Forever can be...
#1
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I hunted down the actual thread so I could try and keep it straight. X3 Here it is if you wanna peek at it. ;o


It was forest, quiet and dark, something that could have easily reminded one of the Moaning Woods. The Haunted Forest, at least that was what he recalled it being named. He was in the stream a short distance away from Inferni, the place that he had chosen as his home. When he surfaced, though, a voice came. "Hello?" She was pristine white, just at the edge of the water, speaking to him. "You need something?" What came next was surprising to Hollow. "Shouldn't I ask you that, after all your not in your lands." And then she started to advance, snarling. "Go home you filthy thing."


He emerged from the water quickly, undeterred by the growls and snapping of her jaws. When he reached her he grabbed her immediately, a handful of her hair, and moved his muzzle close to her ear. "I wanna hear you scream..." The words came in a whisper. The words that followed were nothing more than muffled sounds, arguments and protests from the creamy white female. The scene that played out was the only thing that mattered. He had his way with her but what happened next was the real twist, the real thing that Poe was meant to see. At least, then, someone would know the truth about the strange white woman. She begged for him to do it again, to have her again, and she was even the one that made the advancements for it, and it happened.


There he was then, as the scene all faded away, sitting silently at the edge of a small stream. He was hunched over just a bit, staring idly down at the water in front of him. It had never occurred to him that Poe might have known the white female, that Poe's mother had loathed the woman with all of her heart. "Her name was Summer." He spoke suddenly, not bothering to look around because he knew she would be there. They were her dreams, after all.

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#2
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Again, she had found herself uncertain and doubting Hollow's dreamscape return, no matter if she blamed the encounter on mysticism or her own flawed, needing psyche. It all came about like a dark and brief fairytale, whose spell was bound to have broken when the story had finished and the kiss had been taken. Her mind wheeled back to Hollow and the dreams often enough throughout the day that she eagerly reached for sleep each night with flickering hopes of his return. Nights as this, the shift and shuffle of her conflicting thoughts delayed that sweet slumber for too long.


But as with so much of life, time brought it 'round, and with it came another movie reel that did not belong to her. She recognized Hollow, the woods he stood amongst, and then very suddenly, the white woman. She was loosely tied to a number of distant memories, of her mother's lashing words, of a early hunting lesson that she had seemed disinterested in. There had never been any current of connection with the once-beta of Chimera, and as the scene played out, Poe found her increasingly unrelatable.


It was nauseating watching anyone being raped, but Hollow's calm face and sleek words guiding the act crossed a line that Poe had not expected to find. He was anything but similar to the pristine white yearling that had crashed her into the ground long ago, large hands and frantic hips--but his intentions appeared no different. The resurrected memories numbed her as she watched Hollow's rape take a bizarre turn. She asked for it. Begged. Knelt before him and then got up screaming empty threats. Her actions were laughably nonsensical to Poe from beginning to end, and she found herself doing just that when it dissolved into a psuado-reality, where Poe stood a few feet to Hollow's right. Wavering and broken, she laughed quietly at the sky between the trees, trailing off as she rubbed her forehead and pushed through her overgrown bangs with a dark, slender hand, then hooking it over her opposite shoulder.


"I knew her when I was a kid," she replied in a tone that wore no veil to hide her emotional disjointedness, raw in her initial response to the next chapter. Looking at Hollow's profile with an evident regard, her head swam and her stomach clenched. He had seemed so accustomed to both sides of the coin each time she had been allowed a glimpse.
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#3
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The laughter came as a surprise and Hollow wasn't sure what had spawned it. Was she laughing because she now thought him mad? Were the images that he continued to show her each time driving her mad? It would be possible, he supposed, as there was a point in his life where the images of the things that he had done would all come back to haunt him. Guilty conscience, he knew what it was, but after a short time he became dangerously numb to it, to the point that his actions towards other no longer mattered and there was no bit of conscience left in him. He might have considered himself a sociopath were it not for Poe, for the one person who made him believe that he could truly feel something.


"I didn't know.." He finally answered, as if there was some amount of sorrow in his voice. Maybe she had been Poe's friend or guardian at some point but, the truth of the matter, Hollow wasn't sorry about it at all. In his head, it was justified, but the thought that he could have some how inadvertently hurt Poe made his stomach twist in to knots. Even worse was the knowledge that he held, the fact that those wouldn't be the last images she would see of the white woman. Those would be saved for another time, though, as Hollow was already to far broken off from those memories and suddenly absorbed in the fact Poe was now here.


"You woke up last time we were together." He stated in a moment of silence, unable to force himself to turn and look at her. Perhaps she had realized that she was making a mistake and forced herself awake to stop it all. Hollow wouldn't blame her, wouldn't be surprised. Then again, he had been allowed in her dreams once more, and Hollow knew that she could have fought him out of them if she really wanted to.

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#4
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Blah, weird post. :\



His words sounded concerned but without remorse (if that were possible), and may have been worth examining closer if she had wanted either one. But she was not--Summer, in short, was unimportant to her, and the easy shake of her head between the walls of her uncertainty gave note to this. No, it was the absurdity of the situation that had gurgled up that laughter, that a rape might evolve in such a way, that even as strange and different as it was from her own experience, it still dusted off the neglected memories, and snapped a few life-puzzle pieces together that she hadn't expected would ever touch. But rape was a common theme in her life, just as it was in the lands Hollow's memory came from, and in some distraught way, Poe admitted that it shouldn't come as a surprise. Not with what he had shown her already, what she knew these lands did to everyone. But to put his deed next to her father\s, grandfather's, the Khalif boy--it unsettled her, tilted her understanding of the hybrid.



Questions, some answerable and many not, started fighting their way up from her knotted gut, clustering and catching in her throat before she could spit any one out. They were suffocating in a way that could remember only once in a childhood conversation with her mother and brother, and just the same, the focus shifted before she broke into a cognitive coughing fit. Then her attention shifted, and with it moved the questions, warping and turning in to face herself. His silence and direction warily suggested a reason that she hadn't thought through on a conscious wave before--that she might have waken up by her own will, and the consideration was taken seriously in the silence that hung between the two dream-figures.


Perhaps it was true to a degree--it would not be unlike her to take off, always very literally, at the first sign of emotional depth. It was the way life went, she had come to believe. Maybe it had shaped her nature to a degree, but the blatant fact that it was much easier to abandon than be abandoned had come to show its face in these recent times of solitude. She could always feel wanted if she was the one to turn her back. It came about in her mind coldly, and she knew that it would offer no reassurance to Hollow for her to acknowledge it out loud. But the notion of lying to someone who was laying his darkest secrets out for her to see, seemed impossible. So the dark slip of a girl (always just a girl, free in her uncertainty and undisturbed by logic) only walked to the cinnamon man's side and sat there, arm purposefully touching his.


"I know," she answered finally. "I don't really know why," she explained with the same vagueness she felt in her own body, unfair an answer as it may be. "But I've missed you."
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#5
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"Because you're smart.." He answered with certainty, keeping his arm still there beside her, making sure to keep the small connection they had between them. Really, he wouldn't have blamed her disappearing, it might have even been better off for her. Secretly though, he was thankful that she hadn't. "I missed you too.." He admitted finally, taking a short moment to decide that the fact that she had missed him must have meant at least something. Perhaps not all was lost, then, though he did have the urge to utter those words again, just to see if she would flee or return them.


"But you're here now.." He mused quietly, leaning back very slightly to slip an arm around her, testing his waters. Poe was not like anyone else. He cared what she wanted, what she thought, and he was careful with her. She mattered while the rest of them in his life had not. "You've been doing well then?" He asked quietly, tipping his muzzle to look down at her. There was little that he knew about her current life, possibly tidbits that he'd seen here and there through her dreams, but there was no real way to tell whether any of it had actually been real.

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#6
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She listened to his words and soon found herself sinking against the warmth of his side, bound by a strong, wiry arm. It hit her suddenly again, that he was dead--dead and in the ground and rotting and some kind of ghost that she still didn't understand. This wasn't really him, but the realism of the dream and his specter cut a dark contrast and raised goose bumps over her arms. Instinctively, she shifted her body closer to his, an excuse to brush her arms with her hands and assure herself of his presence for that moment, this night and dream.


She didn't have the words to reassure him of his doubts, with her mind distanced with the truths that she could feel in her bones but wouldn't allow into her gut. On this strikingly new ground,, it would take time before the childish woman could digest the full meaning of the three words that had ended their last night, and longer yet to confirm them back to him. Free as her body and mind might be, her heart was far on the other side of the scale, keeping balance to her mentality. And loving a ghost, well, that would send the whole thing into a spin, wouldn't it?


"I've..." she began automatically, not fully thinking through his question before she had begun to speak. It took her a couple of seconds to realign her thoughts. "I've been okay. I've been lonely," she answered with a simplistic honesty that was uncharacteristic when it came to her upsets. It didn't drag her down the way she had expected it might though, and she was quick to move on. Or move back, to be more exact. Turning her head to face his, her muzzle tilted down just enough to tuck a few inches below his. "Why did you choose rape over everything else? What makes rape the best answer there? Anywhere?" she asked with a soft, indirect intensity, keen on peeling back more than one layer of understanding. In the back of her mind, she was very aware of the openness that came with these dreams, with this old friend, would-be lover, could-be step-father (none of those half-relationships had really settled, had they?). It was the most surreal aspect of his presence, this unbound honesty.
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#7
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It was the fact that she stayed still, or maybe she even leaned in to him a little (Hollow didn't know if it was her or just him) that reassured him of the fact that she wasn't going to be running away. He would take him time though, he knew better now, and even in life he had been taking his time for her, he knew she was worth it. Fingers brushed lightly against the delicate fur on her arm as he sat, squeezing her close to him for a brief moment before allowing his arm to relax against her. "You should wander more.." He nodded slowly, grinning a faint grin at her. Her personality was addictive, something unique and special, so much so that she had easily been able to lock the beast inside of him in a trance.


He might have continued had she not moved on, speaking once more on the subject before. Her questions caught him off guard and for a moment his face froze, staring at her as he tried to answer the question in his mind. "That's how he kept us in line.." He stated then, frowning at his own reference to his father. That was the very first thing that came to his mind, the only thing that made sense and screamed at him right off. His father had used it to keep him and Blank in line, it only made sense that it would do the same to others. "It inflicts more pain than death could any day.." His voice was more quiet then, dim. He could clearly remember the nights that Blank had begged to just die, had asked Hollow to kill him even.


Some nights, even Hollow felt that way.

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#8
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H-ho! Angsty-babbling.


His touch stirred up currents inside of her, little shivers and gasps that nearly tickled, and she drank in the brief moment that he pulled her close, muffling the electricity by over-packing it beneath her skin, and it pulled a smile despite herself. He was right, too--she isolated herself, stubborn in her independence and detached from the four-legged world that carried out in the surrounding areas. In part for reasons connected to the evolution of their conversation, and the thoughts knitted snugly together.


His words made more sense than she had been expecting. It was like a Magic Eye poster--at first glance, it was mind-boggling to try finding a picture in the sea of psychedelic squiggles. But given the right perspective, the full image was suddenly so very clear and that first reaction of frustration and confusion seemed only foolish now. You live what you learn, and to have grown up so isolated from kind guidance, it seemed inevitable that those actions might be passed down. After getting to know her grandfather, it seemed very much within reason that the boy who had wrestled her to the ground in the woods had learned it from experience. It was a twisted society with deeply ingrained ideologies that were nearly inescapable for those born into it, even the victims. The thoughts and words settled slowly and heavily, calming her initial (nearly hysterical) reaction to this newest piece of Hollow's history, and to the tap it had created into he own.


Head tilting down again, overlooking the ground just beyond their legs, she opened her mouth to speak, then stopped, considered. It was an urge that she couldn't recall having before--to reveal something of herself in return for one's intimate story. Not something so buried, she was sure of that. "It happened to me once, a long time back," she said factually, making it evident that she had yet to come to terms with it the way that Hollow had. It was embarrassing in an odd way, and her hands fidgeted, tugging her dark nails. "Mm, remember when I left Chimera, the winter before I turned one? Misery's father dragged me out west. Because he couldn't crucify Misery, so why not her look-alike kid?" she laughed awkwardly at the empty joke. It felt like a strange cop-out, this compacted, disjointed story next to the intensely, raw stories that Hollow painted her. But she continued for lack of anything better to offer. "Someone--a cousin, probably, since the whole pack is cross-bred over and over into itself--they helped me out. Through the time that I was there, and through getting me out. And then I would be able to help her, bring her back here, away from the all of that. But the plan didn't pan out, things got messy, and we drew out a crowd. Some white kid, probably no older than I was, got a hold of me and..." she trailed off, eyes lifting and then turning to Hollow again. He knew all of that. He knew what happened in more depth than she did, and to deeper levels than she would ever know. "It would have been worse if she hadn't come and stoned him on the head. I mean, of course it would have been. I would have been dragged back and thrown into a fucking fire," she muttered, casting her gaze away once more and settle her body close to Hollow's. "I was lucky. I got out so, so light," she said quieter, tasting the truth there, stronger without the words huddled inside of her. Maybe it hadn't been worth bringing up with anyone before--maybe that knot it kept was without reason when measured against others. But at least she had offered something to the cinnamon ghost that she hadn't offered anyone else. It wasn't words of love, but it was the closest she had come in her three years of life.
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#9
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His explanation seemed logical in his own head, it made sense, but despite all of that he knew that it was just an excuse. It was a sad excuse, something for him to hide behind for fear (had he ever felt fear before?) that it might drive her away from him. Was it really anything more than the second part of his explanation? Perhaps it was, but it would only be worse from there. It was to ruin lives. It was to draw pleasure from the horror of others, to take them over and have total control of them and, in some twisted fashion, to regain some of the control that had been taken from him as a child. Not even Hollow understood a great portion of it.


His mind didn't have time to settle on these truths though, to reveal them to her, because she spoke and icy eyes narrowed suddenly. His first reaction was instinct, flat ears and bared fangs, a growl that he could feel building in the very pits of his chest. Hollow held it back though, held it back and simply listened to her. While he was listening, whether he knew it or not, his arm tightened around her, almost as if he was trying to protect her, despite the fact that it was far to late for that.


As she spoke Hollow felt something that he'd never felt before, even in the time before his death. He felt despair and emotional pain, empty and hopeless and desperate and a million other things on top of that. For a moment, as her words died off into a hushed silence, Hollow looked as if he might cry. Had she continued speaking, he would have. Poe had given him something that he may have never understood. Now he knew, he knew the kind of effect that his own actions might have had on other people and, from the look on her face and in her eyes when she looked back to him, he suddenly understood the effect that it could have on the victims also.


"We're all sick." He said suddenly, bitter. "We all need to be thrown in a fire and burned alive.." He practically hissed the words, but the dark demeanor that had taken him in those moments that she revealed that was quickly swept away. Screaming at himself in his head, warning himself not to do it, Hollow turned toward her more, pulling her slight frame along with the arm that he already had wrapped around her. His other arm came around, searching for a gentle grasp on her other side, and he slid her in to his lap, facing him.


"I'd kill him for you without a second thought.." However grim the words seemed, they came out in a loving, sweet sort of manner, whispered quietly to her. He held one arm around her, to keep her there and make certain that she wouldn't fall, while the other snaked up to brush lightly at her cheek. He wanted nothing more than to scream in a fit of rage and tear something, anything, to shreds, but it was her eyes, the very ones that he stared in to in that moment, that kept the best within him quelled.

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#10
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She had only been half aware of his building anger while she spoke, absorbed in her own broken ego and the effort it took to formulate two volatile months of memories into a distinguishable story. His arm drawing her nearer eased something in her, whether she was aware of it or not though, and the heated drumming of his pulse subconsciously alerted her to the words that would boil up when she finished. Still, she frowned at him below sorrowful eyes when he spoke of fires and death. He and many others in her life stood as proof that bad behaviors didn't mean someone was a bad person, and despite what his guilt was overwhelmingly telling him now, she knew without question that was not a fate he or any of them deserved. But before she could speak a protest, turn the insight that he had given her to quell her own storm, his hands were moving over her body, lighting up the paths that they took.


Her body moved in tune with his, following premonitions (or perhaps wishes) to lead her straddled around his lap with the ease of two bodies that knew each other far better than they truly did. Her legs folded close to the outer sides of his thighs and her belly arched in to brush against his, leaving their faces inches away, and eyes grasped tight to the other's. "I'd kill him for you without a second thought.." With the deep, dark intensity that she recognized in him from the first moment they had crossed paths to this, he spoke words that given by anyone else would feel empty and chauvinistic. But Hollow, oh dear Hollow, stripped down to the bone for her and with only honesty and passion remaining there, that she believed every word. Like macabre romance, it was dark and wrong in a basic way, but it was like nothing she had ever been told. And she had no words to answer him with, only a bodily, carnal response to kiss him. To lean her body heavily into his, hands pushing up his torso and then around his neck and shoulders, pushing through fur to touch warm, too-real skin.
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#11
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Now, for only the fact that he was dead, the words might have been an empty promise. What made them all to real was the fact that, had he the means to do so, he would have traveled to the ends of the earth to rid the world of such a fool. To eviscerate him and pull his intestines out inch by inch, hang him from a tree by them and dismember him slowly. There were a million things that Hollow could do to him, a million thoughts that slammed through his head at a rate that made even him dizzy. The silence urged the thoughts on, the raging thump of his angry heart in his ears, and the sudden uncertainty of the actions taken.


She touched him though. Kissed him and pressed herself against him and in an instant his mind was blank of anything but her. Her arms came around him and his hands shifted up to meet them, sliding from her elbows to her shoulders in the gentlest of fashions, leaning in to her. The urge to touch and feel whatever part of her that he could had hit, uncertain if everything would suddenly vanish and he would once more be left with nothing when, really, he wanted nothing more than to feel her, to hold her and drown himself in her scent. His muzzle dipped suddenly, nose pressed carefully against her collar bone, and he nibbled there momentarily, taking in what he could of her scent before shifting himself away. He pulled his head back, nipped tenderly at her neck and toward the side of her muzzle, forcing himself away rather suddenly. His hands worked slowly down her sides, exploring soft skin and fur, while his eyes shut tight and he gulped away the words that he didn't want to say, but inevitably would. "Poe.."


For once, the moment wasn't about him.

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#12
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Time had taught Poe that everyone had to live only for themselves when it came down to the wire. Not that it meant there was any reason to be antisocial, neglectful, or anything less than fully appreciative of good company--there was just no reason to rely on anyone else for your own wellbeing, emotionally or physically. It was the lone wolf traveller's mentality, the life lesson of an unreliable, but not unpleasant family scheme. Enjoy life to it's fullest, for there is much to be enjoyed, but don't hold onto anything, for it is just as likely to throw you to the ground as it is to throw you into a fanciful twirl. Bittersweet, it kept her dancing on her toes in a shifting crowd of brilliant and passionate dancers, but she never believed put her full weight into their arms, or believed whispered words of promise. Not until this night, this dream, this dead man with burning-blue eyes and strong, gentle arms that were already holding her body up. The promise that couldn't, shouldn't really be kept was a rusty hook to bite onto, but she did this time. Just this one time, she let it catch her.


His hands moved up her arms and down her torso, leaving trails of goosebumps under her inky fur and warming the skin that awaited. She stretched out her spine, lengthening the contact of their torsos to molding and moving together while hands searched and tongues explored. A swell of thoughts and unrequited hopes from the past poured across her mind, released from some dark corner in the back, only to be quickly washed away by the growing anticipation on the moment. With hands exploring the subtleties of form that could only be discovered by roving hands, along muscles, vertebrae and soft flesh, Hollow found her collar bone and Poe pushed her fingertips along knotted back muscles, only to abruptly pull apart. Her body was still singing when he dropped his hands along her sides, and she could only stare at him with a sort of mid-air anticipation and vague concern.


He uttered her name, and it took her a moment to try wrapping her head around logic and words, all too easily swept right off her feet (and not so unoften, right onto her back) by heartbeats and heavy hands. "Hollow," she breathed, anchoring her eyes within the arctic ocean of his, while her hands slid to hold firmly to his shoulders, grounding their overlapping frames. She had no words for him, nothing that could rightly explain her utter certainty, built up over two years of seeded want and a growing need for his presence that she kept bound and controlled under normal circumstances. So she held his gaze firmly, trustingly, adoringly, and kissed him again. Softly and soothingly at first, then building until she used the weight of her torso and the guide of her hands to push him on his back.
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#13
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She was still a mystery to him, even after so long now. She, in her youth and beauty and grace, was everything that the horrid man ever wanted and needed, everything and more. Somehow, in some brilliant stroke of luck, or some horrible delusion on her own part, she at least felt something of a tug for him. Hollow might never understand how or why, what exactly she saw in him, why she never seemed afraid no matter what he showed her, but he knew not to question it either. Questioning it might bring about the heart-breaking truth, that he didn't matter at all, that maybe she was frightened of him and simply going along with him so that he might spare her. He was dead now though, far from the reaches and planes that gave him any ability to harm her, and that was what kept the small hope inside him burning. Maybe she really could feel for him.


The quiet sound of his name in the silence, the way that she moved against him and looked at him, all of it all at once sent a sudden quake of shudders down his spine, a sudden realization that the moment was all true, even if only a dream. There was something out there, perhaps, rewarding him for the show of humanity that he still had left in him, the well of emotions that had taken him and controlled him now, even if only for her. That, or it was all some terrible nightmare, some illusion that would make him believe that she could have been his, that she might care for him, only to wrap him up in those thoughts and bring them crashing down later by an admittance that she despised him. The sad fact was, Hollow cared for her so deeply that he was willing to risk it all. He was willing to change it all ending in eternal pain, even for the short illusion that she might care for him. That, fake or not, he would hold in his heart forever.


Even before he could wrap his mind around in, the clear certainty that this what she wanted, Poe was kissing him again. He obliged quickly, returning her affections with kisses of his own, roaming hands and heaving chest. It was clear, at least in his mind and his actions, that he had every intention of exploring every part of her that he could, even as her weight led him flat against his back. His arms snaked around her in that moment, wanting to pull her down against him. She could just lay there against him, just so he could hear her breathing and hear the beating of her heart, and he would've been content forever just with that moment.

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#14
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Poe had always carried an unusual brand of romance. Sweet nothings, flowers and a candle lit dinner with lovey-dovey eyes didn't do it for this chick. But with this dead man from her childhood, their paths that had never overlapped at the right time and place, lay with her, cradled in the psychic remains of a regretted history, she swooned. Floating over top of so many unspoken words and unrequited actions, her body melted slowly from hip to chest against Hollow's reclining form. The tangibility of it had her feeling dizzy, drunk on the thrill and taste and touch, and just as soon as her body had begun humming with the warmth of his, she felt it all flicker.


"Wait," she gasped, pleaded to anyone, no one, herself. A hand vainly groped for the side of Hollow's cinnamon neck, her nose tucked under his chin for the split second between a stirred consciousness and a flutter of eyelids and a long, sharp breath of the damp, cool air of her quiet home.


Poe closed her eyes tightly, protesting and pleading again to any and everyone. If she wasn't already crazy, visiting this dead man in the night, it seemed that the visits would get her there themselves. With a small groan, the dark girl rolled onto her side in the middle of a cold bed, and slid a hand between warm thighs. If she couldn't be emotionally fulfilled tonight, it was the least that could be done.
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