I just got back from Costa Rica at two in the morning and I still managed to start the Fabrica of Life. My entire front side is as red as a lobster and I've been smothering myself with lotion for the past week as if my life depends on it. School starts tomorrow and the first thing everyone will notice about me is how red my skin is. Oh well, they obviously haven't heard that red is the new black.
1st Act – Violent Sheets. Soak in Jealousy
I fell to my knees and stumbled back up, scraping my palm across my face to clear away the tears. It was lonely to run without being pursued, but it was all a lot for me. She had always kept me separate. She had always kept me from other boys. She was standing near the brickyard, surveying the construction underway. I threw myself at her.
She bundled me up into her arms, turned my face by the chin with a hand.
I submitted to her inspection breathlessly.
"Leechtin, I went to the piers."
"By yourself?"
It went without saying. I buried my face in her neck, unable to communicate my grief in her language, seven years old, hers for as far as I cared to remember but able to remember much more. I am unable to say what I knew then, because I can't remember what came before being Leechtin's ward. I knew far more then, and she might have known, but I know that at that time, Leechtin didn't care to think about much. I didn't think about much. She placed me highest amongst the other boys and I loved her for it.
She took me into the house, taking down her long black hair as she went. She smelled like construction. She never smelled like herself; she always smelled like Herculaneum. She didn't mention my condition, the dirt on my face, the bruises on my legs, the rock I still held in my hand for life. She took it from me, removing my hand from the rock finger by finger. Unmentionable that I'd obviously used it to strike someone, in defense or otherwise. She kissed my forehead, setting me down on the edge of the fountain in the atrium, unlacing my sandals.
"Who let you out this morning?"
"Vasvius."
"I see."
She breathed out, frowning over my legs, suddenly pushing them down and I was breathless again, surprised. She swept away, letting her heavy silk robe fall from around her shoulders behind her, hair swinging out over her shoulders.
The darkness made patterns through the window.
***
I don't remember a whole lot from the night Vasvius tried to kill me. He has tried to talk to me about it before but I have never tried to listen very much.
Vasvius came at me with the knife and I tried to escape under the bed but he grabbed my tender ankle and I screamed. He squeezed the air out of me with his arm, holding me to his chest. Leechtin caught up, framed in the doorway, breathing heavily, black hair in her face.
"Put him down."
"Fuck you," Vasvius said, spitting out the words, gesturing with the knife, pointing at me, pointing at Leechtin, who had never loved him. He tossed me onto the bed and I couldn't make a noise. Leechtin froze and I was going to die before a savage blow knocked the poor servant from off of my body to the floor, knife clattering away. I scrambled away engulfed by Vasvius's laughter and terror and the sound of him dying.
"I have loved you since I was a child! I have loved you since I was a child!"
It was all I heard. Perhaps I had heard more, seen more, felt more, but it was all I remembered; it was all I kept that night.
***
In the morning when Vasvius stumbled out of Leechtin's bedroom, I flattened myself against the wall with the breakfast tray in my hands; Leechtin reached out and grabbed me and slammed the door.
I remember very clearly the blood on the coverlet and choking back tears while she held me. She was my master as much as she tried to treat me as her ward; there was Vasvius' still wet blood on the sheets. She pressed me onto my back and slept with her hand over my chest so I couldn't wiggle away. I swallowed the screams in my throat. I closed my eyes. The blood soaked into my hair.
I knew what Leechtin was, deep in my heart. We all did, but I think that all of us had our own moment when we knew that we would not be allowed to escape it, that we were trapped. It has been my life. Part of me is still seven years old, lying on a bloody coverlet in the master's bedroom while the other children bang bang bang on the door. Something is wrong with Vasvius. There are blond golems; there is a blond demon.
My skin was itchy with the drying blood. I tried to hyperventilate silently, laying there, laying there with my eyes shut as tight as I could shut them; I listened to the other children go away, go away and I did not cry at all. Would it have been different if I had struggled and pushed him away? Any other child would have. Maybe I was too much over my head in all of that stuff to be any other way.
Leechtin slept. I kept quiet.
The darkness made patterns through the window.
***
In Herculaneum it was really my adolescence. If I care to think about it in any kind of depth, I think that I'd like to go back there. I'm conflicted all the time in a way I don't think I was as a child. I knew which way was up. I knew how to get back to a place that felt stable because there was a safety net, brothers and master and the hierarchy intransigent to all of that.
I have had enough time in my life to have many moments to wonder where the start of everything was. When did I stop believing that things might go normally for me? I think that it was on the bloody coverlet but was it there really?
To be honest, it's often easier not to demonize the players in my life then and it seems more normal to me in that kind of light. At least Leechtin never played games with me. At least Leechtin never did all sorts of things to me that I have seen people do to children over the course of my life, things that I have done like biting and kissing and stealing. It doesn't make it better, but what could I have expected? My lot in life was to have a master, son of a toppled nation in a Roman universe. It was de facto that I was pretty as a child and that Leechtin liked and still likes to worship pretty little children. At least she was discreet about what she was. At least she waited to take me until I begged her to, which is the most important thing. It is the thing that I have not done so many times, waiting, and it is the worst part of me that I haven't. In so many cases, it would have made so much difference to have waited for a little while.
***
Leechtin washed the blood out of my hair, held me, resting her cheek on the top of my head, eyes closed. She liked to hold me and I would be quiet because she liked that too. Her long fingers were always kept where I could see them, not threatening. I couldn't fall asleep in her arms, it was too cold, but it was not difficult to relax there. Heat was a fact of life in Herculaneum and it drew me to those arms where I wanted to be, a cool, dignified reprieve.
She whispered, "Always stay like you are," and I would lazily desire as a child to always always be able to please her; it is part of a greater obsession that is Leechtin in my life.
I coiled my fingers in her sash and rested until she pushed me away, already tired of it, already tired of me.
I could always go play with the other children, but they picked on me mercilessly even if they were protective in public. They were older than me, as old as 14 to my 7 and had all at one time or another caught Leechtin's eye for various reasons, though they were certainly not expected to behave as wards like I could, flouting certain rules if I wanted.
After the time with the bloody sheets, Vasvius stopped caring about me. He didn't dare to slap me around, and let me have as good a plate for meals as the others without tampering with it. Among his many tasks running the house was to make sure the other children were taken as well cared for as could be expected for our station, and he did that without passion.
His passion was reserved for Leechtin, and he had little of it after the violent episode, falling to his knees in the courtyard or staying in his room for days. Finally, he wouldn't go out at all, and his subordinate, Vivacio, took over the daily routine with us.
I have never been close to these people.
Vivacio for me was better because there was very little violence in his nature even in the face of his great jealousy.
Leechtin seemed milder to have gotten Vasvius out of the way.
It was just that a lot of things were hidden from my view when I was at that age.
I cannot say definitively what I feel about Leechtin, or definitively what I felt for her then though I am sure many parties would enjoy the privilege of such information. It has never been clear to me and I have never attempted the figuring out of it, nor should I, I think. I have just been living for a long time and the darkness never failed to make patterns through the window.
