Chapter Text
Cesare could see himself.
He could see his real past self. Lying sprawled across his linen sheets; sleeping with such a calm tranquility he almost didn’t recognise him. But it was no mistaking, he was looking at who he used to be. His olive skin was barely illuminated by the traces of moonlight snaking its way into his room, the wavy dark-brown hair that accompanied it somehow neatly deposited around his head. The slow rise and fall of his chest gently pushed at the light coverings that carefully concealed his body, moving them so slightly Cesare had to squint to see it.
Cesare stared down at him(self?) amber eyes made wide as he took in the man before him, the man that couldn’t be before him. What was going on? Why the hell could he see himself, sleeping peacefully in what used to be his home. Even ignoring the fact that he could not physically be in two places at once, the soft face he watched sleep had now not existed for over a millennium; all soft features, warm colours, liveliness, and life long since worn away through time, leaving only sharp angles, scraggly hair, cold indifference, and death in its wake. No, the man he was watching slumber soundlessly through the warm Venezian night did not exist. Not anymore.
The memory of the scene in front of him flared up an emotion in his chest that he didn’t care to recognise, leaving Cesare feeling quite done with doing whatever it was that he could be classed as doing right now. He was so outta here. He took one final glance towards his younger sleeping self, before swiftly turning towards the too-familiar door.
A hollow wooden clatter reverberated from down the hall.
Cesare froze
His eyes darted to the younger him, searching for any reaction. He didn’t even stir.
Light footsteps began to make their way towards his room.
Cesare didn’t move.
Cesare couldn’t move.
The footsteps stopped just outside the door. A breath Cesare knew he didn’t need caught in his throat.
His eyes were pinned to the door, staring at it in abject terror being the only thing he could do. Eyeing as the handle began to slowly, painstakingly turn, making barely a sound but a muted equivalent of metal being dragged across wood. This was somehow the loudest thing Cesare had ever heard, he didn’t move to cover his ears, he didn’t move at all. He just kept staring, watching . He knew what this was, he knew what he was seeing, what he was about to see.
“Stop it” he somehow managed to croak out a weak command, but he said it so pleadingly, so without vigour, that it came out barely above a whisper.
The door creaked as it opened, as it always had. Cesare had never bothered to oil its rusty hinges, deeming such a task too pointless and too boring to ever consider doing. It made no difference now.
He forced his eyes away from the door and towards ‘himself’. He tried again to speak,
“Wake up” his voice was shaking now, panic setting into his speech.
Either way his younger self made no show of stirring. He was meant to be good at words, speaking well was the one partially decent quality he had going for him. And yet this fact did not change his loss for words.
The moonlight didn’t reach the door, leaving a darker than dark abyss on the other side of the doorframe, and the vague outline of someone who shouldn’t have been there. Who Cesare begged to anyone wouldn’t be there. But god had never cared for him then, why would he start now. A shadowed figure emerged from the dark without a sound, eyes no doubt locked onto the passively sleeping man in the opposite corner of the room. They barely took pause, setting their direction, slowly making their way towards the bed, the gleam of something sickeningly familiar clutched in their hand.
Cesare’s mouth was dry.
“ GODDAMMIT WAKE UP ” What was meant to be anger just came out as breathy desperation. Whatever, he wasn’t playing around anymore, he was over this, he was done.
…
He didn’t move.
And he didn’t stop staring.
Cesare hoped beyond hope that the muted footsteps growing ever closer would be enough to wake him , to give him a chance to fight back, to run, to do anything. It was no use, he knew it was. It was too late, in more ways than one.
A floorboard just beside his bed creaked at the visitor’s intrusion. Cesare had long since begun avoiding it when he’d walked, years of living here having provided him with the subconscious understanding of where not to step, so to avoid the uncomfortable noise.
Stupid unnecessary memories were reemerging from his subconscious as he watched the intruder grow closer and closer, memories of a long lost man who hadn’t thought of anything of the sort for centuries. Memories of a man who was going to die.
He didn’t want to watch. Not again.
Not like this.
Yet his wide fear-stricken eyes kept unwillingly drinking it all in, not even allowing him to blink with the chance he’d miss anything. This wasn’t fair, he knew what happened, for fucks sake he knows what comes next. But still he stays put, body paralysed and eyelids not daring to block his view.
“Don’t make me watch”
When he spoke it was barely a whimper, somehow lost to the thickness of the air now occupying the room.
His eyes stung with the promise of tears.
Long brown-tinted eyelashes fluttered open, the foregoing sleep still adamant in the doe-like eyes that were being partially shielded by them. Pupils dazed and wide in the darkness. Said eyes only had a moment to glance over to the direction of the disturbance that had awoken him, attention locking onto the object reflecting the moonlight of the room like a prism.
Locking onto the knife.
He barely had time to let out a small gasp, eyes going wide, before the knife came soaring down, plunging directly into his chest. Cesare let out a strangled sound, maybe it was meant to be a scream. That’s all he could do, before the knife was extracted and brought down again and again and again and again and again . The strangled cries soon turned to a mix of mangled and broken sobs, and weak attempts at begging in a language Cesare no longer recognised, getting quieter and quieter as more and more blood fled from the confines of the man on the bed and pooled across the wooden floor, infesting the cracks in a deep crimson.
Cesare couldn’t recall falling to his knees, but here he knelt nonetheless, legs no longer able to function as he stared at the bleeding man in front of him. A remnant of what may have once been pain pulsing at his bones as he continued to watch in tragic horror as he died.
His young sobs had quickly devolved to small hiccuping breaths - accompanied only by the tears he shed as the colour and minimal light inevitably faded out from around him - growing shallower by the second. In what must have been his final few moments, his eyes were wild, darting desperately around the room, begging silently in a frantic plea for someone, anyone to show up and save him. Someone that even in his last moments, growing closer and closer, he knew would never come. His eyes locked onto Cesare’s, fear embedded hopelessly throughout them as the last ebbs of life finally drained from him. Young innocent terror stayed implanted on his now too-pale face as his eyes faded somewhat, turning glassy and distant. His body going deathly still. He eerily resembled a marionette with cut strings, stiff and dead eyed.
Cesare screamed
It was guttural and terrified and angry, full of feelings no human should have ever had to harbour, and reignited with the pain and anguish that he had tried to bury along with this god-forsaken memory. He screamed and screamed, at the sight before him, at the unfairness of it all, at the piercing wounds that all of a sudden felt as real and fresh as they were the day he got them. And he screamed for the miserable fact when he died he hadn’t even been given the chance to.
And he woke up, screaming.