Nothing Ever Stays the Same
Chapter 11- Oh! Hark!
"Oh Bollocks" Arthur exclaimed as Alec, he and I stood in the main common room listening to the bad news that Aro was announcing, there was a slight murmur of agreed laughter from Arthur's exclamation, I slapped him across the head
"Behave" I spat in a whisper, and his only retort was an incredulous look
"Yes, people a ball" Aro continued "After our recent altercation in Washington, I think it would be sagacious of to host a ball for the vampires involved in the event, so as to make privy our willingness to modernize and converse our recent upheaval in out management and recoup our former popularity that was achieved with our more honourable day's" he looked around the room, probably not seeing the same thing I was, which was dozens of exorbitantly horrified faces of hardened vampires being told they were going to have to entertain guests for a night of well-mannered revelatory. "The date has been set and the invitations released I expect you all to be there in formal attire with your best foot forward" and with that he turned on his heel and with a feathery laugh he said "this is going to be so much fun" and then he left leaving forty or so vampires in a room all gaping, none of whom could find the right reaction to the news they had just received. Arthur stood up and looked at me
"As I said, Bollocks" and with that he went towards our common room leaving me there looking at him curiously.
"Don't worry Jane" Alec said to me "You could be falling for someone who isn't falling in return"
"Don't talk to me about falling, the only falling I'm doing is falling into a pit of angst" I said aggressively
"When will you learn that I am not the only person in the world capable of loving you" he said condescendingly
"But you're the only person I want to love back, I just don't think I can handle loving another person"
"Your not that emotionally stunted you know"
"Stunted, is that what you think it is, STUNTED" I yelled and Alec grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up the stairs away from listening ears
"Yes, I think your emotionally stunted, and I don't blame you, we don't know of anybody else who has survived what we have survived so we don't have anything to base it on"
"We didn't survive Alec, if we survived we would have died a long time ago" I pulled myself from my brothers grasp and I stormed up the stairs ignoring my surroundings until I reached our common room and I found Arthur lying on one of the antique couches one hand pinching the bridge of his nose and the other raised in the air with his fingers moving up and down in sequence as if he was counting "What are you doing?" I demanded in my temper
"Counting, how long it will take me to remove my savings from my account to a Swiss account and then out again to a new account"
"Why the complication of moving to a Swiss account and then out again"
"I would be easy to track the movement of the money from my current account to a Swiss one, but if I move it out then, given the privacy and security of Swiss accounts, it should be easy enough to just disappear, but given the risk I think I should just withdraw it from the bank as a hard currency and then place it in a new account"
"Afraid your parents will track you down?" I asked
"More afraid they'll get their hands on the money, which is a lot of money" he sat up now legs still on the couch curled up to his chest his feet only noticeable because if his black socks standing out against the white upholstery of the couch. I sat down in the space that was occupied by his legs only moments ago.
"I take it you have a poor relationship with your parents"
"Yeah, as soon as I was hitting my stride in school, being constantly moving up my parents put me up for adoption and they manipulated the whole situation so that in the event of my death before the age of eighteen that they inherit any of my earnings, my adoptive father didn't care all that much he earned enough money without anything I got, see my adoptive father was an academic and a professor of philosophy he saw my intelligence as a way of raising a child we wouldn't be disappointed in as I was showing so much presence and I don't resent him for it he sent me to all the nicest schools bought all the literature I could handle and had me tutored by the leading lecturers at his university in any subject I needed help in. In fact I loved him for it" Arthur took a long unneeded breathe and his face became morose "Then my parents caught wind of my popularity and tried to get me back first they tried the physical way, then they tried the legal, least to say after the physical the legal opportunity became very grim for them and that really confused me, I mean I was nine when they gave me up and eleven when they came back but my professor fought hard for me and we came out closer for it, he really was an ideal parent because he understood my intelligence and he nurtured it making sure that there was always someone a little smarter than me around to help learn, I mean at one point we had a physicist from Geneva at our house teaching me about particle physics and the lot, it was mental and then imagine everyone's surprise when I chose psychology, but when I told my professor that do you know what he did?" Arthur looked at me for the first time since he started reminiscing
"Brought you head cases to practise on?" I offered
"No" Arthur said "though that comes later, he got me every single book and study written by psychologists like Freud and Jung for me to read then he got me a neuroscientist from Mayo to teach me about the brain and it's intricacies, and it wasn't even my birthday or Christmas and that's when I knew that my new life was better than my old but then my professor got married to this absolute bitch of a woman" Arthur said the last bit carefully making sure to get as much malice and hatred out as he could "she didn't like me one bit, and to be far neither did I and she made my professor choose between us, a most cruel ultimatum and well he chose her and my professor was no longer mine and I was once again but up for adoption, but this time I would not be adopted by anyone I was left to myself until I turned eighteen and I would be forced out on my own as a legal adult who no longer needed love or care, it was sitting in the cold room of my orphanage that I wrote my first book my first theory to which I dedicated to the devil for only he can appreciate the irony of my position having most likely put me there and that's when I began touring with my book, arguing with foreign scholars and such, and then you found me in Belgium after I had finished entertaining a room of old fools and you seemed to keep up my thought and that is what drew me to talk to you" he finally finished with a shudder, like he was finally letting go of his tortured past, though he was never able to disappoint always managing to live up to impossible standards he found himself being constantly disappointed by the people that mattered most.
"Why did you tell me this?" I asked him, because it seemed as though it was a lot harder for him to talk about his human life then it would be for me to, since his was so fresh and mine wasn't even modern history.
"Because" he said "I've finally accepted this place as my new lot, and because of that I don't want to feel like a stranger anymore" I was flattered that he thought this place so pleasant especially after the cruel way we took him from his last and that he told me his story when I was the vampire who led him to his untimely and undeserved transfiguration
"Thank-you" was all I could say, he smiled an earnest smile and he stood up, put his feet in his shoes and then turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder
"My door is always open and ear always willing, should you wish to talk about anything at all it is my specialty after all" is all he said before he walked off down the stairs and off to who knows where and I sat in my spot stunned into silence and solitude.
"Jane" I heard a concerned voice call from near by but I didn't bother to look
"Yes" I answered
"Arthur said you might be like this, and told me come and talk to you if I didn't hear any movement for an hour"
"Did he say anything else?" I asked simply my mind much to occupied to proliferate my sentence
"As a matter of fact he did, he told you to get some air in Didyme's garden" I laughed internally
"Naturally, is that all?"
"Yes, miss"
"Then you are excused" the guard so unnerved at being so close to me while I was unstable was all too quick to follow my orders.
I decided to follow Arthur's advice and I went down to Didyme's garden, the garden itself was made after the death of Marcus's wife Didyme, she was said to be beautiful and she had a gift of making the people and vampires around her euphoric and not only was she Marcus's wife but she was also Aro's biological sister, the garden was made by Marcus himself after her death and he spends at least an hour there everyday. I myself had only been in the garden a few times, it is a beautiful place, made of entirely white marble filled with beautiful greenery and everywhere there was yellow, pink, white and violet flowers and in the centre of the garden was a white marble statue of Didyme crafted by Marcus himself, the statue sat on top of a pond that was always filled with the most crystal blue and clear water that I have ever had the pleasure of looking at. The garden was situated in the sunniest part of the exterior castle and no matter what time of day the sun was always shining making any diamond or vampire present sparkle gloriously as if there was no shame in sparkling. The pleasure of gazing upon the garden was reserved for a very limited few and that was because the garden was precious so the only members of the guard allowed in to the garden were senior members of the guard and that included me. As I made my way up the many flights of stairs required to go up to reach the garden I wondered how Arthur had come to know of it's existence, it was a few years before I was privy to the information and Arthur had only been here two days and he was telling me to go there, why I was to go there I didn't know but I trusted that Arthur knew what he was doing. I made my way down a hallway in the castle and then I found the painting of the garden made by Afton, who was Chelsea's husband, the painting was the door to the spiral staircase that led to the garden, it was a hidden passageway and the secret very heavily guarded. I reached the door at the top of the hidden staircase moments after I had made my way through the painting door, I opened he door and let the sunshine soak me and letting myself adjust to the sparkle of my skin before I walked out into the stunning garden.
It was as if my flawless memory had not done Marcus' handiwork justice, the garden was more beautiful then it had been the last time I visited, the garden itself was broken into three parts there was the left hand flower bed which stood raised and contained within a knee height white marble wall. The flower bed itself consisted of a low cut green hedge with behind a layer of white roses and behind that stood ornamental plum trees that stood in precise, even intervals along the flower bed which was approximately thirty metres long. Then there was the marble walkway which was split into three parts in itself, there was the plain white marble pavement which lay on either side of a glass panel under which water from the pond flowed down, like a river running from a dam. The right hand side of the garden there was a perfect symmetrical replication of the flower bed running down the left hand side, all the trees the same size and shape, the hedge the same colour not a twig of place and even the same number of flowers springing up in places. At the end of the thirty metre flower beds there was a ten metre gap in which there were four marble benches, two set at the end of the flower bed and another two placed next to the previous two put up against their closest wall, the benches looked as if they had been cut out of the marble which they stood against. And the end of the ten metre gap was a pond that ran the width of the garden and in itself it was another ten metres it was again made of white marble and the end of it was a wall that ran high. In the middle of the pond which was also the centre of the walkway was the statue Didyme, but not Didyme as she would have been seen by us but Didyme as Marcus knew her when he first met her, this depiction of a Greek goddess, her long hair falling in curls around her detailed face, a face that was smiling her cheeks raised and cold stone eyes seemingly glowing. Her dress looked like a bed sheet was fitted and wrapped around her delicate and slender frame and her dress moved in ripples until it touched the water. The wall behind her was a dull yellow render with Greek inscriptions running across it's berth inscriptions titled In Memoriam.
My appreciation of Marcus' garden was obscured by Marcus himself sitting in one of the marble benches situated in the garden but he was not sitting alone, next to him in all his post-nostalgic glory was Arthur, he was sitting there completely engrossed in whatever Marcus was telling him and he was also unabashedly sparkling like a polished diamond, his head, the chest exposed by the 'v' in his t-shirt and his arms from the cut in his t-shirt down to his fingers and though I had seen thousands of vampires in all their jewelled glory not one had ever striked as beautiful until this moment, he was so beautiful in the way the sun reflected of his multi-faceted skin as if an artist was using tonal shading to highlight the muscles and indentations of his body and it only succeeded in making him more appealing and there was something else, it was his face and the way the sunlight lightly sparkled over his slim face but then when he smiled how the sunlight caught off his raised cheeks and darkening in his dimples and was as if Da Vinci, Bernini and Michelangelo had all been raised from the dead and went to Ireland to sculpt this Adonis as an embryo, but of course such silly thoughts cannot be entertained, especially when Aro had access to such thoughts. But such bad timing on my behalf because at the point I stopped the much entertaining thoughts he turned and gave me the most venom warming experience of my cold life, I walked closer to the pair on the bench and I could feel myself beginning to smile as I got closer just sensing his presence just knowing that he is smiling to just made me feel warmth that I have never experienced and for once in my life I welcomed the warmth of the sun I let it fill me with happiness.
"We were just talking about you" Arthur said as I stepped toward him and Marcus and to my utter astonishment I saw that Marcus was as well smiling not as hard as Arthur was but for Marcus it was significant especially given the complete state of apathy he's been suffering for the past half millennia or so.
"Oh my, Marcus, what's changed?" I asked, my voice reflecting the shock I was internally subject to
"You changed Jane, for so long the relationships around me were so typical there was nothing new, so there was nothing for me to look forward to, nothing for me to feel, the reason I am still in existence is because you and Alec came and your relationship gave me this spur of life and then I met Edward and Isabella" I flinched at their names "and I felt a new hope that there was a light and indeed an end to my despondent tunnel and then there was what I felt at Washington when the Cullen's stood united as a family for that little half-cast and how the were-wolf was tied to the little girl through imprinting and it was then that I knew there was at the end, I was done with grieving and all it would take for me to see the end was a push of constant beautiful relationship that kind of a tie to release me" I looked at him, unsure of where he was going with this "and now because you found Arthur and though you may not know it you and Arthur are tied in a way that made me see the light, it feels like the kind of connection Didyme" he said as he looked at the statue of his love "and I had, it is pure and unrelenting love and it feels so beautiful it makes me feel free" he finished smiling at me obstinately.
"That's what we were talking about before you came up" Arthur chimed
"Oh, well that's nice I suppose" I said as I tried to process all the new information
"I should leave and let you two sort this out" Marcus said as he stood up "Thank-you, thank-you both so much" and he shook mine and Arthur's hand and he left disappearing down the walkway and through the door.
"So a connection" I said "Is that why I was told to come here?"
"No" Arthur said flatly "I told you to come here because this place is beautiful and is a perfect representation of beauty in the world and that's what I thought you needed, and after saying what I said I guessed you would view it somewhat differently"
"Well you were right, this place is truly stunning" I said "But what do we do about the connection?" I asked
"Do you want me to guess?" Arthur asked in retort
"Well your guesses have an awful habit of being right" I said
"I think, neither of us are ready for committing to each other to the degree Marcus senses so I think I should do something else first" Arthur said
"And what is that?" I asked as Arthur stood up
"Jane will you go to the ball with me?" he asked his red eyes looking into mine, my head swam and my motionless stomach heaved as I fought to get my answer out.
A/N:And that's another chapter out and about for your enjoyment. I would love to see some reviews fr this chapter, just because I got slack doesn't mean I want you following my example.