Chapter Text
legends fail and houses fall
in great shame, in elliptical ruins
a king gouges his eyes out
forbidden love takes poison
It’s nearing dawn. She doesn’t feel it in her bones yet, but she can hear the birds outside, and it shakes her out of her stupor. She isn’t sure how long she’s been standing in front of the mirror--it’s been hours, but she can’t remember exactly when she came home—and it makes her mouth quirk into a tiny smile to realize how still she’d gone. Even with only the dim lamps her nude body gleams white. Skin like stone now, something changed, but the same familiar curves, the feminine softness. It was gradual, perhaps, this coming of age—she isn’t sure how long she’s looked like one of the true ancients—but she supposes she doesn’t mind. It isn’t unlike the way she’d accepted the first silver hairs weaving away from her temple as a mortal, or that she’d begun to accept the slightly-lopsided set to her breasts. These are things that she will live with.
But standing there, bold like Hadrian as Mars, she admires the length of pink silicone strapped to her pubis. His, of course, is limp, unused for millennia, where hers stands swollen and tall from her body. She shifts her hips, leaning her weight to the other leg, and watches the way it bobs and shines in the light. She presses a fingertip to the head, testing its give, and lowers her gaze to look at it directly.
It’s firm, but pliant. Somewhere between human and vampire. She lays a lazy stroke down to the base, fingers tracing the sculpted veins, and its weight there in her palm feels monumental.
Birds outside again, and she turns to see that the sky is getting light. For a moment she considers sleeping in it, and waking with it, but being at home in her own skin is an important ritual, one she does not wish to mar.
So she is whole again when she steps out of the harness, and she smooths down the patch of hair between her legs—trimmed short like it had been the night she died—and goes to close the curtains. No need for theatrics anymore, no need to seal herself away. Heavy drapes are fine, and she enjoys the creature comfort of the plush modern bed. The blankets are soft on her cold skin, and she reaches for her phone on the nightstand to pull under the covers with her.
A selfie, they call it today. She grins at the picture, taken when she’d first tried it on. Standing without ceremony in the middle of the room, face obscured by the reflection of the phone in the mirror. But that’s her, unmistakably. The crooked posture as she’d canted her hip to one side, the long white fingers splayed across the toy’s fake testes. The slight paunch to her stomach and the crease in her midsection that never went away. It’s her same body, the one she’s lived in, and it’s amazing that she can still feel surprised.
Nearing dawn here, and she’s not sure where Marius is, but she sends the picture to him, just in case. It’s marked Read almost immediately, and she curls on her side, draws her knees to her chest as she awaits the response.
A tremendous thing! he answers.
She pulls the blanket over her head, trapping herself in the dark with the soft blue science light, and doesn’t even smile on purpose as she taps letters into the glass.
i feel powerful., she tells him.
Little bubbles appear and disappear, as if he’s debating his next move. She almost sends another message, impatient, but finally: You already were powerful.
Oh! Her face scrunches in mock irritation, even though he’s not here to see it, and she considers the easy way she can thread it to an argument. But the dawn is approaching, and she feels soft and easy and knows there isn’t time. Her free hand trails down over her breast, her belly, her hair, and she types back with one thumb. The little pops and clicks of each letter make such a strange rhythm that she thinks she will always associate with this era.
i am equalized, dominant, the leader. women are no longer mere receptacles of pleasure !!
She can practically see the wry, condescending look in his eyes. You realize these have been around for centuries? Bubbles rise and fall, rise and fall. Millennia, even. I believe you may have found one when we were mortal!
not a pink one :) she smiles in real life, too, and adds its sparkly .
Her eyes are starting to feel heavy, and her laughter is sleepy when the phone says Read but he doesn’t respond. She wonders where he is in the world, if the dawn is approaching him, as well. He always becomes so uncharacteristically vulnerable. Affectionate and open and maybe even a bit clingy. She thinks of their early days, sharing a sarcophagus, listening to his heartbeat in the warm dark space. She would press herself to his back, and their limbs would twist together, and he would link their fingers, wherever her hand was. Sometimes on his hip bone, sometimes his chest. Two hundred years of that, and something throbs inside at the thought that no one else alive will ever know him when he’s young. She’s the only one.
Before she can stop herself, she hits the button to call him, and it goes black in her cocoon as she presses the phone to her ear.
“Pandora,” he answers after the first ring. His voice has the familiar depth and warmth, but he seems far away. It isn’t as assertive as she expected him to be. Maybe he’s just tired.
“Where are you?” she asks. She knows she sounds tired, too, almost slurring. Her eyes close and she lets his voice wash over.
“Nowhere.”
Too tired to laugh. “The sun is coming up here.”
“Mmm,” he says. She can’t tell if he’s distant and distracted or if she’s becoming untethered from the world. He’s moving around—she can hear a door opening, then the static of blowing wind on the tiny microphone. He must have stepped outside. “France.”
“France?” her voice has gone up an octave, breathy and girlish, almost gone.
“I’m in France.”
“Oh.”
She misses this, his voice with her in the final moments. Centuries pass but it feels… right. Her mind buzzes with words, fragments, different languages from different places, and she isn’t sure which one is the best way to tell him. But he’s sighing on the other end, and she’s too tired for it to hurt, and she’s back in those early years. She can imagine the press of his lips to her forehead, the strong cage of his arms around her as she finally slips away.
“Goodnight, Pandora,” he says.
“Talk to me,” is the last thing she can manage, but he understands. Without explaining any of it, he understands. And there’s a cadence, the same one from before, and rolling R’s and hard C’s, and the sound of their dead mother tongue would tear her apart if she were awake enough. But no, no. The sun is coming, and her body is settling, and in the abyss there is no time, no pain, and it only feels like home.
“Hoc tamen expositum cunctis nullique negatum, numen ab humani solum se labe furoris vindicat. Haud illic tacito mala vota susurro concipiunt,” she can’t feel her hands, her legs—she’s almost ready to believe he’s here with her like he used to be, “Nam, fixa canens mutandaque nulli, mortales optare vetat: iustique benignus saepe dedit sedem totas mutantibus urbes.”
She doesn’t hear the rest.
Panic seizes her chest the moment she wakes, and her first instinctual breath of air for the night is ragged. Disused lungs ache and she touches her own throat to feel for her pulse. It can be like this sometimes—it’s frightening but routine, and she counts the faint beats to adjust. Carotid artery, it’s called. A word she didn’t know back then, when this began to happen. But she counts, and breathes, and reminds herself what year it is, and when she’s sure she knows where she is she reaches for her phone.
It’s hibernating now, half-dead and lost in the sheets somewhere, and the panic even returns in the quick moment it takes to search. But she watches her own white hand finally lift it, and the deft swipe to unlock, and she’s immediately opening the call history to see how long he was on the phone with her.
One hour and forty-six minutes.
It’s about the length of the time difference, she calculates, before the sun would’ve risen for him. The thought of him mumbling old poetry to no one or listening to her sleep, curled around his tiny modern phone, aches in a way that surprises her. She rubs a hand over her breast bone, marveling that this much time can go by and she can still hurt, that time and wisdom cannot solve suffering.
The sky is barely dark and she knows she has to wait before she can go to him. An hour and forty-six minutes, maybe, before it’s safe. The phone is cold like her skin, and her anxiety tells her not to stray from it, but she plugs it in on the nightstand. And stares at it.
Marius is sleeping, she knows. He won’t call. But the device itself is a lifeline that she can’t let out of her sight. She unplugs the charger and moves it from room to room as she gets ready, taking extra time to bathe and preen.
It's odd, she realizes, the way impatience can still fester sometimes. That centuries pass and time becomes abstract, unimportant. What’s the value of impatience when you have eternity? Impatience is for mortals.
But when it comes to Marius she can never quell the sense of urgency. Maybe from the time they lost, and maybe because she isn’t sure she’d survive it again. She flutters around her apartment, tries to keep her hands busy, packs a bag and twists her hair into a fishtail braid, and waits and waits. She opens the drapes and watches the sun sink lower, and she taps her foot and chews on her lip until it finally seems dark enough.
In France. With Lestat, she suspects, but he’s not answering her calls by the time she touches down. She can communicate with the others if she needs to, by Mind Gift and phone alike—Lestat is usually too desperate for attention to ignore her—and yet… no, she won’t. In her heart this feels heavy, and private, and getting to Marius feels like a surgical operation. No need to involve anyone else, and if she’s satisfied by his well being she can leave again before anyone notices.
Not answering, but she knows he’s down there. It’s in the thoughts of the others. He’s making the rounds in the castle, like he always does when he rises, making sure everything is in its place. He used to do this in the shrine; replace the flowers, light the candles, brush away the dust. He is a creature of ritual. And although they’ve come so far past needing to feed every night, Pandora knows, simply knows, that once he’s checked on everything, he will leave to hunt. She heard it in his voice.
And she doesn’t need to feel him, or hear him, to know his shape immediately when he finally steps through the front doors. His posture has never changed, nor his gait. There’s a warm flood of relief that passes over, just knowing he’s there, and she can’t hear his thoughts but she hears the low thrum of his heartbeat. Steady and old, so much like Hers used to be. Her instinct is terror, revulsion, but it’s easier to focus on the affection, just seeing him there.
She watches the way he strolls up the driveway, casual and collected, though she knows it’s an act. Nowhere, he’d said this morning.
He seems to walk an appropriate distance away, like he’s trying to evade any witnesses, but once the driveway curves into the tree line he takes to the sky. Her heart rushes in her ears and she scrambles to follow him. It’s terrifying, letting the Blood guide her, listening to his heartbeat to know the way. But the idea of him there, so close, the sound of him, is enough to keep her strong.
They’re still in France, somewhere outside Paris, when he comes down. She stays a distance aways, on a roof at the end of the alley, watching the way he smooths down his clothes and tries to straighten his wind-tousled hair. She should do the same, and will, but not yet. He’s cut his hair tonight, medium length, and he has to run his fingers through it several times to keep it from falling over into his eyes. There’s a smile blooming from behind her hand as she watches. He looks so very… modern. It’s surreal, but she thinks it actually suits him. Red pants and a grey henley beneath a fitted leather jacket—barbarian garb, she knows he’d say—but it looks good. And when he’s set himself back in place he approaches the mouth of alley, puts his hands in his pockets like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and enters the gaudy-looking bar across the street.
Now it’s her turn to tidy herself—she straightens her jacket and re-does her braid, adjusts her little backpack across her shoulders. Light as a cat as she drops down into the alley.
She spots him immediately when she finally comes inside. Towards the middle of the bar, one foot up on the rung of the barstool, hands circling a sweating glass. It’s dark and her shoes stick to the floor as she comes closer and slips onto the stool beside him.
It’s not that she expects a warm welcome or anything. He’s been ignoring her calls all evening, after all. But that there’s no reaction makes her deflate a little. Perhaps it was foolish to think she could accomplish a stealth mission like this.
He doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t look at her, but he reaches forward on the bar to a second drink and slides it towards her.
Oh.
The glass is cold and damp, not the same sensual comfort as ordering something hot. Still, a form of camouflage that she accepts, and she even lifts it to her lips to pretend to sip. It’s an instinct to inhale the scent, the way she would in a café, but instead of the sweet, vaporous steam she’s used to it’s chilly and acidic and makes her wrinkle her nose as she puts it back down. Marius is turning his glass around in a circle, staring down into it. He hasn’t even looked at her.
“Well,” she says, and she tosses her braid back over her shoulder like it’s nothing, “I can admit I thought you were handsome from afar, but this childish sulking isn’t a good look on you.”
His fingers stop flexing and the glass stops moving. She turns to watch his profile and sees the unhappy set to his mouth. He lifts his own glass and almost looks like he’s really going to sip it, then finally loses his cool. It thunks against the top of the bar; she’s surprised it doesn’t break.
“Childish,” he says, voice flat, and finally looks at her. Blonde fringe falling over one of his eyes, just enough to dispel the attempted gravitas. In time, if she sticks around long enough, this expression will make her skin crawl, it always does. Timeless, this one, the mix of stubbornness and condescension. She’s seen it thousands of times.
But it’s a matter of seconds before he falters. His face goes slack, and he looks down at his hands, and the brief flash of genuine pain in his eyes that she sees before he looks away strikes her in the chest. There’s empathy, and love, and she even touches his forearm over his leather jacket, but there’s no guilt. Not like there used to be.
“Ignoring me isn’t childish?”
The corner of his mouth twitches in a dry smile. “Stalking me is childish.”
“Oh please, Marius.”
His shoulders fall and he pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s such a human gesture.
The music in the bar swells overhead. She doesn’t think they’d be able to even hear each other if they were mortals. It’s some revival of the 1970’s, all tinny guitars and over-mixed organs. There’s a stoned groove to it that’s making her relax, though, and she rubs her hand up and down Marius’s arm before finally pulling away.
“In any case,” she adjusts her bag and makes like she’s going to stand, “I just needed to know you were alive. I’ll leave now. Answer your phone next time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he grumbles. “Someone would’ve told you if I wasn’t alive. You’re being dramatic.”
“Right,” she actually stands now, and his head snaps to the side to watch. “I’m dramatic. Of course, darling. Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”
His hand comes around her bicep before she even sees him move, and she’s actually surprised. She does a quick sweep around the bar to see if anyone noticed, but thinks they’re safe. When she meets his eyes again her heart breaks a little bit. It’s real, it is. And the guilt is almost back.
“Don’t go,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry. Stay.”
Tight squeeze on her arm, and his eyes close when she pets his face with the back of her knuckles. But she sits back down, and his grip eases, and he lets her hold his hand when she gently pries it away. His fingers are weak and loose and she rubs circles into his palm with her thumb.
No Mind Gift between them, and it’s as frustrating as it’s always been, but she hopes that her hands are saying Tell me what’s wrong, Marius. And the uncharacteristic buckling of his posture says I don’t know how to.
This is normal, though. She remembers nights like this, in the beginning. The way Marius could… struggle with things. With words. Not with articulating himself, exactly, but with admitting any of it out loud. She remembers the nights finding him defeated, isolating himself somewhere in the garden. And she’d suffer, all those years, trying to coax it out of him. Touching his shoulders and his face and pleading until she was distraught herself.
But they’re older now. She’s older. And she’s not going to beg.
Marius opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, but then closes it. He looks up at the ceiling, then down towards the row of liquor behind the bar. She looks, as well, and in between the bottles she sees their faces in the mirrored wall. Their eyes meet in the reflection and his hand curls tighter into hers.
His voice is so soft when he finally speaks.
“Daniel left.”
I see.
She lets the silence hang between them, even through the nagging old instinct to comfort him. She swirls her drink with her free hand, still watching him in the mirror, and waits.
Eventually he looks away, and he props his elbow on the bar to hold his head in his hand. He’s shielding his eyes and rubbing his temples with his fingertips.
“I said something. To Armand,” he says, and she’s still not going to beg, but she squeezes his hand to let him know she’s listening. “I was too harsh, perhaps. Daniel… didn’t appreciate it.”
“And I suppose you didn’t apologize.”
The words make him wince. In the beginning, when all of this was new, she might have rushed to console him. She might pepper his face with kisses and whisper poetry into his ear and offer him a bleeding wrist. But now, with the loud music pulsing all around them, and their faces cast yellow in the electric lights, she just laughs. He begins to recoil his hand, like he’s been burned, but she doesn’t let go.
“A pleasure,” he says, and brushes the fringe away from his eyes, “as always, to know that my pain is amusing to you.”
Another wave of laughter, and she claps her hand over her mouth to stifle the noise. He turns away from the mirror to face her.
“Did you expect me to pity you?” she asks. She sets herself sideways on the barstool to meet his gaze, and reaches out her foot to toe at the bottom of his pant leg. Still no Mind Gift, of course, but there’s frustration and stubbornness burning in his eyes, maybe even humiliation. “Two thousand years old and you still haven’t learned?”
“Haven’t learned what?”
“That people aren’t objects in your life.”
There’s a pause as he mulls it over. “You think I treat people like objects?”
“I think you know better than to act coy about it. With me, of all people.”
The way his face falls brings all the old creases back to the surface and she wants to laugh again. Two thousand years and he can still be a fool, and his face is still the same, and her heart still aches the way it used to.
“Well, tell me then,” she says. She crosses one leg over the other and rests her hand on her knee. She raises her eyebrows. “What did you say to Armand?”
He groans and looks away from her.
“Tell me.”
She continues to hold his hand—he’s trying to draw away again but she doesn’t let him—and instead he covers his face with the other. His shoulders seem to collapse inward, and she remembers finding him like this, wracked with guilt, curled on the ground. But they’re in public now, and hiding his own shame is another art he’s mastered.
“This is very typical of you, Marius,” she lifts his hand away from the bar to rest it in her lap. “And if you want my opinion—“
“I don’t.”
“—I think you need to stop obsessing over yourself and learn to apologize. This self-superiority nonsense is very tired.”
He peeks at her from between his fingers and scowls. And she feels the power in his Blood when he finally pulls away from her.
“Did you come all the way here to gloat?”
“Of course not, darling. Nor did I come to witness you sulking over something that’s your own damn fault.”
“Pandora…”
“Would you like to tell me what’s really bothering you?”
She’s staring hard, still in denial that she can’t feel him on some subliminal level. Centuries of this, her whole life—she should know by now, she should stop trying. But it’s been millennia and she can still get lost in his eyes, always seeking, because it always feels like the answer is just barely out of reach. It isn’t something she can hear, or sense, the way she’d be able to with someone else. But it chills her, down her spine, squeezing at the back of her head, that just from repetition she can read him like a book.
And she was teasing, just a little, she can admit to herself. But suddenly it’s too intense. Her pulse is beginning to flutter again, and there’s a head rush that makes the room warp around them, and for a moment she isn’t sure what year it is, or what country they’re in, or where she found her clothes.
Marius’s face softens, sympathetic and worried, and he turns, stands, pets her hair and kisses her forehead as she catches her breath.
His lips brush her cheek as he speaks. “I’m sorry.” Thumbs stroke her orbital bones. “I’m here, I have you.”
Muscles relax beneath the soft touches, and the beat of the loud music keeps her connected. It takes a moment to take hold of her senses, but it’s remarkably easier with him there to spot her. She feels herself settling back down, and when the thirst begins to burn through the fog she can see the same need lurking in his eyes. She’s too disoriented to taunt him by laughing, but she knows he won’t admit it unless she pushes him. His hands are still on her face when she puts hers on his shoulders.
“Marius, you need to kill something.”
The old human crease flashes in his brow and his fingers go stiff. He almost pulls away, but she tilts her head, pressing into his palm, and it makes him stay. No Mind Gift, never the Mind Gift, but she expects the denial, the shame. I know you came here to kill something, she wants to say to him, and there’s fear and pain hovering just beneath the feigned coldness. He rolls his eyes, a beat too late.
“Don’t be barbaric.”
But the idea of it is already tingling on the surface of her skin, and she scoots forward to the edge of the barstool to be closer to him. “You don’t have to pretend, Marius,” she says. She leans in close, right up against his ear. “Not for me. I’m not judging you.”
His frame goes stiff and rigid and he opens his mouth to protest but doesn’t get the words out before she kisses the corner of his jaw.
“Concipiunt,” she whispers. “Nam, fixa canens mutandaque nulli, mortales optare vetat: justisque benignus, saepe dedit sedem totas mutantibus urbes.”