"I must tell you that I was always afraid of the fury with which I loved you. It overwhelmed me. I thought it beyond comprehension, therefore my silence."
Henry Rollins
Ghosts pt. 5
I know I owe you the rest of the story, Nick, but I just don't know if I have the heart to tell it. I had never envisioned living to tell it. I thought I could just sneak out and never have to answer to either of you.
It's a pity you don't have his gift. Then you could just read Alice's mind.
She showed you, didn't she Edward? How Aro had been determined to destroy you and your family long before I came along, how the only way to get to the support of Caius and Marcus was by exposing Aro's secret, how without Nick, Cyril and Andreas wouldn't have the will to confront him, how I was the only one who could get close enough to Aro to bring him down, how everything had to happen in exactly the right order to survive Aro's ambitions. It was an enormous spider web of events and the deadly creature in the center? Perhaps it was Aro; more likely it was me. I certainly fit the profile.
But back to the beginning? I went back to the Bowery after you sent me away that night in New York. I was devastated. I had offered myself on a platter to an angel-faced virgin judge and he had screamed at me to leave.
I took the first trick I could find and then the next and the next.
Edward, I see you wincing. You think that you want me; you think that you want this. If you want me the way you think you do you have to know all of it, don't you? I'm not trying to push you away; I'm trying to tell you who I am when I'm not longing for you. But then, when have I ever not longed for you? I know that surprises you. I had to keep it from you. If I told you what you were to me you wouldn't have let me go play my part and we all would have died. Surely Alice showed you all that, too.
I took their money, fixed, killed your memory, woke up and repeated the cycle. For a short time I had whole hours where I didn't think of you. After I was changed I no longer had the luxury. That became the worst part of being a vampire. Not being able to smother my memory of you in sleep or dope or other men. Although I tried. Poor Demitri.
I was reckless. I was robbed, beaten up, raped. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything. I hated myself and I hated you and I hated Carlisle and Esme for saving me for this life. Finally I got what I wanted and a trick left me for dead in a Greenwich Village alley. As I lost consciousness, I thought, "At last."
But I woke up. Again, in the company of the Cullens. But this time I wasn't in the apartment in the city and I wasn't human anymore. And Alice was there.
Alice. My fellow soldier and my enemy. If I never see her face again it'll be too soon.
She tried so many times to explain to me what I had to do. All I could hear was that I couldn't be with you. I hated her.
This mating, this compulsion, must be a trick of vampire biology. All I know is that when I woke up this way I knew I needed you and that need has pulled at my insides every day for sixty years. I hated you for being the spike I couldn't pull out of my heart, for being the face I couldn't banish, the name I breathed. My fingers have itched to touch you when you were thousands of miles away. I saw your face when I closed my eyes and when my eyes were open they searched for you until they strained. I sniffed the air for your scent and licked my lips compulsively searching for your taste. I imagined your voice and pulled the memory of your every gesture and attempted to duplicate them in my imagination.
I couldn't even let you touch me in that cabin because I knew that I would never be able to leave.
Was it better for you to not know? The thought of what I had to give up made me insane and angry. It was how I fueled my hatred for Aro. How could I pretend for sixty years to be his loyal servant and then be prepared to rip his head off? The thought of what he would do to you if I didn't play my part fueled every second of it.
Alice explained to me what I had to do. I had to give you up, travel to Italy and spend the next sixty years in Aro's cage. I was the only one who could get close to him, she saw that he would be obsessed by the one mind he couldn't read. She spent weeks briefing me on my mission over and over, proving her abilities to me again and again. I screamed and left, raged at her, attacked her, begged her, cajoled her. I wanted her to find another way; I wanted to doubt her.
I even tried to kill her, as if that would help change the future.
I thought that surely there was a way to reduce my sentence, do what needed to be done faster. She proved to me over and over again that I had two choices; spend sixty years separated from you in servitude to her plan or spend the next six decades with you and then die at your side.
I would have died that very day for just an hour with you but you deserved more than that. Not to mention that I was sentencing all of the Cullens to the same fate. Esme and Carlisle, the only loving parents I had ever had. Rosalie and Emmett, who had accepted me without question and would stand by me no matter what decision I made. There was only one decision to make.
I waited for you to come back. It was my last hope, that you would come back and that the words you would say to me wouldn't be the words Alice predicted. Then I would know that there was another choice, a third strand to our future.
Do you remember what you said? You said, "You made me an offer." It was exactly what Alice told me you would say, down to the inflection in your voice. I had to accept that she was right, that we were doomed.
I insisted that she not tell you we were mated. It didn't make any sense anyway. You were so perfect, so moral, so untouched and I was so debauched, so ruined. I had never believed in anything, never loved anything but freedom and heroin. In that way mating is like alchemy, isn't it? Mixing these disparate ingredients to make gold?
All I knew was that I had to leave you, drive you away, keep pushing you away, repulse you, reject you. That was the only way I could save you.
And Alice had to keep throwing me in your way, or your resolve would weaken. You would forget how much you hated me, you would forget my vileness. You would go to Italy, Aro would touch you, find out about Alice and it would all end that way. We all had to play our parts perfectly and you didn't even know you were reading from a script.
But even in my heroic sacrifice I couldn't stay out of the gutter. I killed humans, I took a lover, I lied and fucked my way through the last six decades while you stayed as perfect as ever.
I couldn't even resist taking what I did from you in the cabin. I needed to touch you, I needed to taste you, but you were pure and unsullied and your first sexual experience should never have been a blow job from a hooker. I couldn't even resist defiling you in that way.
That's why I begged Marcus to destroy me, that's why I fought. I was meant to die decades ago. I did die, twice. I came back as the most unredeemable of creatures. How could you want this? It's a trick, a trap. No matter what the mating imperative tells us I can't be what you want, what you deserve. I don't know how to love, I only know how to deceive and destroy, no matter how badly I want to crawl inside you and stay there for eternity.
Redemption? I'm not even sure I believe in it. Do you?
^0^ ^0^ ^0^ ^0^ ^0^
Vision
It was a busy night for Tanner's. The "Music and Words of the Beat Generation" event had drawn some younger people, probably college students, but mostly it seemed to be an older crowd.
There were old hippies with long hair and sandals, middle-aged professor types with sports coats and jeans, young kids in skinny jeans and dark eyeglass frames. And then there were the two in the corner.
They were stunning, pale and somber when they entered. He was aloof, his reddish hair mussed and his dark suit hanging on a thin frame. He seemed to be going for a "period" look: wearing a thin, black tie and a white shirt, he looked like he could have been here in the 1950's.
She was dark-haired and small, with delicately beautiful features and a dark silk dress and a wool coat.
He slipped her coat off her shoulders stiffly, formally, and then stared for a moment at her back and bare arms before sliding into the booth in the corner next to her carefully, placing himself next to her without touching.
The bartender was positive that they were on a first date. They were so careful not to touch each other and they were so clearly anxious in each other's company, glancing at the other every few seconds. He sent a waitress over immediately, pitying them and hoping some alcohol would help.
A pianist got up on stage and played "'Round Midnight" and the woman's gaze dimmed a little as she listened to the music, her upper body swaying slightly.
The waitress decided that this was no first date. The way the man looked at her was adoring and intense, as if he was memorizing her face. They were clearly in love, or at least, he was. The dark-haired woman pulled her attention away from the performance long enough to order a drink. The waitress took their orders quickly and left without making small talk. She had the feeling they wanted to be left alone.
The NYU literature professor in the front row knew that he should have been paying attention to the retrospective, but the couple in the corner was fascinating. An actor got up to read from "On The Road" and the woman said a few quiet words to her companion, glancing at him…shyly? He pressed his lips together as if considering his response, but just then the waitress dropped off their drinks and his view was blocked. When the waitress left the professor could see that they were staring straight ahead again, as if avoiding each other's gazes.
The girlfriend of the actor who had been hired to read from "Naked Lunch" knew he was up soon and that she should be paying attention but the couple in the corner distracted her. Their otherworldly beauty was undeniable but what was especially poignant was their body language. The foot of space between them crackled with tension and every time one of them moved she was sure it would be to touch the other. How could they resist? She wished her boyfriend could see this, if he could duplicate that tension and the intense mix of emotions at the table he would be brilliant in his current play. The red-haired man said something quietly to his…lover? Wife? It was impossible to tell. The woman's face twisted into a look of sadness and apology and the man frowned, as if feeling regret for his words.
A five man jazz ensemble set up on the stage and began to play "Lester Leaps In" after an aging Beat historian explained that it was the inspiration behind Ginsberg's "Howl."
The twenty year-old college student - forced to be here by his professor - let his gaze travel around the room as he rolled his eyes at the jazz being played on stage. How could this stuff be described as "experimental" and "exciting"? It sounded like stuff his grandpa would listen to. Now the chick in the corner? She was exciting. If the stiff sitting next to her wasn't interested, he certainly was. As he watched, hoping that maybe they were fighting, the woman said something to the man, wincing. He shook his head slightly and the woman reached out and touched what he could now see was a white scar on the man's cheekbone. The brunette stroked the scar apologetically. The man's eyes closed slightly at her touch and then he reached out and touched her bare upper arm. There was a similar scar on her arm and when he touched it she smiled wryly at her companion, the first smile anyone in the room had seen from her all evening. The student snorted, disgusted. Apparently they weren't breaking up.
An aging poet got up to read, "Howl" and the woman seemed to tense up again as the man spoke.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/madness, starving, hysterical, naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn/looking for an angry fix..."
The actor recited the staccato lines of the poem, his voice barking out the stanzas.
"who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in/Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried, their/torsos night after night/with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares..."
As the waitress watched, the man reached out and took her hand, looking at her for permission. She gave him a shy smile and turned her attention back to the stage.
"who wandered around and around at midnight in the/railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,leaving no broken hearts..."
The man let go of her hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulder as she tensed again. He looked down at her and stroked her shoulder as she listened to the poet.
A few more stanzas went by and then he reached out and touched her chin, turning her face to his, merely inches apart.
"ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe…"
The red-haired man leaned down and kissed her lightly. It didn't seem to the writer watching from the next booth to be a particularly passionate kiss; it seemed more like a comforting gesture. As the man pulled his face away the writer could see a look of wonder on the woman's face that took his breath away and his mind desperately spun thinking of ways to describe that look, short of taking a picture.
As the bartender watched, pleased that he had guessed correctly about it being their first date, the woman stretched up and kissed the young man back. This time the kiss became more passionate and when they parted they both seemed breathless and happy. The woman turned back to the stage with a slight smile and the man leaned down and nuzzled his face in her hair. The space between them was gone.
The aging poet finished up the poem on stage:
"I'm with you in Rockland/in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-/journey on the highway across America in tears/to the door of my cottage in the Western night."
In the midst of the applause, if by unspoken agreement, the couple got up and he helped her on with her coat, pausing as she turned around to face him to reach out and touch her cheek again.
They barely took their eyes off of each other as they walked out of the dimly lit club, hand in hand, into the night.
The bartender argued half-heartedly with the waitress about whether or not they were on a first date as they cleaned up that night, sweeping the floor and wiping down the tables. They sat down in the booth that the two had sat in and shared a drink. As their conversation trailed off the bartender leaned back and glanced around the old room again, increasingly making it's money off of it's history, and it was then he noticed that there were two old photographs missing from the wall.
a/n: My apologies for abandoning the Beat poets for the epigram; Henry Rollins just said it so much better. A big endless, fawning "Thank You" to EverlastingMuse for beta'ing this and Liz3615 for her awesome cheer-leading, pre-reading and hand-holding. Thank you to everyone reading and reviewing and recc'ing this; it was neither an easy read nor a particularly "feel-good" one, so thanks for bearing with me. Xoxo JuJu