October 9th, 1927

My Dearest, Kyungsoo,

Tonight smells like you.  Like night air, and crushed grass.  Like sweet earth, and the soft cool behind your ears.  I can hear crickets singing, lulling me to sleep, but it’s so hard to sleep at night, now.  It’s so hard to sleep without you.  

I look at the shivering stars scattered across the black silk sky, at the shy and luminescent waning moon, and I wonder where you are in this great, wide world.  Wind sings through the leaves in the trees, but it’s cold.  Lonely.  

I miss your voice.  Hearing you speak, hearing you sing, to close my eyes and dream while you whisper sweet lullabies like dark velvet caressing my skin in the night…  These simple pleasures are now all I desire.

Increasingly, I find myself spending nights staring into the fire while my mind wanders the vast and dark earth.  Searching for wherever you are.  Wandering back to where we’ve been.

I remember the night you saved me.  I remember the squalid miasma of loneliness permeating the room, making each struggling breath even more torturous.  The knowledge that I was the last living thing in that cursed house (for no place was home before you), and the knowing that time slipped through my fingers like sand.  

It was so hot, so unbearably hot that I just had to have the window open to the cool night air.  The knowledge that death stalked the streets of the Vieux Carre meant nothing to one who already had it crouched in the corner.  Staring.  Waiting.  From my bed I gazed out the window then--at the night sky.  Just as I do now.  I watched the stars, and the moon in their slow dance, and I wondered what it would feel like to fly.  

When your exquisite visage filled the window, I thought that I must be dreaming.  Your flawless golden skin.  Your great, still eyes.  So dark, so entrancing.  Then you were inside, and leaning over me, and the stars no longer shimmered in the night sky--they were in your eyes.  You brought the stars to me.  “You’re beautiful…”  It hurt just to inhale deeply enough to make the words--pain wracked my chest like fire--but I had to tell you…

When you spoke, your voice--even your breath--was so sweet.  “Would you like to see the night?”

I knew what you were, then.  I knew, and I didn’t care.  I had to go, I knew this, but to be given a choice on how…that was a gift.  “Take me with you.”

You smelled like earth, and grass, and sweet musk as you lifted me into your arms.  I know that I had wasted away to much of nothing by then, but even so, the ease with which you lifted me was the most comforting feeling of my entire life…  And you carried me, in my nightdress, in my bedclothes, down the cobbled streets of le carre, and the cool night wind kissed my cheeks, and not a soul graced the streets.

We didn’t fly--not quite--but it felt like flying in your arms.  It felt like freedom.  It felt like joy, and wildness, and safety.  You took your time carrying me back to the manor.  I don’t know how long you walked the streets with me in your arms, but it seemed like forever.  The implacability of your unmoving arms beneath me, the strength of your shoulders under my hands, I savoured these sensations.  Savoured the way your muscles glided under your skin, the soft humming that invited me to rest my head in the crook of your neck.

I still remember the way the candlelight made the rooms of your home glow.  How you carried me from room to room, infinitely patient as you showed me everything, as you told me stories of your long-lived life, of your travels, of how you came to be here in this piece of Paris in the New World.  And then, when you finally laid me down in a luminescent patch of moonlight gracing the chaise in the library, I felt that you had paid me a thousand times over the simple need you had of me.  As I looked out the window, and once more saw the stars, I felt no fear, only longing.  “Here?”

The soft hunger in your great, dark eyes made me want…so many things.  “You look the most beautiful by moonlight.  I want to remember you just like this.”

I had never known true love until you killed me.

Sincerely, 

Yours

***

January 7th, 1751

Mine,

I find myself thinking often…to the night that we met.  You were so beautiful.  As you remain.  I’d like to think that you will be forever.  The sensation of your heartbeat beneath my palm as I drank, the whisper of breath in your delicate throat, your hands in my hair, around my shoulders, pulling me closer…  The way you trembled and fluttered like a little bird.

When your heart finally stopped, when sweet exhalations no longer passed rosy lips, I regretted my greed.  Silent and mournful, I decided to bury you in the garden beneath my bedroom window, where you could bathe eternally in the moonlight that kissed your skin so lovingly.  The roses would bloom over where you lay, and I could look upon where you rested, and remember our night.  

I dug your grave slowly.  I wanted to suffer for having taken you so precipitously.  I buried you in my own coffin.  Nestled in the crimson velvet, you looked so fresh and perfect.  Still unable to control myself, I leaned over and stole a kiss as easily as I had stolen your life.  And then, with regrets, and recriminations, I laid you to rest, gently shoveled the dirt over the polished rosewood, each soft patter of earth rebuking me for my haste.  But we had spent most of the night together, and the arrival of the sun took me off guard, forced me back inside the manor.

With the next night’s moonrise, unwilling to let go, mourning, craving, instead of finding another, I stood over where you lay, deep underground.  Finally, as dawn began to lighten the sky in the east, I turned toward the manor, took a step, and suddenly--there was movement.  Down, deep within the earth.  The quick, terrified inhale.  The soft scritch of nails against velvet.  

I knew that I hadn’t changed you, and I will admit that--in that moment--I knew fear.  But then…I heard it--the sweet song of a powerful heartbeat.  And breath…no longer stilted, pained, cut short--but full and desperate.  I took the shovel, and dug like a madman, then--at the end--abandoned the tool to dig like a dog.  When I tore open the lid--wood splintering, fabric ripping--you flew into my arms, terrified, desperate, crying, clinging to me like a child.  

Under my hands you were warm, alive--there could be no doubt.  You were not like me, but you were no more as you had been--an enervated, delicate flower presenting frail, trembling petals before its consignment to earth--no, you were whole; you practically vibrated with good health, and I had never, in my centuries of living, felt so grateful.  I realized then, what you were--what you had to be.  An immortal.  

My immortal.

Mine.

My own.

May I never forget the night that brought you to me, mine.  My love, my sweet.  My endless nights are as soft as spring dawn with you by my side.  It’s so natural to love you.  I felt it from the first moment I laid eyes on you.  When I held you in my arms, when I pulled you from the earth, I knew that, for a long time, I would love you.  Like the flow of the seasons. Like as spring passes and summer takes its place...unchangeable, intractable, eternal is my love for you.  

I hear your light, quick footstep on the stair.  I must end this letter before you catch and tease me.  I am, as ever,

Yours,

Your Own Kyungsoo.  

***

October 10, 1926

My Dearest, Kyungsoo,

I miss you.  I miss you, I miss you, I miss you.  Where are you?  Come back to me, my love, from wherever you are.  I will never turn you away.  You have been father, brother, friend, husband, lover…  Simply put, to me, you have ever been everything.  

Do you remember the first time that you saved my life?  It would be a small matter to die endlessly, only to return to you, but that man brought true death.  1760…or was it ‘63?  Algiers…  We had only been together a mere decade, but the years do blur…  You heard him before I did, that immortal who had recognized what I was in the night market, and followed us back to our home.  I had felt this queer, inner vibration upon seeing him, but as yet did not know what it meant, only that it made me restless.  He came to kill me, to take what little power and strength I had for his own, but he didn’t expect you.  

You never even gave him the chance to lift his sword.  You were…masterful.  So powerful.  Deadly.  Prior to him, I had never seen you hurt anyone, but I realized in that moment that my beloved was a predator.  I had only ever seen the gentle, the sweet; I had never even heard you raise your voice in anger.  

When you came to me, covered in his blood, your eyes were soft, regretful as you informed me that I must take his head.

“Take his head?!”  I felt so dizzy.  “I can--I cannot kill this man!”

“If you do not…then he will kill you.  That is the curse of your kind.  There can be only one.”

I looked at the sword--a heavy, brutish thing that looked like it belonged in some medieval chieftain’s burial mound.  I didn’t want to die, but…to take someone else’s life…

You saw my indecision.  You have always known me better than I know myself.  “If you do not…then he will return.  He will take you from me.  You would leave me…all alone.”

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