AUTHOR'S NOTE: This chapter is quite unlike anything I've written before. Consider this my preferred ending to the Marcus/Didyme saga. As a warning, I must add that this chapter is from the perspective of a rather self-harming vampire, and involves character death of a sort. If this is problematic for you, please sit this one out. The chapter title is taken from the song Blue on Black by Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Thanks go once again to H.K Rissing for suggesting the overall idea for this story.

Years from now

Marcus speaks:

I have kept your possessions until time destroyed them, my Didyme, and that ripped my soul to scraps a thousand times over.

We will not pretend that I am soulless. Semantics become mirrors and smoke with the years, and I will not trouble myself with the faith of mortals.

Your clothes faded first, reduced to wisps, then mist, then nothing at all by moths and decay. Even your scent did not linger upon the scraps of silk and ribbons of linen.

I tell myself that your skin carried the memory of slow summer, sweet with honey and the promise of apples. It is not that I can't remember—I try to remember so fiercely that I fear my mind has given me a pretty tale instead of the truth.

I will never ask Aro to remind me. I cannot, my heart, and I pray that you understand.

You collected beautiful trinkets, scrolls and shells and feathers. Every so often, I move a box or reach into a corner with filmy fingers and find some echo of you veneered with cobwebs and smooth at the edges.

That hasn't happened in centuries, but I retain hope that something—anything remains undiscovered.

I almost hate you for wearing silver. It tarnishes, you see, so quickly that I can scarcely go a decade without polishing it. You were never dull, and it seems an insult for your jewellery to turn the ugly shade of iron. I am clumsy though, and soon enough, those bright scraps of metal are bent and broken.

Perhaps gold would have suited you better. Would have lasted.

I have so little left of you, my darling. A looking glass—it is only a bronze disc, but I remember the grace of your fingers moulded around it. Hair pins. A few breaths of fabric, but those are fraying. A handful of coral beads.

When that is lost—I cannot. I will not think about it.

You will permit me that flaw, I hope.

[-]

The days are brutal now, a grind of metal that splinters my shoulders beneath it.

I cannot stand my brothers. I will not pretend that the tawny fall of time has been kind to me, but they have matched it blow for blow in cruelty.

I suppose you would like it if I were kind to Aro, and gentle to Caius. You insisted that your blood brother was good, that your brother by words alone had something of worth at his core. I do not wish to prove you wrong.

So I sit beside them, straight-spined and stern, watching them judge supplicants, the penitent and the damned.

You would think that they would grow weary of it, or that the ceaseless stream of our kind would one day turn into a trickle lapping at Volterra's cobblestones. Even humiliation in America, before an audience of half the world, has not stemmed it.

I suppose nothing will.

"You look tired, brother," Aro tells me at twilight, every day for a thousand years.

[-]

It is strange, my dear.

I doubt you will believe me.

I keep all of your treasures in a box. It is not locked, but I permit no one in my chambers. Not my brothers, or their wives, or Charmion-Chiara-Chelsea, my blank-eyed shadow.

Your looking glass was on my desk, winking at the dying sun like a cheerful child. I do not comprehend how.

I suppose I raged, enough to make little Renata weep and scamper to Sulpicia's side. She has never seen me do such a thing, but then, I have never felt truly mad.

I cup the warm metal in my hand before letting it slip into its proper place, encased in oak and silence.

[-]

Do you remember the parapets, my Didyme?

We climbed there to see the stars or the roofs, to avoid the squabbles of our family. The pigeons would fly from us in a wall of feathers and grey softness, and you would laugh.

Your laughter was beautiful. Mostly, that is merely something that lovers say, but I promised that I meant it. I did, if that matters. Falling silver and rainwater, the arch of your brows—I cannot forget that.

I heard you laughing today, my darling, amidst the church-bells and the cooing doves.

For a moment, I did not think myself a dreamer or a man with a fleeing mind. I merely thought that my wife was happy, a creature of gold in the sunlight.

[-]

I wish you had lived to see the present. The world has become so clever, sleek and slender and infinite. You would have delighted in screens and signals turned to images and words. Every time I unfold my computer, a mystery of wires and silicon trapped in a silver shell, I think about you, your eyes round with wonder.

Your joy was limitless, as was your curiosity.

When I removed my laptop from its sheath of soft leather today, a handful of blossoms tumbled onto my knees.

Apple and honeysuckle.

I could throw porcelain at the walls, and frighten whatever wide-eyed wraith my brothers have decided should guard me. I do not.

It is winter. The flowers are not in season.

[-]

I look for you in every alcove and portico now. Perhaps—oh, but I do not believe in shades and spirits. You are dead as earth and ash, my heart, and my mind is painting lies for me. It is a small mercy.

I do not give Aro my hand anymore. I would rather he not know that I chase spectres and shadows.

[-]

Like every one of our kind, I retain my preferences when I feed. Or rather, your preferences.

Do you remember how much you enjoyed lapping the blood from red-headed humans? You could never explain the appeal to me, but I believed you. I still do.

Today, the girl in my arms had copper curls and eyes like a storm at sea. I did not twist her neck before tearing apart her throat and eating her alive.

She was thrashing, and then she wasn't. She was freckled, and then pale, flawless as sculpted alabaster. She was a scab-kneed mortal thing, and then she was—you, my Didyme. Ink-haired and scarlet-eyed with bruised petals ringing her lashes.

I did not drop her. I would not let you fall either.

I swear she—you—spoke. Greek, ancient and inflected, as no over-eager scholar could emulate, a mere cold breath against my cheek as I feasted upon arterial blood.

Come back.

And then she was a dead girl again, with hair like a troubled sunset.

Felix looked at me strangely when I gave him her body to hide in the catacombs. I hadn't left a single bruise on her arms, you see, and I am not a gentle man.

[-]

I have no trouble accepting that my mind is no longer my own. Madness is the eager companion of immortality, after all, and I assumed that it would pay me a visit with time.

It is—I suspect that you are unhappy somewhere.

That breaks me, more than a dozens of sullen centuries. I taste tears in my throat, the way one does after weeping for hours, and I do not think I can stand. After that—there are no words.

Once more, my Didyme, I ask for your forgiveness.

[-]

I have a fireplace in my room, which I find almost charming in its foolishness. Blood sings to those of us who are not fractured, but flame will do just as well.

It is too simple to spill oil onto dry wood and let a candle tumble onto the slick birch. The hearth brings with it the scent of cathedrals, or a pyre of an ancient king, all frankincense and blue coils of rising heat.

One by one, I feed your memories to the lapping crimson tongues, severing my ties to this place, this hell of red rock and muffled voices. Bronze will not burn, but everything else is greedily consumed—a sacrifice, a purchase of safe passage.

I pray that the stench of smoke-bitten robes will not disturb my brothers.

There is no decorous way to end a life, my own included, so I settle for clumsiness. Logic's facade shrouds and dims the embers of fear.

I push both of my palms, without caution or experimentation, into the fire and deeper, touching the charring wood. It hurts, of course, but not nearly as badly as I expected. Everything worth losing has long since burned away, you see.

The orange-blue dance engulfs me, robs me of touch and sight, of memory. I scream, I think, but whether it is agony or ecstasy, I cannot say.

[-]

"You came."

The words are a breath and a brush of warm wings against my cheek. I do not dare open my eyes—if I do, I will be home once more, amidst the ashes of you, a chamber that smells of flame, an appalled family, ruins for hands.

"Look at me, Marcus."

A sliver of laughter lingers in the air, and the scent of summer. I comply. You were always a bossy little creature.

Your eyes are brown-grey-green, and breathtaking. Phantom freckles brush your nose.

My legs splinter, shatter, permit me to fall, until I am kneeling.

"I've imagined you," I whisper, sobs curling the corners of my speech. "So many times. This isn't—this—"

Slim fingers tangle into my hair and trace a pattern that is distinctly yours. The fabric of your skirt is the shade of pearl, and beneath it, your legs are sun-warmed.

"Maybe we are imagining. But it is a shared imagining, yes?"

Your whimsy lurks in those words, your laughter too. You're in my arms suddenly, and the fit is glorious. You're tiny, a doll really, and so soft, feathers and shells— I kiss you like a drowning man while my heart tears and breathes and lives. I think you're laughing against my mouth, eager and so bright that it hurts.

When we pause, to stare and gasp and murmur meaningless things, a tide of salt-streaked tenderness, the stars come out on a strange horizon, in constellations that I have never seen before. They are so lovely, these figures in the sky, that I would accuse you of making them, if I could remove my lips from you.

"What is this?" I will not let you go, not for a moment, not even to see your expression as you answer.

"What comes after," you whisper.

You are more than I remember, but I do not know how to say that.

Instead, I touch you all over, as you giggle and sigh and whimper winged encouragements, as though we were young and terribly poor at this game once more. Your cheeks are stained pink, and that's enough to make me forget how to think.

It's strange that I have not told you how much I love you, so I do. Like a child, with broken, ragged words.

"I know," you say, shivering. "No less than I love you. Do you know how long I've waited-?"

The stars fall overhead, a rain of silver.

[-]

We rise later—hours, weeks, moments—a pearl skyscape stretching above, too intimate and distant, devoid of suns and moons and birds. The grass whispers, ghostly with forgotten words, and alien as the pewter sprawl above it. There are pressed paths in it, large and small, as though little children and grown men have wandered through.

You take my hand, your nails like shells, and we do what those who have come before us did, after the waiting.

Another AUTHOR'S NOTE: Unlike Carlisle, I've decided that vampires have an afterlife. It seems to be a cross between the Grecian Underworld and the Heaven presented in the novel The Lovely Bones. Not quite sure how that happened.

I realize that the concept of this story is strange, but I've meant to write it in some permutation for a long while. Please let me know what you thought, and thank you for reviewing the previous one-shot in this series.