[Book is currently at 10 parts, with much more to come. Throughout SoVL, there is a book Dasius is trying to get from Mini, containing Laurent's correspondence and personal writing. This is that book. Appearances by every character in SoVL, and more. Considering L's personality, a sexier, more emotional but also more analytical approach. One does not need to have finished SoVL to read "L." No prior knowledge is required.]

https://www.wattpad.com/story/88112366-l

ch 1.6

In my blood, I feel the stiffness of lead, and sometimes I fall leaden, unable to move. I know that I am clean, and that there is no taint in me of metals, but there are still times when I wake up and cannot move, like that night, when those people came.

I sit here writing, and Nicky is in my washroom, and he has decided to be nice to me today, and how I so want that, that I am willing to forget his abuse for a minute, and smile at him. And he is just like a child, though he hates to hear it most of the time, in that when anyone smiles at him he smiles too. I do it, as he comes into the room, and he smiles back at me.

He opens the window and leans out, and he says, "The street is very far below."

"You won't die. You will break your body, and no one will be able to help you."

"So I will be like a monster, with all my broken angles."

"Yes, perhaps forever. You may like it awhile, but when you no longer like it, you'll wonder why you ever jumped out the window, and now must be a monster forever."

He seems to think about it a moment, and then he says, "I'll wash my hair," shutting the window again, and latching it.

"You'll smell nice," I tell him, a silly thing to say. A slightly hysterical thing.

"And we will go to a theater show?" he asks. "You have to say yes, please."

I'll take him if he insists because of what I have lately been thinking about, and for no other reason.

I will not take him because I am afraid of him. Not because I am afraid of what he might do to me. He will do it anyway. Or he will change his mind about doing it, and never do it again. But it will be up to him, and not because of anything I have done.

I am old enough to know that what I do matters very little. I have been old enough to know that since I was living, and up to my neck in trouble with all the devils in the world.

Nicky says, from my washroom, "Take a nap." So I go to lie down, and when I close my eyes, for a moment the darkness makes me afraid. When I open them, I cannot hear anything, and I feel scared, so I begin to cry.

He comes to find me, and he coos and coos at me, "Don't swallow your tears. Don't swallow them. You'll get a clot. You'll choke." He says, laughing, nervous, "Now stop it. Stop it. You're so silly. You stop doing it. Stop crying." He is nervous because he knows that he has been the cause of my crying for some days, and that it is silly for him to try comforting me now. He does not dare to touch me without say so.

I wish that he would.

***

Nicky looks so mild, when he wants to look mild. He has large, wet eyes, brown with a black line circling his irises. This black line is the key to his beauty, because it makes his features look so fine. He possesses skin so delicate and pale as to look powdered. Sometimes when I have kissed him upon the nose, I wipe my lips of this invisible powder, forgetting his charms. Expressive lips, enough hair not to ever need a wig, with loose, brown curls that spring back when pulled. He is nothing like a doll, giving as he does every impression of the future of his features. He would have been a fine young man, with those eyes that give so the candid idea of his looking and looking and looking. He would have been slight of figure all of his years. The sort of young man whose throat I would rather cut than see his beauty ruined.

But he uses his beauty, and he has always been using it, and in his babyhood, he was indiscreetly killing young women. He had been creeping up to them, and pulling on their hands, and using some reserve of faithless loneliness to earn a night or two in their charge. Nice young ladies. He has always liked them. Even now, sometimes he touches me in a delicate way when he is not fully possessed of his mind; a delicate way that is how he touches these women, with the tips of his fingers. It makes me shudder and shiver with abject disgust, because I know what he does to them, and I know what he is like when he is after them, and how in a moment his gentleness collapses into scenes pareil a le Grand Guignol. Quelle horreur. ...Mais je sais que j'ai fait des choses sembables... Un cafard, moi... I am caught like this.

I think of his little fingers digging into flesh. I think of them pulling and ripping. I think of how he has hurt himself as well, and how he has turned on himself, but then I know that I am only imagining that these two matters are in any way related.

That night in Paris, five hundred years ago, in our house, he was playing in the front room, and he has whispered to me, falling asleep these days in my arms, that he saw a fire through the thick window glass, that he looked up to see these figures, these faces distorted by the fire and by the glass, and that his heart pounded so hard that he felt he was being shaken. He had been listening to his brother and I, fighting, and he had been sitting there chewing on a finger bone, which he spit and put in his pocket.

He was, as his brother had told me, in an evil mood.

Oh, I yawned. I am tired. Here he comes, tugging me, saying, "Go to bed. Why are you writing? Read to me. I want a book," being nice to me, acting like the child I want. "Where did you get this lace around your wrist?" he asks, flattering me. It is machine-made lace. It is not worth anything. Not like lace was, back in those days. So much of it would have been worth our rent for more than a year. What I would've had to have done to get it, five hundred years ago. The things I did do, for nice fabric, for trinkets. "Take off your clothes," he says to me. "I'm sorry. Read me a book. I'll sit up so you can sleep."

He knows so many things about me.

"What book?"

"Or just talk to me," he says, successfully pulling me away from the pretty writing desk Dasius got in a shop in America. He shipped it to me in a crate. A gray writing desk with silver scrolling. A prison is a prison even if it is finely appointed. I have nowhere else to go, and no money to escape. "You're writing about something."

"You seem less mad than you were. You're ill, little darling? You've bad blood? Is that why you hurt me? And now feeling better?"

"Oh you sound awful," he says. "No not ill. There's something the matter, but I wonder if I should talk about it."

So I talk to him while he strokes my hair, and he tuts me because my voice is weak. But my voice is weak because he is touching me, and I am so comforted, and so confused by being comforted.

"You were playing in the room and men came in," I tell him, and he is tutting softly like a dove afraid in the dark. "And they knew already that there were monsters, killers, and so they saw you, and you rose to meet them without fear, and they bayoneted you, spilling out your insides, and I heard you gasping."

"No," he says, sounding completely sane except that what he says is mad. "They shot me."

"No they did not shoot you," I say, un peu peur. A little afraid.

"You don't know," he says. "They shot me."

"No," I say, firmly, fixing my eyes on him in the dark. "There was a knife on the end of the barrel of their gun, and they drove you through with it. I saw it. I was there."

"Why would they do that?" he asks, thoughtfully, wondering if he is wrong. I hear it. Doubt.

"Why wouldn't they? Sweetheart," I say. Nom de dieu, je l'aime, no matter what he does, and I cannot bear to hear madness in his voice.

"Don't. Just move on."

I take his hand that is stroking my hair and I clasp it, and I kiss it.

"Why do you love me?" he asks, sounding afraid.

"Your brother was against the window when these men came in, and they looked at me, and they thought 'A, un petit, un passif. Ce n'est pas notre homme,' and they grabbed him, six or seven men, pulling your brother away from the window. They heated the room, these people, holding a lantern that lit our dusty place, and I remember the sound of your brother's fingernails on the windowpane, and I remember trying to tell him, the way that I used to talk to you, without words, not to resist them. Not to resist."

Nicky is quiet, listening, watching me kiss his hand.

"They took him, and did you know it? One of them stayed behind with me, and I would have stayed there shivering and frightened except that he stayed, and took me by my cheeks, and he breathed on me with breath of rotted teeth, and he asked me if I had any disease, because you know that many living people think that I look like I am dying."

"Did you kill him?"

"Not yet, but he dies before the story is over."

"And did I die?" he asks me. Then, "Why didn't you kill all of the others instead of letting them go?"

"Do you think that I could have?"

"Yes," he says. "Yes. At that age, I thought that you could do anything. I had seen you do things."

"I was afraid of them. Do you think less of me? I was afraid that they might do something to me I would not ever recover from, and live forever like that. Do you understand?"

"Yes. Do not feel ashamed," he says, too quickly, and I know that men have done something to him, and I begin to cry, because even though I am crying for him, I am also sad for myself, because I cannot forgive him for hurting me without remorse. Oh why did he have to do it? "Oh, you silly little lamb," he whispers, and he bends to kiss my tears away.

"They took your brother because he is so dark-looking. He is so exotic," I say, babbling. "It has always been a problem for him, and I feel so bad because he is so beautiful to me, and I have been selfish about him, and he never complains."

"He has outlets, believe me," Nicky says, trying to lighten my mood. "What did you do to the man who tried to rape you? What a fool."

Did men shoot him? Is that why Nicky has gone mad? When did it happen? Merdaille!

"I tied him by the little finger to the bedpost and I went to get your brother, because I didn't know how to help you, and I could not think very well. I thought that I would never see your brother again, or not whole, and I looked for him for hours, and when I found him across the river, he had already slipped away from those men, and wouldn't talk about it. But I always have suspected that he killed a horse, because he smelled like that, like animals dying, and he had taken off his shoes so that he could run, and I noticed that he had stopped breathing. Until then, he had breathed whenever he was awake, though of course he didn't while asleep, because he didn't have to. And he had stopped, and I remember thinking that he was glorious, with his hair come loose, and his hands still tied behind his back."

"It's nice but I want to know if he killed those people."

"Does he ever talk to you about it?" I ask.

"No, but when I ask him about those times he says that he dreams about fire and won't talk about it. He's so reserved, and I am so curious."

"I think that he did do it," I whisper.

Nicky takes his hand back from me, and strokes my nose with his finger. "I don't think of him as a killer, but he is, isn't he? Like me."

"Not like me?" I ask him.

"No," he says, gently. "You're a lover. Sometimes men die by accident."

"Un romantique. J'ai sommeil," I tell him, feigning sleepiness.

When I brought Dasius back to that house, where Nicky lay, clinging to his life, Dasius told me what to get and I did, bringing these medical supplies I didn't know that he had. Catgut for stitching and these barbs, and he said, "Chut," to me, "I'm not very good, but I think that it will work," hushing me because I felt hysterical, and must have been making noise, and I could not believe that we were going to get away with it.

We were to going to get away with Paris, or I was. I was going to get away with being selfish, and taking for myself these boys, and letting myself love them, and giving myself away to them, and not always looking over my shoulder, and if this was the worst that I would get for it, we were going to get away with it, and I could not hide my desperate fear, or the joy I suspected I would get, and I was hysterical with those two feelings, and in my hysteria, I went into the little room, where I had slept so many days with my fitful demon in my arms, my Nicky, and I beat that young man who I had tied there until he was dead.

I don't wish to be the romantic figure that Nicky must want me to be. I don't wish it. I like killing, and I like getting away with things, and having what I want, and that night I got to do both, and we stole a horse that we had been renting down the road, a big black hunter. On him, we fled away into the night.

As I fall asleep, I hear Nicky asking in the dark, without trace of madness, or do I just wish not to hear it? "Is that when we met Miriam? Next? Laurie, was that the same time?"

That name between his lips. O.

Le fremissement. What shuddering.