What was love to someone who carried the Zabini name like a crown of thorns? What was love to one whose hands were stained with the blackest blood? The blood of sin. The blood of the unutterable. No amount of prayer could turn the slaughterhouse into a house of God. No amount of repenting could reverse time and bring the shattered teacup back together.
He had been born with sin burned into his very soul; tainted by the hands of his creator. He was the exact image of his mother—others had said so continuously—blessed with her beauty and grace. But there in the reflective light of the mirror above the bathroom sink, it was his father who stared right back at him. It was him and the portrait of his sins. Perhaps his father recognized the thrum of the blood rushing through his veins as his own and knew there would be no saving one or the other. Perhaps it was his own soul that he grieved whenever he looked upon his son and knew he had damned them both. Perhaps that is why his hands had turned cruel; his hatred of his self was greater than the love for this blessed child.
And blessed he was. Oh, how beautiful he was. A true angel full of honey syrup and razor sharp teeth; with wings of silver and talons of gold; with veins full of the sun’s blood and words wrapped up in the most beautiful silky tongues. Created in His very image, housing the most heavenly seraphic spirit. Was there any greater glory but to be something divine? Was there anything greater than to be God’s favourite?
Yet, Blaise was young when he first contemplated the reason for his existence; still reaping the fruitful seeds of a childhood. Was his very existence not more a burden to him than to his father? He had not asked to be borne—to be this hideous creature sewn together by regrets and impurities. With cracked bones and cut up skin. It was him who was hurt by the sharp edges of that prison which was his flesh at each corner and every turn. It was not his father but he who had to push the horrid weight of his existence up the hill every continuous day only for it to fall back down.
What could possibly become of the holiest creature who was born into the lake of unrighteousness? There was no lightning strike to send him down under the dead soil of the earth. There was no fall from the gilded cage of heaven. There were no eternal chains to keep him in the infernal darkness until the day of judgement. There was no wrath of God to be met with for the skies and altars were empty.
Did God see him in his gentle mother’s womb and knew then that he could never entirely appeal to Him?
There had been a noose tied around his delicate neck from his very first breath. His first cry had tied the final knot. His birth had been his ending and death will be his beginning. This life he had been gifted was a purgatory of his own creation. The fires sprung from his own fingertips and the hymns were ripped from his throat. His knees were raw from their place before the altar each night, his hands together and his lips murmuring the familiar words of their prayers.
Please, Lord. Please, take me someplace far from here. Take me somewhere where he cannot touch me any longer. Why is it that I must suffer at the hands of my supposed protector? What wrongs have I committed to have been condemned to such a fate? Please, forgive me for all of them and relieve me of this eternal suffering. Grant me the sacred haven bought with the precious blood of Christ.
And with every coming morning, as nothing had been divinely altered and the rot was spreading no less within him, the blood in his mouth would thicken. It sat there, patiently waiting on his tongue as he prayed—so very eager to choke.
But in the end, no matter how one tried to escape it, the day of reckoning came for all. Judgement came for all. Every beast and every man. None was safe from the holy wretchedness of God. None could outrun their fate when the angels came down from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit of eternal sufferings.
And so, salvation had finally come. Though, the heavens had not opened up and no hand of God had reached down to take the reap of what was sown. Salvation was brought down by a mother’s scorn. The scythe was wielded by her sainted hands and it was she who became the retribution for his wicked actions. For the Lord Himself had said that the wages for sin was death.
It was right there, at the too large dinner table, with the eyes of Jesus Christ looking down upon them from his spot on the wall, and a lifeless man slumped over with his face directly into his mother’s ribollita, that he learned the rage of a mother. The love of a mother.
Though this was nothing rather new for him. Throughout these early stages of his childhood, he never once had reason to doubt his mother’s love for him. It was clear in the way she held him tightly and sung his favourite lullabies, in the way she read to him and kissed the crown of his head. The love of his mother ran as deep in his blood as the rage of his father; it was the essence of who he was and would become.
And yet, this very act, which was as much self preservation as it was anything else, showed Blaise that perhaps he had been wrong all his life whenever he believed that no person, no matter who, could ever entirely understand him. Perhaps it was his mother—the woman who had given him his heart and breathed life into the lungs she had created—who was the only one in all of existence that could fully understand him; see him, accept him, and love him. That no matter how much of him he believed to be a hideous creature meant for nothing but atonement, she saw him as the beautiful boy she, herself, had made and grown. It was she who was the creator of this blessed angel in her strong arms. Not God, not his father, but she alone.
“My dove, my darling. I love you, my dearest one.”
She had bled for her child as he came into her world and she would bleed a million times over to keep him.
In the grand scheme of things, it was odd how little power the death of his father held over his conscience. He could certainly sense how the scene would have brought layers of well-fitted macabre nightmares with it—ghostly eyes in the mirror, voices in the dead of the night, a creeping sense of guilt clasping around his heart. But to such a loose and unseemly imagination as was his, he thought not much of it at all unless reminded of the man.
His mother seemed even less troubled by the blood on her hands than he was.
The funeral was a rather quiet affair. Before long, they were back in a home that was far too large for the two of them and they never spoke of it again. She pulled him beside her in her own bed and cradled him until he fell into prescient dreams of another angel.
Throughout these upcoming years of his life, it was difficult to discern where his young self started and ended. At times, he swore he could see the unscarred hands of the young boy he once was before him but one look in the mirror ridded him quickly of that image. Yet, he could still feel him. He lived in his veins, running and running as though chased. He tried beckoning him into his own arms with sweet whispers of safety but it was fruitless. So, he left him to his running because it was his own self and he would be damned before he killed that lovely little boy.
These trying years were an in-between. A haunted brush of time with memories of what once was and hopes of what one day will be. It was a house of ghosts wherein he himself, though entirely aware of this fact rather than the ones who never realised, was the greatest plague; never entirely walking on the back of his feet and disturbing the dust. He was more often than not alone in these years but never lonely.
His mother and he fell into a steady rhythm as the time grew. He knew exactly the right way to behave whenever someone new was strung along: how to smile, how to make polite conversation, how to blink.
“Isn’t he charming?”
He knew when they had to move and how to evade any questions or suspicions thrown his way. It was all terribly, horrendously dull.
He read his books and played the piano when asked nicely, he slept blanketed by the sweltering rays of the Italian sun and read some more. The few people of his own age that he saw were dreadfully boring and he could not begin to grow and care for them. He certainly had no one to call his own.
What was love to one who was cursed with a name like his? Love was a fleeting moment; nothing but a mere means to an end. It was nothing real or true.
Then he met her. Oh, she was beautiful. She was spoiled and easily bored and beautiful. She was a tempest of her own. A beautiful raging storm of a ferociously cold stare and even sharper words. Love was nothing to those who had never been in the presence of her. They could not possibly have felt a hair’s breadth of the devotion he felt towards this seraphic girl.
For a man—though he was far more like a simple boy in the hands of her; a mere something desperate for the slim fingers of her gilded hands to mould him into the cavity of her chest, engulfing her heart—whose entire life up until then had been devoted to being a righteous angel of God, a devotee, he had never felt a more religious man than he did at the very sight of her. A dove had been released from the heavenly gates and descended upon her.
He was Adam, a man made from the dust, and God had just slipped His holy fingers beneath his carefully crafted skin, gently plucking out his rib, leaving behind a chasm of eternal longing. Every second of its continued absence let it grow larger and beastlier. But it was there, in the eyes of his darling pansy, that he felt what it meant to be whole. The emptiness that had once resided there was eternally forgotten. The void turned into liquid mercury, healing with the gentle pads of her fingers the frail and raw edges God had negligently left behind. And as her hand slipped into his—a simple greeting; an insignificant hello—the entirety of his soul rose in recognition. He knew, with full lucid certainty, that this beautiful girl was everything that he was missing. She was what God had stolen from him and was now finally returned to her rightful place.
He wanted to zip himself open entirely and press her lovingly inside—back where she belonged. He wanted her to stretch herself over the void and reform into the bone from which she had been taken so he could be full of her forever. He wanted, selfishly, for her to press a kiss to his heart, beating steadily in the rhythm of her breaths against her lips.
He wanted her to devour him in return. To ravage him. To get drunk on him. He wanted to taste himself on her tongue and to be the pieces stuck between her teeth. He wanted her to pry him open until he was naked before her and feast on the taste of his bones and delight in his blood. His blood that was so stained with sin, cleaned by the simple devoting act of the highest love. He wanted her to be so full of him that when Sunday came and she sat in Mass, she would be far too full of him to receive the body and blood of Christ. He would be her penance, her absolution, her God. She would be the cathedral and he the devotee. She would only need to ask.
She voiced her name.
“Pansy,” he repeated, like a prayer, relishing in the way his mouth curled around the most beautiful word, the taste of it in his mouth. It was something biblical. Something that was meant to be breathed rather than spoken and only with the utmost reverence. Her pulse hummed gloriously in a hymn beneath the place where his finger met the skin of her wrist. He wished he could rest there forever, listening to the song of her heart.
But then her hand slipped out of his, taking away the thrum of endlessness, and her eyes slid right over to the boy who was everything he was not.
The possible idea that she felt not an echo of their bond was untenable. How could she hold his heart, carved right out of his now forever bleeding chest, in her raw hands and not be immensely aware of the heavy weight she carried? Her very name was written in the sinews that bound him together. The siren call of her voice was etched into the bones that held him up. The sweet sighing of her breaths were carved into his own lungs. When the maggots had their fill of his rotting corpse, all that would remain in his grave were echoes of her. This longing for her would outlive his mortal body.
He watched as she continued to grant the sweet syrups of her soft skin to one who held no true intellect of the divinity with which she was stained; one who never rip himself open at her thorns and grant the spilled blood as sacrifice, hoping that his blood was pure enough for her to sustain herself with.
He wanted to be the recipient of the wicked smile and vicious eyes. He wanted her gentle laughter echoing in the chambers of his heart. He wanted to brush his fingers down the slope of her nose, to kiss the pale skin of her eyelids as she slept soundly, and to memorise every line and plane of her.
Could she not see? Could she not hear his screaming devotions?
I want to carry you into the deepest caverns of my skeleton and worship you there until the final flames of hell die down. Had I every moment of forever, it still would not grant me the time enough to wholly love you. You are the very air stolen from my lungs. To cleave you from my soul, would tear me down entirely.
He was a demanding creature, born from the hollows of love, who, until the end of time, would forever be hunkering for more. But for her, he would be her humble servant. He would relinquish anything he had and follow her wherever she wished to go. Wherever she was, there was Eden.
He was a demanding and selfish creature. He was a faulty creature who could not help but show his nature to her. In every meaning of the word, he seemed unworthy of this darling girl, and yet she has excused every last one of his faults. She has christened him clean.
Never in his short life had he understood that need for an eternal life; was one century of chained misery not enough? But now, as he looked upon this fire of his heart, the thought of ever breathing for a mere second when she was not, was too agonising to even consider. He could never be parted from her from then on forth. He would walk that arduous path to the dead with his feet bare and bring her back with him, not looking back until they finally saw the stars again. He would never sacrifice even a wisp of a moment, let alone forever.
Did she know the truth—the absolute bone-crushing truth—of his love? She must, for even the greatest idiot would not miss the tongues of his spoken worship or the hymns of his devotion. She must for when he took too long to waver his eyes away from the arch of her throat or the dip of her collarbones, or if a moment of impetuous bravery seized him, the soft flesh of her lips, she looked at him with such an odd look in those hallowed eyes of hers that it eclipsed, even if for just a mere glimpse of a moment, the slow death he was dealt by the absence of her flesh in his.
And then, like a foolish child attracted to the flickering flame of a candle, he proceeded from staring to touching; a singular finger curling around a lock of her dark hair, as gently as if it were a bird.
She called his name and he felt his heart trembling within him. He wondered if it might crawl right out of his ribs, seeking her warmth. He would not resent it; he understood the impulse.
Say it again, he nearly begged. Say my name until the taste of it never leaves you.
She touched him and everything felt right once more. The cavity in his chest seemed no longer eternal. He could return to his own self. He could breathe again, having forgotten it in her prolonged absence. This was what he was created for. Every momentary agony he had felt upon being born this horrid creature fell away like water and made way for the warmest rays of sunlight.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice chiming as though a heavenly song. It was a psalm that all angels above were right to feel jealous of. None could begin to compare.
You, he thought. Forever.
Her sharp eyes glinted with the promise of ‘one day’ and softened with the knowledge that the space she had left behind at her creation would forever be waiting for her.
But then it slipped right on away yet again and the emptiness returned tenfold. Every pain he has ever experienced entered the forefront of his mind. Every scrap of warmth was taken by the gentle hand of the woman he loved beyond all reason.
He pressed his fingers to the dip in his skin—his missing rib—digging agonisingly into the wound, serving as a constant reminder of his love.
Bone of my bones. Blood of my blood. Why do you continue to keep choosing this life alone? I am familiar; I am a heartbeat you have forever known. You know, as well as I do, that he could not love you more in a hundred years than I do in a single moment.
But Blaise loved her and so he waited. For his love, despite all else, did not come selfishly. It came with blunted knives and carefully filed down claws, with tainted blood and a constant haunting of whispers, whispering hodu l’Adonai, but never would he let it carry a cage. He could never keep her behind bars of gold and clip her little wings. Because, as he looked upon this blessed woman, sitting beside God, he knew that she was made to fly.
He would never, and yet, the entirety of his self yearned for her. The drum of her name was the blood rushing through his veins. The wish for his heart’s darling has consumed him so completely; his great thought in living was her. It has swallowed him with bones and all. He woke up aching and went to bed yearning. The space in between was filled with a longing so fierce that he feared it must undo him. But what was death but eternal possession?
So he waited and would have waited an eternity more had she not at last understood the language he spoke and looked at him in return with the sweetest imaginable looks. She, at last, reached with her pure hands into his tainted body and reformed herself into the rib from whence she came, making a home between the folds of his flesh, and embracing so rightly the heart that would eternally be hers to hold. Never would they be separated once again; every living creature on earth would cease to be before either would forsake the other.