Why Should I Cry for You?
a Forever Knight story
by Lizbetann
March 7, 1997 Fkfic-L Post
Preface | Story
PREFACE. This needs some explanation. Waaaaaaaaay back in August, I needed the Merc Mommy General to do me a favor. (I won't go into what that favor was, but it involved socks, Cousin Cherri and kidnapping.) Now, as we all know, Mercs do not do favors. So in return, I was to write her a story set to Sting's "Why Should I Cry For You?"
Said story was to be posted to FKFIC by October 31st, 1996.
Obviously, I missed the deadline. Why? Hmmm, well, a Highlander Convention, a new job, another round robin, a Forever Knight convention and a Virtual Season episode all competed for my attention. But still, I persevered.
Chris, this story is for you. And keep an eye out for something else to serve as my groveling apology for getting this to you so late...
Thanks to Tigon (Alpha-Woof), Dianne (Her Grand Highness) and Cath (NatPacker extrodinaire) for betaing this one for me.
Warning! This is not a Cleopatra story. If you are one who refuses to believe that "Last Knight" happened, don't read any further! As with "Moon Over Bourbon Street," "Seven Days," "Fragile," and "Mad About You," the lyrics to this piece are from the magical mind and soul of Sting. I wish I had one-hundredth of his talent. All of the above stories are available at the FKFIC archive, and through my home page.
Nick, Nat and LaCroix belong to Parriot, Tri-Star, Sony, whoever. No copyright infringement is meant. Rene Claudet belongs to me, and will appear in another story that has had an even longer genesis than this one has had...
Non-carbohydrate chocolate, offers of Mercenary employment, and story critiques gratefully accepted.
STORY. Why Should I Cry for You? by Lizbetann
Under
the dog star sail
Over the reefs of moonshine
Under the skies of fall
North,
north west, the stones of Faroe
1992
Nat shoved open the door to the loft. The pitting and scarring was still fresh and vivid, and she shuddered in memory of how close Nick had come to dying. He had told her damned little about what had happened. Nick was relentlessly closemouthed about his past, about the vampire nature that he so desperately wanted to shed.
She had never even heard of LaCroix until a few days before his death.
Nick stood just outside of the lines of sunlight banding the floor, his arms crossed over his chest, deep in thought. Nat walked through the light to reach him, feeling it warm her skin. "Nick? Do you want to talk about it?"
"Talk about what?" he asked her, his voice dulled and harsh. "I hated him, and now he's dead."
"But it isn't that easy, is it?" she asked. Resolutely, she ignored the painting on her left with violent splashes of red and gouged marks, as though someone had clawed it until it bled. "If it was that easy, you wouldn't be suffering like this."
Nick laughed, a sound that made Nat shudder. "Patricide is a crime so heinous that the mind simply shrinks from it. Oedipus was hurled down from his throne, blind and exiled, for such a sin." A hollow silence fell until Nick's hoarse voice filled it again. "And I cursed him as he died by my hand."
Nat reached out to touch him, and he flinched away from her seeking hand. "After all he did to you, how can you still grieve?"
Dazed, Nick shook his head. "I don't know."
Under the Arctic fire
Over the seas of silence
Hauling on frozen ropes
For all my days remaining
But would north be true?
1996
"This isn't necessary, you know." Rene added, "Sir," for politeness' sake. They were alone in the most literal of senses. The echoing emptiness of the Raven made him feel very exposed, very noticeable. As an Enforcer, that made Rene uncomfortable.
"Ah, but you see, I think it is very necessary." LaCroix didn't look at the young dark-haired vampire behind him, but merely stared off into space. Or into the past, as the case might be. "You see, there is a certain amount of hubris in what I did, in who I am. I dominated his life, controlled his thoughts, shaped his very existence. Is it any surprise that I was the instrument of his death?
"I never thought I would fail," he continued, absently. "I underestimated him. I continually dismissed his desire for redemption as a whim, a fancy, merely a rebellious child striking out against his father. I never, never believed he meant it -- until the very last."
All colours bleed to red
Asleep on the ocean's bed
Drifting in empty seas
For all my days remaining
1992
"Do you regret killing him?" Nat asked quietly. She was slowly coming to the realization that Nick had left a lot out of his past with LaCroix in the first scathing description he had given her. "Would you bring him back if you could?"
"No. Yes. Nat, it isn't that easy!" he cried out painfully. "LaCroix made me who I am. Not just the vampire, but the man. He found in me music and art and taught me appreciation for both. We argued philosophy and science. He made me think in a time and place where original thought was scarcely valued."
"He found in you hatred and lust and violence, and taught you to use and exploit them," Nat reminded him. "He dominated your life. He gave you all these tools to be yourself, to discover what you were, and then refused to allow you the freedom to do so. He kept you in a cage, Nick," she said fiercely.
"I know." His voice was anguished. "But do the two sides cancel each other out? Can I say that I owed him nothing for what he has given because of what he has taken away?"
But would north be true?
Why should I?
Why should I cry for you?
1996
"I thought I knew him. I thought I understood what he was. But I only understood my perception of him. Strange, is it not, that I should have been so blind?" LaCroix turned back to Rene, who was shifting in a monumentally human gesture of discomfort. Smiling briefly, LaCroix refused to release him. "He fought me for every scrap of independence he gained. I would have expected no less of my son. But do you understand, in the end... if he had merely stated his intention of killing himself, I would have exerted myself to the utmost to stop him. But when he turned to me, full of trust and certainty, and asked me to strike the blow... how do you refuse that? How do you betray a shining trust in your child, yourself? How could I have done aught else than what I did?"
Dark angels follow me
Over a godless sea
Mountains of
endless falling,
For all my days remaining,
1992
"Nick...." Nat fumbled for words. Rarely since the night they had met had Nat been struck so completely with the simple fact that Nick was, indeed, something very different than herself. Always before, it had been the physical differences, the biology of human versus vampire, an intellectual understanding rather than an emotional one.
Now, Nat began to glimpse the essence of immortality, endless years when the world changed around you and constants were few and far between. When those constants were clung to desperately, a secure center in a shifting universe.
"You have to grieve for him," Nat said, finally, grudgingly. "Grieve for what he was -- and what he wasn't. Otherwise, the bitterness will consume you. Most of all, you have to grieve for what now can never be. 'Where there's life, there's hope.' Now that there is no longer life, you have to deal with the fact that nothing can be changed, that the past can't be rectified, that what was then is all that there will ever be. That this is the end."
"But it isn't," Nick said quietly. "It can't ever end. He's inside of me, inside my mind. What is the saying -- so long as someone remembers you, you are immortal? In that case, LaCroix will never die. I will never be free of him."
What would be true?
1996
"De Brabant was insane," Rene said finally. "He must have been. To give up immortality, power, everything he gained when you brought him across, and for what? First he did it to be mortal, to live what he would call a normal life, to walk in the sun. Finally, in the end, he gave it up for... nothing. For a woman who would never know of his sacrifice. He never gained what he sought."
"Ah, but that depends. Did he seek humanity... or mortality?"
"Aren't they one and the same?" Rene asked, baffled.
LaCroix shook his head, his gaze far away again. "No, indeed. One requires hope. The other... faith."
Sometimes I see your face,
The stars
seem to lose their place
1992
Nat reached out to him again, and this time, Nick did not pull away when she placed her hands on his crossed arms, her touch conveying comfort and sympathy. With a soft sound, he coiled his arms around her, pulling her close, burying his hands and face in her loose hair, breathing in the sweet scent of her humanity, her caring. He shuddered in her arms, wracked by a pain that he could barely understand.
After a long moment, she pulled slightly away from him. Smiling gently, she touched his face. She promised a loving ear and an understanding heart without a word, then silently left him to come to terms with himself and his past.
Nick crossed to the defaced painting resting on its easel. Moving slowly, dreamlike, he lifted it aside and replaced it with a bare canvas. Wielding a piece of charcoal with the hand of a master, he began to block out a face on the surface. The eyes, nose, mouth... yes, he knew them all....
Why must I think
of you?
Why must I?
Why should I?
Why should I cry for you?
Why would you want
me to?
1996
LaCroix stared at his son's image of himself. It was odd, to see himself through his son's eyes. Was there really so much cruelty in his gaze? So little charity? Had appreciation, caring -- love -- been so little expressed that Nicholas had not been able to see them? Had Nicholas only seen the strength, and never the weakness?
Yet this was not the straightforward painting of a devil, a demon summoned to drag sinners off into hell. The emotions of subject and artist were too complex to allow for such a simplistic response. Humor, cynical but real, gleamed in the pale eyes, curved the sharply defined mouth. Lucifer, light-bringer and evil tempter, all at once. The man in the painting would have been inhuman, inhumane, if it weren't for the small detail of one elegant hand holding a rebec. Long fingers delicately cradled the instrument as though it were a precious, fragile treasure, too painfully gained and too easily lost.
His son loved him, to the best of his ability. Understood him. Hated him. All were mixed in with the oils and spread across the canvas. The tale of a relationship that never should have been.
And what would it mean to say,
That,
"I loved you in my fashion"?
1992
Nat picked up the scattered kernels of popcorn that seemed to multiply like tribbles whenever she was over at Nick's watching movies. They also grew legs and ran into distant corners; she knelt nearly under the stairs, scooping the wayward grains into the cup of her palm.
A ghostly hand gleamed above her head, caught out of the corner of her eye. Her head shot up even as her rational brain denied the possibility of ghosts. There was nothing there but a covered canvas, hidden in the darkness under the stairs.
Under a corner of tarp, revealed by an awkward ripple, a hand showed light against darkness. Driven by curiosity, Nat lifted the covering away from the canvas. The face thus revealed startled her. There was arrogance in the lifted brow, the tilt of the head. Cynical amusement gleamed in pale-blue eyes. Not a handsome face, but a striking one -- arresting, powerful.
Unforgettable.
"Hey, Nat, what's this? Hide-'n-seek? Olly olly oxen free?" Nick's voice echoed through the loft.
Quickly, Nat wriggled out from under the stairs. Somehow, she knew she didn't want to bring Nick's attention back to this painting. There was too much feeling in it, too much pain, too much grief. Nick had loved the face that he had painted there, with an anguish that twisted sharply, and hated it enough to blight his soul.
Nat shuddered, and blessed the fact that LaCroix was dead.
What would be true?
Why should I?
Why should I cry for you?
1996
"Is there anything more destructive than the power of fire? It is a force that can kill in moments, can destroy homes, streets, entire cities. And yet, if we had not fire, we would have no civilization. No art, no music, no beauty. We would be beasts shivering in the cold, scraping for survival.
"Modern science theorizes that what exists, exists. It is endlessly destroyed and renewed, defeated and created. If this is true, then nothing is lost. Nothing can be lost. Nothing can be given.
"This is the Nightcrawler's farewell. You will, I fear, hear no more from me. Night's candles are burnt out, and my time here is over."
He turned off the microphone. Silence held sway, so complete that it seemed nothing could shatter it.
"Bonne nuit, Nicholas," LaCroix finally murmured to the night. "Dorme bien, et bonne chance."
FIN