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Avenoir. n. the desire that memory could flow backward.
The sky is stained deep blue with shades of gold and blush when you find him in the garden. He is as still as the first time you saw him, all sharp angles and hard-edged grace wrapped in clinking bracelets and thick fabric. He was unmarked then, and you still remember the shimmering olive of his eyes when he looked down at you for the first time. It felt like fate, like you’d tear apart the earth to have met him even half a second sooner.
The first time he kills for you is the first time you tell him you love him. You etch the way his eyes blow wide into your memory, then carve him forever into your skin with sharp teeth and sharper sighs. You lay with him for the first time that night, letting him make and unmake you with his hands and his teeth and his lavender hair tangled between your fingers. He splits you apart again and again and again and you’re not a pious man but you still forsake your gods to worship at his feet.
He tells you stories of the before, when humans were still young and called your kind things like “god” and “divine” and killed each other merely for a chance to look upon smooth marble skin. He laughs when you ask a thousand questions, never tiring or taunting in the face of your childlike wonder and desire for knowledge. You are old, yes, but he is eternal. Or at least, that’s what you used to think.
He confesses to you that he sometimes yearns for his lost humanity, if only so he could feel the burning in his veins when your bodies melt together night after night. The moment he tells you he can feel the heat of the fire Haruka uses for his craft is the moment you know you will one day lose him. You ask him if there is a way to stop it, to slow it down, and you try not to cry your devastation into his hair when he just gives you a serene smile and tells you it will be okay.
You think to ask Toraichi and Miyako but you know that for all the ancient texts they have stored in their library, none of it is as old as Nao or half as knowledgeable. You spend centuries with him in that subterranean castle and you cherish the time he is awake like you never have before you thought that you could ever lose him.
He doesn’t talk about it in the same way you do. You hold him closer when he sleeps and run your fingers through his lavender silk hair. You pray to those forgotten gods you forsook millennia ago even though you can’t remember the language to speak their names. Nao hides his fear in his work, buries his anger in your body, carves his acceptance into your skin. You press kisses to the scar on his arm when he admits to being afraid while you dance in the garden at half-past three. Lightning flashes through the darkness, and you can’t help but think that for all his years he still looks so young. You hold him tighter and kiss away his fear under the moonlight until he shoves you against a wall and shows you exactly why he was called a god.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
He understands you better than anyone else long before you charm your way into his eternity. He never tries to cage your wild heart or stop you from roaming the continents in search of another adventure. He goes with you to the place where you were born, though the sunlight is harsh and the air vibrates with hidden secrets. He tells you that he was there when those monoliths were built. You get drunk off his laughter and his voice when you finally charm the story out of him.
He goes with you to the place where he found you—now a sprawling city drenched in sunlight and sin. You hold no love for the place, though Nao leaves a single gladiolus bloom on the place that would have been your grave. You pretend it doesn’t remind you of when your heart still beat.
He understands the wanderlust in your veins, understands that you are not trying to leave him but merely trying to see. You ask him where he was born one day, and he looks so stricken for a moment that you almost regret the question.
“Would you like me to take you there?” he asks, and you feel the gravity of the question weighing in your bones.
You do not hesitate. “Yes,” you say. His smile curves ever so slightly, and your stolen blood roars with the rush of pleasing him.
He takes you to a place that has no name. Magic quivers in the air around you, more ancient than the first forest and more powerful than the Seelie queen. Scattered stones carved with symbols in a language you don’t know surround a singular hut on this mountain in the middle of nowhere, and you think it fitting that Nao was born so close to the moon. The white hut is small, nestled into the earth like it grew from the rubble of whatever ancient structure once stood here. Nao calls out what sounds like a greeting in a language you don’t know, the words deep and primal and thrumming through the air with a power you know the world could not afford to find. More people than you thought could fit in such a small space emerge from the swinging crystal sheet, led by a woman you can’t comprehend.
Her face is entirely devoid of features, yet you know that she could see right down to your soul should she choose. Her skin is nearly translucent in the moonlight, ageless and free of impurities. She is painted in swirling, iridescent symbols that you cannot read, and her clothes are a stark black version of what will become Nao’s own robes millennia down the road.
Her head turns in your direction, and though she has no eyes or mouth you can feel her smile in the magic that wraps around you. She bows her head and presses her faceless form against the back of Nao’s hand. Her fingers skitter under his bangs, down the lids of his eyes and beneath the line of his jaw. You feel something like sadness thrumming through the air, but Nao just smiles that serene smile and shakes his head.
You won’t realize for another three thousand years what those touches meant, and when you return to that mountain seeking a fix for Nao’s stolen sight, you find that the hut and the mountain are gone—vanished like they were never there to begin with.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
He looks so tired now, sitting on a crumbling stone bench with his eyes turned skyward like he wishes he could still see the fading stars. Exhaustion slumps the line of his shoulders, and you lean him back into you when you stand behind him. He sighs when your fingers dig into his skin, massaging away tension and stress with practiced hands.
“Mmm. You’re so warm. You’ll put me to sleep if you keep that up,” he rumbles.
Your fingers freeze immediately, and you nearly choke on how fast you suck in a breath between your teeth. Nao tilts his head back further into you, as if pressing his very presence into the fabric of your clothes.
“It was a joke, darling.”
You squeeze his shoulders gently, shaking your head to rid yourself of the thought of him sleeping for weeks on end. He only ever sleeps for a week at a time. You have no reason to fear.
“My love, I—“
He grabs your wrist—traces your mating scar with his thumb, then his lips, then his tongue. He stands to his full height and curls his own fingers through your hair, pressing down on all the pressure points along your skull that leave you boneless in his arms. Your jaws snap shut as your body betrays you, trembling and shivering at the mere concept of him.
Nao hums. “You were saying?” The smirk curving up his face proves to be your undoing, and you sweep him into your arms so he doesn’t have to expend energy on the stairs.
“Natsuya,” he breathes on an exhale, content to merely taste the weight of your name on his tongue as he weaves his fingers into the very fabric of your soul. Your toes curl and your eyes close; you always come undone at the way he whispers your name into the hollow of your throat.
He maps the planes of your back in the afterglow—soft strokes that leave gooseflesh rippling along your skin. His lips curl into a small o as he yawns, and you turn to bury your face in his chest to avoid thinking about the ins and outs of sleeping.
“Will you be here when I wake?” he asks, voice soft and colored with the barest shade of fear.
Your dead heart nearly collapses in your chest. “Always, my love. I will always be here when you wake.” You hope he can feel the promise you press into the skin of his chest.
When you look up, he is asleep.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
One week of slumber turns into two, and he gives no sign of waking. You lay opposite him, tuck his hair behind his ear, trace the scars that frame his face. His face holds no pain while he sleeps, and you wonder if his eyes will open if you wish hard enough.
It’s another three days before he finally wakes. You’re so elated that you pick him up and spin him around the room; his laugh is a soft, tired thing, but the sound of it still fills you with euphoria to the tips of your unruly hair.
You take him to the garden that same night and dance with him under the moonlight like you did when you could still call yourselves young. You remind him that you love him, that he is yours and you are his. He tells you he is afraid, and his face twists in pain with it because even after millennia walking this earth Nao does not like to allow himself to be weak. You tell him he is strong, that you will figure this out together.
You do not mention your hand on his back and his toes on yours because he is not strong enough to dance with you on his own.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
“Please, my love,” you whisper when six months pass and he has not woken up. You crush your lips to his forehead and tell yourself it will be fine.
You wish you could believe it.
He wakes in short bursts. Five hours here, forty-two minutes there, an entire day just once. You tell him stories of Rin and Sousuke and Haruka and Makoto when he wakes, of Gou’s exploits in battle with Isuzu by her side. You tell him that they’re doing just fine and they want him to get the rest he needs more than anything.
You do not tell him that it’s been fifty-seven years and sixteen days since you’ve seen any of them.
You tell him the world is the same, on the rare occasions he asks. You bury your sorrow and your pain and your fear deep inside yourself, down and down and down until he can’t even find it through your mating bond.
You lie to him, because it is the only thing you can do when you hear his voice for the first time in two hundred years and he asks how long he has been sleeping.
“Just a few days,” you tell him with your silver tongue and golden smile.
“Stay with me?” He asks, and it is so quiet even your enhanced ears strain to hear him.
“Always,” you vow once more, but he is asleep before the words reach him. You put a hand on his arm. His skin is harder than it has ever been, an unmovable block of marble beneath your palms because the longer you live as a vampire the more impenetrable you become, and Nao has been alive for longer than even you can comprehend.
You don’t leave his side except to feed yourself, and the time you spend with him is spent telling him stories of what you’ve done together—you know he hates the silence that comes with being all alone more than anything.
It’s another seven hundred and eighty years before you step into the world during the day and realize you can feel the warmth of the summer rain on your skin. You breathe deeply of freshly watered earth and warm, humid air. You allow yourself five minutes to bask in sensations you thought you’d never feel again before cementing a plan in the back of your mind.
Despite your determination, it is another three hundred and twenty-six years before you can bring yourself to consider making such a long trip without Nao by your side, and another one hundred and fifty-three before you dredge up the courage to actually do it.
His eyes have not opened since the last time he asked you to stay with him, and you shove the despair further down into the depths of your fraying soul. You have one hope left and you cling to it with the one piece of yourself that isn’t still lying in that bed with Nao.
You do not listen to the part of your soul that whispers she will not be there.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
You send a message to Haruka through Gloom, begging a once-in-an-eon favor with no questions asked and no strings attached.
He acquiesces and hands you two spelled objects like he knows what you’re going to do with it but respects you too much to tell you not to.
You pour your heart and soul into it. You tell Nao you love him, tell him he is your moon and you are his sun and despite any distance between you, you will never leave him. I am yours, always, my love. Even when the stars burn to ash, I will be yours, you write. You tell him you will return when you have found what you are looking for, and lay it on his chest beneath a gladiolus bloom and his own stiff fingers.
Haruka says the spell will last for an eternity.
You don’t say that Nao was supposed to last that long too, but you think that Haruka hears it anyway.
You travel halfway across the world until you find the place where the sun meets the sky. A single mountain rises out of the water in the distance, and you cling to the shred of hope that’s kept you going since the last time Nao closed his eyes.
You climb the mountain with your bare hands, following your instincts and your heart more than any path designed to trick you. Three of Nao’s bracelets clink against your wrist with every step, and you close your eyes against the image of him laughing and dancing in the garden that threatens to overwhelm you.
The journey is longer than it was when you were here with Nao and twice as overwhelming. You feel it the instant that you cross a barrier—ancient magic skitters across your skin and kisses your lashes. It feels primordial, powerful in a way you still have no name for, and it is warm against your skin. You wonder if this is how Nao felt when he brought you here for the first time. Unsettled yet at peace, emboldened yet humbled.
You do not know what the word Nao spoke all those millennia ago in that ancient language was, but you remember the way it sounded and the way it reverberated against your teeth. You speak it now, standing in front of a little white hut with a curtain of crystal and moonlight.
The faceless woman emerges once more, her skin as clear and smooth as the first time you saw her. She is dressed in the mourning clothes of his own homeland this time, all silken robes in earthen colors.
Your breath seizes in your lungs and a tiny piece of your soul unravels faster than you can catch hold of it. No. No.
She steps toward you and presses a warm hand against the silent, gaping cavity of your chest.
“Please,” you croak, but the word comes out shattered in the middle because you know what her answer will be before she even shakes her head.
You want to ask her who she is to him, but you cannot see beyond the black void of your own despair, cannot speak through the burning ash clinging to your throat.
The faceless woman steps back into the hut with the moonlight curtain, and you know that you will never see her again.
You have failed. You collapse to the ground and pray to gods you don’t believe in for the earth to reclaim you so you do not have to live with the knowledge that you cannot save the one thing that matters to you. A primal sound rips itself from your throat, echoing across the mountain. The forest responds in turn, howling its despair until your very bones vibrate with the force of it.
Your heart burns to ash. Your soul unravels until the only thing left of you is the thread connecting you to Nao.
It is sixty-two days before you have the strength to follow that thread home.
꧁ ⋅ ✦ ⋅ ꧂
You do not stop for anything on your journey. You do not eat, you do not drink, you do not sleep. You pass through cities and towns like a ghoul, following the only thing you know to get back to Nao.
His skin is waxy in the light when you make it back to him, stretched thin over empty veins and hair that never seems to grow any longer. Your ribs are collapsing inside your chest cavity, piercing your lungs from the inside out and ripping apart the only shelter you ever had for your too-fragile heart.
You sit down beside him and try to tuck his hair behind his ear, but your fingers cannot move the strands as they once could. He is frozen, perfection incarnate in a marble statue that lies in your bed.
You lie next to him, threading your stiff fingers through the gaps between the hand he holds on his chest. You breathe his name against his skin and swear your vow with open eyes.
You will stay with him forever.
(“Nothing ever truly lives forever, Natsuya,” he said to you once. “There is always a cycle, always a beginning and an end.” He turns to you with a serene smile at this, and you were too enamored with his sparkling eyes and the milky-white skin of his throat to really understand what he meant.
“As long as I’m with you, I think I can handle not living forever,” you’d responded, shaking the curls from your eyes in the way you knew would end in scrapes from brick walls and investment in sound-proof panels for your bedroom.
He runs his fingers through your hair, breathing your name into the hollow of your throat. His voice comes out in a purr that sends your toes curling. “You will stay with me, then? Until the end?”
You have made this vow countless times, and you will make it countless more times, but in that moment it was the only vow that mattered to either of you.
“Always.”)