This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part IX, Part VIII, Part VII, Part VI, Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…
Milos craved Areti’s paintings as a diver craved air. It went beyond a desire or an impulse. It was a part of himself that would die without her. A primal fear awakened, thrashing about, knowing that if all things were kept equal, it meant death.
Remembering her hair, her smile, her skin, he felt a crush in his chest. A desperate longing from lifetimes ago that he had thought he had forgotten. It must have only been slumbering, waiting for the right time to emerge from its dark hiding place deep in his core. Milos had to have her paintings. He was but an addict with deep solace that knew he was finally gazing upon his next score. He was nothing but a series of moments from where he was without to where he would be within.
Captured by bliss. Elated and floating. Above all things… because he would have her back. At least the memories of her would belong only with him.
It was a comforting thought that each of the crew longed for an object in a similar way, even if they didn’t feel the visceral emotions as Milos did.
Shirin desired her first Domain, a relic that had been passed on from King Solomon and as important objects typically are, lost to time. Not the best of her Domains, but easily her favorite. And so many of her Domains had already been irretrievably lost to the unrelenting grinder of history.
Then Al, who longed for the comb from his first nation, the First Nation of what would become British Colombia once the colonizers had their way. It appeared to be silver inlaid whale bone carved into a simple hair comb, but it was much more than that. It was said to carry the touch of the Old Ones, a touch that would be like a salve on the open torment of his condition. The Old Ones were long dormant powers that may have been the Creator himself, but then again, they may have only been the lucid dreams as the Creator had slept on the seventh day.
Shirin could have known, since she was one of the Fallen, but she had been cast out long before God had the breathing room to dream about rest in the first place.
And finally, there was Liz, who coveted the necklace of her eldest cousin, Lady Eleanor, the one and only true love of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the Last Leader of Wales. The death of her cousin had basically had given birth to what Liz would become. If Eleanor hadn’t died, the crucible that Liz had fallen into would never had been fired to life in the first place.
Each of them finding something that they had thought lost only to realize it was just out of reach. Because of the fucking Accords.
Out of all of them, was the abject denial of desire the worst for Milos? He pondered the question as he walked the halls of the Met.
Vampires were not human. They were once human, yes, obviously. But being a vampire was like being an artist’s imitation of a thing. The result is only a creative representation of what came before, because the created objects was its own thing, a reflection of a thing, but still a thing of its own. Vampires looked human, could pass for human, but they were not human. Any more than a painting of a rose is also a rose itself.
Human and Vampire are inextricably connected, but one is not the same as the other, and the transition leaves little if anything of what came before intact. Vampires could be held akin to humans that had become grossly obese or extremely geriatric. The changes that lead to the outcome happened by degrees. Small changes over time.
A thin human does not wake up suddenly fat, shocked to find that they had tripled their bodyweight overnight. No, it is a battle of attrition, admitting to oneself every day that they should do something about it, but never fully committing to what it will take. Instead, continuing the pattern of behavior that leads to the small daily measures of inevitable weight gain. They wake up fat because they had woken the day before deciding that the comfort of food was worth more than a healthy body weight. Not the best example, but aging does not align wholly either. Obviously, one does not wake up in a body of ninety year old, wondering where the preceding seventy years had wandered off to since they had been in their prime. Aging is not a choice, where as consuming too many calories is. The uncurable condition of vampirism falls somewhere in the middle.
It is not a choice. But at the same time, it very much is. The changes are miniscule, taking place with every feeding, slowly evolving what was the prey into what will become the apex predator. The virus was an animamorphic curse, meaning it was both physical and spiritual in nature, the physical manifestation acting on the cells and systems of the human body, and the spiritual manifestation twisting and adapting the spirit of the person. Vampires have souls too. But they are unbound souls after the virus does its job… when the host dies, the spirit goes with it, released back to the cosmos. Only oblivion awaits a vampire at their end. As the virus propagates through the body, it is fed by the act of hunting in both ways, and it in turn morphs the carrier from their previous self to the next self. Every day, every hunt, it is small measure of iterative change. Vampirism is a slow gradual descent towards the impenetrable darkness of becoming ‘other’. Something that is forever apart from what it had been before.
Being a vampire, there is a day where one wakes up and realizes that they are as much a human as a fucking unicorn. Milos had hit the ‘I am a fucking unicorn’ stage somewhere around Ottoman conquest of Athens. By the time he met Areti, he had been a divergent ‘other’ for centuries.
Did Areti care? Did she look at him and think of him as a vile monster? Did she wonder how God could exist if this fucking thing was allowed to stalk and kill thinking, feeling, human beings such as herself?
No. She has looked through him, penetrating him with but a glance. It was if his severed soul was a mere plaything that she could pull from his chest and inspect any time she wished. She would look over his heart, his mind, the very threads of his being and come to the conclusion, that yes, this peculiar being was worthy of her love. She had loved him selflessly, with passion and fervor, and had loved him from the day they had met to her last shallow, rattling breath. A cruel joke to watch her spirit so freely fly from the world of men when his own was forever bound to the shell he was born into. A handsome and powerful shell thanks to the virus, but it was a dead end. There was no continuing on.
Perhaps it was being up past his bedtime, knowing there was an obliterating sun hanging in the sky outside, and that it would only take one thing to go wrong among a thousand possibilities of things going sideways for everything to be fucked… maybe all that weighed on his mind and it made him introspective. Thinking of his own death and the unfortunate consequences of the wisdom gained from a long age spent on the Earth.
What would the human version of Milos think? That version of himself was definitely not to be found in the wide halls of the Met. There was no method to pull the old human Milos up in some form of a memory and ask him either. That version of himself was lost to time, much like Shirin’s many Domains. Milos would like to think that his human self would not be horrified, but he knew that wasn’t true. It was horrifying.
The moments prior to death. A stretching conflated canvas of tumbling moments that feels like an infinite amount of time that lasts only a few breaths.
The moment of death. By itself, one of the few places in the universe where no measure of time exists. Nothing but an indivisible point on the timeline.
The moments after death. Measured by overwhelming moments of madness, despair, and wonder that has lead to every moment, every choice, every event afterwards. How does one measure a single lifetime, much less the span of a thing that lives for many lifetimes.
Milos had lived for nearly a thousand years. His memory did not stretch that far.
That was horror, wasn’t it? Knowing that you had known something, and that it was gone. Just gone. Evaporated in place, fleeing the sanctity of the pure mind, an inmate no longer contained by the walls built to contain it. Neurons surely had the shape of the memory somewhere, and they had forgotten how to retrieve it.
Memories like books of an abandoned library, moldering on a shelf never to be perused again. As Milos passed through the Armory exhibit, he laughed to himself, realizing that he had more in common with the Met than he had realized. Most of the collections were not on display, hidden from view. Just like his memories.
What was it about Areti? What made her so singular?
Milos strolled through the crowds, feeling the ache of being awake during the day deep in his bones, the dragging fatigue of daywalking grasping at his limbs like the air itself was water and he was a deep sea explorer figuratively out of his depth. Even his teeth ached. He groaned at the imposition of physical discomfort and tightened the straps of his simple backpack.
He listed and made small comments into his earpiece as the team performed their work, but he was lost mostly in his own mind, counting random things… the number of tiles in an alcove, the sconces in a hallway, the number of Flemish knots on a particular piece of armor, the number of eyes on the paintings in a single room. His mind flashed with arithmetic formulas for aggregating and collating data as his eyes drank in everything around him, yet he was disassociated from that as well, thinking about life, death, and the meaning to be had when you are lost in a world that does not want or need you.
He heard Al torch vampires at the offsite Network Operations Center. He heard Shirin disable security in the local office in the Met. He heard Liz confront an old front and handle him like the amateur he was.
Did he ruminate on what the Family would do when they found out about the room of torched vamps at the NOC? Did he wonder why the Watcher was no longer a consideration for Shirin? Did he marvel at the long history that Liz carried around with her, but so effortlessly, he should be feeling a sting of jealousy?
He didn’t. Because he had absentmindedly wandered right back to Areti.
There she was.
Hanging on the wall.
She was the sun.
She was the sea.
She was the light and the foam and the crest and the wash and the crash and the spray and the glimmers of flying beads of water as they scattered the light like laughter.
She was in every brush stroke. Every dot. Every tap from a brush that had turned to dust centuries ago. Yet here she was.
Liz’s voice sounded far away in his ear, but his name pulled him out of his trance like state.
“Milos. Are you ready? When I let go, our comms will be offline. Everything will be offline, at least until the Wards realign.”
Milos looked at what was left of Areti and smiled widely, letting his teeth show like the predator he was. “I am ready. See you all at Liz’s tonight.”
The lights flickered all at once.
Milos pulled the earpiece from his ear and slid it into his pocket. He crossed to the front of the small alcove of the gallery and pulled the rope across to block anyone from entering. He stepped into the larger hall and took in the chaos unfolding.
Like a herd of cattle looking upwards at a stormy sky wondering what thunder was, the humans had no idea that the Wards regurgitating the flow of their interrupted magic into the real world was epically fucking the devices that they so depended on. Like a wave of confusion, every person with a smart device pulled it out, looked over it in dismay, and compared the results to their neighbors.
Mutters and harsh whispers started, wonderings and assumptions flowed between human minds that were not equipped to understand the chaos the Wards were dumping throughout the entire Met. Small quiet voices overlapped in suppositions.
“It isn’t a terror attack, you think? Some middle east whackadoo?”
“No, no, I bet it is just an outage… it will come back up any second…”
“Power outage? Did you see all the lights flicker? They have generators?”
“I bet it the Governor’s fault, he is a Democrat. They can’t do anything right.”
“I bet a backhoe jockey hit something over on 5th. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Con Edison is ran by Republicans, and you know they can’t get anything right.”
“Attack on the power grid. I bet it is China.”
“Oh I read about cyberattacks, it could be one of those.”
Milos wondered through the comments like they were floating bits of ash on the wind. The humans couldn’t feel or see it, but the reverberations of the Wards were wild to witness first hand. Milos watched as ultravoilet flickered like fairy light amongst the metal objects in the room, sparks jumping into being as quickly as they faded away. The pressure waves against his psyche was like air pressure changes from a fan the size of an airplane propeller, washing over him and enveloping him in its propwash. His other senses, the ones that made him what he was, shirked in the onslaught, but in its own way, it was a glorious show of power. Real, absolute, unassailable power that most humans could only dream of.
Watch a tornado for fun up close and one might understand.
But it was a tornado that Milos could fucking ride. His smile stretched wider, and his mulling over the deep questions were washed away in the baptism of redirected power.
Milos pulled on the fountains of free energy the Wards were dumping off, as they shook the very fabric of the building and everything contained within it. Milos’s lethargy faded away as if it was nothing but a bout of anxiety.
Daytime outside? Who gives a fuck?
Sun in the sky that can end you permanently? Not today, Sun.
Surrounded by terribly fragile humans in a place of protected sanctuary? Who cares?
Protected under the Grand Accords of All That Occupy? Not rules per se, more like guidelines.
Milos unleashed himself from the constraints that humans have to deal with. He moved faster than their cow eyes could understand, rippling through crowds as if they were nothing. His feet did not touch the ground, and no part of his body brushed against any person he passed. He was like a ghost given flesh, tempted to interact with the world, but ultimately disgusted by the physicality of it all.
To the young boy in the Native American exhibit, a man materialized out of nothing, like a magic trick. Then, like a whole another magic trick, he lifted a display case with one hand like it was made of air, took a white comb out from the display and without any effort, put the case back. By the time the little boy got his mother’s attention, the man was gone again as if he had never been there. Just like the comb that had been in the case. The little boy gave up on his mom, who was enraptured with her malfunctioning phone, and he slowly read the tag in the case.
‘Whale Bone Comb with later inlaid silver, First Nations of North West Coast, British Columbia, circa. Comb 15000-25000 BCE, Silver inlay unknown.’
In another part of the Met, the lights popped in order from the entrance of the Hall to the other end, as if a ripple of a power surge took every light and rendered it useless. The crowds yelped and shrieked with timid smiles as they left the space in a hurry, rushing for the exits. His fingers smoking from smashing the lights in quick succession, Milos moved aside the glass, gently retrieving Liz’s necklace in a movement that was so fast, it was near breaking the sound barrier.
In yet another hall, a man wandered in casually, passed a plinth, and then wandered out just as casually. No one noticed that the small exceptionally detailed Assyrian vase that had been on the plinth had been replaced with a replica from the gift shop. There happened to be a naked woman nearby wandering just as casually and everyone watched her warily as a large crowd of security guards followed closely behind wondered what to try next.
And as if no time had intervened, Milos stood again in front of everything that represented Areti.
He shifted his backpack off, careful not to damage the vase, the necklace, or the comb within, and reached out to take the small paintings from the wall to add them quickly to his haul.
“Stop.”
Milos looked around the small gallery. Not a single person stood or sat nearby. Was it his imagination? The power of the malfunctioning Wards was making him giddy.
He reached out again, and he felt her hand on his own. He stopped and his sharp breath tore at his chest. How could he have forgotten her touch?
“My love. Stop.” Her voice was unmistakable. He felt a tear form at the corner of his eye.
Milos cleared his throat, feeling like a child. “Who is this?” He asked foolishly.
“Stop, Milos. They are where they belong.”
Milos spun in a quick circle in panic, looking everywhere for his assailant. He was alone in the closed off gallery, no one outside the entrance was even looking in on the olive skinned man standing alone appearing to have a panic attack.
Milos rubbed his hands together in frustration and reached out again for the small painting of the ocean sunrise.
“They are where they are meant to be, Milos. Just as I am. Don’t you remember?”
The tears came unbidden, the tightness in his chest rushed up his throat, and attacked his eyes. Milos realized these were the first tears he had since before the founding of United States. Everything is too long.
Milos felt her touch on his face, one hand on each cheek, just as she had all those centuries ago.
“I am my paintings, Milos. I am here.” A hand, invisible, traced the path of his tears and touched his forehead gently. “I am also here.”
“I will never get another chance, Areti. I have to take them now or I never will.” Milos managed through the first hitch in his chest. He forgot how physical grief was. It manifested itself in his body painfully.
“Then you will have to come here and remember me. How many do I touch now? How many will I be with in the future? How many people need me and not know it? I did not paint for only myself, my love. Milos. I painted for you. For them. For everyone.”
“I needed you. I need you.” Milos managed. He gently fingered the edge of the painting, temptation electrifying his fingertips.
“Yes. Yes you do.”
Milos waved his hands around trying to touch the untouchable. He wanted to grab her and pull her close.
Another touch on his hands. Stilling them both. “Stop.”
“And leave?”
There was no answer. Then he felt the presence of her immediately in front of him, at the tip of his nose, and her lips brushed his own. He felt her kiss.
He kissed her back knowing his answer. Then she was gone.
Milos gave another longing look at the paintings and sighed knowing he would be back to look at them until they were moved somewhere else. Then he would look at them wherever that was. And so on, until time either ended or he was lost to the cosmos.
He would never forget Areti again.
He grabbed his backpack and headed for the basement. No one saw him pass and no one saw him exit.
When the security systems finally came back online and a young naked woman was taken away by ambulance, and the security team finally reconnected to the NOC, and the consultants finally showed up…
That is when someone finally noticed something was missing.
It was four days later. And Milos had already been back twice to sit on his bench, wave at Martha as she wandered by on her duties, and stare at the paintings, knowing he was with her.
And she was there. In her own way.