A/N: This story started with me just rambling to myself as an exercise and then I just kept going. Caroline's confession in the very first sentences is shamelessly swiped from the great F. Scott Fitzgerald (which inspired me to write the whole thing).. all else is mine :) Let me know what you think, I'd appreciate it because I haven't written in a long time and frankly I am self-conscious of my writing, almost didn't post this.
let him wear the wolf's head (the sign of the outlaw)
There was no grand declaration.
"I fell in love with you the first time that I saw you,"she said quietly.
He pretended not to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal.
She did not wait, could not.
She: the sapphire-eyed princess, decaying in the caverns of her mortar tower, asphyxiating under the earth's dirt mouth. There she would be. See her feasting on the wine of bulbous rats, hair sewn together like the roots of weeds, fingernails putrefied half-moons?
For that is what she would be if she waited for him.
Hagged and wizened, though no vulturine year breathed molded kisses into the bow-red throbbing of her lips. Eyes peeling away to the sickly grey of a snake's crisped and forgotten skin. Her voice, sing-along bird's song, hollowed out reverberations of a bone-dry well. A cell of impossible utterances, ineffable prayers—and immortal cherub-fattened cheeks deflated. No more undulating infancy before the ravening jaws of always, always, always and forever.
"I fell in love with you the first time that I saw you," she said quietly.
She did not wait, could not.
Instead she watched.
O, death—
He was. Erected; a gargoyle in the warring hiss of the firefight.
And he was a goblin, so mutinous the shadows were to his fine features, so eagerly they tortured his fair façade into cinder and ash. Devoured him and picked apart his flayed cheekbones and black, tomb eyes.
She wondered if he wasn't full of centipedes, if they wouldn't crawl out from his eyesockets and slither out of his lips, coal-coiled snake bodies, little living hungry things that ate the innards out of him, memories or parasites or piranhas. Was he not made out of vermin, writhing worm hoards, pestilence entirely? Was he not a tower of sucking mollusks, stacked upon themselves, to fill this threadbare manskin-costume? There were auguries in his breath: to death, to death, to death.
She had never seen a fireplace rage so brightly nor a beast so still.
How to explain it? This peculiar look to him— as if he were being hunted, he, the hobgoblin, finally, the prey.
And so it went on like this as the clock stole minutes from those who shirked them. The bitter clock and its everlasting countdown: to what now? The echo of its particular hands banged against the walls like cannonfire.
Behold the death of death's keeper—so loud was the tumbling iron of his scepter falling from his hands, calcified wrists of rod-wrecked knuckles and bones. His black-plated amour mildewed off the taut cord shoulders, leaving the leper behind. And there he was, eaten away, skin made of wax. A corpse only, held up by a myth.
And what did this—? Her words? Have they slayed him so easily, this dragon with his angry, helical wings. Has he made a knight out of her so hastily? this princess in the silver-shining armor, come to rescue him held up upon slamming phantom hooves, the ghost of the hellfire-white horse his father had slain?
His hydra of poisons drowned.
His eternal fall withstood.
She was a priestess, summoned things back from the dead beyond.
He growled.
He was the thing in the ground which holds all rooted things.
He was the pit apple core of the rotted fruits at the base of Eve's ruinous tree.
He threw off breath like it were an ornament. He did not have to breathe, not truly, dead he was. Why then did he feign this mortal coil? Was it habit? Or worse— some horrid vestige of the worthless, spineless, bloodless Niklaus. That bowel-voiding, battle-fearful, wide-eyed squire sack of filth. Yes, he could taste him now and all his ridiculous and humiliating terror. He would rip his face from his skull, eat his eyes and ears and lungs, silence to his coward screams, swallow the blood and vomit it back out. No, take his breath.
He did not need it.
Nothing.
Nothing to resurrect, burning bright demon. Scathing Calypso. Halcyon shrew.
Wicked, wicked lighted thing made of blistering sunstroke.
O, seraph—
Death has killed itself to avoid your touch.
Has erased all the world.
Retreat, unwanted thing.
Silence your siren screams!
Unloved daughter, sticking her hand in the black den of Cerberus.
He looked at her so coarsely, so angrily. No longer curious or forlorn, no scraps of that cruel jest of hoping, but treacherous and virulent like a yellow-secreting plague.
His breath cholera.
His raw gums arachnid-kissed contagion, milking out as fangs protracted.
He roared with canine jaws and wet calligraphy eyes, "There is nothing left to love, and yet you love. What a pitiful thing you are. I am the monster. I am the end."
But she did not wait, she watched.
He crumpled to her feet like a child to a statue.
Her hands were bleeding.
He was eating them, kissing them.
Everything he touches dies, burns, falls.
And he does not want that for her, can't you see? The way he crushes her knuckles into dust against his cheek. It is not fear or pride or anger or malice, it is guilt.
Guilt.
How perfect he is in his repentance.
She does not care that he will never find it.
He does not care that she cannot give it.
Useless little girl with her little pony night-light.
"Last night I fucked a girl so much prettier than you," he snarls.
He is laying backwards on a velvet sette with his head upside down.
The cushion is stained, maybe from this girl so much prettier.
They are burnt. It is the desert, the dormancy of them.
She is kissing her fingernails with the dead eggplant venom of a python.
"When you fucked me I pretended you were him," she says.
He hiccups, sneers, bitch, tosses a bottle onto the dead woman at the floor of the sofa.
One pinky nail, slick and gleaming.
The next: brush over lubricated liquid purple.
She squints below the white harsh light above the table.
"She was gorgeous. Animalistic," he eyes her.
She and her unforgiving porcelain glass, tightly-wrapped bone.
Curse her, send her the long way to hell—
She has drawn up the gate.
Eat her.
Leave nothing left to taunt, nothing left at all, no frigid glass bones or cobalt casket stare.
Her eyes in his stomach.
Unable to avoid him, bubbling in the bile.
Yes, leave him to the lions and he will consume you.
His memories of copulation fracture out in his mind like a child's flipbook.
"Loose, lascivious, free," his mouth fucks the syllables to spite all of her cold, crushing pearl. "She loved me out the way I crave."
She is a taciturn butterfly, ensconced in the lamplight, on another moon, another flower, eons away.
"I miss Tyler," she says. "I miss Stefan."
"They are dead," aggravation usurps covetousness, grows ragged as it slips over the dagger of his fangs.
"I wish they weren't."
"You have me," the assertion is blank, red, desirous.
He stares at the ceiling in the haze of his herbs and his poultices. He blinks black eyes so slowly that his vision blurs.
"I don't want you."
"You pitch superficial wounds into the heart of darkness, darling darling darling."
She stands and drives a kitchen-knife through his sternum, leaves him pinned to the couch, dying out, in the haze of his witches' poisons and the sweet plum-smell of incense.
Royal purple nail polish bleeds across the floor.
He finds her seven years later.
"What did I ever need it for?"
It, he says.
Like it is catching. Like it is some kind of disease to be cured of, to be decayed from.
"Voluntary prisoner, controlled by something feigning better strength than I."
She looks up at him.
The small table in the shadows of the darkened Moroccan marketplace is covered in books written in Arabic. Oh, it suits her. Look at her with her lightbulb bright hair and her shining shellacked lips in the rubicund stone alleyway, alight with bangles and trinkets and pungent foods. It suits her so, as the sun boils into the patchwork skyline of this gasping dust-city. The harmitan draws a veil of crimson across the sky, paint drops yawning into the bowl of the desert.
"You think it controls you," she laughs, and her laughter startles him.
It trickles into the valves of his yellowjacket heart like honey.
"It is the only way not to be a prisoner," she says, looking up only once to see him, parched boy in this parched land, and she is an oasis, a mirage.
"I know that you're in love with me," he tells her light-heartedly, he is a child today, freewheeling in the cool moonshine over the water. He is star-caressed, hands above his constellation-crowned head, laying in the open lips of a gondola, Venice, Italy. "And anyone capable of love is capable of being saved."
"What hack made that up," she says, ink-stained night hair curling over her shoulders, bitterness in her two-hundred year old hands as she swipes through the water like a stone-toothed shark.
"Did you mean it or did you do it to save your skin?"
She looks away from him, to the corroded brick-tops of the sinking city of romance.
"I was hallucinating."
She is wide-legged, begging, need.
He kisses the soft core of her rabbit jaw, chokes on the brambles of her poison berry skin. He crushes her hip, breaks her bones into diamond ice chips. He feels his skull crack angrily against the wooden frame as she snipes his throne, spreads her thighs astride him, deadbolts him down with the vault of her.
He is concussed, drooling, bleeding, and weak. Undone like he is never for this harlequin heart and her starbitten mouth.
She could kill him now, in this crosshaired second of eternity—
Murder him—
Make him sob for his mother and his dead horses and his poor, poor broken heart.
He is so perfect—
Imagine his funeral, the horror-film 35mm death of him, the crow-netted sky and the hated things melting from the earth into the magma below—
This injured animal, this broken malformed demon-winged freak—
How softly he breathes—
How she turns her back so easily, just like that.
Do not ensnare him! See what I can.
Pureness is not more easily corrupted than darkness, this is what they forget.
Her ruined knight, she would crawl into the casket with him.
She kisses his jugular, rips open his throat. Kisses his punchdrunk lips, scrapes her fingernails against his knife-sharpened cheeks. She holds his face, breathes of him, her lungs dissolved. He is a furnace stoked with rotted, choking coal. His teeth grip her own, his tongue singes the wet insides of her throat. He buries his claws in her, and she caves to him, caves like a mountain to the wind never could.
He thunders her name into her hair, holds it in his teeth, breaks her ear drums, he is not dead, not dead.
Fuck her princess gown and his Cinderella complex— he would fuck her in the cinder-snowing dystopia of his ruined, ruined kingdom. He would fuck her stained in ash, watch her cheeks blown red by the burning of Rome. He would fuck her with these screams in his ears, the magma dissolution of Pompeii, but only her pomegranate moans would flood him, fill his abdomen and jaw with ripe, raucous hunger.
Yes, he would fuck her, and she would bleed like she would bear his children, and she would cry into his shoulder, and sink her fangs into his collarbone, and he would be king for a moment, and free, and welcomed for once—
She pulls him closer—
Yes, allow him. Invite him.
She opens her lips, he watches, rapt, juvenile.
She is going to say his name—
She is going to crown him with those argent notes, and he will be rajah here, he will be tsar to her forbidding dead Siberia.
Yes, sweetheart, give him a polar kiss. Give him violet hate, the empty empty cold, anything, lay his neck across the blade and watch his arteries stammer out sable onto planks of hangman's wood. But do not deny him—
So softly does he meet her that he does not recognize this body he is trammeled in.
Kiss him, sweetheart, like you do the other men. Reclaim him, why don't you, he is yours.
You blasphemous, burdensome thing. Your snowing confidence melting into impermanent water, and your arctic circle heart.
He caves first, he is always caving, sinking into the trenches, shot in the shoulders by her howitzers, is this some kind of harbinger, some beacon of annihilation—? Could this be the skeletal reaper who drags overgrown fingernails across his flanks, who splits his hair with forked and desperate hands, who breathes daffodil desperation through those deprived and pretty lips? Whose need spills like cranberry stains onto his unshaven face, his bombastic vocal strings?
No—it is her.
It is her and her strawberry heart, too young, too sour, beating, beating for him, with her raspberry thighs and her sick slick desire, her Artemis bow vibrating, taut, aching, she breathes him. How to care for her—? This child, this suspended baby doll, with all the trappings of a woman. This monster made of innocence snaked with needs darker than forbidden fruit.
Give it to her.
It is his perfect rejoinder, his care and callousness in one like an eclipse.
Make her howl from the intricacies he, only he, can taste over her map. He is her cartographer, he will draw her peaks and sink her into gorges, he will burn and freeze her.
Only—
Look at him first.
(Look at him with his penniless neon-lighted need, darling his eyes, they betray him so maddeningly.
And rip them out if you do not)
She offers no salve, no Nightingale to his agony.
And he is. He is waiting for the words. Hopeless poet, militant artist who sketches out massacre.
Bomb him.
Deconstruct him with the Blitz. March on him with goosesteps, line him up to slaughter.
Just say it—
Say it.
"Say it," he demands, naked and burning and so nearly forfeit.
She is untied, blue-lipped, moon-shot and struck by the skidding, assaulting wholeness of him. Of his presence, of his promise to her.
Look at how certain he is, and she knows he would leave her here, desperate and unbitten.
Disappear into the sands, reappear only as a memory.
He holds his breath, presses forward one moment more.
"My last," she vows.
She has her hand over his echoing, echoing chest, and he crushes his lips to hers.
Four hundred years had passed. The world had changed but people were the same, the moon was the same.
He was so like the moon, waxing into rage, waning into melancholy. Cratered-carved, pock-marked by ancient collision; a silent world of impotent dust blanketed over the fabled façade of a man.
A lifeless bulb like an ornament cast off the bulletholed sky.
There he was, swinging, swinging around her fertile earth, distantly bowling around her in the hollow expanse of space.
She: teeming with life, the ocean swaying of her hips, the scorching heart of her equator.
There were moments when they were happy.
She watched him under the obsidian spill of night, there in the great wide forests of the north, beside the roaring bonfire which spat at the heavens with its tongue.
He sat cross-legged, like a guru, like a wise, wise keeper of deep, deep things, his skin stained with paint in ruby and ink and chalk. Designs swiped over his canine lips, up across his vaulted cheekbones, over the archways of his church-door brows. His heart rang the bell: yes, yes, yes. Everything was yes, and he was framed in the blueberry smoke of these peoples' rituals and legends with his eyes gloriously shut.
His eyes closed, to think such a thing, without pretense, could be—
For she was there, shielding, armor he had fitted himself inside.
He opened them like a child, like a child eyes the sky, and he stood and grabbed her hands and swung her like a stone, threw his head back, took strides as large as sycamores.
The long black feathers around his neck framed his shoulders, expanding them so broad and so powerfully, they danced as he moved, black and coruscating red, and he looked alive, so alive that it astounded her.
It was perfect here, in this place, eating hunted things, and drinking human blood, and killing and maiming under the sly, sly moon. He plummeted into slumber, asthmatic with passion, exhaustion, cheek slack against her breast, staining ivory with a selfish mouth smeared with offal, the color of wine.
Her hair grew long.
He would run his knuckles through it, rasp Rapunzel in violent German consonants, lick her hairline with a flat, warm tongue. He obsessed over the satiny locks of puckered-lemon yellow, would tell her stories of fair-haired girls in the village of his youth, making shadow puppets against the elk-skin tent they secluded themselves within.
He squinted as he recalled, as the dust billowed off the shelves of his memories, and her heart shuddered and brimmed and gasped: he remembered it all. Eternity had only sharpened his mind though it dulled has his soul, and he was inexplicable, eerily distant yet spiked with clarity, so destined to unrest.
She marvels at his depth, the airless reaches of Everest's isolation, she gapes at his shallowness, the film of car grease over puddles.
She looked at him, so sure that the more complex something grows, the simpler it becomes.
"Kiss me," she says.
Kiss me she says, perdition in her eyes.
He hears the bells of recompense, he hears it all, everything, this is the burden, oh and the gift of the beast—
Her words ring, they say I listened.
He slides his flat, hot palm down her abdomen, strikes her harp, hears her gasp out his name in those fluttering, butterfly-soft tremors.
He fucks her like a wolf under the torn open sky.
There are bad nights.
She cries so hard that he forgets his heart is forged of granite.
He roars as the inferno, the tempest, creates chaos from the atoms which spin inside the hovercraft cities, the whooshing space of these clean, dark, skylines full of spacecraft and the promise of tomorrow.
He threatens ancient gods, rouses them from their centuries-old slumber, strikes them up from their history-thick netherworlds.
Hephaestus remake me—!
Take it, this heart of stone.
Take it back, finally, just give him a feather's kiss, a moonbeam's gauzy touch, the forgotten weight of dandelion seeds.
For what does he do with these gangrenous monster's hands to quell, to summon, to strangle the pain up from her breast, quivering like a doe in the wrath of summer's storms.
He threatens Elysium and her reborn earth, he stomps quakes into the ground that are felt into the oceanbeds, that he might better understand.
Mommy— she says, Mommy.
Daddy.
Stefan.
They are the underbelly of these towering, bleeping, buzzing cities.
And she is crying against the pillow like it is a headstone as he blinks.
There is eternity—
A white soundless ghost, so eerily still beside her.
He is gravely ill.
Slumped on his throne, he is upheld by the arms of archaic wood like the depictions of the Savior at the St. Louis. His jaw is drawn, his hair silvered. Behind the thickened shell of glaucomic eyes is something strange, there lingers something pale and almost frosted.
They say he is dying.
The king is dying—
He dictates with furious malice, shakes the drapes on the wall, makes the painted-glass tremble. But the way his brothers avoid each other's eyes, the way they make no protestations to his violent rants, the way they shuffle business quietly between themselves, how they duck their heads, say, of course, brother—
The haunted city whispers.
Its ageless ghosts stalk the halls of their manor, they curl mildewed fingers around the doorways, stretch eyeless skulls to catch a soiled glimpse of him—
The demon king, paying his voodun dues, his maker finally come to collect.
This is the dried blood on the walls. The nighttime slaughters, the screams of broken glass, the pleading and pleading and pleading he was ecstatically deaf to in his perfect mania. His mistress called power, and how he loved killing, how he would be a slave to her, not a king, for this one blood red joy.
It is not possible. They are immortal.
Original.
Some hex, some curse, they have waged against it all before, they have, haven't they. They have molded this world like red clay from the hapless riverbeds of time.
His sister recalls the darkest times of his madness, fifty-two years of insanity, constrained like a lion behind circus bars, stalking, sinewy muscles stinging against lunacy, his cage of bones and stagnated blood dissenting, baying for absolution, and murder, and mayhem.
It is at the back of every tongue, like acid, like bile.
She sits beside him, and nudges his forearm when she finds his eyes straying during an audience, a nonagenarian witch recounting the troubles caused by a sorcerer come up from the islands.
They come for audience now.
They seek his advice, and he has become benevolent with his rage, turning its passion against those that might disrupt this supernatural Olympus.
The werewolves scream under the vertebrae arch of the full moon, and the streets reek with the colors of magic, with the tourists' hoodoo and the religious beauty of the mother continent's voodun.
All the graffiti of putrid peoples allowed to live.
Long live the King—they would carol, under the banners of Mardis Gras, drunk and dancing and demonized with spells and enchantments. Long live the King— they would whisper, as their straining bellies went to starvation during the solemnity of Lent.
He has raged a bloody war, has for centuries endured.
He has murdered, and craved, and eaten, and plotted, and stole.
But he has stayed.
He has stayed amongst the damned, the phantoms and the poverty and the wolves rife with mange.
He has swam in their grease, has taken their spittle and excrement and anger and he has forced this black coiling cape of monarchy from it, has not belittled or despised them, has not accused them or accursed them. He opens his arms to their violence, their strife, their struggle. He has reveled— he understands.
He roars against the witches and the wolves, the succubus and the undead, but it is a king with his court of lords, under the same banner he sees them march.
They have come to respect him. He, a corporeal museum of peoples, and places, and times; a relic of barbarism, a flagstaff of adaptation, carbon copies of lifetime after lifetime, evidence of the colors that run below the world. He, the hated one.
How they have found use for him, how they have finally learned what he has strongarmed beneath his furious carapace. They revere at his encyclopedic knowledge, at his elderly wisdom, now that they have glimpsed it, and he was startled at first to find the worth of his brains and bones, but has learned to give of what can never be taken from him.
He, with the strong hand of autonomous might, who chooses to abstain from tyranny. It is so right, this tenuous and profitable balance of worth, and peace, and need. This respect, this fatherhood that he feels towards those who come to him.
And her—
Together, sitting there, a scale, a symbol, universal, balanced.
She fills his halls with starving people, dumps his riches into the streets from the lofted windows, wears shrouds to walk among the hackneyed hawkers of Bourbon Street and the meandering lovers at the riverfront. She carries red dahlias to the singing wedding bells of St Louis, black roses to the necromancers laid to rest at Lafayette.
The sticky-fingered children wave to her when she steps out onto the balcony, damp air latching curls at her temples. They leave dolls made from cotton and glass beads at their doors.
The priestesses press her palms with sprigs of lavender when she slides into the outdoor circles of their open demonstrations. They draw pentagrams on her lips, they put cinnamon in her hair, they give her necklaces made from crocodiles' teeth.
The believers beam when she sings the haunted southern hymns behind the rows and rows of the devoted, voices rising up in auspice and penance, crammed into the sweating churches like peaches in jars.
The humans whisper gratitude, tender nurses handling vampiric blood into the stock rooms at Tulane.
And oh how she loves.
And oh how they see this, how they come to understand what it is she means. How they wake, blinking from the perpetual darkness, how they shove out the monolith of fate deceiving them in the dark cavern of legend, and stumble into the light, sheltering their scalded eyes.
For: she too is a monster, but there, even in monsters lies the capacity for good.
How they come to worship her, how they long to sap some of her light, how they are indebted to this vision after so long in dreamless and bleary slumber.
And so it is.
He the shadow behind her light, together they are loved. They are bound.
But he has aged.
The gold has tarnished. The witches look seriously upon his face, see his distance that she has refused to know.
They cluck behind worried eyes.
They say, my lady—
That she is blind by the most powerful incantation of all.
And then one wet-tongued summer afternoon, when the sun is low, and the indigo streaks of light rivulet into their halls like the gentle lilac of a quiet church, there is a visitor.
A hag, a crone, a rag-tattered thing with begrimed teeth and blind white dragging eyes, she is the first to whisper, to laugh: yes
he will die.
He will
He will
Die
This laughter, she feels it like a thorn to the finger of her soul, the cackling coarseness of it, the decayed truth after so many months of strange catacomb denial.
She rises, screams, clouts the woman's face across, leaves a blur of blood that turns her stomach to molten need, and devours her.
"How is it possible," she says to his brother, whose downturned brows and almond brown eyes are smudged with cherry-colored fear.
She lay in bed at night, her cerulean stare suspended upon him as he sleeps, and touches with wonder the silver in his hair, the argentine shadow to the beard on his face, the lines that have deepened beside his eyes into careful caverns of consideration, the canyons of outrage above his brow.
Witches stumble in from the streets offering remedies and tonics, but some, dripping in gold and blue jewels, hail from the farthest reaches of places he had known with the intimacy of lifetimes, worlds he had conquered with the flaked silver weapon of aloneness, before she was even born.
With heads bowed and heavy necklaces dangling over living pulses they offer poultices and bandages and herbs and tarot. They read his fortune with the angle of the stars, they wave pendulums over his head, they spread oils over his arthritic fingers and they chant in the dusk with only candlelight.
Not even piecemeal reasons are found.
Nothing succeeds in halting this visible decline, not the secrets of the wolves, not the arcane knowledge of the witchdoctors or the intuition of mediums, asking for aid within the flooding, moaning realms of the mournful dead.
And soon it is known.
Like a grey-massed knell of a storm, a hurricane come across the gulf, a dark unrest in the underbellies of crocodiles.
The willows of the bayou still as stone.
Every torn up fence and ruined streetlight, every splayed vomit of spilled bourbon on the drunken streets seems to say: the King will die.
The graveyards yawn for one more soul.
And the haunted city waits to grieve.
She lay beside him in the rich reds of the silk bed.
Her hand rests on his age-spotted chest, and his brother turns from the door, hacking and clearing his throat and shouldering past the mahogany.
It looks like a pyre, how the candles coruscate at every paint-chipped crevice of the room, how the totem bed posts stand like a Stonehenge around him. His paintings on the wall flicker in and out of the fire's smile, the window open, hot, silent.
"It's okay," she whispers so quietly. "It's okay to rest."
To stop fighting. Fifteen hundred years. To stop.
"I am here. I will watch them," she says, she is breathing louder than she is speaking, looking at his closed sovereign eyes, not moving her own, and outside of that is the rattle of his thinned chest, the burning of incense, of sage, and the watchful orange eyes of candlesticks.
He is a greyed king.
This eternity they have spoken of a dream, but he is still beautiful, will remain beautiful as if in stone.
"Sleep, Klaus," she speaks the sounds of winter, the crisp unfair cold that is never supposed to creep into the slough tendrils of the bayou. "Sleep," her eyes are gold from the flames, fire in their oceans like the burning of oil.
It's the child.
His child.
This unprecedented infant, growing like molasses pours, slowness and sapped and sweet unhurried wheat in the wind of hunger.
It is this motherless child, still so young though everlasting old. This is the rusted irony accompanying the promise of his unending reign and eternal potency.
As the child grew, he would wither.
From blood comes blood, and from life now death.
She leans across his prone form, folds his hands at his chest, touches them with such reverence. Her own shake. He is alone on this bed, this last resting place.
She feels the brick of the walls rough against her bare shoulders, as if coming in close, smothering, her breast gleaming with sweat in the tawny orange light. Everything is growing so small, so near, and see how her breath grips to the air in her lungs like black ocean things do to the solid promise of the cold, cold floor.
See her sweep his moonswept hair off his ripened brow, child's fingers grazing tenderness upon the arch of withered age.
Who could ever love the beast?
Who?
And the anguished gasp of her shocked winter breath says she could, she could, Caroline could, and so could we all, couldn't we? This spool of innards and pain and deception must be undone, this thread of lying neurons ripped, retribution's web untied for once, for all, forever—
Only give her more time—
What were his words that she longs for now, thumbs to the page, rapidly grasps? Maybe someday, in a year, or even a century this can repeat, but not today, not when there is still so much left.
She watches his breath shudder—her heart a stalled thing, and her chest burning, and her throat as tight as solid glass, and time is there on the mantle smiling at her, smiling, saying see, sweetheart, see—
"No," she says, she shouts, hand flying to his chest, to feel it beating, the heart that is there, that has always been there, the core within now finally recognized and fading. It is then that eternity stretches out before her like it did not ever have access to, this selfish pink princess with her pretty pageant crown, her ageless lips and eager eyes and gasping mouth for always more. No, not with the death of her father, nor the bitter goodbye of her mother, her lover Tyler, her brother Stefan. But there, now, is the thin interminable road swept over with time's greyscale dust, and he is neither on it nor beside it, not to mock or ruin her, not to burn and drink her, but nowhere, only left behind, a tiny thing, a black sugar ant, if one could turn and see quick enough before—
"Klaus," she mourns so vibrantly, her colorwheel of pain, crinkled nose and shuffled hair and eyes unmoving from him, darting to and from his chest. She links her fingers into his. He is only lifeless warmth, but not yet faded.
She stammers, inhales, widow's lips, and sorry, sorry child's cheeks, all apple-red.
"I can't do it, I can't," she apologizes to him, to the wizened wax of melting candles, the bleeding wallpaper, anything that will bear witness to her now, and it's here the tears come. "I am so sorry."
Does she kiss him then, you wonder? How does she suffer her last goodbye?
Her kiss on his lips is the sea to the shore, continually pulled away and pushed in again, never free.
Never free.
And goodbye—? They do not know this word, why would they have ever learned it.
She cannot say it.
The morning is new.
And when he wakes he blinks into the paleness of Easter yellow, the pastel imprints of leaves on his red silk sheets, candles abandoned to their wicks like dead men come apart.
Is this true death? He wonders, will he marvel at man's greatest fear, will he sleep.
But it is his brother who snipes his illusion, his one second of release, of amity. A true instant where he was not ink-tipped Atlas, knuckling under the weight of his own blackness.
"What is this," he says, unsure at first.
When has he ever felt this? Uncertainty and the buttercup yellow of soft confusion.
His brother stares.
The house too silent, the windows too bright.
No sing-along bird's song.
He throws off his peace, throws off his mercy, throws off the veil of his dreaming and stands, torrents past his brother with violence, with fear, with horror trammeled in his heart like a spider bite, bleeding out into every stony pore and turning it to gelatinous dread.
And it is he who stammers in his steps, he who blinks the billowing chemical cloud of refutation from his eyes, he whose howl shakes the foundations of this haunted hovel they call home.
It is her.
Asleep.
Not not asleep—
"You promised me, brother!" he bellows, barking through, wolfing sorrow. But his attention cannot be elsewhere, cannot be stolen, "You promised me," he keens, stepping towards her body, extended so preciously on the table, surrounded, suspended by carnations and rose and lavender and oleander. His hands shudder as he reaches to touch her, to feel with animal certainty her absence, and he bewails, scars from the scorching heat on his cheeks. "You liar," he spits with beloved war at her motionlessness, cradles her face so gently. "You liar."
The witch who did the spell bows out of the room without a word, her debt repaid from her mother's, mother's, mother's, mother.
The name Deveraux to be erased from this sinister family line, and the spine-cracked wolf-man who screams out the loss of his companion.
It is tattooed into the bark, the needles, the dirt.
You cannot breathe without tasting it.
The funeral procession is not for a King, but for a queen.
Oh the mourning of the city. The soft pinks and lilac berries, the streets littered with French lilies, petals everywhere like untarnished snow. The rose wine is shared among bars for free, her favorite, her coral kissed lips around the crystal of the glass. Decanters flood with it, shattered against one another in tearful laughing toasts. Shops embellish their doorways with flushed petunias and rosy bleeding-hearts.
The procession is flanked by more heads than years he has lived, and he is solemn beside her slumber, agonized, motionless. If only she could see this love letter to her, to see the outpouring of his grief, how grand it is, how endless it will be, like an ocean flooded red, staining the shore of every life, every pinked grain of sand.
His brother stands beside him, his child gripping one monstrous finger with sticky, skull-candy crushed palms.
"You must be selfless," are the caramel words from his ancient relation.
He mustn't end his life, and so all these people, too.
And yes, he has thought it. Yes, he longs to join her in that pastel-yellow room where he first opened his eyes.
He must live on, with this world, with this child, safe in his grasp.
"It is what she wanted," his brother says, walnut brown pupils marbles on his shoulder.
And he looks out onto this—
The flocks of people, the humans, nature's servants, the moon's slaves, the undead damned. Intermingled, standing side-by-side, fingers linking, tears indistinguishable between different breed and bone and curse, blood in the cups alongside sweet blush wine, together.
And he thinks, finally, this lesson must come to pass.
This bitterness.
What bravery, what stupidity, what unbearable force was in her to finally teach him this. To carve a keyhole in his stubborn, ageless, hateful oak, and to heave a skeleton key through it, to shock his brain alight, to hold his heart in her very hands and throttle it, to strangle it, and contract it, and force it to life, over and over and over again, for five hundred years over, to shunt blood through it until it awoke.
The terrible honor to be irreparably whole at last.
Yes, he thinks, but he cannot say it.
"Yes," he whispers, like a clawing bird is released out from his throat, choking him with tar feather wings.
He is laying in the Fontana del Tritone in Rome, Italy.
He is soaked through to the bone, might as well be a body washed up onto a shore.
His shirt clings against him like a cat in water, and he imagines the push and pull of the ocean with open eyes pitched into the night.
He remembers its construction, 1624, brush off a few shelves, pull open the spine, there it is, the memory, stained with time's port wine.
The artistry and inspiration and beauty of the world.
How everything seemed to come alive, yes even stone had life, and it felt so like someplace else, like it always did for him, it felt like youth and discovery and living in union with the elements of the earth, untainted and childlike and so rich and worth being. That is what he had told her, when he brought her here, had her gaze upon Triton's solemn depiction, glowing in the ardent spotlights, as he used his will to calm the seas. She was his goddess of the unrelenting waves, nauseous unrest calmed by her cool wind, her iridescent siren smile.
This is the place she told him that she hated him.
This is the same street with the same lamplights, the same autumnal air.
He remembers her tearing the pearls from her throat, whipping them against the statue… they came apart, sunk in the still water with the agony of teeth being pulled from someone waking.
"I can't do this," she was bilious, pirouetted around to him like the dancers in the Roma Baca, she could have been costumed like they were she dazzled so.
He fucked her in that ballet box, hours ago, the crescendo of La Tosca below them rising so steeply like the alpine heights of Mont Blanc, the poison in his veins as he plucked her skin with his teeth, the violence in her eyes as the music swelled wildly and she threw her pale pink throat back, let him seize her with his jaws, clung nails into his chest, hearing nothing but his tattered breath, the soundlessness of his desperate fury for this woman who had said, let it go.
Yes, she was the ballerina, his Tosca, quell'occhio del mundo, even with this guilt in her eyes before Poseidon's fountain.
This horrible guilt which made him start.
She didn't care who watched.
The Italians and their zealous appetites, their vengeful romance, had adulterated her with their cobblestone reds and the burgundy of their wines. She was Vermeer's girls, full of light, golden-haired with their white, white skin and their Renaissance brows, and their huge accusing eyes.
"Can't, or won't," was his response, not touching on her grief, his good-humor not yet lost, toying on the edge of boyishness, pulling her elbow, narrowing her focus to only him.
"Klaus," she said, gripping, oh gripping the fur collar of his jacket, so urgently, so painfully that it made him growl out from reflex. "Klaus, we're immortal, and look at me—"
It was like she the mourned the loss of a child, the way she gestured outwards, as if signifying all the world meant naught.
He stared at her with a liquor-keen gaze, his focus shuttering out the streetlamps and the passerby, the fountain's Roman rain.
From whence came this delirium? This rejection?
Hours ago she had purred his name, had snagged her thighs against him, ached around his body, prayed against his ear those polluted whispers which made him rigid with possession.
But now—
Her eyes so wide and devastated, they included him in this statement, this bereavement, this outpouring of denial, a slip of her pretty tongue in this unforeseen attack of loss, oh how dare she, in her resplendent beauty, her bangles with which he had adorned her—
She her in her splendor, yes, bedecked in that vixen fashion of the elite and erudite, the never-hungry but always-starving. Her sable dress that licked her curves, long legs extended by bird-cage shoes and perfume that lingered after she walked like she was made of punch-red ink that marked each frame of life she spun through.
She was his, she had played along for a year, for a decade, but not long enough—
It would never be enough, don't you understand, sweetheart? Don't dare pull the thatching off this Viking village lodge, this nuptial house he had constructed so grand, so meticulously, so patiently, tearing down the homes of others, huffing and puffing and dismantling the brick, eating the children and the wives, clearing the land for them only. Give him an ax and a good sword and he will kill for you, but do not leave him floundering in the wilderness, dripping with entrails, path home swept asunder by your Calypso breath—
"Klaus," she begged, and for what? What compelled her into a state of such madness, what could he have possibly forgone her? The tears in her eyes were sharp, real and heavy as coins. "Klaus, what are we doing?"
"Stop this," he demanded, though did not break her vice grip on his collar, her mouth too close to his. "You're acting out. You've had too much to drink."
She stared at him, a smile made of dissent ripping at merlot stained lips. "How can you just stand there like I am the crazy one?" she commanded his answer, took one disgusted look at her lavish black leather purse and her perfect black nail polish. She dropped it to the street. "What are we doing? Shouldn't there be something else, something more?"
"More," he said the word as if it were vile. "What more?" he extended his arms like threadbare wings. All of this was hers. Every last brick. Every last inch of the sky.
She shook her fists in his coat.
"I mean, what have I done, what have I done with all this time… there are people starving somewhere, dying," she blinked heavy eyes, somewhere someone longed for this flaming insobriety that knocked her heels unsteady to dull the agony of life, not to enhance the brilliance of it.
"This is natural thing," he assured her, he spoke clinically. "You're three-hundred years old. You'll hit morose, melancholy, reflection. But I intend to deflect that, Caroline. Not you, love, you will keep your light."
He pressed two fingers under her chin in reverence.
She sneered, looked away.
"Caroline—" he reached for her arm, to smother her discord. That is what he was, the dust on the fire.
"No!" she snapped, ripping it away, standing apart from him, one step, two. She stared at him as if she could not bear to. "For who? For you? For me? That is not light, Klaus, that is a lie. That is nothing but selfishness."
She stamped, pointed her finger into the street, and onlookers whispered, smiled, ate dolce while sipping punch-fisted espresso.
L'amore.
"That is selfishness? To assure you your sanity? How easily you spit at he who feeds you. How simply you accuse when you wear my bruises at your hips. You best reconsider," he derided, breathed heat, losing his verve despite the public scenery, the lamp-lit stage they created like at the Teatro del'Opera.
"It is selfishness, you idiot," she shoved him back as he neared her, "To do nothing with your time? To claim the whole world, and then ignore its suffering? How is that light? What kind of kingdom is that? What kind of king are you—"
"Yes, sweetheart, project upon me," he encouraged falsely, mocked her tears, eyes narrowing into scythes. "What purpose have you but to demand of me that which you cannot name? That which you feel inadequately within yourself. You selfish little thing with your narrow little heart."
"You're over a thousand years old! There is still, … hunger, hunger and disease and misery in the world. You didn't do anything to stop it. You had a thousand years to make a difference, to change it. And you didn't! You took, and took, and took, and now look what you are! We could do something great, really, truly great, but you're drinking ballerinas and high off some prince's wine, walking around like you don't touch the floor!"
"And you open your legs to it, my ruby red Caroline."
The air stilled between them, carried the scent of parmagiana and people and night.
"I hate you," she breathed.
He was simmering, and she was finished, she was done playing princess, all her dreams spent and the dress up clothes too much, too little.
"I want to be better than this," she said, and turned, her jacket flaring with the finality of a curtain.
He roared, rounded on her, bared his fangs.
She struck him across the face so hard it sung through the pavilion, and the Italian hearts rolled.
He felt the burn up his jaw like scalding water, and thought one moment to tear her limb from limb, clean down the middle, like her little spoiled soul.
But he felt the clattering of raindrops, the pearls of her necklace fanning out onto the street as she tore it from her neck with blazing, departed eyes.
She had beat him to it.
He stared at the place she had disappeared.
That plain, plain girl.
Her bare face and her thin lips and her grey eyes.
Those plain-spoken words, sharp as his own talons in anger.
He had devoured women thereafter, smudged the memory of her departing form in his sketch books like a piece not worth finishing, blocking it out night after night after night only to terminate it with a fierce drag of his palm.
He ate. He loved nameless hundreds through until they ached, begged him to stop, scratched on the windows like animals, were drained dry, open-mouthed and cod-eyed, cold as the first false morning of spring, stomachs or hearts eaten out and red, red stains marring their mousehole apartments.
His drove fangs into warm-olive skin, compelled truffle-brown eyes, kissed thick, hungry lips. He sought strong-thighs and rose-hips and the heavy tropical curves of thundershowers. Anything to spite her stunted-girlhood plainness, her glass frame and her cherub cheeks and her arrested child's body.
He dismantled and dismembered them, he lapped the blood pooling at the dark corners of soft shoulders, let them writhe in his arms, fight him with all their canary strength, pant and tremble and smear his face with their blood, red train tracks of their frantic fingernails.
Sometimes he tore the ligaments from the throats of ash-haired blondes, swallowed them whole. He'd cover their bulging eyes with his paw palm and drink their bodies until they convulsed and wretched and ended in his arms.
There is his mercy, sweetheart.
The merciful extent of his philanthropy. Let them die. Let them all die and end this pathetic mortality before they grew weak and hideous, before their skulls congested with decomposing brains, before they were tasteless and frail and rotted-through, too putrid in physical form to even be of purpose for his hunger.
Let him eat.
Their natural predator.
Why should he extend his arm? Of what benefit would it be to him?
The whipmaster of the foodchain, the ringleader in the black top hat and the tailed red jacket, hugging his abdomen, shadowing his jaw, lashing the lion's snaggled tooth.
—oh but why was he still so hungry? What would satiate him if the blood of continents did not slake and fill him? What was this which drew him back into his bed, weary and starving and clawing for unconsciousness? Why was he thrust into relentless dreams, delirious with malnourishment? And in these dreams was a plain-faced blonde with her sad, searing eyes and her flower-petal touch. She did not say a word, she only watched, and he could not sketch her, he could not. He could not capture her when he woke.
But, hadn't he shaded her into a queen, used her body as a canvas for his claymaker hands, her lips as a palate for his bloodstained kiss? She had cried out his colors as he fucked her, salmon-stained pinks and dark-mottle blacks, had bled his brushstrokes when he drank her. Hadn't she kissed his monster's soul with the impressionism of her bunny nose touch? Hadn't she blocked his stark cubism with her angry hands, shoving him into doors, rocking the hinges of his brain and his bones?
And yet she had rejected his art—
Had thrown pearls at his feet like they were plastic beads for fancy dress. Had scoffed at his work like a critic and ripped his name from the archives of greatness with one typographic word.
She had never been afraid to leave him.
And there she was, walking away from his gallery, saying no, no, not enough, too much of this, too little of that, no inspiration, nothing new, nothing new. There she was in her highwire heels and her milky white legs, walking into the rainy black ribbon streets, ducking into bars and gallerias and thinking that, now this makes me live.
He blinked in the cold fountain water, laid there, soaking up the ice and the memory under Poseidon like he was the southernmost point, he was the map pole of Antarctica.
She was gone now, too.
But he would not be finding her seven years later, like he did then in Afghanistan.
He would not marvel at her brick-by-brick dedication to the altitudinous village, suspended in the mountains, and her careful learning of a language her tongue could barely kiss, watching the weak hands of babies tug her gilded hair.
He traced the trail of where she had been jailed by the government, accused of inciting uprising, put to trial, and executed. He'd follow her path from Taiwan's enclaves of anti-Communist defectors, to the disease-thick jungles of the Congo and her sure-footed steps through the slaughterous civil war and its rape, and plunder, and cronyism.
He'd find her with her hair filthy, pulled back, eyes swiped clean of makeup, smiling over a pair of woven shoes on the dirt streets of Mongolia, and he did not breathe a word, dead heart not beating.
Another woman pulled his hand away and he let her.
He had been fucking an Egyptian, sinking his fangs into her sun-carameled skin, compelling those chocolate bonbon eyes, kissing stung, hungry lips. But still, he forgot to stop himself from screaming her name during those frenzied, silver-stripped full moons.
Oh how in those satin curtains of desert-barren luxury he surrendered to the white flag waves of the lunar glare. How he would howl and destroy and work and call her name into the emptiness of the hot, dark wasteland. He would shout it wherever she could not hear him, to no one, to nothing.
She had found something better—
He watched the stars gape back at the eternal endless loneliness of him.
His swallowing black hole of space-frozen heart.
Come back.
In his hometown kingdom he whirled in the covers of his deathbed. Little fly, little fly, in the spider's silken trap. Reach for what you cannot grasp.
Come back!
The haunted city creaked her footsteps through its humid mold-grown walls. She tapped her nails on the wallpaper, scraped the windows with her knuckles.
Please, come back.
Can she see him from that pastel-yellow room? Can she breathe the swirling sun-mote light with living lungs? Can she touch him through this wall, press with the fingertips of her warm-beating heart? He can smell her lavender twig hair and her mint teeth and her summer touch. Is she not here—
Caroline, he aches.
He presses back.
She watches him grieve.
Touch the paper-thin skin of her face, the way he has preserved her, refused to bury her, suspended her in a coffin that he can cart around for decades and for centuries. No resting place for you, dear pink-hearted sweetheart, no Caravaggio darkness.
Have you learned nothing, idiot?
Wake up, he says. Wake up, willing her with his impatience and his rage.
He stares at her jade veined eyes and her fallen leaf lips, imagines them opening up, just one more second and yes, surely—
Stares him straight in the eyes, but his are just off-center, just to the left of her.
She is the brightness of citrus and he the density of mangroves.
Don't let him go, he begs with his eyes drawn down to the dehydrated body in the white silk coffin. He pulverizes a spider crawling across her cheek, grinds it between his fingers like a piece of dust, leaving a greasy black smear across his skin. He sucks it off.
It has been two hundred years since he has heard her bluebird song, the seductive floating vowels of her French lilting in melody across his shattered staff of angry sixteenth notes. How he longs to hear it now, echoing through the halls of the manor as he slumps into the nooks of his throne. Scrape the remaining vessels out from his fossil, trip into his perilous core.
Oh the night he first found her in his haunted city.
There—
Bathed in blue velvet, fire red lips over one marble white shoulder.
Complainte de la butte— she sang,
Et sous ta caresse je sens une ivresse qui m'aneantit—
And his was a drunken touch, the way he knocked over tables as he ducked below the simple wooden sign of this small tavern, muted on the street between desperate neon and raucous horns.
Les escalier de la butte sont durs aux misereaux—
This voice was starlight, quelling the rabble inside, hushing the animal. Drawing him into the quieted thrum of standing bass and lonesome piano, like a wolf to the wide-opened heart of a kill.
Les ailes de Moulin protege les amoureux—
And who was this sad-toned woman who sang so tenderly about the agony of the world? This sapphire beauty crisscrossed with the bars of blue stage light, hiding her eyes under a taffy curl of blonde hair.
Her lips soothed the detested man who had once wanted so much in return.
Perhaps he could eat her, love her.
If he could have no light, no taste of the heat upon his vicious lips, no open curtains to evaporate the mildew of his cavernous insides, then perhaps he could have this at least, this broken-bird song on this leafless winter tree. This small frigid town with its tiny little fire.
But as he glimpsed her face—
The cherub cheeks absconded by shadow—
The small white hands—
and no—
Imagine his child-eyed surprise, seeing her, his beautiful, strong, full of light, reduced to a simmer and shadow and the crescent moonshade kiss of sadness.
And what was it, this revelation, that the shock of it rocked him. That she was many-colored, like his own palette of boiled reds and utter blacks, not just burning yellows and a hint of wide open blue, but deep purples and quiet maroons and sagacious forest greens.
She was more mournful than a Madonna, more worth worshipping. He stood in the back of the saloon, among the quiet-breathing rout and their potent poison drinks.
And his heart lurched, this painful notion hitting his dead island core, bringing to life again a wolfish instinct more pure than even desire.
We are the same.
He craved her, yes knock off her gilded halo, fine—
He will bend it in half, shove it into the ground like a headstone at her feet so it would not escape her, but—
With his uninvited eyes he witnessed this locked away solitude she carried in the fragile snowflake of rib and alabaster bone. His burning-eyed, selfish-hearted girl. Is this what lay dormant inside of her? This understanding, this perception, these layers, these shades of somber, aching navy that could, that could answer his old question, But you can't, can you?
He returned for fortnights, watching this nighttime songstress replace his resplendent summer yellow Caroline.
I know that you're in love with her too, said a plain-spoken voice inside.
It has been three hundred years and she has grown impatient. She cannot wait forever in that pastel yellow room, filling up her lungs with the breeze and twirling in the sunlight from the windows.
Still he has yet to bury her, to give her resting place. But she is too good for the dirt, for the earth. She is of the sky and the sun and the burning baldness of Mercury.
She is anxious and angry with him, she shakes the shutters of his home, slams doors that no one opens, breaks glass that no one touches.
Yes— he cackles as the candlelight shudders, and he looks happier, madder in the flickering light. "Haunt me," he growls, marveling, knowing she is there.
She screams his name across the barrier and he laughs, eighteen hundred years old and his oil laughter clings to the walls, slides away like salamanders.
There is no balance, no balance when she is gone.
Through his endless life he had childishly coveted the pomp and circumstance of leaders who would rise up among the dung-heap flies of men. Hitler and Churchill and Charlemagne and Caesar and Hammurabi. Armies and legions reduced to raving at the very drop of their jaws. But he does not have the conviction, he is bored, he is too wise, too old. His rule is failing, like stone walls against the sea.
His decisions are impermanent and unfinished, his mind saying, when she returns—
He cannot bring her back, his brother says.
It is impossible.
But he is tired. He is tired of hearing impossible when he has defied every law, has torn time itself to weeping ribbons of sordid flesh with his ancient ivory teeth.
So he kneels, he kneels to a witch and he throws the keys of his kingdom to a wolf like he would garbage to a hound, and he forgets his child, and he abandons his brother.
Let them live. He has learned, he has learned..
And he is free but for only one thing.
He says, take it all.
And they do.
Unbind him, let them link to the eternal white oak, that was the deal and the excruciating agony, like all of the wars of men combined into one tearing death, stripping of all, exhausting him into nothing more than a chicken-boned man with melting ice fingers.
Let them live on, oh little spiders, meek, weak inherit the earth, go on. He does not own them, not now.
And let him die, but forgo the peace.
(the wolves tear into him, and it is blessed this torment
the witches split his brains in two)
He does not need it.
When he gets there, they will make a dominion out of hell.
The dead wolf king and his strawberry queen.