And then, there was a lot of night. That long silence after I was poisoned is populated with stories, confessions, begging. All I know of it is what has been told to me, or intimated through behavior towards me now.

From Laurent, in the 20th century, tangled up in bed, there was often tenderness, remarks upon my body and how goodly it looked in comparison to the spring and summer of 1742. He would press his cheek to the little concavity below my ribs and ask my body if it remembered being a living skeleton, scrubbed quite clean by him twice a day. He would ask my body, not me. He would trace the femoral artery of my inner thigh and ask it if it remembered being cut open with a lance and bled, ask my lips if they remembered the taste of Dasius's blood, which paid for his continued life. From this I gather that continuously, there were conducted transfusions of blood through me, compulsive washing, inside and out. 

When he was sad, sometimes Laurent would ask me if I wanted to claw at his face again, tear at his hair, beat him with my fists. Since I cannot remember ever doing such things, I think I must have done so during those long forgotten weeks, torturing him for betraying me. Sometimes he would repeat things that I had said to him, which had punctured his very soul. "I only did it once. Please, pet, forgive me it. Please, pet. Don't think me a whore. Please, after that night, I never drank again until you left me." In my waking life, I cannot remember ever reproaching him, or calling him names. He would take my hands and hold them between his, "Moitie," he'd say, my half, "I would have died for you."

Towards the end, I wonder if he thought himself back there with me, in 1742. In that big house in California he lived in, when I visited him, he would often be tucked away in the back of a closet, in the dark. I would go up the stairs and slide back the door, and find him. He was living with his master, who kept him clean and dressed finely, though the frankness of his expression betrayed a lack of lucidity. His expressions were in general clever, guarded, subtle, but near the end, he often greeted me with naked joy and kissed my face from forehead to lips, bubbling over with praise. I would help him up and to bed if he was willing, and he would curl his body against mine, humming happily. Other times, however, he would fold in upon himself at seeing me, and cover his face, and beg for my forgiveness. I would lift him then and ask him why he greeted me thus, when I loved him well. "Do you mean it, pet? Have you come back to me?" As if he had forgotten the many other times I had visited, the times we had lived together in Paris, and the many summers we had spent since in Monaco. In bed he would ask me, rhetorically, muffled against my neck, "Moitie, why did you leave me? Moitie, why?"

Oh, I am so shattered.

***

My first memory after the poisoning was months later, in September of 1742. I awoke, deliciously, as if from a long sleep, in a warm bath. I lifted my arms out of the water and studied my wrists and fingernails, taking in their purple, bruised color. After a long moment, I dipped my head under the lip of the water, and held my breath for a long time. When I came up, my hair stuck to my face and neck, making me laugh. My skin felt feverish, and I held onto my right hand with my left, as if to stop the right hand's tremoring. But I was a pale slip of happiness in the warm water, as if I had slipped back into my familiar body after a long, homesick absence.

A soft voice said, "Salut," in the doorway, and I looked up, and it was Laurent, looking afraid and tentative. Hi.

"Salut," I said. 

"Is it you, pet?" he asked. "Have you come back to me?" He was wearing just an overlarge linen shirt, untied at the collar. His legs were bare to mid-thigh. My eyes lingered. 

"Did I go somewhere?" I asked him, flicking my eyes up, looking at him through my eyelashes.

He came closer, and I tried to sit up to meet him. He rushed forward then, stopping me from exerting myself, putting his hand on my back and taking my hand to help me. I tried to catch his lips and he seemed taken aback.

"Oh, won't you let me kiss you?" I asked.

"You've been sick," he said, breathless, letting me take his face in my hands. 

I kissed his trembling lips. "I feel quite good."

"You look that way," he said, "but you're not. You're not, pet. Rest now." 

I pushed my fingers into his pale curls and he met my eyes, sat back on his heels, out of reach. 

"Finish soaking, my blond. You will come out, and we will go to bed."

"I don't want blood," I said, glorying in my body, head tipped back against the bathtub's copper lip. The light was weak through the window, but it seemed to be very late afternoon. The air in the room seemed stale, and I wanted for the windows to be open.

"I will find a cloth to wrap your hair up," he said, ignoring it and rising. 

When he came back, he had the square meter-by-meter cotton cloth which had covered the silver dish, when he had made steam for me. He helped me sit up in the tub and squeezed the water out of my hair with his hands, and wound the cotton around my loose curls, tying it securely at the top of my forehead.

"Have you been wrapping my hair all the time?" I asked, as he helped me out of the tub and to dry, and pulled a tunic over my body.

"I haven't," he said. "Dasius has."

I shrunk from his touch, and his response was sharp and immediate, corrective.

"Little pea, you do not know what we have done for you these months," he shouted, close to my ear. "I am tired of your reproach." The sudden sound was loud enough to exceed my ability to make out each individual word.

My legs were weak and I looked for somewhere to sit with my hands. He put his arms around my body so that I wouldn't collapse. I rested my cheek on his head, cooing apologies, unable to do otherwise. I found his body under the linen and dug my fingers into his shoulders through the fabric, rubbing at his tension.

"Let me be angry," he said. "Oh pet, let me be anything but a nursemaid. I am wary of this life. Oh, yes, touch me. How I have missed being touched. I tremble."

"Beat me. Whip me. Don't be angry."

"Oh, what you do to me," he muttered, taking me by my purpled hand to the yellow bedroom.

I went gladly, though slowly, feet cold on the wooden floor, and he laid me on the familiar bed, spreading my arms and resting my tired head on a pillow.

"Will you be tied?" he asked, gesturing to bonds on the bedpost, "or will you now behave?" His face was cast in long shadows, as that room is always darker than the others.

I winked at him, sprawled on the coverlet, unable to sit up, still blind to his mood, which was guarded but brittle with bitterness. I did not see that he was barely held together by his gentility and good manners, that he was on an emotional hair trigger. All I could see was wanting him to be warm to me.

"Ange dechu," he grumbled, fallen angel.

"Je te veux sans cesse," I said, trying to purr, I want you endlessly.

"Is that love?" he huffed, going to the simple desk by the window and rolling a drawer out. 

I didn't see what was in his hand until he came near. "Please, please, moitie, don't cut me."

"Save it. I have heard it," he said. "You must be bled every day. You will be. Will you make me tie you?" He had a small edged blade, which caught the fading light.

"Please," I moaned and trembled about love, begged that all ill health had fled me, that I was not weak and had been abandoned, feeling cold and without friends. The room had produced Dasius with a shallow golden tureen as if birthing a corporeal shadow. I clawed at the coverlet and sobbed a wordless cry of outrage and fear.

Laurent took my bruised wrist roughly and opened it with the knife. When he lifted his eyes to mine, I could not read them, and I turned my face away. When the wound closed, he opened it again, drawing another cry from me, from reaches inside my chest where I had not felt breath for over a year. 

The shadow took the tureen away and came back with a glass phial with a gold stop. When I looked, he had melted away again, subsumed once more by the creeping dark. While they had bled me, the evening had drawn long and all natural light had gone. Laurent came up the bedcovers, having lit a candle and loosed my hair. He had lifted my head to pull the cotton away. "Drink now," he said, holding the phial out.

"I will drink from no phial," I said, sulking.

"If you make me force you I will be very cross," he threatened.

"I will drink from no phial," I said, raising my voice. "I am no babe suckling at the breast. I am a creature of evening."

"You sound like a child complaining of lessons."

"I am not the one sitting on my heels as a child playing games in the dirt."

He closed his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was raw and more naked than I had ever heard it, breaking through every pretense he had. "Leis," he whispered, eyes closed, "if you force me to do this while you are lucid you will unmake my love for you." He took a breath. "I am deathly serious. You will drink this without another word."

Gently, I let him prop my head, and held onto his arm as he tipped the phial against my lips. 

"It tastes of medicine," I whispered, as the room began to spin and the tingling began.

"Dasius has been dosing himself with quinine. He can no longer sleep without it. It seems to do finely with you."

"I don't want to sleep. I want to be with my master," I said softly, desiring to pull him down to me. 

"I am so tired, Leis. I am so cold. Don't fight sleep." His voice came without affection.

"You will go and sleep with him instead," I said, whipping it at him.

"I have no dignity left," he breathed, breaking into sudden, shocking tears. "Don't do this to me. You have taken the blood from me. You have taken away my life. What end to this prison will there be? I am cold. I am afraid. Do not condemn me for wishing to sleep beside my child. My ward. I am broken." He gasped breath as if he were drowning.

His outburst stopped my heart. I had no idea yet of what I had done while succumbed to the poison, and his response seemed horribly outsized to me because it. My whole body went cold in his arms in spite of the blood running through me.

I asked him, very quietly, shocked into voicing my deepest fear, because I could see no other reason why he would speak to me in such a way. "Moitie. Moitie, are you tired of me?" 

He didn't hesitate. " I will be devoted to you until I am dead, pet, but it is killing me."

I turned my face away and he touched me, touching my eyes to see if they were dry, in the dimness. 

"Leis, please, listen to me. If it's you, understand this."

"I am listening. I am in love with you. You are my angel," I said, in the dark, eyes closed at the touch of his gentle fingers. I wanted to kiss them, still thinking of kissing him, so foolish.

"Then, I want to tell you that I am nearly seventeen centuries old. Darling, do you know how much time that is? I want it for you, but you cannot be so rigid. You say you are a creature of evening. As am I," he kissed my forehead, and I made an involuntary sound, a swallowed lover's sigh, needful of his comfort. "I know who I am. I am what I have made myself. I am a creature of blood. I love beauty, pet. Yes, you are the most beautiful boy I have ever known. Your willingness to purr at the slap drives me absolutely mad. Your sweet nature is a pearl a young man who has lived such a life as you have has no right to. But you are demanding my death."

"And what of Dasius?"

"He has been with me two hundred years. You cannot understand how long that is. You are not bloomed yet."

So near his chest, I could hear his heart beating in my ear, like the pulse of a calm sea. "I wish to stay here all my life," I whispered, listening to it. "Moitie, you are home to me. Forget what I said."

I did not know that I had injured his pride in the long delirium, had made him question his way of life, called him "putain" "salop" "menteur" "diable" "massacreur", slut, liar, devil, butcher, whipped him and whipped him with these words and broken myself upon trying to break him, cracking my fingerbones and losing teeth, which the shadow had put right again. I knew nothing at all. I thought that I could whisper, "Take blood, forget our promises, I didn't know that you needed beautiful boys to be whole, to remember who you were when you were living, let us go together." I thought I could say, "Let us go and you may watch me kiss them, and they may have me in their back rooms, and I will be as anything you like. I am your kitten," because I didn't know that I had snapped something important inside of him, which would never be the same. 

I didn't know that I had made him ashamed to be what he had built, gone into his soul and torn at him until he could only crawl away from me and cry, that he would nurse those wounds for the rest of his life. I had woken from the poison innocent that he feared my judgment.

All I knew then was that I wanted him and he was hurt somehow, perhaps made overweak by lack of blood, and could not be fixed. 

"Will you soften towards me with time?" I asked, weeping, ignorant. 

"My blond," he said, sighing as I slipped my hands up the back of his linen shirt. My fingers found the divots at his lower back, traced the bones of his spine, the curve of his ribs through his familiar skin. "Stay with me always. I would rather a short life if you are mine."

But it was impossible, and knowing nothing else, I knew that. 

In the morning, as he slept, I took an ormolu urn from the sitting room mantel, a few pieces of silver, and left. In 1870, I wrote him letters, but his shadow, Dasius, tore them up. In 1872, I came to that shadow, on behalf of my young lover, who needed his help. Later on, I will tell you that story if you like. But between my master and I, things would not be put right again for nearly two hundred years, until 1928, and by then, he had decided to die. And Mini, oh, I only wish that I could know how he had come to think that was the only way. Mini, where was my master born? Please, God, tell me if you know, in exchange for this story, the flesh from my body, I have given you. Comfort an old creature of evening, and tell me of my angel as a child, when he knew nothing of the pain which pulled him apart. I am overcome. Oh, would that I were dead myself. Oh, God, I cannot live without him.