A Fleeting Passion

The King of the Jews bent his dishevelled head and folded his hands upon his knees with a sigh.

"Jesus," he said in a voice as soft as the whisper of the shifting sands.

"Jesus, my friend, do you imagine that, if you give up your life tomorrow, people will still speak your name fifty years hence? Do you actually believe that you will matter in a hundred years time? A thousand?"

Wide, incredulous eyes lifted to his face as he spoke. The mortal was trembling but this time the Everman suspected that it was less caused by the cold than by his fervour.

"They will speak my Father's name and that is enough."

"Is it, though? Is it enough for 'you'?" Akhenaten leaned forward with his hands clasped upon his knees and his chin resting upon the backs of them. He did not avert his eyes from the face of the young man before him.

"My reward will be far greater in Heaven than any on this Mortal Earth," Jesus whispered, his gaze suddenly far distant. "I will be immortal."

"But first you will be crucified," Akhenaten reminded him seriously. "I'm not trying to put you off, Jesus my friend, but I've 'been' crucified and I 'don't' recommend it."

That solemn, mistrustful stare moved slowly back to his face. The Son of God clearly believed he was mad. There were days when Akhenaten believed it too.

"You live," Jesus said with a slow shake of his head.

"A life of sorts," his companion agreed with a shrug.

"Show me your hands."

The Everman held them both out towards him, his palms pale and smooth, the Lifeline long and unbroken on both of them; the Line of Fate casting its manifold branches; the Line of Love that was broken and then resumed.

"You lie," said Jesus.

"A miracle," Akhenaten murmured. "You do 'believe' in miracles, don't you?"

PART 3 -- THE PASSION

He slept fitfully that night, not least because the floor was cold and hard, but also because his belly growled at him and nagged away, reminding him that he shared a cell with warm and living flesh; a creature whose blood still ran hot in his veins. A stranger who seemed not to care that tomorrow his life's blood would be spilled and wasted. Akhenaten rolled onto his back with a heavy sigh. It was hard to think of something else. He could bite the man tonight but the Immortal Kiss, though it could be given, must by its very nature be received upon three separate nights, and with more than a single day between them. And in any case, the man called Jesus would not thank him for it.

Akhenaten had met martyrs. He did not like them but he knew their habits. They were ungrateful creatures, all of them. This man, this Son of God, would not appreciate a life unending on this foul earth, no matter how much good work he could do in all that time. No, he wanted the Heavenly Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, and whatever foetid rot he had been promised by whichever miserable, scumbag prophet that convinced his poor mother she was carrying the get of his thrice-damned God and not some unfortunate by-blow.

He stared up at the grille overhead and listened to the sounds of the night, the calls of the soldiers on watch around the walls of the Palace; the tuneless songs of the whores outside the walls. What he would not give for a juicy whore right now, to taste her hot blood and drive himself into her luscious pussy as she squirmed beneath him. He slid a hand beneath his loincloth and began to pump his stiffening sex discreetly.

"You will go to Hell if you spill your seed on the stony ground," a quiet voice pointed out to him from the darkness.

"I will spill it on my belly then, 'if' that is all right with you?" he sighed.

Jesus was lying watching him, not more than a couple of arm's lengths away. His gaze was silver in the moonlight that filtered through the bars.

"How can you think of such things at a time like this?"

Akhenaten turned his head and looked at his companion solemnly.

"What better time to think of love and life than when one is still living?"

"You do not think of love nor of creating life, only of your own foul pleasure," his cellmate said disparagingly.

"Do you have a problem with that?" Akhenaten carried on stroking himself languidly. There was something perversely pleasing in having this beautiful, pious young man watch him bringing himself to climax. "Why did the Gods create us with the capacity to experience ecstasy if we were not to make ourselves ecstatic?"

"You speak again of your Heathen Gods," Jesus remarked a little dismissively. "Perhaps 'They' would not mind!"

"I'm sure 'They' would be delighted to watch," Akhenaten told him with a sly smile. "Look, Jesus! You may believe that your mother found you beneath an olive tree, but we all know that in order for you to come along, she had to spread her..."

" 'Enough'!" The young man was sitting up now, looking at him with an expression of horror. "You condemn your soul to purgatory."

"I have no soul," he lied, for he was beginning to believe that this was in fact a fallacy. The Undead were alleged to have forfeited their souls but without a soul he could have no conscience. Yet, without a conscience he would have ripped out this boy's heart and feasted on it before night had fallen.

"I am beginning to fear so," said Jesus with a little shake of his head.

"Oh good, you know fear then. I was beginning to think you were simple," Akhenaten sniped, giving vent to his frustration.

"I know fear." His companion curled around himself a little tighter. He bowed his head for a moment, long, tangled curls hiding his face.

Akhenaten hesitated, then he wiped his sticky palm on his thigh and rolled onto his knees, shuffling over to sit beside the young man. When Jesus did not respond, he leaned closer and put one arm around the lad. A long, yearning shudder ran through his battered body and he leaned into that unasked for embrace in silence.

"Have you ever known a woman?" The Everman asked him as they reclined against the wall.

The Son of God was still leaning against his shoulder, wrapped in the eternal embrace of the undying one. He had been silent and withdrawn since they came together and Akhenaten wondered if he was embarrassed to show any weakness.

"Would you even admit it if you had?" he asked, though he had only intended to think this question not to give it voice.

"I..." Jesus cleared his throat. "I 'wanted' to."

Solemn golden eyes looked down on him and the young man peered up warily into that unblinking gaze now.

"Was she very beautiful?" Akhenaten enquired with a wry smile.

"She was... she was a whore. But she was kind to me, and yes, she was... 'is' beautiful." Jesus smiled a little too at the memory.

"I'm glad," his companion murmured, still curled around the warmth of his frail, mortal body. "In the face of death, everyone should have a thing of beauty to contemplate."

"Will you think only of your own pleasure when they lift you on the cross tomorrow?" Jesus asked him, almost harshly.

He had almost forgotten about that little problem. Akhenaten sighed heavily and shook his head. Another crucifixion! Would the imaginatively challenged Romans never find a new mode of torment for their opponents?

"It beats bemoaning my fate," he answered with a sigh.

"Hell is too good for you!" the Son of God exhaled in an exasperated tone, but there was a shimmer in his pale eyes that spoke of emotions too complex for words. Akhenaten sensed fear there and sorrow too.

He cupped the man's perspiring face gently in both hands; kneeling beside him. There was a streak of blood on his forehead, close to his hairline that made the Vampire's mouth water. Silently, Akhenaten bent forward and kissed the mortal's sweat-jewelled brow tenderly. Jesus tried to struggle away from him at once.

"Wh-what are you doing?"

"Shhhhh," Akhenaten exhaled almost inaudibly. "Did your mother never kiss a scrape better when you were a boy?"

There was a pensive silence as he lipped gently at the drying blood on his companion's left temple, swirling the dry, coppery taste around in his mouth and savouring it.

"You're not my mother though," the young man ventured nervously at last.

"Use your imagination," The Everman encouraged him with a feral smile. The fellow's startled expression made him feel uncharacteristically malicious for a little while. "Were you a virgin, Jesus? Before those men did the unspeakable things they did to you today, were you untouched?"

The outrage in his cell-mate's wide eyes almost raised laughter in him, but that shadow of fear remained behind his clear, fathomless eyes. The deathless one restrained his mirth.

"You have truly never known the tenderness of a woman, have you?" he murmured less coarsely. "Nor of a man?" His hands traced silent shapes on the mortal's slim shoulders and he felt the man quiver under his touch like a spooky horse.

"I must not be distracted from my true path," Jesus whispered urgently, shaking his head as if he could dislodge the seed of impure thought his companion had planted there.

"Of course not," Akhenaten soothed, still caressing him automatically and drawing the young man back into his arms. He wanted that warmth close to him tonight. He 'needed' it. The blood would sustain him tomorrow and perhaps the loss of it would speed his cell-mate's passage to whatever afterlife he believed awaited him.

The Vampire folded silently around him once more and this time his companion did not resist. Through the darkness of the night and into the still of a new morning, they embraced and the man now known as Barabas bit down deeply into hot, yielding flesh and tasted the richness of another life as it spilled into his mouth and filled him with it's strength. In his arms, Jesus shuddered against the sobs that threatened to tear themselves from his chest and closed his eyes against the treacherous cascade of tears. With his face buried in the broad pillow of his fellow captive's shoulder he could let them fall briefly, hidden from view, for the first time in many moons.

He was quietly submissive as the big, bronze-haired stranger eased him down on his back and slunk like a cat between his legs to mount and enter him. Everman was gentler than the guards had been. His cellmate did not resist but he was as sore as he was needy. Akhenaten's body moved in a comfortable rhythm with his mate's uncoordinated limbs, driving steadily deeper, offering no words. The heat and tightness of his companion's naked body, even after all that he had endured, drew on the Vampire's thrusting sex until they were physically joined in a moment of impossible, unforgivable ecstasy. Akhenaten growled long and low in his throat at the rush of hot, sweet pleasure in his loins. Then he moved lower, taking his mortal lover's guilty sex in his mouth and suckling tenderly on it until the young man could not fight his body's instinctive craving any longer.

"Ohhhhhh..." Jesus exhaled quietly, the only sound he uttered throughout their brief, intimate coupling. His eyes were closed tightly, as they had been throughout, but his lips parted like those of an angel in sacred ecstasy, rendering his battered face completely beautiful for an instant.

Akhenaten rose with a slow smile, licking his lips.

"Don't worry," he promised. "We didn't spill a drop."

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EPILOGUE

History recounts the rest of this tale. It is written into fable and parable how justice was given to the people of Jerusalem and Jesus Barabas, heroic slayer of hated Romans, walked free whilst Jesus the Nazarene was raised on the cross.

They built up their icon in order to tear him down. In the square beneath Pilate's balcony the people of Jerusalem were in a total frenzy. Their bloodlust put most Vampires to shame, the Everman thought grimly. On the podium, high above the screaming throng, Jesus of Nazareth would not meet his eyes, not even to bid him farewell.

"Come with me," the Vampire whispered urgently. "Any man who tries to bar our way will die, I swear it."

"It is not to be so," the other man answered him with inhuman calm. "It is my purpose in this world to take your sin and the sins of the world to my grave. Even in death they shall not destroy me. Even in death I will bring you purity and truth, justice and peace and in death I will find life eternal."

"I pray that you are right about that," The Everman declared, shaking his head incredulously as he held out his arms to embrace freedom and the crowd below roared their approval.

When the storm broke over Golgotha, Akhenaten was far away. Grimly he turned his thoughts from the man who was martyred in his stead, writing off the incident as another sorry postscript to history.

Even the immortals get it wrong sometimes!

THE END

A FLEETING PASSION - © JOSH AND SADIE ROSE BERMINGHAM 2004