title from Jon Bellion - Guilotine

Sleep on me, feel the rhythm in my chest, just breathe
I will stay so the lantern in your heart won't fade
The secrets you tell me, i'll take to my grave
There's bones in my closet but you hang stuff anyway

Also this fic was heavily inspired by this lovely piece of writing

///

You pull your sleeves back, wiping the dust from your watch on the coat that you stole from a nobleman’s manservant at the nearby tavern. You watch as the minute hand slow ticks. It inches its way closer and closer to the appointed time and when the minute and hour hand finally align, you begin your walk to the cemetery.

It’s the first time she’ll meet you. The year is 1665 and you’re walking on the docks alongside the River Thames in London. She perished like so many others in her time during the Plague.

Eventually you locate the cemetery and walk across each row until you see her name. Perched on one of the tombstones, it doesn’t take long before the soil under her tomb begins to shake and fracture. You hear a muffled scream from below the ground but you received clear instructions to only offer your assistance only after she has risen from the ground.

You marvel at the beauty of her rebirth. You can feel her unborn strength as she rises from her resting place and soon, you see her fingers, her arms, slender and pale as she breaks to the surface. Her entire body is covered in earth, her pupils are a bright crimson red and her hair is in complete disarray, but there she is.

It’s amazing how she never changes, that she still looks the same. In every century, in every age.

She knows what she’s become and she lets out a scream which physically pains you. Her fingers try to scratch her heart out, but her perfect impenetrable body prevents it. She’s frantic and it’s the first time you’ve ever seen her panic.

You approach her with a smile like how she tells you whenever she recounts the story of how you met her. Her eyes widen in fear and you reassure her that you’re not a hunter. You glance at the watch; there’s not much time left. The loop will open soon.

You explain hastily to her what you are and that you’ll meet again five years from now in Venice. “Don’t feed on humans until the next full moon. Only animals but be discreet”, you hastily remind and you wonder if she’s able to digest the happenings of the first ten minutes of her new life.

Digest. Anything. Ha. Oh, you can wait to tell her that pun when you get back to the present. But for now, she stares at you with wide eyes when you pass her five blood bags that you stole from a blood bank in California from 2005. “Remember. No feeding on humans. Take this instead.” You hold her scared face in your hands and smile.

You’re here now. She doesn’t know it yet, but you’re here now.

“You’re going to be okay.”

//

She kisses you until you wake in Fukushima. It’ll be arguable one of the busiest days in existence for the both of you. You’ve told her of the catastrophes of mankind and she doesn’t like to interfere with the daily lives of human beings.

But today, the both of you are in Fukushima and although you know that nothing will prevent the nuclear disaster that is sure to happen, you want to minimize the amount of bloodshed as much as you can.

The both of you go around diverting traffic away from the areas that you remember were the worst hit and cause traffic accidents even to make drivers take the safer route uphill away from the beach.

When disaster strikes, you help with the evacuation process while she lifts boulders and buildings and escorts the kids back to their families.

Later that night she is quiet and so are you. You’ve both seen your fair share of destruction, but that doesn’t make the next any easier to stomach.

//

The first World War had just begun. Your father was on the frontline when you were delivered. He was always warm but you rarely saw him as he was always on a big boat that carried him further and further away with each voyage. But you’ve met him. Many times. Watching the tales that your mother told you in person was indeed more satisfying. You watch him save thousands during your travels.

His death was noble and quick. You lay him to rest on a peaceful hill in Switzerland.

You made your first jump when you were 12. You’re huddled with your mother underground in the bunkers when the bombs drop. You feel the vibrations with get stronger as the bombs get closer. The younger children are crying but your mother is at peace and suddenly everything disappears in a white light. You’re breathing in the rubble and the scream that leaves you is immediately muffled by a hand.

Your eyes snap open and immediately you stumble back but a hand reaches out to steady you. You’re in the middle of a rainforest and your brain refuses to work because nothing is making sense.

“Hey, you’re okay.” A lady that is wearing clothes that you’ve never seen before is speaking to you. What kind of heaven is this, you can’t help but wonder?

“No, this isn’t heaven. Unless you’re insinuating that I look like an angel. By the way, these are skinny jeans and these are converses.” She laughs at you, as if reading the thoughts in your head was a daily occurrence and continues, “This is going to sound crazy but I’m you from the future. I’m coming from the year 2010.”

Your stunned silence only causes her to smile wider. But somehow you don't question this sudden turn of events. Later, much later you will come to question what happened to your family, your home. Much later you will become resentful and confused. But for now you believe this stranger and find comfort in her knowing grin.

“We’re currently in Brazil and the year is 1800.” She s a piece of paper in your hands. You can’t read but it looks like an address. Your next jump is going to be to San Francisco. Its currently in chaos because a bomb went off a few days ago. You’re going to this address and say our parents died in the blast.”

“Who are these people?”

“They’ll take care of us, you, for the next three years. Learn as much as you can while you’re there. We’ll start jumping a lot after that.”

//

You meet her for the very first time when you are around 18. Time no longer makes sense to you and you gauge your age as best by looking at the reflection of your face.

It was six months after a particularly traumatizing jump. You’d ended up in the middle of Berlin during the second World War. You emerged from a loop right before the eyes of Hitler himself. You were on the way to the dissection lab a loop opened and scrambled to make your getaway.

Traumatizing would have been a light word to use for such a situation.

Every night since then you’ve been drinking and inhaling whatever substance you can find to forget about what happened. She finds you on the corner of the street with your fellow junkie friends not far from your dealer’s house in Minnesota one night.

They wolf whistle and she turns to give them the scariest face you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s a face that’s ready to kill and it only hardens when she notices you. She marches straight up to the sidewalk and everyone starts apologizing and backing up but she pays them no attention. Instead she drags you by the collar and forces you to stand before hauling you off to the nearby park.

“You made me wait a ing century for you, just so I could pluck you off the sidewalk from your gang of riffraff’s snorting ?” She’s enraged and you have no doubt that she could kill you. Something about her just screams danger, you know that she’s a hunter, but she’s ing ethereal under the street lamps and you can’t look away.

You also don’t process any of the words she says. “I’m sorry. Have we met? Are you a cop?”

It takes her a while to come down from the shock. But when she finally realizes the turn of events she laughs. And it scares you even more but her laughter is edging closer and closer to sounding a little maniac and you stare at her confused.

“I’m sorry, it’s just the irony in how we’re meeting. You’re Wendy. And You’re a Time Traveler. You warned me about this but I didn’t expect that we’d be meeting today. We met in England, at the height of the Great Plague. Oh, I’m a vampire by the way.”

You laugh. Like double over and land on your knees and laugh. Had you taken LSD? Aren’t you supposed to go on some psychedelic hippy trip? Why did no one warn you that your brain might try to tear itself apart?

Berlin. Vampires. Death. Bombs away.

It loops and loops and loops in your head until your breathing shallows. You start to clouds mushrooming. The sounds of machine guns firing start to drill your ears along with diabolical German words and the sounds of saws and you’re about to scream when she lifts you and starts running.

You let her take you because you’re convinced that death will end your misery but she places you on silk sheets and when you look out the window, you see the Empire State Building. You should be scared when she starts to crawl up your body but you aren’t. There’s something every familiar about this stranger when she fits her body beside yours and gently holds you.

Your body begins to shake and the tears fall and she holds you even after you break apart and put yourself back together and tear yourself once again.

She orders room service while she drinks out of a juice box that says ‘cranberry’ but you know that’s just false advertising at play.

“What do you mean when you said I made you wait a whole century?” You croak as you swallow bacon and chug down milk from the breakfast feast she ordered for you.

She winces and sighs. Her fingers twitch and fidget like she wants to hold onto something, someone, you realise when they eventually wrap around your wrist. “I last saw you in 1860. You said it would be awhile before we’d meet again. I didn’t expect it to be a thousand years.”

“I’m sorry.” You don’t know what else to say but the lines around her face disappear and she looks content with holding your wrist as she sinks into bed.

“This is the youngest I’ve ever seen you and yet you look older than me.”

“How old are you?”

“My heart stopped beating four thousand years ago.”

“You look good.”

She looks at you fondly and your heart aches because there is history here. She looks at you like she knows you, even though you don’t know who don’t know who, or what, you even are. “I don’t age, my love.”

“How long have we known each other?”

“For me? The day I stopped breathing. For you, today is Day 1.”

She smiles so sweetly and she looks at you with love. And though she’s had a history with you, you realise that you’re looking at your future. 

A future that’s for once, not so uncertain.

//

Stumbling into her apartment in present time. You shout for her as you search the rooms and find her with her headphones on while she paints. Your legs give way but she catches you, she always will.

“Where are you coming from?”

“The year 2001. New York. September. 11.” Her eyes soften as she holds you on the cold winter floor. It is currently three days from Christmas but all you think about is how acrid death smelled. “I was on the roof of the World Trade Center. Trying to enjoy some fresh air cause I’m an idiot. I saw the planes; I saw their faces.”

She frantically searches for any signs of injury and is instantly relieved when she finds none. You breath her in to try and forget. But instead the sounds of steel twisting and crushing and the breaking of bones fills you once again and you don’t know what year it is or the date. You don’t know where your family is nor do you know if they’re alive or not.

“I saw their eyes; I could hear their screaming and I could smell the bloodshed.”

You stare at Irene and focus on the colour of her eyes. Now, it is gold. A dull gold but her red eyes from when she first turned, flicker and then her eyes are black like when she’s hungry and you shut your eyes because you hear the screams of children from Fukushima, Irene’s from London and then you hear your own from Berlin.

You hold onto her so tightly that you’ll bruise in some places but she’s immortal, a constant. Your constant. Your home. No matter how far and for how long you’ll return to her. You don’t think of the lonely nights when she cries herself to sleep or the people that she used to in her angry rage while she waits.

Time is non-linear for you. And she knows this. She kisses your knuckles gingerly but you still wince in pain and find that they’ve been split open. She starts to recount the first time you saw her. And the second. And the third. She’s an immortal and she never forgets even when memories and events disorientates you.

She remembers when you first kissed her, in Venice, the second time she saw you yet the thousandth time you met her. You’d forgot it was only your second meeting when she saved you from drowning when the loop opened in one of the canals.

You kiss her when you wake up and she proceeded to slap you and kick you out. It never fails to make you smile.

She remembers where you both made love. On an island in Greece. It was your first time with her but her nth with you. You remember her hands on your hips and your core on her thigh. You remember how she made you gasp with a single finger and how she made you fall apart with .

She remembers the worst fight when she’d thrown a piano at you and when you showed up at her door with flowers and blood packs.

She tells you that if you ever forget, to not fret because you have left traces of yourself everywhere. Little clues that will always help you find your way home to her.

//

You blend into the shadows and run into the night, narrowly escaping the angry mob carrying torches and pitchforks.

Your steps are hurried but you cannot afford to get caught. Tonight, there’s a mass hunting of vampires. You’ve gone back into the past again and Irene has only just turned 50 days old. It’ll be her third time meeting you.

You find her lying down in a corner in a stable. She is shivering next to a dead horse, the carcass devoid of any blood.

She’s too groggy when she sees you and barely accepts the pack of O negative (which you’ll eventually learn is her favorite), you hastily get rid of the bloody garb she’s in and into fresher garments.

There’s a cottage not far from here that the both of you camp out in. You sit as far away as you can from her.

“I’m coming from the year 2020. I’m still pretty mad at you.”

“Were we fighting?” She stares blankly at you and it’s hard because she doesn’t know you yet. She’s not your Irene. The one that picks you up from after you collapse home dead tired or the one that tells you you’re beautiful after a nightmare. She’s not the Irene that’ll rub your tummy or help you braid your hair. ”Should I kill you now?”

You roll your eyes because it’s so like her to be dramatic. “You want a cat. But I think it’s pointless attaching ourselves to something so fragile and tiny and cute. It’s only going to hurt when it dies.”

“Why do I want a cat? A walking blood bag?” She looks at you in horror and disgust. She’s young and her thirst overwrites everything else.

“You get a lot better at controlling your thirst 5000 years from now. And a lot more annoying.” You assure but she frowns. Her expression soon changes when you pass her another bag of blood. “There’s many reasons but the main one is because you’re lonely.”

“You should go then. Spend more time with future me then maybe I wouldn’t need that cat and we wouldn’t be fighting. I don’t know who you are so you can leave me alone now.”

You sigh. Five centuries later and she is still insufferable. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t come and go as I please. Don’t worry, you’ll start to fall in love about a few months from now. I can’t wait. I romanced you so hard, you couldn’t keep your hands off me all night.”

The look of disgust is back again. You also know she’s curious because she told you many years from now. She told you that for once in that depilated cottage, she felt something other than misery. She stopped looking forward to the end of her existence and started to look forward to something.

“Wendy, I want a cat.”

“Please, shut up.”

Everything is painfully mortal except Irene. Be it a cat, dog, trees and rivers, they’ll come and go and die with the passage of time but nothing will change for Irene. You’re not an exception. Time is not linear for you but you will age. You’re temporary. Getting attached to something that’s captive to the sands of time will only destroy her.

But Irene wants a cat. She wants something. Your Irene who has given up mortality and normalcy. She has roamed the earths and survived war after war, plague after plague. She has met seen and met people from every corner of this earth, dined with the powerful and shared with the poor but she has chosen you.

Chosen this strange little traveler that can only bring her little souvenirs from the past and anecdotes of the future.

Ten days later, in 2007, you engage yourself in a stare off with your new inhabitant. She is arrogant and bratty and has claimed Irene as her own.

“I told you this was a bad idea. I told you.”

She laughs and kisses you as she gently carries your new sworn enemy worms her way back into your lover’s arms. “You’re so cute when you’re jealous.”

//

Irene’s laughter rings above the screech of the tires as you make a sharp turn at a red light. God, you’re going to die today for sure. You want to hate her because this is all her fault. “You just had to kiss me in a country where homouality is a crime, didn’t you?”

She laughs as you make a sharp turn. “I hope we’ll be placed in an all-female facility. God, just imagine how many baby gays I’m going to awaken.”

“None. Hopefully. Cause I don’t intend to get thrown into jail.” You shout, frustrated, as you make a sharp right and coming this close to colliding with a cement barricade.

You wonder if adrenaline courses through her dried vessels because this is the most fun you’ve ever seen her have. She beautiful when she laughs

“Also, why would you be flirting with the other inmates?” You question even though the police sirens are getting louder and louder. “This isn’t Orange is the New Black.”

“What’s that?”

Your favorite shows on Netflix? Right, never mind. You don’t know what Netflix is yet.” While multitasking has been something you pride yourself in having, now is not the time to be explaining how badly Irene crushes on Alex Voss when you’re engaged in a pretty intense car chase.

It’s the middle of the night when you drive the car straight into the river.

You take a deep breath and she yanks on your arm, carrying you bridal style and propels you to the other side of the world in the blink of an eye.

“Not cool.” You choke when you emerge onto your private beach in Monaco but all she does is smile and laugh and she is an absolutely vision and the amount of affection she showers you in could kill. “All this trouble because you couldn’t keep your hands to yourself.”

“Look at you.” She whispers into your ear, “how do you expect me too.”

It makes you blush because you know she wants you, loves you and it makes you feel powerful even though she could crush you with one hand. “It’s still your fault.”

“I lose my senses when I’m with you. You make me go crazy.”

And there is lust and love and probably every human emotion that could be seen in her eyes even though she’s dead. But she feels things for you. She feels. You make her feel. And with that your hand starts to tremble but you kiss her anyway. She needs to know that you feel things for her too. To the best of your human capacity.

“Take me home”

//

She’s an absolute mess. She bears the weight of living century after century after century, watching people come and go. It’s killing her but she can’t die.

You’re all she has. Even though you disappear, you’ll always be back. In a different city, for a couple hours, a month at most. She’s known you’ll return to her since she crawled from the ground. For five centuries, she awaits your soft kisses and hugs you when it’s time to leave knowing that she’ll be able to do it all over again.

But when day, that’ll all end. You will never come back for her.

You’re sunbathing when she smacks your shoulders and gasps. She signals for you to hold still, so you do. You feel a prick and she rolls you around so your lying on your back and shoves a single strand of hair in your face.

“My love, your hair. It’s white.”

Nothing prepares you for the fear that wracks her face. Nothing. Her eyes go out of focus and starts unconsciously scratch at her unbreakable skin.

You don’t get it. And you’ve known people who’ve had white hair as toddlers so you don’t understand the reaction when it hits you, straight to your gut. You’re not old, not that old at least. You try to recall your age. How old even are you?

She’s looking at you like you’re lying on your deathbed and she grips your wrists so hard it could break and you want nothing more than to be able to stay.

//

Her head is resting on your lap. You’re lounging in a penthouse in Milan. Being a Time Traveler has it pros, such as being able to play the stock market like a finely tuned instrument. “Doesn’t it bother you that I can’t stay? That I come and go as and when I please?”

“Does it bother you that my basic instinct would be to kill you right now?”

You shrug, you’ve never given much thought about it. “Not really. I trust you. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Yeah well, you can’t help it either. We both…programmed this way. I know that every single time you’re not here, you’re out there trying your damn hardest to find a way back to me, and that’s enough for me. I can wait. I have forever.”

“It would have been easier if you had taken another of your own kind.” You’ve always known this. If she’d been with another, she wouldn’t have to put up with a lover that disappears into the shadows and reappears, sometimes 30 years later.

“Infinitely. But I am happiest when you are with me.”

You simmer in your thoughts, in your memories. Her face is always a constant, even as the architecture evolves through the eras, as fashion recycles and you see chokers grace the runways again, as the earth starts to deteriorate and decay. She has always been yours in every age, she is always lovely and smiling and smug and flirty. Sometimes she is sad and sometimes she shakes with rage. You remember her with tears streaking her face and it still kills you because she is out there somewhere mourning your loss.

“I came from Paris, two years ago. You were crying and I just left you.”

“Oh.” She can feel Irene tensing, can feel the worry start to seep into the air. She remembers that day clearly.

There’s been a question, a worry that lingers in the back of her mind. “What’re you going to do after I’m gone?” Wendy makes it sounds like she’s taking a long vacation but they both know it’ll be a one-way trip.

“I’ll watch the world spin madly on until I can’t. I’ve lived four thousand years too long. Maybe I’ll count the number of trees in this world. Or the stars in the night sky. I could uncover the secrets locked away in the depts. of the ocean, I could even stay there. My life would have no purpose without you in it. Every single day we’re apart I count the minutes, the seconds. I count the number of faces that I’ve to meet until I get to see yours again.

“You saved me from the pits of hell. The first face I ever saw was yours. I could do good things I know you’d want me to, like saving people or doing good . You’ll say I deserve to live my own life and find someone else. But I’ve only ever been home when I’m with you. This heart of mine hasn’t beaten in four thousand years. It is cold and out of use but nonetheless it belongs to you. Everywhere that we’ve ever roamed together is home. I can’t wander for another four thousand years for a home that no longer exists.

You make your decision there and then. It’s something you’ve been theorizing but never put into practice. Never dared to try. You could the universe up. You wonder if it’s possible for other people to experience time the way you do. God, you want to experience time like how everyone else does.

She always knows when it’s time for you to leave, it’s as if she feels a similar physical tug in her chest when a time loop opens for you to go.

Irene squeezes your fingers and kisses your check. You understand that it’s her way of saying that it’s okay to leave, not matter how difficult it is on her end to let you go, she knows she must.

But if your survival depends on a loop, then maybe this way you’ll remain immortal too. You don’t move. Not even when very pore of yours is screaming for you to. The tug in your chest transformers into a gravitational pull. You can feel every cell humming and Irene takes your shaking hand into hers and kisses your knuckles. She is confused but you shake your head. “Isn’t the last episode of The Vampire Diaries showing today?”

The pull gets stronger and stronger but she holds onto you tightly refusing to let you go. You know she hates that show but watches it religiously anyway like every other vampire inspired show. She is confused and her voice shakes when she finally understands the implications of your words. “You want to stay and watch it with me?”

“Always.”

It snaps eventually and suddenly there’s a hollowness in your chest. You wait for your heart to stop beating, for your lungs to stop breathing. Nothing happens. For a moment, it feels like time has been suspended. But it only lasts for a fraction of a second, barely noticeable to a normal human.

Irene feels it too. Your body somehow feels anchored and grounded. Perhaps now you are chained to time. You wait for the repercussions. You wait for your body to fade or your bones to disintegrate or for God to descend and strike you down for breaking their rules.

But the world continues spinning, the cars are still honking and the broken air-conditioning hums in the background and maybe you’re finally able to exist beyond time.

x