Chapter Nineteen: Love's Demons

Strawberry: This chapter is unhealthily short, just to make up for the fact that chapter 20 is RIDICULOUSLY long. And I also needed a bit of a bridge between 18 & 20… I'm also quite sorry about the long no-update period :[ I didn't have time when Oklahoma! went up, and right after that I started Cinderella, so things have been a bit hectic. My would-be boss hasn't called me, though, so at least I'm not working xD Anyway, I hope to get this story finished by the end of this summer. Its one year anniversary is coming up! Let me know what you think.

About ten minutes later, Fana's head dropped reluctantly onto his shoulder. He jumped at the feeling of her against him, but otherwise, completely ignored her actions and continued to stare straight forward.

"Are you afraid of anything?" she asked him. He had heard her with perfect clearness, but he still might have sworn that she had really been saying, "What's wrong with you?" He pondered the real question, half-sure he would find nothing and half-afraid of finding the answer. He was afraid of finding the answer, but it didn't make any sense to explain it to her. He would have bet his life—which didn't say much—that there was nothing in the world that he feared. He wasn't irrational or oversensitive to what the world threw at him. He knew how to handle it all.

Maybe he was only afraid of not being able to handle it.

"Mm…no," he lied tactfully. "Would you like it…ha…ah, heh…if I were?"

Fana craned her neck to look up at him with his smeared face and scheming eyes. They were locked together for one supreme moment, promising one another that they truly existed even in their wrongs. They were both imperfect, and if they were anything less than that, they would have hated each other. Her eyes were dim and glorifying, telling him a thousand things he might never have known of otherwise. With those eyes, she scrutinized him indirectly, and he knew beyond a doubt that she was staring indecisively at the paint.

Her fingers touched his neck, pushing him away from her as she gently touched his skin with her mouth. Her lips were comfortable, though tensed. He knew well what she was thinking: she was wondering what the hell was wrong with her, and if she weren't wondering that, he would've considered her the smartest human. But she wasn't.

"If you were afraid," she whispered, tugging on his sleeve tightly, "I wouldn't mind." He hated the way she touched him for the specific reason that he liked it. He was right, and she was the loser, he the winner. Even so, it annoyed him to no end that his body reacted to hers just as though he wasn't who he was meant to be. It was marked in stone that his name was eternally buried, his gravestone bearing not the name, but the alias. The things he loved were inhuman and he was pleased with that. The things he hated didn't exist because too much emotion was senseless and forbearing. He must have been wrong to say that Fana's touch positively affected him. He had to have been wrong, because he liked to lie to her and toy with her mind. He liked to make her feel little and pointless. He felt like a demon sometimes because of it, as he had known what it had been like to be little and pointless. He had known what it was like to know that when you died, you would never be remembered. It had not been so long ago that he had felt that way.

Through all of that, she was still snuggled up against him like a helpless child, unable to understand that her mother was masochistic and her father was a wreck. She would follow after them stupidly, regardless of how many times they struck her down. They had that same relationship, with him as the abuser and she as the countless victim who didn't understand. He reminisced back to what he had said a few minutes before. He'd told her about his curiosity for murdering her, a curiosity that she would never understand and minutes later she was against him still, letting him squeeze her hand with no purpose whatsoever.

Was a man supposed to love a woman simply because she accepts him in all his glory and downfall?

He must have loved her then, because she had sat beside her and proven that she was sticking herself to him almost permanently. Even in that very moment, when he was afraid to even shift slightly lest he disturb her, she proved that nothing he said bothered her. Maybe in the pit of her stomach, all of those things did bother her, but in general, she kept herself from judging him. He wondered if their similarities were the reason. She was corrupted because her father had indirectly killed her mother, while she was forced to take the blame for not being able to stop it. She was laden with that feeling of guilt and terror that he had felt at eight-years-old when he knew well enough that his mother was held back because of him. He felt the same guilt when he was twelve, when his father had abused their family and proven to him that he had just made a mess by existing at all. He had been an accident, and accidents didn't deserve to live, did they?

Lorelei had given him that stabbing feeling of guilt, too, because he felt as though it were his duty to protect her when it was really nothing of the sort. She had made it impossible for him to leave her alone because she had hooked him with her reckless sense and love for danger. And what was worse, he was reminded of his helplessness towards her injuries each time he had looked at her. He knew what it was to feel that way, and he understood that Fana hadn't been smart enough yet to realize what she needed to do with those pestilent feelings that didn't want to be crushed. But that was the part of being better than best: being able to crush the uncrushable.

His eyes fell on her face restlessly. Her lips were almost purplish from the cold icehouse; they were thin and parted in her doze. She must have fallen asleep a few minutes ago, because she looked to be in that state in between waking and being out cold. Drifting. Her wild hair brushed against the collar of his shirt, close enough to touch his neck in little wisps, as if she were made of smoke. He rested his head against the wall behind him lazily, thinking that he might be okay. Of course, he didn't really care, he thought with a smile, but there were plenty of nice aspects to the answer.

Clearly love had its demons, too. And he himself was the king of those demons: Love's demon himself.