A/N: A couple of notes, since this is a historical piece and unless you've actually studied this period of time, you probably won't know what I'm talking about:
Hougoumont is in reference to the farmhouse located at the bottom of the escarpment where the British forces faced Napoleon's armies at Waterloo.
Ohain is the sunken road that claimed a good portion of the calvalry.
The Pont d'Alene is (was, I believe, or it has been renamed) a bridge in Paris during the early 19th century.
Celery was apparently expensive and a bit hard to get ahold of (or at least it was here in America, in the 19th century) which is where the reference to it as a 'prized commodity' comes from.
Also, to those of you who have reviewed my previous Vampire Diaries fics, thank you for such a warm welcome to the fandom!
Netherlands, 1815
For so long, war is stretched out, held taut, a breath trapped in statue stillness inside your throat.
Your fingers curl in marble immobility around your reins; you feel the sweat of your horse, the sweat of your palm, the sweat of the sky; you wait with hat and head tipped down, the rain pouring in a mercury thunder off your brim, your pommel, your epaulets.
For centuries, the rain comes down on your head.
You breathe your cirrus breaths.
Your horse shifts a foot, flicks an ear, shivers her muscles in a liquid rippling underneath you.
What has a man to contemplate, throughout these centuries? What does he wonder, with his eyes cast down and his lashes soft on his cheek and his gut churned to a sudsing uneasiness?
Love?
Eight centuries ago, your mother sang you down into sleep; eight centuries ago, your mother praised your messy child scribblings and wrapped your clumsy child wounds; she molded you from man to monster, she cast you out, she slammed the door.
She did not want you.
You froze your heart when you tore out hers.
Life?
Sandglass minutes? Days burned to ash behind your back, one after another after another, until there is no more room to run?
Your mother stopped time stumbling in its tracks when she turned you from innocence to iniquity.
Life, love, these eternal mysteries of man: you ponder neither.
No.
A horse.
This creature who stands with shivering muscles underneath you, who is quieted with a pat of the neck, a soft word to the back-cocked ear- this creature who can be named 'friend' when no man will don this mantle- now here is a thing worth a few meditative moments.
War is a waiting, a hush, a held breath.
An incoming storm front of cannon fog.
A shifting foot, a flicking ear.
And then: the charge.
The cannon fog stings tears burning from his eyes and the screaming of the men, the horses, the jingling of the saddles, the orders shouted back from the front- these are all a maelstrom into which he is sucked, and how quickly everything moves- the death shrieks of man and beast, of artillery and saber, the roaring gunshot rain-
The springing of the ground beneath his horse, gone to marsh beneath her hooves-
Hougoumont is chipped away; the cannons smoke; the walls splinter; the trees burst apart into matchstick fragments.
The tiny distant ants of the English soldiers-
The ringing of the sabers, how they shriek against one another-
The horses-
Ohain is a death trap into which lines and lines of riders and their mounts slip, tumble, flail screaming down its liquid banks.
He steers with his knees, reins in teeth; they dodge this sunken lane filled with so many thrashing crashing bodies, squirming their slippery eel deaths-
Napoleon directs the cannons, sends his flanks in a surge of infantry and mounted soldiers to drop themselves like hammers across the English line, and like a wave gone to shore, they break apart, they turn, they scatter-
She runs so beautifully. Her form, her stamina, her speed-
He could take her from one end of the earth to the other, and never tire of her.
"There's a good girl," he tells that back-cocked ear, and he shifts to one side in the saddle, sends his saber whistling down to split a man from shoulder to shoulder, spurs her on, sweeps his blade in a reaper flashing down upon the next-
He turns, he stabs, he holds the line.
He charges the cannons in a thundering of hooves and a thundering of heart, swinging his guillotine blade.
Advance, you are told.
In this way you chase war, run her down, beat her screaming to her knees.
Let her come to you- what's the fun in that?
But his horse- she startles back before the yawning black caverns breathing their dragon exhalations, poor thing, just a touch of nerves, go on, sweetheart, don't be afraid- he stretches out his hand, gives that sweat-blackened neck a pat, lets her feel his touch-
They run on.
From his saddle he reaches down to seize a gunner by his collar, hauls him up over the horn, darts his head forward with snake quickness, comes back up painted red-
He tosses the man down into this seething ocean of men and beasts, of steel and ash, feels the man's head split apart in a melon cracking beneath her hooves.
This wasp's hive of killing breaks before him, divides itself into two rivers through which he charges, sword over his head, teeth gleaming in a red smear from his beard-
A ball shatters men into little pieces of children's toys; they come back down in a raining of boots, of hands, of staring marble eyes.
"Yah!" he cries.
Faster, she runs.
And like this they proceed on, in a roaring of hoof beats like this centuries-long rain, in a flashing of executioner's blade, in an ecstasy of smoke and stink and death- how alive he is, chopping these men down like trees-
Cut a man down when he runs- stick him through when he screams -yes- tear them down- he is a God out here- you will live and you, over there crouching behind the wall- you with your tears and your leaking bowels and your gibbering pleas- you will die; bow before his ruling-
"Come along then, sweetheart," he urges, and she gives him more, more, the love, she runs her heart out for him- she sweeps him along on this tide called war, always above it, raining his death blows down on the fleeing soldiers-
His mother loved him for years, and then one day she could no longer stand to look at him; one day she broke him apart into pieces and did not bother to make him whole, but a horse- a horse loves until the end of days.
A horse comes gently to his hand and stands so patiently beneath his wandering fingers, and this game little beauty beneath him- he is no abomination to her- he is not a thing to be destroyed, to be cut down like these men who fall like harvest to the scythe.
A stableman fell to his lust right in front of her stall, and when he left this pale rag doll man heaped in the aisle before her, did she shy away, did she call him 'monster' and turn her back- did she never again quite bring herself to look at him the same way-
No.
She searched his coat for the carrot he kept in an inner pocket; she nudged his hand and blew her soft hay breath into his face and stood quietly while he pressed his forehead to her mane and blinked the stinging from his eyes.
How afraid he'd been, approaching her with the stableman's blood still in a lipstick coating across his mouth.
And did she even flinch, brave little sweetheart?
She stood before him like she stands before this ocean wall of men with their blades, their guns, their cannons, and she did not balk.
She never batted an eye.
Where he steers she goes, blindly trusting, running on.
And then the lancers come for the horses with their long shining sticks and he flings himself from saddle to ground, saber in hand.
You will not fall; you cannot die.
A man like you- a thousand years is only a fluttering of the lashes, a December snowfall; it passes, it rushes by, it melts away.
What are a million lancers with their long shining sticks all pointed bristling at your heart- go on and have a try, mates -fill him full- leave him porous.
But his horse- not his horse.
He falls snarling on them. He crushes with his hands; he leaves them in a fine powder of bone and brain beneath his boots; he reaches with his fingers into the chests of these men and plucks their hearts like petals from their stalks, so easily, just a little tug-
Their screams, God, the way they fulfill him-
He flashes from man to man, ripping, jerking apart, latching on, breaking down.
A man is never so interesting as when he is disassembled.
The ripe organs in their pulsing death throes, the gaping eyes, cavernous wounds, the fingers twitching their final impulse spasms-
Behind him, the tide shifts, angles out, finds a different shore.
The French begin to sway, to topple.
The English whittle away at their flanks.
They close their incisors over the front line, worry away at it, hold on tight, ride out the thrashing, the final frantic explosions of the cannons-
The smoke rolls down and down and down.
The battlefield is all smog and shadows and the snorting of the horses dying their pathetic whickering deaths.
The guns cock their smoking heads to fix their blind black eyes upon Hougoumont.
They fire.
They pound the walls to ruin; they hammer the foundation to rubble.
The soldiers in their green and their blue pour themselves screaming over hills and through trenches and between cannons; they fall upon one another in a banshee wailing, dying their flashing bayonet deaths, pushing forward, falling back, all of them beasts now, tearing, stabbing, snapping.
War is a thing to break a man.
The screams, the stink, the officers and infantry and artillery you called comrade, friend, brother, in a jumble all around you; the throats with their gaping lipstick smiles; the dragging of your severed stump leg through the mud underneath you-
But he is not a man.
He stands beside his corpse mountain, these men who came for his horse and never got to leave, and he pets her clammy nose, feels her harsh fever snorts against his palm, lets her lean her head into his chest.
He smiles.
"Good show, love," he says quietly into her ear.
"God- don't tell me you were out mooning over that stupid horse again, Nik. Sometimes I think you love her more than me."
He lifts his eyebrows.
Rebekah sits in a puddling of rose silk before his easel, hands in her lap, pout on her face, and what a thing, the way her hair catches the light through the window.
He reaches for his sketchbook.
"I do love her more, sister. She listens. She doesn't nag. I don't have to kill off her suitors because they pop round at all hours of the night, tramp through the halls, leave their bloody boots on my worktable-"
"That happened once, Nik- I can't control where everything ends up once it comes off."
"Really, Rebekah, love, maybe if you'd-"
"If you tell me to keep my liaisons to the street corners, I will bloody scream, Nik-"
"In the streets or in the gutters, sweetheart, it doesn't matter to me as long as you keep them out of my studio."
"You don't have to be mean."
"You don't have to be so…adventurous."
He sits down in the chair across from her, boot up on his knee, and flips open his sketchbook. "Hold still."
She rolls her eyes. "And how did your little war go?"
"Fantastic."
"I hear you lost."
"I never lose, love. The French made a good showing of it; Napoleon's fled with tail tucked between his legs, but a man like that- he'll be back."
For a moment she sits, head tilted just so, and he takes his charcoal in hand, crosshatches a loose layer of shading down onto the page, a smudge here, a smear there-
You are not supposed to use your fingers when blending. A bit of cloth, a scrap of rag- these are acceptable alternatives to this monstrous finger, this thing of oil and dirt. But the rich coal of the lines, the raven glint of her eyes, the soot, the dust- he can't resist. He smoothes an edge, blurs a corner, pats and lifts and spreads about.
"Why don't you get yourself a girl, Nik? The kind that you don't eat."
"What would I do with her then, love?"
"Paint her; draw her; I'm tired of sitting for you."
"I thought you enjoyed being the center of a man's world, sister."
"I'm not the center of your world- you are. You and that stupid horse."
The center of his world is a void. Once, perhaps, his mother with her soft hands and her lavender hair and her crepe paper eyes- how they crinkled when she smiled at him- once perhaps, she lived in this void and she filled it up with her light and he was not alone.
He told his family, stand with him or fall, and one by one they rose up against him, they chose the tomb, they would not kneel.
And Rebekah- Rebekah flits about with her counts and her colonels and her chevaliers, and this house with its soaring turrets and its three acre garden and its magnificent stained glass windows- it echoes. It sounds its sepulcher whispers beneath his boots and if he spends too much time with his horse, if he sits for hours in this very chair with his letters spread flat across his knee-
It is only because they are not here, they could not obey, they turned their backs, and what was he to do.
They left him behind.
There is a music hall in Paris called the Académie Royale de Musique which is full of sleek blonde wood and mirror-glass metal and a thousand different seats. The polished handrails and the private boxes and the plush moss carpets which engulf a man's boots to the ankle transport him from pavement to paradise, from the steaming manure streets to the haunting ballades and the carefree sonatas.
It was here where Quinault's soaring soprano taught him to feel again.
It shook the walls, trembled his hand, moved his heart.
How long had he gone on not feeling it stir, missing its steady moth fluttering- how many times had he wanted, for just a moment, to sense it pumping in his breast, this thing his mother stopped entirely so many centuries and centuries ago.
For only a monster has no heart: even man, black though he may be, possesses something in this cavernous space between the ribs, something which he may feel palpitate, leap, sink its stone weight into the gut.
But he has only a hollow.
How brittle you feel sometimes, carrying around this hole, how close all the rest of you presses around it, threatens to collapse it in.
And this man on his dimly-lit stage in his coat and his wig- he flung this motionless coal heart up into the clouds; he dropped it in pieces at his boots; he wrung it out; he opened it up.
He sat in his dark box with no sister beside him, with no brother, no mother, no soft powdered girl with her fresh milk shoulders and her fluttering lace eyelashes, and he wept.
Soundlessly, with his hands in fists on his armrests, with this newly awakened thing inside him in a knot in his throat.
Quinault sang of solitude, of groping in the blackness, of no hand to pull you free, of how man finds his way into the light one day and basks there in the glory of God, who forgives all.
But he is no man.
He has no god.
He keeps his family in boxes in his cellar, forever sleeping.
He carries home the letters of these soft powdered girls and pins them above his bed and pretends they are his own.
Man may find his way through the darkness to this bright white daylight, but what about an abomination, a creature who the sun does not welcome, who drinks the life of man to sustain his own- how far does this God's forgiveness stretch- how much can it be made to endure-
He comes here often, to sit with closed eyes, open heart, crossed boots.
He inhales; he breathes this music in; he lets it carry him away.
Rebekah chases her counts, her colonels, her chevaliers, and he sits alone in the dark.
He keeps time with his fingers on his chair, tapping, tapping.
He feels his heart, this wonderful, monstrous thing, moving in his chest, beating in his throat, thundering in his wrists.
He remembers that once his mother loved him; once his sister looked upon him with smiling lips and welcoming eyes; once his brother raced him laughing from village to woods.
Once his mother loved him.
Once his mother loved him.
He sits for so long in the dark, keeping time, feeling his heart.
The cafés of Paris are filled from corner to corner, from nook to nook with all the young city men with their fever cheeks and their fever eyes who fancy themselves intellectuals. Poetry, music, art- they lob these subjects at one another like children's toys juggled from hand to hand. The penal system- is man born bad or made so by society, who casts him out and grinds him down; love- is woman devil or angel, sinner or saint- is evil committed in the name of this grand emotion washed clean of its taint; suffering- man has not witnessed misery until he sees a childhood steeped in the rags of the poor and the sin of the streets, but is this childhood once contaminated forever spoiled-
They believe that these discussions, these passions, these harsh words and fists beaten upon tables have the ability to create change, to turn time reeling to one side, to topple history in its tracks, but for eight centuries he has walked this earth, mates, and what he has learned is that, always and forever, time grinds on, history flows forward; they leave you in their dust.
Napoleon in his green jacket and his gray overcoat and his cocked Brienne hat will be swept up with this dust and thrown out in the street; a hundred years from now, who will cry his name with clenched fist and gritted teeth; who will bow trembling at his feet; who will stand before him with saber raised and stone eyes, waiting to be cut down or to be granted clemency.
He will be a footnote, a few chapters in a schoolbook.
If walls do not endure, neither do ideals.
Time consumes them all.
But they are interesting to listen to, these boys with their sonnets and their essays and their epics.
In the early hours of the morning, with the mist curling around his feet and the streetlamps flickering their lighthouse signals, he leaves these cafés and he walks the city's streets with hands in pockets, whistling.
These are the hours of sinners, of men who kill for sport and women who sell modesty for bread; of boys who pick pockets and girls who vend rattling weed bouquets.
He kills with impunity here.
It gets so tiring, compelling people to forget, to overlook what they have seen, to never notice how you do not age, you do not fall ill, and so when your body count has piled too high and for too long your eyes have not shown the mark of a single day, you move on.
Rome, Russia, Rwanda; you bounce from corner to corner, from sea to sea.
But a killing ground like this, a buffet of creatures who will not be missed, who will never be asked after- a man can feast for a long time, in these shadowy doorways and unlit alleys.
He picks up the women sunken into their gowns by starvation and privation; he tells them do not be afraid, it won't hurt but a bit, go on and be a good girl, pretty, tilt your head-
He licks his fingers as he goes.
In this way he stalks Paris.
A sewer beast; a bedtime story: The man with the beautiful voice and the fancy coat and the blood beneath his fingers, who plucks naughty children from their beds, who cracks their bones between his teeth and leaves them dying in the gutters.
"Where are you going?"
"Out."
"Where are you going?"
"I said out, Nik. Go back to your sketchbook. I'll be back this evening."
He sets down his charcoal.
"I asked you where you are going, sister."
She sweeps past him with her haughty chin and her smug nose, tipped so high, and he winds his jaw tight; he grips his sketchbook until it bends.
She flees down the drive to their carriage, holding her hat in place with dainty gloved hand, her ribbons and her lace and her fluttering silk petticoats flapping in the wind, and how happy she looks, going off without him.
He stands watching out the window for a very long time.
In the stables there is only the pawing of a stallion settling down to nap, the snorting of a mare snuffling her velvet lips along the floor in search of stray oats.
And there she is, his beauty, head over the door, soft eyes blinking, forelock in a chestnut comma over one lazy lid.
"Hello, love," he says with a smile, leaning in to scratch behind an ear.
The horse, that beautiful, loyal creature, broken by man but never bitter.
"No saddle today, sweetheart. Let's just have a quick jaunt over to the pond, shall we?"
They fly.
For days, for weeks, for months, he can run without tiring, with a speed to tear leaves in a hurricane rushing from their branches, to startle birds shrieking into their skies, but he is never free.
He is still bound by the limitations of man; he cannot wing himself up into the clouds or skim himself like a skiff across the ocean; there is only the mechanical churning of his legs, the pumping of his piston arms, the whole world in an Impressionist blur all around him.
But on her back, with her mane in his hands, with her reaching on forever underneath him, just fast enough for him to feel the wind in his hair, just slow enough for him to see each individual leaf on each individual tree, nature's carefully-placed brushstrokes-
He is weightless.
He never comes down.
The smell of her sweat and the pounding of her drum hooves, the way she takes each little inch of rein he feeds her and gives him so much, never wavering, never questioning-
Here is loyalty, mother.
Here is devotion, sister- here is everything they stopped giving him- here is everything she took away when she called upon her dark arts to transform him from shy little Nik to posturing bastard Klaus.
Three times a week, she sweeps past him in a rustling of silk to fling herself unladylike down that graveled drive to the waiting carriage.
So undignified, Rebekah, love.
So obvious.
There is a new one, a man with dimpled cheek and honey words who promises to treat her right, to spirit her away, who will woo her and bed her and abandon her sobbing in his arms.
He sits before the window with his sketchbook, waiting for her to come home.
He crosses the Pont d'Alene in his gentleman's clothes and returns in his artist's rags.
He sits with stool and sketchbook, the charcoal dust in a fine youth's beard on his cheeks, the compressed sticks broken in pieces between his fingers. A young girl poses stiffly before him, turning her head this way, that way, patting her curls, straightening her skirts.
And how much does he charge, she wants to know?
Just a bit, sweetheart.
He smiles and he winks and he flicks his eyes shyly up to meet hers as he works, and she blossoms under his calculated coyness, poor stupid little thing; she brightens, swells, throws back her shoulders.
And have you a man, sweetheart, a tryst sneaked under prying parental noses, he teases with the sketchbook balanced on his knee and his charcoal in a thick black snowfall on his fingers.
No, she says, and he lets her go with picture in hand and charmed smile on her face.
Yes, says the next, and with her glassy doll's eyes she leads him away, hand arranged so properly on his arm, her beautiful sunshine hair in ringlets down her back.
She keeps her letters in a perfumed stack in the little chest at the foot of her bed, and he folds them carefully away inside his pocket, creasing them neatly, stowing them tenderly.
Her blank calf eyes go on staring for so long.
It's a shame about the dress, love- such a pretty, pristine white, it was.
Four weeks, five, six, she flees down the drive to the carriage.
He watches.
Any day, she will throw herself with red cheeks and red eyes through the doorway into this room with its artist's light, its painter's fragrance, and he will scold her for letting herself get carried away, for devoting her silly little heart to some stupid unworthy human, for thinking she needs anything other than this house he has bought her and the dresses he has given her and the feather plumes he has placed with savant flair in her custom hats.
He watches.
He places his strokes wrong; he spills his paints; he dips his brush into watercolor instead of oil.
He turns back to the window.
Any day, any time now, Rebekah, love.
He walks to the stables with pockets spilling apples and carrots and pieces of celery, that prized commodity of the vegetable world, and sits with letters in hand on a stool in the corner of her stall, lantern at his feet.
"She's refused her fortune for him, sweetheart," he says quietly. "The separation of the classes, the disapproval of her mother, poverty, starvation, a life spent scrabbling in the streets for her daily bread- she doesn't care."
To laugh without humor, to move the lips but not the heart-
What a painful thing.
Like shrapnel to the chest in the few seconds before the wound seals over, before the skin heals closed, the burning, the sharp dagger piercing of a thousand little metal gnats, worrying their piranha teeth inside your heart-
He scratches his neck, looks down into the flickering lantern and up into her steady eyes.
"And what kind of a person would do that for me? How do you inspire like that?"
This poor peasant boy with his dirty nails and his tattered trousers- he has no magic; he cannot look into the eyes of the woman who penned these words and make her bare her throat, throw back her head, bow trembling backward with her curls fisted in his hand of charcoal dust-
And yet he stirs such devotion in her.
He leads her by the heart into destitution, misery, uncertainty, and she goes so willingly.
Does Rebekah see it, this thing that turns intellectual to idiot, coquette to housewife? Is this what she is off exploring these weeks gone past, the kind of feelings he hears in a vocalist's passionate baritone, in a violinist's masterful nocturne?
Why does she experience what he cannot; why does she get what he will never have-
He is bumped by a searching nose.
He turns out his pockets.
Isn't it something, to have a friend like this, who requires nothing more than a bit of carrot, a slice of apple, who wants only a little scratch to the chin and a quiet word of love.
She huffs a moist breath all over his jacket, wipes her alfalfa saliva across his shoulder.
"Oh, thank you, sweetheart," he says, and pushes away her nose; she wriggles it back under his hand and stands looking at him with her soft doe eyes, and this time his laugh is real, this time it does not shred his chest or brick over his throat, and for a long time he goes on sitting on his stool, letter abandoned on his knee, stroking her forelock, patting her neck.
Seven weeks, eight, nine.
For so long he sits with sketchbook open on his knees, watching the sun turn the window to church glass.
A stunning Mars Red, a stain of battlefield blood.
He does not paint it.
He waits.
Ten, eleven, twelve.
She is in love.
She flits about the house like the stupid little thing that she is, humming, mocking his sour face and his surly responses, and how lovely is the sky, how beautiful the flowers which are just now in bloom, showing their tiny infant faces.
She straightens his cravat. "Don't frown so much, Nik. You'll give yourself wrinkles." She smiles at her little joke, and spins away, singing her simpleton's tunes, her moron melodies.
"Do you have to sing all the time," he snaps, holding his brush like the slender kindling neck of this Casanova charmer she prefers to him, until it cracks.
"Don't be afraid, love," he whispers to the Lady Brigitte, heaped in a pretty white pile underneath him, her chemise bunched in a soiled ruffle up about the slim little hips which have not yet been spread by motherhood.
She digs her nails into his shoulders -like talons, they are- and cries out his name and he thrusts himself to his own brink, sinks his teeth into her jugular, feeds until he comes.
She has no letters.
He overturns her vanity, kicks stars into her mirror, leaves behind canine gouges in the wallpaper.
He kills the footman, the stable boy, the carriage driver.
Stop looking at him, worms, he shrieks- always they stare for too long, never do they stop seeing, these red, red humans with their mannequin eyes.
To the manor of Marquis de Lafayette, the coachman stammers when he inquires, so politely, to where it is that he drives the lovely Rebekah so often these days.
And does this loyal coachman with his little beauties, those two charming young girls in their fresh spring ribbons and their frothing lace skirts, think it's a serious liaison, then?
Yes, the man tells him, so nervously, mate- easy.
Just a little brotherly concern- she's so gullible, the silly thing.
He smiles so pleasantly, standing there before the polished brass traces, running his hand down the sleek black lines of the driver's box- such a funeral color, this stark vehicle swimming in its wax glaze.
His horse colics, and for hours he walks her up and down the stalls, coaxing her gently, shushing her pained little whickers; just another step, love, that's it, sweetheart, what a brave girl she is, there we go, on just a bit farther now-
He keeps watch in her stall with his lantern and his letters, crooning encouragements.
"Cheaper just to get another, my lord," the groom mentions, and the man's brittle peppermint spine comes apart in his hands.
She tries so hard for him, the sweetheart, heaving herself groaning to her feet when he asks, dragging herself with arthritic slowness after him down the aisles-
He sleeps curled up beside her with the lantern sputtering in the corner.
She'll be all right, this creature who loves him, who lies with chin on his shoulder breathing her sweet molasses exhales.
She will be all right.
"Why don't you just let her go, Nik?" she asks him with her head over the door, arms on its ledge, hat spilling its cherry ribbons in sunrise streamers down her back.
He does not answer.
He sits with her head in his lap, moving his fingers along the bright white line of her blaze, feeling the velvet nose, the velour hairs.
Rebekah sighs and whispers away on her slippered feet.
She rallies.
She worsens.
She lies so still, blinking up at him, twitching her magnificent sprinter's legs.
"Please, sweetheart?" he asks.
Do it for him, love -let him be enough- let his longing pull her back, keep her here, let his callused monster's hands with their artist's stains be something of value, something to heal and not hurt, just for once, God, you with your merciful heart-
Please- how must a man beg, go down on his knees before your might- tell him what he has to do for this, his only friend.
He wakes to find her standing over him, nosing for her oats.
There is a music hall in Paris called the Académie Royale de Musique which is full of sleek blonde wood and mirror-glass metal and a thousand different seats. The polished handrails and the private boxes and the plush moss carpets which engulf a man's boots to the ankle transport him from pavement to paradise, from the steaming manure streets to the haunting ballades and the carefree sonatas.
It was here where Quinault's soaring soprano taught him to feel again.
But it was not here where he learned how sharply a heart can break, how simultaneously it can be put back together.
"Is she better?"
"Much. I think she's over the worst of it now."
"Thank God. You've smelled so bad, these past few days. Go on and have the maid draw you a bath or something, Nik." She sniffs delicately.
He kicks his boots off with a smile and sets them neatly in the corner, sloughing off his soiled coat to lay it down across the back of the chair in which she perches.
She holds herself with a frown away from it, sweeping her skirt out to lie in a waterfall of lavender crinoline down over her slippers.
"Nik," she says as he turns to walk away, unbuttoning his shirt as he goes.
He stops.
He feels all the muscles in his shoulders knot themselves in fists beneath his skin.
"I know that tone, Rebekah."
"I have something to tell you."
"Really, now? Something about your marquis? About how you're here two days out of the entire bloody week- how long is that going to keep up, Rebekah? How long until he tires of you? How long until you run home, sobbing for your brother, because he wasn't serious -he didn't mean it- when are you going to learn, Rebekah-"
"It isn't like that this time, Nik. Would you just bloody listen to me?"
He turns to her with clenched jaw.
How scared she looks, how determined- how eager she is to break away, to abandon him like trash strewn in autumn piles in the gutter- isn't that what this is about, sweetheart- the nobleman with the confectioner's tongue who has stolen her heart-
He crosses his arms.
"He wants to marry me."
"This is ridiculous, sister-"
"Stop interrupting me. He wants to marry me, Nik. I'm going to do it."
"You can't be serious, Rebekah. In forty years, he will be an old man, and you will barely have even felt these years crawl past. Do you think he won't notice, love, that while his skin turns to papyrus yours remains just as fresh and lovely as the day he met you- do you think he won't notice how you go out in the evenings with your unpainted lips and return with a gaudy whore's mouth?"
"I could turn him-"
"No." Turn him and run away with him and live forever with her marquis' stupid candy-coated lies- leave her brother with his sweet little horse who in another decade or so will be claimed by mortality, that pesky thing- no.
"You can't tell me what to do, Nik. You're my brother, not my father, not my keeper, Nik- I'm not staying here. I love him."
"Rebekah-"
"I'm going," she hisses, standing with her skirt in her hands.
"You will regret it, sweetheart," he says quietly.
She cannot leave him -he is her brother- this stupid frail human with his sweet promises and his gentle hands and his eyeblink life- he is never going to be there for her, not the way she needs- how could he ever possibly understand her, he with his three decades and she with her eight centuries-
"I'm going, Nik," she repeats.
"Rebekah."
The slamming of the door sets his paints to shuddering in their pots.
He watches her stomp down the graveled drive.
He waits.
She does not turn back.
Lovely place, this Marquis de Lafayette's home.
The exquisite arches with their ivy braids, their climbing rose vines; the vast forever lawns watered to a crisp Viridian Green-
What a pretty landscape this would be, adorning his easel- the new watercolors he just purchased in a riot of rainbow shades- those would be just the thing.
He finds the stable boy with his ripped trousers and his dirty elbows napping at his post.
He leans down to look the boy eye-to-eye.
"Let the horses loose, and then go on and give this old shack the torch, would you? And don't leave- you'll miss all the fun. There's a stool in the corner over there- have yourself a seat once you've set fire to the place."
The boy blinks. "Ok, sir."
He smiles encouragingly and pats the boy's shoulder.
He crosses the crisp Viridian lawns with the barn smoking and crackling behind him, the horses in a terrified screaming rush on the drive, charging the grooms and the carriage drivers and the house servants in their white collars who dash with splashing buckets toward this inferno billowing its great black storm clouds into the sky.
He picks up a stone, tosses it playfully.
It slaps back down into his palm.
He fires it with all the Herculean strength in his arm into the head of the man closest to the barn, and like a cannon ball it bursts apart his skull and sprays his brains across the open screaming mouth of the driver beside him.
He is on them in a second.
He takes the house servant's heart, the groom's head, the driver's throat.
He spreads them in a layer of confetti across this watercolor landscape, tearing, scattering, disemboweling, and the horses scream and the boy screams and he walks on, wiping his mouth.
The ivy braids fall in a landside rushing to the lawns; the exquisite arches crumble in an earthquake roaring beneath his boots.
The pretty maid with the exotically-slanted eyes who steps from foyer to portico does not have time to scream.
She is delicious.
He sucks her blood from his teeth, picks her skin from beneath his fingernails.
With fire iron in hand he stabs this man who would take his sister from him as he rises from his fireside seat; he leaves him squirming on his lovely imported carpet -Italian weave, if he is not mistaken- and turns to the young woman who cowers on the velvet sofa.
"Shh, love- don't be afraid," he says with his red, red lips. "Is this your brother, sweetheart?"
"Yes," she squeaks, knotting her hands
"And is he very fond of you, love?"
"Yes," she whispers.
He did not kill the man; he is too familiar with human anatomy for that, the precise depth at which a blade can penetrate and leave a man gasping but not gurgling, the exact angle at which the heart is scraped but not skewered.
"Go on and be a sweetheart, then, and throw yourself into the fire."
This man who would take his sister from him vomits blood onto his Italian-imported carpet, tries to speak, drags himself with fingers hooked to frozen arthritis claws toward the trembling young girl.
He seats himself on the sofa as she stands, flips his coat tails out from underneath him, crosses his boots at the ankle, fire iron over his knees.
He gestures dismissively with his hand. "Go on, love."
Her curls are the worst- the stink of them, the way they flake in charcoal pieces to the magnificent carpet- and so beautiful they were, too, like a doll's flawless coils, and that particular shade of red with the little snaking threads of blonde shining like sunrays in its midst- you just don't find that every day.
"I presume from my dear sister's absence that she is not here at the moment. I of course assumed she came directly here after her little tantrum, but it seems I was mistaken. She'll be done with her pouting in a bit, mate, and come running- she's predictable, is Rebekah."
He smiles and twirls the fire iron on his knees.
"In the meantime, why don't we get to know one another a bit?"
"Nik…Nik what have you…my God what have you done-"
"Hello, Rebekah."
He rises smoothly from the sofa.
Don't look at him like that, love- you made him do this- you tried to throw him away, sweetheart- you tried to leave, and he will not be left behind, Rebekah, not again-
He opens his hands to release the marquis in pieces that fall in a raining of butcher's meat at her feet.
The way she looks at him, standing there with her flaring nostrils and her flexing throat and her shining eyes.
You whet a blade on its stone and plunge it directly into a man's heart, and it does not cut so deeply, it does not push through the way her eyes do.
If a thing like him can even regret, if for just a moment he can feel a pang, there behind the ribs- that would be both blessing and bane, because perhaps then she would stop looking at him like so, working her jaw, pursing her lips.
Perhaps then she would understand- he will not be abandoned; he will not be discarded- his mother tossed him aside and she will not do the same-
She whirls away.
She is gone in a lightning second.
He stands looking down at the marquis in raw cutlets beneath his boots, holding the fire iron so tightly, breathing the girl's beautiful burned curls.
For three days, he does not go home.
He stalks the Pont d'Alene.
He collects his letters, entire bundles of them, throws them in a December flurry over the side to alight like birds on the Seine.
The barn smells of copper.
He wrenches open the doors.
"Mikael says 'hello'," the groom tells him, blinking his blank doll eyes.
No.
No God don't tell him please don't tell him not her- one of the stallions, perhaps; the cook, who comes here with her leftover scraps for the eager noses that poke themselves over stall doors, smelling her blouse of sage and cinnamon-
She was a friend- he has no others please-
She lies in a puddle behind her door.
Her neck with its halo of blood drying in a brown paint- her bovine stare, so devoid- he is not seeing this- his father's sword did not take her from him in an instant, before she had time to lash out with flashing hooves, with gnashing teeth-
She plunged through an entire sea of English, evading their blades, their bombs -she trusted him, you see- she knew he would take her through, steer her right -she had faith- she always forgave him-
He hangs onto the stall door by his fingertips, leaning all his weight down upon it, and the sound that comes from him- the neighbors will think the place haunted, listening to this wretched keening.
For so long, he clings to this door with his slick saltwater fingers, making this sound that cannot possibly belong to him.
Rebekah.
Rebekah who has probably fled days ago, who will probably never set foot inside this house again- but, God, if she came back-
He tears through the manor.
"Rebekah," he screams, throwing aside the sofas, the settees, the cabinets.
Stupid, of course, he knows this, because if Mikael has found her she'll have no more tongue to answer, no more lips to cry out- but he has to look, he needs to see-
He stands in his empty house with the furniture in tornado chaos all around him, and this silence, this nothing-
This is when a man truly understands what it is to be alone.
For a hundred years, he does not see her.
He never knows.
For a hundred years, he waits, and he wonders.
A/N: Well, we all knew what was going to happen to the poor horse. :/ Also, I took a bit of liberty with my reference to Impressionism- that particular art form didn't really take off until much later in the 19th century.