Page 66 of These Eternal Bones
My chest aches with the weight of my own sobs, turning the next page filled with her words with trembling fingers.
“Cartiel left an hour ago to gather my things. I hope he returns soon. Now that I’ve had time to calm down, I realize how badly I hadn’t wanted to leave. How terrible the things I said are. I knew that our time was limited to a degree. I mean…I’m human, he’s not. But this, god, mychest aches. The broken sound of his voice before I left, needling it alongside the pang of the bond. He is suffering.
He always suffers.
Here I am, tormenting him further.
When Cartiel returns, I’ll–“
I frown, sniffling at the sudden cutoff of her writing. Turning the page, there’s nothing…
The rest of the diary is blank. Blinking to clear my eyes, I scour the leather bound, paint smeared book again as if I missed something.
It just...stops.
My body seems to work with a mind of its own after that, my thoughts heavy as I put the diary down, draining and refilling the water in the tub that’s run cold.
Trapped.
A child.
A broken god.
So, so much loss.
And hate.
Rage like nothing I’ve known.
The next time I blink, I’m nude, and the bath is nearly overflowing, but I don’t rush to turn it off, my chest and mind swapping wildly between numb and aching. The water is hot, too hot when I lower myself into it, barely biting back a hiss. My core is sore from the last time we were together and the water slips underneath my sensitive breasts next. We had a snowball fight; we played and laughed and–
“It’s been seven hundred years, and I still have not grown into the man she deserved.”
Tears burst into my eyes as I wrap my arms around my legs, hugging them tightly to my chest like that will hold everything in. It makes sense now, why he didn’t want to tell me,why he fought so hard against it all. The bond is a beautiful gift, perverted. He…he did this to us.
But did he?
Has he not suffered enough?
The month leading up to Imogen’s bond last time, he was the same, wildly possessive and on edge.
Starving himself.
There was no mention of how it was done, but one could fathom it had something to do with feeding. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to imagine that empty place inside my chest filled with…something. With him. How wonderful or terrifying it would be to feel the things he does. If it would weigh me down and frazzle my mind like it did hers. I frown. According to the beginning of the diary, she’d lived a good life…her mother and father loved her. She had a brother she missed, but she was happy. Whole with friends and an education. She had ties. No real strife or loss to mar her thoughts. No internalized self-hatred to whisper in her ear as she tried to fall asleep, at least none that I could see.
She was untouched by the kind of thing that makes one…feel like this. Caught off guard by the weight of it.
I know then that I-thisversion of me could handle it. I could hold him when he couldn’t bear the weight of himself. I thought to forgive him, before realizing there’s nothing to truly forgive. Funny, I’d spent my whole life being taught to worship one made of warm flesh and cunning smiles…all the while, soul bound and fated to one who was ice cold and everything I was told to fear. Funny, except little actually feels humorous right now.
How could it?
The water grows cool by the time the door opens, there’s no knock, but there never is, and I can’t find it in myself to mind. Elric steps inshirtless, water sleuthing off his inky strands of hair as if he bathed elsewhere. His body is toned and chiseled. It’s strange I ever thought him a mere man at all. Even from a distance. My eyes fall to the pajama slacks falling low on his hips, outlining every obscene bulge and curve of him. For once, his tendrils are nowhere in sight. I try to look at him differently, knowing that I should. I try to feel horror and disgust, fear like Imogen, but none comes. Or if it does, I can’t sort it apart from the overwhelming sense of sadness in my heart.
The god of Blood and Eternal Death looks at me with the same degree of pain, and this time, I finally understand it. There’s substance to the agony in his eyes, the worry and pacing. The madness. God of Blood and Eternal Death, I suppose, is a very fitting, weighty title to complement the being in front of me. I’d prefer to call him Elric Onogahara, Vampire Lord of Port Clyde. We stay like that, taking each other in, him with the lens of nearly a thousand years of grief and me perhaps clearly for the very first time. When his attention leaves me, flitting to the dairy, it is jarring, like stepping from the fireplace into the snow.
He doesn’t mask his movements like usual, keeping them smooth and languid. I don’t think that he can, the bond and hunger riding him hard. One moment he’s looking at the paint smeared leather, the next it’s in his hands. His eyes widen as he flips it open, his fingers smoothing over the pages, and suddenly, he looks his age. I can see the weight of eternity in the obsidian depths of his eyes. He skips forward toward the back, to where it ends, before he brings it to his nose, inhaling the pages. It feels intimate, a private moment of grief that I shouldn’t witness, but I don’t look away. It’s me he’s grieving after all.
But I’mrighthere.
