Such Sweet Sorrow

Chapter Five

BPOV:

I stepped out of the bathroom, fully dressed, though my hair was still incredibly damp. Aro  had moved on to inspecting my room, and all the books I had haphazardly lying in unorganised piles.

"Sorry about the mess," I said sheepishly, dumping my dirty clothes into a laundry basket by the door. "I didn't expect to have guests," My room was quite untidy, not horribly so but still cluttered enough that I felt embarrassed. My bed was unmade, there was paper strewn all over my desk and at least two separate piles of clean washing sat by the window that I hadn't put away before running off the Italy with Alice. Aro simply looked at me and smiled fondly.

"Don't worry mio amore, I think it's avvicente," I didn't speak Italian but I assumed it was something positive. "I like the range of books you have."

"Oh," I exclaimed, plopping down on my bed. Though it was mid morning I was the sort of bones deep exhausted that came from a wild adventure, a small rest would be nice about now. "A lot of them were here from when I was about twelve. I stopped visiting my dad for a while and brought the rest when I moved back." Aro picked up the book on top, it was Wurthering Heights, clearly not in mint condition, a lot of the pages were dog eared and the covering had some marks around the edges. 

"Well loved."

"It's my favourite." I say, leaning back on the pillows. With jeans, it wasn't that comfortable, but the only pyjamas I had about now were long t-shirts and athletic shorts, I wasn't going to wear those around a veritable stranger- soulmate or not. "I just realised I know hardly anything about you." 

"Easily fixed," Aro said lightly, before sitting on the end of my bed. Without much thought, I moved my leg over to bump into his back, rolling over on my side to get a better look at him. He placed a hand on my calf, perhaps he longed for physical contact as much as I did. "What do you want to know?" There were so many questions to ask and yet none of them seemed to fit quite right in the moment. My brow furrowed for a second.

"Uhm, how old are you?" 

"About three thousand years." I blinked, silently trying to comprehend that. I couldn't even picture that amount of life. And that amount of life without your soulmate? 

"Thats... wow. That's a really long time." He shrugged but I could tell he wasn't that unbothered by it really. I wasn't sure how I knew that but I just... did.  "Ancient Greece right?" Aro nodded, studying my expression for something "Did you ever go into the library of Alexandria?" Whatever he had expected me to say, that wasn't it. I didn't want to ask for his entire life story right out of the gate. It would have felt much more like an interrogation than discovering him, and if this soulmate thing was true, then we'd have eternity to get to know each other. Aro burst out laughing. It was a beautiful howl of laughter, completely untamed and unrefined. I knew in that moment that I'd do whatever it took to see that laugh again. 

"Really?" He asked, trying to compose himself. I just smiled awkwardly, red as a tomato, probably. "Any question about my three thousand years and you're asking about a library?"

"Was it a good library?"

"Oh it was magnifico," he whispered, a serene smile on his face. I already knew he loved books and coveted knowledge, but while Aro was thinking about this place, his mind was completely somewhere else. "So much knowledge in own place. Our coven was small at the time, we hadn't yet moved to Volterra either, and the people at the time had an inkling of our existence. In fact that was probably the reason it was burned down."

"Because of vampires?" I asked incredulously, just how much of history did I have to relearn because it was secretly vampires all along?

"Well, no. Because of me probably. I spent an obscene amount of time holed up in there. Some of the city's inhabitants took umbrage to the presence of vampires and blamed the library for them being in the city. So they tried to burn it down with us inside."