Work Text:
Now, I couldn’t just keep her. That would be against the rules. She’d made the deal, same as him. Spent decades ruling at his side. Even got her turn in the final spotlight, there at the end. Highest throne in the land, propped up as it was on that slick mass of accumulated corpses. No, Madeline Usher got exactly what I promised her and the price was her death— with his.
So I couldn’t just keep her. Couldn’t accept her attempted bargain or her admirable cheat. Couldn’t lean forward in that moldering leather chair and welcome her home with a smile and a kiss hello. That would be against the rules.
So I had her packaged up for me instead. For later.
What. Don’t tell me you believe they came by it organically. The particular Egyptian bent to their tender fixation on immortal life? She picked it up from that night, which, I suppose, is more organic than it could have been. She lied to him, you know. Oh sure, about all sorts of things, now and then, but one very big one: she remembered that night far more clearly than he did. For him, it was all a drink-dulled blur of music and lights, the woman in his arms a nameless shade of convenient alibi. But for her?
I stole a little something extra from her. Not her first kiss. No, she’d used her kisses for things before. Tolls. Tithes. But mine was the first kiss she ever wanted, then got to have. I could have called that even; I stole something precious, but gave her something she’d longed for all in the same tidy press of lips-on-lips. And yet it felt imbalanced, in no particularly grand cosmic way, but in that way I don’t care for. Asymmetry. It meant something to her, that brief, warm first. I could see the trailing paths it snipped away in that other life of hers, a woman she would have kissed in a different dark bar while flush with one of the rare but achingly meaningful triumphs she’d have had without me. It mattered that she tasted me instead, and felt me taking, and for the very first time in her hard, determined life, wanted, ever so briefly, simply to give.
So I had to give back. For the balance, you see. When she and her grim-faced brother left my little patch of world outside place and time, she took with her her memories of me, crystal clear. And when poor Roderick seemed lost in a daze the first few times she mentioned their whirlwind night at the bar that was a brick wall with a painted raven, she decided it was for the best, that she remembered, and he forgot. It gave her a clarity of vision he would always lack, sowing his seed to the wild winds. And if she remembered but rarely believed, well. I can’t begrudge her that. It made the living a little easier. Sweeter. Less steeped in preemptive guilt or fear.
She had to fear the end. Certain inevitabilities when a woman like her takes a bargain like mine. But she’d prepared for it. Purchased pilfered goods that surely belonged in a museum rather than her office or home. Held them in her hands. Felt the weight of them, their history, their taste for decadent decay. Crystals, hooks, knives— Madeline held them one by one and remembered the woman with the strangest eyes she’d ever seen, leaning in to meet her mouth with hers.
Then she boxed them away, for safekeeping.
Roderick could not have cared less what his sister was accumulating with their mutual ill-gotten gains. But it took only the littlest nudge, to have him tidy her up for me.
See, there are rules about these things. All deaths are mine in one way or another. A corpse is a corpse is a corpse; a stilled heart has a weight I can feel so sweetly every time I close my eyes, even with clean, empty hands. It’s like I said: it’s never been about souls. I’m no collector, no grim reaper, no preservationist of moral ills in stenotype and microfiche for perusal by some great judgemental archivist in the sky. And yet. All deaths are mine. Some deaths are more mine than others.
There are ways to deliver that weight to me personally. For safekeeping. Depending where you meet me on the precipice night of your life, you might see a few of them around. And they have been around for a long, long time. It’s a business I’ve stayed out of for centuries and yet. This one. There’d been something about this one from long before she met me. A stern determination in her very blood when she bleeds. A look in her eye that really makes you feel it: the near miss of every moment in her presence you spend still alive. She wears competence as a crown where her lessers would wear only empty pride. Ah, my Cleopatra.
And I’d made her a promise I have always intended to keep. Not both of them. Her. Can’t break the rules. Can’t leave her breathing. Can’t let her live another decade looking grimly over her shoulder, ever wondering when her time will re-arrive, worriedly tinkering with her grand invention: a virtual soul. Ha. Something so far beyond this generation’s capabilities that she’d find herself at age eighty-five staring down her likeness captive in the phone in the palm of her hand and witness in dawning horror the way it has learned to speak, realize with each passing word that this dull simulacrum will only ever shame her memory. She’d raise arthritic hands and type a scathing indictment to her CTO, only to die with her finger hovering over send on the email that would have called off the whole project, ended it, scrapped it, rendered her meager attempt at eternal life to the digital dustbin of history, and without that email ever sent, Madeline Usher would soon find herself lying entombed at a funeral where the only speaker is her own digital avatar projected on a flat impersonal screen, reciting a eulogy which would later be revealed as widely plagiarized from those given for Steve Jobs, Princess Diana, and Ronald Regan.
That’s what would have happened if I let her cheat. Let Roderick Usher quietly overdose before the jingling brick wall of the start of our time together. Someday perhaps I’ll tell her what I saved her from, taking her when I did. But for now, I don’t mind if she’s angry at me for it. For not letting her get her way. I admire how determined she is to win despite how little joy it brings her. But the time for winning is over: I’ll be showing her joy. Soon. Very, very soon.
Because when I asked her what she wanted, her dreams didn’t stop at wealth. It didn’t stop at the shared power of a corrupt corporate empire of numbness and greed. No. She demanded two things: a life never bowing to any man— and immortality.
It’s a funny word, immortality. The rare few who find the trail I leave through history would almost certainly accuse me of having it. Yet what is it, really? Deathlessness? I’m hardly that. An endless mortal life? I have never been mortal. And if it were simply living and living and living on, how would one account for the ravages of endless age? The inevitable encroachment of decay? Can an immortal yet become so much dust, so long as some spark of sentience has been crystalized in the billions of pieces scattered to the corners of the cosmos that were once a part of the you that was shaped like a man? Well. Since there is no immortality for man, I’m the best she has. In time—and she will have plenty of that—I suspect Madeline Usher will see things my way.
Yet even as perfectly packed up for me as I left her, there’s a chance she walks away. The children lingered for Roderick’s final show, but not like she did. She clung to life with blood determination and gave him his grand finale. Glorious. Then, of course, all that tidy business of headstones and graves, but what’s a little dirt and stone to a woman who once laid two hundred bricks by hand merely to remind a man of the scale of his insignificance. She could scorn me, but she won’t. I believe that fully.
And I am many things, but wrong?
She’s back at my bar in a week.
She looks lost in the doorway; momentarily small. She flickers between selves, this place bringing out in her the pale, pretty blond in an eye-catching costume from a decade unseen even as the sight of me behind the bar sends blood spilling down her cheeks from beneath blue stone eyes.
I wait—just until she closes the door—then leave my post to greet her, two drinks in one hand. Her hair grays as I close in and that’s better, really. As uncommonly lovely as she was when we met, this is her grand becoming, the sum of a cruel life delightfully lived. I hand her the glass. She takes it, just as she did that first fateful night.
I drink—a silent toast to the moment—and set mine on the nearest table. It frees me; I can reach carefully up towards her and remove those priceless weights from her eyes, prying them out with the tips of my fingernails. I pocket them; I’m due for it. A visit to the marble slabs which memorialize my work on this most ruinous of family trees. I’ll leave them there; they’ve served their purpose. They’ve delivered her to me.
Then I cradle her face in my hands and wipe the tracks of blood from beneath the lined hollows of her eyes. “My Cleopatra,” I say with a smile.
It takes my kiss to draw them back out of her, the memory of the eyes he cut away, but of course they come back for this. She’s dreamed of it too many times—how she’d thought my eyes were as gray as the sea till the moment I’d leaned into her, and then all she could see were the deepest shadows of the darkest night. She needs the eyes to see it all happen again, and she needs just the same to let me see her eyes in turn: show me that flash that says she remembers how it felt to snap my neck, how much pleasure she would take in doing it again. But lids drifting lower have a way of concealing whether or not a murderous urge stays when I taste the death of her on her lips. And nothing can hide the hitch in her needless breathing when she parts for me, and lets me in.
Mmm. Most days, I enjoy my work. But oh so rarely has any day of it been sweeter.