Sting

The creature murmurs their defeat as he whimpers through the dinned streets.

There are welts on his pelt; savage lines cut cruelly across his pale skin, embellished with the amber thickness of his own poison, as it seeps down the concave of his hollow, ivory cheek. He wears them proudly, like trophies thrown upon him like a victor: because that's what he was. A victor. He relished in the secrets pried between their warm bones: melted his skin to theirs and pried them apart with bloodied fingers, until they were a pool of their own misfortune. They whispered their secrets to him, as well as their mercies – they're prayers mumbled to unforgiving ears in the breadth of the forgotten evenings. But he does not pity them, as a wolf does not pity it's prey.

Twin limbs exude weariness as he scrambles in the shadows of the dimly lit corridors; haunted by the brick walls as they enclose him, press his flesh from wall to wall until he almost screams. He is delirious with his own exhaustion, with his own joy, that he tumbles about – his fangs weak as they pierce against ivory and crumble miserably.

It was his own wrong doing. His own curiosity brought it's violent fingers across the arch of his back and scolded him, left imprints on his skin that marred the impossible beauty of his charred face. The slant of his defined jaw was highlighted by the maroon liquid that rested there, and he wore it as a warrior wore his paint to war – with a cruel sense of pride. Fangs bore as he sauntered, and he thought once more of their remains: mangled, and brilliant and beautiful, and he was filled with another bout of ecstatic joy that crippled him at the hinges of his severed torso.

He loved death so wholly and so unwittingly, that he had married himself too it. He had caught his fingers with a golden band, and he had wed himself to the discrepancy of death. Unutterable vowels conjugated from his morphed lips; but all that emerged was a gurgle that decorated a laugh.

The creature stumbled onward, his weary limbs seeking comfort. His delicate ears had tended the name through proximity; had listened to it as it passed between lips of men dressed in robes, unfit to bear the plate of the man they mumbled for. They filled him with rage – marred his frail bones with discomfort, made his blood boil and blister his ghostly folds. He took to the night like a thief, pilfered names and addresses from the lips of the dying young – searched hungrily for his twinned limbs, for the half that had carved himself from his skin what felt like a thousand years prior.

Moonlit orbs fell upon the grace of an oaken door. He stumbles to it's frame – both fearful of his own inexplicable hunger as it blossomed from the winter that longed in the cage of his ribs, and overjoyed at his own inexplicable defeat, as it came to rest before the wooden frames. He was vulnerable there, vulnerable as he had not been since he was the tender age of eighteen; opted by the savagery of the wind in the winter, and the bounty of the harvest in the spring as it plundered from the snow. Curled fingers came to rest on the fringe, with a rap, rap, rap.

There was no answer.

Desperately, fingers clawed at the handle – obsidians pools cloaked in his own misery as he peered over his shoulder and into the depth of the streets, which sauntered in his peripheral like an untamed beast. Vita was no fool. Even though he had the brain of a genius and the quick hands of an assassin, he was weary with exhaustion, overcome with his own euphoric dimension, that he would be a quick slaughter in there fingertips. He pushed his forehead to the door then, as he relinquished himself to the younger boy that had danced among the snow, before he had pranced upon corpses and instead among flowers.

“Vaska.” He hissed into the grains of the door; obsidian orbs fluttering behind flushed eyelashes. The salt of her soil poisoned his jaw, draped along the crook of his arched neck and painted him a villain in the winter of the night.

“Vaska,” he called once more, a certain crack filtering into the hook of his vocals. “It's me, Vita. Vitaliy. Your brother. Your twin. Your half.”

He sprawled himself against the oak then, a picture of skin and wintered bones.