Dedicated to Laura: For the creation of Elsa, Kawaii and Larkin, without whom, this story could not exist.

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Lost Doves

Prologue

A low flame flickered to life on a single candle in a quiet room. The hand that lit the match flinched from the small spark of flame, and then settled silently on the tabletop beside the lighted candle. It was the only light, and it caused the shadows to jump, grow then shrink again about the hunched figure that sat beside the single window.

He was alone, but then, he had spent much of his life feeling alone, and in many of those cases, he had sought the solitude. But tonight, while the moon was low and the city was quiet with the sound of sleeping souls, the figure with the hunched back was feeling that it was not a night he wished for it.

His sire was busy enough without him that he was confident he could be alone and not be bothered, and he felt less of that yearning hunger for he had fed earlier in the night. And so he was filled with emptiness and regret, so far from where he had once been, and yet exactly in the same place as years past.

His bent body curled over the table, a pale hand with crooked fingers seeking out the pad of paper that was set before him. It grasped the pen that awaited his command and hovered over the blank white pages in readiness to write.

He had never attempted this before. To put his life to written words had never been a desire or an urge, but on this cold winter night he was not feeling the same as he had in years passed. Indeed, he had not felt completely like himself since the change, but how could he really know what it was like to be himself? Perhaps this was why he had conceded to tell his story. He had no intention of letting it be seen or read by human eyes, (or otherwise) but it would be there, set free from his mind. Maybe he would feel freed from it once the pages were filled.

All his nights were cold now. He felt no more warmth, even if he searched for it, either from the flame that dwindled by his side, or by the touch of a woman. The first he now feared for fire was deadly, and the second, due to events beyond his control, he had lost. He would never again see his wife, as she was now dead, killed by a hand he both hated and loved. They had not even been wed a year, yet she had been the most precious dove he had kept. He had never deserved her, he knew, but he had taken her anyway, kept her caged like one of his birds… Maybe now she could be free.

The hand had not yet moved to paper, for his mind was consumed with these thoughts. He would have to break away from the present to bring forth the past. The past: which he oft loathed to remember, where his hatred had grown to bitterness and betrayal. Tonight he would remember, and if he could, feel as detached from it all as much as he had felt detached from the rest of the world.

Such long moments stretched before he began to write, the ink sinking down to record his cursed tale. And once he started, the words came easily. They poured from him like blood gushing from a wound, like a fire set lose on a wood. He would consume the pages in such an act of creation and destruction.

In this way, he started his confession.

I knew from the day that I died that happiness could not be attained by the monsters that the world created…