[html]  Rain dribbled and splatted across her bedroom windows, shrouding her from the cool, gusty elements beyond. It was quite, cozy and empty in her big bedroom in her small home, nestled off to the side of the downtown docks. It was a familiar white noise silence after the last week had kept her close to home and near her fireplace. Like a lullaby, it soothed her wandering mind, filled its songless gaps with static, and rationalized her solitude. Made a night of aging lobster meat and flame-reading make sense after a day of saturation. The cold water still lingered in her undercoat, soothing the hardened scars on her torso and chilling the soft skin around it. Eyes half-lidded and jaw loosened by yawns, Poe lay curled up on her side a few feet from a dying fire, wrapped in and on a puddle of blankets. A broken, drifting trail of others led to a bed that was surrounded by dressers and chests, drawers overflowing with fabrics that dulled in the poor light, and topped by knick knacks that only glinted when the fire licked high enough to catch their sides.
She lived comfortably, contently, but she was aware of something missing. Friends, family, they were all somewhere out there, kings and queens of their own tangled webs and just out of her lax reach. She had never known, and maybe never wanted to learn how to hold on, but these loner ways took their toll at times. At times, she just wanted those faces too far away. The ones that she knew would never come back. Never could. But maybe had once, anyway.
Her eyelashes fell into a kiss, warmed by the glowing embers, and she slid smoothly downwards into a sleep as thick as honey.
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I stuck a mature tag in the title. XD Also, this is a little bit weird but I hope it's okay?
It was what he had been waiting for, the time that she drifted off to sleep. He had visited her only once before and he would have liked to sooner, but his son had fallen terribly ill. The link between father and son had faded. Stygian was better though and Hollow had finally come back strong enough to feel her. And oh, he could feel her. He knew that her sleep would be deep enough for him to visit her, to show her more. Only a short time had passed, hardly an hour, before he was finally able to find his way into her dreams.
It was a small house, far away from the cave that had been in the first thing that he had shown her. A house, perhaps, much like her very own. It was a scarcely furnished room with nothing more than a mattress in the corner, harboring two young occupants. Both of the males were barely old enough to shift, but they indeed were, and even with the blanket that was draped loosely across them, it was obvious what they were up to. Hollow was atop the younger boy, who had his arms draped carefully over his brother. Amidst the quiet panting and hushed sounds of pleasure, a voice rang clear. "Are you alright?" It was a breathless question, one that could only be answered with a very faint nod from the youngest of the pair. Hollow was tender with his brother, always careful, because he knew just how fragile the younger one could be.
All would not stay perfect though. The door to the room opened, revealing the form of another young hybrid. Their sister, Meenah, who stared in horror at her brothers. In a single fluid motion, Hollow was standing, suddenly facing the younger girl. "I'm telling dad!" She exclaimed suddenly, but before she could even turn away to leave, Hollow had her. "Do you think it will make him love you?" He had her by the arm, a tight grip, because he knew exactly what she was thinking. Tell dad and maybe she would be rewarded. Maybe nothing bad would happen to her. "We can't have her telling him, Blank." He explained then, his voice oddly calm, eerily cold.
He jerked her suddenly, dragging her back across the bedroom, toward the mattress in the corner. Blank was quick to move away, staring in partial horror as Hollow forced their sister to the bed. "You know why, right?" He glanced to Blank, who could only nod. Immediately the younger boy rose, off of the bed and out of the door. Blank sat outside, leaning against the door while it happened, sobbing quietly to himself. The screams of the girl could be heard for a short amount of time, eventually fading off into nothing. Blank knew what happened even before Hollow emerged from the room, smeared in blood and sweat.
It faded quickly. Blank disappeared from the picture, the scenery changed, but Hollow remained. The blood was gone, leaving Hollow as she would have remembered him. He moved carefully, seating himself at the very corner of the bed.
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[html] Definitely good.  I <3 Hollow. Even in all of his creepiness. xD
She watched the scene from a stationary point in the room, that she did not truly exist in, no body and all emotion. Shock, disturbance, sympathy, heartache and onwards. Incest was a concept that she was well acquatinted with between her mother's crazed hisses of accusation, her grandfather's proudly gruesome stories and threats, and unbeknownst to her, a near-trist of her own. The tenderness between Hollow and his brother hit her with a mixture of thoughts that managed, in this strange movie-dream land, to simplify quickly. Love is love is love, without force and pain and then his sister was there and she wanted to do something but she was nothing.
She was standing on the pile of blankets she had fallen asleep in, where she had taken a vantage point from, and her head swam and chest boomed. When she turned to see him only a few feet away, her breath hitched and she steadied her gaze on him, heavy with the depth that she was beginning to see of him, cradled by what she felt. His presence felt a little realer, perhaps without the initial shock of his presence, or the surroundings that could just as easily be dream as reality. She still couldn't be certain that it was either one.
Poe swallowed, collected her thoughts and managed a few words. "You're back," she whispered with a staggered smile and mixed emotions. She wanted to know more about what she had seen. What he had done. Whys and hows and what-thens that she couldn't fit her lips around, and could only watch him in a sort of greedy-needy anticipation. He had her undivided attention with or without the cinematic insight.
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There was nothing in his eyes, even for the longest time before his death, there had been nothing there. Now though, with Poe lingering so near, the cold fire that had filled them at some point in his short life had returned. Despite knowing that he was dead, or even when he was alive, it was always Poe that could make him feel truly alive. The truth was, Poe had done very little to make Hollow fall for her. She had simply been herself. Quirky, quietly devoted to those the cared for and, perhaps, that was a larger part of the reason that she meant the world to him. He had successfully kept herself hidden from her. To Poe, Hollow wasn't the monster that everyone knew him to be, and her actions and words and feeling toward him were all so really. Perhaps, in a better life, he would've met Poe far before he ever did in his previous life. Perhaps she could have prevented the monster that had reared it's head from ever coming to life.
It was to late for that now, just as it had been to late for him to tell her the truth of his existence when he was living. Fortunately, it seemed that he now had a chance to show her the truth, almost like a test to see just how devoted she could really be. "I would never you leave you." He spoke quietly, calm as he turned his head, lifting it slightly to let his eyes gaze on her. Mixed messages really. Things that he had longed to say to her in his time of living, things that could have possibly made a world of difference back then. He hadn't known it at first, but the dead could feel and love. He did all of those things, all of them, and it was possibly the reason that he had put so much effort into seeing her now. To show her the truth and, perhaps, find out if she really could love him.
Slowly, Hollow lifted his arm to her, extending his hand out to her. He wanted to feel her, to be close to her, but he said nothing to the effect, only a motion of encouragement to come near. "I'll tell you anything you'd like to know." He reassured her, a quiet admission that he had seen the questioning look in her eyes. He would give her the secrets of the universe if he only could.
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[html] Hollow had an effect on Poe that she had never been able to put her thumb on. A rush and a stillness bundled together in the core of her torso, woven together in such a complex embrace that to focus on the definition and detail was to see something seemingly abstract. At least to the girl who tried her very best to control her emotions while allowing her spirit full rein--a balance that was difficult to achieve, particularly in moments such as these.
Her smile immediately took settled, warm and thrilled beneath the cool and calm that didn't want to admit that while she had never asked those words of anyone, it moved her to hear them from him. This lost, dead boy that was opening up so widely to her, she was bound to fall inside. Gravity tilted, and she couldn't help but move for his outstretched hand and continue her fall towards him. A few long steps and she sat down on the edge of her bed (just as she had seen it before drifting off, lightly warmed by the dying fire) and close by his side. The lusty, childish side of her could have fallen right into him, on top of him, cocooned them in a tangle of sheets, if it had been another time. Another life between the two, where his words and presence were not so rare and far between, and very possibly only in her mind. But this dream world had a purpose that thickened the air, and she pulled her thighs to her belly and angled her neck to examine his gaze and hold his words.
"Why?" she asked, simple and open, drifting off for further consideration between them both. There were far too many whys to be asked let alone answered, and she tried to narrow it down. "Why your brother? And your sister... Your father..." she vaguely managed.
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He could see the smile as it settled in on her face, only telling him that she was somehow coping with what all she had seen. It was a sudden thing, he knew, but somehow he expected that she could survive through his memories without some great and dramatic response to it all. The dark woman, she was a woman now, drifted toward him much like how he thought an Angel might move. She could have been just that, an Angel, sent to lull him towards a path that would have caused a greater outcome. As always though, Hollow had strayed from that path and had taken steps down another. By the time he would realized it, it was far to late to try and turn back.
She seated herself at his side, gracefully like always, and Hollow shifted himself slightly, turning more toward her than he had been. His hand lingered on hers, never straying far, though his fingers shifted slightly against her soft fur. She might never know just what it was like for him to touch her, to feel her when he spent his days being able to feel nothing at all. Poe might not know just how much it really meant to him. Ears twisted slowly, sliding across his head to meet the words that she spoke, the questions that she had, which he was more than ready to answer.
"My father was afraid of us. Afraid of what we might grow in to." He began, keeping his eyes trained on her face as he spoke. "He was afraid to lose his position as Alpha, afraid to let us anywhere near those ranks, so he and the rest of them decided they had to show us who was boss early." It was a pathetic reason, even Hollow knew that, but that was what he had understood it all to be. "I was just comforting him after it happened one day, just trying to calm him down, and before long it turned in to that. I don't remember how or why, but it did, and it seemed to make him happy." he frowned just a bit in that moment, though his face straightened out quickly. "Take the bad and turn it in to something good, I guess." She had to know that they loved one another, it wasn't even worth saying.
"When she found us like that, even before she said anything, I knew she would use it against us. If our father had ever found out that we were doing that together, that we were being happy, he would have killed us--no. He would have killed me for certain. Blank though, I couldn't even imagine what he would have done to him. I wouldn't imagine it and I couldn't let it happen." He paused once more, the expression on his face much more serious than it had been before. "I had to protect my brother. I had to get rid of her to do it."
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[html] Hollow's touch was sweet and delicate, but she found herself very aware of his pale fingers moving slowly over the short, fine fur that covered her hands. She would never know what it felt like to him, standing on the other side of reality and feeling that warmth only in rare moments such as these, but it still brought an awareness of how much she had missed it, missed him. Their time together had been incomplete and far between, but she had always believed on some level that there would be more. When she had washed up on these shores one year earlier and heard from his son that the inevitability that she had believed in (and perhaps one that she had been following across the Atlantic) was no longer, a part of her had been unable to deal with or accept it, while her brain rationed and pushed it all away. While she still wasn't quite sure if he was any more than a figment of a disconnecting mind, his hand indulged and soothed those hopes, planted so long ago and never really uprooted.
He was surprisingly prepared to answer her broken questions, openly and honestly. She followed his words and slide them between the pages of the story he was beginning to show her. His insights were profoundly and objectively wise, an angle that could only come with a great deal of time and introspection. There was no regret, no pity, no fear, and yet she found herself interlacing her fingers with his and squeezing their palms together while he spoke on. A silent reply, a touch of appreciation and acceptance. His relationship with his brother and murder of his sister were, while standing alone, shocking pieces of a torrid history, but the weight of their reason and impact seemed evident within the context he exposed.
"What happened afterwards?" she asked in a soft, low voice that matched her softly rounded eyes and the lean of her face towards him; a degree of open fascination and delicate need to understand.
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There had always been ill emotions between Hollow and his sister. She was never treated the same way, forced to do the same things, as he and Blank had been put through. His father had always thought nothing of females, not fit to have names after taken by a male and good for nothing but producing children. Even his own mother, a half coyote, was never allowed to utter her name to her own children, they had been taken away from her the moment that they had been weaned. His sister had been named, in a quiet corner of the den while they were very small, but there was no question that she would be stripped of the name as soon as she was awarded to one of the males in the pack, a time that had never come.
Hollow gave a light squeeze of her hand in return, finally turning completely toward her, one leg twisting about to settle beneath the other leg as to not hinder how close he could be to her. For a brief moment the other hand rose to brush a few stray pieces of hair from her face, finally coming to rest against her leg. "Blank and I told my father that we found her trying to run away, that when we tried to stop her she attacked me and that was the result." He paused a moment, a personal silent moment, just to gaze at her. "He didn't think much of it, other than he was proud of me. After seeing what I did to her though, things only got worse. He died eventually though, for one reason or another. They buried our mother alive with his body and then I took over.." The very thing that his father had been trying to prevent.
"I killed every last one of them." He said, in an almost proud tone. "Blank and I stayed to raise the pups that were around then and I left to try and find somewhere to bring them all. Eventually I found Bleeding Souls." And that was how he had come to meet her and everyone else that he had met in his life. It may have seemed like the end of the things that he would show her, but there was so much more that he had to share, more that would come later, and it was apparent in his eyes.
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[html] Poe dropped her own knees to fold loosely, knees just touching Hollow's. Ever brush of touch grabbed for her attention, perhaps for its realism in this so-called dream. There was a steady current webbed between their limbs and gaze, one that hung heavy as he told what she assumed, was the last of his gut-wrenching story. His calmness in the storm of his story surprised her, but did well to sooth her own jumps and concerns. He had done what he had to keep his brother safe, and then taken drastic action to put an end to all of it. She had led an unusual life by many standards, but it seemed dwarfed in comparison and she found herself in quiet regard for Hollow's dark history. It rivaled her mother's--which was, perhaps, part of what brought them together years ago, she thought now, while the story settled in her mind. It was then that her thoughts crept to their own history. They seemed like trivial moments by an outside standard--their initial confrontation at Chimera's border, thanks to her mouthy little sister, playing dress-up in the city. Even then, she saw him as an electrical current; enigmatic, alluring, and very possibly dangerous. He had been the first one that she just wanted to touch. It was an urge that she had never been able to shake off, only restrain as far as she was sure she should. Like much of what she experienced with him, it was under a thin, tight surface, never exposed enough to explain without doubt, why he was with her now. After the last border passed, why he came back to tell her this.
And under the thin surface of her eyes, her train of thought shifted and lurched at this. "Why have you shown me this..?" she asked softly-slowly, touching his hand on her thigh with her own, grazing the veins that led to his wrist and resting there. It was a childishly appreciative question.
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The answer to her question was simple in his mind, even if he understood that there was nothing simple about it at all. Why would anyone go beyond what was possible, living or dead, just to return to someone and share their secrets? She deserved to know, there was no doubt of it in his mind, but why did she deserve to know? Hollow had always intended to die with his secrets, that he and he alone would know the many horrors of his life and the havoc that he caused for others. Like all things though, his plan had changed. Even after she asked the question he was silent, eyes falling at the soft touch of her hand, staring down at it as it moved. Things were not so simple in his life, they never had been, but he was now free of the plague that had taken him over.
There was no nervous glimmer in his eyes, only the smooth sort of clam that had always remained. Even in death there was an intensity their. He searched her face a moment, watching her settled expression, before his eyes simply feel right in to hers. "Because I love you." It was stated so simply, there was no question that it was true. Silence came again, taking a moment to let the words sink in, perhaps more for himself than for Poe. He was making right what he screwed up in life though, if he had a chance to do it again, she would have heard the words from his mouth while he was still living. "And you deserve to know."
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[html] Poe knew intimacy, the physical as well as the emotional, with a number of souls that had crossed her long path. She had an open mind and a reckless spirit that allowed it, time and time again, but only under the condition that she should disappear before it took hold of her heart, like a fairy tale that must run into the horizon before the midnight bells. For this, she had never known an exclusive love before, never seen someone's eyes and words so focused on her, and despite her deeply ingrained nature telling her to look elsewhere, anywhere but there, stop their slipping into each other--she found her breath dissipate from her lungs and her gaze widen and embrace his.
But she couldn't find words. Her vocabulary did not hold any that could give a valid, encompassing reply--because it was not so simple as I Love You Too. Hollow was a dead man, these looks and touches had been stifled when they could have meant something, and Poe was a coward in the face of love. But she knew and felt strength in movement and touch, and fell into their embrace when the words simply would not come. She fell into him.
Her head moved to his at the same pace that her hands slid up his arms, ruffling paths through the cinnamon fur, stopping when her lips found his and gripping there. Soft and firm, she felt the rush of a very delayed gratification from a kiss that she had secretly wanted since she placed the crown on his head in a hazily lit room surrounded by a dust mote ballet. Her skin tightened around her muscles and fur stood on end as she fell deeper into the kiss, deeper into Hollow--too deep, she vaguely realized in too short of a moment.
With a small gasp of surprise, Poe opened her eyes to the dull glow of a dying fire, viewed from her side on the floor. She quickly, sleepily forced herself upright to look across her shoulder to the bed on the opposite side of the room, finding what seemed like a gapingly empty space on its end. Like a velvet curtain, her heavy, damp bangs slid out from behind her jaw bone to veil her view of what no longer was, likely hadn't really been, and she slumped back down onto the hardwood floor, face tucking into folded arms.
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