A/N: I've wanted to write a brief little piece on this scene since I saw it, so here it is. If you have not watched 4x13 yet, then do not read this. Back away from the computer, and go and watch the damn episode. Now.
The title of this is part of a quote from Emily Dickinson: "Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell."
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
So said Robert Browning, connoisseur of French wine, of English women- an artist whose every pen stroke painted meaning into eight hundred years of insignificance. What was the winding down, the ticking forward of a clock's hands to him, an abomination who had nothing to fear from these timepieces, who watched the tiny orange stars of the torches come for Louis XVI, and sweep themselves along Time's eternal ocean to chase the Romanovs from their palace.
For eight hundred years he watched men fling themselves into the abyss of history, to be swallowed, born away, and he took up those torches, he sliced those guillotines ringing toward the necks of fallen rulers, but never was there any sort of challenge to it, never did he stand with slick palms and jackrabbit heart wanting to know if he was next, if his death should bring about the fall of an entire country, a whole people, so important was he- and what do you think it does to a man, to contemplate this question over and over, for centuries, and always the answer is no, and forever will it be no-
Such was the condition in which Browning found him, in a small bookstore on a busy Parisian street corner.
Two francs, he paid for Browning's Bells and Pomegranates, and for an entire afternoon, he sat at a table at the Café de la Paix and he breathed this man's words, he remembered again the weight of a brush in his hand and the way a smile sneaks up on you, so quietly, how a man can live a thousand thousand lifetimes, and never feel everything there is to feel.
An entire palette of emotions: the fever highs of the summer yellows and the nuclear heat of the autumn reds and that nothing shade black, with its funeral shroud dropped whispering across your heart.
The art, the music, the poems- a whole lifetime, he told her. A thousand lifetimes.
Browning packed a thousand lifetimes of passion into his short little human life, and how could he do any less- what experiences he had left, with his family around him in a neat little graveyard row, never alone.
Fantastic man, at least until old age and infirmity made him a bit doddering.
But on the matter of love he was wrong.
He has no tomb. He slipped the noose, sidestepped the axe, kicked the guillotine squealing from its stand.
To seal a man up like that, just because he does not subscribe to this tender springtime emotion, to brick a man away because he has stopped up his heart with the ashes of his mother's condemnation- what a shame.
I know that you're in love with me, she tells him in her sandpaper voice.
For so long he has watched her slip away from him, and he knows -he knows- that he can do nothing, that he can sit here and watch her slip further still, that he can wait with steady hands and stable heart for her to take her final shuddering breath.
And then she takes those unblinking blue eyes, and she stabs him through the chest with them.
Is this what love is, then? This bloody…choking?
You live a thousand years, and along the way you forget a few things here and there: the majesty of a sunset, you have seen so many of them; the wonder of discovering for the first time a woman's soft thighs, you have bedded so many of them; all the little in-between moments which are made so precious by time's too-quick passage.
But precisely how hot the eyes can become, the way they burn, the knots that tie themselves into all the spaces where your voice can no longer go-
You will never forget that.
You will never not know how to cry.
Anybody who is capable of love is capable of being saved, she tells him, and is that what she really thinks, that there is hope for a creature like him-
She is filled with so much belief, this sunshine woman.
Everybody loves a bad boy, sweetheart. And do you know what happened to the last woman who thought she could change him, who convinced herself that underneath this mineral man was a sandstone center, crumbling to pieces at a touch too hard?
He sank his teeth in to the quick and, God, how sweet she tasted- he tore and he tore and he tore, love, that's what he did, and so much for the woman's faith, so much for her soft Bambi eyes and her broken sobbing pleas-
He doesn't want you to save him, little baby.
A man has his pride.
A man has a reputation to uphold, love: don't take it so personally- nothing to do with you, sweetheart, just a little clash of wills, a snarling of dogs. He is the only alpha male here, and Tyler Lockwood has to learn that, and what a pity that she found herself caught between the two of them, but many a woman has found herself trapped between testosterone warfare throughout the centuries, and she will not be the last of the casualties.
But his eyes, his throat, his chest, as she slips away from him.
No one will ever sit around a table telling stories about a man who couldn't love.
And what about a man who couldn't get one stupid eighteen-year-old boy to bow, Rebekah, love? What good does love do him this stupid nothing emotion- she will never love him back-
"Caroline," he says in his own sandpaper voice.
"Caroline."
There is a type of silence which is so loud it howls in a man's ears until he becomes deaf with it.
There is a type of pain which is so sharp it numbs everything it touches, and for days, for weeks, for months, you do not feel its sting.
But he does not get days, or weeks, or months.
He rips his wrist out with his teeth and holds his broken bleeding arm to her lips, and for an eternity her mouth does not move: he stands waiting forever.
For the first time, he is bloody terrified of these timepieces with their ticking clicking hands and the way they do not stop- why has time kept moving forward without her- drink damn you-
And when she does- when he at last feels her lips open and her teeth latch and her tongue curl out to lap his shredded skin-
Sometimes relief, it picks you up on its waves and slams you face first into the shore, and for so long, it goes on doing this, picking you up, smashing you down, until you can do nothing but shudder, let yourself be sucked under the swell, held down until you are drowned.
He rests his chin on her head as she feeds, tilts his face down to feel her hair with his lips, lets these waves wash over and over and over him, until she is the only thing left to cling to.
God, how badly he wants, with her here in his arms.
What will they say around their tables now, about this man who couldn't love, whose chest is so tight and whose eyes are so hot- what will they say about his pride, and the way his teeth left it behind in pieces like his skin-
And when she goes to sleep in his arms, when he spends so long looking at her peaceful slumbering face in the moonlight, when he cannot let her go-
Browning, mate, he thinks with his hand on her cheek-
An earth without love is not a tomb.
He recommends Dante's Inferno, should you ever want a peek at the void in which a man exists, without this emotion.