Desiderium Pius

So much spam, I'm sorry, but this guy came up in-story and I just had to share because he's... pretty important now.

This guy is (former) Huguenot Brother Simon du Mont, and he just became Claris's first (and probably only) vampire childe. It just kind of... happened. No premeditation, just an irresistible, irrational, emotional urge. Let's call it romantic. Or compassionate. But really, I'm not sure if it is.

Text wall with context! Sorry, this is a really long one. As always, feel free to skip.

Claris, now calling herself Clara de Roydon, has a pretty sweet setup in Paris, as you might remember. She lives in an underground vault where she keeps all the art, books and manuscripts she collects, and Blancheflor and Saffron both live upstairs in the "house" portion, or downstairs if they want. They go out and travel a LOT. In the couple decades since she's moved to Paris, they've been to Italy twice, Spain, Germany (now part of the Holy Roman Empire), and the area that used to be known as Flanders and which is now having the height of its artistic Renaissance (Belgium and the low country of the Netherlands). On a return trip from Italy, the group stopped for lodgings in Lyon, and Claris while hunting spotted two very young men, maybe 14 or 15 years old, having a spirited debate about religion. One was a Catholic, one was a Huguenot, and at this time tension between the two factions is VERY high. Huguenot Boy, she observed, was fiercely intelligent, questioning, passionate, VERY beautiful, and, uh... a little loud and turning more than a few heads. Not in a good way. The friends' debate was good-natured, but after the Catholic kid left, Huguenot Boy was all by his lonesome and the target of a bunch of burly, angry farmin' dudes who followed him out of the tavern. Now, Claris is fairly dispassionate at this point. She does not care about people she's not connected with automatically. Whatever depraved crap people will do to each other, they'll do, and if it's convenient she'll intervene on behalf of the victim, but if not, then... well, stuff happens. This kid, however, kind of took her by surprise. She has a soft spot about five miles wide for people with strength of conviction... especially intelligent idealists (hmm, I wonder where that could possibly have come from), and she gets quite rankled about persecution in general. Goodness knows she's seen quite enough of it over four centuries.
So she tails this group of guys who are following the kid, and eventually they pull him over to the side of the road and start physically beating on him. Even though she's kind of kicking herself for getting involved, she runs over and... forcibly dissuades the offending parties. Which is a nice way of saying she bares her fangs and looks all monstery and then breaks an arm or two. Huguenot Boy, a little worse for wear, sees this ethereal, creepy-looking lady doing this kind of stuff that a person who's built like her really ought not be able to do and makes a fantastically erroneous assumption: that she must be an avenging angel. She tells him to be careful when and where he speaks, and to go heal up, and in classic adorable "OMG THIS IS A DIVINE ORDER" fashion, he takes this to mean "Go get into a profession where your words will be accepted, and seek to heal with what you say."

Flash forward about five years, and Claris and co are traveling through Lyon again en route to Paris from Marseilles. She's out hunting after dark, as usual, and becomes aware that she's being followed. She's able to get a look at the person tailing her, and surprise surprise, it's pretty little Simon, who's gotten EVEN MORE ATTRACTIVE now that he's not jailbaity anymore, and in clerical robes to boot. Huhu. Still, she avoids him because even though he makes her dead tummy do little flip-flops she really shouldn't get involved. He's really damn disappointed when he loses her, and she finds it a little touching, so she follows him back to his church. He's already gone into the rectory, but notices her outside the door and runs down all adorable and breathless and prayerful until she tells him to stop, they go inside the church, and she levels with him that she's definitely not an angel. However, he's still totally into her, holy crap. Freaky stuff. She hasn't really had a crush on anyone in HUNDREDS OF YEARS, and it's kind of blowing her mind. And then he kisses her oh god yessss. She's never *passionately* kissed someone who was actually alive before. Like, ever. She's kissed Rose and Saffron before, but it's really not the same. She can't handle it. And runs away, because man, she can't do this mortal-romance-thing.

Flash forward a couple years. It's 1572 now. Claris etc are still hanging out in Paris, and one night while she's out she spots... guess who. He's with a bunch of Huguenot priests and nobles staying at the palace of the Louvre. For those of you who know your French history (or your Millais paintings, I guess) this should raise a red flag or two. At this time, tension between Catholics and Huguenots is at an all-time high; the king's admiral, Coligny, is an avowed Protestant in the service of the Catholic king, and became a target of assassination; shortly afterward, a wave of state-sponsored massacres of significant Protestant nobles, princes and clergy swept over France (the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres). During the one in Paris, the king's Swiss Guard charged to guard the Louvre palace dragged all the Huguenots out into the streets in the middle of the night and slaughtered them. Fortunately, Claris was up and about during this whole uproar when the church bells started ringing, and rode over to the palace out of concern for Simon. By the time she got there, it was basically too late, and even though she tried to stop the guards, they speared him through the stomach right in front of her. Needless to say, this was justifiable prompting to start killin' some jerks. After dislocating a few limbs and severing more than a few arteries, she rushed over to Simon, who was pretty much a goner at this point. And out of an irrational sense of needing to protect this boy who made her all twitterpated after she thought she'd NEVER feel twitterpated again, she did the deed and turned him because it was the only way to save him from such an immediate deadly injury.

So now she's stuck with a childe she never intended to make and never planned, who's forcing her to feel all these confusing mixed-up emotions, and she doesn't know the first thing to do with him... least of all, how to explain to this pious, pacifistic clergyman that he now has to drink human blood to survive. Joy abounds.

Tl;dr version: She saved him when he was a kid, he mistook her for an angel and joined the clergy because of their encounter. He kissed her the next time he saw her five years later and she got hot and bothered and couldn't handle it. The next time she saw him was during a massacre where he was almost killed, so she made him a vampire right before he died properly. She feels really, really bad about it because she's afraid she might have somehow ruined him, but doesn't want to let on so as not to traumatize the poor boy further.

_{Texture from `Princess-of-Shadows; brushes by ~green-eyed-butterfly.}