whoreofabaddon:

I talk about Vlad Tepes regularly; about his glories and his failings. I talk about the brief moment where he would be dumbstruck by love and unfamiliar kindness, juxtaposed by the moments where he ran a finger through a prisoner’s blood and licked it clean with orgasmic pleasure. He is a monument to what great cruelty creates; how a situation might warp a small boy with eyes like burning stars into a monster that longed for damnation. He is, to me, a patron saint of retribution. He has his place in the threads of the world, in frightened whispers, in heated and horrifying dreams.

Yet, what about the other boy given as tribute beside him?

Radu with a gaze so tender that somehow, intended to be a prisoner, he became the playmate of the young sultan instead. So sweet and gentle that he would remain the sultan’s dear friend till one day he was, instead, his closest confident. He was a man so soft and beautiful, who inspired such confusing surges of arousal and jealousy that he was mocked as the favored pet of the sultan’s harem instead of his bey of beys. The thought of him inspires me as well, with honey sweet lips that Mehemet so longed to taste, and poems dedicated to his dark curling eyelashes (that cut sharp as blades.)

How fascinating that this Dracula was dubbed ‘pretty’ while his brother was dubbed ‘impaler.’

Radu was so dainty and harmless as a boy that he was compared to a bouquet of flowers; inoffensive and meant only to decorate a room. He was quietly won by God, listening to the same verses as Mehmet, with bright eyes and eagerness. This was the faith of the people Vlad saw as his captors, yet Radu knew only as caretakers and beloved friends. His father was a distant shadowy figure who had abandoned him, forsaken him, declared him dead for the glory of an abstract concept as he still stood breathing. The same men who so famously whipped Vlad bloody and raped him into submission, taught Radu to read, to write, to fight when he must and to love with a poet’s passion and a child’s abandon.

Vlad would come to the Turks as foreign in his ways, arrogant, wicked and needing to be tamed as a wild horse would be broken. He would return to the Wallachians called foreign still with an unfamiliar lilt to his cold words, a penchant for torture, and an arrogance that he had suffered unspeakable shame for the boyars to sleep comfortably in their beds. Vlad was broken but he forced the pieces together so that the sharp edges were all that could be touched.

Radu, meanwhile, was never broken because how was one meant to break the invulnerable?

He was a picture of an often invisible strength; his lovingkindness could not be warped by bitterness, jealousy, or pride. He was the one who would see god as beloved and merciful past all the blood that fell for His various names while everyone else was left to wonder how they could break the heart of a willing servant in his master’s name. How was one meant to pry glory from the hands of one who merely holds it for another? How does one shame someone who has come to so intimately know humility?

One day, finally, Radu would raise a hand to his perfect lips to muffle a fit of coughing and draw a hand back damp with blood. There would be no vicious execution of him to avenge a wrong, because one day, God would simply quietly accept him as he had so long ago accepted God.