a mess, darling. And you do know 'the trots' means he had diarrhea?"

"It does? I thought it was Yank slang for being hot under the bonnet."

"It's 'He has the hots for her'."

He stretches back along the bench, letting his leg dangle over the side. "Anyway, it could still work. Maybe she makes him really nervous."

"Or he has Irritable Bowel Syndrome." Kol puts his feet up on the pew in front of him, and settles both hands in his pockets. "Do you know, I once made a man eat himself, and sometimes the things you read still concern me."

He drops his arm from the pew he's slung it over, and raps lightly on the back, two short knocks, then one, then a rattling staccato of five.

"And what does that mean?" Kol asks.

"I don't know, actually. I don't know Morse code."

"This was just poorly conceived all around, wasn't it, darling?"

He slings his arm back over the pew, and smiles from beneath his hat.

And then for a while they just sit in that fine repose of silence which no architecture of man lays quite so gently on the brow as these shrines of belief.

It's a fine thing for the years to steal a man's heart if they can't have his breath.


And so it goes.

They break into the Jameson Distillery one night and drink most of it, then go skinny dipping in the Liffey.

They're cheered on by a pissed stag party, whose groom has to be restrained from joining in, and is subsequently chased down O'Connell Street waving his shirt over his head, trousers half undone, the boot tongues flapping with each step.

Dublin is rocked by the slaying of two young women who appear to be the victims of a serial murderer.

He appears at the second crime scene dressed as a Garda, and goes round with the same air of solemnity which the other officers have muffled themselves in, that they might keep at least one fragile layer between themselves and this gruesome testimony to how fine an edge man walks, in this brain which is so indiscriminately faulty.

He squats down at the feet of the girl, and tilts his head, twirling the pencil which ostensibly is to be for his notes.

The stomach has been slit open, and the organs sloppily removed, the entrails still in a slippery heap across her lap, and you know, yawn, darling, he was hoping for a bit more creativity, this is a bit, oh, 101, don't you think?

He does have his quiet moments, though.

He likes to shave in one of the looking-glasses he stole from Bekah, propping it on the desk where Tim has scattered several of his books, and left a pair of his trousers hanging haphazardly off one corner, and chat while he maneuvers the clippers over the more unkempt patches of his beard.

Tim reads whatever it is he has currently propped on his bare stomach, here and there lying it down to offer a comment, or throw what's heaviest and closest at hand with a good-natured curse when he makes a jab.

He starts leaving Enzo a little more to his women, and stalking Tim on his nighttime walks, which with Dublin acquaint him as intimately as any man could ever hope to know a city.

They walk out to Howth one night, and sit for a while on the rocks skipping stones across the water, till Tim proposes a race out to Ireland's Eye at human speed, none of his old man cheating, now, so for a moment there is a staredown which the little flinches round the eyes and the twitches of the mouths reveal is a valiant attempt on both their parts not to laugh, and then a sudden burst of mad scrambling for the laces of the boots, and the collars of their shirts.

Tim has his shoes off first, but his shirt must be unbuttoned at least halfway before he can pull it off over his head, and so is left still undressing on the rocks when the midnight waters are first broken.

He takes a good slap of foam to his mouth, plunges under for a moment, resurfaces coughing.

Tim dives off the rocks, and the wake lifts him on one of its peaks, so that he is thrown out of his rhythm, and must flail for a moment to regain it, and he is recalled, suddenly, as only water cold enough to shrivel the testicles can shock a man back to his youth, that in his piddling human years he was rather rubbish at swimming. Competent but graceless, and only slightly slower than one of the village elders who was buried some ten years back, as Bekah graciously put it.

He grabs Tim round the neck and holds him under until his feet have kicked out all their most fervent struggles, and flutter merely out of habit.

He is soundly informed of what a cheating bastard he is, but well, darling, can he help it if you can't hold your breath long enough to survive a playful dunking?

Apparently, this isn't the the answer Tim was looking for.

"You're a touchy loser, darling," he points out helpfully, and is thrown off the very top of the church ruins which oversee the island.


Wednesday the Gate Theatre is showing Romeo and Juliet, which is his least favorite of Shakespeare's comedies, but he does love a live show, and anyway, when's the last time he had an excuse to shame the handsomest of humanity's slenderest offerings which on its best of days barely holds a candle to his mere jeans and t-shirts? (To this day Elijah tells him Romeo and Juliet is not, in fact, a comedy, but he cried till he nearly choked when that histrionic twit axed himself just seconds before his unconscious wife came to, so who exactly fails to grasp the true implications of the material, brother?)

He leans Bekah's looking-glass against one of Tim's books, and shaves himself clean.

Then the black dress trousers, neatly pleated on either leg, and into its waistband the crisp white shirt, whose cuffs may not be perfectly symmetrical, Elijah, but who needs symmetry when you've got a face like this, and lastly the black bow tie, which Bekah would have fussed over for a good century, while Nik watched with the grim anticipation of one who is next.

Tim has disappeared, probably to have his hat cleaned, and the comfortably lived-in boots shined back to their birth.

Enzo appears twenty minutes or so before the show, dressed in a tux he wears as comfortably as his jeans, and from his pockets taking three flasks. "The silver one's vodka," he says, and shuts the door behind him with his heel. "Where's Tim?"

"He'll be here soon, I'm sure. He's probably off having some of his buttons sewn back on. Or even buying a new shirt. The sky's the limit, as long as he doesn't have to take off his hat."

"He's going to Shakespeare dressed like that?"

"Tim's idea of dressing up is rolling down his shirt sleeves." He checks his watch, also pinched from Nik, who has enough of them anyway, and won't miss it. Probably. Perhaps. Anyway, Bekah's likely angry at him for one thing or another, and will take the blame for it. "Let's just start for the theatre now; I'll text him to meet us there."

They have just joined Dublin's throng, and have for their extreme and potentially illegal levels of handsomeness gotten more than a few stares, when he spots a man leaning against the statue of the angelic Courage, and has for a moment to stop, phone in his hand.

Enzo whistles.

"You were going to walk right past me," Tim says, smiling at him.

He's left off the hat, and has slicked back his hair so you can see the cut of his cheekbones, and over the broad shoulders there is snugged a fitted suit jacket, with the soft compliment of the dove gray vest underneath, the chain of his watch glittering star-like against this neutral background.

There is in his chest what he thinks a first love must feel like; he doesn't remember.

His palms agree with that dampness of the fidgety virgin, and he shoves them into his pockets.

If we are thrust so high on it, sooner or later it must toss us like a horse, and crush us beneath it, he thinks, but what heart is receptive to reason?

He doesn't disagree with your little spiel, Nik.

He tried so hard to remember it.

But anyway, deep breath, he loves (try to contain yourself, darling, the pounding heart is so very chaste, and the slick palms a touch post-Caroline Nik) this beardless young twit, and perhaps slowly, slowly, he will steady himself in this realization, and begin to feel one day it doesn't always have to be a fall, it doesn't have to be an ending, he doesn't have to hold his breath through it, till all the most painful parts are over.

He smiles, and he can tell by the way Enzo looks away that it's a private thing, that peculiar tunnel vision of lover and loved where all the world is merely a simulacrum, and such smiles sole truth, where the eyes for a moment meet and touch something deeper.

"I didn't recognize you, dressed in something that hasn't been foraged from an old man's rubbish bin."

Tim crosses his arms. "And I didn't recognize you, without the rat's nest."

He lifts his hands to either side, lets them drop against his legs. "As becoming as I am wearing absolutely anything, there's only so long you can deprive the world of the full pleasure of this." He strokes his smooth face.

"Ah, Jaysus." Tim shakes his head. "I'll be needing me boots back."

"Well, boys?" Enzo asks. "Shall we?"

They naturally fall into a certain order, as they manhandle their way through the evening crowd, he and Enzo out in front, Tim falling slightly behind, but he makes sure to yank Tim abreast, and loop one arm round his neck while they walk, the tourists parting willingly enough, and shivering a little at the neck, when he gives them that certain look.

The Irish wind makes a peak of Enzo's hair, and he gets a good surge of bang right in his own eye; Tim's hair is too stiff to so much as tentatively flutter.

"What have you got in there, darling, cement?" He reaches out to stroke it the wrong way, giving him a sticky-looking Mohawk.

"Keep your paws to yourself! I'll have you know, I spent a good half hour on this," Tim protests, smoothing it back.

"We won't even need any lube tonight; I'll just rub my cock on your head for a moment."

An old man stops and stares at him.

He tosses his other arm round Enzo. "I believe we need a theme song for this strut, darlings. What about the one about the dragon? The one where the singer's too hot for a dragon or something?"

"He's so hot he makes the dragon want to retire," Tim corrects him.

"How hot would you have to be anyway, to make a dragon want to retire?" Enzo asks.

"Observe," he says, and gestures at himself.


He loves the tension of the curtain.

There is a certain awe of that heavy drape, the laughter is hushed, the conversations are conducted behind hands, the children shushed, the hearts rise into this communal throat of spectatorship.

Anxiety is communicable; maturity reversed, childhood revisited, the wonder of novelty heavy in your stomach, and gleaming in your eyes.

Perhaps the story you've heard before, in dry and ancient prose, which lies untasted on the page.

He has seen Romeo and Juliet, to be exact, 1,024 ½ times.

But each Romeo is new, and every Mercutio more homosexually repressed than the last, Juliet sometimes wears the traditional gown, or modern blouse, she sometimes misses the emphasis that is required of her 'nor any other part belonging to a man' speech, there is in Romeo a naïveté, an arrogance, futility, virility, he does not always understand precisely what torch it is she teaches to burn bright, Nurse is by turns melodramatic, monochromatic, the scene dressing, the show-stopper.

He leans forward with his chin in his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tim smile at him for a long while before turning to face the curtain.

He keeps his hearing at a human decibel, so that he doesn't hear the prep of the chorus, the last recitations of the actors, the shuffling of the costumes, so the dimming lights shock him just a bit, his heart lifts, he strains forward as far as the next row allows him.

The curtains part.

He sees both Enzo and Tim sneak a sip from their flasks, but he is rapt upon the chorus, and cannot reach for his own.

"Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,

Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;

The which if you patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

Just smashing beginning, darlings.

He does hope you keep it up. It's a nice theatre; he'd hate to get blood all over it.


Kol watches the play like a child.

He likes to see that sort of smile, pressed back into the knuckles cradling his cheeks on either side.

It reminds him you could be, oh, a billion and seventy-five, and still resurrect beauty from all the old world.

Fecking sap, he thinks fondly, and his hand itches for a tousle of the wind-stirred bangs, but he won't rouse the lad, not from a spell like that.

Anyway, not till he sees the eyes start following Juliet's tits far closer than her lines, and clocks Kol a good one in the ribs with his elbow.

Don't you be givin' him the 'but look I'm so handsome' smile, you fuck.


Tim reaches over during the second act, while Benvolio and Mercutio stand scratching their heads over Romeo's cold bed, and grabs his hand.

He's slipped his own hand under the arm rest, so he means it sneakily, and is probably red with it, and for a moment he stifles his amusement at this, covering it with a cough, and then leans back in his seat so Tim's wrist isn't so awkwardly cocked.

Romeo settles his marriage plans with Juliet's nurse, the curtain is lowered, there is the brief scraping of a hasty set change, and then those breasts appear once more in all their abundant glory.

Tim punches him in the shoulder.

The actress is unruffled.

Enzo has taken one too many dips into his flask, though, and bursts out laughing.

"You show some respect!" some old lady hisses from behind them, and appears angry enough to box the ears off the lot of them.

Tim is properly shamed, and slides down in his seat with his free hand over his eyes; Enzo pats him on the shoulder. "It's all right, mate, he deserved that."

"O God, she comes! O honey Nurse, what news?" Juliet asks smoothly, and furrows that lovely brow, taking the gasping old woman by her shoulders. "Hast thou met with him? Send thy man away."

Tim's cheeks are downright sunburnt; he fans him helpfully with his program.


This performance has been quite stable, he thinks; the actors have got a good grasp of where all the little inflections must be placed, and how to move not with that artificial pomp of some amateurs, who appear to associate Shakespeare's florid prose with bowel issues, but naturally, smoothly, so for that at least they won't be eaten.

And he greatly enjoyed Juliet's dramatic downing of that fateful potion; he stood and clapped until the old lady threatened him, and Tim pulled him down by the sleeve.

Coincidentally, she will not be making it out alive.

Romeo and Paris engage their swords; he leans forward in eager anticipation as they dodge among the headstones, throwing their lines at one another so they are almost not a reading, but rather a natural release of everything that festers inside a man, he hears pain, not performance, and mouths the words in silent support: Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague! Can vengeance be pursued further than death? Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee: Obey, and go with me; for thou must die.

The swords sing; Tim shifts beside him; upstage, Juliet lies motionless on her slab.

For a moment, he squints at the spread of her hair, and the angle of her jaw, tipped up so the face is unrecognizable to him.

He flicks his eyes back to the struggling men.

He's not sure he completely approves of the fight's placement, but it's well-staged enough.

"I must indeed, and therefore came I hither."

He looks once more to Juliet, cocking his head.

The hips lie gracefully beneath the skirt, scarcely disturbing its line, and the hands folded upon her breast are muffled by the elaborately inaccurate bosom of the dress, the one half of her lies in that outer edge of Paris and Romeo's spotlight, the other in darkness-

"I do defy thy conjurations and apprehend thee for a felon here."

They have paused to catch their breaths, and warily circle one another now.

Tim leans forward, setting his chin on top of his balled fists.

Enzo has abandoned his flask, and tips himself toward the stage with similar rapture.

There is a twitch inside him, he is drawn back to the peaceful Juliet, with the light like a fickle moon on her jaw line, the white hands perfectly still-

"O, I am slain!" Paris cries out, and falls with one hand to his chest. "If thou be merciful, open the tomb, lay me with Juliet."

"In faith, I will. Let me peruse this face: Mercutio's kinsman, noble County Paris!" Romeo sinks to his knees, to cradle the dying Paris.

He is distracted by the soft reflection of the lights off Tim's hair, the pulses all around him in breathless sprint, the trembling of Paris' hand, Romeo's sweat-

The chair beneath him is suddenly intolerable, his suit too hot, Tim's breathing too loud-

"How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! which their keepers call a lightning before death: O, how may I call this a lightning? O my love! My wife!"

He squints at Juliet again, feels in himself the brink before the sudden flailing step into realization, grabs Tim by the thigh, he doesn't know why, but it's hard enough to jolt him in his seat, and take his attention from the stage-

Romeo mounts the stone platform of Juliet's slab.

"Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty: thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, and death's pale flag is not advanced there." He touches her cheek reverently.

"Are you all right?" Tim whispers very quietly, keeping an eye out for that old woman behind them.

Romeo has begun to sob on Juliet's breast. "Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour?" He shakily opens the phial he takes from his tunic. "For fear of that, I will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart again: here, here I will remain with worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here will I set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh."

The lashes on those pale cheeks stir not an inch, the hands on the sleeping bosom rise nary a centimeter.

"Kol," Tim whispers, and brushes a thumb along his jaw. "You all right, lad?"

"Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!"

The nervous hands slosh just a bit of the phial's poison.

Tim stops trying to engage him and settles for leaving a hand on his knee.

"Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark. Here's to my love!"

Romeo lifts the phial.

For a moment, the haunted eyes are turned out over the audience, who with a gasp notices what this stricken lover will not see in time: the first shudder of the lash, and flicker of the hand.

He drinks.

"O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick."

And now the fair lids peel open, the hands release, and fall open at her sides, Juliet begins her slow rebirth, the shining hair whispering quietly against the slab, and the dress making a quiet river of its ruffles over the stone-

Romeo touches her face so softly, his tenderness resonates so far out into the audience, who each perch silently in their own individual suffering-

Their lips brush.

Romeo hangs in her grip for a moment, feeling with such wide-eyed awe the living mouth, and the warm cheeks, bravo, darling, you can see, to the very tips of him, how he quivers with his discovery.

Juliet slips his dagger from its sheathe.

"Thus with a kiss I die," Romeo breathes against her mouth.

He can see, out of the corner of his eye, how pale Tim has gone.

Juliet fingers the dagger for a moment, turns it so the light catches it just so, the audience leans as one, Tim's hand has gone rigid on his knee, Juliet lifts her eyes beseechingly, and raises the dagger after.

She stabs Romeo in the throat with it.

"Hello, Kol," his sister says cheerfully.


He leaves Kol and the sister arguing in their hotel room, and steps out for a walk.

Must be just after ten or so; back at the theatre there was the crush of the audience making for the exit doors, everyone screaming, few of the more lucid ones panicking through their emergency calls, oh, a right mess, but here on Grafton he's not much but the cobblestones for company, and here and there the errant junkie watching from their sleeping bags.

He can smell Stephen's Green from here.

Used to be, round about 98 years ago, you couldn't make out the flowers from the powder, and the sweet grass crushed beneath sweating youth, who were for the first time putting their shoulders to the might of the British like all their Das before them.

His hands are still shaking just slightly.

He pockets them both.

There was a moment, when he first recognized Kol's sister- he thought sure Klaus'll be lurking then, he'd feel the hands on his neck, not menacing at first, almost tender, like, you'd want to lean into them, you'd hear the murmur in your ear, shh, shh, it's all right, mate, and you'd know to your tiptoes oh, thank me Father in heaven and any others might have had a hand in it-

You're safe now, lad.

Anyway, that was what he thought, strung up in the ruins of that old fort, bleeding from anything squishy.

He'd feel the kind hand on his cheek, and for a moment love him just a little, as he would have loved anything which reached him through that fog, and gentled him beyond the sting of his nail growing back, and the crunch of the knee cap piecing together its slivers.

And then there'd be the same touch on his hand, and the crack of the wrist breaking, and all the world before him whiting out, and some poor fucker screaming for a solid few seconds before he recognized the bastard.

Just the sister; just the sister, it's all right, then, breathe, you silly fuck, he tells himself, and wipes the sweat from his upper lip.

He sits down on the step in front of the shopping center just outside Stephen's Green, and for a moment breathes with his head between his knees, oh, he'd knock over your granny right now, and strangle the old bint black for the pack of cigarettes he left back at the hotel.

The flowers are fresh-blooming in their beds, and the stones still raw with an earlier rain, so he can smell the earth and the years in them, the moon hunts the mystery from the street, and lamps him a good one with the whop of the reality: just the empty shops, and the moon-like glimmer of his own arsehole face in the windows.

He blows out his final steadying breath, and pops his collar.

It always works for those movie lads.

Right. He's not scared, then, he's 123, he'll walk with a swagger, he'll touch his slick hair, and do the Michael Jackson thing with the feet-

Right, not that. Look like an asshole. Lord let the surveillance cameras have been put to bed like sweet babies.

He snaps the lock on the bars with his hand and lets himself into Stephen's Green; he's not risking these trousers on the top of that gate.

Nice place for a night stroll, once you've fought off the bums, and had a snack from the Garda patrolling the grounds. Can hardly tell you're packed into a city two million thick; the trees snap right closed round you, the little stream chuckles away under your feet, if there is in all of Dublin technology roaring past on the streets, or blinking away in the coffee shops, fuck if you know, watching the flowers drowse by moonlight, and the statues sleep till morn.

He stops on the little wooden bridge to drape his arms over the railing.

He flips down his collar. Jaysus, he's an asshole sometimes.

There's the faint burning on the back of his neck, where you feel the eyes most prickly of all.

Two yellow fecking eyes, he sees when he turns back toward the entrance, and the rest of the creature blending into the shadows the trees have laid over its coat.

And Jesus, Jesus, it's on his goddamned throat in a second, he braces himself a bare moment before the hit, and then they're bang on the railing, the bloody thing cracks loudly, he loses his footing, fuck fuck fuck get it off him, get it off him-

He bashes the snapping jaws against the railing, once, twice, gets a hand round the throat as the wolf pushes, pushes, the railing groaning beneath him, the splinters ruining his poor jacket, there's another crack, something splashes into the water-

Jaysus, fur in the nose, fur in the eyes, he can't see what he's jammed his thumb into, but it yields, the wolf yelps, it skips back, he kicks the fucker's snout-

And now round the throat, he can feel the ridges of the windpipe, and the sudden whistling struggle of the inhales, one of his fingers snaps, the thumb creaks, but the teeth are flinging saliva all over him, he's slimed to the elbow, the cuff of his sleeve hangs in ribbons, but oh Jesus, Jesus, thank you Father, the skin's not broken-

He gives the head another smack against the railing, feels the skull crack, the railing sag, draws the head back once more, smashes it through the wood, so he feels the reverberation in his own teeth, and flips the whole limp thing over the railing and into the stream.

Jesus- Jesus-

"The fuck?" he snaps, and the second one jumps him from the side.


"I recognized your thick ankles," he tells Bekah, smiling up at her from where he has decided to recline on the bed, hands behind his head, while she bickers with him.

Enzo is watching them from the chair in the corner, moving his eyes with great interest from one to the other, like he's watching one of those matches with the balls and paddles. Peen dong? Something like that. It's rather kinky. Though he has been informed by reliable sources he doesn't play it correctly.

Ping pong. He thinks that's it.

There is the smell of blood in the hall.

Tim must have had himself a nice walk.

"Well, Bekah, I don't know what to tell you. They look fat to me."

Bekah grabs him by the feet and flips him right off the bed; he lands in a crouch, and straightens his bow tie with a little smirk when he stands.

The door bursts open.

"If you're going to consort with peasants, Kol, at least teach them some manners," Bekah says tartly.

"It's his room, darling," he replies, and then he gets his first look at Tim, who has returned with a ripped sleeve, a torn collar, blood all down the side of his neck- he's quite the wreck. "What the hell happened to you?"

"I've got a slight problem."


A/N: lol sorry they were too happy bye oops