@pandoratheancient: ❓+ Eric
Santino exhaled lowly. “It always baffles me, how close we can be to other people and yet continue to see them in unfamiliar lighting. There are so many parts of him that I will never truly understand. There is so much life in him, so many memories, that I will never share. I will never walk with him through the forests of his youth, and I will never stand with him at the foot of the temple of Ephesos in its prime. I won’t know what it felt like to see the wonders of Babylon for the first time like he does. There is so much of him that is missing from me. And I see the traces of those memories in how he acts today. Who is he when he works in his garden, humming tunes I have never heard before? Who is he when he is spellbound by a withered stone arch in a place that means nothing to me? I dream of these things when I see them in his Blood. But that doesn’t satisfy me. It is a voyeuristic experience and I am a terrible voyeur.
I don’t know if Eric truly understands me when I speak to him of it, when I beg him to teach me his native tongue. He humors me but never enough. No one speaks it, he says, it’s useless, why bother? And of course he is right. It’d be useless to anyone but me. Could I not use it to share with him this earliest fragment of him, those mortal secrets, those innocent moments before the Blood? But then, perhaps he simply does not want me there, in the forests with him. Maybe he wants to guard his secrets instead. We all must be allowed our islands of solitude, something we keep for ourselves. I have no right to any part of him. I am just greedy.
Sometimes I feel my age very keenly. But next to him, him and his three thousand years of life, I will never grow old. I will never see the world as he sees it. I don’t know if I could or should change that. I love to hear him speak of all manner of things. He is a born storyteller. I would not want to miss that. But the stories will always remain replicas, imitations of the real thing. He will always be a translated language to me.”
