AN: This takes place directly after Schrodinger trolled him.
OOOOO
He can remember the face and he can remember the name. He can see the stone inlay walls covered heavy in embroidery. Scenes of victory and battle, of love, of heartache, of God's love of Christendom. Paintings of him, of her, of nameless faces that exist only in memories out of grasp line the hall and hang above the bed. An iron chandelier heavy with wax from melting candles lightly sways overhead in front of the arced doorway leading to a small potted garden on an even smaller terrace, the plants wrapped in large muslin bags to keep the frost off sunk down heavy with snow, the entirety of the circular outing hanging off the edge of their self-made world in the mountain, everything lain thick with snow and ice.
It's a place of longing and familiarity and ruin. When the ache of homesickness surfaces and home is not what you recall, he finds himself here. It's the place where when the present is left behind, he must exist there to the exclusion of everywhere else.
He finds it hard to keep his eyes open. The sound of a woman humming from across the room echoes and calls and he weakly lifts his head from pillows of gold and red brocade to see long black hair pulled behind ivory and shell combs fallen back against a bustle of blood red silk that is pooled on the floor.
When he looked back that day, she was standing there.
A striking image as she always has been, even in his memories of sloughed and marbled gray flesh, she is and always will be. Standing on her snow terrace she looks back to him with her snow skin and ink hair and smiles at him with flush pink lips. He smiles back to her. Just like then.
I remember you.
Walking towards him she says, You haven't forgotten me by now?
He tells her a lord never forgets his princess. No matter how much he may want to.
There's no substance to this place, it's simply an elaborate copy of a copy and even though he can feel the grain of the velour damask prickle his hand when he touches the bed and he can feel the cradling warmth beneath him, smell the ice soaked stones of the castle and see the silent forest out beyond―he's nowhere in particular. How he knows this he can't say.
Is this death then?
I don't know, she says stepping towards him. What do you think?
What is this place.
The bed gives and leans as she smoothes her skirting underneath her and sits next to him on the bed. Your home, my love.
He laughs and says, My home was five hundred years ago in a lifetime long gone. This is not real. Neither are you. Which is a shame, I must say.
I'm not?
A soft, warm fingertip runs along his cheek and he dies a fourth time. I'm as real as you are, my love. She tilts her head and softly laughs as she murders him again and again. I like it, she says running her hand over his jaw and cheeks and neck. So smooth.
Still stroking his face she says, You of all people should know there is more to this world than life and death. You're with me between the axis. There is no time here. There is no life nor death here. It is neither nowhere or anywhere.
He swallows hard and looks at her. Purgatory? You're sounding Catholic now.
Not exactly, but a kind of purgatory, yes. And I perish the thought.
He smirks. He looks up at the looming chandelier and tries to remember lying in this bed, here with her, what she smelled or tasted like but there is nothing. I'm sorry, you know. For then.
You don't need to apologize, my Lord.
Perhaps not, but I am anyway.
He finds it hard to keep his eyes open. He remembers a city destroyed. And blood. Oh yes, that's right. London fell. Walter is dead. Integra probably too. She called out for him, he thinks.
I failed her huh.
What makes you think that.
I didn't protect her. Maybe it just wasn't meant to happen. It was all a dream.
Stop speaking that way. You know it's not. She says, You had wanted to protect me too.
And I didn't.
Her fingers run through his hair and as one comforts a child she says, But you wanted to.
He closes his eyes and smiles. Ah, that's the way it always is, isn't it.
I'm always too late.
It can't be helped.
I've missed you.
I know. That's your problem. You have yet to let it go.
I let all this go long ago.
Then why are we sitting here, my Lord.
How should I know. He closes his eyes and says, I don't think of you often, you know. But you still come into my thoughts five hundred years later. Not anyone else from this time. Only you.
You have an odd concept of letting things go. She smiles and puts his hand to her face and kisses it and places it back down. But it's gone. All of it. Everyone is dead. Your kingdom, your children. Me. We're all dead. Even you are. It's as you always wanted.
Oh, that's right. We had two?
You had four, we had two, yes.
I never wished for your deaths.
A week after he left, fisherman found her on the banks of the river below. Broken and decayed. It was during the invasion. His wife died not by his own cruel hand nor even those of foreign barbarians, but ultimately by her own. Everything came to an end that day. They said she did it because she thought it hopeless and the invasion would reach her, but who is to say. The house girls got out. The children escaped along with them. But she, she remained behind in her empty castle and flung herself from her snow blanketed garden above the trees and mountains and clouds and earth. It was all a lie. Or it wasn't. It mattered not. All he knew was she took her own life and they were responsible for him not being there to stop her.
Only once he felt in his heart, not in his thoughts, but in that pain that lies deep in the chest behind the breastbone, the one that drives us to our ends, that she did this because of him. But from this pain in her death came his own, and this terror imprinted upon terrors past and always present, a demon was born of a tyrant.
Those days mean everything and nothing to him now. What he feels for them, this family of a mad warrior king, he can't say anymore. He wants to say he feels nothing but he cannot. He doesn't love them now. He can't recall if he ever really did. He thinks he must have, a father loves his children. His wife. For memories it's too late. He's left them. In his mind he no longer has the touch of baby's soft skin, their scent, smiles. The sound of their voices are all but gone except sometimes he'll recall the hint of it echoing from behind the stairwell where they would hide at times, playing as children do. He can't remember anymore but a blonde child running past him once. A girl, he thinks. Their laughter he can't hear it anymore―neither their laughter or cries. It's dead, finished, over.
He can only see her looking over her shoulder at her terrace courting the lover she truly desired. And from below looking up. That day. She looked down and called out for him. That last time.
He wants to say he feels nothing. But he cannot.
He tells her he can't remember what he did after she died. But he can still see her corpse as clear as that day. Even now. Two lifetimes later.
Oh, I think my Lord knows why that is. It ended everything and was the last of your descent into madness. When you left all humanity behind.
Not all of it.
No?
I've loved since you.
She laughs and pats and rubs his chest. You loving someone has never been a problem. You've loved many. Too many, perhaps. You're a lonely tyrant, my Lord. You always have been. When the melancholy strikes you, you are much like a child is, clinging to a skirt.
Love and company are different.
Maybe so. But that one, she wasn't company now, was she?
He doesn't say anything.
And now, there is another, isn't there?
How do you know of it?
I know you too well, my King.
Tell me why I am here.
Because this is where it all started and this is where you have to leave it behind. So go to her. Let this horror disappear for good.
Everything was built on it. His very existence. His love for her. His life was built upon horror. The rot of the bodies staked and hung along the road, the sound of the flesh and bones ripping apart from one another as a body slowly slides under its own weight towards the end of the stake, the blood spindrift across your skin, the cries, the horror and godless fields of death. In those days when he closed his eyes and relived these things there was no greater enjoyment and contentment to his mind. The only thing that he had outside and that now brings a sting to his eyes, was she took away the pleasure of her and left him for death.
What if I don't want to.
Then you will be forever stuck between death and nothingness. You will continue on and on, each age passing before your eyes. Everyone you will ever love or need will wilt and die, but you, you will always exist. Lingering in shadow, in darkness and death. In blood. Bound to this world and forever cast out of it at the same time.
So gloomy, princess.
You know what I say is true. It took you an entire unliving lifetime ending with your insane obsession with your lover to learn this lesson. So go on. Go to your child before she leaves this world. You have to fight now. Before you fade for good. And before your heart is broken again and the monster comes forth in despair as it has time and time before.
No, not anymore.
How will this time be different then?
It just is. Simple as that. All of it. I have let it all go and given it to her. My life is hers. And through her, I will return.
She looks at him for a moment. Have you found the way back to God, my Lord.
Is it not fitting you are here then. Whether it is ever possible to atone, who is to say. Forgiveness and mercy. I know nothing of these things.
We all have to go back to the beginning. She smiles and kisses him gently. She smells like nothing. Tastes like nothing. Her breath is neither cool nor warm as she whispers across his lips, One day, we'll be together again.
You truly believe that?
I do. Don't you?
He takes her face in his hands and kisses her. I think this will be goodbye, my love.
He brushes the hair away from her face and looks at her. He tells her how beautiful she is. And she is. How much he loves her. And he believes what he says. He kisses her again. He says, I just thank God he finally allowed me to say it to you.
OOOOO
Everywhere and nowhere.
You drift through time until the concept is no more than a meaningless theory. You exist outside it to the exclusion of everywhere else. Your exile. To the audience is where you will sit and watch the play unfold in front of you. The only reference to the philosophical hours, days and years is the narrative that always plagues these stories, stories and grand performances of decay and death of everything you love before your eyes. The players show in the first act, the love is there already. By the second act, it's already half way done and gone. You have to be quick with it, being outside it's easy to lose base, to turn around and in an instant and see a young child turned a young woman and a young woman turned old. The third act is coming to a close and the curtains will soon fall, only to set up for the next performance with a new set of players. Again. And Again. An endless live rerun.
And no horror is left behind. Your horror is what you cling to, it defines you. It defined every cell in his body until he became horror itself. What he is he can never forget. And that this life now is an exchange and blood is the currency. For he would rather condemn her to an eternity in Hell by his side than to wander this earth alone.
Because through her, he will return. His salvation lies in her and nothing else.
And so it's weakness. Perhaps. Humanity has a curious was of overtaking you unaware. So yes, when he thinks about it, he knows it is weakness.
But our weakness is what defines as humans, as pathetic creatures cast from a perfect Creator whom loves and forgives even the most horrid men of this earth. Weak and feeble children crying out in blood and a waking death. No matter how much you try to rid yourself of it completely, this weakness, this humanity holding you back―it will always remain, if even just the faintest sliver. When a princess left him to ruin a small piece of it, of her, stayed behind
The slightest pain in the chest.
It's still there, this pain.
And so it's weakness when he goes to her that day. It all happens very quickly. It is neither justified or planned it just simply happens in a moment. In a theoretical second. It's his weakness when the pain takes over and he slips helplessly into selfish desire. Desperation is perhaps what you would call it, later on he's not sure what to call it. And it's her weakness that leaves her as no more than an injured dove trembling and reaching out for release, only to succumb as prey. And it's weakness when he looks at her, at what he has done and there is a hitch in his throat and he can hardly stand it.
There's a thin smile on her face when she turns from her balcony that stands tall above the treeline watching the silent snow drift and blow down and across her hair and leaving little wet kisses on her cheeks. Across flush lips as red as her eyes.
He's always too late.
But not this time.