Chapter Text
1922-1923
Madrid, Spain
I found Pedro, and for a moment, I believed in humanity.
I berated him for never contacting me, and he cried like the baby he once was. He is happy with Carmen, and she is kind, understanding. They met when he was still poor, and she is unchanged by his success—a gracious, fearless woman, a woman worthy to be his wife. She reminds me of you—but so does everything in my life these days. Her eyes sparkle. She is a soft woman, and you are not—you are beautiful, and you are abrasive, and you are dangerous, and you are wild, and you are everything women in my world are not allowed to be, and you are everything this world is not, and yet I see you, hints of you, whispers of you, like a fleeting breath—momentary satisfaction, momentary life—and then it is gone.
Carmen smiled at me, and all I saw was you—you, an ageless, immortal goddess in the face of a world-weary Spaniard who is five months pregnant, and it was then that I realized how truly desperate I have become. I do not regret leaving you. You knew that I would. That I could never—what, remain in your capture, in your possession for the rest of my pitiful life? That cannot be, not for me, and not for you. But I find myself in need of accepting that I have lost… I have lost, once more, that which I would have given my life to keep, to have and to hold.
Oh, Diana, why did you not simply kill me when we first met, why did you not let me die in the bitter cold, why does it pain you so to grant me mercy? I have done many things in my life deserving of torment, but I dare you to point to me any act that renders me deserving of this insatiable hunger for you. I cannot... I cannot. Please, Princesa. Let me go. Allow me to let you go.
In the velvet calm of the night.
That is where you will find me. In the darkness that does not terrorize, but comforts, embraces, smolders. I write this letter to you from the velvet calm of the night, when the world is quiet, and peaceful at last. I write this letter to you from the silence of the moment, because in this very sliver in time, life is beautiful, and I dream of you: You and the life you wanted us to have; you, and the person you wanted me to be. And here, in the lingering dark between the setting sun and the rising moon, life does not seem as hateful as it once did.
Such dreams are foolish.
She is days, perhaps months of travel away from Madrid, and I am the one who put this yawning space between us.
Even after everything.
Everything.
I can hear your voice. I can feel you, in the dark. I can taste you. And I… I breathe. I breathe. And you fill me, as if you were life itself, as if you were necessary for life, to live. I see you in the dark. It is not so simple now, it never was. But I see you, and I dream. I see you, and I breathe; I see you, and I live.
Please... please, just for a night. Just for a night, put everything aside: everything I am, everything I have been, and love me. There will be time enough for terror, for hate. There will be time enough for destruction and ruin and suffering and death and all of these things that mankind brought forth into this world. But let the world wait a little, Princesa.
Let the world wait.