.
.
His lips were thin and bloodless, and his chest heaved with the effort to breathe. "Are you in pain, my son?" Amshel asked, and Karl raised his head-barely, just barely, eyes rolling upwards in a paroxysm of forced-consciousness. "Karl?"
His eyes opened once before closing again, and Amshel watched the cuts on Karl's face begin to knit. He didn't heal at the same rate he normally did: forced starvation and a chamber pumped full of gas did wonders in terms of delaying Karl's healing. Amshel wrote it in his notebook, pleased.
"Karl," Amshel said, and Karl's eyes cracked open. They were puffy and bruised and the whites of his eyes were injected with red. "You have done well. Diva will surely be pleased."
"Diva," Karl rasped, and he closed his eyes.
xXx
.
The years with Karl have taught Amshel many things: how a lack of blood could triple the feelings of pain, how a severed arm reattached loses some of its strength. He ripped off fingernails and placed on electrodes, transected vessels and infused countless chemicals all in the attempt to see what could augment a chevalier's strength and what would help them heal.
He held these experiments before, of course: the countless mouse models he'd used and the mongrel dogs on which he'd experimented were nothing compared to the specimen in front of him now, a living, breathing, immortal man, whose secrets he could finally begin to understand. Karl wheezed and moaned and squeezed his eyes, but it was a small price to pay to understand how he and his other brothers worked, the way their bodies knit at a molecular level.
Now Karl was etiolated and motionless, the grayish hue of his skin sickening as it lurched toward something nearly human. Amshel frowned, writing neatly in his notebook, when there was a knock at the door.
Diva wanted to see him, the odd little chevalier Amshel politely asked for her to turn. Behind her, Nathan waved with grand gestures while Solomon walked, face pinched, the both of them trying to talk her out of it. "He's a pretty, pretty present and you've been hiding him from me! I want to see him," Diva said, and her face split. "I want to see him now."
Disgusted, Amshel turned, irritated by Diva's sudden arrival. Yet again he came to another failed experiment: for all his work and all his inquiry, the Delta project barely left the ground.
He was picking up his pen, ready to dismiss Karl and patronize Diva at a moment's notice, when he saw it: Karl's heartrate increasing, the tell-tale beats an erratic staccato on the monitor.
"He looks delightful," Diva said, and Amshel watched, pleased as Karl hesitantly stood by Diva's side. Diva smiled, a rare, devilish sort of smile, before dipping low and whispering against Karl's neck, her tongue running a lazy path up Karl's ear. The bond between a chevalier and his Queen was a nebulous one indeed, and for all of Amshel's experiments, he could not even begin to understand. The deep-seated pangs of loyalty and arousal, a sexual chemistry that went beyond the bounds of any human relationship-it was something he could only observe in himself.
Perhaps this is the experiment I should have conducted, before...
xXx
.
Karl was Diva's newest plaything, and Amshel watched, at turns transfixed and disgusted, as the whole of their courtship seemed to blossom before him. Years of study taught him nothing if not patience, and patience was what Amshel needed now, as Karl clumsily began to navigate the tenuous relationship between himself and his beautiful Queen.
As Amshel suspected, love was not an easy thing for Karl. Loneliness was a thing that plagued the boy even before he was locked up in Amshel's cell, and it was this solitude that gave Amshel a mordant fascination: Karl stared at Diva when he thought she wasn't looking; his voice stuttered and tripped over his throat when he tried to speak. From the shadows, Amshel watched as Karl stole one of Diva's underthings and crushed it to his face; he could see the shame creep into Karl's expression, even as he secretly balled up the fabric and stuffed it into the pockets of his coat.
It was hopeless and yet frightening in its intensity, Karl's yearning for contact. Darkly, Amshel wondered how Diva would react if she knew the intensity of Karl's devotion, and that night Amshel set about to find the answer.
xXx
.
It was nighttime in the garden, and Diva walked the garden path as she always did, an idle hand trailing the thicket of roses, its petals falling as she passed. Karl rose, heart in his throat, as Diva stepped close and began to peel back the fabric of Karl's shirt.
Amshel didn't need to see it: how the boy's eyes closed, the telltale signs of his desperation, nor how he trembled at Diva's mouth curling softly against his skin. She drank and thought nothing of touching him there, the hard knot of his arousal pressed beneath her fingers.
This was not the first time Diva has done this: her chevaliers seemed to exist for her pleasure alone. Amshel watched as Karl shyly turned and leaned forward for a kiss, which Diva generously allowed, opening her mouth and receiving him with a languid warmth. She seemed to think nothing of kissing him, letting her tongue trail against the muscles of his neck while she straddled him, groaning open-mouthed and rocking beneath the bunched up fabric of her skirt. When she came, she thought nothing of suddenly and unexpectedly pulling back, laughing and grinning as Karl fumbled with his now neglected hardness, the shame on his face making him shake, because to her he was nothing but another beautiful doll, someone whom she could use and just as easily smash against the ground.
xXx
.
Amshel's notebook thickened and grew with these observations. Diva stretched, catlike and disaffected, as her other chevaliers flanked by her sides. They spoke and laughed easily around her, indulging her whims while Karl stood noticeably apart. Moments passed like this, before finally Diva rose.
Amshel could see it: the hitch in Karl's breath, the tense anticipation that Diva was coming to stand next to him. But instead Diva ignored him completely, walking past him and reaching for Solomon's hand.
And what did he expect? To hold her? Talk with her? To share a bed and make love to her? Slowly Amshel began to record the things that Karl yearned for, watching him with studied eyes.
"His name is James," Diva said one day, and the other chevaliers raised their eyes when Diva twirled into the room, tugging the newest member at the very center. "He is very pretty and very, very special. He says he'll call me 'Mama," Diva says, and her blue eyes glittered, cold. "And he's prettier than any doll."
Nathan clapped and Solomon shook his hand, but Karl stood before they could say anything. Not that Diva cared. She preened over James' suit, cooing that thiswas the face of a man she could love.
Amshel watched. Wrote with his pen how Karl moved quickly from the room, jaw tight with an angry and bewildered sadness, the sting of Diva's rejection battering him at all sides. Hours later, he would find Karl balled up at the foot of his bed, a patch of filthy moonlight quivering on the concrete floor.
xXx
.
The experiments were nearing an end. Karl sat at the foot of the gurney, docile and quiet, as Amshel prepared a syringe. He tied a tourniquet around Karl's arm, pausing before reaching and drawing blood.
"You can keep going," Karl said, after Amshel had finished. He did not meet Amshel's eyes.
The Delta project rested on these experiments. He knew how long it took bone to knit and skin to heal. But what he didn't know was how much blood a chevalier could lose, if it was possible to recoup the blood loss before dying. Amshel had many pet theories on how to kill chevaliers: decapitation and incineration being among them. But the loss of blood seemed crucial to him-it was a theory he had long wanted to test, were it not for the risk of losing his most precious subject. But the Delta project was nearing its end and more than enough Schiff to work wtih, Amshel no longer needed Karl for those experiments. Karl seemed to know this too, because he held out his arm, without looking at him.
"Do you not wish to see," Karl asked softly, and he lifted his eyes, "what exactly it would take to kill me?"
Amshel lowered his hand. He watched Karl, carefully. "Why?" Amshel asked, and Karl's mouth thinned.
"I am one who was born unwanted...both as a man, and now," Karl said. His eyes slid upwards, meeting his.
"Perhaps with my death, I can be something useful."
xXx
.
How was it that things ended like this? That Amshel's long life, the multitude of futures, should bow and bend at the sight of another one's ruin? Once he pressed his hand on the pulse of something foreign to himself, the silken webs of a thing that was beyond understanding. Now he felt as if he were a boy plucking off a butterfly's wings, and to him it was what love was like: heartless and mocking, something sad and terribly, inexplicably cruel.
Karl did not die. Not when he slumped over the straps on the gurney, skin pale and clammy and eyes the color of a runny egg. Not when his blood trickled out from a multitude of cuts, countless wounds that would not close. His pulse was a threadbare one and his meager life was strung up by thin fraying cords that threatened to snap, and just as the last drops of Karl's life seemed to ooze and puddle at Amshel's feet, Diva swooped in, terribly displeased.
The strike, when it came, did not surprise him. Amshel pitched to the side and staggered back, raising a hand to the cut on his cheek.
Somewhere from the folds of her petticoat, Diva had produced a knife; the small blade glinted as she cut the palm of her hand, sniffing with a smug superior look, and then dribbling her blood over Karl's mouth.