Coming Home.

Fingers folded gently over the precipice of the grayed paper. He had memorized the lines; committed them to memory, in fear that he would lose his only tether to her. The man imagined the silhouette of her face, the remnants discarded from his wistful dreams. He had seen so many faces, a multitude of different shades; all a replica of the original. The original was the one he loved, the one he wanted. The one that danced like ash throughout his memories, sliding through his fingertips whenever he grasped for her velvet skin.

He moved like a shadow. Each step longer than the next, each one more desperate. Cigar, usually stored within the clenches of his ivory teeth, was positioned safely in his pocket -- forgotten, for now. He pawed restlessly, boots clicking unevenly against the rough stones as they compacted under his touch, shaded optics searching nervously for familiarity. He was lost for only a moment (perhaps an hour, a day, a month), when suddenly he found her, and she found him.

He sought her, anxiety remedied by her presence. The previous perilousness that had boiled within his stomach, twisting and turning and churning him into a seemingly bottomless pitt (or the recesses of his mind, wondering where she could be, hidden underneath the makeup and her own obscurity) had faded into a murmured moan. Tumbled toward her, broken and desperate, the shade of a man empowered by his own desperate passion. He loved her, loved her, loved her; and perhaps if he murmured it enough, she would too.

Ivoried tendrils wandered from his bruised, battered sides to the curves of her arched, golden cheeks. He grasped them; rough enough that it would be enough to shake her into the present (to remind her that he was real  and they were not), but soft enough so that his touch would not spring purple flowers from her casket. Archetype brought his forehead to her own, perilously close. So close, in fact, that his breath was hot against her own, causing waves of guttural longing to 
shiver through his aching bones.

"You've been gone so long," the man murmured through lucid lips, dreary portals brought downward to avoid her own. It was, perhaps, that he didn't want to ruin the moment, retch it off it's insidious plans. Parted lips brushed over tender skin with a passionate remorse; filled with instead of lust,love, generic and pure in origin. It was finally that his arduous, worn portals brought to her own, and the emptiness returned. How long would he have her for now? A week? A day? An hour? The rarity of the situation was, that she was not his, but he was her's indefinitely.

Like we're going to war.

She was beautiful.

Her porcelain skin was fair, and the only remedy of color remained on the tilt of her rounded cheeks. Barely born into the world, she wept with misunderstanding. Violent tears grazed the stretch of her facade, pitiful sobs racketing from the hollow of her withering chest. She nestled perfectly into the crook of his slim arms, her enlarged cranium sitting dutifully in the space collapsed within his elbow, her button nose pressed into his bicep. He held her gingerly, his lithe tendrils lightly grasping her sides in a sudden fear that his touch would somehow harm her. It was ridiculous he knew, but the worry had been imprinted within his thinking pattern, marring him mentally.

Moments prior he had been howling, overcome with the desperate grief of a young man succumbed to violent turbulence. His decrepit, emerald optics had watched as the ivory bird willowed in her sheets. Lost in a flurry of red, drowned in a pit of screams, he had not been by her side when the life force had evaporated from her hopeless carcass. Her chocolate optics, once flooded with such innocent vibrance that none other could match, were drained. Her porcelain skin darkened, and her mind plunged to a place where he could not follow. It was perhaps what scared him the most, pitched his hollowed howls into mournful moans.

Only the creature that emerged from her tethered him back to existence.

He cradled it with more warmth, with a sudden vigor instilled by the loss of a life. He was surrounded by white, the stinging pulse of antiseptic flooding his nostrils until it singed him. They grabbed, tendrils dashing towards him, reaching for the child sheltered within his grip, and he pulled away from them violently, emerald eyes widened with fear. He stumbles backward, losing footing, and he crashes into various, metal tools. He regains himself though, with a panic for the life, and steadies himself uneasily. The fingers have ceased. Instead, guarded optics gaze at him wearily, tired with battle and fatigue. They speak, monotonous tones voweled across the thin space, and he listens reluctantly.

She is dying. The life is dying.

He howls mercifully as they tear her from his tendrils.

Time's End.

Aleksandar Daskalov had never been one to promote suffering through relentless pain.

Of course, he had never held that opinion when it pertained to himself. Only when his small, ripe tendrils were wrapped around the thick, corse neck of the hound that struggled uneasily in his surprisingly strong grip. It wasn't that he had a particular, inbred hate for the mutt; though there were a few certain times where he had wished to disregard it's seemingly futile existence. It was because the hound, after relentless years of padding uneasily on aged paws, had come to the spiraling end of it's weary life. There was no bright tunnel ahead, no sign that pushed him onward. 

The dog was useless. 

And useless things were just that, useless.

It squawked and resisted under the boy's grip, but old age could not overcome the fingers that circumvented it's neck. In it's last few moments, it gazed wearily at one of it's former owners, darkened irises softening as each breath strangled from between it's lips. There was not a bone in the twelve year old boy's body that asked him to stop, no remote part of his cranium reasoning that cruelty was worse than faux loyalty. Some part of him that whispered that the hound had some sort of buried reason to live, to continue breathing air. There was no functional humanity that disrupted the glaze of his shadowed pupils as they rested on the face of the animal. There was a slight hitch, a last breath struggled, pushed through the thick of his neck and into his core, before the light faded from his optics. Where his muscles were once tense, rigid with the fight for life, they weakened, limp in the young boy's arms. 

The creature was dead.

It took moments for the boy's tendrils to relax, to detach from the creature's neck. Blinded pupils lit up, if only for a moment - like a sudden realization. But the feeling never sank, never rested in the pit of his stomach, and as quick as his humanity had appeared, it vaporized. The body of the former hound sunk into the dirt, his own ivory canvas blending with that of the rusted earth, and still the child didn't move. He watched the carcass apprehensively, waiting for a side to lift, or a moan to erupt from it's sewn lips; but no such moment occurred.

Minutes melded into hours. And what seemed to be days later (but in actuality was only a matter of seconds), a figure appeared in the breadth of the stone doorway. The boy didn't look up. The silhouette moved in a distinctly feminine fashion, it's slanted shoulders set upward with worry, the curves of it's face dampened with anxiety. Palms came to rest on his relaxed shoulder, circles traced lightly over the square of his shoulder blades. Hushed words were soothed into his ears. But she didn't understand, couldn't. It wasn't a mothers job to predict that her child was inhuman. 

A model on the outside, a monster inside. 

She hustled him into the house, her touch gentle, her words kind. He followed her, obediently. Not because he truly was upset, because he found there was no other option. They buried the dog in a hollow ditch later that day, and where he was supposed to cry, he didn't. He watched as the creature was enveloped in the dirt, and he couldn't help but affirm that he had done it a favor.

He had given it a purpose.