someone else's gain will be my loss, ghaul

[gospel]

gospel

you're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. you feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. see, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

He does not recoil in the way she’d hoped he might.
He does not gasp or shriek.
Instead, as if spurred by some shockwave, he surges closer.

He fits himself so neatly into the space around her that she is overwhelmed by the stench of blood. Her head swims with it as he drags his mouth down the length of her side, streaking her with his warpaint.

How bizarre, she thinks, such a terrifying and fascinating combination of things he is. He touches her, curls himself around her, but it does not occur to her to be afraid. Because she can taste the venom when she catches her tongue on her fanged teeth and she knows that one day she will be lethal.

But he touches her face, if only by accident, and she rears back her head. She hisses and spits her warning. She gnashes her teeth but makes no effort to cast herself out of this tiny circle of heat where he presses himself so close to him that she can smell him underneath the metallic smell of all that blood. It makes her think of how she’d sunk her teeth into her father’s shoulder and swallowed that mouthful of blood, delighted in the way it tasted like hers, too.

She reaches out then, touches her mouth to his shoulder and exhales a sharp breath. Her mouth comes away bloody and she tentatively licks her lips, swallows down this foreign blood and narrows her gaze. She considers licking him clean, taking all of that blood into her own belly. To purify him.

“What did you do?” she whisper-hisses, giddy.