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fanatiquee · 3 years

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❓ + Is there some measure of relief that Paul was taken from you, that the burden of his life was lifted from you?

SEND ❓+ A QUESTION AND MY MUSE HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO ANSWER TRUTHFULLY status: accepting

A thoughtful hum, a furrow of the brows. The sting of a distant pain that clarifies his gaze. “You are asking this question of a vampire who, now, having endured two hundred years, can only conjure Paul as if he were born to the world a shade. My memories are clarified only by the pain of his loss, and it is only that this loss has never entirely released me that I remember him at all. I have seen such visions of him that I can imagine his shape, but I strain to recall such things as his voice, a voice that to me was once the most precious of sounds. There is a phrase that every Frenchmen of a certain age knows, it does not come from my generation, but it nevertheless applies here, to my loss of Paul. It is that, the loss of him all but depeopled the world. I cannot remember who coined this phrase, one of the morbid French Romantics who was once beloved by me. In any case, in a way this is no longer true, so one might be forced to conclude that his loss is less meaningful to me, now. Or that it has taken on some other shape, some other dimension, which is unknown to me. But I don’t believe this is the case. I know for a fact that if Paul had not been taken from me, I could never have forsaken the daylight to become a vampire. As long as Paul was a creature of daylight, I would have been content to exist in mortal blindness, simply to stand at his side, and to know him, and to see him grow to eclipse me in every way, and to die an old man, knowing he would outlive me and that I would never know the pain of his loss. Like a father, who never conceives of the loss of his child, I had never imagined a world in which Paul did not exist. There is no word for this, a father who loses a child, a brother who loses a brother. I was both, brother and father. And so my loss was inconceivable. Can I now look back with some of what I might call my detachment, and understand that Paul’s death liberated me of a responsibility I bore without my own awareness of it? Yes, I can see it. I can see that in Paul I was chained, not only to him, and to my sister, and my mother, and the stone of my father’s tomb, but to all the mundanity that was mortal life. All of its cruelty and necessity. And, yet, as I have said, if not for Paul’s dying I would never have become a vampire, and it was in becoming a vampire that I was freed of these things. But I was also bound to them all the more powerfully. It was as a vampire that I felt the true pain of my loss of Paul, and in my pursuit of vengeance, vengeance against myself, that I became a vampire. In some ways, the burden of him became greater only when his life was stolen from me.”

#ᴛʜᴇ ғɪʀsᴛ ғʀᴀᴛʀɪᴄɪᴅᴇ : ᴘᴀᴜʟ #[ all these asks become a wall of text f <3 ]#thank you!!!!#ask memes

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fanatiquee · 3 years

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🕯

There seems to be a moment of hesitation, a furrow in the young vampire's brow as he searches for the correct word or the phrase. His hand, dangling limply from the arm of his chair, curls into a cool, loose fist. "What you must understand about my brother, Paul, is that he was not simply my brother, but the very reflection of my self. I do not mean this, literally, of course. He and I looked nothing alike. He was fair, and strong, and it was possible with time he would have outgrown me in height and become a rare giant as happened in rich families in the colonies at that time. He was a true Creole, in a way that I was and perhaps still am, only by half. But what I mean to say, when I tell you that Paul was my reflection, is that Paul was the unspeakable part of my soul that was good. I do not say, unspeakable, because there is something about goodness that cannot itself be articulated in so many words, but because I did not know of its existence. I had no tangible belief in it. I considered myself to be a good enough man, I went to Church, I cared for my family, it was true that I gambled on occasion, that I was drunk now and again, but this was not the most of my character and so I was a good man. But that is an abstraction, the true goodness in me was my brother, and my love of him and his love of me. How can I recount to you the number of nights that he waited for me? He was fearful, always, of my being killed in some petty duel or other because I was too proud, or simply being thrown from the half broken horses I preferred to ride, or perhaps even that I would drown in one of the Bordelle's, full of drink, among what amounted to old school friends who frequented such places every evening. And so he waited, disapproving of my habits, on the stairwell for my return, in the half darkness. He forgave me each time. Do you know what this meant? For this boy, such a godly boy, to look in the face of his fallen brother and say, I forgive you, I love you the same, nothing has changed in my heart for all of this? He saw in me a better man than I was, he understood, however much he despised my habits, that these were superficial things, and that his love of me, could save me. And I was proud, and I despised to have been seen and understood so fully, even by Paul, whom I loved unconditionally. I failed to understand this. I believed I was good enough, for the pressures I endured, which I would not now take back for anything. But goodness is so rarely this way, true goodness does not rely on excuses, and mine were excuses. Paul knew this. And still, he loved me."

#ᴛʜᴇ ғɪʀsᴛ ғʀᴀᴛʀɪᴄɪᴅᴇ : ᴘᴀᴜʟ #[ like what the fuck is he saying here? who knows when it comes to paul it all comes to pieces ]#deromanum #[ thank you!!!!!!! ]#🕯 in the wind

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