VALENTINUS

by Apache

Content:
Gen
LaCroix; Janette
No Sexual Situations
No Violence

There was a certain cheeky humor in his erstwhile daughter's gesture:  using Federal Express, that popular tool of the daylight hours, to deliver a private valentine.

There was a little awkwardness at the door, but a sufficient tip soothed all ruffled sensibilities...

It would be useful, LaCroix supposed, to have a mortal about the place as he kept his own vigil during the sunlit hours of each day, hiding in the pleasant shadows of his quiet domain.  Rather like a shabbes goy, as the prosperous Jews of another time an place had called it when they employed a gentile or two to cook and light candles on Saturdays, allowing them to circumvent the holy but rather inconvenient demands of their God. Of course, he pondered, there would be the issue of disposal later, for it was too much to hope that a mortal employed as a watchman at the Raven would fail to watch a little too closely for the comfort of his uniquely secretive employer.

"*Mon ancien pere*" her little note began: "my old/former father..." Yes, Janette -would- have her tiny joke, had always preferred that her *entendres* be *doublees.* "You know that I am gone..."

//*Bien sur,* daughter,// he thought.  Gone in a manner you yourself could not comprehend, never having fledged a child and watched over its weak hours...  Janette, his peregrine who had flown true from the first night. Sleek blackbird, immaculate hunter, so truly herself in the dark light of the vampire night...

Janette over whom he needed not trouble himself.  Janette, he mused, who really had -never- quite tantalized him as wonderfully as his prodigal son.  Nicholas, his eagle, a tawny fierce-eyed raptor, a creature of sufficient grandeur to be a Roman's heir. .. who turned and called his maker a vulture, a crow, a picker at carrion--

--*if* he was feeling charitable that day.  LaCroix smiled.  //Ah, the joys of the ungrateful child:  how sharper than a serpent's tooth the fangs of a renegade fledgling.//  He smiled more.

And then, ces soir, Janette had sent roses as well, with a card that said only *a mon oncle* -- for her "uncle," as the local jeunesse among the Community had taken to calling him.  //Well,// he mused, //I do prefer it to *grandpere* but how... piquant.  How... wicked, as his *tres mechante petite fille* had indeed always been.//  How humorous, really, though he had not understood her to be in a cheerful mood from what Nicholas had told him of her new... circumstances.

And the roses she sent were red:  the red roses of hot love, and of regret, and of the house he had once assisted toward the throne of England, as she was doubtlessly slyly recalling to his mind.  And one white rose...

*Oui, la rose niegeuse,* the rose like snow, the rose that meant his one lost flower, as Janette knew well.  That one flower, that perfect rose who had budded, bloomed, blown, faded, withered and finally been blasted to dust on the wind of a century that itself was nothing more than the subject of academic debate to all but a handful of beings now alive upon the Earth.

But among them were himself, his son, and his lost daughter.

And now Janette had learned to pity him his lost love.  Fleur, the pale feminine apparition of his Nicholas, a girl of nectared heart and wild mind who after only --- had it been fourteen?  seventeen?  he really should remember -- years of mortal life in the midst of the general dimness that was human culture of those days had flung her mind into the stars.  So Janette, having buried a mortal, pitied--

How strange to have no knowledge of her in his blood, after so many centuries, half his life, really, of recognizing some small stirring in himself as a fragment of emotion or experience communicating itself from her to him.  if she were in the same town or province, it often would be a constant awareness, a constant parental sensation of her wellbeing or lack of it ‑‑ though wherever, with Janette, a lack of *bien etre* was sensed, Lacroix himself would soon be present.

Never again.  Such appallingly final words for one whose sense of "never" and "forever" was that he was on the giving, not receiving, end of them.

And what remained to him was a son, errant Nicholas, who would have shocked LaCroix by causing any sense of *bien etre* to stir in his old blood.  No, Nicholas was not happy unless he was unhappy, and he had this whole talkatively miserable modern culture around him to abet his little fantasies of mending his soul.  And making amends to them, the mortals who had maintained his exquisite life--

What had they been, those shadows?  Transient images, forgettable even if one wished to remember.  All of them had their highest realization of existence in serving to feed that infinitely more excellent life-- and Nicholas could not see it.  Could not see the virtue of his own life or the damnations of those he'd fed upon.  Could see nothing but a pit of misery and repentence and denial.  //Ah my Nicholas, how you love your hair shirt, your whip of the flagellent, how you love your own heavy cross and cherish every splinter that drives pain into your soul... Nicholas, my child, give up this pain.//

LaCroix frowned.  Pain of his own, fingering the red petals of the flowers from Janette, the rose fragrance of them driving his vampire senses to distraction with the memories they summoned.  And that one white rose, so beautiful tonight, so quickly to fall to dust...

Time to send his thoughts out to the dark... to his children, so scattered, so many-- were they not -all- his children?  And he felt Nicholas, as he so often did, driving the streets of Toronto, reaching for the dial...

"Tonight, my children, let us contemplate the fable of Saint Valentine," LaCroix began.

He watched the silence outside his booth in which the mortal and vampire avants gardes mingled and occasionally merged.  How they danced...

"He was one Valentinus of Alexandria, who came to Rome in the second century of the current era and dared to preach that men could know all love for themselves, even that most difficult of all loves to bear: the love of the one who made them.  He dared to suggest that one might find in the love of a physical woman, even a whore, the divine love of the spirit's mother. 

"Ah, children, imagine how those joyless celibates, the fathers of the early Christian era, received this teaching.  And what happened? Dark, foreign Valentinus was buried in the Via Flammina, his teachings scattered and named a heresy. Now the Encyclopedia Britannica refers to them as a 'mysticism of which we possess only a few of the beautiful flowers...'  And so we remember his day by exchanging flowers..."

LaCroix paused, pulling petals away from the white rose, broadcasting only the sound of his breathing for long seconds.

His blood told him that not far away, Nicholas was grieving, though he could not tell for what precisely his son's heart bled tonight...  and his daughter, the glistening black raven who had left her name to his home, the child whose voice would never stir in his blood again, where was she?  Pulling a petal from the rose released an additional tang of broken life from flower's stem.  He drew a breath:

"Children, among the cruelties perpetrated by those among us we have called saints, shall we not condemn this myth that love may live forever as the wickedest of them all?  And even if we love, can those whom we love hear us? ...  My children, call, and answer me.  You know that I will -always- listen to the outcry of your hearts, because I -am- eternally.... the Nightcrawler."  

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