A/N: So, here we are, the second part of this final fic, to which the usual warnings apply: here be sex, obnoxious allusions to classic literature, and also irritatingly long history boners. Also severed heads (and hands). I'm not going to say too much here except to cite a few quotes. I'll stick my history notes at the end of this update, so you can read my comments on the flashback there if you'd like to.

"Thus with feet imposed does love press his head" is from an Oxford World's Classics collection of Propertius' poems, translated by Guy Lee.

Quoth Marshal de Saxe: 'The human heart is then the starting point in all matters pertaining to war.' This quote is from Ardant Du Picq's 'Battle Studies: Ancient and Modern Battle'. De Saxe was a Saxon soldier in the 1800s who eventually became Marshal General of France.

And 'season of mist and mellow fruitfulness' is from Keats' 'To Autumn'.

'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of any number of years must still be in want of adulthood.' This is a play on the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, which goes, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.'

'O Spring! You are a letter that I write to her' is a quote from Les Miserables.

Also, I have written in real events that recently happened in Egypt within the last few years, but I have fudged the dates a bit; most of the upheaval I describe took place in 2013. And Bab-al-Hara, which the boys are watching at one point, is a historical Syrian soap opera that is extremely popular throughout the Arab-speaking world. I did some poking around the internet to find soap operas that would be known and broadcast in Egypt, because I can totally picture Enzo and Kol getting completely caught up in them.


Alexandria, 2014

She stops bursting into Kol and Tim's room when she flings open the door one day to find Kol tied naked to a chair, Tim mid-backhand.

"Hello, darling," he says casually.

She screams.

She is, in that afterward clarity provided by trauma, at least 86% convinced this was a set-up; Tim once blushed at a bra on her bed, but merely looks up from bloodying Kol's lip with the politely inquisitive eyebrow lift of a homeowner fending off a Mormon. Have a Nice Day But Kindly Fuck Off, his eyebrow says.

"Warn a bitch!" she yells, and slams the door.

She commandeers a room in the Library of Alexandria and begins, here and there, to pluck potential students off the streets; the boys, predictably, ensconce themselves in the back of her classroom and are aggressively horrible pupils. Enzo puts his feet on his desk; Kol's habitual response to "Ok; any questions?" is "Will you take off your shirt?"; and Tim, she finds, starts playing little practical jokes on her as his comfort level slowly increases.

She sits them all down one day when the rest of the class has already disappeared, standing with her arms crossed in front of the chalk board on which she has illustrated all the tastiest (and least fatal) zones of the human body. "Somebody keeps moving all the stuff on my desk. And also rearranging the pens I spent an hour categorizing by type and color. It's you." She points at Tim with all the gravity of Zeus casting the fatal bolt.

He obliges, jumping.

"I didn't do it," he insists, fussing with his hat.

"Yes you did," Kol says in unison with her own incredulous snort.

"You rat bastard." Tim kicks him under the desks.

"Really? You didn't do it? Because Enzo was with me when it happened, and when I looked back over the security cameras whoever did it was careful to keep out of sight. If it was Kol, he would have waved at every single one of them and also probably shown me something I can never unsee."

Tim squints up at her from beneath his hat, ruffling the hair at the nape of his neck.

She narrows her eyes at him.

He's the only one who will sit politely in time out, so the next day she sticks him in the punishment corner with his back to everyone else, quietly obedient, until Kol starts throwing bits of paper at him and he retaliates with what she realizes suddenly is one of her notebooks and up to the front of the classroom she frantically click click clicks to holler, "Stop being gay!" at the top of her lungs, and the bits of paper gracefully snow the floor and the suddenly open mouths shut noisily, one by one, and Tim freezes mid-flick and carefully replaces his hat on his head.

Her students stare.

She takes a deep breath.

"Ok, I didn't mean for that to come out as gross as it did. No matter what anyone or your government or whatever has told you, it's ok to be gay. Just not in my class, ok? Because you're here to learn. And that means listening to everything I say, not flirting with your boyfriends or eyeing the cute foreign boys which I totally noticed you doing, by the way, Halima, during page four, paragraph thirteen of As I Lay Feeding."

"Cute, by the way," Enzo drawls, lacing his hands behind his head.

"I was personally holding out for Crime and Punishment: Except Not Really. Have Your Cop and Eat It Too," Kol cuts in.

"Moby Dick; or, Your Experimental Centuries," Tim adds, looking pleased with himself.

"I'm talking!" she snaps.

"I don't think you were, gorgeous," Enzo points out.

"Well, I was going to. So everybody shut up."

"May I use the toilet?" Kol asks.

"No."

"Tim ate my homework," he says, leaning his chin on his hands.

"Seriously, shut up," she demands, and then she notices that Tim is kind of shuffling awkwardly around in his seat and not looking at her and she slams down the book she is holding and snaps, "Did you actually eat his homework?"

"Sorry," he says, looking genuinely repentant.

"You're supposed to do the demonstrations! How am I supposed to use you as an example of how to vampire if you eat the humans you're supposed to bring to class? We're working on control. You know, like not actually murdering our meals?"

"In all fairness, he was very tasty," Kol says.


They like to walk the street markets in the afternoons when the hot winds have not yet wilted the leaves in their stands, and the shish kebabs are fresh off their grills, when the chicken still dissolves right from the stick and there is the bright after pop of the tart raisins and the cinnamon's hot jolt.

Enzo trots along at her side prepared to eat anyone who so much as stares a vague threat in her general direction, and when Kol has vanished off into the crowds she has Tim yoked alongside her as well, not smoking like a good boy because she has well had her fill of it, thank you very much, but walking along with his hands in his pockets, watching the faces around them.

When Kol pops back into their little circle, he and Tim usually walk on ahead together, laughing at something while she holds court with Enzo and Rebekah in the rear, stopping frequently so she can taste the various street foods and Rebekah can elegantly molest her chosen scarves until she has selected the softest and most expensive of them all to burden Enzo's sweating neck.

He is wearing four of them and carrying another over his arm when Rebekah finally disappears down an alley for a snack; Tim and Kol are barely visible through the crowd, Tim's head bent down toward Kol and one arm around the neck that barely reaches his shoulder.

"Are you ever gay sometimes?" she asks Enzo, watching them.

"What?"

"Sorry; just, you know, small town Southern girl. I'm just wondering how this all works. It's kind of weird to think you just…stop caring about gender eventually. You don't have to answer. You just always seem to go for girls while everyone else basically flips a coin. Penis, not penis? The toss decides it." She can see Enzo smiling out of the corner of her eye. "Sooo…what's the deal with you?"

He has this broody moment; she doesn't see it very often with him. She thinks, sometimes, he's convinced he's supposed to be happy; he's supposed to uplift the people around him. He's supposed to be this empty vessel: not Enzo at all, but all the little preferences and quirks people heap over the top of him, because who wants to love a person, that takes work, that takes compassion, you have to dig and dig, and just hold your nose past the bad bits until you excavate the good, you don't want blood, bones, those old depositories of ancient ash which at a stir are an ex-lover and a dead brother: why blow the dust from already used goods when you can superimpose your pedestals from which a toe dare never plunge?

She puts her head on his shoulder.

"I only loved one man," he says. "He was all I had."

"Did he die?" she asks softly, grabbing his free hand.

He doesn't answer for a long time. "No. He left me to die."

She lifts her head from his shoulder.

He smiles tightly down at her. "They just don't make loyalty like they used to, gorgeous."

She touches his stubbled chin, and the smile changes: love him, oh love him, it says, and she used to know a girl like that.

"What's there to cry about, gorgeous?" he asks, but gently, and puts his arm around her.

"Nothing," she says, and wipes her eyes on his shoulder. "He's a jerk, whoever he was. Do you want me to beat him up for you?" she asks, and they smile at one another.


She doesn't confront Rebekah about the dreams.

She opens her mouth to, once when they're having massages at a spa just outside Alexandria, and then she shuts it.

What's it like, to only know love like that; you are: a pair of breasts, legs, cultured fingernails.

She blurts: "Enzo likes you," which she so totally maybe should have kept quiet, but he's, like, another decade shy of making his move and she gets they're all immortal here, but seriously, why stand to the side of the dance floor and awkwardly shuffle your feet with those abs and that accent?

There is the whispered slide of the masseuse flipping the sheet.

The room vaporizer breathes its lavender sigh.

"Really, Caroline," Rebekah says.

"What?"

"Am I your ugly friend?" she snaps. "I hardly need you to scrounge a pity date for me."

"You are such a jerk, firstly. And secondly, I'm serious! Are you freaking blind? He's basically been following you like a puppy this whole trip, and you're like, ah, yes, here's my hanger again, jolly good, don't wrinkle that scarf, by the way, it needs to hang, not be scrunched up round your throat like that."

"Your English accent is terrible."

"No more than the way you treat him."

"If he wants to carry my things, who am I to turn my nose up at an eager bellhop?"

"Why the hell do you think he does it in the first place?" she demands, shifting against the table.

"He's naturally servile. He carries your things, too."

She pauses, opens her mouth, shuts it once more. She can feel Rebekah's smugness from here. "Ok, fine, maybe I am also a jerk who has occasionally taken advantage of his eagerness to please, but at least I actually acknowledge him in other ways!"

"How equal opportunity of you," Rebekah drawls, and then just fluffs the hair at the nape of her neck and goes completely still beneath the sheet once more, conversation finito, just like that, and on behalf of Enzo and how hurting him is basically like kicking the world's cutest puppy who has already been kicked and still wags his tail and thinks you're just super, she throws one of the heated stones the masseuse places on her back at Rebekah's head.


Kol walks right into her room one evening holding a severed hand.

"Excuse you!" she yells, leaping off her bed.

"I need you to keep this for me," he tells her, setting the hand on the table beside her bed.

"That's a hand!"

"Very good, darling," he says, and lifts one of his legs to roll his foot playfully at her. "And this is a foot; hand with toes."

"Don't be a jerk. Why do you have a hand, and why are you bringing it into my room still dripping, I might add?"

He flops down on the bed, scissoring his arms and his legs so he takes up as much space as inhumanly possible. "It's for Tim, so obviously I can't keep it in our room, or else he'll see it. It's a surprise."

She pinches the bridge of her nose, and for a moment thinks surely, surely, this is what Elijah has spent ten long centuries disappointing his way through. Bless your heart, she thinks with Southern menace, and crosses her arms. "Please tell me that's not, like, your anniversary present or something. Do you guys even have an anniversary? I mean, do you even remember when you met? It had to have been a billion years ago or something."

"May 3rd, 1915. Officially," he says. "Nik was banging him long before that, so he was around."

"Kay, could we not talk about that? Hand. Explain."

"It's a gift. To match one I got for him while we were in Ireland. He did throw that one away, which rather hurt my feelings, but it was the thought that counted."

"Why don't you get him a normal present? Flowers or whatever?" She stops, works her mouth a little in thought, touches one heat-wilted curl contemplatively. "Ok, he's probably not a flowers guy, but I'm pretty sure there are better options."

"Should I bring him a whole person?" Kol asks. "We could keep them in your bath. I could flourish the shower curtain for the big reveal."

"No."

"The closet?"

"No."

"You know, you're not very supportive."

She sighs. "Why are you getting him a present? Did you do something?"

He presses a shocked hand to his chest, and gasps dramatically. "Darling, that you could accuse me-"

"Seriously, no," she interrupts. "I have seen your brother pull that exact expression before, so no. Just stop. Did you do something?"

He folds his hands behind his head and one foot slips off the bed to toe the carpet with one pass, another, a little shurr shurr shurr during which he expertly schools his face, and she realizes, stunned, that he is, in fact, embarrassed.

"It's just because. You know, I'm glad…he came back."

"Ugh ugh ugh. I can't believe I am about to say this, but that is so sweet."


So she helps him with his big romantic gesture even though she afterward has to move hotel rooms and in her expert opinion the whole thing really probably should just be burned to the ground and she suddenly remembers during one of their trips to the markets that she promised Kol she'd meet him for drinks and murder and darts away to leave Rebekah and Enzo awkwardly faced off over a falafel cart and on Tuesdays she takes the train back to Cairo to wander the Egyptian Museum where the walls softly whisper back her lonesome footsteps and 160,000 dust-salted antiquities sail her gently on away down 5,000 years she will never walk.

He follows her the first time, maybe for her safety, maybe because he is lonely; she never sees him; of course she never sees him.

But he's forgotten how to walk so the after ripples do not grab the throat, and radiate down the neck. He's forgotten, you don't always need presence, you don't have to take up so much space, there is no allotted number of people who must look up with a frown and think oh yeah, oh yeah, that guy- he's someone.

He's been good, so she doesn't scold him. Enzo is not sans his head, nor Tim missing a knee cap. Kol is, if not exactly relaxed, then less twitchy, and he laughs more.

Rebekah does not talk about him.

So he tiptoes after her like some ghost who is, if not exactly benevolent, neither malevolent, and oh, the big jerk, what he probably wouldn't give, to stand shoulder to shoulder with her before the Faiyum Portraits elaborating almost shyly on their techniques.

And she goes back.

She puzzles over the Arabic labels, trying to ignore their English counterparts. She stands humbled before the polished yellow statues of Amenhotep III and Tiye as museums always shrink a person, who is, solo, one insignificant speck among those great movements of history. Fifty centuries of death agitate her nostrils and creep down her neck and in her belly she feels those faint stirrings of premonition that ice the spine: for fifty more this will happen all around her, death reaping, and the little people falling like wheat. You could say, she's practically a child: she always knew she was going to live forever.

But she can touch the faded sarcophagi and contemplate not the morbid bitch slap of future fates: thus shall you too lie; but pause, startled, and remember: mom did what she was supposed to. And Bonnie before her, and daddy, and Tyler. And she's always going to be standing here, looking down.

She can imagine herself back to Cleopatra's scented milk bath, with the fresh rose petals like garnishes on her eyes; and Waterloo's slippery charges, when the rain sank artillery and hope alike; and the poor gut-shot boys of Confederate youth, crying into dust and shit. Before and before and before: her books are full of them. You can snatch them fully realized straight from the page.

But after, after: that murky vacillation of future Carolines, wiser but no older. She can't see those.

When she stops for too long to linger over one display or another, she thinks she can almost see him out of the corner of her eye. He's wearing gray, she thinks, and his curls are carefully styled into that casual riot of unconcerned bedhead: oh, who me? I'm just naturally this hot.

She's so tired of being angry at him. She has nursed something hot and hard and unyielding through months and countries and museums and she never wanted it like this, half a year not of inevitable head buttings and angry wall sex, but enforced silence, the hardest of all to break. He has been punished too much, or never enough: she can never decide.

But she doesn't call out to him.

She comes to the museum every Tuesday, 9:00 in the morning; she spends precisely three hours with the exhibits; she eats in the cafeteria from 12:00 to 12:30.

On the third Tuesday, she gets hit on by one of the cashiers. She's not sure exactly how to say, "Ok, so, I'm pretty sure my crazy boyfriend is stalking me, which, don't worry, is actually kind of his way of being romantic, he's not going to hurt me, but you he will ritualistically murder, so maybe find another smoking foreigner to try out your English pick-up lines on", so she tells him off in the aggressively rude Arabic that Tim taught her once when he was very, very drunk.

He'll probably still get ritualistically murdered, but she tried.

Kol, Tim and Enzo meet her at Ramses Station with a donkey and baggage cart they have stolen; they're not sure precisely why. It seemed the thing to do.

She does scold them, but probably not as much as she should; the donkey is really cute, ok, and it tickles when he eats carrots out of her palm.

Kol rides it through the station like a crazy man, popping up into a handstand right on its back, which apparently even Tim never knew he could do, so of course for the next hour and a half he limberly acrobats his way through this crazy circus routine and, when he has tired of that, tries to teach Tim how to do some of it, which provides him with another good hour of entertainment to the delight of the watching crowd and the lesser enthusiasm of Tim, who cracks open his head on his final attempt and staggers up cussing such a streak even the donkey looks taken aback.

On the fourth Tuesday, she sees him in the reflection of a glass case, and her heart stops.

She does not look up quickly enough.

But there is a man following her, not a vampire, some broad-shouldered human, foreign, with an Australian accent she heard earlier when he paid for his ticket. He very carefully does not look at her. There is a studied casualness in his case to case slink.

He smells of wood.

He will not make it out of the museum alive.

When she sits down to her 12:00 lunch, he is already gone.

I can take care of my own hunters, she scribbles on a piece of scrap paper from her purse, and leaves it under her tray.


On the fifth Tuesday, there is a note on her favorite table: I know, love. But perhaps we could take care of them together, say, around 6:00 this evening?

You could frame his handwriting.

She crumples it in her hand, and throws it down on the table.

But he's found a chink, and he knows it.


He is more often reflected in those display cases, and if she stubbornly does not turn, it stubbornly does not dissuade him: Do you come here often? his next note asks, which he probably thinks is pretty funny.

What's a jerk like you doing in a place like this, she writes back, and then rips it up, because he is, after all, still an asshole and she doesn't find him cute or annoyingly charming at all, and she is certainly not thinking about how long it's been since he's touched her hair with that careful reverence, when you can tell he's never handled anything so softly.

She brings a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poems that she stole from Tim and pages through it at lunch; when she leaves for a brief bathroom break, she finds a copy of Keats' poems in its place.

If you're going to read the Romantics, sweetheart, at least sort the wheat from the chaff.


She shows up on a Friday, just to annoy him and maybe throw him, because she had to lie to Tim about how she's pretty sure she saw Kol with that book and he was playing some kind of crazy fire game and she'd love to talk but actually she has a standing shopping date with Enzo on Fridays for slutty underwear, which scares him off further questioning faster than this one time she almost got caught sticky fingering Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and in a blind panic she flashed him. He blushed all the way to his ears and walked right out of his own room without another word. It's pretty handy, actually; she now employs the girls in all emergency situations involving Tim. Thus far she has stolen three books and also successfully blamed that one accidental drowning on Kol.

He is neither annoyed nor thrown; he leaves another note: That scarf matches your eyes as well as any material item can be expected to poorly imitate such a color. ;)

Stop using emoticons. You are way too old to do that. It's like getting a text from your parents with the word 'ur' in it.

She's only gone for maybe a minute, just long enough to pick out another dessert, but somehow he slips another note under her tray, and is still nowhere to be seen when she reaches her table once more.

:) ;) :O :'( :D

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of any number of years must still be in want of adulthood.

She rolls her eyes, and trashes the note.


Quoth Marshal de Saxe: 'The human heart is then the starting point in all matters pertaining to war.'

And so it is.

A society need merely be dissected: the human heart lies there at its unchanging center, where you will find that to plumb any man, you discover merely the same innards. Brother man may change his clothes, doff or imitate his neighbor's habits, sow his lands with different seeds, and into the world send his children with those ideals of novelty which only a human could persuade himself of possessing, but he need not embellish himself: Homer has long unearthed what he considers new-tilled, and Genghis Khan trampled what new freedoms he thinks to bedeck himself in.

He is simple, then, and his lands and his freedoms tremulous: has he feasted on Content, and Prosperity fattened his belly and shod his children; does he loll about in his shackles, or chafe them at the wrists; of his most base necessities does he partake regularly, or does he instead nurture a hole for a belly, rags for his soles, clothe himself in lice, shelter under dirt?

The 2011 revolution has left Egypt uncertain, fumble-footed: frail society of cliffside shale, what mere jostle will send you Mediterranean bound!

It takes him a few days to polish the Arabic which long centuries have rusted; haggling in the markets well eases his somewhat stoppered tongue.

But honey from an unbearded foreigner hath an alien taint: he chooses from one coffee shop a youth of that age when the fire is hottest and most undiscerning, and sends him out among the crowds of Cairo to decry General Abdel. Hear him beat the sword to his chest, and with roses in his cheeks thunder humanity's most well-worn drum: do they not scramble for tourist coin, and walk lightly where the government says they may, sans even their stick, while the president reclines in palaces of rime and riches? Do not winter breezes calm his lotioned toes, and his neck creak beneath aught but golden coronet?

Man riots easily; his inner foam is always at a simmer; the smallest storm will breach its calm.

Cast long your shuttered lamp, Erebus.

The news channels drop any nonsense of that vampire business in Europe and the States in favor of recent local troubles; but don't worry, loves, he'll come back to that. For the moment this clamor subsides, speculation vanishes, the hunters he has whiffed roil for a moment and are, grumbling, reduced to their usual hunting patterns.

On Tuesdays he goes to the Egyptian Museum.

On Wednesdays he for hours at a time carefully prowls his own hunting grounds, seeking seams, and determining who shall yield to kindled breast, and who meekly pump his fist in sham solidarity and slither back to his taxi.

He does long for that Camille woman on hot nights alone in his hotel, when he has but a few books and a sketchpad or two to amuse himself. He forgot her somewhere in New York, poor thing; anyway, she'd outlived her amusement.

He watches Caroline stumble through her beginner's Arabic and exclaim over the museum displays and enjoy her lunch with an infant's relish; what he must have missed from country to country, as she touched them each with her questing fingers and to their strange tongues applied her own in halting fervor.

Thus 'with feet imposed' does Love press his head.

He memorizes the folds of her scarf, and recalls the curls which are merely hinted at; the skin, fresh as Juno's moon; so do old fools muse, whose wits have outwitted themselves. Love, perhaps, is no errant fate; and mischievous Cupid laughs behind his bow: to so tumble the mighty.

He murders the hunter who stalks her into Tutankhamen's exhibit, and leaves him for the others to find.

When on a slow Tuesday she looks over her shoulder with a frown on her face, seeking, seeking, his heart jolts pathetically and he looms over her shoulder as she turns back to one of the displays, panics, vanishes before she can turn back.

He starts leaving little offerings at her favorite table: once the book of Keats, afterward a scarf to match her dress.

Once, a letter which he snatches back and speedily vanishes into his trouser pocket before she has turned from the cashier.

To cut oneself over a page, and bleed and bleed: of course he is no stranger to these missives of tender expression.

But she does not deserve to have his regret so distilled; to place a barrier between them, to allow himself the consolation of pen and paper, which are no mean judges but fair peacemakers, to so excuse himself- he has perhaps lost a brother to similar cowardice.

Oh, to be iron before a cannon and shudder before a girl-

He wipes his hands twice on his trousers and follows her.

And so he minces about after her, these long afternoons.


He continues to prod the hornet's nest, and watches with satisfaction.

Mankind always assumes himself to be an inventor of the wheel; his pride does not accept that he is a mere imitator of seasons past, and revolutions already failed.

These street gatherings of provoked youth and fed-up elderly are conducted with that peculiar zest of first spring, when the buds are yet virgin and the old man feels himself up to another year, his bones springy with new rain. Dusty August has scoured most of the tourists from its resorts, and huddled the rest inside to worship at their air conditioners; he walks among the protesters, pale, naked-cheeked, scarcely noticed.

Some of these demonstrations come to blows occasionally, and once exasperated soldiers open fire on a small group engaged in pelting them with stones. A retaliatory car bomb in Cairo kills half a dozen.

He spots Tim once among one of the protests, hands in his pockets, keeping a hawk-eyed vigilance on the proceedings. A rock bounces off his hat; he thrusts out an arm to shield Caroline, who pops up suddenly beside him.

He does suppose the lad will have to be kept alive after all. Shame. Kol would surely have tired of him eventually; Caroline will never let loose.

When a sudden flurry of violence stacks up, as it is wont to, one on top of the other, nearly bottle-necking in its eagerness to surpass the previous day, the government declares a daily curfew; at least 36 Christian churches lay in ashes, and nearly as many police stations before the day is out. In Cairo's Nasr City district, the finance ministry building smolders eerily. So does the discontent peasant reap what his government has sown.

He likes to walk these little demonstrations in the evenings, when Apollo's chariot has retired and political injustice not merely another water to be steamed off; man is at his feistiest when he has wiped his boots of his job and come home to children even worse than his customers.

Kol's latest spree attracts an assembly of hunters, but Caroline is not present, so he allows the shootout between them and Tim.

She likes lonely after-curfew walks: to stretch the limbs beyond their limits, to confront man's shadowy beasts that lurk those haunted corners of elderly buildings, to revel, simply, in past frailness and to recall ah, yes, never will I ever be inflicted with man's infirmities- ah youth, youth, how it does test its teeth, and so upend past victimizations.

She murders three young men in one night alone: O Spring! You are a letter that I write to her.

He returns home after one such enjoyable outing to find that Enzo prat once more in his hotel room.

He's lounging in one of the chairs this time, legs draped irreverently over the arm. "Hello, mate," he says in the sort of voice which men have been murdered over.

He slams the door. "Get out."

The leg swings lazily; one arm hinges over the knee. He unconcernedly drinks from a water bottle in his hand. "You might be wondering how I keep finding you: it's easy. I simply ask myself, 'Where would a self-entitled prig with over compensation issues choose to stay?' And here you are, mate." The boots which are nonchalantly dirtying his chair are upended, and duly examined: "These have gone to rubbish. You walk enough markets with a gorgeous blonde, they're bound to suffer, I suppose." The peeling treads are wiped on the bedspread which is spaced within convenient stretch of the legs.

He tightens his jaw.

He decides, for the sake of Caroline, who is for some reason apparently enamored of this creature (there is no accounting for most of her taste, but she's young, after all; distinction will come) to extend that affable olive branch which man calls a joke. Let her not say, then, that he didn't try.

"God rest their soles," he replies, and what rage this man might inspire cannot, at least, override the warm joy to be found in cleverness; he smiles.

Enzo blinks at him.

He tilts his head. "Unsurprisingly, this appears to have passed right over your thick head. Soles, mate. S-o-l-e-"

"I get it," Enzo interrupts. "It's just not funny."

He escorts Enzo out by the scruff of his neck, smacking his head several times on the door frame, and is dismissively laughed off: a slow count of three and the image of Caroline which he has faithfully immortalized save the man's head.


But he's back, of course, as any pestilence will simply run its course regardless of man's timely intercession.

He moves once, twice, thrice, and is simply found and found again by this gnat, whom he interrupts once in his shower, and once more paging through his sketchbook.

He rips it from Enzo's hands. "I understand privation is not given to privacy, but regardless what dirty urchin used to thumb through and ultimately pass up your meager belongings, we do not touch that which does not belong to us."

"You shit in a ditch too, mate. No secrets between a couple of old army buddies, yeah? By the way, that nude study of our girl- very nicely done. Breasts are a touch off, though. I hear."

"From who?" he roars before he can rein himself in.

"Seems Tim has been privy to them a few times. Ah, ah, ah, mate- let's not look like that." Enzo leans forward to playfully tug at the patch of beard sprouting under his lip. "Remember: Caroline's been in at least two bar fights with him. That's a life bond."

He rips Enzo off the bed by his ankles and stomps on his neck; the limp body is afterward conveyed to the skip where it belongs.


"I found your tumblr blog on me," Enzo tells him amicably one day, over a kebab stand.

He walks to the next street cart, exercising some of the most surely admirable restraint mankind has ever practiced.

Enzo follows him, snatching one of the kebabs from its grill. "I'm flattered."

"Do you really think I'd waste my time on a social media account dedicated to you?"

"Really? You aren't lorenzomorelikepoorenzo? Sideblog Nicholas Sonof Michael? The one with all the puns and the posts slagging off Hitler's speeches?"

"He stole several of mine," he snaps, and abruptly shuts his mouth.

Enzo taps him on the forehead with his kebab. "Check your blog, mate."


Enzo has somehow, in between occupying himself with a lack of nose breathing and scratching his lice, managed to hack the blog.

There are several photoshop jobs: a 17th century painting of himself in which it now appears that Enzo is kissing his forehead while he gazes with dreamy content into the eyes of this intruder; the one of him with Stefan, who has now been supplanted by Enzo; and another which in the original showed Rebekah posing with an arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder and which now depicts Enzo in her place.

There is a post just above this sequence of pictures: mate don't make your password caroline.


Two days later, there is another sequence of pictures and another post:

don't make your password forbes and her birthdate either bloody hell


Understand, she's not lonely.

She has friends. She has friends; for almost twenty years she never really understood what that meant. A friend is someone you love with a dog's faithful gusto; never mind your master's fickle tenderness, which comes and goes with mysterious arbitrariness.

Elena helped her with her pre-Homecoming lipgloss and advised her on shoes and said with that strange blend of gentleness and brutality with which she always thought all friendships were conducted, "Caroline, I don't think that's really your thing" whenever she expressed an interest in anything outside of shopping, and a small part of her used to say, there has to be more, and the far larger part of herself replied, shut up, bitch, not for you. And so she practiced her best Miss Mystic smiles, and when she stayed up until 3:00 in the morning chewing over Aristotle's On the Soul, she told everyone it was a late night Twilight binge and made some inane comment about Edward's ass. Not for cheerleaders the contemplations of man's inner clockwork.

But she gets into a discussion on Heidegger with Tim that turns into an argument, and not once does he tell her to shut up, or pat her careful curls, he debates her like a reasoning individual, and she thinks oh, oh, and at 4 am on a random sand dune she starts to cry about her mother and Enzo puts an arm around her and doesn't remind her about that one time he lost so much more: tiptoe by tiptoe does she advance on understanding.

So she's not lonely. She goes out dancing and for long midnight walks through centuries of philosophical evolution courtesy of Tim, who likes you to know he is more than just a pretty face, and Kol, who tries to pretend he is not, and Rebekah who misses her brother, who loftily says she does not, starts 'accidentally' falling asleep in her room once more, curled up on the covers in front of their latest movie night.

She walks in on the boys one day to find Tim sprawled in a chair beside their bed, his feet up on the mattress, book in his lap; he pokes Kol every so often with his toes and smiles. Kol and Enzo lie, rapt, on the bed, chins in their hands, watching Bab al-Hara. Tim translates distractedly every so often for Enzo, whose Arabic is extremely shaky; Kol is too absorbed to bother.

She gets this fullness inside her.

These idiots.

So this is love; no need for the tender fingers in sleek whisperings along your spine.

But one day they're walking through Cairo's Tahrir Square and she's not eavesdropping, so she doesn't hear it, but Kol says something that makes Tim laugh.

And he just loops his arm around Kol's neck and pulls him onto his toes so they can share the sort of kiss where you're just all smashed up against one another, foreheads touching, noses squashed, not something that's supposed to cater to polished camera angles: something you can't help. Something you just do.

People stop and stare.

But you don't notice that.

They pull apart, but stand with their faces close together, talking. Tim laughs again, and kisses Kol between his eyebrows.

And she feels this…bottoming out.

She loves him.

Sometimes she's sorry for that.

But she loves him.

It's like…her stomach is the look on Tim's face. There's one person; there is no spinning planet. There is no jostling crowd with its elbow in your ribs; the hot dust is mere fantasy. It just freaking twists her: you can miss someone so badly it hurts worse than any physical violation.

"I don't forgive you," she says one afternoon at the museum, without turning around. "But pretend you don't know me. Pretend you're some douchey stranger who gets his freak on lecturing visitors on the last three thousand years of art history and how it evolved from Cleopatra's fetish for self portraits or whatever."

He doesn't come out for a while, like he's pretending he's not there.

She keeps strolling from exhibit to exhibit, waiting.

It's like the air shifts when he slides out from behind one of the columns. It's like she can breathe more easily.

"They're panel paintings," he says, quietly.

He doesn't touch her.

He stands three feet away, with his hands behind his back. There is so much longing in him, it's like another person between them. What a stupid, stupid jerk, she thinks, and maybe tears up a little.

The mummy portraits have been unearthed all across Egypt, but are most commonly found in the Faiyum Basin; these 'Faiyum Portraits' are generally a stylistic distinction rather than a geographic one, however, he tells her, and then he pauses with endearing first date awkwardness, and she breathes, she remembers: she still kind of wants to punch him in the face.

But he is cute when he's sharing something about which he feels passionate. He's like a nervous little boy: he wants so badly for you to love it just as much.

She wonders if Mikael tried to beat that out of him. Artwork is for weaklings; love for something even worse.

Sometimes she just wants to tell him, it's ok: it's so, so frightening, but it's ok. He's carried it around inside of him like a shame for so long.

But she doesn't say anything; she just listens to him talk. She likes his voice; she's forgotten that, a little. Not because it's smooth; not because there is in it the cultured silk of the aristocratic Brit, long captivator of American hearts (and loins): it cracks a little when he talks now, and once he runs two of his sentences together.

She tries not to smile.

He's so careful as he lectures: the distance is cautiously maintained, and the hands kept innocuously behind his back, like he doesn't know what sudden movement or misplaced word might startle her back out of his life. He has to sneak all his looks; little sidelong glances she is not supposed to notice, but she's always going to notice that: she's always going to feel the weight of him.

She could have run for a thousand years.

She could have put…so many years and loves between them.

But it's the boy; it's the girl and her answering heart, who smiles first this time.

He stops talking.

He stands with the three feet between them and his hands behind his back and he looks up into the eyes of these long dead predecessors, and sometimes you can see, if you know how to look, if you care how to look, how he staggers: all these great mysteries of time and mortality, which cooperates for only those forgettables of human history whose bones were never arbitrarily bog-birthed.

She takes a step closer, so she can see the painting from the same angle. "Do you ever walk into a museum sometimes, and see yourself just…staring back?"

He stands there silently for a long time; she can hear his hands nervously chafing one another, and that twitchy unstillness a human would never catch: all the subtle little shifts of thigh seam upon thigh seam, and the settling of his toes in his boots. He's breathing too fast: he always forgets to regulate those prey-like tics around her, so she can hear the blood in the pale undersides of the slender wrists, and the heart panicking against his ribs.

"There's a museum in Iceland; in Reykjavik. They have some of my mother's loom weights and the toys I used to make for Kol and Bekah when they were little."

"Did you take them?"

"No," he says, still staring at the portraits. "Kol was dead. He died…loathing me. I didn't think he'd want me to have them."

She clasps her hands behind her back; angles her head to the precise position of his. "I don't want to praise you for just doing the decent human thing, but thanks. For leaving him alone. Little by little, you're gonna' get there."

"If this is a marathon for my humanity, Caroline, I'm afraid that race has already long been run, love. I veered off into the bushes and ate the frontrunner."

"Yes, for your humanity. Not for your civilization, not for sitting across a dinner table from someone and deciding not to eat them, they're only an innocent- for the thing humans are supposed to have in them and sometimes I think they're slowly starting to breed out. The part of you that you look at someone- you look at them and you just love them so much. And when they smile, you don't want to destroy it for the way it makes you feel. It doesn't have to be some kind of sacrificial altar -your love or your dignity, one's gotta' go- no. You don't get stronger ignoring what you've carried around inside of you for a thousand years. You love your family; you love me. I know you do. Accept that this something you've carried around in you for a thousand years? It's never going to go away. There's still a brother there who used to so completely dote on his younger siblings. He wasn't weak: weakness evolves out. And he's still here, ten lifetimes later."

He looks over at her and smiles, the bashful one she knows isn't contrived. "Rah, rah, siss boom bah, I believe is the next line?" he says, and does that innocent eyebrow lift that is so gently mocking she wants to grab him by the ears and kiss him blind.

"You just totally ruined a really heartfelt speech. You were probably the guy in the audience booing Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech."

"It was admirable but ultimately naïve."

"You're pretty much despicable."

"Ah: 'pretty much'. Do I sense a crack in our unwavering resentment? Ought I to mount the hill now with sword drawn?"

She squints at him. "Was that some kind of freaky nineteenth century innuendo?"

He smiles; wolfishly, this time. "It can be, if you like."

"Nope," she says, and sails on out of the room.


So it's a dance: it always is with them.

She gives him an inch, and heaves him right back to the starting point when he tries to take the mile.

But on Tuesdays her smile is brightest, and her scarf most carefully selected.


On the tenth Tuesday, the Muslim Brotherhood storms the museum and takes seventy hostages.


Petrograd, 1916

St. Petersburg suffers a wet September, and in October mists carefully masks its frosts so that the undiscerning long forgets the Neva's prophetic ice. The Horseman presides in slick triumph, flourishing his great legs which are in this century a bit greener, a bit more worn with that unsentimental pumice, Mother Nature. These gently exhaling barges who cough their soot at intervals which powder the sky and soil the Neva appear with the clamorous spontaneity of old Marley.

He likes to put on his best coat and walk the prospekts early, before the sun, before those human stirrings of factory-bound unfortunates; there is sometimes a persistent prostitute or a cabbie with ten children to sustain who pursue with surprising deftness this elusive customer, but mostly he is accompanied by the eternally chuckling Neva, fat with rain.

Troubled Mother Russ, who brews thunder in her streets and lightning in her drinking houses, did she not for too long encourage Father Tsar, and now at his meekest promises Elysian fantasies to her hungry youth? Does his stump bleed coin, will he be quartered for bread, can you in a palatial coup or back alley betrayal sow your barren fields? Will his bones fill your coffers, and his entrails nourish your children? Petersburg, Petersburg, weary of war, bereft of your best, what gain from hot breast, which foresees no future surrogate and thinks only of short-burning fire?

Most entertaining, though.

Royal tea proceeds each day without change: same bread, same biscuits, same polished samovar; Lady Nastasya, less intrigued by Fokine's dazzling Firebird than her lover, flirts her fan skillfully; somewhere Russia's valiant officers are murdered by German guns, but anyway, that libretto is simply flawless. What mire flounders and defeats these distant officers is no unpleasant reflection in gilt railings.

He is, occasionally, still amused by such ignorance. To miss the raised pitchforks on account of the matched gowns and the imported slippers, to pass the queuing mob gaily in the rattling cab, to think offhandedly to oneself, oh, silly peasants (as Bekah would say), to be stunned, imagine, by life's most consistent constants: death and the vengeful peasant.

If humans are not entirely creative, they are, at least, entirely stupid. What fool past centuries have perfected future decades will inevitably surpass. Never say man halted in his (d)evolution while unwearied onward march his machines.

On a gray Monday he takes a cab to the outskirts of the city and on foot continues to the edge of an atmospherically thick and menacing wood. The clouds have begun to gather more threateningly when he slips into the trees; once inside, the weather is immaterial; the wood manages its own perpetual gloom. Here the sun is a mere fable, and summer merely a warm dream spun by dying fires. If all winter's fatal annoyances can be summarized, they are here described in this wood that at a glance ices the spine, and paralyzes the heart.

He does enjoy that touch. Afanasyev's most stout-hearted Ivan surely would balk at a wood like this.

Perhaps ten minutes in the wood flares out into a little clearing whose sole inhabitant is a hut on gnarled chicken legs; it crouches silently beyond its fence of human bone. There is an empty pike and beside it a new acquisition still bleeding from the neck; wonderful theatrical instincts, truly.

He stands outside the hut and links his hands behind his back, smiling. "Little house, little house! Stand with your back to the woods, your front to me!"

The house shifts; there is a pause, and then slowly the entire thing revolves.

He steps through the door.

"Fie, fie, fie! Until now there was no smell or sight of a Russian soul. Are you doing a deed or fleeing a deed?"

"Visiting an old friend," he replies, and the door rumbles shut behind him. "You've looked better, love."

Crude, but he assumes it really does the trick; the rickety legs have been slung over the stove, and the long nose grows into the ceiling. The dripping nostrils dangle their snot precariously over the threshold. The breasts, elongated and flattened with age, have been tossed up over a hook; she sharpens her teeth casually as he takes off his hat.

"Do you like it?" she asks, and the harsh croak has been abruptly smoothed into a close approximation of his own cultured accent. She likes, she once told him, the creaminess of the English accent; it's wonderfully snobby. And anyway, certainly it's good enough for that German whore which Nicholas' youthful ardor has crowned.

The legs slip from the stove; the breasts shrink and lift; the nose is suddenly retracted. She's very deft; he almost misses the transformation. When she steps naked from her rags, it's quite the fairytale hat trick: from blistered beast to stunning tsarina.

"Nikolenka," she says, and kisses him on either cheek; her breasts press rather than brush him. He'll forgive the crudeness, in light of her attention to detail regarding the hut.

And they are marvelous breasts, after all.

He dimples at her.

Propertius' powdered Cynthia, slender of limb, with a maidenly cheek stain worthy of its immortalisation, holds no mere candle stub by comparison. One well sympathizes with Paris, in confrontation with a face such as this.

"You haven't brought your brother?" she asks him in English, with only a faint accent. He follows her into the back room, where her workroom resides. She's laboring over some new formula, he can smell; something with arsenic in it.

"Kol is elsewhere at the moment," he lies smoothly. "You know how he likes to flit about. I believe he is currently somewhere in Asia."

She looks at him. "You believe," she says, and laughs at him. "You believe nothing; you know." She sits down at her work table without bothering to so much as wrap herself in a sheet. The long white legs cross; the black hair falls coquettishly over her breasts. "Your timing is excellent; Petrograd is poised on the edge of revolution."

He smiles and lowers himself into a nearby chair. "So I observed."

"And you're here for information about it."

"Where else would I come?" he asks, lifting his hands out to either side. "Grigory Rasputin. Is he a warlock?"

"Yes. Not a very powerful one, though. A few parlor tricks; that's about all he can be credited with."

"And these Bolsheviks?"

She leans back against the table, a sly pose; it arches her back, emphasizing the breasts. "You'll have to pay me for that information. I don't know if one of you is enough, though. You ought to have brought your brother."

"Can I interest you in my sister?" he asks, dimpling again. "I believe you enjoy blondes?"

She uncrosses her legs.

"I wasn't aware you had a sister? Why didn't you tell me about her sooner?"

"We had a bit of a falling out; we were estranged the last time I was in Russia." He slips off his jacket. "Someone's approaching the house."

"Yes; that would be Ivan. Well, I call him Ivan. I don't know his real name. Who cares; anyway, I caught him poking around the house one day, and now he's mine."

"Little house, little house," he hears from the front yard, and the hut gives a shudder.

She stands up and brushes the hair from her breasts. "Ivan," she calls out, and a curly-haired young man enters; he sees why she kept him, indeed. The shoulders are knotted beneath his shirt, and the waist perfectly proportioned; if the nose is a bit crooked, the eyes eclipse it, and the lips more than make up for it.

He smiles up at the young man as any knowing predator sizes up its prey.

"You are joining?" she asks him. pulling Ivan toward the bed in the corner with the finger she hooks into his waistband.

"Oh, no; not this time, I think. But please; proceed," he replies, and seats himself in a chair to watch.


Bekah (stage alias Nina Alexandrovna) is a revolution; Petrograd society adores her. Anna Pavlova's London-cast shadow has been quite firmly supplanted, though he does overhear the inevitable comparisons with great amusement: Bekah has more than had her say about this 'clod broomstick' whom three years have neglected to vanish from the Russian stages and the patrons' hearts.

He takes Lizaveta to watch her perform in The Sleeping Beauty, as the fair golden-haired Aurora, of course, though he thinks the wicked Carabosse is far more suited to his sister's rather bristly temperament. But to Carabosse and her minions goes only a brief act and much theatricality but little dancing: not for our most luminous stars so limited a spotlight.

Introductions are afterwards made while Bekah is still in costume and 'sweating like a horse', as Kol would point out with malicious delight. Both women eye one another with that calculated suspicion of great beauties; Bekah will right now be attempting to tabulate how much of her brother's attention must be divided between herself and this interloper, and Lizaveta whether this delicate-looking blonde is truly as enchantingly depraved as her brothers.

Bekah will be, if not entirely enthralled with her, at least delighted upon discovery of what happened to the girl's family, and if she has rather fewer dalliances with women than he, still she is no less appreciative of that softness peculiar to them, and the pleasures which dandies in particular live in haughty ignorance of. He has need of only a wife: what need he of a pleased one? Does a man ask that his 18th century empire mahogany dressing table be gently petted, and all walk softly around it, or does he require merely a layer of polish, that it might be worthy to adorn his house?

The girls have decided to stop circling one another; Lizaveta has acquitted herself satisfactorily, for Bekah has an arm through hers now. They have a similar vein of casual brutality which those long years of fluttering Victorian heroines have assured man does not exist in such pretty creatures; those decorative and still dripping fixtures which fence Lizaveta's hut might beg to differ, but let a man hold to his chintz fantasies of mucky gray reality: it does keep him going.

Bekah thus distracted, he is free to proceed.


First: to parse those murky half-truths which all tongues weave about aristocracy.

The young Tsarevich Alexis Romanov is afflicted with hemophilia, he finds after much inquiry and compulsion: few even within the inner circle are in fact aware of the heir's vulnerability. And thus opened the crack for Grigory Rasputin to slither through: in this holy impostor has the drained mother placed all her faith and fate. On this finicky seesaw, trust, then, does the dynasty teeter, and her starving, war-stricken children eye Alexandra Romanova, German whore, spy, traitor with that hollow-eyed cunning only true privation can replicate.

Rasputin is universally reviled, and, consequently, universally fascinating. Shaded with those delicate confections of lace and silk behind which the ladies shield all their secrets are whispers of the hypnotic pleasures to be had in his bed; the pomaded and perfumed dandies of Petrograd have little allure, beside this stinking peasant and his eyes, those 'two phosphorescent beams of light melting into a great luminous ring which at times draws nearer and nearer and then moves farther away', as related to him by young Prince Felix. Parlor tricks, as Lizaveta dismissed them. But to the naïve human, divine power.

There are rumors young Youssupov is a former lover of Rasputin's, perhaps refuted and perhaps confirmed by his utter loathing of the starets; more interesting, however, are the rumors which surround Youssupov and his companion, the Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, first cousin to the Tsar himself.

Petrograd society is rather proudly scandalous: affairs are plentiful, and the gossip surrounding them more plentiful still. Young Youssupov's past 'proclivities', then, are whispered staples of the well-informed. A beautiful young nobleman's influence is far-reaching, and his youthful errors contagious: so assume those concerned family members who bite their nails at those salacious rumors of a dandy's frolics, and mercilessly brood over how far the stain and the shame shall set. Some years ago, then, came an order from the palace itself, forbidding Dmitry from the side of his prince, which you see to this day has been summarily ignored; if Felix were a fresh babe, and Dmitry his conjoined brother, they could not be closer yet.

The three threads, then; or shall he call them marionette strings?

He finds it easy enough to befriend both men; another charming young dandy, Youssupov assumes, and adds him happily enough to his stable of acquaintances. A fellow rake, Dmitry supposes, and is similarly welcoming.

If the ration lines stretch longer, and the arms are more insistently taxed for their bread, Petrograd's upper echelon scarcely notices; is there a war on, then, he might ask round his cigar: just dreadful, she might conclude with an affected shudder. His brother man might perish in the mud, and mother Russia yield another son to distant wood; but war is a peasant's game, save for those rare and noble officers, and ought to be accorded similar notice.

Felix is no military man, though his backhand on a tennis court might be called similarly brutish, and Dmitry is caught more often with his head up his skirt than his hand round a gun; but as any idle young gentleman must be proficient in his various lazy pursuits, they are imbued with enough education and interests to at least mildly entertain him. He passes several pleasant conversations with them in various restaurants and drinking establishments; Felix is London educated, and his English nearly native; Dmitry has a slight thickness to those first and second languages which a foreign tongue must sometimes wrestle for its mastery, but their conversations being conducted in a mélange of Russian, French and English and the Romanov heir well able to keep pace, he must be excused for any fleeting roughness in his contributions.

Gossip declares Felix generally reformed, and a genuine husband and a fond father. Marriage is, after all, an instant curative for that insidious illness, homosexuality.

Likelier: young Felix has shed his mother's clothes, and the coquettish smiles which from beneath lavender crape beckon forth young officers of the Imperial Guard; his eyes, limpid, fair, a luxuriously lashed inheritance of his mother, follow still those paths of handsome youth which cross, innocently enough, the horizon of this rapt watcher. One can droop the eyelashes indolently enough, and miss nothing.

Dmitry's tastes are harder to suss, in these early days of companionship. The prince is clearly his sun; the day rises and sets upon their meetings; there is no fresh courtship between an officer and his apple-cheeked maiden with more stars in its eyes.

But there are occasionally those male friendships which bypass all sexual undercurrent and are destined for more gentle tendernesses: a brother could not lay more softly in his elder's arms, and with less lasciviousness. He has seen such a bond between those men whose muskets have chained them, and which the mud forever adheres. He sobs in his companion's dead arms not for want of kisses, but because war has forged that precious after-birth umbilical, and suddenly severed him from it.

Dmitry is undeniably a rake; promiscuous, frequenter of brothels; a legitimate admirer of female beauty.

But likelier still than Youssupov's relapse into sodomitical sin is that the men, despite the prince's restorative marriage, are having an affair. There is just enough clandestine touching any less careful eye might easily bypass; no weighty double talk is there in a hand on the shoulder, but the last time a man contrived to bump his knee, or briefly touch the gloved hand with such regularity was a Hungarian count with whom he was conducting a torrid affair until the man's ironic death at the hands of an enraged brother who insisted he'd compromised his sister.

October is no ideal season for it, but the prince takes them hunting on the grounds of one of his many estates, and for several miles they wander with the dogs loping gamely along, and their guns over their arms. Winter has yet to make her lion's entrance, and on a good day their romps are a prophetic page from one of Turgenev's Sketches: tenderly blue, the willows polished, the delicate red grass crisp but not yet vanquished underfoot.

The woodcocks are most partial to old lime trees, and are regularly flushed out by the eager dogs, right into the fatal shots. Felix, always resplendent in those colorful overcoats to which Oscar Wilde surely would have penned an ode or two, hands them off to a servant to be deposited in a game bag.

He brings along his sketchbook for those moments of idleness after the picnic hamper has been properly emptied, and the tea finished, when the flamboyant Youssupov heir stretches out his long legs, boots elegantly crossed, and drowses in the autumn sun like any coarse peasant. Beside him, Dmitry reads silently from whichever work of Gogol's has currently engaged his attention.

The limes are his favorite subjects; the frosts have murdered them in their boughs, and so provides that perfect contrast of living sky, sickly grass, bested citrus. Cyclic wonder: the emaciated limbs will in a mere season or two transform once more to that sturdy green wicker, and the flowers presage a flourishing crop. The rye, straighten its anguished back and wave cheerfully to those playful spring gusts. Oh, do not lament this 'season of mist and mellow fruitfulness'; Mother Nature, she doth gift with both hands.

"You're a master," Dmitry says to him one afternoon, admiring a landscape over his shoulder. "That belongs in the Hermitage."

He smiles up at the lad.

Nearby, Youssupov sleeps on.

"Thank you. Interesting reading?"

"Mmmm. I prefer his short stories, frankly, but I don't think Gogol penned a truly poor word." Dmitry returns to his novel, his eyes flicking for a moment to the toe of Felix's boot, which has drifted against his calf.

He waits for Dmitry to become absorbed once more in the text, and clicks his fingers for the servant. "Take the game bag back to the estate and remain there for the rest of the afternoon. You're unnecessary," he says in Russian to the boy, dredging up the slangiest phrasing he can recall. Dmitry's Russian is a bit shaky in regards to the peasant dialect, and anyway, he appears truly involved in his book.

A lingering stare into the boy's eyes, and he turns and rushes off into the trees, pelting back toward the miles distant estate at a good clip.

"Now where's he gone off to?" Dmitry asks, raising his head with a sudden surprised snap. "That was odd."

"I haven't a clue," he says innocently. "Seems a bit flighty, though, poor lad. What can you do." He sighs heavily. "Good help is so hard to find." He picks up his charcoal once more, and positions his hand. For a moment, he and the boy eye one another over the slumbering body between them.

Dmitry turns once more to his book; he begins his next sketch.

But the eyes shift back to him from time to time, to the overcoat he has unbuttoned, and the collar he has loosened against an unseasonably warm day. He returns the glances demurely from beneath his eyelashes, which the light hits at just the precisely correct angle to illuminate the blonde in them.

Of the duke he has revised his opinion: undeniably a rake and legitimate admirer of female beauty.

But so too does his gaze follow the finer of the officers and their sleek moustaches.

Certainly the duke is attracted to him; he has eyes.

He lets the glances simmer for a while, until Dmitry has not turned a page in a good five minutes, and the leg he has crossed lazily over the other twitches in agitation. A fly settles noisily on the page of the sketchbook; a shake of the pages encourages it elsewhere.

"Would you like to see what I'm working on?" he asks innocently, pretending to misinterpret the stares.

Dmitry startles. "Ah…that's all right. If you haven't finished. I was only drifting off."

"Come now. I highly doubt your thoughts were among idle clouds, hmm?"

Dmitry blinks. "I'm sorry? Pourriez-vous répéter cela?" he asks; his French is better than his English.

He obliges, replying in French. "We are grown men with no eyes on us. Is there any need for this sort of coquetry?"

Dmitry cocks his head, and bookmarks the page with his finger. A faint smile crosses his lips beneath the well-maintained moustache. "I had no idea Englishmen were so forward. I was always of the impression they were…" He twirls his hand idly in the air.

"Yes, yes; born with a rod up our asses. It explains our stately postures." He smiles, keeping the sketchbook on his lap, and with his hand idly describing the beginning lines of his next work. He looks down, drawing out the moment and the tension, and ensuring the eyes are nowhere but his face. "If you haven't read so much as a line in ten minutes because you're that invested in my drawings, I'll eat both our hats, mate."

He looks up once more, from beneath his eyebrows, not tilting up his chin, so there is now a sort of menacing promise in his smile.

Dmitry swallows.

He glances back toward the trees into which the servant disappeared, and next to the peaceful Felix, still quietly napping.

"I think perhaps I might have a better subject in that pond a ways back. The one with the rushes round it. An artist needs privacy, after all," he says, and stands up with an elegant stretch, arching his back with exaggerated pleasure. "As you were," he tells the duke, dimpling.

The stroll is a pleasant one; he divests himself entirely of his coat, carrying it over his arm. Petrograd will be knee-deep in snow soon enough, but the countryside is still mild, and he loosens the stiff collar another notch, to feel the sun on the back of his neck.

He has only a few minutes to wait, and then Dmitry walks casually enough onto the bank beside him, hands in his vest pockets. He spends a moment looking out over the pond, as though they are both not overly aware of why he has come.

The beginning, of course, is always the most delicious frisson: just setting his hand on Dmitry's knee excites both their breathing.

"Undo your trousers," he says, in the sort of tone Romanov heirs are not well accustomed to hearing, he imagines. For a moment Dmitry startles, and opens his mouth for what must surely be a reprimand.

He grabs the boy's chin, roughly. "Undo your trousers. Mate." He does not kiss him; better to let the breath quicken against the red lips and the oiled moustache, to let the anticipation mount between the threat of embrace and the actual culmination of it.

The hands pause for a moment, and then with shaky expectation undo the buttons, and draw down the zipper.

He pulls Dmitry's cock out, and slowly, with feathery tenderness, runs his thumb up the underside of it, and over the tip, letting off after just this one teasing pass.

"Relax; this is going to hurt a bit. Just for a moment," he says, and slides his tongue up the boy's neck to his earlobe, which jerks a low cry out of him.

He grabs a fistful of the boy's hair, and tilts his head for the choicest angle.

When he bites him, Dmitry cries out; his back arches; the tip of his cock brushes the hand he has braced against the front of the boy's hip. "What are you doing; what are you doing," he gasps.

"Shhh; shh," he soothes, brushing the bangs from the suddenly sweating forehead. "Forget your little hang-ups; does it feel good?"

Dmitry pulls a shivery breath in through his nostrils; touches the hand on his hip. "Yes. Yes," he breathes, and clenches the wrist of the hand on his hip in a grip that would powder a mortal's frail bones.

He lays the boy back in the grass.

He doesn't touch the boy at all, but for that first slide of his hand along the fat cock.

He works the ravaged neck with skillful teeth and tongue for twenty nearly unbearable minutes, if the boy's shaking and pleas are anything to go by, and then the smooth tip of that cock suddenly nudges him once more as the boy's hips strain up off the grass and he comes all over his belly with a breath like a sob.


He is nonchalant toward the boy for the next several days; the untended fire poses two risks: to peter out completely, or rage uncontrolled beyond the grate.

Of course, he has judged the duke aright, and upon their next outing, Dmitry himself dismisses the servant once Felix has dropped off.

In the long grass beside the pond, he takes off both their shirts, and presses himself close to the boy, so he can feel the warm belly skin upon belly skin, all the little shifts of the muscles in his stomach as he breathes, the twitching of his cock through his trousers-

He kisses the boy's nipples and lingers over his stomach, just around the waistband, so that his breath slithers down to the sensitive skin beneath, and hints at pleasures to come.

He lets Felix nearly stumble upon them, kissing Dmitry's cock through his trousers just as those footsteps at last register upon the duke's thundering ears, and he jolts up to scramble into his shirt with mere seconds to spare.


He has other engagements when next the lads come to call for their routine hunting trip.


A mere week out from November, the weather is still holding; the trees are a bit poorer for it, and the limes a little more shriveled, but the snow yet bides its time, and they cross once more the brittle red grasses to the familiar groves, muffled in scarcely an extra layer. Dmitry is, in fact, sweating beneath his own coat and scarf, and spends most of their walk preoccupied with wiping droplets from his eyes, lest they spoil his aim.

He waits impatiently with his book open for Felix to drift away into his customary nap, hardly pretending to read it.

Scarcely ten minutes after the pale eyelids have drooped, and the long hand relaxed on his chest, Dmitry bids the servant return with their game, and starts up from the blanket upon which they are all sprawled.

"That's rather a long walk," he tells the boy, leaning back on his elbows, and looking up at him pointedly.

He does spare a look for his sleeping prince, but is not long in deciding.

Dmitry straddles him, already hard.

The boy seizes great tufts of his hair in both hands, and kisses him so hard their teeth knock together.

Dmitry merely ruts against him, no finesse, a desperate sort of copulation in which there is not time to surmount even the barrier of their trousers; he lets his head fall to the broad shoulder, eyes fluttering.

The boy's fingers tighten in his hair as he comes; the moustached lips are pressed to his temple.

He opens his eyes to find Felix watching them through half-lidded eyes.


Upon their next outing, he finds the servant missing.

They walk past the usual groves and have penetrated far deeper into the trees, hampered by raspberry brambles, when Dmitry finally whistles and calls ahead to Felix, who is in the lead, "Yousoppov! Where are you taking us?"

"There are snipes farther in," Felix responds. He is carrying the blanket and picnic hamper himself today, and has handed his gun off to Dmitry. He sets a brisk pace, though it is not audible in his voice.

Perhaps an hour into the dense wood, he suggests they stop for lunch, and the blanket is spread out, the hamper set untouched off to one side.

"Come on, Dima, so distant; take your nose out of your book and come lie beside me," Felix suggests with a lazy smile, lying back himself so that his hands his handsome dark head.

He's very good; he must have snared many a lady and her lord with such artful subtlety. There is no indication of what he intends to a mere human, who cannot smell his arousal or note the slight dilation of the eyes.

Dmitry lies down quite innocently beside him.

For a while, they are left to their respective thoughts and hobbies, he sketching the curve of Felix's jaw, Dmitry faking interest in Tolstoy.

They are complicit in this, he realizes, catching the prince's eye, and with a smile closing the sketchbook.

When he bends down to kiss the pretty lips, soft as any woman's, the prince's hand comes up to cup his neck, and idly stroke the hairs there. They leave their mouths open; Felix, to his young credit, is an excellent kisser, who does not advance too soon with the tongue, and when he presses its advantage at last, teases with the tip instead of thrusting with amateurish enthusiasm. It's the sort of kiss you feel all the way down into your spine; they are quite some time at exploring the other's lips, artist to artist, one of the delicate white hands which has never known a day of any labor it does not choose sliding into his lap.

He pulls away to gauge the reaction of Dmitry: thunderstruck; the book falls from his knee.

The hand in his lap does not pause when the prince rolls toward his friend and in releasing his own neck, slides the long fingers over the nape of the startled duke. Dmitry is guided in lingering bewilderment to the damp mouth.

He unzips his trousers; Felix's slender fingers find his bare cock.

He watches the two men kiss through half-lidded eyes, smiling.

When the prince releases his friend at last, they collapse into a lazy sort of tangle, the legs and arms thrown this way and that, the nimble hands taking their time with those accouterments of nobility behind which the supple backs are demurely secreted. Youssupov has the waist of a woman; Dmitry, the shoulders of a mountaineer.

The sun shifts overhead.

The breeze walks its sensual fingers up his spine.

He throws his head back, digging his hands into the hip in front of him, and with unhurried thrusts sliding his cock between Felix's thighs.


Alexandra relies entirely upon Rasputin for her child's safety; the Duma, naturally, resents him with equally consuming passion.

History is rather neatly stacked, one event on top of the other; it always has been. Isolation knows no worse bedfellow. If Ferdinand's hapless assassination could not, in all its incendiary magnitude, be the sole striker in that following Armageddon, certainly no shift in Rasputin's title or influence will bring this ancient autocracy howling to its knees.

But certainly you can pull the pin, and see which part of the mechanism suddenly falters.


Dmitry does not approve; Felix has been 'unmasked', as it were, once before, and ought not to press his luck.

But fine dresses which will not be recognized by that hawk eyed society who knows his mother's every crinoline are got easily enough; Felix is near enough to Bekah's size, and she won't miss a few absent silks.

Or, rather, she will, but he's left enough hints that it is in fact Elijah who has muddled about with her closet that his ears ought to be saved a sound blistering for at least a few days.

Entering restaurants with the prince on his arm allots him that instant admiration of a pretty wife; indeed, Bekah herself would be hard pressed to match him in heads turned.

They like to prowl the soldiers' favorite watering holes, sometimes with the prince in ringlets and flounces and himself holding court as the starry-eyed new husband who scarcely touches his vodka for his love sickness, sometimes with himself in complimentary silks.

Once they corner a pissed young buck who fancies himself the luckiest man alive, and leaves with them both. His surprise upon slipping under the skirts of these two charming 'ladies' is reiterated with language only a military man can boast.

He is, in the end, too drunk, too lonely, too afraid to not fuck and be fucked by them both.

With Dmitry he haunts the drinking houses and the brothels where the duke pays extra for them to be serviced together, roughly.

In separate apartments which the prince has retained for precisely this reason, they meet for hours, fucking one another like 'Catholic rabbits', as Kol might say. Unguarded pillow talk nets him those inner workings of autocracy which are only spilled at the will of sex or wealth.

Sometimes, he sits beside his brother in his coffin and reads to him. Romeo and Juliet, generally; one of his favorite comedies.

The first time Kol saw it, he laughed so hard he accidentally rolled down the hill of the open air theatre and into the midst of it, to the great surprise of the actor playing Juliet, who had to hurtle him.

He smiles and pauses for a moment, stroking the overgrown bangs.

Elijah will have to see to those.


It is late November when he lets himself quietly into the prince's chambers at the Moika Palace. A morning stroll has brightened his nose, and pinched the tips of his ears; he's muffled both his hands in his coat. A reveal is terribly boring without the flourish, after all, isn't it?

Felix has on a dressing gown and is in the middle of his tea. "Irina is outside," he says. "Baby needs some fresh air, apparently." He lays aside the novel he is reading. "What's the matter?"

He lets his face blanch beneath its fresh December rouge; the hands he extracts from his coat are trembling.

Truly, he is marvelous.

"Rasputin…Rasputin has somehow come into possession of these. How they were got, I don't know. How many more he might have, I don't know either." He lays down a packet of photographs, fanning them open on the table for maximum effect.

Youssupov sips his tea, sets it carefully down on its saucer.

He is utterly silent for nearly a minute; he does not touch the photographs.

The long hands are folded on top of the table, one of the fingers smoothing a ripple in the cloth. "Dmitry-"

"Doesn't yet know."

The pale fingers work themselves between one another; he swallows visibly, but the face is otherwise unruffled. "And he's in none of these? His face, I mean."

"None of these, no."

Youssupov leans back in his chair and thoughtfully steeples his fingers beneath his chin.

"Might I suggest another motive for our friend Dmitry?" he asks innocently, fluffing the curls along his brow surreptitiously, so they frame the flushed cheeks and the bright eyes with cherubic artlessness.

"Another motive," Youssupov replies, without the inflection to make it a question.

"Rasputin will need to be disposed of, clearly. This will ruin you. Rumors are one thing, explicit photographic evidence another altogether. Perhaps your influence will keep you out of prison, but you'll likely be exiled. Shunned, at the very least. Dmitry, however, will not murder a man over a scandal, whatever the empress may believe of his other morals."

The long lashes blink at him, and drop in contemplation.

"If he could be persuaded it's in the best interests of his family- if he could be talked round to believing Rasputin is doing irreversible damage to the autocracy, to their influence…he could be made complicit. No one need know about these photographs except the two of us."

The fingers shift against one another.

The legs re-cross beneath the silk robe.

"Rasputin is a stain upon this country. Upon your honor. Your child will be besmirched by him. And who knows to what heights he will elevate himself, with these pictures."

One of the hands lifts smoothly, the features still blandly studying him. "You don't need to persuade me, Nikolai. Dmitry-"

"Is a reasonable man who has seen for himself the damage this peasant has inflicted upon the government." He dimples; not too much. No need to parade his triumph. When testing the puppeteer's strings, one must be careful not to jostle them so the audience is rudely transported from their fantastic tale to that mean reality of sawdust and tattered villager's curtain.

Somewhere in the house, a door opens.

They hear the incessant chattering of new children, and the answering fondness of the prince's wife.

He sweeps the photographs gracefully into his hand, and slides them into his coat pocket a mere thirty seconds before she enters the room with their child on her hip.

"Nikolai! I don't believe we were expecting you?"

"Just consolidating some theatre plans. Your husband is kind enough, or perhaps unwise enough, to allow me to steal him from such a ravishing creature as yourself," he replies smoothly, with just enough self-deprecation in his smile to flatter rather than offend.

He bends to kiss her hand, without letting go the prince's hot gaze.


A/N: Ok, so some flashback notes. You'll note that I refer to both Petrograd and St. Petersburg interchangably; as I explained in the last part, if you recall, St. Petersburg's name was changed to Petrograd shortly after the commencement of WWI, because it was felt that Petersburg was too German a name. (Teh ENEMY!) However, when Klaus was last in Russia, Petrograd would have been St. Petersburg, so I've used both names since the flashback is from his perspective and I feel he'd probably slip sometimes, not having had a couple of years to get used to referring to it as Petrograd. Plus, it's not like he has any political affiliations, so what does he give a shit if Petersburg sounds too German.

The horseman Klaus notes is a statue of Peter the Great which you can still view today in St. Petersburg, if you're into really big fucking statues of dudes on horses. Pushkin wrote a poem about it called 'The Bronze Horseman', which we'll all be very surprised if I don't try and work in somehow.

The hut in the wood which is home to the witch Klaus visits for information is basically just a big jumble of references to Russian folk tales: I told you you guys were going to feel my Big Russian Boner throughout this flashback. I'm not going to explain every reference because that would take too long, so I'll just say: read some Russian folk tales if you haven't already. They are, in the usual vein of undisneyfied folk and fairy tales, massively fucked up.

Prince Felix's description of Rasputin is from his personal letters.

'Turgenev's Sketches': a reference to Ivan Turgenev's 'Sketches From a Hunter's Album', a collection of short stories based on Turgenev's observations while hunting throughout Russia.

Ok, so. Rasputin's assassination. It's quite the senstional event, honestly. The official motivation is a political one. However, there are suggestions floating around that Youssopov, who did not have much interest in politics and was unlikely to have been driven by them, knew that Rasputin had information about him which was damaging. In the aftermath of his murder, however, Dmitry and Felix had quite the falling out, and it's unlikely Dmitry would have loyally refrained from telling what he knew about whatever it was Youssopov had been indicated in, if he in fact knew it. I have, then, combined both motivations: Dmitry's being the political, and Prince Felix's the personal, courtesy of Klaus, and his deft little machinations.

There are no explicit descriptions of the relationship between Dmitry and Prince Felix; there, were, however, many rumors surrounding the sexualities of both men, and their relationship in particular. Youssopov's cross-dressing was fairly well-known (he in fact talks about it in his memoirs), and he was indeed caught out at it after a restaurant owner recognized him and passed word along to his parents, who were like, "Hey, son, you need to knock off that gay shit." In his memoir, Youssopov also talks about a deep relationship between himself and Dmitry which hints at unions of a spicy, homosexual nature, but never makes explicit what their relationship actually was. As you see, I have opted for the really gay route. May I burn in hell for writing real person fic where they do it lots (they have been long dead, at least, and probably aren't going to sue me for this). Also, if history would STOP BEING SO GAY, I wouldn't have to do this.

The real question, however, is what will Rebekah do when she realizes Klaus stole some of her dresses and spent several dirty, dirty sexcapades stretching them out and also ruining the fabric, because gay threeways makes for a lot of splooge, I'm assuming (having little experience myself with gay male threeways)?

Tune in next week (lol, not really) to find out this and more! One highlight you might look forward to: Klaroline murder shenanigans. Because turns out the hostage situation at the museum is not what it seems.

Thank you so much for reading, and also a great big thanks to those of you who nominated me for the Klaroline Awards! I do appreciate that you guys are still thinking of me, three years later.

Jenn out.