Then, one morning, while I was washing his feet, I heard a small fearful taking in of breath, and when I looked up, kitten was looking at me as if he knew me, blue eyes wide and soft lips parted.

"Laurent," I said quietly, holding onto Leis's foot.

Laurent was sitting at my desk, flipping through one of the books. He made a nonverbal noise of acknowledgement, absorbed. I imagined that his legs were crossed at the ankles, and that he licked his fingers to turn the pages.

"Will you come in, darling?" I asked. 

"Help me, dove, if you want to," he said. 

I went to Laurent's side, and he put his arm over my shoulder so that I could help him cross the short distance to Leis's bed. It was much darker in that room, because Laurent insisted on low light or no light at all in case of harming vulnerable eyes, but it was enough to see by. In a moment, I could see that Laurent saw what I had seen, that Leis knew us, that he seemed lucid. I felt Laurent's hand on my abdomen, low, pushing me gently backwards. I stepped back. 

"Pet, is it you?" Laurent asked, not for the first time. 

Leis had seemed a little better over the past few days, maybe three days, not crying as much, quieter, smiling occasionally in his sleep. He looked now to his left hand, which was tied as fast as his right to the bedpost.

"Can we untie him, dove?" Laurent asked, deferring to me. 

I thought that it would be all right. We had been caring for him for weeks. Perhaps I just wanted for things to be different in some way, for progress to be made. It had started to feel like we would be this way, nursing him, forever, in the dark. I knew that Laurent felt the same, that he had begun to hallucinate, that he had begun to fight me when I tried to make him stop bleeding himself. I was tired of the misery of it, how misery seemed to have become our neutral state. I remembered how things used to be, and felt that we were living in limbo, unsure if kitten would live or die. I had grown tired, and careless. "I think that it is worth trying," I said. 

I reached for Leis's hand, for the leather thong binding him to the bedpost, and he shrunk from me. This seemed further proof of lucidity. 

I think now, about what you said, Mini, about this being for the children. I wonder if you know how Marcellus and the other younger ones would feel about this. I wonder it genuinely. I don't know. They seem so selfish to me, and unfeeling, and I suppose very like you. Not to say that I am not selfish myself. I know that I have been. But do you know what he says to me when I tell him the import of what I write? He says, "Didi," in that annoying tone he has, that tone, "why do you only write terrible things? Who wants to remember all those bad things? I like it when you're funny." And he makes me sit and wonder it myself. I tell him, "But we are writing about him dying." And he says, "Well I suppose that's alright then. To talk about him dying." 

Are there other reasons? Will you tell me them? Sometimes, because it is so terrible I forget. You said, "So we won't forget about them." But how could I ever forget about them? My darling, I still hear him at night. Will I tell you that when I dream of kitten, it is only this terrible one I dream about? Who is so unlike the one we know, and who yet still harbors a horror of himself, as if he, so soft and gentle, could ever be that way again. So why should I remember Leis like that, and write it down?

I let Laurent unbind him, and the pretty thing said, "Come near," extending his now free hand, and I backed to the curtain, into the dark, and drew it over myself, so that he would not see me well, but that I would be close. I pulled the fabric taut, obscuring half of my face in its shadow. 

I had brushed Laurent's shorter hair into a neat side part, letting it curl, and Leis's hand went into this, clutching him gently, as a lover. And his lips to Laurent's ear, speaking softly, and a kiss of that ear, which I turned away from, towards the dark avenue outside, distorted by the glass. There was a sliver of moon hanging there, and the thickness of the glass gave it a large and hazy halo, which I looked at for some time, trying not to listen to the soft and happy sounds of relief, and pleasure, which did not include me.

After a few minutes, I thought, surely it is fine now, and I will slip out, but waiting a few minutes more, began to hear a change in the current, of the sound, turning to find them as I had found them  before, in the same position of lips to fragile ear, and Laurent's hands upon Leis's face, his eyes squeezed so hard shut it brought me to speak. "Ca va?" How are you? All right? Nonsense.

At that, a moment of silence, and then the greatest gushing forth of sound, a choked wail from Laurent, whose fingers were digging into Leis's smooth cheeks, the crying of a fragile creature set upon my an owl in the dark. I did not act, as there seemed no obvious violence, but this sound of a mouse trying to hide and failing, high pitched, my hands found Laurent's hands, his fingers digging into the stiff and unmoving Leis. But close I could see that Leis was not still at all, his lips moving wetly, whispering, holding Laurent by the hair, and there were so many hands then, holding on and trying to prize fingers apart, and Laurent pushing against kitten's face. And finally I decided that one may play as dirty, and dug my fingers into the evil little thing's hair as well, and yanked back on kitten as hard as I could, and tossed him away, wrenching his still bound right arm around. 

"Why do you let him do it to me?" kitten shouted, which whipped me up and around from helping Laurent up off of the floor. Laurent waved me off in the corner of my eye, forearm raised over his face. 

"You are speaking to whom?" I demanded, and saw immediately that he was not lucid at all, and yet aware, and mouth left open in a way a well-mannered vampire never allows. 

He wiped his lips with the back of his free hand. "To let you touch me in this way, to hurt me. You are low. So he says! A low black thing, a shadow cast by the sun! Would that I were not touched by low creatures what cling to the earth because they have no spine of their own!" he spat, his body folded up and facing away from me. And certainly, I recognize these are the sorts of words Laurent might have said to him at one time. 

His handsome face was drawn up in a way he had never held it, and I thought, "He is possessed by the poison. And I would like to cut him apart and scrape it out with my knife. If we insist that it lives, let me clean it piece by piece. A pleasure." But I said, "You will allow me to bind your hand or you will be allowed to suffer as you suffer now," in a sharp whisper.

"Be gentle, pet, I am begging you," Laurent, hand on my leg, and I was not sure who he was addressing. Then, "Pet, I will bleed you and you will feel better, and it will be better, and we can forget this, this horrible thing we have done to you, who are so sweet and so good."

"Ta toi, salop de bordel," Leis breathed.

"It was only once, pet, I am on my knees."

"Il m'abat une fois de plus." Another shot. "He is only for boys, is he? A man for him, none. How many? How many? Come close and I will give him what he wants, the bite! And what else does he desire? What should we say next?" 

And at that I could not take it, and lunged at him, tying him back up, and taking out my knife to bleed him, so that he would faint away. He struggled and tried to bite me, eyes sharp and meaning to dig in his teeth, and I thought, if you are the sweet creature you were, let you remember this in any case. Let you remember what you have done, though of course now I do not think that at all. 

He was naked already so there was nothing to rip, nothing to pull up, and I lanced him at the femoral artery, difficult as he struggled against my strong hands, cursing me, and his lover, and then so sweetly in that voice we knew as his own, which was worse. His thigh was taut under my hand, my fingertips pressing into his yielding flesh, cutting him so sloppily that the blood gushed against my hand, slipping the knife from my fingers, and his thrashing caused me to slash myself. I cried out at the pain of the knife sinking itself into my thumb, putting it to my lips instinctively, and oh God, tasting him for the first time mixing with my own blood. 

My eyes rolling back into my head, I felt weak arms fold around my waist, and whispering, "Darling, darling, my sword, my sword, get my sword."

"Don't say anything more or I will bind you as well, and you will know that I can do it."

When I tried to move, he held me fast. "Do not leave me, but I cannot leave him until he sleeps," he whispered. So we watched kitten fall asleep together, writhing on the bed in private torment, it being so obvious that though he spoke to us, we were not really there for him, his teeth pressed together against the pain constant in his body. And Laurent, pressed against my back, his cheek resting on my shoulder, whispering, "He does not know what he does, or what he says. He does not know what he does, or what he says." And how he told me that with his lips, but I knew even then that he was too vulnerable to know it for himself, and that in some way he had been penetrated, and that some part of him had left his body, and from then was like a ghost.

Later on I caught him with my scissors again, grasping them with shaking fingers, and I took them from him though he tried to retain them. "From now, let me do it," I told him. 

"You do enough. I am for him, my darling. This I know how to do. This I am good at, please," he whispered, hand on my arm, stroking me gently with his fingertips. 

He had become so pale and so weak he seemed a fleshly wraith to me, held up by will alone, and currents of air. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his cheeks sallow. I turned the bowl he had set beneath his wrist. His growing hair was wrapped in a white cloth, tied across his forehead. I held him by his narrow shoulders, his delicate collarbones pressed against my palm. Made vulnerable, he drew his sash a little tighter on his dressing gown, looking at the bowl so that he wouldn't have to look at me. I knew that making him vulnerable offended him, but he hardly seemed to have the strength to speak about it. 

"From now. I will do it. You are too faithful and beautiful of spirit, my love," I told him, and using that "love" that we used so rarely. "You cannot keep bleeding. I don't know what will happen. Please that you must live or I will die. Please," I whispered. 

"It is grotesque, to show this weakness to me," he whispered back, head bowed. 

"Hush. You will rest awhile, and then we will see how it is," I said, and found from the weight against my hands that I was holding him up, and then soft crying from him, which I took to be protest, and despair. "It will be all right, my darling," I said.

"But that you have become so handsome and good of spirit," he moaned, "in spite of what I am and what I have done to you, and all the others. Of what I am, oh let me bleed that I may in some way pay for it."

"Come to bed. I'm troubled," I whispered. 

"No but you must bleed then, dove, look," he said, gesturing, "or he will suffer. Look, that if we give him blood, perhaps he will come back to us. Pray for it, dove. I have seen it happen before. I promise, I promise," begging me.

And of course, because I loved him, I bled. And in those moments when kitten was gentle, felt that there was love indeed, in these ways that we cannot understand them.