I like to believe that Walter and Joachim had some kind of lord-knight relationship that went terribly awry. I also like to make up long, convoluted backstories so nyaaah. (There's some mildly smexy slashy rapey stuff going on later, but seriously, take it like a man if it's not your cup of tea.)

And yes I made Joachim a violinist ZOMG DEAL. I am a massive whorebucket for classical musicians so I will make Joachim play the violin if I want to.

Now then. 0300 is high time for my beddy-bye. Tell me in review form if I need to go back and revise it, I can't think in editor-mode right now.

The Shadows of the World

Joachim Armster had not always been a creature of the night, but some things never changed. Even before the sun made his eyes close in pain, before the edges of his teeth grew to cut his lip while he slept, before the blood in his mouth was like sweet poison, he had hidden from the light and lived in darkness.

He remembered the days of his childhood as an isolated Hell, where the infighting was terrible and intense and there was nowhere to escape but deeper into the murky rooms of his prison. To pass the time that he spent in the shadows of the world, his mother taught him to fight with a sword, his father to play the violin and love music, and on occasion he was grateful… but more often he was angry and confused, never knowing why he was stowed away constantly in the dark rooms of his family home, the grandest of German estates that was immense and lavish and the thing he hated most. He had nothing but himself, nothing but the things he could make out of life.

When he was older he learned that the world was afraid of him – afraid of his appearance, his voice, his arresting stare and all the other things that made it so hard to believe he was human. He could not be seen outside, where the light would make sunrays out of his silver-white hair and the many translucent greys and blues of his eyes would glitter like jewels, and he could not be heard, for fear his voice like velvet and soft articulations would make his beauty all the more unsettling... would convince all those who watched that the Armster bloodline had produced not a son but something sinister.

When the time came that he could no longer keep in chains his growing desire to know the world, he stole away into the departing caravans of war as the knights of his village went to battle. It was easy to escape the prison of his house; as soon as he was old enough to break through the doors and climb over the walls of the mansion, the only thing keeping him behind his parents' veil of secrecy was the fear that he was something different, something that others could not understand. It was misfortune only that the French-German border conflicts caught them before they got far; before he knew it he was covered in blood and sword powder, and the fighting arts of his mother were saving the lives of cousins and neighbors he'd never known.

How glorious it had been to learn that he had a place in that cursed, gold-gilded society… as a child raised in the shade, in the back alleys of life, he was bewildered and overjoyed to learn that once his sword had proven its sharpness, his fine features and unnatural beauty meant nothing. Once a blight and a disease, his appearance was suddenly remarkable, not frightening; his pale hair and eyes became just one more reason for Walter Bernhard to lavish him with gifts.

Joachim would forever remember the first time he met his newfound lord. The castle on a hill, for so long a fairy tale to a boy locked in an ivory tower, loomed around him, and that alone was enough to make him dizzy… but by God, riches and furnishings and draperies, and still this enormous estate's beauty could not match its owner's.

Walter Bernhard shone like the sun and spoke like the murmuring of the wind, and watching him was like watching a king at court – all the motions, the graceful sweeps of cloth and broad smiles, and none of the pretensions. He'd glided across the room to greet this sixteen-year-old savior of their company, gotten down on his knees and told him he was beautiful… what an honor! Joachim would have loved Walter even if he hadn't been bound to do so by their contract of fealty.

He was Walter's favorite. For the benefit of his family, whose coffers ran over with each day Joachim spent with Walter in his castle, he stayed there in that dark windowless building at his lord's side. His music was the diversion of Walter's banquets, his conversation was Walter's pleasure in his leisure time, and so they spent their days always together. Joachim's life, once only for himself, seemed to have become only for another. He was for Walter alone – God help the rich men at the banquet who touched his shoulders when they spoke to him or the wealthy widows who batted their eyes at him from the wings, for Joachim's jealous master would bring ruin upon them and take everything from them but the clothes on their backs.

Joachim no longer knew how he felt about the way Walter looked at him. Sometimes those amber eyes were filled with kindness, and Joachim felt a warm affection for him, for the attention he lavished on his most beloved knight… but other times that amber gaze made his spine quiver with unease, made his skin crawl with a strange blend of excitement and dread. It was a fierce glower – a greedy, covetous rage unfitting of a gentleman that burned like a beating heart beneath the affectations of his noble upbringing. It wasn't the chaste, paternal affection of the knights in his company, the kind that got him brotherly nudges and good-natured horseplay from people he knew wanted nothing more from him than friendship. He learned to look the other way, to catch the very edge of that predatory stare and then turn away hoping that the eerie lust would only be momentary this time.

Things changed gradually. The tides of war shifted, and less and less was Joachim called away; yet the more time he spent under the roofs of castle Bernhard, the deeper Walter's frown grew and the tighter the grip on Joachim's life grew till he thought he would suffocate. It was no longer safe for him to spend time with others, for what a temper Walter could display, what a terrifying, smoldering wolf-eyed passion that made his blood freeze and made something sickening rise in his gut, some kind of bizarre burning excitement that he craved and hated all at once.

Walter did not go outside. Walter did not come out during the day, Walter hated the light and kept his castle dark, Walter ate very little and was never hungry. But no one noticed, for those were the habits of the rich in Germany; no one suspected that their lovely young lord, their trusted Walter Bernhard, was a demon and had been a demon all the years they had so loyally served him.

Joachim only wished he had realized earlier what tore at his master's conscience from inside. Walter would live forever, be beautiful forever, a vampire in the shadows, but as for the one he loved and wished to call his own… Joachim's beauty would wither, he would be torn from the world and from Walter by time and age, and his love for his lord would die with him.

The thought struck him one night during a cold October, along with a dread creeping feeling in his heart, that his life had been too short, too strange and sad, that lately he was thinking not like the youth he was but in the tenses of an old man touching the fringes of death. He was barely an adult, still with boyish roundness in his face and the clear, uncorrupted eyes of a child; yet his world had grown so dark and small that there was only one thing left for it to do, and that was extinguish completely. Walter had perfectly orchestrated his last few months. He knew he was going to die.

Surrounded by the sleeping bodies of his drunken comrades amidst the sleepy aftermath of one of Walter's bier hall banquets, Joachim realized too late that the strength in those inhuman arms was too much for him, and that he had not thought about what he would do on the day Walter resorted to brute force to get from his favorite knight what he wanted. The flights of spiraling stairs seemed longer when he was being dragged up them terrified and stumbling, and the towers much colder when his mind was blaring with fear and the blood in his arm pounded from the viselike grip.

It was in flashes after that, slammed doors and satin sheets and the terrible sound of fabric tearing. The unease didn't stop when the blackness took over; through gaps in that hazy unconscious he recalled a prolonged agony that lasted for days, the blind horror, the hopeless cries of I don't want this that resounded in his own head but were drowned in the viscous emptiness that seemed to hold his voice prisoner. Everything drowned in that dark vacuum – everything him, everything Joachim. The only thing he knew emerging from the dark cocoon into the offensive light was that these strong pale arms wrapped so possessively around him owned him now.

Run along now, clean yourself, murmured the voice by his ear. The water brought back his senses, made him shudder at the bizarre new sensations shivering up and down his spine. Running his fingers along his naked back, he found gashes in rows, deep furrows where the skin was torn like paper and his senses flared to the touch. The pain, the darts of liquid fire through his back, brought back flashes of things he didn't want to remember – foreign skin gliding against his own, terrible gasping heat, greedy nails ripping through him, through his untouched body, virgin flesh that had never seen the touch of another…

He was changed, violated, what could one call it? He was dead. No, not dead, but different. Raped, pillaged, in every sense of the word. He could go back to nothing, return to no open arms that would accept the thing he had become. He had nothing now but the strange demon blood in his veins and the red-haired devil who dressed in silks and spoke of love and pretended he was not a monster, and that was how Walter had wanted it all along.

Days like these, feeling his sanity slip away and wishing there was something besides the slow drip of water to keep him company, it was all Joachim could do to relive the days of his youth – a time when there were colors other than grey, a place where his friends were many and his parents looked at him with love in their eyes… the familiar parlors of his home and the red-velvet cushions and dark stone walls of Walter's bedchamber, the only places in his mind where there were memories.

It was a shame that these echoing voices, these screams, this crying, would be the only things in his mind now and forever, for the rest of his days till his immortal heart broke… until then, all he'd have to fill his ears was the slow emptiness, the steady rush of water on chains, and the throb of loneliness and betrayal that burned whenever Walter's beautiful smiling face surfaced in his mind… always the saint, always the devil, always the only thing he had in his little world of shadows.

End