Lara spent most of her commute to the museum both regretting having spent all of last night bawling her eyes out, and being thankful for her endless restraint in not getting blackout drunk as well.
The Curator, to her great fortune, saddled her with only the faintest grimace at the first sight of her, and made no further note of it. It did make the walk to the exhibit quite devoid of conversation, however. He, who could find little more prescient to comment on than her swollen countenance, and she, who could find little to energize her to emote with that swollen countenance, made a pair content with stale silence. As far as she could glean, at least.
In reality, she did not know this Curator at all, and could not speculate with any real certainty about his feelings. He seemed a kindly enough man, dark, square and creased, but with undeniable youth lined in the plush of his cheekbones and the deep black of his curls. A picture of him on the museum’s website had her place him at around his early 40s, but upon seeing him in person; seeing the set of his shoulders and that strange sparkle of wisdom in his eyes usually attributed to the elderly, she wondered if he was not simply a much older man who had aged quite well.
By the time she’d reached that point in her musings, her curiosity had been stamped by her melancholy, and it struck her that she was surely devoting far too much of her notepad to the man giving her the tour, than the exhibit of interest she was meant to document, and she stopped.
The prominent facts were:
- The man was at best, kind (at worst, bored) enough to accept an interview and tour of the exhibit of interest on account of her friendly working relationship with the previous curator.
- Lara was most likely making the worst first impression of her admittedly limited journalistic career.
She was beset by an unfortunate set of circumstances that made it unbearably difficult for her to muster even the slightest cheer or professionalism, and felt in this moment more than she ever had in her life, that she would rather be anywhere but here. Preferably at home, probably crying. Hopefully drunk.
On top of her various personal affairs, there was the matter of the interview itself. It was a deeply terrible subject, striking all too painfully and personally into the heart of her current preoccupations, nevermind that she would rather not be seen in public at all.
She could have simply told her group she wouldn’t be able to do it. They’d been operating on the loose arrangement that either She or Eden would take care of the interview, and Eden would not show up unless informed at least 10 minutes in advance (so they might run there from their apartment). It was, of course, too late to opt out now, but additionally there was the fact that she’d rather have her entire bloodline cursed than ask Eden right now. In fact, said curse struck her as preferable to encountering Eden at all, and she was beginning to doubt she would ever speak to Eden ever again.
It made her sick to her stomach for somewhat different reasons. Something like unfettered rage, and something like heartbreak. And now she was going to cry again.
Even diverting her thoughts to the exhibit did not help. Thinking about it only brought to mind half-remembered anecdotes about eternal loyalty, trust, unbreakable bonds-
“Your subject of interest is Ephelides’ Tear, if I’m correct?” said The Curator, inclining his head.
“You are, sir.” She tried, narrowly achieving vocal stability at the cost of her tone sounding entirely annoyed. She nailed her eyes to her notepad in animalistic fear.
“Then I dare say we have arrived at our destination.”
He began imputing various codes for security measures, and as she watched the doors shift open, and the billowing of white vapor through the seam, she readied her notepad.
She allowed herself one fortifying breath, banishing thoughts of her own fractured bonds to make room for the purely historical ones.
“For clarity, sir,” She began, “I ask that you differentiate any information you know to be unverified by the museum’s sources. That is, please clarify if it is something you are providing personally.”
And he replied, “I will do all that I can.” with something slightly pointed in his smile.
===
The first question of the interview was out of the ordinary, in that it was for her, from him. She was rather too enraptured by the sight of the artifact upon entering to be bothered.
“Do forgive my asking, but do you believe in the tear’s mythos, Ms. Lara?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the question.” She said absently.
She snapped to attention when he smiled at her. “Vampires, Ms. Lara. Do you believe in vampires?”
“Ah, that. I’ve heard some of their myths, at least in relation to the tear.”
“Do you believe they exist?”
“I can’t say I ever put all too much thought into deciding one way or another.”
He laughed. “Then I must ask you suspend your disbelief for a while. There is very little we can say about the tear’s mythos without first supposing the existence of the vampires who cried them.”
Lara stilled in surprise, though her pen moved faster than ever across her notepad. “Please, go on. You mean to say it is an actual tear?”
“Such is the myth. It’s referred to in some regions as “a shard of eternity.” The last mortal tear a vampire cries before they are forever turned, or so the story goes.”
She lifted her hand from her notepad for a second, rolling her wrist as she reassessed the tear. Smaller than she anticipated, yet strangely imposing. It felt out of place, suspended within its glass case, and slightly unsettling. Like it ought to be better secured.
“The meaning is more poetic than I’ve heard.”
“Isn’t it? It’s pictured in certain literature as a symbol more than anything: a crystalized artifact of a life left behind. And yet, a gift. Given to none other than its cause. An eternal link with whoever it was that wrest you from your mortal life. The landmark of an everlasting bond. Supposedly.”
The words would have perhaps mired her in another trudge through her own swamps of despair, if not for the particular tone with which they were spoken—that slightly dubious drawl—that sparked her curiosity enough to distract.
“Do you perhaps…disagree with that picture of it?” She stared, pen against page in eager equilibrium. He seemed to weigh the worth of her inquiry carefully, as if speaking on something very delicate. He hedged,
“Forgive the imposition of my personal bias. Anything I could tell you about that matter would be largely useless in a strictly academic sense. As in, largely my own conjecture.”
Heedlessly curious, Lara waved at him to continue. He sighed.
“Merely… I can only presume it cannot be of a value so universally understood, inherently acknowledged, if there is one sitting within a museum.”
Lara could not help but glance back at the tear, a refracting collection of light, crystalline and pure, encased by tempered glass and alone inside a cold room. It was undeniably beautiful, but only more lacking in sentimentality in flaunting it. Lit by canned lights and singularly magnificent in a stony room built to surround it. Something to gawk at. An exhibit.
And Lara was not sure she believed in the mythos in the first place, but the sheer juxtaposition turned her stomach. The air felt heavier. It felt not quite like , or seeing something that was never meant to be seen. When she spoke, intending to present a reasonable counterpoint, it rang more as a self-consolation.
“Perhaps… if the owner was killed?”
The Curator smiled. “You make a good point.”
But she was still unsettled, unassuaged by this half-baked reassurance.
Lara frowned. “But then, if it’s meant to be a mutual bond, wouldn’t the one who turned them treasure it? But then, I suppose they could be dead as well.”
“Another good point.”
Lara tapped her pen against her page, lost in thought. Finally, when she could come up with no way to turn the sentiment into something academically digestible, she admitted, “It doesn’t feel like one. It feels…convenient. Like retroactively justifying a conclusion we’ve already reached. No, even if it is the case here, who’s to say it’s the same everywhere? If many tears exist, cried by every man made into a vampire, then how can we say for certain there has never been one stolen, or sold off?”
She writes them down on her notepad, but they are questions she cannot entirely expect answers to. Each one is punctuated with frustrated question marks.
So distracted by her own line of inquiry, she did not even notice the soft laughter coming from The Curator.
“You seem to be quite a conscientious person, Ms. Lara.”
“Is that a bad thing?” She asks, hackles rising.
The Curator raises his hands in appeasement. “I don’t mean it as one, in this case. Only,” He cannot help but laugh again, clearing his throat with a cough. “While we are discussing my personal opinions, I agree we can’t prove the tear to be universally meaningful merely in abstract. I suspect the tear has some sort of physical influence on its owner. A pact of loyalty of some sort.”
She begins to jot it down, but loses steam halfway through, muttering, “What’s so wrong about sentiment in the abstract? Why does it need a physical effect to justify its importance?”
The Curator blinks at her, shocked. Then he begins laughing. Not of any particular volume, but insistently. It begins to make Lara self conscious. Finally, he settles.
“You’re right. You’ll have to forgive this callous old man for doubting the limits of sheer sentiment.” He doesn’t seem all that old at all to her, but she nods. He stares at the tear, static in its strange suspension, in that little glass case.
Quietly, he says,“If you’ll forgive my asking. Do you have anyone you’d like to spend eternity with? Anyone you think you could love through endless life?”
She blinks at him, but he keeps his gaze on the tear, only asking to make some sort of point. He has no way of knowing the way the thought burns her. She swallows a knot in her throat, feeling renewed tears burning at her nose and eyes. Unexpectedly, what escapes her is only the complete truth.
“I think…if you asked me about a week ago, I would’ve said yes.”
He looks at her, startled.
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah.”
“My condolences.”
“It’s no big deal.”
They sit in a gently awkward silence. Before she has time to regret her all too personal admission, he returns, “I felt the same, once. But it is a scary thing, to watch someone change. Scarier, I think, to feel it happen to you.”
Lara’s eyes begin to blur, and she winces at the sheer breach of professionalism they are reaching, but The Curator only smiles and holds out a handkerchief.
She wipes her eyes as he speaks. “There is a saying ascribed to vampiric myth that I’m quite fond of.”
He runs a hand across the plaque in front of the tear’s pedestal. “In simpler words, it is: The only way to know if you can spend an eternity with someone, is to spend an eternity with them.”
He laughs at the slight look she gives him, and says, “I suppose it sounds somewhat silly. But that is why I underestimate the sheer force of sentimentality. Vampires, I feel, are not creatures whose hearts can remain unchanged in the face of time. A heart that can change is one that can never be promised for eternity.”
He speaks, soft and solemn, as if reaching some conclusion. It is rather lost on her, only glad to have stopped crying. She tries to return his handkerchief, but he waves a hand at her.
She turns to the tear, that slight little stone of brilliant silver blue. “Do you think…” She makes no moves to write on her notepad. “The owner wants it back? If they are alive.”
He raises an eyebrow at her, as if trying to ask if she wants his answer or one she will like. She huffs. “Whether in your belief or mine—or in fact, why not both? Perhaps the sentiment of everlasting love or connection is not so eternal, but is there not a sentiment in belongings themselves? Even if it is only some physical summation of a magical pact? Isn’t there sentiment in keeping what is yours for the sake that it should belong to you?”
He stares at her rather blankly, long enough that she begins to fidget in worry that she’s offended him. Instead he beams, wide and sharp.
“You certainly make a good point.” He says, “Though I cannot help but wonder if it belongs to the once-human that shed it, or the vampire it was paid to.”
She gives it a thought, rolling her pen between her fingers. It is a terribly beautiful pen. Terribly expensive too. Terribly good birthday gift. She wondered if she owned all the tears she’d ever shed for one Eden Caldanna.
And so she does not know quite whether she is referring to herself or the vampire when she mutters, “Who could tears belong to, but the ones who cried them? The exceptions are only offerings.”
The Curator’s laugh, hearty and pleased, is enough to startle her back to her composure.
She returns to her notepad, flipping back to the page of her original questions that they’d strayed embarrassingly far from. It all feels surface level after the wealth of information she’d just received, but figured she ought to cover her bases anyway.
That is until The Curator’s walkie talkie goes off, some barely comprehensible back-and-forth, and suddenly the two are trading hasty goodbyes as he is called away on urgent business. He is particularly apologetic about it, but she waves him off.
“If you could just direct me to where the museum’s information is, I can look through it myself. It’s no trouble.”
He laughs dryly, and points to the small plaque in front of the pedestal. “It’s all right there. I apologize for my failure to delineate the two, but I’ve done quite a bit of my own studies on the tear, so I had a fair helping of my own supplementary knowledge of it. Perhaps not as rigorously verified as you might’ve hoped, I apologize. Also, the doors will lock once you leave.”
She stares blankly at the short list of epithets and sentence long description inscribed on the plaque. As he begins to rush off, she tries numbly to hand him back his handkerchief.
“Keep it!” He insists. “Call it a trade off!”
She can only watch, processing, until he is far down hallways.
“Trade off for what?” She shouts.
It is a fair few weeks later when she becomes involved in the investigation. The disappearance of a priceless, newly acquired artifact is nothing to be scoffed about, and she is a prime suspect, being one of the scant few who had seen the artifact before it was stolen.
Her saving grace, of course, that The Curator disappeared on the same day.
In the end, she keeps his handkerchief.