"Good morning."

When Edward awoke, he laid in the deep morning sun, heavy with the forthcoming day. He looked down to the edge of the bed where Henry held a tray of burnt eggs.

"I haven't cooked since—" He stopped, gaping, trying to find his words, but there were none.

He placed the tray over Edward's lap and handed him a spoon. Gingerly, Edward slurped the egg in one fell bite. "It's good," he muffled through his full lips.

The phone rang, interrupting him as Henry sat down, and Edward reached over to the nightstand and answered it. "Hello?" His voice was hardened from the softness he held for Henry. It boomed in the small bedroom of his. He let the phone clatter back on the receiver. "My—" he gulped, staring at the flooring, "The publisher just called me. He wants us in the office this weekend."

On the garden top overlooking New York, Edward and Henry lounged besides the butterflies. "Look at them," Henry marveled. "They fly so carelessly. They look as if they were carrying something heavy the way they dip every time they flap their wings. Especially the bigger ones—they look as if their wings could fold in half. So delicate, yet so strong."

Edward, his arms above his head as he looked out at the rising sun beneath the hazy clouds, smiled reluctantly and nodded. The corner of the rooftop housed trellises with flowers that kissed and romanticized the butterflies and bees. They closed their eyes, taking in the soft morning air before the rush of the day's work.

|||| "Angela!" Edward made his rounds at the office, circling from the printers to the desks and back again. He pressed himself deeply into the corner pillar that protected the printers where Angela worked. "See me in my office." He grunted through his clenched teeth.

When Angela walked into Edward's dark office, he was sitting down with a stack of letters she recognized towering before him.

"You've been stealing my letters to Henry." His cold voice sent shivers down her spine.

Angela gulped before speaking, rocking back and forth on her heels in nervousness, "I thought to keep them as a memento?" Her voice was soft and daring.

Edward squinted his eyes "You know it's illegal to do such a thing let alone insensitive."

"—I know about you and Henry." She blurted over Edward.

Wide eyed and surprised by the audacity of his employee, Edward stood with slow movements, taking off his glasses. "And you think you can blackmail me, is what I'm guessing."

She nodded.

"You can't blackmail me; I'll fire you before you even devise a plan to. I'll tell everyone that the letters you have are for my wife whom you've stolen. Then it would be means for a proper firing. You'll be seen as the bitch who got in the way."

"I'll tell them." She stood her ground.

Edward backed out of his desk and stood towering over Angela the best he could, peering down his nose to her. "But you haven't yet."

"I want to join you two." She stated ever so boldly.

"Join? Join us for what?" Edward's face turned to disgust as he touched a delicate finger to his books. He turned back to Angela who placed her clipboard firmly on the desk.

"I'll tell." She hyperextended her back, so it arched.

Edward stood silent. He was thinking. "What if I told you I could make you an immortal?"

Angela's ears pricked: if she couldn't have both, she'd settle for Earl. "Oh, Earl, you wouldn't?" She teased. "I won't tell if you promise to make me one."

"So, you have noticed Henry's mannerisms?"

She nodded, folding in romantic anguish that clutched her heart. Edward jumped as she collapsed into his chest. "Once Henry turns me, I'll bite you."

"Promise?"

"That's a guarantee." He kissed the top of her head.

~~~~~~

The grass beneath him supported his aching back; a soft and mellow warmth that radiated from the suns burning oven in warming the ground seeped through Henry's cool white shirt into his back. Edward laid beside him, lethargic with the heat of the summer sun sucking the energy from his marrow.

"Don't you know the heart is the only organ you can constantly feel?" Henry softly remarked. Edward murmured an unclear response. Picking him up by the shoulders, Henry sat Edward up against his will. "There's a museum nearby across the river and past the garden. I want to check it out."

Sitting beside a delicate pond, a circular dome cathedral hid in the soft green trees. It had a yawning opening with smooth stone pillars and walls. Henry took Edward's shoulders and led him in, whispering to his ear with a caressing lip, "This all used to be mine."

It was quiet and peaceful unlike the loud clanging of Edward's work life pounding in the back of his head at a constant monotonous drone. No one dared speak, but even then, there were little people gazing at the paintings and the literature and whatnot.

"It's a shame none of this is yours anymore." Edward stood in front of a tall painting of a young man ignudi; his body was contorted in an emotional manner with his head looking out into the distance, sharpening his look. "Is this you?" Edward gasped in amazement.

"Yes, it is." Henry paced to stare next to Edward.

"Who painted it?" He ducked to read the passage.

"Michelangelo." Henry held his hands behind his back, watching Edward's face flicker with thought. "He was using me for proportional practices."

Edward lifted his head back up, dumbfounded by the sheer beauty of the human body. "You knew Michelangelo. Wow."

"I didn't know him. He knew me." The subtle smirk from emancipation drew and etched a feeling of desire, weaving the thought into the divot beneath Edward's abdomen.

"There are rumors that spread quickly when you're as inconspicuous as I was back then." Henry let out a chucked. "Then again, back then everyone had their own beliefs and believed that witches and wizards were real like we know viruses and bacteria are." He sighed a heavy weight of remembrance fluttering on the top of his tongue.

"Michelangelo found me when I was briefly in Italy at my old home. God, I had that place in Italy for a millennium. He painted this as a gift for what he viewed a heavenly and perfect body." He turned to Edward and gave a tilted smile to show a singular fang. "Ironic innit?"

"What's ironic?" Edward pulled himself away from the painting.

"He said I had a heavenly body."

"Oh." Edward pressed his lips into a thin line. "I think it's heavenly—well—it sure looks heavenly." Edward's words melted together as he took in the portrait of Henry one last time.

Henry laughed to himself—a reminder of how arrogant he once was; how arrogant other people's compliments made him."Come see some of the literary pieces I collected over the years." Henry pulled the reluctant Edward away from his portrait to his collection of books that were labeled and placed behind locked glass doors.

"Dickinson's poems. Look!" He smiled at a poem framed on the wall. There was a blood stain that streaked across.

"You know, Veronica spilled that one night as she was rearranging my papers." He shook his head. "I got so angry at her. I wasn't fair or nice and look now: they're supposing that Emily Dickinson herself had bled onto that page." He shook his head.

"Either way, whoever's blood that is, it gives it such literary value I see, the purpose of what Dickinson was trying to say about humanity and life! All these years, I couldn't understand her when she talked to me about the meaning of life coming from death, but now I see it clear as day!" Henry pointed to the bloodstain. "The ability to bleed words and breathe blood. That right there is the humanity: the humanness that brings us all together."

"But" Edward started. "You don't breathe or bleed anymore."

"I—" Henry sighed, looking away from Dickinson's curly handwriting. "We can bleed words onto pages with pen, Edward, that's what Dickinson wrote on the page: her blood! We can breathe words too! Listen as I speak, and you can hear my breath. Sure, I don't need it to live, but I need it to suck the blood of life."

Edward shifted his legs to face Henry. "I'm guessing you've met with Dickinson before then."

"Yes, well, she was the one who gave me a purpose to live after having a discussion with her on the meaning of life. Death gives meaning to life, and since I can't die, the meaning comes from a death of one's soul, and I don't mean the soul we don't have, I'm talking about the soul that defines us."

"What, like, individuality?"

"Precisely! See, Edward, it's about who you are that defines you." Henry pointed to Dickinson's poem again, "Dickinson had a close relationship with death, and because of that, I sought her out to help me find him."

A couple walked by, and Henry stopped to let them pass. He started again, whispering excitingly, "I felt bad after she told me I should be grateful to live because of all the people that loved me and that have loved me and that will love me in the future." Henry turned to Edward and shuffled close to his face. "I think she knew about the future, Edward. I think she knew I would one day find you again after 1790."

"Surely a person doesn't know about the future. Suppose she was just guessing like those fortune tellers, and you tied this with what she said?"

"You clearly didn't know Dickinson like I knew her." Henry crossed his arms.

"Where were you born?"

"What is now modern-day Sicily." Henry and Edward found themselves looking at a painting of Italy. Its colors of warm golden browns and light yellow glowed from where it hung. "I was a young boy at the time around oh bother." Henry took a deep breath. "This was around one thousand years before common era. Greeks colonized later than several hundred years, but they came and went for a long period of time, so I could have Phoenician blood in me potentially, but the Greeks were there battling the natives and Phoenicians." Henry shrugged. "Who knows, I probably am Phoenician." He took another deep breath, waiting for Edward to stop him. "Greek city states were then at war with the Spartans nearby. I remember I was at Athens when they sacked it, watching the whole place burn on the water."

"Trojan war?" Edward asked.

"Yes, yes. All of my belongings from Sicily burned during the Peloponnesian war when it reached Sicily. I lived in Greece for a while until the Roman Empire took hold. It was around then that I became a Cillian pirate. We," Henry laughed at a fond memory. "We kidnapped Julius Cesar!"

"You what?"

"Yes! And then, then well that's when I lost."

"Lost what?" Edward turned to see Henry point below his waist which made Edward's face contort with a mixture of disgust, pain, trying to hide his amusement.

"Yes. It was a brutal attack those Roman's." Henry shook his head. "Those damn Roman's."

Chapter 17

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