zg_shadows | For Mike L (Reply)

When I met him, I despised him utterly. He was a heretic, a caitiff, everything that was meant to be dirt within the Camarilla. He wore the marks of the outcast Followers of Set, and then claimed Camarilla loyalty, even whilst he preached tainted paths.

He carried status from the Dark Ages, and I was one of the people who stripped it from him, with utter ruthlessness and efficiency. He was a threat to us, you see. He was a threat to our certainties, to the rigid structure we upheld. His status gave him a power that we couldn't allow him to have. So we tore him down.

Were we right?

God knows. There's not a lot I know for sure any more.

Months later I found myself in love with a piece of shit Giovanni. Jimmy was hell on wheels, and I should have been out of his league. I'm a true blue blooded Toreador, childe of the line of Villon. I'm was a princess a long time before I was a Prince, and I shouldn't have let that grimy brat touch me. But I did, and somehow found myself in the very awkward situation of requiring an expert on paths of enlightenment to help a repentent serial killer.

He didn't have to help me, or Jimmy, you know. He would have been entitled to sneer at me, to at least make me pay through the nose for any help he did offer. God knows, I'd have done that in his place. But he didn't. He just helped.

Oh, he's driven me insane over the years. His respect for the Masquerade is minimal, his grasp of status has never been that strong and we won't even talk about his tendancy to teach thaumaturgy as if it were basic French for tourists. There are rumours that he is responsible for a mysterious thaumaturgical plumber who roams the streets of south London, offering people clean toilets and prayers to Sutekh. I know that Tristan Felgate actually develops this weird little pulsing vein at the corner of his brow at the mention of Akenheru's name, and he positively encouraged my idiot Childe in a number of his more ridiculous schemes.

Yet I still remember. He did not have to help.

The world has changed now. I look at myself, and I do not know if I despise what I have become, or if I despise who I used to be. My certainties were torn apart in the fires and in the chaos, and now I only know my world is dying, and all I can do is try and go down fighting. I don't know if I delayed this horrible ending, hastened it, or if nothing I have ever done has made a damn bit of difference.

I don't know if it matters anymore.

And he's still trying to help.

He smiles at me when we meet and tries to make small talk. He says he can protect me. I don't think there's a damn thing left in this world that can do that, but I love him a little just for trying. He talks about the opera, art, and magic. I remind him that I once tried to make a warding with an asymetrical triangle because I thought pentacles were passé. He smiles, and for a moment I can pretend that the world isn't falling apart outside, and I do feel a little safer for having him there.

And I know that once, a long time ago, I said I'd take Akenheru as my lover when hell froze over. It's funny really, isn't it? Because I swear hell is empty and and cold now, and all the devils are here.