A/N: This is a follow up to "This Bed We've Made". You don't necessarily have to read that one to read this one. Either way there are still gaps in our knowledge of the past. One of these days I'll get around to explaining Lucius' point of view.

Thank you very much Muse of Lucius, Mia, and Rubicon.

Delusional, Saints of Villainy, Part 2 of 7

Tom wasn't returning. He promised it over and over in the letter he wrote daily- reams and reams of parchment telling a story of love and hate and despair.

"I haven't had breakfast yet and I've thought about you 37 times today. 37 times I dreamed of your eyes, your voice, your skin. 20 times I thought of your lips and I've imagined you stark and perfect in my bed 23- no, 24- times today. Update the count to 38 times I've thought of you since breakfast.

"At night it feels like you're with me, slipping your voodoo needles into my heart, cooing and reassuring me with a voice that feels like velvet against my skin. The pain will only last a little while, you said. Just a lifetime and a lifetime is a mere candle flame that sputters and dies the moment it is lit. There has been a mistake. My candle refuses to go out and I still hurt.

"Sometimes I think I imagined you, that there was no white-haired seraph with alabaster limbs, persimmon lips and mercury eyes. No one would create beauty without feeling or heart and I'm just insane. I'm insane to torment myself this way, imaging that I see such beauty when I'm alone in the dark waiting for a reason to live, wondering if I wanted it badly enough would the vision become flesh and blood and emotion.

"Grand delusions. Delusions of your grandeur. But the memory is too bright to be a delusion unless all delusions are bright and hold the light hostage as they draw blood. Would I really invent someone with a past like yours?

"I know what he did to you. I know it although you never told me. It's written all over your face, stamped in your eyes, flaunted in your fallen angel pride. The favorite dragged through the mud, cheapened and used, but not destroyed, not by him. Not even by me. You destroy yourself. Every night with every drink and every partner, you slide closer to oblivion. It wants you so badly, lusting after you like everybody else does. Sometimes it touches you upon the shoulder and you look into those dead, white-hot eyes and it scares you. It scares you so much that you run to me for reassurance. Reassurance that you and I weren't meant for oblivion; we are part of something greater. We are the stuff of fairy tales, but our fairy tales don't end with 'happily ever after". We are not the heroes. We are the saints of villainy- the multifaceted ones whose glory is stolen by a hero who can barely muster the intelligence to spell his name. Ultimately, we will be hated, but people will love to hate us. It must be the way insanity catches the light and diffuses the glow around a face like a halo.

"But I'm being morbid again, aren't I? I'm predicting doom and madness for us when I would have given anything to make you smile, hear you cry my name. 25 times today I've thought of you in my bed. You laughed at me the first time I said I loved you. You ignored me the last time I said it. My darling tormentor, do you think I don't know that you enjoy hurting me? I love it when you do and I hate myself for it- hate my dependency on your damning caresses. "

"H'm...I think I shall stop here for now. I'm not telling you anything new, and I have yet to eat my breakfast. I think I'll have some coffee."

Comments?

Love,
J. Silver