Give Me That Body (Oneshots)

Leechtin, 1870, Paris, "A Possession"

(Note: May be read as an Easter egg concerning ch. 2 (Belle Epoque: Nicky) and ch. 10 (Belle Epoque: Leis + Q) of SoVL, but is meant as a stand alone chapter.)

He could not tell if anything around him was real. His eyes were narrow and blue, as if stuck with shattered glass. 

I could not keep back. I could not do it any longer. Take me. Have me. Do whatever you want. Somehow, he had caught a glimpse of me and I could not keep away from his eye. Lingering too close to his front door at daybreak, when I knew that he would be coming back.

"Oh, dream," Escha whispered to me, touching my hair. Tenderly. "Oh, Dream."

The gentle pressure of his hand.

Memories of his hands, living, careful, taking tooled silver ornaments out of my hair, his unclasping of heavy jewelry from my neck and putting it away with solemn preoccupation. His hands, stealing a momentary stroke of my neck, and my pretending not to notice him touch me. Of the feeling of lightness and stolen intimacy. Cold silver. Of his pressing a broad, metal bracelet against his face to soak in the coolness from my skin. The sultry air. The way he had looked wearing red. 

The smell of rain, just before sunrise, rising from between cool paving stones. Outside of his home so far from our Rome, here in Paris, and his hand. Delicate hand.

Oh, would he never touch me that way now if he knew day from night. I raised my hand to grasp his, but it was away before I could. 

"Only to see you," I said. "Only that."

His blinking was too slow. He stroked me upon my head again, as if comforting a child, or wanderer, or both. "O Umbra," he whispered, in our Latin, oh Ghost, oh Ghoul. Our Latin, full of spider cracks and fractures, broken, shattered. "Come in, why don't you. Come in, why don't you, Wraith."

Do not say it if, I thought, oh do not say it at all. 

"You are in my dream," my Escha whispered, hitting himself gently with both hands, on his precious head. "You are in my dream all the time. Why don't you come in ever? You are always a little far from me, and I cannot touch you, and now you are here beneath my hand and it is unbearable that you will go out of my reach. Do not go."

"Come away with me."

"God save me, he is real."

"I have not come to disrupt your life."

He pushed me. Hard. I was not prepared for how hard he could push me, and fell back from the front step, against the side of his house. 

"Don't you care what you look like?" he begged me, speaking a language I could only understand in impressions. 

"Speak our," I started, not caring if I were humiliated. Not caring at all.

"Not even understanding the Continental language?" he spat at me.

As if he were dreaming.

"You are being poisoned," I told him. "I have seen it, these months. Please, my pet, my pride."

He held out his hands, not hearing me. I put mine in his.

"What do I do?" he asked me, voice light and wavering, in the growing light of morning.

Rubbing the back of his hands with my thumbs, I could only look into his cloudy eyes.

Cold morning. He squinted against it. Front stoop away from gas lamps but facing directly into the sun. 

"Where will you go?" he asked me, voice thick with emotion and unable to look at me any longer. "Where have you been sleeping?"

"Don't cry, Dove," I whispered.