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To miss the sun, as a vampire, becomes a folly after some time. That useless ball of light and heat means nothing when your eyes adjust to darkness quicker than a cat’s, or when your flesh resembles the finest planes of cold marble. Even as the years pass and the effect it holds on you lessens, it still leaves a faint sting - a reminder that you are not allowed to feel its loving embrace, no matter how much you beg or plead, no matter how many times you come crawling back in sobbing apology. The sun will never cradle you as it once did.
Perhaps that is why in many stories the sun is a man - a father - something that clings to you so lovingly in youth, but changes the tone of its grip, its eyes, its malice as soon as you dare to change.
One evening, some hours before sunrise, Daniel lies sideways on the couch looking at the television. He’s watching an old VHS tape he’d dug up in storage a while ago; it’s a Carl Sagan lecture - intercut with General Motors commercials that unfortunately taped over some of the good bits. Now and then, the visage of the astronomer is intercut with images of space - planets, stars, asteroids, and the like. One image, which Daniel has paused on for the last twenty minutes, is of the Sun. He had not realized how mottled the sun was, reminded of his own skin that had not aged gracefully after years of drugs, lack of sunscreen, and perhaps an underuse of moisturizer.
He stares at the image with a strange ache in his chest. There is something forlorn about looking at the sun as it truly is. Some part of him clings to an image of that nearby star likened to that in his childhood picture books: always tucked into the corner and awash in buttercream yellow, adorned often with a smile on its face. This sun, the one that lingers on the screen, is an angry beast glaring at him with a bright, familiar orange. He thinks of the cempasúchil that littered the ofrendas when he’d visited Mexico several years ago on a story about cartels in Guadalajara, how they’d glimmered under the candle light with a similar furious radiance. Then, he remembers the orange marigolds that dripped from the walls during a Hindu wedding he’d attended - a colleague of his he believed - a tribute to Vishnu, lord of the sun. He thinks of long-horned cattle wearing wreaths of marigolds trotting through Delhi, bright flashes of sunlight coursing through the veins of the city even in the middle of the night. So many people and their connection to that start. Truly a piece of humanity he has forsaken.
But was that not always so for Daniel? He had clung to the night as a youth. It was the best time to meet people with weaker inhibitions, to corner them and pull the truth from them like unwinding a string from a ball of yarn. Countless times, Daniel had exploited the night, filling his tapes with stories or flushing his pockets and bloodstream with drugs. Under the careful, silver gaze of the moon, he had dove into the bed of whoever to fill his side of the social contract, chasing one last string of pleasure from whatever stranger would have him - all away from the hateful eye of the sun.
Daniel would be nothing like his father
the sun.
He does not remember what his last glimpse of the light was like. Perhaps another memory swipe from that damned Armand. Couldn’t even give him the satisfaction of remembering how it felt to feel the warmth of the sky god one last time before an eternal life of darkness befell him.
But then he remembers Louis, his body blackened and rippling with mottled scar tissue, smoke and ash and the horrific smell of burning flesh surrounding the two of them at that table in the Divisadero place. As if the sunlight had peeled away yet another layer that was uncalled for, letting the young journalist see just how raw and ragged these mysterious monsters were when faced with their enemy, their merciful father that they yearned for. Daniel was shaking then. He’s shaking now.
The sun is an angry father. He who hath made us is now our destruction.
He remembers Armand - or Rashid, then - bowing forward in prayer, his hands reaching for the boundary where the light of the sun carved a harsh line against the cool, gray floor of the penthouse. What is a mediocre star to a 514 year old vampire?
God he had looked so beautiful-
Daniel rolls away from the television, afraid to look at the image of the sun as if it will crawl out of the screen and flood him with fire. Like a psychosomatic nightmare, he feels a phantom heat crawling along his skin, prickling the flesh like heated needles. It is a burning unlike anything he’s ever felt, but it isn’t real. It cannot be real. He’s dying, and it’s painful, and it’s not real. Why does it hurt so much?
Don’t hurt me, father
Somewhere, as the sun rises above the skyline of the city, a lone vampire sits on the ledge of a skyscraper, dangling his feet into nothingness. The sunlight touches his skin like fingernails dragging across his flesh - enough to bleed but not enough to kill. It stings like a wartenberg wheel, drawing little pleasures across his flesh that burn just on the side of satisfaction.
Orange eyes like marigolds greet the angry father as the day begins.