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Joseph could hardly contain his excitement as he opened the mercury box and took out the metal sheet. He turned it over to see the image it had captured, and found… nothing.
No – not nothing, exactly.
There was the wall of their palace, with its ornate moldings, and the beautiful, throne-worthy velvet-upholstered chair that Cesare had been sitting in.
Everything was rendered there on this silver sheet, in fascinatingly intricate detail, and from just a few minutes’ exposure.
The only part that was missing was the part that should have been the focus of the image: the three people – the three vampires – who had been posing there in front of the camera.
Angelo looked over Joseph’s shoulder, and Joseph heard his murmur of disappointed surprise. Then he gasped. “Oh! It must be because of how our atoms move. More quickly than natural – you know, that’s what lets us flit. But I never thought… perhaps our molecules just wouldn’t sit still long enough for…”
He trailed off. Joseph considered, as Cesare and Miguel came to see.
“Well,” Miguel said. “That detail is pretty amazing.”
“Yeah, but it’s as if we just disappeared!” Cesare said. He seemed as disappointed as Joseph was, and Joseph understood why. He had looked marvelous in what would have been his first photographic portrait.
Did Angelo’s explanation make sense? There wasn’t even a blur where the three of them should have been. The part that should have been behind them was rendered in just as sharp detail as the rest of the scene. Only a hint of the edge of Cesare’s cape remained. But if it wasn’t that quirk of their atoms, then what…
Frustrated, Joseph let his hands drop to the table, but Angelo caught them, and the photo. “Wait,” Angelo said, “Don’t you want to seal it?”
Joseph looked again at the plate. It was a wonderful image, and his first with his new equipment. The disappointment was strong now, but he was old enough to realize that it would fade. He’d regret it if he didn’t save it.
“There’s so much more that we can photograph, even if we can’t photograph ourselves,” Angelo said, holding Joseph’s arm and trying to cheer him up. “We can do flowers, scenery…” he laughed slightly. “We could even take photographs of ourselves with puppets, and when we disappear, it would look like the puppets are floating! You know, to take advantage of the situation.”
“And science will keep moving on,” Cesare said. “People will keep developing new processes for these things, and we’ll be around.” The Prince sighed. “I was looking forward to playing with it, but I’ll wait.”
“I can guess what kind of photos you wanted to take,” Miguel teased, squeezing Cesare’s shoulders. Cesare laughed, and Miguel pulled him closer, into a kiss.
Angelo smiled at them as he began to prepare the fixing process. “Subject aside,” he said to Joseph, “Your attempt has succeeded. Congratulations.”
Joseph smiled. “My attempt? You’ve been just as involved as I have.” Together, they’d flitted to Paris and back to get the scientific papers, the instructions, schematics, and formulas, the necessary materials, and together, they’d built the equipment for every step of the process.
“But this has always been your passion,” Angelo said. It was true. When Joseph had joined them, he had embraced the opportunity to create his own life, guided by his own interests. Of those interests, the possibility of capturing images from light had always been first and foremost. He had even created some of his own processes that had had some success, though never that durable. As one who lived out of the world of humans, he couldn’t share his findings as he would have liked, but he didn’t do it for acclaim. He did it from pure scientific curiosity.
But this new conundrum… it changed a lot. Would he never be able to photograph his friends? Or himself? The group of them had plenty of friends who weren’t vampires, true, but that wasn’t who he wanted to photograph.
He shook his head. He had centuries ahead of him, he had to remember that. These three had already been alive for almost four hundred years.
“Oh, stop moving so much!”
Joseph heard Cesare’s voice, and looked up to see Miguel and Angelo sitting on the couch, cuddled together, with Cesare sitting on a chair across from them, a large sketchbook on his knee, and a pen in his hand, trying to draw them. Miguel pulled Angelo close and kissed him, then said something to Cesare, teasing him, probably, though Joseph couldn’t hear from where he was. Cesare nudged Miguel with his foot, and gave some frustrated expression, but even seeing him from the back, Joseph could tell that Cesare was full of love for the two of them.
Joseph smiled at the trio that had given him a home. Someday, he would be able to take a photograph of them. That, he knew. He would make sure of it.
—-------
This time, for sure…
Over the past 80 years, how many times had they said that?
80 years since they’d first attempted to take a photo of vampires. Over 120 years since Joseph himself had first become a vampire. He’d changed a lot since then. Now, he was Lord Delphine, leader of the Fleur de Lis, and the true ruler of the city of Lysenne. Photography was only his hobby… but it was that hobby that fueled him.
Joseph stood with Luca, a young vampire who’d joined them recently, whose experimental fervor far outdid Joseph’s own. They were in a lounge on a high floor of the Fleur de Lis building. Cesare, Miguel, and Angelo lounged on the ornately embroidered couches, reunited for the first time in quite a while. Angelo had just returned from some years of travel with Fiona, the High Priest of Carcossa and a fellow vampire. Angelo rested in Cesare’s arms, and Fiona in Miguel’s, as the central pair showed the other two their travel journals.
Angelo was translating something he’d written down in a language none of the others yet knew, a quotation from a poem. He was busy explaining how the grammatical structures of that language gave the poem an ambiguity in regards to time that he found beautiful. The poem itself was sweet, but Miguel couldn’t resist teasing Angelo about its imagery and other kinds of fun that Angelo and Fiona might have gotten up to. Angelo blinked, then smiled, and Cesare laughed, holding him closer. Fiona also leaned closer to Angelo, and Miguel with her.
Joseph looked towards Luca. Now.
Luca pressed a button.
The click from the vase on the table in front of them wasn’t loud, but they all heard it.
“What was that?” Miguel asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” Luca said. They returned to their conversation, though they all noticed that it wasn’t long before Luca made his excuses and went back into his laboratory, taking that vase with him.
Joseph sat down with the others, and when Fiona and Angelo were finished, Joseph, Miguel, and Cesare began to share details of what had transpired in Lysenne since the pair had been away.
Not much more than an hour had passed when Luca ran back in, beaming, holding a few large cards in his hands.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” asked Cesare, a Prince of vampires and still unmistakably their leader.
Luca came closer, so that he stood over the table.
“History,” he said, as he lay the print on the table before them.
Cesare, Angelo, Fiona, Miguel. Teasing, laughing, smiling, holding each other, in brilliant detail, in monochrome.
The five vampires all stared at it.
“You’ve done it–” Angelo said, standing up in his excitement. “You finally managed…”
Luca shrugged. “We would have let you two in on it, but you were busy.” He tried to sound casual, but Joseph could see how proud he was.
“Even I don’t understand most of the technical details of what Luca did,” Joseph said. “Fiona might, but the rest of us, well…”
“Our genius lies elsewhere?” Cesare offered. He looked to Fiona, but the High Priest of Carcossa was still watching Luca.
“First, you gave us your improved sunwalking potion that doesn’t require a god to make it. And now, you’ve figured out how to photograph vampires.” She considered.”You’re changing what it means to be a vampire, you know. I’m beginning to wonder if it was a mistake to blood you.”
“You… you don’t mean that, do you?” Luca asked. “And anyway, you can’t take it back… can you?”
“You didn’t test this before, did you?” Miguel asked. Luca admitted that he hadn’t – it was worth it, wasn’t it, to share this discovery with everyone? Congratulations went all around.
Joseph let his mind wander. Now that this technology was in their hands, he considered which project to take on first. He had dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks full of almost a century of ideas, saved up for this day. Cesare had shared his love of theatrics and costume parties with Joseph, and many of the ideas in Joseph’s notebooks were ones they’d come up with together. They had already made costumes from some of the ideas, and even staged some scenes at the Fleur de Lis’ parties.
Live performances were fun, as were paintings, but now photography was open to them.
Now…
—-------
“Oh–”
Aesop sat with Joseph’s arms around him. He held one of Joseph’s photo albums open in his lap, and Joseph watched him as he turned the pages. The photo he’d just opened to had caught his attention, though Joseph knew he had no idea how special it really was.
“You didn’t take this one,” Aesop said. He almost sounded as if he’d wanted to add “Did you?” to the end of that, but he didn’t. That was impossible, right? His mind must have been saying.
“No, I didn’t,” Joseph said. It was true – he’d been there, but Luca had taken it. “It was taken about a hundred years ago.”
He still hadn’t told Aesop that he was a vampire. He would have to, soon, he knew.
“Who are they?” Aesop asked. “They look so happy.”
“It was taken at the place where I work.”
“Everything looks lovely… does it still look like this?” Aesop asked.
“More or less.” He pulled Aesop close, held him, kissed his cheek. “I’ll show you someday. Whenever you want.”
Aesop smiled, and relaxed in Joseph’s arms, but he didn’t turn the page. “They look so happy,” he said again. “And they’re all so beautiful…”
“They are, aren’t they?”
Aesop continued to look at it. It was a beautiful photograph. Someday, Joseph would tell Aesop the story behind it, and what a part of history it was – the first successful photo of vampires ever taken.
But to Joseph, it was so much more than that.
He loved photos of beautiful people in beautiful costumes, in beautiful scenes, of all sorts. But how much better it was when they weren’t just beautiful people, but people he knew and loved. Miguel and Angelo, Fiona, Kurda and Cyrus, Patricia and Luchino, even that Edgar, or that certain Sire S… and in costumes they’d designed and made together, in the rooms where they’d shared so many memories.
He looked back to Aesop. Since they’d met, Joseph had almost filled another sketchbook with ideas of costumes for Aesop. One idea came to mind, blue, with gold and feathers…
Perhaps he’d suggest it soon…