Chapter Text
Charles leaves, and Arthur does not move. He sits, and grips his chair, like he has been welded to it. All while knowing that he cannot follow after him. He feels the waking sun knock on his windows, and he can see the red-hot glow, membrane-like, where the newsprint layers need amending. He looks at the bed, the two wine glasses, and something stirs in him. An aimless, and destructive fury that his existence has become so useless.
He stands, and kicks over his chair. Then walks over, and rips the cloth off the mirror it had been covering, and the whole frame leaps off the wall, on reckless, terrified impulse. It bounces on the floor, and the silver white panel shivers in its casing, then bursts into starry pieces. The air is filled with cascading twinkles, and then there is a silence that is impenetrable. Arthur stares at the mess he has made. His anger lowers into shame. A dull, and aching disappointment. He bends down on his knees, and begins to scoop up the fragments. Pale blades of foil, which he lifts up to his face, and sees nothing looking back at him. Silently, he stands, and sets it all down, with a loose clinking sound onto the table. He always hated his reflection. He watched it transform each year - a sour and maturing likeness of his father. But losing it has felt like yet another attack upon his personhood, serving to alienate him further from what once made him human.
Arthur moves around the room, towards his wardrobe, and takes Charles’ jacket up in his hands. The nape peaks, where it was hung on the door handle. A soft buckskin. Creased and balding at the shoulders and elbows. Embellished with two strips of beadwork, appliquéd to the lapels. Monochrome chevrons that remind him of patterned tail feathers. He feels nervous, and foolish, but he lifts the fabric to his nose, and takes a deep breath, and he closes his eyes, and bunches the fabric close to him. He clings to it like a memory, desperate, and reverent, remorseful. Quick glimpses pass through his mind, like a clicking slideshow. A burned hand, sealed in the fiery escape from Blackwater. Bison, their peaked forms like the shape of black mountains. A shotgun blast. An eviscerated poacher. Hunting trips. Stoic nights, around a shared campfire. Gold cornfields. A thin pencil of blood, spurting from the neck of a bounty hunter. An army fort, like a spiked crown, guarding a young prince. His and Charles’ bodies joined like lock and key, for a brief, and singular moment.
They went through so much together. There is no taking that away, and there is no taking away their reunion. But there is no returning to what they had, or what they could’ve had if things turned out different. Time did not stop for them. A new century arrived, almost a decade passed by - they have been apart for longer than they were ever together. Arthur exhales. An old and stubborn custom that no longer serves any purpose. He walks to the bed, and folds the jacket into a neat square, and places it on the covers. He sits on the edge, and it floats alongside him, like a liferaft.
He has missed so much. All he has is time, and yet it’s value to him has been rendered completely worthless. What good is an eternity without joy? Without freedom, or purpose? Stripped of all the pleasures that he used to know, when mortal? The phantom play of light on his face. The plains, burning gold under the sun, shaking in the wind like embers. China skies, without so much as a blemish etched upon them. Clouds like portals, between man and the heavens. How can he endure this caged existence, while knowing what exists upon the other side of it? He has become immune to time’s passage, and yet he is, and will forever be held a prisoner to it. Every time he wakes, he enters a dimmed and limited version of the day time world, like wandering about some decommissioned stage set. None of it feels real, none of it feels finished, or attended.
It is funny. He used to relish a world of silence, a world in which he could roam to its very edges without any human encounter, or evidence. It used to fill him with a certain kind of wonderment. The feeling that he was a custodian to everything he witnessed, because it was only him, like he could be the world’s sole, and last inhabitant. But now, it is much different. Without people to fill his world, without life, without company, he has become an exile. No home, and no-one to call home, either. Sometimes, he is possessed by a frightening sense that he is becoming strange, and warped somehow. A dimming awareness of things that once made him a human.
Before St. Denis, he kept to the hills. Circling Annesburg and Van Horn for about a year, until he could withstand it, no longer. He hunted Murfrees. It was logical, and he convinced himself there were even less than animals. He gave them death because they were despicable. Even as he didn’t know if that made him more despicable for what he did to them, in the name of survival. Of course, there came a time that even their flush numbers dwindled. He was forced closer into the towns, and his pickings became harder. He fed on men that preyed on women. Miners that were already near expired. Dunkards, and beggars. Shipwrecked bodies, banked up on the street curbs. He searched for burnt-out eyes. Groveling hands. Coughing lungs. Any excuse. Thin, and unconvincing justifications for any life to be cut short. All of them.
He did his best. Truthfully, he didn’t know how to do much better. Maybe killing indiscriminately would have been fairer. Maybe it was folly of him to try and judge an entire life’s worth, in just a moment. Maybe, none of it made a difference. Every soul that he took, it felt like he was becoming drained along with his victim. He could almost taste it. A certain hom*ogeneity to their blood. As though all their pain, and their sorrow, and destitution had somehow been biologically coded into them. An awful plague that seemed to touch everyone and everything. Something in the land, in the air, the water.
So, he left. Southbound, towards St. Denis, sustained on the murky promise made by every city. A life built from vitality, and opportunity, and commerce. The sort of life he always despised for himself. But the sort of environment that he depends on now, to sustain this new existence. The city is abundant, and thriving, and in constant, unrelenting motion. People arrive, and leave, and disappear in hurried cycles, and no-one seems to care or pay much attention. Front page news lasts but a day, before it is tossed into the trash, and forgotten about. It is a place where crime breeds like rats, and it is frankly unsettling how easy it is to hunt his victims, and dispose of them, without any consequence.
In recent years there has been a timely rise of crematory associations citing the cleanliness and virtue of their practice. This, coinciding with concerns over the grievously overburdened cemetery, has yielded an excess of body sized furnaces, fit almost exactly for his purposes. Then, there is the robust reptile population that will devour fresh meat, without any precursor of hesitance. The avenues are endless. The entire city is a spider web, and he can pluck at its strings, in any which direction. He understands how the vampire that turned him settled here, so confidently. Going so far as to leave a cryptic trail of prose, to lure new prey into his clutches. He wonders, given another decade, another century, is that what he is destined for? Will he become so disenfranchised with his own slogging existence that he will construct elaborate games and puzzles, just to provide some vapid type of enrichment?
And what of the present moment? What of Charles? How much did he see? Then, how much did he understand of what he saw, before collapsing, and cracking his head on the pavement? What does he do? What does he tell Charles, and what does he withhold from him? How does he explain the past eight years, without actually explaining any of it? Would it be better or worse to simply rip the curtain back? And even if he commits to this risk, once he has jumped the first hurdle, and made Charles believe him, what comes next? Back then, he always pushed Arthur to be better, he always claimed there was more to be found in him. But will he finally give up hope? Now that there is nothing good, nothing left to be salvaged?
It is impossible to know, and for these reasons, Arthur told himself he would not unsettle the past, he would not seek out anything, or anyone familiar. It was a form of protection, a form of kindness. Or so he thought. Even in this noble intent, he has proven useless. All along, he believed his sacrifice on that mountain to be selfless. Victimless, in the sense that he would be the only victim, and that was something he alone could handle. But seeing Charles so undone, has made everything he once thought come undone, as well. Whatever his intentions, it feels conceited, that he would never consider the outer impact of his actions. The notion that anyone’s life might be made poorer by his absence.
Whilst he tended Charles’ head, he uncovered a wealth of wounds, a journey his eyes made with mounting despair, and trepidation. Exploded lacerations, where the skin had been burst by fierce, blunt trauma. He lifted his shirt, and saw fist sized bruises stamped all over his person. Dark, waxy seals, as though his pain had claimed physical ownership over him. The smell of blood singed his nostrils. There came a point that Arthur was forced to step away just a moment. He had not been prepared for this horrific and intimate tableau. Nor the obscure, yet afflictive sense, that he has faced it all before.
He too, sought self destruction, as a redeemer. He thought that by punishing himself, he could save everyone else. He thought his suffering would elevate him, scorch away his shame and his guilt - it would purify him, somehow. He was so drugged on this belief, so weak and desperate that he didn’t know anything else. He thought he was changed, he thought he was reformed. But truly, all he did was trade Dutch for another false provider. Then, the sicker he got, the more urgent it felt to push harder, in a delirious, and momentous effort to compensate for his body’s degradation. He could not reconcile that by putting himself in pain, he might be bringing that pain unto others. Self sacrifice felt like the definitive act of love. It felt like seeding the hope for a brighter future. He didn’t need to see it happen. His life would feed the soil that his family’s lives would flourish upon. But really, all he did was sow more sorrow.
Is this how it felt for the others, back then? When the girls would look upon him, with such soft, and ardent commiseration? Did Charles watch him, frail, and beaten, and falling apart, and did he feel the same as Arthur does now? Completely, hopelessly trapped behind his agony? Encumbered by a terrible, indistinct complicity, and yet indispened to reach across, and do anything?
Arthur closes his eyes, and he feels something settle, like a stone inside him. He was a fool back then, and he is surely a fool now. But, for the first time in a long while he feels moved to act, to do something more, than engage in the persistent drudgery of survival. He sought death on that mountain, in the name of love. Then he was reborn, and it is like he forgot this truth, altogether. His heart stopped beating, and he thought that had made him untouchable. He thought that his heart, in its frozen state, had become unbreakable. But the pain in his chest upon seeing Charles was real, and he thinks, what else could it be but love? What else could make him feel so human?
