Moonlit Sonata

 Inside his heart, Ross was a prisoner.

 Strange, he had spent so many years behind bars, but never felt trapped. When you had all of eternity rolling out before like the formless wash of the ocean, what were a few years? Time to reflect, no big deal, just idle time to plan each masterpiece.

 After all, he was an artist, and his works had changed the world.

 When he'd been young, they caged him because they thought him too savage, their conservative souls unable to see the dark and flamboyant beauty in his art. They had seen only bone and blood and chunks of flesh, ignoring the pleasing mesh of colour and the lustrous gleam of open eyes, staring at the sky.

 He had never told anyone why he always left their eyes open, and arranged their corpses so they gazed up at the night sky. Nor had anyone ever thought to ask.

 Mostly it was because they feared him; he could smell it on them, a pungent mix of sweat and the rank sweetness he labelled terror, so strong that he thought if he leaned forward and licked their skin, it would fizzle on his tongue.

 And really, there had only been one woman who didn't fear him; or at least, who had enough self-control to hide it from him. All he ever smelled on her was icy indifference, matched by the supreme contempt in her eyes.

 Trifolia Rasmussen. God, how he hated her. Oh, oh god, how he burned for her.

 He couldn't decide if it was luck or irony that had made that ice maiden his soulmate. All he knew was that the revelation had shattered his long life of art and artifice. One moment, and he was undone.

 He had looked at the world through her eyes, and in the clear-cut context of her thoughts and experiences, seen the monster in himself.

 Worse still, the fear she had felt for the puckish, crabbed thing that lurked beneath his skin was as nothing compared to her disgust and - cruellest of all - her disappointment. In an instant, his surety was whipped from beneath him and he found himself collapsing, only a crude mockery of the grandiose image he had created of himself.

 The eye of his soulmate, the complement of himself, was a terrible truth.

His masterpieces were reduced to rubble and ashes, and reeling, he fled from her, fled where he hoped she would never deign to go. To Pursang, where he searched for redemption in every face. Surely they too felt the tender love for death and the art it could produce?

 Yes, there, among the trained executioners of the Nightworld, he found the same intensity he had honed in himself. There was macabre intent in every cut they made, each death staged as carefully as the opening night of a play.

 He was surrounded by inhumanity and he drowned in it.

 Yes...drowned. No matter how often he told himself that so many people could not be wrong, he saw them through her appalled eyes, as if some gauzy imprint of her soul was laid over his vision. Loathing echoed about his mind, each slash of her disapproval a wound on him. He began to wake drenched in sweat from dreams full of weeping and horror, licking the salt from his lips in the midnight hours.

 Trifolia Rasmussen had seen the entirety of him, every crevice of his soul, and she had been repelled by him. She - who was surely supposed to love every shadowed secret in his heart.

  Every day, a battle raged for his soul: every day, it ended in tense stalemate, his ideals smashing against hers. Even a thousand miles away, her disgust haunted him, denying his very essence.

 At first, one drink could taker the edge from his self-hatred and confusion. It was all washed away in an amber gush, burning a hot path through the carnage in his mind, leaving only a furry uncertainty in its wake.

 One drink began to arrive in a bigger glass. Eventually, it came in a bottle, and it was clear liquid that seared away his pain. It was pain, he had realised by then, this dreary, endless battle, and it hurt him in ways he had never imagined. He was beginning to disintegrate under her imagined gaze and he could not face what it meant to accept she was right.

 Even the cycle of vomit and firewater-fuelled lies and hangover was better. Even when he came to thinking someone was tying barbed wire round his guts, and shivered hopelessly until that first poison trickled down his throat, it was all worth it for the respite from her vicious truth.

 But he could never quite drink enough to forget her entirely. Even when he drank to the bottom of the bottle, the memory of her lingered as a vague unease.

 One day, no amount of liquid could erase his memory.

 Then he turned to powders and pills, wheeling through starry worlds in the blink of an eye, bodiless, soulless, vacant. Under an addled sky, he found himself able to work once more, blood spilling beneath his hands as he laughed and sang and destroyed.

 Once, he cried, and only when he thought back on the kill did he remember that the girl had a sheet of silvery-blond hair, and perfect, winter-morning eyes. After that kill, Pursang had begun to find other tasks for him; research and administration.

 By the time Chatoya Irkil took over Pursang, he was sinking beneath the weight of his addictions. He felt the hopelessness of his life more deeply than ever and hid it better than ever.

  Somewhere, deep in his body, a clock was counting down to the moment when he would drift away from the world, his life distilled down to the contents of a syringe.

 Or so he thought. And then Chatoya had offered him something he hadn't even known he craved.

 She had offered him hope, and his soulmate. And in one lucid moment, he had understood that only Trifolia Rasmussen could resolve this conflict within him. He would look once more into those chilled and distant eyes - and he would decide, once and for all.

~*~

 He picked the lock on her apartment. He told himself it was habit as he moved the picks, half his mind listening for the soft snicks of the pins, the other half chanting that he just didn't want the door slammed in his face.

 The door eased open, and he straightened up, strange thrills snaking out from his stomach. He slid in, wondering why his heart was thundering so in his chest.

 She was sat at a desk, one hand rubbing her forehead as she read through papers. For a moment, he was frozen, all his cool and measured words melting in his mouth to leave the taste of regret.

 She had cut her hair; that was first thing he noticed. It fell in a sleek, shiny cap, still that same flaxen colour, cupping her face like an outspread hand. Without the long sheet of hair she'd always worn like a cloak, she seemed strangely vulnerable; perhaps it was the curve of her neck, her veins bared to him.

 He must have made some noise; perhaps she felt the flutter of his surprise against her heart - she looked up, and saw him.

 "What are you doing here?" Breathy, not as icy as he remembered - she kicked back her chair and stood, confronting him.

 He felt tremors beginning in his shoulders and though he controlled those, he couldn't stop the trembling of his mind, faced with her once more.

 She hadn't aged a day, of course - she never would - but he saw the changes of the years; in his mind, she always wore the face of that disdainful young woman, scorning all he was. Now, there was a softness to her lips he had never seen before and though her eyes were porcelain pale, something haunted them.

 "I came to see you," he managed, and his skin broke into goosebumps at the truth, hanging there so nakedly.

 "You came. You saw. You didn't conquer - now leave."

 Something was different; it was as intangible as the perfume of a ghost, barely discernable, yet it was there all the same. He took a deep breath, and another, and then he looked at her, truly looked. Not at his avatar, not at the iconic creature that had belittled him from the bottom of every bottle, but at her.

  There was hesitancy in the way she carried herself - her body set sideways, one foot half poised as if she didn't know whether to step forwards or run backwards. Her hand were limp at her sides, neither reaching nor refuting, and her face seemed to hold more hollows than he remembered - shadow pooled beneath her eyes and cheeks as if it found refuge there.

 It decided him, that uncertainty.

 "No."

 Her eyes widened. "It wasn't a request."

 Ross stared right back, meeting the cold blast of her stare and finding it less powerful than he recalled. "It wasn't an order either."

 And for the first time ever, he fumbled for the soulmate link, a stagnant pool in the back of his mind; he dared reach beyond the bounds of himself, along that alien connection.

 To his senses, she was the sweet side of winter; the frost patterns curling over his window, the spinning symmetry of a snowflake, the crack and snap of ice - the lush morning skies that heaved with pink and purple flows, all the more brilliant for the chill surrounding them. The ice that encapsulated her was hard and cold, yes, but it was transparent too, and he felt the shapes of her emotions pushing against her glassy cage.

 Cage...yes, he thought, perhaps she was as much a prisoner of her imaginings as he.

 "Stop it," she said, her voice shrill and thin.

 What was she afraid of him seeing? Fear, yes, of course it was fear - he was intimate enough with it to recognise it at once.

 He drew back. See, I can be civil too.

 "I want you to go." One hand was on the desk, shoring her up. And in that moment - her body bowed, her voice so soft, her skin chalky and her eyes averted, just so, just like that, he was struck by a memory so strong he nearly rocked back on his feet.

 Ryar ap Sangager had stood that way too: she had turned to Lance Stormshot, searching for redemption, and he had slapped away her hand and called her monster. In the moment before she fled, she too had been stooped under her pain - in her eyes, longing had wilted into despair.

 Trifolia Rasmussen was far too proud to run. But longing and despair, that was what meshed in her eyes. How had it taken him so long to see that? Each morning, he avoided his own eyes in the mirror to pretend those same demons did not haunt him.

 "No you don't," he said, certain now.

 One step towards her, testing. He had to be right; he could not bear to be knifed by her contempt once more, trampled down once more.

 Her supporting arm trembled and her teeth bared. "Are you deaf?"

 I have been deaf and dumb and blind to you, he wanted to say. I drowned you in vodka and immolated you in firewater, I dissolved you on my tongue with crystal meth and hunted down dragons that wore your face.  And in those seconds when I tilted a syringe to the light, you sparkled among the diamond-dust and heroin - I kept you so close I could no longer see you clearly, yet could never be free from you.

 Overwhelmed by you, I shrank into fear and rage and loathing, and never stopped to consider that you suffered too. What grotesquery of me devoured your happiness?

 You had nothing to lose yourself in.

  And that leaves you...this. A bare apartment, and the darkness crawling up into your skull.

 I think...I think perhaps you have been dying too, but with more grace than ever I could manage. You wither in silence, ice melting away with the onset of spring - me your Easter passion, the crooked cross you bear.

 "Well?" She straightened, but slowly, her mouth flat and thin. "You know the way out."

 "But you don't, do you?" Another step, bringing the world to pinpoint clarity. "How long have you been looking for a way out, Tri?"

 "From what?"

 He waved a hand at the bleak little room; nothing personal on the shelves. Family photos had once clogged her homes, bric-a-brac cluttering every surface. To see her in such an empty space was startling, as if those possessions had defined an unseen part of her. "From this. From me, I guess."

 "I don't need a way out," she averred, life flaring across her face in bands of pink, in the glitter of her eyes. "It doesn't matter whether you're in my life or out of it - you mean nothing to me."

 He felt her anger score him, and ignored the wound; one more on top of many.

 "I used to tell myself the same," he said. "You meant nothing. I'd repeat it with every fucking glass I drank, and for a while, it seemed like it was true. Then I guess I started to think a little too much. Nothing - yeah, you were nothing to me; you were this space inside where something should be."

 He didn't look directly at her, but from the corner of his eyes, he saw the hints of a frown.

 "It was a scary thought. When the drink wouldn't chase it away, the drugs did. And one day, I realised that I had it all wrong. It wasn't you that meant nothing - it was everything else."

 He didn't understand it - he never had. He just lived with it, and tried not to see the pathos of it all. After all, everyone else saw, and he had enough critics without adding himself.

He couldn't look at her, couldn't bear to let himself be pinned under her stare like a moth on a board. "How did you do it?" he said, his voice cracking. "How did you become everything?"

 Silence, and then he did risk a glance, to see her stood there with her arms wrapped about herself.

 "Fate's a cruel bitch, isn't she?" she said tightly. "You don't understand love and I don't want it."

 The question was out before he could stop it. "What do you want?"

 She shuddered. "Peace. Any kind of peace." Something raw and brittle shone in her eyes, broken glass that promised to cut him just as easily as she lashed at herself. "I can't help you, Ross. I can't give you whatever you're looking for."

 The foolishness of her remark brought a momentary smile to his mouth. "But I'm looking for you. How could you be anything except what I want?"

"Sometimes I forget what a child you are." It was wonder, not mockery in her voice, and that took the sting from the comment.

 "And a little child shall lead them," he quoted.

 She was absolutely still, but he saw the fractures running through the ice maiden now. And swallowing down his pride, swallowing down his fear, he held out a hand.

 She shook her head.

 "No?" he said, trying to force back the despair that rose in him. "And what then, Tri? Where does either of us go? Do you have someone in this world who'll fight to keep you here, because I don't - and I can't keep living this way. You say you can't give me love, well, no problem. Do you honestly think I'm here to confess my undying love?"

 A shrug, her arms loosening a little about her small form. "Aren't you?"

 "I don't understand love," he reminded her shortly. "But I understand obsession. It's all I've ever really had, and maybe, just maybe, you could become more than something I carry around to remind myself that I don't have the strength to make it alone. Maybe we'll both wind up surprised, and there will be love. Probably there won't. But won't you even try?"

 How her face had haunted him, driving him across the world in flight and fervour. She licked her lips, once, and he wondered what she tasted like, if she was like a snowfall, forming and reforming at every instant.

He was right; surely she knew he was right. Two lonely people, only made aware of their loneliness by one another, they could not continue like this.

 "What do you want?" she said finally, her voice rough.

 To touch you again, he thought, but did not say it. To see those strange, hot emotions move in your face as they do in the people I know. Why does Vaje smile when he looks at his vampire girl? What is that pulls Lance back to that lake and his weak little mermaid time and again?

 What would it be like to lie beside you, and smooth the cold from your skin? Will the world be better when our lips meet, or will I just not notice the darkness? Will you keep the moonlight from me, or is it already too late?

 "Whatever you're prepared to give," was all the answer he had, terrified that she would tell him 'nothing', abandoning him to his squalid end.

 Her eyes were too shrewd, as piercing as he had remembered - something of her old intelligence sharpened her voice. "And what do I get? Will you give me the moon if I ask for it?"

 He shuddered, and felt the serrated edge of the question. "Not the moon."

 Her smile was surprising - and rich with sorrow. "I wouldn't want it. No one ever knew why you did it, you know. Why you always left them looking at the sky."

 No - that had always been his secret. No one could understand that simple pagan fear in the deepest part of his soul.

 "But then," she continued, and some vibration in the words dragged him back to her, "not many people believed that legend. Only the ones who'd seen it - like you." A deep breath, as if she drew courage in with the air. "And me."

 "You?" he whispered.

 "Sleep in moonlight and go mad," she murmured. "No one ever believes it, because they always forget what it means. Sleep - it's such a poetic term, really. Die under moonlight, we should say, and rise undead and mad. The saving grace is that you have no memory of who you once were. I saw it happen long ago, and I will never forget. That's why you left their eyes open - so they could stare down the moon. So they would be spared the madness. One small mercy, at least."

 Mercy, was it? He didn't know - he only knew he had been compelled to keep them from lunacy, to keep them from the maddening silver glare of the full moon. No one should ever feel that...no one.

 He didn't even notice she had come close until she brushed his forehead. The touch made the air crackle, and in his mind, gold lights wheeled.

 "At least, if you're alive, you wake undead and mad," she said, her voice terribly gentle. "If you're already dead, though, if you are Nosferatu newly made - if you're a child who cannot understand what he's become, and fool enough to run away and sleep in the moonlight because the dark frightens you..."

 He could not stop the shaking any longer; it burst from his stomach into his skin, and he was powerless under her touch. "Then you wake mad, and half-alive, and who you were," he told her, falling to his knees in front of her. "Some part of you, god, it always knows just what you have become, and how pitiful it is."

 Her hands cradled his head, and beneath her glassy reserve, he sensed only cold understanding, and realised that was what he had wanted. Someone to understand the pity and the wonder of all he was - to offer comprehension without apology, to understand the tragedy and yet know that it made him no less dangerous or treacherous.

 It had been years before the madness faded, years of witches prodding him and casting their little hexes to try and destroy the madness, and even now, he was never quite sure if it had been subdued entirely. Years of prison, years when his art had meant nothing to him because the madness had subsumed even the best part of him.

 "There is no moonlight here," she said simply, and knelt too, her fingers stroking over his skull. Eye to eye, and when he raised his hand to brush her cheek with his knuckles, she tried to stifle the flinch.

 "I don't want love," he whispered, and the lie was so small, he didn't notice it. "I won't ask you for what you can't give."

 Gold and blue and white, his winter morning, she watched him, their breaths mingling in the space between them. His hands found her waist and settled there, surprisingly comfortable. The space between their lips seemed to be shrinking, his fingers scrunching beneath the fabric to find smooth flesh.

 "But I will ask you for everything you are able to give," he whispered, as the gap between them reduced to nothing.

 Nothing. Everything. The difference could be very hard to see.